Chester Anderson - The Butterfly Kid

“Right.”

And so we split, Sean carrying our share of Laszlo’s treasure. I closed the metal door silently, carefully relocking all five locks, and we started to tiptoe down the stairs.

Halfway down we stopped dead. There was a strange noise below us, a familiar strange noise, an absolutely Laszlo kind of noise.

“Trapped!” I cursed.

We turned and tiptoed double time back up the stairs, past Laszlo’s pad and two flights farther, all the way up to the door to the roof, which was locked from the other side.

“Yeah,” Sean whispered while I swore inventively, “trapped.” Meanwhile Laszlo loudly climbed the stairs below us. He seemed to consider each step a personal offense, and kept it no secret. He wasn’t a happy Laszlo, not at all.

He reached his landing and the Laszlo noise abated. Then there were crisp metallic noises, four sets of them: the Bard of MacDougal Street unlocking his door. This developed into a furious muffled rattling, punctuated by spurts of amateurish profanity. The rattling grew louder, and there were vigorous percussive sounds most likely made by kicking.

Under cover of this racket Sean whispered, “Hey, man, did you do something to that other lock?”

Clatter bang.

“Other lock?”

“You know, man. They was five locks, only one of ’em didn’t work. Remember?”

Thunderbash clamorbang cuss!

“Oh Christ,” I admitted. “You’re right.”

“You locked it?”

“I locked it.”

Sean and I huddled at the top of the stairs, waiting. It didn’t seem likely that Laszlo’d come upstairs and find us, but considering Laszlo, that wasn’t much security. I became acutely conscious of the rustling paper bag in Sean’s hand. That could take some explanation. It might be easier just to slug him, but Mike wouldn’t approve. Too inelegant, he’d say. Too crude.

Suddenly Laszlo fell silent, except for a thin low mutter that was probably his detailed opinion of the situation. Sean and I held our breaths. Laszlo’s muttering grew louder, and there were footsteps approaching. Complications threatened to set in.

Laszlo climbed up two flights, to the landing half a flight below where we were huddled in the insufficient darkness. He stopped before a door in plain sight of us, stood fuming for a moment, then rapped abstract invectives on the door.

Sean and I were paralyzed. This was clearly a situation out of which no good could come. All Laszlo had to do was turn around and we’d be had. He was bound to wonder why we were lurking around his pad, and we could count on him to think the worst — especially since he’d be right.

He rapped again. No answer.

“Why me?” he wondered bitterly. “What have I done? Why do these things have to happen to me?”

I could’ve told him, but it didn’t seem wise.

“It’s a plot, that’s what it is. They’re out to get me, that damn Anderson and all his stinkin’ crew. I know what’s going on here. Oh yeah, I know where it’s at, baby.” Louder rapping. “I’ll show them bastards.” Further rapping.

I felt better already, but, “Hello there,” said the wrist radio into one of Laszlo’s silences: transistorized instant traitor I squelched the gadget before it could say any more, but too late.

“Who’s there?” Laszlo panicked in anger, revolving like a paranoid top. “Who said that?”

Sweating foolishly, I pretended to be invisible. Doubtless Sean played some such desperate game as well.

Laszlo stopped twirling, his silly-putty nose aimed straight at us. “All right,” he snapped in a scared falsetto, “I see you. Come down here. Come on.”

“Okay,” whispered something in me that was half stubbornness and half humiliation, “I’ve been caught by Laszlo Scott, fair and square, but I’ll be damned if I’ll cooperate. If he wants me, let him come and get me.” So I sat rock-still and didn’t make a sound. Being pretty much stuck behind me, Sean had no choice but to do the same.

“Quit stalling,” Laszlo said with less conviction than before. “Come on down here.”

We didn’t move. Presently Laszlo said something commonplace and foul and stomped ungracefully away. We heard his cloddish feet descend two flights; we heard him rattling his door again; we heard him clomp the rest of the way downstairs to the ground floor, and we heard him slam the front door, hopefully behind him.

Still we did not move. Very gradually we realized that somehow Laszlo hadn’t really seen us after all. This was very strange, for Sean was wearing a white shirt and the stairwell wasn’t really all that dark.

But we didn’t hang around to work it out. As soon as we understood that Laszlo’d actually split for someplace, we tiptoed cautiously but swiftly down the stairs. (I was getting sick of all this tiptoeing. My green suede boots weren’t made for it, and my feet were starting to hurt.)

At the street door, Sean — -whom Laszlo conveniently didn’t know — poked his head outside to reconnoiter, keeping his left hand and Laszlo’s verdant treasure safely out of sight.

“It’s cool,” he announced, and out we went, looking so exactly nonchalant and casual we were almost invisible to ourselves.

We got home five minutes after Mike, and Sean instantly abandoned himself to Sativa again while I tried to explain to the irate M. T. Bear why I hadn’t responded to his last radio signal, why it took us so long to get home, and why we found nothing more significant than the bulging paper bag. Mike liked his plots to work the way he meant them to.

“Apparently,” he said when he’d digested my report, “Laszlo missed his connection at Grand Central.”

“He wasn’t very happy,” I agreed.

“So you’ll have to start tailing him tomorrow.”

“Oh.” That again.

But the time had become five o’clock, and we felt justified in calling it a day. This left us gloriously free until the morning, because it was Monday night, the Village sabbath, and all the entertainment coffeehouses were closed, and nothing, praise God, was happening. We could all use a little nothing happening. So we settled down to sample Laszlo’s grass.

An hour or something later we all nobly admitted that just this once we had to admire Laszlo’s taste. We were all absurdly pacified.

“Man,” I drawled for all of us, “I’m stoned. All I want to do now is move as little as possible. Wow.”

“Oh yeah,” Sativa languidly remembered, “I forgot.”

“That’s cool,” Mike said. “What’d you forget?”

“She can’t recall,” Sean answered, but:

“Oh no,” she corrected. “Somebody called. While you were away. I’ll remember in a… oh yeah, Harriet called.”

The rest of us groaned. We dearly loved Harriet, but only in conservative doses and never on the phone. She could burn up an hour saying good morning.

“What,” I queried bravely, “did she want?”

“It’s her anniversary. She and Gary the Frog have been living together for seventeen and a half weeks Tonight. Isn’t that sweet?”

“Better him than me,” said Mike. “Better her than me, too, come to think of it.”

“Well, I think it’s sweet. And they’re having a party tonight to celebrate.”

“Forewarned,” I uttered, “is forestalled.”

“Right,” Sativa gleamed. “And we’re all going.”

That produced the finest stunned silence our pad had heard since Mike’s third-last mistress announced that she was pregnant. (It turned out that she wasn’t pregnant at all, and that Mike didn’t do it anyway, but for a while there our atmosphere was very oddly charged.)

I recovered first. “A,” I insisted, “I do not go to parties. Ever.”