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Authors: Gregory Gibson

Tags: #Crime, #General, #Mystery & Detective, #Hard-Boiled, #Fiction

BOOK: The Old Turk's Load
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In the course of her dealings with Gallagher and his small band of activists (whom he called, in hip Latin American style, the
foco
), Irene began to engage Gloria’s native intelligence. Soon she had her younger friend questioning the entire scene.Was it all about Vietnam? Okay, let’s get out of there. But what happens then? Do we really want to “bring the war home”? Did Gloria really want murder in the streets? Had she ever killed anyone? Had she ever actually thought about it? Imagined the feel of hot blood on her hands? Had she ever wondered where Gallagher’s rabble rousing would end? Ever stopped to consider that there might be different

22
GREGORY GIBSON

ways to introduce change into a hidebound system? And what
was
the system? Surely more than a bunch of white old farts— Johnson, McNamara, Hoover. What was its true nature? How had it ingrained itself so deeply?

As an inevitable consequence of this line of inquiry, Gloria began also to question her relationship with Kevin Gallagher. She’d naively assumed that she’d seduced him into granting her access to a secret and exciting world. But now she was beginning to realize that the only thing Kevin ever really did was run head trips on the people in the
foco
about who was the most committed revolutionary. It was all about power with him, which was all that the sex was, too. He was as big a bully as any of her father’s thugs—worse, in fact. At least some of them supported families.

She’d already run her personal finances to the limit, posting bail for protesters and helping Irene research the cases of the most important political prisoners, and had felt fine doing it—a part of something larger than herself. But Kevin kept insisting on the need for funds, which forced her to have to keep explaining, in front of the others, that her own access to family capital was years away. It was humiliating. That was when she began to feel the first tug of a strange sense that grew stronger over the months.

There’d been many group discussions about money. Gallagher was all for stealing what they could from Mundi Enterprises. Gloria pointed out that the assets of her father’s company consisted primarily of slums in Newark, New Jersey, which would be difficult to steal. So he switched tacks and went on a toot about kidnapping for ransom, an approved revolutionary tactic in Latin America and one much discussed of late in radical circles. He kept pressing her, digging for information about her father as well as certain company employees. When she told him that Julius Roth was the one man the company couldn’t do without, Kevin got excited.They’d abduct Roth, he announced, and hold him at a remote spot. Maybe they’d kill him, maybe not. Gloria informed Gallagher that Julius Roth would be much more likely to kill
him,
and when Kevin actually got a look at the formidable Roth the idea quickly evaporated.

However, in the course of doing groundwork for a possible heist at Mundi Enterprises, Gloria found out about Daddy’s windfall. This brought matters into focus.

Roth had spoken of the old Turk’s load only generally, as an unanticipated situation over in Newark with huge potential and much risk. Her subsequent questioning of Seamster convinced her that Mundi Enterprises was holding something big. When he let it slip to her that the Mafia was posing a problem, Gloria figured it had to be drugs—what else would’ve belonged to the mob? Money or jewelry, maybe, but something that easy to convert would be gone already. Pot and acid weren’t valuable enough.That left heroin or pills or coke. The bummer was that, full of pride at her own brilliance, she’d bragged about the Newark score to Kevin.

Now she was almost at the end of the long process of realizing how badly she’d been fooled by his square shoulders and intense eyes. He’d tricked her in some fundamental way. Used her, when all along she thought she was using him. Gloria was just beginning to understand how angry that made her. But it wasn’t until she remembered the lioness that she understood the feeling that had been building inside her all these months. It wasn’t anger. It was shame.

Kevin climbed off and went to lick himself. Gloria regarded him with intense distaste. Irene was getting inside her head.
The Situation with Kelly
N

orbert was a keen student of human nature. He knew it wasn’t enlightenment that made Kelly the way he was. Although he sometimes took on the amnesia of the habitual drunkard, Kelly’s condition, in fact, predated his alcohol habit. His father, a journeyman welterweight called Irish Johnny Kelly, had prepared for his only child’s birth by getting falling-down drunk. When the doctor handed over his newborn son, Johnny dropped him. Norbert knew the family, and that much was a matter of record. For the rest, he had developed a theory.

