Genius Page 13

  “Definitely. Only the big cases, though. We have a permanent-type office in Paris, France, just to keep an eye on any conspicuous spendingue.”

  “Isn’t that interesting,” I said weakly.

  “Seen Mr. Starr this morningue?”

  “Oh, good Lord, no. When he goes away for the weekend, sometimes he’s not back for . . . well, for weeks.”

  “You dint say he was gone for the weekend yesterday.”

  “Didn’t I? Well, I’m sure he won’t be . . .”

  “St. Regis,” Starr bawled from his bedroom above our heads. “St. Regis! I want my breakfast.”

  “What was that?” Mr. Guber asked sharply.

  “Th-that? Why, that was Miss Ximinez’s parrot, Loro. See? He’s perched up there right above us.” Mr. Guber squinted upward toward where Loro was dozing. “Amazingue,” he said.

  “St. Regis! My breakfast,” Starr bellowed louder than ever. By now the argument on the street had reached such a crescendo that St. Regis couldn’t have heard a fifty-megaton explosion. However, Perro’s incessant barking from the street suddenly inspired the parrot up in the tree to an imitation. As an encore he finished off with his impressions of Madame X, saying, “Buenos dias, I aff come for de rent.”

  “That’s some bird,” Mr. Guber said. “Ve-ry ver-sa-tile. Shirl—that’s my wife back in Teaneck—has a parakeet but she can’t teach it to say anythingue.”

  “Well, that’s life,” I said desperately. “Some can, some can’t.”

  Mr. Guber looked up into the purple jacaranda blossoms where Loro, having located a particularly delicious covey of vermin under one wing, was pecking away at himself. “Astonishingue! Uh, speakingue of breakfast, is there some kind of coffee shop in the vicinity?”

  “Hasn’t Señorita Ximinez assigned a maid to your apartment yet?”

  “I don’t expect to be here longue enough for that. Too expensive. But if there’s a cafeteria of some kind . . .”

  I began to see a way out for Starr. “Well, there’s a bar-cum-chili-parlor across the way. . . .”

  “That ought to be good enough.”

  “Oh, no, it won’t. Very dirty. Lot of low types. Drunks. Mean drunks. And they hate Americans.”

  “Well, I’m not a drinkingue man myself. I mean I haven’t got anythingue against it—in moderation. Rye and ginger ale at a social gatheringue—somethingue like that—but . . .”

  “No,” I said firmly. “It wouldn’t be neighborly to send you across the street. I’d never be able to forgive myself if anything happened to you.” He looked dismayed. “But, I’ll tell you what, Mr. Guber. Why not try San Angel—the German restaurant. That’s very nice. You can pick up a taxi at the corner and . . .”

  “A cab. About how much . . .”

  “Oh, the merest pittance. One peso, fifty—two pesos at the most.”

  I could almost hear the comptometer of his mind clicking. “That would be about sixteen cents—few mills less. About the same as a New York subway.”

  “Exactly—and so much more colorful and interesting. You’ll like San Angel. Don’t hurry back. Look around. Very old. Very quaint. Very picturesque.” I was beginning to feel like Miz Priddy.

  “Well, thank you very much, I’m sure. But I can’t waste any time on sight-seeingue. Business first, pleasure later. The German restaurant in San Ongue-hell.”

  “That’s right. The drivers all know it. Buen provecho!”

  “Thanks a lot. So longue.”

  I waited until he was out of sight, then I gathered a handful of pebbles and threw them up at Starr’s open window.

  “Ouch!” he cried. “Merciful God, am I to be shot as well as starved?”

  “Starr!” I hissed as loudly as I dared. “Starr!”

  He appeared at the window, hair and dressing gown flying. “What kind of practical joke is this, Dennis?”

  “Starr,” I said. “I’ve got to tell you something. It’s important.”

  “Oh, very well,” he said. “Just let yourself in, and while you’re about it would you mind bringing a pot of coffee, some hot—not cold but hot—milk, croissants with sweet butter, and some simple confiture—I don’t suppose you have any . . .”

  “No, Starr,” I said. “Not here. Any place else, but not here. Now throw on some clothes and . . .”

  “Well, it will take me some little time, dear boy. There’s my tub, and I can’t find my valet to shave, massage, or feed me. Then I run through a set of calisthenics—one likes to keep fit, you know. . . .”

