Lookout Cartridge (83 page)

Was Claire—unlike Gilda—wearing lipstick when Incremona killed her? I can’t ask Monty, for on Sub’s phone answered first by Gilda at dawn Sunday, Monty sounds blind except that the eyes staring at a wall in his King Street house do not know what even to imagine out of the zero that has been inserted behind those eyes, and as if from that absence of pulse I find an idea which he assents to—he knows a man on the west river—easy enough to rent a chopper on a Sunday but do it through Monty, when did I want it?—I had not even thought until his call came, I had been asleep in Sub’s bed my skin on someone’s hair—Monty will phone, will phone—nor can I ask if Claire had on
no
lipstick—I look 900 feet down hours later from a hired crow’s nest and June’s frantic words said to Claire’s late answering service come to me in Gilda’s voice in a delayed translation: Leave Chad out of it, it wasn’t his idea it couldn’t have been, you said you know where and when but not who, only that it’s Chad’s idea. But I don’t even know the idea but it’s not my brother’s please believe me it isn’t Chad, for Christ’s sake it takes a sick mind to blow up a bunch of children Halloween morning—and something makes the surface of Manhattan bulge and instead of the green which city or barren land or industrial area shows up in an infrared aerial photograph there is a blue of Claire’s lips snapped directly without box or emulsion into me like thought.

Whose open end betrays across the East River Brooklyn Heights where trees soften the edge of the promenade below which cars flash softly along that stretch of the Belt Parkway; the St. George Hotel sticks up; I know where there is a wood-frame house, and on the top step of its stoop I tried my tongue upon the corner of Renée’s closed mouth and when she at once turned her head my tongue-tip ran all along the fold where her lips met until my mouth was in her russet hair which we found we liked and under the angled light from the street lamp the russet took on a less soft sheen though hardly that hot San Francisco copper I have made so much of somewhere here—her parents’ house not original New Amsterdam though like it, as the Dutch wood-framing was like the New England and the New England like the Virginian, itself a recollection of Tudor half-timbering—but what those great brick-layers the Dutch thought up was stone masonry construction, first rubble laid in straw-bound clay but ultimately oyster-shell-mortared stone-block walls which with wood-framing inside came to be your common combination in taverns and warehouses; and I know if I can’t quite see where there are a hundred stoops, I know one near my parents’ old apartment house where we played stoop ball which was in those days a matter of angles (unlike London where in any case they don’t play stoop ball) but now is a matter of wide cars oncoming between parked cars like a transistor’s printed circuit. The kids, said Gilda, as we listened in Claire’s foyer and heard steps in the hall and now the phone again, you won’t let anybody blow up some kids.

Alba’s false labor was false. Why did we leave Corsica when we did? Not because she phoned, because she didn’t phone. But why in the first place did Dagger change his mind again and go?

Have I asked that before?

In the long cozy trench of English life I say that the tortoise has come back and Lorna who has got into the habit of not hearing says, What? and I (as they say in the military) say again; but the next day when I say the man from the County Council is coming about the tortoise and Lorna says What? in a servo-circuit which threatens to loop until Doom’s Day, I interest myself by saying the County Council man’s coming about the grass, which exits me even excites me out of that forlorn loop—a service to us both.

L
IBERTY
, the ’68 poster said in another language,
IS THE CRIME WHICH CONTAINS ALL OTHER CRIMES
.

I was at liberty, a framed killer of Claire, but only so long (Aut said) as I stayed lost. But how could he call me “someone” and say “lost” if he knew I was collapsed right there in a closet?

What are you doing, said Gilda, for I had sprung into Claire’s room, fallen across her bed and speared the phone on the eighth or ninth ring.

June sounded farther away now than the message Gilda had related.

Did I have the news?

Tragic, I said.

Had I been at Claire’s long?

Two minutes, still out of breath, just long enough (I said) to call the answering service and find out its log was impounded, so it was lucky I hadn’t missed June.

Oh. Did I know their name? the answering service?

I knew where, I knew when, but I didn’t know who (remember?)—only that it was Chad’s plan.

Oh. Yes.

