Odditorium: A Novel (32 page)

“Mmmm.” He smacked his lips. “Tastes like old neck.”

It was in an upstairs corner room, at a slate billiard table with mother-of-pearl inlay and ball-and-claw feet, that Pierce and Christo convened to discuss the Morocco operation. They puffed stale cigars and played Chicago rotation by the light of frosted candleflame bulbs.

“Give me your assessment on quality,” Pierce said, lining up a knotty three-ball combination.

“Devastating. Couldn’t see my hand in front of my face.”

“You brought a sample?”

“Fuck no. I went out of there clean, baby. An investment like that, I wasn’t going to get popped at the airport for a couple of measly ounces.”

“That’s not like you.”

“Maybe not. You’re disappointed I didn’t screw up?”

“Hey, you’re my hot prospect, my rookie phee-nom. Would I let you fall short?”

Christo flubbed a delicate onion slice on the ten ball. “Not so far.”

“You’re sitting right smack on top of the biggest score of your life, so cheer the hell up. Show a little faith in yourself.”

“Tell it to the Swede.”

“What about him?”

“We were what you call incompatible.”

“Really?” Pierce appraised the end of his cigar, began to pace. “Maybe it figures. The man has the battle stars and he’s been through some hard campaigns. But I have to say I didn’t fill you in all the way on Tommy Ulrich before you left.”

“Let’s have it.”

“I heard—from a highly impeachable source, mind you—that he had a breakdown three years ago, burned out some circuits.”

“Shit.” Christo flung cue chalk across the room. “So you sent me over there without a map.”

“Take it easy. I didn’t want you to get, as it were, psyched out.”

“Thanks a lot. So who told you?”

“His wife.”

A sickening gyroscope spinning around his brain, Christo slumped onto the window seat. Always the last to know when the joke’s on you. Outside thinly layered snow had turned ghost blue under the moon. He pressed his fingers to the cold pane, then his eyes.

“You all right?” Pierce meant to be solicitous, but sounded annoyed.

“Relax. I’m not going to bleed on the furniture.” Forebodings were best left where they were. Trite phrases would do: “I’m tired out is all. Overworked.”

“Country air will take care of that. A respite among the evergreens, that’s my prescription.”

Christo moved his eyes slowly over the shadowy room. “I don’t know about this place. Too much gloom, too many spooks.”

“Exactly. That’s why I come here. The sacred ground of the ancestors. They’re my people, those spooks, and I need to get in touch, replenish the spirit now and then. Great uncle Lydon who owned half of Nova Scotia at one time and held the state record for brown trout up until the fifties. My grandfather, who appeared drunk before the Supreme Court. And Granny Syl, she gave me the money to swing my first major dope deal. I told her I needed something to live on while I wrote a novel. But they’re all gone now and I’m the only one holding on. My parents come here for a week every summer and bitch about the property taxes. So it’s me. Everything flows into me. The magic fucking power of the ancestors and I’m the only one who sees how valuable it is.”

“How valuable it is,” Christo repeated. “I despise the rich.”

They dined on a muddy goulash of canned goods and went early to bed.

These rooms were glacial with gentility, outlined in trickery and clutter, overfed on the trivial seductions of the past—yachting trophies on the mantel, seashells in a reed basket, a fez set rakishly atop a bust of Longfellow. Christo could only react to it as a job site. He’d been checking the layout all morning, conjecturing what ought to be taken and what left behind: the thief’s triage. And he was watched every step of the way by the brushstroke eyes of china statuettes, the faces in countless photographs whose posed implications were as unbending as noon light on rich wood surfaces all around, brown in a dozen languages.

On the porch in his overcoat, Pierce hunched over his typewriter, banging away at preliminary notes for a detective story. No title yet, but it would involve treachery on the international commodities market and plutonium secreted in someone’s toothpaste.

Over the last few days they had not been getting along well. Tension and close quarters: a recipe for spite. Pierce didn’t help matters any by making a point of competition—gin rummy, backgammon, twenty questions, even Candyland and Lotto, children’s board games dredged up out of musty drawers.

“Enough,” Christo protested. “Even boredom is better than this.”

“We just need to find a game you can win at.”

