Straight Cut (23 page)

I stayed poised on the balls of my feet, but Yonko, though conscious, was off the count for now. Grushko had caught his breath but wasn’t taking any action, and before he could, I took the two Dutch passports out of my pocket and put them in his hand. That gesture changed the tone of the proceeding, indicating that we were all still in business together despite the recent misunderstanding, et cetera.

Yonko pulled his arms and legs together and sat up in the pile of puffy cotton he’d reduced my mattress to. Still vibrating, I took a step toward him.

“Listen to me,” I said, not just for him but for Grushko too. “Go ahead and hate. You’ve got the right. I don’t blame you a bit.” There was no calculation at all in what I was saying, it was all just coming out. I could feel that I had Yonko’s attention.

“But I’m not the one,” I said. “It was never me. It’s —” and then I knew I’d already said enough. I too had moved into the pulse of change, reached the moment where the wish and the act are one.

“You know who’s responsible,” I said, thinking,
ah, so that’s how it’s done.

A
LTHOUGH FLYING TO
E
UROPE
takes all night, when you fly back from Europe you get there only three hours after you left, which was convenient for me this time, since the predeparture period had been more frantic than usual. I had scarcely had a chance to make up with Grushko and Yonko when a knock came on the door, followed by the voice of my landlady. Someone adjacent had called to complain of noise, presumably the sound of Yonko slamming into the wall, for there hadn’t really been much else. Through the locked door I tried to convince her that I’d only let the bed down a little hastily. After I’d assured her several times that there’d be no further disturbance, she relented and went away.

I got rid of Grushko and Yonko fairly swiftly after that. However confused and irritated they might have been, even they could agree that there was not much use in their hanging around at that moment. They had their Dutch passports, anyway, and I told them they’d have to be satisfied with that and a street corner meet somewhere in New York in a couple of days. I gave them about a fifteen-minute lead out of the place, spending the dead time reckoning up the damage Yonko had done to the flat. The landlady was going to be very disappointed in me, though I did leave her most of my ready cash by way of reparation. It was late enough for her to have gone to bed by the time I crept away myself. I walked to Paddington to collect my gear and from there caught a cab for Heathrow. I had to sit up for the rest of the night, waiting for a flight that would land me in New York around ten the next morning, U.S. time. That left me plenty of time to catch up with the mail.

Homeward bound. Lauren’s letter was filed away for the moment. Who I had to think about was Kevin. I was thinking of him in terms of S.K.’s mystical question: Did he laugh when he was alone? If he was laughing, somewhere in secret, I hoped to have him laughing out of the other side of his mouth before long. But I did not really think he would be laughing. In a sense the question was not applicable to Kevin, who stood outside the whole issue in an area where the twin-ship of desire and its object is the rule for all action. You have to perceive an irony before it becomes amusing. How does one laugh without reflection? It was just me again, trying to reanimate Kevin by breathing interpretations into him.

And in spite of all that, I was really sort of looking forward to the whole thing. It wasn’t just the old affection, so difficult to completely destroy, or the thrill of the mostly fraternal rivalry there’d been between us from the very beginning. I thought now of how I myself had changed, taken a long step in his direction, and I wondered whether he would be able to notice and appreciate that. That really was a vexed question, not a rhetorical one, and my speculation was that he would not, unless across some subconscious synapse — Symparanekromenoi, the fellowship of buried lives.

I slept then for an hour or so, and when I woke the plane had already caught up with the sun. It was going to be a hell of a long day. I still felt stunned, waterlogged with sleep, when the plane landed. Customs was uneventful, though slow.

I gave the cab driver the Brooklyn address and then changed my mind when we hit the expressway. It dawned on me that it would be better to keep a lower profile than that, given all the circumstances surrounding this particular trip. I had the driver take me to the old Earle Hotel. After I checked in there was nothing left to do but try to stay up long enough to straighten out my schedule. I managed to make it until just after dark.

