Agnes Among the Gargoyles Read online

  Wegeman takes over the mayor's microphone. "I think we've heard enough crap," he says, and the crowd hoots in agreement. "Let's get this fucking show on the road. I'm freezing my nuts off."

  The mayor wrinkles his puffy eyes and manages a smile. Of course, heh, heh, he and Weege are always putting each other on this way. He shakes a playful finger at the Great Man. "I'll get you for this, Ron."

  "Fuck you."

  Agnes steels herself. She almost enjoys it when Wegeman makes the mayor eat shit. She reminds herself that boorishness in the public arena can be attractive simply because it seems a genuine human response and not the creation of some press agent. But flatulence is just as genuine, and Agnes wouldn't like it if Wegeman farted into the p.a. system.

  Agnes has one hand in her bag. She fondles Gandalf. Wegeman's goons don't pay any attention to her.

  Wegeman holds up a model of the new building. He puts it to his crotch. "Yes, we did use my dick as the model for this," he says.

  The laughter is deafening.

  He is a truly ugly man, thinks Agnes, uglier even than the buildings he erects. He is pathologically dirty-mouthed; he says fuck in a way that wrenches from it every guttural, hocking nuance.

  The image of Wegeman and his breathtaking wife Madelaine arriving at some charity function or another appears on the evening news as inevitably as the weather map. With her French twist and high, noble forehead, Madelaine is one classy woman. Her husband is a man of the streets. He is physically repulsive. He has a moon face and splayed nose and jack o'lantern teeth. He wears his hair in an oily pompadour. A spit curl bobs against his forehead like a worm on a hook.

  "Let's get in out of the cold and do some serious drinking," says Wegeman. Agnes grips the gun in her bag. She waits for her moment. Wegeman turns away. He runs his hand through his greasy hair.

  Shots ring out.

  His bodyguards are down. Wegeman has been shot in the leg. The gun fires again. A shot hits him in the chest, driving him against the rostrum.

  Agnes can't believe it. The gunman is standing not ten feet from her. He is a lithe man of about 50. He wears a peacoat and an earring and severe rimless glasses. His gray hair is cut in a flattop.

  Only in New York, thinks Agnes bitterly. If you're not first in this town you're last.

  The man takes aim at the helpless Wegeman. He gets ready to fire the third shot, the one that will surely kill.

  Wegeman, bleeding from the chest, gives his assailant the finger.

  Taken aback, the gunman lowers his weapon for an instant, and Agnes acts instinctively to stop the carnage. She grabs the man from behind and immobilizes him with a blow to the solar plexus—a vicious version of the Heimlich Maneuver that she picked up in her Tae Kwon Do class. She flips him over her shoulder. He lands hard, but the pistol stays in his hand. The barrel is pointed right at Agnes. She freezes. The man looks at her. He sits up, puts the gun to his temple and fires, covering the approaching cops with blood and fluid and brain tissue.

  Cops and reporters and security people are everywhere. Wegeman points at Agnes and swoons. The cops grab Agnes's arms and hustle her away. She clutches her bag to her chest. The police shove her into the back of a squad car and get in themselves. Wedged between police officers, Agnes is shaking violently. The cop on her left slides his hat to the back of his head and sneers at her.

  "Why'd you do that, lady?" he asks her.

  "That cocksucker evicted my mother."

  Chapter Four

  Someone has decided that the way to shore up the New York City Police Department is to make the precinct houses look the way they did in the days when there wasn't so much crime. On the day Wegeman is shot, restoration of the 17th Precinct house is nearing completion. The workmen are preparing to mount the twin green globes, each etched with the numeral 17, that will flank the entrance.

  Agnes is questioned in a small room beside a toilet. The cops trip over themselves making sure that she is comfortable. It seems to hurt them that she won't have a second glazed cruller. She is asked the same questions over and over. The assailant has not yet been identified. Did Agnes notice him prior to the shooting? Did he say anything to her before taking himself out of the picture?

  Agnes is relieved to find out that no one cares why she was at the ceremonies in the first place. No one wants to look in her bag. The Parallel Plot Theory hasn't occurred to anyone.

  The mayor and his entourage arrive.

  "I was just at the hospital," the mayor announces. "Weege is out of danger."

  He grips Agnes's hand. The mayor's hands are small and bloodless, like those tiny Latex monster hands kids wear on their key chains.

  "Agnes Travertine, it's a pleasure to meet you," says the mayor. "Crime would certainly cease to be a problem in our great city if more New Yorkers had what you have."

  "What's that?" Agnes asks.

  "Tell her, Chief."

  A look of horror crosses the face of Chief of Detectives Larry Codd. Finally he hazards a guess. "Knowledge of Oriental combat techniques?"

  "No, no!" barks the mayor. "I'm talking about a willingness to get involved."

  "Oh, that," says Chief Codd.

  "And good instincts," adds the mayor. "Chief, could you use her on the force?"

  "Sure, I guess. I mean, I could ease her way."

  "Oh, please consider it, Agnes," says the mayor. "I could guarantee you a badge in three months. We're always waiving requirements and test scores for one reason or another. For you, we'll waive everything."

