Who is Teddy Villanova?

by Thomas Berger

  I withdrew my billfold and took from it my sheaf of licenses. I handed them to him wholesale, before he could twist himself into another guise.

  His vision was apparently the faculty in which his physical fitness was lagging. He took one document and held it so near that it seemed impaled on his nose. At last he lowered it and said: “But dis driving permit is surely in order?” He returned it to me.

  My own name had returned as magically as it had left. The driver’s license had been issued to Russel Wren. The same was true of all the other credit cards and permits. The famous dog license was not to be found at all.

  In one sense I had gained an advantage: the motive for my recent bludgeoning was now obvious. But I was no nearer an understanding of why my identification had been switched with Villanova’s in the first place.

  The Hindu was annoyed when I voiced Frederika Washburn’s name again and requested him once again to certify that she was not his regular student.

  “Hell’s bells,” he said in a fluty liquid lisp, “it is mosth irritating! Though time does not exist, you must not persist in vasting mine.”

  I was still holding the contract, Maugham’s novel, and the pen, which I had not been able to put down, because of the absence of furniture, nor to return to him owing to his going into a new gymnastic performance whenever I tried. It now occurred to me that I had no implement on my person with which to jot down the notes I should have begun to take long since; the details in this case were getting too profuse to commit to memory.

  “I’ll tell you what I’ll do: I might buy your pen, but seventy-nine cents is highway robbery. It’s a giveaway item, from the look of it.” I read the silver legend on the blue barrel, which I had not hitherto examined that carefully: REAL ESTATE WALLAH, with an address in Yonkers. “Unless I miss my guess, it’s in fact an advertising souvenir for another enterprise of your own.”

  Something else, in tiny printing, caught my eye: New House or Old, It Must Be Sold. Mere banal doggerel of the trade, or was it still another pugmark of the stealthy tiger of whom I knew so little I could not yet identify him as either hunter or prey?

  I barked at the Hindu: “Teddy Villanova! What does that name mean to you?”

  His response was unexpected, as I suppose that any, unless in the negative range, would have been at this point.

  “A very bad man, sahib.” The yogi’s visage took on the appearance of a dried apricot. “Good God! You do know him?”

  As his grimace grew even more violent he lost the trappings of the cosmic sage. He virtually spat: “A damned bloody bugger.”

  I tend in moments of excitement to take terms literally. “A practicing sodomite?” This would tie him in with The Ganymede—but no, for an instant I had forgotten that firm was clean as the incisor of an Irish setter: except, perhaps, for the presence of that .25-caliber slug I found in the brownie.

  “A scoundrel,” said the yoga wallah, impatient with my question. “Blahst him. He was a bloody police constable in Goa.”

  My blood ebbed. “That’s a world away, I’m afraid. I don’t believe it likely he would have followed you to New York, unless the charge was murder. More likely it was mere smuggling.”

  By chance I had hit a nerve.

  “You bloody sod,” said the Hindu, advancing on me as if he were soon to discard his nonviolent principles. True, he was tiny. But in the hierarchy of living things the deadly cobra is a midget. I could not chance more punishment. In a word, I immediately took the leave that for some reason is called French—except in France.

  So the visit to the wallah had not been fruitful except in its revelation that Donald Washburn II, like all the other principals in the case, was not to be trusted. Why had he told me that his wife was a long-time student of yoga?

  Of course, it was still possible that the Hindu was prevaricating for reasons of his own. But insofar as he represented himself to be Asiatic and limber, he was no impostor: these traits could not be donned like a policeman’s uniform or merely asserted by word of mouth, the latter being Zwingli’s technique—had he really found merit in my play? In the circumstances he had had no motive for flattery. Though a fake as the new breed of cop, he might well belong to the new breed of criminal, using his swag to pay tuition fees at one of the many local institutions of higher learning.

  On the sidewalk again in front of Yoghurt City, I realized I was still carrying The Razors Edge and the ballpoint pen, though in my hasty departure from the fourth floor I seemed to have lost the contract. I put them into the pockets of my corduroy jacket. I’m no sneak thief. I would either return them by mail or send the Hindu a check.

