Chronic City (56 page)

“Les Non-Dupes?”
Richard repeated when I asked, then laughed to himself. “A joke. One day he told me it was the basis of our friendship: we weren’t dupes. The Two Non-Dupes of Horace Mann, he called us. Really he’d only flatter me to set up another teardown session, I’m guessing you know what I mean. He used to mock me for airing out my high-school French, so I insisted we call our gang
Les Deux Non-Dupes
. We’d shout
Les Non-Dupes refusé!
at boring assemblies, stupid bullshit like that. Or write it on our homework.”

Richard spoke of himself as much as of Perkus. In return I reminisced, too, of my life before I came to New York City, such as it was. I talked about Bloomington, about becoming an actor in junior high, my emancipation. (I only didn’t mention Janice Trumbull, for I found myself confused about her whenever I tried.) The two of us memorialized Perkus by talking of ourselves, talking simply, as we’d never done before. Murmuring through the bars of those two cells, we were careless about which ears might listen, for we each made certain to say nothing to betray him. Perkus was dead and we protected him the only way we still could, by not offering his secrets in this ashtray of human freedom, littered as it was with stubbed-out ends.

It was close to four when a weary detective came downstairs and began whispering to the pair of keepers that had been stationed here below. I caught a tone of sarcastic delight in their exchange. Then, without raising the lights, the keepers came to our two cells and curled a summoning finger at us where we sat.

“You really got some pull to go with your camel-hair coats,” said one of the cops, impressed despite his chafing tone. “I’d have sworn you was just another pair of bozos.”

“What’s going on?” asked Richard.

“Somebody got a judge out of bed,” said the cop. “So now, you tell me, who are you guys?”

“I’m not sure,” said Richard. “Let me see who got the judge out of bed and I’ll get back to you on that.”

In the booking area we discovered Arnheim’s short aide, the blonde I’d seen maneuvering the mayor at his party. She carried such an air of machinelike destructive efficiency that they should have set her to digging the Second Avenue subway tunnel and saved themselves a lot of heartache. She wore a comically practical parka, snow glistening in the furry unibrow of its hood, and creamy leather boots engulfing her tucked slacks to her knees. When she saw us coming, shuffling moronically, toes curled to keep our feet inside our laceless shoes, she shoved a BlackBerry into her purse, rolled her eyes at Richard, and stuck out her hand to me. “I’m Claire Carter,” she said, and before I could speak, added, “Believe me, I know who you are.”

“Sorry to have woken you. I appreciate your getting us out of here.”

“My driver’s waiting,” she said. “I’d give you both a lift uptown, but I’ve been informed you’ve got about half an hour’s worth of paperwork before they can decommission your shoelaces, so you’re
on your own. I spoke to your pregnant common-law wife, Richard, she knows you’re not dead.”

“Claire, have I told you lately to go fuck yourself?”

“You’re welcome.” The smile she brandished was no less convincing than any I’d seen her produce.

A sleepy half hour later Richard and I stepped out, in shoes with laces, onto the white-smothered pavement. The snowfall had eased to a trickle, having satisfied itself to barrage the city beneath a foot or so. The moon was gone, dawn not close, the pillowscape of buried cars and newspaper boxes and trash cans lit only by street-lamp and the red warning blinkers of the scarce passing plows, which seemed as much to be tunneling for their own survival as breaking a useful path for anything that might follow. Nothing tried. The notion of a cab was too forlorn to speak the word aloud. Perkus Tooth was dead and we didn’t deserve a cab and none was given. We trudged, plowing with our feet in our laced soaked salt-ruined shoes six long blocks to the subway, the Lexington line. I wouldn’t have known how to find it, but Richard did. That underworld was steamy and ferocious and constant and a spectral empty car of the 4 train drew us up to Eighty-sixth Street.

