Death of a Flack Read online

  It was a stately, old-fashioned, white limestone house with a wide glass-and-iron grill door which the key opened without any trouble. There was no elevator. There was a well-kept lobby and a broad marble stairway. There were two apartments on each floor: 2-B was faced to the front. I considered ringing the bell, rejected that as a lackluster commencement for an international affair, used the key, and found myself in a small, round, lighted foyer. No one greeted me: there was no sound. Through a high, peak-topped, door-less doorway, I entered, two steps down, into a blue-carpeted living room, beautifully furnished, and then into a smaller dining room, beautifully furnished. The dining table was set for two, silver gleaming, a single candle in a silver candlestick, softly burning, but all was quiet, muffled: there was no sound. To the left was a clean yellow kitchen: empty. To the right was a rose-colored bedroom with a wide thick-matrressed four-poster bed, turned down and ready, pillows bright, sheets gleaming, but with no one in it. Across the room was a mirrored door with a glass-faceted doorknob. I turned the knob and I was in a bathroom and it was not empty. Sophia Patri lay neck to tile, hair piled on head, in the clear clean transparent water of a perfumed bath. Her eyes were closed. Her smooth, shimmering, hairless, coffee-colored body, beautifully formed, was motionless, except for the large, round, pink-nippled breasts which moved, gently, half-floating at water-top. For one quick dreadful moment I thought she was dead.

  She was not dead.

  SIX

  The dark eyes opened.

  There was repose in her face.

  And then she smiled a small, lip-curled, innocent, half smile, and brother, there is nothing more lewd than an innocent half smile from a naked woman. There exists within me a streak of restraint of which I was then unaware, else I would have splashed a high-dive into that bath, clothes and all, and the hell with it. Instead I stood rigid in all departments except the jaw which I felt go slack. I stood, one leg straight, one knee bent, like a dandy-type moron, gracefully leaning upon the cane of my rolled-up umbrella. Get that picture! Get that picture and frame it and harbor it and bring it out sometime when you are seized by melancholy and need a laugh—the coffee-colored smiling lady lolling in her bath and the rigid dope stiffly gaping open-mouthed, with an umbrella yet.

  “Hello,” she said, so softly.

  “Er,” I said.

  “There was beginning to be worry that you would not come.”

  “Um,” I said.

  “I am so glad you are here.”

  “Eh,” I said.

  “Please take off your clothes.”

  Just like that! Good to see you. So nice of you to have come. Please make yourself at home. Take off your clothes!

  I stood as though I were permanently annexed to my umbrella and my umbrella was rooted to the ground. She emerged from the bath, slipped into a thick terry-cloth towel-robe; let the water of the bath run out. Then she went to her knees and cleaned the bathtub. She arose, darkly flushed, and smiled. “Please, Mr. Chambers, take off your clothes.”

  Were you ever invited to take off your clothes by a lady who addressed you by your surname? What would you do? What would you say? I said, “I am Peter. Peter.”

  “Yes, Peter, Peter,” she said. “Take off your clothes.” And she grasped the crutch of the umbrella from me and I almost fell. “Please,” she said, quietly, intently, a brim of shining tears in her dark eyes. “You will bathe. We shall start fresh together. Cleansed. Clean. Out from the water as though baptized fresh. Clean. Cleansed of all before. As though born anew.”

  It came through to me, finally. Perhaps we Americans have laid away our sentimentality. Perhaps Europeans cling more tenaciously and lovingly to the symbols of romance which we have discarded as trivia. This was ritual, fantastic ritual, but solemn, serious and pure. The lady quit her toilet carrying my umbrella—which may afford you another picture for your gallery of giggles.

  I got out of my clothes and into the bath. It was a warm bath and relaxing, but I did not relax. I expected her return at any moment. I lay no claim to inordinate modesty, but the situation was sufficiently unusual to keep me in a state of nervous, half-cocked prickliness. But the dear lady may have come to the realization (perhaps from a badly concealed expression of shock as I had leaned upon my umbrella) of the ingrained austerity of the puritanical American male, despite his glib, outward, outgoing, superficial prurience, for she made no assault upon my undefended sanctum other than the insertion of one naked arm the hand of which hung two towels and a Chinese-type half robe upon the hook inside the bathroom door.

