I smiled at him so big my lower lip split in the center, and waited for him to answer the Professor’s question. If he had come here specifically to kill the Professor, out of impatience, then I needed to leap bodily through the nearest window in search of a nice merciful sidewalk. If he had some less urgent purpose, I could hold that in reserve. I was curious.
His voice made my lubricant run cold.
“It’s like dis here,” he said. “I ast youse nice to gimme back my Hamiltons, and ya says to me, ‘it can’t be done.’ Then a little later ya says to me, ‘two days.’ Later on I get to tinkin’, it can’t be both. Which time are youse shittin’ me? I tink about it, an’ I remember when I hoit youse wuz after ‘it can’t be done’ and before ‘two days.’ So de smart money says da handbills is gone, an’ dat means youse gotta be lookin’ to leave town. So I come over to say g’bye. Maybe help youse move, after ya can’t move so good by yaself no maw. I know dis great place in Joizy, a little wet but nice and peaceful.”
“Tony—” the Professor began.
“Den I get here an’ I see youse ain’t packed nuttin’. All ya stuff is here. So I decide to wait awhile before I go track youse down, see if ya come back fer anyting. Maybe yer out gettin’ de posters after all. While I’m waitin’, I figure, suppose he can get the tickets in two days. Why can’t he do it in one? Maybe he’s got ’em here right now. So I toss ya place.”
The apartment looked as though a large dragon with claws had suffered an episode of epilepsy there. Anything that could have concealed five thousand treasury notes had been torn apart. I could not see any really comfortable places on which to be thrown down and raped to death.
“As I explained to you—” the Professor tried.
“Now you come in wit dis bimbo”—I did not look like a bimbo, never did except by specific client request—“an’ I gotta figure youse ain’t serious about dis. You figure youse got spare time.”
“—she’s my cousin, Ton—”
“I didn’t make it clear, how bad I want de postcards. I gotta make it clear.”
He moved forward with a bouncy stride.
The Professor spoke quickly but with confidence. “If you want to lose that dough—worse, leave it in the hands of the kind of clown who doesn’t mind talking to grand juries—keep on coming, Tony. I’ve almost got it back from him for you…but this is a square guy I’m dealing with, a solid citizen. If I have so much as a bloody nose when I see him he’s gonna get the wind up him and back off. Breaking my arm is only a momentary pleasure—but beating a bad paper rap will keep on being fun for three to fifteen years under present statutes.”
Tony Donuts had stopped moving forward. “Youse almost got it back, huh?”
“It’s like money in the bank,” the Professor assured him.
I wanted to kick him.
“So how come ya said youse couldn’t do it foist?”
“When I said it couldn’t be done I meant it couldn’t be done without wrecking my own sting…and I was tracking maybe a mil. Once I realized that wasn’t really so important, it became a simple matter of cooking up a new sting to get my bait back. It’ll leave me broke, but hey, for a friend…”
“A mil, huh?” Tony looked thoughtful. “I could do sometin’ wit’ a mil.” He frowned, shook his head like a bull worrying flies. “Nah. I radda have my fliers back. After tings cool down, maybe you an’ me we go get dis mil togedda. When do youse get de scrolls back?”
“Like I said, Tony. Tomorrow, Friday.”
“Youse can’t speed it up?”
“You are my friend and I have a chance to do you this favor. Can you picture me stalling?”
Tony almost smiled. It was odd to think that he could be amused by anything other than inflicting pain. The concept of resistance to his will must have appealed to his sense of humor.
“No, I guess not. Ya can walk.”
He turned to me for the first time since we had entered the apartment, and I stopped breathing. His gaze itched as it traveled up and down me. I was in a strange apartment, strewn with ruin and badly lit; I wanted to look around for hopeless escape routes. But it was more important to watch his eyes. He was about to make a decision on the order of shall I have another cigarette now, or later? and I wanted the early returns. I watched closely—
—and saw the danger pass. Even a Tony Donuts cannot rape every woman he encounters; too many women, not enough hours in the day. Perhaps he had a prior appointment to rip someone’s ribs out. I watched his eyes, and saw the pupils contract slightly. When they do that, you don’t even have to check the crotch; he’s lost interest for now.
