by Ned Beauman
‘That wasn’t Frank Parker,’ I said.
‘Huh?’
‘I was there when they dragged him out. Frank Parker wasn’t in that basement. It was just a fellow who looked like him. The Coehorn boy, I think.’
‘I introduced myself, all right?’ said Trimble. ‘I recognised him because I’ve seen him sing before. We had a conversation. It was Frank Parker.’
I turned to our editor. ‘Bev, I’m telling you it wasn’t.’
‘Let me note in passing that there should never be any need for two of my reporters to be at the same nightclub at the same time, unless each of them is only doing half his job,’ said Pomutz. ‘Did you actually talk to him, Mr Zonulet?’
‘No. Trimble and I were there on unrelated business.’
‘Boss, this is too good not to use,’ said Trimble. ‘Frank Parker’s got this soap-sud mummy’s-boy image and here he is getting dragged out of an octopus-wrestling match because of gambling debts. Besides, half the stuff we put in that column is just hearsay but this time I was right there watching it.’
‘It’s a few days old?’
‘Yeah, because Busby ain’t been taking anything I’ve been giving him. But it’s still fresh. None of the other papers have used it.’
‘Okay, write it up and I’ll look it over. Next: back to Mr Zonulet. This cop who’s taken up the current fashion for losing your fucking mind all of a sudden even if you’re a grown man with a job to do.’
Pomutz was referring to the case of Joseph Cybulski, a young police officer in Red Hook, Brooklyn. On Friday, Cybulski had vanished during a watch, and the next morning he was found wandering around Red Hook Park, shirtless, chest hair matted with vomit, mumbling nonsensically. According to the dispatcher at the station, there had been reports of noises coming from inside an old deconsecrated church on the waterfront that had been boarded up ever since the roof collapsed during an unlicensed taxi dance, and Cybulski had gone down there to sweep the place for vagrants. Considering that, back in ’35, Cybulski had needed only a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer to gird himself against the sight of five dismembered bodies in the back of a truck he’d stopped at a junction – I’d interviewed him about that case myself – then whatever he found in that church must have been pretty fearsome to send him out babbling into the night like that.
Or, I suggested, ‘maybe he just had some bad oysters. Bev, I still don’t think there’s much of a story here. I promise you my time is better spent on the Boilermakers’ Union case. There’s a week of front pages there if I can crack it open.’
‘You have strong reasons to believe that?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’ve been doing a little more work on it?’ Pomutz said casually.
‘A little. As it happens, the reason I was down at the Bering Strait Railroad Association basement, where I saw a guy who definitely wasn’t Frank Parker, was because I was running down a source …’ As I tailed off, Vansaska couldn’t help wincing at my mistake.
Pomutz slammed both of his palms on the top of his desk as he rose from his chair. ‘You are on the Cybulski story! You are not on the Boilermakers’ Union story!’
Scofield starting yipping.
‘Boss—’
‘Everything you tell me about the Boilermakers’ Union story reconfirms for me that it’s a dead end and I’ve told you that half a dozen times, so what the fuck you think you’re doing wasting your time and my money on a snipe hunt that at this point can only really be described as a recreational activity because it sure as hell isn’t your fucking job …’
Vansaska didn’t know anyone but Pomutz who could yell such long sentences. Yipping even louder, the Pomeranian jumped up and down as if someone were dangling food just out of its reach.
‘Boss—’
‘The reason I am able to accord my reporters such an exceptional degree of autonomy is because they do what I fucking tell them! That’s how things work around here! You know that! You are on the fucking Cybulski story!’ Then he looked at Scofield and his hands clenched into talons. ‘I hate you more than anything on earth,’ he said in a conversational tone, ‘and I wish your own mother had eaten you when you were still a puppy.’ The animal subsided. ‘Now, Miss Vansaska,’ said Pomutz, turning to her. ‘When did you get back from the Land of Sunshine and Wealth?’
