by Don DeLillo
This was where the routine was important. He stuck to the routine. The routine enabled him mentally to bury this queer bit of intelligence, Ludecke and Radial Matrix, a conjunction of interests that could only lead to areas he wasn’t privileged, or competent, to enter. He wasn’t a detective, after all. He didn’t build models of theoretical events surrounding a criminal act. Nor did he concern himself with policy.
Ludecke was linked to the Senator. It wasn’t within Selvy’s purview to meditate on additional links, even when they might pertain to his own ultimate sustenance. Especially then. This was why the routine existed.
In his right hand, as he stood looking out the window at nothing in particular, was the .41 magnum, loaded with expandable bullets. Selvy’s regard for the implements of an operational mode became a virtual passion where handguns were involved. He went regularly to the range to work on sight alignment and trigger control. He dry-fired, he used live rounds. He practiced grip and finger positions. He worked on various steadying exercises.
This, too, was the routine.
He kept the chambers clean. He took precautions against fouled bores and corrosion. He owned any number of lubricants, brushes, swabs, preservers, conditioners, degreasers and removers.
To Selvy, guns and their parts amounted to an inventory of personal worth. He controlled the weapon, his reflexes and judgment. Maintaining the parts and knowing the gun’s special characteristics were ways of demonstrating involvement in his own well-being.
These pieces, laid out at his fingertips, resembled nothing more than routine hardware. Still, there was order in this grouping; distinct precision. He could see how each surface was designed to adapt to at least one other surface. The interrelationships accumulated and spread. Things fit.
Where the routine prevented Selvy from seeking human links, it prompted him to study the interactions within mechanisms.
At the range he worked on stance, breath control, eye focus. The idea was to build almost a second self. Someone smarter and more detached. Do this perfectly and you’ve developed a new standard for times of danger and stress. He stood at a forty-five-degree angle to the proposed line of fire. He tried to avoid locking his elbow. He fired, focusing his master eye, the right eye in his case, on the gun’s front sight.
The handgun is intimate. A functional accessory. You wear it. It fits you or doesn’t, and vice versa.
He found it reassuring to handle the parts, to know their names and understand their functions. Attention to detail is a form of vigilance. There were no shadings in his willingness to use the stopping power at his disposal. This was very clear, this resolve. It affirmed his bond to the weapon itself.
Evening. The room was dark. He didn’t move from the window to turn on a light.
Sex with an unmarried woman. Two and a half days without a shave. Minor lapses. He saw the humor in his idiosyncrasies. The routine still applied. That’s what mattered most. The routine applied to the extent where he didn’t actively speculate on who that might have been who was standing in the doorway of that run-down bar directing automatic fire across the room, or what the reasoning behind it was, or who was supposed to get hit.
In a storeroom on H Street, Moll Robbins went through Running Dog’s files, such as they were, on Earl Mudger.
From bases in Japan he led strikes by F-84Es against selected enemy targets in Korea. These strikes were operational tests of refueling procedures as much as combat missions. He also coached the football team, 116th Fighter-Bomber Wing.
Still in Korea he resigned his commission and spent a year in special paramilitary programs run by Air Force Intelligence, an open-ended term of duty.
He left to return to civilian life as Vice-President, Distribution, Process Management Systems, a firm with headquarters in Oklahoma City.
Three years later he appeared as chief training officer at Marathon Mines, an abandoned silver mining site in rough country north of the Rio Grande, where antiguerrilla specialists taught survival techniques and conducted war games.
In Laos he was a contract officer attached to Air America during operations secretly directed by the CIA.
In Vietnam, still on a contract basis, he recruited and directed CT teams against the Vietcong. Later he helped set up a network of provincial interrogation centers, where Vietcong suspects were tortured. Then he ran a cover operation in Saigon, hiring mercenaries for special operations.
