Budding Prospects (45 page)

Then I was out in the hallway, my jacket torn from the hook, rattle of car keys, Phil’s face, Gesh’s, the long aluminum table heaped with our sad, diminished and tainted gains, my feet on the steps, the outer door, the porch, the car. The engine caught with a roar and I lurched out into the street. I didn’t see traffic lights, flashing neon, the sweeping turrets of the Golden Gate Bridge. Through the glare of the oncoming headlights and the shadows lashing at the windshield, I saw one thing only: Vogelsang.

The night was clear, the moon a gift in the sky, a sharp unforgiving stab of cold on the air. Though the main gate was locked—barricaded like the portals of Teste Noire’s castle—I could see lights in the distance, and faintly, as in a midsummer night’s dream, I could hear snatches of music. He was home. I contemplated the glowing spot of the buzzer, the dark grid of the squawk box. Should I ring and announce myself like a dinner guest—or bound over the wall like a renegade? I’d come to the end of the line. I wanted answers, apologies, amends, I wanted to see Vogelsang on his knees, stigmatized by his guilt and begging forgiveness in a spew of
mea culpas
, I wanted to see him humbled like a Harijan outside the temple—maybe I even wanted blood. I don’t know, I wasn’t rational. Or I was rational in the way of a Son of Sam or a George Metesky, stealth and calculation on the surface, violence burning beneath like a primordial itch. I turned away from the buzzer.

Gravel crunched as I maneuvered the Toyota alongside the gate, squeezing in parallel, inches to spare. I had no thought—no conscious thought, anyway—of closing off the gate as if I were laying siege to the place, but that was the effect. My idea had been to use the car as a ladder, but as I hoisted myself from the Toyota’s roof to the top of the gate, I saw that I’d also managed to set up a blockade—as long as the car was there, no one was going anyplace. Blood sang in my ears; I heard the soft thump of drums from the direction of the house. Slowly, cautiously,
with the grace that comes of necessity, I lowered myself down the inner side of the gate—it must have been ten feet high—and dropped into the darkness below.

All was quiet, save for the fitful melody drifting across the night from the dimly lit house. There were no crickets, no locusts, no katydids, the seething generation of insects that had chattered and gibed at me through the summer’s crises dead now, trod under. I moved toward the light, stealthy as an assassin. Down the drive, past Vogelsang’s faintly gleaming Saab and the pale backdrop of the eucalyptus grove—but what was that? The familiar outline of the Jeep, and beside it the Datsun pickup. Vogelsang had been busy.

Through another gate, circling round, and up the redwood steps to the back deck. No pets to worry about, no scurrying Siamese or lurching old hounds, no surprises or alarms. Breathing hard, I inched my way along the rear wall, a cloud of water vapor clinging to my face like a mask. The shades were drawn on the first window—kitchen or bedroom, I couldn’t remember which—but dead ahead a long parallelogram of light cut across the deck where the ballroom would be. Carefully, carefully. I edged toward it, the music dying and starting up again, louder now, more distinct: tabalas and tambourines, some sort of weird goatherd’s serenade pierced at intervals by an intermittent reedy piping that suggested a hobbled old fakir sporting a turban and dying of emphysema.
Chink-chink, doom; chink-chink, doom.

I was forcing myself to move slowly, counting one, two, three seconds between steps, concentrating on images of bushwhackers, scalp-takers, naked sly Iroquois to whom the snap of a twig meant the difference between life and death, when all at once a cold stiff hand shot out to snatch at my arm. I jerked back reflexively, there was a sharp rasping as of a chair shoved back against a parquet floor, and next thing I knew I was frantically juggling one of Vogelsang’s mannequins. The mannequin had been propped against the wall, minding its own business, and I’d blundered into it. Now, eyeless, faceless, it came at me, toppling like a cut tree, like a corpse dislodged from its niche in the catacombs, and I was already shrinking from the crash, the alarmed footsteps, the burst of the floodlights and the click of the shell in the chamber of that black blazing shotgun, when I
lurched forward at the last second to catch it with the plunging manic swoop of a tango instructor at the graduation ball.

