Harmony In Flesh and Black

by Nicholas Kilmer

  Naked, the woman had the same dramatic power as a man in uniform.

  “It’s what I have to sell,” Sheila said with a smirk, turning until she faced him again. “Whatta you think, Fred?”

  “It’s good, but just the same I wish you’d spend more time working on your curveball,” Fred said.

  “What?”

  “Something to fall back on,” he explained. “I was distracted. In fact, I was thinking about someone else.”

  “Thanks. I don’t want to use Dawn’s futon,” Sheila said, standing in a slouch, making no effort to mitigate her nakedness by posing.

  “Put something on if you’re cold,” Fred said. “I wanted to make sure not to miss anything.”

  “You’ve been through my fucking apartment, too, haven’t you?” she said.

  Fred started looking in the pockets of her jeans. She stared at him. He laid out Certs and change, a comb, subway tokens, a ticket stub from the Loew’s in Harvard Square.

  “You want to search the body cavities, too?” Sheila said, standing there naked.

  “Nope.” He began working through her bag.

  Sheila charged him, fighting and striking at his face with her nails until he rolled her into a red blanket and more or less sat on her. His face was tender enough from the previous day’s attentions, thanks.

  He found it in her bag, among the tissues: the Sony videocassette she was carrying.

  Sheila sighed and went limp. Fred put the tape in his coat pocket. He stood up.

  “We can work it together,” she said.

  “I’ll be off,” Fred said.

  “That’s mine. It’s all I got.”

  “It’s mine now,” he told her. “The works.”

  The woman rolled out of the blanket and came toward him, fragrant with effort. “Tell you what,” she said, persuading. “It needs more than one person. I was thinking of going with Russ, but it needs a man. Fuck Russ. Him and Dawn. Think they can cut me out? He’s out now anyway, according to you.

  “You’ll see, we can work good together. I was there that night. This guy showed up while I was working, said he was coming back, and he did. In spades.” Sheila shuddered. “I figure I’m not going back there again and I want some protection. So I rip the tape off.”

  She noted both that she was cold and that her nakedness was a useless tool, and she stooped for the blanket, wrapped it around her. “Seeing what happened, it’s gotta be worth big bucks. But if you get this guy and put the squeeze on him, keep me out of it. He scares me.”

  “I’ll be in touch,” Fred said.

  28

  Fred drove to the house in Charlestown. He was relieved, given the nature of Pearl Street, that the material he’d taken out of Russell’s apartment—the computer disks and the two cardboard Porta-file boxes that Russ had taken from Smykal’s place, and the video camera (after the man was dead, and before Fred got there? that didn’t sound like Russ, but it wasn’t Fred’s concern)—was all still in his car.

  Dawn, the one with balls, was also the smart one—smart enough to know, yesterday morning, after looking Fred over, that it was finished, and time for her to get lost.

  It was four in the morning. The city of Charlestown was not dark, but its buildings and its Bunker Hill monument made silhouettes of black against a sky in which light was struggling to establish itself.

  Teddy was at the desk, on watch, his eyes wide. He was dressed in a black suit, looking like a Mormon missionary, but missing shirt and tie and haircut. Here, in the safety of the house and with sentry duty to give him focus, he seemed more like himself.

  “I’m in your room, Fred,” Teddy said. “I told you you’d be back. You carryin’?”

  Fred nodded. Teddy, alert, was referring to the gun under his arm, not to the file boxes.

  “I’m on until eight,” Teddy said. “So go ahead, sleep. It’s your bed anyway.”

  “Gotta work,” Fred said. “Bill Radford still got his TV stuff in the kitchen? I have to look through some tapes.”

  Bill Radford was inclined toward brief, expensive hobbies.

  Teddy nodded, saying, “Don’t tell him I told you.”

  Fred took the things upstairs. They had the whole three-decker, but it was a small one, with a total of only ten bedrooms. Some people bunked together; the normal population varied from five to thirteen. The only rules were no drink, no stealing, no women, mind your business, and it helps if you play chess.

