King Death

by Nik Cohn

  As the days went by, all that Eddie ever did was rehearse, and he began to grow restless. It was almost two months since he had made his last completion, the longest layoff that he’d had in years, and the inactivity brought him out in a rash.

  Descending from his room, he tracked Seaton down to his hammock and confronted him squarely: ‘I am not happy,’ said Eddie.

  ‘How come?’

  ‘I am kept too long in idleness,’ the performer told him. ‘If this doesn’t end soon, I will lose everything.’

  ‘Why should you?’

  ‘Death will not be kept waiting. If her blessing is wasted, she will withdraw it and, once she is gone, no professional can ever win her back. Therefore, I must keep hard at work. Training is all very well, kept in its proper place, but there is no substitute for the reality. Without it, a man goes soft, his touch and timing desert him and he forgets what he was created for. Before he knows what’s happened, he has lost his vocation altogether and is only fit for killing.’

  After dark, the partners drank hot toddies by the fireside and a dry wind hissed in the chimney, the windows rattled, the floorboards creaked and sighed. The mansion stretched out interminably on every side, full of draughts and indecipherable echoes, and Eddie was troubled by a persistent itch in the small of his back, which he couldn’t quite reach to scratch: ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘I don’t feel right inside.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I cannot rightly say. So long as I stay downtown, in the gym or on the streets, I’m fine. But as soon as I come back through these gates, the moment I set foot in the gardens, I turn sour and listless and my limbs are weighted down with lead. Maybe it’s the air, maybe I’m just homesick. But whatever the cause, when I wake up in the night, there is the strangest taste in my mouth.’

  ‘Perhaps there’s something wrong with your regime,’ Seaton said.

  ‘How could there be? I follow the same discipline that I’ve always done. I eat nothing but honest home cooking, I do not drink or smoke, I have no truck with women and I sleep eight hours every night. I am clean.’

  ‘And yet?’

  ‘Inside this house,’ said Eddie, ‘I feel soiled.’

  The Englishman looked blank and asked no more questions. But long after midnight, when Eddie had gone upstairs to bed, he continued to sit by the fire, staring into the embers. The screens were dead, the families were all asleep. Lost birds flew into the windows, and Seaton was utterly alone.

  First thing in the morning, he called for J Jones Dickerson and Mort Mossbacher, and the three of them reclined in an arbour full of pink and yellow roses. Watching from his attic, Eddie could not hear what they were saying, but they sported carnations and drank repeatedly from the lemonade fountain. For an hour, they laughed with their mouths wide open and scattered petals every which way. When at last they arose, however, they shook hands formally and, suddenly, all of them looked most solemn.

  Three days later, as Seaton lolled in the back of the black limousine, surrounded by chickpeas, guacamole and red hot peppers, a scrofulous youth in blue jeans came sauntering through the market and ambled down the block, passing underneath the blackened gymnasium windows.

  Between a pawnshop and a seafood store, he came to a large brick wall, every inch of which was covered with scrawled obscenities, propaganda slogans, love plights and catchwords. Inside the gym, behind the tarpaulins, there was a rattle of machine-gun fire and the youth paused for a moment, idly scratching his rump, as he scanned the collected graffiti. Then he reached inside his back pocket and, while the Englishman watched through smoked-glass windows, he pulled out a stick of yellow chalk.

  Upstairs, Eddie threw nine knives in the space of 3.78 seconds, to form a perfect heart on the wall. Mantequilla spat and in large, clumsy lettering, obliterating half a dozen previous declarations at a single scrawl, the youth wrote:

  KARL ROSEN IS AN UNAMERICAN.

  Seen in long shot, early in the morning, Popular Park was a wasteland. Three tramps were asleep on sacking and one old lady walked her dog. A soft rain fell on shrivelled trees and, in the distance, there were high black tenements with tiny windows.

  From one of these windows, on the sixth floor, came a faint and intermittent dazzle, like Morse code spelled out on a scrap of broken mirror. Inside there was a small bare room, with just a bed, a table and rickety chair, and Eddie stood with his back to the cameras, flicking dice.

