Humboldt's Gift (64 page)

  “The payoff was when he got after Theo to teach him Swahili words and the first thing he asked for, naturally, was ‘motherfucker.’ Charlie, there is absolutely no such thing in Swahili. But Louie couldn’t accept the fact that in the very heart of Africa this expression should not exist. He said to me, ‘Man, after all, this is Africa. This Theo has got to be kidding. Is it a secret they won’t tell the white man?’ He swore he wasn’t coming back to America without being able to say it. The truth was that Theo couldn’t even grasp the concept. He had no difficulty with part one, the sex act. And of course he understood part two, the mother. But bringing them together was beyond him. Several long days Louie worked to get it out of him. Then one evening Theo at last understood. He put these two things together. When the idea became clear, he jumped up, he grabbed the jack handle out of the Minibus and swung at Louie’s head. He landed a pretty bad hit on the shoulder and lamed him. This gave me a certain amount of satisfaction but I had to break it up. I had to pull Theo to the ground and get my knees on his arm and hold his head while I reasoned with him. I said it was a misunderstanding. However, Theo was all shook up and never talked to Louie again after this mother-blasphemy had struck home. As for Louie, he griped and bitched about his shoulder so long that I couldn’t continue to follow Ezekiel. I decided that we would go back to town and wait for him. Actually we had been making an enormous circle and were now only fifty or sixty miles from Nairobi. It didn’t look to me like any beryllium mine. I concluded that Ezekiel had been collecting or perhaps even stealing beryllium here and there. In Nairobi we X-rayed the young fellow. Nothing was broken but the Dr. did tie his arm in a sling. Before I took him to the airport we sat at an outdoor café while he drank several bottles of milk. He had had it with Africa. The place had become phony under civilized influence and denied its heritage. He said, ‘I’m all shook up. I’m going straight home.’ I took from him the outfit I had bought for his use in the bush and gave it to Theo. Then Louie said he had to bring African souvenirs home for Naomi. We went to tourist shops where he bought his mother a deadly ugly Masai spear. He was due to reach Chicago at 3 a.m. I knew he had no money in his pocket. ‘How are you getting home from O’Hare?’ I said. ‘Why of course I’ll phone Mother.’ ‘Don’t wake Mother. Take a taxi. You can’t hitchhike on Mannheim Road with that fucking spear.’ I gave him a twenty-dollar bill and drove him to the airport. Happy for the first time in a month, I watched him in shirt sleeves and sling climbing up the stairs and carrying the Assegai for Mother into the plane. Then at about a thousand miles an hour ground speed, he took off for Chicago.

  “As for the beryllium, Ezekiel showed up with a barrel of it. We went to an English lawyer whose name I had from Alec Szathmar and tried to set up a deal. Ezekiel needed about five thousand dollars worth of equipment, a Land Rover, a truck, etc. ‘Good,’ I said. ‘We’ve got ourselves a partnership and I’m leaving this check in escrow and he’ll pay it over as soon as you give him a title to the mine.’ There was no title forthcoming, nor any way to prove these semiprecious stones were legally come by. I’m going down to the coast now to visit the old slave towns and try to recover something from this double-disaster of Naomi’s kid and our sour beryllium deal. I’m sorry to say that some kind of African con was going on. I don’t think Ezekiel and Theo were on the level. Szathmar sent me your address, in care of his colleague in Nairobi. Nairobi is fancier than ever. Downtown it looks more like Scandinavia than East Africa. I’m getting on the night train to Mombasa. Coming home via Addis Ababa and maybe even Madrid. Yours with love.”

  thirty-eight

  While I was absorbed in boning a slice of
merluza
for Roger, Pilar came into the dining room and whispered as she leaned over me with her high-aproned bosom, that an American gentleman was asking for me. I was delighted. Stirred, anyway. No one had called on me before, not in ten weeks. Could this be Géorgie? Or Koffritz, come to fetch Roger? Also Pilar, with cool apron, warm white face, large brown eyes leaning toward me with her powder fragrance, was being extremely discreet. Had she never swallowed the widower story? Did she nevertheless know that I had a deep legitimate sorrow and good reason to dress in black? “Shall I ask the señor to come to the
comedor
to take coffee?” said Pilar, and moved her eyes from me to the kid and back to me. I said that I would talk with my visitor in the salon if she would sit with the orphan for me and make him eat his fish.

