Running Dog (19 page)

“Nice seeing Joanie. You could have done worse than show up for a little home cooking. Where to next?”

“Where to next.”

“All these ramps and levels. You be sure to pick a good one now.”

“I think we ought to just keep going in the same straight line we’ve been going in ever since New York.”

“Have we been going in a straight line?”

“Ever since New York.”

“I’m glad to see you, Slim. Were you afraid I wouldn’t think you’d show up?”

“We’ll have to go through that question point by point some time.”

“It’s a tricky one.”

“Where to next,” he said. “Check the glove compartment.”

“You’re looking kind of tired and glum.”

“There’s a map.”

“Tell you what I don’t like. It’s this little nip in the air. It’s too early and we’re too far south.”

Her hand came away from the glove compartment holding the small dagger that Selvy had taken from the ranger about a day and a half earlier. She waited for him to notice.

“What’s that?” he said.

“Hey, bub.”

“I use it for fingernails. A grooming aid.”

“Is this what they call an Arkansas toothpick?”

“This is smaller.”

“Being we’re in Arkansas.”

“You thought you’d ask.”

“What’s it for?” she said.

“I slash mattresses when I’m depressed.”

They sent him to Marathon Mines. Here he attended classes in coding and electronic monitoring. There was extensive weapons training. He took part in small-scale military exercises. He studied foreign currencies, international banking procedures, essentials of tradecraft. For the first time he heard the term “funding mechanism.”

His instructors conveyed the impression that he was part of the country’s most elite intelligence unit. It was manageably small; it was virtually unknown; there was no drift, no waste, no direct accountability. He heard the words “Radial Matrix.”

A great deal of time was spent studying and discussing the paramilitary structure of rebel groups elsewhere in the world.

They analyzed the setup the Vietcong had used. The part-time village guerrilla. The self-contained three-man cell. And
tieu to dac cong
, the special duty unit considered the most dangerous single element in the VC system. Suicide squads. Special acts of sabotage in ARVN-controlled areas. High-risk grenade assaults. Assassination teams.

They studied the Algerian
moussebelines
, or death commandos, groups undertaking extremely hazardous operations independent of local army control. They discussed the action of the FLN bomb network that operated out of the Casbah, maintaining a state of terror for nearly a year despite its limited numbers.

Selvy thought it curious that intelligence officers of a huge industrial power were ready to adopt the techniques of ill-equipped revolutionaries whose actions, directly or indirectly, were contrary to U.S. interests. The enemy. This curious fact was not discussed or studied. He heard the phrase “internal affairs enforcement.”

Groups attached to various agencies, U.S. and foreign, trained at the Mines. From people belonging to some of these groups, Selvy kept hearing about the exploits of the original
chief training officer—the man, more than any other, responsible for the techniques and procedures currently employed. Earl Mudger. Said to be in business these days somewhere in the East.

“Remember chocolate cigarettes?” Nadine said.

Selvy drove along a two-lane road until they found a restaurant. It was a long room with a state trooper at one table talking to a waitress in sneakers.

“Miss the lights?” Selvy said.

“Gotta be kidding.”

“Times Square.”

“Arm, leg, hip, breast.”

“You think that woman might come over and take our order sometime before sundown.”

“She’s visiting, Glen.”

“What’s he doing?”

“I think he’s sniffing.”

“That’s what I think.”

“I think he’s getting ready to kick dirt.”

“Call her over,” he said.

“What’s the rush?”

“Get back to our straight line.”

When the food came they ate quietly. A small white worm moved over a lettuce leaf in the center of Selvy’s plate. He ate around it.

“I used to work in Sample’s Café in Langtry,” Nadine said. “I think it’s uncanny the straight line goes past my sister, goes past my dad.”

“You want to see him, don’t you?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “He was pretty close to being an all-out bastard, no holds barred. It was only my mom made things bearable. When she died, Joanie took off like a bat. It took me a little longer. I was always slow to notice what was going on. But I see it a little clearer now. The man just isn’t very nice.”

