Odditorium: A Novel (37 page)

Tomas zigzagged away, hand cupped under his demolished nostrils, recognizing this first serious blow of the fight just as he received the second, a fast kick to the groin that doubled him over. Christo had time to gauge and fully design a swooping uppercut to the chin which landed with the sound of two boards slapped together. Tomas flew back against the railing, tipped, hung a moment in miraculous horizontal balance; in that millisecond’s space a debate in Christo’s mind (Should I let him go or try to catch him by the heels?) was drowned out by vivid sensation: the texture of Tomas’s suede moccasins as they slipped off his fingertips. Tomas dropped like a cliff diver onto the roadway below.

Christo turned to muffled pounding behind him. Her nude body splashed with purple, Inge stood riven and horror-struck, breasts pressed against the glass.

“Stay there.” He knew a crowd was already forming around the corpse in the street, but he moved slowly, wanting to defuse her if possible. “Can you hear me? Stay where you are.”

Not much time to take care of her; someone in a uniform would probably hit the scene in just a few minutes. Was this what experts had in mind when they warned about failures in long-range planning? Inge fell against him when he eased the door open. He felt the latent frenzy in her hard flesh.

“I’m sorry,” he said ritually, a lie.

“What happened? Where is he?”

“It’s done. You can’t help now.” He righted the overturned chair and guided her into it.

Inge quivered like an overworked lab animal as he plucked grape skins from her hair, humming softly.

Then she pushed his hands away. “No no … I’ve got to make it real,” and darted past him.

“Trust me, you don’t want to look.” Inge flashed across the patio, arms out like wings. “Okay, do it your way, but I can’t stick around.”

He grabbed his jacket off the banister, moved coolly but briskly out the door and down the street. After another hundred yards he began to run. He ran away from the harbor as fast as his residual energies would allow, dodging through traffic, knocking over a man with a cane, stumbling uphill. Blood trickling down his arm seemed to spread the pain of his chewed shoulder.

Dread and exhaustion. Christo stood in the entranceway of a mosque, near the pile of shoes left behind by the faithful who had gone inside to pray. The wind that whistled through the open corridors and tumbled gutter rubbish was as cold as the deep blue aura that was starting to replace the shadows of afternoon.

The longer he waited, the greater his risk of arrest; but he was so tired, so disablingly tired. Inge had surely given the cops his description by now. No time to clean up, she’d be huddled in the kitchen with her strange warpainted face, telling all she knew to a man with a notebook. Thank God it wasn’t much. Still, they would be waiting at the airport, checking the passenger lists. He had to get out of here, go find a cab. If it wasn’t already too late, it soon would be. The chances were good that later on, in the depths of night, he’d be ringed by vulture faces in some tiny underground room with sweating walls, the shadow of a rubber hose across his face and a hot wire taped to his balls. Maybe. He didn’t really care. The only things that mattered now were the pain that burned in his shoulder and the vindication that glowed in his heart.

He walked deliberately, keeping his eyes on the pavement.

All was serene when Christo finally reached the airport. He got the last seat on a flight to Madrid, where he’d have to make his own connections. The ticket agent wished him a pleasant journey. So did the man who passed him through the boarding area after a cursory glance at his passport. Ominous. On the plane, Christo sweated out an interminable and unexplained delay. He could not sneak a cigarette and risk drawing attention to himself. He could not read the safety pamphlet because the little stick figures depicted all seemed to be assuming postures of surrender. He could not look out the window because every blinking light he saw represented an oncoming police vehicle.

By the time the jet finally lifted off the runway, Christo was virtually paralyzed. It was at least fifteen minutes before he could bring himself to speak. He asked a stewardess for some aspirin and whiskey to wash them down.

What Christo did not know was that he had already provided for his own safety. His scorn and violence had propelled Inge into total regression; shortly before he boarded the plane, she confessed.

My husband was viciously drunk, she said. He abused me all afternoon, forced me to commit acts of unspeakable perversity. When he went downstairs to open another bottle, I followed. There was an argument on the patio. You know the rest.