Gilda snuggled her ear in, but for a moment there was nothing to hear; then June asked for the name of the answering service and I said
quid pro quo
—and I heard nothing, not a breath. I pointed to the bed-table drawer and Gilda moved over and pulled it out so she didn’t hear June say with a matter-of-factness that was not like her: It’s tonight.

But I know that, I said without thinking, at least I figured it out before your brother or someone hit me on the head. But I want to know
who
.

June got nice. She pleaded. She honestly didn’t
know
who.

You could say for her that she loved her brother.

I looked in the bed-table drawer and saw the name of the service. I gave it to June, she gave me the time, I said I was going to be held up downtown just south of the warehouse till nine thirty and tonight was in fact more convenient for me. I hung up.

What am I doing here? said Gilda when I blew out Tris and Ruby’s jack-o’-lantern. A light moved one-way between two dark towers and it was a helicopter or a plane. Former Prime Minister Macmillan was on Rose’s indestructible acrylic-fiber carpet which by the light from the new solid-state TV which came on at once and which I hadn’t reimbursed Sub for had changed color from what I recalled as orange and magenta.

George Washington Carver and me—peanuts and peat, for Christ’s sake. I lit a cigarette.

She touched me and I spoke to her. All these things I knew that others didn’t. Gene in effect lied about the Marvelous Country House letting Jack think it didn’t figure on the film. Aut’s so-called man who Claire told Jack had shot the Bonfire was really Dagger. Gene let Jack believe the portfolio on Paul’s table was Jan’s. Gene did not dispute Jack’s assertion that Jan had been at the hut with Paul just before Gene and Jack had come. My eyes caught smoke as if this were my first cigarette and I touched Gilda and I wondered where Aut and John as Aut had said were meeting tomorrow. But all these things I knew that others didn’t left me feeling like a rat whose brain has been somato-mapped so you can predict which cells will show electrical response when a given limb is stroked.

Hair-thin pages of mica flipping now fast as Will’s hand-made movie—

Digital mosaic compounded through liquid crystal techniques but impounded from me—

So what good was what I knew?

She said and was still saying the next day 900 feet high above Manhattan (but by then only in her mind), I think you have to go to the end, I think there is an end.

Too high to see Incremona inflating with mad rage, say, his own taxi Paul left to be towed off. A yellow taxi balloons between buildings, squeezes out into the air.

Something is about to happen. Is there an anti-Lenin demonstration? From here I could never see into the Ukrainian neighborhood north and far east of where I watch—and just south of that ancient and dilapidated and only theoretically open-ended street of chipped stone and greasy fire escapes and chilly mattresses and busted glass where that junkie you remember having (through me) not met, hides in the fourth-floor toilet to count the stolen wallet’s cash he doesn’t know is hot.

Something else is making Manhattan bulge.

It probably isn’t the Flint warehouse. This turns out to be a grab-bag full of things left over or waiting—surplus acupuncture models; surplus science treasure chests with magnets, one-way mirrors, materials for many experiments a ten- or twelve-year-old can do; 25-foot surplus weather balloons (for holding up swimming-pool covers, facilitating aerial photography, marking scuba divers’ descents); a dry-chem component of a surplus experimental liquid fertilizer destined for Cambodia; thousands of rounds from a Minnesota cartridge firm now lobbying to weaken the ’68 gun control law; and to plug the ears, cartons and cartons of Swedish Wool made of glass down best for frequencies of 2000 to 4000 cycles per second. Don’t forget also surplus Science Fair projects, geodesic dome kits, Digital Counter Kit with integrated circuits, and water that goes uphill.

Where are the armored vests found by the forces in Vietnam to be defective? Are there any left? Or the 40,000 emergency artificial respirators sold in the U.S. though known to be badly designed and ineffective?

