Running Dog

by Don DeLillo

  “Is that the office?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Play tennis.”

  “Great.”

  “Except it’s impossible without waiting for hours or joining a private club or suddenly coming into great wealth and building your own rooftop court.”

  “Ridiculous.”

  “You know where we can play?”

  “Last night in the cab after I dropped you off we went by some courts in this remote little area in Central Park, a hundred feet off the road but in a place where you can’t stop the car. We’ll walk. It’s easy from here. No problem.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Do you have an extra racket?”

  “Nobody plays tennis in Central Park just by walking out the door and making a left turn.”

  “Come on, get dressed.”

  She spooned a final bite of yogurt out of the carton she held between her thighs and then went into the bedroom to get some clothes on, hearing Selvy dial a number on the phone. When she was dressed she found him waiting by the bedroom door. He went inside to dress and she called her boss, Grace Delaney, at the office.

  “I couldn’t answer when you called.”

  “Obviously.”

  “Percival’s willing, I think. I also think he’ll talk to me at his place in Georgetown, where the collection’s almost got to be.”

  “You don’t really believe he’ll let you anywhere near it.”

  “I believe he will, Grace.”

  “Put your dreams away,” she sang, “for another day.”

  “Well, he will, I talked to him, we sort of struck up a tiny little rapport.”

  “Why are you whispering?”

  “We went to the men’s room together.”

  “Spare me the details.”

  “See you later maybe.”

  “Who’s there that you’re whispering?”

  “I’m taking care of a sick friend.”

  “What’s he got, the clap?”

  “Always a joy to talk to you, Grace.”

  Rackets in hand they walked through the park in a northeasterly direction. Selvy pointed out a clearing in some trees beyond a children’s play area. They could make out two courts, both empty.

  “Ever get bombed on sake?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Once, on one of those high-speed trains to Kyoto, I think it was, I nearly did myself in.”

  “Dutch gin’s good for doing yourself in.”

  “Where?”

  “I was in Zandvoort for the Grand Prix.”

  “Grand Prix of volleyball, I suppose.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look,” she said.

  “Those aren’t tennis courts, are they?”

  “Those are volleyball courts,” she said.

  They decided to play anyway. Because the nets were so high, they hit underhand shots exclusively and did a lot of dipping and knee flexing, using strange body English. A small girl watched from the top of a sliding pond nearby. Eventually a certain lunatic rhythm began to assert itself. The players got the feel of things. They appeared to enjoy playing within these limitations and started keeping score more diligently.

  Moll chased an errant serve down a small hill and when she came back up to courtside found that Selvy was about forty yards away, heading across the lawn, racket in hand, toward a black limousine that was parked on the grass. The back door opened and he got in. She watched the car bump down off the curb back onto the roadway and then swing left and pick up speed, passing behind a knoll and out of sight.

  The small girl standing atop the sliding pond also watched, from a somewhat better perspective. Moll looked at her and shrugged. The girl pointed, her index finger tracing the direction of the car. Finally her arm dropped to her side and she came sliding down the shiny ramp and walked off toward a group of parents and other children.

  Moll stood for a while, scanning the area, two tennis balls in one hand, the racket in the other. One of the children shrieked, in play, and when Moll turned in the direction of the sound she saw Selvy walking toward her along a paved lane between two rows of benches. He was still fifty yards away when she said, softly: “You forgot your racket.”

  She was back on the church bench, wearing Selvy’s long johns this time. He came out of the bathroom, still a little wet, with a towel around his waist, grinning at the sight of her in his underwear.

  “I just used that towel.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said.

  “Get a clean towel.”

  “I’m fine. I’m happy. Leave me alone.”

  He sat at the table, facing her, his thumbnail nicking the label on the bottle of Wild Turkey she’d set out.

  “We may be the start of a new kind of human potential group,” she said. “Wear each other’s clothing.”

  “It’s probably been done.”

  “Get in touch with each other’s feelings by exchanging clothes. I see it becoming big. Huge rallies in ballparks and concert halls. When people join the movement they have to fill in forms telling what size clothes they wear. We need a name for it.”

  He leaned across the table and poured an inch of bourbon into the glass she held in her lap. Then he filled his own glass and got some cold cuts out of the refrigerator and sat back down.

  “Apparel Personality Exchange,” she said.

  “Some mustard on this?”

  “APE.”

  “You’re in the wrong business,” he said. “You ought to be promoting, merchandising.”

  “My father was an advertising immortal.”

  “It shows.”

  “You mean the apartment. Really, I’m not all that consumer-oriented or brand-conscious. It’s just a phase I went through about a year ago. I bought a lot of shiny stuff and maybe I regret it. But my father, getting back to that, he did the midget campaign for Maytag. It made him an immortal.”

  “I guess I missed it.”

  “Wash a midget in your Maytag.”

  “I did miss it.”

