The Snake Oil Wars Read online

  Not being a lawyer, Coyul didn’t follow immediately. “Where’s the advantage?”

  “Taking Helm’s away. I may look like the south end of a northbound mule, but I’d never try an emotional case on the opposition’s home ground.”

  Since the real issue was not Candor – Speed explained – but Coyul’s disputed presence, to say nothing of his identity, the case resolved to whoever got his viewpoint across to the jury. In a criminal case prosecution would be constrained to try the act of assault for guilt or innocence. Defense could successfully object to any testimony not directly concerned with that assault, while any doctrinaire hoopla Candor sang on the stand would be admissible.

  “But in a civil case – invasion of privacy, personal distress, what have you – your own cause can be heard. Mistaken identity, the damage as direct result. Helm will have the hell of a time objecting to that. We don’t play his game; he plays ours”

  Coyul found himself impressed. “Very good, Josh. Immaculate.”

  “Obviously you’re not the Devil.”

  “To my occasional regret. Life would be downhill and shady.”

  “I wouldn’t think the pay worth the pain,” Speed opined. “Who’s on the bench?”

  “Marcus Aurelius.”

  “Yes” Speed seemed pleased with the choice. “Literate, reflective...”

  “And tolerant for his time. Dear old Gibbon suggested him.”

  “Your friend Purji who admitted me?” Speed poised a pencil over his notes.

  “She’s of your own race?”

  “Yes. Like mine, her human form is a convenience – most of the time, She tends to overdo.”

  “I forgive her,” was Speed’s laconic gallantry. “Spent some time as an object of worship? A... fertility goddess?”

  “Purji does nothing by halves.”

  “We can use an experienced deity on our side. Expert witness,” Speed block printed PURJI and drew a box around the name. Then another box which he left blank. “And one ace in the hole.”

  “Ace?”

  “Just a cud I want to chew before making up my mind, Surprise witnesses are always effective,” Speed wadded his notes into a baggy side pocket. “You agree to a civil case?”

  “I’m in your hands.” Literally. Coyul’s offered hand was engulfed in Speed’s mammoth paw – as Purji’s mind whispered into his —

  Darling? Mr Helm is here, Please take him of my hands.

  Trouble?

  I know it’s silly of me, but he’s so like a Keljian reformer who once ran me through with a spear before I could discorporate. Sorry to get emotional.

  I would too, dear. Send him in “Enter the villain,” Coyul stage-whispered to his counsel. “Here’s your chance to size up Peter Helm.”

  When Peter Helm entered, Coyul was privately amused by the contrast between the two barristers. Next to the severely tailored Helm, light and tight in his movements, totally balanced and assured, Speed’s most controlled gesture looked like something dislodged and about to fall. Speed rose courteously; introducing them, Coyul thought he saw a flicker of recognition pass between the two men, not so much of person but kind, rival predators on a disputed hunting ground.

  “We are prepared,” Helm clipped. “I am not altogether happy with the bench. A Christian would be preferable.”

  “Oh, there were no end of popes keen for the job,” Coyul told him. “Lutherans, even a few Unitarians. Aurelius is totally impartial.”

  “I see.” Helm allowed himself a small, frigid smile. “Let it stand. Ready, Mr. Speed?”

  “Well, like a fresh egg in a cold hen house, I could use a few more days in the shell. My client is dropping the criminal charge for a civil plaint.”

  Coyul read an instant of consternation in Peter Helm, but no more. That mind was masked as efficiently as Speed’s. “Very astute, sir. I will request a brief continuance to adjust.”

  “There is a vague popular belief that lawyers are necessarily dishonest.” Speed grinned ruefully, “Let’s discourage that, Mr. Helm. I daresay we’ve both seen base instincts in the employ of noble causes. Fair fight?”

  “A just one, Mr. Speed”

  They shook hands. Like prizefighters, Coyul thought. “And I will release the long suffering Candor,” he said, seeing them both to the door. “Old Wyclif won’t be sorry; the damp’s been cruel to his arthritis. See you in court, gentleman.”

  “Join me in a drink?” Speed invited Helm.

  “I never drink, sir.”

  “What a pity. How’s your poker?”

  “Nor do I gamble.”

  “You’re gambling now,” Speed reminded him. “Just wanted to see how you bet.”

