by John Farrow
By the ninth large inhalation, he was at the door.
The bottom exterior door was unlocked, but a bull of a man nodded with his chin, expecting a password. Cinq-Mars took his tenth deep breath.
“Mer—” He lost his voice, his breath, his nerve. He cleared his throat. “Merlin sent me,” he said, and the man looked him over from head to foot then nodded, and let him go ahead.
He found the freight elevator and pulled up the large garage-style door. A second, inner set of doors peeled back with a slight tug. He stepped inside. As he punched the button for the third floor, the doors closed and, noisily, painfully slowly, the elevator ascended, coming to a rest with a jolt. The inner doors parted easily, but he had to heave up the outer door on his own again, and this time it didn’t run smoothly. He smacked his hands together to shake the grit off them. Only people walking and touching things moved the dirt around in here—the place was never cleaned. Cinq-Mars carried on down the corridor, dark and drab with dusty air. Fortunately, the doors were painted white, and he easily spotted the one with three red dots by the upper hinge.
He knocked.
Nothing.
Knocked again.
Still nothing.
He tried the knob. Somebody opened the door from inside.
“Hold on to your dick,” a grizzled, wiry, short old-timer grumbled.
“Merlin sent me,” Cinq-Mars declared.
“Who asked you?” the man said back. Unshaven, with white whiskers.
“I was just saying—”
“Who sent you?” the clearly crotchety figure demanded.
“I told you. Merlin.”
“What does that make you, you think? Fucking King Kong?”
A subliminal reference, Cinq-Mars deduced, given that he was at least a foot and a half taller than the elfin, irascible doorman. Or perhaps he was expected to know a coded response. He froze.
“You got money? Show me. We’re not a fucking bank in here. You want a loan? No sweat. We take your dick as collateral.”
“In your dreams,” Cinq-Mars quipped, proud of himself. That sounded like a tough, raw response to him, words that wouldn’t normally come out of his mouth. Maybe he could get the hang of this detective racket after all.
He chose to be slow, pulling bills from one pocket, then another, and if a few fell on the floor, he left them there.
The doorman rushed him through a set of heavy, dark curtains before the fresh arrival noticed the denominations he’d dropped, and delivered a parting admonishment. “Next time, Prick Face—knock.”
Most voices in the room were pitched low—quiet demands to raise a stake, murmured announcements closing a table to further bets. One boisterous fellow let the room know whenever he won or lost, barking out his victories and cursing his defeats. Over the tables, the lights were as low as the gentle murmuring, the smoke intense. Ceiling fans blew warmer, smoky air down upon the gamblers, and Émile Cinq-Mars deliberately coughed.
Good move, he thought. He was coughing to conceal his survey of the room.
About twenty people were present, a quiet night. In the minds of the players, then, a safe night, for a police bust would be more dramatic when the place was packed. The croupiers, at first glance, were dressed for the part, wearing white shirts and black vests, but as Cinq-Mars sidled up to a table next to a bald-headed customer, he noticed that the croupier’s vest showed a few dark stains, probably from spaghetti sauce or something similar. His shirt had been due for a cleaning weeks ago. Cinq-Mars was pulling bills out of his inside jacket pockets and shuffling them into some kind of shape. He smacked his tongue over his thumb a few times to moisten it, and decided to put his bills into order by denomination. “I don’t know what I got here,” he said to no one in particular, then looked up at the bald man.
He was not the guy.
He looked around the room more carefully, and counted. All told, eight bald guys. As if a hair-growth convention was being held in the city.
He went by them all, ostensibly to check the action at the various tables while shooting a glance at each of the suspects. No luck. Then a ninth man, still doing up his fly as he emerged from a washroom, proved to be his mark. He looked exactly like the snapshot.
Cinq-Mars followed him to the roulette wheel and put his money down.
“I feel lucky,” Cinq-Mars declared. “You?”
The other man shrugged. He didn’t want to talk to the new arrival whose hands were full of cash.
