Strange Trades Read online

  In any event, my response was limited and simple. I posted notice of Charlie’s absence, pretending to my customers that it had been planned, and contacted the mainland agency I used for a new singer on a day-by-day basis. She was talented enough, I supposed, but lacked Charlie’s genius.

  It was during the substitute’s first song, as I stood in the club with its strangely altered and diminished atmosphere, that I realized what freshness the Kid had brought to our artificial paradise. Had he arrived that morning weeks ago riding a dolphin and clutching a lyre, his advent could not have been more portentous or fraught with consequence.

  My idle wondering about how Christina had managed such a long separation from her possessive father was satisfied when the rumor-mill ground out information on the whereabouts of Henrik Blauvelt. He had chartered a small boat, filled it with peach liqueur and two women, and anchored in Sturgeon Cove the day Charlie and Christina left. Evidently, in Koos van Staaden’s eyes, Blauvelt and Christina were off sailing.

  On the morning of the fourth day, Jaime Ybarrondo, owner of the Hesperides’ lone hotel, called me. His bearded face floating in the holotank struck me like some apparition in a Delphic pool as he told me that Charlie had returned to his hotel room sometime after midnight. I thanked him and switched off.

  I contained myself until Charlie arrived that evening at the club. I let him reach his dressing room before I joined him.

  He sat on the couch with his musikit cradled gently in his lap. I recognized the tune he was fingering: “Love’s Labours Lost” by the beaIIles. Charlie had programmed the drums to sound exactly like Ringo, while he played Julian Lennon’s part.

  I was shocked at the changes in his face. An indefinable something had left him, perhaps his air of invincible youth. New lines seemed graven about his cerulean eyes. His lips were tightly compressed.

  He finally looked up at me. He swiped nervously at his black curls, shut his machine off, and sat back.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Hello,” he replied.

  Having recapitulated our first conversation, we halted.

  “Good to have you back,” I said.

  He smiled. It was only fifty watts.

  “Where’ve you been?”

  “South.”

  I waited, but he volunteered nothing else.

  “Well,” I said. “Do you feel like playing tonight?”

  “Sure,” he nodded. “Sure.”

  There seemed to be nothing else to say, so I made a half-turn, thinking to go. His lifted hand stopped me. I swung back.

  His right hand had come to rest—unconsciously, I believe—on the scar around his neck. Suddenly, I thought how it looked as if someone had wrapped a piece of barbed wire around his throat and it had sunk permanently beneath his skin. Life in anarchic Mexico City had been chaotic before the UN forces stepped in. I thought then of Christina’s hidden scar, and my invisible ones. In a searing, timeless epiphany, I felt the three of us bound together into one crippled being.

  “My life hasn’t been easy,” Charlie rasped. He looked down, as if ashamed of even such minor self-pity. “I was only looking for love—and to give it. That’s all.”

  Two steps closed the distance between us. I stood by his seated figure with my hands on his bony shoulders while he silently wept.

  In revenge, his singing that night broke the heart of everyone else in the packed club.

  Two weeks passed. Christina and Charlie still were constant companions. The rest of the world revolved in its time-accustomed ways.

  The three Fates—Ellis, Riedesel, and Englander—started a new fad raging. Eschewing clothes, they had gold circuits printed directly onto their skin. A small battery pack in one earring caused the circuits to emit mournful drones, facetious beeps, or catchy jingles out of the button-speaker that was the matching earpiece. Soon, the whole island was a carnival of naked noisy flesh laced with gold diagrams. The poor fellow who had been drafted into layering the circuits—a retired billionaire from Silicon Valley—saw so much female skin during the fad that he was later forced to spend a month at the monastery in Carmel.

  Among the daytrippers, I noticed the proliferation of T-shirts that read:

  NO MORE SINGAPORE?

  ACCIDENT, HELL—IT WAS WAR!

  The televised images of the millions of corpses in the sterilized country did much to offset our island’s natural gaiety. In Las Vegas, bookmakers were offering three-to-two odds that the Philippines were the source of the CBW agent that had eliminated their rivals in the cheap-labor market. (Insiders picked Malaysia.) Already the media were calling it “The South Pacific Commerce Wars.”

