I’d been like Steve Martin in Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, playing scenes opposite phantasms, figures unreal and deceased. Yet Perkus had made me peculiarly brave. The Polish starlet was also the detective who couldn’t kill or be killed by guns, but might brandish love. It struck me that Oona had done me a favor, too, enmeshing me in such a lame script. How many ever know they’re in one? “Being until recently one of the local fakes,” I told Claire Carter, “I take the matter seriously. Forgive me if it strikes you as tendentious.”
“Let me make a suggestion,” she said. “Follow the money.”
“Sorry?” The glib cliché shattered my reverie, returned me to the tangible fact of the mayor’s operative, her dress-for-success pugnacity, her horrific completeness, how she made in her whole earthly self Perkus Tooth’s true opposite, and how vile she was to me, real or fake. She might begin clubbing me, as a pelt prospector clubs a baby seal, with further phrases such as do what you love, the money will follow and show me the money, and I might die here yelping on the mayor’s superb Oriental. I couldn’t brandish love in this encounter, had to choose my battles, flee.
“Take a look at who signs your checks. If it isn’t a city agency, and it isn’t, then you’ve brought your complaints to the wrong door.”
I wondered, for the first time, if my residuals weren’t all residuals. “I get… direct deposit.”
“We’re in the coping business around here,” said Claire Carter, ignoring me. “Like any administration, we inherited the problems we’re trying to solve.” Her tone was almost sulky. Perhaps my accusations had reached her, in whatever slight place she could be reached. Or maybe the phrases were a secret signal, for now the mayor arrived. He wore a brocade robe over silk pajamas, and inspected me like a disgruntled father in a black-and-white comedy, or Sherlock Holmes resigning himself to lecturing Watson on the obvious. He should have been carrying a candelabra. But these weren’t Hugh Hefner or Rossmoor Danzig pajamas, tailored to jollify ugliness, these were no laughing matter, the pajamas of power wakened from its deserved repose. I had to make myself worthy of interrupting these pajamas. I felt I might have wandered into another joke besides the riddle about the Polish starlet now, that like a penitent who’d ascended a snowy Tibetan mountain to speak with the hermit guru, I’d be permitted a single question before being returned to my exile. Why is it snowing? Is Marlon Brando alive or dead? On what support does the weight of the world rest? I couldn’t choose, and so exhibited my traditional mask of placid stupidity. Yet before the swarming pressure of the unreal rose up and swallowed us three where we stood, Arnheim’s impassive features deflated in an approximation of human sorrow, and he beckoned with his short arms to encircle me, and like a giant infant I was for a moment comforted against his shoulder, which was surprisingly knobby under my cheek, as though it had knuckles.
“I’m deeply sorry for your loss,” he said. “Our city mourns with you.”
“Thank you, sir.” I tried to conceive that Perkus would be granted this tribute after all, and whether I should accept it for him. On the other hand, it might be an attempt to persuade me not to look into the circumstances of his “death.”
“She won’t be forgotten.”
“She?”
“The Chinese will pay some price for this, don’t doubt it.”
Arnheim meant Janice Trumbull. The ghost-astronaut had been declared dead at last, I gathered, though I’d have to buy the Times the following day to learn that rather than linger any more in fetid cancer and agriculture, the space captives had serenely directed their station into the path of the mines, to be cleansed in vacuum fire. Did the mayor believe I still believed that stupid tale? Did he? Perhaps Claire Carter was simply being truthful when she told me I’d come to the wrong door.
I had nothing at all to say to him, or anyone, about Janice Trumbull. But in the comedy we now played, in which the billionaire Arnheim, veins so notoriously icy, now steadied me by the elbows and gazed into my eyes with avuncular wartime bonhomie as if I were some far-posted confidential agent coming in briefly to receive encouragement from the home office, I could let “her” stand for Perkus Tooth. This suited me. Perkus could be everywhere and nowhere, as I’d often felt him to be. I hungered to dismay Arnheim, to let him wonder if the operative in his embrace had gone over to the other side, even if I had no idea whether another side existed. “I learned certain secrets from her, before she died,” I told him. “Secrets about the city. The tiger, for instance.”
Arnheim stepped back from me, placing his hands in his robe’s deep pockets as if he were suddenly ashamed of them. He didn’t have to bend his elbows to do so. “I’m glad you mention it.”
“I didn’t want there to be any confusion.”
“There’s a Sufi aphorism that’s apropos to this situation-have I ever mentioned it to you?”
I stared in confusion. Arnheim spoke as though we enjoyed some long association.
“The secret protects itself.”
“That’s the Sufi aphorism?”
“Go with it, my friend. You can do no wrong. The secret protects itself.”
I found this notion, that I could do no wrong, demoralizing in the extreme. If I believed it I might have to hurl myself into one of Noteless’s chasms, perhaps the Memorial to Daylight, during the opening ceremonies. Though I suppose my most flamboyant suicide could be incorporated readily enough into a tale of the astronaut-fiancé’s bereavement. Better to drift into the gray fog and be forgotten. I noticed I’d now officially contemplated suicide, an act no one warns you is involuntary, unfolding as it does in contemplation. All it had taken was the crushing force of this parlor’s decor, and a mayor who might himself be a memorial to daylight, as though he’d drunk it all for himself and left nothing on the table. Who required even hiccups to destroy me? In my despair I tried one more code word on Jules Arnheim, a gesture in commemoration of the now-dissolved Fellowship of the Chaldron. “Les Non-Dupes refuse!” I said, producing the slogan with all the useless courage of Nathan Hale on the gallows.
The mayor had a ready response, one which seemed to gratify him, not at the layer of his bogus joviality but in the deeper stirrings of his killer’s soul, on view at last. “Les Non-Dupes errant,” he said, gazing unblinking and unavuncular into my eyes. My own high-school French, flickering in memory, supplied the interpretation. Like knights-errant, we non-dupes were not only lost but mistaken. We wandered in error. To be unduped was not to live. There was no way out, only a million ways back in.
“What do I do now?” I asked him, helpless not to turn to the authority before me, the father we dream of in joy and fear.
“Go back to a city that needs you.”
“You mean, Manhattan?”
“No one disputes your place here. You own your apartment outright, don’t you? I understand it has a fine view.”
If I stayed a moment longer Arnheim might describe those birds and that tower, my heart’s last sacred quadrant of sky. I fled into the night and snow before I could hear it.
CHAPTER
Twenty-eight
This is the story of Bloomington that I told Richard Abneg, the night of Perkus’s death and the night of our arrest, while we sat with our heads leaned close against the bars of our cells, in the quiet that descended in the dark there. Richard had finished speaking of his teenage life, and Perkus’s. He’d asked how I’d come to the city, how a person becomes a star in a television show filmed live on a soundstage on West Forty-seventh Street while still the age of a high-school junior, leaving parents and friends and a world behind in distant unimaginable Indiana. I tried and faltered over making him a portrait of my parents, my old and helpless and perfectly kind parents so confused by their youngest son, and the story of my legal emancipation from them by the talent agent who discovered me, in order that I could travel and be tutored and work for the benefit of myself (and the agent) before I’d attained a legal working age. It was all a bit much and likely too boring to tell.