The Last Manly Man (16 page)

“I'm a journalist, and my girlfriend here is a model,” I said, gesturing to Jason.

“Oh sure,” the cabbie said.

The cab smelled vaguely of previous occupants and their sins—a trace of Giorgio, a vague hint of vomit, and someone had broken a city bylaw by puffing on a cigar in this cab sometime in the last twenty-four hours. I swear I'm not making this up: My sense of smell is heightened when I'm ovulating—if not my sense of smell, then certainly my imagination. I rolled down a window and smelled the outside city for a while.

When we stopped at the hotel, the cabbie turned around and looked me up and down. “I was right! I recognize you. I've seen you on Channel Thirty-five, in one of those escort commercials, old commercial too, from the eighties.”

“Have it your own way,” I said.

When we got out of the cab, we looked both ways to make sure there were no thugs around. Jason, his hand on his thigh, followed me into the Plaza. I paid for the room, leaving one card-key at the desk for Charlotte, and we went upstairs to wait.

“You seem very natural in women's clothes, Jason, if you don't mind me saying so,” I said, parking my tired old bones on one of the double beds, while Jason staked out the other.

“Lots of practice. For my gender studies thesis in college, I dressed as a woman once a week and wrote about how differently people treated me, good and bad.”

“Yeah, what did you find?”

“There are advantages and disadvantages,” he said. “People are quicker to help you, especially men, but men look at you differently. Like you're prey. People expect more and less from you. You're not expected to be as strong, but you're expected to be gentler, nicer. You get talked down to a lot too. What surprised me was how much more patronizing or rude other women were toward me when I was dressed as a woman. And how few people, men or women, could tell I was a man.”

“You're small-boned and have fine features, it works for you. But you're starting to get a five o'clock shadow.”

There was a knock on the door. Charlotte was punctual. Jason and I looked at each other.

“I'll get it,” I said.

When I opened the door and the woman saw me, she said, “I must have made a mistake.”

“No mistake,” I said, yanking her into the room.

“Oh wait,” she said, looking first at me then at Jason in drag. “I don't do lesbian stuff.”

“You're not here for sex,” I said. “My name is Robin Hudson. I want to talk to you about Luc Bondir. You may know him as Frenchie.…”

“No way. I don't want to be mixed up in this,” she said, turning to go. I blocked her way.

Jason had his gun out. Charlotte whipped out a gun of her own.

“Put the guns away,” I said. “Look, Charlotte, we won't involve you in this. Just answer some questions. Lives are at stake.”

“You wearing a wire?”

“No.”

“Prove it. Strip down to your underwear. Do it, or I'm not talking.”

Jason and I looked at each other.

“We'd better do it,” I said.

When we were down to our underthings and panty hose, Charlotte picked up our clothes and threw them into a corner.

“You're a guy,” she said to Jason, and, indeed, in his underwear he made a distinctly male impression.

“Yeah.”

“Whatever. Cool. Is there a key for that minibar?” she asked.

“Yeah. Here. Help yourself,” I said.

“Frenchie was a client,” she said, opening a mini bottle of vodka and downing it straight. “I saw him once a week at least, when he came into the city for the weekend. He sometimes spent the whole night with me, so I knew he had some bucks.”

“Who did he work for?”

“I don't know. Some asshole he had to work for, for some reason. I think it had to do with immigration. That's all I knew. By the time he got to talking about his problems, I was drunk, I wasn't listening too close.”

“What problems?” I asked.

“You know, he talked about his problems a lot, but not real specifically. He was a real depressive, Frenchie. I know he was a scientist, and for some reason he couldn't go back to France. He hated his boss. He had limited freedom, had to work almost all the time.”

“When did you see him last?”

“Sunday night. He was with his buddy Huf. We were going to get a girl for Huf, but Huf was agitated, just wanted to walk around, said he'd meet Frenchie in the morning.”

“Huf?”

“Frenchie called him Huf, or Harris sometimes.”

Hufnagel.

“What did Huf look like?”