  I caught a taxi, and before I got in, looked carefully to see whether the driver was the same man who had brought me down here. Could it have been a mere coincidence that he had known the route to Chai Wallah’s obscure establishment, among all the yoga studios in this great city?

  The current cabby, however, was a dark little man in black fedora and raincoat. He answered to the description one of my former clients, a keeper at the Bronx Zoo, had once given me of the type of deviate who shows up at animal mating-times and watches the beasts copulate. But he also looked familiar in a particular way.

  “Forgive me for asking this, but it might be important,” I said, speaking through the opening in the plastic partition. “Did you happen to use the toilet on the third floor of the building at-East Twenty-third Street a couple of hours ago?”

  His eye in the mirror was black, beady, and wary. “So you’re a COP?”

  As the victim of a series of impostures, I decided to perform one myself. “You know it, fella.”

  Had he asked to see my badge, I should have been embarrassed, but instead he said, preposterously: “You got a warrant?”

  “You don’t need a warrant to answer a simple question.”

  “That’s pretty personal, ain’t it?” He put the vehicle into motion. “I mean, the police come in the toilet with you, the next step’s Hitler. I gotta right to remain silent. I gotta right to call my lawyer. If I don’t have a lawyer, the court’s gotta assign me one. All that comes from that time the Supreme Court let a spic killer go back on the streets, because his fucking rights had been denied, I forget the name: Villanova, or something.”

  “What name?”

  “Carmen Miranda.”

  “Why did you say ‘Villanova’?”

  “Aw, forget it,” he groaned. “What the hell do I care if you’re interested in my craps. Yeah, I took one in the men’s room of the Bellmore Cafeteria at ten o’clock this morning, for God’s sake. You guys are getting to be perverts, you know that?”

  I had had enough. In a fantasy engendered by rage I believed I was a real cop. “You’re under arrest. Pull over to the curb.”

  He did as ordered, got out, came around, opened my door, and said, with a wide smile: “Wrong! You’re under arrest.”

  He showed me a real gold badge, identifying himself as a real detective. That was a change, as the fox said when they flayed him. He spread-eagled me against the side of the cab. With my available eye I could see a crowd gathering. He emptied my pockets.

  He said: “Looka dis, so you can’t claim I planted it onya.”

  I pushed myself erect. He held The Razor’s Edge at the level of my chin and slowly opened it about halfway through its text. It was more box than book; a hollow had been cut through the depth of pages and extended to within an inch of the margins. In this depression was embedded a glassine bag full of white powder.

  The detective grinned at me. “Villanova, this is the end of the line.” He handcuffed me, then doffed his hat, burlesquing a congratulatory gesture. Another few strokes of a comb and he would be totally glabrous of crown. “Some chase, huh? Well, you had a good run. Know what led to your downfall? Huh?” He poked me in the ribs. “Pussy. Huh? You kept it in your pants, you might of been a free man still. Huh? Not you. Gotta keep the old sword oiled, right? You know who blew the whistle onya in the end? Huh? None of the
dark meat, boy. It was the little mick from the old home town, what’s her name, huh, Tumulty, one with the big jugs?”

  I couldn’t come up with anything better than: “It’s not my home town.”

  He himself was obviously a native. “It’s some shithole,” he said with satisfaction. The crowd that had gathered to watch my shaming continued to increase in size.

  “What’s next?” I asked. “I’m not going through my story again until I’m safely inside a police station. Do we take the cab?”

  He seemed to find pleasure in standing there chatting on the sidewalk with a manacled suspect, enjoying a bit of notoriety with the public before returning to the necessary obscurity of his profession. In fact, like a Catskill comedian in his first Broadway play, he soon began to perform directly to the audience without regard for the other members of the cast. He hooked his gold badge into the moire of his hatband, and opened his topcoat and, with one fist to his hip, draped it back so that the gun he carried there could collect interest.

  He said loudly: “Yeah, it’s a real interesting job sometimes. It’s not for everybody, that’s for sure. Takes somebody with a whole lot of guts, but like I say, you get the satisfaction of knowing you got what it takes.”

