Kisses of Death

5

The Waldorf Cafeteria, on Sixth Avenue near Eighth Street, was within a stone’s throw of MacDougal Alley and its quaint studios and New York’s only remaining gas streetlamps, in the midst of one of Greenwich Village’s several centers of nightlife. Here, where skyscrapers were conspicuous in their absence, and brick buildings and renovated stables held sway, countless little bistros and basement boîtes had sprung up on the narrow, chaotically arranged streets like so many exotic mushrooms. Longhaired men and shorthaired women wandered in their dark, drab clothes and sunglasses, moving through a lightly falling snow like dreary ghosts.

Finding Maxwell Bodenheim took exactly one afternoon. I had begun at Washington Square, where I knew he had once pinned his poems to a picket fence for the dimes and quarters of tourists. A bearded creator of unframed modernistic landscapes working the same racket for slightly inflated fees informed me that “Mad Max” (as I soon found all who knew him in the Village referred to him) had given up selling art to the tourist trade.

“He got too weird for the room, man,” the black-overcoat-clad artiste of perhaps twenty-five told me, between alternating puffs of cigarette smoke and cold-visible breath. “You know, too threatening — half-starved looking and drunk and smelly... the Elks won’t do business with a crazy man.”

“The Elks?”

“Out-of-towners, man — you know, Elks and Rotarians and Babbitts. Or cats from Flatbush or the Bronx who let their hair down when they hit Sheridan Square.”

“So what’s Max up to, now?”

“He’s around. Moochin’ drinks and peddlin’ poems for pennies in bars. Been runnin’ the blinkie scam, I heard, with some Bowery cats.”

I didn’t relish hitting that part of town.

“No idea where he lives?”

“Used to be over on Bleecker, but they got evicted. Him and Ruth got busted for sleepin’ on the subway. Didn’t have the twenty-five bucks fine and spent the night in the can.”

“It’s a little cold for doorways and park benches.”

He shrugged. “They probably still got enough friends to flop for free, here and there. Just start hittin’ the coffeehouses and clubs and somebody’ll lead you to him.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Here’s a contribution to the arts.” And slipped him a fin.

I started to walk away and the guy called out, “Hey man! Did you check with Bellevue? He’s been in and out of there.”

“As a nutcase or alcoholic?”

“Take your pick.”

I called Bellevue, but Max wasn’t currently a guest.

So I hit the streets, which were alive with native bohemians and wide-eyed tourists alike — it was Saturday and the dusting of snow wasn’t stopping anybody. I covered a lot of ground in about three hours, entering smoky cellar joints where coffee and cake were served with a side of free verse, stepping around wildly illustrated apocalyptic Bible verses in chalk on the sidewalks outside the gin mills of West Eighth Street, checking out such tourist traps as the Nut Club and Café Society and the Village Barn, gandering briefly at the strippers at Jimmy Kelly’s, stopping in at cubbyhole restaurants that advertised “health food” in conspicuously unhealthy surroundings, but eating instead at the Café Royal, which advertised itself as “The Center of Second Avenue Bohemia” and served up a mean apple strudel. The name Maxwell Bodenheim was familiar to many, from the Café Reggio to the White Horse Pub, but at the Village Vanguard, a deadpan waif with her raven hair in a pixie cut told me to try the Minneta Tavern, where I learned that the San Remo Café on MacDougal Street was Mad Max’s favorite haunt. But at the San Remo, I was sent on to the Waxworks, as the Waldorf Cafeteria was known to hip locals.

What could have possessed the owners of a respectable, pseudo-elegant chain of cafeterias to open a branch in the heart of Bohemia, a place Maxwell Bodenheim had once dubbed “the Coney Island of the soul”? Its wallpaper yellowed and peeling, its “No Smoking” signs defaced and ignored, its once-gleaming fixtures spotted and dull, its floors dirty and littered, its fluorescent lighting sputtered with electrical shorts even while casting a jaundiced glow on the already-sallow faces of a clientele who had taken this cafeteria hostage, turning it from eating place to meeting place. The clatter of dishes and the ring of the pay-as-you-go cash register provided a hard rhythm for the symphony of egos as poets and painters and actors announced their own genius and denounced the lack of talent in others, while occasionally sipping their dime’s worth of coffee while nibbling at sandwiches brought from home, the cheap flats they called “studios.”

Holding forth at a small side table was the man himself, decked out in a World War One vintage topcoat over the same shabby suit and food-flecked tie he’d worn to the Renaissance reunion, months ago. On the table, as if a meal set out for him, was a worn bulging leather briefcase. Sitting beside him was Ruth, in the pale yellow dress she’d worn to Riccardo’s. Both were smoking — Bodie his corncob with that cheap awful tobacco, Ruth with her elbow resting in a cupped hand, cigarette poised near her lips in a royally elegant chain-smoker posture. To the cups of coffee before them Bodenheim was adding generous dollops from a pint of cheap whiskey.

Bodenheim, of course, was talking, and Ruth was nodding, listening, or maybe half-listening; she sat slumped, looking a little bored.

