“Nothing of mine’ll fit her,” Veronica said. The plain truth, but still withering. “Maybe—jeans.”
“Not jeans,” the woman said. “My sister—”
“Expects you to come home in something nice, hmmm?”
In tears again, the woman nodded into the bath towel being handed her. Amazed, he saw the girl wasn’t being sarcastic; the woman was half-smiling at her. His presence had done that to them. To their sympathies. Or his voice had.
“Wait—” Veronica said. She was into the bedroom in a flash and out of it again, walking like a bridesmaid, gold folds glittering on her arm. “Here.”
“Jesus,” the woman said. “Sequins.”
She’ll say the Lord’s name to that or to murder, Mulenberg thought. Or to her own vomit. But it’s only lack of taste. She’s one of those who’re too stupid to be venal. That’s why she’s here.
Veronica was already helping her into the garment, a long, draped one with a cape. They managed it, although the woman was hard put to walk. Sequins crunched. “There. It’s not hard to get to Queens from here.” Veronica handed her her bag. “But I wouldn’t take the subway.”
“Thanks, doll. Oh thank God, I never let go of my bag.” The woman looked down at herself. “Oh gee. The bag don’t go bad, hah? Oh gee. Listen. I’ll mail this back to you, hah?” He could hear the reluctance in her voice.
“Keep it,” the girl said. “I never wear it. It was a gift.”
“From him?” the woman said.
Veronica stared at him.
“No,” he said. “Not from me.”
The woman looked down at the stained pink suit. “From Ollie?” She whispered it.
“From my brother?” the girl said, conversationally. But that was the way she said almost everything—as if what she was really saying was stowed away elsewhere. “Yes, Ollie gave it. But to our mother, not to me.”
“Your—” The woman looked at him first. Then, a hand over her own mouth, at the girl. Then at him, again, as if to say Hear that. She made a throaty sound; would she puke again?
Mulenberg shook her. “On your way.” The muddied thing on the floor had tangled between his feet. He reached for it. “Here. Take it along.” Over her head he said to the girl, “The police might damn well be watching for it. Why should you have to get rid of it?”
“Who’s this one?” the woman said, her eyes narrow. “He your brother too?”
Mulenberg was dumfounded. A minute ago pathetic, gulled by everybody including probably the sister-in-law, now she was nasty, fully street-wise; he could well see her behind the bar in Rego Park. Or buying Ollie. Or being bought. Everybody was at least two people—why not her? But what’s done it?
She was edging away, even guarding herself, with the gilt gift dress. Fear was doing it. Not of him. Of the black girl.
Who saw. Walking toward her, very slightly smiling. As the woman backed up. To the door.
The woman gathered the gold folds around her. “I’ll take it, don’t worry, I’ll take it.” The handbag she’d thanked God for being left with was large, almost a satchel. She knelt and stuffed the pink suit in, averting her eyes.
If she can get back to Queens in time, Mulenberg thought, she’ll be able to avert her eyes to anything. The bar in Rego Park would be open. It was only eleven o’clock. “You have cab money?”
She got to her feet defiantly. “My own. No money ever passed.”
“Hurry then,” Mulenberg said.
The two women turned on him as one.
He was the voice of reason here; why should they be glaring him down? But for the moment, they had puke and blood between them. And the two dresses.
“Listen—thanks, doll,” the woman said. “And—listen, I’m sorry. For—you know.”
Veronica seemed to.
“It’s only—you know. Like I was knocked for a loop.” She couldn’t seem to take her eyes off the family picture on the coffee table. “Upstairs they all think you’re only in his stable. Only that he don’t want them to know.” She spat toward the picture. “My sister was right. She trun him out the bar. ‘He has the evil eye,’ she said. ‘Only on that kind of Indian, it don’t show.’” She clutched her throat, the gilt cape, her satchel, her mouth dragging at the corners. “Oh God, oh God.” The door slammed.
Together, not saying a word, they turned off all the lights and watched her from the window. Down below, the street lamps bloomed romantically. The restaurants were letting out. She got a cab almost at once.
