by Hob Broun
After dinner, Inge served refreshments in the living room—coffee for the men, chamomile tea for herself. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and she smelled harshly of laundry soap. Tomas, suddenly the mellow host, showed off his up-to-the-minute sound system.
“These tapes are very rare. Live broadcasts from the ballroom of a Kansas City hotel.”
But his sermon on the martyrdom of Charlie Parker was interrupted by a phone call.
“A Frenchman,” Inge reported. “Something to do with business.”
She lowered herself to the floor near Christo, now supine and awash in Beaujolais. Smiling tightly, she wiggled her naked toes on the rug, hugged her knees.
“Where were you born?”
“Flint, Michigan. That’s up north.”
“We have been in the States. Did he tell you?”
“Not that I recall.”
“It depressed me. A crumbling empire, you know? And the people are so insecure. So desperate for heroes, don’t you think?”
“Not desperate.” Christo rolled onto his side. “Just fickle.”
“Everything is treated like a pair of shoes.” Inge was flushed with vehemence. “What life is there for artists? You see all the musicians who must go abroad for appreciation while the people worship athletes and television stars.”
Right. Next, Christo supposed, she’ll be asking me if Malcolm X was murdered by the oil companies. “We need a lot of tranquilizing, that’s all. Nothing special.”
Inge squinted at him, stretched out her legs. “Do you mind?” Already her feet were wedged up against his thigh. “I have poor circulation and they get so very cold.”
They were clammy, too, pressing under him and up, digging in like a couple of baby fists. He looked at sea-green veins distinct along her ankle, then into her steady eyes.
“I think in America you must be a beggar or a king and nothing in between,” Inge said, and tiptoed up to the fork in his legs.
“That must be why I left.”
The laundry soap smell was hypnotic, a rhinal drug like the perfume dumped into department-store ventilation systems. Without the least hint of anything on her face, she massaged the root behind his balls with an icy big toe. The most artless pass ever thrown at him, but they were both breathing hard. Crazy situation, ferociously dreamy, brainless, but under wraps somehow. Strangers when we meet. He noticed a saliva bubble in a crevice between her teeth.
“We must stop.” She flipped her bangs, looked away.
Hearing footsteps, Christo rolled over to hide his erection.
A bad morning, Christo faltering out of hermetic sleep and into the shower, rolling his clogged head under the spray until the hot water ran out. Tomas seemed edgy as they walked to the shop, glancing over his shoulder and nibbling the end of his tongue. The paint was dry on the Rover and Abdel, who’d been up all night, had gauze bandages wrapped around one hand. Tomas told him he could take the rest of the day off.
“No hard feelings?” Christo said.
“No feelings, none.” Tomas drew a flat line in the air with his pipe. “I close the book on this thing and then no more. You tell New York what I say. No more.”
“Well, thanks for the dinner. Next time you and Inge will have to come over to my place.”
Christo drove along the waterfront checking pier numbers. The Sombra, a freighter under Liberian registry, was a sorry-looking item, algae blots along the waterline, its red stacks barred with soot. White sunlight gave it the complexion of a disaster ship. Christo imagined a Taiwanese mate gone berserk with a fire axe, alone by morning on a rudderless vessel lost in the garbage currents. Oh well. Maktub, as they say hereabouts. It was out of his hands.
He signed clearance papers, a stack of traveler’s checks. Then, on his way to find a cab to the airport, he let loose his rabbit’s foot and watched it fall, an offering to the sea.
Pierce at the wheel of the Packard was a jolly welcome-wagoneer, rocking from side to side as he hummed selections from On the Town. He’d been a few hours late picking Christo up at the terminal, but presumably had needed the extra time to deck out in the belted camel’s-hair coat, pinstripe three-piecer, taupe gloves, to grab the feel of this event and then describe it in clothes.
“So our ship comes in on the sixteenth and everything is everything. I never doubted your aptitude, jazzbo, not for a second.”
