Night & Demons (10 page)

Smokie Joe turned. “You sell a customer what no one will give him,” he said quietly.
“
I think a tour will do better than any words I could use to explain. Come on, let’s take a ride down to Third Street.”

“At three in the afternoon?”

Joe cocked a thin line of eyebrow.
“
At ten in the morning, Big Tom. Even bankers have started staying open the hours customers want—and we’re selling what they can’t get free, remember?”

The drive was short and without further discussion. Big Tom’s headquarters were in the old industrial section, near the railroad station and the car shops. Angelo had set up in a huge frame house, a Victorian leftover on the outskirts of the business district. The previous owner had once refused to sell, Mullens remembered, preferring to hold the property against future rezoning to commercial or apartment use. Until now, Big Tom had not wondered why the old fellow had decided to sell to Angelo.

Smokie Joe swung the car through the alley entrance to the fenced courtyard behind the house. There were already three cars within: a Buick, a Chrysler, and a rusted gray Nash. “The staff doesn’t park here,” Joe said. “Of course the girls don’t leave at all.”

The door opened before either of the visitors rang. Angelo gave Smokie Joe a brief nod that could have been either recognition or obeisance.
“
Good you could come, Mr. Mullens,” he said.”I think you’ll be impressed by our operation—your operation, that is.”

Within, the house appeared to have been little modified from its original design. Down the rear stairs came a pair of laughing men, a huge black with boots, a loincloth, and a whip; and a middle-aged white man who used the brim of his hat to shield his face when he saw Big Tom. Mullens had already recognized Judge Firbairn.

Firbairn scurried out the door. The black nodded to Angelo, eyed Joe and Mullens with mild interest before he swaggered down the front hall and into a room to the side. Something had dripped from his quirt onto Big Tom’s wrist. It seemed to be blood.

“That’s Prince Rupert,” Angelo volunteered. “Some of our customers prefer watching to doing. Rupert does real nice for them. And we use him for other things, too, of course.”

“Why does he pad his crotch that way?” Big Tom asked, disgusted but unwilling to admit it.

“It’s not padded,” Smokie Joe cut in, heading his employer down the high-ceilinged hall. “He has lymphogranuloma, and the scarring in his case has led to elephantiasis.”

“Jesus God!” Mullens grunted. “I don’t know how you could pay a woman enough for that.”

“We couldn’t,” agreed Angelo with a smile. He unlocked the first doorway to the left. “Not money, at least. All the girls are strung out. So long as they get their four jolts a day, they don’t care—they don’t even
know—
who does what to them.”

He threw open the door. Big Tom gagged as he took in the bed, the extensive props, and the mewling woman who lay in the midst of them. He pulled the door closed himself. “She’s only eighteen!” he said.

Angelo spread his palms. “They age quicker than you’d think,” he replied. “Then we got to sell them south or to Asia.”

“They come to us, Big Tom,” said Smokie Joe. His eyes were as intense as diamond needles. “Remember that. Everyone of them asks, uses the words, for everything that’s done to her. If they change their minds later, that’s too bad.”

Mullens shook nausea from his mind.
“
How in Hell are you running this? No fix on earth would cover up a deal like—” He waved his hands to save words he did not want to speak.

“Think Judge Firbairn would sign a search warrant for this place?” Smokie Joe gibed.

“There’s other judges in the district. They haven’t all been here.”

“You’d be surprised,” said Angelo. “And even some who don’t . . .”

His voice trailed off but Smokie Joe had already opened the door of a converted broom closet and unlocked a drawer of the filing cabinet within. “Suppose you were about to launch a push against—well, you’d call them ‘the forces of crime and decay’ when you held your press conferences, I suppose. Then your daughter got drunk enough to take a dare from some girlfriends—girls she’d grown up with, though maybe if you’d paid more attention you wouldn’t have cared for some of the company they’d been keeping recently. Took a dare and got in a little deeper than she expected.

“So the next morning,” Smokie Joe continued, snaking out a packet of photographs, “a messenger brings you a roll of Super-8 movie film. What do you do then, Mayor Lawrence?”

Big Tom Mullens riffed through the photographs. “Jesus Christ, you
did
get Betty Jane Lawrence! Jesus Christ! She goes to school with my son, he’s
dated
her!”

“Still think Prince Rupert wears padding?” Angelo asked.