  On the other side of town, meanwhile, Karl Rosen yawned. Rising from slumber, he stretched and shook himself. Then he sat on the edge of his bed, bare feet dangling, and his long black hair fell forward in a tangle across his face.

  He was a mischief-maker; disturbance was his profession. He organised marches and mass rallies, he made speeches about revolution, he was photographed with machine guns. He waved his fist and shook his hair and swore. Three times already, he had been arrested and brought to trial; three times, on different technicalities, he had won an acquittal.

  Such feats had made him heroic. His public appearances filled football stadiums and amusement parks, his books and manifestos were bibles, and a hundred thousand posters, stuck up in lofts and cellars across the country, showed him brooding and defiant, in beard and beret, behind a barbed-wire barricade.

  In celebration of his latest acquittal, he undertook a nationwide tour, declaiming at rallies in every major city, and so it was that he had come to Chicago, where he commandeered a duplex overlooking the lake and turned it into his operational headquarters. He had the front door painted red, pulled down all the blinds and installed a target range. Men with rifles and steel-capped boots patrolled the corridors, there were hand grenades in the icebox. Underneath the guerrilla’s bedroom window, a gaggle of teenage girls kept vigil through the night.

  On the day appointed for his appearance, fans and sympathisers began to assemble from breakfast onward. At first in twos and threes, then in a continuous stream, they converged from all over the city, and by noon Popular Park was filled to overflowing.

  The crowd was dressed in anoraks and badges and dirtied-down sneakers, they carried banners and chanted slogans. Police encircled them and helicopters hovered overhead, cameras weaved and burrowed among them like electronic ferrets. Electric music blared, and the black mass of the tenements was almost forgotten.

  At the sixth-floor window, a shadow appeared, a dark watching shape, barely visible behind the glass. In close-up, this shape was revealed as a black slouch hat, drawn low across a single opaque eye, steady and unblinking.

  After lunch, Karl Rosen put on his army boots, his combat jacket, his beret. He kissed his wife and children goodbye and was driven away in a jeep, closely followed by a convoy of other jeeps, flanked in turn by a troupe of motorcycle outriders. There was a bodyguard to his left, a bodyguard to his right, a bodyguard in front and a bodyguard behind, and Karl sat snug in a bullet-proof vest.

  By now the crowd had reached forty thousand and, right at the farthest extreme of the park, raised high on a wooden platform, where they were half hidden behind a rampart of microphones, men in beards and berets had already begun to make speeches.

  When Karl Rosen came into sight, he stood up in the back of his jeep and raised his right arm above his head, his fist tightly clenched. Instantly, forty thousand fists shot up in response, like so many TV aerials, and the chanting rose to a crescendo. The outriders revved their engines, the police fingered their batons. Karl Rosen’s black hair blew out behind him in a slipstream.

  In the sixth-floor bedroom, Eddie opened up his suitcase and crouched down by the window, focused in left profile. His image was repeated endlessly; his eyes, his hands, his silhouette. Under the blazing arc lights, he crossed himself, and Karl Rosen, stately, most solemn, ascended the platform.

  He took up his station behind the microphones. Seen from the tenements, he looked frail and undernourished and for almost a min
ute he waited without speaking, while the chanting broke in wave after wave upon his bowed head. When he raised his hand for silence and the tumult was hushed, everything went still. ‘Peace,’ said Karl Rosen, and instantly his eyes were snuffed out, like candles, in giant close-up.

  The guerrilla fell over backwards. As he did so, his feet got entangled with the microphone wires and the entire system came crashing down on top of him, almost burying him. Eddie gazed directly into the lens and, for a second, his eyes caught fire. Then they dimmed again and he was gone.

  From the park below, there arose a formless muttering and growling, like bubbling in a cauldron. At first impact, the crowd had been paralysed but now they began to crane their necks and shout. The bodyguards drew their guns, the lieutenants sprang to their fallen leader’s side. A single volcanic scream, pre-recorded, soared high and clear above the hubbub, in ultimate grief and terror, and in this instant the sound was cut, the image froze.

