CHINA GIRL
(The trail to Buddha's Mirror)
Don Wisnlow
Einaudi
Una storia avvincente di Winslow dove il narratore non solo ha costruito un intreccio da thriller ad alta tensione, ma al tempo stesso nell’azione ha inserito pezzi di storia di Hong Kong e della Cina, del Sichuan in particolare, dove la vicenda si conclude. Gli amanti dei romanzi di spionaggio qui troveranno il massimo del piacere di lettura.
[...]He never should have opened the door[...]
THE TRAIL TO BUDDHA'S MIRROR
Part 1
The China doll
Graham looked miserable and ridiculous standing there. Rain sluiced off the hood of his raincoat and down onto his mud-caked shoes. He set his small suitcase down in a puddle, used his artificial right hand to wipe some water off his nose, and still managed to give Neal that grin, that Joe Graham grin, an equal measure of malevolence and glee.
“Aren’t you glad to see me?” he asked.
“Thrilled.”
Neal hadn’t seen him since August at Boston’s Logan Airport, where Graham had given him a one-way ticket, a draft for ten thousand pounds sterling, and instructions to get lost, because there were a lot of people in the States who were real angry at him. Neal had given half the money back, flown to London, put the rest of the money in the bank, and eventually disappeared into his cottage on the moor.
“What’s the matter?” Graham asked. “You got a babe in there, you don’t want me to come in?”
“Come in.”
Graham eased past Neal into the cottage. Joe Graham, five feet four inches of dripping nastiness and guile, had raised Neal Carey from a pup. Taking off his raincoat, he shook it out on the floor. Then he found the makeshift closet, pushed Neal’s clothes aside, and hung up the coat, under which he wore an electric blue suit with a burnt orange shirt and a burgundy tie. He took a handkerchief from his jacket pocket, wiped the seat of Neal’s chair, and sat down.
“Thanks for all the cards and letters,” he said.
“You told me to get lost.”
“Figure of speech.”
“You knew where I was.”
“Son, we always know where you are.”
The grin again.
He hasn’t changed much in seven months, Neal thought. His blue eyes were still beady, and his sandy hair was maybe a touch thinner. His leprechaun face still looked like it was peeking out from under a toadstool. He could still point you to the pot of shit at the end of the rainbow.
“To what do I owe the pleasure, Graham?” Neal asked.
“I don’t know, Neal. Your right hand?”
He made the appropriately obscene gesture with his heavy rubber hand, which was permanently cast in a half-closed position. He could do almost everything with it, except Neal did remember the time Graham had broken his left hand in a fight. “It’s when you have to piss,” Graham had said, “that you learn who your friends are.” Neal had been one of those friends.
Graham made an exaggerated pantomime of looking around the room, although Neal knew that he had absorbed every detail in the few seconds it had taken to hang up his coat.
“Nice place,” Graham said sarcastically.
“It suits me.”
“This is true.”
“Coffee?”
“You got a clean cup?”
Neal stepped into the small kitchen and came back with a cup, which he tossed into Graham’s lap. Graham examined it carefully.
“Maybe we can go out,” he said.
“Maybe we can cut the dance short and you can tell me what you’re doing here.”
“It’s time for you to get back to work.”
Neal gestured to the books stacked on the floor around the fireplace.
“I am at work.”
“I mean work work.”
Neal listened to the rain dripping off the thatched roof. It was odd, he thought, that he could hear thatsound but not recognize Graham’s knock on the door. Graham had used his hard rubber hand, too, because he had been holding his suitcase in his real hand. Neal Carey was out of shape and he knew it.
He also knew it was useless trying to explain to Graham that the books on the floor were “work work,” so he settled for, “Last time we talked, I was ‘suspended,’ remember?”
“That was just to cool you out.”
“I take it I’m cooled?”
“Ice.”
Yeah, Neal thought, that’s me. Ice. Cold to the touch and easy to melt. The last job almost chilled me permanently.
“I don’t know, Dad,” Neal said. “I think I’ve retired.”
“You’re twenty-four years old.”
“You know what I mean.”
Graham started to laugh. His eyes squinted into little slits. He looked like an Irish Buddha without the belly.
“You still have most of the money, don’t you?” he said. “How long do you think you can live on that?”
“A long time.”
“Who taught you how to do that—stretch a dollar?”
“You did.”
You taught me a lot more than that, Neal thought. How to follow a mark without getting made, how to slip in and out of an apartment, how to get inside a locked file cabinet, how to search a room. Also how to make three basic, cheap meals a day, how to keep a place clean and livable, and how to have some respect for myself. Everything a private cop needs to know.
Neal had been ten years old the day he met Graham, the day he tried to pick Graham’s pocket, got caught, and ended up working for him. Neal’s mother was a hooker and his father was an absentee voter, so he didn’t have what you’d call a glowing self-image. He also didn’t have any money, any food, or any idea what the hell he was doing. Joe Graham had given him all that.
“You’re welcome,” Graham said, interrupting Neal’s reverie.
“Thanks,” said Neal, feeling like an ingrate, which was exactly how Graham wanted him to feel. Joe Graham was a major-league talent.
“I mean, you want to go back to gradu-ass school anyway, right?” Graham asked.
He must have talked to my professor already, Neal thought. Joe Graham rarely asked a question to which he didn’t already know the answer.
“You’ve talked with Dr. Boskin?” Neal asked.
Graham nodded cheerfully.
“And?”
“And he says the same thing we do. ‘Come home, darling, everything is forgiven.’”
Forgiven?! Neal thought. I only did what they asked me to do. For my troubles I got a bundle of money and a stretch in exile. Well, exile’s fine with me, thank you. It only cost me the love of my life and a year of my education. But Diane would have left me anyway, and I needed the time for research.
Graham didn’t want to give him too much time to think, so he said, “You can’t live like a monkey forever, right?”
“You mean a monk.”
“I know what I mean.”
Actually, Graham, Neal thought, I could live like a monk forever and be very happy.
It was true. It had taken some getting used to, but Neal was happy pumping his own water, heating it on the stove, and taking lukewarm baths in the tub outside. He was happy with his twice-weekly hikes down to the village to do the shopping, have a quick pint and maybe lose a game of darts, then lug his supplies back up the hill.
