Searches & Seizures (18 page)

“Aren’t you satisfied with my work, Mr. Main?”

“Perfectly.”

Now his face goes redder still, and Main sees ideas squeezing in his brain like turds. “Oyp and Glyp,” he says breathlessly, “you found Oyp and Glyp.”

“Oyp and Glyp are dead.”

“Dead?”

“Or captured. Split up, perhaps. Gone straight, could be. Married with kids. Working in factories or fueling jets on the runway. With the Highway Department, waving red flags to stop the traffic while the road’s being fixed. Or selling door-to-door, or moving
The Watchtower.
Hired hands, maybe, or taken up cooking. In Dobb’s House management, Dairy Queen. Studying the motel trade.”

“You have information?”

“Who has information? Nah, they’re dead.”

“Have you given up on them, sir?”

“The bailbondsman’s statute of limitations, Mr. Crainpool, the Phoenician’s sanctuary, Main’s pardon—they have it all.”

“Gee.”

“That surprise you?”

“I thought you’d found them, or even just one of them.”

“Never find ’em. They’re vanished. Cut my losses like a tailor. God told me that in a vision.”

“Yes, sir. Good advice.”

“What, that? That’s how He answers all prayer.”

“Oh,” Crainpool says. “That lawyer called, Avila. He told me to tell you that Mr. Withers is back and that he’ll appear as scheduled.”

“Anything else?”

“Just before I closed up, the desk sergeant from the Fourth District called in with some leads about the arraignments. I tried to reach you at home.”

“Something interesting?”

“Well, they’ve picked up a suspect for that bank robbery. They think they have enough evidence to hold him. I left a message with your answering service and asked the girl to call before you left in the morning.”

“All right.”

“Would you like some coffee, sir? There’s only the hot plate, and it’s just instant, but I could make some if you’d like.”

“You’re losing the thread.”

“Sir?”

“You’re losing the thread. Of the conversation. I make this extraordinary late-night visit and an absolutely unique allusion to your past to which you duly react, and now you’re losing the thread of the conversation. You’re not out of the woods yet, you know, Mr. Crainpool.”

“I know that, sir,” he says shyly.

“That’s better. Tell me, Crainpool, did you blush like that when you beat up your wife and put her in hospital?”

“I didn’t have the opportunity to study myself, sir.”

“No, of course you didn’t. Did you have the opportunity when you heard three weeks later, and you were already out on my bond, that there was a fire in her ward and that she’d burned to death?”

“Mr. Main,” Crainpool says, “that was sixteen years ago. You spoke of the statute of limitations.”

“Certainly. And you’ll be able to take whatever advantage of it you can once I turn you over to the police. Be sure to mention it to them. Tell your lawyer.”

“You’re turning me in? Jesus, Phoenician, that was sixteen years ago that happened. I’ve been your goddamn slave
eleven
years. You’re turning me in?”

“Which among us craps jellybeans, Mr. Crainpool?”

“Sixteen years and you’re turning me in?”

“No, lad, I’m killing you. I’m going to kill you.”

“The statute of—”

“That’s between you and the State of Ohio. We have a contract.” He pats his breast pocket. “Nothing about any old statute of limitations in this. You jumped my bail. Do I have to read it to you? Good God, man, you’ve worked for me eleven years. You’ve seen thousands of these contracts, you have the relevant clauses by heart, all that stuff about consenting to the application of such force as may be necessary to effect your return.”

Crainpool jumps up from the bed. “Let’s go,” he says crisply and smiles. “
I consent!
” He begins to laugh. “I consent, I consent. Draw your gun and stick it in my ear, I consent!”

The Phoenician studies him. “You’re putting up an even bigger struggle than I anticipated. Best sit back down, son. Sit down, honey.”

“But I
consent,
” Crainpool whines.

“My life should retain credibility,” the Phoenician says.

“Listen, Mr. Main,” the man pleads, “let me off.”

“Hush, Crainpool.” He looks at his man. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

“What I’m
thinking?
I’m scared stiff.”

