Lunch at the Gotham Cafe

‘Spoken like a true American-‘

‘I hope she stands you up, Steven-‘

‘I know you do.’

He hung up and went out to get his alcohol substitute. When I saw him next, a few days later, there was something between us that didn’t quite bear discussion, although I think we would have talked about it if we had known each other even a little bit better. I saw it in his eyes and I suppose he saw it in mine as well - the knowledge that if Humboldt had been a lawyer instead of a therapist, he, John Ring, would have been in on our luncheon meeting. And in that case he might have wound up as dead as William Humboldt.

I walked from my office to the Gotham Cafe leaving at 11:15 and arriving across from the restaurant at 11:45.I got there early for my own peace of mind - to make sure the place was where Humboldt had said it was, in other words. That’s the way I am, and pretty much the way I’ve always been. Diane used to call it my obsessive streak’ when we were first married, but I think that by the end she knew better. I don’t trust the competence of others very easily, that’s all. I realize it’s a pain-in-the-ass characteristic, and I know it drove her crazy, but what she never seemed to realize was that I didn’t exactly love it in myself, either. Some things take longer to change than others, though. And some things you can never change, no matter how hard you try.

The restaurant was right where Humboldt had said it would be, the location marked by a green awning with the words GOTHAM CAFE on it. A white city skyline was traced across the plate glass windows. It looked New York trendy. It also looked pretty ordinary, just one of the eight hundred or so pricey restaurants crammed together in Midtown.

With the meeting place located and my mind temporarily set to rest (about that, anyway; I was tense as hell about seeing Diane again and craving a cigarette like mad), I walked up to Madison and browsed in a luggage store for fifteen minutes. Mere window shopping was no good; if Diane and Humboldt came from uptown, they might see me. Diane was liable to recognize me by the set of my shoulders and the hang of my topcoat even from behind, and I didn’t want that. I didn’t want them to know I’d arrived early. I thought it might look needy, even pitiable. So I went inside.

I bought an umbrella I didn’t need and left the shop at straight up noon by my watch, knowing I could step through the door of the Gotham Cafe at 12:05. My father’s dictum: if you need to be there, show up five minutes early. If they need you to be there, show up five minutes late. I had reached a point where I didn’t know who needed what or why or for how long, but my father’s dictum seemed like the safest course. If it had been just Diane alone, I think I would have arrived dead on time.

No, that’s probably a lie. I suppose if it had been just Diane, I would have gone in at 12:45, when I first arrived, and waited for her.

I stood under the awning for a moment, looking in. The place was bright, and I marked that down in its favor. I have an intense dislike for dark restaurants, where you can’t see what you’re eating or drinking. The walls were white and hung with vibrant impressionist drawings. You couldn’t tell what they were, but that didn’t matter; with their primary colors and broad, exuberant strokes, they hit your eyes like visual caffeine. I looked for Diane and saw a woman that might have been her, seated about halfway down the long room and by the wall. It was hard to say, because her back was turned and I don’t have her knack of recognition under difficult circumstances. But the heavyset, balding man she was sitting with certainly looked like a Humboldt. I took a deep breath, opened the restaurant door, and went in.

There are two phases of withdrawal from tobacco, and I’m convinced that it’s the second that causes most cases of recidivism.

The physical withdrawal lasts ten days to two weeks, and then most of the symptoms - sweats, headaches, muscle twitches, pounding eyes, insomnia, irritability - disappear. What follows is a much longer period of mental withdrawal. These symptoms may include mild to moderate depression, mourning, some degree of anhedonia (emotional flatness, in other words), forgetfulness, even a species of transient dyslexia. I know all this stuff because I read up on it. Following what happened at the Gotham Cafe, it seemed very important that I do that. I suppose you’d have to say that my interest in the subject fell somewhere between the Land of Hobbies and the Kingdom of Obsession.

The most common symptom of phase two withdrawal is a feeling of mild unreality. Nicotine improves synaptic transferral and improves concentration - widens the brain’s information highway, in other words. It’s not a big boost, and not really necessary to successful thinking (although most confirmed cigarette junkies believe differently), but when you take it away, you’re left you with a feeling - a pervasive feeling, in my case - that the world has taken on a decidedly dreamy cast. There were many times when it seemed to me that people and cars and the little sidewalk vignettes I observed were actually passing by me on a moving screen, a thing controlled by hidden stagehands turning enormous cranks and revolving enormous drums. It was also a little like being mildly stoned all the time, because the feeling was accompanied by a sense of helplessness and moral exhaustion, a feeling that things had simply to go on the way they were going, for good or for ill, because you (except of course it’s me I’m talking about) were just too damned busy not-smoking to do much of anything else.

