"She was so psyched about directing," says Joy. "She was already arguing about line cuts. She used to say that you can't fuck with art for the sake of good taste. Let's make the audience uncomfortable. Let them hate me, she'd say. Oh, God, it's so sad."
Chapter Fifty-Two
Tommy shows Agnes his brownstone. They get there in the early evening. The street is lined with beautiful brownstones, most of which have their windows boarded up. The roofs stand out in elaborate silhouette against the darkening sky, a backdrop of purple whorls and arches like one of God's fingerprints.
On the entire block, there are only three occupied buildings. The city has planted a row of new trees on each sidewalk. Their delicate young trunks are protected by sleeves of cast-iron.
"For saving this house we should induct you into the Telamones Society."
Tommy is not convinced. "You sound like the guy who sold it to my father."
Agnes and Tommy descend to the basement. Until recently, there were squatters living there. The floor is littered with debris. Tommy did manage to clean up the rotting food.
"It's like I had the worst subletter in history," he says.
They lie together on Tommy's bed in the dark. The radio plays a piano sonata, the sort of simple piece Agnes learned to play as a child. A city dweller to her bones, Agnes likes the feeling of neighbors on the other side of the wall; that there is hardly another soul on the street makes her nervous. She burrows into Tommy.
He gives her the latest police news. They located Vanessa K., the whore in the polka dot dress. Tommy has seen his share of strung-out prostitutes, but Vanessa K. was shocking. She weighed about seventy-five pounds. She wore not polka dots but a beaded flapper dress; her hair was the color of creamed corn. She kept picking invisible things off her arms. She talked about her clientele in a dreamy way. She talked of the preferences of one john and said, "I think he a sick man."
"No offense," said Tommy, "but anyone who would sleep with you is a priori sick."
"They not sick. They lonely." She squinted up at Tommy, as though there were bright lights shining behind his head. "Ah can suck you so good ah make you think ah fuck you."
Whitey showed her the Minotaur letter. Did she see anyone near the Jumel house that night?
"Ah tell you what ah saw," she says. "Ah saw Santa Claus."
"Oh beautiful," said Tommy.
"Ah did. Ah saw him behin' the house. Ah said to mahself is way too early fuh his fat ass."
Whitey shook his head. "I don't get it."
Tommy asked Vanessa to describe the man she saw.
"Big and fat," she said testily.
"Long white beard?"
"No fuckin' beard."
"Santa without a beard? What was he wearing?"
Vanessa K. was losing her patience. "You know what Santa wear. Big red coat. Big white pants. White things. Here. Crossed over. Lahk this."
She traced a crisscross pattern on her chest "as though," Tommy tells Agnes, "she were modeling a Cross-Your-Heart bra."
"Was he wearing a hat?"
"Big tall hat, yeah."
"Was he carrying a gun?"
Vanessa nodded. "Rifle."
Whitey was stumped. "Santa doesn't carry a rifle."
"In that neighborhood, he got to!" said Vanessa with a guffaw.
"It's a musket," said Tommy. "He's dressed as a redcoat. What could be more audacious? Mrs. Chesser sees him and figures he's there for some ceremony and lets him in."
Whitey whistled softly. "The Minotaur's got some pair of balls."
"I want pizza," said Vanessa K.
Agnes takes a shower. Tommy has excellent water pressure. The hot water beats against Agnes's body, then slows to a trickle. Uh-oh, she wonders. Has one of Harry's squatters returned to wash some clothes in the basement sink?
Chapter Fifty-Three
At one point in his life, Bezel waited tables in Buffalo, New York. Buffalo wasn't a bad place, but what drove him crazy was that you couldn't walk two feet without a mention of the fucking Falls. Everything was Niagara—the beer was Niagara, the theaters were Niagara, Niagara Street, Niagara Avenue, Niagara Lane. You saw Niagara until it was like the sound of the thing pounding in your ears.
The nice thing about New York City is that it has so many tourist attractions that you never have to think about any one of them. Bezel thinks about this when he goes to the Transit Museum in Brooklyn. What a crazy place! Admission is a token. There is a shop where you can buy old station markers and maps, where a dozen train-crazed losers make a nuisance of themselves.
Downstairs, strings of antique trains sit parked. Bezel asks the attendant to direct him to the BMT low-voltage cars. Bezel remembers riding on trains like these. He remembers them being a lot dirtier.
The Young Pretender sits alone, reading a newspaper. Bezel gets his first look at him. He is shocked. He really is young. he's a little kid—maybe fifteen. He looks like any kid: freckles and red hair, sweatshirt and dungarees and sneakers. Bezel takes a seat directly across from him.
Getting involved with a child. What was the Frenchman thinking about?
Finally Bezel speaks up. "The Frenchman sent me."
The kid folds his newspaper. He takes out a little black gadget the size of a cigarette pack and presses it to his throat.
"Where is that Belgian fuck?"
The voice is electronic. Bezel has run across this before. The kid doesn't have a voice box.
Bezel shrugs. "He said he'll be away for a while."
The kid taps the device against his cheek. "You didn't kill him or anything, did you?"
