1975 - Night of the Juggler

by William P. McGivern

  As always, Gus Soltik watched with fascination and a sense of awe as the smiling beasts circled the base of the clock, providing a tinkling, bell-like concert for the appreciative audience that had grouped itself in the courtyard between the peristyle and the pond of sea lions. The chubby gray metal animals caught in prancing dance steps filled the air with sweet and innocent music.

  The hippo bowed a violin, the kangaroo blew a horn, the bear shook a tambourine while the elephant played an accordion and the goat tinkled his pipes and the penguin pounded a pair of drums.

  Lanny. This was where he had met him. The day he had brought the food. Gus liked standing here with the name “Lanny” forming in his mind. There were big people here, too, watching the show. Not just children. That made it all right for him to be here. While he enjoyed the prancing animals and occasionally clapped his big hands together in an attempt to show approval for their antics, the music disturbed him; it was frightening because he didn’t understand it.

  Gus went into the animal house where Charlie, the tiger, was feeding and the big lion, Garland, was pacing behind his bars with the regularity of a metronome, obviously having savaged and pulped and devoured his twenty pounds of raw meat, for his eyes were sleepy and there was blood on his whiskers and the floor of the cage.

  Gus felt at home with the cages. He liked the smell of the animals, acrid and fetid, and despite the tang of ammonia in the air, the smell was wild and exciting.

  Without realizing it in any way at all, Gus Soltik was also given a sense of annealment and strength by the behavior of many of the people in the lion house. They were afraid, and they held their children up to be frightened by the sudden, erratic roaring of the big cats. And for reasons he was forever helpless to define, Gus Soltik took some pathetic comfort from this spectacle.

  He stood looking at the big lion called Garland because it was too soon for “greenropes.”

  Garland was eight years old, a black-maned African male, a gift to the city of New York from Jomo Kenyatta, President of Kenya. He had been named by the schoolchildren of New York in a contest conducted by the Daily News. The name which had, in fact, topped all others had been Bert Lahr, but this had been disallowed (privately) on the assumption that the children’s votes had been influenced by adults who remembered the great comedian from The Wizard of Oz. The contest officials decided to name the little cat Judy, which they thought would satisfy all age groups, but Jomo’s gift had turned out to be a male, and so they had decided on the lovely but epicene Garland, a name which had not received a single vote in the contest.

  He could not tell time, but he could estimate it with reasonable accuracy. And now he knew it was time to look at “greenropes.”

  The growling of the lions waiting to be fed had fixed the time for Gus Soltik. Soon, very soon now, he thought, as he hurried toward a place of concealment he had already chosen, thick privet underbrush just behind the wall bordering the eastern side of Central Park at Fifth Avenue in the upper Sixties—soon, he was thinking with a surge of agitation, because he mustn’t be late. The bus would be stopping at the intersection, and she would get off and stand talking to her friend, the winds blowing their green skirts about their white legs, and it was very important that he see her now, because tomorrow was the anniversary of his mother’s death.

  Shortly after three o’clock a yellow bus with black trim from Miss Prewitt’s Classes stopped at Fifth Avenue in the upper Sixties of Manhattan. When the front doors opened with a gentle pneumatic hiss, a pair of chattering youngsters climbed down the steps and stood at the intersection waving good-bye to friends, who waved back to them from behind the windows of the bus which was accelerating, heading toward the southern boundaries of Central Park at Fifty-ninth Street.

  The names of the two girls were Kate (Katherine Jackson) Boyd and Tish (Patricia) Tennyson, and they were eleven years of age and wore identical uniforms, which consisted of smartly cut black blazers, short green flannel skirts, green berets, white socks, and black moccasins.

  The girls lived in adjoining apartment buildings whose drawing-room windows faced the verdant and dramatic views of Central Park.

  Kate Boyd had shining blond hair which she wore in a ponytail, secured by a green ribbon, and a pale, unblemished complexion from which her cherry-dark eyes blazed with an almost comical intensity. It was apparent from even a superficial view of these youngsters that the confident excitement and aggressiveness in Kate’s manner completely dominated her friend, Tish Tennyson, whose skin tended to be sallow and whose chubby hips and rounded stomach had scored permanent diagonal creases in her green flannel skirt.

