I leaned down and looked in at the driver.
He fell across the seat in my direction, hand outthrust in greeting. “Clyde McCoy. Good to see somebody from Home.”
Of course, he was the man Rasmussen had mentioned.
I thrust my hand in and shook his. “What should I do about the door?”
McCoy managed to sit up. He was a skinny, sinewy individual and dressed in a dark-gray suit that I suspected to be properly light gray. His urine-yellow shirt had surely begun life as white. The hue of his tie could be called grease-green. He left the car and staggered around the hood to reach the fallen door. He was one of those persons who owing to slightness of figure and lifelessness of hair could be any age. Using what seemed the strength of sudden madness, he lifted the door and got it back on its hinges. He closed it gingerly. Then he reached through the glassless aperture, found a twisted coat hanger that hung there, and fastened the wire to the upright post of the frame. This took a few moments of intense application in which he breathed in upon me, and when the job was done I felt half drunk.
When he returned to fit himself in back of the wheel I asked apprehensively, “You wouldn’t want me to drive?”
He peered at me through lids that were almost closed. “It’s understandable you think I’m under the influence. I suffer from a disease that resembles drunkenness so closely that my breath even seems to smell of alcohol. That’s why I first came to this country. Saint Sebastian had the only doctor in the world at the time who knew how to treat this ailment. You know what he prescribed? Schnapps. Lots of it. You’d notice if I were to take a drink or two now I’d be sober in no time.”
The vehicle was so old that its starter was mounted on the floor, and after making his statement McCoy began to look for it with the toe of his right foot, which was shod in a battered old shoe from which a section had been cut out, presumably to favor a bunion.
“I suppose you know that Rasmussen sent me,” I said. “But what you might not know is that I’ve had no preparation for the assignment. I don’t even have any money or a passport. And what language is spoken here? I want to get hold of a dictionary or phrase book.”
“Don’t worry about anything,” McCoy answered. “I’ll be back to normal in no time.” He had begun to shake, but he finally got the starter’s range and brought the engine into deafening life. The car jerked into motion and sped towards the terminal building.
It occurred to me to ask: “Don’t I have to go through Immigration and/or Customs?”
The question fortunately came just in time to halt McCoy’s head in its descent to the steering wheel. He lifted it and said, “Naw.”
If we had continued on the current course we would have driven directly through the little terminal building. I urged McCoy to turn, which he did abruptly, lifting us on two wheels.
“But,” I pointed out when the car had regained its equilibrium and left the airport on what was presumably the exit road, an unpaved, rutted lane, “am I not making an illegal entry? If mere rudeness is punished so severely, what about this?” I turned to see whether we would be pursued, but could not, owing to the cardboard in the back windows.
McCoy frowned. Looking at me, he forgot the road. I leaned over and seized the rim of the wheel with both hands and kept it steady.
I was worried. “Hadn’t we better switch places?”
McCoy shook himself and reclaimed the wheel. “I’m fine. I just need a little pick-me-up and I’ll even be better.”
We were entering a town, shaking along a narrow cobble-stoned street that wound past clustered stone buildings, going over an occasional bridge, also of stone. We passed through more than one quaint square around which were a bakery, a cafe, an épicerie, and sometimes a spired church. But human beings were not to be seen.
Finally McCoy pulled against a high curb, scraping, with an awful sound, not only the tires but the edges of the wheels as well.
“Got to stop this way,” said he. “The brakes are pretty far gone, and except in the royal garages mechanics are in short supply. Except for foreigners, and of course the prince, cars aren’t permitted in Saint Sebastian. Better slide out this way, so I don’t have to undo that door again.” He left the vehicle.
I slid over and out and stepped onto the stones of the next street I had touched after leaving the asphalt of Third Avenue, New York City. We were before a modest five- or six-story structure labeled, over its plain entrance, Hotel Bristol.
