Dancing Aztecs

by Donald E. Westlake

  And so he trembled at the brink of his third marriage. The prospect of finding his kind of woman outside his own class was overpowering. A tall, self-controlled, blonde woman who was not sized like muslin; was it possible? “I trust you’ll enjoy my—my car,” he said, and the boldness of his hesitation frightened him and yet thrilled him; already this girl was bringing him out of himself.

  “Just so it gets me there,” she said.

  “You’ll be staying in California?” Instant fantasies, instant scenarios, formed in his brain.

  “Forever,” she said.

  “My own stay won’t be quite that long, unfortunately,” he said, while reminding himself that he would have reached California by the time she got there, and that she would be delivering the car directly to him. “I’ll only be a bit over a year,” he said. “I’m going for my sabbatical.” And yet, at the same time, a part of him despised him for trying to impress this creature; “sabbatical,” indeed. Dropping that word into the conversation, knowing she wouldn’t understand it, anticipating the inevitable question.

  Which did not, for some reason, ensue. “That’s nice,” she merely said, and nothing more.

  Van Dinast continued his pursuit. “And you? Are you going out for any specific reason?”

  “To get away from my cocksucker of a husband,” she said.

  Van Dinast recoiled. Passion, yes; vulgarity, never. “Well,” well,” he said. “Shall we go down and look at the car?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  In the front hall was some monstrous black piece of luggage, or something; it reminded Van Dinast of monks in Bergman films. “My harp,” the girl said, and wheeled it out to the hall.

  Riding down in the elevator toward the garage, alone with the girl (and her harp) in this small chrome box, Van Dinast found his interest growing again as the immediacy of the girl’s vulgarity waned. And wasn’t vulgarity, in the larger scene, merely indicative of life? “I’ve always been fond of music,” he said, smiling at the black-encased harp.

  The girl shrugged. “It’s okay,” she said.

  They left the elevator at the parking garage in the basement, where the XJ12 slouched in its accustomed slot. A great silver-gray beast of a car, it was Jaguar’s four-door sedan combined with the Jaguar sports car’s V-12 engine, a big roomy powerful machine, an elegant monster. A beauty.

  Even the girl was impressed. “Very nice,” she said. “Very nice.”

  “Get behind the wheel,” he suggested. “The seat is infinitely adjustable.”

  But first she had forms to deal with, a great sheaf of them out of her purse. The car had to be gone over for dents and scratches and tears. They both had to sign, here and here. And then, finally, she got behind the wheel. Van Dinast, after democratically closing the door behind her, trotted around and slid in on the passenger side.

  Although the car was English, it was the export model, with the steering wheel on the left. The girl was devoting her attention to adjusting the seat, studying the controls, fiddling with the rear-view mirror. Van Dinast, smiling in utter infatuation at her clean profile, said, “It is a beauty, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is,” she said, without interruption of her tasks.

  “I care a great deal about beautiful things,” Van Dinast said, and put his hand on her near knee.

  She gave him a cold and dangerous look, “Watch it,” she said.

  He didn’t watch it. God help him, he couldn’t watch it He was as helpless as his grandfather had been, when the fourteen-year-old Polynesians had climbed over the rail of the ship. “Bring me that one,” the old bastard had said. “To my cabin.” And the same blood flowed through the hand that now tightened its clutch on the girl’s knee. “My dear,” Van Dinast said, his voice suddenly husky, “I hope you don’t think I’m some cheap masher. From the instant I saw you—”

  She rabbit-punched his wrist. “Get out of there!”

  He felt nothing; his hand remained clamped where it was. “Give me an opportunity,” he begged. “Get to know me. We’ll have lunch!”

  She dug nails into the back of his hand. “Goddam it, stop!”

  The Polynesians had also been squirmers. Van Dinast’s other hand shot forward, cupping the back of her dear head, the soft straight blonde hair, the curve of the skull; that small fragile bowl full of thought and memory, emotion and desire.

