The Exterminator

by Peter McCurtin

  Kahane turned to go back up the steps but found his way blocked by reporters.

  “Has the FBI come into his yet?” one of them asked.

  The deputy mayor nodded. “The killer used the mails to make threats. That makes it a federal matter. Yes, the FBI has entered the case. In this instance, the City of New York welcomes all the help it can get.”

  “What about the CIA?” another newsman asked.

  The deputy mayor glared at him. “I will not dignify that question with an answer. What possible interest could the CIA have in this case? That’s all. No more questions.”

  Just before Eastland turned off the set the announcer said, “Stay tuned for more bulletins.”

  High above lower Manhattan in a beautifully glass-walled office, a middle-aged man with a suave manner pressed a remote-control button that shut off a huge color TV set into the teak paneling facing his desk. Like the paneling, his desk was a slab of teak polished to a high gloss and bare except for three telephones of different colors. The paintings on the walls were originals; from where he sat he could see the Statue of Liberty. The Staten Island Ferry was pulling into the slip far below; a passenger liner was going out to sea.

  The man behind the desk was the control-agent in charge of New York. His bald head and smooth face were deeply tanned from a recent vacation in the Bahamas. He answered only to someone very high up in the CIA. In most matters the big decisions were left to him.

  When he spoke his voice was without accent. A stranger might have taken him for—what? An Englishman? A Russian? A westernized Turk? He was in fact a German of Rumanian origin; he spoke four languages, all fluently. After the fall of the Third Reich, he had been a spy and political assassin for many governments. Now he was an American and had a passport to prove it, not that he ever had to prove anything. Now he worked for the CIA. His last field job had something to do with overthrowing the legally elected government of Chile. Now in his fifties, too old for field operations, he held down one of the most important desks in the Agency.

  “I don’t like it, I don’t like it at all,” he said. “The country is in a vigilante mood and it can only get worse if this Exterminator isn’t stopped. It’s going to be hard enough to re-elect the President as it is. The Opposition is pushing the ‘crime in the streets’ issue for all its worth. A recent independent poll shows that Americans are more concerned with crime than they are with inflation, unemployment or foreign affairs. Our President, good man that he is, has been promising to do something about it. Of course he hasn’t, but he’d like the voters to believe him.”

  “Something could be done about crime,” the other man said. The other man was a subordinate, a field agent of about forty who affected clothes of British cut. He had the dead eyes and the bored voice of a professional assassin. He went by the name of Shaw.

  “Of course something could be done. Give me twenty-five good men and absolute authority and the New York crime statistics would drop by fifty percent in a month. It would be so easy, Shaw. So easy to round up every major drug dealer and Mafioso—quietly, of course—and take them out to sea.”

  Shaw smiled a wintry smile. “Except that we need the Mafia.”

  “I was speaking hypothetically, Shaw, as you well know. And not just the Mafia. Indeed, where would we be without the Mafiosi and their contacts in all corners of the world? Some of the top drug dealers are just as important. You can’t have forgotten that it was a drug dealer who put us onto a certain senator’s son who was a heroin addict. Amazing how the senator stopped pressing for an investigation of the Agency after a few facts were explained to him.”

  “The Exterminator?” Shaw said.

  “Can you take care of it?”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “I think the country would be better off if this lunatic were brought to justice. Lunatic he may be, but he has proven himself to be a clever and resourceful man. I get the feeling that he won’t be easy to find. But I know you’ll find him. You have a way of always finding the men you go after. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have sent for you.”

  “We could use a man like that in the Agency,” Shaw suggested.

  “I think not, Shaw. You see, I’m convinced that The Exterminator—such melodrama—is an honest man who believes in the rightness of what he’s doing. Indeed, what he’s doing is right. All over the Republic there are millions who believe as he does, except that only he has the courage and determination and the skill to do something about it. If our roles were reversed, I would agree with him myself. Don’t underestimate him, Shaw. We are dealing here with something that is quite out of the usual.”

