Stuffed (22 page)

Chapter 23

G
arth!”

Was I back on Partridge’s stoop?

“Garth!”

Yep, that was Angie’s voice, all right, and my head hurt, and my mouth was dry as a mummy’s, and I was being tugged.

She shook me and my eyes creaked open. I was home, in bed. I knew because I could see the buffalo head on the right, the sailfish tail to the left, and the bearded gnu chin directly overhead. Angie was all the way at the end of the bed, and she was pulling on my feet, doing her darnedest to pull me out of bed. Her progress in this effort had my calves and knees off, but the rest of me was still nailed to the sheets.

“Sit up. We need to talk.”

The glare of the sun from the small, grimy bedroom window stung my eyes. That’s right, I’d been at Tiki Bob’s. And now? I was in dutch.

Confront a man with a knife-wielding freak singing Belle Beverly in a room full of flaming taxidermy, and still his worst fear is to hear his mate utter the words:
We have to talk.
Times two if you’re hung over. Times three if you don’t remember coming home.

I sat up, my feet dropping to the floor at the end of the bed. My eye caught the time: 12:01
P.M.
I was still wearing my shirt, but my pants were slumped in the corner.

She looked me over, hands on her hips. The body language of disappointment.

But in these chilling confrontations—which are few and far between—I’ve found contrition a poor overcoat. I had nothing to be ashamed of. I’m allowed to feel sorry for myself every blue moon. It was unavoidable. Kismet, thy name is SB.

So I shrugged on the overcoat of unrepentant and glib perspicacity.

I expected her to say something like:
What the hell is wrong with you? You come home drunk with a half-dressed penguin? Is that any way to act?

I’d bet a million dollars that no man has ever been lambasted for coming home with a half-dressed penguin. But I’m a special case.

And I’d say something like:
There’s nothing wrong with me that some aspirin, some coffee, and a half gallon of water won’t cure. As to the penguin and his state of undress, he’s an adult. And this is no act. I was depressed and I got drunk, an age-old phenomenon that I reserve the right to practice, from time to time, when under extraordinary strain.

But Angie didn’t say what I thought she would.

“What’s this about you being offered a job?”

My eyes went from slits to saucers.

My mouth moved, and when it failed to make any intelligible sound, my hand came up and started waving the air in a way to suggest the glib perspicacity I was unable to deliver.

There was a cup of coffee on the dresser, and she handed it to me, then put her hands back on her hips. I drank and tried to collect my thoughts.

Hers were already collected.

“Look, Garth, I know we’ve been through a lot this week, but for God’s sake, did you ever think I might like to get a little hammered myself now and again?”

I blinked, still sipping, wondering where this was going. I’d have curled up inside that cup if I could.

“I mean, you might have called me from Tiki Bob’s, and I’d have come down. Instead, I’m sitting here staring at the TV wishing I was somewhere having a drink. Several, in fact. Instead, you’re drinking with a frozen penguin. Why didn’t you call me? I’d have called you if I was alone drinking.”

I shrugged, still hiding in the mug of coffee. Man, was she hard to predict sometimes.

“And if it isn’t enough that you’re getting looped with a dead penguin instead of me, I answer the phone yesterday afternoon and it’s some guy from Fish and Wildlife wanting an answer from you about the job offer. What job offer? Wouldn’t I discuss that with you? Am I your partner or what?”

I lowered the mug and put it on the floor. While I’d been trying to work angles on what she was saying and what I should say, my heart suddenly shoved my brain aside and spoke up.

“You’re the best thing that ever happened to me, Angie, and I love you more than anything, even my own life.”

I paused. Men are virtually incapable of baring their feelings while looking someone in the eye, so I cast mine to the floor.

“And that’s the problem. I sometimes think I’m
not
the best thing that ever happened to you. Not that you don’t love me, and not that you don’t think, maybe, that I’m the best thing that ever happened to you. But I know I’m not all I should be. For you. I love you so much that I’d rather see you happier, more successful, with someone else than with”—I waved my hand at the buffalo to my right—“a taxidermy bum. I feel I’ve held you back from being the art jeweler you always wanted to be. Had I been more successful, a lawyer or doctor or something, you could have had the time and resources to say no to piecework and invest time and money in your own stuff.”

I finally looked up at her. Now I remembered why men don’t look at women while baring their feelings. The waterworks were in progress, tears streaming down her cheeks. When I see that, my heart bottoms out and I want to cry. I suspect many women find crying can be a welcome release. For most men it’s an excruciating, gut-wrenching indulgence. Once I start, it takes days for me to recover.

I looked away, lockjaw of emotion strangling my words.

“I need to take that job. For you. So I can hold on to you. Because I’m terrified that one day you’ll wake up and see what I see. That you deserve better.”

