Jerzy

by Jerome Charyn

I began to hear a rasping noise, like a rodent in the room.

  Then someone called to me in Kosinski’s voice. “Ian, will you let me out of the genie’s jar?”

  I believed him. A genie’s jar. But I couldn’t find the genie. Then I noticed that one of the drawers in the dresser beside the rear wall was wiggling. I opened the drawer. Kosinski was lying within, all folded up, like a sweater or a shirt.

  He unfolded himself and crept out of the drawer.

  “My God, how could you accomplish that?”

  He smiled à la Kosinski, with his tight, narrow mouth. “You’re my Boswell. Can’t you guess? . . . I was hung from the rafters of a barn when I was a little boy. My shoulders were dislocated. But there was an advantage in that. It made me double-jointed, like an acrobat.”

  “But we’re not inside a circus. Why the hell would you hide in a drawer?”

  “There’s a price on my head. I have enemies among the UB, the Polish secret police. I flirted with the bastards once. That’s how I got out of Poland. They forged documents for me, from institutions and professors that do not exist. And they felt betrayed after I published my first books. They had considered me as one of their sleepers, and when I wouldn’t perform for them, they decided to kill me.”

  I didn’t believe a word of it. “I’m not with the Polish Gestapo, Jurek. How come you hid from me?”

  “I wanted you to gaze at the photographs without any distractions.”

  “Is she the dying woman in Steps?”

  “No, she was a mistress of mine, a salesgirl at Bendel’s. I met her while I was buying an expensive monogrammed scarf for the baroness. The salesgirl helped me pick the scarf. I trembled in front of her eyes, told her I had to photograph her or I would jump out of my skin. I begged her to leave the store that very moment. She did.”

  I was the one who was trembling now. “What was her name?”

  “I called her Evelyne. She liked that, the anonymity of it. She was a born actress, my Evelyne. She loved to pose. She undressed even before I asked.”

  “But where did you photograph her?”

  “Right here, in this room, with a huge black drape over the windows and reflectors on the walls. She stood with her hands over her head, her armpits adorned with rich red hair, like roughened silk with a waft of sweet perfume. I had never been so aroused by hair on a woman’s body. I was drawn to her like a lovesick moth to a red flame. But she wouldn’t let me kiss her or bury my head in her armpits until I finished our session. The spotlights and panels of silver foil excited Evelyne; she licked her lips every time I leaned over her with a lens. And she insisted that we make love under the lamps and the silver foil, a hidden camera clicking with its own time delay.”

  “And did you grow weary of your new model?” I asked, dreaming of her rough red silk.

  “Not at all. I couldn’t get enough of Evelyne. But she wouldn’t tell me where she lived. She would meet me in a month, she said, show up at my door. But if I should follow her, or seek her out at Bendel’s, she would quit her job, and I would never see her again.”

  It sounded like a suppressed chapter from Steps, but I couldn’t stop listening.

  “She had changed, wilted in a month. That wild perfume was gone; the red silk under her arms was all matted now, like dull fur; she was still eager to have me crawl over her with my camera; and there were little ravenous moans with every click. But I couldn’t have sex—that underarm silk had served as an amulet, a love ticket, and now nothing she did could please me.”

  “Jurek, did she turn away from you?”

  “No,” he said with a wistfulness that seemed to crawl right out from under that secretive mask of his. “It was like a marriage in which she was faithful once a month. . . . Had I imagined the red silk, created my own jungle creature with a magnificent splurge of hair?

  “She continued to knock on my door. Each time I photographed her under a blitzkrieg of lights. I began to feel stuck in some strange pietà, where I was murdering my own mother, punishing her for having aroused me at the Zanzibar—it was on the Baltic, while we were bathing, that I first discovered the luxurious red hair growing under my mother’s arms. It was our very own secret, outside Papa’s realm.”

  “What happened to Evelyne?”

  “She disappeared, didn’t knock on my door; I missed the companionship we’d had under the lights. I felt closer to her than any other model I had ever had—the waifs I’d met at parties, the prostitutes I’d picked right off the street. But I wasn’t idle. I looked for Evelyne everywhere. I even played policeman. I returned to Bendel’s wearing a military uniform. I love uniforms. I collect them. I could show you my closet, Ian. I have epaulets and insignias that would oblige a Turkish general to kiss my feet. I discovered the power of a uniform in Poland. Sometimes a silver mark on your shoulder can make the difference between life and death.”

