When the Cat's Away (19 page)

I was standing on a sidewalk in the Village at 11:30
P.M.
on a Saturday night, holding in my hands a brick of cocaine whose street value, when cut, would probably exceed a quarter of a million dollars. Want a toot?

I’d been in the presence of that much cocaine before on several occasions, though I doubted if the quality had been commensurate with the current batch. Once in L.A., I’d been sort of house-sitting for a rather shady friend who was off somewhere in the Caribbean. I knew the guy had a few too many Tiffany lamps but I didn’t figure it out until I stumbled on a large briefcase full of off-white rocks the size of puppet heads.

Years later, I’d related this story to a well-traveled, coke-dealing Brit in my hotel room in New York and he had not been too impressed. “I’ve seen the factory, mate,” he said.

“Let Ratso hold that shit,” said Rambam. The two of them whispered back and forth as my hands trembled.

“Obviously, the Jaguar is Carlos’s bitter enemy and believes what he reads in the
Daily News”
I said, looking pointedly at McGovern.

“I’m not Deep Throat,” said McGovern.

Fortunately, the weather was keeping sidewalk traffic to a minimum, but it was still a very strange feeling holding what could surely be my certain death and destruction in my hands. Of course, I’d have some fun before I’d go.

“Better let one of us keep it,” said Rambam, like he was talking to a child.

“C’mon,” I said. “I haven’t touched the stuff in almost seventy-two hours now. I had to quit when Bob Marley fell out of my left nostril.” I was breaking out in a sweat.

I had tom off some more of the butcher paper and the plastic and run a little taste test to establish that it wasn’t potassium chlorate. It wasn’t.

I gripped the packet tightly until Ratso took it away from me. But I remember gazing at it under the streetlamp. It looked as beautiful as fish scales in the moonlight.

And memories came back to me like snow falling on snow.

52

Sunday started as a busy day on the blower and ended with my almost getting blown away. But first things first.

I got up, fought back a desire to strangle Ratso to find where he’d hid the cocaine, thought better of it, and made some espresso. No point in having hot chocolate. It wasn’t raining.

I fed the cat. Tuna in any weather.

I walked over to the desk with the espresso and sat down. When I took the top off Sherlock Holmes’s head to get a cigar, I looked inside to see if Ratso had stashed the cocaine in there. Of course, it was a ridiculous notion, but there you are. It wasn’t there. Neither were Sherlock’s brains and I had the feeling I was going to be needing them before this mess was over. I would deal with the Jaguar when he came. I would deal with Carlos when he came. I would deal with Leila when she came. A man’s not a man until he’s given multiple orgasms to a Palestinian terrorist. Of course, Leila wasn’t a real terrorist, but she had done some things under a comforter that damn near scared me. I’d been the comforter, of course.

The first call I made was to a colorful, mysterious friend of mine named Dangerous Dan, who was an authority on powders, the Latin American import-export business, and just about everything else that nobody really knows about. Since I spoke to Dangerous, he has left us and gone to Jesus, and I hope and trust that he’s made heaven a happier place since he’s arrived. But if somehow he got de-selected from heaven, I’ve always felt I could do a lot worse than waking up in hell next to Dangerous Dan.

Dangerous said that
perla
meant “pearl” and
yi-yo
was an Indian word that did not compute into the white man’s mind. Taken together, he said, they meant “the best of the best.” Where had I seen that phrase? he wanted to know. I told him the men’s room at the Lone Star Cafe. Which stall? he wanted to know. There was only one stall, I told him. He told me to be careful. I told him I’d do my best.

I miss Dangerous Dan and I think of him, in human terms, as perla yi-yo.

I didn’t know what Dangerous Dan thought of cats, but Slick Goldberg had liked cats and Estelle Beekman had hated cats and someone had killed them both. So what did that tell us? Not a damn thing. Or maybe it did.

For the next half hour I made a series of calls to information operators in Connecticut, finally hit pay dirt, and called my party. Things were just about what I’d expected. We talked for a while and arranged to get together in the city soon for a drink.

Forty-five minutes is a long time to be on the blower but I was used to hard work. Anyway, the alternative was to look around the loft for some perla yi-yo that I didn’t really want to find, because it would fry my remaining synapses in about four seconds and then they would be holding memorial services for my brain in New York and Los Angeles. I got another cigar and another espresso and I made my last call of the day to Jane Meara.

I told her she wouldn’t be having lunch with Estelle Beekman anymore. I gave it to her pretty straight. She held up as well as could be expected. In fact, she was starting to show a toughness I didn’t know she had.

I told her if the cops called her, and I didn’t think they would, she never talked to me about Estelle Beekman. She said she understood.

I asked her if there’d been any news on Rocky from her end. She ticked off an extensive list of everything she’d done to find her. Net result: no Rocky.

