The Captive Condition (11 page)

“Those of us who like to take a pinch of psychedelic, that's who,” he said to himself, replenishing his glass and taking another slug.

He savored the sharp flavor, relishing the way it abraded his throat and how its vapor stung his eyes. While some people ended up having severe psychotic episodes from the juice, Xavier found the effects wonderfully serene. The stuff fired his imagination, made the rusty wheels turn, and it pleased him to know that in the ether there existed a real thing called “perfection” and that it presented itself each day, as if by magic, in the form of a tangy glass of juice.

By some estimates there were eighty varieties of carrot, each with an evocative name, the Tip Top, Oxheart, Bolero, Crusader, Swamp King. There were carrots of different shapes and sizes, colors and textures, roots and cores. Some were rough and some smooth, some had a sweet and mellow flavor, others a complex and earthy one, and a discerning chef was always at pains to decide whether to use those robust carrots grown in the warmer climes of Louisiana or heartier ones grown in the tough soils of Saskatchewan. After months of experimentation, Xavier now preferred the
jazar
carrot, a diminutive reddish variety reputedly found only in North Africa and one with strong hallucinogenic properties. Its flowers resembled those of the deadly hemlock and its taproot was more crisp and woody textured than other varieties. Unfortunately, given the constant political unrest and shifting alliances in that part of the world, the
jazar
was exceedingly difficult to come by, and Xavier was now the only man in Normandy Falls from whom the precious carrot could be procured. He fashioned himself the
jazar
's unofficial ambassador and proud herald and charged his clients accordingly.

Curious to learn more about his favorite root vegetable, he read books and magazines about the international drug trade. According to his sources, Tangier was a famous smuggling center, and every small firearm, sex-trade worker, and sack of
jazar
passed through its shady underworld. During his sojourn in the city, the author Paul Bowles cultivated the carrot, and when no kif could be found in the mean alleys of the old town, he served it to certain houseguests who'd overstayed their welcome, the most famous being the master addict William Burroughs, whose ensuing visions and ecstasies produced some of his most startling work. “That skinny, little fruit served up the carrots raw,” wrote Burroughs, “a naked lunch, a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.”

The carrot had become so prized for its reputed medicinal and mind-altering effects that half-starved refugees making their way across the Mediterranean to the shores of France brought bunches of them in their rafts. They were the finest source of foreign exchange, easily converted into euros. In the narrow streets of sunny Nice the police raided flats and seized entire crates of the stuff. Inevitably, because the carrots were used in a variety of
apéritifs
the same way wormwood was used in absinthe, some corrupt, low-ranking official, a sergeant or lieutenant, sold them to various
brasseries
in the fashionable Marais neighborhood of Paris where dignitaries dining along the rue Sainte-Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie discussed the plight of the poor and powerless North Africans, all the while knowing full well how the delectable carrots had been obtained. None of this seemed to trouble members of the ruling class, who tended to regard irony of this sort as
très chic.

Xavier yearned to explain these things, but Morgan had no patience for his long-winded lectures about produce, and as the day dragged on, she ignored him altogether. For a while things were actually quiet, almost tranquil, but in Normandy Falls anything approximating tranquillity was short lived, and Xavier sensed trouble well before he heard the terrible commotion coming from the dining room, the sound of shattering glass, a sharp cry for help. At first he presumed it was another feuding couple trying to bludgeon each other with the ugly centerpieces designed by Colette Collins. Full-scale domestic disputes were not out of the ordinary, especially when the weather was hot and muggy and the bistro became the domain of unhappy couples whose commitment to each other had devolved into something tenuous and strained. In silence these sullen husbands and wives slurped their drinks and ate their
pot au feu
and tried, but often failed, to camouflage their looks of disdain and outright hostility by pretending to be interested in what the other was saying. The soft glow of candlelight was meant to disguise more than the wrinkles and blemishes they'd accumulated over the course of their shared lives. A kind word poorly delivered could set them off, and like bad actors in a low-budget movie performing their own stunts, they leaped out of their chairs and lunged at each other across the tables; they pushed, shoved, slapped, strangled; they hacked, hawked, gagged, bellowed. In the end someone always stormed out of the restaurant in a rage.

