Nik Cohn - Need

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. 914dc 9636675

v3.1

W hat Willie saw was a fat white woman.

She stepped out of Ferdousines 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 womans 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 bricklayers 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 Crows hand was creeping in Willies groin. It was a sly sneaking hand, a dirty girls 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. Whos the blowfish? Willie said.

Kate Root, I cant abide her. She has the room under mine, were 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.

Dont cheapen yourself, said Willie. It ages you.

It was as if hed 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 thats when he saw what theyd done to his shoes.

Murdered them, thats 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. Theyd never known what hit them.

What kind of pervert would do such a thing? And how come hed 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 couldnt 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.

Willies stomach heaved, he could have had an accident right there. But you didnt destroy him that easy, and he put out Anna Crow at the fire hydrant instead, he drove.

Exactly speaking, the Spyder wasnt his. Bernice had given him a years lease on it for his last birthday. A reward for turning twenty, plus a going-away present at the same time, before shed headed out to marry her phony French marquis or viscount or whatever, Count De Pennies theyd 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 shed listened to reason, not all those slanders and lies, that street-dirt scandalizing. If only she hadnt 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 couldnt touch that. Of course not. It was like his dowry.

That left only the change in his pockets. Fourteen bucks and jangle. Which wouldnt 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 top, 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 whod been to finishing school graduate with blocked sinuses? Was it some kind of diploma?