Despite her pun, it was really she who had picked me up, darting in front of me on upper Second Avenue to seize a cab for which I had waited twenty minutes in the rain at clamorous rush hour. Having done that, however, she invited me to share it, which I did with an odd mixture of emotions, which soon however coalesced into the positive when she said she would of course pay the entire fare. She was also very blonde.
Well, here it was, only an hour before I was to collect Natalie at her apartment in the far East Seventies, and not only was I yet without funds, I had also put in the worst day of my life.
This being an emergency, I put a quarter in the telephone and dialed Natalie’s number. She answered quickly and in a bright voice that did not necessarily reflect her mood, which might well be Dostoevskian if the caller proved an intimate, whereas in the case of a wrong number she might chat merrily for some minutes.
“Natalie, I find myself in an uncomfortable situation—”
“Russel? You’re alive, thank God.” Her tone suggested she was not joking. Yet she had had no means of knowing about the horrors of my day. I kept Peggy in innocence of the names and local habitations of my female friends, requesting them, if they phoned my office and got her, to give a pseudonym, and describing her as an advanced case of emotional imbalance, with homicidal tendencies. I never found one who would not play along; not, I think, from fright but rather from the natural attraction my girls invariably had for conspiracy: I suspect they thought Peggy and I were lovers, if not man and wife.
“I don’t know about that,” I said, with a snigger of self-pity. “I’ve been put through the paces today. I don’t know that I’m in a condition to go to dinner.” I corrected that: “To go out to dinner.”
Natalie was breathing with a noise that came over the instrument like applause from a stadium. “Russel!” she screamed. “I can hardly hear you!”
Natalie Novotny was not given to inordinate displays of emotion. I imagine her placidity was all to the good with the potential hysterics on any aircraft, if it left something wanting at intimate junctures in her private life. It may be ungallant of me to reveal that when making love she often seemed asleep.
Therefore I was struck now by her manifest anxiety. “Just a moment,” I shouted. “Let me check this equipment.” Surely enough, the mouthpiece of the telephone was masked with a squashed blob of pink bubble gum, no doubt the prank of one of New York’s unlovable urchins. Fortunately, this had dried sufficiently so that it could be prized off with a fingernail. I resumed: “Now then—”
“I might have gone off to Hamburg with the conviction that you were lying dead in some alley or floating face down and bloated in the East River.”
“I don’t understand these fears,” said I. “It’s true I had several close calls today, but only one, really, that could have had the kind of issue you refer to. And you couldn’t possibly have known of that, unless you are a student of the yoga wallah, which is unlikely in view of your oft-stated distaste for anything to do with Asia, including the Indonesian rijsttafel that is a specialty of restaurants in Amsterdam, one of the many cities you dislike.”
“What was I to think?” asked Natalie. “You have been missing all night.”
“Just a moment. The night is not yet upon us. It’s just after six o’clock.”
“In the morning,” said she.
“The sun is falling through the western sky.”
“The sun is climbing through the eastern sky!”
“It is the twelfth,” said I, raising my Timex and looking at the little calendar window. “It definitely is…the thirteenth.”
“Yes it is,” cried Natalie. “And unless this is a joke, which if so reveals a new facet of your character, and unless something terrible has happened to you, which you haven’t specified, your sense of time is deranged, probably as the result of narcotics. Don’t expect a lecture, Russel. I simply never want to hear from you again.”
Good gravy, it wasn’t possible that I had slept in the discarded Barca-Lounger, on the sidewalk, for fourteen hours, I told myself at this point in the usual instant it takes for such reflections which when written, as here, exceed a dozen words—one basic reason why literature should never be confused with life. I was also simultaneously eying the street, on which I was alone and had been since arising, and trying to reorient myself with the new understanding that my internal compass had been reversed since I awakened. And in fact, just behind me was indeed the gypsy den and, a little farther along, Yoghurt City, with the wallah’s windows above, everything internal of course quite dark now.