I bought myself a cup of coffee and walked over to them, and bobbed my head toward one of the two untaken chairs at their table. “Mind if I join you?”

As he slipped the pint back in his topcoat pocket, Bodie’s rheumy eyes narrowed in their deep shadowy holes; his lumpy face was the color of tapioca, his cheeks sunken to further emphasize the skull beneath the decaying flesh. Sitting up, pretty Ruth, with her big bedroom eyes, one of which drooped drunkenly, again gave me the once-over, like I was another entrée on the cafeteria serving line.

“My wife and I are having a private conversation,” Bodie said acidly, then cocked his head. “Do I know you, sir?”

“Yes,” I said, sitting down, “from a long time ago, on the West Side of Chicago. But we ran into each other at Riccardo’s last June.”

The thin line of a mouth erupted into a ghastly array of brownish teeth and sporadic gaps. “Heller’s Books! You accompanied that lovely young actress.”

Ruth smirked and snorted derisively, as if compared to her Marilyn Monroe was nothing. Smoke came from her nostrils like dragon’s breath.

“Yes,” I said, “the lovely young actress you humiliated and sent from the room in tears.”

He waved that off with a mottled hand. “That was for that sweet child’s benefit. Cruelty was the kindest gift I could give her.”

“You think?”

“I know.” He patted the bulging briefcase before him. “This is poetry, my poetry, not sentimental drivel, but the work of a serious artist, a distinguished outcast in American letters — hated and feared, an isolated wanderer in the realm of intellect. If I were to encourage the amateurs, the dilettantes, even ones like Miss Monroe, whose skin shimmers like pudding before the spoon goes in, I would lessen both myself and them.”

Ruth cocked her head toward me, rolled her eyes, then winked. She was pretty cute, for a drunk; but I would have had to be pretty drunk, to want to get cute.

“What’s your name?” Ruth asked. Her eyes added “Big Boy.”

“Nate Heller.”

“You’re from Chicago? What brings you to the Village?”

“Ben Hecht asked me to look your husband up.”

That got Bodenheim’s attention and elicited a bitter smirk. “Does my ex-friend wish me to make another cross-country pilgrimage for a twelve-dollar stipend?”

“He’s got a publisher interested in reprinting some of your sex books.”

Ruth’s eyes sobered up and her smile turned from randy to greedy. But the crooked thin line under Bodenheim’s sweet-potato nose was curling into a sneer.

“My novels may indeed be inferior to my poetry — I am nothing if not brutally honest with myself where my literary prowess is concerned — but they are hardly ‘sex books.’ They are not gussied-up pornography, like Hecht’s Fantazius Mallare. Despite certain flaws, those novels sparkle with social satire and a genuine—”

“Whatever they sparkle with,” I said, “there’s a publisher willing to pony up a couple grand for the privilege of putting naked women on the covers.”

Ruth’s eyes were dancing with dollar signs, but Bodenheim was scowling.

“The last time I allowed a cheap pulp publisher... when was it, five years, eight years ago?... they bowdlerized the text, even while presenting my work with the sort of sensational gift-wrapping to which you refer. I won’t have my work simultaneously exploited and censored!”

I leaned forward. “I don’t know anything about that. I would guess the last thing this publisher would want to do is trim the dirty parts. So I wouldn’t worry about your literary integrity.”

Bodenheim froze, his sneering smile dissolving into a hurt, surprised near-pout. “Why, Heller’s Books — you don’t like me, do you?”

“I wasn’t paid to like you. I was paid to find you, and deliver this message.” I patted my chest. “I’ve got the contracts in my inside pocket, if you want me to leave ’em with you. The publisher’s right here in New York, you can talk with them, direct. Ben doesn’t want any finder’s fee, he just wants to see you make a buck or two off your ‘prowess.’”

“I don’t understand who you are,” Bodenheim said, bewildered, the murky eyes suddenly those of a hurt child.

“I’m a private detective.”

“I thought you were a literary man... your father...”

“Ran a bookstore. Me, like the man says on TV, I’m a cop. In business for myself, but a cop.”

“You deal in violence,” Bodenheim said quietly.

“Sometimes.”

Now a look of sadistic superiority gripped the ravaged face. He leaned forward, gesturing with the foul-smelling corncob. “Are you aware, Heller’s Books, of the close connection between the art of murder and the murder of art?”

“I can’t say as I am.”

“Artists are not killed overnight. They are murdered by being kept alive, as poverty, the unseen assassin, exacts from them one last full measure of agony.”

“Is that right.”

“When the arts go down to destruction, the artist perishes with them. For some of us, who do not sell our souls to Mammon, the final resting place is Potter’s Field. For others it is Hollywood.”

“Ben’s just trying to help you out, old man. Why in hell, I don’t know.”

“Why?” Fire exploded in those cloudy eyes. “Because I am the closest thing to a conscience that Ben Hack’t has or ever will have.”

I snorted a laugh. “What do you use for a conscience, old man?”

