Going, Going, Gone Read online

  ‘Well, well,’ said Trish. ‘Gang’s all here.’

  When I stood and hugged Eulie she hugged me back, as usual seeming strangely inexperienced with where the various hands should go. Chlo flashed us her standard warm stare but, thankfully, kept her lip buttoned. ‘Where’ve you been?’ I asked as Eulie worked herself free of me. Didn’t seem like the time to force an answer, so I fell back on sociability. ‘These are friends of mine. Jim, Trish, meet Eulie.’ They nodded, but neither one was looking at the smaller of the pair. ‘Ah, yes, and this is her friend –’

  ‘Chlojo,’ she said, giving her high-pitched growl.

  ‘A pleasure,’ Trish said, examining their threads, sizing and resizing. ‘I’ve heard tell.’

  ‘About?’ Eulie asked.

  ‘You know.’ My evil one grinned to beat the band, sloughing off the nasty looks I shot her way. ‘Did you give Walter a two-for-one deal?’

  The noise I heard myself making bore no relation to a laugh. ‘We require him,’ Eulie said. ‘Agreeable?’

  ‘Of course. I can’t keep my paws off him, myself,’ Trish said, getting up, sliding the straps of her Hermes bag over her arm. ‘Jim, tell you what. We don’t want to be fourth wheels here. Walter can certainly handle himself, not that it’ll be necessary. You got time to grab a bite?’

  ‘Sure,’ Jim said, eager as a puppy.

  ‘I adore the Ring,’ she said. ‘Who’s conducting?’

  ‘If you insist,’ I said. ‘So Burp’ll be expecting me?’

  ‘Burt,’ Trish said. ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.’

  ‘Likewise,’ I said, shaking hands with Jim, giving Trish double pecks. Although I’d have liked them to take Chlo along, I didn’t think Eulie would have been in favour of it. The second my pals were out of earshot I tried to take Eulie’s hand, but she worked out of my clutch. No matter; I was used to her playing impossible-to-get.

  ‘Where’d you run off to, last time?’ I asked. ‘Why didn’t you come back before now?’

  ‘Departure essentials, Walter,’ Eulie said, taking my arm and starting to lead me out of the café. Chlo was giving the remaining matinee ladies a stare that I’d have found awfully disconcerting, but they were a hardy bunch and stared right back. ‘Please.’

  ‘Wait a second. Whose departure where?’

  ‘Officeways,’ she said. ‘Our office. It essentials.’

  ‘For how long?’ Eulie smiled, but didn’t tell. ‘I’ve got something to do tonight. I can take off once I’m finished.’

  ‘Finished when?’

  ‘I got to go to the Astor Hotel. Meet up with some people and drop something off for ’em. Get there at seven, I’ll wrap it up by eight. Boom, bang, cat, bag, bag, river. Then I’m free and clear.’

  ‘AO,’ she said. ‘We’ll accompany.’

  Wherever the gals planned to take me, it wouldn’t be as good as Hawaii; but I would get there sooner. All the same, I wasn’t going to pass up ten thousand big ones; that’d be the best deal I ever swung. Briefly, I considered the millions of ways things could go wrong that evening, if I decided to swing this gig drag rather than stag. Considered that this meeting of the Personality Dynamos, unlike the one I’d glimpsed before, would be going on in a public venue and not back at their den of iniquity – what could possibly happen? Considered that if I let Eulie take off without me now I might never see her again; that made up my mind for me. ‘All right, but it could be tricky. These people I’ll see tonight are –’ I stopped to consider the best way to phrase it. ‘Funny.’

  Chlo didn’t smile. ‘Comedy funny?’

  ‘Psycho funny. You can come with me, but don’t do anything that’ll attract attention.’ Chlo cracked her knuckles, and the sound was like a floor caving in. When shifted from boot to boot her suit changed from rubber to snakeskin to rubber again. ‘You didn’t happen to bring any evening wear, did you?’

  ‘What evening?’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘follow me.’

  We weren’t the high point of the day for the ladies at the Big Gals Shop on West 72nd ‘“No Miss too hard to fit,”’ I said, pointing out the slogan they had plastered all over the window. ‘Where’s truth in advertising?’

