by Buck Sanders
“Sorry, sir,” said Slayton. “But the irony is so beautiful, damn near poetic.” He shook his head, a bemused expression on his face.
“This is serious business,” Winship intoned with a dead-sober demeanor. “Do you have any idea what the press could do with something of this magnitude? The whole bloody country would be laughing—laughing us right out of our jobs. To say nothing of undermining the credibility of the government, the elected representatives!” Winship’s palms were down on the desk, his fingers spread bloodlessly across the shining mahogany.
“Yes, sir,” Slayton said, totally stabilized. He knew just how much he could get away with in this chamber, Winship’s inner sanctum, the most important office in the entire Department.
Not that awe of Winship or the powers of the Treasury intimidated Slayton for a microsecond—in fact, he had breezed into Winship’s chamber as casually as a trucker into a coffee shop. Winship knew it was Slayton—the only man alive who could get past Beverly, at the desk in the outer office, before she could buzz him. Slayton respected Winship immensely, and held no man in awe. The feeling was much the same for Winship, though neither of them would ever admit it to the other.
Slayton had taken his usual stance opposite Winship’s desk, hands clasped before him in an attitude of easy, but complete, concentration. The chitchat that would have transpired in lesser offices to break the ice, to ease the subject in gradually, was totally irrelevant and unnecessary here. Winship did not believe in wasting time, and Slayton did not believe in bullshit.
“By now you’ve been to enough testimonials and political butter-ups to realize that Washington D.C. and Hollywood, California, do have one thing in common,” Winship began. “The parties thrown by people with a lot of money and power have no constraints on behavior. Everyone’s human, I suppose, but humanity means different things to different types of people.”
“I didn’t notice many American Indians at the last Inagural Ball, if that’s what you mean, sir,” said Slayton.
Winship glided over the remark. “The so-called jet-set gentry in Washington are like that anywhere else. This means that what transpires at these gatherings—and as you know, there are seven or eight major ones per day here—is not always strictly legal.”
“There’s always an ambassador that needs plying, or a senator that needs support.”
“Quite. I’m sure, therefore, that you are aware of the sorts of things besides political manipulating and vote-buying and influence-broking that go on at these… affairs.” Winship was skirting the real topic, waiting for Slayton to pick up the ball.
Slayton noticed his superior’s apparent unease. “Well, there are quite a few hookers in the nation’s capital, sir; I think it’s even in the civics textbooks by now. No one is surprised, unless a congressman does something especially stupid, like strangle one.”
“I’m not talking about prostitutes,” Winship said evenly.
“And if we were really serious about cocaine, we’d have to arrest the entire city of Los Angeles. People have parties and get crazy at parties. Where we have so much trouble is in the flux of legality—busting people today for what will be licensed tomorrow. If we started busting all the tooters and tokers in Washington, the country would collapse in a week.”
Winship pulled open one of the massive desk drawers and fished within. He extracted a square, cut-glass bottle that looked a lot like a salad-dressing cruet and placed it on the exact center of the desk between him and Slayton. The angles of the glass caught the light in the room and made blue diamonds of light on the desk top. The tiny bubbles surfacing through the clear liquid inside made coruscating rainbows within the diamonds.
“Do you know what this is?” Winship said.
Slayton recognized it instantly. “America’s latest fad,” he said. “Starshine. It’s a narcotizing hybrid of moonshine liquor and opiate drugs; illegal as all get-out to buy or manufacture. Extremely costly; heroin addiction is a bargain by comparison. It appeals to the rich because it’s so exotic. It costs a lot and not many people have heard of it—it’s the basement-still equivalent of good Turkish hash or snowflake-pure coke. I’ve tried it. It gives you a hell of a buzz.”
Winship’s eyebrows went up.
