Guy Noir and the Straight Skinny

by Keillor, Garrison

  I lifted it. It was very light. Nothing ticked or hissed inside. I shook it, and nothing was loose. Anthrax, I thought. A batch of botulism. But of course the guy wouldn’t want to kill me quite yet, not until I handed over the queens.

  “He didn’t head upstairs, by any chance, did he?”

  She shook her head. “Left here and got into a black Lincoln Town Car and was on his cell phone the whole time. So how are you?”

  I wanted to tell her that I had become a sex symbol, but it isn’t the sort of thing you should have to explain to people.

  I shook the box again and thumped it, and then I stripped off the paper and string and slowly opened the top flaps and looked in, and there, glued to the bottom, was the cigar box from my desk. The box I’d stored the worms in. Empty.

  Out the door I ran and buzzed the elevator and rode up to the twelfth floor and around the corner, and my office door was ajar. Inside, a maelstrom of paper. Mounds of it. Files strewn hither and yon, and the queen worms gone without a trace.

  I called Mr. Ishimoto. He was not perturbed.

  “The good queens I have shipped to China,” he said. “The ones I gave you are bad queens. Very bad, Mistah Cholly.” I heard an insidious chuckle. “Whoever takes the eggs of those queens will get a big surprise. No babies. No sex.” He burst into high-pitched giggles.

  I CAME BACK TO THE Brew Ha Ha and took my espresso to an empty table next to the window looking out at the park where the bums reclined on the benches around the granite fountain. The bum life had appealed to me at one time, the thought of napping in parks and arranging one’s social life around the soup kitchen at the Dorothy Day Center and planning the fall migration to warmer climes. There is intelligent life among the unemployed. You learn about that if you hoof it around town and meet people rather than ride around locked up in a car—there are learned philosophers in Palmer’s and the 400 Bar near Seven Corners, and if you appreciate the art of the storyteller, you will find better practitioners in bars and on city buses than in any creative writing program. Storytelling and panhandling are allied crafts: a writer in no need of ready cash is only going through the motions, like a hockey player without a puck or a horseman on a sawhorse. I had lost the precious tapeworm queens only to discover that they were worse than worthless, they were poison.

  And should I now call Mr. Larry and warn him? Or let him find out that his pencil will soon have no more lead?

  A slim young thing walked over to me, wearing one of those light summer dresses that you just know women who wear them know what they do to men. I mean, ventilation is not all that’s going on here. She had wild kinky black hair and heavy eyebrows and a sullen mouth that I wanted to kiss. “Mind if I sit down?” she said. The bodice of her dress was cut in an interesting way—it was simply two long vertical straps that revealed the sides and undersides of her breasts. Which were perfection, the Monet Water Lilies of breasts.

  She sat down opposite me and flashed a flicker of a smile. “You Noir? Guy Noir?”

  “If you want me to be someone else, just say.”

  “I’m here to meet a friend.”

  “You just did. Me. Where have you been all my life, gorgeous?”

  “Well, for the first half of your life, I wasn’t born yet.”

  Her voice was slightly hoarse. A wisp of smoke twisted out of her mouth as she said my name, and then I saw the cigarette. She tapped the ash into her palm and brushed back a mass of black curls. “My name is Scarlett. Scarlett Anderson. I like noirish stuff. Especially the movies. The ones where the hero is seriously screwed up and the romantic lead is a bad woman and people tend to have dark secrets, especially the cops.” She stubbed the smoke out on the floor. “By the way,” she said, “I’m packing a heater. A Glock. Just so you know. I do it for the thrill. That scare you? Woman with a roscoe?” She grinned. “Or maybe it excites you.”

  I was looking her in the eye, trying not to stare at her breasts, and then I simply had to look. They were proud things, well defined, sculpted, the nipples erect under the cloth. The gun, by the looks of things, was in her tote bag. It certainly wasn’t under her dress.

  “You come here often, Mr. Noir? You look very comfortable.”

  “I do. I like the context. Young people and their creative aspirations.”

  She smiled. “Do you have creative aspirations?”

  “None, whatsoever. I’m strictly a voyeur.”