“That’s—God, I want to puke,” Big Tom groaned, handing the stills back to his smiling lieutenant. “His cock, it looks like it’s
rotting.”

“Well, LGV is an incurable disease, you know,” Smokie Joe agreed. “Not so very bad for a while, if you have the personality Prince Rupert does. And if you have an employer who gives you some fringe benefits.

“Want to see more?” he asked, waving at the scores of file folders. When Big Tom shook his head sickly, Joe slammed the drawer and continued, “Between payoffs and this kind of pressure, Angelo here isn’t in any danger. Nick’s operation is a little different, though, since the heat on him is mostly state and we don’t have the same kind of locks on that.”

“What’s the matter?” Big Tom asked, turning toward the outside door as if it were the gate of his prison. “Couldn’t you get a picture of the whole Drug Enforcement Division having a circle jerk?”

“Oh, anything is possible,” Smokie Joe said agreeably, following the big racketeer down the hall. “We’ll have better luck if we give the state boys something to go after besides us, though. Shall Nick arrange a little diversion for them, Big Tom?”

“Arrange whatever you want,” Mullens said. “I’m not sure I give a goddamn about anything. Except that I don’t want to see you any more today, and I don’t want to see Angelo
ever.”

He slammed the door behind him, within inches of Smokie Joe’s smile. From the front of the house came a scream, then another and another in rhythmic pulses. The smile grew broader.

Big Tom Mullens slapped folded newspaper down in front of Smokie Joe who waited for him with a stack of account books. “I’m getting goddam sick and tired of people playing goddamn games with me,” he snarled. “I get a call from Shiloh Academy saying Danny hasn’t showed up for classes in a month and a half. I get here and Nick hands me this paper, asking how I like the job he did for me.
What
job?”

Joe calmly unfolded the paper.
“
It’s not unusual for boys your son’s age to drop out of school, you know,” he said.

“I’m not spending eight fucking grand a year for that kid to drop out!” Big Tom said.
“
He’s getting chances I never had to really make it by going straight, mixing with all the kids whose folks had money without having to scramble for it. If Danny thinks he’s going to throw that away, I’ll blow his fucking head off!”

“The money doesn’t matter, Big Tom,” said Smokie Joe. “You’ve got more money now than you could have dreamed of a year ago.” He smoothed the front page and rotated it back to Mullens. “Nick probably means the headline,” he said.

Big Tom mimed the words with his lips, then read aloud, “ ‘LSD Poisons Bloomington Reservoir; Hippie Terror-Plot Slays Scores; City Paralyzed.’ What the Hell?”

“It’s the diversion you told us to make,” Smokie Joe explained with a smile. “Acid goes through the treatment plant without being filtered out. We backed it up with a letter to the
Daily News
saying that unless marijuana was legalized and the army was disbanded in three days, we’d do the same to every other city in the country. So now the drug boys—and just about everybody else—are not only in Bloomington and out of our hair, they’ve just about dropped hard drugs statewide to hassle hippies about pot. Slick, isn’t it?”

Big Tom’s mouth was open but no sounds were coming from it. His palms were flat on the table to support his weight, but his forearms were trembling.

The door opened. Big Tom spun around.
“
Danny!” he cried. Then, “Hey, what in Hell happened to you?”

The boy wore a greasy sport coat and a pair of coordinated slacks from which most of the right cuff had been torn. While his father had gone to flesh in the past year, Danny was now almost as cadaverous as Angelo. He looked down at himself in mild surprise. “Hadn’t paid much attention to how I look,” he said. “Not since I went to the doctor.” His hand clenched a sheet of slick paper which he thrust at his father. “Does this mean anything to you?” he demanded.

Big Tom scowled at the sheet, a page torn from a medical text. “I can’t even read this crap,” he said. “No, it don’t mean anything.”

“Then maybe this does.”
The tone would have snapped Big Tom’s head around even if the movement of Danny’s hand from beneath his coat had not. Smokie Joe was watching the boy with an expression of bored resignation, that remained unchanged at the sight of a .45 automatic wavering in the thin fist.

“The men have business to take care of, boy,” Smokie Joe drawled. His fingers drummed absently among the account books. “Why don’t you take your little play toy out and close the door behind you?”

“You
bastard,”
the boy said, swinging the pistol full on the slim, seated figure. “You’re the real cause, aren’t you? I ought to use this on you.”

