Silliman closes the magazine. It does get lonely out here, he guesses. Brian? Tim? Lieutenant Lafferty himself, dreaming of the firehouse Dalmatian? He bags it.
He went to bed one night a spectator and awoke — was awoken, actually — the next morning, engulfed. A weird feeling. He’s followed the whole thing in the papers and on the news. It’s the Bureau’s case, but it seemed to have little to do with anything he knows. Scranton Resident does some organized crime. It works with Treasury on bootleg cigarette sales and such. There are bank robberies; some laid-off mine worker will wander into a local branch with a peremptory note and wander out with a paper bag full of a thousand dollars in bait bills. It is not, in short, a glamour assignment. Now here comes this case, straight from California, filtered through the gaunt sunlight of a Pennsylvania winter. California’s not big enough for all the craziness it engenders? Silliman has twenty years in the Bureau. Silliman understands criminal pathology. He understands the easy money mentality of some moron who drives across state lines in a truck loaded with butts missing their revenue stamps. He understands the miner whose wife closes the fridge and says there’s no food and there isn’t going to be any. He understands a lot of things, but he has trouble understanding these boys and girls who seem to want a different sort of government. What for? He is the government, and he can assure these kids that any conceivable alternative would have men just like him, doing just what he does, at its heart. Of course they wouldn’t believe this. He tries to imagine what they do believe but can envision only a buzzing rush of static in his head: a void, chaotic. It scares the living shit out of him. It has nothing to do with Pennsylvania. What do these sturdy old farmhouses have to do with revolution?
His wife always wants to go out to California. She thinks it’s one big beach, full of movie stars.
Silliman feels that he occupies the quietest zone in the case. Every day he enters a house that in its placid inscrutability tells him little yet offers the most reliable view into the missing girl’s daily life. She stood here, she sat there. Washed her dishes in this sink. When she came out and stood on the top step, this is what she would have seen. He drives down the road and walks the same three aisles she would have walked at the country store. Pork chops and chicken.
The furious storm, and he’s at its eye. The papers have been full of it lately: no breaks, no news, the case already a year old. So quiet here: you could go nuts. But for now he wants to hold the isolation close. The press doesn’t yet know about this place. After interrogating him, Silliman recommended that the Bureau immediately ship Ernest Mock overseas on an all-expenses-paid trip to Europe. He didn’t think Mock would be able to keep his mouth shut for a second.
Just as Silliman is about to wrap it up for the day, an investigator comes into the room holding a bag containing a folded, crumpled section of newspaper, six months old. The New York Times, perfect. It has been discovered stuffed into a hole in the underside of one of the mattresses upstairs. That’s a good find. That looks promising. Silliman tells the investigator so; he likes his men to feel as if they’re not totally wasting their time.
Back in Scranton the next afternoon, Silliman gets a call from the fingerprint examiner at the lab in Philly. He has managed to lift a latent partial print from one of the fragments recovered from the garbage pit, a piece of a shattered drinking glass. In the expert opinion of the fingerprint examiner, the print matches one on file with the United States Marine Corps listed as belonging to Andrew Carlyle Shepard, aka Richard Frank Dennis, aka William Kinder, aka Jonathan Maris, aka Jonathan Mark Salamone, aka General Teko of the Symbionese Liberation Army, currently wanted by the United States of America for violation of the National Firearms Act. The examiner also mentions that using ninhydrin spray, they managed to develop prints on the section of newspaper discovered in the mattress. No match as yet, but the examiner notes casually that the prints display the frequent whorls characteristically found on persons of Oriental origin.
GUY WANDERS INTO A strip club, a workingman’s place off the highway: a perfect place to sit, think, and throw away a little more money. The girls onstage are dancing, if dancing is the word; mostly they sway off beat to contemporary hits, swinging from smudgy chrome poles.
There’s not much to strip. Girls taking the stage wear a bra, heels, and a G-string, with maybe a boa or a cowboy hat, tops. “Midnight at the Oasis” is fading out as Guy takes his seat at the bar, and by the time his beer arrives Marvin Hamlisch’s version of “The Entertainer” is forlornly playing out. Guy figures he is witnessing an unusual confluence of indigenous American imaginative artifacts. A song written around the turn of the century to be performed in the genteel parlors of bordellos — scandalous then but currently popular as a nostalgic evocation, albeit a jarringly anachronistic one, of the 1930s — is serving as the accompaniment to a contemporary and aggressively vulgar display that falsely promises the sex the whorehouses delivered but hid from public view.
In a hundred years, when vending machine sex-robots fuck us for quarters, they’ll probably play disco.
The girls don’t know quite how to respond to this tune. One humps the pole, sliding up and down its length, her tongue hanging out in a caricature of rapture; another walks up and down the narrow stage, looking oddly reminiscent of a stewardess patrolling the aisle of a 707. The patrons, too, seem confused, confused and riled; these scoured westerners didn’t come here to listen to Scott Joplin tell them how damned sad everything is. It makes Guy nervous. He probably should have just taken a six-pack into one of the vacant cabins at his parents’ place, but he half expects to be arrested any day now, and that’s the first place they’re likely to look.
Even the mindless serenity of the strip club is adulterated by the clanging and flashing of the slots parked in every corner. He is sick, sick, sick of Vegas. Sick of the heat, sick of the sun, sick of the recycled air, sick of the dry, rasping cough he rises with each morning, sick of tourists, sick of natives, sick of loud, dumb radio ads for the shows at the casinos, sick of getting the thermonuclear shakes from underground testing.
“You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet” comes on, and everyone seems relieved.
The phone rang one fine morning up in Oregon, and it was his mother on the line. Just wanted to let him know that Ernest had called to say that he would be visiting Europe for a while and that he’d informed on the whole family to the FBI. Agents would probably be paying them a visit once they’d confirmed the details of Ernest’s story. She spoke with a sort of polar calm.
“What do you think I should tell them, Guy?”
“Mom, don’t tell them anything.”
“Well, if they are going to take the trouble of coming all the way out here, I feel bad just turning them away.”
“They’re probably just coming from the Federal Building downtown, Mom.”
“Still and all, they have a right to the truth.”
“No,” said Guy, “they don’t. You need to call a lawyer. And in the meantime keep your mouth shut. Do you understand me?”
“Guy, do you really think an attorney is going to be necessary?”