His routine rarely varied, and he liked that. He got up at dawn, put the coffee on, and bathed while it perked. Then he would sit down outside with his first cup and watch the sun rise. He’d go inside and make his breakfast—toast and two eggs over hard—and then read until lunch, which was usually cheese, bread, and fruit. He’d go for a walk over the other side of the moor after lunch, and then settle back in for more studying. Hardin and his dog would usually turn up about four, and the three of them would have a sip of whiskey, the shepherd and the sheepdog each having a touch of arthritis, don’t you know. After an hour or so, Hardin would finish telling his fishing lies, and Neal would look over the notes he had made during the day and then crank up the generator. He’d fix himself some canned soup or stew for dinner, read for a while, and go to bed.
It was a lonely life, but it suited him. He was making progress on his long-delayed master’s thesis, and he actually liked being alone. Maybe it was a monk’s life, but maybe he was a monk.
Sure, Graham, I could do this forever, he thought.
Instead, he asked, “What’s the job?”
“It’s chickenshit.”
“Right. You didn’t come all the way over here from New York for a chickenshit job.”
Graham was loving it. His filthy little harp face shone like the visage of a cherub whom God had just patted on the back.
“No, son, it really is about chickenshit.”
That’s when Neal made his next major mistake: he believed him.
Graham opened his suitcase and took out a thick file folder. He handed it to Neal.
“Meet Dr. Robert Pendleton.”
Pendleton’s photo looked as if it had been taken for a company newsletter, one of those head-and-shoulders shots that sit above a caption reading, MEET OUR NEW VICE-PRESIDENT IN CHARGE OF DEVELOPMENT. He had a face you could cut yourself on: sharp nose, sharp chin, and sharp eyes. His short black hair was thinning on top. His gallant effort at smiling looked like an unnatural act. His necktie could have landed airplanes on a foggy night.
“Dr. Pendleton is a research scientist at a company called AgriTech in Raleigh, North Carolina,” Graham said. “Six weeks ago, Pendleton packed up his research notes, computer disks, and toothbrush, and left to attend some sort of dork conference at Stanford University, which is near—”
“I know.”
“—San Francisco, where he stayed at the Mark Hopkins Hotel. The conference lasted a week. Pendleton never came back.”
“What do the police have to say?”
“Haven’t talked to them.”
“Isn’t that sort of SOP in a missing-person case?”
Graham grinned a grin custom-made to hack Neal off. “Who said he was missing?”
“You did.”
“No, I didn’t. I said he didn’t come back. There’s a difference. We know where he is. He just won’t come home.”
All right, Neal thought, I’ll play.
“Why not?”
“Why not what?”
“Why won’t he come home?”
“I’m pleased to see that you’re asking some better questions, son.”
“So answer it.”
“He’s got himself a China doll.”
“By which you mean,” Neal asked, “that he’s in the company of an Oriental lady of hired affections?”
“A China doll.”
“So what’s the problem and why are we involved?”
“Another good question.”
Graham got up from the chair and walked into the kitchen. He opened the middle cabinet of three, reached to the top shelf, and pulled down Neal’s bottle of scotch.
“A place for everything, and everything in its place,” he said cheerfully. “Another thing I taught you.”
He came back into the sitting room, reached into his case, and came out with a small plastic travel cup, the kind that telescopes out from a disk into a regular old drinking vessel. He poured three fingers of whiskey and then offered Neal the bottle.
“Damp in here,” Graham said.
Neal took the bottle and set it on the table. He didn’t want to end up half in the bag and take this job out of sentiment.
Graham lifted his cup and said, “To the queen and all his family.”
He knocked back two fingers of the scotch and let the warmth spread through him. If he had been a cat he would have purred, but being a cretin, he just leered. Braced against the chill, he continued, “Pendleton is the world’s greatest authority on chickenshit. AgriTech has millions of dollars sunk into chickenshit.”
“Let me guess,” Neal said. “Does the Bank have millions of dollars sunk into AgriTech?”
Graham’s sudden appearance was starting to make sense to Neal.
“That’s my boy,” Graham said.
That says it, too, Neal thought. I’m Graham’s boy, I’m Levine’s boy, but most of all, I’m the Bank’s boy.
The Bank was a quiet little financial institute in Providence, Rhode Island, that promised its wealthy clients two things: absolute privacy from the prying eyes of the press, the public, and the prosecutors; and discreet help on the side with those little problems of life that couldn’t be settled with just plain cash.
That was where Neal came in. He and Graham worked for a secret branch of the bank called “Friends of the Family.” There was no sign on the door, but anybody who had the necessary portfolio knew that he could come into the back office if he had a problem and talk to Ethan Kitteredge, and that Ethan Kitteredge would find a way to work things out, free of charge.
Usually Kitteredge, known to his employees as “the Man,” would work things out by buzzing for Ed Levine, who would phone down to New York for Joe Graham, who would fetch Neal Carey. Neal would then trundle off to find somebody’s daughter, or take a picture of somebody’s wife playing Hide-the-Hot-Dog in the Plaza Hotel, or break into somebody’s apartment to find that all-important second set of books.
In exchange, Friends had sent him to a toney private school, paid his rent, and picked up his college bills.
“So,” Neal said, “The Bank has a humongous loan out to AgriTech, and one of its star scientists has taken a sabbatical. So what?”
“Chickenshit.”
“Yeah, right. What’s the big deal about chickenshit?”
“Not any chickenshit. Pendleton’s chickenshit. Chickenshit is fertilizer, right? You spread it on stuff to make it grow, which sounds pretty fucking gross to me, but hey…. Anyway, Pendleton’s been working for umptedy-zumptedy years on a way to squeeze more growing juice out of chickenshit by mixing it with water treated with certain bacteria. This, by the way, is called an ‘enhancing process.’
“Now it used to be that you couldn’t mix chickenshit in water because it would lose its juice, but with Pendleton’s process, not only can you mix it with water, but you get something like triple the effect.
“Naturally, this would make a nice little item on AgriTech’s shelf. I might even buy you some for Christmas. You could rub it on your dick, although I doubt the stuff could be that good.”
“Thank you.”
“But don’t get your hopes up, because just when Doc Guano gets this close,” said Graham, holding his thumb and forefinger a sliver apart, “to inventing Supershit, he goes off to this conference and meets Miss Wong.”
“Is that really her name?”
“Do I know? Wong, Wang, Ching, Chang, what’s the difference?”
“Yeah, so? Doctor This, Doctor That, what’s the difference? I’ll bet you AgriTech has more than one biochemist.”
“Not like Pendleton, they don’t. Besides, he took his notes with him.”
Neal could see it coming and he didn’t want this job. Maybe Robert Pendleton didn’t want to finish hisresearch, he thought, but I want to finish mine. Get my master’s and go on for the old Ph.D. Find a job in some little state college somewhere and spend the rest of my life reading books instead of running dirty errands for the Man.