“Please,” Main says reassuringly, “be calm, take time. Nothing will happen yet. What are you thinking?”

The frightened man begins to speak, but hesitates. “Yes?” Main coaches.

“That our arrangement wasn’t such a bad one,” Crainpool says finally.

The Phoenician sighs, disappointed. “You’re trivial, you’re a trivial man,” he says. “Me too. Well-a-day, Crainpool, me too. All I can think to do right now is satisfy you. I put myself in your shoes and I think, ‘He’s mad, he won’t do it, he’ll never get away with it.’ I’d want scenario, demand explanation like a last cigarette, civilized denouement like a detective’s professional courtesy in the drawing room and even the murderer’s glass filled. Do you feel any of that?”

“I do. Yes. A little. I do.”

Main looks at Crainpool suspiciously. “I hope you do. There are conventions, ceremonies. The mechanics are explained but never the mysteries. Foh. Look at me. I’m a parade. At bottom I’ve a flatfoot’s heart:
This is how I broke the case.
You need to know anything like that?”

“Sure,” Crainpool says.

“You’re not just stalling for time, are you?”

“Not entirely.”

“Because to tell the truth I haven’t made my mind up yet. Not absolutely. I’m more likely to kill you than not, but nothing’s been finalized.”

“How’d you break the case, sir?”

“
Don’t patronize me, you son of a bitch!
”

“Take it easy.”

The Phoenician stands. “You won’t rush me, will you?”

“No.”

“You won’t fling the pillows at me?”

“I’m wanted, I’m a wanted man. You didn’t break in. The clerk called and I agreed to see you.”

“That’s right. Look, kid, stall. Stall for time, don’t make sudden moves.”

“All right,” Crainpool says kindly, “how do you think you can get away with a thing like this?”

“That’s it, that’s the way. Good,” the Phoenician says, “good.”

And he begins to tell him, feeding him detail, inventing his plausible arrangements as he goes along, reassuring himself as he annihilates loophole, shutting off Crainpool’s harbors and posting guards at his roadblocks, at his gangways and airline check-in counters, watching Crainpool’s trains. And it is all true, even if it is only a sort of foreign language he has learned to speak, the flashy grammar of body contact, a shoptalk of which he is weary because no one has yet bested him at it, least of all this dim Crainpool. And he sees that the man takes it all in, held, not just stalling but actually
interested,
a disciple to his own destroyer.
Puppy!
The Phoenician punishes him with strategy, game plan, pressing Crainpool’s nose to the blackboard where the y’s and x’s of opposition spray chalk in Crainpool’s spread, admiring nostrils. It’s what has held him all these years, kept him in town while the Phoenician was off rounding up jumpers; not only what kept him when Main wasn’t looking, but what brought him to the office earlier than usual at such times, and what held him there later, after hours, waiting for a phone call that would check up on him, wanting to hear even if only at long distance what normally he got in person, feeding on comeuppance, humiliation, wisecrack, connoisseur of the Phoenician’s abuse. I am his life’s work, the Phoenician thinks. I have rehabilitated him. He has gone straight man.

So he pours it on, showers Crainpool with spurious inevitability, moves him to object only to shut him off at the pass.

“Such force as may be necessary to effect my
return,
” Crainpool says triumphantly.

“Asshole. I’ll return you. You’re a fucking deposit bottle.”

“Suppose I shout? Suppose I shout, ‘Don’t shoot, Mr. Main, I surrender’?”

“You fucked up fucking fuck.
I
shout louder. ‘Call the police,’ I shout, ‘Crainpool’s got my gun.’ ”

“Shmuck. What
about
the police? Why didn’t you bring them to arrest me?”

“First principles. Shmuck yourself, I’m a bondsman. My reputation depends upon doing my own enforcing.”

“You
harbored
me. Eleven years you
harbored
me.”