For a full minute I hunched there, motionless, the mannequin clutched to my thundering chest. I listened for footsteps, waited for the shout of discovery. Nothing. The music went on as before, the piping intertwined now with a flat nasal moan that rose and fell like smoke over a campfire. I didn’t know exactly what I was doing on Vogelsang’s back porch in the dead of night—or what I was going to do—but somehow surprise seemed the key. For once I wanted to catch him off guard, take him by storm, blitzkrieg his sensibilities and blast his composure—for once I wanted the upper hand. And so I froze there, barely breathing, the slow seconds digging into my scalp like tomahawks, until I knew I was safe. Soundlessly, with relief and gratitude and oh such care—picture the novice paramedic lowering a nonagenarian with back problems onto the stretcher—I set the mannequin down. Then, still hunched low, I crept forward.

Vogelsang was sitting at the long table in the center of the room, his back to me. A pair of antique brass pole-lamps flanked him, lighting the table like a ticket booth, and he seemed to be deliberating over the arrangement of a welter of pale, rigid and faintly yellowed objects spread out before him—if I hadn’t known better I might have taken them for ivory backscratchers and chopsticks, for nose flutes and tortoiseshell combs dumped from the bag of a Hong Kong street peddler. Looking closer, I saw the cusp of a mandible, the swell of a partial ribcage, and at Vogelsang’s elbow, the thin-boned dumb-staring skull. Or no, a pair of skulls, face up, worn the color of weak tea and tessellated like parchment. I watched him pick up a polished toe- or finger-joint and compare it with another, then lift a heavy magnifying glass from the table and peer through it as if he were grading gems.

Barefoot, dressed in a short oriental robe with a sash round the waist, Vogelsang could have been a samurai taking his ease in the geisha house. His movements were slow and circumspect, the lamps cast an aureole about him, the fireplace flared as with a ritual blaze. There were the remains of a snack—fish flakes and ginseng, no doubt—and a bottle of wine and three glasses
on the table beside him. To the far left, in the darkened stereo/TV nook, the fiery red light of the amplifier glowed, and the VU needles of the tapedeck dimly registered the percussive clank and moribund whine of the goatherd’s serenade. I saw the guns and knives climbing the walls, the dancing bobcats, glittering display cases and all the rest; there was no one else in the room.

I stood, a fragment of the night, a Ch’en Ta Erh hovering over the go-between’s bed, and tried the handle of the sliding glass door. The door was unlatched. One finger, the slightest pressure, and I’d cracked it an inch. The music sharpened suddenly, all edges, and I could feel the warmth of the room on my face. I hesitated, steeling myself, fishing for an opening line—what do you say to someone who’s violated a trust, used and manipulated you, who plays dirty yet never loses, someone lounging in his pajamas in his own living room and fiddling with a heap of discolored bones while the walls bristle with guns and knives and swords?
Naaah, naa-aaah-naaah
sang the goatherd,
chink-chink, doom
went the drums. It was then—just as I’d screwed up the nerve to throw back the door and spring into the room like an avenging demon—that Aorta swung through the kitchen door with a coffee mug in her hand. But it wasn’t the mug that caught my attention: no, not that. The first thing I noticed was that she was naked.

Thirteen years old, I’d peeped through the curtains at sad yeasty middle-aged Marge Conklin and watched her roll the sepia stockings from legs like suet, until I lost heart—something terrifying there, something claustrophobic and fatal—and sank into the bushes as if I’d been clubbed. I felt the same way now. Forbidden fruit, systems overload: I was electrified. Aorta crossed the room, her breasts gently swaying, the swath of hair caught like a juggler’s prop between her legs, and stopped to lean over Vogelsang and his sepulchral booty. She showed me her backside, tight, solid, slightly parted legs, ass wagging, as she brushed Vogelsang’s cheek with her lips and set the mug down on the table. I was riveted, turned on, hot as a moth doused with pheromones, but feeling guilty, too, ashamed: I’d come with high purpose, I’d come to vanquish deceit and wave the banner of decency, truth and honor, and here I was shuffling around
outside the window with a hard-on like some pubescent Peeping Tom. I backed off and pressed myself to the wall.

When I looked again, Vogelsang was alone. Aorta had moved off into the shadows at the far end of the room: I strained to make her out. So long as she was in the room—and especially so long as she was prancing around in her skin as if she were about to rub herself down with coconut oil or powder her privates—I couldn’t burst in and confront Vogelsang. Could I? But why not, I thought, feeling a rush of evil, remembering my hurts. I’d come to take him by storm, right? How better terrorize him than to spring through the door with a bloody shout just as he mounts her amid the phalanges and vertebrae? Yes, I thought, grinning like a deviate, and I began to pray that she’d stop fiddling around in the dark and come back to distract him from his bones.

