Shatterday Read online

  Obviously the two empty chairs were for Leslie and me.

  We moved toward the chairs and started to sit down, but the imp stopped us, saying, “Mrs. Crowstairs, would you take the third seat please; Mr. Bedloe, Kerch wanted you to sit in the second seat.” We rearranged ourselves. It made good sense:, I separated Leslie and SylviaTheCunt, who looked on each other with the enthusiasm one might evince at the prospect of root canal surgery.

  The imp waited till we were settled, then he said, “My name is Kenneth L. Gross; I was the attorney for Kercher Oliver James Crowstairs and remain legal counsel for both his estate and The Kerch Corporation in which Mr. Crowstairs was the principal party of record.”

  He showed us the document we had all come to hear.

  “This document is Mr. Crowstairs’s last will and testament, as you might have supposed. However, it will not be read here today.”

  Why had I suspected Jimmy wasn’t finished with us yet?

  He waited a moment for the effect, then went on. “Mr. Crowstairs, as you all know, was a rather remarkable man, with a flair for the original. One day, several years ago, we were discussing the preparation of this document, and I mentioned, almost as a joke, that he ought to videotape the reading of his will. Kerch… Mr. Crowstairs immediately fastened on the idea and instructed me to look into the legal ramifications of such a videotaping.

  “At first there were questions of validity, but Mr. Crowstairs financed the appropriate research, and in a decision handed down just eight months ago by the Supreme Court of the State of California, such a procedure was adjudged permissible, contingent on a written document being prepared as it has been historically.

  “Many of the smaller grants in this document will be handed directly through my office, but the principal beneficiaries are gathered here, per Mr. Crowstairs’s instructions; and you will now hear your bequests directly from the deceased. This extended element of the basic instrument was videotaped four months ago… before any of us had any idea… we never thought…”

  He faltered to silence. I liked him a lot. He bad cared about Jimmy.

  Then he went behind us and turned on the television set from the projection module, cut in the Betamax, light appeared on the enormous screen, color-bands of leader ran through, and suddenly we were looking at this room, with Jimmy, the attorney, Missy, a tall, thin black woman I didn’t recognize, and Bran Winslow, sitting at Jimmy’s desk. It was obvious that Missy, the black woman and Bran Winslow were the witnesses to the execution of the will, and I now understood how two people as close to Jimmy as Missy and Bran had been, who had been there only a few months before when this document had been merely an act of preparing for the long, far inevitable future, had chosen not to attend the burial service.

  They all sat up there, larger than life, on the screen, and I thought with the faintest flutter of trepidation, What a field day the archivists will have with this little chunk of literary gossip.

  Roll ‘em, C. B. It’s magic time, I thought. Break a leg, Jimmy.

  He once took me along with him on what he called a “dangerous mission of research.”

  Because of the confessional nature of much of what he wrote—Jimmy had believed Hemingway when Poppa said, “a writer should never write what he doesn’t know”—Kerch was forever putting himself in crazy situations where raw material for books had to be obtained first-hand, usually at risk of one’s life or sanity; or at very least at risk of one’s complexion.

  He had scaled mountains, raced sports cars, worked in a steel foundry, traveled cross-county on a Vincent Black Shadow with Hell’s Angels, marched with Chavez in the Coachella Valley, spent time in Southern jails for civil rights activities, chummed it up with a Mafia capo, managed to con a trio of radical feminist lesbians into a four-way sexual liaison, covered a South American revolution, hired himself out to a firm specializing in industrial espionage, and God knows what all else.

  He had no secrets when he wrote. He talked about his feelings when his mother had lingered in her endless midnight coma and he signed the order to kick out the plug on her life-support system; he revealed the most intimate secrets of his love life, with Leslie and others; he told stories on himself that men with more humility and a greater sense of shame would have buried in the vaults of their family secrets. Probably because of that open conversation that went on between Jimmy and his millions of readers, his popularity grew and grew. It was possible to trust a man who told everything, a man who could not be morally or literarily blackmailed. It made it seem reasonable that he would go to the burning core of whatever he wrote, because he was not afraid of sunlight striking the tomb of the vampire.

