The Neon Jungle (10 page)

“I’m afraid so, but that’s just between us. She won’t be back this semester. She’s had a nervous breakdown.”

Miriam sniffed. She stared sidelong at Paul and left, taking short quick steps.

After the door closed Wentle said, “The teachers are too busy to keep track, Paul. I know it’s not doing Miriam any good to use her that way. She comes in and volunteers information.”

“Can you give me the addresses that go with these names?”

“Of course. What will you do with them?”

“Turn them over to the proper people. This is extracurricular for me. I seem to keep my nose in other people’s business.”

“I’m glad you do.”

“The worst part of it is telling their parents. I’m glad that doesn’t come up often. You’ll probably lose two more students, Grover.”

“Seniors, too. And they probably won’t be back. The parents won’t blame themselves. They won’t blame the kids. They’ll blame the school. And me. It’s a funny thing. When they’re the children of a good solid happy marriage, they seem to stay out of trouble. I guess Teena is an exception to that rule.”

“No, Grover. Her father married again. Her favorite brother was killed in March. Nobody has had much time for her since then. The house has been pretty gloomy for her, I think. It isn’t going to be enough to cure the addiction. We’ve got to cure the emotional causes too, or she’ll be back on it in a matter of weeks.”

“I’ll have those addresses looked up for you.”

It was a quarter after one by the time he got back to the market. As he walked to the door he looked through the windows and saw Jana behind the cash register. Of all the people who lived and worked there, he realized he knew the least—could guess the least—about Jana. He knew only that his response to her was thoroughly male. She had very little to say, yet in her silences there was no deviousness, no subtleties. She had a look of sturdiness, the uncomplicated woman. He saw her biting her lip and slowly punching the register keys as she totaled an order.

As he reached the door Bonny came from the back of the store toward the doorway, saying something to Jana that he could not hear. Bonny looked at him with cool recognition. She still wore the pale sweater, but she had changed from slacks to a coarse-textured skirt.

“It took longer than I thought. How soon do you have to be back?”

“I shouldn’t stay away more than an hour.”

Her attitude had changed. She was still cool, but there was not so much animosity. He closed the car door on her side and went around and got behind the wheel. She took cigarettes out of her purse.

“I’m in a mood to get away from the neighborhood, Bonny. There’s a place on the Willow Falls road. You can eat out back on a sort of terrace arrangement.”

“All right.”

The small coupe trudged sedately through traffic. Once they were out of the city the hills were warm green with June, and the air smelled of growth and damp change. He looked straight ahead, yet in the corner of his eye there was the image of her, the quiet face, the ripe liquid copper of her hair, a burnishment against the green changes of the countryside.

“It’s good to get away from it,” he said.

“I was trying to remember the last time I walked on a country road,” Bonny said. “God! Way back.”

“I thought you were going to refuse to come.”

He knew she turned toward him but he did not look at her. There was a sudden warm deep sound in her throat. Not a laugh. An almost sly token of amusement. “I wasn’t. I went to Gus. I said Rowell was more than enough to take in one week. I asked him to tell you to leave me alone. You know what he did? He grabbed me by the shoulders. His eyes looked like when the gas is turned low. He nearly shook me loose from my teeth. He said I was his daughter and I was of his house, and I would do what he said. He said I would go with you and talk with you and stop making nonsense. It shocked me and it almost scared me. After he settled down I began to get the pitch. I guess you’re what is known as a friend of the family, Mr. Darmond.”

“Gus is a very loyal guy. And I just… did him a favor.”

“About Teena? He said something about Teena that I couldn’t understand. What’s going on there, anyway?”

“I’ll tell you after we get some food. The place is just up the road. And call me Paul, will you, please?”

It was a small clean hillside restaurant, with bright colors, starched waitresses, checked tablecloths. There were four tables on the tiny terrace under the shade of vine-covered white latticework. The brook came down busily over brown rocks nearby.

