Dancing Aztecs

by Donald E. Westlake

  “I was getting that impression.”

  “If something happened and they didn’t get their shipment,” Corella said, “their whole shipment, you and me, we’d both be in big trouble.”

  “We would?”

  “They’d get sore at both of us.” Corella gestured at the room. “Now, I see you got a nice house here, a nice family, a nice business in New York, you don’t want to—”

  “You’re not from New York, are you?”

  Corella frowned. “What?”

  “Jersey, I’d say.” Beemiss nodded to himself. “Connected with the docks, maybe, is that where your friends are?”

  “You don’t want to know my friends,” Corella said.

  “The question is, do I want your friends to know my friends?”

  “I don’t get that”

  “You want me to give you a list, isn’t that it, of all the people who got statues?”

  “No way.” Corella was offended. “You want me to shlep all over the city? You got a nice office in New York, secretaries; tomorrow morning you put a secretary to work on the phone, call everybody, bring in their statues. Then you turn them over to me.”

  “I assume you’re talking about cash in advance.”

  “First thing tomorrow morning,” Corella said, “you’ll have the cash on your desk. What time you get to the office?”

  “Usually around ten.”

  “Ten o’clock, four grand in cash on your desk.”

  “Four?” Beemiss looked surprised, but Corella was sure the look was fake. “I’m sorry, did I ever agree to four?”

  “You want a little more?” Corella shrugged. “My friends won’t quibble.”

  “I should think, for sixteen statues,” Beemiss said, “sixteen thousand dollars is a more sensible number.”

  “On the other hand,” Corella said, “my friends won’t stand around and get held up either.”

  Beemiss shrugged. “You know your friends better than I do. At what point does quibbling become holding up?”

  “We’ll split the difference. Call it eight thousand.”

  “The way I learned math,” Beemis said, “splitting the difference between four and sixteen is ten.”

  “Half of sixteen is eight Take eight.”

  “And on the other hand,” Beemiss said, “maybe I don’t want the deal at all. Maybe we’d all rather just keep the statues. They do, after all, have a certain sentimental significance.”

  “Listen to me,” Corella said, and now his effort was to combine toughness with fellow feeling. “You and your friends don’t want those statues. Please take my word for it For the sake of your happiness and your health and your well-being you don’t want those statues. You want some other statues.”

  “Twelve,” Beemiss said.

  Corella shook his head. “No.”

  Again Beemiss shrugged, this time having nothing to say. Clearly this was not the first negotiating session he’d ever attended.

  Corella waited, trying to decide on the right balance of threat and payment, and finally nodded and said, “Take ten, then. And be happy I’m such an easygoing guy.”

  “Fine,” Beemiss said. “I’ll accept ten And replacements.”

  “Replacements?” Corella spread his hands. “So go get some.”

  “The same. Give us the shipment your friends got by mistake.”

  A complication; Corella wasn’t immediately certain how to deal with it “I don’t think we could do that,” he said.

  “Then get me another shipment.”

  “We want our shipment now.”

  “Fine,” Beemiss said. “Tomorrow morning you place an order for sixteen more statues, to be delivered to my office in New York, and you send the order slip over with the cash.”

  Corella was becoming more and more troubled. That clown from Ecuador had arranged the first shipment. Corella had no idea how to go about getting more copies. “You do it,” he said. “How much were the damn things?”

  “Eighteen apiece, wholesale. That’s two hundred eighty-eight dollars for sixteen.”

  Corella looked, and felt, bitter. “That’s a nice profit you’re making.”

  “It wasn’t my mistake,” Beemiss pointed out.

  “All right” Corella said. “In the morning you’ll get cash money, ten thousand two hundred eighty-eight dollars. I’ll call you in the afternoon.”

  “I didn’t catch your name.”

  “Mister Kane. And while I’m here, why don’t I pick up your statue?”

  Beemiss raised a slightly surprised eyebrow. “Before the cash is delivered?”

  “All right, all right” Turning to Earl, Corella said, “Give him six and a half.”

