The Straight Man - Roger L Simon (11 page)

"Swami X . . . Swami X." He looked at me.
"Haven't seen that dude in five years. Can't do comedy anymore
because of his legs. Can't do stand-up when all you can do is sit
down."

"What happened to his legs?"

"
Some Haitian junkie broke 'em with a baseball
bat in Alphabet City. Got maybe fifteen dollars for his trouble. Not
that it was a lot of trouble."

"You know where he is now?"

"What're you gonna do when you find him?"

"Ask some questions."

"Anybody gonna get hurt? Motherfucker's had
enough problems, you know. There ain't a lot of jazz lovers left in
this park, but twenty bucks don't buy my soul yet." He picked up
his sax and played a few bars of a bebop version of the Grosse Fugue.

"
He's not going to get hurt. At least by me."

"There's a place called Shannon's Bar on Vesey
Street in TriBeCa. Try the apartments upstairs."

I got back into the cab, startling Fouad, who was
gesturing with his fingers to a couple of punkettes on the corner of
University Place as if they were a pair of stray cats.

"Vesey Street in TriBeCa."

"Okay, okay. TriBeCa." He turned on the
ignition and I took off. I decided it was better not to mention the
Toyota van, which suddenly pulled out about a half block behind us
without its lights on. I wondered what kind of arsenal its driver
kept in the recesses of his cabin. If he was as much of a
professional as he looked, it was likely to be one of the newer
weapons you read about in Soldier of Fortune magazine, like the
Austrian 308-caliber Steyr rifle. With a good starlight scope, the
kind they used in Vietnam to spot elusive VC on dark jungle nights,
that sucker could hit a warthog at four hundred meters. And I was
about twenty-five times bigger than a warthog.

We drove down Lower Broadway toward City Hall. I was
starting to sweat. Maybe this wasn't such a good idea. Maybe I was
endangering poor Fouad, who would have been better off at the L.I.U.
reserve book room dealing with his civil engineering. By the time we
reached Canal Street, I was convinced of it.

"Look, pull over," I said.

"What for, mister? You worried about man in
van?" He gestured behind him. "I see him all the time at
park. Never looks at girls. Don't take it amiss, but you are too
nervous. He is bad guy. You good guy. Not to worry. Allah will punish
him." And with that he made a hard left off of Canal and then a
right down an alley. Then two more rights and a left. Then another
alley and another right. I was in the hands of Allah.

By the time we hit Vesey Street the van was out of
sight. "Over there," I said, pointing at Shannon's Bar, a
dimly lit local joint with a shamrock in the window and a couple of
missing letters in its neon sign. Fouad stopped out front.

"Keep circling the block," I said.

"Sure thing, mister," he replied. "Meter
running."

"Yeah, right. Meter running."

Fouad disappeared, and I glanced in each direction
past a row of decaying brick and cast-iron facades before entering
the door immediately to the right of the bar, number 408. The inside
of the building was one of those older, dingy, turn-of-the-century
warehouses that cried out for gentrification but hadn't yet made it.
The entryway was an ugly sea-green lit by a single bulb that revealed
the name of the one-time residents: S & J IMPORTERS. It must have
been a long time ago. There were several names on the building
register, but none of them faintly resembled "Swami X." I
had started up the stairs when a ferretlike character darted out at
the top of the landing, his eyes bulging with urban paranoia.

"What do you want?" he said.

"Swami X. I'm looking for someone named Swami
X."

"Who?" he shouted again as if he were hard
of hearing, although he could not have been more than thirty.

"
Swami X," I repeated.

"Him. What could you want with him? Are you the
caseworker?"

"No. I'd just like to talk with him."

"Talk with him? What for?" Suddenly he
looked very sad.

"I thought you might've come to see me. I do
these paintings. No one ever comes to see them. They're of the
Holocaust . . . Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen . . . neorealist portraits
of the chambers exactly as they were, taken from original
photographs."

