On my way down, the door to RetroTech opened, and David Cowles poked his big head out. "You ring downstairs?"
"I did, yes."
"It's Bill, right?"
"Bill Wyeth."
He said, "I was wondering whom I'd let in."
"Just me. I'm looking for Jay."
Cowles had one eye on a computer screen. "Haven't seen him."
"Has he been around?"
"Yes, in fact he was earlier and we discussed— oh, hell, hold on, that's the phone. Here, come on in while I get that." I followed Cowles back toward his office and when I got there he was standing at the window.
"That's good," he said into the receiver. "All the way through?" He listened and nodded. "Sure, all right." He covered the phone. "This will just take a second, Mr. Wyeth, bear with me. Just here— have a seat. My daughter wants to—" He uncovered the phone. "Yes, yes, okay, I'm putting it on, go ahead."
Then he turned on the speakerphone and I could hear a piano, some sweet and romantic sonata trilling into the room. I might have said it was Beethoven's "Für Elise," but the sound through the phone was poor, as was the quality of the performance. But Cowles was enjoying it, smiling and looking at the phone and nodding his head with the music. Then the playing stopped. "Good, good!" he called heartily, in the way of an encouraging father.
"You liked it?" came a girl's voice. "I only messed up once."
Cowles smiled at me. "Very good, but keep practicing."
"Daddy, I practiced it five times already!"
"How many times did you get it right all the way through?"
"None."
"Do you want to mess it up tomorrow night?"
"No! What do you think?"
"I think you should keep practicing, sweetie."
"Daddy! You're so mean."
"It's true," said Cowles affectionately. "Nothing you can do."
"Daddy!"
"I have someone in my office, Sally, so I'm going to have to go."
"A pianist," I said after he'd hung up.
"Well, hardly. But she likes to play, and she's got a little recital at the Steinway store."
"The Steinway store?"
"On Fifty-seventh Street? Have you ever been? Amazing pianos! Dozens of them. Ebony, mahogany, everything. Even one of John Lennon's. You're not supposed to touch it but everyone does. They have student recitals there, and of course they don't mind if you buy a piano while you're there. It's quite the setting."
I nodded but wondered if I should tell him that Jay had gone to his daughter's basketball game. He'd ask me what it meant, and I couldn't tell him. But why hadn't I seen Cowles at the game? Of course, he might have been busy, or his wife could have been in attendance and I wouldn't have known.
"Now then," Cowles said, "you were looking for Mr. Rainey?"
"Have you seen him?"
"He was in this morning. About the lease?"
I searched his face. "The lease?"
"My lease? He said you and I'd go over it the next day or so?"
I made a vague sound of recognition.
"He offered me a better rate."
"He did?"
"I agreed to lengthen the lease, which he wanted, but I got him to bring the rent down a bit— only fair, in this climate."
"Was he accommodating?"
Cowles smiled. "For a rapacious landlord, yes. He seems— is he new to all this?"
"Why do you ask?"
Cowles let his eyes drift over his family pictures and out the window to the rooftops of lower Manhattan. "A sense, that's all."
