“I thought you were supposed to be getting bed rest. Avoiding all sinfulness.”
“There’s nothing sinful about booting you right in your guinea machismo, buster. And on your way back with that stuff lock that door. If anybody on the other side of it thinks we’re fucking in here, I’ll thank him for the compliment.”
At about five-thirty, when the Colonel Blimp on the other side of the door announced with his knuckles that the session had to be concluded, Milano handed over a check for exactly seven hundred and twenty dollars to his hostess, reminded her of the salon she’d be holding next evening, and took the elevator down to his quarters to mark time until six. At six on the dot he dialed Betty at the Wardour.
“This Kirwan,” she reported, “is a college professor. Was a college professor.”
“I know. What about his financial set-up right now?”
Betty had a special voice for this routine. Very brisk. “Well, there’s one known checking account, balance for last quarter under required minimum. No other banking account, no brokerage account. One known domicile, eight months’ tax arrears. One known rental property, three years’ tax arrears. Also its present value is negative, maintenance costs exceeding income. One known car, 1972 Skylark, value negative. Only known income here on the printout is from pension and social security. No other known assets listed either. That’s it.”
“All negative,” Milano said.
“Uh-huh. At least under Kirwan’s name and I.D. Of course, if he’s got a lot of gold stuck away somewhere—”
In a way, thought Milano, he did have. Maybe not in gold, but in room after room of goodies calculated to make any treasure hunter reach for his checkbook. No problem at all about converting negative to positive by just going to market with a few of those items. A reminder there. “Wait a second,” Milano said. “The Hendrick Witter Foundation. What about that?”
“Nothing. It didn’t show up at all, Johnny. No way.”
No way. So much for that, the foundation that could be screening a hidden cash flow. And could maintain Kirwan’s Victorian memorial in the style to which it was certainly accustomed. Yet, Kirwan had been goddam convincing about preserving grandpa’s home for the ages.
Betty said, “Still there, Johnny?”
“Yep.”
“A retired old professor?” Something in her voice suggested more than just casual reflection. “Funny how you have to put in so much time on him.”
“I know. But there are some retired old professors who might just possibly be up to something illegal when no one’s looking.”
“Oh. So what about Sunday then? I know you’re working all hours now, but how about breakfast? A great big old-fashioned one. Say ten o’clock.”
“Fine.”
“Sunday, ten o’clock then,” said Betty. “And just try to make sure it doesn’t rain.” She hung up.
Charles Witter Kirwan. Scraping the bottom of the financial barrel.
What with one thing and another, it looked like Lorena Bailey had more pocket money to spend than her employer.
Charles Witter Kirwan
MIDDAY SATURDAY. A brief quiet time among the kraals. A break in the usual Bulanga weekend festival.
The Socratic mode.
I tell you, dear dead Socrates, that in fact you were an agent of corruption.
I tell you, dear self-righteous liberal idiots, dear do-good institutions dedicated to the glorification of the Bulanga, that the ruins all around us are the ruins you made.
My grand event will leave a ruin too.
Rubble dripping with ooze from pulped black flesh.
Oh yes.
Catharsis? No. Catharsis invokes pity and terror, and you and your generation cowering before the occupying tribesmen have already spent enough tears on their sad plight. Enough to drown the world in brine.
Yesterday
Yesterday evening, the heralding of the weekend by the Bulanga in all their glory. Partying by my tenants and their kraal-mates indoors and out.
Inside the apartments of Dapper Dan’s folly they gather, windows open the better to share their festival. On the sidewalk before my home they gather. For sustenance, foods packed in greasy wrappers and cardboards. For the total stupefaction of already dull wits, every mode of cheap alcohol in bottle and can. And the holy weed marijuana, so that the night air curling up from my lawn is thick and sick with it. In the morning that stink is gone, replaced by the stench of piss on my sidewalk and garden wall. And both sidewalk and lawn are instant midden heaps of greasy wrappers and cardboards and broken bottles and empty cans.
