Running Dog

by Don DeLillo

  DON DELILLO’S

  RUNNING DOG

  “DeLillo has his own voice, harsh, eroded, disturbingly eloquent.”

  —Anthony Burgess, Saturday Review

  “DeLillo is among the half dozen greatest writers at work in America today.”

  —Frederick Exley

  “Out of the brilliantly enameled pieces of several varieties of contemporary fiction, from the underground novel to the spy book, the hand-on-hip political exposé and crime fiction, DeLillo constructs a sensuous yet mind-chilling narrative about the lamentable prospects for the character (and characters) of North American life.”

  —Alan Cheuse, Los Angeles Times

  “DeLillo’s Maltese Falcon, with an updated vocabulary.”

  —Debra Rae Cohen, Crawdaddy

  “More than any other novelist to emerge in this decade, Don DeLillo knows the spoiled goods of America.”

  —Thomas LeClair, New Republic

  “An existential crime novel … Paranoia has purified itself to a kind of epiphany, a luminous apprehension of all the hostile forces arraigned against the ordinary citizen.”

  —Anatole Broyard, The New York Times

  “The pace of the action is about what you would expect to find in a gun-club shooting range on a busy day.”

  —Seymour Epstein, Chicago Tribune Book World

  “Swift and skillful … a very accurate reflection of a contemporary mood.”

  —Michael Wood, The New York Times Book Review

  Also by Don DeLillo

  Americana

  End Zone

  Great Jones Street

  Players

  Ratner’s Star

  The Names

  White Noise

  Libra

  VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, JULY 1989

  Copyright © 1978 by Don DeLillo

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., in September, 1978.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  DeLillo, Don.

  Running dog.

  I. Title

  [PZ4.D346Ru 1979] [PS3554.E4425] 813′.5′4

  79-2159

  eISBN: 978-0-307-81717-4

  v3.1

  To Eydie and Phil

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  I - Cosmic Erotics

  II - Radial Matrix

  III - Marathon Mines

  About the Author

  You won’t find ordinary people here. Not after dark, on these streets, under the ancient warehouse canopies. Of course you know this. This is the point. It’s why you’re here, obviously. Wind comes gusting off the river, stirring the powdery air of demolition sites. Derelicts build fires in rusty oil drums near the piers. You see them clustered, wrapped in whatever variety of coat or throwaway sweater or combination of these they’ve been able to acquire. There are trucks parked near the warehouses, some of them occupied, men smoking in the dimness, waiting for the homosexuals to make their way down from the bars above Canal Street. You lengthen your stride, although not to hurry out of the cold. You like that stiffening wind. You turn a corner and move briefly into it, feeling your thighs take shape against the dress’s pleasurably taut weave. Broken glass shines like white mica in the vacant lots. The river has a musky tang tonight.

  Eastward now, you see four letters spray-painted on the side of a building. Mongrel scrawl. ANGW. But familiar somehow, burning a hole in time. And it comes back now from a distance of more than twenty years. The visit to Salzburg. The cousins, the games, the museum. Four letters engraved on a ceremonial halberd. Your father’s explanation: Alles nach Gottes Willen.

  Weapons have become godless since then. Weapons have lost their religion. And children have grown up to find they have traveled curious distances. You feel it’s imminent now, one more corner to turn, someone there, that silent bargaining that has nothing to do with goods or even services; only what you truly are, night-cruising souls agreeing to each other’s terms. A dark elation grows with every step you take.

  All according to God’s will. The God of Body. The God of Lipstick and Silk. The God of Nylon, Scent and Shadow.

  The young man drove an unmarked car north on Hudson. His partner dozed in the seat alongside. Turning west toward the river, Del Bravo expected a certain picture to present itself. Stacks of crates and cardboard boxes. A construction scaffold fronting an old building. Trucks and earth-moving equipment. Derelicts around a fire. Experience told him this is what he’d see.

  He hadn’t expected a woman. Coming this way, striding nicely. She had long hair, darkish blond, and from twenty yards, and closing, he could see how attractive she was. Her black coat was open, revealing a bright red dress.

  No kind of professional in her right mind would patrol deserted areas. She was eye-catching all right. If she was in the business at all, she wasn’t working streets. An unlisted number. A white high-rise in the East Fifties. To Del Bravo, easing up on the accelerator, she was a discrepancy in the landscape. A welcome sight, sure, but also slightly disquieting—she didn’t fit the picture.

  After she passed the car, he watched in the rearview mirror as she approached the demolition site, moving in that nice brisk sexy stride. A perennial all-pro, he thought. The radio squawked. He figured he’d swing around the block and catch her again at the end of the same long street. With nothing better to do, he wanted a second look.

  “Wake up, Gannett.”

  “What’s doing?”

  “Be alert, G.G. There’s something I want you to look at.”

  “Where are we?”

  “Just wait’ll I make this final maneuver here.”

  “I think I was dreaming.”

  “Where the hell is she?” Del Bravo said.

  “I was dreaming about rocks. All these big rocks on a beach. They were huge enormous rocks. I was there but I wasn’t there.”

