Startled, Perk shouted back, “I told you!” Then to those eyes, he added, “Sir.” Then, to more of the same, he murmured, “Well, gosh, I thought I did.”
“Then tell me this. Do they like you?”
“Who—you mean civilians? People? Well, sure. I mean, I guess so. I mean, why shouldn’t they? We help them.” He looked up quickly at that cliff of jowls, and away.
“So you joined the cops so people would like you.”
“No! No, I mean, that isn’t it at all. I just wanted to help!”
With a dreadfully slow, terrifying landslide sort of flow, the old man leaned forward until his elbows reached his knees and the full weight of his great torso came to rest on them. “You are going to be the chief of police here—chief of police in the biggest city in the whole country.”
“Me?” Years later, and for all those years, Perk was to cringe at his memory of that moment, and each time he was to wish he had the moment to live over again, for he squeaked. “Me?”
“You qualify, down the line. You’re the first man I’ve seen who does. All the years I served, and ever since I retired thirty-four years ago in the year 2000, and mind you, retired or not, I never took my eyes off the force and what’s been happening to it, I’ve been looking for that one man to be the kind of chief I was, yeah, and better.”
“Oh no, sir—no! Never that!” Perk was genuinely scandalized.
“Don’t you ‘no’ me, you limp little dick!”
“I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t mean … I mean, I’d like that, more than anything in the world I would, but it’s so—so big that I’ve got to be honest. I’m not the best there is. On my last competence survey I scored eighty-seventh. The time before that I scored forty-sixth. If my next one shows a continued downturn, I’ll think about resigning.”
“You’ll do no such a damn thing. I’ve been looking for you for fifty years and I ain’t got another fifty, let’s not kid ourselves. I’m shootin’ my wad with you, and you’re goin’ out of this room today on your way to the top. You’re goin’ to give this city the kind of police it used to have, if you have to personally make this city what it used to be. Hear?”
“Y-yes sir.”
“Okay. Lesson one is why you, and 99 dot four-9s percent of the police wanted on the force, an’ what I tell you you will never and I mean by God never, repeat to anybody, most especially a cop. Do you really understand that?”
“Yessir,” but it was inaudible. Perk when his lips and tried again. “Yessir.”
The old Chief heaved himself upright and folded his forearms, which was as far as his arms would fold. Out of their caves, the eyes trained downrange like artillery. “From time to time it comes to a man that he wants to straighten other people out, that he was put on the world for that—to see to it that other people toe the mark, and toe it because this man said so. Now a very small handful of them could do it all by themselves, because there was a certain something about them that made folks listen, made folks move.”
“Charisma,” Perk murmured.
“Shut up, I’m talkin’. Mohammed, Marx, Hitler, Gandhi, Jesus, FDR, that feller over there in Hungary I can never say his name right ten, twelve years back. You’re the schoolboy, you know the ones I mean. They could do it and they did, but that thing they had, it comes to one out of dozens of millions. All the rest of it, the wanting to straighten other people out, there’s thousands of them born with that. But when they try to move people like Hitler and Jesus and them, they just get laughed at. So what do they do? They join the police force. Not the Army, the Navy—those guys can to straighten out only other Army and Navy guys. The police, they get to straighten out everybody.” The old Chief raised a heavy forefinger and marked time with his words. “An application to try for the force is an open admission that a man hasn’t got the muscle to do what he wants to do, by himself. His uniform says to the world that he isn’t complete, that he’s some sort of amputee. His club and a side arm and his badge are the muscles he admits he does not have. You got to know that about yourself and about every man and woman from rookie to chief—away down deep they feel impotent and mad that they can’t straighten people out with their own muscle.
“Guys who really want to help—” (he made the word scathing with mimicry) “—wind up in the fire department.” He spat on the carpet.
“If you know that about the force, and if you’re the only one who does, you got a handle on them. You know who to order into what action, you know who has the most to prove and needs to prove it the most. That’s how you make your appointments and promotions, and that’s all you need to handle things inside. But that’s not enough to bring the force back to what it should be.
