Dancing Aztecs (27 page)

Pedro stares at her, his panic abating only slightly. Then he squints, rearing his head back; he has trouble looking at her, the crimson polka dots seeming to swim and fuzz on the orange background. “What?” he says.

“Sit down,” Lupe tells him, “or I will be forced to call the guards.”

Edwardo and José each grab an elbow, and Pedro finds himself seated. “Ung,” he says.

“And stay there,” Lupe tells him. Smiling at Edwardo, who is nearest her, she says, “This must be your friend's first flight.”

“Friend?” says Edwardo, with a big innocent smile on his face. “We're not together. We're all strangers to one another.”

Lupe looks at the three of them crowded together in this one row, then glances around at all the acres of empty seats. “Ah,” She says, and walks away, and looks back to see the strangers whispering furiously among themselves.

Pedro is whispering, “She's a crazy woman! This plane has never blown up? What does
that
mean? Things can only blow up once!”

Edwardo, throughout all this, is whispering, “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

And José, simultaneously, is whispering, “She'll suspect we're together! We have to split up!”

But then the plane jolts, and they are all stunned into silence. (This is also José's first flight, and Edwardo's third.) They look out the windows, and the airport is moving! “Aiiiiii!” moans Pedro.

“Calm
down!”
cries Edwardo, pounding the seat arm with his fist.

The airport is moving faster, rushing backward toward safety. A terrible jouncing has overtaken Pedro's seat. His ears are full of sea water. A crimson haze full of orange polka dots pulsates before his eyes.
“Nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn!”
cries Pedro, and as the DC-3 struggles upward off the patched and bumpy runway Pedro lunges his head forward and throws up into his paper bag, all over his gluppe, and his goat, and his gun.

ON THE WEST SIDE …

Jerry was looking for a parking space on West End Avenue when he saw two faces he knew: Oscar Russell Green and Professor Charles S. Harwood, both squinting in the morning sunlight as they walked north toward 72nd Street. Green was talking, steadily and emphatically, with many hand gestures, and the professor was nodding in a professorial way, the while puffing on a black or dark-brown pipe. The professor was dressed now, in rather rumpled and dirty shirt and slacks, and on closer examination his shoes didn't match.

The hell with a parking space. Jerry pulled in at the nearest hydrant, took his parking sign out of the glove compartment—a hastily scrawled
Broke Down Gone For Help
on the back of an envelope—left it prominently atop the dashboard, and went off on the trail of Green and Harwood.

Who were just reaching 72nd Street and turning east, Green still expostulating and Harwood still ruminating. Jerry, wishing he could get close enough to hear what these two had to discuss, followed them half a block along 72nd Street, until they entered a small restaurant of the sort that features bare wooden tables, many hanging plants, and jumboburgers on rye bread. They'd be sharing breakfast, apparently, meaning the professor's wife hadn't yet come home.

Briefly, Jerry considered following them into the restaurant and having a meal at the next table, but both of those fellows had seen his face last night. Also, this would be a fine time to look over Harwood's apartment again, in search of clues to the whereabouts of the little woman.

So off he went, back to West End Avenue—a cop lacking
any
milk of human kindness was writing a ticket on the station wagon—and this time there was no trouble at all entering the building, since a sullen skinny black man in green work clothes had the door propped open and was sloshing the vestibule with soapy water. He gave a dirty look when Jerry walked on his wet floor, but Jerry gave him a dirty look back, took the elevator upstairs, and credit-carded himself into the Harwood apartment.

Very little had changed in here, except there was no longer anybody living in the closet. Also, a small mound of filthy wrinkled clothing lay on the bed; a scant percentage of last night's clothing rainfall.

A quick look through the apartment convinced Jerry that the only place that might at all be useful was the rolltop desk in the living room, messily crammed with papers. On close examination most of these turned out to be bills, but among the Second Notices and Third Notices (and a few Final Notices) were some letters, old grocery lists, notes about meetings (“Madge, Russian Tea Room, 1:30”), and an address book. This last was a little
too
helpful; it appeared to contain everybody in the Western Hemisphere. That there were as many as four addresses beneath some names, three of them crossed out, showed this to be an old address book only sporadically updated. Certainly many of the people in here hadn't seen or heard from the Harwoods in years.

