I waited, watching the man in maroon from the corner of my eye, and when he turned around to wave at something behind him I ran for the nearest building and rushed inside the doors.
I was in a wide, modern corridor, with huge plate glass windows fronting scenes of natural glory. Massive tortoises stared; a gray anaconda slept. A monitor, half submerged in a jungle pool, observed me with carnivorous eyes. At the end of the wide hallway were two huge windows with the superstars of the Reptile House, the alligator, squat and fierce, and the crocodile, pale and patient and hungry. Where the corridor made a sharp turn to the left I stepped away from the great predators so that while I was hidden, a view of the doors I had come in was reflected for me in the alligator’s window. Just be calm, I tried to tell myself, wait patiently and let him pass the building by as he searches the rest of the zoo. Better waiting and hiding then darting around the zoo’s maze of walkways like a zebra on the loose. Slow and patient, like my friend the crocodile, I told myself, while the bruiser lumbered past and disappeared. I evened out my breathing and the lump in my throat had almost dissolved when off the windowed front of the alligator’s cage I saw the door open and a flash of maroon.
I backed away until I hit a large wooden cube in the middle of the corridor. I slipped around it into the desert alcove. The windows here were smaller, like terrariums studded into the wall. Rattlesnakes, coachwhips, skinks, lots of skinks. I passed the Gila monster and then, using the wooden cube as a shield, I made my way into the older section of the building, toward a second set of doors. The atmosphere turned slippery and green. I backed my way to the far exit, past ropy snakes and tiny poisonous dart frogs and a North American bullfrog, staring at me with passive eyes that seemed to discount my fear. Your legs look mighty tasty, you bastard, I thought as the bullfrog sat comfortably on a synthetic log and watched me sweat. With the wooden cube still acting as a screen, I turned and made fast for the far doors, trotting then running then sprinting, sprinting too fast to stop when the doors opened and a figure, blackened by the light streaming in from behind, stepped through.
I ran right into it, bounced off as if hitting a wall, sprawled backwards onto the floor. The figure took one step toward me. When I recognized Peter Cressi looking down at me I quailed.
“Yo, Vic,” he said. “How’s it hanging?”
Behind me I heard steps.
“Geez, what happened wit’ you?” said Cressi as he eyed my tattered condition. “You crawl into one of the cages? Did some gorilla take a shine to you?”
I staggered up and immediately felt a hand fall onto my shoulder. I spun around. The beefy boy in maroon was grinning at me. He was missing a tooth. “Dante said we’d find someone here and he was right.”
I spun around again and stared at Cressi.
“Quite a thing what happened with that van,” said Cressi. “Quite a thing. To think such a thing like that could happen in this day and age.”
I tilted my head in thought while still staring at Cressi. “How’d you find out about the attack, Peter?”
“Dante, he told us and sent us on over.”
“And how’d he find out about it?” I asked.
“How do you think?”
“You tell me, Peter, dammit.”
My anger and fear all balled together and went directly to the muscles in my arms and in a tremendous shot of energy I slammed my hands into his chest, pushing him back against the doors.
“How’d he know, Peter?” I said. “Tell me that, you bastard.”
Again I pushed him back, this time so hard he hit his head on the glass.
“How’d he know unless he set it up? And you set it up with him. You bastard. Why the hell are you trying to kill me?”
I meant to slam him again but before I could two arms slithered fast as cobras around my shoulders and behind my neck and suddenly I was lifted off the ground.
“You bastard!” I shouted.
“Whoa, Vic,” said Cressi, giving me a strange look. “You’re going ballistic on us. Quiet yourself down or Andy Bandy here is going to have to quiet you for me. We don’t want no scenes in such a public place.”
Still struggling while held aloft, I said, “How’d you find out?”
Cressi gave me a look and then reached into his jacket and I stopped kicking as I waited for what I knew was coming. But what he pulled out of his jacket was a cellular phone.
“Lenny called Dante from the cell phone in the car once they dumped you. Dante sent me over to check out you was okay. We was only trying to take care of you is all.”
