Passing Through the Flame (46 page)

“I want to hear it as committee business. I think maybe it could become committee business.”

Stein thought he got the drift of her remark. A man like Sargent could be exactly what they needed. If they could trust him. “Barry—”

“I could call you back if it became committee business,” Stein suggested.

“If it became committee business
!” Ruby snapped. “You’ll call me back if in your infinite male wisdom you think I should hear what this man has to say!”

Abruptly, Sargent spoke. “Stop bothering the lady. She can stay. Why shouldn’t she? You think I care who hears this? You think I’d trust you further than I’d trust her? You think I’d trust either of you with anything that could be really dangerous to me? Or are
you
afraid of her?” He looked directly at Ruby as he said it, cracked a little smile. Stein sensed a spark of electricity passing between them and, to his own surprise, found himself resenting it.

“If it’s all right with him, it’s all right with me,” Stein said. “Yeah, well, it’s fine with me,” Sargent said, flashing another smile at Ruby. “Let me be honest with you, I want to get this Harry Marvin off your back because I want to teach Jango Beck a lesson he needs learning.”

Jango Beck?
The name on Sargent’s lips triggered a memory image in Stein’s mind—Beck’s party, that dark room full of spotlights, some lunatic coming after Jango Beck with blood in his eye, Star stopping him just short of an explosion.
That’s
where I’ve seen Sargent before! He was the man that threatened Jango Beck! This is starting to look very interesting....

“What’s your connection with Jango Beck?” Stein asked cautiously. “What does Harry Marvin have to do with it?”

“Beck’s burning my ass on this Sunset City thing,” Sargent said. “I run a heavy volume of grass out of Mexico, and Beck distributes about half of it. The rest is split up over six other outlets. Now Beck tells me he needs a tremendous amount of dope by Labor Day for this damn festival of his, twice his usual volume. If I don’t supply it, he won’t distribute for me anymore, and I lose half my volume outlet. But if I
do
supply Beck with what he wants, it means I’ve got to cut off my six smaller distributors on the fall crop, and they will be very pissed off. He’s put me in a bind where whatever I do I lose half my distribution.”

“But what does Harry Marvin have to do with all this?”

“Are you kidding?” Sargent said incredulously. “You think there’s a difference between Beck and Marvin?”

“What?”

Stein found Sargent looking at him with uncomprehending amazement, an amazement that seemed to imply a negative judgment. “Jesus Christ, Marvin owns your ass lock, stock, and barrel and you’re telling me you don’t know he’s just a front man for Beck? Man, you are unreal.”

Stein felt as if he had just been handed a giant all-day sucker, a monster green lollipop with “schmuck” written all over it in bright red. It’s so fucking obvious! Jango Beck owns Harry Marvin. Harry Marvin owns the
Flash
effectively. Therefore, Beck owns me. And who set me up with Marvin in the first place?
Jango Beck
. That goddamn pig son of a bitch used Marvin to set me up for himself! And I walked right into it!

“What did you have in mind, Sargent?” Stein said in a hard, cold voice that startled Ruby, O’Brian, and even himself. Sargent grinned at him as if to say, “Welcome to my wavelength.”

“I want to hit Beck hard enough so that he won’t feel free to put me in an impossible position in September. If I make Marvin give your notes back, it’ll be a slap on Jango’s wrists, but it won’t be heavy enough to make him come after me.”

“How can you do that? If Marvin is just a front for Beck, how can you force him to do something that Beck doesn’t want him to do?”

“Beck wants to maintain the cover. I’m not even supposed to know. So he can’t get pissed at me if I strong-arm Marvin because he doesn’t want to admit any connection with Marvin. He’ll know that I know, but he won’t want to admit it to me. You probably know what a bowl of spaghetti Jango’s mind is. This time, I got him tied in his own knots. Say the word, and I go have a talk with Marvin. Convincing him is easy. Who’s he got to protect him? Beck won’t do it, and he’s not exactly popular with the law.”

“Do it,” Stein found himself saying. “We’ll back you any way you might need. If you can accomplish this, we’ll owe you plenty.”

“And we’ll pay it back, too,” Ruby said unexpectedly. “You prove you can do this, and we’ll show you the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.”