We set out walking together through the snow again, downtown to where we’d part, he going toward Georgina Hawkmanaji’s, on Park Avenue, myself east toward home. Or at least I let him take that impression. We didn’t speak. I meant to keep walking all the way to York and Sixty-fifth, to the Friendreth. I’d keep my promise to walk Ava, that hiccup assassin. Now that we were safely out of hospitals and jail cells and subterranean trains I could admire the night’s supreme reduced stillness, the storm now just dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s of its masterpiece. It might be my task to abide with this night until exhaustion killed me as hiccups had killed Perkus. Until I saw the vacated rooms I might believe he had somehow
transported himself there, just to drop the needle on “Shattered” or “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner” one more time. I didn’t need Richard to know. I felt he was called home (for Richard now had a home, however improbably) as a baby is called to crawl the darkened line pointing through his mother’s navel. Richard Abneg had a head start on me, I now understood—he’d begun saying farewell to Perkus Tooth sometime just after high school. I’d only had a few months, or a few hours. I wasn’t sure when I’d begun, but it wasn’t enough.

At the corner of Eighty-fourth we came upon the giant escaped tiger, moving silently along the side street to cross Lexington there, heading east, away from Central Park. We froze when its long streetlamp-foreshadow darkened the intersection, so stood rooted like statuary in our deep footprints as the creature padded to the center of Lexington’s lanes, under the dangling yellow traffic lights which shaded the great burgeoning white-and-yellow fur of its ears and ruff now green, now red, the procession of timed stoplights running for miles beyond through the calming storm. The tiger was tall, a second-story tiger, though not as enormous as its legend. Still, it could have craned its neck and nibbled the heavy-swinging traffic light which hummed in the whispering silence that surrounded us. I found myself thinking the tiger should be measured in
hands
, like a horse, perhaps because I found myself wishing I could rush to it and grip its striped, smooth-ridged fur with both hands and also bury my face there, then climb into its fur and be borne away elsewhere, out of Perkus’s city, out of my own. This was a death urge, and I did nothing. The tiger had no remotely mechanical aspect to it, nor appeared in any sense to have emerged from underground or be about to return to fugitive excavations, seemed instead to be wholly of flesh and fur, leather-black nostrils steaming above a grizzly muzzle baring just the slightest fang tips and fringed with beaded ice, its
own refrozen breath or drool. There seemed no reason to rub Richard’s nose in this fact, which he’d certainly be capable of observing himself. The tiger’s passage across the empty avenue was languorous, hypnotic, serene.

We weren’t hidden, and when the tiger leveraged that mighty head from one side to another, looking both ways before crossing, we were caught in the psychedelically deep-flat headlamps of its pale gaze for an instant and then released. The tiger either didn’t see us or didn’t care. We were beneath or beyond its concerns, wherever it was going, whatever it might be pursuing or, less likely, eluding. Fearless and splendid, the tiger seemed quite outside the scope of Tiger-Watch or of the tracking throngs that massed to rubberneck at its destroyings. Possibly there were two tigers, the famous and chaotic one that lit the tabloid frenzy, and this more dignified one, who showed itself to us alone. It was after all moving along Eighty-fourth Street, toward the block where Brandy’s Piano Bar and Perkus’s old apartment lay condemned. Perhaps this was the tiger that put things back together instead of destroying them. Its touch seemed light enough, unlike mine or Richard’s tonight. In that spirit it regarded us or didn’t, shone its light on us and then shut it off again, and was gone, leaving only claw prints and, with its tail, an inadvertent serpentine signature lashed into a parked Mayflower van’s snowy windshield.

CHAPTER
Twenty-five

I pushed the buzzer
for O. LASZLO, just my second time in her building and I’d found the courage to actually buzz. While I waited I ran my eyes over the other names, and found a couple that meant something to me, A. SPRILLTHMAR and T. SLEDGE. Sledge lived on Oona’s floor, not a major surprise. Despite Perkus’s admonition to me, I’d never played a detective, hadn’t struck anyone, I suppose, in the brief duration of my post-childhood career, as deep or sad or crafty enough to be persuasive in that sort of role. I wondered if that would be different now. I buzzed Oona a second time and when I’d satisfied myself that no reply was coming I buzzed T. SLEDGE. The sandy little man hadn’t seemed the type to be wandering out the morning after a major snowstorm, and I was again unsurprised to hear his query to me on the intercom. I said my name and he let me inside the building. (A. SPRILLTHMAR I kept in my back pocket for the time being.)

