by Robert Stone
It took Converse several minutes to draw Mr. Roche from cover. Although Mr. Roche owned the building in which Converse lived, it pleased him to pretend to be the manager. In that capacity he could refer to himself reverentially as “The Boss.” Mr. Roche stood slightly over five feet and had fine womanly Irish features. His face, like his apartment house, was his late mother’s. Converse addressed him across two lengths of chain lock.
“Hi,” Converse said, as though attempting to elicit a welcome of some sort. Mr. Roche seemed to dislike Converse and his family so intensely that Converse often wondered why he had rented to them in the first place.
Mr. Roche smiled a great deal; his life was not easy.
“I’m just back from overseas,” Converse explained. “My wife’s out now and I wondered if she left any messages for me.”
“No,” Mr. Roche said. His smile broadened and his eyes twinkled with whimsy.
Mr. Roche was a member of the parish Holy Name Society and of the American Party. He had once owned a dog named MacDuff. One evening while Mr. Roche was walking MacDuff on Ponderosa Street, a column of Gypsy Jokers had rounded the corner and the point rider’s machine had struck MacDuff and crushed his spine. The rider was overthrown. When Mr. Roche, in his bereavement, had remonstrated with the group, the thrown Gypsy Joker had seized him and battered his small head against the curb until he was unconscious. It had been expensive, even with Blue Cross and MediCal. The incident had made Mr. Roche, who was not adventurous, even more wary. When a representative of the American Party called on Mr. Roche to solicit contributions and discuss Americanism, Mr. Roche denied his membership and even pretended to be someone else altogether.
“Well,” Converse asked, “do you know when she went out?”
“Days ago,” Mr. Roche said. “Days ago.” He shook his head in what appeared to be good-natured disapproval. “I understand there was some kind of trouble,” he added softly.
“What kind of trouble? Where did you hear about trouble?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Mr. Roche said. “I think it was one of the fellas that drives the trucks.”
“Trucks?” Converse asked. He yawned convulsively.
“She didn’t pay any rent for next month. The boss’ll want you out.”
“Look, I’ll write you a check tomorrow. Don’t worry about rent.”
“He’ll want you out. There’s been people coming in.”
Mr. Roche closed the door.
From the apartment, Converse telephoned the Odeon. A girl there told him that Marge had not turned up for a week or so. He drank another glass of cassis, looked at the devil picture for a while, and picked up the telephone to call Elmer.
But in the course of dialing he became uneasy about the security of his telephone. He replaced the receiver and decided to use the pay phone in the liquor store on the corner.
He went quickly along the block. It was nearly dark; the empty sidewalks and the ranks of huge headlighted American cars at the intersection frightened him. Passing under the dead eyes of the liquor store clerks, he dialed Elmer’s special number at a phone beside the beer cooler. Elmer believed, with some reason, that Pacific Publications’ phones were tapped and he had personally installed a separate phone in one of the Nightbeat closets for the purpose of receiving private calls.
“Jesus Christ,” Elmer said. “Where are you calling from?”
“A pay phone in Berkeley. Look—something weird is happening.”
Elmer cut him off. “I know about it. Come and see me.”
“Now?”
“Yes, now. Do you know who’s following you?”
“Nobody,” Converse said, realizing at the same moment that he must be wrong.
“That’s impossible. Find out who it is and lose them on your way here. Do it right.”
Converse’s weary brain resisted instruction. He leaned his forehead on the cold metal surface of the freezer.
“I guess I’m in trouble.”
“So it would seem,” Elmer said.
As he walked out of the store a peculiar image thrust itself on his recall. The image was of steam rising from the shower room of the Yokasuka brig. For a moment, he experienced the image with intense clarity—the steam, the sound of the water needling the gray cement, the prisoners’ voices. Converse had once stood by outside the showers while the CMPs, the prisoners, beat up a white rat. They had done it on Converse’s watch because they knew he would not interfere. The recollection induced in Converse a sense of utter despair which he found soothing.
For a short time he stood in front of the store, studying the street with as much indifference as he could affect. The corner was empty and, as far as he could tell, so were the parked cars along the curb. He went back into the liquor store and called Yellow Cab.
It was fifteen minutes before the cab arrived. Converse purchased a pint of Gold Leaf Cognac to cultivate the management. When the cab pulled up, he slipped into the back seat and told the long-haired driver to take him to Macy’s. As soon as they were out in traffic, Converse noticed that the headlights of a car parked across the street from the store went on. It was an ordinary-looking tan-colored car and Converse, who knew little about cars, could not tell what make it was without closer examination. It stayed several lengths behind them, all the way across the bridge and into downtown San Francisco. Converse drank his cognac without economy. He could hardly bring it into Macy’s.
At the Grant Avenue doors, he eased the bottle onto the taxi floor, thrust a ten into the driver’s hand, and hurried into Macy’s without looking behind him. He hurried across the crowded street level with such haste and obvious alarm that shoppers turned to look after him. Macy’s was number ten. It smelled of perfume and breath and there were horrible little bells.
