Your Day In The Barrel

by Alan Furst

  We drive for about an hour and Villegas says “Okay man, this is where I get out. Just put me down by the bus station in Bloomsburg.” I swing off the freeway and into town. A block before the bus station I pull into a MacDonald’s parking lot. Villegas says “I guess I got to thank you for what you did, but right now I’m a little crazy. I had a good lady back there and my friends and maybe a career. I don’t want to be no underground hero. That life sucks. I got all my money back in that town, and my cat and my VA checks and my courses I was gonna finish. I had a whole life, everything.”

  “You made waves, Anthony. You got to know about making waves.”

  “I thought that was in the game. Where it really said to me ‘don’t go here, don’t go there’ I didn’t go. Some of the younger kids in the valley, they wanted to do some evil shit, but I said no. I was into lawyers and civil rights and fair day’s pay. Some people on that campus called me a liberal, y’know?”

  “Somebody went to some trouble to get you killed. They might have found someone else. You coulda been dead.”

  “Yeah, so thanks. Can I ever get in touch with you?” “There’s a lawyer in New York named Tom Lieberman, who lives on the top floor of an old office building on 19th street and Eleventh Avenue. He’s an okay guy and you could leave a number with him. But as for his phone, or mail, I can’t say.”

  “Can’t use the telephone, can’t use the mail. Shit, I don’t know who they are, but they sure as hell got us in their movie. The paranoia express.”

  “Well, take care of yourself. Be careful. Maybe this will come out all right and you can go back and do your things.”

  “Yeah, I wish. Oh, one thing, uh . . .”

  “I got about four thousand bucks left right now, that’s with me here. I’ll give you two which should leave me enough to operate with. I gotta get this thing fixed pretty soon.” And I lift up the battery and thumb bills off the roll.

  “Thanks. I’ll get it back to you, or I could give it to this lawyer.”

  “That would be alright.”

  We shake hands hip-style for a bit and then he’s gone, moving toward the bus station.

  I come very close to tripping out in that parking lot. Everything that has happened for the past week I’ve played past, said “Okay that’s the way it is” and tried to go with the flow. But now, well, my mind sort of throws up. What in the fuck am I doing? My mistake has been staying in this. The minute Red and his ogre left the motel I shoulda taken Genelle and Robbie and split for Big Sur or Europe or somewhere. They might of come after me or they might not. But here I am instead with a Puerto Rican corpse with a Zapata mustache glued on him, and glued wrong yet, whose fingerprints and blood type and even a little tag on his toe—the kid at the undertaker’s had just barely noticed it and tom it off before we put him in his bag—say he is Victor Escobar of Newark, New Jersey. Am I seriously going to try to fool the United States of America’s Central Intelligence Agency with this silly scam? Am I now going to tell them where I am so they can roll out their squads of blue meanies after me?

  Way, way in the back of my brain, of course, the truth is rolling around, trying to get out of there and get noticed by someone who runs things around here. They stole my Yacht, they stole my 50,000 dollars, they drove one of my biggest customers underground, they made me sell the few things I had, they put me out of business and took away the closest thing I had to a family. I suddenly start to see it like a small businessman hassled by the government. Well, what does he do when this kind of thing happens? Usually something strange. A gesture. I can’t run and I can’t fight. I can’t join the John Birch Society or write furious letters to the newspaper. I can’t refuse to pay taxes I already don’t pay or sit in at the Small Business Administration offices in D.C. I can’t kid myself that delivering this corpse in the truck with me is going to resolve anything. And I realize that Lieberman got me back here, somehow. He didn’t tell me to go, but he made it the only possibility. Why? Well, he has a bit of the old acid prankster in him and I’m sure he’s curiouser ’n hell about what’s going on. But I can’t get too pissed off at him. I’ve survived by taking everybody at my value and never their own, which is probably the only way to survive, but you got to be one cold sonofabitch to do that. When trusting becomes a luxury, when it’s the one thing you can’t ever do, it’s like a Jones, a smack habit. And when the shit starts coming down, and it always does, sooner or later, you got to want to lean a little bit. I leaned on Lieberman.

