Brainquake

by Samuel Fuller

  Another car approached the signs, turned down the driveway to the office. Two kids jumped out, followed by their parents. The mother was carrying a crying baby. The father went into the office, emerged with the key, gave it to his wife. The kids followed her. The father opened the garage of number eight and drove in.

  Room nine was on the corner. Its garage door closed. Window shade down. In room nine, Paul and Michelle were asleep. She was still half-sitting in bed, head slumped on pillow, the baby asleep beside her. Paul was still sitting on the floor, his head cradled on one arm across the bed. Soft music was on the radio. A whispered commercial was on TV.

  Michelle was the first to stir when she faintly heard her baby crying. The crying got louder. It awakened her. It also awakened Paul. They both discovered her baby was still sound asleep. The crying came from the next room.

  Paul turned the volume up on the TV. She did the same on the radio. Paul pulled the shade aside an inch. Sunlight struck his eye. Michelle kissed her baby awake, changed his diaper, gave him a bottle, which he sucked eagerly.

  Paul’s exhausted eyes began to close as he sat back on the floor. They shot open again when he heard:

  “This photo of Paul Page was given to the police.”

  He and Michelle stared at Paul’s face filling the TV screen.

  “Police say they have found prints on the murder weapon belonging to both Page and Michelle Troy. Both are considered suspects in the shooting. Arrest warrants have been issued, and the police are urging them to come in for questioning.”

  They were statues. Then one moved. Michelle lifted the baby, held it close.

  “My poor, poor baby!”

  Paul tried to calm her down. She buried her head against him. The baby in her arms began whimpering. Paul kissed the baby, kissed Michelle, kept stroking their faces.

  Michelle’s body was shaking. “What’ll happen to my baby? Oh, God, Paul, they’ll put him in an orphanage! An orphanage! An orphanage!”

  “They won’t find us.”

  She pushed away from him, clinging onto her baby.

  “There’s cops everywhere! There’s your boss’ people everywhere! There’s Eddie everywhere!”

  “We’ll hide.”

  “Where? Where? Where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Have to get out of the country.”

  “Where?”

  “I have an old friend in Paris…grew up with him…”

  “Paris, France?”

  “Yes.”

  “You trust him?”

  “With my life. With my baby’s life.” Then she couldn’t stop the horror filling her face. “But how can we get there? Ships, planes, everything will have cops watching. Do you even have a passport?”

  “No,” Paul said. “But I know a man who can help us.”

  “Oh, God, Paul. Even if we can get there, it takes money to hide. Money. Money!”

  “I have money.”

  “It takes a lot of money.”

  Paul lifted his bag from the floor, opened it. She stared at the brown-paper-bound stacks of cash.

  “Ten million is a lot of money.”

  27

  Sunlight flooded through Johnson’s bedroom window. On the bedstand, a clock, phone, opium pipe. On a shelf by the wall, a plaster bust of Homer he’d found thrown out in an alley near Greenwich Avenue. The base was broken, so he had propped it up with a couple of old paperbacks: a copy of the Iliad, one of Stendhal, and some old potboiler with its cover missing.

  The ringing phone couldn’t invade his world as he slept above his photo shop. It was a world where opium dulled constant pain, stopped his coughing, gently smashed anxiety. He was having his special dream. He and his friend Homer were in white flowing togas, reclining on a massive moving white cloud, smoking their pipes, discussing opium’s incredible virtues.

  “It’s a tragedy,” Homer said. “So few people know that it’s the drug of blessed sleep. I have contempt for cocaine in any form.”

  “Or morphine.”

  “Or any kind of shit.”

  “Or heroin.”

  “Detestable, Johnson. Made from crude opium, it dulls the brain. A cheap clone. Have you ever been in an opium den?”

  “No, Homer. Have you?”

  “No. What is that distant sound coming from below?”

  “Just the phone ringing.”

  “The what?”

  “Never mind.”

  “You know, some people prefer opium mixed with camphor.”

  “Or with hashish.”

  “And they smoke it like a cigarette. How disgusting.”

  “That paregoric taste.”

  “Disgusting.”

