by Don DeLillo
“What do the letters stand for?”
“What letters?”
“PAC/ORD,” she said.
“Not many people in Washington could answer a question like that.”
“Not many people in the whole world, I bet.”
“Personnel Advisory Committee, Office of Records and Disbursements.”
“Has to be evil, with a name like that.”
“Or why else would Percival be involved?”
“He’s a righteous type, is he?”
“Never mind that,” Burke said. “What I’d like to know is why you’re interested in this guy Selvy.”
“It’s just he’s so cute,” she said.
2
Glen Selvy in a three-piece suit walked slowly around the quarter-mile cinder track. There were birds everywhere, wheeling overhead, hopping mechanically in the grass.
Fifty yards away a black limousine turned into the quiet street that skirted the athletic field. Selvy headed over there, watching the back door swing open, his mind suddenly wandering to a nondescript room, a bed with a naked woman straddling a pillow, no one he knew, and then sex, her body and his, relentless crude obliterating sex, bang bang bang bang.
Lomax had a penchant for rented limousines. This was fine with Selvy, whose own car was a cramped Toyota. It was safe to assume the chauffeur didn’t come with the car; he’d be someone Lomax knew. Maybe the thinking was that inconspcuiousness no longer amounted to much. Or that in a town like Washington a limousine was not readily noticeable. Maybe it was Lomax himself. A personal style. A departure from established forms.
Lomax was pudgy, his hair mod-cut, graying a bit at the temples. He liked to pat and smooth and lightly stroke his hair, although it was never mussed. He was dressed for golf today, Selvy noticed. A set of clubs leaned against the far door.
“I learned something yesterday,” Selvy said. “Lightborne knew Christoph Ludecke. Before Ludecke was killed, he and Lightborne had several meetings.”
“In what connection?”
“Ludecke claimed to have access to some movie that apparently the whole smut-industry power structure would love to get the rights to. So Lightborne was all set to act as agent for the sale.”
“Help from an unexpected quarter,” Lomax said.
“Sure, Lightborne. Who figured Lightborne would link up to any of this? It explains the whole thing.”
“Does it?”
“The Senator’s connection to Christoph Ludecke. Now we know. One way or another he knew Ludecke had this footage. One way or another his phone number, or one of his phone numbers, his least traceable phone number, which we nevertheless traced, ended up in Ludecke’s little book. That’s the absolute central fact, the core of his involvement. Percival wanted the movie for his collection.”
“Does he do movies?”
“This would be the first.”
“What’s so special about it?” Lomax said.
“It’s a genuine Nazi sex revel.”
“Wonderful.”
“Supposedly shot in the bunker where Hitler spent his last days.”
“Grand,” Lomax said. “Simply grand.”
Off the road a creek meandered east into the distance. In a park a group of young Orientals practiced the stylized movements of t’ai chi, a set of exercises that seemed to some degree martial in nature. The tempo was unchanging and fluid, and although there were eight of them involved it was hard to detect an individual dissonance in their routine. Almost in slow motion each man thrust one arm out while moving the other back, this second arm bent at the elbow, both hands extended, fingers together, as though the arms were hinged weapons and the hands not terminal attachments but rather the pointed ends of these weapons. Moves and countermoves. Front leg bending, rear leg stretching. Active, passive. Thrust and drag. A breeze came up, the lighter branches on the trees rising slightly as their leaves tossed in the agitated air. Eight bodies slowly moving in a revolving lotus kick. The creek reappeared at the end of a stretch of elms, swifter here, running in the sun.
“We’ve got more than enough leverage to use against the Senator.”
“I don’t make policy,” Lomax said.
“We’ve got the smut collection to use against him. His interest in this movie is just an added twist of the knife.”
“I execute policy, I don’t make it. I do fact-gathering.”
“We know he’s got pieces that once belonged to Goering.”
“People ask me questions. I frame a reply in terms of giving an answer.”