* * *
A minute later, I stepped back out into the street. The cold cloak of evening had dropped. The prudent thing would have been to go home, order in dinner, and write down all I'd learned. Worship Chronos a bit. I used to be pretty good with complex problems but now I was stumped. Too many shards of information. Martha Hallock had handled the real estate transaction between Jay and Marceno, to the dismay of her own business partner. She'd probably lied to Marceno to clinch the deal. She knew a lot about Jay. There'd been an accident. Poppy was her nephew. How did these things connect? Mrs. Jones had described me so well I'd been successfully recognized. Or maybe they had a photo of me. Allison Sparks didn't mind snooping into a man's private business. And didn't mind telling me that, either. What else? Jay hung out in Brooklyn and probably dated a woman named O. He had some kind of weird drug habit that involved inhaled adrenaline. His occasional girlfriend, Allison Sparks, didn't mind getting kissed by an unemployed lawyer who'd been forced to watch some world-class fellatio the night before. She didn't mind having his tongue shoved down her throat and she didn't mind telling him that she'd liked it. Watching the fellatio had probably made him more aggressive, too. Under the momentary behaviors rose the hungers, the looming desires. Jay wanting to kill the baseball, Martha Hallock waiting bitterly for death, Helmo willing to spy on Jay for a few bucks, Allison needing satisfaction. You could drive yourself nuts with these things. Cowles's daughter played the piano. Jay had lowered Cowles's rent, presumably to keep him in the building. Marceno was waiting for his information. H.J. was waiting for his money. Both expected me to get these things for them, both had made their threats well known. What else? What other pieces could I torment myself with? Ha, Allison had basically conceded, controlled the Havana Room— which would be open that night.
Yes, she'd told me that, in her alluring drunkenness. The Havana Room would be open that night. And I was invited.
Six
ANOTHER NIGHT IN THE CITY. Showered and shaved, wallet full of cash. How good can you look, pal? Best shoes, best suit, killer silk tie. Worried H.J.'s men had discovered where I lived. You never knew, until you knew for sure. A quick look up and down the street. Then dart past the gold lettering and potted evergreens, through the heavy door. Immediately, the smell of steak. Then Table 17, as always. Hanger steak, as always. Oil paintings and table linen. No Allison yet. Mexican busboys sailing through the room with steaming trays. Worried about Jay, yes. Determined to have a good time, yes. The joint was topped-off full, an ocean liner of steak-eaters, a fleshatorium. Action upstairs in the private rooms, judging from the lipstick and aftershave heading up the stairs, action at the bar, crossing its legs, checking its watch, shooting its cuffs. I looked around, wondering which of the other men would be heading into the Havana Room. And then there was Allison, coming out of the kitchen, eyes right on me, tongue peeking from the corner of the mouth I'd kissed six hours before, marching toward me in a red satiny dress, which showed me more than I'd seen before. Knees, cleavage, firm attitude. She looked good, Allison, and she knew it as she bent close to my ear.
"Bill!" she whispered. "I'm shocked."
"Why?"
"You took advantage of me!"
"Might have been the other way around," I said.
Allison looked at me fixedly, thoughts kept in reserve, so close that I could see the mascara on her eyelashes, and I didn't know if she regretted the interlude earlier that day. "Midnight," she said. "Door opens at midnight."
* * *
I was there on the dot, of course, stepping casually down the stairs and over the tiled floor to the far booth where I'd sat before, wall sconce and painting next to me. Other men followed and I thought I recognized several from the last time I'd been in the room when it was full, including the two large fellows who'd been examining a set of X rays. My eyes drifted toward the enormous black-eyed nude over the bar. The ancient bartender beneath her, his white hair fuzzed to dissipation, took no notice as he set out drafts and highballs and drinks neat and on the rocks and in shot glasses and the last one tonight, I promise. Within ten minutes, two dozen men had arrived, filling the booths and the barstools.
At that moment the aging literary gentleman I'd seen before came lurching in. Somehow he seemed always to know when the room was open. In his suit and greatcoat he was a pile of elegant ruin, but that night's dosing of booze had torn away his mask of droll amusement at the hopeless strivi
ngs of men and revealed something more sinister, more hatefully despairing. He reached out and held my arm, tightly.
"I'ma get in here, I'ma see what's going on."
"And what do you think—?"
"I'ma investigate—" But at that he tilted sideways. "It can't be true, just not possible!" He stumbled about and I steadied him, only to confront a leering face whose brows seemed arched in perpetual humor but whose eyes belied unfathomable despair. "You, mister, don't you know what they're doing in here, donya see— is absolutely the final, the last—"
The maître d' arrived with three busboys, and the man was taken away.
