The Starshine Connection (2 page)

Tears came from his eyes, at first from the pain, then because his feelings had been hurt. It wasn’t fair to truss him up
and call him nasty names! He was just doing his job. Everybody has a job to do, and it wasn’t fair!

Suddenly he realized that pouting would do him no good either. These were professionals, too sophisticated to be taken in
by such a ruse. Slayton decided to stick with his fake drunk act. It was easily done; all you had to do was recall innumerable
times you had done it for real. Dutifully, Slayton conjured up an image of himself standing in a men’s room, lubricated to
the pores, transfixing himself in the bathroom mirror with an idiot grin. “I’m okay. I’m not really bombed at all!”

The ride was bumpy and uncomfortable, and seemed to take a couple of centuries. Slayton did his best to try to break up the
monotony of the trip by singing and telling jokes in Russian. Nobody laughed. He thought that was unfair, too. Those jokes
would have caused a riot in Washington. He was socially adept: he knew what he was doing. It was just that these guys were
a bunch of callous oafs. No sophistication at all. Slayton had been fooled; reality had changed again. He wanted to cry. He
wanted a woman to hold him and give him eight hugs—that was what some headshrinker had said, that everyone needs eight hugs
a day—and when he was finished crying, he would take her to bed. He had been told he was very good, and by women, too, so
that meant it had to be true.

A blast of chill night air smacked him as he was jostled out of the car, and with the fresh air came a warning, all gilded
in danger-signal red letters:
They’re going to kill you; you’ve got to pull yourself out of it!
He had not uttered a coherent phrase or done a logical thing since entering the car, and now that he was out, he tried to
shed the stupor, and leave it behind with the car.

He tried shaking his head, but that only broke his consciousness apart, sending it flying like swirling snow in a paperweight.

He recognized the uniforms of the men who collected him. He was somewhere in Mexico. He was taken into custody of the Mexican
police. What had he done wrong? He had to make his phone call, had to call Winship in Washington and find out what he had
done wrong! Did he have Miranda rights in Mexico? Did Mexico have an expatriation treaty with the United States? Did they
even have
phones
in Mexico…?

You are my starshine, my only…

Ben Slayton realized that no one knew where he was. Alone, somewhere in Mexico, and about to be killed by bribed
Federales.
Incapable of defending himself, doped up, and bound like a chicken ready for the chopping block. They tossed him into a cell,
and the
Federales
began softening him up the way a cook might soften a cheap steak with a tenderizing mallet. It just wasn’t fair. He had to
fight back.

One guard was leaving him alone in his cell, when Slayton mustered energy, trying to fight back in some small way. The guard
had taken advantage of his debilitated condition and had abused him sadistically, kicking him in the ribs and slapping him
around. Oh boy, there would be hell to pay if Slayton ever got back to Washington! He’d have the sonofabitch arrested!

Brutal reality flooded back in again: //. If you live through the night, you’ll be lucky, he told himself. The specifics of
Slayton’s peculiar journey into Mexico betrayed the nature of the trip as one-way.

But he had to let that damned smug guard know that Ben Slayton was not down and gone, not yet. He summoned his reserve of
energy and let the guard have it. He told the guard in Spanish,
You have a huge roll of lard around your gut, don’t you, fatso?

Oops, wrong move, thought Slayton. The bastard is coming back to stomp me. It was, and he did, and eventually Ben Slayton
passed out for real.

As he tumbled down into darkness, Slayton fought to remember how he had managed to make it from a cushy party in Washington
D.C. to a death cell in Mexico in less than a week.

Ben Slayton was laughing out loud now, and Hamilton Winship simply could not stand it.

He leaned forward, toward the surface of his desk; and planted his chin between the first two knuckles of his left fist, contemplatively
ignoring the laughing agent and scanning the characteristically clean work area of his desk. Winship got things done quickly
and efficiently, with no loss of face cither to the government or the Department, a feat which had garnered him endorsements
from Presidents. Further down the Treasury hierarchy, the rookies of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms regarded the name of Winship
as one of those too-rare legends.

