Needles

by William Deverell

  She smiled again at him, through the mirror, not turning around, and it seemed the smile was an honest one, so he stepped behind her, close, and put his hands on her, caressing her.

  “When do we have to be at the Santorinis’?” he asked. “Do we have time?”

  She did not move away from him, but attentively applied eye makeup, seemingly oblivious to his hardness against her. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t hear you. The hair dryer.”

  “I said,” he called, “do we have time — before we have to be at Eddie and Martha’s?”

  She switched the blower off and smiled a third time — significantly? — saying: “Why don’t you get undressed and get into the shower? You’re all sweaty.”

  What was that? A yes? A maybe? A gentle tease? Cobb did not risk clarification, and began undressing. Deborah switched the hair dryer back on and continued to work with an array of cosmetic tools spread across the tile counter. Inside the shower Cobb washed away the day’s toil and sweat, the hot water beating over his skin and over his stiff erection. Through the shower door he could see his wife’s body shimmering. He breathed heavily with the need for her. Three weeks had passed since they had last made love, and there had been a month before that. So far, it had been a barren year, broken only by fleeting occasions of union.

  Cobb towelled himself, stepped from the stall, and approached Deborah again, moving his body into the warmth of her back, his cock hard against her buttocks, his hands sliding about her hips to the front of her, along the gentle lines of her belly, and under her breasts.

  She appeared, or pretended, not to notice.

  “God damn you, Deb, let’s stop the games and let’s get it on. Or let’s just call it quits.”

  But he knew she could not hear him.

  Again she turned off the blower. “Cobb, I’ve spent the last half-hour getting ready. I don’t want to ruin my face.”

  She leaned away from him, toward the mirror, applying lipstick. “Maybe after we get back,” she said. “I just can’t hack it right now.”

  “Jesus, Deb, we can be a little late. We don’t have to show up panting on their doorstep at exactly seven o’clock.” His hips undulated lightly against hers, but met no responding rhythm, yet Cobb was drawing hope from her failure to physically reject his advances. He bent his knees slightly, and his penis felt the softness of her hair.

  “I need you,” he said. “It’s been nearly a month. You must feel the same.”

  She sucked her breath in sharply. “Christ!” she said angrily. “Then do it! Do it! Get it over with! You’re already half-way up my cunt. Do it, goddamnit!”

  Cobb flushed and backed up, trembling with anger. He hissed at her: “What is making you so frigid? Does it all get used up on Whistler Mountain?”

  She wheeled, slapped him, and ran from the bathroom, tears already beginning to discolor the makeup.

  Cobb slammed the bathroom door shut, locked it, and angrily masturbated.

  The Cobbs were more than fashionably late arriving at the Santorini residence, a flat, rectangular structure spread across a manicured lot in the British Properties — a prosperous subdivision in the lower reaches of the North Shore mountains. Below the house, the lights of Vancouver blinked across English Bay through the cold March night.

  Martha Santorini greeted them at the door. “My God, what a relief,” she said. “I was beginning to think the big-time criminal lawyer had decided to snub us.”

  The muscles of Cobb’s face pulled together a smile, and he gave his coat. In the living room he could see about ten guests, all lawyers and spouses, seated on heavy furniture around the fireplace, eating buffet-style and chatting brightly.

  Ed Santorini’s voice called from the kitchen, where he was attending a sirloin-tip roast. “You guys decide to come by bicycle or what?” he shouted. “I was just going to apply for a bench warrant. You’re both charged with failing to appear.” He guffawed, the laughter that of a practised host. “Come in here. The roast is hot; the wine is red; the canapés are eaten. Shuck your coats and pick up your plates. It’s a twelve-pound monster, so eat your hearts out.” Again the braying laugh.

  Cobb was sullen, prepared to dampen all conviviality. Deborah, however, seemed prepared to make up his deficit, hugging and kissing Martha and cheerfully waving to the guests. Despite the cheerless drive from their home, she was now radiant. She apologized with a lie: “Sorry, folks, Foster got so wrapped up at his office he was an hour late getting home.” Her face carefully repaired, she was wearing a backless, braless, ankle-length gown.

