The Exquisite

by Laird Hunt

  I didn’t answer. I started walking faster.

  Come back here, Henry, Mr. Kindt shouted.

  But I didn’t. I went back to my room and looked out the window through the black netting or whatever it was and wondered if I would see—I did not, I did not see anything—a balloon heliuming its way up into the ether. I wondered, also, if I would ever tell Dr. Tulp the truth about Aunt Lulu, that I had stood by, without lifting a finger, when I could have helped her. But it was all too long ago to matter anyway. Wasn’t it? So much else had happened. Was happening. I wondered about what I had said about being traumatized, about the possibly erroneous nature of the causal relationship of my trauma with the truck, which had been full, I suddenly remembered, though I wasn’t sure why, of the pinkest lilies. I wondered also about Mr. Kindt’s smile and the strange look, not entirely pleasant, that had taken over his eyes. When I thought about it, it was a little like the one that had come into them just before he had bitten my ankle so hard that, later, when he had left, I had had to ask Job for some antiseptic cream.

  After a few minutes he came in. He was holding a package under his arm and a piece of paper in his hand.

  Look, come on, I’ve had enough, stop already, I said.

  Here is a hospital robe, plus fake, and a time frame plus parameters for the next score.

  The next score? Listen to how you’re talking. Who are you? I can’t believe this. What next score?

  The authorities needed someone, as they always do—they came and got someone. They’ve taken him away. He won’t return. That is the way of things. This does not stop us, in any way, from continuing. Do you want a cigar? I’m dying for one.

  We can’t smoke in here.

  We can do anything we want in here, Henry, that’s the way it works, said Mr. Kindt, unwrapping one of his Dutch Masters, rolling it between his fingers, sniffing it, then lighting a match.

  The way what works?

  He winked. I looked at his eyes. Whatever had been in them had gone.

  All right, my boy?

  I looked out the window. No balloon came. No bird flew by. The sounds of the street seemed very distant. I seemed very distant. Empty circles within circles. Inertia clearly had the upper hand. I shrugged then nodded. Then looked at him. Then at the floor. It needed cleaning.

  One blue devil for another, Henry, Mr. Kindt said.

  NINETEEN

  It was a good job, great even. Despite my skepticism, there were customers aplenty—so many that once or twice I had to turn requests down. The pay, as I’ve noted, was more than fair, and it quickly became clear that I could supplement it by lifting the odd item or two after I had, so to speak, put the subject away. This didn’t always work out, of course. Sometimes they didn’t want to stay dead. One guy, who I’d done in good with an aluminum-handled garrote, woke right up and wanted me to have a beer and maybe watch the game. In spite of myself, I found this a little strange, a touch supernatural, as if, while we were sitting there watching his plasma screen, I could see through him a little, and I didn’t stay long. Another, a chipper woman who told me her friends had gotten her a murder for her thirtieth birthday, started plugging me with questions before I’d even gotten started, like about what I did in real life, what kind of music I listened to, whether I thought the murder thing was stupid, distasteful, “and/or kind of cool” (and/or kind of cool, I said), if, maybe, when we were done I’d like to take some X and “see what happens.” Fortunately, the scenario I’d been given, imparted to Cornelius by her friends, had called for me to drop a good dose of her own Halcion in her drink and, in the meantime, “humor her.” Which I did, and eventually her head started lolling and she shut up just before her friends were due to get there and paint her living room. Not that I minded, incidentally, at least as a concept, the x-and-possibly-getting-friendly part—it’s just that, as with one or two other jobs, I had started to get the feeling I was dressed up in a Santa Claus suit and some wiseass kid was tugging on my beard.

  Most of them didn’t get weird or friendly though, and didn’t seem to mind if I prowled around a little. A couple of times I was even supposed to prowl around and steal things. One woman, who told me she worked as a stockbroker in a medium-sized firm downtown as I taped her up, said I should smash what I didn’t want and take the rest: it was all insured. Unfortunately there was nothing there—the requisite knickknacks, etc.—excepted, so I knocked over a lacquer vase and a row of blue coffee mugs and took a pair of toy binoculars that, when I tried them the next day, proved not to be functional, and a book I subsequently read and liked a great deal by an Italian writer, which was about black holes and supernovas and the prospect of getting stuck forever on the moon. The other time I was supposed to steal something the verbal brief was explicit. I was to murder the subject (first by knocking him out with a strong dose of chloroform, then by taking a knife from the chest of drawers in his bedroom and “being especially brutal with it”) the moment he (a practicing accountant by the name of Leonard James Seligman, who worked out of his apartment by the looks of the beat-up diplomas on his wall, the big adding machine on his desk, the half-eaten sandwich, full ashtray, etc.) came home, steal his money, then bag up the entire contents of his desk’s file drawer (the key to which would be on his person) and (“in disgust because there is nothing there worth keeping”) toss the lot into the trash outside the building. I did this, not neglecting to “act disgusted” as I feigned going through the bag before I dropped it into the garbage. It occurred to me to wonder, as I did this, if he himself had requested the murder, or if someone else, perhaps a disgruntled client, had requested it, maybe without his knowledge, for him.

