“Ben!” fat Joey said in greeting.
He was sitting at the bar, drinking from a large glass of clear liquid.
My hand disappeared into his powerful, fleshy grip.
He pulled me to a bar stool, where I perched nervously.
The ex-intelligence officer had brown eyes and brown hair that was probably dyed. His face was very round, rotund actually. His smile held no warmth or even mirth, but that seemed to me an honest expression. He didn’t know me; why feel all personal and cuddly?
“Cass says you got problems,” Joey said.
“Yeah.”
“Between him and me, we’ve seen a whole world of trouble,” Bondhauser confided. “Magda.”
“Yes, Mr. Bondhauser.”
Magda was wearing a red dress that day. She was so beautiful that I could imagine someone aching just by looking at her.
“Make the rooms ready for Mr. Dibbuk here. He’ll be meeting Cassius Copeland up there.”
“Yes, sir.”
When she turned away, I felt a little sad. My time in jail, however long it was, had made me feel that I would never behold beauty again. There was a feeling growing in my chest. It was like a small sphere of radiant energy, pulsing out of sequence with my heartbeat. After a moment I realized that this feeling was yearning — something that I had never allowed myself to feel as an adult.
“You want a drink, Ben?”
“Yes, I do.”
“What’s your poison?”
I wanted to say cognac, cognac in a big snifter with a lime peel on a dish at the side. And not just one snifter, but many of them over the next few days, while the police searched for me and while my wife rutted with the detective — rich amber liquor moving through my veins like chamber music on a sunny afternoon in a many-windowed room in July.
“Cranberry juice,” I said. “No ice but a twist of lime.”
Bondhauser called the order over to his bartender. There was a hint of disappointment in his tone.
“Cass is a great friend of mine,” Joey said then.
“He’s a good guy.”
Joey looked at me, pondering my diffident reply.
“Lotta good guys in the world, Ben,” he said. “Work friends, drinking buddies, guys who’ll lie to your wife when you need ’em to. But a great friend, a friend like Cass, is there when you need him and he’s there for the long haul.
“There was a time once when I was out on my own. My boys didn’t want me and their enemies wanted me dead” — it seemed as if Joey was staring straight through my forehead, into my mind — “I was what they call persona non grata. And Cass was the only man in the world who would go to bat for me.
“I’m not talkin’ about raisin’ his voice and complaining. He put his ass on the line. And when it was all over, and I was back in the saddle, he didn’t even ask for a — for an extra nickel or the slightest consideration.
“You see how he eats at the counter here?”
I nodded as the bartender brought my red drink.
“He doesn’t have to do that. I let all my old friends, the ones that abandoned me, eat at the bar. But Cass knows that he could come up to my house any day and eat up in the bed with my wife and kids. He could have my whole damn house, my bank account, and I wouldn’t flinch. Cass is a great friend. There’s not enough gold in the Federal Reserve to pay for something like that.”
I said nothing to all this. Bondhauser had gotten passionate over his notions of Cass, and even though I agreed with him, I didn’t believe anything I could say would match his fervor.
“And so,” Joey said, “when Cass comes to me and tells me that one of his best friends is in trouble, I stand up. I call the FBI. I tell my man there, Heydrich Lawry, that I need him to come up with some pretext to bring that man out of the tombs.
“Don’t get me wrong, Ben. You don’t owe me a damn thing. I did all of that because of Cass. He’s the real article and I owe him big.”
Magda came up behind her voluminous employer. I was glad to see her. Joey Bondhauser’s emotional demonstration made me nervous. I didn’t know what to say or even how to sit or hold my hands.
“The rooms are ready, sir,” she said.
“Good,” Joey said to her while looking at me.
He gripped my hand again and brought his face close to mine.
“I will go as far as Cass asks me to help you, Ben. Don’t forget that.”
The “rooms” made up a beautiful suite on the top floor of the skyscraper that housed Joey Bondhauser’s Steak House. The sitting room had a western view. The Hudson was prominent and buildings leading uptown glittered in the afternoon sun.
“Would you like me to stay with you?” pale-eyed Magda asked.
“Don’t you have to be at work?”
“Mr. Bondhauser says that you are my most important job today.” Her look was both defiant and submissive.
“Wow. Imagine that. A lowly computer programmer tended by a woman worth ten of him.”
“What can I do for you?” she said in the same mild accent that Svetlana had.
“I’ll call the restaurant if I want anything,” I said. “Right now all I need to do is rest.”
Magda nodded and left the room.
I went to the window and stared at the stone and steel, the glass and smatterings of flesh that made up my adopted city. My fingers were tingling, and if I closed my eyes, I was back in that cell with the man who never spoke. The smell of the jailer who had released me was still in my nostrils.
I thought about Cass’s offer to kill Star Knowland. Her death would have probably vouchsafed my freedom. That, along with the view, brought to mind the scene in the movie The Third Man where Orson Welles asks Joseph Cotten, what difference would it make if one of the tiny ants so far below stopped moving?
Very little, I thought, but still I couldn’t be the one to give the order. I could not ask for her death. I didn’t believe that I had murdered a man. If I had, wouldn’t I be able to kill Star, a real enemy?
“Hello?” she said.
“Hey, Lana. How are you?”
“Ben. Where have you been? I thought you’d be back yesterday.”
I told her about my arrest.
“Are they going to take you to Colorado?” she asked me.
“I don’t know. But will you meet me at the hotel tonight?”
“Yes. I have missed you. I want to make love.”
There were many books on the shelves of Joey Bondhauser’s little getaway. He had the complete works of Dickens, Twain, Hugo, Balzac, Conrad, Zola, James, and many others. One shelf was stacked with modern, well-read paperbacks. I got the feeling that Joey let many people stay in his “rooms.” The classics on his shelves were probably put there by some designer, but the paperbacks were brought in by his guests.
I glanced through these soft-cover books, uncharacteristically drawn to the stories told. I read the first few pages of a couple of thrillers, but they didn’t grab me. There was one book, however, among the mysteries and nonfiction hits, that struck a note. It was a book called The Night Man, about a guy, a kind of mortal vampire, who only went out after the sun set. His name was Juvenal Nyx and he abhorred the daylight because of a philosophical turn of mind. It was a story, of course, about unrequited love. Juvenal fell for a woman who was a painter, a watercolorist, a child of light. The fiber of him was antithetical to everything she thought and believed, but he loved her anyway.
It was a silly story, really, contrived to an absurd degree. Even the names announced themselves as symbols and metaphors. But for some reason I found myself identifying with the man that lived in darkness.
The doorbell was a small line from some piano sonata. When I first heard it, I thought that a radio alarm had gone off. But when the musical phrase repeated, I went to the door.