Dancing Aztecs Read online

  Far away to the south, Pedro Ninni and Edwardo Brazzo and José Caracha are asleep in Quetchyl, with their mouths open. Somewhere in the New York area the real Dancing Aztec Priest glitters in the dark; no switches were made in Descalzo, the real statue is one of the remaining four.

  Financier Victor Krassmeier, suffering from constipation, is sitting on his toilet, reading Barron’s. Mobster August Corella is having a Rob Roy in his living room, watching The Tonight Show and sulking about his day. Earl is in bed with a steak, placing it alternately over each eye and watching The Tonight Show with the other. Ralph is dreaming that he is driving a car down a mountainside with no brakes.

  Wylie Cheshire, with a white X of bandage on his forehead where Angela Bernstein crowned him with the Dancing Aztec Priest, is watching The Crimson Pirate on Channel 9 and feeling sulky and mulish; beneath the X, the bump is still growing. Luke Snell, with his own white X of bandage on his upper lip from where he hit the steering wheel and knocked out three teeth when the motorcycle rammed him, is also watching The Crimson Pirate, but isn’t enjoying it as much as he’d expected.

  Bud Beemiss is sitting in his study with a very dry Tanqueray martini on the rocks, brooding at the space where his Dancing Aztec Priest used to stand, and thinking things over. Downstairs in his house, Hamlet and Ophelia are asleep with smiles on their faces.

  David Fayley and Kenny Spang, each terribly hurt with the other for having brought Jerry Manelli into the house, are lying side by side in bed, wide awake, not speaking and not touching. Jenny Kendall and Eddie Ross are in one sleeping bag together in the woods in Rhode Island, making love; they’ll do just fine with one motorcycle and one sleeping bag and each other.

  Leroy Pinkham is lying on the floor in his living room with his sister Ruby and his sister Renny, watching Bringing Up Baby. Buhbuh is lying on his own living room floor a few blocks away, watching The Crimson Pirate.

  F. Xavier White is sitting up in bed, listening to Maleficent tell him everything he did wrong today, which was everything. Jeremiah “Bad Death” Jonesburg is sleeping happily, dreaming of funerals.

  Chuck Harwood is curled up on his closet floor, snoring in his sleep; he’s going to be very stiff tomorrow. Bobbi, her mind full of confusing dream fragments, is sozzily asleep on Madge’s sofa.

  In their homes, in their beds, Ben Cohen and Mrs. Dorothy Moorwood are peacefully asleep, neither of them guessing what’s coming their way on the morrow.

  Everybody is settling down now. Everybody is going to sleep. You, too.

  THE

  SECOND PART

  OF THE

  SEARCH

  Everybody in New York City wants to get somewhere. At Christmas everybody wants to get to Macy’s, and in the summer everybody wants to get to the beach. At five o’clock everybody wants to get through the tunnels. On Saturday night everybody wants to get to the newsstands for Sunday’s paper. Everybody uptown wants to get to Zabar’s and everybody downtown wants to get to Balducci’s. Everybody all the time wants to get into the next elevator, the next subway, and the next-door neighbor’s pants.

  White-collar workers want to get to the executive wash-room. Executives want to get to Palm Springs or Palm Beach. First-class passengers at Kennedy want to get to the VIP Lounge. Cabbies want to get across town. Children want to get to Radio City Music Hall, grownups want to get to an X-rated movie, and 1 per cent of the population wants to get to a Broadway show. Door-to-door salesmen want to get a free trip to Puerto Rico for writing a million dollars in sales.

  McDonald’s wants to get into the Village. Men in last year’s bow ties want to get back into the swim. Executive assistants want to get into a corner office. Over at ABC, they want to get into the running.

  Shoppers want to get into an air-conditioned cab. Seducers, male and female, want to get into something a little more comfortable. On weekdays, people with a cause want to get into City Hall Park, but on Sundays they want to get into Central Park.

  People on the A train want to get to Harlem.

  Messengers want to get to the seventeenth floor. Exalcoholics want to get to the church basement. Burglars want to get on the fire escape and pigeon breeders want to get on the roof.

  Gotta hustle.