  I had been under the impression that the jobs would be collaborative, that the contortionists would be involved, that the knockout would stop by once in a while to add a little spice to the business, that Cornelius would occasionally climb in through a window wearing his hunting cape, but after the test runs I was left to work alone.

  We’re stretched too thin, Cornelius explained to me one night after I had asked him about it. Business is booming and everyone has to work.

  Do you work?

  I’m old, Henry. I organize—I oversee. I do other things.

  Like speak French?

  Cornelius raised an eyebrow.

  Real murders?

  No comment.

  Tell me more about Mr. Kindt swimming the length of Lake Otsego on a bet.

  Shut up, please.

  Usually, I would get a scenario, delivered verbally—by Cornelius—a night or so before the murder, which gave me time to pick up props if they were called for and think things through a little. Sometimes, though, all I got beforehand was the time and address, with no on-site instructions waiting for me—those jobs, after I had gotten over my prework jitters, were probably my favorites, although the results could get a little messy, even painful.

  Once, for example, the job involved a couple in a building over on Second Street, across from the old Marble Cemetery—a nice little lower-rung tenement with mosaic floors and freshly painted green stairs. I’d been buzzed in, so I figured they would open up when I knocked, but they didn’t, even when I leaned close to the door and said I could hear them in there and that the meter was running and they should let me in. After a few more minutes, I knocked again, louder this time. The door next to theirs opened and a heavy old lady with greasy hair in a dirty housedress looked out. From somewhere in the apartment behind her a man’s voice said, who is it, Lupe? But the old lady said nothing, just kept staring at me, with a premises-vacated-but-haunted look in her eyes. I had seen a lot of that look out in the streets and down in the subway in the eighties. Once I had woken up on one of the old plastic bucket seats in Penn Station and found someone with the look about six inches away, peering into my face.

  I knocked on the couple’s door.

  I asked the old woman, who was still standing in her doorway, if she had the time.

  She blinked, her nostrils flared sligh
tly, she scratched her right side.

  I was getting ready to leave when the husband opened the door and invited me in.

  Sorry, he said. We were just getting things together. Finishing up. Come on in.

  Who’s the neighbor? I said.

  Go back inside, Lupe, it’s all right, he said.

  Get back in here now, Lupe, came the man’s voice from behind her.

  Lupe didn’t move.

  Don’t worry about it, she’s just got a short circuit somewhere, he said.

  I’m not worried, I said.

  He vanished back into his apartment and, after I had said good-bye to Lupe, who did not answer, I followed him in. He introduced me to his wife. We all shook hands. They had some dinner—chicken with wild rice, salad, and sweet potatoes—going and suggested I join them. I sat down. Not too long into dinner—which wasn’t bad, although the chicken was a little tough—we got to it. It was when the wife, who had just finished her glass of 2000 Long Island Blanc Fumé, said, so this is the guy that’s been writing me those letters, Billy. Here he is. I wanted you to see him face-to-face. See who your competition is.

  What? the husband said.

  Yeah, what? I said. I wondered what I was supposed to have written. Maybe the imagined letters had been vulgar, full of details about what I’d do to her if I got her alone, etc. Or maybe they had just been enthusiastic, full of exclamation points, exciting interrogations, curlicues of banal but nicely turned supposition. Who knows what the mind wants, what it needs to talk itself into waking up. She looked nice. Pretty in a quiet, self-contained way. Like a lamp turned on in the early evening, or a modest triangle of green space on a crowded street.

