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  Time to give up on Spade Weeks, he decided, and extricate myself. No wonder they never sent me around here before; these guys are not nice. And then he thought, So as far as I’m concerned, I’ve indefinitely lost my main assignment; Spade Weeks no longer exists.

  I’ll report back to Mr. F., he said to himself, and await reassignment. The hell with it. He rose to his feet stiffly and said, “I’m splitting.” The two guys had now returned, one of them with a mug of coffee, the other with literature, apparently of an instructional kind.

  “You’re chickening out?” the girl said, haughtily, with contempt. “You don’t have it at gut level to stick with a decision? To get off the filth? You’re going to crawl back out of here on your belly?” All three of them glared at him with anger.

  “Later,” Arctor said, and moved toward the front door, the way out.

  “Fucking doper,” the girl said from behind him. “No guts, brain fried, nothing. Creep out, creep; it’s your decision.”

  “I’ll be back,” Arctor said, nettled. The mood here oppressed him, and it had intensified now that he was leaving.

  “We may not want you back, gutless,” one of the guys said.

  “You’ll have to plead,” the other said. “You may have to do a lot of heavy pleading. And even then we may not want you.”

  “In fact, we don’t want you now,” the girl said.

  At the door Arctor paused and turned to face his accusers. He wanted to say something, but for the life of him he couldn’t think of anything. They had blanked out his mind.

  His brain would not function. No thoughts, no response, no answer to them, even a lousy and feeble one, came to him at all.

  Strange, he thought, and was perplexed.

  And passed on out of the building to his parked car.

  As far as I’m concerned, he thought, Spade Weeks has disappeared forever. I ain’t going back inside one of those places.

  Time, he decided queasily, to ask to be reassigned. To go after somebody else.

  They’re tougher than we are.

  4

  From within his scramble suit the nebulous blur who signed in as Fred faced another nebulous blur representing himself as Hank.

  “So much for Donna, for Charley Freck, and—let’s see …” Hank’s metallic monotone clicked off for a second. “All right, you’ve covered Jim Barris.” Hank made an annotation on the pad before him. “Doug Weeks, you think, is probably dead or out of this area.”

  “Or hiding and inactive,” Fred said.

  “Have you heard anyone mention this name: Earl or Art De Winter?”

  “No.”

  “How about a woman named Molly? Large woman.”

  “No.”

  “How about a pair of spades, brothers, about twenty, named something like Hatfield? Possibly dealing in pound bags of heroin.”

  “Pounds? Pound bags of heroin?”

  “That’s right.”

  “No,” Fred said. “I’d remember that.”

  “A Swedish person, tall, Swedish name. Male. Served time, wry sense of humor. Big man but thin, carrying a great deal of cash, probably from the split of a shipment earlier this month.”

  “I’ll watch for him,” Fred said. “Pounds.” He shook his head, or rather the nebulous blur wobbled.

  Hank sorted among his holographic notes. “Well, this one is in jail.” He held up a picture briefly, then read the reverse. “No, this one’s dead; they’ve got the body downstairs.” He sorted on. Time passed. “Do you think the Jora girl is turning tricks?”

  “I doubt it.” Jora Kajas was only fifteen. Strung out on injectable Substance D already, she lived in a slum room in Brea, upstairs, the only heat radiating from a water heater, her source of income a State of California tuition scholarship she had won. She had not attended classes, so far as he knew, in six months.

  “When she does, let me know. Then we can go after the parents.”

  “Okay.” Fred nodded.

  “Boy, the bubblegummers go downhill fast. We had one in here the other day—she looked fifty. Wispy gray hair, missing teeth, eyes sunk in, arms like pipe cleaners … We asked her what her age was and she said ‘Nineteen.’ We double-checked. ‘You know how old you look?’ this one matron said to her. ‘Look in the mirror.’ So she looked in the mirror. She started to cry. I asked her how long she’d been shooting up.”

  “A year,” Fred said.

  “Four months.”

