Elsinore

by Jerome Charyn

  “Mr. Phipps is waiting for you,” she said.

  “How did he know I was coming?” Frog asked, looking into her eyes.

  “He’s psychic about his employees.”

  Holden didn’t believe in psychics. Phippsy must have had a secret route to the Manhattan Mimes.

  “He’s upstairs in the Supper Club,” she said. “Having his tea.”

  Frog rode up to Phipps’ crazy Manhattan, that enormous bowl of metal and glass where the conqueror liked to eat by himself. Phipps sat far from the windows, at a modest table for two. He was nibbling on a soda cracker. Frog had to think like a president. The overhead on that cracker must have been half a million.

  “Hello, Sid. Should we move to a bigger table?”

  “No. This one is fine.”

  Frog sat down with the old man.

  “Would you like a breakfast steak?”

  “It’s almost dinnertime,” Holden said.

  “So what? I keep the hours in this establishment. I’m Father Time.”

  “I’ll have a soft-boiled egg, an orange, and a bit of toast.”

  Holden didn’t have to bark his order. The egg appeared with the orange and a piece of rye toast. Five waiters hovered over him, one to open the egg, one to slice the orange, one to bother about salt and pepper, one to supervise the supervisor.

  “Damn you,” Phipps shouted, “will you let the boy suck his egg in peace?” And the waiters disappeared. Phipps was silent while Holden devoured the egg.

  “How’s the grub?”

  “Good.”

  “We have to get back on the road. It’s Europe this time, Sid.”

  “More funny paper?”

  “Ah, you’ve been reading my mind.”

  “But the other swag we collected was good as gold.”

  “Who told you?”

  “I swiped one bill and had it checked.”

  “So I make you president and you become a bloody thief.”

  Holden returned the thousand-dollar bill. The old man tore it to bits. “I could give you to Paul Abruzzi. He’d love to get his hands on the boy who romanced his daughter-in-law.”

  “I’m not a boy,” Holden said. “And I didn’t romance Fay.”

  “I could borrow a couple of heavy hitters. You’d never leave this building alive.”

  “Probably not. But I’ll bring you along, Phippsy.”

  “You wouldn’t dare.”

  “Call your hitters and see what happens.”

  “I promoted you and you scheme behind my back.”

  “I used my wits, that’s all. And don’t talk to me about funny paper and the life. You’re a billionaire who happens to be cash poor. How come?”

  “There’s a leakage and I can’t find it. So I have to collect what’s mine. I’m too old to run around the world alone. And you’re the best collector in the business.”

  “Aladdin didn’t have your kind of debts. Phippsy, why don’t you concentrate on the leaks. You have lawyers, accountants.”

  “They’re pissing in the dark.”

  “Then look a little closer to home.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like Mrs. Vanderwelle.”

  The billionaire froze behind his cardigan in that restaurant that was like a cathedral. Whatever mercy he had for Holden was gone.

  “I told you. She’s off-limits.”

  “But she’s the key to all your cash problems.”

  “You’re fired,” Phipps said.

  “Good. I can go back to early retirement.”

  But when Frog stood up, the old man started to mewl like a little boy. Then he wiped his eyes with his end of the tablecloth. “Sit down, Sid. Please.”

  “Not if we can’t discuss Gloria Vanderwelle.”

  “She’s my daughter. I told you that.”

  “But her name isn’t Gloria. It’s Judith. Judith Church.”

  “You’re cracking up, Sid. There’s only one Judith in my agenda. And she runs an acting school.”

  “The Manhattan Mimes. I’ve been there.”

  “You visited Judith?”

  “Someone has to look out for your interests. Besides, if you lose your empire, I’ll lose Aladdin. And I like being president, even if I can’t tell where our capital comes from.

  “You visited Judith? Without my consent? Not a word of warning. What does she look like?”

  “You ought to remember. She was your woman, for God’s sake.”

  “But I haven’t seen her in twenty years. She could have developed a tick, or some monstrosity of the face. And I’d be the last to find out.”

  The old man seemed miserable, and Frog had to reassure him. “She’s beautiful, Phippsy. With a gorgeous head of gray hair.”

