by Peter Corris
I put on dark sunglasses and blinked a lot and told myself that Palo Alto with its gum trees and ordered streets was nothing like Canberra. I drove cautiously onto the Stanford campus, learning that here joggers and cyclists rule.
At Students' Records a bored woman with a lot of gold chains round her neck told me that Vin Harvey had not enrolled for the new quarter. When I asked why not, she got sly and started demanding ID. I left after getting a squint at the address on the VDT screen—72 Manzanita Park. I located it on a campus map and walked there dodging the bikes. It was an eye-opener amidst the affluence. Low cost student housing covering an acre or so. The buildings, box-like, pale cream corrugated iron jobs were like beached whales. I felt a wall and judged it to be more tin than iron. The layout reminded me of the army and the atmosphere reminded me of caravan parks at home where I'd gone looking for people who couldn't afford to hide anywhere else.
Number 72 was no different from the others except that it had a poster on the outside advertising the delights of the Santa Cruz boardwalk. Pasted to the rippled surface the picture of the boardwalk and the sea had a disjointed, chaotic look. There was also a poster for a recent on-campus Grateful Dead concert, but there were plenty of those around.
A tall, stringy black youth answered my knock. He wore a light grey track suit and sneakers and he bounced just standing there in the doorway.
‘I, ah, was hoping you might know something about Vincent Harvey.’
‘Who was hoping?’
‘Name's Hardy, from Australia.’ I pulled out the investigator's licence and was just balanced and quick enough to avoid the kick he aimed at my head. I stepped back and he came after me, leaping with the hands out ready to smash me down. The leap took him through the doorway but left him a bit close to the wall; I used the space I had to push him into it, hard. He hadn't learned coming-off-walls and I showed him lesson one which is to avoid going-into-same-wall-again. Lesson two is much the same and it can go on until someone gets tired. He did.
‘All right’, he gasped, ‘you're bruising me’.
‘Truce’, I said. ‘Parley.’
‘Okay.’ He got to his feet and I watched all of him carefully.
‘Why did you do that?’
‘For practice. You guys are supposed to be on guard at all times aren't you? It's hard to find anyone on guard.’
‘Shit.’ I stuffed my hands down tight into the pockets of my jeans. ‘I am officially off guard—all right?’
‘Sure. You're good man, what was that you wanted to know?’
‘About Vin, my compatriot.’
He nodded and ushered me straight into a room which was like a good-sized motel room, except that it had a bookcase, which I've never seen in a motel.
‘Beer?’ He bent to the door of a compact fridge which fitted in between the bookcase and the stereo system.
‘Thanks.’ he handed me a can which had more pictures on it than a Walton's catalogue. Coors didn't seem like much of a name for a beer, but it was good. He watched me as I took the first sip.
‘Terrific’, I said.
‘That's what Vin thought.’
‘Good man is he?’
‘Was.’
‘And you are …?’
‘Percy Holmes.’ He flexed a bicep and jutted his jaw. ‘More Holmes than Percy, if you take my meaning.’
‘I do. You know Vin well?’
He scratched his chin and stayed in the squatting position, giving the thighs a workout. ‘Just because you whipped me doesn't mean I'll spill my guts to you. What's the problem?’
‘I'm not sure.’ I drank some more of the beer and decided it was very good. ‘Diane Holt's father hired me to find her. You know her?’
He nodded. ‘Sure, a young fox. She was around when Vin came back and pulled outa here. And gave up beer. He was different, like weird.’
I'd seen a photograph of Harvey, courtesy of Raymond Evans. He had dark hair, a short beard and what you might call brooding eyes, but he didn't look weird.
‘This is nothing heavy’, I said. I waved the nearly empty beer can and tried a smile. ‘Di's dad seems like a man of the world to me, know what I mean?’
His dark brown brow furrowed. ‘No’, he said.
‘I want to find out if the girl's okay and what's happening. I won't touch Vin or even speak to him in a loud voice unless he's making her do what she doesn't want to do.’
