by Barry, Mike
Also, the people who were sending the stuff in from wherever it was would not be too pleased with him. From their point of view, they would have been stiffed out of a good deal of money.
They would be as mad as hell, and they would come on his ass. People who were able to ship bricks of heroin and deposit them in lockers weekly in the bus terminals, mail in keys like clockwork, would not let a simple thing like failure to pay get between them and their money. They knew exactly who he was. They would kill him.
No, Coates thought, looking at the shit, no, the answer was there, it was clear, it was staring at him, and had been from the moment he had killed Hamilton, and now there was no way around it, he would have to take the stuff, he would have to dispose of it himself, not fence it, and he would have to take all the money—and that money would be his stake, because he would never be able to pass this way again. This was it. A man goeth through only one time, and so on and so forth. He was looking at his destiny on the bed. He would never get another chance to fulfill it, and he would have to get so much out of this that he would not have to worry about fulfilling it.
How much was it worth? He had no idea at all. At a guess, though, maybe there was a couple of hundred thousand dollars in it. There were ten bricks altogether, and twenty-five grand did not seem unreasonable per brick, less a percentage for bad luck. Street value had to be at least fifteen times that per brick. It was not unreasonable.
He wouldn’t be squeezing it out painfully now a grand at a time. He would go for the whole thing and be done. He could advance his eight-year plan by at least two years.
Fuck it, Coates thought, it was the only way. What he would have to do, he figured, was to go to the plant itself, use his badge, edge around a little, try to find out exactly what the destination was of those cars which Hamilton had been smuggling the shit out in. That shouldn’t be too hard to find out; it was all there on the forms, the line for which he was responsible. Once he had the destination, he would simply go up there himself … and he would drop it. That part he would play by ear; he would figure it out. But at least he knew that he had an assured source of demand there, and that was the important thing.
Yes, Coates thought, yes, that was the only way. He had been thinking like a civil servant from the beginning; almost from the day he had gotten out of high school he had had the mentality of the pensioner, and falling into the situation with Hamilton, the one thousand dollars a week had merely expanded that mentality, it had not changed it. Instead of squeezing it out a little, he had been squeezing it out a lot. But this was not a world in which you could squeeze it out anymore. You had to take it in great big chunks, like Nixon, get everything you could on the front end, and to hell with the rest of the situation, to hell with caution and with the rest of your life. In this world you had only one shot, and you had to take advantage. And if you were a little more cautious than Nixon, if you had a decent sense of timing and maybe a little bit better luck, there was no reason for you to be caught at all.
Coates giggled, overwhelmed with the ecstasy of his vision, the clarity of his insight, rubbed his palms together like a child, cackling, gloating. His sounds must have been heard outside the bedroom and caught his wife’s interest, but so excellent was his mood, so sharp was his vision, that when she walked in he did not panic or lose his temper but merely one by one stuffed the bricks back into the bag and then turned to face her calmly, triumphant.
“What are those?” she said. “What are you laughing about? What are those, anyway?”
“Diamonds,” Coates said. “Career- and salary-plan diamonds.” And then he laughed some more.
XIV
Just outside of Detroit Jessica told Wulff that she wanted to stay with him, that she would not leave him under any conditions. There was a look of determination which sat on her face like the petulant way a child’s might get between the eyebrows when he insists upon another ice cream, and Wulff, bombed out by that time and beginning to feel the dread ooze back into his pores, was not in any mood to fight with her. She was on the loose, but so was he; a handful of ordnance and a mission was not much more of a home than this girl had, and in the meantime he could not deny the fact that she had reached him, that she had touched him in a way, and that he needed the company. So he only nodded to her that that was all right if she wanted it that way, and then concentrated on the more immediate problem of getting them into Detroit inconspicuously and trying to figure out where he would move from there. She sat beside him quietly, saying nothing more now that the basic decision had been made, and he allowed his thoughts to spin out in various directions. The best way to approach the problem would be to go to the plant itself. He would have to get into the plant from which the stuff was being moved out, make contact of some sort, try to evaluate in which direction it was being pushed, who was pushing it. That was not going to be easy, of course. But then again, nothing was easy when you came right down to it.
