The schoolgirls, who wore ribboned lavender pancake hats and striped blazers with silver crests over their nonexistent left breasts (S and A in Gothic letters, divided by a unicorn rampant), now tried to seize me like importunate harlots.
I withdrew. The Russian’s large face, melancholy enough in its standard mien, seemed as if it might disintegrate in the despondent effort to produce a smile.
“You are Rissole Rain?” he cried. He pointed to his embroidered chest. “Is Boris!”
He provided neither a family name nor, conspicuous failure in one who stems from the steppes, a patronymic. Already this encounter had begun to give off the familiar stench of hoax.
I caressed my pocketed Luger. But I did not want to make an ass of myself by pointing a weapon, at rush hour, into a conveyance full of little girls. Besides, he was offering me no clear and present harm, and I needed a ride.
Therefore I stepped aboard, carefully threaded myself through the serpent cluster, though not without a painful sting or two, and reached the forward passenger’s seat; inertia hurled me into it as Boris accelerated violently.
The volume of traffic was no deterrent to this willful Slav. He steered with whiplike wrists. His steed knew only the gallop and the precipitous halt, four feet together, following which came the rearing of forehoofs and the forward hurtle. In this fashion we rapidly devoured several blocks to the north, then turned east and charged towards the river.
I found my voice box, which had been disordered by the slamming of my head against the seat back, and said: “Teterboro is in the other direction.” I was still enmired in my old resolve, and I assumed that Boris, as one of the conspirators, would naturally seek that airport. The schoolgirls had no doubt been hired, possibly kidnapped, to provide his cover.
His heavy eyebrow rose and fell; I also studied half a mustache and one coarse nasal lobe, pitted with pores.
“Are you really one of the gang,” I asked, “or is this another ruse?”
“Mais oui!” he answered. “Je suis russe. Je ne parle pas…l’anglais. Seulement…le frangais, n’est-ce pas?”
I proceeded to put to him a question that would have earned me a beating from the late Pete & Tony, no doubt, with their quick ear for possible vile epithets.
“Vous êtes cosaque vraiment?”
Boris shook his shako. “C’est un costume.” We had now come to a feeder lane into the FDR Drive, and he wheeled riotously through it and into a mass of traffic that I should have said did not permit such ingress. “Pour les petites filles,” he added en route. A dreamy smile dissipated some of the gloom in his visage. “Aimez-vous…les petites filles?” His eye drifted up to the rear-view mirror.
From behind me came a chorus of chirping voices: “Nous aimons Boreees!”
I received the ugly confirmation that he lived up to the character Natalie had given him, and with some heat I replied: “Absolument pas!” I mentally groped my sketchy lexicon for a reinforcing phrase. “Je ne suis pas un—un sale type!”
Boris was unmoved by my negative ardor, with its condemnatory implication for him. “Moi,” he said, pointing at his gross nose, “j’adore les petites filles!” He smoothed his mustache. “Parce que…parce que…elles sont si jeunes!”
In disgust I cried: “What a swine you are!”
I suppose he did not understand this. My temple was abraded by the sharp rim of a schoolgirl’s hat, and a high-pitched voice intoned into my neck: “Alors, alors, alors…” A tendril of arm insinuated itself into my peripheral vision on the left. Its fingers became a duck’s bill and, cheered on by strident quacks, it assaulted my nose.
Boris took this as a drollery to which only uproarious guffawing was the proper response. He had the dental terrain of a boar. Another little hand came from behind, bearing in its grubby fingers a poison-green lollipop, already tongued to a loathsome lozenge the size of a limabean, and sought to insert it into my mouth, in revulsion gone slack as an emptied satchel.
Whatever my happy fantasies of dealing with disorderly children (burlap sack, millpond), I do not offer violence to the undersized. Carefully, warily, I took my head away as far as my situation permitted, pressed it against the window, and tried, in my insecure French, to elicit our destination from Boris.
“Où roulons nous?”
“Au bac,” said he.
Either I did not quite hear the word or I could not English it. As a diminutive for “tobacco,” it was senseless.
