Who is Teddy Villanova?

by Thomas Berger

  11

  “See,” Bakewell further growled, “you deal with this type dumbness, you’re always getting problems you never noo you had, so you can’t work out no plans to deal with them before they hap-per—” He hooked a huge thumb into his upper gums.

  It was the first time I had heard him speak since he had burst into my office and begun the case, and once again his dentures had slipped. This detail assured my faculties that they were not working for a man in a dream.

  “I hope you won’t think this an impertinent question,” I said, “but why aren’t you dead?”

  Bakewell merely sneered in response, but Washburn said to him: “We’ve nothing to lose now by clueing him in.”

  “I don’t like to tell nothing to a schmuck,” replied the great big man.

  Washburn shrugged, and heel-and-toed a soft circle in his socks on the shag rug, a wool-to-wool effect that for some reason caused the rims of my ears to tingle as if with a charge of static electricity.

  After two such revolutions he stopped to face me. “You may not find this flattering. But then I shouldn’t suppose you suffer anyway from an undue burden of amour-propre, given your seedy calling.”

  “Just a moment,” I cried. “True, my own practice may at the moment be down-at-heel in a commercial or venal sense. But my profession qua vocation is good as any. I believe your own is criminal, for example. You are at least a skein in a complex web of crime, involving addictive drags, such as that consignment presented me by Mr. Chai, who is neither a wallah of tea, which for your information is what his pseudonym means in Urdu, nor of yoga, nor for that matter”—I touched the ball-point pen in my pocket—“of real estate in Yonkers of all places…Not to mention mass murder, if the term can be applied to the simultaneous slaughter of two gangsters on Union Square at about a quarter after six this morning.” I breathed. “In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that you, yourself, are Teddy Villanova.”

  Bakewell slapped both knees and threw his oxhead forward, uttering a bellow that caused the travel posters to vibrate on the wall above, and across the room, the wandering Jew to swing violently in its basket.

  Washburn joined him in mirth. “Wren,” said he, “I suppose we can lose nothing now by revealing that there is no such person as Villanova. He does not exist. He was pure invention.”

  I dropped myself into a nearby chair that was constructed in the form of half an egg and mounted on a wire crisscross that looked too frail to bear a body, and more or less was, quaking when one moved. I had avoided it in the past; I should have done so now.

  “Oh, no you don’t,” I said. “Hus, the real detective, confirmed the reality of Teddy Villanova.”

  “Hus is our man,” said Washburn.

  “A corrupt cop?”

  “Merely a counterfeit.”

  “Wait a moment.” I sandpapered my hands on my beard of twenty-odd hours. “The two Italians, who incidentally were guards at the Wyandotte Club, the Italo-American association in my office building, and were, I gather from what turned out to be, in effect, a deathbed statement, named Pete and Tony, did not actually pose as policemen, but merely wore the navy-blue coplike uniforms of their private calling.”

  I now rubbed my hands together and felt the sand they had carried from my cheeks—no, that couldn’t be right: I examined its sparkle and saw it was rather glass dust, from the pulverized show window through which Pete and Tony had been scatter-gunned.

  “Zwingli and Knox were the fakes!” I nevertheless said with ardor, brushing my hands on my legs. “Hus had a gold badge.”

  “Well of course he had a badge!” Washburn assured me. “What kind of imposture goes without the furniture of disguise? And you have got it precisely reversed, Hus being the fraud, whereas Zwingli and Knox are authentic detectives. They have in fact gained widespread notoriety as a crack team of the Narcotics Squad and recently contracted with Ziggy Zimmerman, the well-known producer-director, to make a film of their exploits.”

  “Do you mean to tell me—just a moment: but what does that make the black—no, first you must admit that those names are impossible.”

  “I shall do nothing of the kind,” Washburn said self-righteously. “They are precise, they are genuine. Hence the projected title, The Reformers, for their picture.”

  “Are you a detective, as well?”

  His risibilities were once again provoked. “My dear fellow, I’m an avid filmgoer, and keenly follow the gossip columns.”