‘Friday night.’ She had felt such dread on the last leg of the train journey from Los Angeles that a derailment would have come as a miraculous reprieve. In the west it had been easy enough to forget about the engagement ring that she’d sequestered in her washbag. But speeding back into New York felt like entering a black basalt prison dressed up in peonies and crinoline and ivory card stock. As she got into a cab outside Penn Station she saw an old man with a placard warning pretty imprecisely that the last judgment was ‘on its way’ and she wanted to inform him that in fact it was there on the calendar in four months and twenty-two days. Wedding bells, how sweet the music!
The cab started uptown and she slipped the engagement ring back on her finger, realizing that no matter how briskening she had found Hollywood, she still wasn’t up to breaking Bryce’s heart – not to mention both their parents’ and her brother’s, since her family had looked forward to the two of them getting married ever since they’d played together as children. A few nights before she left she had deliberately started a quarrel with him about whether she would keep her newspaper job after the wedding, but even that didn’t rile her enough to make it easy. Usually she was the opposite of sentimental, but in this case she felt like a slaughterhouse foreman who couldn’t bring himself to stamp on a wounded fledgling. She hated herself for every moment that she couldn’t do it and she hated herself even more for how she was treating her handsome fiancé in the meantime. Her toes curled whenever she thought of how lovingly he’d told her that it made no difference to him that he was a virgin and she wasn’t. He didn’t have any moralistic objection to sex before marriage, he’d said, stroking her hand, but personally he’d never felt willing to do anything with a girl which later in life she might come to regret. She wished that just once he could stop being so warm and generous and upstanding and devoted. What a joy it would be to arrive unexpectedly at his house one day and find him in the kitchen jerking off into a stolen polio brace.
‘So: is Arnold Spindler crazy?’ said Pomutz. ‘And on the evidence of this meeting, do you agree with me that our publisher might as well change the name of this newspaper to the New York Dementia Chronicle? Two questions for you.’
‘Everybody in Hollywood says Spindler’s crazy,’ she said. ‘They say he’s too much of a crack-up to run his own studio. They say his deputies have been making all the decisions for years. But in fact Spindler’s still in command.’
‘You talked to him?’
‘I talked to a source.’ When you met a man in those circumstances then of course you knew you’d never see him again. That was part of the point. And yet she’d hardly stopped thinking about Jervis Whelt, the aspiring director, since the afternoon in the motor hotel. Like her fiancé, he’d never been with a woman before. He wasn’t a homosexual, he told her, he just kept to a rigorous schedule and he didn’t understand the purpose of non-reproductive intercourse. Staring up at the ceiling fan that shooed away her cigarette smoke, Vansaska asked him why, in that case, he’d let her seduce him at the diner, and he claimed it had occurred to him that one day he might have to write or shoot a scene in which a couple were implied to have just finished making love and he wouldn’t want to embarrass himself by his inexperience. Indeed, she’d noticed that during the act even his body had seemed computational in its small shifts and adjustments, as if he’d been determined that by the end of his first venture he’d have taught himself how to pleasure a woman as efficiently as anybody in California. But when she asked if he understood the purpose of non-reproductive intercourse any better now, he blushed a little, so she could tell he wasn’t quite as bloodless as he put on.
If she wasn’t already
certain that she had no maternal instincts whatsoever, she might have accused herself of feeling a suppressed impulse to take care of him. Certainly, this boy was a change from the French banker she’d been sleeping with back in New York, with whom her increasingly bruising encounters seemed to be underwritten by nothing but mutual distaste. From some angles Whelt could almost have been a precocious nine-year-old. Yet she’d found that she could talk to him more easily than any of her friends, more easily than the analyst her parents had sent her to, a hell of a lot more easily than her fiancé. Bryce, who’d known her for twenty years, was still so convinced of her sunny disposition that whenever he caught her looking less than sunny he would insist that ‘it [wasn’t] like [her] to be glum!’ But Whelt didn’t even seem surprised when she talked to him about the black basalt prison, about sometimes feeling as if she belonged in a psychiatric hospital. Somehow, in his equable, alien way, he seemed to understand.
