Odditorium: A Novel (23 page)

“How about seafood? You got to like shrimp.”

Tildy jumped up, shook herself. Balanced on the balls of her feet, one arm shielding her breasts, she scanned the twilight street framed by the open window.

That New York mystique had thus far escaped her. Another city just like the others; bigger, with each rudiment carried to a further extreme, but adding up to not very much. A cannon and a peashooter, were pretty much the same.

“What are we doing in this fleabag anyway?” Tildy wanted to know. “There’s all the money from Pierce for the grass we brought up, but then you hole up here like you just got out on parole.”

“What is it you want, a place with a view of the park? I can send you on a tour to the Statue of Liberty tomorrow, if that’s what you’re after.”

“Don’t strain yourself missing the point, Jimmy. This was supposed to be a holiday. I left all my aches and pains to go on a spree, but here I am with the mildewed room and the cold hamburgers and I might as well be back on the road with the Cougarettes. So what’s the story? Am I being punished for getting it on with Looie?”

“We got no ties. You don’t owe me one little crumb of fidelity. And don’t call me Jimmy.” Christo spoke in freeze-dried tones. “Far as the money goes, that’s my business, my score. It’s capital. Always I’d build a little roll, then fritter it away, but this time I’m going to make the right moves. Nothing to do with you one way or the other.”

“So you’re a pretty conventional asshole after all. You make with that gaudy outlaw routine, but it’s all a shuck.”

“Wish you could see how you look coming on all righteous in panties and a plastic lei.”

“Get bent.”

There followed several minutes of arctic, high-tension silence. Then Christo gently asked if she still wanted to go out and eat. Tildy replied that in her present mood whether they huddled mutely in the room or went for an all-night hike, stopping for beer and pretzels in every bar en route, was of no interest at all to her.

Before Christo could counterpunch, there came a vehement pounding at the door. Just as glad of the interruption, he slid off the bed. “Probably room service with our lobster Newburg.”

Tildy buttoned herself into Christo’s denim jacket as the door opened. A pop-eyed individual in a rumpled trench coat darted into the room and pointed his finger like a gun.

“Bingo. How’s the little shortstop getting along?”

“Vinnie.” She spoke the name with tired, unsurprised disgust.

“Vinnie?”

“Vinnie Sparn, ex-manager of the Cougarettes.”

“Want me to bounce him?”

Vinnie backed toward the window, staking out some territory. “I see I came at a bad time. Sorry to spoil the party but it can’t be helped. Sure, I could come back later, but think how I’d feel having to start all over again ’cause you’d skipped out in the meantime. After coming all this way to find you.”

“If this is a social call …”

“Hey, do yourself a favor, Johnny. Put on your pants and get out of here. She won’t be turning any more tricks tonight.”

Christo bore down on him, looking from side to side for a heavy object. “I think I would like to drop you out the window.”

“Stay out of my way, Johnny.”

They were inches apart and breathing on one another, but Tildy interposed herself, pressing a shoulder into Christo’s chest and pushing him back.

“Butt out. I can cope with this flunky.”

“Hey, watch that talk.”

Pulling at the brim of her cap, “Don’t play like you came on your own. What does Pete want from me?”

“An apology to start. When you jumped the team like that it really hurt his feelings. We looked after you and we gave you whatever you wanted. Didn’t I always let you bat leadoff? And then you go AWOL in the middle of the season. The ingratitude really got under Dad’s skin. He’s just that kind of guy. Dad believes in a kind of basic decency and when it’s flouted he gets very upset. That kind of stress isn’t good for a man his age, you follow me?”

“I’ll write him a letter.”

“Okay. You had your screen time, asshole. Now beat it.” Christo had edged back within striking distance.

“I said I’d handle it. It’s my problem.”

“And a letter just won’t cover it. Not nearly.” Vinnie stroked his sideburns, glowered. “It gets into a legal and moral area. Dad sees the idea of the contract as very crucial to our society. It’s not just a piece of paper, it’s a symbol of something much bigger, a complex system of cooperation and mutual trust. When you break a contract with Dad it’s kind of like spitting in church, you know what I mean? No, I’m afraid you’re going to have to come back to Florida and work this out with him face to face.”

“This is a joke, right? Are you really going to these lengths because Pete couldn’t turn out one of his girls as a shortstop?”

“I think I’ve explained it.”

“Not at all. You can start by explaining how you tracked me down.”

