Kilduff rotated his cup slowly in its saucer, thinking: No, that’s not what you were doing at all. You were right, Larry: I’m afraid. Because with acceptance comes fear, and I’m afraid the same way I was before we held up that armored car—maybe more so now, because I had youth then and all I’ve got now are a lot of old memories and faded dreams and the prospect of a life alone. I don’t particularly want to die, but it’s not death itself that I’m frightened of; no, it’s . . . something else, something less simple, less basic, something else . . .
He said uneasily, “Listen, Larry. What can we do even if we find Helgerman? Buy him off? I don’t have a pot any more; my share is gone.”
Drexel was looking at him with incredulity. After a long moment he said softly, “Come on, baby. You’re not that goddamned naïve, are you?”
Outside the window, the sky irradiated for a brief instant with a fresh zig-zag of lightning, as if a gigantic match had been struck somewhere in the heavens, and then grew dark and ominous again. Kilduff’s eyes flicked there briefly, came back to Drexel’s. A chill began to flow through him.
“Naïve?” he said. “I don’t—”
“What do you think we’ve been talking about? Taking him to dinner and a movie?”
“Larry—”
“What the hell do you suppose we’re going to do when we find him?” Drexel said. “We’re going to kill the bastard. We’re going to kill him before he kills us.”
The Tenderloin by night, as seen through heavy rain.
San Francisco’s equivalent to New York’s West Forty-second Street, on a smaller scale but nonetheless squalid, nonetheless garish, hiding its pocked and ugly face beneath the veiling rain and the cosmetic darkness, dying by inches and without mourners. A whore under every street lamp and two behind every drawn shade; gay-boys with mascaraed eyes and codpieces and invitational glances more sultry than those of their female counterparts; con men with sad eyes and glib tongues and hearts of pure ebony; pushers selling furtive oblivion in white capsules or brown packages or dabbed lightly on sweet sugar cubes; winos with nowhere to go and a future as dead as the past, suffering the penultimate indignation of having to compete with bearded and buckskinned hippies for altruistic nickels from Des Moines or Miami or the Sunset District—and here and there, a man who wants nothing and takes nothing and asks only to be left alone.
On Ellis Street, neon flashes AUGIES PLACE, sans apostrophe, alternately with TOPLESS AND BOTTOMLESS REVUE above a black-façaded building situated between a Polish delicatessen and an empty storefront decorated with chalked obscenities. A thick-necked man with a Fu Manchu mustache and flat drugged eyes stands before the curtained entranceway, calling out inducements to the stream of passers-by, “No cover and no minimum, folks,” but he says nothing of the diluted bar whiskey which sells for a dollar fifty a shot and tastes like nothing so much as crude fuel oil.
Inside it is very dark, save for a single light above the back bar and a bright pink spotlight which illuminates a small, raised stage against the far wall. On the stage, a nude red-haired girl with pendulous white breasts and swollen nipples and a shaved, protruding abdomen makes lewd motions with fleshy hips, while an unintelligible masturbation of sound spews forth from a hidden jukebox. Before a chrome-barred cocktail slot stands a platinum-haired waitress wearing a brief sequinned halter and a short skirt with fringe ringing its bottom, and behind the otherwise empty bar a huge, light-skinned Negro sits on a high acmuntant’s stool and surveys the almost deserted interior with implacable eyes.
Only three of the two dozen tiny round tables—which cover with their chairs every available inch of floor space—are occupied. At one, a sailor in dress blues and a hooker in a green lamé dress sit holding hands and whispering; at a second, two more hookers in shimmering black, waiting, silent.
At the third table sits the limping man.
He holds a glass of draft beer tightly between his two hands, and stares with hot brightness at the red-haired girl on the stage. He watches her hips undulate in time to the pagan music, simulating the act of love, her eyes squeezed shut and her lips half-parted in an expression of abandonment, and while he watches he thinks of Sunday night and Yellow.
So simple it had been, so very simple, simpler even than Red and Blue and Gray. Yellow, Yellow, true to form, the habitual animaclass="underline" a walk along Blind Beach, like so many walks before. So simple. He had known Yellow’s destination from the moment he turned onto Highway I, and he had slowed down then and driven leisurely, for there was no need to remain near, and when he had finally taken the rented car onto the turn-out high above the ocean, Yellow’s car had been parked there where it always was. So simple. So simple to hide in the fog on the ledge, to blend into the roiling eddies of mist and wait for Yellow to climb back up the face of the cliff after his walk and pause there, unsuspecting, so simple to reach out and very quickly thrust him into nothingness ...
A movement, a thin rustling sibilance, diverts the limping man from his thoughts. He takes his eyes reluctantly from the girl on the stage. One of the hookers in shimmering black has come to his table, and she stands now above him, smiling, tall and willowy and young, with black hair piled high on her head, with breasts that spill like white iridescent cream over the tight bodice of her dress. “Do you mind if I sit down, honey?” she asks in a voice as sibilant as the rustle of her garment.
The limping man looks up at her for a long moment. A whore, a cheap whore; but he feels hunger in his loins. “No,” he answers slowly, “I don’t mind.”
The girl sits down and crosses her legs, and the short skirt of the dress pulls up on her thighs: more iridescent white cream. His eyes linger there, and he can smell her perfume dark and musky. “I’m Alice,” she says.
“Hello, Alice.”
“Would you like to buy me a drink?”
“All right.”
“Well, groovy.”
“What would you like?”
“Bourbon and water.”
The limping man signals and the yellow-haired waitress moves toward them, her heavy thighs rippling beneath the dancing fringe of her skirt. She takes his order and returns to the bar, and Alice says, “What’s your name, honey?”
“Smith,” the limping man answers, and Alice laughs. A cheap whore, he thinks, but she’s almost pretty when she laughs.
“Where you from, old Smith?” Alice asks.
“Everywhere,” the limping man says. “And nowhere.”
Alice laughs again. “My, how poetic.” She puts her hand on his thigh very lightly and leans close to him and presses her white spilling breasts against his arm. “You wouldn’t be a poet, would you?”
Her hand is like hot fire on his leg. “No, I wouldn’t.”
“What would you be then?”
The limping man does not answer, and the yellow-haired waitress comes back with a tray containing a draft beer and a glass of tea. The limping man gives her three dollars. She nods, retreating. Alice sips the tea, and then puts the glass down and presses her breasts tighter against his arm. He feels them spongy-soft there and looks down into the shadowed valley between them and begins to breathe unevenly. The music builds to a crescendo from within the walls of the room, and the red-haired girl moves faster and faster on the stage, until her nude hips are a blur of motion. Alice strokes the limping man’s thigh, drawing her hand higher. “Do you like me?” she asks.
“Yes,” he answers, “I like you,” and he is thinking of Yellow again, Yellow screaming through the gray, damp fog.
“I’ve got a room down the street, honey,” Alice says softly. “We could go there if you like.”
Yellow screams and screams, but rhythmically now, in time with the beat of the music. The limping man breathes rapidly, irregularly, and her hand sets fire to his trouser leg.