Heroin Annie (29 page)

The room was very quiet and still, everyone was listening and I had to jerk my attention away to check the audience. When I'd been bored rigid in my law lectures twenty years before I used to count all the people in the room. That's why I'd sit up the back with the widest view I could command. Then I'd split them up into groups: sex, rebels, conformists. It passed the time, and I sometimes did bad sketches of people who took my eye. The old habit re-surfaced and, as Harvey went on, I found myself sketching.

‘At that meeting they agreed to experiment with subliminal advertising and propaganda through TV. A couple of scientists there had been researching it for years.' He paused. ‘They can make you belive things and disbelieve things, they can make you angry or passive.' For the first time he lifted the volume. ‘They can tune you like a TV set, and they're doing it right now.'

One sketch showed two men sitting together near the front. They had an air of forced casualness as if the denim shirt of one and the T-shirt of the other weren't their normal dress. The T-shirt one made a tie-straightening movement twice and the other plucked at the hair which sat on top of his ears. The T-shirt was taking shorthand notes.

My second drawing was of a young woman with blonde hair pulled back into a frizzy pony tail. She was in the front row and stared up at Harvey as if she was trying to count the pores in his nose. I caught the glint of a gold chain around her neck above the creased and stained collar of the shirt that had DO IT printed on it in big red letters on dirty grey.
End of the road
, I thought, but it didn't feel like that, not with her looking at Harvey like that and the other two keeping a record and with him saying what he was saying.

‘I have tapes from that meeting and photographs of the participants.' He held up his hands, palms out. ‘Not here, not any one place for very long. It moves, like the rockets in the silos, or did they decide not to move them? Or did they decide not to decide? Or not to tell you whether they decided? One thing's sure, they won't tell you the truth.'

He had them all now—the blacks and the whites, the students and the faculty. He went on spelling out the details of the nastiness and I surveyed the audience again. Sitting next to Diane Holt were three guys who looked a little like cleaned-up Hell's Angels. They had that same air of being there for the beer, and ready for trouble. One was prematurely bald, the other two were fair, they looked middling-tough. Next to them was a dark Hispanic character I dubbed the Dark Stranger. He wore dark blue clothes, was slim and looked very tough indeed.

‘You can do something', Harvey was saying, ‘you can refuse to read their papers, you can turn off the tube and tell them so at ratings time. You can stop putting classifieds in the papers and you can protest against people who
do
advertise. There are lots of ways to do that. But there's a bigger and better protest you can mount, a protest that can be immediately and massively effective. If you've been convinced by what I've said tonight you'll want to be part of it; and I'm sorry for this, but you're going to have to wait. I'll tell you soon about it, real soon, and I'll tell you in San Francisco where it's going to happen. Be there! Goodnight.'

The muscle moved fast, they were up and blanketing Harvey before anyone else moved. The T-shirt put away his shorthand pad and sat still. I moved as fast as I could but Harvey and Diane Holt and the minders were getting into a Volkswagen van by the time I got out. I couldn't walk up to him and say I was taking his sheila back to Bondi, I couldn't do anything. My car was a mile away. One of the boys handed a bundle of paper down to someone in the crowd and then the van groaned and choked itself into life. As it churned away I saw the two men in disguise follow it in a dark Buick that made hardly any noise at all.

The bundle turned out to be a roughly printed handbill for an ‘event' in San Francisco in three days time. The message was a little vague but the faithful were urged to be at Golden Gate Park at noon. I took one of the sheets back to a motel in Palo Alto where I drank most of a six-pack of Coors and watched ‘Guns of the Magnificent Seven' which had none of the panache of the original.

I started early the next day, driving back to San Francisco, checking into a cheap hotel on Sutter Street and surrendering the Pinto because I knew I'd be spending money and wanted to make it stretch. I bought a .38 Smith & Wesson at a place I'd been told about, where the only credentials they care about have numbers on them and fold easily. Then I bought an imitation leather holder and a star that looked so real I felt like going out and eating a couple of steaks and drinking a lot of beer.