  And got what I deserved. Someone else’s fantasy. Someone else’s trip. In someone else’s trip you never know what comes next, so your reflexes are down to zilch. If you’re gonna lay back and let it happen like a Tibetan monk, you damn well better be a Tibetan monk. I have to get back in control, have to get that console under my fingers so I can turn some dials and see which lights light up. So what’s the best way to do that? I decide to make a list, take a piece of paper out of the glove compartment and find a pen in my shirt pocket. I realize a second too late that I shouldn’t have unscrewed that pen and stop breathing and shut my eyes. But I didn’t have to bother, ’cause when I look down, a piece of paper has fanned out of the tip. It’s all kinds of colors and has stars and planets and asterisks all over it and in the middle, in big print, it says “Lie down and cry, you’ve just been teargassed.”

  That fucker! Suppose I’d tried to snap that thing in the face of some murderous goon! But it’s okay ’cause Lieberman, without intending to, has shown me one way out of this. I check the map, gas up, have the man look over the innards of the Chevy which he pronounces screwed up but functional. Five hours later I’m where I want to be.

  I get a grade-b Chinese dinner in Arlington and spend some time in a movie. It gets to be four in the morning and I take a little ride out to a subdivision east of the town and wind around those streets ’till I find Crestview Lane; there ain’t no crest to view anywhere I can see, but number twenty rolls up just like it should and I don’t hesitate. I crawl into the back, drag Villegas’ stand-in out of his bag, give his goofy mustache a pat and roll him onto Red Roosevelt’s lawn.

  “Today, many people are preparing for tomorrow, so that when tomorrow comes, they will be prepared.”

  Edward Hugh Roosevelt, Valedictorian Address, Washington and Lee High School, Arlington, Va. 1952

  I’m in New York by 9:00 in the morning and snatch four hours’ sleep in the back of the Chevy truck and by 1:30 I’m up and mad and beating on Lieberman’s door.

  “Thanks a lot, you shithead,” waving the pen and it’s message under his nose. “That’s what I get for twelve thousand dollars? Phony tear gas pens? If I was going to 'the electric chair you’d probably give me a pooh cushion.”

  “I didn’t know. I swear to you man, I didn’t know. I bought ten of these things off a freak kid I know. I just didn’t know.”

  “Wiggle, baby. You shoulda told me that. Playin’ God behind that desk. ‘Here kid, the answer to your prayers’.”

  “Okay, okay, what happened?”

  “I tried to use the pen and they killed me and I went to heaven and they sent me back here to sit in your office and call you a shithead forever.”

  “Look, let’s try some of the others,” and he brings a handful out of the desk drawer. The first two pop out the little paper but the third one sends us around the comer to a coffee shop to let the office air itself out. Lieberman’s face has big teary streaks down it and he’s wearing a terrycloth bathrobe, so we must look pretty strange to the longshoremen sitting over their coffees. “Tell me what happened,” sob, sob, “did you call the Dayton number?”

  “No. We bought a body. A thousand-dollar stiff. We got a kid to shoot it and I threw it on Roosevelt’s lawn in Arlington last night.”

  “What?”

  “And I took care of that cop Byszka.”

  “Oh Jesus Christ, I’m gonna be in court for years.” “I don’t know if I hurt him or not, but I sure busted up his rear end.”

  “You did wha
t?”

  “The rear end of his car. I hit it with my truck.” “Which is parked outside my fucking office, no doubt.”

  “Unless someone stole it.”

  “That’d be too lucky right now.”

  “And Villegas is hiding.”

  “Villegas is at this moment staying in the apartment of an old girlfriend of mine in Brooklyn, and if I read body language correctly, they are gonna spend the day balling.” For making you love him after you got set on hating him, this Lieberman is outrageous.

  “What about his friends?”'

  “Never went. He didn’t want to get them in trouble. If you’re a good guy, the time you don’t use your friends is when you get in trouble.”

