“The yoga wallah is of course some Indian policeman.”
“Certainly,” said Boris. “Villanova’s operations are worldwide. It would be no exaggeration to lay at his door most of the criminal phenomena of the past two decades: the efflorescence of the youth cult, obviously; the corruption of most modern languages; the pseudo revolution, actually a retrogressive movement, in sex; the journalistic enshrining of mediocrity, the publicizing of the banal, the investigation of the inconsequential—while he himself has realized the Renaissance ideal, the prince-poet-satyr, autocrat, gastronome, dandy, and I should be tempted to add ‘sage,’ were it not for Baudelaire’s formidable statement that ‘the Sage fears laughter, as he fears worldly spectacles and concupiscence.’ Whereas these are precisely Villanova’s delights.”
Boris flung open his door. “Were it up to me,” he concluded, “I should sit here all day toying with abstractions, but meanwhile Teddy lurks monstrously in apartment five-K. It has taken years to run him to ground. The kill is at hand.”
Something clattered as he lowered himself to the street. For the first time I saw his left side and the saber scabbarded there.
“I trust,” I cried, “you have more modern weapons.”
“Mon Dieu!” gasped Boris, caressing his trunk like an autoerotic. “I left my thirty-eight in my locker. It made an unsightly lump in the sleek fit of this tunic. I felt it would give the show away—” He looked as if he might sob.
“Just a moment,” said I, fetching forth my little Browning. “This is unloaded, but ‘twill serve, perhaps, unless Teddy calls your hand.”
“Which he will,” wailed Boris. “By all reports, he is vicious as fer-de-lance.”
“The Luger, though a cap pistol, is a credible imitation of the real thing, fooling me, an old adept at weaponry.”
He leaned in, appealing across the seat. “I believe you have your own score to settle with Teddy—or should have, considering the way you’ve been used.”
“Or rather with the various policemen,” said I. “I still don’t understand the part I’ve played, but I assure you, I’m nursing a massive grudge against someone.”
“If five K is your own apartment, and if all other measures fail, you might bring trespassing charges against him.” Boris was begging now.
“You have arranged some sort of assignation with the fiend?”
“To furnish him six girls below the age of ten,” Boris explained, “at precisely six minutes before ten o’clock. He has the pervert’s taste for symmetry. That may be a weakness. But, alas, I cannot arrest him until he does something sufficiently indecent to violate an ordinance, and before he does that, he may well produce a weapon of his own, and I am underarmed. Also, this is entrapment, and no court would sustain an arrest so made. Wren, unless you act, this beast will go free.”
I had momentarily forgotten about the actual girls, and Boris, occupied with his plans for me, was also oblivious to them. I looked insolently into the rear of the bus now, in dramatic support of some cynical comment I was crafting—and saw the last of the half-dozen, or rather her strapshoe and knee sock, as she left the vehicle by the double side-door, which had been spirited open during our confused colloquy. The others were already scampering up the walk beneath the torn canopy of my building.
I had only the sergeant’s word that they were strumpets; juveniles they were certainly. I had learned that a policeman would do anything to serve his purposes. That these little flowers, if already darkened at the corollae, would be further polluted by a devil, was insupportable to my moral mystique. Also, the swine was trespassing in my sanctum, had perhaps found my play and wiped his porcine posteriors on it, for its fine tolerances between necessity and virtue would be hateful to his Mephistophelean rationale.
I groped my passage between the ranked seats and leaped through the exit to the sidewalk. Boris presumably followed me, whether yet with drawn saber I did not turn to know. Pelting feet propelled me into the lobby. Five girls were already enclosed in an ascending elevator, a little blinking mobile light told me. But the redhead lingered, with the doorman under the muzzle of her Luger, which, judging from his blench, he believed potent.
She seemed to be relieving him of his money: the rascal had more greenbacks than I had seen in an eon. He had been no friend to me, and I saw no need to rescue him from what was a nonlethal menace.
Therefore, cool to his predicament, I passed him in hot pursuit of the schoolgirls. Atypically, the other lift was free, with yawning door. I pressed the button for 5. Before the sliding portal had horizontally guillotined my view of the lobby, a saber came on board, and then Boris.
