Cut Throat Dog

by Joshua Sobol

  Hey, Shakespeare, he hears Yadanuga’s voice and feels the weight of his hand on his shoulder, where are you?

  In the villa in Nice, says Shakespeare.

  It was brilliant, says Yadanuga. Connecting up to their phone, and then cutting their electricity, letting them dial the electric company and complain of a short, and the Alsation reassures them: Oui, monsieur, we’re sending you a team of technicians.… right away, tout de suite, monsieur! How did you think of it, Shakespeare?

  I had the mind of a writer, Shakespeare mourns for Hanina, and I sold it. And now I’m paying the price.

  Have you been diagnosed with something?

  Diabetes, Tyrell the scriptwriter gives him the second answer that occurs to him. Never the first, banal one.

  That’s nothing, Yadanuga tries to console him. If it’s only diabetes—

  Neglected and deteriorating, Tyrell continues improving his new invention, examining its possible implications for what comes next. I walked around with it for years. Somehow I knew. This dissolving flesh showed the signs. Pins and needles in my feet. Attacks of numbness in my fingers. Attacks of blurred vision.

  You didn’t go to a doctor? Yadanuga pretends to be surprised at his friend. In truth he is simply astonished at Shakespeare’s ability to set in motion improvisations in which he himself enjoys participating, without knowing where they will lead and where they will end.

  Why go to a doctor? Shakespeare laughs. So that he’ll tell me that I should have died three hundred years ago? That the fact that I’m still alive is a medical scandal? That my cardiac arteries are a mess? That I have to stop ruining women’s reputations and drinking myself to death?

  The question is if you prefer to go blind, Yadanuga goes on playing the game. Or to lose your organs one by one.

  I hoped to croak before my body landed up in the hands of the butchers, Shakespeare plays another card, but my heart refuses to die.

  I’m sorry I gave you the whiskey, says Yadanuga, and asks himself how and when the moment of truth, which ends every game, will arrive.

  Don’t be sorry, Shakespeare laughs at himself, those drops won’t change anything now. And the best joke is, it’s caught up with me exactly when I’m suddenly dying to live, and even if I’ve only got one more year, I’m not prepared to give up a single day.

  We’ve finally come to the point, reflects Yadanuga. Now the guy’s beginning to talk about something that really happened to him. But he immediately warns himself: don’t forget you’re talking to someone for whom imagination is reality and reality is imagination. Now, go figure what happened in reality, what happened in imagination, and what happened in the no-man’s-land between the two, where this man lives his life.

  What’s her name? Yadanuga mounts a frontal assault, which causes Tyrell to leap for his script and start scribbling a new scene:

  Francesca, he throws out the first name that comes into his head, the devil knows where from.

  A nun? wonders Yadanuga.

  How did you know? Shakespeare begins with growing curiosity to reveal the biography of a woman whose identity is still unknown.

  I don’t know, admits Yadanuga, a kind of hunch. How did you meet her?

  Through a friend of hers. I was in Florence, I went to the Accademia to see Michelangelo’s David, there were two girls standing there, one of them in a nun’s habit and the other in the uniform of a novice.

  Since when do you know the difference between a novice and a nun? Yadanuga tries to frustrate Shakespeare’s unexpected move with a clumsy mate.

  I heard them talking, Shakespeare laughs at his contestant’s amateurish move. I heard the nun saying to the novice: Do it for me, Isabella. Find out what his business is. You can do it, I can’t. You haven’t taken your vows yet.

  I didn’t know that nuns weren’t allowed to talk to men, Yadanuga marvels at his friend’s powers of improvisation.

  They’re only allowed to in the presence of the Mother Superior, explains Shakespeare, and adds: And even then—they’re not allowed to show their face to a man, or if they do show it, they’re not allowed to talk.

  What do you say, marvels Yadanuga.

  To cut a long story short, the novice comes up to me and says: My friend, Francesca, took a bet with me that you’re a gynecologist. So I answer loudly, to let her friend hear too: What’s the problem, did your brother get you pregnant? And before the words are out of my mouth Francesca bursts into lewd laughter, and I felt as if midsummer was breaking out in the dead of winter in my heart.

