Chapter 15
A couple of days after Arthur's visit my bike was gone from its spot in the hallway when I headed out to Framboise at a leisurely 9 in the morning. Framboise is the bakery a few blocks from my apartment where all the hip 20- and 30-somethings of San Francisco congregate every morning to have their coffee and croissant or sticky bun. It's an extremely popular and busy place, and as an antidote to loneliness I'd gotten in the habit of going over there myself some mornings for a latte and therapeutic disapproval of everybody who was there. Weekdays only. On weekends I don't even bother trying to go: I'd have to wait in line for half an hour and then do takeout, because there's never a place to sit. It's a small store with only a few tables inside, room for maybe 35 people if they don't mind sitting across from a stranger, and a dozen or so more outside, although the outside tables aren't very appealing because of the cold San Francisco mornings, the attentive pigeons, and the often too-interesting street activity. But even on a Tuesday, for example, you're likely to find every spot inside filled with svelte young mothers, strollers parked next to their chairs and jamming the aisles; and with young, hot-eyed, smooth-skinned guys, longish hair, sitting cross-legged at an angle with Framboise's huge coffee cups and mountainous, crumbly pastries in front of them and the New York Times open to the international section, and looking around to see who's there that's cute. The staff meanwhile circulate through all this with people's orders: all busty young women with tattoos winking from the tanned space between their tight stretchy pastel tops and the apron strings tied just above jeans slung low on their butts.
I've lost several bikes in San Francisco during the 20 years I've been riding around the city. One, my favorite, with the dinosaur horn, disappeared from the rack in front of the main branch of the public library; another one was taken away from me on the street early one morning by two genial thugs; a third was lifted from the hallway of the apartment building by, I assume, one of the acquaintances of the meth dealer who that very evening was being evicted for nonpayment of rent. After that I began chaining the bike in the hallway, a habit that I'd neglected to change once Leilah left and there was plenty of room inside for the bike. I was therefore annoyed but not very surprised to see that it was gone. What was surprising was to find it on the sidewalk right in front of the house, twisted and mangled into the kind of artistic sculpture that's supposed to make a statement about the incivility of modern life, its handlebars bent back in agony almost to the crossbar, like the neck of one of those archaeopteryx fossils you see on the Discovery Channel. It appeared to have been run over, perhaps several times, by a heavy vehicle, such as a moving van or a garbage truck. This discovery gave me a lot to think about at Framboise, beyond my usual sociological speculations.
Returning from the laundromat that evening I ran into Arthur in the hallway, as though by prearrangement. I was rolling my big laundry basket on a baggage cart; he was carrying his leather briefcase as usual.
“I've had some thoughts,” he said in his quiet, rumbling voice, maintaining the physical stillness that was partly a product of his enormous mass and partly of his orderly mental processes. I admitted that I'd had some thoughts, too, as he held the door for me. “Let's talk,” he said, motioning toward the stairs with his head. I deposited the laundry cart outside my door and followed him up the stairs, contemplating the laborious alternation of his hips under the gray suit jacket, as I had on other occasions observed April's more evocative rolling motion.
A half hour later I went back down the stairs and collected the laundry that was waiting patiently outside my door. I could hear Arthur's heavy tread in the apartment above as he busied himself in the kitchen, while I sorted my socks and underwear and mulled over what I'd just heard. The one thing he'd said that really stuck in my mind had come at the end of the conversation: “I know you don't think ‘Tony Soprano’ when you look at me, although I suppose we've got the same midsection. However, some of my business associates are more emotional than I am. I'm restraining them as far as possible.” We were both thinking of the mutilated carcass of my bicycle, but nobody was saying anything about it.
After putting away the laundry I went on line again and looked at April's website. There she was all right, or at least I was pretty sure it was her. The face of the woman in the picture had been Photoshopped into a blur, and I had to admit that the rest of her body was sort of generically attractive, like the sexual experience itself. I also noticed that they'd lowered the price to only a thousand a night, two thousand for a weekend. Did that mean there weren't enough buyers at the higher price? The price change made the whole thing seem more tentative and embarrassing, almost touching, hard to take seriously. They really don't belong in that world, I was thinking. But there was the bike, and Arthur's insane proposal. And there on my computer screen April's round body, which still, stupidly, created some kind of preamble in my Joe Boxer shorts. It occurred to me that I might be able to afford it at the new prices.
