The Last Manly Man

by Sparkle Hayter

  I called Mia Cara.

  “Lola, where are you?” Gus asked.

  “Something came up,” I said, trying to think of a suitable lie that would get me off the hook for standing him up. I couldn’t think of one. “I can’t make it tonight.”

  “Oh. I see,” he said, and sounded sincerely deflated. “Want to try again tomorrow night? Say, nine P.M., the Plaza?”

  “Yeah, I would. Sorry about this. See you tomorrow,” I said, and hung up.

  Blue turned right on Eighth Avenue, heading uptown.

  “You’re about to meet a guy named Fast Tony,” Blue said. “Don’t say anything about the bonobos. He’s not one of us. Young Italian guy, very good-looking, dances in the gay clubs, but he’s straight apparently. That’s what he says every chance he gets, that he’s straight. Likes Times Square, likes the action, or what’s left of it since Disney took over.”

  We stopped on Forty-seventh Street. Fast Tony got in the back of the car. “Hey, Blue. How ya doin’? Still dating your ex-wife?”

  “Yeah. Am I a jerk or what?”

  “Glad you showed, man, I’m being cruised by all the fags,” Fast Tony said, handing Blue something. Blue reached into the box on the floor and pulled out a Baggie, handing it to Fast Tony.

  The deal was made in a minute and Fast Tony was out of the car. He was fast.

  “I don’t like doing deals up here. Tony, he’s in, he’s out. There are a lot of cops here and they see that and they know it’s a deal.”

  “What is that? Marijuana?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re an animal rights activist?” I asked, just to be clear about this. He didn’t fit my stereotype.

  “That’s my hobby,” he said, matter-of-factly. “Used to be a sanitation worker, then a sanitation cop. Now I work for myself.”

  “Are you stoned now?” I asked, because the Henri Paul light just went on in the back of my head.

  “No, darlin’. Don’t worry. I drive sober. Let me explain a few things along the way. I don’t know the whole story, so you’ll have to forgive the gaps.”

  “Okay.”

  “You have to promise me you won’t repeat this to the cops or anyone. The lives of these chimps, if they’re still alive, are at stake. Any media or police attention could put them in jeopardy.”

  “Okay.”

  “This is what I know. These chimps were missing from Africa somewhere. Dewey had tracked them to this area with the help of a friendly party who knew where the chimps were,” he continued.

  “What was being done with the chimps?”

  “Who the hell knows, darlin’? Medical experiments? But why these chimps? I mean, there are rhesus monkeys running around that island near Florida. Know the one I mean, Robin?”

  He was talking about a little island where rhesus monkeys, bred for medical experiments, had overbred and basically taken over the island.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Why do they need these bonobo chimps, specifically? They got rhesus monkeys for the picking down there in Florida, a lot closer than Africa. Can’t figure it out.”

  “And Dewey?”

  “He doesn’t know either, or he didn’t the last time I spoke to him. I was supposed to see him after his meeting with the friendly party.”

  “Same friendly party who helped Dewey track the chimps?”

  “I think so.”

  “And you don’t know who that is.”

  “No, darlin’,” he said.

  “Do you know how I got involved in this bonobo business, Blue?” I asked.

  “I know something, a little. I know Dewey was worried about some reporter named Hudson who was asking questions, and worried you’d get too close to the story and jeopardize the chimps.”

  “What questions? Who was I asking?”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t around the day Dewey took a beating. I was upstate doing a … business deal,” he said.

  “Does the word ‘atom’ mean anything to you?”

  “No, why?”

  “I think that’s what those thugs said to me. They wanted to know if I had the atom.”

  “Maybe Jason will know.”

  “How did you get into the animal rights thing?” I asked Blue.

  “It isn’t just about animals, darlin’. It’s the whole planet, the environment, the little helpless animals and the big ones, like us. We’re all at stake. But I do love the little animals, must admit. Except cockroaches,” he said, and laughed. “Dewey and I used to argue about that, if it was okay to kill cockroaches. You know, the female gets impregnated once, and she’s pregnant her whole life. So I figure it’s an act of mercy to kill her, and an act of justice to kill the male cockroach who done it to her. Know what I’m sayin’? You love me now, doncha?”