  I growled at him. “Jurek, please. Evelyne.”

  “I must have interviewed ten salesgirls. They were enchanted with my uniform and would have done anything for me. I talked to the manager, described Evelyne—it’s another trick I learned in Poland. The best lies keep as close as possible to the truth. I elaborated a little, of course, said I’d come to Bendel’s a year ago to buy a scarf for my fiancée, when I suffered an attack of vertigo. One of the salesgirls had been kind to me, sat me down with a cup of water, selected the scarf, and—”

  “Were you able to find Evelyne?”

  “The manager had no record of her. She wasn’t in Bendel’s books. But I took advantage of my epaulets. The manager became my mistress.”

  I didn’t want to listen. But the son of a bitch had captured me like a conjurer. I wondered if Evelyne was nothing more than a wisp of smoke that had come out of his comet. It didn’t matter. I was deep within his thrall.

  — 8 —

  WE WOULD PROWL AT NIGHT, Jurek insisting that we carry black masks. There was nothing unusual about them. They were party masks that one could buy at the five-and-ten, with cardboard nose cones and deep eyeholes—the typical fare of a phantom secret service. But Jurek’s mask did seem sinister, and I’m not sure why. Perhaps it was the way he wore it, at a wicked slant that revealed one of his nostrils. People shouldn’t have been menaced by half a nose, but they were.

  We rode to East Harlem in his Buick well after midnight. I didn’t want to get out of the car. We’d arrived at a fleshpot on 116th Street, a farmers’ market of male and female prostitutes with a flock of admirers and pimps. I saw policemen wearing chains, drag queens who could break your heart, revelers who pissed on the sidewalk, men who walked their dogs, women with biceps as big as ostrich eggs.

  “Jurek, we’re the only ones with masks.”

  “Shhh,” he said. “The mask will save your life.”

  He plunged into this carnival, and I felt a strange tranquillity in him, even with half his face masked. He moved with a kind of exalted freedom, and I realized that the bird-boy had come home. The anarchy on the street must have reminded him of his childhood in the midst of war. These night crawlers could have fallen out of a Polish forest, or drifted into The Painted Bird.

  The entire population saluted him.

  “Hi, Pluto baby, how ya been?”

  “Hello, Sarah darling. . . . Hello, Joshua,” he whispered, walking among his subjects.

  He seemed to know everyone’s name by heart. He dispensed money and advice like a lord of the underworld. He exhorted, cajoled, danced with a drag queen in the middle of the street. He didn’t have a camera, didn’t want to photograph freaks at a private zoo. He wasn’t a storyteller here, entertaining Scheherazade’s guests. He was Pluto with his people.

  I had never liked him until this moment. I adored The Painted Bird and Mr. Chance, not the man of calculation and ice who had created them. Now there was warmth beneath the eyeholes of his mask. He wasn’t distancing himself, observing from the rooftops, mocking his own creation.

  “Pluto doesn’t need a bodyguard,” I said. “Why
am I here?”

  “To watch my back.”

  “But they love you, Jurek. Let’s dump the masks.”

  “It soothes them,” he said. “They don’t have to watch my eyebrows, interpret every wrinkle. They would attack us, I swear, if they had to look at my face for very long. I’m Pluto. That’s enough.”

  But there was a sudden frenzy. The drag queens and the prostitutes began to scatter. Some hid behind Pluto; others ducked into alleyways. Two men had arrived in a battered green Ford. They must have been undercover cops who considered this carnival as their own turf. But something was out of kilter. I don’t mean the earrings and other paraphernalia of cops in disguise. These cops wore lipstick and eyeliner, and had white powder on their cheeks. They called themselves Mabel and Madge.

  “Mabel, look at what the cat dragged in. Pluto and his punk. Should we arrest ol’ Pluto or kick his ass?”

  “We’ll give him a warning, Madge. He has to collect his shit and never come here again with his punk.”

  My instinct was to run right out of Harlem. But Pluto was enjoying himself. He laughed into the murderous still wind that Mabel and Madge had brought with them.

  “Darlings, I’m not moving. And you ought to be gracious enough to leave. You’re not wanted here.”

  Mabel and Madge had blackjacks that were like rubber snake heads on a spring. They twirled the blackjacks and flicked them in front of Jurek’s mask.

