Motown (13 page)

“Try the toilet.”

Mahomet started to withdraw.

“Second.”

He stopped. Quincy looked at him a moment. “Ever sing at a funeral?”

T
HE FARM WAS A
farm.

No different from the others they’d passed, a flat forty acres surrounded by barbed wire with a small white farmhouse and two large barns built of corrugated steel in the shape of airplane hangars. A gate fashioned from an iron pipe hinged to a fence post barred the gravel driveway. Wendell Porter got out of the car, opened the padlock with a key attached to his ring, and swung the pipe out of the way. After he drove through he went back and closed and locked it.

He parked in front of the house and got out. Rick unbuckled himself and followed. They mounted a wooden porch containing a big orange cat curled up in a dilapidated wicker chair and went through the screen door without knocking. The smell of the interior, old damp wood and meals cooked and consumed and forgotten, reminded Rick of Mrs. Herder’s kitchen.

The room was in fact a large kitchen, with brown mottled linoleum on the floor and an old-fashioned pump-up gas stove and electric refrigerator with a cylinder on top and a sink whose white enamel was flaking away from the black cast iron beneath. A black steel desk that belonged in a service station stood incongruously just inside the entrance, behind which a gray-haired man sat with one foot up on the typewriter leaf watching Tom and Jerry on a set with rabbit ears. The man wore a short-sleeved white shirt with a blue necktie and dark work pants, but his footwear, a white sock and high black lace-up shoe, was a dead giveaway. He was a security guard.

“Think he’s ever going to catch that mouse, Fred?”

“I keep hoping, but he ain’t in thirty years. ’Morning, Mr. Porter.” Fred put his foot on the floor and handed Porter a clipboard with a ballpoint pen tied to it.

Porter signed the attached sheet. “This is Rick Amery. The Porter Group just increased by one.”

Fred regarded Rick from behind square-rimmed glasses, then reached into a bowl on the desk and held out a blank white button the size of a nickel. “Pin this on. Don’t take it off while you’re on the grounds. And sign in.”

Rick obeyed and was surprised to see Porter select a button for himself and pin it to his lapel. Porter smiled at his reaction.

“White on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Blue the rest of the week. The guards have orders to eject anyone not wearing the right button, me included. GM might send in a double.”

“You believe that?”

“What I believe makes no difference. Fred was with security at the Ford Willow Run plant for twenty-seven years. We all dance to his tune.”

“Henry the First used to try to sneak past me there; he liked his jokes. I caught him every time and didn’t it piss him off.” Fred got up and turned off the TV in the middle of a commercial for something called a Frisbee. A square Colt Army rode in his belt holster with its barrel in his right hip pocket. “Henry Deuce gave me a watch last year and showed me the door. That was the first and last time I ever seen him.”

“Is he a volunteer?” Rick followed Porter down a narrow hallway behind the kitchen and out a side door.

“No. Everyone at the Farm is on salary.”

They took a path worn down to bare earth to the nearer of the two hangarlike structures. As they drew close, Rick saw that the building was at least twice the size of a normal barn. It could have sheltered a 747.

“I have Caroline to thank for the house and property,” Porter said. “One of her clients, a developer, got in a financial crunch and couldn’t meet her fee. He’d been planning to build a shopping center. We paid up the taxes and here we are.”

“Where are we?”

“On the boundary between theory and proof.” The consumer advocate opened a door next to the big closed bay and held it. Rick went inside.

He wasn’t prepared for the assault on his senses that followed.

The interior was the size of a football field, bounded on four sides by cork paneling and the complex girdered structure of the roof forty feet overhead, where a series of suspended fans turned under louvered vents shaped like gables. The floor was asphalt over cement. Sandbags stacked in a solid lace pattern like tires encircled the center, creating an oval one hundred yards long by sixty yards wide. There a driver in a silver firesuit and red crash helmet was threading a brick-colored Chevrolet Impala convertible through an obstacle course of yellow hazard cones. The roar of the big 409 engine in the enclosed area was horrendous.

“Slip these on,” shouted Porter, handing him a pair of noise-suppressing earphones from a table full of them. He put on another pair.

“Ventilation’s our biggest problem,” he went on at the top of his lungs. “The fans don’t quite do it, and we can’t open the doors without bringing in the whole neighborhood to investigate the noise. Fifteen minutes out of every hour is as long as I dare expose anyone to the fumes, and the shifts are rotated so that nobody’s here two days in a row.”

