Sean and Sativa joined hands again, disillusioning Mike completely. He stood stock-still in the middle of the living room, looked around in marshmallow confusion, then realized with a start that he was both awake and up.
“Gnurph!” he said in horror. He headed back toward his room, but I fended him off and aimed him toward the john.
“Not today, old buddy,” still rather maliciously. “Communist Plot, baby, remember?”
“Gnurph!” he repeated, but he waddled toward the john.
Midway through breakfast most of us were wide enough awake to lay plans of a sort. Michael, his mouth ringed quaintly with milk, immediately took charge.
“The first thing we should do,” he said, we meaning myself and possibly Sean, “is search Laszlo’s pad. Right?”
“Why?” To me the idea lacked appeal.
“He probably keeps some kind of record,” very patiently, “of the source of those pills, or at least of how many he got and what he did with them. We’ll need that sort of thing for evidence when we go to the FBI. Why do I always have to explain these simple things to you?”
This wasn’t worth an answer, so I poured myself another cup of maté and thought about things for a while. Sean and Sativa — still holding hands and having a hell of a time trying to eat that way — weren’t saying anything, and I doubted that they were hearing much either. She was still wearing mainly herself, which gave the breakfast table an unduly festive air.
“Hey,” I realized, “just how’re we planning to go about searching Laszlo’s pad?” I suspected I already knew.
“Simple.” Mike sniffed in well-bred disgust. “We wait around until he splits and then break in.”
That’s what I thought. “As I recall,” I said sarcastically, “that’s called breaking and entering, and there are laws against it in this town.”
“Oh wow. Since when are you allergic to breaking laws?”
He had a point there, but, “I like to think I’m more or less selective about what laws I break. I mean, well, I like my felonies to be fun.”
“Breaking into Laszlo’s pad and searching it isn’t fun?”
“Hmmm.”
“Besides, it’s your patriotic duty to society. Remember that.”
“Um.”
“And if you find those records, you won’t have to follow Laszlo.”
“How do we do it?”
At quarter of twelve we stationed ourselves in a grubby candy store across the filthy cobbled street from Laszlo’s Avenue A pad. Mike phoned Laszlo, hanging up as soon as he answered.
“Still there,” he told us.
We settled down for a moderately long siege, sipping the worst chocolate egg creams on the Lower East Side. While I tacitly counted my woes (I like chocolate egg creams, generally), Mike taught Sean how to operate the two-way wrist radios we were using on this lark.
“All you have to do,” he said for the third unduly patient time, “is press the blue button and slide it to the right to send, and press the green button and slide it to the left to receive. The little gray button controls the volume: slide it to the right to get louder, to the left to get softer. It’s very simple.”
“Yeah,” Sean whispered. “Man, how old is that chick?”
“What chick?” Mike derailed fairly easily and didn’t like it a bit.
“You know.” Long Texas smile. “Sa-TI-va,” very slowly.
“Oh wow. I don’t know. Twenty-five?”
“Yeah?” Sean’s face looked as dreamy as a custard pie in August.
“Now,” calmly, “about this Radio…”
“ On and on they went, while Laszlo stayed perversely home and I swallowed endless lousy egg creams. The plan was for Michael to follow Laszlo, when and if he left, keeping in touch with us by radio, thus leaving Sean and me free to ransack Laszlo’s pad with little chance of getting caught, an arrangement of which I basically approved. Sean, however, didn’t seem to have much of a gift for wrist radios.
“Blue button,” he said ruefully after a prolonged while; “green button” in bewilderment; “gray button! Hey, man, which is which?”
“What?” Mike looked grievously stricken. “What do you mean?”
“I mean which is which, man? I can’t tell them goddamn buttons apart.”
“What do you mean, you can’t tell them apart?” I’d seldom heard Mike sound so utterly offended.
“I think,” I drawled, interrupting my catalog of sorrows, “I think,” again, “Sean’s trying to tell you something.”
“So tell me, dammit.”
“It strikes me,” prolonging Michael’s agony, “that our young friend’s a trifle color blind. Right, Sean?”
“Yeah,” he confessed, embarrassed. “I got these goofy contact things I’m s’posed to wear, but I don’t like ’em.”
So I ended up wearing the radio, though Mike’s generally reluctant to entrust me with electronic gear, being of the odd opinion that every communications gadget I touch falls apart instantly, which has only happened a few times and was never quite my fault.
And still we waited, sipping flat egg creams, telling Sean imaginative tales about Sativa, drawing progressively unfriendly looks from the Puerto Rican counterman and his fat wife or whatever, and cursing Laszlo fluently. None of us was particularly happy, and the day showed signs of becoming interminable and drab.
Laszlo finally left home at half-past two. Mike gave him the traditional half block lead and then slipped out after him, first making sure my radio was on. He doubted I could safely turn it on myself. Fine roommate.
Half a tepid egg cream later my left wrist said, “KRD 429B, mobile unit one, to KRD 429B, mobile unit two. Come in mobile unit two.”
“That’s Michael,” I explained to Sean and the suddenly downright hostile counterman.
“KRD 429B, mobile unit two,” I told my left wrist as Sean and I scuttled out just before the counterman could scuttle us, “to KRD 429B, mobile unit one. Hello there. Do we really need this KRD garbage?”
“You have to,” Mike’s voice said tinnily. “The UNCC may be monitering.”
“Groovy. Considering what we’re up to, I don’t want to be that easy to identify. Are you there?”
My radio crackled thoughtfully for a bit, then, “Right.”
“Great. What’s happening?”
“He’s trying to flag a cab. No, he’s got one. It’s cool to begin the exercise, understand?”
“Robert.”
“Robert?”
“You know, Yes.”
“Roger!”
“I thought that was some kind of British vice.”
“I’ve got a cab. I’ll follow him. You get to work.”
“Roger?”
“Right. Keep in touch.”
Sean and I played truck dodge from one curb to the other, leaping about inconspicuously, and ended up in the aromatic downstairs hall of the hyper-substandard brick antiquity that Laszlo Scott infested. Sean wanted to read the archaic obscenities on the walls, but I hustled him along upstairs. My main ambition was to get this whole thing over with as quickly as possible.
Laszlo’s den, third grimy floor front, sported a shiny metal door with five count them five locks of elaborately different kinds. The homemade universal key Mike’d issued me opened all of them but one, which turned out to be neither locked nor working. I began to feel a treacherous sense of confidence rising within me.
I slowly pushed the door open. It didn’t creak. This bothered me. Laszlo’s door by rights should creak. I stood there wondering about that, and Sean pushed past me into the pad.
Nothing happened to Sean, so I shrugged and followed him in. “Hello there,” I told my wrist before I even bothered to look around. “Are you there?”