“There is nothing humorous in what I am here to say,” Kinski boomed, returning his attention to his host. “I come to sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings.” The words of Shakespeare’s Richard II sat strangely in the mouth of an American tramp seated on a Louis XV chair drinking Lapsang from a Meissen cup, but never mind. “Sit down, René,” said Nero, beckoning me toward him and patting a place on the settee. “Have some tea and listen to this fellow. He’s damn good.” There was a new sweetness in Nero’s manner that was unsettling. He smiled, but it was more like a baring of the teeth than a sign of pleasure. His voice was soft, but it was a velvet glove concealing the painful rawness of his thought.
“It’s going to go badly,” Kinski said suddenly, the teacup shaking in his hand. “The mountain of evil is taller than the tallest building and the guns are all alive. I hear America cry out, where is God? But God is full of wrath because you stepped away from his path. You, America!”—here, oddly, he pointed directly at Nero—“you spurned God and now he punishes you.” “I spurned God and now he punishes me,” Nero repeated, and when I cast a glance in his direction I saw there were real tears in his eyes. The openly godless man, plunged into crisis, had invited this whiskey-breath malarkey merchant into his home and was actually being affected by his unhinged eschatology. I go away for five days, I thought, and when I come home the world has shifted on its axis. “Nero,” I began to say, “this man…”—but he waved me down. “I want to hear it,” he insisted. “I want to hear it all.”
So we had moved from Rome to Greece, and the man who had taken for himself the name of the last of the twelve Caesars was now trapped in a New York version of Oedipus the King, desperate for answers, with his version of blind Teiresias prophesying calamity. Kinski was hollering on but I had heard his shtick enough times to be bored by it, and switched off. Then Vasilisa was standing in the doorway and ended it. “Enough,” she commanded, and her finger, pointing at Kinski, silenced and demolished him. I imagined a science-fiction, Darth Sidious bolt of power emanating from that finger. The teacup trembled dangerously in the tramp’s hands but he set it down intact and jumped nervously to his feet. “How about a coupla dollars?” he retained the chutzpah to ask, “What about my fee?” “Leave,” she said, “or we’ll call the cops and they can see about your fee.”
When he was gone she turned on Nero and spoke to him with the same Nurse Ratched note of authority in her voice that she had used on Kinski.
“Don’t do that again,” she said.
Oh, I thought. We’re in the cuckoo’s nest.
My story has not, thus far, followed Nero Golden on his regular journeys to the apartment on York Avenue where he met his preferred prostitute, Mlle. Loulou. I myself have never in my life seen the inside of a brothel, never paid anyone for sex, a fact which speaks, perhaps, of moral probity—but also, contrariwise, of a na?f innocence, of some deficiency in the story of my manhood. My inexperience in the field made it difficult for my imagination to follow Nero on these excursions up whatever narrow stairway lit by red lightbulbs into whatever cushioned and perfumed boudoir; I knew that they had always been a part of his adult life and that, before he met his present wife, he would sometimes speak bawdily of his exploits to the most louche members of his poker circle, the pair of silver foxes named, perhaps, Karlheinz and Giambologna, or perhaps Karl-Otto and Giambattista, I forget—German and Italian playboys, anyway, politically ultraconservative, the Axis powers at the card table in their tan leather jackets and bright cravats, whose rich wives had died in puzzling circumstances and left them all their money. Regarding the practicality of associations with the call girl tribe they thought as one: you could fit them in between meetings and you didn’t have to remember their birthdays, and you could use the same nickname for them all, Mlle. Gigi, Mlle. Nastygal, Mlle. Babycakes, or Mlle. Loulou. The names the girls themselves gave you were fakes anyway. And—this, in marketing diction, was their USP, their unique selling proposition—for a price, they would do anything you wanted, and keep their mouths shut afterwards. On poker nights Nero and the playboys, Karl-Friedrich and Giansilvio, had boasted of the sexual feats they had persuaded their ladies of easy virtue to perform, and complimented the athletic strength, the gymnastic grace, the contortionist flexibility of their chosen whores. Nero alone spoke of his tart’s intelligence. “She is a philosopher,” he said. “I go to her for wisdom.” This brought forth braying laughter from Karl-Theodor and Giambenito. “And fucking!” they bellowed in unison. “Yes, also fucking,” Nero Golden agreed. “But the philosophy is a plus.” Tell us, they cried, share with us the wisdom of your whore. “For example,” Nero Golden answered, “she says, I allow you to buy my body because I see you have not sold your soul.” “That is not wisdom,” said Gianluca. “That is flattery.” “She speaks also of the world,” Nero went on, “and believes that a great catastrophe is coming, and only from the total collapse of everything will the new order be born.” “That is not wisdom,” said Karl-Ingo. “That is Leninism.” Then they all laughed uproariously and shouted, “Play cards!”
Now, in the time of his decline—his admittedly slow mental deterioration—Nero went uptown to his chosen lady less often. But from time to time he did go, perhaps wanting to listen to her hard-won truths in much the same way as he had been willing to listen to Kinski the tramp. In the aftermath of his double loss he was lost in a fog of meaninglessness and was looking everywhere to find a way of making the world make sense once again. He was still able to function fairly well as long as he was amongst people he knew. He had forged a relationship with a Haitian limo driver androgynously named Claude-Marie whom he now kept on retainer, knowing him to be both competent and discreet, and as a result could travel from Macdougal Street to York Avenue, do what he had to do there, and return without any trouble. On the particular day of which I must now speak, however, Claude-Marie was in a court of law embroiled in a bitter divorce, and sent along his Auntie Mercedes-Benz instead. Auntie Benz’s real name was something Creole-French and unknown; the automobile name by which she now went was an honorific bestowed upon her by admiring relatives. In her day she had been a fine and skillful chauffeuse but in her white-haired years she had grown eccentric. Her driving was unsteady, and so Nero arrived at Mlle. Loulou’s door somewhat shaken up.
“Hello, little fool,” he said. It was his name of love for her. “Your big fool is here.”
“You are sad,” she said, in the false French accent he liked her to adopt. “Maybe I punish you a little and you punish me a little and you feel better comme toujours?”
“I need to sit for a minute,” he said. “A strange driver. I felt, yes, I felt afraid.”
“You have death on your mind, chéri,” she said. “It’s completely understandable. A twice-broken heart will not soon mend.”