Cities of the Red Night

  “Is it all right if my friends come to dinner, Father? They’ll be bringing fish and bread.…”

  “All right with me, son. But they aren’t well seen here.… There’s talk in the village, son. Bad talk about all of you. If it wasn’t for Bert Hansen’s father being a shipowner and one of the richest men in town there’d be more than talk.… Quicker we move the better.”

  “Could the others come too?”

  “Well, son, I could use some more hands in the shop. No limit to how many guns we can sell in a seaport like Boston … and I’m thinking maybe Mr. Hansen would pay to get his son out of here.…”

  * * *

  Spring morning, doves call from the woods. Noah Blake and his father, Bert Hansen, Clinch Todd, Paco, and Sean Brady board a boat with their luggage stacked on deck. The villagers watch from the pier.

  Mrs. Norton sniffs and says in her penetrating voice, “Good riddance to the lot of them.” She glances sideways at her husband.

  “I share the same views,” he says hastily.

  Boston: two years later. Mr. Blake has prospered. He works now on contracts from shipowners, and his guns are standard issue. He has remarried. His wife is a quiet refined girl from New York. Her family are well-to-do importers and merchants with political connections. Mr. Blake plans to open a New York branch, and there is talk of army and navy contracts. Noah Blake is studying navigation. He wants to be a ship’s captain, and all five of the boys want to ship out.

  “Wait till you find the right ship,” Mr. Blake tells them.

  * * *

  One winter day, Noah is walking on the waterfront with Bert, Clinch, Sean and Paco. They notice a ship called The Great White. Rather small but very clean and trim. A man leans over the rail. He has a beefy red smiling face and cold blue eyes.

  “You boys looking for a ship?”

  “Maybe,” says Noah cautiously.

  “Well, come aboard.”

  He meets them at the gangplank. “I’m Mr. Thomas, First Mate.” He extends a hand like callused beef and shakes hands with each boy in turn. He leads the way to the master’s cabin. “This is Captain Jones—master of The Great White. These boys are looking for a ship … maybe…”

  The boys nod politely. Captain Jones looks at them in silence. He is a man of indeterminate age with a gray-green pallor. He speaks at length, in a flat voice, his lips barely moving.

  “Well, I could use five deckhands.… You boys had any experience?”

  “Yes. On the Great Lakes.” Noah indicates Bert Hansen. “His father owned fishing boats.”

  “Aye,” says Captain Jones, “freshwater sailing. The sea’s another kettle of fish.”

  “I’ve studied navigation,” Noah puts in.

  “Have you now? And what would be your name, lad?”

  “Noah Blake.”

  An almost imperceptible glance passes between the Captain and the first mate.

  “And your trade, lad?”

  “Gunsmith.”

  “Well, now, you wouldn’t be Noah Blake’s son would you?”

  “Yes, sir, I would.”

  Once again the glance flickers between the two men. Then Captain Jones leans back in his chair and looks at the boys with his dead, fishy eyes.

  “We’ll be sailing in three days’ time … New York, Charleston, Jamaica, Vera Cruz. Two months down, more or less, and two months back.… I pay ten pounds a month for deckhands.”

  Noah Blake tries to look unimpressed. This is twice as much as any other captain has offered.

  “Well, sir, I’ll have to discuss it with my father.”

  “To be sure, lad. You can sign the Articles tomorrow if you’re so minded … all five of you.”

  * * *

  Noah can hardly wait to tell his father. “I mean that’s good, isn’t it?”

  “Aye, son. Perhaps a little too good. Captain Jones’s name is not so white as his ship. He’s known as Opium Jones in the trade. He’ll be carrying opium, guns, powder, shot, and tools. And he’s not too particular who he trades with.…”

  “Anything wrong with that, Father?”

  “No. He’s no better and no worse than most of the others. Only thing I can’t figure is why he’s paying double wages for his deckhands.”

  “Maybe he’d rather have five good hands than ten waterfront drunks.”

  “Maybe.… Well, go if you like. But keep your eyes open.”

