King Death

by Nik Cohn

  ‘I have an appointment.’

  ‘I know it, and I would not dream of delaying you,’ Seaton said. ‘It’s just that I couldn’t help wondering, I hope you wouldn’t mind, but perhaps I might come along with you. If I promised faithfully to be good, that is, and not get in the way and never make a sound. If I simply stayed in the background.’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘And watched.’

  ‘But you watched in Tupelo.’

  ‘I did; I did indeed; and I was overwhelmed. But I was placed so far away, I could not rightly see and I’m sure I missed so much. All the little details, those special finesses and nuances of style, in which Death was truly expressed. And also I wasn’t prepared, I was taken by surprise. So naturally I was a trifle disconnected. But if I got another chance, if only I could see you perform once more, live and in close-up, I know that my confusion would be swept aside and I would truly understand.’

  With his left foot in the car, his right foot on the kerb, Eddie stroked his chin and considered, while Seaton continued to tug at his wrist and plead with soggy eyes. ‘You are requesting a special service,’ said the professional. ‘And specials cost money.’

  ‘Five hundred dollars,’ said Seaton.

  ‘Drive,’ said Eddie; and they drove.

  Seaton had been in Montgomery before. But somehow, travelling with Eddie, everything looked different, and he found himself in a neighbourhood that he had never known existed, full of tenements, so high and so dark that passing among them was like descending into a pit.

  Down here, the streets were full of black men in smoked glasses and little round hats. Women called obscenities from the doorways, young boys threw stones from fire escapes. Even on a hot afternoon, the sidewalks were plunged deep in shadow, the windows were ablaze with neon and, from far down in the basements, there came a remorseless rhythmic shuddering, which made the walls sweat and shake.

  As soon as he entered this world, Seaton wound up his window as far as it would go, to keep out the smell, and he tried hard not to look. Just the same, there was a tingling, an odd empty aching in the pit of his stomach, and his face felt pinched and crumpled.

  Cruising along beside the railroad tracks, the Lamborghini flowed past block after block of bars and honkytonks, fifty-cent dance halls, dekinking salons and magical mojo booths. Some men were brawling in alleys, while others lay face down in doorways. Still others sat on the kerb, staring, and did not focus on anything. ‘What a most peculiar place,’ Seaton said.

  ‘Only because you aren’t accustomed,’ Eddie reassured him. ‘Once you’ve gotten used to it, you’ll take it all for granted.’

  At a crossroads, they came to a broken-down brownstone, the Hotel Amsterdam, with smashed windows and no front door. ‘Stop here, and wait,’ said Eddie.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Seaton asked.

  ‘I wish to be private. Before I perform, it is my custom to prepare myself, in calm and contemplation,’ the professional told him and, getting out of the car, he disappeared into the coal-black chasm of the hotel doorway.

  Stumbling in the dark, he made his way up three flights of stairs and came to a small blank room, twelve feet by ten. Inside, there was a bed, a table and chair, a washstand in the corner, and an old cracked mirror. The window was boarded up, a naked light bulb hung from the ceiling and Eddie lay down across the unmade bed, hands clasped loosely behind his head.

  A small radio, produced from his overcoat pocket, played softly beside his ear, sentimental torch songs from a long time ago, and for the next four hours he lay without moving, eyes open wide. Meanwhile, Seaton waited downstairs, surrounded by the men in smoked glasses and little round hats, who stared at him without blinking.

  At first they were content to watch from a distance and wait; but gradually, lured by the gloss and glitter of the Lamborghini, which was so much like a shiny red spaceship, they crept up closer and closer. They ran their fingers along the paintwork, prodded the tyres with alligator shoes, studied the warp of their reflections in the hubcaps. Then they scrawled rude words in the dust on the fenders and pressed their noses flat against the windows, as though the Englishman were a rare pink fish from the tropics.

  Upstairs in the Hotel Amsterdam, on the stroke of seven o’clock, Eddie rose and sat down in front of the mirror, his suitcase open on his knees and his overcoat unbuttoned, so that a silver crucifix could be seen at his throat. In reflection, he was dark and lean, of medium height and build, with regular features and no distinguishing marks, except perhaps for his hands, which were small and extraordinarily delicate, almost feminine, with thin pointed fingers and no lines whatever on the palms.