  “So maybe he gets you in trouble.”

  “I’m always in trouble. See that TV repair van across the street? Well, for two months those people have been following me. Maybe the FBI, maybe State Attorney General’s office, maybe the IRS, who knows?” I’m practically under the table at this point, except what’s under that table is worse than going to jail right now. Do you have any idea of what happens to a prune danish when it dies?

  “Don’t go running for the men’s room,” he says.

  “This has nothing to do with you. It’s the nature of my clients. They want to know what a bright young man like me is doing with all these dopers. Radical clients they understand, but now they think I’m into the hippie Mafia.”

  “So I’m on film, hah? And Villegas?”

  “Yup. I’d say so. Been going on for two months. Don’t know who they are and don’t know what they’re trying to prove.”

  “Blech.”

  “See that longhair holding up a utility pole?” “Un-huh.”

  “That’s my friend Ernie. Ernie’s been trying to follow ’em home and see what office building they go into. But they keep going to a warehouse in Brooklyn. One day soon, Ernie’s gonna catch ’em.”

  “They follow you, Ernie follows them.”

  “Yup. What you gonna do now?”

  “Punt. Shit, I don’t know.”

  “Want a piece of lawyerly advice?”

  “Okay.”

  “Find yourself a hole and crawl into it. Get off your beaten track completely. And make it up to Times Square and get the Arlington Herald. If nothin’s there, maybe your bait got took.”

  “Can I go up to that camp where Genelle is?”

  “You keep away from there, goddamit. You’re pure poison just now.”

  “What if I went to Africa, or Europe?”

  “I thought about this. New York is where you can hide best. You’ll stick out like a sore thumb over there. X number of Americans in Paris, it’s no big thing to find one of them. Here you’re just another guy with black curly hair. You might just get lost for a few days.”

  “How long?”

  “That I can’t say. Oh by the way, you owe me 2,000 bucks. I found a guy in D.C. who handles the medical and pension plans for certain federal agencies. The two is his price.”

  “Okay. I’ll send you a money order. I got to go to the bank. I’m living off my principal right now.”

  “So get a job.”

  “Some day I’ll tell you that. Once you’re self-employed, working for somebody else sucks. And I don’t think I can get unemployment insurance.”

  “Well, I suppose the place has aired out by now. Sorry about that.”

  “Forget it. If you ever see the guy who sold you the stuff let me know. I can put my hands on a little something that guarantees 48 hours of pure mean bummer. That’s what karma he earned this week, I’ll just be the Lord’s avenging hand.”

  “Okay. Take care of yourself. Let me know where you are.”

  I leave, and I’m about to call Henrietta, when, like Ford, I get a better idea.

  Like all my ideas lately, this one requires a visit to Manufacturers Hanover and my ten-year safe deposit box. Christ, what I wouldn’t give to move that money about twenty feet from my iron box into their computer. I scoop another two thousand worth of yolk from the nest egg and get a cab uptown to 96th street after parking the truck in a garage.

  Leon is into some very protected dealing set-up, ’cause I always see some familiar face going into or coming out of his apartment—faces from magazines and TV and election posters. Here is where the elite score. I did Leon a favor a long time ago, so he gives me cut-rate prices on the kind of dope that only comes into the country in diplomatic attache cases. One hundred bucks for two spoons of righteous cocaine is a good market price in New York. This is top-of-the-line dealing. The college stuff that I do is one level, high school people are another, and last, meanest and craziest is the plain old street, where I’m about to market the coke for a little safety.

