INFINITY HOLD3

by Longyear, Barry B.

  Was it because I had been the executioner? I was no cherry. It was a little late in the game to be crying over a lost innocence that had never existed in the first place.

  Maybe it was carrying everyone's hate for being the gang cop. Maybe that was part of it, although getting everyone in the world to love me never had been my thing. I never did want what was in your heart. I was after what you had in your pocket.

  Still, it had been everyone's job to take out the soiled spot of Dick Irish. I was the one, though, who had done the laundry. I took out the spot and was hated for it. A few of the tears were for that.

  From my past I remembered a bit of conversation I had overheard in a police squad room in one of those monster piles of human shit that ringed Philly called King of Prussia. I was cuffed into a holding chair, and a stain that was old enough to be my father was tapping my current credits into his terminal while I was trying to look bad-assed to cover up the sick fear I felt.

  My contribution to the information updating exercise had been over for some time, so I was just a piece of furniture while I waited to be taken to Lancaster Juve. Every time that old stain would stretch, take a break, or look around the squad room to rest his eyes, he would look right through me. I was a piece of meat to be processed, and it was easy to see that and hate it. That way I gave my fear a hiding place.

  While I was trying to kill the old stain with my eyes, a young cop, maybe only twenty-five or so, stopped in front of the old guy's desk. I had noticed the tears of anger in the young cop's eyes and the garbage stains on his pretty blue shirt.

  "What're you cryin' about?" asked the old stain, you know, real sensitive like.

  "They threw garbage at me! I took that bloody murdering bastard out of that building, and the people he was killing threw garbage at me!"

  "What'd you expect? Flowers? Money? Gratitude?"

  The young stain worked his mouth a bit, but he had no words. The old stain leaned back in his chair, clasped his hands over his belly, and studied the young officer for a moment. Then he looked me square in the eyes and said, "Listen up, Pancho."

  "My name is Bando, pigshit."

  The old stain nodded toward the young officer. "This is Patrolman Danner, Bando. Danner and his partner are big heroes today. They managed to track down and apprehend Henry Vicat, the Old Gulph Slasher. The Slasher murdered at least nineteen that we know about in the Gulph district, and now Henry Vicat's neighbors can sleep again at night. What do you think about that?"

  I spat at the young stain, but I couldn't make the distance. It probably had something to do with a dry throat. The old stain smiled and looked at Patrolman Danner. "There you have it, youngster. The civvies out there don't notice dog shit unless they step in it. Once they do step in it, however, they have all kinds of things to say about those whose responsibility it is to keep the dog shit off the sidewalk. That's what we are, Danner: turd pickers. We're society's poop-scoops.

  "If the civvies don't step in the shit, they never think about the thing that picks it up. Civvies look at us like garbage collectors, sewer workers, undertakers, and proctologists. They're really not comfortable about shaking your hand. Know what I mean?" The young stain was staring daggers, but the old guy kept at it.

  "But we're a little worse than them in one respect. See, the civvies never identify with garbage, sewage, the dead, or even with their own assholes. However, they do identify with the turds we scrape off the sidewalk. Every powder-puff deadhead who murders nine bystanders on his way to get high that we stick in front of a jury has this going for him: Every juror has a piece of knowledge stuck in his gut that says, there but for the grace of the Great Juju go I, which is why they threw garbage at you when you arrested Henry Vicat."

  "It's wrong," said young stain Danner. "It's not right."

  The old stain went back to his terminal. As he typed he talked. "Danner, there are only two reasons a sane person can have for being a cop. The first reason is the cob, getting on some golden boy's dole and squeezing it down to the last drop. The other reason is because it's a job that needs doing, and doing that job is a satisfaction. If your purpose is to get gratitude, resign and become a priest."

  I thought long and hard about that conversation. Somehow I understood the young cop a bit, but I wished I could talk to the old stain. I had tried to spit on him, too, but the old guy was pretty nimble and had sidestepped the shot.

