Agnes Among the Gargoyles (31 page)

D. "Creeping down the apples and pears with a shiv in my hand."—More Britishisms. "Apples and pears" is rhyming Cockney slang for "stairs"; "shiv" is English slang for "knife."

E "...working under the gaze of the little Jewish fella in Brooklyn. My luck has been bad, you see. Stickman the Raghead and the Girl in the

Polka Dot Dress nearly foiled me at Burr's pad."—"Fella" as slang for "fellow" has not been in use since the late 1950s. "Stickman the Raghead" is Marvin McQuade, a homeless man who does occasional work on the grounds of the Morris-Jumel house. He picks up trash with a sharpened stick, and often wears a rag on his head to cover the bleeding sores. Mr. McQuade has been questioned in connection with the killings; he does not appear to be a witness. "The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress" refers to a prostitute named Vanessa K., who works that area of Washington Heights. She favors polka dot dresses with large bows in the back. She is currently being sought for questioning. "Pad" as slang for "living quarters" is a relic of the

1960s.

CONCLUSION

We believe the Minotaur to be at least 40 to 50 years old. He came of age in the late 1950s or early 1960s. He is well educated, and seemingly knowledgeable about poetry, literature and history, particularly the history of criminality. He has spent at least some portion of his life in the United Kingdom, probably England and perhaps Central London. He has a high opinion of his own literary skills. He hates women, possibly as a result of a childhood spent in a female-dominated environment.

   Agnes receives an upsetting phone call from a friend of Barbara's named Joy who has been living in Europe. Agnes breaks the news to her; Joy can hardly believe it. Agnes's dormant grief awakens.

   "She was so psyched about directing," says Joy. "She was already arguing about line cuts. She used to say that you can't fuck with art for the sake of good taste. Let's make the audience uncomfortable. Let them hate me, she'd say. Oh, God, it's so sad."

Tommy shows Agnes his brownstone. They get there in the early evening. The street is lined with beautiful brownstones, most of which have their windows boarded up. The roofs stand out in elaborate silhouette against the darkening sky, a backdrop of purple whorls and arches like one of God's fingerprints.

   On the entire block, there are only three occupied buildings. The city has planted a row of new trees on each sidewalk. Their delicate young trunks are protected by sleeves of cast-iron.

   "For saving this house we should induct you into the Telamones Society."

   Tommy is not convinced. "You sound like the guy who sold it to my father."

   Agnes and Tommy descend to the basement. Until recently, there were squatters living there. The floor is littered with debris. Tommy did manage to clean up the rotting food.

   "It's like I had the worst subletter in history," he says.

   They lie together on Tommy's bed in the dark. The radio plays a piano sonata, the sort of simple piece Agnes learned to play as a child. A city dweller to her bones, Agnes likes the feeling of neighbors on the other side of the wall; that there is hardly another soul on the street makes her nervous. She burrows into Tommy.

   He gives her the latest police news. They located Vanessa K., the whore in the polka dot dress. Tommy has seen his share of strung-out prostitutes, but Vanessa K. was shocking. She weighed about seventy-five pounds. She wore not polka dots but a beaded flapper dress; her hair was the color of creamed corn. She kept picking invisible things off her arms. She talked about her clientele in a dreamy way. She talked of the preferences of one john and said, "I think he a sick man."

   "No offense," said Tommy, "but anyone who would sleep with you is
a priori
sick."

   "They not sick. They lonely." She squinted up at Tommy, as though there were bright lights shining behind his head. "Ah can suck you so good ah make you think ah fuck you."

   Whitey showed her the Minotaur letter. Did she see anyone near the Jumel house that night?

   "Ah tell you what ah saw," she says. "Ah saw Santa Claus."

   "Oh beautiful," said Tommy.

   "Ah did. Ah saw him behin' the house. Ah said to mahself is way too early fuh his fat ass."

   Whitey shook his head. "I don't get it."

   Tommy asked Vanessa to describe the man she saw.

   "Big and fat," she said testily.

   "Long white beard?"

   "No fuckin' beard."

   "Santa without a beard? What was he wearing?"

   Vanessa K. was losing her patience. "You know what Santa wear. Big red coat. Big white pants. White things. Here. Crossed over. Lahk this."

