by Hob Broun
A lot of dead air among the Milbank party. Pierce stared hard at the dollies, but they held their ground through this obvious exit cue.
“I gather you ladies aren’t going to give up without at least one glass of champagne,” he said. “Right, then. Champagne for everyone. I feel loose tonight.”
He pressed one of the illuminated buttons on a small console under the table and within seconds the sommelier arrived. He was dressed like the best man at a London wedding and wore around his neck a large plastic skeleton key treated with phosphorescent paint.
“Julio, a magnum of the Henzlicht-LaFosse. From Admiral Nimitz’ private reserves, and très sec, if you please.”
“On its way, Mr. Milbank.”
Julio wafted off to call the “cellar” on the intercom. There, two craftsmen were kept busy decanting California wine into bottles bearing counterfeit labels. The bottles were then rolled in a trough of wood ashes and finished off with mylar cobwebs sprayed from a device originally contrived by a producer of television commercials.
Slipping off her pumps, Dodie extended one stockinged foot under the table in search of Pierce. “You seem to have a lot of pull. How come we haven’t seen you around here before?”
“I was probably playing Scrabble in the back room.”
“Do you know Steve personally?” Working her way across Pierce’s instep, Dodie turned to fill in the newcomers. “Steve is the spirit behind the Canteen. He’s like an independent compass for environmental design.”
“Steve is a very beautiful and creative man.” Charmaine sighed dreamily. “When he made love to me it felt like I was being sculpted.”
“How about that.” Christo leaned back in his chair. “Well, I once fucked Johnny Carson all night.”
“And what do you think about that?” Dodie said challengingly.
“I think I have a nicer asshole,” Tildy snapped.
And then, before things could get really ugly, the champagne arrived.
Pierce filled their tulip glasses and proposed a toast to “Our visitor from Dixieland.” Tildy permitted him to kiss her hand.
“I’m a great student of accents,” Charmaine said. “I’ll bet you’re from Alabama.”
“Nope. I come from Louisiana.” Tildy brushed foam off her lip. “With a banjo on my knee.”
“I was in New Orleans once,” Charmaine offered. This one was for real, a memory all too vivid.
She’d flown down for the weekend with a bartender who was in on a lead-pipe scheme to doctor the ninth race trifecta at Evangeline Downs. Except this kid trainer was wired for sound, and when the payoff man whipped out his envelope, Pinkerton agents were all over him like a blanket. Charmaine spent most of Saturday night tied to the bed with extension cords and woke up in the hallway Sunday morning locked out of the room with nothing but a ripped T-shirt, a black eye and a pair of paper shower slippers. Rule #1: Don’t come on to the bartender.
The bandstand receded on worm-geared tracks, was replaced by a back-alley stage set complete with knothole fence, cardboard lamppost and suspended crescent moon. Half a dozen showgirls pranced out to a vamping piano. They wore pink tights with marabou tails appended and pointy ears on their pink berets. They had whiskers grease-penciled on their upper lips; in nasal thirds reminiscent of the Boswell Sisters, they sang,
“We’re fuzzy little alley cats
In a special kind of heat,
We’re all stoked up on catnip
And we love that boogie beat.
“Prowl girls, howl girls
And wag your silky tails …”
The piano rumbled and they rendered some rudimentary and not quite synchronized dance steps.
“Put me up there.” Dodie gestured awkwardly with her empty glass. “Put me up there and I’d show you some moves’d stiffen the neckties in this dump.”
“Dammit.” When Pierce’s fist hit the table, it rattled the lampshade. “What is it? You crib all your dialogue from comic books or what? Why don’t you just cool your jets for ten minutes and be ornamental.”
The pink kittens gurgled.
“Fish may be our favorite dish
But meat is also yummy …”
Tildy felt dizzy and hot. She unknotted her scarf and held it over her mouth. Christo asked if she was doing okay.
“I’m going to go wash my face,” she said.
All eyes at the table turned to watch her go.
“Nice bounce,” Pierce commented.
Charmaine, paralyzed with adoration, listened to her own sedated breathing and wished she were a boy.
