Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said Read online

  Jason Taverner rose to his feet. “Do all you sevens think this way?”

  “What way?”

  “Making strong, vital, instant decisions. The way you do. The way you ask questions, listen—God, how you listen!—and then make up your mind absolutely.”

  Truthfully, Buckman said, “I don’t know because I have so little contact with other sevens.”

  “Thanks,” Jason said. He held out his hand; they shook. “Thanks for the meal.” He seemed calm now. In control of himself. And very much relieved. “Do I just wander out of here? How do I get onto the street?”

  “We’ll have to hold you until morning,” Buckman said. “It’s a fixed policy; suspects are never released at night. Too much goes on in the streets after dark. We’ll provide you a cot and a room; you’ll have to sleep in your clothes…and at eight o’clock tomorrow morning I’ll have Peggy escort you to the main entrance of the academy.” Pressing the stud on his intercom, Buckman said, “Peg, take Mr. Taverner to detention for now; take him out again at eight A.M. sharp. Understood?”

  “Yes, Mr. Buckman.”

  Spreading his hands, smiling, General Buckman said, “So that’s it. There is no more.”

  17

  “Mr. Taverner,” Peggy was saying insistently. “Come along with me; put your clothes on and follow me to the outside office. I’ll meet you there. Just go through the blue-and-white doors.”

  Standing off to one side, General Buckman listened to the girl’s voice; pretty and fresh, it sounded good to him, and he guessed that it sounded that way to Taverner, too.

  “One more thing,” Buckman said, stopping the sloppily dressed, sleepy Taverner as he started to make his way toward the blue-and-white doors. “I can’t renew your police pass if someone down the line voids it. Do you understand? What you’ve got to do is apply to us, exactly following legal lines, for a total set of ID cards. It’ll mean intensive interrogation, but”—he thumped Jason Taverner on the arm—“a six can take it.”

  “Okay,” Jason Taverner said. He left the office, closing the blue-and-white doors behind him.

  Into his intercom Buckman said, “Herb, make sure they put both a microtrans and a heterostatic class eighty warhead on him. So we can follow him and if it’s necessary at any time we can destroy him.”

  “You want a voice tap, too?” Herb said.

  “Yes, if you can get it onto his throat without him noticing.

  “I’ll have Peg do it,” Herb said, and signed off.

  Could a Mutt and Jeff, say, between me and McNulty, have brought any more information out? he asked himself. No, he decided. Because the man himself simply doesn’t know. What we must do is wait for him to figure it out…and be there with him, either physically or electronically, when it happens. As in fact I pointed out to him.

  But it still strikes me, he realized, that we very well may have blundered onto something the sixes are doing as a group—despite their usual mutual animosity.

  Again pressing the button of his intercom he said, “Herb, have a twenty-four-hour surveillance put on that pop singer Heather Hart or whatever she calls herself. And get from Data Central the files of all what they call ‘sixes.’ You understand?”

  “Are the cards punched for that?” Herb said.

  “Probably not,” Buckman said drearily. “Probably nobody thought to do it ten years ago when Dill-Temko was alive, thinking up more and weirder life forms to shamble about.” Like us sevens, he thought wryly. “And they certainly wouldn’t think of it these days, now that the sixes have failed politically. Do you agree?”

  “I agree,” Herb said, “but I’ll try for it anyhow.”

  Buckman said, “If the cards are punched for that, I want a twenty-four-hour surveillance on all sixes. And even if we can’t roust them all out we can at least put tails on the ones we know.”

  “Will do, Mr. Buckman.” Herb clicked off.

  18

  “Goodbye and good luck, Mr. Taverner,” the pol chick named Peg said to him at the wide entrance to the great gray academy building.

  “Thanks,” Jason said. He inhaled a deep sum of morning air, smog-infested as it was. I got out, he said to himself. They could have hung a thousand busts on me but they didn’t.

  A female voice, very throaty, said from close by, “How now, little man?”

