Downtown

16

Oz was a disco on a peninsula that hugged the exit to the Battery Tunnel. Located on Greenwich Street, as opposed to Greenwich Avenue farther uptown, it seemed undecided as to whether it wished to be closer to Edgar or to Morris, which were streets and not people. In any event, the club was so far downtown that in the blink of an eye the West Side could suddenly and surprisingly become the East Side. Or rather, and more accurately, the West Side could become the South Side, for it was here at the lowest tip of the island that West Street looped around Battery Park to become South Street.

“It’s all very confusing,” Connie explained, “but not as confusing as the borough of Brooklyn.”

They had parked the open convertible in an all-night garage on Broadway, and had walked two blocks south and one block west to the disco, passing several young girls shivering in the cold in short fake-fur jackets, high-heeled shoes, and lacy lingerie. Michael wondered if any of these girls had earlier been at the Christmas party where he’d met Frankie Zeppelin. He did not think he recognized Detective O’Brien among them.

At three o’clock in the morning on Boxing Day, there were at least a hundred people standing on the yellow brick sidewalk outside Oz. Not a single one of them appeared to be over the age of twenty, and most of them were dressed like characters from The Wizard of Oz. Standing on line in the shivering cold were a dozen or more Tin Men, half again that number of Scarecrows, six Cowardly Lions, eight Wicked Witches of the East, a handful of Glindas, three or four Wizards, a great many people wearing monkey masks on their faces and wings on their backs, some shorter folk chattering in high voices and pretending to be Munchkins, and a multitude of Dorothys wearing short skirts, red shoes, and braids.

Michael felt a bit out of place in his jeans and bomber jacket.

The sidewalk outside the disco was not merely painted a yellow brick, it actually was yellow brick. The building itself had once been a parking garage, shaped like a flatiron to conform to the peninsula-like dimensions of the plot. Its old brick facade was now covered with thick plastic panels cut and fitted and lighted from within to resemble the many facets of a sparkling green emerald rising from the sidewalk. The name of the club was spelled out in brighter green neon wrapped around the front and sides of the building, just below the roof. There were no visible entrance doors. There was only the yellow brick leading to this huge green, multifaceted crystal growing out of the sidewalk.

The girls and boys standing on line outside were talking noisily among themselves, trying to look supremely confident about their chances of getting into the place. The man in charge of granting admission was about six and a half feet tall, and Michael guessed he weighed at least three hundred pounds. He had bushy black eyebrows, curly black hair, wide shoulders, a narrow waist, and hands like hamhocks.

Despite the cold, he was wearing only a black jacket over a white turtleneck shirt, black loafers, white socks, and gray trousers that were too short. Michael heard one of the kids on the line referring to him as Curly.

There was a sudden buzz of excitement when what earlier had appeared to be part of the building’s seamless facade now parted to reveal two green panels that served as entrance doors. An intense green light spilled out onto the sidewalk.

There was the blare of heavy metal rock. Two youngsters walked out—the girl dressed as a somewhat precocious Dorothy in a pleated skirt that showed white panties and half her ass, the boy wearing a gray suit and a funnel on his head. Both were wearing grins that indicated they’d been allowed to meet the Wizard and all their wishes had been granted.

On the line, all faces turned expectantly toward Curly, who was now parading the sidewalk like a judge at a dog show. He chose two people at random, pressed a button that snapped the doors open again, and, with a surly nod, admitted the couple. The girl was dressed as a Munchkin with a frizzed blonde hairdo.

The boy was wearing blue jeans and a long cavalry officer’s overcoat. Apparently, then, admission to the club was not premised on fidelity to the film. The doors swung shut again. The sound of music was replaced by the keening of the wind blowing in fiercely off the Hudson. Nobody on the line complained, not even the kids standing at the head of it. This was simply the way it was. Curly decided who would go in, Curly decided who would stand out here in the cold. Nor was there any way of knowing upon which criteria he premised his choice. Either you waited for his approving nod or you went home with your dreams. That was it, and this was Oz, take it or leave it.

Michael walked over to where Curly was disdainfully glaring out over the crowd.

“Mama’s expecting me,” he said.