“Among other notables,” Selvy said.
“When the time comes, it comes. If he presses these inquiries, we’ll tell him what we know and how we’ll use it. His constituency will go bananas. Picture the media. Over a million dollars’ worth of sexually explicit art.”
“No way he can move against us.”
“But I don’t make policy,” Lomax said. “I just gather information.”
“Who makes policy? Tell the policy maker. We have whatever we need on Percival. Meanwhile I keep moving paper in his office.”
“Double cover,” Lomax said.
In the current parlance, Selvy was a reader. He was reading Senator Percival. At the same time he and Percival had a clandestine alliance. No one else in the Senator’s office was aware that Selvy had been hired not to help direct the paper flow but to do Percival’s art buying.
“But you shouldn’t call it smut,” Lomax was saying.
“Did I call it smut?”
“You said earlier, his smut collection.”
“You’ve seen the photos, I take it.”
“Interesting photos,” Lomax said. “You’re getting better at it.”
“Less rush this time.”
“There’s nothing shameful about the human body, you know. Some pleasant surprises in that collection. Some very nice things. I’d say the man has taste. Don’t call it smut. You called it smut.”
Three Irish setters ran in a field near Reservoir Road, scrambling over each other when one of them changed direction abruptly. A group of schoolgirls played field hockey, wearing elaborate uniforms, their laughter and shrieks seeming to reach the limousine across a particularly clear segment of space, an area empty of distorting matter, so that the listener received a truer human voice, the vivid timbre of animated play.
“We found the woman,” Lomax said.
“Where is she?”
“Traveling.”
“Whereabouts?”
“The old country.”
It was cherry blossom time.
Moll found Washington spiritually oppressive. Government buildings did that to her. Great weight of history or something. Guided tours. Schoolbooks. The last Sunday of summer vacation. I don’t feel well, mom.
She wore thong sandals, a loose cotton dress and a hip sash—an outfit she used whenever she felt a deceptive appearance was called for. A date with a man she suspected she might dislike, for instance. She believed herself to be attractive, although not quite this way. Clothes, used in this manner, were a method of safeguarding her true self, pending developments.
Her auburn hair, normally curled and frizzed and shriveled up, had an even more electrified look today. Deep-fried hair. Probably caused by humidity, the condition was extreme enough to be taken as a style.
Along a corridor in the Senate wing she moved in her somewhat wary manner behind a group of reporters who were trying to keep up with Lloyd Percival. The Senator, still wearing orange makeup from an earlier TV appearance, answered only certain questions, and those curtly, talking out of the side of his mouth. He was sixty, a large man, beginning to go fleshy, with something of a burdened look about him, small tired eyes blinking above those folds of loose skin.
He wheeled right, strode past an enormous mahogany clock topped by a bellicose eagle, made another right toward a flight of stairs, and as though by hidden signal the reporters stopped pursuing and dispersed, leaving Moll to follow alone, right into an elevator rese
rved for senators and staff, out into another corridor, around a corner, keeping about seven feet behind him, just so he’d know she was there.
“Out with it.”
“Moll Robbins.”
“Print or broadcast.”
“Running Dog magazine.”
“Running Dog,” he said.
“Yes.”
“You people still in business?”
“Barely.”
“Capitalist lackeys and running dogs.”
“Someone remembers,” she said.
He pushed open a large door, looked inside, looked back at Moll, cocked his head, paused and shrugged, saying: “What the hell, come on in.”
It was an enormous ornate men’s room. No one else in sight. Spotless tile, gleaming fixtures. Faint aroma of balsam fir and lime. Percival stooped over a wash basin.
“I have to get this makeup off.”
“I saw it,” she said.
“What, the show?”
She waited for him to raise up a bit so he could hear above the gushing water.
“That man seemed confused.”
“Who, the moderator?”
She waited for his head to emerge again.
“Yes.”
