Vital Parts (27 page)

He found himself gliding backwards, away from the bathroom door, as silently as he had arrived. Sweet had not noticed him. A man putting himself together from scratch did not look for distractions.

The sight was fundamentally more shocking than anything that had happened the night before. Reinhart really found it easier than he might admit to accept any evidence that today's youth were depraved: a historical phenomenon. He was far from astounded that Maw had stopped payment on his check—that of course was merely personal. Back in the outer office he sat down on a chair and realized that he habitually assumed the worst of others, and had furthermore done so for so many years that the process had by use become agreeable. He was comfortable in a world full of malice and corruption.

But Bob Sweet was a man of his own generation who had seemed to escape the accumulated penalties of four decades. Oh, there were other examples, fifty-year-old movie stars who married schoolgirls, sexagenarian statesmen with unflagging energy, but Reinhart did not know them except as newspaper and TV myths. Sweet was his age-old acquaintance and newfound friend, and he now proved to be a collection of detachable parts.

Reinhart's head was in his hands when Eunice came in. His shoes, II-D, as usual needed a shine. When he reached puberty his dad, instead of a sex-talk, had given him a characteristic rule of life: “Always keep your shoes polished and your clothes brushed and you'll find that the doors will open for you.” Reinhart had always found it impossible to imagine what Dad had been like as a youth.

“Hi,” said Eunice cheerily. He answered but did not look up. Her own square-tipped, purple-patent-leather shoes marched by. The cushion of her chair sighed and the swivel squeaked.

He had not a clue to what she expected of him today, question, apology, carnal nostalgia, or indignation. And brutally he did not care. She had no right to make demands on a man of forty-four. Still, he was in better or at least more authentic shape than her father.

“I'm sorry,” he said therefore. “I went out in the hall and tried to ward them off, but you can't do much with cops intent on a raid. Frankly I couldn't see it would do any good for me to get beaten up too.”

“I thought you split before the bust,” she said. “I was so freaked out I couldn't remember.”

He looked up at last. She had a new hairdo: ringlets alternating with dangly droopy locks rather like truncated pigtails, the whole slanting generally upward from low forehead to high crown with many intervening elaborations, false starts, and cul-de-sacs characteristic of dream-architecture as well as certain schools of pastry decoration.

Reinhart was momentarily diverted from the mainstream. “When did you get that?” He looked at his simulated Omega. “I didn't know the beauty shops were open this early.”

“There's a cat named Reynard Fox who's open all night. The hookers all go there. I might have gone there. I don't remember. How does it look? I haven't really seen it.” She squinted. “This light is killing me. I can't find my glasses.”

She searched the desk drawers with more desperation than necessary. Everything was a performance. She found the rose-tinted, window-glass, googoo-eyed spectacles and put them on. She stood up. The waistband of her blue satin bellbottom slacks ended only at the protrusion of her breasts.

“Oh come on,” Reinhart said. He had tried several times to tell Blaine that in any dramatic offering there should be an occasional intermission so the audience could empty its bladders or buy popcorn. He tried it on her. “I happen to know that wasn't marijuana you were smoking but lettuce leaves.” Too late he saw that the possession of such information compromised him.

But Eunice failed to make the inference. She said: “I don't know about that. I was really freaking out on my own thing.”

Sex? Reinhart would not ask. Both Sweets were enigmas but had rapidly revealed themselves as the kind which any attempt to solve would only further becloud as well as peculiarly humiliate the investigator.

He said lamely: “Well, I'm relieved to see you don't have any broken bones. Are you out on bail?”

She laughed. “Not bloody likely. They took it out in trade.” She wore a blouse of the window-curtain material called dotted swiss and as usual her paps were on display. Reinhart had had her, but he saw her now with no sense of ownership, perhaps because she looked so new. Degeneration seemed to refresh her. “All charges dropped, if you forgive the pun.” She stuck a finger into her forehead. “Hey, you know something? Cops are all premature ejaculators.”

Was he being baited? But it never took if done by anybody but his wife or son. He nodded amiably.