“Careful with that blade!” I warned.
“It’s a stage property, blunt as a fence paling,” he said, but lowered it, resting point on boot toe, from which it rose like a large leisurely parenthesis to the pommel on which his knuckles were tensed to white bone.
I produced my empty Browning .25. “Perhaps surprise will compensate for lack of firepower,” I said, brandishing the minuscule weapon, and triggering it for emphasis, luckily towards the ceiling panel, for it discharged, making in that compartment a thunder to which it could not have aspired outdoors.
“O most unruly man!” cried Boris, wheezing at the acrid odor of cordite.
I admit I was myself shaken. “Must have been a cartridge in the chamber…Well, the die is now cast. We are definitely sans shells. There’s an advantage in that: no one will be shot accidentally.”
A tiny hole had been pierced through the ceiling of the car. We reached the fifth floor without further event, deboarded with dispatch, rounded the corners to my remote door, and though I felt justified in using my trio of keys, I deferred to Boris’ wish, in the interests of his imposture, to ring discreetly.
When at length the door opened sufficiently to reveal the most depraved countenance I have ever seen on humankind, I fisted my automatic into the position to deliver to those obscene features a savage pistol-whipping.
14
Luckily my hand did not descend, for it was Peggy Tumulty, not Teddy Villanova, who flinched, retreated, and wailed: “I can explain this, Russ!”
Her condition was not such as to cause a revision in my statement on manifest depravity. For one, her normally swart hair, usually lank, had turned to red-gold ringlets; then her lips were gore-red as the wound of cliched metaphor and her eyes kohled like a houri’s.
Even so, her face was soon obscured by the meretriciousness of her figure, or rather the raiment in which it was scarcely restrained: she wore a net brassiere, the mammaries clutched in black satin hands, and a companion nether garment the breadth of which at its widest expanse did not exceed half that of Alice Ellish’s slingshot at its narrowest. Conjoin these with a garter belt designed from the mingled fantasies of an Obersturmbannfuhrer-SS (portions were of leather and what seemed corroded bronze) and an underwear fetishist of the Edwardian era (tatwork, satin rosebuds); black-lace operetta hose and spike-heeled, stiletto-toed shoes; and you had an ensemble the wearer of which deserved the pistol-whipping planned for Teddy Villanova, whose pedophilia now might seem a harmless caprice.
However, I eventually lowered the gun. “A likely story, Peggy,” I said, “but I pray you can sustain it. Meanwhile” —I pushed past her—“where is that venomous toad?”
The champagne bottle, corkless, in fact empty, stood on the kitchen counter, the little glass saucer, its late caviar remembered only by a single bird-shot pellet and a streak of green-yellow oil, nearby. The pâté’s tunnel-tin was merely a tunnel of tin, a fat-flecked void where the loaf had dwelt.
The little girls were sporting clamorously on the sofa; no adult male was visible. Before I could act on my assumption, saber and Boris arrived at my side and then cleared it, plunged into the bathroom, and, if my hearing served, slashed my shower curtains to tatters, then reappeared, sword drooping and officer shrugging in dismay.
“Teddy est disparu,” said he, and added, I thought in impertinent
coyness: “Comme Albertine.”
I considered Peggy Tumulty’s apparent transformation into a gaudy bawd, endeavoring to conceal from her, until it could be instituted, my decision to call 911 for a brace of husky Bedlam-keepers and a strait waistcoat. Obviously, this case that had so unremittingly threatened my sanity had already claimed hers. I dared not look at her too closely. She displayed even more flesh than I had supposed t she carried beneath her quotidian attire, yet in a form of more luxurious definition: the famous breasts, for example, were of a stately thrust to which the spidery black fingers of Pierre’s bra could contribute but feebly; her thighs I should call columnar rather than the firkin-fat cylinders I had foreseen; and though harness would move me more to mirth than an expense of spirit, the sateen rosettes on her garters had a loadstone attraction for my mettle.
Therefore, in speaking to her I physically addressed Boris, causing his mustache soon to nutter with his eyebrows, for, given the Cossack uniform, my demand could, by an extravagant sensibility, be taken to apply to him.
