When the spider vanished into shadows, I continued to follow the voice of Reginald Smaller as he grumbled to himself. I found him in the downfall of light from a portable work lamp that was hooked to an overhead water pipe, performing routine maintenance on the third of three large boilers, the one that brewed hot water and sent it to radiators throughout the building to heat the apartments. Here in the waning days of summer, when no one needed heat, Mr. Smaller was draining sediment from the bottom of the big tank, an almost syrupy sludge with which he’d filled one bucket and was now filling a second.
A short man with a big middle, he wore as usual a white tank-top undershirt, khakis with an elastic waist, and suspenders as insurance against a failure of the elastic, industrial suspenders that looked as if they had been fashioned from racehorse tack. He once said that he had been raised by a grandmother who was “a mean old cuckoo-bird,” and when he was a young boy, if he displeased her, she stripped him down to his underpants and turned him out into the street to be mortified. He insisted there was nothing worse than being pantsless in public, especially if you had bandy legs and lumpy knees that made people point and laugh. In Mr. Smaller’s case, I thought it was just as bad to wear a tank top, because his chest and back and arms were covered in wiry, poodle-curly hair, glossy black against his white skin, like the coat of a bear with an advanced case of mange.
When I came upon him that morning, he was on his knees beside the hulking boiler, muttering almost as if he were two people having a vigorous debate, but when he saw me, he smiled and said, “Ain’t it but Sammy Davis Junior himself. Will you sing ‘What Kind of Fool Am I’ for me, Sammy?”
“You know I don’t sing, Mr. Smaller.”
“Now, don’t go pullin’ my chain, Sammy. You sing all the time in Vegas when they pay you the big bucks.”
“Maybe I would sing if I got the big bucks.”
“Soon as I drain this disgustin’ muck,” he said, indicating the soupy stuff coming out of the boiler hose, “I’ll hustle upstairs, get a couple thousand from my cookie jar. That be enough for just one song?”
“Sometimes you’re really silly, Mr. Smaller.”
“Yeah, I guess you won’t never sing no song that cheap. How much they pay you to star in Ocean’s Eleven?”
“About a hundred million.”
He pretended to be impressed. “Why’re you still in this dump?”
“Living flashy isn’t my style.”
“Guess it ain’t.” The last slop oozed out of the boiler, and he twisted shut the petcock. “Wish you really was Sammy Davis. Then you’d know that actor Peter Lawford. I’d sure like to talk to Peter Lawford. He knows somethin’ about who really killed the president.”
“You mean President Kennedy?”
“Don’t mean Abe Lincoln. Lawford, he’s married to that Patricia Kennedy. Tell you one thing, it weren’t no Lee Harvey Oswald pulled the real trigger. Castro mighta been mixed up in it. If I had your hundred million, I’d bet it all ties back to Roswell in July of ’47.”
“Who’s Roswell?”
“Ain’t a who. Roswell is a what, a place. New Mexico. Flyin’ saucer crashed there, July of ’47. Some dead aliens was recovered, and maybe one alive. Government’s been lyin’ about it ever since.”
“Wow.”
Disconnecting the short hose from the boiler drain, Mr. Smaller said, “For sure the April ’62 saucer crash near Vegas is part of it, ’cause it just so happens Jack Ruby was in Vegas then.” When I asked who Jack Ruby was, Mr. Smaller said, “He killed Lee Harvey Oswald right after Oswald didn’t kill Kennedy. Them Bilderberger bastards are mixed up in it, too.”
From past conversations, I knew that the Bilderbergers were an international secret society headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, formed to be the secret government of the world in league with the aliens from other planets who lived among us. Being only nine years old, I didn’t know if the Bilderbergers were real or something Mr. Smaller invented. I thought he was a little crazy, but mostly in a nice way, and some of his stories were fun to hear. Because he was so much older than I was, I owed him respect, and I never expressed disbelief.
That morning, however, I’d been spooked by Fiona Cassidy, who was without a doubt real and who was a more immediate threat than the Bilderbergers out there in Geneva. I hoped it would seem the most natural thing in the world when I changed the subject: “The new lady is pretty.”
Getting to his feet, Mr. Smaller said, “All that’s goin’ wrong these days, war and riots, it’s them damn Bilderbergers.” He picked up a bucket of sludge in each hand and walked toward the exterior basement door, which was served by a short ramp. “All them tornadoes last year, two hundred dead, that nurse killer in Chicago, them dangerous new skateboard things, and Nat King Cole gone from lung cancer, only forty-five.”
Following him, I said, “She has nice eyes, how they’re blue and purple at the same time.”
“Girls in silly go-go boots, miniskirts, all them weird-fangled new dances, the watusi, the frug. What kind of dance is a frug? Don’t nobody fox-trot no more? It’s all their plan, the Bilderbergers.”