The Broom of the System (7 page)

Mr. Bloemker looked at her. “A barber?”

“The big killer question,” Lenore said to the sheet of paper, “is supposed to be whether the barber shaves himself. I think that’s why his head’s exploded, here.”

“Beg pardon?”

“If he does, he doesri t, and if he doesn‘t, he does.”

Mr. Bloemker stared down at the drawing. Smoothed his beard.

“Look, can we leave?” Lenore asked. “It’s really hot. I want to leave.”

“By all means.”

Lenore put the Stonecipheco label in her purse and shut the drawer. “I’ll put the key here on the desk, but I don’t think anybody other than the police ought to go looking through Gramma’s stuff, assuming the police get called, which I really think they ought to.”

“I quite agree. You are taking the ... ?”

“Antinomy.”

“Yes.”

“Is that OK?”

“The person on the telephone said nothing indicating otherwise.”

“Thanks.”

There was a knock at the door. A staff member handed a note to Mr. Bloemker. Bloemker read the note. The staff member looked at Lenore’s dress and shoes for a moment and left.

“Well of course as I fully expected Concamadine Beadsman is still with us, over in J,” Mr. Bloemker said. “Would you perhaps care to see her before you—?”

“No thanks, really,” Lenore cut him off. “I really have to get to work. What time is it, by the way?”

“Almost noon.”

“God, I’m going to be really late. I’m going to get killed. I hope Candy isn’t mad about covering. Look, is there a phone where I can dial out to call and say I’ll be late? I really need to call.”

“There are dial-out phones at every reception station. I’ll show you.”

“I remember, come to think of it.”

“Of course.”

“Look, I’m going to be in touch, soon, obviously. I’m going to get hold of my father from work, and I’ll tell him he should call you.”

“That would be enormously helpful, thank you.” Mr. Bloemker’s shirt had soaked the outline of a thin V through his sportcoat.

“And of course please call me if anything happens, if you find anything out. Either at work or over at the Tissaws’ house.”

“Rest assured that I will. You are still employed at Frequent and Vigorous?” ,

“Yes. Have you got the number?”

“Somewhere, I’m sure.”

“Really, let me give it to you to be sure. We get an incredible amount of wrong numbers.” Lenore wrote the number on a card from her purse and handed it to Mr. Bloemker. Mr. Bloemker looked at the front of the card.

“ ‘Rick Vigorous: Editor, Reader, Administrator, All-Around Literary Presence, Frequent and Vigorous Publishing, Inc.’?”

“Never mind, just there’s the number. Can we please go to the dial-out phone? I’m hideously late, and being here longer isn’t going to help get Lenore back, I can see.”

“Of course. Let me get the door.”

“Thank you.”

“Not at all.”

25 August

 

I have a truly horrible dream which invariably occurs on the nights I am Lenoreless in my bed. I am attempting to stimulate the clitoris of Queen Victoria with the back of a tortoise-shell hairbrush. Her voluminous skirts swirl around her waist and my head. Her enormous cottage-cheese thighs rest heavy on my shoulders, spill out in front of my sweating face. The clanking of pounds of jewelry is heard as she shifts to offer herself at best advantage. There are odors. The Queen’s impatient breathing is thunder above me as I kneel at the throne. Time passes. Finally her voice is heard, overhead, metalled with disgust and frustration: “We are not aroused.” I am punched in the arm by a guard and flung into a pit at the bottom of which boil the figures of countless mice. I awake with a mouth full of fur. Begging for more time. A ribbed brush.

One big problem with owning one of those new Mattel ultra rompact cars, which was what Lenore owned, was that the plastic car had a plastic choke which had to be engaged while the car warmed up for not fewer than five minutes, which was particularly irritating in‘the summer, because Lenore had to sit in the small oven that was the car for these five minutes, while the engine raced like mad and made a lot of unpleasant noise, before she could get going and have some cooler air blow on her. While she made the choke-wait in the Home’s parking lot, Lenore watched an ant nibble at something in the wad of bird droppings that lay near the top of her windshield.