  I laughed in spite of myself. “I love you, Blue. Why are all the good men married, gay, or dating their ex-wives?” I asked.

  We drove to a dark side street off Riverside Drive in the West Nineties, and pulled into a parking garage driveway next to a brownstone. Blue rolled down his window and punched in some numbers on a code pad. The garage door opened and we drove through. Behind us, the articulated door rolled back down. Blue slid the car into a parking spot and stopped. A tall, thin man hopped into the back of the car.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  “It’s safe. Don’t worry,” Blue said.

  “Is this her?” the man asked.

  “Yeah, she took a thumping from some jerks. She seems okay but better check her out, just to be on the safe side.”

  “I’m okay. Really,” I said. “It wasn’t that bad a thumping.”

  “You gotta trust us,” Blue Baker said. “He’s a nurse. He’ll take you to meet Jason and the doctor there will check you out. You can’t go to a regular hospital. They’d call the cops. We can’t have the cops involved. Trust me. I gotta go make some more deliveries. But you have our number. If you need me, just call, ask for number seven, and I’ll get back to you, all right?”

  It took me a moment to answer. I had a slight headache, but was wary of this strange nurse. Sure, go off with some male nurse, wake up the next day with a big scar across my belly and no kidneys. But I did trust Blue, call me crazy, and I had an overpowering need to find out what I had become caught up in.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “You’re in good hands with him,” he said, winking at the nurse.

  He handed the nurse a bag of weed. “For the patients,” he said to me. “Look after your karma now, Robin darlin’.”

  As he drove off, he cranked up Living Color on the car stereo, the garage door opened, and Blue Baker disappeared into the night with the music.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “You can call me Horton,” the nurse said, leading me through a heavy gray door and up a blue-carpeted staircase. “And if you need to call the emergency number and ask for me, use fourteen.”

  “What is this place?”

  “It’s a hospice,” he said. “We mainly handle AIDS and cancer patients, but are equipped for all hospital functions except obstetrics.”

  At the second floor, he opened a door and waved me into a room, decorated like a bedroom but with hospital equipment. A young man with a shaved head was passed out in the bed, while Jason, looking haggard, sat in a chair by the bedside. The room was decorated in soft, soothing colors, and some kind of soothing world music was playing softly.

  “Excuse me,” Horton said. “I’m going to go get the doctor.”

  “Is that Dewey?” I asked.

  “Yep. Moved him over here last night. He came to briefly today.”

  For someone who was beaten “within an inch of his life,” Dewey looked not too bad. He had a few bruises and a very black eye, a shaved head crisscrossed with stitches, and a broken arm, but looked otherwise okay.

  “Did he say anything?”

  “He mostly babbled about his auntie, but during a brief coherent moment, he told me to find Dr. Keyes, and said the word or na
me ‘hufnagel’ twice.”

  “Keyes? That sounds familiar. Hufnagel doesn’t ring any bells.”

  “I’m hoping Dewey will regain consciousness again and say more,” Jason said. “I hear you took a drubbing tonight.”

  “A bit of one. You know about this dead Frenchman who washed ashore in Coney Island?”

  “No.”

  “They found Doublemint gum on him, and the man with the hat, he had a half package of Doublemint.”

  “It’s all connected.”

  “It is?”

  “Didn’t you get my message?” he asked.

  “The one-word message: Yes? That one? Yeah, I got it. What does it mean?”

  “Yes, Dewey is part of the Doublemint connection. He had a Doublemint wrapper on him when he was found. Nobody thought it was important at the time.”

  “So Dewey and the man in the hat may be connected to the dead Frenchman,” I said, envisioning the scenario. The man in the hat had a package of gum. He offered the Frenchman, John Doe, and Dewey a piece. John Doe took a piece for later. Dewey chewed his, put the wrapper in his pocket.

  The door opened and Horton came in.

