Yawning, Alys slid from the couch, stood straight upright and stretched her long, slender arms. “I’m glad it’s evening,” she said airily, her eyes squeezed shut. “Now I can go home and go to bed.”
“How do you plan to get out of here?” he demanded. But he knew. Every time the same ritual unfolded. The ascent tube for “secluded” political prisoners got brought into use: it led from his extreme north office to the roof, hence to the quibble field. Alys came and went that way, his key breezily in hand. “Someday,” he said to her darkly, “an officer will be using the tube for a legitimate purpose, and he’ll run into you.”
“And what would he do?” She massaged his short-cropped gray hair. “Tell me, please, sir. Muff-dive me into panting contrition?”
“One look at you with that sated expression on your face—”
“They know I’m your sister.”
Buckman said harshly, “They know because you’re always coming in here for one reason or another or no damn reason at all.”
Perching knees up on the edge of a nearby desk, Alys eyed him seriously. “It really bothers you.”
“Yes, it really bothers me.”
“That I come here and make your job unsafe.”
“You can’t make my job unsafe,” Buckman said. “I’ve got only five men over me, excluding the national director, and all of them know about you and they can’t do anything. So you can do what you want.” Thereupon he stormed out of the north office, down the dull corridor to the larger suite where he did most of his work. He tried to avoid looking at her.
“But you carefully closed the door,” Alys said, sauntering after him, “so that that Herbert Blame or Mame or Maine or whatever it is wouldn’t see me.”
“You,” Buckman said, “are repellent to a natural man.”
“Is Maime natural? How do you know? Have you screwed him?”
“If you don’t get out of here,” he said quietly, facing her across two desks. “I’ll have you shot. So help me God.”
She shrugged her muscular shoulders. And smiled.
“Nothing scares you,” he said, accusingly. “Since your brain operation. You systematically, deliberately, had all your human centers removed. You’re now a”—he struggled to find the words; Alys always hamstrung him like this, even managed to abolish his ability to use words—“you,” he said chokingly, “are a reflex machine that diddles itself endlessly like a rat in an experiment. You’re wired into the pleasure nodule of your brain and you push the switch five thousand times an hour every day of your life when you’re not sleeping. It’s a mystery to me why you bother to sleep; why not diddle yourself a full twenty-four hours a day?”
He waited, but Alys said nothing.
“Someday,” he said, “one of us will die.”
“Oh?” she said, raising a thin green eyebrow.
“One of us,” Buckman said, “will outlive the other. And that one will rejoice.”
The pol-line phone on the larger desk buzzed. Reflexively, Buckman picked it up. On the screen McNulty’s rumpled hyped-up features appeared. “Sorry to bother you, General Buckman, but I just got a call from one of my staff. There’s no record in Omaha of a birth certificate ever being issued for a Jason Taverner.”
Patiently, Buckman said, “Then it’s an alias.”
“We took fingerprints, voiceprints, footprints, EEG prints. We sent them to One Central, to the overall data bank in Detroit. No match-up. Such fingerprints, footprints, voiceprints, EEG prints, don’t exist in any data banks on earth.” McNulty tugged himself upright and wheezed apologetically, “Jason Taverner doesn’t exist.”
8
Jason Taverner did not, at the moment, wish to return to Kathy. Nor, he decided, did he want to try Heather Hart once again. He tapped his coat pocket; he still had his money, and, because of the police pass, he could feel free to travel anywhere. A pol-pass was a passport to the entire planet; until they APB-ed on him he could travel as far as he wanted, including unimproved areas such as specific, acceptable jungle-infested islands in the South Pacific. There they might not find him for months, not with what his money would buy in an open-area spot such as that.
I’ve got three things going for me, he realized. I’ve got money, good looks, and personality. Four things: I also have forty-two years of experience as a six.
An apartment.
But, he thought, if I rent an apartment, the rotive manager will be required by law to take my fingerprints; they’ll be routinely mailed to Pol-Dat Central…and when the police have discovered that my ID cards are fakes, they’ll find they have a direct line to me. So there goes that.
