Closet Case (Robert Rodi Essentials) (9 page)

Impossible.

Impossible that this should be happening.

Impossible that he should be seeing
Toné
, of all people, coming up the street in his direction.

The look on his face began to resemble something from a Munch painting, and Tracy, concerned by his suddenly bulging eyes and slackened jaw, placed her hand on his arm. “Lionel? Honey? Are you all right?”

No, it wasn’t impossible, because it was
happening
. There was Toné, his long black hair flapping behind him like a cape, breezing up Michigan Avenue with the regal bearing of a queen en route to coronation, his eyes — thank God — skyward, as if contemplating the infinite. He hadn’t yet seen Lionel.

“Lionel?” Tracy repeated. “Something the matter?”

That he should have to introduce Tracy to Toné — no, no, not in a million years would he allow such a volatile mixing of chemicals to occur. It would be just like Toné to
insist
on kissing him when they met, and Tracy was too sharp an observer not to read into that what was there to be read; and Toné would very likely be unable to resist making all kinds of veiled references that Tracy would spend an evening mulling over and from which she might draw awful conclusions.

No, no,
no.
But if not, then what, what,
what
?

“Lionel!” said Tracy sharply. “
Tell
me. What
is
it?”

The end was near. Toné had just lowered his leonine head, seen Lionel, and waved.

Oh, God, I’m doomed,
he thought.
Hail Mary, full of Grace, may I please now be run over by the 146 bus.

Looking around frantically, like an animal seeking escape, he let his gaze fall on the protestors at the opposite corner of the intersection. They were in greater force today, still barking out their demands and brandishing placards, and by the way people were stepping in the street to avoid them, Lionel guessed that their mood must be explosive. He pointed to them, his hand shaking in the air as he did so.

“Look over there,” he said. “No,
there.
Ever notice them before?”

“What?” Tracy said, squinting across traffic, not certain at first what he could be pointing at. “Lionel, you’re scaring me — I don’t kn—”

“The Transylvanians!” He jabbed his finger in their direction. As he did so, a couple of businessmen attempted to enter the Romanian Consulate building, and several of the marchers deliberately blocked their way, then jostled and shoved them as they pressed on through to the revolving door.

“Transylvanians?” she said. “You mean like where Dracula comes from?”

“I mean a proud people fighting for their freedom,” he said, and his voice cracked again but this time he was past caring. Toné was almost close enough to call out to him. “Just the way we Americans fought for
our
freedom two centuries ago. I don’t understand how anyone can just stand by and not
help
them.” And with that he dashed into the intersection, weaving between the moving cars, getting honked at and cursed out and almost struck down, until he was standing toe-to-toe with the demonstrators, who seemed no little alarmed by the appearance of this sweaty, panting young man in a three-hundred-dollar suit.

Nearest to him was an elderly woman in a floral print dress, an ancient shawl, and white Sperry Topsiders, carrying a sign that said something in Romanian he couldn’t read. He reached out, grabbed her placard, and said, “Let me carry your burden, Little Mother.”

Unfortunately, Little Mother wasn’t at all eager to yield up her burden, and he had to wrestle it from her, eventually prying her fleshy fingers from the grip and darting away with his prize to the perimeter of the circle. Once he’d done so, he realized that the demonstrators were now looking at him with not only suspicion, but growing hostility — and also he noticed for the first time that Ivan the Adorable was chief among those glaring at him, with eyes as shamelessly blue as the tiles in a North Shore swimming pool.

Several passersby had stopped in their tracks and were watching him; they sensed a scene in the making. Unwilling to disappoint them — and keenly aware that Tracy must be watching as well — he lifted the placard high, and in a reedy, embarrassing voice, cried, “Freedom for Transylvania?” as if he were inquiring whether they might think this was a good idea.

By this time, most of the demonstrators had become aware of the disturbance he was causing, and had broken ranks to crowd around him and stare in aggrieved bewilderment. The only one who had anything to say was Little Mother, who had worked herself into quite a fit of pique over the theft of her placard and was loudly commanding a younger activist — presumably her son — to go and retrieve it for her.