I was reading Jane a story from the
National Enquirer
about a cat named Tom who’d walked 773 miles from Harrison, Arkansas, to his home in Detroit, when I noticed that Sleeping Beauty had awakened from the couch and was walking toward the television set with a screwdriver in his hand. I told Jane to be very careful. I had a few little problems of my own right now, but we’d wrap this whole business up quite soon, I was sure. There wasn’t much else to say, and it wouldn’t have been very easy anyway because Ratso had, by this time, turned the set up quite loud.

I walked over to where Ratso was sitting and looked at the screen. Many men carrying long sticks were moving rapidly across a great expanse of frozen tundra. At either end, there was a large figure wearing a Wachíchi mask.

“Ranger game!” Ratso shouted.

53

By Sunday afternoon at four-thirty, Ratso, myself, Rambam, and Rambam’s attaché case were having lunch at Big Wong on Mott Street in Chinatown. Just before I’d left the loft, Leila had called. She had not heard from her brother Carlos as she had expected, and she was worried. She knew the feds had not picked him up in the bust and she couldn’t understand why he hadn’t contacted her. I told her if I saw him I’d tell him to call her.

There followed a conversation of a rather sweet and personal nature that was rudely punctuated by Ratso’s loud and prolonged curses as the Rangers lost the hockey game. Apparently Ratso’d taped the game at his apartment the previous evening and brought his VCR over to the loft. Nice to see him staying on top of things.

Big Wong was like dying and going to heaven at this time of the day. It wasn’t crowded, the food was great, and the waiters treated us like old friends, doing humorous things like bringing Ratso one chopstick. Ratso never found this to be very funny, but I always got a good chuckle out of it. Rambam thought it was pretty funny, too. I don’t know what Rambam’s attaché case thought. It was sitting in its own chair, not saying anything. I didn’t know it at the time, but it would be talking a blue streak before the night was over.

Big Wong is a little different from most places in Chinatown. It isn’t fancy and the menu is not very extensive and not very expensive. The food could be equated to that at a very good all-night truck stop, if the Chinese culture had such things as truck stops, country music jukeboxes, and rubber machines, which of course it does not. It does have Big Wong.

But occasional honky faces are beginning to pop up among the clientèle these days. Soon some guy with a bow tie from
The New York Times
will stumble onto the place, write a trendy little piece on it, give it a couple of stars, and it’ll all be over. When that happens, you might as well order out from Eggroll King in Columbus, Ohio.

It was starting to get dark by the time we got out of Big Wong. We walked down the sidewalks of Chinatown past ducks hanging upside down in the shop windows, past the Chinese dwarf painting pastel pictures of a distant homeland, past the fish markets along the sidewalk, past stalls selling strange-looking vegetables that appeared as if they’d been grown on another planet.

At this time of day and at this time of year the city was gray. But there was something very vital about things that were East. You could see, hear, and smell them, and they renewed the senses and the spirit. The whole scene was reminiscent of the time I’d spent in Kuching, the capital of Sarawak in Borneo.
Kuching
was a Malay word, I reflected as we crossed Canal Street, that, interestingly enough, meant “cat.”

We walked up Mulberry Street, bought a few cigars at Louie’s. Louie said, “Hey, it’s Buffalo Bill. Look, there he is,” he said to the other customers in the little shop, mostly elderly Chinese buying lottery tickets, “the Gene Autry of Canal Street.” I wasn’t sure if Rambam appreciated Louie as much as Ratso and I did. Rambam was half Italian and Louie was about as close to home as you could get without somebody telling you to take out the trash.

We had cappuccino, espresso, and cannoli at a little sidewalk cafe next to a store that sold Mussolini T-shirts.

“One thing I have very little use for,” I said, “is a Mussolini T-shirt.”

“Neither does Mussolini,” said Ratso, as he took a rather large bite of cannoli.

* * *

In the growing dark we walked through SoHo past stores that sold nothing but pillows, and a ghost town of galleries and industrial lofts taken over by narrow-tied, suspendered New Wave artists. A small group of musicians played chamber music inside a restaurant that served Art Deco chicken-fried steak. SoHo was one of the last places on earth where a break dancer could still draw a crowd.

The closer we got to 199B Vandam, the darker and colder and seedier everything became. Sort of picked up my spirits.

There was a black limo parked on a side street just down from the loft.

“Whose car is that?” Rambam asked.

“Garbage czar from New Jersey,” Ratso said.

“Vandam Street’s a major garbage-truck staging area for the city,” I said, not without some little pride.

“I can see,” said Rambam, as he kicked his way through the swirling newspapers and crap along the sidewalk.

We drew a bye on the freight elevator and legged it up the stairs to the fourth floor. I opened the door of the loft, let Ratso and Rambam in ahead of me, and turned on the lights.

A thin dark man dressed in black was standing very still with his hand inside his coat. He looked like Johnny Cash in 1952. He looked dangerous. He was standing next to the hat rack, but it didn’t look like he was planning to grab his hat and run.

There was another guy across the room from us standing by a window. He had a smile on his face but it was about as thin as airline coffee.

The rocking chair, which faced away from the door of the loft, was rocking slowly back and forth. It wouldn’t have been so bad, except it didn’t look like anybody was in it.

54