The Exquisite (7 page)

Mr. Kindt loved a good cigar, and he would always, with impeccable courtesy, offer me one. Dutch Masters was the brand he preferred, and he didn’t mind if I chuckled about it like it was a joke. In fact, as we have seen, not only did he like for me to laugh about things, he insisted I do so. You have such a very pleasant laugh, it’s so rich and hearty, I find it invigorating, he would say. He was just about as quick with a compliment as he was with a cigar. Apparently I had nice manners and nice features and “fine, strong shoulders” and a nice way of holding a plastic-tipped Premium. Generally, if I was smoking alone, I smoked Merits, but in Mr. Kindt’s company it was cigars. Mr. Kindt thought very little indeed of cigarettes, “those miniature albino cigars,” “those blatant disease-carrying delivery systems for brand names.” There was no reason whatsoever, he said, to suck smoke all the way down into the lungs, which was the custom with cigarettes. The mouth, which held the tongue and the mechanisms of taste, was the appropriate receptacle. Its highly permeable membranes eagerly invited tobacco’s active compounds to enter the “inward-leading complex” of blood vessels they played host to. And of course, he added, cigars tasted much better. I wasn’t at all sure about this last point, especially when it came to Dutch Masters, but I didn’t argue. I didn’t argue either when Mr. Kindt would talk, with a funny little smile on his lips, about how pleasant it would be to die, if one had to, by having one’s throat annihilated by cancer, or lungs filled with fragrant tar. When one is in the early, enthusiastic throes of a friendship, one lets a great deal slide.

Out in the hospital’s so-called garden, the air was either too warm or too cold, depending, often, on how we were feeling and, in my case, how recently I had been given meds. Always there were the sirens coming or going and the sound of sledgehammers and saws and earthmovers in the distance where they were removing rubble. Consequently, it was only in the late evening that you could hear birds or the occasional windblown tree. The temperature or noise level notwithstanding, there from time to time we would sit on one of the low concrete benches and puff and watch the sickly pigeons and Mr. Kindt would grin with his bad teeth, rub his forehead, and discourse. It was during one of these speeches that I learned that the herring population in the North Sea had more than once become quite devastated due to overfishing, and that one clear day many years before his misadventures with Fish Lines, before we had watched our program together, when he had read about this devastation over a cup of coffee in his favorite Amsterdam haunt, he had burst into tears.

Sadness builds like sediment with the kind of predictability that still manages to astonish, the kind that often ends by masking its original cause, he said. Years before that cup of coffee, I stood heartbroken in front of a fishmonger’s and watched his knife, guided as much by physical memory as by his blinking green eyes ringed with flecks of blood, destroy the animate integrity of his dead or merely dying charges.

But you like to eat fish, I said. I haven’t seen you cry when you do that.

Oh, I love to eat fish, of course, herring in particular. It is practically a sickness with me. It is perhaps because of this love, which I have had since childhood, that the whole question became so acute. You know the old adage, my boy: touch one part of the web and the whole thing quivers. I can clearly remember as a boy biting the stomach out of a tiny pickled sardine and thinking, but something large and awful will soon do the same to me. Most of us get over these little waking nightmares, but not I. At least not that one.

It was in the garden, likewise, that I learned how to say “you fucking ball-bag” in Dutch, along with other little bits of terminology. It was pretty pleasant, really. When he wasn’t discoursing, Mr. Kindt was endlessly curious about me, and I found myself saying all sorts of things. I talked about my time on the street under the scaffolding on Great Jones and about my two cats that had become one and then none. A lot of what I talked about, of course, was Dr. Tulp. About the short row of silver pens she kept in her breast pocket. And about how her long cold fingers, in the process of going about their ministrations, would occasionally, I imagined, make unexplained movements across my chest. These movements would, later, when the ward had gone quiet and she had returned for a follow-up “consultation,” occasionally be accomplished with the help of one of her pens. The pen she would use would be dry but the marks it left would be wet. She would dig with her pen until there were neat rows of red trenches then she would lean very close and clean me up with large alcohol-soaked swabs.

I don’t know why I imagine that last part, I told Mr. Kindt.

I’m sure I don’t either, Henry, Mr. Kindt said. But we all have our little fantasies, our little gropings in the dark. Who knows what we find there? Who can say? I have groped in the dark and found my fingers around people’s throats and theirs, in turn, around mine. Who knows where it all leads?