“He’s always confused. The fella’s all image. He can’t talk about something like PAC/ORD. He’s a bunch of little electronic dots, that’s all he is. The fella’s so folksy he ought to do his news show in a living room set, wearing slippers and smoking a pipe, in front of a crackling fire.”
Moll took a towel from a shelf and put it in his outstretched hand.
“They ought to hire a kindly old lady to bring him disaster bulletins on a tray with his raisin cookies and hot chocolate.”
“See, we thought at Running Dog we’d do something different.”
“How different, I’d like to know.”
As they spoke Moll had a distant sense of Memorable Event Taking Place, and could hear herself describing it to friends—“So we’re in this U.S. Senate men’s room and he’s got his head down inside a Florentine marble wash basin and I’m checking out the urinals to see if they have state emblems on them, like Delaware pisses here, and this one’s Kansas”—
A toilet flushed down at the end of a long row of stalls. The stall door opened and an elderly black man came out, fastening his trousers. Moll watched him approach.
“How are you today, Senator?”
“About as well as can be expected, Tyrell, under the circumstances.”
“I know the feeling,” Tyrell said.
He took a brush out of his white jacket and moved it through the air behind Percival’s shoulders and midback, eyeing Moll for the first time, at least openly. It was a look, combined with a haughty shrug, that said, I don’t know what you’re doing here but this is the wrong place to be doing it.
In the corridor the Senator walked at a more reasonable pace.
“We’d like to take a relaxed approach,” she said.
“My so-called human side.”
“It’s fairly common knowledge you spend much of your free time at your Georgetown house. That might be the place to talk.”
“I have aides who screen people like you. Why weren’t you screened?”
“Will you do it, Senator?”
“Running Dog—Jesus, I don’t know.”
“Our problems are strictly financial. We don’t get many complaints about content or format.”
“You run nudes?”
“Occasionally.”
“Male and female?”
“Female.”
“Pubic hair?”
“Airbrush.”
They seemed to be coming to a door that led to the street.
“Nice to know the old values aren’t dead,” he said.
They stood blinking in the sunlight.
“I don’t want to talk about the closed-door hearings.”
“Truthfully, I’m not the least interested. I want to discuss your other activities, Senator. Your reading habits, your family, your thoughts on contemporary life. Your hobbies, your pastimes, your diversions.”
She took a cab to the airport, and about a minute before the plane taxied out to the tarmac to be cleared for takeoff, Glen Selvy walked up the aisle toward her seat, spotting her and nodding. About fifteen minutes into the flight he returned, told her there was an empty row of seats toward the rear of the plane and asked her to join him.
She gave him her limpest category of response, a visual autopsy, but eventually followed.
“Travel to Washington often?”
“Film gala at the Kennedy Center. I do some reviewing. In New York to see Lightborne?”
“I may get around to seeing Lightborne, yes.”
“Nice old turkey,” she said.
She dozed the last ten minutes of the flight. When the plane touched down she was startled, coming awake abruptly, her hand reaching out to grasp Selvy’s on the arm rest. He looked at her without expression, making her feel he’d been observing her precisely that way all the while she was asleep, and she found she liked that.
They shared a cab and sat in stalled traffic for a long time, finally reaching midtown just as daylight was fading. Moll suggested they find a jazz club she used to go to years earlier, somewhere in the stunned landscape of East Third Street. It turned out to be long gone but they found a dive around the corner and went in for a drink.
Selvy took off his tie and jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves. He began drinking shots of Jim Beam. First he sipped a fraction of an ounce off the top, downing the rest athletically in one swallow. The grimace and flush of pleasure hard-earned. Moll started out with scotch and water. Feeling guilty about the water, she switched to rocks.
They talked a while about various things they’d drunk in different places they’d visited around the world. A man sitting nearby, with a bandage around his head, said he was too drunk to go home by himself. This meant they would have to take him home. It was the code of Frankie’s Tropical Bar, he said. The man was Dominican. He said he didn’t care whether they took him to his home or their home, as long as they took him home. He said he knew who killed Trujillo.