Tildy sat in front of a large spotlighted mirror and examined the flanks of her nose for blackheads. Didn’t have the billboard looks of those two back at the table, but there was something solid there, something durable. Lucien used to tell her she’d make her way in the world because there was upright character showing in her face. Thanks, Dad. You should see me with makeup.
She gathered a ridge of skin between index fingers and squeezed until a translucent plug of sebum wormed up out of a blocked pore.
“No, never do that. It leaves pits.” Charmaine swayed in the doorway, twisting the orange scarf in her fingers. “I ought to know. My sophomore year in high school, I had the worst acne in my homeroom.”
“That’s all right,” Tildy said, dabbing saliva on the red spot. “My face needs a little distinction anyway.”
Charmaine moved up to the mirror and plucked at her fawn-colored bangs. “In this city your face is all you’ve got. I dote on mine. Lemon and egg white every morning … But it used to be horrible. I just hid out in my room for months, like I was a leper or something. Then this old Armenian lady who lived next door, one day she gave me some cuttings from a bush she had growing in her yard. Told me to strip the bark, boil it up with the leaves, then soak pieces of cheesecloth in it and tape them to my face before bed. The stains it made. I must have gone through fifteen pairs of pyjamas that summer. But by September my skin was like glass. Better than it is now.”
“And it’s beautiful now. Egg whites? Is that what you said?”
Charmaine turned her back to the mirror. The scarf was wound around her wrist and diagonally across her palm like an improvised bandage. “It was a transformation all right. Boys started to come after me and my new face. They told me I had a different look, older somehow. They’d touch my cheek like it was something from outer space that glowed. I fell in love with a few of them. I had a baby. A little girl. Tara didn’t cry, not ever. She just seemed above it all. Sometimes sitting by her crib watching that face, I’d want to cry. It was so soft and white, I almost expected it to come off on my fingers when I touched it. Like powder. She had a mobile hanging over her crib and one night it got twisted around her neck somehow and she stopped breathing. She just lay there with this necklace of toy lambs.”
Charmaine wobbled her feet and shrugged. There was regret in her voice, but no grief. It was like anything else: a plush apartment, a snazzy car—you had it for a while and then it was taken.
“That was how you found her? My God.”
Tildy meant only to touch her shoulder but it was too long a stretch; her hand came to rest on the upper slope of Charmaine’s heavy breast. They looked at each other for a moment and then Charmaine sank to her knees, one arm around the back of Tildy’s chair.
“Don’t be sad,” she said, lowering her head onto Tildy’s lap. “It doesn’t make any sense to be sad. You can’t keep hold of anything in this world. Not even your face.” Sitting up, pushing Tildy’s hair back. “You ought to show more of your cheekbones, you know.” Charmaine caught Tildy’s hands and held them against her breasts. Her eyes glistened. “They’re a little tender. I’m about to get my period.”
Uh-huh. This was where Tildy always seemed to be coming in.
“Next time,” she said, backing away. “Maybe next time.”
The stage was empty when Tildy returned. So was the bottle of champagne; so was Dodie’s chair. The partners were puffin
g casually on needle-thin reefers.
“We shook off our little hustler,” Pierce said. “You do the same with yours?”
“More or less.”
“Fluffheads,” Christo grumbled. “But at least they matched the decor.” All evening he had been able to think of little beyond his new business horizons. Pierce was free with promises; it was always a bull market with him. He was also someone who needed to be repeatedly pinned down. But Christo could not make his opening, could not find the words. An unfamiliar sensation. “So here we are, just the three of us.”
“Just the three of us,” Pierce repeated. “We should get cozy.” He motioned for them to bring their chairs in closer. “We should just be loose.”
Tildy avoided his eyes, focusing instead on the white satin handkerchief spouting like a fountain out of his blazer pocket. She found him, thus far, completely uninteresting.
“So what happened with the entertainment? I like to watch dancers. Used to be one myself.”