The chief detective nodded, sucked on his mustache, gave Mrs. Ulrich his own handkerchief with which to mop her tears. An assistant passed him a note saying that the victim was on file as a dealer in contraband. He nodded again. From one point of view, the woman had provided a valuable service.

Inge understood the pressures that would come to bear. The expense of a trial. Press coverage. Perhaps there was a simpler solution? She was a very sick woman. She asked only to be returned to Stockholm where she would put herself in the care of a certain physician who operated a private clinic on Lake Vattern.

The detective pretended to smile while removing a small black hair from the end of his tongue. Still, he had to admit the woman made a great deal of sense.

“Champagne and orange juice, as promised.”

“Are we celebrating something?”

Pierce, who’d been at a gallery opening all afternoon and was half in the bag already, leaned across the table to tousle Christo’s hair. “Why not? You evidently have walked away scot-free from a killing. Doesn’t that call for champagne?”

“Why don’t you say it a little louder so the guys in the kitchen can hear?”

“Relax, relax. We’re all killers in here.”

Christo looked all over the bar of the no-longer-posh Excelsior Hotel (where the ballroom was now a
prix fixe
Hungarian restaurant), but the only person he saw who looked at all capable of snuffing someone was a busboy with nail polish. “It wasn’t like that anyway. Not the way you talk it. More personal, uglier. More human. Wish you could have been there. Made a great floor show.”

“I should hope so. It cost me enough.” Pierce had a nasty pitch to his voice. When tense, not sleeping well, insatiably bothered, he became a bad drunk.

“So which is worse? Losing all at once or little by little? And what are you sulking about? I had a damn sight more than money invested. That deal was supposed to be my shot to move up in the ratings, be a contender.”

“So what, so what. No difference between a hit or a miss. The deals that work and the ones that blow up, it’s all the same pointless, stupefying shit.”

“Have another drink.”

Pierce somberly, with one eye closed: “You may think I’m blowing wind, but I’m not.”

“I think you’re in a frame of mind to bitch, that’s all. So bitch all you want. Go on ahead, it’s your party.”

“Things become obsolete …” Pierce faded into clicking teeth, rearranged orange pulp inside his glass. “Things become joyless.”

“You should set this to music.”

“What’s your fucking problem?” Pierce slammed the table and the room went quiet. “I don’t need all this condescending garbage from you today. Christ, treat people like they’re all like you and everything’s a spiel. So maybe Tomas Ulrich robbed you just for being so snotty, if you can get to that. Tommy can be that way.”

“Not anymore,” Christo mumbled, telling Pierce to cool it with a downward motion of hands.

“See …” Pierce grimaced, his train of thought rumbling unalterably along, “I have to change the attitude while I still can. It is possible to reach a point of no return, the terminal stage. And I’m beginning to show signs. I wonder if there’s a bug planted in the bedpost. The Con Ed man in the lobby, I think he’s really a narc taking notes on my every move. And the van parked outside is filming me with a zoom lens. I hear about a friend who’s taken a bust and the first thing that occurs to me is, will he trade me for a lighter sentence? The whole scene just wears you down to nothing after a while. It feels like you’ve been ushering in a theater where the movie never changes.”

“That’s fine, very literate. But I’ve heard it before and that’s the tip-off. When you’re really ready, you’ll stop talking about it. We both know the day’s a long way off when you can let the business totally alone. There’s no defeating that heritage, so why try?”

“But I mean it this time. I’ve got a boat coming in from Colombia in a week or so and it’s finished after that. I’m out. Move on up to Connecticut and take the typewriter to bed with me.”

Christo was laughing too hard to speak.

“You need a demonstration? I’ll give you one.” Pierce was furious, he threw some crumpled bills around, dragged Christo outside and threw him in a cab. Once inside the duplex, he sat Christo down in the office and began methodically taking it apart.

“I mean it this time.”

