Bad Monkeys

by Matt Ruff

  I got a job sweeping floors on the night shift. My first night on, I caught Dr. God alone in the break room and gave him a taste of his own medicine.

  That was it for the Bad Monkeys op, but I decided to keep working at the home for a while. I needed the money. It turned out Annie’s lottery stipend was a special deal just for her; whenever I bought scratch tickets, they were losers.

  You didn’t ask Bob True to provide you with a salary?

  Nah. After squeaking through Probate, I figured I wasn’t in a position to ask for anything. Besides, when I thought about it, it made sense: I was supposed to be doing this for the good of the world, not for a buck. And it’s not like they had me killing bad guys every day. I had more than enough downtime to manage a second job.

  So I stayed on at the home, and even took a shot at having a personal life. I made friends with some of the night nurses and started going to breakfast with them after our shifts ended. There was also this cute doctor, John Tyler, who came in to replace Dr. God. I tried to get something going with him.

  Did you?

  No. I’d hang around the break room with him, you know, dropping hints, but he wasn’t interested. And not that I’m God’s gift, but I figured that probably meant he was gay. Then one night when he was off-duty I was sweeping the floor outside his office and noticed the door was unlocked. I decided to snoop a little, see if I could confirm my suspicions—or if he wasn’t a lost cause, find some clue to what might float his boat.

  There was nothing out in the open. Nothing in his Rolodex, either. I started checking desk drawers, hit one that was locked, grabbed a paper clip…and then, when I had the drawer open and saw what was inside, I reached for the phone.

  True was waiting for me on the roof of the nursing home at dawn. Catering had set out chairs and a buffettable, and as I came out of the stairwell, I saw a guy puttering around the tea service. I might have taken him for a waiter, except he looked more like nearsighted Gestapo: blond crew cut, black leather trench coat, and these thick pebble glasses, you know the kind they stopped making once plastic lenses were invented?

  And this was Dixon?

  Yeah, although I didn’t catch his name right away. He didn’t introduce himself, and I was in too much of a hurry to tell True what I’d found to insist on the niceties.

  “The drawer was full of pictures,” I said. “Pictures of little boys. Not, like, hardcore stuff; they were cutouts from mainstream magazines, product ads mostly: little boys in blue jeans, little boys in bathing suits, little boys in underwear…I suppose there could be an innocent explanation, but what makes that hard to believe is how many of them there were. I mean, we’re talking stockpile, hundreds of images…”

  “Five hundred and forty-four, at last count,” said True. “There’s also a catalog of parochial-school uniforms hidden at the back of the X-ray drawer in his filing cabinet.”

  “You already knew about this?”

  “Eyes Only,” True said.

  It took me a minute to get my head around the concept. “You bug children’s underwear ads?”

  “An obvious strategy for identifying pedophiles. Though perhaps not as cost-effective as initially hoped.” He glanced at the guy in the pebble glasses, who was sitting down now, stirring his tea.

  “So I was right. Dr. Tyler is a bad monkey.”

  “He has potential.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that so far as we know, he’s never laid a hand on a real child, or even tried to. He just thinks about it.”

  “So what?”

  “So, wicked thoughts alone aren’t enough to classify someone as irredeemable.”

  I couldn’t believe it. “You’re not going to do anything?”

  “We’re evaluating him. If it’s warranted, we’ll arrange a Good Samaritan operation to get him some counseling.”

  “That’s it? You might make him see a shrink?”

  “I was referring to moral counseling, actually,” True said. “If his own conscience isn’t enough to keep his impulses in check, I doubt psychiatry will be much use…What is it you’d like us to do, Jane? Execute someone for keeping magazine clippings?”

  “Well if you’re not going to send me in, you could at least let people know about him.”

  “And beyond ruining the reputation of a man who’s done nothing wrong, what would that accomplish?”

  “Jesus, True, do you really need me to spell it out?”

