Odditorium: A Novel (31 page)

“Your wisdom in coming is to your credit. It pleases me much to open my doors for citizens of the world. Since I am a child and my father teaches me to sift kif through horsehair, I am dedicated to a search for better and better ways to make and preserve hashish. Please to come now with me and see for yourself.”

More sunglasses, more relatives. They were busy as beavers in the processing room. Ali Mustafa knelt beside one of his cleaners, dipped into the man’s wide metal pan and rubbed fine powder through his fingers.

“Just to touch our hashish is a pleasurable thing.” He opened his hand to display the resinous globules that adhered. “And you will see the color, how dark. These plants, my friend,
extraordinaire
. Most we pick before the strong winds come, but these we grow terraced behind a mountain and protected. We wait and wait to pick, and the ripeness is so sweet to make perfume in the valley at night. You see now how it takes form.”

From one of the gallon cans, Ali Mustafa scooped an expertly exact amount of his product onto a square of cellophane, laid a second square on top and placed this sandwich in the lower plate of a hand press.

“My grandsons invent this machine. The heat is inside, by electricity. No flame.” He turned a small black dial, activating the scavenged element of a steam iron, then spun the crankshaft; the plates clamped together. “Now is the beauty. The spirit of hashish,
comme on dit …
It unites. The essence set free in the heat.”

The slab he removed moments later was fudge brown, smooth and sealed airtight in cellophane.

“This,” holding the slab over his heart, “this is the pride of Ali Mustafa.”

Once more around the brass table, they waited in reverent silence while the narghile was prepared. Made of cut green glass, it had four flexible, gold-embroidered smoking tubes attached to amber mouthpieces. The urn-shaped bowl was filled to the rim with alternating layers of black tobacco and hashish, a hot coal nestled on top.

Ali Mustafa leaned close to present one of the mouthpieces and Christo saw his eyes were milky and brown like an old dog’s. Suspicion churned inside, stirring up from Christo’s cloudy bottom the urge to see conspiracy. Their cunning scheme: banish his vigilance to an island of smoke, fill his head with hash anarchy, then ambush with curved blades. A piece of throat for every family member. Something now at his ribs.

But it was Tomas nudging him. All right, if only for protocol. Christo inhaled, water bubbling and rebounding off the glass, smoke jetting into his lungs. A kick in the chest from a mule. He clapped his hand over nose and mouth to hold down the coughs.

“Very smooth,” Tomas offered, blue smoke billowing from his nostrils. “And the taste, very fresh. Your skill is unique, Ali.”

Christo could only nod agreement. He had exhaled by now, but articulate speech was beyond him. His eyes were tearing and his throat rippled upward. He took another toke, more cautiously this time, but still felt that mule kick.

“Superb,” he rasped. Protocol.

Ali Mustafa chuckled, tossed another chunk of hashish onto the hissing embers. “Superb, my traveling friend,
mais oui
. Your pleasure is mine also.”

Christo inhaled through clenched teeth, rocked back with eyes closed.

“He flies now, you see? He pilots the magic carpet.”

As Christo sank deeper into the cushions, puffing steadily, he recognized that he was conquered, could no more lift an arm to ward off imminent disaster. He saw Tomas and Ali Mustafa conversing under white corollas, their mouths moving wetly, their hands punctuating the air. The sounds came to him, but none of the words. Let them do their worst, then. Let his uneasy life seep away into these cushions. He could repudiate it all.

Ibrahim looming above him then, a cold presence, and Tomas pulling him upright.

“It’s time for the money.”

“Hmm?”

Ali Mustafa knitted his sausage fingers. “I know you are men of honor.”

“The money,” Tomas hissed. “Show them the bloody money.”

Through bunched cloth Christo felt along his waist where the heavy belt had chafed him. Staggering to his feet, smiling hazily, he dropped his pants.

Casa Nocturne, the villa the Ulrichs were subletting from a British rocket engineer, had a sweeping view of the harbor from its tiled patio. Christo slouched in a canvas chair, his feet propped on the balustrade, and gazed down at a berthed cruise ship, which was strung with lights and gave off faint twitters of cocktail music. Acacia leaves fluttered overhead in a breeze that pushed ahead of itself the aroma of deep-fried seafood.