  I picked up a handful of sand and let it trickle through my fingers. This was Tartaros. Was Earth really done past? It became warmer and beneath my sheet I removed my parka and shirt as the heat increased. I tied them into a bundle that I could sling and pulled the white hood over my head. I turned to my right to keep the sun off of my face as a piece of truth came to me.

  It was the responsibility of being Mr. Po-leece-man that was weighing me down. I was sinking under it. I felt trapped, like I was being eaten by hogs. I didn't know what to do. I thought about what some of the stains and smears I had known on Earth had done with their responsibilities. Let them slide, and if you can grab a cob on your way out from under, do so.

  What would happen if I eased out from under it like I'd seen and heard about so many times before? There were stains who took corn from the dealers and players. Black rags weren't above sucking a cob, either. Every day on the vids, scandal after scandal about another tycoon, general, politician, judge, or vid star who had been caught with a dusty nose or sticky fingers. Only once every winter in Hell did you hear about one of those nibs going down to the crowbars.

  No one had to take my word for it. All anyone had to do was ask former First Minister's appointee to the Office of Procurement, Clark Antess. No one could have been forced to believe that Antess would have gotten the idea to grab the three million on his own. His type doesn't even park in a crip zone unless everyone else is doing the same thing. Everyone had to know that there were others—lots of others. But, just for the sweet old record, no one ever pressed Clark Antess very hard for names, did they? That was the difference between stealing three million and thirty million. Thus endeth the lesson.

  The ones hired to keep the rules dumped on the rules worse than anyone else. It was written: a crook's only a crook, but to fuck over the law big time, you need a lawyer. That was one reason why dirty cops and black rags with sticky fingers never lasted long behind the crowbars. After being sent down, they would be thinned in a matter of hours after being released into the general pop.

  I think the reason was because of this fantasy the sharks believed in. The fantasy went something like this: If all you cops, judges, and politicians were honest and did your jobs with integrity and courage, the world would be a much more livable place.

  I think, deep down, sharks would like to believe in honesty and goodness—something better than themselves. No one dropped more scorn on a cop who can't be bought than a shark in the crowbars. But deep down in his guts was an admiration for the untouchable cop. Even when they cuffed you and dropped the clock in your lap, they were like rocks, islands, in an angry sea of slime.

  You could see the pain in their eyes when a crooked pol, cop, or judge made the news. The sharks'd snicker, nod, and crack wise about them like, "No kidding? A crooked cop? Go figure," To show how wise and yard smart they were, the other sharks would laugh knowingly.

  If you watched the way I watched, though, you could see that twitch in a jaw muscle, that downward glance, that nervous biting at the skin inside the lips, that symphony of impatient gestures that sharks do when they feel betrayed and don't want to let anyone else know. Every time it's like finding out for the first time that your father drugged, your mother slept around, that God left a few loose ends. The crooked cops hurt the killers. They hurt everyone in the pits.

  They say one crooked cop hurts all cops, but no one ever suspected that a dirty stain hurts the sharks, too. But like any other Santa Claus that gets blown away, the law turns out to be just that: a fantasy, a made up thing, a joke, a game to be played for power and profit.
The dirty cop or judge, just by being there, confirms to the shark what the man with his face in the toilet always knew: this is as good as it gets. This is why this is as good as it gets.

  The cops would always say to the vids that the cops who were sent to prison were killed just because they were cops. That was not true. In fact I knew several ex-cops behind the crowbars who were just as liked, respected, and accepted as any murderer or psycho in the place. Two or three of them were with the column. None of them, however, were in the pits for taking corn and looking the other way. The three ex-cops I was thinking of were all in the Crotch for murder.

  One woman cop had thinned her wife-beating husband. The other two, one male and the other female, both from different cities, were sent down for doing a little of what the Chopper had done big time.

  The male cop was called Cap. He was a lanky red-haired former police captain from Atlanta who had been trying to put the shutters on a local sleaze boss called Lou Imagia. The sharks used to call him Diaper Lou because his specialty was providing, for a price, little boys and little girls for sex and snuff parties.