  Which meant that Earl, who until now had kept his good profile firmly toward Beemiss, would now have to show himself full-face. Grumbling, looking sullen, he dug out his wallet, peeled off four hundred dollar bills and five fifties, and slapped them into Beemiss’ hand. Beemiss, a faint smile on his face as he looked at Earl’s black eye, said a quietly ironic, “Thank you.”

  “The statue,” Corella said.

  “It’s upstairs.”

  Beemiss left the room, and both Corella and Earl followed. “I’ll be right down,” Beemiss said.

  “That’s okay.”

  So up the stairs they went, all three of them, and along the hall, and into Beemiss’ study, where Mel Bernstein (also known as Zachary George) was walking across the carpet toward the open window, the Dancing Aztec Priest clutched in his left hand.

  IN THE MEANTIME …

  Jerry put his credit card away and walked into the Fayley-Spang residence. David Fayley and Kenneth Spang, both members of the Open Sports Committee, turned out to share this apartment on West 87th Street, in another bulky old apartment building like the one housing the Harwoods. A short hallway flanked by small abstracts and arty black-and-white photographs led to a living room bristling with artifacts. A wooden African fertility goddess with sixteen breasts dominated one corner, near a sleek grouping of black stereo components on dark walnut shelves. A wall-hanging in predominantly red and blue depicted the arrival of a well-hung barbarian at some effete court. Chrome cube end tables flanked the maroon sofa. Spider plants festooned the windows. Some sort of copper implement, suggesting for some reason the Pennsylvania Dutch, stood among more obscure items on a long black wooden table behind the sofa.

  It wasn’t like the living rooms Jerry knew. The Harwood living room had also been somewhat grander, or artier, than the rooms where Jerry spent his time in Queens, but it had at least maintained the normal pattern, a sofa and two arm-chairs all grouped to face the television set A floor lamp at one end of the sofa, a table lamp at the other. The style had been different—flexible chrome floor lamps were not to be found in Teresa’s or Angela’s living room—but the substance was the same.

  Here, though, everything was different. The sofa, squarely in the middle of the room, faced nothing at all, unless that wall of shelves—crowded with books, figurines, small framed pictures, mementoes, curios, forget-me-nots, whatnots, and thingamabobs, artfully arranged—could be thought to take the place of TV. There was, in fact, no television set in the room at all, nor any armchairs. A few wooden chairs tucked into free spots along the walls could presumably be moved forward to make conversational groupings, but the apparent idea of this room was that it would contain two people who would sit together on the sofa and—what? Talk? Read? Stare at the shelves?

  The suggestion of a different category of life, an utterly strange approach, was so strong that it briefly stopped Jerry in his tracks. Surely Fayley and Spang were queers, but that wasn’t the point; being queer had nothing to do with TVs and sofa placement. Human beings have found a variety of ways to live, a fact most people have scant reason to notice. Taken by this idea, surprised and in a way made curious by it, Jerry stood still in the middle of the room, forgetting for a minute the search for the golden statue while he studied the things around him, trying to work out the attit
udes, the assumptions, that had led to this other way.

  He was distracted from these musings by the sudden appearance in the opposite doorway of a slender, languid young man who strolled into the room as though the presence of strangers in here were simply another part of this different approach to life. As maybe they were.

  Jerry’s first reaction—startled surprise and apprehension—was smothered by his second reaction—a cultural hostility to homosexuals—which gave way almost immediately to yet a third, different kind of surprise, a kind of comic wonder, when he realized this fellow really did accept Jerry’s existence as natural, not at all out of the way. With a little smile, a casual wave of the hand, he nodded at Jerry and said, “Well, hello.”

  “Hello,” Jerry said. Punch him? Make a run for it? Bluff it out? Bluff what out?

  “I’m David. Kenny’s friend.”

  Jerry pointed at himself. “Jerry.”

  Rather more than ordinarily casual, David made another of his waving gestures and said, “I assume Kenny’s taking care of you?”

  “I guess so.” It was hard to know what David thought was happening here, and so doubly hard to figure out the right answers to questions. Also, Jerry had just noticed that the calm casual facade of David was marred by very red, very puffy eyes. David had been crying. Was David a nut case?

