The Cat's Pajamas (11 page)

“Hold on!” cried Green.

“No!” I shouted. “Fire, fire!”

I ran, yelling, through car after car and spread the blaze.

“Fire!”

And panic suctioned all and everyone off the train.

The platform swarmed with victims and crazed lawyers, scribbling names and babbling.

“Fire,” I whispered a final time, and the train was as empty as a dentist's office on a bad noon.

Green staggered up to me, and this time his feet looked sunk in concrete. His face was ashen and he seemed unable to breathe.

“Turn the train around,” I said.

“What?”

Marty led me through a litter of unlit Cuban cigars and playing cards.

“Around,” I wept. “Take the train back to Washington Station, 1865, April.”

“We can't.”

“You just
came
from there. Back, oh dear God, back.”

“No return tickets. We can only go ahead.”

“Ahead? Does MGM still have a track switch not covered up by asphalt? Pull in there, like in 1932, drop Louis B. Mayer, tell him Thalberg's alive on the fourth car back, Mayer will have a heart attack.”

“Louie B.?”

“Harry Cohn too,” I said.

“MGM's not his studio.”

“He can call a cab or hitch a ride, but no one gets back on this stupid idiot bastard train.”

“No one?”

“Unless they want to be buried in Ford's Theatre when I really strike a match and light the fire.”

The lawyer mob on the platform surged and bleated.

“They're getting ready to sue,” said Green.

“I'll sell them my life insurance. Reverse engine.”

The train shook like a great iron dog.

“Too late, I gotta go.”

“Oh God, yes. Look.”

All the victims and lawyers were scrambling to pile on, and the stupid fool who had shouted “fire” was forgotten.

The train jerked with a great rumbling rattle.

“So long,” whispered Green.

“Go,” I said, wearily. “But who's next?”

“Next?”

“With your big damned awful Mortuary Warp. Who gets caught, gassed, and pinned?”

Green pulled out a crumpled paper.

“Some guy named Lafayette.”

“Some guy? You dumb, stupid sap! Don't you know Lafayette saved our Revolution, age twenty-one, brought us guns, ships, uniforms, men!?”

“It doesn't say that here.” Green stared at his notes.

“Lafayette was Washington's adopted son. Went home and named his firstborn George Washington Lafayette.”

“They left that out,” said Green.

“Came back, age seventy, paraded eighty cities where people named streets, parks, and towns for him. Lafayette, Lafayette, Lafayette.”

“Hey!” Green poked the note. “Yeah, Lafayette's
second
farewell tour.”

The train gave an assassin's cry, the wheels ground their teeth.

“See you in Springfield.” Green jumped up onto the back platform. “Next April.”

“Who's that with you?” I shouted.

Green turned and yelled.

“Booth,” he cried. “John Wilkes Booth. He lectures from this observation car up ahead.”

“Poor son of a bitch,” I whispered.

Green read my lips and repeated, “Poor S.O.B.”

And the train moved on.

Y
OU SLEEP ONLY FOUR HOURS A NIGHT
. You go to bed at eleven and get up at three and everything is clear as crystal. You begin your day then, have your coffee, read a book for an hour, listen to the faint, far, unreal talk and music of the predawn stations and perhaps go out for a walk, always being certain to have your special police permit with you. You have been picked up before for late and unusual hours and it got to be a nuisance, so you finally got yourself a special permit. Now you can walk and whistle where you wish, hands in your pockets, heels striking the pavement in a slow, easy tempo.

This has been going on since you were sixteen years old. You're now twenty-five, and four hours a night is still enough sleep.

You have few glass objects in your house. You shave with an electric razor, because a safety razor sometimes cuts you and you cannot afford to bleed.

You are a hemophiliac. You start bleeding and you can't stop. Your father was the same way—though he served only as a frightening example. He cut his finger once, fairly deeply, and died on the way to the hospital from blood loss. There was also hemophilia on your mother's side of the family, and that was where you got it.

In your right inside coat pocket you carry, always, a small bottle of coagulant tablets. If you cut yourself you immediately swallow them. The coagulant formula spreads through your system to supply the necessary clotting material to stop the seepage of blood.

So this is how your life goes. You need only four hours of sleep and you stay away from sharp objects. Each waking day of your life is almost twice as long as the average man's, but your life expectancy is short, so it comes to an ironic balance.

It will be long hours until the morning mail. So you tap out four thousand words on a story with your typewriter. At nine o'clock when the postal box in front of your door clicks you stack the typewritten sheets, clip them together, check the carbon copy and file them under the heading NOVEL IN PROGRESS. Then, smoking a cigarette, you go for the mail.

You take the mail from the box. A check for three hundred dollars from a national magazine, two rejections from lesser houses, and a small cardboard box tied with green string.

After shuffling over the letters you turn to the box, untie it, flip open the top, reach in, and pull out the thing that is inside it.

“Damn!”

You drop the box. A splash of quick red spreads on your fingers. Something bright has flashed in the air with a chopping movement. There was the whir of a metal spring, whining.

Blood begins to run smoothly, swiftly from your wounded hand. You stare at it for a moment, stare at the sharp object on the floor, the little bestial contraption with the razor embedded in a springed trap that clipped shut when you pulled it out, and caught you unawares!

Fumbling, trembling, you reach into your pocket, getting blood all over yourself, and pull out the bottle of tablets and gulp several down.

Then, while you are waiting for the stuff to clot, you wrap the hand in a handkerchief and, gingerly, pick up the contraption and set it on the table.

