Dancing Aztecs

by Donald E. Westlake

  “Bobbi, dear,” Chuck said, as slow and calm and unruffled. as an ocean liner in a windless bay, “you know you always get first pick. In restaurants, with our friends, everywhere. You insist on being first.” Gesturing easily, almost humorously, at the shards in the fireplace, he said, “That was your first choice, so it must be yours.”

  “This is mine.” Bobbi clutched the cold nasty ugly sharp-angled little monster to her bosom. “You’ve ruined my life, Harwood,” she said, “but you don’t get this. Not this. It’s mine.”

  “You’re mistaken, sweetheart. The way you can tell which is which, my statue is still in one piece. And I hope you won’t be silly enough to smash it, the way you did yours.”

  “This one’s mine!”

  “Mine.”

  “Mine, you teeny prick!”

  “Mine.”

  So now the argument was about the remaining Dancing Aztec Priest. Before this, it had been about Bobbi’s insistence on shopping at Gristede’s, which was more expensive, rather than Finast, which was less expensive. Before that, back half an hour or so, it had been about his refusal to learn to drive a car, and just before that it had been about whose fault it was they were living in New York. They’d traveled a long corkscrew path from the beginning of the fight, back at the Open Sports Committee lunch, during the ice cream and Oscar’s speech. It was always the same; they tried to have an argument about whether or not Chuck minded Bobbi sleeping with a lot of black men, but since they couldn’t even agree on the postulates—Bobbi refusing to admit, for instance, that she had been to bed with Oscar or any of the others—they could never manage to stick to the point. The fight swelled and roiled within them, unresolved, while they futilely tried to ease the pressure by yelling about other things.

  If only they could go to California, where people didn’t congregate in such heterogeneous (not to say motley) groups. Chuck had been offered several wonderful posts in different elements of the State University dotted like Monopoly hotels through the San Fernando Valley, just north of Los Angeles, but he’d turned them all down. “I can’t drive,” he always said. “You can’t get around Los Angeles if you can’t drive.”

  “Learn!” she would scream. “Learn, you narrow-minded, pig-headed bastard! Learn, you nineteenth-century louse! Learn, you smug asshole!” She was pretty good when she set her mind to it.

  But it never had any effect. Chuck, getting calmer and calmer, would do his pipe number and say, “I am learning about man. I’ll leave machines to others.” Which was enough to make you gnash your teeth for a week.

  Or he would turn the whole argument back on her, with some crack about the orchestra. “Would you really be willing to give up music?” She would try to point out that she wasn’t giving up music, that even in Los Angeles there were orchestras, that all he had to do was tell her where they were moving and when and she would take care of her own career adjustments. And he would nod, nursing on his pipe, and say, “But I don’t believe you’ve given your notice to the orchestra, have you? Have you?”

  Argue with a man like that, go ahead and try.

  But she did try, she’d been trying for most of the six years they’d been married, and it was her private belief that the constant wear and tear was beginning to have an effect on her looks. She was only twenty-nine, tall and slender, with ash blonde hair and the kind of long-torsoed body that looks terrific in a bikini, but should she have those crows’-feet about her eyes? Should she have that tense set to her shoulders, should her nose be so thin?

  It was the constant battling that was getting to her, she was sure of it. Affecting her looks, even affecting her music; recently she was making the harp sound almost harsh.

  And now she was throwing things. This was new, a new development in their war, and Chuck was too stupid and too complacent even to notice. He merely ducked, as though Bobbi had been throwing things at him all along, and then he proceeded calmly to claim as his her Dancing Aztec Priest. Standing there with his pipe in his face and both hands in the pockets of his robe—he had showered earlier, in the middle of one of her fury-peaks, to display even further his indifference—he maundered on and didn’t even notice that things had changed.

  Well, Bobbi noticed. Clutching the Dancing Aztec Priest to her bosom, glaring at his calm face, hearing them both arguing now about ownership of this statue, all at once Bobbi knew she couldn’t go on with it. Like Russia and the United States, there would always be some other limited war to fight, some other Berlin Airlift or Vietnam War, some dispute about driving or statues rather than the central war that neither side would ever be quite bold enough or crazy enough to undertake.

