Every nation in the world, he knew, trains and sends out a mass of agents to loosen bolts here, strip threads there, break wines and start little fines, lose documentslittle misadventures. A wad of gum inside a Xerox copying machine in a government office can destroy an irreplaceableand vitaldocument: instead of a copy coming out, the original is wiped out. Too much soap and toilet paper, as the Yippies of the sixties knew, can screw up the entire sewage of an office building and force all the employees out for a week. A mothball in a cars gas tank wears out the engine two weeks later, when its in another town, and leaves no fuel contaminants to be analyzed. Any radio or TV station can be put off the air by a pile driven accidentally cutting a microwave cable or a power cable. And so forth.
Many of the previous aristocratic social class knew about maids and gardeners and other serf-type help: a broken vase here, a dropped priceless heirloom that slips out of a sullen hand.
Whyd you do that, Rastus Brown?
Oh, Ah jes fogot ta and there was no recourse, or very little. By a rich homeowner, by a political writer unpopular with the regime, a small new nation shaking its fist at the U.S. or at the U.S.S.R.
Once, an American ambassador to Guatemala had had a wife who had publicly boasted that her pistol-packin husband had overthrown that little nations left-wing government. After its abrupt fall, the ambassador, his job done, had been transferred to a small Asian nation, and while driving his sports car he had suddenly discovered a slowmoving hay truck pulling out of a side road directly ahead of him. A moment later nothing remained of the ambassador except a bunch of splatted bits. Packing a pistol, and having at his call an entire CIA raised private army, had done him no good. His wife wrote no proud poetry about that.
Uh, do what? the owner of the hay truck had probably said to the local authorities. Do what, massah? Ah jes
Or like his own ex-wife, Arctor remembered. At that time he had worked for an insurance firm as an investigator (Do your neighbors across the hall drink a lot?), and she had objected to his filling out his reports late at night instead of thrilling at the very sight of her. Toward the end of their marriage she had learned to do such things during his late-night work period as burn her hand while lighting a cigarette, get something in her eye, dust his office, or search forever throughout or around his typewriter for some little object. At first he had resentfully stopped work and succumbed to thrilling at the very sight of her; but then he had hit his head in the kitchen while getting out the corn popper and had found a better solution.
If they kill our animals, Luckman was saying, Ill fire bomb them. Ill get all of them. Ill hire a professional down from L.A., like a bunch of Panthers.
They wont, Barris said. Theres nothing to be gained by injuring animals. The animals havent done anything.
Have I? Arctor said.
Evidently they think so, Barris said.
Luckman said, If I had known it was harmless I would have killed it myself. Remember?
But she was a straight, Barris said. That girl never turned on, and she had heavy bread. Remember her apartment? The rich never understand the value of life. Thats something else. Remember Thelma Konnford, Bob? The short girl with the huge breastsshe never wore a bra and we used to just sit and look at her nipples? She came over to our place to get us to kill that mosquito hawk for her? And when we explained
At the wheel of his slow car, Bob Arctor forgot theoretical matters and did a rerun of a moment that had impressed them alclass="underline" the dainty and elegant straight girl in her turtleneck sweater and bell-bottoms and trippy boobs who wanted them to murder a great harmless bug that in fact did good by wiping out mosquitoesand in a year in which an outbreak of encephalitis had been anticipated in Orange Countyand when they saw what it was and explained, she had said words that became for them their parody evil-wall-motto, to be feared and despised:
IF I HAD KNOWN IT WAS HARMLESS
I WOULD HAVE KILLED IT MYSELF.
That had summed up to them (and still did) what they distrusted in their straight foes, assuming they had foes; anyhow, a person like well-educated-with-all-the-financial-advantages Thelma Konnfond became at once a foe by uttering that, from which they had run that day, pouring out of her apartment and back to their own littered pad, to her perplexity. The gulf between their world and hers had manifested itself, however much theyd meditated on how to ball her, and remained. Her heart, Bob Arctor reflected, was an empty kitchen: floor tile and water pipes and a drainboard with pale scrubbed surfaces, and one abandoned glass on the edge of the sink that nobody cared about.
One time before he got solely into undercover work he had taken a deposition from a pair of upper-class well-off straights whose furniture had been ripped off during their absence, evidently by junkies; in those days such people still lived in areas where roving rip-off bands stole what they could, leaving little. Professional bands, with walkie-talkies in the hands of spotters who watched a couple miles down the street for the marks return. He remembered the man and his wife saying, People who would burglarize your house and take your color TV are the same kind of criminals who slaughter animals or vandalize priceless works of art. No, Bob Arctor had explained, pausing in writing down their deposition, what makes you believe that? Addicts, in his experience anyhow, rarely hurt animals. He had witnessed junkies feeding and caring for injured animals over long periods of time, where straights probably would have had the animals put to sleep, a straight-type term if there ever was oneand also an old Syndicate term as well, for murder. Once he had assisted two totally spaced-out heads in the sad ordeal of unscrewing a cat which had impaled herself within a broken window. The heads, hardly able to see or understand anything any more, had over almost an entire hour deftly and patiently worked the cat loose until she was free, bleeding a little, all of them, heads and cat alike, with the cat calm in their hands, one dude inside the house with Arctor, the other outdoors, where the ass and tail were. The cat had come free at last with no real injury, and then they had fed her. They did not know whose cat she was; evidently she had been hungry and smelled food through their broken window and finally, unable to rouse them, had tried to leap in. They hadnt noticed her until her shriek, and then they had forgotten their various trips and dreams for a while in her behalf.
As to priceless works of art he wasnt too sure, because he didnt exactly understand what that meant. At My Lai during the Viet Nam War, four hundred and fifty priceless works of art had been vandalized to death at the orders of the CIApriceless works of art plus oxen and chickens and other animals not listed. When he thought about that he always got a little dingey and was hard to reason with about paintings in museums like that.
Do you think, he said aloud as he painstakingly drove, that when we die and appear before God on Judgment Day, that our sins will be listed in chronological order or in order of severity, which could be ascending or descending, or alphabetically? Because I dont want to have God boom out at me when I die at the age of eighty-six, So youre the little boy who stole the three Coke bottles off the Coca-Cola truck when it was parked in the 7-11 lot back in 1962, and youve got a lot of fast talking to do.
I think theyre cross-referenced, Luckman said. And they just hand you a computer printout thats the total of a long column thats been added up already.
Sin, Barris said, chuckling, is a Jewish-Christian myth that is outdated.
Arctor said, Maybe theyve got all your sins in one big pickle barrelhe turned to glare at Barris the anti-Semitea kosher pickle barrel, and they just hoist it up and throw the whole contents all at once in your face, and you just stand there dripping sins. Your own sins, plus maybe a few of somebody elses that got in by mistake.