The Children of Hamelin

by Norman Spinrad

  “How much we got, treasurer?” the guitarist asked.

  Steel-Rims did some arithmetic in his head: “...kilo last week... the smack deal... about two thousand dollars.”

  “Told you these cats had bread,” Robin said.

  Tex California did not seem happy. “Fuck it...” he muttered under his breath. Then: “You guys got a medicine dropper?”

  Blue Denim rummaged around the Shooting Gallery till he found a medicine dropper. He handed it to Tex.

  Tex opened the bottle, stuck in the tip of the dropper, and sucked up an inch of acid. “Think that’s about two thousand dollars worth of acid?” he said.

  “Oh wow!”

  “Get the bread, man, get the bread!”

  Steel-Rims fished a giant roll of bills out from under one of the mattresses and started counting it out. Sacramental silence until he was finished. He handed the money to Tex, who pocketed the bottle, handed the dropper to the guitarist who handled it like the Holy Grail, and slowly counted the money.

  As Tex counted the money, the guitarist said: “Look, will you take an amp and a guitar? Man, I don’t know why you’re selling so cheap, and I don’t care, but you can have anything in this pad...”

  “Shit, you can even have Suzy,” Steel-Rims said, pointing to the recently-fucked chick. “She gives great head.”

  Tex ignored them and finished counting the money. Sticking it in his pants pocket, he said: “Cash and cash only.”

  “But man—”

  “Are you guys cleaned?”

  “Yeah, but listen—”

  Tex turned his back on the entire scene, and to Robin and me said: “Let’s split.”

  We split.

  “This is getting us nowhere fast,” Tex California said as we got into the car. “Chick, you gotta come up with some real heavy-bread men.”

  “What about Terry?” Robin said in a tiny voice. “I mean, it really is acid...?”

  The California Lizard turned and leered his rotten teeth into the back seat at us. “Does it really matter, chick?” he said.

  Robin turned pale, clutched my hand, stared at the convertible roof and giggled. Either I was too high or not high enough because something working my vocal cords made them say: “Fucking-A it does! If you burned those freaks, they just might do it to Terry and Terry knows Robin and Robin knows me—”

  “But you don’t know me,” said Tex California.

  “If you burned those guys, I’d see to it that New York got mighty hot for you...”

  Tex California laughed an ugly laugh. “Who gives a shit?” he said. “The whole United States is too hot for me as it is. I might as well be radioactive.”

  He paused for effect. “Now that you know what the scene is, what the fuck you think you can do about it?”

  The cold of the night seemed to seep in through the windows. The California Lizard was wanted by the Feds, a killer behind acid had pulled a gun thrown Terry Blackstone to the wolves—how could anyone believe he was above burning The Meat Factory? Who in turn were probably not above wasting Terry or Robin or me...

  At that moment, I crossed over the line, flashed all the way, cut the anchor to the shores of my life—my fate was in the hands of a psycho murderer on his way out of the country one step ahead of the Feds and god-knows who else; my life was spinning on the roulette wheel of the gods and there was not one fucking thing I had to say about it.

  “Dig,” said Tex California, “I got no reason not to put pure water in the bottle.” Then with a horrid smile: “And that’s why you can trust me when I tell you the acid is the real thing. Now ain’t I just put you through some interesting changes?”

  Then he turned around, started the motor, and was all business. “Come on chick let’s find some real dealers. Enough of this fucking around. You do know some real dealers?”

  Robin came back long enough to say, “I know a pad uptown... crash pad for dealers coming through town...” But she seemed awfully uptight about something. “I don’t like to go there...”

  “Sounds like just what we want,” the California Lizard said.

  “But... I don’t like to go there....” in a tiny scared voice.

  The dealers’ crash pad was an apartment in a cruddy building in an obscure Puerto Rican neighborhood in the East Twenties. Only two flights up: class.

  Robin knocked on a black door with no less than three shiny new brass locks showing. A sound of lots of hard metal chittering inside, and then the door opened just enough for a tall spade in a red double-breasted silk suit with a huge bush of natural to peer out into the hall.

  “Robin. Friend of Manfred’s. Business. Big.”

