Strange Wine (23 page)

The little man stood close, very close. He stepped up onto Mr. Ingham’s shoes as a small child might when asking her daddy to dance with her at an older sister’s wedding. He put his prominent nose close to Mr. Ingham’s chin and said, very softly, “Look at me.” Mr. Ingham lowered his gaze. His eyes met those of the little man.

There is a scene in the 1939 Alexander Korda version of
The Thief of Bagdad
in which Ahbhu, the little thief, played with considerable ingenuousness by Sabu, finds himself inside a great stone idol in a forbidding temple set atop the highest mountain peak in the world. He is climbing up a monstrous spiderweb. He looks down and sees, far below, an enormous pool in which swim giant octopi. They are lit by an unholy light and they writhe and swirl in a terrifying manner.

Mr. Ingham looked into the robin’s-egg blue eyes of the little man standing on his shoes. He saw writhing octopi.

“Tell me you aren’t one of
them
,” the little man said softly.

“I’m not one of them,” Mr. Ingham said, in a croaking voice.

“Do you know who
they
are?”

“N-no sir, I don’t.”

“Then how do you know you aren’t one of
them
?”

“I’m not a joiner, sir. I’m even a trifle embarrassed to belong to the Book-of-the-Month Club.”

The little man stepped off Mr. Ingham’s shoes. He appraised him carefully. Finally, he said, “No, clearly you’re just another wretched victim. I’m sorry I was rude.”

Mr. Ingham smiled nervously. He said nothing.

“How do I get to that section with the name that will never pass my lips again?”

Mr. Ingham pointed to the rear of Brentano’s, to a stairway almost hidden by cartons of stock. The little man nodded and started away. “Uh…sir?” Mr. Ingham was capable of bravery.

The little man stopped and turned his head. “Would you, uh, would you be Mr. Bird, by any chance?”

The little man stared at him coldly for a long moment. “Bird is a pseudonym. Native Americans have a sensible belief that it isn’t necessary for others to know their real name. Knowing someone’s real name gives
them
a weapon. Who I am, really, is something you or
they
will never know. But the pseudonym will suffice. Yes, I am Cordwainer Bird.” And with that he turned back and moved toward the stairs.

The steps led down into a disturbing semidarkness. Bird thought of the Castle of Otranto. He stayed close to the moist, slimy stones of the wall. Far below he could see the basement section of the bookstore, lit feebly by twenty-five-watt bulbs nakedly protruding from the ceiling. Their withered illumination barely reached the display bookcases ranged in precise rows back and back into the darkness. The floor of the basement section was packed dirt and cobwebs hung everywhere in festoons like Belgian lace. As he reached the bottom, Bird heard the squeaking and scuttling of rats and, from somewhere far back in the hidden depths of the basement, what sounded like the syncopated cracking of a bullwhip.

He paused a moment, shivering with distaste, and approached the first section of bookcases. He was startled to discover they weren’t actually bookcases, but orange crates, stacked one atop the other, with hardcover and paperback books jammed in carelessly, dust jackets torn, packed as closely as files in a government office. Bird thought of Jews crammed belly-to-butt in boxcars, on their way to Belsen.

Genre designations had been scribbled on the sides of the orange crates with magic marker. He could barely read the handwriting. He finally deciphered
miztornz
as “westerns” and
slouglles
as “slaughter.” The former orange crates were filled with paperbacks by people with such first names as Al, Lee, Brace, Prong, and Luke. The latter crates seemed to be an endless series of novels about people called the Butcher, the Executioner, the Tormenter, the Bloodluster, and the Fink.

He kept walking.

Finally, at the extreme rear of the basement, beneath water pipes dripping into pits and pools formed by the continuous patter of rusty droplets of sewer overflow, he found a dozen orange crates hastily identified as “sci-fi.”

And there, between a copy of
The Giant Rutabaga That Performed Unspeakable Obscenities on Pittsburgh
and the Ballantine paperback edition of
The Best of Ed Earl Repp
, he found one copy of
Bad Karma & Other Extravagances
. He bent toward the book and reached for it with the reverence of a supplicant at Lourdes. A spider clambered over the spine of the volume and raced away into the darkness.

Bird withdrew the hardcover book from the orange crate. It was covered with mildew. Silverfish had performed unspeakable obscenities on the pages no giant rutabaga could ever have imagined in its kinkiest moments.