  The street was empty. Del Bravo let the car inch forward. No one in sight. It had taken him very little time to circle the block. At the rate she was walking she should have reached this part of the street right about now.

  The fire was untended. There’d been some men standing around the fire in that vacant lot. It was still blazing. No one there. This he considered a near-discrepancy.

  The headlights picked up dust, a fairly heavy accumulation. It seemed to be coming from the second-story level of a construction scaffold in midblock. A possible discrepancy. No dust a couple of minutes ago. Dust now. Building should be unoccupied. Crew’s gone home.

  “You were there but you weren’t there.”

  “That’s the way I dream sometimes,” Gannett said.

  “I want to look in this building here.”

  “What for, Robby?”

  “Hand me the flashlight.”

  Del Bravo moved through a narrow alley between the gutted building and the one just east of it. Out back he found the windows boarded up, just as they’d been on the street side. He went to the front of the building and took a longer look at the scaffolding. He felt the dust in his eyes and mouth. Gannett watched from the front seat, sniffling a little.

  “You’re not thinking of climbing, are you, because I’d hate to have to get out of the car to give you a hand-hold.”

  “We both know the only thing your hand can hold.”

  “What are you looking for, Robby, so I can show some interest.”

  “If I reach that strut, I’m up and over.”

  Del Bravo hoist
ed himself up a series of interlocking rods and beams until he reached the second-story platform, about eighteen feet above street level. There was an unblocked window here, the one they used to empty the building of its contents. Del Bravo directed the light inside. Piles of floorboards bound together. Large chunks of plaster. Room walls all gone. Plumbing dismantled. He heard Gannett’s voice below.

  “Floor’s liable to give.”

  The flashlight beam picked her out through clouds of plaster dust just as he was stepping through the window. He took a short-barreled .38 out of the shoulder holster under his lumber jacket and played the beam of light across the floor. He moved slowly forward, immediately wary of protruding nails, more generally concerned by the aura, the presences, a field of unnamed sensation.

  She was on her back, vivid in the gray haze, head twisted to one side. There was blood still coming out of her, midbody, beneath the rib cage. All this dust, and the way her head was turned, and the condition of her clothing, indicated there’d been a struggle. A brief one, obviously.

  Del Bravo looked for a weapon near the body. Plaster and wood dust filled his nostrils. He smelled perfume as well, and sweat, and noticed that her mascara had run and that the thick layer of face powder was cracked in places. No trace of pulse. The blood came out. He made his way back to the window.

  “Call in, G.G.”

  “What do we have?”

  “Body, one, female.”

  He went over the whole area, stepping over objects, careful not to disturb the positions of things. He put the gun away and squatted by the woman’s body. He heard Gannett climbing up the scaffold. Events had been such that the woman’s coat had slipped off one shoulder, and her dress, of that shimmering red material, had twisted up toward the left side of her body. Her bra had become loose on the opposite side and he could see it was all padding.

  From a position on all fours, he directed the light down under the bra, spotting dark bristles of recently shaved hair. Without touching the body he moved the flashlight slowly over her hands, face, hairline, neck and legs.

  Gannett came in the window, panting and cursing. Del Bravo lighted the way for him, watching his partner approach in a hunched manner, although the ceiling was fifteen feet high. Gannett crouched down beside him.

  “What do we have?”

  “What we have is either a lady with a hormone problem—don’t get too close.”

  “What do you think, Robby, knife?”

  “I think definitely knife.”

  “Doesn’t look multiple. I see one entry.”

  “Or a man with a funny taste in clothes,” Del Bravo said.

  “If you can get your light under the hair.”

  “No touch.”

  “I call it one entry. I’m surprised all this blood.”

  “Advanced techniques.”

  “What do you call it, Robby?”

  “They don’t pay me to count stab wounds.”

  “I hate these wet ones.”

  “Seen a lot of wets, have you?”

  “Usually with me it’s the female that does the stabbing. I don’t know how many times I walk in and there’s some woman sitting on the sofa, looking a little sleepy, you know, and there’s the common-law husband on the kitchen floor with about skeighty-eight stab wounds. And the woman’s just about nodding off. Maybe they get tired. All that stabbing makes them tired. You want to put a blanket over them and turn off the radio.”

  “I think I hear them outside,” Del Bravo said.

  “I don’t know what it is but with me the body’s in the kitchen. Always the kitchen.”

  “Poor people like to be close to the food.”

  “What do you think, seriously here, one entry?”

  “They don’t like to stray from the food, even in the middle of a knife fight.”

  “If it’s one entry, they penetrated something vital.”

  “That’s safe. I’d go with that.”

  “All this blood,” Gannett said.

  “And it’s royal.”

  “Royal?”

  “Don’t touch, G.G.”

  “Right,” Gannett said. “A queen.”

  About half an hour later Del Bravo stood on the sidewalk blowing into his cupped hands. He wore the yellow hard hat that usually sat in the back seat of the car. An ambulance, two unmarked cars and two squad cars were nearby. Fingerprint men and photographers came and went. An emergency service vehicle pulled up. Seconds later a uniformed sergeant spotted Del Bravo and came over.

