Dancing Aztecs (18 page)

If you were to come to Harlem without knowing anything of its true history, you might think you were on the site of a once-powerful city that had been abandoned hundreds of years ago by its founders, maybe because of plague, or because the civilization of which it was a part had come to an end, or because creatures from outer space had landed and collected all the inhabitants and carried them away to Alpha Centauri to become goulash. Then, you might think, the empty city was left to rot and weather for several centuries of rain and snow and summer heat, and then some other people arrived—probably by dugout canoe from New Jersey—and moved into the empty hulks, and formed their own prímitive society in these relics of the past. Such things have happened in South America, and on the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico, so why not at the mouth of the Hudson? No reason why not. And in fact, when you come to think about it, that history is pretty close to the truth, isn't it?

When Jerry parked the station wagon on 127th Street, half a block from Oscar Russell Green's address, he gave his hubcaps a lingering fond look before walking away, since he never expected to see them again. Then he moved on down the street to a squarish brick structure that was in rather better shape than most of its near neighbors, and he paused on the sidewalk to remark on the fact that at this very moment there were absolutely no bloodcurdling screams to be heard anywhere in the area. Nor were sirens wailing in the distance, nor were shots being fired. Nor was anybody running down the middle of the street waving a butcher knife. To a reader of the
Daily News
this was, at the least, bewildering. Shouldn't the niggers be throwing each other off rooftops? “It's quiet,” Jerry muttered to himself. “Too quiet.”

This building turned out to be easy to enter via the credit card method, and the vestibule doorbells revealed that Green's apartment was on the top floor. Jerry went up and listened at the door, to no effect, then looked around for a service door. Finding none, he went up on the roof instead, down the fire escape to what should be the right window, and found it smashed. Both halves had all the glass missing. If Floyd or whoever had already been here, he'd made an awful mess of things.

Inside there was a bedroom, with lights on but nobody in sight. Jerry slid open the window, trying to be as silent as possible, but when he stepped over the sill his foot crunched on broken glass. Tiptoeing, trying to think himself lighter, he made his way across the crackling floor and had almost reached the far doorway when a reeling drunken black man staggered in, shouting angrily and waving a Dancing Aztec Priest over his head. “Here!” he yelled, as Jerry jumped backward, scared out of his wits. “Here's what you want, goddam it! This is the third time tonight, what's the matter with you goddam people? Leave me alone to get
drunk
, for Christ's sake, goddam it!” And he slapped the statue into Jerry's bewildered hand.

Recovering, Jerry looked down at the thing, and saw at once that it had been broken in several places and glued back together, rather sloppily. It was also very sticky. “Well, no,” he said, and managed on the second try to put the statue down on a handy dresser. “I'm looking for Mrs. Harwood, that's who I'm looking for.”

“Mrs. Harwood? Bobbi?” The black man staggered back against the doorpost, blinking around the room as though she just might be here after all. “There ain't no Bobbi here,” he decided. “Don't I wish there was. You better believe it, don't I wish there was.”

“Where is she?”

“Home.” He stuck his thumb in his mouth and did a disgusting parody of pipe-smoking. “With old Chucky-Wucky.”

“No, she isn't. She left.”

“Yeah? Good girl. Think shell come here?”

Jerry looked the black man up and down, considering him. “No,” he said, “I don't think she will.”

“Shit.”

“Well, you can't win them all. Any idea where else she might go?”

“Orchestra,” the black man said.

Jerry squinted at him. “What?”

The black man reached his arms out in front of himself and made some sort of weird two-handed gesture. “Harp,” he said. “She plays the harp. Classical music. Symphony orchestra.”

“Do that again,” Jerry said.

Now it was the black man's turn to squint. “What say?”

“That thing you did with your hands. Was that supposed to be playing a harp?”

“Sure.” The black man did it again, the same weird gesture.

Jerry shook his head. “Doesn't look like playing a harp at all,” he said. “Looks like pulling in a pot at poker.”

“What, are you crazy?
This
is pulling in a pot.” And he did a different weird gesture.

“Now,
that
one,” Jerry said, “that's something like playing a harp.”

“You don't know shit,” the black man told him. “What do you want Bobbi for, anyway?”