“Really.” Pierce tipped his shoulders forward and she felt his smoky breath on her face. “I might have guessed as much from that physique of yours. Very supple. Like an otter with curves. What was your specialty? Tap? Flamenco? Ballet?”
“Nothing so special. My boogaloo was popular.”
Stagelights flashed on and the band members hurried out. They began furiously tuning their instruments.
“Let’s have some of those doughnuts.”
“Let’s order a drink.”
“Let’s get out of here.”
Pierce negotiated his Packard roadster through a flying wedge of taxis.
“Is this yours or did you rent it for the evening?”
Pierce smirked and flicked Tildy under the chin. “This car has been in my family for years.”
“Didn’t I tell you, kid?” Christo said, pouting in the back seat like a birthday boy who’d gotten nothing but savings bonds. “This guy’s a real ruling-class worm. If he hadn’t got so wrapped up in the dope business, he’d probably be working for the State Department.”
“And doing a superb job. I had three years of Russian, you know.”
It finally occurred to Tildy to ask where they were going.
“My place,” Pierce answered, and his voice went all rich and silky. Like Bela Lugosi.
A cone of balsam incense smoldered in an ashtray on the desk. Fibrous blue smoke moved through a shaft of lamplight in the slowly shifting patterns of dawn at sea. Pierce bent over a mound of white powder glittering on a mirror.
Only weeks ago, on the eastern slopes of the Peruvian Andes several thousand feet below the altiplano, leaves from the shrub Erythroxylum coca had been harvested. Two Indians wearing cotton sport shirts under their ponchos, murmuring to one another in Quechuan, had dumped the leaves into an old oil drum containing a solution of potash, kerosene and water, and left them to soak. After several days the precious alkaloids had been leeched out in the form of a brown paste left behind when the leaves and their marinade were discarded. A former classmate of Pierce’s (at St. Eustatius Prep of Sharon, Connecticut—“It is the Spirit that quickeneth”) serving with a Peace Corps agronomic project near Tingo Maria came in a jeep and collected the paste. Packing it in two Zip-lock bags, wrapping it in a thin sheet of lead to circumvent possible fluoroscoping by the Post Office, he dispatched it to Pierce’s mail drop, a one-room apartment on Staten Island that contained one mattress, one chair and a clock radio. Back at the duplex, in a makeshift lab installed by Looie, Pierce, using a simple method involving treatment with hydrochloric acid, manufactured three remarkably clean ounces of what had been until 1903, in name only now, a key ingredient in the world’s favorite soft drink.
Pierce inserted a piece of drinking straw into first one nostril and then the other, snorting one line into each. “We have lift off. Passing through the stratosphere … ionosphere … Past gravity pull, beyond the orbit track and into deep space.” With a moistened fingertip he gathered adherent crumbs from knife blade and mirror edge, massaged them into his gums.
Christo leaped forward to fill his own nose barrels. “That’s a serious freeze,” he said, backfiring his sinuses. “Off a few pounds of this I could go fishing in the Bahamas for four or five years.”
“Right. So what’re you going to do, a little Rumpelstiltskin magic? Sit down in the basement all night spinning straw into high quality blow? This business is like any other—office machines, aluminum siding—you got to push and push and push. There are no shortcuts, jazzbo. Anybody starts to tell you about one, get a firm grip on your wallet.”
“Right, coach.” Christo served himself another couple of lines.
“I’ll pass,” Tildy said when Pierce beckoned to her, his face wreathed in bright hokum like a schoolyard perv trying to lure her into his car with a bag of jawbreakers.
“Listen, sugar, you’re not going to come any closer to the unadulterated product. This hasn’t been stepped on with procaine or lactose or talcum powder or any of that shit. This is the goddamn sacred bestowal of the Inca sun god right here.”
Without looking up: “Have you got some beer in the icebox? Or a bottle of Cold Duck?”