  The spade ushered us into a pitch black kitchen, closed two door locks and a police lock behind us, and opened the door to the inner sanctum—

  A big room all painted a Day-Glo blue seared your eyeballs to look at with an electric orange carpet wall-to-wall and hot red light from a ceiling fixture, felt like the inside of a blast furnace or a nuclear reactor. Low black backless couches formed three sides of a continuous rectangle rimming the walls. An inner rectangle of gleaming white formica tables surrounded the huge stereo rig at the reactor’s core. The stereo was playing some ghostly kind of acid rock that was mostly ultra- and sub-sonic; felt it with my skin more than heard it, so creepy. On the tables were several ounces of pot, three big brass hookahs and two huge bricks of hash. The air was full of smoke. On one of the couches, a long-haired cat in a white suit, white tie, and black shirt, sucked on his hookah. On another, an A-head type, white, but with a bush of blond natural as huge and wiry as the spade’s, also in an expensive mod suit, this one kelly green. Near where we stood, I could see a light behind a closed door, heard girls muttering from within.

  “Well?” said the spade.

  “This is... uh... Tex,” Robin said. “He’s got a lot of acid to sell and he’s selling it cheap.”

  The cat with the hookah giggled.

  “Well now, the little chicky has brought us a big horse-trader out of the wild west,” the spade said. “Well now, I’m Ali, and those creatures are Marvin and Groove, Mr. Tex-ass. Now what’s all this about acid? We’re not exactly in the market for a box of sugar cubes.”

  “If you’re trying to impress me, you’re wasting your mouth,” said the California Lizard. “I gotta get rid of an ounce tonight.” He palmed the bottle. Ali oohed.

  “I’m Marvin,” said the cat with the hookah. “Do sit down.”

  Tex sat down next to Marvin. Ali sat down on the other side of Tex, boxing him in. Robin and I huddled together on the empty couch and tried to fade into the woodwork. You could smell Dope Power in the air.

  “Can you guys handle it?” asked Tex California.

  “Well now, I think we can scrape the bread together,” Ali said. “First we’ve gotta be sure it’s acid, though.”

  “I got no time to wait for you to get high,” Tex said. But he said it nice and easy and matter-of-factly—these were heavy cats.

  “Won’t take but a minute,” Groove wheezed. “I’ll shoot some.”

  Shoot it?? The cat was out of his mind!

  Groove reached into his inside breast pocket and took out a black leather case. In the case was a hypodermic syringe.

  Tex looked at the spike as Groove took it from the case as if suddenly confronted with someone crazier than he was. “It’s your funeral,” he said.

  “Well now, and it’s your funeral if it’s water, fair enough?”

  “Gimme!” Groove said. Tex somewhat reluctantly handed over the bottle. Groove dipped the point of his spike into the bottle and drew up about half its contents—enough acid to turn on the whole Red Army!

  “You’re out of your fucking mind!” Tex yelled.

  Groove giggled. He squirted all of the acid in the syringe back into the bottle, stoppered it, and handed it back to Tex. “Now I just shoot up with a spikefull of water and if that was pure acid, I’ll get loaded from what’s still sticking to the sides.”
<
br />   Groove went through the kitchen and into the bathroom. Gurgling sounds. A couple of minutes of tense silence...

  Then Groove came back into the room waving his arms and giggling. “Do business with the man,” he said, flopping back onto the couch. “I’m stoned out of my mind.”

  I looked at Groove staring at the light fixture with a big happy smile and couldn’t help feeling an idiot admiration. He could’ve shot a hundred mikes or ten thousand-and he’d done it without a prayer in the world of knowing which. I saw a cat who had casually done something nothing in the world could make me do. Groove was either totally mindless or the world’s heaviest saint.

  “Well now,” said Ali, “it looks like the Dope Exchange is open for business. The whole bottle, eh? What do you think, Marvin?”

  “I think $3000,” said Marvin. “Yes, that’s just about exactly what I think.”

  “You guys are crazy!” Tex whined. “You know what this is worth...”

  “So we do,” Ali said ominously.

  “We know what it’s worth to us,” said Marvin, “and we know what it’s worth to you.”

  “And it’s just not the same thing,” said Ali. “Not the same thing at all.”