  And once he took me with him.

  I was living in Chicago at the time, doing editorial work on a men’s magazine. He called and asked if I was free that night, and if I was free would I like to accompany him on a “dangerous mission of research.”

  Evenings spent in Jimmy’s company were many things, but they were seldom dull or uneventful. I said I was stoked for an adventure.

  He picked me up in a Hertz rental at the office, and all he would say was that we were going deep into the South Side of the city, the section commonly known as Back of the Yards. Oh yes, he said one more thing: he was going to see a woman who had given him a case of the crabs.

  I think I responded with the remark, “Frankly, I’m underwhelmed.”

  But when we got there—there being a rundown tenement in a scuzzy section—I found an apartment half-filled with card-carrying criminals. They had the appearance of righteous gypsies, some kind of hyperthyroid Romany rejects. Eleven of them, looking like road company understudies for “The Wolf Man,” starring Madame Maria Ouspenskaya.

  Four flights up, in what would have been called a railroad flat, had we been in New York and not Chicago, they sat around the kitchen staring at Jimmy and me with dark, hooded eyes. I felt like a cobra at a mongoose rally.

  An extremely attractive young woman had opened the apartment door after Jimmy had knocked in a special cadence: two shorts close together, pause, then three more shorts.

  “’Open, Sesame’ isn’t required, eh? How convenient,” I said. He gave me one of his looks.

  And the door was opened by this extremely attractive young woman, who threw her arms around him and kissed him full on the mouth. I stared beyond them, into the kitchen, and was greeted by the massed nastiness contained in ten pairs of dark, hooded eyes.

  He held her away from him and murmured something too quietly for the gypsies to hear. What he said, Jimmy always the romantic, was: “What’re you pushing this time… cancer?”

  She grinned and gave him a playful punch in the stomach—playful enough to straighten him out with a whooze of pain. Then she led him into the apartment. I followed, not happily.

  Let me cut through all the subsequent hours of weird happenings. The background was this:

  Jimmy had been out on the lecture circuit the year before. In Kansas City the usual gaggle of esurient sycophants who cannot differentiate between the Artist and the Art rushed the podium for autographs and cheap thrills such as the pressing of flesh. In the crowd had been an extremely attractive young woman who, when her turn came to thrust a book and a pen under Jimmy’s nose, had thrust neither. She had moved in quickly and thrust herself. Reaching for him, she had put her mouth to his ear and whispered, “Why don’t we go back up to your hotel room and see if you can make me groan.”

  Needless to say…

  About a week later, Jimmy back home, a phone call on his private line. It was the extremely attractive young woman whom Jimmy had made groan. Her name, she told him, was not Mia, as she had told him. She was not, strictly speaking, a bank teller, as she had told him. She was, in fact, a member of a rather large family that specialized in robbing banks. When they were between jobs, she worked as a bank teller. “Who better?” Jimmy had replied to that one. She was on the dodge, spent most of her time underground with different aliases and different pseudo-
lives, and she had had a wonderful time with Jimmy whose books, during those long hours underground, had brought her endless pleasure.

  When Jimmy inquired why she was revealing all this to him, she shamefacedly admitted—though he couldn’t see her face—that she had probably given him a cataclysmic dose of the crabs.

  Without even bothering to check, Jimmy perceived that he had, at last, an understanding of why he had been scratching furiously for the preceding week. As it was his first exposure to Phthirus pubis, he dropped instantly into panic. “I would rather, “ he said later, “have ten thousand years of tertiary syphilis than ten seconds of the crabs.” He had an urgent Candygram from his autonomic nervous system, directing him in the most stridently hysterical tones, to rush off and set fire to his crotch.

