by John Gardner
“Coffee, Mr. Craine?” asked the woman behind the counter.
He jumped, both hands flying, then glared at her, shaking, covering his embarrassment with anger. “Coffee,” he snapped at her, stalling while he thought. “Coffee, yes. Don’t I always have coffee?” He glanced at the Scotch in its sack, as if not quite sure.
She wearily shook her head, threw a look at the man to the left of him, and poured.
Craine smiled in sudden panic and gave his neighbor a wink. He was himself again, he thought; hard as iron; no ambitions, no regrets. He watched the sway of the woman’s seat as she moved away again, then, catching himself, frowned. It seemed to him now, though perhaps it was in his mind (he was certain of what he saw, yet it was queerly like a dream and he was assailed by doubt), that the shabby man on the stool to the left of him—a miner perhaps, bearded, uncombed, with milky blue eyes—leaned close to him and whispered, spraying toast from his lips, “ ‘Shall the body be raised from the dead?’ That’s what Our Savior asked the Pharisees and Sadducees. Some said one thing and some said another—the texts were indefinite, there were conflicting traditions. Said Our Savior, ‘You are quite mistaken!’ ”
Craine looked at the man, almost certain it was the same one who’d come to him last night with the pamphlet. The man stared back mildly, his narrow lips trembling with emotion. Craine drank the coffee down scalding hot and called to the waitress for another. “I didn’t sleep much,” he explained to the bearded man beside him. “As a Christian, I’m sure you’ll understand my predicament. I can’t seem to wake myself up.” Craine laughed, slightly spitting.
Another man, the man on his right, asked furtively, “You hear about the murder, Craine?” He glanced around, making sure no one had heard him.
“I can’t answer that,” Craine said, “don’t crowd me!” Then he whispered, “He’s right here in this room!”
“Really?” the man asked, stiffening.
“Shit, how do I know?” Craine snapped, strangely angry. He remembered his dream of preaching, those golden curls. “What the hell do you people expect of me?” he whispered.
The man on the right, then the man on the left, drew back a little. With both hands, trembling, Craine raised his coffee cup and drank.
BOOK TWO
Editor’s Note
Hereafter, the narrative loops. In several variants, the first line of what follows is the first line of the book. There is a definite break between the capture of Elaine Glass—with its assault on Emmit Royce—and the unit thereafter where Crainefirst talks with the girl. The chairman of the English department, Professor Davies—an early name for Detective Inspector McClaren—seems, to this reader at least, constructed in haste. But a novel so concerned with time and perceived causality can incorporate a glitch or two in its program; the elements here introduced are, clearly, part of the plot.
One
Craine’s work was a bore. His associates were bores, his clients were bores, the people he spied on were pitiful bores whose secrets, when he finally nosed them out, were boring beyond all description. “If I were you, Craine,” some observer might have said to him, perceiving Craine to be too old, too decrepit, for the kind of work he did—and discerning, behind that whiskey-fog, a mind still keen enough for nobler occupation—“If I were you, Craine, I’d seek employment more suitable.” “Good point,” Craine would have snapped. He had knots in his shoestrings. His fingers shook so badly, till noon or so, that he had to use two hands to elevate his glass. (He’d been an all-day drinker for fifteen years.) Often when he visited old friends in Chicago, former business associates, he was mistaken for a bum. He had wrinkled clothes, dim, bloodshot eyes behind thick, tinted glasses, and in his facial cracks, drab gray whiskers.
“But what would you have me become?” Craine would have added, drawing his pipe out and speaking acidly from the side of his mouth. “A master criminal? A philosopher?” And he’d have laughed, nasty, like a man always one step ahead of you, and he’d have pushed the pipe back in and splashed himself more Scotch.
He was right, of course. We’ve slipped past the age of exciting adventure, no question about it, though the fact may fill young people’s hearts with dismay and drive fools to malevolent fictions and secret societies. Craine had read about such things. Waiting in his office for the phone to ring—hunched forward at his desk (red skin, sharp bones), shoulder holster dangling from the back of his chair—or waiting for people he was shadowing to come through the doorways, he’d skimmed through innumerable books and magazines. He consumed the written word ferociously, indifferently, like a library fire. Never reading deeply, never with full attention—one ear always cocked toward the business of the moment—even when he slept, one ear tipped cautiously toward the ominous potential of the universe. But he read; he thought things over; he caught on. A puzzle solver from way back. His trade.