“Remove that outlandish attire!”
“I thought you said you weren’t a fag,” he noted, but shrugged and began to grope for the closing of his breeches. Dedicated vice-cop that he was, no doubt he yearned to make some kind of arrest.
“I’m not,” I frostily replied. “I’m speaking to Miss Tumulty. She’s under a strain. She’s not at all well. She’s actually a genteel young lady of a fine old family of Queens.”
He chortled coarsely. “Queans, jades, wenches!”
I found it was necessary to look at Peggy. Her right forearm guarded her bosom; the left hand, flattened with fingers aligned, was her rigid fig leaf. She was furious.
“You bums have blown it now! You jerks, you saps, you creeps! I had him, and you had to blow it!”
I identified this outburst as more evidence that she could be ultimately dealt with only by means of a radical lobotomy, poor thing, with bleak future as vegetable, taken out to air daily in the sooty ozone of Ozone Park, otherwise kept in an indoor corner with instructions to watch the nice geranium grow.
But Boris, denied his anticipated sodomy-arrest, was keen to her plaint and soon misidentified her point.
“You had Teddy Villanova?”
“Would of had him,” she wailed, “but you bums bust in and blow the whole shebang, and what’s these kids for? You look like a dirty old wino, Russ, and who’s this guy in the lodge uniform?” She was raving, but I no longer thought her mad.
“Aha,” I said, “I begin to see some light. You had an appointment—in view of your costume, a rendezvous of some sort, an entrapment of your own, with and for the notorious Teddy. Instead you swing back the door for an invasion of schoolgirls, a bogus Cossack, and your disheveled employer. Teddy, you suspect, has been scared off.” I turned accusingly to Boris. “This person, a disguised vice-squad-der, professed to have his own appointment with the arch-criminal.”
“I insist,” Boris said, “that I spoke on the telephone to a man calling himself Teddy Villanova. He had dialed the Stavrogin Academy, on whose switchboard we maintain a constant tap, he said, in search of six little girls to take to view the Statue of Liberty in this the bicentennial year. American maidens, said he, should be made aware of the source of the national mystique, which happens to be both colossal and feminine. Small wonder, he added, that male homosexuals abound: the thought of that massive copper pudendum beneath that great skirt of green patina must be terrifying to a certain type of juvenile constitution—male, that is; a female’s must find it exhilarating.”
“Aha,” I exclaimed at low volume, “for his own purposes, whatever they are, he is willing to pose as fellow traveler of the feminist movement, while—”
“He phoned this number and ordered me to put on what I’m wearing,” said Peggy. “He said he would come here at ten o’clock and flog me with a bull’s pizzle, whatever that is.”
“—while at other times he will play the brutal male tyrant,” I continued. “A protean character, a veritable prism of—”
“Ten o’clock!” cried Boris, and resorted to French either in sheer excitement or mere taste for euphony: “Montrez votre montrel”
I displayed my electric Timex. “Two minutes to the hour, unless the battery, eleven months old, is reneging on its promised year.”
“Precision is his hallmark,” said Boris. “Another trait of the pervert. We have one hundred twenty seconds—make that one-ten, after your lengthy commentary—to arrange an ambuscade.”
“A hundred, allowing for your own,” I riposted. “Where will we stow these tots?” Who, throughout the foregoing colloquy, had been occupied with a magpie congress of their own on the sofa.
“The bathroom,” shouted Boris, polishing his saber blade on his back-of-knee. “Lure them within by offering to expose yourself.”
I suppose his sense of their corruption had been gained by experience, but I still had no stomach for it, and ordered Peggy, as superannuated female child, to deal with her own breed. I drew my empty Browning, which I had put away, and posted myself beside the door.
“Hey, kids,” Peggy said ingenuously, “what say we float some rubber animals in the tub?” She took her hands from her body to gesticulate.
A little blonde chirped: “Vous avez des grands Tétons!
I didn’t want Peggy upset at this moment; she might, in her anticriminal zeal, be willing to dress as harlot to capture Teddy V., but I feared she might swoon at such talk from a little maid.