In addition I was struggling against an impulse to swoon. However, all this consumed nothing in elapsed time, and I was able to forestall Natalie’s obviously imminent withdrawal of her electronic presence, but only just.
“I have an explanation for all this, believe me,” I cried. “That is, an explanation for my failure to appear last night, not an explanation for—”
“Oh, Russel, why bother? Obviously you are playing a devious game. When you were two hours late I called your home phone and got a female who said it was the number for a Teddy Villanova.”
At that instant I felt a hard, muzzlelike object press against my spine and heard a rough clearing of throat behind me.
9
My immediate reaction was not one of thought. I dropped my right elbow and whirled about, violently thrusting the weapon aside, indeed dashing it to the sidewalk, where it smashed with a crash of glash—I mean glass, for it had been a bottle. My assailant was a purple-faced wino, as usual of indeterminate age.
He grinned through teeth like grains of parti-colored Indian corn and said: “It was empty. Buy me a refill, else I’ll abuse you in a stentorian voice, embarrassing you in front of your fellow man, and you’ll have no recourse, because I fear nothing. That’s my weapon, and it’s no secret.”
“You have, in other words, opted out of the social contract,” said I.
“Shamelessness is the answer,” said this contemporary Diogenes. “All the ills of the world can be traced to the foolish desire to look well in the eyes of others.”
“Very clever, but circumspice: there are no others present at this moment. Haha!”
“Hoho!” said he. “There’s me. I’m audience enough.”
He was a psychologist of keen penetration, and I told him as much.
“But praise is as useless to me as punishment!” he replied with asperity.
“And death is the same as life. Therefore, why don’t you die?”
“Because it’s the same!” He had topped me again and, furthermore, plagiaristically, one of the pre-Socratics having said that a good 2500 years before, which I should have remembered.
I gave him all my change, some quarters and pennies, and decided against mentioning that the liquor stores were not yet open, because I dreaded another expression of his scorn, which I realized, in our relative positions, would be evoked by any utterance of mine.
I lifted the telephone, which I had dropped, and expected to hear that Natalie had hung up. But she was still there. In fact, she was speaking and, I suspected, had been doing so throughout, in ignorance of my absence from the line.
“Excuse me,” I said. “My story is too complicated to give here in toto. The woman you talked with was my secretary, no doubt. We are looking for a man, something of a scoundrel I should say, whose name is Villanova, who would seem at the center of my problem. No doubt she was employing a ruse, by saying he was I, hoping to smoke him out, if the telephone call was bogus, as so many things have been lately—”
During the last several words Natalie had been talking under my as usual carefully constructed clauses, and now, with a burst of volume, claimed the wire: “…tell you, I know Teddy Villanova!”
At this the phone went lifeless. No doubt the recorded warning that my time was waning had come while I talked with the derelict-philosopher. I looked around for him now, because he had got all my change. He had vanished.
I s
earched for a cab but saw none on the deserted streets. I began to walk, with my now corrected sense of direction, towards the northeast. Eventually, after quite a hike, I reached Union Square. I had still not seen a taxi. I was about to descend into the Avernus of subways under that complex crossroads, but halted for a moment to look at a gaudy car that glided to a stop at one of the nearby traffic lights. It was a Cadillac and painted in mother-of-pearl. The black man behind the wheel wore a white sombrero, a red jacket, and a tiger-striped tie. I could have sworn he was Calvin, the Negro who, dressed as a drab detective, had been at my apartment that afternoon in the company of Zwingli & Knox. On the passenger’s side sat a girl so blonde as to make Natalie Novotny swarthy by contrast. She seemed in fact an albino.
My attention thus focused on the Cadillac, I was not aware that a panel truck had pulled noiselessly up to the curb, and I failed to notice, until they were upon me, the two men who had deboarded.