  Then I went to the salon, a room seldom used and crowded with old plushy dusty objects. It was kept dark, like a chapel, and I had never seen the sun in it before. Light now poured in, revealing many religious pictures and treasures of bric-a-brac on the wainscoting. Underfoot were rubbishy ensnaring scatter rugs. It all gave the effect of a period vanishing together with the emotions one had had for this period and the individuals who had felt such emotions. My caller stood by the window, aware that I was catching the dust-filled sunlight straight in the eyes and couldn’t see his face. The dust swirled everywhere. I was as dense in these motes as an aquarium fish in bubbles. My caller was still pulling at the drapes to let in more sun and he sent down the dust of a whole century.

  “You?” I said.

  “Yes,” said Rinaldo Cantabile, “That’s who. You thought I was in jail.”

  “Thought, and wished. And hoped. How did you track me here, and what do you want?”

  “You’re sore at me. Okay, I admit that was a bad scene. But I’m here to make up for it.”

  “Was that your purpose in coming here? What you can do for me is go away. I’d like that best.”

  “Honestly I came to do you good. You know,” he said, “when I was a little kid my grandmother on Taylor Street was laid out in a parlor like this with a ton of flowers. Wow, I never thought I’d see another roomful of such old-time crap. But leave it to Charlie Citrine. Look at these branches from Palm Sunday fifty years back. It stinks on the staircase and you’re a fastidious guy. But it must agree with you here. You look okay—better, in fact. You haven’t got those brown circles you had under your eyes in Chicago. You know what my guess is? That paddle ball game put too much strain on you. You here alone?”

  “No, I’ve got Renata’s little boy.”

  “The boy? And where is she?” I didn’t answer. “She blew you off. I see. You’re broke, and she’s not the type for a tacky boarding-house like this. She took up with somebody else and left you to be the sitter. You’re what limeys call the nanny. That’s a riot. And what’s the black armband for?”

  “Here I’m a widower.”

  “You’re an impostor,” said Cantabile. “Now that I like.”

  “I couldn’t think what else to do.”

  “I won’t give you away. I think it’s terrific. I can’t figure how you get yourself into these situations. You’re a superintelligent high-grade person, the friend of poets, a kind of poet yourself. But being a widower in a dump like this is a two-day gag at most and you’ve been here two months, that’s what I don’t uiiderstand. You’re a lively type of guy. When you and me were tiptoeing on the catwalk of that skyscraper in a high wind sixty stories up, hey, wasn’t that something? Honestly, I wasn’t sure you had the guts.”

  “I was intimidated.”

  “You entered into the spirit of the thing. But I want to tell you something a little more serious—you and that poet Fleisher, you really were a quality team.”

  “When did you get out of jail?”

  “Are you kidding? When was I in jail? You don’t know your own town at all. Any little Polish girl on confirmation day knows more than you, with all your books and prizes.”

  “You had a smart lawyer.”

  “Punishment is on the way out. The courts don’t believe in it. Judges understand that no realistic sane person goes around Chicago without protection.”

  Well here he was. He arrived in a sort of torrent as if the tail wind that drove his jet had gotten into him somehow. He was high, exuberant, showing off, and he transmitted the usual sense of boundlessness, of cranky dangers—chanciness I called it. “I just now blew in from Paris,” he said, pale, dark-haired, happy. His chancy eyes glittered under the dagger-hilt brows, his nose was full at the bottom and white. “You know neckties. What’s your opinion of this one I bought on the rue de Rivoli?” He was dressed with brilliant elegance in a double-knit sort of whipcord pattern and black lizard shoes. He was laughing, nerves were beating in his cheeks and temples. He had only two moods, this and the threatening one.

  “Did you trace me through Szathmar?”

  “If Szathmar could get you into a pushcart he’d sell you by the slice on Maxwell Street.”

  “Szathmar is a good fellow in his own way. From time to time I speak harshly of Szathmar, but I really love him, you know. You invented all that stuff about the kleptomaniac girl.”

  “Yes, but what of it? It could have been true. No, I didn’t get your address from him. Lucy got it from Humboldt’s widow. She phoned her in Belgrade to check out some facts. She’s almost done with the thesis.”

  “She’s very tenacious.”

  “You should read her dissertation.”

  “Never,” I said.

  “Why not?” He was offended. “She’s smart. You might even learn something.”

  “I might.”

  “But you don’t want to hear any more about your pal, is that it?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Why, because he blew it—he goofed? This big jolly character with so many talents caved in, just a fucking failure, crazy and a deadbeat, so enough of him?”