  Are you serious? marvels Yadanuga.

  The laugh didn’t come from her belly, it came straight from her Diana-bud, which opened up and made the Cupid-flower blossom in my dormant garden. Suddenly I understood why Orthodox Jews are so afraid of a woman’s voice.

  And what happened afterwards? inquires Yadanuga.

  We began the evening with black cuttlefish soup and celebrated the night in her hotel room.

  With the nun?

  What nun? He laughs. If I tell you, you won’t believe it.

  Spit it out, Shakespeare!

  In good time, Yadanuga.

  Whatever. And the next day you said goodbye—

  The next day we got on a plane.

  A plane?!

  She took me to meet her parents in Vermont. They live in a big wooden house, in a forest of maple trees. They make maple syrup for a living. Maple wine. Maple liqueur. Their house is steeped in the aromas of maple and cinnamon.

  Never mind the maple and the cinnamon, what’s the girl like?

  The girl is maple and cinnamon too.

  What does that mean?

  Her hair is maple syrup. You never saw a color like it in your life. Not only on her head. On her mound of Venus too. And her lips—cinnamon. Reddish-brown.

  Are you talking about her mouth or her pussy?

  Both. But what drove me crazy were her eyes.

  Cinnamon or maple syrup?

  No no, Shakespeare gravely dismisses Yadanuga’s attempts at humor: Her eyes are something you’ve never seen. Their expression is the cleanest thing I ever saw. Clean as clean can be. The innocence of a child, and the sexuality of a woman of thirty-three. When she came to say goodbye to me, her hair was wet with rain. She was wearing a white shirt, and over it a man’s brown leather bomber jacket.

  White and brown, Yadanuga reflects aloud. Hanina takes it in, but Shakespeare goes on telling his story without a break:

  Her cheeks were flushed with running in the rain. She came into the room, sat down in an armchair, breathing hard with flared nostrils, and looked straight into my eyes. For fifteen minutes we sat like that, looking into each other’s eyes. I had such a hard-on I was afraid to move. In the end she stood up and said: I’ll miss you. I have to go to work.

  What does she do, your nun?

  She works for the police.

  A cop?! Yadanuga is stunned by this completely unexpected turn in the development of the character. Where in the hell is he taking me, he wonders, is there a story of getting into trouble with the law behind this tale being spun by his compulsively fiction-fabricating friend? And aloud he asks: Are you trying to tell me that you’ve fallen in love with an American policewoman?

  Not a policewoman. She’s a criminologist. She investigates particularly serious crimes.

  What are ‘particularly serious crimes’? Yadanuga has a hard time hiding the suspicion awakening in his heart.

  Exposed neck crimes, Shakespeare replies with a confidence that amazes Hanina, who suspects that this time even Shakespeare has reached a dead end. He hopes that Yadanuga will let it go, but Yadanuga is as stubborn as a Canaanite mule:

  ‘Exposed neck crimes’? What exactly is that?

  You don’t know?

  No, says Yadanuga. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard of it.

  Hanina almost admits that it’s the first time he’s ever heard the term too, but Shakespeare preempts him:

  Haven’t you noticed that lately all
kinds of people in the media, artists and academics, are wearing jackets with Chinese collars, over black tee-shirts that expose their necks?

  So …?

  Have you ever thought about what kind of crimes are typical of this population group?

  What kind of crimes?

  Think about what’s characteristic of this sector, suggests Shakespeare. These people travel a lot. They fly to congresses, lectures, exhibition openings. They come for one night to some little town in the Bavarian alps, the next day they’re giving a lecture in Elsinore or Helsingborg, and two days later they’re spending the night in Edinburgh or Paris, and before they return to Yale or Cambridge, they manage to fit in a trip to Bali to take in the Barong Festival.

  So? demands Yadanuga, whose head is beginning to spin.