  She looked at the statue, holding it at arm’s length. His crazy devil mask and his shriveled little genitalia attracted one’s first attention, but now she looked at him, really looked at him, his bent knees, his one raised foot, his off-balance torso, and she decided he was ducking, too. Defending himself. Ducking the missiles, ducking the issues, ducking out.

  Fighting about a statue? A useless, stupid, plaster-and-paint joke of a statue? She looked from the Priest to her husband. “This is it, Chuck,” she said, and all at once she too was calm. “You’ve heard of the straw that broke the camel’s back? Well, this is it, right here.” And she gestured with the statue.

  The man was incapable of noticing anything, not even her sudden calm. “Be careful with my statue,” he said, and even smiled slightly.

  At which point she understood he wanted her to break it; he was goading her to break it just as he’d always goaded her to climb into bed with black men. Yes, he was, he absolutely was. Their marriage was built on this eternal argument; resolving the fight wouldn’t cure their marriage, it would end it.

  And the statue had made her understand. This dumb little creature from South America had shown her, finally, the truth. “Once more,” she said, with a calm so steely, so cold, so rigid that Chuck could never hope to match it. “This is the last time, Chuck,” she said, “and if you were ever smart or careful in your life this is the time for it. Once more, now. This is my statue.”

  He shook his head. He had never been smart or careful in his life. “Wrong,” he said.

  “Okay, Chuck.” While he stood there she turned carefully and carried the statue away into the bedroom and locked the door behind her.

  It didn’t take that long to pack; all she did was jam all her clothing—plus the statue—in two suitcases. What took most of the time was throwing all Chuck’s clothing out the window. Shirts, slacks, underwear, socks, jackets, his raincoat and top-coat, all sailing like Daliesque gliders out into the air over West End Avenue. Shoes and hats made a captionless Thurber cartoon as they tumbled down toward the sidewalk. Sweaters, blue jeans, and two bathing suits launched themselves like all the partners in a 1929 stock brokerage, and Bobbi slammed the window behind them.

  Next, leaving the suitcases zipped shut atop the bed, she went out to the living room, where Chuck was rolling a joint, their frequent practice at the end of a fight. (End of a round.) “Hello, there,” he said, looking up from his leather chair. He didn’t call her “dear” or “sweetheart,” another indication that he considered the fight at an end.

  “Give me your robe,” she said.

  He blinked at her in mild bewilderment. “What?”

  “Give me your robe.”

  “My robe?”

  “Give it to me.” At last she had as much patience as he.

  “Are you going to shower?”

  “Give me your robe, Chuck.”

  Still bewildered, but agreeable, he put down the paper and the plastic bag of grass, got to his feet, untied the belt, removed the robe, and handed it over. He had a bony body, with clearly visible ribs, like the Dancing Aztec Priest. Perhaps she had loved him because he reminded her of a harp.

  She took the robe, went back to the bedroom, shut the door, opened the window, and heaved the robe out. It sank with its arms spread wide in horror and despair.

  He was si
tting naked on the leather chair, like O, lighting the joint, when Bobbi came through again with the suitcase. “Good-by, Chuck,” she said.

  He looked at her, speechless, holding the match upright.

  She opened the apartment door and looked back at him. “You’ll burn your finger,” she told him, but it was too late.

  NOT TO MENTION …

  While Ralph the chauffeur piloted the maroon Cadillac Eldorado across the urban and industrial sprawl of Connecticut, August Corella sat in back with his henchman bodyguard, Earl, thoughtfully puffing a cigar while considering the events of the day. Much had happened since Corella had met this noon with the financier, Victor Krassmeier, and not all of it had been pleasant.

  It had begun pleasantly enough. All in all, August Corella would rather deal with a top-level businessman than anybody else in the world. Patsies, pure and simple. In every corporation it was the same; the factory made the stuff, the salesmen sold it, and the executives sat around telling each other how smart they were. They were coasting, cushioned by a system they hadn’t invented and didn’t understand, and they were so sure they were bright and sharp and nobody’s fool that they were everybody’s fool.

