The Last Bender, Chapter 10

CHAPTER TEN

            Despite vigorous protest I left Linda a C note to pay my part of the check and drove uptown to twist Clara Turback’s arm. For the second time that day I found myself budging along with the creeps, the shysters, and the shaved freaks who push numbers and little guys around for kicks. The radio crooned hybrid folk songs played on tin gadgets.

            I double parked in front of a luncheonette and got a scorched doppio to go and phoned Stronghole. He wasn’t at his desk so I left a message for him to meet me at my house around nine. It was time to take a bite out of that warehouse before Linda and Helen sank their teeth in. And them talking to that wine merchant put them maybe ten feet off from Evalyn St. Claude. And if that happens, someone stretches out on the gurney.

            Clara Turback lived about a mile from the St. Claude’s, close to the bay, in a highrise apartment building with an instaphOtObOOth in the lobby. It was serviced by a small army of obsequious doormen, none over the age of twelve. Their uniforms were fashionably baggy: cuffed navy trousers with yellow seam stripes and matching overcoats with gold braid and  buttons. The visored caps lowered over their eyes gave the impression of a troop of Stygian ducks at the beck and call of the signet corps.

            While they fussed about accomplishing the tasks to which they had been condemned, I tried to read the reservations book on the lectern with the phone. The letters looked like tern prints in the sand. Even the numbers were hard to make out.

            The bay was pewter and still. Squiggles of pink and yellow light pulsed against the highway embankment. Framed in the large picture window like that, with the moss-stained sky high above it, it almost looked like the sea. In front of these windows sat a few men in soft white hats and striped shirts, on the hard cushions begrudged them by lobbyists. Between their canary canvas shoes were shopping bags full of boxed and ribboned presents. It was these the staff of preteens were preparing with such bustle and care. The womenfolk meanwhile deposited film with the eerily cheerful developers. Then they sniffed over bouquets of golden rod snipped and arranged to look like fish and birds.

            Finally one of the boys put the flourish to a perfect bow and lowered the box into its intended shopping bag. Then he stood to go polish a pair of ankle-high magenta boots, presented toe first in his face. But he noticed me flipping through the book. Routine 5-B kicked in and he strode towards me as if he’d just hit the number, eyes insanely lit by purpose.

            “How may I help you sir?” he quacked, brightly.

            “I’m looking for Clara Turback. She live here?”

            “May I ask your name, sir?”

            “Jack Bartell. I’m from Monozone.”

            “Just a moment Mr. Bartell.”   He went to the switchboard, and after replugging the wires a half a hundred times he spoke inaudibly into the headset crammed against his ear, causing the hat to capsize. By the widening of his eyes I could see he was getting nowhere. So I slipped him a fin and watched commerce go to work. “She’ll see you sir,” he said, beaming light rods of triumph, “but just for a minute. She’s getting ready for the opera.”

            “Great,” I said, straightening his hat. “The old Rigoletto routine. Just what I need. Some Jane Mansfield drag queen sticks her hairy balls in my face. Here’s five more big ones. Don’t spend it all on drink. It’ll stunt your growth.”

            He grew sullen. “Actually, the oncologist said alcohol would make it swell. But thanks anyway. The elevator’s down the hall and to the right. She’s on the eighty-third floor. Apartment C.”

            She opened the door. She looked like freshly poured concrete, with limp black hair. Her eyes were small and close, her chin pronounced, and nose almost nonexistent. But her lips were full and wet, like they had been dribbled into place with red oil. She was dressed all in khaki, for an urban safari where the game is fish eggs. A thin black belt was drawn so tight around her waist it sent pleats down her bottom and front. Even before she stood aside and motioned me towards the couch I both despised and pitied her.

            For a swank place it wasn’t much. The couch was fake fur, blobs of black on white, arranged at an angle to a wall of stainless steel and glass shelves. On the shelves was a collection of small, colored glass figurines. Cowboys with blue shirts and yellow sombreros, teams of camels and date palms in topaz and emerald, gaggles of grey geese and turquoise milkmaids with chocolate hair and fulsome breasts. It faced the thirteen foot windows and the bay, which looked like a puddle, almost.