  7

  Them old live forever,

  die tomorrow blues

  CANDOR TO BE RELEASED

  CIVIL TRIAL SEEN AS SURPRISE MOVE

  HELM ON TRIAL: “NO COMMENT”

  “How deceptive appearance can be, I will not underestimate Mr. Speed.”

  Helm stopped pacing and halted, hands on narrow hips, glaring at his aide, the Senator from Wisconsin. “That bucolic countryman of yours has neatly removed our whole initiative.”

  The Senator had a moon face, thinning hair and a disconcerting tendency to giggle at inappropriate moments; at other times he looked merely ponderous or paranoid. Working for Helm was old times returned for the Senator, possibly old power restored. Conspiracy had always inspired him. “You want me to stay on Speed?”

  “Anything you can find. We need a lever. There is a new word in your country, something to do with... Watergate? Those who obtained information quietly.”

  “Plumbers.” The Senator giggled. “I’ve got a dozen or more here and Below Stairs.”

  “Employ them,” Helm directed. “No man blanks his record or changes his name to no purpose. Find out who Joshua Speed really is.”

  “Come to think of it,” the Senator said, “I don’t even know who you are.”

  “Trust me, Joseph. We stand for the same principle. Speed wears the black hat and I the white. Loose your plumbers.”

  “Love of my endless life” Purji stroked the back of Coyul’s neck as he chortled moodily at the piano. “When this ridiculous trial is done, can we talk about us?”

  “Immortal longings?”

  “Oh... twinges of permanence.” Purji doodled on the treble keys, “Time we grew up.” Plink! “Settled down.” Plunk!

  “What do you call this, a coffee break?”

  “I’m talking union,” Purji yearned plaintively. “Permanence. Children. Possibilities.”

  Coyul listened sympathetically though distracted. Peter Helm bothered him as Cassius once distressed Caesar: he couldn’t quite corner the problem, but there it was like indigestion. “Such as?”

  “Think, for example, what we could give this world in the way of a messiah. Let your mind toy with the notion.”

  Coyul toyed. The notion was unique, the image unsettling: Purji as madonna, a humble manger, magis, genuflecting livestock and a Miklos Rosza soundtrack. Unlikely. On the other hand, given Purji’s tastes, who’d buy a messiah born in the Plaza Hotel?

  “Meanwhile,” she conspired, “before the trial dampens all of your esprit, let’s throw a party.”

  From the social page: Sheila Seeword, “Topside Tattler.” Latest from the Salon: cool as vodka over ice on the eve of the Candor trial (isn’t Lance the cutest?), we hear Coyul and his glamorous live-in Purji are planning a bash for a Bronze Age jet set called the Algonquin Round Table. We were not invited by the pulchritudinous P. – but girls, let’s be honest. Dead or alive, anyone with that little cellulite is not for real. The official press kit line on Purji is that she’s an alien like Coyul. The real dirt, our spies tell us, is her background in one of those pray-and-play TV ministries where the rectory is the local El Sleazo Motel. Will she sue or just write her memoirs? Quo vadis, Domine?

  The party was a success from the first vivacious arrivals, the ubiquitous Oscar already at the whi
te piano when Purji, a definition of desire in a velvet gown slit far up fabulous thighs, draped herself over the top. Purji loved scotch but had not yet mastered it. She beamed fuzzily at the dour pianist.

  “Cyd Charisse could use your figure, So could I,” Oscar noted without missing a beat. “Don’t say it, I know. You love me.”

  “I love indeed,” murmured his misty hostess, “I was a goddess of love once.”

  “How were the hours?”

  “Not bad. Holidays were always insane. Very big on benedictions. You smile a lot, ‘Always a bridesmaid, never a bride.’ “Purji gazed wistfully after her soulmate, who was welcoming Gershwin at the door. “Coyul says you have talent.”

  “I do. He just came in.” Oscar gulped the last of his coffee, “Do you have any Demerol?”

  “Oscar!” Lida Simone, Kaufman’s current leading lady, slid onto the piano bench, hooking an arm around the pianist’s neck. “George just came in. What would it take to make him play one teeny little song for me?”

  “George?” Oscar chilled Lida with boreal disgust, “The mere wish at a thousand yards.”

