Reinhart shook his head. “Well, rotten lies like that are being discredited nowadays. …”
Splendor made his grisly smile on the blanched pillow. “I am convinced it was a literal rendering. What would be more natural behavior for ex-slaves suddenly transformed into legislators?”
“Of course,” Reinhart said. “But it was the implication—”
“A disorderly lot of cheeky apes,” said Splendor, making his eyes wondrous. “Defecating on the democratic process, the origins of which were in ancient Greece and which had descended through centuries of rationalism. A magnificent progress, the fruit of European civilization, and so on.”
Reinhart threw up his hands. “I know. Pretty shabby, behind all the pretensions.”
“But then,” said Splendor. “What isn’t?”
“I started to say that when I think of Negro history I feel you would have a perfect right to destroy this country.”
“Me?” asked Splendor in amazement. “I certainly have more important things to do than that.”
“I have stayed too long,” said Reinhart, taking a new tack. “You need your rest. Forgive me, but it’s been many years since we’ve had a good talk.” Splendor looked worse than he had several days ago, if that was possible. Reinhart told himself this in defense against the cruel illusion that his friend actually looked subtly better: he was of course merely getting used to the sight. But Splendor certainly spoke with much of the old vigor. It was typical of him not to notice, or at least not to mention, Reinhart’s new garb and wig. He had always been beyond the personal peculiarities of others.
“Not at all,” Splendor said. “You scarcely got here. Do you remember our talks of old? These kids today think they have discovered mind-expansion, but we could tell them a thing or two. We had our guru. Remember the correspondence course from Doctor Goodykuntz’s Universal College of Metaphysical Knowledge? My diploma is still around somewhere. It seems ridiculous now, but these things have their function in developing maturity. That’s why I say, let’s not despair about our children. They may seem foolish at times, but, believe me, they’ll turn out to be fine businessmen one day.”
“Businessmen?” asked Reinhart.
“Why, don’t tell me you have forgotten our youthful peccadilloes.” Splendor waggled a schoolteacher’s finger. “We were once on the wrong side of the bars, old boy.”
Anyway, Splendor himself had been arrested while in possession of a modicum of heroin and the means of injecting it into his circulatory system. Reinhart had visited him in jail. It was interesting that in Splendor’s memory Reinhart was a fellow felon: in his current mood Reinhart wished ardently that he had been.
“Don’t tell me,” Splendor went on from the pillow, “that you are too old to recall our series of experiments to check out the assumptions on which this republic operates?”
Reinhart nodded his acceptance of this revision of history.
“Each generation must establish these truths for themselves,” Splendor went on. “My son Raymond is not content to sit and listen how I was once incarcerated for carrying a pinch of talcum powder and a hypodermic needle without a plunger. Not him. He must strap to his waist a plastic water pistol molded in the form of a German Luger, and go through the daily experience of being disarmed by the constabulary at the muzzle of a genuine Police Special at the trigger of which trembles the nervous digit of a patrolman.”
Reinhart asked: “You mean—?”
“I don’t know how you could forget that priceless moment, one night in 1946,” said Splendor, “when you came to the jail, and we put on the police force. There I was, supposedly raving on heroin, and you were pretending to be shocked and enraged by my antics. I have often thought, Carlo, that you and I had sufficient talent to have had a go at show business.”
Until this moment Reinhart had subscribed to an utterly different version of this incident, but he was free now. He patted the crown of his wig and laughed in a fashion that exposed all his teeth, mimicking Otto’s imitation of human mirth.
“That cop Hasek blew his mind,” said he.
Splendor said: “Do you happen to recall a small person on the West Side who called himself the Maker? He was a pusher and was generally himself under the influence.”
“Didn’t he also have his own one-car taxi company? I believe I rode in it once.”
“Of course he did,” Splendor soberly replied. “That was one of his many covers. Another was prostitution.”
“But that’s illegal too.”
