Good King Sauerkraut Read online

  The last one to bed, King was the last to rise the next morning. He dressed and stumbled down the hall to the bathroom. When he came out he bumped into Dennis just leaving his room. Dennis was barefooted and wearing a robe, and he carried the little red four-inch TV from his room.

  “We’ve got a problem at home,” King greeted him. “Gale Fredericks. She’s not going to be any too happy about the weapons platform.”

  “Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that. We’ll just have to put some money in her husband’s business after all.”

  “Good. How much should I tell her we’re—”

  “You tell her nothing. I tell the husband we’re interested in investing and let him work on her. You keep out of it.”

  King nodded agreement, secretly relieved. “She might come around, you never know. Once she hears we’ve got the plum assignment—”

  Dennis snorted. “Plum assignment my ass! Why do you think Warren gave the EM gun platform to us instead of his own designers? Because MechoTech doesn’t want the damned thing. We didn’t get the plum—we got the lemon.”

  King grimaced. “It won’t be as hard as all that.”

  “Four teams, King. Four other teams tried and couldn’t get it to work.”

  King didn’t want to argue. He looked at the small red television set his partner was carrying and said, “Where are you taking the TV?”

  “To the bathroom—this one.” Dennis pointed his gun hand toward the bathroom King had just vacated. “My back’s killing me this morning. I’m going to have to soak for at least an hour, so you use the other bathroom, down there.”

  “Okay. Hope your back gets better.”

  Dennis made a hunph sound and went into the bathroom. King headed toward the kitchen, where he was happy to find a carton of eggs in the refrigerator. He cooked four, sunny-side up, and made some toast. He was just finishing when Gregory came in, looking as excited as Gregory ever looked.

  “She’s back!” he said to King. “Give me some bread.”

  “Money bread or bread bread? Who’s back?”

  “Our one-footed pigeon. She’s on the ledge now and I want to feed her.”

  King handed over a slice of bread and asked, “What’s this fascination with pigeons?”

  “Oh, I love all birds—I can watch them for hours. They’re so graceful, you know. Not at all like people.” He flitted out of the kitchen.

  King ground his teeth and followed Gregory to the living room. From the bathroom came the sound of gunfire and squealing tires; Dennis was settled in for his hour-long soak.

  King and Gregory peered down through the window. Sure enough, the limping pigeon and her mate were both on the ledge that circled the building not far below. Every time she took a step on her stump, King’s ankles ached. There was no sign of yesterday’s bagel crumbs, which had either been eaten or had blown away.

  Gregory put down his slice of bread and grasped one of the window’s two handles with his small-boned hands. “Remember the noise it made yesterday. Try to ease it up.”

  King took the other handle, and together the two men slowly lifted the heavy window. It made a slight screech, but not enough to scare off the two birds on the ledge below. When they had it high enough, King shifted his grip so that he was holding the window by its bottom frame.

  “Got it?”

  “If you hurry,” King grunted, straining. “It’s damned heavy.”

  Gregory leaned out over the sill and started tearing his slice of bread into smaller pieces. King gritted his teeth and concentrated on holding the window steady.

  The phone rang.

  King’s head automatically swiveled toward the mechanical sound … and in that moment of inattention to what he was doing, he felt the window begin to slip out of his hands. “Gregory!” he screamed.

  Gregory jerked back in at the sound of King’s scream—but he wasn’t fast enough. The falling window hit him in the nape of his neck with a sickening sound. Gregory’s feet slipped out from under him as the window forced his head down, to come to a stop with a thud and the sound of something breaking. King stared horrified at the half-severed neck, the head dangling outside, the dead eyes open.

  The phone was still ringing. From the bathroom came the sound of gunfire and squealing tires.

  Paralyzed and helpless, King watched as the window seemed to give a sigh and settled all the way down. Gregory’s head dropped to the ledge, frightening away the pigeons, and then rolled over the edge to fall to the street below. King squeezed his eyes shut, but still his mind provided him with a picture of the impact a human head would make on a sidewalk after a fall of five stories.