Also, I would tell him about my girlfriend, Carine. And about the French poets she loved so much and about her handsome vintage clothing.

Carine was nothing like Dr. Tulp. For one thing she was not tall, for another she was French-
ish
. I once asked her about this “ish” thing when I was feeling grouchy, and she said she was French by descent and that she had studied French language and literature in school and had lived in France and was a Francophile and was completely and legitimately French-identified. I said that seemed a little stretched and a tad fake, and she, quite legitimately, kicked me hard under the table with her pointy vintage shoe.

I did not study French in school. I did not study much at all in school. A few classics, a little mimicry, a little attitude, that’s about it. This was a sore point, at times, in our relationship.

No, I have not read that, I would say.

Well, do you want to read it? she would say.

I’m not sure, I don’t know what it’s about, I would say.

I just got done telling you,
mon amour,
I’ve been telling you about it for the past twenty minutes, she would say.

Can you recap? I would say.

No, she would say.

Please, I would say.

It’s about disgust and misogyny and the sexual ramifications of the 1968 student uprisings in France and the current impotence of the contemporary French novel, she would say.

You’re just bragging, I would say.

And she would say, you’re cute, but don’t be a dickhead.

I would like to note again that during our sessions and when she came to see me in the ward, I became very fond of Dr. Tulp. I even took to affecting, both in Dr. Tulp’s presence and out of it, a slight Dutch accent. Even though Dr. Tulp, who had been in the States for some time, did not really have one. Actually, Dr. Tulp’s accent was Boston if it was anything. It wasn’t Boston enough to be comical, if Boston makes you, as it does me, laugh to hear in quantity; but there was something there that made you, when you heard it, think of lips being pulled back to expose a lot of white teeth. I have already mentioned my fantasy about Dr. Tulp carving my chest with her pen so I might as well note that there were moments when it occurred to me to imagine waking up one night with Dr. Tulp’s white teeth sunk deeply but not uncomfortably into my throat. I haven’t told you about my teeth yet. For now, let’s just say they could use a little servicing. As could, as I have said, Mr. Kindt’s. Mr. Kindt wasn’t big on the oral hygiene. Frankly, he was not big on much hygiene at all, but he did love a hot shower. Every day he would have one. I don’t say any soap was involved in the shower, or, rather, that I can confirm that there was soap involved, but it was hot. Once or twice when I was visiting him in his room, he asked me to hand him a towel. Once, he asked me to hand him a towel then sit down outside the shower. When I asked him why he wanted me to do this, he said he just wanted, at that moment, to know that I was near.

I have not felt, he said, entirely myself today. Or rather it would perhaps be more accurate to say that today I have felt too much like myself, that my carefully acquired external layers have sloughed off, leaving my interior exposed.

What does it feel like? I asked.

Not at all good.

Not at all good how?

Quite terrible, you know.

You mean like the big thing eating you.

Well, yes. But also it is as if I had retracted, horribly, as if everything around me had begun to blur.

I didn’t say anything.

It has happened before. It can make me scream.

He was standing, a small yellow form behind the semi-transparent shower curtain.

Do you feel like screaming now? I said.

It is never a question of feeling like it, he said. I just scream.

In the meantime though, Mr. Kindt did not scream—he cried and breathed too heavily and said odd, occasionally corny things—and life in the hospital continued much as it had. I met twice a week with Dr. Tulp, who did not sink her teeth into my throat or carve my chest with her pen, but instead asked me questions about patterns of redundancy and potential or actual seams of discontent within, and the location of, my family, and I received nightly and sometimes daily meds and continued to steal items that I passed on to Job. I also read books suggested by Mr. Kindt, like part of a fat history of the Dutch East India company—basically a chronicle of brilliant greed and unvarnished corruption—which he left on my night table one morning, magazines that Job brought in for me, and things I put my hands on as I made my way around the hospital. Nothing I read though seemed as interesting as
The Rings of Saturn,
and I often pulled it out of my drawer and flipped through it. After I had read a page or two, I would lie back on my bed or go and lie down if I hadn’t been lying down already and look up at the ceiling and think vague, melodramatic, mostly borrowed thoughts about playing some key part in the Taiping Rebellion in China or helping to end the early-twentieth-century Congolese rubber trade or carrying on a doomed but sort of elegant love affair with the daughter of a vicar. If I was dozy, which I often was, these rarefied thoughts would shift ground, so that before long, instead of carrying the banner for the failing Chinese rebels or riding across the heath to deliver a bundle of roses under cover of dark, or landing at night to join the Irish separatists, I would be patrolling the ramparts of some besieged fortress culled from the fantasy novels of my childhood, brandishing an unbreakable blade, setting my jaw, and waiting for some hideous onslaught. Well, that’s stupid, but the reason I bring it up is that one afternoon just as the huge black arrows had begun to fly, just as the screams and battle cries had begun to take over my skull, I opened my eyes and—in one of the developments that has slowly helped lead me to a better, though still imperfect, understanding of my position here—found myself looking at my aunt.