  I persisted: “I’m sure it was the black officer, Calvin— you must admit that that name, in conjunction with—”

  “Harry Zwingli and Carl Knox. ‘Calvin,’ however is a first name. Calvin Peachtree. Coincidences are rife, Wren. I don’t know why you jib at them, good gravy.”

  “Forget the names for a moment,” I cried. “I’m sure it was Calvin whom I saw on Union Square, in a Cadillac, both meretriciously adorned, the car in mother-of-pearl, he in white sombrero and scarlet jacket, accompanied by a murderous female albino, who thereupon discharged a double-barreled shotgun into Pete and Tony, projecting them through a show window behind which, displayed in various attitudes, were a number of half-mannequins— that is, literally topless, their figures terminating at the waist—clad in either panty hose or panties alone, or a combination of those garments.”

  Washburn pointed a derisive nose at me. “Wren, are you a deviate of some sort? I catch a whiff of underwear addiction—then I remember too your recent inordinate demonstration on my recovering my own supporter from under the bed.”

  “Frankly,” said I, stung, “I don’t know why you’d wear that in the first place, nor even less, in the second, why it was where you found it.”

  “It is my regular practice,” said he, “to do my yoga every morning.” That was the extent of his explanation in this regard; it far from sufficed, but he was correct in his implication that there were matters of higher import at hand.

  “Calvin Peachtree,” he went on to say, “if it was indeed he you saw, and not some mere hallucination conjured up by bigotry, may be a rogue cop.”

  “You will at any rate admit that the assignment for which you hired me was totally spurious. There is no Frederika Washburn, and she has no illicit lover; in fact, you are unmarried. You are involved in the heroin traffic, your confederates being the so-called Chai Wallah, the large gentleman seated on the modular sofa, and the bogus detective named Hus. But Zwingli, Knox, and Calvin are real Protestants; I mean, policemen, whatever rascality the black man moonlights at, and for that matter Zwingli admitted to me he was himself a heroin user; Knox alone seems clean, perhaps even standard, being the routine sadist of law enforcement…

  “That leaves, let me see, the Wyandotte group, who are your rivals and enemies, and the Gay Assault Team, or was their timely appearance a mere coincidence? And what of the gesturing gypsy and the Diogenes of muscatel—can they pass muster?”

  Washburn touched his temples. “Please, Wren, please! Never have I encountered such a melange of truths, whole, half, quarter, and misapprehensions in the same variety and profusion.’

  “I gather, then,” I said, “that you intend to disabuse me without delay.”

  “I don’t know that I should,” said Washburn. He seized an egg chair for himself; his was colored lapis lazuli, mine being pomegranate. “To remove the sense of wonder is often tantamount to emasculation. However, if you insist…” He deposited his hams with the usual insouciant grace. “I was a sickly child, braces on my teeth, lenses on my nose, undersized yet ungainly, never nimble. My mother was overprotective and my father austere—”

  “Is your early history germane to this affair?” I asked. “I don’t mean to be unsympathetic in regard to your deprived boyhood, but for two days I’ve been incessantly savaged, mocked, and swindled spiritually and, in Zwingli’s case, financially. I’m wanted by the police—no, that’s not right if Hus was the fake cop. But why, if he wanted the heroin, did he not simply go to the yoga wallah himself, Mr. Chai being one
of your mob, or is he? Oh, yes, I see: he had to use me as intermediary, should he, Hus, be under surveillance by the real detectives, Zwingli and Knox.”

  On the printed page this is an interruption of Washburn’s apologia pro vita sua; in life it was not: he had continued in a solipsist fashion to bring himself, in narrative, to the age of puberty or at any rate the age when it claimed him, rather later than for what the English call the Man on the Clapham Omnibus, being coincident with his leaving preparatory school at eighteen, on which birthday he assertedly discovered for the first time a sparse growth of hair in his armpits and on his privy parts.

  “Washburn, desist!” I cried.

  From the sofa Bakewell said to me: “If you don’t shut up, I’m gonna peel your skull like a peanut and I’m gonna grind your brains into peanut butter and put a gob onna window sill for the birds to peck.”