“Have the cops pick him up for theft, then. The notes are AgriTech’s property,” Neal said.
Graham shook his head. “Then maybe he’d be too unhappy to play with his test tubes anymore. The AgriTech people don’t want their professor in the slammer; they want their chickenshit in the pot.”
Graham took the bottle off the table and poured himself another drink. He was enjoying himself immensely. Aggravating Neal was almost worth the terrifying flight over, the endless trip to Yorkshire, and the hike up that damn hill. It was good to see the little shit again.
“If he doesn’t want to come back, he doesn’t want to come back,” Neal said.
Graham tossed back the whiskey.
“You have to make him want to,” he said.
“You mean ‘you’ in the collective sense, right? As in ‘one would have to make him want to.’”
“I mean ‘you’ in the sense of you, Neal Carey.”
All of a sudden, Neal Carey felt a lot of sympathy for Dr. Robert Pendleton. Each of them was shacked up with something he loved—Pendleton with his woman and Neal with his books—and now they were each being pulled back, kicking and screaming, to the chickenshit.
Because of him, they get me, Neal thought, and because of me they’ll get him. It’s all done with mirrors. He reached for the bottle and poured a healthy drink into his coffee cup.
“What if I don’t want to?” he asked.
Graham started rubbing his fake hand into his real one. It was a habit he had when he was worried or had something unpleasant to say.
Neal saved him the trouble. “Then you’ll have to make me want to?”
Graham was really working on the hand now. Pissing Neal off was fun, but extorting him wasn’t. However, the Man, Levine, and Graham had agreed that Neal had been shut up with his books too long, and if they didn’t get him back into some kind of action, they would lose him. That happened sometimes; a first-class UC—an undercover guy—would be put on R-and-R after a tough job and never come back. Or, worse, the guy would come back dull and rusty and do something stupid and get hurt. Happened all the time, but Graham wasn’t going to let it happen to Neal. So he had come to fetch him for this dumb, chicken-shit job.
“You been away from Columbia for what, a year now?” Graham asked.
“About that. You sent me on a job, remember?”
Neal sure as hell remembered. They had sent him to London on a hopeless search for the runaway daughter of a big-time politico—just to keep his wife content and quiet—and he had screwed up and actually found her. She was hooking and hooked, and he had wrenched her off her pimp and the junk and delivered her to her mother. Which was what the Man wanted him to do, but the politician was sure as hell pissed off, so Friends had to pretend that Neal had screwed them over, too. And so he had “disappeared.” Happily.
“Can you do that?” Graham asked. “Just take off from gradu-ass school like that?”
“No, Graham, you can’t. Friends of the Family fixed it. What am I telling you for? You’re the one who fixed it.”
Graham smiled. “And now we’re asking you for a little favor.”
“Or you’ll unfix it?”
Graham shrugged a that’s-life shrug.
“Why me?” Neal whined. “Why not you? Or Levine?”
“The Man wants you.”
“Why?”
Because, Graham thought, we ain’t going to sit around with our hooters in our hands while you turn yourself into a hermit. I know you, son. You like to be alone so you can brood on things and get happily miserable. You need to get back to work and back to school—back with some people. Get your feet back on concrete.
“You and Pendleton are both eggheads,” Graham said. “The Man figures he’s been paying for your expensive education for jobs just like this one.”
Neal took a hit of scotch. He could feel Graham pulling in the line.
“Pendleton’s some sort of biochemist. I study eighteenth-century English Lit!” Neal said. Tobias Smollett: The Outsider in Eighteenth-Century Literature: Neal’s thesis title and a sure cure for insomnia. Except, that is, for eighteenth-century buffs. Both of them would love it.
“I guess all eggheads look alike to the Man.”
Neal tried a different tack.
“I’m out of shape, Graham. Very rusty. I’ve worked maybe two cases in the last two years and I screwed both of them up. You don’t want me.”
“You brought Allie Chase home.”
“Not before I botched it up and almost got us both killed. I’m no good at it anymore, Dad, I—”
“Stop being such a crybaby! What are we asking here? You go to San Francisco and find the happy couple, which shouldn’t be too difficult even for you, seeing as they’re in the Chinatown Holiday Inn, Room ten-sixteen, right there in your file. You get the broad alone, you slip her some cash, and she dumps him. She’s no dope. She knows that money for nothing is better than money for something.
“Then you buddy up to Pendleton, have a few shooters with him, listen to his sob story, and pour him onto a plane. What’ll it take? Three, four days?”
Neal walked over to the window. The rain had let up a little bit, but the fog was heavier than ever.
“I’m glad you have this all figured out, Graham. Are you going to do my research for me, too?”
“Just do the job and come back. You can spend the whole summer here at the Mildew Hilton if you want. You have to be back at school September ninth, though.”
He reached into his case and pulled out a large manila envelope.
“The schedules and book lists for your—what do you call them?—your seminars. I worked it out with Boskin.”
Graham is so damned good, Neal thought. Old Graham brings the prizes with him and dangles them in front of my nose: seminars, book lists…. You have to hand it to him—he knows his whores.
“You’re too good to me, Dad.”
“Tell me about it.”
So there it is, Neal thought. A few days of sleazy work in California, then back to my happy monk’s cell on the moor. Finish my reading, then back to graduate school. Jesus, this double life of mine. Sometimes I feel like my own twin brother. Who’s insane.
“Yeah, okay,” Neal said.
“I’m telling you,” Graham said, “this one is a grounder, easy throw to first, out of the inning.”
“Right.”
So maybe it’s time to come down from the hill, Neal thought. Ease myself back into the world with this sleazy little job. Maybe it’s too easy up here, where I don’t have to deal with anything or anyone except writers who’ve been dead for a couple hundred years.
He looked out the window and couldn’t tell whether he was looking at rain or fog. Both, he guessed.
“Have you heard from Diane?” Graham asked.
Neal thought about the letter that had sat unopened on the table for six months. He’d been afraid to read it.
“I never answered her letter,” Neal said.
“You’re a stooge.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Did you think she was just going to wait around for you?”
“No. I didn’t think that.”
He had left her with no explanation, just that he had to go do a job, and he’d been gone now for almost a year. Graham had contacted her, told her something, and forwarded her letter. But Neal couldn’t bring himself to open it. He’d rather let the thing die than read that she was killing it. But she wasn’t the one who had killed it, he thought. She was just the one who had the guts to write the obituary.
Graham wouldn’t let it drop. “She left the apartment.”
“Diane wouldn’t be the kind to stay.”