I’m not sure how much all this bears on what happened, but I know it has some bearing, because I was pretty sure something was wrong with the maitre d’ almost as soon as I saw him, and as soon as he spoke to me, I knew.

He was tall, maybe forty-five, slim (in his tux, at least; in ordinary clothes he would have been skinny), mustached. He had a leather-bound menu in one hand. He looked like battalions of maitre d’s in battalions of fancy New York restaurants, in other words. Except for his bow tie, which was askew, and something on his shirt, that was. A splotch just above the place where his jacket buttoned. It looked like either gravy or a glob of some dark jelly. Also, several strands of his hair stuck up defiantly in back, making me think of Alfalfa in the old Little Rascals one-reelers. That almost made me burst out laughing - I was very nervous, remember - and I had to bite my lips to keep it in.

‘Yes, sir?’ he asked as I approached the desk. It came out sounding like Yais, sair? All maitre d’s in New York City have accents, but it is never one you can positively identify. A girl I dated in the mid-eighties, one who did have a sense of humor (along with a fairly large drug habit, unfortunately), told me once that they all grew up on the same little island and hence all spoke the same language.

‘What language is it?’ I asked her.

‘Snooti,’ she said, and I cracked up.

This thought came hack to me as I looked past the desk to the woman I’d seen while outside - I was now almost positive it was Diane - and I had to bite the insides of my lips again. As a result, Humboldt’s name came out of me sounding like a haft-smothered sneeze.

The maitre d’s high, pale brow contracted in a frown. His eyes bored into mine. I had taken them for brown as I approached the desk, but now they looked black.

‘Pardon, sir?’ he asked. It came out sounding like Pahdun, sair and looking like Fuck you, Jack. His long fingers, as pale as his brow - concert pianist’s fingers, they looked like - tapped nervously on the cover of the menu. The tassel sticking out of it like some sort of half-assed bookmark swung back and forth.

‘Humboldt,’ I said. ‘Party of three.’ I found I couldn’t take my eyes off his bow tie, so crooked that the left side of it was almost brushing the shelf under his chin, and that blob on his snowy white dress shirt. Now that I was closer, it didn’t look like either gravy or jelly; it looked like partially dried blood.

He was looking down at his reservations book, the rogue tuft at the back of his head waving back and forth over the rest of his slicked-down hair. I could see his scalp through the grooves his comb had laid down, and a speckle of dandruff on the shoulders of his tux. It occurred to me that a good headwaiter might have fired an underling put together in such sloppy fashion.

‘Ah, yes, monsieur.’ (Ah yais, messoo.) He had found the name. ‘Your party is—‘ He was starting to look up. He stopped abruptly, and his eyes sharpened even more, if that was possible, as he looked past me and down. ‘You cannot bring that dog in here,’ he said sharply. ‘How many times have I told you you can’t bring that dog in here!’

He didn’t quite shout, but spoke so loudly that diners closest to his pulpit-like desk stopped eating and looked around curiously.

I looked around myself. He had been so emphatic I expected to see somebody’s dog, but there was no one behind me and most certainly no dog. It occurred to me then, I don’t know why, that he was talking about my umbrella, which I had forgotten to check. Perhaps on the Island of the maitre d’s, dog was a slang for umbrella, especially when carried by a patron on a day when rain did not look likely.

I looked back at the maitre d’ and saw that he had already started away from his desk, holding my menu in his hands. He must have sensed that I wasn’t following, because he looked back over his shoulder, eyebrows slightly raised. There was nothing on his face now but polite inquiry - Are you coming, messoo? - and I came. I knew something was wrong with him, but I came. I could not take the time or effort to try to decide what might be wrong with the maitre d’ of a restaurant where I had never been before today and where I would probably never be again; I had Humboldt and Diane to deal with, I had to do it without smoking, and the maitre d’ of the Gotham Cafe would have to take care of his own problems, dog included.

