by Don DeLillo
“That so?”
“To do a little business. And I wonder if maybe you and I can get together and finish our talk.”
“Weren’t we finished?”
“Tell you what, I didn’t think we’d hardly begun.”
“Call me,” she said.
“I’m thinking next Tuesday’s probably when I’ll be there. That sound about right?”
“Call me.”
What you couldn’t get from the printed page, the news clipping or court transcript, was the force of someone’s immediate presence, the effect it had, someone’s voice, mannerisms, the physical element, the eyes and body. Grace Delaney, for instance. Her eyes, her inflections, the way she’d moved in her chair as she was speaking. These told Moll there was a hidden reason why she didn’t want to run the piece on Radial Matrix. Glen Selvy in long johns, his crooked mouth and frozen gray eyes. Mudger’s blue eyes. Earl Mudger’s voice talking about Lomax and Senator Percival, the fact that the former is the latter’s chief source of select information, in a blacksmith’s apron, his high shoulders, the twist in the bridge of his nose. Mudger’s voice on the subject of his zoo in Vietnam. Mudger’s eyes glancing at the old lady setting lemonade on their table, white wicker, the Shetland ponies grazing. Eyes, bodies, voices. The personal force. It’s never the voice that tells the lies. Beware of personality. Dynamic temperament, beware.
These musings took place alongside Moll’s search for a catchy title. KGB linked with ESP was too much alphabet. Telepathic hit-men. The idea was to work it into a larger framework without telling the whole story in the title. Or were you supposed to tell the whole story in the title?
Briefly she saw the man with ear protectors and tinted glasses standing in the door of Frankie’s Tropical Bar, the weapon jumping in his hands as he fired.
Selvy had trouble concentrating. The miles were slowly unrolling at the back of his brain, leading him toward a vanishing point, deep sleep, the end of conscious scrutiny. He stood by the window of the small cabin. The place was called Motel in the Woods. The girl was in bed, asleep. It suited him to think of her as the girl. The girl is decent company. The girl does not complicate matters.
They would be here in a couple of minutes.
It was interesting that he’d done it again. Sex with an unmarried woman. Well, he’d been a little crazy that night. Sex with an unmarried woman in the front seat of a car parked on a city street and all the time he was being pursued by a pair of highly motivated combat veterans. Foreigners. Indifferent to local sex customs.
In a way his whole life in the clandestine service was a narrative of flight from women. To restrict his involvements to married women was to maintain an edge of maneuverability. He was able to define the style of a given affair, the limits of his own attachment. It suited him. Life narrowed down to intense segments. The equal pleasures of arrival and departure. They felt the same way no doubt, some of the women in question. Their comings and goings were regulated by external factors. It added force and depth and degree to sex. Selvy used these outer pressures to keep his role within certain well-defined limits.
He tried to concentrate.
The girl did not compromise the routine to any great extent. The girl was decent company. Would not unsettle things. Would not open up avenues of neurotic involvement. She was breathing quietly now, dreaming, he hoped, of some pastoral scene.
When he heard the microbus come up the bumpy motel road, he slipped out the door and walked through the darkness to the last cabin on the path to the woods. This cabin he knew to be unoccupied. His car was parked in front of it.
He stood at the edge of the woods, ten feet from the car. He watched the VW bus pull up at the adjoining cabin, also vacant. They got out, looking weary. They left the front doors open. One of them headed this way, checking his car, Selvy’s. The other went back to the bus, probably to turn off the headlights.
Selvy walked out of the woods, showing the .41 magnum. The first ranger reacted but Selvy had the gun to his face, still walking, coming on, and the ranger back-pedaled, his arms at his sides now, flush, apparently to indicate nonresistance. He backed into the side of the car, went down and then tried to scramble to his feet. Selvy, keeping an eye on the second ranger, put the gun right to this one’s mouth, muzzle first, cracking teeth and driving the man back to his haunches against the front tire.
