Eight Million Ways to Die

"Oh, was it? What was he doing there?"



"Hoping to get lucky, I suppose. You never know who'll show up at a funeral."



"Not many people showed up at this one."



"Just a handful."



"I'm glad we were there."



"Uh-huh."



I bought her a cup of coffee, then put her in a cab. She insisted she could take the subway but I got her into a cab and made her take ten bucks for the fare.



A lobby attendant at Parke Bernet directed me to the second-floor gallery where Friday's African and Oceanic art was on display. I found Chance in front of a set of glassed-in shelves housing a collection of eighteen or twenty small gold figurines. Some represented animals while others depicted human beings and various household articles. One I recall showed a man sitting on his haunches and milking a goat. The largest would fit easily in a child's hand, and many of them had a droll quality about them.



"Ashanti gold weights," Chance explained. "From the land the British called the Gold Coast. It's Ghana now. You see plated reproductions in the shops. Fakes. These are the real thing."



"Are you planning to buy them?"



He shook his head. "They don't speak to me. I try to buy things that do. I'll show you something."



We crossed the room. A bronze head of a woman stood mounted on a four-foot pedestal. Her nose was broad and flattened, her cheekbones pronounced. Her throat was so thickly ringed by bronze necklaces that the overall appearance of the head was conical.



"A bronze sculpture of the lost Kingdom of Benin," he announced. "The head of a queen. You can tell her rank by the number of necklaces she's wearing. Does she speak to you, Matt? She does to me."



I read strength in the bronze features, cold strength and a merciless will.



"Know what she says? She says, 'Nigger, why you be lookin' at me dat way? You know you ain't got de money to take me home.' " He laughed. "The presale estimate is forty to sixty thousand dollars."



"You won't be bidding?"



"I don't know what I'll be doing. There are a few pieces I wouldn't mind owning. But sometimes I come to auctions the way some people go to the track even when they don't feel like betting. Just to sit in the sun and watch the horses run. I like the way an auction room feels. I like to hear the hammer drop. You seen enough? Let's go."



His car was parked at a garage on Seventy-eighth Street. We rode over the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge and through Long Island City. Here and there street prostitutes stood along the curb singly or in pairs.



"Not many out last night," he said. "I guess they feel safer in daylight."



"You were here last night?"



"Just driving around. He picked up Cookie around here, then drove out Queens Boulevard. Or did he take the expressway? I don't guess it matters."



"No."



We took Queens Boulevard. "Want to thank you for coming to the funeral," he said.



"I wanted to come."



"Fine-looking woman with you."



"Thank you."



"Jan, you say her name was?"



"That's right."



"You go with her or-"



"We're friends."



"Uh-huh." He braked for a light. "Ruby didn't come."



"I know."



"What I told you was a bunch of shit. I didn't want to contradict what I told the others. Ruby split, she packed up and went."



"When did this happen?"



"Sometime yesterday, I guess. Last night I had a message on my service. I was running around all yesterday, trying to get this funeral organized. I thought it went okay, didn't you?"



"It was a nice service."



"That's what I thought. Anyway, there's a message to call Ruby and a 415 area code. That's San Francisco. I thought, huh? And I called, and she said she had decided to move on. I thought it was some kind of a joke, you know? Then I went over there and checked her apartment, and all her things were gone. Her clothes. She left the furniture. That makes three empty apartments I got, man. Big housing shortage, nobody can find a place to live, and I'm sitting on three empty apartments. Something, huh?"



"You sure it was her you spoke to?"



"Positive."



"And she was in San Francisco?"



"Had to be. Or Berkeley or Oakland or some such place. I dialed the number, area code and all. She had to be out there to have that kind of number, didn't she?"



"Did she say why she left?"



"Said it was time to move on. Doing her inscrutable oriental number."



"You think she was afraid of getting killed?"



"Powhattan Motel," he said, pointing. "That's the place, isn't it?"



"That's the place."



"And you were out here to find the body."



"It had already been found. But I was out here before they moved it."



"Must have been some sight."



"It wasn't pretty."



"That Cookie worked alone. No pimp."



"That's what the police said."



"Well, she coulda had a pimp that they didn't know about. But I talked to some people. She worked alone, and if she ever knew Duffy Green, nobody ever heard tell of it." He turned right at the corner. "We'll head back to my house, okay?"



"All right."



"I'll make us some coffee. You liked that coffee I fixed last time, didn't you?"



"It was good."



"Well, I'll fix us some more."



His block in Greenpoint was almost as quiet by day as it had been by night. The garage door ascended at the touch of a button. He lowered it with a second touch of the button and we got out of the car and walked on into the house. "I want to work out some," he said. "Do a little lifting. You like to work out with weights?"



"I haven't in years."



"Want to go through the motions?"