“I may not know shit,” Jerry said, “but I know the answer to that question, and you don't, and you can go screw yourself.”

The black man looked offended. “That isn't fair,” he said.

“Then the hell with it,” Jerry said. “I'm not going to stay here and be insulted. Where's the front door?”

“I thought you were one a them fire escape types.”

“Only coming in.” Jerry started past him, on his way to find the front door, then stopped and said, “
Third
time? Did you say I was the third one looking for that statue?”

“There I was wrong,” the black man said. “I'll admit it, I was wrong about that. What you are, you're the first one looking for Bobbi Harwood.”

“Tell me about these people looking for the statue.”

“Why?”

“Why not?”

The black man considered that, then abruptly nodded and said, “You're right. Okay, at first there was the goddam ballplayers.”

“Ballplayers?”

“Frank and Floyd. Kept throwin the goddam statue back and forth till they goddam busted it.”

“Frank
and
Floyd, huh?”

“That's what they said. Then there was some tall skinny guy from McDonald's.”

“From McDonald's?”

“Had the napkin on his face. Looked like a beaver.”

Was that the mob guys, the ones that wanted the box marked
E
in the first place? Somehow, the description didn't sound right. Jerry said, “Anybody else with that one?”

“Nope. All by himself. Ran around like a cockroach.”

“Huh. Think of that.” Maybe the mob, maybe somebody else entirely. But the point right now was Bobbi Harwood. “Be seeing you,” Jerry said, and left the bedroom.

The black man reeled after him through the apartment to the front door, where he said, “You sure you didn't come here for that goddam statue?”

“Wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole,” Jerry assured him. “So long.” And he left, trotting down the stairs and out to the street.

There was a lot to think about. Frank and Floyd, for two; what were they doing together? And who was the guy with the McDonald's napkin on his face? And if he wasn't from the mob, where
was
the mob?

But the main point was still Bobbi Harwood. Standing on the sidewalk (he had become so blasé by now that he didn't even notice the prevailing quiet), he looked around almost as though he might see her from here. She was somewhere in this city, right now, with what might be the golden statue. But where?

AT THAT VERY MOMENT …

“I tell you, Madge,” Bobbi Harwood said, pouring more of the Almaden Mountain Burgundy from the half-gallon jug into the jelly glass, “I had a revelation tonight. A revelation.”

“That's good,” Madge said, and yawned discreetly behind her hand.

Bobbi didn't notice, She hadn't noticed much of anything the last few hours, not since she'd stalked out of Chuck's life—that was the way she thought of it now, with a new sense of determination and purpose—and marched away down West End Avenue with the two heavy suitcases hanging from her arms. She'd stamped along, noticing nothing in the world around her, ignoring cabs and catcalls and pedestrians, concentrating exclusively on the activities inside her own head, the new aura of freedom and possibility and movement, the new conviction that she was
out
of it now, well out of it and poised on the brink of a new level of being, and it was only the weight of the suitcases that had dragged her at last back down to earth. Once she had finally noticed that her arms were suffering a great deal of pain, she'd also realized she couldn't simply keep walking down West End Avenue the rest of her life. She would have to have a destination.

Which was when she'd thought of Madge, as she had mentioned to Madge herself several times by now. (“I thought of you right away. Right away.”) Madge being a cellist in the same orchestra in which Bobbi plied her harp, and Madge further being Bobbi's best friend in all the world, and Madge even further being someone who was living alone at the moment, it wasn't all that startling that Bobbi had thought of her, but Bobbi herself couldn't seem to get over it.

In any event, she had lugged her luggage another block and a half to a phone booth, where she had called Madge and said, “It's Bobbi and I just left Chuck forever and can I come sleep on your sofa tonight?” Madge had said why-of-course, and Bobbi had taken a cab down here to this pleasant converted brownstone on Waverly Place in the Village, and the two women had been sitting in the front room of Madge's third-floor floor-through apartment ever since, with the traffic going by down below. Madge had produced the then-full-now-nearly-empty half-gallon of red wine, and they had settled down to have a nice dialogue together. Or monologue, really, since the last few hours had seen Bobbi doing most of the talking, her two topics being (A) a specific catalog of Chuck's faults, errors, omissions, and flaws, and (B) a vaguer but equally impassioned catalog of the fresh vistas open to Bobbi now that she had broken out of the trap. Madge's sympathetic smile had become rather more glassy in the last hour or so, but she too had been married at one time, and she knew how terrific it could feel to have a thing like that over and done with, so she was a good sport and let Bobbi run on as long as she wanted.