“Whadduhyuh gonna do with a fag who won’t get outa town when he’s tole tuh?” asked one of them, to the other, though both stared fixedly into my face. I recognized them, terribly, as the first team of fake cops, those who had savaged me in my office. They now wore green deliveryman’s uniforms.
“You listen here,” I said, backing away but extending my finger in reproach. “You didn’t tell me anything of the kind. You beat me up, looked for the gun, snarled, ‘Fuck this,’ and carried out the body.”
The one with the mustache said, with sinister geniality: “Yeah, that does sound like us. You got some memory, you know that?” He pushed his low forehead at the other. “A fag never forgets, like uh nelephant.”
“Dammit, I’m not queer!”
“Who’s talking about queers?” said the clean-lipped but hairy-nostriled thug. “He meant you was stoopid, a real fag.”
This usage was a new one on me. “Oh, I beg your pardon. Well, look, is it necessary to brutalize me again? I don’t have anything you could possibly want. Also, I am just on my way at last to discover the identity of Teddy Villanova—” I bit my tongue, remembering too late my previous belief that they were Teddy’s own boys.
“Who’s he?” asked Mustache. “Some other stoopid fag?”
“You don’t know the name?”
The other said in disgust: “Don’t try and kiss our ass by mentioning all the guineas you know.”
I found their apparent ignorance as incredible as the recognition of the name by every other principal, though none of the latter thus far had known the owner of it by sight. If Natalie did, I must talk with her without delay.
“If Villanova’s not your friend, then he’s your enemy,” I said. “Believe me, he’s in this up to his ears. You fellows help me find out his identity, and you can have the heroin or whatever it is you are after, no questions asked. He’s undoubtedly the guy who killed, or had killed, your pal Bakewell or Big Jake—if he was your pal, that is. Anyway, you carried out his body. Of course, you did refer to it as garbage.”
I had not forgotten that Hus took the heroin from me; I was playing for time. “And while we’re on the subject of who’s who, is that black man over there with you or against you?”
The pimpmobile, sitting patiently all this while at the red light, which as usual was interminable when so little traffic occupied the streets, had only just begun to move. Neither Calvin (if it was he) nor the blonde was looking in our direction. They were eating something from a shared bag.
Clean-lip squinted briefly over his shoulder. “I never could tell one eight ball from another.”
Mustache did not bother to look. He said: “We never noo that stiff. We was just supposed to get rid of it.”
“Mind telling me why you were dressed as policemen?”
“Guards at the club.”
Ah, the Wyandotte Club. A lot of money must have gone across their gambling tables. And indeed nowadays most supermarkets, even delicatessens, employed private guards, who wore blue uniforms, very coplike to the glance, for their deterrent effect—on respectable customers; shoplifters brazenly ignored them.
Clean-lip said: “We was supposed to tell you to get outa town. Maybe we forgot. We wanted to get the stiff outathere, see. Gives a bad name. Mr. DiGennaro don’t like that, around a building where you got a nice club where judges and councilmen can come and relax, ya know, and union officials, ya know. Somebody cawls on the phome, says some schmuck got blown away on the third fla, so Mr. DiGennaro says, T don’t like that, in a building where you got a nice club and all, Tony and Pete you go up and get ridduh the garbage, roll it in that old rug in the closet, ya know, and take it to the dump, becawss we don’t want to have it around, ya know?”
Beyond him the meretricious Cadillac had made a left turn from Fourth Avenue onto Fourteenth Street and was crawling very slowly in our direction, the occupants seemingly absorbed in what they ate from the bag.
Mustache took up the explanation: “He says to get the piece too, and trow it away, becawss we don’t want no firearms inna building where you got a nice club, and anyway Mr. D.’s on a committee for gun control with senators and all.”
“Then,” I cried, “you Wyandotte folks had nothing to do with the murder?”
“That’s a laugh,” said Clean-lip. “You did it, din’t you? That’s what Mr. D. says, ‘Tell that fag to get the fuck outa the building and out a the town, if he ain’t got no more sense than blow away somebody for some personal matter right inna building for Jesus’ sake.”
