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Johnny Truffles speaking. Giovanni Garibaldi Tartufo.
TWO WEEKS LATER
We're flying off in that plane over there on the edge of the tarmac, the one with the two turbo-props, the one with Rumba Drums standing by the wing, waiting, smoking a cigarette and thinking about something. We're flying out of this little airport in Rhinebeck on Aero Caribe.
We shopped around. We looked at lots of planes and talked to three or four pilots before deciding that we didn't want a jet for this flight. We wanted a slow plane. We wanted a slow plane to cruise in, a seaplane.
JUNE 19 - 52ND ST., BIRDLAND STREET
I got my lounge back, so I'm upstairs now, in my office, taking care of business, taking inventory. It doesn't look like the Babylonians were ever in here. No sign. And there's no smell up here either. Everything's like it was when I left. Jefferson says it's because the windows don't face Mecca. Ay-rabs have to face Mecca.
THAT EVENING
It's about 7:00 and I'm here at my table by the window. Small lamp and a white tablecloth. The window is wide open and I'm watching the people go by on 52nd St. as this summer night begins to unfold. I'm also talking to Honeygirl, who just blew into town for a week and who is now pressed against me. Dexter Gordon is playing "Stairway to the Stars."
So Rumba Drums and I cruised down the coast in the seaplane, and then we cruised on over to Cuba. We dropped down onto some bays and some sounds and a lagoon or two along the way -- Delaware Bay, Chesapeake Bay for crabmeat and sunsets, Albemarle Sound, Pamlico Sound, Onslow Bay, Charleston Bay, Atavistica Lagoon, Port Royal Sound, Savannah Bay, Sapelo Sound, Mosquito Lagoon, Biscayne Bay, Key Largo.
And then, on a bright Tuesday morning, we dropped down onto Havana Bay.
Rumba Drums and I walked through the streets, or drove in the red and white 59 Chevrolet V-8 automatic I rented.
The faded blue and faded gray and faded tan of Old Havana, Habana Vieja, where we stayed for ten days at the beautiful and mysterious Hotel San Cristobal on Calle Habana. Drums, Spanish guitars, and a trumpet man in its dark bar at night, where we always took a booth. The narrow streets full of music and people and voices and carts and cocheros on triciclos. Bright laundry hanging from the balconies in the sunshine and the breeze.
Classic American cars from the 40's, 50's, and 60's parked at all angles, coming around corners. Big whitewalls. Spanish Colonial style, three and four story buildings of brick and stucco, with tall windows and thick, wide, green shutters. All of it cracked and peeling. And sweet kisses from Rumba Drums.
Coast guardsmen with scopes, neighborhood surveillance by committees of The Revolution, rationing, weekly blackouts, pockets of Santeria, cockfights. The too-beautiful Plaza Vieja. The Plaza de Armas on Calle Obispo. Rumbas, congas, salsas, cowbells. The kiosks along the Malecon. The Floridita in the afternoon, full of Brazilians, Euros, Australians, and Americans.
Each day we flew the seaplane around the island for four or five hours. Waterfront marinas on the south coast where we ate fresh red snapper in the sunshine with iced tea and crushed fruits.
Pale, faded, peeling Cuban blue -- in the bright sunshine.
On the way back north, as planned, we found Doctor YaYa and Mo Peppa on the beach of Edisto Island, circled them a few times, and then skimmed down onto the sparkling Atlantic, a hundred yards offshore. They paddled out to us in a rubber raft and we took off, back to the city for the showdown with the Chaldeans.
The takeback was so easy that I can't even say it was a job. Not one shot was fired. The women had them so lulled and so zoned on wine that we just walked up to them and either threw them out onto the street or knocked them out if they resisted.
I took care of Hassan Habib Salah personally. He wasn't as lulled as the others, so I grabbed him by his rughead hair and held him there, stiff-armed, eye-to-eye. "You muscled into the wrong lounge," I told him. LaVern Baker was singing "Soul On Fire."
Then, as he threw his left forearm up hard against my elbow and tried to break my grip, I planted and gave him one lightning left to the chin, one right to the jaw, and he went down, for good. He was out before he hit the floor. One cheetah move, two punches, and that was it. This Pre-Muhammad tried to take my joint.
As I was Fosse-dancing over to a booth where the King of Jive was having some trouble, to the applause of many broads and several Johnsons, Jefferson jerked Sahib Habib up off the floor, threw him over his shoulder, and hauled him away.
