“You have a vivid imagination,” McReady said.
“Where’d you learn to talk that way?” Mullaney said. “Did Fagin teach you to talk that way at his international crime school, all menacing like that?”
“Mr. Mullaney...”
“Oh, so you know my name, huh?”
“Yes, we got it from your driver’s license.”
“We is it, huh? Big criminal organization, huh? Go ahead, torture me, I can take torture of any kind, Irene and I once lived in an apartment that had ten thousand cockroaches, you think I’m afraid of torture? I’ll never tell you where I left those paper scraps!”
“I don’t care where you left the paper scraps,” McReady said. “All I want to know is where you left the jacket.”
“So that’s it, huh?” Mullaney said. “It’s the jacket that’s important, huh? Go ahead, torture me.”
“Have some more schnapps,” McReady said quickly.
“Oh no you don’t!” Mullaney snapped. “Trying to get me drunk, huh, so I’ll spill everything I know, huh? No you don’t,” but he poured himself another drink and raised his glass and said, “Skoal, buddy, I could have won a fortune at Aqueduct today if you louses hadn’t come along and spoiled it. You happen to know who won the fourth race?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Jawbone, right?”
“I have no idea.”
“I thought so,” Mullaney said. “Jawbone, huh? I knew it.”
“Where did you leave the jacket?”
“Ha ha,” Mullaney said, and shoved back his chair defiantly and exuberantly, and then almost fell flat on his face. He staggered back from the table, suddenly ashamed of himself, not because he was drunk but only because he had become drunk in the presence of someone he did not like. There are many many ways to get drunk, he thought, and one way is as good as any other way; the only thing that can be bad about getting drunk is the company you’re in while you’re doing it. He did not like McReady any more than he had liked K or Gouda or Kruger or any of the other members of this vast cartel, perhaps two cartels (so the jacket is important, huh? he thought, never tell a book by its jacket), and yet he had allowed himself to get drunk in the man’s presence, which was a mean and despicable thing to do.
The most fabulous drunk in his life, the only one he could really distinguish from every other drunk in his life, small or large, was the one he had thrown with Irene in their apartment the day she discovered the Cache. She only discovered the Cache because they were at that time waging war against the ten thousand cockroaches who shared their place on East Sixteenth Street, which meant they were opening cabinet doors and dispensing roach powder, lifting dishes and pots and pans, and spraying sharp poofing puffs of poison into dark comers and niches, watching the cockroaches flee in disorganized retreat. The Cache consisted of four ten-dollar bills which she had hidden in a casserole against a rainy day, and then completely forgotten. She had tilted the casserole so that he could get a better shot at the nest of little scurrying bastards hidden in the corner, and suddenly the money had fallen out of it, payment for mercenaries, and it began raining. They had by now sprayed everything in sight or out of it, and since it had begun raining, and since the money had been put aside for a rainy day, Mullaney suggested that they spend the afternoon (it was Saturday) getting delightfully crocked, which suggestion Irene thought was capital, repulsed as she was by the hordes of insects breeding in their closets. They had taken a taxicab up to Zabar’s on Eightieth and Broadway, where they bought a tin of Beluga caviar, and then had come back downtown and bought two fifths of Polish vodka and a box of crackers, and had spent the rest of the afternoon and evening eating caviar and drinking the vodka neat. It had been a marvelous drunk. They tried to make love several times during the afternoon and evening, but neither could manage it because they were positively squiffed, laughing and reeling all over the apartment, drinking to the cockroaches and also to the Beatles (who were fairly new at the time) and drinking to Queen Elizabeth (“Up the Irish!” Irene shouted) and also to Khrushchev (Mullaney took off his shoe and banged it on the counter top, less in imitation of the Russian premier than in an attempt to squash a poison-drunk cockroach who was making his dizzy way toward the sink — and missing) and they drank to J. D. Salinger for having listed all the ingredients in Zooey’s or Franny’s or somebody’s medicine cabinet, without which literary feat American fiction that past year might have been barren and bleak, and oh, it had been a marvelous drunk.
This drunk was a lousy one because it was taking place in the presence of McReady, a joyless staggering dumb intoxication. Its only saving grace was that in talking to the hopeless drunk who was Mullaney, the pipe-smoking McReady had inadvertently revealed the fact that the jacket was important, the jacket, though Mullaney could not for the life of him see how.
“I need air!” he shouted, suddenly desiring to be sober, and staggered across the room to the window and threw it open. A gust of cemetery wind rushed into the room, a blast of chilling tombtop air that smelled of rot and decomposition. Behind him, the front door of the cottage was suddenly blown open by the gust of air that rushed through the window, though it seemed to Mullaney that such a gust would have blown the door closed rather than open. Drunkenly, he turned to see how such a remarkable tiling could have occurred contrary to all the laws of physics, and realized at once that the door had been thrown not blown open and realized in the next drunken shuddering horrible moment it had been thrown open by a ghost.
6. K
K was pale and covered with dust, K was wrapped in tattered, tom and trailing rags, K wore upon his face a haggard look of weariness, evidence of a journey from some distant purgatory, K was a spectral image standing just inside the cottage door, a terrifying poltergeist that raised its arm and pointed a long bony blue finger at Mullaney in mute accusation. Beyond the open window, Mullaney could hear the fearsome wailing of a thousand other ghosts, the clatter of bones, the clanking of chains, all the promised horrors his grandmother had conjured for him when he was but a wee turnip sitting on her knee. The stench of them rushed through that open window, stale and fetid from the grave, while standing just inside the door was another of their gruesome lot, closer, more frightening, pale and ragged and dead, oh my good sweet Jesus save me, killed in a terrible highway accident, dead, and closing the door gently now, the door squeaking on its hinges, closing the door and taking a step into the room, and raising its arm once again, the blue bony finger extended, and pointing directly at Mullaney who swayed in drunken terror near the open window where, beyond, the thousand other keening members of the union shrieked their dirges to the night.
He jumped through the open window head first, arms extended, hands together, fingers touching, as though he were going off the high board at Wilson’s Woods swimming pool, where he and Irene used to swim a lot before they were married. He hit the gravel outside hands first, absorbing the shock with his arms, rolling over into an immediate somersault, and then coming up onto his feet and breaking into a run the moment he was erect. He intended to run toward the sidewalk, out of this grisly place, away from the shrieking, melancholy voices in the cemetery, but his drunken state had been intensified by the plunge through the open window and the head-over-heels somersault he had performed with considerable style and grace, and he detected with horror that he was running not for the open gate of McReady’s Monument Works but instead for the open gate of the cemetery. He stopped himself with effort, and was turning in the opposite direction when the door of the cottage opened, and K stepped into the light with his dusty rags trailing, leaping off the doorstep and bounding across the yard toward Mullaney.