  “Ever tried Dover’s Powder?”

  “Cheap, cheap clone. They didn’t want to call it opium.”

  “I knew a guy who thought that powder would cure his clap. Idiot!”

  “Then there’s that barbaric needle…”

  “Uncivilized.”

  There was a pleasant silence as they smoked.

  “That ringing is very annoying,” Homer said. “It interferes with the rhythm of enjoyment.”

  The ringing became very loud and persistent. Johnson’s hand probed through the cloud, trying to find the phone. Johnson fell off the cloud. Homer kept smoking. Falling through space, Johnson picked up the phone.

  It was Paul’s voice.

  Johnson sat up in his bed. Paul was in trouble.

  “Where are you?”

  Paul told him.

  Johnson swung out of bed. “Stay in that motel room till eight tonight. What wheels have you got?”

  “Roadster.”

  “Plant it behind the billboard in that junk lot two blocks west of my shop. Cover it with busted cartons. Be at my alley door at 9:30.”

  Johnson put the phone down slowly but was thinking fast. A good smoke would help calm him down. But a pipe should be enjoyed. Not rushed. Under the shower his mind was thundering faster. He dressed swiftly, hurried down to his back-room studio, pulled up the trapdoor, turned on the light, flew down seven steps into his basement, cracked open what looked like a stone door, pulled the string. A bulb swinging from the ceiling revealed his workshop. He checked his supply of wigs, beards, dyes. The passport typewriter’s ribbon was new. He took out rectangular and circular official stamps, then checked the amount of wig gook he had left in the jar.

  He hurried upstairs to his cash register, pocketed all the cash, drove his pickup through early morning traffic, filled the tank at the gas station, bought a secondhand suitcase and a big, secondhand backpack he stuffed into the suitcase.

  Then he went on a shopping spree.

  Satisfied he had enough clothes, he bought more transparent tape, staples, scratch pads. Put everything in the suitcase except the staples and scratch pads, which he put aside in the small plastic bag they came in at the store.

  He drove off. It would be some time before he’d see Paul again after tonight. Perhaps never. Ten years ago Paul had made his first drop with Johnson—one of his first drops, period—and that very first time he had found Johnson in trouble, lying halfdead on the floor. Paul knew the rules about finding a drop on dope, but he didn’t report Johnson to the Boss.

  Paul had covered for him many times over those ten years. Johnson had told him he needed the drop fee to buy more and more opium. Paul had never said a word.

  Johnson didn’t fear death. But he hated it. It would mean the end of enjoying the pipe. Paul had given him years of life, years of enjoyment. He owed him.

  He parked his van in front of a diner, sat at the counter, ordered ham and eggs and black coffee and knew that soon his day of reckoning would come. Without Paul around, it would come sooner. Stepping out of his skin, he stood away from himself and looked at himself and saw what a failure he had become because of the pipe he loved so much.

  Born on the Bowery, he got his first high on glue when he was nine, putting together a small model plane his bartender father had giv
en him on his birthday. His father died in the saloon fire, his mother of leukemia a year later, and his own ambition, which he had forgotten, also died. So he became a cannon, got arrested, and wound up in a cell with Harlem Davenport, a passport forger who used to work in a photo shop that was a front for all sorts of illegal activities.

  They became friends. When both were released, Harlem opened his own photo studio uptown, gave Johnson a job, taught him passport forgery and got him hooked on the pipe.

  When Harlem closed the deal to use his shop as a bagman’s drop, he found a more lucrative photo shop in Detroit, used the up-front fee to make a downpayment, and left the New York shop to Johnson to run. It was Johnson’s responsibility to keep the shop doing business and to collect his $500 a week from Pegasus for keeping their bags circulating.

  A man sat down next to Johnson in the diner and ordered cereal with milk, read his paper. Johnson saw Paul’s picture on the front page. GUN WIDOW AND TAXI DRIVER SOUGHT FOR MURDER was the headline.

  When Johnson approached his shop, Officer Benson was looking at the photos in the window. Johnson swung into the alley, parked his van, got out carrying only the small plastic bag.

  “Morning, Officer.”

  “Morning, Johnson.”