  Diaper Lou certainly didn't want to go to the crowbars. Not only would he be cut off from his kiddies, after we got hold of him his balls would have been cut off just prior to his being cut off from his supply of oxygen.

  Maybe three out of every five sharks in the pits, male and female, had been molested as kids. That's why they always saved the slow strangle for child molesters. It gives you time to reflect upon your past life of misdeeds when it takes fifteen or sixteen minutes to die.

  So, Diaper Lou couldn't afford the rent in the crowbar hotel, which is why he had sharp money threads and a couple of black rags and stains chewing on his cob. After Cap's third case against Diaper Lou blew up in his face, it became clear that the system was never going to get Lou Imagia, and the snuff-a-kid franchises would go on until the sickos found some other way to get rid of their money.

  After he returned from court, Cap ordered his men to close the investigation on Diaper Lou. That night, behind a wall of security systems and guards that made it easier to get at the First Minister than at the kiddie-snuff boss, the captain closed Diaper Lou's file for good.

  Cap got away clean, too, and turned himself in the next morning. For turning himself in, not for being an ex cop, the sharks used to give him a hard time. Anyway, the case turned into an election year rights and ethnic thing, so Cap found himself in Ol' Miss doing the rock clock. The way we thought of the captain, any shark who made a move at thinning Cap would have been committing suicide.

  The female cop, Marantha Silver, had been a top inspector in the UTR Ministry of Justice. The MJs had a lot of respect in the hotel, because when they were on the job instead of on the cob, they could put together your life story from the remains of your gerbil's three-week-old fart.

  As the story went, agent Marantha had been assigned as part of an investigation by the MJ into drug moneys being used to purchase off-the-rack political candidates. The vids had uncovered the story first, and at Blackhall the First Minister reacted with a public protestation of his innocence and a proclamation of his support of the MJ's thorough and complete investigation of the matter. A clean sweep was the order of the day.

  It was the public order, anyway. On the block and in the backrooms, it was business as usual. Maybe Marantha Silver was just too thick to understand what had been expected of her. Maybe she just hadn't gotten the word. Maybe she had gotten the word, and just didn't give a damn.

  Anyway, she took the investigation right into the First Minister's office, and that was when the MJ started emptying sacks of marbles on the nicely swept floor. Press secretaries started sending their own press secretaries out to talk to reporters, platoons of ranking witnesses turned out to be too ill or too dead to testify in front of committees or in court, and "Marantha who?" became a whispered joke in the halls and craphouses of the Ministry of Justice.

  Marantha was taken off the case, she was assigned to another station four thousand miles away from the First Minister's office, an investigation was begun on her background and finances, three hundred some odd agents collected up and grilled old boyfriends and girlfriends, former classmates, teachers, employers, and supervisors and subordinates of hers at the MJ.

  From her criminal past the MJs had turned up a student loan that she had repaid several months late, and there was someone who had once been a fellow student back in the eighth grade who was doing six-to-eight months for mugging the secretary of a law firm. For some reason the implications of this set of circumstances staggered the viddies. Sure, plenty of viddies had climbed on the cob, too. Being on the tube didn't keep you clean. There was serious talk of a special prosecutor.

  When news of the special prosecutor cockroach leaked out in a flood, I remembered a yard guru I liked a lot named Stogie Gomez remarking that, if she lived long enough, we would see Marantha Silver in the Crotch.

  "There's no room in the MJ for a good cop this year," he had said. At the time I thought he was farting through his hairpiece, but fourteen months later agent Silver was dropped through the crowbars into the women's side for murdering another agent. Her plea of self-defense was considered preposterous. The idea that the MJ and Blackhall would stoop to having one of their own agents hit to cover up the First Minister's dirty fingers was not even considered, except in the crowbars.