Norbert considered it likely that, after sliding headfirst through his father’s slack grasp, the infant Kelly landed on the part of the brain that believes it knows what’s going on and is always talking, talking, trying to get control of things—the part that most people listen to when they think they’re thinking.This normally dominant chatter center could have been damaged by the fall, so the other, quieter part of the brain that is constantly in communication with the rest of the body—guiding it down the street, recording details it does not see, causing the hair on the back of its neck to rise for no apparent reason, flinching at a muzzle flash—that part could have assumed the functions of the conscious mind. This, in Norbert’s estimation, might explain why Kelly spent so much time in the state of concentrated attention that precedes thought and so little in thought itself.

Certainly helpful in escaping the knives of enraged transvestite hookers (the story related in detail to Norbert over Bloody Marys), but of little use when dealing in any nonphysical way with those of his own kind. For Kelly, there were moments when the human universe was a distant galaxy.

What fascinated Norbert was how his friend had compensated. Shunned as a young man for his strangeness and ignored by both his parents, Kelly found solace and companionship in his father’s pulp magazines and trashy novels. From Hammett he’d learned to present himself with unflinching directness. Chandler taught him how to crack wise while doing so. Cain presented sex as a sadomasochistic rite preferably enacted with distant relatives in abandoned churches. Spillane didn’t teach him much of anything but gave him an ideal of womanhood, the beat-up dame. Further study of these masters provided Kelly with a store of scenarios—the jealous husband, the rebellious son, the too-greedy boss, the crooked official, the weak man brought down by his own vices—a thin array of archetypes for almost any human situation. A few empty years— echoing his playground isolation—on the police force in Bayonne had taught him how to maintain and operate a sidearm and keep his shoes shined. By then he’d grown into a light heavyweight version of Irish Johnny in his prime—cat-quick and possessed of a thunderous right. His education was complete.

The results, to Norbert’s continual surprise, were viable. Kelly was a private detective by trade and had managed for more than a decade—by means of his unthinking courage, physical genius, and limited repertoire of canned responses—not to starve.

This raised an interesting possibility: Could it be that Kelly succeeded because most people’s problems truly did conform to a few hoary stereotypes? If the husband was off the reservation, the official corrupted by his power, the wife murderously at the end of her rope, Kelly knew exactly what to say and do, chapter and verse. Was it possible that people, in all their twisted, self-absorbed dramas, were no more complicated than that?

Norbert respected Kelly—no, loved him—because he had cobbled a persona out of ill-fitting parts and, through his own indefatigable will, was making the ramshackle contraption work. If only, he mused, trundling more shellfish from the cooler, the man weren’t so dense. If only he didn’t act like such a jerk.

But even that had its good side. No one
ever
overestimated him. And, like the blade of Norbert’s shucking knife, the leading edge of Kelly’s physical intensity had no thickness. It slid again and again through the tightest interstices of tough situations, drawing the rest of him with it.

The Mailman’s Best Friend
T

he Mailman had a croaker named Dr. Paulson who lived in a big Victorian house on Middle Street, a couple of blocks down from Faye and Schultzie’s. His office was in the front room and if you had an appointment in the late afternoon you could smell his wife cooking garlicky dinner in the kitchen to the rear.

Dr. Paulson’s chief concern as a physician was sodium intake. The Mailman would sit quietly in the comforting glow of the old shellacked wainscoting and Dr. Paulson would ask him how his throat was feeling. The Mailman would indicate that it hurt. Dr. Paulson would listen to his heart and tell him he was using too much salt.Then he’d write a scrip for two weeks’worth of morphine pills or Eukodol.The Mailman would come back five days later and ask for something else—Dilaudid, maybe—and Dr. Paulson would listen to his heart and advise against salt, writing the prescription without a thought. He made his living from customers like the Mailman, and by giving state-mandated physicals to bus and trash truck drivers in the employ of Schultz Brothers. The post office, under federal jurisdiction, had their own more competent doc a few towns away. He was the one who’d discovered the cancer. But after a while the Mailman figured things out and got transferred to the care of his local physician, the senile stethoscopist, Oliver Paulson, MD. Since he filled the prescriptions by staggering them among a half-dozen area pharmacies, everything looked on the up-and-up.

