Running Dog (2 page)

Cosmic Erotics

Lightborne, at sixty-six, took to using a walking stick on his frequent strolls down West Broadway and through the SoHo gallery district. This one spring evening the sole of his right shoe—he wore penny loafers—began flapping soon after he started out. This somewhat undermined the effect he’d sought to create with his walking stick.

He headed back, gingerly, walking on his right heel. Entering a cast-iron building, he rode to the fourth floor in a self-service freight elevator, a drafty contrivance he feared and hated. The vast metal door to his loft bore the legend in red paint:

He walked through the gallery and stepped past a partition into the area of the loft he used as living quarters. The furniture was dark and heavy, embellished with scroll motifs. An end table leaned a little. The front legs of a desk rested on matchbooks for balance. From a drawer in this desk Lightborne
took a small bottle of Elmer’s Glue-All and tried to refasten the sole of his right shoe.

About twenty people would be arriving at eight-thirty. They were the core of his clientele and he had some new things to show. Only one fresh face likely to appear. This would be Moll Robbins, a journalist planning a series of articles on sex as big business.

The others were collectors, a couple of people who represented collectors, and the inevitable self-conscious dabblers who were captivated by the novelty of it all. Lightborne didn’t mind the latter group. They tended to regard him as an eccentric scholar, a font of erotic lore, and were always inviting him places and giving him things.

Finished with the shoe, he took a pair of grooming scissors and snipped at his sideburns. Then he commenced brushing his hair into a near-ducktail arrangement. Lightborne’s hair was silvery gray tinged with a kind of yellowish discoloration, and he liked wearing it long. Finally he put on a string tie and belted corduroy jacket. Not that there was any reason to concern himself with appearance. These get-togethers at the gallery were always informal. The collectors preferred it that way. He served them Wink in paper cups.

Moll Robbins, as it happened, arrived before the others. She wore jeans and a bulky sweater, a tall lean woman who walked in a sort of lazy prowl. Hanging from a strap over her right shoulder was a large leather case.

Lightborne showed her around the gallery, which wasn’t the usual clinical space of right angles and clever little ramps. It resembled instead an antique shop in serious decline. There were small tables filled with bronze and porcelain pieces, with stacks of drawings and prints, with books and woodcarvings, vases and cups. There were several pedestals to hold the more interesting pieces, and on the wall were a number of oil paintings as well as enlarged photographs of Hindu temple façades and the lucky phalluses of Pompeii. Along the walls
were bins of drawings, more prints, more photographs, and several glass cases full of rings, bracelets, necklaces.

Moll Robbins roved a bit uncertainly through all of this, fingering the lid of a porcelain teapot (Chinese emperor with concubine, apparently), peering at a coin under glass (Greeks, male, dallying).

“Innocent, somehow, isn’t it?”

“It doesn’t move,” Lightborne said.

“Doesn’t move?”

“Movement, action, frames per second. This is the era we’re in, for better or worse. It seems a little ineffectual, what’s here. It just sits. It’s all mass and body weight.”

“Pure gravity.”

“Sure, a thing isn’t fully erotic unless it has the capacity to move. A woman crossing her legs drives men mad. She moves, understand. Motion, activity, change of position. You need this today for eroticism to be total.”

“Something to that, I suppose.”

When everyone had arrived, Lightborne closed the huge doors and began to circulate. Moll took off her sweater and draped it over the erect member of a plaster vicar, noting that Lightborne was spending most of his time at the side of a well-groomed and neatly dressed man, early thirties, seemingly a business type, the kind of junior tycoon who delights in giving crisp directives to his subordinates.

She spoke with several people, finding them subtly evasive, not exactly reluctant to discuss their interest in erotica but unable to focus their attention on the subject. They seemed rushed somehow, distracted by some private vision, high-type horseplayers, secretly frenzied at the edges.

Lightborne introduced her to the man he’d been talking to. Glen Selvy. Then was led away by several other people.

“What got you interested, Mr. Selvy?”

“What gets anyone interested in sex?”

“We don’t all collect,” she said.

“Just a pastime. Line, grace, symmetry. Beauty of the human body. So on, so forth.”

“Do you spend a lot of money, collecting?”

“Fair amount.”

“You must know quite a bit about art.”

“I took a course once.”

“You took a course once.”

“I learned enough to know that Lightborne’s better stuff is kept under wraps.”

“What can you tell me about Lightborne that he wouldn’t want to tell me himself?”

Selvy smiled and walked away. Later, when most of the people had gone, Lightborne talked with Moll in his living quarters. He answered all her questions, explaining that he got started in the business in 1946 when he was down and out in Cairo and managed to come into possession of a ring depicting the Egyptian god of fertility, highly aroused. He sold it to an ex-Nazi for a pretty sum and eventually learned that it ended up on the finger of King Farouk. After that, one contact led to another and he traveled through Central America, Japan, the Mideast and Europe, a worldwide network, buying and selling and bartering.

“What about your friend Selvy? I’m curious. He doesn’t look quite the type. What’s his collection like?”

“My lips are sealed.”

“What do you mean?” she said.

“Some people are here to look. Some to buy. Some to buy for others.”

“Fronting.”

“Sure.”