When he smirked, Vinnie’s eyes became little slashes in his sandpaper face. “No big miracle really. A pretty short order once I talked to your husband. A real good old boy, by the way. A great sport. We sat around and had a few and he let slip you were up here. In another little while I was able to make him see it would be to everyone’s advantage to be a little more specific. Then I caught the first plane out. Nice. I got prime rib and a movie.”

“You knocked him around. You leaned on him, didn’t you, fuck-face.” Tildy hurled a glass ashtray; it whistled past Vinnie’s ear and exploded against the wall.

Vinnie swept ashes from his lapel and popped his lips. “I hoped things wouldn’t develop this way. I hoped you’d come with me voluntarily.” He slipped one hand inside the trench coat and came out with a snubnosed .45.

“Lovely.” Christo subsided onto the bed and took a cigarette from behind his ear. “I used to have one just like it. Got it by selling a hundred and twelve tins of White Clover Salve.”

“Go fry your head, Johnny.” Though he’d practiced all his moves in front of a mirror, Vinnie was close to wetting himself.

“You don’t remember White Clover Salve? Used to advertise on the back page of the comic books. They sent you a consignment and depending on how much you could unload you’d get an archery set or a pair of binoculars or a model airplane or a cheezy little tin bank that was supposed to be like a miniature safe with this plastic combination dial—”

“Shut up! You shut up.” Vinnie hopped from one foot to the other, gesticulated meaninglessly with the barrel of the gun. “Come on, Soileau, shake it. We got a plane to catch at LaGuardia in two hours.”

“Vinnie, this is really too ridiculous. And I’m not getting on any plane with you.”

“Don’t push me.” Vinnie thumbed back the hammer and the three of them played eyeball billiards.

“Okay, you win,” Tildy finally said.

“Wait a minute.”

But she scuttled to the bed and held Christo down. “I’d better do it. He’s more afraid of his father than anything else.”

“Who the fuck is his father?”

“Enough!” Vinnie released the hammer, circled around to the door. A votary of private-eye novels, there was a deep invigoration for him in bringing the timeworn gestures to life. The gun felt warm and comforting in his hand, like a baby animal. He could almost hear background music, bongos and walking bass: Vinnie’s Theme. “Hurry it up.”

“Sure, Vinnie. I’ll just put on some makeup and get my stuff together, okay?” She backed toward the bathroom, her movements slow and easy, her smile placating, as if dealing with a maniac bent on swallowing lye. “Don’t get all worked up now. I’ll just be in the bathroom getting ready.”

“You got five minutes.” Maintaining pistol position, Vinnie took out one of his miniature cigars, but didn’t have enough hands to light it with. “You, Johnny, you lay back easy on that bed and don’t try and be a hero. You’ll just end up making a mess on the floor.”

“Sometimes it’s hard to tell what I’ll do, even for me.” Christo plucked thoughtfully at his lower lip. “I been in and out of the psycho ward pretty near all my life, Vinnie. I think that’s something you ought to know right at this moment. I’ve been declared a SCUT three or four different times. Schizophrenic, Chronic, Undifferentiated Type. That’s how they label the real savages, Vinnie, the ones even drugs can’t touch. You know I once bit an orderly’s nose clean off his face, and after that they used to cut cards to see who had to bring me my meals. So you can’t tell. You can’t ever tell what I might do.”

There was hissing and knocking from the pipes as Tildy opened the taps full.

The little cigar jigged at the corner of Vinnie’s mouth. “You’re all noise, Johnny. You don’t worry me.”

“How many feet from the end of the bed to where you’re standing? Eight, ten maybe? I could be on you in one jump.”

“You want your ass in a sling?”

“You’re losing it, hotshot. Little by little you’re losing it.”

“One more word.” Vinnie snapped into firing position, both hands on the pistol grip and arms stiffened. “I don’t need any more reasons to blow you right through the wall.”

Tildy materialized from the bathroom trailing steam. Tightly, down behind her leg, she held the bronze canister of her father’s ashes, the last thing wedged into the suitcase back in Gibsonton on the chance she might find a becoming place to scatter them somewhere along the way.

“Vinnie, should I wear this beige skirt or something more formal?”

He turned to face her and, with the quick release that had started countless double plays, sidearming across her body, she threw the canister at a crucial point between his navel and his kneecaps and hit it dead on. Clutching his groin, Vinnie collapsed like a marionette and the gun skittered free. Christo sprang from the bed, scooped up the weapon and drove his heel into Vinnie’s liver.