"Maybe some other time. Where's the Swami?"

"He doesn't live here anymore."

"Do you know where he moved?"

"No. He disappeared over a year ago.
Adresse
unbekannt
, as they say. Address unknown.
Return to sender."

"Jesus," I said.

"Why do you say 'Jesus'?" he said. "You're
Jewish, aren't you?"

"It's just an expression."

"So the Swami's gone. That's not surprising. He
probably killed himself. Every genius kills himself eventually. This
is a kingdom of the dumb. You sure you don't want to see my
paintings? You know, it's funny. Someone else was here yesterday,
looking for him."

"A short black guy, wears a baseball cap turned
backward?" Outside, I could see Fouad's cab whistle past.

"Yeah, that was him. He got real upset when he
found out the Swami was gone. I thought he was going to have a
breakdown or something. He didn't want to see my paintings either.
Neither did his friend."

"His friend? Who was his friend?"

"Some creep called Kid Siena. He said I should
know who he was because he was a famous graffiti artist. What an ego!
I mean, graffiti art isn't art. It's just decoration. A few bright
colors on a subway car. You know what I think? All those black and
Latino rebels secretly wish they were on Madison Avenue. One call
from an ad agency and—"

"Any idea where I could find Kid Siena?"

"How should I know? Defacing the Museum of
Modern Art, probably. Now if you'll excuse me, I have serious work to
do." He turned and disappeared off the landing.

Slowly I opened the wire glass door of the building.
Vesey Street was empty. It had started to rain and a small puddle was
already reflecting the blurred neon of Shannon's Bar. I waited for
Fouad on the stoop. It didn't take long. In about thirty seconds he
came skidding around the corner like the front runner at Le Mans. His
back door was already open.

It was easy to see why: the van was thirty yards
behind him and gaining. I dove into the back, slamming hard against
the seat and reawakening my fragile ribs just as a shell came
crashing through the rear window, splattering tiny pellets of safety
glass all over the rear of the cab. I interrupted Fouad, who was
muttering imprecations in Arabic at twice the speed of sound.

"The Harvard Club," I shouted.

"
What?"

"Forty-fourth Street. I need to make a phone
call and it's the safest place I can think of."

The van had disappeared from view by the time we hit
the traffic on Eighth Avenue. I did my best to clean up the backseat
while reassuring Fouad all repairs would be taken care of. For some
peculiar reason he was laughing. "This like old days with Red
Cross. Fouad dodge grenade, dodge Uzi, run roadblock. One time go
right through gate American Embassy, crash into guardhouse."

We pulled up in front of the Harvard Club with still
no visible sign of the van, but I knew he couldn't be far away.
Indeed, if he was truly a professional, he would have changed
vehicles by now. Whatever he was up to, he would probably restrain
himself in this bastion of bourgeois meritocracy. The only paid
assassins around here were of the boardroom kind.

I left Fouad double-parked outside and walked
straight in with the swagger of an up-and-coming member of the Class
of '75. My father had been a graduate, actually, and I had gone there
many times as a boy. I knew precisely where the phones were, or used
to be, over by the cloakroom. I could see they were occupied for the
moment, and I stood at the edge of the lounge, staring across at the
portentous portraits of famous alumni: Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, JFK. I
used to feel contemptuous of the pomposity of the place and critical
of the value system upon which it was based, but this time I felt
ill-at-ease, almost overwhelmed by a sense of inferiority as some
nameless gumshoe off on a ridiculous wild-goose chase across New
York. Almost as quickly, that same sense segued into a feeling of
uncontrollable rage. And then I had the first hallucination of my
life: among the gallery of portraits, somewhere between a president
and a Nobel Prize winner, was my father, in his Wall Street suit,
holding an attaché case and staring down at me with a look of
extraordinary disapproval. My head swam and my face flushed and I
felt like running up and smashing the painting, when my father's
image suddenly started to cry. Just as suddenly, I realized where I
was, shook myself a few times, walked into a now open phone booth,
and called my younger son. I was still trembling as I dialed his
number.

