by Don DeLillo
“Something to that, I suppose.”
When everyone had arrived, Lightborne closed the huge doors and began to circulate. Moll took off her sweater and draped it over the erect member of a plaster vicar, noting that Lightborne was spending most of his time at the side of a well-groomed and neatly dressed man, early thirties, seemingly a business type, the kind of junior tycoon who delights in giving crisp directives to his subordinates.
She spoke with several people, finding them subtly evasive, not exactly reluctant to discuss their interest in erotica but unable to focus their attention on the subject. They seemed rushed somehow, distracted by some private vision, high-type horseplayers, secretly frenzied at the edges.
Lightborne introduced her to the man he’d been talking to. Glen Selvy. Then was led away by several other people.
“What got you interested, Mr. Selvy?”
“What gets anyone interested in sex?”
“We don’t all collect,” she said.
“Just a pastime. Line, grace, symmetry. Beauty of the human body. So on, so forth.”
“Do you spend a lot of money, collecting?”
“Fair amount.”
“You must know quite a bit about art.”
“I took a course once.”
“You took a course once.”
“I learned enough to know that Lightborne’s better stuff is kept under wraps.”
“What can you tell me about Lightborne that he wouldn’t want to tell me himself?”
Selvy smiled and walked away. Later, when most of the people had gone, Lightborne talked with Moll in his living quarters. He answered all her questions, explaining that he got started in the business in 1946 when he was down and out in Cairo and managed to come into possession of a ring depicting the Egyptian god of fertility, highly aroused. He sold it to an ex-Nazi for a pretty sum and eventually learned that it ended up on the finger of King Farouk. After that, one contact led to another and he traveled through Central America, Japan, the Mideast and Europe, a worldwide network, buying and selling and bartering.
“What about your friend Selvy? I’m curious. He doesn’t look quite the type. What’s his collection like?”
“My lips are sealed.”
“What do you mean?” she said.
“Some people are here to look. Some to buy. Some to buy for others.”
“Fronting.”
“Sure.”
“Buying on behalf of a person or group that doesn’t want his, her or its identity known to the world at large.”
“That’s grammatically very clumsy but otherwise correct,” Lightborne said.
“Do you know who Selvy buys for?”
“Actually I only suspect.”
“Someone I may have heard of?”
“Selvy’s been on the job three months or so. Fairly good at it. Has a basic knowledge.”
“That’s all you’re saying.”
“It’s a business full of rumors, Miss Robbins. I get word about things sometimes. So-and-so’s turned up a bronze statuette in some sealed-off church cellar on Crete. Hermaphrodite: Graeco-Roman. I hear things all the time. I get word. The air is full of vibrations. Sometimes there’s an element of truth. Often it’s just a breeze in the night.”
Glen Selvy stuck his head around the edge of the partition to say goodnight. Lightborne asked him in for coffee, which was perking on a GE hotplate in a corner of the room. Selvy checked his watch and sat in a huge dusty armchair.
“My man in Guatemala tells me to expect choice items this trip.”
“About time,” Selvy said.
“Dug up from tombs with his own two hands.”
“He’s found more tombs, has he?”
“The jungles are dense,” Lightborne said mysteriously.
“My principal is certain your pre-Columbian stuff is fake. Do you want to hear what he has to say about the handicraft?”
“Tell him this trip.”
“This trip it’s different.”
“Different,” Lightborne said.
He poured three cups of coffee. Moll believed she detected an edge of detachment in Selvy’s voice and manner. His reactions were just the tiniest bit mechanical. It was possible he was deeply bored by this.
“In the meantime,” Lightborne said, “I can show you a lady with an octopus.”
“Another time.”
“It’s a porcelain centerpiece.”
“Seriously, anything stashed back here? If not, I’m off.”
“You say seriously. Did I hear you correctly?”
“You heard.”
“I was telling the young lady about rumors. The part rumors play in a business like this. Six months ago, for instance, I heard a rumor about an item that could prove to be of interest to any number of people, including your employer perhaps. The odd thing about this rumor is that I first heard it about thirty years ago, originally in Cairo and Alexandria, where my list of acquaintances was colorful and varied, and later the same year, if memory serves, after I went to Paris to live. The item in question was the print of a movie. To be more exact, the camera original.”
Lightborne offered sugar, wordlessly.
“I was telling the young lady that movement, the simple capacity to change position, is an important erotic quality. Probably the single biggest difference between old and new styles of erotic art is the motion picture. The movie. The image that moves. This assumes you consider movies art.”
“Oh, I do,” Moll said.
“In the same league with painting, sculpture, so on.”
“Absolutely.”
“All right then,” Lightborne said. “For several months I kept hearing rumors about this very curious film. People in the business. Collectors, dealers, agents. It’s a world of rumormongers. What can you do? But then the noise died. The little hum, it faded away to nothing. I don’t think anyone noticed. The rumor was implausible to begin with. Hardly anyone took it seriously. So, silence for thirty years. Not a word on the subject. Then, six months ago, the rumor is revived. I hear it from three people, none of them in contact with the other two. Precisely the same rumor. A film exists. Unedited footage. One copy. The camera original. Shot in Berlin, April, the year 1945.”
