Cellars

by John Shirley

  FIVE

  “Maguss?” The name felt funny in his mouth.

  “That you, Lanyard? I’m waiting for your—”

  “I sent it by express. This isn’t a very good connection.”

  “What?”

  “There’s an example. I said, speak up.” Voices gibbered in the background, voices made of sparkling and static crackle. Lanyard was afraid to listen to them.

  “Well, what is it you want?” Maguss was shouting, but the voice came across hollow and distant.

  “I’ve moved,” Lanyard said. “I’m living at 507 East Sixth Street, apartment 5R. You got that? It’s a sublet. Madelaine got it for me, through a friend of hers. I got sick of the Hilton.”

  “Repeat that address again. Can’t hear.” Indeed, the static was a blizzard. “Had three other calls to New York. They all sounded bad.”

  Lanyard repeated the address, and gave his phone number. And hung up without saying good-bye.

  He sat on the couch, trying to orient himself. He was in someone else’s apartment, someone he’d never met. Madelaine had arranged the sublet for him; the leaseholder, a woman named Melissa Wickett, was close to Madelaine and trusted her. Melissa had gone to Europe for a few months.

  He glanced at the typewriter set up on the wooden table between the two living-room windows. The windows were dim with the thickening dusk. He had decided to write a book about his part in the investigation. And naturally he wasn’t going to tell Maguss about the book. It was Lanyard’s chance to break into another kind of journalism. Supposing, that is, he uncovered something conclusive. He took a notebook from the typewriter table and, returning to the couch, opened it on his lap. He was keeping a journal, as background for the book. He took a pen from his shirt pocket and wrote, in his neat, squarish hand:

  I’m sitting in a stranger’s apartment, in a neighborhood strange to me, in a very strange city, caught up in events strange to anyone. I’m part of a police investigation. Strange. I suspect Gribner’s losing interest in keeping me on as part of the investigating team.

  The apartment’s shabby, but comfortable. The roaches are only occasional visitors. It feels funny to sit on a couch someone else picked out, to sleep in their bed, eat off their dishes with their silverware. I’ve been drinking some of her liquor. I have permission for all this, but it feels odd and intrusive all the same. Parquet floor. The walls are off-white. Way off. The only heat will come from a radiator. But this freakish weather makes the radiator unnecessary. The temperature has gone down today. It’s still unnaturally warm, though. It’s not like the usual Indian Summer, either, I’m told…The bathroom is miniature, the water pressure’s almost nonexistent. And this morning (I moved into the apartment last night) when I turned the spigot and held my hands under, I got a handful of rusty foam! I’m drinking from a bottle of distilled water, now. The—

  The phone rang. Lanyard put the receiver to his ear.

  “Lanyard?” Lanyard winced: The voice was Gribner’s.

  “Yes. Uh—listen, Gribner, I can’t—I have an appointment this evening—”

  Gribner didn’t seem to have heard. “Lanyard—uh—there’s something I want to show you. It is worse than the others. There was no—ah—pentagram, but there were signs on the wall—the same sort—not much left of the kid. My dogs. The kid.”

  “What the hell’s the matter with you, Gribner? You’re not very coherent.”

  “It was in my building, Lanyard. My building!”

  “Don’t shout into the phone. Okay, I’ll come and have a look.”

  “My nephew’s gone. I was down in the basement looking for him. I had to break the lock on the elevator-control box to get down there. I don’t know how he got down there. To the sub-basement. It’s just a coal cellar. He disappeared yesterday. He left the jade head. I want you to look at that, Lanyard. I want you to—”

  “All right, all right!”

  “You got a pencil? Here’s the address. You come to—”

  Lanyard wrote down the address, hung up, and went to the door, cursing through it all.

  “I HAD TO sell the cameras today. Well, I hocked ‘em,” Billy Krupp said. He was in one of those antiquated wooden phone booths, against the back wall in a bar so old-fashioned it had sawdust on the floor and a mildewed painting of a topless girl over the rows of bottles. There was someone in the booth adjacent; he could hear the man moving. He waited for his brother Reggie to say something. Preferably something like, “Hey, no problem—I can front you a little cash till you get another film in the can.”

