Dancing Aztecs

by Donald E. Westlake

  “That’s tough,” Frank said. “Once it’s out of the airport, it’s their problem.”

  “The way they talked,” Jerry said, “I think maybe it’s our problem.”

  “But that isn’t right Jerry.”

  Slowly, thoughtfully, Jerry said, “I don’t think right and wrong is the question here, Frank.”

  “Oh,” said Frank.

  “The kind of people we deal with,” Jerry said, “I don’t think we want any unsatisfied customers.”

  Frank said, “So what do we do?”

  “I’ll have to take this other box to the city, to—what is it?” Picking up the box containing the four statues, Jerry read the stenciled address aloud: “Bud Beemiss Enterprises, 29 West 45th Street.”

  “Sure,” said Frank. “You’ll make a switch.”

  Jerry held the box in both arms. “Kicks the hell out of the day,” he said.

  “Don’t worry about it.” Floyd told him. “We did terrific yesterday.”

  “Oh, yeah? What was in that dental supply package?”

  “Teeth.”

  “Oh. Well, you win a few, you lose a few. Hold the door for me, will you, Teresa?”

  BUT …

  The Goddess of Heaven Chinese restaurant, on Broadway near 97th Street, serves Cantonese and Szechuan dishes, and has a menu so large and so long and so intricate in its minute shadings of detail that one time when a Korean philosophy student taking his advanced degree at Columbia stopped by for lunch there, he fell into a cataleptic ecstasy among the varieties of spicy pork and had to be taken away to Bellevue. Coming to his senses in the waiting room of Emergency was such a seminal experience—particularly after the Goddess of Heaven menu—that he at once gave up philosophy and is today a brakeman on a San Francisco cable car.

  In addition to normal facilities for lunch and dinner, and in further addition to its elaborate take-out service, the Goddess of Heaven also provides private rooms for groups from twelve to two hundred. Your wedding reception, office shower, bar mitzvah, or revolutionary call to arms will be given the world-famous Goddess of Heaven treatment of courtesy, graciousness, and fine food: “Your Choice from Our Most Extensive Menu.”

  Today at twelve-thirty a group of sixteen had taken advantage of this opportunity and was in possession of the Mandarin Room, up a flight of coral-colored stairs from the regular dining rooms. The Mandarin Room, with one green wall, one orange wall, one purple wall, and one glass wall overlooking the traffic down on Broadway, was set up today with connected tables forming a U. The sixteen table settings—heavy plates richly decorated in blue and gold, plus massive silverplate spoons and forks, delicate long red plastic chopsticks, real cloth napkins cunningly folded into the shape of dunce caps, and name cards in the form of tiny parasols—were spaced around the exterior of the U, leaving the center empty.

  It would be impossible for the casual observer to guess what common bond had brought these sixteen people together in this room. Young and old, male and female, black and white, straight and gay, they were as disparate as a Gallup Poll cross-section, seeming to share nothing but a general interest in lunch. And yet, throughout the meal they chatted together across lines of class, age, race, and sex with cheerful familiarity.

  At the end of the meal, with the ice cream balls and fortune cookies distributed, everybody was smiling and relaxed except for one young woman, Bobbi Harwood, who was pissed off. She was pissed off at her husband, Chuck “Professor Charles S.” Harwood, who was sitting next to her on her right and blandly assuring her he didn’t mind that she’d cuckolded him with yet another black man, by having slept with Oscar Russell Green. “I have not slept with Oscar,” Bobbi said, through gritted teeth. “I’m telling you for the last time, Harwood.” (She never called him by his last name unless they were fighting.)

  “But I don’t mind, sweetheart,” Chuck assured her. (He never used terms of endearment unless they were fighting.)

  “You stupid, egotistical son of a bitch, you have a mind like a drive-in theater.”

  “Now, darling,” Chuck said. He had an absolutely maddening way of getting calmer and calmer and calmer the more hysterical the people around him became. It was this phlegmatism that had given him, in Bobbi’s opinion, his totally inappropriate reputation for intelligence.