“Strictly in the nature of research, sir,” he said, smiling. Winship nodded. The acknowledgement was sort of a pro forma interdepartmental joke, the way that police officers getting high from burning huge confiscated stashes of marijuana was a joke. Or news stories that the best drugs in any major American city usually came from dealers who stole it from the police department stashes.
“You see, I have been to some of those Washington parties, much as I hate them. And I’ve seen senators snorting coke, and congressmen groping ladies of the evening, and some of our very own governmental higher-ups swilling Starshine… so what, exactly, is the problem, sir? It’s strictly small-league, all the way.”
“The problem, Mr. Slayton, is that apparently Starshine has killed off some of those ‘governmental higher-ups.’” Winship’s words had become clipped, humorless.
Slayton winced inwardly, acutely aware of his faux pas. This was a facet he had suspected, of course, but since he did not have any more information, he remained silent. Some kind of rejoinder now would be disastrous, since he had rubbed Winship the wrong way. He waited.
Winship used the queasy silence that hung between them as an excuse to do a search-and-destroy mission on his own stash of pipe tobacco. Winship’s one indulgence in the otherwise spartanly functional arrangement of his working space was the devotion of an entire desk drawer to a selection of pipes, all nestled in burgundy velvet. He browsed and selected a white meerschaum. Slayton glanced at the pipe and recognized it as brand new by the coloring. He relaxed a bit. If this was important enough for Winship to devote an unsmoked pipe, a virgin pipe, and a meerschaum at that, to his presentation, then he was probably as uncomfortable with the mission as Slayton was with his goof.
The serious atmosphere was Winship’s concession to whomever had died. So, thought Slayton, the mission has finally gotten interesting.
Winship laboriously fired the pipe to life. The tobacco he favored today looked like stale seaweed, and smelled like damp carpeting.
“Two months ago,” Winship said, “a woman, the wife of a United Nations administrator, was admitted to Mercy General with a peculiar bladder infection. She began to have complications. A week after she was admitted, she attacked an orderly with an aluminum walker. They brought her under control, of course, but she has been totally incoherent ever since. Her husband is moving to divorce her and make her a ward of the state of Iowa, where her family lives.
“One month ago, the special assistant to a senator from Montana was admitted with similar symptoms. By then, news of the first case was common, thanks to the hospital grapevine. But he didn’t go mad. One night he choked to death on his own blood.”
Winship pulled from his drawer file a manila folder plump with xeroxed documentation, and placed it on the desk. “In rapid succession, several more cases followed. The incident that was in the Post a few weeks ago about the wife of the congressman from Utah—the one that was papered off as a drunk-and-disorderly? That was one. The death of the congressman from Arizona, the one that made the CBS evening news as a brain hematoma—that was another. This morning, an hour before I contacted you, another man died in Mercy General. He was our government’s ambassador to France. They’re already formulating a new cover-up. Heart attack, or something… that doesn’t really concern you.”
Slayton approached the desk, picking up the glass container of Starshine and holding it to the light coming through the immense, draped windows behind Winship. “And this stuff is involved?”
“In every case so far, according to the doctors. It is, unfortunately, the latest illicit fad among the Georgetown elite. Of course, we’ve had it analyzed to death and we recognize the active agents—there’s more than a little bit of belladonna in it, for example—but te
lling everyone what it is chemically won’t stop the people who are desirous of using it, as well you know.”
“Right. I’m just surprised I haven’t been asked to sign a petition to legalize it yet.”
“The traffic will continue. We need to deal with this on a higher level than just slapping the hands of the abusers who happen to be running the country—god knows, they’re about the only ones who can afford the stuff.”
“Starshine is probably on a lot of expense accounts as cognac or something similar,” Slayton said. Its use was not widespread enough even to be statistically significant. It might have been officially ignored or swept under the rug altogether, had not the death factor been introduced.
“I need you to infiltrate the familiars of that stuff,” Win-ship said. “We need to know where the pipeline for it originates, and cut it off at the source. The past few weeks are all the justification we need. If we wipe it out, thrill-seekers will simply find something else. They may even find something more lethal than Starshine. But if we don’t act, we’re not doing our jobs.”
