Rich and Famous (14 page)

“That's going to be a little hard to take a picture of,” I said, “seeing as she's been dead for thirteen years.”

“All right, Aunt whatever her name is,” the round one said. “Uncle Ned has a wife, doesn't he?”

“Aunt Cynthia.” The skinny one shook his head. “We'll have to change that. Aunt Cynthia doesn't sing. There isn't an editor in New York who can spell Cynthia correctly. What's the simplest name you can think of?”

“Bob,” the round one said.

“Aunt Bob? In this picture George Stable, The Boy Next Door helps his Aunt Bob wash
the
dishes. It doesn't sing.”

“Cut it out, you clowns,” Woody said. “George, be ready to go up there tomorrow.”

Chapter

What was I going to do about it? I couldn't tell
Woody the truth—he'd get upset and start having long phone conversations with Pop, and if that was going to happen I might as well commit suicide right in the beginning. Somehow, I was going to have to avoid going to Uncle Ned's. Maybe I could pick out some other old abandoned barn along the way and say it was Uncle Ned's. Or some house where nobody was home or something. Otherwise, all I could do was pray.

I thought about it all day, and I was still thinking about it at five o'clock when Superman suddenly heaved himself into the studio where I was rehearsing with Damon Damon. “Hold it a minute, Damon,” he said. We stopped playing. “Georgie, I think it's time we had our chat,” Superman said. “I've got a lot of things I want to go over with you. Come on by my apartment this evening— around seven o'clock.”

“Well, gee,” I said. But I couldn't think of anything, so I said, “Okay.” He gave me the address, which was some posh place up in the East Seventies, and left.

“What's that all about?” Damon asked. “Superman never struck me as the type for little chats. Is he serving tea?”

“Oh, I don't know,” I said. “He keeps saying he wants to get to know me better.”

“How odd,” Damon Damon said. “It hardly seems Superman's thing, having little chats with thirteen-year-olds.”

“Have you ever been to his place, Damon?”

“I've never been asked, dear boy. I don't think that Superman and I have much in common.”

“I guess not,” I said. “I wonder what he wants to talk about?”

“I wouldn't bring up the subject of murder if I were you,” Damon said. “I presume he's a bit sensitive about it.”

I didn't want to go; he scared me too much. I mean what were we going to talk about? But when I got up there I was kind of glad I'd come. He had the fanciest apartment I'd ever seen.
I
mean the Stankys have a pretty fancy place, in this brownstone on Eleventh Street, but it was one of these sort of old-fashioned places with a lot of antique furniture. Superman's place was brand-new, with everything modern. There were these great big windows in the living room, so you could sit there and look down on the East River, with the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge and then down further the Williamsburg Bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge. You could see way out into Brooklyn and Queens, and up north to the Triboro Bridge, too. There were wall-to-wall carpets everywhere, and a fireplace, and this modern glass and aluminum furniture. Boy, was it fancy.

Some other guy let me in. I didn't know whether he was Superman's butler or a friend of his or what. But he showed me into the living room where Superman was sitting in a big modern chair. He brought Superman a drink and me a coke, and then he left. I decided he was some kind of servant, because he didn't hang around with us, but went away some place.

There was a record player going, kind of softly. “Do you just play Camelot Records?” I asked, to be polite.

He laughed. “Georgie, I listen to enough of that garbage all day long. I mostly listen to jazz when I'm at home. Or Baroque music. Vivaldi.”

“My Pop likes Vivaldi,” I said. “He keeps trying to get me to like it, too, but somehow I just can't. I mean it doesn't turn me on or anything.”

“Is your Pop still in Europe?”

I didn't like to think about Pop coming home too much. “He's supposed to come back at the end of the week.” I said.

“I guess you'll be glad to see him,” he said.

“I guess so,” I said.

So then he began asking me a lot of questions—what grade I was in, and how I did in school, and about my friends, and my hobbies and a lot of stuff like that. It wasn't what I'd call a chat—more of a quiz, if you want to know. But I didn't much care. It was kind of nice sitting in that fancy apartment looking out at the East River and all those bridges, drinking a coke out of a fancy glass with ice in it, instead of right out of the can the way I usually did. And I began to decide that maybe Superman wasn't so scary after all. He was just one of those people who seem scary.

Finally Superman said, “Well, I guess we've both got things to do.”

So I finished off my coke, put down my glass, and got up. “Well, thanks for the coke,” I
said.

“That's okay, George,” he said. “See you tomorrow.” The servant sort of popped out from nowhere, and started to show me toward the door. But then Superman suddenly said, “Oh listen, Georgie, maybe you can do me a favor?”

I stopped. “Emmett, hand me that package from the side board in the dining room.” The man went out and in a minute he came back with a square package wrapped up in brown paper. It was tied up with string, and there was scotch tape on it, too. “George, these are some tapes of your backup group. I want the arranger to have a listen to them. Be a good guy and drop them off. It isn't far out of your way to Grand Central.”

I took the package. It seemed to have five or six boxes of tape in it. There was an address on them, somewhere on East Thirty-sixth Street. “All right,” I said. I didn't tell Superman that I wasn't going to Grand Central, but down to Greenwich Village.

“Be careful with them, George. They're the only copies we've got.”

I said I would be, and I left. I took the Lexington Avenue Subway down to Thirty-third Street, went over to the address on the package, and rang the bell. But nobody answered. I thought that was kind of funny: I figured Superman would have made sure that the guy was home before he'd send me over with something as valuable as the tapes. For a moment I thought about leaving them with the super, but then I decided I'd better not if they were that valuable. The only other thing to do was to take them back to Superman's, or to take them home. I didn't really want to see Superman anymore. The easiest thing would be to take them home. I could go up to the arranger's house in the morning with them, and if he still wasn't home I could take them up to Camelot and give them back to Superman.

