Blood of the Impaler (5 page)

Everything will be okay tonight
, he thought confidently.
Last night was a fluke, nothing but a fluke. Happens to every guy once in a while, just as Holly said.

Holly . . . I guess I won't be seeing Holly anymore. She probably thinks I'm a fag or something now
.

He turned left at the huge Roman Catholic church which stretched for an entire block along Queens Boulevard, and in a few minutes he was at the Strand, where he and his friend Jerry tended bar. The Strand had been named rather self-consciously after the famous street in London. It was a restaurant and after dark, a somewhat sedate but still acceptably funky disco and singles bar frequented by affluent young adults. This accounted for both the classy atmosphere and the inordinately high prices.

This was fine with Malcolm and Jerry. The higher the prices, the higher the tips.

Malcolm entered to find Jerry Herman already behind the long, horseshoe-shaped bar. "Hey, Mal," Jerry called out. "'Bout time you showed up!"

"Why, am I late?" he asked.

"Nah, it's only eight o'clock. But I was getting bored. This place is dead tonight."

"It's only Tuesday, Jerry," Malcolm reminded him. "It'll be nice and quiet."

"Who likes it nice and quiet?" Jerry asked. "The busier the better, I always say. Makes the time go faster and brings in a lot more good-looking women. And speaking of which, how did things go with Holly last night?"

Malcolm flushed slightly. "Great, Jerry, just great."
Horrible
, he thought.
So damned embarrassing
.

"Lucky son of a bitch," Jerry muttered in mock despondency. "I don't know what she sees in you. She'd be a lot better off with a stud like me."

Malcolm laughed in spite of himself. "Oh, yeah, really?"

"Sure," he said, nodding. "I can go nonstop for two hours with only a fifteen-minute bathroom, smoke, and bourbon break."

"Gee, you're my hero, Jer," Malcolm said, still laughing.

"Herman! Harker!" the voice of their boss boomed from the kitchen at the end of the room. "Get your asses in here and help me unload these kegs!"

"I'll do it, Mal," Jerry said, nodding toward the door. "You got company."

Malcolm turned around and swallowed hard, suddenly very nervous and ill at ease as Holly Larsen closed the door behind her.

T
he hours passed quickly for Jerry, no doubt. He scampered back and forth along his side of the bar with his usual speed and cheerful efficiency, living up to his self-proclaimed reputation as the only bartender in New York who could work, flirt, think, and make proper change simultaneously. Jerry's somewhat broad and acne-scarred face set above a body too skinny to be fashionably thin had never deterred him from his pursuit of the fair sex, nor had it impeded his lotharial success. He was funny enough, friendly enough, and eager enough to counterbalance any physical shortcomings.

It had never been so with Malcolm. Strikingly handsome in an ascetic, almost aristocratic manner, he had never needed to develop the suave manner and false good cheer which might have made his night so much easier on him, and on Holly as well. She had seated herself squarely on the center stool on Malcolm's end of the bar, taking no offense at his cold and aloof attitude. She knew that his behavior was born of embarrassment, so she remained where she was as the hours passed, carefully nursing a few ginger ales as the night passed into the early morning, patiently waiting for him to stop acting like a child.

Malcolm had been able to avoid speaking to her during
the busiest time of the night, but by two o'clock too few customers remained in the Strand for him to ignore her any longer. Steeling himself for an unpleasant conversation, he walked over to her and said, "Hi. Still here?"

"Hi, yourself," she replied. "Of course I am."

He nodded and tried to think of something to say. "You waiting for somebody?"
Good grief!
he thought.
What a stupid thing to ask!

"Yup," she said, nodding. "I'm waiting for you to grow up."

He looked down at his feet before speaking again, thus making himself unconsciously, boyishly, innocently adorable, and she struggled to hide her affectionate amusement. "Look, Holly, about last night . . ."

"Honestly, Malcolm," she said laughing, not unkindly, "you are so stupid."

