Dancing Aztecs (34 page)

Jerry brought himself with an effort back to the issue at hand. “Listen, Angela. Before I forget what's going on at this end, copy down an address.”

“All right I have paper and pencil right here.”

“Terrific Broadway and 39th Street in Manhattan. There's a phone booth on the northwest corner. That's where I am right now.”

“All right.”

“I don't have my car any more, and I'm going to need wheels. I'm following the girl with the statue, and it's getting tricky.”

“You want a car brought to you there?”

“I want the car brought here,” Jerry told her, “but I probably won't be here when it shows up. So the next time I land, I'll call this phone booth and say where the car should be brought. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“Maybe Teresa can bring it.”

“She has kids,” Angela said. “I'll bring you my wagon.”

“You gotta stay on the phone there.”

“Mandy can take care of any calls that come in.”

“Mandy!”

“You can't believe how reliable she is, Jerry.”

“I can't believe any of it,” Jerry said. And then, looking up, he saw Bobbi Harwood emerging from the building, coming this way, pushing her harp. “Here she comes! Get here as quick as you can!” And he hung up.

He waited in the booth till she'd pushed the harp on by, then set off in her wake. She walked half a block down Broadway, then abruptly turned, stepped off the curb, and flagged an immediate cab. Jerry, on the hop, ran frantically out into the street, and there wasn't a bit of yellow anywhere to be seen. Damn! Hell! Crap! Corruption!

Fortunately, it isn't that easy to get a harp in to a cab, so Jerry had more time than he might have. With the help of her cabbie, Bobbi Harwood finally loaded the thing in back, and then she sat up front with the driver, and off they went.

By which time, another cab had turned the corner a block away and stopped next to the wildly semaphoring Jerry. Leaping into it, he yelled, “Follow that cab!”

It was a fleet taxi (“V.S. Goth Corp,” it said on the door), so a thick Plexiglas partition was between Jerry and the driver, with a small grillwork at one corner to permit speech and a small movable trough in the middle to permit payment. This system protects drivers from being mugged, but it also means none of them can ever hear anything the first time. Therefore, “What?” yelled the driver.

The girl's cab was moving away. The light would change and Jerry would be stuck here, with this idot.
“Follow that cab!”

The driver, a short squat man with a mouth made for cigars, turned to give Jerry an appreciative grin through the Plexiglas. “Yeah, yeah, that's a good one,” he said. “Where you wanna go?”

“Straight,” Jerry told him. “Straight down Broadway.”

“Fine,” said the cabbie. He threw the meter, and headed straight down Broadway.

Unfortunately, Jerry's cabbie was more of a hustler than Bobbi's cabbie, and down around Herald Square Jerry suddenly found himself in the lead. “Hey!” he yelled, through the little grill. “Take it easy, will ya?”

“We're doing fine, we're doing fine,” the cabbie assured him.

“Slow down!”
Jerry yelled. Casting a quick look back, he saw they had now gained half a block on their quarry.

“I tell you what, Mac,” the cabbie was saying, in the necessary loud voice, “I drive my cab, and you do what you do.”

“Slow down! I got a heart condition!”

The cabbie took his hands off the wheel in order to lift them in a gesture of despair; everything happens to
me
. Fortunately, he also took his foot off the gas, and they slowed down. Also fortunately, Bobbi's cab didn't make any turns for the next few blocks, and by 29th Street was out front again, where it belonged.

Un
fortunately, Jerry's cabbie did nothing in moderation, and they were now moving so slowly that pedestrians were surging ahead. They were coming dangerously near the end of the traffic-light cycle—the one-way avenues have staggered traffic lights, set for a steady speed Of approximately twenty-five miles an hour—and if they got stuck at a light while Bobbi's cab continued with the greens, he'd lose her forever.
“Not
THAT
slow!”
Jerry yelled.

The cabbie gave him a very dirty look, through the Plexiglas. “You know you're a pain in the ass,” he said. “You know that, don't you?”

“Don't get a red light,” Jerry warned him.

They went through the 27th Street light on the yellow, but after that the cabbie put on a little more speed, and they kept Bobbi's cab in view, and then Jerry saw it make the illegal left-right at 23rd Street.