“Ought you to get out of here too?” he said. The hand in his was unresponsive.
The police. What right did he have to say that to her? Or that she should run? Whether they came at all would depend on what had or hadn’t happened to Ollie in the gents’ room. He squeezed her hand tight, shook it between his clasped ones and let it go. The way people do at wakes, he thought: too late. Muttering an excuse, he made for the bathroom but sneaked instead into the bedroom, felt for the gun on the night table and pocketed it. She shouldn’t be found with it. His wallet slid into his hands by magic. Or prophecy. Nothing in it except his money. Or his health. He bent to the tumbled bed, smoothing it. In the all-night New York glow which seeped anywhere he could see the soft, innocently hatched pattern of the quilt. He laid the Blue Cross card on it.
She was still at her window. He chose not to turn on a lamp; she hadn’t. Taking her in his arms again was like holding a long swathe of the dark itself, turned into a body more body than most. An ear more than ear. Though his tongue had been in there earlier, he held his whisper decorously away from it now. “Veronica?”
Her eyes were the darkest part of her. Almost closed.
“I’m not Ventura.” Guilt flooded him. “I’m Mulenberg.”
Her eyes opened.
In his mind’s eye he got out of there, out the door, down the stairs and into the street. He could feel the whiff of free air on him.
When she moved across the room and away from him, there was no emotion to it he could identify. Don’t put on the lamp yet, he wanted to say. Gradually, he could see her now sitting at her desk, her back to him. Sitting on, she might not have heard him. It began to be comfortable there in the semi-gloom, restful. One’s feelings put out in front of one, lambent fish. Dusk all night—it was part of the trove of this city. He would like to remark on this. And on how her flesh made less noise than his, in the dusk.
“When did you know?” he said. “That I wasn’t. Him.”
She turned on the desk lamp. A glare. Two-bulb strength.
“Stay where you are.” She stood up, flattening herself against the desk, her palms inching protectively along the drawer where the typed page was, and the book. In the same way his mother had touched the secretaire where she’d kept her rings. “Stay, I said.”
He hadn’t stirred.
“The gun. Give it here now,” she said, as to a child.
He laid it in her lap.
She stood up, holding it absently. She was adding him up, from head to heel. His shag of hair, which she’d tousled, saying, “Has those streaks women pay for. But this is natural.” His jacket—scanning it now for what it must have cost. His cock.
Or she was separating him. Into disposable parts.
Meanwhile edging him toward the door.
“You knew it from the first,” he cried out.
She drew herself up, mouth parted, neck arched, shoulders lofty, eyes veiled to a spot behind him. For a held moment she was taller than he was. “How do I know—” she said deep “—what I know?”
Then he was outside the door.
He took the elevator, letting the slow old cage shake him hydraulically. Downstairs he shut the inner door slowly; he wasn’t going to run. His knees were still locked tense in the effort he’d made up there, not to crouch at bay. Or to spring.
In the entry, he listened upward. Nothing. The floor was that fine old marquetry tile, the mailboxes had polished-brass fronts. He wasn’t going to scrutinize them. Over the tr
ansom, he saw the house number in reverse; he wouldn’t need it. In spite of him, the weighted outer door slammed. Don’t look up at the window. He looked, seeing curtains drawn, light faint behind them. Then he ran.
He reached the Athletic Club and still hadn’t sweated.
Must be he jogs regular the three swimming coaches nodded to each other, lined up in his floating head like a row of bank examiners. Now that Ventura, he never jogs.
Mulenberg had never jogged in his life. When he spoke to the desk clerk, chill seemed to vapor from between his clicking teeth, but the man, wearing a light summer jacket, didn’t budge. No, Ventura hadn’t returned.
Whether or not it was Ventura sticking in his gorge, or his own helplessness, he must eat. No use going to the local police, who would only hold his hand, saying, “Wait.”
“Where’s the local police station?”
“Fifty-sixth,” the clerk said. “Wallet?”
Mulenberg shook his head—“Car”—and walked out.