I decided to start breathing again. The pent-up air came out in a little peep sound. I refused myself permission to shudder, and then shuddered.
Before I knew he was going to move, he was right in front of me. I stiffened in terror, thinking I had misread the signs. I wanted to say something quick and confident and distracting, like the Professor had, and I could not remember how to form words. Tony smiled. He reached out with one massive hand and honked my left breast like an old automobile horn. It hurts your throat even more to shriek on the inhale than on the exhale, and takes more effort to stifle it. He released my breast just before I would have started squeaking on the exhale too, and patted me fondly on the head.
“I want youse ta start wearin’ special underwear alla time from now on,” he told me. “Black lacy stuff. I don’t know just when I’ll get back to youse, ya know?”
To my horror, I nodded.
And he was gone, out the same window he had come in.
There was a long pause.
When I spoke, my voice was very soft and quite steady. “A million dollars was enough incentive to do business with him?”
“I thought so right up until I met him. And then it was too late.”
“Yes,” I agreed. I sat down on the carpet.
“As Jethro once said to Homer, I was doing real good right up until gangrene set in. You see why I was willing to actually work in exchange for a hideout?”
“Yes.” I said again.
“Well, I guess the next step is to—”
“Willard?” I said, unthinkingly using his real name for the first time in years. “If he ever has me…I’ll need to die.”
He sat down next to me and put his arms around me. “If things get that far,” he told me, “I’ll be dead already myself. We’ll wait for him together in Hell, with the rest of the alumni.” He stroked my hair. “But don’t worry. To coin a phrase, I have a plan.”
“It better work.”
“I’ll bet it does. Dollars to Donuts.”
And suddenly we were both laughing like fools in each other’s arms, huddled amid the ruins of the once swanky apartment. It was the kind of laughter that could have turned into tears…but it turned into something else instead. Like people in bomb shelters after the bombers have gone for the present, we found ourselves tearing at our clothes, and it turned out that there was a comfortable spot after all. A small one, anyway.
But do you know? the sex actually restored most of the tension the laughter had released.
Oh, it was good sex; we were both ready and we knew each other of old—but I hadn’t consciously decided to have sex with him again yet. And if we were going to, it should have been a conscious decision. I mean, there we were, doing it, and both of us knew as we were doing it that we were no closer to being lovers again than we had been the night before.
So we settled for what we could get, carped us some diem, and there was comfort in it. But not enough closeness. I don’t know that either of us cared a damn about the other’s pleasure. We were not making love: we were fucking. Nothing wrong with that; just not enough right with it. When we were finished, we dressed in silence.
And when we did speak, our voices seemed too loud.
CHAPTER 10
FIRST STINGS FIRST
It turned out that the Professor really only needed two things from his apartment; fortunately
both had survived the attentions of Mr. Donuts. The first item was a shiny new tape recorder. It was intact, even though it was capable of concealing at least a little money inside it, because Teac builds them solid: even Tony Donuts found it easier to simply unscrew the cover than to tear it off. The second thing Prof needed was access to his own personal printing press. It was a small thing, nothing like the monster that Tony must have used to produce the counterfeit money, and its structure could not have concealed a buffalo nickel. Prof said he used it principally to generate stock certificates and diplomas.
In less than an hour, he had caused it to disgorge something more useful for his immediate purposes: a small stack of business cards, convincingly elegant, identifying him as an agent of a large Hollywood casting agency. The name he used matched other ID which he already had available. (The driver’s license and Social Security card were quite authentic, even though no person of that name existed.)
