Ten Little New Yorkers Read online

  “The cat did find the puppethead,” I said thoughtfully. “Maybe there is something to the Curse of the Missing Puppethead.”

  “I can’t believe a great scientific mind like yours is telling me this shit. Sherlock, get a grip on yourself! Fuck the puppethead! You found the hit-and-run killer of Big Jim Cravotta’s kid! You saved Chinga’s life! Aren’t you proud of that?”

  “I don’t know. He doesn’t call. He doesn’t write.”

  Somewhere in the course of this inquisition Ratso managed to order about seven dishes for the two of us. I had hoped that once the food arrived it might occupy his attention for a while, but sadly, that was not to be the case. He just continued to talk and eat at the same time, and it was not a pleasant spectacle to observe.

  “What about The Prisoner of Vandam Street, Kinkstah? Yeah. The Prisoner of Vandam Street. Remember? You were right and everybody else was wrong! Remember that one, Kinkstah?”

  “Can’t say I do, Watson, it’s happened so often. That’s how I know I’m right. When everybody else is wrong.”

  “So that’s your secret.”

  “You see, Watson, this is why I never reveal my methods. Once I explain it, some asshole, present company excluded, of course, always thinks it’s easy. It’s really not that important whether you’re right or wrong, it’s what you do with it. Willie Nelson, whom I call ‘the Hillbilly Dalai Lama,’ always says: ‘Keep doin’ it wrong ’til you like it that way.’ ”

  “But can’t you at least enjoy all your successes, Sherlock?”

  “Of course not. A mender of destinies never enjoys his successes, Watson. Ask Rambam.”

  “You ask Rambam.”

  “I have. He hates it when he puts somebody in prison. The same with Kent Perkins. I once asked him where he was going and he said, ‘To Arizona, to ruin a man’s life.’ People I’ve helped put away hate me. They’d kill me if they could. Their families hate me. Their children hate me. The cops hate me. Our waiter hates me. Everybody hates me, Watson.”

  “That’s because you’re a sick fuck, Sherlock.”

  “Ah, Watson, how very intuitive you are! Indeed I am a sick fuck, as you say. I am sick of what you call my successes. Yet only one thing can make me well.”

  “What’s that, Sherlock?”

  “Justice, Watson. Justice.”

  “Have you tried the roast pork over scrambled eggs,” he said.

  Three

  I’m not sure Ratso ever understood the weight that rests upon the spiritual shoulders of the mender. I also don’t know how well Theo really understood Vincent. He loved him, of course. He was the only one who ever bought a fucking painting. The other artists loved the sunshine, it was said, but Van Gogh loved the sun. When you die, he said, you just take a train to a star. It’s hard to understand a guy like that. You can’t blame Theo or Ratso or Paul or John or Luke. It’s sometimes enough just to know when you’re in the presence of greatness. The great man himself may be a total clueless asshole, but maybe that’s part of what makes him great. He doesn’t just sing the song—his magic is that he gives it to you.

  What I’m saying is that Ratso, in a fine Dr. Watson–like manner, skipped blithely through our little adventures, never fully realizing that each one took away another little piece of Janis’s heart. Like the other Village Irregulars, he felt the excitement of the hunt. Like the others, he felt the joy of being a part of something bigger than himself. But in the end, he didn’t feel the weight, and he didn’t feel the hate. None of them did. Except Rambam, of course. He was a licensed private investigator. He understood what it was like to stand in a dark alley somewhere, trying not to play God. But there weren’t any support groups for this kind of thing. You just did it as long as you could. Then you packed your busted valise and took a train to a star.

  It was a particularly cold winter in New York. It always seemed to be particularly cold in New York. Maybe it was because I was usually in Texas in the summertime. Like a bird of passage, I would drift down there to thaw out, dry out, and generally hobnob with all the friendly ghosts of Echo Hill. Echo Hill invariably made me feel rich in the coin of the spirit. Then I’d head back up to New York and freeze my assets. To paraphrase Dr. Jim Bone, I found myself living between the legend and the lamppost. I didn’t have a home. I didn’t want a home. For way too long now I’d been homesick for heaven.