            On the low coffee table was a pile of Scientific Inania. The cover of the one on top was a line of cheerleaders with hippopotamus teeth and the headline The Psychotics of Baton Twirling.

            I sat down. It was like sitting in the lap of a giant panda doll. The carpet pile was as deep as the lemon meringue pie in a Greek diner. It was the same color too, if you mashed it up with your fork.

            “I’d offer you a drink Mr. Bartell, but I don’t drink,” she said, her voice proper, if not prim.

            “Whuddya do, absorb it through your skin? Let’s cut the crap Ms. Turback. Where’s St. Claude?”

            “I told the police. Now you have to go.” She walked over to the window and toyed with her hair.

            “Don’t turn your back on me, lady. I want some answers and I want them now.”

            After a long pause, she said, “Please try to act human.”

            “So you don’t know where St. Claude is?”

            “Already you’re fighting.”

            “His sure bet is with us.”

            She turned around, framed by the boiled cabbage sky. Her shadowed face was hard to read. “He could be anywhere,” she said.

            “You go to the opera though.”

            “Why not? It cheers me up.”

            “I’d bag that trash. It smells old,” I said.

            “A maggot would know.”   She approached the couch. She relaxed her face, like she’d let out a big fart. It was not the face of some highrise kitten from the suburbs who kills her day selling designer airline tickets and stops off at the salad bar after puking barbells at the gym. You could see the crummy childhood shining through the cracks of the forged persona, the hard work and luck that landed her here.

            “Ms. Turback. I’m not gonna burn holes in your tits or spank your feet. I don’t even care what you and your boy friend do when you hit the hay and have a good felch, or how you got eighty floors above the tenement you first shit your pants in. I don’t really care. Are you gonna help me or not? Cause if you don’t, I gotta whole lot of nuts to crack, and I might as well start with yours.”   She stood in front of me, her small eyes darting and figuring. A faint scar ran from her upper lip to her nose. Her hair hung down, twisted like crow feathers.

            “What do you want to know?”

            “You were bitten by a dog once.”

            She sat down next to me on the couch. “Have you ever noticed that all anybody ever thinks or talks about is money?”

            “What are you talking about?”

            “Bromion doesn’t do things for money anymore.”

            I barked, “What’s he do it for then?”

            “Ask the prophet Ezekiel why he ate shit and Ezekiel says, The desire of raising other men into a perception of the infinite.”

            I tapped my head. “So now you’re saying he’s crazy.”

            “People who try not to be irrational savages are crazy?”

            “Well, the people who believe them certainly are.”

            “Have you ever considered what effect you have on the world? How what you do means something beyond yourself?”

            “Could we stick to the point here Ms. Turback? You say he’s changed. He didn’t used to be like that?”

            “No, he was not. I was his student at Cornell. You spoke to Evalyn?”   I nodded. “I know what she said. I won’t recite the charges. But Evalyn is a liar. She would say anything. She says I endured brutalities as his sex slave; but if I did, I don’t remember it, so who cares? Evalyn does, of course. Jealousy. I believe you would say she ratted us out. Those people at Cornell turned tail and suddenly, Bromion hasn’t a dime.”      

            I tried to figure it out with her. “Lemme get this straight. You were his student at Cornell. He started fucking you and Evalyn blows whistle.  The blue noses huff, so he goes freelance but can’t make it go. That’s when he lands the Monozone deal and puts everyone on the payroll. Then something changes him. What’s that? What happened?”

            “This is like, a bug frequency we’re using Mr. Bartell. You are still mostly bug.”

            She smelled faintly of lavender. Not oil, but the dried flower. Up close, her face didn’t look so much like fresh concrete, not as tough or empty as before. She looked like an old china bowl that has been broken and repaired. Far below, dots of light grew and darkened into red globs which the wind picked up and spread across the water.

            I got to my feet and said, “That’s straight up bullshit!  Why is it no one cares about where he is? I wonder.”   I had to lean harder. I couldn’t let them all get to me and then they start lying their heads off.

            “I don’t know what to say.”

