The Followed Man (3 page)

Stand there, then, he thought,
envying the shadow-man his guiltlessness and passion.

Perhaps Helen was the one "used
up," the one he had "mur­dered." Perhaps he should
go back into her past to look for the avenger. If he wanted to look
at all. Maybe when he got home another letter would be there,
containing more clues. He was cer­tain the avenger would not be
pleased by the lack of real fear he'd aroused in his victim, anyway.
And chances were the letter was a one-shot thing, itself its only
reason for being. Whatever dis­turbed person had sent it would
probably go on to other aberra­tions and other targets.

He lay in the dusty light, the
night sounds of the city calling only faintly up the walls of the old
canyon. There were no nearer sounds; no one seemed to occupy any of
the rooms along his cor­ridor.

In the morning he didn't know if
he'd slept or not, but thought he probably had. He watched the
Today
Show,
musing upon its en­thusiasms until the call came at
nine, then got up, noting that the world didn't seem that much better
without a hangover.

The only reason he was here was
to see if he could handle some­thing that would be intensely
unpleasant for him. He would be studying a matter that was too close
to his own despairs and griefs. There was no residue of adventurous
excitement left, no pride, no infatuation with a profession most
people thought exciting, or even glamorous. But he was no longer
going to sit crooked and drunk and stinking, his eyes looking back
into his head. Self-pity, he had always thought, was not his style.

A few short uptown blocks away
on Madison Avenue were the editorial offices of
Gentleman,
which
occupied three floors of a building completed in 1938 in what Luke
thought of as "Chrysler Air-Flow" style after a car his
father had once owned. Twenty sto­ries of yellow brick, the
building had rounded corners decorated with wide, chrome-plated
horizontal flashings, like bumpers.

He stood for a moment on the
sidewalk outside the building, the day growing hot with a yellow
haze, himself a sudden snag avoided by the walking people. At
breakfast he'd overheard a young man with a Southwest accent say to
an older man, "That's right, but here's where the money is,
right here, so you got to come here. No gettin' around it." And
Luke had realized then that he hadn't come to New York on his
own—that is, without his expenses paid—in over ten years.

He had never been able to
discover what
Gentleman
thought of itself. It was certainly an
interesting magazine, though occasional­ly its yen for
sophistication led it into positions beyond wit, such as a cover
photograph showing George Washington before and after a transsexual
operation. Its rather desperate contemporaneity could seem collegiate
at one moment, academic the next; but there was no other magazine
quite like
Gentleman,
and it did have no rigid ideological
position. He had been saddened to hear that because of escalating
postal rates it was having a hard time staying alive.

At the fifth floor he emerged
from the elevator into a plushly tasteful elongated cubicle presided
over by a receptionist, a wom­an of about thirty whose hair was a
natural brown and whose eyes were neither enlarged by mascara nor
lidded with the reptile green he'd almost gotten used to in this
city. She had the look of intelligence, that dangerous connection.
Smiling as if she meant it, she called and found that Mr. Troup would
see him, then guided him, saying, "It's around a lot of
corners—I'll show you," to Mar­tin Troup's large
office. Luke had visited here only a few times over the years, and
new partitions and display boards were every­where, so he had
needed a guide.

Martin Troup rose from the piles
of clippings, illustrations, manuscript pages and odd notebooks and
folders that were heaped across his desk. He was a big man, a former
athlete who hadn't allowed his paunch to do what it probably wanted
to do to the belly of the crisp white shirt he wore. He was a type
Luke thought of as redneck jock intellectual—Vanderbilt, or the
Uni­versity of the South, the University of Virginia or Chapel
Hill or some such place having turned him toward classical knowledge,
though not away from brawls, pool hustling or too much bour­bon—at
least not in his youth. Now he was in his late forties, a shrewd
gentleman with the threat of violence, perhaps playful, perhaps not,
just discernible behind his southern easiness.

"Luke," he said,
holding out his big hand, "how are you?"

"Fine," Luke said.

Martin turned to a small man
with a blond beard, mod haircut and slinky, neo-hippie clothes. "I
want you to meet the photogra­pher," Martin said. "Robin
Flash, Luke Carr."