  Almost everybody wants to get on television. People on local television want to get on network television. People on network television want to get to Palm Springs or Palm Beach.

  Retired people on the upper west side want to sit in the sun on the benches in the middle of Broadway. When they get there, they want to be in Miami.

  Men want to get next to women. Women want to get equal with men. Girls want to get in the Little League and boys want to get in the big leagues. Smart children want to get into the High School of Music & Art and dumb children want to get out of high school.

  People in tenements want to get into high-rises. People is projects want to get back into tenements. Actors in NY want to get to LA. People at the top of the Guggenheim Museum want to get to the bottom. So do ass-pinchers, river-dredgers, and investigative reporters.

  Everybody in New York City wants to get somewhere. Every once in a while, somebody gets there.

  AT THE CENTER …

  Jerry Manelli wanted to get moving, but his mother wouldn’t let him out of the house two mornings in a row with no breakfast. “You can take five minutes to eat an egg,” she said.

  “The way I figure it,” Jerry said, “the mob’s already had an egg by this time.”

  “So they’ll have indigestion and you won’t.”

  “Okay, okay,” Jerry said, and used the time to call around and make sure the other guys were on the move. Frank was waiting for Floyd, who had just left the house. When Jerry called Mel, a burry female voice said, “Bern-stein res-dince.”

  “Hey,” Jerry said. “What the hell you doing out?”

  “I’m on parole,” Mandy told him. “I gave my word I wouldn’t run away. You want anybody? These pancakes are burning here.”

  “Where’s Mel?”

  “Up with Miz Bernstein, getting dressed.”

  “Don’t let him hang around all day.”

  “What about me?” Mandy wanted to know. “I don’t wanna hang around all day neither.”

  “We’ll figure something out this afternoon,” Jerry told her. “When this other stuff is done.”

  “Huh,” said Mandy, expressing the deepest doubt, and broke the connection.

  Jerry stepped out to the backyard, where his father was shooting at a stamp-collecting album with his new BB gun. The old man was skinny, and he didn’t like to wear his teeth. “How’s it going?” Jerry said.

  “I think the barrel’s bent.”

  Scrambled eggs were ready, with spaghetti sauce on top, and Jerry sat down to shovel them in. His mother, watching, said, “Take it easy, take it easy.”

  “Some other time, Mom. I gotta hustle.”

  “That’s all you care about, hustle, hustle, hustle.”

  Jerry gulped down coffee. “So? What else is there?”

  “I guess you’ll find out now, won’t you?”

  Jerry wiped his mouth on the paper napkin and got to his feet. “Meaning what?”

  “You’ll find this golden statue, won’t you? Your share’s a quarter of a million dollars, isn’t it?”

  “So?”

  “So then you’ll have it,” his mother said. “Everything you’ve hustled for. And what then?”

  “Are you kidding?” He stared at her. “Mom, I could blow that in a month. You kidding? Two hundred fifty grand? Blow it in a month. I wouldn’t even have to leave New York.”

  She frowned at him. “Then what’s the point?”

  “The point? Hustling’s the point. See you later, Mom,” he said, and got moving out of there.

  ON THE SOFA …

  Bobbi and Madge had breakfast together companionably in Madge’s living room, sunlight filtered dappling through the spider plants and avocados. Bobbi was on the sofa, with her breakfast spread b
efore her on the coffee table, while Madge had the chair over by the television set, with her plate on a hassock. “Mmm,” Bobbi said. She ate scrambled egg. She chewed some bacon. She swallowed coffee and munched toast and went back for more scrambled egg. Madge, watching her with interested doubt, said, “How can you eat all that? Why don’t you have a hangover?”

  “Because today,” Bobbi said, “I am a new woman. A totally new woman.” She drank more coffee, bit off another chunk of toast, and suddenly grinned. She giggled, with her mouth closed.

  Madge made a quizzical grin. “What’s so funny?”

  Bobbi chewed, chewed, chewed, swallowed, washed it all down with coffee, and laughed aloud. “I threw all Chuck’s clothes out the window!”

  “So you told me last night. Several times.”

