It was a Plymouth Fury, the GT Sport, a two-door 440 V-8 with hidden headlamps and a four-barrel carb. The color scheme was red over white, and its vanity plates read "Coco." White interior made it a woman's car. The bright finish and the personalized tags would render the vehicle easily identifiable around town, but Robert Lee Jons was unconcerned. To him it was important that he be remembered and that what he did got done with style.
Joe did not spend a lot of time bemoaning the fact that God, who could easily have created him six foot six, rippling with muscles and coruscating with charisma, had opted instead for five foot five, a sagging waist, and social invisibility except maybe in a convention of white supremacists. What did gripe him a bit was there was no consistency. Man who could spend twenty minutes trying to catch the waiter's eye in a half-empty restaurant ought to be able to slip out of a crowded hospital ward without attracting attention, but the long eye of the law was not to be denied.
'Joe, where are you rushing off to?' said Prince, taking his elbow as he stepped into the corridor.
'My oh my,' said Merv Golightly as Joe got into his taxi. 'It's a dressy up party, is it? Have to hurry, don't want you to be any later.'
'I'm not late,' protested Joe.
'Oh yes, you are. About thirty years in that suit, I'd say!'
Merv, who appreciated a good joke, especially his own, laughed at this one for the first five minutes of the journey. Even Joe had to admit there was a real point to it. What to wear at Willie Woodbine's party had exercised his mind greatly. The balding cord jacket was obviously out, though he had hopes if it got much smoother, it might eventually pass for a blazer in the dark with the light behind it. This left either the casual look, which meant his blue leather jerkin over a Gary Glitter T-shirt; or the formal look which meant his funeral, wedding, and choir performance suit.
It was a good suit. He'd had it so long it had come back into fashion twice, and there was hardly a mark on it. Unfortunately, with its broad lapels, slanting pockets, triple=buttoned jacket and seventeem-inch trousers with a two-inch turn, it was at the bottom of its fashion cycle just now.
Manhattan was twenty-two square miles and if he took his time, he'd cover it in two hours. He needed the air, needed to clear the alcohol from his head. The perspective from the driver's seat was a bittersweet pleasure to him.
He continued east.
The Greater Chinatown Dream, the Nationalists had called it: an all-yellow district in lower Manhattan running from the Battery to Fourteenth street, river to river, east to west, by the year 2000.
Then he turned the car north and made all the green lights through loisaida, the Lower East Side, past the Welfare Projects - the Wagner, Rutgers, Baruch, Gouverneur - federally subsidized highrises, which ran along the East River, blocs of buildings that stood out like racial fortresses. Blacks in the Smith Houses, Latinos in the Towers.
That's how the Lower East Side really was, not a melting pot but a patchwork quilt of different communities of people coexisting, sometimes with great difficulty.
Manhattan was symbolic of the rest of Gotham, the Big City, where the best walked the streets alongside the worst.
When the red light caught him, he was already past Alphabet City, in that part of the East Village where the druggie nation came to score: smoke, crack, rocks, pharmaceuticals, and a brand of Mott Street H tagged China Cat, so potent and poisonous it had sent twelve of the hardcore straight to junkie heaven in August, keeping the Ninth Precinct narcs tossing.
"I know the Spartans, that's my old club, have been using the track evenings for training to help it settle. Plus there's the workmen putting finishing touches. Plus people using other bits of the Plezz could easily stroll in here. Shouldn't you concentrate on who's got access to the spare keys? Can't be too many of them."
Oh dear, thought Joe. Like a good princess, she wasn't going to be shy about telling the help what they ought to be working at.
He said, "Got your key handy?"
She passed it over. Joe moved along the wall of metal lockers. They came in blocks of eight. Zak's was second from the left. He counted two in the next block and inserted the key. The door opened. He did the same with the next block.
,p>This way the manufacturers only need eight variations on locks and keys instead of an infinity," he explained."But it's lousy security!" she protested angrily.
"Saves rate payers money," said Joe with civic sternness. "As for security, your crook's got to work it out first."
"You worked it out," she said not un admiringly
That's my job," he said modestly, not thinking it worthwhile to reveal that the lockers at Robco Engineering where he'd worked nearly twenty years had suffered from the same deficiency which he'd worked out after ten.
You see Get Leo?