The ant was torn off the windshield by the wind when Lenore hit the Inner Belt of I-271 and started going seriously fast. The offices of the publishing firm of Frequent and Vigorous were in that part of downtown Cleveland called Erieview Plaza, right near Lake Erie. Lenore took the Inner Belt south and west from Shaker Heights, preparatory to her being flung by I-271 northward into the city itself, which meant that she was for a while with her car tracing the outline of the city of East Corinth, Ohio, which was where she had her apartment, and which determined the luxuriant and not unpopular shape of the Inner Belt Section of I-271.

East Corinth had been founded and built in the 1960’s by Stonecipher Beadsman II, son of Lenore Beadsman, Lenore Beadsman’s grandfather, who was unfortunately killed at age sixty-five in 1975 in a vat accident during a brief and disastrous attempt on the part of Stonecipheco Baby Food Products to develop and market something that would compete with Jell-O. Stonecipher Beadsman II had been a man of many talents and even more interests. He had been a really fanatical moviegoer, as well as an amateur urban planner, and he had been particularly rabid in his attachment to a film star named Jayne Mansfield. East Corinth lay in the shape of a profile of Jayne Mansfield: leading down from Shaker Heights in a nimbus of winding road-networks, through delicate features of homes and small businesses, a button nose of a park and a full half-smiling section of rotary, through a sinuous swan-like curve of a highway extension and tract housing, before jutting precipitously westward in a huge, swollen development of factories and industrial parks, mammoth and bustling, the Belt curving back no less immoderately a couple miles south into a trim lower border of homes and stores and apartment buildings and some boarding houses, including that in which Lenore Beadsman herself lived and from which she had driven up over Jayne Mansfield to the Shaker Heights Home this morning. Families and firms owning property along the critical western boundary of the suburb were required by zoning code to paint their facilities in the most realistic colors possible, a condition to which property owners in the far westward section near Garfield Heights (where the industrial swelling was most pronounced) particularly objected, and as one can imagine the whole East Corinth area was immensely popular with airline pilots, who all tended to demand landing patterns into Cleveland-Hopkins Airport over East Corinth, and who made a constant racket, flying low and blinking their lights on and off and waggling their wings. The people of East Corinth, many of them unaware of the shape their town really lay in, a knowledge not exactly public, crawled and drove and walked over the form of Jayne Mansfield, shaking their fists at the bellies of planes. Lenore had lived in East Corinth only two years, ever since she had gotten out of college and decided she did not want to live at home or enter Stonecipheco, all at once. To the south, 271 gave way to 77, and 77 led down through Bedford, Tallmadge, Akron, and Canton before stretching into the Great Ohio Desert, with its miles of ash-fine black sand, and cacti and scorpions, and crowds of fishermen, and concession stands at the rim.

There were two reliable ways to identify the Bombardini Building, which was where the firm of Frequent and Vigorous made its home. A look from the south at Erieview Tower, high and rectangular not far from the Terminal section of Cleveland’s downtown, reveals that the sun, always at either a right or a left tangent to the placement of the Tower, casts a huge, dark shadow of the Building over the surrounding area—a deep, severely angled shadow that joins the bottom of the Tower in black union but then bends precipitously off to the side, as if the Erieview Plaza section of Cleveland were a still pool of water, into which the Tower had been dipped, the shadow its refracted submergence. In the morning, when the shadow casts from east to west, the Bombardini Building stands sliced by light, white and black, on the Tower’s northern side. As ‘the day swells and the shadow compacts and moves ponderously in and east, and as clouds begin to complicate the shapes of darknesses, the Bombardini Building is slowly eaten by black, the steady suck of the dark broken only by epileptic flashes of light caused by clouds with pollutant bases bending rays of sun as the Bombardini Building flirts ever more seriously with the border of the shadow. By mid-afternoon the Bombardini Building is in complete darkness, the windows glow yellow, cars go by with headlights. The Bombardini Building, then, is easy to find, occurring nowhere other than on the perimeter of the sweeping scythe of the Midwest’s very most spectacular shadow.