  I scrambled out of my bath, twisted a handle for the water to drain out, rubbed down and dried out, combed and fixed, and slid into the Chinese jacket. It was a thing of beauty, a brocade of gold and green with a thick galloon of gold, and it was a thing of utility, but it accomplished that utility by just about an inch. I viewed myself in the mirror and I came off quite well. I looked like a Chinese warlord who had mislaid his boots. It did things to its wearer, that jacket. One was broad-shouldered by virtue of cunning padding, and one tapered down by virtue of the gold braided belt, and then one flared heroically in embroidered gold and green, deftly covered in one’s private parts, but the deft cover just about made it. The best part of the thighs, the muscular part, was exposed, and one felt like stomping about and giving orders. Warlord-like, one stomped out of his castle of water closet, but one gave no orders.

  She was not in the bedroom (and I admit to a twinge of disappointment) and she was not in the dining room and she was not in the kitchen but damn she was in the living room and she lit it up like a flare. She wore no make-up whatever—there are women who look better without make-up: her face was wreathed in a pure, pristine, glowing, unearthly beauty, smoldering eyes wider and darker and deeper than ever. Her hair was down, caught by a silver barrette, hanging in a black, flowing, shining mane to the small of her back. She wore a metallic silver, cleft, opaque negligee that clung like an errant wife to a suspicious husband, and every inciting curve of her was more pronounced, and pronouncing Sophia’s curves would be like delivering an explicit lecture on pernicious pornography. I tried to look away but the sinews of my neck rebelled. Without a word—there were no words between us—she came to me and I accepted her. She put her arms around me and we kissed, long and wetly. Part of me peeked from beneath the Chinese robe. I disengaged and retreated in partly exposed confusion. Hurriedly, I sat down. That was worse. Hurriedly, I stood up, turned my back, and fell to admiring a tapestry on the wall. Hell, this European technique was embarrassing. First off, the initiative seems to be with the woman, and a man resents the usurpation of initiative. Second off, love-making took place in unlikely places. There are, of course, likely places, none of which is a toilet, and a stand-up encounter in a well-lighted living room is about as congruous as a jazz session in a mausoleum.

  “Are you hungry?” I heard her say.

  “For you,” I replied with appropriate, I hoped, gallantry.

  “No. Food,” she said.

  “Starved,” I said, grasping at the opportunity.

  “Go to the dining room. Go sit down. I will make.”

  The candlelit confines of the silver-laid dining room were much more appropriate to the squeamishly amorous, strangely gone-bashful, Chinese warlord wearing a robe with a hemline shorter than the skirt of a Scotch Highlander blowing his bagpipes. Dutifully, I went to the dining room, sat, and tucked myself deeply and demurely beneath the damask tablecloth. Man, when you are doing dalliance out of your league, you are a stranger even unto yourself. It is like swinging in a cricket game with a golf club for a bat. You are, as they say in the best of mixed-metaphor circles, way off base. I sat, unaccustomedly abashed, diffident, potentially tumescent, and twiddling.

  She came with a large, curious, red-tinted cocktail in a long-stemmed glass and she said, “Drink, it is good, while I am cooking,” and went away. I tasted, was neither pleased nor displeased, then drank all out of sheer defense. Within moments, the candle glow
ed more brightly, I felt my lips part in fatuous grin, and I was amenable to a boxing match in the living room. Then she arrived with platters of softly scrambled eggs touched with molten cheese and a mince of ham. With it, we did not have coffee. With it we had wine in crystal goblets. If you have never had scrambled eggs with wine (which never before in my life had I had), have it. Dear reader, if ever you are in doubt about accepting a European for a lover, scrambled eggs with wine (and the implicit promise of other such esoteric combinations) should convince you. Accept. Strange, delectable combinations of cookery augur other and stranger delectable combinations.