  “I’ll put our people to work,” Shaw said.

  “No, no, no! You must handle this all by yourself. There must be nothing to connect the CIA to this man. It could lose the President the election and, Shaw, you stand to lose a lot yourself.”

  Shaw nodded, acknowledging the threat. “I understand,” he said.

  “Think of it, Shaw. If all goes well I can almost certainly guarantee that you will get your own section. We could give you Boston. What do you think of that?”

  “I’d like to have Boston,” Shaw said, thinking how nice it would be to visit the Fogg Museum on rainy Sunday afternoons. There were so many cultural activities in Boston and Cambridge. Agent Shaw was particularly fond of brass quartets. “What would you like me to do?”

  “You know what you have to do. So do it. One last suggestion, Shaw. Instead of trying to find The Exterminator, follow the man who will be trying to find him. He knows the city better than you do, so why not make use of his expertise? I’m told he’s quite efficient within his limits.”

  “His name is Dalton,” Shaw said.

  The man behind the desk leaned back in his executive’s chair. He thought the Statue of Liberty was an example of very bad taste. So vulgar, so American, even if it was a gift from the French.

  “There must be no witnesses,” he said.

  “It would be a lot easier if I had the cooperation of the police.”

  “I’ll give their commissioner a call. A matter of Presidential security and so on. Try to gain the confidence of this man Dalton. Make a friend of him if you can—but there must be no witnesses.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Except for visiting Michael in the hospital, Eastland hadn’t gone out all day. There was no need to tell Michael about the fourteen thousand dollars he’d given Mary. Michael knew. It had been remarkably easy to sell the gold after melting and shaping everything into a bar with the help of the propane torch. All over Manhattan dealers were buying gold, no questions asked. The silver market was in a slump; gold continued to climb. After cutting and testing the gold bar, the West 34th Street dealer bought it at $624 an ounce. The dealer didn’t look at him, didn’t want to know what he looked like.

  After sitting with Michael for an hour, Eastland went to the rented apartment and met the German, Mr. Heindorf, in the hall with a bottle of ammonia in one hand, a rag in the other. There were tears in Heindorf’s eyes from the ammonia.

  “Ah Mr. McGill, I see you don’t use the place so much,” Heindorf said, rubbing the inside of the glass door.

  “Got a girl as well as a job,” Eastland said.

  “You vasn’t tinking of moofing out?”

  “Not me,” Eastland said. “I like to keep a place of my own. That way if we have a fight I’m not out in the street. Knowing that I have a place to go will keep her in line. Besides, if she gets on my nerves I can just take a walk.”

  “I think you are a Lothario, Mr. McGill,” Heindorf said. “Luff dem and leaf dem, is what I say all the time.” The German glanced at the door of his apartment and lowered his voice. “I wish I could leaf de one I haff.”

  “Right on, Mr Heindorf.”

  “One of dese days, Mr. McGill.”

  Eastland went up to the apartment and sat around drinking beer and feeling restless. He read the papers and watched television until it got dark. On the six o’clock new
s they did a recap of The Exterminator story; nothing they hadn’t said before in fewer words.

  What he needed was a woman, he realized suddenly. For days he had been listening to the echoes inside his head. Yeah, a woman! But the thought of going through the routine of picking up some girl in a bar irritated him. The pick-up itself wouldn’t be hard; it was all the talk he’d have to listen to later that grated on his nerves. A working hooker was what he needed. He didn’t favor hookers, but he had nothing against them. Theirs was a business like any other.

  Why not? Anything to get out of the fucking apartment. He put the magnum in a cheap briefcase and took a cab to 42nd Street and Seventh Avenue. He didn’t know why there, not exactly. There were hookers all over town. Maybe he wanted to lose himself in all that noise and tawdry glitter.

