Searches & Seizures (19 page)

He fires the first shot. It goes out Crainpool’s open window and clears the four-story building across the way. “That will merely wake some of them,” he says. “Wait, you’ll hear.” They listen together and can barely make out the sound of one or two doors opening down the corridor. Somewhere a window scrapes open.

“Is everything all right?” someone shouts from the dark street.

The Phoenician levels the gun at Crainpool’s chest in case he calls out. “No,” he whispers. Then to Crainpool in his previous tone, but more excited, “But that’s just the world, the earth. Have you considered astronomy, have you given any thought to physics?”

“No,” Crainpool says dryly. His voice is parched.

“Physics breaks my heart, astronomy gives me the blue balls. I dassn’t bother with mathematics. I better not think about chemistry.”

“No.”

“You asshole, Mr. Crainpool. We’re blind. We ought to have white canes and dark glasses. There should be pencils in our caps. We should sit in the weather against tall buildings and use the caps as offices. Listen, listen to me. They’ve proof that all life is merely four simple compounds arranged on a spiral string of sugars and phosphates. We’re necklaces, Crainpool, sugar and spice and everything nice. We’re fucking
candy.
And your cocksucker and muffdiver are only guys with a sweet tooth. Listen, listen, there’s a theory now that certain things move faster than light. They think that atoms were lighter millions of years ago, gravity stronger. We live in a universe that puts on weight, that builds its body like a Sumo.”

“I don’t follow.”

“I don’t lead.”

“Please, Mr. Main—”

He is talking very quickly now. “I hear tell that matter enters our universe from another universe. That we get our physical laws from some universe in another country. That gravity comes like the post, imported like teak and coffee beans. Physical law like an unfavorable balance of payments. Our ways are not their ways, Mr. Crainpool. Jesus, atoms, atoms and the crap between stars.”

“Why are you killing me?”

“
Hush.
Einstein’s theory posited objects of infinite density within an infinitely small space. You see? Their atoms would be so fat and their gravity so dense that not even light could escape from them.
That
was a darkness, fella. Can you imagine such a darkness? That was a darkness so dark it was invisible. You could read your newspaper through it. Listen, listen to me. Wheeler and Ruffini predicted that by their x-rays we would know them—are you keeping up, are you getting any of this?—that they’d give themselves away circling visible stars, nibbling at them with their infinite gravity, drawing at them, giving the stars a toothache.”

“I don’t know why you want to kill—”

“They’ve been
seen
! In recent months. They’ve been detected. The black holes in the universe.”

“I don’t want you to shoot me, Mr. Main.”

“And for every black hole there’s a
white
hole. That’s what Hjellming thinks, how he accounts for the quasars. Are you reading me, Crainpool? The universes are leaking into each other. There’s this transfusion of law in the sky. I’m honest, I’m an honest man. Upright and respectable here in this universe I inhabit. I’m honest, but the fucking laws are leaking, the physical constants bleeding into each other like madras. God Himself nothing but a slow leak, some holy puncture, Nature’s and reality’s sacred flat. Matter and anti-matter. Inside our universe is another. Dig? Chinese boxes of universes. When I kill you in your room here tonight, maybe that’s virtue next-door. You think?”

“Why? Please, Mr. Main,
why?
”

“Shut up about why. I don’t
know
why!”

Crainpool changes his tactics. He stops whining and becomes almost angry. “You always have to have the last word,” he says. “You always have to do things big, don’t you? Big shot. You’d kill me for nothing, for the sake of your style.”

“My style? Nah.”

“You would. You think you’re so hot.”

“Me? No, I’m catching cold, I’m in a draft, I’ve got this chill. Brr, Crainpool, it’s the Ice Age in me, record snowfalls and not enough antifreeze in the world to grow a calory. My atoms, my gross thick atoms. Can you see me? Can you make me out?”

“I see you. I make you out. Like you said—you’re a parade.”

