by Barry, Mike
But then again, Coates thought, that was an insignificant detail. A man brilliant and cunning enough to have come up with an idea like this would hardly stumble over a basic matter of mechanics. All of that would fall into place when he started to execute. If you kept your mind on the grand design of things, the details would fall into place. Time after time he had seen people with brilliant minds, fine ideas, fail to put them into action because they had staggered over the last details, or worse than that, junked or scrapped the entire idea because of details. That was the difference, he thought, between a man with five million dollars and all the women in the world to fuck and a man who would be pounding it out on a beat until pension time. He knew what he was now. He was ready to seize his destiny.
Tomorrow. He would do it tomorrow; once you had a really solid plan firmed up, once you had things in gear and knew what you were going to do, it would be foolish to let something like this go. Besides, just in case there was a stink about this second Hamilton murder, if there was a manhunt on for him, it would be best for him to keep on moving, go right ahead and do it now rather than wait them out. If you waited them out you never knew what they might stumble across, and besides that, life was too short and too precious to waste. With all the fucking that lay ahead of him, he would be a goddamned fool to delay any longer. Instantly he felt he needed some conversation just to nail it down. He went downstairs and found the clerk, a man in his eighties sitting behind the desk, which was spattered with something that smelled like beer but appeared to have had an effect more like acid upon the surface, and said, “I’m going to be a very rich man.”
The clerk was looking at a picture of a naked woman in a tabloid newspaper. She had her hands across her vagina but was otherwise fully exposed, and it was the look of embarrassment on her face, the amateurishness of her face for the camera, Coates thought, which was what made the picture sexy. “Glad to hear it, Johnny,” the clerk said.
“I ought to be worth five million dollars.”
“You wouldn’t be the first,” the clerk said, running his thumb over the woman’s breasts, leaving a slight indentation. His mouth pursed, he made little sucking sounds.
“It’s foolproof,” Coates said. “I can’t possibly lose.”
“Lots that made it that way too,” the clerk said. “And some made it taking longer chances. The important thing is that you’ve got your health and you’ve got a plan. Look at this fucking piece of cunt. If I could get it up, I’d like to stick it right in her. Of course, it’s a little difficult at my age.”
Coates tugged the newspaper away from the clerk slowly and very firmly and said, “You’re not listening to me.”
“Give me that back.”
“I’m telling you I’m going to be worth five million dollars on a foolproof plan, and you’re looking at a pair of tits. What kind of guy are you?”
“Give me back that paper. I want it.”
“You disgust me,” Coates said, and crumpled the newspaper, threw it in the clerk’s face, and cursing, ascended the stairs again, not caring whether or not the man was staring at him. What did he know? What could he do? What difference would it make to him?
It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but the money. But it was a damn shame on the very last night before you were famous that you couldn’t even get some proper respect and attention, damn it.
Maybe Lyndon Johnson had felt that way, Coates thought.
XIX
Ahead of Wulff the plant had loomed up, as distinct in the dawn as at noon, a gigantic indolent animal of steel that lay over acres of land and belched waste, farted filth. He had driven right up through the gates in the truck, no trouble at all, no security to speak of, and had parked in the employees’ lot, then had carefully taken the ordnance he needed, locked up the valise, tossed it in the back, removed the plates of the truck with a screwdriver, and placed them under the floorboards, which he had also unscrewed. It was not likely that they would look at this truck for a long time, even less likely that if they did they would pull it apart, least likely of all that they would have any kind of an alert out for the murdered Edgerton’s vehicle (they would not even have known that he had a truck; how could they have identified the plates?), but there was nothing wrong with taking reasonable precautions. He intended to be back at work for a while; he would have liked to leave as inconspicuous a trail as possible. The trail would be a canyon deep after today, anyway.
Walking briskly into the plant, just another worker carrying his belongings, Wulff felt that he had taken on not only the appearance and routine but the mental state of an assembly-line worker; his brain felt sodden and limp in his skull, his perceptions had curled into a sodden ball like a half-drowned cat in a corner. Going in here was not to think for whatever period of time that you would be in the enclosure; already the workers that surrounded him, the men in their twenties, thirties, forties, a trickle in their desperate fifties, although they were jammed up against him as they might have been in a subway, did not notice Wulff, did not react to him, nor was there any reason why they should have. Turnover in these plants was so enormous; you might know a few faces on your line, your foreman and your steward, and one face from management, and that was it. Who noticed? For that matter, who talked? Wulff could hear a few men talking in a desultory way about the Tigers’ game, but the conversation was merely in rhythm to the walking, and as they passed into the enclosure it was shut off, as with a faucet.
