“Oh, Jim, I’d like you to meet—”
“I didn’t come here to meet anybody. I came to talk to you.”
“What about?” The smile vanished. She was wearing a black dress with a long, white, pointed collar.
“Ickey called me this morning and said that you were going to consider moving Ball’s play to the Queen Mother,” Jim said.
“I have a new play. A play that I’m very excited about,” Becky said. The old lady smiled.
“Yes. I read the newspaper. Eva Braun. What are you celebrating that Nazi whore for?” The old woman’s cane fell, making a klooking sound on the hardwood floor. She was shaking. The chauffeur scrambled toward the cane and picked it up. The corners of Becky’s mouth were twitching. Her skin became red.
“She may be a Nazi whore to sexists like you, but to many of us, she epitomizes women’s universal suffering.” She was trembling.
“What? You must be out of your mind. She was married to Adolf Hitler?”
“She was coerced. Just as all women are coerced by men into doing things against their will.”
“Must be written by one of your neurotic feminist friends. You let them use the Mountbatten as some kind of playpen where they can mudsling their invective at men, but you would deny the Mountbatten to Ian Ball.” Jim and Becky were now leaning on the desk and shouting at each other.
“We disagree about that. His play is…well, it reads like a first draft.”
“Who are you to decide the merits of his play? You’re just a glorified reader around here. You stupid shiksa. It’s my directing that draws the numbers, and the numbers get the grants.” The dog was on its feet again. Jim and Ian had laughed as they fantasized about the relationship between Becky and her German shepherd. They had said foul, unprintable things.
The old lady whispered something to her chauffeur. He got up and left the room, giving Jim a nasty stare as he exited. Becky began to sob. Jim shifted his eyes in annoyance, first to the portrait of William Shakespeare on the wall, then to the slim vase holding the tulips on Becky’s desk.
“I expect to do Reckless Eyeballing in the Mountbatten, and if you stand in my way I’ll break your neck.” Jim stormed from the room.
He almost collided with the chauffeur, who was returning with two Diet Coke cans. He gave one to the old woman. Becky recovered her composure as she spoke to her guests.
“I don’t have to tell you how sorry I am about this intrusion, but these New York Jews are just…just brazen. They have the manners of the lowly peddlers they are. I don’t know what we’re going to do with them. But don’t worry, Ms. Smith, with your contribution we won’t have to worry about donations from those people anymore. You can count on the Mountbatten. He doesn’t know it, but I’ve already begun casting.” The old woman’s stiff hands removed the checkbook from her purse; she began to write her signature. Becky smiled and studied the piece of paper that would pay the Mountbatten’s expenses for two years. The woman ripped the check from the checkbook and handed it to Becky.
“I still think that you should acknowledge the authorship of the play. The press has been calling. A few interviews might boost ticket sales.” The old woman shook her head.
“As you wish,” Becky said. The dog and the chauffeur were staring at each other. Finally the dog looked askance and began to whine and wag its tail. The chauffeur laughed and continued to drink from the can.
3
Detective Lawrence O’Reedy, “Loathesome Larry,” as he had been nicknamed by generations of admiring rookies (he’d always confront a criminal with his personal snub-nosed.38, Nancy, with the threat, “Give me something to write home to Mother about”), lumbered into the lobby of a fashionable East Side condominium (both down payment and maintenance costs pretty steep) located near the United Nations Plaza, around the comer from Danny Johnson’s obelisk for Ralph Bunche. The black doorman gave him some lip, but O’Reedy knocked him to the floor with one punch to the stomach. The doorman, Randy Shank, fell to his knees and held his stomach in agony. O’Reedy was all out of breath when he reached the elevator, and so leaned against the wall, waiting for the elevator to reach the first floor. He was thinking about Florida. In six months he’d retire to Vero Beach and be seated in a deck chair, dressed in golf shorts and Hawaiian shirt, staring out over the reef. Just a few more cases and he’d be out of New York, which had become a toilet for all the human offal of the world. Wasn’t like the old days when men were men and you could separate the men from the boys. Nowadays, you just about had to read a criminal a bedtime story before you arrested him. He thought of all the P.R.s and nig — or blacks, as they were calling them these days — he’d arrested. He’d spread-eagled and frisked. The brains blown out. The days when men were men. Been a long time since he’d been one himself. He was even thinking about consulting a Chinese herbalist. Nothing had solved the problem. His wife, Betsy, the Lord bless her. She was patient. She had her women’s club and charities.
His esophagus was always burning, and he ate a lot of hard candy because someone had told him that hard candy was effective in treating flatulence. Recently he was having bad dreams in which he’d seen the faces of the dead he’d dispatched to the land of ghosts, blown-up before him. And then, this morning, was it a man, with a part of his skull missing and blood on his shirt, in his house, sitting in his chair, reading his newspaper? It looked up from the newspaper and grinned at O’Reedy, a mass of putrefying flesh hanging from its skull. He screamed and ran back into the bedroom to grab Nancy. Betsy said that she was sure that he was just having a nightmare, but when he went back to get the newspaper, the man had gone, yet the newspaper was scattered about the floor and not outside, on the doormat, folded neatly. Must have been the spaghetti and meatballs he ate the night before. The way he looked at it, those men deserved to die. I mean, they were running away, weren’t they, so they must have been guilty. Well, maybe that black jogger was innocent, but it was dark the morning he shot him. He couldn’t see so well, and besides there had been a number of rapes in that park. Everybody knew that all black men did was rape white women, so too bad for the jogger, but, well, the way O’Reedy looked at it, this was war, and in war a lot of innocent people get killed. But then, the other day he had opened the shower curtain and those three P.R.s he’d shot one night after a rooftop chase were standing there in the shower, nude, and singing some song in Spanish, and the bullet holes were still visible on their chests, and he didn’t understand the Spanish. What really haunted him was the jogger’s name: O’Reedy, same as his.
Tremonisha Smarts opened the door upon the detective who’d come to investigate. She’d called after the intruder left. She’d freed herself from the ropes with which he’d tied her into a chair. The detective was breathing heavily. He was a medium-sized man, and was wearing a brown hat with a band of darker brown. He wore a starched white shirt and plain, dull tie. His black shoes had been shined. His lower lip protruded and some of the membrane was exposed. His jaws were slack, and he had a nose that was crooked in the center as though it had been repaired. He identified himself as Detective Lawrence O’Reedy of the New York Police Department. He tipped his hat and smiled at the woman, who was dressed in a manner that revealed much “eye candy,” as people in advertising said. Her head was covered with some white cloth made of what appeared to be a rich fabric. She wore some earrings and bracelets. Tremonisha Smarts. His wife had insisted that he see her play, Wrong-Headed Man. She thought that he’d fall asleep, but it turned out that he rather enjoyed it. Especially the scene where the big black ape throws his missionary wife down the stairs. Tremonisha was sobbing. She said something like, “I’m glad you came,” and said it in such a manner that got him excited. She guided him into the living room of the large, high-ceilinged apartment and led him to a seat. O’Reedy slowly lowered his huge bottom into a chair and removed his notebook and pen. “Would you like a drink?” she asked.