Passing Through the Flame (15 page)

Of all the places to corner Beck, I have to get suckered into hunting him out at this damn party, hundreds of people I don’t know, any one of whom could be primed to frag my ass if Jango’s set me up. Or even if he isn’t setting me up. It couldn’t be Cornelius, he’s too obvious, he has to be a coincidence, or Jango’s slimy idea of humor. Anybody here could be the man or nobody, but this is civilized turf, I’d better not react too fast, I can’t afford to shoot at shadows.

Still, the weight of the Luger in his shoulder holster was at least minimally comforting. It was loaded with dumdums, and in these close quarters, it would blow a gorilla apart with the first shot. He wouldn’t have to worry about being of fed by a dying man. But then if anyone professional was laying for him at this party, he’d be using the same kind of piece; the first shot would tell the story. And if anyone
is
out there, he’ll know me by sight, he’ll move first. I’ve got to be sharp and fast, but not so fast I get some citizen reaching for his cigarettes. Where the fuck is Jango?

Sargent stepped through an archway and into the strobe room. The alternate flashes of brilliant white light and utter darkness seemed to make time slow down, everything seemed to be happening in jerky slow motion, which would seem to make his reaction time relatively faster. But the extreme rapid-fire contrasts were screwing up his eyes, making him see afterimages in the dark which persisted into the next cycle, ghost auras piling up on each other. Anyway, Jango isn’t here, nothing but necking couples—would they be tricky enough to send a
chick
after me? The organization was cunning in its dumb guinea way, but it was frozen into conventional attitudes in many areas. They would use chicks to set people up or to get information, but a female hit man would never occur to them.

But it’s just the sort of thing that would occur to Jango Beck, if it’s Jango who’s out to get me.

Sargent reached into a pocket for his pillbox, popped another 5mg of meth. Any edge could count.

He walked out of the strobe room and into a room lit by softly flickering orange light coming from a globe mounted on a high pillar. Two low couches with tables in front of them. One couch was empty, and on the other a dude in a red velvet shirt and blue velvet pants was hustling two starlet-type chicks. Again, no Jango.

“—can be a break, people do see them—”

“—dunno, balling in front of cameras is a heavy scene, what if my mother—”

“—would I be able to choose the guy I made it with, I have a boyfriend who might—”

I’ve been in this room at least twice before, Sargent realized. Christ, this place is a maze, worse than any rain forest or elephant grass, I’m lost in here. But anyone looking for me has to be having as much trouble as I am finding Jango. It’s all chance.

He noticed bowls of joints on the two tables. What the hell, I could use it, my nerves are tighter than piano wire, I don’t want to react
too
fast.

Sargent sat down, lit a joint, tasted the smoke: cool and sweet. Acapulco Gold, probably from the last shipment. What a mess
that
had been!

The Federales had jumped the trucks halfway to the coast, and the outriders had had to off nearly a dozen of them before the assholes realized they were taking mortar fire from both sides of the road and pulled out. Then they sent in a goddamn helicopter which managed to cream one truck before Sargent himself personally bagged it with a bazooka. Which meant that the other four trucks had to be overloaded. Which meant that they kept overheating.

We finally get to the cove south of El Dorado and get the grass on the hydrofoil, and then when I go to make the coke pickup, that damn hit man’s waiting for me, and if he hadn’t been stupid enough to let the sun flash on his piece, he might’ve made the score. Then the hydrofoil gets chased by a Mexican gunboat—no real sweat because we’ve got twice their top speed and wire-guided antitank missiles from Nam if worse comes to worst—but it means that that whole section of the coast is going to be hot for months. And it just might also mean that someone is slipping information to the Mexicans.

It just doesn’t add up, Sargent thought. Jango would have no percentage in tipping off the Mexicans to his own shipment, and it wouldn’t make much sense for him to off me. And according to Jango, we have a firm agreement with the organization: we do grass, they do skag, and it’s open season on coke. So why would
they
be out to frag me?

Sargent smoked half a joint, then ground out the oversized roach; it wouldn’t do to get really loaded. He got up and checked out the next room: Danish-style leather-covered couches and chairs, a phony electric fireplace, two faggots in the process of picking each other up, a bald man with a drink in his hand just this side of out cold, a fortyish woman trying to make time with a young kid who seemed ripped on acid or some other psychedelic. Still no Jango.

