Red Heroin

by Jerry Pournelle

  "Drinking this time of day, sweetheart? You'll be a lush by thirty." She laughed, but there was this little edge of concern in her voice. I liked it.

  "Stupid client," I mumbled. "Damn fool doesn't know what he wants. I'm just trying to generate an inspiration. If I don't do this very often, it sometimes works."

  "Oh." She came over to the kitchen table where I was sitting and kissed me. "Had lunch?"

  I shook my head, and she started puttering around. I figured I might as well get it over with.

  "Carole, I have to go out tonight."

  "Oh, that's all right. Can I stay here?"

  "I think you'd better not. Hon, this is a date I've had with the girl in the loan department at the bank. Made it last week. Saw her today about the boat, and it would have seemed funny as hell breaking it while I was doing business with her. So I didn't."

  "Oh. All right." She put the sandwiches she'd made on the table, sat down, and we ate. Neither of us felt like talking, and she looked hurt. I wanted to tell her the standard junk, like this girl didn't mean anything to me, and that sort of thing, but that would have been too natural. She finished eating and went in the bedroom, coming out with her little bag and her books. She must have crammed like hell to get her dress into the bag, because she was still wearing the shorts and blouse outfit she'd gone to school in. "See you," she said, and went out the back. I felt like hell. I even felt like we'd blown the whole job too, because Carole was the only real contact I had going with that outfit. I poured another Scotch, sipped it, made a face, and tossed it off. Then I poured another.

  Miss Youngs wasn't in when I went back to the bank later. A cashier had a check for me, and I went out to Doc's. I'd already found out by phone that my offer was accepted, so I paid for Witch of Endor and assorted gear, and got down to installing some of it. The old anchor I kept for a spare, having bought a new larger Danforth and fifty feet of chain shackled to a cable—a hundred fathoms, or 600 feet—of half-inch nylon line. When I put down an anchor, I want to know that the boat will stay anchored. I've been in too many sticky situations where anchoring would have solved all the problems. I also put in a radio direction finder, one of the little Bendix outfits, and replaced the compass with one I liked better. There were a couple of other items like some new running lines, and so forth. I also hoisted each sail in turn and gave it a more careful inspection than I had when I was thinking of buying the boat. They were all in good shape, as I'd already found out, but ! there was a worn spot in the main. It didn't seem to need a patch yet, but I'd watch it.

  Witch was a lovely boat. She had room to stow all kinds of gear, and she was pretty well outfitted as she came. The old owners had obviously appreciated her. A toolbox with almost everything you'd need for the motor was built in next to the engine, and there was a place to stow all the woodworking and rigging tools I'd kept from my last boat. She was really what I would have looked for myself, or at least what I'd have bought if I'd been wanting a boat and seen her, and she also fit the requirements Shearing had laid on me. It was getting past suppertime when I finished. Time passes quickly for me on boats. I had already arranged with Doc to get a whole set of the charts I'd need, so there wasn't anything else to do but go home and get ready for my big date with the Youngs girl.

  I put on slacks and a sport shirt, and a coat—not the one I'd worn Friday night with Danny—and wound up the car. It was a little early, and I said to hell with it, and got out again. Let her walk, it'll do her good. She didn't live a quarter mile from the District.

  Her apartment was in a new building, with a heated pool about the size of three good bathtubs, and a courtyard full of big splitleaf plants and redwood bark to discourage weeds. Instead of an inside hallway, it had covered balconies running along the inside courtyard, which meant that everybody in the place could see everything that went on in it. I knocked on her door, then again, and was about to worry when it opened.

  She was all over me. "Paul, sweetheart," she started, and after that neither one of us could say anything. I found myself involved in a passionate reunion, which didn't make sense, but she was the boss. Then we broke it off, and she got her bag, and down the street we went.

  "What in hell was that all about?" I asked her when we were well away from everybody.

  "That was all about discouraging the boys who live across the court without letting them think I'm Lesbian," she told me. "You didn't mind, did you? It didn't seem like you minded." She grinned at me, and it took an effort to remember I was mad at her.

  "That's all right, sweetheart," I said in the best unemotional tone I could manage, "but how about the job? If I'm supposed to let Carole woo me into being a Trotskyite, won't it look a little strange for me to have another true love?"

  "That was the other reason for the scene. Paul, the love bit isn't good enough for this job. They won't trust it. Oh, sure, female agents manage to work the sex angle for information and even some cooperation, but you can never trust it to last. Besides, we haven't time to build a convincing case for you. The Halleck girl may actually get convinced that you're in love with her and will do anything she asks, but no supervisor, even an amateur, will stake anything important on her opinion. That's why you and I will be seen together two or three times in the next week. They'll believe you have a strong interest in sex, even if they don't believe you're in love. They can work it from there." She took my hand, and we walked toward the District. Like my wife, she didn't like to walk very fast.