  Teddy made little more impression in the room than Clay made in his.

  Fred had looked into the file boxes already, before he took them from Russell’s neatly arranged apartment. The lighter one held cassette tapes labeled with names and dates. The other was divided into compartments for individual clients, with names, addresses, prurient stills, and, in some cases, notations of collections made—in surprisingly small amounts. Smykal had been a cautious man, bleeding his people in two- and three-hundred-dollar increments at intervals of several months. The quick impression was of an operation going back three years.

  Fred recognized several names but dismissed them as not his business, unless one had done for Smykal. The man had wanted to have a Clayton Reed—or Arthur Arthurian—folder, too, not content with the windfall in an amount much larger than what he was used to.

  Fred would study the client list if he had to, but only if he had to. He had no doubt that what he wanted was on the tape Sheila had been hoarding for her own purposes.

  He dropped Sheila’s cassette into Bill’s machine and rewound it, sitting on the floor next to his mat, which now smelled somewhat of Teddy. The tape presented segments, bits and pieces, filmed surreptitiously from a position in Smykal’s bedroom (if he recalled the layout correctly), from which the camera had the advantage over the studio, its bed, its doorway, and—through that—the front door, visible when the studio door was open.

  What Smykal got was depressing: portraits of men intent on deluding themselves into a parody of art that was also a parody of sex. A microphone hidden in the studio collected sound. It was ugly and pathetic, with occasional flashes of sadism or bravura. The women worked, exhibiting their limbs and parts, responding and suggesting, and seducing their clients into further creative invention. “I know, why don’t we take your clothes off, too?” “Twenty bucks more and you can put that camera down and put your head up in here instead.”

  A running date and time moved along with the image on the film. That would be useful.

  “Honey, what did you say you were doing at eleven twenty-two P.M. on the evening of April second?” the little woman asks.

  “I was at that PTA thing. It ran late.”

  “Funny, I just got this tape in the mail that shows you being sucked off by a girl with red hair,” she says, confused, handing him the pipe and slippers. “You wanna talk about this?”

  Aside from Sheila and Dawn, three other women appeared. Some segments were brief and others as long as ten minutes. The show was worse than the educational painter with the hair. Smykal himself seldom appeared, though on occasion he would step into the frame to give suggestions or reassurance—“It’s all right, they are professional models, this is art.”

  It was mostly sleazy, soft-core stuff—like mud wrestling—but it was sufficient, on the Boston scene, to inspire guilt and terror in carefully screened men if publication was threatened. It was enough to ruin lives and plenty, if the victim was timid, to form the basis for extortion.

  It took an hour to reach last Friday night.

  The TV screen showed Sheila in the studio, on the white bed, in front of the vague roses on the wallpaper, naked, curled on her side, reading a magazine. Beyond her, in the same frame, the studio door opened on the view across Henry Smykal’s living room, to the inside of the front door. The sound on the tape was of a phone ringing, which Smykal did not answer.

  Smykal, wearing that suit, entered the room, Pentax around his neck.

  “I don’t want to miss this guy,” the dead man said, his voice clea
r on the microphone. “You lying here, him coming into the apartment, first thing we see is him seeing the first thing he sees, which is your crotch, right?”

  “Lie here with my legs open,” Sheila said. “I’m not brilliant, but I can understand that, I guess. What else is new?”

  “Not much,” Smykal said. “Let’s not drown the guy. There. Just enough so he thinks, Hey, I got an idea.”

  “When is he coming?”

  “He’ll be here,” Smykal said. He walked out of the room, and shortly afterward the tape went blank, then started again to show—across Sheila, now striking a pose of lascivious welcome on the bed—Smykal going to the apartment’s front door, opening it a crack.

  Hot lights burned, and the telephone was ringing.

  Smykal said, “You’re not him,” and the camera showed his back as he tried to force the door closed. There was a voice on the other side of the door that Fred couldn’t hear precisely. Sheila lolled.

  Smykal said, “I’m filming,” as he pushed against the door. “What letter?”