“What you got to do—and I’m telling you, you are the one that is going to do it—you got to forget if people, I mean that ocean of dumb-dumbs out there, if they like you or not. Respect you, sure, admire you, sure, but if they all like you, you failed, you’ve lost the chance to bring back the kind of power we had when there was such a thing as money, I mean the kind you counted out and passed around from hand to hand, and before the IDs with their bio-sensors, and the mobe, and the freeze, and like that. Can’t you see what’s wrong? Nobody’s afraid of you anymore! Time was when a highway patrolman stopped the car for a soft tire or failing to signal a lane change—this was before the radar waves—the guy in the car would pull out a gun and blow the cop’s head off. And it got so when the guy was stopped on a highway and reached into his pocket for his chewing gum because he was nervous, the cop would blow his head off. Nobody likes to see cops killed, or even civilians, but back then there was always fear, back and forth; people were scared of the cops, the cops were scared of the people. Only, because of that thing I told you about, that kind of amputation, it made the cops tough and mean because it gave them something special to prove. So in those days, sure, cops would find little girl’s lost puppy-dogs and all, and when someone you’re afraid of does the like of that, they are special, boy, special, and they knew it. And that’s what we’re going to bring back. What you are going to bring back. Volstead. That mean anything to you?”
Perk had to shake himself. The old man had perhaps more of that thing he claimed was amputated, that charisma, than he realized. “Volstead. The Volstead Act. Eighteenth amendment. It was against the law to manufacture, sell or transport alcoholic beverages.”
“Oh, you are the little schoolboy,” sneered the old man, but wasn’t there a touch of admiration in it? “It was a dumb law—the dumbest part was getting it into the Constitution, because it made everybody who boozed a federal criminal, and when you have millions of people violating one part of the Constitution you can’t expect them to take the rest of the real serious. Aside from that it was great. For the first time it gave the law the chance to infiltrate and raid and hire informers and make and take payoffs—move in on the citizens. Sure, the citizens fought back in a lot of ways, from apathy to gun-fighting, but it gave the cops more reach than they had just busting unions and chasing burglars. It couldn’t last—the law, I mean, it was too stupid, but by the time it was repealed the force had a taste of what it was like to walk the beat and see people back off and lam out and sit there worrying till the bull walked by. Marijuana.”
“That’s been legal for forty years.”
“Forty-three,” said the old Chief smugly. Inwardly, Perk decided to be a little less accurate. It did the old man a grain of good to be one up on the schoolboy. “Ah, that was a great time. The greatest of all. Outlawing tobacco was small potatoes compared with the marijuana thing, because by then we were pretty well computerized and had sensors out everywhere, sniffing for tobacco. Marijuana was made to order for law enforcement; honest to God, if you was to draw a blueprint for some one thing that would put pride into that empty place in all cops, it was marijuana—pot, we used to call it. Booze, now, you needed a still and you had to feed it with grain and sugar in big lots, big enough to flag long before you even knew there was a still. Hard dru
gs and mindbenders, like LSD and DMT, you needed a laboratory and skilled chemists. And the street price got so high that big bundles of money were as easy to notice as big bundles of grain and sugar back in Prohibition days. Prostitution even—that used to be against the law—it had to have a place to happen in some way to contact the public, all the time, every day, every night. But pot, now, it’s a weed, it’ll grow anywhere for anybody, indoors, in the back of the closet with a little UV light. It never did get out-of-sight expensive, and you can carry a couple of sticks around that would make a hell of a lot less bulge than a bottle. It spread like you wouldn’t believe, all over the country, all up and down the income brackets. It was in the poverty belts for the longest time, at first, poor damn drones, it was the only thing most of ’em could afford to hide from their troubles and that was all right with the force, because if there is anywhere you want to lean hard on it’s the poor. A lot of revolutionary stuff starts with them, and stealing and mugging and the like, and it’s a great thing to have something like pot to go cruising for, something cheap and easy to get and you can smell it! Back in the Prohibition days, the biggest killer gangster of them all, name of Campone—”
Perk opened his mouth to correct him, then learningly closed it again.
