The War Against the Assholes (14 page)

20

T
he Black Dog. That was the name of the bar Vincent worked at. On Amsterdam, near a synagogue with the facade of a shut, fortified armory. I remembered the name because Simon Canary once asked Hob about getting his brother to let him in there. Hob told him that the bar was a shithole, and there were plenty of shitholes in New York happily serving the underage that wouldn't require his owing his brother a favor. Such actions impeded his popularity. That's how life is. Follow your principles and you will suffer. As it turned out Simon wouldn't have needed any help getting into the Black Dog. I walked through the doors in the middle of a Saturday, carrying a school-emblemed gym bag, and nobody asked me for identification. There was in fact nobody there except Vincent. Standing behind the bar in a black suit and golden tie. Drinking from a white mug with the words
WORLD'S GREATEST
printed on one side and a large, canine-shaped chunk missing from the lip. Flies: also present. They came in for the warmth. “Prove it,” sang whoever was singing on the jukebox. A guitar arpeggio followed. “Oh come on,” Vincent said when he saw me. I held up my hand. “I have an idea,” I said. “Wood, seriously, your ideas are terrible, all right,” he said. I let him finish. I explained. He didn't scoff. He didn't say anything at first. “We should at least check, right,” I said, “even if I didn't find anything the first time.” He took another slurp. “What do you expect me to find that you didn't,” said Vincent. “He's your brother,” I said. “Don't fucking remind me,” he said. The jukebox emitted its underearthly blue-green glow. Vincent clicked his tongue. I said nothing. The singer continued to sing. Half yowl, half pure. The light the exact shade, I realized, of the sea serpents in the whiskey carboys. “We need to be quick about this,” he said. Started moving. Shut off the lights.

His apartment: bare. A bed. A lamp. A tall mirror canted against one wall. Four bookcases. Crammed. The shelves bowed under the weight. Four windows looked down onto the street. You could see the sign for the Black Dog. “You have an easy commute,” I said. “Do you not understand what quick means,” said Vincent. He was already pacing. Foot routes worn into the uncarpeted floor. I dumped the contents of Hob's locker. The bio textbook landed faceup, the grasshopper staring. I wish the world could survive without insects. They make human rapacity seem gentle and moderate. “All right,” said Vincent. He lifted his brother's empty coat. His knife flashed. That same short curved knife he'd used to collect the cigarette moss from the water-lapped basement wall. He drew it with frightening speed. He cut out the coat's lining from the torso, using the knife's point. Wrist tense. Shook the coat. Nothing. He removed the sleeves and opened them. The scarf he examined and tossed away. The textbooks he cut up with the same cool-handed, orderly haste: spread them, cut the glue or thread that held the pages in, run the blade under the endpapers, shake out the bundles of pages. “These are called,” he said, lifting a bundle, “signatures, by the way, you ignorant ape.” I'd never heard the word used in that sense before. “I remember this book with the katydid,” he said as he sliced the bio book's binding, “or maybe she didn't. Fucking Katy.” The grasshopper stared, hunger­ing, blank.

His cutting drew and held my gaze. He did it in a professional-­seeming trance, eyes nearly closed. When he had reduced the books, the coat, and the scarf to neat rags, he said: “Well, that was a total failure. Is there anything else?” I almost didn't give him the case. I almost failed to mention it. Because it had come from Hob's nameless ex-boyfriend. Because it was empty. Which I told Vincent. “Nothing in it,” I said. He popped the latch and eyed the metal interior. “Nothing, huh,” he said. “I mean just look,” I said. “You do not know my brother very well, Wood,” said Vincent. He stared at the metal interior again and jabbed his thumbnail at the top inside cover. The plating behind the obsidian plaque. “There we go,” he said. A panel had popped open. Inside, I saw a yellow-white square of paper. “What,” said Vincent. He had the paper or parchment or vellum open, close to his eyes, nose against its surface. His breathing intensified. He inhaled its—I presume—scent. “What,” he said. Low and whispery now. In reverence. “Michael Wood,” he said. “What,” I said. “No, shut up and look,” he said.

The paper was no longer empty. From its outer edges, lines sped toward the center, making precise ninety-degree turns, dividing, ending. It was hypnotic. When the lines had finished moving, I saw a square room. One of its outer walls had a section of dots and dashes. Directly opposite was a solid black line. A window. A door. At the middle point between them a large, ornate letter
M
. “Vincent Callahan,” said Vincent. A
V
appeared. “Eileen Chao,” said Vincent. The view shifted, zoomed out: the paper showed two clean-lined rectangles now, sharing an edge. In the upper right corner of the second, an
E
. “She's your neighbor, right,” I said. “Your deductive skills have improved,” said Vincent, “I didn't even know any of these things still existed. Charthouse is going to shit himself.” It was a floor plan. The type you see in real estate ads. “Hob said he got this case from a guy he knew,” said Vincent, “no way. Not possible. Do you know what this is? This is like a museum piece. Dr. Henry Alfred motherfucking Kissinger.”

