Platinum Pohl - The Collected Best Stories

by Frederik Pohl

  Then he relaxed and grinned. “Aw, hell, sure. Mr. Feigerman’s seeing-eye kid, that right?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but reached under his web belt and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “If you see anybody coming in, kid, you give a real loud cough, you hear?” he ordered, just like Dandy, and disappeared into a stall. In a moment Marcus smelled weed. Cheap chickenshit, he said, but not out loud, because he knew there was no hope that a guard working for Mr. Feigerman would offer a hit to Feigerman’s young protégé, no matter how much the protégé needed to steady his nerves.

  In the waiting room of Feigerman & Tisdale Engineering Associates Marcus dusted off his best society manners before he approached the receptionist. It was, “Mr. Feigerman’s expecting me, sir,” and, “I know I’m too early, sir,” and, “I’ll just sit over here out of the way, so please don’t disturb Mr. Feigerman, sir.” So of course the receptionist relayed it all to Feigerman practically at once, and Marcus was ushered into the old man’s presence nearly an hour before his time. But not into the big office with the useless huge windows. Feigerman was down where he liked to be, in his model room, and he turned toward the boy at once, his headset wheeling and clicking away. “I heard about your dad, Marcus,” he said anxiously. “I hope he’s all right.”

  “Just beaten up pretty bad, Mr. Feigerman. They’re taking him to the hospital, but they say he’ll be okay.”

  “Terrible, terrible. Those animals. I hope the police catch them.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Marcus, not bothering to tell Mr. Feigerman that it was not likely to have been the escaped convicts that had done the beating as much as one of Mr. Gambiage’s associates, just to make the story look good.

  “Terrible,” Feigerman repeated. “And there’s some kind of demonstration going on against the Bed-Stuy project, did you see it? I swear, Marcus,” he said, not waiting for an answer, “I don’t know how Gambiage gets these people out! They must know what he is. And they have to know, too, that the project is for their own good, don’t they?”

  “Sure they do,” said Marcus, again refraining from the obvious: the project could do them good, but not nearly as much good, or bad, as Gambiage could do them. “We going to go take a look at it?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Feigerman, but not with enthusiasm; it was a bad day for the old man, Marcus could see, and if it hadn’t been for the nagging terror in his own mind he would have felt sympathy. Feigerman reached out to fondle a sixteenth-scale model of one of the wind rotors and brightened. “You haven’t been down here lately, Marcus. Would you like me to show you around?”

  If Marcus had been able to afford the truth he would surely have said yes, because almost the best part of working for Mr. Feigerman was seeing the working models of the windmills, the thermal aquifer storage with oil substituting for the water, the really truly working photovoltaics that registered a current when you turned a light on them—all of them, actually. And there was something new, an Erector-set construction of glass tubing with something like Freon turning itself into vapor at the bottom and bubbling up through a column of water and pulling the water along, then the water passing through another tube and a turbine on the way down to generate more power.

  Feigerman’s sonar eyes could not tell him what someone was thinking, but he could see where Marcus was looking. “That’s what we call the wopperator,” he said proudly. “It can use warm underground water to circulate that fluid all winter long, boiling another fluid at the bottom and condensing it again at the top—what’s the matter?” he added anxiously, seeing that Marcus was shaking his head.

  “It’s Dandy,” Marcus explained. “Before they took him away he told me I had to deliver some cigarettes for him—they’re good customers, over by the power plant—”

  Feigerman was disappointed, then annoyed. “Oh, hell, boy, what are you telling me? Cigarettes don’t come in tin cans.”

  Fuck the old bastard! Sometimes you forgot that he saw things in a different way, and that metal would give off a conspicuous echo even inside a canvas backpack. “Sure, Mr. Feigerman,” Marcus improvised, “but there’s two containers of coffee there, too. And Dandy said he’d get the cat out if it got there cold.”