  The radio played Dardanella and, one by one, the performer emptied out the contents of the case, the sum of his earthly possessions, arranging them in neat rows on the table, where he could study their image in the glass.

  There was an early Victorian fowling piece, circa 1840, with gilt-embossed barrel; a spare pair of gloves; a clean white shirt and a clean black waistcoat; two Gilronan .32s and a snub-nosed De Quincey .38; a change of underwear, a plastic washbag and a tin of boot polish; trucidator, jugulator and Albanian occisor; dice, a gold tooth and a rabbit’s foot; silencers (economy packs); colourless fluid in one vial, smelling of burnt almonds, and opaque crystals in another, smelling of old socks; a Gideons’ Bible; a jar of old-fashioned mint candies; and a yellowed and moth-eaten snapshot of his mother, too blurred to be deciphered.

  When all his trophies had been placed in their due order, and Eddie was content, he turned up his overcoat collar, held the Bible in his right hand and adjusted his hat brim to an angle of 13 degrees 30 minutes from the horizontal. Then he gazed directly into the mirror and for an instant, as he went still, the frame seemed to freeze, to turn into a photograph.

  The radio played Melancholy Baby. All of a sudden, Eddie emerged from his reverie, his gloves grew tight as sausage skins and he put his possessions back into their proper place. Shutting his suitcase with a snap, he tucked it under his arm, turned away from the glass and went out on to the dark, foul-smelling stairs.

  The walls were hot and damp, vermin ran between his feet. Ice-cold water dripped down the back of his neck and, in the recess of the second landing, he passed a tin-cup beggar and his performing monkey, who beat upon a drum and wore a red velvet fez with golden tassels.

  Inside the Lamborghini, Seaton had reached two thousand three hundred and twenty-nine: ‘Drive,’ said Eddie; and they drove.

  Dusk was falling and the neon sidewalks glowed brighter, more lurid than ever. Music blared from every window, there was a side-show at every corner. Blind men played the harmonica, chickens danced on hot plates, women in red dresses performed the signifying strut. The streets were ablaze with silks and satins in numberless different colours, so vivid that Seaton raised his hand to shade his eyes, and each time that the Lamborghini passed a patch of waste ground, the space was filled with a roaring bonfire, a holocaust of effigies and masques.

  At the end of the seventh block, across the street from a storefront mission, there was a sign that read Sam’s Soul Place. Inside, there was another room full of hats and smoked glasses, focused on nothing. The air was thick with the scent of exotic cheroots and a quartet of dudes was casting dice against a wall. Eddie sat down by the window and called for a bowl of collard greens and dumplings, polk salad, grits and beans. The Englishman had a glass of milk.

  Outside the storefront mission, a large man and a small man engaged in furious argument. The large man tweaked the small man’s nose. The small man punched the large man in the eye. The large man threw the small man smack into a concrete wall. The small man stuck a stiletto into the large man’s ribs. Then both of them brought out their pearl-handled razors and, calmly, methodically, they carved each other into small pieces.

  Eddie ate dumplings.

  When the performance outside was
ended and the two men had stopped twitching, Seaton stood up and made his way to the toilet, where he vomited. For some minutes, he remained locked up in the dark, shaking, with his head buried in both hands. Afterwards, as he began to recover, he struck a match and cut his initials into the door with a blunt penknife.

  Back at the table, Eddie dabbed at his lips with a paper napkin and, looking grave, he pushed away his plate. ‘That’s what I mean by amateurs, and I am not surprised that you were sickened,’ he said, as the bodies were removed. ‘But now it’s time to look on the other side of the coin. Come with me, and I will show you what true Death can be.’

  Safe in the Lamborghini, they left the neon behind, veering off across the railroad tracks to find themselves in a neighbourhood of empty streets and towering apartment blocks, where the avenues were like canyons and every sound and tremor made an echo. The sidewalks were spotless, all the doors were locked and bolted. Everything was clean and ordered; passions had no place.