"Hiya," Robin Flash
said, and they shook hands. Robin Flash's flared plaid pants, of a
glistening synthetic material, seemed molded to his wiry little
thighs as if with sweat or use, as though, Luke thought irrationally,
he had been ballroom dancing all night with several older women, none
of whom he knew by name. There was something gleaming and unfresh and
urgent about the little face and sharp blue eyes. All around his feet
were the leather boxes and straps of his profession.

"He's the best there is,"
Martin said. "I wanted the best writer and the best photographer
for this job, and now I've got 'em both. Oh, hey, you met Annie
before, right?"

A thin dark girl with the mild,
hardly unattractive wounds of an ancient acne, and the deep, luminous
eyes that seem to go with that disease, had appeared in the doorway.

"Yes, we've met," she
said. "When you did the piece on Attica, Mr. Carr."

"A long time ago,"
Luke said.

"Hey, Luke," Martin
said. "You want to do another piece on At­tica?"

"You didn't like what I
said about Oswald last time," Luke said. Martin had wanted to
cast Russell Oswald, the Commissioner of the Department of
Correction, as a sort of hero, a man in the mid­dle, but after
Luke had spent a day in Albany with the man, his own reaction had
been more complicated than that. In fact his study of prisons,
prisoners and their keepers had led him to be­lieve the situation
hadn't the slightest hope of amelioration from any quarter.

Martin laughed and hit Luke on
the shoulder with his fist, hard—something they had once
instinctively done to each other. Now Martin dropped his arm and
looked embarrassed, not know­ing what to say, as though he'd been
importunate at a funeral. Luke tried to smile it away, but Martin was
too embarrassed for that.

Annie said, "I've got some
more addresses for you, Mr. Carr," and handed him some Xeroxed
sheets.

"How come you call him 'Mr.
Carr?' " Martin asked her. "He ain't more than fifteen
years older'n you, Annie."

"Because he's so sad and
distant," she said.

"And old?" Luke said.

"Oh!" she said,
turning dark, a rather beautiful flawed rose. "I forgot. I
forgot about your tragedy, Mr. Carr."

"Is there something I
should know?" Robin Flash said.

Luke explained as quickly and
plainly as he could.

"Wow. Heavy," Robin
Flash said.

They were silent for a long
moment until Luke said, "Anything else I ought to know, Martin?"

"Well . . ." Martin
said, not looking Luke exactly in the eyes. "You handle it the
way you want. Only one thing. You're going to find a lot of . . .
defensiveness in some quarters. Depends on what you think you want to
look for. I mean about the cause of it all. They haven't found out
exactly why the floor gave way, at least as far as we can find out.
Or at least they're not telling it straight."

"I don't want to be a
detective anyway," Luke said. A nerve had begun to jump
somewhere alongside his sternum, and a breath came short. "I
know how these things can happen. A mistake here, a bad coincidence
there. . . ."

"Yeah, right!" Martin
said, apparently very much relieved. "You and Robin handle it
the way you want. And, Luke ... I mean, if it gets to you, all the
death . . . Maybe it's too soon after. You know. Well, no matter. . .
."

"Do I look that bad?"
Luke said.

"I know you're a pro, Luke.
You're the best. That's why you al­ways get so goddam involved.
Anyway, you know what I mean."

"Okay, Martin." Luke
turned to Robin Flash, trying to assume a bravado he certainly didn't
feel. It was dread he felt, and he could place it anatomically. It
was in his diaphragm, slightly to the left of center, and it seemed
to have a color—a mottled gray—and a shape somewhat like
a certain clinker of slag he had once re­moved from a
coal-burning furnace. "Robin, shall we go and diag­nose the
sickness of this town?"

He must have dreamed last night,
because fragments of dream queried him now, passing close, not
letting him quite grasp them. He was on a snowy road, driving a
bug-eyed Sprite, of all cars. He'd never owned one. No, he wasn't
driving, someone else was. He was in an editorial meeting, and a
girl—a woman—was crying. She had a wide face and long,
horizontal dark eyes—a tigerish look—and she was crying
out of sorrow. What was her tragedy? He meant to get up and ask her
what the matter was, but he asked too soon, before he could get
around the table to her, and he shouldn't have asked until he could
touch her at the same time he asked. Then her face turned dead white,
her eyes black as blots of tar. Something bad, wrong, inexcusable
would happen. Her fault, though, not his. But then, he was the one
who asked. Everyone else had noticed how her face grimaced and
crawled, but they'd said nothing.

