“Are you sure? Did you see his face close up?”
Now she was getting louder again. “You promised you wouldn’t tell the police, but you did, you must have, because now the limper comes—”
He tried holding her for a moment, but that didn’t work. “I swear I never went. It must have been a mistake or something—did you really see this guy?”
“I saw ... a man outside ... he was there ... I started to walk away ... he came after ... limping ... I turned a corner, he turned it after me ... that was enough, I ran.”
“Well, there’s only maybe nine million guys who limp in New York, Elsa,” Babe began. “I mean, it’s world-famous for being gimp heaven—the National Limpers’ Association would never think of holding its convention any place besides the Coliseum, I thought everyone knew that,” and he kept on, giving her a few lines to keep it lively, putting some water on to boil so they could have a little instant, and pretty soon she began to relax. He had a way with her, it was what made them so terrific. By midmorning she admitted it might have been imagination.
By noon she admitted she was fine.
They took in a Bergman double bill, Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, Babe being a Bergman nut, Elsa totally unfamiliar. Then he bought her a cheapo meal at the local Szechuan—he was a nut for that too. Then he took her to her place, where they touched a little, and after that he headed on home. He was bushed, so sleep came quickly, and he had no idea what time it was when he realized that it hadn’t been all imagination on Elsa’s part, because, even half awake, he could tell there was someone in the room with him.
Before he had a chance to get afraid, Babe decided to do what Cagney would have done, so in his best White Heat voice he said, low and even, “I got a gun, I know how to use it; you make a move, I’ll blow your ass to Shanghai.”
And from the darkness came his favorite voice in all the world: “Don’t kill me, Babe.”
Babe practically flipped right out of bed. “Aw, hey, Doc, shit, great.”
“Undeniably articulate,” Doc said. “But then, the lad has always had a way with words.”
Babe let out an actual whoop then, something he didn’t do ordinarily, and a good thing too, since it was hardly Emily Post behavior. But what the hell, anything was acceptable on those rare occasions when your own and only good big brother came to town ...
PART II
DOC
13
“LEMME GET THE LIGHT,” Babe said, and as he flicked it on, Doc went, “Hey?”
“What?”
Doc pointed to the cuts. “Face.”
Babe shrugged. “Nothing. I don’t want to talk about it, just your garden-variety mugging, nothing worth making a fuss over. Happened Sunday—what’s today, Tuesday? I wrote you. When you get back you can read all about it.”
“But you’re okay?”
Babe nodded. When Doc got to worrying, he could be a real mother hen. “As a matter of fact, do me a favor and when you get back, don’t read all about it, just pitch the letter, yes?”
Doc twirled his key chain, which had, among others, Babe’s apartment key on it. After a few circles he flipped it high into the air, caught it behind his back without looking. He did it all in one motion, a trick he could do from the time Babe could remember, only in the old days he did it with softballs or marbles. Now, at least when they were together, Doc did it only in times of decision. Babe realized that, though probably Doc didn’t; it was ingrained by now. “ ’Twill be burned,” Doc said. Then, loosening his tie: “I’ve been off working, and all that was waiting from you upon my return was this, may I say, obscenely overwritten piece of purple prose that would have made Rossetti blush—it contained, to be precise, a description of Her Ladyship, and I figured I better quick get my ass down here and meet her before she made her ascension into Heaven.”
“Screw,” Babe said, “I never went on like that and you know it.”
Doc picked up his Gucci bag and plopped it on Babe’s desk. “You didn’t, huh? You’re just lucky I understand you’re a mental defective and unaccountable for your actions, or I’d spend the rest of my life blackmailing you. I think you called her ‘utopian’ at one point. ‘Indefectible, utopian and sublime.’ Hell, even Annette Funicello was never that great.”
“Screw,” Babe said again, this time barfing out loud, because just once, in a moment of weakness, he had told Doc he thought from certain angles Annette Funicello was “kinda cute” and Doc never forgot anything, especially when you gave him ammo like that to deal with.