What I need, he said to himself, is to find someone who already has an apartment. In their name, with their prints.
And that means another girl.
Where do I find such a one? he asked himself, and had the answer already on his tongue: at a first-rate cocktail lounge. The kind many women go to, with a three-man combo playing fob jazzy, preferably blacks. Well dressed.
Am I well enough dressed, though? he wondered, and took a good look at his silk suit under the steady white-and-red light of a huge AAMCO sign. Not his best but nearly so…but wrinkled. Well, in the gloom of a cocktail lounge it wouldn’t show.
He hailed a cab, and presently found himself quibbling toward the more acceptable part of the city to which he was accustomed—accustomed, at least, during the most recent years of his life, his career When he had reached the very top.
A club, he thought, where I’ve appeared. A club I really know. Know the maître d’, the hatcheck girl, the flower girl…unless they, like me, are somehow now changed.
But as yet it appeared that nothing but himself had changed. His circumstances. Not theirs.
The Blue Fox Room of the Hayette Hotel in Reno. He had played there a number of times; he knew the layout and the staff backward and forward.
To the cab he said, “Reno.”
Beautifully, the cab peeled off in a great swooping righthand motion; he felt himself going with it, and enjoyed it. The cab picked up speed: they had entered a virtually unused air corridor, and the upper velocity limit was perhaps as high as twelve hundred m.p.h.
“I’d like to use the phone,” Jason said.
The left wall of the cab opened and a picphone slid out, cord twisted in a baroque loop.
He knew the number of the Blue Fox Room by heart; he dialed it, waited, heard a click and then a mature male voice saying, “Blue Fox Room, where Freddy Hydrocephalic is appearing in two shows nightly, at eight and at twelve; only thirty dollars’ cover charge and girls provided while you watch. May I help you?”
“Is this good old Jumpy Mike?” Jason said. “Good old Jumpy Mike himself?”
“Yes, this certainly is.” The formality of the voice ebbed. “Who am I speaking to, may I ask?” A warm chuckle.
Taking a deep breath, Jason said, “This is Jason Taverner.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Taverner.” Jumpy Mike sounded puzzled. “Right now at the moment I can’t quite—”
“It’s been a long time,” Jason interrupted. “Can you give me a table toward the front of the room—”
“The Blue Fox Room is completely sold out, Mr. Taverner,” Jumpy Mike rumbled in his fat way. “I’m very sorry.”
“No table at all?” Jason said. “At any price?”
“Sorry, Mr. Taverner, none.” The voice faded in the direction of remoteness. “Try us in two weeks.” Good old Jumpy Mike hung up.
Silence.
Jesus shit Christ, Jason said to himself. “God,” he said aloud. “God damn it.” His teeth ground against one another, sending sheets of pain through his trigeminal nerve.
“New instructions, big fellow?” the cab asked tonelessly.
“Make it Las Vegas,” Jason grated. I’ll try the Nellie Melba Room of the Drake’s Arms, he decided. Not too long ago he had had good luck there, at a time when Heather Hart had been fulfilling an engagement in Sweden. A reasonable number of reasona
bly high class chicks hung out there, gambling, drinking, listening to the entertainment, getting it on. It was worth a try, if the Blue Fox Room—and the others like it—were closed to him. After all, what could he lose?
Half an hour later the cab deposited him on the roof field of the Drake’s Arms. Shivering in the chill night air, Jason made his way to the royal descent carpet; a moment later he had stepped from it into the warmth-color-light-movement of the Nellie Melba Room.
The time: seven-thirty. The first show would begin soon. He glanced at the notice; Freddy Hydrocephalic was appearing here, too, but doing a lesser tape at lower prices. Maybe he’ll remember me, Jason thought. Probably not. And then, as he thought more deeply on it, he thought, No chance at all.
If Heather Hart didn’t remember him no one would.
He seated himself at the crowded bar—on the only stool left—and, when the bartender at last noticed him, ordered scotch and honey, mulled. A pat of butter floated in it.
“That’ll be three dollars,” the bartender said.
“Put it on my—” Jason began and then gave up. He brought out a five.
And then he noticed her.