“Lives alone?”

“You ought to see the house. It’s a shack, just about. Half the things in our house my mom made out of old feed sacks. Dish towels, face towels, napkins, even a lot of our clothes. Pillow cases. Feed sack pillow cases. Feed sack dresses and skirts.”

“Recycling.”

“Poverty,” she said.

About half a mile from the main highway they passed an abandoned farm. Selvy eased the car into some weeds. He reached into a carton in the back seat and removed the smaller of his two handguns, the .38. He walked through the front gate to a deep-water well not far from the main house. Holding the gun flat on his upturned palm, he tossed it about two feet into the air and watched it fall into the well. A blunt muffled sound came up to him.

Looking into the setting sun, Nadine squinted at him as he walked back to the car.

“What’s this business about a straight line?” she said.

Back in Washington, he realized something was different. A man named Lomax came to his hotel. There was no mention of PAC/ORD or Containment Services. People he’d worked with didn’t return his calls. He no longer seemed to be on salary.

Lomax took him for a ride in a black limousine. He said that Radial Matrix had severed all relationships with official agencies of the government. Systems planning would still be done out of headquarters in Fairfax County. All clandestine work would issue from this operation and its spin-offs. There was no other headquarters. There was no table of organization. There was no structure, no infrastructure. Only the haziest lines of command.

Lomax repeated what Selvy had learned at the Mines. Rebel movements drew their strength from the fact that their political and their military functions were one and the same.
Here, Lomax told him, business operations and clandestine activity are combined in very much the same way. One doesn’t support the other. One
is
the other.

Selvy traveled in North America, then throughout Europe and parts of Asia. He gathered information on Radial Matrix competitors. He made undercover payments to representatives of prospective Radial Matrix clients. He paid secret commissions to agents of foreign governments. He arranged the disappearance of a trade commissioner on holiday in Greece. He financed the terrorist bombing of a machine-tool plant. Legitimate business expenditures.

Lomax called him back to the States. They needed a reader. Temporary assignment. Selvy’s name had popped out of the computer.

Four days a week he went to a white frame house in Alexandria. A woman named Mrs. Steinmetz gave him private lectures, with slides, on art history. She accompanied him on visits to the National Gallery and the Hirshhorn. She showed him reproductions of sexually explicit art and discussed the esthetics involved.

Two days a week he went to a suite in an office building near Union Station. Here a Mr. Dempster explained House and Senate protocol and procedures. He gave Selvy reading matter on the subject. Eventually he provided a résumé—background, education, past employment, so forth. All of it was verifiable, none of it true.

The head of Percival’s staff was impressed. He arranged an interview with the Senator. The Senator kept returning to the subject of Selvy’s art background. He arranged a luncheon, during which Selvy was hired.

The black limousine turned up again. Lomax told him that until further notice he’d be paid by dead-letter drop. There was a pension scheme in the works.

For a month Selvy did staff work in Percival’s office. The Senator arranged a small dinner at his Georgetown house. Selvy remained after the other guests left. They had a few.
They talked. They had another. The Senator showed him a room with a spinning wheel and an antique desk. Then he led him through the fireplace to the interior of the house next door.

“This is my true life,” he said. “This is what I am.”

They came out of the hills into ranch country, unbroken skyline and spare plains. They traveled slowly, stopping when possible along the main road for food and rest. Some days they went only twenty miles. Selvy didn’t sleep much. The nights were cool.

On a small rise he spotted a curve in the road up ahead. He closed his eyes and counted to seven, easing the steering wheel left at four, when he’d estimated the car would reach the bend.

Richie Armbrister sat naked in the sauna. The man on the bench facing him was also naked. Through the steamy haze, Richie tried to get a good look at his face, without actually staring. The man was plumpish. Early forties, probably. Some gray at the temples. He seemed perfectly relaxed, which indicated he belonged here, or thought he did.