Again, a pause and Linda saying, Wait a minute. You're Chili Palmer? You are you were on Charlie Rose at least a half hour. He got you to admit your name's Ernest, and I recognize your voice. I've read all about you the interviews, the ones that asked if it's true you were a gangster in Florida? Or was it Brooklyn?
Both.
I loved Get Leo, I saw it twice. The only thing that bothered me, just a little. The guy's too short to be what he is?
Well, that, yeah. But you know going in Michael Weir's short. What was it bothered you?
He's so sure of himself. I can't stand guys who think they know everything. What other movies have you done?
He listened to his voice come on after a pause. I did Get Lost next. Admitting it.
When she says, I still haven't seen it.
He tells her. A sequel has to be better'n the original or it's not gonna work.
"Yeah, he's all right," Louis said. "I'm waiting there about two weeks in Brownsville, McAllen, finally I said fuck-it, I'm going home. But by then I didn't have any money for gas. So I said okay, I'll go out and pick melons for a few days, maybe a week. See, the only reason I was down there I was fucking desperate and this grass was gonna make it, get me a stake. So I sign up at a place, Stanzik Farms, go out and start picking and they call a strike. Actually the strike was going on and I was hired like as a scab, buck sixty an hour. We were out in the fields and the ones on strike were up on the road forming a picket line and this Chicano girl with the union would yell at us through a bullhorn. She'd yell like, 'Vengase! Para respecto, hombres!' 'Come on, for your self-respect.' There'd be police cars there, these hotshot troopers with their sunglasses, chewing gum. Never smile. I think they teach them that at the academy. You're out there, never smile, trooper, show you're a human being, man. Some company people, a foreman, came by there in a pickup truck. Then this Chicano girl, Helen Mendez"--Louis grinned, shaking his head-- "she was something, she'd start calling the names of people she knew out in the field, asking where their dignity was, using that word, dignity, and their respect for justice. She'd say, 'Look at your friends here on the picket line, going hungry for the sake of a just wage.' You should've heard her; she was an actress. And pretty soon some of the pickers they'd be looking at each other, and you'd see them take the sacks off their shoulder and come out of the field."
"And you were one of them," Mickey said.
"And you were one of them," Mickey said.
"Well, I wasn't making all that much and my goddamn back was killing me, that stoop work, Jesus-- so I thought, Well, join the union. They looked like they were having a better time than we were."
"They sent you to prison for striking?"
"No, not for striking," Louis said. "See, they started running the company pickup truck up and down the road past the strikers, giving us a lot of dust and kicking up gravel. Then when the girl, Helen Mendez, would start calling names over the bullhorn, the pickup truck started playing music-- see, the radio was hooked up to a speaker on the roof of the truck--blaring it out so nobody'd be able to hear her yelling their names. I remember, I even remember one of the songs was Falling Leaves, Christ, Roger Williams playing it. And Who Can I Turn To. Helen Mendez'd yell at the truck, 'Hey, you squares, get XECR Reynosa!' You want me to light another one?"
Mickey blinked. "I think I can feel it now."
"Get up and walk you'll find out."
"I'm too comfortable."
"We'd sit out there on the line, this trooper with his ranger hat on'd come along make us get up and stand so many feet apart and so many feet from the edge of the field. We'd say, 'What the fuck do you care if we sit down?' He'd give us this mean squinty no-shit look and point his stick and say something about hauling our ass in if we gave him any mouth. He didn't say nothing to the Stanzik foreman who'd come by in the pickup seeing if he could make us jump back out of the way. I remember the radio was playing Okie from Muskogee--you remember it?"
"Sure," Mickey said. "Merle Haggard."
"How come you know it?"
"I've got a radio too," Mickey said. "I'm not bragging, but we've got about five and only one of them, the one in the kitchen, works."
"I'll fix 'em for you," Louis said. "I was in the Navy. I was a Radioman Third."
"And a melon-picker for half a day," Mickey said.
"Not even that," Louis said. "This truck comes along playing Okie from Muskogee blaring out and some of the strikers they'd hold their signs out in the road and raise them as the truck skinned by. So the foreman got pissed-off, he decided to skin us a little closer, make us jump, and the truck hit this old man, threw him about thirty feet down the road and into the ditch. I saw it, I saw the truck swerve at the man deliberately. Everybody ran over to where he was laying there with his broken leg. The trooper came over, taking his leather book out, and you know what he did?"