  “Go on. What else?”

  “She knows I’m working for you.”

  “That’s insignificant,” the old man said, growling again.

  “Only one person could have told her. Your daughter, Mrs. Vanderwelle.”

  The old man stared out of those merciless wet eyes. “Sid, do I have to fire you again? Judith, damn you. Did she mention my name?”

  “Yes. She calls you Howard.”

  “Why shouldn’t she call me Howard? That’s who I am. Ought to be obvious to a child.”

  “She said you put her in a sanitarium after her husband killed himself. The sanitarium was outside Montpelier. And she bit you on the mouth.”

  “I still have the scar. Took a couple of operations to heal that wound. But did she talk about this restaurant? She loved sitting here, surrounded by glass. She’d dance from morning to midnight. Had to keep my saxophones on a twenty-four-hour call. People would line up forever, just to watch her dance. Can you imagine? My competitors thought she was a shill. They hired a woman to haunt their own clubs. But it never worked. Judith was the genuine article.”

  “She didn’t say a word about the Supper Club.”

  “That was to punish me.”

  “We talked about Elsinore.”

  “Bloody Elsinore? What’s that?”

  “The sanitarium where you put her.”

  “It didn’t have a name. That was the whole point of it. The clientele wasn’t interested in publicity. It was a house in the woods.”

  “Well, she called it Elsinore.”

  “That’s not pertinent to this conversation. Judith has an inventive mind. What else did she say?” Holden was silent. “What else?”

  “She asked if I went into the toilet with you every time you had to pee.”

  Phipps started to laugh. But the sound was very shallow. And Holden was sorry he’d ever talked about toilets. “She was joking, Phippsy.”

  “Judith doesn’t joke. She wanted to eat my heart out.… Come on, Sid. We have to go to Spain. I already booked the seats.”

  “I thought I was fired.”

  “Can’t fire a president, just like that. You have certain privileges.”

  The old man got up from the table. And that one gesture brought a fury to the restaurant. Waiters ran to him from every side.

  “Stop it,” Phipps shouted. “I have my man.”

  And Holden walked him out of the restaurant.

  8

  Holden loved the airport at Bilbao. He didn’t have any steps to climb. The Aeropuerto de Bilbao was a bright little box on a simple plain. The hills outside were summer green, and Holden saw a cemetery surrounded by poplar trees. The stones in the cemetery looked like gray teeth. The Guardia Civil didn’t bother him. Holden had never bumped in Bilbao. It was neutral territory. He’d bumped in Madrid, which had its own street of furriers, furriers who’d tried to steal patterns from his old senior partner, Bruno Schatz. Schatz had arranged Holden’s calendar of hits. But now Holden was president of Aladdin, and he didn’t have to take calls from Schatz in the middle of the night. Schatz had married Holden’s bride, Andrushka the twig.

  A red Jaguar was waiting for them in front of the airport. Holden didn’t see any driver. “I warned you, Phippsy. I’m
not your chauffeur.”

  “Will you get in? I can’t have a third party involved in our affairs. One of us has to drive. Me or you.”

  “But you’re making a habit of it.”

  “Then give me a better solution. Get in.”

  The keys were in the dash. Holden stared at the silver emblem of a very long cat. He’d never driven a Jaguar before. Phipps spread out his map of the Spanish coast like some commandant. The map had a leather cover and a magnifying glass. Phipps searched the coast with that glass. “This is Basque country,” he said. “The Basques would tear our heads off if they could. The Basques hate everybody except the Basques. They’re the only people in the world who never wanted to get rich. That makes them honorable.”

  “And dumb.”

  “No. Not dumb. There’s a difference. The Basques wouldn’t have wanted my Supper Club. They’re crazy about bingo. They build palaces for their bingo games.”

  “I thought they despise money,” Holden said.

  “They do. But they still love to gamble.”

  “Where did you learn so much about the Basques?”

  “I lived near those motherless sons. A long time ago. I bartered with them. The Basques made me rich.”

  “Where haven’t you lived?” Holden asked. “You’re like Marco Polo with your maps.”