  Stogie Gomez had pointed out that Marantha's jury had consisted of too many angel-cake social uprights who were too inexperienced to be able to believe that anyone in high government positions could get dirty, even a first minister. If the trial had been held inside the crowbars, the jury of sharks would have cut her loose in a second. Then they would have arrested and convicted her for her stupes.

  Anytime during that whole thing, Marantha could have taken the smart way. She had been close enough to make Blackhall sweat, so there must have been plenty of cash offers. Right now she could have been rolling in the long green and serene instead of trying to stay alive upon Tartaros. She just hadn't been smart.

  The same thing with Cap. He'd been to Disneyland; he'd seen the duck. The smart door was right in front of him all the time, and he slammed it in their faces. Plain stupe, right?

  Maybe it was something else. Maybe it was something that every shark would like to believe in, but can't. Maybe some people just don't feel comfortable on a cob, no matter how much corn they get. Maybe an oath means something to some people. Maybe there is such a thing as an honest cop.

  Okay, maybe Cap was just a little squeamish about taking money over the corpses of little kids who had been raped to death. But the smart way was still there for him. He didn't have to take any corn. He could have just looked the other way and let that horrible responsibility slide. If he'd kept his eyes shut he'd still be a police captain in Atlanta, maybe even chief of police, pretending to serve and protect.

  Then I thought, maybe people like Marantha and the Cap don't like pretending about certain things. Maybe they hate it; hate it enough to rather die than do it. Trying to understand someone like that made me shake my head in despair. Me, I would have taken the money, shut my mouth, and considered myself both smart and lucky.

  I was crying because I had never felt so unworthy before in my entire life. Unworthy to do a job. Unworthy to do this job. Unworthy to do it right. Anybody could be a crooked cop. What would it take to be an honest one? A competent one?

  I heard soft footsteps in the sand behind me. I turned, looked up, and saw Alna. She stood behind me, put her hands on my shoulders, and began rubbing them. "It's daylight, Bando. Why didn't you come to bed?"

  "I had some thinking to do. You heard about Dick Irish?"

  "Yes." She squatted next to me and rested her face on my shoulder. "You did what you had to do."

  I stood up, brushed the sand from my blues, and looked down into Alna's eyes. "Lady, what do you say we get to a place where there's grass and trees, maybe a few mountains, a pond, a quiet little valley? What do you say
about striking out on our own? Nobody to watch out for except you and me. What do you say?"

  She stood as her face blossomed into smiles. She lifted her hands and fiddled with the drawstring of my hood. "I'd love that, Bando. Just you and me?"

  "Just you and me."

  "We could build a nice little house, couldn't we? Do you know anything about building?"

  "I can learn, even if I have to teach myself." I held her chin in my hand. "Back in Lancaster Juve I once taught a rat to sit on its hind legs and sing."

  "You what?" She pulled her head away and raised her eyebrows at me. "You never taught a rat to sing." She turned and began walking down the shady side of the dune. I followed.

  "I thought it was singing," I said. "The other sharks thought it just sounded like eeee eeee eeee eeee eeeeeeee, but to me it sounded like The Russian Easter Overture."

  I put my arm around her shoulders and she put her arm around my waist and said, "Bando Nicos and his singing rat. Give me a break." We both laughed, and I clung to the laughter.

  "The rat was named Brunhilde!"

  We laughed some more, and I hoped I wouldn't cry. Brunhilde was still at Lancaster for all I knew. God, I loved that rat. It was the only thing besides my sister that I had ever loved. My sister, a rat, and maybe one day soon I would trust myself and Alna enough to love her. Maybe today was the day.

  Alna and I found a place alone and made love for the first time. I don't know about rocket ships flying and fireworks going off. Out in the sand it was enough just to feel a little tenderness.

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  A Room With a View

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  As we slept in each other's arms, I dreamed about a tiny wooded valley with a clear running stream. I was sitting on the bank of the stream looking up at the top of a hill. That would be the place for our house, I thought. A nice view, plenty of trees for shade and firewood. The water was down where I was sitting, and I started thinking about digging a well.