Wulff had expected that there might be some difficulty at this point, difficulty with a time clock, perhaps a guard at a checkpoint, but he had misconceived the Fleetwood plant; there was nothing at all. The clock would have to be somewhere way down the winding alleys of the plant; the guard was in his imagination, the lockers in which the men stowed their clothing and gear were scattered all over the bleak area winding in and around the line, and no one noticed. No one noticed anything at all. Wulff had been prepared to make a sudden attack, to launch his campaign immediately (and thus riskily), but this was much better, better than he had possibly calculated it to be. He could set up in his own time. No one was going to harass him. He could run his campaign in his own way.
It was the noise that surprised him. He had had some conception of what the noise level might be like, and anyone who had spent time on the practice-shooting range in the police academy, let alone taking combat fire in Vietnam, knew what noise was like, but this was something else entirely; the noise here was like hell, or make it more like a maternity ward with women in deep labor grouped in a common ward multiplied several thousand times; like the child, the car, that infant of America, was brought forth in pain and fury, and the screams marking its passage into the world were touched with blood, the glint of the steel that wrenched it into being adding its own terror. Wulff found it almost impossible to concentrate; he needed to quietly and efficiently set up the incendiaries, and he had a corner wedged between the men’s room and the lockers where he could do just that, but it was almost impossible to concentrate with the level of noise, and there was also the heat, the mighty, penetrating heat of this gigantic delivery room, which whisked in and out of every hidden slice of ground and brought him to brilliant sweat. Impossible to make splices, impossible to work with the wiring in this cove of sound and heat, and yet he did it, gathering himself into a fetal position in which the incendiaries were wedged, the valise perched before him functioning as a cover so that any guard, any supervisor, any stroller might only have taken him for being absorbed in cryptograms during a five-minute break. If they moved in closer to question him as to exactly what he was doing, Wulff was in serious trouble, but he was calculating that they would not and that in any case union regulations, the perimeters of functions, were so tightly delineated here that, just as in the PD, no one would feel that anything not his business was his business. It was the only way to get along in a union situation.
He tumbled into himself, working on the fuses, carefully feeding the wires into the little grenades like a mother
feeding a long, tubular breast into a baby’s sucking mouth, giving the dynamite the extension that it needed. The grenades were small, but they were mighty—the best of goods from the larder of Father Justice, who was certainly equipped as virtually no one else in the ordnance business to decide what the best dynamite would be. The Father had been a great character, one of Wulff’s favorites in all of his travels; it was one of the great lessons and losses of his life that he had not had more time to get away with the Father, perhaps in the weapons room back of the chapel, and have a long talk with him about the philosophy and practice of violent revolution. He was sure that the Father would have a great deal to say on the issue, was, in fact, one of the world’s leading experts on the problem, but there had never been the time. He had never really had the time in any of his travels, and there was no exception with Justice. Still, it had been too bad. The Father sold only the best, though.
Occasionally men passed in front of him, their bodies lumbering, their faces abstracted, moving into the toilet or into the locker area. From the look of some of them Wulff suspected that they were going here and there to cop a fast joint on their break time or during the five minutes that the union allowed them to piss on demand, provided that they got cover. That was no secret; pot was the pivot wheel of the factories; practically everyone on the lines had been into it at some point, at least a little, and of course all of the American cars nowadays looked and ran as if they had been put together by men who were seriously involved in marijuana. Oddly, that did not bother him as much as it might have once; Jessica had had something of a point in arguing that one cop on a joint was not necessarily the first inevitable step toward mainlining … and even if that had not been true, here was no question but that marijuana or seeking it had made all of these men completely oblivious of the large, grim, dedicated man in the shadows who was carefully putting together a set of devices which would have blown J. Edgar Hoover clear from his grave if he had been within three hundred miles.
Wulff must have worked on it altogether for over three hours. It was the most painstaking and slow job of this type he had done since way back at the beginning in New York, when he had spent a similar amount of time rigging incendiaries to gas lines so that he would be able to blow a certain important New York dealer clear out of his townhouse. That had been fun, and this was fun too, although he had worked that time in a quiet lot at midnight and this time he was working in a crowded plant, swing shift, after breakfast time. Still, the tension and the possibility of discovery only added a certain amount of spice to the adventure.
At heart, Wulff supposed, he had the psychology of a felon. The fear of discovery made him more efficient.
Somewhere around ten o’clock he was done. The affixed grenades glinted their little messages at him, and he could feel them beating as if they were little hearts, triggering out a pulse rate of death. He fondled them, his creations, with something approaching affection, almost oblivious of the noise in that last moment of satisfaction, and then, standing slowly, easing his limbs, getting circulation moving again, he put them into the valise, closed the valise gently, and put it neatly under his arm, set the clips, moved down the corridor. No one had noticed. No one at all. The line continued to scream, odors whisked through the plant, men moved by ones and twos down the corridors with wrenches sticking out of their pockets, a few in supervisory gear giving Wulff strange sidelong looks. He realized that the reason for his isolation was probably because the workers thought that he was part of management, and management thought that he was some kind of inspector, whereas any inspector coming through the halls might think that Wulff was yet another spy from management. Paranoia, the mutual crosschecking system of the plant, had worked well for him.
