New York Fantastic

by Paula Guran

  Fairy tale justice is sure, if not always swift, and the punishment is appropriate. My only question is which tale gets told tonight. You smile at the question and there’s a glimmer like gold, like sun-fire when you do.

  Seeing that, I remember how I found my place in the world. The place where I got brought up was in the Five Towns out on Long Island. Kind of a surprise right? But I was the tough, poor kid in the soft, rich town. In school, I got kept back once or twice. And I was big to start with.

  Dyslexia, as I say, was the problem. My oldest girl has it too. Now they can actually do something. Back then when I reached ninth grade, they sent me to this old lady who sat in a little office in the cellar of the school. Just her and me.

  She’d have me read and correct me. Stupid stuff. Not Dick and Jane but very simple sentences. It didn’t seem to help and I hated her at first. Eventually I worked my way up to a book by the Grimm brothers. Those stories stuck with me. Maybe because I’d never read anything else. Or maybe because the old lady was a witch. No disrespect intended, in case you belong to the same union or something.

  The characters I liked weren’t the princes or princesses. In fairy tales, they’re a dime a dozen. You can’t tell them apart. Poor tailors and honest woodcutters didn’t do it for me either. I knew what it was like to be poor if not honest.

  The out-of-work soldiers, sly, smart and smoky, making deals with the devil, caught me first. Like a prophecy, you know. Because rich kids get into as much trouble as ones in the ghetto. Drugs, stolen cars, breaking and entering: whatever they did they wanted me along as protection.

  But the rules are different for rich kids. When trouble came down, they all went into counseling. Forty years ago, poor kids went in the army. Right then that meant ‘Nam. I did my tour in a bad time. When it was over, I became a discharged soldier, every bit as bent and nasty and bitter as the ones in the stories. It happened the devil wasn’t signing deals for souls at that moment or I would have gone that way.

  Instead, I bummed around for a couple of years then started to contact old friends. A lot of them had finished college, taken their time about it, and ended up in New York. So I followed them to this city with nothing but a duffle bag with my clothes and the only book I ever read.

  But everything was in that book. New York was full of frog cabbies who were actually actor princes under a cruel spell. Cinderella waited tables in every bar. Acquaintances had started their own little kingdoms: clubs and restaurants and galleries. Sometimes those places weren’t in the best neighborhoods, or the patrons forgot their good manners, or the wrong kind of people wanted to come inside. They started calling me.

  Maybe a tiny bit wiser, I put the idea of the discharged soldier behind me. There’s another kind of guy in a lot of the stories. He never has the major role. But I didn’t want stardom. He gets different titles: forester, game keeper, the hunter. He plays key parts. And I have the feeling he’s around even when he’s not talked about. Every king or queen needs a royal huntsman. That at least is how it worked in the dark woods of Manhattan.

  2

  That’s my secret identity. It’s because of Rinaldo Baupre that I discovered it. And it’s because of him that I first saw you in action. Rinaldo is standing over there looking, as always, like he’s in pain. No the years have not been kind to him. Drug treatment. Mental hospitals. It’s like something’s been tearing Mr. Baupre in two.

  Sometimes with celebrities, it’s amazing how much smaller they are in real life than in the media. With Rinaldo it’s the opposite. I’m always surprised that he’s average height and build. On first meeting, he seems pretty creepy but in no way misshapen. Inside, though, he’s a dwarf, a troll.

  Mr. Baupre wrote the script for Raphael! And he’s treated his own part in Louis’ life very sympathetically. It turns out he was the kid’s mentor and inspiration. Lots of amazing changes have gotten rung on history.

  Rinaldo was a fixture of the downtown scene, a poet, a sponger, a scene maker. And he had a legend. I mean, the name demanded one. So he was the illegitimate son of a French Resistance fighter who abandoned him and a minor Mexican muralist who died young.

  Rinaldo is a critic. Thirty years ago, the art magazines kind of used him to keep watch at the crossroads where art and the underground intersected. People were starting to pay attention to the downtown scene. Victor Sparger had started getting hot. Victor had gone through a careful rebellion, done graffiti, nailed broken glass onto boards. Rinaldo Baupre had a small part in his rise. But mostly Victor managed himself.

