Our Friends From Frolix 8

  ‘Twelve,’ Charley said. ‘You’re paranoid. Stop looking like you think one of us is a track. You always think someone is a track if you don’t personally—’

  ‘What’s your name?’ Denny asked to Nick.

  ‘Don’t tell him,’ Charley said.

  Turning to her, Denny raising his arm, drew back; she faced him calmly, her face inert and hard. ‘Go ahead,’ she said. ‘Hit me and I’ll kick you where it’ll hurt for the rest of your life.’

  Zeta said, ‘He’s an employee of mine.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Denny said sardonically. ‘And you’ve known him all your life. Why don’t you simply say he’s your brother?’

  ‘It’s the truth,’ Zeta said.

  ‘What do you do?’ Denny asked Nick.

  ‘I regroove tires,’ Nick said.

  Denny smiled; his entire manner changed, as if the trouble had cleared. ‘Oh, yeah?’ he asked, and laughed. ‘What a job. What a vocation. Handed down to you by your father?’

  ‘Yes,’ Nick said, and felt hate; it was all he could do to keep it from showing, and he wanted to keep it from showing; he felt afraid of Denny — perhaps because the others in the room were, and he was picking it up from them.

  Denny held out his hand to Nick. ‘Okay, tire regroover, you want to buy a nickel or a dime booklet? I’ve got both.’ He reached inside his leather jacket and brought out a bundle of tracts. ‘This is good stuff,’ he said. ‘All authentic; I know the guy who prints them. I’ve seen Cordon’s original manuscript there in the plant.’

  ‘Since I’m paying for it,’ Zeta said, ‘it’ll be a nickel booklet.’

  ‘I suggest THE MORALS OF PROPER MAN,’ Charley said.

  ‘You do?’ Denny said sardonically, eyeing her. She met his gaze, as before, without flinching; Nick thought. She is as hard as he is. She is able to withstand him. But why? he wondered. Is it worth it, to be near such a violent person. Yes, he thought; I can feel the violence, and the volatility. He is apt, at any time, to do anything, any minute. He has an amphetamine personality. Probably he takes massive doses of one of the amphetamines, either orally or by injection. Or maybe, to do the job he does, he has to be this way.

  ‘I’ll take that one,’ Nick said. ‘The one she suggests.’

  ‘She’s roped you in,’ Denny said. ‘Like she ropes in everybody, every man, anyhow.’ To Nick he said, ‘She’s a stupid. She’s a stupid, short bitch.’

  ‘You fairy,’ Charley said.

  ‘The lesbian talks,’ Denny said.

  Zeta got out a five-pop bill and handed it to Denny; clearly he wanted to conclude the transaction and leave.

  ‘Do I bother you?’ Denny asked Nick, abruptly.

  He said, carefully, ‘No.’

  ‘Some people I bother,’ Denny said.

  ‘Of course you do,’ Charley said. She reached out, took the handful of booklets from him, found the proper one and handed it to Nick, smiling her illuminating smile at the same time. Sixteen, he thought; no older than that. Children playing at the game of life and death, hating and fighting, but — probably sticking together when there is trouble. The animosity between Denny and the girl masked, he decided, a deeper attraction. Somehow, they functioned in tandem. A symbiotic relationship, he conjectured; not pleasant to look on but nonetheless real. A Dionysus from the gutter, he thought, and a small, pretty, tough girl able to — or trying to — cope with him. Hating him, probably, and yet unable to leave. Probably because he is, to her, so attractive physically, and, in her eyes, a real man. Because he is tougher than she is, and that she respects. Because she herself is so tough she knows what it means.

  But what a person to be melded to. Like a sticky fruit in too warm a climate, he had melted; his face was soft and molten and only the blazing glare of his eyes held his features in conformity.

  I would have thought, he thought, that those distributing and selling Cordon’s writing would be idealistic, noble. But apparently not. His work is illegal; it attracts those who naturally handle illegal things, and they are a type themselves. The objects they peddle don’t in themselves matter; it is strictly the fact that they are illegal, and people will pay a good, a very good, price.

  ‘Are you sure this place is clean now?’ Denny asked the girl. ‘You know, I live here; I’m here ten hours a day. If they find anything here—’ He prowled about, suspicious in an animal-like way: a brooding suspiciousness, replete with hatred.

