by Hob Broun
“Nope.”
“We figured to have heard from her by now. She left us in kind of a hurry, you know. Not a word.”
“So you work for the ball team, is that it?”
“The corporation has many different interests.” The visitor looked at his watch. “You think I might be able to talk to her, umm, say tomorrow?”
“Not likely. Tildy, see, she’s on kind of a vacation. Her old man croaked just a while ago and she’s been wound pretty tight over that.”
“Yeah, Tildy’s a sensitive girl.” Scribbling something on the pad. “So maybe this isn’t the best time to bother her, but we do owe her some back pay and we’d like to settle up as soon as possible, no hard feelings. You tell me where she’s staying and I can get that check to her right away.”
Karl tried to speak in mid-gulp and spilled bourbon down inside his shirt. “Damn surprise check, huh? Now you talkin’. And we can use the money, yes sir. I just knew there was somethin’ fine all ready to pop up like that today. You know how every once in a while you’ll wake up with a feelin’? Like maybe you had a dream was meant to show you …”
“Where do I find her.” The pencil hovered.
“Tell you what. Seein’ as how you all’d like to get your paperwork squared away, whyn’t you let me have the check right now and be done with it? I could hold it for her till she gets back.”
The visitor flinched, doodled interlocking circles on his pad. “Well, it’s not … It’s not that simple. Before I can, umm, actually … Before I can write anything up I have to discuss a few minor details with her. Per diem expenses, that kind of thing.” The circles expanding now, moving unevenly across the page. “I mean, it’s not that I don’t trust you in terms of holding the money. But … I think I will have one with you.” He grabbed at the bottle.
“Come on ahead, amigo. I’ll go get the radio from the other room and we can listen to some tunes.”
“No, that’s okay.” Shivering at his first sip.
“No trouble. I’ll just plug her in over there.”
“I’d rather you didn’t. Really.”
“Sure. I was only thinkin’ we might have a little party. Got a ways to go on that bottle yet.”
The visitor looked disconsolately at what remained in his glass. “If you don’t mind an observation on my part, Karl, you seem a little nervous.”
“No shit. Mite keyed up, huh? Probably just lonesome is all, cooped up in here.”
“Have you heard from Tildy at all? A postcard?”
“Nah. We don’t get much in the way of mail around here.”
“I hope you won’t get hot, but I have to ask this: Has your wife left you? Did she take a walk on you, Karl?”
“You’re pissin’ on the wrong hydrant there, Buck.” Karl lurched out of his chair, gestured sloshingly with his glass. “You got business with Tildy, you wanna ask me some questions, I don’t mind. But don’t you go pullin’ my chain. I got as much dignity as the next sucker. Goddamn right. Now both of us on the road, me and Tildy been separated a lot, but we got a solid understandin’ and we got plans. Hell, she called me from New York last night just to hear my voice.”
The visitor leaned back and arranged his hair, catching his reflected profile in the windowpane. “She give you the address of the hotel?”
A vague sense that he had left the door to the lion cage open flapped at the outskirts of Karl’s mind. “Never said she was at no hotel.”
“Didn’t you?” The visitor topped up Karl’s glass.
Lounging amid shadows and smoke at the Kenilworth, Tildy and Christo argued over where to go for dinner.
“Anyway, I don’t like Greek food,” Tildy said. “It’s too greasy.”
“I heard you the first time.”
She stretched herself across the bed until her palms were resting on the warped brown floorboards. She wore a green baseball cap, flowered panties and a plastic lei rescued from a garbage can.
“I love these little pork chops,” Christo said, petting her shoulder blades.
A photographic rendering of this scene, the kind of grainy enlargement brought into a courtroom and mounted on an easel, might be advanced as the image of two young citizens in a state of postcoital entrancement. That would be an unscrupulous frame-up. In truth, bodily contact had been negligible. Tildy was bewildered, having expected more, some show of possessiveness after she’d spent a second night at the Chemikazi loft.
“How about seafood? You got to like shrimp.”