  “Just drive the car, Sid. Just drive the car.”

  They traveled down the coast, passing tiny villages with beauty parlors and cider houses off the highway. There was odd writing engraved on the mountain walls: HERRIBATASUNA. Frog had never encountered such a word. “Phippsy, what does it mean?”

  “Pay no mind to it. It’s Basque.”

  They passed a beach that looked like Copacabana. And Holden was reminded of Brazil. He’d followed a furrier there, hunted him down in Rio, a rival of the Swisser’s who’d stolen designs from Aladdin. Holden had to retrieve the designs and bump the furrier as a lesson to other furriers. But he never got near the beach. It was in and out of Rio. That was the legend of Holden’s life.

  They drove across another province and entered the mountains of Asturias.

  “Anarchist country,” Phipps said.

  Holden didn’t see any anarchists, just a few donkeys crossing the road and the Marlboro Man painted on the side of a bald mountain. They stopped at a town called Pescadores. It had its own port, a church on a hill, Roman ruins, a tobacco factory, a park named after some Asturian queen, a ramblas, gardens, plazas, a beach, but only one hotel, called Carlos Marx, on the Calle Don Quijote. The Carlos Marx advertised itself with three stars, but Holden couldn’t find a caballero to park his Jaguar. There was no one behind the desk, not even a grim-eyed man to inspect Holden’s passport, or a boy to fetch him some mineral water without gas. Holden had to bring in all the luggage by himself.

  “Phippsy, does this hotel ever come alive?”

  “It’s alive. But it isn’t partial to tourists. The town sort of keeps to itself.”

  “But it has a beach.”

  “For the locals, Sid.”

  “Then why are we here?”

  “To sit down with the general. He happens to be holding bonds of mine.”

  “Who’s the general?”

  “Forgot to tell you, Sid. He’s the hero of the whole province, but he hangs out in Pescadores. You could say he owns the town.”

  “And this hotel. What’s his name?”

  “Well, that’s disputable. He lost it fifty years ago, in the Spanish civil war. There was a price on his head. He had his own army, and he was younger than Joan of Arc. Sixteen. They called him Bibo. He shot Franco’s men to pieces. He held this town, Sid, until the very end.”

  “And Franco let him live?”

  “El Caudillo didn’t have much of a choice. The boy was too damn popular. And how would it have looked for Franco’s regime to blindfold a boy general and shove him in front of a firing squad? There would have been uprisings every year on the anniversary of his death. El Caudillo exiled him to this town. And the boy has never stepped outside its perimeters, even after El Caudillo died. But they wrote each other letters for years. I think Franco admired him, as one general to another. But I’m not sure.”

  “And how did you get involved in all this?”

  “Well, I sold ball bearings to both sides during the civil war. But I saved my best stuff for the Basques and the boy general. I was awful fond of Bibo. And I had one or two things on him after the fighting stopped.”

  “You blackmailed him?”

  “Sort of. That’s why he’s been holding my bonds. Bearer bonds. Any imbecile can cash them in.”

  “Don’t you believe in banks, Phippsy?”

  “Biggest thieves in the world, bankers are. Pious too. Wouldn’t trust my personal fortune with them.”

  “Now tell me about the boy general’s big sin.”

  “He pussied around with the Germans.”

  “After ’forty-one? Suppose he was doing Franco a little favor? The boy’s war was over, wasn’t it? What else was there for an anarchist to do?”

  “Ah, but he pussied around earlier than that. During the civil war. In the thick of all that blood. He was a bit of a German spy. Didn’t compromise his own troops. But he fed the Nazis information. That much I know. I swiped a few papers from Hitler’s secret service. And so Bibo’s been sitting on my bonds.”

  “And you’ve come to claim them?”

  “Exactly.”

  “In his hotel.”

  “Why not? Pick any room you like. No one stays here.”

  Holden carried the baggage up a flight of stairs. He expected dust and cobwebs and little secretive mice at the Hotel Carlos Marx, but he found none. He chose two adjoining rooms for the billionaire and himself. Some invisible maid must have arrived before Holden did. The linen was fresh. The mirrors had been polished. The toilet was impeccable. The entire hotel had been scrubbed down, room after room. And it wouldn’t have mattered which door Holden had decided on. The boy general had been waiting for their visit. He was much too neat for an anarchist.