  "No thanks," says Agnes. "I'll quit while I'm ahead."

  The mayor grows suddenly pensive. "Most people would have waited for the police to take care of things. You jumped right in."

  "And we're glad she did,." says the chief.

  "Yes," says the mayor, gnawing a fingertip. "It's a good thing she didn't wait for the police, isn't it?"

  Chief Codd is stung. "We can't be everywhere, sir."

  "Oh, I don't blame you, chief," says the mayor, clapping the chief on the back. "You're not in the business of deterrence."

  The chief is wounded. "We like to think we are."

  "Oh, of course you are," says the mayor warmly. "It's just that—oh, I go to crime scenes every day. I watch your people collecting evidence. I see them bagging and measuring and taking casts. They're like a bunch of hobbyists gone berserk. It all seems so hopeless."

  Chief Codd doesn't know what to say. "We do our best."

  The mayor punches his palm with his fist. "I want an addition to the penal code. I want a stiff anti-assassination statute. I want New York to have the harshest penalties in the country for offing celebrities."

  The sun sets. The print reporters and wire service people get in and out of their cars. They complain about being forced to wait outside the precinct. Arthur Tollivetti of the News climbs up on one of the scaffolds being used by the men sandblasting the building. He is hoping for a look inside. The cops force him down. A workman packing up to go home accuses Tollivetti of stealing a drill. Words are exchanged. There is some shoving. In the melee, one of the brand-new globes destined for the precinct entrance falls and shatters.

  The mayor, Chief Codd, Agnes, and Wegeman's corporation counsel, Bob Syker, appear outside for a press briefing.

  Chief Codd says that the gunman has not yet been identified.

  Syker says that Ron is doing well. He reads from a statement prepared by the doctors detailing the pathways of the bullets. He reports that the first thing the Great Man asked for upon regaining consciousness was a knish from Leo Fein's on Delancey.

  Agnes slips back into the precinct.

  Syker finishes and follows her in. "Are you all right?"

  "I don't want to talk to them," says Agnes.

  "Why not?" says Syker. "If you don't mind my asking."

  "I don't like the way people in the news look," she tells him. "When your boss reopened that skating rink in Midwood, I watched a bunch of ten-year-olds being interviewed at the hot chocol
ate stand. I watched those children and I thought, What a bunch of assholes."

  "It's not that bad," says Syker, but Agnes has him worried. "Now I'm sorry I talked to them."

  "Oh, it's all right for you," she says.

  "It is? Why, exactly?"

  "Well, you're getting paid."

  "Would you think I was a jerk if you saw me on the news?" asks Syker.

  "Mostly I'd just be jealous of your high-powered job in the Wegeman organization," says Agnes affably.

  "You'd think it's one big party, but it's not," he says.

  The press conference concludes without Agnes's participation. Later, she is spirited out of the precinct and past the reporters. She crouches down in the back seat of Officer Brian Mooney's Delta 88. The officer has come off duty and is returning to his home in Yonkers. He is very young. He keeps asking Agnes if the tape deck is too loud for her. Of course it is, but she won't admit it. Agnes sneezes, and when he pulls down the sun visor to look for tissues, three condoms slide into his lap. He grabs the little packets and drives with them in his hand, too embarrassed to put them away.

  Agnes directs him to her building. She lives in Washington Heights.

  "I appreciate this," she says, getting out of the car.

  He looks around suspiciously. "This is it? You live here?"

  "Yes."

  Before he pulls away, he rolls down his window to talk to her. "Don't take this the wrong way. I mean, don't get offended or anything, but this is a real nigger neighborhood."

  The telephone is ringing when Agnes gets inside her apartment.

  "I just wanted you to know that I got a bonus for my trouble," says Syker bitterly. "So it doesn't matter that I thoroughly debased myself by spouting that nonsense about Leo Fein and his knishes. Here's what I didn't tell the reporters: when my boss woke up, the first thing he did was pull out his feeding tube and spray blood all over the nurse. On purpose. Joking around. He told her he has AIDS, so she might as well have sex with him. You can't keep him down, I'll say that for him."

  The man who shot Wegeman lies in a drawer in the morgue like a pair of knotted socks. One quadrant of his head is gone. He wears the slack-jawed expression of death the orderlies call the Big O.

  Several months later, the Voice will print a free-lance piece by Tollivetti, a bit of muckraking about overtime costs, featherbedding, and litigation brought when a contract is shifted to a new manufacturer under mysterious circumstances. Tollivetti will break the story of how the city paid almost twenty-five thousand dollars to replace that shattered glass globe.

  Chapter Five

  Agnes lives in a sprawling turn-of-the-century apartment house on Riverside Drive in the West 150s. This part of the drive hasn't seen an Astor or a Vanderbilt for a long time, but a few Kennedys and McKibbins may have passed through in the 1970s looking to score heroin. There are plenty of working people here, but the flavor of the neighborhood comes from those who are most visible, the dealers and crackheads, the alcoholics, the screeching lunatics who wander away from the Fort Washington shelter. This is a place of bodegas sheathed in Plexiglas, of stores that sell nothing but glass pipes, of cuchifritos and check-cashing emporia. In the summertime, the orange vendors crouch over their machines and score the skins with a spiral groove, looking like Hispanic Thomas Edisons cranking the first phonograph.