Rick nodded. The screech of the Impala’s brakes as the driver negotiated the turns came unadulterated through the suppressors. He had knocked over about a third of the cones.

They weren’t the only witnesses to the exercise. A man in shirtsleeves and earphones stood with his back to them taking notes on a clipboard, and a motion picture camera attached to a steel tripod recorded everything under arc lights as bright as the sun. A big man in slacks and a loose blue zip-front Windbreaker spotted the newcomers and came their way. He was wearing earphones and Rick was certain the jacket concealed a handgun. Just then the man with the clipboard raised his hand to signal the driver, who cut the ignition and coasted to a stop six feet short of him.

Silence rang.

The earphones came off. Porter introduced Rick to the guard, whose name was Arthur. He was in his late thirties with black hair thinning on top and shallow gray eyes. He nodded at Rick and stepped past him to shoot back the heavy bolt that secured the bay doors. The air sweetened noticeably when he pushed them open.

Porter and Rick went over to where the man with the clipboard was talking with the driver, who had removed his helmet to reveal a shock of curly blond hair on a Nordic head.

“Hal Bledsoe, Günter Damm, Rick Amery,” Porter said. “I hired Hal away from Production and Design at AMC.”

Rick shook the round-faced Bledsoe’s pudgy hand and grasped the bronze one offered by the driver. “I thought I recognized you,” Rick said. “You ran in the Vegas Grand Prix a couple of years back.”

“You were there?” Damm spoke with a soft German accent.

“No, I caught it on the tube.”

“Günter doubled for Elvis in
Viva, Las Vegas,”
Porter said. “He doesn’t like to talk about it.”

Damm’s aristocratic face became animated. “He signed my driving gloves. He said I could have a speaking part in his next picture, but I broke my leg at Monte Carlo and missed the shooting.
Roustabout.
He sent me an autographed poster.”

“But he doesn’t like to talk about it.” Bledsoe was grinning.

“How’d we do?” Porter asked.

Bledsoe handed him the clipboard. “We’re running out of cones.”

Porter skimmed the top sheet and the one underneath. “Nothing we didn’t expect. That’s just too much car for those nine-and-a-half-inch drums. How’d we do for stopping distance?”

“That’s next.”

He gave back the clipboard and pointed at Damm’s helmet. “May I borrow it?”

The German hesitated, then held it out. “You paid for it.”

Porter handed Bledsoe his earphones and put on the helmet. When he’d adjusted the chinstrap, he looked like an investment broker for the Detroit Lions. He smiled at Rick. “Feeling adventurous?”

“Always do on Saturday.”

“There’s another helmet on the table.”

It was silver-colored fiberglass and a snug fit. Rick emptied his pockets onto the table and took off the white button. When he rejoined the others, Porter was climbing into the driver’s seat of the Impala. Arthur the security guard was clearing the yellow cones from the track.

“Wendell, is this smart?” Bledsoe asked.

“If I were smart I’d be defending corporate vice presidents from charges of income tax evasion. Mount up, Tonto.”

The car had no radio or heater. The dash was upholstered with molded foam rubber three inches thick.

“The industry can’t claim my tests aren’t fair. I’m not prepared to sacrifice my drivers just to prove a point.” Porter cinched Rick’s seat belt tight enough to cut off his circulation and buckled his own. “The whole country’s on a speed binge. The auto companies cut back on safety so they have more money to spend on horsepower. When this model was introduced, it had eleven-inch brake drums. Now it’s one and one-half inches less safe than it was last year.”

“What are we going to do?”

“Leave that to me. All you have to do is hang on.” He turned the key.

Porter’s lead foot, hinted at on the way there, found freedom on the unobstructed track. He drove the length of the oval marked off by the sandbags, executed a sliding turn, and roared back the way they’d come, accelerating steadily.

“Detroit’s not evil,” he said, “just blind, deaf, and a little stupid. Safe cars are like sensible shoes, harder to sell than the flashy pumps that pinch your toes and ruin your arches. In order to avoid sinking capital into something it can’t advertise, the industry set out to hoodwink the American consumer into accepting collisions that maim and kill as an inevitability of life on the open road. It succeeded so well it’s become a victim of its own con. The statistics you and Lee and Pammie collect are an important weapon against Madison Avenue brainwashing. Hard results here are another.” He fishtailed the other way and braked abruptly. Rick waited for his vitals to catch up.

