He pushed himself up on one elbow and could smell the cheap (it might have been expensive, but smelled cheap) perfume. Across an enveloping cloud of mist he gazed, and framed in the window casing were the midrange floors of the Empire State Building, indifferent in deco elegance.
Naked under the sheets, he faced the bank of windows and his focus of attention moved inside to the soft cast of the bedroom. On the mauve carpet lay the party dress, effulgence of stiff lace and low satin top, blinding pink in the shadowless almost-winter light, and tissue-paper falsies, disconsolate articles, accusatory, disdainful and crinkled there beside the little Caucasian prayer rug. The smooth tanned thigh and calf thrown over his legs ruined his sense of well-being and when he drew the sheets back—flannel, with a dish-ran-away-with-the-spoon and cow-jumped-over-the-moon pattern—and saw her, thin as a boy, asleep in the bed, he sighed. It was not a pleasured sigh, but beleaguered. He blinked and looked out the window again, thinking that he had better start thinking. On her dressing table were photographs in standard-size chrome-plated frames. He saw her (what was her name again? Myra? Myrna? Mona?—that was it, yes, Mona, because he remembered in the depths of his drunk singing to her, Tell you Mona what I’m gonna do, gonna build a house next door to you) standing between what must have been her parents, father with an especially proud smile on his face under the CAT-tractor cap, the mother willowy, pretty though a bit poker-faced in her lily-print dress. The girl Mona (definitely not Myrna, for Myrna was aunt Wilma’s manx cat) could not have been more than twelve or thirteen when the photograph was taken. There was a house behind them, also, off to the edge of a pond, a modest one-story with a ramshackle jetty added to the back porch and rowboat tied to a piling. A Labrador retriever leaped in front of the family, captured by the camera as a kind of benign blur, teeth predominant in the form of a triangle but making a smile. Mona’s face was caught midlook, snapping out of a childish pout into a giggle at the dog’s treachery.
Hammond could not smile. He knew the night cost more than it should have, and her loan to him of the two-fifty was not as kind a gesture as it might have seemed at the time since she ended up tooting the better part of it up her own nose, as his guest. “Conflicting signals”—maybe it was her way with people like Hammond (who for all his cocksureness still came across very hick)—had led him into thinking there might be some way out, a calm and equitable discussion of who owed whom what, and so he consoled himself, settled down to watch her dance through the explosions of purple strobes, her torso writhing gaily, hips revolving at such a wide and suggestive orbit they seemed detached from her body, hands flung into the smoky air of the club and fingers snapping to the steady bass of the speakers. He was lulled into having fun until the idea that she was a pro escort seized him. That, after all, had happened to him before. What was that other girl’s name? … (hardly a girl, sexy Rita, who shed her wig at the critical moment to revert back into someone named Raoul). This idea passed. She was simply what she was, a bar-crawler. A nice girl, underneath the drugs, the drinks, the craze. He remembered nights, shade-drawn afternoons, mornings smelling of bacon and douche but couldn’t recall a room as homey or comfortable as this. Homey and comfortable, and an unlikely reminder of the mobile home in Boulder where Hammond had grown up, his mother an elementary-school teacher, his father a day-laborer on a chicken farm. Hammond’s room had been just off theirs. The long, narrow house, drafty in the winter, once had nearly toppled in the heavy wind that blew down the canyon and across the chautauqua field, but it had the same hominess as this apartment—the family portraits and combs and pillbox, the beveled mirror at the dressing table, mounds of costume jewelry on its glassy, laminated surface. There was a way out of this debt, he thought, and the new idea fell together.
One foot then both feet silently found the thick-piled carpet and Hammond was out of bed and climbing into his briefs, had his shirt on, stockings, his watch, neckerchief, turquoise ring, before pulling his blue jeans on, whose percussive jangle at the keyring woke her up, “Hey what’re you think you’re, oh my head …”
“What?” he said, belligerent yet accommodating. He did not pull up his zipper. Act of obeisance.
“What time is it? Hey, could you get me some aspirin, right in there in the bathroom.”
Hammond brought her three aspirin and a glass of water.
“What’d you do last night hit me in the head with a building?”
