Serenading Stanley (9 page)

Roger heaved an exasperated sigh and took one step forward. Before Charlie could back away, Roger reached out and pinched Charlie’s nose, blocking any further intake of air. Then he clamped his hand over Charlie’s mouth to block any intake of air from that direction.

“Told you, Little Mouse,” Roger calmly said. “Just like giving a pill to a cat.”

Charlie did a little tap dance of panic as his face got redder and redder. His hands flapped around at his sides as if he were trying to take flight.

Stanley took the opportunity to study those heavenly biceps poking out of Roger Jane’s shirtsleeves. My God, they were solid, rolling around as if they had lives of their own as they held poor, unfortunate Charlie in place while the man tried not to pass out. Stanley wondered how those biceps would taste if he pressed his lips to them. And that thought made Stanley close his eyes for a second before he passed out too. In a brief moment of clarity, Stanley pictured him and Charlie keeling over at the exact same moment, one from suffocation, the other from lust. And wouldn’t Roger be surprised. Or maybe not.

Finally, an exaggerated
gulp!
sounded. Roger released that long, ugly freckled head, and Charlie sucked in a great gasp of oxygen. He clapped his hands to his throat, and the color drained from his face. When he was breathing properly, he muttered a curse.

Roger shook his finger in Charlie’s face. “Be nice. I just did you a favor.”

“Harrumph!” Charlie groused, his freckles glowing a glorious shade of magenta.

“You’re welcome,” Roger answered “And take your pill tomorrow too! Take them
every
day, dammit. Every. Single. Day.” He turned to Stanley. “Got your books? Good. Let’s go, then.”

Stanley waggled a few friendly fingers in Charlie’s direction. “Nice meeting you,” he said.

Charlie muttered another curse as Roger and Stanley let themselves out, both glad to be making their escape. Charlie the Sneak Thief wasn’t a whole lot of fun to be around.

In the hall, Stanley handed Roger the grocery bag. “Here are the books on Aztec history. Enjoy. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some studying to do.”

Stanley hurried off down the hall, not daring to look back. The last thing he wanted to see was the expression on Roger’s face after being dismissed yet again. But then Stanley looked back anyway. He couldn’t stop himself.

Roger Jane was standing in front of the door to 3A, clutching the bag of books to his chest and watching Stanley scurry away. He was grinning from ear to ear.

And the sneak thief was peering over Roger’s shoulder, grinning as well.

“H
E
’
S
a wonderful guy. He really is. Don’t you think he’s a wonderful guy?”

It was ChiChi, Stanley’s next-door neighbor. He was standing in Stanley’s doorway all decked out in his customary Ché Guevara drag, leathered from head to toe with the same leather bandolier crisscrossing his naked chest. A circle of gleaming silver dangled from his left nipple. All he needed was an Uzi and maybe a couple of hand grenades and a portable missile launcher to complete the ensemble. He was expounding on the qualities of Roger Jane to an already infatuated Stanley Sternbaum.

“You’re preaching to the choir,” Stanley wanted to say, but of course he didn’t. What Stanley did say was, “Stop playing with your nipple ring. You’re making me nervous.” Actually ChiChi’s nipple tweaking wasn’t making Stanley nervous, it was making him horny, but he wasn’t about to admit it. While ChiChi was cute as hell in his little leather outfit, Stanley had never paid for sex in his life and he wasn’t about to start now. ChiChi might call himself a masseur but Stanley knew better. He’d heard some of the sounds coming through the wall that separated his kitchen from ChiChi’s bedroom.

ChiChi had the good grace to blush and drop his hands to his crotch, all neatly folded like a nun’s. “Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t know I was doing it.”

Stanley didn’t believe him for a second. He gave the ceiling a quick scan. “Yeah, right. Now you’re squeezing your dick. Get your hands off your crotch.”

“Boy,” ChiChi said, “with the proper pressure applied to the proper pressure points, I could relieve you of some of those sexual hang-ups.”

