Hamfist opened and closed his mouth like a fish. Noonan let him go, returned to the armchair, and put his feet up on the desk.
“Well?” he said.
Hamfist noisily sucked the blood in through his nose and said, “Really, boss… What’s going on? What swag does the Vulture have? He doesn’t have any swag. Nowadays no one has swag.”
“You’re going to argue with me?” Noonan asked with seeming affection, taking his feet off the desk.
“No, no, boss… I swear,” said Hamfist hastily. “Honest to God! Argue with you? I never even considered it.”
“I’ll get rid of you,” said Noonan gloomily. “Because either you’ve sold out, or you don’t know how to work. What the hell do I need you for, you lazy bum? I could get dozens like you. I need a real man for the job, and all you do is ruin the girls and guzzle beer.”
“Wait a minute, boss,” argued Hamfist, smearing blood around his face. “Why attack me all of a sudden? Let’s try to get this straight.” He gingerly felt the sore with his fingertips. “Burbridge has lots of swag, you say? I don’t know about that. I apologize, of course, but someone’s been pulling your leg. No one has any swag nowadays. It’s only the raw kids that go into the Zone, and they almost never come back… No, boss, I swear someone’s pulling your leg.”
Noonan was watching him out of the corner of his eye. It seemed that Hamfist really didn’t know a thing. Anyway, it wasn’t worth his while to lie—the Vulture didn’t pay well. “Those picnics of his—are they profitable?” he asked.
“The picnics? Not very. He isn’t shoveling it in… But then there’s no profitable work left in town.”
“Where are these picnics held?”
“Where are they held? At various places. At the White Mountain, at the Hot Springs, by the Rainbow Lakes…”
“And who are his clients?”
“His clients?” Hamfist felt his sore again, glanced at his fingers, and spoke confidentially, “Boss, if you’re thinking of getting into that business, I’d advise against it. You can’t compete with the Vulture.”
“Why not?”
“It’s his clients; he has the police—that’s one.” Hamfist was counting on his fingers. “The officers from headquarters—that’s two. Tourists from the Metropole, White Lily, and the Alien—that’s three. And his advertising is good, the locals use him, too. I swear, boss, it wouldn’t be worth it to get involved. And he pays us for the girls—if not that generously.”
“The locals use him, too?”
“Young men, mostly.”
“And what do you do there, at the picnics?”
“What do we do? We go there by bus, see? They already have tents, food, and music set up. Then everyone amuses themselves. The officers mostly enjoy the girls, the tourists troop off to see the Zone—when it’s at the Hot Springs, the Zone is a stone’s throw away, right over the Sulfur Gorge. The Vulture has scattered horse bones over there for them, so they look at them through binoculars.”
“And the locals?”
“The locals? The locals, of course, aren’t interested in that. They amuse themselves.”
“And Burbridge?”
“What about Burbridge? Burbridge is like everyone else.”
“And you?”
“What about me? I’m like everyone else. I make sure no one’s bothering the girls, and… uh… well… Anyway, I’m like everyone else…”
“And how long do these things last?”
“It varies. Sometimes three days, sometimes a whole week.”
“And how much does this pleasure trip cost?” asked Noonan, now thinking about something else entirely.
Hamfist said something, but Noonan didn’t hear him. There it is, my oversight, he thought. A couple of days… A couple of nights. Under these circumstances, it would be simply impossible to keep track of Burbridge, even if you were completely focused on doing so and weren’t busy cavorting with the girls and guzzling beer like my Mongolian king. But I’m still missing something. He’s legless, and there’s a gorge… No, something’s off.
“Which locals come frequently?”
“Locals? As I said—mostly young men. The hoodlums of the town. Like, say, Halevy, Rajba, Zapfa the Chicken, and what’s his name… Zmig. Sometimes the Maltese. A tight-knit crowd. They call it Sunday school. ‘Let’s go to Sunday school,’ they say. They’re mostly in it for the women tourists—that’s easy money for them. Say an old lady from Europe shows up—”
“‘Sunday school’…” Noonan repeated.
A strange thought suddenly occurred to him. School. He got up.
“All right,” he said. “To hell with these picnics. That’s not for us. What you do need to know is that the Vulture has swag—that’s our business, pal. That we simply can’t allow. Keep looking, Hamfist, keep looking, or you’ll be out on your ass. Figure out where he gets the swag and who supplies it to him—then beat him by twenty percent. Got it?”
“Got it, boss,” Hamfist was already standing at attention, devotion on his blood-smeared mug.
“And stop ruining the girls, you animal!” Noonan roared, and left.
Standing by the bar in the hall, he leisurely sipped his aperitif, chatted with the Madam about the decline in morality, and hinted that in the very near future he was planning to expand the establishment. Lowering his voice for effect, he consulted her on what to do about Benny: the guy is getting old, his hearing is almost gone, his reaction time is shot, he can’t manage like before… It was already six o’clock, he was getting hungry, but that same unexpected thought kept boring and twisting through his brain—a strange, incongruous thought that nonetheless explained a lot. But in any case, much had already been explained, the business had been stripped of its irritating and frightening aura of mysticism, and all that remained was chagrin that he didn’t think of this before; but that wasn’t the important thing, the important thing was the thought that kept spinning and twisting through his brain and wouldn’t let him rest.
After he said good-bye to the Madam and shook Benny’s hand, Noonan drove straight to the Borscht. The problem is we don’t notice the years pass, he thought. Screw the years—we don’t notice things change. We know that things change, we’ve been told since childhood that things change, we’ve witnessed things change ourselves many a time, and yet we’re still utterly incapable of noticing the moment that change comes—or we search for change in all the wrong places. A new breed of stalker has appeared—armed with technology. The old stalker was a sullen, dirty man, stubborn as a mule, crawling through the Zone inch by inch on his stomach, earning his keep. The new stalker is a tie-wearing dandy, an engineer, somewhere a mile away from the Zone, a cigarette in his teeth, a cocktail by his elbow—sitting and watching the monitors. A salaried gentleman. A very logical picture. So logical that other possibilities don’t even occur. And yet there are other possibilities—Sunday school, for one.
Suddenly, for no apparent reason, he felt a wave of despair. Everything was useless. Everything was pointless. My God, he thought, we can’t do a thing! We can’t stop it, we can’t slow it down! No force in the world could contain this blight, he thought in horror. It’s not because we do bad work. And it’s not because they are more clever and cunning than we are. The world is just like that. Man is like that. If it wasn’t the Visit, it would have been something else. Pigs can always find mud.