Cities of the Red Night (14 page)

A woman's voice sounded guarded: “What is it in reference to, please?”

“I am a private investigator retained by Mr. Green.”

“Well, I'm afraid you can't speak to him. You see, Mr. and Mrs. Green are dead.”

“Dead?”

“Yes. They were killed last night in a car crash. This is Mrs. Green's sister.” She sounded pretty cool about it.

“I'm terribly sorry.…” I was thinking about what Dimitri had said. The “Adepts” who had hanged Jerry did not know what magical intentions they were projecting. They did not know to whom they were aspeak … plane crash … car crash …

I didn't want to think about the Green case anymore, but it stuck to me like the fever smell. What had Dimitri called it? B-23, the Hanging Fever.

Death is enforced separation from the body. Orgasm is identification with the body. So death in the moment of orgasm literally
embodies
death. It would also yield an earthbound spirit—an incubus dedicated to reproducing that particular form of death.

I took a Nembutal and finally slept.

*   *   *

Someone was murdered in this room a long time ago. How long ago … the empty safe … the bloody pipe threader? His partner must have done it. They never caught him. Easy to disappear in those days, when a silver dollar bought a good meal and piece of ass. Smell of dust and old fear in the room. Someone is at the back door.
Quién es?
The hall is dark.

It's Marty come to call … gaslight now on the yellow pockmarked face, the cold gray eyes, the brilliantined black hair, the coat with fur trimming at the collar, the purple waistcoat beneath.…

“We had a hard time finding you.” His drunken driver there can hardly stand up. “Wore himself out getting here, he did.”

“He made a few stops along the way.”

“Come along to the Metropole and have some bubbly. It's my treat.”

Now Broadway's full of guys who think they're mighty wise, just because they know a thing or two

“No thanks.”

“What do you mean, no thanks? We had a long way to find you.”

You can see them every day, strolling up and down Broadway, boasting of the wonders they can do

“I'm expecting someone from the Palace.”

“Your old pals aren't good enough anymore? Is that it?”

“I don't remember we were exactly pals, Marty.”

There are con men and drifters, Murphy men and grifters, and they all hang around the Metropole

“Let me in, Dalford. I've come a long way.”

“All right, but…”

But their names would be mud, like a chump playing stud, if they lost that old ace down in the hole

“Nice place you got here. Plenty of room. You could put the Metropole in here if it came to that.…” He is sitting on the bed now.

They'll tell you of trips that they're going to take, from Florida up to the old North Pole

“Look, Marty…”

I wake up. Jim is covered with white foam. I can't wake him.
“Jamie!… Jamie!…”
Cold white foam.

I wake up. Jim is standing with a pipe threader in his hand, looking towards the back door.… “I thought someone was in the room.”

*   *   *

I got up and dressed and went into the kitchen to make breakfast. It tasted disgusting. The Everson questionnaire and pictures had arrived, and I looked through them as I drank coffee. The pictures were quite ordinary. The Everson boy looked like the clean-cut American Boy. I wondered why he had taken up such an esoteric subject as Mayan archaeology.

Jim came in and asked if he could take the day off. He does that occasionally, has an apartment of his own in the East Village. After he left, I sat down and went carefully through the Everson case: the boy had been in Mexico City doing some research in the library preparatory to a dig in Yucatán. In his last letter he said he was leaving for Progreso in a few days and would write from there.

After two weeks, his family was worried. They waited another week then called the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City. A man checked his address, and the landlady said he had packed and left almost three weeks ago. A police check of hotel registration in Progreso turned up nothing. It had now been about six weeks with no word.

Several possibilities had occurred to me: He may have gone on some alternate dig. Postal service in rural Mexico is practically nonexistent. Probably there was no more involved than two or three lost letters. I was inclined to favor some such simple explanation. I had no special feelings about this case and felt sure I could locate young Everson without much difficulty. I decided to knock off and take in a porn flick.

It was good, as porn flicks go—beautiful kids on screen—but I couldn't understand why they had so much trouble coming. And all the shots were stylized. Every time a kid came all over a stomach or an ass, he rubbed the jism around like tapioca.

I left in the middle of a protracted fuck, and walked down Third Avenue to the Tin Palace for a drink.

There was a hippie with a ratty black beard at one end of the bar and I could smell Marty on him—that cold gray smell of the time traveler. I'd seen him around before. The name is Howard Benson. Small-time pusher, pot and C and occasional O. Lives somewhere in the neighborhood. He caught my eye, drank up and hurried out.

I gave him a few seconds' start and tailed him to a loft building on Greene Street. I waited outside until his light went on, picked the front-door lock and went in. I had an Identikit picture of Marty with me that Jim drew. It looks like a photo. I was going to show it to this Howard and say it was a picture of a murder suspect, and see what I could surprise or bluff out of him.

His loft was on the third floor. I knocked loud and long. No answer. I could feel somebody inside.
“Police!”
I shouted. “Open the door or we'll break it down!” Still no answer. Well, that would keep the neighbors out of the hall.

It took me about two minutes to get the door open. I walked in. There was somebody there, all right. Howard Benson was lying on his face in a pool of blood. The murder weapon was there too: a bloody pipe threader that had smashed in the back of his head.