The paper changed. The lines faded, then raced, straight and steady, across the ivory surface once more. They formed a large, irregular rectangle, subdivided into smaller boxes: an apartment or an office. A black
H
, in elegant, spiky handwriting, appeared in one of the smaller boxes. “He must be taking a shit or jerking off,” said Vincent, “he's been in the bathroom forever. At least I assume it's a bathroom.” “Who's Henry Kissinger,” I said. “I remember the instruction at Cyprian's being poor, but that's ridiculous,” said Vincent. The black
H
floated from the small room into a larger room, one that shared a border with the empty space around the diagram, and paused before a dashed-and-dotted section of the line representing the wall. You could tell right away what we were seeing: a human being looking out a window. Around us lay the torn strips of paper and cloth that had once been Hob's possessions. “He loved that scarf,” said Vincent.

Mappa mundi.
That's what the folded parchment was called. They had first been used during the early Renaissance, when the technique for creating them was mastered by the monk Udo of Brescia, a calli­grapher and theurge in the employ of the library at the Abbazia di San Colombo in Bobbio, Italy. So Vincent told me.
Mappae mundi
required, he said, the labor of a hundred days to make, during which the carto­grapher had to remain awake. Otherwise the map would stay merely an empty sheet of paper. This prolonged insomnia carried with it the risk of insanity or death, so the cartographer also had to be a past master in the use of medical herbs and the spells and formulae governing the body in order to survive it. Cartographers could make a sufficient fortune from creating one
mappa
to live on for the rest of their lives. The initiator of the art, the loyal Udo, had made not one but six, according to Vincent, and made them only for the greater glory of the church and his public god. Not for money. You could observe the location and precise surroundings of anyone or any place whose name you knew. You could ask it even more than that. The true powers of the
mappa
, Vincent said, had never yet been exhausted. Ask and be answered. It required nothing of you. No effort. Just a word, that's all. It struck me as unfair. “This is how they live, all the time,” said Vincent as we walked down Amsterdam, grimacing into the wind, “do you understand me?”

The gritty wind drew tears. They careened down my cheeks. “No one's ever been able to explain, to my satisfaction at least,” Vincent said, “why they keep trying to stamp out any opposing tradition. Look at what they have. Why do they care if a few jackasses are stubborn enough to work their wills without the aid of stuff like this?” He had a point. I had one too. “Why take him? Couldn't they just have read his mind or used an incantation or something? I mean about the map.” “Hob is very good at hiding things,” said Vincent, “in case you hadn't noticed.” “People who are good at hiding things don't use lockers,” I said. “Hidden in plain sight. Obscurity through transparency. And the only reason you were able to find this at all, I'd guess, is that it was his like contingency plan for you or me or someone to do so,” said Vincent. “Why did he lie, though,” I said, “in the first place.” “I assume, and I'm just speculating here,” said Vincent, “that he didn't want to tell Alabama because she would have straight-up murdered him.” “And that case wasn't his or a gift or whatever,” I said. “Exactly, Holmes,” said Vincent. “So how did he know that Quinn had it,” I said. You never get over catechism. “Hob has light fingers. He has tremendous instincts. People talk to him when they should shut up,” said Vincent, “simple as that. It's the weak-little-boy act he does. Put yourself in his place. Can you honestly say you wouldn't have given in to temptation? If you came into possession of that info? Especially given things are the way they are? That's a big no. That's a big fuck no.” A crow was tracking us, high overhead. Cawing and circling. “You see,” said Vincent, “that's what I'm talking about.” “Tyranny of the majority,” I said. “It doesn't have to be that way.” Vincent's mouth crimped and wryed. Disgust formed his primary visible emotion. That's how it goes with idealists. This I've since learned. I nodded, trying to look wise. “Why are you making that face,” said Vincent.

