Agnes Among the Gargoyles (47 page)

   "I saw that fat fuck hanging around last night," sputters the Great Man. "Jesus fuckin' H. Chinaman Christ—"

   "Four minutes," says a technician.

   "We've got to do something," says Agnes.

   Wegeman seems unfocused. "I can't win. I can't even lose with dignity. I'll rot in prison now, all for his fucking fat carcass."

   Agnes grabs the Great Man by the shoulders. "Ron! Ron! What should we do?"

   He looks up blankly, catfish-lips pursed. "Do?"

   Agnes rears back and slaps him across the face. She realizes instantly that she has re-injured her hairline fracture.

   Wegeman's features seem to come alive.

   "Ah fuuuuugggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhccccccccccccccck!!!!!!"

   It is the greatest
fuck
of the Great Man's career. Chest heaving, eyes popping, face contorted like an astronaut battling g-forces, he lifts himself out of his wheelchair. His near-atrophied legs buckle, but he presses on. Through sheer strength of will, he forces them to support his weight. With a rolling, stiff-legged gait, as though he were wearing a pair of leg splints, he takes off for the hotel, screaming and cursing all the way. Camera shutters click furiously. Duck the monkey thinks it's all a game, and falls right into step beside his master, mimicking him perfectly.

   "It's a miracle," someone proclaims.

   Wegeman disappears into the Palace.

   "Two minutes!"

   The tension is unbearable. The cameras pick up the Great Man on the staircase, then running down the hall toward the bathroom. The monkey is right there with him. He rousts the Reverend and the nurse. All three run down the corridor, toward the stairs.

   Agnes leaves the bunker. The anxiety is too much. She goes out into the air. She walks slowly toward the hotel, as though that would speed their progress.

   "Thirty seconds!"

   The onlookers gasp. Wegeman and Reverend Gunn and the nurse appear at the employees' entrance. The Reverend has his pants on, but the young woman still has no top. All three run as far from the Palace as they can before detonation. When time zero arrives, the escaping trio hits the dirt. There is a roar and a great
whoosh!,
and the Palace of Versailles seems to lose the will to stand erect, collapsing in on itself. A cloud of dirt and rubble is thrown skyward, and Agnes is covered with a fine spray of debris. Sirens sound in the distance.

   Agnes is among the crowd that runs to the aid of Wegeman and Reverend Gunn and the nurse. Someone throws a blanket over the poor half-naked woman. Wegeman, dazed, struggles to his feet.

   "The monkey," he says. "Where's the monkey?"

   "Take it easy, Ron."

   "Where's the fucking monkey? Duck! Duck!"

   "He's delirious," someone murmurs.

   "No, find the monkey," says someone else.

   Blood from a cut in his forehead streams down the Great Man's face. He tries to catch his breath. "When we got back to the first floor, I froze. I couldn't remember which way to go. Duck showed us. He led the way to the stairs. He saved our lives."

   Wegeman calls out in vain for his monkey.

  "I thought he was right behind us, Mr. Wegeman," says a grateful and chagrined Lenten Gunn.

   The security cameras caught it all. Wegeman is led back to the bunker for a playback. On the tape, the Great Man is seen to lose his bearings. He starts left, goes right, stops. Duck takes charge, leading the three humans to the employee staircase. Duck points and chatters; Wegeman and Gunn and the nurse push past him. But the monkey doesn't follow. He goes instead to the casino. He jumps up and down with joy at having the place to himself. He bounds onto the craps table, beats his chest like a gorilla, and starts throwing the bones, yelling and leaping between rolls.

   The screen goes dark.

   "Another victim of addiction," says the Great Man.

   It takes the police a good long while to sort out the story. The city was not notified of the blasting, and no permit was issued. The Special Security officers are rounded up and placed in a police van. Wegeman and Tony Ho are led away in handcuffs. It is the beginning of the end for the Great Man. The awesome Wegeman octopus has been dealt a mortal wound. By the following spring, all of his major holdings—One Wegeman Plaza, Wegeman Tower, Ronco Airlines, WEGE, WEGE-AM and WEGE-FM, the Czaki Corporation, the Audubon Ballroom Consortium, the Hotel Scheherazade, Offisquare, the Trade Mart, the Greenpoint Avenue Development Project, Wynex Plastics, the RoMad and MadRo Corporations, Sarah's Smile Music Publishing, a hundred thousand apartment buildings in all five boroughs and even his lovely wife, Madelaine—all will have been wrested from him.

