The Thomas Berryman Number (12 page)

Doubleparked on East 87th Street, he sat on the trunk of the Mercedes, thinking.

Trying not to be distracted by the New York carnival, he
was,
nonetheless. By a businessman riding an expensive bicycle, with a gas mask over his face. His system of empty pipes carried the sign:
NON-POLLUTING VEHICLE
.

The gas mask struck Berryman’s fancy. Once he’d passed Joe Namath and his girlfriend on that same corner. Not a very pretty girl, she’d said, “You don’t have to hold my hand” to Namath. So much for fame and football.

Berryman walked past buildings numbered 92, 94, 100—toward 86th Street. He paused at a city litter basket advertising a midwestern beer. He rummaged through the trash. But there was nothing he could use to implement his plan.

At a flashy boutique on 84th, however, he was given a fancy, plastic carryball bag. It was perfect. It would become a mask.

The glass front door of 88 East End was spray-painted Kool Whip 111. This was luxury, New York style. Smoking a long rope cigarillo, Thomas Berryman walked inside. He was trying to look well-to-do and important, and he looked it.

A heavy Puerto Rican security guard announced him from the lobby. The guard was stationed in front of a system of security monitors showing scenes like the garbage pails out back. The man was smoking a fat cigar, looking as official as a Banana Republic general. “A Mister Ben Toy, jes sir?” he said into a small microphone.

A clipped British voice bounced back from upstairs. “Mr. Toy, please come right up.”

“Ju can go up now,” the doorman said with undaunted authority.

As the elevator cruised efficiently to the thirtieth floor, Berryman carefully poked and dug holes in the plastic bag.

The thirtieth-floor hallway was carpeted, empty, luxuriously quiet. As Berryman looked for the apartment marked M. Romains, he slipped on the plastic bag. He pulled the tie-cord and the bag closed over his head like a White Cap’s hood.

Checking himself in one of the hallway’s gilded mirrors, he had to smile. Both his eyes appeared in one thin slit. His mouth was a small black circle.

He pushed Romains’ button and heard distant chimes.

Presently a man with a shaggy blond haircut and pocked cheeks opened the door the length of a safety chain.

“Well, you’re obviously not Mr. Toy,” he observed. “Who are you, uh, masked stranger?”

Berryman laughed behind the bag. “I’d like it if you never had to see my face,” he said in a slightly muffled voice. “I’m Berryman. Ben Toy is away on other business for me.”

“I suppose,” the forger Romains said. He slid away the gold chain. “I understood he wasn’t playing with a full deck myself.”

“Where’d you hear that one?”

“From a man. Someone,” the forger said.

The living room Berryman entered was large and sunken. It was cluttered with hundreds of lithographs, some stacked against walls like discount art stores. Berryman unsuccessfully tried to take it all in without the aid of peripheral vision.

Romains led him to a white cafÉ table. The table overlooked the East River and an immense neon soda sign.

“You wish to exchange pleasantries?” the forger acted belligerent. But there was absolutely no expression on his puffy face. His eyes were sad and rheumy as a chicken’s.

Berryman shook his head. He barely looked at Romains. Mostly he examined the Hellgate Bridge. Then he started to explain what he wanted.

“First,” he said. “There will be three separate driver’s licenses from three southern states. Georgia. South Carolina. Not Tennessee.”

The forger made a one-word notation.

“Second. There will be credit cards under the names on the licenses. At the very least, I want Diner’s Club and BankAmericard.” These two, Berryman knew, were the simplest to fraud.

“Finally,” Berryman said. “At least one of the credit cards must carry my photograph. The bank card, I suppose.”

M. Romains made a rigid chimneystacked steeple of his fingers and felt-tipped pen. He smiled. “Photograph, Mr. Berryman?”

Berryman withdrew an envelope packet from his jacket.

Romains removed the photo, holding it carefully by its edges. It showed a whisky-nosed man with a blond crew cut. Middle-aged. This, he was certain, was not a Thomas Berryman he would recognize. “Of course.” He made another notation. “A photograph on one of the credit cards. A wise safeguard against theft.”

“There won’t be any problem?” Berryman asked.