“You’re right,” Cinq-Mars analyzed. “Luck’s got fuck-all to do with it. The wheel is scientific. The right scheme, you come away a fucking winner.”
“Everybody’s got a scheme,” the man philosophized. He was an accountant, Cinq-Mars guessed, and knew the odds on schemes. “Sooner or later, it’ll beat you.”
“If you let it, it will. Once your scheme goes cold, switch strategies. That’s my policy. Stay a step ahead of the game. You watch. Learn. I’ll fucking show you how.”
He put a hundred dollars down and said, “Red.” “You’ll need chips, sir,” the croupier told him. “I’m not hungry,” the cop told him.
“Very funny,” the man said. “How much do you want to change?” Cinq-Mars stood confused. “Merlin sent me,” he said. “Great, but you still got to buy your chips.”
“Come on, are we playing here or not?” another man called out from the table’s end.
“Take your money off the table, sir. I’ll sell you chips when you tell me how much you want.”
The cop turned to the bald guy beside him. “I’m superstitious. Tell me something. Have you had a lucky night so far?”
“Break-even,” the man said with a shrug. He had a dimple on the left side of his chin, and bright blue eyes that made him look like a dog of some kind, Cinq-Mars was thinking, a husky.
“How much did you start out with?”
The man shrugged. “That’s your business how?”
“Sir, don’t disturb the customers.”
“I want to order what he did. He’s doing okay. He’s break-even. I want some luck, that’s all.”
“Kid,” the bald guy said, “order a couple of grand in chips and stop slowing everything down, that’s my advice.”
“I appreciate that more than you know,” Cinq-Mars told him. He was weaving a little, to indicate that he’d had a few. He was wishing he could have a Scotch at that moment and regretted that the barmaid was on the other side of the room. He started counting out two thousand dollars. “You’re a gentleman and a fucking scholar, I can tell that. Maybe I can do you a favour some day.”
Not being aware of what the coloured chips were worth, Cinq-Mars raised a few eyebrows when he finally placed a bet, depositing eleven hundred dollars on the black.
He lost.
“That’s some system,” the bald guy said. “Change your mind and lose.”
“Hmm,” Cinq-Mars said, but he was concentrating on finding the trapdoor out of here. “I keep betting until I win.” He laughed. “That’s my system.”
“That’s the whole world’s system,” the man said, and he laughed a little, too, and a few others around the table chuckled, and then the skylight overhead burst with a nerve-splitting shatter and glass showered down upon them.
The bald guy was scooping chips off the table—not only his own—but was looking around with a dazed expression, as though he could not believe it, but this might be the worst day of his life. Cinq-Mars grabbed the shoulder of his jacket. “Follow me,” he whispered in his ear. “I know the secret way out.”
“What secret way?”
“I owe you a favour, right? I pay my debts. Come on.”
While the croupiers were running for the back exits and the customers were scrambling to get out the front door, a police officer shouted through a bullhorn from the now-open skylight for everyone to stay in place. “We got the building surrounded!” Cinq-Mars got down on his hands and knees behind the roulette wheel and pulled a panel free from the lower wall. A tight crawl
space. The owners had to be slim men. He crawled into the dark cavity, receiving a face full of spider web while experiencing the hands of the bald guy shoving his ass through the passage more quickly. He scrambled on his elbows and hips, the darkness severe, the air dank.
After travelling for some twenty feet—which, for all his hurrying, took a while—his eyes had adjusted and he could discern an escape from this purgatory. He fell through the space onto a floor, a drop of three feet, and turned to aid his mark to stand upright again as well.
“Now what?” the bald guy demanded, as though Cinq-Mars had delivered him out of a frying pan into a fire. This section of the building was bordered by floor-to-ceiling windows, and reflections of revolving police-car lights on the street below eerily lit up the space.
“This way,” Cinq-Mars told him. He was doing it. He had gotten his mark out of the gambling den and now would rescue them both. The plan was actually working, and he had managed to perform his part well.
