Dancing Aztecs

by Donald E. Westlake

  For Mel it had been lots of jobs, lots of hustles, none of them really satisfying. He’d been a door-to-door salesman, he’d run a mail-order business selling a book called Danish Marriage Secrets, he’d even sold Arizona land by phone to Washington Heights housewives. For a while he’d been an insurance expert, testifying in disputed-claims cases, but eventually the number of pending lawsuits against him from losing parties who’d found out he had no qualifications got so numerous and annoying that he quit that hustle, permitted all the lawsuits to catch up with him, declared bankruptcy, thumbed his nose at his ex-creditors, and started again as a used car salesman for an outfit in the Bronx called Big Man Motors. (The television commercial tells the Big Man story: “The Big Man hates to say no! Instant credit on the late-model used car of your choice! Got no cash for the down payment? That’s okay, the Big Man takes anything—your old TV, washing machine, refrigerator, you name it. You come to the Big Man, you gone go way with a deal!”)

  You’d think the main problem with a scam like that would be unhappy customers pushing their dead clunkers back onto the lot, but you’d be wrong. Since the customers, generally speaking, never made any of their payments, they weren’t in any position to complain. No, the main problem was with the banks that wound up eating all that worthless paper. The way it works, you sell some janitor’s assistant a seven-year-old clapped-out Mercury for a sofa down and forty-seven dollars a month, and then you discount the loan to the bank. Two months later the bank repossesses the car, since the janitor’s assistant never will come up with any forty-seven dollars, and then what does the bank have? A seven-year-old clapped-out Mercury. Meantime, Big Man has converted the sofa to cash through a subsidiary firm called Soul Furniture, the salesman got his commission out of the money the bank paid when it took over the loan, the janitor’s assistant got to drive around in a regular automobile for a couple months, and nobody’s unhappy except the bank.

  Big Man had run through a lot of banks, and was reduced to dealing with some very hard-nosed type alternate sources of financing, and then it turned out these new financers didn’t believe in repossessing junk. They believed in breaking heads. A couple of janitor’s assistants got their heads broken so bad they wouldn’t ever need a car any more, and a few others who’d only had secondary bones broken started coming around Big Man looking for the salesman who’d got them into this. It was hard to convince such simple brains that it wasn’t the salesman’s fault, and Mel decided to try another occupation.

  Which was when he found literature.

  WRITING IS NOT ENOUGH

  Of course, you’re a writer. You know that. But ft isn’t enough merely to write, you need to be published as well. Success in writing is really yours only when you have reached the great Public with your ideas.

  But how can you “break into” print? Is publishing really the closed world that people say? Do you really have to “know somebody”? Or, can talent “make it” on its own?

  I say you can make it. I’ve seen others who made it, and I’ve helped some of them along the way, and I can help you, if you have the talent, and the desire, and if you’ll trust me.

  For a limited time only, the Zachary George Literary Agency is seeking to expand its client list Send me your short story, your novel, your magazine article, your poem. If it’s salable, I’ll find the right market for it. If it isn’t quite “up to snuff,” I’ll write you a personal letter, telling you where I think you went wrong.

  Once you’re successful, I’ll take only the standard 10 per cent commission from my sales of your work. Until then, of course, it will be necessary to charge an advance against those commissions—fully refundable when you begin to sell—at the following rates:

  Short story or article

  $10.

  Novelette or TV script

  25.

  Novel or film script

  50.

  Get in touch with me today. Why wait for success any longer?

  Mel wrote that ad in a burst of literary inspiration one cool Sunday afternoon in October three and a half years ago, since when it had appeared frequently in the gamier men’s magazines, the loonier women’s magazines, and the more tolerant writer’s magazines. And didn’t the stories come in. Short stories combining two or three recent television shows, novels imitating 1960 paperback originals, articles on fluoridation and Reinhard Heydrich, film scripts about people inadvertently taking LSD, poems about sunsets, novelettes about a young girl’s first sexual experience (“awakening,” in the language of the authors), TV scripts about youth gangs terrorizing subways—oh, the stories came in, right enough. Everybody in America, it seemed, had glared at the TV set and said, “I can write better than that.” It was amazing how many of them were wrong.