They exchanged a faint smile through the steam.

Richie got up and put his head out the door. In the passenger compartment a party was going on. People danced in the disco area while others sat around eating snacks and drinking. The co-pilot emerged from the flight deck through a beaded curtain and accepted a sandwich from Richie’s bodyguard’s girlfriend.

It was this bodyguard whose eye Richie was trying to catch. Daryl Shimmer. A rangy Negro skittering over the dance floor, all ripples and blind staggers. Richie wondered why this passionate concentration, so typical of his entourage, was forever being applied to ends other than his, Richie’s, peace of mind.

Failing to attract Daryl’s attention, he closed the door,
took a pitcher and poured more water on the heated rocks. Then he sat back down.

The man leaned toward him in the fog.

“We want to talk about a can of film.”

“We being who?” Richie said.

“You and me.”

“I don’t want to do any talking about any can of film.”

“It’s on this plane. I think I speak for both of us.”

“You think you speak for both of us when you say what?”

“That’s it’s on this plane.”

“Nothing you mention is on any plane I know of.”

“Richie, be a grownup.”

“Do we know each other?”

“I’m called Lomax.”

“Why are you here?”

“I could tell you I was supposed to meet another party. Aboard a different plane. There was a mixup. I found myself on the wrong plane. That’s one version.”

“Nobody checked? Nobody asked you?”

“Apparently I’m one of those people who blends well. I’m not noticeable. That’s something I’ve had to learn to live with. Blending well. Failing to stand out.”

“They know I’m here. Daryl and those. In case you’re wondering.”

“There’s another version.”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“You’re fully grown, Richie. You’re not going to get any bigger. It’s only right we treat each other as adults.”

“Yeah, but for right now I have to start getting ready because we’ll be landing soon.”

“Certainly.”

“Landing is bad enough with clothes on.”

“I understand,” Lomax said. “We’ll continue later.”

Richie got dressed and went out to the passenger compartment. He was stopped by a young woman named Pansy. She was Daryl Shimmer’s girlfriend and for weeks she’d been
trying to prevail upon Richie to get Daryl a dune buggy with chromed exhausts for his birthday. Richie was in no mood.

“Look around,” he told her. “All these Vic Tanny imbeciles with their goggles, their male jewelry, their sculptured hair. It’s like helmets they’re wearing. It never moves, short of an earthquake. Get them out of here with their dipping shirtfronts, with their space boots. I want normal for a change. I want ordinary. People with real hair. I want less orgasmics around here. Everybody looks like they’re climaxing. I walk into the warehouse, there’s live bands, people writhing. I get on the plane, they’re still shaking, it never stops. What happened to normal? Where is normal?”

About fifteen minutes later, as the plane approached D-FW, Lomax sat in a swivel chair, belted in, munching on roasted nuts. People were still dancing. He glanced over at Richie Armbrister. With the plane descending toward the runway, Richie had assumed a bracing position. His shoes were off. There was a pillow squeezed between the fastened seatbelt and his stomach. Another pillow lay across his knees. He’d bent his upper body well forward, head resting on this second pillow. His bony hands were clasped behind his knees.

Nadine crawled across the motel bed. Reaching over Selvy’s body, she pointed one end of the cylindrical reading lamp right at his face.

“What are you?”

“Explain,” he said.

“I’m analyzing your features.”

“Racially, you mean. As to type and so forth.”

“What are you?”

“An Indian.”

“You don’t look like an Indian.”

“I’ve trained myself to look different. There’s exercises you can do. Muscular contractions.”

“Those aren’t Indian features, Glen. You’re not Indian stock.”

“You can look different if you train. You start with a good mirror. It’s like anything. Quality tells. You get yourself a quality mirror.”

“If you’re an Indian, that’s not your name, what you’ve been telling people all these years. What’s your real name, your Indian name?”

“Running Dog,” he said.

Marathon Mines