He seemed to find that very funny. He let out a short laugh and then a longer one. He reached into the fridge, got out two cans of Coors, tossed one to me and popped the other himself.
‘You got it round the wrong way man. That Di, she's got him here.’ He gripped his crotch.
We both drank some beer and I started to put together an easy scenario for myself: Australian-raised girl with fantasies about America grabs the first chance she gets to take the trip, rages for a while, gets sick of it and is happy to come back to good old Sydney University with dinkum detective. Then he had to go and complicate it.
‘She wanted to go to Santa Cruz’, Holmes said. ‘That was the place for her, “dreamland”, she called it. They had the biggest fight right here.’
‘Santa Cruz—what's that?’
‘UC campus—south of here, funky place.’
‘Harvey can't transfer his PhD there can he?’
He shook his head. ‘No way. Look, I roomed a while with Vin, he's okay. You sure that's all straight—just findin' the chick and all?’
‘Yes.’ I finished the beer to prove it.
‘Okay. Vin, he's through with the PhD, he says. He says it's meaningless, I'm not sure why. He's pretty freaked out, that's why he put Santa Cruz down so hard. A cop-out he says. He's into, like anarchy, you know? And the chick wants to hang out in Santa Cruz, shit.’
He seemed to remember that he wasn't exercising anything at the moment while sitting on the floor. He did some squats, it was time to go before he started shadow-boxing in the confined space.
‘So where did they go?’ I said.
‘San Francisco—where else?’
‘Driving what, Percy? Living where?’
He grinned. ‘Drives a Volkswagen van. Ah'm sorry suh, ah don' know the number.’
‘Okay, okay, sorry. Do you happen to know where he lives in San Francisco, Mr Holmes?’
‘No, Mr Hardy, I don't; but you're in luck, he's going to be right here tonight.’ He got up and rummaged among papers on top of the bookcase. He handed me a roughly printed notice which said that Harvey would be giving a lecture entitled ‘Owning the Air’ on the subject of the media and politics. The lecture was sponsored by the Stanford Committee for Responsible Social Science and was scheduled for that evening at eight p.m.
‘Will you be there?’
‘Not me. I'll be playing basketball.’
‘Are you tall enough for basketball?’
‘No, I play for fun.’
I drove back to Palo Alto and found a place called a Creamery in which you could eat and drink and read. I ate a salad, drank a beer and read the San Francisco Chronicle. The food and drink were better than the paper but I did learn that Michael Spinks was defending his cruiserweight title against nobody that afternoon on TV. I asked the kid behind the counter if I could watch it and he nodded and turned on the set mounted high on the wall.
‘Who's Michael Spinks?’ he said.
‘Brother of Leon.’
I let him bring me another beer while I watched the fight. The beer was fine but Spinks wasn't so good. His opponent was a dark, chunky guy who looked like a blown-up middleweight and Spinks took about three rounds longer than he should to put him away.
I did the crossword in the paper, had another beer, walked around for a while and filled up with gas. I drove very cautiously; all the cops I'd seen so far wore black uniforms with big guns tucked up high, wicked-looked nightsticks and discontented expressions. Cops have a way of spotting men who are in a similar line of work, and of being nasty to them. I wasn't licenced to blow
my nose in California and I knew what one of those nightsticks in sweaty hands could do to a sensitive man like me.
I gave a boy and his girlfriend a ride to the campus because they looked so forlorn walking. Everyone else was in a car or on a ten-speed cycle. I asked the kid if he was going to the media lecture.
‘Naw’, he said.
‘Freaks’, the girl said.
A campus patrol car came alongside and the boy waved insolently at the driver. I swore silently at him but the cop just gunned his motor and cruised past.
‘Pigs’, the girl said. I wondered if they limited themselves to one-word statements. I dropped them near one of the student dormitories; the boy waved, he, was a good waver; the girl said ‘Thanks’.