  “Do feel right at home,” David was saying, with an almost imperceptible break in his voice. Suggesting, perhaps, that his heart was also breaking?

  “Thanks,” Jerry said. He was sure by now the statue wasn’t in this room, though most other statues from human history were.

  “Is Kenny getting you a drink?”

  What was the answer to that one? Frowning toward the doorway through which David had entered—would the unseen Kenny enter at any second with a gun in his hand?— Jerry hopelessly said, “A drink?”

  “You mean he isn’t?” David shook his head with a kind of fussy petulance, then offered a long-suffering sigh. “Well, then, I suppose it’s up to me to maintain the hospitality of the house. What would you like?”

  “To drink?” It was hard to follow this conversation. “Sure, what the hell,” Jerry said, and shrugged. “You got a beer?”

  “Beer?” Doubt touched David’s brow, also perhaps a touch of snobbery. “I’ll see,” he said, and went away, back through the same doorway.

  Jerry was still trying to decide whether or not to follow him, give the rest of the apartment a quick search, when the apartment door opened behind him and another one came in, putting his keys back in his pocket.

  Kenny Spang; no doubt of it A painfully skinny black man with a huge fuzzy Afro, he gave Jerry a look of combined surprise and irony, saying, “And what have we here?”

  “You must be Kenny,” Jerry said, since he might as well go on behaving as though he belonged here.

  “So I must,” Kenny said. “And who must you be?”

  “Jerry. David’s in the kitchen.”

  “Is he?” A very knowing amusement glittered in Kenny’s eyes.

  “Getting me a beer.”

  “How good of David. But then, David is such a good person.”

  “Sure,” Jerry said, and David himself came back, with a tall pilsner glass full of beer.

  “Well, well,” Kenny said, and watched the glass as David handed it to Jerry.

  The truth would have to come out very soon now. Jerry drank beer as quickly as he could.

  David gave his roommate a wounded look. “It’s good of you to come back,” he said, his misery showing through his attempt at unconcern.

  “Rather too early, I see.”

  David showed such serene languor that he looked boneless. “Jerry and I have just been having a chat while waiting for you.”

  “Waiting for me. That’s rich.”

  If Jerry was going to search the rest of the apartment, he’d better do it now, before these two realized the mistake they were making. Putting the empty glass down, he grinned at them both and said, “Well, you know what they say. You don’t buy beer, you just pay rent on it. Where’s the head?”

  Both of his hosts seemed taken aback by his manner, but it was David who recovered first, pointing at the doorway and saying, “Through the bedroom.”

  “Fine.”

  The television set was in the bedroom, at the foot of the double bed. So were the statues, both of them on a high glass shelf over a table with an expensive-looking chess set laid out on it While scratching the bottoms of both statues with a key, to see if it was plaster or gold beneath the paint, Jerry listened to the conversation continuing in the living room. There was a smirk within Kenny’s voice, hurt outrage in David’s.

  KENNY: “Well, I can’t say I care much for your taste.”

  DAVID: “My taste! You’re one to talk!”

  KENNY: “It happens I know what I’m looking for, unlike some others I could mention.”

  DAVID [Wistfully]: “I have been looking all my life for a rational love.”

  KENNY: “You choose unusual places to look.”

  DAVID: “I’ll certainly agree with that.”

  KENNY: “Well, I couldn’t interrupt you two for the world. I’ll find somewhere to go.”

  DAVID: “Don’t you dare! If you leave here, you’ll take him with you.”

  KENNY: “Losing your nerve, sweetie?”

  DAVID: “Well, you’ll never lose yours. But if you walk out and leave that creature here I’ll never forgive you. I mean that, Kenny, I’m very serious about that”

  KENNY: “Giving him to me, are you?” [Tinkling laughter] “If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the park.”

  DAVID: “Oh, you’re just vicious. Vicious!”

