Tongue tied

Chapter 20

I caught a cab at Broadway and Seventy-second, and the cabbie, Ahmed something, was willing to take me to Brooklyn. We sped crosstown toward the FDR and the East River bridges. The cab's suspension seemed to fall out at Seventy-second and Third, but Ahmed exhibited no concern over what had happened, so neither did I.

I brought along the cellphone I kept stashed at Susan and Liza's. I had another one I kept in my desk drawer in Albany, and a couple of others in strategic locations. I did not like the things. Nobody who carried them around had enough privacy. You couldn't just bask in your immediate natural surroundings without fear of interruption from afar, or have any kind of uninterfered-with interior life.

Timmy considered my "cellphone phobia" both neurotic and impractical for anyone in my line of work, and I had to agree with him on the last point. Also, as he had explained to me more than once, you can just shut the damn things off. Nor was it required of cellphone owners that they make blabby spectacles of themselves in public places like restaurants, airports and trains. You could own one and still use it considerately.

Logic was on Timmy's side, and I knew it was only a matter of time before I was transmittered- and antenna-ed up, if not 24/7/365, then maybe 18/5/312. Still irrationally, sentimentally, uselessly-I longed for a return to the days when public telephones were black things hung inside stand-up boxes with doors that accordioned shut and that reeked of stale cigarette smoke and Audrey Tbtter's perfume. And, like Marlowe in The Big Sleep, you could pop a nickel in a slot and turn a rotary dial. And then while you waited for whatever bad news or treachery was at the other end of the line, you could sooth your apprehensions by listening to a series of exquisite, subtly mechanical clicks followed by a string of perfectly rolled Rs that could have been created by the tongue of a Catalonian countess or a sloe-eyed bullfighter.

I brought the cellphone along, even switched it on. Not that I was likely to divulge the number to anyone but Lyle and risk having the thing start twittering next to my pancreas. Of course I would give Thad the number, once I was satisfied, as I was sure I soon would be, that he was not a liar and a kidnapper and a seriously unrighteous, duplicitous Mennonite.

Traffic was lighter than it had been earlier, but even at a quarter to three in the morning the city's main roads felt like workday rush hour in Milan. New York was not just a city that never slept; its nighttime existence constituted a kind of parallel universe to its regular-hours self, and being in that New York night world always felt to me like exciting world travel, like going to Barcelona or Cairo.

The cab rolled up to the Lorimer Street apartment at 3:10 AM. The street was much quieter now, with no sign of the cops who had been watching the building earlier, or of their patrol car. The rain had let up, and the air was fresher in the lungs than it had been, with just an undertone of steamed asphalt and the variegated human smells of the city.

I paid the cabbie, and was turning toward the building when three young people came up the street. One of them said to me in a sarcastic tone, "Hi, schmuck."

"Hey, Charm, it's you. Did you escape from Sing-Sing?"

"I'm not in Sing-Sing yet-no thanks to you, asshole."

"What brings you to Brooklyn, Charm? Are you making a woolly cheese delivery to the Williamsburg Incas?"

As her two companions, one male and one female, stood at attention on either side of her glaring at me, Charm snapped, "I'm lucky to be here at all, what with you siccing the staties on me. They told me not to leave Massachusetts, as a matter of fact, but I talked to my dad's lawyer, Graham Witherspoon in Great Barrington, and he says nobody can connect me with any kidnapping, and I haven't been charged with anything, and those goons can ask me to do what they want me to do, but they can't tell me what to do."

"Uh-huh. But don't you want to be helpful, Charm? The cops just want to find the kidnappers and make sure Jay Plankton is freed before he is maimed any more than he already has been, or even killed."

"What do you mean, maimed?"

She evidently had not heard the news. So I explained about the tongue that had been dropped off earlier at the Post. "Or," I asked, "did you send the tongue, and this is another one of your bad-taste stunts in the name of the FFF?"