I woke up far and away too early, of course, and had to sit around for a couple of hours waiting for it to get light. I went down to an all-night coffee shop and got a double-large cup to go, then brought it back to my room, where I sat staring out the open window with my feet propped up on the sill. The air outside was cool and damp; the summer was winding down. I’d been gone a long time. As it got lighter, I could see into the north corner of Washington Square. The trees and grass looked lush and green, and I kept studying them as if they mattered to me somehow. Still I was surprised when Grushko and Yonko strolled into the circle of benches around nine o’clock; I’d nearly forgotten I’d promised to meet them there.

It seemed as if some sort of role reversal had occurred when I went down. Yonko looked cheerier than I’d ever seen him, while Grushko looked very stern. Of course, Yonko had always wanted to come to the States, right? He’d already bought himself an “I Love New York” T-shirt. It became him so well that I almost didn’t notice that he had that same old raincoat shoved down in a small shopping bag, and that the bag swung more heavily than any raincoat could really account for.

And then I noticed that Grushko had a heavy shopping bag also, which he was carrying in the manner one might handle a basket of rattlesnakes. That seemed to raise the situation to a whole new level of seriousness. I had no idea how they’d made these arrangements, but it seemed certain enough that they had been made. Two for the price of one, oh boy. Of course I had invited them, in a sense. I took a seat between them on the curving bench.

“Well?” Grushko said. He really did seem edgy. He was looking at me sidelong, not even turning his head my way, and he kept fingering his shopping bag in a way that made me sort of uncomfortable. The Pink Pussycat, said the bag. Sure.

“Relax,” I said. “You’re making me nervous.”

“This situation has gone long enough,” Grushko said. “We get tired of waiting. “

“Well, it’s good practice if Yonko really wants to be a cop,” I said. “You need a lot of patience for that. Stakeouts and everything.”

No one seemed to think that was too funny at all. I guess I should have known better.

“It’s time for something to happen,” Grushko said.

“I know, I know. But you’ve really got to be patient for just a few more days. Remember, the business isn’t with me. You’ve got to wait until I make the transfer. “

“We’d like to be there,” Grushko said flatly.

“That’s impossible. You know that.”

“Nearby, then.”

“Okay,” I said, and then I thought for a moment before I went on. But all I could think was that it did all seem to be happening. They were making the moves I needed them to make, without my even having to nudge them. My last little moral holdout was that I wasn’t going to give them the
what,
but I did come across with the when and where.

Then for the next little while there was not very much to do except sit around. I procured a shipping list from which I learned that the
Eleusis
would not be in for four or five more days, and until that happened I wouldn’t even know whether the whole skin-diving maneuver had done anything more than create a whole new class of junkie whales and sharks. It was time to sit and wait. The most trivial social encounter remained for the moment inadvisable. I’d made a promise to myself that I would stay away from Lauren until the business matters were resolved. The one person I did need to see was Kevin, and for the first day or so I didn’t really feel up to that.

But it got awfully boring. I went out some, of course; I had to, but I tried to hold it to a minimum. The only time you have accidental encounters with people you know in New York is when you don’t want to. Then also, whenever I did go out, be it only for a cup of coffee or a paper, either Grushko or Yonko appeared on my tail. Always one and never both, which I gathered meant they were keeping the hotel under twenty-four-hour surveillance — a bit excessive, I would have said. It didn’t take me long to notice all this, since they made no effort at all to conceal themselves, and I’m sure they wanted me to know they were keeping an eye on me. It didn’t matter much. I didn’t need my privacy for anything yet, but it was a macabre effect. I spent most of my time in my room. The circumstances were ideal for a total surrender to jet lag. I slept most of the days and spent the nights watching late movies on TV. It might have been a combination of ennui and my weird sleep schedule that finally led me to conceive a sort of novel way for getting in touch with Kevin.

I suppose it goes with the rest of my personality that I am the sort who will never throw away a key. Like a pack rat, or a magpie. Thus my New York key ring is still the size of my fist even though I don’t really live there anymore. One night, during a long commercial break on Channel 7, I tried amusing myself by flipping through the keys and trying to remember what doors they used to open. When I hit the set that used to go with Chameleon International Filmworks, the light bulb went on.