“Don’t believe everything they tell you, killer. I don’t give a fart for me. You can have my personality for a Green Stamp. My ego wore out years ago. Call Goodwill Industries, I’ll put it in a box on the front porch they can pick it up. Crainpool,
dummy,
this isn’t heroics, it ain’t no grandstand here. I’m a functional illiterate, I don’t know my ass from my elbow mystery-wise. If I can’t stand being a fool, it’s got nothing to do with pride. Screw the bubble reputation, I say, fuck fame and shove I. Gobble genes and blast being. I pass.”

Crainpool has had to strain to hear this last, leaning so far forward that he can almost pluck the gun from Main’s lap. “Then it makes no sense to kill me,” he says.

“All I wanted,” Main says so quietly that the clerk has to watch his lips to understand him, “was to know things. I’m honest, I’m an honest man. I took delight in the impersonal. I’ve lived with curiosity like the seven-year itch. That’s what attracted me to you guys, you mugs and malefactors, you villains and cutpurses. Who done it? What’s the motive?
Cherchez la femme.
What’s that? What does crime come to at last? Nothing. Crummy hornbook, lousy primer. Slim volume, Crainpool, pot fucking boiler, publisher’s remainder. You taught me nothing, mister. And where did I get the idea that by getting next to aberration I could…But what hurts, I mean what really
hurts,
is that if I had a brain as big as the Ritz I still wouldn’t know anything. We die dropouts. All of us. Disadvantaged and underachievers. I have questions. I’m up to
here
with questions. I never needed to be happy; I only needed to know. Simple stuff. A dopey kid of the next century could tell me. If I could only live long enough I would sit at his feet as if he was Socrates and he’d tell me…What? Whether Dubuque ever made it into the majors. If there’s crab grass on distant planets. Who won the war and what they were supposed to be fighting for and old Uncle Tom Cobbly and all. He’d rattle off the damn fool slogans of his time and I’d take them in like the Ten Commandments. What do I do with my wonder, I wonder?”

Crainpool stands up. He squeezes himself between Main and the bed and walks toward the door. “Please,” he says, “I’ll see you in the office. Go on home, Mr. Main, get some sleep.” He opens the door for him.

“What?”

“It’s pretty late, Mr. Main.”

“You off the hook?”

“I think so.”

“Out of the woods?”

“That’s the chance I’m taking.”

“And you’ll see me in the office.”

“Yes.”

“In the morning.”

“Yes, sir.”

The Phoenician smiles wearily. “You let me talk myself out, do your stalling for you.”

“You’re a reasonable man, Mr. Main. You’re a reasonable man, Alex.”

“Oyp and Glyp are dead.”

“Well, as you say, who can know what happened? I’m glad you closed the books on them. It was time.”

“That’s right.”

“You had a perfect record otherwise.”

“Sure.”

“They don’t change that.”

“No.”

“Do you want me to call a taxi for you?”

“Do you think they’re really dead? I mean, I’ve got no actual
proof.
It’s just a feeling.”

“You know those two. If they were alive we’d probably have heard something. We were bound to. Leopards don’t change their spots.”

“I guess.” He raises his pistol and aims it at Crainpool’s hand which is still on the door. “There was always someone to hunt,” he says. “A mystery I was good at. My line of country. But if Oyp and Glyp are dead—”

“Come on, Mr. Main, don’t—”

He fires and the bullet chips the knuckles of Crainpool’s hand. Astonished, the clerk raises the hand to his mouth and stares wild-eyed at the Phoenician. The blood makes it appear that he has been eating cherry pie.

“Run,” the Phoenician commands, hisses. “Run, you bastard.”

“What?”

“
Run.
Down the stairway. Run,
run.
”

“What are you doing?”

He raises the pistol again, and Crainpool turns and flees. The Phoenician walks into the corridor. Doors are ajar down the long line of rooms. Oddly they give the hallway the appearance of stalled traffic. Old women stand before them in nightgowns, their hands at their hearts. The Phoenician can just make out Crainpool’s back as he shoves open the door to the emergency stairway. “OYP,” he shouts, “AND GLYP,” he shouts, “ARE DEAD,” he shouts. He starts after the clerk in his old man’s gravid trot. “LONG,” he roars, “LIVE CRAINPOOL!”