  “The street stuff is bad right now,” Fred said, not trying to imagine the girl, nineteen, with her hair falling out. “Cut with worse garbage than usual.”

  “You know how she got strung out? Her brothers, both of them, who were dealing, went in her bedroom one night, held her down and shot her up, then balled her. Both of them. To break her in to her new life, I guess. She’d been on the corner several months when we hauled her in here.”

  “Where are they now?” He thought he might run into them.

  “Serving a six-month sentence for possession. The girl’s also got the clap, now, and didn’t realize it. So it’s gone up deep inside her, the way it does. Her brothers thought that was funny.”

  “Nice guys,” Fred said.

  “I’ll tell you one that’ll get you for sure. You’re aware of the three babies over at Fairfield Hospital that they have to give hits of smack to every day, that are too young to withdraw yet? A nurse tried to—”

  “It gets me,” Fred said in his mechanical monotone. “I heard enough, thanks.”

  Hank continued, “When you think of newborn babies being heroin addicts because—”

  “Thanks,” the nebulous blur called Fred repeated.

  “What do you figure the bust should be for a mother that gives a newborn baby a joypop of heroin to pacify it, to keep it from crying? Overnight in the county farm?”

  “Something like that,” Fred said tonelessly. “Maybe a weekend, like they do the drunks. Sometimes I wish I knew how to go crazy. I forget how.”

  “It’s a lost art,” Hank said. “Maybe there’s an instruction manual on it.”

  “There was this flick back around 1970,” Fred said, “called The French Connection, about a two-man team of heroin narks, and when they made their hit one of them went totally bananas and started shooting everyone in sight, including his superiors. It made no difference.”

  “It’s maybe better you don’t know who I am, then,” Hank said. “You could only get me by accident.”

  “Somebody,” Fred said, “will get us all anyhow eventually.”

  “It’ll be a relief. A distinct relief.” Going farther into his pile of notes, Hank said, “Jerry Fabin. Well, we’ll write him off. N.A.C. The boys down the hall say Fabin told the responding officers on the way to the clinic that a little contract man three feet high, legless, on a cart, had been rolling after him day and night. But he never told anybody because if he did they’d freak and get the hell out and then he’d have no friends, nobody to talk to.”

  “Yeah,” Fred said stoically. “Fabin has had it. I read the EEG analysis from the clinic. We can forget about him.”

  Whenever he sat facing Hank and did his reporting thing, he experienced a certain deep change in himself. Afterward was when he usually noticed it, although at the time he sensed that for a reason he assumed a measured and uninvolved attitude. Whatever came up and whoever it was about possessed no emotional significance to him during these sessions.

  At first he had believed it to be the scramble suits that both of them wore; they could not physically sense each other. Later on he conjectured that the suits made no actual difference; it was the situation itself. Hank, for professional reasons, purposefully played down the usual warmth, the usual arousal in all directions; no anger, no love, no strong emotions of any sort would help either of them. How could intense natural involvement be of use when they were discussing crimes, serious crimes, committed by persons close to Fred and even, as in the case of Luckman and Donna, dear to him? He had to neutralize himself;
they both did, him more so than Hank. They became neutral; they spoke in a neutral fashion; they looked neutral. Gradually it became easy to do so, without prearrangement.

  And then afterward all his feelings seeped back.

  Indignation at many of the events he had seen, even horror, in retrospect: shock. Great overpowering runs for which there had been no previews. With the audio always up too loud inside his head.

  But while he sat across the table from Hank he felt none of these. Theoretically, he could describe anything he had witnessed in an impassive way. Or hear anything from Hank.

  For example, he could offhandedly say “Donna is dying of hep and using her needle to wipe out as many of her friends as she can. Best thing here would be to pistol-whip her until she knocks it off.” His own chick … if he had observed that or knew it for a fact. Or “Donna suffered a massive vasoconstriction from a mickey-mouse LSD analogue the other day and half the blood vessels in her brain shut down.” Or “Donna is dead.” And Hank would note that down and maybe say “Who sold her the stuff and where’s it made?” or “Where’s the funeral, and we should get license numbers and names,” and he’d discuss that without feeling.

