The Dark Fantastic Read online

  Out of a novel I take pleasure in returning to every few years. South Wind by Norman Douglas. From all accounts he was an unpleasant fellow, but how much have those accounts been colored by the fact that when he sat down with pen and paper he was a remorseless truthteller?

  Glimmers of a passage in the book kept rising to mind. Something addressed to an acquaintance by the story’s protagonist, the Anglican Bishop of Bampopo in Africa. Something about the imaginary African tribesmen the good Bishop once served. I have the book before me now; I will present the passage verbatim.

  “And your friends, the Bulanga! To think that I once baptized three hundred of them in one day. And the very next week they ate up old Mrs. Richardson, our best lady preacher. The poor dear! We buried her riding boots, I remember. There was nothing else to bury ….”

  Uncanny.

  When I look out of any window of this study I see them up and down the block, the Bulanga of Witter Street.

  Not imaginary. Real. And that is the obscene truth of it.

  John Milano

  MONDAY, MILANO CAME INTO THE OFFICE AT NOON just in time to meet the thundering charge of thirtieth-floor personnel heading for the elevators and lunch. Willie was having lunch at his desk, a full-sized pizza with all the trimmings and a quart of beer.

  “Where’ve you been?” he said. “On those pictures?”

  “Uh-huh. Shaking the grapevine.”

  “How’s it look to you?”

  “Not too bad. I think we might owe Rauscher one.”

  “Yeah? Well, don’t ever let him know it. Only thing that asshole hates worse than insurance companies who pay off under the table is the agencies that do the paying off for them. That reminds me. The money part is settled. Pacifica’ll have it ready on forty-eight hours notice any time it’s called for. All you have to do, Johnny boy, is make sure we have to call for it. And that we wind up with a very big slice of it.”

  “Depends. Meanwhile we’ve got that fifteen thousand up front. Enjoy it.”

  “When you’ll be blowing it on expenses inside a week?” Willie was not altogether joking about it. “Wait a second,” he said as Milano headed for the door, five minutes alone with Willie amounting to an hour under a dental drill. “Suppose Rauscher’s faking it? Giving that Hale a bum steer just so’s any agency on the case would be up shit creek?”

  No surprise. After all, this was the Willie Watrous who was reputed to be so cagey that he wouldn’t enter a confessional without taking his lawyer along.

  Milano found Hy Greenwald in his cubicle, hard at work according to instructions. The floor was littered with files of agency reports, decks of index cards, and shoebox-sized plastic containers heaped with newspaper clippings.

  “Any of the pieces coming together?” Milano asked.

  “Maybe. But I’ve got some questions.”

  This was the first real test for Hy who had been with the agency only a few weeks and so far had served as Milano’s apprentice on an earn-while-you-learn basis. For all that beard and those granny glasses he was a bright boy, kept his eyes and ears open, and absorbed information like a sponge. At this rate, in a year or two he’d be ready to take himself off and hire out to another agency for twice the money Willie would be willing to pay him. It had happened before. Meanwhile questions were in order.

  “Whatever,” said Milano.

  “All right then. This cop in San Francisco – this Rauscher – takes a look around and says it’s a selective theft. What makes him so sure?”

  “Did you check out the inventory of the Grassie collection?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then let’s say that when nobody’s looking you sneak up to that collection some night with your shopping bag in hand, ready to hit the jackpot. You look around and along with some second-rate stuff you see a couple of Monets from his middle period, and two Cezannes, both gems. And of course those two Boudins. Now which do you load into your bag?”

  Hy weighed this. “You mean whoever it was didn’t pick the superstars. But those Boudins are only fourteen by sevens. Small and handy. Maybe that was their attraction.”

  “They’re both on panels, not canvas, and when it comes to walking out on the street with a million dollars worth of stolen art on you, panels are a stiff pain. Highly dangerous. And if you’re thinking, well, it’s easier to lift a panel off the wall than slice a canvas out of a frame, it’s not that much easier. Take my word for it.”

  “All right, I will. And you see it Rauscher’s way. You believe those paintings are heading in this direction right now.”

  “So the odds say. Now what’ve you got so far? Sticking to what I asked for.”