He hurries to the stairwell through the door that Crainpool has just moved through. He is panting; the hand that holds the pistol shakes. He leans over the railing and sees a blur of Crainpool as the younger, faster man reaches the bottom stair. He points the pistol downward and fires without looking. Ah, he’s missed. Good. He puts the gun in his jacket and walks lazily down the stairs. He enters the lobby and, feigning breathlessness, calls to the night clerk behind his counter. “Did you—did you see him?”

“What the hell’s happening?”

“Did you
see
him?” He taps his pocket. “I’ve got a warrant for his arrest. Did you see which way he went?”

The clerk shakes his head. “He went out. I don’t know. He went out. He was bleeding,” he says. “His hand was all blood, his mouth.”

“Yeah, he was too fast for me. I missed. I catch him I’m going to fuck all over him.”

He goes through the revolving doors and out into the street. The air is lovely. He looks left and right. Which way, he wonders. North? To the suburbs? East towards the railroad tracks? Or did he double back? Head downtown maybe? To the street where he himself had walked that afternoon? Where the people were more like film stars than the film stars were, as everybody was these days, handsomeness creeping up the avenues of the world like the golden bedsprings in the Cincinnati trees?

The Making of Ashenden

I
’VE BEEN spared a lot, one of the blessed of the earth, at least one of its lucky, that privileged handful of the dramatically prospering, the sort whose secrets are asked, like the hundred-year-old man. There is no secret, of course; most of what happens to us is simple accident. Highish birth and a smooth network of appropriate connection like a tea service written into the will. But surely something in the blood too, locked into good fortune’s dominant genes like a blast ripening in a time bomb. Set to go off, my good looks and intelligence, yet exceptional still, take
away
my mouthful of silver spoon and lapful of luxury. Something my own, not passed on or handed down, something seized, wrested—my good character, hopefully, my taste perhaps. What’s mine, what’s mine? Say taste—the soul’s harmless appetite.

I’ve money, I’m rich. The heir to four fortunes. Grandfather on Mother’s side was a Newpert. The family held some good real estate in Rhode Island until they sold it for many times what they gave for it. Grandmother on Father’s side was a Salts, whose bottled mineral water, once available only through prescription and believed indispensable in the cure of all fevers, was the first product ever to be reviewed by the Food and Drug Administration, a famous and controversial case. The government found it to contain nothing that was actually
detrimental
to human beings, and it went public, so to speak. Available now over the counter, the Salts made more money from it than ever.

Mother was an Oh.
Her
mother was the chemical engineer who first discovered a feasible way to store oxygen in tanks. And Father was Noel Ashenden, who though he did not actually invent the matchbook, went into the field when it was still a not very flourishing novelty, and whose slogan, almost a poem, “Close Cover Before Striking” (a simple stroke, as Father liked to say), obvious only after someone else has already thought of it (the Patent Office refused to issue a patent on what it claimed was merely an instruction, but Father’s company had the message on its matchbooks before his competitors even knew what was happening), removed the hazard from book matches and turned the industry and Father’s firm particularly into a flaming success overnight—Father’s joke, not mine. Later, when the inroads of Ronson and Zippo threatened the business, Father went into seclusion for six months and when he returned to us he had produced another slogan: “For Our Matchless Friends.” It saved the industry a second time and was the second and last piece of work in Father’s life.

There are people who gather in the spas and watering places of this world who pooh-pooh our fortune. Après ski, cozy in their wools, handsome before their open hearths, they scandalize amongst themselves in whispers. “Imagine,” they say, “saved from ruin because of some cornball sentiment available in every bar and grill and truck stop in the country. It’s not, not…”

Not what? Snobs! Phooey on the First Families. On railroad, steel mill, automotive, public utility, banking and shipping fortunes, on all hermetic legacy, morganatic and blockbuster bloodlines that change the maps and landscapes and alter the mobility patterns, your jungle wheeling and downtown dealing a stone’s throw from warfare. I come of good stock—real estate, mineral water, oxygen, matchbooks: earth, water, air and fire, the old elementals of the material universe, a bellybutton economics, a linchpin one.