  A wave of nausea swept over him that made his head spin and his legs turn to rubber. Half-blind with shock, King stumbled across the room, crashing into furniture and banging his head against a door when he opened it. Out in the hallway his legs gave way altogether. On his hands and knees he crawled to the bathroom and pushed the door open.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, King!” Dennis snapped. “I told you to use the other one! What are you doing?”

  King half rose to lurch toward the toilet. He flung out his arms to keep himself from falling again, knocking something off the toilet tank lid in the process. He bent over the bowl and started throwing up—first that morning’s eggs and toast and later just bile. He vomited so hard it was coming out of his nose as well as his mouth. He heaved and heaved until there was nothing left.

  He rested his forehead against the seat a moment, and then reached out for some toilet paper to wipe his mouth and nose. The toilet was right next to the bathtub; he flushed and slowly eased himself up to sit on the side of the tub, his back to Dennis. Every part of his body was shaking. But he was going to have to face Dennis; he was going to have to tell him what had happened.

  Heavily he turned toward his partner. At first King didn’t understand what he saw. Dennis was lying utterly motionless in the tub, both his mouth and his eyes open. Oddly, he didn’t seem to be breathing. Between his feet in the water rested the red four-inch television set. That was what King had knocked off the toilet tank lid. There was a smell of burning in the air.

  Then he understood. Dennis was dead. And King had killed him.

  Totally numbed, King sat there a long time, looking at his dead partner. Then he slowly got up and went to the washbasin. He washed his face and hands and used Dennis’s toothbrush to clean his teeth. He stared at his image in the mirror and thought: So that’s what shock looks like.

  He left the bathroom and went into Dennis’s room. The bed wasn’t made. Then he went into the kitchen, where he opened the refrigerator door and closed it again. He wandered into the office, powered up all three computers, and wandered out again.

  I’ve got to tell somebody, King thought. Warren Osterman, the police, somebody. But how could he? How could he admit that he … before he could complete the thought, the phone rang again. This time the sound scared him. He backed away from the phone; he couldn’t talk to anybody, he couldn’t face anybody.

  Not after what he had done.

  King Sarcowicz bolted. He staggered out of the apartment and beat his fist against the elevator button. He looked at the lights over the doors and saw the elevator was already on its way up.

  People. He couldn’t face people yet.

  Wildly he looked around for a stairway … over there. He pushed through the door and stumbled down the stairs, flight after flight, as fast as his feet could carry him.

  He ran.

  5

  The fireworks going off in King’s head shut out most of the street noise; he ran a block, then jogged a block, and then gradually settled down to a hard-breathing walk. The air was thick with exhaust fumes; a siren was wailing. Strangers jostled him, and an adolescent boy tried to sell him something. In his flight to avoid facing people, King found himself surrounded by them.

  He didn’t know where he was going. DennisDennisDennis his head pounded, and once in a while Gregory. He paused a mom
ent to watch an elderly man and woman arguing, on the verge of coming to blows. “I’ve killed two men,” he told them plaintively. Nobody paid any attention.

  King let himself be borne along by the forever-changing mob of pedestrians. When they crossed the street, he crossed the street; when they stopped, he stopped. He didn’t know whether he was headed uptown or down, and he didn’t care. The fireworks inside his head gradually began to die down and the traffic noise took over. In one part of his mind King marveled at the casual way the people on the sidewalk brushed against him; he was contaminated, and he felt surprised they couldn’t see it.

  All at once he began to feel suffocated. He broke away from the mob and bolted down one of the side streets, which turned out to be no less crowded than the street he’d left. He ran for two long blocks before he started slowing down, weaving his way among the other pedestrians. Up ahead he could see the river. He didn’t know which river.

  Eventually the street came to an end. King crossed under a rusting elevated highway and found himself facing a series of blue street barriers. Low ones, though, less than three feet high; they didn’t even come up to his crotch. He stepped over the barriers and ended up on a pier—Pier 97, a sign said. He couldn’t see any ships. Not a single ship, but all the free space on the pier was taken up by parked garbage trucks. Unhappy, King squeezed among the trucks and worked his way toward the end of the pier; he sat down on a bollard, dizzy and exhausted.