  THE PRIVATE ASSHOLE

  The name is Clem Williamson Snide. I am a private asshole.

  As a private investigator I run into more death than the law allows. I mean the law of averages. There I am outside the hotel room waiting for the corespondent to reach a crescendo of amorous noises. I always find that if you walk in just as he goes off he won’t have time to disengage himself and take a swing at you. When me and the house dick open the door with a passkey, the smell of shit and bitter almonds blows us back into the hall. Seems they both took a cyanide capsule and fucked until the capsules dissolved. A real messy love death.

  Another time I am working on a routine case of industrial sabotage when the factory burns down killing twenty-three people. These things happen. I am a man of the world. Going to and fro and walking up and down in it.

  Death smells. I mean it has a special smell, over and above the smell of cyanide, carrion, blood, cordite or burnt flesh. It’s like opium. Once you smell it you never forget. I can walk down a street and get a whiff of opium smoke and I know someone is kicking the gong around.

  I got a whiff of death as soon as Mr. Green walked into my office. You can’t always tell whose death it is. Could be Green, his wife, or the missing son he wants me to find. Last letter from the island of Spetsai two months ago. After a month with no word the family made inquiries by long-distance phone.

  “The embassy wasn’t at all helpful,” said Mr. Green.

  I nodded. I knew just how unhelpful they could be.

  “They referred us to the Greek police. Fortunately, we found a man there who speaks English.”

  “That would be Colonel Dimitri.”

  “Yes. You know him?”

  I nodded, waiting for him to continue.

  “He checked and could find no record that Jerry had left the country, and no hotel records after Spetsai.”

  “He could be visiting someone.”

  “I’m sure he would write.”

  “You feel then that this is not just an instance of neglect on his part, or perhaps a lost letter?… That happens in the Greek islands.…”

  “Both Mrs. Green and I are convinced that something is wrong.”

  “Very well, Mr. Green, there is the question of my fee: a hundred dollars a day plus expenses and a thousand-dollar retainer. If I work on a case two days and spend two hundred dollars, I refund six hundred to the client. If I have to leave the country, the retainer is two thousand. Are these terms satisfactory?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very good. I’ll start right here in New York. Sometimes I have been able to provide the client with the missing person’s address after a few hours’ work. He may have written to a friend.”

  “That’s easy. He left his address book. Asked me to mail it to him care of American Express in Athens.” He passed me the book.

  “Excellent.”

  Now, on a missing-person case I want to know everything the client can tell me about the missing person, no matter how seemingly unimportant and irrelevant. I want to know preferences in food, clothes, colors, reading, entertainment, use of drugs and alcohol, what cigarette brand he smokes, medical history. I have a questionnaire printed with five pages of questions. I got it out of the filing cabinet and passed it to him.

  “Will you please fill out this questionnaire and bring it back here day after tomorrow. That will give me time to check out the local addresses.”

  “I’ve called most of them,” he said curtly, expecting me to take the next plane for Athens.

  “Of course. But friends of an M.P.—missing person—ar
e not always honest with the family. Besides, I daresay some of them have moved or had their phones disconnected. Right?” He nodded. I put my hands on the questionnaire. “Some of these questions may seem irrelevant but they all add up. I found a missing person once from knowing that he could wriggle his ears. I’ve noticed that you are left-handed. Is your son also left-handed?”

  “Yes, he is.”

  “You can skip that question. Do you have a picture of him with you?”

  He handed me a photo. Jerry was a beautiful kid. Slender, red hair, green eyes far apart, a wide mouth. Sexy and kinky-looking.

  “Mr. Green, I want all the photos of him you can find. If I use any I’ll have copies made and return the originals. If he did any painting, sketching, or writing I’d like to see that too. If he sang or played an instrument I want recordings. In fact, any recordings of his voice. And please bring if possible some article of clothing that hasn’t been dry-cleaned since he wore it.”

  “It’s true then that you use uh psychic methods?”

  “I use any methods that help me to find the missing person. If I can locate him in my own mind that makes it easier to locate him outside it.”

