The Grasshopper King Read online

  “You took your time getting here,” McTaggett said, without taking his eyes off the mirror.

  “I live a ways away. I had to take my bike.”

  The bartender looked my way. She was a bleak, strict-looking woman optimistically lipsticked in a ghostly shade of coral. I ordered a scotch; then, thinking of this afternoon, made it a double. My usual drink was a gin and tonic. But I was embarrassed by the thought of drinking something with fruit on it here.

  “So he hasn’t said anything,” McTaggett said glumly.

  “Not yet.”

  The strict bartender brought me my drink, which I gulped at silently. It was McTaggett who had brought me here; it was his responsibility to say whatever needed to be said.

  “Did you know that this school once produced a championship basketball team?”

  “I think so,” I said. Everyone knew that. It was still on the school’s letterhead.

  “My senior year. I was on that squad.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yes,” he said, “it is so. Many people don’t even remember this today. Times have been better. Things,” and here he leaned close to me, as if imparting some confidential cipher, “have changed. Of late.”

  “It’s something,” I said helplessly.

  “We had a reunion a few years back. All those boys—they’re in advertising now. They’re claims adjusters. They got married and moved East. I’m the only one left. You know what makes a good basketball team into a championship basketball team?”

  His question caught me off guard. I managed an inquisitive noise.

  “Execution,” he said significantly, and mimed an easy layup. But the way he said it didn’t remind me of basketball at all. He had spoken with the relish of a hanging judge.

  “Listen,” I said, “what are we here to talk about?” I wanted out of the Tooth and Nail. The old men’s murmurs, the amber half-light, McTaggett’s soft mountain of napkins, the prancing figurines, had begun to unnerve me, like predictions of an unappealing future.

  “I’m getting to that,” McTaggett said.

  “Because I’ve got to go.”

  “You haven’t finished your drink yet.”

  “You can have it.”

  “Let me buy you a sandwich.”

  “I ate at home.”

  “You know what?”

  “What?” I said, guardedly.

  McTaggett folded his hands in his lap and leaned stiffly back on his stool. “He’ll talk.”

  Suddenly I became willing to stay a few moments longer.

  “You think?”

  “He’ll talk,” McTaggett said again. He sounded almost sorry; but then, he always sounded sorry. “You know how the cops catch a criminal?”

  I wondered if he were changing the subject again.

  “Fingerprints?” I guessed.

  “It’s not fingerprints. And not powder burns either. And not eyewitnesses. The way they get him is that a criminal will always talk about the job. Always. He’ll tell somebody. It’s a law of human nature.”

  “Is Higgs a criminal?”

  “Jesus Christ,” McTaggett said. “It’s an analogy.”

  He gestured wildly, in the process striking a sidewise blow to the ceramic dog on the bar. The dog’s stool tipped, wobbled, and finally fell; the dog cracked in three pieces, and the ball, freed from its perch, rolled to the edge of the bar and dropped to the floor with a little crash. McTaggett stared dumbly at the scattered shards of dog.

  The strict bartender glanced over from the register.

  “Put it on my tab with the other ones,” McTaggett said.

  I stood up. “Now I really do have to go,” I said.

  McTaggett turned to me, seemingly startled that I was still there.

  “I’m glad we had this talk,” he said.

  “Me too.”

  “Best to the wife.”

  I nodded. I could think of no reason to correct him.

  Riding home through the gnatty evening, passing in and out of the greenish, fathomy light of the streetlamps, I tried to reflect on what McTaggett had told me. But I found, to my surprise, that I had no more capacity to think about Higgs. The next morning he would speak, or he would not speak; correspondingly he would not be carried off by Treech to the psychiatric hosptital, or he would. It was as simple as that.

  So I thought.

  That night I slept at my desk again. I dreamed I was a basketball player. More than that: I was a spectacular basketball player. I twisted and knifed through the futile coverage of my faceless opponents, sank jumper after unerring jumper. There was a sense that the game was of great importance, a championship, and that not much had been expected of me.

