Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (14 page)

‘What did you think of the Master’s paper?’ she asked.

‘What paper?’

‘The one he read from …’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I don’t know. I’m afraid I’m not up on Cosmic Consciousness.’

‘The paper wasn’t on Cosmic Consciousness,’ she said. ‘It was on the Psychology of Knowledge.’

‘Same thing…’

‘Oh, no. Not at all.’

‘What I meant was they’re equally difficult to understand. For a layman …’

‘Yes, I suppose you do need some training. Was your consultation with the Master satisfactory?’

‘Very. Thanks to you …’

She slowed up near the drug store, moving the car out of the center of the street.

‘How far are you going?’ she asked.

‘We go the other side of town,’ I said.

‘I’m going that way myself. Why not let me drive on till we find a taxi? I don’t see any around here. There wouldn’t be, anyway. Not in this neighborhood.’

‘We don’t want to bother you,’ Jinx said, reaching for the door. The car hadn’t stopped rolling yet, but he was opening the door.

‘It’s no bother,’ she said.

‘Well, thank you very much,’ I said. ‘Close the door,’ I said to Jinx, nudging him. He slammed the door hard. You goddamn sorehead, I thought. You son-of-a-bitch. The girl speeded up the car, turning back into the center of the street, and we rolled on. The city was ahead. Beyond the city were the Marakeesh Apartments and Holiday. Holiday was tremendous. El Dorado. Tremendous. But, I asked myself, don’t you think that solely because she was the first one in better than two years? Isn’t she strictly jungle? Why, right this minute, how do you know it isn’t the janitor or one of the guys from the second-hand lot even. But this girl beside you now: would she? You know she wouldn’t. This one’s class. This one’s quality. This one’s no push-over for every guy she says hello to. You wouldn’t have to go around worrying about what she was going to give you.

‘How long’ve you been interested in Cosmic Consciousness?’ I asked.

‘Well, a long time. Three or four years.’

‘I don’t like to seem thick, but what is it? A religion or something?’

‘No. It’s a philosophy. It goes into the Fourth Dimension. Or, I should say, it goes into the mathematical concept of the Fourth Dimension.’

‘That properly screws me up,’ I said.

She laughed. ‘It’s very interesting, though. I hope to see you at one of the Master’s meditations.’

‘I’d be a bad influence. My vibrations would be poisonous.’

‘Maybe not.’

‘Oh, but they would,’ I said. ‘I don’t know anything about Cosmic Consciousness but I do know a little something about the Dimensions. And I don’t hold with the theory that the Fourth Dimension is either philosophical
or
mathematical. I think it’s purely intuitional.’

She looked at me, surprised.

‘I’m not trying to give you an argument,’ I said; ‘and I don’t want to sound pretentious. But that’s what I believe.’

‘I’ve never heard that before,’ she said thoughtfully.

‘We’ll have to go into it sometime soon that and some other things,’ I said, and I knew from the glance she gave me that she understood what other things I was talking about.

Jinx straightened up, leaning forward. ‘There’s a taxi,’ he said.

‘There’ll be others …’ the girl said.

‘We don’t want to impose on you too much,’ I said, winking at her slyly, so Jinx wouldn’t see, trying to tell her that the next time I met her I’d see to it that Jinx wasn’t along.

She winked back, pulling the car over and stopping it.

Jinx opened the door and got out. As I started to get out I caught that perfume again and this time I knew what brand it was. It was
Huele de Noche.
‘I like your taste in scents,’ I said.

‘What?’ she said.

‘Your perfume. It’s wonderful,’ I said.

‘Perfume?’

‘
Huele de Noche.
I recognize it now. It tugged at me before, but I couldn’t quite place it. Now I can.
Huele de Noche.
’

‘I’m not wearing perfume,’ she said, with a tentative smile.

‘I smell it,’ I said. ‘I’ve smelled it several times tonight.’

‘It’s your imagination,’ she said. ‘I’ve never used perfume in my life.’

‘Come on,’ Jinx said.

I shrugged, getting out of the car, shutting the door. If she wanted to deny that she was wearing perfume, as if to admit it would degrade her somehow, it was all right with me.

‘Good night,’ she said.

‘Good night,’ I said.

‘Come on,’ Jinx said.

I nodded to her, and following Jinx into the taxi that was waiting by the kerbing; and she was gone, two red dots disappearing into the distance. He reached across me and slammed the door, shaking his head.