“What are you going to do with that stuff under the seat?” Jessica said after a long time. “Are you just going to leave it there?”
“I guess so,” he said. “I’ll have to figure out something. In the meantime, it’s safe there.”
“Coke is all right. There’s nothing wrong with coke. Edgar Allan Poe was supposed to live on it.”
“Edgar Allan Poe went crazy and died of tuberculosis at forty after pretty well ruining his life,” Wulff said, and that was about all the communication that they had until he had put the truck into downtown, moved out along a boulevard, and then far, far down saw the signs of the rooming houses beginning to come into focus. That was best, it was always best to stay in a rooming house off the downtown strip; the laws of mutual confidentiality seemed to be respected in rooming houses as they were nowhere else. You could do literally anything in a rooming house as long as you kept it within the confines of the walls and did not scream too loudly.
He stopped at the first TO RENT sign down the strip, parked the truck, left Jessica in there while he went to talk to the landlady. She seemed to be utterly devoid of affect, answering in a monotone, looking through him with brown, bleak eyes that, he decided, simply had seen too much of Detroit. When he gave her fifty dollars in advance for the first week and she gave him the keys, he went out for Jessica, and the woman showed no response to that either, although there was just the slightest twitch of attention when they started to take out the ordnance, wrapped in blankets, from the back of the truck. She stood at the open door to the lobby while they struggled in with the firearms, holding them like babies swaddled, back and forth several times, her eyes incurious and yet encompassing. But when they made the last trip to the second-floor cubicle, a hot, odorous little room which overlooked what appeared to be a pack of wild dogs living in the backyard, she was gone. Wulff decided that this might be to inform the police, but he did not care. Sooner or later you had to lose your capacity for suspecting everyone and everything; if you did not do that, if you looked for everything to provide your undoing, your undoing was certainly going to come … from the inside.
Up in the room he locked the door on the chain bolt while she sat on the hard, wide bed, dangling her legs on the floor. He said, “It’s not too beautiful, is it?”
“I’ve been in worse.”
“There’s no reason to stay,” he said. “You shouldn’t feel you have to stay.”
“I don’t. I don’t at all. I asked to come with you.”
“You won’t enjoy it.”
“What the hell?” she said, and shrugged. “Where else would I go?”
“I’m sure you have places,” Wulff said.
“I’ve seen them all. I’ve been to all the places I care to go to, and that’s the end of it.”
“I’m not going to be around,” Wulff said. “I’ve got to go somewhere. Do you understand that?”
“If you say so.”
“I might not be back, either. I might, and then again I might not. You’ve got to understand that.”
“I
understand everything,” she said. “You’ve got business here, all right. I don’t know what that business is, and I’ll never ask you.”
“All right.”
“I could make a guess, though, and you could tell me if I’m right.”
“I guess I could,” Wulff said, “and then again, I might not.” Seeing her poised in that attitude on the bed, legs now closed in the slices of light, her back arched, he felt a vagrant impulse for sex again and thought that this was the first time really since San Francisco when he had thought of sex at all. With Tamara that had been; Tamara had been back with him in Miami, but that had been a death trip for the two of them, and there had never been any inkling of connection. But now …
“It has something to do with drugs,” she said. “You really don’t like drugs. You’re attacking the drug trade, aren’t you? You’re using all that ammunition because you’re out to kill the people who are in the trade in Detroit. That’s what brought you here.”
“It’s more complicated than that,” Wulff said.
“No,” she said in a strange, withdrawn way. “It’s very simple, I think. Everything becomes very simple once you understand it, once you realize how simple it really is. I think I know who you are.”
“All right,” he said, “all right.”
“I think I’ve been reading about you. And I think that I know why Edgerton wanted to kill you. He was trying to kill you, wasn’t he?”
“He had that in mind.”