   "It's really a shame about Weege," says the mayor.

   What bits of Duck the Monkey can be found are buried in the new mausoleum, which was meant for him all along.

"It's nothing less than a fairy tale," says Wayne.

    "So to speak," says Syker.

   Sallies of this sort are not helping to dissipate the cloud of tension hovering over the table of four at Palestrina. Mrs. Syker was promised lunch with her son and Agnes; she got that and, in the person of Syker, a lot more.

   "We've got our whole lives ahead of us now," says Syker, buttering his cilantro bread.

   Mrs. Syker, in a peacock blue jacket with matching pillbox, pearls and nets, the works, struggles to find something appropriate to say. Agnes's heart goes out to her. In breaking the momentous news about his own sexuality, Robert made no compromises. He announced his homosexuality before the salads with walnut vinaigrette were on the table.

   "You don't seem happy for us," he says to her.

   "It's not that. It's just a shock."

   "It shouldn't be. We're out there, Mother."

   "I see that."

   Robert starts talking about his and Wayne's impending trip to Curacao. Wayne has friends with a house there; he and Robert will be gone a month.

   "What about your job?" asks Mrs. Syker.

   "Hmmph. Why do you think I'm going? Things are in an absolute mess."

   "Your boss needs you."

   "What he needs is a good criminal lawyer. They're going to charge him with about a thousand counts of reckless endangerment and acting the depraved indifference and violating building codes and conspiracy to defraud his investors. All his licenses are bound to be pulled, just watch. The banks are already running away. It's a mess."

   "A month is a long time," says Mrs. Syker. "I'll miss you."

   "We'll write every day," says Wayne. "That's what you do there—sit on the veranda and write long, florid letters about nothing. It's marvelous. Do you know St. Anna Bay, Mrs. Syker?"

   "No," she says to Wayne. "I'm sure it's lovely. Please do write me. And don't sign his name if he doesn't contribute anything."

   "I don't know if I told you," says Wayne. "My first boyfriend in New York was one of your floorwalkers. In better rainwear."

   "What was his name?"

   "Charles Shea."

   She thinks for a moment. "A tall man, with glasses?"

   "Yes."

   "I do remember him. He always reminded me of—now what sort of bird was that?"

   "A crane," says Wayne. "Everyone said that."

   "Oh, he was such a nice man," says Mrs. Syker. "We used to move him up to Santa's Village at Christmas because he was so good with the children."

   In the ladies room, Agnes says, "Are you all right?"

   "Yes, dear. The shock is already wearing off."

"It's not what you wanted, is it?"

   "Not by a country mile. But as you get older you get used to disappointment. Nothing turns out as you want it to. Life just gets worse and worse. Look at poor Wayne. He used to be with Charles Shea. Now he's with my son."

Bezel and Spock and Mr. Parker and Faure go over their plan one final time. The timings are set, or as set as they can possibly be. Bezel has to explain to the kid how split-second timing in enterprises of this sort is a myth; life is sometimes early and sometimes late, and criminal activities, if they are not to be detected, must be woven into the fabric of life. "Our biggest enemy is coffee," says Bezel, and tells of previous schemes of his thwarted by a security guard or bank teller's satisfying of a caffeine craving at an unexpected time. You can't plan for that sort of thing, says Bezel. Fortunately, not too many people smoke anymore, so unscheduled cigarette breaks aren't really a problem.

   The four conspirators sit in Spock's house. It is late afternoon. A cheerful fire burns in the grate.

   "One of the things I have learned from painful experience," says Bezel, "is that people worry too much about fingerprints. Gloves are mandatory, too be sure, but there are hundreds of ways for a man to be identified. We can think of ourselves as nothing more than collections of distinguishing characteristics."