Charm made a face, and shot back, "Bad taste is only bad taste, so don't start in on that shit with me. Bad taste is in no way comparable to injury or murder. Name one major religion or secular philosophical or ethical construct where taste and morality intersect in any important way. You can't, can you?"

"Oh, Charm, Charm-I think you were not raised Presbyterian."

"No, but I've studied Calvinism, and I think I know the difference between predestination and simple, ephemeral notions of fashion and propriety." Charm's friends, her characteristic claque of two, gazed at her with awe.

"So, are you going in?" I asked, indicating the entrance to Sam Day's building.

"No, why should I go in there?"

"You don't know anyone who lives in here?"

"No, and anyhow we're not going in anywhere, we're going out."

Charm introduced me to her friends, Louis Murphy and Strawberry Swirl, who lived nearby, and said they were going over to North Sixth Street to the Pussy Pound.

Strawberry Swirl, it turned out, was female-lithe and catlike, with no hint of an out-of-control Sealtest-ice-cream habit, despite her name-but Louis was a hulking male and an unlikely habitue of the venue named. Although, I guessed, maybe selected male aficionados were let in too.

I was about to make careful inquiries about what an evening at the Pussy Pound might consist of, and to try to determine if, as it appeared, Charm's showing up on Lorimer Street was coincidental with Sam Day's living there. But before I could do either, Thad Diefendorfer came down the street with two other men.

"Don! Hey, it's you!" Thad recognized me but didn't seem to know Charm, Louis or Strawberry Swirl, and they showed no sign of recognizing Thad or the men on either side of him. "What are you doing out here?" Thad asked. He was holding a long-handled shovel with a sharp, narrow blade.

"I was hoping to talk to you," I said. "I was here earlier, but I guess you were out… what? Practicing a little urban agriculture?"

"Yes," Thad said, "we were over at the Bush wick Community Garden weeding the arugula and watering the tomatoes. The guys both work til ten o'clock, and anyway they like to garden when it's quiet and cool. Don, 1 want you to meet two friends. This is Daryl Kemmercr, an old friend from Ephrata, and Sam Day. I think I mentioned Sam, my main squeeze back in my FFF days. Now Sam and Daryl are together.

Amazing, isn't it? Or not so amazing, really, since Sam was always turned on by simple Amish boys, and there are only a certain number of us available outside of Lancaster County."

There were introductions all around, including Charm, Louis and Strawberry.

"Are you Charm from the cheese farm?" Day asked. He was tall and bearded and wore a sweaty T-shirt with a picture on it of what looked like a head of cabbage.

Kemmerer, similarly clad, was lankier, like Thad, with the same big ears that stuck out, chin whiskers, a formidable Adam's apple, and wavy locks that came down the back of his neck.

Charm said, "It looks like I'm famous-Charm from the cheese farm. Cheesy Charm.

Oh, right." She gave me the evil eye.

"Well, you sure did a good job of making the FFF look bad," Day said. "Aren't you the one who sent Plankton all the threats and that other weird stuff?"

"The FFF did an awful lot of really good work in its early days," Thad added. "It's really a shame, Charm, that your impression of the organization came strictly from Kurt Zinsser. Kurt was always prickly and a bit uppity, and he doesn't appear to have improved in either regard."

Charm chose not to reply to any of this. She just looked at Day and said, "I've heard of rice queens, and I've heard of dinge queens. And I've heard of snow queens for the dinge queens. But I've never before run into gay men who go for Amish guys. What do you call yourself, Sam, a clip-clop queen? Do you have to worry about getting into masochistic relationships where you start to feel buggy-whipped? Or is that what you're looking for?"

"No," Day said cheerfully. "The two Amish men in my life have been in no way abusive. They've been rational, sweet-natured, gentle and very comfortably masculine."

"Oh, swell, congratulations," Charm said. "And now you're having this rational, gentle, masculine, wild threesome. Can we all come up and watch?"