“I’m sure you could. And give me all new ones in the process.”

ChiChi giggled. “You may be right. I have a little battery-operated twizzler that could really curl your toes if you wanted to let your hair down for once in your uptight little li—”

“I’m not uptight,” Stanley announced a little too desperately. Then he destroyed what little veracity there was in the statement by saying, “Well, yes, I am. No, I’m not. Well, maybe a little.”

“Right,” ChiChi smiled. “Yes. No. Maybe. A little. That’s you all over the place, Stanley.”

Before Stanley could think of a comeback to that, footsteps approaching down the hall made them both turn. “Ah,” ChiChi said. “My six o’clock appointment. We’ll finish this discussion later, Stanley.” And with that he gave Stanley a wink and ducked back through his own doorway, his little leather-covered ass sashaying very fetchingly. Stanley wasn’t sure if it was sashaying for Stanley’s benefit or for the benefit of the customer coming down the hall.

Stanley hung around long enough to see ChiChi’s appointment bustle past, looking all eager and bright-eyed. Jeez, the guy was a big bruiser. Handsome in a rugged, surly, macho Neanderthal sort of way. Stanley nodded a silent greeting, which the man ignored since his mind was apparently elsewhere, like on ChiChi’s leather-clad ass, and with nothing further to see, Stanley quietly closed his door. Thirty seconds later he heard voices coming through his kitchen wall. A couple of minutes after that, he heard the unmistakable sound of leather thongs thwapping somebody’s naked skin. Either that or ChiChi and the Neanderthal were over there flipping flapjacks.

Well, that didn’t take long
, Stanley thought, glancing at his watch. Stanley supposed ChiChi had a schedule to maintain. Still, he wouldn’t mind knowing just who was thwapping whom. Not to sound all perverted or anything, but Stanley sort of wished he had a peephole on the kitchen wall as well
as the front door.

Stanley wasn’t quite sure why ChiChi had knocked at his door in the first place. Maybe just being friendly. Nor was Stanley quite sure how their conversation had ended up being a rambling testimonial of sorts to the wonderfulness of Roger Jane. Aside from Charlie, the redheaded sneak thief on three, everyone seemed to sing Roger’s praises every chance they got. In his own silent little head, Stanley was constantly singing those praises too, but he wasn’t about to share that information with anyone. Stanley felt susceptible enough already. If anyone else knew of his crush on the hunky nurse downstairs, Stanley would die of shame. As Arthur pointed out on their one and only outing together, which was the day Arthur showed him the apartment, there is nothing more pathetic than a mortal getting all googly-eyed over a god, because Lord knows the gods don’t stoop to getting googly-eyed over the mortals.

Nope. Stanley knew his mortal limitations. And Roger Jane was right there at the top of the godly list. Dammit.

F
OR
Stanley, the worst part of doing laundry at the Belladonna Arms wasn’t climbing up and down six flights of stairs. Since the laundry room was in the basement, the worst part was climbing up and down
seven
flights of stairs.

And since a sneak thief was known to live on the premises, Stanley thought it prudent to stay with his laundry, to make sure it didn’t end up mysteriously migrating up to Charlie’s apartment to find itself stacked in a corner, waiting for resale. Not that Stanley had any clothes
worth
reselling.

So to keep his dirty laundry safely within eyeball range, today Stanley brought along a little tome tucked in among his dirty undershorts and stinky socks titled
Vilcabamba: The Last Stronghold of the Incan Empire
.

With his clothes nicely sorted and being sloshed and sudsed into faded respectability once again, and with the grumbling and thumping of the old Maytag washer shimmying and tap-dancing in the corner of the dusty basement laundry room as a backdrop, Stanley settled in to the adventures of Hiram Bingham. That’s right. World-famous Hiram Bingham, who in 1911, in the jungles of Peru, would set the realm of archaeology on its veritable ear. Since Hiram Bingham was one of Stanley’s biggest idols, Stanley was really getting into the story too. Climbing into Bingham’s head, seeing things through Bingham’s eyes, hearing the rushing Urubamba River at his feet, feeling the biting wind off the frozen Andes looming to the north, hearing the condors screeching in the Peruvian skies overhead. Then Stanley’s mind wandered and he began picturing some poor kid (not unlike himself) sitting in a laundry room a century from now reading about world-famous Stanley Sternbaum, intrepid explorer, who was made famous for discovering whatever the hell it was he became famous for discovering. Which, even Stanley had to admit, was pretty much putting the cart before the horse, since he wasn’t even out of school yet.