  ‘Sir, I’m terribly sorry,’ the assistant manager said, avoiding Chlo’s glare. I got the idea she was having flashbacks of a real bulldozer of a gym teacher. ‘I don’t see how we can possibly –’

  Then the owner came back from lunch. ‘Can’t possibly what?’ she asked, stepping back onto the floor of the shop, wiping her lips with a napkin. She had on harlequin glasses and red ensemble coordinated down to her toenails. ‘What’s the problem?’ Chlo stepped into her field of vision. ‘What’ve we got here?’

  The sales girl tried to explain, but didn’t get far. ‘They’re looking for an outfit for the, uh –.’ She gestured toward Chlo but still didn’t look at her. ‘- their friend. I’ve told them we simply can’t help them, we don’t have anything –’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said the owner, not missing a beat. ‘You are a big one, sweetie. What size are you? That’ll save us time.’

  ‘One hundred thirty-seven,’ said Chlo, after giving it some thought.

  ‘Oh, we don’t use European sizes in this country, dear.’

  ‘She’s from New Jersey,’ I interrupted. ‘Needs something for an evening event. Nothing fancy, just nice. Within reason. Better than nice. Know what I mean?’

  Even if she didn’t, she’d have never let on. ‘Oh, sure,’ she said, taking out a tape measure and wrapping around Chlo’s various attributes. ‘Usual trouble areas don’t really present a problem,’ she said. ‘Problem’s not height but your width, dear. Your shoulders and arms are somewhat oversized –’ The sales girl made a barely noticeable expression, and sent up some kind of enigmatic retail smoke signal. ‘May I speak frankly for a moment?’

  ‘Shoot,’ I said.

  ‘The lady is a lady, isn’t she?’

  I wasn’t sure what to tell her, and looked to my lovely little one. ‘Chlo,’ Eulie said. ‘Denude.’ With a long single zip, Chlo opened her jumpsuit and stepped out, sliding it over her gloves and boots. Since she wasn’t wearing underpants, and favoured a close shave down in Happyland, it was obvious right away which side of the fence she’d landed on. Her basic structure was hourglass, kind of, though it turned out her spectacular fore and aft were to some degree artificially enhanced by her outerwear. No matter; what got me was that from the scars on her neck, between the metal bra holding her casabas, all the way down to the honey pot, there was what looked like a flesh-coloured plate. It would have looked like the bottom of a turtle shell if a turtle shell was made of telephone plastic. Her skin was puckered along its edges like it had been glued on. Sticking out of her bra were two metal nozzles right where the nipples were – I guessed – and then I remembered those little bumbershoots she’d used on Romeo, first night I saw her. Her legs and arms looked like they’d had some work done as well, but there they’d used chrome steel to fill her out. She wouldn’t rust, at least.

  ‘Judas Fucking Iscariot.’ The owner probably meant to whisper, but didn’t quite pull it off. ‘What happened to you, honey?’

  Our naked glamazon just blinked.

  ‘Car wreck,’ I said. ‘Touch and go for awhile. Complete success, under the circumstances. Modern medicine’s a miracle, isn’t it?’

  ‘Dear, let’s get you covered,’ said the owner, suddenly conscious of the scene any new customer would encounter, walking in; she helped Chlo pull her suit back up.

  ‘So what’s the verdict?’ I asked.

  ‘Frances,’ she said to the sales girl, who was standing behind the counter. If there was a bat back there I’m sure she was ready and willing to grab it. ‘That shipment from Hawaii. The island wear for summer. I think we can work something out.’

  ‘This essentials?’ Chlo peeped, growling at me.

  ‘We’re still observed,’ Eulie said.

  ‘Not as much,’ I said. ‘Trust me, it�
�s better than it was.’

  The owner had taken two muumuus, as she called them – one with pink and green flowers, the other with green and blue – and in no time at all her gals in the back managed to put the two together, kind of. Colours clashed a little but I’ve seen worse off the rack, especially on hayseeds. Her new frock hung down to her boots – you could still see their sharp metal pointy toes, but only if you looked for them – and they’d wrapped a long blue scarf around her neck. She insisted on wearing her jumpsuit underneath, but it only showed on the arms. We were still getting rubberneckers, true, but not as many as before. I still wasn’t sure how she’d go over that night, and figured when the time came with luck she’d be willing to dawdle in the lobby.

  ‘Believe me, you’re dressed to kill,’ I said.

  ‘Always,’ Chlo said.

