by Ned Beauman
Not more than thirty seconds had passed since the splash, but he was astonished, in a woozy sort of way, by what he saw when he turned back to the tank. The octopus seemed to be riding the diver piggyback, with its beak nuzzling between his shoulder-blades. Two of its tentacles were suctioned to the glass wall of the tank for leverage; two more had the diver’s wrists trussed behind his back; a fifth tentacle was a long way down the diver’s throat; and a sixth, though concealed by the seat of the swimming costume, seemed to be equally deep in the diver’s rectum.
The notion of an octopus getting the drop on a wrestler was as laughable as the notion of a greased piglet at a county fair trampling the farmhands trying to catch it, but on the other hand this could hardly have been a deliberate strategy on the diver’s part, and the diver’s bulging eyes were enough to assure Coehorn that he’d been correct in his earlier evaluation of the octopus’s vigor. Apart from a few chattering girls at the opposite end of the basement who probably didn’t even know there was a fight going on, an uneasy silence had fallen over the crowd. By the time the clock showed sixty seconds, you could tell from the kicking of the diver’s legs that his current ambition was not so much to unknot himself from the rapine harness as it was simply to get up to the surface of the water where he might have a chance of breathing through his nose. But the octopus wouldn’t even let him do that. He should have been able to hold his breath without any trouble for at least three, maybe three and a half minutes, but perhaps the shock of enclosing about a foot of mollusk at each end, like reverse food poisoning, had prematurely loosed a few pints of air. Coehorn wondered how that would feel. He’d had dicks in his mouth and his ass at the same time before but, fortunately or unfortunately, none of them had been prehensile.
‘Which way did you bet, Mr Parker?’ said Trimble.
‘Long,’ said Coehorn.
‘Same here! You know, the rules say the clock keeps running until either the diver or the octopus is out of the tank. So, technically, if he croaks in there, they got to keep paying until somebody dredges one of them out. We’ve got a home run on our hands. Unless they argue that he’s not in the tank any more because he’s already in heaven, but I don’t think they could get away with that.’
‘You don’t mean he could actually die?’ said Irma.
‘I don’t see why not,’ said Coehorn.
‘Isn’t anyone going to do anything?’
‘Like what?’
‘Smash the glass and get him out.’
‘What about the octopus? It’s only defending itself.’
‘You can fill up a sink for it in the men’s room,’ said Irma.
‘This waistcoat is lacewing silk and my tailor specifically told me not to get so much as a drop of water on it.’
‘For heaven’s sake, Elias, if I have to watch that man die I won’t be able to sleep for a year!’
Coehorn could never say no to Irma, who was very sensitive. Also, this would make a good anecdote. ‘Well, all right.’ He rolled up both sleeves, knowing there was a particular phrase you always said in this kind of situation. Then he remembered it. ‘Stand back, everyone.’
‘Hey, hey, hold on just a second, Mr Parker,’ said Trimble. ‘How much are you up?’
Coehorn looked at the clock. He was now up three hundred dollars. If he made five hundred dollars tonight, which would only take another seventeen seconds, he could hand it straight over to Irma to reimburse her for the money she’d lost on the paintings he’d taken it upon himself to entrust to that ‘charming’ ‘White Russian’ ‘gallerist’ while she was away in the desert, which would be a wonderful gesture. Surely she would prefer that to this capricious intervention in the life of a stranger, and if there was a choice of problems to solve, Coehorn always preferred to solve the one he could solve neatly with money. Admittedly, he wasn’t sure that in good conscience he was allowed to put off saving the diver’s life for another seventeen seconds. But perhaps he was allowed to put off making the decision about whether he was allowed to put off saving the diver’s life for another seventeen seconds for another seventeen seconds. That is, for another sixteen seconds. Fifteen seconds.
‘Elias!’ shrieked Irma.
By now the seventh tentacle of the octopus had blindfolded the diver, who was still wriggling like a bad escape artist but looked as if he was beginning to slacken. Shuffling from foot to foot, Coehorn willed the time to go faster. When he glanced at the spectators behind him he found them as detached as masturbators. Deciding that Irma was right and he’d rather find her last hundred dollars somewhere else than wait another nine seconds, he reached for the metal stepladder so he could smash the tank with it.
