The Neon Jungle

by John D. MacDonald

  Brahko nodded slowly. “I get it. He shouldn’t have got her a fix.”

  “Correct. By doing so, he impaired his value to us, and rendered his own suggestion invalid. The action we take must be more direct. I suspect that it is a matter that we can turn over to Guillermo for necessary action.”

  Brahko stared at him. “Say, like it says in the note, the kid is only seventeen.”

  “I don’t believe that has deterred Guillermo’s operations in the past. I believe you should contact him, Brahko. She should be quite pliable. Tell him that it will be wise to hand her over to one of the more distant establishments. Norfolk, Memphis, Jacksonville. And he should induce her to leave a parting message. A plaintive little note. ‘Do not try to bring me back.’ Guillermo knows the procedure. And perhaps a letter from her mailed from some distant point.”

  “She’s pretty young.”

  “Brahko, the softness of your heart astonishes me. Or is it that you hate to lose one of your consumers?”

  “Maybe you ought to check before you make it an order, Judge.”

  Karshner sat very still for a moment. He looked at Brahko in utter silence until the man shifted uneasily and said, “I just meant that maybe there’d be some other way of—”

  “You aren’t handling yourself well, Brahko. The phone call. The unknown woman. Your obvious nervousness. You make me wonder how adequately you are performing.”

  “Judge, I was just—”

  “See Guillermo today, Brahko. That’s all.”

  Brahko stood up. Karshner watched him leave, and then signaled to the girl to bring more coffee. He bit the end from his first cigar of the day. He wondered what the young Varaki girl was like, and then forced that thought from his mind. It was much safer to think of them as factors in some vast complicated equation. That young man, Lockter, could be removed just as readily, and no damage done. If they took him in and he talked for ten days to police stenographers, he could not tell them anything that could be construed as evidence against anyone higher up in the organization. Lockter could topple the peddlers, but there were always peddlers. It was the old immutable cycle of supply and demand. If the supply channels collapsed, demand pressure would bump the price back up again to the place where new peddlers would accept the risk.

  Guillermo’s people would handle the child correctly, using the drug the way you entice a kitten with a scrap tied to the end of a string. He finished his third cup of coffee and wished, with a certain regret, that he had told Brahko that he would contact Guillermo himself. That would have given him a chance, while speaking to Guillermo, to indicate that a small favor would be appreciated. It had been quite a long time now. Longer that ever before.

  There was, of course, the problem of getting word to Lockter. A strange young man. A strange glitter about him, like knife blades. A flawed young man. Too fond of intrigue for the sake of intrigue. He should be told that it was out of his hands, and he should be informed that his procuring of the drug for the child was astonishingly stupid. Given that little morsel, Rowell would enjoy long talks with Lockter.

  He remembered the last time he had spoken to Rowell. The memory made his cheeks burn dully. Rowell had elbowed him into a corner of a hotel lobby, out of sight behind the public phone booths.

  “Patties up, Judge.”

  “Take your hands off me!”

  “Now, Judge,” Rowell had said soothingly, and made of the business of searching him a brutal game, roughing him up with ease of long practice, elbow under the chin to click the teeth sharply, hard knee bruising the thigh, hand thudding hard over the kidneys, so that Karshner’s hat had fallen to the dusty floor, and his eyes had filled with tears, and he gagged for breath.

  “You can’t do this to me!”

  “Why, I just did, Judge. You want special treatment when I brace you? You figure you’re better than any little punk in your organization? You look just the same to me, Judge. Why don’t you sue me or something? Upstanding citizen assaulted by police brutality. Why don’t you tell me you’ll see that my badge is lifted or something? Isn’t that the usual line? Better pick up your hat, Judge.”

  He had started to pick it up, and then turned around so that he wouldn’t be facing away from Rowell. He picked up his hat, brushed it on his sleeve, and hurried down the steps to the side door of the hotel followed by Rowell’s laughter. The incident had made him think of schoolyards of long ago. Tommy Karshner crying helplessly. They used to get him in a circle and push him back and forth until he fell.

