Dancing Aztecs (19 page)

The only thing wrong, in fact, was what was wrong with the same idea every time they tried it. Floyd's wife Barbara and her partner (they rotated)
invariably
lost every game. Invariably. And Angela, who was a very intense and rather good bridge player,
hated to lose
. Hated it, hated it.

And she was going to lose again, no doubt of it. Down three, at the very least. Jack of clubs led, king X X in dummy (one of Barbara's few honors, as it happened), X X X in Angela's hand. If she played over the jack, surely Kathleen would have the damn ace. If she didn't, Teresa would have the damn ace. Whatever happened, Angela could see herself losing three club tricks in a row. Hell and damnation.

Angela chose to finesse, playing a low club. If Kathleen had the ace but not the queen, she might play high. Except that she didn't, and on the second round Teresa led the queen, and this time Angela played the king over it, and Kathleen had the ace.

Kathleen was leading the ten of clubs, which was now high in that suit, when Barbara came back from the phone to say, “I think it's Mel.”

Angela had just about had enough of Barbara. Glaring at her, she said, “You
think
it's Mel?”

“He sounds garbled,” Barbara explained.

“In a minute.” Angela played that club round through, Kathleen took the trick, and now Angela had to take every last trick after this to make the contract. Fat chance.

Kathleen led another club. Angela was now void both in her hand and in the dummy, but given Barbara's lack of Strong cards Angela would prefer to be in her hand, so she played a low trump, and damn if Teresa didn't go over it with a medium-size trump, and now Angela had to decide whether to lose the trick or to use up not only one more trump on this same trick but also to use up one of the few entries to dummy.

“How we doing?” Barbara said.

Angela looked up at her. “We?
We?”
Making a sudden decision, she got to her feet, slapped the cards face-down on the table, and said, “
You
play the hand. I'll go talk on the phone.”

Angela left Barbara blinking and went into the living room, where she picked up the phone and snarled, “Hello!”

“Angela? Is that you?” Mel didn't sound garbled, he sounded hysterical.

“What's up?”

“I'm arrested!”

“Arrested? For burglary?”

“Everything but,” he said. “Reckless driving, endangerment, grand larceny, assault and battery, attempted murder, willful destruction of property and leaving the scene of an accident
Attempted
leaving the scene of an accident”

“You?” Disdain dripped like honey from her lips. “Yon don't have the guts for all that”

“The point is,” he said, “I'm here in Haddam Neck, Connecticut and I'm—”

“You're in
what?
Horse's Neck—”

“
Haddam
Neck. Connecticut. And this is the one phone call I'm permitted, and I made the mistake of calling my wife. I'd do better to call Yassir Arafat”

The presence of Barbara back there in the dining room left Angela with no compassion in her heart. “You may be there in Horse's Ass, Connecticut” she said, “but I'm here in Dreadful Gulch, Queens, playing bridge with
Barbara McCann
, and what the hell am I supposed to do about
you?”

“Jesus, you're a sweetheart I've been
arrested”

“Better late than never.”

“Listen, Angela,” he said. “I can tell you're in one of your moods, so just listen to what I tell you, and pass it on to Jerry when he calls in. I think they plan to hold me overnight but I want somebody to get a good Connecticut lawyer up here in the morning. That's
Haddam Neck, Connecticut
.”

“All right all right I got it.”

“Also tell Jerry, I got to the Beemiss statue and it wasn't the right one.”

“Beemiss.” Angela was finally starting to jot things down on the notepad beside the phone.

“I didn't get to any of the others,” Mel went on, “but I
did
run into two people on somebody else's list Almost ran into them, anyway. Edward Ross and Jennifer Kendall. I think Frank had them. Their statues weren't any good.”

Angela wrote the names on the pad. “Anything else?”

“You're a terrific person, Angela. Your husband is about to spend the night in a jail cell, and
you
say, ‘Anything else?'”

Angela made the effort: “Keep well,” she said. “Try not to get bugs.”

“What a warm human being,” Mel said, and hung up.

Angela shrugged. She'd tried, hadn't she? Going back to the dining room, she said to Barbara, “How we doing?”

