Agnes Among the Gargoyles (44 page)

   "The old girl turned up as a cadaver," he told Bezel. "I had to take out her gall bladder."

   "You're mistaken," says Bezel. "All corpses look alike."

   "She had the toes. The rings. Advanced fungal infection. But not the eye. I checked. The muscles had relaxed. Death does that to you. Both eyes looked right at me. Right through me."

   "Poor old thing," said Bezel.

   So Bezel has no interest in the Minotaur. The nut beside him on the bench begins to pester him.

   "When priests kill, it bodes ill," says the nut.

   Bezel pays no attention. He sees who he is looking for across the street. Bezel crosses and pretends to browse in the shop windows, all the while limping steadily toward his quarry. Bezel waits for the right moment to creep up on his blind side and shove him.

   "Why don't you watch where you're fucking going?" says the froggy, mechanical voice. Spock holds the amplifier to his throat. His expression changes. "Oh hi."

   "Hello, Spock."

   "I thought you were a bicycle messenger. What are you doing here?"

   Bezel takes Spock by the arm and pulls him into the doorway of a stereo shop. "That's a question
I
should be asking you. Didn't I warn you to stay out of his area?"

   "My speech therapist is around the corner."

   "Get an new one."

   "I'm stressed out," Spock confesses. "I can't wait anymore."

   "I won't have you coming here staring at that damn building," says Bezel. "Someone will see you and wonder what you're staring at."

   Bezel and the kid walk uptown.

   "I guess I'm paranoid," says Spock. "I think everyone on the street is a building inspector. I'm scared someone will discover our secret."

   "Then we'll find another one," says Bezel.

   They walk in silence. The kid taps his amplifier against his temple. Then he puts it to his throat and says, "You'd do another job with me? If this one doesn't work out, I mean."

   "Sure, kid. Why not?"

   "I just didn't think you would, that's all. I thought you just needed me because of the subway thing."

   Bezel must stop to rest his leg. "I work with people because I want to. There's no one who can't be replaced. By the way, Condon is out of the picture."

   "No. Is he dead?"

   "You've seen too many movies," says Bezel. "You think this one's dead, that one's dead. He got hauled in after a fight in a bar, and an old warrant turned up in the computer."

   The kid stops and buys a candy apple. "So what do we do?"

   "Faure can blast," says Bezel. "He knows how, but I plan to keep a few extra steps between myself and the live charges—just in case he's bullshitting."

   The kid squints at Bezel. "If Faure needs a helper he can have Mr. Parker."

   "You're learning, kid."

The old Herald Building on Park Row looks like a medieval fortress, squat and turreted. An iron portcullis hangs above the main entrance. The brickwork, once a brilliant orange and considered a terrible eyesore, has darkened with time, and is not a pleasing sort of earth color. What used to be the pressroom, in the basement, is now rented out for large functions. It is a beautiful space, busy with Victorian ornament and crisscrossed with catwalks. James Gordon Bennet, founder of the
Herald,
would have been astonished to know that the socialites and power brokers of a future age would dine and dance and forge alliances on the catwalks in the room where his linotypes clattered and the presses roared like turbines and layer upon layer of ink lodged in the pores of his increasingly melanotic pressmen.

   "This is where we're having No Diamonds Please," says Sarah. She shows Agnes the empty room.

   "I love it."

   "I knew you would."

   On the floor in the lobby there is a trigonum terra-cotta mosaic. It dates from the final years of the newspaper, when powerful unions and shrinking revenues forced a series of mergers that only delayed the paper's inevitable demise.

Offices of the

World Journal Herald Statesman American Tribune Gazette

   Agnes and Sarah go up to a small screening room on the seventh floor. Tonight is the premier of Sarah's film. The Persons With AIDS Alliance is sponsoring a Persons With AIDS film festival. Sarah's film and a half-dozen others will be judged tonight for possible inclusion.