  “I can see that, the way you’re looking me over.” She pulled a cigarette out of somewhere, I didn’t see where, I was looking elsewhere. “I like to be looked at. And there’s a lot more of me to look at than what you’re seeing right now. If you were a painter, I’d offer to model for you.”

  “If you were my model, I’d for sure try to be a painter.”

  “Whatever you did would be just wonderful, I’m sure. So long as it came from pure feeling.” The way she said “pure feeling” made my skin follicles take a deep breath.

  She lit the cigarette. Minnesota has been a No Smoking state for so long, people around us were staring at her as if she had stepped out of a history book. She blew a great cloud of smoke into the air, and they shuddered and crouched down to avoid it as it drifted across the room, as if it were radioactive. They were too young to remember when people used to do this.

  “I’ve always been drawn to older men with aspirations,” she whispered. “I’m twenty-three years old, and so I have a lot of older men to choose from. I like to experience men who are experienced. Men who bear the burden of age and disappointment and loss but their hearts still can leap. And frankly, I like the looks of you. Some men are put off by a woman who is frank about what she wants. Well, Mr. Noir”—she put her hand on mine—“when I see what I want, I take it, and there’s not much anybody can do about it.” She leaned forward and slid her chair around toward mine. I could feel my blood pressure rising. And something else. “I think I can make your heart leap, Mr. Noir. I am fairly certain of that.”

  Suddenly I had a picture in my mind of her naked, standing in an open window, sunlight around her like an aura, the pale skin of her long legs, her radiant thighs, her womanhood, and my heart did sort of leap. Not as high as once it did long ago when Beatrice Olsen wrapped her legs around me, but high enough. And it could learn to leap higher.

  “By the way, I’m from Pfizer,” she said, putting a hand on my leg. “You know. The drug company. I’ve been talking to a Mr. Ishimoto, who I believe you know. The name ring a bell?”

  “Ding.”

  “And what about Naomi Fallopian?”

  “Ding. Ding. Ding.”

  She smiled. “Good. Then you know what brings me here.” She had the advantage of surprise, and also she had her hand on my leg. “America is a great country, Mr. Noir, and every so often some enterprising entrepreneur gets lucky with an invention such as your little pill, Elongate, and they have visions of wealth and success, and they try to go it alone, and the outcome is not good. No, it is not. They’re like a rowboat in a busy harbor where big ships are steaming to and fro, and they wind up getting smashed and sinking to the bottom and—guess what?—nobody even knows they existed. I happen to know exactly how much you’ve been paid by Miss Fallopian.” She pulled out a paper and pencil from her tote bag—I glanced down and saw the butt of the Glock wrapped in a red silk hanky—and wrote down a six-figure sum that looked pretty accurate to me.

  “We can do better than that, Mr. Noir. A lot better.” And the hand on my leg slid upward. “Pfizer is a giant cash machine. The big money in America used to be in gold or oil or manufacturing cars, but now it’s in feel-good pharmaceuticals. Half of all Americans are on medications now, and in ten years that number will be up to three-quarters. We’re developing drugs to combat discouragement, boredom, ennui, revulsion, fear of death, all the negative emotions once considered inevitable in life, and these drugs can keep a pe
rson’s chemistry beautifully balanced at a high peak of lightheartedness. In ten years, nobody in America will experience loneliness at all. It will disappear, like smallpox. Pfizer has been working on a weight-loss drug for years, and we think that your drug can give us a new angle. It’s rather crude. Side effects include dizziness, heightened libido, loss of inhibitions, and flatulence. You give that pill to a thousand people, and you’ll have about 128 of them running around naked, throwing themselves at strangers, and farting up a storm. Whatever Pfizer develops will be nothing so primitive as tapeworms, but the chemistry is interesting. And that’s why we need your queens. There’s some DNA there that we can’t retrieve through reverse engineering.”

  Her hand was now up around my pants pocket. “Did you know that Pfizer owns the name Elongate? We trademarked it for the drug that came to be called Viagra instead. So we have grounds for an enormous messy lawsuit that I’m afraid would be personally disastrous for you, sweetheart. Pfizer uses attorneys as casually as you and I use Q-tips. I could make a phone call this afternoon, and tomorrow morning you’d have a man at your door with a two-pound subpoena, and you’d be in for four years of misery that would leave you limp as a used tea bag and a couple million in debt. Miss Fallopian can gallivant around Paris, heedless of American law, but here you are, easy prey. Why go down that chute and land in the sewer? And that doesn’t include the misery of having the feds on your case. There are laws about drugs, you know. A drug like yours needs to be brought into the market very, very carefully, and that means seducing the FDA.”