  As the crisp gusting winds whipped their hair about their foreheads and cheeks, the two girls hugged their book bags to their chests and chattered at each other with ferocious intensity. Their present preoccupation and stimulation stemmed from a mix of heady ingredients: boys, older boys at that, practically men, and the girls’ shabby betrayal by these adult and arrogant males.

  Kate and Tish had scored a coup for their fifth-grade class. They had worked up their nerve to approach Bob Elliott, who was seventeen and the leader of a rock group called The Purple Dreams, with an offer to play the Prewitt School’s “sweet young thing” afternoon tea dance.

  To their surprise and delight, Bob Elliott had accepted; The Purple Dreams were cool and “in,” thus an impressive catch indeed for a fifth-grade tea dance. Even though the fee was high, one hundred dollars for a three-hour gig, plus fifteen dollars for the transportation of their electronic gear, Kate Boyd had committed the class funds to the project without reservations, knowing that whatever the price, it was a triumph and worth it.

  But this morning their excitement and dreams had collapsed, after Bob Elliott had called to tell them the gig was off because two of The Purple Dreams were down with the flu. This, while wretchedly disappointing, was something they could live with, but at lunch in a pizzeria near Miss Prewitt’s, Kate had learned a bitter, unacceptable truth: Bob Elliott had simply dropped them to play a more prestigious date at Darwin Prep’s senior dinner dance.

  Kate Boyd, who was flamingly outraged by any and all degrees of injustice, had cabbed across town to Bob Elliott’s apartment immediately on learning of his betrayal.

  “He just laughed at me,” Kate said for about the fifteenth time to Tish.

  “Laughed at me. He said we were just kids and wouldn’t understand his music anyway.”

  “Did you really say it to him?” Tish said with a thread of excitement in her voice. “What you told me?”

  Kate sighed. “No, I didn’t.”

  “But you said you said it.”

  “Well, I wanted to. I wanted to say, ‘I’d like to kick you’”—Kate lowered her voice theatrically—”’right in your jewels, Bob Elliott.’”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “Don’t be stupid. I wanted to, it’s the same thing.”

  “No, it isn’t, Kate.”

  “You don’t even know what it means,” Kate said.

  Tish looked anxiously at Kate. She could stand neither Kate’s dismissal nor Kate’s displeasure. “Maybe I don’t,” she said. “Where’d you hear it?”

  “They were in bed and she was laughing,” Kate said, and then added the logical prologue to the sentence as almost an afterthought: “I heard my mother say it to my father.”

  “When’s your mother coming back, Kate?”

  “Well, we’re not sure. She calls every day, of course, but she’s got to take care of her aunt.”

  “What’s the matter with her aunt?”

  Kate shrugged in what she meant to suggest was a gesture of casual dismissal, but she felt the sting of tears in her eyes and looked quickly away from Tish, tilting her face against the cold, freshening breezes.

  “She’s got some kind of flu, from Brazil or from Greece or wherever it’s coming from this year.”

  Again Tish felt a pang of anxiety; she shouldn’t have asked about Kate’s mother.

&nbs
p; “Can I call you later, Kate?” Tish asked, with a fruitless effort to make the question sound casual. “I mean, after homework?”

  “If you want to,” Kate said, and hurried off into the lobby of her building where old Mr. Brennan, the uniformed doorman, greeted her with a genuine smile and walked the length of the foyer with her to the elevators.

  At about six o’clock that night, Luther Boyd let himself into the Fifth Avenue apartment which he had rented for three months from a theatrical producer who was staging a show in London, a production (he had explained to Boyd’s complete disinterest) which would feature Sir Laurence Olivier as an albino Othello, surrounded by an otherwise all-black cast, save for Desdemona, who would be played by the Oriental actress Yoko Tani, whose role—as opposed to the others—would be comprised of operatic recitative and arias. Luther Boyd had wished him well but without excessive conviction since the last play he himself had seen had been a production of Camelot after Julie Andrews had left the company.

