Vital Parts (51 page)

“Claude Humbold,” said Reinhart, referring to his old realtor boss who had been the prime mover in the sewer swindle, “Claude got away scot-free, though, didn't he? I hear he has the biggest used-car dealership in Southern California.”

“Nothing could have been easier than dealing with Claude,” Splendor said. “If you recall, when we were blasting for the long-delayed sewer excavation on my home street, Mohawk, a little too much dynamite was employed and we lost half the block. Well, of course, Claude personally owned these houses and did not do badly in his rents, persons of color not having a great deal of choice in their abodes in those days. It was either the West Side or hit the road.” Splendor waved his spiderweb hand. “I'm not sniveling, as you well know. I never laid around with a pint of Thunderbird in a paper bag, collecting my relief payments and sourly spitting into the gutter.” He cleared his throat and, writhing up against the white-pipe headrail, reached for a glass upon the bedside table.

“Here,” said Reinhart. “Let me.”

Splendor waved him off. “You don't know what a satisfaction it is after all these weeks to have the strength again to attend to simple functions.” Not only did he grasp the tumbler. He managed to fill it from a pitcher heavy with a good four inches of water, though his strained tan arm looked like a working model of stark radius and ulna.

Reinhart had not come here to dig up old dirt. He was thrilled by Splendor's implication.

He asked: “You feel results after only a couple of days?”

Splendor displayed, as a skeleton might, how man drinks. Reinhart followed the progress of the water down through the hollow between the clavicles. His friend then breathed for a while.

At last Splendor said: “Indubitably. I can almost feel those fresh cells putting the malignant ones to rout. Vitality, Carlo, will always win. We tend to forget that, with our easy emphasis on morbidity, but it is the law of life.”

“Easy?”

“Lazy,” said Splendor. “Dying is hardly a positive procedure. Contrary to the old myths, death is an absence and not a presence, not a hooded figure hacking you down with a scythe—actually an attractive image: were Death an antagonistic personage, intent on imposing his will, we would have known how to defeat him long since. It is nothing, the void at the end of a long incline of passivity, the goal of a negative momentum, a state unknown to any living thing but man.”

Reinhart frowned. His earlier peevishness had not evaporated before it was replenished.

“All things die.”

“Only man
knows
he will, in the words of the sage.”

“Oh.” It was one of those semantic sleights-of-hand. You're not unhappy, you just think you are. He hasn't died but gone on to a better life.

Reinhart forced a grin and said heartily: “It's good news that you feel better.”

“You don't believe it,” said Splendor, with more amusement than reproach. “You think Professor Streckfuss is either a charlatan or a maniac.”

Reinhart was embarrassed. “Hell,” he began, “hell,” petered out. He started all over. “I never said that. I don't know what to think. But when you get into a corner you will take any exit that is offered. He might turn out to be the greatest genius in the history of medicine.”

“He has my vote,” Splendor stated decisively.

Reinhart would not be such a swine as to point out that it was technically impossible for new cells to do more than swim around in the tissue for the first few days. Even the antihistamines he had once taken for an allergic reaction to a cough medicine showed no results for forty-eight hours, and they were soluble in water, absorbable by the blood. The goat cells were the material, palpable, concrete stuff of life, flesh indeed, alien—far more alien than a heart transplanted from one human being to another, and most of the cardiac recipients had died.

He wondered whether he should tell Splendor of his decision to be frozen. Decided not to: the poor devil might feel jealous.

“Why,” asked Splendor, “do you continue to work with him if you distrust him?”

“I had no choice,” Reinhart answered in a change of tense.

Splendor flowed back down into a supine position with a serpentine ease that contrasted with his prior efforts to rise.

Reinhart was now ready to hear more scandal. “You were speaking of Claude Humbold?”

“Yes. The way it worked out was that Claude transferred that West Side property to me.”

“That was nice. But if I know Claude, he had some cunning motive. He probably ended up with more money than if he had kept it.”

“Let me just say this.” Splendor's tongue made a big boil in his cheek. “His name was never found on any kind of document.”

“That figures.”

“And neither was yours.”

Reinhart studied the meaning in Splendor's lowered eyelids.

