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“This is a list. You don’t have to tell us anything right now. If you get results, they won’t be questioned.”
Frankie looks at the names. All those dancing princesses, skipping the hop down to the underground.
“But don’t know anything. Believe me. I work, that’s all I do. If not on the floor, on my books. Nobody tells me anything. I’m a terrible person for the job, honestly. Just about anyone else would be more tuned in than me. I mean, have you asked Al? I’d ask Al. I just write detective stories. When people go missing in real life they’re usually…well, usually dead. And when people go dead, usually you never find out why.”
Raspy and Caspar glance at each other. They’d ask Al if they could. But you don’t ring-a-ding and summon the guy like a bellhop.
“She might be up on 201st Street for all I know. Or New Jersey. Or France. It’s impossible.” Frankie’s starting to panic. Sure, it’s nice to have a rich man grateful to you, but it’s miserable to fall down on the job he hands you.
Everybody’s real quiet. The kind of quiet that’s both the asking and the answering. She’s not in France or New Jersey or up in the nosebleeds. Frankie doesn’t know much but he knows a little. Raspy and Caspy know a lot more. There’s no world outside the hotel once you’ve lived here long enough, and Miss Pearl’s lived there from day one. She’s here. And even if you don’t know where the good gin’s pouring on any given night, you know where people go when they disappear in the Artemisia. And if Zelda went to Canada, Frankie knows he’s staying Stateside.
“Why me?” he croaks.
Raspy has a little chuckle. “Well, my lad, between the mad, the drunk, the psychotic, and the consumptive, you’re the only one left.”
Lobby
It’s not hard to begin. It isn’t ever hard to start—not stories, not jobs, not flings. It’s the finishing that sticks in your jaw. Frankie always liked starting a story best. Putting a hat on his detective, grey or white or black or buff or blue. Deciding who’s dead. Deciding who wants them not to be dead. Putting shops on the street where Hank Hart or Ken Sharp or Walter Bent keeps his office. Good old Wally. Does he like bourbon or opium? Is he a teetotaler? Will he survive the story? It’s good to live in the beginning. In the Not-Yet, like Zelda said. So right now, Frankie is all right. He hasn’t screwed up yet. He hasn’t rushed the ending or blown out the plot like a flabby tire. He has a place to go, first off. He hasn’t got a hat, but he’s got a mysterious girl love interest and one pair of good shoes and that’s a start. He’s worked with way less than that.
Frankie goes to the only secret place he knows in the Artemisia. It’s where he gets his paychecks. A little room in the lobby, past the fountain full of gargling seals and their balls all covered with stars, past the soda fountain and the concierge desk and the check-in counter, between the Silver Umbrella restaurant (French and Continental) and the Blue Heart Cafe (Hungarian). It’s a wall and it’s a door and it’s nothing at all. It’s magic, Frankie knows that, even if he doesn’t like to say that word, even if that word is almost like a swear word around here, falls flatter and harder than an uncareful fuck or cunt at the supper table. But he still thinks it’s the kind of magic fellas down on 42nd St do up on stage in tuxedos, the kind that goes abracadabra and then there’s a bunny.
Here’s the bunny.
If you stand in front of the paisley wallpaper, right where the blue swirls look like eyes and the oak leafing looks like scrambled green eggs, between the two cafes, and order a croque monsieur with extra gruyere and boysenberry jam, pretty soon after there’ll be a silver dish with a check on it waiting for you in the service elevator, sitting fine as you like on the operator’s plush stool. The dish always beats you to the elevator, even if you take off at a dead run halfway through the -yere in gruyere. It does this time, too. Frankie’s sopping when he rips the gate open, sweating like he gets paid by the drop. But it’s not a check, no sir.
&nb
sp; It’s a swimming cap. Black with silver stars.
And a little card with some awful nice handwriting on it. The handwriting says Midnight. The Ballroom.
Thing is, Al won’t close the door on anyone. His parties have room for all. Come on in. Nobody to look at you funny in here. Nobody to tell you not to have that drink, kiss that fella, smash that chair, light that chandelier on fire. Do it all. Do it forever. It’s not Al’s style to wall up his best so a boy like Frankie can’t get at it. He doesn’t dance to that jig. The more the merrier, and Al is all about making merry. Brick by brick, hinge by hinge. Al loves you, kids. From the bottom of your bones.
Trouble with love is it wants company.
Banquet Hall
Al came into this world dancing shoes first, and that’s the way he’ll go out, if he ever does go out. But really, kittens, what are the chances of that? You could say a dance is all he is. Used to be nothing much to do in this world but eating, fucking, killing, trying not to get killed, having babies, and, if your particular local glaciers weren’t too much of a drag, picking berries off the bush and apples from the tree. Back then, Al and his people were a little like dinosaurs. They were bigger than us and better fixed for this world. Sharper teeth, quicker on their feet, lighter bones. Muscles like funny tight braids. They could see better in the dark. Had a couple of different brains to handle the extra load. Larynxes that could make noises that weren’t vowels or consonants but something else, something that could glottal-trot and whistle-waltz so that only wolves and dragonflies could hear. Sometimes they had tails. Sometimes horns. They’d been around for a dog’s age, going about the good animal life, laying eggs, guarding nests, sucking marrow, writing poems on buttercup stems.