  And a mind of its own. How she squirmed, muttering fresh vulgarities, as inexorably he brought her forward, her beautiful face toward his adoring lips. His trembling right hand slid up her cool round thigh, his determined left hand brought her closer, closer—

  And she bit his nose.

  “Nga!” he said, which is the way a person says Ow while his nose is being bitten. Both hands left her utterly desirable person and flew protectively toward his face. His eyes had watered, a stinging sensation was spreading raylike through his cheeks.

  But the girl, rather than press her advantage by continuing her physical assault, made the mistake of turning away, searching for the door latch in this unfamiliar car. Van Dinast, still smarting and blinking but in no way deterred, laid both hands on her again, and brought her back.

  This was not the sequence he’d had in mind, but the strength of her opposition had escalated his approach from compliments and lunch offers almost immediately into the realm of physical dominance. Clutching at her with both hands, roiling her blouse and skirt, parrying her blows with elbows and forearms, he was panting like a miler and gasping withal, “Just have lunch! Give me a chance! Get to know me!” And meanwhile his hand, getting to know her, was inside her blouse, clamped to her braless breast.

  “I’ll scream!” she screamed, and then did so. Her nails tried for his face, but had to be content with his arms.

  He felt nothing, he was dissuaded by nothing. Hadn’t he had this same scene with both his wives, more than once?

  There are class differences. Neither of his wives, with all their opportunities, had ever abruptly grabbed his genitals and twisted. “YYYYYYYYYYY!!!” he said, and when next he could sit up straight she was outside the car, adjusting her clothing and looking very angry.

  In small and rheumatic movements he left the car. She watched him, glaring, across the silver-gray hood. “You keep your distance, you son of a bitch,” she said.

  “No, no,” he assured her, trying for a smile through his grimace. “You’re right, you’re absolutely right. That was shocking behavior on my part. Shocking.”

  “You’re goddam right.” Her bag was on the hood. Continuing to watch him, she was withdrawing from it materials of restoration; a crumpled Kleenex, a comb, a Wipe ’n Dri.

  “I’m a very lonely man, Miss Harwood,” he said, having seen her name on the form he signed. “Usually, I’m really a very civilized man. Please believe that.”

  “You’re another faculty masher,” she told him, and ran the comb through her hair.

  The phrase, such an obvious class contradiction, startled him, so that he repeated it. “Faculty masher? Where on earth did you pick up an idea like that?”

  “You aren’t the first one I’ve seen,” she said, “but you’re the worst. Usually they have to get drunk at a party first, and tell you how the head of the department doesn’t understand them.”

  “Good God!” he said. “Are you a faculty wife?”

  “Not any more,” she said.

  Terror trembled the hands he rested on the hood of the car. “At what school?” (Not, he prayed to Henry VIII’s God, let it not be NYU.)

  “Columbia,” she said.

  “Columbia.” And he was thinking, Harwood, Harwood. “Oh dear. I believe I may have met your husband.”

  “You act like you trained with him.”

  “Oh, I am sorry. Mrs. Harwood, I—”

  “Mizz,” she said.

  “Yes, of course. Mizz Harwood, I hope you’ll believe me when I say I lost control for just a moment, and I will not lose control again.”

  “Not around me, you won’t,
” she said.

  “I hope, Mizz Harwood, I hope you’ll still take the car, and—well, and just behave as though none of this had ever happened.”

  He could see her thinking it over. In fact, she told him her thoughts. “What I’d really like to do,” she said, “is go straight to the nearest cop, and spread you all over page three of the Daily News.”

  “Oh, Mizz Harwood.” One hand fluttered in air, asking for sympathy.

  “But,” she said, “I’m determined to get out of town today, and this is the only way I can do it.”

  “Oh, Mizz Harwood!”

  “But you,” she said, and pointed a finger at him. “You get out of here. Go away, back into that elevator.”

  “Are you sure you understand all the controls? Have you driven this sort—”

  “Go,” she said.

  “I give you my word of honor, I would nev—”

  “Either you go or I go.”

  “I’ll go,” he said. “But I do hope you can believe this was only an aberration, that it could never be repeated.”