It was while Mudger was on loan to Special Forces for unknown duties that he became something of a legend in Vietnam. Apparently he established a feudal barony complete with loyal ARVN soldiers (loyal to him, not the government) as well as pimps, black marketeers, shoeshine boys, war refugees, bar girls, deserters, pickpockets and others. It was suspected to be a drug operation with a thriving sideline in black-market piasters. As head, Mudger dispensed land, money, food and other favors.
He also set up a private zoo in the jungle outside a village called Tha Binh. He managed to stock it with tigers, wolves, elephants, peacocks, snakes, leopards, apes, zebras, monkeys, hyenas and hippos.
Virtually all this information Moll found in a single clipping, most of it color background for an AP dispatch that detailed Mudger’s exploits during the fall of Saigon. Waving a Browning automatic he commandeered a C-123 transport, rigged for defoliation, and crammed most of his people aboard, along with seventeen of his animals, on the day before the city fell.
Lomax put his feet up on the jump seat. He opened his briefcase and took out a red folder.
THE DORISH REPORT
A confidential reporting service
He turned to the first page and began reading.
Sir:
An investigation has been conducted pursuant to your request and authorization concerning Grace B. Delaney, Managing Editor, Running Dog magazine, a property of RD Publications, which person resides at 116 East 61st Street, New York, N.Y. 10021, in order to ascertain Grace B. Delaney’s background, reputation and responsibility. The results of our investigation are set forth below under headings designed to facilitate your perusal and analysis.
The headings were: Identification, Background, Personal Relations, Credit, Litigation and Finances. Lomax scanned Personal Relations before any of the others but eventually found Finances to be more to the point. Tax matters in particular.
At the bottom of the last page was a statement in italics:
This report is made available to you at your express request, as you have employed us for that purpose. It is a privileged and confidential communication, and the information contained herein is not to be disclosed to others, verbally or otherwise.
It concluded: The Dorish Report, Investigative Confidentiality for the Special Needs of the Seventies.
Trying to hail a cab on H Street, Moll watched the black limousine gradually come to a stop in front of her. The driver was square-jawed, dark suit and cap. The man sitting in the rear, opening the door toward her, was wearing sports clothes and moccasins. He smiled pleasantly.
“Come on, I’ll take you.”
“Where?”
Shrug.
“To the Senator,” she said. “That it?”
Smile.
“The Senator wants to apologize, does he?”
Smile.
“I’ll have to take a raincheck,” she said. “Tell him next time.”
“No rainchecks. We don’t give rainchecks.”
“Tell him thanks anyway.”
“It’s urgent,” the man said.
His face didn’t quite indicate that. The smile was still there but only technically, no longer bearing traces of pleasantness. But it wasn’t urgency that had replaced it. Just impatience, she thought. Still, the strangeness of it kept her from walking away. She was feeling a little disassociated. Limousine, driver, Senate aide. If Percival wanted to talk to her, it would be foolish, considering the revelations of the night before, to put him off.
She got into the car, sorting a number of thoughts at once. She noticed they w
ere heading west on K Street. The man in sports clothes lit a cigarette.
“He’s at his Georgetown place, is he?”
The man patted his sideburns, one at a time.
“Taking some time off, is he, from his onerous duties on the Hill?”
They passed Washington Circle and were on a freeway skirting the channel. They turned onto a bridge approach and Moll twisted in her seat and looked out the back window, realizing that was Georgetown they’d just left behind.
She began reading road signs aloud, not knowing quite why. At a certain bend in the road, sunlight filled the interior of the car and when she glanced down at the material covering the back seat she saw it was covered with dog hair.
Soon they were passing Falls Church and heading into intermittent countryside, fields of black Angus grazing. The car slowed occasionally for extended stretches of motels, plant nurseries, supermarkets, auto and truck dealerships. Streams and brooks were called runs here. Roadside shops advertised Civil War relics.