  She sat a table-length away from me, a good deal of her hidden, but a good deal of her palpitatingly cleft-exposed, and we talked. She told me about herself. Her mother was Spanish, her father Italian, both were dead. She had been born in Barcelona and had lived there until her mother had died, and then, three years ago, her father had taken her to Rome, and there he too had died, and she had been alone.

  “Were you left any money?” I said.

  “Very little,” she said.

  “What did you do?” I said.

  “I met a man,” she said.

  “Naturally,” I said.

  “An old man,” she said.

  “But naturally,” I said.

  “George Demetrios,” she said. “A learned man, a foreign attaché in Rome. We were together until six months ago, when we broke. I came here to the States.”

  “With money?” I said.

  “A little,” she said.

  “How long did it last?”

  “Four months.”

  “And then?”

  “I met a man. An old man.”

  “Cobb Gilmore?”

  “Yes.”

  “But naturally,” I said.

  “I love you,” she said.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Please believe me,” she said.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “You are not eating.”

  “I am finished,” I said.

  “You are tired?” she said.

  “Beat,” I said.

  “Go,” she said. “Go to bed. Go to bed and sleep. I will clean up. Go to bed.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  I went to bed but I did not go to sleep. I doused the lights, doffed the Chinese jacket, dented the four-poster, and pulled up the sheets. I lay naked and as tremblingly expectant as a boy. I waited. She was merciful. I did not have to wait long.

  SEVEN

  The male of the species in this our twentieth, atom-tinctured, bomb-bombastic, highly civilized century is, after conquest—no matter it was he who was conquered—as preeny as a peacock, as casual as an urban traffic-crosser strolling in front of an oncoming automobile. At nine-forty of a drizzly Tuesday morning I leaned over that exquisite woman as though she were a lumped pillow and reached for the telephone which was on the night table on her side of the bed. I dialed my office number and received as penance the familiar cigarette-burnt croak of my estimable secretary: dour, sour, cynical, loyal, irreplaceable Miranda Foxworth.

  “Office of Peter Chambers,” she sang off key in her sweetest voice which was like fermented cider.

  “I’ll be in late,” I said.

  “Oh no you won’t,” she said, deleting whatever sweetness there may be in fermented cider.

  “No lectures,” I said. “No sermons. I’ll be in late. I’m tired.”

  She snorted, equinely. “Tired? At twenty minutes to ten in the morning?”

  “I had nightmares. I couldn’t sleep. I’ll be in late.”

  “Oh no you won’t!”

  “Miranda, go off and die somewhere. And let me die, elsewhere, in peace. I’ll see you later.”

  “Go to work, bum,” she said.

  “Like this I am addressed by my employee?” I said with insufficient rancor.

  “Employee has a message.”

  “From who?”

  “Whom is grammatical, employer.”

  “I told you I’m tired. Who—message?”

  “Jefferson Clayton. Called at nine-thirty. Urgent. Wants you at his office—but like at once. So rise and shine because like that you pay the rent. Present my apologies to whoever you’re sleeping with.”

  “Whomever.”

  “Bad grammar is contagious,” she said and hung up.

  I leaned on my companion and hung up. My companion did not stir. My companion was sleeping the sleep of the just—or unjust. I slipped out of the bed and covered her and kissed her forehead. She made a sound like a sigh (a contented sigh I must pridefully state), turned on her side, drew up her knees, and snored melodiously.

  I found a razor in the cabinet in the bathroom. Undoubtedly, it was Cobb Gilmore’s. I shaved, angrily, with Cobb Gilmore’s razor, detesting him with the normal illogic of a supposedly reasonable man—remember with what fervor we hate the lender when we cannot pay the debt—and I silently crowed that I had rendered him relatively cuckold. I dressed and stealthily stumbled out of my lady’s apartment, tightly holding on to my umbrella as though its sombre black folds were some cabalistic symbol of rectitude.

