Odditorium: A Novel (36 page)

Destructively cerebral as Milo was, he had helped Christo to give revenge a fancy name.

“What things would you like to have?”

Milo looked startled. “Should I say peace on earth? An end to hunger? Why are you quizzing me this way?”

“No, no. Things. Household objects, appliances.”

“Things, yes. Well … I think it would be healthy for me to have a radio to keep the silence away. And for my body, I don’t know. Barbells? Or maybe a juicer so I could be sure and get my daily vitamins.”

“Now you’re talking. We’ll stop at a department store on the way to the train station.”

“Faust.” Milo shook his head. “This is reminding me of Faust.”

A passport, fresh underwear, pills and a pint of brandy (preventive medicine)—the needs of a traveling man are few. The New York weather was clear and calm, perfect for takeoffs, and Christo (a.k.a. Arno Bester) was eager to go.

“Mission improbable,” Pierce observed, making a grudging withdrawal from the petty cash drawer in his office. “A waste of time and energy like this puts my back up. It must be my New England heritage.”

“Fuck you and your heritage, too. This whole damn swindle may be a tax write-off to you, but it’s what my life is all about.”

“That’s your heritage, your conditioning. Same difference.”

“What does this have to do with growing up in half a dozen mining towns in Michigan and getting high before gym class?”

“It’s not for me to say.” Behind his impeccable desk, Pierce in blue blazer and tie looked ready to have his picture taken for
Business Week
. “But I hope you’re not in over your head. I don’t want to sound like an alarmist, but you might want to consider carrying some sort of weapon.”

Christo tapped his cranium. “This has been good enough so far.”

“Suit yourself. Just don’t forget to take the safety off.”

They had gimlets and changed the subject. Pierce had been shopping for a literary agent, with no luck up to this point.

“I want to do essays, social history, but nobody wants essays now. It’s a dead form, like chamber music or the sonnet.”

“Social history, huh? Right, you figure you can peddle your theories like you’ve been peddling dope. To a grateful public. Jesus, and you think I’m crazy for wanting to regain my self-respect?”

“I’ll match my delusions with yours any time, jazzbo.”

“Best of luck.”

“Same to you.”

They drained their glasses and parted without another word.

Christo walked round and round a small park near Casa Nocturne wondering how he could have come this far without evolving a plan. He’d wasted all his time on the plane thinking of Tomas in various states of humiliation; a series of disconnected images, coherent maybe, but like a pornographic collage, too trivial and predictable to inspire the brain. He’d left himself only one choice then: the tactic of no tactics. The hell with timing, the hell with fine points and the integrity of the performance—he’d just have to go in there and get it done. Geronimo!

But if you don’t simmer down, Christo warned himself, you’re liable to fuck up all over again. He waited a few minutes, chewing grass and tilting his face to the sun, then jogged downhill to the house.

Inge answered the bell in a rumpled bathrobe. Her hair was pinned up and she smelled of sleep.

“I couldn’t stay away.”

“Tomas is not here now.”

“So I’d hoped.”

“You lost your job?”

“It’s a long story.”

She shrugged and motioned him in. “I don’t try to understand things.”

“That’s the spirit, Inge. All men are liars. Old European proverb.”

Inge smiled and played with the dangling ends of the sash that held her robe closed. She hovered at the foot of the stairs, apparently undecided as to where to go. Her pupils were little black nailheads. She pulled the robe around herself more tightly and retied the sash. It was easy to see there was nothing underneath it. The breasts from which the entire family had drunk sagged halfway down her torso. Christo liked that; that Inge’s flesh should be as doughy as her self.

“I was sewing just now.” And she went up the stairs, leaving damp spots on the banister which Christo slid over with his own hand as he followed.

“You’re not afraid to be alone with me?” He brushed against her on the landing, drew knuckles over the soft knobs of her spine.

“You shouldn’t ask me,” she said indifferently, disappearing into a room down the hall, a cramped room with no windows.

Christo slithered through the open door, enjoying this game. Ironing board, sewing machine, bolts of fabric and cardboard boxes piled high—Inge’s little playroom. She picked up a long piece of orange velvet.

“I am just starting this. A vest for Tomas.”

“Nice color,” Christo said dryly. “Go ahead and work if you want. I won’t mind watching.”

She sighed. “No, I am interrupted now.” Laying the velvet across the ironing board, she smoothed it with her hands, picked off lint and bits of thread that weren’t there.