  “Oh, hell.” Since Feigerman wasn’t much good at reading other people’s expressions, perhaps in compensation his own face showed few. But it was clear this time that he was disappointed. He said in resignation, “I don’t want to get you in trouble with your dad, Marcus, especially after those thugs beat him up. Sam!” he called to the modelmaker chief, standing silent across the room. “Call down for my car, will you?” But all the way down in the elevator he was silent and obviously depressed. No more than Marcus, who was not only depressed but scared; not only scared but despairing, because he was beginning to understand that sooner or later somebody was going to connect his visits to the prison with the fact that the escaped prisoners had just happened to stop at his father’s candy store…and so, very likely, this was the last time he would spend with Mr. Feigerman.

  Julius was waiting for them with the car, illegally parked right in front of the main entrance because it had begun to rain. Mr. Feigerman’s machine was doing its whee-clickety-beep thing and he turned his head restlessly about, but the sonar did not work through the windows of the limousine. “There’s a lot of people out there,” said Marcus, trying to help without upsetting the old man.

  “I can hear that, damn it! What are they doing?”

  What they were doing was shouting and chanting, and there were a lot more of them than Marcus had expected. Old man Feigerman was not satisfied. Blind he might be, but his otoliths were in fine shape; he could feel the pattern of acceleration and deceleration, and knew that the driver, Julius, was having a hard time getting through crowds. “Is it that maniac Gambiage’s demonstration?” he demanded.

  Marcus said apologetically, “I guess that’s it, Mr. Feigerman. There’s a lot of them carrying signs.”

  “Read me the signs, damn it!”

  Obediently Marcus rattled off the nearest few. There was a Give Bed-Stuy Freedom of Choice! and a Salvemos nuestras casas! and Jobs, Not Theories! and two or three that made specific reference to Mr. Feigerman himself, which Marcus did not read aloud. Or have to. As they inched along, block by block, the yelling got louder and more personal. “Listen, Feigerman,” bawled one man, leaning over the hood of the car, “Bed-Stuy’s our home—love it or leave it!” And old man Feigerman, looking even older than usual, sank back on the seat, gnawing his thumb.

  The rain did not seem to slow anybody down—not anybody, of all the dozens of different kinds of anybodies thronging the streets. There were dozens, even hundreds, of the neighborhood characters—five or six tottering winos, fat old Bloody Bess the moocher, even two young brothers from the Franciscan rescue mission, swinging their rain-soaked signs and shouting—Marcus could make out neither the slogans nor the signs, because they seemed to be in Latin. There were solid clumps of blue-collars, some of them construction workers, some from the truckers and the airline drivers; there were people who looked like bank clerks and people who looked like store salespersons—put them all together and it was a tremendous testimonial to Mr. Gambiage’s ability to whip up a spontaneous riot on a moment’s notice. And they were not all pacific. Ahead there was a whine of sirens and a plop of tear-gas shells from where the construction equipment stood idle.

  “They’re getting rough,” bawled Julius over his shoulder, and he looked worried. “Looks like they’re smashing the backhoes!”

  Mr. Feigerman nodded without answering, but his face looked terribly drawn. Marcus, looking at him, began to worry that the old man was not up to this sort of ordeal—if, indeed, Marcus was himself. He craned his neck to peer at the clock on the Williamsburgh Bank Building and gritted his teeth. They were running very late, and it was not the kind of errand where an excuse would get you off. It didn’t get faster. A block along a police trike whined up beside them, scattering a gaggle of high-school girls shouting, “Soa
k the rich, help the poor, make Bed-Stuy an open door!” The cop ran down his window and yelled across at Julius, then recognized him as a fellow policeman and peered into the back to see Mr. Feigerman.

  “You sure you want to go in here?” he demanded. There was a tone of outrage in his voice—a beat cop who had spent the first hour of his shift expecting to find desperate escaped convicts, received the welcome word that they were probably across the Hudson River and then been confronted with a quick, dirty and huge burgeoning riot.

  Julius referred the question to higher authority. “What do you say, Mr. Feigerman?” he called over his shoulder. “Any minute now some of these thugs are going to start thinking about turning cars over.”