   She traced a crisscross pattern on her chest "as though," Tommy tells Agnes, "she were modeling a Cross-Your-Heart bra."

   "Was he wearing a hat?"

   "Big tall hat, yeah."

   "Was he carrying a gun?"

   Vanessa nodded. "Rifle."

   Whitey was stumped. "Santa doesn't carry a rifle."

   "In that neighborhood, he got to!" said Vanessa with a guffaw.

   "It's a musket," said Tommy. "He's dressed as a redcoat. What could be more audacious? Mrs. Chesser sees him and figures he's there for some ceremony and lets him in."

   Whitey whistled softly. "The Minotaur's got some pair of balls."

   "I want pizza," said Vanessa K.

   Agnes takes a shower. Tommy has excellent water pressure. The hot water beats against Agnes's body, then slows to a trickle. Uh-oh, she wonders. Has one of Harry's squatters returned to wash some clothes in the basement sink?

At one point in his life, Bezel waited tables in Buffalo, New York. Buffalo wasn't a bad place, but what drove him crazy was that you couldn't walk two feet without a mention of the fucking Falls. Everything was Niagara—the beer was Niagara, the theaters were Niagara, Niagara Street, Niagara Avenue, Niagara Lane. You saw Niagara until it was like the sound of the thing pounding in your ears.

   The nice thing about New York City is that it has so many tourist attractions that you never have to think about any one of them. Bezel thinks about this when he goes to the Transit Museum in Brooklyn. What a crazy place! Admission is a token. There is a shop where you can buy old station markers and maps, where a dozen train-crazed losers make a nuisance of themselves.

   Downstairs, strings of antique trains sit parked. Bezel asks the attendant to direct him to the BMT low-voltage cars. Bezel remembers riding on trains like these. He remembers them being a lot dirtier.

   The Young Pretender sits alone, reading a newspaper. Bezel gets his first look at him. He is shocked. He really is young. he's a little kid—maybe fifteen. He looks like any kid: freckles and red hair, sweatshirt and dungarees and sneakers. Bezel takes a seat directly across from him.

   Getting involved with a child. What was the Frenchman thinking about?

   Finally Bezel speaks up. "The Frenchman sent me."

   The kid folds his newspaper. He takes out a little black gadget the size of a cigarette pack and presses it to his throat.

   "Where is that Belgian fuck?"

   The voice is electronic. Bezel has run across this before. The kid doesn't have a voice box.

   Bezel shrugs. "He said he'll be away for a while."

   The kid taps the device against his cheek. "You didn't kill him or anything, did you?"

   Bezel starts. "What kind of a thing is that to say?"

   "I know how you people operate," says the kid.

   "What do you mean
you people?"

   "Hey, you're not a bunch of Greenpeace protestors."

   The kid takes an old issue of
Ring
magazine out of his knapsack. He opens to an article that goes into painful detail about the fight that ended Bezel's career. In the accompanying photo, Bezel is curled up in fetal position while his opponent, Bony Barrow, stands over him, oblivious to the shouting of his trainer and the referee, too stunned by that has happened to get to a neutral corner.

   "How could you throw a fight, Bezel?" the kid wonders. "And to Bony Barrow, of all people. He was a stiff."

   Several museum-goers get on the train.

   "The Frenchman talks about me?" says Bezel.

   "All the time. I've been dying to meet you. In the annals of boxing you are a glorious footnote."

   Bezel walks around the subway car. "This is an odd place."

   "I love it. It's peaceful."

   "Built it just like a subway, did they? Clever."

   "It
was
a subway. The HH line of the IND—the Court Street Shuttle. An expensive blunder that was closed in 1946."

   An attendant wearing striped overalls like an old-time engineer swings a lunch pail as he passes. He greets the kid by name.

   "You come here often?" says Bezel.

   "What's often?"

   "More than twice in a lifetime."

   The kid emits a weird electronic giggle. "Sometimes I sleep here."

   Bezel nods. "Why?"

   "I guess I love subways."

   "So go ride a few."

   "Those aren't subways, my friend," says the kid with disdain. "Those are hell."

   Bezel gets down to business. "The Frenchman said that you know something."