  “How do you figure that?” said the California Lizard, squirming a bit on the couch between Ali and Marvin. For the first time, I saw gaping holes in his cool.

  “Well now,” said Ali, “to us that stuff is worth maybe $20,000, which is the profit we figure to make over what we pay you. But you’re in a bind, Mr. Tex-ass, or you wouldn’t be up here using a nickel-bag dealer for a connection and selling acid an ounce at a time, now would you? Man, everything about you is screaming Heat. You are a leper, you are a pariah, you are a walking dose of clap. You need bread instantly. You oughta be down on your Tex-ass knees thanking us for being softhearted enough to lay on 3Gs.”

  I mean, that Ali was a genius! Genius in the black magic of dealer’s logic. Tex California was a heavy-bread berserker, but these boys were pros. Paisanos in full standing in the private Dealer’s Mafia. Tex California the Ice Lizard death-on-acid big bread berserker was like a bar-room brawler suddenly come up against a karate-freak.

  They had him and he knew it.

  “Come on man,” he begged, “I’ve gotta hole up in Tangier or somewhere. I need bread.”

  “We’ll make it four thousand,” said Marvin. “‘Cause we like your groovy white coat.”

  They were bargaining for real now. “Come on man, make it seven.”

  “Four,” said Ali. Sounded like the bargaining had ended one step after it had begun.

  “Shit, a lousy five thousand bucks, five, okay?”

  “Well now,” said Ali, “tell you what. My old lady is in the next room cutting some hash into sticks. We’ll leave it up to her. Okay, things?”

  Marvin nodded. Groove just giggled.

  “Hey Tanya, haul ass in here!” Ali shouted. At the sound of the name, a shudder went through Tex that spent itself moving his hand with a seemingly-random twitch into his right coat pocket.

  Out of the other room came a slim chick in a tight black dress, pale and skinny and spookily good-looking, a sinister A-head Madonna.

  “This here is—”

  “You know who that is, you dumb jive spade!” Tanya shrilled when she saw Tex. “That’s Larry Allen! Oh Jesus, oh shit... Larry-the-Depthcharge Allen!”

  I saw Tex’s right hand close on his gun; apparently he didn’t like someone calling him by his rightful name.

  “Well now, who the fuck is Larry Allen, you crazy speed-freak bitch?”

  “Wait a minute! Wait a minute...” said Marvin. “The Depthcharge... I know that name from San Francisco—”

  “Bet your ass you know the name from San Francisco!” Tanya said, staring hot razorblades at Tex. “Remember the cat was supposed to be sticking cyanide in one cap out of five hundred? Larry Allen!”

  “Well now, cunt, I don’t see what you’re getting so excited about,” Ali said.

  “Hey, now I remember,” crooned Marvin. “Month ago, when I was in the Haight, there was a story going round about some Federal narc was going around making big scores off all the dealers in sight and then busting them quietly, one by one. Was getting kind of ominous. Then, the story goes, some cat put the narc in a position where he had to taste some of the merchandise and it turned out to be cyanide...”

  Groove came back from giggle-land just long enough to say: “If this is the same cat, then we’re talking to a hero!”

  “Hero!” screamed Tanya. “Some fucking hero! For openers, he didn’t know the narc was a narc, he just slipped him the Depthcharge on general principals. It’s his thing, he grooves behind it. He’s left a string of bodies everywhere he’s gone—cops, dealers, connections, customers, Feds, carhops, mafia hoods—you name it, he’s killed it.”

  “Well now,” said Ali sitting on one side of Tex and suddenly making it seem very significant that Marvin was on the other. “This changes things, doesn’t it? This creature has the Feds, the Mafia, and for all we know the CIA and the NKVD after him—sounds like he’s set the all-time record for Heat. I figure we just take his acid and pay him nothing. If he bitches, I figure we might just as well make a lot of people happy and kill—”

  Suddenly, Tex California exploded off the couch, whirling around like a typhoon, gun coming up out of his pocket—

  A muffled Cooosh! sound like someone jabbing a chisel through cheap sheet-metal and the firecracker smell of gun powder—

  Tex California’s face was suddenly ten years younger, a Malibu beach bum looking at death from the wrong side folding and falling like a punctured balloon clutched feebly at his chest where the blood made a weirdly-lovely rising-sun pattern on the shiny white leather of his coat; he pitched over on his face and I knew he had died could feel the cosmic stench of his death in the room he was really dead I was looking at a dead body would never get up and walk again he was dead dead really dead...