They worried a bit when we figured out fire. Watched us watching it, watching it like it was holy, like it was gonna save us from something, which is all holy’s ever meant. They didn’t like how we watched our fire. See, not a one of Al’s folk ever had to suss out how to make things burn. Or build a hut or chase a mammoth off a cliff or knap a knife or blow through a hollow sheep-bone to make a song or cut a hunk of fur into a person-shape to keep warm when the stars go winter. They’ve got all that inside them. Like you and I got livers. We don’t have to think about how our liver works, it just does its thing and all’s well. One of them could look at a mammoth and it’d find its own cliff and taking a flying leap without so much as a sure, boss. They were knives and fur and songs and burning, they burned all the time, so hot it hurt their bellies, but they couldn’t help it, they crackled and forked and from a ways away it always did look like sparkling.
So there we were, eating and fucking and killing and trying not to get killed and picking berries and munching apples and lighting sticks against the dark. I just felt sorry for the poor bastards, Al says when you ask him about it, which you should, if your brain is tired of thinking in just the one direction. Anybody gives their dogs toys, don’t they? You don’t just let them lie around in their own shit getting so bored they tear up the sofa just to get a little attention. They were just so cute and helpless. I’ve always had a soft heart.
So up comes Al and he says to some sad sack of cavemen wearing bear feet over their people feet ’cause the stink is a damn sight better than ten toes worth of frostbite and he says:
“Hey, cats and kittens, lambs and rams, ladies and gents! Have I got something for you! One hundred percent brand spanking new! You’ll love it, I promise. It’ll knock you flat. It’ll make you feel like a million bucks. What’s a buck? Oh, bucks are fun, you’ll find out later. But what I got? It’ll make a new man out of you. You’ll wanna tell all your friends. It’ll fix you up if you’re sick and make you grin if you’re grim. And it won’t cost a thing. Just take this patch of mammoth butt and stretch it out over these branches, nice and tight, yeah? Tighter than that, even. Come on, put your back into it! There you go! Then you take your hand and you whack it. Whack it again. Whack it quick and whack it slow. Whack it three times, hold still for a sec, then three more times. Two, then three, then four, then hold up, hold up—then five as quick as you can. That’s it, any way you want, loud as you can stand it. Look at you, little drummer girl! Pa-rum-pa-rum-pum! Now just do like I do.”
That’s what Al does. That’s what he asks. Just do like I do. Be like I am. Faster, quicker, harder, hold still, do it again.
He showed them how to lift up their people-feet-inside-bear-feet and put them down again on the beat. How to shake their hands and shimmy their hips and do a little soft-shoe on the roof of their caves. He taught them so good they couldn’t stop. It was more fun than staring at fire.
But Al couldn’t stop either.
“Hey, man, how about you rip up that cat with the fluffy tail? If you dry out his guts and twist them up real good you can strum something better than drumming. Don’t worry, that cat probably don’t mind. Being music is a damn sight better than being a cat. If you put holes in his bones and blow your breath through his death, you can make just the sweetest sound you ever heard. And hoo boy, lookee here, if you eat these berries instead of those, you’ll see stars. Stars like being born! Come on now, eat up, there’s a good ape. Now, I know you won’t believe me! But if you leave this particular sort of green fuzzy grass in a bunch of water for a spell, it’ll turn into beer. What’s beer? Why, kid, beer’s your best friend. And if you think dancing to dead cat and mammoth ass is good now, just you wait till beer cuts in and shows you how to do-si-do. Aw, look at you. You drew a horsey on the wall! Aren’t you clever. Com’ere and let old Uncle Al give you a kiss.”
And that’s how people learned to dance. For a good spit of the world, we danced with Al’s crowd and everything was fine as fairy-dust. Sometimes us and them liked the look of each other and it wasn’t easy, but where there’s a lust, there’s a way. Sometimes we got afraid that they’d take it all away. The dancing and the music and the beer and the dead cats that somehow made us cry when you rubbed horse hair against their guts and we’d have to go back to being entertained by the rot of bear feet on our real feet. So then we killed some of them and they killed some of us. But there was always more of us. Life is a numbers racket. They lived a lot longer, but we made more, made them faster, and made them in style. Al did all right with the dancing, the rest of his people said, but maybe he should have cooled it with the beer.
And I know you won’t believe me, but it’s dancing that made everything else. Once we get ahold of something, we want more and we want it now. More music, more liquor, more dancing, and to get those things and keep those things, you gotta plant things in the ground, try your breath on the bones of every thing that has them, remember the best songs and figure out how to write them down so when somebody’s blowing on your bones, the songs keep on. To have a really good party, you gotta make some swell houses, light them up, paint the walls, invent tables so you can dance on top of them, and doesn’t all that booze taste nice cold?
