Running Dog (16 page)

“I’m a little crazy tonight.”

“Try reaching that ashtray and push it closed.”

Stale cigarette butts. Smell of various plastics that made up the interior of the car. They straightened up finally. She sat on the driver’s side, back resting against the door, her feet up on the seat. Selvy looked straight ahead. A silence, followed by:

“Naomi is this buxom Israeli girl who we find bathing one day in a stream that runs through her kibbutz. She has giant white breasts, etcetera etcetera, nipples, etcetera. So then along comes Lateef, who’s an Arab army deserter. Well, to tighten the script, they meet and fall in love and just screw and screw and screw, doing it where they won’t be discovered. Forbidden love with a capital F. I’m skipping the details, understand. There’s a lot about Lateef’s Arab pecker, which you probably don’t mind if I glide over. Anyway one day we find them having a picnic on the Golan Heights. It’s very star-crossed and tender.”

“Wait a second.”

He was looking in the rearview mirror. Nadine turned her head, intending to lean back out the open window and check what it was he’d seen.

“Don’t do that.”

Nobody said anything for the next four or five minutes. Selvy kept his eye on the mirror. He seemed engaged in deep and melancholy thought.

“It’s getting daylight,” she said.

He got out of the car, walked around to her side and stood leaning against the door, smoking.

“We ought to get my clothes. One thing, I won’t mind leaving that hotel. More Lysol. Night clerk’s insane. Pigeons in the elevator. One more week here, I’d be ready to fall on my sword.”

He was interested in knowing precisely what instruments, devices, tools they might be carrying. It would put things in perspective, having that information. It would clarify the relationship, subject to adjusters.

“Glen with one
n
,” she said. “If you’re bent on avoiding someone, how come you’re standing in plain sight outside the selfsame car that you’re getting ready to drive away in?”

He reacted as though coming out of a trance, a state of detachment from his present surroundings. Yet there was an element of alertness in his features, his whole body, as though at the center of that dazed state he’d found a level clearer than any thus far accessible to him.

He was facing east, watching the tops of buildings take on color in the hazy light.

1) A gut-hook skinning knife.

2) A fillet knife with a rosewood handle.

3) An Arkansas toothpick with a buffalo-horn handle.

4) A bowie weighing fifty-one ounces, with a ten-inch blade, scalloped butt cap and brass collar.

5) A throwing knife, minus handle.

6) A hunter with a cholla cactus handle.

7) A hunter with a dropped-point blade and a stag handle.

8) A boot knife with an ivory handle.

9) A stiletto.

10) A palm dagger.

11) An English-style bowie in a strictly decorative buckskin sheath.

12) A survival model with a hollow steel handle to accommodate codeine pills and water-purifying tablets.

13) A combat knife with a mahogany handle.

14) A combat knife with a brass guard and a five-inch blade.

15) A combat knife, walnut handle, set in a leather sheath.

16) A combat knife with a double-edged point and a seven-inch blade.

17) A combat knife with a double-edged point and an eight-inch blade.

The coffee table was new, inset with a plexiglass terrarium full of dwarf trees and shrubs. Grace Delaney talked into the phone, girlishly twirling the cord with her free hand. Eventually she went into her swivel routine, ending up facing the window. She hadn’t yet poured skin cream on her hands, so Moll stayed put, studying the bonsai, marveling at the other woman’s ability to produce convincingly intimate laughter.

Grace turned toward her, placing the phone in its cradle.

“We were saying.”

“You miss a sense of solid footing.”

“Moll, a single unnamed source.”

“We go with that all the time. That’s why Percival handed me the story. We’re totally irresponsible. He knows it gets picked up elsewhere once we run it.”

“We ain’t running it, swee’ pea. It’s essentially a blind item, the way you’ve written the thing. It’s couched in the most excruciatingly vague terms.”

“I use names,” Moll said. “I name Mudger. I name Radial Matrix.”