Instead, I went to the Goldwasser Printing Shop, the name of which had been stamped in small letters on the handbill. I found it on my tourist map and walked there—more economising. The print shop was jammed in at the back of a supermarket and accessible only from the lane behind. It had a furtive air, but that might have been because it still used ink and moving machinery instead of fancy photography. As I went up the narrow wodden stairs I could hear the thin sound of a pinched cough from the printshop—that was good. I wasn't feeling at all physical and the morning fog had brought me close to coughing myself.

He was dark, small and stooped from bending over his work. He straightened up as far as he could and peered at me over his half-glasses.

‘Yeah?'

I put the handbill down on the cluttered bench where it became about the millionth piece of paper.

‘So?'

‘I want to know who you did it for.'

‘Who wants to know?'

I let him see the gun in its holster when I got out the shield which I flapped open and shut in front of him. It made a flip-flop sound like thong sandals on cement.

‘Trouble?'

‘Not for you. No dirty words, no pictures. Who was the customer?'

‘You talk funny.'

‘I used to be a tennis player, we pick this talk up from the Aussies.'

He reached for a rag he had hanging out his back pocket, wiped his hands and took a few shuffling steps across to an old grey filing cabinet under the dusty window. The boards creaked under his hundred and ten pounds or so, and I wondered how safe it was to have the heavy old press here in the room—I was doing fine at feeling like an official.

‘I got it here.' He held up a docket and I got further into the role by pulling out my notebook and getting set to write.

‘Give me the name and address.'

‘Enquiry fee ten dollars.'

I looked at him for a minute and then got out a ten; he reached and I let him take it while I grabbed the docket. He said ‘Shit', but the cough started and shut him up. I wrote Pedro Moreno and the address. There was no phone number. I handed the docket back.

‘Thanks.'

‘I think that shield's a fake', he said.

I turned back on my way to the door. ‘Do you care?'

He shook his head. ‘Get you a better one.'

The address was in the district up behind the University of San Francisco; I gave it to the taxi driver and asked him what kind of neighbourhood it was.

‘Bo-ho', he said.

‘Huh?'

‘Kinda slummy but not a jungle. I'll take you right there. Some places I'd just drop you close.'

We went over some hills and I got glimpses of the water before the next dip snatched it away. The street was a mixture of residential—apartments dating I guessed from the 1920's, when they re-built after the earthquake—and shops and blank, anonymous buildings whose functions I couldn't guess at. The number I had was one of the apartment blocks; stucco with grey peeping through the white paint and water-stained from the rusted guttering. I told the cabbie to go on a little.

‘Undercover huh?' he said as he made change.

‘Mafia.'

He struck his forehead lightly. ‘I shoulda known. Spread to South Africa, eh?'

I didn't tip him.

Brave men march up to the front door; men in their forties who think it might be interesting to live into their fifties go around the back first. Along the street and down the lane, and we weren't bo-ho anymore. The back part of the apartment building had been scarred and broken by a fire. Windows were boarded up, woodwork was scorched and charred; and the wooden handrail that had run beside the metal fire escape was gone, leaving the steps naked and dangerous.

I stood behind a car in the lane and looked at the ruin and let the bad feeling creep over me.There was no VW van, but sticking out of an open window on the top floor was a hand. The hand wasn't stuck out to feel for rain, it wasn't doing anything.

I went up the fire escape feeling like a tight rope walker without his pole. I had the gun but you use a gun for ballast rather than balance. The back door to the top apartment was half-open and I listened at it for what seemed like an hour. There was nothing to listen to there and nothing down below where the building had been gutted. Up here there were signs of life of a sort, if you count an ashtray brim full of butts on a window ledge inside.

I pushed open the door and walked down the short passageway on broken boards laid like a walkway on top of charred bearers and between water-streaked walls. In the kitchen the water came in through a hose and went out through a hole. The floor was a sea of wine jugs, newspapers and take-away food containers.