As Paul walked behind Bonny to the farthest table he was aware of the way she walked, of the sway of skirt from the compact trimness of hips, how straight her back rose from the narrowness of the concave waist, how the sheaf of hair swung heavily as she turned to look back at him, one eyebrow raised in question as she gestured toward the table.

“Fine,” he said, and held the chair for her.

She looked at the brook, and at the vines overhead, the blue sky showing through. “This
is
nice, Paul.”

“I used to bring my wife here when we could afford it.”

“You used to bring her?”

“She died over a year ago.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know that.”

“There’s no reason why you should have known it. I recommend their chicken pie. It has chicken in it.”

“Imagine!” And again she made that warm sound in her throat. When her face was alive she was extraordinarily pretty. It was only when she retreated into expressionlessness that there was that look of hardness, of defiant glaze.

They ordered, and as they ate they talked of idle things, staying away from any serious subject as though they had carefully decided it in advance.

THOMAS ARTHUR KARSHNER came up out of sleep, up out of dreams of thirty years ago. His bedroom glowed with the soft yellow of sun against the closed blinds, and he knew it was late. He lay quite still, retasting the vividness of the dream, knowing it would fade soon, wanting to hold it as long as he could. It was odd how, these past few years, the past was becoming more vivid. A sign of age, perhaps.

This dream had been of Caroline. Warm, young, alive, lovely. Not the thick fleshy body he had buried in ’34, but the younger Caroline of those years right after the war. In the dream she had been looking for something in that New York apartment where they had lived. He had been helping her look. Yet she wouldn’t tell him what it was they were searching for. Some precious thing that had been mislaid. The loss of it had frightened her in some obscure way.

The dream faded and the apartment was gone, and all Caroline’s warmth dwindled to those few photographs, quite faded, of a slim woman in awkward outdated clothes. He lay and wondered what Caroline would think if she knew. How he would find the words to explain it to her, explain how it had come about.

You see, dear, it started in such a vague way. It wasn’t as though there was any signpost. He’d been pointed out to me. There can be a certain fascination in evil. That was back when they were nailing so many of them for income-tax evasion when they couldn’t get them on other counts, and it worried him. I didn’t know that, at the same time, I was being pointed out to him, pointed out as a man who could make arithmetic do sly tricks. It started as a small service I performed for him. It amused me to do it. It gave me, with my friends, an amusing notoriety. You see, Caroline, he is not the sort of man to leave you alone if you can perform a service he wishes to buy. His affairs, even then, were vastly complicated. He wished to use me for other small services, all legal, of course. Yet he had to know he could trust me. And he is a very uncomplicated man in personal relationships. A trustworthy person is a person who does not dare to hurt you. He framed me with the casual efficiency with which a riding master saddles a horse. I was restive under the bit, and he soothed me with what he called “a yearly retainer.” It soon became quite clear that he resented any work I did for others. My services for him became more and more extralegal, until at last the mere fact of having performed those services was as effective as the documentation of my private vices. For a long time I thought of myself as trapped. But I did not become truly trapped until I became aware of my comfort within the trap. My services were extralegal. In return I have received a silken existence, wine, steaks, brandy, cigars, and the touch of flesh when required, and the sense of power.

He permits me to take small liberties with him. To speak to him as an equal, almost. It is much the same way that a man might amuse himself by making a friend of his butler. I am the butler of his scattered household. I am the arranger, the smoother-out, the handler of funds, the taker of messages. I am required to devise little schemes that will make the household run more smoothly. It leaves him free to control policy. I keep his world in order.

I am very good at it, Caroline.

He can be at Las Vegas, Acapulco, Miami, New York, and know that while he is gone, things are conducted in an orderly fashion.

They call me the Judge, Caroline. I have cultivated a mild judicial manner, spiced with some tricks of force I have picked up from him. You would not recognize me.

I have profited, Caroline. In the past eight years he has acquired a passion for legitimate investment. I own blocks of stock in eight of his legitimate corporations. A chain of motels. Two large suburban shopping centers. A resort hotel. A small chain of liquor stores. A business block. Apartment houses.

