Lookout Cartridge

by Joseph McElroy

  But struck in the comers of my eyes by two figures on my right out on the sidewalk not in the recessed doorway and on my left up near the theater corner by headlights swinging round, I looked neither way but without knowing where I was going hastened like Jack Flint in his peajacket and white helmet into the depths of the dark lot directly across the street and found a moment later that I had disappeared.

  We meet again, said Jack Flint holding out his hand, but at my touch he seemed to reach back for something he couldn’t quite find. And when we shook hands on my departure forty-five minutes later, same thing—but by then there was more for Jack to reach back with.

  By then I had his Scotch in my system and twenty thousand dollars in Sub’s pockets and mine, and Jack didn’t know he had Claire’s cloisonné cross left by my unaccountable impulse in his raincoat on the window-seat, and both of us had new information.

  I had said my head ached but (I said) whether from the whiskey or the shot his brother’s crowd had given me I wasn’t sure, and Jack had said, Which brother, the good one or the bad one? and I had said, Maybe neither. That’s the one thing I don’t know.

  That, and one other thing, I went on: since red was Jack’s favorite color—the jaguar, the plane—had Jack in fact given that dilettante geologist the red car that he was tooling around the Hebrides in?

  To which Jack replied, He’s got money. But it was easier to buy his services than for Aut to please his own wife. And that was the exact thing she didn’t even know she wanted so much, even more than dashing up to Clisham to protect my little brother.

  But was it so easy to buy the geologist’s services? I said, and wondered again as I looked at the peajacket on the hotel TV why Jack had needed the disguise, and I didn’t understand the money I was taking with me, I had to reach closer; and I said as for reimbursement Paul would never have approved of the geologist taking Krish’s fighter, if he was lucky the crofter widow didn’t see his car; and Jack said, she couldn’t have seen what was in it but it wasn’t there for long and isn’t it like you to take the fighter which was useful and leave the body; but when I said What body? You didn’t see it, Jack shot back at me Just goes to show how efficiently your dilettante geologist served me—and if I was under the illusion his brother commanded undying loyalties etcetera, that guy was on his way to Chile; and when I said did he mean his brother, he said no, the dilettante geologist as I called him—and by the way I was funny; but Jack’s square-boned face that resembled some police photographer’s reconstruction had a haggard tuck around the mouth and there was deep and genuine anger in his throat—so I asked if the d.g. knew Gene, and Jack said, See you tomorrow, Cartwright, and I said, Is Wheeler really out of it, and Jack couldn’t quite let me go and it wasn’t the twenty grand and he said, So you and Wheeler went to college together—well, he had a checkered career, that was the other reason we picked him, and Jack at once (so I didn’t believe him) added, Actually I never met Wheeler.

  So I said, Like the geologist never met Gene.

  Jack reached at me and instead put a hand on my shoulder: You know who your geologist was under the spell of, Cartwright, you must surely have found that out, for God’s sake.

  I reached out for what I was supposed to possess, and turning away into the long carpeted hotel hall said without any question in my voice, But the spell is over, eh Jack?

  The strong hand like a steel automaton pinched my bicep and I felt it in my heel, and I smelled the greater alcohol on Jack’s breath as he said, Oh the time’s they are a changin’, man, and Christ it’s about time.

  So turning upon our separate axes Jack and I had met for a moment, and I had to get away in part to think how he’d known Wheeler and I went to the same college, and I said over my shoulder that I was still suffering from jet lag, or maybe the bang on the head, and I wished I’d had one of those construction worker’s hard-hats.

  When I let myself into Sub’s apartment the jack-o’-lantern was burning again, and Gilda was reading. Sub had phoned to ask me to get eggs, milk, and bread, because they’d all be back in the apartment tomorrow; and did I want to get arrested?—a friend had mentioned a peaceful occupation scheduled to take place tomorrow at a base in New Jersey, a bus was leaving Manhattan at 10 A.M. Someone had phoned and hung up—the usual, this time of night. Well, on the way back from Claire’s we had already bought all that Sub would want and Gilda had told him exactly what we’d bought, and it sounded as if they’d had quite a pleasant conversation.