In the room at the back I got my first sight of American flies in any number. They had four bodies to swarm over. Two men lay on their faces along one wall. Big pieces of their backs were missing and their T-shirts were gory ruins. The hand sticking out the window belonged to the Dark Stranger; his dark clothes were darker and glistened where the blood had soaked in. He'd taken two in the body but had still made it to the window. He and the other pair were neat compared with Vin Harvey: he was lying naked on his back in the middle of the room. He'd been worked on with cigarettes and razor blades. One eye was a black ruin. Thin and bearded he looked like something El Greco might have dreamed up on a bad afternoon. All the fingernails were missing on one hand, and I recognised the object nestling in the congealed blood of his left nostril as a front tooth.

I went over to the window for some air; and after I'd got some and was trying for some more, I heard the dark man speak.

‘Muerto', he whispered, or something like that.

I bent down, it seemed impossible that he could still be alive.

‘English', I said, ‘no Spanish'.

‘Ozzie', he said, like in the Nelsons.

‘That's right, where's the girl?'

‘Away. Afortunado.'

‘Harvey told them?'

The movement he made was slight but it looked like a nod. Some blood seeped out of his mouth to join all the blood from everywhere else. The flies buzzed so loudly I had to put my ear down near his mouth.

‘Agua', he whispered. I knew that much and went out to the kitchen to the hose. I brought it in a throwaway cup that should have been thrown away. His lips were nearly black and the glint in his slitted eyes was from pain. I wet the lips but he couldn't swallow.

‘Priest?' I said.

‘Shoot me. I beg you.'

I realised I still had the .38 in my hand, although I could have been holding it by the barrel for all I knew.

‘Where's the girl, where did she go?'

‘Shoot'

‘I can't.'

‘Shoot', he breathed.

‘The girl?' I didn't mean to make it sound like a condition but maybe it did.

‘Dreamland.' He'd echoed Percy Holmes. His voice was just a touch stronger, as if it had synched with the last beat of his pulse. There was no need to shoot him.

The smell of the guns was still faintly in the air, the dead were still warm and the vomit around Vin Harvey's body was fresh. The killing and torturing had happened a few hours ago at most. There was a light dusting of something on the floor near the wall where the two dead men lay. I didn't touch it and haven't seen enough of it to be sure, but it looked like heroin. Insurance. The thing could look like a drug dispute, a little extreme maybe.

There wasn't much else in the place. Every possible hiding place had been ripped apart. Books, notes and manuscripts were torn and there were a couple of piles of ashes. There were student clothes, student food and a little grass. There was a .22 handgun in the kitchen in a drawer that stuck. Vin Harvey had seriously over-matched himself.

Two things worried me: the poster on the wall in the passageway was the same one I'd seen at Stanford, singing the praises of the Santa Cruz boardwalk. The hit men might make something of that. The second thing was the absence of the third muscle man I'd seen at the lecture. That could mean a lot.

I felt like Bony examining the road and car marks in the dimming light. It wasn't hard to read: a big oil stain showed where the van usually stood and fresh oil drops showed where it had stood briefly. These led away over the rubber laid down by a car leaving in a hurry.

No one saw me in the apartment or the lane; if they did they decided not to make it their business. I got a taxi back to my hotel, picked up some money and hired another Pinto. I bought a jug of wine with a narrow, drinkable-from neck and a box of oatmeal cookies and set them up carefully on the passenger seat. I studied the map carefully and set out for Dreamland.

After some false turns around Daly City I picked up the Cabrillo Highway which hugs the coast all the way south to Santa Cruz. Along the way Moss Beach and Half Moon Bay were nice names to roll off the tongue and the road had that hopeful, optimistic feel coast roads have. I drove just above the speed limit and drank wine from time to time. I felt more at home when I passed the greyhound track and had some wine and a cookie on the strength of that. A signpost to Bonny Doon amused me more than it should have, and I laid off the wine.

Santa Cruz was quiet; it was after eleven and everyone was inside watching the news about the poisonings and muggings and the fires in the trailer parks. I drove fast along Pacific Avenue down past the back of the Greyhound depot. The town shops were mostly new and or newly appointed and half of them seemed to sell things made of leather. Beach Street was at the end of Front, past the used car yards and the tyre repair place that had been in business since 1937.