Mustache said: “See, you want somebody blown away,you cowl somebody. You don’t do it yourself for Christ almighty sake. You don’t wanna shit where you eat.”
They had turned so earnest and, I thought, sympathetic, that I began rather to like them. Still Zwingli had said my “Bakewell” was actually Big Jake Cozzo, a dealer in heroin.
“Cozzo!” I said, intending to follow it with, “Does that name mean anything to you?”
But Clean-lip roared, “Who you calling a prick?” and buried his fist into my poor belly. Alas, I was not fluent in Neapolitan obscenities. I folded onto the pavement.
However, in the sequel this was one blow I did not regret taking, for at that moment the pimpmobile had come collateral with us, at the end of a slow diagonal roll to the wrong side of the street, and, from my writhe on the concrete, I saw Calvin, for it was surely he, put out the window a brown hand, holding a white paper bag, the bottom of which was translucent with grease, and call: “You motherfuckers want some ribs?”
Then, cackling, he dropped the bag into the street, ducked from sight, and the girl leaned across him with flour-blanched face and platinum hair and a double-barreled shotgun, and in quick series, thunder and lightning, blew my companions out of their shoes, across the sidewalk, and through the show window of a discount lingerie shop, the shattered glass from which sprayed me like the exhaust from a snow blower.
Calvin’s white hat and brown face came back into view, and the car accelerated through the left turn into Broadway and vanished.
I can report that, at least for me, being a witness to violent death has a stupefying effect. I rose in an orderly manner, the stomach pain having been, as it were, expunged by the shots; adjusted my clothing, even buttoning the corduroy jacket which had swung free since the day I bought it; and strolled across the empty street on an angle that brought me to the boarded-up facade of the former S. Klein department store, on which were pasted the usual advertising posters such a surface collects: karate lessons, rock concerts, and pornographic entertainments.
This montage is my only memory of the several-miled walk to East Seventy-third Street near York Avenue, where I entered the lobby of Natalie’s high-rise apartment building and asked the seated doorman, over his copy of El Diario, to announce my arrival to her on the intercom.
He sighed, crackled his paper, and asked: “You nang?”
“Villanova,” said I, with the same utter lack of mental volition that had characterized my long comatose hike from downtown.
He was a
plump young fellow, wearing horn-rimmed glasses, and his temples looked as though he might be bald before his time: Spanish genes still ran in his veins after centuries. Making this observation, I was conscious of emerging from my coma.
“Excuse me. I meant Wren.”
“Chess,” said he, rising with a grin that all but reached his earlobes. “My nang is Villanova.” With a thumb smudged from the newsprint he gestured at the little black Bakelite plate, with its white legend, over the breast pocket of his beige uniform.
I read it aloud, using the Spanish pronunciation: “T. Villanueve.”
“Chess,” said the doorman.
“The T. means what?
“Tomás.”
“Well,” said I, “as long as I’m here anyway, I might as well go up.” As I went towards the elevators I heard him say “Meester Ran” into the mouthpiece on his panel full of buttons.
Natalie took forever to answer my buzz at her door, and when she appeared she was transformed into another person, a stocky little soul in a floor-length housecoat of lime green. It was in fact her roommate, the girl hitherto referred to as often having been ejected by her unpredictable boy friend in the wee hours, from whose abode she returned home, thereby displacing me in the lone bedroom on East Seventy-third.
This girl’s name was Alice Ellish. She had the kind of snub-nose rubber-ball face that could be called cute by those with a taste for such physiognomy. Having met her on several occasions in the course of three weeks (having luckily missed her on many more), I had not yet succeeded in evoking from her any sign of recognition at any outset, though Natalie was ever wont to say hastily, with significant emphasis: “You remember Russel Wren.”
Who is Teddy Villanova? Page 13