No fewer people were passing; the avenue was just as luminous as when he’d left it. If this were anywhere in Oman, he knew people who if necessary could get him to the Sultan. Or in Yemen, some official of Elkershi Shipping would get him to the Minister of Planning by afternoon grapevine and back, in time for tea in Hodeidah. Not that he would learn anything more than a hint of who, why and how—or, courteously as a blank wall bowing, that he was not to learn, ever. Even if the result was nix, he was part of the power structure, even of violence. That was the high-class route; that was trade.
Here in his home office, it was still possible to know or explore the vast network of manipulation behind ordinary blind trade—he wasn’t fool enough to think otherwise—but democracy was slower about the violence, and seamier. Or it could even be corrupted by its own honesty; too often it left the organization of such matters to people outside the pale. To what proportion he didn’t know, but if he went to the local police here, they mightn’t either, which would be impossible in the Middle East.
But—to tell anyone must involve the girl. That was unthinkable; he’d been trying not to acknowledge this. Yet if he would go that far for her, why had he run?
Normally by now he’d be ravenous, like tonight not having eaten since noon. He’d formed the habit of dropping in after these excursions to Trader Vic’s, where, no matter how late, he could sink into a straight chair opposite the plangent, circular shadow of one of the high-backed rattan ones, letting himself be served soft-footedly by waiters with the silent, nurturing expressions of amahs, and eating largely of the salty-sweet, piece-y Polynesian food, which he never at other times craved. Maybe the same need for saline replenishment was what sent Ventura to the Oyster Bar.
Shrugging off that, he plunged out of the A.C.’s marquee, strode east along Central Park South, hesitated at the Trader Vic totem, passed it, hitching his jacket, in whose left-hand pocket he now remembered he had a folded-up tie for the restaurants which didn’t credit Western strings, and walked up the Plaza’s main steps, intending to cross through to the south side. Though what could he do on entering the place—inquire for Mr. Ali, check the gents’ room? But his knees were being undependable, an extreme sign that his large body had to be stoked. The thought of oysters sickened him.
Inside the hotel he walked on to the central heart of the place, the landing which descended to its main entrance, and stood there as he had on many such nights. On these lone dark sorties the place had become his real companion; in other cities he had similar ones, which commercial travelers like him (for he knew himself to be that, no matter the scale of it) cherished and compared. Life had by-passed certain of these Grand Hotels, the Plaza-Athénées, the Ritzes, for luxe; they could no longer be emotionalized. Broader-based old nineteenth-century joints like this one were the best. These days their dramas were increasing again. The Arabs were seeing to that. Such hotels were now their western palaces. A Sultan of Oman had exiled his father to the Dorchester, where Mulenberg had run across him. A former Prime Minister of Yemen, whom Mulenberg had known years ago, had been murdered outside his London hotel.
Here, his real allegiance was to the Oak Bar where his father, that disciple of open spaces and potting sheds, had nevertheless first taken him, saying, “When this ranch first started, John, even Andrew Carnegie was from the sticks.” And where, about a year ago, he and Ventura had met.
That’s where he should go. Where he’d find the man miraculously resurrected from the grim dreams of his friend Mulenberg, munching peanuts and chatting tennis to the barman. Alight with the gaiety of his recent exploit, but dropping no word of it—except to his friend. Freed for the moment from certain money worries, but not mentioning that to a soul. Fresh in from charming that Concetta woman into such sincerity that he himself had been won by her. As he forever expected, hoped to be. Sending her by go-between beforehand the expensive pink suit. Fretting over the style of Mulenberg’s adventures. Craving for himself only whatever normality life still might give.
His friend, Ventura. To whom he still owed a cargo of Arabian light.
But who was not in the Oak Bar. The barman, a new one, checking his receipts in an empty house, gave Mulenberg a “That’s it, buddy” stare. Though it wasn’t closing time yet, maybe he was tired of humanity and had decided to risk it. The place felt like London after hours—or Saudi Arabia. Like all the enragingly dry ones. No, it felt worse than that—later than any of the late-night cities he knew so well. He felt caught between the pincers of all the places known in one way or another. With no name in his wallet. Even though two beds legally his, at his office, his club, were within blocks of here, and a ticket for Bahrein was in his morning file.