Diane turned around and at first I saw nothing in her face and in her eyes but a kind of frozen politeness. Then, just below it, I saw anger... or thought I did. We’d done a lot of arguing during our last three or four months together, but I couldn’t recall ever seeing the sort of concealed anger I sensed in her now, anger that was meant to be hidden by the makeup and the new dress (blue, no Speckles, no slit up the side, deep or otherwise) and the new :hairdo; The heavyset man she was with was saying something, :and she reached out and touched his arm. As he turned toward me, beginning to get to his feet, I saw something else in her face.

She was afraid of me as well as angry at me. And although she hadn’t said a single word, I was already furious at her. The expression in her eyes was a dead negative; she might as well have been a CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE sign on her forehead between them. I thought I deserved better. Of course, that may just be a way of saying I'm human.

‘Monsieur,’ the maitre d’ said, pulling out the chair to Diane’s left. I barely heard him, and certainly any thought of his eccentric behaviours and crooked bow tie had left my head. I think that the subject of tobacco had briefly vacated my head for the first time since I’d quit smoking. I could only consider the careful composure of her face and marvel at how I could be angry at her and still want her so much it made me ache to look at her. Absence may or may nor make the heart grow fonder, but it certainly freshens the eye.

I also found time to wonder if I had really seen all I’d surmised. Anger? Yes, that was possible, even likely. If she hadn’t been angry with me to at least some degree, she never would have left in the first place, I supposed. But afraid? Why in God’s name.’ would Diane be afraid of me? I’d never laid a single finger on her. Yes, I suppose I had raised my voice during some of our arguments, but so had she.

‘Enjoy your lunch, monsieur,’ the maitre d’ said from some other universe - the one where service people usually stay, only poking their heads into ours when we call them, either because we need something or to complain.

‘Mr Davis, I’m Bill Humboldt,’ Diane’s companion said. He held out a large hand that looked reddish and chapped. I shook it briefly. The rest of him was as big as his hand, and his broad face wore the sort of flush habitual drinkers often get after the first one of the day. I put him in his mid-forties, about ten years away from the time when his sagging cheeks would turn into jowls.

‘Pleasure,’ I said, not thinking about what I was saying any more than I was thinking about the maitre d’ with the blob on his shirt, only wanting to get the hand-shaking part over so I could turn back to the pretty blonde with the rose and cream complexion, the pale pink lips, and the trim, slim figure. The woman who had, not so long ago, liked to whisper ‘Do me do me do me’ in my ear while she held onto my ass like a saddle with two pommels.

‘We’ll get you a drink,’ Humboldt said, looking around for waiter like a man who did it a lot. Her therapist had all the bells and whistles of the incipient alcoholic. Wonderful.

‘Perrier and lime is good.’

‘For what?’ Humboldt inquired with a big smile. He picked up the half-finished martini in front of him on the table and drained it until the olive with the toothpick in it rested against his lips. He spat it back, then set the glass down and looked at me. ‘WEB, perhaps we’d better get started.’

I paid no attention. I already had gotten started; I’d done it the instant Diane looked up at me. ‘Hi, Diane,’ I said. It was marvelous, really, how she looked smarter and prettier than previous. More desirable than previous, too. As if she had learned things - yes, even after only two weeks of separation, and while living with Ernie and Dee Dee Coslaw in Pound Ridge - that I could never know.

‘How are you, Steve?’ she asked.

‘Fine,’ I said. Then, ‘Not so fine, actually. I’ve missed you.’ Only watchful silence from the lady greeted this. Those big blue-green eyes looking at me, no more. Certainly no return serve, no I've missed you, too.

‘And I quit smoking. That’s also played hell with my peace of mind.’

‘Did you, finally? Good for you.’

I felt another flash of anger, this time a really ugly one, at her politely dismissive tone. As if I might not be telling the truth, but it didn’t really matter if I was. She’d carped at me about the cigarettes every day for two years, it seemed - how they were going to give me cancer, how they were going to give her cancer, how she wouldn’t even consider getting pregnant until I stopped, so I could just save any breath I might have been planning to waste on that subject - and now all at once it didn’t matter anymore, because I didn’t matter anymore.

‘Steve -Mr Davis,’ Humboldt said, ‘I thought we might begin by getting you to look at a list of grievances which Diane has worked out during our sessions - our exhaustive sessions, I might say - over the last couple of weeks. Certainly it can serve as a springboard to our main purpose for being here, which is how to order a period of separation that will allow growth on both of your parts.’

