“If you’re trying to say that people are hypocrites, that’s not exactly a newsflash. And what’s it got to do with me?”
“Who told you to search John Tyler’s office?”
“No one.”
“You just intuited somehow that there was something to find?”
“No, I was just being nosy. I’m like that.”
“How many other offices did you search?”
“Well…none.”
“What about the nurses you’ve been having breakfast with? Did you go through any of their purses?”
“No.”
“What about their lockers?”
“No, but—”
“So you’re not that nosy. Why single out Dr. Tyler?”
“I thought he was cute, OK?”
“Oh. So you were stalking him?”
“No! I was just checking him out…I mean, I don’t know, maybe I did get a vibe off him.”
“A vibe.”
“Yeah, like you said, an intuition. That there was something not right there.”
“But then what about the nurses?”
“What about them?”
“Two of them have been stealing painkillers—shorting their patients’ dosages—and giving them to their boyfriends to sell. Strange you didn’t get a vibe about that. Maybe if they were taking the drugs for personal use, your intuition would have picked up on it…”
“Look, where are you going with this? You think I zeroed in on Tyler because I’m like him?”
“Are you?”
“Hey, if you’re worried I’ve got my own collection of magazine clippings, you’re welcome to search my apartment.”
“We already did.”
“OK…So you know your schlecky-affa-whatever theory doesn’t hold water.”
“It’s often a related transgression, rather than the exact same one,” Dixon said. “Just to be thorough, I ran a check of your reading history to see if there were any signs of inappropriate sexual interest.” He held up the batch of printout he’d been looking at when I came in. “That search was more fruitful. Tell me, do you recall stealing a book from the San Francisco Public Library when you were twelve years old?”
It was such a left-field question I almost laughed, but the funny thing was, I knew exactly what he was talking about. When he said, “Do you recall,” it was like my brain got zapped with some kind of flashback ray.
And what was he talking about? What was the book?
Anaïs Nin’s Delta of Venus. Moon’s mother had a copy, and Moon and I used to read it to each other during sleepovers. Eventually I decided I wanted a copy of my own, and hooking it from the library was easier than shoplifting it.
“How do you know about that?”
“Library Binding,” Dixon said.
I thought he was talking about the anti-theft strip: “But I didn’t take it out the front door.”
“No, you tossed it out of the second-floor girls’ bathroom window. That branch of the library lost a lot of books that way.”
“OK, I’ll cop to stealing it. But what’s so inappropriate? I mean, Delta of Venus is smut, but it’s literary smut.”
“It’s a curious sort of literature, though, isn’t it?” Dixon said. “For example, the third story in the book—the one entitled ‘The Boarding School’—concerns a young student at a monastery who is ogled by priests and sexually violated by his classmates…This is what you consider wholesome erotic entertainment?”
“I don’t remember that story.”
“Don’t you? I’d have thought it was a favorite. According to my records, you read it nineteen times while the book was in your possession.”
“According to your records?”
“Library Binding.” He offered me the printout. “There are some other items here I’d love to get your comments on.”
I started going through it. It was crazy: a catalog of every piece of porn and erotica I’d ever laid eyes on. Not just titles, either—there were notes about specific scenes, even specific paragraphs I’d paid special attention to. And you know, it was bullshit, what he was implying, but with all of it thrown together on one big list like that, I could see how someone with an overly suspicious mind might get the wrong idea.
What else was on the list?
Well, De Sade, of course. Assorted Victorian gentlemen—in college, I must have gone through the entire Grove Press library, I mean, who the hell didn’t? Henry Miller. William Burroughs. Anne Rice.
At first I was kind of mortified, you know? But as I got further into it—it was a long list—I started to hit stuff that was harder to be embarrassed about, books and stories that weren’t technically smut at all, even if they did have sex in them. Towards the end the list-maker really seemed to be reaching—there were even a couple of Shakespeare plays, I think. And then on the last page, I found the weirdest entry of all…
“The Bible?”
“November 13th, 1977,” Dixon said. “One of the few times you were actually in church. Eyes Only caught you lingering over a passage in Genesis—the one where Lot offers his virgin daughters to the mob in Sodom and Gomorrah.”
“Uh-huh…And because I lingered over this Bible verse, you think I might want to sacrifice a real virgin to an evil mob?”
“If you’d lingered over it nineteen times, I’d certainly have cause to wonder. Just the once, we can probably write off to prurient interest…Although I do find it curious you were laughing as you read it.”
“Right.” I shoved the printout back into his hands. “I get it.”
“You get it?”
“Yeah. You can tell True to get bent.”
“Ah…You think Mr. True told me to give you a hard time about this.”
“I questioned his call on Tyler, didn’t I? But this isn’t even close to being the same thing…”
“You are laboring under at least two misimpressions right now,” Dixon said. “The first is that I care whether you’re comfortable with Mr. True’s policy decisions. Trust me when I tell you, putting low-level operatives’ minds at ease isn’t one of my concerns in this life.”
“What’s the other misimpression?”
“That I disagree with you about Dr. Tyler. If it were up to me, the organization would deal much more aggressively with him—and all others like him. Unfortunately, like you, I have to defer to Cost-Benefits. And even if the decision was mine to make, my dream solution wouldn’t be feasible.”
“Why not? Because everyone has sick fantasies?”
“No. That’s just something people who have sick fantasies tell themselves, so they can feel normal. But there are enough of you to make a clean sweep logistically impractical…” He waited a beat before adding: “People who act on their sick fantasies, though—that’s a more manageable number.”
And just like that, I finally got it, what this was really all about: he knew about the pet boys.
“I know about the pet boys,” Dixon said.
The pet boys?
Yeah, OK, how do I explain this…You remember how, when I was talking about my twenties, I said there were times when I had a little too much fun? This was like one of those times.
It was a couple summers after I got kicked out of Berkeley. Weekdays I was working this roach-infested burger joint in the Tenderloin. On Friday and Saturday nights I had a different gig, at a liquor store across from the Golden Gate Panhandle. There were a lot of street kids in the Panhandle, and every night I’d get a bunch of them coming into the store, trying to buy booze.