  Plaster, and plaster. Putting the statues back, Jerry returned to the living room on the second “vicious,” to find the roommates confronting one another like a pair of cats. Jerry gave them his cheerful unaware grin, saying, “Well, listen, fellas. Sounds like you two got a lot to talk about, so I won’t keep you. Thanks for the beer. See you around.”

  “Oh, I’m sure,” Kenny said, while David struggled in vain to look unconcerned.

  “Well,” Jerry said to himself in the elevator going down. “Whadaya think of that?”

  AFTER DINNER …

  Wally Hintzlebel, swimming pool salesman and afternoon adulterer, was one of those people who grow up in the shadow of New York City without ever being a part of it In the Long Island community where he’d grown up, many of his school friends had had fathers who worked in the city, and during his teens kids he knew would occasionally take the train to Manhattan, but Wally never hung around with that kind of crowd. He hung around with a local crowd. He was a small-town boy, surrounded by other small-town youngsters, and the fact of Manhattan upthrust on the horizon meant nothing to him.

  In adult life, his swimming pool selling would occasionally bring him over the city line into Queens or Brooklyn, but so far as Manhattan was concerned this was only the third experience of his life. The first, nine years ago when he was fifteen, had been on the occasion of his mother’s birthday. Having saved sufficient money, Wally had presented her with tickets to a Broadway musical, plus dinner in a midtown restaurant Though Mom had kept saying how wonderful it all was, he’d known from the very beginning it was a mistake, and one he’d never repeat. Her strained smile in the grubby noisy train had told him, with no words from her, just how difficult she found this mode of transportation. In the restaurant, her assurances that everything was delicious had alternated with her repeated questionings of the waiter, wanting to know the ingredients of all the dishes. She kept tasting things and looking far off, as though trying to hear a distant bell, then saying, “What an unusual taste.” As for the musical, full of nearly naked girls and much boisterous singing, Mom had patted his arm afterward and said, “I’m sure it’s a wonderful show.”

  The second Manhattan experience, five years later, had been during one of Mom’s rare absences from home. Aunt Leah, Mom’s only sister, was dyin
g in Springfield, Illinois, and Mom had gone out there for a week, four days of bedside waiting, and then the funeral. Wally drove her to LaGuardia Airport for the flight to Springfield, then got back into the car after her departure, suddenly realizing that home was empty, nobody was there; a nervous, expectant tingling had all at once suffused his body, like a sunset blossoming over a western sky. Driving from the airport out to Grand Central Parkway, he came to the point where he could either turn east toward home or west toward the city, and like the trivet on a Ouija board the car suddenly jerked itself westward. What could Wally do but go along?

  In its way, this second visit had been even worse than the first. After driving about hopelessly through two hours of late-afternoon traffic jam, knowing no one, having no destination, Wally had settled at last in a hokey tourist bar off Broadway, where he had become very drunk and very sick. Also, the police impounded his car, and he had to spend the night in a hotel room, alternating nightmares with mad dashes to the bathroom. It had cost fifty dollars to get the car back the next day, and Wally had spent the rest of his mother’s absence safely in front of the television set in his own living room.

  And now he was back for the third time (with a break for dinner), but in this instance Manhattan meant nothing at all. If the trail of the golden statue led to Alaska, to the Congo, to the rings of Saturn, that is where Wally would go. Manhattan was a backdrop only, it had no place in his thoughts.

  Which meant he didn’t realize until he got to 29 West 45th Street, the Bud Beemiss address, just how unlikely that was to be a private residence. He drove there hurriedly from the Midtown Tunnel, dinner (chicken, peas, baked potato, cherry pie, coffee) roiling in his stomach, and he visualized himself in the Beemiss apartment, clutching the electric coolness of gold, but the instant he saw the building he knew what had happened. Beemiss’s office, not his home. And nobody here at this hour.

  Blinking, churning, Wally scrabbled in the glove compartment for the list of names and addresses. Beemiss no good, somebody else, somebody else.

  Oscar Russell Green, 291 West 127th Street That had to be a home address. Also, Green was supposed to be the leader of the Open Sports Committee, so why wouldn’t he have a full list of the membership?