The Lure

by Felice Picano

  Other scientists, looking at the psychosociological model Loomis had designed, and at its solution, would call them “elegant.” Mirella Trent, for example, would rave over its structural beauties.

  The fragile but very real split within himself came together with one thought: how could he ever escape the Fisherman’s control, when he hadn’t even known until now it existed? Eric’s hold on him, even Alana’s, were as ribbons to steel bands.

  Or was that entirely so? Reading the condition he was supposed to be in, his first thought had been, Yes, this is how it is. But his second thought had been, So what! It’s not so bad. It’s true. All true. But despite it all, despite even the danger, I’m alive. Not unhappy, somehow; stupidly, not unhappy. Whatever happened, it was happening to him, and would never have happened if he hadn’t made a choice on that March morning at the abandoned warehouse. True, he was living on the edge. But the edge was making him more alive than ever before.

  So, he didn’t believe he could kill Eric. At the same time he suspected that if the circumstances were slightly different, he really just might. That was the problem.

  He stopped, realizing he’d circled the table many times. He looked at Priscilla Vega, concerned, patient, holding a cup of cold coffee in her hand. Then he sat down.

  “All right,” he said. “Granted. I’m the bomb. How do we defuse me?” As though weighing something, she looked him over for a long time before she spoke.

  “We did not tell you this before,” she began in a low, carefully modulated voice, “because you were supposed to become schizophrenic if you ever did find out. You were supposed to split apart into two people, and then destroy yourself.”

  “I did split apart into two people,” he said. “Just now. But it didn’t last.”

  “Which means the programming is not perfect. As Buddy and I thought. But why isn’t it perfect?”

  “Does it say anything in here about a woman?” Noel asked.

  “Much. Two women. One would put you off, reject you. Another one you would reject after abusing her in some way. They would together make you disgusted with all women, which would intensify your problem.”

  Noel searched himself for the truth, then said, “But I’m not disgusted with all women. And she’s the reason why not, I think.”

  “The one who rejected you? She’s attracted to you because you are fulfilling her need for a certain type of man.”

  “It’s true. I know it. But I don’t care. Alana’s too good to me. She cares for me. I don’t know if anyone else does, but she does. I think that’s what has thrown off the programming.”

  “Maybe,” she said, sounding unconvinced. “But what if you are not defused now? What if you are still dangerous? Perhaps even more dangerous, because now you are an unaimed weapon?”

  That was another jolt. But it made sense. It would be just like Loomis to build in every safeguard. How much of his everyday life in the past six months had been predictable, given over to someone else to determine? The man hit by the car, for instance. The night in Le Pissoir. How much more? His life had been changed not only in large areas—his work, his friends—but in details, too: the hours he kept, the stimuli around him, even the music he’d been listening to was different. His schedule was disarranged, his values shaken, his former life all but gone, and his new life constantly unsettling. Could Loomis and his computer—he had to be using one—could they predict, say, when he brushed his teeth, or if he brushed his teeth? Possible. Incredible. But possible.

  “Noel!” Priscilla was shouting at him, shaking his arm.

  He came back to her. “It was happening again: the splitting apart business. But it’s all right. It will help me to understand exactly how to get around this.”

  She stared at him.

  “I’m okay. Really. Now how do we defuse me?”

  “Buddy had a plan. Not based on statistics or psychology or anything fancy like that. But we discussed it several times. He thinks it would work.”

  “Thinks!”

  “Thought, I mean. Please. I know he is dead. Sometimes I can’t believe it. But I know it.”

  Very gently, Noel asked what Buddy’s plan was.

  “You know why Buddy had to leave the Navy?” she asked.

  “Yes, but…”

  “Not for the reason he told you. He was a thief. He was asked to steal documents from one group by another. He was caught. It was all hushed up. He became a civilian and sometimes a man from the government would come to see him and ask for him to steal something. Then this top policeman came to ask Buddy to work for him. He knew he was a thief.”