  The Judge left his usual generous tip and got up from the booth. It was nearly noon. He decided to take a short walk to settle his heavy breakfast, and then drop in his offices, the offices of the Johnston Service and Development Corporation, check the mail, and then go over to the sedate Johnston Athletic Club for prelunch cocktails and perhaps a few hands of bridge. Another hour at the office in midafternoon should be enough to take care of the routine. As he walked he again felt a lingering regret that he had not arranged to contact Guillermo himself. It involved a slight loss of dignity to go to Guillermo with only that one obvious reason. And suddenly he realized that one of Guillermo’s people might be ideal to use to contact Lockter and give him the word. The two functions of informing Lockter and setting up the young lady’s trip might be best handled simultaneously. It involved fewer contacts. He lengthened his stride a bit and compressed his stomach muscles and squinted ahead into the June sunshine.

  Twelve

  OVER COFFEE PAUL SAID, with that sudden grin that changed his face, “They call me the Preacher.”

  “I know,” Bonny said. “I’m braced.”

  “For what?”

  “A rehash of my duty to myself, to God, my country, and the Varakis.”

  “I meddle, Bonny. I get curious about people. I get most curious about them when their masks don’t fit well.”

  “Masks?”

  “You make me think of a social lassy trying to play a cheap chippy in a B movie. When you forget the act, you begin to come through better.”

  “The real me? Goodness gracious!”

  “How much college did you have?”

  “Three years. Why?”

  “Dreams of your name in lights, maybe?”

  “You’re sharper than you look. Yes. And was told I was talented.”

  “And you were what is uncommonly known as a good girl?”

  She looked down at her hands, clenched in her lap.

  “A very good girl,” she said. “Virginal at nineteen. Dreams of future bliss. It was going to be like floating on the fattest pink clouds, when it finally happened. Turned out to be a pretty functional operation. Very sweaty affair, you know.”

  “Trying to shock me, Bonny?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Maybe you are. And that would be part of it, too.”

  “Part of what?”

  “A result of that tremendous, ridiculous burden of guilt you’re staggering around with.”

  She made herself look at him. “Guilt? That’s an interesting idea. Hmm. Nice plot line.”

  “Shock me. Shut me out. Any defense you can find. The next step will be to make a large pass. To prove to yourself that you’re a tramp at heart and you’ve proved it and you’re going to keep on being one, so there.”

  “Please shut up!”

  “I’m going to, Bonny. But first I’m going to tell you a story. A true one. There was a man of thirty in Johnston who lived with his mother. He had an IQ of about seventy, I’d guess. Just a big dumb harmless guy who parked cars for a living. Drove well, too. Most feeble-minded people do. Didn’t drink or smoke. Some of his buddies got him drunk one day. For a gag. He went home reeling, got mad at his mother for objection, and took a punch at her. Just one punch. It happened to kill her. There were enough extenuation circumstances so that he got a short-term manslaughter rap. He went to prison and began to drive the authorities nuts. They couldn’t figure out where he was getting it. They watched him. But every few days
he’d really tie one on. Reel and stumble around and pass out. Finally some genius gave him a balloon test. Not a damn bit of alcohol in his system. Guilt, Bonny. Drunk on guilt. Labeling himself as a drunk.”

  She stared at him. “It’s not that way. I know what I am. I know damn well what I am.”

  “No. You don’t know what you are. You’ve selected an arbitrary label. Tramp. I just don’t think it’s accurate.”

  “It’s not the real me? I see. Actually, I’m the reincarnation of Joan of Arc. I’m full of a suppressed desire to walk barefoot through dewy fields and talk with the birds.”

  “If your self-classification was accurate, Bonny, your act would have more unity. Now it’s an off-and-on deal.”

  “Maybe we aren’t getting basic enough, Paul. Maybe there’s a better question—one that I can ask you. What difference does it make? What’s your angle? Maybe it’s an act, maybe it isn’t. So what?”