  At the same time, I was a sportscaster in a well-appointed broadcast booth high above the action. My color man was Henderson. In my dream he was a man of about thirty.

  “How about that young Grapearbor?” I said.

  “I’ll tell you, Sam,” Henderson replied. His voice was honey-smooth and every word was served up neatly as a lozenge. He had no accent. “This plucky youngster has just come off the bench and taken over this game. And I think I can say that everyone is extremely excited about the tremendous performance of the young Grapearbor that we’re seeing here tonight.”

  “Another three for Grapearbor!” I cried, hitting the basket effortlessly from midcourt.

  A sumptuous platter of food had appeared in front of Henderson: long, knobby breads, wagon-wheels of cheese, wine bottles, crudité rafts becalmed on dark, still lakes of bean dip, pastry shells and meat salads, stuffed capers, apricots wrapped in strips of bacon, whole smoked fish, tropical fruit. Henderson lifted a dripping veal chop to his mouth and ripped off a chunk with his teeth.

  “Well, it all comes down to this, Sam . . . all the practice, all the hype . . . and I’ve got to tell you, I never thought it would come out quite this way. The ghost of Tip Chandler is living today, Sam, and he is smiling.”

  Henderson bent down into a vast tureen of soup, and when he came up his face was smeared with it, and gravy from the chop, and other foodstuffs I could not identify. Back in the game now, I launched myself daintily from the top of the key and floated fairylike, untouched, to the basket, where—just as the buzzer sounded—I slammed home the winning field goal with a contemptuous jerk of my wrists. The force of my dunk broke the glass backboard from its moorings; it shattered wonderfully on the hardwood beneath the spot where I still hung from nothing, beaming. The crowd boiled forth from the stands. From the exits and from the seams in the roof there was an angry pinkish glow, the color of sunrise; it was a fire. And the stampeding fans were celebrating victory and fleeing the flames at the same time. Henderson lifted a paper napkin to his lips and drew it deliberately across his face, back and forth, seemingly unaware of the smoke coiling into the booth. The napkin was growing larger; now it was the size of a piece of writing paper, a poster, a bedsheet. Henderson’s whole body was hidden behind it. He said something I couldn’t make out; and then the smoke rose up to cover everything, the booth, the stands, the elevated scoreboard, the fire too.

  When I awoke, the real sunrise beating on the windows, it had occurred to me how Higgs might yet be saved.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE GRASSHOPPER KING

  It was already half-past seven; there was no time to dawdle. I rifled through the papers on my desk, then, not finding what I wanted, I upended my wastebasket, dropped to my hands and knees and dug frantically through the crumpled sheets of rough draft, wax paper squares, the weeks of used tissues—no luck. I turned out the pockets of every pair of pants I owned. Finally it occurred to me to look under the bed, and there, amidst the gum wrappers and the news magazines I’d been meaning, with all sincerity, to get to, was my object: the paper napkin on which Charlie Hascomb had written his phone number.

  The napkin was just out of my reach, and I had to shoulder the bed a few inches to get to it. The motion woke Julia up a little.

  “What are you doing dow
n there?” she said drowsily, poking her head over the edge of the mattress. Her nightshirt drooped away from her freckly collarbone and I was stopped short for a moment with affection. Then she woke up a little more. I watched her remember what day it was, our macabre schedule, and how angry she was at me.

  “Come on, what?”

  One more shove and my thumb and forefinger closed on the napkin.

  “Don’t worry, darling, sweetness,” I said, standing, straightening, my heart hurrying as if I’d been injected with a new and potent hormone of resolve. I was bursting with reassurance; but I was still not ready to explain. “Honey,” I said.

  Julia lay back on her pillow and shut her eyes.

  “Romance,” she said. “What’s this for?”

  “We’re going to meet an old friend of mine.”

  “Today?”

  “Bear with me,” I said. “Go back to sleep.” I left the apartment—shutting the door gently, so as not to awaken her any further—and called Charlie from the pay phone on the corner.