Here's the situation. The avenues run parallel, north and south, but Broadway comes down at an angle from northwest to southeast, and where it crosses the avenues it make the big squares and circles of Manhattan; Columbus Circle at Eighth Avenue, Times Square at Seventh Avenue, Herald Square at Sixth Avenue, Union Square where Fourth Avenue turns into Park Avenue South. Below Columbus Circle Broadway is one-way southbound, and so is Fifth Avenue, so at Madison Square, where Broadway crosses Fifth, the Fifth Avenue traffic is given the choice of staying on Fifth or switching to Broadway. But the Broadway traffic is forced to switch over to Fifth, and the only way a driver can stay on Broadway is to make a quick left-right jog at 23rd Street, which is illegal because no left turn is permitted at 23rd Street. However, every cabbie in Manhattan makes that illegal turn at least once a week, because time is money and nobody wants to lose the cycle of green lights. Therefore, Bobbi's cab did the 23rd Street jog.

“Stay on Broadway!” Jerry yelled.

“Yeah yeah,” the cabbie said. But he didn't keep to the left.

“At Twenty-third! At Twenty-third!”

“It's against the law,” said the cabbie, as another cab made the illegal turn in front of them. This bastard, because he was sore at Jerry, was planning to drive down to 22nd Street, make the left
there
, wait at the red light, then make the right, go one goddam block to another red light, waste two full minutes, and get them onto the
next
green light cycle, two minutes behind Bobbi and hopelessly lost.

No way.
“Do it!”
screamed Jerry, pounding on the Plexiglas with his fists.
“Do it, you son of a bitch!”

New York cabdrivers are argumentative, but they aren't crazy. One look at Jerry's face through the Plexiglas, and this cabbie hunched his head down into his shoulders and made the left-right jog.

And so they proceeded, down to Union Square, where Bobbi's cab kept to the right and Jerry's cabbie, following Jerry's screamed orders, did likewise. Down past 14th Street now on a two-way street called University Place, and then a right turn on 9th Street, and Bobbi's cab stopped at one of the big postwar apartment buildings where the northern part of Greenwich Village used to be, before NYU bought up all the land and turned it into Indianapolis.

“Stop at the corner!” Jerry yelled.

“Gladly,” said the cabbie.

When they stopped at the corner, Jerry stuck a five-dollar bill in the pay trough, and looked behind him while waiting for his change. Bobbi was pushing the harp into the apartment building.

The cabbie, making change, took the opportunity to point at the intersection in front of them and shout, “That's Fifth Avenue there! Remember all that stink about stay on Broadway? That's
Fifth Avenue!”

Of course. And Bobbi's cabbie had come down Broadway because 9th Street is one-way and he had to be at the other end of the block to get to the address Bobbi wanted. Which was too complicated an explanation to give this cabbie even if he deserved it, which he didn't, so Jerry told him, “You drive your cab, and I'll do what I do.”

The cabbie shoved the change in the pay trough and gave Jerry an angry smile. “You're an asshole,” he said. “You know that, don't you?”

Jerry took his change, and ostentatiously dropped a nickel tip in the trough. “Here,” he said. “Go get your head examined.”

IN PARTNERSHIP …

PARTNERSHIP AGREEMENT

1.  The purpose of this document is the formation of a limited partnership to be known as The Statue Company. The purpose of The Statue Company is the furtherance of educational and charitable projects in the Western Hemisphere.

2.  There are three partners in The Statue Company. These are:

1)  Victor Krassmeier

2)  August Corella

3)  The Open Sports Committee

A)  Though the membership of the Open Sports Committee numbers sixteen, for the purposes of this document it is limited to three individuals, who share one-third the voting power of the partnership. These individuals are:

  i) Oscar Russell Green

 ii) Robert Beemiss

iii) Professor Charles S. Harwood

3.  The Statue Company does not anticipate revenues.

4.  Should The Statue Company, despite anticipation, obtain revenues, these will be distributed as follows:

A) The first three hundred thousand dollars to the Open Sports Committee, for equal disbursement among its members.

B) A fourth hundred thousand to be set aside for payments to other non-named members of the Open Sports Committee, should these become necessary.

C) All remaining revenues, after reasonable expenses, to be divided between the remaining partners.

5.  Pursuant to Section 4, Sub B, if the Open Sports Committee does not require the fourth hundred thousand for payments to other non-named members, such money shall be returned to the assets of the partnership and distributed in accordance with Section 4, Sub C.