  “So Buddy was supposed to steal those dossiers and show them to me?”

  “Those, yes. But Buddy got suspicious about you. When he read your dossier, it reminded him of some other papers he’d come across that he later knew he was not supposed to find. Those are the reports we were not supposed to know about.” She indicated the photocopied reports attached to the psychological weapons plan.

  Noel began reading one, then went on to the others. Each of them detailed the activities of a former AIN control. All were successful assassins. In all four cases, the men were now retired on some sort of pension, even though one of them was younger than Noel, and all of them were happy, oblivious to what had occured. They simply did not remember what they had done.

  “Look at that last one,” she instructed. “Not the print, that mark there.”

  “It looks like some sort of institutional seal,” he said, barely able to make it out

  “Buddy had it blown up and copied darker. This is it.” She pulled another paper from the accordion envelope. The stamp was larger, clearer. At the top, Noel could easily read the name of the social research agency in Albany that was paying his salary for Whisper. How had Eric characterized them? “Very right wing. Very conservative. Very against social change.”

  Priscilla went on: “We don’t know exactly who they are. But Loomis is connected with them. Buddy was certain the police do not know how deeply this group is involved. Only two copies of these memoranda were sent to the Police Department records files. Both were initialed by people that he discovered were merely secretaries. Then they were filed away in ‘disbursements,’ indexed only for special retrieval. Buddy was the first person to take them out since they were filed.”

  “That wasn’t predicted?” Noel asked.

  “Only you are predicted. You are the weapon, not Buddy. He was merely supposed to find the dossiers and show them to you. Nothing more. It was because they made it so easy for him to steal the dossiers that he got suspicious and went back to look again. This AIN and psychological weapon plan the papers kept referring to intrigued him. So he decided to see for himself. That’s how he found this. It is only you who are planned for. He was dispensable,” she added bitterly.

  “But if, as you think, they killed him, then they must know he found all this, too,” he said, shaking the papers she’d given him.

  “No. It was his stupid telephone call to you. Your telephone is tapped. But he was so excited!” Her voice sank to a murmur.

  After a minute she told him Buddy’s plan.

  It wasn’t as complex or fail-safe as Loomis’s master plan, but it sounded effective. All this material was to be brought to the attention of the police commissioner by Noel, the Lure himself. Priscilla would go with him to corroborate everything. They’d explain how a homicide investigation had been transformed by Loomis into a psychological weapon proving ground for the upstate social research agency. They’d ask to have Loomis taken off Whisper. Noel would resign. Without the circumstances, the weapon could not be used.

  Noel thought about what she said. He wasn’t sure it would hold enough water with the police commissioner to disband Whisper.

  “We need something more substantial,” he told her. She was silent a short while, then, “What about graft?”

  “Graft? Between Loomis and this agency in Albany?”

  “No, between him and organized cri
me.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “We monitored the loops for twelve days. Buddy had three other phones installed and connected up and we listened in on them. Anytime someone used the loops, Buddy or I would take down what was said. I used to be a stenographer.”

  “My calls, too?” he asked. She nodded yes. “Go on,” Noel prodded. “If what you’re saying is true, this is what we have to go for.”

  “It’s true. There is a fourth emergency loop. Never used to our knowledge by anyone but Loomis. He used it twice in the time we were listening, to call a man named G or Gee. They never talked more than a minute or so, even though it was a special loop. They were always brief, businesslike, usually arranging meetings. The last meeting they had was last week. Another one is due in two days.”

  “So you didn’t hear anything really about graft.”

  “Yes, we did. Both times Loomis reported progress on his ‘mutual’ interest with Gee. Gee in turn reported that his lawyers were working out a suitable manner of payment. They discussed the transfer of stocks and bonds over a period of a year and a half, from one dummy company to another feeding into Loomis’s bank accounts. We wrote down all the information. Some payments had already been made. For previous ‘bounties’ which Gee’s ‘associates,’ as he called them, were very pleased about.”