Barbara was blinking furiously. “Down four,” she said.

“It could have been worse,” Angela said. She'd expected it to be worse.

“So far,” Barbara said, and led a card.

IN DUE COURSE …

Swimming pool salesman Wally Hintzlebel was slowing down. The story of New York is speed, is movement, movement without stopping, on the go all the time,
gotta
hustle, but Wally was slowing down. The nervous energy still crackled and fizzed inside him, it still pushed and poked and prodded, but he wasn't used to the pace, and his brain was slowing down.

That was why it was so good to be in the Professor Charles S. Harwood apartment. Empty, silent, calm. What a place to be, after all he'd gone through. First the library, then the phone call with Mom and the scramble home for dinner and back to the city, then the Beemiss address being not an address, and then the drunken black man with the statue glued to the windowsill. Why would anybody glue a statue to a windowsill?

A bigger question: What sort of person pours boiling water out his window onto the head of somebody in the street below? (All right, technically Wally'd been burglarizing Green's apartment, but he hadn't
taken
anything, had he? Did that deserve boiling water on the head?)

But now, like a safe port after stormy seas, here he was at last in the Harwood apartment, wonderfully empty of crazy people, or indeed of any people at all.

Unfortunately, it was also empty of golden statues, since that pile of fragments in the living room fireplace clearly had once been a plaster copy of the Dancing Aztec Priest So the million dollars wasn't here. It was necessary to move on.

Out of Manhattan, at last. Of the only two remaining addresses in Wally's possession, one was over in New Jersey and the other was in Deer Park, on Long Island, not far from Wally's own home. Frenzy and lust pushed him to do New Jersey, but exhaustion and dulled nerves encouraged him to settle for that fellow in Deer Park—Wylie Cheshire, his name was—then go on home and start up again tomorrow morning.

Leave, anyway. He should leave here now, this apartment was useless to him. Still he stood where he was, trembling slightly, his eyes dull but with flickerings deep within as he gazed around at the empty living room. Something was holding him here, something—

Why were the lights on? Every light in the apartment turned on, and the apartment completely empty.

Why was the bedroom stripped? Living room and kitchen looked lived-in—the kitchen, in fact, was one of the messiest rooms he'd ever seen in his life—but in the bedroom the dresser drawers gaped open, empty. What was going on here?

Wondering, frowning, back to the bedroom Wally went and brooded at those empty dresser drawers. And when he turned to the closet he discovered the door was locked. With the key in the keyhole. Puzzled, at sea, Wally reached out a tentative hand, unlocked the door, opened it, and a wild-eyed naked man leaped out at him, babbling, “
Oh, thank God, thank God, I thought I'd starve in there, I was praying somebody would
—”

“I don't want to talk to you,” Wally said. He pushed the naked man back into the closet, he locked the door, he went away. To Wylie Cheshire, Deer Park, Long Island. Enough craziness. Enough of Manhattan. Enough.

ANON …

Mel Bernstein's car looked like a hobo's hat after its ricochet romance with the trees of Connecticut, but the damn thing still ran. Mel ran west in it for ten miles before he found a phone booth, next to a closed gas station, where he called Angela once more.

This time she came on herself, and Mel said, “It's me again.”

“Listen, Mel,” she said. “I'm glad you called back. I was in a very bad mood before.”

“I noticed. Anyway, the—”

“We're playing cards here, Teresa and Kathleen and Barbara and me, and you know how Barbara affects me.”

“It's water over the bridge,” he said. “What I'm—”

“
Under
the bridge.”

“What?”

“It's either under the bridge or over the dam,” she said. “Water
over
the bridge would be a disaster.”

“Exactly,” he said. “That's what my entire life is, water over the bridge.”

“Poor Mel,” she said. “How's your cell?”

“I'm not in a cell. I got out, that's what I'm caning about.”

“You
escaped?”

“They let me go. Listen, I'll tell you the story,” Mel promised, and he did, from the time he'd entered the Beemiss residence until the motorcycle had run into the state trooper's car, at which point Angela said, “Come off it, Mel. If you did all that, they'll
never
let you go.”