  I sat down at my old battle-scarred desk, hoisted the cap from Holmes’s cranium, and reached deep inside his brains for a Cuban cigar. I took my trusty butt-cutter out of my pocket and lopped off another butt. Some measure their lives by when their passports expire. Some measure their lives in coffee spoons. Some measure their lives in butts, Cuban cigar or otherwise. I belonged to the latter butt-measuring category. I fired up the cigar just about the time the phones started ringing.

  As you might or might not be aware, I have two red telephones at opposite ends of my desk, and they’ve been there so long I’m not even sure anymore why they’re there. I’m not even sure anymore why I’m here. Maybe the red telephones represent the whorehouse of the human spirit. Maybe my presence indicates the return of the whore. Maybe you know the answers better than I do. Maybe you should be writing the fucking book and I should be over there in the rocking chair by the fire saying, “What’s this asshole nattering on about?”

  I picked up the blower on the left. I puffed pontifically on the cigar for a brief moment.

  “Start talkin’,” I said.

  “Dis is Big Jim Cravotta and I’m comin’ over dere ta rip your heart out!”

  “You’re too late.”

  “Jesus Christ,” said Rambam. “Are you still feeling fucking sorry for yourself?”

  “Who better to feel sorry for?”

  “How about me? My Jewish dominatrix turned out to be a born-again lesbian working for the ATF.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  “Not really. I’d rather be the spanker than the spankee.”

  I leaned back in the chair and puffed patriotically on the cigar as a small parade passed before my eyes of all the crazy shit Rambam and I had done together on both sides of the law. I saw the American flag going by. Then the flag of Israel. Then the Texas flag.

  “I said, ‘I’d rather be the spanker than the spankee,’ ” said Rambam.

  “Is there an echo in this room?”

  “Is there an echo in this room?”

  I puffed the cigar for a long moment and watched the smoke of life drift upward to the man-made sky.

  “What the hell’s wrong with you, Kinky? I know you very fucking well, but I’ve never known you to be this blue this long. I’ve seen your smiles, your frowns, your ups, your downs. I can’t really say that I’ve ever grown accustomed to your face. But I’ve got to tell you, you do sound pretty fucked up.”

  “It’s been a rough year.”

  “Everybody’s had a rough year. Why is this little private investigator different from all other little private investigators?”

  “I miss my cat.”

  “I miss my Jewish dominatrix. Hold on. I’m going to stitch that one onto my holster. That is, after I blow a few holes in the ceiling to shut up these neighbors.”

  “Try living under a lesbian dance class.”

  “You call that living?”

  “Not really.”

  Things had been so quiet lately that even Winnie Katz’s little Isle of Lesbos had not seemed to be making its presence known to man. The loft felt emptier without the cat and the lesbians. The whole city felt hollow.

  “Look, man,” said Rambam, “if things are really that bad, maybe you ought to get out of here for a while. You could go to Hawaii and hang out with your friend Hoover.”

  “Hoover’s busy writing features for the Honolulu Advertiser about saving the descendants of Princess Kaiulani’s flock of peacocks from being euthanized by some condominium committee.”

  “Why don’t they just euthanize the condominium committee?”

  “Hoover suggested that,
I believe. When Princess Kaiulani died at the age of twenty-three, the royal peacocks all cried, as did the people of Hawaii. Now they have Starbucks and the Hula Bowl and the fucking condominium committee. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, now is the time for their tears.”

  “Why don’t you go back to Texas for a while? Help Cousin Nancy and Tony with the Rescue Ranch. Working at Utopia might be just what the doctor ordered.”

  “I can’t work at Utopia. I’m the Gandhi-like figure. Gandhi-like figures never work.”

  “Tell me about it. I’m watching about seventeen of them right now in the street outside my window. They’re all watching one guy with a shovel. Of course they don’t call themselves Gandhi-like figures. They call themselves City of New York maintenance workers.”

  I could see the whole picture in my mind. Rambam standing at his window watching the seventeen maintenance workers standing around on the street watching the one guy working with the shovel. Most of us, I reflected, are just like them. We are merely observers of life. We leave the real digging and the heavy lifting to others. Why get your hands dirty if you don’t have to?

  “You could go to Vegas,” Rambam was saying. “You always liked Vegas.”