“Are you asking me to attend a lot of those Georgetown parties on purpose?” Slayton said, suddenly amused.
“Whatever it takes. You have more stamina for that sort of social interaction than I have.”
Hockey-pucking through dense party after dense party, hoping to ferret out a lead to Starshine? Slayton groaned inwardly, knowing it was inevitable. The inexorable phoniness and stupidity that abounded at these so-called “elite” gatherings grated on his sanity. Had Winship at that moment asked him to unseat some banana republic dictator barehanded and alone, he might have gladly accepted that mission instead.
But of course, Ben Slayton was in no real position to refuse any mission.
“Tell me,” Winship said, “just why is this stuff called Starshine?”
“It’s supposed to originate in California, sir, specifically, Hollywood. Where it is said by sages that one may lie upon the sand and look at the stars. Or vice-versa.”
Winship snorted. “Of course.”
“The congressman—I have to know this, sir—wasn’t he the one who was so heavily behind the repeal of conditional fines for possession of marijuana a few months back?”
Winship nodded. That was when Slayton broke out laughing. He did relish the poetic justice of it all, even though the mission was, as Winship had asserted, serious business.
“I don’t think the primary connections will be hard to seek out,” Slayton said, changing tack as Winship puffed capaciously on his new pipe. “You realize, of course, I’ll probably have to go to California.”
“You already have the full cooperation of whatever law enforcement resources you’ll need there.”
“Any sort of time stricture on this, sir?”
“No. We just have to get to the root of this problem and wipe it out. Bear in mind that the interests that control Starshine represent not only illicit narcotics traffic, but a great deal of money as well. They will be primarily interested in keeping their operation safe. Considering the power brokers involved in this so far—we’re not merely talking government here, but the usual industry and business captains as well as their military counterparts—there could be some very well-insulated initiators. That’s mainly what we’re worried about.”
“Could be department heads manipulating the whole thing,” Slayton said, aware that one of Ham Winship’s conference-table equals might just as well be the head dealer for the Starshine traffic. He lifted the dossier from the desk. “I’ll take this and begin immediately.” He turned toward the door.
“One other thing,” Winship said to his back.
“I know, sir: ‘Don’t get killed and be home by eight.’”
“No. We both know that it’s your job to get killed if you have to, though I wouldn’t advise it. I was just thinking that there is a deadline on this assignment alter all.”
“Yes?”
“Crack this thing before someone else gets killed.”
Slayton left his superior behind amidst his own cloud of smoke.
3
“… of course, Roeg’s visual esthetic is the reason he has been denied the Hollywood-type accolades that come so easily to his inferiors—it has nothing to do with his choice of material, or handling of it. He began as a cinematographer, not a director. By not staying in his caste, he offended the sensibilities that dole out meaningless prizes like Academy Awards. When was the last time anyone mentioned Roeg for commercial merit on the basis of his directoral work?”
Slayton was capable of reciting the speech in his sleep. He had tried to mix, but as usual wound up dominating the group of five or six younger Washington socialites. The males were eventually reduced to nodding importantly in counterpoint to Slayton’s lucid dissections of the states of the various arts. The women, clutching their arms, gradually became more and more starry-eyed as Slayton spoke. The worst he had to deal with was an impulsive conversational attack by one impudent lad who, when nailed down, thought baroque and rococo were the same styles.
It was incredibly dull and time-wasting for Slayton. The progress he was making had nothing to do with the talk that issued so mechanically from his mouth and held the Washington coeds and senator’s daughters so hypnotically.
In the past week, attending two and three of these affairs a day, Slayton had gauged the ebb and flow of the social interactions themselves. He timed himself to the very pulse of the parties; in two days he knew which ones to avoid. Normally he would have shunned them all, but given the criterion of Starshine, he calculated which affairs to attend, and applied himself with a suicidal kind of verve toward being fascinating. It was like bagging a dead snake with a shotgun.