Robin Flash had said something
he hadn't heard, and now got up and began to drape the straps of his
camera boxes over his thin, foxy shoulders.

"Anybody question who you
are, have them call here," Martin said. "And Luke,
remember; if you want to drop this anytime it's okay with me.
There'll be other projects."

"We'll see," Luke
said.

In the elevator, and then across
the lobby to the sultry clangor of Madison Avenue, Luke held himself
steady against his low-grade dread. Robin Flash came along beside
him, a part of the city and its constant movement; if any animal
could have evolved to fit this environment, Robin Flash, with his
metal sheen and glitter, seemed to be the one. He looked everywhere
with quick, squirrel­like glances, yet this was not a squirrel's
defensive alertness, it was more like avidity.

They took a cab crosstown.
Robin, still looking everywhere, told Luke that his name had
originally been Fleisch, that he had been married for five years and
had a kid four years old, a boy; that he was really into films,
documentaries—that's what he was most into at the moment.

They had stopped in traffic by a
parking garage when Robin jumped up in his seat. "Look!" he
said. "See that little spade in the fur hat!"

A small, dapper, glittering
little black man—literally glittering with diamonds, even what
looked like diamonds on the tongues of his yellow elevated shoes and
in the band of his visored fur hat—was yelling at three tall
black girls, two of them slender but one a yellow-brown giantess in
short-shorts and knee socks. "Wow!" Ro­bin said.
"That's a new one! Will you just bother to
look
at that
ass?"

The giantess' reddish Afro
seemed as wide as an umbrella, wid­er even than her great thighs
and buttocks.

"Wait here a minute. Can
you pull over for a second?" Robin asked the cabby, who pulled
over two feet, stopped and then, as if he had long had a violent
grudge against the honking cabby be­hind him, tore himself
screaming and cursing from his cab and ran back past Luke. Robin left
by his door, yelling, "Hey, Ruiz! Hey, Ruiz!"

The small black man shot the
cuffs of his magenta shirt and hunched the sharp shoulders of his
maroon jacket. He was still mad at his girls, but he smiled a
glittering smile at Robin. They spoke for a while, seemingly about
the giantess, who was sullen. Finally Robin and the cabby both came
back, the cabby cursing and shaking as he lit a cigarette. Robin's
eyes slid up into his head. With a strange, libidinous twist to his
mouth that made him look like a child who had to go to the bathroom,
he crooned, "Ooo, ummm! I back at twelve for a bit of a noonie,
friend. I mean did you
see
that super-gash? Did you ever
see
such a monumental ass? I mean wouldn't you like to goddam drown
in all that yaller hon­ey, man?"

"Is that a question?"
Luke asked.

"Well, yeah," Robin
said, curious now.

"No," Luke said. "Some
other time I might have, I suppose, but I can hardly remember when."

The cab jerked forward, honking
its own horn.

"Oh, yeah, I suppose, what
with what happened. Yeah, I guess I understand. Well, no, I guess I
don't."

"I don't either," Luke
said. "No doubt she is a young, smooth, healthy girl giant, but.
. . ."

"I like 'em big,"
Robin said. "I like a continental ass and global goddam boobs."

"And you're coming back at
noon?"

"Yeah. See, they got an
arrangement with the guys run the parking garage, you know? So you
get it in some limousine or oth­er—Caddie, Lincoln
Continental, something like that. Actually a Rolls Royce is smaller
inside, you know that? Anyway, I'm doing some feelthy photos for
Ruiz, so I get a break." Then he went on, shaking his head in
wonder, "I bet I can't reach all the way around one of those
thighs,
man! I mean you could
hide
in that beaver! You
could
ambush
somebody from outta that bush!"

In Luke, who thought himself
knowing, who had seen much of the world and of man's foibles,
including war, Robin's en­thusiasms produced an intense feeling
of weakness, or weariness, and he wondered why. Once he would not
have felt this aliena­tion. Though he might not have desired to
join Robin's games, he wouldn't have felt them so far beyond the
pale, beyond fun. He had never been very partial to whores, though he
had gone to them occasionally long ago. But it was more than that
now; there was the feeling that Robin's compulsions were normal,
usual, the common urge of men, and that his own fastidiousness in the
mat­ter was unnatural, even sick. Maybe he was too tender, too
brittle, for this city and its blood passions.