  I pulled back. Her hand had reached a critical spot.

  “It isn’t a medication,” I said weakly. “It’s an entirely natural substance, like butter or cheese.”

  “And what does the F in FDA stand for? Flatulence?”

  “It’s not a food either. It’s an antifood.”

  “Then it’s a med.”

  I wasn’t sure what she wanted. If Pfizer wanted to put tapeworm eggs into pill form, surely they could figure out how to do it without my permission.

  She took her hand off my leg. “Let me get to the point, sweetheart. We’d like your cooperation. We’ve got some questions about genetics. We need to find Mr. Ishimoto. We’d like to borrow some worms. He seems to have vanished into the woodwork. And because I like you, Mr. Noir—I like you a lot—and I mean that—I’m honor bound to tell you that Pfizer has some rough people working for it. We’re not all English majors, darling. Some of our people got an MFA in the art of nasty. There are medications that can turn very nice people into bloodsucking fiends with shaved heads and mirror shades who get a kick out of scaring people into involuntary bowel movements. Men with no family, no friends, who spend their nights at the gym and do three hundred crunches at a sitting and then four hundred push-ups. Men who are programmed to attack on command.”

  She made a good case—that Pfizer needed the tapeworm queens and was willing to unleash the dogs of war to get it. I saw no need to tell her that the queens were bad queens and that they were gone, probably in the possession of the Bogus Brothers. I could still make a deal, sell the worms to Scarlett, avoid being pounded to a pulp, walk away with a bundle, and then disappear before Pfizer was any the wiser. Why not? Naomi had two best-selling books and a booming business in China. She was out in the Milky Way somewhere, circling the Pleiades. I ran a daily Google search on her, and she was here, there, and everywhere talking about The Blessing of Less as the answer to all of mankind’s problems—it and its sequel, The Loss of Austerity, sold like iced lemonade in Hades—and she bought herself an eighteen-room apartment in a co-op on Fifth Avenue so exclusive that the Dalai Lama had been turned down by the co-op board, and so had Toni Morrison, Archbishop Tutu, Mr. Rogers, and Elie Wiesel. I called Naomi’s number over and over and over and got a personal assistant—a different one each time—Anna, Brianna, Arianna, Madison, Addison, Natalie, Destiny, Brooklyn—Brooklyn?? Yes, Brooklyn. A twenty-two-year-old with a breathy voice, drop-dead polite, like all of them, and she had no idea where Naomi was or who I was or why, and she wrote down all my information, as did Anna, Brianna, Arianna, et al.—slips of paper accumulated with my name and number on them, and no call from Naomi.

  So I was on my own.

  PFIZER DID NOT BELIEVE IN Lessness. I knew that much. It had earned gazillions from Viagra and from a super form of Viagra called Biagra that gives a man an erection for eight to ten hours and that nursing homes and hospitals gave to old men at night to keep them from rolling out of bed. And then there was Niagra for urinary tract problems, which makes an old man piss like a palomino. And Miagra, a pacifier that calms anxiety and also induces forgetfulness, so you are likely to take all of your pills a second or third time, thus giving Pfizer sales a nice boost. If Pfizer wanted to hire a couple of shooters to ding my bell, they had the dough to do it. If they could grease the skids for that $200 billion federal giveaway to the big pharms in the Medicare drug program—the day Congress put all of its principles into cold storage and promised to pay full retail price for Gamma and Gampy’s Lipitor and not negotiate a deal—then Pfizer could handle an old gumshoe like me.

  I rubbed my nose. I tugged on my chin. I looked out the window and crossed and uncrossed my legs. It didn’t take me long to decide to capitulate. I said, softly, “I can get you a worm. Do you want it dead or alive?”

  “Either one works for us.”

  “Give me an hour, and I’ll have what you want,” I said. We shook hands. She ordered a BLT and an extra-large latte. She intended to stay right there.

