Vital Parts (50 page)

“You wanna?”

Reinhart's return expression was of the same genre. Then he shrugged slowly and said: “No thanks.”

“Chicken.”

Well, why not take Harper's car? The old man relied on him. He got in.

The teen-ager looked through the other window.

“Fag,” she said.

She seemed about the age of the next-door Julie, whom he was falsely accused of having ravished. He now recognized his old platonic lust for teen-agers as having been pure and simple fear. Girls old enough to be fully sexed but so young as not to die for decades—he now saw the sentimentality of his old obsession. This maiden, for example, might at any hour be run down in the street or drown in a public pool. She was no more eternal than he, he who had in independent volition offered himself to ice.

“Go tell your mother she wants you,” he said and backed out. Anyway, he was not much interested in sex at this juncture, nor in food. A man whose time was precious should have more exalted aims than emptying and filling himself. The high-speed travel had however been profoundly rewarding, disclosing to him truths beyond the range of verbal or pictorial expression in a universe in which the velocity of light is 186,000 miles per second. Yet there are stars whose sparkle takes countless years to reach our planet. And he had moved at a mere hundred and forty mph.

Well, that was done. Harper's car, a 1964 Plymouth, seemed to be inhibited from exceeding fifty: the old guy probably had installed a governor to protect his property against the mechanics who serviced it. Reinhart motored serenely along the back roads, avoiding the big highway when astride such weak horses. It was obvious that Eunice preferred him square. The same thing might well be true of Blaine, and of Gen as well. He was now provoking, no longer provokable. He should go home and terrorize them.

He bumped over some grass-grown railway tracks. To the right were several long sheds, sheathed in undulating panels of iron that had lost its galvanization to orange rust, moss-green stains, purple corrosions: nature's psychedelic turn-on of man-made materials. He drove in on a truck road of dust and stopped below a loading platform.

The warehouse doors were hasp-locked. This was where Bob Sweet kept his cocoa beans. Reinhart had been through the whole of Berne: this was the only place. He worked for Bob. Were Bob along, Reinhart would ask him: OK if I take a look at your cocoa beans? I have eaten a lot of chocolate in my life and never seen what it's made from. That's one of the things I'd like to do before I check out, strange as it may sound. I am gratifying whims nowadays.

And Bob would produce a key.

So Reinhart went to the car, opened the trunk, and found a jack handle. He inserted it between jamb and hasp and ripped the latter off with a scattering of screws. Surely enough, loaded gunnysacks filled the dusky interior. Reinhart withdrew his little pocketknifenail file and slashed one bag. A stream of pebblelike particulars clattered onto the wooden floor. Reinhart picked one up, rolled it between thumb and forefinger, took it out to the platform and appraised it in the light of the sinking sun. It was indeed a pebble.

With the whiskbroom of his left hand he gathered a right palm-load of cocoa beans, took it outside for assaying, and saw a handful of gravel.

There could be no mistake. Bob had definitely said cocoa. The words were not similar. “Gravel,” Reinhard said aloud and pitched it onto the tin roof, for the childish pleasure of the sound.

Were he a scientist, he would of course have had to examine more than one sack. Streckfuss had frozen a variety of small organisms before he was ready for a man. Or had he? One monkey. There were others in the capsules. Only one had been thawed. When the doctor tested you for allergies, he made several scratches with as many substances, but always left one untreated, as “control”: the physical abrasion alone might evoke a bump.

But another thing from which Reinhart was now liberated was the law of probability in its literal sense, the code of the professional seeker-for-knowledge. And it had not been the truth that made him free.

Sweet had lied. Every sack, in all three sheds, contained not cocoa beans but gravel: Reinhart was convinced of that. It could further be assumed that this fact was substantive to some sort of swindle. Bob had spoken of a loan for which the contents of these warehouses were security. You could not say gravel was cocoa in this age of computers and wiretapping and hidden tape recorders, electric eyes, and omniscient professional and private busybodies.