The boys are back in town.
I'm getting those Ay-rab smells outta here -- that olive tabouli tahini ganouj, that raisuli um-q'sr q'dafy q'ran hamas smell, that fatwa kebab smell. I got a crew working on it.
I kept the golden calf. It impresses me and has an effect upon me, up close and also at a distance. The Great Big Idol With The Golden Head takes up some floor space -- and most of the wall beside the translucent blue door that leads into the Root Man's place. You see it across the room as you come in the front door. I have a spotlight on it.
JULY 6
Rumba Drums is sweet-talking me for some more Caribbean. She wants to get back in that seaplane and fly, Aero Tropicana Caribe. She's restless, it's causing her to be bad, and she's saying that since everything's under control now we could head south and come back sometime in September. I'm warming to the idea.
JULY 12 - PORT-AU-PRINCE, THE OLOFFSON
I drift into the shadowy green barroom of this hotel. Rumba Drums is upstairs taking a nap. It's the middle of the afternoon and it's hot and sweaty and dusty out on the street where I've been for the last forty minutes, but in here there's shade, and these powerful black ceiling fans are high over our heads. Through the big, Spanish-style doorways you see the veranda and the white light that bleaches all things.
I got my hat off, my liquid-green sunglasses still on, and I'm pressing the sweat off my forehead with this soft handkerchief. I'm also sliding around in the pockets of my pants for my lighter but I can't find it, so I turn to this woman at the bar, who is smoking, and I ask for a light. She looks at me cool as a gimlet and says, "Drop dead, Smooth" or "Drop dead, Slick," one or the other.
She has a saltwater suntan and looks like she sailed in this morning from a North African kasbah. When she gets up and walks over to the phone booth in the corner, I see that she is tall, at least 5'9", has trim, slender lines, and an ass that is felonious.
I feel something like love at first sight. Something in the neighborhood. And within an hour I discover that she's Cousin Doc Duvalier's wife.
I have to nip this in the bud.
"Siren Song," Margaret Atwood:
"This is the one song everyone / would like to learn: the song / that is irresistible / even though they see the beached skulls, / the song nobody knows because anyone who has heard it / is dead, and the others can't remember. / Shall I tell you the secret? / I will tell the secret to you, / to you, only to you / come closer. This song / is a cry for help: Help me! / Only you, only you can, / you are unique."
The next morning, after some coffee with Rumba Drums, I call Rousseau and get him on the phone. I describe the situation and ask for a prediction, to see what he'll say. He says it'll go bad fast, but the short-term looks just right if I'm willing to be pursued. Any chimpanzee could have told me this.
AUGUST 3 - CAP-HAITIEN
Beautiful morning in this old colonial town, here on the North Coast. Giselle and I have taken this ocean-front cottage, far from the madding crowd and far from Cousin Doc's Tonton Macoutes, who were prowling the streets of Port-Au-Prince in their Jeeps, searching for us.
This Cousin Doc reacted fast to his wife's disappearance, but she needed help. She was in dire straits; she was more of a captive than a wife.
But we're living sans souci now. She's Zhe-zelle and I'm Zhahnee Nwarrr. Our heads are full of endorphins and we have the monkey faces of true romance. At night and also in the afternoon Giselle likes to slip into one of her books, light a reefer, play jazz from the 20's and 30's, and sip wine.
For her it's short shorts with cuffs. Sometimes she's on the couch, leaning back into one corner, and I press the heel and sole of my foot between her legs. She grips my foot with both hands to give it more pressure and force. She closes her eyes, squeezes her proud olive thighs together, and whispers the syllables of love.
We spend the daytime hours on the beach, and in the late afternoon the quadroon from Madagascar arrives to stretch out with us. The three of us have long drinks in the barroom, and, later, after showers and lotions, the oceanfront dinners take hours.
Behind us, on top of Mount Bonnet-a-L'Eveque, looms the Citadelle. We're going to spend a week here, maybe two, and then slip on down to Jacmel, on the Caribbean.
AUGUST 12- HINCHE, HAITI
We didn't get down to the South Coast. We didn't make it to Jacmel. Instead, we got in a shootout on some dark road last Saturday night, and now we're layin' low in this voodoo village about 20 miles from the Dominican Republic.
Giselle took a hit in her left shoulder and she's in and out of consciousness, but this houngan and I are beating the tambours, summoning Les Invisibles, and making paquets Congo to kill the fever and bring her back.