But this was different, the racket far more intense, fierce, manic. Remembering how the Gonk had promised to pay him a visit one fine day, Xavier grabbed his trusty “master of cooking” knife from the counter and hurried to the dining room, but he was so stunned by the macabre scene unfolding before him that he thought he was having another bad episode from the
jazar.

Gathered in a semicircle, chattering in an incomprehensible Iron Age dialect, three college boys clapped and whistled at Lorelei as she danced on top of the bar, her hips gyrating, her head bobbing in time to a secret turbo tempo blasting inside her skull. Like a demented dervish on high-octane smack, she twirled round and round lost in an ecstatic trance, drawing her extended arms closer to her torso until her body revolved at impossible speeds so that, for an instant, she appeared to float a few inches in the air. The black cloak rose above her ankles and calves, billowing higher and higher until it exposed the tender flesh of her pale thighs, but it wasn't until she unclasped the hook and let the cloak fly to the floor that she managed to draw a round of applause from the trio of hyperactively horny frat boys.

“Dude, this joint is better than the cabaret!”

“A kick-ass private show.”

“Fucking sick, man,
sick.
”

Morgan, who failed to coax Lorelei down from the bar, shot Xavier an accusatory look. “Drugged,” she spat.

As the other diners scampered from the bistro without paying their tabs, Xavier wrapped his arms around Lorelei's legs and lowered her from the bar, but when he attempted to lead her through the kitchen door, he met with resistance. A discernible change had come over her, like someone who'd been rudely awakened from a marvelous dream. Her eyes spun like pinwheels and sparkled not from the concentrated sugar and powerful drugs but with a clear and unambiguous animosity. The thousand miseries and insults she'd endured at the hands of a thousand different men were compressed into an unblinking gaze of animal hatred directed squarely at Xavier. She became a vindictive, execrating hellcat with splintering fingernails that she used like the whirling blades of a high-speed blender to disfigure his fat face.

“Out the back door!” he commanded.

But the college boys wanted the show to go on.

“Hey, dude, let her finish the performance.”

“Yeah, man, leave her alone.”

“Here's a dollar, honey!”

Xavier reached into his back pocket and flashed the knife at the college boys. “I think it's time you children ran along.”

“Whoa, dude, you a fucking psycho or something?”

“You gonna try to cut us with that thing?”

“Yeah, let's see your skills!”

Before Xavier could react, the boys grabbed Lorelei's black cloak from the floor and raced around the bistro, pulling it away from Xavier each time he made a clumsy attempt to grab it, fingers just out of reach. He huffed and shook and panted; he stomped his feet and charged like an exhausted old bull. The boys were quick to capitalize on his lumbering passes, and right before delivering the
coup de grâce,
they yanked Xavier's apron from his jiggling waist and kicked it into a corner.

“I don't need this shit right now!” Morgan shouted. “I'm moving into a new apartment this weekend.” She reached for the phone on the wall. “I'm calling the police.”

“No!” Xavier cried.

In a steady, thundering beat the boys belted out the college fight song and stomped in single file out the door.

Gasping for air, listening in alarm to his own choked and clotted breathing, Xavier collapsed into a booth and thumped his chest a half-dozen times, hoping to correct his irregular heartbeat and somehow slacken the steady pounding in his temples.

“Morgan,” he rasped, “I want you to know that I had absolutely nothing to do with this. I swear, I have no idea who is responsible.”

Morgan scowled. “You're fucking disgusting.” She gathered the cloak from the floor, draped it over Lorelei's shoulders, and led her outside.

In the past there had been plenty of disruptions on Saturday afternoon, but this was on a whole different order of trouble. Every time a group of swinging dicks in blue uniforms paid him a visit and ordered their usual coffee and pastries, Xavier gritted his teeth and prepared to get fucked in the ass by the United States government. One dick he could handle, but not a whole army of them. Those law-and-order men knew at a glance when something was wrong and no doubt were looking forward to the day when Xavier finally screwed up. From having read dozens of books and articles on the subject, he knew it was safer to deal out of a private residence, but he felt the alley was far less conspicuous. As long as he played it cool and didn't get too greedy, he could hold on to this side operation for another year before the feds raided it. The trick, of course, was knowing when to get out before some irate moral crusader finally blew the whistle.

