Mysteries of Motion (16 page)

Leaning forward, Mulenberg jostled a man, who only kneaded him in closer, as if to be one flesh here was what was wanted. Others did the same. “Sorry—” he said, but no one heeded. He was working his way right and halfway down when a woman asked, “What is it?” A young man answered, “They found somebody”—and Mulenberg stopped.

He put his head in his hands and raised it again. At peak hours, the hotel’s islanded driveway streamed with limousines, private cars, and cabs depositing or picking up. After theater a few select cars were parked, hired limousines waiting for their clients but not averse to being bribed for a quick in-between run; he’d often done it. The police car wheeled next to a gleaming one of these, whose chauffeur standing alongside saluted. One vehicle was parked ahead of his. A big cab, lights out.

A Checker? He couldn’t tell from here.

“Watch it, honey pops.” A pair of leather-boys he’d jostled opened their teeth at him.

“That a Checker, down there?”

The two exploded at each other, in mime. “Can’t have that one, honey. It’s took.”

Whee-ah, whee-ah.
An ambulance was having trouble getting through down there. The cops toughed the crowd back. A searchlight went on.

It was a Checker. They brought the two thieves to the highest hill, was that the way the Bible said it? And left them there. Outside the hotels was the way they were doing it now. Parked.

The body came out of the car slowly onto its stretcher, passed along to the men in white who covered it. The crowd strained forward anyway, Mulenberg with them. Not long back, an elderly colonel, dying of natural causes in a public place and with all his papers on him, had been hauled off for burial in potter’s field, while his family hunted him; their outrage had caused a
Times
editorial. Had Ventura his credit cards on him, anything?

In his own thinned wallet a roll of bills lodged, anonymous. Tomorrow, en route to Bahrein, the wallet would be fat with identity again.

A soft shrill passed through the crowd. Two plainclothesmen, one of them hatted, had partially uncovered the body. A forehead. A black crest of hair.

Not enough to identify your own brother from.

The two men, staring down, had an exchange.

Gamble on it.

“Officer! Officers! I think I know that man.”

The way twenty or so heads around him shrank back, then closed in—he recognized a movement herders knew.

The two men cased him, exchanging glances; had this fellow said something obscene? “Ste-p up.”

He tried to.

“Let him through, d’ya hear.”

He’d walked through such hostile aisles before—more tailored ones, but the eyes quite as ready to make him pay for it.

They uncovered the face. A blue-chinned man turning to putty under the cheekbones, thick, naked yellow at the nose, but not long dead. Not long enough. They must have left him alone to it.

Mulenberg knelt. Ventura’s long-lashed eyes glared askance, the eyes of a horse about to spook. Like all the dead, he knew something. He was the victim of it. Of what all would know. Those left behind rushed to close the eyes for that reason. More than for respect.

Except for the police. “Know him?”

The victim, as the police reports would say. Maybe this had been the origin of his own contempt. The other guy in the deal. He shook himself, as he often did after a big one.

“I know him,” Mulenberg said, leaning over Ventura with the heavy bated heartbeat of the better businessman.

So he got to the station house after all, going with the willingness of the respectable. When he gave his deposition there was a moment, when asked his name, when he trembled. But not because he had no identification. This was easily explained—and could be corroborated. He’d merely been for a walk.

A solicitous young rookie was sent back to the club with him anyway. Invited upstairs, he accepted, cannily scanning the signed portraits of shahs, sultans and sheiks which Mulenberg set out in every hotel room, on the certainty that now and then an original would turn up. Once the officer had properly refused a scotch on grounds of duty, other virtue spread from him. Mulenberg could have refused to come along, he instructed. Strictly speaking, it was no crime to know a corpse. “First thing they taught us at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. No honest citizen ever knows his civic rights.” He then accepted a cup of powdered coffee. But they’d had to gamble on it, you see. “You could have been some kook who was connected.”

Mulenberg sank into a chair, the scotch, a hotel staple he rarely drank, warming through him. He jerked his head awake, clicking up his jaw. “I knew my rights.”

“You did, eh?”

