Need

  ALSO BY NIK COHN

  The Heart of the World

  Rock Dreams

  Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom

  I Am Still the Greatest Says Johnny Angelo

  This Is a Borzoi Book

  Published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

  Copyright © 1996 by Nik Cohn

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

  http://www.randomhouse.com/

  Originally published in Great Britain by Martin Seeker & Warburg, Limited, London, in 1996.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Cohn, Nik.

  Need / by Nik Cohn.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80043-5

  I. Title.

  PR6053.038N4 1997

  823’. 914—dc 96–36675

  v3.1

  For Vera and Norman Cohn;

  and, of course,

  for Michaela

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part 1 - First

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part 2 - Second

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part 3 - Third

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Part 4 - Fourth

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Part 5 - Last

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Acknowledgments

  FIRST

  What Willie saw was a fat white woman.

  She stepped out of Ferdousine’s Zoo with a pearl-grey bird on her wrist, some kind of cockatoo or parakeet, and stood exposed on the sidewalk, her big body all pinks and creams in a flowered cotton dress cut straight up and down like a shift or maybe a converted bed-sheet with armholes hacked out. It was hardly even daylight.

  Apart from Willie D and Anna Crow double-parked by a fire hydrant in his red Spyder, the block was deserted. There was only heat and a guttering trash-fire, the smell of burnt rubber.

  And the bird began to sport.

  It flirted the air with wings outspread, did a back-flip, drifted as if hang-gliding. Then dropped like a stone to the kerb, playing dead. Then whirled back up again, flurrying. Its plume was a pale yellow cut with cinnamon, it had a vivid orange patch on either cheek, and when it fluttered, its wing feathers flashed hidden colours, not only pearl but shades of bracken and butter.

  From where Willie watched, the flowers on the woman’s dress looked like marigolds, or maybe some strain of daisy. There was a gap in her front teeth when she laughed, and the bird nuzzled at her hair, pecked lightly at her cheek. They looked like lovers then, and the woman played the bird like a ball on a rubber band. Flipped it off her left shoulder and caught it on her right knee. Trapped it under one bricklayer’s arm and held it struggling, squawking. Bumped its beak with her nose in a kiss.

  Lank wisps of hair, gunmetal-grey, clung sweaty to her neck. When she raised her hand to brush them away, she caught sight of Willie D inside his Spyder.

  The pied-pearl bird was nestled between her breasts, and her heavy legs were bare. Posed with one foot flat and the other raised on tiptoe, half sprung from its fluffy blue mule, she looked at Willie head on, and seemed to see him clean through.

  It was as if she saw nothing. As if there was nothing to see. The bird, impatient for more play, kept tugging at her dress. Absent-minded, the woman brushed it off like lint, and stepped back inside the Zoo, out of sight.

  Anna Crow’s hand was creeping in Willie’s groin. It was a sly sneaking hand, a dirty girl’s hand, with bitten fingernails painted black. Willie had no use for it.

  The way that woman had looked him through.

  When the bird tugged at her dress, the flowered shift had been pulled taut across her thighs, the bloat of her belly. “Who’s the blowfish?” Willie said.

  “Kate Root, I can’t abide her. She has the room under mine, we’re more or less cohabitors, but she never hardly speaks or gives me the time of day, just whips that beady eye on me like some kind of basilisk I think it is and gives me The Look, unclean, malign, I heard she was a witch one time.”

  When she shifted her legs, the backs of her thighs blew farts against the black leather seat. “Come to bed,” she said.

  “Don’t cheapen yourself,” said Willie. “It ages you.”

  It was as if he’d been stripped. Like one of those sick dreams in childhood where you get caught naked in class or the schoolyard. On reflex he took a quick look down himself, checking for stains or wrinkles, and that’s when he saw what they’d done to his shoes.

  Murdered them, that’s what.

  His olive-green wing tips in butter-soft suede by Manzio, hand-stitched, Cuban-heeled, with ostrich trim and retro-Valmenon tonguing. Only yesterday morning he had brushed them out with a new monofilament wire comb from Beddoes & Wine; stroked and pampered them till their coats had glistened like thoroughbreds on the muscle. Now they were dead meat.