  The result of today’s negotiation with Krassmeier? Another fifty thousand sliced out of his gut and if it actually cost Corella half that much to reclaim the statues he’d be astonished.

  His present plan was simple. Find the person in charge of the group with the statues, go to that person, and buy them all back. Offer three thousand to start, go to a top of ten thousand, and lead the seller to believe two things: first that there was heroin in at least some of the statues; second, that the Mafia owned the heroin and would kill the seller if he tried anything cute. Neither of those things would be said straight out but both would be gotten across. And then the seller would do the legwork, collecting the statues while Corella dealt with other things.

  From Krassmeier’s office, Corella had gone directly to the Goddess of Heaven restaurant where a five-dollar bill had bought him the information that today’s luncheon had been paid for by an outfit called Bud Beemiss Enterprises, at 29 West 45th Street Back in midtown, Ralph and the Cadillac had waited out front while Corella and Earl went up to have a look at this Bud Beemiss Enterprises, which turned out to be a public relations firm with a very snooty receptionist When Corella told her he wanted to see Beemiss, she said, “Did you have an appointment?”

  “No, I just want to see him.”

  “I’m terribly sorry, but he isn’t in the office this afternoon. There was a special luncheon uptown today—”

  “That’s what I want to talk to him about.”

  “Well, he decided not to come back after lunch but to go on home.”

  “Then I’ll talk to him there,” Corella said.

  “All right,” the girl said. “I am sorry about the mixup, gentlemen.”

  Corella said, “What’s his address?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “We don’t give out home addresses.”

  “Then his phone number,” Corella said. With the phone number, he could get the address himself.

  But the girl said, “I’m sorry, not those either. Would you like to talk to Mr. Beemiss’s secretary about making an appointment? He might have some time free tomorrow, I couldn’t be certain.” Her hand was resting on the complicated telephone console beside her.

  “It’s today I want to talk to him,” Corella said.

  “Then I really wish you’d phoned this morning.”

  Corella stepped back a pace. “Earl,” he said. “Explain it to her.”

  Earl, who was very big and very tough and who had been Jerry Manelli’s contact in the Port Authority parking garage, flexed his shoulder muscles inside his jacket. He said, “We think it’s important we get Beemiss’s address.”

  The girl smiled at him. She said, “Do you know, when I first moved to New York I was afraid of muggers and rapists and all sorts of things, but for the last two years I’ve been studying at a women’s martial arts center down on Chambers Street, and it’s just built up my confidence tremendously. For instance, studying karate and tai chi chuan, I’ve gotten to the point where just with the edge of my hand I can break a board just about as thick as your head.” Picking up the phone receiver, she said, “I’ll call Mr. Beemiss’s secretary; you can arrange with her for an appointment later in the week.”

  “Never mind,” Corella said, and left the office. Out in the hall Earl said, “Mr. Corella, I could of taken her.”

  Corella didn’t bother to answer. He pushed the elevator button, and said, “Find Beemiss.”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Corella.”

  So then Corella went home to Red Bank, New Jersey, and waited for Earl to report, which he didn’t do until well after five o’clock. He had the address at last, and when Corella and Ralph picked him up on the way through Manhattan, it turned out he had a black eye as well. It made him sullen, having a black eye. Apart from the physical pain, he believed that a black eye detracted from his credibility as a bodyguard and general tough guy.

  What had happened, Earl had tried his regular sources of information, looking for Bud Beemiss’s home address, but his regular sources of information mostly knew things like the addresses of hit men or where to buy an untraceable gun, so finally he just waited until Bud Beemiss Enterprises closed for the day, then entered the premises and found the address on Beemiss’s secretary’s Rolodex. He was out of the office and almost to the elevator when who should come down the hall but that damn smart-ass little receptionist Immediately she was suspicious: “What are you doing here?” Irritated in general, and bugged by this girl in particular, Earl didn’t try to calm her with some story, but attempted instead to brush on by her. That’s when she started doing her nasty karate moves, bouncing him off the corridor walls. And when, plagued beyond good manners, he took a swing at her, she moved in under his roundhouse and poked him a very smart left fist in the eye. Bony goddam hand. If he hadn’t fled at last down the stairwell who knows what might have happened?