  Gilda put her novel down.

  Later a loop rang all around me and I was not really dreaming of Monty in color on top of an affectionate pastel Claire; I woke to black and white shades of someone else’s skin and hair which moved, and then Gilda was speaking far away and said Graf? but I was trying to deliver a speech on my American trip in the Highgate Literary and Scientific Institution Reading Room while at the same time trying to pull some tight-folded old collector’s-item newspapers out from under the arms of Incremona for I wished to have in my conclusion some headline violence I knew was there; and to a group of old parties on folding chairs, one of whom had on the greasy old mac that had inspired Lorna to make me go buy a new trenchcoat, I was saying, We are in the grip of forces—but also of their absence, and I tried to make Paul Flint appear, but an empty London cab rolled up with a motor like an outboard and then Gilda handed me a smooth warm phone and I was not in bed but hiring a helicopter, at least through Monty the middleman, and as an afterthought asking how well and from whom he had known my old college acquaintance Wheeler, and Monty could only say I’m so tired, so very tired, but he roused himself to answer (what I hadn’t asked) that Claire had known nothing and that he had known only that Wheeler had wanted out, whatever he was in, and had been following me at the time of the stabbing and had dropped out of sight.

  I had gone too far with Monty.

  The more I make the revolution, the more I want to make love.

  Later Gilda and I had breakfast.

  She borrowed the novel.

  So what was with the suitcase, she said, where was I staying tonight?

  I said I didn’t know.

  The Sunday streets were solemn and poignant. You could think of slave-catcher Clare—for that was his name—arriving quietly on horseback, hiring a carriage and making arrangements, then kidnapping James Hamlet to Baltimore, there to become (according to my son’s research) the property of one Mary Brown. You could hear lone roaming cabs rattle the manhole covers. It was a pleasure to see a long way. I dropped Gilda at her subway and she made me wait and bought two copies of the only paper sold at the newsstand and shoved one through the window onto my case which I had put on my knees when she got out.

  And fifteen minutes later I left that paper wrapped in its funnies in the cab untouched.

  I went toward the warehouse from the east through the alley that ended in the lot. There were four cars parked along the old street, one a VW microbus—no Opel.

  I looked straight at the left-hand warehouse as I went. There came a glint above and to the right, in a window of the right-hand warehouse where I’d been last night.

  A change occurred as I set foot on the west sidewalk. It seemed to be in the late-model Ford parked down the block which looked like last night’s car. My hand was on the knob of the left-side door of the double-doors of the warehouse that I’d had only described to me by J. K. Flint, and then my case twitched as if someone had kicked it, and as if by coincidence a dry back-fire like a shot acted through my shoulder and arm to yank the door open and I was inside, and far above me John-of-the-loft called to the voices of children, and there was a second adult voice, and it was Aut’s.

  I silently climbed the first flight, and John was saying into an acoustic slot I shared, OK when I say Action, really bend it, OK? then lay it on the table and talk into Mr. Aut’s mike, and then when he nods, light your match and talk into the mike again.

  Experiments were being filmed. This one was low-density Nitinol, a spin-off all
oy from NASA advertised now to hobbyists as “Metal with a Memory.” No one had reopened the front door below me. At the head of the stairs I saw the vast second floor, and crouched. There were stacks of cartons, aisles of shelves, detachments of great paperboard cylinders.

  Somewhere below me the ground-floor door was opening and I slipped down between two four-by-four boxes made of some tough gray composition material. I listened to more instruction and to a light, low child’s voice.

  Steps were coming up. Did Brunel apply engineering principles to delicate situations at home? The Clifton bridge was over-designed. There was a new shuffle of steps above me and I thought the filming must be not there but on the fourth floor. The steps overhead moved across from south to north, and then I knew the other person climbing from the ground floor had arrived and was with me here on the second floor—but hidden where I was I saw only across to the north wall.

  I was unarmed.

  I wasn’t thinking.

  OK, sweetheart, called John, have your scissors handy so you can cut the flow after you show what it can do, right?

  Hello? called John, and there was silence except for a child.

  Then there was more talk and Action! and a girl’s voice was clearly though with indefinite loudness (but with my help since I knew the product) telling how what she put in the glass of water was an antigravity additive that had such a long molecular structure it reduced friction and the water would now…flow…uphill!

  There was a silence and after a time John was asking a boy to tell how his dad had once made one of these (and here I found myself witnessing such an improbable coincidence I reached back for an old but unused, even surplus, hypothesis perhaps as Jack last night had in his own way tried to put his finger on something I’d said that in fact would have told him that earlier last night I’d seen him here, or—to be precise—in the next warehouse, or coming out of it) and John said explain how the high-Ω tuning coil worked and the variable condenser and germanium diode and then play your station, man, play it right into Mr. Aut’s mike. (For this must be a kit-facsimile of the old crystal receiver that Red was trying to get because he said it would sell in England.)

  But a soft pop was heard now. Then rapid steps. Then John from beyond the steps called Hello? and the presence that had been near me moved and I looked out from behind a box and Nash with stubble merging with a bruise turned away then and had his back to me and said Jesus! and Incremona in a beret plunged the last half-flight to the second floor three-at-a-time, and he knocked Nash down in passing and ran into my big room with a long pistol. He had on the hooded olive-green parka I’d bought in Glasgow ten days ago, his pistol was longer but I couldn’t see if there was white; he squeezed and darted along the wall as if there were someone else here that he was hiding from, and then there was.

  For Incremona clambered between two cylinders along the north wall and shoved the pistol into a hole in the bricks, an oblong hole in the bricks that was wider than it looked which I’d been staring toward without recalling the old hypothesis I’d posed but neglected and was on the point once more of not remembering, and there was a pronounced pop like what I’d heard above and Nash and I stared at each other for a moment whose miraculous length Ned Noble would not have scoffed at and during which I wondered what the one question was that Jan wanted to ask the black revolutionary woman Erika Huggins—and Incremona knocked Nash down and made off down the stairs and Nash got up and plunged after him calling, He didn’t do it, did you do it?

  Upstairs John said, What happened to Flint?

  Must of had a hard night, said the other voice.

  I risked time and ran to the windows on the east side, but Incremona was not waiting for me.

  What had they thought I might be going to do here, and why had Jack wanted to film the children’s science filming secretly?

  Nash was down on the right in the middle of the street looking north, and Incremona was running up toward the theater corner; then Nash was running to the Ford and I made out the Frenchman’s hair, Chad’s face, and someone else. And I was as sure Incremona had meant to kill Jack as I was that Jack had been possessed by the deepest hatred of his younger brother Paul who was not here. John called Hello?

  The work resumed upstairs.

  I was on the sidewalk. I crossed and paused. Nash at the driver’s window looked as if he was giving directions.

  The front door on the other side of the car opened but no one got out; Nash set off toward me and I ran west across the lot and into the alley. Then around its first sharp turning I waited to hear how many feet came after me. I set my case down, and I wondered if a bullet hole through a pack of hundreds inside my case would be easier to trace than a finger-mark on a busted aerial.

  The steps were light enough not to be the Frenchman.

  My pursuer veered right and with both hands I grabbed his right arm and used his momentum to swing him out against the wall, and it was Nash.

  He was on the ground under my knee, his eyes were choked, and when I demanded to know who had fired at me his nose began to bleed, and he said no it was the suitcase, the suitcase. And when I said what about the suitcase, I was told by this now receding figure whose colored rings might have done me damage if he’d tried to hit me but whom my own madness might cure of his loose tongue, that they had thought I might hit the Flint warehouse, they didn’t know who I was working for, Chad had shot at the suitcase.