Tildy jumped up, shook herself. Balanced on the balls of her feet, one arm shielding her breasts, she scanned the twilight street framed by the open window.
That New York mystique had thus far escaped her. Another city just like the others; bigger, with each rudiment carried to a further extreme, but adding up to not very much. A cannon and a peashooter, were pretty much the same.
“What are we doing in this fleabag anyway?” Tildy wanted to know. “There’s all the money from Pierce for the grass we brought up, but then you hole up here like you just got out on parole.”
“What is it you want, a place with a view of the park? I can send you on a tour to the Statue of Liberty tomorrow, if that’s what you’re after.”
“Don’t strain yourself missing the point, Jimmy. This was supposed to be a holiday. I left all my aches and pains to go on a spree, but here I am with the mildewed room and the cold hamburgers and I might as well be back on the road with the Cougarettes. So what’s the story? Am I being punished for getting it on with Looie?”
“We got no ties. You don’t owe me one little crumb of fidelity. And don’t call me Jimmy.” Christo spoke in freeze-dried tones. “Far as the money goes, that’s my business, my score. It’s capital. Always I’d build a little roll, then fritter it away, but this time I’m going to make the right moves. Nothing to do with you one way or the other.”
“So you’re a pretty conventional asshole after all. You make with that gaudy outlaw routine, but it’s all a shuck.”
“Wish you could see how you look coming on all righteous in panties and a plastic lei.”
“Get bent.”
There followed several minutes of arctic, high-tension silence. Then Christo gently asked if she still wanted to go out and eat. Tildy replied that in her present mood whether they huddled mutely in the room or went for an all-night hike, stopping for beer and pretzels in every bar en route, was of no interest at all to her.
Before Christo could counterpunch, there came a vehement pounding at the door. Just as glad of the interruption, he slid off the bed. “Probably room service with our lobster Newburg.”
Tildy buttoned herself into Christo’s denim jacket as the door opened. A pop-eyed individual in a rumpled trench coat darted into the room and pointed his finger like a gun.
“Bingo. How’s the little shortstop getting along?”
“Vinnie.” She spoke the name with tired, unsurprised disgust.
“Vinnie?”
“Vinnie Sparn, ex-manager of the Cougarettes.”
“Want me to bounce him?”
Vinnie backed toward the window, staking out some territory. “I see I came at a bad time. Sorry to spoil the party but it can’t be helped. Sure, I could come back later, but think how I’d feel having to start all over again ’cause you’d skipped out in the meantime. After coming all this way to find you.”
“If this is a social call …”
“Hey, do yourself a favor, Johnny. Put on your pants and get out of here. She won’t be turning any more tricks tonight.”
Christo bore down on him, looking from side to side for a heavy object. “I think I would like to drop you out the window.”
“Stay out of my way, Johnny.”
They were inches apart and breathing on one another, but Tildy interposed herself, pressing a shoulder into Christo’s chest and pushing him back.
“Butt out. I can cope with this flunky.”
“Hey, watch that talk.”
Pulling
at the brim of her cap, “Don’t play like you came on your own. What does Pete want from me?”
“An apology to start. When you jumped the team like that it really hurt his feelings. We looked after you and we gave you whatever you wanted. Didn’t I always let you bat leadoff? And then you go AWOL in the middle of the season. The ingratitude really got under Dad’s skin. He’s just that kind of guy. Dad believes in a kind of basic decency and when it’s flouted he gets very upset. That kind of stress isn’t good for a man his age, you follow me?”
“I’ll write him a letter.”
“Okay. You had your screen time, asshole. Now beat it.” Christo had edged back within striking distance.
“I said I’d handle it. It’s my problem.”
“And a letter just won’t cover it. Not nearly.” Vinnie stroked his sideburns, glowered. “It gets into a legal and moral area. Dad sees the idea of the contract as very crucial to our society. It’s not just a piece of paper, it’s a symbol of something much bigger, a complex system of cooperation and mutual trust. When you break a contract with Dad it’s kind of like spitting in church, you know what I mean? No, I’m afraid you’re going to have to come back to Florida and work this out with him face to face.”
