Paradise Man by Jerome Charyn Read Free Book Online Page A

suspense. No one can help you, Holden.”
    “Dada,” the Marielita said.
    Loretta scowled. “That man doesn’t deserve you, child. He talks about Parisian lollipops. But you wait. He won’t deliver.”
    Holden stooped to nuzzle the leopard girl and tasted her lipstick.
    “Go on,” Mrs. Howard said. “Cozying up to a child like that. You ought to be ashamed.”
    “I am.”
    He hugged Mrs. Howard before she could escape. He recalled her aromas when she’d lived around him, a black woman in a white brassiere who smelled like sweet country grass. He’d loved her all through junior high. It was only Andrushka who’d relieved him of the spell. It was Holden’s misfortune that he was a monogamous man. He couldn’t exist with more than one sweetheart in his head.

Andrushka

6
    H E HAD A CROQUE MADAME at a café near the Swisser’s office. He loved grilled cheese crowned with an egg. The croque madames at American bistros were a tasteless pile of toast. He gorged himself whenever he got to Paris. The Swisser had found him an apartment on the rue du Dragon. But Holden preferred a hotel. There was no one to greet him at the apartment, nothing but neighbors who never smiled and a concierge who wondered why the mysterious American didn’t need a mailbox. The apartment looked out onto a wall and the lower margins of a roof; it felt like a prison with tiled floors. Holden had gone from the airport to the apartment, stood on the tiles, stared at the pocked white wall, and registered at a hotel on the Place St. Sulpice, where no tourists ever went. The manager always seemed to have room for Monsieur. Holden’s French was rotten. But he could gesture with his mouth, make the little explosive noises of a Frenchman. He’d lost a mom in Avignon, but he must have picked up something from the frogs.
    He had his second croque madame and suddenly he could feel a pair of eyes, soft as a spider, sitting on his chest. Holden smiled. His shadow had come into the café. Billetdoux. Billetdoux always followed him when Holden came to France. He worked for a French furrier who was scared of Holden. Holden had kidnapped the furrier five years ago, a certain Mr. Bronshtein, who was feuding with Holden’s senior partner, Bruno Schatz. Bronshtein had insulted Bruno’s mannequins at the Paris fair, corrupted his messengers, and stole Nick Tiel’s designs. It was a disaster for Bruno Schatz. His whole inventory had been compromised. That’s when Holden kidnapped the furrier, brought him to one of Bruno’s warehouses behind the Gare d’Austerlitz, sat him down in a huge, empty loft, so that Bronshtein had a world of ceilings to look at, and waited until the furrier began to weep.
    “Don’t kill me,” Bronshtein had said, crawling to Holden on his knees. He had a lot of metal in his mouth, a face of golden teeth, and Holden felt sorry for him, because he hadn’t been instructed to hurt the furrier, but to tease him and harrow his life a little.
    “Will you make restitution to the Swisser?” Holden had to ask.
    “Certainly,” the furrier said.
    “You’ll repay him for ruining his winter line.”
    The furrier took a checkbook out of his pocket that was like a long flat boat and began to scribble numbers in the book.
    “Mr. Bronshtein, this is a deal between gentlemen ... we’ll take cash.”
    “How much?”
    “Swiss will leave that up to you. He knows you’ll be generous about the damage you’ve done.”
    Holden escorted the furrier out of Bruno’s warehouse and put him into a cab. Now Bronshtein had a fever the minute Holden was in town. And he hired Billetdoux, a bumper from Marseilles, to watch Holden. It was almost like a friendship, Billetdoux and him. The big bumper could have hid a gun factory inside his overcoat. His head looked like it had been assembled with a hammer. Billetdoux had seams under his ears. He reminded Holden of a bionic caveman, a brute with interchangeable parts. Holden asked the waiter to bring