When Ben Slayton had been one of those trainees, Winship recalled, the first thought that had occurred to him was to have
Slayton yanked from the line and subjected to a governmentally proper haircut. But later, Winship had followed young Slayton’s
suggestions to modify dress standards for Treasury agents. When Slayton was a rookie, Treasury agents were still wearing
white socks and black shoes. Thanks to Winship’s directives in the years that followed, they were no longer so conspicuous
or inept. This was one of the many small ways the Department managed to catch up with the twentieth century under Winship’s
tenure. There had since been just as many
large
ways.

And though he frequently grated on Winship’s nerves and tested patience, Ben Slayton was his best agent. Win-ship had given
just such an endorsement of the man to several Presidents. He made a silent memo of thanks that none of the men to whom he
had commended Slayton so highly were present now.

He cleared his throat, and Slayton clammed up. Almost no one was comfortable enough to laugh in Winship’s presence except
Slayton—but then Slayton was a legend himself within the Department.

“Sorry, sir,” said Slayton. “But the irony is so beautiful, damn near poetic.” He shook his head, a bemused expression on
his face.

“This is serious business,” Winship intoned with a dead-sober demeanor. “Do you have any idea what the press could do with
something of this magnitude? The whole bloody country would be laughing—laughing us right out of our jobs. To say nothing
of undermining the credibility of the government, the elected representatives!” Winship’s palms were down on the desk, his
fingers spread bloodlessly across the shining mahogany.

“Yes, sir,” Slayton said, totally stabilized. He knew just how much he could get away with in this chamber, Winship’s inner
sanctum, the most important office in the entire Department.

Not that awe of Winship or the powers of the Treasury intimidated Slayton for a microsecond—in fact, he had breezed into Winship’s
chamber as casually as a trucker into a coffee shop. Winship knew it was Slayton—the only man alive who could get past Beverly,
at the desk in the outer office, before she could buzz him. Slayton respected Winship immensely, and held no man in awe. The
feeling was much the same for Winship, though neither of them would ever admit it to the other.

Slayton had taken his usual stance opposite Winship’s desk, hands clasped before him in an attitude of easy, but complete,
concentration. The chitchat that would have transpired in lesser offices to break the ice, to ease the subject in gradually,
was totally irrelevant and unnecessary here. Winship did not believe in wasting time, and Slayton did not believe in bullshit.

“By now you’ve been to enough testimonials and political butter-ups to realize that Washington D.C. and Hollywood, California,
do have one thing in common,” Winship began. “The parties thrown by people with a lot of money and power have no constraints
on behavior. Everyone’s human, I suppose, but humanity means different things to different types of people.”

“I didn’t notice many American Indians at the last Inagural Ball, if that’s what you mean, sir,” said Slayton.

Winship glided over the remark. “The so-called jet-set gentry in Washington are like that anywhere else. This means that what
transpires at these gatherings—and as you know, there are seven or eight major ones per day here—is not always strictly legal.”

“There’s always an ambassador that needs plying, or a senator that needs support.”

“Quite. I’m sure, therefore, that you are aware of the sorts of things besides political manipulating and vote-buying and
influence-broking that go on at these… affairs.” Winship was skirting the real topic, waiting for Slayton to pick up the ball.

Slayton noticed his superior’s apparent unease. “Well, there are quite a few hookers in the nation’s capital, sir; I think
it’s even in the civics textbooks by now. No one is surprised, unless a congressman does something especially stupid, like
strangle one.”

“I’m not talking about prostitutes,” Winship said evenly.

“And if we were really serious about cocaine, we’d have to arrest the entire city of Los Angeles. People have parties and
get crazy at parties. Where we have so much trouble is in the flux of legality—busting people today for what will be licensed
tomorrow. If we started busting all the tooters and tokers in Washington, the country would collapse in a week.”

Winship pulled open one of the massive desk drawers and fished within. He extracted a square, cut-glass bottle that looked
a lot like a salad-dressing cruet and placed it on the exact center of the desk between him and Slayton. The angles of the
glass caught the light in the room and made blue diamonds of light on the desk top. The tiny bubbles surfacing through the
clear liquid inside made coruscating rainbows within the diamonds.