Tomas had been furious with Christo’s inept comportment. A wonder they hadn’t both been left in a gully, he said. Back at the garage, once they’d finished loading the Rover’s carefully padded deadspace, Christo had thrown Tomas his cut like a bag of giblets.

“Milbank sends me his office boy.” Tomas had folded his arms, struck a pose of pedagogic disdain. “It’s not worth getting angry about.”

Office boy? Maybe. Christo shifted his eyes from the harbor to the Beaujolais in his glass. He imagined Tomas hemmed in by ski-masked zealots, on his knees before a crate of rifles packed in cosmoline. That much of a pro, he thought, I don’t need to be.

“More wine?” Inge Ulrich stepped onto the patio, surfer-blond bangs fringing over her brow like a torn hat.

“Sure. I’ll take a splash.”

“Such a lovely moon from here. And the ships.”

Christo had been presented to her in his biochemist’s guise; he was supposed to be on his way to a university lectureship in Accra. Inge, her husband explained, was deeply concerned with physical health and purity.

“No mention can be made of your business here. It would be extremely unpleasant if she found out I am involved in something she considers destructive. But she never objected to my arms business. ‘Just machines,’ she would say. ‘I have nothing against machines.’ Does that make sense?”

But Inge had always lived on contradiction; and in ways Tomas knew nothing about.

Years ago in Stockholm she was a prostitute, an addict. She was tough enough to keep the pimps off her back, but she was afraid of the dark and kept a crucifix under her pillow. Her steadiest customer was a physician whose wife had been maimed in a train derailment. He paid Inge generously to put on rubber boots and defecate over a glass coffee table while he lay underneath. On the promise that she service him exclusively, he installed her in a deluxe apartment, supplied her with ampules of morphine that she stored in the egg tray of the refrigerator. But Inge’s promise was as empty as her merchant’s heart. A private detective reported that she was seeing as many as five clients a day.

The physician was distraught, bent on revenge. He took her to his chalet on Lake Vattern and handcuffed her to steel rings in the attic floor. For five days he denied her food and sleep, beat her with hemlock boughs and pierced her with heated safety pins. This was behavior modification of the crudest type, but when at last he freed her, dumping her scab-covered body in a roadside snowbank, Inge felt immeasurably cleansed. From that day forward, she had not touched so much as an aspirin and, until her marriage to Tomas, was doggedly celibate.

Inge had learned that truth extended no farther than the surface of her skin, that flesh and bone were all the wealth she’d ever have. Now she drank no water that had not been boiled first, and confined her diet to vegetables and whole grains. She douched with ginseng vinegar and all day long gobbled papaya enzyme and bee pollen tablets mailed to her from London.

After dinner, Inge served refreshments in the living room—coffee for the men, chamomile tea for herself. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and she smelled harshly of laundry soap. Tomas, suddenly the mellow host, showed off his up-to-the-minute sound system.

“These tapes are very rare. Live broadcasts from the ballroom of a Kansas City hotel.”

But his sermon on the martyrdom of Charlie Parker was interrupted by a phone call.

“A Frenchman,” Inge reported. “Something to do with business.”

She lowered herself to the floor near Christo, now supine and awash in Beaujolais. Smiling tightly, she wiggled her naked toes on the rug, hugged her knees.

“Where were you born?”

“Flint, Michigan. That’s up north.”

“We have been in the States. Did he tell you?”

“Not that I recall.”

“It depressed me. A crumbling empire, you know? And the people are so insecure. So desperate for heroes, don’t you think?”

“Not desperate.” Christo rolled onto his side. “Just fickle.”

“Everything is treated like a pair of shoes.” Inge was flushed with vehemence. “What life is there for artists? You see all the musicians who must go abroad for appreciation while the people worship athletes and television stars.”

Right. Next, Christo supposed, she’ll be asking me if Malcolm X was murdered by the oil companies. “We need a lot of tranquilizing, that’s all. Nothing special.”

Inge squinted at him, stretched out her legs. “Do you mind?” Already her feet were wedged up against his thigh. “I have poor circulation and they get so very cold.”

They were clammy, too, pressing under him and up, digging in like a couple of baby fists. He looked at sea-green veins distinct along her ankle, then into her steady eyes.

“I think in America you must be a beggar or a king and nothing in between,” Inge said, and tiptoed up to the fork in his legs.

“That must be why I left.”