In the evenings Pierce would fry potatoes, broil some previously thawed chops, uncork yet another bottle of wine. Afterward they’d listen to the radio or to hissing 78’s of Paul Whiteman, Vincent Lopez and his Hotel Pennsylvania Orchestra. Then finally, one of them would cross out another box on the calendar; one less hindrance in the way of Hash Wednesday on the sixteenth.

While Christo displayed classic cabin fever symptoms, wandering aimlessly from room to room and talking to himself, Pierce grew increasingly preoccupied. He disappeared for hours into glassy contemplation, spoke cursorily, and only when prompted, of their deal. Would the turnover take long? Had he lined up buyers in advance? Pierce would mumble and shrug, treating the whole thing as an intrusion on his pensive vigil. Christo saw this aspect of his partner’s personality both as a surprise and as something he should already have guessed. Here, in the blunt context of Bleak House (the apt name Christo had found on the tooled spine of a book), was the truth for which Pierce had been overcompensating all along. He was not so very different from his sister, no more removed than she from the onerous requirements of Family. Christo wondered whether he had ever considered suicide.

“Writing is no better than factory work,” Pierce said now, shivering as he came in from the porch. “How about some lunch?”

“We just had breakfast two hours ago.”

“If there’s something you’d rather do than eat, let’s hear it.”

So, while Pierce made busy with skillet and spatula, Christo sat acquiescently at the big oak table. He toyed with a wooden napkin holder in the shape of a turtle. Probably made in some blazer-school shop class and wrapped up for Christmas. Granny had developed a fixation for turtles; they were all over the place, in needlepoint, on coffee cups. One more compulsory tradition.

“I was thinking this morning I might move up permanently.” Pierce served a tunafish-and-green-bean omelet. “Somehow I feel a lot closer to reality here.”

“You’ll get over it.”

“It’s more than a passing mood.” Pierce pointed with his fork. “You don’t come from anywhere, that’s your problem.”

“You’re pulling rank on me now?”

“I only mean to tell myself not to waste explanations on you.”

Christo pushed away from the table. “This tastes like soap.” His scalp tingled with exasperation.

Pierce had to be dragged from under the blankets on Wednesday morning. All the way down in the car he complained of swollen glands.

“You want to stop at a diner for chicken soup?”

“No, let’s get this thing over with.”

But by the time they reached the customs terminal in Port Elizabeth, Pierce had regained his urban gloss and laughed at his own jokes. After all that down time on the Milbank acres, Christo found the industrial landscape soothing and was able to dismiss the vague unease that had been plaguing him. All cut and dried, really. The hard part was already done; the rest was mere processing. Documents in hand, he went to claim his property.

All omens were good. The
Sombra
had arrived slightly ahead of schedule and the off-loading was already done. The sun was shining and the customs agents looked tired and complacent. Still, he noticed, they’re wearing sidearms.

“Lived in New York long, sir?”

“I hear these babies don’t get the good gas mileage.”

Inspecting the Rover from front to back, they small-talked him, the usual testing for nerves. Christo answered placidly, in no hurry. Then they brought out the German shepherd. No problem, he reminded himself. That’s why we layered red pepper on top. At a whistled command, the dog bounded into the front seat, sniffed busily with ears pricked and tail wagging.

“Okay, Rusty.” The agent snapped his leash back on, slipped him a biscuit. “Follow me please, sir.”

The voice was dry, uninflected; handcuffs jingling on the agent’s belt were astonishingly loud. Christo felt momentarily that all was lost and it was too late to run. But all they wanted from him inside was his signature on a few more forms.

With Pierce leading the way in the Packard, he headed at last for snug harbor in lower Manhattan.

Looie met them at the elevator gate with a coil of yellow extension cord in one hand and a circular saw in the other.

“Could we get started right away? I’m hosting a poetry reading tonight.”

He put on a scuba mask to protect his face from flying particles and went to work on the Rover’s rear panel, careful not to push the saw too deep and tear up the merchandise. Pierce was doing figures out loud, lauding their profits-to-be. Christo was holding his stomach. Something was wrong with the noise of the saw. When Looie started cutting the second leg of the rectangle, the bottom edge dipped, meeting no resistance.

“Hold it.”