“I’ve used this agency before,” the Professor said. “They’re so big everybody’s heard of them, but they have no New York branch. It’s funny, but even a suspicious millionaire is less likely to check you out if it requires a long-distance call.”
“Do I get a card?”
“No, honey. Today you are my loyal secretary, and secs don’t get business cards. Your primary function this afternoon will be to make me seem totally harmless and legitimate to a suspicious woman in her home. Take it from me, a male alone can run into a lot of trouble trying to run the casting-agent wheeze. There are so many cynical, suspicious people in the world these days. Even the ugliest woman alive—and I suspect our target will be at least a finalist—believes that a rapist would want her. But a secretary or a fairy assistant usually reassures them.”
“A pregnant secretary reassures them?”
“No, no. Tomorrow you’re eight months pregnant. Today you’re a cool, efficient secretary, and I’d be lost without you.”
“Play it straight, in other words.”
“You’ve got it.”
An hour later we were before the door of a mansion in the ritziest part of Prospect Park South, and the Professor was whanging away with a door-knocker shaped like a horrid cast-iron rose. I wished I could take a picture of it to show Mary, who once worked as a blacksmith; she’d have vomited. The door was opened by a butler I’d have called large and powerful if I had not just met Tony Donuts. He seemed a little young for his job, but he had the gravity and utter impassivity of the best butlers.
“Good afternoon,” he said in the totally unaccented voice of a radio weatherman. “How may I help you?”
“How ya doing? Nat Frenkel, Creative Associates, this’s my right leg Carol. Here’s my card. We’d like to see the lady of the house, Mrs…” He snapped his fingers.
“Willoughby,” I said.
“—Willoughby, yeah,” the Professor said. “Would that be possible, you think?”
The butler scanned Frenkel’s card carefully, then looked us both over. We were both well dressed, and I was carrying an expensive tape recorder.
“Mrs. Willoughby is not expecting you, sir?”
“Friend, she doesn’t know us from Adam’s off ox. But we only want a few minutes of her time; we gotta be back on the coast by sunrise.”
He made his decision. “If you and your companion would care to wait in the parlor, sir, I will find out whether Mrs. Willoughby is at home. In the event that she is, may I inquire as to the nature of your business with her?”
“I’ll be honest with you, pal. I won’t know until I see her. Just ask her if she’s got a minute, okay?”
“Very good, sir.”
He led us inside and brought us to the parlor. I set the tape recorder down and looked around. It was a museum of horrors. Never in my experience had so much money been spent to assemble so much ornate ugliness. A huge winding staircase ascended to Paradise, where Mr. and Mrs. Willoughby built their nest. There were actually little cherubs carved into the risers. The butler headed for the staircase. Then he slowed, stopped, turned around and, with some apparent reluctance, came back to rejoin us. “Sir?”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t wish to seem impertinent. May I ask you a personal question?”
“Depends how personal, I guess. Shoot.”
“Er…was there ever a time in your life when some people called you ‘The Professor’?”
I tried to unobtrusively step out of my heels. I would run lots faster without them. Take the tape machine? Or leave it?
The Professor never batted an eye. “Which people?”
“Well…a man named Slowhand Trudell? He used to work with a man who used the name Frenkel sometimes, and you resemble the description.”
The Professor dropped out of character. “You know Slowhand?”
“He’s my old man,” the butler said, dropping out of his. “I’m Theo Trudell. It’s a great honor to meet you, Professor.” He stuck out his hand, and the Professor shook it.
“So you’re old Slowhand’s boy. He told me you were enormous. How is the grand old fart?”
“Not good. Arthritis in his fingers, he can’t work.”
“Now that’s a damn shame, Theo.”
My heart was beginning to return to normal speed. I hate surprises. The Professor introduced me to Theo as his cousin Alice, and we shook hands.