  By then I’d met Louis Raphael through a young photographer, Norah Classon. Norah loved Louis like he was a little brother. He was this skinny, Caribbean kid, living on the street, bumming money and cigarettes and a couch to crash on.

  I’m supposed to say I got knocked out the first time I looked at his work. Like everyone else apparently did. And that I could kick myself for not having the fifty bucks or whatever he was charging for a painting. In reality, the first time Norah talked me into letting Louis stay at my place I was pissed off because he got paint on my walls. And he was apologetic and cleaned it up. That was shortly before Rinaldo discovered Raphael. Like Columbus finding America is how my wife described it. That is, America was always there, big and rich and unexploited. A lot of Indians knew about America. But Columbus talked it up where it counted.

  Rinaldo was the same way. Others had the goods. But he had the contacts. And a talent for spinning. Most people can’t do it. Publicity is the magic that spins gold. And once Mr. Baupre had done that for you, he never let you forget it. Rinaldo was always real nice with me. He was too smart to insult headwaiters or gate keepers. To our faces. And I was always polite enough. But I’d gotten to see him in action with Norah Classon.

  To give him credit, he saw what she had done and made sure that others noticed too. Of course, then he wanted her first born. For Norah in the days before she had children, that meant her work. And he claimed a major chunk. “Oh, this is beautiful! Darling, I must have it!” That kind of thing. He told people that he hadn’t just discovered Norah Classon, he had shaped her art.

  Norah I were stepping out back then. She had gotten a one woman Soho show. He wrote the auction catalog and wanted his name bigger than hers. When she objected, he decided to sink the whole deal.

  One night in the packed bathroom at the Mudd Club, I was trying to fight my way through to the can. And I heard the unmistakable voice of Mr. Baupre saying, “I’m the only hose in this hick town gas station. You want fuel baby, you line up here. The spot right where you’re standing is where I discovered Louis Raphael. You don’t know who he is!”

  Someone said something I couldn’t make out, a couple of other people got mentioned. Then I heard Norah’s name and Rinaldo said, “Not if she begged. Ms. Classon is over and done. She’s screwing doormen now. The next step is busboys.”

  And, yeah, I saw red. But I knew that decking Rinaldo wouldn’t help Norah. These days I’ve got a private investigator license. I’m entitled to carry a gun if I ever want to. But a Swiss Army knife is about all I usually pack.

  Back then, I was still learning. I already knew enough, though, to stand aside and wait.

  As Rinaldo made his way out of the room, he looked at something in his hand, grimaced and threw it aside. Curious, I recovered it and stepped out of the club. Under a light on Milk Street, I unfolded a matchbook for the Thunder Ranch Bar and Grill in Wilkes-Barre. Thinking it was a joke or a camp, I was ready to toss it aside.

  And this figure appeared, a radiant being, I guess I’d say. My first thought was that you were an acid flashback from the sixties. Then you spoke one word. What you said was,

  Rumplestiltskin.

  I didn’t remember any hunter in that story. But I went home and re-read it slowly, taking my time with every word like always. The girl whose future depends on her weaving straw into gold and the little man who appears and does it for her fit perfectly. She becomes queen but he’s going to take
her child if she can’t guess his name. I still didn’t see where I fit in. Then I reached the part where the queen sends out a messenger to scour the countryside for the secret name.

  He’s the one who comes back just before the little man appears to claim the baby and says, “At the edge of the forest where the fox and the hare say good night to each other … ”

  What he goes on to tell her is that he’s seen a bonfire and a little man dancing and heard the song with the name Rumplestiltskin in it. But that stuff about the fox and the rabbit gives him away. He’s a hunter. It makes sense. Who else would she have sent out to comb the woods?

  So I made a couple of calls, took a little trip down to Pennsylvania. I found the trailer park outside Wilkes-Barre where a certain Mona Splevetsky lived.

  Oh, there was a dance and a song all right. Thursday was polka night at the Thunder Ranch and I got her drunk and she boogied and told me all about her son Marvin.

