It was me he was looking at, me he was approaching. I stared at him, feeling almost hypnotized—it was like one of those dreams where you discover that you haven’t studied for the exam you’re supposed to take or that you’re attending a White House dinner in your honor with no clothes on—and I might have stayed that way if Humboldt hadn’t moved.
I heard his chair scrape back and glanced at him. He was standing up, his napkin held loosely in one hand. He looked surprised, 332
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but he also looked furious. I suddenly realized two things: that he was drunk, quite drunk, in fact, and that he saw this as a smirch on both his hospitality and his competence. He had chosen the restaurant, after all, and now look—the master of ceremonies had gone bonkers.
“Eeeeee! . . . I teach you! For the last time I teach you . . .”
“Oh my God, he’s wet his pants,” a woman at a nearby table murmured. Her voice was low but perfectly audible in the silence as the maître d’ drew in a fresh breath with which to scream, and I saw she was right. The crotch of the skinny man’s dress pants was soaked.
“See here, you idiot,” Humboldt said, turning to face him, and the maître d’ brought his left hand out from behind his back. In it was the largest butcher-knife I have ever seen. It had to have been two feet long, with the top part of its cutting edge slightly belled, like a cutlass in an old pirate movie.
“Look out!” I yelled at Humboldt, and at one of the tables against the wall a skinny man in rimless spectacles screamed, ejecting a mouthful of chewed brown fragments of food onto the tablecloth in front of him.
Humboldt seemed to hear neither my yell nor the other man’s scream. He was frowning thunderously at the maître d’. “You don’t need to expect to see me in here again if this is the way—” Humboldt began.
“Eeeeeee! EEEEEEEEE!” the maître d’ screamed, and swung the butcher-knife flat through the air. It made a kind of whickering sound, like a whispered sentence. The period was the sound of the blade burying itself in William Humboldt’s right cheek. Blood exploded out of the wound in a furious spray of tiny droplets. They decorated the tablecloth in a fan-shaped stipplework, and I clearly saw (I will never forget it) one bright red drop fall into my waterglass and then dive for the bottom with a pinkish filament like a tail stretching out behind it. It looked like a bloody tadpole.
Humboldt’s cheek snapped open, revealing his teeth, and as he clapped his hand to the gouting wound, I saw something pinkish-white lying on the shoulder of his charcoal-gray suitcoat. It wasn’t 333
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until the whole thing was over that I realized it must have been his earlobe.
“Tell this in your ears!” the maître d’ screamed furiously at Diane’s bleeding lawyer, who stood there with one hand clapped to his cheek. Except for the blood pouring over and between his fingers, Humboldt looked weirdly like Jack Benny doing one of his famous double-takes. “Call this to your hateful tattle-tale friends of the street . . .
you misery . . . Eeeeeee! . . . DOG-LOVER!”
Now other people were screaming, mostly at the sight of the blood. Humboldt was a big man, and he was bleeding like a stuck pig. I could hear it pattering on the floor like water from a broken pipe, and the front of his white shirt was now red. His tie, which had been red to start with, was now black.
“Steve?” Diane said. “Steven?”
A man and a woman had been having lunch at the table behind her and slightly to her left. Now the man—about thirty and handsome in the way George Hamilton used to be—bolted to his feet and ran toward the front of the restaurant. “Troy, don’t go without me!” his date screamed, but Troy never looked back. He’d forgotten all about a library book he was supposed to return, it seemed, or maybe about how he’d promised to wax the car.
If there had been a paralysis in the room—I can’t actually say if there was or not, although I seem to have seen a great deal, and to remember it all—that broke it. There were more screams and other people got up. Several tables were overturned. Glasses and china shattered on the floor. I saw a man with his arm around the waist of his female companion hurry past behind the maître d’; her hand was clamped into his shoulder like a claw. For a moment her eyes met mine, and they were as empty as the eyes of a Greek bust. Her face was dead pale, haglike with horror.
All of this might have happened in ten seconds, or maybe twenty.
I remember it like a series of photographs or filmstrips, but it has no timeline. Time ceased to exist for me at the moment Alfalfa the maître d’ brought his left hand out from behind his back and I saw the butcher-knife. During that time, the man in the tuxedo continued to 334
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spew out a confusion of words in his special maître d’s language, the one that old girlfriend of mine had called Snooti. Some of it really was in a foreign language, some of it was English but completely without sense, and some of it was striking . . . almost haunting. Have you ever read any of Dutch Schultz’s long, confused deathbed statement? It was like that. Much of it I can’t remember. What I can remember I suppose I’ll never forget.
Humboldt staggered backward, still holding his lacerated cheek.
The backs of his knees struck the seat of his chair and he sat down heavily on it. He looks like someone who’s just been told he’s disinherited, I thought. He started to turn toward Diane and me, his eyes wide and shocked. I had time to see there were tears spilling out of them, and then the maître d’ wrapped both hands around the handle of the butcher-knife and buried it in the center of Humboldt’s head. It made a sound like someone whacking a pile of towels with a cane.
“Boot!” Humboldt cried. I’m quite sure that’s what his last word on planet Earth was—“boot.” Then his weeping eyes rolled up to whites and he slumped forward onto his plate, sweeping his own glassware off the table and onto the floor with one outflung hand. As this happened, the maître d’—all his hair was sticking up in back, now, not just some of it—pried the long knife out of his head. Blood sprayed out of the headwound in a kind of vertical curtain, and splashed the front of Diane’s dress. She raised her hands to her shoulders with the palms turned out once again, but this time it was in horror rather than exasperation. She shrieked, and then clapped her bloodspattered hands to her face, over her eyes. The maître d’ paid no attention to her.
Instead, he turned to me.
“That dog of yours,” he said, speaking in an almost conversational tone. He registered absolutely no interest in or even knowledge of the screaming, terrified people stampeding behind him toward the doors.
His eyes were very large, very dark. They looked brown to me again, but there seemed to be black circles around the irises. “That dog of yours is so much rage. All the radios of Coney Island don’t make up to dat dog, you motherfucker.”
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I had the umbrella in my hand, and the one thing I can’t remember, no matter how hard I try, is when I grabbed it. I think it must have been while Humboldt was standing transfixed by the realization that his mouth had been expanded by eight inches or so, but I simply can’t remember. I remember the man who looked like George Hamilton bolting for the door, and I know his name was Troy because that’s what his companion called after him, but I can’t remember picking up the umbrella I’d bought in the luggage store.
It was in my hand, though, the price-tag sticking out of the bottom of my fist, and when the maître d’ bent forward as if bowing and ran the knife through the air at me—meaning, I think, to bury it in my throat—I raised it and brought it down on his wrist, like an old-time teacher whacking an unruly pupil with his hickory stick.
“Ud!” the maître d’ grunted as his hand was driven sharply down and the blade meant for my throat ploughed through the soggy pinkish tablecloth instead. He held on, though, and pulled it back. If I’d tried to hit his knife-hand again I’m sure I would have missed, but I didn’t. I swung at his face, and fetched him an excellent lick—as excellent a lick as one can administer with an umbrella, anyway—up the side of his head. And as I did, the umbrella popped open like the visual punchline of a slapstick act.