A Diet of Treacle Read online

  Let’s do something, for Christ’s sake.

  Your name had been Joe Milani, then as now, and you had been taking courses at NYU and living in a ratty room on West 12th Street. You had had a landlady whose false teeth had been so perfect they had resembled false teeth, and the room had always been neat as a pin because the landlady habitually cleaned it up and hung up your clothes after you had thrown them on the floor, and had swept up your cigarettes when you had stamped them out on the linoleum. And you had been taking a bevy of courses, exams coming up in a week—not finals, just midterms, and you had been smart enough so the exams had looked to be a breeze.

  You had come home from school one day. You had sat down in front of the table, the room’s excuse for a desk, and you had propped up a book. You had been taking a course in the development of the early English novel and the book in front of you had been Humphrey Clinker by one Tobias Smollett. You had had to get the book read so you had flipped it open to page one and had started reading.

  That had been at three-thirty.

  At four o’clock you had gotten to page forty-five because you could read like a bat out of hell, except not like a blind bat out of hell because blind bats obviously couldn’t read. Did they have braille books for blind bats, Joe wondered momentarily. It was worth thinking about, but forget it for now. You’re contemplating immobility, remember?

  So at four o’clock you had been on page forty-five and you had kept on reading.

  At five o’clock you had been on page forty-five.

  At six-thirty you had been on page forty-five.

  You hadn’t taken your eyes off that page. You hadn’t moved from that hard wooden chair.

  But you had still been on page forty-five. Seven more butts had littered the linoleum and your beard had grown perceptibly longer than when you had started, but that’s all that had happened.

  You had still been on page forty-five.

  Three days later you had still been on page forty-five. You had eaten eight or nine meals, had gone to The Palermo once or twice, had talked very briefly with the landlady when she had entered to make the bed. But you hadn’t managed to read any more or do anything except smoke a number of packs of cigarettes and drop three days out of your life. You hadn’t gone to classes or read anything else, and never in your life would you progress further than page forty-five in Humphrey Clinker.

  By one Tobias Smollett.

  Joe dropped the cigarette, squashed it with his foot, lit another and closed his eyes when the end-smoke from the cigarette hit them and burned them a little. Then he opened his eyes, dragged on the cigarette, blew out smoke and let his eyelids drop shut again.

  Now why had page forty-five stopped him so cold?

  All right. To begin with, Humphrey Clinker by Tobias Smollett had been a grade-A bore. The whole course, from Pamela to Mansfield Park, had been a grade-A bore. The whole bit at NYU, from the required geology course he hadn’t wanted to take to the advanced English courses he had looked forward to with a great deal of pleasure-all had added up to a grade-A bore.

  So he had been bored then as now. Was that any reason to spend half his life on page forty-five?

  It wasn’t.

  And if he were bored, didn’t it figure he should do something to stop being bored?

  It did.

  Then what the hell?

  Immobility, you damned fool.

  Joe dropped the cigarette before he was finished with it. The cigarette fell from its perch between his fingers and dropped to the pavement. It rolled several feet into the middle of the walk and a passer-by stepped on it without noticing it.

  He had dropped the cigarette because he had just come upon a great eternal truth, and the shock of discovery had been too much for him.

  Immobility was the opposite of something!

  The opposite of mobility, obviously. But as Joe looked at immobility from that unique point of view, some things began to make sense.

  Sitting on a bench like an oyster on the floor of the Atlantic was the same at the root as running around and turning on and banging good old Fran and drinking too much and raising all kinds of quiet hell.

  The same thing in reverse.

  The reaction.

  The other side of the coin, the other face of the Roman gatekeeper, the opposite.

  Ah!

  Because, Joe thought, when you did move you moved at the speed of light. You could do everything at once, go every place and know everybody and read a book in an hour and do all your work at school with both eyes shut and race around madly and dig everything. When you were immobile, nothing appealed; when you were—well, call it mobile for the time being—when you were mobile you could dig everything because everything was dynamically real and vivid and alive and breathing and gasping with things that mattered.

  Ergo: the running and the joy-jumping and all was the same as the sitting and walking and lying down.

  Ergo: immobility was not a phenomenon but a result of whatever made him the person he was, the Joe Milani who lived on Saint Marks Place and sat on benches in Washington Square.

  Which raised another inevitably interesting question.

  Why?

  It was an interesting question. Joe reflected on it for several hours, conjuring up all sorts of interesting notions without getting any place in particular. The hell of it was that he had been over it all before without getting anywhere then either, and he was beginning to develop the sneaking suspicion that the pondering and contemplating was not an entity in itself but another facet of the condition, the mass neurosis of the Hip and the individual neurosis of the person named Joe Milani. He might have followed this last train of thought a little further except that somebody coughed, somebody close to him, and his eyes left the spot between the second and third fingers of his right hand and looked upward.

  Into the eyes of Anita Carbone.

  4

  Shank was being followed. He heard the pattern of footsteps behind him and saw the familiar figure visible again and then again over his left shoulder. His first reactions were automatic. He stopped abruptly, wheeled, headed across the street and doubled back along the block. As Shank turned he spotted a man wearing a grey overcoat and a droopy felt hat shading the face—the latter dodge not enough to arouse suspicions, but enough to conceal the man’s features adequately.

