"I've had a foreboding," Everett said.
"He's setting up. I'll get in my car one morning and find him sitting there. He wants this to happen as much as we do."
"I've had a feeling these past weeks that something isn't right."
"Everything is right. The city, the time, the preparations. The man is absolutely solid."
"I believe in the power of premonitions."
Larry put down the phone. Downstairs he found Beryl at the table with the newspaper, her coffee and a pair of scissors. Pages were spread over the wineglasses and dinner plates.
He'd stopped commenting on this oddness of hers. She said the news clippings she sent to friends were a perfectly reasonable way to correspond. There were a thousand things to clip and they all said something about the way she felt. He watched her read and cut. She wore half-glasses and worked the scissors grimly. She believed these were personal forms of expression. She believed no message she could send a friend was more intimate and telling than a story in the paper about a violent act, a crazed man, a bombed Negro home, a Buddhist monk who sets himself on fire. Because these are the things that tell us how we live.
Baby LeGrand stood at the end of the runway, knees bent, hands locked behind her neck, the drummer going boom to the jolt of her pelvis, and she scanned the club meantime, making out shapes beneath the tinted lights, whole lives that she could diagram in seconds, oh sailors and college boys, just the usual, plus a waitress taking setups to the hard drinkers, a kid in a skimpy outfit that makes her titties bulge. She ran a sash between her legs and waved it slow-motion through the baby spot. She eyed the table of off-duty cops drinking their cut-rate beer. She saw the odd-job boy taking Pola-roids of the customers which Jack will present as gifts. These are men in suit and tie, on business in the city, and men who come with dates to do the twist between sets. Brenda knows the twist crowd. She likes the younger cops if they are blue-eyed. She knows the smallest tomato stain on the narrowest tie because the only food is pizza from up the street, which somebody sticks in the warmer. Meantime the drummer's picking up the beat and a sailor says go go go. She drags the sash through the smoke and dust, scans the bar for the lowlife types that Jack drags in off the street, sad sacks and drifters he feels sorry for. And there is the gambling element or whatever they are, the vending-machine and Sicilian element, men of sharp practices, standing frozen at the back of the club. It's the whole Carousel in a five-second glimpse, plus the tourists from Topeka. They are saying go go go. They are crying for a garment. They want the piece of silk that passed between her legs. They are here to bathe in the flesh of the sleepwalking girl, the girl who wakes up naked in a throbbing crowd. This is how it always seems to Baby L. She is having a private fit in the middle of the night, like she is demonized, and wakes up naked in a different dream, where strange men are clutching at her body. Does anybody here know the stupid truth? She wants to be a real-estate agent who drives people around in a station wagon that is painted like wood. An award-winning realtor in a fern-green suit. But she is humping a spotlight in front of a crowd, flinging sweat from her belly and thighs, and the tassels on her pasties are swishing to the beat.
She did her trademark twirl of the breasts, one breast spinning clockwise, the other counter, and quickly disappeared.
Then she showered and wrapped herself in a towel and sat in the dressing room, smoking. This was the time when a cigarette was the purest pleasure known.
Lynette was in street clothes sitting at the next mirror. She had her head in a copy of Look.
"If I had the slightest sense," Brenda told her, "I'd get what I'm owed and just scram. I have a seven-year old and a four-year old and I am half the time too tired to say hello."
Lynette turned a page. She said, "I will tell you this Bobby Kennedy is right up my alley. Bobby is the one who could make me crazy. He has got this little hard gleam. Ten minutes with Bobby, I am out of my head."
"He doesn't do a thing for me."
"He could drive me into wah wah land."
"Where is that, Lynette?"
"He has got this little meanness in the eye but he doesn't really know it like?"
"I think he knows it," Brenda said. "Give me his brother any day. Jack would be better in bed. I like a lover with some shoulder to him. I stay away from these rabbity types."
"Bobby's an athalete."
"The President is mature to handle a woman like us. Not that I'm ready to settle down with the man."
"You need one of those bouffant hairdos like Jackie."
"I need more than that."
"You got the knockers, Brenda."
"Tit tit tit. This is my Achilles heel you're pointing out. Too much talent up front. It means a bunch of trouble."
"What's he do anyway, the Attorney General?"
"Are you kidding? He's the top cop."
"Top cop or top cock?"
"Same difference," Brenda said.
There was some kind of commotion out front. They could hear a few voices and a glass or bottle breaking. Lynette turned a page.
"Do you believe what they say about tell a person exactly when you were born, to the hour and the minute, and they can figure out everything about you?"
"I smell a fish, to quote a maxim," Brenda said.
The disturbance, whatever it was, grew louder. You feel these things in the walls. Brenda put on her robe and went to the end of the hall and looked out. Between the bar and the entranceway there was a flurry of bodies and arms, maybe four guys including Jack who were physically propelling a man who looked like he combed his hair with firecrackers. It now developed that Jack wanted to throw the man down the stairs. The others were trying to prevent this as extreme. Brenda waited until the odd-job boy lost his place in the moving knot of people and came off to the side, shaking a hand that may have been bitten.
"What is it?" Brenda said.
"This guy like grab-assed one of the waitresses. You know, felt her going by."
"Do we kill people for this?"
"You know Jack when it comes to abusing the girls. He about flipped sky-high."
Jack wrestled the man away from the others and the two of them went quick-walking down the narrow stairs, actually out of control, banging off the handrail, almost pitching forward to the street.
The bar crowd went after, hurrying down single-file and loud. Brenda took a deep drag on the cigarette and went back to finish her talk.
Out on the street Jack knocked the guy down. He went after him with his feet, kicking in a fastidious way as if trying to shake dog matter off his shoe. The guy skittered away and ran down the street, breaking through a line of people in front of the club next door, where an amateur strip night was going on. Jack went after him, followed by five or six others from the Carousel. The man was much faster but turned halfway down the block and was ready to fight. It made no sense to anyone and only got Jack madder. Jack charged into him swinging. The sheer bulk and force of the attack knocked the guy down. Jack kicked at him twice and the guy grabbed Jack's ankle and twisted him down to the pavement in slow motion. Then he started crawling toward a parking sign. Jack was on his knees and grabbed the guy's leg to keep him from reaching the signpost. Someone from the bar crowd tried to break Jack's grip, speaking soothingly to Jack. The guy kept struggling toward the sign. This was the clear meaning of what was going on. If he could only reach the sign. Two men from the bar crowd broke the fighters apart but Jack got in two kicks at the guy's ribs. The guy stood up, eyes averted. His pants were somehow unbuckled. Jack punched him hard in the head over the shoulders of the men between them and the guy walked out in the middle of the street and stood there, making the cars go around him. He fixed his clothes. He stood out there in traffic. He would not look at the men on the sidewalk, their chests pumping from the run and scuffle.