THE BUSINESSMAN A Tale of Terror Read online

  Glandier checked the musical offerings listed on the card and chose the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing “Nearer My God to Thee.”

  A preliminary flourish of organ music drowned out the chirping of the robin that had hopped onto the sill of the Dove Room’s single window. From the sill the robin dropped to the forest-green carpet, and then in a few hops it crossed the room to the foot of the trolley (as the attendant had termed it, though it more closely resembled a simple conveyor belt) on which the casket had been placed. Thence, with a flutter of its wings, it rose to perch upon the casket itself.

  Glandier at last noticed the robin, and remarked, “What the fuck.” He walked over to the casket and took a swat at the bird, but the robin proved more agile, and its parrying peck drew blood from the back of Glandier’s hand.

  Only then did it occur to him that this might be no ordinary robin. Ordinary robins would not peck at the silver cross that decorated the lid of a casket. (“Silvery,” rather, for the cross was only a piece of paper glued over a thin shell of molded plastic. Schinder’s, true to its advertising claims, did not waste their clients’ money on needless pomp.) No, this was a robin only in the illusory sense that the heron at Rush Lake had been a heron. Yet in another sense it was a robin, at least until it could change to some larger and less vulnerable form. Now, if ever, was the moment to see to it that it underwent no further metamorphoses.

  With conscious slyness and with a sense of delight born of that slyness, Glandier slipped off the jacket of his coat and, holding it up, netlike, in both hands, pounced upon the robin. But, being ponderous at the best of times and especially awkward in this particular, he pounced too hard, and the plastic casket, weakened by the robin’s pecking, split apart at the seams the silvery cross had concealed. In the same instant the halfling leaped across the infinitesimal interface separating the animate tissues of the robin from the inanimate remains of the corpse.

  Glandier had lost his balance, so that both hands and most of his weight were resting on the slick surface of the body bag within the sundered casket. As he struggled to push himself upright, and as the reanimate corpse within tore at this last confining membrane, the black plastic ripped and a noxious odor filled the air of the Dove Room to mingle with the triumphant strains of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

  Bony fingers knotted about Glandier’s silk rep tie. As though he’d received a blow to the solar plexus, Glandier doubled forward. In an instinctive gesture of self-protection, he lifted his right knee. It touched the button that triggered the casket’s journey to the crematory chamber. Two doors of polished brass opened at the end of the short conveyor belt, and the casket was propelled toward the opening.

  Glandier’s screams, as he was pulled by his necktie down the metal-rollered incline beyond the double doors (in much the way a carton of canned goods enters the basement of a supermarket), could not be heard above the hymn’s joyous conclusion. The doors closed behind him, and for a moment all was blackness. Then through the grating of the grille on which he lay he saw the hundred blue flames of the crematorium winking on, row upon row, as his wife’s grinning, fleshless mouth rose toward his to seal their union with a final kiss.

  CHAPTER 58

  They walked along an infinite path through a boundless prairie toward a horizon that seemed always just fifty or sixty feet ahead. He had taken off his tweed jacket and left it on a scarecrow. His sleeves were rolled up, and his feet were bare. She too had thrown away her wrestling boots, though she still wore the rest of her Mazeppa costume, except for the cumbersome, sweaty turban. They talked about politics and the folly of the nuclear arms race, about Paris and New York, but mostly they talked about poets and poetry. She was full of wonderful gossip about Whitman, whom she had seen cruising Manhattan’s primal beatniks at Charley Pfaff’s beer cellar on Broadway and Bleecker, and about Swinburne, whom she had tried to vamp for £10 at the request of his friend, Gabriel Rossetti. She was able to compare the sexual staying power of Dickens to that of Dumas père (the latter excelling, she insisted, in strict proportion to his greater girth). Berryman told tales of Roethke and Lowell and Delmore Schwartz, to all which she listened with remarkable patience and attentiveness, considering she knew nothing about them and had never read their work.