“Comment?” A little tentacle was now snaking under my right shoulder, the cap of which was compressed against the window sill.
“Au bateau de passage pour Stah-teen Issland.”
“The Staten Island ferry? L’Academie, est-elle là-bas?” No doubt such an institution had good need for isolated grounds. Perhaps the name Stavrogin was a code word to attract degenerates who shared Boris’ persuasion and used the school as brothel, their subsidies thereof serving as legitimate deductions under the naive or quite possibly disingenuously corrupt tax laws of New York, notorious for punishing the maladroit and rewarding the malfeasant.
“Merde!” cried Boris, in answer not to me but rather to the raised fist displayed by a taxi driver whose vehicle he had but narrowly missed defendering. Then, mouing into the rear-vision mirror: “Je fais mes excuses, mes petites!” For which he was celebrated with a flockmeal peal of silvery laughter and several iterations of the indecency, along with variations, in compounds, of which I had until then been ignorant.
Finally the Russian gave me the, or a kind of, answer: “Non.”
“Pourquoi allons-nous a Staten Island?”
“Pour voir,” said Boris, “la Statue de Liberie.”
I had enough of his mockery. I clawed for my Luger, intending to thrust it at his mustache in support of my demand for a straight story, but my pocket was empty. The groping little hands had done their work.
I hurled myself about and looked into the rear of the vehicle. A carrot-haired moppet held the big black gun in the proper position to shoot me between the eyes, if such was her purpose. In my fear I forgot French practice and addressed a child in the formal third person.
“Donnez-moi le joli pistolet, mademoiselle, s’il vous plaît!”
“Va te faire foutre!” she obscenely replied, and Boris’ stentorian mirth roared in competition with the engine.
“Si charmante,” he then crooned. “Ah, oh!” He made a forceful right turn that threw me towards the gearbox but failed significantly to alter the command with which the little girl kneeled on her seat, both hands on the raised gun.
Guile was needed here. I groped for my mouchoir, while saying, approximately, what I must translate as follows for those who have no French or, conversely, use it with the felicity of Flaubert.
“My little cabbage, you have need of a handkerchief with which to clean your visage. Your nose is not dry. Is it possible that mine serves such a purpose?” I removed mine from my pocket; it was balled and had a crackling core. “Ah, perhaps it is not clean. What a damage! Zut alors! Perhaps Boris lends you his.”
I did not dare turn to consult the Russian directly on this matter: her cold little green eyes were diminishing in circumference as she prepared to squeeze the trigger. How grotesque to be shot by a sang-froid schoolgirl.
“Non, non, mignonne! Defense de tirer! Do not shoot the gentil gentilhomme, I pray of you. It is not droll. It is an affair very serious—”
She discharged the Luger point-blank at my forehead, and continued to pump out successive shots. The reports were feeble for such a formidable weapon and accompanied by but tiny wisps of smoke, from breech and not muzzle, and instead of hot brass shells, the ejecting mechanism produced a thin strip of chewed paper. I had been assassinated by cap gun.
I began to doubt whether Natalie was really an agent of the Treasury Department. I turned to Boris.
“Ecoutez! Pas encore de perversion! Pour qui me prenez-vous?”
“I take you for a committed human being, I hope,” said he
in limpid English, standardly accented. “Dedicated to the cause of civil decency, I trust.”
“Good gravy,” I blurted. “Then neither are you what you seem!”
“If you mean that for general application, then it is the mere parroting of an outmoded psychoanalytic platitude,” Boris said, continuing to drive in his new role as inordinately as of old. We were already clearing the housing project on, if I knew the lay of land, East Twenty-third Street. The plan to view the Statue of Liberty from the Staten Island ferry had been doffed, I supposed, with his mask.
“But if,” he went on, “your reference is made peculiarly to me as a discrete individual, then it is well made. Forgive me for putting you to the test, and my congratulations on passing it. You’re no child molester, else you’d have lost control when brought into juxtaposition with this shipment.”
