Alien Nation #6 - Passing Fancy (19 page)

“Here you go, Detective Sikes—
uurrrrrrppp!
—George.”

They signed for the radio-controlled devices and he handed the case over to Matt, who slung its strap over his shoulder.

Being in charge of nonweapon material was a new responsibility for Albert, one that he shared with several khaki officers, and he took the job seriously, very much a stickler for procedure. He filed away the release forms with the corresponding authorization signed by Grazer. Next, he reached for a seltzer bottle he carried on his utility belt, and swigged a little, throwing his head back, putting into relief the very pregnant shape of his midriff. After which he winced, as if in pain.

“You okay, Albert?” Matt asked.

“Oh, yes, thanks to George’s remedy. Sort of.”

“Sort of?” George said.

Albert sighed. “May won’t let me stop drinking carbonated water for the next week. The doctor said that three days would be sufficient to recreate a chemical balance in my system . . . but May’s a—
uuuuuurrp!
—worrier. She doesn’t want a repeat of yesterday.”

“Look at it this way,” Matt offered. “There’s guys’d think it’s pretty cool to be able to belch continuously and not worry about what anyone thought of ’em. It’s purely medicinal, it’s amusingly gross. Everyone here is in on the gag. What’s not to like? Enjoy!”

“Oh, I do not worry about my manners appearing uncouth,” Albert said. “It’s just that . . . between the weight of the pod and all this water . . . forgive me for being indelicate, but—”

“You always have to pee,” Matt guessed.

Albert nodded morosely.

“I can’t perform any activity for more than six or seven minutes. I can’t concentrate on a book or a TV show. I can’t even sit still for a meal. All I can do is feel—
uuurrrppp-pup-pup
—pretty much the way I feel now. Excuse me.”

He started to waddle off in extreme discomfort.

“Albert,” George called after him. “Tell May from me that she needn’t be so excessive. A little release of carbon dioxide will go a long way. There’s no reason to go overboard.”

Albert’s hands went reflexively to his crotch.

“ ‘Overboard’ is a very bad word to use right now, George. But I’ll tell her.
Urrrrrrpppp!
Oh, I’ll be only too happy to tell her.
Urp.”
And he continued on his quest for porcelain.

Matt turned to George.

“And how are
you
feeling?”

They had, in the normal course of things, greeted each other upon meeting at their adjoining desks nearly a half hour before—hellos and nods and amenities of on-duty procedure—but it wasn’t until right now that conversation,
real
conversation, found its way back into their relationship.

“What do you mean?” asked George, knowing full well.

Matt shrugged. “Seems to me we both went a little overboard yesterday before we parted company.”

There was affection for his partner in the half smile that came to George’s face. “Oh, I don’t know, Matthew. A little stimulating debate is good for one.”

“It is, huh?”

“I believe so, yes.”

“So?”

“So. How do I feel,” George repeated. And thought about it because he did not immediately have the answer. “Not as smart as I thought,” he concluded finally.

Matt, hearing the answer, became aware of the weight of the paperback he had fitted neatly into the inside breast pocket of his jacket.

“Funny you should say that, partner,” he said.

More than just Sikes and Francisco were in on this now. Given the introduction of hard evidence into the case, stopping the spread of bad Stabilite had become an official Operation, whose active personnel would increase as—and if—the investigation progressed.

The first extra hand to be involved would be Bob Sled, the little druggist, himself. Some quick negotiating and plea bargaining between his public defender and the district attorney’s office yesterday had created a “mutually satisfactory climate” in which he would work with the police to identify the Stabilite dealer in the act of making a transaction.

He was receiving his official briefing from George Francisco in the back room of
See Gurd Nurras
on what was very likely its last official day of doing business—under the current management, at any rate.

George handed him a palm-size black box, upon which was a little red switch.

“When your contact comes in,” George said, “reach into your pocket and slide the red switch up, Then conduct business as usual.”

“And that’s it?” asked Bob Sled.

“And that’s it.”

“Hey-hoo, pretty easy.”