“Ah, yes, but unless a public nuisance is created, sidewalks obstructed, or of course unless an organization of respectable ladies brings pressure on the politicians at election time, a pander who is careful with his payoffs rarely comes to grief.”
“Splendor, I always thought of you as quite the Puritan,” said Reinhart.
“I have mellowed to a degree. As one ages he looks more tolerantly, I have found, on the vanity of human wishes. It was quite true that when young I had a blue nose. Now I am willing to admit that many men find it necessary periodically to succumb to base impulses. And sex is a good deal less deleterious, if hygienic procedures are observed, than smoking, drinking, and even overeating.”
In his new role Reinhart had not taken any food all day, so if he knew sensitivity now, it was in retrospect.
“Narcotics, though, are something else. I put the Maker in prison.” Splendor’s eyes were feverish with pride.
“You became a cop?”
“Not at all. I sent the police chief and the mayor carbon copies of a letter I wrote to the state narcotics bureau.”
“The Honorable Bob J. Gibbon and his brother, Chief C. Roy,” said Reinhart. “Wait a minute! It comes back to me now. That was the beginning of a series of investigations—dope traffic on the West Side, then all the rest of it, contractor’s kickbacks on public projects, the disappearance of municipal funds, and so on. Bob J. blew his brains out, and C. Roy vanished. Well, you and I were involved in the building of the sewer, or nonbuilding, as it turned out.”
“The subject of a letter of mine to the state attorney-general,” said Splendor.
“I certainly thought it was strange that a series of manholes would not have any pipes under them,” Reinhart said, reminiscently. “…What?”
“Anonymous, naturally. I sought no personal acclaim.”
Even in his new character, Reinhart found himself nettled by this smugness.
“The whole cleanup resulted from a couple of unsigned letters?”
Spendor said: “Naming names and specifying details. The right word in the right ear. You’d be surprised, Carlo. Democracy works, but the correct techniques are required. The nay-sayers to the contrary notwithstanding, precision is always the answer.”
Reinhart’s eyebrows ascended almost to touch the low brow of his wig, then fell towards peevishing eyes. It had lately become commonplace for him to hear of remarkable accomplishments which he must accept on faith. Streckfuss’ thawed monkey, Splendor’s puissant muckraking, neither presented with a shred of proof.
“You don’t suppose,” said Splendor, “that I would have got far by inscribing my own name and address?”
True enough. Publicity, supposedly so gross a medium, was actually a subtle discipline. Reinhart could appreciate that. And like so many things, it was conditioned by time. Today Splendor might well be given an audience with the governor as a “black leader,” having outlasted an era in which he was a nothing nigger with a narcotics record.
“Claude Humbold,” said Reinhart, referring to his old realtor boss who had been the prime mover in the sewer swindle, “Claude got away scot-free, though, didn’t he? I hear he has the biggest used-car dealership in Southern California.”
“Nothing could have been easier than dealing with Claude,” Splendor said. “If you recall, when we were blasting for the long-delayed sewer excavation on my home street, Mohawk, a little too much dynamite was employed and we lost half the block. Well, of course, Cla
ude personally owned these houses and did not do badly in his rents, persons of color not having a great deal of choice in their abodes in those days. It was either the West Side or hit the road.” Splendor waved his spiderweb hand. “I’m not sniveling, as you well know. I never laid around with a pint of Thunderbird in a paper bag, collecting my relief payments and sourly spitting into the gutter.” He cleared his throat and, writhing up against the white-pipe headrail, reached for a glass upon the bedside table.
“Here,” said Reinhart. “Let me.”
Splendor waved him off. “You don’t know what a satisfaction it is after all these weeks to have the strength again to attend to simple functions.” Not only did he grasp the tumbler. He managed to fill it from a pitcher heavy with a good four inches of water, though his strained tan arm looked like a working model of stark radius and ulna.
Reinhart had not come here to dig up old dirt. He was thrilled by Splendor’s implication.