“Ding bust!” She grabbed me by my shirtfront, and when I looked up, my temples and tear ducts throbbing, I thought she was going to belt me one. She doesn’t say
ding bust
unless she’s really mad.

“Don’t you
dare
take that job, Garth Carson. This is the man I love, taxidermy and all, not some state functionary. Not some doctor or lawyer. You didn’t just choose me,
I chose you,
just the way you are, and anything more or less isn’t what I signed on for. I’m the only one responsible for my career, the only one responsible for whether I’m successful or not. You got all that?”

I tried to say something, but didn’t. She continued.

“My career is my doing.” She wiped tears from her eyes. “And as it so happens, Peter Van Putin called. I got the job doing his piecework. Without you being a doctor or lawyer.”

I put my hand on hers and pulled her to me.

That was one strong, long hug. It was the kind of hug where two people love each other so much that, if it’s strong and long enough, the embrace might actually meld them into one being, one heart, one love. Be a cynic if you like, but there are such things as soul mates.

Well, it was going to take days for me to recover. So be it.

An hour later, we were eating cheeseburgers. Not just any cheeseburgers. These were from a place called Houston Smith, over on Eighth Avenue, and their burgers make Mickey D’s look like they came from a rendering plant. And like many self-indulgent New Yorkers on a Saturday morning, we ordered in. New Yorkers may act elitist sometimes, but never so much as when they glory in the variety of take-out menus at their disposal. Knowing that ninety percent of the U.S. is relegated to emollient, cheese-heavy take-out pizza fills us with quiet glee. It’s the little things that make life worth living.

And finding myself in bed after noon with Angie, eating Houston Smith cheeseburgers and fries with chipotle mayo, is one of those little things.

As we ate, I filled her in on all the latest developments, and when I finished, she had a finger to the curl of her lips, her gaze distant. This was the posture she assumed while doing crosswords or watching quiz shows. Her brain was calculating.

“The horn of a kving-kie . . .” she muttered. “Hokey smoke!”

I looked up from my burger, mostly in wonder at the vast range of her dopey expletives. Her eyes were wide, and I thought she might be choking. But I heard her swallow. Hard.

“Garth! You did have the kving-kie in your hand when the windows exploded!”

“I was holding the crow . . .”

She tossed her burger down and we locked eyes.

“The stick.”

“The stick?”

“The branch, the stick the crow was standing on. That was the horn.”

I blinked, brow furrowed.

“Remember? When we went to Remington, to the auction house, the log said it was a white crow on a rock in a bell jar. Partridge buys the crow, replaces the rock with a stick.”

I set my burger down and heard myself swallow. Hard.

“Why would he do that?”

“To hide it. He knew it was valuable, and he hid it somewhere nobody would think to look for it. You know the picture Jim Kim showed you, of the horn, and you said it looked like a stick, right?”

“Sort of. But when I first saw that picture, years ago, I thought it was an illustration of a gallbladder or something. So when Kim showed it to me . . . of course. How could I have been so stupid? The crow was holding the horn, which just looked like a stick.”

“Garth? Is it possible you really did make those windows explode?”

I suddenly felt very warm. “I don’t know. I mean, there was so much going on, what with the fire and that horrendous freak coming at me.”

“Is there something that happened that was, you know, strange? I mean, stranger than Belle Beverly.”

I found myself standing. “Well, as I said, there was a lot going on. But . . . there was a moment where I thought I was dead, because I could look down and see me and Flip, him doing that little dance in front of me with the knife.”

She gasped. “An out-of-body experience.”

“I dunno about that.”

“And that’s when the windows exploded?”

I nodded. “And I saw Flip go out the window while I watched myself just stand there, smoke and ashes flying all around me.”

“What about what Dudley said?” She had her finger back to her lips. “And about what Jim Kim said. Do you feel any connection with the horn?”

My appetite was suddenly shot. “Not unless that connection feels like fear.”

“Do you get any feeling about where the horn is now?”

“And if I did?”

She looked up at me, and then away, adjusting her robe.

“I’m sorry. You’re right. We’ve had enough trouble for a while.”

“A long while, I hope.” I sat on the bed, my back to her. Her hand gripped my shoulder.

“Let’s forget about it. The horn is someone else’s problem now.”

“Renard’s problem.”

Chapter 24

T
he night I got in from my bender at Tiki Bob’s, there was a message on my machine from Rodney. For some strange reason I’d completely forgotten about this. Once Angie and I finally got out of bed, I noticed that there was an unerased message on my machine, and gave a listen.

He was in town, which meant only one thing: He wanted to collect on the Chinese meal and beer I’d promised. So I gave him a ring.

