Sin Hellcat

by Lawrence Block

  Somehow in the course of all this I had managed to get rid of two glasses and one blouse. I took off Jodi’s bra. I have often been a vicarious sort, despite the rather active sex life of which I have boasted in foregoing chapters, and books and movies never fail to arouse me. A story, recounted to me by a beautiful woman, can have an even more erotic effect. Perhaps the profession is partially responsible—when you sell sex night and day, as you do on Mad Ave, you become every jot as suggestible as the rank fools who buy the products you sell.

  Thus, as I stood there listening to Jodi’s little narrative, my profile became somewhat annular in one particular area. And Jodi’s bra went away, and her breasts were warm in my hands.

  “There’s more,” she said.

  “I know there is. It’s under your skirt.”

  “More to the story,” she said. “Don’t you want to hear it, Harvey? It’s kind of interesting.”

  “Well, make it fast.”

  Jodi giggled. I was still holding her breasts and they seemed to be growing in my hands. Maybe flesh expands as it grows warmer, like metal. Another story.

  “So this sloe-eyed dame finished making love to me.” Jodi said “And she got up, and hot-shot took her place. And he made love to me, and then he made love to her.”

  “That’s sort of anticlimactic,” I said, “And no puns intended.”

  “That’s not all.”

  “I think you’re stalling, Jodi.”

  She giggled again, lewdly again. “I’ll make it short,” she said.

  “You already made it long.” I squeezed her breasts. “Long and drawn-out.”

  “The story, I mean. I got dressed, finally, and he gave me a hundred dollars, and I started to leave. And I asked Miss Sloe Eyes if she was coming. I figured we could have a drink somewhere, or talk about this nutty trick, or something.”

  “So did you?”

  “No,” she said. “She stayed with him.”

  “Maybe he wanted her for the night.”

  “He wanted her all the time, Harvey,” she said. “The sloe-eyed one was his wife. His wife, for God’s sake!”

  It might have been a nice story for us to talk about, and to cluck tongues over, or something of the sort. But if you have read this far, you have no doubt gathered there was a strong physical attraction betwixt and between dear Jodi and I, and that we were both rather physical types. And you may have established a pattern in our relationship. And, if this is so, you know very well that we did not sit around and talk about the Rich Bastard and his Dyke Wife.

  You know very well what we did.

  In the morning, which was clear and dry, we had breakfast downstairs in the hotel’s coffee shop. The food was good if not exotic, and the bill of fare seemed divided between American items and German food; Rio itself seemed divided between American tourists and escaped Nazis, and our waiter bore a striking resemblance to Martin Bormann. One never knows.

  Jodi and I had schnitzel Holstein, veal with eggs on it, and I felt only mildly ridiculous ordering the dish in English in a Brazilian restaurant. The coffee was hot and thick and black. There’s an awful lot of it in Brazil, as says the song. But very few Brazilians—just Americans and Germans.

  Everett Whittington (or Everett Christopher, as his passport swore up and down) had flapjacks with maple syrup and a hearty glass of milk. He ate as though food was a new discovery and Jodi beamed at him.

  “This is so nice,” she said.

  “The schnitzel?”

  “No, silly. No, just all of us here. You and me and Ev.”

  “Ev?”

  The moppet beamed at Jodi. And at me. He was sort of a cute little one.

  “I can pretend,” Jodi said. “Do you know what I’m pretending, Harvey?”

  “What?”

  “That we’re married,” she said simply. “We’re a pair of married tourists, off to Brazil on a spree, and Ev is our little boy, and we are all very much in love. Isn’t that a nice pretend?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Isn’t it, Harvey?”

  “It really is,” I said, meaning it. “But couldn’t we call the little tyke something besides Ev? It gets to me.”

  “What’s a tyke?” Everett asked.

  We ignored the question. Jodi smiled at him and patted his hand, and I said, “Why not Rhett?”

  “Rhett?”

  “Sure,” I said. “It’s better than Ev, for God’s good sake.”

  Jodi tested the name on her tongue, deciding that she liked it. “But it doesn’t really matter,” she said. “We have to turn him over to Whittington, damn it. That old bastard.”