  “One shot, Pluto. That’s all it takes. You’d be crippled for a couple of seasons, crippled for life.”

  I was a bouncer before I’d ever been Pete’s slave. I was familiar with blackjacks and the harm they could do. Madge wasn’t boasting. A blackjack could turn your brains to putty. But Pluto was reckless in his underworld. He tried to knock the blackjack out of Mabel’s hand. Mabel struck him on the shoulder, and Pluto’s knees collapsed. Then Madge twisted him around with a shot on the other shoulder. Pluto’s eyes wandered under his mask. They meant to humiliate him in front of his subjects, drive him to the ground and have him scream for mercy.

  “Darlings,” he said, blood spurting from his nostrils. “You can do better than that.”

  Madge and Mabel hit him again.

  I removed my mask. The eyeholes had cut into my peripheral vision. I hit Madge once, twice in the face. He had a startled, moronic look before he tottered and fell, but I hadn’t been alert enough. Mabel’s blackjack landed on my right elbow, which dropped at my side like a deadweight and dangled there. A nauseating numbness seized my gut. But I didn’t faint. I sucked up that nausea and decided to come at Mabel with whatever little I had left.

  Looking into my eyes must have confused him. He didn’t find much fear, and his curiosity had slowed him down. I clipped him with my left elbow before he had a chance to strike. The blackjack dropped out of his fist. He fell beside Mabel. I picked up the blackjack and hammered every finger in his and Madge’s right and left hands. They were beyond the need to whimper. I wanted to break their necks. And that’s when I saw Jurek slumped over, catching the bloody strings in his mouth with the cup of his hand, a religious fervor in his eyes.

  “I was right,” he cackled. “You do have the clockwork of a killer.”

  Six drag queens appeared out of the dark and began to paw Pluto and wipe his blood on their blouses. They sobbed for him and shrieked their delight. The blood seemed to electrify them. But Pluto hadn’t bothered to notice. He was still cackling at me.

  God knows, I was drawn to this underworld. I had to get the hell out, or I might have been stuck forever in Pluto’s forest. I returned to London on the next flight.

  — 9 —

  AS USUAL, SELLERS WAS ON THE ROAD TO FOLLY. He’d settled into a castle outside Dublin with a new wife, Miranda, an aristocratic lady who must have reminded him of Ma’am Darling. But Miranda was more interested in her pet birds and dogs than in Peter Sellers. She fed her “babies” the finest fillet, while Pete, the master of Carlton House, County Kildare, had to fend for himself. It wasn’t Kensington Palace Gardens, where he could entertain lords and commoners alike under the royal tea tent. In Ireland, he was a jester king without an audience. He grew murderous in his isolation. He smothered Miranda’s cockatoo and drowned one of her babies in the pool. He cut off most of his hair in a botched attempt to disfigure himself.

  I found him at the Dorchester, where he was hibernating while his hair grew in. He looked dreadful, with patches growing out of his bald pate like twisted wire. But the exiled master of Carlton House took me in his arms and started to cry.

  “I was going dotty, mate. Suicidal I was, abandoned by kith and kin.”

  Kith and kin. He had children he never saw, and three wives, but his mum was his only kin, and Peg had had a heart attack in 1967. She told her nurse to piss off and died in her hospital bed. He hadn’t been so kind to her near the end. Once he moved into the Dorchester and began to court Princess Margaret, Peg became an encumbrance with purple hair and toreador pants. He had her cremated at Golders Green—that was five years ago—but he communed with Peg’s spirit. He wouldn’t start the day without talking to his mum; he could conjure up her voice at will, and Peg advised him about his finances and his love affairs. I wondered now if it was Peg who had made him cry.

  I began to feel awkward in his arms. He was hugging me the way Peg had hugged him, with violence and a touch of treacle.

  “What’s wrong, Pete?”

  “Look at me. I can’t even stand in front of a mirror. I’m bloody Vincent van Gogh, a walking pot of mutilation. . . . I called Kosinski.”

  Pete stopped crying and let out the chuckle of a bad little boy. “I chatted him up like a house on fire. I fooled that puss pot. I borrowed your voice, love. He was in bliss. Said he couldn’t wait to see you. You both have some unfinished business, says he. Something about a girl in a photograph. Evelyne or Elizabeth—and Pluto. Who the fuck is Pluto? I brought up Peter Sellers. And here’s the gist of it, love. The puss pot is coming to London with his inamorata.”