For entertainment, whitey’s own diabolical invention, the electronic music player, turned against him. From the apartments, rent paid or not, the thud-and-thud-and-thump-and-thump on and on and on and on through the endless hours to dawn, the Bulanga water torture, the boiling drops of water rhythmically pounding against the oversensitized whitey skull.
Oh yes.
And there are electronic voices too, raised in tribal song. The caterwauling of the Bulanga female wailing for her demon lover. The bellow of the Bulanga troubador chanting over and over the baby-baby-baby he has managed to memorize.
So
What was left for old whitey through it all last night was a drugged and sweaty and broken sleep, the little there was of it.
Exhaustion in the end, not of pain but of rage.
Yet, one needs
I need that rage.
Dulls the gnawing physical pains. Fires the will.
I need five more days of it. Five. The grand event will take place this coming Thursday at seven in the evening. As full a house as possible then, before the weekend. The close of dinner hour. The heating up of those television sets and those stereos.
Then the moment.
The instant end of my pain, the beginning of your wisdom.
Yesterday I set the explosive charge at the top floor of the other dumbwaiter shaft. The western wing of the building. Only three of these jobs remain now, a few hours each for tomorrow and Tuesday and Thursday. Alternate days. Days between will be needed for me to muster my strength.
Good that there is no photograph showing the scarecrow Charles Witter Kirwan of this moment. Old pictures will have to be used by those newspapers and magazines and book publishers and television and motion picture producers to make even more profitably vivid my narrative of the grand event.
Mine.
For which they must pay and pay and pay because it is all mine alone.
An endowment to make this house inviolate. To staff it and secure it and make it a treasure for all time. To celebrate the
The
Where was I?
The photographs. A photograph. None to show me as I see myself in the mirror now. Show what’s left of me. Failing flesh, potent spirit. Leader of the Tötentanz, lacking only the scythe.
That last photograph of me taken at my retirement dinner. Sage and smiling, full of years and honors. Full of hate for myself. And for all those smiling bleeding-heart faculty faces around me. Cowards who had incited my own cowardly surrender to the Bulanga.
My own hypocrisy.
So
Yesterday.
A hard morning, braced there at the top of that shaft. Suffocating dust. And flaccid muscles now which can lift a little weight but not sustain it. Maddening. You tell your fingers to close tight around a tool. You watch them as they slowly move – doubtfully – as if deciding among themselves whether to do it. They suddenly give up, and you climb all the way down to retrieve the tool. Once, twice, three times and all the way up again, the last time with legs buckling as they carry you rung by rung to the top of Everest.
But
But as long as the raging spirit does not fail, the body will not fail.
So
Only three more days of this trial. Five days altogether.
Now a message to the authorities. And to the executor of my estate. Attention, please.
Believe me, I am not indulging in
the macabre when I say bluntly that my own remains will be hard to detect. If they can be detected at all. One stick of dynamite is being withheld from its planned location on the top floor. It is being reserved for my personal use. For my personal instantaneous destruction. Against my chest. The shortest lead to the detonator. The first to go. Instantaneous.
This information is urgent. Pay close attention to it, please.
It is formal assurance that I will be dead – I will be totally dispatched at the moment of explosion – detectable remains or not. So there must be no foolish legal questions brought up about it. No red tape to delay the immediate execution of my will and final instructions. The papers establishing the Witter Foundation must be filed at once by my estate. The very first money coming to the estate from the media must be applied to the Foundation.
The very first.
Yes.
So
What was I about to
Yesterday.
A curious episode. Inevitable in a society with a fatal nostalgie de la boue. With a wild yearning to kiss the shiny black ass of the Bulanga.
An enlightening episode. It must be told. Bear with me.