  Suddenly, he picked up a floor lamp. He examined it, then got from his pocket a coin; he unscrewed three screws and the baseplate came loose in his hands. And, from the hollow shaft of the lamp, appeared three rolled-up booklets.

  Denny turned toward the girl, who stood unmoving, her face calm — virtually so, anyway; Nick saw her lips press tightly together as if she were preparing herself for something.

  Lifting his right arm, Denny hit her, hit at her eye but missed. She had ducked, but not far enough; the blow caught her on the side of the head above the ear. And, with startling speed, she grabbed his extended arm, lifted his wrist and bit him, bit deep into his flesh. Denny screamed, flailing at her, trying to free his wrist from her teeth.

  ‘Help me!’ Denny yelled at Nick and Zeta. Nick, not knowing what to do, started toward the girl, hearing himself mumble at her, telling her to let go, telling her she might bite through a nerve and leave his hand paralyzed. Zeta, however, seized her by the jaw, inserted his big, dark-stained fingers into the hinges and pried her jaws open; Denny at once withdrew his arm, examined the bite; he seemed dazed, and then, immediately after, the violence returned to his face. And now it was a murderous violence; his eyes bulged as if about to pop literally from his head. He bent, picked up the lamp, lifted it high.

  Zeta pinned him, gasping; he held the boy in a huge grip, and at the same time gasping to Nick, ‘Get her out of here. Take her somewhere he can’t find her. Can’t you see? He’s an alcohol addict. They’ll do anything. Go!’

  In a trance, Nick took hold of the girl’s hand and led her rapidly from the apartment.

  ‘You can take my squib,’ Zeta, panting, yelled after him.

  ‘Okay,’ Nick said; he tugged the girl along — she came willingly, small and light — and he reached the elevator, stabbed at the button.

  ‘We better run off up to the roof,’ Charley said. She seemed calm; she, in fact, smiled up at him with her radiant smile which made her face so exquisitely lovely.

  ‘Are you afraid of him?’ Nick asked as they got onto the escalator and began to sprint up it, two steps at a time. He still held her gripped by the wrist, and she still managed to keep up with him. Lithe, spirit-like, she combined an animal-like ability to move swiftly with an almost supernatural gliding quality. Like a deer, he thought, as they continued on up.

  Far below them on the escalator, Denny appeared. ‘Come back!’ he yelled his voice shaking with agitation. ‘I’m going to have to go to a hospital to get this bite looked at. Drive me to the hospital.’

  ‘He always says that,’ Charley said placidly, unstirred by the boy’s pitiful whine. ‘Just ignore him and hope he can’t run faster than us.’

  ‘Does he do that to you very often?’ Nick panted as they reached the roof field and sprinted in the direction of Zeta’s parked squib.

  ‘He knows what I’ll do,’ Charley said. ‘You saw what I did — I bit him and he can’t stand to be bitten. Have you ever been bitten by a full-grown person? Have you ever thought what it would feel like? And I can do another thing — I stand against the wall and sort of hold myself there with my arms out, so I’m tight against something, and then I kick, with both feet. I’ll have to show you sometime. Just remember: never try to touch me when I don’t want to be touched. No man is going to do that and get away with it.’

  Nick got her into the squib, ran around to the driver’s side, slid in behind the tiller. He started up the motor, and there, at the escalator exit, stood Denny, wheezing. Seeing him, Charley laughed in delight, a girlish laugh; she put both h
ands to her mouth and rocked from side to side, her eyes shining. ‘Oh God,’ she said, ‘He’s so angry. And there’s nothing he can do. Take off.’

  Pressing down on the power knob, Nick took off; the squib, old and battered as it was, had a well souped-up motor which Zeta had built himself; he had modified every moving part. So, in his own squib, Denny would never catch him. Unless of course, Denny had souped up his own squib.

  ‘What do you know about his squib?’ he asked Charley, who sat smoothing down her hair and arranging herself tidily. ‘Has he—’

  ‘Denny can’t do anything involving manual labor. He hates to get his hands greasy. But he’s got a Shellingberg 8, with the B-3 engine. So he can go very fast. Sometimes, if there’s no other traffic, like late at night, he opens it up all the way to fifty.’

