The entire rear of the Kapernaum factory blew outward and collapsed. The roof came down. Glass fragmented into razor-thin shards and the concussion carried them like pollen through the woods. Some of the perimeter cops reported seeing the fabled black-and-orange mushroom cloud, but most were too busy rolling and tucking and covering their skulls with their arms. A hash of debris made of splintered brick and metal and wood was thrown a hundred yards beyond the mill and the roar of the holocaust shattered the eardrums of some of the closest survivors.
The accuracy of the final pathology reports has always been disputed, but lacking a better count, the department files will always report eighteen casualties: thirteen Tung, some of whom will always remain unidentified, and five police officers — Ceil and her back-up unit.
As in most incendiary deaths, the descriptions of Ceil’s remains are best left on the loop of magnetic tape that spooled around, almost noiselessly, in the autopsy room of the county morgue and recorded the dispassionate and clinical words of the city’s coroner. Gilrein had no need to ask questions when he signed the release form for his wife’s dental records.
He was given the leave of absence that evolved into his resignation. He was picked up, not quite catatonic, but surely within the extended family of that diagnosis, by Frankie and Anna Loftus and brought to Wormland Farm, another voiceless body sculpted from the seemingly limitless insanity this world easily and endlessly provides.
The story of the Tung was disseminated briefly beyond the Quinsigamond borders, picked up by several major wire services, but its carnage and senselessness quotient was defeated in just a matter of days by reports of a new and imaginative “genocidal incident” from the heart of a religious war halfway around the globe. Something about children being fed to their initially unknowing and hunger-mad parents.
As for Inspector Lacazze, he instantly but quietly lost his reputation, his funding, and his untouchable status in the moment that the first of the Tung’s pipe bombs ignited. No more prisoners were exposed to the Methodology on Dunot Boulevard, and the word went out to the city utilities that they could terminate service to the old precinct house at their convenience.
The Inspector throws the last bloody fragments of suture over his shoulder. Some of them stick to the wall.
Gilrein pulls his lips in, feels himself start to tremble. Lacazze moves to a corner of the room, roots in a pile of trash, eventually withdraws a small, labelless glass jar. He comes back to the shoe-fitting stool, gets down slowly on one knee, and unscrews the jar, filling the office with the smell of sulphur and garlic. He dips two fingers into a chunky gray paste, extracts a generous amount and begins to smear it into his patient’s lips, stopping at one point to dip his thumb into his mouth, collect a cover of spittle and mix it with the muddy balm.
“It absorbs very quickly,” Lacazze says, “but we’re going to need some ice. Let me know when you feel up to walking.”
14
There is something slightly phantasmal about Cabaret Vermin. Walking through Ribbentrop Square, you would have no sense of the chic decadence conceived nightly in the cellars below the old Bubben-Krupp Iron Works. But on any given evening, as you sit beneath the low, vaulted ceilings breathing in the nicotine and schnapps, as you listen to piano ballads that make Teutonic myth infectious, your sense of spacial perception can seem to slip just a touch. Patrons report finding themselves unable to keep track of time. Trips to the rest room become perilous due as much to the constant hint of vertigo as to the mazelike floor plan. Sampling the complimentary knockwurst cubes, you find your mouth flooded with the taste of metal and ash.
No one can provide an adequate explanation for the phenomenon, and while some point to the architecture of the basements and others the lack of proper ventilation, owner and host Rikki Tzara will simply shrug off the analysis and say that people come to the Vermin to lose themselves and that process is always a bit dizzying at first.
It’s no secret that more than anything else, Tzara wants canonization into the Canal Zone mythos. He yearns nightly to be remembered as one of the era’s arbiters of hip, a legend carved along the same lines as Elmore Orzi. And Cabaret Vermin could well be his vehicle for ascension into decadent sainthood. The club has anticathedral possibilities, the way it insinuates itself into the earth, snakes itself underneath the streets of the Zone, weaving and bobbing, rising and falling, tunneling its way into a morass of geometrical confusion, chambers leading into mushroomlike hollows that flow into fishbowl parlors with each little squat café having its own subtle but absolute individuality. The only unifying decor, the single motif that extends from bunker to bunker, is an ongoing tribute to dancer Anita Berber, the once legendary star of the old White Mouse Club in Berlin. Tzara has made Berber into something of a deity and it is said that when he locks up the Cabaret at dawn, his last act is to genuflect before a marble statue of his lascivious goddess, bringing his head down to her cold, bare feet — nails made apple red one night by an impulsive beautician — and repeatedly mumbling the word Morphium as he beats his breast.
When you exit the Vermin, you never know what street you’re going to arrive upon. Tzara would have you believe he’s the only one who can maneuver through the entire club without a map and a trail of bar nuts, and that may well be the case. But it’s really Tzara’s innate talents as both showman and provocateur that define his character. Dressed each evening in his chartreuse velvet dinner jacket, his remaining hair dyed the color of oxblood and slicked back on his skull with what the waitresses swear is Crisco, Tzara can fondle a microphone stand in a manner that could make the most hardened barkeep at Caesar’s Palace phone in sick for a shift or two. Tzara’s oiliness knows no limits. Introducing the perennial amateurs of open mike night, the Rikkster will have you believing the King himself has risen from his Memphis grave just to shimmy to a backup band that features the Angel Gabriel blowing “Don’t Be Cruel.”
And that’s not far from the patter he gives as he leads Gilrein and Inspector Lacazze through dense clouds of purple-tinged smoke to a cocktail table adjacent to the lip of the stage. The club is packed and as Gilrein slides into his seat he watches Tzara refuse the Inspector’s attempt to palm the host a gratuity. Tzara shakes his head adamantly as he removes a RESERVED sign from the table and begins to snap fingers for a waitress.
“So good to have you back with us, Father,” Tzara fawns.
“Please, just call me Emil,” the Inspector says.
“As you wish,” Tzara replies, bowing slightly and at the same time corralling a spooked young woman dressed in a reflective sequined minidress. “Katrina will see to all of your needs.”
Tzara claps a hand on Lacazze’s shoulder, then disappears through an archway into the club’s next cavern.
Katrina says, “Welcome to Cabaret Vermin. Tonight’s special is the Witch’s Sabbath.”
Gilrein picks up a small, plastic-coated card from the table thinking it’s a drink menu. Instead he reads
FIVE SYMPTOMS OF ST. LEON’S GRIPPE
• SWELLING OF THE TONGUE
• CHRONIC DRYNESS OF THE TONGUE
• NUMBNESS OF THE TONGUE
• WEEPING PUSTULES ON THE TONGUE
• MALAPROPISMS
IF YOU HAVE EXPERIENCED ANY OF THE ABOVE PLEASE DO NOT BOTHER CONTACTING A REPRESENTATIVE OF THE CITY’S HEALTH SERVICES AS THEY CONTINUE TO DENY THE GRIPPE’S EXISTENCE.
“I’ll have a double Siena with an onion,” Lacazze says. “And bring my friend—”