“She means the national park,” I said. “Contiguous with Yellowstone, visited last summer in the family camper. Silly Daddy was pawed by a bear.”
Perhaps Peg had a semester of French at St. Dottie’s. “Yeah, so what, you little snotnose,” said she, and proceeded to burn my ears: “You don’t have any tits at all. You all uh yuh get your little cans in the can.” She pointed and began to count cadence; the girls rose in unison and marched into the bathroom.
My admiration was arrested by the sound of the doorbell. Boris had taken pains, I saw, to be behind the door when it opened, though he had the only effective weapon. I hefted my tiny automatic, which seemed to wither in the degree to which its use was needed.
Boris turned the knob and with great energy swung the door back to conceal himself absolutely. Strain caused my gun arm to perform as though waving to a minuscule figure on a remote horizon.
In actuality I proved to be greeting almost as small a creature in the foreground. It was the red-haired schoolgirl who had stopped to rob the doorman: she had discarded the cap pistol, but clutched the roll of bills with the command of a street-corner crapshooter.
She entered in the mode of a Casbah cooch-dancer, tinkling imaginary finger-cymbals. I injected my head into the hall: the corridor was yet empty.
I pulled the door to, exposing Boris, who, not yet seeing who had entered, quailed. Identifying the girl, he displayed l’esprit d’escalier, snickersnacking the air with his blade, like the character in Marlowe, “whisked his sword about, / And with the wind thereof the king fell down.” If I tripped briefly, it was to avoid impalement.
“Dieu,” he phewed. “I might have cut her to ribbons!”
Further saucy performance by the dwarf redhead was frustrated by Peggy’s conducting her forthrightly to the bathroom. Boris and I reassumed our old positions. Tension falsely relieved returns with triple strength. When Peggy’s piercing cry came, I felt the thrill of brittle coherence known to a goblet about to be shattered.
“There! Outside!”
Over the jagged socket of the half-demolished building, onto which my principal windows gave, hovered a helicopter. The clatter of its arrival I had heard previously, I realized, as the laboring of my own organs, ventricular, intestinal.
Our faces were soon monkeyed in trio and compressed against the glass. The pilot sat alone in his pellucid plastic bubble beneath the whirling parasol that produced the pocketty-pock of a great percolator. Helmeted, and goggled like the caricature o
f an owl, he offered no discernible feature—except perhaps the cruel mouth, though that feature invariably seems sinister if it alone can be clearly seen, as may be proved on your next encounter with a child garbed as astronaut.
“Can that,” I heard myself breathe in obsequious awe, “be, at last, the legendary Teddy Villanova?”
And vice-squad Boris, sophisticated as he must have been in figures and arrangements that the naive would call mythical, struck the same note.
“Such style!” he moaned. “In a more noble time the man would have been a prince. If we ever nab him, we will thereby have taken all the color from the world.”
Peggy alone sounded the dull gong of disenchantment.
“Well, he’s not Our Lady of Fatima. He’s just a lousy crook in an egg beater, and if I could get ahold of him I’d cool his gravy all right.” She shook her fist at Teddy, who thus far rode his Pegasus inscrutably. “Damn his dirty hide.” She hurled herself off the sill. “I’m gonna look for something to throw at him.”
“One moment,” I said. “There have been enough misidentifications.” I went to my desk. My apartment, incidentally, had been put in order during my overnight absence, presumably by Peggy; all drawers had been closed, after having been seemingly refilled, for their contents were no longer on the floor; all pillows re-covered; all books reshelved, though doubtless not in my fastidious arrangement. It was not unjust that she had rewarded herself for the labor by consuming the champagne, caviar, and pate, which had anyway not been of my purchase.
The manuscript of my play, manhandled by Knox, had been reassembled and put into its nest. I could find no fresh paper in my haste; therefore I seized a sheet of dialogue and the laundry marker I use for revisions, rushed to the window, and in dumbshow told Teddy, if it was he, still hovering and surely with his clatter attracting an audience above and below us, that I should scrawl a note and display it to him.
He returned no signal, but neither did he soar away. On the reverse of my scene I hastily inscribed the following in capitals of great magnitude: