‘What’d you do?’
‘Jesus, what’d your mom do? Did she scream? Did you stand outside moaning and kicking the door and trying to ring the bell with your elbow?’
‘Our house had a knocker. I would have been screwed.’
‘I bet some of the other kids were in their houses cracking the curtains to look out the front window at you like staggering around moaning from house to house with your hands out straight like Frankenstein.’
‘It’s not like a shoe which you can just take off.’
‘I’ve got a story about shit, but it’s not pretty.’
‘I don’t remember. The memory ends with the shit and my hands and trying to chase everybody, which is odd, because up to then the memory is extraordinarily clear. Then it just stops and I don’t know what happened.’
‘I’m assuming I haven’t talked before about running around with this odd gang of guys at Bradley and the strange thing we got into junior year of breaking into people’s dorm rooms and holding them down while Fat Marcus the Moneylender sat on their face.’
‘I think I would have remembered.’
‘This was at Bradley; you know the weird shit you get into. There were five or six of us and this senseless thing got started where it was a tradition to cruise the freshman dorms at about four in the morning and find an unlocked door and all burst in and we’d all hold the guy in bed down and Fat Marcus the Moneylender would take his pants down and sit on his face.’
‘…’
‘There was no reason to it. We just thought it was a gas.’
‘Fat Marcus the Moneylender?’
‘An enormous guy from the Chicago suburbs. Morbidly enormous. Always had cash and lent it out and kept his accounts in a small special ledger. Very careful bookkeeper, could compound daily without a calculator. Never even just Fat Marcus, it was always “the Moneylender.” He was a Jew but I don’t think that had anything to do with it. It was how he put himself through school after his parents had cut him off—this wasn’t his first school but I don’t remember his background too good.’
‘Why the sitting on people’s face?’
‘The weirdness of it was the charm. That’s all I can tell you. It was just something we started doing. I get a strange feeling even just thinking about how to describe it.’
‘What did the guy in bed do?’
‘The guy in the bed was not a happy camper, I can tell you that much. It would all happen real fast where we’d all just burst in and be on the guy before he was even awake. We’d each grasp an extremity and quick as shit Fat Marcus the Moneylender’d have his pants down and sit on the guy’s face and stay there just long enough where the kid in the bed didn’t smother. Then we’d be out of there just as fast as we came in. That was part of the whole point, so the guy in the bed probably didn’t even know if it was real or a nightmare or what the hell it was.’
They weren’t far off the Sticky; the fog was a storm coming in off the river. The very air was at attention. Two ledge-chested older women were peering in the window of the coin shop.
They all had unconscious habits of which maybe only Hurd, as the new one, was fully aware. Agent Lumm’s habit on surveillance was in a blank absent way to use his front teeth to peel a tiny fragment of dead skin from his lip and put it on the tip of his tongue and gently blow it out his mouth to land somewhere invisible. He was wholly unaware that he did this, Hurd could tell. Gaines blinked slowly in a stony mindless way that reminded Hurd of a lizard whose rock wasn’t hot enough. Todd Miller wore a corduroy coat with a sheepskin collar and bunched and unbunched his left sleeve; Bondurant stared at a point between his shoes on the van’s rug as if it were a chasm. It seemed staggering to Hurd that no one smoked. He himself was an endless catalogue of tics and fidgets.
One probationary agent whose sunglasses hung from his collar wore twelve-hole Doc Martens whose holes Hurd had counted several times.
‘How does Marcus the Moneylender pull his pants back up while you all are running out?’
A long silence ensued while Bondurant gave Gaines a prison-yard stare. Gaines said, ‘You ever try to get dressed while you’re running? Can’t be done.’
‘The guy thinking it might have been a dream until that is he gets up to shave and sees his nose squished flat and a big ass-imprint on his face.’
‘Did he scream?’
‘In a muffled way they all screamed. Of course they screamed. But the thing that was making them scream was also the thing that muffled the scream.’
‘Some fat man’s ass coming down and covering their face.’
‘Speed and quiet were the essence of the operation, and this was important because this was breaking in and assault of a sort, and Fat Marcus had already been expelled from at least one place, and none of us were what you might call on the Dean’s List, and let’s don’t forget this was 1971 and the draft board was just about standing at the front gate waiting for you if you got kicked out.’
