Crowned Heads (55 page)

“It’s Gethsemane time, gang.” Arco made a clownish leer, pantomiming a microphone and speaking into it like Walter Cronkite. “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. We are here high atop Golgotha, overlooking the holy city of Jerusalem. Let me tell you, it’s quite a hike up here, folks, but the view is magnificent. If you look to your left you can see the Wailing Wall, and just over there is Pilate, washing his hands. As you see, he’s using Camay, and afterward, Vaseline Intensive Care Lotion. And just there is dear Mary Magdalene, on a coffeebreak with the Virgin Mary. And here, you lucky people, on the cross, you see before you Mary’s son, and here’s the son’s naughty drag, for which we will not cast lots.” He tossed up the draperies which had been stripped from Willie’s body, leaving him naked, except for his undershorts, white tricot boxers, with a coronet embroidered on the thigh; his papal crest.

“How’s it going, old-timer?” Arco asked good-naturedly, stepping fully into the light.

Willie shook his head, croaked out four words. “Get me down now.”

“Not yet”

“Wha’ we waiting for?”

“For you to tell.”

“Tell. Tell what?”

“Where’s the safe, Willie?”

“Safe …” He remembered something about the safe.

“The mirror’s in it,” Arco explained. “We want it.”

Willie’s shoulders shook as he laughed again. “Mirror? You … want … mirror?”

“We got a guy. He’ll pay five g’s for it.”

“Worth more.”

“Doesn’t matter—it’s enough to get us where we’re going.”

“Hula skirts? Tropical shores? Won’t get you to Redondo Beach. Arms are going to sleep.”

Arco’s voice was soft, gentle even. “Where is it, Willie?”

He closed his eyes; lights danced behind the lids. He rested his head back. “Can’t tell you.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“Suit yourself.”

“Willie, you can come down or stay up there, but if you come down you’ve got to tell first.”

“Mean … I have a choice?”

“That’s what I mean. What it’s all about—everything’s a choice. Up or down.”

“Up.”

“Suit yourself.”

“Metaphor?”

“Hm?”

“This … one of your … living metaphors?”

“If you like.”

“I don’t.” He watched the figure below. “Significance escapes me. Who’m I s’posed to be? Jesus? That what you have in mind?”

“Whatever turns you on, babe.”

Willie choked, gagged, hiccupped.

“He needs a drink,” Judee said.

“Get him one,” Arco ordered. Judee clopped away on her wooden shoes, Arco following.

Bill paused in the doorway. “You better tell him, Willie.”

Willie chuckled; the joke was outrageous. He shook his head again.

Bill said, “He’s going to hurt you, Willie.” He, too, went away.

Judee came back with a glass of water and ice. She dragged over a bench to stand on and held the glass to his lips. He drank greedily. She rubbed an ice cube on his forehead.

“Wha’s happening?” he asked her.

She shrugged. “I’m pretty ripped, sweetie. You better do what he says, though.” Willie was laughing again; she didn’t understand why. He started to tell her, then decided not to. He emptied the glass and she took it away. He held his breath as she had suggested, and the hiccups subsided. He felt more sober. He closed his eyes, wondering how long they would leave him there before they let him down. His wrists hurt, the circulation was stopping in his legs. His vision blurred, then focused, blurred again. Beyond the light, the uprights of the door seemed to bend and waver like reflections on water. Someone moved in front of the fireplace, flames leaping behind. Arco was carrying something to the fireplace. Willie blinked, felt a chill when awareness seeped in on his dazed state.

“Bad cess to you, Arco,” he called defiantly through the open doorway.

Arco was dropping manuscript pages, one by one, onto the burning logs.

“You can stop it, Willie,” Arco returned.

Willie clamped his mouth shut, staring unbelievingly as page after page was fed to the flames. Then Arco began dumping in whole sections; smoke poured out into the room.

“Ge’Italiani sono grandi amanti della bellezza, non è vero?”
Willie called.

“Vero.”
Arco’s hand moved methodically, transferring the pages from the crook of his arm to the fire.

“Liar!”

“Sì,
caro.
” The destruction went on.