“Tonight?” I half-moaned. The SBs were still resonating throughout my body, and I didn’t really feel like drinking beer. With or without a penguin.

“Has t’be. I just ran some sea chests down an’ go back tomorrow. You have other plans, do you?”

“No, I just—”

“Not gonna welsh on me, are you, Garth?” He chuckled, knowing he had me.

“I’m a man of my word, Rodney,” I sighed, but tried to sound enthusiastic.

And so it was I met him down in Chinatown at the Golden Frog, two six-packs under my arm. This was a ritual between me and Rodney. Whenever he ran his circuit of Manhattan antiques stores, he never failed to give me a ring for a Chinatown repast. Especially when I owed him a free dinner. Especially when the beer was included.

Like most New Yorkers, I have a couple shabby little Chinese greasy spoons I like to think have the world’s best Szechuan. One of those drab, BYO places Asians actually go to. That’s not to say they don’t have their charms. They typically have various Chinese prints on the beige walls, some paper lanterns hanging from the fluorescent lighting on the ceiling, and a giant algae-filled aquarium full of carp in the front window. These are eating carp, so when you order
live carp
from the menu, it’s one of these poor devils you get to choose from. Chopsticks are an automatic—you have to ask for a fork and then hope they can find it.

Chinese food in Chinatown is a completely different cuisine from the usual grist of restaurants in other parts of town: moo goo gai pan, General Tsao’s chicken, kow pung beef, pork fried rice, etc. The non-Chinatown joints have essentially sold out to American tastes. I mean, what is it with broccoli in almost everything? And yet in Chinatown, I’m not sure they even know what broccoli is.

Anyway, on this night I chose the Golden Frog. It’s not my favorite, but it boasts a menu with some of the most original, hideous-sounding treats you can imagine.
Cold jelly with spicy sauce. Duck blood and intestine in sour cabbage. Spicy duck tongue with green sauce. Sautéed stinky to-fu—
no lie.
Double-cooked lamb stomach in ma-la sauce. Shrimps and pork groin. Spicy duck feet with mustard.
Mind you, I don’t order any of those things. I don’t go to the Grand Canyon either—but it’s reassuring to know it’s there if I ever want to go. My tastes are a tad more pedestrian, like shredded beef with dry bean curd, rabbit tenders in red chili sauce, diced duck with basil and green pepper, Chinese string bean with minced pork.

This hole-in-the-wall is on Division Street, just off Kimlau Square, and that’s where I found Rodney just around dusk. We were soon settled into a booth with some hot and sour soup spicy enough to etch glass. The beer was slow going for me; not so for Rodney. Funny, as much beer as he drinks—which he does almost constantly—I don’t think I’ve ever seen him drunk. Then again, I’ve probably never seen him with a 0.0% blood-alcohol level, so I have no basis for comparison.

He naturally wanted to be updated on all the latest with the white crow. I gave him the quick version, concluding with the notion that the stick the crow had been mounted on was actually a horn. I did not touch on any of the psychokinetic stuff, at least not from my personal experience. What was the point? Besides, the very thought of it turned my stomach.

“Bloody ’ell, Garth. You do get yourself into int’restin’ situations, don’t you?”

“Interesting? Not interesting when Angie’s neck is on the line.”

“I mean, first you had that thing a couple years back. That shoot-out over bear gallbladders. Now this.”

My mind flashed to Smiler handing me the photocopy, and then to the same one Jim Kim had shown me. I forced it from my mind.

“Which reminds me of the one about the hunter and the bear. This hunter goes into the woods, finds this bear, see? The bear puts up his paws, the hunter takes aim and pulls the trigger. But the gun misfires, so the bear swats the gun to the ground and says . . .” The rest of the three encounters between the hunter and the bear were licentious in the extreme, enough so to make a grizzly blush. Good thing the other patrons probably didn’t speak much English. It ended with the bear saying, “You don’t come out here to hunt, do you?”

Rodney loosed his cannonade of laughter, but stopped abruptly. “Maybe, Garth, you don’t do this for the taxidermy. You have a knack for scrapes.”

“I know. Believe me, if I could possibly avoid this sort of thing . . . but you just don’t see it coming. C’mon—this could happen to you. You buy a sea chest, and there’s something hidden in it, and people come looking for it, and—”

He was wagging his head, polishing off his third beer.

“Somehow I don’t think so, Garth. Luck runs different ways for different blokes. Mine doesn’t run that way. Yours obviously does.”

“Ah, that’s right, you and luck. I’d almost forgotten about your luck theories.”

“You think it’s all probability, then? That it’s all random?”

“No.” I sipped my beer. “We make choices. From the choices we make, there are consequences and happenstance associated with it. I come to an intersection. I make a right turn, and I get into an accident with an old lady in a Studebaker. I make left turn, and there’s no old lady in a Studebaker so there’s no accident.”

