A Cat in the Wings: (InterMix) (8 page)

Chapter 14

I’d given Basillio a couple of early-morning assignments. Then he was to pick me up at my apartment. It was close to ten
A.M.
, which meant that he was forty minutes late. Resisting the panic that prickled just under the surface of my skin, I stood at the window leafing through that crazy script. Finally, the downstairs bell rang.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said, rushing through the door. “But it wasn’t my fault. It took forever to set things up at the bank. And then the photos weren’t ready when I got to that place on Twenty-third.”

He put two brown envelopes on my long living room table and then blew on his whitened fingers.

“Why aren’t you wearing gloves, Basillio?”

“I never wear gloves. They inhibit the sense of touch.”

“What are you touching on the street?”

He shrugged in answer.

I undid the buttons of his pea coat and loosened the muffler around his neck. “Don’t get overheated, sport.”

I picked up the larger of the two envelopes and opened it. There were supposed to be thirty-five ten-dollar bills inside it, taken from the special expense account Frank Brodsky had set up. I felt the heft of the stack of bills, as if I could determine whether the money was all there just from the weight. It felt right, I guessed.

Then I looked inside the other envelope. There were five different shots of Peter Dobrynin, taken from newspapers and magazines and reproduced in wallet-sized prints. All were late photographs of Dobrynin, which was good. But unfortunately, none of them equaled in clarity of feature the photo I’d seen in Betty Ann Ellenville’s loft. On the other hand, how could they?

“Want some coffee, Tony?”

“I want many things. But I’ll settle for Java.” I went into the kitchen and turned the flame way up under the kettle, returning with a cup of instant Medaglia d’Oro for him.

“I won’t be long,” I said. “Just let me get on some socks and a pair of warm sweaters. I mean, some sweaters and a pair of—you know what I mean.”

I went into the bedroom to dress for the long, wintry walk on the wild side. When I came back into the living room I saw Tony, seated backward on a chair, staring intently at Bushy.

The cat was basking in his daily circle of light—a spot by the window where a small but brilliant beam of sunlight appeared each morning. It wasn’t there for long, but before it dissipated it was as dazzling as any diamond. Bushy’s burnished coat gleamed in the sunlight, his eyes half-closed, his body still and expectant. He gave the impression of a king sitting for the royal portraitist.

“What are you doing?” I asked Tony good-naturedly. “Admiring the gorgeous Mr. Bush?”

He gave a disgusted snort. Then his face contorted slightly as he began to speak in a grossly broad “mitteleuropa” accent. I realized at once that he was gracing us with his not-very-good Peter Lorre impersonation.

“Your cat may be quite beautiful, madame, but . . . heh-heh . . . I denounce him as a traitor and a fop . . . heh-heh . . . To you perhaps he is an innocuous Maine coon. But we know him to be an imposter, a fraud. Why, he cannot catch a mouse or a bird . . . or, heh-heh . . . even a cricket. And for his crimes, I say he must die . . . I must
kill
him . . . heh! I
want
to kill him.” He then hobbled out of the apartment door, and I followed.

I know Bushy heard it all, but he never moved a muscle.

***

We chose to start at Forty-third Street and Ninth Avenue, walk north along the avenue until we reached Roosevelt Hospital, then go east to Broadway, up Broadway to Seventy-second Street, and west on that street until we hit Riverside Park.

This route, we hoped, would provide us with maximum exposure to the homeless people who existed in the shadow of the Lincoln Center complex and who might have known Dobrynin.

At the beginning our progress was impeded by the sheer numbers of homeless—in alleys, on gratings, in the entrances to banks where the cash machines were located, anywhere these people could escape from the cold. We were also impeded by our reluctance to confront these unfortunates, because of their dress, their demeanor, and often their smell. Then too, as we needed to show the photographs to them and get some sort of coherent response, our total lack of experience in differentiating between the merely down-and-out and the mentally deranged was a real liability.

But it really didn’t matter. No one responded to the photos anyway. And no matter how we tried to resist that kind of behavior, we ended up handing out many of the ten-dollar bills just for charity’s sake—which was awfully bad strategy.