  ‘No problem,’ Nick said. ‘This old clinker will reach seventy or even seventy-five. If Zeta’s word can be trusted.’ The squib was moving rapidly, now, weaving in and out of the mid-morning traffic. ‘I’ll lose him,’ Nick said. Behind him he saw a Shellingberg, painted bright purple. ‘Is that him?’ he asked her.

  Twisting around to see, Charley said, ‘Yes, that’s it. Denny owns the only purple Shellingberg 8 in the United States.’

  ‘I’ll get into heavy cross-city traffic,’ Nick said, and began to descend to the level frequented by short-hop squibs. Almost at once, two innocuous squibs filled in behind him as he tailgated the squib ahead. ‘And I’ll turn here,’ he said, as the balloon marked HASTINGS AVE appeared bobbingly on his right. He turned, became — as he had hoped — utterly involved in the slow rows of squibs looking for parking places… most of them driven by women out on shopping trips.

  No sign of the purple Shellingberg 8. He peered in all directions, trying to catch sight of it.

  ‘You’ve lost him,’ Charley said matter-of-factly. ‘He depends on speed — you know, free speed high up out of traffic — but down here—’ She laughed, her eyes shining with what seemed to him delight. ‘He’s too impatient; he never drives down here.’

  Nick asked, ‘So what do you think he’ll do?’

  ‘Give up. He’ll get over being mad in a couple of days, anyhow. But for about forty-eight hours he’ll be homicidal. That really was stupid of me to hide those booklets in the lamp; he’s right. But I still don’t like being hit.’ Meditatively, she rubbed the side of her head where he had hit her. ‘He hits hard,’ she said. ‘But he can’t stand to be hurt back; I can’t really hit him and make it work — I’m too small — but you saw me bite.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The all time great bite of the century.’ He did not wish to dispute that.

  ‘It’s very nice of you,’ Charley said, ‘a total stranger, helping me like this, when you don’t even know me. You don’t even know my name.’

  ‘I’ll settle for Charley,’ he said. It seemed to fit her.

  ‘I didn’t get your name,’ the girl said.

  ‘Nick Appleton.’

  She laughed her bubbling glee from between the fingers of her hands. ‘That’s the name a character in a book would have. “Nick Appleton.” A private track, maybe. Or on one of those TV shows.’

  ‘It’s the kind of a name that denotes competency,’ Nick said.

  ‘You are competent,’ she admitted. ‘I mean you got us — me — out of there. Thank you.’

  ‘Where are you going to spend the next forty-eight hours?’ Nick asked. ‘Until he cools off?’

  ‘I have another apartment; we use that, too. We transfer stuff from one to the other, in case a PSS s-and-s warrant gets served on us. Search and seizure, you know. But they don’t suspect us. Denny’s family has a lot of money and influence, and one time a track started probing around, and a top PSS official, a friend of Denny’s dad, called to tip us off. That’s the only time we’ve had any thouble.’

  Nick said, ‘I don’t think you should go to the other apartment’

  ‘Why not? All my things are there; I have to go there.’

  ‘Go where he won’t find you. He might kill you.’ He had read articles about the personality changes often suffered by alcohol addicts. How much feral cruelty often came out, a virtually psychopathic personality structure, blended with the fast moving quality of mania and the suspicious rage of paranoia. Well, now he had seen one, seen an alcohol addict. And he did not like it. No wonder the authorities had made it illegal — really illegal: an alcohol addict usually found himself, if caught, in a psychodidactic work camp for the rest of his life. Unless he could pay for a major lawyer who in turn could pay for expensive testing of the individual, with the idea of proving that the period of addiction was over. But of course it was never over. An alc-hound remained what he was forever, even after Platt’s surgery on the diencephalon, the area of the brain which controlled oral cravings.

  ‘If he kills me,’ Charley said, ‘I’ll kill him. And, basically he’s more afraid than I am. He has a lot of fears; most of what he does he does out of fear — out of panic, I should say. He’s in a constant hysterical panic.’

  ‘What if he hasn’t been drinking?’

  ‘He’s still scared, and that’s why he drinks… but he isn’t violent unless he drinks; he just wants to run away and hide. But he can’t do that — because he believes people are watching him and know he’s a dealer — so then he drinks; that’s when it occurs.’

