The Boston Tangler
Chapter Seven: The police close in
By Roland Merullo
After their argument, after Luba drove away, Louis stood for several minutes in the parking lot of Kelly's Famous Roast Beef, staring at the creatures and objects surrounding him, as if the dusty surfaces of automobile fenders and pigeons pecking at stray French fries was the stuff of another universe. Clouds swirled, thunder rolled, a few raindrops spanked his cheeks. Every few seconds, he looked out at the road, expecting to see Luba driving back into his life in her yellow Beetle. And every minute or so, another happy couple came out through the doors, tossing a nasty glance in his direction, as if they were all related to his ex-wife's lawyer.
He sat in his cab for a little while and then headed back toward the city in a trance. He paid his toll on the Tobin, made the big, slow loop onto the expressway, took the ramp for Storrow, and spent an hour just driving aimlessly. He kept the two-way radio switched off. People stood at curbs, waving an arm in his direction; he ignored them. The day shift ended at 4:30, and he should have returned the cab to the garage for the night driver. Instead, he cruised back and forth along the streets of the South End, hoping to catch a glimpse of a woman with perfect posture and a confident stride, wondering why Luba had been so reluctant to give him her exact address. A dozen times, he pulled over at pay phones and dialed her number. Each time, it was the same: 15 rings, no lover.
At last, exhausted, he turned the cab in and had another driver take him and his golf clubs home. Vizelot was on the stoop, teaching Haitian jump-rope rhymes to the neighborhood girls, a favorite pastime of hers. The girls were Cambodian-American, American-American, Guatemalan-American, and African-American, and they all jumped rope with a Haitian accent. "Louie," his neighbor said, eyeing his 7-iron and then smiling up at him. "Where is your nice friend?"
"Gone," he said, waving an arm as if were a broken wing. "Gone."
"She be back, Louie. Vizelot see her coming back, right up this walk, back, right up this walk, right up these steps."
Louis had no faith in Vizzy's psychic powers and was not soothed by this prediction. On the portable phone in his apartment, he dialed Max's number, but it was only more of the same - the dull gnawing of an electronic tone in another empty house. He lay down on the bed - the same bed where he and Luba had made love what seemed like only hours ago - and tried to tell himself it was just a simple misunderstanding. The truth was on his side, surely: He wasn't the Tangler, and he knew it.
The truth was on your side with Alicia, too, a sinister voice muttered in his inner ear. Look how much good that did you.
He drifted in and out of a restless, tormented sleep, haunted by visions from another chapter of failed love. In one of these scenarios, Alicia was flinging bags of Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee beans out the kitchen window and into the yard, something she had actually done once. "Goofy!" she yelled, heaving the first bag. "Immature" - another. "Boyish" - a third. "I don't want a little boy for a husband at breakfast!" Seven small bags in all, an entire pantry shelf of the best coffee he could afford. A while later, he went outside and collected them, carried them back inside, and locked them in an aluminum box in the garage.
"You," he said, "are nuts. You're acting like a drug addict."
Which, in fact, Alicia had turned out to be. A marijuana addict, at least. Fits of frustration and ravenous appetites, followed by stretches of almost somnambulant good humor. There were worse types of addicts to be married to, he supposed. Still, even in a dream, he did not like reliving the coffee-bean scene or remembering the attempt at early-morning humor that had sparked it.
Next day, he awoke with a plan. He had a quick breakfast, then caught a cab to St. Botolph Street and prowled. Seeing neither Luba nor her car, he went from building to building looking at the names next to doorbells. No Neazhidana.
He found a rather decrepit-looking pay phone and tried calling again, but a robotic voice kept saying: "The call you have made requires an initial deposit. Please hang up and try your call again." Quarter and dime, dime and quarter, three dimes and a nickel, seven nickels - no initial deposit seemed good enough. In the end, after bringing him to the requisite level of frustration and proving to him how helpful it was to have recorded announcements take the place of actual humans, the machine simply confiscated his money and left him pounding palm against steel.
Louis walked to a different phone and called again, but Luba was either not at home or not answering. He tried Max and got a busy signal. He called Bellevue to ask if she'd made a tee time. No Neazhidana. On a hunch, he took the T to the women's shelter where she volunteered, and when he knocked on the door there, a nun in an old-fashioned white habit appeared on the glassed-in porch and spoke to him through the intercom in a booming, scratchy voice. "It is our policy not to let the husbands see their wives here," the nun said. "You'll have to wait until she comes back to you of her own free will. You should use the time to examine your conscience, to think about getting help."
"I'm only looking for someone who works here, who volunteers," Louis pleaded. "She's my girlfriend, not my wife. I hate men who hit women. I even hate men who hit men."
But the nun was having none of it.
"Why don't you just call her at her home, then, if she's a volunteer?" the nun asked, quite sensibly.
"She won't answer."
"Why won't she answer?"
"Because we had a little fight."
"Get help," the nun said, and the intercom went dead, leaving Louis standing helplessly on the stone steps in Sunday-morning sunlight.