"What?" Mickey said.
"He gave the old man laying there a ticket for obstructing traffic."
Mickey thought of the security girl with acne at Saks Fifth Avenue.
"I asked one of the strikers if I could use his car to go into town," Louis said. "I had to get out of there, go someplace maybe have a drink. He said sure, for a dollar. I got in the car, started up the road and there was the foreman standing beside his pickup truck with the door open. I think it was the way he was standing, hand on his hip watching, not giving a shit, you know? I gunned the car at him. I just wanted to make him jump, the son of a bitch, but I cut it too close, took his door off and broke both his legs."
"God," Mickey said. "What happened?"
"Everybody cheered," Louis said. "I was arrested, charged with attempted murder, plea-bargained it down to felonious assault and got two to five in Huntsville. Served thirty months, same amount of time I was in the Navy, and I'll tell you something. Even being at Norfolk, Virginia, I liked the Navy a little better."
A lot of people might not like how I acted with that white woman. They might ask: Why didn’t he get mad? or Why would Mouse be breaking his butt to get money out of a poor farmer when this rich white lady would be so much of a better target?
Mouse was just doing what came natural to him. But there’s a reason I wasn’t angry then, why I’m still not angry and why the people of Pariah didn’t rise up and kill that woman: It’s what I call the ‘Sacred Cow Thinking.’
Miss Dixon lived alone out in a colored community that hated her because she owned everything, even the roads they walked on. But Miss Dixon, and every other white person, was, to that colored community, like the cow is to those Hindus over in India. They’d all starve to death, let their children starve, before they’d slaughter a sacred cow. Miss Dixon was our sacred cow. She had money and land and she could read and go to fine events at the governor’s house. But most of all she was white and being white was like another step to heaven...
Killing her would have been worse than killing our own children; killing her, or even thinking of it, would be like killing the only dream we had.
Mitchell Alden had been born with a number of gifts, but overshadowing them all was the Curse of Poor Decision Making. It was genetic. He remembered sitting in the kitchen in the house where he grew up in Queens, listening to his father talking to his business partner, who wanted to get out of the indoor air-cleaning business and invest in computers. "Dammit, I don't know how long this computer fad is going to last," he remembered his dad saying, trying to talk his partner into staying with selling Smoke-Eeters. "But as long as I'm alive, people will be smoking in bars in New York City."
These words turned out to be true. Mitch's dad died on the Long Island Expressway, six weeks before the ban on smoking in New York City bars went into effect, because of another error of judgement, this one involving a tractor trailer's stopping distance. Mitch carried on the family tradition by joining the army and getting kicked out six weeks later for failing a drug test, then going to community college and majoring in English.
“He worked like a slave. His professors regarded him as their most promising pupil. He had no friends. He never spoke much, even to his fellow students.“
He was poor, but he was used to poverty. Often he went to his classes with no socks. More than once he worked in the market, unloading vegetables to earn a few centimes…“
Then came the catastrophe. His mother died. There was no more money.“
And suddenly, without any transition, he turned his back on his dream. He might have looked for work, as so many students do. But no, he didn’t lift a finger…“
Did he have a suspicion that he wasn’t quite the genius he’d imagined? Had he begun to lose confidence in himself? In any case, he did nothing. Nothing whatever. He merely loafed about in cafés, writing begging letters to distant relatives and appealing to charitable organizations. He sponged cynically on any Czechs he happened to meet in Paris, even flaunting his lack of gratitude.“
The world hadn’t understood him. So he hated the world. And he spent his time nursing his hatred. In the Montparnasse cafés he would sit among people who were rich, happy, and bursting with good health. He would sip his café crème while cocktails were being poured out by the gallon.“
Was he already toying with the idea of a crime? Perhaps… I really don’t know. But I know that twenty or thirty years ago he’d have been a militant anarchist tossing bombs at royalty. But that’s no longer fashionable these days…
“By working ourselves up into a frenzy, we ended up as packs of nerves. Especially those of us who didn’t eat enough. Do you see what I mean? Little Émile Klein included. A kid who didn’t eat, but kept himself going with loads of drink.