“Listen, Professor—” Theo hesitated. “Look, I put in three months of work already on these diamonds. But now it’s different. You’re a legend. Maybe I shouldn’t be saying this, but it’d be such a privilege to work with you—”
The Professor held up a hand. “Theo,” he said. “I wouldn’t horn in on Slowhand’s boy for the world. The diamonds are yours. I’m running a different game, and I see no conflict.”
Theo seemed simultaneously relieved and disappointed. “Well, if you’re sure. Maybe another time. Can I help any?”
“Thanks. Just act natural. And give my love to your Pop. Kick him in the ass for me, and tell him he’s an ugly old sheeplover.”
Theo smiled. “I’ll do that. Gee, he’ll get a bang out of it.”
He left again and disappeared up the staircase to the stars.
“Fame is good for the ego,” the Professor said thoughtfully, “but one day soon it could get to be bad for business.”
“Nonsense,” I told him. “I remember the time you bummed a light from that broker the day after you took him for twenty-six thousand, and he never recognized you. That kid didn’t know you, he knew the name you were using. Just retire ‘Frenkel.’”
He sighed. “A shame. It’s always good to carry ID that’ll stand up, and it’s such a pain in the ass getting it these days. But you’re right, of course.”
“Do you know I actually didn’t get scared? When he asked if you were you, I mean. Alert, sure. But on the day you meet Tony Donuts, nothing else is scary.”
Mrs. Willoughby was unquestionably a fool, but even a fool can be shrewd. When a representative of a Hollywood casting agency calls on you, saying that he won’t be sure what he wants until he’s seen you, certain inferences can be drawn, certain improbable hopes born. She kept us waiting for ten minutes, then made a grand entrance, appearing at the top of the stairs in a dress so expensive that she must have been sure it flattered her, makeup laid on with a trowel. She posed, then descended. My occupation has made me very good at not bursting into laughter every time I see something ridiculous. This strained me. She wasn’t even a third of the way down when her perfume hit us. I’m sure she hadn’t had a mosquito bite in a long time. She posed again when she reached the bottom of the stairs. She complimented, rather than complemented, the room.
“Mr. Finkle, is it? I’m Constance Willoughby. How may I help you?”
“A minute ago I’d have said one thing. Now I think maybe I’m gonna say another.”
“I’m afraid I don’t follow you, Mr. Frankel.”
“Well, look, you seen my card. I’m casting; I don’t do location scouting, that’s production’s h
eadache. But they find out I gotta come East to see my mother in Queens, they say to me, Nat, keep an eye open, we need a mansion set that’ll knock people’s eyes out. See, the picture’s supposed to take place in Boston, but those goniffs on the Coast think Boston and New York are like next door. But honest, Mrs. Willoughby, your neighborhood here could pass for Nob Hill easy. So I knock on your door to ask would you consider letting Metro make a major film on your premises. But now that I see you I feel my instincts working. Tell me: you’ve had some acting experience, am I right?”
She emitted what I believe she thought was a tinkling laugh. It would have blown out the candles on a birthday cake. “Hardly any at all,” she simpered, “and not for years. Summer stock, mostly. You have sharp eyes, Mr. Funkel.”
“I’m gonna lay my cards on the table, Mrs. W. This particular project, the stars are set, actually they’re practically set-set, and I got the ‘co-starrings’ and the ‘also starrings.’ But I still got a few ‘withs’ to cast. There’s a part for a banker’s wife.”
“I am a banker’s wife,” Mrs. Willoughby managed to say.
“There you go. Kismet. I got a picture in my mind of what I want—and wham, here you are. I cast a lot of real people. I find most of the people walking around on the street can act circles around the so-called professionals, and they give you less aggravation. It’s not a real large part. You probably wouldn’t be on screen for more than ten, fifteen minutes altogether. You get kidnapped by Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas. Is it worth talking about this?”
It took Mrs. Willoughby a few seconds to get her mouth working. Finally she said, “Well, I am quite busy with my charity work…but I suppose it couldn’t hurt to discuss it. Would you and your lovely assistant care for anything to drink?”
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