Splendor went on: “You were titular president of Cosmopolitan Sewers, the dummy firm hiding Claude and the Gibbon Boys.”

“And you were vice-president and chief engineer, as I remember.”

“You,” said Splendor, “signed the contracts and subcontracts, the invoices and bills and the rest of the blizzard of paper. Before leaving for California, Claude burned all of that.”

“That was nice of him. Claude wasn't the worst man in the world.” Reinhart had never wondered why he himself was not investigated. At the time of the probe he was operating the television shop and doing so badly as to be totally distracted by his losses. He had not known at the outset, when Claude maneuvered him into being front man, that the sewer project was a swindle When he caught on, he and Splendor had made a serious effort to build a usable facility, ending with the blast that excavated most of Mohawk Street.

“Wait a minute,” Reinhart said now. “We picked up your son at your old house the other day—”

Anticipating him, Splendor said: “I restored the area long since. What do you think of that apartment house?”

“I didn't see it.” Sweet's car had come from the other direction. Reinhart had also been so apprehensive about entering a Negro neighborhood in this day and age that he might have overlooked the landing of a flying saucer.

Splendor frowned. “About all that's left in its original form over there is our old plantation. Call me sentimental but whatever the cost in dollars and cents I couldn't raze the old home where I used to listen to
Amos 'n' Andy
.”

That had a bitter ring, but when Reinhart stared at him, Splendor was looking into the past. “I refused for years to believe the simulators were Caucasian. And the back yard, site of many a Western gunfight and once, with a cast of at least six or seven children, Custer's Last Stand. I was armed with a cavalry saber made from a length of trellis lath. Many years later I read a debunking, derisive sort of book which stated that Custer did not possess his saber at the Little Big Horn, contrary to the depiction in the famous painting.” Splendor said reproachfully: “Why must they destroy all the great old images?”

Reinhart shook his head. In his new way of looking at things he did not want to dwell on this.

“There are even those,” said Splendor, “who would have you believe that Julius Caesar, that magnificent tragic figure, was a homosexual.”

“Frankly, I don't care one way or the other,” Reinhart said bluntly. “I am having myself frozen.”

There, it was out, and no doubt sounded so outlandish that Splendor would ignore it.

And he did. He said: “Claude did not obliterate those incriminating materials out of the goodness of his heart. That was part of the deal, along with the deeding to me of the West Side property. We had a little ceremony around my charcoal grill: he burned the documents and I in turn threw in the tape recordings made from the tap on his phone.” Splendor chuckled. “My cousin,” he said, “was a serviceman with the telephone company.”

All at once Reinhart had the conviction that Splendor would recover.

He said: “Your son told me he bought this house for you, but I'll bet you paid cash.”

“Raymond will say almost anything. He has discovered the technique of bold assertion, in which the content is almost irrelevant. He is American to the core: to
say
is to
be
. You and I make a distinction between rhetoric and reality. Perhaps we are essentially foreigners, Carlo.”

Reinhart said: “Yes, I have had the same thought about my boy.”

“I put my trust in land,” said Splendor. “As soon as I get back on my feet I am going to begin to acquire this whole neighborhood.”

Reinhart asked soberly, but not sadly: “And make it all black?”

“Blue, green, or polka dot,” Splendor cried. “I'm going to make it all money.” Which had also been Claude Humbold's bedrock democratic principle, and it was actually anything but mean.

Reinhart stood up. “I must be running along, old friend.”

“Surely not before you get the grand tour,” Splendor said. “I have done some remodeling of your old abode, Carlo. A second bathroom, and the basement is pine-paneled and floored with that impervious synthetic carpeting.” He shouted: “Grace!”

For an instant Reinhart believed this cry some kind of religious invocation. But soon the plump nurse appeared from the hallway.

“I indulged myself, Carlo,” said Splendor. “I also installed a sauna, but I have not yet been able to use it.” He gestured at the nurse. “Did you meet the other day? Or did I forget the amenities in a concern with my then incipient mortality? My wife, Grace—Carlo Reinhart, an old, dear friend. You have heard me speak of him on many occasions.”