Alone in the basement of Brentano’s, Cordwainer Bird began to sob softly. He held the book to his naked chest and rocked it back and forth like a mother with a Thalidomide baby.

Then, in the cryptlike confines of that basement, there was a soft trilling sound; an ominous note sustained beyond measuring; almost unhuman, certainly not mechanical; the warning sound of powers about to be unleashed.

The blue of Bird’s eyes seemed to darken.

Clutching the book, he spun on his heel and moved swiftly toward the staircase. By the time he reached the steps he was running. He took the steps three at a time, seeming to bound from riser to riser with the ease of an astronaut on a moonwalk. He reached the top at full speed and paused only a moment, legs apart, fist clenched, head turning this way and that as if seeking
them
.

Coming toward him, down an aisle from the ADULT GAMES and PLACE MATS section, an elderly woman leading a group of large, muscular men sporting eyepatches and tattoos approached rapidly. “That’s him!” the woman yelled. The heavyweights moved past her and bore down on Bird. He recognized her: Brentano’s book buyer!

Instantly, he dropped into what seemed to be an incredibly relaxed posture. He placed the book on a counter nearby and permitted his now open hands to fall to his sides. But his eyes were the color of the Bay of Mexico just off Madeira Beach, Florida, at evening, with a squall approaching.

The first of the muscled men reached Bird and clapped a hand the size of home plate at the Polo Grounds on his shoulder. “I got ’im, Miz Jararacussu,” the behemoth said gutturally.

What happened next happened so quickly, no one was later able to describe the actual motion. But it
seemed
as if Bird laid his fist against the attacker’s sternum, bent at the knees, and
twitched
his hips. The behemoth was suddenly catapulted backward through the air, a scream torn from his throat. He flailed helplessly as his trajectory carried him over two tables of books of poetry by Rod McKuen. He thundered through the merchandise–which fluttered into the air as light as
beignets
from the Café du Monde in New Orleans and settled like faerie snowflakes on a February morning in Vermont–and, still screaming, he hit the far wall. He lay there in a hideously twisted pile of arms, legs, and trailing visceral material. The surgeon’s report later verified that the impact of Bird’s movement had shattered the spleen, liver, gall bladder, pancreas, kidneys, and pylorus. The heavyweight had also, inexplicably, contracted sugar diabetes. An intern suggested it was from the exposure to McKuen.

But at that moment, in Brentano’s, no one laughed. The elderly woman began shrieking. “Take him! Take him!” And then three of her side-boys converged on Bird from three different aisles. He stood waiting, still loose-limbed in that relaxed posture preceding the flight of the phoenix.

“Huey, Dewey, and Louie,” Bird said, smiling tightly.

Dewey reached the little man a fraction of a second before his associates. With a windmilling motion so swift no actual pattern could be discerned, Bird broke
both
his arms. Huey and Louie came at him from either side even as Dewey staggered away sidewise, flapping his broken arms like a VFW poppy salesman. As they careened toward him, Bird gave a bound and rose above their heads. The two heavyweights crashed into each other and Bird came down on their shoulders.

Locking his legs in a scissors grip that pressed the faces of Huey and Louie together like young lovers, Bird tipped backward and applied pressure. The two attackers thrashed this way and that, trying to free themselves from Bird and from each other. Bird squeezed. In a moment both men turned blue and their legs gave out. As they fell, limp and gagging, Bird bounded free.

The other eleven thugs took one look and ran shrieking. In their flight they knocked the elderly Mrs. Jararacussu to the floor. When she looked up, Bird was standing over her.

“Permit me to assist you, madam,” he said.

He lifted her overhead with one hand and held her there with her Lord and Taylor pantsuit jacket wrapped tightly within his fist.

“Explain to me why this book,” Bird said, carrying her a few feet to the counter where he had placed
Bad Karma & Other Extravagances
, “is not stocked in the hundreds of copies, why it isn’t up front near the door where the best sellers can be found, and why it doesn’t appear with banners in your miserable front window?”

Mrs. Jararacussu’s mouth tightened down into a thin black line. Bird thought of Helen Gahagan Douglas as
She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed
in the 1934 Merian C. Cooper-Ernest B. Schoedsack film; the best of the seven remakes of Haggard’s
She
.

