Park Avenue Tramp

Chapter 7

Bertram Sweeney went directly to his office, which was a small malodorous room at the rear of the third floor of a building that was headquarters for a dozen fringe operations. He stood for a couple of minutes in the center of the room, rubbing his scarred scalp with the palm of his right hand, and then he walked across to a narrow window and stood staring down through dirty glass into the litter of an alley.

The world today, he felt, was even a worse place than it usually was, and this made it intolerably bad. The world was a pustule, and of all the infectious organisms that lived in it, there was none more loathsome than Bertram Sweeney. He didn’t know how he could possibly stand himself and the world for the rest of the day, and so he began to do what he always did when the gross ugliness of the two, the world and Sweeney, became too oppressive for him to bear. He began to slip softly into fantasy.

Turning away from the window, he sat down in the swivel chair behind his desk and removed an 8x10 photograph of Charity Farnese from the desk’s belly drawer. He stood the photograph on the desk and rocked back in the chair and sat staring at the face of Charity with a kind of drugged dreaminess in his eyes and an odd, unpleasant slackness in his mouth. He had got the picture at the beginning of his service to Oliver Alton Farnese, and it had been then much smaller, about the size of an identification photo you could carry in a wallet, but he had taken it to a studio and had it blown up and two copies made. One of the copies he kept at home, the rented room in which he slept, and the other one he kept here, in the office, and so he had a picture of Charity, whichever place he was, to look at and talk to and take with him in dreams to a different world in which there lived a different Bertram Sweeney.

“You lovely,” he whispered. “You wanton, prowling little lovely.”

Charity looked back at him with an expression compounded of excitement and tenderness and ineffable sadness, as if she understood quite well that she was surely going to do something for pleasure that would later cause her pain. Her pale hair fell forward on the heavy side, and in her eyes was a capricious solemnity. He could have sworn that her lips moved in the slightest of smiles and shaped the suggestion of a tender word.

They were lovers, of course. They existed in a detached and intimate devotion to each other in this second world of Bertram Sweeney, and Charity in the second world was precisely as she was in the first, except that in the second her dispersed and wasted self and love were reserved entirely for Sweeney, who was a tall, straight man with heavy hair and a fine, plain face and flat belly and long, strong legs. They were restricted only by the resources of fantasy, and they were at different times in many places, but the best and most recurrent place was a long beach of white sand between lush green growth and a bright blue sea in a hot country.

He was standing suddenly on the beach at the edge of the water, and the water whispered up the sand and broke like a salty caress around his ankles, and his strong brown body gleamed like bronze in the tropical sun. Then he heard her call his name, once and clearly, and she was running toward him from a distance, closer and closer to Bertram Sweeney, her body as bare and bronzed as his, so light and fleet and airily moving that it left no prints at all upon the sand.

Her hands solicited his love. She whispered soft salacities. Now they were quiet in the ebb of desire. Now they were roused in its flux and flow. All day they were lovers in the sun. Night came, and they were lovers in the night. They slept entwined on the white sand beneath enormous stars.

So it was with Bertram Sweeney, who consistently spied upon and betrayed the woman he loved in two worlds and possessed in one, and his ability to do this could be explained only as a miracle of adjustment to a complex situation. He had thought at first, when Farnese hired him, that he was being retained simply to obtain evidence of adultery for a divorce, and this would have been simplicity itself, the matter of a minor effort on any one of many nights, and the only thing he couldn’t understand was why Farnese, a man of great wealth, would hire a fringe operator like Bertram Sweeney. Then, as the arrangement continued, he began to understand that Farnese did not want a divorce on grounds of adultery, or any grounds at all, and he had hired a fringe operator because that was the only kind who would serve him in his purpose. What this purpose was precisely, Sweeney did not know, but he knew that it was not pleasant and possibly abnormal. He was no fancy psychiatrist, Sweeney wasn’t, but he had sat and sensed the agony of emotions in the man he served and hated, and what he had sensed besides the natural fury of a cuckold was an intense excitement that was not natural at all.

Well, Sweeney could understand that, in a way, although he was only a fat and ugly man in hopeless love, not a husband with certain claims and rights to assert. It was part of the miraculous adjustment to a complexity, as far as Sweeney was concerned, and he had felt many times the same fury and excitement he sensed in Farnese. He felt it when be stood at the end of a night’s work outside whatever place Charity had gone with whatever man, and afterward he would go home and look at the picture and go south to the white beach.

Farnese was a stinking sadist, of course, and probably it gave him a charge to be on top of the situation, knowing always the truth and saying nothing, knowing that he could, if he chose, exercise the advantage of an executioner at any time. As he had, in fact, exercised it twice in the cases of two selected men. Sweeney had been the agent in both cases. He had arranged the details and had felt afterward that the revenge was as much his as Farnese’s. His conscience did not disturb him appreciably.

Sweeney was certain of Farnese’s sadism, and he was also certain of something else. The sadism was not exercised against Charity Farnese for the sake of a more subtle cruelty, but if it ever was, to Sweeney’s knowledge, then Sweeney would kill Farnese. He had even decided how he would do it. He would simply walk into Farnese’s office, as he had today, and he would sit down in the chair he had sat in today, and he would take from the pocket of his coat, instead of the notebook, a gun. He would look at Farnese and say nothing and shoot him dead, and Farnese would understand clearly in the end why he was dying. There would be a kind of artistry in the simplicity of it, and the necessary sacrifice of Bertram Sweeney would mean nothing much to anyone on earth, not even to Bertram Sweeney.

So he sat at his desk this particular day that followed a particular night. Bertram Sweeney, private detective and consistent betrayer for pay. He sat at his desk in a fantasy of love at the edge of a whispering sea.