What did it matter? Willie thought. A lot of silly stories. It was true, he could stop it, could be taken down. He could tell them where the safe was, let them have the mirror, get them out of the house. His eye went from the flames to the gleaming portrait. “Mama,” he said. He did not smile back at her. Out of the vague swarm of thoughts that came to him—and there were few he seemed able to hold on to—there was one: in all his life he had never risked anything, chanced anything, dared anything. Bee had made the decisions, forced the hands, seen to the arrangements, ruled the roost. He had been a kind of wind-up doll with a little steel key in his back: bow, move, twirl, sing, dance, amuse. Hardly a life; hardly a man. He sorrowed for both, but not for his autobiography. Salad Days, when he was young and green. He was older, wiser, tireder now.

He would not tell.

In they went, page after page. Judee dragged up a chair and sat watching, giggling moronically as she recited, “‘Little Willie in the best of sashes fell in the fire and was burnt to ashes …’” Willie closed his eyes, but could not keep them shut; the sight was too fascinating. The ruin of the manuscript took time, the hearth blazed, flames roared in the chimney. Then at last it was done. Arco’s hands were empty. He dusted them in a neat, decisive gesture, and looked across the room to the cross.

“‘Later on the room grew chilly, but nobody thought to poke up Willie,’” Arco said. He did not laugh. Willie eyed him silently as he came and stood in the doorway. “You ready to tell now?” Willie closed his eyes again, wilted against the cross. Arco left.

When Willie reopened his eyes he could scarcely believe the sight that presented itself. “No—no—” A cry escaped him before he could prevent it.

“What about this?” Arco was asking sardonically. “Is this a fake, too? This another of your jokes?”

“They’re her
ashes
!”

Arco had lifted the gold urn from the mantel and was cradling it in one arm; in his other hand was the lid, which he wrenched away. It rolled, then fell flat with diminishing metallic reverberations on the tiles. “Maybe it’s just cigar ashes. Maybe it’s not Mama at all.” He brought forth a handful of gray matter and held it palm up before him. Drifting currents lifted a small puff and they sifted to the floor. Then he tossed the rest in a flurry up in the air.

“In God’s name—it’s my mother!”

Arco was scooping out the ashes with his fingers and letting them sift across the yellow velvet of a chair, across the Marion Davies sofas, across the coffee table. Then he stepped to Judee and drew an ashy X on her forehead and made the sign of the cross.

“
Pox vobiscum.
That’s Latin, Willie,” he called, advancing back to the chapel. “Where’s it at? Tell, or there won’t be anything left of Mama come the dawn.”

Willie shook his head. “No.”

“It’s your funeral. Sorry, I mean your mother’s. To Bee or not to Bee, all that crap.” He came in through the gate and stood at the altar, where he tilted the urn, letting the ashes pour from the inverted mouth. When the vessel was empty, he raised it over his head and hurled it against the stained-glass window. The lead mullions gave way, and the glass shattered in an explosion of color. Willie moaned and averted his head.

“Watch me, Willie.” Arco’s face was paler than ever as he stood below, fists planted defiantly on his hips. Then an arm shot out, he pointed upward, the blood surging back into his face in a new outburst of fury. “Look, you sick prick, I know you. I
know
you! I’ve seen you everywhere. In every city I’ve been in I’ve seen you and your stinking kind, with your goddamn fancy cars and your goddamn fancy jewelry and your goddamn fancy women. You’ve got it all—you think. But you listen to me—you’re not going to keep it all, you hear? None of you people!”

“We earned it—”

Arco raised his hand and slammed it down on the altar. “I don’t care who earned what! You’ve got it! You got your share and you got my share and his and hers”—pointing at Judee and Bill—“and we want ours. That’s what we came for. To get ours.”

“Then … it wasn’t just … ? You had it all figured out.”

“I got everything figured out.” He moved closer; his words spilled out in a harsh rush. “Listen, old man, I’ll do things to you. I’ll frighten you. I’ll hurt you. You understand? Hear me?
Hear me
?”

On the cross, Willie’s body trembled. Spittle had gathered in the corners of his mouth. He favored Arco with a thin, mocking smile, then, in an effort at lightness, said, “Somebody bring me a drink. Scotch, not too much ice.”

“Sure thing.” Arco stalked rapidly from the room, going first to the bar for the Scotch bottle, then to the table for Willie’s glass. “Here’s ice, Willie.” He picked up one of the crystal cubes and dropped it in the glass, then another. He poured Scotch over them and held it out. “Here’s to crime, Willie.” He raised the glass over the table, then released his fingers. The heavy double-old-fashioned glass slipped, struck the tabletop, and shattered. He circled the table, taking up one crystal object after another and letting it drop—obelisks, eggs, animals, cigarette box, ashtrays. He turned and grabbed up another glass and sent it crashing against one of the mirrored screens. The cockatoo screamed in its cage, the dogs scampered under the piano.