To keep him there, Selvy hit him across the left cheekbone with the gun butt. The other ranger was climbing into the back of the microbus. Selvy took an old pair of handcuffs out of his back pocket. He turned this one on his stomach and bent one leg way up behind him, limber little devil, cuffing the ankle to the opposite wrist. The second ranger closed the rear door.
Selvy searched this one, finding only a small knife with a slender tapering blade. He dropped it in the window of his car. Then he went to the VW and opened the rear door just a crack, inserting the mag in the opening, showing about four inches of barrel. No reaction. Not a sound. He opened the door slightly wider.
The ranger was squatting in the dark, holding a knife in his right hand, an inch above floor level. He was motionless. He was still as a wood carving. He waited there, facing Selvy, head-on.
The latter nodded and closed the door. He went into the vacant cabin and stood by the window. The ranger came out of the microbus and dragged and lifted his buddy into the front seat. Then he got in next to him and backed slowly down the motel road and out toward the highway.
Lomax sat at a corner table watching Earl Mudger make his way across the dining room of the Executive Towers Motor Inn, off Arlington Boulevard.
“It’s about time we heard some news from the field. It’s overdue. What are you drinking, Earl?”
“News. There’s news.”
“I just have to outright say it. I think it’s a mistake. Selvy may have been leaning some. But I don’t think he had an arrangement with the Ludecke woman.”
“Who’s Selvy?”
“The subject,” Lomax said. “I think he may have been edging toward something. But I don’t think he was there. I think he may have been helping the Robbins woman put some moves on the Senator. Personal reasons. He wanted off that assignment.”
“He squashed my bug.”
“Earl, he may not have known.”
“He was trained to know. He knew. Of course he knew.”
Lomax groomed his sideburns with the tips of his fingers. The waiter brought drinks and menus. He said something they didn’t catch. People sitting nearby were turning to look at the bar. Mudger and Lomax glanced that way. Two men and a chimpanzee were seating themselves at the bar. They didn’t react to the attention they were getting, and in moments people went back to their food and drink. The chimp wore a leisure suit with flared trousers.
“The FCB matter,” Mudger said.
“She’s still playing. She has to play. IRS has been breathing heavy ever since her days as a Panther bagwoman. They’re looking at fraud.”
“Can we get them to ease off, if and when?”
“No,” Lomax said. “It was all I could do to get the file and tape.”
“Does it matter?”
“I don’t think so. She has to believe we have influence there, and she’s aware they want to prosecute. We’re buying time, that’s all. Considering our lack of resources these days, it’s all we can really hope to do.”
“Been meaning to ask. How is it you’re using these Dorish Reports? Granted, we’re a corporate entity. But don’t we have our own intelligence? If we don’t, why don’t we? I hate to think we have to use the same investigative service General Motors uses, or Chase Manhattan.”
“It’s ironic, Earl, but Selvy was in the process of putting together a report on FCB. We phased into adjustment before he was finished. With Selvy out, Earl, we really have no one fully capable.”
“How did that happen, in fifty words or less?”
“How that happened, Earl, is when you broke away from PAC/ORD that was the end of our supply of
trained investigators. We’re not at all strong in the investigative area, Earl, these days. We’re strong in the paramilitary area. We’ve got counterterrorists we can call on, for whatever it’s worth, more or less around the clock.”
“You think I failed to anticipate.”
“In a matter like the FCB matter, we don’t need but a single capable investigator. We don’t really have one, sad to say. Thus the Dorish Report. Thus getting down on all fours to beg favors from an old friend at IRS.”
“Tell you what let’s do.”
“You want me to shut up,” Lomax said. “You think I’m being a little preachy. Okay, good beef here. Let’s order.”
Lomax chided himself for being slow to realize that Mudger was in a foul mood. He couldn’t help being disappointed. He’d expected a word of commendation for his resourcefulness in gathering intelligence on the FCB matter. Now he’d have to wait for the right moment to bring it up again, or forget it completely.