“She found a place on 104th, between Broadway and West End. She has a roommate. A woman.”
“What did you do? Follow her?!”
“Sure. I thought you’d want to know.”
“Thanks.”
“Maybe look her up when you get back to the city.”
“What are you, my mother?”
Graham shook his head and poured himself another shot.
“Way I look at it,” he said, “she’s a friend of the family.”
He never should have opened the door.
She was a looker, all right, this Lila.
That was her name, or the name she used working conventions, anyway. Neal learned this from the file Graham had given him, which he had ample time to peruse on the endless trip to San Francisco. It included a Polaroid taken at dinner by one of Pendleton’s AgriTech buddies, which showed Pendleton sitting at a banquet table with a striking Oriental woman. The buddy had scrawled “Robert and Lila” along the bottom.
Looking at the photo, Neal couldn’t blame Pendleton for preferring Lila to his Bunsen burners. Her face was heart-shaped, her hair was long, straight, and satin black, swept up on the left by a blue cloisonné comb. She had beautiful, slanted eyes that gazed on Pendleton with what looked like affection as he struggled with his chopsticks. She was smiling at him. If she was a pro, Neal thought, she was a classy pro, and he liked her just from looking at her picture.
He had no feel for Pendleton yet. The book on him was pretty simple. Forty-three years old, single, married to his work. Born in Chicago, B.S. from Colorado, M.S. from Illinois, Ph.D. from MIT. Taught for a couple of years at Kansas State and then went for the corporate bucks. First for Ciba-Geigy, then for Archer, Daniels Midland, and then AgriTech. Had been there for ten years before he ran into Lila. Lived in a condo, played a little tennis, drove a Volvo. No financial problems, credit hassles, debts. In fact, when you compared his salary and bonuses with his expenses, the guy should have a bunch of money in the bank. Drinks a beer on weekends. Friendly enough, but no close buddies. No women. No boys, either. Fertilizer was his life.
Jesus, Neal thought, no wonder the guy went off the deep end when he discovered sex with a gorgeous, exotic woman in a city as beautiful as San Francisco.
Neal had first gone to San Francisco back in 1970, seven years earlier, when the city was the counterculture capital. Sporting longish hair, denim, one tasteful strand of beads, and the hungry look of the fugitive, Neal was working point for Graham on your basic Haight-Ashbury runaway job. He located their particular flower child in an urban commune on Turk Street. She was the daughter of a Boston banker, and was trying hard to live down her capitalist heritage. Neal had shared a bowl of brown rice and a floor with her, gained her trust, and then ratted her out to Graham. Graham did the rest and Neal heard later that she ended up at Harvard. All betrayals should end so happily.
His next trip to the city was even easier. He was a mature twenty then, and one of the Bank’s clients wanted to film a television commercial in front of a sculpture in Battery Park. Turned out the sculpture was the work of a San Francisco artist who didn’t like to open his mail or answer his phone. Neal found A. Brian Crowe at a coffee house on Columbus. The artist dressed all in black, of course, and hid behind his cape when Neal approached him. The two thousand dollars in cash persuaded him to come out, though, and they sealed the deal over two iced espressos. A. Brian Crowe left happy. Neal hung around the city for a week, and he left happy, which made this an unusual assignment all around.
Neal figured you’d have to be a fool not to love San Francisco, and whatever else Dr. Robert Pendleton was or wasn’t, he was no fool. He was probably a man getting a little romance for the first time in his life and not wanting to let go of it, one of the lucky few who found a hooker who was also a courtesan, a true lady of the evening. She probably took presents instead of cash, or maybe a discreet check had been deposited in her account.
So Neal would write her another check, and that would be that.
Neal closed the file and cracked Fathom open. He fell asleep after a couple of chapters. The flight attendant woke him up to put his seat upright for the approach to San Francisco.
Neal had never liked the Mark Hopkins Hotel. The bill was always as large as the room was small, and the Snob Hill address didn’t impress him. But it always helps a bribery deal to look like money, and he wanted to ask Lila to a quiet drink at the Top of the Mark and have quick access to a room where he could hand her some money in privacy, so he swallowed his distaste and checked in.
He handed the Bank’s gold card to the precious clerk, confessed to having only one small bag, and found his own way to the sixth-floor room, which occupied a corner, so you could actually turn around in it without folding your arms across your chest. The windows allowed a view of the Oakland Bay Bridge and some nicely restored Victorian houses on Pine Street. Neal didn’t care much about the view, as he didn’t plan to spend a lot of time there. He wanted a slow shower and a quick meal before getting down to work.
He called down to room service and ordered a Swiss cheese omelet with a plain, toasted bagel, a pot of coffee, and a Chronicle. Then he stripped off his airline-grody clothes and stepped into the shower. After months of heating his own water for barely tepid outdoor baths, the steaming spray felt great. He stayed in a little too long and was still shaving when the doorbell rang.
He signed for the bill and the tip, poured a cup of black coffee, and sipped at it while he finished shaving. Then he sat down at the small table by the window to devour the food and the newspaper.
Neal was a print junkie, which he figured came with being a native New Yorker. He bypassed the front page of the Chronicle in favor of Herb Caen’s column, enjoyed that, and then turned to the sports section. The baseball season was about to start, and the Yankees looked pretty good for ’77. That’s one of the great things about spring, he thought. All the home teams look like they have a shot. It’s only in the sere days of summer that hopes begin to wilt, then wither and die in fall. Unless, of course, you have relief pitching.
After a thorough perusal of the sports pages, he turned to the front section to catch up on the news. Jimmy Carter really was President, wearing Ward Cleaver sweaters and treating the country like a collective Beaver. Mao was still dead, and his successors were squabbling over the remains. Brezhnev was ill. The same old same old.
Which reminded him that he had the same old job to do: find some miscreant and bring him home. He used his third cup of coffee to come up with a plan.
It wasn’t much of a plan. All he had to do was amble down to the Holiday Inn, trail them until he could find a way to contact her alone, and make his pitch. Then pick up the pieces of Pendleton’s shattered heart and check them through to Raleigh. Almost as easy as giving money to a starving artist.
That’s when he got the bright idea to let his fingers do the walking. Why drag his ass all the way down the hill and waste time following them around? Call their room instead. If he answers, hang up. If she answers, say something like, “You don’t know me, but I have a thousand bucks in cash sitting under your water glass at a table at the Top of the Mark. The name is Neal Carey. One o’clock. Come alone.” There wasn’t a hooker in the world, no matter how classy, who wouldn’t make that appointment.
Safe, simple and civilized, he thought. No point making this any harder than it has to be.