  The tail was sharp. He continued walking in the same direction about ten paces before he turned and began following Shank once more.

  All right. Shank had a tail. Now he had to keep the tail from realizing that his presence had been detected. If the tail knew Shank were on to him, the whole game would become that much harder. Shank had not decided whether to shake the tail or lead him to the upper reaches of the Bronx; in either case, it would be best to keep the tail in the dark.

  Shank stepped inside the first corner drugstore and moved to the counter to buy cigarettes. Evidently the tail had not yet caught on because Shank could see him through the window as he—Shank—bent down to pick up a coin he managed to drop. Shank also ascertained he had never seen the tail before.

  After lighting a cigarette to make his purchase seem a natural one, Shank left the store and ambled down the street as he thought about the tail. He wondered where the guy had picked him up. Shank had quit the BMT at Union Square. The drugstore was at Broadway and Tenth. This meant the tail had been with him all the way from the meet with Mau-Mau or had just picked him up on the street.

  Shank tended to reject the second possibility. He rarely rode the BMT from Times Square, rarely got off at 14th Street, rarely walked along Broadway. The first possibility struck him as being much more likely. Could the guy have been with him on the subway? It was possible. And if he had been, and if he had seen the meet with Mau-Mau and knew what was happening, there might be trouble. A lot of trouble.

  The Mau-Mau was a middleman, a sort of wholesaler. Most of the marijuana smoked in the United States was raised in Mexico and smuggled across the border. If the shipmen
t were part of a syndicate operation, nobody needed the Mau-Mau. If, on the other hand, the guy who brought it in were a freelance hauling across a pound or two at a time, the Mau-Mau operated. He bought it by the pound and sold it by the ounce to the small pushers, and he profited enough at this to keep up one of the posh pads in one of the posh sections of Harlem.

  About an hour ago the Mau-Mau had laid three ounces of very choice merchandise on Shank in exchange for twenty-five dollars. The three ounces nestled in a small, brown envelope in Shank’s back pocket.

  Which meant that Shank was hotter than a rat in a smoky sewer.

  Shank took a right turn at First Avenue and headed down in the general direction of his room. Stalling for time, he stopped at a candy store on First between Ninth and Tenth, took a seat at the counter and ordered a chocolate egg cream. He had to think through this situation.

  The tail, whoever he was, had not tried to bust Shank while he had been with the Mau-Mau. Maybe the Mau-Mau had the tail bought and the guy was trying to make his quota on small pushers. Maybe the guy was afraid to make a pinch in Harlem. Maybe, for that matter, the guy figured Shank had a heavier bundle at his pad, in which case the tail probably had not the slightest idea of where Shank lived, which was fine with Shank. If his pad had been known the fuzz would have arrested him on the street and would have had somebody else bust the pad. But this wasn’t the way the game was being played.

  Shank sipped at the egg cream and wished he had ordered something more drinkable. He thought of leaving the thing unfinished but passed up the idea because he had to appear straight all the way. Suppose, Shank thought, he didn’t go back to the pad? That would prevent the joker from finding out Shank’s address, but it would also practically invite an arrest. And Shank was holding three big ounces. Suppose he shook the tail? That wouldn’t be too hard to do, not with the joker shadowing him on foot. Just take a corner fast and hop into a cab and goodbye, tail. But there were two things wrong with such a course of action. For one thing, suppose this were a double-shadow job—Shank losing one man only to have the other stick with him, which would mean the end of the ball game. Or suppose Shank would make it clean?—then the guy would be after Shank for the rest of his life. Would that be good?

  No—the best move would be to lead the tail right back to the room. There was less than an ounce in the room, anyway, and the most Shank could get for that would be a year and a day. There were two raps for possession of marijuana-straight possession of any amount, and possession with intent to sell. Just holding was a misdemeanor, but if you held enough so that they could call it possession with intent you caught a felony rap.

  Under an ounce was definitely just holding, pure and simple. But how about three ounces? That might go either way. Shank was not sure.

  He finished the egg cream and sauntered out of the candy store, his mind made up. He had to head straight for his pad and get rid of the stuff in his pocket before he was in the door. If he could ditch the rest, fine. If not-well it was a year and a day, and for a first offense he might get off with a suspended sentence.

  This was the safest way to play it.

  He saw the tail over his left shoulder when he went out the door. Shank strode down First to Saint Marks, pacing at his usual speed. He turned at the corner, spotting the tail again as he did so, and headed toward his own building.

  Now how in hell was he going to ditch the stuff?

  Three ounces was three ounces-a hell of a lot to chuck in the river. The stuff around his pad was nothing, less than an ounce and not the best stuff in the world, anyway. But what he had in his pocket was top-grade and he was looking forward to a stick or two himself. He had twenty-five dollars invested in it, and by the time he had it softened a little with Bull Durham he would have close to a bill’s worth right there. Sixty bucks if he sold it by the ounce, but a bill easy if you figured the guys who bought a stick or two at a buck a stick. And who in the hell wanted to throw away a bill, Shank thought savagely.