  “What’s a bastard?” Everett asked.

  While Jodi tried to tell him what a bastard wasn’t, I thought about Dixon Whittington, the old bastard. Whittington was an executive of some company or other, or had been, until he did the only truly sensible thing in his life and absconded to Brazil with seven hundred thousand dollars of company funds, partly in bearer bonds and the rest in cash. He stopped in Mexico to divorce his wife, then headed to Brazil and married a slut of some sort to make extradition impossible. His wife, scandalized, leaped out a window. Everett—Rhett, damn it—was now half an orphan, and the other half was in Brazil.

  So Dixon Whittington wanted the kid—more because he was a possession than anything else. And, because people with seven hundred thousand dollars can get in contact with almost anyone, he had reached our animalistic friend Al, who swiped the kid and shipped him, via us, to his rightful owner.

  The way Jodi had explained it, it wasn’t kidnapping. A father couldn’t kidnap his own son, not unless the courts had awarded custody to somebody else, and this they had not yet done. But because the U.S. government was rather anxious to bait Papa Whittington into returning to the States, Rhett was not allowed to make the trek to Brazil.

  Thus the deception.

  “It’s a shame,” Jodi said. “I know.”

  “But I guess we have to give him back, Harvey.”

  I looked at Rhett. Never again could I think of him as Everett, and hardly Ev.

  “Son,” I said in fatherly tones, “what does your old man call you?”

  “The little bastard,” he said. “That’s a funny word, isn’t it? Why won’t you tell me what it means?”

  “It’s a term of endearment,” I told him. And to Jodi I said, “You’re right, of course. It’s a damn shame.”

  “Couldn’t we wait awhile?”

  “Not according to instructions.”

  “Today,” Jodi said sadly.

  “Today. This morning, in fact. Pronto. We bundle Rhett into a cab, drop him in the old bastard’s arms, and scram. I think we should start now.”

  “Now?” she said glumly.

  “Now.”

  “Can’t we even—even have another cup of coffee?”

  “Honey, we can drink every cup of coffee in this whole country,” I said. “We can ruin our kidneys stalling around. But sooner or later Mr. Whittington’s seven hundred grand is going to be calling for its mate—or his kid, or whatever; let’s quit trying to push fancy metaphor. We have to give up sometime.” I felt pretty hopeless, all of a sudden.

  We were sadder than hell. We got up from the table, signed a check, left a tip. We walked to the elevator to get Rhett’s suitcase. The moppet walked between us, and each of us held one of his wee little hands.

  “I like you,” said Rhett.

  I swallowed but there was still that lump in my gullet. Ad men are horribly emotional. It’s the kind of work they do, naturally.

  “I like you both,” said Rhett. “And I’m going to live with you forever.”

  I looked at Jodi. She had that tear back, in her eye, and I didn’t even try to wipe it away.

  NINE

  Don’t talk to me about fate. It’s 1946 and you’re offered some IBM stock at seventy percent of market price and you turn it down and today that block is worth about five million dollars more than what you would have had to pay for it, and yo
u try to console yourself by saying it’s fate, that’s the way it goes with fate, you can’t fight fate.

  Phaugh. It ain’t fate, comrade, it’s you. You decide not to buy that stock, you. Nobody twisted your arm. It’s just that you’re an imbecile that’s all.

  But don’t feel bad, brother of mine, don’t feel badedoo, I’m an imbecile, too. We’re all imbeciles, marching along arm in arm together, with Corrigan leading the way. It isn’t the fluke of fate when we make a wrong decision, podnuh, it’s the fickle finger when we make a right one.

  When was the last time you made a right decision? Yeah, you, hiding over there behind that eight ball.

  What gets me mad is that we didn’t even talk about it. Jodi and I, I mean. We rode up in the elevator, and we were both thinking the same thought, and we both knew that the other was thinking the same thought, and we didn’t even talk about it. Arm in arm, brother, imbeciles we.

  You know what I’m talking about, don’t act coy. Jodi and I and the little bastard, that’s what I’m talking about. A series of really monumental wrong decisions had brought me thus far to Rio de Janeiro of all places, in company with a college-educated whore and a five-year-old basketball who wanted to live with us forever. Do you realize how long forever is? More than a year.