After staring at it for ten minutes you sit down and have yourself a cigarette clumsily, and your eyelids jerk and flicker and your vision melts and hardens and remelts the objects of the room, and finally you have the answer.

…
Someone doesn't like me.... Someone doesn't like me at all …

The phone rings. You get it.

“Douglas speaking.”

“Hello, Rob. This is Jerry.”

“Oh, Jerry.”

“How are you, Rob?”

“Pale and shaken.”

“How come?”

“Somebody sent me a razor in a box.”

“Stop kidding.”

“Seriously. But you wouldn't want to hear.”

“How's the novel, Rob?”

“I won't ever finish it if people keep sending me sharp objects. I expect to get a cut-glass Swedish vase in the next mail. Or a magician's cabinet with a large collapsible mirror.”

“Your voice sounds funny,” says Jerry.

“It should. As for the novel, Gerald, it is going great guns. I've just done another four thousand words. In this scene I show the great love of Anne J. Anthony for Mr. Michael M. Horn.”

“You're asking for trouble, Rob.”

“I have discovered that only this minute.”

Jerry mutters something.

You say, “Mike wouldn't touch me, directly, Jerry. Neither would Anne. After all, Anne and I were once engaged. That was before I found out about what they were doing. The parties they were giving, the needles they were giving people, full of morphine.”

“They might try to stop the book, though, somehow.”

“I believe you. They already have. This box that came in the mail. Well, maybe
they
didn't do it, but one of the other people, some of the others I mention in the book, they might take a notion.”

“Have you talked to Anne recently?” asks Jerry.

“Yes,” you say.

“And she still prefers that kind of life?”

“It's a wild one. You see a lot of pretty pictures when you take some kinds of narcotics.”

“I wouldn't believe it of her; she doesn't look that sort.”

“It's your Oedipus complex, Jerry. Women never seem like females to you. They seem like bathed, flowered, sexless ivory carvings on rococo pedestals. You loved your mother too completely. Luckily I'm more ambivalent. Anne had me fooled for a while. But she was having so much fun one night and I thought she was drunk, and then first thing I knew she was kissing me and pressing a little needle into my hand and saying, ‘Come on, Rob, please. You'll like it.' And the needle was as full of morphine as Anne was.”

“And that was that,” says Jerry on the other end of the line.

“That was that,” you say. “So I've talked to the police and the State Bureau of Narcotics, but there's a fumble somewhere and they're afraid to move. Either that or they're being handsomely paid. A little of both, I suspect. There's always someone somewhere in any one system who clogs the pipe. In the police department there's always one guy who'll take a little money on the side and spoil the good name of the force. It's a fact. You can't get away from it. People are human. So am I. If I can't clean the clog in the pipe one way, I'll clean it another. This novel of mine, needless to say, will be what will do it.”

“You might go down the drain with it, Rob. Do you really think your novel will shame the narcotics boys into acting?”

“That's the idea.”

“Won't you be sued?”

“I've taken care of that. I'm signing a paper with my publishers absolving them of any blame, saying that all characters in this novel are fictitious. Thus, if I've lied to the publishers they are blameless. If I'm sued, the royalties from the novel will be used in my defense. And I've got plenty of evidence. Incidentally, it's a corking good novel.”

“Seriously, Rob. Did someone send you a razor in a box?”

“Yes, and there lies my greatest danger. Rather thrilling. They wouldn't dare kill me outright. But if I died of my own natural carelessness and my inherited blood makeup, who would blame them? They wouldn't slit my throat. That'd be somewhat obvious. But a razor, or a nail, or the edge of the steering wheel of my car fixed and set with knife blades... it's all very melodramatic. How goes it with your novel, Jerry?”

“Slow. How's about lunch today?”

“Fair enough. The Brown Derby?”

“You sure ask for trouble. You know damn well Anne eats there every day with Mike!”

“Stimulates my appetite, Gerald, old man. See you.”

You hang up. Your hand is okay now. You whistle as you bandage it in the bathroom. Then you give the little razor contraption a going-over. A primitive thing. The chance were hardly fifty-fifty it would even work.

You sit down and write three thousand more words, stimulated by the early morning events.

The handle of the door to your car has been filed, sharpened to a razor edge during the night. Dripping blood, you return to the house for more bandages. You gulp pills. The bleeding stops.

After you deposit the two new chapters of the book in your safety-deposit box at the bank, you drive and meet Jerry Walters at the Brown Derby. He looks as electric and small as ever, dark-jowled, his eyes popping behind his thick-lensed glasses.

“Anne's inside.” He grins at you. “And Mike's with her. Why do we wanna eat here? I ask.” His grin dries and he stares at you, at your hand. “You need a drink! Right this way. There's Anne at that table over there. Nod to her.”

“I'm nodding.”

You watch Anne, at a corner table, in a monk's cloth sport dress, interwoven with gold and silver thread, a link of Aztec jewelry in bronze units around her tan neck. Her hair is the same bronze color. Beside her, behind a cigar and a haze of smoke, is the rather tall, spare figure of Michael Horn, who looks just like what he is, gambler, narcotics specialist, sensualist par excellence, lover of women, ruler of men, wearer of diamonds and silk undershorts. You would not want to shake hands with him. That manicure looks too sharp.

You sit down to a salad. You are eating it when Anne and Mike come by the table, after their cocktail. “Hello, sharpster,” you say to Mike Horn, with a little emphasis on the latter word.