  “We used to argue all the time. It was awful. I thought he was the absolute lowest form of toad in the whole sick society. I was living with Penner then. And I’d see my father twice a year and we’d have these all-out screaming fights about the consumer society and revolution and all the rest of it. I remember seeing Zabriskie Point about then and that scene at the end when the house blows up and all those brightly colored products go exploding through the air in slow motion. God, that made my whole year. That was the high point of whatever year that was. And I tried to get old Ted Robbins to go see it, just out of spite, out of petty malice, all those packages of detergent and powdered soup and Q-tips and eye liner and that whole big house, boom.”

  “Who’s Penner?”

  “Remember Gary Penner? The demolitions expert who traveled all over the country blowing up things. Dial-a-Bomb.”

  “Yes,” Selvy said.

  “Feared coast to coast. FBI wanted him badly. He was J. Edgar’s secret obsession. I lived with Penner for seven months. Running Dog was in its prime then. We used to run statements from Penner about once a month hinting at what bank or whatever target in what city was due to get it next. I actually wrote the statements. Oh, it was a weird time. Weird times were upon us. Penner was the strangest son of a bitch. I mean he was wrapped up in explosives beyond human comprehension. He was also the meanest bastard you’d ever want to come across.”

  “But you like mean bastards.”

  “Fortunately I like mean bastards.”

  “He got it how?”

  “Some woman shot him, finally. Motel in Arizona. About a year after we split up. Running Dog did an obit with a black border.”

  Feeling a sneeze coming on, Selvy got up, moved away from the food on the table, whipped the towel off his waist and got it up to his nose just in time. Then he tossed the towel in the direction of the open bathroom door. They looked at each other. She downed
all but a few drops of bourbon. Then she put her thumb under the elastic band of the long johns, pulled it away from her belly and poured the last of the liquor down into the opening. She watched Selvy react interestingly and involuntarily. She got up, put the glass on the table and walked toward the bedroom, touching him lightly as she passed.

  When Moll woke up later it was early evening. A soft rain was falling. It seemed to hang out there rather than actually descend. She felt a chill and reached down to the floor for the sheets and bedspread. She started to place them carefully over Selvy’s body, in order not to wake him, when she realized he was watching her. She bit his shoulder and licked at his nipples. He moved, resettling himself, eyes closed now, as she kissed his lids and brows and moved the tips of her fingers across his chest.

  “I know whose limousine that was,” she said.

  He faced the ceiling, eyes closed.

  “Senator Percival, wasn’t it?”

  With her finger she traced a hank of hair around his left ear.

  “I know you work for him, Glen. He’s an avid collector of explicit art. You scout for him and do his buying.”

  Her hand on his chest rose and fell with the beat of his even breathing.

  “He can’t do it himself, obviously. You do it for him, following his instructions, presumably, and using administrative cover. Look, we may or may not end up using Percival in the series I’m doing but if you can help me get at the collection, great, fantastic. If not, I understand. I may be able to manage it myself.”

  She watched his eyes come open.

  “I even know your first name,” she said.

  Before she knew what was happening, he was kneeling between her legs and hefting her up toward him, his hands at her hips, making her arch, and then was in her, cleanly, and driving, using his hands to force her body tighter onto his. Her head back on the pillow, pelvis way off the bed and knees up, she watched him grimace and stroke and then had to close her eyes, abandoning the visible world to enter this region of borderline void, his nails burning into her hips.

  When she woke this second time it was the middle of the night. She half dreamed various things, a run-on series of images, and slept, and woke again. She kept picturing Selvy in a military setting, a barracks usually. He’s standing around in white cotton boxer shorts, a dog tag around his neck. Maybe she was mixing Monty Clift into it, in From Here to Eternity. She pictured Selvy doing a hundred pushups in his white shorts. She pictured him sitting on a cot, spit-shining his boots. She pictured him running laps, his rifle at high port, sweat beginning to dampen his combat fatigues.

  Without turning his way or reaching an arm across the bed, she knew he was no longer there.

  3

  People who don’t make the trip every day have a tendency to grow silent as the train passes through Harlem. It isn’t shock or gloom so much as sheer fascination that brings on the hush. The pleasure of ruins. The eye’s delight in finding instructive vistas. It’s so interesting to look at, so numbly colorful, especially from this distance, and while moving through.

  Selvy got off at the Bronxville station and took a cab along Palmer Road. They turned left across an overpass and into a quiet street in the less expensive section. Klara Ludecke lived in a small attractive house on this street.

  His instructions weren’t specific. She’d been traveling in Europe. Why and precisely where. He didn’t care to get involved in side issues, such as her husband’s murder, being concerned only with the dead man’s connection to the Senator and the leverage it provided.

  Her face was a near circle, though pretty. She was somewhat broad of figure, maybe thirty years old, and spoke in an accent that was pleasant to hear even in its odder journeys through certain words. She led him to a dark parlor and then sat waiting in a straightbacked chair, hands folded on her knees.

  “You’ve been away, Mrs. Ludecke.”

  “To Aachen, in West Germany.”

  “Your husband was born there.”

