The rockabye contract, p.1
The Rockabye Contract, page 1
The Rockabye Contract
A Joe Gall Mystery
Philip Atlee
Chapter 1
The helicopter thrashed off Kennedy International Airport, through the night air, and I approached New York City like any travel-weary malcontent. I have been to most places and am not inclined to rhapsodize, but as we neared the lighted towers of Manhattan I made an involuntary obeisance. Babylon, Baghdad, and Tokyo were nothing; down among these blazing ziggurats and incredible hives was the mightiest pulse of the world …
Then, staring at the tremendous night jewelry, I smiled wryly. The metropolis glowing and flickering and coruscating below me would look different in the harshness of daylight. I would be able to see the people, and their debris …
When we had touched down on the rooftop heliport, I checked my bags and went downtown in a cab to the Eunuch’s Horn, a basement discothèque where I had an appointment.
I got there in time to catch the first show. The place was a smoky cave, jammed tight with uptown trade, and I had to fight my way to the end of the small bar. A Miss Hester Prim, who had just come on stage, was wearing a short black vinyl skirt and black boots. Strands of her flaming hair had been taped over the nipples of her breasts, and she handled the twelvestring Gibson like a ukulele. Hester was a big girl, several inches over six feet.
Miss Prim opened with a couple of Child ballads, straight, to not much of a hand. Then she went into the big-beat sound with some imitation Beatle arrangements that got over better. From them she segued into a bawdy Roger Miller and an even bluer lament for a hairdresser named Freddie. Her timing was good, her delivery droll, and she bowed off to heavy applause.
When the applause became insistent, she encored with a fiery number she said was her own arrangement of Lorca’s “Bloody Sunday.” Pre-Franco Spain could have sued, had there been any jurisdiction, but she got another full hand and that was it. I glanced at my watch and saw that she had done forty minutes. Her voice was appealing, in a light alto range, but she was no Baez, for all her boot-stamping. It was the superb body that had held them.
As the central stage darkened, four smaller spots flared on around the club with young dancers go-going languidly under them. They were all scantily skirted, nubile, and wore lowslung belts to emphasize their pelvic thrustings. Their hand motions were not lovely-hula by any definition; they just kept spading around without any particular grace.
The joint stunk, but I toughed it out. Sweat, spilled beer, the heat from packed bodies, and hazy tobacco smoke … most of all, the stale aroma of a place that never saw the sun. I stayed because I was monitoring the conversation, trying to tune my ear to the random drawls and laughing quips around me. It was part of my work; I had to get with this background.
I was about to leave the United States on another contract assignment for the agency, and the oversized folk singer was my cover. Hester Prim was going on a European tour, and I was her manager.
We were flying to London the next morning, before dawn, on Lufthansa.
The tour was legitimate. Hester opened on a Palladium bill. Not a headliner, of course; she followed the trained bears from Irkutsk, but anywhere on that bill is good. From London we went to West Germany.
Twenty minutes later, Hester came striding through the bar crowd in a white raincoat, with people glancing at her and whispering. Several of them handed her slips of paper to autograph.
I moved away from the bar to stand beside her, waiting. When she turned, smiling automatically, and saw that I didn’t want her autograph, the green eyes flickered.
“Hi,” she said, and smiled differently—for all her size, and the pancake makeup and eye-shadow, like a gamin who has finally outgrown her baby fat but remembers where it went.
“I’m Charles Ayres,” I lied. “Could I buy you a drink?”
“So you’re the man.”
“I’m a man.”
“Rooster’s Ass, Charley!” the tall girl said. “There are a lot of people around who ain’t women. That is, they have outdoor plumbing. But damned few of them are keepers, as men …”
“In that case,” I admitted, “I’m the man.” I was smiling back at her, but without much wattage. Not only oversized but emancipated, too. I don’t socialize a lot. In fact, the big shift to the pill left me stranded with nearly a full gross of condoms. “How about the drink?”
“Not here,” she said. “Let’s crash out, hunh?”
“Right.”
