Stanley Elkin - Searches & Seizures

He took out his wallet, put seven dollars on the plate beside the bill and stood up. “What sign are you? Do they still ask that? What sign are you?”

“Me? Sagittarius.”

“Sagittarius, yeah?”

“What sign are you?”

“Pliocene.”

The Phoenician put the girl in a taxi. He had the beginning of a hard-on.

Stepping out of the bright cool sunshine, Alexander Main opens the door to his office, jiggling the gay sleigh bells above his door. “Get to work, Mr. Crainpool,” he calls out absently to the arm-gartered man. “Get to work, you idle scoundrel. While the cat’s away, is it? If you’ve finished what you were doing, find something else. We don’t pay out our good money…’ello, ’ello,” he says in his inspector’s voice. The mug from Chicago is sitting at his desk. “Who’s been sitting in my chair?” the Phoenician asks dully.

“Where’s Morgan? What did you tell him?”

“Listen, type, you owe me money. The bail came to something under the five thousand you mentioned.”

“Where is he?”

“You want to know where he is?”

“That’s right.”

“He got away from you?”

“You told him I was outside.”

“Let me understand. He got away from you and we’re back at square one?”

“Yeah, right.”

“Then I’m still on the payroll?”

“Where is he?”

“I’m still on the payroll?”

“You know where he is?”

“Yes?”

“If you can produce him.”

“Let’s see. The bond came to fifty bucks. Thirty percent for fingering him is another fifteen. That makes it sixty-five dollars I’m owed.”

The gangster takes out his wallet and lays two twenties, two tens and a five down on his blotter.

“Very well.” He takes the bond agreement from his pocket and shows it to him. “Yes. Municipal court. Room nine. His appearance is in three weeks.”

“You’re something else, brother.” He shoves one of the tens back in his pocket.

“Welsher!” Main shouts. “Do you see, Crainpool, how this soldier contrives to worm out of our agreement? Indian giver!”

“Oh, you’re really something else,” he says. “You’re just lucky I’m a professional and that no one’s paying me to do you. I don’t play benefits. But I’m going to have long talks with my superiors about you. Oh, yes, I’m going to make detailed reports about you, Mister.” His tone changes and he looks at Alexander with something like surprise. “Fifty bucks? His bond was only fifty bucks? Shit, don’t they know anything in this burg?”

“A backwater.”

“Okay, bad information. We got this call he was busted and they sent me down.”

“What the hell, a day in the country for you.”

“Sure, right.”

“An outing, a little fresh air. Come back and see us now you know the way.”

“Right,” he says. “In three weeks.”

He goes out.

“Well, Mr. Crainpool, was that exciting enough for you?”

“I’ve seen better.”

“Yes. And you’ll see better yet.”

“Will I?”

“Twenty-twenty, sir, close calls and closest. Now then, what have you got for me?”

Crainpool points to a calendar. “Tomorrow’s the first.”

“Yes. I’ll call on Avila, I think.”

“You’re always the one who gets to go out,” he whines.

“Yes,” I say, “that’s the thing about freedom.”

Avila’s offices are downtown. He is not a criminal but a divorce lawyer, and his place of business reflects this. It is in with the good stores and better office buildings in that three- or four-block section of the city that is our Fifth Avenue.

The day is a reproach to my heart, as though, like all old men on a splendid day, I precede Nature, am there by sufferance, time’s professional courtesy. I have left my topcoat behind, but no matter. God sees through me, knows it’s only old Alexander Main down there in His high-rent Cincinnati, no boy, no boulevardier, only the sullied Phoenician with sin and history like shit in his gut. God sees through my bright caps, knows what’s beneath them, sees right down to the gums, the pink base of my being, the cloudy tracings in which the teeth stand parallel as staves. And under the gums the cementum-sheathed roots hooking bone, seeking wild handhold and purchase like some apraxic mountaineer. God knows my jaws.

Still, here I am. If nothing else my money entitles me. (I have written my will. I am to be buried with my cash. It will line my coffin like salad, so that one day the archaeologists will find me, lightning will strike, the earth move, the state push through a thruway, the new ice age bulldoze me a thousand miles south, scientists of some distant time catalog me, my bones like leftovers in the wormy lettuce of my fortune, Alexander’s ragtime bond, gone surety for himself, in on bail. Perhaps, if they still exist, space will be found for me in the case of some future museum, the fingertips of schoolboys on my glass, smudging the watch face of my crystal isolation.) Meanwhile I usurp pleasure from the fine day, shudder in the faint chill of the spring breeze blowing through Cincinnati’s Lego boulevards, in our Lego America. Down the big street I go where the skin of one building merges with the skin of the next in Siamese connection, a long Chinese wall of architecture, past an outdoor cafe with a little low white fence propped on the wide white street like a playpen that must be folded each night and taken in from the weather. Awning shows. As if Cincinnati were a port city, some sailcloth town. A waiter moves in and out among the tables, not in uniform but in a light gray suit, wearing an old boy’s tie beneath a vest crisscrossed with watch chain and trophied with the keys of elective societies.

I gaze in at the clean store windows — there’s our century’s real art, in its window trimming — like sets for a perfected life. I enjoy other people’s good taste. Things are set off, isolated in high fashion’s splendid cages — a beautiful desk and beautiful chair off-center in an immense window. In another, on a luscious rug, across the arm of a superb Wassily chair, is a Braemar cashmere, pale green as the open spaces on dollar bills. A kiosk bristles with bright announcement — a Ukrainian dance troupe, Lipizzaner horses, the Black Theater of Prague, the Stones, the Black Watch — the posters projected on the tall cylinder like foreign countries painted on a globe. I am surprised they are printed in English and not French. Even the air smells French — chestnuts, Gauloises and gasoline. Ahead of me a girl steers down the street with her hand deep inside the back of her boyfriend’s trousers, using his ass as a tiller.

I pass another sidewalk café. An elegant woman sits beside a man who wears the whitest turtleneck I have ever seen. His cavalry twill trousers are custom-made, bespoke slacks. Elbows on the table, the two lean toward each other in intense affinity over their empty coffee cups. I look down to read the message in the crumbs of their brioches on the white cloth, a Morse code of dough and crust. Further on, workmen in ladder trucks lift Easter decorations into the thin trees, long strips of gold foil in light rigid frames, exactly the size and appearance of bedsprings. When I passed here two days ago they were up only to Pogue’s Department Store; now they have gone another two blocks, inching their way the long length of the avenue like a golden blight.

I enter the new office block and refer to the huge directory that takes up almost the entire width of one black marble wall. I locate the number of Avila’s suite — I have never been here before — and tell the operator I want the eighteenth floor. He stops the car between floors, turns to me and takes a crude wooden box from his pocket. There is a sort of Hawaiian scene painted on it. He is going to show me a magic trick. “You smoke?” Without waiting for me to answer, he lifts the lid and demonstrates that the box is empty; then he opens it again and there are four cigarettes in it. They look stale and have lost tobacco at both ends. He laughs. He has plastic hearing tubes in his ears like tiny drains. “Maybe I get you one of this. Three dollar.”