“This is a joke, right? Are you really going to these lengths because Pete couldn’t turn out one of his girls as a shortstop?”
“I think I’ve explained it.”
“Not at all. You can start by explaining how you tracked me down.”
When he smirked, Vinnie’s eyes became little slashes in his sandpaper face. “No big miracle really. A pretty short order once I talked to your husband. A real good old boy, by the way. A great sport. We sat around and had a few and he let slip you were up here. In another little while I was able to make him see it would be to everyone’s advantage to be a little more specific. Then I caught the first plane out. Nice. I got prime rib and a movie.”
“You knocked him around. You leaned on him, didn’t you, fuck-face.” Tildy hurled a glass ashtray; it whistled past Vinnie’s ear and exploded against the wall.
Vinnie swept ashes from his lapel and popped his lips. “I hoped things wouldn’t develop this way. I hoped you’d come with me voluntarily.” He slipped one hand inside the trench coat and came out with a snubnosed .45.
“Lovely.” Christo subsided onto the bed and took a cigarette from behind his ear. “I used to have one just like it. Got it by selling a hundred and twelve tins of White Clover Salve.”
“Go fry your head, Johnny.” Though he’d practiced all his moves in front of a mirror, Vinnie was close to wetting himself.
“You don’t remember White Clover Salve? Used to advertise on the back page of the comic books. They sent you a consignment and depending on how much you could unload you’d get an archery set or a pair of binoculars or a model airplane or a cheezy little tin bank that was supposed to be like a miniature safe with this plastic combination dial—”
“Shut up! You shut up.” Vinnie hopped from one foot to the other, gesticulated meaninglessly with the barrel of the gun. “Come on, Soileau, shake it. We got a plane to catch at LaGuardia in two hours.”
“Vinnie, this is really too ridiculous. And I’m not getting on any plane with you.”
“Don’t push me.” Vinnie thumbed back the hammer and the three of them played eyeball billiards.
“Okay, you win,” Tildy finally said.
“Wait a minute.”
But she scuttled to the bed and held Christo down. “I’d better do it. He’s more afraid of his father than anything else.”
“Who the fuck is his father?”
“Enough!” Vinnie released the hammer, circled around to the door. A votary of private-eye novels, there was a deep invigoration for him in bringing the timeworn gestures to life. The gun felt warm and comforting in his hand, like a baby animal. He could almost hear background music, bongos and walking bass: Vinnie’s Theme. “Hurry it up.”
“Sure, Vinnie. I’ll just put on some makeup and get my stuff together, okay?” She backed toward the bathroom, her movements slow and easy, her smile placating, as if dealing with a maniac bent on swallowing lye. “Don’t get all worked up now. I’ll just be in the bathroom getting ready.”
“You got five minutes.” Maintaining pistol position, Vinnie took out one of his miniature cigars, but didn’t have enough hands to light it with. “You, Johnny, you lay back easy on that bed and don’t try and be a hero. You’ll just end up making a mess on the floor.”
“Sometimes it’s hard to tell what I’ll do, even for me.” Christo plucked thoughtfully at his lower lip. “I been in and out of the psycho ward pretty near all my life, Vinnie. I think that’s something you ought to know right at this moment. I’ve been declared a SCUT three or four different times. Schizophrenic, Chronic, Undifferentiated Type. That’s how they label the real savages, Vinnie, the ones even drugs can’t touch. You know I once bit an orderly’s nose clean off his face, and after that they used to cut cards to see who had to bring me my meals. So you can’t tell. You can’t ever tell what I might do.”
There was hissing and knocking from the pipes as Tildy opened the taps full.
The little cigar jigged at the corner of Vinnie’s mouth. “You’re all noise, Johnny. You don’t worry me.”
“How many feet from the end of the bed to where you’re standing? Eight, ten maybe? I could be on you in one jump.”
“You want your ass in a sling?”
