Agnes Among the Gargoyles (36 page)

   "It doesn't suit you. Look what you've done to your bread."

   Syker has tied his semolina roll in a knot.

   Mrs. Syker tells Agnes how Syker's paid its floorwalkers more than any other department store, and thus it was the dream of every New York balcony boy to head up a department at Syker's.

   "Balcony boy?" Agnes has never heard the term.

   "You know. Like our waiter," says Mrs. Syker. She makes a limp-wristed gesture. "There was a time he would have been in bedjackets."

   "Oh, God, so would I," says Agnes dreamily.

   "You're the first girl Bob has brought around who's even heard of the store," sniffs Mrs. Syker.

   When Syker leaves the table to call the office, his mother gets down to business. She looks Agnes in the eyes and says, "There's nothing between you and my son, is there, dear."

   Agnes hesitates. "I'm afraid not."

   "I knew it was too good to be true," says Mrs. Syker, sipping her iced tea. "I worry about him so much. He's such a difficult soul! So like his father, but his father was fortunate enough to have me."

   "The more you pressure him, the more he'll buck," says Agnes. "That's how I am with my mother."

   "Oh yes, everything has to be his idea," she says. "He's never gotten over the fact that I was the one who thought of having him."

   "...No one knows where he was during all the excitement," says Mrs. Onassis. "He claimed to be out having a soda at the time, but I never believed that...."

   Drinking a Coke in the Texas School Book Depository?

   Syker returns. He is grumbling about having to go to Tokyo. Mrs. Syker shakes her head at the hopelessness of it all.

   "I hope that's a case of Parkinson's Disease you're developing, Mother," says her son acidly. "Did you ladies discuss anything interesting while I was gone?"

   "We talked about you," says Mrs. Syker.

   "Your mother was just telling me how much like your father you are," says Agnes helpfully.

   Syker laughs with malice. "My mother spent a lifetime of marriage straightening out my poor father. She had him just about set when he died. You know what killed him? Exhaustion and irritation."

   "Robert, that will be enough."

   "That's what it says on the death certificate, Mother. Exhaustion and irritation."

   Mrs. Syker turns to Agnes. "Where were we, my dear?"

   "You were telling me about the store. I was about to ask you about the sign."

   "The sign?"

   "Yes, the beautiful sign over the main entrance.
Syker's
in gorgeous script. The loop on the
k
looked like the Eiffel Tower. My mother always told me that if the loop wasn't lit at night, it means there was a fresh shipment of Paris copies on the racks. Was she right?"

   "No, no," says Mrs. Syker. She is enchanted by the story. "That sign gave us trouble for years. Where would she get such an idea?"

   "Folklore, I guess."

   For the moment, Mrs. Syker is happy. She leans over to Agnes. "Would you like to come for a stroll through the old place?"

   Agnes drinks her wine. "Is it allowed?"

   "Of course. The store is only closed temporarily for renovations."

   Some renovations, thinks Agnes. Fifteen years worth. The poor woman is deluded.

   "Just hold on," says Syker. "Nobody's going anywhere. It's too dangerous. That rat-infested hovel should have been torn down years ago."

   "You'll love seeing the old place, Agnes," says Mrs. Syker.

   Her son laughs. "You're not listening. I'm forbidding it."

   "Of course you are," says Mrs. Syker. "Is your car outside? We'll be more comfortable in that."

   Agnes and Mrs. Syker get up to leave.

   "Remember," says Syker, shaking a finger at them. "I forbid it."

   "Whatever you say, Robert."

   "...She's not the sort of person I'd choose to spend time with," says Mrs. Onassis, slipping on her famous oversized sunglasses. "It's all she talks about: macaroni this and macaroni that...."

   Not daughter Caroline!

   The driver opens the limo for them. Mrs. Syker announces their destination. They glide off toward Union Square.

   Mrs. Syker wrinkles her nose. "What's that smell? Is that pot?"

   "I think it's incense," says Agnes.