But just as he was hoisting it unsteadily over his head, four hands yanked at his shoulders and the stepladder crashed back to the stone floor.
At first he assumed that some other gamblers who’d bet long on the octopus were trying to keep him from curtailing their prize. But then, instead of the punch in the nose he’d been expecting, he felt himself being dragged backward through the crowd.
Twisting left and right, he saw that his new escorts were two men in black serge suits, built like sasquatches, even more muscular than the diver. Coehorn owed a lot of people money but he was careful about the lenders he used – nothing more harrowing had ever resulted from his delinquency than a chocolate box full of dead cockroaches in the mail – so there was almost no chance that these were thugs here to collect. ‘Irma, stop them!’
But Irma was now struggling to lift the stepladder herself, and the other spectators were still too entranced by the floor show to notice Coehorn’s abduction. ‘Whoever you’re looking for, I can guarantee it’s not me!’ It wasn’t until he was at the stairwell that he came up with another guess about what might have happened. ‘Now, listen, I’m not Frank Parker! Do you hear me? I don’t know what he’s done but I’m not him! I just look like him. If he was younger.’ He craned his neck for one last look at the diver but Irma and the tank were already out of sight.
I’d just arrived at the building, and at the top of the stairs I had to press myself up against the wall to let the three men past. The recent craze among midtown filing clerks for a new chewing tobacco that was supposed to whiten your teeth had turned the sidewalks here piebald. Outside, Coehorn found 49th Street painfully bright. ‘Good grief, is it Sunday morning already?’ he asked, squinting. That’s the only part of this I saw with my own eyes.
For the first time one of the sasquatches spoke. ‘Monday morning.’
‘Oh,’ said Coehorn.
Without loosening their grips, they marched him to a Buick limousine parked at the corner. Waiting in the front seat was a chauffeur and on the back seat a steel bucket. Coehorn got in, moved the bucket from the seat to the floor, and sat down with a sasquatch on either side of him. ‘We won’t need this,’ he said, ‘I’m not going to puke. I never puke.’ As the chauffeur started the engine, the sasquatch on Coehorn’s left took from his trouser pocket what looked like an asthmatic’s nebuliser. ‘What’s that?’ said Coehorn. The sasquatch jammed the nozzle of the nebuliser up Coehorn’s nose and gave the bulb three brisk clenches.
Coehorn felt as if he’d been shot in the frontal lobe with a bullet made of mustard powder and static charge. Turquoise flares went off in his eyes and he got a strange cramp at the base of his tongue. Then he felt the remains of his last meal stampeding out of him. He bent over the bucket and puked so hard he thought he was going to punch through the bottom. When he’d finished, the sasquatch on his right handed him a silk handkerchief and a glass ampule of lavender water, so Coehorn gargled and wiped his mouth before dropping both the handkerchief and the empty bottle into his dregs. The sasquatch cranked down the tinted side window, dropped the bucket into the road, and cranked the window back up before Coehorn could get any idea of which direction they were headed.
That was when Coehorn realised he wasn’t swacked any more. Careful introspection didn’t turn up the slightest blush of champagn
e, gin, cocaine, hashish, Benzedrine, or sewing-machine oil. He had no hangover. And he didn’t even particularly want a cigarette. His head hadn’t felt so clear since he was about sixteen. The tank had been smashed and now he lay there in a puddle with nothing between him and the grasping fingers of the world. As a child, Coehorn had been a drooping orchid – bilious and photophobic, deeply in love with his bed and his dog, so late to puberty you might have taken him for a castrato – until the day he got drunk for the first time and discovered he could be as gallant as anyone else for as long as he forgot that he wasn’t. ‘What did you just give me?’ he mumbled. The sasquatches didn’t answer. Deglazed by this horrible new clarity, Elias Coehorn Jr. now found himself able to deduce his real destination without any trouble. The sasquatches didn’t think he was Frank Parker. They knew exactly who he was.
They were taking him to see his father.