The forger looked into the slit of eyes. “No problem,” he said. “You must tell me when, and where they must be delivered. I’ll tell you how much. Yes?”

Thomas Berryman withdrew another envelope and handed over the fifteen fifty-dollar bills.

Romains counted the bills and nodded. “Good,” he smiled. “One half in advance is my requirement.”

Now Berryman smiled. “No, my friend,” he said. “I’m trusting you with the full payment now. I’ll expect delivery in no more than four days,” he said. He told the forger where the materials were to be sent.

After leaving the forger’s building, Berryman walked up East End Avenue. He turned up 89th Street, walking very slowly to the Flower & Toy Shop. He passed six or eight young people circling around a dead man lying in his black raincoat on the sidewalk. Flies were buzzing over the man’s face and a psycho-looking girl was shooing them away with a
New York Times.

Birds and old men, Berryman thought, die terrible deaths in New York. Much worse than anything he would allow.

The color of most of the flowers was perfect, but every one of them was dead. Berryman could see that no one had been in the shop for weeks.

Long flowers were hung craze-jane over plastic vases and pots; or they’d just lain down and died in their little wooden windowboxes. Shorter flowers were fallen in heaps, as if they’d been mowed.

The more fragrant flowers (stocks, some roses) gave off a heavy odor; and mere was foul water in the room. But most of the dead flowers bore no smell.

Berryman slowly walked up the aisle, breaking flower heads off and smelling them. A hanging lightbulb was on, shining over the counter. Bells on the front door were still jingling back and forth, back and forth.

“Hey Ben,” he called out. “Benboy. Goddamnit, Ben.”

The answer was
ka-rot, ka-rot.
His boots on the wooden planks.

There was no one in the small back room of the shop either. Water was dripping on more dead flowers in a stainless steel sink. Dead flowers were in a garbage pail. Dead flowers were wrapped in gift paper and ribbons, and signed with various billets doux.

Berryman sat down and composed his own note. He wrote:

Ben,

You ‘re getting crazier than a shithouse rat. Call me on the Island or I’ll have to kick your ass.

He Scotch-taped the note on the inside glass of the front door. It looked like a closed-because-of-a-death-in-the-family notice.

For a very few moments outside, Berryman had a nervous tic in one eye. His mind was flooded with memories that portended (if one
believed,
in one way or another) big trouble for two reverse ass-kissers who had gone against near everything and everybody. Who had stoned girls and fucked Texas boys and cows.

Hampton Bays, June 23

It rained for several days straight near the end of June. It got muddy all around Berryman’s home, with the sea smelling extra salty, and all the cloth furniture cool and damp to the touch.

Berryman took the occasion to relax. He needed to relax totally before starting for Tennessee.

Now and then he caught a fish in the ocean; ate it, or threw it back. He thought that the ocean was profoundly intelligent, but that bluefish were not. He kept expecting Ben Toy to pop up, dirty and long-whiskered like some male dog on the bum.

One morning he sat sipping a mug of Yuban and munching honey cakes on the back (beach) porch. It was 9
A.M.
, but dark, and the house lights were on. He rocked on the love seat (cool on the back of his legs and against his arms), and he read Jimmie Horn’s fat autobiography: it was called
Jiminy.

He read every word, and enjoyed each sentence, each little vignette, immensely. Finishing one page, he would think about what had been described so adroitly, feel bad that it was over, then only slowly move on and start another page.

Over his head the rain sounded as if it was falling on soggy paper. The sky was steamy and cardboard-colored. All vertical noise was the ocean, which seemed especially wet because of the rain and wind.

It was his last pleasant memory of the sea captain’s house.

While he sat rocking, reading, humming, Oona came out in a boy’s yellow slicker and matching hat.

“What object—that is now sitting in the village of Hampton Bays—would make your day a little brighter?”

Berryman could think of nothing but the newspaper.

Oona told him that she was going to get wine; beef; com on the cob (did he like com on the cob?
yes, about half a dozen at a sitting);
mushrooms; clams (did he like Little Neck clams?
yes, about a dozen at a sitting).

She waded off through the mud in high, open-heeled sandals. Chose the best mudder, the Cadillac. Waved in the arc cleared by
swish-swash
windshield wipers. Rolled away into the stew.