“There’s a price on your head, isn’t there?” she said almost dreamily. “There must be ten thousand dollars, Edgerton must have thought that was good enough reason. He was a greedy, stupid little man, though, because it’s a lot more than ten thousand. They would have paid him off at that, but I bet there are people who would think that you’re worth ten times that.”
“I don’t know,” Wulff said. “I never took any estimates. It’s not an object of pressing interest, knowing how much it’s worth to someone to kill you.”
She shook her head, her eyes still holding that dreaming cast, and then slowly she got up from the bed and came toward him, moving her pelvis. “You don’t have to go out just yet, do you?” she said. “You don’t have to go out right now.”
“It excites you,” Wulff said. He should not have said it aloud, but a man living on margin did not care anymore. Once you got out past propriety, into those dead spaces where the only consequence was what you could bring about through force, you did not worry about amenities. “That’s all it is. Something to excite you.”
“Why not?” she said, and he could feel her close against him. “Why shouldn’t it? It’s better than junk, isn’t it? You have to agree to that.”
“Yes,” Wulff said, “I guess it is. If you look at it that way, it certainly is.” And then, in the hot, closed, dangerous, light-streaked room on the outskirts of Detroit, they had sex all over the bed, the floor, and damned near the walls, and all through it Wulff was thinking in a bemused way that it was her excitement upon which his own was stoked; her own necessity which was fueling his. It was funny that way; if you looked at it from that light, it meant that he was being excited by the same thing that he was accusing her of finding arousing. But it did not matter; what the hell, sex was sex, a fuck was a fuck, just like a shot was a shot to a junkie, and it was good to know after all he had been through and all that lay ahead that he could still have it and make it good, that it still meant something to him, that his world was not centered and enclosed, pebble in a shell, by junk, junk, junk.
XV
It had all seemed very clear to Coates in the bedroom, but now, going out into the world, actually contending with the fact of the assembly line, it was different. Everything was confusing, assaulting him in many colors and wedges of light, whereas it had been a simple, crystalline black and white with which he had seen the situation in the bedroom—the world neatly dwindled and very much within his control.
That was the damned trouble, Coates thought, that was the trouble with all of it, with the whole question of living itself; in the abstract it seemed to be a simple process that you could both understand and beat, but when you had to face it in the real, nothing worked anymore. Politicians must feel that way. In the bedroom, looking at the bricks piled on the bed, it had seemed that there was literally no gap anymore between desire and accomplishment, that he could go out into the world, make his few simple adjustments, and carry on from there, go to Canada, hawk the stuff, take the money, put it into small unmarked bills, run. But when you (or he) had to actually contend with the matter, had to go into the damned stinking, thunderous building where the Fleetwood coaches rolled skeletally by, their form as blunt and horrifying as skulls, it was something entirely different. Not simple. Not simple at all.
It was the civil-servant mentality all over again. Maybe he was nothing but a cop after all. Maybe he was too limited to establish a sector of control over the world, although Coates did not want to think so; any man who could establish the keenness of his insight, could so well articulate his very difficulties, could not possibly be in that category. Could he? The Fleetwood plant overwhelmed him.
It was the sheer sound, the impact of that sound as it assaulted him, grating, screaming, rasping sound, sound at all decibel levels and at all levels of pitch. The fumes coming off the line, the smell of smoke, asbestos, and fire—that was terrible, but it was as nothing to the matter of the sound itself, which battered at him, caused him to tremble, made him feel suddenly small and insignificant. He had thought until then that the worst possible noise would be that of the police siren generating helplessness and terror in everyone whom it passed (which was why he had liked to use it when he was on patrol duty, why he had felt that it was the best riot-control device going), but the siren would merely have been one element in the hundreds on the floor, and it would have been eaten up.