  Agnes lives here because the apartments are beautiful. Where else could she afford eight rooms, including a study and a formal dining room, parquet floors with walnut braid, built-in bookshelves? Where else could she have a view of the Hudson? Only in what many would call a slum.

  Agnes's building is called the Duke of Exeter. It was built by a woolens magnate named Randolph St. John Christopher, for whom Christopher Street is named. Obsessive about detail, Christopher hounded his architect about the placement of every sconce and flower box.

  It doesn't take very long for the reporters to find Agnes's apartment. They set up a command post outside her door. Agnes can hear them talking and telling dirty stories and growing increasingly giddy as the night wears on and she doesn't appear.

  Figures from the peripheries of her life have already begun showing up on the TV news. Tollivetti, guesting on The Bulldog Report, interviews Agnes's Tae Kwon Do instructor. Someone else talks to the recording secretary of the Telamones Society. Mike Masters, with whom Agnes once went on an excruciating date, who used to work for Infertility and now writes copy for The Bulldog Report, drops the bombshell that Agnes Travertine is pregnant.

  The telephone rings. It is Agnes's mother, Hannah.

  "I think it's an absolutely marvelous way to break the news," says Hannah.

  Agnes had fallen prey to the notion that she should date more, and the disastrous evening with Mike Masters was the result. Mike, was retiring and bookish, not to mention movieish and theaterish and recordsish. He was thoroughly steeped in art; the movie he and Agnes were to see would be his second film of the day. (Agnes's vanity was a little wounded by this; in her mind, their dinner took on the character of a short subject between features.) Mike described the movie he had seen that day as "important." This was more than Agnes could bear. "Important for the director and actors—they made a fortune," she hooted. Mike just looked at her in a puzzled fashion. She spent a few minutes trying to dissuade him from his life of aesthetic consumerism. She tried to see how much money he was spending on other people's half-baked notions. Then she stopped. Why was she doing this? Mike Masters was perfectly happy—more content with his life than Agnes would ever be, certainly. He was an innocent monument of welladjustedness, a monument on which Agnes was spray-painting graffiti.

  She felt guilty about raining on Mike Masters' parade, even though he seemed oblivious. She felt so guilty when he asked her for another date that she took a coward's way out. She told him she was pregnant.

  "Relax ma," she says. "I'm not pregnant."

  "But Mike Masters—"

  "Mike Masters misunderstood me."

  Hannah knows her daughter too well. "You know, Agnes, you'll never catch a man that way."

  "I'm not looking to catch one. Besides, once he thought I was pregnant, he never called me again. So I guess he wasn't worth catching, was he?"

  "He seemed very nice on the news. Maybe he's got German Measles, so he's staying away. Give him a call. Clear up the misunderstanding."

  "I'm not interested in Mike Masters."

  "I didn't call to talk about him, anyway," says Hannah. "I called to tell you that I'm proud of you."

  "Oh, don't be. I should have minded my own business. Now everything is all screwed up."

  "Nonsense," says Hannah. "You should be positively gleeful. Ronald Wegeman owes you his life! Granted, he's not my cup of tea. I'm sure he sleeps through all those operas he goes to. He's always reminded me of a pharmacist, for some reason. He's got that bad complexion they all get from staying in the back room with the pills. He's not too bright, I'm sure. But Agnes—he could hand you a million dollars out of his pocket change if he wanted to."

  Hannah Travertine has never quite thrown off her dreamy adolescence, much of which was spent in movie theaters. She retains a great fondness for that staple of American cinema so beloved of screenwriters groping for a climax: the flamboyant, romantic gesture—the bequeathing of a fortune to a total stranger, the marriage proposal chalked on Mount Rushmore, the pregnancy announced on the 11 o'clock news.

  Agnes makes a preemptive strike. "Ma, don't talk to any reporters, okay?"

  "I already have."

  Agnes's heart sinks. "What did you tell them?"

  "I just answered a few questions."

  "I know the format, Ma. What did you talk about?"

  "About you, of course. And it went quite well."

  Agnes cradles the telephone on her shoulder. She rubs her eyes with weariness and frustration. "Ma, don't discuss me with anybody. It's a violation."

  "Oh, here we go again," says Hannah.

  "Well, it is."

  "Agnes
, this could be the best thing that ever happened to you. You never know where it might lead."

  "To where, Ma? To my own comedy/variety series? Don't talk to any more news guys. They don't care about you. You're just fodder."

  "They went to a lot of trouble to find me," says Hannah, who is overawed by any vaguely official presence. "It would have been rude not to talk to them. And I am proud of you."

  The conversation dies away.

  The reporters wait outside Agnes's apartment all night long. Agnes is too wired to sleep. At three in the morning, she catches the mayor on CNN:

  "She has what more New Yorkers should have, namely, a working knowledge of Oriental combat techniques. Actually, in terms of violent crime, New York has a bad rap...."