It was too fond a hope.

I was crestfallen—as voyeur and sadist both—when a moment later she emerged from the shadows in a short robe identical to Vogelsang’s and made for the kitchen again. But wait a minute. Was this Aorta? Stiletto nails and black lipstick, yes, the up-thrusting breasts and liquid legs, but there was something different about her—was it her hair? It seemed longer, darker, and the broad badger stripe was gone. Or was it something else—-her chin, her nose, the way she moved? I couldn’t be sure. The kitchen door swung to, and she disappeared.

Now was my chance. I thought of Jones, Rudy, thought of nine months down the tubes and threw back the door with an apocalyptic rumble. Vogelsang glanced over his shoulder—casually, with the barest interest, as if he were dining at Vanessi’s and the cocktail waitress had dropped a glass at the bar—and then all at once his face went numb and I saw the spasm of alarm, the panic that froze in his eyes till they shone like the glass buttons of his badgers and bobcats. I was huge, I was terrible. A wave of malicious joy swept over me. “Felix,” he said, fumbling for my name as if he’d forgotten it.

I stepped into the room. Saying nothing.

Anyone else would have expressed shock, surprise, outrage, fear, anyone else would have demanded an explanation, reached
for the shotgun or ducked under the table. But not Vogelsang. No: he was never surprised, never startled; like some serene alien being, some exemplar of cool, some god, he merely turned his back to me. I’d broken into his house in the middle of the night while his woman strutted around naked, I’d sprung from the shadows to strike terror in his heart and make him think, if even for an instant, that his reckoning had finally come, and he turned his back on me. I was stupefied, enraged, cheated even in this. Was he deliberately baiting me? I was about to bellow his name in stentorian wrath, scream it till the windows shook, when he turned slowly round with the bottle in his hand. He held it aloft, offering it. “Wine?” he asked.

I looked beyond him to the three glasses on the tray and in that moment felt the balance shift—if for a second the momentum had been with me, I’d lost it now. Three glasses. Why three? It was uncanny, unsettling: it was almost as if he’d been expecting me.

“It’s been a while,” he said, pushing the chair back and standing to face me.

My throat was constricted, as if I were standing before a packed courtroom and trying to swallow a lump of cold egg noodles while cross-examining a witness. “Why’d you lie to us?”

He was pouring wine into a long-stemmed glass. “Bordeaux,” he said, “Haut Brion, 1972. Ever so slightly tart.” He stepped toward me, then thought better of it, and set the glass back down on the table while he bent to refill his own. We were playing at host and guest—the ceremonial offering, the gracious smile and easy banter—and all the while billowing little bursts of rage were detonating in my head. Even at the best of times the wine was an affectation, like his stilted diction and his sangfroid. Something to have, to know about, to control. I’d never seen him drink more than half a glass in my life—why would he? Alcohol softens you, takes the edge away. The competitive edge.

“We’re celebrating tonight, did you know?” He gestured toward the table. “Cocopa. A woman and child. We found them together, in a single grave, just across the border in Sonora.”

This was archaeology night. Here we were, pals, a pair of old bone collectors sharing a bottle of good wine prior to the slide show. Well, I was having none of it. I stood there fuming,
intransigent, waiting for an answer: I would not be put off. “You lied,” I said.

He rolled the glass between his palms, deciding something. I watched the light catch his hair and the way his shadow loomed toward me as he rocked back and forth on his heels. “All right,” he said finally, “I admit it. I lied to you.”

If there was a moment at which things could have gotten physical, it had passed, and he knew it. I could have flung myself at him like a kamikaze, I suppose, and I’d been close to it in that gut-tightening instant when he’d turned his back to me as if I were nothing—a child, a cripple, a pup—but we both knew he could have taken me easily. I had only to think of the night he’d brought Gesh down, of the primal look that had come into his eyes and the terrifying mechanical response of his body, to understand how futile it would be. I’d come to recover my dignity. Lying prone beneath Vogelsang as he applied the Montagnard death grip was no way to start.

I stood there in the doorway, itching like a gunfighter called out back of the saloon. There was a cold draft on my neck, the night smelled of wet leaves and eucalyptus buttons, I heard the ring of silverware from the kitchen, the sad stiff bones glowed under the lights, the dancing bobcats grinned at me. “You’re a worthless son of a bitch,” I said. “You’re a cheat and a liar.”