  “It still sounds too vague.”

  “As soon as Mr. X is killed, his territory will be bought up again, by some contact of Loomis’s in a city agency. They’ll condemn the properties, then sell them in a rigged auction to Gee’s friends. Loomis assured Gee that this contact of his was already partially paid off.”

  “He said that?”

  “You want to read what I took down?”

  “No. Later. Did they mention amounts of money?”

  “Absolutely. I have all the figures on paper. Loomis was to get five percent of the final price. They estimated that Redfern’s gay businesses—clubs, discos, baths, bars—were worth about ten or twelve million dollars. They couldn’t touch his private holdings.”

  “Five percent of that is a lot of money,” Noel said. He now understood why Loomis was so hell-bent on eliminating Mr. X. If it were true. “Loomis told me himself that organized crime had dropped out of gay businesses because they weren’t so profitable,” he argued.

  “Maybe so. They are profitable now. And now they want them back.”

  And Eric’s dream would be destroyed, Noel thought. Eric’s dream of an economic/political power base that would unify gays against those who’d always exploited them: the mob, the police.

  “Then Loomis was lying to me all along about those men being murdered,” Noel said, recalling the Fisherman’s impressive first visit.

  “He wasn’t lying. They were killed. Buddy thought Whisper eliminated them in an attempt to scare this Mr. X out of all of his businesses out of the city. But he wasn’t scared. And that’s when Loomis tried to work out a scheme where he would pin all the deaths on Mr. X, who was closely associated with all of the victims. Evidently in the middle of that scheme he discovered these AIN control plans, and decided that would be the most efficient method of eliminating Mr. X.”

  “We need real proof of this deal,” Noel said.

  “The next meeting is in two days in a Horn and Hardart cafeteria on Fifty-seventh Street. Loomis and Gee will meet as though by accident, have lunch, and discuss it.”

  “How do we get near them, how do we get proof?” Noel asked. He still had to convince himself all she had told him was true.

  “Buddy bought this a few days ago,” Priscilla said, going to a kitchen cabinet and taking out a portable cassette recorder the size of a small transistor radio. “To tape their next conversation. He became obsessed with what Loomis was doing, Noel. He felt sorry for you, but it was more than that. He didn’t want his children to grow up in a world where it is possible to use people as you are being used.”

  Noel inspected the recorder, read the directions, then tried out the demo tape with the recorder under the table. It was fine inside a quiet kitchen. But there would be a great deal of background noise in a large, public restaurant. How could they get close enough to tape the two men there?

  “Buddy thought I could do that,” Priscilla said. “We planned to have me go to that meeting to tape them. But I don’t know who Loomis is.”

  “I’ll have to be there, too,” Noel said. “Hidden.”

  After discussing it, Priscilla declared she would go, with her baby, not only to disarm suspicion, but to provide a hiding place for the recorder close enough to the men’s voices, in the baby’s lightweight, folding stroller.

  She would carry parcels with her, as though shopping, speak only with a heavy Spanish accent, if possible seem to not understand English at all. Noel would check out the cafeteria beforehand to get more ideas about placement, possible problems and solutions. He and Mrs. Vega would meet the following day near the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park, as though by chance, and go over any remaining details in their plan.

  “After you’ve taped the conversation,” he said, “give me the tapes, then take your baby and go to Puerto Rico, to your great-aunt.”

  “But you will need me to tell…” she protested.

  “If all this is true, then none of us is safe, you or your baby.”

  “It is true!” she protested again. “Safe from Loomis, you mean?”

  “From Loomis, yes,” he said, admiring her courage, her resolve to avenge her husband, “but you said it yourself, Mrs. Vega, I’m an unaimed weapon. You may not even be safe from me now.”

  She looked at him, but she didn’t argue the point.

