The Exquisite

by Laird Hunt

  Then I put on the robe and went to get the speed.

  So maybe now …I said.

  Oh, not quite yet, Henry, Mr. Kindt said. You made things quite difficult for me, you see. You made my position less certain, and even if it was only briefly, dear Henry, you will have to continue to pay for a time.

  For how long?

  Mr. Kindt shrugged. For a time. But you must think of it as an exchange—a simple transaction. Difficulty for difficulty. I would call it quite fair.

  Like wampum and some hatchet heads for an island.

  It’s much less problematic a transaction than that one was, Mr. Kindt said.

  I’ll leave, I said. I’ll get the fuck out of here.

  Leave? Mr. Kindt said. Leave here? None of us get to leave. Don’t be outrageous. That’s just silly, Henry.

  It was. I didn’t completely know that yet, but that is certainly how it has turned out.

  O.K., fine, I’ll talk to Dr. Tulp.

  Do so. Yes, please do.

  Dr. Tulp, who was back in her office, barely looked up at me over her papers.

  I’m very busy, Henry, she said.

  Like last night.

  Yes, she said, like last night, like today, like tomorrow. This is a hospital in a city where hospitals are much needed, perhaps now more than ever. A hospital is a center of learning and healing. Here we are in the business of casting light into the shadows, of banishing trauma, of soothing hurts. How is the incision?

  It’s great. I’m just fantastic. I really appreciate your concern.

  It was necessary, Henry. It will help. You were drifting. I suspect it will lead you back on track.

  Dr. Tulp’s eyes, which had flipped up for a moment, went back to her papers. I stood up. Dr. Tulp’s hand moved toward the buzzer that would bring the attendants. I sat back down.

  My aunt, I said.

  Dr. Tulp raised an eyebrow.

  Never mind. Forget that. I don’t want to talk about her. Mr. Kindt.

  Dr. Tulp straightened her papers and put them down.

  My friend. He’s changed. I offended him. He’s getting out of control. He says he’s got his own visitor now. A guy in swim trunks. Is there a pool here? I think it’s supposed to mean something.

  Sorry, Henry, I don’t follow you.

  It’s me. I’m the one who’s been ripping this place off. Mr. Kindt took over for Job. I pissed him off.

  Slow down, Henry.

  He’s withholding my meds.

  No one is withholding your medication, Henry.

  Yes, someone definitely the fuck is.

  No, Henry, Dr. Tulp said.

  See, my boy, said Mr. Kindt when I returned. There is unfortunately absolutely nothing your beautiful young Dr. Tulp will do.

  No, I don’t think there is.

  I looked at him.

  Well, I said.

  Yes, dear boy? he asked.

  I shut my eyes. I counted to fifty then opened them. He was still there. I took a deep breath. I sighed.

  You could at least apologize for calling me a little shit earlier, I said.

  Did I call you a little shit? After all it doesn’t quite sound like me, does it? Not quite the variety of vocabulary I would elect to employ.

  I shook my head. It didn’t. It sounded like Aunt Lulu. Mr. Kindt took a step toward me and took my hands in his.

  I am not the one who needs to apologize to you for anything, Henry, am I? he said. Not for anything, relatively speaking, too serious?

  No, I suppose not, I said.

  I think my apologies, if there are to be any, will be directed elsewhere—toward my poor wet young man. In fact perhaps I should slip off for a time and see if I can’t make myself more available to him.

  Mr. Kindt gave a nervous little laugh, like a lightbulb breaking, like a tiny frozen fist shattering against a wall.

  I nodded and squeezed his soft, near-translucent hands.

  Ah, my dear Henry, my dear, dear Henry, I sense we are starting to understand each other, he said.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The night of Mr. Kindt’s murder it rained hard. I had a couple of drinks at the Horseshoe and watched the rain beat down on the park and finally wondered, with more than a mild sense of unease, what I’d gotten myself into. It’s not that I wasn’t happy enough to help Mr. Kindt out with his little fantasy, but after the events of the past week, since the night with Tulip, since my visit to Mel the Hat’s and his various insights, since a meeting with Cornelius and the others on, as Cornelius put it, the various modalities of the crime, not to mention my encounter with the proposed victim himself and the subsequent revelations about the famous night on Lake Otsego, my brain was really chewing at things, and these things did not taste good.

