He smiled a bad-boy smile at her and asked, secretly rhetorical, knowing almost word for word what he would get back but wanting to hear his old close-to-the-blood self speak through Sara’s lips: “What do you want us to do?”
“Isn’t that all you need?” she asked. “Howards a murderer, and even if you couldn’t prove it you could put the parents of those kids he bought on the air, and then get Howards… But that’s your line of evil, you know just how to destroy the Foundation, you almost did it twice. And we could be careful, not let anyone get at us to… to… I’m not afraid.”
“I wonder if Madge Hennering said that too,” Barron said, but it was only a pro-forma cop-out and he knew it even as he said it. Got Bennie’s ass against the wall now for sure, he thought, and he’s not fucking around with Ted Hennering now, he’s playing chicken with Jack Barron, and I wrote that book. You set up your insurance already, didn’t you? What the fuck can Bennie do? Can’t get you off the air, not with that GOP Fat Cat action from Morris… should be able to keep away from hit-men you know are there. The fucker tried to kill you, you gonna let him get away with that?
“No, goddamnit, you’re right for once, Sara, Bennie’s not gonna get away with this. Not murder. Not sitting on top the whole country on a pile of dead bodies for the next million years, not a cat tried to kill Jack Barren and gets off whole! Yeah, no sweat to kill this Freezer Bill, and with the kind of stink I can hang on Howards, he’ll never be able to hold on to enough Democrats to block the Pretender… Sure I can do him in. And I will. Only…”
Only maybe the stakes are just too big for you to afford revenge, he thought. Across the river, smoke reached into a blue sky that went up and up and up till it became a cold, clear, black nothingness that went on and on in all directions as far as… as far as forever. And that’s a big thing to blow, forever. That’s more hero than any sane man can be. Jesus H. himself’d have to think twice. Big deal, he died to save us, but he had an angle, he died knowing he had forever made (’but if you black, when you go, you don’t come back’). How big a Baby Bolshevik would he have been if he knew he was blowing the Big All, immortality, on that dirty old Cross?
“Sure,” Barron said, “it sounds groovy when you riff it out like that. Makes you forget the one thing Bennie does have going—I do him in, we kiss immortality goodbye. You really ready for that, Sara?”
And this time her eyes were only a question; there was no answer anyone could give. But, he thought, there is that piece of paper.
“Sara,” he said, “are you ready to play the big game for all the marbles, today, right now?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I call Bennie right now, tell him we’re on our way to Colorado, we want that immortality treatment now, and once we get it—then we’ve got it all! Yeah! That’s his only edge, and once he blows it, we’ve got him. You ready? You ready for immortality now?”
“But… but how do you know he won’t just kill us?”
“Wonders of Modern Science plus a little pure nastiness,” Barron said. “I’ll carry a miniphone and get him to spill the beans to me, fuck with his mind till he’s gibbering, and—”
“What’s a… miniphone?”
“Huh…? Oh, that’s a new Bell Labs gizmo, personal portable phone not on the general market yet, strictly for vips. Transmits directly into the phone system’s satellite-ground-relay circuit, so you can use it from anywhere, just like making a call from an ordinary vidphone.
“I can set up a conference vidphone hookup, one or two phones here, couple at the office, and have the miniphone feed into the circuit with recorders on all the phones to get everything Bennie and I say on tape thousands of miles away, with instructions to Vince to mail copies to Luke, the FBI, Morris, maybe the AP, if anything happens to me. All I gotta do is get Bennie to incriminate himself when he thinks we’re alone, and he won’t be able to touch us no matter what.”
“You really mean it this time, don’t you?” she said. “I can hear the real Jack Barron talking now…” And her arms around him, her lips half-open, eyes that reflected bottomless depths of naked pleasure were eating him up in Berkeley sheets Meridian streets Acapulco-tropical-night-sounds bottomless feral worshipping hunger sucking him to her flashing images of Berkeley SJC attic streets-of-danger the feel of his own blood surging hot through his arteries with Sara beside him, always beside him with that manic turn-on hunger screaming “Go! Go! Go!”
Yeah, a free hard-on in every bag of power-junk, and a free bag with every hard-on, Baby Bolshevik bullshit and you know it, but man, oh, man, feel that dirty old surge! Yeah, we felt everything all over in those days, it was just us kids against all the crap in the world, and wasn’t that groovy, and shit we were more or less right. And then along came magic age thirty and we all got hungry for a piece of the action, and before we knew it, it was all just use me and I’ll use you politics, and them that stayed had the monkey on their backs. Like Luke… didn’t want the monkey, just didn’t dig power-junk hooks everyone who makes that scene, sooner or later, like it or not. And that’s what I saw when I got out. I wasn’t the cop-out, they were, or as much as me anyway, and show biz was the only thing could keep the monkey off my back. Yeah, everyone sells everyone else down the river sooner or later, was luck, is all, I found show biz or I’d still be doing it too. And letting Bennie cool things’d be selling everyone down the river in one big forever lump, biggest cop-out of all time…
“Seems like I don’t have much choice,” Jack Barron said.
Like cherries coming up on a slot machine, he saw that old familiar delicious Pavlovian reflex-arc close behind the windows of her eyes in a sizzle of hero-worshipping sparks, and she moved her mouth down his chest, licking and biting, leaving a trail of sweet juices, as her hands undid and dropped his pants with that old weirdly-masculine efficiency. She dropped to her knees, free hair bobbing, hands undulating over him, mouth moving against then around him in one sinuous fluid movement as her rolling tongue and warm pulsing lips sucked him in…
She paused in mid-beat, stared wide-eyed up at him across the flesh of his stomach as if it were the marble of some heroic statue; then her eyes mercifully closed as her nails bit the roundnesses of his ass, hands stuffing him into her mouth like a big bite of sweet melon. She grunted once softly as she picked up on the beat, faster and faster and faster in an asymptotic rhythm, kneading and clawing and sucking faster and faster and faster…
Faster, fasterfaster-fasterfaster fasterfasterfaster—and he slumped forward, half-limp over her as pleasure-waves inside him crested and crestedcrested-cfested-crestedcrestedcrested crestedcrestedcrested in onrushing rhythmic explosive series till they dopplered merged peak-to-peak in a continuous timeless flash… and he sighed a great air-release groan and exploded through her tension released in a synapse white-out reversal, paused, then cupped her face in his hands, lifted her up to him and kissed her softly on her moist, love-bruised lips.
And the breeze from the river was warm and soothing, filling him with a calm as wide as it was deep. Ah, it’s all such a shuck, the whole damn hurricane, when you stand at the center, none of it’s real. And anyone’s at the center if he sits up and looks. Got as much going for us as the next cat, just gotta be me. Peel the biggest vip going down till he’s mother-naked, and all you get is a man who deep inside, won’t believe what he is. Mano a mano, you got enough going for you to stand up to anyone, you’re looking down from where all those big-league politician cats look, and no wonder they don’t talk about it, it’s all just a shuck, none of those pricks got any more business telling the whole fucking country what to do than you have. You know it, and they don’t, is all. That’s where show biz is at—the only way to get that old surge without getting hooked on the junk, and without doing anyone in along the way. Politics! Statecraft! Horseshit! All you need to get into the big game is a little bit of muscle and a lot of bluff.