  ‘But by drinking,’ Nick said, ‘he draws attention to himself; that’s the very thing he’s trying to avoid. Isn’t it?’

  ‘Maybe not. Maybe he wants to get caught. He’s never done a lick of work in his life before dealing in tracts and booklets and minitapes; his family always supported him. And now he takes advantage of the cred — what’s the word?’

  ‘Credulity,’ Nick said.

  ‘Does that mean like when you want to believe?’

  ‘Yes.’ It was reasonably close.

  ‘So he takes advantage of their credulity, because people, a lot of people, superstitiously believe in Provoni, you know? About his coming back? All that shrnap you find in Cordon’s writings?’

  Nick, incredulous, asked, ‘You mean to say that you people who deal in Cordon’s writings, you people who sell it—’

  ‘We don’t have to believe it. Does the man who sells someone a pint of liquor have to be an alcohol addict himself?’

  The logic, correct as it was, appalled him. ‘It’s for money,’ he said. ‘You probably don’t even read what’s in those tracts; you just know them by name. Like a clerk working in a warehouse.’

  ‘I’ve read a few.’ She turned to face him, still massaging her forehead. ‘God, I’ve got a headache. Do you have any darvon or codeine at your place?’

  SEVEN

  ‘No,’ he said, filled with abrupt, alert unease. She wants to stay with me, he thought, for the next couple of days. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I’ll take you to a motel, one picked at random; he’ll never find you. I’ll pay for it for two nights.’

  ‘Hell,’ Charley said, ‘there’s that master location-meter and control center that processes the name of everyone checked into every motel and hotel in North America; for two pops he can use it just by picking up a fone.’

  Nick said, ‘We’ll use a fake name.’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head.

  ‘Why not?’ His unease became greater; he felt, all at once, as if she were sticking to him like flypaper: he couldn’t pry her loose.

  ‘I don’t want to be alone,’ Charley said, ‘because if he does find me in some motel room, alone, he’ll beat the hell out of me; nothing like you saw, but really. I have to be with someone; I have to have people who—’

  ‘I couldn’t stop him,’ Nick said, truthfully. Even Zeta, for all his strength, hadn’t been able to hold onto Denny for more than a few minutes.

  ‘He won’t fight with you. It’s just that he doesn’t want anybody, any third party, to see what he does to me. But—’ She paused. ‘I shouldn’t try to get you involved. It’s not fair to you. Suppose a figh
t broke out at your place, and we were all bursted by the PSS, and they found that tract on you that you got from us… you know the penalty.’

  ‘I’ll throw it away,’ he said. ‘Now.’ He rolled down the window of the squib, reached into his cumberbund for the small book.

  ‘So Eric Cordon comes second,’ Charley said, in a neutral voice, a voice without censure. ‘First comes protecting me from Denny. Isn’t that funny? It’s really funny!’

  ‘An individual is more important than theoretical—’

  ‘You’re not hooked yet, sweet. You haven’t read Cordon; when you do, you’ll feel different. Anyhow, I have two tracts in my purse, so it wouldn’t make any difference.’

  ‘Throw them away.’

  ‘No,’ Charley said.

  Well, he thought, the stuff has hit the fan. She won’t give up the pamphlets and she won’t let me leave her off at a motel. What do I do now? Just drive around and around in this damn in-city traffic until I run out of fuel? And there’s always the chance that Shellingberg 8 will show up and we’ll be finished right then and there; he’ll probably ram us and kill us all. Unless the alcohol has worn off by now.

  ‘I have a wife,’ he said, simply. ‘And a child. I can’t do anything that—’

  ‘You did it. By letting Zeta know that you wanted a tract; you were in it the minute you and Zeta knocked on the door of our apartment.’

  ‘Before that, even,’ Nick said, nodding; it was true.

  So fast, he thought. A commitment made in the blink of an eye. But it had been there a long time, building up. The news of Cordon’s pending murder — and that was what it was — had brought him to a decision, and at that moment, Kleo and Bobby were in danger.

  On the other hand, the PSS had just now spot-checked him, using Darby Shire as bait. And he — and Kleo — had passed it. So from the standpoint of statistical probabilities, there wasn’t a good chance he’d be investigated soon, again.