Okay. Back to the reminder-type notes. Jerry went quickly through these again, keeping track of the frequency with which people's names appeared, and at the finish there were three names that recurred the most in the neat small handwriting he'd decided belonged to Bobbi Harwood. (The other handwriting, large and messy and hard to read, seemed suitable to the professor.) These three were Madge, Bill, and Eleanor. The address book produced one each of Madge and Eleanor (Madge Krausse, 18 Waverly Place, and Eleanor Bonheur, 298 East 81st Street), but seven Bills.

Oh, well. A cute telephone stood on the rolltop desk, a modern re-creation of the tall phone reporters used to use in thirites movies, and Jerry now drew this close and began calling Bills.

1)   “Hello?”
“Hello. Is Bobbi there?”
“Who?”
“Bobbi.”
“Bobby who? Do you have the right number?”
“No.”

 

2)   “Hello?”
“Hello. Is Bobbi there?”
“Hold on.”
(Pause)
“Huw-wo?”

 

3)   “Hello?”
“Hello. Is Bobbi there?”
“My
name is Billy.”
“Hi ya, Billy. Is Bobbi there?”

“Well, there
was
somebody here named Brucey, but he went home. Could a Billy help?”
“No.”

 

4)   Eleven rings. No answer.

 

5)   “Hello?”
“Hello. Is Bobbi there?”
“Not right now. Do you want his L.A. number?”
“No.”

 

6)   “Hello?”
“Hello. Is Bobbi there?”
“Knock-knock.”
“What?”
“Come on, come on. Knock-knock.”
“Okay. Who's there?”
“Bobby.”
“Bobby who?”
“Bobby pin! Hyar hyar hyar hyar hyar hyar hyar!”
“Terrific. How about Bobbi Harwood?”
“I don't get it.”

 

7)   “Hello?”
“Hello. Is Bobbi there?”
“Listen. Do you mind if I tell you something?”
“What?”

“Nobody calls me any more. Listen, I know why, I don't blame anybody, there's nobody to blame but myself. I come on too strong, that's the problem, I scare people away. But it's just I'm so lonely, so damnably
lonely
, this feeling of depression, this grayness, this—I haven't shaved in three days, do you know that? I'm afraid to go near the razor. And the window. I was just walking toward the window when the phone rang. Nobody wants me, that's what I thought, nobody cares, nobody will even know I'm gone. But then the phone rang, and I thought,
maybe
. Maybe somebody
does
care, maybe, maybe it matters, after all; maybe there's one small spark of hope left!”

      “Sorry. Wrong number.”

 

So much for the Bills, except number four, who could be tried again later. And that left Madge and Eleanor, and for no particular reason Jerry called Madge first.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Madge?”

“Yes?”

“Is Bobbi there?”

“No. she left. Chuck?”

“Yeah. Where'd she go?”

“I think you might catch her at the orchestra office. And Chuck?”

“Uh-huh?”

“I think she really means it, you know. If you want her back, you'll have to work at it.”

“Oh, I want her all right,” Jerry said.

ON CLOUD NINE …

“Good luck, darling.”

“
You're
my good luck, sweetheart.”

“And hurry home, darling,” Angela said.

“Oh, I will,” Mel promised, and they kissed once more, long and lingering, before he at last left the house and trotted out to his battered station wagon, its sides still streaked with bark from the trees of Connecticut.

What a wonderful new world this was! The sun was shining, the air was clean and clear, and Mel's heart was overflowing with the tenderness of love. What had happened in the past, with Angela and—that fellow—had turned out to be for the best after all. For the best. They'd seen that, he and Angela; they'd both finally seen it last night, during the long hours of talk with Mandy at the kitchen table. And later last night, in the wonderful warmth of their bed together, they had exchanged new vows, sincere heartfelt vows, and this morning there was a kind of soft glow surrounding the both of them, like overripe cheese. Their marriage, on the very brink of disaster, had been saved.