2
Lightborne wore a hat with a little feather stuck in the band. It was a gift from one of his customers, who thought it would go well with his Norfolk jacket. He wore the hat just this one time, an after-dinner stroll through the gallery district. It made him feel like a veteran sportswriter covering the Army-Navy game on a clear and brisk November day. Or like a man out for a Sunday drive in his Buick Roadmaster in the year 1957.
The phone was ringing when he got back to the gallery. It was Richie Armbrister, the twenty-two-year-old smut merchant, calling from a special hookup aboard his customized DC-9, which had just landed at JFK.
“I’m back from Europe, Lightborne. We came down in the dark. I hate nighttime landings.”
That squeaky voice sent little tremors rippling through Lightborne’s nerve apparatus.
“Hear that music? That’s my disco. People are dancing. They danced right through the landing. Listen, I want to ask. Is it still warm? Full-length, I mean. The business you mentioned. How hot’s the trail?”
“I’d say very warm, Richie, without fear of overstating.”
“Good, listen, we’ll talk. I’m coming over there. It’s a layover, for maintenance. I definitely want to explore this thing. The more I talk to people, the more I hear about profit potentials with first-run. I made new connections in the European capitals. Features. They’re feature-crazy. Exhibitors are hollering for more product. So I think I want to get my toe in the water, Lightborne. Eventually distribute worldwide maybe.”
These last remarks Richie delivered in a subdued and earnest manner. An encouraging development. Lightborne was heartened.
“Betty’s Azalea Ranch,” Moll said.
The man read a newspaper.
“Topside Pool Supplies.”
About a hundred yards beyond the Centreville Free Will Baptist Church, the limousine turned into an unmarked dirt road. Half a mile in, they passed a one-story L-shaped building, both wings very long, no landscaping out front. Farther on, maybe two miles, the car stopped in a grove of scarlet oaks near a large stone house. Two Shetland ponies stood in a split-rail cedar corral. There was a pond to the side of the house and some stables beyond that.
They got out of the car. Moll watched a small helicopter setting down in a field nearby. Two men hopped out, both wearing skin-tight jeans, denim jackets, sunglasses and Stetsons. They walked toward the back of the stone house as the helicopter slowly rose, slanting now toward the deep woods in the distance. The men were Orientals, she was quite sure, looking boyish in those narrow pants and small-scale western hats.
Earl Mudger stood in the doorway. Moll was aware her escort had paused, leaving her to approach the house alone. Mudger wore a blacksmith’s apron and heavy-duty gloves. He was a thickset man with curly hair trimmed close, with ash-blond eyebrows and a strong jaw, slightly jutting—the picture of a man who wouldn’t yield easily to aging. His eyes were a fine silky blue. He had a bent nose, broadly columned neck and something of a surfer’s numinous gleam—his eyes and hair and brows shining just a bit, as though bleached by the elements.
She followed him to a wicker table set under an oak tree. He took off his gloves and apron and tossed them onto one of the extra chairs. An old woman, an Oriental, brought out lemonade and some cookies. Moll could tell Mudger fancied himself a charmer. Tough but winsome. She set her face to Executive Chill.
“Let’s us talk some.”
“Fine,” she said.
“Fact number one, everything Percival told you last night was exaggerated by a factor of seven.”
“What did he tell me last night?”
“I can replay it for you any time. Fact number two, it doesn’t matter anymore because I’m no longer involved with PAC/ORD, or Radial Matrix, or Lloyd Percival. Born free, that’s me. No more attachments. I’m shaking loose. Time to retire.”
“A life of meditation,” she said.
“Fact number three, you’ve got the alliances all mixed up, assuming you believe what the Senator’s been telling you. Did you ever wonder how Percival’s select committee gets their input? Lomax is Percival’s man. Lomax is the source of everything the committee knows.”
“Who is Lomax?”
“Man in the limousine.”
“I’ve mistaken him twice for the Senator’s man. Once in New York, I think. Now here.”
