by Don DeLillo
“How long have you lived here? Have you lived here all this time? Why don’t you live where everybody else lives?”
All this time the kids had been crowding around Lomax, baiting him, ridiculing his clothes. Selvy noticed he was sweating, really irritated. The small one scuffed his other shoe. Selvy watched him clench his fists. He was very tense. He didn’t know what to do.
“It getting dark, white.”
“You’re being where you don’t live, man, and it getting dark.”
“Pizz on you, white.”
The small one scuffed his shoe again. One of the others ran his hand along the top of the ledge, coming away with ash and tar. He moved in now, feinting with the other hand, then reaching out to smudge Lomax’s tartan slacks, a move half aggressive, half defensive, the kid drawing away quickly, his action comically stylized, head bobbing. Lomax pulled a Walther automatic out of the waistband holster under his jacket. He was shouting, waving the gun in their faces. They backed off slowly, eyes white in the dimness. The small one chewed gum. They didn’t know whether to be impressed or scared. They seemed to believe Lomax. He was riled enough to start shooting. As they got close to the door they relaxed a little. A trace of swagger crept back into their style. They went through the door strutting a little, shaking their asses.
Lomax was still shouting, calling them names. Selvy watched him holster the gun, his hand trembling a bit. He quieted down finally and took out a handkerchief and spat into it a few times. Then he put his right foot up on the ledge and began cleaning the scuff marks off his shoe. Selvy finished eating and tossed the peach pit over his shoulder into the air shaft.
On the 8:13 heading back to Grand Central, Lightborne considered two aspects of the situation. First, whoever held the footage had to contend with an element of danger. Second, Christoph Ludecke tried to sell the thing outright—half payment up front—without allowing the buyers an advance screening. Aside from being naïve, this attempt indicated that the movie wasn’t quite the commodity it was rumored to be. Ludecke wanted to get what he could and disappear. It also indicated there were huge sums involved.
A little later that evening Lightborne’s phone rang. The man at the other end didn’t identify himself by name.
“You’re acquainted with Glen Selvy.”
“Yes,” Lightborne said.
“He’s been acting as my representative.”
“You collect.”
“That’s right,” the man said. “And Glen told me recently you might have an unusual item to offer.”
“Certain commitments have been made.”
“But the matter hasn’t actually been settled.”
“Depends on interpretation,” Lightborne said.
“I gather the widow is proving difficult. She and I have talked. My problem is that I’m not in a position to verify the item’s value. I need someone to handle details. Of course if you’re already acting on behalf of another collector, we’ve got nothing to discuss.”
“It might be I could work something out,” Lightborne said. “How do I reach you?”
“You don’t.”
“Why not let Selvy handle it?”
“I don’t know where he is. He hasn’t shown his face for days. Doesn’t answer his phone.”
“Well, then.”
“She wants to hear from me.”
“There’s the matter of my own fee,” Lightborne said. “I’m happy to mediate, to bring people together, to work out touchy details. But this is turning into an operation where the utmost delicacy is required. The risks involved are considerably more than I’m normally willing to expose myself to.”
“You want adequate recompense.”
As they bandied vague phrases, Lightborne realized why the voice at the other end sounded so neutral, so free of cadence, ornament or regional flavor. The man had been trying all along to disguise it. Lightborne was tempted to point out that he’d always had a pretty fair idea as to the identity of Selvy’s principal. It was a small world, smut, and even those who spent time in the more affluent haunts were sooner or later known to all the rest, the marginal drudges, eking out their mean existence.
“History is so comforting,” he told the man. “Isn’t this why people collect? To own a fragment of the tangible past. Life is fleeting, and we seek consolation in durable things.”
This was Lightborne’s speech to new collectors. Whether or not it applied to such an object as a ribbon of film was a question that didn’t engage his interest right now.
“Pretty sunset,” Lomax said.
“Isn’t it, yes.”
“Why don’t you live where everybody else lives?”
“Get to the point.”
Lomax offered him a cigarette.
“You’re being referred to as the subject.”
“An adjustment’s in progress then.”
“They want to adjust, definitely.”
“Frankie’s Tropical Bar.”
“Right,” Lomax said. “Someone from out of town. Some jerk-off. You parked one in his vest, case you didn’t know.”
“The weapon was firing him”
“Right, that’s right, a regular jerk-off.”
“Why is it felt, Lomax, that I rank as a subject?”
“Call me by my first name.”
“I don’t know your first name.”
“Arthur.”
“What’s behind the adjustment?” Selvy said.
“You first of all made an arrangement with Ludecke’s widow. You and she are trying to market the Berlin film together.”
“Joke.”
“Her house was miked. You deactivated the damn thing. It was felt in some quarters this was highly incriminating.”
“It never occurred to me, frankly, it was one of our devices. No reason I know of for us to be listening. If we’re listening, Arthur, why don’t I know about it? Find a bug, you ought to squash it.”
“It wasn’t appreciated, tampering with audio surveillance. The feeling in this outfit concerning devices of any kind is close to religious. You ought to know that.”
