The Old Turk's Load Read online

  The results, to Norbert’s continual surprise, were viable. Kelly was a private detective by trade and had managed for more than a decade—by means of his unthinking courage, physical genius, and limited repertoire of canned responses—not to starve.

  This raised an interesting possibility: Could it be that Kelly succeeded because most people’s problems truly did conform to a few hoary stereotypes? If the husband was off the reservation, the official corrupted by his power, the wife murderously at the end of her rope, Kelly knew exactly what to say and do, chapter and verse. Was it possible that people, in all their twisted, self-absorbed dramas, were no more complicated than that?

  Norbert respected Kelly—no, loved him—because he had cobbled a persona out of ill-fitting parts and, through his own indefatigable will, was making the ramshackle contraption work. If only, he mused, trundling more shellfish from the cooler, the man weren’t so dense. If only he didn’t act like such a jerk.

  But even that had its good side. No one ever overestimated him. And, like the blade of Norbert’s shucking knife, the leading edge of Kelly’s physical intensity had no thickness. It slid again and again through the tightest interstices of tough situations, drawing the rest of him with it.

  The Mailman’s Best Friend

  T

  he Mailman had a croaker named Dr. Paulson who lived in a big Victorian house on Middle Street, a couple of blocks down from Faye and Schultzie’s. His office was in the front room and if you had an appointment in the late afternoon you could smell his wife cooking garlicky dinner in the kitchen to the rear.

  Dr. Paulson’s chief concern as a physician was sodium intake. The Mailman would sit quietly in the comforting glow of the old shellacked wainscoting and Dr. Paulson would ask him how his throat was feeling. The Mailman would indicate that it hurt. Dr. Paulson would listen to his heart and tell him he was using too much salt.Then he’d write a scrip for two weeks’worth of morphine pills or Eukodol.The Mailman would come back five days later and ask for something else—Dilaudid, maybe—and Dr. Paulson would listen to his heart and advise against salt, writing the prescription without a thought. He made his living from customers like the Mailman, and by giving state-mandated physicals to bus and trash truck drivers in the employ of Schultz Brothers. The post office, under federal jurisdiction, had their own more competent doc a few towns away. He was the one who’d discovered the cancer. But after a while the Mailman figured things out and got transferred to the care of his local physician, the senile stethoscopist, Oliver Paulson, MD. Since he filled the prescriptions by staggering them among a half-dozen area pharmacies, everything looked on the up-and-up.

  Weekdays, the Mailman tried to keep to maintenance doses. But on Friday and Saturday nights he’d load up and go on his downtown ramble, working selected bars east along Main Street and returning westward via other waterfront establishments. This was as close as he ever got to recalling the pleasures of his old postal route—the recollection being always perfect, whereas the actual experience had often been marred by aggressive dogs, surly humans, the persistent pressure of the spiderweb. There weren’t many mutts on the route of his ramble and, oddly, once he got the operation, they started liking him. Maybe it was the smell of meat.

  The Mailman had a difficult time venturing on the streets sober. People gawked. At the bank or in the grocery store, it was a constant, hideous game of charades. When he was forced to speak, tellers cringed, children burst into tears. The doctors had tried to get him to use one of those gizmos you hold up against your throat, but there was so much scar tissue, he never found the sweet spot that made the gurgles resonate into speech.

  Friday nights he’d quadruple up on whatever med was in supply, crush it in a soup spoon, mix it with Karo syrup, and swill it down with little gulplets of flat beer. Then he’d float from bar to bar, insulated, stoned, and silent, but with those around him in his drugged-up mystical way, drinking slow lubricating beers, empathizing, telepathing, reading entire life stories in new faces, the happenings of past weeks or months in the ones known to him.

  THE OLD TURK’S LOAD 29

  Few conversations interrupted his reverie, but occasionally there’d be adventures. One Friday, just after sunset down at the Main Deck, a rackety bar built out over the water, a guy in full umpire regalia propositioned him on behalf of three not-bad-looking whores standing around the cigarette machine. The ump had just finished working a Little League game down at Boudreau Field but didn’t bother to explain why he hadn’t changed out of his dark pants and jacket and was still wearing his chest protector. Maybe he was expecting rough trade, or thought the outfit would be helpful in Friday night conflict resolution. Twenty bucks got the Mailman a blow job from June in the man’s car ’round the side of the building. June was skinny, with a lean long face, and he came and came into it, in love at that ecstatic moment with her, his drugs, the bar, and the improbable ump.