Once on his feet, McCoy magically gained a certain sobriety and positively loped into the hotel. I followed, entering a small lobby furnished with a high desk behind which were a set of birdhouse mailboxes and a panel from which hung outsized keys of dull brass. This complex was controlled by a stout person with a handlebar mustache. He wore an ancient-looking tailcoat, which I suspect would on closer examination have proved all but threadbare. His wing collar was none too clean, and the posy in his lapel was browning. He gave me a quick frown and then a slow, broad smile that eventually reached the gold tooth on the far left.
“Sir, without doubt you are Mr. Wren.” He spun around, frighteningly fast for a fat man, and seized one of the hanging keys. He placed the key on the counter and rang the little domed bell there. From nowhere came a teenaged boy in a green monkey suit with brass buttons. He saluted me with two fingers and was about to pick up the key when, remembering I had no money in my pockets, I shook my head. Call me a tender soul, but I cannot stand to stiff a servitor.
“No, no,” I said. “I’ll find it myself. I have no luggage.”
The concierge leaned onto his desk and, lowering his heavy head, winked ponderously. “He is available for more than carrying bags, sir.”
For an instant I did not get his drift, being impatient to follow McCoy, who, oblivious to me, was already opening the grill-work door of the tiniest elevator I had ever seen.
“Then,” my oily questioner persisted, “shall I send up a person of the remaining sex?”
“Neither,” I blurted, and as he was beginning a response that I feared might well extend to zoological matters, I snatched up the key and stepped towards the lift. But I was too late. The feckless McCoy was already ascending in the little cage, his runover shoes just at the level of my nose, through the brass grille of the door.
It took an eternity for the elevator to return, throughout which I had an unpleasant wait, for the concierge renewed his importunities in a crooning, obsequious voice that was more repulsive than what he was suggesting.
The lift finally returned, and I took it to the fourth floor, being directed there by the number on the key. When I found my room, the door was open and there, before a rickety desk-table, stood McCoy, draining into his mouth the last few drops from an upended flat pint vessel. His lower lip was dippered out like that of a performing chimpanzee who has learned to drink Coke from the bottle.
He saw me when he lowered the now dead soldier. “All right,” he said bitterly, “so I have a little snort now and again, so send me before the firing squad. Other people kill, torture, mutilate, yet never hear a word of criticism, but let me just take a little drink and I’m a criminal.” He bent in the ever so careful movement of the drunk and deposited the empty bottle in a little wastecan under the desk. Then he went to an opened suitcase that lay on the bed and began to root through the clothing therein. “Rats,” he gasped, growing more desperate and eventually hurling the valise’s contents onto the coverlet. “Did you bring only one bottle?”
“I wasn’t even permitted to bring a change of clothing,” I told him indignantly, remembering my plight. “I assume I can get outfitted on one your local accounts.”
“This is your luggage,” he said in disgust. “It beat us here from the airport.”
“Mine?” Except what I was wearing, tan corduroys and a knitted shirt in dark green, my own wardrobe, such as it had been, had perished in the explosion in New York. That Rasmussen had had time to collect the contents of this valise suggested that he had prepared for my m
ission far in advance of my being informed of it. The realization did nothing for my souring mood.
“Kindly get away from my possessions,” I told McCoy. “I gather you have just drained the bottle the Firm included for my own medicinal uses.”
McCoy sank to a seat on the edge of the bed. “If I don’t get another drink I’m going to die.”
And he had only just finished a pint of ardent spirits!
“What you need, my friend,” I told him, “is rather a thorough drying out. I don’t know whether Saint Sebastian has a chapter of the good AA folk, but you must take all possible measures towards eventual teetotalling. I’m no bluenose when it comes to drink, but—”
He had begun to shake violently. “You f-f-fucking idiot,” he murmured. “I’m dying.” With one great hug of his midsection he hurled himself onto the carpet, writhed fiercely, then went still and silent. I was relieved to see he had passed out: I should have been ill put to deal with delirium tremens.
