Tongues of Fire (16 page)

“How did you do in school?” he heard himself say. It was not one of the questions he had meant to ask.

Paulette laughed. She threw back her head and laughed some more. Her breasts jumped up and down. Her nostrils flared like tiny laughing mouths. The plastic curlers clicked together.

“Hush,” said the old woman in the wheelchair in a thin irritated voice. “I can't hear a word they're saying.” She spoke without looking at them. She did not take her eyes off the screen for a second.

Gradually Paulette's laughter subsided, flaring up once or twice the way a badly tuned motor does after the ignition has been turned off. “Men have asked me a lot of funny things,” she said, in a tone that was much less harsh; perhaps laughing cleansed her voice, Rehv thought.

“It doesn't matter anyway,” Rehv said. “But I do need to know if you've ever been pregnant.”

“Yes.”

“How many times?”

“Five,” she answered immediately.

“Any children?”

“I don't have children. I have abortions.”

“That's not true, child,” the old woman called from the other side of the room.

“Shut up,” Paulette said. Harshness reentered her voice like a cactus that thrives in a desert of bad feeling.

“What does she mean?” Rehv asked.

Paulette lowered her eyelids, whether to shut him out or to threaten him he didn't know. “Nothing. She's a stupid old meddler.”

Rehv glanced at the woman in the wheelchair. She hunched forward, narrowing the gap between her eyes and the television. “She had a baby, sir,” the old woman said. “A little baby girl.”

“Don't call him sir,” Mr. Cohee said suddenly, very angry.

“Why not?” Her weak tired voice sounded angry too. “She should have another baby. Be the best thing in the world.”

Mr. Cohee glared at her but said nothing.

“When did you have the baby?” Rehv asked Paulette. She folded her arms across her chest and kept her mouth shut.

“June the fourth nineteen hundred and seventy-two,” the old woman answered.

“I'd like to see her,” Rehv said, fearing as he did that the child might have been taken to live somewhere else by its father.

“Then you'll have to be able to see through six foot of solid ground,” the old woman said. “She got run over, right here on this street.”

“I'm very sorry.” The room grew quiet, except for a man on television who was threatening to burn every settlement on the Spanish Main unless he got his way. Rehv thought about Lena. He was vaguely aware of the two dark faces watching him, and tried to push her away, but she would not go. Her presence made it much harder to say what he had to say; he came very close to not saying it at all. But finally, as if to keep them inside was as impossible as holding one's breath forever, the words came out: “Was she a healthy child?”

The color seemed to drain from Paulette's face, like chocolate ice on a stick when someone sucks it. “Jesus.” She spoke the word so softly he could barely hear it.

“She was a perfect baby in every way,” the old woman said.

“Shut your fucking mouth,” Paulette shouted.

“Perfect,” the old woman muttered defiantly, hunching closer to the screen.

Rehv looked at Paulette, trying to will a little friendliness into her angry eyes. “I have nothing more to ask,” he said gently. “I'm sorry, but I had to know.” Her eyes stayed the same.

“I have a question,” Mr. Cohee said. “A money question.”

“I'm offering Paulette fifteen thousand dollars, payable the day the child is born. It must be a boy.” He felt a little surge of nausea inside himself and took a deep breath to force it back down. “Because of that Paulette will have to be tested as soon as possible after she becomes pregnant. If it's a girl it will have to be aborted and we'll try again.”

None of that bothered Paulette or Mr. Cohee. “I want more than that,” she said.

“You forgot to mention how much you were paying me,” Mr. Cohee said. “If we go ahead with this Paulette will probably miss a month of work. Sometimes they miss two.”

“Paulette won't be working at all. We can't risk having the baby infected with a venereal disease.”

“You're a dreamer,” Mr. Cohee said. “Tell him how much you give me every week, Paulette.”

“Five hundred dollars.”

“Can you multiply, Dr. Vere?”

Rehv ignored him. “On the day the baby is born I will give you one pound of cocaine.”

Mr. Cohee pulled himself closer to the edge of his chair. “What kind of cocaine?”