I don’t throw away keys, and Kevin likes to rotate cylinders.
It was a half-baked idea, but even if it didn’t work, which it probably wouldn’t, it would at least break the monotony for an hour or so.

It wasn’t so late, not much past ten. Yonko was on duty outside the Earle and he fell in behind me as I went up the street. No skin off my nose; Kevin was probably the only person in the world I didn’t at all mind leading him to. But once I got into Chelsea I began to feel enough uncertainty to make me hesitate. I went into a Puerto Rican bar on Ninth Avenue where I knew I could knock back a couple with perfect anonymity. There was next to no light, and Yonko, who came in and sat near the door, was probably more conspicuous than I was down in the shadows at the far end of the counter. I had a beer and a shot and a beer and a shot and a beer and a shot, and by the time I left, a little past eleven, I didn’t feel uncertain anymore.

Yonko stopped when he saw me go up to Kevin’s entryway. I was tempted to wave back at him, but I didn’t. Of course the first hitch in the whole scheme was that I had no way of getting past the downstairs door. I’d thought of nothing to cover that contingency, but now, on the spur of the moment, I just mashed all the buttons on the buzzer plate
except
for Kevin’s. In a building that size, somebody’s always expecting someone. Sure enough, in a second or so here came the buzz.

Upstairs, it all began to seem like an exercise, a true time waster. Kevin’s door had a Fox lock set in its center, with the cylinder behind a steel plate where I couldn’t read the brand. It no longer seemed a likely proposition, but since I was there I thought I might as well go through the motions. I had six keys from the Chameleon days, three Segals and three Medecos, and I started trying them, quietly, very quietly. The Segals wouldn’t go in at all. The first Medeco made it about halfway. The second was a perfect fit. Slowly, softly, I turned the lock.

The door swung into the little end of the ell of Kevin’s loft, so that the main living area was around the corner from where I was standing. The lights were on over there and I could just see the beginning of his rows of stills along the white wall opposite. I let the door drift shut, not locking it, and padded toward the light. I was wearing soft-soled tai chi slippers and my feet seemed to make no noise at all on the floor.

It was a straight shot from the corner to the round white table below the windows in back. Kevin was sitting down there. He was facing across the table, in profile to me, and he seemed to have noticed nothing. On the other side of the table sat Lauren.

Freeze frame.

Slammed back into editorial detachment, I studied the tableau down there at the little end of the room. Lauren, I saw, was dressed for the street. She had her shoes on and her purse was near her on the table and she did not have the air of a woman who is, however temporarily,
at home.
It was possible, then, that she had only dropped in for the evening. She was smoking with the fast jerky movements which usually implied that something fairly serious was up. Kevin was watching her closely, leaning a little toward her across the table. After a long, long moment, he sat back in his chair and his eyes drifted up toward the ceiling. It was a classic Kevin vague-out; I could recognize it from the other end of the room. Lauren snubbed out her cigarette and turned toward the windows behind.

My heart faltered. The windows were black, reflective, but if she saw me she gave no sign of it. I detached myself from the wall and walked quietly, deliberately, down the middle of the floor toward the table, watching not the two of them now but the reflections of all three of us. I floated toward our images as if I were riding a dolly. The reflections were dim, a little distorted, unrealized, resembling not the ghosts of the dead but shades, perhaps, of the as yet unborn. It was passing strange that no one had noticed me yet. I reached the table and stopped beside it, and after a moment I let my knuckles fall and click against the Formica top.

There we are.

Kevin swiveled in his chair and looked at me, eyes blurry, with no real sign of recognition. Lauren was more composed and I realized she probably had been watching my approach after all. She rose, apparently with perfect calm, and slung the strap of her purse over her shoulder.

“I’ve got to go,” she said to Kevin, who nodded but did not otherwise respond. Lauren came round the table to me and kissed me on the cheek. A tremble of her fingers against my collarbone.