  Hy bent over his notes. “In the past couple of years, eighteen thefts of major works of the Boudin period – let’s call them pre-Impressionist – where they nailed the dealers in Europe who were handling them. The thefts were from collectors here and in Europe. Included some prime Courbet, Jongkind, and early Manet. Two dealers took the rap, a Gerard Ost and a Nassos Fountas.”

  “Bespoke dealers,” said Milano.

  “Fences,” said Hy.

  “I was being polite and high-toned.” Milano seated himself at the table and closed his eyes in reflection, conjuring up the images of a series of paintings – mental filing cards – which he flicked through his mind’s eye. A necessary exercise and, as bonus, a highly pleasurable one.

  “Well?” said Hy.

  “Gerard Ost,” said Milano.

  “Right. He and Fountas are both in jail now. In Switzerland.”

  “Figures. Anyhow, the way it goes is that some billionaire who plays strictly by his own rules – it’s pretty much South America and the Middle East nowadays – needs some pieces to round out his very private collection, except those pieces are not for sale. So guys like Ost and Fountas help solve that little problem. Now it looks like some fat cat out there is building himself a real nice pre-Impressionist show, and you can’t leave Boudin out of that, can you?” Milano pointed at the clutter on the table. “Did the name Rammaert turn up anywhere in that stuff? Wim Rammaert?”

  “No. Who’s he?”

  “Rammaert Gallery over on Fifty-seventh. Small, select, and, to those in the know, smelly. The interesting part is that Rammaert is Gerard Ost’s cousin.”

  “Oh?” Then Hy gave it added thought. “But Ost is in jail.”

  “Leaving someone in the family to fill in for him. They’ve got a very hot cousins’ club operating there.”

  “I see. Then this someone gives the order for the Boudins to Rammaert who lifts them—”

  “Has them lifted.”

  “Has them lifted and is supposed to make delivery to the billionaire customer. So now you get together with Rammaert for a deal before delivery can be made.”

  “Not that fast. If I show him my hand and he isn’t the guilty party, I’m wide open for disaster. He could have himself a real fun time stringing me along about a possible deal while some total stranger is stashing those Boudins away somewhere in downtown Kuwait. Or in somebody’s castle on the pampas.”

  Hy looked doubtful. “I don’t know. If I was Rammaert—”

  “I’m talking out of painful experience. I’ve been taken like that by Rammaert’s kind of people. Willie’ll gladly tell you about it any time you ask.”

  “Yeah, but if Rammaert is the one, what about him getting in touch here? You told Hale that’s how you’d handle it. Was that just talk?”

  “Not altogether. When word gets around that we’re interested in those paintings – and if Rammaert is the one – he might get in touch. Or he might not. But we don’t sit and wait. Right now, for instance, you’re taking a little trip to the Rammaert Gallery.”

  “Incognito, you mean.”

  “Just another bug-eyed college art major. See if he runs the place alone, or, if there’s help, how the help shapes up. Friendly and chatty? Knows the inventory? That kind of thing. And bring back any brochures. There might be a branch office listed at a foreign add
ress. Basel would be good. Ost worked out of Basel. Buenos Aires and Rio would be good. And be ready in case Rammaert asks you any questions.”

  “I’ll be wise as the serpent,” Hy said solemnly.

  “Don’t strain yourself,” Milano told him. “When it comes to being the serpent Rammaert’s got you outclassed all the way.”

  He was at his own desk indexing descriptions of some lost, strayed or stolen rare coins when Hy returned two hours later looking pleased with himself. Yes, the place was open and Rammaert was there but not on the scene. He and Mrs. Rammaert were in their apartment, one flight up over the gallery. Rammaert did some extensive traveling on business now and then, but he hadn’t been out of town for several weeks. Nor his wife.

  Best of all, there were branch offices, three of them. One in London, one in Cannes, one in Basel. All listed in the gallery’s fancy brochure.

  “Talk about pieces fitting together,” Hy said. “London for the petrodollars, Cannes for the gaucho gold, and Basel for the numbered bank accounts.”

  “Very shrewd surmise,” Milano said. “But somebody there had to give you this stuff. Who?”