   Sarah is all dressed up in leather and boots and a cap like the one John Lennon wore in
Help!
(Maybe it's the very cap, thinks Agnes; Madelaine did have a walk-on in the picture.) Sarah and Agnes have a drink with Wayne, who looks great in a jolly green paisley bow tie. The air conditioning is up high, so Wayne has his Chesterfield on. His voice is raspy. "There's something happening with my respiratory system," he says, "but there's
always
something happening with my respiratory system." He never loses heart, thinks Agnes. What an inspiration! "I think it might be bacterial pneumonia. Everyone told me to get the vaccine, but I wouldn't put that stuff in my body. I might have to try some supplemental acupuncture."

   The program begins. The first film is a rather dry history of the drug Levamisole, discovered in 1966 by Janssen Pharmaceuticals. Used first as an animal dewormer, it is a proven booster of the immune system. The second entry is fiction, a mawkish depiction of two gay men who were once lovers meeting at the funeral of a third. Next comes an interview with Mathilde Krim, and then a biography of Beanpipe Conroy, who played for the Chicago Cubs in the 1950s and is now ARC. Agnes enjoys the footage of Wrigley Field in the one. She is touched by the interviews with Conroy's longtime companion, the shortstop "Hands" Wagner.

   Consumed by nervousness, Sarah paces outside the screening room. Agnes goes to check on her.

   "I feel like I'm about to throw up," says Sarah.

   "You'll do fine," says Agnes. "Where's Ivan? I thought surely he'd be here for this."

   "If for no other reason than to make fun of me," says Sarah bitterly. "He's in Eftsoons. He says they really need him there, which I find hard to believe. But I guess when there's a serial killer in the family, Ivan seems normal."

   "You're not having problems, are you?"

 "No. We're just not in awe of each other anymore."

   "You were never in awe of him," says Agnes.

 "To be in awe is not necessarily an endorsement," says Sarah with great precision. "I have also found myself in awe of the poverty of Mexico City."

   Sarah need not have worried. Her film is clearly the most successful. Laughter ripples through the screening room; there are sniffles at the end. The unique qualities of Wayne Torrence seem to come through on film. There are a few technical problems, jumpy cuts and unclear transitions, and the emotional impact of Wayne's reunion with Pat Summers is weakened by the annoying intrusion of a boom mike. But Sarah's film,
StreetWise,
is the hit of the evening. Afterward, everyone congratulates her. She has the dazed look of someone flush with artistic success. Agnes is telling her, again, how marvelous she is when a new face presents itself in the screening room: that of Kevin Wexler, a researcher from St. Vincent's Hospital. Kevin has been working on the AZT/bee pollen study for which Wayne has been part of the control group.

   "Sorry I couldn't make the film," Kevin tells Wayne. Kevin, a grad student, is a rawboned farmboy with a big earnest face. His cowlick bristles with excitement. "Can I see you about something?"

   Wayne bustles off with Kevin to a corner of the screening room. Kevin tells him something, gesturing excitedly with his long hands. "Oh, oh!" says Wayne. He has to lean against the plywood wall for support. "Oh, oh!"

   Agnes and Sarah look on curiously. Wayne continues to moan.

   Agnes calls over: "Are you all right?"

   "He ought to be," says Kevin.

   "Come on over," says Wayne weakly.

   Agnes and Sarah join them.

   "Tell them," Wayne instructs Kevin.

   "Well, I was working with a couple of Wayne's blood samples," says Kevin. "I was getting kind of funny readings on his T-cells. Something just wasn't right. I was about to centrifuge the sample when I decided I had to double check. So I did. I just got the test back. You know what? He's HIV negative! I couldn't believe it."

   "I don't have it," says Wayne, nearly weeping with joy. "I don't have it."

   "I can't explain it, but it's true," says Kevin.

   It can't be, thinks Agnes. It must be a cruel joke. Or a dream. She looks around for telltale absurdities in her surroundings. No—everything makes sense. It's no dream.

   "Are you sure? Are you sure?" she keeps asking Kevin in the midst of the tumult, and he shows her the computer printout for the HIV antibody test. Hallelujah! Wayne is saved. He's crying now and so is Agnes. Wayne starts laughing at the sight of Agnes's tears. Sarah is, understandably, more restrained, for Wayne's life is her artistic death (at least for the moment). She is the auteur of a distinctive, worthless, and truly bizarre piece of documentary cinema.

   "I'm just so fucked," says Sarah.

