Running Dog (6 page)

“When is murder normal?”

“Beyond the fact that he was murdered, there were unusual details.”

“Abnormal, perhaps you would prefer to say.”

“Words.”

“Abnormal,” she insisted.

“Yes, why not?”

“Anyone would agree. A grotesque death. And it’s interesting that you haven’t spoken a word about the people who killed him. Circumstances so abnormal that this small detail is completely overlooked.”

“No, wrong.”

“Perhaps this aspect of the crime isn’t part of your special investigation. You’re not interested? It’s too routine for specialists. You’re bored with that question?”

“I’d like to discuss the matter of acquaintances.”

“Would you really?”

“Your husband’s work took him to Washington on occasion.”

“This is correct. Washington and the surrounding area.”

“Washington in particular.”

“I wouldn’t say that, no.”

“According to the original police inquiry—”

“The police,” she said. “The police know nothing. Sex crime, that’s all they know. It’s the people in the special investigation who know what’s important and what isn’t. They know where to look. How deep, how shallow. The police. They photograph the body. They make chalk marks on the floor. They check their files on deviates and the killers of deviates. That satisfies them. They have such experience in these areas. Who am I to complain?”

Klara Ludecke raised her eyes to an angle level with his.

“How special can this investigation be if you haven’t even asked about Radial Matrix?” she said.

Selvy picked up a plastic disk from the coffee table in front of him, a scenic paperweight, three-dimensional vista of rolling hills, and studied it a moment. He watched the woman rise from the chair and walk through the dark parlor and along the equally dark hallway, where she opened the front door and held it, not taking her eyes off the opposite wall as he walked past her into the sun.

Later that same day he rode an escalator down to the Capitol subway with Lloyd Percival.

“You’re due at Lightborne’s when?”

“Tomorrow night,” Selvy said. “Auction.”

“What, more Guatemalan stuff?”

“Apparently.”

“We see nothing but stiff pricks lately. What I wouldn’t give for a single mushy prick. Might be a whole new approach. Jesus Christmas, what happened to the esthetic element? Tell Lightborne. The subtlety, the complexity, the simple charm. All he seems to show us are junkyard pieces.”

“He knows, Senator.”

“Just heard from some friends in Amsterdam. Someone’s come up with a plaster-and-polystyrene copy of a Bernini I’ve always admired.”

“
Saint Teresa in Ecstasy
.”

“Right, some young Dutch sculptor.”

“Lightborne’s got a vicar he did.”

“What kind of vicar?”

“A vicar with a stiff prick, Senator.”

“Why did I ask?”

“Anyway.”

“Anyway what this Dutch fella’s done is to lift the folds of Saint Teresa’s habit way up around her thighs and to place her knees well apart without changing the original position of the feet. Hell, it was already there. All he’s done is highlight it. Her ecstasy always was sexual.”

They were the last two people to step onto the small electric conveyance and it started immediately.

“Bernini might not agree.”

“Don’t quibble, Glen.”

“Not to mention Saint Teresa.”

“Are you a prude?”

“Possibly.”

“Interesting fella. You’re an interesting fella.”

“What about the angel?”

“He’s changed the configuration of the arrowhead but only slightly.”

“To make it more phallic.”

“Marginally so,” Percival said.

“The sacred and profane.”

“Special form of eroticism, isn’t it? Always been attracted to it myself. It pleases the Lord that only a few of us have the wherewithal to pursue such attractions.”

They got off the subway and took an elevator to the third floor of the Dirksen Building.

“Magazine wants to make me look human.”

“Which?”

“
Running Dog
.”

“Stay away,” Selvy said. “It’s not my department of course.”

“Why?”

“They’ll burn you.”

“How do you know?”

“They’re after controversy. They’re dying and need a fix. Even if they do the piece they promise, you’ll be hemmed in by autopsy reports, photos of entry and exit wounds, who killed Brown, who killed Smith, who killed Jones. They deal in fantasy.”

They walked down a corridor toward the Senator’s office.

“It’s not your department of course.”

“Absolutely not,” Selvy said.

“Your duties are strictly administrative.”

“Their editor’s unstable. Grace Delaney. A lush. Used to spend all her time raising bail for well-hung Panthers.”