  Under the street lights I had a chance to look her over. She was wearing a skirt and sweater, and while she looked nice, she wasn't anything like as attractive as she had been in the bank. There was a little too much makeup, somewhat disarranged by our hello, and she overdid the walk a little. She did look sexy as hell, but I'd liked her better before. I guess I'm a sucker for the polished, well-bred type, and when that's not around the well-scrubbed outdoors girl. The nice thing about that is that it's possible for the same girl to be both.

  The Varsity Theater was showing one of those incomprehensible foreign films in which everyone is miserable and makes sure he won't get out of the situation making him miserable. All the intellectuals have to see every one of these films, so we had a good audience for our own show in the balcony. Janie Youngs made it damn clear that everyone was expected to think we were headed for bed.

  After the movie, we walked again, and I steered us toward the campus. When we were away from the theater crowd, she said, "The Treasury people report that that heroin was more important than we knew. The distribution people are having trouble getting enough to keep the customers happy. These people are either more incompetent than we thought, or they've hit a streak of bad luck by over-recruiting addicts before they had a backlog of drugs big enough to supply them. Either way it's a break for us, and it makes this plan a little more likely to work. Shearing thinks they'll get frantic for somebody to carry the stuff out of Canada pretty soon, but they won't want to take the risk with anyone important. You may get a new offer for company on that trip sooner than you think."

  "After tonight," I told her, "if it's Carole I'll buy the idea that she's a messenger girl. There were three or four of her friends at the Varsity and they saw us. Hell, the show you put on, everybody saw us." We were on the campus itself now, walking under the trees. It's a nice campus at night.

  "We might as well give them a little more if they're watching," she told me. We sat on one of the benches for a while.

  The trouble with that sort of thing is that it's hard to act and keep it that way. At least it is for me. If I get that physical with a girl, I'd just as soon stop all the mental processes for a while and enjoy it. I got her up and we walked toward my house.

  "At this point, you have a choice," I told her. "We can stop this show business and go hide in a closet or something for a sufficient length of time, or we can start it up and end up in bed. But I will be damned if I'm going to get that frustrated over anything, job or no job."

  She looked at
me with a funny little grin. "After the last couple of nights with Carole, I'd think you would be in a position to be more objective about it all."

  "Why don't you lay off Carole for a while?"

  "Because, Paul Crane, I'm as endowed with female emotions as anybody else, and I like to know how I compare. While you're on the subject of Miss Halleck, Shearing says to tell you not to get involved. I thought you'd be insulted by such instructions, but now I think you need them. She may be a cute little kitten, my friend, but she has been around. Did you happen to know she was one of the people sent to represent the University of Washington at a national conference of Stop the War leaders?"

  "No," I told her. "I knew she was involved, but she gave me the impression that she wasn't very high up in the organization."

  "That's one of the reasons we're interested in her. In fact, that was what decided Mr. Shearing on taking the gamble on you getting the stuff in. We think she may be a second echelon herself, although I doubt very seriously that she is aware of any connection between narcotics and the peace movement, or who knows who finances the peace business. But that innocent little kid friend of yours is a pretty effective leader, Paul."

  "Okay, you made your point. What do we do from here?" We were getting close to my house.

  Janie looked at me. With her height she didn't have to look up far. "Paul, just what do you think I am? Some kind of hardened superspy who seduces men for the good of her country? I guess I could do that if I had to, but mostly I happen to be a girl trained in business management who got recruited into this business because I could see that somebody had to do it. I've had more training than you have, but we don't have the kind of people you seem to think I am. If we do I never met any. I've been assigned to be your girl friend, which means that I'm stuck with you however you turn out, and it also means that until this is over I don't go out with anyone else. You happen to be a reasonably nice guy who I know more about than I do about anyone else in Seattle. I don't mind having a little fun with my work, but I'm damned if I'm going to get raped by my partner. With a little luck, though, our having to spend some time together doesn't have to be so bad, does it?"

  "When we get in that house, Janie, we have to act like they're listening. Shearing told me that and I'm sure he told you. Before we go in, there's this one thing. This afternoon I was thinking that it would have been great to meet either you or Carole without all this other jazz. I still wish it had happened that way. But it didn't, and I was married for several years, and whatever was wrong with my wife didn't affect her sex life. Missy, I just ain't used to playing games. It's not part of my makeup. When we get inside, if you start in like you did out there on the campus, I'm apt to lose control. And after that I'm apt to want to justify it to myself by deciding I'm in love with you. What with already playing that game with myself over Carole, it could develop into quite a situation. Now let's go in."

  As we started for the stairs, she said, "We're going to have this problem as long as we're together, aren't we? Let's get it over with and maybe you can be rational."

  I took her home two hours later.

  I spent all day Tuesday getting Witch ready and taking her out for practice. She handled as well as I'd thought she would, but that was Lake Union with the breezes we get in there. I still wondered how she'd take a real Juan de Fuca blow, but I wasn't worried.