“I’ve got all the gold I can handle,” Sargent said, rising. “But who knows, I could learn to handle more. I’ll see you three days from now. With the paper you gave Harry Marvin.”

When he was gone, Stein excitedly asked Ruby, “What did you have in mind?”

“I’m not sure. But this guy sounds like what we need to seize the festival.”

“Right,” Stein said. “And he seems to be a potential enemy of Beck. If he’s not just bullshitting, and if we can motivate him.”

“Yeah, that’s about as far as I’ve gotten too.”

“What are you two
talking
about?” O’Brian shouted.

Ruby’s face was becoming animated, alive, in a way Stein had not yet seen. “Sargent is the kind of man we need to actually seize the stage and the PA system at Sunset City,” she said. “He’s the kind of man the Movement lacks: real muscle, a man who knows how to get a concrete mission done and doesn’t care how. A
real
revolutionary, not just another mouth.”

“I’d hardly call Sargent a revolutionary,” Stein said petulantly. How much of this is true, and how much of it is what flashed between her and Sargent? And how much of
that was
exactly the kind of male charisma she puts down in Ivan, only in a much nastier package?

“Oh, not yet, not yet,” Ruby said blithely. “He’s got no revolutionary consciousness. But that’s a matter of education. He’s an outlaw living a life of revolutionary action, following his own class interest. AH we’ve got to do is use that to wake him up.”

Chris Sargent was amazed at the stupidity of the “Revolutionary Action Committee,” amazed at how they were walking right into what Jango had set up. He somehow goaded them into taking over the festival because he wanted those record album tapes destroyed by a “riot” or an “accident,” and now he’s slipping me right in to make sure it gets done right, all without touching anything with his own hands.

Sargent reached into a jacket pocket and triumphantly threw the notes Jango had bought from Harry Marvin onto Barry Stein’s desk. Jango had admitted that the notes cost him fifty thousand dollars, which made a hundred thousand dollars he was willing to pay to have those album tapes destroyed. There must be quite a killing at the other end.

“My God!” Stein exclaimed, his big eyes bugging, his tired-looking face lighting up with amazement and relief. “How did you do it?”

“Took a squad of my men, captured his pornography factory for an afternoon, mined it, and stuck an M-16 in his mouth,” Sargent said. “You’d be surprised how cooperative he became.” That was the crazy cover story Jango had concocted to account for the notes and to show them what a bad-ass he was. And sure enough, the nerds were eating it up like strawberry pie.

Ruby Berger, the hard little chick just the right side of being a dyke, with her trigger temper and her hot pants for him, looked particularly enthusiastic. She might not be bad; she might turn out to be more of Jango’s “fringe benefits.”

Stein suddenly began to look worried again. “What’s to prevent Marvin from running the same kind of number on me? He must be really steaming!”

Yeah, sure, sap, he’s steaming with fifty thousand dollars of Jango’s money in his pocket. “I told him I could take his factory again just as easily as I did the first time, and if I had to stick a piece in his mouth again, I’d for sure pull the trigger.”

“You seem to have had some kind of military experience,” Ivan Blue said. “Were you in Vietnam?” This dude seemed the heaviest of the three. Old Ruby couldn’t stand him; he had too much balls combined with too much bullshit. But she’d spread her legs for balls without bullshit.

“Yeah, I was in Vietnam. In the Green Berets, which is about as far into Vietnam as anyone could be crazy enough to get.”

“But the army taught you a trade,” Ruby said.

Sargent laughed. “Yeah, they taught me the trade so well I decided to go into business for myself.”

“What if you went into business for the people?” she said. “What kind of people?” Sargent asked. Here comes the pitch; I better not play too easy to get.

“Our kind of people. Your kind of people. Aren’t we on the same side against people like Harry Marvin and Jango Beck?”

“I’ll go into business with whatever people show me where the bread is,” Sargent said. Then more warmly: “But I’ll admit I can do without creeps like Marvin and Beck. There’s too much blood in my business for me to like leeches. Are you making me an offer?” She stared at him as if trying to read some secret message on his forehead. Weird chick.

“Well, yeah,” Barry Stein said over the lip of a coffee cup. “How would you like to cut the middlemen out of your entire operation? Middlemen are bloodsucking leeches, right? What if you could sell your grass directly to the customers?”

