I picked up the telephone and listened to the dial tone, music of a dead universe. The sound fascinated me. Ever since the phone had been put back in working order, I had fallen into the habit of lifting the receiver from time to time and simply listening. Source of pleasure and fear never before explored. It was always the same, silence endowed with acoustical properties.
I dialed the numbers of Globke's office, his home, his car. Nobody knew where he was. His wife spoke to me about the stillness at the center of a thing in motion. In the background, as she talked, I heard my own voice, revolving at thirty-three and a third, second cut on side one of third album.
A man wearing a gendarme's cape appeared at the door. He was small and pallid, almost lost in the cape and long boots, and in his eyes was a frenzy he seemed to be trying to pass off as alertness. He gestured toward the bathroom.
"What's in there?"
"Everything that's not in here."
"My name isn't important. Menefee. It happens to be Menefee but that's not important. What's important is the person I'm clearing for. I'm here to clear. I'm here to make the area secure before you and the person in question conduct your undisclosed business. We have procedures we've developed over a long period of time. Can I use your phone?"
As he dialed he stood between me and the telephone. Talking to the person at the other end he buried his head in the cape. Merely listening he turned slightly and glanced my way every few seconds, as if verifying a description.
"Change of plan," he said. "We don't go there. He comes here."
"Who comes here?" I said.
"Dr. Pepper."
"He's going to be disappointed."
"Don't tell me anything,'' Menefee said. "I'm only here to clear. I make things secure. I work with details, not sum totals. I don't want to be made a party to any information that has sum totals involved in it. This job is tough enough. Handling details for a man like Dr. Pepper is like the ultimate in nerve-rackingness. We run up and down the country, in and out of hotels, motels, airplanes, taxi-cabs. Seeing people, fleeing people. Making deals, turning wheels. Dr. Pepper is a master of many things. People think he restricts his genius to dope and matters related to dope. Dope-related matters. Not so. The man shows his genius in an unspecified number of ways, each and every day, north and south, in lake country or mountain terrain, talking to the makers and shakers or just ambling along a country road laying a gentle rap on some backpacker who's into penance and mortification. But the man's a stickler for detail and this makes my work tough as can be. Soon's we get something all set up he contacts me in some devious way and changes eight details out of a possible eleven. You could say the man's hyper-secretive. You could use adjectives like eerie and uncanny and you'd be right on the mark. He's got disguises, he's got surprises. He doesn't trust a soul, least of all me. He's all the time devising tests to determine my loyalty. The man's a master of regional accents, a master of total recall, a master of surreptitious-ness. Every time I meet some stranger somewhere I automatically assume it's Dr. Pepper in disguise probing at my loyalty. But the man's an aw-thentic genius. I'm grateful to him. I had two years of crisis sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara in Santa Barbara, California. Ruined my head just about. Dr. Pepper took me out of the world of terminology and numbers and classifications and provided access to new kinds of awareness. Centrifugalism and overloads. Brain-patching. Electrode play areas."
He stopped talking abruptly and I became aware of a jackhammer beating into the street about half a block to the west. I sat at the small table near the sink. Menefee remained by the door, his body yielding to an occasional mild twitch, his face reflecting a mental concentration so intense I thought his eyeballs might suddenly click backward in their sockets in order to peer into the depths of his mind, leaving curdled sludge and pink drippings for my own eyes to gaze upon. Slowly he moved across the door, opened it an inch and looked into the hall. Then he billowed back toward the middle of the room, followed by the man himself, Dr. Pepper, a figure of ordinary size, wearing ordinary and somewhat out-of-date clothing, all in all no less common than a clam on a paper plate. Menefee made clearing motions with his hands and after the door was locked, the shade drawn and the introductions made, we crowded around the table, Pepper and I seated on identical straight-backed chairs and facing each other, Menefee between us in the low-slung canvas chair, leaning forward, his face at table level.
"The product isn't here," I said.