I was a bit late finding the lecture room and I wasn't ready for Vin Harvey. Evans' photograph was the sort that would let you recognise someone in the street and not much more. Harvey appeared a dark-haired young man with a heavyish face and a short beard; his eyes were said to be blue and his build was said to be light, but all that did was distinguish him from brown-eyed truck drivers. The man addressing the crowd in the room might have been dark with blue eyes and slight build, but why hadn't anyone said anything about charisma? He had it. He was tall unless he was standing on a high box and his beard-framed face didn't look heavy.
He worked at talking—his voice was pleasing with a mid-Pacific accent and he moved his shoulders a little for emphasis. He wore jeans and a white T-shirt and his arms and hands moved like an orchestra conductor's. I took a seat up at the back of the steeply sloped room and listened.
‘They are not faceless’, Harvey said, ‘never think that. You can see their faces in the business magazines and newspapers they own. Their faces are on the screens, coming at you from the TV stations they own. Then there are the faces of the men and women they own—the lawyers, politicians and newsreaders.’ He suddenly stood quite still and the movement dramatically underlined his words. ‘But more important than the faces are the words.’ His voice went a bit deeper as if concern were forcing it down. ‘Last year, there was a meeting. It was held in Sydney, Australia. All the media corporations had representatives there, the political people, a few of the union people. You'd recognise some of the names if I mentioned them. For public consumption the meeting was to organise aid for the under-privileged of the Pacific. That's a hell of a lot of people and for all I know they might get some water to villages in the Philippines. But the real talks, the ones the journalists didn't get in on, weren't about water—they were about direct access to your minds.’
The room was very quiet and still, everyone was listening and I had to jerk my attention away to check the audience. When I'd been bored rigid in my law lectures twenty years before I used to count all the people in the room. That's why I'd sit up the back with the widest view I could command. Then I'd split them up into groups: sex, rebels, conformists. It passed the time, and I sometimes did bad sketches of people who took my eye. The old habit re-surfaced and, as Harvey went on, I found myself sketching.
‘At that meeting they agreed to experiment with subliminal advertising and propaganda through TV. A couple of scientists there had been researching it for years.’ He paused. ‘They can make you belive things and disbelieve things, they can make you angry or passive.’ For the first time he lifted the volume. ‘They can tune you like a TV set, and they're doing it right now.’
One sketch showed two men sitting together near the front. They had an air of forced casualness as if the denim shirt of one and the T-shirt of the other weren't their normal dress. The T-shirt one made a tie-straightening movement twice and the other plucked at the hair which sat on top of his ears. The T-shirt was taking shorthand notes.
My second drawing was of a young woman with blonde hair pulled back into a frizzy pony tail. She was in the front row and stared up at Harvey as if she was trying to count the pores in his nose. I caught the glint of a gold chain around her neck above the creased and stained collar of the shirt that had DO IT printed on it in big red letters on dirty grey. End of the road, I thought, but it didn't feel like that, not with her looking at Harvey like that and the other two keeping a record and with him saying what he was saying.
‘I have tapes from that meeting and photographs of the participants.’ He held up his hands, palms out. ‘Not here, not any one place for very long. It moves, like the rockets in the silos, or did they decide not to move them? Or did they decide not to decide? Or not to tell you whether they decided? One thing's sure, they won't tell you the truth.’
He had them all now—the blacks and the whites, the students and the faculty. He went on spelling out the details of the nastiness and I surveyed the audience again. Sitting next to Diane Holt were three guys who looked a little like cleaned-up Hell's Angels. They had that same air of being there for the beer, and ready for trouble. One was prematurely bald, the other two were fair, they looked middling-tough. Next to them was a dark Hispanic character I dubbed the Dark Stranger. He wore dark blue clothes, was slim and looked very tough indeed.