  But Reggie only said, “Jeez. Thas a bummer. Lissen, I gotta go. Someuh these guys, they wait till they see I’m on the phone, then they try’n rip me off for stroke books, you know?”

  And he hung up.

  Krupp slammed the receiver into its cradle. He sat for a moment, despondent, on the little metal stool in the phone booth, staring at the urine-soaked newspapers on the floor. Absentmindedly, he read the headline: INFLATION SOARS.

  “Yeah, tell me about it,” Krupp muttered. He’d spent twenty minutes detailing his financial horrors to Reggie, who had listened almost silently, now and then mumbling , “Jeez,” and popping his gum in the mouthpiece.

  “Fuck him,” Krupp said more loudly. “Not like he hasn’t made any money off my fuck-flicks.”

  Krupp pushed free of the phone booth and shuffled, with exaggerated pathos, toward the bar to spend his last twenty dollars.

  Billy Krupp was the subject of a photo portrait, part of a series by a photographer who specialized in snapping the Times Square area. The black-and-white—Billy Krupp had never seen it, didn’t know it now hung in a well-appointed SoHo photo gallery—was titled The Pornographer. It showed Billy Krupp very characteristically: in motion, leaning toward the bed over which the 16-millimeter movie camera brooded like a dour mechanical bird, obscuring all but the feet and ankles of the man and woman on the bed. Krupp’s stubby arms were outstretched; he was bent at the waist, emphasizing the roll of fat overlapping his belt; he wore sweat-stained checked polyester shirt and high-water corduroy bellbottoms. His blond toupee, which didn’t closely match the rest of his hair, was slightly askew on his head; his dandruff-flecked extra round glasses were low on a nose that was like the head of a ball-peen hammer. His jowly face was patched with missed whiskers. His mouth was open as he rasped directions—“No, pull it out when you cum so it shoots on her—”

  Now he looked very much the same, dressed similarly, arms outstretched, leaning forward, mouth open, as he tried to get the bartender’s attention. “Whiskey sour,” he said. The bartender didn’t hear: He was watching baseball on a ghosting color TV over the bar, “Whiskey sour!”

  The bartender grunted and mixed the drink. “Shit-ass Dodgers,” he said, slapping the drink down so hard a fourth of it sloshed onto the bar.

  “Hey you’re costing me money,” Krupp said, reluctantly passing over his twenty.

  He watched closely as the bartender made change.

  There were only two other customers. He took note of them. An old woman whose tipsiness and toothlessness made her impossible to understand. The man beside her, middle-aged, face blank with TV-absorption as he watched the ball game, nodded now and then as if he understood the yammering old woman. They seemed harmless. Krupp kept an eye on the door. He still had twelve hours to come up with the eight hundred dollars he owed Ponti, but the bookie might’ve sent some muscle to remind poor forgetful Billy Krupp. Krupp hoped to avoid that. He watched the door, as his mind checked off the possibilities.

  He couldn’t borrow money from Eunice. He’d squirmed out of paying alimony. She could afford to loan the money, but she’d say, “Nope—it’s a mattuh of princ-ih-pull.”

  His old man might muster a hundred. But it wasn’t likely.

  And Krupp needed eight hundred dollars. For starts.

  He might get two hundred dollars for the car, but—

  He flinched as someone sat down beside him. There were four empty stools t
o either side of Krupp. The guy wouldn’t have sat beside Krupp, a complete stranger, unless he wanted something from him. Either he was a grifter of some kind or Ponti had sent him. But the guy was small. Nearly a midget. Little bald guy. Wisps of hair around his ears, not much more. Nice suit. Gold watch. Lots of rings. Didn’t look like costume jewelry.

  “Your name’s Billy, isn’t it?” Friendly voice. But a voice with purpose in it.

  Krupp decided to be polite. “Yeah. Billy. Uh…” He shrugged. “We met?”

  “Not directly.” The little man smiled. “To be perfectly honest—and I’m always perfectly honest—I heard your conversation with your friend Reggie in the phone booth. I was in the next booth, trying to find a phone number in one of my pockets. Never found it. Maybe I found something more important: a business associate. You.”