He blushed slightly and then smiled. "Yeah?"

"Yeah," she said. "You don't have to worry about some asinine 'superstud' image with me, Mal. What happened last night happens to every guy once in a while. It's not a big deal, and it certainly doesn't matter to me."

"Really?" he asked, liking her enormously.

"Of course," she replied. "I mean, I could just as easily interpret the whole thing as meaning that I'm not attractive or exciting, right? It could be a reflection on me, not you, right?"

He laughed. "Holly, that would be ridiculous!"
Absurd, absolutely absurd
, he thought as he looked at her. Her eyes were hazel, soft, warm, deep, inviting eyes. She had hair the color of burgundy wine, hair that cascaded down around her shoulders in curly ringlets, and flawless skin the color of ivory. Her figure was slender, her legs long. She combined pristine beauty with lusty earthiness, a dual heritage from her Norwegian and Irish ancestors. "You're gorgeous, Holly," he whispered.

"Hmm, tell me more," she said, and leaned forward to kiss him, relishing the compliment that might have sounded false and cloying coming from anyone else.

Malcolm felt a familiar stirring in his loins, and he called over his shoulder, "Hey, Jer, I think I'll leave early, if it's okay with the boss." To Holly he said, "Don't go away, please! I'll be back in a minute." He kissed her again and then walked quickly away. As Malcolm Harker rushed back to the kitchen to let the owner know that he was leaving, Holly Larsen whipped a compact from her purse and gave herself a quick once-over.
Lookin' good
, she thought to herself.
I hope he's okay tonight. It doesn't matter to me if it happens once in a while . . . they say it happens to every guy once in a while . . . but I don't want anything to mess up this relationship
.

Jerry Herman walked toward her from the other end of the bar, waving a greeting. She smiled at him and said, "Hiya, sailor. Buy me a drink?"

"Cute, Holly," he said, grinning. "Real cute. So, it's your fault that I'm gonna have to tend this bar all by myself tonight!"

"You can handle it," she said, amused by his feigned rebuke. "The place is emptying out."

"Yeah, I know, I know." He nodded. Then, as if the thought had just occurred to him, he said "Hey, how's Marlene? I haven't seen her for weeks. How's she doing?"

Holly laughed. "She still doesn't want anything to do with you, if that's what you're asking."

He blushed slightly and grinned again. "Really? I thought maybe she might have sort of missed me, just a little bit."

"She says that you're an octopus, Jerry. Lots of hands, and all of them all over her all the time."

He shrugged. "So I'm enthusiastic."

"I don't think that's quite the description she would choose," she chuckled.

He shrugged again. "C'est la vie."

"C'est la guerre, more likely," Malcolm said as he approached them. "You think of women as enemy territory to be conquered, Jer."

"Ah, yes," his friend replied, tapping his fingers contemplatively against his lips, "the thrill of combat."

"Come on," Holly said to Malcolm as she slid off the barstool. "Let's go before Jerry starts to make me ill."

Jerry Herman watched as Malcolm held the door open and he and Holly left the Strand. He shook his head, muttering, "You got it bad, buddy boy," as he emptied a tray of clean glasses and placed them into the overhead glass rack.
You're too romantic, Mal
, he thought,
too unrealistic when it comes to women. You think everything is like in the movies. Holly's a fine-looking woman, and real nice, all right, but don't kid yourself into thinking that her feelings for you have nothing to do with your family's bank account. It's the old
story. The guy is after the body and the girl is after the wallet
.

"C'est la guerre," he said aloud, "c'est la guerre, c'est la guerre . . ."

Jerry's cynicism would have outraged both Malcolm and Holly, had they been privy to his thoughts. True, Malcolm was not immune to Holly's physical beauty, which was considerable, and the joint motives of love and lust mingled in him without distinction; but overriding both of these urges was the simple fact that he
liked
her, that he enjoyed being with her, that, until the previous evening at any rate, he felt comfortable with her. It was true that Malcolm sowed his wild oats with the recklessness characteristic of young men, and that he had initially regarded Holly as just another warm furrow to be ploughed, but his feelings for her had very quickly grown deeper and more meaningful.