  Suddenly serious, intense, Bobbi stared across the room at her friend. “I left him, Madge, I left him for good!”

  “You mentioned that, too.”

  Bobbi frowned. “You think he’ll be all right? What if he’s stuck in there forever, without any clothes?”

  “He’s fine,” Madge said. “I phoned there this morning, and there wasn’t any answer, so he’s up and out. With his clothes on.”

  “And looking for me.”

  “Wouldn’t doubt it for a second.”

  “Mm.” Absent-mindedly chewing, Bobbi looked around the room, organizing her thoughts, and then spied the Dancing Aztec Priest, the Other Oscar, standing on the windowsill amid Madge’s jungle, and she smiled. The Other Oscar; he had made it all possible, he had made it happen. He danced in there among the greenery, his golden skin glistening with sunlight, his green eyes vivid with intelligence, his very posture a command to do and be and move and become.

  “What are you smiling at?”

  “My future,” Bobbi said.

  “You know what you’re going to do?”

  “Absolutely. I’m going to California.”

  “So you really are, huh? No morning-after second thoughts?”

  “This isn’t the morning after,” Bobbie told her. “This is the morning before. The morning before my life begins.”

  Madge grimaced. “Send that to the Reader’s Digest,” she said.

  “I’m really going to do it, Madge.”

  “Well, bully for you. Got your schedule worked out?”

  “As soon as I get dressed I’ll go see Everett Coalshack at the orchestra. He can give me references and letters of introduction to people on the West Coast. And then I’ll pick up my harp and I’m off. Today.” Suddenly both ravenous and impatient, she stuffed her mouth with food and asked Madge if she had the Yellow Pages.

  Madge said, “What?”

  “Fumfumfumf,” Bobbi said again, then chewed quickly, slugged down some coffee to clear the way, and said, “Do you have a Yellow Pages?”

  “Sure.” Getting it from the shelf under the TV, bringing it across the room, Madge said, “What’s the idea?”

  “I have practically no money,” Bobbie explained. “I’ll go to the bank this morning and take out a couple hundred, but there isn’t much more than that in there, and I’m not going to Chuck for anything. Not that he has anything.”

  “If you find money in the Yellow Pages,” Madge said, “show me the listing.”

  “Not money,” Bobbi told her. “A way to California.”

  “Fascinating.” Madge sat on the sofa next to Bobbi to see how it was done.

  Very simply. Bobbi turned to the Automobile listings and under the heading Automobile Transporters & Drive-Away Companies there were about twenty-five companies offering to ship your car to or from anywhere. “Right,” Bobbi said, and reached for the phone.

  Madge said, “Ship a car? You don’t have a car.”

  Bobbi said, “Where do you think they get their drivers?” And she made her first call, saying to the person who answered, “Hello. I’d like to drive a car to California.”

  As it turned out, there were only two problems. In the first place, she wanted a car to drive today, and that was a bit too precipitous for most companies, though they could provide her with a car next Monday or Tuesday. And, in the second place, she didn’t call the companies in alphabetical order but by some intuitive sequence of her own, so that it wasn’t until the eighth call that she reached Beacon Auto Transport, where a harried-sounding young woman said, “Girlie, you’re on. We had a guy didn’t show up this morning. If you’ve got the seventy-five-dollar damage deposit and valid references we can check on the phone and you can be out of town this afternoon.”

  “I’ll be there in two hours,” Bobbi said.

  IN THE EXECUTIVE SUITE …

  August Corella and Victor Krassmeier sat moodily together in Victor Krassmeier’s private office, waiting for the arrival of Bud Beemiss. Corella hadn’t liked coming back to Vic this way, and he certainly hadn’t liked calling in Bud Beemiss, but what choice did he have?

  The truth is, August Corella was not a member of the Mafia. He had a few nice hustles going, that’s all, principally a sweetheart union in the bakery business, and it helped most of the time to give the impression he was a card-carrying mobster, but in fact he was not now nor had he ever been a member of the mob. Any mob.