He tore up the contents of file drawers, hammered his answering machine to bits with a marble paperweight, pulled the pharmaceutical bulletins down from the walls, the color photos of a Jamaican ganja field. He stormed through the equipment closet, laying waste rolls of plastic bags, boxes of gelatin capsules, tools for cutting and measuring. As a finale he filled a roasting pan with ten-dollar bills from his personal bank and threw in a match.

They watched smoke plume toward the ceiling and Christo said, “I’d be a lot more impressed if I thought it was only me you were trying to convince.”

Pierce was exhausted. “There’s no pleasing you,” he grunted, and threw open a window. Smoke drifted out to the airshaft and swirled up.

“It just seems ludicrous to burn money.” Christo pushed hair out of his eyes and sighed. “When you could give it to me instead.”

“Is that it? You want me to keep the business alive so you won’t lose a meal ticket, huh?”

“Maybe you are getting a little paranoid.” Pulling fingers down the sides of the desk with the sadly resigned bearing of someone rowing to an island funeral: “I’m planning to quit this evil town within twenty-four hours.”

“You didn’t tell me that.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything. I was just going to do it.”

“Well. That does alter the landscape some. Where to, jazzbo?”

“South.”

“Just South. Back to that hit and run stuff, eh?”

“More or less.”

“Why move backward where you’ve already been? I don’t want to jinx you, but …”

“That’s good. I don’t want you to either.”

“But don’t you worry about falling into the grinder this time around? You’re way overdue.”

Christo rotated the desk chair, reached down and placed his hand over the edge of the roasting pan. “See that? I know how to burn my fingers. I’ll be all right.”

From the desk’s bottom drawer Pierce removed a tape player, slapped in a cassette he’d been carrying in his pocket. “This came in yesterday’s mail.”

Looie’s voice was harsh and excited: “
Start
.
Initial draft
, A Guide to Automotive Landscape Painting.
Introduction … The magic kinship of man and earth is at the core of all visual art
.
Period
.
In adapting this principle to a mechanized age
,
comma
,
the depiction of landscapes has become the province of photography
.
Period
.
But we are a species in constant motion
,
comma
,
madly covering ground in a world of blurred image formations
,
semicolon
,
thus there is no fixed moment in which the shutter can close
.

“
New paragraph … Imagine all elements in the heat of our motion
.
Period
.
Trees are made of butter
.
Period
.
Buildings are soft cakes
.
Period
.
Only the roadway is solid and continuous
…”

“Bloody maniac.” Pierce hit the “fast-forward” button.

“I kind of like it so far.”

“But he’s like a kid who never learned to read. He doesn’t know where the boundaries are. Wheeling along the Richmond Parkway, for Christ’s sake, with a canvas tied to the dashboard and a brush in one hand … Just listen. It’s coming up.”

Looie again, over varying traffic sounds: “
At forty-five miles per hour I make my first stroke outlining the hills
.
Not the hills I am passing now
,
not the hills from two miles back or those two miles ahead
,
but all of them together
.
All motion/time images distilled to an essence of hills … Keep the wrist loose as you work
,
move the brush smoothly
.
As you grow used to these operations you will begin to see yourself as in a film
,
moving with grace and ease … Accelerating through a curve now
,
I mix a lighter shade of green …
”

It began with a single small cry, the bleat of a surprised sheep, then clustered thuds and clatters as the machine sheered off to become part of the landscape, a final implosion of metal meshing with itself.

Christo, standing now, leaned horrified over the speaker. “Did he make it?”

“Barely.” Pierce extinguished and ejected the cassette. “He’s off the critical list now, but there was a lot of internal bleeding and they still haven’t assessed the damage completely.”

“Have you seen him?”

“Nobody has. He won’t allow visitors.”

“The rites of spring … Jesus, this has been a bad year.” Splaying his burned fingers, holding them away from his body like spoiled sausages, Christo made for the door. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

“Yeah, let’s move to the conference room upstairs. It’s time for more drinks.”

“You’re not hearing me, man. I’ll repeat it. We’ve got to get out of
here
.”

And Christo, with curved arms, made a gesture so wide that it seemed to encompass not just the city, but the hemisphere itself.