  And we didn’t even discuss it. Never mind right decision wrong decision, I’m not talking about that. It was far too late for a right decision by then. What we had to do was choose which wrong decision to plummet into. And the best wrong decision we didn’t even talk about.

  There are shades and shades of rightness and wrongness. Now the blackest wrong decision we could have made, the wrongest wrong decision, was to act sensibly, in line with our previous wrong decisions, and simply turn Everett Whittington over to his dear papa and take our next plane back to New York and never see one another again. And the whitest wrong decision we could have made, the rightest wrong decision, was to act with total incoherence, to run off somewhere with Rhett, and the three of us remain an unlikely trio forever. Of course, there were complications of legality and income and language and a few dozen other hurdles far too high to leap so we didn’t even talk about it. That’s what makes me so mad, brother, that we didn’t even talk about it. I don’t mind being an imbecile, it’s part of my humanity, but I hate being a coward as well.

  So I bit my tongue as a punishment, and we went up in the elevator again, and Rhett looked up at me and said, loud and clear. “Whatcha gonna do with my suitcase?” And the elevator operator glanced around, wondering too.

  I said, “Hush, Rhett, we’re skipping out on the bill.” So then the operator figured we couldn’t possibly be skipping out on the bill, so he ignored us again, and I bit my tongue harder for even more of a punishment because it wasn’t a bill we were skipping out on; we were skipping out on Rhett.

  Outside, a gaily colored taxi was a reminder of our gaily colored homeland far to the north. I looked at it, standing there in the Southern Hemisphere sunshine, and a strange thought went gliding unasked through my mind: I never have liked New York.

  The lemmings rush to the sea. The bright young humans rush to New York. I think now that the lemmings have the smarter idea. Drowning is so much cleaner a death.

  We boarded this northern chariot and I withdrew from my pocket the slip of paper and read from it the address, and on the second try the driver comprehended, and we jolted away into traffic.

  “Where are we going?” That was Rhett.

  “To see your father, dear.” That was Jodi.

  “Are we all going to live with my father?” That was Rhett again.

  “Grrrrr.” That was me.

  “I don’t remember what my father looks like.” Rhett once more.

  “Oh, Harvey.” Jodi again. “Oh, hell.” Me.

  The conversation continued in that vein, sporadically, until we turned through a blacktop turnoff between pale stone walls and along the curving drive to a low rambling white manor which lacked only the darkies’ quarters out back. We emerged from the cab, and I’m certain that this time I was overcharged, and we rang the bell.

  A haughty male servant allowed us ingress, and ordered us to wait upon the marble entrance hall. He went away toward the back of the house, and when he opened the distant massive door sounds of revelry poured forth, snipped off again when he closed the door once more behind him.

  Guilt and indecision faded for a time from my mind, as I stood waiting for Dixon Whittington to put in his appearance. I was, like unto bird and snake, fascinated by the man. I wanted to know what he would look like. What would a corporate thief look like? What would be the physical appearance of a man who entrusted his son for a three thousand mile journey to the hirelings of mobsters? What possible face could front such a mind?

  Renewed revelric reverberations signaled the re-opening of the door. I looked up and saw the face I’d been wondering about.

  One thing was certain. No Dorianesque painting was locked away above stairs in this villa. The face of Dixon Whittington reflected the man. The eyes, of course, were the features one noticed first. Small and nearly round, with a darkish gray-green tinge, they were set deep in the forepart of his skull, widely separated by pasty flesh. The nose was thick and veined, with flaring deep-lined wings and black gaping hair-filled nostrils. Lines of sour discontent fanned down across the flesh from his nose to the corners of his mouth. His cheeks were rounded and mottled, though meticulously shaved, and his small mouth was thick lipped, the lower lip protruding in a moneyed pout. His forehead was high and pale and gleaming, with thick black brows hung awninglike over those beetle eyes. In ridiculous contrast to the jungly under-brush of brows, his coal-black hair was plastered straight back on his bulky head in the style of Valentino.