‘Miss Vansaska, maybe “everybody” in Hollywood agrees that Mr Spindler is a King Ludwig,’ said Pomutz. ‘But Kingdom Pictures continues to operate on the premise that its chairman is its chairman. Hundreds of people go to work there every day on that premise. That premise has a lot on its side already. If a source tells you a legally capable person is also a factually capable person, that’s not a hot cockle. What else have you got?’
‘Spindler’s still in command, but he’s definitely half-crazy.’
‘This is your source again?’
‘Yes. He’d just come out of a meeting with Spindler at his estate.’
‘He’ll go on the record?’
‘No.’
‘So we have a source anonymously refuting – no, refining a rumor that most of our readers never heard in the first place. Jesus Christ,’ said Pomutz, still trying to muffle himself for the sake of the dog. ‘Do you have anything whatsoever?’
‘Kingdom Pictures is rushing a comedy into production with a first-time director. They’re shooting it on location at a temple in the jungle like The New Adventures of Tarzan.’
Pomutz gave up trying to muffle himself. ‘I pay for you to sun yourself in California for a week because you promise to get me something juicy about Arnold Spindler,’ he roared, ‘and you come back with nothing to show for it but an item I could have read in a fucking press release?’
The truth was that Vansaska had worked harder on the Kingdom Pictures story than on anything else she’d ever covered. She’d called on dozens of people in Hollywood and spent days waiting outside Spindler’s estate. The mystery still gnawed at her. But she was finding it impossible to compose a defense, so she was relieved when Pomutz switched his attention to Scofield. He picked up the barking dog, carried it over to the open window, and held it out over Fifth Avenue. ‘If you don’t shut up, I will drop you!’ He rotated the irritant. ‘Do you see that, you little shit-heel? You will burst down there on the sidewalk like a fucking five-pound rambutan!’ To its credit the dog continued to bark as if it were more than willing to give up its life in the line of duty.
‘Hey, Bev, there’s no need for that,’ I said.
A vein stood out so far from Pomutz’s temple that it looked as if you could have plucked it out in one motion like a shrimp’s. ‘Yes, there is.’
‘Bev, just settle him down on the desk and I’ll show you what I do when I’m trying to interview somebody and there’s a baby crying nearby.’ Pomutz grudgingly withdrew the animal from the window and did as I said. Fixing a big smile on my face, I got up and walked over to the desk. ‘Oh, what a beautiful little muffin you have here! I just love babies. Can I say hello?’
‘Uh, sure,’ said Pomutz, who hadn’t realised he had also been cast in this scene.
‘Is it a boy or a girl?’
‘I never actually bothered to check.’
I took from an inner pocket an object resembling a miniature bicycle horn. ‘Do you like shiny things, little muffin? Do you?’ Sticking the toy right in the dog’s face, I beeped it a couple of times. Scofield’s eyelids fluttered and then it went limp.
There was a short silence as everyone stared at the dog. I put the horn back in my pocket. ‘What the fuck did you do?’ said Pomutz.
‘I gave it a spritz of benzoic oxymorphone.’
‘Is it dead?’
‘I don’t go around killing babies. I just put them to sleep for a half-hour. A lot of people, if there’s a baby getting on their nerves, they’ll never relax and open up.’
‘Well, you’re back in my good books, Mr Zonulet,’ Pomutz said as he dropped Scofield without ceremony into the wastepaper basket beside his desk. ‘Although if it starts to snore …’ But the animal only turned over noiselessly in its sleep, swaddling itself like a genuine baby in the crumpled sandwich wrapper that had broken its fall. Pomutz sat down. ‘You, on the other hand, are not in my good books,’ he said to Vansaska. ‘You are in my bad books. You are in the books so bad the fucking Vatican won’t even ban them because it doesn’t want the Pope to get wind they exist. Where is this picture being shot?’
‘Spanish Honduras.’