Doc looked around Babe’s room. It really was crummy. Bare-floored and covered all over with dust. Books piled everywhere, the sofa showing bare springs, the bathroom permanently gray. “You’ve done wonders,” Doc said. He had been down only once before, a week or two after Babe took the place.
“It’s not everything it’s gonna be,” Babe admitted, “but my decorator’s so goddamn unreliable. I should fire him, but not many top guys will handle a job this big.”
Doc nodded, opening his bag; he took out three bottles of red wine, and looked at them against a bare light bulb by Babe’s desk. “I just hope the sediment’s not too stirred up,” he said. He looked at Babe. “Corkscrew?”
Babe pointed toward the kitchen, waiting for the lecture to start on the glories of Burgundy wine.
“I’ll open the Moulin-à-vent,” Doc said. “It’s a Beaujolais, but I think you’ll be surprised at the power.” He concentrated on opening the bottle.
“Terrific,” Babe said. He tried a few experimental snores, drooped his eyes shut. “Go on, go on.”
Doc was having trouble with the cork. “It’s known as the king of Beaujolais—Fleurie’s the queen—”
“Fascinating, my God,” Babe managed, snoring a little louder now.
Doc ignored him. “This is a splendid year, seventy-one, and the balance is what I want you to pay attention to.”
Babe dropped his head limply, began snoring and whistling, snoring and whistling.
“You are a boor and a turd,” Doc said, but then he was laughing. “I give, I give, no more wine talk.” He paused. “Dammit, I meant to bring glasses down with me.”
Now Babe started to laugh. “You bastard, you know I got glasses.” He headed toward a cabinet.
“I do not include paper cups,” Doc said.
Babe grabbed a glass, handed it over. “Here, goddammit.”
Doc started to pour, stopped. “This thing is filthy.”
“I never said I had clean glasses, asshole,” Babe said, and then they said, at precisely the same moment, “Not the shoulders, just the head,” and then, again together, they started plotzing out loud, because it was a favorite family story. H.V. had loved it, about an awkward Brooklyn Dodger, Babe Herman, who got angry one day when a sportswriter said, in print, that Herman was going to get beaned on the head by a fly ball, he was so clumsy in the outfield, and Herman, furious, cornered the sportswriter and called him every name in the book, ending up by saying, “And I’ll betcha fifty bucks you’re wrong,” and the reporter said, “Okay, it’s a deal, fifty bucks says you get hit on the head or the shoulders by a fly ball,” and Herman thought that one over awhile before concluding, “Nah—nah—not the shoulders, just the head.”
Still laughing, Doc went to the sink and turned on the water. “When does it stop being rusty?” he asked after a while.
“If you’d unpack, it’ll probably be okay by the time you’re finished.”
“Might as well wash one for you too,” Doc said, and he picked a dirty glass from the sink.
“Just a touch,” Babe said. “I’m working up to twenty miles now, and booze is tough on the wind.”
“Burgundy is not ‘booze,’ ” Doc said, busying himself with the glasses. “I’m sorry I joked about your place,” he said, his back turned. “You’re a scholar, what the hell do you need with a palace? Live the way you want while you can. Forgiven?”
“I wasn’t even sure I’d been insulted.”
<
br /> “Good,” Doc said, working away. “It’s a crazy world, I tell you, who the hell knows what’s gonna happen one minute to the next, I was just reading this morning’s Wall Street Journal and there’s this California firm—you won’t believe this but what the hell, they’re all nuts in California, I guess, that’s how they qualify for citizenship—anyway, this bunch of West Coast guys have patented a thing they call, lemme get this right now, oh yeah, they call it a ‘br—oooo-m’—it’s like a long stick with a bunch of hay tied to one end of it, and the Journal says they think they’ll make a fortune with this thing—they claim with their ‘br—oooo-m’ you can clean things, floors, for example, just by sweeping.”
“Never catch on,” Babe said.
Doc whirled from the rusty water. “Jesus, Babe, how can you exist in an armpit of a place like this?”
“Glasses’re clean now,” Babe said. “Pour the firewater.”
Doc poured, giving the bottle a twist to avoid spilling.
