The Bialy Pimps (55 page)

In front of him, the shape in the shadows continued to move.

(Aluminum siding doesn’t move.)

But the movement was only his imagination. It
had
to be his imagination, because it couldn’t be anything else. They all came down here all the time, to retrieve cups and napkins and plastic silverware, and if there was
 

(an infestation)

a problem down here, they would have known about it before now. They would have seen it.

(Unless they hide.)

He watched the shape for a little while longer, thinking how much it looked like a man hiding in the shadows, knowing that if it was indeed a conglomeration of rats on shelves and on one another, that he might have a serious problem on his hands. Rats in a pack could get nasty.

But of course, it was just a bunch of old 2x4s. It was not rats, or a man, or even a mutated rat-man. He felt quite sure of it.
 

(So go look.)

He swallowed hard, wondering if maybe he
should
go look. But that was just silly. The cobwebby bulbs down here made everything look creepy.
 

The sounds of the party above broke his paralysis, forcing him to ignore the rat man and get back to work.

Dire situation. Secret weapon.
 

He remembered where he was and what he was supposed to do.

He could hear the people partying above him, cawing and overlapping in their parrotlike voices.
 

“...yes, we were there, but we...”

“...without a doubt. Twenty or thirty thousand...”

“...comes out dressed in that jumpsuit and starts to dance and
ooooh
is it great! I mean...”

“...love them!
So
much. I’ve been following them since before they were famous, and...”

And on and on and on and on and on.

Tracy moved into the chamber next to the Lair of the Air Conditioner Queen and snapped on the light. And then it was in front of him, in all its glory.

The bagel-slicing machine was four feet long, weighed fifty pounds, and had, during its tenure in the basement, rusted in a mottled Holstein pattern. From one end protruded a chrome chute. At the other end was a heavy cowling. The cowling housed a razor-sharp blade which for some reason could not slice butter. The machine did the exact same job as a knife, except that it did it more expensively and with a greater chance of catastrophic injury. It scalped every third bagel. It fired bread shrapnel from the end of the chute, so you had to know to turn your head lest you take bread in the eye. Oh, and it also jammed if you used it to cut bagels.
 

Tracy hoped that it would work better for what Philip had in mind.

He wiped the thing with a rag that had been flung into a corner to remove the worst of the dust, then he reached underneath and hefted. Then, straining, he waddled the length of the main room with the thing and began to climb the stairs.
 

When he reached the top, wheezing and wishing that he was a nonsmoker, the chute caught on the drywall, tossing his balance hard to the right. Tracy canted and banged against a sheet of plywood that had been laid against the side wall near the top, then recovered, then lunged and shifted his momentum away from the yawning staircase and crashed into the opposite wall. He felt a sharp edge on the machine’s chute cut into his hand, and somewhere in the back of his mind, he wondered if he’d need a tetanus shot. There was a moment of indecision, and then his center of gravity swung back into his chest and he staggered out, around the corner, safe.

There was a loud noise behind him as the plywood sheet fell. It clapped down hard over the top of the staircase like a trapdoor. Tracy turned his head to look. Beyond the sheet, the basement beckoned in the darkness, now a three-foot fall off of the back edge of the plywood.

Then, with an urgent shuffle, he turned and carried the bagel-slicing machine past the sink and into the front room.

Philip and the others were waiting for Tracy when he returned. They stood behind the counter in their tuxedos and gowns, contrasting markedly with the inner-city casuals of the crowd. There was just over an hour left to go until the ball (or in this case, the plastic bagel) dropped, and most of the people on the star-studded guest list were already in attendance.

The entire staff was present and accounted for. Tracy. Mike. Philip. Slate. Rich. The Anarchist. Darcy. Beckie. Smooth B. Nick and the new guy, Artie, were off to one side, and even Dungeonmaster Eric had put in an appearance. Jenny had just arrived. Bricker was working the door. With Roger present, only Little John, who might have drunk himself literally to death, was missing from the usual cast. This last absence seemed to be for the best.