  17

  Mr. Banana comes to town

  I WENT UPSTAIRS TO MY devastated office and looked around in the drifts of debris for the envelope with the death pills. Larry B. Larry’s goons had pulled handfuls of papers from the drawers and flung them every which way, and you know? If someone had stuck a radio transmitter in my scrotum, I might’ve been out for revenge, too. I searched through the mess, and as I did, it occurred to me that (1) I was never going to return to the twelfth floor of the Acme Building and (2) I was not going to miss the old dump much. What a misspent life. A 1978 calendar from Sam’s Clam Disco. A poster for Splendor in the Grass starring Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty. A pink boa, a souvenir of some party, a vague memory in a cloud of gin, and a pink polka-dot hanky, probably from the same party. A box of matchbooks from the Capriccio Hotel in Vegas. An ad for comedian Eddie Rictus at the Can Can Casino. Some old detective paperbacks: The Blonde in 204, Close Cover Before Striking, Dead Men Don’t Shop. A wall plaque, glass broken: IT’S BETTER TO GO OUT BURNISHED FROM USE THAN RUSTING FROM PRINCIPLE. A bronzed fruitcake, courtesy of Thompson Tooth Tinsel. A newspaper story on a survey that showed that the rate of infidelity among women named Evelyn is very low. A sheet of coupons good for 25 percent off at the Hat Hut. A black sweatshirt that said, GO AHEAD, ASK ME. THE ANSWER IS YES. A recipe for The Seven Joys of General Tsao Chicken Almond Ding. A paper fan with a picture of Charles Wesley and underneath “Epworth League, Seward, Nebraska.” Two tickets to the Schoolbus Demolition Derby at the Minnesota State Fair. From some catalog, a picture of a girl in a skimpy outfit: “Our shimmering silky flip skirt will make you the belle of the ball, especially topped off with our oh-so-naughty lace tee, festooned with hand embroidered butterflies.”

  And the picture of Nevaeh in the Pontiac. Ah, Nevaeh. Why did you do it? Thank you for doing it. You shouldn’t have done it. What are you doing to me?

  I didn’t hear the footsteps in the hall.

  “Hey, Numb Nuts. Wake up and die right.”

  It was Lieutenant McCafferty in the doorway, in his customary green plaid jacket and porkpie hat, the bulge under the left arm. He looked around at the devastation. “Looks like you survived a tornado, Noir. Consider yourself lucky.” He kicked a pile of folders aside and plopped down in my client chair. “Gimme a shot of your whiskey,” he said, and I dug out the bottle from the bottom file drawe
r and found a Dixie cup and poured him a shot. “I been dealing with losers all day, I need a little elegance in my life. Ignorance and cruelty and greed, that’s my daily diet. This morning I hadda deal with a little punk who shoved his grandma down the stairs. Two flights. Old lady in a print dress, hair up in a bun, lying there at the bottom of the stairs, two minutes after she’d made him breakfast. Eggs and cottage fries and bacon. Eggs over easy. He wanted sunny-side up. So boom, down the stairs she went.”

  He gave me a long, lingering look. “Hey, you look pretty good, buddy boy. I hear the ladies are climbing all over you.”

  “I’ve been working out and watching my diet, lieutenant.”

  He snorted. “Hell you have. You’ve been ingesting illegal drugs, and you’ve been selling them on the open market. You got Bac-O Bits for brains, buddy boy. And you’re in more trouble than you ever thought possible. You ever hear of Johnny Banana?”

  “The Johnny Banana?”

  “There is but one. The capo del capo del grande primo capo. And also the recto del recto del recto del humungo recto, if you’re up on your Italian. He came to town looking for you, buddy boy. He’s up in the penthouse suite at the St. Paul Hotel, with ten pinstripe guys the size of refrigerators, and he’s sitting and tapping his foot and chewing on his cigar, and he’s saying your name under his breath over and over. The word is out: you’re a marked man. These boys aren’t playing tiddlywinks. They want you bad, and when they get you, they’re gonna squeeze you hard, and then they’re gonna include you in some construction project.”

  “Does Joey know about this?”

  The lieutenant laughed. “Joey is a sardine. When the killer shark comes on the scene, the sardines find a rock to hide under.”

  “What does he want?”

  “You, buddy boy. He wants you.”