Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [92]
I inquired of them, in order to calm the sobs that were welling up inside me, to tell me a little about Urdu. They said it had a literature as great as any in the world, but that it had begun as a spare and ugly artificial language invented in the court of Genghis Khan. Its purpose in the beginning was military. It allowed his captains to give orders that were understood in every part of the Mongol Empire. Poets would later make it beautiful.
Live and learn.
I gave the police Mary Kathleen’s maiden name. I gave them my true name as well. I was not about to be cute with the police. Neither was I ready to have anyone learn yet that Mrs. Jack Graham was dead. The consequences of that announcement would surely be an avalanche of some kind.
I was the only person on the planet who could set it off. I was not ready to set it off yet. This was not cunning on my part, as some people have said. It was my natural awe of an avalanche.
I walked home, a harmless little elf in his magic dancing shoes, to the Hotel Arapahoe. Much straw had been spun into gold that day, and much gold had been spun into straw. And the spinning had just begun.
There was a new night clerk, naturally, since Israel Edel had been summoned to Arpad Leen’s. This new man had been sent over to fill in on short notice. His regular post was behind the desk at the Carlyle, also a RAMJAC hotel. He was exquisitely dressed and groomed. He was mortified, having to deal with whores and people fresh out of jails and lunatic asylums and so on.
He had to tell me that: that he really belonged to the Carlyle, and that he was only filling in. This was not the real him.
When I told him my name, he said that there was a package for me, and a message, too.
The police had returned my shoes and had picked up the clarinet parts from my bureau. The message was from Arpad Leen. It was a holograph, like Mary Kathleen’s will, which I had in the inner pocket of my suitcase—along with my Doctor of Mixology degree. The pockets of my raincoat were stuffed with other materials from Mary Kathleen’s shoes. They bulged like saddlebags.
Leen wrote that the letter was for my eyes only. He said that in the midst of the confusion at his penthouse he had never gotten around to offering a specific job to me. He suggested that I would be happy in his old division, which was Down Home Records. It now included The New York Times and Universal Pictures and Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey and Dell Publishing, among other things. There was also a catfood company, he said, which I needn’t worry about. It was about to be transferred to the General Foods Division. It had belonged to the Times.
“If this is not your cup of tea,” he wrote, “we’ll find something that is. I am absolutely thrilled to know that we will have an observer for Mrs. Graham among us. Please give her my warmest regards.”
There was a postscript. He said that he had taken the liberty of making an appointment for me at eleven the next morning with someone named Morty Sills. There was an address. I assumed that Sills was a RAMJAC personnel director or something. It turned out that he was a tailor.
Once again a multimillionaire was sending Walter F. Starbuck to his own tailor, to be made into a convincing counterfeit of a perfect gentleman.
• • •
On the following morning I was still numbed by my dread of the avalanche. I was four thousand dollars richer and technically a thief. Mary Kathleen had had four one-thousand-dollar bills as insoles for her basketball shoes.
There was nothing in the papers about the death of Mary Kathleen. Why would there have been? Who cared? There was an obituary for the patient Sarah Clewes had lost—the woman with the bad heart. She left three children