Free Very Old Bones by William Kennedy

I realized then that I didn’t know the
man’s real name, or if he had one. The usher grew impatient and said if I wanted to go inside I’d have to buy a ticket, and I did.
    A military hanging was in process in the film. A much-decorated warrior wearing his uniform and medals ascends to the gallows, and disdains the hood that covers a hanged man’s death gasp.
Hangman loops rope around his neck, man proudly strokes his medals, and hangman weeps as trapdoor springs. Close on face of hanged man: tongue out, eyes all but exploded. Hold on face as eyes
return to normal, tongue recedes into mouth. View on military guards weeping as they look at hanging man. Close on hanged man, dead and smiling. His eyes suddenly open, his smile widens, and he
laughs.
    I went up the stairs toward the office by the projection booth. It was as I remembered, but empty: no movie posters, no naked women, no furniture, telephone, or rug. Meister the Magnificent had
made himself disappear. The usher came in behind me, said I shouldn’t be up here, and ushered me out into the night. I circled several blocks, looking for the Meister’s car, my
peregrinations bringing me eventually to the only other place where I knew to look for him, the Rhineland Bar. It was busy with a mix of men and women, whores and pimps, and I sought my main
connection, the sugar whore, but without success. I wanted to see her again expose her scar, the validity of which I had begun to doubt. Was it pasted on? Tattooed? Drawn? Would it run during sex,
or come off on your stomach? Would you then be scarred?
    Sitting with a whore who was not as attractive as my sugar whore was a corporal from Seventh Army who had worked as a courier for the Meister. All I knew him by was Bosco, which may or may not
have been his name. And when I had this thought I realized how very little I knew about any of my co-conspirators. I’d met Bosco in Switzerland, where the Meister had sent him with
greenbacks—to deliver to me—for the purchase of German marks, the Meister reasoning that I was the more suave, more cosmopolitan figure to deal with bankers.
    Bosco, now in civilian clothes, looked like a character out of the funny sheets of my childhood, Wash Tubbs. He was short with glasses and wiry black curls all over his head. I found him a mix
of regular-army rube and bright, wily skuldugger. We’d had drinks on two occasions and talked of the Meister, about whom Bosco was mysterious but portentous. What I took home from him was
that the Meister not only dabbled in the black market, the currency conduit, and the flesh exchange, but Bosco also hinted vaguely at the more exalted intrigue of politics. And that implied
politics. Was the Meister an agent? A double agent? A provocateur? A hired political killer? I couldn’t say. But that’s how the imagination went.
    I went over to Tubbs-Bosco and greeted him with a question: “ Zigarette, bitte? ” He smiled, proffered a Lucky Strike, and asked me to sit down beside his whore, whom I glanced
at with a certain shock to the system, for she looked very like my Aunt Molly, one of the grand people of the universe. I squinted at her, disbelieving my eyes, and saw she looked not like Molly at
all but really like Juliette Levinsky, a blond Jewess of great beauty who was the love of my life for a year or more, and yet this woman was not a blonde; and when I looked at her from another
angle she resembled neither Molly nor Juliette. Clearly this face required further scrutiny.
    “Have you seen the Meister?” I asked Bosco.
    “Not since before the fall,” he said.
    “Which fall is that?” I asked.
    “Fall? Fall? What do you mean fall?” he asked.
    “I mean fall. It’s what you said. Whose fall? What fall are you talking about?”
    “That’s my question,” he said.
    “The Meister,” I said. “Where is he?”
    “I wish I knew the answer to that,” Bosco said.
    “When did you see him last?”
    “Last week. We had a meal