  Johnson unlocked the door. The cop followed him in, closing the door. Johnson walked behind his counter, took out the scratch pads and box of staples from the plastic bag. Behind the counter was a stack of leather photo albums in different colors for sale. Next to the albums, a file box with customer names. Next to it, a box with yellow envelopes holding pictures ready to be picked up.

  Officer Benson picked up a can that had a slit on its top for coins, studied the sticker: DAMON RUNYON CANCER FUND. The can was old. The sticker was old. Officer Benson shook it. Coins rattled. He dropped a quarter through the slot.

  Office Benson said, “I never thought this kind of shit would hit the fan.” He unfolded a newspaper, planted it on the counter. Page one, with Paul’s three-column photo. The same headline as the paper in the diner. “What the hell do you think made him snap?”

  “Why’re you asking me?”

  “You knew him.”

  “Not well. Hardly said two words to me, any time he came in.”

  “Thought he was a decent sort. Turns out he’s just a thief with a hard-on. Couldn’t resist all that cash he carried every day. He’s made it rough on all of us.”

  “It’s going to be rougher on him.”

  Officer Benson dropped another quarter through the slot. “We’re all up shit creek if a kosher cop nails him before the Boss does.”

  Johnson hoped Paul got to Omaha Beach safely. Hoped even more that it didn’t show in his face.

  Officer Benson ripped off the top sheet of the scratch pad. He wrote down a number. “A hotline’s been set up. You hear anything about that thief, phone this number.”

  He gave the sheet to Johnson.

  “Memorize it. Burn it. The price tag on him is five hundred grand.”

  Five hundred. Jesus.

  Johnson couldn’t help himself from asking, “And if he’s got the loaded bag on him?”

  “An additional million.”

  28

  In the bright full moon, the Boss was driven along the waterfront. A slim man was waiting for them near a small motor launch. Max stopped the car. They looked at each other. Both knew what the result would be. But she had insisted. The longer she could postpone the hunt for Paul, the more time he would have.

  When she told Max her idea, he knew he was sitting next to a dead woman. So he asked her what she wanted him to do with her body. Bury or cremate it?

  He couldn’t blame her for what she did. She owed Barney a lot. Max wouldn’t have done that for anybody’s son. Not even for his brother’s son. Or would he have?

  It was the first time in Max’s life he was about to be an accessory to suicide. He didn’t have to tell her how he felt. His face was a corpse. He hadn’t and never would talk about Samantha’s existence to his superior. He promised if he ever did meet Samantha, he would take her to Rebecca’s phony grave with a phony gravestone in a legitimate cemetery and explain how her mother had died in an auto crash.

  It was time.

  “Thanks, Max.”

  “Goodbye, Rebecca.”

  She got out. Max drove off. She strode to the slim man. He helped her into the launch, then jumped in himself.

  On the deck of the yacht, three men watched the launch approaching in the moonlight. With Hampshire were two of his lieutenants. He told them to leave him. They left.

  Alone, he saw her coming closer. He could have asked Father Flanagan to handle her, but curiosity about what she’d done stayed his hand. Max, always the go-between, had filled him in with only the particulars Rebecca had shared.

  Hampshire helped her aboard. The launch turned around, headed back to the lights of Manhattan.

  “You came to make a personal pitch,” Hampshire said. “Make it.”

  The Boss couldn’t hide the surprise in her eyes.

  “I owe a lot to his father. Paul was like my son. He fucked up—but he didn’t do it to hurt us. Or to help himself, or to get rich. He fell in love.”

  “You’re making the pitch to give him time.”

  “It’s my only chance to help him.”

  “You struck out before you came to bat. I knew who Paul was early this morning.”

  The Boss reeled.

  “When an indie cab driver’s wanted by the cops, Security checks the names of every bagman in the five boroughs. He and the widow’ll probably make their move tonight to get out of the country.”

  “Max knew nothing about the widow.”

  “I know.”

  Hampshire put his hands on the rail, looked at the skyscraper lights.

