Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said Part 11

"But it was the last," he said. He made his way into the bathroom; there he washed the blood from his arm, kept cold water flowing on the gash until coagulation began. Five minutes, fifty; he could not tell. He merely stood there, holding his elbow under the faucet. Ruth Rae had gone G.o.d knew where. Probably to nark to the pois, he said wearily to himself; he was too exhausted to care.

h.e.l.l, he thought. After what I said to her I wouldn't blame her.

10

"No," Police General Felix Buckman said, shaking his head rigidly. "Jason Taverner does exist. He's somehow managed to get the data out of all the matrix banks." The police general pondered. "You're sure you can lay your hands on him if you have to?"

"A downer about that, Mr. Buckman," McNulty said. "He's found the microtrans and snuffed it. So we don't know if he's still in Vegas. If he has any sense he's hustled on. Which he almost certainly has."

Buckman said, "You had better come back here. If he can lift data, prime source material like that, out of our banks, he's involved in effective activity that's probably major. How precise is your fix on him?"

"He is--was--located in one apartment of eighty-five in one wing of a complex of six hundred units, all expensive and fas.h.i.+onable in the West Fireflash District, a place called Copperfield II."

"Better ask Vegas to go through the eighty-five units until they find him. And when you get him, have him air-mailed directly to me. But I still want you at your desk. Take a couple of uppers, forget your hyped-out nap, and get down here."

"Yes, Mr. Buckman," McNulty said, with a trace of pain. He grimaced.

"You don't think we're going to find him in Vegas," Buckman said.

"No, sir."

"Maybe we will. By snuffing the microtrans he may rationalize that he's safe, now."

"I beg to differ," McNulty said. "By finding it he'd know we had bugged him to there in West Fireflash. He'd split. Fast."

Buckman said, "He would if people acted rationally. But they don't. Or haven't you noticed that, McNulty? Mostly they function in a chaotic fas.h.i.+on." Which, he mediated, probably serves them in good stead . . . it makes them less predictable.

"I've noticed that--"

"Be at your desk in half an hour," Buckman said, and broke the connection. McNulty's pedantic foppery, and the fogged-up lethargy of a hype after dark, irritated him always.

Alys, observing everything, said, "A man who's unexisted himself. Has that ever happened before?"

"No," Buckman said. "And it hasn't happened this time. Somewhere, some obscure place, he's overlooked a microdoc.u.ment of a minor nature. We'll keep searching until we find it. Sooner or later we'll match up a voiceprint or an EEG print and then we'll know who he really is."

"Maybe he's exactly who he says he is." Alys had been examining McNulty's grotesque notes. "Subject belongs to musicians' union. Says he's a singer. Maybe a voiceprint would be your--"

'Get out of my office," Buckman said to her "I'm just speculating. Maybe he recorded that new p.o.r.nochord hit, 'Go Down, Moses' that--"

"I'll tell you what," Buckman said. "Go home and look in the study, in a gla.s.sine envelope in the center drawer of my maple desk. You'll find a lightly canceled perfectly centered copy of the one-dollar black U.S. Trans-Mississippi issue. I got it for my own collection but you can have it for yours; I'll get another. _Just go_. Go and get the d.a.m.n stamp and put it away in your alb.u.m in your safe forever. Don't ever even look at it again; just have it. And leave me alone at work. Is that a deal?"

"Jesus," Alys said, her eyes alive with light. "Where'd you get it?"

"From a political prisoner on his way to a forced-labor camp. He traded it for his freedom. I thought it was an equitable arrangement. Don't you?"

Alys said, "The most beautifully engraved stamp ever issued. At any time. By any country."

"Do you want it?" he said.

"Yes." She moved from the office, out into the corridor. "I'll see you tomorrow. But you don't have to give me something like that to make me go; I want to go home and take a shower and change my clothes and go to bed for a few hours. On the other hand, if you want to--"

"I want to," Buckman said, and to himself he added, Because I'm so G.o.dd.a.m.n afraid of you, so basically, ontologically scared of everything about you, even your willingness to leave. I'm even afraid of that!

_Why?_ he asked himself as he watched her head for the secluded prison ascent tube at the far end of his suite of offices. I've known her as a child and I feared her then. Because, I think, in some fundamental way that I don't comprehend, she doesn't play by the rules. We all have rules; they differ, but we all play by them. For example, he conjectured, we don't murder a man who has just done us a favor. Even in this, a police state--even we observe that rule. And we don't deliberately destroy objects precious to us. But Alys is capable of going home, finding the one-dollar black, and setting fire to it with her cigarette. I know that and yet I gave it to her; I'm still praying that underneath or eventually or whatever she'll come back and shoot marbles the way the rest of us do.

