Getting Even

Mr. Big

I was sitting in my office, cleaning the debris out of my thirty-eight and wondering where my next case was coming from. I like being a private eye, and even though once in a while I’ve had my gums massaged with an automobile jack, the sweet smell of greenbacks makes it all worth it. Not to mention the dames, which are a minor preoccupation of mine that I rank just ahead of breathing. That’s why, when the door to my office swung open and a longhaired blonde named Heather Butkiss came striding in and told me she was a nudie model and needed my help, my salivary glands shifted into third. She wore a short skirt and a tight sweater and her figure described a set of parabolas that could cause cardiac arrest in a yak.

“What can I do for you, sugar?”

“I want you to find someone for me.”

“Missing person? Have you tried the police?”

“Not exactly, Mr. Lupowitz.”

“Call me Kaiser, sugar. All right, so what’s the scam?”

“God.”

“God?”

“That’s right, God. The Creator, the Underlying Principle, the First Cause of Things, the All Encompassing. I want you to find Him for me.”

I’ve had some fruit cakes up in the office before, but when they’re built like she was, you listened.

“Why?”

“That’s my business, Kaiser. You just find Him.”

“I’m sorry, sugar. You got the wrong boy.”

“But why?”

“Unless I know all the facts,” I said, rising.

“O.K., O.K.,” she said, biting her lower lip. She straightened the seam of her stocking, which was strictly for my benefit, but I wasn’t buying any at the moment.

“Let’s have it on the line, sugar.”

“Well, the truth is-I’m not really a nudie model.”

“No?”

“No. My name is not Heather Butkiss, either. It’s Claire Rosensweig and I’m a student at Vassar. Philosophy major. History of Western Thought and all that. I have a paper due January. On Western religion. All the other kids in the course will hand in speculative papers. But I want to know. Professor Grebanier said if anyone finds out for sure, they’re a cinch to pass the course. And my dad’s promised me a Mercedes if I get straight A’s.”

I opened a deck of Luckies and a pack of gum and had one of each. Her story was beginning to interest me. Spoiled coed. High IQ and a body I wanted to know better.

“What does God look like?”

“I’ve never seen him.”

“Well, how do you know He exists?”

“That’s for you to find out.”

“Oh, great. Then you don’t know what he looks like? Or where to begin looking?”

“No. Not really. Although I suspect he’s everywhere. In the air, in every flower, in you and I-and in this chair.”

“Uh huh.” So she was a pantheist. I made a mental note of it and said I’d give her case a try-for a hundred bucks a day, expenses, and a dinner date. She smiled and okayed the deal. We rode down in the elevator together. Outside it was getting dark. Maybe God did exist and maybe He didn’t, but somewhere in that city there were sure a lot of guys who were going to try and keep me from finding out.

My first lead was Rabbi Itzhak Wiseman, a local cleric who owed me a favor for finding out who was rubbing pork on his hat. I knew something was wrong when I spoke to him because he was scared. Real scared.

“Of course there’s a you-know-what, but I’m not even allowed to say His name or He’ll strike me dead, which I could never understand why someone is so touchy about having his name said.”

“You ever see Him?”

“Me? Are you kidding? I’m lucky I get to see my grandchildren.”

“Then how do you know He exists?”

“How do I know? What kind of question is that? Could I get a suit like this for fourteen dollars if there was no one up there? Here, feel a gabardine-how can you doubt?”

“You got nothing more to go on?”

“Hey-what’s the Old Testament? Chopped liver? How do you think Moses got the Israelites out of Egypt? With a smile and a tap dance? Believe me, you don’t part the Red Sea with some gismo from Korvette’s. It takes power.”

“So he’s tough, eh?”

“Yes. Very tough. You’d think with all that success he’d be a lot sweeter.”

“How come you know so much?”

“Because we’re the chosen people. He takes best care of us of all His children, which I’d also like to someday discuss with Him.”

“What do you pay Him for being chosen?”

“Don’t ask.”

So that’s how it was. The Jews were into God for a lot. It was the old protection racket. Take care of them in return for a price. And from the way Rabbi Wiseman was talking, He soaked them plenty. I got into a cab and made it over to Danny’s Billiards on Tenth Avenue. The manager was a slimy little guy I didn’t like.

“Chicago Phil here?”

“Who wants to know?”