Seated several seats down. She had been his mistress years ago; he had not seen her in a hell of a while. But she still has a good figure, he observed, even though she’s gotten a lot older. Ruth Rae. Of all people.
One thing about Ruth Rae: she was smart enough not to let her skin become too tanned. Nothing aged a woman’s skin faster than tanning, and few somen seemed to know it. For a woman Ruth’s age—he guessed she was now thirty-eight or -nine—tanning would have turned her skin into wrinkled leather.
And, too, she dressed well. She showed off her excellent figure. If only time had avoided its constant series of appointments with her face…anyhow, Ruth still had beautiful black hair, all coiled in an upsweep at the back of her head. Featherplastic eyelashes, brilliant purple streaks across her cheek, as if she had been seared by psychedelic tiger claws.
Dressed in a colorful sari, barefoot—as usual she had kicked off her high-heeled shoes somewhere—and not wearing her glasses, she did not strike him as bad-looking. Ruth Rae, he mused. Sews her own clothes. Bifocals which she never wears when anyone’s around…excluding me. Does she still read the Book-of-the-Month selection? Does she still get off reading those endless dull novels about sexual misdeeds in weird, small, but apparently normal Midwestern towns?
That was one factor about Ruth Rae: her obsession with sex. One year that he recalled she had laid sixty men, not including him: he had entered and left earlier, when the stats were not so high.
And she had always liked his music. Ruth Rae liked sexy vocalists, pop ballads and sweet—sickeningly sweet—strings. In her New York apartment at one time she had set up a huge quad system and more or less lived inside it, eating dietetic sandwiches and drinking fake frosty slime drinks made out of nothing. Listening forty-eight hours at a stretch to disc after disc by the Purple People Strings, which he abominated.
Because her general taste appalled him, it annoyed him that he himself constituted one of her favorites. It was an anomaly which he had never been able to take apart.
What else did he remember about her? Tablespoons of oily yellow fluid every morning: vitamin E. Strangely enough it did not seem to be a shuck in her case; her erotic stamina increased with each spoonful. Lust virtually leaked out of her.
And as he recalled she hated animals. This made him think about Kathy and her cat Domenico. Ruth and Kathy would never groove, he said to himself. But that doesn’t matter; they’ll never meet.
Sliding from his stool he carried his drink down the bar until he stood before Ruth Rae. He did not expect her to know him, but, at one time, she had found him unable to avoid…why wouldn’t that be true now? No one was a better judge of sexual opportunity than Ruth.
“Hi,” he said.
Foggily—because she did not have on her glasses—Ruth Rae lifted her head, scrutinized him. “Hi,” she rasped in her bourbon-bounded voice. “Who are you?”
Jason said, “We met a few years ago in New York. I was doing a walk-on in an episode of The Phantom Baller…as I recall it, you had charge of costumes.”
“The episode,” Ruth Rae rasped, “where the Phantom Baller was set upon by pirate queers from another time-period.” She laughed, smiled up at him. “What’s your name?” she inquired, jiggling her wire-supported exposed boobs.
“Jason Taverner,” he said.
“Do you remember my name?”
“Oh yes,” he said. “Ruth Rae.”
“It’s Ruth Gomen now,” she rasped. “Sit down.” She glanced around her, saw no vacant stools. “Table over there.” She stepped supercarefully from her stool and careened in the direction of a vacant table; he took her arm, guided her along. Presently, after a moment of difficult navigation, he had her seated, with himself close beside her.
“You look every bit as beautiful—” he began, but she cut him off brusquely.
“I’m old,” she rasped. “I’m thirty-nine.”
“That’s not old,” Jason said. “I’m forty-two.”
“It’s all right for a man. Not for a woman.” Blearily she stared into her half-raised martini. “Do you know what Bob does? Bob Gomen? He raises dogs. Big, loud, pushy dogs with long hair. It gets into the refrigerator.” She sipped moodily at her martini; then, all at once, her face glowed with animation; she turned toward him and said, “You don’t look forty-two. You look all right! Do you know what I think? You ought to be in TV or the movies.”
Jason said cautiously, “I have been in TV. A little.”