He had no idea. “Colombian,” he said, remembering an article in the newspaper. “Very pure.”

“How pure?”

“Ninety percent,” he said, trying to recall the text of the article.

“Have you got a sample?”

Rehv took a small plastic bag from his pocket and unrolled it. In one corner was a teaspoonful of white powder. He rose, walked over to Mr. Cohee, and handed him the bag.

“Wait here,” Mr. Cohee said. He stood up and went out of the room by the front door. Rehv sat down and looked at John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Paulette twisted the curlers in her hair and flexed her long, muscular feet. The pirates hauled their cannon through the jungle.

After a while Mr. Cohee returned. “Leon says it's not ninety percent. But it's good enough.”

“Then we have a deal?” Rehv asked, wondering whether it was one hundred percent pure.

“If you give me coke now, yes, we have a deal.”

“No. One-third tomorrow. The rest when I said.”

Mr. Cohee stared at him for a moment, looking for something he didn't find. He sighed. “I'll have to trust you.”

“That won't be hard for you,” Rehv said. “You've got Leon.”

Mr. Cohee laughed and offered his hand. Rehv shook it, thinking of the way it had cracked across Angel's cheek. It was a very hard hand. “Leave the coke here with Paulette,” he said. “I'll pick it up tomorrow night.” He turned to go.

“What about me?” Paulette said to him. “I can't stop working for nine months. Who's going to pay the rent?”

“I'll take care of your expenses,” Rehv said.

Paulette and Mr. Cohee exchanged a glance. She shrugged. “Have a nice holiday,” he said to her as he went out.

“Holiday,” Paulette repeated, as though it was a word from a foreign language. She rose and walked toward Rehv, with a look in her eye that made his chest feel tight. She stood very close to him and asked, “Why me?”

Rehv tried to think of something that would make sense. “We'll go well together,” he said.

Paulette laughed her big laugh. He was very conscious of her size and strength: They seemed to give her an invisible power, like gravity. She stepped forward and put her arms around him.

The Spanish Main went up in flames.

But only for a moment: And in that moment he felt a flooding of desire in his penis that was so strong, so quick, that it sucked in all his energy and made his mind a haze; and he knew without thinking that he had reached the shore of a dangerous land, more dangerous than the Battle of Haifa, more dangerous than Abu Fahoum's bodyguard in the night. And danger found him right away: In the haze he saw Naomi's face as it was in orgasm. His penis, not quite fully hard, fell like a bird shot at the instant of takeoff.

“Come on,” Paulette said, pulling him toward a dark corridor.

“Not now,” he said, drawing back, feeling light-headed, almost faint.

“Don't worry about her,” Paulette said. “She's used to it.”

“It's not that.” Rehv bit the inside of his cheek, hoping it would clear his head. “There's no point until you're off the pill.”

“No?” He heard mockery in her tone. “But I don't use the pill. I have a diaphragm.” She drew him into the corridor.

“It's not that simple. We're trying to produce a baby. We have to know where you are in your fertility cycle, for example.”

“What?”

“When was your last period?”

“About a week ago.”

“Then you're probably not ovulating yet.”

Paulette stopped tugging at him. “So you want to get me pregnant with just one fuck? You think that's going to happen?”

Rehv said nothing. He had really not thought about it. While he was thinking he felt her tongue touch his ear. She ran it all around the edges and then stuck it inside. “Come on,” she whispered.

She led him to a bedroom at the end of the hall. In the bedroom were an unpainted plywood chest of drawers, all of them opened, a scattering of clothing on the floor, a lamp made from a bottle of gin, and an unmade double bed. Paulette went to the window and lowered the venetian blinds. “No free shows,” she said. She turned to Rehv: “Take off your clothes.”

“Maybe we should turn off the light.”

He heard the low chuckle, deep in her throat. “Why? Don't you want to see what I got?” She pulled her flannel nightgown over her head, and Rehv saw: the long heavy muscles of her legs, the thick curly black pubic hair reaching almost to the round, deep navel, the long hard nipples of her breasts, the little circles of hair under her arms, her smile, her eyes, amused, and the blue curlers in her hair. Paulette lay on the bed. “Take off your clothes,” she said again.