6.  Further pursuant to Section 4, Sub B, the Open Sports Committee, speaking for both present and absent members, holds its fellow partners in The Statue Company harmless from any and all demands over and above the fourth hundred thousand.

7.  There is no general partner.

8.  There have been no investments made in The Statue Company, nor does the partnership own or control anything of value, nor has the partnership any assets, nor does The Statue Company intend to engage in any business or activity controlled, licensed, or regulated by the City of New York, the State of New York, or the United States of America.

9.  The laws of the State of New York shall apply to this partnership.

10. This partnership may be terminated, either orally or in writing, by any partner at any time.

“We aren't getting anywhere,” Beemiss said.

“That has been obvious,” Krassmeier told him, “for some time.”

Once the squabbling had resolved itself at last into agreement, if not into mutual admiration, the partners had repaired to this neat but anonymous spare office at Winkle, Krassmeier, Stone & Sledge, containing two desks with telephones. Chuck Harwood sat interminably at one of these, trying to find his wife, who had one of the statues but who was, for some reason, not immediately available. (Chuck was reticent and bad-tempered on that topic.) So Chuck was calling everybody he knew, starting with the black males and going on to the white males and finishing with the white females, while Bud and Oscar alternated at the other phone, trying to find out what was doing with the rest of the statues.

There were sixteen to be accounted for. The four held by Chuck, Oscar, Bud, and Wylie Cheshire had already been eliminated, while those held by David Fayley and Kenny Spang were apparently still in the running and were now safe from the Manelli gang. (Krassmeier had already arranged for a messenger to pick them up, and Bud had phoned the weeping David to let him know the messenger would be coming by. As with all messengers, this one was now late.)

Which left ten statues to deal with, only ten. Confidently expecting the inventory to take almost no time at all, Oscar and Bud settled themselves at the desk and started phoning. Then Mandy Addleford failed to answer her phone. So did Dorothy Moorwood. So did Felicity Tower and Jenny Kendall and Eddie Ross. Ben Cohen, Leroy Pinkham, and Marshall Thumble were also not at home, but at least with those three it was possible to leave a message with a relative: “Please tell him to call just as
soon
as he gets in.”

As for F. Xavier White, Oscar called that number and the conversation went like this:

“Savior White's Fu-
ner
-eal Home, Mrs. White speaking.”

“Hello, Fissy?” (Oscar was one of the few people on earth, not including F. Xavier himself, who could get away with calling Maleficent by that nickname.)

“Who's there?”

“It's Oscar, Fissy. Oscar Russell Green.”

“Oh, Oscar! Oscar, I've just undergone a miracle!”

“You have?”

“I'm reborn, Oscar!”

“In a funeral parlor?”

“I've received a sign, Oscar!”

“That's wonderful, Fissy.”

“I'm a new woman now! Everything's gone be different!”

“Fissy, uh, about that statue—”

“How'd
you
know?”

“Huh?”

“You're part of the sign! My God, my God, I
do
believe! Oh, I
will
diet, I
will
be good to my man, I will
not
remain in the coils and toils of Doctor Eramus Cornflower. I will
not
permit any Theodora Nice to—”

“Fissy? That statue I gave—”

“Praise the Lord!”

“Do you still have it, Fissy?”

“I'll treasure that statue all my born days!”

“You've still got it. And it's in good shape?”

“Wonderful. 'Cept for the head, naturally.”

“The head?”

“It's gone! Oscar, the head is
gone!
Isn't that wonderful?”

“Wonderful,” Oscar agreed, and hung up, and told the others, “The wrong one.”

After that, while Chuck went on with his morose telephoning and Bud and Oscar went back to dialing numbers that didn't answer, Krassmeier sat on the leather sofa to one side, sneering contemptuously at everybody like some road-show Sidney Greenstreet, and Corella with his stinking cigar marched back and forth like an expectant father who isn't entirely sure he
is
the father. Until, during a pause in the calling, the phone rang and it was Leroy Pinkham for Oscar. Him and Buhbuh, they just got back from the baddest funeral in the history of the
world
. Leroy wanted to talk about the funeral, but Oscar finally dragged him around to the subject of statues, and Leroy told him a couple of plainclothes cops had come around and taken his and Buhbuh's both, and busted them. Two more down.