  Phippsy took a nap, and Holden went downstairs into Pescadores. He followed the Calle Don Quijote to a little garden near the beach. The garden was filled with old women who looked at Holden as if he were some sea animal. Holden returned to his room.

  The billionaire rose at seven, had a bath, drank a Coke from his minibar, put on a linen suit with a sweater underneath to guard him from a chill, and knocked on Holden’s door.

  “It’s time to meet the general. Did you bring a gun?”

  “No.”

  “That’s a shame. Because Bibo already has the advantage of his home town.”

  “Phippsy, how could I have gotten a gun through the goddamn metal detector?”

  “I’m not that foolish, Sid. I could have arranged for a pickup in Bilbao.”

  “We would have had to monkey with the Basques.”

  “It’s better than being empty-handed. Come on.”

  They went toward the harbor. Holden saw a beggar playing a bagpipe. He saw gypsy children. He saw fishermen standing on the seawall. There was a cow’s head in the water. Holden didn’t care. The head seemed benign.

  They went up an old, winding hill, arrived at streets whose names had been removed from the walls, and Holden realized: This is how the general likes it. He erases all tracks of himself. Has his own enchanted town, where old women gossip near the beach, and men live out their lives inside the dark of a door.

  They entered a crumbling palace. Holden heard the whine of motorbikes. Brats of fourteen and fifteen with rifles slung around one shoulder, and wearing brown shirts stolen from the Guardia Civil, were racing across the general’s gigantic living room. Their bikes caromed off the general’s furniture. And Holden groaned. He’d had to go up against seventy-five-year-old men in Chappaquiddick. Minot and Paul. And now he’d have to face an army of children with carbines and bad teeth.

  The general met them in his library. He had a seam down one side of his
face, a long pocket of skin that was more like an act of nature than the rotten sewing job of some anarchist surgeon. He still looked like a boy. His chin line was as firm as Holden’s. He smoked cigarettes with tobacco strong enough to destroy Holden’s mouth. The general didn’t seem to mind the roar of bikes around him.

  He’d already signaled to the old man. And Frog understood right away that Phippsy was closer to the general than he liked to reveal.

  “I’m starving,” the general said.

  Phippsy grunted at him. “Jesus, it’s not even dinnertime. And this is your town.”

  “I’m always hungry,” the general said.

  “Bibo, you must have eels up your ass. They’re feeding on your blood. You won’t find a restaurant open at this hour. It’s not London or New York. It’s Pescadores.”

  “And in Pescadores dinnertime is whenever Bibo wants to eat.”

  “But I’ll get embarrassed if you start shouting at the waiters. I won’t be able to stand the stress. Have an aperitif. We’ll whistle away a couple of hours.”

  “Viejo, I want to eat now.”

  They walked out of the palace, dodging the fourteen-year-old bikers, who hissed at the general, and Holden wondered if that was how all anarchists behaved. They entered a tiny restaurant across from the palace. El Pescador, with an octopus painted in the window. But no one stirred for the general. El Pescador was only a darkened cave. All those years of exile must have hurt Bibo’s grip on this crazy town. He sat in the cave, said nothing, and slowly men emerged from the blackness. El Pescador had a barman and a chef. Candles were lit. And the scar on Bibo’s face, that flap of skin, had a kind of gorgeous color.

  “Old man,” Bibo said, “what would your bodyguard like to eat?”

  “He’s not my bodyguard. He’s my companion, Sid Holden. He’s the president of his own company.”

  “I know who he is,” Bibo said. “El Presidente, what would you like to eat?”

  “Paella,” Holden said. That’s all he ever had in Spain, no matter what town he was in.

  “This is Asturias,” the general said. “I would insult the cook and his brother if I asked him to prepare a dish from another province. We are soldiers who live near the sea. Paella doesn’t sit well under the heart. I can bring you some fisherman’s stew … and red beans.”