  He walked past the sex movies and the porn shops, the peep shows with nervous squares in suits standing nervously outside, trying to get up enough nerve to go in. This was the armpit of the world, a place where no one was a friend and everyone was a potential enemy. Bruce Lee was dead but here on 42nd Street he lived on. The new Bruce Lee was some guy called Jackie Chan. One movie come-on said Jackie was deadlier than Bruce. One blow-up showed him taking on a bunch of guys armed with tommyguns and samurai swords, so he had to be pretty tough.

  Bored cops stood around looking at the creeps that paraded from Seventh to Eighth and back again. They called West 42nd “The Street,” but all they meant was one block of it. This was where the action was. Transvestites, gaudier and screechier than any woman, paraded in their finery, fluttering their false eyelashes, gesticulating with their foot-long cigarette holders. Pimps in leopard skin jackets and safari hats watched the scene with cruel eyes. Drugs were peddled openly: coke and heroin, uppers and downers, angel dust.

  Rat faced men lingered at the counters of papaya stands; the night air stank with gasoline fumes and frying fat. Kids went up and down with blaring radios the size of suitcases. A guy, some kind of Hindu, tried to sell Eastland a digital watch.

  “Is the very latest thing,” he whined in that Indian accent. He sounded like Sabu or someone like him.

  A very young faggot with bleached hair tried to interest Eastland in his ass. He must have been desperate because he followed Eastland for half the block. A rival fag shrilled that he’d get a dose if he tricked with “that bitch.”

  Eastland got to the corner of Eighth and started back on the other side of the street. The hell with it! Maybe he should forget the whole thing.

  He was heading for the subway when a young hooker, blonde and not bad looking, drifted up to him.

  “Going out?” she said.

  “Not tonight.” Eastland walked on she followed him.

  “I’m good—the best,” she said, getting in front of him so he couldn’t miss the thrust of her breasts in the low cut dress. He couldn’t guess her age, but he knew she was young. She looked so tired.

  “I’ll give you a good time,” she said.

  Why not? This was what he had come for. “Okay,” he said.

  “It’ll cost you twenty for me, five for the room. Still not interested? How about fifteen for me, five for the room? That better?

  “I like you,” the hooker said, linking her arm with his. “You’re not rough, are you?”

  “Somebody rough give you the bruise on the face?”

  The bruise on her chin was daubed with make-up; it still showed. “I don’t like rough people,” the hooker said instead of answering the question.

  “Me neither,” Eastland said.

  The hotel was on Eighth Avenue and it started on the second floor above a massage parlor. Worn, dirty linoleum covered the stairs and the brass rail was loose. The whole place smelled of wood-rot, roaches, sweat and fear. Behind a metal grille the night clerk sat looking at the beaver pictures in a porn magazine. He was a seedy little jackal with bags under his eyes and a sneering grin. He went into his spiel and his voice might have been a recording:

  “Well, you probably know the rules. Five dollars a half-hour. Five dollars each additional half. Ten dollars deposit. You get five back if you’re out on time. Clean sheets five bucks extra. Five bucks deposit on the sheets.”

  Eastland passed a twenty through the slot. “Clean sheets.”

  “Always go in style,” the clerk sneered, reaching under the counter for gray looking sheets, a pillow case. Then he slid out the room key.

  Eastland looked at the sheets. “These are the clean ones?”

  “Hand laundered in Hong Kong,” the clerk said, going back to his dirty magazine.

  Up in the room the hooker changed the sheets. The bureau mirror was cracked, the lamp had no shade. The hooker sat down after fluffing up the pillow. When she took off her blouse he saw that her body was covered with burns. There were burns on her ribcage, her stomach, her breasts.

  “What the fuck are you staring at?” she said angrily. “What did you expect to get for fifteen bucks—Marie Osmond?”

  “Who did that to you?”

  She covered the burns with her blouse, but Eastland made her take it off. Rage was starting to boil in his head.

  “What happened is my business,” the hooker said. “Tough shit if you don’t like how I look. No way you get the money back.”

  “Screw the money. How did you get burned like that?”

