A Bad Man (39 page)

That’s that, he sighed, a realist who surrendered quarter where it was due and would never be a pusher, but merely sin’s friend downtown, a doer of favors, crime’s wardheeler, transgressions’s lousy legman, wrong’s cop and felony’s cabbie giving directions to the conventioneers.

But seeking to cover all markets, he needed to know the names of the pushers. He dialed Freedman. “It’s me, Doctor…Not good, Doc, not good. Sad and downhearted. Got the blues you know, old time, sunk-spirit funk. The fantods, Physician…No no, nothing you could call a new wrinkle. It’s Lilly again. We hooked her, Doc. Lilly’s hooked. She come up a dope fiend. Flaming, raging addict, Lilly is. She’d kill for the stuff, Doc. Yes sir, she’d lie and steal and murder and cavort. We did it
this
time. Freedman. We sure did a job on old Lilly. Good thing I’m rich, a habit like she’s got. Only thing keeps her off the street this minute’s my money, I guess. Have to appreciate small blessings, way I look at it. But Lilly, well sir, Lilly’s got a monkey on her back like King Kong…No, no. You know Lilly,
her
character. A cure’s out of the question. Only way to make her stop is tie her up and sit on top of her. A cure’s out. Lilly’s system just couldn’t stand up to cold turkey. No, Doc, I look down that lonesome road, and all I can see is doom in that direction. We’re just going to have to accept it, I’m afraid, and that’s why I had to call my family physician…No, hell,
I
understand your position.
I
know that as a medical man you can’t just go on prescribing these drugs for her…I
know
about your Hippocratic oath, and I want to tell you I respect you for it….
Ab
solutely not, out of the question,
I
appreciate that. I wouldn’t have it otherwise. But still and all, Doctor, you’re the one got her into this, ruined her health with an abortion, then prescribed narcotics to bring her round again…No, of course I’m not blaming you. Of course not. You did what you thought necessary. But, well sir, we’re decent people, Lilly and me. What do
we
know about the underworld and the syndicate and those plug-uglies? I was hoping I could get the names of some pushers from you so’s I could keep Lilly supplied, so’s the cupboard’s never bare…Sure, pos
itively
, that’s all I want…How’s that?…You will? Well, I appreciate it. Here, just let me get a pencil and a sheet of paper. Okey-dokey, I’m ready…Uh huh. Uh huh.
Him?
Tch tch…Uh huh. Uh huh. Fine, I got it all down. Thank you…But I do have a bone to pick with you, Dr. Freedman. Can you guess what it is?…That’s right, the suit…All right, now that’s a promise. That’s a promise from a man that’s under the Hippocratic oath.”

Replacing the phone, he thought: That Freedman is dangerous. He ought to be locked up.

With his heavy abortion trade, relieved now and then by the public’s incipient interest in drugs, Feldman managed to remain fairly equable for a while. It was still true, of course, that he was at their mercy and had not yet found any way to deflect their specific demands. Once, when he was still naïve, he might have settled for just these conditions, all sin subsumed in the body’s joy, the nervous system’s reasons, but he had begun to discover in the victims—he could not say
his
victims—a sense of prior submission, of simple yielded-to, statutory plight. Here were no fearful presences to justify either pistol in drawer or alarm button under the rug to bring help—he felt no real harm in them, and he was annoyed by their indulgence, bothered by the absence of driving pride, the firmer greeds. The truth was, he was haunted by the ghosts of those who had gotten to them first. Jealous as some taken-in bridegroom, he heard the lies still whispering above their heads, the wily lines of truckers in bars, cousins at parties, guests under their fathers’ roofs. Also, he recognized what they did not, that their need of him hung on an ignorance. Why did they need him? What did they use him for? He was merely a distraction for them, his function a ritual, a ceremonial fiction, as though their troubles and their solutions needed channels and red tape to legitimize them.

In the meantime, he was kept busy with referrals from his salesmen, listening to old ladies with some determined memory of a particular pair of house slippers long out of stock or some fly-by-night gadget seen at a friend’s. He could have whiled away the time running some of these down, or even had what he would once have considered fun switching their ardor to some other object, but he dismissed them as quickly as he could, getting them out of the way for the next white-gloved, goofy-hatted girl in trouble—with whose insides, despite himself, he was still in love.