Lightborne nodded to indicate a measure of absorption in his own commentary. He went to the refrigerator and got a box of Graham crackers. He offered them around. No takers. He sat back down.
“In the bunker,” he said.
He took a cracker out of the box and dunked it in his coffee.
“Spell that out,” Moll said.
“The bunker under the Reich Chancellery.”
“And who appears in this footage?”
“Things get vague here. But apparently it’s a sex thing. It’s the filmed record of an orgy, I gather, that took place somewhere in that series of underground compartments.”
Selvy gazed at the ceiling.
“I don’t believe it myself,” Lightborne said. “I’m the chief skeptic. It’s just the curious nature of the thing. The recent rumor is point for point the same as the original, despite a thirty-year gap between the two. And the few people who believe the thing, at least as a possibility, are able to make some valid historical points. I happen to be a student of the period.”
Robbins and Selvy watched the soggy bottom half of the cracker in Lightborne’s hand detach itself and fall into the cup. Lightborne used a spoon to gather the brown ooze and eat it.
“In any case I thought it might be useful to trace the story as far as I could, maybe with luck even to its source. Eventually a contact in the business, someone I trust, put me in touch with an individual and we arranged a meeting. He didn’t volunteer his name and I didn’t ask. Man in his thirties. Slight accent. Nervous, very jumpy. He said he knew where the footage was. Said prints had never been made. Guaranteed it. Said the running time would qualify it as full length, more or less. Then he grew melancholy. I can see his face. A performance, he said, that would surely take its place amo
ng the strangest and most haunting ever given. He also said I wouldn’t be disappointed in the identities of those taking part. All this and yet he wouldn’t give a straight answer when I asked if he’d seen the footage himself or were we dealing in hearsay.”
Lightborne stirred his coffee.
“The idea we agreed on was that I would act as agent for the sale. I have the contacts, I know the market, more or less. We further agreed that with sex exploitation reaching the level it has, certainly there’d be no problem finding powerful and wealthy groups who’d be utterly delighted at the chance to bid for distribution rights to something this novel. Think of it. The century’s ultimate piece of decadence.”
“And it moves,” Moll said.
Lightborne sat back and crossed his legs, holding the cup and saucer to his belly.
“So,” he said, “a small-time dealer in erotic knickknacks, some good quality, some not so good, and here I am with a chance to act as go-between in some monumental pornography caper. I begin to send out feelers, veiled hints, to this part of the country, that part, to this fellow in Dallas, that fellow in Stockholm. As things begin to happen, as the market heats up, my man suddenly disappears. I have no idea how to reach him. He always insisted he would contact me. So I call people, I make inquiries, I hang around our usual meeting place. Finally I hear from the same man who put us in touch at the outset. X is dead, he tells me. Not only dead—murdered. Not only murdered—done away with under strange, very odd circumstances.”
“How odd?” Moll said.
“He was wearing women’s clothes.”
Selvy looked at Moll Robbins, at the same time motioning for Lightborne to pause.
“What’s in that case you’ve got?”
“Nikon F2,” she said.
“It stays inside, okay?”
“I don’t know, you’ve got a fairly nice profile, Mr. Selvy. Might look good somewhere near the tail end of a story, just to break up lines of print.”
“It stays or you go.”
“And a Sony cassette recorder,” she said.
“Take it out, please. I’d like to see it.”
“Mr. Lightborne, this is your residence. You invited me to come here. You placed no restrictions.”
Selvy picked the leather case off the floor, opened it, took out the tape recorder, turned it over, removed the battery case, opened it, took out the four small batteries and set them on the nearest table.
“Quite a routine,” she said. “You must be handy around the house.”
“No words, no pictures.”
“It wasn’t necessary, you know. I’m not about to tape your insipid voice if you don’t want it taped.”
Lightborne reacted to all this by taking his cup and saucer to the sink and washing them out. Returning, he pushed the box of crackers toward Moll. This time she took one, halving it neatly before taking a bite.
“After this depressing turns of events,” Lightborne said, “the whole matter dried up and total silence prevailed. But I wanted to give you a little background, Glen, because just yesterday the smallest whisper reached my ear. If things get interesting again, I think your employer ought to be informed.”
“Sure, absolutely.”
“As for you, Miss Robbins, you’ll have to forgive a garrulous old man.”
“It’s been interesting, really.”
“Who do you work for?” Selvy said.
“Running Dog” she said.
He paused briefly.
“One-time organ of discontent.”
“We were fairly radical, yes.”
“Now safely established in the mainstream.”
“I wouldn’t say safely.”
“Part of the ever-expanding middle.”
“We say ‘fuck’ all the time.”
“My point exactly.”
“Was that your point exactly? I didn’t realize that was your point exactly. I didn’t know you had a point exactly.”