  This was Fred. But then later on Fred evolved into Bob Arctor, somewhere along the sidewalk between the Pizza Hut and the Arco gas station (regular now a dollar two cents a gallon), and the terrible colors seeped back into him whether he liked it or not.

  This change in him as Fred was an economy of the passions. Firemen and doctors and morticians did the same trip in their work. None of them could leap up and exclaim each few moments; they would first wear themselves out and be worthless and then wear out everyone else, both as technicians on the job and as humans off. An individual had just so much energy.

  Hank did not force this dispassion on him; he allowed him to be like this. For his own sake. Fred appreciated it.

  “What about Arctor?” Hank asked.

  In addition to everyone else, Fred in his scramble suit naturally reported on himself. If he did not, his superior— and through him the whole law-enforcement apparatus— would become aware of who Fred was, suit or not. The agency plants would report back, and very soon he as Bob Arctor, sitting in his living room smoking dope and dropping dope with the other dopers, would find he had a little three-foot-high contract man on a cart coasting after him, too. And he would not be hallucinating, as had been Jerry Fabin.

  “Arctor’s not doing anything much,” Fred said, as he always did. “Works at his nowhere Blue Chip Stamp job, drops a few tabs of death cut with meth during the day—”

  “I’m not sure.” Hank fiddled with one particular sheet of paper. “We have a tip here from an informant whose tips generally pan out that Arctor has funds above and beyond what the Blue Chip Redemption Center pays him. We called them and asked what his take-home pay is. It’s not much. And then we inquired into that, why that is, and we found he isn’t employed there full time throughout the week.”

  “No shit,” Fred said dismally, realizing that the “above-and-beyond” funds were of course those provided him for his narking. Every week small-denomination bills were dispensed to him by a machine masquerading as a Dr. Pepper source at a Mexican bar and restaurant in Placentia. This was in essence payoffs on information he gave that resulted in convictions. Sometimes this sum became exceptionally great, as when a major heroin seizure occurred.

  Hank read on reflectively, “And according to this informant, Arctor comes and goes mysteriously, especially around sunset. After he arrives home he eats, then on what may be pretexts takes off again. Sometimes very fast. But he’s never gone for long.” He glanced up—the scramble suit glanced up—at Fred. “Have you observed any of this? Can you verify? Does it amount to anything?”

  “Most likely his chick, Donna,” Fred said.

  “Well, ‘most likely.’ You’re supposed to know.”

  “It’s Donna. He’s over there banging her night and day.” He felt acutely uncomfortable. “But I’ll check into it and let you know. Who’s this informant? Might be a burn toward Arctor.”

  “Hell, we don’t know. On the phone. No print—he used some sort of rinky-dink electronic grid.” Hank chuckled; it sounded odd, coming out metallically as it did. “But it worked. Enough.”

  “Christ,” Fred protested, “it’s that burned-out acid head Jim Barris doing a schizy grudge number on Arctor’s head! Barris took endless electronic-repair courses in the Service, plus heavy-machinery maintenance. I wouldn’t give him the time of day as an informant.”

  Hank said, “We don’t know it’s Barris, and anyhow there may be more to Barris than ‘burned-out acid head.’ We’ve got several people looking into it. Nothing I feel would be of use to you, at least so far.”

  “Anyhow, it’s one of Arctor’s friends,” Fred said.

  “Yes, it’s undoubtedly a vengeance burn trip. These dopers—phoning in on each other every time they get sore. As a matter of fact, he did seem to know Arctor from a close standpoint.”

  “Nice guy,” Fred said bitterly.

  “Well, that’s how we find out,” Hank said. “What’s the difference between that and what you’re doing?”

  “I’m not doing it for a grudge,” Fred said.

  “Why are you doing it, actually?”

  Fred, after an interval said, “Damned if I know.”

  “You’re off Weeks. I think for the time being I’ll assign you primarily to observe Bob Arctor. Does he have a middle name? He uses the initial—”

  Fred made a strangled, robotlike noise. “Why Arctor?”