We stopped to drink coffee at a little muffin place on Fifty-seventh Street, walked another block to the hospital, and were about to head toward Broadway and the Columbus Circle area when Tony spotted another candidate pushing an enormous makeshift wagon heaped high with his belongings and detritus of all sorts. There were newspapers and sprung sofa cushions and books and rags, all tied onto the contraption with twine.

The heavy-laden man was approaching us from uptown, perhaps heading toward the small public park at Ninth Avenue.

“I think we’ve got a hot one,” Tony mocked. “Let’s show the dear boy to him.”

As we drew closer to the man, we took in his bizarre costume. He was wearing a black ten-gallon hat with a few greasy feathers attached to it, and a filthy buckskin shirt with long, bedraggled fringes. He appeared to be a buffalo-hunter who had emerged from a hundred-year sleep. His grizzled whiskers only buttressed the image.

Tony stepped up to the man and politely addressed him. “Excuse me, could I speak to you for a moment?”

The old-timer halted, eased the end of his cart to the pavement, and met Tony’s gaze with an open, if blank, expression of his own. “Hell, yes,” he answered. “You can speak, buddy.”

“Have you ever run into this man?” Tony displayed three of the pictures, fanning them out like playing cards.

The buffalo hunter squinted hard at the photos.

“Say, partner, you wouldn’t happen to have a smoke on you—while I’m looking them over?”

Basillio lit one of his cigarettes and handed it over. The derelict seemed to crush down on it with his lips and puff out smoke in great billows.

He “looked them over,” as he put it, for quite a few minutes. I thought he’d forgotten we were standing there. But presently he brought his eyes up and, flicking his fingers contemptuously against the head shot on the left, said, “Never liked him. Never liked that one at all.”

“Are you saying you know him?” I burst in.

“Hell, yes, I know him,” he said. Then he took on a menacing air. “‘Buddy,’ I told him, ‘keep movin’! Get movin’ and keep movin’—see? Cause I don’t like you!’” He gave out what I’m sure he meant to be a hard-bitten laugh.

Tony quietly extracted two tens and stuffed them with emphasis into the breast pocket of Buffalo Man’s shirt.

“Can you tell us when you last saw him?” I asked.

He puffed on the cigarette again like a mad whale, then said, with true reflection: “I believe the last time I saw Lenny was Thanksgiving . . . over there at that dinner they give us. At the soup kitchen.”

“Lenny?” I repeated. “Did you call him ‘Lenny’?” Basillio and I exchanged looks, suddenly deflated.

“Hell yes, it’s Lenny. Oh, hell yes. He tried to hang around, but I told him, ‘Keep movin’!’ Just moved him along. Never liked him.”

Tony retrieved the photos and displayed them once more. “Are you sure that’s Lenny?”

Buffalo Man picked them out of Tony’s grasp and spent less than two seconds studying them again. “Lenny,” he pronounced, handing them back.

“Tell me,” I said before he could move on. “Where is this soup kitchen? Where you last saw Lenny.”

He seemed surprised that the whereabouts of the soup kitchen wasn’t known to all. But after we had apologized for our ignorance, he told us all about the kind people at the church on Seventy-first Street. Then Buffalo Man picked up his overburdened cart and left.

Tony and I stepped into a doorway to warm up a bit and to digest our first investigative success.

“I don’t know, Tony,” I said. “How can we be sure that Lenny was Peter Dobrynin?”

“Well, that guy seemed positive.”

“But he may be totally psychotic.”

“I doubt that.”

“But why would he call himself ‘Lenny’?”

“How should I know?”

“I think we’d better go over to that soup kitchen.”

The custodian was the only one on the premises of the Episcopal church. The man pictured in the photos didn’t look familiar to him, and he didn’t know anyone named “Lenny.” In addition, he told us, the church had suspended its feed-the-homeless program about six weeks ago, due to lack of funds. He did give us the names of the churchgoers who had run the program, though. We thanked him and left.

On the street again, Tony complained, “Not being a hardy Nordic type like you, Swede, I can feel the energy draining right out of me. This cold weather really takes its toll.”

“You mean you want to call it a day?” I asked. “I probably shouldn’t have you out here in your crippled condition, anyway.”

“No, I’m fine. But I do vote we dip into those tens to buy us something to eat.”

