It was a dark wet Tuesday in January, about as cheerful and warm as the cold nose on a dead puppy. Stumbling soberly around North Beach, I stormed into Cafe Tosca and stared down the bus boy for a cigar and a drink and a rag to clean the blood off my shoes. A damp, alcoholic gloom nestled snugly in the old bar like a rheumatic baby ocelot into the withered teat of despair.A clutch of elderly Italian men sat in the back planning to corner the Boise prosciutto market, each draining a bottle of Grappa and/or a tipple of Venetian turpentine. A dinghy, indifferent mediterranean painting hung on the yellowed wall like it was going to hang there for another fifty years waiting for a dusting from some future atom robot electro-maid. Down the long brown bar, a couple of downtown business girls conducted business about some business downtown with a reporter for the Chronicle, an ottery meat balloon named Clive, I think, hard to forget with that greased, centerpart hair, pencil moustache, and tropical-themed ascot with a little naked Hawaii girl that jiggled when he coughed.
I couldn't get the blood off my shoes, so I shifted gears and burnished it into sort of a brownish stain. Caruso tinnly damned his fate as a cheap clown on the Wurlitzer. I glanced up across the bar.
It couldn't be. Behind the rows of glasses scowled Crumples, the pickled flesh of his all-too animated corpse stuffed into a tailored white waistcoat and black tie serving the bottle of Lorenzo's Turpengrappa I'd ordered, with the exact ripple of forced politeness passing that coarse malevolent face that also wrinkled Mussolini's mug when he begged a couple hundred Panzers from Hitler. There was no escape from Crumples. In my life, he was a demented antedeluvian student loan collector who served you second hand paint thinner instead of a court summons. He hated me like eye cancer, but with a kind of quasi-benevolent consistency.
Crumples crinkled the skin curtains around his eyes, piling up folds like a Norwegian prison laundry. As a greeting, he made that sort of noise like an electrical short. I tossed a couple crumpled Jeffersons his way. Picking up a Two, a bloody tooth rolled out onto the walnut bar. He gave me a look with his good pupil like he'd box the thinking jelly out of that salad mould I called a head if only he was 78 years younger.
"Guy didn't want to part with his lettuce, " I explained. Cheap job, working for a hunting lodge accountant trying to track the hooker that stole the wad he'd skimmed from the moose accounts and then ran off with his wife, a perfumed chippie from Nantucket with an ironic allergy to whale vomit. Pathetic bastard tried to short me when I told him they were opening a back alley abortion clinic and notions shop in Castro valley. It only took one blackjack whip across the kisser to put the triple-timing bean-counter into the accounts paid column.
Crumples glared, boring holes in my forehead with a couple of twin .50 pupils. Down the bar, the business girls looked miffed, like Clive the reporter was talking them down to 6 bucks and a pint of tequilla.
Clive eventually oiled his way over, flanked by the curvier of the broads. He held out a limp hand with his business card and smiled with his little moustache that closed the top of his pie hole like a paranthesis. He was the kind of business reporter that wrote leads like "Red union slackers have harmed the war effort with specious demands for non-flammable pants."
"Mack, hey! Mack!, 'What's all this, then?' Hahaah ahhaha!" he said, laughing like a toy steam hammer while tilting his eyes at the floozy's impressive heavers.
That English bobby bit was the weakest joke since Calvin Coolidge met Paul Robeson and the tiny husk of a President started up with an Amos and Andy routine. Clive perpetrated this embarassment every time he saw me, expecting a laugh like he was a naked Chaplin in a room of full of drunk sorority girls and a loosened tank of nitrous oxide, which I happened to know was a habit of Chaplin's, from Oona's pedicurist, who was now my chiropractor. But for Clive the laughs always came in his head, anyway, from the adoring pretend audience who read his business-beat column. He wrote the worst business tips since Henry Ford was advised to avoid the transportation sector.