“I,” and he’d begun edging around the bed toward the door which led into her front room.
“You headed somewhere you think you’re headed?” She pulled the sheets up around her neck, closed her eyes, and rubbed her temples. He was stuck, he felt, and watched her. She glanced up at him. The sun, reflecting off windows of the building across the street, was harsh on both their faces—they saw each other as older, more flawed, than imagined in the artificial light of the club where they met. Each understood it as a reflection on him-herself—not getting any younger in all these wars, or so ran the basic thought.
“Listen, I, about last night, I better go out and get you the money I owe you.”
“I think I’d better come with you, just give me a minute, let this aspirin work.”
He climbed over the bed, ran through the door into the small front room.
“Wait a minute you sonnabitch. I knew it.”
The fuzzy tabby screeched at Hammond’s shoe having caught the tip of its tail. Yanking at his zipper, Hammond flung the door open and ran down the wallpapered hallway; behind him he could hear her shouting. He pushed the button with the down-arrow for the elevator but took the stairs three at a time down the emergency exit until he reached ground. Composing himself, he walked past the doorman and into the crowd along the avenue. A cab pulled hard to the curb. The driver took him the few blocks. Hammond reached down into his pocket and paid with change, then stepped out and breathed the morning air. Halfway up the fourth flight of stairs inside the building, and just as he was beginning to register the feeling of joy at having escaped his predicament, expediently, deftly, with the connoisseurship for timely action that only the superheroes in his comic books regularly displayed, he realized something was missing.
His heart sank (it felt, as if down to the basement). His face warmed and fingers involuntarily flexed up to his open mouth. He had forgotten his coat. It was back at Mona’s apartment neatly hung in her front closet, his billfold in its breast pocket. As he trudged back downstairs he started inventing lavish scenarios whereby she might if not forgive him, at least take the money he would now have to ante (post facto) and let it ride for a bit of outlandishness.
Nothing very convincing had come to mind when he pulled the downstairs door open to find Mona standing there with a confident smile playing above the crimpled party dress she had worn the night before. “Hees yall jacket, Tex.” The aspirin had brought back her wits and her accent, which she thickened for his benefit.
He didn’t like the Tex. “Ahm, I yes,” he managed, ready to go into a confession coaxed both by her smile and the way she simply handed him the tweed bundle as if nothing had happened.
“Yall have a good time last night there? yall think I’s a pretty worthwhile piece of tail?”
“That’s well not that’s not quite the way I’d put it.”
“Why’d yall go running out on me like that? If I remember right, you owe me some bread.”
Hammond couldn’t think. “I don’t know, I mean I remembered I was late for this appointment, then I was going to go to the bank and get the money and come back to your place.”
“Late for an appointment.” She picked a cigarette from the pack, put it to her lips and waited for him to light it. He dug for the matches in his pocket.
“I had an appointment.” He could feel the shame and silliness of the lie rise in sweat over his face; could she see?
Mona’s lips puckered before the flame and the magenta flecks of yesterday’s lip gloss transferred to the filter tip before she blew smoke into his face sayi
ng, “What country you think this is, Tex?”
“I don’t understand what you’re getting at.”
“What I’m getting at is this isn’t Russia you happen to be in America, pal.”
“So what,” he countered.
“So what this is what, land of equal opportunity, I’ve got the same constitutional rights as yall do, correct?”
“I don’t understand what you’re getting at.”
“Look, amigo, can I come in for a minute? we got to talk a couple things over.”
“No, I already told you I’ve got an important appointment.”
Mona’s face was a hard read, her clipped nose and chiseled features stationary as she remarked, “Listen now, you said yall had a fine time with me right? I loaned you the two-fifty and now I’d like to have it back, you see. This is how a gentleman behaves. Sad part is I kind of liked you. But obviously you’re just a jerk.”
“Yes, but I got to go now. Why don’t we meet later? And anyway, you gave me one-fifty, not two-fifty.”
“It was two-fifty, man.”
“Okay, we’ll talk about this a little later.”
