The Frumious Bandersnatch полностью

He had first admired her feminine pulchritude in uniform, the blue tailor-mades showing off her perky figure to great advantage, ah yes. But in uniform, she wore highly polished flat black rubber-soled shoes. And in uniform, her long black hair was pulled up and tucked under her cap, and she wore no lipstick or eye shadow, and she carried a nine-millimeter Glock on her right hip.

But tonight…

On this balmy, breezy, first Saturday night in May…

Patricia Gomez was wearing a tight-fitting red dress cut high on the thigh and low on the neck. And tonight, Patricia Gomez was wearing her raven hair falling to the shoulders, punctuated by dimesized sized circles of red earrings on either side of her beautiful face. And tonight, Patricia Gomez was wearing glossy red lipstick as bright as the dress, and midnight-blue eye shadow that made her look slinky and sexy and Spanish, like some señorita coming down a long wrought-iron staircase in a movie with banditos and good guys. And tonight, Patricia Gomez was barelegged in strappy red satin sandals that made her seem even taller than her five-feet-seven, which Ollie had already informed her was a perfect height for a woman.

Best of all, Patricia Gomez was in his arms, and they were dancing.

Detective/First Grade Oliver Wendell Weeks was a damn fine dancer, if he said so himself.

The place he had chosen for their inaugural outing was a spot called Billy Barnacles, which was perched on the edge of the River Harb, on the city’s Upper North Side. The place served great sea food—he had asked her two nights ago if she liked sea food—and it had the advantage of a live band and a parquet dance floor under the stars and directly on the river’s edge. The band called itself The River Rats…

Ollie wondered what their name was when they were playing someplace less proximate, ah yes, to the river, but they’d been playing here forever, and in fact Arnie Cooper, the leader, was Billy Cooper’s brother, who owned Billy Barnacles, but that was another story.

The band played all kinds of music, all of it danceable. Dixieland from the twenties, swing from the thirties and forties, doo-wop from the fifties, rock from the sixties all the way to the present, even a rap song or two to satisfy the handful of Negro customers who wandered in from Diamondback further uptown. Ollie did not mind dancing on the same floor as “people of color,” as they sometimes preferred calling themselves, so long as they behaved themselves. The trouble with most Negroes—and Ollie preferred calling them this because he knew the outmoded label pissed them off—was that they seldom knew how to behave themselves. He considered this a crying shame, which was why he tried to take as many of them off the street as he possibly could.

But this was a Saturday night, and not a time to be ruminating about the difficulties of the job in a city as large and as diversified, ah yes, as this one. He considered it a comment upon his social aptitude that he had never once discussed police work all through dinner, and was not now discussing it as he and Patricia glided nimbly across the floor to a spirited version of “When the Saints Go Marching In,” another of the tunes in The River Rats’ repertoire.

To watch Ollie prance around the dance floor was tantamount to watching the hippos in Fantasia performing to “Dance of the Hours,” except that Ollie wasn’t wearing a tutu. He was wearing instead a dark blue tropical-weight suit he had purchased at L&G, which was short for Lewis and Gregory, two brothers—literally and figuratively—whose shop Ollie frequented on Chase Street in the Eight-Eight Precinct, where both he and Patricia worked. Ollie suspected that half the clothing at L&G had fallen off the back of a truck, which meant it had been stolen. But “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was a very good policy to follow when you were looking for designer-label garments at discount prices. The suit made Ollie look a lot thinner than he actually was, which meant he looked like an armored weapons carrier instead of a tank, not to mix metaphors with hippos, oh no, m’little chickadees. Ollie was also wearing a white shirt and a red tie, which made him look patriotic in the blue suit, and which also picked up Patricia’s dominant color scheme, the tie, that is.

For a fat man…

Ollie knew that there were some people in this city who called him “Fat Ollie,” but never to his face, which he considered a measure of respect. Besides, he would break their heads. He himself never thought of himself as being “fat,” per se. Large, yes. Big, yes.

For a big large man, then, especially one who was gamboling about the dance floor the way he was, Ollie sweated very little. He figured this had something to do with glands. Everything in life had something to do with glands.

He twirled and whirled Patricia.

The number was reaching a climax.

Ollie pulled Patricia in as close as his belly would allow.