He announced they were bound for Pine Hill, Connecticut, and the Milbank family retreat. It was a proclamation rather than an invitation and Christo chafed at his lack of choice. Back behind the lines, mission accomplished, and still he was following orders. There they were, bombing up the Taconic Parkway with the top down and the threat of snow in the air. They sipped warmth from a pewter hipflask while naked trees whipped by in stripes of gray and brown, a frugal winter plaid.
Minutes from the state line, a police cruiser came up alongside and ran even with them, door handle to door handle. Every few seconds the bruiser inside would turn and stare at them out of his dark eyeholes.
“Fucking yokel,” Pierce said. “I should put him away. Done one twenty in this thing against a headwind.”
“No special effects.” Christo touched his arm. “Please.”
It was just the sort of challenge Pierce would hand himself, one more small stone in the legend he was building. But he just smiled and waved, hissing through his teeth, “Your mother’s head in a plastic bag, Nazi.”
The cruiser peeled back, U-turned across marshy median grass.
By the time Pierce turned onto the gravel drive that led through dark and aromatic woods to the house (erected in 1909 by his great-grandfather with the proceeds from a cotton mill and two tuberculosis sanatoria in the Adirondacks), snow had begun to fall. He coasted around the last curve, leaned back and let woolly flakes melt on his face. With its exposed rafter ends, incised shutters and jigsawed eaves, the house looked like a huge chocolate cuckoo clock.
“Like going back in time, isn’t it?” Pierce surveyed his patrimony from the running board. “To the golden age of the robber barons.”
Inside, Christo stared at his reflection in the dusty glass bell sheltering a stuffed canary while Pierce chased around turning on lights and thermostats. The furnace kicked on, blowing musty fumes, and Christo said he needed some coffee. Badly.
Improbably shiny copper pans and utensils hung from the kitchen beams. Pierce filled the kettle and got French roast beans out of the freezer. The coffee maker took paper filters but none could be found, so Pierce substituted a scarf that had belonged to his grandmother. The resultant brew had a faintly iridescent surface. Christo lifted his cup, blew, sipped.
“Mmmm.” He smacked his lips. “Tastes like old neck.”
It was in an upstairs corner room, at a slate billiard table with mother-of-pearl inlay and ball-and-claw feet, that Pierce and Christo convened to discuss the Morocco operation. They puffed stale cigars and played Chicago rotation by the light of frosted candleflame bulbs.
“Give me your assessment on quality,” Pierce said, lining up a knotty three-ball combination.
“Devastating. Couldn’t see my hand in front of my face.”
“You brought a sample?”
“Fuck no. I went out of there clean, baby. An investment like that, I wasn’t going to get popped at the airport for a couple of measly ounces.”
“That’s not like you.”
“Maybe not. You’re disappointed I didn’t screw up?”
“Hey, you’re my hot prospect, my rookie phee-nom. Would I let you fall short?”
Christo flubbed a delicate onion slice on the ten ball. “Not so far.”
“You’re sitting right smack on top of the biggest score of your life, so cheer the hell up. Show a little faith in yourself.”
“Tell it to the Swede.”
“What about him?”
“We were what you call incompatible.”
“Really?” Pierce appraised the end of his cigar, began to pace. “Maybe it figures. T
he man has the battle stars and he’s been through some hard campaigns. But I have to say I didn’t fill you in all the way on Tommy Ulrich before you left.”
“Let’s have it.”
“I heard—from a highly impeachable source, mind you—that he had a breakdown three years ago, burned out some circuits.”
“Shit.” Christo flung cue chalk across the room. “So you sent me over there without a map.”
“Take it easy. I didn’t want you to get, as it were, psyched out.”
“Thanks a lot. So who told you?”
“His wife.”
A sickening gyroscope spinning around his brain, Christo slumped onto the window seat. Always the last to know when the joke’s on you. Outside thinly layered snow had turned ghost blue under the moon. He pressed his fingers to the cold pane, then his eyes.
“You all right?” Pierce meant to be solicitous, but sounded annoyed.