  “Kind of a triple threat. Receptionist, secretary, guide. Not that she’s any art expert. She was faking it. Making echo talk.”

  “Belgian, by any chance? Another one of Rammaert’s helpful cousins?”

  “American,” said Hy. “Black and very beautiful. Her name’s Christine Bailey.”

  Charles Witter Kirwan

  A GOOD NIGHT LAST NIGHT, A GOOD DAY SO FAR.

  Slept soundly, woke with the realization that I was suffering almost no pain. I sometimes see that pain as a venomous snake coiled in its nest under my breastbone and slithering out along wellworn paths through my body. Now the snake appears to be coiled tight in the nest biding its time.

  Only biding its time, I know that. Any minute, it may stir again and I’ll have a different tune to play.

  Oh yes.

  I’ve had a few such gratifying spells during the past months. Had even been fooled a couple of times into allowing thoughts of possible remission to enter my mind. No more of that gullibility. Never.

  Strange thing, I didn’t rejoice in those thoughts, I was terrified by them. All my strength now stems from the finality of my death sentence. Cancel it – even postpone it – and I would be nothing.

  Less than nothing.

  I can savor this easing of pain though. Cancer does offer its victim that one pleasure: there are actually moments when he may forget it’s devouring him. My wife enjoyed a few of them before the very bad final stretch. Lymphatic cancer, that was. Such medical sadism as radium and chemotherapy didn’t help in that final stretch either.

  Poor miserable puking soul.

  Doctors. God’s witnesses on earth to the joys of brutal, greedy, unrepressed egomania.

  Never mind.

  I’ll just say that I woke up feeling comparatively well and it showed. An objective observer remarked on it. Mrs. Bailey, my Bulanga domestic, here for the Tuesday housecleaning, Tuesday being the day reserved for me. To Mrs. Bailey – to all the world except those doctors who put me through their tests – I have a bad bronchitis. Mrs. Bailey attended to my wife before the hospital phase; now she is inclined to attend me and my cough. So I invented the bronchitis to keep her at bay, bearing as well as I can her Aunt Jemima solicitude.

  In fact, she is as much an Aunt Jemima as I am a bronchitis patient. She has the face and swollen proportions, she can ooze sweetness as the sugar maple oozes sap, but, a true Bulanga, she is the born petty thief and easy liar. Or a magician. A silver creamer is found missing from its shelf. A convincing anguish is expressed about this by its owner. The next day, the creamer miraculously reappears in a sideboard where it had never been stored. In another case, eight half-dollars, the last of a trove in a kitchen canister suddenly becomes seven. No public notice is taken. The seven becomes six.

  In her final year, my wife had her own bedroom, and I knew her personal possessions well. After her death it was our teary Bulanga who cleaned up that disheveled and sour-smelling room. When I got around to gathering together those possessions I saw that she had not lost on the deal.

  But things even up. Yes they do. Because with an irony Norman Douglas himself would have relished, Mrs. Bailey has of her own free will given me the use of her pet, her chief concern in life, her Lorena. Planted the idea in my head by her incessant talk about Lorena this and Lorena that and the trouble bringin’ up a nice girl in today’s world, keepin’ ’em away from drugs and such and from them turkeys, them studs, you know what I mean, Perfessor, who only look to get a girl in a mess. The kind shows her a fat wad of green and say, baby, you just point at anything in that window and it’s all yours. Girl needs some money of her own, else she buys that talk, you know what I mean? And who got the money to give her, the way things are? Even with Christine willin’ to chip in. When she got it to chip in.

  So the litany. The old Charles Witter Kirwan would have heard it through, outwardly sympathetic, inwardly twitching with impatience. The new Charles Witter Kirwan, under death sentence, twitched himself into action.

  Fearfully of course. With apprehension. But then, can anyone abruptly decide to transform his most heated fantasies into glorious reality without apprehension? I couldn’t. Not even as ray new self. So I made my offer hesitantly, and, an added irony, I think it was my hesitance, my evident embarrassment, that told the doting mother the offer was simon-pure.