Security multiplied was no security at all.
He moved up several ramps, found a walkway, moved higher, found himself on a parapet. Here he looked down upon the arena of the plant as if it were a stadium. It was empty here too; no one to share the height with him, no one looking up. He put the valise down. Very carefully he sprang the clips and took out an incendiary.
When the voice within him said that it was the proper time, he threw it.
XX
Coates walked briskly through the plant, carrying a rolled-up newspaper like an executive, striding confidently, moving toward the assembly point. He was attracting a lot of attention, he noticed, but no one seemed inclined to stop him yet. All of them knew him, of course, and had respect for him; that was the reason that they were not stopping him. If they did, if any complications arose, he had a point-thirty-eight in one pocket and a point-forty-five in the other, equipment which he would be happy to use if the necessity arose, but he did not think that it would. A little confidence would carry him through. That was all you needed, in or out of this world. Confidence and a sense of command.
He was wearing his patrolman’s blues, but without the holster belt and clips. No reason to call that kind of attention his way. A cop was always worthy of respect, and the blues made him look good; he always looked crisp and vital in his blues; he knew that so well, knew how when he walked the streets wearing them every woman wanted to fuck him just to get close to a cop … shit, a cop was the only protection you could find in life nowadays. But wearing the holster belt was too damned provocative. A gun got everybody nervous; he even had to admit that it got him nervous. There was something about looking at an exposed gun which was like looking at an exposed cock, Coates thought, all of that power and promise were best concealed, the message was too unbearable to be confronted directly. He knew that his wife would have been proud of him, the bitch, if she could have seen him now, the way that everyone in the plant looked at him with respect, that respect coming into him in little streaks of power so that he walked confidently, erect, striding through the plant like one who might have been at the highest levels of management, but of course the bitch did not see him now. Too bad. She would never see him again. Too bad for her again, but then, if she had seen the kind of man he had become and what she was missing, it might have been unbearable for her and there would have been one of those scenes.
He hardly needed this, not at the point when he had reached the summation of his life, that height at which at last he had become everything that he was supposed to be. The power emanating from him was obvious; no one was making the slightest attempt to block his path or interrupt his progress. No one would say a word to him. The guns banged provocatively against his thighs, and with every bang he smiled, with every reassuring little sway of the metal against his flesh he felt another stab of joy. Into the car then.
He was down at the extreme end of the line, that point at which the assembled Fleetwoods came off under their own power. As they rolled off the belt, a man would run to them, leap inside, start the engine under full throttle, and then in one scream of fan belt and rubber the cars would bolt down the long line, about a fifth of a mile to another point where the maws of the trucks themselves waited. The birth cry of the cars was one of anguish, Coates thought, like the scream of a child being spanked. The cars, forced into life, bellowed from their guts, pain wrung out of their metal hearts, and you could see why American cars lasted only seven years or sometimes four if they were conceived from such abuse. The men behind the wheels fooled around not at all, declined to tease them into life; they floored the accelerator at once and whipped the Fleetwoods down that line and into the maw of the ramp that would lead to the truck, and then sprang from the enclosure, rubbing their hands, striding as if they had accomplished something noteworthy and significant that would change their entire lives. Perhaps they would, Coates thought. It was a good job. It was a job which combined all of the satisfactions of America: a huge new car in their hands for the first time and the freedom to abuse it. If they had not been allowed to floor the accelerators, cycle the cars into high rpm’s at birth, Coates thought, they probably would have settled on more obscure and dangerous ways to abuse the cars that would be sold at maybe eleven thousand dollars api
ece, spitting on the deep-pile rugs or touching a lit match to them or putting a carefully hidden penknife to some of the crushed-velour upholstery. It was better this way. The suckers were not the ones with the eleven thousand dollars; they had enough money to trade the cars in after a year or two and indeed would only have them in this way; the suckers were those who would pick up the cars as fourth or fifth owner six years down the line and find that the early abuse had resulted in a pale and decrepit old age. But who the hell saw these people anyway? They were invisible. Everybody throughout the system was invisible, Coates thought; that was the key to its efficiency.
He held the sack containing the shit closer to him. It was neatly piled in there, tied with rubber bands, little bricks snuggled against his person. Acapulco gold they called it, or was that marijuana he was thinking of? Yeah, mary jane, that was Acapulco gold; heroin was horse, smack, shit, skag, or (he had heard this expression once and had never forgotten it) the doctor. Whatever you called it, it was precious, the most precious commodity in the world. If the gold standard ever collapsed, the shit standard would be there to replace it.
Coates giggled with his power. People were looking at him strangely, and indeed he must have presented a strange appearance with his cop’s blues and the sack, but just as he had thought they would, they figured him for a supervisor or as a guard of some sort; his real identity was unknown to them, but his aspect was so positive, his person so secure, that it was inconceivable that anyone would question his presence there. He had figured everything out. He had done it perfectly.