  The husband, for his part, did not look all that nice, though he had been pleasant enough through dinner. A tattoo of a wildly burning pinecone on his forearm had figured in the conversation. He told me he had gotten it during a stint as a construction worker in Jersey City. While sometimes, now that he wasn’t working a jackhammer, he regretted having had it done, other times it filled him with a kind of pride. More than once, “on that day they got us,” when he was helping with the stretchers, he had looked at it through the smoke, gritted his teeth, and soldiered on. Also, his wife found it cute.

  A pinecone, she had said, as if by way of confirmation.

  Listen, asshole, he said, standing up.

  It didn’t take a genius to figure out that now a struggle would ensue, things would get out of hand. I would kill the husband, and maybe even the wife.

  All right, I said. We got to it. The trouble was the husband was more into grappling than I was, and before I knew it I was getting slapped around pretty handsomely. After a while, in fact, it was either do something drastic or give them a refund. Fortunately, the guy stopped and pointed at the big wooden salad bowl on the table. I picked it up and broke it over his head.

  Sweet Jesus, God in heaven, said the wife.

  Yeah, I said, starting to move toward her.

  You won’t hurt me or anything will you?

  I wasn’t exactly sure how I was supposed to take this, but after my tussle I was feeling a little fatigued, so I told her, albeit politely, to shut up, then put tape over her mouth, did my best to hog-tie her, and held my fingers over her nostrils long enough for her to lose consciousness. I took a look around the apartment. Nothing caught my eye until I was heading for the door. On a table in a corner was a box full of all shape and presumably variety of pinecones. I took one as a souvenir for Mr. Kindt.

  Lupe appeared not to have moved from the open doorway, although she now seemed agitated and was even wringing her hands. After a moment, I could hear a soft snoring coming out of the room behind her. I must have been disoriented, because I was suddenly overwhelmed by the feeling that all of New York, like some horrible dark spider, had crawled into the apartment behind Lupe to sleep and shouldn’t, at all costs, be woken.

  Bye, Lupe, I whispered.

  A couple of gray cats had appeared and were sitting pressed up against her light-blue slippers.

  Oftentimes, after I’d completed a job, I would go over to Mr. Kindt’s and tell him about my evening. He liked hearing about what he called my escapades, and took particular interest in the ones that had a more openly theatrical aspect, like the job involving a rooftop terrace overlooking Tompkins Square, a black chair sitting on a red blanket, and poison dripped into an old guy’s ear. He also took considerable pleasure in hearing about the simpler ones, including the murder of an older woman by following her into her apartment and smashing an ax into her head. Maybe not surprisingly, a considerable number of people were interested in death by falling, or smoke inhalation or sudden impact, and Mr. Kindt was always very interested to hear about how they had been accommodated.

  Sometimes during these conversations, Tulip was present, and I have to say I tended to lay things on a little thick when she was there. Since our conversation in the bar after her murder, I had had the impression that certain elemental operations in my body, like cell mitosis or proper oxygen conversion or general nutrient replacement and calorie conversion, got interrupted when those eyes of hers would light on me. I had the impression that she had undergone an attitudinal adjustment toward me since the night of the second trial run, and, though it’s a little embarrassing to admit, it was hard not to keep hearing her say, you’re pretty too. Of course it’s important not to overstate this perceived shift in circumstances. It’s not like Tulip was suddenly falling all over me—hardly. Where before, a disinterested “whatever” might have come close to describing her attitude toward me, there now emanated some glimmer of maybe, just maybe, more than moderate interest from her direction when I would show up at Mr. Kindt’s and start talking.

  So of course I talked.

  This talking, when it strayed from description of accomplished fake murder or of fake murder slated to be accomplished, was admittedly not much, but neither Mr. Kindt nor Tulip seemed greatly inclined to interrupt me. It was in this way that I came to discuss—with a level of bitterness that I only afterward and only vaguely wondered at—my unhappy early years in the city, the endless days spent working as a messenger in the basement at Forty-second and First, my dismissal, the brief and pleasant spell on severance and then unemployment, one or two incidents, my job shifting garbage and objects at the little antique shop on Second, my first attempted theft and its embarrassing result, a stint as a freelance writer for a weekly paper, the dismal try at a pulp novel, a Parisianesque girlfriend, several related episodes, including being dragged to poetry events at St. Mark’s Church and the KGB Bar, my general distrust of these events, where people either moved too much when they read or too little, the strange excitement of all the references to long-dead poets, the episode with my poor little cat, the Parisianesque girlfriend’s abrupt and not unviolent and indeed heartbreaking departure from my life, my inability to make rent, certain family problems to do with my aunt, renewed attempts at theft, sketchy business opportunities, life on the streets, time in the hospital, where I was treated for my injuries, forcibly detoxed, given an opportunity to fill my pockets with some saleable pharmaceuticals, then discharged—in short, the whole sad story until Tulip walked up to me at a party, etc. Both Tulip and Mr. Kindt seemed sympathetic during my ramblings on this and other not especially related subjects, and at one juncture, when I was having an especially hard time describing something unpleasant that had occurred one night not too far from my old apartment, they told me to come sit between them on the couch.