  The walls of the large apartment were covered with memorabilia of the theater: faded playbills, first-night telegrams, the glossy photographs of actresses and actors with intimate greetings and signatures. None of this held much interest for Luther Boyd, although he knew that some of the glamorous faces awed and fascinated Kate.

  Luther Boyd thought there was something sentimental and childish about the lavish salutations and congratulations on the photographs and in the telegrams. And he thought there was something tacky and unsporting in the defensive effusions which obviously stemmed from box-office flops. But he could live with all this. He had rented the apartment, not for its furnishings, but for the dramatic and sustaining views of Central Park afforded him from the formal drawing room and his book-lined study. The shining crowns of Chinese elms and black alders that he could observe from these fifth-floor windows gave him cheerful memories of the six hundred open acres which surrounded his dairy farm in southern Pennsylvania. Also, he enjoyed walking in the park in the evening, and since flora and fauna and terrain were as much his profession as his pleasure, his investigations satisfied him as both a soldier and a naturalist.

  On his leisurely strollings from the southern end of the Mall (his customary starting point) north past the cruciform esplanade of the band shell and then farther north to the boathouse and lake, he had observed dozens of domestic and exotic trees and shrubs; in his east-west crisscrossings along this north-south route (he had been advised to avoid the Ramble), he had found what amounted to a naturalist’s laboratory. In these few weeks Boyd had seen and studied, sometimes to his astonishment, towering cork trees, monumental magnolias with leaves like polished green leather, English and peach-leafed hawthorns, cucumber trees, bald cypresses, red and silver maples, and oaks of all varieties, black and English, red and willow and scarlet.

  As he closed the door of the apartment, Luther Boyd was greeted by a furious excitement by Kate’s Scottie, Harry Lauder, and by what he judged to be a gratified insolence from their housekeeper, Carrie Snow, a stout middle-aged black lady, who stood waiting for him in the long drawing room with her hat on and a brownpaper market bag in her arms.

  “You’ll have to clean up after your ownselves tonight, Mr. Boyd.” Her white teeth flashed in a smile of relish against the gloom of the long room, which at this hour was lighted only with a pair of table lamps.

  “Food’s in the oven, and the plates are out, so you’ll have to serve yourself, too.”

  “Very well, Carrie,” Luther Boyd said. “And Kate?”

  “She’s in the bathtub, but first she did some homework before she used up all that was left of that pheasant in a sandwich.”

  “We’ve still got six or eight brace in the freezer, Carrie.”

  “I know, but it seems strange.”

  Whatever Carrie’s point was, Luther Boyd thought with a certain weary humor, she was certainly determined to make it.

  “What’s strange about it?” he asked her, trapped by their relationship—which was blended of what: sympathy, courtesy, guilt?—into asking a question when he didn’t give one goddamn about the answer.

  Barbara had never appreciated his frequent need to get back to barracks and training camps. In those simple environments, one could cut through just such knots of supererogatory sensitivities. One told a captain what to do, and the captain did it. Or he’d better have a goddamned good reason for not doing it. But here Luther Boyd stood pleasantly tired after six hours in an office and two hours on a squash racquets’ court, fencing with a gloomy black lady’s hurt feelings, judging without interest what finesse might incline this tiny, boring conflict toward a sensible and, he hoped, speedy conclusion.

  “Well, the strange thing is, Mr. Boyd, is a young girl, I mean, a baby child, sitting around in the afternoon watching TV and eating pheasant sandwiches.”

  There it was, the rebuke. Now presumably Carrie Snow felt better, having got that off her chest. Luther Boyd glanced at his watch.

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to hurry, Mrs. Snow, if you’re going to make that bus.”

  This was a nice, tactical stroke, but it made Luther Boyd feel irritated with himself, because that had been his rebuke to her, a dismissal, with all that meant to her crotchety but basically kindly sensitivities.

