Dancing Aztecs (35 page)

And another two fell when Bud called his office to say he wouldn't be back this afternoon, and his secretary told him somebody named Eddie Ross had called collect from Rhode Island to ask if he and somebody named Jenny could get two new statues because some crazy person had smashed theirs.

“Okay, okay, okay,” Corella said, when he heard that part. Rubbing his hands together, he said, “We're finally getting somewhere.”

(Meanwhile, Chuck was in conversation with a black faculty member who lived on a houseboat at the 79th Street Boat Basin and who was sympathetically suggesting other black faculty members—as well as two Jewish faculty members and a Czechoslovak faculty member—with whom Bobbi might have taken up.)

Next, Krassmeier himself got on the phone, calling the messenger service, which told him the messenger was on his way. Krassmeier threw his weight around, insisted on speaking with the manager, and the manager told him the messenger was on his way. Krassmeier stooped to heavy sarcasm, and the manager hung up on him.

More useless telephoning followed, interrupted at last by a call from Ben Cohen. And when Bud mentioned the statue, Ben Cohen went through the roof. It had been stolen by a filthy sacrilegious probably-not-even-Jewish son of a bitch who'd claimed—could you credit this one?—to be from the UJA! And
then
it was stolen from
that
son of a bitch by some
other
son of a bitch, and the two of them ran off somewhere, who the
hell
knows where? And after he himself last night had regilded a spot on the statue's ruckus where the paint had scraped off and the white plaster showed through.

When Bud got off the phone at last and reported all this to the others Corella said, “So they don't have it yet.”

Oscar said, “But who's this
other
one? I remember distinctly there were three sets of them came around last night.”

“Some
other
breach of security, no doubt,” Krassmeier said, glowering at Corella.

“Not from me,” Corella told him. He was beginning to get a little pissed off at Krassmeier.

At that point the messenger finally arrived with the statues from David Fayley and Kenny Spang, in a brown paper bag. While Krassmeier submitted him to a lot of heavy irony and innuendo, Corella removed the statues from the paper bag and twisted their heads off. “Wrong ones,” he said.

Four to go.

DOWNTOWN …

His name was Hugh Van Dinast, and his family went back to the Patroons. They had lived in New York, near Washington Square, since the only people one knew were fellow parishioners at Grace Church. One of his great-grandmothers was portrayed, unflatteringly, in Edith Wharton's
The Age Of Innocence
. His family had been in shipping in New York when shipping was the thing to be in. They had also been in the Street, and several branches of the clan still were. Others, inevitably, were in banking, and most of the younger sons for the last five or six generations had taken up Law (corporation, of course, not criminal), though increasingly the less combative males went into education or the arts; currently, the Van Dinasts could boast two extremely academic painters, a daily book critic on
The New York Times
, a distinguished professor of economics at Columbia, the world's foremost authority on Colley Cibber (currently at Stanford), and Hugh Van Dinast himself, Associate Professor of Political Science at New York University. A liberal conservative (he favored food stamps, opposed busing, spoke out against Vietnam a full three months before Hubert Humphrey did), he was about to take his sabbatical year in California, studying that state's volatile and unique political progression for a planned massive volume tentatively titled
Tomorrow the World
.

Six feet four inches tail, Hugh Van Dinast was at forty-three utterly the patrician New York type in appearance. His hair was thin and sandy, his eyes mild and blue and somewhat watery, his nose unobtrusive, his mouth broad and made for easy smiling, his chin slightly recessive, his body built for the uniform of a palace guard. His accent seemed British to most Americans, but other New Yorkers recognized it at once and bridled at it. One assumed he would spend his evenings swapping condescending remarks with William F. Buckley and George Plimpton, although in fact his acquaintanceship with those two gentlemen was slight, and he much preferred the books of Gore Vidal. (Seeing him with Jimmy Breslin, as one on occasion might have done, they being in approximately the same vocation, was to undergo a strangely Kiplingesque echo; for if that wasn't the Colonel with his loyal Master Sergeant, there is no such thing.)