With that, Andy Bandy loosed the iron snakes around my shoulders and neck. Once again I dropped in a sprawl onto the ground.
“Pull yourself together, Vic,” said Cressi. “I’m not used to seeing you squirm like a slug such as you’re doing here. It’s enough to get me thinking, you know. It’s not a good thing to get me thinking, pal. It ruins my whole day.”
He reached into his pants pocket and jiggled what was in there for a moment before pulling out a small peppermint swirl wrapped in cellophane. He lifted his hand and with a quick squeeze he squirted the candy into his mouth before tossing the wrapper to the side.
“I can understand you being all shook up and all, but I hate to see you down there afraid of me.” The peppermint candy clicked in his teeth as he spoke. “What do you think I am, an idiot? You’re my lawyer. What kind of idiot would hurt his own lawyer?”
He leaned over me, but I found myself unable to look him in the face. Instead I was staring at something else, something I couldn’t yet understand the significance of, cringing and sniveling on the floor as I was, numb with fear of the two men standing over me. I couldn’t yet understand the significance but still I couldn’t stop staring, as if somewhere within me I knew the truth, that what I was staring at from the floor of the Philadelphia Zoo’s reptile house was the first loose thread in the eventual unraveling of the darkest secrets of the Reddman demise.
22
CRESSI AND ANDY BANDY drove me home and waited for me to enter the vestibule before they drove away, waited as if I were a schoolboy dropped off in the middle of the dark. “You want I should stay around some and keep an eye out for you, Vic?” had asked Peter from the front seat of the Lincoln. “No,” I had answered. The problem with Peter guarding my back was that I would have had to turn it to him and I didn’t trust him far enough for that. So I went into my apartment alone and stripped off my ragged suit and took a shower and put on a new white shirt and a relatively fresh suit and tightened my tie and looked at myself in the mirror. Then I loosened the tie and took off the suit and took off the shirt and the shoes and the socks and went to bed. It was now early afternoon and there was much work to be done at the office but still I went to bed.
I get this way, I guess, after I stare death in the face and she laughs at me. The fierce whine that had slid by my head in that car was death’s chortle, there was no doubt about that, and I had all but accepted her embrace when Andy Bandy held me aloft and Cressi reached into his jacket for what I was certain was a gun. But then death had slipped away for the moment, satiated, so it would seem, by the acrid scent of fear secreted by my endocrine system, satisfied with having reminded me once again of exactly what I truly was. I know people who look at the stars and say the night sky makes them feel insignificant, but I don’t believe them when they say it. When I look at the stars I don’t shrink but grow, filled with the perverse certainty that the whole of the universe has been put here solely for my amusement and enlightenment. But face to face with the grinning mask of death I know the truth. I am a randomly formed strand of DNA no more significant than random strands of DNA that define the leaf of grass upon which I tread or the cow whose charred muscle I gnaw. I eat Chinese food and crap corn and sweat through my socks and stink and the same DNA that gave me this nose and this chin and my ten fingers and ten toes has also sentenced me to oblivion. It directs my arteries to clog themselves with calcified fat, it directs my liver to wither,
my kidneys to weaken, my lungs to spew bits of itself with every cough. And in the face of this utter randomness and planned obsolescence I can’t even imagine mustering enough energy to get out of bed and to walk the streets, to dry clean my suits, to return my library books, to vote for judges whose names I can’t pronounce, to act my part as if any of it really matters.
So for the whole of that afternoon I lay with my head beneath the covers, shivering, though I wasn’t cold, smelling the dried sweat of the fifty nights it had been since I last had laundered my sheets, trying and failing to come up with a reason to get out of bed. As if the smell of fifty nights of my dried sweat was not reason enough. Trying and failing until the phone rang.
Should I answer it? Why? Who could it possibly be that would matter at all? The answer was that it could be no one. I let it ring almost long enough for my machine to answer it, but maybe four hours of smelling old sweat was enough, because I peeked my head out of the covers, picked up the phone, and, with a little high-pitched squeak of a voice, said into the receiver, “Yes?”