  Often there were more drugs—Sopors, to be taken carefully with beers, or rolls of downers imported, it was said, from Mexico, to be taken even more carefully—to lay him back into a deep velvety cushion of the evening, making everything a movie as flawless as his collection of recollections. More often it was dex and bennies—pills crushed and popped like Lik-m-aid. Coke was a high-end rarity in the bars he frequented, though once he got into some with a gracious fisherman friend at Kellehers. Couldn’t snort it, of course, but did his gums sore with it.Then danced all night to Captain Jack Melquiez’s squeeze box, winding up with a chubby, good-humored girl named Audrey who didn’t mind doing all the talking and gave him a good fucking in her place over the Portuguese restaurant across from Pavilion Beach. She was a nurse at Addison Gilbert and he didn’t scare her at all.

  When the sun came up he left her asleep and walked off the last of the coke around the neighborhood called the Fort, then down to Fisherman’s Wharf where he sat under the docks, bathed in the luminous yellow-green of morning sun low off the water of the inner harbor, remembering the fresh vernal odor of the incoming tide, and imagining the cunt smell she’d left on the fingers of his right hand even though he couldn’t really smell it, going back for just one more whiff again and again, as if it were the most exotic perfume or the ultimate no-fault cocaine. He thought he’d see her again after that, but she disappeared. Somebody told him she took a job in San Diego.

  At first his rambles were an idyll, but gradually the weekends stretched from Thursdays to Sundays.The drugs did something else, too. He didn’t have words for it, but the image was of his walkingaround body being offset from the center of himself.The drugs made him feel good when he didn’t feel good, but then, sober, there were moments when he should’ve felt good and felt nothing. He was functional, showing up at the Historical Society four days a week, yet many other symptoms lurked.

  The waterfront junkies could’ve recited them rote—the not shitting for a week, or the yawning gulf of terrible sickness he fell into the time Dr. Paulson took a vacation. With all his might the Mailman resisted, ignored, denied. The junkies—like tentacles of the old Turk’s load—understood it was just a matter of time. Not that they gave a damn.

  The Brain in the Jar

  A

  fter the clams and Bloody Marys, Kelly began to feel chipper. He was needling Norbert, a die-hard Yankees fan, about the Amazin’Mets when the stool beside him scraped the sawdust floor and a pale face loomed through the underwater light.

  “Lloyd. Is this an office visit?”

  “I had some business in the area.”

  To Kelly, Lloyd Chamberlain was a man adrift. Blond, fey, and

  smooth, Lloyd was a trust funder from some wealthy New England family, supposedly working as an artist. But Lloyd had gotten into acid and contagious-looking splotches of paint, then speed and no paint at all. He was dealing now, not that he needed the money, and had replaced painting with talking, always talking, only occasionally about art. If there was a genetic predisposition to the low life, this poor bastard had it. Kelly p
itied him, vaguely liked him, hoped he’d turn himself around, but saw nothing wrong with using him in the meantime. Lloyd was on the street a lot. Saw things. Knew people.

  As far as Lloyd was concerned, it was Kelly who was the odd man out. Unless you actually were a narcotics agent or a jazz musician, you should not dress in shiny black shoes, dark sport coats, and skinny ties. Still, the private detective was a decent companion— stolid, a good listener. And he could handle himself.

  Kelly finished his drink, and Lloyd proposed they mosey downtown. He and Helen were having people over that night and she wanted him out while she got the place together. The two of them could hang for a while, then Kelly could come over to his pad. That suited Kelly. Prior to the mess with the German he’d done a difficult divorce case—a lot of surveillance and not much sleep—and was now serious about laying low. An afternoon of moderate drinking followed by an evening of Chamberlain’s arty and intellectual friends didn’t sound strenuous. Plus, there would be Helen. Kelly had a thing for Lloyd’s wife.