“That’s too risky, and I’d need an operation as big as General Motors to move the same volume,” Sargent said. These assholes are trying to tell
me
about the dope business?

“What if you could sell to street customers at half street-level prices without any hassle, right out in the open, and with someone handling the selling and distribution without taking a profit?” Stein said.

“What if a rich uncle I never heard of died and left me a billion dollars?” Sargent said. “Where do you think I could come up with a Santa Claus deal like that?”

“At Sunset City. We’re going to take it over. We’re going to turn the festival area into a permanent liberated zone.”

“Permanent liberated zone? Is that like a ‘secure strategic hamlet’? Or is it more like a place you hold until dark?”

“We’ll seize control of the main stage and the PA system and hold them long enough to get the people with us,” Stein said. “At that point, Beck’s security force will be powerless. We’ll convert the temporary facilities into permanent facilities for a city of twenty thousand. By the time they can send in the National Guard, we’ll be a
cause celebre
, and we hope to have enough money raised before they can evict us to buy the land we’re squatting on. Then we have a permanent liberated zone. Our own laws. Our own government. Our own way of doing things. Our own police.”

“And our own attitude toward the sale of grass,” Ruby said. “You sell it to us at one-half street price, and we resell it at cost to the people. Not just to the people living in the liberated zone, but to anyone who cares to show up to buy it. We’ll pay you twice what Beck is paying you, handle your whole volume, and make you a hero to the people. You can double your profit and feel good about it, too.”

Sargent found it mighty hard to maintain his cool. These people are off on some incredible fantasy trip, like the Pentagon in Vietnam. They’d have the National Guard and the Army and the fucking Tactical Air Command if they needed it on a scene like that in a week. Assuming you could hold the stage at all. Assuming you could get a quarter of a million people to climb on your own trip before a few dozen police cars got there. Assuming you were cretin enough to think you could rip Jango Beck off like that and live to enjoy it.

But this was just about what Jango had predicted, and this was supposed to be his point of entry. He had to treat this opium dream seriously, he even had to be enthusiastic. “If you could actually deliver something like that, I’d be crazy not to take the deal,” he said.

“Would you come in on it with us?” Ruby said, her eyes shining him on, trying to use everything she had to sell him this truckload of oregano. “From the beginning?”

“What do you mean from the beginning?”

“We need someone like you, Chris,” Stein said. “We need someone who can organize a strike force, take over the stage, and hold it against opposition.”

“Hold it for how long?”

“For an hour or two,” Blue said. “That’sall it’ll take to bring the people over, and the rest will be easy. Can you do it?”

“Sure it could be done,” Sargent said. “Not by amateurs, but by men who knew what they were doing.”

“Could you do it, Chris?” Ruby said.

“Oh, yeah, I could do it. With the right ordnance and about fifty pros.”

“How about with a hundred and fifty amateurs?”

“
If
I had the time to train them,
if
 I had the right weapons,
if
I had some pros to help me lead them.” Sargent found himself gaming the fantasy. It would be easy: create a series of diversions, take the stage mainly with Green Mountain Boys, burn the tapes, and get out. We could finish the whole operation in five or ten minutes. Sure, that’s the way we’ll do it.

“How about it, Chris?” Ruby said. “You know how to get it done. Help us do it.”

“You’re asking me to take a big chance,” Sargent said. “I can carry out my end. Can you give me a reason to believe that you can carry out yours?”

Come on, baby, come out with something reasonable so I can agree without looking stupid. Jeez, I hope I haven’t overplayed my hand.

“We believe in you,” Ruby Berger said, with utter sincerity, with lust for him in her eyes. He let that lust bounce back, making sure that Stein and Blue saw it, believed that she was cockteasing him into it. At the same time, he found the moment touching, a sweet shadow of that sweetest of all moments with Star. Once again, a woman was telling him something that seemed to float just beyond the bounds of his firm comprehension, something that made him feel sad and good at the same time.

He smiled back at Ruby Berger. “I think you’re going to talk me into it, lady,” he said.

“You know what the problem is,” Bobby Paoluzzi said, zipping up his fly and walking over to the big mirror above the row of sinks. He ran his fingers through his wavy black hair and extracted a beaded pillbox from his shirt pocket.