I looked through the clothes provided for me. Alas, Rasmussen’s taste, if he had selected them, was deplorable. The jacket was of that madras which is altogether innocent of India, in an awful blue-and-red plaid that has no reference to Scotland. The polyester trousers celebrated the principal bad-taste colors, kelly green, turquoise, and magenta. The loafers were of artificial leather and adorned with tassels. I had not traveled in some years, but I wondered whether the Firm’s idea of typical American tourist attire was up to the minute in an age when quiche and pasta primavera had become popular even in the hinterlands.
I looked down at McCoy. Could he be genuinely ill? For the first time I actually thought about his having, good God, chug-a-lugged a pint of whiskey in the time it took me to rise on the elevator! I retrieved the empty bottle from the wastecan.
The label identified its late contents as having been no brand of potable spirits but rather an after-shave lotion cutely packaged to resemble a pint of Scotch. I sniffed at its neck: the odor was certainly lethal.
I knelt and searched for a pulse at various places on McCoy’s body. I could not find one, nor could I find a house phone when I rose, and when I dashed down the hall to the elevator, there was no response to the finger I pressed repeatedly against the button.
I found a stairway behind an unmarked door at the end of the corridor and hurled myself down it, two steps per vault. Having miraculously reached the bottom without breaking a bone, I burst into the lobby.
The corpulent functionary behind the desk leered at me. “Aha, I knew you would change your mind and want the boy after all!”
“Quick,” I cried, “a doctor! Mr. McCoy has been poisoned.”
“That is not possible. He only just went to his room.”
“Don’t argue with me! He’s dying of poison, I say. Call a doctor!”
The concierge reached under his counter and brought up one of those ornate brass vintage telephones, reproductions of which are now sold in American discount stores. He barked into the mouthpiece, “Constabulary!” When the connection had been made, he said, “Hotel Bristol. One tourist has poisoned another.... Yes.” Having put away the telephone, he found an automatic pistol in the desk, brought it up, and trained it on me.
I raised my hands, but protested vigorously. “I’m no killer, and for God’s sake will you call an ambulance!”
The concierge rolled his eyes, and his upper lip came down. “Our hotel is not a refuge for gangsters.” From his left hand he extended the index finger and waved it before my nose.
The police arrived promptly, two of them, on bicycles, which they trundled into the lobby. These lawmen were uniformed as if for an operetta: braided tunics, high glossy boots, caps like pots, and very small holstered pistols. They carried truncheons. The one in the lead had porcine nostrils and was about my height but much wider. Without a word he produced a pair of what proved to be handcuffs and attached ankle manacles, linked by a chain so short that when the other constable had knelt and fettered me with the lower shackles after the first had braceleted my wrists, I was necessarily a hunchback.
I was bent (though not in the British sense), but not mute. “You can’t do this to an American national,” I blustered, hoping that they would not throw recent Iranian events in my face. “I demand to see my consul.”
The larger policeman struck me deftly on the crazybone of my right arm, which was thereby paralyzed for many minutes. “You have no passport,” he said after a perfunctory search of my person. “You have no other papers and no money. You are a stateless vagrant, and you are a murderer. On the first charge you are sentenced to a flogging. On the second, to probable death: it would be unkind to predict another outcome to the Hunt.”
I had to slow down the centrifuge inside my head, and choose which point to make first. “I’m not a murderer, for heaven’s sake. Flogging? Probable death?” Already my neck was aching from trying to look up at him. “What’s the Hunt?”
The smaller constable spoke for the first time. He had a soft, round, bespectacled face and looked like a village schoolteacher, but so had Heinrich Himmler.
“You will not find here the brutality of other countries,” said he. “We do not sentence murderers to prison terms, and we do not perform so-called executions. We have the Hunt. We provide the condemned homicide with a revolver.”