He settled back into the chair and the eyes went rheumy again; he collapsed into himself and said, very quietly, “My own crushed life sits beside me, staring with sharp, accusing eyes, like a vengeful ghost seeking retribution for some foul murder committed at a time of delirium and terror.”

“I don’t mean to barge in,” a male voice said.

He was a good-looking kid in well-worn jeans and a short-sleeve, slightly frayed white shirt; he had the open face, wide smile, dark-blond pompadour and boyish regular features of the young Buster Crabbe; same broad shoulders, too, only he wasn’t as tall, perhaps five eight at most. He only seemed clean-cut at first glance: then I noticed the scars under his left eye and on his chin, and how that wide smile seemed somehow... wrong.

“Joe,” Ruth said warmly, “sit down! Join us.”

“This is something of a business discussion,” Bodenheim said, tightly.

“Don’t be silly, Bodie,” she said. “Sit down, Joe.”

Joe sat down, next to me, across from Ruth. He was eyeing me suspiciously. I would have sworn the kid was looking at me through the eyes of a jealous boyfriend, but that would be impossible. After all, Ruth was married...

“Joe Greenberg,” he said, offering his hand, wearing that big smile, though the eyes remained wary.

“Nate Heller,” I said. His handshake let me know just how strong he was.

Bodenheim said, “Mr. Greenberg is a dishwasher here at the Waxworks. It’s a career he’s pursued with uncommon distinction at numerous establishments around the Village.”

“Nice to meet you, Joe,” I said. “If you’ll excuse me, I was just going...”

I began to rise but Ruth touched my arm. “Stay for just a little while. Joe, Mr. Heller has wonderful news. A publisher wants to bring some of Max’s books back out.”

Joe’s grin managed to widen, and words streamed out: “Why, Max, that’s wonderful! This is a dream come true, I couldn’t be happier for—”

“It is not wonderful,” Bodenheim said. “It is, like you, Joseph, possibly well-meaning but certainly insulting.”

“Max, don’t say that,” Joe said. “You and Ruth are the best friends I have around here.”

“Look,” I said, “do you want me to leave the contracts or not?”

“My old friend Ben is not aware,” Bodenheim said, with strained dignity, ignoring Joe, who was looking quickly from husband to wife to intruder (me), “that I am currently engaged in the writing of my memoirs for Samuel Roth, publisher of Bridgehead Books.”

“That’s swell,” I said. “Sorry to have bothered you...”

Again, I began to rise and Ruth stopped me, her brown eyes gazing up, pitifully beseeching. “Mr. Heller, what my husband says is true, he’s been going in and writing every day, but the pay is meager. We don’t have enough to even put a roof over our heads... we’ve been sleeping in doorways, and it’s a cold winter...”

Bodie seemed to be pulling down pay sufficient to afford whiskey.

Joe leaned forward, chiming in, “I told you, Ruth — you and Max are welcome to stay with me...”

Now it was Ruth leaning forward; she touched Joe’s hand. “That’s sweet, Joe, but you just have that one small room... it’s an imposition on you...”

Joe squeezed her hand, then with his other hand stroked it, petted it. His mouth was moist; so were his eyes. “I’d love to have you stay with me...”

“Leave her alone,” Bodenheim spat, “or I’ll kill you!”

Joe removed his hand and his face fell into a puttylike expressionless mask. “You hate me, don’t you?”

“Of course I do,” Bodenheim said, and withdrew his pint and refilled his coffee cup.

“What if I let you two take my room,” Joe said nobly, “and me move in with my friend, Allen.”

And he nodded toward a skinny redheaded busboy with glasses and pimples who was clearing a table across the room.

“I’ll pay the rent,” Joe said, “and when you get on your feet, and get your own place, I’ll move back in.”

“I once warned a girl named Magda,” Bodenheim said as if latching onto a stray thought just floating by, “against the possibility of falling into the hands of some degenerate in whom the death of love and the love of death had combined into a homicidal mania. She was strangled in a hotel bed.”

Joe was shaking his head. “What are you talkin’ about? I’m tryin’ to be nice...”

Ruth said, “Oh, Bodie, don’t you see? Joe’s our friend. Don’t say such cruel things.”

“Today,” Bodie said, patronizingly, “when the world is falling apart like scattered beads from a pearl necklace that once graced the lovely throat of existence, the bestial side of man’s nature is revealing itself... blatantly.”

“Now you’re insulting me!” Joe said. “I know when I’m being insulted.”

“The indignation of fools,” Bodenheim said grandly, “is my crown.”

I’d had enough of this touching scene. I got up, saying, “I’m in town till Monday. At the Lexington. If you change your mind, Max, give me a call.”

As I left, Joe moved around to where I was sitting, nearer to Ruth, and he was leaning forward, speaking quickly, flashing his most ingratiating smile and issuing the best words he could muster, about how his good intentions were being misinterpreted, while Bodenheim sat uncharacteristically silent, frozen with contempt, a sullen wax figure in the Waxworks cafeteria.