“It’s convoluted and tricky and elusive beyond anyone’s ability to salvage. It’s a ten-thousand-word blind item. Clunk. It goes down like pig iron.”

“What do you want changed?”

“I told you, it’s unsalvageable. We can’t build this elaborate
dream structure using a single unnamed source who’s already told you he denies everything in advance. The Senator’s intent on moving you off his collection. That’s about the only basis this story seems to have.”

“He doesn’t know I’m
on
to his collection.”

“Knucklehead, of course he knows.”

“Grace, goddamn.”

“Want some coffee?”

“No.”

Delaney opened a desk drawer and gestured questioningly.

“Okay,” Moll said. “What is it?”

“Vodka.”

“Okay.”

She took the silver flask and drank.

“He knows, Moll. Of course he knows. He’s got resources. He’s got people all over the place. He’s a fucking senator, isn’t he?”

“I don’t like these plants.”

“Don’t be stupid. They’re beautiful.”

“Too carefully sculptured. They don’t look real.”

“Go do your sex piece,” Delaney said. “That was the original idea, wasn’t it?”

“It’s what led me precisely to the thing I ended up doing.”

“Time’s awastin’, Moll.”

“We’ve gone with riskier things.”

Delaney reached for the hand lotion. Her secretary came in, a middle-aged woman named Bess Harris. Moll gave her the flask as she went by, and she put it on the desk. Grace picked it up and drank.

“Want to hear my theory?” she said. “This is my world view. What the whole thing’s about, ultimately. Lloyd Percival and Earl Mudger and you and me and Bess and all of us. The bottom line.”

“Go ahead,” Moll said.

“All men are criminals. All women are Mafia wives.”

“Stupid. Very stupid.”

“I was married to the same man for eleven years. I did his bidding. Not fully realizing. His
silent
bidding. Somehow, mysteriously, unspokenly. It’s built into the air between us. It’s carried on radio waves from galaxy to galaxy.”

Bess Harris drank from the flask.

“Not for a minute,” Moll said. “I don’t believe word one.”

“I’m a Mafia wife.”

“Grace, shut up.”

Delaney took the flask from her secretary and drank.

“The ultimate genius of men. Do you care to know what it is? Men
want
. Women just hang around. Women think they’re steaming along on a tremendous career, toot toot. Nothing. Nowhere, I’m telling you. Men
want
. Bam, crash, pow. The impact, good Christ. Men want so badly. It makes us feel a little spacey, a little dizzy. What are
we
next to this great want, this universal bloodsucking need of theirs? Bess, get the hell out of here. What are you doing here?”

“It doesn’t reach me,” Moll said.

“I have been backed into so many bloody corners, it’s reached the point where I just react automatically. I am so tired. I am so up against it. Bam. I am so old. You wouldn’t believe.”

“You’re not reaching me.”

“They’re crazy. That’s their secondary genius. They’re totally, rampagingly insane. Examine it. Really think. They’re nuts.”

“Who are you talking to?” Moll said.

“And we’re their wives. We live with them.”

“Because you’re not talking to me.”

“Examine it. Your own life. Dig really deep. It’s there. One way or another, it’s their game you play. Just so you know that. Just so you don’t believe otherwise. Because forget it, you’re not your daddy’s little girl anymore.”

“I know, Grace. The radio waves. The galaxies.”

“Think it out. Dig down.”

“Give me the flask, Grace.”

“I am so old and tired.”

“You won’t go with the piece,” Moll said. “Tell me so I can get out of here.”

“I was against your idea about Percival’s collection for the reasons I pointed out to you. Whatever they were. Lack of design, of political implications. This is a different issue, granted, this piece here, because there
is
design, there
are
implications, there
is
a web of sorts, a series of interconnections. But I can’t and won’t run it.”

“Because you’re old and tired,” Moll said.

“Because it’s too shaky. Too iffy. Not enough footing. I do miss that. A sense of solid footing.”

“Thank you.”

“Are we still friends?” Grace said.