“You weren’t mistaken,” Mudger said. “Loyalties are so interwoven, the thing’s a game. The Senator and PAC/ORD aren’t nearly the antagonists the public believes them to be. They talk all the time. They make deals, they buy people, they sell favors. I doubt if Lomax knows whether he works for PAC/ORD or Lloyd Percival, ultimately. You have to understand, agencies allow this to go on all the time. People know what’s happening. But they allow it. That’s the nature of the times. You go to bed with your enemies.”
“I assume you feed Lomax false information.”
“Tell you what,” he said. “Sometimes this is so much fun, I’d do it for nothing.”
“Who is Glen Selvy?”
“No idea.”
“Howard Glen Selvy?”
“Not a leaf stirs.”
“Bullshit,” she said.
“I like your smile.”
“I’m not smiling.”
“I thought that was a smile. I mistook that for a smile. Have some lemonade, why don’t you?”
“These are Vietnamese, these people you’ve got here?”
“We have some Vietnamese here, definitely.”
“That you got out just in time.”
“I’ve had hairier moments. So have they. Compared to the life most of these people have had, getting out of Saigon was on the level of an escapade.”
“Ho Chi Minh City,” she said.
“Yeah, Ho Chi Minh City. A lark with firecrackers.”
Moll nibbled on a cookie and drank some lemonade. She couldn’t shake the feeling she’d crossed an invisible frontier into another way of life. The rules were different here. Sitting in the shade. White wicker and lemonade. Ponies motionless in their small corral.
“Back that way along the road,” she said. “Radial Matrix?”
“Right.”
“Thriving, by all accounts.”
“Systems. It’s one of the areas we still excel in.”
“ ‘We’ meaning Americans.”
“Nothing but.”
“In Vietnam you were involved in drug trafficking, no?”
“We did some of that. We were a link. As I say, I’ve unlinked myself. Too much software, hardware, so on. Technology. The whole thing’s geared to electronics. There’s a neat correlation between the complexity of the hardware and the lack of genuine attachments. Devices make everyone pliant. There’s a general sponginess, a lack of conviction.”
“You had your own zoo in Vietnam.”
“Checking up on me.”
“A little,” she said.
“My pride and joy, that zoo. We got to the point where we were making exchanges wi
th real zoos halfway around the world. We had an animal dealer from Michigan come all the way out to see our operation. I had more gibbons than I could use. I was laying off gibbons the way bookmakers lay off excess bets. I had this rare type lynx, Eurasian, almost extinct, this one variety, and we bred it successfully in captivity. I tell you what, that made my war.”
“Victory after all.”
“We won far’s I’m concerned. Revise the texts.”
“What sort of retirement plans—forgive the skeptical look.”
“Domestic bliss,” he said. “My wife’s off having a baby, matter of fact.”
“Nice.”
“I’m fifty-two years old.”
“Interesting.”
“Wife number three.”
“Not bad.”
“She’s a gook,” Mudger said.
Apron and gloves. Helicopter landing in a field. She recalled what Percival had said before his sour mash whisky slowed him to a crawl. One set of rules. Mudger’s. Nobody else gets to use them. Vietnamese in cowboy hats.
“Not that I don’t have something to fall back on,” he said.
“Aside from domestic bliss.”
“I’ve got a shop in the basement. Sometimes I go down there and work half the night. Do a little planing, a little sanding. Lock things in vises. It’s good for the soul. Punch holes in metal, do a little buffing. So anyway I got to fooling around with a small machine of my own devising that tests the hardness and content of steel. Machines that size do hardness alone, normally. I can tell you high carbon, low carbon, how much nickel or manganese. Is this boring?”
“Sort of.”
“The machine has a thing called a diamond tip penetrator. I trademarked it as the Mudger tip.”
“A little better,” she said.
“I’m building a large shop about twenty miles south of here, If things work out, I’ll be filling contracts for Radial Matrix.”
She watched him light up a little at the irony of that.
“This is what’s called negotiating a termination,” he said.