Curly looked him over.

“Expecting who?” he said.

“Silvio,” Michael said.

“Silvio who?”

“Just say Silvio.”

“Mama ain’t here yet.”

“I’ll wait. Inside.”

Curly hesitated.

“Push your button,” Michael said.

Curly shrugged. But he pushed the button.

The panels sprang open. Connie and Michael stepped together into the interior of the jewel, and were immediately inundated by a mortar explosion of battering sound and emerald-green light. The place was thronged with Tin Men, Cowardly Lions, Flying Monkeys, Dorothys, Wicked Witches, Munchkins, Wizards, Glindas, Scarecrows, and even ordinary folk. Green smoke swirled on the air. Bodies twisted on the small dance floor. On the bandstand, five blond men wearing black leather trousers, pink tank-top shirts, and long gold chains played guitar and electric-keyboard backup to a young black woman standing at the microphone and belting out a song that seemed to consist only of the words “Do me, baby, do me good” repeated over and over again. She had a big, brassy gospel singer’s voice. She was wearing brown high-heeled boots and what appeared to be draped animal skins. The thudding of the bass guitars sounded like enemy troops shelling the perimeter. The room reverberated with noise, skidded with dazzling light. Out of the deafening din of the music and the refracted green glare of the lights and the dense hanging fog of smoke, a young man in a red jacket materialized.

“Sir?” he asked. “Did John admit you?”

He looked extremely puzzled. Had the system somehow broken down?

“Mama’s expecting me,” Michael said.

“Who’s Mama?” the young man asked.

Michael winked.

“John knows,” he said.

“It’s just that I haven’t got a table,” the young man said.

He seemed on the edge of tears.

“We’ll wait at the bar,” Michael said.

“But how will I know her?” he asked.

“Don’t worry about it,” Michael said, and winked again.

He took Connie’s elbow and led her toward a bar hung with rotating green floodlights that restlessly swept the room like the eyes of Martians, striking the tables around the dance floor, exploding upon them like summer watermelons and then moving on swiftly as if there’d been a prison break, Michael’s motion-picture associations recklessly mixing similes and metaphors, the probing green searchlights in a London air raid, the sky-washing green klieg lights outside Graumann’s Chinese, green tracer shells on a disputed green killing field—but in reality the shells had been yellow and red and the world of Oz was green and loud and somewhat frightening in its insistence on colorization. They sat on high-backed stools alongside a young man dressed as a Cowardly Lion whose mane, awash in the overhead light, looked as green as wilted asparagus.

He turned to Michael and said, “You’re in the wrong movie.”

Ever since Christmas Eve, Michael had been thinking exactly the same thing.

“What are you, Twelve O’Clock High?” the lion asked.

“A Guy Named Joe,” Michael said.

“She’s The World of Suzie Wong, am I right?”

“Shanghai Gesture,” Connie said.

“What’ll it be?” the bartender asked.

“Lost Weekend,” the lion said, and nudged Michael with his elbow.

Michael figured that in this splendidly green place a person should order either creme de menthe or chartreuse.

“Do you know how to make a hot rum toddy?” Connie asked.

“Come on, lady,” the bartender said.

“A Beefeater martini then,” she said, “on the rocks, two olives. Green.”

“Tonic with a lime,” Michael said.

“Green.”

“Hard or soft, the minimum’s the same,” the bartender said.

“That’s okay,” Michael said.

“And besides, the tonic costs three bucks.”

“Fine,” Michael said.

“Hello, darling,” a voice behind him said.

“You’re out of costume.”

He turned.

Glinda the Good Witch of the North was standing there in a diaphanous blue gown, wings on her shoulders, waving a wand. Wings on his shoulders, actually, since Glinda was in reality Phyllis from the Green Garter, with whom Michael had danced earlier tonight, oh what a small world Oz was turning out to be, not to mention the city of New York itself. Phyllis was with a Scarecrow who under all that straw turned out to be Gregory who had rescued Michael from the bad guys and then admired his buns, curiouser and curiouser it was getting to be.

“A Pink Lady, please,” Glinda, or Phyllis, or both, said to the bartender.