Panicking, Lionel swelled his chest and cried out again, this time manfully and unabashedly,
“Freedom for the people of Transylvania!”

The sound of his voice surprised even him. He’d made the banal slogan sound like an imperative from Almighty God.

Some of the demonstrators yelled something that he couldn’t understand but chose to interpret as support. Little Mother was nagging anyone who would listen about the injustice she’d suffered, and a moment later two demonstrators in the rear got into a shoving match while trying to see what Lionel was up to. The protest was dissolving into chaos, all because of Lionel — while Ivan, his broad neck bulging with power and authority, tried desperately to shout everyone back into order.

But before that could happen, a sharp voice sailed over Lionel’s head and pierced the pandemonium. “If this isn’t just
typical
,” it said.

He turned and found himself facing an extremely thin, appallingly aged man in dirty Birkenstock sandals and a ratty white cardigan with yellow armpit stains down its sides, and who carried a tattered plastic grocery bag which he was apparently in the process of filling with discarded aluminum cans.
“Typical,”
he repeated, almost spitting it in Lionel’s face. “This is how it ends, is it? The Great Experiment, the Revolution? Not with a glorious class war, but with a rabble of fragmented and disunited splinter states racing to become as bourgeois as the West, in the process reviving the petty tribal bickerings and divisions that Comrade Lenin purged from the Soviet sphere. Serb turns on Croat, Armenian on Azerbaijani, Transylvanian on Romanian.” The demonstrators were again all but climbing over each other to view this latest interloper, and the onlookers in the street had swelled to the point of blocking traffic. Horns blared; shouts lapped up against each other like angry waves. The demonstrators had become a mob, and Lionel was being personally berated by a demented and smelly old communist. He was beginning to realize that this particular lunch hour might not end in actual lunch.

The old man waved his grocery bag at Lionel and the cans clinked together ominously. “And now you clamor like animals on a city street, howling for what you want handed to you on a silver platter! In the foppish vestments of imperialism, you shamelessly crowd this public place like a herd of cattle and
dare
to demand freedom, freedom that socialism could have given you forever, had you not allowed it to be subverted and
destroyed
.”

The Transylvanians muttered darkly at this, and Lionel, who was more than a little put off by the old man’s vehemence — he wasn’t used to this kind of passion in his daily exchanges — tried to get him to leave. “Listen, buddy,” he said, “back off, okay? No one here wants to get into a thing with you.”

“Of course not,” he said, sneering. “Argument and debate are devalued practices in your materialistic little hive-mind.” A pearl of saliva leapt out of his mouth and fell on Lionel’s shoe; Lionel grimaced in distaste and wondered how he could get it off without touching it. “What you
want
is what you
want
,” he continued, less eloquently now, “you
creatures
of appetite — you
monsters
of free will — you
abortions
that live to eat your mothers! You have undone us! You have pulled us into a new Dark Age. Were Comrade Lenin alive to see what miserable —”

Suddenly he was struck down. From behind Lionel, a placard had bonked the old man’s head, knocking him to his knees. Lionel whirled and saw Ivan at the other end of it, a look of such fury on his face that Lionel almost didn’t recognize him as the big fuzzy bear of his masturbatory fantasies. “Shall I show you how socialism saved my
niece,
you black-hearted rogue?” he howled. “Dead at the age of two. Shall I show what that feels like?” Lionel didn’t see how Ivan
could
show a ninety-year-old what it felt like to die at the age of two, but no doubt he wasn’t at his most rational right now.

The old man rubbed his bruised head, glared at Ivan, and said, “The same fate should have been
yours
.”

And that was it. All hell broke loose. The old man apparently underestimated the effect that an invocation of the fallen regime would have on a bunch of post-1989 Eastern Europeans who were extremely pissed off to begin with. From what Lionel could tell, the word
socialism
had roughly the same effect on them that
motherfucker
had on your average American gathering. In a flash, six or seven Transylvanians had piled on top of the Leninist curmudgeon and were beating him with their placards (or at least trying to; the signs had a distressing tendency to butt together well above the victim’s head).

