Thomas Godfrey (Ed) Read Online Free Page A

on?”
    “Hey—what’s the Old Testament?
Chopped liver? How do you think Moses got the Israelites out of Egypt? With a
smile and a tap dance? Believe me, you don’t part the Red Sea with some gismo
from Korvette’s. It takes power.”
    “So he’s tough, eh?”
    “Yes. Very tough. You’d think with
all that success he’d be a lot sweeter.”
    “How come you know so much?”
    “Because we’re the chosen people. He
takes best care of us of all His children, which I’d also like to someday
discuss with Him.”
    “What do you pay Him for being
chosen?”
    “Don’t ask.”
    So that’s how it was. The Jews were
into God for a lot. It was the old protection racket. Take care of them in
return for a price. And from the way Rabbi Wiseman was talking, He soaked them
plenty. I got into a cab and made it over to Danny’s Billiards on Tenth Avenue.
The manager was a slimy little guy I didn’t like.
    “Chicago Phil here?”
    “Who wants to know?”
    I grabbed him by the lapels and took
some skin at the same time.
    “What, punk?”
    “In the back,” he said, with a
change of attitude.
    Chicago Phil. Forger, bank robber,
strong-arm man, and avowed atheist.
    “The guy never existed, Kaiser. This
is the straight dope. It’s a big hype. There’s no Mr. Big. It’s a syndicate.
Mostly Sicilian. It’s international. But there is no actual head. Except maybe
the Pope.”
    “I want to meet the Pope.”
    “It can be arranged,” he said,
winking.
    “Does the name Claire Rosensweig
mean anything to you?”
    “No.”
    “Heather Butkiss?”
    “Oh, wait a minute. Sure. She’s that
peroxide job with the bazooms from Radcliffe.”
    “Radcliffe? She told me Vassar.”
    “Well, she’s lying. She’s a teacher
at Radcliffe. She was mixed up with a philosopher for a while.”
    “Pantheist?”
    “No. Empiricist, as I remember. Bad
guy. Completely rejected Hegel or any dialectical methodology.”
    “One of those.”
    “Yeah. He used to be a drummer with
a jazz trio. Then he got hooked on Logical Positivism. When that didn’t work,
he tried Pragmatism. Last I heard he stole a lot of money to take a course in
Schopenhauer at Columbia. The mob would like to find him—or get their hands on
his textbooks so they can resell them.”
    “Thanks, Phil.”
    “Take it from me, Kaiser. There’s no
one out there. It’s a void. I couldn’t pass all those bad checks or screw
society the way I do if for one second I was able to recognize any authentic
sense of Being. The universe is strictly phenomenological. Nothing’s eternal.
It’s all meaningless.”
    “Who won the fifth at Aqueduct?”
    “Santa Baby.”
    I had a beer at O’Rourke’s and tried
to add it all up, but it made no sense at all. Socrates was a suicide—or so
they said. Christ was murdered. Nietzsche went nuts. If there was someone out
there, He sure as hell didn’t want anybody to know it. And why was Claire
Rosensweig lying about Vassar? Could Descartes have been right? Was the
universe dualistic? Or did Kant hit it on the head when he postulated the
existence of God on moral grounds?
    That night I had dinner with Claire.
Ten minutes after the check came, we were in the sack and, brother, you can
have your Western thought. She went through the kind of gymnastics that would
have won first prize in the Tia Juana Olympics. After, she lay on the pillow
next to me, her long blond hair sprawling. Our naked bodies still intertwined.
I was smoking and staring at the ceiling.
    “Claire, what if Kierkegaard’s
right?”
    “You mean?”
    “If you can never really know. Only have faith.”
    “That’s absurd.”
    “Don’t be so rational.”
    “Nobody’s being rational, Kaiser.” She
lit a cigarette. “Just don’t get ontological. Not now. I couldn’t bear it if
you were ontological with me.”
    She was upset. I leaned over and
kissed her, and the phone rang. She got it.
    “It’s for you.”
    The voice on the other end was
Sergeant Reed of