There was a briefcase on the floor beside him. He picked it up with a grunt and set it on the table’s one empty chair. Humboldt began unsnapping the clasps, but I quit paying attention at that point. I wasn’t interested in springboards to separation, whatever that meant. I felt a combination of panic and anger that was, in some ways, the most peculiar emotion I have ever experienced.

I looked at Diane and said, ‘I want to try again. Can we reconcile? Is there any chance of that?’

The look of absolute horror on her face crashed hopes I hadn’t even known I’d been holding onto. Horror was followed by anger.

‘Isn’t that just like you!’ she exclaimed.

‘Diane—‘

‘Where’s the safe deposit box key, Steven? Where did you hide it?’

Humboldt looked alarmed. He reached out and touched her arm. ‘Diane .. I thought we agreed—‘

‘What we agreed is that this son of a bitch will hide everything under the nearest rock and then plead poverty if we let him!’

‘You searched the bedroom for it before you left, didn’t you' I asked quietly. ‘Tossed it like a burglar.’

She flushed at that. I don’t know if it was shame, anger, or both.

‘It’s my box as well as yours! My things as well as yours!’

Humboldt was looking more alarmed than ever. Several diners had glanced around at us. Most of them looked mused, actually. People are surely God’s most bizarre creatures. ‘Please... please, let’s not—‘

‘Where did you hide it, Steven?’

‘I didn’t hide it. I never hid it. I left it up at the cabin by accident, that’s all.’

She smiled knowingly. ‘Oh, yes. By accident. Uh-huh.’ I said nothing, and the knowing smile slipped away. ‘I want it,’ she said, then amended hastily: ‘I want a copy.’

People in hell want icewater, I thought. Out loud I said, 'There's nothing more to be done about it, is there?'

She hesitated, maybe hearing something in my voice she didn't actually want to hear, or to acknowledge. 'No,' she said. 'The next time you see me, it will be with my lawyer. I'm divorcing you.'

'Why?' What I heard in my voice now was a plaintive note like a sheep's bleat. I didn't like it, but there wasn't a goddamned thing I could do about it. 'Why?'

‘Oh, I Jesus. Do you expect me to believe you’re really that dense?’

‘I just can’t—'

Her cheeks were brighter than ever, the flush now rising almost her temples. ‘Yes, probably you expect me to believe just that very thing. Isn’t that typical’ She picked up her water and spilled the top two inches on the tablecloth because her hand was trembling. I flashed back at once - I mean kapow - to the day she’d left, remembering how I’d knocked the glass of orange juice onto the floor and how I’d cautioned myself not to try picking up the broken pieces of glass until my hands had settled down, and how I’d gone ahead anyway and cut myself for my pains.

‘Stop it, this is counterproductive,’ Humboldt said. He sounded like a playground monitor trying to stop a scuffle before it gets started, but he seemed to have forgotten all about Diane’s shit-list; his eyes were sweeping the rear part of the room, looking out for our waiter, or any waiter whose eye he could catch. He was lot less interested in therapy, at that particular moment, than he was in obtaining what the British like to call the other half.

‘I only want to know—‘ I began.

‘What you want to know doesn’t have anything to do with why Humboldt said, and for a moment he actually sounded alert.

‘Yes, right, finally,’ Diane said. She spoke in a brittle, urgent voice. ‘Finally it’s not about what you want, what you need.’

‘I don’t know what that means, but I’m willing to listen,’ I said. 'If you wanted to try joint counselling instead of... uh... therapy... whatever it is Humboldt does... I’m not against it if—‘

She raised her hands to shoulder level, palms out. ‘Oh, God, Joe Camel goes New Age,’ she said, then dropped her hands back into her lap. ‘After all the days you rode off into the sunset, tall in the saddle. Say it ain’t so, Joe.’

‘Stop it', Humboldt told her. He looked from his client to his clients soon-to-be ex-husband (it was going to happen, all right; even the slight unreality that comes with not-smoking couldn’t conceil that self-evident truth from me by that point). ‘One more word from either of you and I’m going to declare this luncheon at an end.' He gave us a small smile, one so obviously manufactured that I found it perversely endearing. 'And we haven't even heard the specials yet.'

