The Last Bender, Chapter 34

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

          By the time I reached Clara Turback’s place the daylong squalls of rain had stirred the city up from the bottom. The air smelled like fish. The facades of buildings winced beneath a sooty rain. It drilled the puddles and plopped on windscreens. Pigeons huddled and shivered in eaves and awnings. People dashed and darted, hunched under newspapers, hopping over flooded gutters. Street vendors rolled up their wares and ran. A bum hiked up the sidewalk singing. As he passed he looked me in the eye and I saw in his a charming light. He barked with joy and I half expected a troop of merry bums to follow, marching off into a mad, sunlit republic, one that would bar our entrance as too grey.

          I sat double parked, waiting for Stronghole to arrive, in a spot with a view of the front entrance, where nubile guards tended to the bags and packages, leading the old and infirm into cavernous black umbrellas. The vigorous old strode forward, dismissing their determined servants with an impatient wave of the hand, shaking water off of white umbrellas and plastic kerchiefs. The browner, the greasier, the more dismal it got the warmer and brighter the lobby lights glowed. I felt as if someone had taken my eyeballs out and thrown them on the glass, everything looked like random lumid splatter. Soon I fell in with the engine’s hum, the downpour’s needle. Part cloud, part raindrop, part puddle, I shuttled and schlepped with the storm, a petrel, a sea fog, a dribble. Knock-knock-knock, squeak-squeak. I looked up. All my pieces flew together; my brain sucked Stronghole in through its eyes and spit him out a recognized, codified whole. Rain ran like sweat down his face. It worked along the top of his mustache and dripped from his mouth.

          “I said, open the door!” He compressed his wet, limber bulk into the bucket seat and handed me a blue cardboard cup decorated with a caricature of Afradite.

          I had come to think of my heart as a bunion. A smudge print. An asshole. A little bowl of diseased phlegm. A patch of discontent stashed between my lungs and stomach. Nothing cupid would ever shoot at. And if he did, there was no room for a dart, much less an arrow. But Evalyn St. Claude had uncovered a puffy, sore, functional heart no bigger than a clit.

          The coffee was hot and milky and sweet. You couldn’t taste the char of scalded, all day brew. We fogged the windows up. The light failed. Rain pursued its victims down the sidewalk, their faces fixed like fingers curled in death. They run into the thing they flee. There is no way out.

          “So?” he asked.

          “She didn’t answer the phone,” I said.

          “Maybe she’s vacuuming.”

          “Yeah, or drying her hair or taking a shit. My guess is she’s out.”

          “So we sit here and watch?”

          “Why not? It’s overtime pay.”

          “Not for me. I quit.”

          I looked up the street. “You had the meeting.”

          “Yeah I had the meeting. I told them I quit.”

          “Them?”

          He looked distracted and said, “Yeah. Laraby and Church.”

          “Church?” My intestines sucked on my stomach.

          “Yeah. The plan was Church goes on the Watts drop for security. Already I didn’t like it, and that was just the start.”

          I sank low in the seat and looked up and down the block. The light and rain fluttered like ribbons. “Did Laraby look at you?”

          “I dunno. It was the usual. He looked like a purple sock in a darning ball. The guy’s weird. And Church, he sat there with those fishbowl eyes. He was eating peanuts.”

          “In the shell?”

          “Nah. They were the boiled ones.”

          “Before you told them ‘I quit,’ did you get any?”

          “Jack, describe what’s in your gut.”

          “I feel like I’m going to shit my stomach out.”

          “That’s not good Jack.”

          “It’s no way to feel at all,” I said.

          Then it was his turn to sink into the seat and look around. There were so many cars, speeding up, slowing down. Every one of them looked suspicious. We sat there like a couple of kids under the blankets, too afraid to look and too afraid to hide. After a while, he asked, “What do we do?”

          I held the steering wheel and pushed against it. “I dunno.” It got kinda dark and quiet between us then. Absentmindedly I said, “The coffee’s good. Is it Pringles?”

          “Nah. Not as good as that. But if you want good coffee, go to the right places. See, you got these cheap sons of bitches who boil a pot all day long. You can always tell by the smell going in. You see one of those big stainless steel urns, it smells like singed hair. And the glass pots smell like a dock fire. You smell that, walk out.”

          “What is that?”

          “Evocative, Jack. Chestnut vendors always burn a few. When I was growing up, my grandma used to tell me stories about, you know, the old times. I loved that. And she could cook. She put me to work on the corn and potatoes. And then she’d work around to it. Telling me about this all night poker game she used to run. And how, around midnight say, she’d put a pot of sugar, water and butter up on the stove and slowly burn it, so the smell would waft through the place, get everybody hungry. Then she’d go around selling sandwiches. You know, I can’t smell a pot of burned coffee without thinking of that story. Evocative Jack. That’s what smell is.”

          I thought about it. “Yeah, but after a while, you can’t smell anything at all, if everything smells like shit.”

          “Maybe we should have a look around.”