George thought it best not to comment that they’d kept it easy because they didn’t trust him. Not that there was any more illegal activity he could get away with, but Matt had had the suspicion—and George had to agree—that Bob Sled was a panicker. He was too sweaty under pressure. Probably exhibit so many involuntary tics when the sting was on that he’d give away the game. So to minimize the pressure, he was given only one simple thing to do: Flip a switch to send the alert that the dealer had arrived. Matt and George had decided to let him think that was the depth and breadth of it.

And they didn’t tell him the rest.

They didn’t tell him about the microcamera and its built-in microphone in the scalp conditioner box, with a wide-angle view of the counter.

They didn’t tell him that it was battery powered and remote controlled and would be activated by his flipping the red switch.

They didn’t tell him that his most docile customer that day—a lazily browsing young man in a tank top, grooving mindlessly to the private sounds of his Walkman—would really be Paul Bearer, a Newcomer rookie; nor that the Walkman was really a two-way radio, whose left earphone received information and whose right earphone (which was really a camouflaged microphone, sensitive enough to pick up his voice through his auditory canal) sent information out.

And they didn’t tell him about the very special
thing
that Paul could do.

They didn’t want Bob Sled
looking
involuntarily toward the camera, or Paul. They didn’t want him
trying to guide the conversation
between himself and the dealer unnaturally.

They wanted him to be as natural (or as unnatural) as he normally was.

Because that’s how a sting got stung.

“Now, you say he usually arrives around ten-thirty?” George asked.

“Geez, Ossifer, I only tol’ you that around forty-seven times.”

Actually, it had been more like five. But that was okay. Careful reiteration of information was part of this business.

“Just clarifying,” George said.

“Like clockwork. Ten-thirty.”

It was nine o’clock when this conversation took place. But the cops would begin their surveillance
now
in any event.

Leaving nothing to chance.

Or so they thought . . .

Matt, in the front passenger seat, tried to hide the book when he heard George open the driver’s side door of their unmarked cruiser. He didn’t quite make it. And George didn’t just slide into the car, talking and oblivious, as others might’ve done; that wasn’t George’s way. No, old George stuck his head in first, got a real good look at Matt’s sudden furtiveness—

—and smiled. A smile that would have been infuriating if it weren’t so warming; the proud smile of a teacher who discovers a student has been doing extracurricular work in
secret.

“Matthew,” he said, “you’re
reading.”

Matt made a tired flapping gesture with his hand. “Don’t spread it around.”

Settling behind the wheel and closing the car door, George asked, “What book is it?”

Matt exhaled quietly through his teeth.
Oh. Christ,
he thought,
oh, well, in for a friggin’ penny . . .

“I’ll show you,” he said, “but you gotta promise me something first.”

“And what might that be?”

“Don’t make me talk about it. Okay? No comments, no questions.”

“Odd. But easy enough.”

Matt held the cover of the book up and put it down quickly, as if it were a flash card. If the book meant anything to George, he gave away none of it on his face.

“Ah,” he said, noncommittally, and Matt considered that a deeper act of friendship than George could possibly know.

They had parked their car across the street and half a block away from the drugstore. From this vantage point, they would conduct their surveillance, affording them a parallax view of the store facade. As for viewing the inside: There was a small remote television for that, on the seat between them, prepared to receive a program not even the best cable service could provide. Next to that was the walkie-talkie, which would connect them with Paul Bearer, the young rookie.

And now they would watch and wait. Mostly wait. Until they got the signal.

“Listen, ahhh,” Matt said uncomfortably, “do you mind if I’m not great company for a while?” He somewhat guiltily indicated his book. “I’d rather not make conversation. I’m kind of into this.”

“Nothing would make me happier than that you continue,” George replied seriously, again, in such a way that Matt could draw no conclusions other than that his partner was willing to be solicitous. Or was he? For after he said it, George folded his arms and stared fixedly front, through the windshield.

Matt sighed, started to put his book away. “Well, if you’re gonna be
that
way about it, make me feel like I’m
abandoning
you . . .”

With a look of surprise, George turned back toward Matthew. “Oh, no, no, I did not mean to convey that impression. I was just, as I’ve heard my eldest daughter say, getting myself into Zen à la mode. Concentrating.”