“I harbored somebody who called himself Crainpool. In the five years it took me to catch up with you, you’d aged beyond recognition. You’d lost hair. You were seventy-five pounds lighter than when you jumped my bond. Your mama wouldn’t have known you.”

“The perfect crime,” Crainpool says appreciatively.

“You’re in season. It isn’t even crime.”

The man nods; he is satisfied that it can be done. Probably he’d never doubted it. But he still doesn’t understand why. “I was your slave,” he says.

“I paid top dollar. You got annual raises, paid vacations, fringe benefits. The first bondsman’s clerk in the State of Ohio with his own retirement plan.”

“I don’t want to die,” Crainpool says. “My God, Mr. Main, why would you do this?”

“Because,” he says quietly, “you’re the only man in the world I’m allowed to kill.” He has drawn his gun.

Crainpool begins to whimper, and the Phoenician is moved. He owes this forlorn man more than the fringe benefit of his theatrics. “How,” he asks, “can there be indifference? How can there be suicides? Why are there old men? Help me, Crainpool. Why is life so lovely? The night sweeter than the day and the day more joyous than the night? Who alive can grieve? How dare there be good weather, seasons when the world is at room temperature? Where are my muscles, my smooth skin? Why doesn’t desire die? Why is it that it’s the one thing which remains intact, that has some fucking strangle hold on immortality? Who sabotaged us and gave our will insomnia? Why am I more interested in others than others are interested in me? What am I to make of their scents, their firm bodies and their healthy hair? Of the snatches of conversation I overhear, the endearments passed like bread? Who wired this tension in me between ego and detachment? Why do I have this curiosity like a game leg? How can I cross-examine the universe when it jumps my bond?”

He begins to feel a little of what he has been saying. Crainpool is alive too, and his determination to kill him momentarily wavers. He sees it as a stunt, one more thing to impress this man who has lived eleven years with and for such impressions and who would, in the instant he squeezed the trigger (first the wild warning shot overhead or out the window to establish alibi—Crainpool would understand, having lived so long in ringside connection to technique, a first-nighter in aisle and orchestra to the Phoenician’s thousand performances, would perhaps even roar “Author, author. Bravo, bravo” to his own death—to make the point that in this small room, in these close quarters, he could not possibly have missed his man and had given him a chance to come quietly), probably smile, appreciation riding his lips like dessert, recognition sparking campfires in his eyes.

“Look at me, Mr. Crainpool. I take all the papers. I. F. Stone wrote me newsletters. I have
Scientific American. The Journal of the American Medical Association
is on the floor by my bed.
National Geographic
is in the toilet,
American Heritage
next to the toaster. Time-Life gives me the prepublication discount.
Au courant
I am as a deb with my nose for trend and influence and my insider’s thousand knowledges. What does it mean? Everything I don’t know and will never know leans on me like a mountain range. It creams me, Crainpool. It potches my brains and rattles my teeth.”

“You, Mr. Main? You’re a smart man. I wish I had a tenth your brains.”

“Yeah. Same here. I wish I had a tenth yours—anyone’s, everyone’s. I’d fatten on your memory and experience like a starver, suck at your inputs and engrams as at sweet fruit. What’s the future going to be like, Mr. Crainpool? What will people whistle a hundred years from now? What snatch of song will run through the beautician’s head as she leans forward over a customer’s hair? Tell me and I’ll let you go. What will the priorities be? What ruins will yet be uncovered, what treasures from what sunk ships will rise from which seas? What cities will be built and destroyed and uncovered again? Whose teeth will come up in the earthquake and go in the case?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Me too.
Nothing.
Me too. The ocean beds are squeezing together, did you know that? They tow the continents like tugboats. Asia will be a day’s hike from Australia, and a man standing in Italy will cast a shadow in Yugoslavia. Nations shall be resolved like a jigsaw, Mr. Crainpool, and what we call land will one day form a perfect circle, a globe within a globe that sits on the oceans like a skullcap. What a seashore that will be! Like a wet nimbus, Crainpool! Who’ll drive the Golden Spike that first day? What language will he speak?”