“And a Whisper, please,” Gregory said.

The room was stultifyingly hot. Michael took off the bomber jacket and draped it over the high back of the bar stool. The music was still deafening, but the beat was slower now, designed for dirty dancing, the bass guitar chords jangling insistently into the room like the bone-jarring sound of bedsprings in a cheap hotel, the black girl’s gospel-singer voice soaring to the roof where the air was thin and clear, high above the poisonous green smoke, setting the rafters atremble the way it had back home in Mississippi, where Michael imagined she used to sing with the Sunday choir.

“Dance with me,” Connie said.

There was—for him in the next several moments, and perhaps for Connie as well—the certain knowledge that they were the two most beautiful people in the joint, perhaps in the entire city, glowing with an inner light that shattered the emerald-green myth and illuminated them as sharply as if a follow-spot were leading them out to the dance floor. In the movies, this would have been Ginger and Fred, he in elegant tails rather than Levi’s and a sweater, she in a long pale gown rather than jeans and leg warmers and a long-sleeved blouse. And in the movies, they would glide out onto a crowded dance floor—just as the dance floor here was crowded with people pressed against each other, sweating against each other, pumping against each other, dry-humping to the thud of the guitars and the angelic voice—and the crowd would part as Fred stepped out and Ginger followed, those first graceful steps indicating to the mere dancers on the floor that here were italicized dancers, here were goddamn capitalized DANCERS to be reckoned with! And the floor would clear at once, and they would be alone at last, a heavenly mist rising from beneath their feet, and they would dance divinely on clouds, oh so easy, oh so beautifully airy and light and incredibly easy, the way Michael and Connie were dancing now.

The black singer from Mississippi was caressing the dirty lyrics of the song as if the devil had entered her little church and corrupted not only the minister but the entire congregation. The song’s double meaning was as subtle as a rubber body bag, designed to be understood by the dullest adolescent. With a forked tongue, the song spoke of “breaking and entry” and “shaking and trembling” and “taking so gently,” the rhymes so slanted they were bent, the stumbling lyrics pounded home in a tune as simple as the village idiot. But transformed by Ginger and Fred, this crudest of melodies with its thinly disguised pornographic patter became a Cole Porter accompaniment to a dance of unimaginable sensitivity and skill.

Oh how they floated on that sea-green dance floor, oh how they drifted airborne on wafted winds of invention, oh how they wove intricate terpsichorial patterns around and among the stunned bystanders who watched them in envy and awe, open-mouthed and wide-eyed, here a black teenager wearing a modified Afro and a Scarecrow’s stuffed suit, here a stunning brunette in a green micro-mini and braids and red stiletto-heeled shoes, here a lanky, loose-limbed fellow who strongly resembled a young Ray Bolger, and here a beautiful, long-legged woman with short blonde hair and wide brown eyes that opened even wider as he and Connie glided—holy Jesus!

It was Jessica Wales.

Dressed as the Wicked Witch, wearing a skintight black gown, and sparkly red high-heeled shoes, and pale white makeup and blood-red lipstick, and dancing with— Arthur Crandall.

Who looked portly and pompous and pleased as punch, which was probably the way most fat men looked when they had slender gorgeous blondes in their arms.

“Long time no see,” Michael said.

The self-satisfied smile vanished. Perhaps Crandall had expected Michael to be in handcuffs by now, in a holding cell at one or another of the city’s lovely police stations. Or perhaps he’d expected him to be in a garbage can behind one of the city’s many beautiful little McDonald’s locations, which was where Alice might have left him, given her wont. But wherever he’d expected him to be, it was certainly not here in a smoke-filled disco called Oz at twenty minutes past three on Boxing Day.

He went immediately pale.

But not because he thought Michael was a murderer. Oh, no.

That would have been good enough reason to have gone pale, oh yes, a wanton killer here inside this nice noisy club, a cold-blooded murderer here inside this jewel of a joint, good enough cause for Crandall’s eyes to have grown round with fear. But whereas Michael had bought Crandall’s little act in the St. Luke’s Place apartment on Christmas morning—” Careful! He’s a killer!”—he now knew far too much to accept it all over again. Green lights blinking on his round, sweaty face, Crandall was realizing that somehow Michael had tracked Mama here. Which meant that he had also tracked Mama to Crandall himself.