  I wouldn’t reply. I saw no point in discussing such a thing with Cantabile.

  “What would you say if I told you that your friend Humboldt scored a success from the grave. I talked to that woman Kathleen myself. There were some points I had to discuss with her and I thought she might have some answers. Incidentally, she’s real keen on you. You’ve got a friend there.”

  “What is this about a success from the grave? What did you talk to her about?”

  “A certain movie scenario. The one you described to Polly and me just before Christmas in your apartment.”

  “The North Pole? Amundsen, Nobile, and Caldofreddo?”

  “Caldofreddo is what I mean. Caldofreddo. You wrote that? Or Humboldt? Or both?”

  “We did it together. It was horseplay. A vein of humor we used to have. Kid stuff.”

  “Charlie, listen, you and I need to reach a preliminary agreement, have an understanding between us. I’ve already taken a certain amount of responsibility, put out money and effort, made arrangements. I’m entitled to ten percent, minimum.”

  “In a minute I’ll ask what the devil you’re talking about. But tell me first about Stronson. What happened to him?”

  “Never mind Stronson now. Forget Stronson.” Cantabile then shouted, “Fuck Stronson!” This must have been heard all over the
pensión
. After that his head shook a few times as if with vibration or recoil. But he collected himself, fetched his shirt-cuffs from under the coat sleeves, and said in quite a different tone, “Oh, Stronson. Well, there was a riot in his office by people who got screwed. But he wasn’t even there. His big worry should be obvious to you. He lost a lot of Mafia money. They owned him. He had to do anything they said. So about a month ago they called the obligation in. Did you read about the Fraxo burglary in Chicago? No? Well, it was a sensational heist. And who should be flying afterward to Costa Rica with a bag, a big valise full of dollars to stash away?”

  “Stronson was caught?”

  “The Costa Rican officials put him in jail. He’s in jail now. Charlie, can you actually prove that you and Von Humboldt Fleisher actually wrote this thing about Caldofreddo? That’s what I asked Kathleen. Have you got any proof?”

  “I think so.”

  “But you want to know why. The why is kind of strange, Charlie, and you’ll hardly believe it. However, you and I have to have an understanding before I explain things. It’s complicated. I’ve taken a hand in this. I’ve laid out a plan. I’ve got people standing by. And I’ve really done it mostly out of friendship. Now take a look at this. I’ve prepared a paper that I want you to sign.” He laid a document before me. “Take your time,” he said.

  “This is a regular contract. I can’t bear to read these things. What do you want, Cantabile? I’ve never read a contract through in all my life.”

  “But you’ve signed them, haven’t you? By the hundreds, I bet. So sign this one too.”

  “Oh God! Cantabile, you’re back again to hassle me. I was beginning to feel so well here in Madrid. And calmer. And stronger. Suddenly you’re here.”

  “When you get into a tizzy, Charlie, you’re hopeless. Try to check yourself. I’m here to do you a major favor, for Christ’s sake. Don’t you trust me?”

  “Von Humboldt Fleisher once asked me that and I said, ‘Do I trust the Gulf Stream or the South Magnetic Pole or the orbit of the moon?’ “

  “Charles” (to calm me he addressed me formally) “what’s to get so excited? To begin with this is a one-shot deal. For me it provides like a regular agent’s fee—ten percent of your gross up to fifty thousand dollars, fifteen percent of the next twenty-five, and twenty percent on the balance, with a ceiling of one hundred and fifty thousand. So I can’t get more than twenty grand out of this any way you look at it. Is that a colossal fortune? And I’m doing it more for you, and for a few kicks, you poor dimwit. A lot you got to lose. You’re a fucking baby-sitter in a Spanish boardinghouse.”

  These last weeks I had been far from the world, beholding it from a considerable altitude and rather strangely. This white-nosed, ultranervous, overreaching, gale-force Cantabile had brought me back, one hundred percent. I said, “For just an instant I was almost glad to see you, Rinaldo. I always like people who seem to know what they want and behave boldly. But I am very happy to tell you now that I will not sign any paper.”

  “You won’t even read it?”

  “Definitely not.”

  “If I were really a bad guy I’d go away and let you miss out on a fortune of money, you creep. Well, let’s have a verbal agreement. I put you on to one hundred thousand dollars. I manage the whole deal and you promise me ten percent.”