  “Starr, listen. Just put on anything and your dark glasses and come with me. I’ll explain later.”

  “Oh, all right, if you must have your childish dress-up games. I’ll be down shortly. Damn St. Regis!”

  Starr was downstairs in a remarkably short time. I couldn’t help noticing that he had left off his girdle and the tiny little patch of hair, nor can I say that, informal as his outfit was, he was dressed as inconspicuously as I would have liked under the circumstances. He was wearing skin-tight white sharkskin trousers, kelly-green espadrilles, and a blazing red shirt of voile so sheer that you could count every hair on his chest from across the patio. He had, however, put on the biggest, blackest pair of wrap-around glasses I had ever seen. All very chic on Capri or at St. Tropez or even in Acapulco, but if that was Starr’s idea of disguise, he’d have been a lot less noticeable stark naked in our little suburb.

  “You look like the Mexican flag,” I said.

  “And you look like a pile of . . . Do you realize, my dear Dennis, that not one morning since I’ve been in this misbegotten place have I seen a pot of coffee before I’ve seen you? Friendship is one thing but breakfast is another. Now do let’s tuck into a decent meal before I’m forced to listen to your trivial chitchat. I’m told there’s ra-ther a nice little Bierstube at San Angel, we might stroll . . .”

  “Oh, no! Anywhere but there. It’s an ex-Nazi hangout.”

  “Very well, then. You’re the great gourmet. You suggest something. What is all that caterwauling out in the street?”

  He soon found out. The crowd had thickened to an alarming size. Señorita and Mamacita were both screaming at the tops of their lungs. St. Regis was all but in tears, and even the garage mechanic was hard put to control his passions and the small command of English he reserved for interpreting. Perro barked hysterically throughout.

  “What,” Starr said, drawing himself to his full height, “is the meaning of this disgraceful street brawl? St. Regis, I have needed you and you have failed me.”

  “Oh, Mr. Starr,” St. Regis said, “it’s just awfil! I mean the things this cheap—I mean the terrible things Miss Ximinez is saying. Oh, she’s accused me of . . . Oh, I’d hate to say what not!”

  “Starrrrr!” Madame X shrieked. “El automóvil—mi Hispano-Suiza, un automóvil importado y muy caro—no anda! El motor no marcha bien. Tiene un desperfecto; la bateria no funciona; se necesita reparar el carburador; necesita bujías nuevas; la llanta necesita un parche. . . .”

  “Quiet, you dizzy bitch! Silencio!” Starr’s roar of command somewhat stilled St. Regis, Catalina, Mamacita, and the crowd. “Ask for a mechanic, Dennis, there’s a dear.”

  “Hay un mecánico allí?” I said automatically to the mechanic.

  “Si, señor. Yes. I am mechanic.”

  “Here’s your man, Leander.”

  “Now just what does Señorita Ximinez seem to be saying, my good man?”

  “The Señorita Ximinez is saying that her motorcar is Hispano-Suiza, imported and very expensive. Also, she is saying that it does not run. The engine has a how-you-say to knock?”

  “A knock?” I said helpfully.

  “Thank you, yes, señor, the engine knocks. It is not marching properly. The battery fails to function. It is necessary to repair the how-you-say carburador?”

  “Carburetor?” I ventured.

  “Exactly. Thank you, señor. It is necessary to repair. Also it is needing replacement of the . . .” he gestured t
oward the sparkplugs. “As well the tire wants a . . .” Another gesture told us that it needed patching. “The Señorita Ximinez say also that you take her car to corrida de toros one day past and you must pay.”

  “Absolutamente!” Catalina screamed. She had been hanging on the mechanic’s every word and had more or less followed his translation. “Hispano-Suiza, very rare. Cost much. Now is roto. You pay.”

  I glanced nervously up and down the street. A parade couldn’t have drawn such throngs. Wet, bare bodies were hanging out of the windows of the public baths, women in rollers had come out of the Vog Salón de Belleza. I could hardly have chosen a worse time to spirit Starr quietly away.

  Mamacita’s brown old India-rubber face began to work, her adder’s tongue shot out to lubricate her whiskers, her leather lips. “Mai . . . doter . . . beeg . . . star!” she screeched with pride and then chortled happily.