  As a hustle, and except for the reading involved, the Zachary George Literary Agency was Class A. It still wasn’t The Law, but it was nice. Very nice, and very profitable, and actually legal. And the best part was that Mel was now a dignified Professional Man, just like any attorney or doctor or dentist or CPA. He was a Literary Agent.

  Within a year, so many hopeful writers had sent in so much hopeless crap that Mel expanded out of his midtown convenience address and his Queens closet full of letterhead stationery into an actual two-room office on Varick Street in Manhattan, with a good-looking secretary-receptionist named Ralphi Durant. If it weren’t for all the garbage he had to read, life would be perfect (He didn’t read every word, of course. He’d skip through each submission just enough to get the idea, then send it back with one or another of his stock letters about how your story showed real promise and do send in more of your work. With more of your money.)

  But the reading did get grim after a while. It was affecting Mel’s digestion, it was making him cranky, it was making him cringe every time the TV was on. It began to look as though progressive brainpoisoning would bring an untimely finish to Zachary George’s career. Then, midway through his second year of operation, Mel suddenly found the solution, in the person of Ralphi’s boyfriend, a fellow named Ethelred Marx who was a poet, and who was so stoned all the time that his ears steamed, like sewer gratings in the early morning. Ethelred wanted nothing from life but enough cash money to keep himself clothed, sheltered, and bombed while he worked on his projected twelve-million line epic about the American railroads. (He’d been stuck for the last three years trying to find a rhyme for “parallel.”) Within Ethelred’s gangly corpus, however, lay the remnants of a Rhodes scholar, Guggenheim Fellow, and Ph.D. in American Lit, and it turned out he was the perfect reader for the Zachary George Literary Agency; his zonked mind absorbed all those stories and novels with a Buddha-like receptive wonder, and his letters of response—freely adapting Mel’s stock paragraphs—were marvels of erudition, insight, bullshit, and weird linkages.

  Not trusting the strange aromas that seemed to hang around Ethelred all the time, Mel signed a lease on a one-room office next to his present two rooms, and that was where Ethelred these days did his reading and his letter-writing and his freaking-out. (Strange noises came from Ethelred, too, sometimes.) Ralphi continued to fend off the amateurs in the outer room of the main office, and Mel spent his days at his desk in the inner room, where he was secretly—even Angela didn’t know about this—working on a novel. (One of the early submissions had had an idea in it that Mel kind of liked, so he’d saved a Xerox of the manuscript and was doing his own version of the story. It was about a girl who kidnaps a psychiatrist to get him to cure her nymphomaniac twin sister, and so far as Mel could see it had best seller written all over it.)

  Which was why this golden-statue thing was such a godsend. Like most writers, Mel felt everything would be okay if he could just get a little money ahead, so he could sit down and really write, without having to worry about anything else. The Literary Agency hustle was doing very well, but it all just seemed to dribble away. The trip to Israel had been expensive, the trip to Rome had been expensive, and in between Angela could always find domestic ways to
be expensive. No matter how quickly Mel’s income increased, his outgo seemed to increase at the same pace. With a quarter million dollars, though, he could leave Ralphi and Ethelred in charge of the agency, move into a secluded cottage down in Puerto Rico or somewhere, and really write.

  Driving northeast across Connecticut, in the wake of the road hog in the maroon Cadillac, Mel hunched over the steering wheel and wondered if it was considered ethical for a Literary Agent to peddle his own stuff.

  SIMULTANEOUSLY …

  Jerry was parking the station wagon next to a fireplug on West End Avenue when a shoe bounced off the hood. “What?” he demanded, and glared all around, like any true New Yorker. His expression became clouded when a gray cardigan sweater with leather patches on the sleeves and a crumpled half-pack of filter Mores in the little pocket on the right-hand side spread itself like a despairing widow over the windshield. “Well, son of a bitch,” Jerry said, and, “Wait a damn minute.” And he stepped out of the car to a veritable rain of haberdashery.