  Chuck Harwood, a tall angular stooped Lincolnesque figure of thirty-three, was an anthropologist, originally from Chicago and now an assistant professor at Columbia. He had lived all his life either in major cities with adequate mass transit or in utterly backward corners of the world—seven months in Guatemala, fifteen months in Chad—with no transportation at all, and so was one of the few adult white male Americans of the twentieth century who didn’t know how to drive a car. Had no interest, in fact, in driving cars.

  Which infuriated Bobbi almost as much as his allegedly sophisticated attitude toward her alleged miscegenations. (Chuck never believed she was cuckolding him with white men.) The point wasn’t even whether or not she was sleeping with all those black men, the point was whether or not Chuck’s avowed nonpossessiveness was hypocritical. That was the point, the only point, and it drove Bobbi crimson with rage that he wouldn’t admit it.

  As for Bobbi, who had begun life as Barbara Ann Callfield in Oak Crest, Maryland, and who was perfectly capable of supporting herself as an independent woman (she was first harpist with the New York City Symphony Orchestra), she had never been either northern enough to feel guilty toward blacks nor southern enough to feel hostile, neither big-city enough to fear them nor rural enough to be bewildered by them. The result was, her unweighted treatment of black men as normal human beings occasionally created misunderstandings. “I like you as a friend, Jojo,” she would say, one restraining hand on his rippling dark brown arm. While across the room Chuck would suck on his pipe and smile with false indulgence.

  As he was doing now, calmly, soberly, judiciously nodding, saying, “You have your own life to live, darling, I’ve always told you that, and I mean it.”

  A flower arrangement in a heavy milk glass bowl was within arm’s reach. Bobbi reached for it, but before she could complete her intention (whatever that might have been), she and Chuck and everyone else at the table were distracted by the tinkling of a spoon rapped against the side of a teacup. A tall and muscularly built black man had got to his feet at the center of the table, and was calling for quiet.

  This was Oscar Russell Green, leader of this group of sixteen and Bobbi’s latest alleged lover. With his bushy mustache, modest Afro, and easygoing smile he looked much younger than his forty-three years, and he’d been active in politics and Civil Rights activities for nearly a quarter of a century. He was also no stranger to public speaking, and now he stood in silence, smiling at his audience, until he was sure he had the attention of everyone in the room. Then, with a nod and a grin, he suddenly said, “Well, we did it.” And in an abrupt loud voice, fist punching the air, “We made the system function!”

  And the audience burst into cheers of delight, yelling and clapping their hands and grinning huge grins at one another. Even Bobbi gave off her feud with Chuck, and smiled happily around the table.

  Oscar Russell Green nodded and smiled, and when the reaction had tapered off he said, quietly, “They didn’t take us seriously, gang. Crazies and weirdos, that’s what they thought we were. And they thought we couldn’t work together for the common good. White and black, men and women, they thought we’d spend all our time fighting one another and no time at all fighting City Hall. Well, they were wrong!”

  More cheering, more applause.

  But now Oscar Russell Green became serious. “I think we can be very proud of ourselves,” he said. “And I think we all learned and grew and became richer, better human beings as a result of this experience. We learned that we can work together. We can make the system work—for us.”

  Applause again. Her hands beating together, Bobbi became aware of Chuck’s indulgent smile, and she immediately stopped clapping. Then, outra
ged that he should keep her from joining a general applause by his hypocrisy, she started fiercely clapping again just as everybody else stopped. She yanked her hands down under the table, and began muttering into her throat.

  “Well,” Oscar Russell Green was saying, “We’ve had a delicious lunch here today, and I might say we well deserved it. And at the end we got our fortune cookies, and I looked at mine, and it seemed somehow very appropriate, and I’d like to read it to you all.” He opened the little twist of paper and read, “He who hesitates is second.”

  The audience laughed at that, nodding and making joking remarks at one another.