  “If it’s an act, Bonny, then you have to keep your mind on it, and keep your attention away from other people. If it’s an act, you’re rolling in it, enjoying the pathos and tragedy. It’s damn selfish.”

  “You’re out of line. I’m not standing still for that kind of critique.”

  She stood up. He looked at her with an entirely different expression. “Sit down, Bonny.”

  “Listen, I—”

  “Sit down. I wasn’t concerned with your welfare. Teena adored Henry. He’s gone. What was left for her? A grieving old man. A bewildered young wife. A pregnant nag. A sour brother. Old Anna. Vern Lockter. And you. But you were too busy with yourself to see loneliness even, much less try to do anything. So you share it with the rest of them. A new load of guilt, Bonny. I think if you’d tried to understand her situation and make a friend of her after Henry was killed, I wouldn’t have had to take her to a sanitarium this morning for a cure for drug addiction. You were too damn wound up in your own petty little torment to see a real hell shaping up right in front of you. And if Teena comes back into an unchanged household, Bonny, that cure is going to be only temporary. I want you there, and I want you straightened out and through playing your stupid game with yourself when she gets out. And while she’s away, you can practice on the new kid, Jimmy Dover. He’s a good kid, but he’s going to need some kind of prop. Somebody to help hold him up. Don’t flatter yourself that I’m fingering your little illusions because I’m trying to do you good. I’m trying to help Teena because she needs it more than you do or ever will.”

  When he stopped talking the brook noise seemed too loud. It made a sound in her ears like the sound heard before fainting. She saw herself, for one long shattering moment, with cruel objectivity. Saw all the self-pity, the blinded selfishness, the self-dramatization. Those hours Friday when she had sat alone in her room and heard the bus sounds had seemed so filled with a torment that was bittersweet. It had been, she saw, merely an exercise in ego, another scene in the long drama of self.

  “Dear God,” she said softly.

  “We better leave,” he said.

  He drove a mile farther along the road and pulled off where the shoulder was wide. “I should get back,” she said.

  “That walk in the country you talked about might help a bit. Monday is slow, isn’t it? Jana can handle it.”

  She got out dutifully, still feeling numbed and shocked. There was a path that curved up and around the shoulder of a small hill. She walked ahead of him on the narrow path. Beyond the hill was a jumbled pile of dull gray glacial rocks, bushel-sized and sun-warmed. She sat on one. He gave her a cigarette and then sat on the moist ground, his back against the rock she sat on. She looked at the whorl of hair at the crown of his head, at the gray hairs in the sunlight. The highway was not in sight. There was a distant farm, some fencerows of trees.

  “Poor damn kid,” she said. “I’ve seen them. I could have been one, I guess. I tried it once. I was sick for days from it. An allergy, I guess.”

  “You were sort of trying to … blot yourself out, weren’t you?”

  “I guess so. Lose identity. Lose everything.”

  “That can be a strong compulsion.”

  “Henry brought me out of it, even when I didn’t want to come out of it. I didn’t want the pain of being alive and having to think and know.”

  “What started it?”

  “A guy. I looked at him and I didn’t see what he was. I saw what I wanted him to be. And he wasn’t. He had no more thought of marrying me than of flying like a big bird. But don’t think I went around bleeding on account of that. I got him out of my system, but in the process I got myself all mixed up.”

  “Teena won’t talk yet. She will, eventually. I keep wondering how much guilt is mixed up with other things. How about Vern Lockter? Do you think he could have helped push her over the edge?”

  “I don’t know. I know the type. A very sharp apple. Very aware of himself. I saw the way he looked at me at first and I waited for the pass. It didn’t come, for some reason. Offhand, I’d say no. But that’s only a hunch. I mean if he didn’t want to get tied up with me in any way, I guess it would have been more from caution than anything else. I’m his type, I’d imagine. If it was caution, that would go double with Teena, wouldn’t it? But isn’t he one of your wards? How come the suspicions, Paul?”

  “I just have a feeling it’s not working out. Maybe his mask doesn’t quite fit, either.”