I grabbed him by the lapels and took some skin at the same time.

“What, punk?”

“In the back,” he said, with a change of attitude.

Chicago Phil. Forger, bank robber, strong-arm man, and avowed atheist.

“The guy never existed, Kaiser. This is the straight dope. It’s a big hype. There’s no Mr. Big. It’s a syndicate. Mostly Sicilian. It’s international. But there is no actual head. Except maybe the Pope.”

“I want to meet the Pope.”

“It can be arranged,” he said, winking.

“Does the name Claire Rosensweig mean anything to you?”

“No.”

“Heather Butkiss?”

“Oh, wait a minute. Sure. She’s that peroxide job with the bazooms from Radcliffe.”

“Radcliffe? She told me Vassar.”

“Well, she’s lying. She’s a teacher at Radcliffe. She was mixed up with a philosopher for a while.”

“Pantheist?”

“No. Empiricist, as I remember. Bad guy. Completely rejected Hegel or any dialectical methodology.”

“One of those.”

“Yeah. He used to be a drummer with a jazz trio. Then he got hooked on Logical Positivism. When that didn’t work, he tried Pragmatism. Last I heard he stole a lot of money to take a course in Schopenhauer at Columbia. The mob would like to find him-or get their hands on his textbooks so they can resell them.”

“Thanks, Phil.”

“Take it from me, Kaiser. There’s no one out there. It’s a void. I couldn’t pass all those bad checks or screw society the way I do if for one second I was able to recognize any authentic sense of Being. The universe is strictly phenomenological. Nothing’s eternal. It’s all meaningless.”

“Who won the fifth at Aqueduct?”

“Santa Baby.”

I had a beer at O’Rourke’s and tried to add it all up, but it made no sense at all. Socrates was a suicide- or so they said. Christ was murdered. Nietzsche went nuts. If there was someone out there, He sure as hell didn’t want anybody to know it. And why was Claire Rosensweig lying about Vassar? Could Descartes have been right? Was the universe dualistic? Or did Kant hit it on the head when he postulated the existence of God on moral grounds?

That night I had dinner with Claire. Ten minutes after the check came, we were in the sack and, brother, you can have your Western thought. She went through the kind of gymnastics that would have won first prize in the Tia Juana Olympics. After, she lay on the pillow next to me, her long blond hair sprawling. Our naked bodies still intertwined. I was smoking and staring at the ceiling.

“Claire, what if Kierkegaard’s right?”

“You mean?”

“If you can never really know. Only have faith.”

“That’s absurd.”

“Don’t be so rational.”

“Nobody’s being rational, Kaiser.” She lit a cigarette. “Just don’t get ontological. Not now. I couldn’t bear it if you were ontological with me.”

She was upset. I leaned over and kissed her, and the phone rang. She got it.

“It’s for you.”

The voice on the other end was Sergeant Reed of Homicide.

“You still looking for God?”

“Yeah.”

“An all-powerful Being? Great Oneness, Creator of the Universe? First Cause of All Things?”

“That’s right.”

“Somebody with that description just showed up at the morgue. You better get down here right away.”

It was Him all right, and from the looks of Him it was a professional job.

“He was dead when they brought Him in.”

“Where’d you find Him?”

“A warehouse on Delancey Street.”

“Any clues?”

“It’s the work of an existentialist. We’re sure of that.”

“How can you tell?”

“Haphazard way how it was done. Doesn’t seem to be any system followed. Impulse.”

“A crime of passion?”

“You got it. Which means you’re a suspect, Kaiser.”

“Why me?”

“Everybody down at headquarters knows how you feel about Jaspers.”

“That doesn’t make me a killer.”

“Not yet, but you’re a suspect.”

Outside on the street I sucked air into my lungs and tried to clear my head. I took a cab over to Newark and got out and walked a block to Giordino’s Italian Restaurant. There, at a back table, was His Holiness. It was the Pope, all right. Sitting with two guys I had seen in half a dozen police line-ups.

“Sit down,” he said, looking up from his fettucine. He held out a ring. I gave him my toothiest smile, but didn’t kiss it. It bothered him and I was glad. Point for me.

“Would you like some fettucine?”

“No thanks, Holiness. But you go ahead.”

“Nothing? Not even a salad?”

“I just ate.”

“Suit yourself, but they make a great Roquefort dressing here. Not like at the Vatican, where you can’t get a decent meal.”