“I wish Ted could be here to witness our big moment,” said Beckie. The sloth was riding her shoulders, wearing a jury-rigged animal tuxedo and drooling down her dress. She seemed not to notice.

Tracy placed the giant machine on the countertop. Philip rotated it, angling it so that the input chute pointed toward the revelers like an accusing finger.
 

“Witness
this,”
he said.
 

He plugged the machine in and turned it on. Then he flipped the switch to reverse the direction of the blade, and the machine’s fury caused the entire counter to vibrate.

“Isn’t this playing along?” said Rich.

“Play along
this!”
Philip said. He threw a stale bagel from the leftovers bag into the chute, then dove away as if he were firing rockets on a mortar range. There was a clanging, an ugly
thum-mmm-mp,
and then, with a regurgitating rattle of rusted parts, the projectile fired from the chute and struck one gala-goer squarely in the back of the head. He fell to the floor in a heap, unconscious.

The Anarchist looked on. “Wait a minute,” he said. “This is exactly the sort of thing they want us to do.”

Philip held one of the rock-hard leftover bagels up to the Anarchist and shook it. “You find me one person who
wants
one of these in the face. Just one.” He dropped the bagel into the chute. A moaning rattle. A projectile fires. A member of the crowd drops.

“Philip, you’re playing right into what’s expected of you.”

“Expect
this!” Whump!
A grunt.

Tracy knew better than to say anything. They had tried silent rebellion. They had tried too get out of their obligations. They had tried to do it their own way. After all that, Philip had cracked. He’d decided that enough was enough, and that maybe all-out assault, with zero playfulness, was still unexpected enough to be effective. Annoyed retaliation was the norm these days. Maybe seething rage could still command respect.
 

Drop. Fire. A hit.
Philip was not trying to wing people. He was shooting for the head.

He was going to bagel them all to hell.

Philip’s teeth had pulled back, exposing his gums. He felt the old Toby creep back into him – the raging Toby who, long before salads and Tai Chi and nonsmoking, operated out of instinct. The Toby who had chased Pissy Pete down High with a pipe after he’d thrown a cup of coffee at Carla. This was the real deal, yo. Masks were off, and Toby Martin was pissed.

The Anarchist watched Philip’s face, seeing it change.
 

Philip scanned the crowd, feeding bagels, aiming, trying to hit as many people as he could. He wanted a reaction, and he’d get it by any means necessary.
 

Fear. Hurt. Surprise. Anger. Rage.
 

Any would do. Anything normal. Anything rational. Anything but the blind, obedient acceptance that had met every Bingham’s atrocity so far.

They were watching him. The party had stopped and all of the people packed into the front room were looking at Philip, watching this unknown face that looked like it was definitely not kidding, like it did not find a
damn
thing funny here. They saw Philip. They saw the others, too.
 
The rest of the crew was in a frenzy, handing bagels to Philip, frothing and gnashing, all of them, one by one, de-evolving into animals. The revelers watched as Bingham’s Bagel Deli came undone. They saw the frustrated fury, the silent scream that said,
Get away for your own good! We don’t know what we’re capable of, and we don’t want to have to hurt you!
 

Then the people in the lobby began to clap.

Fuh-whump! Thwack!
A grunt. Philip’s aim with the bagel-shooter was dead-on.

There were hoots. Cheers. Whoops. All while the felled lay on the floor at their feet, bleeding and concussed.

Philip looked up, a bagel held over the drop chute, and stared back at them. And then he stopped.

For the first time, he realized that they all looked like sheep. Every one of them had a woolly head and little beady eyes. They seemed to stand on four legs, and as one or another of them spoke, the sound they made was like a bleat. He wondered why he hadn’t noticed it before. He wanted to yell at them and shoo the herd of them away, to holler,
Get lost, sheep! I’ve got a pair of extra-sharp shears and a jittery cutting hand!
 