“May I cut in, please?” a voice said, and suddenly Michael was in the arms of a short, thin, mean-looking man with a thick black mustache, wearing a shiny silk gray suit that was supposed to make him look like the Tin Man.

“This is a knife,” he said, and Michael suddenly detected the faint Spanish accent, and realized at once that this was the man Mama had sent to meet Crandall on Christmas Eve. The knife was in the man’s left hand. The point of the knife was against Michael’s ribs. The man’s right arm was around Michael’s back, pulling him in tight against the knife. The man danced them away from Connie, who stood looking puzzled as a swirl of Dorothys and Cowardly Lions and Wicked Witches flowed everywhere around her in the dense green fog. Michael suddenly remembered that his bomber jacket was draped over the back of the bar stool. All the way over there, the pistols were of no use to him. The man smiled under his mustache.

“I’m Mario Mateo Rodriguez,” he said.

“You dance divinely,” Michael said.

“Thank you.”

“But I wonder if …”

“Mama for short,” the man said.

Michael looked at him.

“Mama,” the man said. “For Mario Mateo.”

“You’re a man?” Michael said.

“Nobody’s perfect,” Mama said.

Michael winced. Not because Mama had just quoted the best closing line of any movie Michael had ever seen in his life, but only because he accompanied the line with a quick little jab of the knife. Michael was suddenly covered with sweat. He did not know whether Mama planned to kill him right here on the dance floor under all these swirling green lights or whether he planned to dance him out of here at knife point, onto the yellow brick road, and over to the Hudson River, where once stabbed he could be disposed of quite easily, but either way was a losing proposition. Crandall and his Wicked Bimbo of the East had vanished into the green fog. So had Connie. There was only Michael now, and Mama, and the knife, and the pounding music and the swirling green lights and the enveloping smoke, and all of it added up to being in death’s embrace for no damn reason, no damn cause.

“May I?” the voice asked.

The voice belonged to Phyllis in his blue Glinda gown and his diaphanous wings. He held his magic wand in his left hand, and his right hand was gently urging Mama back and away from Michael. He was attempting to cut in, the dear boy, which Michael considered infinitely preferable to getting cut up.

There was a sweaty, uncertain, awkward moment.

Mama naturally resisting any intrusion at such an intense juncture.

Phyllis naturally intent on dancing the light fantastic.

Michael naturally wishing to stay alive.

The scream shattered the hesitant moment.

High and shrill and strident, it cut through the din as sharply as the word that defined it.

“Knife!”

Someone had seen the knife.

“He has a knife!”

Mama froze.

Suddenly the center of attention, unprepared for such concentrated focus, he smiled in what seemed abject apology, made a courtly Old World bow, his arm sweeping across his waist, and then immediately straightened up and turned to run. Phyllis was directly in his path. Mama hit him with his shoulder, knocking him over backward, his wings crushing as he hit the floor, his head banging against the waxed parquet, his legs flying up to reveal gartered blue stockings under his Glinda skirt. Mama pushed his way through a gaggle of chittering midgets dressed as Tin Men instead of Munchkins, all of them squealing indignantly as he shoved them aside. More people had seen the knife now. Someone shouted at Mama as he pushed his way off the dance floor, knocking over chairs and tables on his way to the exit doors, cursing in Spanish when he banged his knee against a busboy’s cart, angrily slashing at the air with his knife. Michael was right behind him.

He wondered why he was doing this.

Chasing death this way.