Twice married and twice divorced, Van Dinast was engaged in no serious sexual affairs at the moment, but was looking forward to something tanned and exciting occurring out in sunny California. (Which was one of the reasons he was basing himself in Los Angeles rather than the state's capital, Sacramento.) Unlike most of the Van Dinasts of the last eleven generations, who had married tall self-controlled blonde ladies but who had reserved their true passions for fourteen-year-old Polynesians of either sex, Hugh Van Dinast's passion was for tall self-controlled blonde ladies. Neither of his wives had had the faintest idea what to do with a passionate Van Dinast, and in the collision of his passion and their alarm both marriages had foundered. It had seemed to him, in recent years, that perhaps for one of his temperament marriage was not, in any event, the ideal, nor even a possible, life-style. Perhaps, not to put too fine a point on it, there was just too much of Henry James in his character, not to mention his upbringing and heritage, for him, no matter the intensity of his desires, to find happiness in either a marriage within his own class and social set or in a crosscultural alliance, of even the unlikeliest sort.

It was while he was pondering this problem yet again, in the study of his seventeenth-floor apartment in The Ambassador, that Ingrid, his black maid, entered to say that the driver was here for the car, and was waiting in the parlor. “I'll be right along,” Van Dinast promised.

He would be living fourteen months out there, in faraway California, and did not wish to spend that long driving some rented green Impala. On the other hand, he had neither the time nor the patience to drive his own silver-gray Jaguar XJ12 across America. He was, in other words, the ideal customer for Beacon Auto Transport, and like most of such companies' customers he was under the mistaken impression that his car would be driven by a professional transporter, an employee of the company.

Imagine his surprise, then, when he entered the green-and-gold parlor with its view south toward The Mark Twain, the next nearest high-rise apartment building, to discover the driver to be a
very
personable young woman, tall and blonde and quite obviously self-controlled. “Well, my dear,” he said, with a smile at once charming and friendly, “you're hardly what I expected.”

The girl's expression combined disinterest with distraction. “I'm not?”

On the surface, Van Dinast remained calm, friendly, even affable, but underneath his emotions had begun to roil. In the first place, the pay could not be particularly lavish for an occupation such as auto transporter, and in the second place, he recalled Beacon's having made a point of its drivers having all been bonded, which meant that, in addition to being tall, blonde, and utterly self-controlled, this young woman was evidently
poor but honest
. The combination, for Hugh Van Dinast, could not possibly be resisted, and he can be forgiven for the scene that followed.

To begin with: “I hadn't expected anyone so attractive,” he said.

“Thank you,” she said, but without the slightest trace of warmth or response in her voice. Most men would have understood the depth of the girl's indifference by then, but Van Dinast had
never
heard the slightest trace of warmth or response in a woman's voice, and so had no idea whether he was progressing famously or not at all.

And so he trembled at the brink of his third marriage. The prospect of finding his kind of woman outside his own class was overpowering. A tall, self-controlled, blonde woman who was
not
sized like muslin; was it possible? “I trust you'll enjoy my—my car,” he said, and the boldness of his hesitation frightened him and yet thrilled him; already this girl was bringing him out of himself.

“Just so it gets me there,” she said.

“You'll be staying in California?” Instant fantasies, instant scenarios, formed in his brain.

“Forever,” she said.

“My own stay won't be quite that long, unfortunately,” he said, while reminding himself that he would have reached California by the time she got there, and that she would be delivering the car directly to him. “I'll only be a bit over a year,” he said. “I'm going for my sabbatical.” And yet, at the same time, a part of him despised him for trying to impress this creature; “sabbatical,” indeed. Dropping that word into the conversation, knowing she wouldn't understand it, anticipating the inevitable question.

Which did not, for some reason, ensue. “That's nice,” she merely said, and nothing more.

Van Dinast continued his pursuit. “And you? Are you going out for any specific reason?”

“To get away from my cocksucker of a husband,” she said.

