Thomas Godfrey (Ed) (4 page)

“Unless I know all the facts,” I
said, rising.

“O.K., O.K.,” she said, biting her lower
lip. She straightened the seam of her stocking, which was strictly for my
benefit, but I wasn’t buying any at the moment.

“Let’s have it on the line, sugar.”

“Well, the truth is—I’m not really a
nudie model.”

“No?”

“No. My name is not Heather Butkiss,
either. It’s Claire Rosensweig and I’m a student at Vassar. Philosophy major.
History of Western Thought and all that. I have a paper due January. On Western
religion. All the other kids in the course will hand in speculative papers. But
I want to
know.
Professor Grebanier said if anyone finds out for sure, they’re a cinch to pass
the course. And my dad’s promised me a Mercedes if I get straight A’s.”

I opened a deck of Luckies and a
pack of gum and had one of each. Her story was beginning to interest me.
Spoiled coed. High IQ and a body I wanted to know better.

“What does God look like?”

“I’ve never seen him.”

“Well, how do you know He exists?”

“That’s for you to find out.”

“Oh, great. Then you don’t know what
he looks like? Or where to begin looking?”

“No. Not really. Although I suspect
he’s everywhere. In the air, in every flower, in you and I—and in this chair.”

“Uh huh.” So she was a pantheist. I
made a mental note of it and said I’d give her case a try—for a hundred bucks a
day, expenses, and a dinner date. She smiled and okayed the deal. We rode down
in the elevator together. Outside it was getting dark. Maybe God did exist and
maybe He didn’t, but somewhere in that city there were sure a lot of guys who
were going to try and keep me from finding out.

My first lead was Rabbi Itzhak
Wiseman, a local cleric who owed me a favor for finding out who was rubbing
pork on his hat. I knew something was wrong when I spoke to him because he was
scared. Real scared.

“Of course there’s a you-know-what,
but I’m not even allowed to say His name or He’ll strike me dead, which I could
never understand why someone is so touchy about having his name said.”

“You ever see Him?”

“Me? Are you kidding? I’m lucky I
get to see my grandchildren.”

“Then how do you know He exists?”

“How do I know? What kind of
question is that? Could I get a suit like this for fourteen dollars if there
was no one up there? Here, feel a gabardine—how can you doubt?”

“You got nothing more to go on?”

“Hey—what’s the Old Testament?
Chopped liver? How do you think Moses got the Israelites out of Egypt? With a
smile and a tap dance? Believe me, you don’t part the Red Sea with some gismo
from Korvette’s. It takes power.”

“So he’s tough, eh?”

“Yes. Very tough. You’d think with
all that success he’d be a lot sweeter.”

“How come you know so much?”

“Because we’re the chosen people. He
takes best care of us of all His children, which I’d also like to someday
discuss with Him.”

“What do you pay Him for being
chosen?”

“Don’t ask.”

So that’s how it was. The Jews were
into God for a lot. It was the old protection racket. Take care of them in
return for a price. And from the way Rabbi Wiseman was talking, He soaked them
plenty. I got into a cab and made it over to Danny’s Billiards on Tenth Avenue.
The manager was a slimy little guy I didn’t like.

“Chicago Phil here?”

“Who wants to know?”

I grabbed him by the lapels and took
some skin at the same time.

“What, punk?”

“In the back,” he said, with a
change of attitude.

Chicago Phil. Forger, bank robber,
strong-arm man, and avowed atheist.

“The guy never existed, Kaiser. This
is the straight dope. It’s a big hype. There’s no Mr. Big. It’s a syndicate.
Mostly Sicilian. It’s international. But there is no actual head. Except maybe
the Pope.”

“I want to meet the Pope.”

“It can be arranged,” he said,
winking.

“Does the name Claire Rosensweig
mean anything to you?”

“No.”

“Heather Butkiss?”

“Oh, wait a minute. Sure. She’s that
peroxide job with the bazooms from Radcliffe.”