They jogged down a corridor, and Cinq-Mars showed him the escape chute, which looked like a fast drop.
“You’re kidding me,” the mark said. “I’m not going down there.”
Cinq-Mars didn’t blame him. His own stomach was churning. “Take the chute or face the cops,” he warned him. “I’ll go first. That way, you’ll see it works.”
The bald man considered his options. He had none. “All right,” he conceded. “But I’m not going down there until I see for myself that you come out alive.”
“Tell you what. Once I’m down, I’ll bang the chute three times. That’ll tell you it’s safe to follow me down. If you don’t hear nothing, stay put.” “Go already. Let’s get out of here.”
The young officer on his first undercover operation hesitated at the brink of his descent. That was a long way down. Three floors, all of it steep, into the dark, and at the bottom, potentially, oblivion. He sat in the chamber. He straightened out his legs on the slick aluminum slide. He put his hands down by his sides and bent back at the waist. Straightening. The incline was steep enough that he didn’t need any help, but the bald man chose to give him a push.
“Go!” he said, and Cinq-Mars descended the ramp like a missile.
The air flew out of him with the rush of the fall. He felt as though he’d exhaled his heart. This was too fast, too extreme, and he uttered involuntarily small cries as he whooshed down towards his destiny.
He yearned to hit soft mattress.
Instead, the chute expelled him, he flew through the open air in the dark, and suddenly his body dove feet first into a fluid.
He was sinking into a pool of molasses-thick darkness, a rheumy substance heavier than water, like oil, and he struggled back up to the surface.
He gasped for breath, and breathed the ghastly scent. He had to act quickly, for his mark might soon follow. Should he knock on the chamber, to demonstrate that he should follow and survive? Or should he spare him the ignominy of this awful bath?
He crawled up and out of the chamber that held him, the air fetid, the slimy texture of the fluid over his clothes quite revolting, when suddenly a bright light shone on him, blinding him. Then he heard a great roar, which he thought for a moment might be an alarm. But that wasn’t it. His heart sank. He wanted to shoot himself. That wasn’t an alarm going off.
People were cheering.
They started to applaud.
As Émile Cinq-Mars climbed down from the chamber and shielded his eyes against the light, he discerned that he was surrounded by police officers, who were being joined by croupiers and customers from the room above. The man laughing the loudest, almost convulsing, was Detective Fleury. Standing beside him, with a massive grin on his face, stood Captain Armand Touton.
When their eyes met, Touton raised his hands and joined in the applause.
The intense light was turned off, and others that lit the courtyard turned on, so that Émile Cinq-Mars could see that he had fallen into a deep vat, likely of oil, grease, tar and water, and molasses, too, and that his fellow officers were enjoying the prank they’d played on him. He saw also that his brand new suit, the pride of his wardrobe, was ruined. Every pore, every thread, every stitch, had been soaked with smelly grime.
What he could not see, but could readily imagine, and what kept the other cops laughing, was that he looked a sight. When he smiled a little, his white teeth were almost blinding, emerging as they did from his blackened form.
Touton stepped towards him. As he did so, the other men allowed their jeers, laughter and whistles to ebb.
The “mark” came running from the building to join the party. Touton waited before he spoke.
“So we hear you want to be a member of the Night Patrol. To join us. Well, son, you’ve been initiated now. You’re still assigned to your beat, but when we want you, we’ll know where to find you.”
“Not tonight—” Cinq-Mars started to protest.
“No, son,” Touton smiled. He almost placed a hand upon the younger man’s shoulder, but wisely pulled it back. “Not tonight.”
Cinq-Mars could not take a cab home. No taxi would admit him. No bus driver would appreciate his smelly, oily presence, either, but in any case buses were too public a mode of transportation. Certainly no cop was going to offer him a lift, so he had no option but to walk home, a good distance made longer by his condition.