  Somebody had wasted them, execution-style. Their uppers had been smeared with oil and ashes, and their tongues cut out at the roots. They’d never known what hit them.

  What kind of pervert would do such a thing? And how come he’d got away clean? The last time Willie could picture seeing them alive, the shoes had been propped on the brass rail at Sheherazade, not a smudge or speck on either one. So they must have been hit at Chez Stadium. Sometime while he was in conference, or Anna was yakking in his ear, rabbit rabbit, he couldn’t hear himself think. In that dim back room like a windowless cell, you could barely see your own hands in there. Never mind some torpedo, slipsliding at your feet like a crawling snake.

  Willie’s stomach heaved, he could have had an accident right there. But you didn’t destroy him that easy, and he put out Anna Crow at the fire hydrant instead, he drove.

  Exactly speaking, the Spyder wasn’t his. Bernice had given him a year’s lease on it for his last birthday. A reward for turning twenty, plus a going-away present at the same time, before she’d headed out to marry her phony French marquis or viscount or whatever, Count De Pennies they’d used to call him, who ran the fat farm in Rancho Mirage. Now the lease was down to its last three weeks. Eighteen days more, and Willie would be fresh out of car.

  And Regina was no help. If only she’d listened to reason, not all those slanders and lies, that street-dirt scandalizing. If only she hadn’t had her locks changed, and trapped his collected shoes inside, all twenty-eight pairs.

  So: no wheels, no shoes, and no ready cash. Up in the South Bronx near Yankee Stadium, right off the Major Deegan Expressway, Pacquito Console owned a topless carwash that was a potential goldmine, guaranteed, anyone could see that, only right now it was underfinanced, and Pacquito was touting for investors. Ten grand would buy ten per cent. To date Willie had squirrelled away almost half. But he couldn’t touch that. Of course not. It was like his dowry.

  That left only the change in his pockets. Fourteen bucks and jangle. Which wouldn’t afford a gangrened sneaker.

  Driving east through Central Park, he hit the rocker switch on the console, and the Spyder went into its programmed ballet. The side windows slid down, the quarter windows tucked back into the to
p, the clasps at the head of the windshield unlatched, the rear deck opened like a clamshell, and the folding steel top rose to tuck away behind the rear seat. Twenty seconds flat, and the coupe was converted to a missile, 320 horse, 24 valve, twin-turbo.

  Some crazy in Sheep Meadow had set fire to his own hair. Or maybe it was just a wig.

  The thing about a topless carwash, all right, so it was not his dream exactly, but at least it was equity. What Deacon Landry called a commencement; Step One on the path to a balanced investment portfolio, and what was wrong with that? Why would Anna Crow roll her eyes and make that honking noise like a strangled goose? She called it laughing. And why did every bitch who’d been to finishing school graduate with blocked sinuses? Was it some kind of diploma?

  Fourteen dollars and change.

  When the first sunlight hit the Midtown roofs the clock on a mirrored tower said 6:49, then 91°. A commencement, that was all. You have to shit before you can crawl. His Cousin Humberto had told him that.

  Though Willie D felt no heat, he closed up the Spyder against the tightening streets. Put all those rods and pistons to work, shutting him in. Most days it made him feel like the boy in the bubble, immune. Not this day.

  Across the Brooklyn Bridge he hung a right, passed into a white tunnel. First thing he saw when he got inside, the fat lady flipped a pied-pearl bird off her left shoulder, caught it on her right knee. Bumped its beak with her nose in a kiss.

  This city certainly was full of ugly people.

  Was it just imagination, or could he smell corruption? Hard to tell with all these fires and the reek of burnt rubber everywhere. When he hit the Belt Parkway he could see a pall of smoke like toxic yellow smog overhanging Manhattan. It was that kind of summer. A season of fat white women, and murdered shoes.