“Sure, kid,” Smokie Joe agreed, tilting his chair back a little, “but you don’t have the guts. You probably don’t even have the guts to use it on yourself.”

“Don’t I?” Danny asked. He looked at the baffled rage in his father’s eyes, then back to Smokie Joe’s cold scorn. The pistol seemed to socket itself in his right ear of its own volition.

“Wait, Danny!” Big Tom cried. He threw his hands out as the gun blasted. The windows shuddered. Danny’s eyeballs bulged and the ruin of his head squished sideways with the shot before his body slumped to the floor.

Big Tom more stumbled than knelt beside his son. Smokie Joe scooped up the torn page from where it had fallen. “Sure,” he said, “he probably tried curing it himself with what his roommate had leftover from a dose of clap last year. When the doctor told him what he had and what his chances were of getting rid of it now, Danny wouldn’t want to believe him—who would?—and picked up a book to check it out.
‘Lymphogranuloma venereum
is a disease of viral origin, usually transmitted by sexual intercourse.’ Well, the only important thing about LGV is that it’s like freckles—it won’t kill you, but you’ll carry it till you die.”

Mullens was squeezing his son’s flaccid hands. “Normally just blacks get it,” Smokie Joe went on. He squatted beside the wax-faced racketeer. “That isn’t . . . shall we say, a law of God? Give her a chance and a white girl can catch it. And given a chance, she can pass it on to . . . .” Joe’s hand reached past Mullens to unhook Danny’s belt.
“
Funny thing—you wouldn’t have expected Betty Jane to have been interested in a man for a
long
time after Prince Rupert was done with her. Maybe she was too stoned to care, or maybe Danny-boy used a pretty—direct—approach. There’s no real harm done by screwing a girl, is there?” He jerked down Danny’s slacks.

The boy wore no underpants. His penis was distorted by three knotted sores slimed with yellow pus.

Big Tom choked and staggered upright. His right hand had wrapped itself around the butt of the automatic. Smokie Joe raised an eyebrow at it. “That’s a mistake, Big Tom. Don’t you hear that siren? When the police arrive, they’re going to think you shot your own son. Better let me take care of it—just tell me to and I’ll fix it so you won’t be bothered. You don’t care
how
I take care of it, do you?” He stretched out his hand toward the pistol.

“I’ll see you in Hell first!” Big Tom grated.

“Sure, Big Tom,” said Smokie Joe. “If that’s how you want it.”

Big Tom crashed out the six shots still in the pistol’s magazine. Amid the muzzle blasts rolled the peals of Smokie Joe’s Satanic laughter.

AWAKENING

Many of the SF writers of the 1930s and ’40s were fascinated by Charles Fort’s collections of unexplained phenomena. My friend Manly Wade Wellman told me that F. Orlin Tremaine, the editor of
Astounding
from 1933 till John W. Campbell took over at the end of 1938, had bought the rights to Fort’s collection
Lo!
to mine for story ideas. I’m not sure that’s true, but Tremaine certainly did serialize the book. I didn’t see a pulp magazine until one of my high school teachers loaned me a couple issues of
Weird Tales,
but as a teenager I read lots of SF from the period in anthologies.

Fort’s technique was to go through scientific journals and note oddities which he then retailed in four volumes beginning with
The Book of the Damned
. He threw out a number of speculations on what caused the data he reported: “I think we’re property,’’ or “Perhaps somebody is collecting Ambroses,’’ which are familiar even to people who don’t have the faintest notion of where the phrases come from. Personally, I’m convinced that Fort was joking—that is, that he believed the items were as true as anything else you’d find reported in, say,
Nature,
but that he understood the causes of the phenomena he reported were unknowable on the available data.

Then again, maybe he was a humorless wacko who believed in wild conspiracies. Goodness knows, a lot of the people who’ve followed in his footsteps fit that category.

SF stories led me to Charles Fort, but then I read him for his own sake. As for what I myself believe: I believe that the world is a very strange place, certainly stranger than I can explain.

I haven’t used much Fortean material in my fiction because I find attempting to explain the phenomena leads to very silly results. This is as true of fiction like Donald Wandrei’s “Something from Above” as it is of Philip Klass’ “scientific” explanations of all UFOs as plasma effects (a notion that plasma physicists find ludicrous). Once in a while I tried, though. “Awakening” is an example.