Even secret Mafia meetings were bugged and the minutes disseminated nationwide. Reinhart himself, for example, knew that Luigi Malefice, alias Pat O'Toole, suffered from hemorrhoids, subsidized a Little League team, kept a henna-haired mistress in Alpine, New Jersey, and channeled his illicit earnings through a quite legal restaurant-laundry business.

A queer on the very staff of the White House had been publicly exposed. Everybody knew everything if it was shameful, and almost everything seemed to be, under its rind. Yet to take the Mafia alone, its activities seemed to be, openly, more profitable every year, its leaders, known, farther than ever from jail. If the whole FBI and the combined police departments of the nation could not nail Malefice, why could not Bob Sweet pass off three warehouses full of gravel as cocoa beans to some Midwestern bank?

On the other hand, Reinhart had been scandalously wrong in his easy assessment of Streckfuss as an old Nazi. There were better things to do with life than getting the goods on other people.

The precedent represented by Otto was useless for Reinhart's purposes because the monkey could not speak. But Streckfuss had also injected goat-liver cells into the moribund Splendor Mainwaring.

Reinhart drove Harper's car in the direction of his old homestead.

17

“So,” Reinhart said to Splendor, with reference to his own activities during the twenty years since they had last had a real talk, “I guess you could say I have survived, though I haven't prevailed, to allude to the Nobel Prize speech of the late William Faulkner.”

“I have read some of his literary works, but frankly found them to miss the point,” Splendor said. “You know, my own immediate origins are in the South. Did you ever see that contemporaneous caricature of the first Negro-American members of a Southern legislature during Reconstruction days, feet up on desks, cigars between teeth, making a mockery of the institution?”

Reinhart shook his head. “Well, rotten lies like that are being discredited nowadays. …”

Splendor made his grisly smile on the blanched pillow. “I am convinced it was a literal rendering. What would be more natural behavior for ex-slaves suddenly transformed into legislators?”

“Of course,” Reinhart said. “But it was the implication—”

“A disorderly lot of cheeky apes,” said Splendor, making his eyes wondrous. “Defecating on the democratic process, the origins of which were in ancient Greece and which had descended through centuries of rationalism. A magnificent progress, the fruit of European civilization, and so on.”

Reinhart threw up his hands. “I know. Pretty shabby, behind all the pretensions.”

“But then,” said Splendor. “What isn't?”

“I started to say that when I think of Negro history I feel you would have a perfect right to destroy this country.”

“Me?” asked Splendor in amazement. “I certainly have more important things to do than that.”

“I have stayed too long,” said Reinhart, taking a new tack. “You need your rest. Forgive me, but it's been many years since we've had a good talk.” Splendor looked worse than he had several days ago, if that was possible. Reinhart told himself this in defense against the cruel illusion that his friend actually looked subtly better: he was of course merely getting used to the sight. But Splendor certainly spoke with much of the old vigor. It was typical of him not to notice, or at least not to mention, Reinhart's new garb and wig. He had always been beyond the personal peculiarities of others.

“Not at all,” Splendor said. “You scarcely got here. Do you remember our talks of old? These kids today think they have discovered mind-expansion, but we could tell them a thing or two. We had our guru. Remember the correspondence course from Doctor Goodykuntz's Universal College of Metaphysical Knowledge? My diploma is still around somewhere. It seems ridiculous now, but these things have their function in developing maturity. That's why I say, let's not despair about our children. They may seem foolish at times, but, believe me, they'll turn out to be fine businessmen one day.”

“
Businessmen?
” asked Reinhart.

“Why, don't tell me you have forgotten our youthful peccadilloes.” Splendor waggled a schoolteacher's finger. “We were once on the wrong side of the bars, old boy.”

Anyway, Splendor himself had been arrested while in possession of a modicum of heroin and the means of injecting it into his circulatory system. Reinhart had visited him in jail. It was interesting that in Splendor's memory Reinhart was a fellow felon: in his current mood Reinhart wished ardently that he had been.

“Don't tell me,” Splendor went on from the pillow, “that you are too old to recall our series of experiments to check out the assumptions on which this republic operates?”