  It was five rings before he answered, and it took a little while after that for me to impress upon him who I was.

  “Sammy,” he said. He sounded groggy and a little incredulous. “Of course. What’s going on?”

  “You told me to call you sometime—remember?”

  “Yeah,” he said cautiously.

  “I need your help with something. It’s very important. I wouldn’t ask you if we weren’t old friends.”

  “How much do you need?”

  He had grown suddenly more alert.

  “I don’t need any money. I need you to do me a favor.”

  “Well, good goddamn,” he said, evidently relieved, “I guess I’m always good for a favor.”

  “Fine. Meet me at the corner of Ovid and East Main in fifteen minutes.”

  “Urr. Can it wait?”

  “Actually, no.”

  “Fifteen minutes,” he said. He made it sound like a sum of cash. “OK. But what’s so urgent?”

  Over the top of the telephone box I could see the scowling Greek sandwich-maker, half-obscured by the reflection of dawn in his plate glass storefront. He maneuvered himself deliberately about the space behind the counter, turning his machines on, dipping below my sightline to indecipherable tasks.

  “Let’s just say,” I told him, “I need you to talk to someone for me.”

  Charlie arrived ten minutes late, unevenly shaven, wearing a too-small T-shirt with “STONED AGAIN” decaled across the front. The street was empty except for a rangy old man sweeping the sidewalk in front of a jewelry store. A phalanx of low, squarish clouds was marching up from the east side of town.

  “This had better be good,” Charlie said. “I had to get my father to take care of the store. I’m in very big trouble if a certain parcel comes in before I get back.”

  “You’ll be back before lunch,” I told him.

  Rising before us, shadowing the streetcorner, was the desultory concrete parallelepiped of the college repository. I led Charlie inside. The security desk was manned by a surly-looking undergraduate, bent ferociously over a paperback. At our appearance, he jerked upward, startled and resentful.

  “See some ID?” he said.

  I displayed my card. He directed an interrogative grunt at Charlie.

  “Dr. Hascomb is with me,” I said. “He’s a visiting scholar from Tunisia. He’s consulting with us on the degradation of storage media.”

  “Tunisia.”

  I chastised myself: keep it simple. “Dust storms,” I said. “Dry heat. The scirocco. There’s no more inhospitable environment for information.”

  “I’ll bet,” the undergraduate said without interest, and waved us through. Triumphantly I led Charlie through the low portal into the dim realm of the stacks.

  The shelves crowded our shoulders on either side; we proceeded through the corridors of Italian periodicals, botanical drawings, endless minutes of forgotten societies. The floor was wire mesh and beneath us one could see the shelves descending three stories into the earth, if one cared to look. Charlie did; I didn’t. I was cultivating an atmosphere of perfect assurance. I’d need it. We stepped into the rickety elevator and I pushed the button for the bottommost floor.

  “This isn’t exactly how I expected we’d see each other again,” Charlie said, as we emerged.

  “Chance is a funny trick player,” I replied.

  We had come out into a vast, cold room, one of whose walls was lined floor to ceiling with wooden drawers, of a flat antique kind that suggested pinned butterflies or Latin-labeled beakers; we used them for lecture tapes. I wheeled the stepladder into position, climbed up almost to the top (above me, through three layers of mesh, I could just make out the surface world) and came down again, huffing, with Higgs’s tape. I slid it into the machine, leaned down on PLAY, and beckoned Charlie silent as the familiar recording began. “Henderson between the wars was a figure of solitude and an object, when his solitude was interrupted, of derision and contempt . . .” When the waterlogged screeching began, I shut off the tape.

  “Well,” Charlie said, “you were right. Your storage medium’s degraded.”

  “Come on,” I said impatiently, “can you do him?”

  “Do what?”

  “Can you do him. Higgs. Do his voice.”

  “Play it again.”

  I did so; and afterwards Charlie scratched his forehead, leaned back, coughed, and Higgs began to speak. “Henderson between the wars,” Charlie said, “was a figure of . . . isolation? An object of scatological skulduggery on the part of his peers, held fast in a perfect balance between his Roman Catholic faith and his carnal appetite for his teenaged relatives . . .”