He called people as we walked. A true pro. An apartment broker, I thought. He had an impressive phone voice: he dropped his regular reedy voice about half an octave and injected loud, confident joviality into it. He spoke to a coworker whom he got to cover his shift. He spoke to a woman named Kavitha, crowing her name, out of an appointment with whom he had to wriggle. “Sorry, I know I've been a flake,” he said, gnawing a thumbnail, “I know. I know it's ridiculous. I know. But then again that's why you like me so much, is that I'm unpredictable.” More gnawing. He pumped a fist in silent celebration when she bought (I assumed) his excuse, which was that he had to go to the dentist. I was impressed. His life possessed a complexity mine innately lacked. When you're not yet twenty you venerate those older than you but under thirty as paragons of autonomy. “The master at work,” said Vincent. He made a third call. I realized it was Charthouse as soon as Vincent started speaking: all that fake timbre and depth was gone from his voice and he sounded as he had when he spoke to me the first night we met. He said he'd found it. Found what it was. He explained. Waited. Then he told Charthouse I had helped, for a change. “Yeah, we'll meet you there,” said Vincent, “I think bringing some's a good idea, you never know. Okay. Okay. In a bit.” He hung up. He exhaled. He said, voice steady and cold, “Hats off to the great masters.” We kept walking. Vincent kept smoking. “There's a chance that idiot might survive, assuming they didn't kill him already,” said Vincent. “Why would they kill him,” I said. “It's true that what he took is a value proposition for them,” said Vincent, “but you never can tell when you're dealing with Nazis.” “You mean metaphorically, right,” I said. I remembered Mr. Stone's tales of Hitler and Sebottendorf. “
Metaphorically
's a big word,” said Vincent.

There.
Turned out to be a concrete staircase leading upward and inward from Cathedral Parkway onto a dead hill in the park. Stained steps, no balustrades. Charthouse waited at the bottom. Face stony. He wore a heel-reaching leather coat and a glazed bush hat, and he carried his cane and a white plastic bag. The sky had gone leaden. Snow speckled the steps, their rectilinear, scarred path. “How did Hob end up with it,” he said. No preface. No preamble. “He used to rob my mother's purse. He used to rob my father's wallet,” said Vincent, “and he wouldn't even spend the money. He would show me. So draw your own conclusions.” Dry thunder. “Let's get to it,” said Charthouse. We climbed the stairs. His cane clattering. The silver badger's yellow eyes seemed alight. I knew the stairs. I knew the hill. At the top lay the plateau where I had smoked weed for the first time. With Simon Canary. He called it the Magic Mountain. Stone benches. An empty malt liquor bottle, into the neck of which an optimist had inserted a black, dead twig. A view out over the Meer, which is the name of the lake in the park's northeast corner. Islands of gray-white ice drifting. Dead high grass. Dead-glinting foil shards. Charthouse tossed me the grocery bag. It contained, I saw, three shrink-wrapped packages: ground beef, tripe, and deep-hued, gleaming liver. “Only the finest,” said Vincent. “Looks tasty,” I said. “Dump them out,” he said. I did. The maxi-pad-like oblongs of paper and Styrofoam they package meat with clung to my freezing fingers. Watery blood dripped. “Is this a sacrifice,” I said. “Only of eleven American dollars,” said Charthouse.

The meat sat on the cold stone. It looked human. Vulnerable. The way eyes glisten. You can see their fragility. Charthouse took up a position at the head of the stairs, cane readied. Vincent megaphoned his hands around his mouth and started screaming at the top of his lungs: “Verner Potash is a bearded bitch who blows goats.” Other imprecations. Charthouse watched the lead-gray skies. A couple of kids started up the stairs and noticed us. Made for us. I lifted my fists. They looked weak, thin, necky, their ball caps cocked at an angle. Charthouse stared at them. Swinging his cane. The ferrule struck each of his white sneakers: ticktock. “What you looking at,” said one. His colleague spat. Vincent kept shouting. “Damn, man,” said the spitter, “why he yelling like that.” Charthouse yanked on the badger head. The cane's body divided. A shrill, single note. Metal glinted in the heavy light. “That nigga got a sword cane,” said the spitter, who wasn't black, to his colleague, who was. The kids got this glazed look in their eyes. They adjusted their ball caps: both Yankees fans. They headed back down the stairs, their hissing laughter echoing. “Faggots,” the observant one called. Charthouse kept the point of his blade aloft till they reached the street. I was impressed. I hadn't figured Charthouse for a swordcane user. That requires a lot of inner fortitude. The wind rose. More snow fell. Vincent kept on with his stream of obscenities. “Alabama's going to meet us later,” said Charthouse. “I didn't say anything about Alabama,” I said. “Don't insult my intelligence, Wood,” said Charthouse. “You fat cunt, we are going to murder you and eat your heart, do you hear me,” said Vincent. “Is he just blowing off steam now,” I said. “They're like cabs,” said Charthouse, “they're everywhere until you need one.”