  This was no place for a man without a hard-hat. Skipping through the T-shirts and sweatpants, he trotted across the sidewalk and ducked into the vestibule at number 237. A large gray stone building, it was half a block wide and a dozen stories high, filled with high-ceilinged apartments featuring interesting wall moldings in which the cockroaches bred. There was the usual West Side-style Early Tile Revival decor in the vestibule, in contrasting black black and gray white, with the usual Brass Array addition of rank upon rank of doorbells.

  Jerry looked for the name “Harwood” among the doorbells, and finally found it next to the button marked 7K. Fine. He took out his Bankamericard, planning to slide it down between the door and the frame, to force the bolt back and unlock the door, and then he noticed the metal slat screwed into place along the edge of the doorframe, blocking the space he needed to get at.

  Well, hell. Now what?

  He was still standing there, credit card in hand, when the door was abruptly yanked open and a good-looking but grimly angry girl stalked out, carrying two suitcases. She brushed by Jerry without a glance and marched on out to the street.

  Jerry moved fast, and got a hand on the swiftly closing door before it could snick all the way shut. With a glance over his shoulder at the girl—who was kicking her way through drifts of jockey shorts—he entered the building and made his way to the seventh floor.

  There was no sound behind the metal door of 7K. Pausing there, Jerry looked up and down the hall, and saw off to his right a door marked Service. Service? Going down there, opening that door, he found a grubby gray-painted stairwell, with a landing full of cartons, stacks of newspapers, brooms, and a tricycle missing one wheel. Also the back doors to four apartments: 7J, 7K, 7L, 7M.

  “Right” He stepped over several cartons to ring the door-bell at 7K. When nothing happened he rang again, and still nothing happened, so he was already in the process of slipping the Bankamericard in next to the door—no damn metal slat here, anyway—when a male voice called out from inside, “Who is it?”

  “Uh.” Jerry pulled the card back, slipped it into his shirt pocket, and in a loud confident voice he cried out, “Maint’-nince.”

  “Is something wrong?” And this time Jerry noticed the voice had a strange hesitant quality to it, a sort of fluttery nervousness.

  Jerry’s own voice remained loud and confident: “Trouble widda plumbin.”

  “One minute, please.”

  Waiting, Jerry looked around at the junk out here, and saw leaning against a stack of newspapers an old red rubber plunger with a wooden handle. Picking, it up, he held it over his shoulder like a bindlestiff.

  Meantime, several locks and bolts and chains had been rattling and popping on the other side of the door, followed by a brief but bewildering silence. What now? Jerry was about to shout again when the voice, sounding much farther away, called, “Come in!”

  Something was screwy here. Holding the plunger in front of himself like a club, Jerry reached out and turned the doorknob and pushed.

  The door opened. It eased back in a slow curve, showing more and more of a small cluttered kitchen full of white appliances, off-white paint on wooden cabinets, white tile walls, gray-white vinyl floor and a rectangular kitchen table with green wooden legs and a white metal top. Color was furnished by the many boxes, bottles, cans, plates, cups, pots, bowls, plastic bags, and twisties lying around on all the available flat surfaces.

  But the interesting thing about the room was, it was empty. Frowning, peering cautiously into the dead space behind the open door, Jerry advanced pace by pace into the room and it just went on being empty. Now holding the plunger in both hands like a baseball bat, he stopped shy of the table and said, “Hello?”

  “Excuse me,” said the familiar voice.

  It was like Alice in Wonderland. Jerry looked to his right, and a head was peering through an almost closed doorway across the room. Only the head and the fingers of one hand showed, and both were bony. The expression on the head’s face seemed uncertain, tentative, unsure of everything including itself; it featured very highly raised eyebrows. It appeared to be male.

  Jerry, partly in the character of the maintenance man and partly expressing his own curiosity, said, “What’s up, Mac?”

  The head said, “Would you like to earn ten dollars?”

