He was aware he had dismissed our film to my face. And after Len Incremona had fired a “ball” through the dartboard as if he’d missed his real target, and we had left, and John had pulled himself together with a third plate of Nell’s buckwheat spaghetti which the black man Chad had made the sauce for, John recalled my face bearing him as much ill will as Len’s. John did not remember what he’d said to me except who the hell would pay us to go make a film in Corsica. But now John had heard from Nell’s husband that Cartwright was running about with explosives on him. Nell had told Gene that Len had told her Cartwright and his friend were not to be trusted, Cartwright was trying to unload a famous shrunken heart or head, a French girl who’d tried to convert Incremona to macrobiotic food had told him this and she had it from an American whose name John said wouldn’t mean anything to Monty (which Monty did not push, though now across the table from me he said I of course would know who the French girl and the American were). And John said since he regarded Incremona as a dangerous opportunist (precisely because, from decathlon to radio-telescope maintenance to political adventure to, one suspected, quick and surreptitious cash killings, Incremona was not a patient enough opportunist) and since Incremona regarded Cartwright as dangerous, Cartwright became dangerous raised conceivably to the power of Len. The man’s anger was like nothing John had seen before except in two Hungarian Catholics who as it happened had been married to each other. Oh Incremona fell out with anyone, even one who revered him.
Nash, I said.
That’s the one, said Monty glancing away.
John-of-the-loft was off his bar stool.
Monty said no doubt I knew Nash had been beaten up by Incremona in South London two hours and more after Incremona had apparently gotten over his anger. Nash had acted independentiy, which was bad enough; but he had arranged a meeting in an Underground station with a woman supposed to know Cartwright, Paul Flint, and something important, and she never showed, but others did, and Incremona led Nash away berating him. But finally calmed down. Or so Nash had thought.
John-of-the-loft was leaving. There was no doubt of it.
I was up feeling for my trenchcoat, my eyes on Monty.
He now made a pretense of keeping me: The grub at John’s is better than here, he said. You’d expect that. John’s a gourmet, his housekeeper’s Austrian; he’s opinionated: what does macrobiosis mean anyway but longevity? he says, and only a fool measures that in mere years. He says macrobiotic food takes the spring out of the capillaries.
OK, I said, you went to Coventry. You had a meal. You heard some gossip.
I don’t know some of these people, said Monty — Len, Nell, Gene, Nash.
Graf, I said (and he put a hand to his ear), you spoke of liquid crystals, there is no question that you spoke of liquid crystals, you said from crystal set to liquid crystals, right?
John again, he said.
I turned away into the dim aromatic tinkling and a waitress’s laughter, but Monty said, Jack Flint was responsible of course.
I turned and nodded slowly, though John might be getting away.
So they investigated you, said Monty. I gather it’s been mutual.
But Graf, I said, you haven’t said why you had to see John in Coventry in the first place, nor why he passed on to you all this trivia. The truth is, you haven’t begun to talk.
Monty’s last words, against the laughing of the waitress, were a comedown from his earlier challenge about the letter left on Aut’s desk — for now he said, Take care of Claire.
A bicyclist passed on the far side of a panel truck, I saw her head. John-of-the-loft was halfway into the next block. I’d been holding my breath, a habit Andsworth says is dangerous. John stopped and half turned as if to see me, and in that very instant a bottle came out across his path, missed him, and split in the gutter. John-of-Coventry’s irked and rubicund words pursued John-of-the loft’s intention that I follow him. I had crossed the first crossing when a cab passed. And I had reached the vicinity of someone’s deep chuckling when a second cab crunched over broken glass and stopped at my curb just as the cab ahead stopped for John. The chuckler leaning back against a stoop was black, but he was not the asbestos-watcher I’d given a dollar to so long ago. I opened the cab door as John did the same ahead, and the person on the stoop said, We all part of the system, man.
I did not understand why more people didn’t drop objects out of these high buildings.
The history of Gramercy Park as in an essay by some private-school student veered away at right angles (its brownstones, its large central iron-fenced garden for residents, venerable clubs with newspaper rooms, mediocre food, and domineering darky servants), plaques outside showing say a pair of masks (tragic? comic?) and overhead two pre-Civil War black-iron entrance lanterns with curved spikes like fierce horns crowning a vacant-faced warrior. I was at the southern edge of midtown Manhattan within striking distance of Sub’s icebox and Ruby’s coloring book and a curiously imprinted amber pinch bottle I’d had my eye on and a telly glowing gray on Sub’s face and a jack-o’-lantern on the sill facing the heights of New York but directly across the way a clipped white dog watching in a window. I hadn’t seen a headline since Monday. My life was in danger, my suitcase at Monty’s, my parka likely discovered, my daughter on her own.
We turned sharply again and drove downtown, a high-slung gypsy cab able to move more than one way at once. I’d told my driver to follow the other cab. This simplified things for him but also, as he did not know, for me. It gave us both a certain illusory freedom between ourselves from the consequences of coercion. Our fields impinged in ways I knew more about than he, with his narrow hunched shoulder blades as if he did not know this city or his vehicle though his moustache was in the current younger mode of college cabbies if without Bach for background though his aerial was up. I saw the shaggy tip of his moustache aligned above the window-wiper beyond it and on my side between two signs on the steel screen dividing front and back seats (“Please do not smoke. Driver is allergic” and “This cab can be hired for trips of any distance. Ask driver for rates”). If he had sat up straight, his hair might have brushed the roof. If he was who I thought he was, what could I say to him? Which side are you on?
We were on Broadway down among the blocks of dark and comparatively low commercial buildings; we were between the East and West Village and we must soon turn if we were headed for Mercer. I could not say to him what did it feel like when Tessa on Stonehenge night said Go to hell? I could not say, What blame do you take for Jim Nielsen’s death? Was Krish correct in saying yours was the picture filmed in the Suitcase Slowly Packed? Knowing that my driver did not guess I knew him was too much for me to lose — but most of all I wanted to ask him what my last cabbie Mike had meant on Sunday night in North London when he’d said that if I went on as I was going on, the first thing “we” knew the “whole thing” would blow up again.