A Horse’s Head Read online

  “There were no short people on Fourteenth Street,” Gouda said. “I would like some schnapps, after all.”

  “There’s no time for schnapps,” K said.

  “That’s right,” Gouda instantly agreed, “there’s no time for schnapps. Where’s the suit, O’Brien?”

  “Get the suit,” O’Brien said to the man who had offered the schnapps. The man obediently went into the other room, but over his shoulder he called, “It won’t fit.”

  The other men sat waiting for him to come back. The bald-headed driver was cleaning his fingernails with a long knife, What a dreadful stereotype, Mullaney thought. “What’s your name?” he asked him.

  “Peter,” the driver answered, without looking up from his nails.

  “Pleased to meet you.”

  The driver nodded as though he felt it wasteful to exchange courtesies with someone who would soon be dead.

  “Listen,” Mullaney said to K, “I really would not like to become a corpse.”

  “You have no choice,” K said. “We have no choice, therefore you have no choice.” It sounded very logical. Mullaney admired the logic but not the sentiment.

  “Still,” he said, “I’m only thirty-seven years old,” lying by two years. Almost three years.

  “Some people get hit by automobiles when they’re only little kids,” Peter said, still cleaning his nails. “Think of them.”

  “I sympathize with them,” Mullaney said, “but I myself had hoped to live to a ripe old age.”

  “Hopes are dainty things ofttimes shattered,” K said, as if he were quoting from something, Mullaney couldn’t imagine what.

  The stonecutter came back into the room with a black suit on a hanger. “I left the shirt,” he said. “The shirt would definitely not fit him. What size shirt do you wear?” he asked Mullaney.

  “Fifteen,” Mullaney said. “Five sleeve.”

  “He can wear his own shirt,” K said.

  “I’d like to wear my own suit, too,” Mullaney said, “if that’s all right with you.”

  “That is not all right with us,” K said.

  “In fact,” Mullaney went on, “I’d like to go home right now, or better still, I’d like to go to Aqueduct. If you gentlemen are interested, I have a very hot tip on a horse called …”

  “He’ll wear his own shirt,” K said.

  “A yellow shirt?” O’Brien asked, offended.

  “It’s not yellow,” K said. “What color is that shirt?” he asked Mullaney.

  “Jasmine.”

  “It’s jasmine,” K said.

  “It looks yellow.”

  “No, it’s jasmine,” Mullaney said.

  “Put on the suit,” K advised.

  “Gentlemen …”

  “Put it on,” Gouda said, and made a faintly menacing gesture with the Luger.

  Mullaney accepted the suit from O’Brien. “Where shall I change?” he asked.

  “Here,” Gouda said.

  He hoped he was wearing clean underwear; his mother had always cautioned him about wearing clean underwear and carrying a clean handkerchief. He took off his pants, feeling the sharpness of the keen April wind that swept over the marble stones in the courtyard and seeped through the crack under the door.

  “He’s got polka-dot undershorts,” Peter said, and made his short laughlike sound. “A corpse with polka-dot undershorts, that’s a hot one.”

  The pants were too short and too tight. Mullaney could not button them at the waist.

  “Just zip them up as far as they’ll go,” K said, “that’ll be fine.”

  “They’ll fall down,” Mullaney said, transferring his twenty-cent fortune from his own pants to the ones he was now wearing.

  “You’ll be lying in a coffin, they won’t fall down,” O’Brien said, and handed him the suit jacket.

  The jacket was made of the same fine black cloth as the trousers, but was lined and therefore substantially heavier. There were three thick black buttons on the front, each about the size of a penny, and four smaller black buttons on each sleeve. The buttons resembled mushroom caps, though not rounded, their tops and edges faceted instead, a very fancy jacket indeed, if a trifle too tight. He pulled it closed across his chest and belly, and then forced the middle button through its corresponding buttonhole. The shoulders were far too narrow, the armholes pinched, he let out his breath and said, “It’s too tight.”

  “Perfect,” K said.

  “What’s the lining made of?” Mullaney asked. “It rustles.”

  “It’s silk,” O’Brien said, and glanced at K.

  “It makes a nice whispering rustle,” Mullaney said.

  “Those are angels’ wings,” Peter said, and again gave his imitation of a laugh. The other men laughed with him—all but Gouda, who, it seemed to Mullaney, had suddenly become very nervous and pale.

  “Well,” Gouda said, “let’s get on with it, there isn’t much time.”

  “Put him in the coffin,” K said.