‘You can do something’, Harvey was saying, ‘you can refuse to read their papers, you can turn off the tube and tell them so at ratings time. You can stop putting classifieds in the papers and you can protest against people who do advertise. There are lots of ways to do that. But there's a bigger and better protest you can mount, a protest that can be immediately and massively effective. If you've been convinced by what I've said tonight you'll want to be part of it; and I'm sorry for this, but you're going to have to wait. I'll tell you soon about it, real soon, and I'll tell you in San Francisco where it's going to happen. Be there! Goodnight.’
The muscle moved fast, they were up and blanketing Harvey before anyone else moved. The T-shirt put away his shorthand pad and sat still. I moved as fast as I could but Harvey and Diane Holt and the minders were getting into a Volkswagen van by the time I got out. I couldn't walk up to him and say I was taking his sheila back to Bondi, I couldn't do anything. My car was a mile away. One of the boys handed a bundle of paper down to someone in the crowd and then the van groaned and choked itself into life. As it churned away I saw the two men in disguise follow it in a dark Buick that made hardly any noise at all.
The bundle turned out to be a roughly printed handbill for an ‘event’ in San Francisco in three days time. The message was a little vague but the faithful were urged to be at Golden Gate Park at noon. I took one of the sheets back to a motel in Palo Alto where I drank most of a six-pack of Coors and watched ‘Guns of the Magnificent Seven’ which had none of the panache of the original.
I started early the next day, driving back to San Francisco, checking into a cheap hotel on Sutter Street and surrendering the Pinto because I knew I'd be spending money and wanted to make it stretch. I bought a .38 Smith & Wesson at a place I'd been told about, where the only credentials they care about have numbers on them and fold easily. Then I bought an imitation leather holder and a star that looked so real I felt like going out and eating a couple of steaks and drinking a lot of beer.
Instead, I went to the Goldwasser Printing Shop, the name of which had been stamped in small letters on the handbill. I found it on my tourist map and walked there—more economising. The print shop was jammed in at the back of a supermarket and accessible only from the lane behind. It had a furtive air, but that might have been because it still used ink and moving machinery instead of fancy photography. As I went up the narrow wodden stairs I could hear the thin sound of a pinched cough from the printshop—that was good. I wasn't feeling at all physical and the morning fog had brought me close to coughing myself.
He was dark, small and stooped from bending over his work. He straightened up as far as he could and peered at me over his half-glasses.
‘Yeah?’
I put the handbill down on the cluttered bench where it became about the millionth piece of paper.
‘So?’
‘I want to know who you did it for.’
‘
Who wants to know?’
I let him see the gun in its holster when I got out the shield which I flapped open and shut in front of him. It made a flip-flop sound like thong sandals on cement.
‘Trouble?’
‘Not for you. No dirty words, no pictures. Who was the customer?’
‘You talk funny.’
‘I used to be a tennis player, we pick this talk up from the Aussies.’
He reached for a rag he had hanging out his back pocket, wiped his hands and took a few shuffling steps across to an old grey filing cabinet under the dusty window. The boards creaked under his hundred and ten pounds or so, and I wondered how safe it was to have the heavy old press here in the room—I was doing fine at feeling like an official.
‘I got it here.’ He held up a docket and I got further into the role by pulling out my notebook and getting set to write.
‘Give me the name and address.’
‘Enquiry fee ten dollars.’
I looked at him for a minute and then got out a ten; he reached and I let him take it while I grabbed the docket. He said ‘Shit’, but the cough started and shut him up. I wrote Pedro Moreno and the address. There was no phone number. I handed the docket back.
‘Thanks.’
‘I think that shield's a fake’, he said.
I turned back on my way to the door. ‘Do you care?’
He shook his head. ‘Get you a better one.’
The address was in the district up behind the University of San Francisco; I gave it to the taxi driver and asked him what kind of neighbourhood it was.
‘Bo-ho’, he said.
‘Huh?’
‘Kinda slummy but not a jungle. I'll take you right there. Some places I'd just drop you close.’