“Yes, Willie?”

“No.”

Arco whirled, rushed to the bar, and with a violent gesture swept the remaining glasses from the shelves, then the liquor bottles, which he seized by their necks and threw one after the other, crashing, out onto the floor. Next the refrigerator door was hurled open and with two or three quick movements he had cleared the shelves of champagne bottles. He tore the photographs from the wall and scaled them out into the room, where they fell helter-skelter. Then he was among them, tearing out the signed pictures from under the shattered glass and throwing them into the fire.

“Everything, Willie, everything goes.”

No reply.

Lamps went over, and tables, chairs, the remaining mirrored screen striking the floor with a crash; jagged shards flew in all directions. Arco scrambled around until he had retrieved several of the crystal eggs, and assuming a pitcher’s stance, he lobbed them at the fish tanks. The glass panels shattered, water sluiced forth in cascades, carrying rainbows of fish, flopping, gasping, dying on the tiles. The dogs ran to investigate, then retreated as the rest of the aquariums broke. When they were empty, Arco dragged them from their shelves and heaved them through the panes of the sliding doors. Wind sucked the curtains out in pale gauzy flourishes.

The cockatoo had not stopped screaming. Arco lunged at the birdcage and with a vicious yank tore it from its stand. The bird flapped wildly, its wings striking the wires, then, as the door was held open, it flew in crazed circles around the room until it blundered through a broken window and sailed low across the pool, and up into a palmetto tree.

“Tell.”

Arco’s breath came in frenzied pants as he stood in the chapel doorway, looking up at Willie. There was no answer. Turning, he rushed to the wall and snatched down one of the sabers and began attacking the sofa pillows, the sharp edge slicing through the fabric and sending feathers up in clouds. Then, brandishing it aloft, he began hacking at the chandelier, ducking his head after each swipe, as the crystal prisms rained around him. He had signaled to Bill, who took down the other saber, and together they ran about the room, slashing at everything in sight, coming at last to the cathedral figures at the fireplace. With a wild swing of his blade, Bill struck one of the heads, spattering chips in all directions.

“Plaster?” Arco looked across the room. “Jesus, what a fake.”

“Movie magic,” Willie muttered.

They toppled the statues, and half crouched over them, wielding their blades with alternate strokes, like woodsmen, chopping; one of the heads rolled onto the floor. Its fellow soon followed, then, in turn, the arms and legs, until the dismembered trunks lay piled one on the other like a pair of decapitated corpses amid a pile of broken chips, over which hung a small cloud of plaster dust.

Exhausted, Arco flung aside his saber and threw himself into a chair, gasping with exploded passion, clutching his stomach. Bill stumbled toward the chapel, dragging his saber, the point scraping on the tiles. He stared up, dazed, at Willie on the cross, the same sheepish but crooked smile puffing up his cheeks and making his eyes small. With his uneven teeth and chopped hair, there was something macabre, dangerous, about him; utterly unlike the simple, abashed cowboy who had arrived at the door—how many hours ago? He lurched into the chapel and lolled over the altar railing, his mouth slack and wet.

“You better tell now, Willie. He’s damn mad.” Willie closed his eyes, heard only the voice. “He’s gonna hurt you, pardner. You don’t know him when he’s mad…. That out there”—he gestured haphazardly at the vandalized room—“heck, that’s nothin’.”

Willie opened his eyes and stared out at the wreckage, his gaze moving across the sea of broken glass, the toppled cage, the watery floor where fish were still expiring in nervous agitation among sodden pillow feathers. A back draft in the chimney blew ashes up in a black gust, and they settled about the room, mixing with the grayer ones that were the remains of Beetrice Marsh.

“It … doesn’t matter,” he said weakly. “Give me something … to drink … ?”

“No.” Bill went away, leaving Willie alone in the chapel. He could see their heads together in connivance beyond the back of the sofa. Someone had turned the records over: Mantovani and
Music for a Rainy Night
; appropriate. In its fetters of black tape and plastic cord his body began trembling, shaking uncontrollably. The circulation had left his arms, his legs, and he could feel his heart throbbing; nothing would quiet it. Sharp pains shot through his head. He looked at the empty place on the mantel, and the portrait above.