  “Y también yo deseo seis llantas nuevas,” Madame X shouted.

  “En garde, Starr, she’s trying to screw you out of six new tires!”

  “I’ve had enough of this,” Starr said with enormous dignity. “My dear fellow,” he said to the mechanic, “will you please tell Señorita Ximinez that the car is almost as old as she is, if such a thing is possible.” The mechanic did. It brought down the house. “You may also tell her that I happen to know where she got it and when and, more importantly, how.” Catalina gasped at this juicy bit of translation. The audience was loving it. “Please add that the car shook like a reducing machine—comprende usted ‘reducing machine’?—and rattled like castanets, and if she thinks I’m going to do anything but repair that glassy-smooth old tire that burst she’s insane.”

  The crowd got an enormous charge out of this translation. Besides being impressed by Starr’s bravura performance, the neighbors were more or less anti-Ximinez, disliking her for the airs she put on, albeit a former screen star and general’s mistress. “And now, St. Regis, please leave this degrading scene and prepare Miss Emily’s breakfast. When she awakens please tell her that I shall return. Come, Dennis.” Like General MacArthur he marched up the street. Over Madame X’s rage and the taunts of the crowd and the barking of Perro, I could hear the poor mechanic saying, “No podemos arreglarlo hoy. No tenemos los accesorios correspondientes, Señorita Ximinez. Puedo arreglarlo por el momento.” No question about it, the scene had been all Starr’s.

  “. . . very idea,” he muttered, “of that Indian sow trying to hold me up for a whole new car. No wonder she never got anywhere in pictures after I made her name a household word. Greed, I tell you, dear Dennis, pure avarice—that’s why that ignorant, grasping savage never got ahead.” I fought down the impulse to point out that Catalina Ximinez—greed be damned—was by now several million dollars ahead of Starr. I also knew that he’d have to unwind before I could tell him anything. We strolled on for about a quarter of a mile into a woefully shabby section quite unfamiliar to me, when finally Starr said, “Dear boy, I can’t go another step until I’ve had some nourishment to sustain me—at least a cup of coffee. I do think you might offer me that much before I have to listen to your problems.”

  We went into the only available place, a dank, dark little café that reeked of stale beer, fresh urine, and rancid grease. A couple of drunken Mexicans were at the bar and so were a couple of beatnik Americans naïve enough to think they were wallowing in true Mexican culture. We sat down at a damp table. On the wall above us some discouraged American had written, in a burst of poesy:

  The flag is a rag.

  The Bible’s a book.

  Mother’s a hag.

  And God is a crook.

  It was that kind of place. Out in back I could see a slattern filling the mineral-water bottles from a rusty tap. Starr ordered coffee, eggs, beans, and tacos. Having witnessed the water trick, I settled for a beer and elected to drink it straight from the bottle. “I hope you’ve got a strong stomach, Starr,” I said, wincing at the disgusting mess on his plate. Starr said, “I believe in letting my every organ know who’s boss. Keep the stomach too busy to feel sorry for itself and you’ll never have any trouble. And speaking of trouble, what seems to be your problem, dear fellow?”

  “Well actually, Leander, it isn’t my problem at all.”

  “Then you make a dreadful mistake in meddling. Worry only about your own problems and you’ll never . . .”

  “It’s your problem.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid so. There’s a man down here looking for you from the Department of Internal Revenue. A Mr. Guber.” Starr went gray beneath his tan, whether from the information or the meal I didn’t quite know. “I put him off yesterday when you and Emily were at the bullfight, and I managed to get him out this morning. But of course he’ll be back. He’ll have to come back. He’s taken a little place in Casa Ximinez. He’s living there.”

  With surprising aplomb Starr said, “Ah, Mr. Guber. Poor Irving. Sometimes I fear that he has formed a deep homosexual attachment for me—unfulfilled, of course. You know, dear boy, when I once considered directing Les Misérables, I was struck by the notion that it might add a bit of piquancy to that old chestnut if the inspector—cold, bureaucratic, literal, apparently without feeling—was actually, unbeknownst to himself, a seething sinkhole of the most unusual emotions and had the hots for Jean Valjean. Well, naturally, that was too daring for Twentieth Century-Fox during . . .”