Lightborne leaned forward to grimace, inches from the mirror, checking his teeth for traces of the grilled cheese sandwich he’d had for dinner. He turned on the cold water, wet his index finger and then ran it several times across his clenched teeth.

He cleared a space in the gallery and set out folding chairs and a bench, deciding finally not to bother hauling the armchair out here. He went around turning on lights. In his jacket pocket he found a slightly bent Tareyton King and he blew on it several times to remove microscopic lint and then began searching for a match, the cigarette held between thumb and middle finger, an idiosyncrasy he’d copied from a titled Englishman he’d once done business with. With no matches to be had, he finally turned on the hotplate and was waiting for it to warm when the first of the bidders arrived.

Eventually eleven people sat in the gallery as Lightborne made final adjustments. Glen Selvy carried a chair out of the living area and sat against a wall, slightly apart from the others. Lightborne showed a carved wood fertility figure.
Noted its characteristics and advised as to period, precise handiwork involved, where found and how. A well-tanned man named Wetzel was the sole bidder.

A copper statuette with a lesbian theme also went without competitive bidding. Wetzel captured a bronze satyr—once owned by Fulgencio Batista, Lightborne said—after an encouraging flurry of bids against three other people.

Lightborne pushed a trunk on rollers into the auction area. He undid the belts, used an enormous key to open the trunk and then, with the help of a couple of men sitting up front, removed a three-foot-high volcanic stone phallus that pointed upward from a base of a pair of testicles larger than bowling balls.

The piece was variously chipped, pockmarked and discolored. It had character. Lightborne invited the bidders to take a closer look, and most did. Then he delivered a brief interpretation of the piece and opened the bidding.

Wetzel said, “That thing is about as pre-Columbian as an Oldenburg clothespin.”

“Who said pre-Columbian? I said it was dug out of a tomb in the jungle. Who specified a date?”

“Your man chiseled the damn thing in his backyard.”

“He knows tombs no one else knows,” Lightborne said. “They’re in the densest areas. You can’t get in there except on foot, hacking.”

“Hacking,” Wetzel said.

“Professor Shatsky was supposed to be here to authenticate. He’s late, evidently.”

“Shatsky.”

“The Jewish Museum.”

“What the hell does the Jewish Museum know about Guatemalan pricks? This particular prick isn’t even circumcised.”

Lightborne made a gesture of pacification.

“Go easy on the Anglo-Saxonisms,” he said.

An hour later the whole thing was over. A full-fledged disaster. Lightborne poured some Canadian whisky into a shot glass and sipped it. He got out a box of marshmallow cookies and ate three of them whole, washing them down with small amounts of rye.

Bottles of Shasta and Wink sat on tables in the gallery. Someone’s cigar still smoldered in an ashtray. Lightborne took the bent Tareyton out of his pocket and used the acrid cigar to light it. He locked the door, turned off the lights and slipped behind the partition.

A sixty-watt bulb hung over the wash basin, swaying a little in the breeze from an open window. Lightborne poured some more rye and sat by the phone. He dialed the operator and asked her to get a Dallas number, person to person, collect.

After some delay the call was accepted by Richie Armbrister, known as the boy wonder of smut, a twenty-two-year-old master of distribution and marketing who lived and worked in a barricaded warehouse in downtown Dallas.

Armbrister controlled a maze of one hundred and fifty corporations which numbered among their activities and holdings a chain of bookstores, strip joints and peep movies coast to coast; massage parlors and nude-encounter studios, southwest U.S. and western Canada; outlets for leather goods and mechanical devices west of the Mississippi; sex boutiques, topless bars, topless billiard parlors across the Sunbelt; a New Orleans car rental firm with topless chauffeurs. He took few vacations and had no hobbies.

“Lightborne, how are you? Always a pleasure to speak to a knowledgeable person, what with all these second-raters who work for me.”

“I understand the business is getting tight, Richie. I mean legally speaking, as far as successful prosecutions.”

“They’ll never find me. I have too much paper floating around. I’m very well hidden, believe me. Holding companies
in four states. Dummy corporations. I don’t exist as a person. I’m not in writing anywhere. I’m sitting behind all that paper.”