  I didn’t envy “Young Joe” his task of mediating the dispute. But no one had ever promised him the president’s job would be easy.

  At the end of those particularly frantic two weeks, my own private world felt a tremor high on the emotional Richter scale.

  Charlie and Christina disappeared a second time, for five days.

  They returned for a night. I never even got a chance to see him. Then they vanished for a week.

  When they returned again, Koos van Staaden had somehow learned of his daughter’s affair.

  Deatherage stood massively between van Staaden and me. The old man wasn’t shouting—that would have been less upsetting. Instead, his voice was dead and controlled, as if artificially generated.

  When Blauvelt had phoned me that van Staaden was on his way to the club to confront either Charlie or me, I had summoned Deatherage as mediator.

  “I insist that he be fired, Holloway,” van Staaden persisted in his monotone. “He’s seduced my daughter and is obviously no more than a wild rutting bull. No White woman on the island is safe while he’s around.”

  I opened my mouth to voice something appropriately caustic, but Deatherage, sensing my anger, intervened.

  “The man’s done nothing to warrant his dismissal, Mr. van Staaden. From all accounts, the affair between your daughter and the Kid was mutual. And she is an adult. I’m afraid that your only recourse is to try to change your daughter’s mind, if you continue to disagree with her.”

  “She’s locked herself in her wing of the house. Won’t come out, either.” Van Staaden paused. “In the old days, where I come from, Chief Deatherage, a man in your capacity would clap this Kid person in jail for such an offense, and then supervise his hanging.”

  It was out in the open now, and although Deatherage and I had both known van Staaden’s true feelings, to hear them voiced shocked us silent.

  Deatherage spoke first. “We don’t have your goddamn exalted but defunct system in this country, mister.”

  Van Staaden held Deatherage’s gaze, a defiant specter. “Then someone should kill the beast personally.”

  Deatherage went to grab van Staaden’s lapels, found none, and settled for his shirt front. “That’s an actionable threat, van Staaden, and could get you locked up. If I hear any more such shit, it will.”

  Van Staaden twisted free and banged out the door.

  I phoned everywhere, seeking news of Charlie, but couldn’t find him. I wondered if he was closeted with Christina in her half of van Staaden’s house high atop Bosky Knob. I remembered him as he had been that night when I held him while he cried.

  The next morning Deatherage came by to take me to see the Kid’s broken body on the rocks below Bosky Knob.

  It was literally the first time I had left La Pomme d’Or in three years. The sunlight felt heavy and hot atop my unshielded head. The sand felt strange beneath my bare feet. Deatherage had come with the news while I still wore my robe, and I had gone out immediately with him.

  Charlie’s death was obviously the catalyst for my leaving the dark sanctuary of my club. Yet I felt that subtler forces were also at work. It was as if I had been a fairy-tale prisoner immured, and the death of Kid Charlemagne had set me free.

  Down on the wet, weed-wrapped rocks, a small crowd had gathered for a novel diversion. Three of Deatherage’s me
n held them back.

  Splayed awkwardly over the slick stones (he had never been awkward in life) lay Charlie Maine. His flesh was puffy from contusions.

  And someone had opened up the old scar in his throat.

  I stood a moment, transfixed. Then I crouched to take his limp hand.

  When I arose, Christina was there. Her eyes were filmy, like two pebbles glazed with snail slime.

  “He’s so beautiful,” she said dreamily.

  And then I knew.

  The motor scooter buzzed through the dark, up toward Bosky Knob. Random breaks in the foliage and trees on my right allowed me to see the gaudy lights clustered around the bay below. They looked alien somehow, already distant. Tonight, for the first time in years, my club was closed.

  It didn’t matter to me. I knew I was leaving. Something black inside me that had held me captive all these years had shattered under the impact of Charlie’s death. What the future held for me, I couldn’t say. But it had to be better than the past.

  I had a final chore, though, before my morning departure.

  Events had moved on. Koos van Staaden sat morosely in the Hesperides’ single jail cell. He denied any involvement in the murder, but made no secret of his satisfaction. Henrik Blauvelt was confined to his house under guard, as a possible accessory. Deatherage’s theory was that Blauvelt had pinioned Charlie’s arms from behind while van Staaden performed the grisly murder.