FCB was the way they referred to Grace Delaney. It meant Flat-Chested Bitch.
Mudger kept looking over at the chimp. The restaurant manager was talking to the two men who flanked the animal. It seemed to Lomax from this distance that he was content to let them stay as long as nothing unseemly happened.
“I’m making moves,” Mudger said. “That’s how you keep going. You renew yourself. Systems planning is fundamentally lacking in one important respect.”
“You’ve said. People.”
“People, correct.”
“Earl, it’s peaked.”
“I’ve been studying pornography for a long time now. Hell of an interesting field. Dynamics involved. The psychology. Interesting element. Strange arrays of people. Pacts and alliances and accommodations. That intrigues me. Systems is all formulation. Essentially sterile concepts. I miss human interest. The war was full of human interest.”
“The thing has peaked, Earl.”
“Multimillions. Close to a billion, including the soft stuff.”
“You’ve had success employing unique methods. You go into smut in a big way, you’ll find these methods aren’t so unique.”
“Don’t I thrive on challenges?”
Lomax patted the top of his head.
“Isn’t it all business? When you come right down to it? Isn’t the whole thing just a slam-bang corporate adventure? Arthur? Isn’t it?”
Lomax didn’t like these moods.
“The profit on hard-core movies is awe-inspiring. You can make an X for fifty thousand and get a return in the millions. You don’t even have to make. Alternatives exist. I’ve got people. I’m already tied in. All I need is product.”
Mudger turned once more to glance at the bar.
“The chimp is ape family,” he said after a while.
“I didn’t know.”
“Did you know that?”
“No,” Lomax said.
“Most intelligent member, although some would dispute that.”
“I’m a dog man.”
“Some would say gorilla.”
“Dessert, Earl?”
“Did you ever watch animals? Steadily watch? Because there’s things you can learn from watching animals go about their business.”
“I’ve got dogs. I watch dogs.”
“If you said wolves.”
“Domesticated. That’s my range.”
“Wolves. You ever watch wolves? I can remember outside Tha Binh.”
“I admit to snakes. I watch snakes.”
“Snakes are good,” Mudger said. “You can do worse than snakes.”
“But only at the zoo.”
The waiter brought coffee.
“There’s news all right,” Mudger said.
“Where from?”
“Van’s in the hospital. All busted up. Shattered cheekbone. Teeth and gums.”
“Which one is Van?”
“He’s the one whose sister I’m married to.”
“Sorry,” Lomax said.
“Christ, it’s hilarious. Cao doesn’t know where the hell they are. All I have is Mercy Hospital.”
“Not what city.”
“Not what fucking state,” Mudger said. “He’d like for someone to tell him what fucking state he’s in. He knows about four words of English. Van, with easily double that vocabulary, has a mouthful of wires and little silver wheels.”
“I told you that about Selvy.”
“They’re out there somewhere. One of them’s got a busted face. The other one, it’s all he can do to call Tran Le on the phone. Don’t you know she doesn’t take his number down? All she gives me is Mercy Hospital.”
“I told you. Selvy. They took him light.”
“He’ll make the same mistake if he thinks whatever happened is any real indication. They took him light, okay. But those boys can deal. I’ve seen them. They’re not your typical ARVN grunt. He’s up to his ass in it. And it’s climbing fast.”
“I say he’ll handle it.”
“You say he’ll handle it.”
“The thing about Selvy. Selvy’s more serious than any of us. He believes. You ought to see where he lives. Where he used to live. Buried in some rat-shit part of the city. Isolated from contact. He’d do it for nothing, Selvy. The son of a bitch believes.”
“Believes what?”
“Believes in the life.”
“The life,” Mudger said.
“Eleven weeks at the Mines, incidentally.”
“Was he at the Mines?”
“I told you. Selvy. Best I’ve ever run.”
Lomax signaled for the check.
“How will they find him now?”
“I’m a bitch if I know,” Mudger said.