  These people are developing a multiple identity syndrome. On the one hand—one identity is not responsible for what the other identities do, and on the other hand—it’s very difficult to keep track of their activities, because they’re here today and somewhere else tomorrow. Do you understand? The investigation of exposed neck crimes requires sharp senses, special insight and tremendous skill, explains Shakespeare and thinks of the unavoidable murder, the liquidation of the maniac who might be Tino the Syrian and who is definitely threatening the life of Winnie a.k.a. Melissa Timberlake, and he concludes with the fateful words: And that’s what Francis does.

  Nice story, says Yadanuga. Now let’s hear the simple truth.

  That is the truth, Shakespeare tries to sound as convincing as he can, but Yadanuga isn’t buying it:

  Bill, he says, I really enjoyed your flight of fancy, but enough is enough! Come back to reality. Tell me the sordid truth, without any embellishments. You got yourself involved in a dangerous, criminal affair, and you involved someone else as well. Am I right or wrong?

  The truth is she is called Melissa. A New Yorker whose parents got divorced when she was four, and ever since she had lived with her alcoholic mother, who would come home drunk in the early hours of the morning, every time dragging a different man behind her to finish the night with. At the age of twelve she ran away from home for the first time, and became a streetwalker.

  You got mixed up with a New York whore?

  She’s a sales assistant in a fancy shop on Sixty-something or Eighty-something Street off Madison Avenue in the daytime, and at night she’s an unhappy prostitute.

  Go on, says Yadanuga.

  A highly educated girl. Doing a doctorate on a family of British hangmen, says Shakespeare, and Hanina’s voice breaks. He puts the bottle to his lips, takes a healthy swallow of the bittersweet Knob Creek, and finishes with an Arabic curse.

  A whore doing a doctorate on a family of hangmen?! Shakespeare! There’s a limit! protests Yadanuga.

  She’s from a family of hangmen herself, explains Shakespeare. Her grandfather was a hangman. He executed the Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg.

  Yeah, sure! laughs Yadanuga. I suppose you met him too, and he gave you a piece of the rope that hanged Hans Frank or Baldur von Schirach.

  No, says Shakespeare. Her grandfather was killed in a work accident. He sat down on an electric chair in order to demonstrate the routine to a group of apprentice executioners, and someone, apparently a cleaning woman, raised, or forgot to raise, the switch by mistake.

  Good going, Bill! says Yadanuga. Shakespeare himself would never have come up with an invention like that.

  I didn’t invent it, Shakespeare defends himself. It’s what she told me. By the way, a lot of hangmen ended their lives on the gallows. There was a well known case of a hangman who had a stroke at the moment he was hanging the convicted man, and there were also a number of gangster-executioners, who were sentenced to death and executed, which proves that the death penalty is evidently not a deterrent.

  And is the prostitute a real prostitute? Yadanuga asks again, to make sure he understood correctly.

  The mother of prostitutes, says Hanina. She receives customers at home, and at the same time she does phone sex as a sideline.

  Where exactly does she work as a sales assistant? asks Yadanuga.

  What do you know, says Hanina, I’ve forgotten the name of the store!

  Aha! Yadanuga hurries to widen the crack that has suddenly opened up in the story. What kind of store?

  Fashion, says Hanina. What’s the name again? Something that sounds like a killer. Not Rudolf.…

  Stephane Kellian? suggest Yadanuga.

  Not Kellian.…

  What were you looking for there? Yadanuga attacks.

  A cashmere suit.

  For a woman?

  No, for me.

  A men’s fashion store, says Yadanuga.

  Both. Men and women. I think it’s something like Lars.

  Larson?

  Is there a fashion designer called that?

  I think so, I’m not sure.

  No, it wasn’t Larson. Maybe Karlson.

  Karl Lagerfeld?

  Lagerfeld rings a bell.…

  A cashmere suit you said? Is it supposed to be a Scotch fashion house?

  Today they breed goats you can comb cashmere from in Mongolia too, in China, even in Texas, in Florida, and other places too, says Shakespeare.

  When did you suddenly start taking an interest in cashmere? Yadanuga fails to conceal his surprise.

  He was wearing a cashmere suit, says Shakespeare.

  Who?

  Adonis, says Shakespeare. Her pimp.