  Five pairs of watchful male eyes followed Deborah Cobb as she wound her way through the living room into the kitchen, her red hair dancing on her shoulders, hips rolling, breasts bobbing, voice sparkling with apparent happiness as she greeted friends. Cobb followed, his face wrenched into a poor, mooning grin. Inside the kitchen, behind the large roast, stood Santorini, chief prosecutor in a chef’s toque. He put down his implements and put his arm around Deborah’s lower back, gave her a quick cuddle and a gentle buss on the cheek. Santorini took Deborah by the waist and Cobb by the arm, bustling them to the bar.

  “No time for cocktails,” he said, pouring instead from a wine bottle into two crystal glasses. “The Bordeaux, alas, has disappeared. I offer in its place a nice St. Vincent, 1971, very full-bodied, very pleasant.” He gave the bottle an expert half-turn as he raised it from each glass, and with a gallant flourish presented the glasses to the Cobbs.

  Santorini was large in his gestures, especially when drinking. As a trial lawyer he was guilty of stentorian sermons. Robustly handsome and knowing it, he moved about the courtroom like a peacock. Cobb liked him, because behind the thin parchment of Santorini’s blustering exterior was a generous and gallant ally. They counted each other as their respective best friends, and had grown to know each other over the years. Two years ago Santorini had been chosen over Cobb as senior city prosecutor, and openly stated he was unhappy with the choice, having considered his friend to be the better man, even saying so to the members of the police commission. Cobb’s dark past was not discussed by the commission, of course, but hovered above their discussions like a fat balloon that everyone preferred to pretend was not there.

  Deborah took her plate to the living room. Her husband stayed in the kitchen and listened to Santorini talk. The senior prosecutor complained as usual about the workload and heavy trial lists. He recounted to a distracted Cobb developments in a current fraud trial involving a lawyer who had tried to get too rich too quickly. Cobb was not helping the conversation out, and after a while Santorini said: “What’s eating you, guy?”

  Cobb shook his head. “I guess I’m feeling the strain — getting a practice going, a heavy trial coming up, Deborah and I are fighting. I’m bad company. I’ll get it together.”

  Santorini put his arm around him. “Listen, Fos,” he said, “once the trial is over, we’ll all go up to Whistler, ski all day, and get pissed.” He began to march him out to the living room. “Hey, how’s that little chickie we sent over to help you?” he asked, leering. “Probably a nice little piece of ass if you’re into trying something different.”

  Cobb flinched. Santorini enjoyed a locker-room reputation as a ladies’ man, but Cobb doubted that he indulged in extramarital pursuits as frequently as he boasted of them.

  Cobb paused before they entered the living room. “Eddie, do you know a Corporal Everit Cudlipp, RCMP narcotics? Smythe-Baldwin threatens to call him for alibi evidence. The guy won’t return my calls. It makes me edgy.”

  Santorini shrugged. “I wonder what kind of game that old owl is playing now,” he said. “Cudlipp is your standard-brand cop. Above average mind. Does heavy drug cases. The feds think he’s fine. I’ve seen him in court — pretty solid on the stand. He’d be a tough nut to turn in cross. I suppose it’s possible that the Surgeon didn’t do this one — who knows? Maybe once in a w
hile he’s not guilty.”

  “He’s guilty,” Cobb said. “They don’t come guiltier.”

  “That’s the spirit,” said Santorini, slapping Cobb on the back. “That’s thinking like a prosecutor. That’s what I like.” And they passed into the living room, Santorini brandishing another bottle of St. Vincent ’71, determined to see no glass remain unfilled.

  Billy Sam had slept through the day, and by evening his head began pulsing brutally, and it woke him up like an alarm clock. Beside him, sleeping on her back, Millie Redfeather hoarsely snored. Both were clothed, but Redfeather’s jeans were down, exposing her thick, mottled thighs and hips. Her pubic hair was matted where Billy Sam had attempted a clumsy, rubbery entrance about twelve hours earlier. He had encountered neither passion nor resistance from his commonlaw wife, who was already in drunken slumber as Sam exerted himself manfully atop her passive form, swearing at his limp and uncooperative member. A greater want than the need for sexual satisfaction had now overtaken his body: a fire had lit up his belly and spread to his throat, dry like tinder. No extinguisher could be found in their small room — the bottle of wine that he had husbanded through the previous night had fallen from the dresser and broken, leaving a sticky stain. So Billy Sam searched through the jungle of Millie Redfeather’s purse, finding three dollars and some change — enough for a start. And more could be bummed on Hastings Street near the entrance to one or another of the nearby beer parlors.