  “The doctor would like to see you now,” Horton said to me, and took me to see a woman, a redhead like me.

  “I’m Dr. Nineteen,” the redhead said with a smile.

  “Robin. I don’t have a number.”

  “Not yet,” she said, shining a light in my eyes, making me touch my nose and perform a variety of other tasks. She insisted on doing an X ray, which showed no damage, before she let me rejoin Jason and Dewey.

  By now, it was well after midnight. Jason and I were both exhausted.

  “So you’ll help us,” he said to me.

  Fuck.

  “Yeah. Don’t seem to have a choice. I don’t know how I’m going to do it, with everything else I have to do.…”

  “We all have busy lives,” Jason said impatiently.

  “Okay, look, I’m going to help you, all right. But when you free those horny, matriarchal chimps, I want the story. I’ll keep mum until the chimps are free, but then I want the exclusive.”

  “Now that it’s a story you’re interested—”

  “I’ll help you anyway, but it’s only fair you help me out too. I’ve got a lot on the line right now.”

  “Okay, you can have the exclusive, but you can’t use our real names or provide any details that would help identify us.”

  “Agreed.” We shook hands.

  “And do you think you can avoid eating meat and wearing leather when you’re around me?”

  I hesitated. The contrarian part of me almost blurted out something rude, but then I remembered the High Road thing, and how compromise was the key to all peace.

  “Yeah, okay. I’ll do my best. Tell me about the Organization. It doesn’t sound very organized.”

  “It’s a different kind of order,” he said. “Have you heard of the Assassins, from medieval times?”

  “A religious sect of hashish-smoking killers or something like that?”

  “Well, yeah. We adopted, and adapted, their organization, not their ethos. We don’t kill anything except in strict self-defense. The Assassins had a secret state that opposed all government and stretched across the Mideast and Central Asia in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. What made up this state was a network of remote enclaves devoted to gaining knowledge. Information flowed between them via secret agents.”

  “Do you oppose all government?”

  “Not actively. We see it as a necessary evil, but borders just get in our way. Our concern is the entire planet. We want to save our planet.”

  “Earth?”

  He scowled. “Yes, Earth.”

  “Just checking. That’s a rather vague goal, to save the planet.…”

  “Different cells concentrate on different goals, to save our natural resources, preserve endangered species in their natural habitats, protect indigenous peoples, stop cruelty to animals, fight nuclear proliferation, and so on. Our cell concentrates on animal rights, but occasionally we help out on other things.”

  “How big is the Organization?”

  “I don’t know exactly, but everywhere I go on Organization business, I meet a lot of our ‘assets,’ and we seem to be growing. We are on all continents, in almost every country. We have one ship that I know of, some small planes, some boats.”

  “And your leader?”

  “We call him Hank. I can’t say any more about him.”

  There were a lot more questions for Jason, but he was too tired to answer them. Though Jason wanted to stay with Dewey, just sleep there, there were no spare beds. Horton the nurse insisted he go home, that he, Horton, would stay with Dewey and record everything he might say.

  Blue Baker came back and drove us downtown. I was exhausted and so was Jason. We didn’t speak until the car dropped me off at my building. Blue sang along to music and cast each of us the occasional sympathetic glance.

  “I’ll come by and get you tomorrow … today,” Jason said to me. “Around noon?”

  “Yeah, okay,” I said.

  “We’re going to wait down here until you get upstairs,” Blue said. “Flick your lights on and off to let me know you got up there okay. You going to be okay? I’m worried those thugs will come back.”

  “They’d have to get past my gun-toting neighbor Mrs. Ramirez,” I said. “And my six locks, plus the poison ivy I keep in my window boxes as a burglary disincentive measure.”

  “That’s my girl,” said Blue.

  My head hurt a bit and I was dead tired, so tired that all I wanted to do was collapse on my bed in my clothes. But my brain wouldn’t stop. It most definitely wasn’t a hoax. It most definitely was a real story. The bonobos were real, and the PACA kids were real, and the John Doe, Frenchie, was connected. Where was the man in the hat?