He’d read of West Coast fertility cults—even met a fellow once who had claimed to be a demon, the one time Craine had made a trip to San Francisco. Craine had perked up. “Demon?” he’d said, supposing it must be a slip of the tongue but straining to make out, with his watery eyes, some oddity in the eyes of the stranger. “In ancient times,” his aunt Harriet had told him solemnly, when Craine was about six, “demons were supposed to be all around us, even in us. Our Lord once chased a great flock of them into some pigs and made them run off a cliff.” His aunt had been a dabbler in things antiquarian, going through old bookshops, visiting museums. She’d placed in his bedroom (it had given him nightmares) a greenish black statue of the Horus bird. His aunt had been odd in a number of ways. She’d been a sleepwalker. Sometimes in the middle of the night she would drift downstairs and sit in darkness staring out the window.
The San Francisco demon had proved, of course, a disappointment. Plump-faced boy of twenty-one, slanted eyes, pink sunglasses. Craine had sighed, half-sneered, and turned away. It was everywhere, of course, that hunger to get free of the facts, float high above the patched and ragged earth as the plane he’d been on then—bound for San Francisco—floated high above the tinkle and pachinko of Nevada. Ah, spirituality! Alpha waves, Do-in, Silva Mind Control! Better Carnac’s tarot, his dowsing for telluric centers of the ancient gods’ power. That was sanity, in a man who’d had his head smashed. Yet the child in Craine hoped on, of course, like the rest of poor hopeful humanity; hoped on, scorning hope. Craine scowled, shook his head, and lit his pipe again, thinking of cancer. Hannah glanced in, moving past his door, but did not stop. The mail hadn’t come yet; they had nothing to do.
Craine understood how it was with the world. Zeus-cult revivals in Boston and New York, and here in the old, plain-brained Midwest, secret organizations of loyal Americans, disloyal Americans, people who hated Jews, people who hated gasoline, people who hated banks or universities or churches, women who hated men—the whole tiresome range of deranged human spirits whose personal and professional disappointments they’d nursed into cosmic monsters, foul, dark beasts as dreary as any to be seen late at night on the snowy TV of some run-down motel outside, say, Decatur—but monsters that in fact had the power to kill, given their bulk and mindlessness. Mesopotamian bulls, animation by Disney. Malevolence and stupidity huddle all around us, cowering in chrome-furnished bedrooms with their Playboy magazines, or gliding down the aisles of the A&P with a vengeful raised consciousness not even the Muzak can disarm. All empty. That was the miserable fact, the fact that remained. Gerald B. Craine would give you his word as a specialist in these matters, a man who’d been studying—or anyway outfoxing—the abnormal psyche for a quarter of a century: there were, at least among particular persons, no cat-women, she-devils, goddesses come back; there were only bores, fools, and lunatics—also some good people, though he could think of none—and there were therefore no openings for your old-time True Adventurer.
That was general knowledge in the world these days, though fools might struggle infernally to deny it, wearing charms, smoking pot, buying lottery tickets. Di
sillusionment was king, except with morons. It used to be, even here in southern Illinois, that a boy could aspire to be a lion tamer. Now if he was lucky he got a job as attendant for the kiddie-kar rides at the Murdale Plaza; or he saved up his money and rented an office like Craine’s, above the Baptist Book Store, with a view of the flower-lined hospital parking lot, sparrows on the window ledge, and got himself a pistol and a ball-point pen and a sign on the cracked, frosted glass of the door, GERALD B. CRAINE DETECTIVE AGENCY.
No business for a person in Craine’s condition. His bowels were the least of it.
