East of Suez (27 page)

There were six cars in the taxi rank, one behind the other. A customer had just hired the front car, and, when I arrived, the other drivers were pushing by hand all of the other cars ahead in the rank so as not to waste the gas. I took the top car so that the remaining drivers could push all over again. I assumed it was for the sake of economy that they did this. Maybe they weren’t allowed to use fuel except on bona fide customers? Who knows?

My taxi got me to the nightclub where Clay worked. But, of course, he wouldn’t be due for several hours. When I talked to the Chinese manager, he protected his musician with unhelpful talk calculated to fend off bill collectors and writs. I wondered whether he thought I looked like a local cop. I ducked into a movie house next to the nightclub to kill a few hours, but I felt stupid watching
Chinatown
in Chinatown, when I’d seen it several times before, years ago, at home. At first I tried to sleep, but was followed through my dreams by a man with a bandaged nose. The second feature was a nearlocal effort. Made in India, I mean. The music and then the wonderful face of the entertainer caught me and held on to me for the next hour or so. Without understanding a word of what she said or sang, I was in her pocket. She had a look that went right through me. I hadn’t felt like this about a movie star since as a thirteen-year-old I fell for a young Hollywood starlet, called Fleurette in the movie, playing a bareback rider in a circus. I’ve forgotten her name and am surprised that the memory has survived my recent battering.

I was then subjected to about twenty minutes of advertisements, some of which were as crude as the earliest TV ads. But many were as sophisticated as those on TV back home. I suppose that’s being condescending. Maybe it was. I tried to work it out while the feature started again and I remade the acquaintance of the girl of my dreams. The show continued after I watched Jack Nicholson walk around John Huston and Faye Dunaway one more time.

Limp from watching too much singing, dancing, and incest, I came out of the theater into the heat of the night. If the theater had been air conditioned, I would have felt the heat on my arrival on the street. As it was, the street was just as hot as it had been three hours earlier. I went next door again. Again, the manager was no help. I considered escape with my allsinging, all-dancing beauty for another round at the cinema, but I thought better of it.

Instead, I walked the streets: window shopping, browsing, and actually buying a few things. I found the source of the
shawarma
-like sandwiches that Clay had introduced me to. It made me feel more competent, more on the ball.

I had been wandering without much idea of where I was going, a sensible enough state when you have no particular place to go. Then, suddenly, I recognized a newspaper kiosk. And next to it a familiar nest of café tables. I was on familiar ground. But, just as an overwhelming sense of certainty overtook me, so did Billy Savitt.

“’Ello, ’ello, ’ello! Mr Cooperman! Are you looking for our mutual friend, Vicar? You’ve just missed him. Join me in a nosh round the corner?” I was feeling peckish, so I nodded. Billy settled up his bill and away we went, diving into the narrow streets behind the wide avenue. “I’ve learned more about Takot here on Ex-Regina Street than I could learn in a month of Sundays out in the squares. You see that bit of work on the road just there?”

“Where half the street’s dug up?”

“They do it with backhoes and top-hole earth movers out there on the boulevards, but back here they’re using mattocks and rope sacks to move the dirt. Queer, ain’t it? The old ways last longer back here. I’ll tell you another thing—” He didn’t get to finish: a
tuk-tuk
blew its hooter and we both took to opposite sides of the street to let it pass. The scooter roared down the middle in its own halo of light and sound. Billy crossed over to me again.

“Here we are. It doesn’t look worth an old bint’s wink, does it? After you, Lord Fauntleroy.”

Inside, what struck me first was the darkness of the place. Nothing stood out in that dim interior of tables and chairs. There were three elderly waiters, none of whom greeted us. They were locals, but they returned Billy’s Yiddish greeting after we were seated at a table halfway down the shop.

I let Billy do the ordering: I was already trying to distance myself from this budding disaster. The waiter had shuffled off to the kitchen, where, no doubt, a chef as old as he was was waiting beside a cold stove. Billy and I were the only customers. “Maybe we should come back another time,” I suggested. “They look like they’re about to lock up.”

“They’re never very busy, Benny.” I took in another breath and let it go slowly. “Benny, how well do you know Beverley Taylor?” His voice was low and serious.

“Why? Have you heard from her?” I hoped my anxiety didn’t show.

“Not since the good father’s feast. Charming girl. But what does she
want
from my short life? That’s what
I
want to know.”

“How has she bothered you?”

“Last Tuesday. She came to my hotel, invited me to have breakfast, and began questioning me about a bunch of dead writers. Hemingway and Sassoon and Fitzgerald and Frenchmen I never heard of. Who wants that before breakfast, I ask you?”

“Oh dear.”

“Now, she’s an attractive little bint, I don’t mind saying. But I keep thinking that I’m going to say the wrong thing and she’ll hop it.”

“When did you see her last?”

“You turned off your boom-box? Not since the dinner, the feast. You were there. She kept asking me about someone named Julian Symons and another called Ross Macdonald. Does she think I’m a professor or something? She’s got another think coming.”

The food began to appear on the table, served oriental fashion, in small tureens. When I lifted the lid of the first of them, I was transported back to my grandmother’s kitchen. Here was the ur-source of my mother’s failures in the kitchen. It was like tasting real food after a diet of nuts and raisins. Suddenly, I could hear my grandmother clattering with pots and pans, asking me if I had any Chiclets, trying to hurry the kettle to boil. The next dish, something with kasha, I think, kept the pictures coming. I could smell her apron, hear her wooden spoon in a mixing bowl.

“What’s the matter, Benny?”

“Nothing. The food! It’s very good.”

“Would I take you to a jumble sale? This is the goods. I told you.”