  Luther Boyd disliked insolence, not because it rankled him in any personal sense, but because he correctly assayed it as a surrogate for anger, an emotion he respected, particularly if it resulted in positive and constructive action. Yet stern as he was in his judgments on everyone around him, including himself, he was fair enough to understand that anger was a luxury that certain blacks and other misbegotten creatures of the world could savor only in the silence of their souls.

  Mrs. Snow looked uneasily past him toward the kitchen.

  “I could catch the next bus, Mr. Boyd—it don’t matter that much—and put away the things after dinner.”

  He saw the white flags of surrender in her fluttering eyes. (“Thank you kindly, General Lee. It’s a privilege to accept such a magnificent example of the swordmaker’s art.”) What else could he do but accept her offer of service? He paid her well, and he and Barbara and Kate treated her well; but if they denied her a sense of usefulness, what did the rest of it mean?

  “That’s very kind of you, Mrs. Snow,” Luther Boyd said.

  And so, his tactical energies expended in trivia, Luther Boyd went toward his study, while Mrs. Snow, her dignity flying like plumes, strode importantly into the kitchen.

  Kate Boyd, who liked to think of herself as a curious observer rather than as a busybody, made it a habit to take her bath with the door open a crack so that she missed nothing that went on in the apartment, and when she heard her father’s footsteps going toward his study, she sang out, “Daddy, is that you?”

  “Yes, honey. I’ll see you after your bath. . . .”

  “But I’ve got some absolutely dreadful news.”

  He opened the door of the bathroom and looked in on her. The air was steamy and warm and fragrant. Kate was up to her chin in bubbles, and whorls of thick, creamy shampoo had transferred her hair into what looked like a great white Afro.

  “What’s the trouble?” he asked her.

  “It’s about Bob Elliott.”

  “After your bath,” he said, and smiled at her and closed the bathroom door.

  On this particular night, Luther Boyd would have preferred that Carrie Snow had gone home on schedule and that Kate was sleeping over with Tish or one of her other new friends. Luther Boyd did not mind taking care of himself, in fact, he preferred it; one look at him would have confirmed this in the eyes of anyone who understood the physical disciplines of thoroughbreds. He was tall and rangily built and, at the age of forty-two, still played hours of squash racquets every day, lifted weights, and worked out regularly with a judo expert, who was proficient enough to give him an active, though ultimately inconclusive, match. They played only for exercise, which put Luther Boyd at a disadvantage, for—if they had played to a co
nclusion—it would be no contest for him.

  As a result, his stomach was as hard as something fashioned from whalebone, and as recently as six months previously, he had scored a remarkable ninety-seven over the Rangers’ obstacle training course at Fort Benning, Georgia.

  His clothes camouflaged the power of his body because he preferred gabardines and coverts, fabrics which streamlined the width and strength of his shoulders with chiseled economy.

  Walking into his study, Luther Boyd was frowning and rubbing his jaw with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, one of his few physical gestures which revealed an inner anxiety. He would have preferred to be alone tonight because he was trying to solve two problems, one simple and the other very complex, and the frowning concern in his expression now made him look oddly youthful and vulnerable. This oddness stemmed from the fact that everything about Luther Boyd, from his closely cut black hair, sharply angled features, and cold gray eyes, suggested a confidence and authority of such an impregnable essence that it was difficult to imagine a problem he couldn’t solve with simply a snap of his fingers.

  The first problem centered on Major General Scott Carmichael’s putatively authoritative three-volume work on the strategy and tactics of what the general described as “Phoenix Confrontation” by which he meant “guerrilla warfare.”

  That was problem number one. And that was why Luther Boyd was in New York in an apartment which he had rented for three months: to check the proof of the general’s three-volume exegesis of guerrilla warfare, to verify facts, dates, and place-names and, more exasperatingly, to reshape what seemed to him a variety of warped conclusions in Carmichael’s treatise.

  That was the simple problem. Since retiring from the Army in the early seventies with the rank of bird colonel, Luther Boyd had augmented the income from various substantial trust funds by free-lancing as a military consultant to publishing firms, motion-picture companies, foreign governments and, on more than one occasion, the United States Army.