The Devil Tree (21 page)

Finally, I said that I had no longer any interest in taking drugs, and at that the man changed the subject. He began to talk about his special investments: drug dealing on a grand scale in the underdeveloped nations, to which cultivating poppies and refining opium into morphine and heroin are what producing oil is to Arab nations. Next to oil, he said, illicit drugs are the largest international moneymaker; their American sales alone generate three times as much money as the entire steel industry. Given its magnitude, the illicit drug business is an amazingly centralized, reliable, and well-run enterprise; it controls the production, supply, quality, and price of narcotics as efficiently as legitimate business controls any other international commodity. A dozen large banks act as clearing houses and laundering channels for the dope business. The man said that his contacts covered the major opium-producing countries of the “Golden Square”—Burma, Laos, Thailand, and Red China, which was the major grower and transporter. With the ease and enthusiasm of a businessman discussing iron ore or textiles or electronics, this man told me that a fifteen-hundred-pound load of pure uncut heroin, half the weight of an American sedan, costs him about eight million dollars through his contacts. A few weeks after purchase, courtesy of bribed diplomats, local officials, and air force and navy base commanders, the stuff reaches his distribution agents in New York, Miami, or Los Angeles, where its value is
over three hundred million. The man pointed out that ours are inflationary times; it takes an investment of many millions of dollars to produce one Hollywood movie—and nobody can even guarantee its success. Eight million dollars is also a lot of money to invest in a once-a-year operation, but at least its profits are guaranteed—and what profits! They should not be brushed aside, even by someone of my wealth, the man said with a note of invitation in his voice. As he spoke, I could tell that he was proud of his lucrative business. In the grain of the classical American entrepreneur, he was the true descendant of those eighteenth-century merchants of New England who encouraged poppy planting in China in order to profit from the trade in “black rice,” as opium was then called. Indeed, Americans were so aggressive in this venture that they were accused by both the British and the French of being unwise and indiscriminate in their opium dealings, thereby causing widespread addiction in China.

Today, the man said, he felt sorry for the “ordinarily decent” American businessmen who have to work their tails off to make the small profit that is left to them after excessive taxation. He said he makes more money in terms of actual dollars, in his pursuit of easy happiness—putting big deals together while attending parties, courting beautiful women, and traveling all over the world—than my father did in a lifetime of joyless Protestant endeavor. “You may have noticed in today’s paper that the police are very proud of themselves for discovering an abandoned car with two hundred and fifty pounds of heroin in the trunk. They claimed the street value of the stuff was close to forty million dollars. Of course, the police usually exaggerate. Let’s be conservative and say it was worth only fifteen million. Think of it! A suitcase in the trunk of a Ford worth fifteen million dollars! To make that kind of money, Mr. Whalen, your father needed to own mines and factories,
railroads and highways, and entire company towns; he had to employ hundreds of thousands of workers; he had to talk to the unions, brown-nose politicians, be nice to the people in power. All I need, you might say, is the short-term friendship and cooperation of a few foreign diplomats, a U.S. flight sergeant, some Coast Guard customs men, and one or two smart, well-placed narcotics detectives.

“But I can see that you think all this is a dirty and vicious business, Mr. Whalen,” he said. “Let me remind you that you are also engaged in corrupt enterprise, however indirectly. Do you know that the fish caught near the out-wash of some of the Whalen factories are unfit to eat because the rivers and lakes have been contaminated by nickel? That the same nickel has also damaged the livers of the workers in the Whalen company’s smelters, mines, and plating factories? That as a result of the poisoning, these men and women often die young of high blood pressure, hardening of the arteries, and arthritis? It’s true. So how about throwing all the humanity crap to the diseased fish too and talking business for a minute?

“When the government admits that last year Americans spent more on narcotics than they did on imported oil, I don’t feel responsible for the hundreds of thousands, millions maybe, of hashish suckers, pipe masticators, and disco freaks who use spoons, tinfoil, and needles to hit themselves with the dope. You were once an addict yourself, Mr. Whalen; you know I don’t make them do it. The man in the black overcoat who gives American kiddies free samples so they’ll become hooked on hash is a shitty Madison Avenue myth. He has never existed and never will. Why should he give away free samples when he can sell every bag he gets?”