  I hadn’t told him that it took only one to kill when love bred trust.

  I rounded a curve and saw the lights in the windows of van Staaden’s home. The place blazed like a cold pyre. I cut the motor, dismounted, and walked the rest of the way.

  The front door was unlocked. I patted my pocket. The cassette was still there. I had purchased it—an anonymous self-contained unit—on a quick trip to the mainland that afternoon, after the shock of seeing Charlie’s body and after my fatally delayed revelation had worn off. It would never be traced to me.

  I pushed open the door and went in.

  I found Christina in a second-floor bedroom. She sprawled on a divan, beneath a wall-mounted sjambok, wearing silken undergarments that rode high on her thighs and low on her shoulders. She was engaged in a minute examination of the flame of a candle standing on a table beside her. I knew she had probably been sitting that way for hours.

  Once, I had done the same thing myself.

  “Christina,” I said quietly.

  She turned her Circean profile languidly. The candlelight shimmered on the watered silk across her loins.

  “The beautiful Mr. Holloway,” she murmured between her black lips.

  “Why did you do it, Christina?” I asked. “Why couldn’t you just discard him, leave him to the rest of us, once you’d finished with him?”

  “He was threatening to tell Father,” she said. “Tell him about the people we met in Mexico, and what they sold me.” The flickering candle captivated her again. After a time, she said, “But they know me down there now, and trust me. I have my contacts. I don’t need Charlie anymore.”

  “He was a person, Christina. He deserved to live.”

  The black rose of her mouth formed a smile. “He was just a kaffir. I’ve killed them before—accidentally and on purpose. I don’t hate kaffirs, though. Why should I? Do you know that I have a little piece of kaffir’s brain in mine? A piece from a little baby bugger. That almost makes me a kaffir, doesn’t it?”

  She began to giggle, and didn’t stop.

  I went up to her and lifted the feathery hair from her neck. The white tab of estheticine blended almost invisibly with her alabaster skin. The three dots of coding looked like red freckles.

  Rummaging in her purse, I found the rest of her stash: a dozen tabs, bought at such a high price.

  I held them in a hand that trembled only slightly as I thought about what they contained: easy relief from the pain of Charlie’s death.

  But I didn’t use them on myself.

  Instead, I applied them up and down her pretty legs, pressing firmly to establish diffusion. She didn’t resist, although I’m sure that in the back of her mind she knew as well as I did that twelve was way over the threshold of permanent brain damage.

  “Life’s so ugly,” she said when I was done. “Did I ever tell you about my mother? I couldn’t let them take my one comfort away.”

  “There’s no need to worry anymore,” I said. I took the self-contained player-cassette from my jacket, set it down, and flicked it on. I thought about how Charlie had really loved the old songs.

  “Oh, how nice—music,” she said.

  The old lyrics poured forth:

  It’s all so beautiful,

  It’s all so beautiful…

  Before I left, I snuffed the candle out.

  “Spondulix” is a story close to my heart, dealing as it does with the triumph, downfall, and salvation of an underdog character with whom I easily identify. (I envision Rory Honeyman played by Jeff Bridges in the movie version of this story, by the way.) I liked this tale so much in fact that I turned it into a novel, published by Cambrian Press. In that expansion, you will find many new characters and scenes, as well as a crucial artistic rethinking: I refer to Rory only by his first name, not last, throughout.

  If you ever visit Providence, Rhode Island, be sure to drop in on the original model for Honeyman’s Heroes, Geoff’s, on Benefit Street. You’re certain to be insulted by the surly art students who man its steamers, a masochistic honor equal only to the pleasure of noshing on one of their “Rich Lupo” sandwiches.

  Finally, all my renewed thanks to editor Scott Edelman for taking a chance on the original publication of this piece of “fiscal science fiction.”

  Spondulix

  1.

  Beer Nuts

  The sign read honeyman’s heroes, and featured a cartoonish illustration of a Dagwood-style sandwich: two slabs of painted pumpernickel separated by approximately six inches of various lunchmeats, cheeses, lettuce, pickles, tomatoes, sauerkraut and hot peppers, dripping with mustard and mayo. The name of the artist was scrawled in the lower right corner: Suki Netsuke. In the lower left: established 1978.

