Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [148]
“You’re dead anyway, fat-ass,” said Cantabile. “They’ll find you in a sewer in a few months and they’ll have to scrape an inch of shit off your face to see who it was.”
“There’s no permit for a gun. Beautiful!”
“Now take these guys out of here,” said Stronson.
“Are you going to charge everybody? You only got two warrants.”
“I’m going to charge everybody.”
I said, “Mr. Cantabile himself has just told you that I had nothing to do with this. My friend Thaxter and I were coming out of the Art Institute and Cantabile made us come here to discuss an investment, supposedly. I can sympathize with Mr. Stronson. He’s terrified. Cantabile is out of his mind with some kind of vanity, eaten up with conceit, violent egomania—bluff. This is just one of his original hoaxes. Maybe the officer can tell you, Mr. Stronson, that I’m not the Lepke type of hired killer. I’m sure he’s seen a few.”
“This man never killed anybody,” said the cop.
“And I have to leave for Europe and I have lots of things to attend to.”
This last point was the main one. The worst of this situation was that it interfered with my anxious preoccupations, my complicated subjectivity. It was my inner civil war versus the open life which is elementary, easy for everyone to read, and characteristic of this place, Chicago, Illinois.
As a fanatical reader, walled in by his many books, accustomed to look down from his high windows on police cars, fire engines, ambulances, an involuted man who worked from thousands of private references and texts, I now found relevance in the explanation T. E. Lawrence had given for enlisting in the RAF—”To plunge crudely among crude men and find for myself . . .” How did it go, now? “. . . for these remaining years of my prime life.” Horseplay, roughhouse, barracks obscenity, garbage detail. Yes, many men, Lawrence said, would take the death-sentence without a whimper to escape the life-sentence which fate carries in her other hand. I saw what he meant. So it was time that someone—and why not someone like me?—did more with this baffling and desperate question than had been done by other admirable men who attempted it. The worst thing about this absurd moment was that my stride was broken. I was expected at seven o’clock for dinner. Renata would be upset. It vexed her to be stood up. She had a temper, her temper always worked in a certain way; and also, if my suspicions were correct, Flonzaley was never far off. Substitutes are forever haunting people’s minds. Even the most stable and balanced individuals have a secretly chosen replacement in reserve somewhere, and Renata was not one of the stablest. As she often fell spontaneously into rhymes, she had surprised me once by coming out with this:
When the dear
Disappear
There are others
Waiting near.
I doubt that anyone appreciated Renata’s wit more deeply than I did. It always opened breath-taking perspectives of candor. But Humboldt and I had agreed long ago that I could take anything that was well said. That was true. Renata made me laugh. I was willing to deal later with the terror implicit in her words, the naked perspectives suddenly disclosed. She had for instance also said to me, “Not only are the best things in life free, but you can’t be too free with the best things in life.”
A lover in the lockup gave Renata a classic floozy opportunity for free behavior. Because of my habit of elevating such mean considerations to the theoretical level it will surprise no one that I