When the Cat's Away (21 page)

There is a rhythm to fear.

It’s not something you pick up at Arthur Murray. It’s measured in the statistical velocity at which the head and the feet can fly toward each other when the guts disappear. It’s something you feel when you stand in a dark hallway and realize you may be about to die.

It has a sickly, draconic, not quite Caribbean flavor that can be very catchy when you see the cotton-candy-colored specter of death pressing its evil, childlike nose against the frosted glass of your mind. By then, of course, the party is
o-v-e-r.

On the stairwell below I could hear the sound of a man dying in another language. I didn’t plan to stick around for the translation. I was moving on up faster than the Jeffersons when Rambam caught me on the landing between the fourth and fifth floors. He had the Uzi on a strap around his neck. He handed me the police revolver.

“How do I use it?” I asked.

“You see anything that even faintly resembles a spic, you pull the trigger,” he said.

“Fine.” I didn’t like this at all. Where the hell were the sirens? I wondered. I wanted sirens. I needed sirens.

“They’re using MAC-10’s with silencers,” said Rambam. “That’s the noise like a zipper you keep hearing.”

“Until they make contact,” I said. “Then it sounds like somebody caught his shvantz in his Jordaches.”

“That gap-lapper with the dance class still up here?” asked Rambam as we hit the fifth floor.

“Yeah,” I said, as I looked at the pistol in my hand and at Rambam with his Uzi and Israeli Army jacket. “But I’m not sure if she’s ready for the raid on Entebbe.”

As we listened to the freight elevator creak ominously through the gloom, Rambam banged once on the door of Winnie Katz’s loft, turned the knob, and threw it open.

If you’re going to interrupt a lesbian dance class, you can’t insist upon no surprises. We were ready for just about anything and that’s just about what we got.

There was a Colombian lying barely inside the doorway. A bright red worm was crawling out of his head and moving in the general direction of the kitchen. Winnie Katz was standing over the body in a powder-blue warm-up suit, holding a MAC-10.

“How do you reload this cocksucker?” she asked. There were sirens in the distance now, but I could see shadowy figures moving around on the fire escape. A fag in leotards came leaping by and two hysterical girls were cowering in the kitchen. Nothing wrong with cowering in the kitchen, I thought. I was just starting to look around the place when a barrage of shots forced us all to the floor and took out a large mirror on the wall behind us.

Rambam killed the lights, took up the Uzi, and cleared the fire escape, taking out every front window in the place. A quiet, uncertain moment followed in which everybody’s ears rang and cold air and colder fear poured into the loft in about equal quantities. I looked outside but I didn’t see any movement on the fire escape.

“You oughta get a silencer for that thing,” I said.

Rambam was looking out of one of the broken windows. “Still a lot of action down there,” he said. “I’ll stay here. You check the bedroom.”

I walked across the darkened studio with my pistol out, like a gunfighter walking into the bar where the bad guys were. I didn’t think anybody was in the bedroom, and I was pretty sure Rambam didn’t either or he wouldn’t’ve sent me in there. It was like sending seven different people to get blankets when you’re treating a drowning victim. Gives everybody something to do, and maybe somebody shows up with a blanket in time to cover the guy before he dies of shock. If everybody shows up with blankets, you send them out again for beer and fried chicken and you have a picnic by the riverside.

Halfway to the bedroom I saw something move down by the floor under a desk. I crept closer and pointed the revolver in front of me. As I got very near the desk, a taut white face looked up at me. It was Ratso.

“What the hell are you doing?” I asked, dropping the gun to my side.

“What the fuck do you think I’m doing?” said Ratso. “I’m calling 911!”

“Jesus Christ, Ratso, how long does it take to call 911?”

“I’m on hold,” he said.

I walked over to the bedroom, prepared to take a quick, cursory look around. I walked in about four or five nervous steps. There wasn’t even a bed in the place, just one of those tofu mattresses. Lesbians are weird, all right.

As I turned to leave the room, a figure suddenly detached itself from the far wall and flew at me like a desperate bat. It was too dim in the room to tell if it faintly resembled a spic, but it had a long, shiny knife in one hand so I pulled the trigger. The knife seemed to flutter against my throat like a steel moth and then it fell away. At that distance, with Rambam’s big gun, even Mr. Magoo would’ve been deadly. The bat bit the tofu.

I hit the lights and looked at the body. It was very dead. The first life I’d ever taken. A line came into my head from the poet Kenneth Patchen: “There are so many little dyings, it doesn’t matter which of them is death.” I turned the body over with my foot.

It was Carlos.

I stood there for a moment breathing like the guy who came in 791st in the Boston Marathon.

“Call your sister,” I said.

58

I crept back across the studio like an anxietous crab. Rambam was peering out of the doorway into the hall and motioned me to join him. Two dark figures had forced the doors of the freight elevator, and a third was firing down into the shaft with a MAC-10. The wall switch for the elevator had been thrown and apparently it had stopped between floors. There was no roof to the freight elevator; it was little more than a grimy cage with a light bulb hanging from two crossbars. It was like shooting fish in a barrel, except that the fish were screaming and cursing in Spanish, and the racket was echoing in the elevator shaft.

It sounded, to quote my pal Tom Waits, “like Jerry Lewis going down on the
Titanic
.”

After the fish began to sound more like ceviche, the three figures turned from the elevator and Rambam field-stripped them with the Uzi. He stepped over the bodies, threw the switch, and pushed the down button, which sent the stiffs in the elevator to the ground floor.