  “Fine, fine,” she said. “Go.”

  “Yes. I’m going.” He backed away a few paces. “Um—have a—have a pleasant trip.”

  She merely glowered.

  So at last be did depart. And, riding up in the elevator, he was thinking about their next scheduled meeting, in California. Surely she would be over her mad by then. He would be civilized, restrained. (After all, he now did have a more accurate picture of her, as a faculty wife, someone toward whom one’s behavior should be less earthy than toward an ordinary woman chauffeur.) They would have a common topic of conversation by then—his car—and surely she would accept a drink.

  With a sleeping pill in it.

  Make it two.

  ACROSS TOWN …

  When Madge came out, in response to Bobbi’s honking, Bobbi could see the expression of awe that came over her face. And why not; it was really an incredible car, even with the back seat full of harp, jutting up like a black iceberg.

  Sliding in on the passenger side, Madge said, “Holy cow, what a car!”

  “Travel in style, that’s what I always say.”

  “Man or woman?”

  “Man.”

  “You shouldn’t have taken the car,” Madge said. “You should have stayed there and married him.”

  “Not that one,” Bobbi said, and as they proceeded across Waverly Place toward Seventh Avenue she told Madge all about the attempted rape. And she remained unaware of the gasping man running along the sidewalk in her wake.

  After Hugh Van Dinast had finally retired, she had spent a few minutes familiarizing herself with the Jaguar, and had then loaded the harp, and driven it out to the street. (She had been baffled at first by the closed garage door at the top of the ramp, until she noticed the box-with-button over her head, attached to the driver’s sun visor. One push of that button, and the door had obediently slid up out of the way.)

  Ninth Street being one-way, she’d had no choice but to turn west; but that was the direction she wanted, anyway. Driving to the corner, she waited for the light to change, while behind her a man she didn’t notice searched frantically and vainly for a cab. Then the light did change and she turned left, traveling one block to the red light at Eighth Street. (The unobserved man trotted after her, spinning in circles in search of a cab.)

  The Eighth Street light turned green, and Bobbi drove south the last remaining block of Fifth Avenue to Washington Square, where she turned right (that light was green) and went the long block with Washington Square Park on her left until she came to the red light at MacDougal Street. (The unnoticed man pelted along behind her like Jack running for his beanstalk.)

  The light turned green. Bobbi steered the Jaguar forward half a block (how the following man ran!), then pulled to the curb in front of Madge’s building and honked the horn three times fast, the prearranged signal. (How the following man sprawled across a parked car, gasping!) And now Bobbi and Madge were heading for Buffalo Roadhouse for lunch.

  First to Sixth Avenue, where the light was red. (The following man walked after them, conserving his strength and still looking for an empty cab.) Bobbi’s recital of her encounter reached the basement, and then the light turned green and she continued west, across Sixth Avenue and along the next block of Waverly Place, which was just as narrow as the preceding block but which was for some reason two-way. Dodging on-coming fenders, Bobbi continued with her story and continued not to see the head bobbing at a corner of her rear-view mirror.

  Waverly Place veers north before joining the spaghettiplate of intersections making up Sheridan Square, where Seventh Avenue is crossed by Christopher Street, Grove Street, Washington Street, and West Fourth Street. In veering, Waverly Place bisects briefly, so that one of the more unusual intersections in Manhattan is that between Waverly Place and Waverly Place.

  At that intersection, Bobbi and her pursuer both took the left fork, and from there turned onto Grove Street, made tangential contact with Sheridan Square, and turned left on Seventh Avenue. Since there was only a stop sign at Grove and Seventh, the following man had to put on a real burst of speed in order to keep the Jaguar in sight. And still there were no empty cabs.

  “That’s terrible!” Madge was saying.

  There are parking meters on this part of Seventh Avenue. Sometimes, there are even open parking spaces. Bobbi drove slowly, looking for one.

  It wasn’t the following man’s idea of slowly. Panting, running, swaying from side to side like the wounded cavalryman bringing news of the Indian attack, he reeled southward on Seventh Avenue, desperate for an empty cab.