A minute later Allison appeared, having brushed her hair and put on a bit more lipstick.
"Gentlemen," she announced loudly, settling the room, "this is the moment when we explain the Havana Room to new attenders— there are a few tonight— so I am going to go through my entire presentation, which only takes a minute, and then we'll close the door. Good to see so many of you could make it." She nodded at several men— nodded at them in particular, it seemed— and I felt a shot of jealousy.
At that moment the beautiful black woman I'd seen before entered with her blue suitcase. She shrugged off a long winter coat and hung it behind the bar. She was dressed in a frilly cocktail dress with subtle golden epaulets on the shoulders and matching oversized buttons, a getup somewhat theatrical, I realized. She opened the blue suitcase and lifted out a golden tray with two silken straps attached at the sides. These she lifted over her shoulder, raising the tray in front of her like an old-time cigarette girl.
Allison followed her progress, turned back to the men, and began again. "As you may know, the Havana Room has been open continuously for more than one hundred and fifty years, including as a speakeasy, a betting parlor, and even, for a year in the thirties, as an opium den. These nefarious uses would seem more or less obligatory, given its sunken and protected setting, and the fact that there's only one door in. Anything less unsavory would be a bit of a disappointment, don't you think?" The men smiled, happy to feel themselves included in the city's long history of vice and lawlessness. "In more recent years," Allison continued, "it's mostly served as a spare bar for this marvelous restaurant of ours. And except for the routine intrusions of law enforcement, operation of the Havana Room in one form or another has been interrupted only three times in the last century. I know the dates, too. November 23, 1963, the day after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and then for two days during the 1977 power blackout in New York City, and for a week following the attack on the World Trade Center. And you, gentlemen"— here Allison smiled at the obviously memorized nature of her speech—"are not the only illustrious patrons of this room. We know that souls who have sat in these very booths include Ulysses S. Grant, "Boss" Tweed, and Babe Ruth. Yes, after he was traded by the Boston Red Sox. We know that Charles Dickens was taken here on one of his celebrated visits to New York City. Mark Twain ate upstairs and was invited downstairs but declined. It was in this room that Franklin Delano Roosevelt first discussed running for governor of New York in 1927. It was also in this room that the details of one of the Joe Lewis title bouts in the old Madison Square Garden were finalized. What else? Billie Holiday met one of her male pals here, and they argued, it is said. Oh, and Eisenhower visited here before he was elevated to power during World War II. The room was opened especially for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis one morning in the 1980s, when she became faint outside."
"What about Elvis?" came a voice. "I heard that he—"
"Yes, that's true. Elvis rented the room in the 1970s after performing at Madison Square Garden only a few blocks away. I could go on and on, gentlemen, but you get the idea. We are proud of the history of the Havana Room, especially its appeal to important and successful men like yourselves."
The beautiful black cigarette girl, if that's what she was, had now started at the far end of the room, presenting her tray to the men.
"Now then," continued Allison, drawing a breath, hands clasped before her, the model of poise, "we know that our clientele lead busy and harried lives, and so what we offer here is a respite from that. Plain and simple, gentlemen. In a moment or two we will lock the door for no more than sixty minutes. You will be sealed in. Quite comfortably, I might add. We have a full bar menu available. Lastly, please note that all our cigars are, of course, Cuban, and are complimentary. We have the very best brands: Cohiba, Montecristo, Excalibur, all of them. Your waiter is knowledgeable, should you need some help with your choice. And yes, you are allowed, encouraged, and invited to smoke here, despite the draconian antismoking laws enforced by the city, which we have managed to elude by way of metaphysical semantics. We hope that you enjoy your brief time in the Havana Room."
I could feel Allison pulling the room of men along a slow logical track, drawing us into an altered frame of reference— changing the rules of perception, perhaps. I didn't mind that she hadn't looked directly at me, for I could feel myself staring in wonderment.
