by Don DeLillo
They got off the subway and took an elevator to the third floor of the Dirksen Building.
“Magazine wants to make me look human.”
“Which?”
“Running Dog.”
“Stay away,” Selvy said. “It’s not my department of course.”
“Why?”
“They’ll burn you.”
“How do you know?”
“They’re after controversy. They’re dying and need a fix. Even if they do the piece they promise, you’ll be hemmed in by autopsy reports, photos of entry and exit wounds, who killed Brown, who killed Smith, who killed Jones. They deal in fantasy.”
They walked down a corridor toward the Senator’s office.
“It’s not your department of course.”
“Absolutely not,” Selvy said.
“Your duties are strictly administrative.”
“Their editor’s unstable. Grace Delaney. A lush. Used to spend all her time raising bail for well-hung Panthers.”
Lightborne leaned forward to grimace, inches from the mirror, checking his teeth for traces of the grilled cheese sandwich he’d had for dinner. He turned on the cold water, wet his index finger and then ran it several times across his clenched teeth.
He cleared a space in the gallery and set out folding chairs and a bench, deciding finally not to bother hauling the armchair out here. He went around turning on lights. In his jacket pocket he found a slightly bent Tareyton King and he blew on it several times to remove microscopic lint and then began searching for a match, the cigarette held between thumb and middle finger, an idiosyncrasy he’d copied from a titled Englishman he’d once done business with. With no matches to be had, he finally turned on the hotplate and was waiting for it to warm when the first of the bidders arrived.
Eventually eleven people sat in the gallery as Lightborne made final adjustments. Glen Selvy carried a chair out of the living area and sat against a wall, slightly apart from the others. Lightborne showed a carved wood fertility figure. Noted its characteristics and advised as to period, precise handiwork involved, where found and how. A well-tanned man named Wetzel was the sole bidder.
A copper statuette with a lesbian theme also went without competitive bidding. Wetzel captured a bronze satyr—once owned by Fulgencio Batista, Lightborne said—after an encouraging flurry of bids against three other people.
Lightborne pushed a trunk on rollers into the auction area. He undid the belts, used an enormous key to open the trunk and then, with the help of a couple of men sitting up front, removed a three-foot-high volcanic stone phallus that pointed upward from a base of a pair of testicles larger than bowling balls.
The piece was variously chipped, pockmarked and discolored. It had character. Lightborne invited the bidders to take a closer look, and most did. Then he delivered a brief interpretation of the piece and opened the bidding.
Wetzel said, “That thing is about as pre-Columbian as an Oldenburg clothespin.”
“Who said pre-Columbian? I said it was dug out of a tomb in the jungle. Who specified a date?”
“Your man chiseled the damn thing in his backyard.”
“He knows tombs no one else knows,” Lightborne said. “They’re in the densest areas. You can’t get in there except on foot, hacking.”
“Hacking,” Wetzel said.
“Professor Shatsky was supposed to be here to authenticate. He’s late, evidently.”
“Shatsky.”
“The Jewish Museum.”
“What the hell does the Jewish Museum know about Guatemalan pricks? This particular prick isn’t even circumcised.”
Lightborne made a gesture of pacification.
“Go easy on the Anglo-Saxonisms,” he said.
An hour later the whole thing was over. A full-fledged disaster. Lightborne poured some Canadian whisky into a shot glass and sipped it. He got out a box of marshmallow cookies and ate three of them whole, washing them down with small amounts of rye.
Bottles of Shasta and Wink sat on tables in the gallery. Someone’s cigar still smoldered in an ashtray. Lightborne took the bent Tareyton out of his pocket and used the acrid cigar to light it. He locked the door, turned off the lights and slipped behind the partition.
A sixty-watt bulb hung over the wash basin, swaying a little in the breeze from an open window. Lightborne poured some more rye and sat by the phone. He dialed the operator and asked her to get a Dallas number, person to person, collect.
After some delay the call was accepted by Richie Armbrister, known as the boy wonder of smut, a twenty-two-year-old master of distribution and marketing who lived and worked in a barricaded warehouse in downtown Dallas.
Armbrister controlled a maze of one hundred and fifty corporations which numbered among their activities and holdings a chain of bookstores, strip joints and peep movies coast to coast; massage parlors and nude-encounter studios, southwest U.S. and western Canada; outlets for leather goods and mechanical devices west of the Mississippi; sex boutiques, topless bars, topless billiard parlors across the Sunbelt; a New Orleans car rental firm with topless chauffeurs. He took few vacations and had no hobbies.
“Lightborne, how are you? Always a pleasure to speak to a knowledgeable person, what with all these second-raters who work for me.”
“I understand the business is getting tight, Richie. I mean legally speaking, as far as successful prosecutions.”
“They’ll never find me. I have too much paper floating around. I’m very well hidden, believe me. Holding companies in four states. Dummy corporations. I don’t exist as a person. I’m not in writing anywhere. I’m sitting behind all that paper.”
“Legal fronts, wonderful.”
“So speak,” Armbrister said, his high-pitched voice seemingly on the verge of cracking.
“Remember the business we talked about some months ago.”
