Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [151]
The cop took us out of Stronson’s office. Stronson called after us, “You bastards are going to get it. I promise you. No matter what happens to me. Especially you, Cantabile.”
Tomorrow he himself would get it.
As we waited for the elevator, Thaxter and I had time to confer. “No, I’m not being booked,” said Thaxter. “I’m almost sorry about that. I’d love to go along, really.”
“I expect you to get busy,” I said. “I felt that Cantabile was going to pull something like this. And Renata’s going to be very upset, that’s the worst of it. Don’t go off and forget me now, Thaxter.”
“Don’t be absurd, Charles. I’ll get the lawyers right on this. Give me some names and numbers.”
“First thing is to call up Renata. Take Szathmar’s number. Also Tomchek and Srole.”
Thaxter wrote the information on an American Express receipt form. Could it be that he was still a cardholder?
“You’ll lose that flimsy bit of paper,” I said.
Thaxter spoke to me rather seriously about this. “Watch it, Charlie,” he said. “You’re being a nervous Nellie. This is a trying moment, sure. Exactly why you have to watch it all the more. A plus forte raison.”
You knew that Thaxter was in earnest when he spoke French. And whereas George Swiebel always shouted at me not to abuse my body, Thaxter forever warned me about my anxiety level. Now there was a man whose nerves were strong enough for his chosen way of life. And notwithstanding his weakness for French expressions, Thaxter was a real American in that, like Walt Whitman, he offered himself as an archetype—”What I assume you will assume.” At the moment, that didn’t particularly help. I was under arrest. My feelings toward Thaxter were those of a man with many bundles trying to find the doorkey and hampered by the house cat. But the truth was that the people from whom I looked for help were by no means my favorites. Nothing was to be expected from Thaxter. I even suspected that his efforts to help might be downright dangerous. If I cried out that I was drowning, he would come running and throw me a life preserver of solid cement. If odd feet call for odd shoes, odd souls have odd requirements and affection comes to them in odd modes. A man who longed for help was fond of someone incapable of giving any.
I suppose that it was the receptionist who had sent for the blue-and-white squad car now waiting for us. She was a very pretty young woman. I had looked at her as we were leaving the office and thought, Here’s a sentimental girl. Well brought up. Lovely. Distressed to see people arrested. Tears in her eyes.
“In the back seat, you,” said the plainclothesman to Canta-bile, who, in his pinch hat, white in the face, hair sticking out at the sides, got in. At this moment, disheveled, he seemed for the first time genuinely Italian.
“The main thing is Renata. Get in touch with Renata,” I told Thaxter as I got into the front seat. “I’ll be in trouble if you don’t—trouble!”
“Don’t worry. People won’t let you disappear from sight forever,” said Thaxter.
His words of comfort gave me my first moment of deeper anxiety.
He did indeed try to get in touch with Renata and with Szathmar. But Renata was still at the Merchandise Mart with her client, picking fabrics, and Szathmar had already closed his office. Somehow Thaxter forgot what I had told him about Tomchek and Srole. To kill time, therefore, he went to a Black Kung Fu movie on Randolph Street. When the show let out he reached Renata at home. He said that since she knew Szathmar so well he thought he could leave things to her, entirely. After all, he was a stranger in town. The Boston Celtics were playing the Chicago Bulls and Thaxter bought a ticket to the basketball game from a scalper. En route to the Stadium the cab stopped at Zimmerman’s and he bought a bottle of Piesporter. He couldn’t get it chilled properly, but it went well with the sturgeon sand-wiches.
Cantabile’s dark form was riding before me