We started through the crowded entrance, where more people pawed at her. Bulled our way past them and up the few steps to the street. Hester took a deep breath.
“What is wrong with these snots?” she asked me, straightening the white raincoat and buckling its belt more securely. “Aren’t they getting any?”
People were still jostling us, streaming out of the cellar dive, although other talent was supposed to be on soon. I concluded that Hester must be the big draw at the Eunuch’s Horn. When I asked about it, she shrugged.
“I guess. Max Simonson, the manager of the sewer, nearly dropped dead when I told him I was leaving. He’s been paying me a fast three hundred a week since the publicity hit, but that’s because I’m a gorgeous freak. Those kids doing the go-go stuff get fifteen a night.”
“What dance are they doing?” I asked. We had moved on down the sidewalk, away from the crowded club entrance, and could converse in normal tones.
“Oh, they call it soul stuff. All they’re really doing is flashing their butts, so what difference does it make? The sound itself is changing, getting more bluesy, comes from Motown mostly.”
At the corner, we began to pass groups of lounging boys and girls, most of them twentyish or younger. The girls wore sweaters and tight short skirts or clinging stretch pants, with boots or chukka-style shoes. The boys, as many bearded as not, looked scruffier, and affected skin-tight jeans with their artillery tailored to the action station. Some of the bulges on the young studs seemed exorbitant, and I wondered if we had entered a new era of the false codpiece.
Strolling by these disaffected ones, we passed knots of scornful homosexuals, fluting sotto voce bons mots and birdlike laughter. Quite a few of them seemed to be in drag, but I didn’t feel like searching anybody for that kind of news. At the intersection, a bus farted pure carbon monoxide at all the odd celebrants.
Hester and I walked on, and she got quite a few rude suggestions. I sighed, because I wouldn’t prove anything by low-bridging these characters. After all, she did invite comment.
Pizza palaces, darkened storefronts, dim doorways with malodorous steps, and even a psychic delicatessen … a flacked-out wino with one foot hung in an overturned garbage can. Had he been in the can, trying to get out?
We were shunted aside rudely by a haughty quartet of pimpled youths carrying instrument cases. Tiny lower-class faces framed by masses of hair, they bumped us and went strolling on down the East Village street like conquerors. The odds were long that they had no bookings anywhere, that not one of them could read a lead sheet properly, and that their only audience lay with the underaged vaginas.
In short, boys with noise.
Yet you couldn’t fob them off that easily. They strutted, these nonmusicians, and might have pressed an imitation tribal chant out of their mouthings. “YEH, YEH, YEH!” And if they had, the record might have sold a million copies, every one of them bought by teenyboppers who had cadged the money from their parents.
So, perhaps rich boys with noise. Busboys and neophyte masturbators turned macaroni, the princes of cheap street. Thousands of good musicians, mostly Negro, must have been watching their progress with amazement and chagrin. These inept white howlers were getting on the Sullivan show regularly, while people who could really blow or sing were fighting for cheap club dates …
Hester and I strolled on, past the Head Shop on East Ninth. This emporium had on display in its window a two-foot-long Pyrex glass pipe with a nest of smaller glass accessories. Studying it, I told Hester that it was probably a fine pipe, but would also serve admirably for simple retort work in the laboratory, if a fellow had something like that in view. To manufacture LSD, for example.
“You are so right, country cousin,” the tall girl said, laughing. We walked on and found a heterosexual saloon with fumed and cracked-black-leather booths in the back. Hester had a sandwich and a Coke, while I stalled through a Black Daniel’s. Then we talked and I learned more than she did, but that was what I had been trained to do.
When it was time for her to go back to the Eunuch’s Horn for her final show, I said I would stick around in the bar for a while and meet her at the club later. The tall girl nodded, pecked a kiss at my right ear, and swung out like one of Beauty’s daughters. Seemingly quite invigorated by one turkey-on-rye-with-Russian-dressing and a Coke.