Managing to collect my thoughts and recap my meeting with Arthur, I was able to piece together the following main points:
•Arthur was engaged in at least one other business beyond his partnership with April;
•He had recently taken shipment of some merchandise, some unspecified, expensive merchandise, from none other than our mutual friend, the ex-cop Victor Carogna;
•Arthur had been counting on the revenues from his partnership with April to pay off Victor Carogna;
•Because of my shiftlessness and that of a couple of other deadbeats who had spent time celebrating with April without first examining the state of their checkbooks, Arthur now found himself temporarily embarrassed in terms of cash flow;
•Regrettably, Victor Carogna (we know how impatient he can be) was not disposed to wait very long for his money, citing the ballooning medical expenses attendant to his wife's medical treatments;
•Some of Victor Carogna's business associates (why did everyone except me have these useful friends?) were apparently even more mercurial than Arthur's (the ones who had left me the bicycle message, although that was of course never mentioned); Arthur himself and, god forbid, even April had been threatened by them with bodily harm;
•Arthur had learned from April, who had picked it up at the knitting sessions, of my recently acquired facility with handguns;
•Arthur was proposing that I use my deadly new skills, which were of course well known to Victor Carogna, to persuade him to extend the payment deadline until the unspecified merchandise could be “moved” in accordance with Arthur's original plan;
•In exchange for these services, half my debt, let's say, would be cancelled, the remainder to be placed on an E-Z payment plan that wouldn't put undue strain on my pension check.
There were so many flaws in Arthur's proposal that I'd hardly known where to start. My initial impression of his razor intelligence was rapidly losing its edge on the stubble of his actual business practices. But there was still the mangling of the bike to consider, an operation which did not require much in the way of brains. I mentioned what to me seemed the most important difficulties.
“I don't have a gun,” I told him. “I've been borrowing one of Victor Carogna's when we go to the shooting range. You're expecting him to lend me a gun so I can threaten him with it?” He sat like a gray-suited grizzly on the couch, with his hands on his knees, looking at me. Apparently that was exactly what he did expect.
I tried again. “Look, I can't threaten Victor Carogna, even if he doesn't mind lending me a gun to do it with. You've had business dealings with him; you know better than I do who he is. To me he's just a brilliant knitter with a past in law enforcement. But you say he's putting physical heat on you and even on poor April, who really doesn't have anything to do with your money-making schemes, or at least with your other ones. I may know how to shoot a gun, but Victor Carogna not only knows how, he's done it. At people. He's probably bumped off god knows how many perps and bea
ten the shit out of countless others. How am I going to scare him? Come on, Arthur. Look at me.” Spreading my skinny arms.
“He's 70 years old. And you may have to do more than scare him to make your point,” he said, without turning a hair.
It was my turn to stare at him. He seemed to be serious, although I noticed that his broad forehead above the thick glasses was glistening a bit. “Arthur.” I finally said, getting a little angry. “This is not me. It's silly, can't you see that? I'm an innocent zhlub who's gotten stuck in the middle of this whole lowlife operation. No offense. I'm an asshole, and apparently I've let my dork get me into trouble, but I'm just not thug material. Look, I'll give you what money I have. I'll clean out my savings completely, but I'm not going to get any deeper into this than I already am.”
He shook his head. “That's not really going to be enough. In any case, what you owe is at this point only a relatively small part of my shortfall. I need a more drastic intervention. I think you're the man for it.”
“You're crazy,” I said. “I'm a fucking school teacher, for christ's sake. Retired. The most violent thing I've ever done is refuse to give a kid the bathroom pass. Besides which, you may be having problems with Victor Carogna, I don't know what his life is like outside the knitting group, but he's a friend of mine. Or sort of. I've met his wife. I've eaten her cookies, for god's sake.”
“Is he a friend of yours?”
“As much as anybody, at this point.”
“If he's a friend of yours, then you might be interested to hear that he's been eating your ex-wife's cookies, too.”
“Wife,” I said. “We're only separated. Anyway, she ran off with a birdwatcher. Victor?” The surprise and discomfort in my tone when I mentioned the name reminded me of a recent occasion when I had heard the same tone in someone else's voice.
“Why don't you ask the women in the knitting group? One or two of them might be honest enough to tell you the truth. Certainly April is well aware of what was going on.”
I stared at him some more, speechless now. I was trying unsuccessfully to damp down an image of Victor Carogna's leathery face buried in Leilah's bosom, the waxy tips of his handlebar mustache tickling her nipples.
“I'll give you a day or two to think about it, but I don't have more than that,” Arthur said. “You have to understand that you're at the bottom of a pecking order here. You're going to have to decide whether to step up, or to get pecked. I think you know what I mean.”
I did know what he meant. But I was so busy trying to twist my world back into some recognizable shape that I couldn't be bothered to think about it just then.