Small World (13 page)

At last he laid aside the tools he’d borrowed from Dolly’s cupboards, and looked pridefully at Dolly. She was much more interested in the Carousel.

‘Look at it,’ she breathed.

He had been looking at it all morning, he thought, and from some damned strange angles. He looked at it again anyway and grunted.

‘How does it go?’ she asked.

‘With a motor. Like just about everything else,’ Roger said shortly. ‘It won’t work like this. It has to be modified.’

Dolly became very cross. ‘Shit. How long will that take?’

Roger shrugged, i’ll have to take the mechanism apart, to start. I need to think about it. Let’s have lunch.’

Dolly ground out her current cigarette mercilessly. Roger winced to see what she was doing to the pathetic little cancer stick.

‘This isn’t any fun.’ She plumped herself down onto the sofa, pouting.

i’m sorry,’ Roger explained. ‘It’s electrical. You can’t just plug it somewhere. The wire couldn’t take the charge. It needs a different set of works.’ .

Dolly looked doubtful. ‘Oh, hell.’ She examined her nails. What do you want for lunch? I’ll tell Ruta.’

Roger nodded happily. A quick lunch and he would get right down to it. She would be amazed how fast he could whip the Carousel into working order. He watched her leaving. Her bottom sure was nice to watch. It didn’t move like his mother’s at all. Actually, with her girdle on, his mother’s didn’t move. It sort of waddled. He settled back on the sofa, remembering the nice things he knew about Dolly’s behind.

The music began at last. The horses plunged and reared in undulating ranks of four. The chariots glittered as they rushed by, drawn by glossy steeds. Roger decided he liked the white ones best. The outer white reached with his head for something, something that wasn’t there. A brass ring, freedom from his elegant colorful trappings, for joy? His tail was cropped and gold; the mane on the arch of his neck also gold.

it’s
Blue Skirts,’
Dolly said suddenly, and hummed with the music to which the Carousel revolved. Roger recognized it too; it was what she hummed earlier, when he was freeing the Carousel from its building, and what she hummed during lovemaking.

A blue-wheeled chariot, emblazoned with colorful dragons and silvered moldings, went by. Above the sculptured beasts, a frieze crowned the Carousel. On its cupids shot arrows and captured doves and danced about in red diapers. Roger like them, too, especially the little rabbits the arrow-bearing cupids seemed to be chasing. He'd always thought cupids shot love into peoples’ hearts. Perhaps the rabbits were symbolic hearts. Whatever, he wasn’t up on that stuff. It wasn’t his field.

On the walls of the drum, which now housed an electric train transformer, among other things, clowns and monkeys dressed as clowns cavorted. Roger twitched his nose and sighed with pleasure.

Dolly studied the rise and fall of the merry-go-round as it circled. She was entranced. Her face was sunny and gentle. She patted Roger’s head absently, and leaned against him.

‘Oh, Roger,’ she breathed, ‘let’s do it again.’

Nick Weiler tossed the newspaper to one side of his cluttered desk and tipped his chair back. Muck, all muck. One could always hope that sense would come bubbling up out of the muck. The unfortunate thing about muck was that bubbles from it usually stank like a month-old string mop. He closed his eyes. His head ached from thinking about the bizarre article in the newspaper.

The only verifiable fact was that during the previous night the Central Park Carousel had been removed. By whom, to where, for what purpose, was a mystery. So was how. In the night, and in Central Park, which meant overtime for union workers, and while the unbarred zoo of humanity was restless. The most curious, the most oddly shaped piece of the puzzle was that the building housing the Carousel had also been removed, the sort of debris that workmen usually leave behind had been meticulously cleared away. Curiouser and curiouser. As if it been moved all of a piece.

Nick shook his head to clear the cobwebs. It was only too likely that the whole business was some colossal piece of idiocy on the part of the parks workers and their masters. Very likely the whole thing would be discovered, someday, in some storage area, or at. the city dump, or in New Jersey or Nevada in the hands of some wide-eyed, hard-working, and crooked-as-old-Mike-Hardesty entrepreneur.