  A cab takes me to Nutty Joey’s, a juice bar. A juice bar doesn’t sell juice, it sells decor and walls. The decor, mirrors and whorehouse-red satin, and booths of the best Naugahyde, attract people too young to get into bars. They have Led Zeppelin-type rock on the juke box and people sort of dance—most of ’em are so high they are gyrating to some special little stoned rhythm inside their head, but the music playing while they twitch makes it dancing. The walls keep out curious eyes, ’cause here is where the drugstore fruit salad is really king, and dealers with bad shit can always turn it in a juice bar, a pill at a time for 50 cents or a buck ’cause these aren’t the kids with money. This is, to say it right out, working class underage freakdom, and for political or economic or chemical or whatever reasons, they are buying the margarine, the soybean burgers, the chicken backs and necks, the low end of the dope spectrum: Quaaludes, homemade methedrine with just a few impurities, acid that’s really animal tranquilizers, mescaline laced with strychnine (a terrific backache after your trip), hash that’s 70% Cana, a Moroccan cosmetic that the farmers there have long since learned they can sell to Americans, Methadone that’s been smuggled out of some clinic in a junky’s mouth, balloonsfull of glass-icer that the kids’ parents don’t keep in the house any more (you inhale from the balloon, slowly, or you ice your lungs and they decide not to work for an hour), Nembutols, Tuinals, phenobarbitols, little bottles of Paregoric that smack addicts use to kill the pain by injecting. So here’s where I can turn my two spoons of coke, and lovely coke it is, to excellent advantage.

  It’s dark in there, though half the people are wearing shades of some sort, and I grope my way to an empty booth. It’s nine, real early juice-bar time, but there’s plenty of people hanging out. A tall dude in a fur vest cruises by and flashes a handful of Sopors at me. I wave him off, but not unfriendly-like. A fat chick wants to know if the booth is taken. I say it is. Ah, here it comes, I’d say about seventeen, not too skinny but working on it, with straight-up little tits under a white sweater with about a million tiny little buttons on it, good legs and a tight rear in black shorts. Her face looms up out of the haze: straight hair in long loops everywhere, firm cheekbones, a clipped-off nose and tiny mouth bent in a downwards bow, complexion not too messy, maybe a little the color of New York’s air on a bad day, a mixture of dead white with lead overtones. Slight remnant of a recent acne battle, which the face won, this time.

  “ ’n I sit?”

  “Yeah.”

  “ ’Tsearly ”

  “Yeah.”

  “Meet anybody?”

  “Unh-uh.”

  “I been in three places tonight.”

  “Mmmmm?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Mmm.”

  “ ’Tsa hassle.”

  “Really.”

  “You’re older.”

  “A little.”

  “Kids in here.”

  “Yeah, mostly.”

  “You heat?”

  “No way.”

  “You ain’t tripping?”

  “No, I’m high though.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “On what?”

  “Good coke.”

  “Oh, sure.”

  “Really.”
/>   “Yeah, Coca-cola maybe.”

  “Want a hit?”

  “Sure.”

  I unlimber my plastic Bufferin bottle and in my lap roll up a new ten dollar bill into a tight tube. I get a pinch on the skin between thumb and forefinger and say “Come over next to me.” I’ve got my eye on the two enormous bouncer/enforcer types, but all I can see is size 91 back, yards of it. She slides in next to me and her hip slides just next to mine, touching, but not pushing. She bends her head, presses her left nostril closed with her finger, and with her other hand closed around mine on the rolled-up bill, snuffles up about 8 bucks right there. Cocaine is a rich man’s pleasure. She says “Faaaar out.”

  “Nice?”

  “Dynamite.”

  We watch the bodies bang into each other for a few minutes.

  “I got a couple spoons of this.”

  “I ain’t got any bread man, except to get home.” “That’s okay. We could do it up. But I wanna go somewhere private.”

  “We could go to Forest Hills.”

  “What’s there?”

  “My aunt’s apartment. But she’s in Vegas. I usedta live in Springfield, Mass., but now I live there.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “Don’t go away.” And she gets up and vanishes into the crowd, appearing again in a few seconds with another girl, this one maybe fifteen, if she’s seventeen, or sixteen if she’s eighteen. The face is broader and the hair dyed blonde. She’s a lot more solid up top and in the rear, maybe fat, I can’t tell, and her mouth isn’t so sulky, it’s wide and full and might even laugh if you said the right thing. She’s wearing the same outfit as her sister.