Which apparently was forever. “A revelation,” Bobbi repeated. She swigged half the jelly glass of wine, and said, “I suddenly realized I could be my own person, you know?”

“I know,” Madge said, and she really did know. Bobbi had said the exact same thing at least eleven times by now. Quickly, before Bobbi could say anything else that she'd already said, Madge told her, “But I'm sorry, honey, I'm afraid I've had it for today.”

Bobbi stared at her, not understanding. “You what?”

“I'm sleepy.” Madge got to her feet. “Stay up as long as you want, Bobbi, but I have to go to bed.”

“In the morning,” Bobbi said. “I'll go see Coalshack.” Everett Coalshack was the director of the New York City Symphony Orchestra, where Bobbi and Madge both worked.

“That's right,” Madge said.

“He can send me to the right people out on the Coast,” Bobbi said. “I know he'll help me.”

“I'm sure he will,” Madge agreed, not for the first time, and retreated out of the room and out of earshot, while Bobbi went on talking.

“I'll get to California,” Bobbi said to the jelly glass and the wine jug and the empty room, “and the
first
thing I'll get is a car. A
car
, goddam it. And a nice little house somewhere near the ocean. And never have to see or hear or speak to that bastard Chuck again.”

She went on in that vein for a while, eventually noticing that she was indeed alone, and then she prepared herself for bed, a process that involved emptying both suitcases all over the living room floor. When this exercise unearthed the little gold-painted statue that had started it all, she gave the ugly creature a radiant smile and whispered to it, “You're my good-luck charm. You know that? You made it all possible.”

She placed the statue on the windowsill, among the avocado plants, with the spider plants dangling overhead; a very jungly atmosphere, perfect for the little devil. And when at last she turned out the lamps and stretched herself on the sofa under Madge's other blanket, she saw how the peach-colored glow of the sodium streetlight outside glinted in metallic slivers on all the contorted surfaces of the creature. Coral and gold, with wicked emerald eyes. “Good night, little devil,” she whispered to it, and she could almost believe that one of the eyes winked at her.

SOON …

The four women playing bridge in the Bernstein dining room were Angela Manelli Bernstein (north), Teresa Manelli McCann (east), Floyd's wife Barbara Kavetchian McCann (south) and Kathleen McCann Podenski (west). (Kathleen, Frank and Floyd's sister, was married to a Polish gentleman named Howie Podenski who was currently serving three concurrent terms for mail fraud but was expected home soon.) Angela was in four spades, doubled, on the basis of Barbara's promise of strong support, but when Teresa led the jack of clubs and Barbara lay down her dummy hand Angela saw at once that she'd been screwed again. “Barbara,” she said, glaring at her sister's sister-in-law, “what in Jesus Christ's holy name made you support spades?”

“Well,” Barbara said, blinking in that infuriating way of hers, “you sounded so enthusiastic about it”

“Barbara,” Angela said, and in the other room the phone rang. Angela closed her mouth, counted to seven, opened it again, and said, “Barbara, answer the phone. You're
dummy
.”

“All right.” Barbara went away to answer the phone, and Angela settled down to compare her hand with the dummy's, to see how much could be salvaged.

When Angela had called Frank's and Floyd's wives to tell them their husbands wouldn't be home for dinner, the idea of bringing in Kathleen Podenski for a fourth and settling down to a nice game of bridge had seemed a natural one. And since the Bernstein home was the only one not blessed with children, it had also been natural to hold the game here. (Besides, Angela was on duty for phone messages, of which this one was the first) The nine children belonging to the other women, ranging in age from Frank and Teresa's eleven-year-old Francine to Floyd and Barbara's four-year-old Ronald, had all been assembled over at Barbara's house with Francine as their baby-sitter and the color television set to keep them out of trouble, so everything was fine.