I cannot say the judgment was a relief to me, not having been aware of the threat, and I was insulted by his implication that it was my status that required definition, not his.
“Who are you?” I asked in foul humor.
He smirked. His walrus mustache now looked so obviously bogus that I wondered why I had not penetrated its falsity at the outset. Nor did he appear to any degree Russian in any other point of visage or mien; the strong features, along with the melancholia, had vanished with the coarseness of palate. “We’re safe in English,” said he. “The girls don’t understand it, of course. By the way, you speak French comme une vache espagnole.”
The well-known abusive phrase applied by the Gauls to any foreigner who essays their precious tongue evoked derisive giggles from the girls in back.
“Whoever you are, you’re a rude sod,” I said.
“I should think you might have understood why I used that idiom,” Boris told me, raising a gauntleted index finger from the wheel. “To give them an explanation for our resorting to English…I’m Boris, of the Vice Squad, NYPD.” He plucked open one of the befrogged gold buttons on his tunic and found a little leather folder within. He passed it to me furtively. “Examine it inside your lapels, so they can’t see over your shoulder. Chuckle, or titter and snort as though it’s an indecent picture.”
I shielded it with my jacket, but refused to perform further until I had confirmed his claim…Indeed, badge and carte d’identité were in order, unless they too were counterfeit. He was Sergeant Conrad Garnett Boris.
“All right, Sergeant, 111 play along—”
He nodded at the rear-view mirror. “Oui, monsieur, je suis sergent cosaquien!”
“Very well. But despite your authentic-looking credentials I don’t intend to cooperate unless I hear a reasonable statement of your game and its goal. Is it your contention that these small female persons are assisting in the pursuit of the counterfeiters?…Yes, I think I see it clearly now:Bakewell and Washburn, to throw off suspicion, pretend to be pederasts, when actually they are pedophiles. Though the common root of both words is the Greek for ‘boy,’ and with the notorious Attic bias, also by extension ‘child’— female liberationaries should take note of this aggrandizement at the very beginnings of our civilization—the suffixes ‘rast’ and ‘phile’ make all the difference for the English-speaking deviate.”
Boris threw the bus into a left turn on Second Avenue, allowing the wheel to whiz through the loosened clamps of his gauntlets on the recovery, saying meanwhile: “Nietzsche was first a classical philologist.”
“Is that germane to what I’m saying?” I asked acerbly.
“It may well be,” said the vice-squad sergeant, plucking at his mustache, which I realized was very like that shown in existing portraits of the mad philosopher in question, though Boris lacked the burning eyes deep below beetled brows. And speaking of pictures, the sergeant proceeded to do just that.
“Are you conversant with a photograph showing Nietzsche hitched to a cart while Lou Andreas-Salome stands nearby with brandished whip?”
“Not at all. Nor do I grasp your point. Frau Lou was also Rilke’s inamorata, but probably only a platonic pal of Freud’s.”
“That,” said Boris, “there may be some profound link between deviation and derivation.”
“Or that,” said I, “you will discard all discrimination to make a bon mot. Getting back to the counterfeiters—”
“I know nothing about them, but I’m sure the Treasury people will want any information you possess. Their local number is in the book, surely. My own area of competence is, uniquely, prostitution, further divided into that branch concerned with the traffic in underaged females.”
“Good God,” I said, recoiling. “Surely that is happily rare.”
“No, indeed,” Boris said, with what seemed gleeful enthusiasm. “Be assured it is rife.”
“And these poor little things,” I pointed rearwards, “are the helpless merchandise of that beastly trade”
“Far from it. That is, they are so to speak the product offered for a price, but I should call them anything but helpless.”
Nevertheless I persisted in my maudlin supposition. “Snatched from slum cradles the world over, sold by indigent parents too poor to support moral values—”
“Not at all! These are children of the prosperous professional classes, by which I mean principally lawyers and psychiatrists, though the odd allergist, orthodontist, or sociologist father is represented.”
“Yet they speak only French?”
Boris turned right and shot through the routine filthy side street of parked cars, spavined dogs, scarred cats, and a living gallery of manifest rogues—but statistically more damaging to their intimates than to the casual passer-by.