But that wouldn’t make a difference, of course. It was as if he were a farmer telling the crows on his corn that they’d better leave or they’d get hurt. Only, crows don’t reason. Crows don’t understand logic. Crows stay until the farmer gets mad enough to get his gun, and then crows get shot. And then the next day, with the corpses of the others still rotting on the ground below them, the other crows would return. It wasn’t that they were persistent or determined. They were just too dumb to understand the danger they were in.

Philip was besieged by an immense sense of failure and desperation. All of a sudden, he saw the root of the problem. Why did nobody protest? Because they were crows. Where would they draw the line? Nowhere, because they were crows. Now that Bingham’s had the world’s attention, they could do no wrong. No venture was too stupid. No abuse was too egregious. These people would never fear for their safety or their sanity or their self-respect. Not because they were loyal or devoted or trendy or principled, but because they just didn’t know any better.

Philip lowered the hand holding the bagel. He switched off the machine, which rattled into silence. The crowd continued to clap and cheer and smile. The felled and unconscious patrons were stirring. Then, as they stood, they too began to clap and smile, many of them bleeding from the scalp and missing teeth.
 

Angela came up to the counter as Philip was pushing the machine against the back wall, his expression heavy and resigned.
 

“Wow!” she said. “That was great, Philip, just great. We were wondering if you guys were alive back there, but I guess you are, huh? Whew! That was wonderful, improvising like that. Never saw it coming. Not for a minute. Anyway, now that you all are back into it and with the program, how about you set up for your performance? It’s eleven-fifteen, and we’ll want you to do a few songs before midnight. How about changing into something more casual? No? Well, I guess you’re going for a new look, and that’s fine by me, as long as you do your tunes up there on that stage and do them well. So we can get set up? Great. Fabulous. Thanks, Philip, you’re a doll.”

Angela spun to go and it occurred to more than one member of the crew that Angela never waited for answers. And when had she started calling Philip “doll?”

“Angela,” said the Anarchist.
 

She turned.
 

“Did you know that I used to serve food to a man who worked for the CIA?”

“I don’t follow you.”

“His name was Ted. He was the reason the Cuban Missile Crisis was resolved, because he went down there and reversed the polarity on all of the electronic firing triggers on the missiles. Castro’s men couldn’t figure out how to fix them because they were Soviet warheads, so Castro backed down.”

“I don’t know what...”

“Oh come on,” said Beckie. “You know, Army Ted. He used to hang out with Clint Eastwood. Dated Sandy Duncan. Was behind the scenes on every winning America’s Cup team since 1982. He even beat Bobby Fisher in chess once, but it happened in a park and the newspapers refused to believe it.”

Angela looked confused. “Why are you telling me this?”

“They’re telling you,” said Tracy, “because sometimes things are beautiful just as they are. Sometimes trying to manipulate and exploit that beauty will destroy it outright. When people are made to dance, they often lose what made them want to dance in the first place.”

“It’s more about singing than dancing,” said Angela, “and you’ll be lip syncing anyway, but if you don’t get a move on...”

“Some things are mysteries,” said the Anarchist, cutting her off, “and sometimes those things should remain mysteries. You can’t find a frog’s life force by dissecting it. Instead, you’ll lose the very thing you’re looking for by asking too many questions.”

“Can you just tell me what you’re getting at here?” Angela said impatiently. “Because I have a party to run.”

“I’m just saying that at a certain point, some things should just be left alone. Because the next thing you know, the magical subject that you are trying so hard to demystify might just walk out in front of a bus, and then you’ll never see the forest composed of those mysterious, wonderful trees.”

“Okay, great,” she huffed, already turning away, “just be ready to perform in ten minutes.”

Beckie touched the Anarchist’s shoulder. He turned.

“What?” he said.

Beckie smiled, and said nothing.

“You’re welcome,” he told her.

Captain Dipshit, who had last been inside Bingham’s with several rats hanging from his head, made a fittingly dramatic entrance. He followed two immaculately dressed lawyers, and the lawyers in turn followed three policemen who yelled at the entire gathering to freeze and lay down on the floor.