His agency covered, in theory, the usual: civil and criminal investigating, guarding, patrolling, confidential and undercover, missing persons, industrial, personal injury…. He had a large staff, for a town like Carbondale: three, or, counting himself, four. He’d had sixteen people in his Chicago agency, but in a place like Carbondale, sixteen would be an army. When need arose, which it rarely did, he could expand his staff by stepping down the hall to the Hannon Agency, or Curtis, across the street, or by signing on a few university students or calling in various down-and-outs worse off than Craine himself, old business acquaintances—the usual practice, cheap labor. Put ’em in a uniform and prop ’em up in a conspicuous place and, if nothing else, they tended to discourage vandalism. He’d seen many a night when, discounting the police—which it was wise to discount in any case (sitting in the station, hardly answering the phone, watching TV in the cell-block with the prisoners)—the town had been placed in the sole guardianship of addicts and flat-out alcoholics. You could walk from the ABC Liquor Store, downtown, to that field with the cinder-block building on it, which the Carbondale Council called its industrial park, and you’d never encounter but two night watchmen with their peepers open—and those two, for all you could tell, dead.
But mostly the four of them were all the Gerald Craine Agency required—himself; his secretary, Hannah Johnson, who occasionally stepped in as a female operative, though she’d never been licensed; his man Tom Meakins; and that pushy, irascible little banty Emmit Royce, ex-Marine, big chin with a dimple in it—a man Craine ought never to have brought down from the city, but it was too late now. Fire Royce and the son of a bitch would shoot you. It was possible. Royce got meaner every year, like an old German shepherd. Forty pushups a day, despite his emphysema. Played with his gun like some hopped-up kid, had it always within reach and, in a joking way, would pull it on people, especially big, tough blacks from the Northeast, the Negro section. He’d do it anywhere—gas station, whorehouse, hardware store, some stinking, grimy public lavatory. “Gotchoo, you bastard!” Royce would cry, eyes glittering with excitement, icy as a dog’s eyes, and he’d push the gun tight into the black man’s jaw and with his free hand reach into the black man’s coat and relieve him of his heat. The black man would roll up his eyes in mock terror, playing, always, playing, though deadly for all that; then both of them would laugh and Royce would toss the gun back, with a fierce, sharp-toothed grin, saying, “Watch yourself, that’s all, you dumb black bastard!” Royce meant nothing by it, nothing whatsoever, merely keeping his hand in, but eventually someone was going to kill him—if not some irate black then some irate husband—it was a foregone conclusion. Yet time went by and nobody did it—Royce must be pushing forty-five by now—and Craine, when he recalled that it hadn’t yet happened, would be surprised, but only slightly. Detectives know better than most people do what incredible stupidity and inconvenience human beings will put up with.
So the work was a bore. They’d called Craine an artist, in his Chicago days, and they were right; that was his problem. He knew all the tricks and had practiced them for years with weary mastery until, bored to drink (he remembered no details), he’d thrown it all away and come down here to Carbondale, to semiretirement, where diligence and thought were unnecessary. “Maybe do some reading,” Craine had said. A joke of sorts. He’d been known even then for his insatiable consumption of the word. “Maybe take a course or two. College town,” he’d said. But here it was even worse, he’d discovered. Craine himself, though head of the agency, had done more than his share of sitting all night in an old pickup truck inconspicuous as a stump, with a bottle beside him, his pipe in his hand, trying to read by the moonlight through the window and waiting for some housewife—her husband off throwing their money at the ponies—to come sneaking down the back-porch steps and away through the bushes to her cabdriver lover. He’d done more than his share of skimming through old papers at the Southern Illinoisian or scrawled official records at the Murphysboro Courthouse, figuring out who was the cunninger liar, his client’s enemy, his client’s enemy’s lawyer, or his client; and more than his share of questioning some poor bastard about people the man knew no more about than he knew about the night of his conception. It had made Craine testy, cranky-philosophical. “I’ve had it,” he said aloud. He got an image of himself, walking bent over, the skirt of his overcoat nearly dragging on the ground. He’d had it, no question. He talked to himself pretty constantly, often about what some would call extraordinary things. “All that can happen in the universe does happen. Primary law of physics. Ha!”
Odd as an ostrich, no question about it—as Detective Inspector McClaren was aware. What a windfall for him: a direct connection between Craine and the latest of the victims! Craine’s mind shied back.