  Round a certain corner, however, Seaton was confronted by a woman who did not belong. Fat and ageless, she was standing underneath a street lamp, in a sequin-spangled dress, sucking on a corn-cob. Butter glinted on her chin, the sequins danced like fireflies in the light and, behind her, there was a fire escape, which appeared to reach straight upward into infinity.

  At Eddie’s command Seaton stopped the car, and they dismounted. ‘Climb,’ said the performer; and they climbed.

  They rose seventeen floors up the fire escape, Eddie zigzagging swiftly in the lead, a silent black phantom, and Seaton floundering half a flight behind. At the eighteenth floor, they halted.

  Looking in through a lighted window, they saw a man sprawled upon a bed, with his shoes and socks kicked off, reading about prize fighters in a glossy magazine. A small pile of beer cans lay scattered across the carpet and the walls were plastered with pictures of naked starlets. Beside the man on his bed, there were several wads of bank notes, circled with elastic bands.

  Light brown in colour, the man was still quite young and unused, with a long pink scar slashed down one cheek. There was an outsized diamond on his little finger, an opal in his tiepin, flashing gold inside his mouth, and he wore a gun in a fancy Mexican holster. Without any question, here was a hipster and, stretching, he yawned and wriggled his toes.

  Outside the window, Eddie straightened his hat brim, raised his right hand and, though he seemed to tap quite gently, the glass broke. The man sat up straight and half turned his head, directly into the path of Eddie’s eyes, which went translucent and began to dazzle, just as they had done in Tupelo, outside the Chinese laundry. Polite and unhurried, the performer smiled and his subject, who had started to rise and go for his holster, immediately sat down again. His hands fell to his sides, he simpered and a bullet passed cleanly, with a noise like a damp squib, through the centre of his forehead and into his brain.

  His magazine fell fluttering to the floor, he lay down on his bed, among the bank notes, and Eddie set off back down the fire escape. But Seaton remained, staring in through the broken window, and tried to fix this frame for ever in his memory – pictures pinned on a wall, beer cans strewn at random on a scuffed green carpet, and a man asleep, faintly smiling, upon an unmade bed.

  Far below, Eddie honked the car horn and the Englishman shook his head, shook his entire body, like a dog emerging from deep water. It was only when he left the window and started his descent that he found, with a sense of distant surprise, that he was shuddering, his legs were soaking wet and he was, he understood, weeping uncontrollably.

  Ten hours later, Eddie and Seaton were eating breakfast beside a silvery lake, some twenty miles from Tuscaloosa, and they sat enshrouded on a vine-trellised balcony, overhanging the water, while they gorged themselves on waffles and maple syrup.

  At dawn they had pulled in at a clapboard truck stop, just outside Magnolia City, and Seaton shut himself inside the backyard washroom. When he entered, he was soiled and shambling with red-rimmed eyes. Seven minutes later, when he reappeared, he had been changed back into a choirboy.

  He shone from head to toe. His fingernails and teeth, his chukka boots and even the brass buttons on his blazer had all been freshly polished; his hair was slicked down flat with soapy water, lank and glutinous against his scalp; and every millimetre of his visible flesh had been scrubbed till it gleamed. Most dazzling of all, his tie was a riot of scarlet cricket bats and, just as he stepped out into the forecourt, pink and new, he was caught by the first thin rays of morning sunlight, which made him squint and smile uncertainly, as if for a prep-school photograph.

  Now he ate waffles and the water sparkled beside him, the air was full of columbine and jasmine. Soon syrup began to ooze from the corners of his mouth, and he gestured vaguely out across the lake with his fork. ‘Tell me,’ he said.

  ‘What about?’ asked Eddie.

  ‘Anything and everything – where you came from, who were your folks, how did you grow up, what formed you and guided you, how you first got involved in the industry.’

  Eddie reached for the huckleberry jam and helped himself to more syrup. ‘These here are mighty fine waffles,’ he said.

  In spite of his night’s exertions, he looked as spruce and unflustered now as he’d been when he stepped forth from his room in the Hotel Amsterdam. Sunlight, sneaking in through the trellises, formed soft dapples on the crown of his hat and, in the morning brightness, with his plate piled high and his napkin tucked neatly into the neck of his overcoat, he might almost have passed for a juvenile.