“You could show me the other rooms.”

“To see what?”

For a long minute they observed one another across an invisible frontier, Inge breathing through her mouth, fingers at rest now on the cloth and slightly curled. He noticed a brown speck on her upper lip, a crumb of food possibly, and this one compromising of her laundered paleness made his belly tighten. Her hands slid down the velvet, dropped at her sides. Otherwise, she was still as a mannequin and her eyes would not respond, not with scorn, desire, anticipation. She was like an ornament, a woman about whom other women would whisper.

“I can do you,” Christo said.

He crossed the frontier in two strides and came at her from the side. He pushed the loose hair back behind her ear, and his hand continued down the side of her neck, over her shoulder, followed the line of the collar down and down until he reached the knot, pulled it, and tore the robe open. Inge did not move, but made a noise like she’d been punched in the stomach. A warm draft rose from between her legs, a flowering scent of coastal mud. He jerked the robe off her shoulders, away from her arms, and except for a pair of heavy socks, she was all white radiating skin.

Christo flicked that brown crumb away and, holding her behind the neck, very slowly explored the inside of her mouth with his fingers, gum ridges, slippery linings of lip and cheek; pushed deeper, pressed on the back of her tongue so that she gagged. But even this did not unlock her passivity.

He pulled her down the hall and into the bedroom—bare white walls, a narrow strip of sun. The bed was carefully made and littered with round pillows. Christo swept them to the floor, ripped off the covers, threw Inge onto her back. Her eyes were alive now; her hips dimpled in tempo as she flexed pelvic muscles.

“Take off your socks.”

“My feet are cold.”

“Yeah, I remember.”

He pulled her by the ankles to the edge of the bed and knelt to the salt lick, went at her roughly with teeth unshielded. Urging him deeper, she tugged at his ears, gurgled. Christo stood up and got out of his clothes. Inge was the dream of an after-midnight Weimar cabaret as she followed his snapped commands, clambering onto her knees, pulling her buttocks apart, anointing herself with her own saliva. He came to her with his erection swinging in front of him like a piece of industrial machinery. He told her he was a thief, spoke her name like a curse, fit himself to the slick, reddened knot, paused—a tense, drawn-out moment of threat with a loaded weapon—and drove to the neck of her uterus in one stroke. It was over almost instantly.

“You are a monster.” Inge touched herself gingerly. “You make me burn there.”

Christo lit a cigarette and walked out of the room. So far, so good, but it was only the beginning. He roamed through the house breaking lightbulbs and emptying drawers onto the floor. In the kitchen he smeared the walls with raw eggs and ketchup, drank a leisurely beer while he watched the mural dribble and run. He took a bowl of fruit back upstairs with him and found Inge tightly curled in a facsimile of sleep. Removing one of her socks, he tickled experimentally and she smiled without opening her eyes. The shiny skin of her sole was delicately crackled like the bed of a dry lake.

Inge turned her head and sucked air. “It’s so late. Tomas is coming home now.”

“Don’t speak.”

“But it’s true. He could come in any …”

“Shut up.”

He bent her leg, forced it back and to the side, and she suckled obediently on her toes.

“You don’t know your husband is a dope runner, do you?” Pressing down, jamming her mouth with foot, “Don’t say anything, just hear what I tell you. The first time I came through here it was to put together a large-scale drug deal with your quiet little housepet man. Thought he’d cleaned himself up, didn’t you? Well, he’s dirtier than old diapers, sugar. He jobbed me, understand? Ripped me off for the whole motherfucking load so he could sell it off himself. That’s a little bedtime story for you.”

Christo released her and picked out a nectarine. Puffy lips quivering, head rolling from side to side Inge righted herself. He waited for sobs, for invective or the protest that he was lying, but none came. Grapes splattering on her clavicle got a reaction. She shrieked, clawed out as he leaped on her, smashed another handful between her breasts. Juice ran down and pooled on her belly. Inge slapped his head and he pitched over, caught himself, left a gruesome print on the sheet, murderous fingers outlined in purple. He twisted her hair and reached back for fresh supplies to slather on her neck. She bucked furiously in an effort to dislodge him, but he had a forearm across her throat, a knee in her crotch. Sputtering, pawing at his chest, she dug her heels into the mattress to gain leverage. Christo leaned in and spat an explosion of chewed grapes onto her face.