  (In fact, Oscar Russell Green was not telling the truth. The fortune in his fortune cookie actually read, “He who keeps mouth open sure to catch flies.” Last night, however, in preparing today’s speech, Green had decided what his fortune cookie fortune would read, and if the real-world fortune cookie of today failed to deliver as specified that was certainly not his fault. And what message was there anyway in, “He who keeps mouth open sure to catch flies”?)

  Green went on, “Well, I guess we’ve all learned that much through this experience, haven’t we? Not to hesitate, not to allow ourselves to be second. Not ever.”

  Green put the twist of paper down. “Like the Lone Ranger, our work is finished here now, and we can all ride off into the sunset. But we’re leaving behind us a tangible reminder of what we have done. Last Monday construction began, and within a year the Stokely Carmichael Memorial Squash Court and Snack Bar will be complete and open and functioning in Morningside Park, bringing the availability of the healthful and upwardly mobile sport of squash to the residents of Harlem of all races.”

  Which produced a standing ovation. This was what these people had in common. Young and old, rich and poor, yin and yang, they came together eight years ago, ignited by the purpose of bringing squash to the disadvantaged. Wealthy matrons, determined political activists, passionate college students, liberally committed advertising men, they were united by a goal, and now that goal had been achieved, they were applauding themselves and their own accomplishment, and why not? They deserved it.

  (There was for a while one small point of controversy within the group concerning the name of their accomplishment. A few of the overly educated middle-class types objected to calling it the Stokely Carmichael Memorial Squash Court and Snack Bar, on the grounds that Stokely Carmichael wasn’t dead, but as Oscar Russell Green finally pointed out at the time, “He doesn’t have to be dead for us to remember him, does he? Stokely did a lot for the Cause in his moment on the stage of history, and he deserves to be remembered.” Which ended that, despite some smart-aleck muttering something about Humpty Dumpty.)

  But these were more than victors. They were also survivors, the sixteen remaining stalwarts from a pressure group that had once totaled in the hundreds. The activism of the sixties had set them on their path, and in the early days it was easy to maintain a fat membership list for nearly any Civil Rights cause, but it took stamina to remain steadfast halfway through the Sluggish Seventies. They were an anachronism, and they knew it, and more often than not anachronism is its own reward. They could be forgiven if they chose to applaud their own durability.

  The standing ovation, like all good things, came at last to an end, and the flushed and happy members of the group reseated themselves, laughing and talking together, until Green raised his voice again, saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your indulgence for just one minute more?”

  He could. He was the one who’d brought them all together in the beginning, who’d led them through the years of fundraising, public relations, lobbying, and general struggle that had brought them to this moment of triumph, and he could have their indulgence just as long as he wanted it.

  “Thank you. I have one more thing to say. Our real reward, our true reward, is being constructed right now up there in Morningside Park, but I thought we all ought to have a little something to take home with us, some little memorial of what we went through together. Like the movie people giving out an Oscar.” Grinning, he added, “Well, I’m Oscar, but I can’t give you me. I can give you my love, and my gratitude, but I can’t give you me.”

  Bobbi ignored Chuck’s smirk.

  Green was saying, “So I talked it over with Bud Beemiss and Chuck Harwood, and we decided we all ought to have something like an Oscar, because we all performed magnificently!”

  Laughter, applause.

  “So here it is!” And up from the floor beside his chair Green lifted a tall package wrapped in brown paper. The paper was ripped off and a Dancing Aztec Priest emerged, glittering, to be placed on the table in front of Green’s dish of melting ice cream.

  The statue was greeted with a combination of laughter and bewilderment. Smiling at it. Green said, “Now, Chuck found this little fella, and Bud arranged to have him shipped here, and Chuck told me his history, and the fact is, this little man doesn’t have one thing to do with squash.”

  Nobody knew if that was supposed to be a joke or not, so there was a brief hiccup of laughter, soon over, which Green mostly ignored. “This is a copy,” he said, “of a very ancient Aztec statue, and it’s an Aztec priest doing some sort of dance. At least, that’s what he used to be. What he is now is the Other Oscar, our award to ourselves. This is the Rain Dance Oscar, jumping around like we did that day at the Board of Estimate, you all remember that?”