This place has the Bizango and the Cochon Gris and the loup garous, the fearsome loup garous of Hinche.
AUGUST 27
High winds and heavy rain going on here in the middle of this night. The candles are all flickering, some are already out, and we're wet. The houngan is shaking the rattle, blowing the lambi, kicking the drums with his bare feet, rolling his eyes and tossing some farine into the air to trace the veves, but he's exhausted. He says she'll die before Monday. He says her esprit is about to drift. He says it's Ian Guinee for Giselle, and he says he's going to call for the firedancers.
She's glowing in the dark. Shining.
SEPTEMBER 9, HISPANIOLA
I got across the border, into the Dominican Republic. Bright sun, then heavy sky, then big storms and winds, then sunshine. Steamy. This country is two-thirds of the island, but nobody hears anything about it. Haiti makes the news from this part of the world.
I'm driving at trotting-jaguar speed down these dirt and mud roads, the ones with the true ruts, through farmland and jungle, in this beat-up pink Coupe DeVille.
The houngan's riding low shotgun. He wasn't able to save Giselle and he's full of attitude. We're making our way down to Barahona on the Caribbean. I got a plan.
I got the yellow shooter's glasses on, a bottle of brown whiskey, a carton of Camels, a good radio station playing funk, and about 30 rounds, which means that I couldn't realistically expect to survive a shootout with more than 8 or 10 Tonton Macoutes.
They come over the border at will.
The houngan's a holy man, but I know he'd join me against the Macoutes, no matter how many there were. But I only have one gun, the Model 66, so his job would be to summon powerful Bullet Ju-Ju, instantly, in a millisecond, while I take the same amount of time to summon the idea that they killed Giselle.
SEPTEMBER 20 - 52ND ST., BIRDLAND STREET
I've got this high, sub-tropical fever but I'm back in The City, where it's raining and foggy. I've got the lethargy and the lassitude and I'm in a sweaty torpor. Sometimes I feel like my body is unusually large, and sometimes it seems small. Everything looks flat to me, or out of proportion. It all seems much too loud and way too fast. It will take a few days.
I'm remembering my escape from Barahona on the rusty freighter, aided by Greta, a woman of many wigs and disguises.
OCTOBER 2 - CHATEAU NOIR IN CENTRAL PARK
Saturday afternoon and the fever's still high. I'm by an open window in this woman's apartment on the corner of 72nd and 5th, on a cot, inside this mosquito net, high over the park, but I don't know how I got here. Sometimes it seems that we drift off to that turret over there in the trees, and out onto the roof garden. Sometimes I go to the dance.
She presses a cold washcloth lightly on my forehead and murmurs. She seems like Greta but sounds like Linda, my high school girlfriend, and through the delerium she often looks like Linda. She keeps the music down low, but it's always here, night and day.
OCTOBER 8
Linda or Greta tells me they're looking for me because they think I'm a host for the mosquito-borne killer virus, West Nile. It causes fever and confusion, then death from brain and heart damage. They think I brought it with me from either Haiti or the Dominican Republic, and they fear an epidemic.
Listen, I'm not gonna allow any examination by federal agents or state agents or city agents. They can forget it. They will never see me and they will never talk to me, about a West Nile virus or about anything else. I am out of contact with all agencies and all bureaucracies forever, and if they want to push it then we'll have to do some battle. They can take their public health problem to the United Nations.
OCTOBER 9
Saturday morning and the fever's down to 101. By this afternoon it could be back up to 103 or 104. It's highest in the middle of the afternoon.
Saltines only. I'm drinking quinine and sipping lemon jello and getting glucose from lime Gatorade, and Linda's telling me that some multi-agency force has gathered to find me. They're offering rewards and asking for tips and getting some. She says we should take off before the middle of next week, maybe earlier.
She wants us to get in the supercharged Mustang with the big tires and cruise up to my hideout in the Adirondacks -- do the payoffs and the dealing from there, from a safe and leisurely distance, as the autumn leaves of red and gold drift by our window. Go incommunicado in the mountains.
I don't like this idea. My instincts all tell me to get them before they get me, to go into action. But she says I'm not strong enough and that there are too many of them. This will take some guile, she says, and she tells me I'm not real sharp right now.
She's the voice of reason.
"It's going to take more than the lizard-brain response of someone in a delerium," she says, "so sip the jello and let me do the thinking. Take one of them out and a dozen will pop up as instant replacements."