•   •   •

As Whalen waited on the street corner for the light to change, a plump man with a neatly folded newspaper under his arm absentmindedly tapped the pavement with his black umbrella. Next to him, a woman wearing a cloth coat and ankle socks set down her shopping bags and rummaged through her handbag until she found a scarf and an accordion-pleated plastic rainhat.

The traffic light turned green. All three of them crossed the street, went single file into the subway, bought their tokens, and pushed through the turnstiles. Whalen stayed close to the woman. Ambling toward the front of the platform, she put a coin into a gum machine, but no gum came out. She inserted another coin. Still no gum. The woman then noticed the mirror at the top of the machine and stood on tiptoe in order to see her whole face in it. She smiled at herself, pushed some stray wisps of hair into place, then walked to a bench against the wall, sat down, arranged her bags, and rubbed her eyes. The subway rumbled as it approached. People on the platform fidgeted, shifting their weight. The train caused a draft of air and came to a stop. Whalen entered the closest car and hurried to a seat. The plump man with the newspaper was behind him getting in. As the train jolted forward, Whalen settled back and looked around. The other passengers seemed preoccupied with small details; they buttoned or unbuttoned their coats, smoothed their hair, looked at their watches, gathered their packages together, pressed umbrellas to their sides. The manner, dress, and look of every one of them betrayed an overwhelming sense of busyness, of immediate purpose. Except for the fact that he was on this subway with them, Whalen realized with a pang, he had nothing in common with these people. His stomach felt hollow and cold, his heart was in a vise. Holding his breath and bracing himself against the train’s rocking, he impatiently counted the stops and promised himself never to ride the subway again.

•   •   •

Whalen hurried through the lobby of his hotel, his clothes dripping water onto the carpet and the floor of the elevator. Once in his suite, he changed into dry clothes, but he was still shivering with cold. He gulped down a glass of cognac, and then, having nothing better to do, he decided to go downstairs. Maybe he could sense what Karen had once called “the throbbing of the hotel lobby.”

It was late. The only people in the lobby were a man at the cashier’s window, an elderly woman talking on the house phone, and a plump man reading a newspaper. Whalen was about to go to the bar when he recalled that he’d seen the same plump man on the street corner and again on the subway. As Whalen glanced at him again, the man raised the newspaper in front of his face.

Whalen decided to find out whether he was being followed. He strolled casually out of the lobby. The doorman promptly called him a taxi, and when it arrived he got inside, turning to look back as the cab left the curb. Two sedans parked near the hotel immediately pulled out behind the taxi. Whalen asked the driver to go around the block. When the taxi turned the corner, the two cars followed. Whalen told the driver to take the first right turn and then the next left. The sedans were still behind him. When he asked the driver to go around the block again, the man became suspicious. Whalen explained that he had bet some friends of his that he could lose them in city traffic. He told the driver to drop him in the middle of Times Square, and as the taxi halted Whalen paid the driver and jumped out. He ducked behind a newsstand. It was still raining. Both sedans pulled to the curb, and two men got out of each
and scattered in the crowd. As one of them passed near the newsstand, Whalen heard the static of a walkie-talkie. For a while Whalen mingled with the crowd, but soon he was drenched and moved into a crowded cafeteria.

Sitting at a table away from the window, his back to the street, he wondered who was paying to have him so elaborately tailed: the plump man, two cars, four men with walkie-talkies. Was it police? In spite of his previous drug history, they must surely know he was no longer buying or concealing drugs. The drug people? What for? He owed them nothing. Mafia? He remembered reading newspaper stories about people who kidnapped the rich, but he dismissed the thought. The crime syndicate worked subtly and efficiently; if they wanted him, they would have kidnapped him ten times over by now. Then who were his followers?