  You’re past that and on to other things now, Henry, Mr. Kindt said.

  Yes, Tulip said.

  Anyway, generally speaking, they were both nice to me during these episodes. Mr. Kindt would say a few comforting words then gently steer me back to the subject of my escapades, and Tulip didn’t get up and walk out of the room whenever I started talking, like she would have before. So it was all pretty agreeable.

  Incidentally, I offer (or let stand) the above-mentioned biographical details, merel
y pointed to as they are, only to provide further context for my subsequent actions—to acknowledge, in a sense, that I had started my sad-sack downward slide long before Mr. Kindt, Tulip, Cornelius, and his posse entered my life, and that what was to happen very soon afterward, had as much to do with my own shortcomings—by that I mean my own idiocy—as with any particular external forces. Sure, there were machinations being conducted around me, but the truth is I had plenty of warning. To take one instance, the day of what I called the pinecone murder, in fact, Anthony appeared out of nowhere as I was heading over to Mr. Kindt’s, grabbed my arm, and told me that he had been hearing things and that if I was smart I would put as much distance between myself and Mr. Kindt et al as I could. Instead of asking him why, what he’d been hearing, etc., what I did—and you will see that no matter how many questions I did actually ask I was to repeat the essence of this gesture several times in the days to come—was hold up the pinecone and say, Nice, huh?

  TWENTY

  There are two New Yorks. One of them is the one you go out into every day and every day it smacks you in the face and maybe you laugh a little and the people walk down the street and trucks blow their horns and you are happy or you are not, but your heart is beating. Your heart is beating as you walk, say, through a steady drizzle, your beat-up umbrella bumping other beat-up umbrellas, muttering excuse me, skirting small, dirty puddles and drifts of dark sediment, stepping out of the way of the young woman or young man on a cell phone who didn’t see you coming, didn’t notice you had stepped out of the way, didn’t give a shit, didn’t hear you say, because of this, fuck you, saying fuck you with your heart beating faster, feeling pretty good about saying fuck you, suddenly maybe feeling good about the drizzle, about the brilliant beads of water on the cabs going too fast down Prince, on the delicate ends of the oak branches as you cross Elizabeth, on the chain-link mesh as you move along the street. Your heart beats fast then slow then fast again as you cross Lafayette, the rainy vista extending all the way to Astor Place, then move across the shiny remnants of cobbles as you negotiate Crosby, the old, converted factory buildings surrounding you until you hit Broadway, where you can see up and down the shop-infested lower spine of New York, and you stop for a time and think about verticality, then compromised verticality, then rubble, about steaming ruins, about vanished buildings, and wonder where you’re going, though not why. With money in your pocket and no place to be, why is not a question you are obliged to ask yourself as you start up again, a location in mind now, up Broadway past Houston then across Third, back to the East Village—home. There isn’t any why as you wait at the light to cross Bowery, as you flip off a bike messenger who takes a puddle hard and sprays you with it, as you walk fast, in familiar territory again, as you stop in a bar and have a Cape Cod, as you smile a little but talk to no one, as you light a cigarette and close your eyes and lean back in your booth. For a short time then you subtract yourself from the proceedings, leave the cabs and chain link and cell phones outside, and, thinking of steam and rubble, drift. Down dark, windswept hallways, across empty public spaces, past vanished water-tasting stations and stopped-up springs, along oily waterways littered with rusting barges and sleeping gulls, down abandoned subway tunnels and the sparking guts of disused power stations: into the second New York. The one in which a heartbeat is at best a temporary anomaly, a troubling aftershock, an instance of unanswerable déjà vu. Which is much bigger than the first, and is for the most part, in your current condition, inaccessible to you, you think, although sometimes, like sitting in the bar drifting, or lying on your bed surrounded by lights and strangers, you can catch a glimpse.