“Sure.”
“It’s hot again,” Lightborne said. “I got a phone call that sounds encouraging.”
“You’re encouraged.”
“It could be nothing.”
“I’m still interested. Full-length movies. First-run. The field’s been denied me so far. Some bad luck. A series of small incidents. Organized crime, you know. The families. They’re involved in full-length.”
“It could be nothing, Richie.”
“But the trail is hot again.”
“It’s warm. I’d say warm, realistically.”
“What do you need, Lightborne?”
“To show some money.”
“All my money’s tied up in cash.”
Lightborne realized he was being called upon to laugh and with an effort he managed to do this.
“Hey, I bought a plane,” Richie said. “I’m going to Europe to do some business. We gutted the whole passenger section and redid it. It’s big, it seats thirty-one, a DC-nine. Maybe I’ll stop in New York on the way back. We’ll get serious about this thing.”
“I know Europe well,” Lightborne said with no particular conviction.
“First we go to England to look at the theater setup. Then Hamburg or Stockholm, I forget which, for the shops, to see if we can push our rubber line. Then maybe Amsterdam for bondage items, to check out their expertise.”
Lightborne was suddenly exhausted and wished only to stretch out on his cot and go to sleep. He stared into the dimness, nodding to the rhythms of the voice on the other end. There was a remark, a brief expectant silence, and then Richie’s manic laughter came swimming across the continent.
“Ha ha,” Lightborne said at the first opening.
The next day he walked into a railroad diner near Chinatown. He was a couple of minutes late and breathing heavily as he hurried the length of the room and sat next to Selvy at the counter.
“We discussed footage, you recall.”
“Yes,” Selvy said.
“Would he be interested?”
“Oh, he’d be interested.”
“Tell him it could be on.”
“I’ll tell him.”
“Tell him to forget about past failures.”
“It’s on. I’ll tell him.”
“Never mind the stuff from the jungle, tell him.”
“This is different,” Selvy said.
“Of course it’s still sight unseen. It’s still a question of plausibility.”
“You were the chief skeptic, last time we talked about it.”
Lightborne ordered soup and absently ran the edge of a matchbook under his fingernails.
“Common knowledge there was a steady flow of women in and out of the SS guard rooms in the bunker,” he said. “All told there were hundreds of people in the bunker. It was an elaborate operation, running the country from down there, what was left of the country.”
“All those people, things could happen, you’re saying.”
“On the other hand when we talk of the old boy himself, this is when I become highly skeptical once more.”
“Hitler.”
“He was too feeble to take part in anything like that. He was partially paralyzed, he was under sedation much of the time. In his last days he wasn’t well at all. Eva Braun. Eva Braun certainly wasn’t a candidate for a mass sexual exercise. Not the type. Of course she liked movies. She once worked for a photographer. But that’s of little matter.”
“Very little,” Selvy said.
“On the other hand there were the early days with Geli Raubal. His niece. Story goes he forced her to model for dirty pictures. Close-ups and such.”
“Who drew the pictures?”
“He did,” Lightborne said.
“Hitler.”
“So you have this pornographic interest. You have the fact that movies were screened for him all the time in Berlin and Obersalzburg, sometimes two a day. Those Nazis had a thing for movies. They put everything on film. Executions, even, at his personal request. Film was essential to the Nazi era. Myth, dreams, memory. He liked lewd movies too, according to some. Even Hollywood stuff, girls with legs.”
“You’re building a case. You’re tilting.”
“It could be nothing.”
“You’re a student of the period.”
“Did I say that?”
“I believe I recall, yes, you said that.”
“You see, he’s endlessly fascinating. The whole Nazi era. People can’t get enough. If it’s Nazis, it’s automatically erotic. The violence, the rituals, the leather, the jackboots. The whole thing for uniforms and paraphernalia. He whipped his niece, did you know that?”
“Hitler.”
“He used a bull whip, story goes.”
Lightborne broke a saltine cracker and dropped the pieces into his tomato soup.
“Not that I don’t remain skeptical,” he said. “I remain highly skeptical.”
“About the existence of the film itself or just the people taking part, their rank and such?”
“About both of those plus one other thing, which is the commercial prospects such a document would have. I call it a document to dignify it. Is there really any demand for such a thing? Is this what people want out of pornography? Maybe it’s too historical. Maybe it is a document. I’m asking myself. What do people want? Is there a strong fantasy element involved? Will this kind of material help people upgrade their orgasms?”
Selvy couldn’t help laughing.
“I like your walking stick,” he said.
“Someone noticed. You’re the first. Up until now, nobody saw it. I paid money. This is African wood, right here. The handle is a monkey if you notice.”
“Nice stick, very.”
Lightborne called for the check, noting that his companion had only a cup of coffee before him on the counter.
“Don’t bother,” Selvy said. “He pays.”
“And you think there’s a chance he’d be interested.”
“Oh, he’d be interested all right. I know it for a fact.”
The routine. Cab, terminal, plane, terminal, car. He moved through it apart from other people, sitting in aisle seats, standing at the edge of waiting lines, unobtrusively watchful, last on, first off. He found a place for his car on Potomac Avenue and headed into the building, skirting two small boys playing on the stairs outside his apartment.