  Sitting there, it seemed to me I could trace the beginning of the decidedly unpleasant taste to the latter portion of my night with Tulip, which is when, though I didn’t give it much thought until after my encounter with The Hat, I finally learned something concrete about the circumstances of her relationship with Mr. Kindt.

  After our chat at Grand Central, Tulip and I had made our way back to the tattoo parlor on Orchard, where we poured ourselves shots from a bottle of Ketel One and toasted Cornelius, the knockout, the knockout’s formidable cleavage, the flexibility of the contortionists, my new tattoo, and, most of all, Mr. Kindt. On the subject of this latter, Tulip took pains to stress that she really had been stretching things into the realm of the speculative when she had offered me Mr. Kindt’s presumptive biography and, in high spirits, I lied and told her that Mr. Kindt’s origins didn’t matter to me in the least. He had been an extraordinarily generous friend, almost a patron, and if the 1 + 1 of some night on some lake didn’t feel like adding up to 2 then that was fine with me. Tulip said it was also fine with her—that if he had been a patron to me, he had been that and more to her in the time that she had known him. Which, I asked her, had been how long? She raised an eyebrow, started some kind of count on her fingers, stopped, shrugged, and said that it hadn’t been that long.

  How long is that? I said.

  Cornelius introduced me a month or so before I met you, she said. How long ago was that?

  Cornelius introduced you to Mr. Kindt? I said.

  She shrugged and took a sip of her drink. Then she toasted Anthony, the inept but very handsome first murderer. We drained our glasses, then Tulip put the bottle away, grabbed my hand, sunk a fingernail into it, and grabbed the back of my head.

  It had been a very long time since anything like Tulip on that night in that back room had happened to me and by the time we were done and she had put on her T-shirt and gone to get herself another shot, I was lying in a heap extruding sweat, etc., and panting and feeling pretty magnificent. As I said previously, it was only the next day, as I was walking around the neighborhood in a daze, like someone had borrowed my brain and stuck an old cream-filled donut in its place, that any kind of even low-grade analytical thinking process kicked in. But after I left The Hat’s, and had poured a few midafternoon beverages on the paranoid feelings my visit and his peephole and commentary had produced, I went home and back to wallowing around in what, by the time I fell asleep in/was knocked out by the hot dog cart fumes, I had only half-convinced myself were probably just the symptoms of uncertainty inherent in any budding romance, let alone one taking root in the context of mock murders and so forth.

  Anyway, my limping mind had gone on melting in and out of a sense of unease around the Tulip question. And sitting there at the Horseshoe that night, I kept coming back to the fact that she had only known Mr. Kindt for a little longer than I had, and that Cornelius had introduced her to him.

  I hadn’t gotten much more to go on about this at my meeting with Cornelius and Co., though there had been plenty of information of a more general nature, especially in retrospect, to make my eyebrows tick up a notch or two.

  This meeting had taken place the day before the murder at one of the outside tables at Veselka, and had s
tarted with Cornelius stressing to me that Mr. Kindt didn’t want to see me until after the job had been completed, that this was an important part of the scenario and should be adhered to.

  Why? I said.

  That’s the script, Cornelius said.

  But I always see him.

  Not before the murder.

  The knockout and the contortionists were present at this get-together, which, like my conversation with the knockout at the Odessa, possessed a certain hard-boiled feeling that I will do my best to evoke, though not, in this case, I should stress, at the conscious expense of substantive or incidental accuracy: we are too deep into these sad, blurry proceedings for that. The knockout had on a black raincoat and a black miniskirt and kept crossing and uncrossing her legs, saying goddamn it, and sucking, almost slurping, on cigarettes, so that Cornelius finally told her to either take it easy or leave. For their part, the contortionists, dressed in matching purple velour tracksuits, had arrived late, then immediately settled into unpleasant leg and body positions and wouldn’t stop staring at me.