“What else?” Selvy said.
“Secondly, your involvement with Running Dog was taken into account.”
“Elaborate.”
“That woman you’ve been seeing. What’s to elaborate?”
“You know, it’s interesting, the first thought I had that night was that she was the subject. Her article on Percival. Then I thought, Christ this is insane. No way. I’m half hallucinating this thing. They wouldn’t come down that hard. Insane, totally.”
“You were the subject,” Lomax said. “Of course it wasn’t supposed to happen that way. You were supposed to be alone. And you were supposed to be unarmed. But you were holding. Why were you holding? There’s no justification for that.”
“I mean shit, Arthur, you nearly shot three kids just now. Do you need a gun, your job?”
“It’s the business, I guess.”
“The business.”
“Or maybe we’re just gun-totin’ folks.”
Selvy waited for Lomax to stop chuckling.
“We go to bed.”
“You go to bed,” Lomax said. “Thanks for your candor.”
“But that doesn’t involve me with the magazine.”
“Our information’s different. Our information’s that you were pointing Robbins in the right direction. I think recent events prove this to be the case. But that’s all behind us. I came on my own, by cab, to let you know they want to adjust, period.”
“What recent events?”
“She found the collection, Robbins.”
“Not with my help,” Selvy said. “Not with any help from me.”
“That annex sensor you rigged in the fireplace. The readout indicates that wasn’t Percival going through on the night in question. Much lighter person. She was there that night. I can play you the tapes.”
“What’s my motive?”
“Motive, obvious, sex, clearly.”
“Sex, clearly.”
“It’s been known to happen,” Lomax said. “The lady wants to make a name. She’s tapping away on her Olivetti. The exposé of the half century. When she hits a dead spot, you fill it in for her. Hump, hump, tap, tap. When she needs a tactical lead, you provide it.”
“You said information. Your information’s different. But this is speculation, it’s gaming.”
“Hard information behind it. Granted, they didn’t wait for all the input. They tried to adjust a hell of a lot sooner than they should have. But you were Robbins’ source, weren’t you? So in retrospect it was justified. Technically you can fault them for being premature. It was handled badly. We’ve been doing that. There’s been some slippage. I’m frankly concerned.”
Selvy was tired of this. It brought things to the surface, or close to it—things he didn’t care to know about. Textures, entanglements, riddles, words. It compromised the routine.
“What I came for, ultimately,” Lomax said in the midst of a deep breath. “There’s a new operation in progress. This time you’re looking at something different is my understanding.”
“What am I looking at?”
“An assassination team of former ARVN rangers.”
“How many?” Selvy said.
“Two in number.”
“Carrying what?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Been nice chatting,” Selvy said.
“They’re part of a kind of special project. A pet project. Pulled out of Vietnam at the very end and then brought over here.”
“I’m glad to hear they’re gainfully employed, the little fuckers.”
Lomax stood with hands in pockets, the edges of his sport coat drawn back. There was an alligator stitched on the breast pocket of his knit shirt. A plane banked over the river after takeoff from National. Lomax checked the tar on his pants.
“Want you to know,” he said. “I’d like to undo it completely. Whole process.”
“Don’t.”
“I’m thinking of getting out myself. Stand clear for a while. Get a perspective.”
“Sure, your dogs, the puppies.”
“Buy a place in the country.”
“They need room to run,” Selvy said.
By midnight he was on Interstate 95 north of Philadelphia. In the back seat of his Toyota were some clothes and a couple of cartons packed with various possessions. He smoked and listened to the radio. Fixed limits and solid dark. After a while he turned off the radio and rolled down his window. The highway was almost empty but a roar filled the interior of the car, an air blast so integral to travel on major routes that he couldn’t break it down to component sounds. So much his own car. So much the sparse additional traffic. So much the power of night.
Moll Robbins sat looking into the keys of her typewriter. On the wall to her left was a neon display, bluish white, a smoking gun. At her elbow, which rested on the table before her, was a glass of iced tea and half a cruller. The limp white page in the typewriter was blank.
When she got up and looked through the peephole to find it was Selvy who’d just knocked, she discovered she didn’t fully welcome the visit. Something in her resisted his appearance just now. Bad timing, that was all, probably.
“What time is it?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“I’m awake, oddly enough.”
“I like your robe. It’s not your kind of thing, though, is it?”
“The gunfighter. Sit down, I’ll get you something. It’s not a robe, it’s a tea gown. I’m drinking tea.”
“I’m drinking whisky,” he said.
“What else? The gunfighter’s special. NYPD’s been looking for you, hill and dale, ever since you rode into the sunset. I get calls regularly. Precinct, homicide, missing persons.”
“They know my name?”
“Nope.”
“What’d you tell them?”
“You were a pickup. I picked you up. You were too cute to resist.”
“Plausible,” he said.
“Sure, good girl, except you’re not Clark Gable and I’m not Jean Arthur. Any of it begin to make sense to you?”
“Afraid not.”
“The police have some leads, apparently.”
“Cops don’t know shit. Forget cops.”