The coffee was weak; he felt sluggish. He thought of calling Karen but decided against it. Lately, when they talked, Karen seemed distant, probably because there was another man in her life, who was perhaps in bed with her right now. It was bad enough to be trapped in Times Square by the rain and anonymous pursuers without being reminded that he was also trapped by Karen.

•   •   •

Karen claims that when I seem sexually guarded, even though she’s turned on by my resistance, she responds by being cold—despite the risk of scaring me off. This makes her feel Victorian, passive, alive to nothing, just there to accept sex whenever I want to give it.

I told her that even in sex I was always trying to conceal both portions of my personality: the manipulative, malevolent adult who deceives and destroys and the child
who craves acceptance and love. Now I know that I have really tried to conceal the child at the expense of the adult. While my dominant concern all my life has been with not admitting needs, not asking for things, not squandering money, my worst terror has always been that I might seem helpless, and that in appearing helpless or childish I might again be judged in relation to my parents. That’s why, even in my lovemaking, I manage to stay self-contained, allowing myself no extremes of pleasure or happiness. Recently Karen remarked that I must have lost my passions somewhere abroad. I wonder if she thinks I ever found them again before coming home.

For Karen, sex and rage are inextricably related. Even her anger often leads to the most violent lovemaking, in which the discharge of passion is in clear proportion to the rage that preceded it.

She once recalled her parents’ violent arguments. One ended with her father’s shouting at the top of his lungs, “Any whore in Pittsburgh is better in bed than you are!” To which her mother replied, “I’m glad you can get it up for the whores in Pittsburgh.” There was a hidden lesson in Karen’s remarks: she obviously assumes that whores free me of whatever inhibitions I still feel with her.

•   •   •

For those who can afford it, New York seems to have been designed as the perfect pharmacy, with remedies available around the clock, for all human ills. All except anguish. At midnight I called a neighborhood bookshop and asked the employee who answered to select twenty-five books of poetry for me and have them delivered to my hotel room. Shortly after the books arrived, Karen called and said she
wasn’t feeling well. She said she was probably depressed because Susan had just left to visit her ailing mother in California. I sensed Karen’s need for me, but instead of inviting her over or going to see her, I told her that, if she liked, I would try to console or distract her by reading her passages from some of the well-known American poets. I said I had just had two bagfuls delivered. She hung up before I could even begin.

That left me free. To embark on a trip with yet another Strangelove from Odyssey 2001? I decided instead to do my own hunting. I went to a singles’ bar and started to talk to a girl standing next to me. She was good-looking and alone, and as she watched me I could see her breasts through the thin material of her dress. She had unusually long nipples. I ordered a pitcher of sangría, and we moved to a small table and sat close together. The girl seemed self-assured, and as she observed my gestures and the way my pants hugged my thighs, I could tell that she was assessing my body. I began to think of myself as an object of desire, and the more I concentrated on her image of me, the more I desired her. I tried to imagine myself in her place and wondered if she had any idea I was doing so. I finally asked her what it was like to ponder the idea of being with a man she hardly knew. She answered that familiarity, combined with the memory of past pleasures, was for her the most potent of all aphrodisiacs; still, she said, she was able to look at a man across a room and feel that she already knew him intimately.

She asked me what I did, and I told her I lived off a rich older couple from Pittsburgh. She was horrified at first, fearing that I might be some bisexual gigolo, some human hyena scavenging among the elderly set, but I quickly dispelled her fears by inviting her for a ride in my new convertible—which, even if she assumed I had bought the car with the earnings from my unwholesome profession,
she was not about to miss out on. With the top folded down, pop songs blaring on the radio and tires screeching, we drove through the empty streets of the financial district, staring up at the Wall Street skyscrapers. On the way back I stopped at the marina. The captain of my boat—whom I’d called from the bar—was waiting for me, a bit sleepy but smiling, with the boat at the ready, quietly humming, its lights on. We stepped inside, and as the captain piloted the boat down the river the girl and I had a drink on the afterdeck. By now she no longer cared how I got my money. Like a prop on a watery stage with Manhattan for a backdrop, the boat moved slowly and almost noiselessly past the Battery.