He found the hotel number in the file and dialed the phone.
“Room ten-sixteen, please,” he said.
“I’ll transfer you to the operator.”
He took a sip of coffee.
“Operator. May I help you?”
“Room ten-sixteen, please.”
“Thank you. One moment.”
It was more than a moment. More like ten moments.
“What party are you trying to reach, sir?”
Uh-oh.
“Dr. Robert Pendleton.”
“Thank you. One moment.”
Ten more moments. Long ones.
“I’m sorry, sir. Dr. Pendleton has checked out.”
Swell.
“Uuuhh … when?”
“This morning, sir.”
While I was showering, filling my face, and lounging over the spring training reports, Neal thought.
“Did he leave a forwarding address?”
“One moment.”
Did he leave a forwarding address? Your basic desperation effort.
“I’m sorry, sir. Dr. Pendleton left no forwarding address. Would you like to leave a message in case he calls in?”
“No, thank you, and thanks for your help.”
“Have a nice day.”
“Right.”
Neal poured another cup of coffee in the time it took to call himself an asshole. All right, think, he told himself. Pendleton’s checked out. Why? Maybe money. Hotels are expensive and he’s found himself a pad somewhere. Or maybe AgriTech kept bugging him, so he changed hotels. Or maybe the party is over and he’s on his way back to Raleigh. That’s the best maybe, but you can’t afford to count on it. So back to work.
Pendleton isn’t a pro, so chances are he won’t think about covering his traces. He probably doesn’t know that anyone is on his trail. And there’s only one place to pick up his trail.
Neal hustled to get dressed. He put on a powder blue button-down shirt, khaki slacks, and black loafers, slipped on a red-and-blue rep tie but left the knot open, and dumped half the stuff out of his canvas shoulder bag, leaving enough in to give it some weight. Sticking his airline ticket jacket into the pocket of his all-purpose, guaranteed-not-to-wrinkle blue blazer and shoving a ten-dollar bill in his pants pocket, he hoofed it to the elevator, which seemed to take forever to get there. He figured he was ten minutes away from his only shot at tracking Pendleton and he didn’t know if he had the ten minutes.
The Holiday Inn was on Kearny Street, a straight shot down California Street from the Hopkins. Normally he would have walked there, but the cable car was pulling up just as he hit the sidewalk, so he bought a ticket and hopped on, hanging on the side like he’d seen in the movies. It was sunny and cool out, but he was already sweating. He was in a race with the maids at the Chinatown Holiday Inn.
He got off on the corner of Kearny and California, three blocks south of the Holiday Inn. He didn’t run but he didn’t exactly walk, either, and he did the three blocks in about two minutes. Avoiding the doorman’s eyes, he headed straight for the bank of elevators, and there was one waiting for him. He caught his breath on the way up. Or almost caught it. He wanted to look a little breathless for the show.
The doors slid open and he looked at the sign—1001-1030—with an arrow pointing to the left. He trotted down the hallway and, sure enough, there were two maids’ carts sitting between rooms 1001 and 1012. So, Neal thought, it all depends on where they started.
He tried to look worried, hassled, and in a hurry. None of this required any serious level of method acting.
“I’m going to miss my flight,” he said to the maid who was just stepping out of 1012. “Did you find a ticket?”
She gave him a blank look. She was young and unsure. He stepped around her to 1016 and jiggled the handle. It was locked.
“Did you find a ticket in this room? Airline ticket?”
The other maid came out of 1011. “What you lose?”
She was an older woman. The boss.
“My plane ticket.”
“What room?” she asked, checking him out.
He knew he couldn’t give her time to connect Pendleton to the room. He hoped the good doctor hadn’t been a big tipper.
“Could you let me in, please? I have to catch a flight to Atlanta in forty-five minutes.”
“I call manager.”
“I don’t have the time,” Neal said as he pulled the ten-dollar bill out of his pocket and laid it on the edge of her cart. “Please?”
She took her key ring and slipped the key in the lock. The younger one started to speak rapidly in Chinese, but the older one shut her up with a hard glance.
“Quick,” she said to Neal. She stood in the doorway as she ushered him in. The younger one joined her, in case Neal swiped an ashtray or a TV or something.
Neal had tossed a lot of rooms in his life, but never in front of an audience with the clock running, unless he counted the endless practice sessions with Graham. This was like some sort of private cop game show, where if he passed round one he got to go on for cash and prizes. It would have helped if he knew what he was looking for, but he was just looking, and that took time.
The bed was unmade, but otherwise the room was neat. They hadn’t left in a hurry. They had even left their wet towels in the bathtub and thrown their trash in the cans.
Neal started with the bureau drawers. Nothing.
“Shit,” he said, just to give the scene realism.
He checked the nightstand beside the bed. There was one of those little hotel notepads beside the phone book and the Bible. He turned his back to the audience and stuck it in his pocket.
“I’ll never make it,” he said.
“Under bed?” the older maid suggested.
He humored her and got down on all fours and looked under the bed. There wasn’t even any dust, not to mention a bachelor sock, or a note telling him where they had gone.
“Maybe I threw it away,” he said as he got up. “Stupid.”
The maids nodded enthusiastically in agreement.
The trashcan was full, as if they’d straightened up before leaving. Polite, thoughtful people. Three empty cans of Diet Pepsi sat on some pieces of cardboard, the kind you get with your laundered shirts. A pocket map of San Francisco and a bunch of ticket stubs at the bottom.
“Jesus, how could I be so stupid?” Neal said as he bent over and reached into the trashcan. He showed his audience his butt as he slipped his airline ticket out of his pocket and into the can. Then he put the map and the ticket stubs under the ticket envelope, straightened up and showed them the ticket, then stuffed the whole mess into his lapel pocket.
“Thank you so much,” he said.
“Hurry, hurry,” said the older one.
Hurry, hurry, indeed, thought Neal.
Security picked him up in the lobby.
Security in this case was represented by a young Chinese guy who was both larger and more muscular than Neal would have preferred. His chest looked uncomfortably stuffed into his gray uniform blazer, and he had big, thick arms. He had clearly spent some quality time on the old bench-presses. Neal, who didn’t have to worry about leaving space in his jacket for his muscles, knew the guy would have no trouble pinning him up against a wall and keeping him there. The guy’s white shirt was rumpled around a waist that was beginning to go to fat, and he had a two-way radio hooked to his belt. There was probably a nightstick stuck into the belt somewhere, Neal thought, probably at the small of his back. Except nothing about this guy was small. And he seemed to want to talk.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said. There was no trace of a Chinese accent. “May I ask what you were doing in Room ten-sixteen?”