“I’ll come right to the point, Pontiff. I’m looking for God.”

“You came to the right person.”

“Then He does exist?” They all found this very amusing and laughed. The hood next to me said, “Oh, that’s funny. Bright boy wants to know if He exists.”

I shifted my chair to get comfortable and brought the leg down on his little toe. “Sorry.” But he was steaming.

“Sure He exists, Lupowitz, but I’m the only one that communicates with him. He speaks only through me.”

“Why you, pal?”

“Because I got the red suit.”

“This get-up?”

“Don’t knock it. Every morning I rise, put on this red suit, and suddenly I’m a big cheese. It’s all in the suit. I mean, face it, if I went around in slacks and a sports jacket, I couldn’t get arrested religion-wise.”

“Then it’s a hype. There’s no God.”

“I don’t know. But what’s the difference? The money’s good.”

“You ever worry the laundry won’t get your red suit back on time and you’ll be like the rest of us?”

“I use the special one-day service. I figure it’s worth the extra few cents to be safe.”

“Name Claire Rosensweig mean anything to you?”

“Sure. She’s in the science department at Bryn Mawr.”

“Science, you say? Thanks.”

“For what?”

“The answer, Pontiff.” I grabbed a cab and shot over the George Washington Bridge. On the way I stopped at my office and did some fast checking. Driving to Claire’s apartment, I put the pieces together, and for the first time they fit. When I got there she was in a diaphanous peignoir and something seemed to be troubling her.

“God is dead. The police were here. They’re looking for you. They think an existentialist did it.”

“No, sugar. It was you.”

“What? Don’t make jokes, Kaiser.”

“It was you that did it.”

“What are you saying?”

“You, baby. Not Heather Butkiss or Claire Rosensweig, but Doctor Ellen Shepherd.”

“How did you know my name?”

“Professor of physics at Bryn Mawr. The youngest one ever to head a department there. At the midwinter Hop you get stuck on a jazz musician who’s heavily into philosophy. He’s married, but that doesn’t stop you. A couple of nights in the hay and it feels like love. But it doesn’t work out because something comes between you. God. Y’see, sugar, he believed, or wanted to, but you, with your pretty little scientific mind, had to have absolute certainty.”

“No, Kaiser, I swear.”

“So you pretend to study philosophy because that gives you a chance to eliminate certain obstacles. You get rid of Socrates easy enough, but Descartes takes over, so you use Spinoza to get rid of Descartes, but when Kant doesn’t come through you have to get rid of him too.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“You made mincemeat out of Leibnitz, but that wasn’t good enough for you because you knew if anybody believed Pascal you were dead, so he had to be gotten rid of too, but that’s where you made your mistake because you trusted Martin Buber. Except, sugar, he was soft. He believed in God, so you had to get rid of God yourself.”

“Kaiser, you’re mad!”

“No, baby. You posed as a pantheist and that gave you access to Him-if He existed, which he did. He went with you to Shelby’s party and when Jason wasn’t looking, you killed Him.”

“Who the hell are Shelby and Jason?”

“What’s the difference? Life’s absurd now anyway.”

“Kaiser,” she said, suddenly trembling. “You wouldn’t turn me in?”

“Oh yes, baby. When the Supreme Being gets knocked off, somebody’s got to take the rap.”

“Oh, Kaiser, we could go away together. Just the two of us. We could forget about philosophy. Settle down and maybe get into semantics.”

“Sorry, sugar. It’s no dice.”

She was all tears now as she started lowering the shoulder straps of her peignoir and I was standing there suddenly with a naked Venus whose whole body seemed to be saying, Take me-I’m yours. A Venus whose right hand tousled my hair while her left hand had picked up a forty-five and was holding it behind my back. I let go with a slug from my thirty-eight before she could pull the trigger, and she dropped her gun and doubled over in disbelief.

“How could you, Kaiser?”

She was fading fast, but I managed to get it in, in time.

“The manifestation of the universe as a complex idea unto itself as opposed to being in or outside the true Being of itself is inherently a conceptual nothingness or Nothingness in relation to any abstract form of existing or to exist or having existed in perpetuity and not subject to laws of physicality or motion or ideas relating to non-matter or the lack of objective Being or subjective otherness.”

It was a subtle concept but I think she understood before she died.