So back to Hiram Bingham. Behind his geeky-ass glasses, Stanley scrunched up his face in concentration and lost himself yet again in the book he was holding in front of his nose. Bingham was the man who, a century earlier, discovered Vilcabamba, the final stronghold of the Incas, later to be known as Machu Picchu. That one incredible feat of derring-do assured the man a place in the textbooks for the rest of eternity. It was the sort of coup Stanley would dig the shit out of pulling off. Of course, first he would have to scrape together a master’s degree and establish himself among the panoply of archaeologists already out there, each and every one of them trying to discover something momentous as well. Stanley was excited by the knowledge that archaeology was one of the few fields of endeavor in which one relied rather heavily on a large amount of luck to attain even a modicum of success. The way Stanley saw it, this made his chances for fame and glory just as good as anybody else’s.

In everything but his love life, Stanley was a “glass is half-full” kind of guy.

Stanley was just getting to the part where Bingham was struggling across the raging Urubamba River and closing in on Vilcabamba with his barefoot Indian guide Arteaga, when a shadow crossed his line of sight out in the hall.

It so startled Stanley that he jumped and dropped his book. These old buildings were kind of spooky after all.

With the washing machine still making a racket behind him, Stanley almost didn’t hear the staccato thunder of his own heart suddenly banging away like a war drum. Nor did he perceive the dichotomy in a world-famous explorer being startled by a shadow in a basement, which was probably for the better. No sense draining Stanley’s half-full glass of hope quite yet.

He pulled himself to his feet and warily approached the laundry room door, looking more like a frightened teenager than a world-famous archaeologist closing in on the discovery of the century. He poked his head outside and peered up and down the hall. Off to the right, in an area Stanley had never explored, he saw a door quietly closing.

Curious, Stanley tiptoed down the hall toward the door, which was about twenty feet away. When he got there, he pressed his ear to the door and held his breath while he listened.

Inside, he heard crying. Soft, muted crying.

Carefully, Stanley opened the door to reveal a vast empty room, only partially lit by a series of small basement windows Stanley realized would be right at ground level if one looked at the building on the outside. The windows had been painted over at some time or other, so the light they let in was weak, diffused, and maybe even a little creepy. The shadows that filled the empty space were transected by long streams of color. Gaudy strips of red, pink, green, and yellow swagged across the ceiling, their tones blunted by age and darkness. Stanley tried to blink away the gloom, wondering what they were.

Groping along the wall beside the door, he found a light switch and flicked it on. Fluorescent lights overhead stuttered awake, ticking and buzzing, solving the mystery of the streams of color, and calming Stanley’s fears as well.

It was old crepe paper—fading ropes of the stuff, drooping all over the place. Off the ceiling, off the walls. It festooned the room from one end of the great hall to another. Empty folding tables had been set up around the perimeter of the room with paper tablecloths of more colors neatly covering their battered legs. The tablecloths too were dusty and crumpled. In the center of the room hung a disco ball, big enough for a room twice this size. Unspinning and unlit, it looked like the Death Star waiting for the perfect moment to vaporize an unsuspecting Alderaan.

Stanley’s whimsical take on the disco ball was interrupted by a voice coming from the corner. He knew the voice immediately, although he couldn’t see the speaker.

It was Sylvia. Her words seemed to writhe across the room like phantom aches.

“Come sit with me,” she said, and Stanley heard her hand patting the floor beside her. Then he heard her hiccup. She was the one who was crying.