“Did you hear what happened on the Schuylkill Expressway today?” said Beth in a gush. “A van with a hole bored into its side slid up to Raffaello’s Cadillac and shot it all to hell. It’s all over the news. Somehow the Cadillac got away. Raffaello is recuperating in some unnamed hospital, they won’t say, but can you imagine? Everyone’s talking about it. On the Schuylkill Expressway. Everyone wants to know who was driving the Cadillac. Apparently it got away even with one of its tires blown to pieces. The driver’s an absolute hero. I want him driving for me. Amazing. I think, Victor, it’s time to find ourselves another class of clientele, don’t you? Where have you been anyway?”
“I’m feeling a little under the cosmic weather, so to speak,” I said. Beth didn’t need to know I was part of it all. No one needed to know, no one ever needed to know, which was exactly why Raffaello had pushed me from the careening Cadillac.
“Are you all right?” said Beth. “Is there anything I can do?”
“No. Did they say on the news who did the shooting?”
“They have no idea. Just that there is apparently an internal dispute of some sort. The authorities are all mystified. You sound terrible. Do you need some soup or anything? Have you eaten?”
I had to think about that for a moment. It had been a day and a half, really. I had a quick lunch yesterday afternoon, but then there had been the repulsive offerings at Veritas and I hadn’t had time for an edible breakfast before Jimmy Dubinsky’s funeral. I wondered if my deep existential soul searching was less a result of my brush with the grinning mask of death than mere sugar depletion. Maybe there did exist a surefire solution to all our deep metaphysical dilemmas–a Snickers bar. “No,” I said. “Not for a while.”
“Let’s do dinner.”
“You sound obscenely cheery.”
“I’ve been going to that place in Mount Airy you wanted me to look into. The Church of the New Life. We should talk about it.”
“Anything interesting?”
“Interesting as hell,” she said.
We met at a restaurant on a deserted corner in Olde City. Beth had suggested a retro diner off Rittenhouse Square but all I could think of was its wide plate glass windows. I didn’t want to be behind wide plate glass windows just then, so I suggested this place well off the beaten track, and on the other side of the city from my apartment, and she had agreed. Café Fermi was a pretentious little restaurant with a pickup bar and bad art and an ingenious menu one step above the chef’s ability to deliver. I took a cab to the funeral parlor and picked up my car and still got there ahead of her. I ordered a Sea Breeze and drank it quickly to give myself a brave front. I went through a basket of bread while waiting. Beth arrived with a strangely serene smile on her face. A guy on his way out bumped her slightly and she just turned that smile on him.
She sat down and looked at me closely and put a hand on my cheek. “What happened to your face?”
“I cut myself shaving.”
She squinted. “That must have been some blade. How was James’s funeral?”
“Touching.”
“They said Raffaello was coming back from the cemetery when they shot up his car.”
“Oh yeah? I didn’t see him there. You hungry? Let’s order something. How does the veal look?”
She rubbed her thumb along the cuts on my cheek. “They didn’t say exactly who was in the car with him.”
I just shrugged and was surprised to feel tears well behind my eyes. I was about to lose it, but I didn’t. I held it in and looked away. I blinked twice and twice more. I raised my hand for the waitress and by the time she came it was all back inside where it belonged and I was once again as dry-eyed as a corpse.
Our waitress was a tall leggy woman, wearing all black, with heavy earrings and some demented metal objet d’art on her blouse to make it clear how au courant she was and we weren’t. “Yeah?” she said, and I didn’t like the way she said it, like we were disturbing her evening.
“We’re ready to order.”
“Sure,” she said, “I’ll be right back,” and then she shuffled off to serve someone more important.
“Is it just me,” I said, “or was she rude?”