Arson. Arson for profit. Inevitable. Under sentimentalist liberal law, the landlord, worse comes to worst, must house the Bulanga at his own expense. Make sure they’re snug and secure. And make sure you buy a large bottle of red ink for your bookkeeping. The landlord’s options? Abandon the property or sell at a loss to someone who has his own way of making a profit from it.
A profit? How?
Oh, by way of a large insurance policy, a few gallons of gasoline, and a match.
That’s it. A fat profit and a burned-out building. To be then sealed up by the city of New York so that drunk and derelict Bulanga can’t make a home of it and perhaps bruise their tender hides falling through its charred floorboards.
Oh yes.
We already have one such monument on this block. No secret about it, the work of a professional arsonist. The top floor going up with a roar, bringing down the roof, making the building uninhabitable. Full insurance paid, every penny of it.
And behind that professional? The unsentimental gangster. The new generation of whatever it is that’s called the Mafia, the Syndicate, Cosa Nostra. That smart new businessman who really does make the doomed landlord an offer he can’t refuse.
No sensationalizing in this. No imagining. I met one yesterday.
Smooth. Obviously designated by the family for the college finish, the cultural veneer, the ingratiating manner. No plug-ugly, but a veritable Borgia. Beautifully clothed, well-spoken, driving fifty or sixty thousand dollars’ worth of imported car. Middle-aged – plenty of time to progress from rhinestone in the rought to polished rhinestone – and yet, despite those choirboy eyes, plainly stamped with the inherited family ruthlessness, the bent for pimping and arson and murder.
Italian, of course. For our police officials – for what good it may do them – the name is John A. Milano, the address the Sunderland Towers, Central Park South.
Smooth. He came to buy my wretched Kirwan legacy next door, and at my first sign of refusal he demonstrated an instant passion for my Witter legacy, this house. Not to buy, of course. Oh no, not to buy, but simply because it overwhelmed him with its magnificence. Anything, you understand, to charm, to ingratiate, to get me in a selling mood.
And, in fact, he displayed enough shrewd judgment of this house and its furnishings to intrigue me despite myself. To actually gain a foothold in it and a sort of tour of it. But he was up against something new to him. Someone whose life is now being measured out in minutes and so wasn’t in the least afraid of him.
An amusing episode. A visitor symptomatic of these obscene times. Dapper Dan Kirwan would have found him admirable. Impressive. His idea of quality folk. Not quite as desirably flashy as our family bootlegger had been, this Mister Milano, but he would do. High style. But tough. In charge. Capable of beating you to death if you trod on his handsome shoe.
Italian? Well, Dapper Dan never forgave that in those new neighbors from Palermo and Naples who first settled on our block, but he did forgive it in his bootlegger. He would forgive it in our Mister Milano, too.
Here, I should
I must make clear that I am not deprecating the Italian or the Italianate style. No witness to the Bulanga invasion should do anything but admire it.
Yes.
Instructive.
It is
A moment, please.
Not a seizure.
No.
The mind remained clear. In control. Always in balance.
A sort of strangulation. Sudden shortness of breath, then no breath. Agonizing pain extending from throat to right hip.
My fault. I had delayed in taking the increased dosage of Percodan now required. Knew it was required, thought to put it off until I had dictated today’s installment. Afraid of drowsiness, so invited disaster.
Never mind.
Today’s installment. The bitter truth. No surprise in this since absolute truth is always gall and wormwood. Those history texts which Professor Charles Witter Kirwan researched but never had the courage to write. Our idols, our shining beacons, always driven by fanatic self-interest. The catering to the populace. Elitism made a dirty word by my secretly elitist colleagues.
They will read this narrative, and oh dear me, oh gracious, oh horrors.
Outwardly. For public consumption.
And inwardly? They will never let you know. Too much at stake. Tenure. Honors. The esteem of their masters, the high-intellectual liberal press.
So
Here is a dose of gall and wormwood to constrict their impacted bowels.