Moving through the tourist lines, trying to stay calm, losing the battle, Coates knew that he was overreacting. He wanted to scream and beg for cessation, wanted to hurl himself on the floor through which, on tracks, the gigantic mouths of the empty cars circulated, and say that he could take it no more, that he simply could not bear up under it, that someone would have to help him. But that would have done no good anyway; he merely would have been dragged away, an intrusion, something that had momentarily blocked the flow. That was, if anyone had even been able to hear him. Coates doubted that very much. It was all like one of those 1940’s illustrations from the popular magazines of “Life in an Assembly Plant”; small, helpless stick figures would be seen juxtaposed to automotive skeletons that overwhelmed them, the crude representations of humanity being the least significant component of the drawing, and over their heads would be clocks indicating forty seconds to install a joint, sixty seconds to weld a door, two hours and thirty minutes through the line, the stick figures not there in the last panel, only the full-color portrait of the gleaming car itself, which seemed to deny those minuscule and helpless human forms which had run the machinery to construct it.
Yes, the car reduced humanity all the way, Coates thought; that was probably the key to the whole idea, but worse than the reduction was the sense of sheer assault. One simply could not work here. He could not imagine how anyone could get used to it. Even the stewards like Hamilton, who had had to come out on the lines only for grievance procedures or for shape-ups, must have found it unbearable. Five minutes on that line would have been too many, would have already been unbearable; ten would begin to take away the very humanity and dignity of a man, and a full day of it would leave at the end something that was in no way human. At least, that was the way he looked at it from his relatively protected cop’s perspective. He guessed that the point was that after working on this line for a certain amount of time you no longer knew the difference. The human chemistry was wonderful, it could shut you off from an awareness of almost anything.
Still, there had to be a way. There had to be a way to come to terms with the situation. Somehow
there was a feed line; these cars came out of the plant and went on trucks and were taken northward, and he had to find out where. That was why he was on this tour here, not to engage in philosophical insights into the American automobile industry. Fuck the industry. It was just as dirty and corrupt as anything else in the country, except that the products came out a hell of a lot prettier than most and had a sort of superficial utility, so that their real junkiness was not visible until a certain regulated period of time, usually thirty-six months, had elapsed. After thirty-six months the majority of car loans had been paid off and it was time to make the customer so sick of his old car that he could not wait to get into a new one of even more doubtful value, while the older car meanwhile got kicked downstairs to Sam’s Quik-Finance, where the cycle would start on a lower level. After all, the important thing was to keep up the chain so that even the kid at the bottom, junking fifty-dollar Pontiacs for ten, would be able to look forward to stepping up to a two-hundred-dollar Oldsmobile. After seven years, or at the most ten, everything was dead, but the replacement, rather than starting in one sweep, had been phased in gradually so no one knew to what extent they were being cheated and robbed. Of course, this was not to be bitter about it, Coates thought. This was America, and everything done in America had a justification of some sort.
“Excuse me,” he said to the guide, “I want to get down to the floor, I want to look at something,” and before the young man in the neatly fitted uniform with the visor cap and the name stitching over his left pocket had even had a chance to react to this, Coates had vaulted over the rail, clambered down a set of stairs, and was now into the work area itself. Instantly he felt himself encircled by men, some of them holding wrenches, others in neater foremen’s uniforms, all of them shouting at him, all of them sweating. They were screaming something about insurance, something about plant regulations, and as they closed in on him, Coates realized that he had done something stupid, monumentally stupid in all likelihood, reasonably stupid at the least; he had attracted attention to himself, gone far beyond those rules of inconspicuousness which he should have known were the only rules which would carry him through this. “It’s all right!” he shouted, waving his arms, sparks shooting from an enclosure near him where two workmen in hell were working a weld on the roof of a Calais coupe. “I’ll get right out, I just want to know which was Shields’s line? Shields?” he screamed over the roar. “You remember him, he used to be a foreman here, he had an accident, but I’m an insurance investigator, I’m trying to get some information for his policy on behalf of his wife and kids, I have to know if it was work-related.” This babble seemed to work; maybe on the Gehenna of the floor this seemed to make sense, or at least made as much sense as anything else that was going on. “Shields worked down there,” a huge man holding a torch said, and motioned toward another part of the floor through the tangle. Coates nodded and began to move in that direction.
