He looked for old Edgar.
An executioner and a nun did a pas de deux, a round of simple circling steps, and then the others gradually joined, the skeleton men and raven women, and in the end it was a graceful pavane they did, courtly and deadly and slow, with gestures so deliberate they seemed acted as well as danced, and Clyde saw his young partner move silkenly in their midst.
I will stick my tongue so far down your throat.
The guests watched in a trance, five hundred and forty men and women by actual count, and musicians and waiters and other personnel, and men assigned to guard the jewelry of the women, all part of the audience for an entertainment other than themselves-respectful, hushed and half stunned.
It will pierce your heart.
When they were finished the troupe stood in a line and removed their headpieces and masks. Then they opened their mouths, saying nothing, and directed hollow stares at the guests. An extended moment, a long gaping silence in the columned hall.
They departed single file.
A couple of minutes later Clyde found the Boss and they went to the men's room to collect themselves.
"Enjoy your dance, Junior?"
"I think I know who they are."
"Didn't you say that last time we were in here?"
"A group little seen and less known. Campus demonstrations mostly. No one, and this is odd."
"What?" the Boss barked.
"No one in Internal Security has come up with a name for the group. They've been known to act out protests, playing all the roles, even the police. Turn around."
"Find the links. It's all linked. The war protesters, the garbage thieves, the rock bands, the promiscuity, the drugs, the hair."
"There's some dandruff on your jacket," Clyde said.
Men entered and left, carrying a single sullen murmur in and out of the tiled room. They unzipped and peed. They urinated into mounds of crushed ice garnished with lemon wedges. They unzipped and zipped. They peed, they waggled and they zipped.
Edgar stood before the mirrors, still masked, and the sight of him prompted Clyde to think of the secret garden behind the Director's house, a sector fenced away from neighbors and never shown to guests, where statues of nude young men rose from fountains or stood draped in fall-flaming vines. Less titillating than inspirational, Clyde believed. This was the male form as Edgar's idealized double. A role livingly filled by Clyde. At least it used to be that way in the days when Edgar would stealthily tilt a mirror so he could lie in bed and watch Junior doing push-ups in the adjoining room.
That was 1939 in Miami Beach. This was 1966 in New York and we are living in muddle and shock.
He'd let that girl charm and tempt him, and he'd liked it, and he'd been disappointed when she slipped away before the kiss, and he'd been played for a fool in the oldest way-that radical enravishing self-possessed heartless come-hither bitch.
Back in the ballroom half the guests were gone. The rest measured out the time so their departure would not seem influenced by the spectacle, the protest, whatever it was-the mockery of their sleek and precious evening.
The society band played some danceable numbers but nobody wanted to dance anymore. Edgar and Clyde sat drinking with a putty-colored man in smoked glasses and his overmasked wife-satin wings, coq feathers and embedded diamonds.
Possibly Mafia, Clyde surmised.
Edgar would not speak to anyone. He sat, drank and hated. He had the sheen of Last Things in his eye. Clyde knew this look. It meant the Director was meditating on his coffin. It gave him dark solace, planning the details of his interment. A lead-lined coffin of one thousand pounds plus. To protect his body from worms, germs, moles, voles and vandals. They were planning to steal his garbage, so why not his corpse? Lead-lined, yes, to keep him safe from nuclear war, from the Ravage and Decay of radiation fallout.
And when he died, whatever the circumstances, they would suddenly, all those elements that despised his unchecked power-they would invert their distrust and begin to float rumors that the Director himself was the victim of a wry homicide planned and carried out by unknown parties in the vast and layered webwork of the state.
This is how the Boss would finally draw some sympathy, an old man put to sleep in a complex scheme so expedient and deceitful as to be widely admired even as it was only half believed. And Clyde himself was already prepared to half believe it.
Edgar dead, pray God, not for ten, fifteen, twenty years yet.
Maybe the sixties would be over by then.
The woman in the gaudy mask said, "You think they'll be waiting outside, those creeps, to make me miserable all over again?"
The husband said, "It's nearly four a.m. Hey. They gotta sleep sometime."
At four a.m. they were waiting outside. Clyde and Edgar watched from the lobby. The last partygoers straggled out and the protesters rasped and chanted, wearing children's masks again.
An hour later it finally ended. Edgar and Clyde left by the main entrance and went down to the Cadillac as the spent trash of a day and a night in a great coastal city went wind-skidding through the streets.
The armored limousine rolled slowly back to the Waldorf.
Yes, the Director would finally get some sympathy from the same people who made jokes about them both. Smutty swishy jokes. But Edgar and Clyde were not a couple of old queens doddering on. They were men of sovereign authority. And Edgar did not intend to yield control anytime on this earth.
Clyde spotted the bug.
He glanced at Edgar, who sat mute and brooding in his sequined mask. He'd worn the mask steadily since dinner. Hard, cold, laconic, with all the private fury of some unassuageable pain, he wore the leather mask because it eased, if only briefly, the burden of control.
And when Clyde spotted the bug, the poky little Volkswagen with its incandescent doodles and whorls, he decided to say nothing to Edgar. The car was a hundred feet behind them, like a day-glo roach, slow and sleepless and clinging.
He said nothing to the Boss because the night had been filled with shock and distress and he wanted to absorb this final bodeful moment on his own. He was Junior after all, now and always, willingly, necessarily, however tired and befooled, the life companion and loyal second man.
5
This was Thursday. They'd first felt the full impact of the danger on Monday evening when the President addressed the nation on radio and television. On Tuesday they were told that Soviet ships were en route to Cuba with missiles and warheads to add to the number already installed on the island. Wednesday was tense. On Wednesday they found out that our naval blockade was in effect and that fourteen Soviet ships were nearing the quarantine line.
Now it was Thursday. On Thursday evening as SAC bombers carrying thermonuclear weapons circled the Med or flew Arctic routes across Greenland or hugged the western borders of North America, people rode home from work with the radio on or the newspaper up in their eyes.
And with darkness webbing down out of the broad and soaring sky over the lake, deeper into evening now, the night people were out, slipping past the bars and tonky clubs, mingling with tourists and conventioneers who were checking out the action. On the fringe streets they sidestepped taxis on the prowl and veered around the traffic of negotiated vice and they made their way to Rush Street, finally, where Mister Kelly's stood, a big-name room in Chicago's bouncing night.
Lenny Bruce came slouching down from the second-floor dressing room and walked a little bleary-eyed through the kitchen and out the swinging doors, where he did a sidle step onto the stage.
A waiter with a tray said, "It's a human zoo out there tonight."
Fifteen minutes into his act Lenny took a condom out of his pocket and tried to fit it over his furrowed tongue. Then he tried to talk though it, or out of it. Finally he dangled the item between his thumb and index finger, holding it away from his body, specimenlike-it's a dead jellyfish that has the reflex power to deliver one last spasmic sting.