Don’t forget also acres of thin plastic sheets that change color because of the liquid crystals inside them but compared to other liquid crystal displays will have uses far more sophisticated (to use a term from weaponry, confides the man himself, J. K. Flint, approaching a flagon of Scotch during an encounter so fatally fortuitous Saturday night very late that now these five moments of October 30 and 31 turn slowly at different speeds in an equilibrium more spatial than genuine: attempted ambush earlier Saturday night; attempted helicopter-watch Sunday afternoon; the bombing of Incremona Sunday at twilight; the eye of all this terminal action Sunday morning, and the midnight chat with Jack Saturday). I said we had talked about women and the Hebrides and my various accents, and speaking of liquid crystals Jack must know that our old associate Red Whitehead would shift his ground at the drop of a toy bomb and kept his mouth shut only at home watching color TV (though it wasn’t, said Jack, just the TV that shut him up at home and he might be
my
associate but he wasn’t
his
), and (I got up, I went on, I could capitalize on what lay behind the affability) I couldn’t trust anything now except cash, I said, Dagger had set me up never guessing what
I
wanted out of the carton in Claire’s closet of which I could make interesting use, though what I really hoped to get into was the digital mosaic capability with John who had the real-time-projection ideas (mind through machine direct, though he was getting a bit irritated at delays) while I had as Jack knew a certain commercial acquaintance with plasma crystals, as I suspected so did Jack (who now again grinned affably saying Commute from London but my only tie with “Whitehead was what Len got out of him about you and as I moved to the window-seat he leaned to take up the decanter again with the smooth coordination of an alumni fullback whom the pressures of domestic life have not kept from staying in shape), so since I said the footage showing the revolutionaries was just going to get in the way of my work with John whom I was going to see first thing tomorrow after he got through with Aut, the footage was for sale and—(and recalling some Yucatan or Hindu and in some way Maya proverb about plunging ahead without too much thought if you’re going to get what you didn’t know you wanted) I slipped something in Jack’s trenchcoat lying on the window-seat beside Sub’s black navy mac and gray forties fedora, returned to put my glass on the desk in this hotel room and after he asked if first thing tomorrow meant Monday, for it was now past midnight and it was Sunday, I said, Twenty thousand cash tonight would almost do it.

Give Jack credit for madness, my God.

Almost! he laughed, and never spilled a drop of that old Scotch and pulled out the desk drawer and produced four green, white, and black stacks of hundreds.

He asked if I knew what Incremona was capable of if I didn’t come across, and if I knew that Krish had not been found. I said I knew whose weapon Len had used on Claire and who Jack was framing which I didn’t like at all, and this was the rest of the deal I’d meant by
Almost
.

I’ve got an
almost
too, he said, but don’t tell me you know Wheeler (and for a moment Jack thought back but couldn’t reach it, and was interrupted by me to hear the name of a New England college, one of the Little Three)—don’t you worry about Wheeler, he said. What the police know and what they can do are two different things, but that depends on you.

Why don’t you frame
me
for Claire, I said.

I like your style, he said.

Where’s Wheeler—South America?

Jack gave a stiff smile in my general direction and then and there could have killed me if I could have vanished. Then he laughed. Then he laughed again.

Mexico of course, he said. You could have figured that out for yourself. Hunting jaguars bare-handed. Maybe he’ll disappear.

Your
almost?

The one remaining copy of the diary—arriving by mail from Callanish yesterday, tomorrow, immediately.

Jack did not know quite enough. And I leave it to you who have me to conclude that this one of the aforementioned five moments has its dreamlike features.

Like the strange collaborations early in the summer arising out of the London subway.

Like the liquid crystal warehouse elsewhere in this other city.

A warehouse not exactly central to the Flint enterprises but associated by multiple systems under the normal levels of commerce and product research which are coded not to make Manhattan bulge. What is that bulge seen from a hired chopper? Black kids move weightlessly from subway car to car. So do black men.

Although Incremona was given cause to think John-of-Coventry a private opportunist when Red Whitehead told him John had made inquiries, improbably Incremona won’t act on these suspicions.

And whereas the diary is less and less likely to stay secret at Callanish since the dilettante geologist (joined or not by Jack Flint a week ago) will probably spot it while seeking Krish, improbably this doesn’t appear to happen.

The chopper pilot looks back at a middle-aged businessman and shrugs. We have circled, but I recall this only later, staring at a smashed pumpkin, seedy and moist upon Sub’s sidewalk.

Wait for me, I said at eight thirty Saturday night to Gilda.