‘I never heard such a lot of crap in my life,’ he said. ‘You’re full of that stuff, you know that?’

‘Shut up,’ I said. ‘I’m remembering something.’

I was remembering something, I was close to remembering something, something that I vaguely knew I did not want to remember, but remembering it I was: the smell of that perfume was getting stronger and stronger and stronger, and then every nerve and fiber in my body began to vibrate with music from an old-fashioned organ and like a clap of thunder there was a bright blinding light inside my head and through it I could feel the cold wind tunnelling from many, many years away and when it passed it left in focus only a white, white face, and black, black hair, and there was my grandmother stretched stiffly in her coffin in the parlour in the old place in the Gap, only her head visible, and that lighted by single tall candles at either end of the coffin, and the room was filled with the smell of the big
Huele de Noche
bushes which had grown around the house.…

Great Heavenly God! I thought, fighting to get my breath, this is what I smelled. It was not the perfume the girl was wearing; she was right, it was my imagination. Her face was of the same whiteness as my grandmother’s, and her hair of the same blackness, and there was a sameness in the cast of features, too, and this was what had done it, that sameness, that same goddamn sameness.…

I couldn’t turn it off, I did not want to remember it, I had been a lifetime learning to forget, but I could not turn it off.

W
HEN THE DOOR OPENED
and I saw Keith Mandon, Cherokee Mandon standing there (for it had to be he), I thought: No, this cannot be, this is a grotesque symbol that belongs to the infantile world I have just left, from the infantile world of shameless libidinous fantasy that I have just left. That is what I thought: No, this cannot be. He was a little guy, barely five feet tall, certainly no taller than five feet, with a mongoloid nose and heavy eyebrows that seemed to grow straight out like primigenous feelers, so heavy and thick that you had to look twice to see if he had eyes at all, and carefully the second time. He was wearing a heavy cotton wrapper that almost touched the floor, and a pair of wooden sandals, the kind you wear in a locker room.

‘What do you want?’ he asked in a harsh coercive tone.

‘I’d like to talk to you, Mister Mandon.…’

‘This is where I live, not where I work,’ he said. ‘See me at my office.’

‘Please, Mister Mandon,’ I said. ‘It may be too late then.…’

He growled displeasure in his throat and started to shut the door and I moved forward, saying, ‘Please, Mister Mandon. This is very urgent and very important. Important to you, too…’

‘Well, what is it?’ he asked slowly.

‘I can’t very well talk about it standing here,’ I said. ‘Won’t you let me come in?’

He raised his eyebrows two or three times, the middle of his forehead sagging under their weight. ‘Come in, come in,’ he said grudgingly. He stepped back and opened the door, and I went in. The room suddenly swam before my eyes and my first flash thought was that I was still in the grip of that same fantasy, and then I thought that maybe the fantasy had gone and that this was a dream, and then I thought: No, this cannot be a dream because it is too absurd and crazy, a dream makes more sense, things are not this haphazard in a dream. I was just talking to the guy in the hall, I told myself (or did I imagine that too?) and I turned around and there he was, his back against the door, staring at me with no expression on his face, and I turned around again, looking at the room, and now the things began to have some definition. Heavy, massive furniture had been placed indiscriminately around; there were seven or eight throw rugs on top of the carpet itself, and there were pictures and prints and photographs covering the walls. An enormous marble mantel stood propped against a wall where there was no fireplace, and on the shelf-piece four clocks of different sizes and makes chattered at each other in different keys. In front of this was a long red plush davenport, so big and ugly it could only have been originally designed for an exclusive country club, and in front of the davenport was a folding card table which had been transformed into a coffee table by sawing the legs off, bearing the weight of a complete drummer’s outfit: bass drum, snare drum, traps, cymbals, and a triangle, with the yellowed skin of the bass drum wearing a faded monogram, not his. The only light in the room was from a tall stand lamp with a yellow silk mansard shade. It stood beside a wooden high-chair, the kind you see in pool rooms, and on the chair was bolted a kidney-shaped piece of wood, just rough wood, which served as a desk and which now was swung open and held several law books and typewritten papers, and a half-folded golf towel. You could not walk straight into the room, you had to pick your way. This was exactly what would happen to a room full of furnishing if, after many years of absolute subjugation, each object were given one wish. No; this was no dream, and it was too crazy to be accidental. This guy, I told myself, threading my way through the junk, trying to find a place to sit down, has deliberately arranged all this. This guy is trying to be eccentric.