"We do ask that you not discuss the Havana Room outside its confines, for entry is strictly by invitation only, at the discretion of management. This is to ensure an elite clientele and high level of service. Prior to the opening of the doors, Shantelle, our cigarette goddess"— Allison threw a quick glance at Shantelle, who smiled mysteriously—"will come around a second time with a selection of goodies. I'm afraid that she is not one of them. Should you be interested in their purchase, they may be put on your bill but will not be itemized or described in any way. Please enjoy your time with us tonight. Thank you."
And with that the men dropped their heads into momentary conversation. Now Ha entered the room, went behind the bar, and pushed a wheeled glass tank under the bridge and forward into the room. Whereas before I'd always seen him in work clothes, he was dressed in a crisp white uniform and carried a small stainless steel case. A number of the men watched him with curiosity. He whispered something to Allison, then stood back. Meanwhile, Shantelle had set down her tray and stacked a set of porcelain plates on the bar behind Ha.
"Gentlemen!" called Allison. "It looks like we're ready. All right then?" She waited until the room quieted and she had every man's attention. "Each of you is cultured and well traveled, and many of you know of the Japanese fugu fish, a delicacy in Tokyo and rumored to be actually served at one or two places here in New York. The fugu fish, for those who don't know, is famous for being dangerous to eat, if not served by a chef trained in its preparation. Trained ten years, I might add." She smiled playfully. "The next part is a little hard. Let's see if I can get it, okay? The fugu fish is from the family called Tetraondontidae, class Osteichthyes, and order Tetradontiformes. Also known as the puffer fish or globefish or swellfish. Usually it's eaten raw, and when it's prepared in Japan correctly, the diner receives a buzzy, numb feeling around the lips and an interesting light-headedness. If prepared incorrectly, the fish, eaten in significant quantities, will kill you." She nodded vigorously. "Yes, and rather quickly, depending on how much poison you ingest. In Japan, fifty or sixty people die each year from fugu poisoning. The most poisonous parts include the liver, skin, muscles, and the ovaries. These sections of the fish are rich in tetrodotoxin, the principal poison, which is perhaps a thousand times more deadly than cyanide. Tetrodotoxin is heat-stable, so cooking the fish does not make it safer to eat. The lethal dose for an adult would fit on the head of a pin, perhaps one to two milligrams."
"How does it work?" came a voice from the room.
"I'm not a doctor," said Allison, "but my understanding is that the poison blocks the sodium channels in nerve tissue. That means nerves can't fire, can't make muscles contract. There's paralysis, the degrees of which we'll get to in a minute. But full-blown poisoning means respiratory arrest, cardiac dysfunction, central nervous system failure, that kind of thing."
"Do you have the antidote on hand?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"There is none." While the room absorbed this difficult fact,
Allison paused, nodded at Ha, then went on. "Where was I? Oh, the deaths. Yes, indeed in the last few decades there've been many hundreds of documented deaths, the great majority of them in Japan. The fish's attraction has always been the genuine chance that it might be one's last meal." She smiled dangerously. "The fugu fish has been generally banned from time to time throughout history, and specifically banned for certain populations at other times. To this day, it remains the only delicacy which cannot, by law, be served to the Japanese emperor and his family."
"I don't see the attraction," muttered someone.
"Oh, I do," came another voice.
"The taste is said to be enslaving," Allison responded. "But beyond the taste there does appear to be a desire in human beings to taste that which is prohibited them." She studied the men before her, as if to see if they possessed such an impulse. "While we appreciate that some people enjoy the Japanese fugu fish, it seems a somewhat tame entertainment, not particularly provocative, not particularly interesting. It has not caught on here in New York City, and maybe that reflects the genuine scarcity of the fish and the chefs who can prepare it, or it may reflect the fact that New Yorkers are inured to certain dangers, the regular dangers, if you will, and are not compelled by the idea of paying four hundred dollars for a piece of fish that may just cause only a little numbness around the mouth."
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