  They had dark beers, hard cheese, and raw onions in the company of dozing cats and muttering geezers at a place in the Village. As the students began drifting in they moved west, toward Lloyd’s “business,” stopping at My Office on Hudson, a dingy railroad car of a joint with only two other customers. Lloyd and Kelly stood way down at the end, under the TV around the corner from the men’s room, facing the front door, a distant rectangle of pearly light in the gloom. Kelly ordered two Schaefers.

  Lloyd was in a pathologically chatty mood, even for him, probably because he was cranked. Kelly listened patiently. Finally he said, “There’s something green stuck between your teeth.”

  Lloyd stopped talking, stared at the other man intently, then walked out of the bar. Kelly lit a cigarette and waited. Lloyd returned fifteen minutes later and pushed Kelly around the corner into the phone booth by the men’s room, pulling a plasticene envelope of dirty white powder from his pocket. He made two minuscule piles of the stuff on the flap and held them up to his nose with one hand.

  THE OLD TURK’S LOAD 33

  The thumb and slender ring finger of the other held the half-length of blue-and-white-striped soda straw and the index finger blocked the nostril as he sucked up one of the piles. Second pile in the other nostril. His back stiffened. He offered the envelope to Kelly.

  Hitting the street again, they stopped at one more run-down gin mill for another toot, perfectly timed to catch the receding wave of the first, before heading across town to Lloyd’s apartment. On the way, Lloyd told him about a lifer in the army, a platoon leader in ’Nam, who’d gotten all shot up. Which was when the helicopter came down, a big flying, stainless steel state-of-the-art operating room, and scooped him up. Just shoved the regular medevacs out of the way and sucked the mangled body up inside it and disappeared.

  Kelly looked over at Lloyd, who caught the look and said, “No. I actually know this guy. I mean I know about the guy whose identity they stole and put him into. I read the b-book about what they’re doing.”

  Something in his voice. “What’re they doing, Lloyd?”

  “They’re looking for a fucking B-BRAIN.” Flecks of white spittle dotted the corner of his mouth.

  “Lloyd . . .”

  “No. I read—I read the book and the fucking reports, too.” Kelly let him talk.

  A top secret government organization had been working on this, Lloyd went on, since the end of World War II. They’d put the finishing touches on the technology just in time for Vietnam, which was perfect. What they needed,apparently, was a brain.They thought they were going to have to use car crash victims in their experiments but now the war provided an endless supply of mangled bodies with heads intact.That stainless steel chopper would swoop down and get the poor bastard and then they’d take out his brain— Kelly experienced a jangling flashback to Norbert’s hands on those clams—and keep it alive. Because what they needed was something to organize their computing devices.

  “They’ve got all these Univacs running along, giant things, they fill up rooms. Some monitor electricity, some do the railroads and airlines. Some, they listen to telephone calls, see who’s calling who. Some keep track of charge accounts. Not to mention the military stuff. The thing is, it’s so much information that no machine can handle it. So they’ve been working on ways to wire human brains into the machines. Some are like traffic control, you know, switching devices, and some are like moles running through all this information for the Man.”

  Despite himself, Kelly got the picture. Computers the size of houses with wires to brains in jars at the bottom of a deep gray canyon of chemical nutrient. Hadn’t there even been some movie?

  “So they got this guy’s brain, but they didn’t get all the personality out.”

  “How do you know they got him, Lloyd?”

  “He’s been trying to fucking CONTACT me.” It was almost a wail. Lloyd had been getting coded messages on his telephone and electric bills. They looked like gibberish. He couldn’t figure them out. The poor bastard was on the ragged end of a weeklong speed run—couldn’t tell the traffic buzz from the one in his head.

  Lloyd heard the thought, the way they sometimes could on crank. “Fuck you, Kelly. I didn’t say I b-believed it. I’m just laying it down the way I think about it. I think about it a lot. And how strange is it compared to all the other weird shit going on out there?

  Weird shit. That was for sure.