  A foot in Fred’s shoe was stuck in the crack of the door. Fred heard the sound of the name Arthurian, spoken in a voice he recognized.

  Smykal said, “You can’t come in. It’s art film. I guarantee privacy.”

  There was a murmur from the far side of the door.

  Smykal said, “You can’t come in, not now.”

  Sheila posed, increasing the welcome, lifting her legs.

  Smykal pushed at the door, saying, “Just get out.” Then, softer, “It’s not here.”

  Fred got the reprise, the Smykal’s-eye view of his first visit of Saturday morning, until he pulled out his foot and Smykal, in his shiny suit, closed the door again.

  “Forget it, Sheila,” Smykal said, walking out of the picture. “Knock it off.”

  The screen went blank. Fred put it on pause.

  Sheila had said, “The guy came back.”

  That was the part that interested Fred. He started the film forward, the picture focusing on Sheila tossing her magazine to one side and assuming her position again. Smykal came into the picture, going to the door, listening a moment, taking off the chain.

  “Now,” Fred said.

  Smykal’s door was pushed in. Buddy Mangan, in the man-of-the-soil outfit, shoving Smykal backward past the studio, gave the naked woman a glance, said, “Get lost,” and pushed Smykal off camera.

  Sheila rolled over, scratched her backside, picked up her magazine, and said, “Shit.”

  She stepped out of the camera’s frame, and there was nothing to see but empty rooms. Mangan’s voice, hard to make out, came from somewhere else: “What do you mean telling my guy the deal’s off? Where’s the fucking picture? What’s wrong with my fucking money, Smykal?”

  Sheila, now in jeans and sandals and a pink sweatshirt, carrying the black bag, walked into camera range and out of the studio. A loud slap sounded, and Mangan’s voice again: “What’s wrong with my fucking money?”

  The picture stopped. It was over.

  Fred stared at the machine.

  He looked at his watch. He could afford to sleep for an hour, in Teddy’s bed.

  29

  There’s heat and pain and solitude. Their first aim is to assault the spirit, which, in each of us, can finally be broken: don’t fail to believe it. Afterward they start gnawing on the soul.

  Curious moral quandary when they say, speculatively, “We’ll shoot one and ask the other questions. Which shall we shoot, the big one or the fat one?”

  Fred lay in Teddy’s dusky room, smelling the discomfort of distressed male and recalling the cramped agony of weeks of confinement in their bamboo cage, hearing again the drone of his insistent envy for the fat one, whom they had selected as the one to shoot, believing Fred’s size would promote a heavier fall when he gave in. While they rested between sessions with him, they failed to provide him with a copy of Proust—which, in any case, he could not have read in the total darkness underground.

  Whatever he did afterward, forever while he lived, he owed a life. He’d never even learned the fat one’s name.

  Relentless malice and the drip of blood through jungle splashed with rain made Southeast Asia in this corner of Charlestown—a pocket of horror unresolved that had so many fellows throughout the country, Fred knew, that the character of the country itself had been permanently altered.

  He wondered what form they had chosen for the boy’s torment. Fred had a chance to pull him out if he was rested. He stared at the black windows and forced himself to sleep.

  * * *

  Fred woke at around seven. He telephoned Molly from the kitchen extension.

  “Where have you been?” Molly asked. “For God’s sake, are you all right?”

  She sounded frantic. God, he hadn’t told her anything since yesterday afternoon.

  “Sorry,” Fred said. “I’m okay. I’m working it out. I couldn’t go back to the hotel till I took care of something.”

  “You’re all right, then.” Now Molly could replace mortal worry with what sounded like close to mortal mad.

  “I should have called,” Fred said.

  “Tell me about it.”

  Fred said, “I talked to the guy in Providence, and it sounds like it’s going to work. Listen, I called to wake you up.”

  “Who was asleep?” Molly asked.

  “I’m sorry,” Fred said. “Thank you for worrying. I’m stupid. I didn’t think. I’m not used to thinking.…”

  “No sob stuff,” Molly said.

  “I wanted to catch the kids before they go to school.”