  “Oh, George!” Lida departed unsteadily on her quest. “Geo-o-rge —”

  Across the room, wearing a hunted expression, Kaufman could not shake Ricky Remsleep, late of a sixties rock group, the Assassins – now, through cruel default Kaufman’s collaborator on the new musical. Kaufman had naturally wanted Moss Hart; alas, Mossic was pigging out Below Stairs, living high and sleeping until noon, regretting only that everything was free. As for dear Edna – at that moment dispensing iron opinion like sparks from a fire across the Salon – they’d written hits together despite incompatibility. Edna had an Anchorite dedication as a writer. She rose early and, even Topside, walked two miles before downing the first of three solid, sensible meals, and began work just as Kaufman began to think of bed as a place of rest. Currently she was finishing her American Indian novel interrupted by death, a singular inconvenience Edna swore never to repeat — “and never call before five, George. You really need to discipline yourself.”

  And so he was stuck with Ricky Remsleep, whose faint celebrity rested on a mixed-media vaguery for guerrilla theater in 1969, just before he overdosed. Unstoned. Remsleep might do a fresh page or two; more often he clogged the script with grim counterculture significance, tugging now at Kaufman’s sleeve, insistent as a hound harrying a preoccupied elk.

  “Listen, man, it’s gotta be relevant.”

  “How about a little fun along the way?” Kaufman retorted acidly. “We could sort of sneak it in when your generation wasn’t looking, like cyanide in Tylenol. The world did not begin or end with Woodstock. Which reminds me: that guitar the juvenile used to lug around in every scene.”

  “Used to?” Ricky bristled, sensing profanation. “He still does. When’d you cut that?”

  “Now.”

  “He’s a rock singer f’crissake. A revolutionary.”

  Desperate, Kaufman stepped out of character. He hated physical contact but laid a fatherly hand on Remsleep’s shoulder, from which death alone had routed dandruff. “Kid, do you know what revolutionaries grow up to be? Tired business men and mothers who might want a laugh at the end of a hard day.”

  Ricky snarled his contempt and drank, slopping his rum Coke. “Yeah, shit. The ones who lived to fucking sell out the whole movement. You’re history, George. You are archaic”

  Kaufman cast about for escape – as Lida Simone boozily hooked Remsleep’s arm like a brass ring, allowing the harried Kaufman nimble escape from worse-than-death. “Talk to me, Ricky.” She nuzzled his car. “Gershwin is being selfish, moaning about Paulette and 1937, whatever they were, and he won’t play ‘ASummer Place’ for me.”

  “Neither would I,” Ricky declared.

  “Oh, I love romantics.” Lida aimed an inaccurate kiss at the Remsleep mouth and managed only to dampen his cheek. “Jimmy Webb and Richard Harris... will you play your guitar at my wedding?”

  “What dude you splicing?”

  “My fourth husband again. No, my third. We always had a thing. DOTTIE!” Lida loosed Ricky to pounce on a tiny, horn-rimmed woman and dragoon her close. “Dottie, come talk to me. I love the way you write. Will you come to my wedding?”

  Dottie had large, wounded eyes and a tremulous voice. She removed the glasses, gazing at Lida with mournful sincerity. “How could I miss your wedding, dear? The last few were such fun.” She readjusted the horn-rims, drifting away. “Excuse me. Mr. Benchley is surrounded by Alec Woollcott and signaling for help.”

  The piano relinquished under protest by Oscar and Gershwin, a white-jacketed orchestra bumped and slid the dancers through a sinuous tango. In Coyul’s expert but absentminded embrace, Purji whirled and dipped with total involvement, head flung back, blond waves flashing —

  “Oh, la. To be mortal and urgent – darling, do keep your mind on it. I’m dancing with an accomplished coat hanger.”

  “Sorry.” Try as he might to put Peter Helm out of his mind, the man left a too-familiar ring in his ear. An idealist like Speed but with a glacial difference, a seeker of truth without compassion. He reminded Coyul of no one so much as Oliver Cromwell, the same icy zeal that could greatly strive for celestial motives while immolating his best friend, putting ground glass in dog food or even catsup on beef.

  The tango ended; Coyul and Purji retrieved their drinks just starboard of a politely drunk Dottie staring through her horn-rims into limbo or perhaps the cozily recalled depths of a certain speakeasy on Fifty-second Street. Coyul took her glass.

  “What are you having, love?”

  “Not much fun,” Dottie slurred.

