'He doesn't drink,' John said. 'And you shouldn't have any more.'
'Come on in the kitchen with me, everything you need's in there.'
'Alan, I have to get you upstairs,' John said. 'You need to get cleaned up.' .
'I had a shower this morning.' He jerked his head toward a door on the right-hand side of the room, grinning at me to let me know that we could cut loose in the kitchen if we got rid of this turkey. Then his face closed up again, and he gave John an unfriendly look. 'You can come in the kitchen too, if you tell me where April is. If you know. Which I doubt.'
He crunched my elbow in his bony claw and pulled at my arm.
'Okay, let's see what the kitchen is like,' John said.
'I don't drink to excess,' said Alan Brookner. 'I drink exactly the amount I want to drink. That's different. Drunks drink to excess.'
He tugged me across the room. Brown streaks and spatters had dried onto his legs.
'Ever meet my daughter?'
'No.'
'She's a pistol. Man like you would appreciate her.' He banged his forearm against the door in the wall of books, and it flew open as if on springs.
We were moving down a hallway lined with framed diplomas and awards and certificates. Among the awards were a few family photographs, and I saw a younger, robust Alan Brookner with his tweedy arm around a beaming blond girl only a few inches shorter than himself. They looked like they owned the world—confidence surrounded them like a shield.
Brookner went past the photograph without looking at it, as he must have done a dozen times every day. His smell was much more intense in the hallway. White fur like packed spiderwebs covered his bony shoulders. 'Get a good woman and pray she'll outlive you. That's the ticket.'
He thrust his way through another door and pulled me into a cluttered junk pile of a kitchen before the door swung shut. The smell of rotting food helped mask Brookner's stench. The door swung back by itself and struck John Ransom, who said, 'Damn!'
'You ever think about damnation, John? Fascinating concept, full of ambiguity. In heaven we lose our characters in the perpetual glorification of God, but in hell we continue to be ourselves. What's more, we think we deserve damnation, and Christianity tells us our first ancestors cursed us with it, Augustine said that even Nature was damned, and—' He dropped my arm and spun around. 'Now where the hell is that bottle? Those bottles, I should say.'
Empty Dewar's bottles stood against the splashboard of the sink counter, and a paper bag full of empty bottles stood beside the back door. Pizza delivery boxes lay strewn over the counters and tipped into the sink, where familiar brown insects roamed over and through them, scuttling across the crusty plates and upended glasses.
'Ask and ye shall receive,' Brookner said, fetching an unopened bottle of Scotch from a case beneath the sink. He slammed it down on the counter, and the roaches in the sink slipped inside the nearest pizza boxes. He broke the seal and twisted the cap off. 'Glasses up there,' he said to me, nodding at a cupboard near my head.
I opened the cupboard. Five highball glasses stood widely scattered on a shelf that could have held thirty. I brought down three and set them in front of Brookner. He looked a little like a disreputable Indian holy man.
'Oh well, today I could use a drink,' Ransom said. 'Let's have one, and then we'll get you taken care of.'
'Tell me where April is.' Brookner gripped the bottle and glared at him out of his monkey face.
'April is out of town,' John said.
'Investment poo-bahs don't go dillydallying when their customers need them. Is she at home? Is she sick?'
'She's in San Francisco,' John said. He reached and took the bottle from his father-in-law the way a cop would take a handgun from a confused teenager.
'And what in Tophet is my daughter doing in San Francisco?'
Ransom poured half an inch of whiskey into a glass and gave it to the old man. 'Barnett is going to merge with another investment house, and there's been talk about April getting a promotion and running a separate office out there.'
'What's the other investment house?' Brookner drank all of the whiskey in two gulps. He held out his glass without looking at it. Liquid shone on his jutting lower lip.
'Bear, Stearns,' John said. He poured a good slug of whiskey into his own glass and slowly took a mouthful.
'She won't go. My daughter won't leave me.' He was still holding out his glass, and John poured another inch of whiskey into it. 'We were—we were supposed to go somewhere together.' He gestured at me with the bottle.
I shook my head.
'Go on, he wants one too, can't you see?'
Ransom twisted sideways, poured whiskey into the third glass, and handed it to me.
'Here's looking at you, kid,' Brookner said, and raised his glass to his mouth. He drank half of his whiskey and checked to see if I was still interested in having a good time.
I raised my glass and swallowed a tiny bit of the Scotch. It tasted hot, like something living. I moved away from the old man and set my glass on a long pine table. Then I noticed what else was on the table. 'Ta-ra-ra- boom-dee-ay,' Brookner boomed out in his disconcertingly healthy voice. 'All the whores are in luck today.' He sucked at his drink.
Next to my glass was a revolver and stack of twenty-dollar bills that must have added up to at least four or five hundred dollars. Beside that was a stack of tens, just as high. A taller pile of fives stood beside that, and about a hundred singles lay in a heap like a pile of leaves at the end of the table. I made some sort of noise, and the old man turned around and saw what I was looking at.
'My bank,' he said. 'Worked it out myself. So I can pay the delivery boys. This way they can't cheat ya, get it? Make change lickety-split. The gun there is my security system. I grab it and watch them count it out.'
'Delivery boys?' John asked.
'From the pizza place, the one with the radio vans. And the liquor store. Generally I asks 'em if they'd like a little blast. Mostly they just take the money and run.'
'I bet they do,' John said.
'Uh-oh, my stomach feels bad.' The old man palped his stringy belly with his right hand. 'All of a sudden.' He groaned.
'Get upstairs,' John said. 'You don't want to have an accident in here. I'll come with you. You're going to have a shower.'
'I already had—'
'Then you'll have another one.' Ransom turned him around and pushed him through the swinging door.
Brookner bellowed about his stomach as they went up a second staircase at the back of the house. The loud voice went from room to room. I poured whiskey over the roaches, and they scampered back into the pizza boxes. When I got tired of watching them, I sat down next to the piles of money and waited. After a little while, I began stacking the pizza boxes and flattening them out so that I could squeeze them into the garbage can. Then I squirted soap over the heap of dishes in the sink and turned on the hot water.
About forty minutes later Ransom came back into the kitchen and stopped short when he saw what I was doing. His wide, pale face clouded over, but after a moment of hesitation, he pulled a white dish towel from a drawer and began wiping dishes. 'Thanks, Tim,' he said. 'The place was a mess, wasn't it? What did you do with all the stuff that was lying around?'
'I found a couple of garbage bags,' I said. 'There weren't all that many dishes, so I decided to take care of