“Aha, yes, but what if the old lady made a different turn that resulted in her being beyond the left turn?”

“Then if I made the right, no problem.”

“But don’t you see? What about when you both happen to make the decision to end up at the same place and have that accident?”

“Now, that’s random.”

“Is it?”

This was beginning to make me uncomfortable. We were straying toward more spooky stuff, the stuff of which wild bovid horns are made.

“Look, you’re depressing me. If you’re right, I’m in deep shinola, because it means things will keep happening to me. Right?”

He nodded.

“If I believed that, I’d end up in a mental institution.” I shook my head. “So if you don’t mind, I’d very much like to hear everything that’s going on in your life, where luck doesn’t run the way it does in mine.”

He let the luck topic go.

For the next hour, he regaled me with the intricacies of the antique sleigh and wagon market. Somehow he managed to quaff seven beers to my three, all the while pontificating seamlessly on troikas, felloes, whiffletrees, and spokeshaves. Slurping through the soup, we shoveled dumplings, rabbit tenders, sizzling war bar, and a happy family. In the end, we found ourselves like a couple of happy, teetering gourds.

“Bloody ’ell, Garth, what I wouldn’t do for vittles like that in the North Country.” Rodney grinned, engulfing a fortune cookie. “I’d say this Golden Froggy is better than Wong’s.”

“I’d say. Um, Rodney, you didn’t take out the fortune.”

“Never brought me any luck readin’ ’em, now, did they? So now I got a theory that if you don’t read the fortunes, maybe they’ll come true.”

I knit my brow. “How would you know if it came true? I mean, if you don’t read it . . .”

“That’s the point, dear boy. When somethin’ good ’appens, you chalk it up to the fortune cookie.”

“You really enjoy deluding yourself, don’t you, Rodney?” I snapped open my cookie, hoping it would say something innocuous like
Avoid gas-station bathrooms.

“So whatsit say?” Rodney held out his hand, but I didn’t offer the fortune. “You opened it, now you have to tell me what it says. That’s the rules. If you eat it whole, you don’t have to tell.”

“It’s stupid.” I tossed it in front of him.

“Aha!” He squinted at the slip of paper, and read,
“Never trouble trouble until trouble troubles you.”

I slid out of the booth and staggered up to the cashier. In the time it took me to pay, Rodney opened and downed the last beer. His nine to my three. And he seemed no worse for wear.

Standing at the register, I was inserting a piece of bubblegum in my mouth when I happened to look out the front window at a limousine parked across the street.

I blinked hard and began choking on my gum.

Under the glow of a streetlamp, I clearly saw Agent Renard and an Asian man in a double-breasted suit emerge from a small office building. They ducked into a limousine, and a waitress started smacking me on the back.

“Awright, lad?” Rodney took over patting my back, and I pushed his arm away, gurgling and pointing. The limo zoomed off down the street and the pink gum shot from my mouth into the open register.

“It’s Renard!” I barked, darting out into the street.

“Hey!” I heard Rodney holler. “Garth, what the ’ell are you doin’, y’bloody fool!”

Here I was, running through the streets of Chinatown after the limo, my meal rolling around my gut like a water balloon.

Rodney had a very good question: What the bloody hell
was
I doing? Here I’d just gotten through saying that I didn’t want any more trouble, ever.
But they had the horn, right there in that limo.
How did I know that? I just did. And for some reason, that was enough.

A glint of hope that I might catch up kept me in track-star mode. A red light at Bowery let me gain a few strides before the long black car turned right. I could hear Rodney calling after me as I avoided a near collision with a delivery bike, weaved around a knot of German tourists, and ducked right on Catherine Street. I thought I might just be able to cut the limo off before it could reach the Manhattan Bridge.

My thoughts flew by like cards in a shuffling deck. Who was Renard with? Where was he going? How would I catch him? Should I stop and make a phone call? To whom? Would the police help me? Would they believe me? Of course, the one card I don’t remember pulling from the deck was the question of how I planned to stop the limo when I caught up with it.

Traffic was snarled at Canal Street, and the limo was inching its way between a stalled cab and some construction barricades when I threw myself on its hood. All I could see of the limo’s occupants was the driver, a guy decked out in black chauffeur duds, a big black mustache, and black wraparound sunglasses. He put the car in park and got slowly out of the limo the second before a loud buzz filled my head.

The chauffeur grabbed me by the collar and said, “Garth, what do you think you’re doing? You’re going to blow the whole thing. Garth? Garth?”

Headlights and neon blinked out. My eyes shut. I guess I fainted.

Never trouble trouble until trouble troubles you.
I haven’t opened a fortune cookie since.