Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy (10 page)

A dangling “e” fell past from another book.

They were opening the curtains to let in sunlight. The
white wall was a hospital wall. A hand at his wrist told hir that now her pulse was being taken.

Epicene Wildeblood awakened again. “I’m Mary Margaret,” he gasped happily, beached on the shore of reality, cast up from the ocean of dream.

“Yes,” said the real doctor’s voice (his name was Glopberger, not Ahab), “the operation was um 100 percent successful. You are most certainly Mary Margaret now.” He beamed, an artist proud of his work, yet tentative, waiting for the Work’s first live movement.

Mary Margaret Wildeblood looked about her at the New World. This is Johns Hopkins Hospital. This is 1983. Everything that went before was just a nightmare. I am alive. I am me. I am free.

“How soon do I get the Curse?” she cried. “When do I become a
real
woman?” Thinking: the Blood of the Lamb.

Glopberger’s pink face, agape, was yet another Disney caricature, the waters of unconsciousness calling hir home. Home: back to the stars. And She went, she went, into the great ether drift, into the cosmic void again, from dina shaur to turban bay in a michaelsonmorley regurgitation to the Hawkfouledest Convention in Elveron. Yes a forty-four-year-old male rising like Venus on fours out of the waves but aglow gleaming as in Botticelli: hir Self surprised at this astonishingly female body a really successful crossing and one hand crept as she slept toward the crypt rested there happy yes: it was true. A female body. She snored hoarsely.

And Dr. Glopberger, like Baron Frankenstein, looked on his work and saw that it was very good. So far.

They were sitting in a VW Rabbit on Market Street in San Francisco. The marquee across the street still said DEEP THROAT after twelve years. “They never going to change that?” Starhawk asked. “Everybody and his brother been there to see that Linda Lovelace swallow peckers by now. Hell, everybody and his brother been there twice by now.”

“She could swallow my pecker anytime,” Mendoza said. Mendoza was a cop.

“I seen a funny one the other day,” Starhawk said, starting to laugh. “In the men’s crapper in the archaeology building. ‘Linda Lovelace for President,’ it said. ‘Let’s have a
good-looking
cocksucker in the White House.’ College kids.”

“They’re all a bunch of fags these days,” Mendoza told him seriously. “Fags and dopers. And they call us pigs. Anyway, what were you doing in the archaeology building?”

“I like to study my people’s history,” Starhawk said. “There a law against that?”

“The fuck,” Mendoza said, “I don’t care what you do on your spare time. You make out with those college girls? Don’t tell me, I know. You make out like a bandit. You’re the greatest thing come down the pike since Burt Reynolds, you are.”

Starhawk started to clean his nails with an attachment on his key ring.

“Tell me about the coke.”

“Murph owns more guns than the army got, up in Presidio. He’s a real nut on guns. I mean, it’s your ass he catches you. He won’t think twice about it. A police officer catching a burglar in his own house, it’s your ass. You got to understand that.”

“Dig,” Starhawk said. “It’s always my ass. You think there’s a crib worth knocking over they don’t have guns these days? Christ, there’s never been a better-armed country since we had the Revolution, is what it is. Even little old ladies. Even in Berkeley for Christ’s sake. This is no business for anybody got shaky nerves, these days. College professors, their houses are stacked with enough munitions for Black Panther headquarters. What I don’t understand is how come everybody in the fucking country hasn’t been at least wounded by now. Everybody’s even more crazy-mad than they are shit-scared. It’s like
High Noon.
You don’t have to tell me, be careful. I wasn’t careful, I’d be one dead Indian.”

“Son of a bitch,” Mendoza said suddenly, sitting up.

Starhawk was almost startled. “Huh?”

“That dog,” Mendoza said. “You see that son of a bitch shit right on the sidewalk? They do that all over the city, the ordinance doesn’t mean a fucking thing. Dirty, filthy animals, I’d ban them from the fucking city entirely, I was mayor.”

“Yeah,” Starhawk said. “That’s our chief problem here, dogs shitting on the street.”