          “Not yet. I’m wondering about dinner with Wanda Watts.”

          He laughed. “You figure it for a date? A little romance mixed in?”

          “It ain’t high romance, if that’s what you mean.”

          He shook his head. “You’re a single man but you don’t put out.”

          I didn’t want to talk about it. I said, “Let’s not get personal here.”

          “Why not? Don’t you talk about your family Jack?”

          “How do we get from that to that? Romance to my family?”

          “I’m just wondering, is all. If I were in your position.”

          What kind of a position is that? I wondered. “What, Priscilla’s not cutting it anymore? Don’t be a cop about it. Stay with her. Burn your knees on the carpet at home. As for me, I’m off love. It isn’t real and when it is it’s no good. I just never had any other kind of luck in love.”

          He ripped open a package of red licorice. “Who were your parents, Jack?”

          “No one at all. Good people. They worked hard.”

          He nodded and offered me a licorice. I took out the Lemon Drop suckers and popped one in my mouth. What did we know about anything?

          A red and white van pulled up. I pointed at it. “Look.”

          “It’s a van,” he said, as if it were the Holy Grail and a host of angels flying in formation.

          “Yeah, Cut The Rug.”

          “They clean carpets. Did mine when we moved. Real nice minty smell after. Not like the cedar. That stuff always smells like you’re trying to cover up dog shit.”

          “Maybe you oughta go on T.V. and do a commercial.” Two guys got out and went up to the desk. “That’s the company Braque caught Clara Turback cruising around with.”     

          “You see that car?” he asked. A car pulled up and sat double-parked a few spaces back of the van.

          “Yeah. I see it,” I said. “Let’s move. You got a gun?”

          “Uh huh.”

          “Good. Go in there and distract them. I’ll go upstairs. If something’s wrong, call the apartment. Let it ring three times and hang up. Got it?”

          “Yeah.”

          We crossed the street. He entered the lobby while I cooled off in the rain. Stronghole was one of those guys who could work any angle, once he had it figured. Sometimes, talking with him was like a duet for trombones. He walked up to one of the boys in gold, in his beat up leather jacket and five o’clock shadow and handed him the kind of smile that says money, not some guy without a nose to pick. I watched him work through the milky window. He bowed his head slightly in greeting, gestured extravagantly with his hands, patted down his pockets, and drew a piece of paper out with much relief for all concerned. Soon three of the doorboys clucked around him, peering closely at the paper. One scratched his head. Another studied the street and gazed distantly at the bay. Stronghole went down and my moment was near. When no one was watching the door I slipped in. Stronghole was saying, in a Grassmear accent, “Oh dear, look what I’ve done now.”

          The doorboys were worried. “What is it?” one asked.

          “My contact lens. You must help me find it. I’m nearly blind in that one eye and I have to drive back to Guernsey after the party–” he scanned the ground, his nose an inch from the carpet. Soon he had all three down there with him. I breezed by, got on the elevator and felt sick as the steel trap hurtled heavenward.

          At the door of her apartment I listened. It was quiet. I knocked and then I knocked harder. The door swung open.

          At first I didn’t see her. She was all over the place. That is, her blood was. A pill caught in my throat. There was the splat on the ceiling, fresh enough to drip down on her body. Her head was propped up about two feet away, with what appeared to be her vertebrae attached. She looked so vulnerable, broken into two like that. I wanted to put her back together.

          I reached for my gun and realized I didn’t have one. I went in to get a better look. She was lying on her stomach. It looked like she had been ripped, or rather cut open along her back and decapitated. The blood was puddling on the deep pile carpet.

          What had she done to deserve this? Her long black hair was tied up in her spinal column. She looked like a prawn with a human head. I knelt beside her and looked into her eyes. She wasn’t afraid when it came.

          There were sounds in the hall. I ducked into the closet. That jumble of boxes and ribbons and shoes and coats was a tight fit. I fell back into a mink coat. The smell made me drift a little, before looking through the slats.

          The light came on. Two men in white jumpsuits stood around her torso. The slats made everything flicker. They took off their white jumpsuits and put on these vinyl raincoats with goggles and facemasks and heavy rubber gloves. They were green and smeared all over with blood. Very gently they packed her head into a long, Styrofoam box, face down, spine carefully arranged behind her. This they sealed. Then they stuffed her torso into a body bag, which fit into an official CUT THE RUG duffel bag. Then they removed the suits, which they placed, along with the Styrofoam box, into identical duffel bags. They turned off the light and left without speaking once. Their movements were practiced and well planned.

          I could barely breathe. I ran from the closet, into the hall and heard the phone ring three times. The elevator held back, it took forever to come. By the time I reached the lobby, the van was gone. Stronghole wasn’t there and the fops viewed me from beneath their outsized visors with grim suspicion. A man barged in through the lobby doors, his trench coat stained and wet. Braque didn’t even say my name. He grabbed me by the sleeve and pulled me out the doors, barking, “Let’s go.”