  “Covertly funded, covertly engaged, making enemies by his activities. What’s Arctor’s middle name?” Hank’s pen poised patiently. He waited to hear.

  “Postlethwaite.”

  “How do you spell that?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t fucking know,” Fred said.

  “Postlethwaite,” Hank said, writing a few letters. “What nationality is that?”

  “Welsh,” Fred said curtly. He could barely hear; his ears had blurred out, and one by one his other senses as well.

  “Are those the people who sing about the men of Harlech? What is ‘Harlech’? A town somewhere?”

  “Harlech is where the heroic defense against the Yorkists in 1468—” Fred broke off. Shit, he thought. This is terrible.

  “Wait, I want to get this down,” Hank was saying, writing away with his pen.

  Fred said, “Does this mean you’ll be bugging Arctor’s house and car?”

  “Yes, with the new holographic system; it’s better, and we currently have a number of them unrequisitioned. You’ll want storage and printout on everything, I would assume.” Hank noted that too.

  “I’ll take what I can get,” Fred said. He felt totally spaced from all this; he wished the debriefing session would end and he thought: If only I could drop a couple tabs—

  Across from him the other formless blur wrote and wrote, filling in all the inventory ident numbers for all the technological gadgetry that would, if approval came through, soon be available to him, by which to set up a constant monitoring system of the latest design, on his own house, on himself.

  For over an hour Barris had been attempting to perfect a silencer made from ordinary household materials costing no more than eleven cents. He had almost done so, with aluminum foil and a piece of foam rubber.

  In the night darkness of Bob Arctor’s back yard, among the heaps of weeds and rubbish, he was preparing to fire his pistol with the homemade silencer on it.

  “The neighbors will hear,” Charles Freck said uneasily. He could see lit windows all over, many people probably watching TV or rolling joints.

  Luckman, lounging out of sight but able to watch, said, “They only call in murders in this neighborhood.”

  “Why do you need a silencer?” Charles Freck asked Barris. “I mean, they’re illegal.”

  Barris said moodily, “In this day and age, with the kind of degenerate society we live in and the depravi
ty of the individual, every person of worth needs a gun at all times. To protect himself.” He half shut his eyes, and fired his pistol with its homemade silencer. An enormous report sounded, temporarily deafening the three of them. Dogs in far-off yards barked.

  Smiling, Barris began unwrapping the aluminum foil from the foam rubber. He appeared to be amused.

  “That’s sure some silencer,” Charles Freck said, wondering when the police would appear. A whole bunch of cars.

  “What it did,” Barris explained, showing him and Luck-man black-seared passages burned through the foam rubber, “is augment the sound rather than dampen it. But I almost have it right. I have it in principle, anyhow.”

  “How much is that gun worth?” Charles Freck asked. He had never owned a gun. Several times he had owned a knife, but somebody always stole it from him. One time a chick had done that, while he was in the bathroom.

  “Not much,” Barris said. “About thirty dollars used, which this is.” He held it out to Freck, who backed away apprehensively. “I’ll sell it to you,” Barris said. “You really ought to have one, to guard yourself against those who would harm you.”

  “There’s a lot of those,” Luckman said in his ironic way, with a grin. “I saw in the L.A. Times the other day, they’re giving away a free transistor radio to those who would harm Freck most successfully.”

  “I’ll trade you a Borg-Warner tach for it,” Freck said.

  “That you stole from the guy’s garage across the street,” Luckman said.

  “Well, probably the gun’s stolen, too,” Charles Freck said. Most everything that was worth something was originally ripped off anyhow; it indicated the piece had value. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “the guy across the street ripped the tach off in the first place. It’s probably changed hands like fifteen times. I mean, it’s a really cool tach.”

  “How do you know he ripped it off?” Luckman asked him.

  “Hell, man he’s got eight tachs there in his garage, all dangling cut wires. What else would he be doing with them, that many, I mean? Who goes out and buys eight tachs?”