Bezel starts. "What kind of a thing is that to say?"
"I know how you people operate," says the kid.
"What do you mean you people?"
"Hey, you're not a bunch of Greenpeace protestors."
The kid takes an old issue of Ring magazine out of his knapsack. He opens to an article that goes into painful detail about the fight that ended Bezel's career. In the accompanying photo, Bezel is curled up in fetal position while his opponent, Bony Barrow, stands over him, oblivious to the shouting of his trainer and the referee, too stunned by that has happened to get to a neutral corner.
"How could you throw a fight, Bezel?" the kid wonders. "And to Bony Barrow, of all people. He was a stiff."
Several museum-goers get on the train.
"The Frenchman talks about me?" says Bezel.
"All the time. I've been dying to meet you. In the annals of boxing you are a glorious footnote."
Bezel walks around the subway car. "This is an odd place."
"I love it. It's peaceful."
"Built it just like a subway, did they? Clever."
"It was a subway. The HH line of the IND—the Court Street Shuttle. An expensive blunder that was closed in 1946."
An attendant wearing striped overalls like an old-time engineer swings a lunch pail as he passes. He greets the kid by name.
"You come here often?" says Bezel.
"What's often?"
"More than twice in a lifetime."
The kid emits a weird electronic giggle. "Sometimes I sleep here."
Bezel nods. "Why?"
"I guess I love subways."
"So go ride a few."
"Those aren't subways, my friend," says the kid with disdain. "Those are hell."
Bezel gets down to business. "The Frenchman said that you know something."
The kid nods excitedly. "I know lots of things. I know things about the way this city is built that nobody else knows."
"So tell me."
"You must be high, Bezel. You'll find out soon enough."
Bezel looks uncomfortable. "Do you have to use that thing?" he says, pointing to the amplifier. "It drives me a bit batty."
"If I don't I sound like this," says the kid. He speaks without amplification. His voice is choked and unintelligible. He sounds like he's drowning. He resumes the device. "So, yes, I have to use it."
"You sound lik
e that pointy-eared robot on TV. What's his name? Spock. You sound like fucking Doctor Spock."
"It's Mr. Spock and he's not a robot."
"He sounds like one. And so do you."
LITTLE ENOUGH TO RIDE FOR FREE? asks a sign above the kid's head. LITTLE ENOUGH TO RIDE YOUR KNEE!
HELP THE WAR EFFORT. EAT GRAPE NUTS.
Bezel slumps in his seat. He rests his head against a window. "Did you have to remind me about Bony Barrow?"
The kid slips into a reverie. "Sometimes I sit here and I thinks that if only I could concentrate hard enough, I could make the doors close and the train pull out. Isn't that insane? And at the next station the car would fill up with men in fedoras and women adjusting their slips, because you don't look like a slob even to ride the subway. Maybe you'd get on, Bezel, and we'd all know you're a fighter because you're pumped up in a world where no one else is."
"And where are we going, kid?" says Bezel.
The kid points to a place on the subway map. The map, dating from the Forties, is elaborate and ornamented and difficult to read, like an ancient sea chart; Bezel half-expects to see a drawing of a sea serpent lurking at the edge of the paper.
"I want to go there," says the kid. "New Lots Avenue."
"What ever for?"
"Have you been there? It's desolate. It's nothing but burned-out buildings and vacant land. There's no reason to go there. But the subway does. There was something there once. It was a place, a real place, with things in it and people living there. That's where I want to go."
Chapter Fifty-Four
Coney Island is a big vacant lot with a bunch of rides thrown together haphazardly, a Tilt-A-Whirl and a tame flume and a lethal looking contraption from Germany, the Schlimmbesserung. Nothing looks bolted-down anymore. Coney Island seems as impermanent as a state fair. Only a few big attractions remain: the Cyclone, the Wonder Wheel, and the Parachute Jump. Wegeman's tubes of green neon creep up the latticework of Brooklyn's Eiffel Tower like intravenous feeding tubes.
The opening is weeks away, but today is the dedication of Wegeman's Palace of Versailles on Surf Avenue, right in the heart of Coney Island. On the rostrum sits the Wegeman inner circle: his advisors; corporation counsel; a handful of CEOs from his other holdings; his "operations people," many of whom seem to be named Dick; the mayor and the governor; Bob Syker; Madelaine and Duck and Clark Ho; Agnes and Sarah.
The Palace of Versailles is Wegeman's latest crowning achievement. Clark Ho has designed a cheesy copy of Louis XIV's palace, including the Marble Courtyard, the Royal Courtyard and the Great Courtyard, where souvenirs are sold. Construction materials costing what they do, there is an inevitable lack of solidity to the building; no granite where there could be concrete or terra-cotta, no stone where brick would do; no brick where brickface is sufficient. What appears to be marble is sometimes marble and sometimes laminated wood. Every expense has been spared, corners cut ruthlessly. Still, the model Ho used was so inspiring that there couldn't help but be traces of nobility in even his pallid copy.
"This is my favorite Clark Ho building," Agnes whispers to Sarah.
"Mine too. But I say that about them all."