That - the first mention of food since I'd joined them - was just before the bad things started to happen, and I remember smelling salmon from one of the nearby tables. In the two weeks since I'd quit smoking, my sense of smell had become incredibly sharp, but I do not count that as much of a blessing, especially when it comes to salmon. I used to like it, but now can't abide the smell of it, let alone the taste. To me it smells of pain and fear and blood and death.

'He started it,' Diane said sulkily.

You started it, you were the one who tossed the joint and then walked out when you couldn't find what you wanted, I thought, but I kept it to myself. Humboldt clearly meant what he said; he would take Diane by the hand and walk her out of the restaurant if we started that schoolyard no-I-didn't, yes-you-did shit. Not even the prospect of another drink would hold him here.

'Okay,' I said mildly .. and I had to work hard to achieve that mild tone, believe me. 'I started it. What's next?' I knew, of course: the grievances. Diane's shit-list, in other words. And a lot more about the key to the lockbox. Probably the only satisfaction I was going to get out of this sorry situation was telling them that neither of them was going to see a copy of that key until an officer of the court presented me with a paper ordering me to turn one over. I hadn't touched the stuff in the box since Diane booked on out of my life, and I didn't intend to touch any of it in the immediate future.. but she wasn't going to touch it, either. Let her chew crackers and try to whistle, as my grandmother used to say.

Humboldt took out a sheaf of papers. They were held by one of those designer paper clips - the ones that come in different colors. It occurred to me that I had arrived abysmally unprepared for this meeting, and not just because my lawyer was jaw-deep in a cheeseburger somewhere, either. Diane had her new dress; Humboldt had his designer briefcase, plus Diane's shit-list held together by a color-coded designer paper clip; all I had was a new umbrella on a sunny day. I looked down at where it lay beside my chair and saw there was still a price tag dangling from the handle. All at once I felt like Minnie Pearl.

The room smelled wonderful, as most restaurants do since they banned Smoking in them - of flowers and wine and fresh coffee and chocolate and pastry - but what I smelled most clearly was salmon. I remember thinking that it smelled very good, and that I would probably order some. I also remember thinking that if I could eat at a meeting like this, I could probably eat anywhere.

' The major problems your wife has articulated - so far, at least - are insensitivity on your part regarding her job, and an inability to trust in personal affairs,' Humboldt said. 'In regard to the second, I'd say your unwillingness to give Diane fair access to the safe deposit box you maintain in common pretty well sums up the trust issue.'

I opened my mouth to tell him I had a trust issue, too, that I didn't trust Diane not to take the whole works and then sit on it. Before I could say anything, however, I was interrupted by the maitre d'. He was screaming as well as talking, and I've tried to indicate that. but a bunch of e's strung together can't really convey the quality of that sound. It was as if he had a bellyful of steam and a teakettle whistle caught in his throat.

'That dog... Eeeeeee! . . . I told you time and again about that dog . . Eeeeeee!... All that time I can't sleep.. . Eeeeeee!.. . She says cut youf fave, that cunt... Eeeeeee! . . . How you tease me!... Eeeeeee! . . . And now you bring that dog in here... Eeeeeee!'

The room fell silent at once, of course, diners looking up from their meals or their conversations as the thin, pale, black-clad figure came stalking across the room with its face outthrust and its long storklike legs scissoring. No amusement on the surrounding faces now; only astonishment. The maitre d's bow tie had turned full ninety degrees from its normal position, so it now looked like the hands of a clock indicating the hour of six. His hands were clasped behind his back as he walked, and bent forward slightly from the waist as he was, he made me think of a drawing in my sixth-grade literature book, an illustration of Washington Irving's unfortunate schoolteacher, Ichabod Crane.

It was me he was looking at, me he was approaching. I stared at him, feeling almost hypnotized - it was like one of those dreams where you discover that you haven't studied for the bar exam you're supposed to take or that you're attending a White House dinner in your honor with no clothes on - and I might have stayed that way if Humboldt hadn't moved.

I heard his chair scrape back and glanced at him. He was standing up, his napkin held loosely in one hand. He looked surprised, but he also looked furious. I suddenly realized two things: that he was drunk, quite drunk, in fact, and that he saw this as a smirch on both his hospitality and his competence. He had chosen the restaurant, after all, and now look - the masteter of ceremonies had gone bonkers.