  You’re all making me nervous, I finally said.

  He’s nervous, one of the contortionists said.

  I had a run-in yesterday, I said. With a guy called Mel the Hat. Old-timer. Anyone ever hear of him?

  Mel the Hat? Is that a joke? the knockout said.

  No, I’ve never heard of him. Now remember to hit him hard, said Cornelius, who had already run through the scenario once and was going over it a second time.

  I heard you the first time, I said.

  Once you’ve got the tape around him you smack him on the side of the head with the big ashtray and then you pull the wire tight around his throat.

  Are you ladies going to be there? I asked the contortionists.

  Us ladies, they said. Flicking their eyebrows up.

  Just you, said Cornelius. You won’t need any help with him.

  This proved true. When I pulled him out of bed the night of the murder, he smiled, and said, my dear boy, and let me push him into the front room.

  What about for moral support?

  At this, the knockout picked up her cigarette and jammed it into her mouth, then two-fingered a shard of lettuce and flicked some of the dill dressing coating it onto the ground.

  If you don’t mind my pointing it out, you guys seem a little agitated, I said to Cornelius after we had all watched the knockout slip the lettuce shard past the cigarette into her mouth.

  Unrelated, Cornelius said.

  Nothing to fucking do with you, said the knockout.

  That’s right, Mr. Nervous, said the contortionists.

  Fine, I said.

  I asked if I could have a copy of the scenario.

  Cornelius said I could not.

  That’s why I’ve been going over it with you, Henry, he said. Oral instructions only, no record—safe. Just like every other time we’ve done this.

  I had written instructions the first couple of times.

  Yeah, big deal, what did they say?

  Why isn’t Tulip here?

  Why would she be here? said the knockout. Why does he think Tulip should be here, Cornelius?

  Cornelius said he didn’t know why I thought Tulip should be there.

  I said maybe because she (1) apparently had known him for quite some time and was probably either working for or with him and (2) was a key player in the scenario.

  He can count, said the knockout.

  I’ve known her for a while, said Cornelius. She’s a friend. Then he said Tulip wasn’t there because she already knew what she was supposed to do. Her presence had not been required because her role in the affair was merely ancillary and did not involve the scene of the crime.

  She practically lives with him, I said.

  Not according to the scenario. According to the scenario she lives on Orchard Street, behind the tattoo parlor.

  Yeah, I know about that place, I said. I know about the back room. We’re getting pretty friendly, me and Tulip.

  No one said anything.

  Very friendly, I said.

  Jesus Christ, make this guy stop with the commentary, said the knockout.

  That’s your business, Henry, Cornelius said. We don’t care about that. Just stick to the scenario.

  She gave me a tattoo, I said.

  Tell him to shut up, Cornelius, the knockout said.

  I just thought you guys would be interested, that’s all. Aren’t you guys interested? I said to the contortionists.

  They didn’t answer.

  Yeah, yeah, we’re all real interested, the knockout said. Henry finally got a piece of ass.

  O.K., said Cornelius, placing a hand on the table, does anyone have anything germane to say? Otherwise this meeting is adjourned.

  I looked at the knockout. She looked at her fingernails, which were tapping away on the table in front of her.

  Why? I said.

  What do you mean, why? said Cornelius.

  I mean why am I murdering Mr. Kindt?

  You already asked Tulip that.

  Yeah, she told me a ton. Real helpful. I’m going to write a book. Incidentally, she referred, in this illuminating chronicle, to the fact that Mr. Kindt comes from Cooperstown.

  So what, he does. We’ve already talked about this.

  So what I’m asking you is, does this murder I’m supposed to carry out have anything to do with Cooperstown?

  What are you, Sherlock Holmes? You’re getting paid. Mind your fucking business.

  How do you say that in French?

  Plus you’re a real joker.