  “Move it, buddy, crime area.”

  “What?”

  “This area’s sealed.”

  With a weary sigh Del Bravo took out his shield and pinned it to his jacket.

  “These days, what is it? Everybody’s in disguise.”

  “I know, sergeant.”

  “Tell me how in the hell people are supposed to know who’s the police. All this dressing up. The police don’t know each other. Junkies, car boosters, beards, hats. Blind man with a dog, he could turn around and shoot you. It used to be you could go by the clothes. But you can’t go by the clothes anymore.”

  “You go by the sex organs,” Del Bravo told him.

  Gannett joined them, breathing steam, his arms crossed on his chest.

  “We missed the stairway,” he said.

  “What are you talking about, stairway?”

  “Place used to be a restaurant. West side of the building there’s an outside service stairway going up to the kitchen. Didn’t you go around the west side of the building?”

  “I went around the east side of the building,” Del Bravo said.

  “Anyway that’s how they got the victim up there. We’re climbing scaffolds. They walked him up the stairs and in the door. There’s a door at the top of the stairs, Robby. It wasn’t locked.”

  “I checked the back. I checked the east side, the front and the back.”

  “Three out of four,” the sergeant said.

  Arms still crossed, Gannett wedged a hand in each armpit.

  “Wouldn’t I like to be in Florida right now.”

  “Go coop some more. Maybe you’ll dream about it.”

  “That’s right, the beach.”

  “He dreams about rocks,” Del Bravo told the sergeant.

  “Rocks on a beach.”

  The sergeant waited for more.

  “I’m there but I’m not there,” Gannett said.

  I

  Cosmic Erotics

  1

  Lightborne, at sixty-six, took to using a walking stick on his frequent strolls down West Broadway and through the SoHo gallery district. This one spring evening the sole of his right shoe—he wore penny loafers—began flapping soon after he started out. This somewhat undermined the effect he’d sought to create with his walking stick.

  He headed back, gingerly, walking on his right heel. Entering a cast-iron building, he rode to the fourth floor in a self-service freight elevator, a drafty contrivance he feared and hated. The vast metal door to his loft bore the legend in red paint:

  COSMIC EROTICS

  THE LIGHTBORNE GALLERY

  He walked through the gallery and stepped past a partition into the area of the loft he used as living quarters. The furniture was dark and heavy, embellished with scroll motifs. An end table leaned a little. The front legs of a desk rested on matchbooks for balance. From a drawer in this desk Lightborne took a small bottle of Elmer’s Glue-All and tried to refasten the sole of his right shoe.

  About twenty people would be arriving at eight-thirty. They were the core of his clientele and he had some new things to show. Only one fresh face likely to appear. This would be Moll Robbins, a journalist planning a series of articles on sex as big business.

  The others were collectors, a couple of people who represented collectors, and the inevitable self-conscious dabblers who were captivated by the novelty of it all. Lightborne didn’t mind the latter group. They tended to regard him as an eccentric scholar, a font of erotic lore, and were
always inviting him places and giving him things.

  Finished with the shoe, he took a pair of grooming scissors and snipped at his sideburns. Then he commenced brushing his hair into a near-ducktail arrangement. Lightborne’s hair was silvery gray tinged with a kind of yellowish discoloration, and he liked wearing it long. Finally he put on a string tie and belted corduroy jacket. Not that there was any reason to concern himself with appearance. These get-togethers at the gallery were always informal. The collectors preferred it that way. He served them Wink in paper cups.

  Moll Robbins, as it happened, arrived before the others. She wore jeans and a bulky sweater, a tall lean woman who walked in a sort of lazy prowl. Hanging from a strap over her right shoulder was a large leather case.

  Lightborne showed her around the gallery, which wasn’t the usual clinical space of right angles and clever little ramps. It resembled instead an antique shop in serious decline. There were small tables filled with bronze and porcelain pieces, with stacks of drawings and prints, with books and woodcarvings, vases and cups. There were several pedestals to hold the more interesting pieces, and on the wall were a number of oil paintings as well as enlarged photographs of Hindu temple façades and the lucky phalluses of Pompeii. Along the walls were bins of drawings, more prints, more photographs, and several glass cases full of rings, bracelets, necklaces.

  Moll Robbins roved a bit uncertainly through all of this, fingering the lid of a porcelain teapot (Chinese emperor with concubine, apparently), peering at a coin under glass (Greeks, male, dallying).

  “Innocent, somehow, isn’t it?”

  “It doesn’t move,” Lightborne said.

  “Doesn’t move?”

  “Movement, action, frames per second. This is the era we’re in, for better or worse. It seems a little ineffectual, what’s here. It just sits. It’s all mass and body weight.”

  “Pure gravity.”

  “Sure, a thing isn’t fully erotic unless it has the capacity to move. A woman crossing her legs drives men mad. She moves, understand. Motion, activity, change of position. You need this today for eroticism to be total.”