  “I do appreciate your feelings in this matter…”

  “You appreciate—”

  “You’re a proactive personality,” True said. “When you see a potential threat, you want to eradicate it. That’s a useful instinct in a hunter, and it’s one of the reasons you’re in Bad Monkeys. My desires are a bit different, however. Like you, I want to fight evil, but I want to fight it effectively. In particular, I want to make sure that when the organization acts, it’s out of a reasonable expectation of a positive result, and not just for the sake of doing something. That’s why I’m in Cost-Benefits. And that’s why you take your orders from me.”

  I didn’t trust myself to respond to that, so instead I jerked a thumb at Pebble Glasses. “And what does he want?”

  “This is Mr. Dixon. He’s attached to Malfeasance.”

  Malfeasance is the Panopticon subdivision that investigates operatives; it’s the organization equivalent of Internal Affairs. “Did I do something wrong?”

  Dixon looked up from his tea. “In my experience,” he said, “the proper question isn’t ‘Did I?’, but ‘How much do they know?’ Then again, there’s a first time for everything. I’ve always wanted to meet a truly innocent person; maybe you’ll be her.” He plucked a card from a hidden pocket in his coat sleeve. “This is the current location of my office. Come by this evening at eight o’clock. We’ll chat.”

  “Uh, my shift here starts at nine-thirty. Will that be enough time?”

  “Eight o’clock,” Dixon repeated. He stood up. “Don’t be late.”

  I waited until he’d left, then turned to True: “What the hell is this about?”

  “I don’t know. Dixon called me last night, right after you did, and said he wanted to meet you. I assume it has something to do with your background check.”

  “I thought I passed Probate. Why would Malfeasance still be running a background check?”

  “They’re always running it.”

  “And you have no idea what they might have turned up?”

  “Dixon didn’t say.”

  “Well, is there some way I could find out before I go see him?”

  “Try asking yourself,” True suggested.

  “Asking myself what?”

  “Whether you’ve ever done anything evil.”

  The address on the card was for a video arcade in the Mission District. I was surprised to find it open for business. I stood by the entrance, checking out the crowd—most of them were too young to be anything but civilians—and wondering if I had the right place, until this guy in a change apron came up and tapped me on the shoulder. He pointed to a sign on the wall that read, ALL TOY WEAPONS MUST BE SURRENDERED BEFORE PROCEEDING.

  I looked at the guy. He tugged at his earlobe, which was pierced with a monogram earring that had the letters OMF in gold. I gave him my NC gun. He tucked it into his apron and brought out a yellow elastic band that he slipped around my wrist. The wristband was tight and had some sort of metal contacts on the inside, and right away it started my skin tingling. While I was still adjusting to that, the guy slapped an ice-cold can of Coke into my other hand. He pointed to another sign: FREE SODA WITH SURRENDER OF WEAPON. Then he nodded towards the rear of the arcade and said, “He’s waiting for you.”

  I started back. The Coke can was freezing my hand, so to warm it up I popped the tab and took a big gulp. It was like drinking liquid nitrogen; my whole mouth went numb, and when the Coke hit the back of my throat I spiked an ice-cream headache that made my eyes water.

  The arcad
e seemed to go on for miles. Every time I reached the end of a row of machines, there’d be another one, and as I went farther in, things started to get strange. The kids manning the joysticks were replaced by gnomes, blond gnomes with pebble glasses and leather trench coats. The machines changed too, Virtua Fighter 3 and Dance Dance Revolution giving way to games with more of a Seven Deadly Sins theme. And the images on the screens…Let’s just say, the Concerned Parents Association wouldn’t have approved.

  Finally I came to a door marked EMPLOYEE INTERVIEWS. I took another sip of Coke, knocked, and went in.

  Dixon’s office had a single overhead light fixture, like a search lamp mounted in the ceiling—the bulb was like a thousand watts or something, and if it had been angled at the door instead of aimed straight down, I’d have gone blind on the spot. A long folding table had been set up in the cone of the lamplight. The left side of the table was piled with paper, mostly old-fashioned computer fanfold printout. The right side was reserved for a sleek laptop, its screen flickering with a cascade of green figures.