I crooked a finger and the friendly Irishman at the bar sang out “Black Daniel’s, right?” I nodded, and he brought the drink back to the booth, with a half-glass of soda on the side. From where I sat, I could see the street outside, and for another hour I watched the Village parade at midnight.
It was motley, to a man who lived in the country.
Chapter 2
I walked back to the Eunuch’s Horn just before the last show broke. The crowd was not as large as at the first show, but the cave was still packed. And the mule-girls were still frigging thin air to the bluesy beat from Motown.
The joint had nearly emptied when Hester joined me at the bar. She looked tired, and I said we’d better catch a cab.
We walked a block, and she found an ice-cream parlor. My Ozark soul revolted against such an establishment being open after midnight, but she only said “Foo!” Went inside and bought a triple-dip cone. I refused one. We walked to a taxi stand, and, miraculously, found a cab pulling in. The cabbie was a beetle-browed thug; he slammed the flag down and U-turned toward uptown.
“Have a taste,” insisted Hester as we were thrown back against the worn upholstery. When I refused, she asked me for a kiss and I gave her a glancing one. I was beginning to be irritated with the subworld in which she spent her time and made her living.
Her friends, the hippies and kicksters. Calm hatred for everyone over thirty was in their eyes. Goddammit, I hadn’t intended to get older; it had been an accident. Something that had happened while I was out in the boondocks, in places they couldn’t even spell.… Fighting wars or trying to prop up American contentions in obscure alleys….
Hester sensed my anger. She patted my cheek and sat back in her corner, long legs folded, licking contentedly at her cone. The cab rolled uptown.
When we coasted to a halt before a Central Park South apartment marquee, the doorman helped Hester and her dripping ice-cream cone out. The tall girl strode into the brightly lighted lobby.
After I had paid the cabbie, I went in too, and the elevator operator said Miss Prim lived in 12A.
The ivory-paneled door to that apartment was open, but Hester was nowhere in sight. Logs had flaked to fiery chunks in the Georgian fireplace. When I called, her faint shout came up the right hallway.
“Lock the door and hook the chain, dear old Charley, or we might get busted yet.”
I bolted the front door, put the chain on, and walked down the right hallway until I came to a dim room that had vivid colors flowing across its ceiling.
“Here, lover,” called Hester. I turned into the room and found her stretched out in the briefest of shortie nightgowns, on a bare mattress. She was still licking at the cone. There was no furniture in the room, but through the multicolored dimness I could see other bare mattresses and leather poufs. Like the sitting room, this one had an entire glass wall fronting on the park.
It was a room for modern revels. Hidden pin spots, separate from the flowing bands of color overhead, encircled oriental mandala drawings. Other small spotlights picked out wall niches containing single fresh flowers in slender vases. Tibetan prayer wheels, with their paper tags of prayers rustling, revolved slowly, and a musk of sandalwood and dried rose petals filled the air. It was an incense I had associated for years with the sweaty, unwashed smells of Indian and Bur-man temples.
All in all, an effective room except for the remote taped music that was so dissonant and jerky I knew it must be Cage, the IBM troubadour. Garbage cans toppled in an obbligato of unripe ideas.
Hester reached up her hand, and I sank down beside her on the mattress. “Old dad,” she breathed.
“A favor?” I asked, on my back and staring at the colored rivers swimming across the ceiling. “In the matter of nomenclature. Drop that ‘old dad’ stuff. As the spirit moves you, call me something else, like ‘Hot-Rocks Charles.’ The name you’ve been using gives our association a strong flavor of incest.”
“Don’t want that, darling,” she said drowsily.
“Miss Hester,” I said, “love, or just casual sex, can be a fine thing. But you must give it some kind of mystery, ribaldry, or saving grace. Otherwise, it is just slopping pigs.”
She began to cry. I put my left hand out and began to massage the back of her neck gently. That made her sob worse than ever. We lay forlorn, strangers in the dim psychedelic temple, with prayer wheels rustling their entreaties over us.