By the late 1930s, Elias Coehorn Sr. was an almost mythological figure in New York life, a frost giant or skyscraper khan, honored in the persecution fantasies of more raving Bowery bums than anyone else in the country. And he was not the type whose aura dissipates the first time you meet him in person. Quite the opposite. In 1934, during my very first week working at the Mirror, I went to interview an albino from Mott Haven who had managed to convince a lot of people that God was in the habit of schmoozing with him directly. God, he reported, had plenty to say about the dismal future of the United States under a socialist president. We’d scheduled the interview over the telephone, but when I arrived at his apartment he was no longer interested. ‘I’m going to see Elias Coehorn this afternoon,’ he said, meaning Elias Coehorn Sr. ‘He told me I couldn’t talk to the press in the meantime.’ Elias Coehorn Sr., in addition to being one of the wealthiest men in New York, was an avid collector of Christian visionaries, and the albino was understandably giddy because this had the potential to be a very lucrative engagement. When I got back to the office, however, Bev Pomutz, my editor, called me a ‘fucking witless mealworm’ for taking no for an answer. So the next morning I returned to Mott Haven without an appointment, and I found a husk of the guy I’d met the previous day. He was curled up under a blanket like an invalid. ‘Coehorn saw right through me,’ he said. ‘He knew right away I was making it up. The way he looked at me … It was so fucking scary.’ ‘So scary it almost turned your hair black?’ I joked, facetiously. But the ‘albino’ missed the joke. ‘No, actually, it won’t grow out black for another few weeks.’ He confessed that he paled himself with bleach, rice powder, and eye drops. ‘Coehorn saw that right away too. I don’t know how. Nobody else ever guessed.’
I never met Elias Coehorn Sr. in person myself (although I believe I later came very close – only a matter of inches between us). But everyone I knew who did, whether they wanted to admit it or not, felt like they’d barely escaped with their souls. Even Elias Coehorn Jr., who’d had a lifetime to get used to his father, and made a policy of regarding him with utter derision, had to steel himself as he was ushered into his father’s office on the thirty-second floor of the Pine Street headquarters of the Eastern Aggregate Company.
There was no chair on the near side of the titanic mahogany desk, so he asked for one. Phibbs, his father’s private secretary, started to say that he’d be happy to fetch one from the vestibule, but he was interrupted: ‘My son will stand and listen.’
Coehorn Sr.’s thin face was framed, as ever, by bushy white sideburns and an upturned detachable collar; he’d permanentised his style four decades ago, around the same time he’d permanentised his diction, ridding it of the last traces of the Pennsylvania workingman’s accent that would once have betrayed his origins on the outskirts of Hershey.
He’d started his first business making pard liquor in a shack at the age of fourteen. Pard liquor, in the 1880s, was still produced by sawing up any available dead horse that wasn’t worth tanning for leather, stuffing the meat into a barrel along with plenty of sorghum jelly and caustic potash, and flipping the barrel twice a day for a week before straining out the resultant brown goo, which local butchers liked to mix with wood chips to ensure a slow and steady burn when they were smoking hams or congealing blood sausage. The work was not pleasant, especially in summer. But because there was so little demand for pard liquor outside certain Dutch hamlets in south-eastern Pennsylvania, nobody on this side of the Atlantic had ever bothered to start producing it on a large scale, so even a lone entrepreneur with no initial capital using pre-industrial methods was able to stay competitive.
One winter, a butcher sifted from a bucket of Mr Coehorn’s pard liquor an engraved wedding ring belonging to a Hershey schoolmistress who’d recently vanished without a trace. Dark conclusions were drawn, and Mr Coehorn might have been torn apart by a mob if that same afternoon the schoolmistress’s body hadn’t been discovered in the woods, intact apart from a few fingers most likely chewed off at some earlier juncture by one of the racoons with which the boy made a thrifty practice of bulking out his horse barrels. That incident spurred his decision to leave Hershey for Manhattan, where his career began in earnest. (He didn’t entirely forswear the pard liquor trade, however: forty-seven years later, within one of Eastern Aggregate’s dozens of subsidiaries, there was still a division manufacturing a comparable product, which was nowadays used as an additive in luxury women’s cosmetics.)