The other aforementioned identifying feature was the white skeleton of General Moses Cleaveland, which found itself in shallow repose in the cement of the sidewalk in front of the Bombardini
B
uilding, its outline clearly visible, of no little interest to passing pedestrians and the occasional foraging dog, the latter’s advances discouraged by a thin bit of electrified grillwork, the General’s rest thus largely untroubled save by the pole of a sign which jutted disrespectfully out of Cleaveland’s left eye socket, the sign itself referring to a hugely outlined parking space in front of the Building and reading: THIS SPACE RESERVED FOR NORMAN BOMBARDINI, WITH WHOM YOU DO NOT WANT TO MESS.

Frequent and Vigorous Publishing shared the Bombardini Building with the administrative facilities of the Bombardini Company, a firm involved in some vague genetic engineering enterprises about which Lenore in all honesty cared to know as little as possible. The Bombardini Company occupied most of the lower three floors and a single vertical line of offices up the six-story height of the Bombardini Building’s east side. Frequent and Vigorous took a vertical line of narrow space on the western side of the Building for three floors, then swelled out to take almost all the top three. The Frequent and Vigorous telephone switchboard, where Lenore worked, was in the western corner of the cavernous Bombardini Building lobby, across the huge back wall of which, cast through the giant windows in the front wall of the lobby, the Erieview shadow steadily and even measurably moved, eating the wall. Time could with reasonable accuracy be measured by the position of the shadow against the back wall, except when the black-and-white window-light flickered like a silent movie during the fickle shadow-period of mid-day.

Which it now was. Lenore was hideously late. She hadn’t been able to get through to Candy Mandible on the phone, either. The Shaker Heights Home’s phones were apparently on the fritz: F and V’s number had put Lenore in touch with Cleveland Towing.

“Frequent and Vigorous,” Candy Mandible was saying into the switchboard console phone. “Frequent and Vigorous,” she said. “No this is not Enrique’s House of Cheese. Shall I give you that number, even though it might not work? You’re welcome.”

“Candy God I’m so sorry, it was unavoidable, I couldn’t get through.” Lenore came back behind the counter and into the switchboard cubicle. The window high overhead
flashed
a cathedral spear of sun, then was dark.

“Lenore, you’re like three hours late. That’s just a little much.”

“My supervisor wouldn’t take it. I’d get fired if I pulled anything like what you guys pull,” Judith Prietht shot off between calls beeping at the Bombardini Company switchboard console a few feet away in the tiny cubicle.

Lenore put her purse by the Security phones. She came close to Candy Mandible. “I tried to call you. Mrs. Tissaw called me out of the shower at like nine-thirty because Schwartz had answered this call for me. I had to go to the nursing home right away.”

“Something’s wrong.”

“Yes.” Lenore saw that Judith Prietht’s ears were aprick. “Can I just talk to you later? Will you be home later on?”

“I’ll be off over at Allied at six,” Candy said. “I was supposed to be over there at freaking twelve—but it’s OK,” seeing Lenore’s expression. “Clint said he’d get somebody to cover for me as long as I wanted. Are you all right? Which one is it?”

“Lenore. ”

“She didn’t ... ?”

“It’s
unclear
.”

“Unclear?”

“My supervisor, you gotta have reasons for being late, and submit ‘em in advance, and they have to get signed by Mr. Bombardini,” Judith said amid beepings and rings. “But then we have a real business, we get real calls. Bombardini Company. Bombardini Company. One moment.”

“She’s being particularly pleasant today,” said Lenore. Candy made a strangle-motion at Judith, then started to get her stuff together.

Their console sounded. Lenore got it. “Frequent and Vigorous,” she said. She listened and looked up at Candy. “Bambi’s Den of Discipline?” she said. “No, this is most definitely not Bambi’s Den of Discipline ... Candy, do you have the number of a Bambi’s Den of Discipline?” Candy gave her the number but said it probably wouldn’t make any difference. Lenore recited the number and released.

“Bambi’s Den of Discipline?” she said. “That’s a new one. What do you mean there’s probably no difference?”

“I can’t figure it out, I don’t see nothing wrong,” a voice came from under the console counter, under Lenore’s chair, by her legs. Lenore looked down. There were big boots protruding from under the counter. They began to jiggle; a figure struggled to emerge. Lenore shot her chair back.

“Lenore, there’s line trouble that I guess started last night, Vem said,” Candy said. “This is Peter Abbott. He’s with Interactive Cable. They’re trying to fix the problem. ”

“Interactive Cable?”