“Radcliffe? She told me Vassar.”

“Well, she’s lying. She’s a teacher
at Radcliffe. She was mixed up with a philosopher for a while.”

“Pantheist?”

“No. Empiricist, as I remember. Bad
guy. Completely rejected Hegel or any dialectical methodology.”

“One of those.”

“Yeah. He used to be a drummer with
a jazz trio. Then he got hooked on Logical Positivism. When that didn’t work,
he tried Pragmatism. Last I heard he stole a lot of money to take a course in
Schopenhauer at Columbia. The mob would like to find him—or get their hands on
his textbooks so they can resell them.”

“Thanks, Phil.”

“Take it from me, Kaiser. There’s no
one out there. It’s a void. I couldn’t pass all those bad checks or screw
society the way I do if for one second I was able to recognize any authentic
sense of Being. The universe is strictly phenomenological. Nothing’s eternal.
It’s all meaningless.”

“Who won the fifth at Aqueduct?”

“Santa Baby.”

I had a beer at O’Rourke’s and tried
to add it all up, but it made no sense at all. Socrates was a suicide—or so
they said. Christ was murdered. Nietzsche went nuts. If there was someone out
there, He sure as hell didn’t want anybody to know it. And why was Claire
Rosensweig lying about Vassar? Could Descartes have been right? Was the
universe dualistic? Or did Kant hit it on the head when he postulated the
existence of God on moral grounds?

That night I had dinner with Claire.
Ten minutes after the check came, we were in the sack and, brother, you can
have your Western thought. She went through the kind of gymnastics that would
have won first prize in the Tia Juana Olympics. After, she lay on the pillow
next to me, her long blond hair sprawling. Our naked bodies still intertwined.
I was smoking and staring at the ceiling.

“Claire, what if Kierkegaard’s
right?”

“You mean?”

“If you can never really
know.
Only have faith.”

“That’s absurd.”

“Don’t be so rational.”

“Nobody’s being rational, Kaiser.” She
lit a cigarette. “Just don’t get ontological. Not now. I couldn’t bear it if
you were ontological with me.”

She was upset. I leaned over and
kissed her, and the phone rang. She got it.

“It’s for you.”

The voice on the other end was
Sergeant Reed of Homicide.

“You still looking for God?”

“Yeah.”

“An all-powerful Being? Great
Oneness, Creator of the Universe? First Cause of All Things?”

“That’s right.”

“Somebody with that description just
showed up at the morgue. You better get down here right away.”

It was Him all right, and from the
looks of Him it was a professional job.

“He was dead when they brought Him
in.”

“Where’d you find Him?”

“A warehouse on Delancey Street.”

“Any clues?”

“It’s the work of an existentialist.
We’re sure of that.”

“How can you tell?”

“Haphazard way how it was done.
Doesn’t seem to be any system followed. Impulse.”

“A crime of passion?”

“You got it. Which means you’re a
suspect, Kaiser.”

“Why me?”

“Everybody down at headquarters
knows how you feel about Jaspers.”

“That doesn’t make me a killer.”

“Not yet, but you’re a suspect.”

Outside on the street I sucked air
into my lungs and tried to clear my head. I took a cab over to Newark and got out
and walked a block to Giordino’s Italian Restaurant. There, at a back table,
was His Holiness. It was the Pope, all right. Sitting with two guys I had seen
in half a dozen police line-ups.

“Sit down,” he said, looking up from
his fettucine. He held out a ring. I gave him my toothiest smile, but didn’t
kiss it. It bothered him and I was glad. Point for me.

“Would you like some fettucine?”

“No thanks, Holiness. But you go
ahead.”

“Nothing? Not even a salad?”

“I just ate.”

“Suit yourself, but they make a great
Roquefort dressing here. Not like at the Vatican, where you can’t get a decent
meal.”

“I’ll come right to the point,
Pontiff. I’m looking for God.”