  Never in his life had he been called “little man”; he stood over six feet tall. Turning, he started to say something in answer, then made out the creature who had addressed him.

  She too stood a full six feet in height; they matched in that department. But in contrast to him she wore tight black pants, a leather shirt, red, with tassle fringes, gold hooped earrings, and a belt made of chain. And spike heeled shoes. Jesus Christ, he thought, appalled. Where’s her whip?

  “Were you talking to me?” he said.

  “Yes.” She smiled, showing teeth ornamented with gold signs of the zodiac. “They put three items on you before you got out of there; I thought you ought to know.”

  “I know,” Jason said, wondering who or what she was.

  “One of them,” the girl said, “is a miniaturized H-bomb. It can be detonated by a radio signal emitted from this building. Did you know about that?”

  Presently he said, “No. I didn’t.”

  “It’s the way he works things,” the girl said. “My brother…he raps mellow and nice to you, civilizedly, and then he has one of his staff—he has a huge staff—plant that garbage on you before you can walk out the door of the building.”

  “Your brother,” Jason said. “General Buckman.” He could see, now, the resemblance between them. The thin, elongated nose, the high cheekbones, the neck, like a Modigliani, tapered beautifully. Very patrician, he thought. They, both of them, impressed him.

  So she must be a seven, too, he said to himself. He felt himself become wary, again; the hackles on his neck burned as he confronted her.

  “I’ll get them off you,” she said, still smiling, like General Buckman, a gold-toothed smile.

  “Good enough,” Jason said.

  “Come over to my quibble.” She started off lithely; he loped clumsily after her.

  A moment later they sat together in the front bucket seats of her quibble.

  “Alys is my name,” she said.

  He said, “I’m Jason Taverner, the singer and TV personality.”

  “Oh, really? I haven’t watched a TV program since I was nine.”

  “You haven’t missed much,” he said. He did not know if he meant it ironically; frankly, he thought, I’m too tired to care.

  “This little bomb is the size of a seed,” Alys said. “And it’s embedded, like a tick, in your skin. Normally, even if you knew it was there someplace on you, you still could never find it. But I borrowed this from the academy.” She held up a tubelike light. “This glows when you get it near a seed bomb.” She began at once, efficiently and nearly professionally, to move the light across his body.

  At his left wrist the light glowed.

  “I also have the kit they use to remove a seed bomb,” Alys said. From her mailpouch purse she brought a shallow tin, which she at once opened. “The sooner it’s cut out of you the better,” she said, as she lifted a cutting tool from the kit.

  For two minutes she cut expertly, meanwhile spraying an analgesic compound on the wound. And then—it lay in her hand. As she had said, the size of a seed.

  “Thanks,” he said. “For removing the thorn from my paw.”

  Alys laughed gaily; she replaced the cutting tool in the kit, shut the lid, returned it to her huge purse. “You see,” she said, “he never does it himself; it’s always one of his staff. So he can remain ethical and aloof, as if it has nothing to do with him. I think I hate that the most about him.” She pondered. “I really hate him.”

  “Is there anything else you can cut or tear off me?” Jason inquired.

  “They tried—Peg, who is a police technician expert at it, tried—to stick a voice tap on your gullet. B
ut I don’t think she got it to stick.” Cautiously, she explored his neck. “No, it didn’t catch; it fell off. Fine. That takes care of that. You do have a microtrans on you somewhere; we’ll need a strobe light to pick up its flux.” She fished in the glove compartment of the quibble and came up with a battery-operated strobe disc. “I think I can find it,” she said, setting the strobe light into activity.

  The microtrans turned out to be in residence in the cuff of his left sleeve. Alys pushed a pin through it, and that was that.

  “Is there anything else?” Jason asked her.

  “Possibly a minicam. A very small camera transmitting a TV image back to academy monitors. But I didn’t see them wind one into you; I think we can take a chance and forget that.” She turned, then, to scrutinize him. “Who are you?” she asked. “By the way.”

  Jason said, “An unperson.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning that I don’t exist.”

  “Physically?”