  I was bewildered. “The baroness?”

  “Yes, yes, the baroness. Or some other tart. And I had you, dear Ian, invite them for a romp at the Dorchester in my name. Cocktails in our suite, says I in your best accent. Sizzling steaks and a side salad at the Dorchester grill. We won’t even have to leave the hotel.”

  “Did you mention Mr. Chance?”

  “Did I not? He’s been scribbling in the dark, practically has a finished scenario of the book, with lots of delicious dialogue, and guess what? He’s bringing it with him to London.”

  CURIOUS AS I WAS ABOUT THE BARONESS, I still dreaded meeting Jurek on Pete’s turf. He ruled us all the minute he arrived. He was wearing the same double-breasted suit I had worn at Annabelle’s soiree. The baroness wasn’t as sultry as Scheherazade. She had short hair and a mannish face. She towered over Jurek in her leather suit, her legs like a lovely pair of scissors. I liked her a lot. I would later learn that they had met at a masquerade ball. Jurek had dazzled her, and she’d fallen in love with him by the end of the ball, discarded the man she had meant to marry, moved in with Jurek, put his filing cabinets in order, typed all his manuscripts, and made herself indispensable.

  Before we had a chance to say hello, Jurek tossed us out of the living room, had us close our eyes, and challenged Pete.

  “I’m going to disappear, and if you can find me, Sellers, you can play Chauncey Gardiner in any film made from my book.”

  “That’s a lark,” said Sellers, not knowing how diabolic Jurek could be. “You ought to tell your solicitor that you’ve been cheating yourself.”

  He wore a wig to cover up the twisted wires of hair on his scalp. He wouldn’t have seen Jurek without that wig, but it didn’t match the gauntness he’d been cultivating as Inspector Clouseau. His face seemed lost under the wig’s magnificent pompadour.

  The baroness stood behind him with a look of pity on her face, while I opened drawer after drawer in the living room and never found Jurek. We searched
every closet, every cabinet, crawled under the couch; he’d folded himself somewhere beyond my ability to imagine.

  Sellers stifled a sneeze. “I’m all knackered, mate. My nerves couldn’t stand another minute of this.”

  He plopped onto the cushions of his velvet couch, beckoned us to sit beside him, and had one of the Dorchester’s liveried footmen serve us champagne.

  “To Chauncey Gardiner,” he said, clinking glasses with the baroness; he’d already shoved me into the background. “Tell me, Baroness, does he always play hide-and-seek?”

  “Almost always,” she said, her knees higher than Sellers’ chin. “Once, there was a colonel from the KGB, a defector, who found him. But the colonel had been training spies at a KGB kindergarten for years.”

  “Ah, then I shouldn’t feel so sad. I can’t compete with a KGB kindergarten.”

  He didn’t see a hand begin to snake around his ankle, but I did, and I felt sorry for Pete. Suddenly his eyes had a yellowish cast. He froze on his cushion.

  “I’m getting the heebie-jeebies. There are rats running around at the Dorchester, rats and other hairy things.”

  And when that same hand slithered up his leg, Pete rose out of the cushions with a terrible wail. His wig fell off, and he had to cover his scalp with both hands. Jurek came out from under the cushions, where he’d been hiding like some perverse flattened submarine.

  “Sellers,” he said, with that familiar smile of an SS captain, “you failed the test. How could I trust you with Mr. Chance?”

  Sellers had retrieved the wig, but he hadn’t had the time to coif it, and it sat lopsided on his head, the pompadour over one ear.

  “Couldn’t I have a look at the screenplay?”

  “No,” said Jurek, grabbing the baroness by the hand. And he turned to me with a brutal stare.

  “I found Evelyne by sheer chance. She was back at Bendel’s.

  . . . She had never left. It was her hiding ground. She’s married to one of the store’s executives. And she goes slumming from time to time, takes the place of a sick clerk. I began to shiver the moment I saw her. I had to sit. It was like my first encounter with Evelyne. All her loveliness was there again, that same rough silk in her hair. She didn’t have to take any risks. Bendel’s was her private brothel. It kept her alive. Male shoppers would fumble around in a women’s department store like fish out of water; it was Evelyne who smiled at them, put them at ease, played the innocent whore.”