  “Look,” Mullaney protested, “I’m a married man,” which was not exactly the truth, since he had been divorced a year ago.

  “We will send your wife a floral wreath,” Gouda said.

  “I have two children.” This was an absolute lie. He and Irene had never had any children at all.

  “That’s unfortunate,” K said. “But ofttimes even little babes must untowardly suffer,” again making it sound like a quote which Mullaney did not recognize.

  “I’m a respected professor at City College,” Mullaney said, which was also pretty close to the truth since he used to be an encyclopedia salesman. “I can assure you I’ll be sorely missed.”

  “You won’t be missed at all,” Gouda said, which made no sense.

  Somebody hit him on the back of the head, Peter he supposed, the dirty rat.

  2. KRUGER

  The stench was definitely chloroform.

  His father had lied to him at the age of six, telling him he was going to get lots of ice cream after the tonsil operation, but neglecting to mention that chloroform was the vilest-smelling of anesthetics. He would never forget that odor, and there were definitely traces of it in the coffin now. He supposed, of course, that he should be grateful he was alive, if indeed he was alive. He certainly felt alive. He seemed to be breathing, albeit with difficulty because of the tight pants and jacket; he noticed that someone had left the coffin lid open perhaps an inch or so, very thoughtful because otherwise he might have suffocated. But then, he had known they weren’t going to kill him because it would have been senseless and also a trifle wasteful to knock a man out if you were going to kill him. In the two seconds it took for everything to go black (everything actually went a sort of mauve, to be honest) he remembered realizing with soaring joy that they were not going to kill him, and then he fell to the floor.

  Aside from the aroma of chloroform, the coffin was a very nice one indeed, lined with silk he could feel but not see since it was very dark in there even with the lid partly opened, roomy and quite comfortable. All in all, even though he wasn’t dead, he had to admit they had given him a coffin every bit as nice as Feinstein’s. In fact, and this was probably only pride of ownership, he had the feeling his coffin was even a little nicer than Feinstein’s. He did not know whether or not he was still on the airplane to Rome because he didn’t know how long he had been unconscious. He felt no sensation of movement, but maybe that was due to the comfortable padding of the coffin. He wondered why the original corpse had jumped out of the limousine on Fourteenth Street, and he also wondered who all those people in the stonecutter’s cottage had been, people of taste no doubt, witness the fine comfortable coffin and the beautifully tailored suit.

  It was very quiet in the coffin.

  He began to like being there. It afforded him the opportunity for a little contemplation, a luxury that had been denied him from the moment he had first laid a bet on the trotters at Yonkers. That was two years ago and, worse luck, he had won a hundred dollars. Well, all water
under the bridge, he thought. I would not be on my way to Rome right now (or already there, for all I know) if I weren’t a horseplayer who’d been thrown down the stairs by Hijo, standing on the corner opposite S. Klein, Always on the Square. I would not be here right now if I were not Andrew Mullaney himself, which is after all the only thing to be, and a very nice thing to be when you own a comfortable coffin like this one. He was willing to bet not many people were blessed with such fine coffins, Irene should only see him now.

  Since he had a lot of time on his hands and also a nice place for contemplation, he began thinking about Irene in earnest, and discovered as he always did that the image of her never varied. They had known each other for two years before getting married, and then had lived together in wedded harmony (he supposed) for an additional seven years before the divorce a year ago February; all in all, a good long time. But he always thought of her as she had looked when they met at the dance given by the Sons of Erin on Fordham Road, long red hair and sparkling green eyes, a saucy grin on her mouth, the absolute stereotype of every Irish girl whose skirts had ever been raised in a Dublin pub.

  He thought how nice it would be if Irene were there in the coffin with him, they had never made love in a coffin. They had made love on a midnight train coming down from Quebec, where they had gone for a short vacation, and they had made love in the basement of their building at two A.M. while waiting for the clothes to get done, and they had almost made love on a Ferris wheel once, but Irene was afraid they wouldn’t be able to keep track of where they were once they got started and might end up screwing in front of everybody at Palisades. Still, they had almost. Well, almosts don’t count, Mullaney thought, a horse who almost shows doesn’t almost anything. Still, they had almost. It would probably be great fun in a coffin, too. Maybe not this coffin, because of the chloroform smell, but take a coffin like Feinstein’s, that would be a great coffin in which to make love.