He asked: “You feel results after only a couple of days?”
Splendor displayed, as a skeleton might, how man drinks. Reinhart followed the progress of the water down through the hollow between the clavicles. His friend then breathed for a while.
At last Splendor said: “Indubitably. I can almost feel those fresh cells putting the malignant ones to rout. Vitality, Carlo, will always win. We tend to forget that, with our easy emphasis on morbidity, but it is the law of life.”
“Easy?”
“Lazy,” said Splendor. “Dying is hardly a positive procedure. Contrary to the old myths, death is an absence and not a presence, not a hooded figure hacking you down with a scythe—actually an attractive image: were Death an antagonistic personage, intent on imposing his will, we would have known how to defeat him long since. It is nothing, the void at the end of a long incline of passivity, the goal of a negative momentum, a state unknown to any living thing but man.”
Reinhart frowned. His earlier peevishness had not evaporated before it was replenished.
“All things die.”
“Only man knows he will, in the words of the sage.”
“Oh.” It was one of those semantic sleights-of-hand. You’re not unhappy, you just think you are. He hasn’t died but gone on to a better life.
Reinhart forced a grin and said heartily: “It’s good news that you feel better.”
“You don’t believe it,” said Splendor, with more amusement than reproach. “You think Professor Streckfuss is either a charlatan or a maniac.”
Reinhart was embarrassed. “Hell,” he began, “hell,” petered out. He started all over. “I never said that. I don’t know what to think. But when you get into a corner you will take any exit that is offered. He might turn out to be the greatest genius in the history of medicine.”
“He has my vote,” Splendor stated decisively.
Reinhart would not be such a swine as to point out that it was technically impossible for new cells to do more than swim around in the tissue for the first few days. Even the antihistamines he had once taken for an allergic reaction to a cough medicine showed no results for forty-eight hours, and they were soluble in water, absorbable by the blood. The goat cells were the material, palpable, concrete stuff of life, flesh indeed, alien—far more alien than a heart transplanted from one human being to another, and most of the cardiac recipients had died.
He wondered whether he should tell Splendor of his decision to be frozen. Decided not to: the poor devil might feel jealous.
“Why,” asked Splendor, “do you continue to work with him if you distrust him?”
“I had no choice,” Reinhart answered in a change of tense.
Splendor flowed back down into a supine position with a serpentine ease that contrasted with his prior efforts to rise.
Reinhart was now ready to hear more scandal. “You were speaking of Claude Humbold?”
“Yes. The way it worked out was that Claude transferred that West Side property to me.”
“That was nice. But if I know Claude, he had some cunning motive. He probably ended up with more money than if he had kept it.”
“Let me just say this.” Splendor’s tongue made a big boil in his cheek. “His name was never found on any kind of document.”
“That figures.”
“And neither was yours.”
Reinhart studied the meaning in Splendor’s lowered eyelids.
Splendor went on: “You were titular president of Cosmopolitan Sewers, the dummy firm hiding Claude and the Gibbon Boys.”
“And you were vice-president and chief engineer, as I remember.”
“You,” said Splendor, “signed the contracts and subcontracts, the invoices and bills and the rest of the blizzard of paper. Before leaving for California, Claude burned all of that.”
“That was nice of him. Claude wasn’t the worst man in the world.” Reinhart had never wondered why he himself was not investigated. At the time of the probe he was operating the television shop and doing so badly as to be totally distracted by his losses. He had not known at the outset, when Claude maneuvered him into being front man, that the sewer project was a swindle When he caught on, he and Splendor had made a serious effort to build a usable facility, ending with the blast that excavated most of Mohawk Street.
“Wait a minute,” Reinhart said now. “We picked up your son at your old house the other day—”
Anticipating him, Splendor said: “I restored the area long since. What do you think of that apartment house?”
“I didn’t see it.” Sweet’s car had come from the other direction. Reinhart had also been so apprehensive about entering a Negro neighborhood in this day and age that he might have overlooked the landing of a flying saucer.