  Dixon stood with his back to the door, flipping through a sheaf of printout and pretending he hadn’t heard me come in. I took this for a standard interrogation tactic: he wanted me to speak first, to establish that he was the one in charge. Instead I drank more Coke, slurping it. The belch at the end seemed to get his attention.

  “It’s 8:09,” he said. “I told you to be here at eight.”

  “Yeah, well, you didn’t tell me about the walk in from the street. How long is this building, anyway?”

  He turned around. Some sort of device had been attached to his glasses: a tiny arm extended from the top of the right lens, dangling a clear plastic rectangle a half-inch in front of it. The rectangle flickered, green, in tandem with the flickering of the laptop on the table. It was completely geeky, but it was also kind of hypnotic.

  “Do you know why you’re here?” Dixon asked.

  Another interrogation tactic: get me to guess what I’d done, and maybe I’d volunteer something he didn’t know about. I shrugged and played dumb. “True thought it might have something to do with my background check. So what, did you find some unpaid parking tickets?”

  “Der schlechte Affe hasst seinen eigenen Geruch.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s a saying we have in Malfeasance. Not as pithy as ‘Omnes mundum facimus,’ but it serves us.”

  “Well don’t keep me in suspense. What does it mean?”

  “It’s an observation about human nature,” Dixon said. “One difficulty we have in running these background checks is that our information-gathering apparatus is so effective, we end up drowning in data. Of course we have technology to help sort through it, but even machines have their limits, and a brute-force search of an entire life—particularly one that hasn’t been all that well-lived—eats an enormous number of computing cycles. So we try to find clues to help us narrow the search space…Loosely translated, Der schlechte Affe hasst seinen eigenen Geruch means that people are most deeply offended by moral failings that mirror their own. The minister who preaches a tearful sermon against fornication: he’s the one you’ll find sneaking out of a brothel at midnight. The district attorney who crusades against illegal gambling: look for him at the track, betting his life savings on Bluenose in the fifth.”

  “If you’re trying to say that people are hypocrites, that’s not exactly a newsflash. And what’s it got to do with me?”

  “Who told you to search John Tyler’s office?”

  “No one.”

  “You just intuited somehow that there was something to find?”

  “No, I was just being nosy. I’m like that.”

  “How many other offices did you search?”

  “Well…none.”

  “What about the nurses you’ve been having breakfast with? Did you go through any of their purses?”

  “No.”

  “What about their lockers?”

  “No, but—”

  “So you’re not that nosy. Why single out Dr. Tyler?”

  “I thought he was cute, OK?”

  “Oh. So you were stalking him?”

  “No! I was just checking him out…I mean, I don’t know, maybe I did get a vibe off him.”

  “A vibe.”

  “Yeah, like you said, an intuition. That there was something not right there.”

  “But then what about the nurses?”

  “What about them?”

  “Two of them have been stealing painkillers—shorting their patients’ dosages—and giving them to their boyfriends to sell. Strange you didn’t get a vibe about that. Maybe if they were taking the drugs for personal use, your intuition would have picked up on it…”

  “Look, where are you going with this? You think I zeroed in on Tyler because I’m like him?”

  “Are you?”

  “Hey, if you’re worried I’ve got my own collection of magazine clippings, you’re welcome to search my apartment.”

  “We already did.”

  “OK…So you know your schlecky-affa-whatever theory doesn’t hold water.”

  “It’s often a related transgression, rather than the exact same one,” Dixon said. “Just to be thorough, I ran a check of your reading history to see if there were any signs of inappropriate sexual interest.” He held up the batch of printout he’d been looking at when I came in. “That search was more fruitful. Tell me, do you recall stealing a book from the San Francisco Public Library when you were twelve years old?”

