Now, focusing in on Putnam’s blank visage hanging over the Paradise pauperizing machine, a frost settled over my heart cockles. His encounters with me are never casual. He looks me up only when he has some kind of job for me to do.
Why me? Because of O.R.G.Y., that’s why. Just as Charles Putnam utilizes the expertise of nuclear scientists, China-watchers, and professional I-spies, he takes advantage of my knowledge of the sexual underground when the necessity arises. I’m his “Man in Gommorah,” his “Spy Who Came in from the Orgy,” his “Agent Oh—Oh—Sex, Licensed to Kiss—and—Tell”!
Not too willingly. I’m not one of your gung-ho Nathan Hale1 types. Not me. Mrs. Victor didn’t raise her boy to be a martyr! Still, somehow, Charles Putnam always managed to con me into situations where my ass was fair game for an unhealthy variety of slings. Which is why my attitude toward him was immediately negative.
“No!” I greeted him.
“ ‘No’ what?” Putnam ignored my glance, which was filled with the congeniality of a cobra for a mongoose.
“ ‘No’ whatever it is you’re going to ask me to do!”
“Shall we try to be more positive, Mr. Victor?”
“We shalln’t,” I garbled. “The last time you talked me into being positive I ended up in the middle of the Tet offensive, up to my nostrils in hostiles. After that one, they canceled my life insurance.”
“We all make sacrifices, Mr. Victor.”
“Try telling that to Metropolitan,” I muttered.
“Let’s discuss it over a drink,” he suggested, switching smoothly to the diplomatic approach.
Broke as I Was, it was my only chance for tonsil tonic. Hell! I needed a belt! “Okay.” I agreed reluctantly and followed him into the dimly lit Casino bar, a horse-ass fly webward bound.
I ordered a double Chivas on the rocks. It was balm to my Leila-jangled scrotum, my bankrupted billfold, and my Putnam-knotted guts. If one was balm, two would be balmier. Why not? After all, Putnam was buying. I signaled the bartender for a refill.
Putnam’s visage nodded approvingly in the purple-tinted glass of the dark mirror over the bar. Mein host was no piker. Drink your fill, my boy! There’s plenty more hemlock where this came from!
“I’ve gone to some trouble to track you down, Mr. Victor,” Putnam said conversationally.
“You shouldn’t have bothered.”
“You’ve been moving around very erratically.” His voice was gently chiding. “It took three government agencies to follow your path through Africa and Scandinavia to Paradise Island.”
“Too bad,” I told him. “You should have saved the taxpayers’ money. There must be better things to spend it on. A busing program for the Nixon kids, maybe; a better mouthtrap for Veeps; or how about a new lock for the Pentagon?” I drained the second double and jiggled the ice in the empty glass for a third.
“Your country needs you.” His soft-sell tone robbed the words of their triteness, almost succeeded in lending them urgency.
But I wasn’t buying. “Shee-it!” I took a deep gulp from number three.
“Scatology won’t fill that need.”
“Neither will I.”
“A man has an obligation to his country.”
“A man has an obligation to himself.” The bartender poured another. “To stay alive,” I added.
“If the World is to be saved from the horrors of --” Putnam started to say.
“Give us this day our daily dread,” I interrupted firmly. “Can it! I’ve gone that circle route. What it adds up to is more horrors to save the world from the horrors of Whatever. Tell it to the marines-—but only the raw recruits!”
“You’re a cynical man, Mr. Victor, so I shan’t pursue the question of your elusive patriotism. However, your government does need your services. And it’s willing to pay, Mr. Victor. How does that strike you?”
“Like a lead-filled dirigible. I’m not interested.”
“Not even for . . .” He paused and then mentioned a figure. It was awe-inspiring.
“God bless America!” I said reverentially.
“Have I rekindled your patriotic fervor?” Putnam inquired.
“A man has an obligation. . . .” I mused. I drained my fourth -- or was it my fifth?—double Chivas. The purple mirror was becoming quite blurry. My eyes skidded off it like pinballs. “How much did you say?”
Putnam repeated the figure.
It swam up the River Chivas to take harbor in the one calm corner of my Scotch-soggy brain. Fact: I was drunk. Fact: I was broke. Fact: I was tempted. Result: I accepted!
“Then we have a deal, Mr. Victor. I would suggest we both sleep on it, and in the morning, when we’re more . . . umm . . . clear-headed, I shall fill you in on the particulars.”
He said good night and left me then. I watched him go, Mephistopheles in a drab, gray business suit, fading back into the woodwork. A deal had been made, even if I was too drunk to quite know what it was that had been bought and sold.
And that, kinder, is how Faust took the first step on the road to Inferno!
CHAPTER THREE
Inferno, Iowa, that is. Where -- remember?—I was watching a cadaver shovel moist, black dirt over the pointy-nippled, grave-lodged bosom of his own recent excavator. What happens after she’s buried? I wondered.
Simple. The act couldn’t be topped. I left the cemetery. I went back to the furnished room I’d rented in Inferno. I went to bed. To sleep. But I hadn’t seen the last of either the nubile necrophiliac or her corpsy friend.
The next day dawned warm and balmy. The sun came up like a giant peach over the wheat fields of the prairie. Its rays speckled through the leaves of a quiet, tree-lined street in the residential district of town. Its warmth spread gently over a clean-scrubbed white clapboard house in the middle of the block. It smiled through organdy curtains into a room on the second floor, a room with a bed, a bed with a girl in it.
Perched on a radiator in the corner of the room, I stared at the girl. Her eyes were closed; she might have been asleep or she might not. What had me staring was the transformation.
She was the same girl as the one in the graveyard the night before. She was the same girl, but she was different. Very different!
Last night, if I’d had to sum her up, it would have been with the word “eerie.” This morning I’d have used “wholesome.” In the moonlight her hair had been coldly black; now, in a halo of sunlight, it was a soft brown with warm hints of red. The face, so harsh among the tombstones, was now as sweet in repose as the crinoline doll nestled against one cheek. Her eyebrows, arched like batwings at midnight, were full and untouched in the daylight. Her formerly shroudlike complexion was now baby-pink with a trace of suntan. Nor were there any fangs; only small white teeth framed by moist, natural lips. Morning had transformed last night’s Vampira into the epitome of the all-American-girl-next- door. With her long-lashed eyes smoothly closed she looked as shucksy as apple pie!
Even her sensuality seemed subtly to have changed. Last night it had seemed perverse and sadistic; now it was just as pronounced, but more natural, warmer, more innocent. Schmaltzy, even; the appeal of early Debbie Reynolds2 .
She stirred in her bed, as if in the throes of a nightmare. She strained upward against some unseen weight, pushing off the sheet and blanket covering her. She was wearing pajama tops-—no bottoms-—and they reached exactly to the tops of her thighs. Her legs seemed slightly plumper, a bit more shapely than they had appeared in the cemetery mist.
One of the curlicues on the delicately styled white radiator cover was biting into my underthigh. I shifted my weight to the other buttock. I continued to watch the girl.