Reinhart nodded his acceptance of this revision of history.

“Each generation must establish these truths for themselves,” Splendor went on. “My son Raymond is not content to sit and listen how I was once incarcerated for carrying a pinch of talcum powder and a hypodermic needle without a plunger. Not him. He must strap to his waist a plastic water pistol molded in the form of a German Luger, and go through the daily experience of being disarmed by the constabulary at the muzzle of a genuine Police Special at the trigger of which trembles the nervous digit of a patrolman.”

Reinhart asked: “You mean—?”

“I don't know how you could forget that priceless moment, one night in 1946,” said Splendor, “when you came to the jail, and we put on the police force. There I was, supposedly raving on heroin, and you were pretending to be shocked and enraged by my antics. I have often thought, Carlo, that you and I had sufficient talent to have had a go at show business.”

Until this moment Reinhart had subscribed to an utterly different version of this incident, but he was free now. He patted the crown of his wig and laughed in a fashion that exposed all his teeth, mimicking Otto's imitation of human mirth.

“That cop Hasek blew his mind,” said he.

Splendor said: “Do you happen to recall a small person on the West Side who called himself the Maker? He was a pusher and was generally himself under the influence.”

“Didn't he also have his own one-car taxi company? I believe I rode in it once.”

“Of course he did,” Splendor soberly replied. “That was one of his many covers. Another was prostitution.”

“But that's illegal too.”

“Ah, yes, but unless a public nuisance is created, sidewalks obstructed, or of course unless an organization of respectable ladies brings pressure on the politicians at election time, a pander who is careful with his payoffs rarely comes to grief.”

“Splendor, I always thought of you as quite the Puritan,” said Reinhart.

“I have mellowed to a degree. As one ages he looks more tolerantly, I have found, on the vanity of human wishes. It was quite true that when young I had a blue nose. Now I am willing to admit that many men find it necessary periodically to succumb to base impulses. And sex is a good deal less deleterious, if hygienic procedures are observed, than smoking, drinking, and even overeating.”

In his new role Reinhart had not taken any food all day, so if he knew sensitivity now, it was in retrospect.

“Narcotics, though, are something else. I put the Maker in prison.” Splendor's eyes were feverish with pride.

“You became a cop?”

“Not at all. I sent the police chief and the mayor carbon copies of a letter I wrote to the state narcotics bureau.”

“The Honorable Bob J. Gibbon and his brother, Chief C. Roy,” said Reinhart. “Wait a minute! It comes back to me now. That was the beginning of a series of investigations—dope traffic on the West Side, then all the rest of it, contractor's kickbacks on public projects, the disappearance of municipal funds, and so on. Bob J. blew his brains out, and C. Roy vanished. Well, you and I were involved in the building of the sewer, or nonbuilding, as it turned out.”

“The subject of a letter of mine to the state attorney-general,” said Splendor.

“I certainly thought it was strange that a series of manholes would not have any pipes under them,” Reinhart said, reminiscently. “…What?”

“Anonymous, naturally. I sought no personal acclaim.”

Even in his new character, Reinhart found himself nettled by this smugness.

“The whole cleanup resulted from a couple of unsigned letters?”

Spendor said: “Naming names and specifying details. The right word in the right ear. You'd be surprised, Carlo. Democracy works, but the correct techniques are required. The nay-sayers to the contrary notwithstanding, precision is always the answer.”

Reinhart's eyebrows ascended almost to touch the low brow of his wig, then fell towards peevishing eyes. It had lately become commonplace for him to hear of remarkable accomplishments which he must accept on faith. Streckfuss' thawed monkey, Splendor's puissant muckraking, neither presented with a shred of proof.

“You don't suppose,” said Splendor, “that I would have got far by inscribing my own name and address?”

True enough. Publicity, supposedly so gross a medium, was actually a subtle discipline. Reinhart could appreciate that. And like so many things, it was conditioned by time. Today Splendor might well be given an audience with the governor as a “black leader,” having outlasted an era in which he was a nothing nigger with a narcotics record.