  Cruising down the lake I had time to think, but I didn't really want to. You can only think the same things over and over so many times, and every time it added up to the fact that I wished to hell I was out of all this. I wasn't used to using people, or to assigned company who had to like you whether you wanted them to or not. The spy bit didn't bother me; I could work up a real case of hate for people who sold dope to kids, and I wouldn't mind catching some Red Chinese agents. But here all I seemed to be doing was waiting for something to happen, and spending a good part of the waiting time in bed with somebody under rather strained circumstances. I kept telling myself I was crazy. Here I had two perfectly good chicks, both damned attractive and both amenable to seduction, and I had to worry my head off about whether or not it was genuine. Lots of guys would saw off an arm to have my troubles. On the other hand it couldn't last. If Carole didn't get back pretty soon, and in a way I was hoping she wouldn't because that would prove that it had been real, she was gone for good. And if somebody didn't proposition me shortly after that, Janie would get a new assignment. What happened to Paul Crane was something I couldn't figure, but I didn't think Shearing would toss me to the wolves. Not unless he could get some advantage out of it, and I couldn't think what that might be.

  So after a while I gave up thinking and became a part of the boat. I ran up every sail, practiced heaving her to with and without the engine running, practiced getting the sails up and down, and got to know her pretty well. I still liked everything about her, and if nothing else in this crummy game came off I was going to keep her, one way or another.

  There was a light on inside when I got back home. I hadn't left one on, and I got a tight feeling. Which one was it? When I got inside, there was Carole in her shorts and black stockings, hovering over the stove, and saying, "What kept you? I've had dinner ready for an hour."

  Chapter Seven

  Carole was back, and I was glad to see her, but I had still been hoping she wouldn't be. After all, it looked like a good possibility that she had some reason to be there other than just an interest in me, no matter how unflattering that might be for my ego.

  "Hi," I told her.

  She started to say something, didn't, turned away, then looked back. "You can't get rid of me unless you really want to, Paul. I won't let myself be just a good lay. I think we mean something to each other, and I'm not going to walk out. You'll have to tell me to go this time."

  She stood there with a defiant look, and I was right back where I started. Job or no job I was a good halfway in love with this girl, and I wanted to believe her. Hell, maybe there'd be somebody else take me up on my little sailing venture. Whether there would be or not, it was time to give them a chance.

  We went to the Penthouse Theater after supper. The University of Washington has three theaters, all acquired by Glenn Hughes when he was head of the drama department. When he was in charge, they all paid their own way, with the university budget for his department being no bigger than for any other department of comparable size; smaller, in fact. Mr. Hughes made profits with his theater system, which is unique for college drama.

  The Penthouse was one of the first theaters in the round, and had been a special project of Hughes. Most of the serious productions were put on there, with the showboat being reserved for money-raisers, and the playhouse alternating between experimental stuff and master's thesis productions. The play was quite good, a Noel Coward comedy. After it was finished we went to the Eagle.

  The usual crowd was there. There's something about taverns on the fringe of a university. They sort themselves out into different clubs. The fraternity set and playboys will go to one. Serious students of the liberal arts will patronize another, and the science and technology people generally find a third, although the engineers may, if the town's big enough to have one, go to a kind of less-expensive playboy tavern. But big or small, there will always be one more, where the students who take themselves but not their studies seriously, who think that what they talk about is vastly more important than anything else in the world, and who may even have dropped out of school years ago—where the rope-soled shoe set goes. It may not be a very big tavern, and I've even seen towns where there wasn't one for the serious students, but there will always be one for this outfit. The Eagle is Seattle's, and it draws customers from all over town.

  The requirements for such a place are simple. The management has to abandon all hope of keeping order, although the customers will help him evade the laws about minors and fighting and such, because they'll know every inspector by sight from a block away. The physical arrangements should run to the shabby, because there will b
e fights once in a while, and although they won't last long and generally nobody will be hurt, they should be spectacular: which means some furniture should be broken. Movable chairs are therefore not too good an idea. Built-in booths are much better, and if made out of cheap plywood they are ideal. The booths ought to be laid out so there are several, but set so everybody can see everybody else if he wants. It should also be possible to tell at a glance from one central place just who is and who is not there. This saves trouble. There ought to be a jukebox, but the selections on it should be toward the unusual. Finally, there ought to be smooth easy-to-write-on walls in the men's room. Some of the finest doggerel and pornography in the world is to be found on the walls of the men's room in the Eagle. The crowd resents outsiders contributing, though, and will remove anything they think isn't clever.

  If you have all these characteristics, and you are near a university, seriously consider turning your bar into a gold mine. It will be one, because there will be people there all the time. There will be a lot of deadbeats and you'll get your share of unpaid bills, but not too many. Late yes, but unpaid no, because ostracism from the place is tantamount to death for a real member of the group. They go there every night and stay until it closes, and on weekends you'll get tourists—come to see the beatniks.