Dancing Aztecs Read online

  Meantime, Angela was trying to hurry Mel upstairs, but Mel was whispering, “Wait a minute, will you? Let’s get what we came after.”

  “Well, hurry.”

  Mel hurried. He crossed the family room, plucked the Dancing Aztec Priest from its place amid the trophies, and finally joined the jittering Angela on the stairs. Up they went, and out the back door, and around to the front of the house, where a wiry black man who’d just clambered out of a thoroughly disreputable old Buick took one look at Mel and shouted at the top of his voice, “You! You are the son bitch sold me that car! Hey, Wyyy-lieee!”

  “Oh, no,” said Mel.

  “You shut up,” Angela said to the black man. “Just shut up, that’s all.”

  And at that instant Wally Hintzlebel leaped out of nowhere, grabbed the Dancing Aztec Priest out of Mel’s astonished hand, spun away, and ran pell-mell into Angela, so that the two of them went sprawling together onto the lawn.

  “The statue!” Mel shouted, and the aggrieved black man punched him in the eye. “Ow,” said Mel, and punched him back. The house door opened, and a lot of people came running out.

  Angela and Wally sat up and stared at one another. “You!” said Angela. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Grab the statue!” Mel shouted at his wife. He was scuffling with the black man, who had grabbed him around the waist and was trying to give him a bear hug.

  Wylie Cheshire came chugging across the lawn, plucked Mel and the wiry black man apart, and said to Mel, “Who let you out, goddam it?”

  “Wylie!” yelled the black man. “That’s him, that is him!”

  “Shut up, Willy,” said Wylie. He shook Mel a little. “Who let you out, huh? Just tell me that much.”

  Mel, however, was paying insufficient attention to Wylie, since he was watching instead the byplay on the lawn between Angela and Wally. Angela and Wally were sitting facing one another, and Angela was saying, “You listened in that closet, didn’t you? You dirty bastard.”

  “I got just as much right as any of you people,” Wally said.

  “Give me that statue,” Angela snapped, and tried to grab it out of Wally’s hand. The two of them rolled on the lawn.

  Meanwhile, Willy was shouting, “Wylie, he sold me that Willys!”

  “Shut up, Willy, like I told you before! You listen to me, you! How’d you get outa that—”

  “Oh, leave me alone,” Mel said, and pushed Wylie away as though he were a flea. Wylie gaped at him in utter amazement, and Mel went over to say to Angela, “And what’s all this?”

  Angela, having kneed Wally a good one, was struggling to her feet with the statue in her possession. “Come on,” she said.

  “You better answer me, Angela,” Mel said. (In the background, Willy was now explaining to Deke Finburdy that it was indeed Mel who had long ago sold him that Willys, while Georgia Cheshire was asking Teresa for more information about the League of Women Voters, and both Faith Finburdy and Kathleen were standing around with their mouths open.) And Mel repeated, “You better answer me.”

  “Oh, don’t be stupid,” Angela said, and made as if to march away.

  Wylie Cheshire stopped her by standing in front of her and saying, “That’s my statue, lady.”

  “Oh, it is, is it? Then here” And, in total exasperation, Angela whammed him over the head with it.

  Fortunately for Wylie, it wasn’t the right one. It broke, and Wylie staggered back, and Angela gave everybody the same disgusted glare—Mel and Wylie and Wally and Willy and Deke and Kathleen and Teresa and Faith and Georgia—and marched away to the station wagon. Enough was enough.

  AT WHICH MOMENT …

  “I don’t understand this scheme,” said Pedro Ninni.

  “You never understand, Pedro,” Edwardo Brazzo said. His tie was even limper and more sweat-soaked than usual, and his small original store of patience was completely used up. “Why don’t you, Pedro,” he said, “just accept the fact that you are a dumb useless stupid creature, and do what we tell you to do without arguing all the time?”

  “No,” said Pedro.

  “No?” Edwardo stared at him. “No what?”

  “No everything,” said Pedro.

  José Caracha, with his sculptor’s patience, entered the conversation then, trying to smooth things over. “It’s a hot night, Edwardo,” he said. “Let’s not get excited.”