The younger maid hadn’t wasted any time calling down. So much for her five bucks, Neal thought.
“I left my—”
“Save it. That wasn’t your room.”
Neal nodded at the other guests in the lobby. “Can we do this outside?”
“Sure.”
He opened the door for Neal and let him get a good feel for his bulk. Neal knew that his next move would be to get in front of him and maneuver him to the wall. Which would be the end of the game, so it just wouldn’t do to let Benchpress here make that next move.
Neal looked off to his left as soon as he cleared the doorway, held up his hand, and yelled, “Taxi!”
The front cab in line started to edge forward on the curb as a bellhop hustled over to open the cab door.
“No, no, no,” Benchpress said, waving his arms as he quick-shuffled between Neal and the cab.
This was okay with Neal, who didn’t want to take a cab anyway. He wanted to take a nice long walk up a long, steep hill to see just how badly Benchpress wanted to carry all those big muscles and that belly up a pitch to talk. With Benchpress off to his left, Neal had his whole right side open to move, and he knew where a right turn would take him: through North Beach and then up Telegraph Hill, which was plenty long and steep enough for what he had in mind. He took a hard right and headed out.
Benchpress wasted two seconds standing by the cab wondering how embarrassed he should be, and then another second trying to decide if the chase was going to be worth it.
He decided it was.
Neal wasn’t happy to look over his shoulder and see Benchpress coming after him, but he wasn’t too worried either. The guy wasn’t going to cause a scene—not near his hotel, anyway—and he wasn’t going to call the city police over this kind of crap. Nevertheless, it wouldn’t hurt to make sure this thing became real personal, so Neal wasted a second of his own to turn on his heels and grin at Benchpress. Then he inserted his middle finger in his mouth, twisted it around, popped it out, and displayed it to Benchpress.
Benchpress took it personally. He nodded, put his head down, and started forward.
Okay, Neal thought, come on. I’ve spent six months hiking up and down a steep Yorkshire moor carrying packs of supplies. No overweight, pumped-up rent-a-cop can catch me on a hill.
Neal led him up Kearny and took another right on Broadway, which was a little flatter then he remembered. He picked up the pace past the strip joints and sex shops that were just opening to catch the early trade. Benchpress wasn’t distracted by the tired barkers who were sipping on Styrofoam cups of coffee, or by the sleepy dancers who were just arriving with their dancing togs in gym bags slung over their shoulders. He didn’t trip over any of the empty beer or wine bottles, or slip on any of the wax-paper sandwich wrappers or any of the trash that littered the North Beach strip. A sharp, cool wind was blowing off the Bay and into their faces, but that didn’t slow Benchpress down much either.
Reduced to cheap tricks, Neal crossed Broadway in mid-traffic, inspiring some aggravated honking but no apparent concern in Benchpress, who swatted a Renault out of his way and kept coming.
Jesus, Neal thought, what a day. First I screw up and let Pendleton take off, next I find the only house detective in America with an overdeveloped sense of duty.
He swung a left onto Sansome Street, which gave him the incline he was looking for. Like a sparkling brook that flows into a polluted river, Sansome Street seemed a world apart from Broadway. Its street-level garages led up to white and pastel apartments and houses that featured large sun rooms overlooking the Bay. A lot of their windows had those security-service decals plastered on them, the kind that let prospective burglars know that they shouldn’t mess around here unless they wanted police academy dropouts with nightsticks, rottweilers, and inferiority complexes coming down on their sorry asses.
Sansome Street was pretty, trendy, and expensive looking, and Neal wondered where the money came from. Maybe it came from streets like Broadway, money that slipped through the fingers of the strippers and the whores, money that got away from the junkies and the porn addicts, from the sad drunks who paid six bucks a shot to peek over their grimy glasses of cheap bourbon at the bitter shake-and-jiggle of somebody’s baby girl. Maybe it was the angry neon glare of the strip that paid for the warm, bright sun rooms with the view of the Bay.
His class-war reverie took his mind off the pain that was starting to shoot through his legs, pain that reminded him to take Sansome Street for what it was, a steep route up Telegraph Hill. He sucked it up and shifted into high gear. There’s a trick to climbing a hill: you keep your knees slightly bent as you walk, like Groucho Marx going up a staircase. Every three or four steps you rock back on your heels. The technique saves wear and tear on the knees and ankles, and it moves you up a hill faster. Fast enough to leave a musclebound, beer-bellied badge from Woolworth’s stretched out on the pavement sucking air.
After punishing his pursuer for a couple of minutes, Neal looked back over his shoulder and saw that Benchpress was huffing, puffing, muttering, sweating … and gaining on him.
Neal didn’t know where Benchpress had learned Carey’s Own Special Hill-Climbing Technique, but figured his patent was in jeopardy. Also his ass, because his legs started to do one of those reverse Pinocchio numbers and turn to wood. The pot of coffee and the cheese omelet he had consumed started to make some serious complaints in the form of an excruciating cramp, and his lungs began to ask if all this was such a good idea.
He looked around for some boulders or something to roll down on Benchpress like they do in the movies, but didn’t see any. So he took a nice, deep gasp and plunged a little faster up the hill. Plan A, the Leave-the-Fat-Boy-on-the-Slope Maneuver, hadn’t worked, so he tried to come up with a better Plan B. The wit and wisdom of Joe Graham came to him.
“If you can’t beat ’em,” Graham had once intoned, “bribe ’em.”
He had about a ten-second lead on Benchpress and figured he’d need at least fifteen. His current tactic wasn’t getting it done—in fact, he’d be really lucky to reach the park at Coit Tower with a five-second cushion, and five seconds weren’t going to be enough for what he had in mind, so he broke into a run.
“Run” was a grandiose word for the shuffling jog he managed. His heart went into its Buddy-Rich-on-Speed imitation, the pleasant cramp in his stomach reached down into his groin, and his lungs issued a strong protest in the form of a wheezing gasp. But his legs kept moving. They ran up to the corner of Filbert Street and turned right, then hopped over to the north side of the street. While his legs were busy running, his right hand reached into his jacket, lifted out his wallet, and put it in his left hand. The two hands cooperated to take out one of the Bank’s crisp one-hundred-dollar bills and put the wallet back. Then they tore the bill in half, the left hand putting its half in the left pants pocket, and the right hand gripping its prize in its sweaty palm.
