Isaac by Ivan G. Goldman

Author:Ivan G. Goldman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1579623050
Publisher: The Permenant Press

CHAPTER 13

LENNY

Centuries ago, riding north of the Black Forest, I spotted a dead wolf nailed trophy-like to a shed at the edge of the road. He hung there like an old coat. Some peasant must have struggled to get all that dead weight up there, making me wonder whether he’d held a personal grudge against the animal. The face, debased and shrunken, was folded into furry wrinkles of despair and suffering, as though in its last moment the wolf understood the fullness and finality of its own death. The jowly, permanently disgruntled face of Trianon the hedge fund manager reminded me of that wolf. But instead of stalking peasant flocks he obsessively watched stock quotes moving across the bottom of his TV screen. He also loved to talk back to the screen images of politicians as they made their pronouncements to the cameras. “Think about the children,” he’d say in a derisive, burlesque tone, mocking the idea and those who profess it while implying that anyone who claims to care about the needy always hides selfish motives.

Trianon breathed and spoke in grunts and half-grunts, exhaling an inexhaustible gravel of restless indifference. You prayed for him to clear his throat. When he ate, it was like listening to a machine chew up tree parts. He was clearly impressed by the delinquent aura that surrounded Powell, while ex-con Powell longed to be accepted by rich white people and mostly had to settle for dwarfed personalities like Trianon. They were a symbiotic pair, but I couldn’t tell whether Powell was the water buffalo that attracted parasites or the tickbird that ate them off Trianon’s ass.

Trianon, a lap-dance addict, apparently was well known on the nude bar circuit, where it was rumored he left a long, twisted trail of hundred dollar bills and jizzum stains. It was the subject of ongoing banter between him and Powell, who, doggedly faithful to his wife, refused to accompany him to his strip dives and late-night clubs. As a compromise, Trianon would invite Powell to his Coliseum-sized compound on Mulholland, where he ordered out for whores, disc jockeys, Thanksgiving turkeys, whatever he felt like. On this particular evening he’d rented two blondes in little black dresses from a strip joint near the airport. I wasn’t sure whether they were the same ones from the Blankenship funeral.

Powell was envious that Trianon could pull his stock market scams high above the weather, while he had to operate down in the part of the economy where rats scramble for garbage. Just now he was inquiring what it cost Trianon to get a specific paragraph attached to a congressional tax bill.

“We don’t put it in those terms, Ray,” replied Trianon, sifting his words through his customary throat gravel. He sat sandwiched between the two blondes on a white, L-shaped sofa the size of a gondola, caressing with short, nervous fingers one cute, panty-hosed knee in each hand, probably more to stake out ownership than to reap a sensual dividend. The blondes were in their early twenties, if that.

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