“What’s happening?”
“Contact, smooth and easy. Where are you?”
“Third and 28th Street headed north.”
“Groovy. Keep in touch.”
Then I looked around. It wasn’t exactly the kind of pad I’d expected Laszlo to have, but it was obviously Laszlo’s kind of pad. The internal walls had all been torn down, not quite neatly, making the pad one huge and thickly littered room, in the midst of which stood Sean looking shocked. I got the impression he wasn’t used to dirt.
The walls were whitewashed, mostly, and decorated with Laszloish slogans in gaudy colors, like: Art is Fredom; The Cretor is The Onley True God; The Futur Belongs too the Poet — the rest being unprintable, just as poorly spelled, and pretty dull.
The windows were covered over with colored tissue paper pasted directly on the panes — the standard poor man’s stained-glass effect — which was covered over in turn by a few years’ geological accumulation of good old city filth. The light that found its way through these barriers was dim and resigned, unable to give a damn, precisely what Laszlo’s litter needed. Complete darkness would’ve been even better, aesthetically, but might’ve had some practical drawbacks.
“Well, Sean, this is a New York poet’s pad. How do you like it?”
“You mean he lives here?”
“That’s what he calls it. There’s his bed.”
It was over in the farthest, darkest corner of the mess, a bare and superannuated mattress on the floor, torn and filthy with historic dirt, surrounded by discarded bottles, beer cans, chocolate milk cartons, creme-filled cupcake wrappers, sandwich bags, used tissues, mummified corned beef sandwiches, obsolete stockings, assorted dingy female undergarments, badly used torn comic books — the enduring moldy record of Laszlo’s Village life. The place smelled of mature cat box, too, though there seemed to be no cat.
Sean clearly didn’t believe a word of this. “You say this cat’s a Poet, man?”
“That’s the general idea, baby. A genuine twentieth-century bard.”
“Oh yeah?” Sean was learning fast.
“Hey!” my left wrist suddenly demanded. “What’s happening?”
“We’re inside,” I assured him, while Sean, tiptoeing fastidiously, touching whatever he thought he had to as little as possible and wiping his fingers nervously on his Levi’s afterwards, more or less began to search the pad. The litter was six inches thick on the average, deeper in drifts, and the task before us had a lean and hopeless look.
“What the hell are you doing?” Mike insisted.
“Talking to you,” I said reasonably enough. “What’s happening?”
“We’re in Grand Central. Subject’s waiting for someone under the clock. Looks worried.”
“Great. Keep up the good work, fellah.” Sean had found a chartreuse desk minus a drawer or two, and was cheerfully ransacking it, emptying it onto the floor, creating an additional mess Laszlo was unlikely to notice.
“Are you, ah, proceeding with the exercise?” Poor Mike.
“With great viguh, sir, in spite of all but insurmountable obstacles.”
“Results?”
“Ambiguous.”
“Oh? Well, ah, keep in touch.”
“Later,” That done, I joined the hunt.
Sean and I in record time formulated a neat set of ground rules for the search. Nothing on the floor, we agreed, was worth considering; anything carefully stashed anywhere was. That made our job 90 percent easier. Another rule prohibited putting things back where we found them, which would just be wasted time and needless charity. Working thus, we went through Laszlo’s midden with a gap-toothed rake.
It took an hour or so, during which Mike called frequently to report that Laszlo hadn’t done anything yet and ask us what we’d found.
I was getting dragged by the mess, my tiny respect for Laszlo was clear gone, when Sean yelled from the bathroom, “Hey, what’s this?”
And Mike tinned, “Chester, are you there?”
“Aye, aye, sir,” to Mike and, “Hold it,” to Sean.
“He’s gone!” Mike shrilled, buzzing the speaker.
“Where’d he go?”
“Dunno.” The fidelity was poor, but good enough to carry the embarrassed tone of Michael’s voice.
“You lost him?” Considering Mike, this was hard to believe.
“There was this ChicK, you understand?”
“Chick?”
“Yeah. She asked me for a light, and when I turned around again, he was gone.”
“Oh. A ChicK.” I thought it over, then, “Pretty?”
“Wow!”
“Figures. Well, we’ll cut out like now, okay?”
“You better.” Pause. “Oh, find anything?”
“Not particularly. Agent 002’s got something in the John, but I haven’t seen it yet.”
“Hmm. Right. Anyhow, get out as fast as you can. He may be heading back, you know. See you at the pad.”
“Roger. Keep in touch.”
Well. That was interesting, I supposed. “What’ve you got?” I yelled at Sean.
“C’mere an’ see. I cain’t tell.”
Laszlo’s john couldn’t surprise me anymore, not after the rest of the pad, but it certainly was unusual. Yeah, unusual. It looked like a cross between an explosion in a pharmacy and a condemned abattoir, just what I expected but more than I could take. Nevertheless, I took it. I’m a dedicated man now and then.
Sean was standing in the middle of all this, skitterishly shying away from anything. He was holding a medium-size brown paper sack, well-filled, over his head.
“What seems to be the matter here?”
“Dig.” He handed me the bag. It was full of crushed, dry green leaves. For a moment I felt a thrill course through me, but then I remembered Laszlo’s slimy practices.
“It’s probably oregano,” I regretted.
“Don’t smell like it,” he offered.
He was right. “Step into my office,” I suggested, and we moved back into the big room.
“I happen to have with me,” I said, pulling my trusty little pipe from my pocket, “an extremely sensitive testing device.”
“Groovy,” my faithful assistant exclaimed.
I dipped up a pipeful of Laszlo’s unknown green stuff, lit it, and inhaled deeply. “Nope,” I said after a while, “it’s not oregano.”
“What is it?”
I dropped my voice to a solemn whisper and said, “Marijuana, baby. Loathsome Laszlo’s private stash.”
“Hey, man, what a gas! Let’s cop it.”
“You want to steal Laszlo’s grass?” The idea had an appalling charm.
“Why not, man?”
“Well — he’d notice. Mike doesn’t want him to know we’ve been here.”
“Oh, man, like you know bards can’t count.”
Years ago, before we knew what Laszlo was, I’d innocently paid him twenty bucks for prime spaghetti seasoning, so, “Okay, but leave some for Laszlo,” there being a kind of honor in every minority group.
“Right.”
And so we split, Sean carrying our share of Laszlo’s treasure. I closed the metal door silently, carefully relocking all five locks, and we started to tiptoe down the stairs.
Halfway down we stopped dead. There was a strange noise below us, a familiar strange noise, an absolutely Laszlo kind of noise.
“Trapped!” I cursed.
We turned and tiptoed double time back up the stairs, past Laszlo’s pad and two flights farther, all the way up to the door to the roof, which was locked from the other side.
“Yeah,” Sean whispered while I swore inventively, “trapped.” Meanwhile Laszlo loudly climbed the stairs below us. He seemed to consider each step a personal offense, and kept it no secret. He wasn’t a happy Laszlo, not at all.
He reached his landing and the Laszlo noise abated. Then there were crisp metallic noises, four sets of them: the Bard of MacDougal Street unlocking his door. This developed into a furious muffled rattling, punctuated by spurts of amateurish profanity. The rattling grew louder, and there were vigorous percussive sounds most likely made by kicking.