In an alley, he removed his shoes, then wrung out his socks. That seemed too hopeless a task, so he tossed the socks away and put his shoes back on barefoot. Much better. Less squishy. Next, he peeled off his jacket and did a fitful job of squeezing out the ooze from the fabric and scooping oil from his pockets. The cause was futile, but he needed to improve his mobility.
He wanted to stop dripping as he walked, and leaving footprints marked in oil. Noticing that small portions of his white shirt had been spared, protected by the jacket, he removed it and wiped his face on the bare sections, then threw it away and put on the still-oily jacket over his bare skin. The clothing felt a little better. Looking around, he ducked in behind a telephone pole, opened his trousers and, with his hands, scraped away the residue from his underwear and from around his genitals, then wiped his hand against the brick wall.
Yuck.
And he still had a long walk home.
He stuck to the back streets. At least it was early morning and only a few people were up. Those in cars were too sleepy to notice, or perhaps they habitually drove past weirdoes covered in black oil, their hair plastered against their scalps.
The few incidents that did crop up didn’t affect him particularly. The woman who crossed the street to avoid passing him on the sidewalk. The cabbie who slowed down, bolted ahead, then slowed down again. The gawk of a child from a back-seat window, but the child showed no surprise, suggesting he might have gawked at Cinq-Mars in any circumstances. Émile made it to his block, which revived him somewhat, although he was grumpy and determined that, when he was in charge, when he was made a captain, when he had a police force to command, rookies would never be treated this way.
And then he spotted Anik Clément upon the outside steps to his second-storey flat, about halfway up, waiting for him, and his heart sank at the same moment that it floated upward. He felt stretched to the brink of snapping.
His initial instinct was to hide. But she’d been watching him for a while, certain that she recognized the posture, that it had to be him, but how could it be? What in the world had happened? He came closer. She stared with her mouth open, not knowing whether to call an ambulance or run for cover.
Then he was standing at the bottom of the stairs, looking up, grinning in an odd way, his teeth as bright as pearls.
“What the hell—” she began.
“Don’t ask,” he advised her.
“I’m asking.”
“It’s a cop thing.”
“Cops did that to you?”
“Anik, what are you doing here?”
“Apparently, I’m here to wash you off, although I didn’t kn
ow that until now. Émile—isn’t that …? That’s your brand new suit.”
“Which your friend Touton made me buy. Knowing that this would happen.”
That’s when she laughed, uproariously and bent double, and that’s when he knew they’d be together.
Cinq-Mars showed off his grimy palms. She was trapped on the stairs, with nowhere to flee. “Hi there, Anik,” he said.
She could only run up a half-flight. Which she did. She scrambled on the spiral staircase to reach his door, and there awaited his blackening, smelly, grimy, oily repulsive embrace.
On his doorstep at dawn, she squealed, after a fashion. More a mock scream shared between them. He clamped a gooey black hand over her mouth to shush her, and once he had done so, her fate was sealed. She had to go inside to clean herself up also. He unlocked the door.
“I thought you were Catholic,” she said. They were lying in the nude on his narrow bed, their bodies cleansed and depleted. Their feet entwined.
“I am so Catholic.”
“Are you going to confess this sin, then?”
“Don’t laugh at me.”
“I’m not laughing. I just want to know.”
“If I have the courage to do so, I will confess this sin.”
No other boy in her general field of vision would ever say such a thing. “So you feel bad about this?”
“That’s the trouble.” Cinq-Mars sighed. “I don’t. I know I should, though.”
“So you’re troubled? No—don’t sigh and moan to yourself, Émile. I’m trying to understand. We took a shower together and made love—you for the first time, I take it? We had a wonderful time. I did. I know you did. Now … you’re troubled.”
He moaned and sighed despite her admonition. “It’s ingrained, Anik.”
He wasn’t going to allow her to just make fun of him. He’d make sure she discovered that she had gone to bed with a serious man, notwithstanding their sport in the tub, soaping the goop out of his hair and from between the cheeks of his derrière. That had embarrassed him so much. She delighted in making him squirm in his private agony.
Or, perhaps, she was finding out, in his private hell.