Vital Parts (2 page)

Sweet interrupted. “I hate to do it again, Carl, but it's ‘ka-ra-tay,' all syllables evenly stressed and a little trill on the
r
if you can manage it.
Kara
—empty.
Te
—hand. ‘Karotty' is TV-talk.”

“Well, Bob, that's appropriate,” Reinhart said quietly. “That's all I've got, Bob. That's the only excitement and color in my life—television. And don't worry. Even if you were still pimpled little skinny Sweetie you could take me with one hand now. You could also buy me from petty cash.”

Now that Sweet received the unconditional surrender, he was as benevolent as was his country with its fallen enemies. He said sympathetically: “Don't you think you should get some food into your stomach? Why don't I have that mess hauled away and get you a steak instead?”

“Bob, I couldn't chew it. I have to mince my meat before I can get it down. My teeth are in bad shape.”

“Good red meat,” said Sweet, swallowing the last of his, which in fact was largely a yellow gristle which it did not help Reinhart's digestion to see being milled behind Sweet's flashing incisors. “Good red meat never hurt anybody.”

“You married, Bob?”

“I was,” said Sweet, attacking the salad, which glistened with oil. “I may do it again when I get old.”

Even in self-pity Reinhart lied about his age, a habit of several years' standing. “I
am
old. I'm forty.”

For a moment Sweet was taken in by Reinhart's desolation. “That's funny,” he said, frowning behind the horn rims. “You and I were in the same class, yet I'll be forty-five in November.”

Reinhart was beyond embarrassment at the moment. “All right, forty-four then. What does it matter? I'm finished, pal. I'm a living corpse.” He snapped his fingers at the passing waitress. “Hey, you, bring me another.”

She skidded, backed up, and stated evenly: “I don't have to take that sort of a thing, sir. You can request but don't demand like I was your servant.”

Worse, she was not the hard-pressed hag of his own age which, not having inspected her earlier, he assumed she would be. She was young, and had a lovely hard pair, and though she remonstrated with him he was to her only a rude abstraction. “I'm a human being,” she said redundantly.

He tried to smile, saying: “I'm not.”

She was even more winsome with her lip curled. He took a swinish delight in the exchange, and as she marched indignantly away, he sneered for Sweet's benefit and muttered: “Snotty bitch.”

“Get hold of yourself, Carl,” his host said sharply. “There's no profit in that.”

A heavy hand touched Reinhart's shoulder. He turned his head to look at it and saw a thick growth of swarthy hair amidst which flickered the gold of an almost hidden ring. Far above loomed the Mafia face, blue with close-shaved beard, of Gino, whose restaurant this was.

With a thug's courtesy, Gino said: “I wanna speak to yuh in private,
sir
.”

“Sure, Gino.” Reinhart was proud to be singled out by the proprietor of a popular establishment. In these parts influential people sucked up to restaurateurs, maître d's, and bartenders. It was a prestige-making thing to address such worthies by name and hear your own in return. Though having run up a modest bill, Reinhart had not yet got on the top terms with Gino, but now was apparently the time. And just when he had seemingly reached bottom. He excused himself to Sweet, already regretting he had bared his soul to the pimply schoolmate reborn.

He followed the thickset figure and managed to keep erect while threading through the tables, from almost every one of which some diner hailed Gino. Reinhart recognized many of these people. He had lived his life in the region, and most of the local businessmen ate lunch here. He nodded at certain faces, said a word to others, touched a shoulder now and again. The responses were not enthusiastic. They were a think-small, provincial lot, else they would have been in New York or Chicago, but no doubt they were perceptive enough to catch the assurance behind Reinhart's superficial amenities, for he was on his way up again after a series of descents which would have ruined a weaker spirit.

Gino's office was full of cold from a whirring window air-conditioner. Gino was shorter than Reinhart but as wide and not fat at all where it counted. He stood very close, breathing cigar fumes and a piquant memory of his famed spaghetti sauce.

He said: “It isn't easy to get good waitresses nowadays and they don't come no better than June. If you was not in the company of that gentleman I would kick your stinking teeth out, you lousy slob. I don't want to never see you in my place again.”