I was crippled by an utter lack of belief that this was happening. “Let’s go back to the beginning, I beg of you,” I said. “A fellow American, Mr. Clyde McCoy, by accident drank an entire pint of after-shave lotion. I rushed down here to summon a doctor, since there’s no phone in the room—”
“The Hunt,” said the pigfaced policeman, “consists of your being released with the pistol and our following your trail with the intention of killing you on sight.”
“Just a moment, you policemen can only accuse me of a crime. You can’t serve as judge and jury too.”
Pigface put the end of his truncheon just under my nose and raised it, to give me a hog’s snout as well. “Remember, this is Saint Sebastian, not the USA. We believe that only the policeman is capable of making these judgments, for isn’t it only he who deals with the criminals and investigates the crime? Where is the judge all this while? In bed with his mistress! And the members of the jury are going about their little bourgeois affairs in safety and comfort. How can any of these people know of criminal matters as well as, not to say better than, the law-enforcement officer? And why should Sebastianers take seriously the so-called rights of those whose profession it is to damage those who observe the law?”
In this debate, if such it was, I was hampered by more or less agreeing with him, after years of residence in New York, where generally speaking the only citizen whose life is without hazard is the ruthless felon. But by the same token, viz., being a New Yorker, I was culturally constrained to bring into use the word “fascist,” which is literally meaningless except in a use peculiar to Mussolini, but which in Manhattan is regularly applied to any projected inconvenience.
The Sebastiani cops snorted in indifference, and the smaller said, “So why should we care what name be given the practice? The point is, there are crimes and criminals here as elsewhere, for roguery is natural to mankind, but there are no habitual criminals.”
“We should surely see eye to eye on this subject,” I said, “were I not unjustly accused, arrested, and restrained. There’s the flaw in your practice!”
“And this is to demonstrate your flaw,” the shorter policeman replied, and struck me across the kidneys with his truncheon. “You are helpless.”
He had made his painful point, and I sensed that it would be politic for me to stay silent, but I could not accept the unfairness of it. “Won’t you at least get medical help for my friend McCoy? There might still be hope for him.”
“Aha,” said the larger man. “You are the sort of pervert whose pleasure is bringing some poor devil to the threshold of death and then reviving him so that you can do it all over again?”
It seemed hopeless, and
they were about to conduct me to the police station (by walking me in my bonds between them on their bikes, I assumed), where I would be given the aforementioned pistol and sent out as prey for the Hunt, when the little lift came down to the lobby and who should emerge but McCoy, not good as new, which would probably not have characterized him even as a child, I suspect, but certainly better than when last seen.
He lurched up to my captors and asked, “What are you scum-heads doing to my friend? Get him out of those bracelets or I’ll drive those billy clubs up your fat rumps.”
Both officers blanched, and each contested with the other to be first to comply with the abusive demands.
While with twenty blundering thumbs they undid my various restraints McCoy asked, “Why did you let them do this to you, Wren?”
“They’re armed, for God’s sake.”
“Why,” said he, “that doesn’t mean anything. Look.” He booted the larger officer in the behind. The victim looked only more miserable. He had hung the strap of his stick over his holster, and he failed to make a move towards either of his weapons.
“But they represent the law,” I pointed out.
He gave me his bleary eyes. His breath stank of shaving lotion. “Only if you agree to let them.”
“You mean what’s legal or not is arguable in Saint Sebastian? That if I actually had murdered you I could righteously refuse to be arrested?”
“Murdered me?”
“I thought you were dying after drinking that stuff. I was looking for a doctor.”
McCoy snorted. “It’s that disease I told you I had. I didn’t get the booze down quickly enough, so I passed out. But I came to when the alcohol had had time to take hold. By the way, somebody put the wrong label on that bottle. It’s not Scotch but rye, and not a bad one. Decent booze is hard to get here unless you visit the prince. Schnapps is the local firewater.”
Nowhere: A Novel Page 4