Ascending on the escalator, Converse watched the door he had come in. To his horror, a dark-bearded man came quickly in from Grant and looked, rather angrily, among the crowd. Converse had almost cleared the second floor landing before the man looked upward toward him. He looked away from the man before their eyes met. The second floor was as crowded as the one below. Converse dashed round the posts to rise another story. The third floor was as high as he dared go; above it would be unpopulated wastes of furniture and carpeting in which he might be brought to bay. Stepping from the escalator he loped across the record department to find the other set of escalators. In the record department they were playing the “Age of Aquarius.”
On the other escalator, he decided to ride all the way down. He was back on the street-level floor in seconds, making for the O’Farrell Street exit in prodigies of self-control. There would be another one outside, he realized, circling in the tan car.
The car was not in sight as Converse dodged through the Powell Street traffic. Rounding the corner of O’Farrell, he permitted himself a near run and he kept going until he reached a side door of the Mason Hotel. He crossed the lobby and walked upstairs to the mezzanine where he found a bar with a view of the doors. The bar was furnished in bamboo and its walls and hangings were designed to suggest the Orient. Converse ordered a Scotch and water, leaning forward in order to keep the length of the lobby in his scan. Sporting in the regency plush below were men with name cards, on their lapels and a large number of blond children with crew cuts and bow ties. There were no bearded men.
He drank deeply of his weak drink; fatigue was undercutting the alcohol in his blood and he felt no closer to intoxication than tachycardia.
His choice of Macy’s as a place in which to flee had not been an instant improvisation; he had been pursued through Macy’s before and had escaped there. It had been Christmas time—the store had been more crowded and seasonably decorated. His pursuer at the time was a middle-aged man with a harelip whom Converse had rashly interrupted in the act of stroking ladies’ privates on the Geary Street bus. The man had slunk off to the rear without a word, but he had followed Converse from the bus at Union Square. Cursing his own fatuous interference, Converse had dodged thro
ugh the noontime crowds, but the harelipped man had been dogged and agile. At each intersection, Converse had cringed in anticipation of the bullet, the blade, the hatchet. At last he had darted into Macy’s and escaped along a route very like the one just employed.
How peculiar and stupid everything was, he thought. In the short length of time during which he could force himself to reflect on the matter, he felt certain that it was preferable to be chased through Macy’s as a scourge to the poor and a poisoner of children than as a hapless, cowardly concerned citizen. It was more chic, probably even in God’s eyes. He ordered another drink.
If he had been just a bit less timid in Vietnam, he thought, he might be honorably dead—like those heroes who went everywhere on motorbikes and died of their own young energy and joie de vivre. Now it would be necessary to face death here—where things were funnier—and death would be as peculiar and stupid as everything else.
He paid for the drinks and went down to the Mason lobby. Returning to the side door, he stood just inside it for a while and then stepped out to the sidewalk. No beard, no tan car.
When he had crossed Mission, he turned in his tracks and looked around him, but he could see no trace of pursuit. He went all the way to Howard and followed it to Seventh and by the time he turned back toward Mission again, he was as concerned with the likelihood of being mugged as with whoever was following him. He was reasonably satisfied that he had, for the moment, broken free.
Elmer’s office was above two stories of shirt factory on the corner of Seventh and Mission. Converse had a key to the elevator.
There was a bell beside the door that led to the offices from the darkened foul hallway. When he rang it, Frances called to him from inside.
“Yeah?”
“Converse.”
“He heard the sliding of a police lock and Frances stood before him in the office’s fluorescent light, squinting with concern.
“Johnny! Jesus Christ, chum.”
She had grown a bit soft under the eyes but her poitrine endured, firm as ever.
Pacific Publications was as he had left it. Over Mike Woo’s desk was a photograph of Mao Tse Tung, a written inscription across the buttoned pocket of the Chairman’s tunic:
“To Mike Woo
A real neat Marxist Leninist
and a helluva nice guy
Always a Pal
Chairman Mao”
Converse had written it on the picture the day before he left for Vietnam.
R. Douglas Dalton, the colorless odorless alcoholic, sat late at his desk, typing the week’s last story. He was pale and natty as ever. When he saw Converse he stood up slowly.
“Great Scott,” he said, “young John fresh from the steaming wartorn.” His lips parted over a Draculan smile. “Hip hip,” he cried softly, “hurrah. Hip hip . . .”
“Douglas,” Frances said, “. . . please.” She watched Converse with hyperthyroid curiosity. “Your father-in-law would like very much to see you.”
“Same here,” Converse said.
Elmer Bender worked in a large gray room. Its only furnishings, besides the desk, were a leatherette armchair, an old-fashioned coatrack and an electric percolator. Across the surface of the desk were spread pictures of dead people which would be used to illustrate the stories in Nightbeat. Dead people could be portrayed as anything—killer hermits, spanking judges, teen-aged nymphomaniacs—they had no recourse to law. Only in Utah could lawsuits be filed on behalf of the deceased, so it was vital that the dead people come from everywhere else.
Elmer sat primly behind the rows of photographs, his hands folded beside a dummy of the current front page. The headline was a ten-inch blue banner—MAD DENTIST YANKS GIRL’S TONGUE.
“Sit down, dear boy,” Elmer said. “Are you confused?”