“It ain’t funny,” Mendoza said. “Filthy bastards spread all kinds of diseases. And you take your kid out for a walk and there’s two of them humping and the kid says, ‘Daddy, what are the doggies doing?’ What are you gonna tell her, is what I wanna know. Dirty, filthy animals.”

“Yeah, but about Murphy and this job.”

“Okay, okay,” Mendoza said. “I’m just telling you dirty filthy animals should be banned. With Murph you got to be in and out as slick and sneaky as a preacher’s prick in a cow’s ass. I mean, he likes guns, more than most cops. And he’d love an excuse to shoot you.”

“Murphy?” Starhawk turned in his seat. “Murph and I, we never had any bad feelings.”

“Well, okay, he loves the ground you walk on. Like all the hookers on Powell Street, and the housewives up in Marin, and the college girls now too. But he hates what you are. He hates all minorities—Indians, niggers, it don’t matter to him, he’s democratic about it. The fuck, he doesn’t like me much, and we been partners going on ten years this May. And he hates burglars especially. An Indian burglar, that’s almost as good to him as a nigger burglar. You got to realize that when you go in there.”

“That’s a hot one,” Starhawk said, not laughing. “That really is a hot one. All the stuff he’s fenced for me, and he hates burglars. That really is good. Next thing you’ll tell me is the Vice Squad hates hookers.”

“Murphy’s religious,” Mendoza said. “He’d love to make holes in you. That’s what you got to understand.”

“Support your local police,” Starhawk said, “for a more efficient police state.”

“Look, you on this caper or you just going to sit here and crack wise? I can get Marty Malloy, you know.”

“You’re religious too,” Starhawk said. “I went and made fun of the department and now you’re going to get Malloy. Who’ll fuck up the whole job and you’ll both be up in Q
for the next twenty years. But at least he won’t crack wise about the department. He’ll leave fingerprints all over the joint, and drop the snow in the bushes on his way out, and crash into an Oakland P.D. car going home, and then lead them right to your front door, but he’s got proper respect for the police, Malloy. Yeah, you get Malloy.”

“Look, no need to be touchy.” Mendoza was ingratiating. “I want you, I don’t want Malloy. Just lay off the department, is all.”

“Okay, okay. No need for either of us to get antsy.” Starhawk smiled like an actor. “How much coke you think?”

“Like I say, who knows? But it’s got to be around 500 Gs. That’s what Amato says and he’s good at making estimates like that. Say Amato is wrong for once in his life, say it’s only 300 Gs, still you don’t get half of 300 Gs every night you go out and knock over a house.”

“It’s beautiful,” Starhawk said. “It’s so beautiful it stinks. A cop with a couple hundred thou in hot cocaine, all I got to do is walk in and walk out, he’ll never report it to anyone. That’s just what bothers me. Murphy comes home and finds it gone, he’s going to do something. Okay, he can’t call the captain and say, ‘Some thief just stole the cocaine I took from Freddy Fuckerfaster when I busted him, before I could sell it to Maldonado. Send over a squad car real quick.’ That’s what he don’t do. So, okay, what does he do? You know him better than I do.”

“He gets mad for a week, and anybody we bust better watch his ass or Murph will turn him over to wrecking crew. That’s all. What the fuck can he do, you see? There’s just nothing you can do when somebody snatches something you shouldn’t have in the first place. Especially when you’re a cop.”

“There’s me and Malloy,” Starhawk said. “And five others Murph knows as well as me. And two I can think of that Murph doesn’t know about yet. And maybe two that I
don’t even know, let’s say. That’s let’s see, about ten or eleven guys who might have done it, afterwards. Ten or eleven really good cat burglars in the Bay Area that Murphy will come looking for, one way or another.”

“So? You had a day in the last five years somebody on the force wasn’t trying to put you away?” Mendoza grinned. “Or you worried that Maldonado will think the coke’s already his and put the whole Cosa Nostra onto getting it back? Balls. There’s ten guys around here could do it, like you say. And ten more might have come up from L.A. and another ten from Vegas or Chicago or Christ knows where. You go in as slick as you usually do, nobody’ll ever have a lead. Murphy’ll have a purple hard-on for a week or so, and I wouldn’t want to be anybody he busts then, but that’s all that’ll happen, all. You in or you out?”