Pomutz leaned back in his chair. ‘You know, my old buddy Hal Denny spent some time in the jungle during the uprising in Nicaragua. He said he’d never been in a place that seemed so indifferent to human endeavor, and then he stopped himself and he said, “Nah, that’s not right, it’s only half the time that it seems indifferent to you, the other half of the time it seems like it passionately fucking hates you.” He said he wouldn’t go back to the jungle if they paid him ten million dollars. Miss Vansaska, guess where you’re going?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘You’re going to tag along with this picture. They’re sure to take you if we offer. They’ll want the advance publicity.’
‘But what’s the story?’ I said.
‘They’re shooting a movie out in the jungle with a first-time director. The story is when the whole fucking thing falls apart and they come home empty-handed just like you did. In the meantime, you can get some gossip for our starving column.’
Vansaska knew this was meant as a punishment, and it was a blatantly disproportionate one, arising from Pomutz’s compounded displeasure with all three departments in this meeting. But in fact she was so happy she could hardly stop herself from beaming. She’d longed to visit the jungle ever since she was eight years old and her father had sent her to take piano lessons.
In the apartment below her piano teacher’s, there was a childless old woman who happened to die during that first dissonant summer of lessons, and when the old woman’s nephews arrived to see about the body they found that she’d filled the apartment with dozens and dozens of spider plants and dumb canes and aroid palms, so many that one could hardly move around inside. While the nephews made preparations for the funeral, they instructed one of their sons to start clearing out the apartment. What the entrepreneurial 17-year-old did instead was charge the neighborhood kids a nickel each for admission to the ‘jungle’.
The radiators were turned up high, and back in the kitchen four big pots of water were boiling on the stove, so you could feel the jowls of humidity in the air as soon as you walked inside. Under your feet the floorboards were gritted with a thin layer of loose soil and dry mulch. The potted plants had been arranged into an avenue leading from the front door so you had to push the foliage aside with every step. For some reason that year every fruit and vegetable stall in New York was selling mealy Mexican guavas, and either they attracted drosophila faster than any other fruit or they already had eggs in their skins when they were sold, because a bag on a sideboard would populate a room within twenty-four hours, so the corners of the apartment had been heaped with them. The winks of nervous blue in your peripheral vision were the single live butterfly the grand-nephew had employed along with the fruit flies, and there were also a few budgerigars chirping in a cage somewhere out of sight. Even with the windows closed, you could hear the rumble of the elevated train outside, but it might have been a distant pachyderm. As
you got about halfway into the living room, a pulley squeaked and then something pounced from the ceiling. This was a taxidermied jaguar cub that thumped to the ground and then lay there on its side staring up at you with empty eye sockets, a rope trailing from its left hind leg, the black fur on its flanks worn away in patches like an old rug. And while you were still recovering from the scare, a witch doctor appeared out of nowhere.
The grand-nephew wore a ghoul mask painted with red stripes and a bearskin rug that he’d pinned into a sort of toga, and he pranced and gibbered for a minute before giving you a taste of roasted crocodile, which was pork rind dyed green with food coloring. Then he shook your hand and escorted you out of the apartment. Several of the other kids apparently asked for their nickels back, but not Vansaska. The amateur jungle stayed with her for years. She had so many questions about it. Why would the grand-nephew have gone to such trouble when it couldn’t possibly have been worth his while financially? Where had he found the stuffed jaguar cub and the live butterfly? Was the jungle supposed to be located in Africa or South America or Asia or at some impossible tripoint like the Rock of the Three Kingdoms? Why did he think crocodile meat would be green all the way through? And how long had the apartment been like that before the neighbors intervened? Long enough for the imitation to become real, for the jungle to legitimate its exclave, as the birds laid eggs and moss ate the wallpaper and the floorboards warped up like revenant trees? When Bryce took her on a date to see Congo Cavalcade she loved it because the unconvincing sound-stage sets made her feel as if she was right back in the Upper West Side version. Several times in the motor hotel room in Westwood she’d told Whelt how jealous she was that he’d get to see the wilds for himself. Now Pomutz was telling her that she would have the same adventure. For at least a few more weeks she’d be far from Bryce, far from her father, far from New York, far from everything; but close to that awkward, long-lashed boy.