OCTOBER 12
It just got dark, night just fell, and I just punched off from talking to William Wallace, my legal counsel. We discussed the pursuit tactics of public health agents for about thirty seconds, and then I asked him to tell me the Vietnam story again. When he was on the Perfume River.
He was in the Navy and had a job running barrels of gasoline up the Perfume River to Hue in a slow-moving, 75-foot-long landing craft. It had a diesel and no power for a quick burst of speed.
"It was more like a barge."
It was the day the Tet offensive began, this was it, but none of them knew it yet.
He was with three others, one a lieutenant, and their job was to run the barge up and down the river.
The lieutenant hears that the huge tank at the gas depot near Hue has exploded and is in flames. He wants to go up the river to see the blaze and find out what happened.
"We had two M-16s and a recoilless rifle that no one knew how to fire."
They come in off the ocean in the landing-craft barge and start up the Perfume River. They've been smoking some Panama Red.
They get about a mile up the river, just out of sight of the ocean, and there's a long column of uniformed troops, green uniforms, walking along the bank, walking toward the mouth of the river. Maybe a hundred of them. 75 at least.
"We didn't know who they were. We'd never seen the North Vietnamese Army before. They weren't that far away from us. We were throwing C-rations to them and they were waving and smiling at us."
The sailors had to take the boat around a small island in the river, away from the NVA, and when they got back into the main channel the NVA opened up on them with AK-47s and machine guns and mortars. And the mortar rounds are walking straight toward them.
It takes William Wallace more than a minute to find his M-16, it's a big boat, and when he does get it in his grip, it's jammed. So he goes through each textbook emergency move, stopping after each final jerk of the bolt to aim at the line of NVA and squeeze. Over and over again, a different move each time, trying everything, but he can't make it fire.
He's partially protected behind some iron, and he extends himself further each time he tries to shoot, jerking and almost dancing, in fast-motion.
"I'm sure they thought I was funny."
So he decides to shake it, as if it's begun firing, even down to the popping of clips. Aiming it at them and shaking it tight and violently. Bullets flying and ricocheting. The lieutenant is lying down on the deck and firing at the column of NVA with his .45, hitting nothing. The other Navy man with a rifle is hiding somewhere.
The mortars are coming in tighter and all four of them are going to die, when out of nowhere, over the trees, comes an F-4 Phantom.
"We couldn't call in an air strike. Nobody knew how. We didn't have a connection. The fighter just came in out of the blue. He was alone. Maybe he'd been looking over the blaze in Hue."
The pilot circles out over the ocean, once, then streaks back lined up on the column of NVA, which is just now beginning to scatter, and he lights up the whole line with napalm for two- or three-hundred yards.
After this, he banks, comes back for one low pass, and is gone. The lieutenant turns the boat around in the river and heads back out to sea. Black bodies of NVA burning along the shoreline and no live ones in sight. Just smoke and flames, the concentrated petrol-smell of napalm, and the crackling sounds.
OCTOBER 14 - MRS. WATSON'S APARTMENT IN JERSEY CITY
So we're here in the apartment of my high school English teacher, Mrs. Watson. Linda arranged it. She's one of Mrs. Watson's favorite students of all time and she's stayed in touch with her over the years.
On the way down the corridor, after we'd gotten off the elevator, I stepped into a wrong room.
Mrs. Watson's got a couple of high-strung Salukis, one male, one female, and the male is working my leg.
Dogs got no dignity, but cats have it.
We cruised over here in the Mustang last night during the big storm, through sheets of rain and those high winds. Mrs. Watson wants us to stay here as long as we wish, and she's got lots of space, lots of rooms.
William Wallace thinks it's a good idea for me to be out of the apartment on 72nd and 5th. Too dangerous. Too many snitches and too many people around town eager to cooperate with anybody who flashes a badge. He preferred my hideout in the mountains, but I like the idea of being nearby, across the harbor, so this is where it's gonna be.
About 3:00 this morning I got my first look at Mrs. Watson in 18 or 20 years. When she opened the door, in a chenille robe and with her hair pulled back, she looked good, and her world-class ass was tight against the nubby cotton. It looked almost exactly the way I'd remembered it from school. I was pleased when she bent over to restrain the two leaping dogs.
"You were always trouble, Johnny," she said, "but sometimes you made me laugh."