  So now they were heading northeast at last across Connecticut, Ralph the chauffeur annoyed because he’d had a terrific date set up for tonight, Earl annoyed because of his black eye, and Corella beginning to get annoyed because it was taking one hell of a long time to get there. They’d traveled on the Merritt Parkway for a while, but now Ralph’s road map had dumped them onto a winding blacktop two-lane road in the twilight, surrounded by local traffic that didn’t care when it got home. Ralph brooded on his lost date. Earl brooded on his throbbing eye, and Corella brooded on all this wasted time. He too had financial pressures these days, though certainly less so than a duffer like Vic Krassmeier, and he wanted that damn statue found and delivered and paid for. But here they were mousing around the boondocks of Connecticut, amid the waving maple trees, following some arthritic station wagon. Annoyance suddenly spilling over, Corella leaned forward and said, “Ralph, you gonna follow that son of a bitch into his garage?”

  Ralph hated people to yell in his ear. “Soon as I get a passing zone, Mr. Corella,” he said.

  Eventually a passing zone did appear, and Ralph angrily yanked the Caddy around the drifting station wagon containing Mel Bernstein, yowling his horn enough to make Mel nearly swerve completely off the road. Then the Caddy tore on northeastward toward 11 Winding Lane, Greenway, Connecticut, the home of Bud Beemiss.

  “Goddam it!” Mel hollered, wrestling with the steering wheel. “Goddam road hog!” Then he got the station wagon once more under control, and he too continued northeastward toward 11 Winding Lane.

  IN ADDITION …

  Mel Bernstein had almost been a lawyer. Until he’d joined his brother-in-law Jerry Manelli’s great Statue Hunt, that had been the central fact about him, from which all other facts spiraled out. He had almost been a lawyer, but he was not a lawyer.

  The way it had happened—or not happened—was like this. Mel’s father, a bus driver with the City of New York, was a compulsive gambl
er and therefore always broke. Meantime, Mel’s mother’s brother Phil Ormont (né Goldberg) had a ladies’ clothing store in Miami Beach (pronounced “Momma Bitch”) and was not a compulsive gambler, and he was doing very well, thank you. And he didn’t mind caring for his sister’s boy Mel on summer vacations, particularly since Mel was bright and personable and could be very useful around the store. So Mel spent his formative summers in Momma Bitch, where the heat and humidity are both ninety-two all the time, day and night, and Uncle PhD kept assuring him his future was made. “Your future is made, kid,” Uncle Phil used to say, in the air-conditioned splendor of his store, amid the old ladies fingering the flower-print dresses. “Anything you want, kid, anything you want to be, it’s yours.”

  “I want to be a lawyer,” Mel said, more than once.

  “It’s yours, kid,” Phil answered, more than once. “Go help the old lady. Look in her shopping bag, I think she just boosted a package Supphose.”

  Then, in February of the year that Mel was seventeen and about to graduate from New Utrecht High in Brooklyn, his Uncle Phil left the air-conditioned splendor of his store, entered the natural environment of Momma Bitch, and promptly dropped dead on the spot. On the sidewalk. Right there in the street. Fat, dead, and moist. Heart; what else?

  Mel’s mom waited a respectable period of time—three months, until mid-May—before writing to Aunt Rachel, reminding her of poor Phil’s oft-repeated promise to put his favorite nephew Melvin through college and law school, and when there wasn’t any answer by mid-June she splurged on a long-distance call, and the Ormonts’ home phone number was not-in-operation-at-this-time. So she called the store instead and the new owner told her that Rachel had moved either to Las Vegas or Saint Thomas, unless maybe it was someplace in California.

  The problem with being somebody who had almost been a lawyer is there’s this constant tingle in the fingertips, this feeling that the lifeline has just slipped through your hands. What is the alternate occupation of preference for somebody who thought he was going to be a lawyer?