Out of the elevator I looked to Oona’s door, wondering if she was somehow huddled silently inside, pretending not to be home for my benefit, but the door told me nothing—it wasn’t as if there were
milk bottles set outside it. Then I examined myself in the mirror in the corridor there, as I suppose no detective would have. The muscles of my calves pinged from my night of trudging through unshoveled snow. I’d steered the grateful and untiring Ava north again, from the Friendreth, to my apartment, and introduced her to my own bed before collapsing there for a few dream-fuddled hours of sleep in morning glare. Ava had draped herself across my legs, and if she’d wondered about Perkus or this change in her circumstances she did nothing to show it. When she woke she pogoed on her forelimb to give my rooms close-sniffing inspection, then circled into my softest chair. I’d left her there, with only a bowl of water and a few slices of Muenster cheese, to go by myself on this new expedition. But first, prisoner of vanity, I’d showered, shaved, slicked my hair. Now, too vain not to use this mirror to judge the result, I couldn’t locate the disenchanted and fearsome character I wanted to believe the night had made me.

It was my curse to look unruined in my ruins. If the bereaved had no language for speaking to the unbereaved, my own bereavement had no language for making itself known on the outside of me. You’d cast this face as the astronaut’s ineffectual fiancé to the end. My solipsistic fugue might or might not be justified by the discoveries presently dawning on me (or perhaps force-fed, by Perkus, and finally, reluctantly, swallowed by myself). Anyway, I was interrupted by T. Sledge (Thomas? Theodore?), formerly known to me as Blurred Person, the pale sidekick presence lolling around Oona’s apartment waiting for delivery sandwiches the only time I’d been here before. He’d opened his door just a crack at the sound of the elevator’s ding, and now stood watching me with one eye. Now I understood he was more than Oona’s best friend. He was the model for “Sledge,” the gardener, the other American trapped aboard the space station with Janice Trumbull.

Sledge’s door was triply locked from the inside, including an iron bar extending to a slotted plate on the floor, to form a reinforcing buttress a battering ram couldn’t have overcome. Inside, I saw he had every reason to want to be sure a visitor was alone, not flanked by some team of DEA agents. The light inside was all artificial and warm, the smell sweetly fungal, like a rain-forest floor. Bulbs hummed and seeping watering systems chortled, bringing throbbing life to the hundreds of sprouting marijuana plants visible in long open tanks covering every spot of floor in the maze of rooms. The humid false summer here was as oblivious to the snowstorm outside the building’s walls as it would have been to a dry desert heat or the void of space. When I stepped inside I felt I was as near to entering an orbital station (one orbital station in particular) as I’d ever be. There didn’t look to be a bed or even a couch for sleeping. I suppose Sledge spent his nights in some small extra room in Oona’s spacious apartment. Possibly they’d nicknamed it the Attic.

Sledge and I stood in the only bare zone, around his kitchen table, a sort of processing station that included a digital scale for weighing buds and two Tupperware bins full of Lucite boxes, one loaded with empties, the other with those already bulging with zesty-looking wreaths and braids of dope. Between our feet rolled several empty Starbucks to-go cups and crumpled white delicatessen bags. I wouldn’t have been shocked to have a leaf-cutter bee alight on my knuckle, but none did.

“I’m sorry about your friend Perkus.” As before, Sledge seemed to be half asleep, a nodding dormouse. His words squeaked, as if they slipped past unguarded sentries on tiptoe. I wondered if it was possible to die of yawning, as one died of hiccups.

“How did you know?”

“Apparently somebody notified the
Times
. Their fact-checker called Oona this morning about some details in the obituary.”

I wasn’t interested in having Oona’s reaction to the news, at least not in Sledge’s paraphrase, so I changed the subject. I plucked up one of the full Lucite boxes. Though unlabeled, it had a familiar weight and ambiance. “Do you do business with someone called Foster Watt?”