   The kid nods excitedly. "I know lots of things. I know things about the way this city is built that nobody else knows."

   "So tell me."

   "You must be high, Bezel. You'll find out soon enough."

   Bezel looks uncomfortable. "Do you have to use that thing?" he says, pointing to the amplifier. "It drives me a bit batty."

   "If I don't I sound like this," says the kid. He speaks without amplification. His voice is choked and unintelligible. He sounds like he's drowning. He resumes the device. "So, yes, I have to use it."

   "You sound like that pointy-eared robot on TV. What's his name? Spock. You sound like fucking Doctor Spock."

   "It's Mr. Spock and he's not a robot."

   "He sounds like one. And so do you."

   LITTLE ENOUGH TO RIDE FOR FREE? asks a sign above the kid's head. LITTLE ENOUGH TO RIDE YOUR KNEE!

   HELP THE WAR EFFORT. EAT GRAPE NUTS.

   Bezel slumps in his seat. He rests his head against a window. "Did you have to remind me about Bony Barrow?"

   The kid slips into a reverie. "Sometimes I sit here and I thinks that if only I could concentrate hard enough, I could make the doors close and the train pull out. Isn't that insane? And at the next station the car would fill up with men in fedoras and women adjusting their slips, because you don't look like a slob even to ride the subway. Maybe you'd get on, Bezel, and we'd all know you're a fighter because you're pumped up in a world where no one else is."

   "And where are we going, kid?" says Bezel.

   The kid points to a place on the subway map. The map, dating from the Forties, is elaborate and ornamented and difficult to read, like an ancient sea chart; Bezel half-expects to see a drawing of a sea serpent lurking at the edge of the paper.

   "I want to go there," says the kid. "New Lots Avenue."

   "What ever for?"

   "Have you been there? It's desolate. It's nothing but burned-out buildings and vacant land. There's no reason to go there. But the subway does. There was something there once. It was a place, a real place, with things in it and people living there.
That's
where I want to go."

Coney Island is a big vacant lot with a bunch of rides thrown together haphazardly, a Tilt-A-Whirl and a tame flume and a lethal looking contraption from Germany, the
Schlimmbesserung.
Nothing looks bolted-down anymore. Coney Island seems as impermanent as a state fair. Only a few big attractions remain: the Cyclone, the Wonder Wheel, and the Parachute Jump. Wegeman's tubes of green neon creep up the latticework of Brooklyn's Eiffel Tower like intravenous feeding tubes.

   The opening is weeks away, but today is the dedication of Wegeman's Palace of Versailles on Surf Avenue, right in the heart of Coney Island. On the rostrum sits the Wegeman inner circle: his advisors; corporation counsel; a handful of CEOs from his other holdings; his "operations people," many of whom seem to be named Dick; the mayor and the governor; Bob Syker; Madelaine and Duck and Clark Ho; Agnes and Sarah.

   The Palace of Versailles is Wegeman's latest crowning achievement. Clark Ho has designed a cheesy copy of Louis XIV's palace, including the Marble Courtyard, the Royal Courtyard and the Great Courtyard, where souvenirs are sold. Construction materials costing what they do, there is an inevitable lack of solidity to the building; no granite where there could be concrete or terra-cotta, no stone where brick would do; no brick where brickface is sufficient. What appears to be marble is sometimes marble and sometimes laminated wood. Every expense has been spared, corners cut ruthlessly. Still, the model Ho used was so inspiring that there couldn't help but be traces of nobility in even his pallid copy.

   "This is my favorite Clark Ho building," Agnes whispers to Sarah.

   "Mine too. But I say that about them all."

   The governor introduces Clark Ho as "the man who claimed he could end world hunger simply by streamlining the pineapple."

   Ho speaks frankly of his design approach.

   "I knew I could not replicate the Palace, and so I arrived at an ingenious solution. Working from photographs, I would stare intently at one section of the original structure—the North Wing, for instance—and then look away. I would quickly sketch the impression that remained in my mind's eye. My design is one of afterimages. What stayed with me were those architectural elements that were essential. Detail and ornamentation faded from my memory, and were omitted. Those things were too expensive to reproduce anyway. We don't have the luxury of every last gargoyle."