“Oyster Bar still open?” His voice felt rusty.
“Couldn’t say.”
He turned down a corridor, traversed it twice, turned wrong, and was almost lost. Hotels of this vintage tended to confuse, with a plushy mix of grillework and a constant dirty renaissance of doing-over—but he always got lost anyway in large buildings. His staff teased him, thinking this was because he came from the wide-open West, when it was actually in part why he had left, with his father’s sad compliance and a headshake from his gimlet-eyed mother, who was a quarter Indian and rode their land and all the outer hills like a map maker. As a boy he’d had almost no sense of topography, having to acquire the local one over and over. These days, he was relieved to let the airlines do all his geography for him, traveling in the company of many first-class passengers of all nations who, whether or not they knew it (often a woman confessed it) were exactly like him.
Maybe there was no inner entrance to the Oyster Bar.
The central entrance to the Plaza itself coming round again, he walked out onto the wide Fifth Avenue steps. It was late enough for the horse carriages to be gone. No, there went a last one disembarking its tourist couple or pair of lovers against the park’s slotted murk. A mild heat lightning vibrated the whole square, so well known that memory had postcarded all its views into one: from the General Motors Building’s faky plaza across to that old à la Vieille Russie corner store, which through the years must have sold and resold all the Czarist loot there ever was, all the way down to the Bunny Club. Which served you girls in can-can stockings, who in turn served you hamburgers with a body bend as prescribed as the protein in the burgers—and in fact couldn’t be seen from here. In between, the flower-bedded horse and rider in the center of it all flashed off and on like a souvenir from another era entirely. In front of him the steps were crammed; must be a street performer. They played anywhere; the police had become benevolent patrons of art. But here came a police car, sidling the roadway at the bottom of the steps.
Leaning forward, Mulenberg jostled a man, who only kneaded him in closer, as if to be one flesh here was what was wanted. Others did the same. “Sorry—” he said, but no one heeded. He was working his way right and halfway down when a woman asked, “What is it?” A young man answered, “They found somebody”—and Mulenberg sto
pped.
He put his head in his hands and raised it again. At peak hours, the hotel’s islanded driveway streamed with limousines, private cars, and cabs depositing or picking up. After theater a few select cars were parked, hired limousines waiting for their clients but not averse to being bribed for a quick in-between run; he’d often done it. The police car wheeled next to a gleaming one of these, whose chauffeur standing alongside saluted. One vehicle was parked ahead of his. A big cab, lights out.
A Checker? He couldn’t tell from here.
“Watch it, honey pops.” A pair of leather-boys he’d jostled opened their teeth at him.
“That a Checker, down there?”
The two exploded at each other, in mime. “Can’t have that one, honey. It’s took.”
Whee-ah, whee-ah. An ambulance was having trouble getting through down there. The cops toughed the crowd back. A searchlight went on.
It was a Checker. They brought the two thieves to the highest hill, was that the way the Bible said it? And left them there. Outside the hotels was the way they were doing it now. Parked.
The body came out of the car slowly onto its stretcher, passed along to the men in white who covered it. The crowd strained forward anyway, Mulenberg with them. Not long back, an elderly colonel, dying of natural causes in a public place and with all his papers on him, had been hauled off for burial in potter’s field, while his family hunted him; their outrage had caused a Times editorial. Had Ventura his credit cards on him, anything?
In his own thinned wallet a roll of bills lodged, anonymous. Tomorrow, en route to Bahrein, the wallet would be fat with identity again.
A soft shrill passed through the crowd. Two plainclothesmen, one of them hatted, had partially uncovered the body. A forehead. A black crest of hair.
Not enough to identify your own brother from.
The two men, staring down, had an exchange.
Gamble on it.
“Officer! Officers! I think I know that man.”
Mysteries of Motion Page 12