He knew only that to find his way again, he had to follow Mama, follow him out of the green smoke and through the green exit doors that swung out onto the sidewalk, follow him into the cold night air past Curly and the waiting hopefuls, onto the yellow brick sidewalk on Greenwich Street, follow that to where it ended as abruptly as a shattered dream, pound along after Mama on a plain gray sidewalk now, past Rector and a girl in her underwear standing under a red-and-green neon sign that read GEORGE’s LUNCH, and then Carlisle where an armless man stood under an elegant white canopy lettered in black with the words HARRY’s AT THE AMERICAN EXCHANGE, and then Albany on the left, the street, not the city, and Thames on the right, the street, not the river, and another canopy stretching to the sidewalk, tan and brown this time, PAPOO’s ITALIAN CUISINE and BAR, and then O’HARA’s PUB on the corner of Cedar and Greenwich, the place names blurring with the street names until at last Greenwich dead-ended at Liberty and the World Trade Center loomed high into the night on the left. Michael was breathing hard, sweating in what was no longer fear but what had become certainty instead: he would follow Mama to his death. That was what this was all about.

Michael dying.

There.

Up ahead there.

A black Cadillac limousine.

A China Doll car, he thought.

Connie, he thought.

But no, it was only Arthur Crandall stepping out of the car with a gun in his hand. And suddenly the limo resembled a hearse.

“Join us,” Crandall said.

Michael figured he still didn’t know how to use a gun. But as he moved toward him, Mama suddenly appeared again out of the night, and the knife was still in his hand, and besides, Michael could now see that Connie was inside the car.

Mama grinned.

“Yes?” he said.

Michael nodded.

The limo was quite cozy.

Mama and Michael on jump seats facing Connie on the left, Crandall in the middle, and Jessica on the right. Crandall still had the gun in his hand. Mama had the knife pressed into Michael’s side between the third and fourth rib on the left. About where his heart was, he guessed. Jessica looked somewhat bewildered. He wondered if she knew what was going on here. Did she still think he’d murdered someone? How big a story had Crandall sold her? Her eyes kept snapping from the gun in Crandall’s hand to the knife in Mama’s.

“This is Mama Rodriguez,” Crandall said.

“Yes, we’ve had the pleasure,” Michael said, and then realized that Crandall was introducing Mama to Jessica. Which meant she’d never met him before tonight. Again, he wondered how much she knew about what was going on. He also wondered how much he himself knew about what was going on.

“How do you do?” Jessica said.

She seemed even more bewildered now that she knew this man’s name was Mama. A man with a thick black mustache? Mama? Her eyes now snapped from the knife in his hand to the mustache under his nose. Michael was more worried about the knife than he was about the mustache.

“You did say Mama?” Jessica said.

“For Mario Mateo,” Mama said, and smiled at her like one of the bandidos in Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

“I see,” she said.

She did not look as if she saw anything at all. She looked as confused as Goldie Hawn in a hot air balloon over the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Mama’s fingers were dancing all over the handle of the knife, as if he simply could not wait to use it. This was a good movie back here in the backseat of the limousine.

Beautiful Chinese girl looking gorgeous and alert. Beautiful blonde girl looking like a dumb bimbo, which she probably was, Albetha had been right. Fat motion-picture director with a Phi Beta Kappa key across his belly and a gun that looked like a Luger in his hand. Little Mexican bandido holding an open switchblade knife in his hand, coveting either Humphrey Bogart’s high-topped shoes or the blonde’s sparkly red ones. And sitting on one of the jump seats, the hayseed from Sarasota, Florida, the death-defying orange-grower who after the Tet Offensive in the year 1968, when he was but a mere eighteen years old—

“Let me tell you what I think happened,” he said.

“No, let me tell you what’s going to happen,” Crandall said. “Jessica and I are going to get out of this car on St. Luke’s Place, and then Mama is going to take you and your lovely little friend …”

“I’m five-nine,” Connie said.

“… out to Long Island someplace …”

“And I don’t want to go to Long Island,” she said.

“The ocean breezes are very nice at this time of the year,” Mama said. “You’ll enjoy Jones Beach.”

“Why are you sending them to Long Island?” Jessica asked, puzzled. “Why don’t we take them to the police instead? This man’s a murderer!”

“Don’t worry,” Crandall said.

“What does that mean, don’t worry? This person killed a person!”

“There are police on Long Island,” Crandall said. “Don’t worry.”

“Why did you do that, Mr. Barnes?” she asked, turning to him. “I’m an actress, as you know …”

“Yes.”

“So I keep wondering about your motivation. Are you a crazy person? Is that it?”