  “I never thought to hear it,” Coyul tisked. “Mrs. Parker repeating herself.”

  “So is the world,” she enunciated too carefully. “All they do is remakes. Christ, I hated Hollywood. Purji, you do the most wonderful parties.” Dottie dropped her horn-rims into a cavernous handbag and rose precariously. “Even if Lida Simone is cutting me up the back, I will now ask Mr. Benchley to see me home. You mustn’t mind Lida,” she confided warmly. “We go back forever. I knew her before she was a virgin. Oh, shit! I have to write tomorrow,” she wailed to Coyul. “God, how I loathe it. I am ghosting one of those ‘from the heart of a simple woman’ autobiographies. Do you know Letti Candor?”

  Regrettably, Coyul did.

  Dottie batted her eyes in mime and malice. “Y’all know how lonely li’l her must be without her Lay-ance, living hand-to-mink. Do you know how much she sounds like my mother-in-law? Good night... Mr. Benchley awaits.”

  With that seraphic smile and great dignity, Mrs. Parker fell on her face and remained there. Purji thought to rouse her – but no. “She seems so peaceful and childlike.”

  “The Little Match Girl with a blowtorch. Back in a second.” Coyul would spare Benchley the trouble. Where the inert Dottie could no longer navigate, he transported her instantly home to her own poodle-strewn bed to slumber without troubled dreams of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

  The party waltzed on, unabated. In one corner, Kaufman whispered intimately to an appreciative Lida, Oscar was at the piano again, and Purji waxed sentimental.

  “I am serious, Coyul. I want to settle down. Put in roots. Produce permanence. Have children.”

  Coyul was uncertain about inflicting humans on their offspring. On the other hand, the world was not ready either.

  “But we need purpose,” Purji persisted. “With our lifespan we need more than television or the religious tragedy of Lance Candor. No one we know goes in for tragedy.”

  “What then, my love? Shall we seek the central meaning of existence. Square the circle?”

  “Oh, we did all that in school. And look at us. Are we really what they called us then? Brats, wastrels, dilettantes?”

  Coyul abbreviated her lament with a kiss. “You just have the blahs.”

  “Do not digress. Dottie was right. All our cons are remakes. Stars explode, worlds die, wars start, lovers part. Myths re
cycle yet again to explain the tiresome monkey to himself I’m so damned tired of it.”

  “So was I by the rise of Sumer,” Coyul admitted. “How about bed. Our guests can fend for themselves.”

  “Unhand me, villain! I am feeling fin de siècle and very articulate about it, and you offer mere sleep to knit the raveled sleeve of ennui?”

  Coyul’s next kiss was more to the point. “I said bed for openers.”

  Purji softened. “You are a romantic. I am with you, Masked Man, but not like humans again. Please? Such limited gymnastics. Let’s make love like us for a change. For which” — Purji covered a furtive hiccup —” bed is super... superfluous. Honestly, it’s all so sad. Humans. Brief candles. I think I’m drunk. But I like being drunk, it’s the only way I can manage a good cry without laughing myself to death. Don’t you envy humans, Coyul? I mean, don’t you wish sometimes we had just a little of that desperate need for now?”

  “No,” said Coyul as they faded from the party. No one missed them at all.

  8

  After the ball

  Even as Dottie passed out, Lance and Scheherazade enjoyed their own party à deux in the Hilton Hereafter. After his release, he might have gone home and even took a faltering step in that direction. But why? he asked himself. Letti had not visited him once, while Sherry came every day, even before he redecorated his room. He wouldn’t go home just yet. Letti would learn he had a mind of his own. The moral aspect nagged him at first before Lance sedated his scruples in a triumph of pragmatism. Where women were concerned (and Lance was very) a bird in the Hilton was worth two at home. Scheherazade moved in forthwith, backpack, tantric tapes and all.

  Her incendiary influence was reelected in a defiant Ché Guevara poster, militant peace symbols and pink neon LOVE signs sputtering softly here and there about the walls, the whole elect softened to a cerise glow now as they dined by candlelight. Flattering lights and Lance’s deprivation set of Ms. Ginsberg at her dramatic best. She was even deeper into her current astrological phase, romantic and intense, hair redone in raven black. To Lance in his need, she was desire itself as she poured the Chianti and set his plate before him with a Nourish.