Manhattan Noir 2 (14 page)
“No.”
“Well, wouldn’t help anyhow. You ain’t got none.”
“Seems the only reason you say anything is to needle me.”
“You people, man, you operate at three and three while the rest of it’s at fifty and fifty.”
“Rest of what?”
“Everything.”
“You know that for a fact?”
“No.”
“Well … listen, how come you talk? I thought about that a while back.”
“I’m an atavism.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It seems the thing to say.”
He swung in front of me and sat. He cocked his head to one side. “Hey, man. Hey.”
“Yeah?”
“I love you.”
“I know. I love you.”
“Does it help, loving?”
“It helps. Sometimes, but it’s not nearly enough.”
He nodded.
We resumed walking. I said, “The thing is, there’s no significance. Nothing makes any difference. Nothing is more valuable than anything else. Which means there isn’t any such thing as value.”
“Uh-huh.”
“How do you endure it?”
“I don’t.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“You won’t survive then.”
“Is that really important?”
“No, it isn’t.”
Without Ahab I would have gone mad, if there is such a state. That is, in a negative sense. Which I don’t believe. I was sinking. Interminably. From nowhere, to nowhere. I am still sinking, all of us are, interminably. But now there is a vital difference—I have the key, the
raison d’être
; better, the
mode d’être
. It is the answer, the only answer. Thank you, Ahab.
Sometimes I called him Ahab Flying Death Defier. I would throw one of his rubber toys and he would leap high, with grace, and close his powerful jaws about it in midflight, then land erect with light resilience. Now and then I would say, “It’s a dynamite stick! Catch it, boy, or we’re done for!” And he would snatch it from the air. I laughed. He wriggled pleasurably and came to get his ears scratched, his chest rubbed. We loved each other. For whatever that was worth.
I functioned well. The vicissitudes of my life went smoothly and successfully. Everything was, however, uniformly neutral. Everything still is, on that higher level. Or that lower level. Deterioration is not always symbolically manifest, nor even literally manifest. But that is what our dialogues had been about. Because deterioration is dominant, although deterioration is perhaps not the proper word: it implies values. And there is the crux of it all.
“Self-determination and a positive outlook,” Ahab said. “We must pull ourselves up by the bootstraps, so to speak.”
It was winter in the park. The sky was corrupt. The snow on the ground had been three days rotting. It was soot and sickly ice crystals. We had just come through a city election.
“It requires will, strong will. Immediate investment. A sacrifice on all our parts, which, I point out, will not be easy. But I tell you that a sacrifice made easily and without effort is no sacrifice at all and is therefore without consequence. Invest now and in a little time you will reap benefits one hundred, nay even one thousand–fold.”
“Where is this taking us?” I asked him.
“To our logical, our inescapable conclusion, my fellow countryman.”
Three boys in leather were approaching.
“Why didn’t you tell me earlier there was one?”
“You weren’t desperate enough. Now is the time. The iron is hot.”
“Is it cusp?”
“It is cusp.”
“I suspected that, dimly. But it doesn’t make any difference.”
“True enough. That is why you must recognize its importance.” The boys in leather came scuffling closer. Ahab’s walk stiffened. “Discover your nature!”
“You said I didn’t have any.”
“You don’t.”
“Nothing does!”
“Nothing is!”
“Then how can—”
“Hey, Jack, you got any butts?”
“No, sorry.”
“Pull that mother back, or he’s dead!”
“He’s dead anyway. Come on, your wallet, Jack.”
They held thin steel in their hands, fine implements from the looks of them. I never knew much of cutlery. But they made good, solid metallic clacks when they sprang open. Discriminating buyers, I am told, look for that sound. I marked the absence of Ahab’s customary barks; this time there was only a low rumbling in his throat. He moved. The nearest one, the tallest, screamed. Ahab had opened his wrist. I could see a tendon. The knife fell. All three of them ran. Ahab loped after them, furrowed a calf, but broke off and returned when I called him.
“Thank you,” I said.
“My pleasure.”
“How do you feel?”
“Full. Brimming.” He raced ahead, spun, raced back, spun … “Overflowing,” he said.
“Functioning as you’re meant to gives you such joy?”
“Functioning, yes. As I’m meant to, that’s a non sequitur.”
“Everything has an intended function.”
“Bullshit.”
“The function is to die.”
“Puppycock.”
“Mountains erode. Organisms wither, drop and decay. Physically, we are eating ourselves. Spiritually, we are disintegrating. Psychologically, we are being gnawed from within. Everything is collapsing.”
Ahab chewed angrily at some irritation on his flank. “So?”
“So
a priori
there is no question of ultimate survival, and temporary survival can be obtained only through self-neutralization.”