  Irene hadn’t known Feinstein at all; there were a lot of his friends she never got to meet, primarily because he himself had only met them after the divorce. She probably would have enjoyed someone like Feinstein, though, a truly great blackjack player with a fine sense of humor, and a rare piety, which is how he happened to get killed, but that was another story.

  He wondered again if he was in Rome, and decided to try lifting the lid of the coffin, an excellent idea that had not occurred to him before this, so engrossed had he been in recalling Irene and the highly comical sequence of events that had led to Feinstein’s death. He tried the lid now, somewhat regretfully since he was enjoying his retreat very much indeed, and discovered that it moved quite easily. Well, he thought, all good things must come to an end, and he raised the lid completely, and then sat up and looked around the room. There were two windows in the room. There was a dresser against the far wall. Above it there hung a picture of an old man with a beard, probably Sigmund Freud. There was a lamp on the dresser. There was a chair across the room from the dresser. A man was sitting on the chair.

  The man looked a lot like an Italian Everett Dirksen. He had white hair like Dirksen, and nice kindly puffy eyes like Dirksen, and his tie was sort of sloppily knotted the way Dirksen’s tie sometimes looked on television after a particularly heated session with Chet Huntley. The only thing about him, in fact, that did not look like Senator Dirksen was the gun in his hand, which, if Mullaney was not mistaken, appeared to be a very large American Colt .45 automatic.

  “Boo!” he said to the man, thinking he might faint dead away on the floor, the way they do in movies when a coffin opens and there’s a live person in it. But Dirksen just looked at him with his kindly puffy eyes, and nodded, as if he had known all along that Mullaney was only unconscious and that he would be waking up sooner or later. Mullaney shrugged. Dirksen got off the chair, went out of the room, and came back a moment later with another man who also looked like Dirksen.

  “È desto, eh?” the new one said.

  “Si,” the first one replied. “A questo momento.”

  “Va bene,” the new one said and walked over to the coffin. “Out,” he said to Mullaney in English. “Out of the box.”

  The coffin was resting on two sawhorses. Mullaney climbed out of it with great difficulty, cautiously looping one leg over the rim and then the other, certain he would split the tight pants.

  “Where’s the money?” one of the men said.

  “Are you talking to me?” Mullaney asked.

  “Yes. Where’s the money?”

  “What money?” Mullaney said, and realized instantly he had said the wrong thing. The man who had been talking to him suddenly made a face that indicated to Mullaney Oh are we going to play that game, where you pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about and where I have to get rough perhaps, when you know very well what money I mean? That was what Mullaney read on his face, and all at once he didn’t look at all like Senator Dirksen, neither of them did, they looked instead like people who could possibly get very mean if you didn’t tell them where the goddamn money was.

  “He doesn’t know where the money is, Henry,” the first man said.

  “He doesn’t know where the money is, George,” the second man repeated.

  They both had rather pained expressions on their twin faces, as if they were distressed by what they now felt they must do. It was obvious that what they now felt they must do was knock him around a little, Roman style. It seemed to him that he had been getting knocked around a little ever since Hijo threw him down the poolhall steps, and he really had no desire to get knocked around any further, in any style. At the same time, since he didn’t know where the money was, or even which money they were talking about, he couldn’t very well tell them what they wanted to know. It all looked hopeless. He decided to ask for the manager.

  “Where’s Gouda?” he said.

  “Gouda is dead,” Henry said.

  “That’s not true. I saw him only a little while ago.”

  “Was he alive?” George asked.

  “Of course he was alive.”

  “He’s dead now,” George said.

  “How did he die?”

  “A terrible highway accident,” George said, and looked at his twin.

  “Terrible,” Henry repeated.

  The room was very still. Mullaney cleared his throat. “Well,” he said, “I’m certainly sorry to hear that.”

  “Yes,” George agreed. “Where’s the money?”

  “I don’t know,” Mullaney said.

  “We figured it had to be in the coffin,” Henry said.

  “Well then maybe it is.”

  “No. We looked.”

  “Did you look carefully?”

  “Very carefully. We even removed you and put you on the floor,” Henry said. “The money is definitely not in the coffin.”

  “So where is it?” George asked.

  “I told you. I don’t know.”

  “We’d better take him to Kruger,” George said.

  “That would be a small man who wears a letter K on his tie, right?” Mullaney said.

  “No. He’s dead.”

  “He is?”

  “They’re all dead,” Henry said.

  “The accident,” George said.

  “Terrible,” Henry said.

  “Take him,” George said, and son of a bitch if Henry didn’t hit him on the head again.