“—they never got him for anything he ever did except he didn’t file his income tax, and for that they jailed him. Well, pot in a small way was like that. You may not have anything on a suspect except you don’t like his looks, chances are you can pat-and-frisk and come up with some marijuana; one time, before the law eased up, we jailed a guy, he was one of those against-the-war kooks, for three seeds we found in his coat lining! There’s another guy, used to preach LSD like a religion, they nailed him in Texas with four ounces of weed, gave him thirty years. That cut down on the preachments a whole heap. You see what I mean.
“Rule two is that the idea some rookies got—maybe you had it, I don’t know—that in the long run the police are in the business to eliminate themselves—well, that’s just wrong. There was a time when dentists claimed they would teach folks to take such good care of their teeth they’d never need dentists; some doctors used to do the same kind of promo. I’m going to give it to you straight; if ever a time comes when there ain’t enough crime around to maintain a police force, somebody will make new crimes, or make something everybody does or eats or drinks or rubs on their belly a crime; but if they don’t, it’s up to the police to do it. Just don’t get caught at it, is all. There’s always better ways.
“Pot, now, it was full of better ways. Like in that war we fought in Indo-China, there was all sorts of good grass around there, and when the Army got gung-ho about the soldiers smoking it, some officer sniffing one stick in a whole barracks and handing out dishonorable discharges, the soldiers quit grass, which didn’t hurt them, and switched to heroin, which did, just and only because heroin don’t smell. This was great for us when those junkies got home, because the stuff they got here wasn’t pure like what hooked them, it was cut ten times over, and cost so much they couldn’t feed their habit without robbing and stealing; oh, we had a ball with that. The next time you hear that marijuana leads to hard drugs—well you don’t hear that anymore, but it was our Number One chant—remember those soldiers. Pot smells. Heroin don’t.
“Oh God, those were the days! The money that went around! I remember a government study ’way back in ’72, the figures …” The old man laughed; it was not until then that Perk realized his own perennial wonderment: did the old Chief ever laugh? Had he ever? There was indeed an unpracticed tone to it, but it was real and hearty. And brief. “I used to sing myself to sleep with them. A hundred seventy thousand low-level dealers in the US, makin’ about $250 a month each. About a third got busted each year. Got that? Now, the cost for bustin’ dealers and potheads in California alone was forty-three million in ’69, it went up from there, and a healthy slice of that came to us. You think we were about to lean away from a shower o’ gold like that? We had PR blowouts and block meetin’s all over, warning against evil, suggestin’ it was a commie plot (you wouldn’t know what a commie is, or was) and when the facts started flowing the other way we ignored ’em, when they got too deep to ignore ’em we took refuge in: As Long As It Is Illegal We Will Uphold the Law.” His voice supplied the complacent capitals. “Cops can always do that. No cop is required to debate the justice of the law, don’t you never forget that.”
“Was it dangerous, then?”
“Hell no. There is a big study clear back in 1899, the British, where it showed up practically harmless. Even before that a limey doctor name of Birch used pot to cure a chloral hydrate addict and a dude hooked on opium, by steering them to pot and then withdrawing the pot; in the Carolinas, in ’59 two doctors were curing addicts and alcoholics with a derivative. I even remember their names, Thompson and Proctor, the doctors, not the addicts.”
“And the government didn’t—”
“The government just lost the papers, and we, why we upheld the law. Long as there was a law,” he added regretfully. “Finally all that was left was a law against growin’ it, an’ even that faded. Now the government has quality control on ten thousand acres in Mississippi and grows a breed of marijuana so much better than you can grow yourself that it just ain’t worth the little trouble it takes.” He sighed. “Take away ‘forbidden’ from the fruit, sell it over the counter like candy bars, make it so a smoker ain’t rebelling against anything, an’ then you find what it really is and where it’s at: a big percentage of folks with a high threshold, got to suck a bomber and a half to get where other folks go with two hits; another big percentage just don’t like the taste or smell and can now admit it; and worst of all, it ain’t like tobacco and alcohol; it just ain’t addictive. Pretty soon a rock group is singin’ it plumb out of fashion.”