The back of her neck was knotted up with fatigue centers. As I tried to smooth them out, I asked her how she felt and got a distant answer. Under my hand, her skin cooled and she fell away, rolling to the other side.
I tested her pulse. It was strong, but too slow. Heaving myself up, I went to the wall switches beside the door and flipped several before I got the cabalistic colors off and the room filled with normal light. On the other side of the mattress, beyond Hester’s sprawled figure, was a champagne glass with the remains of the ice-cream cone stuck into it.
Keeling, I lifted the damp stub of the cone and licked at it. After a few minutes my tongue and the lining of my mouth and throat began to burn. I put the remnant of the cone back in the flaring glass.
Then, for a few seconds, I allowed myself the luxury of uncontrolled rage. Squatting beside the unconscious girl with the shortie gown hiked up in the small of her back, I thought bitterly: So I’m supposed to take this knocked-out hunk of meat to Europe with me in a few hours. I hope we don’t have to meet the Queen….
Turning off the room lights, I left her slumped there, staring sightlessly at the too-perfect fresh rosebuds in the wall niches. A misty rain was falling outside the apartment building, and I stood hesitant on the sidewalk. West around the corner was the St. Moritz. I decided on east around the Plaza, and walked that way. My tongue was still stinging, and seemed to be swelling.
I went down Fifth Avenue to Fifty-seventh Street, where I found a drugstore. From a telephone booth in the back, I called the agency’s unlisted number, and when the duty officer answered I gave him the word and the number. We had a minute of open line, and he came back on and said, “Okay.” What number was I calling from? I told him, hung up, and almost immediately the phone in the booth rang again.
“Who’s your doctor?” I asked, and when he gave me the number, I scribbled it inside the flap of a matchbook. I thanked him, hung up, and dialed the Bronx number. It whirred and whirred, and finally a sleepy voice answered. The doctor grunted when I gave the name and number, and said to go on.
I told him that I had a tripster acid-head on my hands, a girl twenty-four years old. That ordinarily it wouldn’t make a lot of difference, but she was my cover on a European assignment and we were both supposed to catch a flight to London in a few hours.
“What was the dosage?” the doctor asked.
“No idea. She took it in an ice-cream cone. I can tell you the flavor, though. Pistachio.”
The doctor did not answer immediately. All I could hear was his patient breathing from the Bronx; perhaps he was thinking about how much the agency paid him to be available around the clock.
“All right,” he said finally. “Chlorpromazine will take her off it. Where are you?”
I repeated my case name, the name of the drugstore, and the telephone number in the booth.
“My God, man!” he said testily, “that’s the busiest drugstore in Manhattan at this hour. Do you think the pharmacist there answers the phone in that damned booth?” And he hung up.
When I got back to the apartment overlooking Central Park, Hester was still motionless on the mattress. I got a glass of water from the bathroom, raised her head, and made her swallow the big capsules. Then I carried her back to a bedroom with a circular bed and sponged off her sweating face.
It took about an hour to break off her trip. When she was fairly coherent, I manhandled her under the cold shower, toweled her, and told her to start packing. After several cups of scalding coffee, she seemed to understand.
Walking back to the other wing of the apartment, I found an empty bedroom. Took a cold shower and stretched out on the bed, after instructing the switchboard operator to ring both master bedrooms in an hour, until somebody answered. Okay?
“Thenk you,” cooed the operator.
“Good night.” Sleep, disjointed, came in fitful intervals. In one brief dream I was reaching for an ice-cream cone when somebody howled “Pistachio!” and my fingers exploded with fire …
Before dawn the big Lufthansa jet was rustling eastward over the Atlantic, and we were aboard. By alternately bullying and cajoling Hester, I had gotten us through the amenities that precede a flight to Europe. She kept complaining that she had left at least half of the things she needed behind.
Only two things were important, however. She was with me, even if bitching dolefully, and I had personally carried the huge Gibson guitar on board. Presumably the folk songs, old and new, charming and blue, were still lodged in her addled pate. Slumped in the elegant first-class lounge, we went slamming through the upper air toward swinging London Town.