“Yes, Billy, you told me.” I finished my plate and refilled it and finished that, while images from my past flooded my mind. Anna once told me about a French writer who got to see his whole life after eating a cookie of some sort. A cookie dunked in tea.

I don’t know what Billy thought of me. I was so absorbed in my meal that I scarcely spoke a word to him. Not that he wasn’t eating up a storm on his side of the table. We were both enshrouded with our own private reveries. No opium den could have suited me better. And Billy seemed just as content in his.

When we’d finished, I thanked Billy and struck out on my own again to see if I could find Clay before the cops landed on him. I found the club easily enough, although it was uphill most of the way, and through a market still overflowing with durians and mangoes and other exotic fruit.

I didn’t see the first cop car to drive up, but the second had me running around the corner, kicking myself for getting Clay involved in this. Cops didn’t exactly roll out of the cars like oranges, but there were four of them, and all well armed. There was nothing I could do for him here. It was the car, I figured, that gave him away. Somebody had linked me to the little Morgan and its owner. I couldn’t think of any way to save him. At least, I thought, the cops down here are color blind: Clay won’t get hit harder than the next fellow.

I got out my street map and began charting a course to Fiona’s place overlooking the old inner-city gates. It looked like a trip of a local kilometer or more on the map, and later my feet testified to its being more like four or five.

“What are you doing here?” Fiona asked as she opened the door to me. I gave her a fast run-down based more on my imagination and on the movie
Chinatown
than on fact. Somewhere in it I made the point that the cops were after me and that I was on the run. When I caught my breath, I told her that my jazz-playing friend, Clay Fisher, was probably about to be picked up by the cops when he came to work. I had stopped, long enough to check my watch, when the bedroom door opened. It was
Thomas
. He was dressed, but hastily put together even for him.

“Hello, Cooperman. What’s going on? Are you lost or something? Come to borrow a fuse wire or a cup of lentils?”

“Oh, hello. No. I seem to have kicked over a beehive and I’m trying to warn a friend before the cops pick him up.”

“What
have
you been mixing in?” Thomas said everything with a superior sneer.

“I went calling on Chester Ranken and found—”

“I know. It’s
terrible
. They’ll kill us all if they have to.” Fiona’s hand went automatically to her throat. “What’s the name of the jazz club where Clay’s playing?” I told her and she made a couple of phone calls. I held my breath marveling both at her cool response to my problems and also at the remarkable way her sun-bleached hair framed her face. She cupped the phone with her hand and told me at the earliest moment: “The manager says that he’ll get word to your friend. He blames you for getting Clay into this trouble with the law. He has to play nice with the police or he won’t be able to stay in business.”

“If you want to talk about that, shouldn’t we all sit down?”

“Good idea,” Fiona said. “I’ve been cooped up here all day.” She nodded toward the microscope on a table by the window. Thomas made a face and at the same time his hand caught her elbow.

“Some other time, Cooperman. I’ve got a nasty beast in my head from my lunch with our ecclesiastical friend.”

I blustered a protest that I hadn’t done anything to offend the cops. Fiona nodded her head thoughtfully, but I don’t think she believed me. She and young Lanier exchanged glances. My head was too muddled to be able to interpret what passed between them. When I suggested that I was interrupting and should be on my way, she told me that I could stay. What was left of my head was trying to get used to the idea of Fiona and Thomas as an item. Nobody had told me. I couldn’t be the first to know. But it was too big a thought for my small brain. I put my head down on the couch and promptly fell into a deep sleep.

TWENTY-THREE

IT WAS STILL LIGHT OUT
when I came around. My watch told me, though, that I hadn’t slept away most of the day. In fact, this was the day that was full of cops and running. I wasn’t used to having the cops on the other side. I wasn’t even sure that they
were
on the other side. I just wasn’t certain of much in these latitudes.

Fiona and her friend had gone out, so there wasn’t much for me to do but wait. I found the heel of a loaf of bread and a bottle of chutney. Under the circumstances they made not a terrible sandwich. But I knew it wouldn’t hold me long. For a while I worked on the code message that Jake had left for Vicky—at least I assumed it was for Vicky—at their place in the hills. It was a good project for getting the clock to move faster. After a half-hour’s work, I began to get lucky. In fact, when I put my pieces of paper away, I had made a breakthrough.

I called Clay to tell him the news, but he was out. There weren’t many people to share the news with. I don’t like to share pieces of a puzzle until I have the last piece in place, but, since I had started working again, I had to make up new rules. Confusion was sitting on my shoulder; I needed all the help I could get.

I began by getting my head in order in the Cooperman way. “The head,” Ma always said, “never works when the belly’s empty.” It wasn’t that I hadn’t eaten recently, but I think my stomach was still looking for another platter of the home cooking on these wilder shores. So I went out for something to eat. A gaudy bus selling
shawarmas
and kebabs was parked in front of a French restaurant offering bouillabaisse and cassoulet. The French place was upscale and unfit for me in these clothes. The take-out in the bus suited me better. The ramshackle old thing showed signs of having once served on New York’s Fifth Avenue. But it now had as many painted curlicues and serious graffiti on the outside as it had bad gas lines inside. She was pretty, though: mixed in with the scrollwork, I thought I saw a frieze of romping rock stars and classical nymphs. I could smell the baked-on exhaust as I looked around the darkened fuselage. I was greeted with the local salute of pointed hands and bowed head. I made a merry, solitary feast of it. By now I was used to my peculiar need to eat whenever the heat was on. A psychiatrist would find little to feast on between my need for food and naps and naps and food.

I headed back to my own room to try the phone again. I knew enough to take the garage entrance. When I reached my door, I could hear the phone ringing inside. I got there in time to hear the desk downstairs disconnect. I called back and finally was given Clay’s number, which I dialed at once.