  It was not perfect; but it was very, very good.

  “Charlie,” I said, “I’m going to make you a star.”

  He grinned uncomplicatedly. “I always knew,” he said.

  When we emerged from the stacks, the surly-looking undergraduate turned his eyes up wearily. He had shut his paperback. Strange to think that for him, nothing of any interest was happening that day. From the look of him, nothing of any interest might ever have happened. Camaraderie overtook me. I wanted to warn him that one day, through no fault of his own, he might do something important.

  But of course he wouldn’t have believed me.

  “Looks pretty bad,” I told the undergraduate. “This place is an information catastrophe waiting to happen.”

  “Really?”

  “Salaam,” said Charlie. We pushed out onto the wakening street.

  It must be obvious by now what I was up to. If Higgs would not speak, then Charlie would have to speak for him. But what should he say? I had to keep it brief. The longer the speech I asked Charlie to fabricate, the greater the chance of some betraying error. After a little thought I decided he need say no more than “Red whistle.” Having Higgs refer to “Sudetenland, My Mother” would be the most potent endorsement possible of my own work, and I thought it was not too selfish, considering that I was saving Higgs’s life, to give myself a boost up in the process.

  Ellen had been right about the rain. When Charlie and I came out of the repository, the first huge drops were splattering against the windshields and store windows, and a startling cold wind was toying with the limp flags of the auto dealership. By the time we got to Higgs’s house the rain was falling in sheets. Mud boiled up from the cracks in the front walk, expelling earthworms onto the flagstone where they lay pink and dazed, ready for the end.

  Ellen and Julia were waiting for us on the stoop, as I’d called ahead and asked them to.

  “This is my friend Charlie Hascomb,” I said, raising my voice to be heard over the rain.

  “Charlie, you remember Julia. Charlie, Mrs. Higgs.”

  “I’m wet,” Julia said. “Can we go inside now?”

  “Not just yet. I need to explain something first.”

  “That you can’t explain inside?”

  “The tape recorders—the tape recor
ders.” I felt a guilty excitement at my adopted air of mystery. I almost wished I could maintain it longer. But, as I’ve said, there was no time to dawdle. I nodded at Charlie.

  “Sammy has a plan,” Higgs said. And Ellen gave a little gasp, glanced up at the thundering firmament, and fainted.

  Julia moved to catch her, too late. Ellen dropped to her knees and then slumped backwards onto the path. A moment later she came to with the cold rain slapping her face. She glared up at me from the walk. Her dress was striped with mud and a gaping tear ran up one side of it. I saw now that I should have introduced my secret weapon in a less dramatic manner. But no second thoughts—I resolved against them. There would be no time. I helped Ellen to her feet and began to explain what came next.

  I had read enough crime novels to know that when it came to a frame-up, every complication was an invitation to mishap. So I’d kept the plan as simple as I could. I would go down to the basement and make a “final plea” for Higgs to speak. Ellen, Julia, and Charlie would follow, all together so as to mask the sound of Charlie’s footsteps. Charlie, standing behind Higgs, would say “Red whistle.” The four of us would rush up the stairs (together, always together) to call Treech. Finally, I would leave the house on the pretext of purchasing a celebratory bottle of champagne; in that manner, Charlie, too, could leave, without an unexplained opening and shutting of the door.

  If all went as planned, there would be no evidence on the tape that anyone but Julia, Ellen, and I had been in the house that morning. It was imperative, I reminded my accomplices, that no one say anything contradicting that impression. If some contingency made it absolutely necessary to mention Charlie, he was to be referred to by his code name.

  “What code name?” Charlie asked.

  In fact, I hadn’t thought of one; but something about the fierceness of the elements, the rain crashing to earth, put me in mind of the quiet moment I’d shared with Ellen, in the Higgses’ kitchen. I thought of stillness, yellowness, the smell of something frying.