“Wait. When’s Murph’s next day off?”

“Tomorrow. Why?”

“Some people,” Starhawk said, “they had this kind of merchandise, they’d hide it so you practically got to take the walls down one by one before you find it. You know? Case like that, you want to save yourself some time, you watch until they show you where it is.”

“Hey, Murph’s no dumbbell. You think you’re the Invisible Man or something?”

“It’s got to be tomorrow. Believe me, he’ll never see me, but I’ll see him. You was to ask me, going in today bare-ass, before I can case the house, would be the best way to get my balls in a sling. For all I know, he’s got a friend staked out there for when he’s at work. And I wait till the day after tomorrow, when he’s at work again, he may have already sold it to Maldonado. Am I right or am I right?”

“Jeez.” Mendoza turned to look straight at Starhawk. “You going in there, with Murph at home, I don’t like that at all. What I don’t want is somebody gets dead, him
or you. That happens, my ass is grass and the whole department is the lawn mower.”

“Anybody in the department ever link me to a killing? Even suspect me? You know better than that, Mendy. I don’t go in bare-ass, you know. Already, I got three plans.”

“Then you’re really in.”

“Oh, I’m in.” Starhawk stopped cleaning his nails and returned the key to the ignition. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world. The only thing I like better than stealing from a cop is fucking a cop.”

“Funny,” Mendoza said. “Remind me to laugh on my day off. That attitude is going to get you in a lot of trouble some fine day, my friend.”

The first Furbish Lousewart was a retainer on the Greystoke estate in England in the thirteenth century. He was a foundling, the bastard offspring of the local curate and a nun who, oddly enough, later told Chaucer a story he considered good enough to retell in verse. The nun was also the model for the Prioress in the earliest Tarot deck
and her basic features remained even after that card became the Female Pope and, later, the High Priestess.

Lord Greystoke named the infant Furbish Lousewart because he looked so dainty when they found him in the manger. Furbish Lousewart was as dainty a name as you could have in Merrie England in those days, being the vernacular term for
herba pedicularis
, a most lovely flower of the snapdragon species.

Furbish Lousewart grew to manhood, married, fathered three legitimate children and died in the Third Crusade. One of his illegitimate children, by Lady Greystoke, was the only Greystoke to survive that Crusade and carried on the Greystoke line, unknown to his brothers and sisters, who continued the plebeian line of Lousewarts.

And Dr. Glopberger, like Frankenstein, looked on his work and saw that it was very good. So far.

But the nurse, Ms. Ida Pingala, returning along the long white hall permeated with Lysol to the snug white cubicle of the nurses’ lounge, seated herself smoothing the starched white hem of her skirt over her pale white
knees and punched numbers quick and neat on the phone console, white keys on white plastic the colorless allcolor of antiseptic sterility.

“Ubu, here,” came the Voice in her ear.

“Roy. It’s Ida.” Ms. Pingala was equally crisp.

Sounds of canine panting; Roy was always a cut-up.

Ms. Pingala laughed merrily. “Tonight?” she asked.

Sounds of louder, more passionate panting.

She giggled again. “Your place or mine?”

“Yours. You know how the Bureau is….”

“Eightish?”

“Nineish, to be on the safe side. All hell is breaking loose again.”

“Nineish, then. You devil.” More panting.

“Oh you devil you wild man you animal.”

“Nineish gotto go now love you bye.”

Roy Ubu, in Washington,
*
hangs up and glances at his wristwatch. Time for the meeting with Babbit.

A listless Santa Claus dingdonging his bell with empty junkie eyes as light snow fell in sparse crystals, not sticking to the sidewalk, but a biting Washington wind stings Ubu’s eyes as he leaves the FBI office, turning up his collar to slouch hands deep in pocket to his car. Shifting from first gear into second turning up Pennsylvania Avenue the snowflakes growing thicker and heavier as he drives, snaps on the car radio.