  To Washburn, who had in fact not halted his narration, he said, with a geniality of which I should not have believed him capable, “Just go on, Donnie. I heard this a hundred times and I could hear it a hundred more. You got a way with words.”

  I knew a certain jealousy, Zwingli having made me the same praise—I hoped, in spite of all, not altogether in a disingenuous effort to gain my confidence.

  But in view of Bakewell’s threat, I had no option but to listen. However, because Washburn had continued to speak relentlessly throughout, when next I heard him he had, grace a Dieu, gained his early twenties in reminiscence, leaving me only with an obligation to suffer another decade, judging from his apparent age currently, which give or take a year must resemble my own.

  “…than in the observance,” he was saying, smiling cavalierly at an imaginary auditor in the middle distance, i.e., neither Bakewell nor I, “and I’m afraid that for a decade thereafter the only scents I detected were those of a succession of red herrings. Nevertheless, in my obsession I followed where they led: Chittagong, Chiswick, Churubusco, and Churchill County in Nevada; Padua, Pittsburg, and Piltdown, in East Sussex, which in itself suggests the fraudulent, the remains of the Lower Pleistocene humanoid found there having been identified—just as I arrived in the area in 1952—as the skull of a much later man superimposed on the jaw of a modern ape. Incidentally, the perpetrator of that hoax has never been uncovered.”

  “Forgive me,” I begged Bakewell, and to Washburn I said: “In nineteen fifty-two I was nine years old.”

  He had stopped to ponder, staring into the palm of his hand—a term not redundant here, owing to the presence, in the miserable window-garden, of a stunted miniature palm tree, and in fact it was towards this arboreal entity that he peered next.

  However, he addressed me: “Well then, you could have served no purpose at the time. There was, however, a child who came into play at one point, or perhaps a midget.”

  “My implication was that surely you, as well, are at the most in your early thirties.”

  His eyebrows sought his crown. “How flattering. Good gravy. Fifty-odd summers have I seen.”

  “You can’t mean that.”

  “I assure you I do.” He saluted; for some reason, like a Household Guard, finger tips at an imaginary bearskin. “But now if you’ll permit me to continue my account of the quest for the Sforza figurine.”

  I was giddy. “The which?”

  “I refer of course to Ludovico Sforza.”

  “He’s the leader of the Wyandotte mob?”

  Washburn leered at Bakewell, who guffawed, then growled: “He ain’t just a little punk: he’s a dumb little puh—” As usual his teeth slipped on the approach to the voiceless velar.

  I tried to recover: “Certainly I am aware of the Renaissance prince of the same name, but what would a fifteenth-century Milanese have to do with heroin traffic in New York in nineteen seventy-six?”

  “Rien du tout,” said Washburn. “Ludovico, surnamed Il Moro owing to his swarthy complexion, usurped the rule of Milan from his nephew Giangaleazzo circa fourteen eighty. In fourteen ninety-nine, after he had broken an alliance with the French, he lost the duchy to them, was taken prisoner, and as such died in France. He was married to Beatrice d’Este, et cetera, et cetera. While all this is of interest to the historian, it is not to the point here. What is germane is his patronage of Leonardo da Vinci.” Washburn halted here to insult me: “No doubt you have dined on his scallopine, in Thompson Street.”

  I rose above that, yet spoke levelly: “The Sforza figurine is a work of art?…A product of the hand of Leonardo. Priceless. Unknown to the catalogues, yet the subject of the rumors of three hundred years. Glimpsed, or alleged to have been, throughout the centuries; yet never verified by witnesses whose reliability went unquestioned.”

  “You’re gaining ground,” said Washburn. “True, it has been considered legendary. But in fact I have seen it. I have held it. I have owned it. IT IS REAL.”

  His intensity, I thought, partook of the synthetic, but I played along. “The representation of a wood nymph. A naiad, or perhaps a Muse.”

  “Not so,” said he. “No, it is actually a group, two figures in conjunction: one a man of some years, hirsute of head and face; the other a hairless stripling…We’re men of the world: the former is performing an aberrant act on the latter. I expect it is a representation of Zeus and Ganymede.”

  At this point Bakewell gave vent to a hurricane of laughter that by contrast made zephyrs of his former sounds of amusement. “Them old guineas was real fruits!” he thundered.