‘This is why Bondurant was in the war. In The Nam.’
‘I was a G-2 bookkeeper in Saigon, dickhead. That’s not The Nam.’
‘But you’re saying this is what got you drafted? Assaulting freshmen with a big Jew’s ass?’
‘I’m saying it was just something that started happening and that we pulled off numerous operations all up and down the underclass dorms with a hundred percent operational success until the day the door we found open belongs to this kid, Diablo, that everybody called Diablo the Left-Handed Surrealist, this Puerto Rican mural-painter scholarship from Indianapolis that was crazy, that for example lost his student-aid job in the faculty dining hall because one day he came in on what we’re pretty sure was acid and set all the place settings at everybody’s place with all knives, and saw visions and painted these spiky fluorescent Catholic murals on walls on warehouses down by the river, and was crazy—Diablo the Left-Handed Surrealist.’
‘Didn’t anybody at your school ever have names like Joe or Bill?’
‘That for the most part nobody ever messed with because he was crazy as a fucking mudbug, this little hundred-pound spic kid from some Indianapolis barrio, but by this time the operation was a finely honed mechanism built for speed, that plus nobody even placed who it was until we’d all bursted in and deployed around the bed. I had the left ankle I remember, and Fat Marcus was up on the bed undoing his belt and getting his feet distributed on either side of what was usually the guy’s pillow except this kid didn’t use a pillow or even sheets; it was just the bare dorm mattress with those stripes on them.’
The only truly fat person Gestine Hurd had ever known had been a Special Examination GS-9 in the Oneida Post who’d spent the entire two years Hurd knew of him back-auditing an Oneida firm so tiny and specialized that it made nothing but the corrugated dividers that went into the cardboard boxes used to ship a very particular kind of tiny lightbulb that went into tiny brass lamps that clicked onto the top of frames that display-quality paintings in historical homes and country restaurants often hang in.
‘Which should have alerted us to trouble, plus the fact that Diablo the Left-Handed Surrealist seemed already awake when we boomed the door and didn’t sit up or yelp or rub his eyes or thrash around or struggle when we all came booming in and each grabbed us an extremity and Fat Marcus the Moneylender got up on the bed and commenced to lowering his gargantuan white ass down to his face; he just laid there very still with his eyes glittering with Latin cunning and all-around craziness. You didn’t even want to know the decor, what-all was on the walls; if the operation’s total surreal speed had allowed it, if we’d paid one bit of attention to the room or the expression on the kid’s face on the mattress we could of stopped and reconnoitered and saved us all a lot of trouble and got to stay in school and not have to spend a fucking year in Saigon learning requisition-write-up accounting. Which I wouldn’t wish on a dog.’
The spools turned slowly with a slight triple hiss. The IRS agents’ expressions were those of Cub Scouts around
a Storytime fire. A quick bob in the entry’s mike’s tape went unremarked.
‘Waited until Fat Marcus the Moneylender’s ass was right down next to him, touching his face but not with the full weight of the ass on him yet, and jerked up and bit into Fat Marcus’s ass. And I’m not talking a lover-nip here, I’m talking a full front Doberman-type sinking of his whole frontal set of teeth into the buttock arc of Marcus’s ass, so that even down by his ankle I could see blood going down the Surrealist’s chin and see Fat Marcus the Moneylender’s ass flexing as he reared back and let out a scream that made the windows shiver and knocked the two guys holding Diablo the Left-Handed Surrealist’s shoulders back against the row of no-eye masks the spic’s got on his wall that all fell and made a racket and could see the horrible thing of this unbelievably obese guy rearing back and up and trying with all his weight to get his ass out of the teeth of Diablo the Left-Handed Surrealist, who gentlemen just let me say wasn’t letting go, the kid was a Gila monster, even as Fat Marcus had both hands hooked in the kid’s nose’s nostrils trying to peel him off his ass and Fat Marcus’s main stooge Marvin “the Stooge” Flotkoetter actually bent in and was biting Diablo the Left-Handed Surrealist’s ear and cheek, trying to make him let go, and both him and Diablo were growling and Diablo was shaking his head trying to tear the mouthful of ass clear out of Fat Marcus’s ass and his nose and ear were bleeding and blood was just shooting I mean arterially shooting in all directions out of Marcus’s ass and into the mattress and his pants and Fat Marcus took a shit in fear and pain and his screams brought everybody in pajamas and underwear and pimple cream and retainers to the still-open door, looking in at what looked of course later though none of us realized it at the time like a prison-type gang-type sexual assault gone wrong.’