   "You sound like the Frenchman," moans the kid.

   Bezel ignores him. "I must take precautions, for example, to hide my missing finger."

   He stands up. He throws the notes and sketches and blueprints—everything they have reviewed that evening—into the fireplace.

   "The four of us have something in common," he says. "We can be identified by our voices. I, of course, am English, and even after what seems like a lifetime in this country my origins are apparent. Faure here is obviously Quebecois. My friend Mr. Parker, thoroughly American though he is, speaks the identifiable patios of the New York black man. And as for my young Martian friend here, the removal of his larynx has fucked up his speech beyond belief."

   The burning blueprints sizzle and pop.

  "Tomorrow is the big night. I recommend strongly that no one speak during the operation," says Bezel. "To get myself into the proper frame of mind, I plan to stop talking as of right now." He checks his watch. "Five-fifty PM."

   "Really, Bezel," says the kid.

   Bezel is as good as his word. He says nothing for the rest of the night. He maintains his silence all the next morning and afternoon, throughout the final preparations. The kid tries to goad him into speaking. Bezel refuses. The kid tries everything in his adolescent arsenal of annoying behaviors. Bezel would like to break his silence to lecture the kid on the importance of self-discipline, but that in itself would be a surrender, and Bezel doesn't like to lose, particularly to kids.

Agnes's gown for No Diamonds Please takes Tommy's breath away. There is a bustier arrangement that cinches and elevates her breasts; the dress is slit to the thigh. The dress conforms to her awkwardnesses and physical imperfections, and she almost forgets that she has it on. Her movements are stylish and graceful.

   It should be quite an evening. Many luminaries will be there. What, Agnes wonders, will she say to them? She imagines herself alone in the bathroom with Liz Taylor: "Did you worry about having kissed Rock Hudson in
The Mirror
Cracked?"
An aside to Martina Navratilova: "I'm not gay, but if I were I'd go for you. I think you're the cutest thing." The Secretary General of the U.N. is scheduled to attend. "I sort of lost track of the U.N. after U Thant. Whatever happened to old U?"

   Tommy emerges from Agnes's bathroom in tails.

   "That's beautiful, Tommy. Just the right casual touch."

   "There was no tie in the bag," he explains.

   "You don't need one. You can carry it off. Wear a cardigan."

   "What am I supposed to do?"

   "Don't panic."

  Agnes picks up the telephone and dials directory assistance. She gets the number of Schuyler Formalwear, on Lexington Avenue and 125th Street. They're open and they have white ties.

   "It's getting late," Agnes points out. "By the time we get downtown, everything will be closed. So we'd better take care of this up here."

   She loves nothing better than showing off her urban resourcefulness.

   She has nothing to wear over her dress. She puts on a baseball jacket that Sarah left behind, and hopes what she always hopes when she looks odd, that she looks hip.

   The expedition to Schuyler's is a success. They get there not a moment too soon: in five days, Schuyler's will close its doors permanently.

   Tommy hasn't been on the subway in years. He rides like a tourist. He commits the boner of wanting to sit in the corner seats, which have been ceded to the homeless. He cranes his neck to see the name of every stop.

   The train empties as they move downtown. Agnes puts her head on Tommy's shoulder. She certainly was lucky to have found him. How lonely most New Yorkers seem. She dozes off, and when she wakes up the train is sitting in the City Hall station—the last stop.

   Agnes jumps to her feet. "Come on."

   "What?"

   "This is it."

   The doors close in their faces.

   "I thought you said the name of the stop was Brooklyn Bridge," says Tommy. "The columns say City Hall."

   "They changed it," says Agnes. "I forgot."

   "So what happens now? A tour of the railroad yards? I wouldn't mind," he says, embracing her from behind. "We could bag this party and make out."

   "No such luck, my dear. There's a turnaround loop."

   The train pulls into the tunnel and executes a screeching turn. It moves slowly, slowly, then stops suddenly. Agnes and Tommy look out the window at the eerie sight of what looks like a ghost station.