  4

  What Priscilla told Noel numbed him. He knew that if he began to think about its implications—as had happened before—that he would begin to split apart into two people. As predicted. With no assurance the split would come back together again, as it had before. But then, wasn’t he imperfectly programmed? If it were true. Which it appeared to be. If imperfect. Whatever that really meant. If it didn’t mean everything. Which was where the splitting began again. Stop it! he warned himself.

  He hailed a cab going down West End Avenue, jumped in as it swerved to the curb, and immediately began making conversation with the driver in order to shut off the inner dialogue—what did he think of the traffic and the best way to get to the East Thirties from where they were, the decline of a local rock music station, varieties of drug down trips. It was bizarre but effective therapy. Noel tipped him a dollar and went up to his apartment, calmer.

  It didn’t last long.

  I’m a human time-bomb, he said to himself as he unlocked the door. Then he rushed to the phone to dial Mirella. He didn’t know what he would say to her, but just to hear a voice from his old life would help. Or had that last time with her, the time he had screwed that up, been controlled, too?

  She wasn’t home. He didn’t leave a message.

  He still wanted to talk to someone, decided on Redfern. Just to hear his voice, to prove to himself it couldn’t be true.

  Okku answered. There were voices in the background. He must be on the main floor. After a grunt or two, Okku was gone, and Alana answered. “Eric is busy right now,” she said.

  “Sounds like a party.”

  “You are feeling better?”

  “Fine. You? What’s going on there? A party?”

  “No. Cal and Geoff and Rick and a few other people are here. They are getting together about the reopening party at Window Wall. Are you coming?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, then wondered whether she was asking about the party or the town house. “If they’re working, I’ll just be in the way.”

  They hadn’t talked alone, it seemed, for such a long time. He wanted to apologize: for the last time, when she’d run out of the dining room, and for his behavior to her out at Fire Island. To say, sorry, but I’m a human time-bomb and what if I’m pointed at you? He couldn’t say that. Not even if it were true. And he wouldn’
t know that for sure until he heard Loomis say it.

  “Eric said to ask you over,” she said simply.

  “What about you? Don’t you want to see me, too?”

  He could picture her talking to him. She was probably in the library, her legs thrown over the low arm of the big, tufted-leather chair, her hair hanging half in front of her, as she dandled it while talking.

  “Every time I see you something bad happens. You get hurt. I get hurt. Eric becomes more convinced of his…whatever it is.”

  “Come on now, it’s not all that bad,” he said.

  “It is!”

  “When did I hurt you?”

  “Yesterday. The time before. On the beach. I am tired of crying over someone, Noel. There! I’ve said it. That’s what you wanted to hear, wasn’t it?”

  Part of him, yes. “Tm coming uptown right now.”

  “No. Exactly because of that, you ought to stay away from me. From Eric, too. Go away, Noel. Go somewhere very far for a very long time.”

  “Then you come here, tonight. Stay with me.”

  “That only ties it tighter.”

  What she was saying was true. Except the part about Eric. Even if Noel did nothing, went away, Eric would still be in trouble. “I’m coming. Tell Eric.”

  “I’ll tell him,” she said. She didn’t sound pleased.

  They were all in the big living room—Geoff Malchuck, Rick, Cal, Jimmy DiNadio, “Marge”—sitting around the coffee table, which was spread with plans, sketches, diagrams, swatches of fabrics and carpets, pads full of graduated colors. When he entered, everyone seemed to be talking at once between tokes of marijuana and sips of wine.

  Chaffee spoke first. “Congratulate me. I’m a husband.”

  “We’re living together now,” Jimmy said quickly. “It’s very shared, if you know what I mean.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s more open,” Rick said.

  “Open? What do you call open?”

  “I call going to the Tubs together on buddy nights open.”

  “That’s your definition of open.”

  Before the developing argument could get fully under way, Noel congratulated them, drank a toast, then sat down next to Eric, who made a space next to himself for Noel and immediately held up an artist’s rendering.