OCTOBER 15
Bright morning here on Mrs. Watson's balcony. Sunshine. View of Liberty Park and of lower Manhattan across the river. The fever's gone, I'm thinking clearly, and I feel like myself for the first time since I escaped from Barahona on the rusty freighter and was gripped by the sweaty deleria.
We're having a slow, late breakfast of soft-boiled eggs, onion bagels with butter and saga cheese, sliced Northern Spy apples, prosciutto de Parma, pear nectar, peach nectar, and coffee with heavy cream. There's a slight chill in the air, but the sun makes it just right with these robes and thick white socks.
Linda and Mrs. Watson are laughing about me as I clean and oil the Model 66.
"I can't imagine a crook dumber than you," Linda says. They think they're funny.
I hold the roscoe up in the air, parallel to Linda's face. The gun shines in the morning light, and I tell her to crook this.
OCTOBER 25
All three of them, including Mrs. Watson's companion/secretary, Suzie Kurosawa Yokohama, are saying they want to take the train to Niagara Falls. They want to open the windows of the Pullman and look out at the last of the leaves, have breakfast brought to our compartment, and lunch, and maybe dinner, stretch out on the couch of luxury, play some music, watch the season continue to unfurl. Maybe some champagne, maybe some naps. And then the power and immensity of the falls, the mist that is everywhere, and the strong river. The black rubber raincoats and the elevator ride down through the rock.
NOVEMBER 4 - MRS. WATSON'S APARTMENT IN JERSEY CITY
So we took the express to the Falls and a 17-stop ride back to Grand Central. We have returned. All four of us. And I intuit that none of us will ever be the same.
We've been here for two days now.
It's a cool, gray afternoon and we're out here on the balcony with a fire going in this clay chiminola. We're burning cherry. Nobody's doing any real work. We're on vacation.
I am now among the few who have gone over Niagara Falls and emerged alive and uninjured. And I did it with more style than anyone in history. So I set a record -- Most Style. Two bruises on my left arm. That was it.
I gave the barrel a simple design. On the inside, I had it reinforced with four steel bars and padded with three queen-sized innerspring mattresses. That was it. Outside, it was an almost-round kayak with breakaway pontoons. And I built two cockpit seats on top, where Suzie Yokohama With The Dragon Tattoo and I sat, fast in the current on that bright 75-degree afternoon.
A wave every now and then, a thrown kiss, a cigarette, as the swift and undeniable water took us to the edge and over it, out into the air and the mist propelled by the great force of the Niagara River. At that moment, we jerked the hatch closed and shot, spring-loaded, down into the mattresses for the ride. We rolled with it.
NOVEMBER 5 - AROUND MIDNIGHT
Last night, late, when they were all in bed, I walked out here on the balcony for a cigarette. It was sweet and cool and I was looking across the harbor at the city and at the lights on the water. I glanced over to my left, at the bank of windows one floor below me, and through one of the windows I saw a blonde on her knees.
She was kneeling in front of a woman in stilettos who was seated above her. The blonde was beginning to take the toe of the woman's shoe into her mouth, and this picture caught my eye. I got the binoculars and watched them for fifteen minutes, until they walked out of the room together. The stiletto woman was gripping the back of the blonde's hair.
This afternoon, the same blonde slipped into the elevator behind me and turned around to face the door. She was swaying to some faraway rhythm as we rode up eight floors together.
Then, earlier this evening, I'm in the market on the corner buying some nectars and cigarettes and tangy mustard and Nutella and a crate of Spanish clementines. She's behind me in line. I'm asking the checkout girl from Bangkok about the pen she's just used on my fifty to see if it's counterfeit.
"How do you know if the bill's counterfeit?" I ask her. "What color does the ink turn if it's counterfeit?"
She slides the tip across a piece of white paper and the tan streak darkens. It's almost black.
"My counterfeits are high quality," I say.
First the blonde laughs, then the Bangkok girl laughs.
APRIL 2 - 52ND ST., BIRDLAND STREET
So I'm back in my place, standing at the bar feeling energized and alive, sipping some brown whiskey and getting a summary of recent events from Jefferson. We have big band on , and Rousseau will be drifting through the door, doing the moves, any minute now.
It's gray and almost cold outside on this late afternoon. Trenchcoats. Through the windows I think I see some flurries in the air.
The public health scare's blown over, it's history, so the public health officials can return to their desks, put their heads down, and go back to sleep. And for insurance, I had Bobby Three-Heads pay off two fat functionaries at city hall to make sure my name never comes up again in their discussions of exotic fevers and epidemics.