“Hey, you the landlord?”
“No.”
“Where you belong?”
“Hey, white.”
“What you be doing here?”
“Hey, white.”
“Where you belong then?”
He took a shower and waited for time to pass. He didn’t mind the waiting. Somewhere to be at 1500. No one he knew, or might talk to in the intervening period, would ever suspect the nature of his business. It was carried on beneath the level of ordinary life. This is why it made no difference where he lived. It was all the same, mere coloration for the true life, for the empty meditations, the routine, the tradecraft, the fine edge to be maintained in preparation for—he didn’t know what. In preparation for what?
He lived in the off-hours. He created his own operational environment, having little outside direction, no sense of policy. Periodically he reported to a house near the Government Printing Office, where he was given a technical interview, or polygraph, or lie detector test.
He was a reader. He read his man. There was nothing cynical in his view of the world. He didn’t feel tainted by the dirt of his profession. It was a calculated existence, this. He preferred life narrowed down to unfinished rooms.
That afternoon at three Selvy stood outside a restaurant on M Street, Palacio de Mexico, as the limousine approached and the back door slowly swung open. There was a fully grown St. Bernard on the front seat next to the driver and three St. Bernard puppies mauling each other across the length of the rear seat. Lomax had squeezed himself into one of the jump seats and he motioned Selvy toward the adjoining one.
“I took them running,” Lomax said.
“They haven’t stopped.”
“They needed the exercise. Dogs this big. It’s crazy, having them in the city. Maybe I’ll buy land somewhere.”
“Fairfax County.”
Lomax took one of the puppies in his lap and began stroking its neck. The car moved past the Executive Office Building.
“I saw Klara Ludecke,” Selvy said.
“And?”
“She wants to know why she’s a widow.”
“Only natural.”
“That’s what I thought. Only natural she’d get around to asking.”
“Is she in contact with Percival?”
“I doubt it.”
“Any clue as to what she was doing back home?”
“Relatives, she says.”
“I hear different,” Lomax said.
The car headed west now, turning sharply on its approach to the Key Bridge. A long silence ensued.
“Why would she mention Radial Matrix?” Selvy said.
Lomax tossed the puppy back onto the seat.
“She mentioned it, did she?”
“She mentioned Radial Matrix.”
Lomax took a box of throat lozenges out of his pocket and put one in his mouth. The car headed south on 29, the Lee Highway. Lomax pushed his way onto the rear seat and began playing with all three puppies, letting them scramble over his head and neck. Up front the fully grown dog sat looking straight ahead.
“The lady’s natural curiosity raises a question,” Selvy said. “It’s not in my jurisdiction but, still, I’ve wondered lately.”
“Mo here’s gonna be stronger than a goddamn moose.”
“Who killed Ludecke?”
“I’m looking at Percival,” Lomax said.
Selvy thought this was stupid to the point of imbecility. He watched Lomax try to extricate himself from the roistering dogs.
“The Senator’s just a high-toned smut collector. His thrills are vicarious, strictly. Murder is too powerful an idea for someone like that, even on a contract basis.”
“Stay on Percival.”
“That
line of investigation has nothing left to yield. He wanted the Berlin film. He knew Ludecke had it. It doesn’t go beyond that.”
“I’m looking at Percival,” Lomax said. “And don’t call it smut. You keep calling it smut.”
Selvy glanced out the window at a frame house with a plastic pool on the lawn and about half a cord of firewood stacked under the front porch.
“There’s an outside chance some magazine may do a piece on the Senator’s collection.”
“Christ,” Lomax said.
“There goes our advantage.”
“Ain’t it the truth.”
“So?”
“I’ll get back to you.”
“In the meantime,” Selvy said.
“In the meantime, go to New York.”
The limousine pulled into a gas station and then swung across the road and headed back toward Washington.
“I just got back from there,” Selvy said.
Both men knew this wasn’t a complaint. It was an indirect form of acquiescence, a statement of Selvy’s willingness to blend with the pattern, to travel an event to its final unraveling.
All the way back Lomax remained slumped in his jump seat, talking to the dogs.
4
The office was cluttered and bright, a sizable room with a fireplace that didn’t work. Grace Delaney sat behind a teak desk, swiveling gradually toward the window behind her. Moll presented her argument, with gestures, trying not to be distracted by police cars wailing down Second Avenue. Men with guns. That was the aspect of things no one would be able to change. She sensed she was losing Delaney to the view.
“That’s it, Grace. Finis. Das Ende. I can be in Georgetown before the dew is on the rose, or whatever.”
Running Dogs offices were divided among three sites. A duplex in an East Side brownstone. A suite in an office building way across town. And someone’s house in Sunnyside, Queens.
This of course was the brownstone, top floor, rear, looking south, view of ailanthus trees and small gardens. Grace Delaney was a carefully tailored woman, slim and angular, whose face and hands often appeared to be flaking. She faced the window now, her back to Moll, who sat on the liquor cabinet, waiting for Grace to think of something to say.