  I couldn’t hold Nash. But it was not his strength. He receded.

  Len let you down, I said.

  Krish sold his boss old information.

  I didn’t know if Nash was armed. I slapped him, it didn’t seem to matter, increased deep in his being a certain resigned determination to get away.

  Was that Chad’s gun Len had?

  Nash mustered last-ditch contempt: You don’t fit a silencer onto a recoil.

  What little he then said I took with me. We ran in opposite directions.

  I had to talk to John. Nothing to save a soul. But a proposition.

  I was in a helicopter level with the tops of buildings.

  I was nothing.

  A godlike thought.

  What had I lived through?

  Would Incremona liquidate me if I didn’t keep after him? But it had been Wheeler Jack planned to frame, not me; and they had let me get out of that closet—maybe because they thought I wouldn’t leave without my trenchcoat.

  Back through the vacuum of unremembered lookout dreams in a closet near a display console, I recalled the red-and-blue room, a paper on the carpet, Mike’s voice just before or after I got slugged saying of Incremona, He’s going to blow up a few police tow trucks, and saying it with a quiet scorn that I heard the more clearly for seeing it in Corsica, it was like his scorn for Paul’s pastoral archaeology that had led to some dumb mysticism of distances and muscle enslaved in a pre-proletarian dream of big stones dragged from here to there, and the night Nielsen was killed at Stonehenge there were those who might have killed Paul Flint not just because of Jim’s renegade devotion to Paul nor for what Paul knew about them all or a plan of theirs he’d helped to put in Chad’s head which was about to be called off (and which two months later they had begun to think a London-based American who’d come almost out of nowhere or out of some film was going to pursue on his own) but might have wished to kill Paul on account of what he’d given and then disowned for reasons more numerous than some formula that real revolution in America was as unlikely through violence as it was just plain unlikely.

  But here was I with strange detachment recalling my daughter who would do whatever she was going to do; here was I pondering Minuit’s famous payment to the savages of Manhattan (menahanwi, isolated thing in the water, in Sub’s Webster), pondering Stephens’ fifty-dollar Maya city his gifted English friend Catherwood was to draw wearing a hat like the broad-brimmed high-crowned affair with a buckle Ned doodled on a cloth at Fraunces Tavern down to my right, and a logo not Ned’s, not wholly mine, I scrawled for myself
alone on a scrap torn off a newspaper in a red-and-blue room—pondering real estate inflation only suddenly to see as if evoked by me Manhattan bulge below me, bulge as if to split—but the bulging I saw below was in fact an illusion due to wave cadences from the changed blades of our helicopter, and the flash below was an explosion but not antiaircraft, and there was not at this moment of radio static and altitude-loss any way to be sure Monty held me accountable for Claire or therefore had got his locksmith nephew with the one noiseless and one organic nonnoiseless shoe to unlock the overhead rotor’s swash-plate before lift-off, but I was now, through another (an orange) emptiness, sure that my Jenny could not have helped save me by revealing Savvy’s receipt of Corsican Montage, because she knew those people had read in his copy probably as long ago as early August my recorded swimmer Mary saying once not overloud to Mike, as they floated and flirted between me and the naval engagement he had left, the word Halloween, though who besides me knew that Savvy would probably never have received Corsican Montage had Lorna not come to the softball game that Sunday after our Saturday night fight and appeared just as Savvy behind his catcher’s mask was speaking of open ends.

  But Jack, I now knew, had received from Krish old information: the time of the hit, Halloween morning. Inaccurate because canceled, but when Mary (with the Montrose heart on her mind) had phoned Dudley’s lawyer friend at the Westbury (when?) to ask if he knew a link between a Maya jaguar and a New York bombing and Mary mentioned Halloween, the lawyer (the New York history buff whose services Dudley had decided he did not need) had mentioned to Dudley the phone call from the Scots woman, and from Dudley the connection had reached Tessa (now faintly impressed by his protectiveness), thence Alba, Cosmo, Krish, Jack.