“Unless he drops into Mercy Hospital for an appendectomy, how the hell will they find him?”
Lomax paid the check and went to the men’s room. On the way out, Mudger stopped at the bar. The chimp was eating mixed fruit out of a plastic bowl.
“How much you want for the animal?”
“Not for sale,” one of the men said.
“Name your price, go on.”
The man turned on his stool.
“Not for sale. No sale.”
“You shouldn’t dress the animal up. It’s degrading to the animal, having to wear clothes.”
“What are you?”
“You think it’s cute, coming into a bar with an animal. It’s a joke, dressing the animal up and coming into a bar.”
“What are you, a Christian Scientist?”
“It’s a joke,” Mudger said.
“A Jehovah Witness. They don’t give blood.”
The other man turned toward Mudger.
“He’s asking. What are you?”
“Tell him to piss up a rope,” Mudger said.
“He’s asking politely.”
“Tell him to piss up a rope.”
Mudger put his middle finger to his thumb as if to flick an insect off his sleeve. Instead he delivered a quick blow to the second man’s ear. The man reacted as if shot. Then he turned back to the bar, head down, right hand covering his ear.
“Tell him to piss up a rope,” Mudger said.
Lomax was standing alongside, watching. The man turned to his companion, speaking over the chimp’s head.
“Piss up a rope, Stanley.”
Sitting in the passenger seat as Lomax drove, Mudger looked out the side window. His gloom hadn’t lifted. He thought of his own animals, the ones he’d managed to take out of Vietnam. He’d had to leave them behind on Guam, every one, under enforced isolation. In the end, practical considerations and endless technicalities forced him to abandon the animals to the whims of local authorities. There were things you couldn’t do once the shooting stopped.
He thought of Saigon women in their silk blouses and sateen pants. Beds draped with mosquito nets. The relentless drenching heat.
He thought of people sharing hammocks in open-fronted huts outside Tha Binh. VC gongs sounding through the night. Parachute flares from a C-47
lighting up part of the sky. The roiling din of Medivac choppers landing nearby.
He thought of GIs heading down jungle trails with transistor radios, tossing gum wrappers into the bush. Occasional rounds from an M-60 machine gun. The sandbagged checkpoints. The fresh weapons being broken out of crates. The punji sticks smeared with human feces.
6
Richie Armbrister flashed a look at his laser-beam digital watch. The elevator gate opened with a crash and he followed Lightborne into the gallery. They went directly to the living quarters in the rear, where Lightborne began boiling water for tea.
“So, delay number two. What’s going on, Lightborne? I paid money.”
“And it’s in a safe place. And the lady will get it as soon as she hands over the film can.”
“With the film inside it.”
“I remain confident, Richie.”
“I have things. I have a number of projects.”
“I understand,” Lightborne said.
“Do you know how long I’ve been away?”
“Go back to Dallas, Richie.”
“I’ve never been away this long.”
“I’ll handle it from this end.”
The wrist watch, or chronometer, was the sole outward sign of Richie’s wealth, excluding his DC-9. He wore heavyweight khaki trousers, scuffed cordovans and a crew-neck sweater with a reindeer design, the wool unraveling at both cuffs.
He appeared younger than twenty-two, looking a little like a teenager with a nervous disability. High forehead, prominent cheekbones, large teeth. He seemed intense, overcommitted to something, his voice keening out of a lean bony face—a face Lightborne could never look at without wondering whether he was dealing with a genius or a half-wit.
Not that Richie’s accomplishments were to be questioned. He’d built an empire almost singlehandedly. He’d perfected the technology of smut, opening up channels of distribution and devising ingenious marketing schemes. At the same time he’d managed to remain legally immune, hidden in a maze of paper.
“I leave Odell behind.”
“Who?” Lightborne said.
“I leave Odell here. Odell is my technical man for all film projects. You and Odell stay in constant touch, Lightborne. That way I know what’s going on.”