A man came into Feldman’s office, a tall, stern, raw-boned, sinister fellow in his fifties, his hair graying at his temples but black everywhere else. His features were sharp, all angles and bas-relieved bones, the unrecoverable Eskimo or Mongol just under his skin now Anglicized and windburned Christian. He reminded Feldman of conductors on commuter railroads, whose solemn aspect had made him fearful, or of ace pilots now alocholic, or of investors embittered by businessmen, and of businessmen themselves as they were sometimes shown in movies—hard and ruthless and cynical, soft only on their daughters. Feldman thought of the gun he did not keep in the secret drawer he did not have.

“Are you Feldman?”

“Yes,” he said. The man remained standing by his desk, his courtesy a warning. “Please be seated.” The man looked at the chair suspiciously, then back at Feldman, and sat down as though defying some trap. “Yes?” Feldman said. “Yes sir?”

The man scrutinized him, and Feldman thought
Cops
even as he dismissed the idea. There was something too fastidious about the man’s anger. The father of some girl dead on the abortionist’s table, the sore old man of a kid junkie. But this too seemed unlikely. Something about his bearing was uncommitted, as though he were checking not for some bad quality he knew Feldman had, but for some good quality he was afraid he might have. Waiting him out, Feldman could feel himself posing. He gave him tough, gave him bold, gave him patient, gave him poker, gave him a dozen patent bravuras he did not feel, and was aware that his face was as frozen as his visitor’s, that not a muscle had moved nor a hair stirred. Indeed, it might still have expressed the question of his “Yes sir?” and he settled for that.

There were several buttons pinned to the man’s lapel. As he shifted in his chair he seemed to propel them forward. Noticing them for the first time, Feldman thought impertinently of all strange feats of belief, so many causes inscribed on the head of a pin. On one was an American flag, on another a sort of contemporary minuteman, for which some younger version of the man himself might have served as the model. The rest were the acronyms of unfamiliar organizations. A last badge read: “WDSG.” (“Wealth, Death, Sex and God?” Feldman wondered. Impossible.)

Still the man had not spoken, though Feldman understood that showing him the pins had been a gentle act, a shy feeler like the inexpert flourish of some schoolgirl’s engagement ring. He was inexplicably touched.

Finally the stranger spoke. “Feldman,” he said speculatively. His voice was as arrogant as ever, as if there had been no soft overture from the lapel; indeed, that had somehow been retracted. “Feldman,” he said again, turning the name over with his tongue as if it had been some gunned hood’s suspicious last effect in the hand of a policeman.

“What’s up?” Feldman made himself ask.

“There are some merchants,” the man said, though it was clear, from the tone of rehearsal that he brought to his speech, that they had not entered conversation, “I’ve heard about who, not Jews themselves, affect Jewishness. They do it superstitiously, much as a smithy hangs his first horseshoe above his door or the owner of a tavern frames his beginning dollar. Are you such a merchant, Feldman? Such as I’ve described, trading on your Christian credit to appease some Rothschild Cash and Carry Immanence?”

In a panic Feldman tried to remember Freedman’s telephone number and couldn’t.

“I’ve asked if you’re Jewish, Feldman.”

“Half Jewish,” he said, projecting a disparagement of the Jewish half.

“Oh,” the man said, disappointed, and once more was silent. But the buttons had come out again. Observing the man closely, Feldman saw that as he shifted he raised one shoulder slightly, swelling only half his chest. It was a puzzling, schizophrenic business, and he was not sure what to make of it, save that he knew he preferred the ingenious shoulder to the rigid, brooding one. He had to make the stranger keep the badges forward.

On a hunch he boldly put out his hand and fingered one of the tin buttons, the one with the American flag. “Old Glory,” Feldman said.

The man sat uneasily under Feldman’s touch but did not pull back.

Feldman’s finger moved to another button. “AFSAF,” he said. “FAFAC.” He opened his drawer and rummaged in it for a moment. “Here it is. I knew I had it,” he said, handing his find to the stranger.

“This is a paper clip,” the man said.

Feldman winked and took it back. “
So
,” he said expansively, something settled between them. “
So!
” He nodded forcefully. He had an idea now why the man had come: for a contribution. He leaned forward and glared at him. Then, inspired, he turned to the other lapel, the one without the buttons, and stared at it fixedly. After a moment the man moved his arm across his chest in a long, slow diagonal like some mystic fraternal salute, and taking the edge of the lapel, he turned it inside out. A hidden button was revealed.

“RAFAPACALFAF,” he said.

“How long,” Feldman asked, “have you been, ah…interested?”