  “None of your fucking business.”

  “Quit the horseshit. How did you get burned?”

  “Is that what you want—dirty stories? Is that how you get off?”

  Eastland said quietly. “No, I don’t get off on dirty stories. I just wanted to help.”

  The hooker started to cry and he put his arm around her. “Tell me what happened,” he said.

  The hooker said:

  “It happened the other night. I was standing in front of the Pussycat. That’s a porn bookstore on Broadway. A guy not bad looking, not so young, came up to me and I asked did he want to go out. He laughed and said he wasn’t going out, but if I wanted to come in maybe we could do some business. I asked him what he meant by that and he flashed a roll of bills and said for a hundred bucks I shouldn’t ask so many questions. Well, you know, business was slow and a hundred bucks looked good. We went to 42nd and there was this massage parlor with a flashing sign that said BOYS like there was a peep show or maybe movies with boys in them. We got upstairs and he opened a whole bunch of locks and I got kind of scared.”

  The hooker choked on her tears. Eastland waited. “Tell me the rest of it,” he said.

  “I asked the guy what was going on and he said he had this client that liked to do young boys. That was the specialty of the house, he said. Only this client wanted to be done by a woman while he was doing the boy. That was where I came in. I tried to tell him I wasn’t into stuff involving kids. That’s when he started to get rough. You dirty fucking cunt, he said. I wasn’t going no place. This client needed a woman to make a trio and I was it. He slapped me and then this fat guy with glasses—naked, just a towel—came out of another room. He started bitching that he’d been waiting twenty minutes and when was the action going to start. Then when the first guy said I was going to be part of the action, the fat guy started feeling me up. When he got through he said I’d do fine but what was I looking so mad about. The other guy said I didn’t want to do it. Then the fat guy got pissed off and said he’d go some place else where the people knew their business. The first guy grabbed the fat guy by the arm and said wait a minute, this cunt will be glad to do it, and maybe what I needed was a little discipline.”

  “Nice,” Eastland said.

  “That fat guy practically drooled when he heard that and he said sure that’s what I needed—a little discipline. ‘I like it when they fight it,’ the fat guy said. I tried to run but there was no place to run. The door was locked and when I screamed the two of them just grinned. The place was soundproof, I guess, because the screaming didn’t bother them a bit. ‘I like it when they scream,’ the fat guy said. Then the first g
uy, the pimp, dragged me into the other room and the fat guy held me down while the first guy chained my wrists and ankles to the bed. I could hear a kid crying in another room and knew the little boy was in there. The fat guy ripped off my clothes and started playing with himself.”

  “You sure the sign at this place said BOYS?”

  “Sure I’m sure. I pass it all the time.”

  “What happened next?”

  “Then the fat guy said something like ‘Can I?’ and the pimp said sure, but it was going to cost him extra. The fat guy said fine with him and the other guy said for him to get his toy. That’s what he called it. You know what it was?”

  “Tell the rest of it,” Eastland said.

  The hooker began to shake again. “A soldering iron, that’s what it was. There was a long extension cord and he plugged it in and waited till it got hot. Then—oh Jesus!—he used it on me and when I passed out he threw cold water on me to wake me up. He did that over and over. I can’t sleep, I keep seeing that red-hot iron coming at me in the dark. I’d go back to Minnesota if I had any money. I used to think being a waitress there was the worst job in the world. Now I’d crawl on my hands and knees to get it back.”

  Eastland peeled off five hundred dollars and gave them to her. “Go on home,” he said. “That man will never hurt you again.”

  Eastland found the place with the blue neon sign that flashed BOYS. At the bottom of the steps he wiped off the briefcase after he took out the magnum, stuck it in his belt, covered it with his jacket. Like everyone he’d heard about “chickenhawks,” the perverts who liked to make it with very young boys. But they had to be very young; to a real chickenhawk a boy of twelve was over the hill. Eastland hoped there might be a few chickenhawks on the premises when he got inside.