“You never told me.”
“You never asked.”
“Well, I’m asking. Tell me.”
“I’ll write you a letter.”
“Tell me.”
“I’ll draw you a picture.”
“Tell me.”
“What’ll I tell you? Perry carries a gun? Okay — Perry carries a gun. So does Simmons, did you know that? Simmons carries a gun.”
“In the Mews?”
“Yes, in the Mews. In the Mews! Infant! Baby! There are ladies in this world would sell anything. They sell the outside of their bodies. The inside — the inside, do you understand me? Piece by piece they sell it off, like at an auction. They do not always walk in the streets and stand under lampposts. Sometimes they sit in mahogany captain’s chairs on leather seats. They eat from linen thick as carpets with forks of soft pure silver. There are toothmarks on my spoons. There are doctors who perform illegal operations. I do not speak of men with breadknives and dirty fingernails in rooms behind stores. I speak of men on Park Avenue, in hospital amphitheaters with the best equipment. There are men that push junk, that water the liquor, the gas, the milk, the currency. I do not speak of muggers in parks, of creeps at windows with their hand on their thing, or rapers and queers. There are men that cripple and others that kill, that fix fights and World Series and prices and wars. There are wheelers and there are dealers.”
“If you’re trying to frighten me—”
“Baby! It doesn’t frighten you? I go to the track with these men, we sit in each other’s boxes at the World Series, in Indianapolis for the Five Hundred. In Louisville for the Derby we are on the floors of each other’s hotels, and I am frightened of them.”
“Well, of course. I understand that, Nate. But why?”
“Harold Flesh.”
He was in a state of active terror, abandoned to it, yet for all that still trying not so much to deal with it as to preserve it long enough to communicate it to me, his action vaguely heroic, as though I were someone sleeping in a burning house whom he must rouse before he could think of safety for himself. “Nate,” I said.
“The world is not clean.”
“Nate, this—”
“It is not a clean world.”
“I know that. I know it’s not clean. Fixing beyond fixing.”
“So make sense. Be afraid in it.”
“I can take care of myself.”
“Good,” he said. “Good news.”
He took out a cigarette, something I never saw him do in the restaurant, though he smokes heavily at home. His hand shook as he lighted it.
“Nate.”
“Harold Flesh is such a son of a bitch.”
“Why did you want me to see him, Nate?”
“It’s important,” he said. “You know too many movie stars.” He put out the cigarette and stood up. “Have Perry bring you something,” he said and started to go.
“Nate.”
“I have to see. In the kitchen, I have to see.”
“Nate, please. Are you clean?”
He looked at me. “Are you?” I said.
“I’m shmutzic,” he said.
“What can you have to do with Harold Flesh?”
“With him? Nothing. I swear it.”
“But — then why do you care?”
“Because,” he said. “Because I’m like you. He’s a champion, ain’t he? From all walks. If they’re champions you tear up the check. Do you understand?”
“Nate, I don’t believe you. Something is on the line.”
“Ah,” he said. He smiled for the first time. “You chiseler. ‘Something is on the line.’ All right. Good. Just one of the things on the line, just one, is my place. Who needs that kind of trade? Who needs it? If those guys make it a habit to come here they could ruin me. That kind of trade. Cardinals eat here, for Christ’s sake.” He leaned forward. “In this world there are two kinds. Those who still bother to lie and those who don’t. On the average it is safer and more profitable to deal with those who still bother to lie. Perry!”
Perry came to the table. “Bring Mr. Boswell a nice pot of arctic lichen tea.” He left.
I looked around the room. Across from me, in a round wide booth, the red velvet upholstery tufted and buttoned like the canopied bed of a baby prince, a handsome man toasted a lovely woman. Were they clean, I wondered. Sure they were. In a far corner two middle-aged men — they seemed as unsinister as brokers — chatted amiably. Which one pulled the trigger? I studied the well- dressed, decorous women. Which were the expensive whores? I watched the carefully polite men moving self-consciously back in their chairs as the waiters placed food in front of them. Which was Mr. Big?
I settled dreamily into a contented vision of duplicity. I saw everything twice, the chic surfaces over the dry, stale mass, the vital appearance skin-tight across the unhealthy frame. Nate was wrong, of course, but his vision was the comfortable one. It was not a worthy cynicism, only a step beyond child’s play, a fantasy not of good versus evil, of good guys and bad, but the all- embracing comfort of bad guys and worse. It let one off, this view, as original sin let one off, or some sterile notion of environment. No, if anything, the world was too fine, people too good. Who would hold their measly temper tantrums against men who had to die?
In Nate’s Place it was an understandable illusion, an honest mistake. The place was like one of those enormous night clubs in films of the thirties. One automatically dipped the side of one’s jaw before one spoke. Somewhere, one was sure, a code knock would move a wall aside to reveal a casino where people in evening dress gaily gambled and talked about the DA and called their girlfriends “Sister.”
I did not think I wanted to stay to meet Nate’s Harold Flesh. Perhaps he was a bad man, but if he were he would be vaguely comic, too, a type who took himself too seriously or always wore a white carnation or carried a silver dollar for luck. Evil, if it exists, is as rare as virtue. No, it was in making something out of the gray, moral middle ground that greatness lay. That’s why Felix Sandusky, who took flesh and spun it into muscle, was great.
So Harold Flesh, whether he was Professor Moriarty out of Boston Blackie out of Damon Runyon — whether he was, as Nate himself thought he was, the Devil himself— was not someone who could matter very much to me. Horseracing, baseball, boxing. Why, Nate’s devils were boys, children.
I looked again at Nate’s comical room, thinking, sadly, that perhaps it was time to write Nate off as a contact. He had said it himself: I knew too many movie stars. His people were not of that middle distance where things happen. It was too easy to hypnotize myself in my friend Nathan’s nighttime world. As Perry, who only held its leaders’ coats, had — as Nate had. Too easy to get caught up in its real but probably incidental melodrama. Perhaps there were the things Nate said there were in the world, perhaps it was unclean. But it was the humdrum mud in cemeteries which terrified me, not the dust indoors. How little the atrocities Nate described had to do with me anyway, I thought, whose crimes, like most people’s, were merely petty, merely against myself, who picked no pocket, peddled no whore, pushed no dope, did no violence. At that moment it came to me as a revelation that I was just one more good man.
I went to the washroom. The porter did not look at me when I went in and when I left he didn’t get up to brush my jacket. He knew me, knew my circumstances (which in some views are the same). He expected no tip and withheld his services, one more who would deal with me on a professional basis only.