  The body on which this head sat solidly and truculently was, in a word, gross. Is that the right word? Does it get the idea across? What I’m trying to picture for you is, see, a businessman. You know what businessmen are built like, they’re the ones for whom the double-breasted suit was invented. Kind of barrely. Chunky. Now, you take that businessman, and you give him a nasty mind and a life of ease and dissipation, and pretty soon that same double-breasted suit, when he puts it on, is single-breasted. And he isn’t chunky anymore, he’s soft and flabby. Gross, in other words. But the original businessman body is still down inside there someplace. You have the feeling that if you prodded him with a finger, it would be like prodding a thick layer of dough over a honeydew melon. Soft and flabby, with the original chunkiness down underneath. Gross. See?

  I looked at this thing, this seven hundred thousand dollar mistake, this Dixon Whittington, and then I looked at Rhett. The gross mistake before us had created this tiny child, and what that proves I don’t really know. I’d have to see the mother first. But of course, the mother had flung herself from a window, and was unavailable for the viewing.

  Come to think of it, that fact alone made the viewing unnecessary. It didn’t matter what the mother looked like. Having been betrayed by this dank troll here in front of me, she had taken the easy way out, totally ignoring her own responsibility to the child she had brought into the world.

  Isn’t it amazing? The most utter wretches of creation, civilization’s anal excretion, the vilest black souls of Newgate, still are capable with their scabrous swords and gaping maws, in an act of loveless conquest, of producing beauty and value. Rhett, now, was surely the only even remotely possible excuse for the existence of Dixon Whittington or his cowardly spouse. How had they done it? The rose on the dung pile, and it never fails.

  The troll advanced. “You got him,” he said. He might have said exactly the same thing, in precisely the same tone, to a servant who had finally bagged the rat in the basement.

  “Yes,” I said. I looked once again from father to son, and this time I looked at Jodi. She looked ill.

  The troll had closed the door behind him when coming out to this hall, and now the door opened again, drenching us with another burst of alcoholic viv
acity, and a slut emerged.

  Here we go again. You never know, really, what words mean. Such as gross previously, which can also mean twenty of something. Or is that a score? Or a stone? Maybe a gross is twelve twelves. A hell of a point to make, at any rate.

  But about words. Take slut, for instance. By dictionary definition, Jodi was a slut, and the woman who came toward us from the revels was not a slut. By dictionary definition. But dictionaries are usually wrong. I don’t know whether you’ve ever noticed that before, but it’s true. Being a Mad Ave word purveyor for so long, it was brought home to me fairly often.

  A slut, for instance, is not a prostitute, though the dictionary might claim so. No, a slut by usage is a promiscuous slattern, a sloppy slobby easy make. Jodi, though she worked the midnight trampoline for pay, was not a slut. The woman who had just joined our little group was a slut. Not the dictionary definition. She looked like the kind of woman you would mean if you said the word slut. Okay?

  So that’s what she looked like in loose wrinkled clothing, barefoot. Black-haired, by the way. A good-looking woman about three or four years ago, before she decided to be a slut. Also, she was drunk.

  She arrived and cast a jewel-fingered hand upon the troll’s elbow. She smiled sickeningly at Rhett, her unfocused eyes damply gleaming. “And is this Everett?” she said, the way women like that say things like that to little children, trying to be cute and motherly simultaneously and missing both by a mile.

  The troll—no, I’m not going to call him Dixon Whittington—pushed her hand away ungraciously. “Go on back to the party,” he said.

  She went down on one knee, but not too steadily, so she went down on both knees. Then she extended her arms—both draped with gold bracelets—toward Rhett and mulched, “I’m your new mama, honey. Come to mama.”

  Rhett, understandably, did his best to fade into the material of Jodi’s skirt.

  “Sober up first,” said the troll to mamacita. He had the grace, surprisingly, to look embarrassed.

  Me, too. Hadn’t I brought Rhett here?

  I suddenly remembered something that I had successfully managed to avoid conscious thought about for eight years. This was before Helen, when I was still a normally oversexed bachelor grinding away at the prevarication factory, finding my physical ease wherever I could, and a fellow pulser on advertising’s bed of gold told me about Will Brockheimer’s wife.