“That’s ‘Zen mode,’ George. Concentrating on what?”

“A fascinating game I’ve discovered in the puzzle pages of the Sunday paper. I’ve become rather taken with the pun-and-anagram crosswords. I can’t say I’m as proficient at them as I’d like to be. So many of the answers hew to colloquialisms that don’t come naturally to me yet—‘Zen mode,’ I suppose, being an example of one such—but I’ve found that there are anagrams everywhere. On storefronts, awnings, passing cars, billboards, posters. And in moments when there is nothing to do but sit and wait, the game of anagrams is one I find useful and amusing. It relaxes and entertains the mind while keeping it active.”

“Uh
-huh
. . .” Matt commented. And then, after a moment, because he knew he’d only pay for his ignorance later, “What the hell’s an anagram?”

“I’m sorry, Matthew,” George said with self-effacing charm, as if Matt’s lack of knowledge were somehow
his
fault. “An anagram is the rearrangement of letters from a word, or group of words, to form
another
word, or group of words.”

“Oh, yeah, I’ve heard of them,” Matt said, relieved because he actually had.

“For example,” George continued, “using the letters of your own name, Matthew Sikes, one could get ‘Skis met wheat.’ ”

“ ‘Skis met wheat’. . .” Dryly.

“Or ‘Skim a stew,’ provided you drop one of the
T’s”

“Got it.”

“Or, perhaps best of all, ‘The Wet Kiss Ma.’ ”

“You can stop now, George.”

“The title of your book there
—Black Like Me
—might be rearranged to produce, ‘Lick ’em, Elba.’ ”

“Makes no sense. Elba’s a place, not a person.”

“Then how about ‘Lickable me’?”

“Why, you little filth-monger, you. I didn’t know your mind worked that way.”

“The salacious ones are the most fun.”

“Well, now you’re talkin’. Can you find any others?”

Furrowing a bemused brow, George scanned the street. “In fact,” he said, “there is a terribly suggestive anagram hidden within the name
See Gurd Nurras.
Only one would have to rearrange the Tenctonese letters, rather than the phonetic English spelling, and then translate.”

“To arrive at—?”

George paused a moment, then shook his head slightly. “No, it’s too dirty.”

“Trust me, George, I can take it.”

“No, no, I really can’t. It would distract you from your book.”

“George—”

“I insist, Matthew. See to the expansion of your mind. Don’t worry about me and my frivolities. What you want to do is
so
much more important.”

George faced forward anew, having once again betrayed no hidden agenda. But Matt was certain now, certain, that he had just been the victim of a subtle vengeance, and that if one were to look into the mind of George Francisco, one would find mischievous self-satisfaction.

In the face of which, what was there to do but read his book . . . ?

The remarkable, sobering, and deeply troubling thing about the odyssey of John Howard Griffin is that it never read as if it were a sociological treatise. Matt found it to be an emotional roller coaster with a novelistic power that tore at the soul, precisely because it
wasn’t
a fiction.

The further Matt read, as Griffin’s journey took him deeper and deeper into the South, the more often he kept flipping back to the passage at the front of the book that haunted him most of all. He’d read it so many times he very nearly had it memorized—and still it possessed him.

Griffin had planned on maintaining a cool journalistic objectivity about the task he’d undertaken. But that had been blasted away the moment he’d seen himself in the mirror, a white man utterly transformed into a black man.

“I had expected to see myself disguised,” he wrote, “but this was something else. I was imprisoned in the flesh of an utter stranger, an unsympathetic one with whom I felt no kinship. All traces of the John Griffin I had been were wiped from existence. Even the senses underwent a change so profound it filled me with distress. I looked into the mirror and saw reflected nothing of the white John Griffin’s past. No, the reflections led back to Africa, back to the shanty and the ghetto, back to the fruitless struggles against the mark of blackness. Suddenly, almost with no mental preparation, no advance hint, it became clear and permeated my whole being. My inclination was to fight against it. I had gone too far. I knew now that there is no such thing as a disguised white man, when the black won’t rub off. The black man is wholly a Negro, regardless of what he once may have been. I was a newly created Negro who must go out that door and live in a world unfamiliar to me.”