That’s that, he sighed, a realist who surrendered quarter where it was due and would never be a pusher, but merely sin’s friend downtown, a doer of favors, crime’s wardheeler, transgressions’s lousy legman, wrong’s cop and felony’s cabbie giving directions to the conventioneers.
But seeking to cover all markets, he needed to know the names of the pushers. He dialed Freedman. “It’s me, Doctor…Not good, Doc, not good. Sad and downhearted. Got the blues you know, old time, sunk-spirit funk. The fantods, Physician…No no, nothing you could call a new wrinkle. It’s Lilly again. We hooked her, Doc. Lilly’s hooked. She come up a dope fiend. Flaming, raging addict, Lilly is. She’d kill for the stuff, Doc. Yes sir, she’d lie and steal and murder and cavort. We did it this time. Freedman. We sure did a job on old Lilly. Good thing I’m rich, a habit like she’s got. Only thing keeps her off the street this minute’s my money, I guess. Have to appreciate small blessings, way I look at it. But Lilly, well sir, Lilly’s got a monkey on her back like King Kong…No, no. You know Lilly, her character. A cure’s out of the question. Only way to make her stop is tie her up and sit on top of her. A cure’s out. Lilly’s system just couldn’t stand up to cold turkey. No, Doc, I look down that lonesome road, and all I can see is doom in that direction. We’re just going to have to accept it, I’m afraid, and that’s why I had to call my family physician…No, hell, I understand your position. I know that as a medical man you can’t just go on prescribing these drugs for her…I know about your Hippocratic oath, and I want to tell you I respect you for it…. Absolutely not, out of the question, I appreciate that. I wouldn’t have it otherwise. But still and all, Doctor, you’re the one got her into this, ruined her health with an abortion, then prescribed narcotics to bring her round again…No, of course I’m not blaming you. Of course not. You did what you thought necessary. But, well sir, we’re decent people, Lilly and me. What do we know about the underworld and the syndicate and those plug-uglies? I was hoping I could get the names of some pushers from you so’s I could keep Lilly supplied, so’s the cupboard’s never bare…Sure, positively, that’s all I want…How’s that?…You will? Well, I appreciate it. Here, just let me get a pencil and a sheet of paper. Okey-dokey, I’m ready…Uh huh. Uh huh. Him? Tch tch…Uh huh. Uh huh. Fine, I got it all down. Thank you…But I do have a bone to pick with you, Dr. Freedman. Can you guess what it is?…That’s right, the suit…All right, now that’s a promise. That’s a promise from a man that’s under the Hippocratic oath.”
Replacing the phone, he thought: That Freedman is dangerous. He ought to be locked up.
With his heavy abortion trade, relieved now and then by the public’s incipient interest in drugs, Feldman managed to remain fairly equable for a while. It was still true, of course, that he was at their mercy and had not yet found any way to deflect their specific demands. Once, when he was still naïve, he might have settled for just these conditions, all sin subsumed in the body’s joy, the nervous system’s reasons, but he had begun to discover in the victims — he could not say his victims — a sense of prior submission, of simple yielded-to, statutory plight. Here were no fearful presences to justify either pistol in drawer or alarm button under the rug to bring help — he felt no real harm in them, and he was annoyed by their indulgence, bothered by the absence of driving pride, the firmer greeds. The truth was, he was haunted by the ghosts of those who had gotten to them first. Jealous as some taken-in bridegroom, he heard the lies still whispering above their heads, the wily lines of truckers in bars, cousins at parties, guests under their fathers’ roofs. Also, he recognized what they did not, that their need of him hung on an ignorance. Why did they need him? What did they use him for? He was merely a distraction for them, his function a ritual, a ceremonial fiction, as though their troubles and their solutions needed channels and red tape to legitimize them.
In the meantime, he was kept busy with referrals from his salesmen, listening to old ladies with some determined memory of a particular pair of house slippers long out of stock or some fly-by-night gadget seen at a friend’s. He could have whiled away the time running some of these down, or even had what he would once have considered fun switching their ardor to some other object, but he dismissed them as quickly as he could, getting them out of the way for the next white-gloved, goofy-hatted girl in trouble — with whose insides, despite himself, he was still in love.
A man came into Feldman’s office, a tall, stern, raw-boned, sinister fellow in his fifties, his hair graying at his temples but black everywhere else. His features were sharp, all angles and bas-relieved bones, the unrecoverable Eskimo or Mongol just under his skin now Anglicized and windburned Christian. He reminded Feldman of conductors on commuter railroads, whose solemn aspect had made him fearful, or of ace pilots now alocholic, or of investors embittered by businessmen, and of businessmen themselves as they were sometimes shown in movies — hard and ruthless and cynical, soft only on their daughters. Feldman thought of the gun he did not keep in the secret drawer he did not have.
“Are you Feldman?”
“Yes,” he said. The man remained standing by his desk, his courtesy a warning. “Please be seated.” The man looked at the chair suspiciously, then back at Feldman, and sat down as though defying some trap. “Yes?” Feldman said. “Yes sir?”
The man scrutinized him, and Feldman thought Cops even as he dismissed the idea. There was something too fastidious about the man’s anger. The father of some girl dead on the abortionist’s table, the sore old man of a kid junkie. But this too seemed unlikely. Something about his bearing was uncommitted, as though he were checking not for some bad quality he knew Feldman had, but for some good quality he was afraid he might have. Waiting him out, Feldman could feel himself posing. He gave him tough, gave him bold, gave him patient, gave him poker, gave him a dozen patent bravuras he did not feel, and was aware that his face was as frozen as his visitor’s, that not a muscle had moved nor a hair stirred. Indeed, it might still have expressed the question of his “Yes sir?” and he settled for that.
There were several buttons pinned to the man’s lapel. As he shifted in his chair he seemed to propel them forward. Noticing them for the first time, Feldman thought impertinently of all strange feats of belief, so many causes inscribed on the head of a pin. On one was an American flag, on another a sort of contemporary minuteman, for which some younger version of the man himself might have served as the model. The rest were the acronyms of unfamiliar organizations. A last badge read: “WDSG.” (“Wealth, Death, Sex and God?” Feldman wondered. Impossible.)
Still the man had not spoken, though Feldman understood that showing him the pins had been a gentle act, a shy feeler like the inexpert flourish of some schoolgirl’s engagement ring. He was inexplicably touched.
Finally the stranger spoke. “Feldman,” he said speculatively. His voice was as arrogant as ever, as if there had been no soft overture from the lapel; indeed, that had somehow been retracted. “Feldman,” he said again, turning the name over with his tongue as if it had been some gunned hood’s suspicious last effect in the hand of a policeman.
“What’s up?” Feldman made himself ask.