  At last, when his reminiscences had wound down and she judged him to be in his mellowest mood, she proffered the suggestion she had been reserving all the while they had been journeying. “Do you know what would be wonderful?”

  “What?”

  “A workshop.”

  “A what?”

  “A poetry workshop—in heaven. Not in the Empyrean, perhaps. In the higher reaches, I suppose, one loses interest in poetry—and in prose. But Dante does put Homer and the other classical poets in the very first circle—”

  “Of his Inferno,” Berryman noted.

  “Yes, but they’re not suffering there. They’re discussing poetry, just as we were. And there are probably millions and millions of souls in heaven who’d like to take a workshop with the great John Berryman. Your reputation with your students stood very high, you know.”

  “And would these millions of celestial poets sit and listen while each of the others read his or her poems aloud and then had them critiqued? That could take rather a long time.”

  “Well, we’ll be there for all eternity. It was only a suggestion.”

  “I thought that once we arrived in heaven we’d be in a state of permanent mindless ecstasy. When do we arrive, by the way?”

  Adah looked down at her forearm, as though consulting a wristwatch, though she wore only bangles. “It’s not much farther.” She was pouting.

  “I didn’t mean to seem slighting.”

  “Your problem, John Berryman, is that you’re an elitist.”

  He shrugged.

  From behind them there was a voice, hailing them by their names: “Hey there, Mr. Berryman! Mrs. Menken! Wait up!”

  It was the Sheehy boy, riding toward them (with some difficulty, owing to the bumpiness of the path) on a bicycle.

  “Puck!” Berryman saluted him with a wave of his arm.

  The boy braked to a stop beside them. “It’s Jack,” he corrected, in an aggrieved tone. “Jack Sheehy. You probably don’t remember, but I tried to kill you a few days ago.”

  “Oh, we remember, certainly,” said Adah. “Mr. Berryman was just giving you a kind of nickname. Do you already have a nickname that you prefer?”

  “Not really.”

  “Well, now you do!” she said brightly. “Puck was the hero in a play by William Shakespeare. In case you didn’t know.”

  Jack seemed unsure whether he was being made fun of, and then decided it didn’t matter. “Here,” he said, reaching into the basket of his bicycle. “Mrs. Anker told me to give this to you as a bon voyage present.” He presented Adah with a bouquet of bloodroot, bluet, and bridal wreath. “And this is for Mr. Berryman.” He produced a bottle of New York State champagne.

  “Isn’t that nice of her,” said Adah. “Do give Joy-Ann my thanks, and a big kiss from me.” She stooped to kiss Jack on the forehead. He grimaced.

  “She didn’t think to send glasses with the champagne, did she?” Berryman asked.

  “Right here,” said Jack, and reached into the basket to produce two wineglasses of blue cut glass.

  Berryman thumbed off the cork of the bottle, which, under the open sky of the endless prairie, did not make much of a pop, but the champagne itself foamed out of the bottle quite dramatically, thanks to the bumpy ride it had enjoyed in the bicycle basket.

  “Look,” said Jack, just as they’d lifted their glasses to each other in a wordless toast. “Up there—a blimp!”

  And so there was; in the western sky, where the sun was sinking into banks of apricot and cantaloupe clouds, a silvery dirigible covered with winking lights approached.

  “Can you read what the lights spell out?” Adah asked.

  “My eyes were never that good,” said Berryman. “It’s
still a long way off.”

  They strolled down the path, sipping the champagne and admiring the joint spectacle of the sunset, which was a supremely beautiful sunset, and the blimp’s approach, which was ponderous but also, in its own way, sublime. Jack followed, wheeling his bicycle.

  After a very short time the path came to a stop at the edge of a cliff. Below them a river of awesome breadth wound from north to south, bisecting the infinite prairie. The sunset slanted down into the mirror of the river and leaped up in glory.

  “That can’t be—” Berryman began. “No. Impossible.”

  “What’s impossible?” asked Adah.

  “That isn’t… the Styx?”