  “What are you? A fucking travel agent?”

  “Go visit your magician friends, Penn and Teller. Maybe they can make your grumpy attitude disappear.”

  This, I felt, was truly the pot calling the kettle black. Rambam had enormous grumpy potential himself. It was just that whenever one of us became deeply depressed, the other one would become positively chirpy. This, of course, proved all the more irritating to the one who was grumpy.

  “What was that your dad always used to say about being depressed?”

  “Oh, yeah. ‘Cheer up. It only gets worse.’ ”

  “He was right, by the way. But don’t let it bother you. If you refuse to leave the city, your only alternative is to stay busy.”

  “I know that, Dr. Freud. The problem is, like the great Sherlock Holmes, I’m currently between cases.”

  “You are aware,” said Rambam, “that Sherlock Holmes was a fictional character.”

  “Scientists aren’t sure of this.”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  “They’re not sure of him either.”

  I liked people who may or may not have existed. People like King Arthur and Robin Hood and myself. Maybe the great detective of Baker Street wasn’t real. Maybe he was merely the thinking man’s Jesus Christ. Maybe if Jesus were around today he’d be doing what I was doing. Maybe he’d be standing around Times Square listening to people telling him to get a job. Maybe he’d get a job. Maybe his job would be standing around outside Rambam’s window with all his disciples watching a guy with a shovel. Maybe not.

  “Kinky? Are you there?”

  “Part of me’s here. Part of me’s wandering around some alley in the dark.”

  “That’s okay, I guess. Just as long as nobody ties tin cans to your tail.”

  Four

  According to my friend, Dylan Ferrero, guys our age are in the seventh-inning stretch. I’m well aware that this rather arcane sports analogy may be lost upon Iranian mullahs and non–baseball fans, so let’s just say that most of the game is over. Perhaps everybody does know what the seventh-inning stretch implies, it’s just that most of the world is too young or too busy to take the time to care about what it means to baseball or to life. A lot of important and wonderful things can happen, of course, after the seventh-inning stretch, but statistically speaking, it’s pretty fucking late in the game.

  More evidence of just how late it was could probably be elucidated from knowing that Dylan Ferrero pulled a muscle in his back recently while wiping his ass. This may seem a moderately repellent tidbit of information, but it’s true. None of us are getting any younger and none of us are getting any smarter. About all we can hope for is wise or lucky. We’re old enough to realize and young enough to know that when the Lord closes the door, he opens a little window.

  Still, I missed the cat. And I missed the trials and the tribulations and the joys and the sorrows of Yesterday Street. And I even missed Winnie Katz and the lesbian dance class. As irritating and unpleasant as the peripatetic pounding on the ceiling had always seemed in the past, now that the whole place was silent I somehow missed it. What the hell, I thought, even lesbians need to take a vacation sometimes. Maybe the Kinkster needed one as well. Except it’s kind of hard to go on a vacation when your whole life’s already a vacation. Everybody goes on a vacation from something. You can’t really go on a vacation from nothing, can you? But this was the very thing that Ratso could never understand. A mender of destinies cannot conjure up cases and adventures and damsels in distress and investigations of sordid natures out of the whole cloth of life as we know it. Even a mender of destinies must await his destiny. And mine, in this high-tech, jet-set world, appeared to be arriving by Pony Express.

  Anyway, it wasn’t my job to fulfill Ratso’s fantasies about being Dr. Watson with the game afoot. If he wanted a game he could turn on his television set. All the Irregulars in the world couldn’t be of any use if you didn’t have a case. And I didn’t have a case. I didn’t even have a cat. All I really had was a great urge to kill myself by jumping through a ceiling fan. But I didn’t have a ceiling fan.

  So here I was in the seventh-inning stretch, no cat, no case, no ceiling fan, trying to decide where to go for my fucking vacation. What the hell, I thought. Maybe I’d just take Jim Morrison’s advice: “The West is the best.” He died, of course, in a bathtub in Paris. He had a dog named Sage, however. Sage grows in the West. In New York nothing grows, unless you want to count a rotating crop of tedious. So in the West you had Texas, Vegas, and Hawaii. They were all magical places but they were so far away. Yet as the gypsy said, “From where?”