I took a quick look around. There was a filthy pile of bedding in one corner and a phone beside it, some tools, dusty windows, a splintery floor. Benson was lying in front of an old-fashioned safe which was open. A dead gray smell hung in that loft like a fog. Marty was there.

The whole scene was like something out of the 1890s. I bent down and sniffed at the open safe. Faint but unmistakable, the fever smell. I got a nail. It stuck to the sides of the safe. The walls were magnetized. Jerry's head had been in that safe.

Quickly I drew a circle around the safe, seeing the head as clearly as I could inside. I repeated the words and touched the absent head three times with the amulet that Dimitri had given me. A tingle ran up my arm.

Half an hour later, I was sitting in O'Brien's office. His boss, Captain Graywood, was also there. Graywood was a tall blond man with thick glasses and a blank expression.

“You want the whole story, then?”

“That's the general idea.”

I told them most of it, what I knew about Marty, and showed them the picture. I told them about Dimitri finding the body and about Adam North's story. Captain Graywood never changed his expression. Once or twice O'Brien turned into his brother, the priest. When I had finished he took a deep breath.

“Quite a story, Clem. We've had cases like that … and worse things too: torture, castration … cases that don't get into the papers or into the courts.”

Captain Graywood said, “So it is your theory that the head was brought here as a potent magical object?”

“Yes.”

“And you are convinced that the head was in that safe?”

“Yes.”

“And why do you think the body was addressed to South America?”

“I don't know the answer to that.”

“Ecuador is headhunter country, isn't it?”

“Yes.”

“It is logical to assume then that someone planned to reunite the head and the body in South America.”

“I think so.”

“You haven't told us everything.”

“I've told you what I
know.
”

“This Marty … Dimitri's men never saw him?”

“No.”

“But you could see him?”

“Yes.”

“We can't arrest a ghost,” said O'Brien.

“Well, if he can make himself solid enough to beat someone's brains out with a pipe wrench, you might be able to.… Question of being there at the right time.”

EVEN THE COCKROACHES

 

The Cucaracha, where Kiki worked as a waiter, had “La Cucaracha” on the jukebox. It's a basement restaurant, with a small bar and a few tables. It was 11:00
P.M.
and the place was empty. I hadn't seen Kiki since I interviewed him on the Green case. Looking very handsome in a worn dinner jacket, he was leaning against the bar, talking to the bargirl. She does a striptease act uptown on weekends which is a thing to see.

Because old Pancho shakes the dirt out

I shook hands with Kiki, ordered a margarita, and sat down, and right on cue a cockroach crawled across the table. When Kiki brought the margarita I pointed to the cockroach and said, “He's getting his marijuana and getting it steady.”

“Sí,”
said Kiki absently, and brushed the cockroach away with his towel.

I looked around and saw there was one other diner by the door. I hadn't noticed him when I came in. He was sitting alone and reading a book called
Thin Air
about a top-secret navy project to make a battleship and all the sailors on it disappear. It was supposed to confuse the enemy; however, all the test sailors went crazy. But CIA men were made of sterner stuff and found it modern and convenient to “go zero” as they call it in a tight spot.

On the wall were bullfight posters and
The Death of Manolete.
The poisonous colors made me think of arsenic green and the flaking green paint in the WC. It's a big picture and must be worth a lot of money, like a wooden Indian or
Custer's Last Stand,
which the Anheuser-Busch Company used to give out to their customers. I remember as an adolescent being excited by the green naked bodies sprawled about ass-up, getting scalped by the Indians, and especially a story about one man who played dead while he was being scalped and so escaped.

I drank the margaritas and ordered a combination plate and went to the green room. When I came back, “Thin Air” was gone. Kiki came and sat with me and had a Carta Blanca. I told him Jerry was dead.

Kiki nodded philosophically and a face leered out, the face of a middle-aged man with a cast in the right eye. This must be Kiki's macambo magic master, I decided.

“It was his destiny,” Kiki said. “Look at these.” He spread some postcards circa 1913 out on the table. The photos showed soldiers hanged from trees and telephone poles with their pants down around their ankles. The pictures were taken from behind. “Pictures get him very hot. He want me pull scarf tight around his neck when he come.” Kiki made a motion of pulling something around his neck.

“Jerry's spirit has got into my assistant. Only you can call him out.”

“Why me?”

“Jerry's spirit has to obey you because you fuck him the best.”

Kiki's eyes narrowed with calculation and he drummed on the table with his fingertips. I was thinking I could use an interpreter on this trip … after all, expense account. My Spanish is half-assed and in any case he could find out more than two nosy
gringos.

“Like to come along with us to Mexico and South America?”

I named a figure. He smiled and nodded. I wrote the address of my loft on a card and handed it to him. “Be there at eleven in the morning. We make magic.”

*   *   *

When I got back to the loft Jim was there, and I explained that we were going to perform this ritual to get Jerry's spirit out.

He nodded. “Yeah, he's half in and half out and it hurts.”

*   *   *

Next day Kiki showed up with a bundle of herbs and a head of Elleggua in a hatbox. As he was setting up his altar, lighting candles and anointing the head, I explained that he would fuck Jim and evoke Jerry to bring Jerry all the way in—and then I had good strong magic to exorcise the spirit. Kiki watched with approval, one magic man to another, as I set up the altar for the noon ritual and lit the incense. It was ten minutes before noon.