  “Not get excited? When all this idiot does is question and argue and complain and say no, no, no everything?”

  “He doesn’t understand, that’s all,” José said. Turning to Pedro, he said, “Let me try to explain.”

  “I am not a dumb useless stupid creature,” said Pedro.

  “Of course not,” José agreed. “Edwardo is just a little nervous, that’s all.”

  “Nervous,” echoed Edwardo. “Our lives are at stake.”

  “Easy, easy,” José told him. Turning back to Pedro, he said, “Pedro, you know that something seems to have gone wrong up in the United States, and we don’t have our money.”

  “I never believed in it, anyway,” Pedro said.

  “Be that as it may. You also know that Hector Ovella, the curator of the museum, is a member of our little group, and is just as annoyed as we are that he hasn’t been paid his money.”

  “I’m not annoyed,” Pedro said. “I never did believe we’d get any money.”

  “You see what we have to put up with,” Edwardo said.

  “Gently, gently. Pedro, the point is, Hector very unfairly blames us, we three, and he says if he doesn’t get his money by the end of the week he will turn us all in to the authorities.”

  “And they will hang us by our tongues,” Pedro said, “as I expected all along.”

  “Which is why,” José said, “we have to leave the country.”

  “Santa Rosita Rosaria isn’t out of the country,” Pedro said. “Santa Rosita Rosaria is a city in this country.”

  “That’s right,” José said. “We know that already, Pedro, we’ve lived here all our lives.”

  “So why do you want to go to Rosie?” Pedro said, giving the common slang nickname for the town of Santa Rosita Rosaria.

  “Because,” José said, while in the background Edwardo made fists and ground his teeth, “because no one will let us board a plane that is leaving the country. But they will let us board the plane to Rosie, and then we will hijack the plane and force it to take us to New York.”

  “Here comes the bad part,” Pedro said.

  “Not at all bad,” José assured him. “It simply makes sense that it doesn’t take three men to hijack an airplane. So one of us will hijack the airplane, and when the airplane reaches New York the other two will simply drift away while the hijacker gives himself up to the authorities and resquests asylum as a political refugee. Then the other two can go to the people in New York who owe us the money, and collect the money, and use some of it to hire a lawyer in New York to get the hijacker out on bail, and then all three of us will go somewhere completely different and live on the rest of the money.”

  “In New York they’ll hang me by my tongue,” Pedro said.

  “They don’t do things like that in New York,” José promised him. “They’re very civilized, very nice in New York.”

  “You can’t explain anything to a dunce like that,” Edwardo said.

  “Yes, he can,” Pedro said. “Thank you, José, you explained that like an intelligent person and I understood it completely.”

  “Fine,” said José. “I knew you would. And now, we draw straws to find out which one of us will be the hijacker.”

  “Hmmmm,” said Pedro.

  AND AFTER THAT …

  When Jerry got back to the Bernsteins’ house there were a lot of people there. Mel and Angela were in the kitchen, arguing about something. Teresa and Kathleen and Barbara were in the dining room, arguing about bridge. And Frank and Floyd were in the living room with an old fat colored woman, arguing with her about whether or not they should have
kidnapped her.

  “What’s going on here?” Jerry said.

  Neither Mel nor Angela would answer him, none of the card-playing women would give him an answer he cared about, and Frank and Floyd kept both talking at once. Jerry pointed at the colored woman and said, “What the hell’d you bring her back for? She ain’t no Dancing Aztec Priest.”

  “I don’t dance for nobody” the colored woman said.

  Frank finally got sufficient silence around him so he could answer the question, and then he said, “Jerry, I had to do it She recognized me.”

  “Recognized you? What do you mean, recognized you?”

  “I mean recognized me as in recognized me. As in, ‘Hello, Frank.’ That’s how.”

  “You know her?” The social combinations necessary to such a thing boggled Jerry’s mind.

  “She works at the theater,” Frank said. “She’s a maid, she’s seen me around backstage. Her name’s Mandy, that’s all I ever knew. How’m I supposed to know she’s somebody called Amanda Addleford?”