Maybe Jango’s been lying to me all along, Sargent thought. Maybe we
don’t
have a deal with the organization at all; maybe his game is to fight it out with them. But then why not
tell me?
Man, if it came to a knock-down drag-out between the organization and the Green Mountain Boys, those wops wouldn’t have a prayer. We’re experienced jungle fighters, and they’re mostly greasy thugs who’re clubfooted nerds in the boonies. We’ve got the two highspeed hydrofoils, mortars, bazookas, M-60’s, sniperscopes, more M-16’s than we can use, even four Stoner rifles.

Jango set up this operation like a small guerrilla army. Nothing but Nam combat vets with Ranger or Green Beret training. A hundred men, half again as many as our operations really need. Enough sophisticated ordnance from the Nam to seize a Central American banana republic.

To handle the Federales and the Mexican army, Jango had said. But what if that was just a cover? What if the real game was to fight the organization for
all
the action?

But goddamn it, that doesn’t add up either. Why would the organization wait so long to try to hit me? Why wouldn’t Jango tell me what he was doing up front, when he set it up so that we outgun them?

Unless something’s gone sour up here, and the organization’s gunning for Jango. And the slimy fucker is throwing me and the whole Mexican operation to the wolves to get them off
his
back....

Yeah, that’s the only thing that makes any sense at all.

Sargent felt the weight of the Luger hard and ready against his body. A cool, machinelike determination came over him; at last he had a strategic plan of action.

I won’t wait around for someone to come gunning for me. Sooner or later, I’ll find Jango at this goddamn party, and then he’ll either satisfy me or take a dumdum between the eyes, consequences be damned! Jango is no berserker; if he believes I’ll kill him on the spot and take my chances, he’ll talk.

How many of these citizens will have pieces anyway? I could blow Beck’s head off, throw a few more shots into whatever crowd’s around to panic ‘em, and have a better than even chance of getting out of the house and into the chaparral. And once I get into the woods, they couldn’t even find me with helicopters.

Sargent felt his nervous tension transform itself into useful, focused energy, his fear into hyperalertness. He was in his element. He had an objective, the right weapon for the job, and an escape route if necessary.

And Jango will know that I can kill him and get out of here, and he’ll know that I know he knows. Because he picked me to head up this operation. He knows what I
can do
and what I
will do.
And he knows that if he fucks with me, they’re the same thing. Moving lightly on the balls of his feet, his eyes scanning a hundred-and-twenty-degree arc every three seconds, Sargent continued his search pattern.

As he walked down the redwood-paneled corridor five careful steps behind Billy Lee, John Horst found his gaze wandering toward Billy’s buttocks as they moved under the tight white duck pants, so spotless, so crisply ironed, so ironically pure. Smooth, taut flesh pressed against clean new material.

Except that Billy Lee was no longer a thin-limbed child star, a fifteen-year-old playing twelve-year-old parts. He was pushing twenty-six, and what had been an erotic undertone of boyish softness in the fifteen-year old, an undertone that appealed to the polymorphous awakening sexuality of preteens of both sexes as well as to any random homosexual impulse that might arise in ordinary older men, was, in the twenty-six-year-old flunky, simply seedy, epicene faggotry.

Billy was no longer capable of inspiring aberrant secret lusts in ordinary heterosexual men. At best—with his darkly curled black hair, slim oversoft body, and sullen aging boy’s face—he could make it as a male hooker or a platonic gigolo for the sort of horrid old woman who on a lower budget would have to content herself with keeping poodles.

Instead, he was a gopher for Jango Beck.

They reached the end of the corridor. Billy pressed the stud, and the elevator door slid open. He stood to one side, gesturing with his open palm and a slight bow at the waist for Horst to enter. His big dark eyes were expressionless behind their huge black lashes and overtended eyebrows, but his full-lipped cherub’s mouth was twisted into a grimace of subtle cruelty, a Borgia’s decadent smile.

“After you, Mr. Horst.”