He caught one of the competition's cabs to Eden Street in Charlestown, stepped up to Max's front door, and rang the bell three times. Olga Maximov answered, a petite, pretty woman in Sunday dress and gold earrings. "Louis," she said, standing on her toes and wrapping him in a warm hug, "come in, come in. How have you been? How is this wonderful woman friend of yours that Max has been telling me about?"
At this question, all the pain of the past 24 hours rose into Louis's throat and spilled out of him in a cascade of sobs and tears. He stood there on Eden Street, with townies walking past on their way back from Mass at St. Francis's, and young urban professionals driving home in their Quattros with bags of bagels and the Sunday paper on the front seat, and he thoroughly wet the left shoulder of his best friend's wife's best dress.
Olga patted him on the kidney and held him tight. In a moment, Max Twice came walking out of the kitchen, bowlegged in his bathrobe, clutching a section of the Sunday Globe in one hand. "What, what?" he said, in a pretend-gruff tone. "This is about getting married, Louie?"
"Max, you ass," his wife said.
"What?"
Louis freed himself from Olga's embrace and wiped a sleeve across his eyes.
"What, Louie, my famous friend."
In a few miserable sentences, Louis explained the situation. Luba, thinking he was the Tangler, and a liar to boot, had broken off with him, wouldn't answer the phone, had probably left on the morning Hondo Air flight to Tegucigalpa.
Max's response was to show him the headline on the front page, which read, on that Sunday: POLICE CLOSE IN ON TANGLER.
"You want to hide here, Louie, you hide. Max and Olga will never in a million years tell."
"I'm not the Tangler, Max. It isn't me. It isn't."
"Louie, my Dangler pal, we'll give you insylum."
"Max, really, I am not the Tangler!"
Max reached out and hugged him, looking at Olga with a triumphant smile. "My friend, eh?" he said. "Twenty years they give him he never wouldn't talk."
"Max, you ox," Olga said, and she followed this with a torrent of Russian thrown toward her husband's cinder-block face, a veritable fire-hose stream of shch's and ts's and oski's.
In his defense, Max held up the paper and read from the article: "In a press conference Saturday afternoon at Government Center, Detective Richard Hector told reporters from all over the world that the police investigation is now focusing on the Allston section of the city and a suspect who was questioned after the sabotage of the Fenway Park video screen. He expects to make an arrest this weekend."
"The police now will be after you, see? You can ..."
"I am not the Tangler!" Louis shouted at the top of his lungs. Olga elbowed Max in the hip for good measure.
Max stared at him for two long seconds. "But I told Luba that you are."
"Exactly."
"Exactly," Olga echoed. "Tochna. Now you make him look like a liar."
"And she for that broke with you up?"
"She had a history of men lying to her, or something."
Olga raised her eyebrows in mock surprise. "Lying men," she said. "Who ever heard of such a thing."
Within the half hour, Max Twice and Louis were riding north in Olga's Toyota Corolla. "Take 99 to the Parkway," Louis told him. "The Parkway to 1A. 1A to Lynn."
Eleven minutes after noon, they pulled up at exactly the spot on Lynn Shore Drive where Louis had asked Luba out on their first date. Her parents' crumbling mansion, architectural metaphor for a finer, ruined age, stood shimmering in the ocean light. With Max lumbering along behind, Louis hurried up the front walk. He pressed the doorbell and listened to it echo behind curtained glass. After an interval of several seconds, the handle turned, the door swung inward on squealing hinges, and he found himself standing face to face with a man in clown sneakers and brown tails.
Louis, stunned, could manage only: "Who are you?"
"An important question," the professor said in a shrill but serious voice, raising one index finger beside his face. He winked at Max and then turned back to Louis. "Great thinkers, from Catullus to Descartes, have all asked it, and the answer, it seems, can best be contained in the dictum put forth by St. Augustine: I am a question to myself."
Max took the professor by his left shoulder, and shook him until he stopped talking. "My friend's girl we have to find. Luba. Love. This is home of her parents."
"Luba is my sister," the professor declared.
"Luba Neazhidana?" But, at last, Louis could see the resemblance. Take away the craziness, and it was obvious that the brother had Luba's eyes, her posture, her coppery skin tone and wonderful mouth.
"Exactly. The family name, in Russian, comes from the word `ozhidat,' to expect, the root of which is: `zhdat,' wait."
"We can't," Max said. "And the lesson we don't need. Where she is?"
"At her boyfriend's, in Allston. Sleeping over, as far as I know. We are a rather open-minded family when it comes to premarital ..."
"I'm her boyfriend in Allston," Louis said.
"I'm Irwin, her brother. Very pleased."
"We've met already. You sat down next to me on the bench at the Mother Church and told me you'd never forget me for not giving Luba's name to the police."
"I can't say I remember."