   They pull up in front of the old department store. The driver escorts them to the front door, which is barred by a riot gate. All the windows of Syker's have been boarded up. In the shadow of the old, sad emporium sit odd-lot jobbers and record shops blaring salsa music.

   The two women step inside. Grayson lowers the gate, and they are plunged into darkness. Mrs. Syker throws a knife switch on the wall, lighting a network of standing work lamps.

   "Oh, my," says Agnes.

   The store looks wonderful. There isn't a stick of merchandise to be seen, but everything else is intact: the fixtures and counters, the partitions dividing the floors into alcoves, the cash registers, the racks upon which purses and scarves once hung. Even the standing clawfoot ashtrays are still filled with white sand. Syker's looks as though it has been closed not for fifteen years but maybe a week.

   Agnes stammers, "It's just the way I remember."

   Mrs. Syker's cheeks puff with pride. "We're ready to reopen, once the renovations are done."

   They tour the store. It is so well preserved that Agnes half-expects a crowd of shoppers to come clattering down one of the wooden escalators. The old woman keeps up running commentary. They pass empty racks, poles, hangers—bones without flesh. Agnes gets the strange feeling that Mrs. Syker can see the merchandise in her mind.

   On the fourth floor, Mrs. Syker cocks an ear. "Do you hear that?"

   Agnes hears nothing and says so.

   "This way," commands Mrs. Syker. They pass through Ladies Outerwear, and Agnes glimpses a weird hydra-like rack that once held muffs.

   Muffs. Agnes had muffs. God, she feels old. She wants a muff again.

   Now Agnes can hear the sound of running water that alarmed Mrs. Syker. It is coming from the cathedral-ceilinged ladies room. The pink tile is just as Agnes remembers it. And the leather couches are still there!

   Someone has gone into the last stall and smashed a hole in the wall. A broken pipe sticks out; a sluice of water pours forth. The water has eaten away at the mortar and plaster. It drains through a crack, pouring down to the lower floors.

   The damage is not extensive. The old store was built to last. But Mrs. Syker is depressed. On the mezzanine, she opens a window and removes a loose board and gazes out into the street. Men stand around aimlessly, drinking and listening to the radio. A homeless woman pushes her belongings in a baby carriage. Anyone looking up from the street would find it an eerie sight: a faded woman in a netted hat looking out from a long-shuttered store.

   "I'm afraid the renovations will take longer than I thought," says Mrs. Syker.

   Agnes's heart breaks for the old woman. She joins her at the window.

   "I guess," says Agnes.

   Mrs. Syker catches Agnes's patronizing tone and gives her a withering look.

   "I don't mean in
here,"
says Mrs. Syker. "A broken pipe—what's that? I'm talking about out there." She points out the window at the scene below. "That's where the renovations are needed, my dear. When that's done, then we'll reopen."

People will talk of serial killers of the past.

   Where were you when they caught Sam? Remember how the sketch looked nothing like him? Remember Kallinger, the Shoemaker? What were the last words of the Laughing Man? Remember? He was wearing one of those dynamite harnesses and it went off unexpectedly. Don't tell me—I'll get it. Can you name Sam's victims? Well, there were Volante and Moskowitz, but they're the easy ones....

   When talk turns to the Minotaur, atrocities tallied, victims remembered, there are always two who are, for some reason, forgotten: Olga Jenke and Katrina Knudson, two Swedish flight attendants murdered in their room at the Wegeman Grand Central Plaza Hotel. Their deaths don't seem to enter the public consciousness; perhaps the citizenry is saturated with Minotaur data.

   "There's no security in these modern hotels," wails Agnes. "They're too complicated. Too many entrances. In the old days, you had to get past a desk clerk."

   The victims' pictures are in the paper. Their faces are similar. They have the same angular features, same spiky nose. One blond, one brunette. They could be sisters.

   The
Graphic
spares no gruesome details. The Minotaur apparently got into the room by posing as a room service waiter. There was beach mud caked all over the place "He was in the room with the women for at least two hours," says an unnamed police source. "Then he was in there by himself for another hour." He did everything depraved he could think of; when Agnes reads what he did with the mints the chambermaid had placed on the pillows she wants to throw up. The women must have been glad to die. The Minotaur dismembered the corpses and stacked the body parts on the room service trolley. He cut out both women's hearts and put them in the toilet tank.