  Footwear had always been his friend. Far back as he could remember, there had been an instinctive bond. Not that he sold other garments short. Whatever touched him, be it shirts, pants, even sweaters, became some part of him. Still his feeling for shoes went above and beyond. More than just apparel, they were his silent partners. His driving wheels, that steered him right.

  Like any other love, they had brought grief. Persecution even. The year he turned fourteen, his Aunt Guadalupe, who loved him best, had bought him a pair of Brunswick Glides, ice-blue with a shine that outdazzled the sun. The first day he wore them to Holy Martyrs the schoolyard was swept away. Paralysed with envy. You could feel the malice rise up shimmering in waves like heat off the concrete and tar, but nobody moved. Not at first. Not till he’d put his feet up on a litter bin, first the left, then the right, to inspect them for dust. He saw himself reflected, he was gorgeous. If there was one instant in his life when he knew for certain that he was special, set apart, that was it. Then Sister Teresa came by. Breathing hard and furious like always with her man’s red hands outspread, the spatulate fingers flattened and scarred. And she’d caught Willie dreaming; lost. So she reached out and touched his nose, held it a moment between a thumb and bare forefinger, and she snapped it like a twig. To save him from perfection, she said.

  “Jesus wept,” said Willie D in his Spyder now, thinking money, thinking stone cold cash. He was parked in Brighton Beach, in Little Odessa beneath the train tracks that ran twenty foot overhead, the El, where all the people and their faces and their signs were Russian, and when he went upstairs inside a room with yellow floorboards, Ivana was eating a tuna-melt sandwich. “This man,” she said. “He wanted to watch me swallow soup.”

  Version Girl, he called her. A raised and reddened scar like a wire necklace ran round the base of her neck where a surgeon had cut her for thyroid, and all she did was tell tales. “He gave me a Franklin to sit in the back of his car and let him voyeur me drink hot and sour. Some kind of Russian, he looked like a moulting bear. Smelled like one, too. Kept the soup in this metal canister like an urn or Chinese thermos with snakes and fire-tongue dragons painted on it, and inside it was scalding. One sip and my lips burned up, I thought I like to died. I mean, I was screaming like Oh my God. But the man never said or stirred. Just kept flopping more twenties on me, pushing them down my top. Man had a touch like scar tissue. So I sipped again. He held the canister up over my face and started to tipping it, slow. And what was weird, by the fourth, or maybe the fifth swallow, I’d forgot to feel a thing. It was like I’d rubbed coke on my teeth and gums, inside my throat. I couldn’t hurt and I couldn’t taste. There was soup running over my chin and neck, all down my chest, and the Russian, he started to lick it off. Kept one of his fat fingers held against my throat, pressing tight against the pulse, so he could feel it kick back, each time a new mouthful went down. I thought he’d maybe strangle me. Thought I’d ought to start screaming. But he never even squeezed. Just kept on feeding me soup, more soup, till I’d drank the canister dry.”

  As she remembered, she stripped. Pink spandex hotpants and a halter top, shiny black thighboots, and she searched herself for damage. “Believe it, I was a mess,” she said. “Hot soup was in my hair, soaked through my pants. So I started to fix my lipstick, and the fat bear Russian, what does he do then, he only bursts out sobbing. Kissing my hands, he wouldn’t stop. I’m loving you, he kept on saying and saying.”

  “They blew my shoes away,” Willie said.

  “I’m loving you,” Ivana said. Rolling back her lower lip, she studied its reflection in her compact mirror, a constellation of livid purple circles ringed in white. “What kind of statement was that?”

  The El ran right past the window and, every time a train roared through, the whole room shook. Behind the drawn blinds, the walls were papered with a duck-hunting scene, green and yellow on faded teal—one duck flying high, two more lurking in tall reeds, and the hunter in his rowboat with his gun across his knees, a globular man puffed up like a gorged tick with ear-muffs and a walrus moustache.

  A splash of white filmed the hunter’s left eye. It might have been a flaw in the printing process, but what it looked like was a cast. “What do I do now?” Willie asked.