Van Dinast recoiled. Passion, yes; vulgarity, never. “Well,” well,” he said. “Shall we go down and look at the car?”

“Yes,” she said.

In the front hall was some monstrous black piece of luggage, or something; it reminded Van Dinast of monks in Bergman films. “My harp,” the girl said, and wheeled it out to the hall.

Riding down in the elevator toward the garage, alone with the girl (and her harp) in this small chrome box, Van Dinast found his interest growing again as the immediacy of the girl's vulgarity waned. And wasn't vulgarity, in the larger scene, merely indicative of life? “I've always been fond of music,” he said, smiling at the black-encased harp.

The girl shrugged. “It's okay,” she said.

They left the elevator at the parking garage in the basement, where the XJ12 slouched in its accustomed slot. A great silver-gray beast of a car, it was Jaguar's four-door sedan combined with the Jaguar sports car's V-12 engine, a big roomy powerful machine, an elegant monster. A beauty.

Even the girl was impressed. “Very nice,” she said. “
Very
nice.”

“Get behind the wheel,” he suggested. “The seat is
infinitely
adjustable.”

But first she had forms to deal with, a great sheaf of them out of her purse. The car had to be gone over for dents and scratches and tears. They both had to sign, here and here. And then, finally, she got behind the wheel. Van Dinast, after democratically closing the door behind her, trotted around and slid in on the passenger side.

Although the car was English, it was the export model, with the steering wheel on the left. The girl was devoting her attention to adjusting the seat, studying the controls, fiddling with the rear-view mirror. Van Dinast, smiling in utter infatuation at her clean profile, said, “It is a beauty, isn't it?”

“Yes, it is,” she said, without interruption of her tasks.

“I care a great deal about beautiful things,” Van Dinast said, and put his hand on her near knee.

She gave him a cold and dangerous look, “Watch it,” she said.

He didn't watch it. God help him, he couldn't watch it He was as helpless as his grandfather had been, when the fourteen-year-old Polynesians had climbed over the rail of the ship. “Bring me
that
one,” the old bastard had said. “To my cabin.” And the same blood flowed through the hand that now tightened its clutch on the girl's knee. “My dear,” Van Dinast said, his voice suddenly husky, “I hope you don't think I'm some cheap masher. From the instant I saw you—”

She rabbit-punched his wrist. “Get
out
of there!”

He felt nothing; his hand remained clamped where it was. “Give me an opportunity,” he begged. “Get to know me. We'll have lunch!”

She dug nails into the back of his hand. “Goddam it,
stop!”

The Polynesians had also been squirmers. Van Dinast's other hand shot forward, cupping the back of her dear head, the soft straight blonde hair, the curve of the skull; that small fragile bowl full of thought and memory, emotion and desire.

And a mind of its own.
How
she squirmed, muttering fresh vulgarities, as inexorably he brought her forward, her beautiful face toward his adoring lips. His trembling right hand slid up her cool round thigh, his determined left hand brought her closer, closer—

And she bit his nose.

“Nga!” he said, which is the way a person says
Ow
while his nose is being bitten. Both hands left her utterly desirable person and flew protectively toward his face. His eyes had watered, a stinging sensation was spreading raylike through his cheeks.

But the girl, rather than press her advantage by continuing her physical assault, made the mistake of turning away, searching for the door latch in this unfamiliar car. Van Dinast, still smarting and blinking but in no way deterred, laid both hands on her again, and brought her back.

This was not the sequence he'd had in mind, but the strength of her opposition had escalated his approach from compliments and lunch offers almost immediately into the realm of physical dominance. Clutching at her with both hands, roiling her blouse and skirt, parrying her blows with elbows and forearms, he was panting like a miler and gasping withal, “Just have
lunch!
Give me a
chance!
Get to
know
me!” And meanwhile his hand, getting to know her, was inside her blouse, clamped to her braless breast.

“I'll scream!” she screamed, and then did so. Her nails tried for his face, but had to be content with his arms.

He felt nothing, he was dissuaded by nothing. Hadn't he had this same scene with both his wives, more than once?