  ‘Weren’t we there?’ Eulie asked, pointing across Columbus toward the Natural History Museum.

  ‘Yeah, in the park,’ I said, remembering that night, that kiss, those frogs. ‘You never have said where you went. I looked all over –’

  ‘That museum. I minored zoology,’ she said. ‘It’s seeable?’

  Not my favourite place in town; not by a long shot. ‘You’d like to see it?’ She smiled, and any resistance I might have offered melted away like dew. ‘Just behave yourself.’

  Zipping across Columbus we wandered over to the 77th Street entrance, underneath the big arch. The old ladies manning the counters looked about as upset as the matinee crowd back at Roosevelt Centre but they were probably more used to seeing visitors from faraway climes. I led the gals upstairs, through the long marble corridors, past the glass ferns and the stuffed parrots and the big painting of old Teddy. Didn’t strike me as odd that a Jersey girl, even one with a fondness for animals, wouldn’t have gotten to the museum before this. A tourist trap, on the one hand, and on the other something to keep eugenicists happy. Eulie looked pleased, though; and Chlo seemed to have calmed down enough that I wasn’t as worried she’d suddenly start pulling those construction worker tricks.

  When we reached Akeley Hall, where they keep the gorillas and the rhinos and the herd of elephants in the middle of the room, that was when I really started to wonder about them both. As soon as we went in they stopped dead in their tracks; they looked at the lit cases with three-year-old’s eyes. Eulie looked especially upset, considering she’d wanted to go the zookeeper route. True enough, though, I never found Jersey girls, even down in Devil territory, in the Pine Barrens, to be any more adept than New Yorkers at dealing with animals more exotic than Airedales. I stood there with them for maybe five or ten minutes before I realized that both Eulie and Chlo were letting loose with the waterworks. I’m no stone heart but like many gentlemen of my acquaintance, I never know what to do when a woman breaks down with a bad case of the boohoos. ‘There’s more to see,’ I mumbled. ‘Come on.’

  ‘They’re alive now?’ Eulie said as we stumbled back into the brighter light in the hall, hooking her arm into mine. I tucked her in close to me as it sunk in to my thick head just how much the place seemed to be upsetting her.

  ‘They had their day in court,’ I said. ‘Look real, though, don’t they –?’

  ‘Nya,’ she said, dabbing her eyes with my sleeve. ‘In habitat, meant.’

  ‘Honey, I don’t get you. What’s wrong?’ I glanced at Chlo, but she looked as sad; perhaps not as willing to seek comfort.

  ‘Extinct,’ she said. ‘They’re not extinct?’

  ‘Course not, not on this floor,’ I said. ‘You want extinct, we got to go up to the fourth floor and see the bones.’

  The two of them sat down on a marble bench, looking like they’d just come out of a four-hankie matinee. Eulie’s makeup ran, turning her eyes all raccoony. Nothing I said seemed to bring them out of it. ‘What’s the matter with you two?’

  ‘We’ve only seen visuals,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t get you two,’ I said. ‘Half the time you act like you’re in charge of the show, and half the time you act like you’d spend your life savings buying magic beans.’

  They started drying up.

  ‘Cognitive dissonance,’ I said, remembering the phrase. ‘Why don’t we go?’ I asked. ‘I never thought this was a good place, myself. Come on, this way.’

  We stood up, and I led them down the hall, thinking I knew a quicker route to the exit from where we were. I waited to see if they were going to say anything, but they were trying to pull the old speak-no-evil again. It wasn’t long before I realized that we’d wandered right into the Hall of Man. I hadn’t been in the museum since I first hit town; once was enough. ‘Not this way,’ I said. ‘Over here, I think –’

  But Chlo had already spotted what I’d tried to avoid seeing, and strode across the floor, almost knocking over an elderly couple passing away their remaining time. ‘Eulie,’ she said, whispering – of course, she could have whispered in the basement and you’d hear her in the attic. Eulie sidled over to where her big pal stood, blocking the view. I heard her say one word.

  ‘Godness.’