   "You're alive!" says Agnes to Wayne. "It's a miracle."

   "It's the happy ending of all time," says Wayne.

   Soon everyone is wrung out. Wayne asks Agnes for a quarter for the pay phone. It takes him a while to reach the other party. "Hi!" he says. "Guess what? I just got my HIV test results....Of course they're a little late. But guess what?...No. Guess again....What's the matter with you? I don't have it! I'm negative!...Yes...Yes...Of course I'm sure. Kevin Wexler just told me....What?...Do you really think so?.. I suppose it's possible...I haven't had time to think about it...Hmmm."

 Wayne hangs up the phone. He seems preoccupied.

   "What's the matter?" asks Agnes.

   Wayne sits down. He undoes his bow tie. He cocks his head and frowns. "I didn't realize all the implications. I've purged it from my system. Syker understood right away. I've awakened my
kundalini.
Surely if I can cleanse myself of the AIDS virus I can become a
bodhissattva.
Enlightenment is just around the corner. It's a little frightening."

   "Wayne, were you ever actually tested?" asks Agnes.

   "No," he says, "but there's never been a question in my mind."

Agnes is euphoric.

   Wayne's delivery from the jaws of AIDS is thrilling news. Agnes's happiness for him is untainted with remorse or envy or skepticism or any of the other junk she can never quite get rid of no matter how joyous the circumstances. Agnes fairly bursts with pure delight.

   New York City is still a marvelous place.

   In two hours it will be midnight. Tommy, back on the job, will come off duty, and he and Agnes will have eggs in their favorite diner, the one that caters to the meat cutters. Stanley's, it's called. It sits on the waterfront like a grounded copper-colored dirigible; its green wooden roof is cut in scallops, very pastoral.

   Full of good cheer, Agnes wanders about the city. She meanders fearlessly: she looks at the couples, she admires details of architecture, she buys a pretzel, she is moved almost to tears by the embryonic Pennsylvania Station. (One single massive column is nearly complete; Agnes thinks of the laborious raising of the Pyramids.)

   HOTEL SPITALFIELDS.

   Sarah was right: it strains belief to think of Ivan actually helping his family in their time of need. Agnes has herself buzzed into the Hotel Spitalfields, which stands soiled and hunched between a Blimpie's and a wig store.

   The lobby smells of some foul dairy product, sour milk or rancid butter or curdled cream. Several men in hooded sweatshirts and paratrooper boots stare with hate at the TV, which is blaring a rerun of
The Love Boat.
Prostitutes flounce busily around the front desk, all except the one who is either dead or in a deep sleep on the sofa. Two women in shorts and beach thongs and scarves over curlers rock baby carriages and smoke near the soda machine.

   The desk clerk is toothy, with lots of moles.  "Good evening, madam," he says to Agnes.    "Welcome to Clinton's Hotel Spitalfields. Please sign the register in pen. May I ask how you heard about us?"

 "I have a friend staying here, I think. Ivan Clarence Kroger?"

   "Room 306."

   When Ivan answers the door, he looks terrified. Agnes expects him to greet her warmly, but he doesn't. He doesn't smile, doesn't say anything, but nods for her to come in. Sitting on his bed is a sickly-looking girl hooker with bleached hair and bitten nails and sad little tits. She picks up her coffee and cigarettes and potato chips and tells Ivan she'll see him later.

   Ivan looks Agnes over. "I suppose I should beat the shit out of you for the honor of my family, but I know I'd lose," he says.

   "I'm sorry how things turned out," says Agnes.

   "I knew he was a psycho, but not like that. Got any pot?"

   Agnes shakes her head. She sits in the spot vacated by the prostitute.

   "How'd you know I was here?" he asks.

   "I didn't. I had a hunch. You'd been in Eftsoons a long time."

   "I only stayed a couple of days," he says. "Very depressing. My mother can't even talk."

   "I was at Sarah's premier tonight," says Agnes.

"You want half a turkey hero? I just got it. You want a beer?"

"No thanks."

   He shuts off the black and white TV with the cracked case and taped handle. He had been in the process of sweeping his floor; he gathers up his broom and dustpan and stores them behind the bureau.