  He smiled like an insurance salesman.

  “Yeah?” Krupp smiled cautiously back. “What makes you think—”

  “Hey, this is silly,” said the little man. “I haven’t introduced myself. I’m George Tooley.”

  They shook hands. Tooley’s hands felt dry, feverishly hot.

  He no longer seemed so small. His gray eyes seemed to grow. Krupp found it difficult to look away from those eyes. They were the color of a bank vault. As the little man talked in low measured, mellifluous tones, something in his voice hinting Big Opportunity and Gain and Don’t Blow This One, he seemed to grow, in Billy Krupp’s perspective. Not physically—not exactly. But, though he was half a foot shorter than Krupp, he somehow seemed to be gazing beatifically down on him from a height.

  “Money is funny stuff,” Tooley was saying. “It’s sort of like ice cream. You can crank it like homemade ice cream and fluff it up and make it more. Or you can store it. But you got to be careful how you keep it—you don’t keep it in the right place, it melts.”

  “Boy, it sure melts all right,” Krupp said. In some part of him, a warning bell was rattling, like a burglar alarm heard in the distance. It was the internal alarm that warned him when something looked too good. But there was something so deeply reassuring about Tooley.

  “And money is like something else. It’s a form of energy, Billy. It’s a hard thing to explain. But if you learn the right way to handle money, why you can make it come back to you on a circuit just like with electricity. You can use people for transistors to make it a stronger current. But you got to plug into the right places. You know what I mean?”

  “Sure, you bet,” said Billy Krupp, in utter dishonesty.

  “Now, my organization is looking for someone to channel some of that energy into. You pick the right guy—well, you put money into him, you get good money—good current—right back from him. If everything’s done right. I think you might just be one of those guys. The right guy. It’s funny how we just sort of stumble across them, now and then.”

  Krupp nodded numbly, fascinated.

  “Did you ever wonder…” Tooley went on, slowly, philosophically, “how they do it? The guys with a knack for making the big dough I mean. You wonder—is it smarts? Or is it something else? Like maybe they’re just the lucky types…”

  “Yeah. That’s the way I figured it. Some guys just sort of walk into it. They’re the lucky types. Not many of them. But they’re around, all right. Sure.”

  “You’re right. There are guys who are just…lucky. Only, there’s a trick to it. Of course. See, the guys who are lucky had to learn how.” Tooley paused dramatically, as the bartender finally came and took his order. He asked for a piña colada.

  Krupp waited impatiently, trying not to seem eager.

  Tooley smiled, toying with a swizzle stick, waiting for his drink, glancing at his watch, watching the bartender as if to be certain the drink was mixed properly.

  The bartender brought the drink over but didn’t ask for the money then and there. He wrote the amount on a bill. This irritated Krupp: The bartender had waited till Krupp had paid before handing over the whiskey sour.

  Krupp cleared his throat. “You say—uh—the lucky guys weren’t always—uh—”

  “Prosperity luck is a form of energy. Because, like I said, money is part of an energy flow. It’s society’s blood flow, is money. Anyway—say you want to pick up another kind of energy, radio signals. What do you do?” He smiled inquisitively.

  “Uh—you buy a radio.”

  Tooley chuckled. “I mean, suppose there isn’t one to buy. You build a radio. You want to pick up that radio signal, you got to have the right equipment, work according to the right diagrams. Same with picking up prosperity luck: Got to have the right equipment, work with the right diagrams. You got to work for the right people. For the right power.”

  Krupp was beginning to get the drift.

  Tooley put his hand to his throat and drew a gold coke spoon into sight. A gold coke spoon on a gold chain.

  “Who—uh—” Krupp began. He brought his glass to his lips—his throat was suddenly like an old boot—but the glass was empty.

  “Bartender!” Tooley called cheerfully. “Another drink for this gentleman.” The bartender seemed startled at this description of Krupp, but he brought a whiskey sour.

  “Who,” Krupp began again, “would I be working for, exactly? I mean—I have the impression you’re offering me a job.”

  “In a way. I’m offering you a chance.”