“But honest methods are often slow.”

“How about that. How
about
that. You’re damn right.”

They almost shook hands on it.

“Sorry about your friend.”

They’d told him nothing, he realized. “Who found him?”

“The doorman. He noticed the cab.”

“There long?”

A shrug.

“Did he die there?”

“They’ll tell us. Chances are the cab was stolen. We don’t know he was robbed. He carry much?”

Mulenberg looked up. They’d already asked him that. “I just don’t know.”

“He wasn’t rolled. Now—a pross’ll do that. Or two of them. Maybe no time for it.”

“A—? Oh.” Mulenberg cocked his head innocently, shook it doubtfully. The scotch seemed to run to the tip of his ear, reddening it.

“Too bad,” the officer said. A wedding ring shone on his stout finger. “That could leave it random. Junkies. Punks.”

Mulenberg stood up. “Will you people notify his family? Or shall—?”

“Being done.”

“Because I leave for Bahrein tomorrow evening.”

A good citizen always babbles openly to the police.

“Have to do our jobs.” On his way out, the officer stopped again in front of the photographs. “Know all these guys, huh? What’re they like?”

Mulenberg laughed. It felt good to. “Not like us.”

The officer gazed at the picture of Mulenberg’s wife and daughters. “Your friend. Would you say his habits were more or less like yours, sir?”

“Guys, you mean?”

“Yes, sir?”

“He liked it normal,” Mulenberg said.

Those were the hardest, he was informed again. Citizens just out for a walk.

On leaving, the young man had clearly already forgotten Mulenberg’s name. “Well then, we’ll do what we can, Mister, er—”

Mulenberg was having that same image—of wafting the other man over the doorstep by his lapels—which he often had ending a successful conference. “It’s an odd one.” What he always said, but suddenly he was shaking again. By an exertion that left him limp he didn’t voice what some demon was pressing on his tongue: Ventura. “Mulenberg.”

When he shut the door, he looked at his sheiks. Though they were of diverse nations, the West rightfully thought of them as one. Collectively they often reminded him of those pottery horsemen of some Chinese dynasty long before Ming, who sat welded to horse and lance, and through these to ground and sky. Though he’d never seen any of these live men on horseback, when dealing with them he sensed brotherhood in their buttocks, even through their business suits. They still traveled together. Though their women now carried Vuitton bandboxes and they themselves put slim attaché cases of black ostrich on his desk, or stood in the airports centered in mahogany hills of Italian leather, they were only changed on the surface from the days when they’d villaged forth behind perimeters of waxy or dirty linen pouches containing honey and dates. They all had the same luggage, carrying their oasis with them everywhere. They left the lowly spiritual labor of building the world up from scratch every morning, the tramp stews of going it alone, to nations built up of separatists like Ventura and himself. They had their feet on more diurnal rhythms. To them, an individualist was simply a man who had to travel without kin.

He felt hungry now—not ravenous, but ready. It was never any good to think of the world too much in terms of nations. Between any two poles there existed that modest vale-in-between where people could talk. Though he’d never been a Christian by more than birth, when singing his Latin he could still feel a vague churching. Even though Ventura’s failure—for to be murdered was to fail—wasn’t his, surely his own success could be partly Ventura’s and without charity; he still had a tanker that belonged to the man.

Trouble could come—and demons too—from finding the vale of such human connections too modest. For he knew why he traveled. People said they traveled for adventure, or learning, and often thought so. More often they were like him—if they had enough money for it. As long as they skipped on, they kept themselves from the event chains that made up ordinary life. This time, too, would he run?

Downstairs, he met several club members he knew. Too bad; they’d remember him. When involved with crime, or with happiness, keep yourself unmemorable.

Outside, New York’s most faithful star, that low one—was it Venus?—shivered like an asterisk which wasn’t sure what it was replacing.