  “My wife is into psychic things. That’s why I came to you. She has an intuition that something has happened to him and she says only a psychic can find him.”

  That makes two of us, I thought. He wrote me a check for a thousand dollars. We shook hands.

  * * *

  I went right to work. Jim, my assistant, was out of town on an industrial-espionage case—he specializes in electronics. So I was on my own. Ordinarily I don’t carry iron on an M.P. case, but this one smelled of danger. I put on my snub-nosed 38, in a shoulder holster. Then I unlocked a drawer and put three joints of the best Colombian, laced with hash, into my pocket. Nothing like a joint to break the ice and stir the memory. I also took a deck of heroin. It buys more than money sometimes.

  Most of the addresses were in the SoHo area. That meant lofts, and that often means the front door is locked. So I started with an address on Sixth Street.

  She opened the door right away, but she kept the chain on. Her pupils were dilated, her eyes running, and she was snuffling, waiting for the Man. She looked at me with hatred.

  I smiled. “Expecting someone else?”

  “You a cop?”

  “No. I’m a private investigator hired by the family to find Jerry Green. You knew him.”

  “Look, I don’t have to talk to you.”

  “No, you don’t have to. But you might want to.” I showed her the deck of heroin. She undid the chain.

  The place was filthy—dishes stacked in a sink, cockroaches running over them. The bathtub was in the kitchen and hadn’t been used for a long time. I sat down gingerly in a chair with the springs showing. I held the deck in my hand where she could see it. “You got any pictures of him?”

  She looked at me and she looked at the heroin. She rummaged in a drawer, and tossed two pictures onto a coffee table that wobbled. “Those should be worth something.”

  They were. One showed Jerry in drag, and he made a beautiful girl. The other showed him standing up naked with a hard-on. “Was he gay?”

  “Sure. He liked getting fucked by Puerto Ricans and having his picture took.”

  “He pay you?”

  “Sure, twenty bucks. He kept most of the pictures.”

  “Where’d he get the money?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She was lying. I went into my regular spiel. “Now look, I’m not a cop. I’m a private investigator paid by his family. I’m paid to find him, that’s all. He’s been missing for two months.” I started to put the heroin back into my pocket and that did it.

  “He was pushing C.”

  I tossed the deck onto the coffee table. She locked the door behind me.

  * * *

  Later that evening, over a joint, I interviewed a nice young gay couple, who simply adored Jerry.

  “Such a sweet boy…”

  “So understanding…”

  “Understanding?”

  “About gay people. He even marched with us.…”

  “And look at the postcard he sent us from Athens.” It was a museum postcard showing a statue of a nude youth found at Kouros. “Wasn’t that cute of him?”

  Very cute, I thought.

  * * *

  I interviewed his steady girl friend, who told me he was all mixed up.

  “He had to get away from his mother’s influence and find himself. We talked it all over.”

  * * *

  I interviewed everyone I could find in the address book. I talked to waiters and bartenders all over the SoHo area: Jerry was a nice boy … polite … poised … a bit reserved. None of them had an inkling of his double life as a coke pusher and homosexual transvestite. I see I am going to need some more heroin on this one. That’s easy. I know some narco boys who owe me a favor. It takes an ounce and a ticket to San Francisco to buy some names from the junky chick.

  Seek and you shall find. I nearly found an ice pick in my stomach. Knock and it shall be opened unto you. Often it wasn’t opened unto me. But I finally found the somebody who: a twenty-year-old Puerto Rican kid named Kiki, very handsome and quite fond of Jerry in his way. Psychic too, and into Macambo magic. He told me Jerry had the mark of death on him.

  “What was his source for the coke?”

  His face closed over. “I don’t know.”

  “Can’t blame you for not knowing. May I suggest to you that his source was a federal narc?”

  His deadpan went deader. “I didn’t tell you anything.”

  “Did he hear voices? Voices giving him orders?”

  “I guess he did. He was controlled by something”

  I gave him my card. “If you ever need anything let me know.”