There are two bodies of unrelenting resistance to the Bulanga in this Borough of Brooklyn, City of New York, United States of America. Unreconstructed and unrelenting. Our native Italian-Americans, our native Hasidic-Jew-Americans. Sons of the sons of Sicily. And sons of the sons of Polish ghetto ecstatics centuries ago. They live in enclaves, all whiteys so to speak, ferocious in their hatred of the Bulanga.
Oh yes.
Primitives in their way, deaf to sweet socio-political songs about brotherhood, they are wise enough to know their brothers, and their brothers are not the Bulanga. The Bulanga is the enemy and must keep his distance or suffer the consequences.
Your history lesson for today. Your sociology lesson for today.
So
Whatever repugnance I feel toward this Mister John A. Milano as predator – and scavenger – I must – this dying, truth-telling Charles Witter Kirwan must – defer to him as one of that breed staunchly committed to holding their gates against the Bulanga.
Thus ends the
No.
One more item. A non-event.
Lorena Bailey did not make an appearance yesterday. I had not told her to, but I believed that her money hunger would lead her to defy orders. Have her intrude on me. Blackmail perhaps.
I was wrong.
It is a curious fact that with some
John Milano
SATURDAYS APPARENTLY BEING NEWSPRINT CONSERVATION DAYS for the New York Times, this morning’s Saturday Times was inevitably skimpy, but, as Milano flicked through it, there the ad was anyhow, a small, tasteful job among a few others of its kind on the fine arts page.
Neo-Cubist Constructivist works by Raoul Barquin. Opening today at the Rammaert Gallery. Ten a.m. to five p.m.
Milano put aside the paper and attacked his three-minute egg and patented Swedish Rye-Bites. Neo-Cubist Constructivist. Jesus, art hustlers had to have some freak locked in an attic somewhere just cooking up names for these passing – and profitable – fancies. Our Mister Bananas, Director of the Trendy Department.
On the serious side however, he warned himself, helping open the gallery at ten a.m. could be overdoing it. Eleven would be about right. Just drop in casually. See if she still looked like that. Moved like that. Sounded like that. A clandestine lunch together maybe, during her noon break.
See if she could still pack it away like that, the miracle being that a large helping of everything obviously had no effect at all on that mind-boggling figure.
This reminded him to do some lover’s calculation. Nourishment presented no problem. The co-op’s doorman, its Numero Uno hustler, could, on amazingly short notice, come up with anything from the lowly pizza to the regal caviar on toast any time of day or night. As for liquid refreshment, Milano decided, since there was a sufficient variety of bottled high-proof in the wet bar to cover any request, it was just a case of whipping up a pitcher of dynamite martinis and stashing it in the refrigerator for the occasion. He did this, and as an afterthought planted in the vegetable bin of the refrigerator – its higher temperature zone – his last half-dozen bottles of John Courage beer, that lovely evidence that the British, whatever their other deficiencies, could manage to brew a veritable wine from malt and hops.
Music. Musica.
He squatted before the stereo cabinet considering political implications. Thus, if out of personal preference you laid on Bessie and Billie and Aretha, would it be tantamount to offering this edgy love object fried chicken and watermelon for dinner? For that matter, who the hell knew how she even felt about fried chicken and watermelon? Would she casually eat it, wisely smile at it, or bounce it off your skull?
All right, let her pick the goddam music. Open herself to his judgment for a change.
He carefully checked out the apartment which, no surprise, was about as pristine as the housecleaning service had left it earlier in the week. The living room maybe a little too pristine, so some careful disarrangement of a cushion here, a couple of magazines on the coffee table there, was in order. The bedroom okay, with a change of bed linen. The bathroom, after he had finished using it, got closest consideration. Luxurious all right – the Emperor Caracalla couldn’t have had it much better – but just one of these long black hairs decorating the sink basin could turn any female stomach. At least, so sister Angie had caustically informed him on her maiden visit to the apartment, and while resemblance in any way between Angie and Chris Bailey appeared to be slight who could tell?
The Dark Fantastic Page 19