“Do you know what this is?” Winship said.

Slayton recognized it instantly. “America’s latest fad,” he said. “Starshine. It’s a narcotizing hybrid of moonshine liquor
and opiate drugs; illegal as all get-out to buy or manufacture. Extremely costly; heroin addiction is a bargain by comparison.
It appeals to the rich because it’s so exotic. It costs a lot and not many people have heard of it—it’s the basement-still
equivalent of good Turkish hash or snowflake-pure coke. I’ve tried it. It gives you a hell of a buzz.”

Winship’s eyebrows went up.

“Strictly in the nature of research, sir,” he said, smiling. Winship nodded. The acknowledgement was sort of a
pro forma
interdepartmental joke, the way that police officers getting high from burning huge confiscated stashes of marijuana was
a joke. Or news stories that the best drugs in any major American city usually came from dealers who stole it from the police
department stashes.

“You see, I
have
been to some of those Washington parties, much as I hate them. And I’ve seen senators snorting coke, and congressmen groping
ladies of the evening, and some of our very own governmental higher-ups swilling Starshine… so what, exactly, is the problem,
sir? It’s strictly small-league, all the way.”

“The
problem,
Mr. Slayton, is that apparently Starshine has killed off some of those ‘governmental higher-ups.’” Winship’s words had become
clipped, humorless.

Slayton winced inwardly, acutely aware of his
faux pas.
This was a facet he had suspected, of course, but since he did not have any more information, he remained silent. Some kind
of rejoinder now would be disastrous, since he had rubbed Winship the wrong way. He waited.

Winship used the queasy silence that hung between them as an excuse to do a search-and-destroy mission on his own stash of
pipe tobacco. Winship’s one indulgence in the otherwise spartanly functional arrangement of his working space was the devotion
of an entire desk drawer to a selection of pipes, all nestled in burgundy velvet. He browsed and selected a white meerschaum.
Slayton glanced at the pipe and recognized it as brand new by the coloring. He relaxed a bit. If this was important enough
for Winship to devote an unsmoked pipe, a
virgin
pipe, and a meerschaum at that, to his presentation, then he was probably as uncomfortable with the mission as Slayton was
with his goof.

The serious atmosphere was Winship’s concession to whomever had died. So, thought Slayton, the mission has finally gotten
interesting.

Winship laboriously fired the pipe to life. The tobacco he favored today looked like stale seaweed, and smelled like damp
carpeting.

“Two months ago,” Winship said, “a woman, the wife of a United Nations administrator, was admitted to Mercy General with a
peculiar bladder infection. She began to have complications. A week after she was admitted, she attacked an orderly with an
aluminum walker. They brought her under control, of course, but she has been totally incoherent ever since. Her husband is
moving to divorce her and make her a ward of the state of Iowa, where her family lives.

“One month ago, the special assistant to a senator from Montana was admitted with similar symptoms. By then, news of the first
case was common, thanks to the hospital grapevine. But he didn’t go mad. One night he choked to death on his own blood.”

Winship pulled from his drawer file a manila folder plump with xeroxed documentation, and placed it on the desk. “In rapid
succession, several more cases followed. The incident that was in the
Post
a few weeks ago about the wife of the congressman from Utah—the one that was papered off as a drunk-and-disorderly? That
was one. The death of the congressman from Arizona, the one that made the CBS evening news as a brain hematoma—that was another.
This morning, an hour before I contacted you, another man died in Mercy General. He was our government’s ambassador to France.
They’re already formulating a new cover-up. Heart attack, or something… that doesn’t really concern you.”

Slayton approached the desk, picking up the glass container of Starshine and holding it to the light coming through the immense,
draped windows behind Winship. “And this stuff is involved?”

“In every case so far, according to the doctors. It is, unfortunately, the latest illicit fad among the Georgetown elite.
Of course, we’ve had it analyzed to death and we recognize the active agents—there’s more than a little bit of belladonna
in it, for example—but telling everyone what it is chemically won’t stop the people who are desirous of using it, as well
you know.”