“Legal fronts, wonderful.”

“So speak,” Armbrister said, his high-pitched voice seemingly on the verge of cracking.

“Remember the business we talked about some months ago.”

“Sure.”

“It’s hot again,” Lightborne said. “I got a phone call that sounds encouraging.”

“You’re encouraged.”

“It could be nothing.”

“I’m still interested. Full-length movies. First-run. The field’s been denied me so far. Some bad luck. A series of small incidents. Organized crime, you know. The families. They’re involved in full-length.”

“It could be nothing, Richie.”

“But the trail is hot again.”

“It’s warm. I’d say warm, realistically.”

“What do you need, Lightborne?”

“To show some money.”

“All my money’s tied up in cash.”

Lightborne realized he was being called upon to laugh and with an effort he managed to do this.

“Hey, I bought a plane,” Richie said. “I’m going to Europe to do some business. We gutted the whole passenger section and redid it. It’s big, it seats thirty-one, a DC-nine. Maybe I’ll stop in New York on the way back. We’ll get serious about this thing.”

“I know Europe well,” Lightborne said with no particular conviction.

“First we go to England to look at the theater setup. Then Hamburg or Stockholm, I forget which, for the shops, to see if we can push our rubber line. Then maybe Amsterdam for bondage items, to check out their expertise.”

Lightborne was suddenly exhausted and wished only to stretch out on his cot and go to sleep. He stared into the dimness, nodding to the rhythms of the voice on the other end. There was a remark, a brief expectant silence, and then Richie’s manic laughter came swimming across the continent.

“Ha ha,” Lightborne said at the first opening.

The next day he walked into a railroad diner near Chinatown. He was a couple of minutes late and breathing heavily as he hurried the length of the room and sat next to Selvy at the counter.

“We discussed footage, you recall.”

“Yes,” Selvy said.

“Would he be interested?”

“Oh, he’d be interested.”

“Tell him it could be on.”

“I’ll tell him.”

“Tell him to forget about past failures.”

“It’s on. I’ll tell him.”

“Never mind the stuff from the jungle, tell him.”

“This is different,” Selvy said.

“Of course it’s still sight unseen. It’s still a question of plausibility.”

“You were the chief skeptic, last time we talked about it.”

Lightborne ordered soup and absently ran the edge of a matchbook under his fingernails.

“Common knowledge there was a steady flow of women in and out of the SS guard rooms in the bunker,” he said. “All told there were hundreds of people in the bunker. It was an elaborate operation, running the country from down there, what was left of the country.”

“All those people, things could happen, you’re saying.”

“On the other hand when we talk of the old boy himself, this is when I become highly skeptical once more.”

“Hitler.”

“He was too feeble to take part in anything like that. He
was partially paralyzed, he was under sedation much of the time. In his last days he wasn’t well at all. Eva Braun. Eva Braun certainly wasn’t a candidate for a mass sexual exercise. Not the type. Of course she liked movies. She once worked for a photographer. But that’s of little matter.”

“Very little,” Selvy said.

“On the other hand there were the early days with Geli Raubal. His niece. Story goes he forced her to model for dirty pictures. Close-ups and such.”

“Who drew the pictures?”

“He did,” Lightborne said.

“Hitler.”

“So you have this pornographic interest. You have the fact that movies were screened for him all the time in Berlin and Obersalzburg, sometimes two a day. Those Nazis had a thing for movies. They put everything on film. Executions, even, at his personal request. Film was essential to the Nazi era. Myth, dreams, memory. He liked lewd movies too, according to some. Even Hollywood stuff, girls with legs.”

“You’re building a case. You’re tilting.”

“It could be nothing.”

“You’re a student of the period.”

“Did I say that?”

“I believe I recall, yes, you said that.”

“You see, he’s endlessly fascinating. The whole Nazi era. People can’t get enough. If it’s Nazis, it’s automatically erotic. The violence, the rituals, the leather, the jackboots. The whole thing for uniforms and paraphernalia. He whipped his niece, did you know that?”

“Hitler.”

“He used a bull whip, story goes.”

Lightborne broke a saltine cracker and dropped the pieces into his tomato soup.