‘There was no need for a kidnapping, Father,’ said Elias Coehorn Jr. ‘You could simply have called.’ He preferred not to concede that he’d been at all rattled.
‘I did call.’
‘We have placed many, many telephone calls to a variety of residences and establishments with which you have been associated, Master Coehorn, but with no results.’ Phibbs had found infant fame as what the newspapers now called a ‘medical miracle’: he had been an ectopic pregnancy, developing outside the womb, and could not have survived but for a nearby fibroid tumor on the outer wall of the uterus that had soaked him generously in the blood it embezzled. His chinless head lolled on his long neck like a boxer’s punch-ball.
‘Yes, well, my friends know never to take messages. What’s so urgent?’ Before this Coehorn hadn’t spoken to his father for over a year, and he had come to feel like a migraine patient who goes for so long without an attack that he begins to wonder if he’s cured.
‘I am never sure exactly how much willful or pretended ignorance I am to assume on your part,’ said his father. ‘But you must be aware, I suppose, that there exists a body called the Coehorn Missionary Foundation.’
‘Am I to be presented as an exemplar of why their attention is urgently needed back here in New York?’ Coehorn had always found his father’s naïve schoolhouse Christianity, and in particular his obsession with latter-day Saint Francises who claimed to be in touch with God, to be his most mockable quality – and his most incongruous, too, given the rigor he applied to every other section of his life.
‘In Spanish Honduras, the foundation operates a mission station in the north-east, near a town named San Esteban at the edge of the jungle, bringing the Lord’s word to the river traders and the native Pozkito people. Eight days ago, they received an unexpected visit from two Frenchmen, begging for water and medical aid. They were the only survivors of a party of nine archaeologists who had ventured deep into the jungle. They were both feverish and one still had a three-foot arrow through his forearm. But they reported that they had found a temple. The settlement at Copán has long been assumed to be the easternmost of the major Mayan ruins, but this one was apparently almost two hundred miles further east, and its design was at variance with any such precedent.’
When he heard ‘Mayan ruins’, a picture came into Coehorn’s mind of the sort of limestone ziggurat with four-fold symmetry he’d seen in Life; but the small balsawood model that Phibbs set down on the desk was not quite like that, because instead of four stepped sides it had two stepped sides and two sheer vertical sides, like a pair of stepladders pushed together end to end to make a podium. When he picked the mo
del up, it fell apart into two pieces. He could hardly be blamed for its shoddy construction, but his father nevertheless gave him a look he knew well from childhood.
Those looks. Sometimes, when you got a glimpse of the ice caves behind Elias Coehorn Sr.’s countenance, it was hard to believe he’d ever been able to father an heir: you’d expect any woman who submitted to an injection of his animal fluids to be frozen solid from the cervix outward.
Nevertheless, Ada Coehorn had managed to survive the procedure – only to fall from one of Braeswood’s turrets the winter of her son’s sixth birthday in 1918. From the staircase of old dictionaries she’d built to get up to the high window (W–Z; R–S, T–V; J–L, M–O, P–Q; A–B, C–D, E–F, G–I) the police had concluded she’d been trying to free a moth that had got trapped between the sashes, but for a long time Coehorn had assumed, as anyone would in the circumstances, that in fact his father had murdered her. When he was fifteen, however, and he had the idea of bribing his Latin tutor to go to the Glen Cove courthouse and transcribe a copy of the coroner’s report, he discovered to his surprise and displeasure that it would be very hard for any reasonable person to dispute its verdict that neither his father nor his father’s butler could possibly have had anything to do with the death. For a second time, thirty-six years after the schoolmistress in Hershey, his father was grudgingly acquitted of murder, grudgingly because it would have fit so much better if he had done it.
‘I trust you won’t be too obtuse to appreciate the magnitude of this discovery,’ his father continued after Phibbs had retrieved the halves of the model, ‘but at any rate, the salient point for our purposes is that nobody else knows about it yet. The missionaries wouldn’t have permitted the Frenchmen to leave the mission station even if they were medically capable of doing so. The details were transmitted by cipher, and the sketches the Frenchmen drew were presented upside down to the wirephoto operator in La Ceiba as plans for a new gold mine.’