  “Don’t start that again,” she said mildly.

  “Still sore?”

  “No, Paul. But I want to think. I want to do an awful lot of thinking. Because I can sense all the resistance I have to that guilt-mask idea of yours. Too much resentment. So much that maybe it’s true. And I want to think it out and see if it is true.”

  “And if it is?”

  “Maybe you’ve finished what Henry started. A very thankless process of putting the girl back on her own two legs. But no matter what, there are still a lot of bad dreams you can’t forget.”

  “Don’t enjoy thinking of how bad the dreams are.”

  “You know too damn much, Paul.”

  “I don’t know enough. Yet.”

  She stood up and moved a bit away from the rock so she could look down at him. She saw the way he looked up at her, and saw the way his mouth changed in that first look of awareness of her as something desirable. It was something she did not want to see, particularly at that time, especially from Paul Darmond. To cover her own momentary confusion she awkwardly put her hand out to help him up and said, “Rise and shine, you parlor philosopher. I’ve got to go to work.”

  His hand was hard and warm, and she made a mock show of tugging him to his feet. He stood and he did not release her hand. With his other hand he cautiously, gingerly touched the bright sheaf of her hair, smoothing it tenderly back from her temple, cupping then her cheek warmly with the hand’s hardness, bending and kissing her lips while she stood, making no sign of movement, stood with a stillness all about her and in her heart.

  And, with sudden self-hate, with a kind of tortured despair, she pulled at him and thrust her body insolently against him and widened her lips, burlesquing desire and feeling only a deadness within herself. He pushed her away and his eyes had gone narrow. His hand came up and she stood, awaiting the blow. He held his hand poised for a moment, then scrubbed the back of it against his mouth. She watched his anger go away quickly.

  “Why did you do that?” he asked in a quiet voice.

  “Isn’t that the reaction you wanted?” Her anger came quickly, shaking her “You, you’re so goddamn brilliant! What do you want? Something winsome? Should I blush and simper, for God’s sake? What difference does it make to me? Take anything you want. The merchandise is free. This is a nice handy place. If you want something quick and al fresco I’ll be glad to—”

  She didn’t hear the slap. It came as a hard red explosion inside her head. She saw the flick of his hand. She stumbled sideways and caught herself. The sharp sting made her eyes water and she looked at him, shocked. He stood, c
alm and tired-looking, watching her with a certain remote curiosity.

  She ran by him, ran down the path toward the road. As she reached the road she slowed down. She stood still for a moment and then crossed and got into the car. She looked out at the fields on that side of the road. She heard the scuff of his shoe on asphalt. The door latch clicked and the car tilted a bit under his weight. The car door chunked shut. She saw his hand as he reached across her knees and punched the glove-compartment button with his finger. It fell open and she saw the blue and white of the box of tissue in there.

  She reached in and took several and shut the glove compartment. He started the motor and said, “Cry or don’t cry. But don’t sit there and sniffle.”

  “Shut up.”

  The tires squeaked as he U-turned on the narrow road. He spoke in a quiet conversational tone. “I’ve been trying to figure it out. I mean the original kiss. I suppose part of it is due to the body making its normal demands. I haven’t touched a woman since Betty died. And another part is due to the way your hair looked in the sun. That’s a fine color with gray eyes. You’re a handsome woman.”

  “Dig, dig, dig. Poke and pry. Why do you have to take everything apart? And why all the damn fuss about a kiss, anyway?”

  “It was an improbable act, that’s all. It startled me.”

  “Good God!”

  “It was perhaps subject to misinterpretation.”

  “The Preacher!”

  “The Preacher. That’s right. Sociology with overtones. I’m of the opinion, Bonny, that’s it’s all just a mass application of moral codes that are constantly in a state of flux. But in any time, in any race, there are certain standards. Humility, decency, generosity. We all have some of that in varying amounts. And we’ve all got the reverse side of the coin, too. Fear, loneliness, evil.”

  She dropped the balled tissue out the window. “How much of those first three things does Rowell have?”