  Terry was bright and able first thing in the morning. Sam was grumpy, grumbling, waking up. Fred said hello, he missed them, have a good day, work hard in school.

  There was no sign of movement from his roommates. Dirty light came in through the windows. Sam hung up the phone as Fred was saying, “Okay, then, see you, Sam. Can you put your mom back on?”

  Fred had to call back and tell Molly, “I should be back this evening.”

  “See you then,” said Molly. She was still pissed.

  The cassette in his pocket, Fred told Teddy he was leaving some things in the room for a day or two.

  “If you want to wait until eight,” Teddy said, “and if you want backup—so people see you got friends—you want me to ride with you? People see me, bein’ big and black, it might give you a better edge.”

  Fred thought about it a moment.

  “Thanks, Teddy,” he said. “I better say no this time. The people I have to see, it’s better if I don’t scare them. I appreciate it.”

  Terry nodded and watched the door as Fred closed it behind him.

  * * *

  Fred drove back to Cambridge. It was brisk in the early morning. It would be a bright day: spring. He cut across the bridge and took the long route, skirting the river on the Cambridge side, watching the trees, dogs, joggers, and students on the river in their sculls.

  He grabbed a muffin and coffee and carried them with him to the hotel. He picked up his messages at the desk: four calls from Molly, at 1:30 A.M., 3:30, 5:00, and 6:45. She’d been worried, and he was a shit.

  A message from Clayton: “Go ahead.” Good, Clay was his partner again.

  He had the coffee and the muffin in his room, took a shower, and put on the clean shirt Mclly had brought yesterday with lunch. He called Clayton at eight-thirty. Clay was an early riser. He’d be in his room, completely dressed or in that dressing gown, mixing his Perrier and his fresh orange juice, his New York Times finished, ready to start the day’s Proust.

  “I got your message,” Fred said. “It was too late to call back.”

  “It’s highway robbery,” Clay said. “But it is the only way to get it done. How do you want the money?”

  “Why don’t you have a cashier’s check made out to me, and I’ll endorse it after I’m sure everything’s copacetic.”

  “Nothing’s been copacetic for years,” Clay said. “Not since nineteen t
wenty-five.” He was feeling better. He agreed to have the check drawn up and sent by messenger.

  “I’ll tell you when I think it’s safe for you to go back home,” Fred said.

  “I’m not here for my safety,” Clay exploded. “Have you completely lost your sense of priorities? You insist on going off on tangents while you leave me to concentrate alone on our main effort?”

  The Heade. Yes.

  “Finn wants to rope me into some slimy maneuver,” Clay said. “It’s the only reason he’d have sent me that note. He thinks he can knock me off the Heade. I’ve talked to my bank. Maybe it means I don’t buy another picture for five years, but we’re going to bid on that thing until we buy it.”

  “I’ll keep in touch,” Fred said.

  He couldn’t expect a call from Providence until the end of the morning. He called Video Shak and arranged to rent what he could, buy the few components he couldn’t rent, and have everything delivered to his room.

  The boys who brought the stuff, who should have been in high school, took his credit-card imprint, made him sign papers, and left him the two VCRs, the jack to connect them to the room’s TV, and cassettes and connector inserts. They took five bucks each for a tip.

  Fred had decided before he slept that his object would be for the complete tape never to be seen or used. His second object, if the first did not apply, was for the majority of the tape never to be seen. He didn’t relish the idea of testifying in court to what he had been saying behind the door Smykal pushed against while the camera played across the reaching legs of Sheila.

  However, the tape—or at least the last part of it, the entrance of jolly Buddy Mangan, complete with the recorded time of that entrance, 1:17 A.M.—was evidence of murder. Fred made two copies of the last six minutes, then he rewound the tape and started to copy the whole thing from the beginning. Evidence that important, given the unpredictability of life, you couldn’t have just one copy of, not if you wanted to be sure you could produce it later.

  * * *

  Providence called at about noon. It was the same voice as yesterday.

  “Fred?”

  “Yes,” said Fred.