  “You were dead the minute the bagman broke the rules. You didn’t phone Max. But you didn’t run off, you came head-on, hoping having the guts to face me would be of some help to Paul. It was a wasted gesture. Ten million isn’t important. Opening the bag for himself is. Pictures of that thief have been faxed to every office we have, and put in the hands of informers all over the world. If the police get him carrying ten million dollars, they’ll know it’s bag money, and they’ll resort to old-fashioned methods to make him talk, and he’ll talk, and he’ll name names. He’ll name Pegasus and the FBI will move in and then he’ll name Mr. Railey and Mr. Railey is jello and he’ll name me—all this because of a bagman with a bankrupt brain.”

  All the Boss could say was: “He’s sick.”

  “Who isn’t?”

  He raised two fingers toward the cabin.

  A few minutes later the two lieutenants finished binding the Boss with rope and iron weights. She never tried to struggle. She showed fear in her face but didn’t fight to live. The two lieutenants threw her overboard. The last face she saw was Hampshire’s. It was a cipher face.

  Through the moonlight, fish investigated the distorted eyes and distorted open mouth of Rebecca Plummer being pulled down into darkness.

  29

  Facing the camera for his passport photo, Paul was unrecognizable. Bronze makeup masked the tape tugging down his left cheekbone, changing the contour of his eyelid. Long-haired dark wig with ponytail. Dark brown beard. Earring, necklace. Battered brown leather jacket.

  His picture was taken.

  The baby was asleep in the chair.

  Paul removed the gear, scrubbed off the makeup, removed wig, beard, tape, and donned his clothes.

  Michelle checked her makeup, line of her mouth made slightly fuller, shiny black wig, gypsy earrings, gypsy necklace, gypsy blouse under old blue men’s jacket.

  Her picture was taken.

  She removed wig, makeup, jewelry, slipped back into her clothes. On his passport typewriter, Johnson had entered their new names and U.S. birthdates, making Paul one year older and Michelle two years younger.

  Paul placed both wigs in a cardboard box, the jewelry in a small leather pouch, s
hoved them in with the makeup box and clothes in the bulging suitcase.

  Johnson pasted their photos in their passports.

  Paul signed Henry Smith on his. Michelle signed Gaby Smith on hers. Johnson stamped the date, then ENTRIES/ENTREES, POLICE NATIONALE, CHARLES DE GAULLE, FRANCE in both passports and looked at his watch.

  “Time to go,” Johnson said. “Got the two hundred grand ready, Paul?”

  Paul nodded.

  “Twenty thousand for the car?”

  Paul nodded. Then he opened his black bag. “Take some.”

  Johnson stared at all that cash, pulled just the top $100 bill from one stack.

  “That all?” Paul said.

  “Enough for ice cubes.”

  * * *

  Johnson’s pickup passed Van Cortland Park, veered through a heavily wooded area, pulled up under a clump of trees. They got out, heard engines warming up.

  Paul had the suitcase. Michelle held the baby and the blue diaper bag.

  “Minute I get back I’ll get rid of that roadster.” Johnson pointed. “You’re going behind those trees. Hangar near a dirt runway. Go to their office. You’ll see two men, Woody has a beard, Cappy doesn’t. Give Cappy the two hundred grand and say only two words to him: Brobant farm.”

  * * *

  Silhouetted against the full moon, Cappy’s small two-engine plane headed toward Newfoundland. The steady drone had put the baby to sleep in Michelle’s arms. To make it more comfortable for her, Paul sat across the aisle by the window.

  Michelle wasn’t disturbed. She’d had no chance to be alone to phone Eddie, but there was time. Paul was looking out the window. He turned toward her. His face was blank. She smiled back. Not a word had been exchanged between them. They were as silent as Cappy, at the throttle of the six-seater, staring out into blackness.

  Michelle’s eyes roamed to the suitcase on the floor behind Paul. In it was their future. Hers. Eddie’s. The baby’s. It was a future that could only be created by angels, and each of them had a private angel. Thus far she didn’t even have a sliver of guilt about her plan. Paul had told her about the tinge of red in the pink brainquake. He had told her how his father’s brainquake exploded in red just before he died. He said he wanted to write a poem about how the slow change from pink to red meant death.