Moll took a cab to the magazine’s West Side office, where her own cubicle was located. She went to work reediting a piece written by a professor of Eastern European studies. He asserted that Russian parapsychologists, at the prodding of the KGB, were close to perfecting a system of assassination by mental telepathy. Moll, actually, didn’t doubt it. She started playing with titles as the phone rang.

“Your old lemonade-drinking buddy.”

“Who?”

“Earl Mudger.”

“What do you want?”

“I’m heading your way.”

“That so?”

“To do a little business. And I wonder if maybe you and I can get together and finish our talk.”

“Weren’t we finished?”

“Tell you what, I didn’t think we’d hardly begun.”

“Call me,” she said.

“I’m thinking next Tuesday’s probably when I’ll be there. That sound about right?”

“Call me.”

What you couldn’t get from the printed page, the news clipping or court transcript, was the force of someone’s immediate presence, the effect it had, someone’s voice, mannerisms, the physical element, the eyes and body. Grace Delaney, for instance. Her eyes, her inflections, the way she’d moved in her chair as she was speaking. These told Moll there was a hidden reason why she didn’t want to run the piece on Radial Matrix. Glen Selvy in long johns, his crooked mouth and frozen gray eyes. Mudger’s blue eyes. Earl Mudger’s voice talking about Lomax and Senator Percival, the fact that the former is the latter’s chief source of select information, in a blacksmith’s apron, his high shoulders, the twist in the bridge of his nose. Mudger’s voice on the subject of his zoo in Vietnam. Mudger’s eyes glancing at the old lady setting lemonade on their table, white wicker, the Shetland ponies grazing. Eyes, bodies, voices. The personal force. It’s never the voice that tells the lies. Beware of personality. Dynamic temperament, beware.

These musings took place alongside Moll’s search for a catchy title. KGB linked with ESP was too much alphabet. Telepathic hit-men. The idea was to work it into a larger framework without telling the whole story in the title. Or were you
supposed
to tell the whole story in the title?

Briefly she saw the man with ear protectors and tinted glasses standing in the door of Frankie’s Tropical Bar, the weapon jumping in his hands as he fired.

Selvy had trouble concentrating. The miles were slowly unrolling at the back of his brain, leading him toward a vanishing point, deep sleep, the end of conscious scrutiny. He stood by the window of the small cabin. The place was called Motel in the Woods. The girl was in bed, asleep. It suited him to think of her as the girl. The girl is decent company. The girl does not complicate matters.

They would be here in a couple of minutes.

It was interesting that he’d done it again. Sex with an unmarried woman. Well, he’d been a little crazy that night. Sex with an unmarried woman in the front seat of a car parked on a city street and all the time he was being pursued by a pair of highly motivated combat veterans. Foreigners. Indifferent to local sex customs.

In a way his whole life in the clandestine service was a narrative of flight from women. To restrict his involvements to married women was to maintain an edge of maneuverability. He was able to define the style of a given affair, the limits of his own attachment. It suited him. Life narrowed down to intense segments. The equal pleasures of arrival and departure. They felt the same way no doubt, some of the women in question. Their comings and goings were regulated by external factors. It added force and depth and degree to sex. Selvy used these outer pressures to keep his role within certain well-defined limits.

He tried to concentrate.

The girl did not compromise the routine to any great extent. The girl was decent company. Would not unsettle things. Would not open up avenues of neurotic involvement. She was breathing quietly now, dreaming, he hoped, of some pastoral scene.

When he heard the microbus come up the bumpy motel road, he slipped out the door and walked through the darkness to the last cabin on the path to the woods. This cabin he knew to be unoccupied. His car was parked in front of it.

He stood at the edge of the woods, ten feet from the car. He watched the VW bus pull up at the adjoining cabin, also vacant. They got out, looking weary. They left the front doors open. One of them headed this way, checking his car, Selvy’s. The other went back to the bus, probably to turn off the headlights.