–finagle's fifth fundamental finding
"The fuck," Malloy said. "Where you get an idea like that? I don't sing, I never sing. Who's been handing you that shit?"
It was a small furnished room on Taylor Street in the San Francisco tenderloin. A sign outside the window advertised an establishment on the ground floor,
Les Nuits de Paris Massage.
Starhawk said, "Marty, I know three guys up in Folsom because of you. They're not sure. Each one of them, he says it might of been you, it might of been two other guys. I'm sure. I make it a point of honor to be sure about things like that. You pick up $20 here from Mendoza, $15 there from Murphy, and you tell them what you think they want to hear, mostly crap. To keep them interested, you give them a live one now and then, somebody you don't like. You and twenty other guys in this town. Don't crap me, Marty. I'm here to make money for you, not to give you a hard time about it."
Malloy said, "You're crazy. You should go see a psychiatrist. You must of been back on the reservation eating peyote again. I don't know what the fuck you're talking about."
"Okay," Starhawk said. "You're smart, Marty. You're so damned smart you don't admit anything, even when the other guy knows more about it than you do. My ass. You're so damned smart you're stupid, is what you are."
Malloy started to get up.
"Sit down," Starhawk said. "I keep telling you, I'm not here to give you a hard time. Listen to me, Marty, just a minute. I've got a century that's not doing anything, and it's yours." He opened his wallet and laid a $100 bill on the table. "Now, do we talk about its four brothers, and what you do to get them, or do you go on shitting me until I go out the door and find another guy that talks to cops?"
The massage sign below the window flickered on-off, on-off.
"Suppose I do it," Malloy said. "I mean, I'm not admitting anything, but suppose just this once I go talk to The Murph. What I got to know is, whose ass is in the sling, who goes up? You understand, I don't want somebody comes looking for me from the Syndicate."
"Nobody goes up, that's the beauty of it," Starhawk said. "You're just going to tell Murph about a guy got in today from L.A. He's here to do a job for Maldonado, see, and he got drunk and started shooting off his mouth about how funny it was, the guy he came to do the job on is a cop."
"Jesus," Malloy said. The massage sign flickered off and on again. "Don't tell me, let me guess. Starhawk, the man of bronze, two balls of cast iron and no more brains than a hamster. You got it in your head it's cop-hunting season and you're going to shoot one of them. And they trust good old Marty Malloy so much they'll spend all their time looking for an imaginary hit man from L.A., just because good old Marty tells them so. I take it all back. You don't need a psychiatrist, you need a new brain."
"Don't get your bowels in an uproar," Starhawk said. "It's not that kind of job. It's just a heist."
"What's this cop got, somebody comes all the way from L.A. to heist it? The crown jewels?"
Starhawk raised his fingers to his nose and made a sniffing motion.
"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph," Malloy said. "This cop, what he's got is a bag of snow, so he won't be talking to anybody else in the department when it turns up missing. I got to hand it to you, kid. Nobody could have set this up for you but another cop. The fuck, it would have to be his partner. Who's pissed because he didn't get his half, right?"
"Don't think about that, you might get so excited you'll talk about it in your sleep. The thing is, you just got to tell Murph about this Syndicate gun from L.A. and how funny he thinks it is, that this crooked cop is trying to sell some hot snow to Maldonado's boys and they just went and brought up this gorilla to take it from him, no down payment, no monthly installments, for free."
Malloy was grinning broadly. "Murph'll shit," he said. "He'll absolutely shit a brick."
"Yeah," Starhawk said. "I kind of think he will. You like it?"
"Kiddo," Malloy said, "if I wasn't so broke this week, I'd do it free. Just to watch him trying not to look like the cop I'm telling him about. The fat prick."
"I sort of figured you'd like it," Starhawk said. "Me, the only thing I regret is I can't be there to see his face myself."
"Yeah," Malloy said. "The fat prick."
IS VLAD A SYMBOL?
A class made up solely of intellectuals will always have a guilty conscience.
–furbish lousewart V, Unsafe Wherever You Go
"Defection?" Ubu suggested at the second conference on the Brain Drain. "Russia or China…"
"The CIA was the first agency into this," Babbit said, "and they say it's impossible. They know what color drawers every commissar wears these days with the latest surveillance techniques. One hundred thirty-two top American scientists are not working over there unknown to the CIA. Take that as axiomatic." Babbit was firm.
"Well there are only twelve people in HOME…"
"They haven't left the planet," Babbit said briefly. "People of that caliber do not travel about without somebody noticing-Intelligence, newspapers, TV, other scientists, somebody. It is as if they have crawled into a hole and dragged the ground in after them." His chair creaked screeee as he leaned forward for emphasis.
"Hell, they're not loose inside the country sir," Ubu said firmly. "Americans can't just disappear these days. Why to cash a check any kind of check you've got to write both your Social Security number and your GWB number and have them both scanned by the Beast. Sir there's never been a people better watched and protected than the American people of November 1983. And we expect to do even better sir when the new circuits are put in the Beast next month."
He's gonna find out who's naughty or nice
But the snow falls thicker, making a blanket of foam against the window of Babbit's office and piles against the door of The Upstart Crow bookstore off Dupont Circle across town, where Marvin Gardens is autographing copies of Vlad Victorious.
"I never got a real live autograph from a real live author Mr. Gardens tell me why did you write two books about a man like Vlad?"
"To make money," Marvin said in his Peter Lorre cokehead voice. He had prepared for the ordeal of the seventeenth autograph party in twenty-three days by snorting more than his usual morning quantity of the snow and was in no mood to conceal his divinity from the blind uncoked Earthlings. "I have always been possessed by a mad, passionate, almost erotic desire for a very large bank account. In fact, I love the feel of money the crisp crinkle of bills the metal solidity of coin the visual impact of a large check with seven figures,"
"Is it true John Wayne will play Vlad again in the sequel?"
"That's just in the talking stage now and frankly I don't care if they cast Raquel Welch the important thing is cash on the barrelhead my agent is asking a million for the screen rights and we won't settle for a penny less… Yes?"
"Is Vlad really a symbol?"
The twelve people in HOME-High Orbital Mini-Earth-were construction engineers, six male and six female. They had originally been sent there to build, with materials shipped from Lunar Mining, HOME II, a space village for 10,000 occupants. This program had been canceled as "non-ec" by President Lousewart and the twelve colonists restricted to "ec" research, mostly astronomical, which President Lousewart turned over to his astrologers for a mystical interpretation.
HOME was located in the area called Libration Point 5, where the gravitational fields of Luna and Terra were equally balanced. This null-gravity area had been mathematically discovered by the astronomer Lagrange and was therefore sometimes called the Lagrange Area. The name for the space town, HOME, had been coined by psychologist Timothy Leary in 1977.