  “MSG brings me out in hives.”

  “Go barefoot through the streets?”

  “Then all my glands swell up, I look like a frog.”

  “Wrap my feet in rags?”

  “Or not a frog exactly. More like a salamander.”

  Stripped, she dropped to her haunches and started to burrow for her drugs behind a skirting board. The angle that she squatted, doubled over with her butt stuck in the air, Willie could see in a single stretched bowbend from the pucker of her asshole to the back of her long neck where the dyed pink hair turned into fuzz soft as goosedown and the ends of her scar failed to meet.

  Beneath the pillow on the metal-frame bed were two soup-sodden twenties, a ten and some singles. “Impervious to fire,” said Ivana, shooting up, and Willie D walked out into Little Odessa.

  Along the dark channel beneath the El the morning papers were printed in Cyrillic, and the sidewalk stands sold pirogis and kvass. Even in this heat, the men lounging in shop doorways favoured woollen shirts, thick scratchy socks, double-breasted suits with wide lapels. Inside the Yalta Café, old women with headscarves spooned jam into glasses of lemon tea. And all of them saw the ruined shoes. The oil and ashes, the tongueless mouths; there never was such disgrace.

  Each train pounding overhead set off its own shower of sparks. A peck of pigeons, burned, whirled up into Willie’s eyes. Behind the drumming of their wings, he saw the pearl-coloured bird drop like a stone, playing dead.

  Now he started to get mad.

  Which wasn’t his style. Ask anyone he did business with, Deacon Landry, Mouse Williams, whoever, they’d tell you he was a gentleman. Taste and class, the good life, he believed in the finer things. But that didn’t make him a pushover. No way the contract called for him to stand still and take it while some old douche-bag and her bird made a monkey out of him. Staring through him like shit on the half-shell, it wasn’t right. No respect.

  Inside the Spyder, which was his
office, there were seats in soft Corinthian leather to bolster his back and nestle his buns, book-tapes to ease his mind. Before she changed the locks Regina had bought him a self-help library. The Road Less Travelled, and Chicken Soup for the Soul, and Release the Prisoner: Your Secret Self and You, He didn’t follow the words, but the sound of the voices soothed him, they made a change from Rap.

  One sentence he did recall. In Release the Prisoner, he thought it was: “In times of stress, repeat to yourself: THOU ART THE LION GOD.”

  He tried it out for size; it didn’t sound as hot. Along the Coney Island projects, when he wheeled back towards the city, some of last night’s fires were still burning. Fourteen dollars and change, plus two twenties, a ten and some singles. Say seventy bucks total. You couldn’t buy a Gucci loafer or wing-tip Oxford for that. So there was no help for it. Though he’d sworn to himself he wouldn’t, not ever again, he went to see Mrs. Muhle.

  Her apartment overlooking the East River was all shiny steel and glass, and she was baking zucchini bread. Flour whitened her hair, her flushed cheeks. When she saw Willie’s shoes, all she said was: “You poor boy. Oh, you poor, poor boy.”

  She was a woman with no clothes underneath her clothes. Every movement she made, even raising her hand to touch his cheek, sent loose flesh rolling and flopping, spilling over like tumbled pups. “I have made a significant salad,” she said. “Mediterranean chicken aux herbes.”

  When she recited the recipe, she made it sound like erotic verse. “One medium-size yellow onion, peeled and quartered. Two carrots, peeled and chopped,” she sighed, and began to unbutton his shirt. “One leek, white part only, cleaned and sliced.”

  “I need a century,” Willie said.

  “One teaspoon dried thyme, one bay leaf, six parsley sprigs, twelve black peppercorns, four cloves. Salt, to taste.” Her touch was damp, slightly oily, like her bread. “Three whole chicken breasts, about three pounds. One-third cup virgin olive oil, two teaspoons dried Oregano, two tablespoons drained capers, and one cup of imported olives, Niçoise preferred.” Then her mouth was on him, suckling. “The juice of a fresh lemon,” she said.