Selvy got to his feet, saying goodnight to Lightborne and then bowing toward Moll Robbins, clicking his heels together as he did so. She followed as far as the gallery area in order to pluck her sweater from the rigid appendage where she’d left it earlier, returning then to thank Lightborne for his time. He watched her replace the batteries in the tape recorder.
“I was wondering,” she said.
“Yes?”
“Is he always in that much of a hurry? Could be a plane he’s got to catch. Or commuter train maybe.”
“Glen’s not the type to hang around and make small talk.”
“Of course if I found out who he buys for, and if it’s someone interesting and important, and if I use this information in one of the pieces I’m doing, it wouldn’t do you any good, would it?”
“Wouldn’t do me much harm either,” Lightborne said. “The collector Glen represents hasn’t shown much interest in the stuff I’ve been coming up with. According to Glen, he may be on the verge of dropping me completely.”
They walked out into the gallery and Lightborne went around turning off lights. He looked at Moll from a distance of thirty-five feet or so.
“You mentioned trains and planes.”
“Just wondering aloud,” she said.
“If you were heading Glen’s way, and this is only speculation, you’d probably choose to fly. Although if you didn’t like flying, you’d be able to take a train.”
“I don’t mind short flights. Anything over an hour, I get a little restless.”
“I think you’d be all right.”
“Trains are fun. I like trains.”
“Three and a half hours on a train can be a little tiring.”
“You could be right.”
“Although Penn Station. If the old structure still stood. That would make it worthwhile. Just walking in the place. A gorgeous piece of architecture.”
“I was also wondering,” she said.
“What else?”
“What would I need in the way of clothes?”
“It might be slightly warmer.”
“Slightly warmer, you say.”
The last light went out and Moll stood in shadow in the open doorway, unable to see Lightborne at all.
“I’m only speculating, understand.”
“You’re not a meteorologist,” she said.
“I only know what God wants me to know.”
When she was gone, Lightborne locked the door and went back into the living area, where he took off his jacket, his string tie and his shirt. He went to the wash basin, took his razor out of the cabinet and then removed the top on an aerosol can of Gillette Foamy, noting a bit of rust on the inner rim. He had an appointment first thing in the morning and thought he’d save time by shaving now.
Moll Robbins hailed a cab on Houston Street and twenty-five minutes later was on the phone in her West Seventies apartment, talking to Grace Delaney, her managing editor.
“Do we still have a Washington office?”
“It’s called Jerry Burke.”
“What’s the number?”
She put down the phone and dialed again.
“Jerry Burke?”
“Who’s this?”
“I understand you have terrific access to the corridors of power.”
“What time is it?”
“This is Moll Robbins in New York, Jerry. We haven’t met, I don’t think, but maybe you can help me.”
“You do movie reviews.”
“From time to time, yes, but this is a different sort of thing completely. I’d like you to help me track someone down.”
“You were full of shit about the new King Kong.”
“I don’t doubt it, Jerry, but listen I’m looking for a man named Glen Selvy, white, early thirties, six feet one, possibly in government down there. There must be some kind of giant directory of government drones that this man’s name is listed in. If you could look into it or ask around or whatever, I’d be forever in your debt, within reason.”
“Six foot one?”
>
“I thought it might be important.”
“What do I need his height for?”
“Detective work,” she said. “All the particulars.”
Glen Selvy drove from the airport to a four-story apartment building in a predominantly black area near the Navy Yard. He’d been living here for several months but the place looked recently occupied. It was severely underfurnished. A number of unpacked cartons were arrayed near the bed. There was a floor lamp with the cord still tied in a neat bundle at its base.
This quality of transience appealed to Selvy. It had the advantage of reducing one’s accountability, somehow. If you were always ten minutes from departure, you couldn’t be expected to answer to the same moderating precepts other people followed.
He took off his suit coat, revealing a small belt holster that contained a lightweight Colt Cobra, .38 caliber. The Smith & Wesson .41 magnum, with six-inch barrel and custom grips, he kept wedged in a carton near the bed.
Late the next day Moll got a call from Jerry Burke.
“I’ve been through a number of registers. No results at all. Then I remembered the Plum Book. Policy and Supporting Positions. Many, many government jobs. Descriptions. Names of incumbents.”
“Excellent,” she said.
“Your man isn’t listed there.”
“Damn.”
“But I came across an appendix in a Senate bulletin and there’s something called Congressional Quota Transferrals and it’s chock full of names and next to each name there’s an alphabetic code that refers you to page something-something. Anyway on this one little list I found a Howard Glen Selvy. According to his code letters he’s on the staff of Senator Lloyd Percival.”
“Jerry, that’s terrific.”
“He’s a kind of second-level administrative aide.”
“Isn’t Percival in the news these days?”
“It’s been going on for a while, really, but in closed committee sessions. He’s investigating something called PAC/ORD. It’s ostensibly a coordinating arm of the whole U.S. intelligence apparatus, strictly an above-board clerical and budgetary operation. Whatever Percival’s digging for, it hasn’t been leaked.”
“Secret hearings.”
“Every day,” he said.