“She has a tough job,” said Beth, which was very unlike her. Beth had the marvelous ability to take umbrage at even the mildest slights in our slighting culture. It derived directly, I think, from her natural optimism. She was a generous tipper, generally, but when a waiter was rude or a bartender nasty it was fun to sit back and watch the sparks fly. She was not the type to say, “She has a tough job,” not the type at all.
“What are you,” I asked, “in love?”
“No,” she laughed.
“All right. Tell me about the kooks in Mount Airy.”
“They’re not kooks,” she said quickly and quietly.
“Aaah,” I said slowly. “I begin to see.”
“Begin to see what?”
“Tell me about Mount Airy.”
Her head tilted as she stared at me and I could see something working its way in her eyes and I flinched from the expected tongue lashing but then that strange smile arose and all was once again serene.
“Well they’re not a cult, or anything like that,” she said, fiddling with her silverware. “They’re just a lot of nice people trying to find some answers. They believe that the voices of the spirit and of the soul are always there to tell us the secret truths of our existence, but we need to learn how to hear them. We need to somehow cut through the murk of our omnipresent reality and learn to listen and see in a spiritual way. The purpose of the Haven is to teach us how.”
“Okay,” said the waitress with a roll of her eyes. She had slinked upon us as silently as a predatory cat. “You said you were ready.”
“We’ve been ready,” I said. “I’ll have the Caesar salad and the veal in the apple cream sauce. Is the veal any good?”
“I haven’t gotten any complaints,” said the waitress.
“A ringing endorsement. And another Sea Breeze.”
“I’ll just have the bean chili,” said Beth.
“They have that Texas ribeye I thought you’d like,” I suggested.
Beth made a face, an I-don’t-eat-red-meat kind of face. I had seen that face on many women before but never before on Beth.
“Aaah,” I said slowly once again. “I do see.”
“You see what?”
“Go on about your new friends.”
“What they’re trying to gain is a way to see into the spirit world, what they call initiation into the temple of higher cognition, where they drink from the twin potions of oblivion and memory.”
“The twin potions of oblivion and memory,” I said, nodding. “And this is not a cult.”
“Not really. They teach a series of practical exercises that will help you climb up the twelve-step path to initiation. You can do it with them or on your own, with proper knowledge. There’s some chanting and incense, su
re, but no magic. And no Kool-Aid. Just a natural way to a higher wisdom. Twelve steps with explicit instructions for each step. There’s actually nothing so unique about it. They’ve been doing it for centuries in the East. This is just a way for the Western mind to train itself.”
“And I assume you’re in training.”
“As part of my cover, of course.” She fiddled with a packet of Sweet’n Low. “But I will admit it seems to speak to a certain void I have been feeling. Maybe even what we talked about before, the something I had been missing.”
“Wouldn’t a few dates be more practical?”
“Shut up, Victor, you’re being an asshole.”
I was, actually. I didn’t know if it was the vodka talking or an outgrowth of my false brave front or the feeling I had that the last bastion had fallen, but I didn’t like to hear about Beth’s voids or her search for spiritual meaning. I could always count on Beth to stay rooted in the real world. Her idealism had nothing to do with any mystical esoterica, just the realization that we had a job to do and let’s get to it. And if her job was helping the disadvantaged it was no big thing. I never thought I’d see her groping for meaning in the spirit world. That was for mixed-up losers who couldn’t make it on their own and wanted an excuse. That was for hipsters too cool to accept the Western way in which their minds moved. That was for phony shamans in orange robes, not for Beth.
When my drink came, plopped in front of me without ceremony, I took a deep gulp and felt the bitter sweetness of the juice and the cut of the vodka. “All right,” I said. “I’m sorry,” and I was. Beth was the last person who took me seriously, I think, and for me not to take her seriously was a crime. “Tell me about the twelve steps.”
“I don’t know them all yet, but I’m trying to learn. The first step is just wanting to find meaning. It’s walking in the door. The second is understanding that the answers are all around us, both internal and external, but in the spiritual, not physical world. To access that world we are required to develop new ways of seeing, to develop our spiritual eyes.”
Bitter Truth Page 19