Rehv took off his clothes, feeling her dark eyes on him. “You have a very nice body,” she said. She spread her legs a little. Rehv approached the bed. Paulette reached out and took his penis and testicles in her big hand and tested the weight, like a shopper at a fruit stall. “This will be nice too, when it gets hard.”

But it wouldn't get hard.

Rehv lay on his back. Paulette knelt over him. She licked his penis. She took it in her mouth. She took his testicles in her mouth, one at a time, together, with his penis. She licked her middle finger and forced it into his anus. She removed it, licked it again, and put it in farther. Rehv was aware of all this, but he felt nothing, as though his nerve endings no longer reached his brain. He watched her work. She was an experienced mechanic in a country where spare parts were scarce and only clever improvisation kept the faulty, damaged cars on the road. She did not seem surprised, upset, or disappointed.

Rehv felt something gathering force in his body, not where he wanted it, but higher. It was a kind of laughter, building in his chest. An insane laughter that once begun would never stop, could never be stopped by him. His heart began to pound with it. His penis, his sexuality, his manhood as people used to say, were betraying him, were destroying the last hope for his own salvation and the salvation of his people. He had thought of everything but that: to be beaten by himself.

The laughter pushed up his throat like a fist. He opened his mouth; and felt Paulette swing her body over his, and lower her huge, strong buttocks onto his face. “Lick,” he heard her say. And then: “Come on, man. I want that big Jewish cock inside me.”

Suddenly, as his tongue touched her and he heard those words, he felt again the wild rush of blood to his groin, and he turned her over—she seemed to weigh nothing at all—and sank his penis deep inside her. He began to pound her body, and pound and pound. He heard her gasps and her cries. Their pores opened and cloaked their bodies in a common wetness, like giant twins in an amniotic sac. Her cries changed to soft whistling sounds in the back of her throat. He felt her great body slowly tire. He did not tire at all.

And when he finally came it was so long and so painful he felt he was losing his insides. Like childbirth.

Later he awoke. He heard Paulette snoring quietly beside him. Carefully he got out of bed and looked out through the slats of the venetian blinds. The night was completely still, except for the little wisps of vapor someone was exhaling across the street.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“I'm sorry,” Armbrister said. “I did all I could.”

“Like hell you did.”

“I did, Krebs. I really did.” Armbrister wore a solemn face that strove for compassion but did not quite achieve it, and so seemed ambivalent instead: the kind of face usually seen by unpleasant relatives on their deathbeds. “Confidentially, it was Bunting. Right from the beginning I could see his mind was made up. ‘The asshole got caught.' That's what he said whenever anyone spoke in your favor.” Armbrister looked down and began poking through the piles of paper on his desk.

“What if I told you they're trying to raise money by moving into drugs and prostitution?”

Armbrister lifted a stack of files and peered underneath. “Why do you say that?”

“I've been watching him.”

“Who?”

“Rehv.”

Armbrister stopped shifting papers and raised his head. There was no longer the slightest ambivalence in the expression on his face. “You make everything very difficult, Krebs.” He had more to say, but he kept it to himself, staring coldly at Krebs while the thought unfolded in his mind. Then he sighed and again began pushing papers around his desk. “Ah. Here it is,” he said, holding up a white envelope. He handed it to Krebs.

Krebs opened it. Inside was a check for $5,722.33.

“Severance,” Armbrister said.

Krebs took the check, his pen and pencil set, and his round mirror and left the building. On the way to the garage where he kept the car he went into a bar and ordered a scotch on the rocks. There was no one in the bar except the bartender, cutting his nails, and a middle-aged waitress dressed like an Eastern European folk dancer. Krebs drank his scotch and thought about Armbrister. He drank another and thought about Bunting. He had several more and thought about Isaac Rehv. People came in. They were hungry and thirsty. They smoked and laughed. They talked shop. Lunchtime. Krebs paid his bill and left.

At the garage he asked for a rebate on his monthly payment.

“We don't give rebates,” the attendant said.