  Certainly it was plausible. There are at least a couple of thousand books in the house. I wanted them catalogued and if Lorena thought she could handle the job, well, it was all hers. Say, an hour every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday right after school. And I’d be willing to pay five dollars for each hour. It was less than I’d have to pay a professional, of course, so I’d be making a saving and Lorena would have her pocket money.

  Could anything have been more plausible?

  And, in fact, when this sullen Bulanga maiden first appeared for duty I did introduce her to the stack of blank index cards and pencil and pencil-sharpener and to the brimming bookcases scattered through the building, most notably to those in the second-floor tower room, my study, as it had been my grandfather’s, where work was to commence.

  One card for each book. Author’s last name, first name, title of book, publisher, date of publication. All explained very solemnly. Any questions?

  “Yeah. How many of these things supposed to get done in an hour?”

  “As many as you can without making mistakes. There’s no rush.”

  “An’ I get paid off after every time? No waitin’?”

  “Paid in cash. No waiting.”

  She worked. I sat at my desk pretending to take notes from a textbook before me and watched. If she knew I was furtively watching, she gave no sign of it. It was gratifying to observe that Lorena, only fifteen, only a second-year student at Erasmus Hall High School, had already mastered the alphabet, a rare achievement among the Bulanga youth. It was even more gratifying just to observe Lorena, all skintight jeans and revealing T-shirt, at this close range. Shoes off after awhile. Dark-skinned, pink-soled, beautifully-shaped feet.

  No time for a lengthy courtship here. How well I knew that. Yet, when the moment came two days later to make my move I didn’t have the courage to do it. I hit bottom afterward. I went through a shivering, sweating, self-hating emotional crisis questioning whether this supposedly tough new Charles Witter Kirwan wasn’t just a fraud, just a cancerous version of the old futile, daydreaming Charles Witter Kirwan.

  Foolish, really.

  So in preparation for the girl’s next appearance I took my courage from the bottle as my stepfather so often used to do. Although I was not at my best that day I forced myself to abstain from the usual steady dose of Percodan, not sure how alcohol would mix with it, and at lunch put away almost a full bottle of wine. It worked. It laid the old Charles Witter Kirwan to rest forever.

  It did not ease my physical p
ain. I remember that when I—

  Yes.

  When I started to lean back casually in my chair as a preface to what I would say I instantly discovered that this was like being stretched on the rack.

  So.

  So I leaned forward, resting my arms on the desk. Lorena, pencil in hand, was using the floor as her desk, kneeling there head down, rounded buttocks high in the air.

  I said, “Do you go out with boys, Lorena?”

  She cocked her head toward me. So far we had exchanged no more than a dozen words altogether, and those had concerned only her make-work. Yet there was no surprise in her face at this overture, only a narrow-eyed speculation. The Bulanga instinct. The scent of oestrus coming downwind. And no fear of ole whitey either when you’re twice as quick and strong as he looks to be.

  “You seen me goin’ with boys,” she said at last. “Right outside there.”

  So I had. I said, “I didn’t mean that way. I meant, do you sleep with any of them?”

  That startled her. She slowly stood up, measuring me even more intently. “You drunk?”

  “No.”

  “You sure smell like it.”

  “I’m not drunk. Just curious. Did any of your boy friends ever see you naked?”

  “Hey, man—”

  “I have.” I pointed at the window. “Right across the way there. Sometimes you forget to pull down your bedroom shade.”

  She glanced at the window, then turned back to me with curled lip. “Big deal.”

  “It could be, Lorena. A big money deal for you. I liked what I saw. I’m ready to pay to see more of it.” I laid the money out on the desk as if I were laying out a hand of solitaire, fifty dollars in tens. I had carefully calculated the amount, calculated that if everything went well, stakes would have to be increased later and this was exactly the right bait for the start. Not too little, not too much.

  Yes.

  More important, I was prepared for anything going wrong at this point. For the least hint of rejection, which could mean mama would be told about all this. So, if the least trouble impended I must be ready to reach mama at once. With outrage. I am sorry to say, Mrs. Bailey, that I badly misjudged Lorena. For her to demand more money when I’m being generous as it is, and then to threaten that if I didn’t give her more she’d tell you I tried to get her clothes off and make love to her—