  “Let me put it this way: Suppose I agree to learn whatever it is that brings this prosperity luck. What do I do for you? I mean, what’s your—uh—percentage?”

  “It’s very simple. You’ll be one of us. The more of us there are, the stronger we are. You’ll understand later. After the initiation.”

  “Initiation?

  Krupp began to wonder if he were being shucked into a Moonie cult. Or Jesus people. Moonies with coke spoons? Jesus people offering material wealth? “How do I—uh—how much do I have to invest?”

  “Not a penny. Nothing to sign. No organization to pay dues to. It’s not a religious cult, if that’s what you’re thinking. It’s not a con scam. It’s that rarest of pearls: genuine opportunity.”

  “You don’t get something for nothin’, friend,” said Krupp. But this show of skepticism was only a kind of prod to induce elaboration from Tooley. Krupp had already accepted Tooley’s word. You could tell when a fellow was bullshitting. Tooley wasn’t.

  “No, you don’t get something for nothing,” said Tooley, nodding approval of Krupp’s perspicacity. “There’s something you have to do. No expense to yourself. You simply have to lay out the luck—on the energy diagrams. And we’ll show you how. Because the more people we help, the more we’re helped by it. That’s just the way it works. Ready to go?”

  He said it as if his going were a given.

  Krupp heard himself say, “I’m in.”

  Tooley silently paid his tab, tipped the bartender handsomely, and preceded Krupp to the door. Outside, the street was alive with wind. Whirlwinds sucked newspapers and plastic cups high overhead. There was an edge of damp-cold in the gusting; the sky glowered with clouds.

  Krupp looked around in surprise. “Looks like the heat’s done with. That crazy heat. Just like that, whammo, we got windstorms.”

  “The heat will come back,” said Tooley, opening the passenger side of a blue Mercedes for Krupp. Krupp got in, admiring the leather seats, the inlaid wood around the speedometer, the smell of newness. Tooley got in and started the car. “How much do you suppose this little beaut cost me, Billy?”

  “I hate to think!” Krupp tilted his head to one side and twisted his lips. “Um—thirty thou, thereabouts?”

  Tooley shook his head. “Oh, it’s worth more than that, easy. It cost me twelve hundred bucks. Friend of mine had to get rid of it. Tax problems. Needed to undersell it. I lucked into the deal.”

  “Lucked into it…” Krupp repeated dully.

  They drove past Times Square. A black guy on the corner was trying to sell shish kebab from a portable grill. The wind stirred his coals and spattered h
is shirtfront with grease from the spit-roasting meat; stung, he leapt back, and Krupp could read his lips: “Shit motherfucker!” Krupp chuckled. Tooley pressed a button on the dashboard. Muzak soothed from a hidden speaker. A version of the Beatles song “Baby You’re a Rich Man.” Krupp nodded his head in rhythm. Hookers cruised the sidewalk nearby; Krupp eyed them professionally, thinking about hiring a few for some shooting once he got a grubstake together. Maybe he could go up to 35-millimeter. Class. Get reviewed in Screw magazine.

  Krupp was distantly aware that he felt—well, different.

  Like that time they’d given him Demerol in the hospital. Like everything was smooth going, everything was amusing. And he knew, dimly, that his sense of well-being was connected with Tooley. So he didn’t ask Tooley where they were going. It just didn’t seem right to ask too many prying questions. He tried not to seem as if he were listening in, when Tooley opened a panel on the underside of the dashboard, extracted a telephone, and made a call: “This is Tooley. We’re going to want the Direct Line at Second Avenue and Houston. Two-thirty. Get it there sharp. And monitor the other trains this time, we don’t want any more foul-ups….Don’t worry about those, we’re keeping them contained. Yeah. Beautiful. Later.”

  Tooley hung up, glanced at his gold watch, and drove peacefully on.

  Krupp slid into a contented reverie, visualizing the parties in his honor at Plato’s Retreat and the Valencia Hotel when his Big One grossed more long green than Talk Dirty To Me.

  Tooley hummed along with the Muzak.

  It seemed only a moment later, but it must have been at least twenty minutes, when Tooley pulled up in front of a delicatessen at the corner of Second Avenue and Houston.