“Well, I had some advantages,” Mel told her. “In the first place, the couple on the motorcycles was interracial.”

“Oh? Which one was black?”

“The boy.”

“Ah hah,” said Angela.

“In the second place,” Mel said, “the people in the Cadillac turned out to be mobsters of some sort. They kept being evasive with the cops. But the thing that really did it, the trooper that I hit with the motorcycle, he's an amateur writer, he—”

“No,” she said.

“Swear to God.”

“He's a
customer
of yours?”

“Client,” Mel corrected. “He's sent in a couple stories, yeah. He recognized the Zachary George name right away. They wanted my occupation, and I said I was Zachary George's assistant, and this trooper fell over.”

“Mel, that's incredible.”

“What's so incredible? I get hundreds of pieces of shit in the mail every week.”

“But the
trooper
.”

“Angela, to tell you the truth, I think the interracial business and the mobster business would have done it for me, anyway. But the Zachary George connection didn't hurt.”

“So they let you go.”

“I posted a bond, by check, but it won't come to anything. The mobsters didn't want to press charges or make any waves, and the cops didn't want to listen to the interracial couple, so I'm home free.”

“You coming back now?”

“No, it isn't that late, and I've only done one of my four names. Two of them are on Long Island, I'll try them tonight and come home after that”

“Good luck,” she said.

“That's what I've got, all right,” he agreed, and hung up, and back in the station wagon he studied his list. One of the three remaining names was at an address way over in New Jersey, but the other two were relatively handy to Mel's home:

Ben Cohen
27–15 Robert Moses Drive
Glen Cove

Wylie Cheshire
58 Ridge Road
Deer Park

Ben Cohen? No, not first Mel was ready for a quiet interlude, something safe and easy. Wylie Cheshire, that was the one. There was something comfortingly civilized, sedately English about that name. Deer Park. Wylie Cheshire.

WHEN ALL AT ONCE …

The Adventures of Frank and Floyd in the Ghetto
A SERIES OF BLACKOUTS

1

From Floyd's list:

Leroy Pinkham
119 West 122nd St
.

Leroy, he say, “Buhbuh.”

Buhbuh, he say, “Yuh?”

“Lu dah cah.”

“Wuh cah?”

“
Dah
cah.”

Buhbuh, he look at that car, he see two white men inside there in that car. “Huh,” he say.

Leroy, he say, “Dah cah, it been rowndeh block befoah.”

Buhbuh, he say, “Yeh?”

Leroy, he say, “Kewbee cops?”

Buhbuh, he say, “Nah.”

Buhbuh and Leroy, they sitting on the stoop out front Leroy's house. It after eight o'clock, but not dark yet. Leroy's Mama and Leroy's sister Rose and Leroy's other sister Ruby, they at the church, practicing with the choir. Leroy's other sister Reeny, she to the movies with her boyfriend, and Leroy's big brother Luther, he in the Army. Nobody in Leroy's house. Leroy, he don't like to be in there by himself, so him and his best buddy Buhbuh, what also goes to Liberation High, they out on the stoop talking about the astronauts, until Leroy, he see that car.

Now they don't talk about nothing for a while, and then Leroy, he grin and say, “Man, I
dig
that Chi-neez food.” Him and Buhbuh, they ate in a restaurant today for almost the first time ever, and they both of them they really dug it Chinese restaurant, regular restaurant where you sit down and they's waiters and everything. Him and Buhbuh got to go there cause they helped out with some bunch of people that Miss Tower was working with. Miss Tower, she their favorite teacher at Liberation High, cause they is both got the hots for her. That Miss Tower, she got some beautiful ass, but she don't go for none of that shit at all. She a goddam
virgin
. But pretty to look at.

Liberation High, that something else. It for guys like Leroy and Buhbuh, what dropped out of school and now is like nineteen, twenty, and they ain't getting nowhere. So they can go back to this school, and it ain't like no regular school with bad-ass teachers and dumb subjects and all. It special for older guys what are smart and what
want
to get theyselves an education. Already they been fourteen graduates from Liberation High gone to City College.