  They gave the exhibit the old looksee over and over again, like they hoped to get some kind of reaction out of those black glass eyes. They looked at it probably the way I looked at it, the time I’d seen him before. I’d read about the exhibit back in Seattle, and found it as hard to believe as it was easy to believe – cognitive dissonance popped up all over the place, once you started thinking about it. They’d set him up just off Akeley Hall when he was first installed, I gathered; I suspected they wanted him there so the curious could conveniently size him up, vis-à-vis the gorillas. Then foreign tourists – the ones that mattered, Canadians and Argentinians and Australians – raised enough of a ruckus that they moved him here, where at least he nominally fit in within an anthropological framework.

  ‘Sambo?’ Eulie said, giving me bugeyes.

  ‘Nickname,’ I said, reading the label on the mahogany part of the case. ‘First one of his kind ever brought over.’ I reconsidered. ‘Of his tribe.’

  ‘Masai,’ she said. I couldn’t remember what his real name had been; remembered it sounded just as made up. He was as tall as Chlojo, but only half as wide – all muscle, posed on one foot, a long spear cradled in one arm. His skin was as dark as an oxblood loafer, I suspected they waxed him periodically, to keep him fresh. ‘He’s Masai.’

  ‘May as well be Cherokee.’

  ‘Brought here in 1917?’

  ‘And sent to the Bronx Zoo,’ I said. ‘Didn’t stay too long, though. Died in the pandemic.’ I tried to remember the name of the disease no one caught anymore, the one that took all four of my grandparents. ‘Brainbuster.’ Eulie and Chlo looked at one another and nodded, and kept staring in the case, at the man who wasn’t man, not officially, not here. You’d have thought their moms would have warned them about things like this, but maybe they never had the chance. Or maybe they were Canadians after all, and sheltered from the more mindboggling acts of their neighbours to the South.

  ‘Zoo?’ Chlo asked.

  ‘Genetic upkeepery,’ said Eulie. ‘None protested?’

  ‘Only ones’d protest would have too much reason to complain,’ I said. ‘Maybe it’s not that bad a thing. Long time from now, I don’t know where I’ll be, but chances are good he’ll still be around.’

  I turned down the volume; we seemed to be alone in the room, but you can never be too careful when it comes to acoustic tricks in these old Victorian barns. ‘Even so, speaking personally, I can’t hang out in this joint without thinking I might wind up in one of these boxes myself.’ I started to think that if I stuck around much longer, I’d start making with the boohoos myself. ‘Come on, ladies. I need to pick up something at my place before we make the scene tonight.’

  SEVEN

  The something that needed picking up before we hit the Astor was a standard-issue test tube containing 30 parts distilled water to one part phenylethylamine isoergine-144, an especially delirious new compound tagge
d by the Interior Department’s pocket protectors as Pi-R2. Now it strikes me as probable that some of you have passed what idle newspapermen call the acid test. Six months earlier, while the finishing touches were still being put on, I gave Pi a try. Let me tell you, my brothers, the difference between the trip LSD-25 gives you and the one you get from Pi is like the difference between your old granny pinching your cheek and the Homicide boys hauling you into the back room and making you believe you took a razor to Shirley Temple. And like that perm-a-muggles Chlojo gave me, you only had to let your finger do the walking through the stuff to get the right size hit, that is, one which dropkicked you right there into a twenty-eight-hour ride on the Cyclone, nineteen hours of which consisted of the old peakeroo.

  The wise man knows that that way lies dementia praecox. Once I splashed down, and spent a week recovering, I presented my report, suggesting that it might not be a bad idea if they just stuck Pi in the storage room, back there with the smallpox and anthrax, but I don’t have to tell you that in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is ignored.

  Considering that to the best of my knowledge the Personality Dynamos weren’t familiar with anything stronger than strawberry mesc, dosing the punchbowl with Pi would make sure that if the hapless Dynos had personalities of even an animal sort prior to sipping, they would be tabula rasae afterward. But a further mixing would bring the trip down to a bearable state; I simply wasn’t sure how much mixing would be necessary.

  We made the Astor at six forty-five. I’d changed into my dullest suit, a slate-blue single-b model that made me look like an accountant who could be persuaded to forget how to add. In her little black mini Eulie blended in beautifully. Chlojo, however, still presented problems no matter how good the camouflage. Her muumuu was colourful enough as street wear, but in close quarters it made her look like a one-woman parade float. Every time she took a step those silver-spiked boot toes of hers poked out from beneath the hem, and even though Eulie convinced her to finally ditch the gas station gloves it didn’t really help, considering that she could have palmed a honeydew one-handed.