They all knew he was harmless. The people of Carbondale were tolerant of oddity, excused him more quickly than he excused himself. If he got seriously drunk in some bar and lashed out at astrologers and witches, quoting Scripture, bewailing the experience of Samson, they said, “Amen, brother,” and bought him more whiskey. (People would sometimes tell him later what he’d done.) If he leaped in horror at nothing, they patted him and calmed him. He did no harm, old Craine. Everybody knew it. His checks were good, he’d never been known to womanize, like Royce (Two-heads Carnac was, at times, a flasher). Despite his line of business it was acknowledged on every hand that, except if he were pushed to an extraordinary degree, old Craine would never hurt a fly. They watched him cross the street, teetering like an acrobat, clutching the paper sack in which he carried his Scotch, or they watched him stop abruptly and ask questions of a door, and they smiled and shook their heads. “Poor crazy Craine,” they said. (He knew what they said.) They told the story of his shoot-out, twenty years ago now, with the psycho on the Marshall Field roof. He was nothing to worry about, except maybe to Hannah.
She stared daggers whenever he poured Scotch into his glass, and made remarks under her breath. Sometimes, after he’d left the office, she’d get up from her desk and grab her purse and follow him, staying out of sight. Usually Craine was aware of her behind him, spying on him, hounding him. She was big as a courthouse and black as coal, hard for even an old drunkard to miss. He would grin wickedly and make cunning little feints, circling like a fox until he’d lost her, and then—at Sohn’s, for instance—he’d watch from behind a clothes rack as she went up to the girl at the register and said, “Honey, you seen Mr. Craine?”
One morning when she was tailing him—he hadn’t been aware of it that time, as it happened—some fool had jostled him as he was about to cross the street and he’d slammed down flat on his back. As he’d lain there swearing, slightly dazed among crumpled cigarette packs and gum wrappers, Hannah had run up and set her fat, clay-dark legs like the columns of some squat Ethiopian temple, had reached down her arms as if Craine were her child, huge tears in her eyes—he’d stared in amazement—and she’d said, “Oh Mistah Craine!” Later, on his back in his foul gray bed in his foul gray hotel room that looked out on the tracks, Craine had scowled at the window as if in fierce disagreement with it—he couldn’t see the tracks, only the gleaming wires leading off toward nowhere—and later still, sitting on the toilet with his pipe in his mouth and his trousers around his shoes, a book in his lap and his glass of Scotch on the linoleum beside him, he’d suddenly looked up from his reading—Tarzan and the Ant Men—and snapped his fingers and
said, “Bingo!” If he’d meant something by it, he’d forgotten what he meant that same instant.
No doubt of it; his work—or his solitary ways, or his “drinking habit,” as Hannah called it—had unhinged him. It worried him a little, but not much. (Did it? He thought about it, frowning. It did not.) Certainly it never made him doubt the morality of the work he did, never made him feel, like Tom Meakins, theologically uneasy.
“It’s a shame, this work we do,” Meakins had once told him. Or words to that effect. When Craine slid his eyes up from his magazine, Meakins was shaking his big, pink, baggy-eyed baby’s head and sadly looking down past his pink and blue suspenders at a surveillance report he’d just now typed—likely some wife who’d been fucking the mailman, and Meakins didn’t blame her, or some faithless husband whose better half was snaggle-toothed and stupid. He was a large man, Tom Meakins—red-headed when Craine had first hired him, years ago. Now Meakins was balding, the hair around his ears turning yellowish white. Sweated perpetually; fatter than a mule. It was a wonder Tom Meakins had never had, so far, a heart attack. He was a family man—five daughters, all fatter than he was and two of them prostitutes, not even call girls: Calumet City. Meakins had once mentioned it, speaking louder than he meant to, sitting in the nickering darkness of the Cypress, watching cowboys running and shooting each other on the screen above the bartender’s head. He spoke of his daughters’ prostitution with sorrow and a touch of distaste but no definite condemnation. They still visited him in fact, every two, three years, dyed blond and painted, wide as church doors, smelling up the world like smoldering incense or a roomful of flowers at a funeral parlor. That easy forgiveness of his daughters was nothing exceptional, for Meakins. If a dog came up and bit him on his own front walk, Meakins would work it out that he’d had it coming. He could be hard when absolutely necessary, of course, capable even of squeezing off a shot if his life depended on it—though there was no way on earth he could Work up the cocksure, pure lunatic meanness of that damn . fool Royce, heart black as bile, black as cobra’s blood, living for the day when his next chance came to kill somebody.