Yet we continue most of our original sources of extra-legal profit. Drugs, women, and gambling. A pretty trio. The marketing of thrills. On these mornings, Caroline, I tell myself that I am old and tired, and aware of my own filth. Yet I know, with a certain melancholy, that during this day I will become comfortably aware of my own cleverness, that I will take a cold pride in my tact and my managerial abilities, that I shall find some small place of weakness during this day, and use the power I have by decree, and enjoy the use of that power.

You saw that same flaw, didn’t you, Caroline? And that was what soured it all, at last. And he saw it too, and he has used it to his good advantage.

Karshner got out of bed slowly, standing like a plump red-faced child in his blue and white striped pajamas. In the bathroom he ran the brisk humming razor across his red face, the warm head biting off the white stubble with small crisp sounds. He lowered himself gruntingly into the hot tub, soaping the worn sagging body. He toweled himself harshly, brushed the white hair, clothed himself in white nylon underwear, in black silk socks, in handmade cordovan shoes, in a heavy creamy French linen shirt, in muted sapphire cuff links, in deep maroon knit tie, in the pale gray summer-weight suit. From the top of the bureau he took an alligator wallet, a small stack of change, a gold pen, and a gold key ring and placed them in the proper pockets.

Armed for the day, he phoned down to the desk. There had been two calls. He wrote the two phone numbers on the desk pad, then hung up and used the other telephone for the calls, first closing the small switch in the line that activated it. He paused before dialing the first number. It was not a good number to call from this phone. The world of electronics had made telephones unsafe. He held the phone in his hand, finger motionless in the first hole of the number, then shrugged and dialed the number. A woman answered.

“Karshner speaking,” he said.

“Oh, sure. Hold on a sec.”

The man came on the line. “Judge, I want to see you.”

“That’s very interesting. If you’re eager I shall be finishing my breakfast in forty minutes. I shall be at the Walton Grill, last booth on the left. I can give you five minutes.”

The booth was dark-paneled, the table linen sparkling white. The walls between the booths were low. The young girl poured his second cup of coffee. “Thank you, my dear,” Karshner said, patting his lips with the heavy napkin. As the girl walked away he saw Brahko coming down the wide aisle between the booths wearing a distressing shirt. He resented having to talk to Brahko, resented any dealing with the more muscular division of the organization. Brahko was dark, and there was a handsome—in fact, almost a noble—look about the upper half of his face. But the chin faded meekly toward the collar and Brahko could cover his large yellow-white teeth only by distorting his lips oddly, like a man about to whistle. And, of course, he wore distressing shirts.

He sat down with a shade too much heartiness. “Good morning, Judge.”

“Please don’t phone me, Brahko. I don’t like it. Who is that woman?”

“Don’t get sweaty, Judge. She’s all right. She’s a good kid.”

“Don’t phone me. Is that clear?”

“I phoned you when I got this. It was in with the collection this morning. Take a look.”

Karshner unfolded the piece of paper, aware that Brahko was watching his face carefully. He did not permit his expression to change as he read it. “The young man is astonishingly literate,” Karshner said. “A pleasantly careful young man. You could learn from him, Brahko.”

“I figured anything that might foul up the setup, you ought to know about, Judge.”

Karshner continued as though he had not been interrupted. “A careful young man up to a point. Aiding the young girl out of her difficulties yesterday was astonishingly stupid. I am afraid he is erratic. I was aware of that when he insisted on the very melodramatic way of enlisting the services of his accomplice. Yet he’s been quite effective.”

“Can you do anything?”

Karshner lit a corner of the note and placed it in the glass ash tray. When it had burned away, he puddled the fragments with the end of the burned match.

“You have informed me, Brahko.”

“Sure, but are you going to
do
anything?”

“It is unfortunate that one of your… ultimate consumers should be a member of the same household. It could attract unwelcome attention. The young man is quite correct about that. However, his proposed solution is as devious and erratic as his method of acquiring the services of the butcher.”

“I don’t get it, Judge.”