"I think I'll pass."



My name is Matt and I pass.



"Be a minute," he said.



He went into a room, came out wearing a pair of scarlet gym shorts and carrying a hooded terry-cloth robe. We went to the room he'd fitted out as a gym, and for fifteen or twenty minutes he worked out with loose weights and on the Universal machine. His skin became glossy with perspiration as he worked and his heavy muscles rippled beneath it.



"Now I want ten minutes in the sauna," he said. "You didn't earn the sauna by pumping the iron, but we could grant a special dispensation in your case."



"No thanks."



"Want to wait downstairs then? Be more comfortable."



I waited while he took a sauna and shower. I studied some of his African sculpture, thumbed through a couple of magazines. He emerged in due course wearing light blue jeans and a navy pullover and rope sandals. He asked if I was ready for coffee. I told him I'd been ready for half an hour.



"Won't be long," he said. He started it brewing, then came back and perched on a leather hassock. He said, "You want to know something? I make a lousy pimp."



"I thought you were a class act. Restraint, dignity, all of that."



"I had six girls and I got three. And Mary Lou'll be leaving soon."



"You think so?"



"I know it. She's a tourist, man. You ever hear how I turned her out?"



"She told me."



"First tricks she did, she got to tell herself she was a reporter, a journalist, this was all research. Then she decided she was really into it. Now she's finding out a couple of things."



"Like what?"



"Like you can get killed, or kill yourself. Like when you die there's twelve people at your funeral. Not much of a turnout for Sunny, was there?"



"It was on the small side."



"You could say that. You know something? I could have filled that fucking room three times over."



"Probably."



"Not just probably. Definitely." He stood up, clasped his hands behind his back, paced the floor. "I thought about that. I could have taken their biggest suite and filled it. Uptown people, pimps and whores, and the ringside crowd. Could have mentioned it to people in her building. Might be she had some neighbors who would have wanted to come. But see, I didn't want too many people."



"I see."



"It was really for the girls. The four of them. I didn't know they'd be down to three when I organized the thing. Then I thought, shit, it might be pretty grim, just me and the four girls. So I told a couple of other people. It was nice of Kid Bascomb to come, wasn't it?"



"Yes."



"I'll get that coffee."



He came back with two cups. I took a sip, nodded my approval.



"You'll take a couple pounds home with you."



"I told you last time. It's no good to me in a hotel room."



"So you give it to your lady friend. Let her make you a cup of the best."



"Thanks."



"You just drink coffee, right? You don't drink booze?"



"Not these days."



"But you used to."



And probably will again, I thought. But not today.



"Same as me," he said. "I don't drink, don't smoke dope, don't do any of that shit. Used to."



"Why'd you stop?"



"Didn't go with the image."



"Which image? The pimp image?"



"The connoisseur," he said. "The art collector."



"How'd you learn so much about African art?"



"Self-taught," he said. "I read everything I could find, went around to the dealers and talked to them. And I had a feel for it." He smiled at something. "Long time ago I went to college."



"Where was that?"



"Hofstra. I grew up in Hempstead. Born in Bedford-Stuyvesant, but my folks bought a house when I was two, three years old. I don't even remember Bed-Stuy." He had returned to the hassock and he was leaning back, his hands clasped around his knees for balance. "Middle-class house, lawn to mow and leaves to rake and a driveway to shovel. I can slip in and out of the ghetto talk, but it's mostly a shuck. We weren't rich but we lived decent. And there was enough money to send me to Hofstra."



"What did you study?"



"Majored in art history. And didn't learn shit about African art there, incidentally. Just that dudes like Braque and Picasso got a lot of inspiration from African masks, same as the Impressionists got turned on by Japanese prints. But I never took a look at an African carving until I got back from Nam."



"When were you over there?"



"After my third year of college. My father died, see. I could have finished all the same but, I don't know, I was crazy enough to drop out of school and enlist." His head was back and his eyes were closed. "Did a ton of drugs over there. We had everything. Reefer, hash, acid. What I liked, I liked heroin. They did it different there. You used to get it in cigarettes, used to smoke it."



"I never heard of that."



"Well, it's wasteful," he said. "But it was so cheap over there. They grew the opium in those countries and it was cheap. You get a real muzzy high that way, smoking skag in a cigarette. I was stoned that way when I got the news that my mother died. Her pressure was always high, you know, and she had a stroke and died. I wasn't nodding or anything but I was high from a skag joint and I got the news and I didn't feel anything, you know? And when it wore off and I was straight again I still didn't feel anything. First time I felt it was this afternoon, sitting there listening to some hired preacher reading Ralph Waldo Emerson over a dead whore." He straightened up and looked at me. "I sat there and wanted to cry for my mama," he said, "but I didn't. I don't guess I'll ever cry for her."