  It was such a left-field question I almost laughed, but the funny thing was, I knew exactly what he was talking about. When he said, “Do you recall,” it was like my brain got zapped with some kind of flashback ray.

  And what was he talking about? What was the book?

  Anaïs Nin’s Delta of Venus. Moon’s mother had a copy, and Moon and I used to read it to each other during sleepovers. Eventually I decided I wanted a copy of my own, and hooking it from the library was easier than shoplifting it.

  “How do you know about that?”

  “Library Binding,” Dixon said.

  I thought he was talking about the anti-theft strip: “But I didn’t take it out the front door.”

  “No, you tossed it out of the second-floor girls’ bathroom window. That branch of the library lost a lot of books that way.”

  “OK, I’ll cop to stealing it. But what’s so inappropriate? I mean, Delta of Venus is smut, but it’s literary smut.”

  “It’s a curious sort of literature, though, isn’t it?” Dixon said. “For example, the third story in the book—the one entitled ‘The Boarding School’—concerns a young student at a monastery who is ogled by priests and sexually violated by his classmates…This is what you consider wholesome erotic entertainment?”

  “I don’t remember that story.”

  “Don’t you? I’d have thought it was a favorite. According to my records, you read it nineteen times while the book was in your possession.”

  “According to your records?”

  “Library Binding.” He offered me the printout. “There are some other items here I’d love to get your comments on.”

  I started going through it. It was crazy: a catalog of every piece of porn and erotica I’d ever laid eyes on. Not just titles, either—there were notes about specific scenes, even specific paragraphs I’d paid special attention to. And you know, it was bullshit, what he was implying, but with all of it thrown together on one big list like that, I could see how someone with an overly suspicious mind might get the wrong idea.

  What else was on the list?

  Well, De Sade, of course. Assorted Victorian gentlemen—in college, I must have gone through the entire Grove Press library, I mean, who the hell didn’t? Henry Miller. William Burroughs. Anne Rice.

  At first I was kind of mortified, you know? But as I got further into it—it was a long list—I started to hit stuff that was harder to be embarrassed about, books and stories that weren’t technically smut at
all, even if they did have sex in them. Towards the end the list-maker really seemed to be reaching—there were even a couple of Shakespeare plays, I think. And then on the last page, I found the weirdest entry of all…

  “The Bible?”

  “November 13th, 1977,” Dixon said. “One of the few times you were actually in church. Eyes Only caught you lingering over a passage in Genesis—the one where Lot offers his virgin daughters to the mob in Sodom and Gomorrah.”

  “Uh-huh…And because I lingered over this Bible verse, you think I might want to sacrifice a real virgin to an evil mob?”

  “If you’d lingered over it nineteen times, I’d certainly have cause to wonder. Just the once, we can probably write off to prurient interest…Although I do find it curious you were laughing as you read it.”

  “Right.” I shoved the printout back into his hands. “I get it.”

  “You get it?”

  “Yeah. You can tell True to get bent.”

  “Ah…You think Mr. True told me to give you a hard time about this.”

  “I questioned his call on Tyler, didn’t I? But this isn’t even close to being the same thing…”

  “You are laboring under at least two misimpressions right now,” Dixon said. “The first is that I care whether you’re comfortable with Mr. True’s policy decisions. Trust me when I tell you, putting low-level operatives’ minds at ease isn’t one of my concerns in this life.”

  “What’s the other misimpression?”

  “That I disagree with you about Dr. Tyler. If it were up to me, the organization would deal much more aggressively with him—and all others like him. Unfortunately, like you, I have to defer to Cost-Benefits. And even if the decision was mine to make, my dream solution wouldn’t be feasible.”

  “Why not? Because everyone has sick fantasies?”

  “No. That’s just something people who have sick fantasies tell themselves, so they can feel normal. But there are enough of you to make a clean sweep logistically impractical…” He waited a beat before adding: “People who act on their sick fantasies, though—that’s a more manageable number.”

  And just like that, I finally got it, what this was really all about: he knew about the pet boys.