  For the next five minutes, Seaton did not speak, and it seemed that he must be pondering some deep problem, for his head was bowed and his fork lay idle in his hand. Absent-minded, he smeared his sticky fingers up and down his thighs, while one drop of syrup congealed and hung on his chin.

  At last he seemed to reach a decision, and he lit a fat cigar. Dragging deep, he coughed three times on to the back of his hand and gazed past Eddie’s left shoulder, straight into infinity. ‘I hope you won’t think I’m forward; I do not mean to presume,’ he said. ‘But I have a proposition.’

  ‘What is it you desire?’

  ‘Death,’ said Seaton. ‘And you.’

  Far beyond the balcony, a lone white bird went wheeling and spinning on the water. At first it flew quite flat, skimming close above the surface, and gradually its plumage turned to silvery blue, merging with its background. Then all of a sudden it reared and flared into the sun, as though magicked from a conjurer’s sleeve. Dazzling white, it swooped and swirled and circled, then dropped back down on to the water, just as suddenly as it had soared, and its radiance was extinguished in an instant. ‘Permit me to elaborate,’ said Seaton.

  ‘Go right ahead.’

  ‘I am by profession a salesman. To be precise, I trade in spectacles and TV entertainments, which I call images. Furthermore, I am most extremely successful, I have grossed many millions of dollars.’

  ‘Yes?’ said Eddie, with his mouth full.

  ‘Therefore, performers are my specialty. I have been watching and marketing them half my life, ever since I got out of knee socks. And if there’s one thing that I have learned to know when I see it, that thing is magic. Charisma, stardust, Secret Ingredient X – call it what you like, no man can define it but, once I have witnessed it, I can neither mistake nor forget it.’

  ‘And I’ve got it?’

  ‘You have indeed; you’ve got it in the absolute. From the very first moment I glimpsed you, looking down from my window, I was convinced. And everything that has passed between us since – our talk in The Golden Slipper, last night in Montgomery, your every word and gesture – has only served to render me more certain. You are a star. You were born to touch the skies.’

  Eddie made no comment.

  With a little sigh, he put down his knife and fork, wiped his lips and folded his napkin. Then he rose from the table, replete, and wand
ered down to the lakeside, where he collected a random sampling of pebbles and began to skim them across the smooth water.

  Seaton stood close behind his shoulder, where even the softest murmur could not escape him, and puffed at his cigar, and watched. The performer drew back his arm and the pebbles hissed through the air, bouncing as they touched the waves. ‘What is your proposition?’ Eddie asked.

  ‘I wish to become your manager,’ Seaton replied. ‘I want to take you away from here and carry you back to Los Angeles, where you rightfully belong; I want to package and promote you, launch a campaign and sell you clear across the nation; and I give you my guarantee, I will not rest content until I have made you into the greatest, best-loved and biggest-grossing image in creation.’

  Eddie skimmed pebbles.

  Raising his head, he looked out across the lake, at the pale blue mountains beyond, and tiny waves lapped at his boots, his hat brim was furled by gentle breezes. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Regrettably, I must decline your offer. I am happy as I am and, besides, I have already been contracted in Peoria, Illinois.’

  ‘Who is your subject?’

  ‘She is described as a faithless Jezebel.’

  ‘And what, if I may ask, will be your reward?’

  ‘One thousand dollars in cash,’ said Eddie. ‘Plus expenses, and the joy of a job well done.’

  Behind the professional’s back, Seaton blinked and shook his head, as if in disbelief. ‘A thousand dollars,’ he exclaimed. ‘Why, goodness gracious, that’s scarcely more than chicken feed.’

  ‘It suffices to my needs.’

  ‘But you’re being most grossly exploited. If you came with me, you could earn a hundred times that much, no problem whatsoever. You could live in a penthouse, drive a pink Cadillac and surround yourself with starlets. Before a year was out, I promise you, you would have soared to the utmost peak of the industry, and the world would be your oyster.’