  Daddy’s Stash

  T

  he foco, their revolutionary cell, hung out at Gallagher’s place on the Lower East Side.The living was communal and informal, but the lifestyle was highly politicized, an ongoing planning session involving the core group—Kevin, Gloria, Leo, and Juan. Lloyd Chamberlain came and went, usually delivering drugs, and Irene hovered at the fringes as legal consultant, scrupulously avoiding firsthand knowledge of their plots and schemes. They all had their own places in the city, but they might as well have lived at Kevin’s, as much time as they spent there. Gloria slept with him regularly—at first. But as his head issues became apparent, she tailed off. He needed for her to be his “whore” or his “bitch” and that doggie-style thing was way too hung up. He was, she soon realized, damaged. A user, a hustler, a loser. For the rest: Leo lacked discipline, Lloyd was a drug addict, and poor Juan just wanted to be wherever Irene was.

  Originally they’d bonded over their shared belief in the corruption and imminent failure of the establishment. All were certain that there were things they could do to hasten the inevitable end. The most radical group dedicated to this mission was a shadowy band of dedicated revolutionaries who called themselves the Motherfuckers. In the foco only Juan and Lloyd weren’t Motherfucker dropouts, Gloria and Irene by choice, Leo and Kevin because of their “adventurism,” which Kevin claimed was Motherese for having more brains than they—very unlikely in Gloria’s view. They bounced him because, no matter what Kevin said, they recognized him as a liability.

  As far as Gloria was concerned, the Mother commitment to violent overthrow of the established order was too limited, too inflexible—suicidal, really, which was what made it sexy. Kevin was obsessed with doing something to impress them, to show them they’d made a mistake about him. So he was always talking about spectacular schemes like kidnapping someone from Mundi Enterprises or blowing up government buildings.

  At this moment, for example, he was coiled on the edge of his ratty couch, intense and crazy. Gloria, he announced, would dress in maternity clothes, padded big, like seven or eight months pregnant. She’d come into a station house in obvious distress and ask to use the ladies’ room.Then she’d plant two sticks of dynamite hidden in the stuffing, along with a simple alarm clock detonator, behind the toilet or in the trash can.

  Juan nodded eagerly, ready for anything. Leo was excited about doing something big with Kevin. Lloyd was off somewhere, but that was okay. No one really counted on him for anything except pot. Gloria contemplated walking around with dynamite taped to he
r, setting alarm clock detonators in a police station bathroom, while her accomplices waited, blocks away.

  It was always the same pattern: Kevin concocting a bold scheme that involved someone else taking the risk. Not that it

  THE OLD TURK’S LOAD 37

  mattered. His plans never came to fruition. Irene would put her foot down, or Lloyd would show up with some acid and they’d all get distracted, or the idea would start to seem fatally flawed before it could be put into execution.

  The inevitable flaw was they were scared. Especially Kevin. When you blew up buildings people got killed. Other people hunted you down. So they muddled along, Kevin ranting and scheming, Leo aping Kevin, Juan adoring Irene, and Irene and Gloria putting their efforts into funding and delivering legal aid for antiwar demonstrators and conscientious objectors, the only useful accomplishment of the foco to date.

  Now this. Maternity bombs.

  She’d been a fool to let Kevin know about Daddy’s stash. Instead of figuring out how to get it—instead of helping her to get it—and fence it, and use the proceeds to start focos in major cities, greased with lawyers and funds, Kevin did nothing. Said nothing. Talked darkly of “the right time.” Instead of seeking the advice and counsel of the group, he was using all the power and intimidation he could muster to get her to keep quiet, to keep it from them. Did he really believe she couldn’t see through him? Did he imagine this dynamite business was going to distract her? Yet here he was tonight, working harder to sell it than she’d ever seen him.

  “The pigs won’t have a clue. We head north and into Syracuse —I’ve got people up there—and do it again. Other groups will see how easy it is. That’s when things’ll get interesting. We’ll be the spark. And here’s the kicker”—he glared around intently, trying to judge whether they were worthy conspirators—“I’ve got funding for this one. An old friend. A guy whose life I saved in jail. It’s a long story, but”—he produced a fat wad of bills—“three grand. Enough to get us a set of wheels that can’t be traced. Enough to set us up again somewhere else.This is going to happen, people, if we want it to. All I need is for you to tell me. Is this what we want?”