The morning after my first murder, Mr. Mancini, the manager of The Fidelity, where I had been staying since I left the hospital, knocked on my door and told me I had a phone call.

Who is it? I said.

Yeah, yeah, let me check with my secretary, shitface, he said, smiling.

Since my arrival at his establishment, Mr. Mancini had called me shitface six times that I knew of, and once when I asked him if I could have an extra key to my room he had taken a baseball bat out from under his desk and smacked it against the wall. He also smiled constantly and really unpleasantly, and, even though I wanted to try very badly, he was too big to even imagine beating the shit out of.

Actually, I had imagined beating the shit out of him several times. Each time, as I threw the last, devastating punch, aiming for his throat after I had worked over his midsection and face, I thought of previous imagined triumphs and said, who’s the shitface now?

Anyway, after I had put some clothes on, I went down to the lobby, attempted to ignore Mr. Mancini, who had taken up position behind his desk, and picked up the greasy yellow phone that sat on a stack of old coin-collector magazines in the corner. Then I walked over to the Odessa Café on Tompkins Square and took a seat at the back and waited for the knockout to walk in.

It’s not every day that you have the opportunity to break bread with someone you’ve murdered the night before, and while it had all been, to borrow and permute Anthony’s vocabulary, unpleasantly messy (basically I had fucked it up), continuing the acquaintance appealed greatly to me, not least because as I left, one of the contortionists had stuck two hundred dollars in my pocket with her foot.

I had spent a good quarter of my earnings at the Horseshoe, drinking Cape Cods and hoping that, even though he didn’t work there anymore, Anthony would show up so that we could compare notes. He did not. I finally asked the bartender on duty about him and was told that Job, if that’s who I meant, hadn’t been there for weeks.

The knockout and all her nice proportions arrived a few minutes after I did. She was wearing a maroon slip, a black leather bomber, pink-tinted glasses, and a kiss-my-ass grin that she tore off and tossed in my lap as she sat down.

Hi, I said.

Get us some drinks, and soup, I want borscht, she said.

A waitress who had clearly been eating too many pierogi for too many years and who was wearing a lot of eye makeup and what looked to me like a wig she had possibly inherited from a great-aunt in the old country came over and called me sweetheart and I ordered.

While we waited, the knockout pulled out a cell phone and made a couple of calls, one to a guy named Bob, who apparently did bodywork for her, and one to Mr. Kindt.

He wants to talk to you, she said.

About what?

She didn’t bother to answer, just handed me the phone then got up and went in the direction of the toilets.

Henry? Mr. Kindt said.

Yes, I said.

Come to see me this afternoon, dear boy, after you have finished with your lunch and conversation.

I killed this lunch partner of mine last night, you know,
murdered
her, I said.

Yes, well, that is what she wants to talk to you about—listen to her, she is quite articulate and quite direct. She can be of great help.

Great help with what?

Mr. Kindt laughed. With any, if you should choose to carry them out, future murders, he said.

I knew what you meant.

I know you did. Was the pay satisfactory?

It was.

Good, and there will of course be more. So for now just think of last night as a test, a trial run. A little fine-tuning is in order, that’s all.

Does Cornelius know about this lunch I’m having? I asked.

Of course he does, my boy, he is in charge, how could he not? Now, finish up there, then come and see me.

I hung up just as the borscht arrived. A couple minutes later we were both eating sweet, airy challa bread, spooning up the red stuff, drinking Cape Cods, and looking at each other.

Yeah, I know you saw me naked, so what? she said.

She leaned forward, expressing some serious décolletage, and stuck one of her nails a little farther than was comfortable into my forearm.