“When later?” she said, still cool, stylishly brandishing her cigarette, wearing the air of world-weariness which the party dress under daylight and the unbrushed blond hair highlighted matching pink at the temples only emphasized. She knew that he would close the door (he did) and heard the lock mechanism clack into place; that it came open again so quickly surprised her as she had not thought him to be so astute.
“All right, okay, where’s my billfold?”
“It’s safe,” she said, “but short. Can I come in?”
Hammond stood, stolid, dumbfounded, said, “No you can’t,” but she inclined forward and took the step into the imperforate darkness of the foyer, the standpipe, the stairwell, and he withdrew into the prejudice of her rank perfume, the closeness of her skin and a recognition that she had displaced any authority—whether by a locked door or a fabrication—that he had held. The breach of trust here, unwritten law of Hannah and Hammond both that no one enter these precincts, opened wide, and he felt panicked she had gained entrance to the ranch itself. “Now hold your horses you can’t be coming in here this is private property.”
“My privates’s property too, bub. You owe me. Only twenty bucks in yall’s wallet there what kind of mental midget goes out has himself big old time on other people’s money loans? You must be wet behind the ears, buckaroo, must have an ocean in behind there or something, I don’t know about you.”
“Listen. You can’t come in here.”
Mona had disappeared into the vault of blackness as Hammond, guided by the echo of footsteps, moved into the burgundy rendered by the exit lamp. “Vamoose on me expecting not to pay me back you ought to be ashamed, god what’s that smell smells like pony shit.”
Her shoeleather creaked exaggeratedly; then a palliative silence. The tip of her shoe had driven into something malleable—a pile of burlap bags, she could smell them there, seed-scent, oats, and a remembrance of her father’s shanty stable, and her Shetland pony. Fermentation and excrement, a mix that summoned up a queer kind of anger, impatience in her; she kicked the mass of burlap, saying, “What in hell yall got going here, Tex?” just as Hammond jerked her by the elbow, and the orange point of ash pitched away and the air ducts augmented her high scream.
Mona retained enough self-confidence to cry, “Let go of me.”
He released her, retreated several steps. Everything had fallen to redness. Her poise returned instantly. She rubbed her hollow cheek, defensive but unintimidated. “Three hundred.”
Hammond laughed airlessly, “You said two-fifty.”
“You ever heard of interest?”
“I’ll give you a hundred and fifty dollars, that’s what the amount was and that’s what I owe, and besides you used up most of the stuff.”
“What is this, some kind of auction? I want three hundred or I’m going to have to get some of my friends to look in on you.”
“I don’t have it.”
“What’s that stink in here anyways? Three hundred dollars. I got your wallet, I got friends, I don’t like you, don’t like this stink here neither,” a weasel quality to her voice confounded him, angry now and his gastritis had him half doubled over in agony. Was she being heard upstairs?
“I don’t have, I’ll have to get it.”
“So well?” and already Hammond had skipped ahead as he led her out, not noticing that she wedged, as a precaution against his running away, the empty cigarette pack between the latch and the bolt.
7.
HIS ANGER OVER the way it all had gone off center and deviated out of control did not, apparently, equal his fear of being captured. Given this, Krieger’s choice to take the train back to New York might have been viewed as tempting fate were it not for the fact that those voices of provincial authority he had heard back in Berkeley’s high-ceilinged foyer found nothing but three unmade beds in the guest suite. The burlier of the two officers did decide it was better at least temporarily to confiscate the parcel of unusual photographs (they seemed pornographic, all these National Geographic sort of nudes, but turned out not to be) Berkeley had spread out on the kitchen floor.
But beyond that there was little to be done except take notes toward filing a report. Even when they were called out again to investigate Jonathan’s claim that a car had been stolen (he was to be vindicated some weeks later when it was discovered in West Virginia, where it had run out of gas on a stretch of rural road and been abandoned) no further credence to his first charge could as yet be provoked.