Kemmerer blushed, Day smiled, and Thad just shook his head. There was a part of me that wanted to compliment Charm on the first intriguing suggestion, however unrealistic it was, that I had ever heard her make. Instead, I said, "I was hoping you'd invite us along to go dancing, or whatever, at the Pussy Pound, Charm."

"Don't you wish," she said, then had to laugh, and the rest of us did, too.

Thad said to me, "How did you find me out here, anyway? Did I tell you where I was staying?"

"No," I said, "but why don't we go on inside, and all that will soon become clear."

"I hope you don't mind if we don't join you," Charm said. "Sitting around with four middle-aged male homosexuals is not my idea of Saturday night in New York."

We all made it clear that Charm, Louis and Strawberry Swirl would incur no social penalty by moving on, which they soon did.

"So," Thad said, "Charm and her gang are in the all-clear?"

"I'd say so, yes-that is, if they aren't out here conspiring with you three in the kidnappings of Moyle and Plankton."

"Conspiring with us?" Kemmerer said, looking bewildered.

"Where would anybody get that idea?" Day said.

Thad smiled wanly and said to me, "Lylc Marncr?"

I nodded. "He's inside, in Sam's apartment. I Ic's going to ask you a lot of stupid questions, which you're probably going to have to answer."

"Lyle Barner, the cop?" Day said, "lie's in my apartment?"

"The super let him in. Don't be too hard on the guy. Lyle made it look legal. Hard to resist, anyway."

I explained to the three of them that Barner had had Thad followed to Brooklyn from Albany, based on nothing more than Thad's FFF history and an irrational antipathy fed by baseless sexual jealousy. And that when Barner discovered that Sam Day, another old FFFer, was the listed tenant of the apartment Thad was visiting, this-plus some as yet unexplained peculiar language that one of the kidnappers used-was all Barner needed to send the kidnapping investigation wackily Thad's way.

"And then," I said, "when he heard you'd left the apartment with a shovel, it seemed to confirm Lyle's worst suspicions."

"Suspicions ofwrtat?" Day asked. "Agriculture?"

"It never made sense to me either," I said. "Anyway, I think I know who's got Plankton. It's someone Barner doesn't want to believe would do such a thing, so he may need to abuse the three of you uselessly for a short time before he confronts the obvious. But there's not a lot of time to waste." I described the latest news reports about Jay Plankton's tongue having turned up in the Post newsroom.

Thad said, "I'm surprised. I figured these guys to be jokers. Like tattooing Leo Moyle and then letting him go. But this is… how could anybody do something that vicious just because the guy was some jerk on the radio?"

Kemmerer said, "How would anybody even know how to cut somebody's tongue out?"

"Yes," Day said, "I would expect that to be a lost art on Long Island."

But in fact I had read a month or so earlier about just such a practice. "It's still done by some of the nastier security forces in the Middle East," I said. "You blindfold a man, hold him down, somebody pinches his nose shut, out pops his tongue, and then snip, snip."

They all considered this somberly.

Day said, "So do you think it's Middle Eastern terrorists who have Jay Plankton?"

"No, I think it's some gay cops, high on potent recreational pharmaceuticals, and on resentment and rage. What I have to do now is convince Lyle Barner of this with no hard evidence to go on. But if I can convince him, and if I can get Lyle to accompany me out to his boyfriend Dave Welch's house in Hempstead, I think we can free Jay Plankton before an unavoidable kidnapping and assault charge against the man Lyle loves turns into something even worse."

Day and Kemmerer regarded me with apprehension, and Thad listened thoughtfully, as if he was not altogether convinced. Then Day let us into the building with his key, and the three of them followed me up to Day's apartment on the second floor. The apartment door was locked, and when Day opened it we saw that the lights had been left on, but Lyle Barner was gone.

"Maybe Barner came to the same conclusion you came to, Strachey," Day said, "and he went out to Hempstead to rescue Jay Plankton and arrest his own boyfriend."

Kemmerer said, "Arrest him or warn him," and it occurred to me that Lyle, in the state he must have been in at that moment, might have been capable of either.