  The sign hung above the door of a small shop on Washington Street, in Hoboken, New Jersey. The time was noon, on a vibrantly sunny Monday in June. The door to the shop was locked, a placard in the window turned to closed. The placard was fingerprinted in ketchup.

  Washington Street was busy with two-way auto traffic, with pedestrians and cyclists. Moderate-sized buildings lined each side of the broad avenue, businesses below, residences above. There was a faint odor from the river to the east lying atop the scents of exhaust and cooking. The Maxwell House plant, down where Twelfth Street met Hudson, diffused an omnipresent odor of roasting coffee, like a percolator of the Gods. Spanish chatter, hiss of air brakes, thump of off-loaded cardboard boxes hitting the sidewalk, infant squalling, teenage brawling, sirens, music—the little city was noisily alive.

  Down the sidewalk a block away from the sandwich shop a man walked absentmindedly along. He had a thick, ginger-colored beard, longish hair under a Mets cap. He wore sneakers, jeans and a baseball shirt that bore the legend SPONSORED BY HONEYMAN’S HEROES on the back. He was trim, gracile rather than muscular. Twenty years ago, he had been certified a world-class diver. Good genes and a moderate appetite, rather than any strenuous regimen of exercise, had helped him keep his youthful build.

  The man walked past a dry cleaner, a bookstore, a bar, a bodega, a botanica. His hands were in the pockets of his jeans, jingling a few coins; he whistled a shapeless tune.

  When he arrived at the sandwich shop, he grasped the worn handle of the door without noticing the closed sign, and attempted to enter. When the door did not immediately open, he seemed baffled. It took him a moment to decide there was no mistake on his part. He looked at the illustration of the gargantuan sandwich above the door. He studied the fingerprinted placard. Shading his eyes, he peered through the window at the darkened interior of the
store. Had he possessed a driver’s license, he would in all likelihood have removed it from his wallet and examined it just to verify that he was indeed Rory Honeyman, and that this was his place of business.

  Having made up his mind that the forlorn shop was, after all, his establishment, and that it was still locked up tight when it should have been opened for an hour in anticipation of the lunch-time rush, Honeyman stepped back from the door and muttered two words: “Goddamn Nerfball.” Then he pivoted and stalked away, with an angry determination.

  Honeyman walked north on Washington until he came to Fourteenth Street. The smell of coffee grew stronger, then weakened. At Fourteenth, he turned east, toward the river. The neighborhood became dingier, poorer, unkempt. Abandoned buildings alternated with tough-looking lounges (ladies welcome) and apartments sporting broken windows patched with cardboard and tape. Factories and warehouses began to predominate. A fish- processing plant exuded a maritime stench. A cat prowled hopefully outside the building. Honeyman thought he recognized Cardinal Ratzinger.

  The cross-town street finally dead-ended at the Hudson. A rusty chain-link fence separated the street from a flat wasteland of weeds studded with abandoned tires, plastic bags, shopping carts, car hulks.… Across the sprawling river Manhattan reared in all its grimy glory.

  At Honeyman’s left stood a building. Before it, Honeyman paused, his former certainty of purpose momentarily faltering.

  The problem: whether to enter the door before him or not. If he entered, he might possibly find his missing employee, and thus be able to open his store before he missed the entire lunch-hour trade. On the other hand, it was just as likely that he would encounter some bizarre event-in-progress that would draw him, whirlpool-like, into its centrifugal embrace, shanghai and waylay him with voices and flesh, drink and dope, schemes and plots, and completely waste his entire afternoon. Maybe even the whole day. A week. A month. A year. The rest of his life? Who knew? It had happened before, to others.… But wasn’t he wasting his life now already? Hadn’t he been for twenty years, since that single im- plosive day, under the Mexican sun, where his life had collapsed, impelled by his own impulsive actions, down to a singularity, infinitely dense, inescapable, poignant with the foreclosure of everything outside itself? Hush now, son, that’s a question for 3 a.m., if ever, not a bright June afternoon.…