Babe took a sip, Doc too. Babe could never remember even seeing his brother high, much less drunk, and the same held true for him. But then, H.V. had more than brought up the old family average. At least during the last days. Last years, actually. Last bad years.
“This expensive?”
“Sort of, why?”
“No reason. Smells it, kind of. Smooth. Whenever I don’t have a coughing fit, I figure it’s expensive. Oil business must be good.”
Doc raised his glass to toasting position. “The oil business is always good.” He made a slight religious bow.
“That wasn’t east,” Babe said.
“I was bowing toward Detroit, jerk—General Motors is more important to this country than Jesus ever was.”
“Goddamn polluters and thieves,” Babe said. He really hated it that Doc worked at what he worked at. Drilling equipment; selling it all over, contaminating the goddamn world.
“If you give me your ecology lecture now, I swear I’ll tell Irmgaard when I meet her how I caught you pulling your pud when you were twelve.”
Babe laughed. “That was a great day for me, really. Up till then, I thought I was the only one in the whole history of the world to do anything that horrible. I thought you’d have to cast me out or put me in the stocks and have the villagers throw rocks at me. When you told me that everybody did it all the time, I remember thinking, ‘Those bastard grown-ups, why have they kept it secret from me all these years?’ ”
Doc smiled, pointed to the bed. “Move your debris.”
Babe began to. They had a deal: Whenever Doc came calling, he got the bed, Babe took the spring-filled sofa.
While this was going on, Doc said quietly, “Hey? Quit living in a hovel like this, come on down to Washington, I’ll set you up in a decent place, we’ll be near each other, give it a try, huh, I got the bread, you know that’s no problem.”
Babe shook his head. “No decent grad schools down there.”
“Nothing to compare with the glories of Columbia, is that it?”
“Columbia’s, not all that great, I’m not saying it is, but it does have a much lower percentage of mouth-breathers than, say, Georgetown.”
Suddenly Doc was hollering, “Jesus, Babe, for Chrissakes, just ’cause Dad did it you don’t have to!”
“I’m sick of that!” Babe hollered right back.
Doc stopped short, confused. “Sick of it? I never said it before.”
“Professor Biesenthal at Columbia. He did, kind of.”
“Wasn’t he one of H.V.’s geniuses?”
Babe nodded yes. Then he said, “Look, I like my hovel, thanks for the offer, but I’m staying here, and it’s got nothing to do with H.V.”
“Bull!”
Babe shrugged, shifted pillows, while Doc continued hanging up the few clothes he’d brought along. “So I’ll take you and Etta for dinner, okay? She does need food, doesn’t she? Or can she sustain her divinity on pure atmosphere?”
“Wait’ll you see her, you’ll salivate, I guarantee it.”
Doc laughed. “Sonny, you’re talking to a guy who was married once and engaged three times before he was twenty-five—it takes a lot to make me lose my spittle.”
“What is that, bragging? Four arrests and only one conviction?”
“I haven’t had a sincere conviction since I entered the oil game—there’s an industry-wide regulation against them.” He closed his Gucci bag, shoved it into a corner of Babe’s closet. Casually, he said, “Hey, you don’t still have that thing, do you?”
Knowing the answer, Babe still said, “What thing?”
“When I let myself in tonight and you were set to blow my ass to Shanghai, you sounded really authentic, very George Raft.”
“Nobody imitates George Raft for Chrissakes—that was supposed to be Cagney.”
“Do you?”
“Loaded.” He went to his bottom desk drawer, took out the pistol and the box of bullets. “Here.”
“Take those things out, then give it to me.”
Quickly Babe unloaded the pistol. He was expert with it, but then, he should have been, considering the hours he’d put in practicing over the years. Doc was the reverse; he’d always hated guns. “Here,” Babe said again.
Doc took it, tried handling it as if it didn’t panic him. “How can you keep something like this?”
“What do you mean ‘how’? You didn’t want it.”
“Want it? Who could possibly want it?”
“Me, obviously.”
“Why?”
“No reason. Keepsake. You know damn well why, to get back.”