“Lingerie,” he said.

We could hear cops in the hallway now and random shots being fired in the street. We went back into Winnie’s place and collected Ratso.

Winnie seemed calm and cool. “You want some Red Zinger tea?” she asked.

“No thanks,” I said. “I’ve got some coffee downstairs.”

Rambam casually gave his Uzi to the dead Colombian by the doorway.

“Illegal,” he whispered to me.

“I see,” I said. I gave the revolver back to him.

By the time Rambam, Ratso, and I got back to the loft, the cops were swarming all over the place. There were more crushed Colombian Dixie cups lying around than I’d thought, but, like Rambam said, they were expendable.

I conducted a rather agonizing search for my cat, finally locating her in the closet in the bedroom. She was fine. Just a little pissed off. I gave her some tuna.

I took out about forty-nine cups and poured coffee for anyone who wanted it. I guessed that it would be a long, tedious debriefing, or whatever they called it, and I was right.

I got myself a cup of coffee and walked through the loft surveying the damage. It didn’t look too bad. Of course, it hadn’t looked too good to begin with.

I was able to observe only one casualty on our side: The puppet head had taken a direct hit.

There was one other thing I noticed that bothered me almost as much as the loss of the puppet head.

There was no sign of the Jaguar.

59

Two days later, on a crisp, cold Tuesday morning, I was having breakfast with Eugene in the little Greek coffee shop at the rather obscene hour of 8
A.M.
I had asked for the meeting, not the other way around. I wanted to get this Rocky-Goldberg-Estelle Beekman situation spanked and put to bed. The sooner the better. Eight o’clock in the morning was a little early for my blood, but some people work for a living and Eugene was one of them. I wanted to meet with him away from the publishing house.

“Eugene,” I said, “I need your help.”

“What can I do?” he asked.

You can stop wearing that yellow knit tie, I thought. I sipped a hot cup of coffee and mulled it over. “I need someone,” I said, “on the inside, so to speak. Someone more familiar with the publishing business than I am.”

“Why don’t you talk to Jim or Jane?”

“I’m going to talk to everybody, but Landis is being uncooperative and Jane is the one I’m worried about.”

“I’m worried about her, too,” said Eugene. “I gave her a manuscript over a month ago and she hasn’t finished it yet. That’s not like her.”

“What was the manuscript?”

“A novel I wrote.”

“No kiddin’? What kind of novel?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Nobody’s ever going to find out, the way things are going. If Hemingway were around today he’d probably be writing ad copy.”

“You’re right,” I said. And he was. Van Gogh had been able to sell only one painting in his lifetime. The painting was
The Red Harvest
and he sold it to his brother, Theo. Good ol’ Theo. Franz Schubert’s estate at the time of his death was valued at twelve cents. He didn’t have a brother around to buy the
Unfinished
Symphony.

“It’s frustrating,” said Eugene. “Jane’s just got to come to grips with reality. She’s got to realize that that cat is
gone.
It’s not just affecting her work—it’s affecting her mind.”

“Yeah,” I said. It was affecting my mind, too.

Eugene did not know Goldberg. Eugene did not know Estelle Beekman. Eugene had to get to work. Fine.

* * *

If Eugene had not been my ideal choice for a breakfast companion, Hilton Head for brunch was worse. I had to talk to these people. The battle of the Colombian drug cartels on Sunday night had convinced me that the Kukulcan angle, the possibility that the Colombians were behind Goldberg’s and Estelle Beekman’s demises for some reason that was connected with Jane Meara’s cat, was very doubtful to say the least. Men who kill with silenced MAC-10’s, who perform Colombian neckties, who perform Colombian butterflies, would be more creatively cruel and clever than merely to cut a man’s tongue out. And it had been a sloppy job at that. I didn’t see the mark of the Jaguar there, so to speak. But who knew?

Sunday night had also convinced me that the Baby Jesus wanted me to live for some reason. To save Jane’s life? To find Rocky? I didn’t know, but I doubted if the reason was so that I could have brunch with Hilton Head.

I had brunch with Head in the Village. Wanted him to feel he belonged. We ate at some chic European rabbit-food place that blew in more ways than one.

I browbeat Head about what Leila was doing coming and going from his apartment. Finally, he told me.

“Just delivering a little shmutz,” he said. He pronounced it like “fruits.”

“Shmutz?”

“Cocaine,” he whispered irritably.

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Shmutz.”

It was not uncommon, I’d learned, for people to give harmless little names to very deadly, dangerous things. Ted Mann had once told me about an heiress he’d known, from some spiritually bankrupt family, who also called cocaine shmutz. She’d snort about eight grams a day and drink about four bottles of vodka. She’d destroyed her mind entirely and her very life was hanging on a thread and here she was still calling it shmutz. “I’ll just have a little shmutz.” Well, we all have our blind spots.

The only other interesting thing that emerged from the Head brunch was that Hilton, several years before he’d come out of the closet, had dated Estelle Beekman for a while. He didn’t seem in great grief about her death. He seemed more to think it was rather pathetic.

I wasn’t a professional checkup-from-the-neck-up kind of guy. Just your normal dime-store Jungian. But I really thought Head’s sexual evolution let him off the hook. I couldn’t see a guy who’d finally come out of the closet ever wanting to put somebody else back into it.

60