But she never will.

He thought, And the reason I offered her the one-dollar black was because, simply, I hoped to beguile her, tempt her, into returning to rules that we can understand. Rules the rest of us can apply. I'm bribing her, and it's a waste of time-- if not much much more--and I know it and she knows it. Yes, he thought. She probably will set fire to the one-dollar black, the finest stamp ever issued, a philatelic item I have never seen for sale during my lifetime. Even at auctions. And when I get home tonight she'll show me the ashes. Maybe she'll leave a corner of it unburned, to prove she really did it.

And I'll believe it. And I'll be even more afraid.

Moodily, General Buckman opened the third drawer of the large desk and placed a tape-reel in the small transport he kept there. Dowland aires for four voices . . . he stood listening to one which he enjoyed very much, among all the songs in Dowland's lute books.

. . . _For now left and forlorn_ _I sit, I sigh, I weep, I faint, I die_ _In deadly pain and endless misery_.

The first man, Buckman mused, to write a piece of abstract music. He removed the tape, put in the lute one, and stood listening to the "Lachrimae Antiquae Pavan." From this, he said to himself, came, at last, the Beethoven final quartets. And everything else. Except for Wagner.

He detested Wagner. Wagner and those like him, such as Berlioz, had set music back three centuries. Until Karlheinz Stockhausen in his "Gesang der Junglinge" had once more brought music up to date.

Standing by the desk, he gazed down for a moment at the recent 4-D photo of Jason Taverner--the photograph taken by Katharine Nelson. What a d.a.m.n good-looking man, he thought. Almost professionally good-looking. Well, he's a singer; it fits. He's in show business.

Touching the 4-D photo, he listened to it say, "How now, brown cow?" And smiled. And, listening once more to the "Lachrimae Antiquae Pavan," thought:

_Flow, my tears_ . . .

Do I really have pol-karma? he asked himself. Loving words and music like this? Yes, he thought, I make a superb pol because I _don't think like a pol_. I don't, for example, think like McNulty, who will always be--what did they used to say?--a pig all his life. I think, not like the people we're trying to apprehend, but like the _important_ people we're trying to apprehend. Like this man, he thought, this Jason Taverner. I have a hunch, an irrational but beautifully functional intuition, that he's still in Vegas. We will trap him there, and not where McNulty thinks: rationally and logically somewhere farther on.

I am like Byron, he thought, fighting for freedom, giving up his life to fight for Greece. Except that I am not fighting for freedom; I am fighting for a coherent society.

Is that actually true? he asked himself. Is that why I do what I do? To create order, structure, harmony? Rules. Yes, he thought; rules are G.o.dd.a.m.n important to me, and that is why Alys threatens me; that's why I can cope with so much else but not with her.

Thank G.o.d they're not all like her, he said to himself. Thank G.o.d, in fact, that she's one of a kind.

Pressing a b.u.t.ton on his desk intercom he said, "Herb, will you come in here, please?"

Herbert Maime entered the office, a stack of computer cards in his hands; he looked harried.

"You want to buy a bet, Herb?" Buckman said. "That Jason Taverner is in Las Vegas?"

"Why are you concerning yourself with such a funky little chickens.h.i.+t matter?" Herb said. "It's on McNulty's level, not yours."

Seating himself, Buckman began an idle colortone game with the picphone; he flashed the flags of various extinct nations. "Look at what this man has done. Somehow he's managed to get all data pertaining to him out of every data bank on the planet _and_ the lunar _and_ Martian colonies . . . McNulty even tried there. Think for a minute what it would take to do that. Money? Huge sums. Bribes. Astronomical. If Taverner has used that kind of heavy bread he's playing for big stakes. Influence? Same conclusion: he's got a lot of power and we must consider him a major figure. It's who he represents that concerns me most; I think some group, somewhere on earth, is backing him, but I have no idea what for or why. All right; so they expunge all data concerning him; Jason Taverner is the man who doesn't exist. But, having done that, what have they achieved?"

Herb pondered.

"I can't make it out," Buckman said. "It has no sense to it. But, if they're interested in doing it, it must signify something. Otherwise, they wouldn't expend so much"--he gestured--"whatever they've expended. Money, time, influence, whatever. Maybe all three. Plus large slabs of effort."

"I see," Herb said, nodding.

