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PART
TWO:
Down, vain
lights, shine you no more!
No nights are black enough for those
that in despair their lost fortunes deplore.
Light doth but shame disclose.
Chapter 7
Early in the
gray of evening, before the cement sidewalks bloomed with nighttime
activity, Police General Felix Buckman landed his opulent official quibble
on the roof of the Los Angeles Police Academy building. He sat for a time,
reading page-one articles on the sole evening newspaper, then, folding the
paper up carefully, he placed it on the back seat of the quibble, opened
the locked door, and stepped out.
No activity
below him. One shift had begun to trail off; the next had not quite begun
to arrive.
He liked
this time: the great building, in these moments, seemed to belong to him.
"And leaves the world to darkness and to me," he thought, recalling a line
from Thomas Gray's Elegy. A long cherished favorite of his, in fact from
boyhood.
With his
rank key he opened the building's express descent sphincter, dropped
rapidly by chute to his own level, fourteen. Where he had worked most of
his adult life.
Desks
without people, rows of them. Except that at the far end of the major room
one officer still sat painstakingly writing a report. And, at the coffee
machine, a female officer drinking from a Dixie cup.
"Good
evening," Buckman said to her. He did not know her, but it did not matter:
she - and everyone else in the building - knew him.
"Good
evening, Mr. Buckman. " She drew herself upright, as if at attention.
"Be tired,"
Buckman said.
"Pardon,
sir?"
"Go home."
He walked away from her, passed by the posterior row of desks, the rank of
square gray metal shapes upon which the business of this branch of earth's
police agency was conducted.
Most of the
desks were clean: the officers had finished their work neatly before
leaving. But, on desk 37, several papers. Officer Someone worked late,
Buckman decided. He bent to see the nameplate.
Inspector
McNulty, of course. The ninety-day wonder of the academy. Busily dreaming
up plots and remnants of treason ... Buckman smiled, seated himself on the
swivel chair, picked up the papers.
TAVERNER,
JASON. CODE BLUE.
A Xeroxed
file from police vaults. Summoned out of the void by the overly eager -
and overweight - lnspector McNulty. A small note in pencil: "Taverner does
not exist."
Strange, he
thought. And began to leaf through the papers.
"Good
evening, Mr. Buckman." His assistant, Herbert Maime, young and sharp,
nattily dressed in a civilian suit: he rated that privilege, as did
Buckman.
"McNulty
seems to be working on the file of someone who does not exist," Buckman
said.
"In which
precinct doesn't he exist?" Maime said, and both of them laughed. They did
not particularly like McNulty, but the gray police required his sort.
Everything would be fine unless the McNultys of the academy rose to
policy-making levels. Fortunately that rarely happened. Not, anyhow, if he
could help it.
Subject gave false name
Jason Tavern.Wrong file pulled of Jason Tavern of Kememmer, Wyoming,
diesel motor repairman. Subject claimed to be Tavern, with plastic S. ID
cards identify him as Taverner, Jason, but no file.
Interesting,
Buckman thought as he read McNulty's notes. Absolutely no file on the man.
He finished the notes:
Well-dressed, suggest has
money, perhaps influence to get his file pulled out of data bank. Look
into relationship with Katharine Nelson, pol contact in area. Does she
know who he is? Tried not to turn him in, but pol contact 1659BD planted
microtrans on him. Subject now in cab. Sector N8823B, moving east in the
direction of Las Vegas. Due 11/410:00 P.M. academy time. Next report due
at 2:40 P.M. academy time.
Katharine
Nelson. Buckman had met her once, at a pol-contact orientation course. She
was the girl who only turned in individuals whom she did not like. In an
odd elliptical way he admired her; after all, had he not intervened, she
would have been shipped on 4/8/82 to a forced-labor camp in British
Columbia.
To Herb
Maime, Buckman said, "Get me McNulty on the phone. I think I'd better talk
to him about this."
A moment
later, Maime handed him the instrument. On the small gray screen McNulty's
face appeared, looking rumpled. As did his living room. Small and untidy,
both of them.
"Yes, Mr.
Buckman," McNlilty said, focusing on him and coming to a stiff attention,
tired as he was. Despite fatigue and a little hype of something, McNulty
knew exactly how to comport himself in relation to his superiors.
Buckman
said, "Give me the story, briefly, on this Jason Taverner. I can't piece
it together from your notes."
"Subject
rented hotel room at 453 Eye Street. Approached pol contact 1659BD, known
as Ed, asked to be taken to ID forger. Ed planted microtrans on him, took
him to pol contact 1980CC, Kathy."
"Katharine
Nelson," Buckman said.
"Yes, sir.
Evidently she did an unusually expert job on the ID cards; I've put them
through prelim lab tests and they work out almost okay. She must have
wanted him to get away."
"You
contacted Katharine Nelson?"
"I met both
of them at her room. Neither cooperated with me. I examined subject's ID
cards, but -"
"They seemed
genuine," Buckman interrupted.
"Yes, sir."
"You still
think you can do it by eye."
"Yes, Mr.
Blickman. But it got him through a random pol checkpoint; the stuff was
that good."
"How nice
for him."
McNulty
bumbled on. "I took his ID cards and issued him a seven-day pass, subject
to recall. Then I took him to the 469th Precinct station, where I have my
aux office, and had his file pulled ... the Jason Tavern file, it turned
out. Subject went into a long song and dance about plastic S; it sounded
plausible, so we let him go. No, wait a minute; I didn't issue him the
pass until -"
"Well,"
Buckman interrupted, "what's he up to? Who is he?"