“Relax. I’m not going to bleed on the furniture.” Forebodings were best left where they were. Trite phrases would do: “I’m tired out is all. Overworked.”
“Country air will take care of that. A respite among the evergreens, that’s my prescription.”
Christo moved his eyes slowly over the shadowy room. “I don’t know about this place. Too much gloom, too many spooks.”
“Exactly. That’s why I come here. The sacred ground of the ancestors. They’re my people, those spooks, and I need to get in touch, replenish the spirit now and then. Great uncle Lydon who owned half of Nova Scotia at one time and held the state record for brown trout up until the fifties. My grandfather, who appeared drunk before the Supreme Court. And Granny Syl, she gave me the money to swing my first major dope deal. I told her I needed something to live on while I wrote a novel. But they’re all gone now and I’m the only one holding on. My parents come here for a week every summer and bitch about the property taxes. So it’s me. Everything flows into me. The magic fucking power of the ancestors and I’m the only one who sees how valuable it is.”
“How valuable it is,” Christo repeated. “I despise the rich.”
They dined on a muddy goulash of canned goods and went early to bed.
These rooms were glacial with gentility, outlined in trickery and clutter, overfed on the trivial seductions of the past—yachting trophies on the mantel, seashells in a reed basket, a fez set rakishly atop a bust of Longfellow. Christo could only react to it as a job site. He’d been checking the layout all morning, conjecturing what ought to be taken and what left behind: the thief’s triage. And he was watched every step of the way by the brushstroke eyes of china statuettes, the faces in countless photographs whose posed implications were as unbending as noon light on rich wood surfaces all around, brown in a dozen languages.
On the porch in his overcoat, Pierce hunched over his typewriter, banging away at preliminary notes for a detective story. No title yet, but it would involve treachery on the international commodities market and plutonium secreted in someone’s toothpaste.
Over the last few days they had not been getting along well. Tension and close quarters: a recipe for spite. Pierce didn’t help matters any by making a point of competition—gin rummy, backgammon, twenty questions, even Candyland and Lotto, children’s board games dredged up out of musty drawers.
“Enough,” Christo protested. “Even boredom is better than this.”
“We just need to find a game you can win at.”
In the evenings Pierce would fry potatoes, broil some previously thawed chops, uncork yet another bottle of wine. Afterward they’d listen to the radio or to hissing 78’s of Paul Whiteman, Vincent Lopez and his Hotel Pennsylvania Orchestra. Then finally, one of them would cross out another box on the calendar; one less hindrance in the way of Hash Wednesday on the sixteenth.
While Christo displayed classic cabin fever symptoms, wandering aimlessly from room to room and talking to himself, Pierce grew increasingly preoccupied. He disappeared for hours into glassy contemplation, spoke cursorily, and only when prompted, of their deal. Would the turnover take long? Had he lined up buyers in advance? Pierce would mumble and shrug, treating the whole thing as an intrusion on his pensive vigil. Christo saw this aspect of his partner’s personality both as a surprise and as something he should already have guessed. Here, in the blunt context of Bleak House (the apt name Christo had found on the tooled spine of a book), was the truth for which Pierce had been overcompensating all along. He was not so very different from his sister, no more removed than she from the onerous requirements of Family. Christo wondered whether he had ever considered suicide.
“Writing is no better than factory work,” Pierce said now, shivering as he came in from the porch. “How about some lunch?”
“We just had breakfast two hours ago.”
“If there’s something you’d rather do than eat, let’s hear it.”
So, while Pierce made busy with skillet and spatula, Christo sat acquiescently at the big oak table. He toyed with a wooden napkin holder in the shape of a turtle. Probably made in some blazer-school shop class and wrapped up for Christmas. Granny had developed a fixation for turtles; they were all over the place, in needlepoint, on coffee cups. One more compulsory tradition.
“I was thinking this morning I might move up permanently.” Pierce served a tunafish-and-green-bean omelet. “Somehow I feel a lot closer to reality here.”
“You’ll get over it.”