Reinhart held his temper manfully. “There's been a misunderstanding, Gino. The young lady didn't catch what I said. There's a lot of noise out there—”

Gino's eyes closed slowly and did not open until he had finished saying: “Any man who talks dirty to a woman is a filthy skunk, period.” Then his lids rolled swiftly up with an almost audible clangor. “Now you getchurass out of here.”

“Tell you what I'll do,” Reinhart persisted. “I'll write a nice tip on the bill.”

Gino, who had seen Reinhart on countless noontimes, had greeted him on entrance and detained his parting with an oily expression of trust that he had enjoyed the meal, now professed to be dumbfounded. “You sign here? I never seen you before in my life, you bum.” He seized the chest of Reinhart's wash-and-wear suit and forced him into a chair. “Don't make a move, you.” He fisted one of his two telephones and shook it at Reinhart's face, then snarled his pegteeth into the mouthpiece.

“Name's Carl Reinhart, for God's sake,” cried the man who had put a signature to that effect on scores of lunch checks.

Gino slammed the instrument home. “
Reinhart!
So you are Reinhart, the biggest deadbeat on the list.” He laughed in a savage scream. “Reinhart, Jesus Christ, Reinhart.” Wonderingly he addressed a glossy leather-bound photograph on his desk—Reinhart was behind it, so could not see its subject—“He owes me a hunnert and eighty-three dollars. The collection agents can't find him. Where is he?
In my fucking restaurant, eating my fucking food, signing more of my fucking checks!
” Gino's face was a mélange of several colors and his voice that of a machine which wanted grease.

“You'll get every penny of it,” said Reinhart. “My guest is Mr. Robert Sweet, the well-known tycoon. We are discussing a deal that will be very profitable to me in the near future.”

Gino's breathing obscured the racket of the air-conditioner. He grasped a bronze paperweight, done in the form of an alligator or crocodile, and broke it into two more or less equal portions. At length he said, as if to himself: “So I kill him and go up for murder. Am I
really
better off?” Again he closed his eyes, and he whispered hoarsely: “You don't take another bite, see? You don't take a sip of ice water or wipe your hands on my napkin. You don't grab a toothpick or after-dinner mint on the way out. And you leave in five minutes flat.”

Reinhart gathered himself together. “All right, Gino,” he said. “If you want to be that way, I'll spare mysef a lot of heartburn.” As he passed through the doorway, one half of the bronze crocodile or alligator dented the frame, very near his right shoulder, with the force of a bullet.

Back at the table he said to Sweet, who he saw with relief had finished the meal, “I'm terribly sorry, but a call just came in reminding me of a one forty-five appointment and it is past that already.”

While Sweet, as promised, took care of the bill, Reinhart revisited the toilet and, choosing one urinal to the right of “Chuck's,” inscribed upon the clean wall above:
GINO IS A CROOKED GUINEA
. The phraseology, somewhat out of date and thoroughly contrary to Reinhart's soul—his best friend in the Army had been an Italian-American, and as irony would have it, Reinhart had once joined him in beating up a guy who called him a guinea—the epithet was chosen with a sense of what would wound Gino most to find on his own toilet wall, revenge being futile unless it strikes bone.

Just as Reinhart finished, another customer checked into the stall next door and, reading “Chuck's” message, stared at Reinhart's disappearing ball-pen and assumed, you could tell from his steely irises, that Reinhart was the Phantom Faggot.

It would have been useless to explain. Reinhart joined Sweet on the square mile of asphalt outside, the apron of a gigantic shopping center which trapped and intensified, by solar reflection off the white and pastel-colored façades, the tropical heat of July in southern Ohio, to which was added the thermal exhausts of a thousand cars as well as the steamy exhalations of countless cooked consumers.

Sweet glanced at his black-faced Omega, of which Reinhart wore a fifteen-dollar plagiarism. “The work on my aircraft should be finished by now, so I'll go straight out to the hangars.” He wore a beautiful pearl-gray suit of some zephyrweight material, with working buttonholes at the wrists, which Reinhart had read, in the woman's-mag reminiscences of a former flunky in the grande luxe hotels of Switzerland, was the true test of a tailor-made garment.