Through a haze of years, Louis recalled that this was, in fact, a trait of Irwin Corey's humor, a sort of weird bonus tacked onto the hilarious riffs and encyclopedic flurries: The great comedian frustrated you to the point of fury. Louis had one vivid memory of Johnny Carson, unable to get a word in edgewise, unable to introduce the next guest, fretting and practically stomping the set as the mad professor ranted on and on. There was supposed to be some kind of a Zen lesson in it, he'd read: the disappointment of expectation leading you to a greater focus on the present, a deeper patience. He had no time for that now.
"Irwin," he said. "Here's the way it is. I'm going to count to three, and if you haven't told me where I can find Luba, I'm going straight to the police and tell them everything I know."
"You wouldn't," Irwin said. He looked at Max, as if for help.
"One."
"You'll betray everything we stand for, everything the movement ..."
"Two."
"Fenway Park!" Irwin said, and before he could produce another word about betrayal and disappointment, broken promises, broken relationships, enduring, impossible faith, Louis and Max were in the Corolla, weaving and speeding and changing lanes without warning, almost like a pair of cabdrivers, heading toward Kenmore Square.
By the time they found a parking lot with an empty space, the game had already started. They hurried up the block in a thin stream of other late arrivals, with souvenir hawkers and men selling Italian ice calling to them as they went. "There will be thirty or forty thousand people here," Louis said. "How are we supposed to find her?"
"Not to don't worry," Max told him. "You're talking now with man who sabotaged sauna at party headquarters in Minsk."
And spent seven years in jail for it, Louis thought. But he followed Max up to the gate, bought two grandstand tickets, and stepped into the gum-stained, beer-and-popcorn-smelling underbelly of what even he had to admit was the finest sports stadium in America.
A thunderous cheer sounded above them; it seemed to reverberate in the deepest part of Louis's soul, sending an old excitement out into his limbs. He was walking double-time to keep up with Max, who had taken on another persona now, eyes fixed forward, arms rigid. "Now, no thinking, Louie," he said out of the side of his mouth when the crowd noise had subsided. "Now is love, no thinking. What Max does you are follow, yes?"
"All right."
"Exactly, yes?"
"OK."
Max strode up one of the ramps, past sweaty young men lugging trays of popcorn and Coke. Face to face with the bright green surprise of the diamond, he stood for a few seconds, surveying the battleground, then set off toward right field. Two aisles beyond the dugout, he turned left, down toward the players, taking off his shirt as he went. Louis did the same.
At the end of the aisle, Max kicked off his shoes, pulled off his trousers, and leapt over the low wall. Louis followed in a sort of trance. It wasn't until he actually felt the infield grass beneath his feet, looked up and saw the thousands of faces, the players turning away in mild disdain, the policemen coming toward him from behind the Red Sox dugout, that he realized he was committing a crime. He was a nut case now, no question.
But by then his friend Max, clad only in underwear and socks, was running in a slow, clumsy, sideways stride down the first-base line, facing the crowd and shouting "Love! Love!"
Louis, wearing white socks with red and blue bands at the ankle and a pair of robin's-egg-blue boxer shorts - quite clean - sprinted behind the pitcher's mound with a portly policeman chasing and trotted back and forth in front of the Seattle dugout, shouting the same thing to the crowd. "Love! Love! Love!" It took Fenway's legion of security forces only 20 seconds to round up the two pranksters, but by then it was too late. Beneath a few layers of sarcasm and complaint, Boston fans are a tenderhearted bunch. Seeing two naked, middle-aged men on the field, waving their arms and screaming "Love!" provoked in them some primal mob instinct, memories of their mothers, of Italian weddings, Irish wakes, Jewish burials, of an older time, long lost, that had been a bit less technologically impressive and somehow more humane.
"Love!" a few people in the box seats started chanting. "Love! Love!"
The infection spread to the grandstand, to the bleachers - even to one or perhaps two of the power couples in the corporate boxes. By the time Louis and Max were being wrestled into handcuffs and carried from the field, the entire stadium was caught up in a frenzy, chanting the word over and over again like an affection-starved nation in revolt. One newspaper reported the next day that even the screen in center field flashed the word a few times, though Fenway officials, for obvious reasons, refused to confirm this.
Louis and Max were given their clothes (however, one female fan kept Louis's undershirt as a souvenir) and taken, handcuffed, in the back of a police wagon, to the very precinct where Louis had undergone his interrogation. A strange awkwardness hung in the air between them. After a few blocks, Louis said, "What the hell was that? You don't strike me as the `love, love' type."
Max glanced away sheepishly. "I forgot name of your girl," he said. "All I remember is it means love in Russian. So I yell love."
They were placed in a basement cell and told they would be allowed one phone call each. Straight-spined, tight-lipped, trailing behind him a regal coattail of Slavic pride, Max Twice used his call to ask Olga to come bail them out. But he wasn't back beside Louis more than a minute when Lieutenant Bella appeared at the cell door with a set of jangling keys. "Let's go, Robinson," she said gruffly. "Somebody made your bail."
"Who?" Louis asked. "Who is it?"
But Bella wasn't saying.
Look for Chapter Eight of The Boston Tangler in next Sunday's Globe Magazine.
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