As for Lionel, he got a good kick in the backside from Little Mother, who it seemed wasn’t a bit fooled by his rhetorical eruption; and the kick sent him tumbling right into the epicenter of the brawl, which by now had been joined by a couple of football-player types who had taken it upon themselves to help out the old commie coot (ideology be damned, it was forty against one).

Lionel tried to crawl backward out of the melee when someone stepped on his head, and as the heel of his oppressor’s shoe ground into his ear, he wondered how he could even begin to explain to Julius Deming how it was possible for someone to have his head trodden on during a midweek lunch break. Because he was certain that, by now, he’d been sufficiently scuffed up to be more or less unpresentable at the office for the remainder of the day.

Not that returning to the office even remained an option for much longer. By the time he got to his knees and was shaking the stars out of his head, the whine of a siren was slicing through the shrieks and screams surrounding him. He was then peremptorily lifted to his feet by someone he couldn’t see — but since whoever it was hauled him roughly away and tossed him into the back of a paddy wagon, it was reasonable to conclude it was an officer of the law.

He stumbled to the back of the vehicle, reeling a little from the effects of the violence and confusion, and when he punch-drunkenly turned his head and looked back outside he saw, just before the doors slammed shut, a sight that gave him no small measure of relief.

For across Michigan Avenue, among the many amazed persons who had stopped to watch the riot, were Tracy and Toné, both of whom stared at him in open-mouthed wonder. But they were several yards apart, and separated by a phalanx of bodies at least eight persons wide.

They had not seen each other; they had not met.

At the police station, which was located on the near South Side in what looked like one of the more interesting neighborhoods in Beirut, Lionel was placed in a holding cell with the seven Transylvanians who had ended up sharing the paddy wagon with him — one of whom was Ivan, whose Disney-blue eyes were now fixed on him with glowering intensity.

As the matronly detective closed the cell door, Lionel pressed his face against the bars and said, “Listen, this is a mistake! You’ve got to understand, I don’t
belong
here!” The detective ignored Lionel’s plea with time-sharpened obliviousness. As she made her way down the corridor, Lionel called after her,
“Goddamn it, I don’t have a drop of Slavic blood in my body!”

“What makes you think
we
do?” said one of the demonstrators directly behind him, and by the half-husky, half-honeyed voice, Lionel had no doubt which one it was.

Sheepishly, he turned, and sure enough there was Ivan standing right at his elbow, so close that he could feel his breath on his face. In spite of himself, he felt a major erection coming on.

“Well,” Lionel said, his voice wavering with anxiety, “you’re Romanians — Transylvanians — whatever. Aren’t you?” He fell back a few paces, but Ivan stepped forward to keep the gap between them a small one.

“We are Romanians by nationality,” he said, “and Transylvanians by ethnicity. That’s just the point.
We aren’t Slavs.
This is a common misconception, because we were for so long a Soviet client state. But Romania is not a Slavic country. Romanian is not a Slavic language. It is a Romance language, and we are Europeans.”

Lionel had to admit that Ivan’s accent sounded more Italian than Russian. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know.” He was acutely aware that all the other demonstrators in the cell were now focused on him. He tried not to stare too longingly into Ivan’s well-deep eyes, or to think about what it would be like to lick chocolate syrup from the cleft in his chin.

Ivan stretched out one of his superbly muscled arms and propped it against the wall of the cell, effectively cutting off Lionel’s only avenue of escape — not that there was any place to escape to. “You know little about us,” he said, his eyes narrowing, “and yet you disrupted our peaceful demonstration and pretended to take up our cause. Why? Was this some lofty American form of mockery?”

“No —
God,
no,” he said, raising his hands in alarm. “Of
course
not. It’s just that — I — well, I was sort of overcome by your, I guess you’d call it
persistence.
” He loosened his tie with his finger and unbuttoned his collar; he was beginning to sweat. “I’ve seen you out there, every day, for — three, four weeks, however long it’s been. I guess you just finally — you know —
got
to me.”
Yeah,
he was thinking;
oh, yeah, Ivan, you really got to me, but good.
He folded his hands before him to try to hide the swelling in his crotch.

Ivan stared at him a little while longer. Then his body seemed to relax; the tension in his posture eased. “If that’s so,” he said, “then you are a very unusual man. It’s been difficult to get anyone to take us seriously.”