Pierce was not a romantic. His relations with women had always been capricious, diversionary. These recreational contacts (sometimes nearly grudging) were wholly separate from the deadly serious system of male competition that had begun long ago at the core of his life and grown outward, adding layer upon layer until exterior guise and interior pith were indistinguishable. But Tildy was anomalous, that rare species who could thrive outside those boundaries, well beyond the reach of his manipulations. Pierce felt like he was looking at diamonds through the wrong end of a telescope, and did not like it at all. He wanted to impress this woman he barely knew, to draw her in. He wanted a charm to reach her with, a magnet, but he had only the parlor trick of spilling the white flakes into a glass of bleach and water, explaining to her that the speed with which they dissolved demonstrated their purity.
“I believe you. I believe that you’re a man with refined tastes and the equipment to back them up. But I would still like a bottle of beer.”
Pierce looked to Christo for help, gained no more than a shrug, and left the room in a poorly concealed sulk.
“I think you hurt his feelings,” Christo said. “I’m proud of you.”
“I thought you said I was going to like him.”
“Did I? You’re sure I didn’t just say you’d like his weed?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“Well, maybe it’s just a city mouse versus country mouse thing.”
Tildy came and straddled his knees, put her arms around him. “Do you have to be partners with him? Absolutely have to?”
“It doesn’t mean anything. Going into business with him doesn’t mean I have to convert.”
The gentle breath soothing his temples, the slow lips that touched him were like dry little explosions to his coked-up nerves. He stiffened under her, shifting, turning his head to one side.
“You’ve come all this way on your own, making your own game. What is it you want to grab so bad you’d change now?”
“That’s the kind of thinking keeps people driving tractors all their lives and buying on time.”
“What’s the matter with that?”
“Plenty. Let’s not get sentimental about it.” He nudged her off his lap and refilled his nose at the mirror.
“You’ll be giving something away if you go in with him and we all know it,” Tildy said. And to herself: Why why why do I care?
Pierce stepped in with Canadian ale, a mug chilled in the freezer and renewed aplomb.
“Here we are. A simple brew from the North Woods.”
Pierce opened a desk drawer, removed writing materials and a pocket calculator. “I think it’s time, jazzbo, that you and I sat down and hacked out some specifics. The kind of move you’re looking to do, that ad-lib style of yours just won’t cut it.”
“Absolutely. I’ve been itching
to get at this all night.” Christo’s eyes were a shotgun; he fired both barrels at Tildy, but she was watching bubbles burst in the beer foam.
“Itching is just low-level pain,” Pierce said. “That’s what my grandma taught me the summer she had shingles. All right then, let’s say we capitalize this thing for a hundred thousand dollars.”
“Hold on.”
“Take it easy. This is only for practice, a nice round figure. Now, you’ve got two cuts to make out of that before you clear this end—” Punching numbers on the calculator.
“Two cuts?”
“Right. The Swede I told you about and then your transshipping back. That’s going to be your second cut.”
“Isn’t there a simpler way to go?”
“Come on, where’s your sense of artistry? I mean, shit, we’re not in this for the money are we? We’re in this to keep from dropping dead with boredom.”
“Sure, sure. I’ve really been looking forward to a trip abroad. But what are we talking about? Maybe twelve and a half percent each way?”
“That seems like a solid figure. So you’re at seventy-five thou, and from there we go to your expenses, which are travel, and the car…. And some emergency fix-it money—we’ve got to allow for that.”
Tildy, with no appetite for shop talk, slipped out and went looking for a telephone. Incense aromas followed her through the thin, dank air outside the room. She stopped in the dim hallway, noticing the photograph of Pierce, his blond bowl cut melting into the pale background of snow and trees; he had on tinted glasses, the kind state troopers wore. Reminded her of Sparn, a youthful picture of him she’d once seen, all slick and slender, outside some Palm Beach movie house with straw hat tipped low and coat draped over his shoulders in the customary impresario pose.
She supposed there were other similarities between the two, both tacticians with unswerving faith in trappings of every kind, but she was already sufficiently depressed—no need to contemplate them further. Dipping her thumb in beer dregs she drew a large X on the frame’s glass.
Next to a ceramic crucifix in the next room Tildy found a wall phone. She pressed a button to activate one of the four lines and punched up a long-distance number; then she wound the cord in her fingers and counted the rings.