  The final frame, in medium close-up, showed Karl Rosen flat on his back. You could see the soles of his army boots and his beret, which lay by his side, just an inch from his clutching fingers; you could see the foreshortened rise of his torso and the petrified faces of his aides, suspended above him. The lone scream reverberated in pure silence and, printed neatly across the centre of the screen, two words appeared:

  KING DEATH.

  3

  The first reviews were most disappointing. Out of three hundred and seventy-three publications which gave the Rosen completion headlines and/or editorials, not a single one proved sympathetic, and the vast majority were downright rude. Nobody understood and nobody was impressed. Nobody even recognised the artistry of execution, the sheer virtuosity of both performance and production. Instead, there was a unanimous howl of outrage, and Eddie himself was described as an assassin.

  In Tierra de Ensueños, the morning afterwards, he sat beside the swimming pool, with his head bowed and his hat pulled low across his eyes, and employed his jugulator to whittle at a switch of elm, carving holes for a penny whistle. The shavings flew over his shoulder, to float on the chlorine-green waters, and even in medium long shot, judging by the speed and severity of his strokes, it was plain that he was distressed.

  Front pages stuck to his feet, twined themselves about his shins, and everywhere he looked, he saw himself referred to as a psychopath, a canker and an animal. He felt trapped and kicked out his ankles, to free himself. But the more he fretted, the tighter the newsprint clung.

  Meanwhile, Seaton was sunning himself in his hammock, clad in a tartan swimsuit. His belly slopped loosely over his waistband and, sipping at a Pimms, he worked his way serenely through the whole massive pile of clippings.

  Dutiful, he went tut-tut at every insult and wrinkled up his nose at each fresh tirade. Nevertheless, he did not stop smiling and, when at last he arrived at the bottom of the pile, he merely shrugged and spread wide his hands: ‘Not to worry,’ he said. ‘Rome was not built in a day, and big oaks from little acorns grow. We’ve known all along that we would meet with folly and injustice, at least to begin with, and Death would not triumph without a long, hard fight.’

  ‘They call me a killer,’ Eddie said.

  ‘I noticed that, and I’m not surprised that you take it amiss. Still, we mustn’t lose our sense of proportion. They’re only expressing a conditioned reflex, a built-in sales resistance. Nothing that patience and perseverance won’t put right. The day will come, I promise you, when many of these self-same hysterics will be numbered among your staunchest adherents.’

  Eddie was not consoled. Even though Seaton had warned him in advance, he was profoundly shocked and hurt. Constructive criticism was one thing, and he had no objection to civilised debate. But this was something else entirely – brutish and foul-mouthed abuse – and he burned inside for shame.

  Seaton, sorrowing to see him so cast down, poured him a Dr Pepper; but the performer left it untouched, and the jugulator flashed and hissed like a serpent’s tongue: ‘They say that I’m a disease and I’m mentally deformed,’ he said. ‘One of them even calls me godless.’

  ‘Take no notice,’ Seaton told him. ‘Critics are buffoons, they always have been, they always will be, and you mustn’t let them upset you. Besides, they are irrelevant. When it comes to selling images, only one thing matters. John Q Public. Mister Average.’

  ‘He hates me, too.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘This morning, while I was brushing my teeth, Jerry McGhee was on the monitor and he called me something I will not repeat. Furthermore, his wife and daughter agreed with him.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘You know I do not lie.’

  ‘Then all I can say is splendid,’ Seaton cried. ‘If they call you names of such a nature, it proves that they must have watched. And what is far more important, they must have been deeply stirred.’

  This was very true. Indeed, when Jerry first witnessed the Karl Rosen completion, his knees had turned to jelly and he almost purged his bowels. ‘Sweet Jesus Christ,’ he muttered and turned his face to the wall, while his wife Martha knelt down on the floor and was sick into a green plastic bucket.

  The same sort of reaction was repeated throughout the mansion; without exception, the residents were startled, shaken, thrown into disarray. Nonetheless, though they were sickened, they were also fascinated. When the instant replay came up, they did not stop watching.