  Whether this was the East River or the Hudson, it gave off a pronounced stench. A stinking river in front of him and garbage trucks behind him—they suited his mood. He looked across the water at either New Jersey or Queens, he couldn’t be sure which. He wasn’t far enough downtown for it to be Brooklyn, he was sure; besides, he’d recognize the Brooklyn Bridge if he saw it. It looked like New Jersey. That was important, wasn’t it? Figuring out where he was?

  No, it was not important. It was a diversionary tactic, a way of keeping from thinking about what he’d done to Dennis Cox and Gregory Dillard. How could one man’s casual clumsiness so easily end the lives of two other people? If he hadn’t turned his head when the phone rang … if he’d paid more attention to where his hands were going when he bent over the toilet bowl to throw up … he wanted to throw up again, but there was nothing left in his stomach. He gave in to self-loathing, feeling heavy and bowed down.

  King thought of his mother. He could imagine her horror, her disgust, if she had lived to see what he’d done this day. No simple headshake of disapproval this time. She’d surely go into shock to think that a son of hers could, simply by not paying attention to what he was doing, cause the deaths of two people. How fragile life was! How easily shattered! How much care was needed all the time, not to harm and not to destroy. You’re careless with people, Dennis had said.

  King edged off the bollard and sat on the very end of the pier, his legs dangling in the air. On his feets uneven. He stared down into the dirty water and thought how simple it would be just to slip off the pier and put an end to it. How could he live with the shame of what he’d done? King buried his face in his hands, hiding himself from the world. After a period of shuddering, he took his hands down and clasped them tightly between his knees, hunching his long frame over into as small a mass as he could manage. It was an interesting, semifetal position he found himself in; all he had to do was tip forward a little more … and into the river he’d go.

  He sat like that for a long while, poised between a decisive, irrevocable act and the muddled mess his life had become. He sat there until the sun was almost directly overhead. He was uncomfortably warm. His stomach growled.

  At last he leaned back away from the end of the pier, bracing his weight on his arms behind him. It occurred to him that if he just slipped into the water, he might pop up to the surface again like a cork. If he were going to do this, he’d need something to weight himself down. He glanced vaguely around the pier-turned-parking-lot but could see no ropes or heavy rocks handy. Not even a rusty anchor left behind on this shipless pier. But what if he did find something for weight, what then? The ropes would come loose, or the weight wouldn’t be heavy enough, or the foul water would make him gag and he’d fight like the devil to get out. One way or another, he’d manage to botch it. He laughed bitterly. King Sarcowicz, general all-around fuck-up. Couldn’t even be trusted with his own suicide.

  If it had been only Gregory who’d died, he could go to the police and tell them how it happened. It was an accident, just a stupid accident; the window had slipped out of his grasp—Mimi Hargrove knew how heavy the window was, she’d helped lift it the day before, Mimi could back him up. He’d meant to tell about Gregory; he’d been on the point of telling Dennis when he’d realized his partner was dead too. If it were just Gregory, he could tell the truth and everybody would say oh-how-horrible and gossip about it with ghoulish relish for a week or so and then eventually forget it.

  But two fatal accidents—and within minutes of each other? Uh-uh. Not a chance. The police might even accuse him of murder, for god’s sake. They couldn’t prove murder, of course … could they? But just the accusation alone was enough to do him in. What would happen to Keystone Robotics then? How many contracts would come rolling in if everyone thought Keystone’s sole surviving partner was a walking death trap for those who worked with him?

  Keystone’s sole surviving partner. God in heaven, how was he ever going to run the business without Dennis? In a rush, a new sense of loss swept over him and King started crying, quietly at first but then more noisily, like a child. Eventually he calmed down and sat moaning quietly to himself. His stomach growled.

  “Hey buddy—you’re not thinkin’ of takin’ a swim, are you?”