  The nice thing about getting hit on the head, Mullaney thought, is that it hardly hurts at all. It’s over so quickly, whap, that you hardly realize it’s happening. And while it’s happening there are these really rather extraordinary colors that go shooting and bursting and rocketing all over the place, somewhat like a Greenwich Village event, though done with considerably more style. However, the terrible thing about getting hit on the head, Mullaney realized as he awakened in a moving automobile, was that whereas it didn’t hurt much at the time, it sure as hell hurt a lot afterward.

  “Ow,” he said, and rubbed the back of his neck, and then silently added Henr
y’s name to the list of dirty rats who needed getting. “Why’d you do that?” he said.

  “To transport you,” Henry, who was driving, said.

  “If you needed to transport me, all you had to do was ask. I’m a reasonable person, all you had to do was ask.”

  He didn’t know where in Italy they were. They seemed to be coming through a suburban area that looked very much like New Jersey—the outskirts of Rome, no doubt. His head hurt, and he was angry with Henry and not exactly delighted with George, either, who sat silently on the back seat of the big Italian whatever-kind-of-car-it-was, holding a very un-Italian gun in his hand, a .38 Smith & Wesson Detective’s Special which his cousins in the Bronx branch of the Mafia had undoubtedly heisted from the body of a good dead cop and then mailed in a candy box to Rome.

  “What kind of gun is that?” Mullaney asked.

  “A very good one,” George said, thereby ending the conversation.

  “What kind of car is this?” Mullaney asked Henry.

  “Cadillac,” Henry replied.

  “Pretty fancy,” Mullaney said.

  He was in a very surly mood, and was beginning to feel highly uncooperative. In a few moments he planned to punch George right in the mouth, take the gun out of his hand, and hit Henry on the back of the head with it, see how he liked getting hit on the back of the head. In the meantime, lie was resting, gathering his strength. What I’ll do, he thought, is kick George in the leg instead. Then when he bends over to grab his shin, I’ll throw him on the floor and take his gun away and then give Henry the old one-two right at the back of the head, pow, Henry, how do you like that little blow to the medulla oblongata? These Roman guys wanted to fool around with Andrew Mullaney, well, maybe they didn’t know just who they were fooling around with here. Maybe he ought to inform them he was the only guy in his graduating class at C.C.N.Y. who could do seventy-four pushups, at a time when lots of kids were Communists. Or perhaps they would like to be told that he had once busted a very husky advertising man from Madison Avenue square on the jaw because first he had stated unequivocally that all girls with red hair were extremely passionate (which Irene was, but it was none of his damn business) and second that people who sold encyclopedias for a living were a little bit wrong in the head. Mullaney hit him with a devastating uppercut. And whereas the uppercut didn’t exactly knock the advertising man unconscious, it certainly dazed him a little; there were perhaps a dozen witnesses who were willing to corroborate that fact, if Mullaney cared to take the trouble. So perhaps these young Mafiosi here driving him all over the suburbs of Rome did not realize they had got hold of a tiger. Well, he would show them soon enough. In the meantime, he kept marveling at the way American culture had engulfed Europe, billboards advertising American gasolines, signs in English catering to American tourists, ah, where were the glories of ancient Rome? The car was obviously closer to Rome itself now since Mullaney could see lights glowing on the distant horizon. He was pretty excited about the idea of being abroad, even if it had to be in the company of these two hoods taking him to see Kruger (there were bosses all over the world, it seemed). He could not wait to get out of the car and pinch his first Italian girl. He had once seen a movie with Jean Paul Belmondo, where Belmondo leaped out of the car and ran across the Champs Élysées and flipped a girl’s dress right up over her head, oh that had been a wild escapade. (Irene hadn’t liked it; suppose the poor thing hadn’t had any panties on? she asked, practically.) This was before they got divorced, when they still used to go to movies and things together. But he had always remembered that crazy nut Belmondo running across the Champs Élysées, whoops, up go your skirts, dearie! As the lights of Rome came closer and closer, he felt some of the same wild exuberance Belmondo must have known. What he would do was smash old George here right in the la panza, and then grab the gun and give Henry such a clunk, oh boy, he could hardly wait. Then he would run out of the car and across the equivalent of the Champs Élysées and the first Italian girl he saw, he would throw her skirts up over her head and then run away laughing. Then he would pinch the next Italian girl he saw, live it up a little, because once they found out he didn’t know where the money was, he was a dead duck anyway.