“A great throw,” he said. “An honest-to-God, Hall-of-Fame throw.”

“Been wanting to do that for two years. I only wish I’d had something heavier, like a thirty-six-ounce bat.”

“You want me to kill him?” Christo spun the cylinder, stepped back. “Christ. It’s not even loaded. You shmuck, I ought to break this thing down and make you eat it piece by piece.”

Vinnie sucked air, unable even to whimper.

“Let’s just tie him up and get out of here.”

“I’m with you. Tear that bedsheet into strips and soak them in water so they’ll hold good and tight.”

Tildy stood immobile, suddenly chilled, her skin broken out in goose pimples.

“Ease up now, girl, it’s finished. You did great, just great.”

“A lot of help you were.”

He came and pulled Tildy against him, talked into the soft mat of her hair that smelled faintly of smoke. “Do you really think I would have let him take you? No way. I was working on him the whole time, playing with his head.” He moved his fingers up and down the column of her neck until she softened, her arms went loose and her face nestled into his.

Ten minutes later, with Vinnie securely trussed and gagged on the floor, Tildy was preparing a snug nest for Lucien in the deepest recesses of her bag. She stroked the cool, curving metal with her hand and said, “You go back to sleep, Papa.” Then she snapped the bag shut, stepped over Vinnie and out the door.

By midnight they had consumed large quantities of shellfish, listened to a 67-year-old pianist play boogie-woogie in a penthouse bar and checked into a fresh hotel near Washington Square. The room had wall-to-wall carpet, air conditioning and a color teevee.

“There,” Christo said. “Is this what you wanted?”

In darkness they watched a Jock Mahoney western (saddle tramp befriends young widow, saves ranch from foreclosure) and blankly, wordlessly, Tildy drew out his damp, curled penis. The dilatory rhythm of her pumping hand did not increase even at the last. His come was cold on her knuckles by the time she went looking for a towel.

M
EN OF AFFAIRS GET
up early and begin striving right after breakfast. While time may not be money, they often race in the same colors; and in the words of a young blood who tried to sell Christo a hot watch at five
A.M.
in the Detroit Greyhound terminal: “Ain’t never too early to be hustlin’.” It’s not so much a question of getting a jump on the other guy as it is of tilting your mind to precisely the right angle, like the morning prayers of Benedictine monks.

Replete with brioche and black coffee, Christo and Pierce sat at the dining table counting and stacking bills and discussing the state of the market.

“You don’t see so much of that good black hash these days,” Pierce was saying. “Some fairly substantial quantities were being moved out of Lahore a year or two back, but I haven’t heard of anything lately. Nothing that’s reached New York at any rate.”

“How much would that bring per pound on a quantity basis?”

“Hard to say. Hash is moving into that premium area right now, so you might, depending on the variables, be able to hit eleven or twelve hundred.”

Christo reached for a paper clip, tossed another bundle of twenties onto the growing centerpiece beside the coffee pot. “I wish we could figure something that didn’t involve my leaving the country.”

“Poor methodology, jazzbo. You want to maximize every advantage, buying at the overseas market value and then selling back here. It’s called transfer pricing.”

“Whatever. It’s still a bit early in the day for that textbook material.”

“You should just meditate for a while. Get in contact with those bills.”

Pierce had suggested the ritual money counting. Clearly, their putative dope scam would require more capital than Christo was in any position to supply and so to increase his bankroll, Pierce had gotten him a seat in a no-limit poker game starting up in a few hours. He had suggested the counting as a kind of preparatory workout, a way of tuning in to those ethereal cash frequencies; the motions of gathering, riffling, folding and unfolding, the tactile sensations, all magnetizing Christo for those monster pots.

“I’ve got my mystical side,” Pierce had said.

“Uh-huh. Pass the sugar, will you?”

The game was run out of the East Side apartment of an all-purpose middleman named Ernest Freed. Back in the late ’60s Freed had almost cracked the best-seller list with an espionage novel called
The Abramowitz Integer
, but his next one had flopped badly and he hadn’t been in hardcover since. The last piece of writing he’d done was the script for a movie about lesbian stock car drivers that was never produced. Now he ran his little gambling operation, introduced his friends to very amiable “fashion models” (the friends, in turn, would occasionally alert him to an upcoming stock manipulation), and dabbled in ghetto real estate. When pressed, he would admit to having a literary project in the works, but indicated the media overlords would never let it see the light of day since it would “blow the lid off their whole lousy game.”