  “Starr,” I said, “I got the distinct impression that Mr. Guber is after a good deal more than your fair white body.”

  “Oh, indeed he is, dear boy. More thousands of dollars than I care to recollect. And he’s been after them for years. Ever since, uh . . .”

  “Ever since you skipped the country?”

  “Since I went away for reasons of health. Oh, my yes, the times I’ve had with Irving Guber—Italy, Switzerland, France, Belgium, Greece, England. A more perceptive individual could have gained the equivalent of a college education just pursuing me from pillar to post. So now the grand tour has led the two of us down to this sewer?”

  “You don’t seem very concerned, Leander.”

  “Why should I be? I can’t be extradited. Mr. Guber is hardly big enough or strong enough to kidnap me and drag me across the border. And even if he could, what would the government get? They’ve taken everything I had to leave behind—a house in Beverly Hills, my office furniture, even attached my bank account.”

  “Was there much in it?”

  “Oh, quite a lot. Ninety dollars, give or take a few cents.”

  After all my pains to shield Starr from Mr. Guber, I began to feel a bit miffed by his cavalier attitude. I have noticed before that whenever anybody voluntarily takes it upon himself to “save” someone from an unknown fate, he expects a kind of blubbering gratitude as his due and becomes resentful if that unknown fate turns out to be anything less than disgrace, imprisonment, or hanging. “Well, in that case,” I said hotly, “perhaps you could ask him to share your apartment. With his per-diem expense account he could at least defray the rent bill. That might help poor old St. Regis!”

  “Ah, good, virtuous, hard-working, respectable Dennis,” Starr said. “You must think me a vain, selfish, unreliable, frivolous old man, had you only the rude honesty to say it.”

  “I have both the rudeness and the honesty to say more than that, Starr. I think you’re a deadbeat and a crook. In fact, I know it.”

  “Well! If you think I’ve come here to be insulted by . . .”

  “I also know that you’re at the end of your rope. Snaky as you are, you haven’t got a pit to hiss in. That old simpleton St. Regis is keeping you in food and lodging and pocket money as well as waiting on you hand and foot. You can’t go home, and there isn’t a civilized country on the face of the earth where you’re not wanted by every hotel and restaurant and tailor and loan shark—not to mention the police. You’re finished, Starr. Everybody knows it. The only funny—or maybe I mean sad—thing is that you don’t know it too.”

/>   “Now listen to me, you middle-aged leprechaun . . .”

  But I was too annoyed to listen to any more. “You’ve run as far as you can run. Now you’re down here living it up on your valet’s money—taking people to night clubs, doing the big pitch for the daughter you’ve neglected, clasping that prayerbook and gassing away about Rolls-Royces and God and a lot of other things you’ve forgotten ever existed. And just who the hell do you think you’re fooling? Me? My wife? Your ex-wife? Ximinez? Emily?”

  “I think Emily was ra-ther impressed.”

  “But for how long? She’s not an imbecile.”

  “Dennis, dear boy, could I allow my own child to believe that I was . . . that I was all the things you said I was?”

  “No, I don’t think you could, any more than you could be a normal, affectionate, flesh-and-blood father who cared whether she lived or died. Not you, Starr. You’ve got to be the last of the big-time spenders whooping it up until the boom falls, and then little Sara Crewe ends up in the garret dreaming of that wonderful Pappa and the diamond mines that never were. But in the meantime by all means go right ahead impressing the girl with the pretty fiction of how big and rich and famous you are—how very much in demand, but don’t say by whom. With any luck she may be summoned back to Philadelphia before you’re kicked out of Casa Ximinez, and she can spend the rest of her life looking back to that paragon of a father who devoted two or three days of his invaluable time exclusively to her. Leander Starr—the father of us all—the great producer-director who’s as dead as Kelsey’s nuts in every picture studio from here to . . .”

  “Stop it!” Starr shouted. “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!” To my amazement there were tears streaming down his face.

  “Starr,” I said, “I’m sorry. I got carried away. When you get right down to it, I’m not much of a father, either.”

  “Have you a hankie? I seem to have come away without . . .”

  “Here,” I said. Disgusted as I was with him, I was also ashamed and contrite.

  “Thank you, Dennis,” he sniffed. “I’ll have my manservant launder it and . . .”