“Yes, sir, Mr Kolinski.” She paused. “Thank you, Mr Kolinski.”
Back in her room, Robin had remained standing beside the bed, exactly as Kolinski had left her, for a full thirty seconds. Then she crossed swiftly to the door, pulled it open a foot and cautiously thrust her head out. Past his waiting back, at the far end of the hall, she could see the black girl just emerging from the office.
Robin shut the door, twisted the key in the lock, then went to the bureau for a clean handkerchief. Her movements, with the craving temporarily stilled within her, were unconsciously graceful and fluid. Her habit was heavy enough that five cc’s of the street-strength solution were merely sufficient to restore her to a normal behavioral state, not enough to put her on the nod. She was humming to herself. Her eyes danced with a fierce joy that was like anger.
With the handkerchief around her fingers, and using a feather touch, she picked up the syringe from the bed where Kolinski had tossed it. Her fingers gripped it with the clean linen just at the very base of the barrel, where the needle fitted over it. She turned the syringe this way and that under the unshaded bulb hanging by its bare cord from the converted gas fixture in the ceiling.
Whatever the light showed her made Robin smile in satisfaction. She carried the syringe over to the bureau, opened a drawer, nested the syringe lovingly in the handkerchief. She was just shutting the drawer when the black girl’s scream came up the hall to freeze her movements.
She waited. The cry was not repeated. She hurriedly blew out the candle, but did not remove it. She went to the wash basin, took up toothpaste and brush from the stained and yellowed enamel, began to brush her teeth very methodically, as if she could never get the inside of her mouth clean.
Only then did Robin cross to the door, unlock it, look out again. The hallway was deserted. On bare silent feet, leaving her door wide behind her, she padded down to the office. The black girl was sitting behind the tiny desk, her immense breasts, bared, flowing halfway across its littered surface. She was crying bitterly.
“Daphne,” called the white girl softly.
Daphne raised her head with a stricken, guilty look. Seeing who it was, she knuckled her reddened eyes like a hurt child, grunted to her feet to reach across and open the door. She didn’t bother to pull her sweater back down.
“I heard you scream,” said Robin. “What...”
“That motherfucker Kolinski! He hurt me. See? He took an’ twisted my tit, wasn’t no call that motherfucker do that.”
“Did he hurt you badly?”
“I’ll live.” The fat lips writhed. “But someday I’m gonna cut that motherfucker’s motherfucking nuts off, I swear. Someday...”
“Not someday, Daphne. Now.”
“Now?” Daphne’s face had changed. Fear and greed had entered it, were fighting their age-old battle on her essentially guileless features.
“It’s today, Daphne.”
“Miss Robin, I know what we done talk about, but—”
Robin came quickly into the office. She shut the door behind her, put an arm around the black girl’s meaty shoulders as a mother might. “It’s more than talk, Daphne. It’s today. This afternoon.”
Daphne licked the fat red lips. “An’ the money, Miss Robin. It’s truly what you said? Five th...” Her voice lost the figure when she tried to say it. “Five thousand dollars? Just for—”
“Just for the phone call at exactly the time I told you.” The white girl’s thin patrician features were expressionless. “That, and sticking to your story afterwards. That’s as important as the phone call. Sticking to it even in court.”
“An’ you’ll back up my story?”
Robin smiled as at a secret joke. “Absolutely.”
“That motherfucker get out on bail, get hold of my black ass—”
“He won’t, Daphne. My... testimony will keep him in jail.”
The black girl looked at her distrustfully, gave her own fear one more chance before succumbing to greed and hatred. “Where your kinda dope fiend get that kinda money, Miss Robin? You out on the street turning tricks when that motherfucker don’t give you your fix, where you gonna get—”
“I’ll have it, Daphne. I’ll put five thousand dollars on the corner of my dresser. After the phone call, come down and get it.” Her eyes and voice changed. “I’ll be on the nod. I won’t see you take it, but don’t try to change your story afterwards. If you do...”
“I know,” said Daphne glumly. “You got friends. Every motherfucker in this world got friends, ’cept Daphne.”
“By tonight you’ll have five thousand friends, Daphne.”
The black girl’s eyes suddenly glittered. “Yeah!” she exclaimed softly. “Five thousand bucks! I fix that motherfucker. I fix that motherfucker’s honky ass good!”
The white girl went back down the hall to her room. She shut but did not lock the door. She looked at the cheap alarm clock on top of the dresser, lay down on the bed on her back. It was a bit past ten o’clock. The heroin was still at work in her. She lay there quietly, a junkie whore named Robin on a whore’s sprung bed in a cheap junkie whore’s slovenly room.
She waited.
Five
As Robin waited, the search for Docker was spreading across San Francisco. Not the San Francisco famous to tourists for the 49-Mile Drive, the bright flower stall on the Bank of America’s sprawling dark plaza, the St Francis Hotel’s dizzying exterior elevators to the tower. Not even the San Francisco of the rich condominiums of Russian and Nob Hills, or of the rows of boxy tracts which had stilled the once-restless sands of the Sunset District.
But San Francisco all the same, a real city as valid as the one they shoot movies in, and give awards to the restaurants of, and write books about.
An underbelly San Francisco, in which Alex Kolinski was on his way to the Bush Street parking garage where Walter Hariss waited, smoking an impatient cigar. In which Pamela Gardner was on the phone, skiptracing the big blond man named Docker. Neil Fargo was just parking his Fairlane in the Fifth and Mission garage. And a uniformed prowlie named Edmunds had feigned sudden illness and had, on behalf of his monthly pay-off from Walter Hariss, tracked down the driver of the 25 Bryant bus which had carried Docker to Army Street. There the big blond-haired, limping man with the attaché case had debussed, and there the trail had ended.
For the moment. But the city through which Docker now moved had thousands of watching eyes and outstretched hands. This was the muggers’ and pushers’ and prosties’ and hypes’ San Francisco. The city of cab drivers so stoned on grass that the shadow line between reality and dream became a little tenuous even on shift. The city of black kids who shot out the windows of Hunters Point buses for fun, of militants who raided precinct police stations with automatic weapons for real, and of Chinatown juvies from the Chung Ching Yee, Hwa Ching, and Suey Sing gangs who emptied .22s into one another for an illusory concept of territory.
It was the city of cheap hustlers like Rowlands, one of many street types alerted by Kolinski’s lieutenant to watch for a big mean cat with long blond hair and a limp and some sort of briefcase. Rowlands was a round little man who made a vague living off information picked up here and there concerning this and that.
He had taken up his post inside the front doors of the Greyhound Terminal on Seventh Street just south of Market. His hands were in his pockets and he was staring blankly out at the taxi rank like a man waiting for his wife, teetering from one foot to the other, checking his Timex. But his deceptively sleepy eyes missed nothing that might translate into money.
At about the same time Rowlands yawned and watched the backside of a girl wobbling down Seventh in a tight skirt, a thin black man named Browne was arriving at the Trailways Bus depot. This was located in the echoing lower level of the East Bay Terminal on First Street, six long blocks away from the Greyhound depot and also just south of Market. Browne wore, among other items of dress, old oxblood dress shoes with a neat hole cut through each upper to ease the corns on his little toes.