  Feigerman shook his head. “I want to see what they’re doing,” he said, his voice shrill and unhappy. “But maybe not you, Marcus. Maybe you ought to get out and go back.”

  The boy stiffened. “Aw, no, please, Mr. Feigerman!” he begged. “I got to deliver this, uh, coffee—and anyway,” he improvised, “I’d be scared to be alone in that bunch! I’m a lot better off with you and Julius!” It was a doubtful thesis at best, but the cop in the trike was too busy to argue and Mr. Feigerman too full of woe. Only Julius was shaking his head as he wormed the big car through the ever narrower spaces between the yelling, chanting groups. But as they crossed the Long Island Rail Road tracks the crowds thinned. “Down there,” Marcus ordered, leaning forward. “Over between the power plant and the shit pit, the stuff’s for the guards at the excavation—”

  Julius paused to crane his neck around and stare at Marcus, but when Feigerman didn’t protest he obediently turned the car down a rutted, chewed-up street. Feigerman gasped, as the car jolted over potholes, “Damn that Gambiage! I thought he was still planning to buy me off—why does he do this now?”

  Marcus did not answer, but he could have guessed that it had something to do with the stuff in his backpack. “Right by the guard shack,” he directed, and Julius turned into an entrance with a wire-mesh gate. A man in uniform came strolling out. “Got the stuff for us, kid?” he asked, chewing on a straw, his hand resting on the butt of a gun.

  “Yes, sir!” cried Marcus, shucking the pack and rolling down the window, delighted to get his errand run so peacefully.

  But it didn’t stay peaceful long. Julius was staring at the man in guard’s uniform, and, with increasing concern, at the quiet excavation and the absence of anyone else. Before Marcus could get the pack off Julius shouted, “Son of a bitch, it’s Jack La Croy—get down, Mr. Feigerman!” And he was reaching for his gun.

  But not fast enough. La Croy had the guard’s gun, and he had not taken his hand off it. The shot went into Julius’s throat, right between the Adam’s apple and the chin, and spatters of blood flew back to strike Marcus’s face like hot little raindrops. Two other men boiled out of the guard shack, one limping and swearing, the other Marcus’s pretend-father, his face scared and dangerous. As La Croy pushed Julius out of the way and shoved himself behind the wheel the other two jumped into the back of the car, fat, fearsome Muzzi reaching for the backpack of weapons and money with an expression of savage joy…

  And from behind them, a sudden roar of an engine and the quick zap of a siren.

  Everybody was shouting at once. Marcus, crushed under the weight of the killer Muzzi, could not see what was happening, but he could feel the car surge forward, stop, spin and make a dash in another direction. There was a sudden lurch and crash as they broke through something, and then it stopped and the men were out of the car, firing at something behind them. Julius would never get back on the force, Marcus thought, struggling to wipe the blood off his face—and whether he himself would live through the next hour was at best an open question.

  For Johnny Harvey everything had begun going terribly wrong even before they broke through the wall, and gone downhill ever since. It was just luck they’d been able to kill the security guard and get his gun, just luck that they’d been able to hide in a place where there was a telephone, long enough for Muzzi to make his phone call on the secret number and beg, or threaten, the big man to get them out. The arrangements were complicated—a delivery of guns and money, a faked holdup to send the cops in the wrong direction, a whomped-up riot to keep the cops busy—but they’d been working pretty well, and that was luck, too, lots of luck, more than they had a right to expect—

  But the luck had run out.

  When the boy came with the guns it was bad luck that the driver was an off-duty cop who recognized La Croy, worse luck still that there was a police car right behind them. La Croy did the only thing he could do. There was no way out of the street they were in except back past the cops, and that was impossible. So he’d slammed the car through the gate of the powerplant. And there they were, inside the powerplant, with four terrified engineers lying facedown on the floor of the control room and forty thousand New York City cops gathering outside. The boy was scared shitless; the old man, his vision gear crushed, was lying hopeless and paralyzed beside the guards. “At least we’ve got hostages,” said La Croy, fondling his gun, and Muzzi, staring around the control room of the nuclear plant, said:

  “Asshole! We’ve got the whole fuckin city for a hostage!”