  Ah-ha! … Yadanuga begins to put the strands he’s succeeded in untangling together, but Shakespeare doesn’t give him time to breathe:

  Apropos cashmere—I’m not talking about the raw material. I’m talking about the mills and the wool industry, where the Scots are apparently still in the lead. Although it seems to me that the Italians are beginning to catch up with them, and they may even have gotten ahead of them by now.

  Maybe, says Yadanuga, with the strands he’s managed to untangle getting tied up in a new knot.

  Why don’t you throw out the name of some fashion house, maybe it will ring a bell, requests Shakespeare.

  McLarn? Yadanuga takes a shot in the dark.

  McLarn? ponders Shakespeare. McLarn.… we’re getting there, but no.

  Leave off, says Yadanuga. It won’t come to you if you worry about it.

  Suddenly I’m not sure it was on Madison either, says Shakespeare.

  What difference does it make if it’s Madison or Lexington, Yadanuga tries vainly to get to the point.

  Something strange is happening to me. To my memory, I mean, complains Shakespeare and looks at his friend in a plea for help.

  There are hundreds of clothing stores in Manhattan, Yadanuga says reassuringly. You probably saw something you liked in a display window and went inside without looking at the name of the store, and when you saw her you forgot about the suit, because she grabbed all your attention.

  That’s true, confirms Shakespeare, but it’s a little scary when whole sections of reality vanish into the mist like ships, until suddenly you aren’t even sure anymore if there was a ship there in the first place. Tell me, doesn’t it happen to you sometimes, that for a minute it seems to you that something that happened didn’t happen at all?

  Or vice versa, says Yadanuga, sometimes it seems to me that something that never happened actually did happen.

  Yes, Shakespeare agrees, sometimes the border is completely blurred, and sometimes it simply doesn’t exist.

  Let’s get back to the girl, Yadanuga suggests. You said she was doing her doctorate?

  Yes, Shakespeare replies absentmindedly. She gave me her phone number. I call, ask if I can come by. She says to me: You can even stay the night. A thousand dollars a night, including breakfast.

  Fuck-and-breakfast, says Yadanuga. And you went there?

  I couldn’t refuse, Shakespeare reflects aloud. It was a cry for help.

  She talked to you about the price, and you heard a cry for help?

  Lately,
confesses Shakespeare, everything sounds to me like a cry for help.

  We’re in trouble, states Yadanuga.

  Yes, Shakespeare agrees. Imagine all the human despair in the world in the laughing face of a child as fragile as Segestria Perfida.

  As what? demands the baffled Yadanuga.

  It’s a kind of spider with long thin legs the breadth of a hair.

  You want to know something funny? says Yadanuga. A few days ago I came across a spider exactly fitting that description, when I stepped into the bathtub.

  And what did you do?

  I flushed it out with the shower hose, confesses Yadanuga. It went down the plug hole.

  Murderer, says Shakespeare.

  What was I supposed to do?

  You should have put a sheet of paper into the tub, and breathed gently on the spider, so it would crawl onto the paper of its own accord, and then taken it to an open window, and blown gently onto it again, so it would fly outside to freedom.

  Why all the blowing? inquires Yadanuga.

  Because its legs are so thin and delicate, explains Shakespeare, that any touch could break them, and the trouble is that they don’t grow again.

  It seems to me that she touched a sensitive spot in you, says Yadanuga.

  I stayed for seven days and seven nights, laments Hanina, and we didn’t fuck once.

  What happened? asks Yadanuga in concern, were you afraid of breaking her legs?

  She wasn’t interested.

  And you? asks Yadanuga.

  You’ll be surprised, he admits, but I wasn’t either.

  I’m not surprised, says Yadanuga. Spiders with long skinny legs never gave rise to any irresistible lust in me.

  Nor in me, admits Shakespeare.

  So what did you do there for seven days and seven nights? demands Yadanuga.

  Nothing, he says. Most of the time we did nothing.

  Did you talk?

  A bit, he says. Nothing to write home about. We talked a bit about vampires.

  Vampires?! What’s there to say about vampires?

  Nonsense, Shakespeare says dismissively. She chatted about vampires, and I answered her with any rubbish that came into my head. Nothing serious.