  O.K., never mind, let me ask you this—does it matter if I know or don’t know about what happened in Cooperstown or what, exactly, you and Mr. Kindt are up to?

  Cornelius paused here. He looked at the knockout. She looked at the contortionists. They shrugged.

  No, it doesn’t matter, Henry.

  But you aren’t going to tell me?

  Cornelius shrugged.

  All right, forget it, how about the first question?

  The first question?

  Why?

  Because he wants you to.

  He wants me to?

  Yeah, he fucking wants you to, you fucking sad ass.

  This last remark surprised me. Because it wasn’t said by the knockout, it was said by one of the contortionists.

  Whoa, I said.

  This is getting very, very fucking boring, the other contortionist said.

  O.K., I won’t bore you much longer. But I do want to know if this whole thing, this whole thing about me committing murders, was a lead-up to this? To killing Mr. Kindt tomorrow night?

  I don’t know, said Cornelius, lying. You’ll have to ask him.

  Obviously, when Cornelius told me I would have to ask Mr. Kindt, he meant after the murder, when it wouldn’t matter anymore. But as it turned out, I got to ask him before. That very afternoon, in fact. My brain, having found a rare felicitous moment, was starting to whir away about Tulip and murder and the mattress in the back room and the look on the contortionists’ faces and the supposed importance of this particular job, and the still-unexplained murk about the old business on Lake Otsego, and as I was sitting over a burger at Stingy Lulu’s on St. Mark’s Place, I got the urge to go over and see my friend.

  In connection with this impromptu visit, and the little detail that Mr. Kindt was in a bad way during it, I’ll relate that one night over several brandies and a couple of cigars, Mr. Kindt, in vintage Mr. Kindt fashion, told me it had been said that the body, in dying, releases a thick white mist, which until that point has been held by mysterious forces within the skin. He did not say what this mist was for or why dying released it, but did note that it tended to gather in the mind when its host was sleeping, and that, in some instances, especially in the case of those “not long for this terrible earth,” did not leave the mind even after the host was awake. He then said he had more than once, when wide-awake, experienced a curious phenomenon that could be attribu
ted to such a mist. When it happened, people and objects tended to lose their definition and bleed into each other, an erosion of border and contour he found very troubling. On those days, he canceled all his appointments and stayed inside, eyes closed, barely moving, as contexts and circumstances that had long seemed inviolable to him came unhinged. It was, he told me, partly to preempt the noxious effects of these occasional bouts that he had taken to admitting a greater-than-average measure of calculated falsification into his life.

  That was all I had gotten out of him on the subject that day, but when I went to visit him when I wasn’t supposed to I got a little more. It was a bright afternoon in Manhattan, and the cool air as I went through the park smelled like it is supposed to, or you think it is supposed to, on a cool bright day in a small city park; by that I mean something like almost fresh, so that, in a way that was totally unrelated to what I was thinking about, I felt pretty good. For a few minutes, my mind ceased its whirring and my unease took a break and I was just some guy with a pretty good job walking across the park on a sunny day. I thought about this afterward, after leaving Mr. Kindt’s, about having felt, for those few minutes crossing the park and walking into his building, almost, as I say, good, or, as I put it, pretty good, and I thought about it while I sat in the bar looking out at the rain over the same park, at the glowing lamps and dark trunks and wet benches, getting ready to murder him. It wasn’t like I left Mr. Kindt’s that afternoon feeling awful—I didn’t. It’s just that after I had left him, especially the first time, I definitely no longer felt “pretty good,” and walking through the park wasn’t going to help.

  Anyway, still sucking in reasonably fresh air, I left the park, crossed Avenue B, and let myself into his building. I took the stairs two at a time, started to knock, and discovered the door was open. I went in. It didn’t take long to realize that Mr. Kindt’s mist or whatever was gnawing away at him, because when I said, hey, buddy (he was sitting, hatless, heart monitor in his lap, in a black rocker by the window), how about some herring? he started to scream.

  Mr. Kindt, hey, I said.