Converse collapsed into the armchair.
“Yes, I am,” he said. “There’s weird shit all over our walls.”
“I don’t know about your walls. Marge is hiding somewhere. Janey is in Canada.”
“In Canada? What the fuck is she doing in Canada?”
“She’s with Phyllis and Jay. We got her out of California and off with them.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because her parents are criminals. What the hell are you dealing in heroin for? Have you lost your mind?”
Converse closed his eyes. He saw the steaming shower room again.
“I take it,” he said, “that we’ve been caught.”
Elmer nodded briskly.
“Who was following me?”
“I’m not sure. Did you lose them?”
“Yes. In Macy’s.”
“What I don’t understand is why they don’t just arrest you.”
“Then they’re after me. Right now.”
“After you? Dear boy—they got you. Do you know where Marge is?”
Converse shook his head.
“Maybe with the guy who brought it over.”
“Maybe dead,” Elmer stood up. “This time I’m resigned. She’s my baby but I can’t help her anymore. She’s a big girl—I’m an old man.” He stared at Converse, the ceiling lights glinting in his wire-framed glasses. “Who do you think you are? Some big hustler? Was it her idea?”
“Both of ours.”
“I can understand Margie, she’s disturbed. In you I’m disappointed.”
“It was a crazy idea,” Converse said. “You hear stories over there. They say everybody does it. Being there fucks up your perspective.”
“So we’re led to believe,” Elmer said. “Who are you in with?”
“These people. They’re supposed to be friends of Irvine Vibert.”
Elmer had a way of appearing to smile when people said things he found disagreeable.
“Irvine Vibert! The wheeler-dealer? Is it true?”
“I think so.”
“Did you think you were a second Irvine Vibert, you schmuck? Do I have to explain to you the situation you’re both in?”
He took a card from the corner of his desk blotter and handed it to Converse. “Benjamin Whiteson, Attorney at Law,” it said on the card, with an address on Ellis Street.
“See him. He’s a friend.”
Converse put the card in his pocket and leaned his head on the back of the chair.
“I’m cracking up,” he told Elmer. “I’m hallucinating. I just got off a plane.”
Elmer pursed his lips and glanced upward.
“It’s incredible,” Converse insisted. “I can’t believe I did it.”
Elmer waved his hand as though he were dispersing an unpleasant odor.
“A sense of unreality is not a legal defense.”
“I suppose not,” Converse said.
“There was a man around here called Antheil, a Fed who talks like a lawyer. He asked me if I knew my daughter was mixed up in a narcotics ring. I said I couldn’t believe such a thing—naturally as soon as he said it I knew it must be true. You know about my difficulties with the Feds?”
“Pretty much,” Converse said. Elmer had had political difficulties.
“Well, this Antheil knew all about that. He accused me of hiding her, he threatened me in various ways. Finally I think I convinced him I didn’t know anything about it.”
“Don’t they watch this place?”
“They watch my house, not here. And they haven’t been around the house much this week. Of course it’s possible that since they lost you tonight they’ll have a look over here.”
Converse stood up, trying to shake off his fatigue.
“Are you sure they know about me? Maybe they infiltrated the people who were going to pick up. They might just be fishing following me.”
Elmer made a sour face and shook his head.
“I don’t understand what they’re doing. Do you know a little bimbo called June? A nutty-looking little blonde?”
“I don’t know any Junes,” Converse said.
“Janey turned up with this June. Marge left her there. The only word I’ve had
from Marge came through June and June’s mind is so fried it’s not easy to make out details. Apparently Marge still has your heroin and she’s traveling with the guy who brought it. There was some kind of rough stuff with somebody.”
“How’s Janey?”
“She’s unhappy and frightened—how else would she be? She’s still salvageable, but she won’t be much longer.”
“I don’t know what to do,” Converse said. “I just don’t.”
“Judgment was never your strong point. You and Marge are quite a team. You better talk to Ben Whiteson before grand inspiration strikes you.”
Converse stood unsteadily in the middle of the room and began to laugh.
“I’ve been waiting my whole life to fuck up like this.”
“Well,” Elmer said, “you made the big time. Congratulations.”
“It’s all true,” Converse said. “Character is fate.”
Elmer shrugged. He disliked words like “fate.”
Converse was pacing again.
“If I could just get back over to Nam, I’d probably be all right. You can hole up forever over there.”
“Hole up forever,” Elmer said. “Sounds very nice.”
“Better there than McNeil Island.”
Elmer brought two cups from the bottom drawer of his desk and poured coffee from his percolator.
“It’s up to you. But something very peculiar is going on. Whoever went after Marge in June’s version doesn’t sound like Feds. If there really is a tie-in with Irvine Vibert’s friends this could all be very complicated. And Antheil.” He sipped his coffee bemusedly. “Antheil has . . . a certain Bohemian flair, if you know what I mean. It’s a quality I find very disturbing in policemen.” For a moment he looked as though the coffee were making him sick. “I have a lot of experience with undercover types.”
“You were a spy,” Converse said. “That’s different.”
As he said it, Fran opened the door and came in with a basket of apples. She glared at him and he was not offered an apple. Elmer declined.