Precedents deliberately established by wise men are entitled to great weight, they are evidence of truth, but a solitary precedent which has never been reexamined cannot be conclusive … was a bit of intellectual trinketry, a tidbit dislodged by the quickening pace both of Krieger’s progress from midtown down into Chelsea, and of his heart, which was unwontedly faint even given the pressure he suffered at finally having taken the biggest chance in his career and, for all intents and by every sign, come up with nothing. Hannah had been a waste of precious time, but what precedent did Krieger have to work with under the circumstances? Was that why the bombast of one of Henry Clay’s speeches to the Senate was regurgitated at this unlikely moment? There was another fragment. It went, more or less: The arts of power and its minions are the same in all countries and in all ages; it marks its victim, denounces it and excites the public odium and the public hatred to conceal its own abuses and encroachments. That was one he had tried to teach the fat man, not only because he perversely reveled in the idea of a nineteenth-century American senator’s words besmirching the tongue of a twentieth-century Nicaraguan reactionary, but also because he thought Obregón (the fat man’s name, after all) might learn something having it by heart. However, inexplicably, the lush Latin sierras whisked it up in a forgetful funnel to deposit it—who knew where? anywhere—on the moon. Good old Henry Clay, pedant and bombast, what for the love of Lucy would he have done, Krieger contemplated, and even as he did realized none of this was taking any of the pressure of failure off him, nor was it useful in imagining what he might do next. Without question he knew he had to find Hannah, lay the blame on her for the unhappy appearance of detectives and immigration officials up at Berkeley house, and then study her reaction. Krieger knew craftiness was not one of Hannah’s long suits and that no matter what she said by response to the question, Krieger would have his answer. What nagged him was his suspicion that, just like Maddie, Hannah had no part in the bust.
“All I know is,” he rehearsed as he rounded the corner, “that Nembies wasn’t my idea … I mean I don’t take drugs I have a record so clean it’s Martinized—Nembutal, hell—you know like those paper rings they put on the toilet seat in some of your finer hotels let you know nobody’s gonorrheal ass … whose? whose what? whose idea? oh, well sir, let me tell you there are at minimum a couple of senators, ambassador or two and a latrine-full of businessm
en going to be pretty fucking upset by the answer to that question … see, it all started with Vanderbilt ran a ferry and carriage service across Nicaragua middle of the last century, the idea being to help get people to California for the gold rush? you know, cash in? Where’d they all come from? I don’t know, same dumps as always Miami, Parma, Alexandria, you name it, and then how the board of directors of Vanderbilt’s company with the Senate’s compliance, good old U.S. Senate the same as ever, cigars, cigars, helped this character William Walker? this soldier-of-fortune Rambo type, helped him out he came in there with American troops invaded declared himself the new president of Nicaragua, ask a simple question, right?”
The monologue ceased abruptly at those two pale pink high heels and fragile ankles. Krieger raised his eyes as the strange couple passed him, frowns giving off every indication of domestic unrest, and when they had passed, he was sufficiently struck by something that he stopped, turned, watched them recede toward the avenue, the man bowlegged and looking like he’d lost his rodeo, she propulsing, sashaying, brightest color in the immediate area, and as they abandoned Krieger to the block she tossed her head to glimpse back at him, the pale man in a khaki suit, white shirt, loosened tie, rather elegant, mumbling to himself, face angelic but crazed.
Krieger was inclined to wink but it was too late; instead he looked up the side of the building, admired the fluted cast-iron pillars in the fake balconies along its fourth story—there were no fire escapes. He had done this some years ago, when he originally found out Hannah had come into some money, found out down the (as he’d termed it) octopine grapevine, and by process of elimination rediscovered the door that led to the two floors at the top of the building. Back then, how many years ago was it?, there was a small buzzer (mammiform, like the pendulous part of Columbus’s globe) and Krieger had pushed it and after several minutes Hannah had appeared before him, happier than Krieger’d remembered her to be. That was when she’d first moved in, first begun converting skills used as a billboard painter (Deutsch had since gone out of business, subsumed under the revolution of printed paper rolls and glue) to her great—if, as Krieger concluded, “dippy”—murals. Times had changed. Hannah, visionary and (again Krieger:) “animal-husbandry counterrebel,” had gotten herself in far over her head. Krieger stared at the blank bit of wall hung with frayed posters, fragments of smiles, blocks of color, and shreds of words, where the buzzer had been. Only the briefest remembrance of how soft she was, her skin, he allowed, before shaking it off, moving ahead. That would never happen again.
Come Sunday Page 46