Splendor frowned. “About all that’s left in its original form over there is our old plantation. Call me sentimental but whatever the cost in dollars and cents I couldn’t raze the old home where I used to listen to Amos ’n’ Andy.”
That had a bitter ring, but when Reinhart stared at him, Splendor was looking into the past. “I refused for years to believe the simulators were Caucasian. And the back yard, site of many a Western gunfight and once, with a cast of at least six or seven children, Custer’s Last Stand. I was armed with a cavalry saber made from a length of trellis lath. Many years later I read a debunking, derisive sort of book which stated that Custer did not possess his saber at the Little Big Horn, contrary to the depiction in the famous painting.” Splendor said reproachfully: “Why must they destroy all the great old images?”
Reinhart shook his head. In his new way of looking at things he did not want to dwell on this.
“There are even those,” said Splendor, “who would have you believe that Julius Caesar, that magnificent tragic figure, was a homosexual.”
“Frankly, I don’t care one way or the other,” Reinhart said bluntly. “I am having myself frozen.”
There, it was out, and no doubt sounded so outlandish that Splendor would ignore it.
And he did. He said: “Claude did not obliterate those incriminating materials out of the goodness of his heart. That was part of the deal, along with the deeding to me of the West Side property. We had a little ceremony around my charcoal grill: he burned the documents and I in turn threw in the tape recordings made from the tap on his phone.” Splendor chuckled. “My cousin,” he said, “was a serviceman with the telephone company.”
All at once Reinhart had the conviction that Splendor would recover.
He said: “Your son told me he bought this house for you, but I’ll bet you paid cash.”
“Raymond will say almost anything. He has discovered the technique of bold assertion, in which the content is almost irrelevant. He is American to the core: to say is to be. You and I make a distinction between rhetoric and reality. Perhaps we are essentially foreigners, Carlo.”
Reinhart said: “Yes, I have had the same thought about my boy.”
“I put my trust in land,” said Splendor. “As soon as I get back on my feet I am goin
g to begin to acquire this whole neighborhood.”
Reinhart asked soberly, but not sadly: “And make it all black?”
“Blue, green, or polka dot,” Splendor cried. “I’m going to make it all money.” Which had also been Claude Humbold’s bedrock democratic principle, and it was actually anything but mean.
Reinhart stood up. “I must be running along, old friend.”
“Surely not before you get the grand tour,” Splendor said. “I have done some remodeling of your old abode, Carlo. A second bathroom, and the basement is pine-paneled and floored with that impervious synthetic carpeting.” He shouted: “Grace!”
For an instant Reinhart believed this cry some kind of religious invocation. But soon the plump nurse appeared from the hallway.
“I indulged myself, Carlo,” said Splendor. “I also installed a sauna, but I have not yet been able to use it.” He gestured at the nurse. “Did you meet the other day? Or did I forget the amenities in a concern with my then incipient mortality? My wife, Grace—Carlo Reinhart, an old, dear friend. You have heard me speak of him on many occasions.”
She had a generous smile. Reinhart was reminded of Splendor’s sister, years ago. Why were Negro smiles especially gratifying? Suggested the good things, the forgiving materials: leather, wood, copper; or the luxurious tastes, like chocolate. Or merely relieved you of the dark apprehensions, with a show of white.
While he looked at her teeth, Grace said: “You and Sylvester must have been quite the scamps.”
Reinhart shook her soft strong hand, and turned to Splendor.
“Now tell me the truth,” Splendor said, beating him out again. “Does Sylvester Gordon Mainwaring sound like me? So I changed it to Splendor Gallant. At least I kept the family name. Raymond has become Captain Storm. We Mainwarings are all self-invented.”
“What ever became of your sister Loretta?” asked Reinhart, referring to the most beautiful girl he had ever seen on earth. He had never heard her speak.