Berryman drifted back into his book. It was going to be a terrific day, he thought. He was extremely comfortable, content, and Oona was getting to be a genuine delight to be with.

He read. Peacefully inhaled and exhaled the slightly mildew air. Until he was distracted by a sudden loud whacking in the house. It was a cracking whack. Then a pause. Then a whack. A pause.

Berryman slowly walked back through the long hall. The noise got louder. He went through the living room, stopped, switched off a lamp. He took a revolver from the desk. Put it down as a gesture connected with incipient craziness. Picked it up again and slipped it under his T-shirt. He went on to the still-breakfast-warm kitchen. More honey buns were sitting out. More coffee.

The screen door suddenly swung all the way to the outside wall. Hit it. Then swung back with a cracking whack.

As Berryman went to latch the door against the wind, he found a note. The door’s hook had been pierced through it.

TomTom

Garden spot of the world. You’re crazier.

Can’t go killing
—
killing Jimmie Horn.

Bigben

Oona came home singing Carly Simon hits—“Anticipation” and “Mockingbird.” She was carrying too much groceries for two people. Too many newspapers for five Berrymans.

She found a rained-on copy of
Jiminy
left out on the porch. She called inside and there was no answer.

Without looking further, she sensed that Berryman was gone on business again. This time she thought she knew what the business was.

Oona stalked around the sea captain’s house for the rest of the day.

In a fit of pouting anger she threw the corn, clams and steak out on the lawn.

She broke a living room window that looked out on the empty shore highway. Rain came in on the rug. Wind blew things around the room.

She called up a friend on Cape Cod and another in California. Whenever she hung up the phone, Ben Toy seemed to be calling for Berryman. Finally, she told him to go fuck himself.

The ocean was unseasonably cold that day, fifties, with scary five- and six-foot breakers throwing assorted garbage up on the beach. She sat on driftwood from a big house, boat, big something. Cold foamy water ran around her legs and wet her bottom.

She walked in the ocean, and the first wave that came threw her face-down into the sand. She swallowed saltwater and ate sand.

She walked up the lawn thinking her nose was broken. It wiggled in her fingers. Maybe it always had. She was noticing things. Sand in the spaces between her teeth. The shape of her legs.

Late in the afternoon a peculiar orange sun finally broke through the black ceiling of clouds. A seagull sat on a post, waiting for the picture postcard photographer. Oona was both nauseated and hungry.

She picked up one of the filets off the lawn and eventually cooked it. Then she fell asleep before eight. Her dreams were fast motion, then Richard Avedon-type shots of herself and Berryman in assorted cinematic disaster scenes.

She had completely different ideas in the morning.

She cleaned up what she’d broken and had the Jamaican fix whatever he could. She went around the house, each room, and examined things, possessions, in ways she never had before.

She called Berryman’s New York number and got a message recorder. “This is uhm Oona,” she said. “I’m missing you in H. Ben Toy has been calling. And uh … No, that’s it,” was the recorded message.

Oona Quinn had reasoned that by leaving her in the house, Berryman was making a commitment to her. She decided that she liked him, liked the way he lived. She decided she wanted to hold on to all of it for a while.

But the girl was wrong on almost all counts.

Quogue, June 24

Paul Lasini was so conservative that at twenty-three he thought Frank Sinatra was the greatest singer in the history of the world. The St. John’s University law student, appointed to the Village of Quogue police force for the summer, was the last person to see the funniest man in America.

Lasini was eating a Chinese-food dinner when Ben Toy walked into the Quogue police station talking to himself on June the 24th. Lasini laughed.

The courtly blond man looked stoned to him. Stoned ridiculous or blind drunk and in either case, stumble-bumming around the station house in one tennis sneaker and one beach thong. His hair was unruly and tangled. He’d also pissed in his pants. There was a big dark stain covering one leg of his khaki shorts.

“Oona Quinn is my left hand.” Ben Toy slobbered his chin as he spoke. “John Harley is my right hand.”

“Better sit down before you fall down,” Lasini called over advice.

The desk sergeant, a pink and pudgy veteran named Fall, slowly looked up from his
Daily News.
He kept his finger on his place in the baseball box scores, and he squinted a good look at Toy.