“Naturally, we re-discovered the world. We had our own ideas about all the great problems! We scoffed at the middle-class, society, and all established truths…“
As soon as we’d gulped down a few drinks and the air was thick with smoke, we’d bandy the craziest ideas about! A mixture of Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Moses, Confucius, and Jesus Christ.“
For instance, let’s see… I can’t remember who it was who discovered that pain didn’t exist and that it was only a figment of the imagination. I was so taken with the idea that, one night, in the middle of a breathless group, I stuck the end of a penknife into the fleshy part of my arm and tried to smile…“
Then there were other things. We were an Élite, a little group of Geniuses brought together by chance. We soared above the conventional world of law and prejudice.“
A handful of gods, do you see? Gods who were sometimes starving to death, but who walked the streets proudly, dismissing the passers-by with contempt.“
We used to plan the future: Lecocq d’Arneville was to be a Tolstoy. Van Damme, who was doing a boring course at the School of Economics, was to revolutionize political economy and reverse all accepted ideas on the organization of the human race
“Each of us had his place. There were poets, painters, and future heads of state.“
All on drink! And how! In the end, we were so used to getting carried away, that we’d hardly have got here, in the light of the lamp, with the skull from which we all drank, before each of us would manage to achieve the little frenzy he wanted, on his own…“
Even the more modest of us could already see a marble plaque one day on the wall of the house: Here met the famous Companions of the Apocalypse.…“
It was a challenge to see who could bring the latest book, or come up with the most far-fetched ideas.“
It’s pure chance that we didn’t become anarchists. We used to discuss the question, solemnly. There had been an attempted assassination in Seville. We’d read the newspaper article out loud.“
I can’t remember which of us cried out: ‘True genius is destructive!’…
Throughout the night I get customers and I learn things. An overweight woman in her fifties with unwashed, stringy black hair comes in at two in the morning and buys three gallons of whole milk. She hands me what looks like a credit card, but instead of a bank logo, this is plain white and has a faded government seal on it. I look at her suspiciously.
"Run it," she says.
I shrug and swipe it through the credit card machine. Nothing happens. She looks at me, I look at her.
"Are you new?" she asks me. She is wheezing with the effort of carrying the milk to the counter.
"Yeah."
"That's an EFS card. You have to push the EFS button on the machine." She smiles at me patiently.
I figure she's a mental patient, and this card is probably an access card to a parking garage in Iowa. I decide to let her have the milk. She obviously likes milk a lot and we've got plenty.
"It's okay," I tell her. "Just take the milk."
"There's a switch, an EFS switch," she says, getting impatient, or annoyed at being treated like a charity case. Then I see a tiny switch at the bottom of the credit card machine marked "EFS." I click the switch, and I'm amazed when a receipt prints up. She signs a copy and walks off, limping under the weight of three gallons of milk which she appears to be carrying home through the cold. It must be for a family's breakfast. I look at the receipt, and it says, "Electronic Food Stamps, Inc."
Electronic Food Stamps, Incorporated. Not Electronic Food Stamps, but Electronic Food Stamps, Incorporated. This is a business. Somebody's making money designing ways to get government aid to people who have been tossed aside. Some money grubbing software designer has a government contract because we all lost our jobs.
That's the biggest insult of all, that we are being fed off. The destruction of my life, my town, represents a business opportunity to someone else. NIne months ago, this woman walking through the cold was probably a factory employee, or perhaps the wife of one, and her children had health insurance and she had a car and she bought milk in the daytime, with money. I am suddenly filled with the urge to find the fucker who owns the EFS company and shoot him right in the fucking face. I feel that someone owes me an explanation, not a corporate public relations-type explanation, but a down-on-your-knees-begging-for-your-life explanation, which is the only kind worth listening to.
But he's not the only one. From now on, I have to make a list of people who need to be shot in the face. There needs to be a real bloodbath, to equal the financial and emotional one which has just been drawn for all of us.