  6

  The job as companion and bedpan changer to old Mrs. Feigerman paid well, worked easy and was generally too good to last. When it ended Nillie de Harcourt didn’t complain. She turned to the next chapter in her life: bag lady. That meant eight hours a day sitting before a screening table in her pale green smock, chatting with the bag ladies on either side of her; while magnets pulled out the ferrous metals, glass went one way, to be separated by color, and organics went another. The biggest part of the job was to isolate organics so they would not poison the sludge-making garbage. The work was easy enough, and not particularly unpleasant once you got past the smell. But that was too good to last, too, because anything good was always going to be too good for Gwenna Anderson Vanilla Fudge de Harcourt. So when she saw The Man moving purposefully toward her through the clinking, clattering, smelly aisles she was not surprised. “Downstairs, Nillie,” he said, flashing the potsie. “We need you.” She didn’t ask why. She just looked toward her supervisor, who shrugged and nodded; and took off the green smock regretfully, and folded it away, and did as she was told. He didn’t tell her what it was about. He didn’t have to. Trouble was what it was about, because that was always what it was about. She followed him into the waiting police car without comment. The driver in the front started away at once, siren screaming. In the back, the cop turned on a tape recorder, cleared his throat and said, “This interview is being conducted by Sergeant Marvin Wagman. Is your name Gwenna Anderson?”

  “That was my name before I married de Harcourt.”

  “According to records, Mrs. de Harcourt, you have fourteen arrests and six convictions for prostitution, five arrests no convictions for shoplifting, two arrests one conviction for possession of a controlled substance and one arrest no conviction for open lewdness.”

  Nillie shrugged. “You’re talking about fifteen years ago, man.”

  Wagman looked at her with annoyance, but also, Nillie noted, a lot more tension than anything he had said so far would justify. “Right,” he said sarcastically, “so now you’re a success story. You married the boss and went into business for yourself. Dope business, numbers business, bookmaking business.”

  “If I was all those things, would I have to get work as a bag lady?”

  “I ask the questions,” he reminded her, but it was a fair question and he knew it. He didn’t know the answer, but then hardly anybody did but Nillie herself—and most people wouldn’t have believed it if told. “You have a son named Marcus Garvey de Harcourt?” he went on.

  Suddenly Nillie sat bolt upright. “Mister, did something happen to Marcus?”

  The sergeant was human after all; he hesitated, and then said, “I’m not supposed to tell you anything, just make sure I’ve got the right person. But your s
on’s in good health last I heard.”

  “Mister!”

  “I have to ask you these questions! Now, did you ever work for Henry Gambiage?”

  “Not exactly. Sort of; all the girls did, at least he was getting a cut on everything. But that was before his name was Gambiage. What about Marcus?”

  “And do you and your husband work for him now?”

  “Not me!”

  “But your husband?” he insisted.

  “Take the Fifth,” she said shortly. “Anyway, you ain’t read me my rights.”

  “You’re not under arrest,” he told her, and then clicked off the tape recorder. “That’s all I can say, Miz de Harcourt,” he finished, “so please don’t ask me any more questions.” And she didn’t, but she was moving rapidly from worry to terror. Mentioning her son was bad enough; mentioning Gambiage a lot worse. But when a cop called her “Miz” and used the word “please”—then it was time to get scared.

  It was all but physically impossible for Nillie to plead with a policeman, but she came as close to it in the rest of this ride as ever since the first afternoon she’d been picked up for soliciting a plainclothes on the corner of Eighth Avenue and Forty-fifth Street, fifteen years old, turned out on the turf just two days before and still thinking that some day, maybe, she’d get back to the Smokies of eastern Tennessee. She gazed out at the dirty, rainy streets as they whizzed by at fifty miles an hour through rapidly moving traffic, and wished she could be sick. Marcus! If anything happened to him—