Under cover of this racket Sean whispered, “Hey, man, did you do something to that other lock?”
Clatter bang.
“Other lock?”
“You know, man. They was five locks, only one of ’em didn’t work. Remember?”
Thunderbash clamorbang cuss!
“Oh Christ,” I admitted. “You’re right.”
“You locked it?”
“I locked it.”
Sean and I huddled at the top of the stairs, waiting. It didn’t seem likely that Laszlo’d come upstairs and find us, but considering Laszlo, that wasn’t much security. I became acutely conscious of the rustling paper bag in Sean’s hand. That could take some explanation. It might be easier just to slug him, but Mike wouldn’t approve. Too inelegant, he’d say. Too crude.
Suddenly Laszlo fell silent, except for a thin low mutter that was probably his detailed opinion of the situation. Sean and I held our breaths. Laszlo’s muttering grew louder, and there were footsteps approaching. Complications threatened to set in.
Laszlo climbed up two flights, to the landing half a flight below where we were huddled in the insufficient darkness. He stopped before a door in plain sight of us, stood fuming for a moment, then rapped abstract invectives on the door.
Sean and I were paralyzed. This was clearly a situation out of which no good could come. All Laszlo had to do was turn around and we’d be had. He was bound to wonder why we were lurking around his pad, and we could count on him to think the worst — especially since he’d be right.
He rapped again. No answer.
“Why me?” he wondered bitterly. “What have I done? Why do these things have to happen to me?”
I could’ve told him, but it didn’t seem wise.
“It’s a plot, that’s what it is. They’re out to get me, that damn Anderson and all his stinkin’ crew. I know what’s going on here. Oh yeah, I know where it’s at, baby.” Louder rapping. “I’ll show them bastards.” Further rapping.
I felt better already, but, “Hello there,” said the wrist radio into one of Laszlo’s silences: transistorized instant traitor I squelched the gadget before it could say any more, but too late.
“Who’s there?” Laszlo panicked in anger, revolving like a paranoid top. “Who said that?”
Sweating foolishly, I pretended to be invisible. Doubtless Sean played some such desperate game as well.
Laszlo stopped twirling, his silly-putty nose aimed straight at us. “All right,” he snapped in a scared falsetto, “I see you. Come down here. Come on.”
“Okay,” whispered something in me that was half stubbornness and half humiliation, “I’ve been caught by Laszlo Scott, fair and square, but I’ll be damned if I’ll cooperate. If he wants me, let him come and get me.” So I sat rock-still and didn’t make a sound. Being pretty much stuck behind me, Sean had no choice but to do the same.
“Quit stalling,” Laszlo said with less conviction than before. “Come on down here.”
We didn’t move. Presently Laszlo said something commonplace and foul and stomped ungracefully away. We heard his cloddish feet descend two flights; we heard him rattling his door again; we heard him clomp the rest of the way downstairs to the ground floor, and we heard him slam the front door, hopefully behind him.
Still we did not move. Very gradually we realized that somehow Laszlo hadn’t really seen us after all. This was very strange, for Sean was wearing a white shirt and the stairwell wasn’t really all that dark.
But we didn’t hang around to work it out. As soon as we understood that Laszlo’d actually split for someplace, we tiptoed cautiously but swiftly down the stairs. (I was getting sick of all this tiptoeing. My green suede boots weren’t made for it, and my feet were starting to hurt.)
At the street door, Sean — -whom Laszlo conveniently didn’t know — poked his head outside to reconnoiter, keeping his left hand and Laszlo’s verdant treasure safely out of sight.
“It’s cool,” he announced, and out we went, looking so exactly nonchalant and casual we were almost invisible to ourselves.
We got home five minutes after Mike, and Sean instantly abandoned himself to Sativa again while I tried to explain to the irate M. T. Bear why I hadn’t responded to his last radio signal, why it took us so long to get home, and why we found nothing more significant than the bulging paper bag. Mike liked his plots to work the way he meant them to.
“Apparently,” he said when he’d digested my report, “Laszlo missed his connection at Grand Central.”
“He wasn’t very happy,” I agreed.
“So you’ll have to start tailing him tomorrow.”
“Oh.” That again.
But the time had become five o’clock, and we felt justified in calling it a day. This left us gloriously free until the morning, because it was Monday night, the Village sabbath, and all the entertainment coffeehouses were closed, and nothing, praise God, was happening. We could all use a little nothing happening. So we settled down to sample Laszlo’s grass.
An hour or something later we all nobly admitted that just this once we had to admire Laszlo’s taste. We were all absurdly pacified.
“Man,” I drawled for all of us, “I’m stoned. All I want to do now is move as little as possible. Wow.”
“Oh yeah,” Sativa languidly remembered, “I forgot.”
“That’s cool,” Mike said. “What’d you forget?”
“She can’t recall,” Sean answered, but:
“Oh no,” she corrected. “Somebody called. While you were away. I’ll remember in a… oh yeah, Harriet called.”
The rest of us groaned. We dearly loved Harriet, but only in conservative doses and never on the phone. She could burn up an hour saying good morning.
“What,” I queried bravely, “did she want?”
“It’s her anniversary. She and Gary the Frog have been living together for seventeen and a half weeks Tonight. Isn’t that sweet?”
“Better him than me,” said Mike. “Better her than me, too, come to think of it.”
“Well, I think it’s sweet. And they’re having a party tonight to celebrate.”
“Forewarned,” I uttered, “is forestalled.”
“Right,” Sativa gleamed. “And we’re all going.”
That produced the finest stunned silence our pad had heard since Mike’s third-last mistress announced that she was pregnant. (It turned out that she wasn’t pregnant at all, and that Mike didn’t do it anyway, but for a while there our atmosphere was very oddly charged.)
I recovered first. “A,” I insisted, “I do not go to parties. Ever.”
“But…”
“B. If I did go to parties, I still wouldn’t go to parties where Gary the Frog and Harriet were likely to appear.”
“But, Chester…”
“C. I didn’t accept the invitation, wouldn’t’ve accepted the invitation, and didn’t authorize you — sweet little songbird though you may be — to accept it for me.”
“But I promised!”
“D. I’ve had a hard day and I want to rest.”
“You and Michael are the guests of honor.”
“E. What with one thing and another, I can barely move at best and have no eyes for that crosstown hike to Harriet’s seventh-story loft.”
“We can take a taxi.”
“And F, I do not go to parties. Ever.”
“You said that before.”
“It’s still true, and it goes for Mike and Sean, too. Right?”
“Right!”
“But I gave Harriet my word…”
“Sorry about that, love. You’re free to join the gruesome orgy if you wish, but the rest of us aren’t leaving this house, and that, my sweet, is where it’s at.”
It’s kind of refreshing, now and then, to exercise authority in your own home.
9
FROM THE very beginning, the party was as horrid as I knew beforehand it would have to be. The guests, more than a hundred, were just about evenly divided between people I didn’t want to see and people I didn’t want to see me. The loft was too hot, too narrow, too crowded, too dark, too smoky, and stank to high someplace of elderly cat box… There were, furthermore, two low-fi sets, one at each end of the loft, each blasting a different record I’d never have listened to otherwise, plus an atrocious and overstuffed rock-n-roll gang abusing megawatt amplifiers at about midway through the loft, plus everybody shouting to be heard above it all. Untold numbers of guests were extravagantly overdue for baths. Other hordes of guests were shakily holding foul-colored drinks ready to spill on the nearest available me. A few guests, most definitely the wrong ones, had already reached the disrobing stage, and some weren’t limiting their efforts to themselves.