  For people like Rinaldo their most important creation is themselves. With anyone else I would have called it the old and sorry tale of an unhappy kid who leaves his past behind. But I wasted little sympathy on Mr. Baupre.

  Unlike Rumplestiltskin, Rinaldo didn’t put his foot through the floor when Norah Classon said the name Marvin Splevetsky. He was real angry. But it had so much power over him that he begged her to keep it secret and gave her back her career.

  3

  Areminder of my next case is also here at Ling’s Fortune Cookie tonight. That scary looking lady waiting for Victor Sparger to appear is Edith Crann, the producer of Raphael! The guy with her is an Italian industrialist. Her fourth husband. Edith’s face is amazing, tragic but unlined, pained but cold, crazy but contained.

  Bankrolling the film was a way of enhancing her investments. Edith Crann was the first important buyer of Louis’ work. She had no idea of why it was good. But Rinaldo advised her and took a commission.

  In the movie, Rinaldo and Victor have turned Edith into Louis Raphael’s muse. It seems that the tragedy of losing her daughter is supposed to have made her sensitive to the plight of a kid thrown out on the street by his family.

  Back at the time their daughter disappeared, I worked for Edith and her first husband, Harris Crann. I had been hired as a bodyguard-chauffeur for young Alycia. It didn’t take me long to recognize Mrs. Crann.

  Everyone around knew she was an evil queen or a wicked stepmother. The only question was which story. Cinderella? Hansel and Gretel? I heard bartenders and waitresses, people who had worked for her, actually discuss this.

  Alycia was seven years old when we met. Her picture was in the papers all the time. She attended Broadway openings. She was at Met galas. Any little girl likes to dress up. All children are thrilled to be out late at night. Little twitches of adulthood. But mostly kids have childhood. Missing that is death as sure as having your lungs and liver cut out.

  One day I heard Mrs. Crann talk about her daughter to an interviewer. “We have long discussions about what she’s going to wear. I never push her. This is what she wants.” And the kid said nothing. Just looked at herself in the mirror, tried on a little powder, as if she didn’t hear.

  As a huntsman, I watched the animals. Like in the tales, they spoke the truth while people lied. Mr. Jimbo was the springer spaniel, brown and white that followed the kid around. Alycia had named him when she was three. Whenever the mother put her hand on her daughter’s mass of careful curls, the dog tensed. I understood what he was saying: he had taken on a job that made him feel bad inside.

  Another time Mrs. Crann told someone, “I talk to Alycia in ways I never had anyone talk to me. It’s amazing. I come into her room the first thing in the morning and we discuss what she has scheduled for that day.” Queen Milly was the Persian cat. She got up from Alycia’s lap where she was sitting and slunk out of the room. I understood: even the cat couldn’t stand to listen to this.

  The parakeet actually spoke, of course. “Hi gorgeous!” it said to Edith Crann.

  She gave her scariest smile and asked, “Who’s the fairest in the land?”

  “You are!” said the parakeet. “Lady. You are!”

  Then the bird flew into the next room and lighted on the little girl’s shoulder. “Hi gorgeous,” it said and whistled.

  “Fairest … ” it started to say and fell silent as the mother appeared. Her face was like a mask. But the eyes behind it were wild with anger.

  Two things finally did it for me. First was seeing Alycia trying to skip like every seven year old does. Except she was wearing high heels and tripped. The second was the picture of her in a leather outfit. She was posed in what was supposed to be a worldly and sophisticated way. The idea, maybe, was to be cute. But her eyes under false lashes looked lost and desperate.

  In fairy tales, everyone’s a prince or a princess. Step-mothers move in to perform wicked deeds. In real life, no one’s a princess and parents do their own dirty work. The parts of the stories are just that, parts. They’re all shaken up and reassembled when you actually encounter them.

  What Edith Crann was doing was stealing her daughter’s most precious possession, her childhood. Seeing her parents, I knew that Edith herself probably hadn’t had one. They were a loveless pair of sticks. I almost felt sorry for Edith. Alycia didn’t like those grandparents either. I know because we talked all the time in the car. She sat up front with me. Going to her mother’s parents, she’d fall silent. They’d look at her and wouldn’t crack a smile.