“I haven’t seen yours,” the man said.

“I don’t belong,” Feldman said. “I don’t approve of their methods.” A pain swept over the man’s face. “Have you heard about my labor policies?” Feldman asked quickly. “I’m off the charge plate, did you know that?” Then he leaned forward, brushing the buttons contemptuously with the back of his hand. “I’m more comfortable with the renegade than I am with the convert. There are good words that can be said for confessed former Communists. I won’t deny it, but there’s something embarrassing in a new passion. Give me men who keep their instincts. The
Northern
racist, give me
him
, whose best argument is his prickling skin, his crawling flesh, his abhorrence fingerprinted in his cells. Give me snarlers who bare their teeth at the soul’s
traif
. Phooey on the isometric heart, the soul like a cleft palate or unequal feet. Am I taking a chance with you?
Am I?
” he challenged.

The man was silent. Then, “They’re getting away with murder,” he said softly.

“
Am I taking a chance with you?
” Feldman insisted. The man looked confused. “The buttons. Your buttons. So many eggs, so many baskets. I know what those cost you, you. The garish orchestration of your politics, a tune for turncoats, fa la la. First one thing and then another.”

“They’re getting away with murder,” the man said again.

“We agree in principle,” Feldman said sharply.

“They have to be stopped,” the man said, and his face went through an extraordinary change, a relaxation, giving way to a kind of gravity he had been resisting. Feldman understood that his brief rhetoric had been rehearsed. Now there was something fervid as falling about him. He might have been dropping through the air in a parachute.

“We agree in principle. Go on,” Feldman commanded.

“There are movements afoot,” the man said with the same blank passion. “A conspiracy.” His voice
achieved
the word. “The nationhood threatened,” he said so feelingly that he seemed close to tears. “Rioters. Looting. So-called civil rights.” As if these phrases had triggered his message, he began to talk rapidly now. Kennedy’s assassination. A signal. Their call to arms. A blood sacrifice—theirs. The Mistaken’s. Pervasive moral collapse. Municipal swimming pools and city parks systems usurped, national parks next. Muggings in the Grand Canyon, rape in Yellowstone. The debilitating effect of modern music: jungle rhythms, chaos. Basements tactics of the so-called Black Muslims. Trouble in so-called Asia. Prayer in schools, together with other decisions of the so-called Supreme Court. In a blueprint—he personally had seen the blueprint.

“You’ve
seen
the blueprint?”

“Yes. I’ve seen it.”

“Go on.”

The Mistaken were actually three and a half months ahead of schedule, and gaining at a rate of thirty-eight minutes a day. An hour and a half on the Sabbath while the nation slept. “
Wake up, America!
” he finished. “
Oh, for God’s sake, wake up before it’s too late!
” Then, as if to reassure himself that it wasn’t, he looked at his watch.

“Guns,” Feldman said quietly. “You want guns. And ammo. Plenty of ammo.”

“What?”

“Be quiet,” Feldman said. “Let me think. Who’s with you?”

The man blinked at him.

“Who’s
with
you? What’s your membership? The usual smattering of retired generals, I suppose, old ladies with cat hairs on their shawls, one of two sore losers from Cuba and Budapest. Is that the element?”

“I want—”

“You want,
you
want. I
know
what you want. You want a radio ministry. Fifteen minutes a day at six-fifteen in the morning. ‘Wake up, America,’ indeed. Do you know who listens to those programs? Shut-ins. People on turnpikes who drive all night to save on motels. I
know
what you want. You want pamphlets in bus stations and flags for the poor. Sit still.
Sit still
. This is important. Arm.”

“What?”

“
Arm
, goddamn it! The so-called British are coming.
Arm!
But the American way—with American weapons. Do you know what I see? A militia of deer hunters in red-checkered vests. A calvary of coon hounds. An arsenal of sporting goods and bombs in Cokes. A Winchester in every golf bag. Poisoned fishhooks and hangmen’s line. Wake up, American!
Force!
How much money you got?”

“I don’t see how—”

“How much
money
you got?” He waved his hand at the man’s lapel. “Don’t tell me that jewelry comes cheap. Don’t jew around with me. We’ll need sleeping bags, canteens, plenty of canvas tents and first aid kits. Don’t expect to get away without casualties. If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. We’ll need Sterno, charcoal grills, paper plates, walkie-talkies. And don’t forget the transistor batteries for the walkie-talkies.”