  “Well, you’re all in trouble,” Mandy announced, “unless you let me go right this minute.”

  Jerry told her, “We’re in trouble no matter what we do, lady.”

  Frank said, “We couldn’t kill her, could we? No. And we couldn’t leave her there to call the cops. So we brought her with us.”

  “You can’t keep her,” Jerry said. “She’s out of season.”

  “Ever since the Emancipation Proclamation,” Mandy said.

  Frank said, “Jerry, I was hoping you’d come up with something.”

  “You were, huh?”

  Floyd said, “We did pretty good otherwise. Jerry. We got the—”

  Jerry said, “Not in front of the prisoner here, okay? I mean, she knows too much already; let’s start cooling it.”

  Frank said “So what do we do with her?”

  “You let me go,” Mandy said. “Right this second.”

  Jerry said, “We’ll stash her while we think it over. Just a minute.” And he went out to the kitchen, where Mel and Angela were still arguing, and said, “Listen, do you have a closet upstairs where we can stash this old woman Frank and Floyd brought back?”

  “Closet!” yelled Mel, and for some reason that made the argument even worse than it was before. Mel screamed at Angela, and Angela screamed right back at Mel, and Jerry couldn’t make any sense out of it at all. So Jerry went back to the living room and told Frank and Floyd, “Screw it. Come on, bring her along upstairs, we’ll find someplace to stash her.”

  “You’re making a big mistake,” Mandy said.

  “It wouldn’t be my first today,” Jerry told her.

  In the kitchen, Mel was yelling the phrase “in the closet” in various ways: “In the closet!” “In the closet?” “In the closet!” Jerry and Frank and Floyd and Mandy went upstairs in search of a closet. They looked around and finally settled on the closet in the master bedroom, which could be locked from the outside. But just as they were about to shove Mandy in there Mel came bounding up the stairs, shouting, “Not in that closet!”

  “Now what?” Jerry said.

  Mel flung himself into the closet as though gold had just been discovered on the inside. He tossed out shoes, hangers, and assorted flotsam, backward between his legs like a dog digging for a bone, and then he yanked back the corner of carpet and yelled, “Look at this! You can hear every goddam thing in the dining room!”

  So you could. The women were arguing about bridge in the dining room.

  “Okay,” Jerry said. “Okay, Mel, no need to get excited.”

  Frank said, “But where do we put Mandy?”

  “On the next bus,” Mandy said.

  Mel said, “Put her in the bathroom.”

  Jerry said, “What if somebody has to take a leak?”

  “We got that half-bath downstairs.” Mel came out of the closet, viciously slammed its door behind him, and suddenly bellowed downward through the floor, “Jezebel!”

  Faintly from the kitchen came the response: “Asshole!”

  Mel ran out of the bedroom, yelling.

  “Everybody’s gone bugfuck,” Jerry told himself. “Come on, let’s put your friend in the bathroom.”

  So they put Mandy in the bathroom, regardless of her alternate suggestions, and went downstairs to the living room.

  Jerry sat on the sofa. “I think somebody better offer me a beer,” he said.

  “I’ll get it,” Floyd said. “Frank?”

  “Certainly,” Frank said, and Floyd went away, and Frank sat down. “What a night,” he said.

  Jerry said, “How come you and Floyd were together?”

  “We combined our lists. Don’t get upset, Jerry, it worked out We went to every address. We got two of Floyd’s statues, and two of mine.”

  “That leaves four,” Jerry pointed out.

  “One of them on Floyd’s list,” Frank said, “was an undertaker in Harlem called F. Xavier White, and when we got there some black gangsters were talking about a funeral with him. They put the arm on us, and we’re lucky it wasn’t our funeral. No way to look for statues in the middle of all that.”

  “Okay.”

  “Floyd’s other one,” Frank said, “was somebody called Marshall Thumble, also in Harlem. We found the address, but there wasn’t anybody home and we couldn’t find the statue. But we did find an extra one at Leroy Pinkham’s place.”

  “An extra one?”

  “It’s been that kind of day,” Frank said. “Maybe that one’s Thumbie’s. Maybe it’s somebody else’s. Maybe it wasn’t one of our sixteen at all. Anyway, they both broke, so neither of them was gold.”