He looked back quickly and saw that Benchpress hadn’t hit the corner of Filbert yet, so it looked like he’d get his fifteen ticks. He hit the bottom of Coit Tower park, found a bowling-ball-sized rock at the base of a tree, and put the half-hundred under it. Then he sprinted as fast as he could up the walkway to the observation tower and marked the location of the tree. He leaned against the railing next to one of the coin-operated binoculars to catch what was left of his breath. As he sucked for air, he took off his left loafer and put the hotel notepad and the ticket stubs inside it before he put the shoe back on. People who search you, even after they’ve beaten you unconscious, often forget to look in your shoes.
He took in a fresh gulp of air as he checked out the view from the observation terrace, which was as stunning as he remembered. The whole bay stretched out in front of him. Off to his left he could make out a small section of the Golden Gate Bridge as it touched Marin County, and above that he could see the southern slope of Mount Tamalpais. Down and to the right of Mount Tarn he could see Sausalito, and scanning farther to the right he saw small sailboats dancing on the sapphire blue water around the plump, notorious little island of Alcatraz. To his right he could see the whole span of the Bay Bridge as it led to Oakland. A huge freighter was plying its way up the bay toward San Mateo.
He had about five seconds to enjoy all this splendor before he turned to see Benchpress shuffling to the base of the walkway. Neal saw a homicidal look in the security guard’s eye and wondered if he was about to get beaten to the proverbial pulp.
This is no big deal on television, where the private eye hero gets trashed by three guys twice his size, because when you see him after the commercial he has some beautiful woman tending his wounds and he’s up and about, so to speak, one roll-cut later. But real-life beatings hurt. Worse, they injure, and the injuries take a long time to heal, if they ever do. Neal just wanted to avoid the whole experience.
He put his back up against the railing and one of the binoculars on his left side as Benchpress reached the observation terrace and began to move toward him.
“Are you going to make me chase you down the hill now?” Bench-press asked as he edged along the railing toward Neal. He was breathing hard, stalling to catch his breath.
“I don’t know, would it work?”
“You’re an asshole. You know where I live? Chinatown. Sacramento Street? Clay Street? California Street? You know what they are?”
I’m an asshole all right, Neal thought.
“Hills,” Neal said. “They’re big hills.”
“I’ve been walking up and down those streets since I was a kid. You think you’re going to shake me on a hill? Get real.”
“You’re right. I apologize.”
“That’s okay. Now what’s your story? What did you steal?”
“Nothing.”
Benchpress was taking his air through his nose now, timing his breathing and slowing it down. He shifted his eyes around to see if they were alone. They were.
He pulled his security guard’s badge out and held it up for Neal to see.
“Let’s make this easy now,” he said.
“I was looking for something.”
“PI?”
“Yeah, okay.”
“ID?”
Neal couldn’t handle any more initials, so he held out the torn hundred-dollar bill.
“You can relax,” he said. “You did your job. I didn’t steal anything. You ran me down. Take the prize.”
He stuck the bill behind the coin slot of the binoculars and started to back away.
“You’re offering me a bribe?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t have anything against the concept, I’m just checking it out.”
“Basically, I’m paying you not to beat me up to defend your honor.”
He smiled, accepting Neal’s craven surrender graciously.
“Where’s the other half?” he asked.
“It’s under a tree down there somewhere.”
He was one quick fat man. His right foot shot out and kicked the air twice, face-high, before Neal could even break into tears.
“I’m not playing hide-and-seek for half a bill that probably doesn’t exist.”
Neal edged farther along the railing away from Benchpress as he said, “Here’s how it’s going to work. You take the half-bill here and start walking down the path. I stay right here where you can see me. The tree is within sight. When you’re, oh, let’s say twenty steps away, I’ll start giving you directions—you know, ‘you’re getting warmer, you’re getting colder’—until you find the other half.”
Benchpress thought about it for a few seconds.
“There are only two paths down from here,” he warned Neal.
“I know.”
“If you try to screw me, I can catch you.”
“I know that, too.”
“If I have to do that, I’ll break your ribs.”
Enough is enough, thought Neal, even for a devoted coward like me. This gig might bring me back onto this guy’s turf again, and I’d need somestatus to make a deal. We have to get on a more equal footing here.
“Maybe,” Neal said. “I’m carrying, Bruce Lee.”
That stopped Benchpress for a second. He hadn’t considered the possibility of this goofball having a gun.
“Are you?” he asked, studying the contours of Neal’s jacket.
“Naaah.”
But you’re not sure, Benchpress, are you? Neal thought. That’s okay. That’s just fine.
“Do we have a deal?” Neal asked.
“I think we can work something out,” Benchpress said. He reached out slowly and took the bill from the coin slot. Then he fixed Neal with a hard-guy stare and started to back away.
Neal counted to twenty, slowly and loudly, and then started to give Benchpress directions. The game went on about a minute before Neal saw him reach under the rock and come up with the other half of the bill.
“Okay?” Neal shouted.
“Wait a minute! I’m checking the serial numbers!”
Smart guy, thought Neal. Next time I come back, he’ll have an office job.
“Okay!” hollered Benchpress. “Now what?”
“I don’t know! I’ve never done this before! You have any ideas?”
“Why don’t I just walk away?”
“How do I know you won’t be waiting for me at the bottom?”
“You have an ugly and suspicious mind!”
“Tell me about it!”
Neal was debating with himself whether to trust him, when Benchpress yelled, “Do you have a dime?”
What the hell?
“Yeah!”
“Okay! I’ll go to Pier Thirty-nine! You wait fifteen minutes and then put the dime in the binoculars. Look down to Pier Thirty-nine and I’ll be standing there waving at you.”
Interesting concept, Neal thought. He shouted, “Right! That gives you a good ten minutes to sneak up the other side and then kick my head into the Bay!”
“You don’t trust me?”
No, Neal thought, but I don’t have a choice, do I? Unless I want to stand on this hill for a few days.
“You can’t walk to Pier Thirty-nine in fifteen minutes!” Neal shouted.
“I’m going to take a cab, asshole!”
There was always that.
“Okay, okay. Just get going!”
“It’s been nice chasing you!”
“Nice being chased!”
Neal watched as Benchpress disappeared beneath the trees. He checked his watch. It was ten-forty-five, but felt to him like it should be a lot later. He spent the time catching his breath, slowing his heartbeat, and enjoying the view. He waited twelve minutes and then put his dime in the binoculars and focused in on the pier. Benchpress must have found himself a hell of a cabbie, because it was not quite eleven when Neal saw him standing on the pier, looking up toward Telegraph Hill, smiling and waving.
I love a man who takes an honest bribe, Neal thought.