  With her father’s side of the family it was different. Harris Crann’s family had gotten bigger and dumber with each generation. Harris was six foot tall and Ivy League. Waspy and stiff as a board. If he saw what was being done to his kid, he never let on.

  His parents were, maybe, five-foot-six, but big on museum and opera boards. And they had established a charitable foundation. In the city, they had this huge co-op up on Riverside Drive, several floors, countless rooms. Kind of pretentious. But when they saw their grand-daughter, their eyes lit up.

  Once I took her up there and they weren’t home. Alycia smiled which she didn’t do a lot and beckoned me down a hall like she was showing me this great secret. We went up some stairs and into this whole separate apartment within the larger one. That’s where I met her great-grandparents.

  Theodore and Heddy Kranneki were ancient and tiny. They had founded the family fortune long ago. They spent part of the year in the Homeland. They had done lots of work for the independence movement there. Probably they were little to start with but now they were no bigger than their grand-daughter. They were entertaining some friends equally old and small. And smart still, with amazingly bright eyes behind bifocals. They looked at the kid in her leather outfit as she tottered on heels to hug them. Their eyes met mine and we all understood exactly what had to happen.

  So now we had the wicked step-mother and the magic little people in place. And the huntsman. That’s all the identity the story gives. He’s a royal employee, as I see it. One day he’s told to take the little girl out in the woods, kill her and bring back her liver and lungs as proof he’s done it.

  The boss’s wife has given him the orders. But he looks at the little girl and she’s so beautiful he can’t. Thinking that the wild animals will kill her, the huntsman lets her go and brings back a young boar’s liver and lungs. These the queen has the cook boil in salted water then eats. I’ll be fair to Edith Crann, she was into more sophisticated dining.

  The day came when I was supposed to drive Alycia up to the Hotel Pierre. Edith’s parents were going to meet her and take her on vacation. Alycia wasn’t looking forward to that at all.

  Under everything her mother had done to her, she had the beauty that’s given to all kids, however the world may bend and warp it. When we were in the car together, we used to sing songs like I do with my own kids now. Old corny stuff. “Singing in the Rain” when it was raining. “A Little Help from My Friends,” when one of us was down. Or I’d tell her stories.

  That partic
ular day I told her “Snow White.” Not because she didn’t know the story, but for the same reason I’m telling you: to make it clear in my own mind what led up to this situation and what will happen afterwards.

  Alycia understood. She was crying when I came to the part about the huntsman and the woods. We got up to the Pierre and there was a delivery truck broken down right in front of the hotel just as I’d been told there would be. As instructed, I parked down the block. The kid got out and stood on the curb while I went around to get her bags out of the trunk. In their prime, Ted and Heddy Kranneki must really have been something. I turned away and on a grey morning there was a flash like sunlight reflecting on a passing rearview mirror. Magic. When I turned back, Alycia was gone.

  It was THE hot New York story for a couple of weeks. Cops grilled me. Reporters wanted my story. The question was whether I was an idiot or an accomplice. I had expected that. Alycia’s picture was in the papers and on TV. Posters were everywhere. The thing was, Edith Crann couldn’t help herself. The picture she used showed the kid in a slinky dress and a tortured expression.

  People began to wonder about little Alycia’s home life. That summer there was a nasty mayoral primary and a racial killing in Brooklyn, the Mets arose from the dead and ran for the pennant, someone named Louis Raphael came out of nowhere and took the art world by storm. Rumors circulated that Alycia had been seen in various places. But no new leads appeared. The Crann kidnapping story quietly died.

  That summer also, Norah Classon and I both started going out with other people. Somehow, it didn’t make me as happy as I thought it was going to. And it didn’t give her more time for her career as she thought it would. I heard that she was having booze troubles. Probably the same stories were going around about me. A couple, friends of us both, invited me out to the Hamptons for the weekend because Norah was staying nearby. But when I dropped around to see her, she had left for Fire Island. When I took the ferry over there, she was gone.