“You came to the right person.”

“Then He does exist?” They all found
this very amusing and laughed. The hood next to me said, “Oh, that’s funny.
Bright boy wants to know if He exists.”

I shifted my chair to get
comfortable and brought the leg down on his little toe. “Sorry.” But he was
steaming.

“Sure He exists, Lupowitz, but I’m
the only one that communicates with him. He speaks only through me.”

“Why you, pal?”

“Because I got the red suit.”

“This get-up?”

“Don’t knock it. Every morning I
rise, put on this red suit, and suddenly I’m a big cheese. It’s all in the
suit. I mean, face it, if I went around in slacks and a sports jacket, I couldn’t
get arrested religion-wise.”

“Then it’s a hype. There’s no God.”

“I don’t know. But what’s the
difference? The money’s good.”

“You ever worry the laundry won’t
get your red suit back on time and you’ll be like the rest of us?”

“I use the special one-day service.
I figure it’s worth the extra few cents to be safe.”

“Name Claire Rosensweig mean
anything to you?”

“Sure. She’s in the science
department at Bryn Mawr.”

“Science, you say? Thanks.”

“For what?”

“The answer, Pontiff.” I grabbed a
cab and shot over the George Washington Bridge. On the way I stopped at my
office and did some fast checking. Driving to Claire’s apartment, I put the
pieces together, and for the first time they fit. When I got there she was in a
diaphanous peignoir and something seemed to be troubling her.

“God is dead. The police were here.
They’re looking for you. They think an existentialist did it.”

“No, sugar. It was you.”

“What? Don’t make jokes, Kaiser.”

“It was you that did it.”

“What are you saying?”

“You, baby. Not Heather Butkiss or
Claire Rosensweig, but Doctor Ellen Shepherd.”

“How did you know my name?”

“Professor of physics at Bryn Mawr.
The youngest one ever to head a department there. At the midwinter Hop you get
stuck on a jazz musician who’s heavily into philosophy. He’s married, but that
doesn’t stop you. A couple of nights in the hay and it feels like love. But it
doesn’t work out because something comes between you. God. Y’see, sugar, he
believed, or wanted to, but you, with your pretty little scientific mind, had
to have absolute certainty.”

“No, Kaiser, I swear.”

“So you pretend to study philosophy
because that gives you a chance to eliminate certain obstacles. You get rid of
Socrates easy enough, but Descartes takes over, so you use Spinoza to get rid
of Descartes, but when Kant doesn’t come through you have to get rid of him too.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“You made mincemeat out of Leibnitz,
but that wasn’t good enough for you because you knew if anybody believed Pascal
you were dead, so he had to be gotten rid of too, but that’s where you make
your mistake because you trusted Martin Buber. Except, sugar, he was soft. He
believed in God, so you had to get rid of God yourself.”

“Kaiser, you’re mad!”

“No, baby. You posed as a pantheist
and that gave you access to Him—
if
He existed, which
he did. He went with you to Shelby’s party and when Jason wasn’t looking, you
killed Him.”

“Who the hell are Shelby and Jason?”

“What’s the difference? Life’s
absurd now anyway.”

“Kaiser,” she said, suddenly
trembling. “You wouldn’t turn me in?”

“Oh yes, baby. When the Supreme
Being gets knocked off,
somebody’s
got to take the rap.”

“Oh, Kaiser, we could go away
together. Just the two of us. We could forget about philosophy. Settle down and
maybe get into semantics.”

“Sorry, sugar. It’s no dice.”

She was all tears now as she started
lowering the shoulder straps of her peignoir and I was standing there suddenly
with a naked Venus whose whole body seemed to be saying, Take me—I’m yours. A
Venus whose right hand tousled my hair while her left hand had picked up a
forty-five and was holding it behind my back. I let go with a slug from my
thirty-eight before she could pull the trigger, and she dropped her gun and
doubled over in disbelief.