  She had gone on—unaware that Jimmy was no longer within ratiocination range—to say she hadn’t known about it herself, that she was sorry as hell, and that she thought it was a crummy thing to do to someone who had given her so many hours of pleasure, both in print and in bed. And that, she told him, was why she was calling him to tell him… and spilling the beans about herself. (Which wasn’t that big a deal, apparently, because she wasn’t in Kansas City any more; and he couldn’t very well find her, or the family, if the FBI, the Federal Reserve System, the Organized Crime Task force, Brink’s and the Pinkertons couldn’t find them.)

  Ever the polite chap, Jimmy had thanked her decently for taking the time to call on such a piddling matter when she obviously had bigger problems to worry about. Then he hung up the phone, hyperventilated, and sent Missy to the pharmacy to buy copious quantities of A-200 pyrinate Liquid, Cuprex, Kwell cream and Kwelll otion—and a thermite bomb just to be prepared in the event a scorched-earth policy proved necessary.

  Now a year later, the Mia-manque had summoned Jimmy from California to Chicago to act as intermediary in the family’s surrender to the Laws (as she called them, reminiscent of the colorful patois of Bonnie & Clyde).

  And this once he had taken me with him.

  Pseudo-Mia took him by the hand and started to lead him down the hallway toward the rear of the apartment. “Hey!” I said. The sound made by a ferret caught in a clampjaw trap.

  Jimmy turned, still being led by the hand, walked backward and said, “Make yourself at home. Strike up new acquaintances. Establish meaningful relationships. I’ll be back.”

  And Not-Mia opened a door to what I presumed was a bedroom off the hall—thereby illuminating her family’s liberal, one might even say cavalier, attitude toward her sexual egalitarianism—and she disappeared inside; followed by Jimmy’s disappearing hand, arm, body, and face, leaving behind only the smile of the Cheshire Cat.

  I turned to stare at ten pairs of dark, hooded eyes that were staring at me.

  A man in his thirties got up, stood aside, and indicated the empty chair at the kitchen table. I sat down, not happily.

  At almost the instant I realized there was a wonderful, dark brown smell of something baking in the apartment, the old woman—an old old woman, shapeless and infinitely corrugated with wrinkles—sitting directly across from me reached behind her, wearing a potholder mitt, opened the door of the oven, pulled out a metal bread pan, and slapped it down on the table between us.

  “Langos,” she said. She pronounced it lahng-osh.

  It smelled sensational. Some kind of deep-fried bread dough she’d apparently been keeping warm in the oven. I looked at it. The guy who had given me his seat took a bowl full of garlic cloves off the sink and put it down in front of me.

  “Bread,” he said. “Rub it with the garlic.”

  I reached in, took a piece of langos, burned my fingertips, squeaked, provoked ten smiles, added an eleventh, my own, and rubbed the hot surface with a clove of garlic. It tasted sensational.

  Then the old, old woman began rattling off at me. She spoke uninterruptedly for about a minute. In Hungarian. I smiled. I nodded. She stopped and looked at me, waiting for a response. I thought of Arctic tundra.

  A man in his fifties, sitting to my left, said, “She asks if you know if Laurie will marry Vic Lamont and if Cookie will go crazy and will Simon Jessup kill Orin Hillyer?”

  I stopped chewing. I smiled. I nodded. I looked from one to another of them, hoping someone would take pity on a man lost in the desert.

  The old, old woman, hearing what the man in his fifties had said, added a few more words. I looked at the interpreter. He spoke resignedly: “ And will Adam Drake fall in love with Nicole?”

  I hoped, with profound desperation, that Mia was neither greedy nor afflicted with the djam karet attendant on ownership of a hooded clitoris.

  “I’m sorry,” I said slowly, “but I don’t know what she’s talking about.” I smiled. I nodded.

  There was an appreciable drop in temperature around the table. The man in his fifties said something short to the old, old woman. She snorted that special snort translatable in any language as, “Who asked for you, who sent for you; who sent for you, who asked for you?”