To the NYPD

Re: Two dead stews

Gentlemen:

This is the Minotaur speaking.

   I love Swedish stewardesses, obviously. Vavavavoom. These two were hot.

   I put their hearts in the toilet to conserve water. We don't inherit the world from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.

   I spent a lot of time in the room with them. I felt sort of aimless. I was walking around, picking things up, a nail file here, a heating coil there, wondering what to do next. Nothing grabbed me. And then it hit me. I'm tired. I'm ready to stop. I've had enough.

   It's not fun anymore. It's become a job.

   What will I do when I retire? Keep bees, perhaps. I will read the great books, finally, of Michner and LeCarre and Clavell. Maybe I will finally figure out why WW I started. Maybe I will read the Gnostic gospels. Have you read them? Fascinating. Gospels according to every fringe character you can think of. The Gospel of the Woman at the Well. The Account of the Fellow Who Sold the Wise Men the Myrrh. Maybe Galilee was like Hollywood, only instead of a screenplay, everybody was hawking a gospel.

   Have you noticed that my spelling has improved? M

   Sure it's a coincidence, but that paragraph about Hollywood and the Gnostic Gospels sends a chill down Agnes's back.

   Time is up. The last words of the Laughing Man were, "This detonator is sensitive like a motherfucker, and I have no problem with exp—

"If I'd known that all I had to do was kiss a bum, we'd have gotten together a long time ago," says Ivan.

   His dream of a lifetime has come true. He and Sarah are dating, or going steady, or whatever it is people of that age do.

   To Agnes, their relationship seems doomed. Nether party understands the passions of the other. Sarah has little success embracing the ethos of goofiness. She stays up with Ivan until all hours watching bad movies (with Agnes tossing and turning all the while—the walls in Agnes's apartment are thick but somehow the dialogue of the Bowery Boys seems to penetrate) but he has to remind her periodically why she is doing such things. A sense of the absurd has never been her strong suit. They laugh together while watching the Three Stooges, but then one day Agnes catches her watching it by herself when Ivan isn't around and she just looks desperately puzzled, like a student who thought she understood the material in class and is proven wrong when it comes time for homework.

   "And Larry's his favorite Stooge," she tells Agnes, completely at a loss.

   Sarah is not a subtle person. Ivan's self-conscious world of devotion and scorn, his stance that everything is to be mocked, including his mockery, just throws her. "I don't even know if he likes this stuff," she says, showing Agnes one of his graphic novels.

   "Graphic novel my ass," says Agnes. "This is a big comic book."

   Ivan is no more successful at becoming like Sarah. He nods attentively when Sarah talks to him about the followers of Inkatha, a Zulu political movement skirmishing with the African National Congress, but his eyes are glassy. Sarah talks about a woman's right to choose, and suddenly Ivan has opinions on the question of when life begins that don't involve corpses sewn together and galvanized during electrical storms. He has an awareness of the handicapped that goes somewhat beyond humpbacked dwarfs.

   "Do you think they're having sex?" she asks Tommy.

   "Of course they are."

   "I don't know. I just can't see it."

   "They're fucking," says Tommy. "Believe me."

   "You just think everybody's fucking but you," says Agnes.

   Agnes waits for a reply that never comes. Tommy goes to sleep. He doesn't trouble to reassure Agnes with a loving remark, or an embrace.

   Agnes senses that she is playing a dangerous game.

   Sarah has spruced up Ivan's nerdwear, replacing his genuine 1980s nerdwear with faux-1950s nerdwear. She has him in eyeglasses with heavy black frames that make him look like a lathe operator.

   Agnes can't help slipping a bug in Sarah's ear. "You can't change anybody, you know. Dear Abby knows that, and she don't know shit."

   "We're doing just fine," says Sarah, put out by Agnes's suggestion. "Dear Abby also says that if it ain't broke, don't fix it."