“Ask your director,” Michael said.

“Ask him why he went to Charlie Nichols and asked him to hire two other actors …”

“Are you casting another movie?” Jessica asked.

“No, this wasn’t a movie,” Michael said.

“This was Christmas Eve in a bar on—why’d Nichols give me your card?” he asked, turning suddenly to Crandall, who sat smiling and shaking his head as if Michael were certifiable. Jessica, however, was not smiling.

Jessica was trying to understand what the hell was happening here.

Maybe she wasn’t such a dumb bimbo after all.

“You expected me to go to the police, didn’t you?” Michael said.

“He already knows the whole fucking thing,” Mama said suddenly.

Jessica looked at him.

Michael did, in fact, think he already knew the whole fucking thing.

But this wasn’t a movie. This wasn’t the scene where the bad guys said, All right, Charlie, since we’re going to kill you in the next five minutes, anyway, it won’t do any harm telling you all about the terrible things we did. Nor was this the scene where the hero was playing for time waiting for the police to kick in the door, during which suspenseful moments he could explain to the bad guys exactly why they had committed all those gruesome murders. This was real life, such as it was, here in the backseat of this limousine, and the way Michael figured it, Mama was ready to make his move.

Dumb blonde bimbo notwithstanding, Mama was ready. Even if it meant throwing away the blonde with the bathwater. The blonde meant nothing to Mama. Mama wanted home free. Mama had gone into this to kill two birds with one stone. Get paid for ridding himself of a competitor and take over his business besides. Now he had both stones in his back pocket and a switchblade knife in his hand and the only thing standing between him and prosperity was a dumb fuck from Sarasota, Florida. And his Chink girlfriend. So naturally, they both had to go. That was the way Rodriguez thought. That was the way to become successful in America. And if the blonde accidentally happened to become a witness to something she shouldn’t have seen, why then the blonde would have to go, too, and Mama would later give her red shoes to his own mama. The way Michael figured it, Mama was a businessman. And business was business. And ‘twas the season to be jolly.

On the other hand, Crandall was now in over his head. Michael guessed that Mama was supposed to have done his job and then disappear into the woodwork again. Supply Crandall with a body, that was all. Charlie Nichols must have told him that he knew someone who could pick up a body for them. His crack dealer. A man named Mario Mateo Rodriguez, familiarly called Mama. No questions asked. Six thousand big ones and he’d deliver a corpse. Crandall was the sort of man who wouldn’t want to know where the corpse was coming from. This was commerce. He needed a dead body. Period. He did not want to know about murder. He preferred believing that Mama would find a dead derelict in a Bowery hallway. Or in a garbage can behind McDonald’s. No great loss to the city. Here’s the money Charlie promised you, six thousand bucks out of the nine I safely drew from the bank, no questions asked, the other three already gone to Charlie and his fellow thespians for their contribution to the scheme. It was nice not knowing you, Mama, good-bye and good luck.

“Mr. Crandall?”

The chauffeur’s voice, coming over the loudspeaker.

Crandall threw a switch.

“Yes?”

“We’re approaching Houston, sir. Will you and the lady still be getting out on St. Luke’s?”

“Yes, please,” Crandall said.

In Vietnam, Michael had simply quit. He had told that colonel to go fuck himself, sir, and he had meant it. He had quit. Because after the way Andrew died, there was no sense pursuing this dumb fucking war any further. This war was all about people doing unspeakably horrible things to themselves and to other people. If he had been the one who’d picked up that baby, if he had been the one who’d reached for that little girl a second before Andrew did, then his hands would have been blown off, his chest would have blossomed with blood, Andrew would have carried him through the jungle, and he would have been the one who was loaded onto that chopper in a body bag, dead. The obscenity had been as much in the randomness of death as in the singularly callous act that had preceded it, the wiring of a baby, yet another random victim. The whole fucking thing was a lottery, and Michael had wanted nothing more to do with it.

He wanted nothing more to do with this, either. But on Christmas Eve, for no reason and no cause, he had been chosen at random to take part in yet another obscenity.

The promotion of a goddamn movie.

So he went for Mama’s knife.