  “No,” Washburn told him, “I doubt that Ludovico il Moro was gay, Gus, though there is reason to believe that the same could not be said of Leonardo. Moreover, in classical times, where these myths find their origins, the sexual sensibility was very different from ours—”

  “Ganymede Press,” I said. “Could it be, despite that sucrose story—which may be another hoax, ruse, or feint—they do after all have more up their sleeves than pots and pans?”

  “Is working one’s way through that mixed metaphor worth while?” groaned Washburn. “But aren’t you referring to those pornographic publishers in your office building?”

  “Gott set dank!” I said. “You have just confirmed an assumption of mine, which has been ridiculed by everyone else…They pretend to be distributors of housewares.”

  “Naturally, with my interest in the figurine, I was struck by the name on the lobby directory-board.” He made a peevish smile. “But, to correct your sense of the situation, very few people know of the statuette. We have left many a false spoor…Gus and I have been a team since he served as my batman in the Second German War.”

  The reference pleased Bakewell, who felt his upper plate and then lowered his thumb to point at his hogshead chest. “Thirty-year man. Went in in sixteen to ride through Chihuahua with Black Jack. Heinies later gassed me in the Argonne. I never breathed right since. I also picked up a dose from the Madamazel from Armenteers.” He fell into a smiling reverie.

  “We both,” said Washburn, “left the colors in nineteen forty-six.”

  I looked now at Bakewell with a new eye. If he had gone into the army in 1916, stayed thirty years, and spent the next three decades as Washburn’s partner in crime, he must currently be almost eighty years of age. To the naive eye he would appear rather to be in the early fifties that were instead Washburn’s own situation. They were an extraordinarily well-preserved team.

  “We remained in Europe,” said Washburn, “where for some years we were occupied in commercial ventures having to do with the disposal of war materiel.”

  “A euphemism for black-marketing, I suspect. But I trust you will soon tell me how I happen to find myself embroiled in the Villanova Affair, which now, according to you, turns out to be misnamed as well.”

  “It is not oxymoronic to say that your role has been massively petty,” Washburn asseverated, “yet essential, because the same could be said of a shoelace. As it happened, as I have already suggested by choosing Chiswick and particularizing Piltdown as among my ports of call—unlike you, I do not resor
t to idle wordplay—the British Isles figured prominently in a certain phase of my quest. There was reason to suspect that the Sforza figurine, during most of the decade of the nineteen sixties, was in the possession of a depraved duke.” This memory was obviously bitter; Washburn glared and spat on the fricatives. “A rheumy-eyed old party, who wore lip rouge and hennaed his hair, reeked of sandalwood. An extremely distasteful encounter when we finally tracked him to earth on his estate in Hertfordshire. He possessed what was surely one of the world’s most extensive collections of indecent literature and pictorial art, all of the sodomist persuasion, I might add. I expect he was almost ninety at the time, yet had his daily birching at the hands of the husky young local rustics, who like all peasants were mercenarily complaisant yet spiritually uninvolved…Are you following this, Wren?”

  “Breathlessly.”

  “He was of course immune to public shaming, le vice anglais being considered only one of the more modest eccentricities in its native land. And as to violence, though Gus was too old to make it peculiarly attractive to him, his erotic pleasure was to be its recipient. However, all speculation on how we might have got the statuette away from him, this side of dynamiting the vault in which he kept the gems of his collection, are irrelevant: he did not then have, nor did he ever, the Sforza figurine.”

  “But why—”

  “In fact, in an access of deviate lust, noble greed, and English commercial cunning, he offered, should we come upon it elsewhere, to buy it from us for a hundred thousand pounds.” Washburn sneered. “Its value, of course, would be rather in the millions, if at all calculable. The very materials from which it is molded, gold, with sapphire eyes for the boy and ruby for the bearded ancient, nates of chalcedony, diamond member—”

  I said: “How vulgar. One would think Leonardo had more subtle taste.”

  Washburn spoke solemnly. “The fantasies of geniuses are no less inordinate than those of “l’homme moyen sensuel.”