“Buying on behalf of a person or group that doesn’t want his, her or its identity known to the world at large.”

“That’s grammatically very clumsy but otherwise correct,” Lightborne said.

“Do you know who Selvy buys for?”

“Actually I only suspect.”

“Someone I may have heard of?”

“Selvy’s been on the job three months or so. Fairly good at it. Has a basic knowledge.”

“That’s all you’re saying.”

“It’s a business full of rumors, Miss Robbins. I get word about things sometimes. So-and-so’s turned up a bronze statuette in some sealed-off church cellar on Crete. Hermaphrodite: Graeco-Roman. I hear things all the time. I get word. The air is full of vibrations. Sometimes there’s an element of truth. Often it’s just a breeze in the night.”

Glen Selvy stuck his head around the edge of the partition to say goodnight. Lightborne asked him in for coffee, which was perking on a GE hotplate in a corner of the room. Selvy checked his watch and sat in a huge dusty armchair.

“My man in Guatemala tells me to expect choice items this trip.”

“About time,” Selvy said.

“Dug up from tombs with his own two hands.”

“He’s found more tombs, has he?”

“The jungles are dense,” Lightborne said mysteriously.

“My principal is certain your pre-Columbian stuff is fake. Do you want to hear what he has to say about the handicraft?”

“Tell him this trip.”

“This trip it’s different.”

“Different,” Lightborne said.

He poured three cups of coffee. Moll believed she detected an edge of detachment in Selvy’s voice and manner. His reactions were just the tiniest bit mechanical. It was possible he was deeply bored by this.

“In the meantime,” Lightborne said, “I can show you a lady with an octopus.”

“Another time.”

“It’s a porcelain centerpiece.”

“Seriously, anything stashed back here? If not, I’m off.”

“You say seriously. Did I hear you correctly?”

“You heard.”

“I was telling the young lady about rumors. The part rumors play in a business like this. Six months ago, for instance, I heard a rumor about an item that could prove to be of interest to any number of people, including your employer perhaps. The odd thing about this rumor is that I first heard it about thirty years ago, originally in Cairo and Alexandria, where my list of acquaintances was colorful and varied, and later the same year, if memory serves, after I went to Paris to live. The item in question was the print of a movie. To be more exact, the camera original.”

Lightborne offered sugar, wordlessly.

“I was telling the young lady that movement, the simple capacity to change position, is an important erotic quality. Probably the single biggest difference between old and new styles of erotic art is the motion picture. The movie. The image that moves. This assumes you consider movies art.”

“Oh, I do,” Moll said.

“In the same league with painting, sculpture, so on.”

“Absolutely.”

“All right then,” Lightborne said. “For several months I kept hearing rumors about this very curious film. People in the business. Collectors, dealers, agents. It’s a world of rumormongers. What can you do? But then the noise died. The little hum, it faded away to nothing. I don’t think anyone noticed. The rumor was implausible to begin with. Hardly anyone took it seriously. So, silence for thirty years. Not a word on the subject. Then, six months ago, the rumor is revived. I hear it from three people, none of them in contact with the other two. Precisely the same rumor. A film exists. Unedited footage. One copy. The camera original. Shot in Berlin, April, the year 1945.”

Lightborne nodded to indicate a measure of absorption in his own commentary. He went to the refrigerator and got a box of Graham crackers. He offered them around. No takers. He sat back down.

“In the bunker,” he said.

He took a cracker out of the box and dunked it in his coffee.

“Spell that out,” Moll said.

“The bunker under the Reich Chancellery.”

“And who appears in this footage?”

“Things get vague here. But apparently it’s a sex thing. It’s the filmed record of an orgy, I gather, that took place somewhere in that series of underground compartments.”

Selvy gazed at the ceiling.

“I don’t believe it myself,” Lightborne said. “I’m the chief skeptic. It’s just the curious nature of the thing. The recent rumor is point for point the same as the original, despite a thirty-year gap between the two. And the few people who believe the thing, at least as a possibility, are able to make some valid historical points. I happen to be a student of the period.”

Robbins and Selvy watched the soggy bottom half of the cracker in Lightborne’s hand detach itself and fall into the cup. Lightborne used a spoon to gather the brown ooze and eat it.

“In any case I thought it might be useful to trace the story as far as I could, maybe with luck even to its source. Eventually a contact in the business, someone I trust, put me in touch with an individual and we arranged a meeting. He didn’t volunteer his name and I didn’t ask. Man in his thirties. Slight accent. Nervous, very jumpy. He said he knew where the footage was. Said prints had never been made. Guaranteed it. Said the running time would qualify it as full length, more or less. Then he grew melancholy. I can see his face. A performance, he said, that would surely take its place among the strangest and most haunting ever given. He also said I wouldn’t be disappointed in the identities of those taking part. All this and yet he wouldn’t give a straight answer when I asked if he’d seen the footage himself or were we dealing in hearsay.”

Lightborne stirred his coffee.

“The idea we agreed on was that I would act as agent for the sale. I have the contacts, I know the market, more or less. We further agreed that with sex exploitation reaching the level it has, certainly there’d be no problem finding powerful and wealthy groups who’d be utterly delighted at the chance to bid for distribution rights to something this novel. Think of it. The century’s ultimate piece of decadence.”