Looie shut off the saw and drew back.

“What the hell?” Pierce, sensing the alarm.

Christo padded his hand with his shirttail. They watched as he worked under the crack and pried up.

Air. And down at the bottom, a few make-weight bags of cement.

Christo saw spots. Like stepping on the teeth of a rake, taking the handle full on the nose.

“I stood right there.”

Looie walked in a circle, massaging his sweating head. “Imported cement,” he said. And again, “Imported cement.”

“I did.” Speech made Christo gag, as though he had alphabet blocks in the throat. “I stood right there and helped load.”

Pierce took three long steps and drove a left hook into the wall.

Looie lay back on the floor. “I’ve walked into one of Aesop’s fables,” he sighed. All Christo could do to keep the vertigo at bay was continue to stare down the hole.

The elevator began to descend. As Pierce disappeared from view, they heard him say he’d be back. Right now he was going to find an emergency room and have a cast put on his hand.

D
AYS LENGTHENING LIKE RYE
grass, bold new movements along the river, mating calls from out of the trees. Yeah, it was spring all right, and the shows were starting up again, siphoning folks out of Gib-town for another season. Time to shake off the long, idle winter. Jam auctioneers were limbering up with tongue twisters, human oddities working out new poses in front of the mirror.

Karl sat dejected by the telephone. He’d been calling around all morning, pleading with anyone he could reach to help him latch on somewhere. He wasn’t an analyzer, a student of self, but Karl understood his own cycles and rhythms. He had to get out on the road again, just had to. But Bert Banion, who ran a fried clam concession for Worldwide, had just told him it was hopeless.

“Nobody wants to touch you after that riot you started last year,” said Bert, ever blunt. “The manager of L & M has put the word out on you. Gables is poison. So forget about it, you’ll have to find chump work this year.”

So he’d be a worthless outcast, a prisoner of the summer, and probably get crazy with boredom or resentment by July. Tildy would finally give up on him, and he’d be a marked man on the street reduced to picking over trash, and kids would throw rocks at him and dogs would pee on him as he slept at night on pieces of cardboard.

Sweet Jesus.

He pulled the newspaper over and went through the classifieds: dental receptionist. Mortgage officer. Typesetter. Karl tapped the side of his nose with a pencil. Were you really expecting there’d be an ad for bathroom attendant?

He turned pages slowly, looking for crime stories, found one headlined
WIFE GETS THE FREEZE.

A spokeswoman for the County Sheriff’s Department announced today that a charge of murder would be brought against Lester Clines of Miami, described as a “three-foot four-inch midget” who had recently been working as a drummer at a Coconut Grove strip club.

While living in Miami for the past four years, Clines continued to pay rent on a bungalow on Gardenville Road in Gibsonton up until December of last year. When his checks stopped coming, the landlord initiated eviction proceedings, which resulted in the charge being filed against the 56-year-old Clines, who is alleged to have clubbed his wife to death and then stuffed her into a 2½-cubic-foot freezer sometime in 1976.

Sheriff’s deputies were removing furniture from the Gardenville Road house last week, the spokeswoman announced, when they discovered the freezer.

“It had a slight odor to it. We were hoping it was spoiled meat but it turned out to be a body,” she added.

Sources close to the Coroner’s Office report that it took three days for the body to thaw sufficiently to permit a positive identification.

Karl had trouble picturing the body as a solid block cast in the shape of a freezer compartment, frost in the eyelashes, arms and legs all contorted to fit in the small space. Mrs. Clines must have been a petite woman. Maybe even an all-out miniature like her husband.

He turned more pages, browsing through an item on a pharmacist’s attempt to cross the Pacific in a rowboat, a recipe for stuffed cabbage. But he couldn’t stop thinking about Lester Clines, the little drummer boy. It was really a comedy story if you looked at it hard—this midget laying down a bump-and-grind rhythm, while miles away his wife slept forever with her head on an ice tray.

It happened then, the slight turn of the wheel, the click. Karl remembered an article from one of his treasure magazines about a tiny coon bandleader with a hump on his back, a drummer, too, who’d stashed away a fortune. Drumming midgets, secret hiding places. It was a sign for sure, unmistakable as a thunderbolt.