Weekdays, the Mailman tried to keep to maintenance doses. But on Friday and Saturday nights he’d load up and go on his downtown ramble, working selected bars east along Main Street and returning westward via other waterfront establishments. This was as close as he ever got to recalling the pleasures of his old postal route—the recollection being always perfect, whereas the actual experience had often been marred by aggressive dogs, surly humans, the persistent pressure of the spiderweb. There weren’t many mutts on the route of his ramble and, oddly, once he got the operation, they started liking him. Maybe it was the smell of meat.

The Mailman had a difficult time venturing on the streets sober. People gawked. At the bank or in the grocery store, it was a constant, hideous game of charades. When he was forced to speak, tellers cringed, children burst into tears. The doctors had tried to get him to use one of those gizmos you hold up against your throat, but there was so much scar tissue, he never found the sweet spot that made the gurgles resonate into speech.

Friday nights he’d quadruple up on whatever med was in supply, crush it in a soup spoon, mix it with Karo syrup, and swill it down with little gulplets of flat beer. Then he’d float from bar to bar, insulated, stoned, and silent, but
with
those around him in his drugged-up mystical way, drinking slow lubricating beers, empathizing, telepathing, reading entire life stories in new faces, the happenings of past weeks or months in the ones known to him.

THE OLD TURK’S LOAD
29

Few conversations interrupted his reverie, but occasionally there’d be adventures. One Friday, just after sunset down at the Main Deck, a rackety bar built out over the water, a guy in full umpire regalia propositioned him on behalf of three not-bad-looking whores standing around the cigarette machine. The ump had just finished working a Little League game down at Boudreau Field but didn’t bother to explain why he hadn’t changed out of his dark pants and jacket and was still wearing his chest protector. Maybe he was expecting rough trade, or thought the outfit would be helpful in Friday night conflict resolution. Twenty bucks got the Mailman a blow job from June in the man’s car ’round the side of the building. June was skinny, with a lean long face, and he came and came into it, in love at that ecstatic moment with her, his drugs, the bar, and the improbable ump.

Often there were more drugs—Sopors, to be taken carefully with beers, or rolls of downers imported, it was said, from Mexico, to be taken even more carefully—to lay him back into a deep velvety cushion of the evening, making everything a movie as flawless as his collection of recollections. More often it was dex and bennies—pills crushed and popped like Lik-m-aid. Coke was a high-end rarity in the bars he frequented, though once he got into some with a gracious fisherman friend at Kellehers. Couldn’t snort it, of course, but did his gums sore with it.Then danced all night to Captain Jack Melquiez’s squeeze box, winding up with a chubby, good-humored girl named Audrey who didn’t mind doing all the talking and gave him a good fucking in her place over the Portuguese restaurant across from Pavilion Beach. She was a nurse at Addison Gilbert and he didn’t scare her at all.

When the sun came up he left her asleep and walked off the last of the coke around the neighborhood called the Fort, then down to Fisherman’s Wharf where he sat under the docks, bathed in the luminous yellow-green of morning sun low off the water of the inner harbor, remembering the fresh vernal odor of the incoming tide, and imagining the cunt smell she’d left on the fingers of his right hand even though he couldn’t really smell it, going back for just one more whiff again and again, as if it were the most exotic perfume or the ultimate no-fault cocaine. He thought he’d see her again after that, but she disappeared. Somebody told him she took a job in San Diego.

At first his rambles were an idyll, but gradually the weekends stretched from Thursdays to Sundays.The drugs did something else, too. He didn’t have words for it, but the image was of his walkingaround body being offset from the center of himself.The drugs made him feel good when he didn’t feel good, but then, sober, there were moments when he should’ve felt good and felt nothing. He was functional, showing up at the Historical Society four days a week, yet many other symptoms lurked.

The waterfront junkies could’ve recited them rote—the not shitting for a week, or the yawning gulf of terrible sickness he fell into the time Dr. Paulson took a vacation. With all his might the Mailman resisted, ignored, denied. The junkies—like tentacles of the old Turk’s load—understood it was just a matter of time. Not that they gave a damn.

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