Lionel shrugged. “I’m sorry about that.”

Suddenly he extended his hand. Lionel, who for a moment thought he was preparing to hit him, responded by jumping back a full six inches in alarm. “I’m pleased to make your acquaintance,” he said with a dazzling smile. “My name is Emil Apostal.”

Relief washed over Lionel. “Pleased to meet
you
; I’m Lionel Frank.” He took the large, hairy hand that had been offered to him, and made an effort to give it his butchest shake.

Too butch, apparently. Emil gave a little yelp and said, “Mr. Frank, you are a
vigorous
man.”

“Oh, Christ, I’m sorry. Jesus, I didn’t mean to be such an ape. I just wanted to make a good impression.”

“You’ve made a fine impression.” With his uninjured hand he slapped Lionel on the back, and Lionel felt something snap in his chest; was this really a gesture of forgiveness, or was Emil just getting revenge? “You are a friend of Transylvania,” Emil continued, “and therefore a friend of ours.”

Lionel checked out the other demonstrators, who looked not entirely on board with Emil’s largeness of spirit. Still, if being Emil’s friend meant being Transylvania’s friend too, than Lionel was all over Transylvania.

“Perhaps you don’t know this,” Emil said, “but Transylvania
was
independent once. Many centuries back, to be sure, and for only a brief period, but it proved that we
can
be a nation. Still, we have spent so many years since being passed around by imperialist states like Turkey and Germany and Austria and Hungary, and finally Romania, that the world considers us nothing but a territory. We believe this must
change,
Mr. Frank. For a time, after the fall of Ceausescu, we thought that freedom for all Romanians would follow, but this hasn’t happened. Romania has no Lech Walesa, no Vaçlav Havel; there is no great man to lead us into a new, free society. So in Romania today, it has ended up that we have Ceausescuism without Ceausescu. That is why we Transylvanians have said, Enough! Let Romania founder, we will go our
own
way, rebuild our
own
state, and we will astonish the world!” Emil’s eyes lit up as he warmed to his theme, and Lionel, whose hard-on was now at full mast, was so stirred by this handsome patriot that he would have thrown himself before a lit cannon if it meant guaranteeing Transylvanian sovereignty.

The detective reappeared. “You joes are in luck,” she said as she unlocked the door. “The old guy you beat on decided not to press charges. Matter of fact, he seems to have slipped out of the station when we weren’t looking, and no one’s got any idea where he went.”

Emil snorted in derision. “He’s probably a fugitive from justice himself, the filthy Marxist.”

“So,” the detective continued, swinging open the cell door, “there’s just the little matter of disturbing the peace. If you’ve got bail bond cards, or post a cash bail, you can go, and we’ll notify you about your hearing date.”

The Transylvanians started filing out of the cell, most of them digging into their pockets to fetch their wallets. Only Emil stood rooted to the spot, a look of terror on his face.

“What’s wrong?” Lionel asked.

“I have no bail bond card, I have no cash.”

Lionel, who had already gotten out his checkbook, nodded in the direction of the other demonstrators. “Surely your pals can pitch in to help you out.”

He shook his head. “It’s a matter of pride, Mr. Frank. I couldn’t ask them. I am the newest of them — I’ve been in the country for less than a year. I couldn’t possibly disgrace myself by — by —” He gulped down the rest of the sentence. Lionel realized with astonishment that he was on the verge of crying.

He looked adoringly at Emil’s quivering lips and high cheekbones, and thought,
The things I do for love!
“Well,” he said, flipping open his checkbook and taking his pen from his breast pocket, “you don’t have to worry about disgracing yourself to
me,
so why not let me lend you what you need?”
Lend, shmend,
he thought;
I’ll never see this money again.

Emil looked at him, his face registering an almost volcanic mixture of astonishment and emotion. Then he did in fact burst into tears, and reached over to enfolded Lionel in a great big bear hug.

Worth it!
thought Lionel as his shoulder grew soggy with Emil’s sobs.
Even if bail is a hundred thousand bucks, worth it, worth it, worth it!