The exhaust bubbled. Porter gripped the wheel at ten to two and gunned the engine twice. The vibration numbed the soles of Rick’s feet and buzzed in his fillings.

“Try not to swallow your tongue.” Porter shoved the pedal to the firewall.

Mortal wails and the prickling stench of scorched rubber. The Impala leaned forward, pawed the ground, and lunged. Something cracked behind Rick’s head and the stacked sandbags on both sides of the car turned into colorless ribbons of speed. The end of the oval track sprang up like something in the pocket of a catapult.

“Stay loose!” Porter jammed on the brakes.

More wailing and toxic smoke. The inside of the car tore loose of the chassis and Rick left his body. Hovering among the girders under the roof, feeling the breeze of the fans blowing down his collar, he looked down and saw his body leave the seat and splash through the windshield in agonizingly slow motion, like a shootout in an Italian western. Then, as if a switch had been thrown, he was back inside his body. The body was inside the car, clamped in place by the belt across his lap. The car had stopped. His view through the windshield was blocked by a sandbag lying on top of the hood. The glass had spidered. The engine had stalled and the only sound was the hissing of the broken radiator.

“Are you all right?”

He looked at Porter. The long seamed face under the ridiculous red helmet was a map of concern.

“Ask my stomach when you see it.”

The hissing didn’t belong to the radiator. The sandbag had sprung a leak and the grains were spilling down the air vent in a brazen stream.

“I’d say you’re all right.” Porter removed his helmet and ran his fingers through his anarchic hair. “What’s the damage, Hal?”

They were surrounded now. Bledsoe and Günter Damm clawed open both doors; the one on Rick’s side squawked against a cocked fender. Arthur, whose Windbreaker had ridden up to expose a cedar-handled Ruger in a belt clip, seized the leaky sandbag and dragged it off the hood. The sheet metal had accordioned back almost as far as the shattered windshield.

“The hell with the car.” Bledsoe’s round features were as pale as the sheet on his clipboard, which he was still clutching. “You okay?”

“I’m fine. I told you it was too much car for those skimpy drums. Make sure you measure the skid marks. I want the stopping distance down to the inch.”

“Jesus Christ, Wendell. Promise me you won’t do that again.”

“No promises.” He undid his seat belt and turned to Rick. “‘What’s next, training wheels?’ I believe that’s what you said.”

Rick unclamped his fingers from the dash. He had torn two large gouges in the foam rubber.

Porter turned Rick’s wrist so he could read his watch.

“Quarter to one. I have an appointment in Rochester in forty-five minutes. Günter will drive you back to the office. You’ll have to ask him about the time Elvis let him drive his custom Cadillac.”

Rick said, “I think I’ll walk.”

L
EW
C
ANADA, WHO HAD
small use for irony, never dwelled long on the fact that he had received his most valuable lesson in life from the first man he’d ever wanted to kill.

One day Major Duveen, a game-legged, cigar-mashing veteran of Chennault’s Flying Tigers who had bullied, humiliated, and excoriated the men of Canada’s company from ground school through combat training and their first jumps, called them into the mess hall to see a newsreel of the Bataan Death March that had not been edited for showing in theaters and stopped the projector on a frame showing a Japanese officer on horseback. The officer had just finished walking his horse over the body of an American GI who had collapsed from exhaustion and thirst and was turning in his saddle to inspect the result.

“Take a long look,” Duveen said. “Next time you see some little monkey-faced Jap in a Hollywood movie, and until you see one on your own, I want you cunts to remember what the sonsabitches look like. We weren’t thrown out of Corregidor by any army of gardeners in thick glasses. Before we’re through here you’ll be able to look at a pile of shit in the jungle and tell me in two seconds if it came through a good Yankee colon or some Jap bastard’s yellow ass.”

As it turned out, Duveen was forcibly retired for breaking both his riding crop and a nineteen-year-old lieutenant’s eardrum before they got around to studying the differences between American and Japanese shit; but long after Canada had learned to transfer his hatred of the major to the enemy, he had remembered that freeze-frame and the speech that went with it. He had taken the memory with him after his liberation from the POW camp in Rabaul, and back in Detroit his ability to read the enemy (both on the street and among his fellow officers) had seen him from a scout car to plainclothes and finally to the command of a special division the rest of the department knew nothing about. He would still be tempted to kill Duveen if the two met on the street, but he liked to think that before he did he would have the good manners to thank the major for his advice.