"I've been apprised of that," Dr. Pepper said. "This courier they hired is off somewhere trying to deal on his own. Predictable. At the very least semi-predictable. This Happy Valley bunch is not what you'd call a heads-up collection of people. They've got initiative to spare but they lack keenness. First they tell me to expect two people with the product. Then there's an unforeseeable delay. In my lexicon there's only one kind of delay. Strategic delay. But I let it pass without comment although I'm satisfied in my own mind, see, that this bunch lacks the necessary keenness. You hone yourself. I've honed myself over the years. I've dealt with the quickest minds and the quickest intellects. That's how I've acquired my own quickness. I've dealt with people who know which deck is the marked deck. I call these people the makers and shakers. You hone yourself. You cut away the glut. So then what do they tell me? They tell me the messenger is now bargaining agent with full bargaining powers. I replace the phone with a smile. A smile creases my face. Lack of judgment, I conclude. Lack of experience. In other words Happy Valley is not to be trusted. Their leadership is not to be trusted. Their hirelings and minions are not to be trusted. Other agencies of the underground are to be viewed with a jaundiced eye in the light of past performance. U.S. Guv is to be viewed with two such eyes in light of the fact that they're the victims of this rip-off. I have one word for U.S. Guv. Booshit. That word is booshit. What is U.S. Guv? It's a bunch of rich men playing golf. It's big business, big army and big government all visiting each other in company planes for the sole purpose of playing golf and talking money. So who does that leave in positions of trust? Friend, it leaves you and me."
Dr. Pepper wore a small fedora with the brim turned down. His suit was a couple of sizes too large, an aged gray outfit over a narrow gray and white tie and a dingy white shirt with frayed collar. He appeared to be in his late forties. His face was blank, tending toward narrowness, and his eyes were dark and still. Although at first he seemed unremarkable in every way, I began to note touches of professionalism about him. His deadpan expression was classically intact, put together from a strip of silent film, frame by frame. His speech was flat and rickety, hard-working in its plainness, the voice of an actor delivering monologues from a rocking chair. Of course I had the advantage of knowing who he was. Also I was fairly certain I'd seen him before and heard either that voice or an approximation. Perhaps the oddest thing about Dr. Pepper was that he didn't wear glasses. He had the kind of face that needed glasses to be complete, old rimless spectacles worn low on the nose, but the absence of this final detail only confirmed his elusiveness and skill; one was inclined to fill in the face, provide a finish to the comic proposition. A single thing connected all others — the invisible mannerisms, the craft, the tiìghtfisted humor — and this one threading element was danger. Dr. Pepper had lived among dangerous men, worked in hazardous circumstances, and his eccentricity, his distance from the axis, had its origins in the basic machine-like pressures that bear on a man who is unable to think or live in accordance with the central themes of the law. Even his appearance, ordinary as it was, suggested some acquaintance with illegality. More than anything else he looked like a man released from prison in 1947 in Joliet, Illinois. It would have been difficult to say what crime he'd been convicted for. He had the gift of putting distance between himself and his applauders. My own tenuous guesses would have included child-molesting, embezzlement, the defrauding of widows.
"I'll tell you, Buck. This stuff they've come up with is not the kind of product a man like me is likely to dismiss. I give them points for initiative. I have sources and these sources confirm what I've long suspected. This isn't some kind of rinky-dink schoolboy caper. No way, manner, shape or form. This is a weighty affair we're involved in here. This drug is some kind of extreme substance. This is a pressing matter and deserves our closest attention."
"I've figured that out for myself," I said. "Everybody in the free world wants to bid. There's a group on the Coast wants to bid. They're very anxious to bid. There's a group in Europe also wants to bid, also very anxious. That's Watney's group. Great Britain and Europe. I haven't heard from the Japanese yet. Of course Hanes may have heard. He's out there with the product."
"Watney first swam into my ken in Boston," Dr. Pepper said. "Sure, Watney and that crowd of his. I was bumping into a whole lot of crank behavior about then. There was a man there that could imitate a sewing machine. There was a pair of girls, Lenore and Doreen, they come up from right off the street, quack-quack, sisters they were, Lenore's the fat one, see, and they're trying to sell me a radio that gets Perth, Australia. I'd just finished manufacturing and dealing off I won't say how many dollars worth of shiny black capsules in bulk, posing as my own sales manager. There were any number of stunts being pulled that night. The sewing machine guy was being hypnotized by a cousin of Watney's that was making his first trip here and refused to leave the hotel for fear of being lashed to the fender of a car and taken north for resale to a lumber operation. At that time in Boston stories of abduction in the night were rife. There was a guy there as I recall, Montaldo, a promoter and manager who on the side controlled the entire orchid business north of Braintree right up to the border, for whatever that's worth. Watney himself was tripping in a unique and interesting manner. There was a kitchenette in the place, just the bare essentials, and Watney takes an egg and places it whole and intact on a frying pan, no fire going, no heat coming up, and he stands there waiting for a fried egg to appear and he just can't understand why it won't. Nobody knew who I was. I was drifting through the suite, witness to any number of propositions. The equipment man for some local group, name of Mulderick, I recall, he............