  And so, every instant anguish, I sat there for the better part of an hour. In Indonesia they have. a name for it: djam karet… the hour that stretches.

  Eventually, open covenants having apparently been openly entered into, Other-Than-Mia and Jimmy emerged from the bedroom. It looked like a draw.

  I got up at a signal from Jimmy, who drew me aside. I started to whisper my. consternation, but he pressed my bicep for silence. Maybe-Mia took my seat, and began speaking in a low, intense voice. In Hungarian. Or Urdu. Or tongues, maybe. What do I know about glossolalia?

  She was about fifteen seconds into the recitation when they all started replying. Eleven gypsies, all going at it like the Russians were invading Evanston. A hailstorm of babble.

  Jimmy leaned in and said, “You know the FBI’s list of Ten Most Wanted?”

  I nodded. Not happily.

  “They just made it to number one.”

  “Terrific. I’ll meet you in the car; say my goodbye& for me.”

  “Shut up and listen.

  “It’s a hype. It’s a publicity dodge. The Feds never put anyone on that list till a week or two before they’re going to make an arrest. That way, they spread it around about all these dangerous felons at large, and a week or so later the Bureau makes a pinch, making it look as if they’re right on top of things. People they can’t find never even get on the list.”

  “You’re telling me Jimmy Stewart’s going to break in here any minute with a Thompson submachine gun, is that it?”

  “I’m telling you they want to give themselves up; but they’re afraid they’ll get wiped out if they just wait for the Feds to find them.”

  “Why don’t they run? God knows they’re in practice.”

  “Shut up and listen.

  “They want me to be the go-between. To get the press and some responsible local officials in here before they pull the plug.”

  “Listen, Jimmy… they pull the plug and you’re liable to lose the baby with the bathwater. I’m referring to me, baby, in case you had any doubts…”

  “Take it easy. I did a docudrama about a Chicago psychiatrist for CBS last year…”

  I hadn’t heard the word docudrama before. I was looking at him with confusion. He understood my problem and said, “Fictionalized documentary. Semi-real. Touches truth in at least ten places. Anyhow…”

  The babble was growing louder. The old, old woman was now silent, watching and listening. The thirty-year-old guy and the fifty-year-old guy were obviously on opposite sides of the question—whatever the question was—and I could see the crowd was about evenly divided. The older guy was with Mia, whatever she was proposing, and I had the certain feeling that if the thirty-year-old guy’s point of view prevailed, that this baby might go down the drain before Jimmy Stewart made one of his rare personal appearances.

  “Are you listening to me?” Kerch demanded, squeezing my arm.

  “No,” I whispered, “I’m listening to them. Somehow I get
the feeling what they’re saying has more to do with my living to a dignified old age.”

  “Just shut up and listen, for Christ’s sake!

  “Marvin Ziporyn is his name… the psychiatrist. He’s the top shrink for the state. Works with the Cook County authorities. Concert violinist, big social mover, wrote a couple of books; he’s got access to Kup and the Mayor and everybody else.”

  I was staring openly now. Hell, anybody could get to the Mayor; but access to Irv Kupcinet, the columnist; well, that was the Big Time.

  “So?”

  “So I call Marvin, tell him what I’m into, get him to contact Kup, who’ll love it a lot. They pull in a few of the local squires and top cossacks… and Mia and the crowd remand themselves into proper custody.”

  “Before Jimmy Stewart breaks in…”

  “Right, right.”

  “I’ll meet you at the car. Thank the old lady for the bread.” I started toward the door. The thirty-year-old guy erupted from his seat and if there was anything else in that lousy kitchen but the gigantic. 45 in his hairy paw, I didn’t see it. There is a quality about blue-steel gunmetal that gathers all light in a room; like a black diamond.

  He was pointing it at me.

  I grinned stupidly, placed both palms against the air and tittered like the village idiot. He seemed somewhat mollified and the barrel of the automatic lowered to the vicinity of my crotch. For a moment there it had been like staring into the mouth of the Holland Tunnel, only bigger.