“Temporary survival
is
total survival, triumph even, since in the grave nothing, including defeat, can be experienced. And survival is dependent on frameworks and structures.”
“None exist.”
“Right, so discover them.”
“Create them?”
“What can be created already exists; discover them. React. In a completely voluntary, and systematically arbitrary way. Reacting, you will act, which will cause reactions in the form of new actions. But it must be codified, all of it. And you must function within the system as if it were built upon categorical absolutes. Never question, never waver. You will have to do it, your species will have to do it. Perversely, you’ve forced yourselves to see the meaninglessness of your lives and values. So now you have no lives and values. You must rebuild.”
“Why, why should we? What’s the point?”
Ahab shrugged.
“It’s stupid,” I said.
“Someone suggested it wasn’t?”
I thought a few moments. “If, I mean just if someone wanted to do that, how would he go about it?”
“Plunge into it. Dramatically. Unequivocally. Your commitment has to be total.”
“And it works?”
“It works.”
“What about you?”
“I told you. I’m an atavism. Old primal race memories come to a head in me sometimes.”
“Then it’s not perfect.”
“Put it this way. Out of uncountable organisms over millions of years there have been only a few minor deviations. That’s not bad. Or not good, depending on your point of view.”
“I don’t have one.”
“That’s what we’ve been talking about.”
I sat up all that night looking out and down through my window at a street light and at the few people who passed hurriedly beneath it. In the morning I washed my face. I took Ahab to the park again. He made no mention of yesterday’s conversation. He made no mention of anything. He frolicked, rolled and burrowed in the rotten snow, delighted with this unexpected trip.
While he concentrated on digging a stick from under the snow several yards away I unzippered my jacket and closed my hand around the Luger jammed in my waistband. The Luger is a 9 millimeter automatic handgun with a parabellum action. Mine was manufactured in 1918 by the
Deutsche Waffenund Munitionsfabriken
and is marked with their monogram, a flourished
DWM
. Its serial number is 4731 and all its parts are original, except for the clip which bears the number 6554. It is an excellent weapon—compact, powerful, accurate and extremely well balanced. Often you will hear that Lugers are unreliable, that they jam frequently. This is not true. When jamming does occur it is invariably due to poor quality ammunition. American shells are not to be depended upon. 9 millimeter is a sporting caliber in the United States, not military, and the powder charge is too weak to keep the weapon working at maximum efficiency. Foreign military loads are easily obtainable. Belgian, Canadian, British or Israeli cartridges are all quite acceptable.
I laid my finger alongside the trigger guard. The metal was only a little chilly. The clip, which holds eight rounds, was already in place. I snapped the first shell into the chamber and flicked the safety off. I curled my finger lightly around the trigger and took aim.
The first shot broke Ahab’s right foreleg at the middle joint. He collapsed heavily. The second shot missed. The third passed high through the rear of his body, but did not break the spine. With difficulty and in obvious pain he struggled to his feet and limped toward me on three legs. “Don’t,” he called. “Oh please don’t.” I fired again. He fell, but continued squirming forward. “Please,” he said, “I love you. Don’t.” His blood was trickling and spraying bright red onto the dirty gray snow. I kept firing. “Please, I love you. I love you, I love you.” The seventh round split his skull. He spasmed and lay still, his broken leg bent beneath him.
I ejected the last round. It broke through the crust of rotten ice and disappeared, unspent. I went home.
It is summer now. Voraciously, I am eating life.
He intended this.
This is what he intended.
He did.
(Originally published in 1972)
Death wore five faces that grim night. Could I pierce those grinning, evil masks and spot the real murderer?
He has been in the hotel room for a long time. No pleasure that but he thinks he has the crime figured out at last. It must have been his wife.
Everything,
everything
points to her. She must have killed Robinson in temper; then, when the placement of the securities next to the corpse would have tied the murder to her, turned the thing around and implicated him with that phone call which brought him to the scene just three minutes ahead of the police.
“Come over,” she said. “Something really terrible has happened; I appeal to you” and linked to her in the end, unable to understand what was going on he had come and had nearly been apprehended.
If he had not run immediately—but no sense in thinking about that now. He had gotten away from the police, just barely, and now at last he had solved the mystery. No time for speculation. No need for it either.
The motives were clear. Robinson and his wife must have been having an affair, had carried it on under him for a long time, his business partner and wife, and Robinson, bored, had been looking for a way out. Wryly he thinks that he could have warned Robinson about entrapment if only the man had been frank with him. In fact, regardless of consequences, Robinson might well have broken off the relationship if only given a little more time. And she could not bear to see it end that way, being that kind of a woman.