  “I don’t know,”—he said, truthfully. Maybe, he thought, if I had been more open with her brother the police general…maybe he could have worked it out. After all, Felix Buckman was a seven. Whatever that meant.

  But still—Buckman had probed in the right direction; he had brought out a good deal. And in a very short time—a period punctuated by a late-night breakfast and a cigar.

  The girl said, “So you’re Jason Taverner. The man McNulty was trying to pin down and couldn’t. The man with no data on him anywhere in the world. No birth certificate; no school records; no—”

  “How is it you know all this?” Jason said.

  “I looked over McNulty’s report.” Her tone was blithe. “In Felix’s office. It interested me.”

  “Then why did you ask me who I am?”

  Alys said, “I wondered if you knew. I had heard from McNulty; this time I wanted your side of it. The antipol side, as they call it.”

  “I can’t add anything to what McNulty knows,” Jason said.

  “That’s not true.” She had begun to interrogate him now, precisely in the manner her brother had a short time ago. A low, informal tone of voice, as if something merely casual were being discussed, then the intense focus on his face, the graceful motions of her arms and hands, as if, while talking to him, she danced a little. With herself. Beauty dancing on beauty, he thought; he found her physically, sexually exciting. And he had had enough of sex, God knew, for the next several days.

  “Okay,” he conceded. “I know more.”

  “More than you told Felix?”

  He hesitated. And, in doing so, answered.

  “Yes,” Alys said.

  He shrugged. It had become obvious.

  “Tell you what,” Alys said briskly. “Would you like to see how a police general lives? His home? His billion-dollar castle?”

  “You’d let me in there?” he said, incredulous. “If he found out—” He paused. Where is this woman leading me? he asked himself. Into terrible danger; everything in him sensed it, became at once wary and alert. He felt his own cunning course through him, infusing every part of his somatic being. His body knew that here, more than at any other time, he had to be careful. “You have legal access to his home?” he said, calming himself; he made his voice natural, devoid of any unusual tension.

  “Hell,” Alys said, “I live with him. We’re twins; we’re very close. Incestuously close.”

  Jason said, “I don’t want to walk into a setup hammered out between you and General Buckman.”

  “A setup between Felix and me?” She laughed sharply. “Felix and I couldn’t collaborate in painting Easter eggs. Come on; let’s shoot over to the house. Between us we have a good deal of interesting objects. Medieval wooden chess sets, old bone-china cups from England. Some beautiful early U.S. stamps printed by the National Banknote Company. Do stamps interest you?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Guns?”

  He hesitated. “To some extent.” He remembered his own gun; this was the second time in twenty-four hours that he had had reason to remember it.

  Eying him, Alys said, “You know, for a small man you’re not bad-looking. And you’re older than I like…but not much so. You’re a six, aren’t you?”

  He nodded.

  “Well?” Alys said. “Do you want to see a police general’s castle?”

  Jason said, “Okay.” They would find him wherever he went, whenever they wanted him. With or without a microtrans pinned on his cuff.

  Turning on the engine of her quibble, Alys Buckman spun the wheel, pressed down on the pedal; the quibble shot up at a ninety-degree angle to the street. A police engine, he realized. Twice the horsepower of domestic models.

  “There is one thing,” Alys said as she steered through traffic, “that I want you to get clear in your mind.” She glanced over at him to be sure he was listening. “Don’t make any sexual advances toward me. If you do I’ll kill you.” She tapped her belt and he saw, tucked within it, a police-model weapon tube; it glinted blue and black in the morning sun.

  “Noticed and attended to,” he said, and felt uneasy. He already did not like the leather and iron costume she wore; fetishistic qualities were profoundly involved, and he had never cared for them. And now this ultimatum. Where was her head sexually? With other lesbians? Was that it?

  In answer to his unspoken question, Alys said calmly, “All my libido, my sexuality, is tied up with Felix.”

  “Your brother?” He felt cold, frightened incredulity. “How?”