  While making this unsolicited statement he cast beseeching glances at the assembled civilians, who I now noticed were all men, all husky young men in fact, wearing knitted short-sleeved shirts and blue jeans. They were a very fit-looking crew and suggested a team of athletes in mufti; to be precise, a mufti that was uniform.

  As the detective started to list his Ten Most Interesting Cases, answering a question he had asked himself, I was in the ridiculous situation of having to plead to be hauled off to jail.

  Several of the athletes, really remarkably robust chaps with the pronounced musculature of weight lifters, now came up to us. This approach caused the detective to blush and stare demurely at his feet, as if he were a wallflower about to be asked to dance with a series of popular lettermen.

  One of them nodded kindly to me and said: “We’re here, Brother.”

  The largest, a fair-haired youth with a porcine face that bore several cleat-scars, addressed the detective: “Let this man go.”

  The officer displayed wonderment. “Come again?”

  “We constitute GAT, the Gay Assault Team,” said the large blond. “We won’t tolerate police harassment.” The little detective disappeared from my view as a ring of these worthies closed around him.

  When the circle of men opened a moment later, the large chap who had spoken to me emerged with a key and unlocked my handcuffs. “Get going, Brother, and good luck.”

  I was in an embarrassing situation. I didn’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings, on the one hand; but though I have nothing against those professing to the persuasion of Marcel Proust, Andre Gide, and perhaps even the great Will himself, I am not myself an invert, having, when it comes to intimacies, an absolute addiction to the other and not the same.

  “Thanks,” said I, “but I’m afraid I’m not gay, and in fact I’m not being charged with that.”

  “Oh, that’s quite O.K.,” he said. “We protect any man from the police. Men have always been the niggers of society, but we will no longer accept that state of affairs.” He showed me a clenched fist, large as a rib roast. His biceps were stout as my thighs.

  The other joined him. One had the detective’s gun, from which he emptied the cartridges plinkingly on the pavement. Another, his knitted shirt straining across the massive pectorals, had taken away the officer’s leather-covered blackjack, a cruel-looking implement with a looped strap.

  “A thing in a thong,” said he, evoking a smile or two from the others: no doubt it was some coterie term.

  I was suddenly frightened to be dwarfed by these powerful men. “Uh,” I asked my particular benefactor, “I don’t have to do anything in return…? I mean, no offense, but…”

  The question caused a general guffaw.

  “No offense,” said this ruddy-faced husky, “but we don’t find you personally very attractive. You’re simply another victim of injustice, guilty of no crime but being born male.”

  Strangely enough, I was somewhat offended, such is the nature of human vanity, while being relieved as well;and also my lifelong attitude towards athletes having been one of mixed contempt and envy, of which for their part they returned only the former, I now had a new reason to question my virility.

  So I accepted their gift of liberty. Before I left the area, however, I made my little speech to the detective, who sat stunned on the hood of the cab, to which he had been lifted, like a doll, by the members of GAT, though going otherwise unharmed by them.

  “I’m not Teddy Villanova, and I’m no heroin smuggler, and I’m not going to let myself be framed. If you are so inept or so corrupt as to arrest me, you can’t be trusted to prove my innocence, so I’m going to do it myself. When I’ve got the proof, 111 let you know. What’s your name?”

  “Hus,” he answered dully.

  Wishing me Godspeed, the stalwarts of the Gay Assault Team gave assurance they would maintain their guard for ten minutes, before returning Hus’s weapons. Projected, as it were, on the clenched fists of their en masse salute, I went hastily away. I rounded several corners and passed through a number of short streets and long alleys. I had got lost every time I came to the Village to seek a restaurant, though having beforehand plotted my route on a map of Manhattan. Now, having no sense of where it was that I had begun my flight, I feared I might, Vico-like, be on a course of mere recirculation. Though utterly innocent, I was a wanted criminal and “at large”— never before had I appreciated the force of that term. Claimed by agoraphobia, I slowed my pace and peered longingly into crepuscular cellarways and the cozy crannies amidst bales of rubbish awaiting the Sanitation Department, service in which was the hereditary career in the Tumulty family: a garbage can was handed down through the generations like a coronet.

