Those were the first four rules, and the fifth was never to go back for a lost bag. Because it just meant trouble and time in court and a hell of a lot of money. We never went back for a “lost” bag, because these days the narcs didn’t always have to open a bag to find the stuff. The narcs were into all kinds of things now: dogs trained to growl at the smell of dope, even dope soaked in Coca-Cola and wrapped in aluminum; and odor-analyzers, weird little machines with a sort of gun attachment that sniffed the air and lit up when they smelled dope.
And so anything that we put in the hold was a strictly calculated risk, and not something to be toyed with. Because the heat had their own little, hustle: when they’d catch a bag full of weed, they’d hold it, announce that it was lost, and then bust whoever showed up to claim it. Not a very original hustle—and anybody who’s carrying always knows that if they say your bag is lost, split. Split fast and never go back. But Sukie’d never run any dope before, and so she’d called John and asked him what to do. And John—
Fucking John.
I hot-assed it through Sumner tunnel, paid my toll, and blasted up the ramp toward the airport—only to come to a dead halt twenty yards up the road. Airport traffic. Newsboys sauntered in and out among the rows of cars with maddening assurance that nobody was going anywhere. Hawking the Boston papers, the most provincial newspapers in America (“Saugus Man Dies in New York Nuclear Holocaust”) and the crookedest (look at page ten for the small item “Ten Officials Indicted in 44 Million Swindle”) as befits the town. I sat in the car and swore and lit a cigarette and got paranoid. My head was completely spaced. I couldn’t even remember if Sukie had come in on United or TWA. Most of all, I couldn’t figure out what John had been trying to do when he’d sent her back. Because if anyone knew how much it’d cost to buy her off of a forty-brick rap, he did. American justice is extraordinarily expensive; the bribe must always measure up to the crime. Forty bricks was going to set John back quite a ways, if anything happened to Sukie.
If anything happened to Sukie…
I had visions of arriving just as they were slapping the cuffs on her, of a fleeting glance of her face looking over her shoulder, looking at me sadly the way she had that night they had dragged me away. She was showing no reproach and somehow that made it worse. And then suddenly she was at the end of a long hallway, it was somewhere in Berkeley but I knew that the hallway would look the same no matter where it was, fluorescent lights leering, and she had on a gray sack dress and two matrons were taking her, still cuffed, down a flight of stairs. I watched helplessly and saw again the sad, un-reproachful face over the shoulder.
Then the line started moving and I began thinking about lawyers and bail bondsmen and where in the world I was going to scrape up the bread. I drifted out of my lane and some swine in a Cadillac honked and skinned my front fender in a burping burst of exhaust. Fuck you, fella. I was down the ramp and at the airport and parked in a cab zone before I knew it. A cop shouted at me that I’d have to move, but I just ran inside, past the people and the porters and the heat that seemed to be everywhere, wondering why I’d never noticed how many heat hung around the place.
I knew where the lost-bag rooms were, and I decided to try United first. I sprinted down a long corridor, turned a corner, and found the office. There was nobody there. TWA’s depot was just a little farther on down, so I decided to check it out, then return to United if nothing was happening there. But the seemingly endless construction that was always going on at Logan had transformed TWA’s lost-bag office into a coffee shop, so I stopped a porter and asked him where it had gone.
“I just flew in on TWA and they’ve lost one of my bags,” I said. “Where do I find it?”
“TWA’s baggage over there,” he shrugged, pointing around a corner. I ran over, and stopped in front of a door which said MISCELLANEOUS, AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. The door was open but partially blocked by a low table, and inside there were racks and racks of bags, bags of all kinds, bags everywhere.
And standing knee-deep in this ocean of bags was Sukie. On each side of her was a man in a raincoat. One of them was putting on the cuffs and before I could turn away and get out of there I saw the tight, familiar, ugly neck, heard the rough, humorless voice. And knew that Murphy had busted another freak.
3
A Taste of Soup
If a fool be associated with a wise man even all his life, he will perceive the truth as little as a spoon perceives the taste of soup.
37
I WAS BACK OUT IN the Lotus and on my way back to Cambridge before I really thought about what I was doing. And even when I did start thinking, it was only about one thing: John, and the shit I was going to knock out of him. I hadn’t been able to understand, on the way to Logan, why he’d sent Sukie back; but now I didn’t care. He was alone when I found him in the room, and he didn’t even look up when I came in. He was tearing the place apart. The radio was on, giving the weather report. John was pulling out dresser drawers, removing the bricks that were taped to the back.
I just stared at him.
“Well,” he said, “let’s get it on.”
“Get what on, half-ass?”
John stopped and looked at me. “You’re alone, right? So the chick’s busted, right? So let’s get it on and get this place cleaned up, so we can get out of here.”
I froze. “You bastard. This wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t sent—”
“This wouldn’t have happened, Peter, if your chick hadn’t already given the pigs her name, her Berkeley address, and our Cambridge telephone number before she thought to call me up and ask what she should do about her ‘lost bag.’ So I told her to go back. What the hell, why not? It didn’t make any difference at that point.”
“She gave them our phone number?”
“Yeah,” John said. “That’s a smart little pussy you’ve got. She really set us up—you with your record—your recent record—and me holding.”
“She didn’t know…”
“And you didn’t tell her, did you? That’s why she didn’t know. You didn’t tell her the first goddamn thing about it.”
“I didn’t know she’d have to check a bag—”
“The fuck you didn’t. You sent her a check for ten thousand. That’s forty bricks. You just overlooked it, you were in such a ball-crushing rush—”