Luck was with him now, Mel was sure of it.
He
would find that golden statue today, because this was Mel Bernstein's day. Hear that, world? Today is
Mel Bernstein Day!

Meaning that the golden statue presently had to be in the possession of either Ben Cohen or Mrs. Dorothy Moorwood, the two Open Sports Committee members left for Mel to check out. Had to be, had to be. One of those two had the statue, and Mel would find it, because
this
was his day.

“For Angela,” he whispered, and started the engine, and drove away from there, heading first toward the nearest of the two:

Ben Cohen
27-15 Robert Moses Drive
Glen Cove, Long Island

ON THE SOUND …

If you're a Jewish retail merchant in Harlem, your smart move is to take an interest in the community, which was why Ben Cohen, whose liquor store was on Lenox Avenue not far north of 125th Street, devoted so much of his time and effort and money to causes like the Open Sports Committee. But on his own time Ben Cohen was a member of an entirely different community; he was a boat person on Long Island Sound.

New York City is amid more water than any other major city in the world, and pays it less attention. Paris has some little brook called the Seine, and they run another bridge over it every fifteen feet. The way London carries on about the Thames you'd think it was a big deal, including lining it with all their classiest buildings, such as Parliament. San Francisco, the wind-up toy of cities,
never
gets over its Bay, and Venice is so much in love with
its
Bay that it's sinking into it.

New York is full of water, and neither looks it nor acts it. Of the five boroughs of the city, only one—the Bronx—is on the mainland of the United States, and yet you can spend months in New York without seeing any water except what comes out of the faucet. Manhattan Island alone is surrounded by three rivers (the Hudson, the Harlem, and the East), one creek (Spuyten Duyvil), and a kill (Bronx). The island is fourteen miles long and less than two miles wide, and of the six ways off the southern half four are tunnels. People who travel to and from Manhattan Island every working day of their lives never see a shoreline until they go to the beach for summer vacation.

For those people called by water, therefore, the only thing to do is leave town, and for most of those people the place to go is Long Island, which for much of its hundred-mile length is flanked by two protected bodies of water, Long Island Sound to the north and the Great South Bay to the south. In the summertime the boat people are as numerous off the two coasts of Long Island as pigeons in the park. And one of them, every chance he gets, is Ben Cohen.

Today was one of his chances. He'd have to go to the store this evening, but most of the daylight hours he could have to himself, so here he was alone on the Sound, getting the
Bobbing Cork II
ready for summer.

Hell of a boat, the
Bobbing Cork II
, a gleaming white Chriscraft with the wheel on an upper deck over a compartment that could sleep four. His twin seventy-horsepower black Mercury engines gleamed at the stern, where two white and pale-green director's chairs stood on the pale-green indoor-outdoor carpeting. The white plastic bucket filled with water (for people with sandy bare feet) stood next to the white rubber welcome mat with
Bobbing Cork II
inscribed on it in pale-green italics. The hibachi, spotlessly clean, stood on its own low white Formica shelf in a corner.

Inside, pale-green and white continued to dominate, on the vinyl cushions of the two settees (the trundle beds slid out from underneath) and on the Formica-topped table and the Formica-faced cabinets and shelves. The curtains, white with green dots, were plastic, and so was the white cabinet of the television set. The interior of the head was white plastic with green toilet paper.

But up top, up by the wheel,
that
was Ben Cohen's territory. Captain of his ship, with his Budweiser hat at a jaunty tilt, under a canvas top and flanked by a pair of long fish teasers looking like a set of whip antennae, when Ben Cohen was at the wheel of the
Bobbing Cork II
Ben Cohen was at
home
.

This space was to Cohen what a den is to many men. Pictures of the family and the store, in weatherproof frames, were mounted all about the dashboard, along with other memorabilia, including most recently the Other Oscar, which he had taped to the top of the dash between the statue of the pregnant mermaid and the statue of the monkey sitting on the book marked “Darwin” and studying a human skull. And the white director's chair at the wheel had written on it, in pale-green script,
Cap' Cohen
.

Cohen was up here now, polishing the brightwork with a diaper (to own a boat is never to lack for something that needs to be cleaned or painted), when a voice on the dock suddenly called out, “Hello?”