Hob Broun - Odditorium

“Just the three of us,” Pierce repeated. “We should get cozy.” He motioned for them to bring their chairs in closer. “We should just be loose.”

Tildy avoided his eyes, focusing instead on the white satin handkerchief spouting like a fountain out of his blazer pocket. She found him, thus far, completely uninteresting.

“So what happened with the entertainment? I like to watch dancers. Used to be one myself.”

“Really.” Pierce tipped his shoulders forward and she felt his smoky breath on her face. “I might have guessed as much from that physique of yours. Very supple. Like an otter with curves. What was your specialty? Tap? Flamenco? Ballet?”

“Nothing so special. My boogaloo was popular.”

Stagelights flashed on and the band members hurried out. They began furiously tuning their instruments.

“Let’s have some of those doughnuts.”

“Let’s order a drink.”

“Let’s get out of here.”

Pierce negotiated his Packard roadster through a flying wedge of taxis.

“Is this yours or did you rent it for the evening?”

Pierce smirked and flicked Tildy under the chin. “This car has been in my family for years.”

“Didn’t I tell you, kid?” Christo said, pouting in the back seat like a birthday boy who’d gotten nothing but savings bonds. “This guy’s a real ruling-class worm. If he hadn’t got so wrapped up in the dope business, he’d probably be working for the State Department.”

“And doing a superb job. I had three years of Russian, you know.”

It finally occurred to Tildy to ask where they were going.

“My place,” Pierce answered, and his voice went all rich and silky. Like Bela Lugosi.

A cone of balsam incense smoldered in an ashtray on the desk. Fibrous blue smoke moved through a shaft of lamplight in the slowly shifting patterns of dawn at sea. Pierce bent over a mound of white powder glittering on a mirror.

Only weeks ago, on the eastern slopes of the Peruvian Andes several thousand feet below the altiplano, leaves from the shrub Erythroxylum coca had been harvested. Two Indians wearing cotton sport shirts under their ponchos, murmuring to one another in Quechuan, had dumped the leaves into an old oil drum containing a solution of potash, kerosene and water, and left them to soak. After several days the precious alkaloids had been leeched out in the form of a brown paste left behind when the leaves and their marinade were discarded. A former classmate of Pierce’s (at St. Eustatius Prep of Sharon, Connecticut—“It is the Spirit that quickeneth”) serving with a Peace Corps agronomic project near Tingo Maria came in a jeep and collected the paste. Packing it in two Zip-lock bags, wrapping it in a thin sheet of lead to circumvent possible fluoroscoping by the Post Office, he dispatched it to Pierce’s mail drop, a one-room apartment on Staten Island that contained one mattress, one chair and a clock radio. Back at the duplex, in a makeshift lab installed by Looie, Pierce, using a simple method involving treatment with hydrochloric acid, manufactured three remarkably clean ounces of what had been until 1903, in name only now, a key ingredient in the world’s favorite soft drink.

Pierce inserted a piece of drinking straw into first one nostril and then the other, snorting one line into each. “We have lift off. Passing through the stratosphere … ionosphere … Past gravity pull, beyond the orbit track and into deep space.” With a moistened fingertip he gathered adherent crumbs from knife blade and mirror edge, massaged them into his gums.

Christo leaped forward to fill his own nose barrels. “That’s a serious freeze,” he said, backfiring his sinuses. “Off a few pounds of this I could go fishing in the Bahamas for four or five years.”

“Right. So what’re you going to do, a little Rumpelstiltskin magic? Sit down in the basement all night spinning straw into high quality blow? This business is like any other — office machines, aluminum siding — you got to push and push and push. There are no shortcuts, jazzbo. Anybody starts to tell you about one, get a firm grip on your wallet.”

“Right, coach.” Christo served himself another couple of lines.

“I’ll pass,” Tildy said when Pierce beckoned to her, his face wreathed in bright hokum like a schoolyard perv trying to lure her into his car with a bag of jawbreakers.

“Listen, sugar, you’re not going to come any closer to the unadulterated product. This hasn’t been stepped on with procaine or lactose or talcum powder or any of that shit. This is the goddamn sacred bestowal of the Inca sun god right here.”

Without looking up: “Have you got some beer in the icebox? Or a bottle of Cold Duck?”

Pierce was not a romantic. His relations with women had always been capricious, diversionary. These recreational contacts (sometimes nearly grudging) were wholly separate from the deadly serious system of male competition that had begun long ago at the core of his life and grown outward, adding layer upon layer until exterior guise and interior pith were indistinguishable. But Tildy was anomalous, that rare species who could thrive outside those boundaries, well beyond the reach of his manipulations. Pierce felt like he was looking at diamonds through the wrong end of a telescope, and did not like it at all. He wanted to impress this woman he barely knew, to draw her in. He wanted a charm to reach her with, a magnet, but he had only the parlor trick of spilling the white flakes into a glass of bleach and water, explaining to her that the speed with which they dissolved demonstrated their purity.

“I believe you. I believe that you’re a man with refined tastes and the equipment to back them up. But I would still like a bottle of beer.”

Pierce looked to Christo for help, gained no more than a shrug, and left the room in a poorly concealed sulk.

“I think you hurt his feelings,” Christo said. “I’m proud of you.”

“I thought you said I was going to like him.”

“Did I? You’re sure I didn’t just say you’d like his weed?”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

“Well, maybe it’s just a city mouse versus country mouse thing.”

Tildy came and straddled his knees, put her arms around him. “Do you have to be partners with him? Absolutely have to?”

“It doesn’t mean anything. Going into business with him doesn’t mean I have to convert.”

The gentle breath soothing his temples, the slow lips that touched him were like dry little explosions to his coked-up nerves. He stiffened under her, shifting, turning his head to one side.

“You’ve come all this way on your own, making your own game. What is it you want to grab so bad you’d change now?”

“That’s the kind of thinking keeps people driving tractors all their lives and buying on time.”

“What’s the matter with that?”

“Plenty. Let’s not get sentimental about it.” He nudged her off his lap and refilled his nose at the mirror.

“You’ll be giving something away if you go in with him and we all know it,” Tildy said. And to herself: Why why why do I care?

Pierce stepped in with Canadian ale, a mug chilled in the freezer and renewed aplomb.

“Here we are. A simple brew from the North Woods.”

Pierce opened a desk drawer, removed writing materials and a pocket calculator. “I think it’s time, jazzbo, that you and I sat down and hacked out some specifics. The kind of move you’re looking to do, that ad-lib style of yours just won’t cut it.”

“Absolutely. I’ve been itching to get at this all night.” Christo’s eyes were a shotgun; he fired both barrels at Tildy, but she was watching bubbles burst in the beer foam.

“Itching is just low-level pain,” Pierce said. “That’s what my grandma taught me the summer she had shingles. All right then, let’s say we capitalize this thing for a hundred thousand dollars.”