Horst stepped into the elevator past Billy, feeling the pressure of his nearby flesh, a sensation of gooseflesh on the back of his neck; not the reawakening of perverted lust, but the distasteful ghost of that lust’s memory transformed into self-disgust. Billy backed in after him. Was he crowding him subtly, intruding closer into his body space than was proper? Was this a deliberate gesture? Billy pressed a button. The door slid shut, and the elevator glided upward. Horst felt a sudden reasonless dread at being confined in this small cubicle—its black velvet drapery and lush red carpeting reeking of Jango Beck’s decadent life-style—with this spoiled fruit, this vile and perhaps dangerous reminder of a few minutes’ madness.

It was the sort of episode that could happen to any normal man, and afterward Horst had taken pains to assure himself of that; discreet consultations with three psychiatrists with no names named, of course. He owed it to Mildred and the children.

Mildred had been six months into that final imprudent pregnancy at the time, and Billy had been driving Tom Hacker up the walls. Tom was a perfectly competent director, but he simply didn’t know how to handle a fifteen-year-old boy who was acting like... well, like a cunt. So he had tried to bounce his problem up to Dick Birnbaum, who was producing
Jungle Jaunt
for Eden at the time. Dick was not the sort to take crap from a fifteen-year-old kid especially since he had a son that age himself. So he had tried to browbeat Billy Lee like an angry father, and the predictable result was a shouting scene, a thrown ashtray, and a sullen refusal to work for Birnbaum that threatened the completion of the half-finished picture.

Thus it was that John Horst, the boy wonder, president of Eden Pictures, found himself in the bizarre position of having to butter up a pouting child star. Half a million was already tied up in
Jungle Jaunt
, so he couldn’t just throw the brat off the lot as he longed to.

Birnbaum himself brought Billy into Horst’s office. The boy was wearing his costume from
Jungle Jaunt
; a tight white T-shirt and blue jeans that fitted snugly around the crotch and outlined the crack in his buttocks, well calculated to arouse murky feelings of narcissistic subliminal sexual identification in barely pubescent boys. He had huge doe-eyes framed by luxuriant dark lashes that turned every starlet on the lot purple with envy, curly black hair cunningly tousled by the best stylist in town, and delicate skin the color and texture of ivory. And a sullen angry mouth that looked as if it had just bitten into a turd.

“Here’s Dennis the Menace, John, and you’re more than welcome to him,” Birnbaum said, closing the door behind him. Billy Lee walked up to Horst’s huge teak wood desk. This hunk of furniture was designed to make the man behind it look like he were sitting on a throne and to make anyone in front of it feel about the size of a peanut. Instead of sitting on one of the chairs, which were designed to let a grown man’s chin just peep up over the desktop, he vaulted up into a sitting position on the edge of the desk itself, from which vantage point he looked down at Horst from no more than two feet away.

“Everyone around here treats me like a prop, Mr. Horst,” he said. “Stand there, Billy, smile into the camera, Billy, hold this spear this way, Billy, that’s it, Billy, be a good boy, Billy, one more take, Billy, and we’ll give you a lollipop. I’ll be sixteen years old in November. I’m tired of being treated like a little boy.”

“I don’t think you’re a little boy, Billy,” Horst said. “I think you’re a young actor who does a good job playing twelve-year-old boys.” That’s about half true, Horst thought.

“Well then, I guess I’m tired of playing twelve-year-old boys, because everyone treats me like the little kids I’m playing. Why can’t I play parts my own age?”

Horst sighed. He could sympathize with the kid. Nothing was more humiliating to an adolescent than to be taken for someone younger. But when Billy Lee was no longer able to play little kids, he’d be all washed up. He had nothing like acting talent; it was all a trick of camera, lighting, and script. They could run him through scenes, and he’d photograph like a twelve-year-old kid living them out. That was the extent of his ability. He
was
just a prop, functionally.

“Because that’s the way you photograph, Bill,” he said. “There are plenty of older actors who’d give anything to photograph a few years younger. Ten years from now, you may consider yourself lucky.”

“But I’m
not twelve years old!”
Billy leaned even closer to him and looked at him with hurt puppy dog eyes. Horst could see that there was real unhappiness behind this tantrum, something deep.

“What’s really bothering you, Billy?” he said. “Maybe I can help.”

The boy’s belligerence broke. He looked down at the shiny oiled surface of the desktop. “Nobody can help,” he said softly.