"We're
following him, via the microtrans. We're trying to come up with data-bank
material on him. But as you read in my notes, I think subject has managed
to get his file out of every central data bank. It's just not there,
and it has to be because we have a file on everyone, as every school kid
knows; it's the law, we've got to."
"But we
don't," Blickman said.
"I know, Mr.
Blickman. But when a file isn't there, there has to be a reason. It didn't
just happen not to be there: someone filched it out of there."
"'Filched,'"
Buckman said, amused.
"Stole,
purloined." McNulty looked discomfited. "I've just begun to go into it,
Mr. Blickman; I'll know more in twenty-four hours. Hell, we can pick him
up any time we want. I don't think this is important. He's just some
well-heeled guy with enough influence to get his file out -"
"All right,"
Buckman said. "Go to bed." He rang off, stood for a moment, then walked in
the direction of his inner offices. Pondering.
***
In his main
office, asleep on the couch, lay his sister Alys. Wearing, Felix Blickman
saw with acute displeasure, skin-tight black trousers, a man's leather
shirt, hoop earrings, and a chain belt with a wrought-iron buckle.
Obviously she had been drugging. And had, as so often before, gotten hold
of one of his keys.
"God damn
you," he said to her, closing the office door before Herb Maime could
catch a glimpse of her.
In her sleep
Alys stirred. Her catlike face screwed up into an irritable frown and,
with her right hand, she groped to put out the overhead fluorescent light,
which he had now turned on.
Grabbing her
by the shoulders - and experiencing without pleasure her taut muscles - he
dragged her to a sitting position. "What was it this time?" he demanded. "Termaline?"
"No." Her
speech, of course, came out slurred. "Hexo phenophrine hydrosulphate.
Uncut. Subcutaneous." She opened her great pale eyes, stared at him with
rebellious displeasure.
Blickman
said, "Why in hell do you always come here?" Whenever she had been heavily
fetishing and/or drugging she crashed here in his main office. He did not
know why, and she had never said. The closest she had come, once, was a
mumbled declaration about the "eye of the hurricane," suggesting that she
felt safe from arrest here at the core offices of the Police Academy.
Because, of course, of his position.
"Fetishist,"
he snapped at her, with fury. "We process a hundred of you a day, you and
your leather and chain mail and dildoes. God." He stood breathing noisily,
feeling himself shake.
Yawning,
Alys slid from the couch, stood straight upright and stretched her long,
slender arms. "I'm glad it's evening," she said airily, her eyes squeezed
shut. "Now I can go home and go to bed."
"How do you
plan to get out of here?" he demanded. But he knew. Every time the same
ritual unfolded. The ascent tube for "secluded" political prisoners got
brought into use: it led from his extreme north office to the roof, hence
to the quibble field. Alys came and went that way, his key breezily in
hand. "Someday," he said to her darkly, "an officer will be using the tube
for a legitimate purpose, and he'll run into you."
"And what
would he do?" She massaged his short-cropped gray hair. "Tell me, please,
sir. Muff-dive me into panting contrition?"
"One look at
you with that sated expression on your face -"
"They know
I'm your sister."
Buckman said
harshly, "They know because you're always coming in here for one reason or
another or no damn reason at all."
Perching
knees up on the edge of a nearby desk, Alys eyed him seriously. "It really
bothers you."
"Yes, it
really bothers me."
"That I come
here and make your job unsafe."
"You can't
make my job unsafe," Buckman said. "I've got only five men over me,
excluding the national director, and all of them know about you and they
can't do anything. So you can do what you want." Thereupon he stormed out
of the north office, down the dull corridor to the larger suite where he
did most of his work. He tried to avoid looking at her.
"But you
carefully closed the door," Alys said, sauntering after him, "so that that
Herbert Blame or Mame or Maine or whatever it is wouldn't see me."
"You,"
Buckman said, "are repellent to a natural man."
"Is Maime
natural? How do you know? Have you screwed him?"
"If you
don't get out of here," he said quietly, facing her across two desks.
"I'll have you shot. So help me God."
She shrugged
her muscular shoulders. And smiled.
"Nothing
scares you," he said, accusingly. "Since your brain operation. You
systematically, deliberately, had all your human centers removed. You're
now a" - he struggled to find the words; Alys always hamstrung him like
this, even managed to abolish his ability to use words - you," he said
chokingly, "are a reflex machine that diddles itself endlessly like a rat
in an experiment. You're wired into the pleasure nodule of your brain and
you push the switch five thousand times an hour every day of your life
when you're not sleeping. It's a mystery to me why you bother to sleep;
why not diddle yourself a full twenty-four hours a day?"
He waited,
but Alys said nothing.
"Someday,"
he said, "one of us will die."
"Oh?" she
said, raising a thin green eyebrow.
"One of us,"
Buckman said, "will outlive the other. And that one will rejoice."
The pol-line
phone on the larger desk buzzed. Reflexively, Buckman picked it up. On the
screen McNulty's rumpled hyped-up features appeared. "Sorry to bother you,
General Buckman, but I just got a call from one of my staff. There's
no record in Omaha of a birth certificate ever being issued for a Jason
Taverner."
Patiently,
Buckman said, "Then it's an alias."
"We took
fingerprints, voiceprints, footprints, EEG prints. We sent them to One
Central, to the overall data bank in Detroit. No match-up. Such
fingerprints, footprints, voice-prints, EEG prints, don't exist in any
data banks on earth." McNulty tugged himself upright and wheezed
apologetically, "Jason Taverner doesn't exist."
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