He sat up straight, thumping the chair’s front feet to the floor. Had anybody considered the possibility that the Carousel had been broken up for separate dispersal into the murk of the antiques industry? Nick rang Roseann, his secretary, and asked her to call a man he knew at the FBI.

He drew the newspaper back out of the general chaos. There were two small photographs with the article: the Carousel itself, reduced to a dark unidentifiable puzzle, and the Parks Commissioner, looking as if someone had just goosed him as his picture was taken. Nick felt a tiny surge of sympathy with the poor guy. Some job.

‘Mr Tucci, returning your call.’ Roseann, over the intercom, interrupted his thoughts.

‘Roscoe,’ Nick said genially, ‘how are you?’

He listened to Roscoe Tucci admit he was still among the living and suffering.

‘Listen, Roscoe, I was thinking about Mike Hardesty and how he got started.’

Roscoe laughed. ‘He was a supply sergeant in Southeast Asia, wasn’t he? Dealt everything there was going and never got caught.’

‘Right. And he got to be president and was out of office and pardoned for every sin he ever committed, back to his First Communion, before one of his partners went public. Anyway, this crazy business of the Central Park Carousel stirred it up in my mind. I remember he used to fence stolen Chinese and Tibetan antiquities. I thought the Central Park business smelled of his work, you know.’

‘Nick,’ Roscoe protested, ‘you’re slipping. Hardesty’s roasting his ass in hell.’

‘I know that,’ Nick paused, i’m sorry I sound flaky. The whole thing is as flaky as anything I’ve ever run into. I just thought maybe somebody had taken a leaf out of his book. Maybe somebody doesn’t want the Carousel, Maybe they want the parts.’ Roscoe was silent for a count of ten. ‘Jesus, that’s beautiful.’ ‘You bet, Roz. Private collectors who aren’t too fussy about who really owns what would eventually pick them up. Pieces of a merry-go-round, who knows how they fit together, how to identify. Whoever has it may even sit on it for a while to let it cool off.’

‘And the pieces will fetch a better price than the whole will.’ Nick agreed. ‘Priced by the glass instead of the bottle, the pop instead of the gram, classic Mike Hardesty thinking.’

‘God bless you,’ Roscoe said fervently. ‘I see a promotion in this for me. You’re invited to the party. I’ll call you back when we get something tangible on this.’

‘Yeah,’ said Nick.

It was nice to think Roscoe would be commended for Nick Weiler’s clever ideas. Roscoe would return the favor someday. Thought of the old Harry himself, Dolly’s darling daddy. Loathsome old bastard. Slimy as a snail. Poor Dolly.

Screw Dolly. Poor Nick. He missed Lucy. He hadn’t heard from her in weeks. She used to bring the kids to the museum once a week. It made him a little sick, thinking that she didn’t miss him, avoided him, even to the point of avoiding the Dalton.

His desk was as messy as the inside of his head, his heart, and the rest of the world. Roseann and Connie fussed over him until he thought he would scream. The museum itself, his beloved Dalton, that he had rescued from the swamps of penury and boredom, was closing in on him like some medieval torturer’s device. It was time for a vacation. Perhaps he would see his mother, who would soothe him, or his father, who might goad him, and either way it was a way of getting off dead center. But first, and he grinned, finding the other end of the logical circle, he had to put things in order.

. . . The thefts—which included several fine gold and silver heirloom pieces, occurred, coincidentally, with a visit to the Borough Museum by dollhouse hobbyist Dorothy ‘Dolly’ Hardesty Douglas—puzzled both police and museum officials with their random nature. The thieves are believed to have made away with the Stillman dollhouse and the other booty while visitors and staff were distracted by Mrs. Douglas’s visit. She is well known there, and has donated several items from her father’s estate to its presidential collection. . . .

6.2.80    —
VIPerpetrations, VIP

The day that Roger Tinker checked out of his hotel room, between his first encounter with Dolly and their adventure in the Park, he had changed his life as well as his surroundings. At times, he thought he might have actually changed skins with someone.