Driving west on Leipzigerstrasse, I met the torchlight parade of Brownshirt legions as it marched south down Wilhelmstrasse, and I was obliged to get out of my car and salute the passing standard. Not to have done so would have been to risk a beating. I guess there were others like me in that crowd, our right arms extended like so many traffic policemen, doing it just to avoid trouble and feeling a bit ridiculous. Who knows? But come to think of it, political parties were always big on salutes in Germany: the Social Democrats had their clenched fist raised high above the head; the Bolshies in the K P D had their clenched fist raised at shoulder level; the Centrists had their two-fingered, pistol-shaped hand signal, with the thumb cocked; and the Nazis had fingernail inspection. I can remember when we used to think it was all rather ridiculous and melodramatic, and maybe that's why none of us took it seriously. And here we all were now, saluting with the best of them. Crazy.
“In a moment, almost finished, particularly as I’m afraid I must be trying Monsieur de Saint-Hilaire’s patience. Let’s go back to the scene of the crime, as they say, do you mind?”
When they got there, he said suddenly:
“You have seen Émile Gallet alive… What I am going to say may perhaps make you laugh… Yes. Do put on the light; with this foul weather it gets dark an hour earlier than usual… Well, I didn’t see him, and I have spent all my time since the crime trying to imagine him alive.…
“To do that, I want to breathe the air he breathed… rub shoulders with the people he lived with… Look at this picture… I bet you’ll say the same as I did: ‘Poor fellow!’ Especially when you know that the doctors gave him only three more years to live. A rotten liver… And a tired heart just waiting for an excuse to stop… I want to picture this man as a living being, not only in space but in time… Unfortunately I could only go as far back as his marriage; he wouldn’t ever tell even his wife what happened before that.…All that she knows is that he was born in Nantes and that he lived several years in Indo-China. But he didn’t bring back a photograph or a souvenir. He never spoke about it…“
He was a little commercial traveller, with some thirty thousand francs… Even at the age of thirty he was skinny, awkward, with a melancholy disposition.“
He met Aurore Préjean and decided to marry her… The Préjeans are social climbers… The father was hard pressed and no longer had enough money to keep his paper alive… But he had been the private secretary to a pretender to the throne! He had corresponded with dukes and princes!“
His eldest girl married a master tanner.“
Gallet cut a miserable figure in that society, and if he was accepted at all it was only because he agreed to put his little bit of capital into the Soleil business… They didn’t put up with him easily. For the Préjeans it’s a come-down that a son-in-law should sell silver-plate articles for cheap presents.
“They try to give him a bit more ambition… He resists. He’s not made for a great career. His liver is far from good at that time… He dreams of a peaceful life in the country with his wife, of whom he is very fond.
“To begin with, we couldn’t see very clearly… I thought for a moment he was dead…“
My husband wanted to call some of our neighbours to help lift him on to a bed… But Jean understood… he started squeezing my hand… squeezing it so hard!… It was as if he was hanging on to it like grim death…“
And I could see him sniffing…
“I understood… Because in the eight years he’s been with us, you know… He can’t talk… but I think he can hear what I’m saying… Am I right, Jean?… Are you in pain?”
It was difficult to know whether the injured man’s eyes were shining with intelligence or fever.
The woman brushed away a piece of straw which was touching his ear.“
Me, you know, my life’s my little household, my brasses, my bits and pieces of furniture… I do believe that if somebody gave me a palace, I’d be downright unhappy…“
For Jean, it’s his stable… and his horses… How can I explain?… There are naturally days when we don’t move because we’re unloading… Jean has got nothing to do… he could go to the pub…
"But no! He lies down here… He leaves an opening for a ray of sunlight to come in…”
And Maigret imagined himself where the carter was, seeing the partition coated with resin on his right, with the whip hanging on a twisted nail, the tin cup hooked on to another, a patch of sky between the boards above, and on the right the horses’ muscular croppers.
The whole scene gave off an animal warmth, a sensation of full-blooded life which took one by the throat like the harsh wine of certain hill-sides.
The situation was ridiculous. The Superintendent knew there was not one chance in ten that his vigil would lead to any result.
But he stuck to it, because of a vague impression; he could not even have called it a presentiment. It was more like a private theory, which he had never even worked out but which just stuck nebulously at the back of his mind; he called it the theory of the chink.
Every criminal, every gangster, is a human being. But he is first and foremost a gambler, an adversary; that is how the police are inclined to regard him, and as such they usually try to tackle him.
When a crime or felony is committed, it is dealt with on the strength of various more or less impersonal data. It is a problem with one—or more—unknown factors, to be solved, if possible, in the light of reason.