  And as I kicked around ideas for my supposed vacation, an evil festered in the city, an evil the likes of which I had not encountered in many years. It pulsed through the heart and coursed through the veins of the gray familiar architecture that was New York. It was not a case yet. It was not an investigation yet. It was not murder. Yet.

  It was not my nature to imbue myself with a prescience I did not possess. For no man, no matter how intuitive or how wise, could see the future. All I can tell you is that I felt this nameless, faceless evil in my bones. As it formed in the mind of another, I could feel it quiver in my soul.

  Five

  Things do seem a little dead tonight,” said McGovern from the barstool on my left at the Monkey’s Paw.

  “Dead?” I said. “This town was dead before the virus hit.”

  “New York’s a bit like Vegas. It never really sleeps. It just nods out every once in a while.”

  “Is that why we’re the only two people in the bar?”

  McGovern looked around at the drab, seedy ambience of the Monkey’s Paw. The sheer emptiness of the place was stunning.

  “Do you think we should take this personally?” he asked.

  “Hell no,” I said. “I never take anything personally.”

  “That’s not what I hear,” said McGovern. “I hear you’re miserable and you’re blaming everybody but yourself.”

  “Who told you that?” I said. “Mother Teresa?”

  “She’s dead.”

  “You’re kidding. Maybe she died of ennui on a visit to New York.”

  “I don’t know why you’re whining about New York, Kink. This old town has been fucking great to you. You came up here from Texas like some cowboy off a trail ride and the whole place has embraced you like one of its own. In fact, it’s done a hell of a lot more than that. This city’s made you a fucking hero.”

  I signaled Tommy the bartender for another pint of Guinness. I watched McGovern drain his tall Vodka McGovern and motion to Tommy as well. I didn’t feel like a fucking hero. I felt, to paraphrase Adlai Stevenson when he lost to Eisenhower, like a little kid who’d stubbed his toe in the dark. I felt too big to cry, but it hurt too much to laugh.
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  “I mean it, Kink,” McGovern was yammering on. “You’ve gotten more ink recently than a goddamn giant squid. There was a time when I was the Lone Ranger, the only guy in town who was bothering to chronicle your successes. Now the media’s all over you. Every time you solve a case they just about have a ticker-tape parade for you. You’re the Sherlock Holmes of Manhattan! Millions of people read about your exploits! They love to see you catch the criminals that elude the cops. And don’t forget, Sherlock Holmes was only a fictional character. You’re a real human being.”

  It was a long speech for McGovern, and, indeed, it was an impassioned one. It was so impassioned in fact that his fresh Vodka McGovern stood virtually untouched on the mahogany, an occurrence that I’d only seen happen once before many years ago when McGovern’s attention had been entirely focused upon the sirenlike embrace of a certain auburn-haired woman. The exhortation itself carried echoes of Ratso’s pep talk to me earlier in the day. Both were extremely well intentioned, if somewhat misguided. Both had the unfortunate effect of falling upon deaf ears. Both were rather poignant in their way, like the words of a child attempting to lift the spirit of an adult friend. Yet McGovern had managed to place his large Irish finger on what I’m sorry to say was precisely the problem. I was not a fictional character. I was a human being. And I was getting tired of this shit.

  “All of these exploits, as you call them,” I said, as McGovern took a deep, deserved drink of his Vodka McGovern, “might finally make a thick scrapbook some day, if anybody in this modern age still keeps scrapbooks. That’s all our adventures have been good for, McGovern. A fucking scrapbook. And you know what happens to all scrapbooks sooner or later? Cats piss on them. Jesus, I miss the cat.”

  McGovern took another drink from his tall glass. He was a tall man, I thought darkly, let him drink from a tall glass. He could drink from the fucking Holy Grail for all I cared. If he wanted to end his days drinking at the Monkey’s Paw, so be it. As for me, it was half-past time for my body and soul to find a healthier environment. Some place like Texas where people still believed in Santa Claus and many of them looked like Santa Claus and crime was not so subtle and fiendishly convoluted and mentally taxing upon the investigator. On the other hand, crime down there was possibly even more violent. Like that lady in Houston who gave her kids a Texas bath.