'Eeeeee.!. . . I teach you! For the last time I teach you...'

'Oh, my God, he's wet his pants,' a woman at a nearby table murmured. Her voice was low. but perfectly audible in the silence as the maitre d' drew in a fresh breath with which to scream, and I saw she was right. The crotch of the skinny man's dress pants was soaked.

'See here, you idiot,' Humboldt said, turning to face him, and the maitre d' brought his left hand out from behind his back. In it was the largest butcher knife I have ever seen. It had to have been two feet long, with the top part of its cutting edge slightly belled, .like a cutlass in an old pirate movie.

'Look out!' I yelled at Humboldt, and at one of the tables against the wall, a skinny man in rimless spectacles screamed, ejecting a mouthful of chewed brown fragments of food onto the tablecloth in front of him.

Humboldt seemed to hear neither my yell nor the other man's scream. He was frowning thunderously at the maitre d'. 'You don't need to expect to see me in here again if this is the way -' Humboldt began.

'Eeeeee! EEEEEEEEE!' the maitre d' screamed, and swung the butcher knife fiat through the air. It made a kind of whickering sound, like a whispered sentence. The period was the sound of the blade burying itself in William Humboldt's right cheek. Blood exploded out of the wound in a furious spray of tiny droplets. They decorated the tablecloth in a fan-shaped stipplework, and I clearly saw (I will never forget it) one bright red drop fall into my

water glass and then dive for the bottom with a pinkish filament like a tail stretching out behind it. It looked like a bloody tadpole.

Humboldt's cheek snapped open, revealing his teeth, and as he clapped his hand to the gouting wound, I saw something pinkish-white lying on the shoulder of his charcoal gray suitcoat. It wasn't until the whole thing was over that I realized it must have been his earlobe.

'Tell this in your ears! the maitre d' screamed furiously at Diane's bleeding therapist, who stood there with one hand clapped to his cheek. Except for the blood pouring over and between his fingers, Humboldt looked weirdly like Jack Benny doing one of his famous double-takes. 'Call this to your hateful tattle-tale friends of the street. . . you misery. . . Eeeeee! . . . DOG LOVER!'

Now other people were screaming, mostly at the sight of the blood, I think. Humboldt was a big man, and he was bleeding like a stuck pig. I could hear it pattering on the floor like water from a broken pipe, and the front of his white shirt was now red. His tie, which had been red to start with, was now black.

'Steve?' Diane said. 'Steven?'

A man and a woman had been having lunch at the table behind her and slightly to her left. Now the man - about thirty and handsome in the way George Hamilton used to be - bolted to his feet and ran toward the front of the restaurant.

'Troy, don't go without me!' his date screamed, but Troy never looked hack. He'd forgotten all about a library book he was supposed to return, it seemed, or maybe about how he'd promised to wax the car.

If there had been a paralysis in the room - I can't actually say if there was or not, although I seem to have seen a great deal, and to remember it all - that broke it. There were more screams and other people got up. Several tables were overturned. Glasses and china shattered on the floor. I saw a man with his arm around the waist of his female companion hurry past behind the maitre d'; her hand was clamped into his shoulder like a claw. For a moment her eyes met mine, and they were as empty as the eyes of a Greek bust. Her face was dead pale, haglike with horror.

All of this might have happened in ten seconds, or maybe twenty. I remember it like a series of photographs or filmstrips, but it has no timeline. Time ceased to exist for me at the moment Alfalfa the maitre d' brought his left hand out from behind his back and I saw the butcher knife. During that time the man in the tuxedo continued to spew out a confusion of words in his special maitre d's language, the one that old girlfriend had called Snooti. Some of it really was in a foreign language, some of it was English but completely without sense, and some of it was striking . . . almost haunting. Have you ever read any of Dutch Schutz's long, confused deathbed statement? It was like that. Much of it I can't remember- What I can remember I suppose I'll never forget.

Humboldt staggered backward, still holding his lacerated cheek. The backs of his knees struck the seat of his chair, and he sat down heavily on it. He looks like someone who's just been told he's got cancer, I thought. He started to turn toward Diane and me, his eyes wide and shocked. I had time to see there were tears spilling out of them, and then the maitre d' wrapped both hands around the handle of the butcher knife and buried it in the top of Humboldt's head. It made a sound like someone whacking a pile of towels with a cane.