§30
‘The Deputy DD’s a man-of-the-people type. But very much Glendenning’s boy. 907313433, a full CPA, Sheehan is, a GS-13, nine years in. He was auditing out of District 10 in Chicago before he got the degree. Came over with Glendenning. Kind of Glendenning’s hatchet man, very hail-fellow, let’s all be friends, all smiles but the eyes go right through you. Liaisons with Internal. Not well-liked. Plus a fashion-plate. Looks like the original seventies hipster almost. Very if you know what I mean mod.’
There were sounds of Reynolds doing something unrelated.
‘Meaning you got the sideburns, the bell-bottoms, the pale blue workshirt. The little leather thong thing around the neck. The whole package.’
‘Spare us the Mr. Blackwell, Claude.’
‘Totally Glendenning’s boy. But a serious 3-D in his own right. Performance Reviews all 8-plus. Nary a 7. Made GS-11 in ’77 on an independent Promotion Board bid; Glendenning had nothing to do with it. But Glendenning’s boy.’
‘So he’ll fight it?’
‘He’s an implementer. Admin was his choice; he applied. If things come down through channels he won’t fight you. But he won’t help you. He implements.’
‘Glendenning’s got a lot of boys in 047, from what you’re saying.’ The slight rise and rounding of Reynolds’s voice indicated he was knotting his tie.
‘Glendenning’s got a high level of Group Manager support. Rosebury and Danmeyer in Exams and Quarterlies might have come with him, their periods in Syracuse overlapped, but the rest were here before Glendenning got the kick. Not yet clear how much of the support is political versus sincere, which would indicate how much of an operator Glendenning’s been at 047. I haven’t been able to squeeze even a private bad word on him out of anybody. Of course that could mean several things.’
‘You don’t have to tell us what things mean,’ without heat. Reynolds’s big gray Motorola had a violin’s chin-cup welded on so he could hold it with his neck alone and free his hands, which whenever Sylvanshine tried this with his own he either forgot and moved his head wrong and the thing fell on the floor and broke and he had to spend time figuring out how to requisition his fourth field phone of the year or else it gave him a stabbing pain somewhere near his shoulder blade. He held a regular touch-tone phone with one hand and bit dead skin from the edge of his thumbnail while he turned sheets on the clipboard.
‘Chaney has a picture of her and Glendenning up on her office wall if you can believe it.’
‘Chaney.’
‘Julia Drutt Chaney, forty-four, GS-10, 952678315, Administrative Supervisor for 047B across the complex. Big, big woman. Large. Stanton-sized in Philly if you recall her. As in muumuus. As in when you see her coming across the quad thing it looks like several women all cohabiting in just one garment. Big red cheeks. But nobody’s fool, Performance—’
‘We’re only interested in 047B for Audits, and that’s collateral.’ Sylvanshine was trying to recall the name of his second-grade teacher, who stood at the terminus of a long chain of idle thought whose medial steps he’d already forgotten but which had started with the maneuvers by which Reynolds had arranged to stay in DC and Martinsburg for several weeks and to keep Mel Lehrl’s ear by offering to analyze Sylvanshine’s initial field reports and reduce them to relevant fact-patterns for Lehrl before eventually joining Claude in this horrible place after all his usual strategies were exhausted. ‘Let’s concentrate on the steak and not the peas here Claudie boy what do you say.’ Jocularity was a tone Reynolds often used with subordinates or those of lower GS rank, and both he and Claude knew that Sylvanshine would be looking for a way to repay the insult. ‘The steak is Examination.’
