Eight Million Ways To Die

"She's all excited. She got two poems accepted by this magazine in San Francisco. She'll get six free copies of the issue the poems appear in.

That's as much pay as she'll get, just copies of the magazine."

A light turned red in front of us. He braked for it, looked left and right, then coasted through the light.

"Couple times," he said, "she's had poems in magazines that pay you for them. Once she got twenty-five

dollars. That's the best she ever did."

"It sounds like a hard way to make a living."

"A poet can't make any money. Whores are lazy but this one's not lazy when it comes to her poems.

She'll sit for six or eight hours to get the words right, and she's always got a dozen batches of poems in the mail. They come back from one place and she sends 'em out someplace else. She spends more on postage than they'll ever pay her for the poems." He fell silent for a moment, then laughed softly. "You know how much money I just took off of Donna? Eight hundred dollars, and that's just for the past two days. Of course there's days when her phone won't ring once."

"But it averages out pretty well."

"Pays better than poems." He looked at me. "Want to go for a ride?"

"Isn't that what we've been doing?"

"We been going around in circles," he said. "Now I'm gonna take you to a whole nother world."

We drove down Second Avenue, through the Lower East Side, and over the Williamsburg Bridge into Brooklyn. Coming off the bridge we took enough turns to throw off my sense of direction, and the street signs didn't help much. I didn't recognize the names. But I watched the neighborhood change from Jewish to Italian to Polish and had a fair idea of where we were.

On a dark, silent street of two-family frame houses, Chance slowed in front of a three-story brick structure with a garage door in the middle.

He used a remote-control unit to raise the door, then closed it after we had driven in. I followed him up a flight of stairs and into a spacious high-ceilinged room.

He asked if I knew where we were. I guessed Greenpoint. "Very good," he said. "I guess you know Brooklyn."

"I don't know this part of it very well. The meat market signs advertising kielbasa were a tip-off."

"I guess. Know whose house we're in? Ever hear of a Dr. Casimir Levandowski?"

"No."

"No reason why you should have. He's an old fellow. Retired, confined to a wheelchair. Eccentric, too.

Keeps himself to himself. This place used to be a firehouse."

"I thought it must have been something like that."

"Two architects bought it some years ago and converted it. They pretty much gutted the interior and started from scratch. They must have had a few dollars to play with because they didn't cut many corners.

Look at the floors. Look at the window moldings." He pointed out details, commented on them.

"Then they got tired of the place or each other, I don't know what, and they sold out to old Dr.

Levandowski."

"And he lives here?"

"He don't exist," he said. His speech patterns kept shifting, from ghetto to university and back again.

"The neighbors never see the old doc. They just see his faithful black servant and all they see him do is drive in and drive out. This is my house, Matthew. Can I give you the ten-cent tour?"

It was quite a place. There was a gym on the top floor, fully equipped with weights and exercise machines and furnished with sauna and Jacuzzi. His bedroom was on the same floor, and the bed, covered with a fur spread, was centered beneath a skylight. A library on the second floor contained one whole wall of books and an eight-foot pool table.

There were African masks all over the place, and occasional groups of free-standing African sculpture.

Chance pointed out a piece from time to time, naming the tribe that had produced it. I mentioned having seen African masks at Kim's apartment.

"Poro Society masks," he said. "From the Dan tribe. I keep one or two African things in all my girls'

apartments. Not the most valuable things, of course, but not junk, either. I don't own any junk."

He took a rather crudely fashioned mask from the wall and presented it for my inspection. The eye openings were square, the features all geometrically precise, the overall effect powerful in its primitiveness. "This is Dogon," he said. "Take hold of it. You can't appreciate sculpture with your eyes alone. The hands have to participate.

Go ahead, handle it."

I took the mask from him. Its weight was greater than I anticipated.

The wood that composed it must have been very dense.

He lifted a telephone from a low teakwood table and dialed a number. He said, "Hey, darlin'. Any messages?" He listened for a moment, then put the phone down. "Peace and quiet," he said, "Shall I make some coffee?"

"Not if it's any trouble."