  “Yes, in 1944, I believe.”

  “Why this particular time to travel? Your husband had just been murdered. You spoke once to the police and then disappeared.”

  “My husband has relatives there, still. I wished to see them. You must understand I needed to be close to people who loved him. I was not capable to deal with things.”

  “You’ve come back—why?”

  She made a sweeping gesture to indicate the house, possessions, legalities, disengagements.

  “You’re not staying.”

  “It would be impossible.”

  “Are you going back to Germany?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps that’s what I’ll finally do. At least my husband’s family is there. His own father died seven months ago but there are brothers and sisters who have been very kind to me, and Christoph’s mother as well.”

  “Your husband was a systems engineer—correct?”

  “You’re not one of the policemen I talked to after it happened.”

  “No,” he said.

  “Who are you?”

  Clipped to his belt holster was a device called a field-strength meter. He took it out, raised the small antenna attached to it, and then tuned the meter to sweep the frequency band. Checking the needle he probed the north side of the room. From the bookcase he took a 1961 World Almanac. Embedded in the narrow space between the spine and the binding was a small audio device. Selvy disengaged the single transistor in the oscillator circuit. He looked at Klara Ludecke. She didn’t know whether to be surprised or angry.

  He took out his wallet and showed her a set of credentials linking him to something called U.S. Strike Force, Internal Projects.

  “Special investigative unit.”

  “What is special about me?”

  “Your husband didn’t die under what I’d call normal circumstances, Mrs. Ludecke.”

  “When is murder normal?”

  “Beyond the fact that he was murdered, there were unusual details.”

  “Abnormal, perhaps you would prefer to say.”

  “Words.”

  “Abnormal,” she insisted.

  “Yes, why not?”

  “Anyone would agree. A grotesque death. And it’s interesting that you haven’t spoken a word about the people who killed him. Circumstances so abnormal that this small detail is completely overlooked.”

  “No, wrong.”

  “Perhaps this aspect of the crime isn’t part of your special investigation. You’re not interested? It’s too routine for specialists. You’re bored with that question?”

  “I’d like to discuss the matter of acquaintances.”

  “Would you really?”

  “Your husband’s work took him to Washington on occasion.”

  “This is correct. Washington and the surrounding area.”

  “Washington in particular.”

  “I wouldn’t say that, no.”

  “According to the original police inquiry—”

  “The police,” she said. “The police know nothing. Sex crime, that’s all they know. It’s the people in the special investigation who know what’s important and what isn’t. They know where to look. How deep, how shallow. The police. They photograph the body. They make chalk marks on the floor. They check their files on deviates and the killers of deviates. That satisfies them. They have such experience in these areas. Who am I to complain?”

  Klara Ludecke raised her eyes to an angle level with his.

  “How special can this investigation be if you haven’t even asked about Radial Matrix?” she said.

  Selvy picked up a plastic disk from the coffee table in front of him, a scenic paperweight, three-dimensional vista of rolling hills, and studied it a moment. He watched the woman rise from the chair and walk through the dark parlor and along the equally dark hallway, where she opened the front door and held it, not taking her eyes off the opposite wall as he walked past her into the sun.

  Later that same day he rode an escalator down to the Capitol subwa
y with Lloyd Percival.

  “You’re due at Lightborne’s when?”

  “Tomorrow night,” Selvy said. “Auction.”

  “What, more Guatemalan stuff?”

  “Apparently.”

  “We see nothing but stiff pricks lately. What I wouldn’t give for a single mushy prick. Might be a whole new approach. Jesus Christmas, what happened to the esthetic element? Tell Lightborne. The subtlety, the complexity, the simple charm. All he seems to show us are junkyard pieces.”

  “He knows, Senator.”

  “Just heard from some friends in Amsterdam. Someone’s come up with a plaster-and-polystyrene copy of a Bernini I’ve always admired.”

  “Saint Teresa in Ecstasy.”

  “Right, some young Dutch sculptor.”

  “Lightborne’s got a vicar he did.”

  “What kind of vicar?”

  “A vicar with a stiff prick, Senator.”

  “Why did I ask?”

  “Anyway.”

  “Anyway what this Dutch fella’s done is to lift the folds of Saint Teresa’s habit way up around her thighs and to place her knees well apart without changing the original position of the feet. Hell, it was already there. All he’s done is highlight it. Her ecstasy always was sexual.”

  They were the last two people to step onto the small electric conveyance and it started immediately.

  “Bernini might not agree.”

  “Don’t quibble, Glen.”

  “Not to mention Saint Teresa.”

  “Are you a prude?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Interesting fella. You’re an interesting fella.”

  “What about the angel?”

  “He’s changed the configuration of the arrowhead but only slightly.”

  “To make it more phallic.”

  “Marginally so,” Percival said.

  “The sacred and profane.”

  “Special form of eroticism, isn’t it? Always been attracted to it myself. It pleases the Lord that only a few of us have the wherewithal to pursue such attractions.”