I forced a smile and tossed the blood-covered towel on the bar, which was a mistake because that's when a six foot rod of rebar crashed through the door window and pierced Clive right through his cheek, and now as he spun around and around bleeding all over the place I had to reach all the way back over to the bar to pick up the towel again and start wiping some of the gore off the girls, which was the most action I'd gotten since Dardenella left for Upper Volta on a mission for insurance fraud - to stop or perpetrate I didn't think to ask.
Funny thing - and this WAS funny- Clive wasn't dead. Oh sure, he'd looked better before a 72 inch steel rod was sticking sideways out of his face, but not all that much, and while Crumples with all the empathy a bucket of prison shivs searched the bathroom floor for a lost nickel to call the ambulance, I tried to comfort Clive as best I could by pouring gin in a glass with a straw and sticking it up his nostil so he could suck one back, but as he sat on the stool with the rebar through both cheeks and six fewer teeth some stumbling rummy came in and hung his hat on one of the rod ends, tilting Clive's head slowly to one side until it hit the bar, and Clive couldn't say anything because the rummy was his editor at Chronicle, Erasmus Veltwiddle, and also there was piece of rebar through his cheeks.
"Say, Eraser, " I asked the rummy, "You know anyone who'd want to hurt Clive? Specifically, with this six foot piece of rebar?" I tapped the rebar with a pencil for emphasis.
"Errrk!" Said Clive. Even the hula girl on his ascot was writhing.
"Sorry Clive, here, let me get my hat back," said Eraser.
"Arrghh..ooww!" said Clive.
"What was Clive working on besides Lily and Edna over there?" I asked. The girls waved gamely.
Eraser, who was still wearing his trademark green shade- under his hat - looked reflective, in the way an orangutan wonders whether he really should have eaten that abandoned shank of Komodo dragon.
"Something about the Davenport Foundation. Something about the foundation's money getting diverted for...what was it Clive?" said Eraser, turning to Clive and spilling his scotch and whiskey into Lily's decolletage, for which he was slapped, which merely caused him to chuckle.
"aaaaghh..." said Clive, as Crumples screwed up his face and tried to pull the rebar out, his Civil War army boot firm on Clive's cheek for leverage.
"Oh, yes," said Eraser, his red face redding up with ready remembrance. "A private army."
"PheoooO!" I whistled. The Davenport Foundation had more money than God's banker's insurance company's dirty accountant's mob lawyer. They were trying to find a cure for polio. Good luck on that. They were nutjobs like rabid squirrels, but they had the dough and they had talent. Maybe they were going to send a rocket for space doctors from Venus.
But a private army?
"AaH! AaH! AaH! AaH! AaH! " said Clive as Crumples jerked the rebar out six inches at a time.
"A private army?" I asked out loud.
"Yes, yes. Hundreds of guys, planes, horses, tanks, small arms. Some weird stuff too: bicycle howitzers, oversize floating shoes, flame throwing seltzer bottles, radium pellet sling shots, very high capacity small cars. Mostly they hire out-of-work tomato pickers and chinese short order cooks, occassionally rocket scientists and circus folk. " said Eraser. "They got a ranch out by Stanford."
"Some charity. More like our Lady of Pincer Movement."
"We haven't run anything yet until we can----" And CRASH, another piece of rebar went straight through the unbroken window and into Clive again, but the aim was too good, sliding perfectly along the original wound and not doing too much more damage to his cheeks. Eraser and I and the girls dove for cover. Then we got a burst of Browning auto rifle fire which finally cheesed off the old Italians in back who whipped out six or seven Tommy guns and returned fire. People in the street scattered. A huge green Buick ran off down columbus, engine roaring and tires squeeling. I watched heartbroken as broken bottles of very expensive scotch slowly dissolved the grease on the floor.
"Arreghghegaaagggghh!" said Clive. He was getting on my nerves. The mystery was getting in my mind. Lily was getting on my lap. I sipped a house cappucino. I was becoming curious.