She poured him a drink. He looked drawn and spare and a little dangerous, reminding Moll of the first time he’d turned up at her door. She left the bottle and sat across the room, studying him.
“Something new in here.”
“What?” she said.
“Neon.”
“Guess I couldn’t resist. More flash. Transience and flash. Story of my life. I realize looking around this place that I don’t have any furniture in the strict sense. I stack clothes in those modular boxes in the bedroom. I work at a folding table. I have a wall unit. It’s just as well, isn’t it? If you don’t live in a house on your own piece of property, there’s no point owning real things. If you’re floating in the air, ten-twenty-thirty stories up, might as well live with play objects, shiny balls and ornaments.”
“It’s a gun. I didn’t see at first from this angle. A six-shooter.”
“I saw it the day after. Couldn’t resist. Also the story of my life. Not being able to resist.”
“Resist what?”
“Whatever I don’t see clearly.”
He gestured toward the typewriter.
“If I’m interrupting, say so.”
“I wasn’t getting anywhere.”
“Where do you want to get?”
She leaned well forward, peering at him, her hands hanging down over her knees, almost as though she was getting ready to slip off the end of the ottoman, an impromptu comic bit.
“Who are you, Selvy?”
He sat back in his chair, an intentional countermotion, a withdrawal, and smiled in deep fatigue, self-deprecatingly. He appeared to be disassociating himself from whatever significance the question by its nature ascribed to him.
“Who is Earl Mudger?” she said.
“Don’t know.”
“Who is Lomax?”
“Lomax. Don’t know.”
“Of course I have my own versions of the answers to all these questions.”
“I can’t corroborate.”
She reached over to the table for her iced tea. It was the middle of the night. She was remotely tired, knowing it wasn’t the kind of weariness that leads to immediate sleep. The reverse probably. Getting to sleep would be labor, prolonged exertion. The ice in her glass had melted, making the tea flavorless.
“What is it like, secrecy? The secret life. I know it’s sexual. I want to know this. Is it homosexual?”
“You’re way ahead of me,” he said.
“Isn’t that why the English are so good at espionage? Or why they seem so good at it, which comes to the same thing. Isn’t it almost rooted in national character?”
“I didn’t know the English controlled world rights.”
“To what?”
“Being queer,” he said.
“No, I’m saying the link is there. That’s all. Tendency finds an outlet. I’m saying espionage is a language, an art, with sexual sources and coordinates. Although I don’t mean to say it so Freudianly.”
“I’m open to theorizing,” he said. “What else do you have?”
“I have links inside links. This is the age of conspiracy.”
“People have wondered.”
“This is the age of connections, links, secret relationships.”
“What would you think of this?”
“What?”
“If I told you this,” he said.
“Tell me.”
“Running Dog is a propaganda mechanism.”
“Who for? You’re kidding.”
“I don’t know who for.”
“That’s bullshit, Selvy.”
“You’re right, I’m kidding.”
“I don’t like that smile.”
&
nbsp; “Just a little joke.”
“Granted, it’s a crappy magazine. Granted, we play to people’s belief in just what I’ve been talking about. Worldwide conspiracies. Fantastic assassination schemes. But we are not anybody’s mechanism.”
“I’m not even smiling, look.”
“I mean granted, we do things in the schlockiest way imaginable. You’d better be kidding.”
“A kidder,” he said. “I like to kid.”
“Whose mechanism?”
“Can’t you take a joke?” he said. “Don’t you know when someone’s joking?”
“Because it makes me think of how we named the goddamn magazine. Except we meant it ironically, of course. Using the Hanoi line then current. The familiar taunt.”
“What taunt?”
“Imperialist lackeys and running dogs.”
“All comes back.”
“Perfect name for a radical publication, considering the temper of the times. The name had impact then. It fairly sparkled with irony.”
Moll this time slipped down the side of the ottoman to sit crosslegged on the floor.
“We almost named it H. C. Porny. H. C. Porny was a cartoon character we’d planned on using. He was supposed to represent the government. More precisely the government plus big business. Short, fat, leering old man. We’d hoped, see, to replace Uncle Sam as a national symbol.”
“H.C. meaning Hard Core.”
“Our cartoonist OD’d, unfortunately. OD meaning overdose. And that was the early end of H. C. Porny. Where were you then, Selvy?”
“Fasting.”
“Ill bet you were. Praying and fasting. People had flag decals. Everybody had something. People had bumper stickers. AMERICA—LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT. So this friend, it’s clear as day, this well-meaning friend gave me a sticker of my very own, which I thought was so devilishly clever I immediately proceeded to affix it to the bumper of my little Swedish car. VIETNAM—LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT. And don’t two guys come staggering out of a bar on Eighty-sixth Street while I’m stopped for a light? And don’t they see my sign and start pounding on my car until the whole thing gets out of hand and there’s a mob of people and I end up with a broken ankle and my car half wrecked?”
“Passions quicken in wartime. We see this time and again.”
“Sure, sex was in the parks and streets. What lovely urgent folly. But what were you doing, pal? We’re waiting to hear.”