  Fastening his belt, Billy Sam woozily withdrew from the room — Suite D on the second floor of the Chungking Rooms — stepped gingerly down the dark stairwell and out into the dusk, groping his way to the Orient Hotel on skid row, where draft costs fifty cents a glass. He would wait for his woman to join him. They would drink together and would find happiness by midnight.

  Skid row, squeezed into several blocks between Chinatown and the Burrard Inlet docks, comprises rows of poor rooming houses, junk shops, and barren square hotels and stores and coffee chops.

  Chungking Alley was at the border of Chinatown and skid row, in an area of warehouses, tenements, and thirty-dollar-a-month hotels. It was a dead-end lane, narrow and forbidding. There were a few old rooming houses here, a small café, and one commercial building, which housed H-K Meats — a wholesale emporium catering to the Chinese restaurants — and, on the second floor, the Nationalist Benevolent Society. The only habitués of the area were drunks and bums and whores past their prime.

  And because there was damn-all to do in this bleak outpost of old Vancouver, Police Constable Number 203 Terry Patrick had decided that he and his rookie partner, Number 416 Jake Moeller, could take half-hour coffee breaks — every two hours. What need was there for two men to be constantly standing guard on the Chungking Rooms?

  Moeller, three months out of police academy, was concluding the first half-hour of his first coffee break. The last sip from his milkshake gurgled up his straw as he closed his book, a thin paperback entitled Teen-Aged Nymphos — Their Case Histories, by Arvid Schroff. Chapter Eight, the story of Miss Wendy K., the Teen-aged Orgy Queen, had left him flushed and hot. Moeller, a farm boy, had found an erotic fantasy world in the little news stands and confectioneries of skid road. He put the book in his inside jacket pocket, then rose from his seat in the little wooden booth at the Jo Wat Café, just half a block down from the Chungking Rooms, hunched into his coat, paid Mr. Jo Wat his sixty cents, and walked out.

  There were stars out; it was crisp and cool and windy. He walked the street. After an hour of this, he would relieve Patrick up on the second floor, where his partner was sitting on a hard wooden chair, watching the doors to the rooms of an old man and a young boy. The hallway in the rooming house was drafty, but Moeller would keep himself warm with Chapter Nine: “The Strange Case of Marylou G. — Pigtails and Perversions.”

  A community within a community, the junkies lived among the rubbies, but were not close to them. In the heart of skid row, yet somehow not a part of it, there was the Corner, the addicts’ Mecca, their prison, their Emerald City — where the junkies dance the junkie dance and score the magic powder that brings their dreams alive, and their nightmares. The Corner, as a corner, is quite an ordinary intersection, and tourists might walk by looking for the action and, not seeing it, shrug and pass on. They might have found it had they dared enter the dank bistros and beer parlors nearby, or the greasy coffee salons; and even then, their eyes untrained, they would not have seen the ritual of the Corner. The rhythms are there to be felt only by those attuned.

  It is true that the Corner has a physical reality. It can be found on a street map as the intersection of Hastings and Columbia. The police, the social workers, and the other outsiders see it simply as that — an intersection. Where losers hang out. But the junkies do not see it in geographical terms. They see it as an abstraction, a style, a ceremony, a celebration. The Corner has its own liturgy; its heaven and hell do not await an afterlife. The sacrament of its ceremony is offered through a drugstore syringe. There are rites that are performed between the buyer and the pusher, and they are observed by custom: the language of the offer, the structuring of the exchange, the indications, the nods, the glances, the lethargic pirouettes of the dealers drifting among the tables.