I hesitated only for a minute. I was indeed hungry—and cold.

Tony guided me to an old-fashioned family-style Italian restaurant. He hadn’t been there in years, he said, and though I’d probably passed it dozens of times, I’d never even noticed it before. We were coming in at an odd time—between lunch and dinnertime—so it was absolutely devoid of customers. The waiters sat drinking coffee together at a large round table. Tony and I took a booth and ordered opulently: a good Chianti, a Caesar salad for two; antipasto for two; then pasta. At the end of it all, we shared strawberries with zabaglione.

The food took its time in getting to us, but we didn’t care. We were warm, and being fed very well, if very slowly. We’d already had a long day, and it wasn’t over yet. I felt I was earning my keep, even though it was impossible to evaluate the little we had learned so far.

For if Buffalo Man was not totally crazy, then we had at last hit upon something solid. Dobrynin had indeed consorted with the homeless. He had been one of their number, known to them as “Lenny.” Unknown to them was the fact that “Lenny” had been the premier classical dancer of the past decade. It was all quite surreal. I was deep in thought, deep into the whole Dobrynin phantasm. The sound of Tony’s laugh brought me back around.

“But it was a lot of fun, wasn’t it, Swede?” he said.

“What was fun?”

“The endless hanging around, walking around we did in the old days. Remember how we’d do a bar, then a coffee shop, then a movie, then something else? How even going into a department store was some kind of adventure? We’d ride the elevators and just observe people. How the hell did we end up doing so much walking in those days? And here we are, more than twenty years later, wearing out the pavement again. Why did we do it, Swede?”

“Haven’t the slightest idea,” I said tersely. I wasn’t sure why, but I wanted to nip his nostalgia trip in the bud.

But I did know why. I remembered.

Basillio and I had entered the theater when the acting schools were still under the sway of the Stanislavki Method of acting. The major premise is simple: You construct each part out of the felt traumas and joys of your own life. If the role you’re playing calls for the character to cry,
you
cry, by remembering the pet who died when you were a child. In that way you infuse the part with authenticity. Obviously, then, you’re only as good as your experience. The more traumas the better. The more joys the better. The more you have suffered, experienced, the better an actor you are, and the wider your range.

In short, a good actor has to be “wilder” than a non-actor. And believe me, we believed it. My determination at that age to live fully—highs, lows, sex, love, work, pain, empathy, scholarship—was awesome. I was going to be great.

The American version of the Method is dead now, but the myths associated with it are still alive, if in a rather pathetic way. Hollywood stars who are making millions construct biographies of themselves to show how close to the edge they’ve lived—to prove that they were truly wild once upon a time. Whereas in fact the only wild thing about them is that occasionally they leave their Brentwood home with only one bodyguard.

That had been the purpose of those endless walks of Tony’s and mine: to gather up people and things and feelings like bouquets. To see more, feel more, learn more, exult more. Everything we encountered on those walks was a memory to be stored away and used on the stage.

I looked across at Tony, smiled at him. But I was surprised to see him glowering, head down, eyes boring into the empty plate in front of him.

“Basillio, what’s the matter?”

It was a long while before he raised his eyes and addressed me, with a disturbingly unfriendly look on his face.

“There’s something I want to ask you . . . Alice.”

I was stunned by his use of my given name, but managed to reply, “Ask away.”

He didn’t ask the question right away, but idly picked up the utensils on the table and began arranging and rearranging them.

Then he said, quietly, gravely, “Why don’t you love me?”

I thought it was a bit. I laughed.

“What’s so goddamn funny!” He slammed a fork down on the tabletop so viciously that wine from his glass sloshed out onto the little dish of sugar packets. “Sorry,” he said, straightening his back.

“Tony,” I began nervously, “I don’t know what to say. I thought you were perfectly happy impressing your young actresses. A lot of men would love to have your success at—”

He cut me off. “I pick up actresses, Swede, because you seem to have no interest in me anymore.”

“Tony, that isn’t true and you know it.”

He ignored me. “You have no interest in me, even though everything I’ve done these last couple of years has been because of you. If it hadn’t been for you, I wouldn’t have left my wife—well, maybe that wasn’t totally because of you. Maybe that was coming, anyway. But I left
when
I left because of you.