  “Of course not!” Adah said indignantly. “The Styx is off in Greece or some such place, a perfectly insignificant river. This, surely, is the Mississippi. Not the real Mississippi, perhaps: the Spiritual Mississippi, one might better say. Americans do some things better, you know, and size is definitely one of those things.”

  As though to prove her point, the dirigible had now drawn near enough for them to make out both its individual markings and its overall size. The latter was expressed succinctly by Jack, who declared it to be at least as large as the mother ship that lands on Satan’s Bluff at the end of Close Encounters. Its vast bulk was given over to a complicated array of blinking lights that alternated the single, cheery exclamation

  SAVED!

  with explosions and geysers and pinwheels of shimmery color, each of them an advertisement and a promise of heavenly bliss.

  “Wowee-zowee!” said Jack (for Adah and Berryman were speechless). “Will you look at that! That is something special.”

  The blimp, as it neared the cliff from which they were regarding river, sunset, and light show, began to descend, until at last the cabin slung underneath the ship proper was brushing the grass and its shadow had darkened the meadow for acres about. A door opened, and a figure stepped from the cabin.

  It was Jesus Christ, wearing the uniform of an officer in the Salvation Army. He strode across the meadow grass with his arms outstretched, smiling the friendliest of smiles.

  “Hi there,” said Jesus. “You must be Adah Menken,” He took her hands and beamed. She blushed. He squeezed. She smiled. He laughed and, without releasing her hands, turned to Berryman. “And you’re John, the same as my beloved disciple. Good to meet you, after all I’ve been told. But who—” He took off his visored cap and hunkered down to be face to face with Jack Sheehy. “—is this? Are you coming back to heaven with me too?”

  “No, sir, I’m sorry but I can’t. I’d love to have a ride in your dirigible, but I promised Joy-Ann—Mrs. Anker, that is—that I would go to Tanganyika and help her daughter get reincarnated there. She’s going to be a Masai warrior in her next life. All I have to do is plant this—” He showed Jesus the protoplast taken from a leaf of the willow that Berryman had brought to Paradise. “—in the uterus of her mother-to-be. Or I guess I should say ‘his.’”

  “A Masai warrior!” Adah marveled. “What a strange choice.”

  “It was either that,” Jack explained, “or the eighth daughter of a Polish miner with Somebody’s syndrome as a birth defect. I don’t know how it worked out to just those two possibilities. A computer does all the astrological calculations. Anyhow, Joy-Ann decided that Giselle should start off her next life from a new angle.”

  “Sounds like a good idea, though I hope it won’t take her a whole lot longer to join the rest of us here.” He stood up. “Well, time to be on our way. Sorry you can’t come along with us today, Jack. Maybe next time?”

  “Actually,” said Jack, “I’m in a kind of apprentice program right now. Eventually I’m going to be Mrs. Anker’s assistant, in charge of everything to do with sex and stuff like that. There’s some kind of connection between sex and death.”

  “I know,” said Jesus. “Though we—” His smile embraced (almost, it seemed, quite literally) Adah and John. “—have passed beyond all that.”

  He offered his hands to them, and like children in a calendar picture they took, each of them, one of his hands and followed him back to the dirigible.

  Jack watched till they were safe inside and the dirigible was back in the air high above the Spiritual Mississippi. Then he turned his bicycle around and started pedaling east to Tanganyika.

  CHAPTER 59

  “Another quennelle?” Bing urged. “Or some more soubise?”

  “Thank you,” said Father Mabbley, “but I’ve already had a genteel sufficiency. Quite seriously, dear boy, such gifts as yours ought not to be wasted on the desert air.”

  “These days, Father, Julia Child is universal, and in any case the desert is your home. Here in the cities of the Great Plains, milk and honey and butter and eggs and all the other sources of cholesterol have their source. In due course Minnesota shall be the Normandy of America. But I’m glad you enjoyed your dinner. Now, shall we repair to the drawing room for our coffee?”

  “What I meant to say,” said the priest, pushing back his chair and rising from the candlelit table, “is that we’ve missed you, Bing dear, simply that. And I do find it hard to understand how you can want to stay on here in St. Paul a day longer than need be. After all you’ve been through.”