The aggregate phoniness was the worst thing for a sensibility like Slayton’s. The older stalwarts, with whom it might have been interesting to discuss politics, were generally only there to keep up social register appearances (“no comment”), or cruising to get laid. The kids were beautiful, but totally callow. Somewhere between, Slayton was certain he would discover a tie-line to Starshine.
“I was almost in a fight, once,” a falsely knowledgeable, man in an ostentatious crushed-velvet suit said, interrupting Slayton’s light story. Somehow the conversation had drifted to personal combat; Slayton had been keeping it light. It would not do to introduce the subject of deathblows and viscera-splattering assassination techniques to this wide-eyed gaggle of innocents. But traditionally, braggart muscles were flexed in this sort of exchange—Slayton could feel it coming. The man rattled on, having stolen the attention of most of the group.
“… and I felt cornered, I mean, what could I do, right? Well, he tried to grab me—I had Sylvia behind me, naturally—and I threw my arms up like this!” He jerked his forearms stiffly upward in a poor imitation of a karate stance he had most likely seen on television. “He hesitated, for just a split second, mind you, and I did this—” He shoved his clenched fist straight out ahead of him, like an off-target Nazi salute. “—and bash! He went down without a sound! I never thought that that practice would pay off, you know, you never ever do, but…”
The girl with him, who was obviously not Sylvia, at any rate, cocked her head as if to say what practice? He shushed her before she could protest.
Slayton did not have enough alcohol in him to rationalize showing the boy up for the fool he was, living in his little fantasy world. At the same time, nothing required him to endure such ego-balming fluff. It was clear that few believed the young man, and no one would challenge him. Slayton decided to stir up the soup a bit.
“Pardon me, young man,” Slayton began with a puzzled expression, “but did you say that you struck out in this fashion?” Slayton imitated the boy’s crude blow. There was a total absence of leverage or any muscular angle that would lend the strike true stopping power—it was a clumsy angle designed strictly for show.
“Yes,” the boy said, defiantly.
“And you claim to have stopped a mugger with such a blow?”<
br />
“Yes.”
Slayton shook his head. “That’s quite astounding, for a man with no training.”
The boy preened visibly. “Yes, well, you know, I was thinking of protecting Sylvia, after all.” He folded his arms, smiling, struggling to appear ten years older than he really was.
Slayton’s pleasant smile was aimed directly at him as he continued. “No, no, 1 meant that it’s astounding because if you held that sort of blow straight out and waved it around, you couldn’t even stop a taxicab with it.”
Suddenly it looked as though, like Dorian Gray, the boy’s face did age ten years, all at once. His eyes flared. He had been contradicted before his peers. Most of the group laughed. Slayton was still watching him, his expression unchanged, as though the others did not exist.
Finally, stepping forward, he said, “Since I’ve now made you look like a fool in front of your friends, let me show you something. Don’t worry, none of them have ever been in a real fight either. Now—” He stepped within an arm’s length of the boy, who involuntarily recoiled, stepping back and nearly tripping over his own feet.
“I propose that I am just such an attacker. Now, I want you to punch me in the face. Straight-arm, no mickey-mouse. And,” he said, turning to address the group as a whole, “I promise neither to hurt you, to deflect the blow… or to move out of the way.”
Somebody in the rear rank of the group went oh wow. Anticipation coiled around them all. Slayton realized what the young man thought he was being offered—a chance to show up this fast-talking asshole in front of everyone.
Slayton was the only person in the room who was totally relaxed.
“You mean… just hit you in the face?” the boy said, with a serpent’s grin.
“That’s right,” Slayton said. “Any time you’re ready.” He stuck his chin comically out, and the women laughed.
But his eyes never left the boy’s. Slayton could see the punch he had in mind coming from weeks and miles away.