“It isn’t a best seller,” Mrs. Jararacussu said. It was the first time Bird had ever seen someone speak and sneer at the same time. It was fascinating.

“Who says?”

“
The New York Times
Best Seller list says so.
Publishers Weekly
says so.
The New York Review of Books
says so. Rex Reed says so. George Plimpton says so. Candida Donadio says so. Michael Korda says so. And
I
say so.”

Bird’s nostrils quivered. Unwittingly, in rage at being held aloft like a Hebrew National salami being inspected for mold or a
shochet
’s illegible signature, she had named some of
them
. For the first time since the fever had taken him, he had a clue to their names, to their secret identities, their holiest invocations.

Actually, she was only Helen Gahagan in those days. She later
married
into the name Douglas.

“Tell your secret masters their days are numbered,” Bird said. His eyes were as black as raven wings. No longer a sweet robin’s-egg blue. “Tell them one of the slighted and snubbed has finally risen from the dust heaps of great wasted talent. Tell them to buy Fox Locks for their eyries. Tell them today is only the beginning. Go back to your puppet masters and warn them that no matter where they hide or run, Bird will seek them out and gift them with terrible justice!”

“Rodomontade,” Mrs. Jararacussu sneered, saying.

Bird reddened. She hung there from his fist, staring at him with nasty little wrinkles around her eyes. Cordwainer Bird. Four feet tall, thick black hair, eyes of robin’s-egg blue radiating the charisma of a Napoleon Bonaparte, the face of a handsome eagle. “You think I indulge in mere shabby braggadocio, eh?” He carried her, swinging, toward the front of the store. It was after hours. She had made sure everyone was gone. The doors were locked. Brentano’s was silent. “Then you shall see…and believe!”

“Do your worst,” she said. “Whatever technique you used on those simpleminded thugs won’t phase me. I’m made of sterner stuff, as you’ll see.”

Bird carried her to an eleven-foot-high replica of Giacometti’s “Man Pointing” and hung her from the scythe-shaped left arm. “No,” Bird said, “
jeet kune do
would hardly be appropriate for the likes of you, a willing mind-slave of
them
. You’ve probably been conditioned against simple physical pain.” The scrawny arm of the Giacometti began to bend away from the body of the sculpture with the weight of the woman. Bird unhooked her and carried her across to a sturdier hook: Auguste Rodin’s “St. John the Baptist Preaching.” He hung her on the upthrust forefinger of the extended right hand.

“When Bruce Lee and I studied together,” Bird said, “he made it clear to me that even the advanced techniques of
jeet kune do
might not work against the true emissaries of darkness. We sat together many a night in that little treehouse in Beverly Glen and discussed alternatives.

“But first, before I extract from you the information I need, here is a demonstration of how Bird will cut the throat of the monstrous conspiracy you serve….”

He went to the glass case on the wall that held the fire hose, the fire alarm, and the huge double-headed ax. With one sharp blow he shattered the glass and withdrew the ax.

She watched him with growing horror as he moved toward her, past her, and stopped at the door that led to the front window. He used one of the blades of the ax to spring the lock. The door swung open. “You wouldn’t dare!” she yelled.

But he would. As she screamed her hatred and defiance, the little man bounded up into the window of Brentano’s and with the skill of a Matawatchan, Ontario tree topper swung the fearsome ax over his head and buried it in a stack of Harold Robbins novels. There was an abortive shriek of pain as the blade cleaved the top half-dozen volumes. A strange sound, akin to that of a blood-gorged Amazonian killer plant being cut in half. As though they had a life never granted by the Supreme Deity, the Robbins novels groaned and howled and spurted pages as Bird hacked them to pieces. Mrs. Jararacussu set up a sympathetic wailing as he went from stack to stack, killing the Peanuts books, the necrophiliac Susann/Segal collaboration, the West bibble-bibble, the tomb-robbing exploitation of the Frank privacy invasions. Mrs. Jararacussu’s eyes rolled up in her head, and from the front window came the gurgle and cacophony of dying trash.

And when he was done, and his sweat dripped to mingle with the green slime and ichor the books had spurted, Bird threw down the double-bladed ax and came to her. She was only semiconscious now, but a dash of cold water from the drinking fountain brought her around. Now she stared at the little man with fear: a full and swamping realization that she faced a power as strong as the one she served.