The encounter with Gino and the suffocating heat of outdoors had begun to sweat Reinhart towards sobriety. Already there were blackened areas of damp beneath his armpits, which cooled briefly, nastily, if he lifted his upper extremities. Therefore he put his hand out to Sweet, while keeping the elbow close in.

“Bob, I can't say how much I have enjoyed this. Let's do it again soon.”

Sweet's hand was forceful yet fleeting. He was clearly a man who could not waste time on nugatory routine.

“It's a pity we were only getting around to the core of things when that phone call pulled you away,” said he. “Carl, I have my sentimental side too. This shopping center depresses me when I think of the fields that were here when we were kids. But things change every sixty seconds in life. I am myself no longer the little mess I was, so if the landscape is lost, the gain is mine. You have to think of things that way or you'll be drowned by the changes of time. Someone's always losing, and someone else is winning. There is no standing still for anybody.”

Sobering, Reinhart wished again he had not been so candid. He said: “I've had my ups and downs. There's a kind of rhythm to that too. I drink too much once in a while and lose my sense of proportion. Thanks again, Bob, and I'll see you around.” If he had had an automobile, he would have jumped in it and gunned off. But his own vehicle had been repossessed and Genevieve used the other one.

“Wait a minute,” said Sweet. “Let's exchange cards. I'd drop you someplace but you obviously didn't walk here—”

But he had, at least from the bus stop. “As it happens, my Cad is in the shop. An associate dropped me off here. I was going to catch a cab back.”

“Then that settles it,” Sweet stated. “We'll have a few minutes more together.” He stared at his watch again and then across the vast parking lot towards the roaring highway.

Reinhart wondered why the tycoon tarried. He asked: “Where is your wagon?” Amid the multicolored hundreds ranked on the plain, through the aisles between which women pushed steel-mesh shopping carts, followed by sturdy, tanned children sucking on Good Humors or chewing wilted pizza slices of flecked yellow on blood-red. Men trundled power mowers, aluminum wheelbarrows, golf carts, and miniature snowplows on which there was a preseason special, virtually a giveaway, a “loss leader” with which to lure customers to blow their wads on other items. Reinhart was painfully familiar with this tactic, having once given it a fling at a gas station he owned.

A husky clerk, good-natured mesomorphic type with melon-dumped biceps, toted a color-TV set from a nearby appliance shop to the purchaser's station wagon, capacious as a city bus of yore. Farther along, another store enjoyed a run on air-conditioners, stereo hi-fi's, bathing suits, and whole salamis, to judge from the huge signs which obscured their show windows and the overburdened clients who staggered out the self-opening doors.

Sweet said cryptically: “He'll be here in a minute.” He nodded his head generally at the mass of consumers and their goods. “Look at that, Carl. That's money in motion, where we used to play cowboys and Indians.” Sweet replaced his glasses with sun lenses in the same type of frame. A slight balding could be taken, on the other hand, as a high, powerful forehead; each temple wore a splash of gray.

A young mother, plodding along in self-righteous oblivion with two grocery bags and two small children, the type who invariably plowed Reinhart down, yet respectfully circumvented Sweet, dropping a few oranges in the shift of line. Reinhart retrieved them, and the woman thanked Sweet, who had not even noticed the incident.

Reinhart panted from the effort of bending, and momentarily he seemed to be looking through the dark portion of a photographic negative.

Sweet asked impatiently: “Is there a helicopter service out here?”

“I don't think so,” Reinhart said. “That is just a little private airport.”

Sweet clapped Reinhart's shoulder. “Call 'em up for me, will you? Somebody should have a chopper he can send over here. I must get to New York without delay.”

Reinhart might have acted on the request, even braving Gino's again, for the thrilling extravagance of it, the whirlybird clattering down on the blacktop like a deus ex machina to carry off his friend to a financial Olympus, while he, the faithful retainer, stood earthbound in a storm of flying candy wrappers and supermarket checkout slips.

Instead, a silver-gray limousine, with deep maroon fenders, chose that moment to glide through the vulgarity and stop silently before them.

“Good God,” Reinhart blurted. His snobbish anticipation had been tuned too low, to Caddie or Continental or Imperial. “Is that a Rolls?”