  Beside the pool, reflected in a dozen screens, Karl Rosen raised his hand for silence and his eyes disappeared, first the left, then the right. In slow motion, he described a graceful backward parabola, weightless as a spacewalker. He floated and looped, he drifted to earth like a leaf. When he went still, his toes pointed straight up to heaven.

  After a moment’s interval, the same sequence began all over again. Eddie raised his half-finished whistle to his lips and blew a few notes, shrill and discordant. The lizards basking in the sun were startled and scuttled off into the shadows, and all the songbirds were silenced. ‘I don’t belong here; I’m lost,’ Eddie said.

  ‘Please don’t despair,’ said Seaton. ‘At this stage of the game, believe me, love and hate are meaningless. Your only need is to make an impact, establish your name and image, as you are already doing. Afterwards, adulation comes automatically.’

  But Eddie was not listening. For a moment, all he could think of was Tupelo, where he had felt at home and no one had dared call him names. When he shut his eyes, he felt again the heat and torpor of the sidewalks, the seclusion of the darkened doorway, the ever-changing glowlights inside The Golden Slipper, and his heart was caught up by strange currents, which made him want to hide.

  Although it was not complete, he dropped the whistle into his overcoat pocket, and he put away the jugulator in his suitcase. He disappeared inside the mansion, lost himself in the labyrinth, and the only trace that was left of him was a pool full of shavings.

  That same night, when Tierra de Ensueños was sleeping, he packed his suitcase, knotted his sheets and secured them to the bedpost, swung his left leg across the window sill and prepared to make good his escape.

  A full moon gleamed among the minarets, lighting his way, and the gardens were flooded by a silvery radiance. Just before he began his descent, Eddie looked down and saw a young doe drinking from a fountain, directly beneath his window.

  As it gazed at its own reflection, bathed in moonlight, it could almost have passed for Bambi. So pure did it appear, indeed, that the whole garden was transformed. All sense of decay and corruption disappeared. The undergrowths were silenced, there were no more whisperings or hidden scurryings. So long as the fawn went on drinking, Tierra de Ensueños was lulled into innocence, stillness, peace.

  Hovering on the brink of his window sill, with one leg out and one leg in, Eddie watched for a long time without moving. Then at last he drew back, put down his suitcase and, instead of runnin
g, he lay down on his bed, where he soon fell fast asleep.

  First thing next morning, he went back into training.

  Clearly, after Karl Rosen, it was not feasible to venture downtown any more, so Eddie rigged up an impromptu gym behind the greenhouses and threw himself fiercely, almost fanatically, into his work. Mantequilla spat in the petunia patch and the performer jumped through blazing hoops, flung himself through windows, shot from the hip until his trigger finger was raw and bleeding. Meanwhile, the Englishman consulted endlessly in the maze with J Jones Dickerson and Mort Mossbacher.

  Outside the mansion gates, the police searched high and low but King Death could not be found. For almost a week, both he and Karl Rosen kept a firm grip on the front pages. Then other sensations took their place and they quickly receded into the background.

  At the same time, the families slipped back into their familiar apathy. Fresh images overlaid the gutted sockets of the Un-American’s eyes, the perfection of Eddie’s left profile. Everything returned to normal.

  Jerry McGhee struck up a casual liaison with Sarah Carter, Tom Potterson came down with mumps, Barney Brannigan made himself sick on applejack. The orchids bloomed and the catalpas died, and the screens never ceased to flicker.

  Eddie stood by his window, lay on his bed, sat in front of his mirror. The radio played Love For Sale and, at the end of the fifth week, suitcase in hand, he descended from the attic and was driven away across America, in search of Jade Carney, the singer, idol and pervert.

  He travelled to Dallas, immured behind smoked-glass windows, and felt as though he were cruising in a space capsule, divorced from weight and time. Though the limousine sped at a hundred miles an hour, it was not he but the landscape outside that seemed to move, flashing past like a series of back-projected sets in a film, while Eddie himself never stirred.