Buckman said, "Sometimes you catch big fish by hooking one small fish. That's what you never know: will the next small fish you catch be the link with something giant or"-- he shrugged--"just more small fry to be tossed into the labor pool. Which, perhaps, is all Jason Taverner is. I may be completely wrong. But I'm interested."

"Which," Herb said, "is too bad for Taverner."

"Yes." Buckman nodded. "Now consider this." He paused a moment to quietly fart, then continued, "Taverner made his way to an ID forger, a run-of-the-mill forger operating behind an abandoned restaurant. He had no contacts; he worked through, for G.o.d's sake, the desk clerk at the hotel he was staying at. So he must have been desperate for ident cards. All right, where were his powerful backers then? Why couldn't they supply him with excellent forged ID cards, if they could do all this else? Good Christ; they sent him out into the street, into the urban cesspool jungle, right to a poi informant. They jeopardized everything!"

"Yes," Herb said, nodding. "Something screwed up."

"Right. _Something went wrong_. All of a sudden there he was, in the middle of the city, with no ID. Everything he had on him Kathy Nelson forged. How did that come to happen? How did they manage to f.u.c.k up and send him groping desperately for forged ID cards, so he could walk three blocks on the street? You see my point."

"But that's how we get them."

"Pardon?" Buckman said. He turned down the lute music on the tape player.

Herb said, "If they didn't make mistakes like that we wouldn't have a chance. They'd remain a metaphysical ent.i.ty to us, never glimpsed or suspected. Mistakes like that are what we live on. I don't see that it's important why they made a mistake; all that matters is that they did. And we should be d.a.m.n glad of it."

I am, Buckman thought to himself. Leaning, he dialed McNulty's extension. No answer. McNulty wasn't back in the building yet. Buckman consulted his watch. Another fifteen or so minutes.

He dialed central clearing Blue. "What's the story on the Las Vegas operation in the Fireflash District?" he asked the chick operators who sat perched on high stools at the map board pus.h.i.+ng little plastic representations with long cue sticks. "The netpull of the individual calling himself Jason Taverner."

A whirr and click of computers as the operator deftly punched b.u.t.tons. "I'll tie you in with the captain in charge of that detail." On Buckman's pic a uniformed type appeared, looking idiotically placid. "Yes, General Buckman?"

"Have you got Taverner?"

"Not yet, sir. We've hit roughly thirty of the rental units in--"

"When you have him," Buckman said, "call me direct." He gave the nerdish pol type his extension code and rang off, feeling vaguely defeated.

"It takes time," Herb said.

"Like good beer," Buckman murmured, staring emptily ahead, his mind working. But working without results.

"You and your intuitions in the Jungian sense," Herb said. "That's what you are in the Jungian typology: an intuitive, thinking personality, with intuition your main function-mode and thinking--"

'b.a.l.l.s." He wadded up a page of McNulty's coa.r.s.e notations and tossed it into the shredder.

"Haven't you read Jung?"

"Sure. When I got my master's at Berkeley--the whole poli sci department had to read Jung. I learned everything you learned and a lot more." He heard the irritability in his voice and disliked it. "They're probably conducting their hits like garbage collectors. Banging and clanking . . . Taverner will hear them long before they reach the apartment he's in."

"Do you think you'll net anyone with Taverner? Someone who's his higher-up in the--"

"He wouldn't be with anyone crucial. Not with his ID cards in the local precinct stationhouse. Not with us as close to him as he knows we are. I expect nothing. Nothing but Taverner himself."

Herb said, "I'll make you a bet."

"Okay."

"I'll bet you five quinques, gold ones, that when you get him you get nothing."

Startled, Buckman sat bolt upright. It sounded like his own style of intuition: no facts, no data to base it on, just pure hunch.

"Want to make the bet?" Herb said.

"I'll tell you what I'll do," Buckman said. He got out his wallet, counted the money in it. "I'll bet you one thousand paper dollars that when we net Taverner we enter one of the most important areas we've ever gotten involved with."

Herb said, "I won't bet that kind of money."

"Do you think I'm right?"

The phone buzzed; Buckman picked up the receiver. On the screen the features of the nerdish Las Vegas functionary captain formed. "Our thermo-radex shows a male of Taverner's weight and height and general body structure in one of the as yet unapproached remaining apartments. We're moving in very cautiously, getting everyone else out of the other nearby units."

"Don't kill him," Buckman said.

"Absolutely not, Mr. Buckman."

"Keep your line to me open," Buckman said. "I want to sit in on this from here on in."

"Yes, sir."

Buckman said to Herb Maime, "They've really already got him." He smiled, chuckling with delight.