With the slow and deliberate footsteps of a much older man nearly crippled by gout, Xavier grabbed a broom and dustpan from the corner and swept up the shattered glass on the floor. After he finished tidying up, he went to the kitchen and climbed the back stairs to his quarters above the bistro. Dyspeptic and paranoid to the point of exhaustion, he cracked open one of the blinds, and like a schizophrenic sentry who tensed up whenever a patrol car drove by, he watched the alley.

To reassure himself that he was still the wily, small-town factotum and culinary craftsman, always one step ahead of the law, he went to the wall and removed a faded poster of black-stockinged cancan dancers doing the Infernal Galop. Hidden in a shallow recess, the new combination safe contained close to fifty thousand dollars, big bricks of glorious greenbacks, many in small denominations held together with colorful straps—yellow, violet, brown, mustard. He stroked and caressed the cash, lifted the bills close to his nose, smelled the ink and cotton fibers. As far as financial improprieties went, Xavier, by his own estimation, had used poor judgment only once, bringing a duffel bag of money to the bank to be changed into hundred-dollar bills. Benjamins took up less space in the safe and were much easier to account for, but even the tellers knew that the bistro hadn't enjoyed that kind of success, and he'd stopped the practice shortly after the drug money started rolling in.

He set aside the cash and flipped through the brochures of Delacroix Cay that he'd collected over the years, full-colored pamphlets advertising new condominiums and rental properties. He studied the pictures of copper-colored nymphs in string bikinis sunbathing under swaying palm trees and swimming beside large schools of damselfish gathered around a cathedral of purple pipe organ coral. The bright, tropical flowers looked like idealized human genitalia and gave him a definite sense of hope and purpose, but sometimes he wondered if it was foolhardy to sock away so much money in order to purchase a scrap of land in the hurricane-prone tropics on a desperately poor island with an unstable government.

He sat on the corner of his bed and pared his dirty nails with the tip of his enormous knife, and from these pictures he gleaned a single, invaluable lesson: that a life of decadence and unspeakable depravity was permissible provided a man had incredible luck and no remorse, and he now feared he was in dangerously short supply of both.

Before any of this madness transpired, I was able to make my purchase from Xavier. Still standing in the alley, I took that first restorative hit of the day and wrinkled my nose at the pall of purple smoke circling my head, a strange mixture of turpentine and savory seasonings—tarragon, fennel, sage. I counted the seconds until the cannabis steadied my nerves and eased the symptoms of my stubborn hangover. Its effects were sublime and helped me to forget every ridiculous trifle, every neurotic crisis, every delusion, not that I was delusional, no, but sooner or later life does have an irritating way of making us believe in things that may not exist or that we do not fully understand.

I left the alley and traipsed across the square but stopped to watch in amazement as the killer came walking down the street. Evidently, he dressed for a Saturday afternoon the same way he dressed for the classroom—a stylish blazer, a freshly pressed collared shirt, a pair of brown shoes polished to a high gloss—but now he seemed decidedly less confident in his powers of intellectual bamboozlement, almost contrite for having subjected his students to so many inconsequential abstractions, someone weighed down by the awful burden of unpleasant realities. For a man who must have been wondering when the homicide detectives would come to put the cuffs on and bring him down to headquarters for a grueling interrogation, he seemed calm enough, but even the most innocent and well meaning of men couldn't live for long without packing away a few sins, secrets, serious missteps, deeds too terrible to admit especially to oneself, and his expression hinted at things subterranean, twisted, evil. Like most professors and other venerable frauds the world over, he had about him an air of entitlement and invincibility, but of course crimes of passion were the easiest of all to solve, and in this day and age of high-tech forensics no one, not even the brightest instructor of comparative literature, could get away with drowning his mistress in a swimming pool. “But she was
depressed,
I swear!” How many times had the cops heard that one?