  They did. And now they all got it, the similarity between this contorted figure and a photograph that had appeared in the Daily News, showing Green hopping around in oratorical frenzy during the group’s appearance before the city’s Board of Estimate. They saw the resemblance, and they loved it, and they all laughed and applauded and pointed at the statue, and then they redoubled the applause when all at once waiters came in, carrying more golden-skinned green-eyed Dancing Aztec Priests in their arms, distributing them around like after-dinner drinks, one at each and every place.

  How sweet, Bobbi thought. How dear Oscar is. (Not that she’d ever been to bed with him, nor even that he’d ever offered.) But he was just a dear sweet human being, that’s all (unlike some she could mention), and this funny crooked yellow statue was just one more example of it. She picked it up, held it in her hands, feeling the cold of it against her fingers, looking at its strained and twisted body, its green eyes throwing off sparks of light in its devil-mask face. She smiled at the statue, loving it, loving Oscar in that moment, and then she became aware again of Chuck watching her, his patronizing smile, his bland eyes, and she turned her head, saying, “Don’t spoil this one, Harwood. I mean it.”

  “My darling, you can do whatever you want. I only hope you’ll come back to me when it’s all over.”

  There was no beating him, and no dealing with him. The only way to survive at all was to let him have the last word, try not to let it rankle too much, try to concentrate on other things.

  Brandy was brought out then, which helped, in tiny gold-encrusted glasses. The group toasted itself, toasted Oscar Russell Green, toasted the Other Oscars, toasted the Stokely Carmichael Memorial Squash Court and Snack Bar, and then at last it was all over. People got up from the table, moved here and there around the room, shook hands with one another, promised to keep in touch, showed one another their Other Oscars, and finally they began to depart, going down the stairs in groups of two and three, the laughter and good-fellowship continuing down the stairs and out onto the sidewalk, where smaller and smaller groups clustered, separated, regrouped, and finally moved away.

  And now, after all these years, Oscar Russell Green actually did make a pass! Bobbi couldn’t believe it. For years they’d been together, Oscar had been in their apartment, Oscar and Bobbi had been alone together a thousand times, and not once had he ever made a move. But now all at once, on the sidewalk in front of the Goddess of Heaven, he was coming on as though he meant it. “Bobbi, you’re holding the wrong Oscar to your breast,” he said, gesturing at the statue she held in both arms. And when
she merely laughed that one away, he said something else. And then something else. And constantly with a bright-eyed intensity in his smile, standing a bit too close, staring at her in a meaningful way, while Chuck stood next to a nearby fireplug, pipe in gently smiling mouth, expression avuncular and indulgent. Until finally Bobbi had to place her hand on Oscar’s forearm, to say, “I want us to go on being friends, Oscar.”

  “Good friends, I hope,” Oscar said. What was wrong with the man?

  And Chuck joined in, saying, “Bobbi, I have to go up to the campus for a few hours. Why don’t you and Oscar amuse yourselves?”

  Which was the last straw. “And why don’t you,” Bobbi said, “stick your prick in an electric pencil sharpener? It’ll fit.”

  “See you soon,” Oscar said, a big smile on his face, back-pedaling down the block, waving like a song-and-dance man going offstage.

  The others all were gone. Bobbi and Chuck were left alone on the sidewalk. “Call a cab, you asshole,” Bobbi said. “I’ve had enough for one day.”

  Shrugging, amiable, unruffled, Chuck stepped off the curb and hailed a cab. Getting into it, Bobbi barely noticed the little white van that squealed to a halt just to the right, nor the worried-looking young man in white coveralls who hopped out of it and dashed into the restaurant.

  WHICH MEANT THAT …

  VICTOR KRASSMEIER * ANNUAL REPORT

  The Current Situation

  While the fluctuations in domestic and international money markets have remained as unpredictable as was forecast in last year’s Annual Report, the general trend has remained down, which was also predicted. To the extent possible this trend has been allowed for in the planning that has taken place within the higher cortical regions of the Victor Krassmeier mind.

  Liquidity