“You’re losing it, hotshot. Little by little you’re losing it.”
“One more word.” Vinnie snapped into firing position, both hands on the pistol grip and arms stiffened. “I don’t need any more reasons to blow you right through the wall.”
Tildy materialized from the bathroom trailing steam. Tightly, down behind her leg, she held the bronze canister of her father’s ashes, the last thing wedged into the suitcase back in Gibsonton on the chance she might find a becoming place to scatter them somewhere along the way.
“Vinnie, should I wear this beige skirt or something more formal?”
He turned to face her and, with the quick release that had started countless double plays, sidearming across her body, she threw the canister at a crucial point between his navel and his kneecaps and hit it dead on. Clutching his groin, Vinnie collapsed like a marionette and the gun skittered free. Christo sprang from the bed, scooped up the weapon and drove his heel into Vinnie’s liver.
“A great throw,” he said. “An honest-to-God, Hall-of-Fame throw.”
“Been wanting to do that for two years. I only wish I’d had something heavier, like a thirty-six-ounce bat.”
“You want me to kill him?” Christo spun the cylinder, stepped back. “Christ. It’s not even loaded. You shmuck, I ought to break this thing down and make you eat it piece by piece.”
Vinnie sucked air, unable even to whimper.
“Let’s just tie him up and get out of here.”
“I’m with you. Tear that bedsheet into strips and soak them in water so they’ll hold good and tight.”
Tildy stood immobile, suddenly chilled, her skin broken out in goose pimples.
“Ease up now, girl, it’s finished. You did great, just great.”
“A lot of help you were.”
He came and pulled Tildy against him, talked into the soft mat of her hair that smelled faintly of smoke. “Do you really think I would have let him take you? No way. I was working on him the whole time, playing with his head.” He moved his fingers up and down the column of her neck until she softened, her arms went loose and her face nestled into his.
Ten minutes later, with Vinnie securely trussed and gagged on the floor, Tildy was preparing a snug nest for Lucien in the deepest recesses of her bag. She stroked the cool, curving metal with her hand and said, “You go back to sleep, Papa.” Then she snapped the bag shut, stepped over Vinnie and out the door.
By midnight they had consumed large quantities of shellfish, listened to a 67-year-old pia
nist play boogie-woogie in a penthouse bar and checked into a fresh hotel near Washington Square. The room had wall-to-wall carpet, air conditioning and a color teevee.
“There,” Christo said. “Is this what you wanted?”
In darkness they watched a Jock Mahoney western (saddle tramp befriends young widow, saves ranch from foreclosure) and blankly, wordlessly, Tildy drew out his damp, curled penis. The dilatory rhythm of her pumping hand did not increase even at the last. His come was cold on her knuckles by the time she went looking for a towel.
10
MEN OF AFFAIRS GET up early and begin striving right after breakfast. While time may not be money, they often race in the same colors; and in the words of a young blood who tried to sell Christo a hot watch at five A.M. in the Detroit Greyhound terminal: “Ain’t never too early to be hustlin’.” It’s not so much a question of getting a jump on the other guy as it is of tilting your mind to precisely the right angle, like the morning prayers of Benedictine monks.
Replete with brioche and black coffee, Christo and Pierce sat at the dining table counting and stacking bills and discussing the state of the market.
“You don’t see so much of that good black hash these days,” Pierce was saying. “Some fairly substantial quantities were being moved out of Lahore a year or two back, but I haven’t heard of anything lately. Nothing that’s reached New York at any rate.”
“How much would that bring per pound on a quantity basis?”
“Hard to say. Hash is moving into that premium area right now, so you might, depending on the variables, be able to hit eleven or twelve hundred.”
Christo reached for a paper clip, tossed another bundle of twenties onto the growing centerpiece beside the coffee pot. “I wish we could figure something that didn’t involve my leaving the country.”
“Poor methodology, jazzbo. You want to maximize every advantage, buying at the overseas market value and then selling back here. It’s called transfer pricing.”