She had a generous smile. Reinhart was reminded of Splendor's sister, years ago. Why were Negro smiles especially gratifying? Suggested the good things, the forgiving materials: leather, wood, copper; or the luxurious tastes, like chocolate. Or merely relieved you of the dark apprehensions, with a show of white.

While he looked at her teeth, Grace said: “You and Sylvester must have been quite the scamps.”

Reinhart shook her soft strong hand, and turned to Splendor.

“Now tell me the truth,” Splendor said, beating him out again. “Does Sylvester Gordon Mainwaring sound like me? So I changed it to Splendor Gallant. At least I kept the family name. Raymond has become Captain Storm. We Mainwarings are all self-invented.”

“What ever became of your sister Loretta?” asked Reinhart, referring to the most beautiful girl he had ever seen on earth. He had never heard her speak.

“Married, with three children, and she is as saucy as ever,” said Splendor. “In a few weeks we'll all get together for dinner. I miss real food. The Professor's chemical potions are not exactly tournedos Rossini. Grace, I think Carlo would like a look-around.”

Reinhart was suddenly desperate. “No, I really don't have time today. Another time. We'll have a good time.” He was stuck on the word. Hastily he shook hands with Splendor and then again with Grace, and fled to the door.

“Don't stay away twenty years again,” Splendor said.

“I won't,” Reinhart lied, and went out.

The Black Assassins' car was parked next to his outside, and Captain Storm was just getting out. Night had now settled in, and Reinhart could not be sure of Storm's expression, with the young man's back to the street lamp.

“Hi,” Reinhart said.

“Do I know you?”

Reinhart had forgotten his wig and new shape. He identified himself.

Storm said: “That is hardly thrilling information.”

“Look here,” said Reinhart. “You got no quarrel with me. I am merely being civil. Why don't you come off this shit?”

“Of course you are. Civility is white, and so are you. But I am black, as you can see, or perhaps you cannot: it is after dark. I happen to believe that it is degrading and evil to pretend to be what you are not.”

“Then how do
you
greet one another?”

“It's no concern of yours, whatever,” Storm said. “Am I in violation of some city ordinance? Is there a law requiring all citizens to say ‘Hi' on passing in the night?”

Reinhart stood quietly.

“Is it illegal to walk around with a black face after the darkness has fallen?” Storm went on.

“Aren't you being childish?”

“I am obsessed by legality,” said Storm. “I never break the law. I won't even step off the curb, downtown, until the green ‘Walk' sign is fully lighted. And when I buy a pillow I wouldn't think of ripping off that cloth tag that says it is against the law to remove it. I never put turpentine in an old whiskey bottle because, as is embossed on the base, it must not be reused on pain of violating the law.”

Reinhart said: “Oh, those things don't apply—”

“You're never going to get me on anything,” said Storm. “I am a conformist. I
comply
, man! I pay cash for everything, and the draft board has the cardiogram, made by a member of the AMA in good standing, on which my heart murmur is registered. I am a lecturer in black studies at the municipal university, and deductions from my salary are duly made according to income-tax and social-security regulations, health plan, insurance, and all of it.”

“OK,” said Reinhart.

“You will look all your life to find a better citizen than I,” said Storm. “And now, unless you can cite authority for obstructing the public sidewalk, I will pass across it and go into a private house on a personal mission.”

“
Vaya con Dios
,” Reinhart said and stepped aside. He had at last got a clue to Captain Storm, née Raymond Mainwaring, and if he still found it difficult to like him, he saw no reason why he should. He did not dislike him and he did not fear him and he did not pity him. Which should be enough for anybody, especially nowadays.

In those movies about doomed men there is never enough time. Yet by late afternoon of the first day Reinhart had satisfied all his true appetites by encapsulating them in the E-Type Jag, taking them down the highway at a hundred and forty mph, and abandoning the wreck. And by mid-evening had disposed of such obligations as could be said to apply to a man whom nobody wanted, by visiting Splendor and finding him prosperous and, probably, in the process of recovery. If a Negro could, while pretending to be shiftless and perhaps even mentally defective, outwit Claude Humbold and amass a tidy fortune in real estate, he could no doubt whip cancer. With the help of an unlikely Swiss-German-Jew who chopped up goats and froze monkeys, financed by a man whose money was tied up in cocoa beans which were actually gravel.