I will not have revelation, he said to his wife—and stopped short. He’d loved his wife best for being able to talk to her, even after the sexual furor had waned. Ventura had at least talked to his Concettas; maybe the live wife in the madhouse, lately refusing to see him on his Sunday visits, had kept that connection warm. For ten years he, Mulenberg, had triangulated the world to keep from himself what many men did—that the people they liked best in the world to talk to were women. His wife’s long dying had been his excuse for doing to himself what he had tried to do to the girl, Veronica. He’d kept himself from personality—his own—by separating it into parts. He and Ventura belonged to a nation whose men talked best and closest to their women, but hid it from themselves. He, Mulenberg, was still talking to the dead.

“Father!”—his kinder, hippie daughter had groaned, hauling him backward at his wife’s funeral. Since that day the other daughter had never written. The burial dress had torn to the breastbone. In her coffin, his wife, a five-month skeleton, had been plumped by the undertakers into a kind of sharp-nosed girl he couldn’t get to. Clasped by paws of music, she had escaped.

Since then, her zombie, floating through the cities, had been made to keep appointment with him, in perfect, synthetic ritual. She never looked like herself. He never spoke.

The big wooden totem at the Trader Vic’s entrance loomed again in front of him. This time he went in.

One of the dimmest restaurants in New York, and usually empty when he arrived—he’d never been too late for it; maybe it never closed. Since it was always the same, he could have the impression that its braziers burnt only for him; that was its specialty. He was welcomed and seated. The lotus-shaped chairs, printing verandas on the pink dim, were meant to inspire him with fake Polynesian feelings, but the place would accept real ones, if held quietly. The same elegant male amah served him. A tall Chinese with a long, grandee head and gold patina profile, he could have sat for an ambassador. Or stood, for waiters did not sit. When he bent to his male customers, speaking with curled, lacquer lips, in the dimness their white faces, raised to that head, were bowls of milk, curdled with beard. Mulenberg knew his lofty impatience with the need for pussyfooting race relationships sometimes didn’t jibe with the facts. His somber assumption of equality or worse unnerved his junior executives. Nor could its recipients always believe in it.

The waiter, at least, brought him his usual drink with a smile, and a table telephone. He always phoned a daughter from here, once a month—not the hippie one, who had no phone in her hutch in the California foothills, but now and then sent him a glittery three-dimensional postcard addressed in roundish script, but the one who didn’t speak to him. He phoned person-to-person—so that she could know it was he, and so that he could hear her voice. To the operator, at least, she always sounded in health.

“Bring me a phone book.”

He was sitting as usual opposite one of the high-backed chairs. By every color curve, the woman he’d met tonight belonged in it, a queen to the bone. It wasn’t her skin that would complicate things between them, or his cheese-curd face. But she’d done her homework in the women’s lounge at Miss Lacey’s. Her mission, whatever it was, would have come from it.

He wasn’t surprised that her name was in the book; that would be her style—a woman who had picked him up, had walked that route for him. My kind of style, he thought. His daughters had no style as yet except reactively, and maybe never would. His wife had been a lovely amulet stored in his armpit—always under a man’s wing. In life no doubt better than his bereft memory of her, in death she could only be the fringe product of his shoddier sense of romance. His mother on horseback, rating him for his trail losses with the Indian red high in her cheek, had had maybe a touch of this girl. But he wanted neither of them now for more than the reminiscent love he bore them. He could say this and be understood—by that girl.

What else could he say of such a girl—other than that she’d picked him up? And that she knew what her own mission was. For which she would walk any route.

That he wanted her to walk his, from now on?—how could he say it to her? Anything thought of brought that laugh of hers whipping into his ear.
Come to the office of the president. I have the key.

Yet they shared something more than the flesh. That brutal something which had bedded them. He could see her going around the world with him because of it, he trying all the while to find out what it was. Or to avoid knowing.

The phone rang and rang; she might be debating whether to answer it at all. Or had already gone out again herself, to wherever such a girl would go? Not to a lover, lockets or not, not now. Nor could he feel around her any sense of other kin. When he could figure out where, then he would have her. He would not tolerate her being lost. Or rather, that he could be left behind. Where could she go that a man like him couldn’t follow?

Find her quick, then, and tell her. Pay her, or beat her, to remember it. That the dead all say the same thing: You better watch out.