So I went home. Barbara Feinberg was eating some canned hash for supper. “Where've you been?” she asked.

“I was up at Superman's. He wanted to have a chat.”

“Do you want something to eat?”

„I'm pretty hungry, I could make myself a sandwich,” I said, hoping that she'd cook me something instead. I put the tapes down on the table.

“There's some more hash in the pan,” she said. “I'm not going to eat it all.” Then she pointed at the package with her fork. “What's that?”

“Tapes of my backup group. I was supposed to deliver them to the arranger, but he
wasn
't home.”

“What do they sound like?”

“I don't know,” I said. I went out into the kitchen and looked into the frying pan. There didn't seem to be an awful lot of hash in it. I guess Barbara Feinberg didn't know how much kids eat. “Listen, how much of this hash are you going to eat?”

“You can finish it up. I'm full.”

I got down a plate and scooped the hash onto it. Then I got four pieces of bread out of the icebox, smeared them up with butter and peanut butter, poured out a big glass of milk, and carried it all out to the table.

“Good Lord,” she said. “Peanut butter and hash?”

“I don't mind it,” I said.

“It's your stomach.” She leaned back and lit a cigarette. “So what does your backup group sound like? Is it country or what?”

“I don't know.”

“Aren't you curious?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I'd like to know if it's going to be a country sound or what.”

“Let's play them. That tape recorder of your Pop's works, doesn't it?”

“Yeah, it works,” I said, shoving a lot of bread and peanut butter into my mouth.

“Well, all right,” she said.

“The thing is, I don't know if I should open them.”

“How would Superman know?”

“There's scotch tape on the paper.”

“I can get that off,” she said, “with turpentine.”

“So it wouldn't show?”

“Sure,” she said. “There's nothing to it.”

I took a mouthful of hash and thought about it. I was pretty curious. “Well, if you think it won't show,” I said.

“Don't worry,” she said. She slid the package over in front of her, and began unknotting the twine, picking at it carefully with her fingernails until it came loose. Then she took the string off the package and set it aside. Next she went over to Pop's taboret, and poured out some turpentine from her painting stuff into a little bowl. She took a sharp knife, dipped it into the
turpentine
and slowly, a bit at a time, worked the knife point under the scotch tape. Rapidly the turpentine dissolved the stickiness on the tape, and it came loose just the way a postage stamp soaks off in water. She went on carefully working the knife under the tape, dipping it back into the turpentine every few seconds, and in about two minutes she had the scotch tape peeled off. She set the piece of tape aside to dry. Then she unwrapped the brown paper. It was splotched up with turpentine. She set it aside to dry, too. “That smell will disappear after awhile,” she said.

It was six boxes of tape. “That's a lot of tape,” I said. “We can't listen to it all.”

She picked up the top box and looked it over. There was no writing on it at all. “Maybe it says something on the reel,” she said. She laid the box on the table and lifted the cover off.

But there was no reel of tape inside. Instead there were a lot of little plastic bags, each filled with whitish powder.

“My God,” she said.

“What is it, Barbara?” But without being told, I already knew, and a cold chill went up my back and across the top of my head.

“Jesus,” she said. She lifted out one of the plastic bags, unfolded the top, and sniffed inside. “Cocaine,” she said.

My mind was sort of stopped and I felt cold and weak. “Are you sure?”

“I ought to know what it is. When my boyfriend got busted, he had a jar full of coke hidden in the spice rack.” She put the top back on the tape box and quickly we checked the rest of the boxes. They were all filled with the same thing—little plastic bags filled with cocaine. “Wow,” Barbara said. “You're sitting on a fortune.”

“How much is it worth?”

She shrugged. “All I can do is guess. I'd say you might have a kilo of the stuff here, more or less.”

“A kilogram?”

“Yeah,” she said, “about two pounds. It's probably worth twenty-five thousand dollars, maybe more. That's wholesale. By the time it reaches the street, it'll be worth a hell of a lot more—maybe a quarter of a million dollars.”

I gulped. “A quarter of a million dollars?”

“I don't know exactly,” she said. “Since my old boyfriend got busted, I've been out of touch.”

She
put the tops back on the boxes and stacked them up. Then she began waving the wrapping paper in the air. “We'll give the turps a few minutes to dry,” she said.

“Barbara,” I said, “the whole thing is crazy. Why would Superman give me the stuff to carry around?”

“Why not?”

“I'm just a kid. I might lose the stuff. I might leave it on the subway or something.”

“That's true. On the other hand he probably figured that if he told you it was tapes of your music you'd be pretty careful about it. Anyway, I guess he figured it was a lot safer than carrying the stuff around himself.”

“Why?”

She lit up a cigarette and thought about it a minute. “Does this Superman or whatever he calls himself travel abroad a lot?”

“All of these A. and R. guys do. Camelot has got a couple of English groups under contract, and some Latin bands from Mexico. He goes all over the place to record them.”

“That's it, then,” she said. “Probably he's acting as some kind of funnel for drugs coming into the country. He's in a good position for it. There have always been a lot of drugs mixed up in the music business; there are always dealers hanging around. So Superman would have contacts here for getting rid of the stuff. The problem would be getting the drugs in—cocaine from Mexico or South America, heroin from Europe.”