He let me reach a deep wing-chair before he spoke. He said: ‘Now, what is it?’

I sat down in the chair. It had a brocaded altar cloth for an antimacassar. ‘I need help, Mister Mandon,’ I said.

‘People who come to me generally do,’ he said. ‘I’m not the type who attracts people socially. What kind of help?’

‘Legal help. Advice …’

‘Advice on something that’s already happened, or advice on something that is going to happen?’

‘Both.’

‘How much money’ve you got?’

‘It’s not how much I’ve got, Mister Mandon. It’s how much I’m going to have.’

‘I don’t deal in futures,’ he said.

‘But these futures, sir,’ I said, ‘are not gambles. I mean they’re not gambles in the sense that Baby-Face Nelson’s futures were gambles.…’

He slanted his head, staring at me for two or three seconds, and then he picked up the golf towel from the desk and blew his nose, hard. He dropped the towel back on to the crude desk and from the top tier of a two-tiered pedestal table he picked up a round pasteboard carton, holding it out to me. I saw that they were stogies and shook my head. He took one for himself and put the carton back on the table and then he saw something which annoyed him very much. I could not tell what it was, but he made a sour face and took from his pocket a small silver whistle because I had seen his cheeks inflate and deflate, but there was no sound. I didn’t know what this was, but I leaned a little to the left to get the right side of my body away from the bulge of the chair’s arm so that nothing would interfere with getting my automatic; and I heard the rattle of wooden rings on a portiere pole and turned around and saw standing in the curtains a black boy in white duck pants and a gray-black sweat shirt, a young and handsome black boy, six feet or more tall. ‘Empty the goddamn ash trays,’ Mandon said, and the black boy reached behind him and came in with a brown paper sack into which he dumped an ash tray filled with sloppily chewed cigar butts.

‘Would you like a drink?’ Mandon said to me.

‘No, thanks,’ I said.

‘Make some coffee, Highness,’ he said to the black boy.

The black boy never said a word. He didn’t look at Mandon and he didn’t look at me, going out with the paper bag, through the portieres. Again Mandon slanted his head, looking at me, and then he lighted his stogie from the torch of a lighter so big he used both hands to hold it. He sat down in the pool chair, swinging shut the kidney-shaped board, hemming himself in, and put the lighter back on the pedestal table.

‘What do you mean, these futures are not like Baby-Face Nelson’s?’ he asked.

‘I mean these are not a sucker’s futures,’ I said. ‘Baby-Face Nelson was a sucker.’

‘Any man who breaks the law is a sucker,’ he said.

‘Does that include the police?’

‘Any policeman who breaks the law is twice the sucker,’ he said.

‘There’s a lot of suckers then …’

‘Do you know one?’

‘I know several,’ I said.

‘Can you prove it?’

‘I got ’em nailed.’

‘Then you should turn them in,’ he said gravely.

‘It’s much more important to me not to turn them in,’ I said. ‘I got the evidence and I intend to use it in my own way. But it’s dynamite. I’ve got to give it to somebody they’re afraid of, somebody they know will turn it loose in case they try any monkey business.’

‘What kind of evidence is it? What form is it in?’

‘In the form of an actual recording of two plainclothes men taking money from me, eighteen hundred dollars, what was left of a market hold-up in which I killed a guy. And at the same time agreeing to be my partners in another hold-up which has not yet come off.’

He puffed on his stogie and frowned, pulling down his heavy eyebrows. They looked like the eaves of a house. ‘Are you suggesting that I am the person to have custody of this evidence?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘What do you mean when you say you intend to use this in your own way? As immunity from arrest after the commission of other crimes?’

‘Something like that. I haven’t got around to figuring out anything definite yet. I haven’t had time. This just happened.’

‘In other words, you’re asking me to become a partner in your felonies?’

‘It’d be worth your while,’ I said. ‘There’d be no danger. Look, Mister Mandon, when these guys shook me down, I was ready to laugh it off just a couple of dumb cops grabbing a piece of change. I wasn’t going to stay here. I was going to pull a fast hold-up and get enough money to get out of town. I fully intended to do that. But when I found out one of them was an Inspector, it changed everything. I figured he was high enough up to do me some good if I could nail him.…’