“Tall guy, older, brown hair, wore a hat. Clung to that hat like it was made of gold.”

“I bet that's the man in the hat,” I said. “Was he a scientist too?”

“I don't know. I guess so. He worked with Frenchie.”

“Anything different about Frenchie that night?” Jason interjected.

“Well, he had great drugs.”

“What kind of drugs?”

“This stuff you inhale. Not like coke. You don't snort it. You just smell it for a few minutes. It was kind of like ecstasy. I mean, it made you feel good, but it wasn't heavy like X. It crept up on you. Wish I could get more. It made things so pleasant. Will this be cash or credit card?” she asked.

I handed her my Visa, wondering how I was going to expense three hundred dollars an hour for a hooker.

“You look familiar,” she said to me. “Did we used to work together?”

“Where have you worked?” I asked.

“Platinum Escorts, Very Best Escorts, A-One Escorts.…”

“No.”

“I coulda sworn,” she said.

Just before she walked out the door, she turned to me and said, “You know, I think Frenchie called that drug something like Adam.”

“Atom?”

“Adam, like, Adam and Eve.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

As soon as she shut the door, Jason and I looked at each other and said, at the same time, “Adam!”

“A drug. An illicit drug. Made from bonobo ape glands or something,” I theorized.

“No, it would have to be some kind of secretion, otherwise they'd have to keep replenishing the supply of bonobos,” Jason said.

“You have access to a computer?” I asked Jason as we dressed. I did not put the scarf and hat back on.

“A safe one? Yeah.”

“And the Internet?”

“Of course.”

“Find out what you can about Harris Hufnagel, print it out, and I'll beep you later so we can meet and go over it.”

“Where are you going?”

“I have a date,” I said. “Where will you go?”

“The hospice. I can use a computer there, and I'll be close to Dewey.”

“Okay. Beep me if it's
urgent,
” I said.

Before I went downstairs to the Oak Room to meet Gus, I brushed my hair, touched up my makeup, and psyched myself out of work mode and into sex mode. It was hard; I was a
tad
distracted. But—carpe diem—who knew when Gus would be back this way again. Successful men didn't have to sacrifice sexual release for work, even if they were married and in the middle of a crisis. Why should I?

Just thinking about him gave me a dangerous ache, the kind you have to suppress when you're nonmonogamous and having a casual relationship, so you don't get your heart broken. Suppress, and channel those feelings into pure lust. Gus was just a “chapter in the memoirs” for me, as I was for him, that was understood. You don't expect it to last forever, you just see it as a great experience to be had with a great person, set entirely in a fictional present, until that theoretical True Love comes along.

I was running a bit late, and Gus was already waiting for me in the Oak Room. He looked nice, dressed up in a nice suit as befits a newlywed, his brown hair neatly combed in an earnest, Sunday school way. He was such a boy in so many ways, though he was only a few years younger than me. It was endearing.

There was a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket by the table and two glasses. When Gus saw me coming, he stood, pulled out my chair, and gave me the Look.

“Is this your bride?” The waiter beamed, pouring the champagne.

“Yes, this is Lola,” said Gus. We kissed, and I sat down.

“I've heard all about you,” the waiter said. “It's very romantic, meeting on a mountain-climbing expedition in Peru.”

“Uh, yes, isn't it?”

“And him carrying you down the mountain to a hospital after you succumbed to altitude sickness.”

“Oh yeah, he's my hero!” I said. The lies weren't disconcerting, but the waiter's demeanor was. Almost everyone in New York had become surprisingly friendly, even trusting, and I still wasn't used to it.

“Enjoy your stay at the Plaza. And I hope your mother is better soon,” the waiter said. “It's amazing she can still play the piano.”

“What's wrong with my mother?” I asked Gus after the waiter was out of earshot. The truth is, my mother is a schizophrenic whose key delusion is that she is an heir to the British throne, but she manages quite well when she's taking her medication. She doesn't play piano. In any event, I had never told Gus this because it was the truth.