            “Is this some way of getting rid of me? Cause if it is, I’ll be damned if I don’t unpack my bags and move in.”   To make my point I sat down and too possession of the couch. “You got any peanuts or anything? A glass of water?”

            “You think your cynicism protects you from the world, but it just blots it out.”

            “Help me out here. What am I supposed to be seeing?”   

            “Look, I’ve gone to a lot of trouble cleaning this place. Your ranting produces an excess of excremental qualia so stifling, I begin to gasp.”

            “I would really like to know what the hell you’re talking about. Now, about this Padraic Stanislau–“

            “is a genius. Bromion would be the first to admit that Stani’s work was indispensable to the breakthrough.”

            “Have you ever known them to be violent?”  

            Her eyes got smaller and her face became harsh, like she were walking into a cold wind. The cracks grew more pronounced. But her voice remained at the same serene pitch she had used all along. “Violence?” she asked. She smiled. “Don’t we live in the Age of Violence? Ruled by people like you, all muscle and desire. Addicted to food, or money. Drunk, like Evalyn. I cannot imagine Bromion is at all acquainted with violence.”

            “Ms. Turback, have you always been like this?”

            “What if you had an octopus stuck to your face?”

            “Don’t start with that.”

            She smiled and licked her lips. “You think that’s funny? I do too. Hear me out. Imagine your nerves, just your nerves, I mean, you are pure sensation, and you are in the clutches of an octopus. You would want to escape. Wouldn’t you like to escape?”

            The room was very dim now. Her khaki clothes glowed in the dusk. Gusts of wind ruffled the crimson water.

            “Yeah sure,” I said. “I’d love to.”

            “Well so do we all. Would you like to see a picture of him? I have two.”

            “Yeah, why not.”

            She brought over two framed pictures. One was the same as Laraby had shown me in the office. Beard to the eyes, one long eyebrow, heavy lips. The other, he’s got no beard and his head is shaved. He’s in these loose white boating pants, standing in the sand. His eyes are deep and dark. I couldn’t tell if it was shadow, or dark matter, radiating out of him.    

            “Have you ever been out to the beach house?” I asked.

            “Certainly. I joined him and Evalyn there many times.”

            “So you and Evalyn hang out? You’re friends? “

            “What you don’t know is almost more amazing than what he does know,” she said, raising her chin. “I had a few bad breaks along the way. Others have treated me far worse and still said they loved me. Then Evalyn got her mole into the lab.”

            Mole? “What kind of a mole? Like on her ass?” I asked. “Or is it, who is the mole working for?”

            “Oh, he was working for her!” she said. “Look at the dipstick Mr. Bartell if you want to know how foul the oil is.”

            “Do you think Evalyn knows where he is?”

            She said to the floor, “I think she’s more of a bug than you are.”

            “You know, ” I said, careful not to raise my voice, but in the throes of irritation, “I’ve had enough of this shit. I think you both know where he is and if you don’t come clean I’ll go to the cops and see what they have to say.”

            “Go to the cops and Monozone will pull your legs off.”

            “What makes you think that?” I growled. “Why do you say that? What do you mean?”

            “He won’t go far without me,” she said quietly.

            “Oh yeah? You don’t sound all that sure of it. I think you’re worried he ditched you. Well, maybe he did. Maybe he took off, and you’re gonna end up taking the rap for him. Shit, you can get hanged for it if anyone was murdered.”

            “He wouldn’t leave without me.”

            “Then you know where he is supposed to be anyway. But if he ditched you, the time to deal is now, and not when it’s too late. If he’s gone bad, and he starts killing, it won’t stop. He’ll come for you then. You know too much.”

            “Mr. Bartell, you are wearing me out.”

            I gave up on the glass of water. “Ms. Turback, I have to go. All this hocus pocus is just spit to me. He can put on the serene face and shout hallelujah all he wants, but St. Claude belongs to Monozone. We want him back and you can tell him for me we’ll let him slide on the lab job and try to save him from sucking gas on the Pechardine. But I will bring him in.”

            She smiled. “My car is waiting, Mr. Bartell.”

            I stood up. The apartment was dark. She showed me to the door. I was incredibly thirsty. It was like a spider had spun a web between my teeth.