  And there it was! Coming down in the left lane, his side of the street, an empty cab, its vacancy light glittering in the sunshine, an empty cab, by God, an empty cab! The following man lurched out into the street, frantically waving his arms, and the cab eased to a stop.

  About to enter the cab, the following man glanced after the Jaguar, and half a block ahead the thing had come to a stop. It was parking? It was parking, backing into a space.

  The cabbie’s window was open. The cabbie was saying, “Well?”

  “Never mind,” said the following man, still panting, and shut the cab door.

  “You again!” yelled the cabbie, for indeed it was he again, a thing that never happens.

  The following man, gasping for breath and holding his side, made his way back to the sidewalk. The women were getting out of the Jaguar, on their way to lunch, after which Bobbi would drive Madge back to her place and pick up her luggage.

  “The next time I see you I’m gonna run you down!” screamed the cabbie. “You know that, don’t you?”

  The following man sat down on the curb and breathed. He didn’t say a word.

  IN THE LURCH …

  (Caption to photo) Mrs. Dorothy Moorwood, local socialite whose charitable interests are well-known throughout the area, greets friends at Hill House, her lavish estate near Palisades Park. Mrs. Moorwood, who has been staying in New York City recently, involved with a charitable concern that she describes as “very close to my heart,” will entertain “a few close friends” at Hill House for the duration of this month, before summering at Cap d’Antibes.

  Acid rock drifted over the greensward, and a naked fat man slept under a tree, an unlit toke stuck in his navel. “Jeepers,” said Wally. “What kind of place is this, anyway?”

  Mel and Wally had left the car out by the public road and had walked through a bit of mosquito-infested woods, and now the house was visible—and audible—across a broad sloping expanse of neatly barbered lawn. Although it was barely five o’clock, every light in the house seemed to be on, and people in all manner of dress and undress could be seen moving about the interior. Others cavorted on a large patio and swimming pool area to the right, and on tennis courts to the left, and also here and there on the lawn. A party was not only in progress, but had obviously been under way for some time, possibly for years.

  Wally
had insisted on bringing along the canvas bag, to carry the statue in once they found it, if it turned out to be the real one, and now he held it up for Mel to see, saying, “We can pretend we’re guests, just arriving.”

  It was Mel’s intention to ditch Wally here, whether or not the Moorwood statue turned out to be the right one. They had come here, in Mel’s car, and Mel had the keys to that car in his pocket, and by the time Wally managed to get himself back to New York the rest of the search should have been completed. Then Wally could go take a flying leap for himself.

  The first step in Mel’s plan was to separate. Then, if he was the one who found the statue, he could simply leave, whereas if Wally found the statue he’d have no choice but to bring it to Mel. Therefore, as they neared the house Mel said, “You take the second floor, I’ll take the first floor.”

  Wally looked dubious. “Shouldn’t we stick together?”

  “In the first place,” Mel said, “shut up. And in the second place, well get done quicker if we separate. There’s other people looking for these statues, you know.”

  “Okay,” Wally said. “Whatever you say.”

  By now they had reached the house, which contained hundreds and hundreds of people, several of them famous, many of them attractive, and some of them personally known to their hostess, who was upstairs at this moment, performing an alternative sex act with a Fender bassist. People seemed to be dressed according to the time of day when they’d joined the party, their apparel ranging from floor-length gowns and formal dinner jackets to bathing suits and denim overalls.

  Parties of this sort never used to exist in the real world, but in the middle sixties trendy movie directors started putting such parties in their movies—it started with trendy English movie directors, actually—and trendy people with money to spend saw these movies and realized they’d been doing everything wrong. No more bridge, no more horseback riding, no more chamber quartets. Certainly no more croquet, no more tennis, no more picnics, no more daytime swimming, no more standing around chatting with a drink in one’s hand. Live rock music, flashing lights (strobes, if possible), people in funny clothes, lots of marijuana, girls with sparkly eye makeup; that’s the ticket.