“I know the one,” said Perk, and recited (he did not dare sing):
Heroin will get you dead
LSD will mess your head
Marijuana gives a buzz
Just because you think it does.
Who needs it?
“That’s it,” said the old Chief, and sighed again. “With tobacco gone, pot pulls one and a half billion in taxes, and damn little of it comes our way.
“So!” he rapped, and again landslid forward to catch his weight on his elbows and knees. “Here’s where you come in.
“First of all you got to change your ways. You got to stop wearin’ your education an’ good manners like national flags so everybody knows what you are and where you come from. You got to act dumb, talk dumb but do everything right. Any time you open your mouth it’s an opinion, not a fact. Here’s a secret weapon: always act dumber than you are, and everyone will treat you like a dumb-dumb, an’ you’ll always win. You never read nothin’, you never learned nothin’ but the P.D. book o’ rules. Aside from that you say every stupid thing that comes into your head, as loud as you can. Always remember that there’s only two kinds o’ people you got to worry about—big shots an’ morons. You listen to the big shots an’ you talk to the morons—in moron talk. Never mind in-betweens, the smarts. The big shots got the power an’ the morons got the vote, and that’s a combination the smarts can’t beat, there ain’t enough of ’em.
“All you need now is what they had in the old days—something you can watch for everywhere, on anybody. Once it was books, would you believe? Or certain kinds of meat. Alcohol. Marijuana. Tobacco. Anything, long as most people are users an’ it’s illegal. You an’ your boys are going to frisk-and-search. Stakeout. Infiltrate. The Marias are comin’ out of mothballs, the courts will jam up again. We’re goin’ to have a force again. Proud. Respected. Feared. There’ll be a black market start up. You’ll let it get big an’ smash it for the news cameras. You’re goin’ to be Chief. What’s that?”
Startled again, Perk followed the pointing finger. On a broad windowsill stood a handsome plant with thick, fleshy, sword-shaped leaves. “Wh—oh. Aloe. Aloe vera.”
“
Tell me about it.”
“Everybody knows. Everybody’s got some. Cuts, scrapes, fleabites, it stops the pain, stops the itch as soon as you squeeze out the jelly and wipe it on. My roomy, she uses it for a hair rinse, face cream. That brown inside layer, it’ll cure constipation. It cured my—”
“Well don’t stop there.”
“Piles,” said Perk with difficulty.
“Cured my stomach ulcer, too. Sunburn. Scalds, burns, it leaves no blisters. Grows anyplace, indoors or out, likes to be neglected. Pups out in three, four months, stick the pup in another jug an’ you got two. In six months, a dozen. In a year, one hundred. Too bad, but progress always costs.”
“You don’t mean … but—there’s nothing illegal about it!”
“Yet.” The old Chief rocked slowly back and effortfully raised his eyes. “There’s a lot of heavy money don’t like the aloe vera a bunch. It snuck up on ’em; nobody saw it happen. Cosmetics. Pharmaceuticals. Ethical drugs. Doctors. All we need is a medical opinion, it causes infantile sexuality. All we need is a Bible scholar discovers the snake hid it in the Garden. All we need is a DOA with his stomach full of aloe vera infusion. All we need is a little panic an’ aloe’ll pile up in the street like snow; mind you, I know; folks ain’t been scared in a long time now. Then all we need is a Board of Health Condition Red: rotting aloe can cause the plague.”
“You’ll never get a doctor or a priest to—”
The hating eyes open wide for a terrible moment, and then half closed. “Want to bet?”
Perk slowly rose to his feet, while the Chief crooned, “Now you go on down to HQ and get yourself braced up, because this is goin’ to be your show. Do it right, an’ next time around, you are goin’ to be Chief.”
Case and the Dreamer Page 21