  “We’ve lived an incestuous relationship for five years,” Alys said, adroitly maneuvering her quibble in the heavy morning Los Angeles traffic. “We have a child, three years old. He’s kept by a housekeeper and nurse down in Key West, Florida. Barney is his name.”

  “And you’re telling me this?” he said, amazed beyond belief. “Someone you don’t even know?”

  “Oh, I know you very well, Jason Taverner,” Alys said; she lifted the quibble up into a higher lane, increased velocity. The traffic, now, had thinned; they were leaving greater L.A. “I’ve been a fan of yours, of your Tuesday night TV show, for years. And I have records of yours, and once I heard you sing live at the Orchid Room at the Hotel St. Francis in San Francisco.” She smiled briefly at him. “Felix and I, we’re both collectors…and one of the things I collect is Jason Taverner records.” Her darting, frenetic smile increased. “Over the years I’ve collected all nine.”

  Jason said huskily, his voice shaking, “Ten. I’ve put out ten LPs. The last few with light-show projection tracks.”

  “Then I missed one,” Alys said, agreeably. “Here. Turn around and look in the back seat.”

  Twisting about, he saw in the rear seat his earliest album: Taverner and the Blue, Blue Blues. “Yes,” he said, seizing it and bringing it forward onto his lap.

  “There’s another one there,” Alys said. “My favorite out of all of them.”

  He saw, then, a dog-eared copy of There’ll Be a Good Time with Taverner Tonight. “Yes,” he said. “That’s the best one I ever did.”

  “You see?” Alys said. The quibble dipped now, spiraling down in a helical pattern toward a cluster of large estates, tree- and grass-surrounded, below. “Here’s the house.”

  19

  Its blades vertical now, the quibble sank to an asphalt spot in the center of the great lawn of the house. Jason barely noticed the house: three story, Spanish style with black iron railings on the balconies, red-tile roof, adobe or stucco walls; he could not tell. A large house, with beautiful oak trees surrounding it; the house had been built into the landscape without destroying it. The house blended and seemed a part of the trees and grass, an extension into the realm of the manmade.

  Alys shut off the quibble, kicked open a balky door. “Leave the records in the car and come along,” she said to him as she slid from the quibble and upright, onto the lawn.

  Reluctantly, he placed the record albums back on the seat and followed her, hurrying to catch up w
ith her; the girl’s long black-sheathed legs carried her rapidly toward the huge front gate of the house.

  “We even have pieces of broken glass bottles embedded in the top of the walls. To repel bandits…in this day and age. The house once belonged to the great Ernie Till, the Western actor.” She pressed a button mounted on the front gate before the house and there appeared a brown-uniformed private pol, who scrutinized her, nodded, released the power surge that slid the gate aside.

  To Alys, Jason said, “What do you know? You know I’m—”

  “You’re fabulous,” Alys said matter-of-factly. “I’ve known it for years.”

  “But you’ve been where I was. Where I always am. Not here.”

  Taking his arm, Alys guided him down an adobe-and-slate corridor and then down a flight of five brick steps, into a sunken living room, an ancient place in this day, but beautiful.

  He did not, however, give a damn; he wanted to talk to her, to find out what and how she knew. And what it signified.

  “Do you remember this place?” Alys said.

  “No,” he said.

  “You should. You’ve been here before.”

  “I haven’t,” he said, guardedly; she had thoroughly trapped his credulity by producing the two records. I’ve got to have them, he said to himself. To show to—yes, he thought; to whom? To General Buckman? And if I do show him, what will it get me?

  “A cap of mescaline?” Alys said, going to a drug case, a large hand-oiled walnut cabinet at the end of the leather and brass bar on the far side of the living room.

  “A little,” he said. But then his response surprised him; he blinked. “I want to keep my head clear,” he amended.

  She brought him a tiny enameled drug tray on which rested a crystal tumbler of water and a white capsule. “Very good stuff. Harvey’s Yellow Number One, imported from Switzerland in bulk, capsuled on Bond Street.” She added, “And not strong at all. Color stuff.”