“There is an actual Stavrogin Academy,” said the sergeant, “and all classes are conducted in that language. The precedent for that, I suppose, having been established by the upper-class Russian pedagogy of the nineteenth century. If you remember your War and Peace, everybody except the peasants is supposed to be speaking French.”
We were on Third Avenue in a trice, and Boris was braking as he neared the corner on which my apartment house loomed.
“But surely when not at school, when at home—”
“Oh, they gibber in an American patois, but I assure you they have understood nothing of what we’ve said since going into formal English.” He had stopped now at the curb. “They are a depraved lot of hardened criminals, most of them recidivists, on whom compassion would be wasted. In the reformatory they’ll make indecent pottery and finger paintings.”
“You will arrest them and not the procurers?”
“Ah,” said he, “though a citizen of New York you have much naïveté to expunge. Don’t be bamboozled by their size: these individuals are wily degenerates. Their games are not the spillikins and conundrums that Jane Austen played with young relatives; they are rather the decadent Roman entertainments that followed Trimalchio’s feast. And long investigation has revealed no panders but themselves.”
God wot, this was an unhappy subject. I turned to another. “Like Detective Zwingli, a colleague of yours though in Narcotics—”
“Now a movie star,” Boris said enviously.
“You seem a man of more liberal culture than the routine officer. I live just there, as for some reason you seem to know, and thank you for dropping me off! I wonder whether, after delivering these miscreants to the Tombs or wherever they will be deservedly incarcerated, you might like to come back for a glass of champagne, a bit of pate—”
The sergeant gave me a withering look and a coarse question which demonstrated that, also like Zwingli, he was au fond a cop.
“You a dirty faggot?”
“Certainly not! I’m a dramatist. I thought you might like to look at a play of mine.”
His face became radiant. “I do have a theatrical bent, it’s true. And vice-squadders have been unjustly ignored, while the limelight plays on the narcos.”
“Very good, then!” I offered a handshake. “A tout a l’heure!”
“Oh,” said he, “we’re going into the same bui
lding. What a coincidence.”
“We?” I asked. “And whatever, why?”
“The girls and I,” Boris said. “To apartment five-K, to arrange an entrapment for a slippery customer who has long eluded law-enforcement bodies the world over.”
“That’s my own number!”
“Surely you are in error. It is the current hide-out of one Teddy Villanova.”
“There is no such person,” I said quickly, hoping thereby to treat what felt very like the onset of a severe pulmonary malfunction. Recovered so suddenly from obsolescence, the name asserted all its old power over me.
“Would that that were so!” Boris sighed so dramatically that the ends of his mustache pointed briefly towards the roof. “He is the personification of evil. I hope only that these little trulls are young enough to meet the requirements of his appetite. Also, he may soon see through the hoax; his pleasure is to corrupt the innocent, and these minxes are anything but naive. Still, we must work with what we have, no?”
“Just a moment,” I said, arresting with my urgency his hand upon the lever of the door. “I gather that you know Natalie Novotny, who poses as girl Treasury agent, for she knows you, in fact assumes you are of the sexual persuasion which you here ascribe to Teddy Villanova—”
“The rivalry between local and Federal law-enforcement services is notorious,” Boris said sadly.
“Natalie has confirmed Donald Washburn’s statement to the effect that Teddy V. is a creation of the whole cloth.”
“I’m delighted to hear that,” said Boris. “That means that the ruse worked. She will follow the red herring to Teterboro Airport, and meanwhile I shall singlehandedly capture Villanova, garnering all kudos and plaudits.”
“She doesn’t give a fig for Teddy,” said I. “Her prey are Washburn and Bakewell.”
Boris smiled. “That little hussy will get her comeuppance if so. Washburn is Special Branch, Scotland Yard; Bakewell, French Surete.”
Going through the dramatis personae of the past day I could now find only the Hindu as yet unassigned to some constabulary. I used him in the recovery of a shred of pride.
Women and Men Page 19