Neal took his time getting down Telegraph Hill. He strolled down Greenwich Street onto Columbus Avenue, stopped to admire the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul’s terra-cotta towers, and took a seat on a bench in Columbus Square. He shared the bench with two old men who were chatting amiably in Italian. The seat gave him a nice view of the park, where he saw young mothers pushing baby carriages, older Chinese people doing t‘ai chi, and still older Italian women, dressed in black, tossing bread crumbs to pigeons. He liked what he saw, but he liked what he didn’t see even better: no Benchpress, no small groups of Benchpress’s friends and associates searching for a young white guy in a blue blazer and khaki slacks. Trust is one thing, he thought, stupidity is another.
He gave it five minutes on the bench before moving on down Columbus toward the corner of Broadway. Bypassing a half-dozen Italian cafés, bakeries, and espresso bars—there would be time for those later—he headed straight for the City Lights Bookstore.
Neal had known about the City Lights Bookstore long before he had ever visited it. What Shakespeare and Company was to the Lost Generation, City Lights was to the Beat Generation. It was a literary candle in the window that showed the way back from Kesey to Kerouac, and in a sense back to Smollett and Johnson and old Lazarillo des Tormes.
Mostly it was just a goddamn good bookstore that had tables and chairs downstairs where people were encouraged to sit down and actually read books. There were no smarmy signs about its being a business and not a library. Consequently, it was both a pleasure and a privilege to buy a book from City Lights, and that was part of what Neal had in mind.
He stepped through the narrow doorway, nodded a greeting to the clerk at the counter, and headed down the rickety wooden stairs to the basement. Several other pilgrims were browsing the shelves, rapt in their perusal of sections labeled “Counterculture,” which held treasures not easily found in Cleveland, Montgomery, or New York.
He did a little browsing himself, settled on a paperback copy of Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire,and sat down at a table. He spent a few minutes enjoying Abbey and then discovered an itch that required scratching on the sole of his left foot. He took off his loafer, removed the notepad and ticket stubs, and put them on the table. One of the great things about City Lights was that nobody cared what you spent your time looking at.
He started with the notepad, which didn’t take much time because there was nothing written on it, nor were there any impressions on the top or second pages. So far, no good.
The ticket stubs were more interesting, each being proof of purchase of a $3.50 round-trip fare from Blue Line Transportation on the Number four bus. Six of them, each from last week. Neal didn’t know where the Number four bus went, but it couldn’t be that far at $3.50. Where the hell could Pendleton have been commuting to? Or was it Lila? A commuting hooker?
Neal stuck the tickets and pad back in his pocket, bought the Bank the copy of Desert Solitaire, and headed back up Columbus. He knew exactly what he needed to follow up the lead, and found it at a sidewalk café called La Figaro, where he ordered a double iced espresso and a slice of chocolate cake. Sugar, caffeine, and carbohydrates were exactly the brain food he needed to inspire him, and he was sitting outside reveling in self-indulgence and Edward Abbey when he felt a shadow looming over his shoulder and heard a voice ask, “So, you have any more money for me?”
Neal looked up at him and smiled.
A. Brian Crowe hadn’t changed much. He still hung out in the same cafés. He was still tall and skinny, still sported shoulder-length blond hair, and still dressed all in black. Even carried the same black satin cape draped over his shoulder.
“Are there more corporate giants wanting to film their obscenities in front of my art?” Crowe asked.
“I’m afraid not.”
“Then you could at least offer me an espresso.”
“It’s the least I could do.”
Crowe signaled the waitress, who headed straight for the espresso machine. Crowe was obviously no stranger to cadging drinks at La Figaro.
“How’s the life of a starving artist?” Neal asked when the coffee had been served.
“Fat,” Crowe answered. He swirled half the espresso around in his mouth, then jerked his head back suddenly and swallowed. He savored the aftertaste, then jerked his thumb back over his shoulder at a skyscraper down in the Financial District. “They wanted a sculpture for their lobby. They commissioned Crowe, who charged them an unconscionable fee, which they foolishly paid. Crowe bought his apartment.”
“You bought an apartment?”
“It was a very large sculpture,” he explained. He tilted the cup into his mouth again and knocked the coffee back. His prominent Adam’s apple bobbed, and he looked like a turkey swallowing raindrops. “It occupies a prominent place in a traffic pattern trod by the sensually enslaved but socially ambitious, some of whom have decided to attempt their climb up the social ladder clutching their very own Crowe. The monetary expression of their undying gratitude allows Crowe to live in the manner to which he has become accustomed.”
“Sun room? View of the bay?”
“In short, I am in, and therefore in the money. Buy me another espresso.” His long fingers whipped a card from his pocket.
“C’mon, Crowe! Business cards?”
“You know a lot of corporate types, don’t you?”
“I guess the Sixties are really over.”
Crowe raised an eyebrow at the waitress, who quickly came over with two espressos. Crowe leaned over his cup and looked sadly at Neal. He dropped the artsy pose and said, “My three-piece-suit clients are always asking me to get them acid. Acid! I haven’t done acid since the first Monterey Festival.”
“So you’re off the bus?”
“And on the gravy train. The Sixties are over, the Seventies are on the downslide, and the Eighties are almost upon us. You want to be carrying some money into the Eighties. Remember that, young Neal. It’s about making money now.”
Neal took the card. “My clients don’t usually come to me looking for art, but …”
“Networking, you know? Networking gets the right people together with the right people.”
“The ‘right people,’ Crowe? You joining the country club next? You were a communist, for crying out loud!”
“I turned in my card. I’m thirty-eight years old, young Neal. I can’t work for rice and beans and dope anymore. One day I looked in the mirror and saw my happy hippie face differently. It looked pathetic. I was a tourist attraction, local color for the tourists who hadn’t figured out the hippie thing was already dead.
“So I quit doing art for art’s sake and started doing it for A. Brian Crowe’s sake. I learned some interesting things, like the fact that a corporation won’t even look at a piece that costs a thousand bucks, but will fight over the same piece when it costs ten thousand bucks. I just started adding zeros to my price tags. I got myself an agent and started going to parties and sipping white wine with the right people. You can call it selling out…. I call it selling.”
Neal avoided his gaze. Crowe looked older. The fire in his eyes had become embers.
“It’s okay with me, Crowe.”
The artist snapped back into his role. He stood up, whirled his cape around his shoulders, and said, “Crowe’s address and phone number are on the card. Give Crowe a call. We’ll do dinner.”
Neal watched him stride out the door. A. Brian Crowe, flamboyant artist, counterculture hero, Gold Card member.
That’s all right, Neal thought. Every one of us is at least two people.
