Sinatra stomps onstage as Sammy creams the crowd at the Crescendo. Sammy blows a bluesy ballad and lights an L&M to look cool. The crowd cracks up. Sinatra signals a waiter. The waiter wings a watermelon up onstage. The crowd craps its pants. Sammy laughs to look like he’s loving it. Frank freezes him out and wilts the room with “Willow Weep for Me.”
I spritzed my spin on Sinatra. Sammy succumbed to its succulence and sucked up to me. We sulked ourselves silly and sunk into a Sinatra-phobe Abyss.
We hexed him with hellish hate. We shivved him with a Shinto curse that Crazy Chris cooked up. We defaced and dart-boarded all his album covers and ratched the records inside. We worked ourselves into a frenzy–frankly frantic and Francophiliacal. The fragrance of Frankincense froze us–and freed me to act.
I said, “Help me steal some furs and run them down to Tj.”
Sammy said, “Yes, Big White Bwana.”
I said, “Call Frank. Make like you don’t hate him, and put out some peace feelers for me.”
Sammy said, “Yes, Sahib.”
We surreptitiously surveilled Teitelbaum Furs. We sat in Chris’s Chrysler and sunk down to the dash. We wore distinct disguises.
I played a Shinto shaman. Dig it: a multicolored monk’s robe and sharp shades to shield my eyes. Sammy posed as a pachuco in peg pants and a cheap cholo chirt.
We restlessly reconnoitered Rodeo Drive. We learned the layout. We laid lazy eyes on the fur shop and watched two lowlifes in a late-model Lincoln loop around it themselves.
They looked larcenous. They looked lizardlike. They loop-thelooped and licked their lips and surveilled every surface in sight.
They surveilled serpentlike. We surveilled them serviceably. They lizard-lunched at Lmnny’s Delicatessen. We noshed knockwurst at the next table and tallied their talk for two days.
The lizards loved liver and onions. They ordered it and ooh-lala’d and went over their plans plenty loud. They conclusively confirmed Demon Dot: the heist would hatch at 6:oo P.M. — 12/27.
We suspended our surveillance on Christmas Eve. Christlike Chris threw a party to praise the Prince of Peace.
Bogie got bombed on his peach-pit potion and peppermint schnapps. He chugalugged it and chanted Chinese chants to beat the Big C. Huxley hooked down hallucinogens. He held forth and heaped judgment on Jesus. He praised that prize prick Pontius Pilate and his “Paranoid Paradigm.” It pissed off Oscar Levant. Oscar opted to ossify some “Existential Eggnog.” He tossed in herbs, hash hunks, and Hungarian wine. The shit sheared Crazy Chris. He spouted aphorisms and spun around aphrodisiacal. The marines lurched from his libidinous assaults and went AWOL.
Sammy stayed stone sober and steamed over satanic Sinatra. He reissued his old indignities in insistently intimate detail and insisted that I listen. He flogged and flayed his own flesh bare. He catalogued catastrophic cruelties and cringed at his own compliance. He christened his crucifier the “Christmas Anti-Christ” and called him on Chris’s phone.
Sammy crawled to the creep. He cradled the phone and crossed himself. He would have waved wolfsbane if he’d had it.
He said, “Frank says he’ll meet you. You pick the time and place.”
I said, “The motel by the Club Diablo. Midnight on the twentyseventh.”
Sammy mumbled into the mouthpiece. I mused on my moment to meet Satan on his own torrid turf.
5
We went in well armed. We masqueraded as marines and made it a military maneuver.
The marines marked for molestation left some shit at the shrine. We draped ourselves in their dress blues and packed their PX-pilfered pistols. I hid my Hudson Hornet and hot-wired a Vauxhall van. Monster masks made us menacing and marked us as men not to mess with.
I went in as the Wolfman. Sammy crept in as the Creature from the Black Lagoon. We moved our minkmobile into the back lot and barged in the back door.
5:46 P.M.
Fourteen minutes to filch furs and fill up the van. Fourteen minutes to fuck the fur-filchers already assigned to the job.
We monster-minced down a mink-lined hallway. We froze by the freezer vault. Al Teitelbaum latched eyes on us and laughed long and loud.
He howled and heaved for breath. He broke a sweat and swatted his legs. He swayed and pointed to a pile of pelts on the freezer floor.