“Babe, Joe McCarthy died a year before Dad killed himself.”
“Maybe, maybe not. There’s lots of lies have come out of Washington.”
“Is Helga sadistic too? Is that one of the things you two cuties have in common? What do you do for fun if there isn’t a vampire picture playing in town?” He gave the gun to Babe.
As he reloaded it, Babe said, “You’re trying to bait me, you bastard, I know you, because before you called her Irmgaard and I didn’t correct you and then you called her Etta and I didn’t correct you then either, and just now you said Helga; well, that’s also not gonna get a rise out of me, but it’s Elsa, Elsa, you got that, not Ilse or Ella or Eva, not Hilda or Leila or Lida, not Lily, not Lola.”
“I’m sorry,” Doc said. “I must be punchy from traveling. I won’t get Olga’s name wrong again, I swear,”
“Olga is nearly it, but Olga is still wrong,” Babe said, patiently. “I’m really proud of you for coming so close, anyone who’s learned to read as recently as you have would naturally have trouble with two-syllable words, but we’re gonna work on Elsa until you get it right, not Portia, Pamela or Paula, not Rhoda either, and it’s also not Sara or Stella, Sophia or Shelia.”
“Ursula?” Doc tried.
“Closing in on it,” Babe said, “give credit where it’s due, but it’s Elsa, not Vida, Vera or Vanessa or Venetia or Willa or Ysolda. ELSA!!!”
“Elsa,” Doc said. He sipped his wine, then looked at his kid brother. “Her I got—who the hell are you?”
14
ONLY ONE ROAD LEADS past the estate. “Estate” is probably too strong a word; in Palm Springs it would have just been a house, “nothing to be ashamed of.” But with the Paraguayan jungle encroaching on the other three sides, the blue house half an hour outside La Cordillera was certainly something close to unique; at the very least, extraordinary.
The peasants in La Cordillera had heard about the blue house, most of them anyway, but not that many had actually seen the place. Because, first of all, it was a half-hour trip even if you knew someone who owned a car, and secondly, the one road was almost dangerously rutted.
And thirdly, the guards.
There were always two, each stationed perhaps a quarter of a mile on either side of the blue house. There was very little traffic, anyway, but whatever came, the guards examined. They never explained what rights they had, where the legal jus
tification came from; they moved with their rifles into the middle of the road and waited for the vehicle to stop. They were not pleasant. They implied, always, menace. Do not return this way unless you must, they seemed to say; we do not like seeing the same faces here.
The only ones they waved through were the ones who delivered. Every week an ancient open truck arrived with food from La Cordillera. A mail delivery took place every other day. And every afternoon an additional guard would leave the blue house and drive to the nearest village for the laundress.
Always shawled in black, she was a bull-shouldered woman of average height. She would enter the house and, several hours later, leave it; then the same guard would drive her back to the village.
Usually she carried nothing with her, but one late September afternoon she emerged, shawled as always, with a black case perhaps one foot square. She got into the same car she always got into, and the same guard drove her from the blue house. The car looked the same as always, and was, except for in the back seat, under a blanket, where there rested a canvas clothes case. The car left the blue house, turned toward the village, and the guard on the road started to move his right arm into a salute, and probably would have had not the driver waved at him in sudden wild anger. The road guard dropped his arm and stood stiffly, head down a bit, ashamed, hoping that the master of the blue house would not retaliate with cruelty.
The car drove on. The laundress sat quietly, bull-shouldered as always, the black box firmly held in her lap, like some strange security blanket of black leather. Her shawl was pulled perhaps more over her face than usual, but otherwise she looked like the laundress going home.
It was crucial that everything look exactly as everything had always looked, because the master of the blue house knew that although most of the occasional peasants who crept past his estate were just that, peasants, Paraguayan and thick and inconsequential, some of them, not many, but enough to be worrying, were Jews.
The car drove to the laundress’s village and straight through it. The driver never spoke. The laundress sat squat and stolid. Both of them perspired. The heat was relentless; unless you were strong, it could kill you. The driver was very strong, the weaker of the two, but filled with power nonetheless.
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