  Bing snuffed out the candles with his fingers and followed his guest into the “drawing room,” which differed from the living room it had been in Joy-Ann’s time only with respect to the installation of new drapes and the banishment of some of the tackier furniture to the basement. The drapes, however, were spectacularly au courant and opulent, a cream-colored silk damask of so monumental a pattern that in their fullest extent they seemed but a swatch snipped from a bolt of gargantuan proportions. Their effect, when drawn, was to make the surviving furnishings seem somehow hypothetical, the furniture of a dollhouse or a stage set rather than of an actual house that people lived in. With that single alteration (and a change of name) Bing now felt entirely comfortable living as the custodian of the museum of his childhood.

  Bing poured the coffee from a Royal Worcester pot that he’d bought on his first great spree after being released from the hospital. It had cost well over a hundred dollars, but it was truly the most beautiful of coffeepots, with orange lotuses blossoming on a field of bone white china, a coffeepot that could be counted as a friend.

  Over their coffee Bing filled in Father Mabbley on the details of his strange good fortune, details too distressing to have gone into at dinner. First, as to Glandier’s dark guilt: the Scrabble Ouija message Bing had received with Alice Hoffman had been confirmed from the unlikeliest of sources. The sister of a crippled Vietnam veteran who had died in a freak fishing accident had discovered among her brother’s effects a confession of his having agreed to supply Glandier with a false alibi for the time of Giselle’s murder, in consideration for Glandier’s buying a lakeside cabin at a wildly inflated price. This, in conjunction with Glandier’s subsequently retracted confession over the phone to the Willowville police, had been enough to persuade Glandier’s attorney and other relevant authorities to declare Bing to be Glandier’s heir, ostensibly as next-of-kin.

  “And so you have two houses,” Father Mabbley marveled.

  “And a cottage by a lake, and rather a large lump of money. Glandier’s company lavished life insurance on its executives as though there were no tomorrow. I’m rich. Or very prosperous, anyhow. So long as interest rates stay above eight percent, I’ll never have to work again. Though just to keep from going utterly to seed and forgetting all my professional training, I’ve volunteered to be the bingo caller for Our Lady of Mercy’s Las Vegas nights.”

  “Ahhh!” purred Father Mabbley with a sanctimony delicately laced with sarcasm. “I’m glad to know that you don’t intend to be wanting in your love for Mother Church. You realize, of course, that in some particulars the church here may not have quite the same enlightened attitudes as you’ve come to take for granted at St. Jude’s.”

  “In that regard, Father, I int
end to balance my benefactions. St. Paul is notoriously homophobic. There was a referendum here some years ago on the issue of gay civil rights, the result of which was that gays were told they were to have none. So, by way of showing gratitude for my various windfalls, I’ll be letting THRUST, which is the most radical and outspoken of the various gay activists’ groups in the area, use this house for their hotline. And the house in Willowville is going to be a hostel for gays who’ve had problems with their landlords.”

  “I wonder if that will sit well with the rectory at Our Lady of Mercy.”

  “If they choose to make an issue of it, I’ll reveal that I am acting according to express wishes of Father Windakiewiczowa.”

  “Surely that would be fibbing,” said Father Mabbley.

  Bing pursed his lips and shook his head. “On my honor, Father Mabbley, as a good Catholic. After all, the man did die at my very bedside. Who would know more about his last wishes?”

  “It’s that, of course—the murder of Father What’s-it when he was visiting you at the hospital—that represents the most impenetrable mystery in the whole tangled skein. One can understand why a disturbed adolescent—”

  “Jack Sheehy was not yet an adolescent,” Bing corrected.

  “Child, in that case: why a child might murder his entire family. Such things have been known to happen, alas. One can even conceive his shooting a psychiatrist he’s been sent to, though it seems altogether too odd a coincidence that your brother-in-law should have visited the same psychiatrist earlier on the day of the murder.”