The laundry soap smell was hypnotic, a rhinal drug like the perfume dumped into department-store ventilation systems. Without the least hint of anything on her face, she massaged the root behind his balls with an icy big toe. The most artless pass ever thrown at him, but they were both breathing hard. Crazy situation, ferociously dreamy, brainless, but under wraps somehow. Strangers when we meet. He noticed a saliva bubble in a crevice between her teeth.

“We must stop.” She flipped her bangs, looked away.

Hearing footsteps, Christo rolled over to hide his erection.

A bad morning, Christo faltering out of hermetic sleep and into the shower, rolling his clogged head under the spray until the hot water ran out. Tomas seemed edgy as they walked to the shop, glancing over his shoulder and nibbling the end of his tongue. The paint was dry on the Rover and Abdel, who’d been up all night, had gauze bandages wrapped around one hand. Tomas told him he could take the rest of the day off.

“No hard feelings?” Christo said.

“No feelings, none.” Tomas drew a flat line in the air with his pipe. “I close the book on this thing and then no more. You tell New York what I say. No more.”

“Well, thanks for the dinner. Next time you and Inge will have to come over to my place.”

Christo drove along the waterfront checking pier numbers. The
Sombra
, a freighter under Liberian registry, was a sorry-looking item, algae blots along the waterline, its red stacks barred with soot. White sunlight gave it the complexion of a disaster ship. Christo imagined a Taiwanese mate gone berserk with a fire axe, alone by morning on a rudderless vessel lost in the garbage currents. Oh well.
Maktub
, as they say hereabouts. It was out of his hands.

He signed clearance papers, a stack of traveler’s checks. Then, on his way to find a cab to the airport, he let loose his rabbit’s foot and watched it fall, an offering to the sea.

Pierce at the wheel of the Packard was a jolly welcome-wagoneer, rocking from side to side as he hummed selections from
On the Town
. He’d been a few hours late picking Christo up at the terminal, but presumably had needed the extra time to deck out in the belted camel’s-hair coat, pinstripe three-piecer, taupe gloves, to grab the feel of this event and then describe it in clothes.

“So our ship comes in on the sixteenth and everything is everything. I never doubted your aptitude, jazzbo, not for a second.”

He announced they were bound for Pine Hill, Connecticut, and the Milbank family retreat. It was a proclamation rather than an invitation and Christo chafed at his lack of choice. Back behind the lines, mission accomplished, and still he was following orders. There they were, bombing up the Taconic Parkway with the top down and the threat of snow in the air. They sipped warmth from a pewter hipflask while naked trees whipped by in stripes of gray and brown, a frugal winter plaid.

Minutes from the state line, a police cruiser came up alongside and ran even with them, door handle to door handle. Every few seconds the bruiser inside would turn and stare at them out of his dark eyeholes.

“Fucking yokel,” Pierce said. “I should put him away. Done one twenty in this thing against a headwind.”

“No special effects.” Christo touched his arm. “Please.”

It was just the sort of challenge Pierce would hand himself, one more small stone in the legend he was building. But he just smiled and waved, hissing through his teeth, “Your mother’s head in a plastic bag, Nazi.”

The cruiser peeled back, U-turned across marshy median grass.

By the time Pierce turned onto the gravel drive that led through dark and aromatic woods to the house (erected in 1909 by his great-grandfather with the proceeds from a cotton mill and two tuberculosis sanatoria in the Adirondacks), snow had begun to fall. He coasted around the last curve, leaned back and let woolly flakes melt on his face. With its exposed rafter ends, incised shutters and jigsawed eaves, the house looked like a huge chocolate cuckoo clock.

“Like going back in time, isn’t it?” Pierce surveyed his patrimony from the running board. “To the golden age of the robber barons.”

Inside, Christo stared at his reflection in the dusty glass bell sheltering a stuffed canary while Pierce chased around turning on lights and thermostats. The furnace kicked on, blowing musty fumes, and Christo said he needed some coffee. Badly.

Improbably shiny copper pans and utensils hung from the kitchen beams. Pierce filled the kettle and got French roast beans out of the freezer. The coffee maker took paper filters but none could be found, so Pierce substituted a scarf that had belonged to his grandmother. The resultant brew had a faintly iridescent surface. Christo lifted his cup, blew, sipped.