  The Corner is a community, tight, paranoid, persecuted like an ancient heretic sect; its membership is exclusive, the badge of entry being a long narrow tattoo of scar tissue inside the elbow. There is little trust in this community, and very little love, but its members, disgorged from the jails, always return, unable to leave forever its mystery.

  Patrol cars cruise slowly up and down the streets, and the people of the Corner stand in the doorways, nodding, stoned, and distant, fearing the police, but knowing that the Corner does not happen without the police. The police must play a role, or the Corner has no meaning.

  It is here, at the Corner, that the heroin marketplace completes its chain: from importer, to front end, to mixer, to middleman, to pusher, the final transaction being the sale of a single capsule from junkie dealer to junkie buyer. Everyone near the bottom of the chain is an addict, and the buyer one day will be the pusher the next, selling to earn a few hours of joy for himself.

  Laszlo Plizit knew the Corner, but was not of it. He held the junkies in contempt. They were slaves, and Plizit was not about to become a slave to any thing or any person. Heroin was too down for him, and he preferred it mixed with Methedrine: speedballs. But usually he did straight speed, popping whites from about noon, when he got up, until midnight, when it was time to slow down, and when he would normally do a couple of downers to ease off. The ups kept him going and kept him sharp on the job for the various tasks assigned by Dr. Au. Plizit was a Hungarian who had escaped from an armed-robbery sentence in the old country when the jails were opened in 1956. He was now Au’s bodyguard and odd-job man.

  It was eight p.m., and Plizit was sitting alone in one of the stark drinking halls near the Corner. Two glasses of draft beer were in front of him on the terry-cloth table cover, and he was taking a mouthful every few minutes, once in a while washing down a pill. The combination of beer and speed made him feel free and brave.

  The first task assigned by Au this night was straightforward: effect the sale of two ounces to a man from Spokane who was to meet him here. A Black who would be wearing a silver ring in his left ear. The man from Spokane would be looking for a face showing a five-inch scar running across the nose to a point under the right eye. The scar was a souvenir from a reluctant target who had slashed Plizit’s face open with a knife, paralyzing the eye. Otherwise his kills had been clean.

  The man came in on time and for a few moments peered about. Then he sat at a table next to Plizit, who studied him. Brown-skinned. Too short and emaciated for a cop. Besides, the bulls don’t pierce their ears. He motioned for the man to join him and waited for the waiter to drop two more glasses on the table.

  “You know Jimmy?” Plizit said. His accent was pronou
nced.

  “I know Jimmy, and Lou and Lakey.”

  “What are their last names?”

  “Jimmy Anderson, Lou Snider, Lakey Lakefield.”

  “Why did you come to Vancouver here?”

  “We tried Seattle. It’s dry, man. We’d be into something regular if this goes.”

  “Who do you know in Seattle?” Plizit was being doubly careful.

  “Well, there’s Rosie Jackson. Creaky. Link Jones.”

  “Who else, white?”

  “Ianozzo. McKinnon.”

  Plizit nodded. “You want two?”

  “Yeah, two complete. I’ll pay forty-five per.”

  “You know the costs. Bottom is five thousand. Ten thousand for two units, no discount, do you see? I have thought it is all arranged.” There was an edge to Plizit’s voice. He did not want to horse around.

  “Right. I dig it. What about a little tester? You got a safe place?”

  It was arranged they would go upstairs to one of the rooms usually reserved for hookers. Plizit gave the man at the desk a few dollars for a key. Upstairs, the buyer cooked a little bit up from Plizit’s bag, and cranked up, using his own outfit. He sat on the bed after that and looked up at the ceiling, breathing slowly and getting into it. “Yeah,” he said after a pause. “Yeah.”

  Plizit took out a small bottle, tapped a pill from it into his hand, and popped it into his mouth. He watched the man, focussing his good eye to coordinate with the wayward one.

  “It’s been stepped on a few times,” the man said.

  “We get it this way,” Plizit said, lying. “It comes this way, you see. It ain’t your brown Mexican shit you used to. We have almost pure White Lady, no mix.” But Plizit knew the man was getting off on it.

  The customer hefted the two ounces, and Plizit knew the man was experienced and could gauge weight accurately. He also knew the man or his people would step on the dope about eight times and make a killing from it.