  Man, I was getting too old for this stuff, car chases, corpses, and shady characters.

  “Asking questions. Hudson,” Dewey had written, according to Jason and Blue Baker.

  Asking questions. But I hadn’t been asking questions, had I? The only people I’d questioned were people I’d spoken to for my Man of the Future series. That might mean someone I interviewed, or pre-interviewed, was involved. Which questions were the offending ones? It was like a game of Jeopardy! Here I had all these answers. But I didn’t know what the questions were. Here I had the makings of a real scoop, the kind of scoop I’d been waiting my whole career for, a legit investigative story, and I couldn’t tell it until it was resolved.

  Shit. And Investigative Reports, aka Reb Ryan and Solange Stevenson, were now looking into it. I’d inadvertently led them into it and helped them out. By now, they might know something about the bonobos. Somehow, I had to stop them so they wouldn’t jeopardize the bonobos and God knew who else.

  If only I’d replaced my dead computer, I’d be able to go on the Internet and look up this guy Hufnagel, see if he was the John Doe. But even then, as Jason said, my phone might not be secure. I needed a safe computer and a safe phone line.

  My neighbor Sally had several and she routinely stayed up till 5:00 or 6:00 A.M. working her psychic hot line, as the TV ads for it ran in the wee hours. She liked to take as many of these calls herself as she could (as opposed to switching them over to her far-flung network of psychics all over the tristate area). Instead of calling her, I just went downstairs.

  “Sure, use the laptop on the kitchen table,” Sally said. “Why?”

  “It’s work-related. Long story. I’ll tell you later,” I said.

  The kitchen was painted in pastel blue and lit only by dozens of strings of pale pink minilights, tacked up to the walls and falling in erratic swoops from the ceiling. Sally is a practicing witch and her apartment smelled vaguely of sick-sweet pagan herbs and aromatic balms, which always made me think of dead pharaohs and virgin sacrifices.

  “How do you like my hair?” she asked.

  Formerly bald, with a Scorpion tattoo up th
e back of her skull, Sally had grown her brown hair out to appease her last boyfriend, and it was almost Beatle length now.

  “Looks great, Sal,” I said, sitting down in front of her laptop. There was astrological software up on the screen, and from the file list it appeared she’d been doing compatibility charts between her and various dead celebrities, something she often did in the wake of a bitter breakup.

  “It’s been a slow night. Just switch out of that program to my on-line server. It’s the little lightning icon,” Sally said. “I’ll make some tea. How are you doing? I haven’t seen you in a while.”

  “Busier than a one-armed paperhanger with a persistent itch,” I said.

  “You heard about me and Mad Jimmy.”

  “You broke up, right?”

  “Yeah, he got arrested again and I couldn’t take any more.”

  “Codependent no more, Sal. I’m proud of you.”

  “I never should have gotten mixed up with him. I mean, he’s an Aries sun and Gemini moon, with a Leo rising!”

  She said this as if it was supposed to mean something to me, the same way an old Czech friend of mine explained another friend’s behavior with the all-encompassing, “That’s the way he is. He’s Moravian,” or the way people still explain another by saying, “What do you expect? He’s a man, she’s a woman.”

  “And?” I said to Sally.

  “And I’m a Pisces sun and moon with Scorpio rising!” she said emphatically.

  I did understand a bit about the double Pisces thing, having had it explained to me at length by Sally. Evidently, Pisces is a condition that should be put on a medic alert bracelet so, in case of an accident, emergency room personnel know that “I feel extra pain so give me extra drugs, please!”

  My cat, Louise Bryant, emerged from the bedroom, yawning and stretching.

  “I gotta make some changes. Maybe monogamy isn’t the way for me right now,” Sally said. “Maybe I’ll try cautious nonmonogamy, like you. I’m a polytheist, so it makes a kind of sense to be more poly in my love life too.”

  “It isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” I said. “What’s your log-in and password?”

  “Bigwitch and Athena,” she said. “You’re disillusioned with nonmonogamy?”