‘A bottle of Bud,’ I said, ‘and a hot pastrami on rye.’
‘Do you want a couple of pieces of eight with that?’
‘No,’ said I. ‘Nor a sunken galleon.’
‘Don’t go refusing my cocktails before you’ve tried them,’ said Fangio. And he actually went off to fetch my bottle of Bud. So things had changed just a little hereabouts.
Fangio returned with a Bosun’s Whistle. A cocktail of his very own formulation, he assured me. So perhaps things hadn’t changed after all.
He did not discuss the matter of immediate payment, so, out of politeness, nor did I. I sipped at my Bosun’s Whistle and picked a bit of seaweed from between my teeth.
‘I’ll bet you can’t identify all the different ingredients in that cocktail, ’ said Fangio.
‘I’ll bet you’d be correct on that,’ I said.
‘How much do you bet?’ Fangio asked.
‘That you are correct and that I cannot identify the ingredients?’
‘Precisely. How much?’
‘Ten dollars?’ I said.
‘You pussy. Arr-harr-harr-harr.’
‘One hundred dollars?’ I suggested.
‘That’s more like it. Shake.’ And Fangio extended a hand across the bar counter. ‘Sucker,’ said Fangio. And chuckling away, as had the man from American Heritage, he stumped off along behind the bar counter upon his newly fitted wooden leg.
Leaving me to ponder one of life’s eternal questions.
Why had I not pressed him further to explain about the pirates?
I viewed the clientele of Fangio’s Bar. None of them were dressed as pirates. Although I did notice two fellows and a lady sporting wooden legs. But that was not necessarily an indication of piratical leanings. Most who know anything about New York in the nineteen-seventies will know that there was a brief fashion for bums. Bums being the American word for tramps. Fanny, apparently, being the American word for bum. The famous bums’ bible, The Autobiography of a Supertramp, which was written in the nineteen-twenties, had been reprinted, and along with Jack Kerouac’s On the Road had become the thing to read. And in the final chapter of Supertramp, the author, who is riding-the-rods on an American train, falls off and loses a leg and this caught the reading public’s imagination. And many folk went out and had a single leg amputated. Weird, eh? Of course, that kind of thing would not happen today, because the readers of autobiographies are far too sophisticated. And intelligent. And beautiful. And sexy. And-
‘Life, eh?’ said Fangio who, having served others, had now returned unto me. ‘You can’t live with it, but you can’t live without it. Or is that women I’m thinking about?’
‘Probably women,’ I said. ‘I think a lot about women. But I never seem to have sex with any of them.’
‘Perhaps you’re gay,’ said Fangio.
‘How dare you,’ I said.
‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ said Fangio.
‘Quite so.’
‘I should have said perhaps you’re gay. Ah-harr-harr-harr.’
‘I should think so too.’ And I sipped at my Bosun’s Whistle.
‘Getting anywhere near a solution regarding its ingredients? Ah-harr? Ah-harr-harr?’ asked Fangio.
‘Sadly not,’ I said. ‘If I can’t come up with something soon, I will just have to accept defeat and take the hundred dollars for failing.’
‘And that will serve you right.’ And Fangio chuckled again. ‘Harr-harr-harr-ah-harr, ’ he went.
And then he said, ‘Ah-harr slice-me-membrane and walk-me-plank (also cocktails), there was a guy in here earlier, asking for you.’
‘Asking for me?’ I said.
‘That’s right. Aar-harr-harr-’ and then Fangio coughed. ‘I don’t know how pirates keep it up,’ he said. ‘It makes my throat sore. But yes, asking for you. Well, asking for Lazlo Woodbine, Private Eye.’
‘A client?’ I said. ‘Well, if you see him again, you send him over to my office.’
‘No,’ said Fangio, shaking his head. ‘I can’t do that. Oh no.’
‘And why not?’ I asked, and I downed the last of my Bosun’s Whistle and then picked a pair of lady’s underpants out of my teeth. ‘Why can’t you send them to my office?’
Fangio beckoned me close and whispered into my ear. ‘Between you and me only,’ he whispered, ‘that was the real Lazlo’s format. The four locations. You’ll have to come up with your own special format. I’m not going to help you to copy his.’
And I thanked Fangio for his whispered words. And I concluded, in my rather drunken state, that he did have a good point there. I mustn’t copy the way Laz had conducted his business, even if I was going to work under his name. And I was. I would have to come up with my own special way of doing things. Perhaps, learning by Laz’s fatal mistake, not such a hands-on, in-your-face, get-up-and-go, jumping-directly-into-danger kind of way of doing things. I would definitely have to come up with my own. Some way to get the job done with no direct danger to myself. Some technique, in fact, that mostly involved sitting down, preferably in the office, or in this bar, and thinking things out. A technique of my own. A technique for Tyler.
The Tyler Technique, that’s what.
And I would have ended this chapter right there. At that momentous moment, when I made my momentous decision. But for the fact that Fangio suddenly tapped me briskly upon the left trench-coat sleeve and said, ‘Hey, Laz – that’s the guy. The one that wants to speak to you. About a case. I think.’
And he pointed and I turned to look. And there he was in the doorway. And I raised up my fedora to the guy.
Because he was Elvis Presley.
46
Well, it certainly looked like Elvis Presley.
But then, how was I to be sure?
Because I remembered Dr Darren McMahon, the Scouse one at the Ministry of Serendipity. So was this the real Elvis Presley, or just another Elvis Presley? Whatever that might mean. But think about this. If this really was Elvis Presley. And he had a case he wanted Lazlo Woodbine to solve. And I was, for all the world, Lazlo Woodbine now. It would mean that I would be solving a case for Elvis. How cool would that be? How cool? I tried to hold on to myself and my composure. I would have to act professionally here. Keep calm, I told myself. And so I kept calm. Very calm. Very very very calm, I kept. Though really rather drunk.
The chap that might be Elvis Presley caught sight of me and he grinned, with that most-distinctively-Elvis-lip- curl grin, and swaggered in my direction.
And I use the word ‘swaggered’ without fear of correction. Elvis was a swaggerer. He sidled also, did Elvis. In fact he combined swaggering and sidling into a walk that was quite his own. Unique, one might say. So perhaps I shouldn’t say that he swaggered. No, he swaggered and sidled simultaneously.
He swiddled.
‘Mr Lazlo Woodbine, sir?’ he said to me, swiddling up and sticking out his hand. He smelled very strongly of ‘product’, this fellow did, and I found myself almost immediately engulfed by an overall cloud of it. I know folk like to write that in his last years Elvis rarely washed, taking the occasional ‘whore’s bath’ – a wipe under the armpits and around the willy and bum/fanny regions – but I can vouch for his cleanliness. It was scrupulous. And so he smelled of ‘product’. Of products.
A musky aftershave. A cedarwood-based body lotion over vanilla soap. An olive essence hairspray that kept those roguish darkly dyed strands [23] in place and a