  Umbrellas were uniquely useless in this our May weather of rain. Actually, it was not raining. The air held a clammy moisture which perforce would have to be termed drizzle for want of more expressive pronouncement. It was ludicrous to hold an umbrella over your head: no rain was coming down, and whether or not you held or did not hold an umbrella, you grew damp by mist which encased you like a wet shroud. I commandeered a cab and was mistily tooled to 5 Wall Street where, on the twenty-second floor, I rendered my name in stern accents to a broodingly inattentive receptionist, and it worked. She snapped out of her rainy-day torpor and repeated: “Peter Chambers!”

  “That’s me,” I said, and did not do a small jig, and thought of Miranda and grammatical criss-crosses.

  “Mr. Clayton is expecting you,” she said.

  “He is?” I said.

  “This way, please,” she said and rose and led me, and her tight-skirted, swing-hipped buttocks afforded my first ray of delight on this gloomy Tuesday.

  Jefferson Clayton, slumped in the swivel behind his desk, looked about as bright as the weather. He was pale and the purple pouches beneath his eyes had lavender bags underneath them. He moved a limp finger which pointed to a chair, and said, “Sit, Pete, I want to talk to you.” He lit a cigarette with flustered fingers. The guy was as patently agitated as the rear end of a cooch dancer. “Two things,” he said. “The first is about a gun. I lost a gun.”

  “The one you were wearing last night?”

  His eyebrows came up and so did he, straightening in his swivel chair. “How do you know?”

  “I’m a detective. Remember?”

  “How do you know, Pete?”

  “I touched you last night. You were wearing a belt holster.”

  “All right,” he said. “I had a gun last night.”

  “Why?”

  “Perfectly proper reason. I had to deliver a large amount of cash to a client last evening before the ballet. I always carry a weapon when I’m carrying cash. A legitimate purpose and a legitimate weapon for which I have a proper and legitimate license.”

  “Bully,” I said. “What kind of weapon?”

  “Smith and Wesson automatic. Small bore. Twenty-five caliber.”

  “They’re cute.”

  “And serviceable, and small enough not to create too much of a bulge in evening clothes.”

  “Check,” I said. “Now, how does one lose a gun? It’s not like it’s a needle and you’re getting laid in a haystack.”

  “Very funny,” he said.

  “Excuse me,” I said.

  “You’re very chipper for so early in the morning.”

  “I had a restful night. How did you lose the gun?”

  He squeezed out his cigarette, lit a new one. “I was stoned last night. Remember when I had that run-in with Martell?”

  “Yes.”

  “We all went
to Sherry Greco’s bedroom?”

  “Yes.”

  “I opened my jacket, Sherry saw the gun, and took it away from me, and I don’t blame her. I was stoned and I was mad. That’s no time to be wearing a gun.”

  “What did she do with it?”

  “Laid it away on the dresser.”

  “Then?”

  “Nothing. We all got cooled down and we went back to the party. You left—anyway, you weren’t around. The party got real hot after a while, lots of action. The old boy took his gal home, she pleaded a headache or something, but after that it got real hot. I got stonier and stonier, but so did little Lori, that Martell hanging on to her like a goddam mother hen.”

  “Father hen.”

  “There is no such.”

  “Rooster.”

  “Oh, he was cock of the walk, all right, hanging on, possessive as all hell, but she gave him a time. He had his hands full.”

  “Like how?” I said.

  “The belly dancers came back and they really hit it up. Lori, but plastered, insisted on doing a dance. They gave her a costume and she did a dance, but man, a dance! Maybe she thought it was supposed to be a strip. She kept throwing off the clothes and Martell kept pasting them back onto her. It was a ball.”

  “What’s that got to do with a Smith and Wesson?”

  “I’m coming to it.”

  “Come.”

  “We got out of there maybe five o’clock a.m. I didn’t sleep much; I was due here at nine. Must have been seven o’clock, I woke up remembering I hadn’t taken up my pistol. Okay. So on my way downtown, I stopped off at Sherry’s. Had to wake her up. The holster was there. The gun was gone.”