Dolly had come back from her dancing class that day and there he was, sitting awkwardly in her living room. She was still wearing her dancing costume, one of those leotard things that looked like a second skin. This one was white. She wore a skirt over it, the kind that wrapped on, and it was tied with a lot of thin ties circling her waist over and over. Her perfume was tinged with a faintly athletic scent, fresh, light, woman sweat.

She had looked him over as if he were a particular virulent specimen of plague germ. His excitement at her entrance had dissolved into a violent wash of embarrassment. His fly was zippered; it was just his instinctive reaction. Some people believe they were born with original sin. Roger was born with original embarrassment.

The peach-colored leisure suit hadn’t helped. He couldn’t explain to Dolly that his mother made him buy it for his cousin’s wedding two years ago. He had tried to make it a little classier with a black shirt, but that had shrunk, along with the suit, and he was afraid he looked like a very low-ranking underworld hit man in it. Still, it was all he’d brought with him, besides his interview suit, and his socks, shorts, and pajamas. He hadn’t planned on staying more than a couple of days. Or on this sudden lady in his life.

She had sat down and lit a cigarette.

‘Dear Jesus, Roger,’ she had murmured. She jumped up and punched him, none too gently, in the gut.

He had been too surprised to react.

‘You’re impossible,’ she had said.

He had known exactly what she meant. Impossible that he should be with her. He had hung his head at the disgust in her

voice.

‘Well, it can be helped,’ she had gone on.

He had looked up in surprise and, seeing the set of her mouth, felt the same dreadful excitement that he knew when she had first touched him.

‘We’re going to buy you some decent clothes. Get rid of these,’ she had fingered the collar of the black shirt distastefully,
'California
rags.’

Roger had smiled gratefully. She was telling him it wasn’t his own terrible taste, just where he had hailed from. Another small

door from one world into another. Thank you, Dolly.

‘Not too many,’ she had continued, ‘because you’re going to be too small for them, very soon.’

Life became more physical than it ever had been for Roger. There were painful hours at the Health Club in Dolly’s building. Sparrow meals. A constant gnawing hunger. He cheated every chance he got, but he spent so much time with her, and she watched him. And Ruta, the maid, couldn’t be tickled out of so much as a goddamn soda cracker.

The hours of physical misery alternated with delicious, lubricious hours with Dolly. She conducted him through another seminar, not miniatures, not dollhouses, but a more basic course. Introduction to Skin, his own and hers.

In his cellar Fortress of Solitude, he had wondered if real people did the things that he read about in the books hidden in the hassock, or if it were all a huge slobbering practical joke on the innocent and lonely. Some of the goings-on sounded very farfetched to him. He had never ventured into the grimy, obscure, grind houses where pornographic films could be seen, fearing, perhaps rightly, some terrible blow to his fantasies from the lewd light shows.

The real thing was the more satisfying for being unexpected. She tutored him; he was happy to play the student. At the beginning she would sit on him and ride him like the white horse in the Carousel. It was easier for him, and perhaps for her, considering his weight. He would have been pleased to do that forever. She wouldn’t let him stop there. Soon enough, there were variations.

It was all either so pleasant or so excruciating that he had a hard time remembering to think about anything at all except what was happening to the small imploding universe of his body.

He did remember to call his mother, who thought he was interviewing for a job with a mythical scientific supply company. He told her he had to stay on a few more days and that he might take a consulting position with them. She was doubtful. Roger knew she was afraid that he might ask her to move somewhere with him, or even leave her for good. They had managed to avoid long separations or his moving in the past. She would move if he wanted her to, of course, because she couldn’t deal at all with the possibility of losing him entirely, but it wouldn’t be easy to leave her home of thirty years, or likely that she would find a new job at her age. Having been reminded of all that, Roger hung up with relief. He couldn’t say how long he might stay, he didn’t know. It

all depended on Dolly.

The rewiring of the Carousel was a welcome diversion from the carnival of flesh. His brain was still a refuge, it still worked. He carried the minimizer with him everywhere, locking it in a public locker when he had to, and sleeping with it in reach of his hand. He made some modifications so that it was a little harder to use, a little less automatic. Dolly gave him a small bedroom in the apartment; it became instantly cluttered with his tools, accumulated like a little boy’s toys in no time at all.