The governor introduces Clark Ho as "the man who claimed he could end world hunger simply by streamlining the pineapple."
Ho speaks frankly of his design approach.
"I knew I could not replicate the Palace, and so I arrived at an ingenious solution. Working from photographs, I would stare intently at one section of the original structure—the North Wing, for instance—and then look away. I would quickly sketch the impression that remained in my mind's eye. My design is one of afterimages. What stayed with me were those architectural elements that were essential. Detail and ornamentation faded from my memory, and were omitted. Those things were too expensive to reproduce anyway. We don't have the luxury of every last gargoyle."
It is finally time for the Great Man to speak. Sarah wheels her father to the podium. He wears dark glasses, and cradles his monkey in his lap. Madelaine, overcome by her husband's courage, sobs softly. She is looking very 1960s today, with lilac lips and a flip hairdo.
"He dropped a lit match on his leg yesterday," Syker tells Agnes.
Agnes waits for the other shoe to drop. "What happened?"
"What usually happens? He screamed like nobody's business."
"I have come to hate making speeches," says the Great Man. "So if there's anyone out there planning to shoot me, do it now and save me some misery."
A ripple of laughter, small and nervous, seems to die in the shore breezes.
A small plane trails a banner over the ocean: CONGRATS, RON, ON YOUR PALACE OF V'SAILLES. The flags atop the Palace snap all green and gold in the wind. Cops and horses carrying cops shift restlessly from foot to foot. Agnes hears a loud grinding of machinery. Over near the boardwalk they are testing some of the rides. The Octopus comes to life for the first time that season.
The party moves indoors. Various suites and common areas have names taken from the great palace—the Peace Drawing-Room, the Gilded Cabinet, the Duchess of Burgundy's Former Cabinet, the Apollo room; the lounge, where Jackie Mason is already booked, is the Royal Opera; the casino is called Louis XIV's Game Room—but all resemblance between the interiors of the two structures ends there. Wegeman and Clark Ho have built a standard resort/business hotel, except that some of the furniture is kind of spindly. The chambermaids look as though they have stepped out of a French farce. In The Quincunx, the bistro serving hamburgers and potato skins and deep-fried cheese sticks, the be-toqued chefs bustle about in close-order drill. brandishing whisks and artfully slicing club sandwiches.
Wegeman and his Director of Hotel Operations, Dick Somebody, conduct a tour of the casino. The dealers and croupiers, hired from the surrounding neighborhood and schooled in "The Wegeman Way," stand nervously at their posts, dice stacked, card shoes stocked, bank at the ready. After the tour there is thirty minutes of mock gambling. Wegeman has printed currency bearing his own portrait and the motto fortuna meliores sequitur, "fortune follows the better man." He propels himself around the casino, which is completely accessible to the handicapped. He kibitzes at baccarat, loses at roulette, spins the chuck-luck cage and takes a simpleminded delight in the slot machines. He sits transfixed by the spinning wheels like a child before a Busy Box. One of the Courtesy Girls pulls the lever for him, puckering her ass as she does. The Courtesy Girls are barely dressed, top-heavy with breasts and teeth; their purpose is to assist the high rollers, fetching drinks and sandwiches and more drinks and providing moral support. They are trained in unobtrusive cigarette-lighting and brow-mopping. "They'll do anything short of clipping your nose hair," Wegeman tells a pack of duly impressed bankers, "and we're forming an elite squad to take care of that."
Wegeman buttonholes Agnes. "I want to show you something."
Wegeman and one of the Dicks take Agnes downstairs to an enormous subbasement parking garage.
"You're interested in building design and shit like that, so you'll appreciate this," he says to her. His voice echoes portentously, caroming from pillar to concrete pillar like a pool ball. "Look where the buses park! Sheer genius. The old people ride in with their social security money, get off the bus, and the first thing they see is the slots! They don't have to walk at all. We don't want them to strain themselves. They can stay basically in one area, and not inflict their depressing presence all over my beautiful hotel."
He waits for a reaction from Agnes.
"You enjoy irritating me, don't you?" she says.
"I enjoy trying. What do you think of my set-up here?"
"I wouldn't want to make money that way."
With a great heaving display of upper-body effort, he adjusts the position of his legs on the footrests of the wheelchair. "People like you are the biggest snobs there are."
"Like me?"
"People with nothing."
Wegeman engages the motor on his wheelchair. "You've hurt my feelings, but I for
give you. Let me show you something else."
They climb a ramp, and emerge at the side of the hotel, in the Marble Courtyard.
"Sarah's on me about the gambling," he says wearily. "I think it's her time of the month. She thinks people are like children. She wants to protect them. Me, I give them a lot more credit."
"I'm sure you do," says Agnes "At usurious interest rates."
The Great Man snorts. "I like that one, Travertine."
What Wegeman wants to show her is the Neptune Hotel, over one hundred years old and still standing. Wegeman has fixed up its outside and actually erected the Palace of Versailles around it. The four-story one-time Single Room Occupancy is attached to the south wing of the Palace like a boxy brownstone carbuncle.
Agnes Among the Gargoyles Page 25