"Hello, Simon."

"Hi, Dad. You in New York?"

"Yeah." It was soothing to hear his voice,
grounding.

"How is it'?"

"
Adventurous. How's school?"

"
I dunno."

"Not so great, huh? What is it? Math again?
Negative numbers? I'll help you when I get back."

"Yeah. I was by your apartment. There was a
woman there. She says she's working with you. Not bad, Dad."

"Chantal."

"She's a good cook, too. Made me some chocolate
stuff. Profit rolls? She said she used to be a chef."

"Profiteroles. Look, Simon, I need your help on
something. Ever hear of a graffiti artist named Kid Siena?"

"
Oh, yeah, Dad. He's fresh. Kid Siena—wow. He
did some bad burners on the Woodlawn Line by the 180th Street
station. It all got buffed, though. You know—erased. You met him?"

"
No. But I'm looking for him. Do you know where
he lives?"

"Un-unh. Those guys, you know. They move around
a lot."

"Yeah. I know. How about his real name? Do you
know that?"

"Kid Siena? ... I think . .. no."

"What about that book you have, The Lords of
Hip-Hop? Maybe it's in there?"

"Yeah, yeah. Right. Hold on."

While Simon went for his book, I glanced over at the
bulletin board of coming club events. Thursday night they offered a
sushi bar, a retrospective of Godard films, and a lecture on
debentures. Something for everyone. In a second Simon was back on the
line. "Here it is, Dad. I got it. Kid Siena . . . Jorge
Mariposa."

"George Butterfly," I said.

"What?"

"That's what it means. Jorge Mariposa is George
Butterfly in Spanish. No wonder he changed it to Kid Siena."

"Yeah. That's weak," said Simon. "Anything
else you wanna know?"

"That's about it," I said, already thumbing
through the M's in the Bronx directory.

"Guess I gotta do that math now, huh?" He
sounded as if he were headed for forty years in the gulag. I thought
of his brother, who ripped through his homework in about fifteen
minutes, and felt bad for him.

"Guess you do."

I said good-bye and hung up just as a group of alums
from what looked like the Class of aught-seven shuffled through the
lobby from the main dining room. They exited the front door to reveal
my friend from the van standing in an alcove about fifty feet away
from me. He didn't say anything, but nodded to me with the apparent
warning that, at least in this city, there was no escaping him, and
walked out. I continued to search the directories, finally finding a
Jorge Mariposa in Manhattan on Columbus Avenue. Judging by the
address, it must have been in the Nineties.

"What it like in there?" said Fouad as we
drove uptown along Central Park West.

"Lot of old farts nodding out, lot of young
farts on the hustle. Pretty dull in all, but it does have a good
cigar stand. Anyway, it's safe."

'
'Don't take it amiss, but in Beirut that the first
kind of place we blow up."

"We? I thought you were with the Red Cross."

He said something in reply, but I was too busy
checking behind me for the guy in the van, trying to figure which
vehicle he was driving now and who his accomplice was, because I
doubted he was working alone. Or maybe that was just paranoia. But
then I remembered the wry definition of a paranoid Nathanson had once
given me in therapy: someone who knew all the facts. Therapy. I
hadn't thought of it in a couple of days. If what it lead to was
having visions of my father hanging from the wall of the Harvard
Club, maybe it wasn't such a great idea.

The address on Columbus Avenue turned out to be a
middling housing development on Ninety-fifth Street, the kind of
place that brought together junior Columbia faculty and upwardly
mobile Puerto Rican accountants in a common devotion to rent control.
Apparently Jorge Mariposa wasn't doing too badly for a graffiti
artist. Maybe he was one of those I had read about who had gone
big-time with museum sales, gallery representation, and dinner at
Elaine's. Or perhaps it was something else.