Inge went limp and her tongue wiggled out, pleading for suction. They rolled around the bed dripping syrup, locked in a reeking, soggy mating embrace as old as the dinosaur. Laughing uncontrollably, she cupped his balls and mounted him. Her pubic ridge blasted down on him, bone against bone, and she guided his hands to her behind.

His head at the foot of the bed, Christo had an inverted view of the white door as it swung open, of Tomas as he poked inside.

“What’s happening in here?”

Her laughter rising an octave, Inge kept whacking away. She yelped a few Swedish words and Tomas answered back.

Then, smoothing his hair in back, “I’ll be in the big room downstairs.” He pulled the door shut with a subdued click.

Inge was corkscrewing her hips, whipping her head to and fro, but Christo, already going soft, pushed her away and slithered off the bed.

“I wanted him to find us, and that’s all I wanted.”

He showered off, dressed, and made his way downstairs. Lodged in a chair, Tomas was flipping through a magazine, casually brought his eyes up when he heard Christo’s heels on the wood floor.

“So you’re back.” He tugged appraisingly at his beard.

“And you know why.”

“Do I? I don’t recall inviting you.”

Up on his toes with weight not overcommitted, Christo inched forward anticipating a lunge. “But you fucking mugged me, ace. And when I cut into that empty car back in New York, I was invited to put my head between my knees and feel like a natural-born moron. See, I just can’t let that kind of atrocious shit pass, no shot. Get up outta that chair.”

“I know nothing,” Tomas said flatly. “Once you drove away from my place, I finished with the whole business. What happens later is not my responsibility.”

“You can’t know how much I had invested in that deal, but you’re about to make good on all of it. Be certain of that.”

Tomas spoke with exaggerated patience. “I do not understand what problems you had with the shipment and I do not even care. An amateur in such business is a risk to everyone, but most of all to himself. Perhaps it was expensive to find this out. May I suggest that once you are home you find something else to do, something that suits you. Go to work in a factory. Pour drinks for the happy animals in a bar. Those are the ones who can be manipulated and bullied, not me.”

Christo stood within striking distance now, and his hand gestures measured the space. “Ain’t you blasé. That’s some attitude, ace. You know I’m here to rumble, but you sit in that chair and shake hands with yourself. I spent the last two hours drilling your wife, but you don’t care. You just sit there and take it.”

“If Inge was able to find some pleasure in it, then I agree.”

No more stalling. Christo ripped the magazine out of Tomas’s hands. “Come on, ace. Let’s get down.”

“You think you are in the movies?”

Christo rammed the chair, tipped Tomas onto the floor and stepped back, making room. “Come at me,” he demanded.

Tomas adjusted himself and sat calmly, treating this as some unfortunate psychodrama. “You see, the things that impress my wife have no effect on me. I won’t fight.”

There was an empty wine bottle on the table. Christo smashed it against the edge, waved the sawtooth neck. “Fucked her and I’ll fuck you, too.”

Tomas retreated through sliding glass doors to the patio. “I give you one last chance to go.” He thought of simpler, better times when he’d never been without a gun.

“I’m not going and neither are you.” Christo stepped into the heat of the patio and slid the door shut, sealing them off. “Unless you can fly.”

“I won’t fight,” Tomas repeated.

Christo feinted once with the bottleneck, then put all he had behind a left hook to the viscera. A tinkling of glass and Christo held out his empty hands. “Even up, ace. You and me.”

Tomas could barely see, but he kicked out, catching Christo on the shin, and came roaring off the tiles. Two simultaneous grunts as they collided, Tomas butting like a ram, Christo driving an elbow to his neck. They grappled and clinched like a pair of Apache dancers, bounced short punches off each other’s ribs. Tomas pulled away, missed a looping right, and they collided again, dragging, swaying, buttons popping and cloth tearing as if they were trying to undress each other. Gathering himself for a finishing blitz, Christo let up a moment; sensing this, Tomas lurched in and pinched Christo’s wrists under his arms, immobilizing his weaponry. Growling, red-faced, he sank his teeth into the meat of Christo’s shoulder, snapped his head to one side and felt a spurt on his lips of coppery-tasting blood. Christo’s howl bounced from rooftop to rooftop and he stomped on Tomas’s instep; his head came up as Christo pulled an arm free, then popped a jab straight into that slim Nordic nose.