  He stopped and pulled out the pack of cigarettes. His own building was just three doors away now and he had not managed to solve everything to his satisfaction. Suppose—Shank sweated to concentrate—suppose he planted the stuff somewhere inside the building but not inside the apartment? That way it probably wouldn’t be found, and if it were they would have a rough time pinning it to him.

  But where would he stash it so the guy would miss it and nobody else would walk off with it? It would be one hell of a joke if Shank could manage to keep it from the cop only to have one of the local yokels wind up with it.

  When he reached the door he decided he had to find out how far back the tail was hanging. He chanced a quick glance around and spotted him a few doors down the street. That gave Shank plenty of room if he played it right.

  He opened the door and went inside. He glanced around the vestibule but it never had looked barer than it did just then. Where the hell…?

  It seemed obvious when he saw it. Shank walked to the mailboxes and dropped the envelope of marijuana into a slot marked MRS. HERMAN RODJINCKSZI, praying silently that Mrs. Herman Rodjinckszi would stay away from her mailbox for the next couple of hours.

  Then he took the stairs two at a time, wondering how long the tail would stay on the street before he decided to have a look inside. He got his answer while he was opening his own door, when he heard the downstairs door open.

  He closed the door, sliding the bolt into place. Then he raced around the apartment, grabbing the half-empty brown envelope from the table, snatching up the packet of cigarette papers although there was nothing illegal about owning them, picking up also the sack of Bull Durham on the off chance some pot was mixed in with the tobacco. He hadn’t remembered spicing up that particular sack but there was no point taking chances.

  The toilet worked on the first flush for the first time in a good three weeks. He flushed it again for the sheer hell of it and let himself relax completely for the first time since he had spotted the tail.

  The relaxation did not last. Suppose Joe had left the stick some place around? Suppose there was a roach on the floor somewhere? Christ, all the cops needed was a grain of the stuff and they could stick you with possession if they wanted you badly enough. Suppose the son of a—

  A knock sounded at the door.

  He took a quick look around. He glanced under the bed, finding nothing.

  “Open up there. Police.”

  Police—well, that wasn’t much of a surprise, Shank chuckled to himself. He opened the door.

  Close up, the tail seemed meek and unimpressive. He could have been sitting across from Shank in the subway all the way from 125th Street without Shank having been aware of him. But the man’s eyes indicated toughness and capability.

  “Want to let me in?” the tail said. “Want to show me your credentials?”

  The man was Detective First Grade Peter J. Samuelson, Narcotics Bureau. Which, come to think of it—Shank gave a mental shrug—wasn’t much of a surprise either.

  “C’mon inside,” he said.

  Detective Samuelson went through the motions then, but it was obvious he no longer expected to discover anything. The first look at Shank’s face had told him the place was clean. Samuelson bothered with a search only on the off chance he might strike uranium. He made Shank stand with his hands on the wall while he went through his pockets. All he found were two opened packs of cigarettes, a wallet with a few dollars and some uninteresting cards, and the knife.

  “You expecting trouble?” the detective inquired.

  Shank gave no reply.

  “There’s a law against knives like this,” the detective pointed out softly. “Can’t buy ‘em, can’t sell ‘em, can’t own ‘em. I could haul you in on this and let you cool off in the Tombs.”

  “That what they got you boys doing? Looking around for switchblades?”

  And now the cop said nothing.

  “You pick four kids off the street,” Shank delivered the brief lecture. “Pick up any f
our kids and three of them got knives like that one. Bigger, most of them.”

  The cop laughed unpleasantly. He pressed the button and the blade of the knife shot out. The cop looked at the knife for several seconds, closed it and dropped it into Shank’s pocket.

  “Here,” he said, “keep your toy.”

  Shank fell silent.

  The cop went ahead and checked the room. He knew all the right places—the toilet tank, the window sill, under the mattress, inside the shoes by the bed. Shank wore a pair of desert boots and the cop double-checked them because there was enough room in the toe to hold illegal merchandise.

  The cop combed just about everything, and while he did he cursed softly to himself because he knew that the search would do no good. Somehow or other Shank had tumbled to him and ditched the stuff, and it was a cinch it was nowhere around the apartment. Well, it served Detective Samuelson right. He knew he should have collared the little bastard on the street instead of taking chances. Next time he would know better.

  “Okay,” Samuelson said, finally. “I guess you’re clean.”

  Shank smiled.

  “When did you make me?” the detective asked casually.

  Shank shrugged. His eyes said he could not possibly be familiar with what the cop was talking about but the cop knew better.

  “When you turned around,” the cop said, reflecting aloud. “Sure. You already had cigarettes. I should have known—I saw you with one before you got on the subway. And you didn’t throw away an empty pack. I should have picked you up the minute you walked into the drugstore.”

  Shank smiled again.

  “I was working close,” the cop said, rubbing his nose ruefully. “I should have figured on you spotting me but I thought I was clear. How did you happen to notice me?”

  “You were lousy,” Shank summed it up.

  For a minute the cop looked as though he were ready to explode. Then his features relaxed.

  “You won this round,” he said. “How many more do you think you’ll win?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”