“I believe in codes,” Selvy said.
They went out to find a cab. The man with the bandage around his head walked right into a fat woman. She hit him in the mouth. He looked around for something, a weapon. He saw a bicycle and picked it up. In the dark he couldn’t tell the bicycle was chained to a fence. He started toward the woman, intending to ram her with the bicycle or to throw it at her. He was jerked back toward the fence and fell on top of the bike, catching his hand in the spokes.
Moll took Selvy by the arm and led him along a line of cars waiting for the light to change. At the end of the line they found a taxi and got in. They headed uptown and then west. Selvy dropped her in front of her building and then went on—somewhere.
Early the next morning he turned up at her door. He strode in, a noncommittal look on his face, and scanned the premises.
“Welcome to Falconhurst,” she said.
Brown walls. Espresso machine. Silverplated telephone. Acrylic stepladder. Black banquette. Spherical TV. White plastic saxophone.
“The walls are brown.”
“I considered mulatto.”
“Chocolate-brown.”
“But finally decided what the hell.”
“The previous tenant was gay, wasn’t he?”
“They’re his walls,” she said.
“You ought to put some plants on the stepladder.”
“I kill plants.”
“That type, are you?”
“They die in my embrace.”
She was wearing a floor-length rugby sleepshirt. On her feet were tennis sneakers, laces undone. The shirt accentuated her height in ways she thought interesting. She watched Selvy open the refrigerator and take out a bottle of Coke, which he drained in two quick gulps. He hadn’t shaved and looked a little menacing. He stood with his back to the refrigerator, arms folded, wa
tching her.
It occurred to Moll he didn’t look much like the man she’d first seen at Cosmic Erotics, the junior exec with the crisp manner. The night of drinking had given him a strange pale aura, a quality of relentlessness. It was almost a form of competence, this ability to suggest a dark force in one’s own makeup. She’d sensed it while they were drinking at Frankie’s Tropical Bar but the aftereffect was even more telling, this spareness about him, a hard-edged overriding disposition, the kind of single-mindedness she didn’t confront in the course of an average day.
Howard Glen Selvy. Second-level administrative aide. Assistant to the assistant.
The small bedroom looked out on a vacant lot that might have been a Zen garden of rubbish. As she knelt at the edge of the bed, Selvy, behind her, put his hands under the long garment she wore and moved them along her calves, lifting the shirt as he did so. Moll bent back to raise her knees and he slipped the garment up over them and his hands moved to her thighs and hips as the phone rang, and to her belly then, and breasts, his forearms tight against her ribs, lifting her a little. She crossed her arms to pull the shirt over her head, the phone ringing, and then sat in the middle of the bed to watch him undress, which he did with a curious efficiency, as though it were a drill that might one day save his life.
There was an element of resolve and fixed purpose to their lovemaking. He was lean and agile. She found herself scratching his shoulders, working against his body with uncharacteristic intensity. He began to sweat lightly, to take deeper breaths, and his stubble scraped her face and neck. She took her left hand away from his lower back and stretched the arm way back and began tapping on the brass post at the head of the bed, hitting it with her knuckles in time to the rhythm of Selvy’s breathing, and then her own, as the sounds they made began to blend.
They were tied up in a ball. They were compact and working hard. Who is this son of a bitch, she thought.
She sat naked in the dining area, her legs extended along the length of an antique church bench, or at least a section of one. Selvy stood leaning against a bookcase, wearing long johns and drinking another Coke. She hadn’t noticed the long johns when he was undressing; obviously he’d removed them in one motion with the trousers that concealed them. She thought he looked great like that, leaning as he was, head tilted to drink, in that archaic underwear, an English lancer on the eve of Balaclava. She took another bite of yogurt, glancing at the telephone as it began ringing once more.