  King jerked his head around to see a man wearing Sanitation Department coveralls standing between two garbage trucks, fists on hips and head cocked to one side. King scrambled awkwardly to his feet, strangely embarrassed. “No, I, uh.” He swallowed and said, “I was just … thinking about something. Thanks for your concern.” He reddened and hurried past the sanitation worker, banging his knee against the fender of one of the garbage trucks. The other man watched him skeptically, uncertain whether he’d averted a suicide or not.

  Still hurrying, King crossed under the old elevated highway and found a street sign that told him he was on West Fifty-seventh. Ah. Then that was New Jersey he’d been staring at after all, and it was the Hudson he’d almost thrown himself into. And that rusting hulk he’d passed under had to be the West Side Highway. King’s rumbling stomach called his attention to the Madison Coffee Shop on the south side of the street.

  Thinking that his face must be tear-streaked, King went into the men’s room and washed up. He stared at himself in the mirror. He looked all right; he didn’t look at all like a man who’d kill two people before lunch. He went back out and ordered pastrami; it came with the usual cole slaw and potato salad. Meat and vegetables; Dennis would have approved.

  Since it was early lunchtime, the place was crowded and King had to share a table with a young man wearing a conservative business suit and a Day-Glo green Mohawk haircut. No one but King seemed to find the combination incongruous. Mohawk ate quietly with neat, small gestures, never lifting his eyes from his plate. King put his age at about twenty, twenty-two.

  He polished off his mountain of pastrami and felt better. Then suddenly King, who only an hour earlier had taken flight from contact with other people, now wanted that contact in the worst way. He took a sip of his coffee and said, “I wonder why they can never make this stuff taste as good as it smells.”

  In a deliberate and put-upon manner, Mohawk laid down his fork, raised his eyes from his plate, and said, “Were you speaking to me?”

  “Yep. I was wondering why the coffee—”

  “I heard what you said. I don’t know why they can’t make it taste as good as it smells.” With that he picked up his fork, lowered his eyes to his plate, and resumed eating. Conversation ended.

  King laughed o
ut loud. He was back among the human race, all right, with all its rudeness and its passion for one-upping the other guy. Mohawk hadn’t been a member of the adult world very long and was still trying out those of its privileges that were new to him—such as rebuffing a man of his father’s generation. King finished his coffee, said “Nice talking to you,” and left.

  Out on Fifty-seventh Street again, King’s momentary buoyancy deserted him. What was he going to do, what in the hell was he going to do? He wasn’t going to kill himself, at least not now (it was, however, a possibility he intended to hold in reserve). What was left? Admit all, lose the business, go to prison? Try to convince the police that it was too just an accident?

  The thought of that unsettled him enough to start him walking—anywhere, just so long as he was on the move. He couldn’t go back to the apartment, not with what he’d left there. He couldn’t take a plane to Pittsburgh; that’s the first place they’d look for him. Should he run and hide? Should he stay and try to bluff it out? He couldn’t just wander the streets forever.

  He stopped and looked around to get his bearings, and found he was standing in front of a restaurant—Le Biarritz. King realized the pastrami had merely taken the edge off his appetite; he was still hungry. He went inside and had Escalopes de veau Casimir with lots of interesting veggies. Dennis would have been proud of him.

  Outside again, King felt a lightening of the spirits which he didn’t think was attributable solely to the bottle of white wine he’d consumed with the veal. Never contemplate suicide on an empty stomach, he moralized. He had a hankering to top off that marvelous French meal with an old-fashioned Amurrican dessert. A few doors down was the Café 57; he went inside and ordered apple pie with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

  Satisfied at last, King continued his aimless stroll east on Fifty-seventh, relishing being alive in a way that was new to him. How could he have considered giving everything up—including the right to wander wherever he pleased, a free man? (Temporarily, at any rate.) He crossed Broadway, glanced over to the other side of Fifty-seventh, and saw the rear end of a black Cadillac sticking out of the side of a building about ten feet above the sidewalk. That bore investigating.