For her part, Holly Larsen was neither the self-serving gold digger Jerry assumed her to be nor the wide-eyed, selfless innocent of Malcolm's fantasies. She knew that Malcolm Harker came from a wealthy family, and she would have been a fool not to have been pleased by that fact; but her own career as a real estate agent in a time of booming prices had persuaded her that she did not need to be taken care of by Malcolm or any man. Only twenty-six, she already possessed a good and growing stock portfolio, a number of bank accounts, and a co-op apartment in the better part of Forest Hills. She was not wealthy, of course; but she had every reason to believe that she would be, five or ten years down the road.

So the wealth of the Harker family, while pleasant, was not what made Malcolm attractive to her. He was simply so utterly different, so totally outside the range of her experiences with men. Holly had lived in New York City for only five years, but she had gone through her share of urban playboys, pseudosophisticates, perpetual adolescents, and upon occasion, closet queens. Social relationships had seemed much less complicated—or at least the men had been more honest and unpretentious—in the small town of New York State's Finger Lakes region where she had been born and raised, but Holly had adjusted to the urban social scene easily enough. She had shed some element of her rural naïveté while pursuing her business degree in college, and by the time she met Malcolm she was close to being as hard and unfeeling as her environment; and New York City can be a cold town.

But that all changed when she went to a party given by her coworker Marlene and there met Marlene's friend Jerry Herman and Jerry's friend Malcolm Harker. He was, as the saying goes, tall, dark, and handsome, and she had allowed herself to be drawn to him by his physical attractiveness, all the while suspecting that he was as big a jerk as the other men she had been meeting lately. She had not hopped into bed with him at the first opportunity, for Holly was too intelligent and too cautious to be promiscuous in an age of frightening sexual diseases; but she realized very soon that Malcolm was unique, and she found herself wanting him very badly, physically, emotionally, romantically.

She wondered, as they walked along Queens Boulevard toward her apartment, making small talk, just when it was that his uniqueness had first become evident to her. Perhaps it was when he told her that he had graduated from Columbia with a major in European history and a minor in classical languages—and had gone on to do graduate work in both areas before dropping out, bored and impatient with the restrictions of formal study. It had struck her as so odd that in a time of self-centered ambition, with everyone in her generation obsessed with money and wealth and upward mobility, that someone such as Malcolm would spend his college years reading Cicero and Plato and Xenophon, or studying Bismarck and Disraeli and Lenin. She understood, of course, when she learned of his family's wealth. She realized Malcolm's job at the Strand was just a way of killing time and having fun, that he had never felt the kind of economic pressure which she had felt, that he had always been able to pursue his academic interests without ever having to worry about earning a living, that while she and her peers had been studying accounting and management and business law, he had been studying German and French, Latin and Greek, philosophy, history, literature and music and art.

He fascinated her.

And when they began seeing each other, Malcolm did not take her to bars and dance clubs. He took her to Ingmar Bergman film festivals, to the opera, to museums. And two weeks before, as they sat upon a blanket on a grassy knoll in Forest Park, drinking wine as he read to her from the poetry of Lord Byron, two thoughts had occurred to her. The first was that the afternoon's activity would have been embarrassingly corny with anyone else, but with Malcolm it was ineffably romantic. The second, which almost took her by surprise, was that she had fallen for Malcolm Harker. She had fallen hard.

They turned from Queens Boulevard and walked down Austin Street toward the charming old building where Holly lived. They mounted the stairs to the second floor and went
to the door of her apartment. As she inserted the key into the lock, Malcolm kissed the back of her neck and whispered in
her ear as his hands reached around and moved gently over her breasts. She closed her eyes and leaned her head back, allowing Malcolm's hands and mouth to express his need. She opened the door, they entered, then she closed and locked it behind them.