  People don’t throw money away for no reason at all. Doubly suspicious, Jerry advanced across the room toward the doorway and the head, saying, “What’s goin’ on here? What’s with you?”

  The fingers abruptly extended into an entire arm, stretched out rigidly toward Jerry with the palm up, like a traffic cop stopping a line of traffic. “Stay right there!” cried the head, and the panic in his voice echoed itself in a great wigwagging of his eyebrows.

  Jerry leaned forward, peering. The arm had no sleeves on it. “Say, you,” he said. “Are you naked?”

  “I want to talk to you about that,” said the head.

  “So,” said Jerry. “Earn ten bucks, huh?” Grasping the plunger near the rubber end, he whacked the handle end into his own palm. “I’ll give you ten bucks,” he promised, and advanced.

  “You misunderstand!” wailed the head, and the palm churned back and forth at Jerry as though to erase him from the kitchen. Then, as Jerry continued to advance, head and arm both abruptly disappeared and the door slammed. Or it would have slammed, if it hadn’t been a swinging door. Instead of slamming, it coughed, made a faint attempt to open in Jerry’s direction, and came to a stop.

  Jerry slapped it open again with his own palm, marching through into a long high-ceilinged living room just in time to see a tall, skinny bare-ass guy duck through another doorway and slam that door. Which did slam, and which apparently also locked, judging from the click that followed.

  Alice in Wonderland. Following the White Rabbit. Jerry strode across the room, intending to kick open this next door and see what the Naked Rabbit did after that, but midway two things brought him to a stop. The first was the memory of all that clothing raining down onto West End Avenue, and the second was the smell of marijuana.

  Ah? Ah, there it was, the remnant of a joint smoldering in an African-looking ceramic ashtray next to a black leather chair. So Jerry had misunderstood. This wasn’t some misplaced men’s room masher, it was a rich radical-chic bleeding-heart liberal getting smashed on grass and throwing all his clothes out the window.

  And the wife? Mr. and Mrs. Charles S. Harwood. Was she around here somewhere, too, also stoned out of her mind and out of her clothes? Jerry tried to remember if any of the garments descending from the sky had seemed feminine.

  Meantime, Harwood was calling again, through this locked door, explaining at great length what Jerry had just figured out for himself, except that he didn’t say he’d thrown his clothes out, he said there’d been an “accident,” all his clothing had “fallen” out.

  Jerry ignored him, because in glancing around the living room he had suddenly spotted something familiar in
the fireplace. Going over there, he went down on one knee and picked up a definite fragment of a Dancing Aztec Priest. The right hand, with a remnant of wrist.

  There were more fragments here. Enough for one statue, or two? Jerry rooted in all corners of the fireplace, pulling shreds and pieces out onto the hearth, and when he was finished he was sure it was only one. The Harwoods had received two statues at lunch today, and apparently the husband while smashed had smashed this one. So where was the other?

  Harwood’s voice had changed by now, becoming more plaintive: “Are you there?”

  Jerry didn’t bother to answer. Instead, he made a quick search, and when he’d satisfied himself that the living room contained no Dancing Aztec Priest other than the one on the hearth, who would dance no more, he went back to the kitchen and repeated the search there. Still nothing.

  He returned to the living room as Harwood was just tentatively creeping out, extending an exploratory naked toe. Seeing Jerry, he yelped and shot back inside, slamming the door and locking it with another click.

  But that was the only place left to search, so Jerry went over, lifted one foot, and kicked the door next to the knob with the flat bottom of his shoe. Inside, Harwood yipped like a spaniel.

  It took three kicks to pop the lock, and Harwood yipped each time. When the door at last did jerk open, Jerry saw Harwood scooting into a closet, pulling the door shut behind himself.

  Good place for him. Jerry took the ordinary skeleton key from the inner keyhole of the door he’d just forced, crossed this cluttered bedroom, and locked Harwood in the closet Then he searched the bedroom and bathroom, and damn if there still wasn’t any sign of the other statue.