Maigret used the same procedure as anyone else. And like everyone else he employed the wonderful techniques devised by Bertillon, Reiss, Locard, and others, which have turned police work into a science.
But above all he sought for, waited for, and pounced on the chink. In other words, the moment when the human being showed through the gambler.
At the Majestic he had been confronted by the gambler. Here, he sensed a difference. This quiet, neat villa was not one of the pawns in the game that Pietr the Lett was playing. That young woman, and the children Maigret had glimpsed and heard, belonged to an entirely different material and moral universe.
‘Any other names?’ Fox asked.
‘One or two are probably still a bit cracked – living as hermits in the Western Isles and writing anarchist blogs. Most of them probably found that as they got older, they became the sort of person they’d previously despised.’
‘The establishment, in other words?’
‘These were bright people, in the main.’
‘Even the ones scooping up handfuls of anthrax from Gruinard?’
‘Even them,’ Professor Martin said, sounding sleepy from all the wine. ‘It’s all changed now, though, hasn’t it? Nationalism has entered the mainstream. If you ask me, they’ll sweep the next election. A few years from now, we could be living in an independent European democracy. No Queen, no Westminster, no nuclear deterrent. That would have been impossible to predict a scant few years back, never mind quarter of a century.’
‘Pretty much what the SNLA and all the others were fighting for,’ Fox concurred.
‘Pretty much.’
‘Is there anyone I could try talking to about all of this, other than psychiatric patients and hermits?’
‘Do you know John Elliot?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘He’s on TV all the time. News and current affairs.’
‘Never heard of him.’
‘He merits a mention in my book.’
‘What about Alice Watts?’
‘Who?’
He told her Aperture magazine had contacted him about doing a book. Call it South Beach. Get all the old people, the art deco look. He was working on it now. No, he was thinking about it more than he was working on it. He wanted to do it. He wouldn't mind having a coffee-table book on his coffee table. It seemed strange though--ask thirty or forty dollars for a book full of pictures of people who'd never see it, never be able to afford it.
"At the gallery they sip wine and look at my pictures. They say things like, 'I see his approach to art as retaliation, a frontal attack against the assumptions of a technological society.'
"They say, 'His work is a compendium of humanity's defeat at the hands of venture capital.'
"They say, 'It's obvious he sees his work as an exorcism, his forty days in the desert.' Or, another one, 'They're self-portraits. He sees himself as dispossessed, unassimilated.'
"The review in the paper said, 'The aesthetic sub-text of his work is the systematic exposure of artistic pretension.' I thought I was just taking pictures."
Jean Shaw said, "Simplicity. It is what it is." Then paused. "And what it isn't, too. Is that what you're saying?"
He didn't want her to try so hard. "I heard one guy at the gallery--it was his wife or somebody who said I was dispossessed, unassimilated, and the guy said, 'I think he takes pictures to make a buck, and anything else is fringe.' I would've kissed the guy, but it might've ruined his perspective."
A wire fence separated the Bajan sculptor's garage apartment and yard from the Robert E. Lee housing project. At least thirty black kids were playing some kind of grab-ass on the other side of the fence. They came over to the fence to stare at Hoke while he pulled into the narrow backyard and parked. There was a huge sculpture of a birdlike creature in the yard, blocking the way to the closed door of the garage. The wings were fashioned from automobile fenders, and the body was formed with welded auto parts. The "bird" had been painted with red rustproofing primer, and its eyes were red glas taillights. The eyes were unlighted, and Hoke wondered for a moment if the sculptor would wire them for electricity when he was finished with the sculpture. He then realized that he didn't give a shit what the sculptor decided to do, because he would never have to look at it again.
At first glance she was a nice old lady, but when you got to give her another look you saw right away that she was weird. Something about her walk, perhaps? The way she nodded her head from side to side or kept glancing back at the passing cars? There was nothing immediately wrong about the way she was dressed. Cal could see colours on these new closed circuit screens, still hadn't got used to it; rust colour to her print skirt, maroon cardigan hanging from her shoulders, draped. Looking closer he could make out strong leather shoes, hair permed and reminiscent of the forties, stiff with setting lotion, tight little kiss curls framing the upper part of her face. No, he was remembering his grandmother. The screens did that to you sometimes, gave a fairly good outline and somehow forced your imagination to fill in the details.