“She got her arm caught in a combine on the wheat farm she runs,” he said. “Now she has a hook for a hand. Naturally, this has affected her playing the piano every Saturday night at the over-sixties single dance, but last week she played the dance for the first time since losing her arm.”

“How?”

“She taught herself to play the left-handed parts with her foot. Those extraordinarily long toes of hers came in handy. She plays with her right hand and her left foot.”

“Good for Mom! And how is your family?”

“My mom's over her late husband's death, and the salesmen are starting to call again,” he said.

According to Gus, when he was a kid, his divorced, working mother was too tired to go out and meet men at the end of the day, so she devised a plan to lure men to the house. She filled out coupons asking for information about various products, enthusiastically checking the box that said “Yes, I want a salesman to call.” It was quite brilliant, really. She brought hardworking men with jobs to her. When they thought they were manipulating her, she was really manipulating them, sizing them up, picking up clues about their characters, if they were any good at their jobs, how they interacted with Gus and his younger brother, what their ambitions were. Promising candidates were invited back to try to close the deal, though she rarely bought anything they were selling. This way, she weeded out the “nerds, losers, married men, assholes, and child molesters,” Gus said. Among the perks were the product demonstrations. Vacuum cleaner salesmen cleaned her living room for her, cookware salesmen made her and the kids dinner, blender salesmen made the kids milk shakes.

According to Gus, this was how she found Gus's late-stepdad, an encyclopedia-salesman-turned-cannery-owner.

“Did she ever date a Morton Man?” I asked.

“Yeah, after the aluminum siding salesman and before the insurance agent,” he said. He picked up the champagne glass and looked at me through the bubbles. “Hey, to us. To our life together, the house by the seashore and all our little redheaded children to come.”

We clinked glasses lightly, and looked into each other's eyes. He has very soulful eyes, dark and sweet. All I wanted to do was get naked and rub up against him. This was nice. Being with Gus made me calm and energized at the same time, if you know what I mean. It was like being at the eye of a hurricane. This is how, um, mature I had become. I could look at Gus and say, Yeah, I could fall in love with you, but it doesn't seem a wise course of action in this case. And then I could keep myself from falling in love with him through an elaborate tissue of funny lies.

“We can have the rest of the champagne sent upstairs, right?” I said.

My beeper went off. It was from Jason. “Come here. Seven is on his way to get you,” the message said. Seven, I recalled, was Blue Baker.

“Damn. I have to go,” I said.

“Damn,” Gus said. “Why?”

I struggled to think of a worthy lie to tell him and came up empty, so I just told him the truth. He'd never believe it anyway.

“Between you and me, someone has kidnapped a dozen of the horniest chimps on earth, for medical experimentation, and I've stumbled into it. There's been a murder and last night I got accosted by fistfighting thugs and ended up being rescued by a mobile pot dealer who belongs to a shadowy organization that is plotting to save the planet.”

“Oh. You really have to go?”

“Yeah. Sorry.”

“Will you come by my room later?”

“I don't know how long I'll be and I have to be up early tomorrow to go golfing with some eccentric moguls. How long will you be in town?”

“I don't know. I have an audi—I mean, I have to see a patient on Monday afternoon here. Brain surgery. After that, I'm not sure.”

“I'll come by tomorrow evening sometime then, okay?”

“Yeah, okay. If you really have to go …”

“I do. Trust me.”

“Want me to walk you out?”

“No, please don't,” I said. “Finish the champagne.”

Before I went out to the front of the Plaza to wait for Blue, I put the scarf, hat, and sunglasses on while Gus looked on, puzzled.

“Sunglasses after dark?” he said.

“Disguise,” I said. “Not pretension.”

He stood and gave me a big swoop of a kiss. God, I hated to leave him.

“Blue, this better be important, because I just left a really great guy in the Oak Room,” I said, bending down the sides of my big hat to hop into a late-model gray Caddy.

“If he's worth anything, he'll wait for you,” Blue said.

“Unfortunately, men have to wait and wait and wait for me,” I said. “I am too fucking busy. And when I do have a man around he gives me trouble most of the time. What is it with you guys anyway?”