“Oh, like the Phantom Baller Show.” She nodded. “Well, let’s face it; neither of us made it.”
“I’ll drink to that,” he said, ironically amused; he sipped at his mulled scotch and honey. The pat of butter had melted.
“I believe I do remember you,” Ruth Rae said. “Didn’t you have some blueprints for a house out on the Pacific, a thousand miles away from Australia? Was that you?”
“That was me,” he said, lying.
“And you drove a Rolls-Royce flyship.”
“Yes,” he said. That part was true.
Ruth Rae said, smiling, “Do you know what I’m doing here? Do you have any idea? I’m trying to get to see, to meet, Freddy Hydrocephalic. I’m in love with him.” She laughed the throaty laugh he remembered from the old days. “I keep sending him notes reading ‘I love you,’ and he writes typed notes back saying ‘I don’t want to get involved; I have personal problems.’” She laughed again, and finished her drink.
“Another?” Jason said, rising.
“No.” Ruth Rae shook her head. “I don’t drink anymore. There was a period”—she paused, her face troubled—“I wonder if anything like that has ever happened to you. I wouldn’t think so, to look at you.”
“What happened?”
Ruth Rae said, fooling with her empty glass, “I drank all the time. Starting at nine o’clock in the morning. And you know what it did for me? It made me look older. I looked fifty. Goddamn booze. Whatever you fear will happen to you, booze will make it happen. In my opinion booze is the great enemy of life. Do you agree?”
“I’m not sure,” Jason said. “I think life has worse enemies than booze.”
“I guess so. Like the forced-labor camps. Do you know they tried to send me to one last year? I really had a terrible time; I had no money—I hadn’t met Bob Gomen yet—and I worked for a savings-and-loan company. One day a deposit in cash came in…fifty-dollar-bill stuff, three or four of them.” She introspected for a time. “Anyhow, I took them and put the deposit slip and envelope into the shredder. But they caught me. Entrapment—a setup.”
“Oh,” he said.
“But—see, I had a thing going with my boss. The pols wanted to drag me off to a forced-labor camp—one in Georgia—where I’d be gangbanged to death by rednecks, but he protected me. I still don’t know how he did it, but they let me go. I owe that m
an a lot, and I never see him anymore. You never see the ones who really love you and help you; you’re always involved with strangers.”
“Do you consider me a stranger?” Jason asked. He thought to himself, I remember one more thing about you, Ruth Rae. She always maintained an impressively expensive apartment. No matter who she happened to be married to: she always lived well.
Ruth Rae eyed him questioningly. “No. I consider you a friend.”
“Thanks.” Reaching, he took hold of her dry hand and held it a second, letting go at exactly the right time.
9
Ruth Rae’s apartment appalled Jason Taverner with its luxury. It must cost her, he reasoned, at least four hundred dollars a day. Bob Gomen must be in good financial shape, he decided. Or anyhow was.
“You didn’t have to buy that fifth of Vat 69,” Ruth said as she took his coat, carrying it and her own to a self-opening closet. “I have Cutty Sark and Hiram Walker’s bourbon—”
She had learned a great deal since he had last slept with her: it was true. Emptied, he lay naked on the blankets of the waterbed, rubbing a broken-out spot at the rim of his nose. Ruth Rae, or rather Mrs. Ruth Gomen now, sat on the carpeted floor, smoking a Pall Mall. Neither of them had spoken for some time; the room had become quiet. And, he thought, as drained as I am. Isn’t there some principle of thermo-dynamics, he thought, that says heat can’t be destroyed, it can only be transferred? But there’s also entropy.
I feel the weight of entropy on me now, he decided. I have discharged myself into a vacuum, and I will never get back what I have given out. I goes only one way. Yes, he thought, I’m sure that is one of the fundamental laws of thermo-dynamics.
“Do you have an encyclopedia machine?” he asked the woman.
“Hell, no.” Worry appeared on her prune-like face. Prune-like—he withdrew the image; it did not seem fair. Her weathered face, he decided. That was more like it.
“What are you thinking?” he asked her.
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said Page 9