  Nor, at that point, would I have said Peggy had a kind heart. That bitch. I could not even reach her by phone: mine, at the apartment, had been disconnected, if you recall. At length I found myself on a residential street of brownstones and ginkgo trees, the kind of handsome block still to be encountered in Manhattan but only by accident, and always polluted somewhere by an abandoned car, stripped to the axles, or a mountain of trash. This one was no exception: a third of the way in from the corner the sidewalk was clogged, from wrought-iron fence to gutter, with enough furniture to outfit an apartment of some magnitude.

  In another culture this would have constituted the trappings of some poor devil dispossessed of his home, he himself perhaps languishing in debtors’ prison, like Dickens’ father in Marshalsea, but here it probably indicated no more than the discard of spring house cleaning: the slip covers were slightly soiled.

  I considered hiring a U-Haul and fetching these furnishings back to my own abode, my suede chair having been ruined forever; and also, I don’t know whether you have noticed that once the covers have been removed from foam cushions they can never be restored precisely to their original state: the seams are always a bit awry; and if adjusted here, they go off slightly there. It is a maddening pursuit. Wearied by this reflection, I sank into one of the discarded overstuffed chairs on the sidewalk. It proved to be a Barca-Lounger, and when I put pressure against the back it moved towards the horizontal, the base rising to support my calves.

  Now that I had stopped running, my head began to remember its hurts. I closed my eyes…

  When I returned to consciousness the sun had fallen beyond even the low roofs of that part of the city. I looked for the time on my wrist, but it seemed that someone had snaked away my watch while I slept…No, I had twisted into such a position that in the confusion of awakening I took my right arm for my left. My watch still encircled the latter. So, as a panicky search established, was everything else in place. It was almost six o’clock.

  My mouth tasted as if I had licked the verdigris off a half-dozen pe
nnies. For two hours I must have been the helpless cynosure of passersby, yet I had gone utterly unmolested, in a city in which persons were regularly mugged in the well-policed high-rent quartiers and held captive in the lobbies of grand-luxe hotels while bandits blew open the safe-deposit boxes. The truth I drew from this was that effrontery provided its own protection.

  I eased my brittle limbs from the chair, erected myself, and walked towards the corner, which seemed much farther away than before I had fallen asleep. Whoever had passed me when I was dormant, I saw not a soul now. I suspected that the entire block, chosen because it was handsome, had been condemned for demolition and cleared of tenants, but that the ill wind of the recession had blown some good by chilling the architectural sadists and freezing their project.

  Despite my resolve, just prior to falling asleep, to work from now on according to plan, when I arrived at the corner and was forced, by the traffic light there, to halt and thus to consider whether to cross the street or turn and proceed in the direction permitted by law for the next half minute, unless a turning car intervened, I was absolutely devoid of volition.

  However, there was a nearby public phone, again in one of those chest-high alcoves, and having stared at it in lieu of thinking about a possible destination, I suddenly remembered that ten years ago, which was to say last evening, I had made a dinner date with a girl—for seven P.M. this day. Now I have mentioned often enough that I had possessed but seven dollars at the outset. I had spent almost three in taxiing to Yoghurt City. I had little hope of getting more by the hour for dining.

  Having fed me a sequence of meals from her own kitchen, the young lady could with some justice expect me eventually to pick up a check. Rather vulgarly, I had used that very term, to which she replied: “You’ve already done that!”

  “Huh?”

  “Picked up a Czech!” Her name was Natalie Novotny.

  It is a mistake to believe that every stewardess is but a superannuated cheerleader—for that matter, it may be wrong as well to assume that all cheerleaders are happy cretins, or that all cretins are blissful, life being as various as it is. Natalie was actually a person of some complexity, and contrary to the impression that might have been given by this first example of her dialogue, seldom stopped her sentences with a point of exclamation. Indeed she was inclined to melancholia, especially on her immediate return from a flight to Rome and back, which she characterized as a shuttle between the two most degenerate cities in the world. I took this judgment seriously until I subsequently heard her make the same on flights to and from any European metropolis, and came to suspect that she simply disliked every large center of Western civilization.