“It’s more than a passing mood.” Pierce pointed with his fork. “You don’t come from anywhere, that’s your problem.”
“You’re pulling rank on me now?”
“I only mean to tell myself not to waste explanations on you.”
Christo pushed away from the table. “This tastes like soap.” His scalp tingled with exasperation.
Pierce had to be dragged from under the blankets on Wednesday morning. All the way down in the car he complained of swollen glands.
“You want to stop at a diner for chicken soup?”
“No, let’s get this thing over with.”
But by the time they reached the customs terminal in Port Elizabeth, Pierce had regained his urban gloss and laughed at his own jokes. After all that down time on the Milbank acres, Christo found the industrial landscape soothing and was able to dismiss the vague unease that had been plaguing him. All cut and dried, really. The hard part was already done; the rest was mere processing. Documents in hand, he went to claim his property.
All omens were good. The Sombra had arrived slightly ahead of schedule and the off-loading was already done. The sun was shining and the customs agents looked tired and complacent. Still, he noticed, they’re wearing sidearms.
“Lived in New York long, sir?”
“I hear these babies don’t get the good gas mileage.”
Inspecting the Rover from front to back, they small-talked him, the usual testing for nerves. Christo answered placidly, in no hurry. Then they brought out the German shepherd. No problem, he reminded himself. That’s why we layered red pepper on top. At a whistled command, the dog bounded into the front seat, sniffed busily with ears pricked and tail wagging.
“Okay, Rusty.” The agent snapped his leash back on, slipped him a biscuit. “Follow me please, sir.”
The voice was dry, uninflected; handcuffs jingling on the agent’s belt were astonishingly loud. Christo felt momentarily that all was lost and it was too late to run. But all they wanted from him inside was his signature on a few more forms.
With Pierce leading the way in the Packard, he headed at last for snug harbor in lower Manhattan.
Looie met them at the elevator gate with a coil of yellow extension cord in one hand and a circular saw in the other.
“Could we get started right away? I’m hosting a poetry reading tonight.”
He put on a scuba mask to protect his face from flying particles and went to work on the Rover’s rear panel, careful not to push the saw too deep and tear up the merchandise. Pierce was doing figures out loud, lauding thei
r profits-to-be. Christo was holding his stomach. Something was wrong with the noise of the saw. When Looie started cutting the second leg of the rectangle, the bottom edge dipped, meeting no resistance.
“Hold it.”
Looie shut off the saw and drew back.
“What the hell?” Pierce, sensing the alarm.
Christo padded his hand with his shirttail. They watched as he worked under the crack and pried up.
Air. And down at the bottom, a few make-weight bags of cement.
Christo saw spots. Like stepping on the teeth of a rake, taking the handle full on the nose.
“I stood right there.”
Looie walked in a circle, massaging his sweating head. “Imported cement,” he said. And again, “Imported cement.”
“I did.” Speech made Christo gag, as though he had alphabet blocks in the throat. “I stood right there and helped load.”
Pierce took three long steps and drove a left hook into the wall.
Looie lay back on the floor. “I’ve walked into one of Aesop’s fables,” he sighed. All Christo could do to keep the vertigo at bay was continue to stare down the hole.
The elevator began to descend. As Pierce disappeared from view, they heard him say he’d be back. Right now he was going to find an emergency room and have a cast put on his hand.
13
DAYS LENGTHENING LIKE RYE grass, bold new movements along the river, mating calls from out of the trees. Yeah, it was spring all right, and the shows were starting up again, siphoning folks out of Gib-town for another season. Time to shake off the long, idle winter. Jam auctioneers were limbering up with tongue twisters, human oddities working out new poses in front of the mirror.
Karl sat dejected by the telephone. He’d been calling around all morning, pleading with anyone he could reach to help him latch on somewhere. He wasn’t an analyzer, a student of self, but Karl understood his own cycles and rhythms. He had to get out on the road again, just had to. But Bert Banion, who ran a fried clam concession for Worldwide, had just told him it was hopeless.