Did you appreciate? she asked.

Yes, I appreciated.

Of course you did.

I had liked the afterimage so much in fact that after I had left the scene of the crime I went back to my little room in Mr. Mancini’s flop and wrestled around with it for a while. But of course I didn’t tell her that. Instead, I took a sip of my Cape Cod, or whatever we were drinking, probably just Coke, it doesn’t matter, and said, O.K., talk to me, tell me why I’m here, tell me what I did wrong.

Everything, genius.

That’s a lot.

You have a way with words.

So I’m told.

By who?

Who or whom?

Let’s say who.

Let’s drop it.

You talk tough, I think I like it.

Now it’s you who likes something.

Who says I just started?

I looked at her. I wished we’d just said all of the preceding, even if it sounded like bad noir dialogue. I wished, after she’d said, everything, genius, and I’d said, that’s a lot, that she hadn’t proceeded to tell me, in detail and pretty directly, how much I sucked.

I already told Cornelius you’re useless.

So what did he say?

He said I should meet with you and, if at all possible, straighten your sorry ass out.

He said it like that?

More or less.

Can you straighten my sorry ass out?

Of course I can.

Why? I mean, why bother? It’s not like I asked to do this.

Why do you think?

I took a bite of borscht-soaked challa and pretended to think about it.

But why does he want me to do this? I said.

You’ll have to ask him that.

I did—later, when I went over to his house.

We’ll discuss motivation another day, he said. Or perhaps I should say the motivation will become clear or clearer later. In the meantime, I will just ask you, as my friend, to help me and my partner, Cornelius, in facilitating this venture. Since my earliest days as a businessman I have been interested in unusual, even improbable, transactions. Don’t forget, after all, that I made my real start in affairs by swimming the length of a lake with my arms bound tightly behind me.

You didn’t mention your arms being tied before.

Well they weren’t, that would have been impossible. I said it just now for effect. But it was nevertheless a transforming experience. When the adventure ended I walked away from Lake Otsego a changed man.

Cornelius told me he was there.

Did he? It’s true that I have known Cornelius for a very long time. He wasn’t much more than a boy then. Nor, for that matter, was I. But at any rate, dear Henry, there is so very much demand for this service, and I am so grateful that you are willing to help and even indulge me.

I was. And had. I mean, the whole time I just sat there and let the knockout disparage me. Of course that hadn’t been entirely about making Mr. Kindt happy. Being insulted then instructed by a beautiful woman about the subject of murder, even fake murder, while eating borscht and drinking Cape Cods or Coke counts as positive in my book.

All right, I said.

All right, what?

I mean all right, I’m enjoying this.

Good, but let’s hope you’re understanding it too.

If you’re going to be sloppy, be sloppy in a big, big way, I said. But it’s better to be neat.

She nodded.

Anthony had his problems, things got out of control, but at least he was neat, I said.

That’s right.

I’m a neat thief, I said.

Even if you are, which I doubt, a neat thief and a neat murderer are not the same thing.

How so?

Degree. Other things too but mainly degree. Death is a different degree. Murder is death amplified and pinpointed. Big focused death. Big but not sloppy. What else?

It has to hurt, I said. Pain implies the actual. There has to be an implication of the actual to engender fear. Fear and the frisson that heralds it are ultimately why the checks get signed. That’s why it’s a good idea to knock them out, chloroform them or something.

Good.

Who writes the scripts?

It depends—sometimes the victim, sometimes Cornelius, sometimes me or the others.

What’s up with those others anyway?

She didn’t answer. Instead she pulled out a gun, placed it against my forehead, and pulled the trigger.

This is a story about murder—Mr. Kindt’s, several other people’s, my own. My own just about blew my eardrums out, scared the shit out of me, and stained my shirt paint-pellet red. The sound was so loud it slammed me back into my seat, and I just watched her as she stood, dropped a note in my lap, and, still holding the gun, which she lifted, menacingly, as if the other chambers had real bullets in them, when the waitress and one of the customers started moving toward her, walked out the door. It was only after I had wiped some of the fake blood off my face and, assuring the waitress and manager that I was all right and that, no, I wasn’t going to wait to talk to the police, left myself, that I opened up the note. It read, “Round two is tonight at three o’clock,” and gave an address on St. Mark’s Place.