"You're a bad influence on my prisoners," he said. "I got a good mind to see that some kind of accident happens to you. I don't want to see you corrupting prisoners in my jail-mine or anyone's-for forty years."
"Sheriff," said George. "What do you want from me? You got me on a pot charge. What more do you want? Why did you stick me in that cell with that guy? What's all this scare stuff and threats and questioning for?"
"I wanna know some things," said the Sheriff. "I want to find out everything you can tell me about certain matters. So, from this moment be prepared to tell me only the truth. If you do, maybe things will go easier on you, after."
"Yes, Sheriff," said George. Cartwright squinted at him. He really does look like a pig, thought George. Most do. Why do so many of them get so fat and have such little eyes?
"Well, then," said the Sheriff. "What was your purpose in coming down here from New York?"
"I'm simply on an assignment from Confrontation, the magazine-"
"I know it. It is a smutty magazine, and a communist magazine. I have read it"
"You're using loaded words. It's a left-wing libertarian magazine, to be exact"
"My pistol is loaded, too, boy. So talk straight All right Tell me what you came down here to write about"
"Sure. You ought to be as interested in this as I am, if you're really interested in law and order. There have been rumors circulating throughout the country for more than a decade now that all the major political assassinations in America-Malcolm X, the Kennedy brothers, Medgar Evers, King, Nixon, maybe even George Lincoln Rockwell-are the work of a single, conspiratorial, violence-oriented right-wing organization, and that this organization has its base right here in Mad Dog. I came down to see what I could find out about this group."
"That's what I figured," said the Sheriff. "You poor, sad little turd. You come down here with your long hair and you expect to get, as you put it, a line on a right-wing organization. Why, it's lucky for you you didn't meet any of our real right-wingers, like God's Lightning for instance. The ones around here would have tortured you to death by this tune, boy. You really are dumb. OK, I'm not gonna waste any more of my time with you. Come on, I'll take you back to your cell. You might as well get used to looking at the moon through bars."
They walked back the same way they had come. At the entrance to the corridor where George's cell was, the Sheriff opened the door and yelled, "Come and get him, Charley."
George's guard, his face pale and his mouth set in a lipless line, took George by the arm. The corridor door clanged shut behind the Sheriff. Charley took George to his cell and pushed him in wordlessly. But at least he was three-dimensional now and less like a marijuana phantom.
Harry Coin wasn't there. The cell was empty. George became aware of a shadow in the corner of his vision. Something in the cell next to him. He turned: His heart stopped. There was a man hanging from a pipe on the ceiling. George went over and stared through the bars. The body was swaying slightly. It was attached to the pipe by a leather belt which was buckled around the neck. The face, with the staring eyes, was that of Harry Coin. George's glance went lower. Something was coming out of
Harry Coin's midsection and was dangling down to the floor. It wasn't suicide. They had disemboweled Harry Coin, and someone had thoughtfully moved a shit-can under him for his bloody intestines to dangle into.
George screamed. There was no one around to answer him. The guard had vanished like Hermes.
(But in Cherry Knolls mental hospital in Sunderland, England, where it was already eleven the following morning, a schizophrenic patient who hadn't spoken in ten years abruptly began exhorting a ward attendant: "They're all coming back-Hitler, Goering, Streicher, the whole lot of them. And, behind them, the powers and persons from the other spheres who control them…" But Simon Moon in Chicago still calmly and placidly retains the lotus position and instructs Mary Lou sitting in his lap: "Just hold it, hold it with your vaginal wall like you'd hold it with your hand, gently, and feel its warmth, but don't think about orgasm, don't think about the future, not even a minute ahead, think about the now, the only now, the only now, the only now that we'll ever have, just my penis in your vagina now and the simple pleasure of it, not a greater pleasure to work toward…" "My back hurts," Mary Lou said.)
WE'RE GONNA ROCK ROCK ROCK AROUND THE CLOCK TO NIGHT
There are Swedish and Norwegian kids, Danes, Italian and French kids, Greeks, even Americans. George and Hagbard move through the crowd trying to estimate its number-200,000? 300,000? 500,000? Peace symbols dangling about every neck, nudes with body paint, nudes without body paint, long and dangling hair on boys and girls alike, and over all of it the hypnotic and unending beat. "Woodstock Europa," Hagbard says dryly. "The last and final Walpurgisnacht and Adam Weishaupt's Erotion finally realized."
WE'RE GONNA ROCK ROCK ROCK TILL BROAD DAYLIGHT
"It's a League of Nations," George says, "a young people's League of Nations." Hagbard isn't listening. "Up there," he points, "to the Northwest is the Rhine, where die Lorelei was supposed to sit and sing her deadly songs. There will be deadlier music on the Danube tonight."
WE'RE GONNA ROCK AROUND THE CLOCK TONIGHT
(But that was still seven days in the future, and now
George lies unconscious in Mad Dog County Jail. And it began-that phase of the operation, as Hagbard called it-over thirty years before when a Swiss chemist named Hoffman climbed on his bicycle and pedaled down a country road into new dimensions.)
"And will they all come back?" George asked.
"All of them," Hagbard answered tightly. "When the beat reaches the proper intensity… unless we can stop it."
("Now I'm getting it," Mary Lou cried. "It's not what I expected. It's different from sex, and better." Simon smiled benignly. "It is sex, baby," he said. "What you've had before wasn't sex. Now we can start moving… but slowly… the Gentle Way… the Way of Tao…" They're all coming back; they never died-the lunatic raved at the startled attendant-You wait, guvnor. You just wait. You'll see it.)
The amplifiers squealed suddenly. There was too much feedback, and the sound went off into a pitch beyond endurance. George winced, and saw others hold their ears. ROCK, ROCK, ROCK, AROUND THE CLOCK. The key missed the lock, turned and cut Muldoon's hand. "Nerves," he said to Saul. "I always feel like a burglar when I do this."
Saul grunted. "Forget burglary," he said. "We might be hanged for treason before this is over. If we don't become national heroes."
"A fanfuckingtastic case," Muldoon grinned. He tried another way.
They were in an old brownstone on Riverside Drive, trying to break into the apartment of Joseph Malik. And they were not merely looking for evidence, both tacitly admitted-they were hiding from the FBI.
The call had come from headquarters just as they were finishing the questioning of associate editor Peter Jackson. Muldoon had gone out to his car to take it, while Saul finished getting a full physical description of both Malik and George Dorn. Jackson had just left and Saul was picking up the fifth memo, when Muldoon returned, looking as if his doctor had just told him his Wasserman was positive.
"Two special agents from the FBI are coming over to help us," he said woodenly.
"Still ready to play a hunch?" Saul asked calmly, pushing all the memos back in the metal box.
Muldoon merely called Pricefixer back into the cafeteria and told him, "Two feds will be here in a few minutes. Tell them we went back to headquarters. Answer any question they ask, but don't tell them about this box."