  “What about the two on your list?”

  “Edward Ross and Jennifer Kendall, down in Greenwich Village. We went there first but there was nobody home and no statues. It looked like they’d cleared out. We didn’t waste any time, Jerry, we covered both lists.”

  “And brought back second prize.”

  “You mean Mandy?” Frank’s face twisted into a combination of apology and straining thought “I didn’t know what the hell to do about that Jerry.”

  Floyd came back with the beer, and with Mel, who was red-faced and breathing hard. Beyond them, Jerry saw Angela hurtle out of the house, raging mad. Her car was heard to start, to roar, and to spin away with a great squealing of tires. Jerry drank beer and said, “Mel, we’re going to figure out where we stand here. Can you give it your attention a minute?”

  Mel glared at the front windows. “Why not?” he snarled.

  “Sit down, Mel,” Jerry suggested.

  Mel frowned, looking around, seemed about to say several dozen angry things, and then abruptly dropped onto the sofa at the other end from Jerry. “I got two of mine,” he said, glaring now at the coffee table. “And two of somebody else’s.”

  Jerry said, “More extras?”

  “Extras?” Mel’s brows came down as though he was trying to burn a hole through the coffee table just with his stare. “Edward Ross and Jennifer Kendall,” he said. “They’re on—”

  Delighted, Frank said, “They’re mine! How do you like that!” Then he looked bewildered and said, “How’d you get them?”

  “They were in Connecticut.”

  Jerry, with a list of the sixteen Open Sports Committee members on his lap, had started checking them off, and now he said, “You got Beemiss?”

  “Yes,” Mel said. “And Cheshire.” His glower increased. “Cheshire.”

  “Fine,” Jerry said. “And I got three of mine. That means we got eleven for sure, and maybe twelve, depending on that extra one Frank and Floyd found.”

  Floyd said, “I think that’s Marshall Thumble’s.”

  “You’ll find out for sure tomorrow,” Jerry told him. “Yon and Frank. Also go back to the undertaker. There’s only four, maybe five statues left, and it has to be one of them. Mel, what about you?”

  Mel turned and brooded at Jerry, as though deciding whether or not to kill him with an ax. “
What about me?”

  “You feel up to doing some more tomorrow?”

  “I’ll do my other two,” Mel said. He leaned across the sofa toward Jerry. “Why wouldn’t I do my other two?”

  “That’s fine,” Jerry said. “And I’ll look for Bobbi Harwood. It has to be one of this last bunch, remember, and we’re still ahead of the mob because they spent all their time futzing around with Mel in Connecticut.”

  “They’ll be back tomorrow,” Floyd said.

  “We’ll worry about it then.” Jerry finished his beer. “That’s it for tonight. Time for everybody to catch their breath.”

  Frank said, “What about Mandy?”

  “Your buddy in the bathroom? She can stay there tonight We’ll work something out in the morning.”

  Mel sighed, and seemed to relax. “I’ll give her a blanket and pillow,” he said. “She can sleep in the tub.”

  “And I can sleep in my bed.” Jerry got to his feet and stretched. “Good night,” he said.

  AT LAST …

  Everybody has been running very hard, but the time has come to slow down. Jerry Manelli is having a final beer at home, in front of the television set, unwinding by watching Bringing Up Baby on Channel 5. Frank and Teresa McCann are lying in their separate twin beds, watching The Tonight Show on Channel 4. Floyd and Barbara McCann are making love, but because of the thin walls of their house and the nearness of their children they are being very careful not to have a very good time.

  Angela Bernstein has come home, and she and Mel are sitting at the kitchen table discussing their marital problems with Mandy Addleford, who is sympathetic but practical, like Ann Landers.

  Wally Hintzlebel is sitting at his kitchen table playing canasta with his mother and telling her lies about those scratches on his face that he got from Angela Bernstein. Oscar Russell Green is asleep face down on his living room floor, with the television set showing Bringing Up Baby to the top of his head. Felicity Tower is wide awake in her bed, glowing like the filament in a light bulb.