“Is Bob in yet?” she asked and strode, bouncing, to the door of the inner office. And Reinhart wanted to scream:
Don't go in there for God's sake
, as if, being Sweet's daughter, she would not know her father's façade could be pulled to pieces; but the main reason he did not was that Sweet then appeared, the whole man and so well arranged that Reinhart had once again to suspend his disbelief. Sweet might wear a toupee and dentures, but they were the best money could buy and represented a strong man's dominion over nature.

“Good, you're here,” he said to Reinhart. “Let's go. We have a candidate.”

Eunice squealed in some sort of emotion, and Reinhart leaped to his feet, discarding all other issues.

Sweet thrust a memo at Eunice: “Tell Hans to meet us at this address.” He passed rapidly into the corridor. Reinhart gave Eunice a little salute of no particular significance and fell in at heel.

“I gather you have reason to believe this is not a hoax,” he said.

The elevator gaped. Stepping in, Sweet responded: “It's better than that.” Which was not an answer. But then Sweet said: “He's a Negro.” Which certainly was.

“I have been here before,” said Reinhart, staring out the window of the Bentley at the ramshackle house. This was no example of the famed, inexplicable déjà vu, but a true memory of twenty years before, at which time the porch had been in the same state of disrepair, collapse apparently imminent but now proved not so as to that era, since it still stood. Sometimes certain edifices were interminably arrested at an arbitrary point of their decline.

Shortly after returning from the war, Reinhart had enjoyed an association, in several projects, with a person of color named Splendor Mainwaring, an impractical fellow, something of a visionary, a man in whom grace and style so took precedence over common sense that his enterprises often failed but were never in bad taste.

Splendor often lost particularly but, unlike Reinhart, could not be termed a general loser. That crucial distinction, perhaps, gave each a motive to drift away from the other. For years they had seldom seen each other even accidentally while both continued to reside in a suburb of fewer than ten thousand souls, though not in the same neighborhoods. This was the same period in which the status of Negroes had improved conspicuously. Not since the fall of Japan had their access to local movies been denied and the emergency provision printed on the tickets—“We reserve the right to change prices without notice”—passed into disuse except as applied to drunk and/or disorderly types of any breed. As if to supply a fine moral problem for a gross gauge, an inebriated and obstreperous Splendor had once applied for admission and been turned away. He had also once done time for possessing heroin. He had worked as an automobile mechanic and once hired a store-front church in which to give an inspirational address, then vanished in one of his moods, leaving Reinhart, blind drunk, with the task. Finally, when Reinhart, then working for Humbold Realty, had been suckered into heading up a construction company actually controlled by Humbold, the mayor, and the police chief, and awarded a contract, engineered by the same cabal, to dig an extension to the town sewer, he had taken on Splendor as his aide. This project was not successful.

Splendor and Reinhart since had gone their separate ways, and the latter could not have said what his old friend did for a living. Through the years Reinhart was occasionally hailed by a brown face in a passing car, or vice versa. He had always intended to renew the friendship when he got a minute or a pretext, but time was in ever shorter supply after he reached thirty.

After confessing that he recognized the house, Reinhart sighed and said: “Then it must be his father. I met him once, a damn nice guy.”

“You know these people?” Sweet asked suspiciously.

“Mainwaring?”

“That's the name.” Reinhart started to get out, but Bob seized his arm. “Do you mind explaining?”

“Don't you remember Splendor?” Reinhart asked. “He went to school with us, a year or two ahead. He was a star athlete, for one. Don't you recall the basketball team that went to the state finals? It was his touchdown that won the Thanksgiving game in '39 or '40. He won more letters than anybody, a record that probably still stands. He got good grades too. I believe Splendor was salutatorian of his graduating class.” Sweet's toupee was a beautifully authentic-looking article, except where the gray sideburns began abruptly: an observation Reinhart had made the day before, when he had not known of the counterfeit.

Sweet made a disdainful mouth. “All I can recall are the guys who picked on me. Not an era I look back on with much sentiment, Carl.”