  * * *

  Mr. Green showed up the next morning with a stack of photos. The questionnaire I had given him had been neatly filled out on a typewriter. He also brought a folio of sketches and a green knitted scarf. The scarf reeked of death.

  I glanced at the questionnaire. Born April 18, 1951, in Little America, Wyoming. “Admiral Byrd welcomes you aboard the Deep Freeze Special.” I looked through the photos: Jerry as a baby … Jerry on a horse … Jerry with a wide sunlit grin holding up a string of trout … graduation pictures … Jerry as the Toff in the high school play A Night at an Inn. They all looked exactly as they should look. Like he was playing the part expected of him. There were about fifty recent photos, all looking like Jerry.

  Take fifty photos of anyone. There will be some photos where the face is so different you can hardly recognize the subject. I mean most people have many faces. Jerry had one. Don Juan says anyone who always looks like the same person isn’t a person. He is a person impersonator.

  I looked at Jerry’s sketches. Good drawing, no talent. Empty and banal as sunlight. There were also a few poems, so bad I couldn’t read them. Needless to say, I didn’t tell Mr. Green what I had found out about Jerry’s sex and drug habits. I just told him that no one I had talked to had heard from Jerry since his disappearance, and that I was ready to leave for Athens at once if he still wanted to retain me. Money changed hands.

  * * *

  At the Athens Hilton I got Dimitri on the phone and told him I was looking for the Green boy.

  “Ah yes … we get so many of these cases … our time and resources are limited.”

  “I understand. But I’ve got a bad feeling about this one. He had some kinky habits.”

  “S-M?”

  “Sort of … and underworld connections.…” I didn’t want to mention C over the phone.

  “If I find anything out I’ll let you know.”

  “Thanks. I’m going out to Spetsai tomorrow to have a look around. Be back on Thursday.…”

  * * *

  I called Skouras in Spetsai. He’s the tourist agent there. He owns or leases villas and rents out apartments during the season. He organizes tours. He owns the
discotheque. He is the first man any traveler to Spetsai sees, and the last, since he is also the agent for transport.

  “Yes, I know about it. Had a call from Dimitri. Glad to help any way I can. You need a room?”

  “If possible I’d like the room he had.”

  “You can have any room you want … the season is over.”

  * * *

  For once the hovercraft was working. I was in luck. The hovercraft takes an hour and the boat takes six.

  Yes, Skouras remembered Jerry. Jerry arrived with some young people he’d met on the boat—two Germans with rucksacks and a Swedish girl with her English boyfriend. They stayed at one of Skouras’s villas on the beach—the end villa, where the road curves out along the sea wall. I knew the place. I’d stayed there once three years earlier in 1970.

  “Anything special about the others?”

  “Nothing. Looked like thousands of other young people who swarm over the islands every summer. They stayed a week. The others went on to Lesbos. Jerry went back to Athens alone.”

  Where did they eat? Where did they take coffee? Skouras knew. He knows everything that goes on in Spetsai.

  “Go to the discotheque?”

  “Every night. The boy Jerry was a good dancer.”

  “Anybody in the villa now?”

  “Just the caretaker and his wife.”

  He gave me the keys. I noticed a worn copy of The Magus by John Fowles. As soon as anyone walks into his office, Skouras knows whether he should lend him the book. He has his orders. Last time I was there he lent me the book and I read it. Even rode out on a horse to look at the house of the Magus and fell off the horse on the way back. I pointed to the book. “By any chance…”

  He smiled. “Yes. I lent him the book and he returned it when he left. Said he found it most interesting.”

  “Could I borrow it again?”

  “Of course.”

  * * *

  The villa stood a hundred feet from the beach. The apartment was on the second floor—three bedrooms off a hall, kitchen and bathroom at the end of the hall, balcony along one side of the building. There was a musty smell, dank and chilly, blinds down. I pulled up the blinds in all three bedrooms and selected the middle one, where I had stayed before. Two beds, two chairs, coat hangers on nails in the wall.