  And because of that, because he was not a bona fide mobster, there’d been nothing he could do about it when both Earl and Ralph refused to come to work today. Ralph claimed he had the flu this morning, and coughed a few times unconvincingly into the telephone. Earl, more straightforward, said he had two black eyes and a very prominent cut on the tip of his nose and he was not, repeat not, leaving his apartment until everything, repeat everything, had healed up. And maybe not then.

  A mafioso, of course, wouldn’t put up with such shit. A mafioso would smile and say, “Nobody quits, Earl. You know that.” But if Corella tried such a threat, Earl would hang up and go to work for some other union thug.

  So Corella, alone, had driven his Cadillac across the river this morning, and he had called Vic, and he had called Bud Beemiss, the PR man whose house in Connecticut had been the scene of last night’s foolishness, and he had set up this appointment because what August Corella needed now was a new gang and a new plan.

  And to keep that goddam statue out of the hands of those goddam Inter-Air Forwarding punks.

  Vic Krassmeier broke the brooding silence at last, saying, “Whatever happened to the fellow who caused all this trouble? The one who didn’t know the alphabet.”

  “Oh. He’s out of it. Earl punished him a little and put him on a plane home to Ecuador.”

  “May it have crashed,” Krassmeier said devoutly, and his intercom buzzed. “Yes?”

  “Mr. Beemiss is here,” said the metallic female voice.

  “Send him in.”

  When Beemiss came in a minute later, bouncing and smiling in his suede jacket, be looked like a man who was pretty damn pleased with himself. If only it were possible to have Earl punish this one and put him on a plane somewhere. Antarctica maybe.

  “Ah, good morning,” Beemiss said, approaching Corella, a mocking smile on his lips. “Mister Kane, isn’t it?”

  “Corella.”

  “Corella? Much more realistic.” And Beemiss insisted on shaking hands.

  Corella introduced him next to Krassmeier, who sat behind his desk and refused to stand, to shake hands, to smile, to speak or to do anything other than grunt. Beemiss seemed amused by that, and when he sat down he turned his amused expression back to Corella, saying, “I must admit that bit of vaudeville last night made me curious.”

  It was time for the truth. Corella said, “One of the statues you people got is the original. We smuggled it in from South America.”

  “Ah,” said Beemiss. “I was wondering if that might be it.”

  “There was a screw-up,” Corella told him, “and you got the wrong box. Before we could straighten it out, this other bunch found out about it. That was one of them got your statue last night.”

  “Which I assume was the wrong one.�
��

  “Right.”

  “I also assume you have a buyer for the right one.”

  “Sure,” said Corella.

  Beemiss waited, amiably curious, and then said, “Who?”

  Corella looked over at Krassmeier, who brooded briefly and then shrugged. Apparently, he believed all hope was lost, anyway. So Corella told Beemiss, “The Museum of the Arts of the Americas.”

  “Ah.” Beemiss turned his smile on Krassmeier. “You’re a trustee there, aren’t you?”

  Grumbling, Krassmeier said, “Yes.”

  “You negotiated for the museum?”

  “Yes.”

  “And how high did you permit yourself to be pushed?”

  Once again Krassmeier and Corella exchanged glances, and this time it was Corella who shrugged. Krassmeier said, “Slightly more than a million.”

  “Slightly? Is there a number figure for that slightly?”

  “Two hundred forty thousand.”

  “That’s some slightly,” Beemiss said.

  Corella said, “There’ve been a lot of expenses. At the South American end, for instance.”

  Beemiss chuckled. “Yes, I can imagine the South American end could be terribly expensive.”

  Krassmeier, leaning forward over his desk, said, “The point is, we’d like you to assist us.”

  “Yes, I see you would,” Beemiss said. “If these other people don’t already have the statue.”

  “We can only hope they don’t.”

  “I’ll do that,” Beemiss assured him. “And if they don’t have it, you want me to get it and sell it to you.”

  “Sell it to us?” Krassmeier sounded truly shocked.

  Bemiss did his annoying chuckle again. “You aren’t asking me to give it away.”

  “We’ll share in the profits,” Krassmeier said.

  “I’m always happier with a dollar figure,” Bemiss told him. “I tell you what, I’ll take that slightly.”

  “You’ll do what?”