Reinhart was suddenly victim to an imminent loss of nerve, teetered as it were on the threshold. He looked up and down the street for a mob. “Say, Bob,” he said. “I suppose it's safe enough here? This car is quite a target.”

“Don't be an ass,” Sweet said, pushingly indicating he should get out.

En route up the cracked walk, Reinhart said: “It's a weird feeling.” Memory had calmed him. “It has changed so little I almost expect to see his sister open the door as she did the first time I ever came here. She was one of the most beautiful girls I have ever seen in my life.” He dropped his voice. “But she seemed to be mute. At least I never heard her say a word.” The images of years past were much more vivid than those of last night. Yes, he had reached that age.

He fell back a few steps before they mounted the porch, so that the worn stairs, precarious two decades ago, would not receive their combined imposition.

The porch floor sounded thin as a drumskin. There was less mesh on the screen door than of old, and Sweet reached through it and rapped on the wooden portal. While they waited Reinhart peeped around at the neighborhood. Like most palefaces he had always been more or less scared of Negroes. There were many explanations for this, sociological, sexual, statistical, and historical, and at any given time Reinhart honored that of whichever persuasion met his current needs, which were largely formulated by what he saw in the media of information.

The person who opened the door to Sweet's summons wore military garb, though not of our side. In fact it looked rather German, specifically SS, being black with white piping, and the pants were those wide-winged breeches, flaring out of high boots, which had done so little, pictorially speaking, for the late Heinrich Himmler, perhaps because of his petit-bourgeois figure. However this chap, whose skin was quite light, not so swarthy, actually, as many of your average Nordic-descended Midwesterners toasted by the summer sun, stood as tall as Reinhart and much trimmer. He had a boy's hips, a girl's waist, and a bull chest. He would also have been very handsome of countenance had he shaved off the continuous beard which joined the sideburns. Reinhart had quite enough of hair, having served too long as Blaine's father.

This lad seemed to be in his early twenties. Reinhart thought his expression could be called menacing, but Bob Sweet, having wrested a fortune out of the world's most competitive economy, did not know fear of ought but death.

“Mr. Mainwaring?” he inquired. “I am Robert Sweet of the Cryon Foundation, and this is my associate, Mr. Reinhart. I believe you called us about a certain sad matter.”

The young man said levelly: “I did. In a minute I will join you in your car.” He closed the door.

Reinhart felt terrible. “God,” he said to Sweet, “that might be Splendor's son, and if so, it's probably Splendor who is dying.”

Sweet nodded briskly, but waited until they were back in the Bentley before making a response.

“I don't know about the patient,” he said. “But that fellow happens to be a militant leader who publicly goes under the name of Captain Bruno Storm: a nom de guerre, I gather, since he answered to ‘Mainwaring.' Didn't you recognize him from the newspaper and television? He is an officer of a group called the Black Assassins.”

Reinhart said: “I'll be damned. Sure I have. My son told me Storm was invited to address the local bar association and began by addressing them as ‘Scum' and said he looked forward to shooting them all and raping their wives, daughters, and mothers. He received a standing ovation when he finished.” Reinhart struck his own fat thigh. “There is talk he may be hired to head up the black studies department at the University. How does a guy like that get away with it, Bob? Do you understand it? I had a run-in with a neighbor once some years ago in which I said, you know how you will, something about punching him in the nose. I didn't touch him but he threatened me with legal action for assault. Luckily there were no witnesses and his lawyer talked him out of it. That's me. This guy threatens a whole roomful of lawyers, uses obscene language in public, boasts of his criminal intent, and they applaud him and pay a fat fee.”

Sweet characteristically shrugged while studying some papers he had taken from his attaché case. “Don't worry about it, Carl.”

“Let me tell you,” Reinhart went on, in part fleeing from thoughts of the dying Splendor, “if I were black, I would probably be a fire-eater too. But I am not. Why should I go through life listening to the troubles of other people when nobody listens to mine? I have never been a white-supremacist reactionary. In fact I have always been a liberal. I abhore the extreme. But I tell you I will defend myself if anybody approaches me with violence.”