‘ADD for Exams is Rosebury, Eugene E., forty, GS-13, 907313433, sandy hair, tall, a little stooped, glasses don’t quite fit or else his ears aren’t symmetrical, looks somehow scholarly but that might be the pipe, smokes a pipe, Glendenning’s boy right down the spine. Don’t like his hair, something about his hair. Implementer. Wind-sniffer. Neither help nor impede.’
‘Second AD is Yeagle? Yagle?’
‘Is Gary NMI Yeagle. Just-call-me-Gary type. Strange-looking specimen. Big heavy slabbish face, but a long jaw, but soft, the jaw, hanging with fat, which together with the lantern jaw makes you feel like somebody’s hitting you with a melting fist when you look at him. Thirty-nine no, sorry, -eight, glad-hander but in a different way from Sheehan because Sheehan’s glad-handing is professional and strategic whereas with Yeagle you feel it’s that he’s just insecure and needs everyone to like him or the world explodes or something.’
‘Which’d make him a potential weak link.’
‘The sort who’s very shy and nervous around you but tries to be very bluff and hearty and outgoing but can’t manage it and so it’s excruciating for everyone. A jaw you could plow snow with.’
‘So Yeagle might be one of our boys if we’re going to fine-target Mel’s efforts in the initial stages.’
‘Plus eyebrows out to here. I kid you not. Tolkien-like eyebrows on a thirty-eight-year-old man. Very intense smile he feigns into trying to make it look like a wicked grin or grimace by drawing these incredible brows down. The sort that shakes your hand with both of his. A GS-13 but a Group Manager since second quarter ’78, so he may have something on the ball but I haven’t seen it. Not the sort of hard driver you’d expect from a Group Manager in an Exams Post.’
‘Glendenning promoted him?’
‘Yeagle’s records are sketchy. You might have somebody there pull down Yeagle’s whole file; his one here’s sketchy that I could find.’ Sylvanshine’s thumb was bleeding slightly and he looked about him for something unimportant to blot it on. Both he and Reynolds knew how very very different the substance and form of Sylvanshine’s report would be if he were speaking to Merrill Lehrl, and though there was no doubt that this irked Reynolds to some degree it in no way made up for the jocularity and its implication. They both knew accounts were not yet square. Sometimes Sylvanshine pictured himself and Reynolds as partners in a kind of courtly dance, very stately and prescribed, so that the tiniest variations were what communicated personality. ‘He and Sheehan are mildly interesting counterpoints in glad-handing. Can’t say I like eith
er of them. Yeagle wore the same tie three days last week. Carries the pipe around with him even when it’s not going. Something that might have been a condiment stain on the tie. Don’t like him, that odd pendulous jaw. Saw him dab at a nostril with the back of his hand the other day.’
Throat-noise on the other end. Tiny bits of some conversation at the fringe of their bandwidth were audible in silences; they made Sylvanshine think of strands of hair in a dusty brush. The sink was piled with dishes and half-full cartons of Chinese take-out he’d sworn to himself he’d clean up two days ago; looking at the sink made it hard to inhale.
‘Tell Mel the best I can do is indications. Yeagle not yet a known quantity. Seems ineffectual, but that may be part of some larger strategic presentation. Recommend an Informal soonest after Mel gets in—loosen him up, get him talking. Possible. That’s as far out on the limb as I can go with Call Me Gary at this point.’
‘Anything re Glendenning himself yet then?’
‘Haven’t gotten in to see him. Busy guy. Constant motion. Seems purposefully busy instead of ineffectually or flailingly busy, which if it’s true it’s worth noting for Mel.’
‘Thanks.’
Not the thumb exactly, but it was true that Sylvanshine was now sucking the edge of his thumb. ‘Seen him in the halls of what-was-it, whatever building his and Sheehan’s offices are in. Disorienting place, the photos don’t do it justice for sheer podular confusion. Looks more like a small college or community college campus than anything. You do know my father taught at a community college.’
‘So when you saw Glendenning in these unrecalled halls then…’
‘Not much thus far. Tall silvery guy. Silver hair rigidly parted. The sort of older man you’d say “distinguished” or “formerly handsome.” Medium-tallish I’d say. Nose looked a bit big but that was in moving profile.’
The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel Page 37