  And Groove was giggling and stroking the silencer on some kind of automatic.

  “You stupid cunt!” Ali snarled at Robin. “Bringing that thing here! We oughta waste you too...”

  “Yeah,” Marvin said, far more reflectively, “it’d be safer to kill these two creeps too...”

  Robin’s nails dug into my thighs in a spasm of total panic. All of them were staring at us from a million eyes with pistols for pupils all staring at us they were gonna kill us oh Sweet Jesus they’re gonna kill us I don’t wanna die don’t wanna die die die...

  “Yeah, and this other creep is probably Allen’s partner,” Tanya said. “Let’s shoot the motherfucker.”

  “Yeah man,” said Ali, “just who the fuck are you coming here and making like the great gray ghost?”

  Die die die die don’t wanna die please don’t kill me don’t don’t kill me kill me please please PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE—

  I was off somewhere—the dark side of gibbering hysteria—then realized I was hysterical and my life was on the line and something cold and swamplike cold stone hard cold took control of my vocal cords and The Man in Black ate my mind and filled me with himself.

  “I’m afraid that’s something it wouldn’t be healthy for you to know,” said The Man in Black. “Let’s just say I represent a certain organization for whom you have just done a small service. The girl... knows no more than you do... a kind of Judas-goat, if you see what I mean.”

  “You’re gonna have to come up with a better story than that,” Groove said, still holding his gun.

  The Man in Black ignored him and his gun and continued as if he hadn’t heard the interruption. “Luckily for you,” he said, “you’ve managed to convince me in the only possible manner that you weren’t involved with the late lamented. The contract I accepted was for Allen and anyone I considered his partners, which of course is why I took my time fulfilling it—it called for a payment of $15,000 for Allen and $2,000 apiece for any... extra work. You’re very lucky I’m not the greedy type, or rather that I
hate cleaning up after myself. But I’ve decided that since you’ve fulfilled my contract for me, everything concerned becomes your property: the red Cadillac convertible outside, the acid, any money on the deceased’s person—and of course, the body.”

  “The body?” Ali screamed shrilly.

  “Of course, the body,” said the Man in Black. “You want the car and the money and the acid, you get rid of the body. If I have to get involved with the details, I keep the acid. Don’t be stupid enough to think that my employers give anyone something for nothing. That was one of Mr. Larry Allen’s more costly mistakes.”

  “Hey... hey wait a minute!” Tanya said, suddenly starting to shake. “Allen was supposed to have slipped one of his depthcharges to the son of a capa mafiosa... You’re not...? Look, none of us ever had anything to do with the creep! You’re not...?”

  “Would I tell you if I was?” said The Man in Black. “Let’s just say that Allen had very poor taste in enemies and leave it at that. Naturally, you people aren’t stupid enough to make the same mistake. None of this ever happened, did it? My employers dislike... publicity. They tend to over-react to minor annoyances. Need I be cruder?”

  “Well now, take it easy man,” said Ali. “We’ll get rid of the body. After all, an ounce of acid’s worth a little effort, isn’t it?”

  There seemed to be a general agreement. Groove put away his gun.

  The Man in Black got up, had to pull his Lady with him—she was totally out of it. “And of course you people have never in your lives seen me?” he said.

  “Never in our lives,” said Marvin.

  “And you don’t know this girl either.”

  “What girl, man?”

  The Man in Black smiled a basilisk smile and said: “You will do well to remember that,” And let a thoroughly uptight Ali rush him and his Lady outside the door.

  Outside on the empty street, the universe flew out of me in a rush of psychic vomit and I was a kid screaming in terror dragging a sleepwalking Robin by the hand and running dead-out to Seventh Avenue and the next thing I remember we’re in a cab back to my apartment and the cab driver is shaking and sweating and Robin is smiling and smiling and crooning to me and stroking my hair...