Ernest sat. He watched the cop type and file some papers for a while. Two patrolmen came in with a drunk who smelled like puke and led him around the front desk and down a corridor for processing, quickstepping him, as if they were tired of dealing with him. Back where the holding cells must have been someone started singing:
Hoya polski naga polka
Meenzata lavuso
Hoya polska gnocchi polka
Mordenchoo leverno
Polka chevy qualum cherchez
Lavooie hardehar
Return to me and always be
My melody of love!
It echoed down the corridor and into the lobby, and the cop on duty rose and slammed a door, cutting off the sound.
“I’m Polish, you know,” he said. “I hate that fucking Bobby Vinton.”
Ernest bestirred himself. “Shoot the bastard.”
“Shit no. Slow death. Death of a thousand cuts. Chinese water torture.”
“You want to shoot him in the throat. Never sing another note.” Ernest spoke authoritatively.
“That’d be nice. I hear the motherfucker’s getting a show on CBS next fall. Just what I need. The fuck.” He gestured, as if the man in the cell were Vinton himself.
A man in plainclothes came in holding a Styrofoam cup of coffee. “Anything up, Casimir?”
“Yeah, no, Lieutenant. This man’s waiting for you.”
“Yeah?”
“He wanted Captain Fry.”
“Fry works human being hours.”
“So I told him.”
“He misses all the good stuff.”
“That’s what we all say.”
“Goes home and has his supper at six and watches prime-time TV like a regular taxpayer.”
“We were just talking about TV”
“It’s no good for you. This is what’s good for you.”
“Sure it is.”
“Work work work for the dawn is coming.”
Bricca turned toward Ernest and lifted his cup to his lips, blowing on the coffee as he gave Ernest the once-over. Ernest bared his teeth in a smile.
“What in Captain Fry’s absence can I do for you?”
“You’re Lieutenant Bricca.”
“Twenty-four hours a day.”
“Just about, huh?” Ernest looked around him, as if the late hour resided in the corners of the room.
“You want to see me about what?”
“You have someplace we can talk?”
“People talk in my office sometimes.”
They sat on opposite sides of Bricca’s desk.
“I have to admit that I’m sitting here with you because I’m a wee bit intrigued that a man claiming to be a friend of St. Earl’s wanders in here at fucking whatever it is in the a.m. looking like a boozer at the tail end of a long unhappy binge. You’re a personal friend, are you?” The lieutenant’s face and voice were full of unveiled hope.
Ernest sort of sized up the way things stood between Fry and Bricca.
“What’s the problem, Bricca? His office prettier than yours?”
Actually, Bricca’s office was pleasant, looking more like a college professor’s than a cop’s with its embrasured windows set in the thick stone walls and the row of bookcases and the framed diploma identifying Bricca as the possessor of a bachelor’s in criminal justice from Shippensburg University. The room was softly lit by a green-shaded banker’s lamp on the desk.
“In about thirty seconds I’m going to make a determination that you’re publicly intoxicated. Class A misdemeanor.”
“Determine away. I’ll sleep it off and talk to Earl in the morning.”
“Sleep? That’s what you think. I guess you didn’t hear the fucking Polack nightingale in there.” He paused. “So,” he said finally, “is there something you wanted to tell me?”
Ernest hadn’t been anticipating this kind of hard time, and he was just nonplussed enough to dig in his heels a little. But he’d begun to feel profoundly tired sitting here, and the prospect of a night in the drunk tank held no appeal for him.
“I have information.”
“What kind of information?”
“Information concerning the whereabouts of a certain missing person. Very high profile.”
“Who would this person be?”
“The Galton girl.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“Let me just say that my training and experience have led me to be skeptical of such claims.”
Ernest’s eye flitted to the diploma. The elenchus of Shippensburg. “You know,” said Ernest. “I’ve got some pretty high-level government contacts from covert operations I’ve been involved with, and I could have taken this information directly to them.” He raised a finger and wagged it at the policeman.
Bricca rolled his eyes. “Oh, dear sweet bleeding Jesus. Not one of these people. Why is it everybody with the high-level contacts somehow ends up sitting in my office three sheets to the wind in the dead of night wearing a dirty shirt? Please, the suspense is killing me, this is something you found out about from a fortune cookie? Spacemen transmitting radio waves into your morning glass of Tang? God talking to your internal organs? I should just leave you for St. Earl to deal with.”
Ernest tried staring him down.
Oddly, Bricca slackened, with a high, soughing exhalation, as if all the tension had left his body.
“Where’s she supposed to be?”
“South Canaan.”
“Well, I suppose that’s not too farfetched. You could hide the fucking Statue of Liberty in South Canaan if you wanted to, though so far nobody has. Where exactly in South Canaan?”
“A farm. I don’t know the address. But I could find it.”
“And how did you happen to see the young lady?”
“I never did.”
“Ah. You never saw her at a place you don’t exactly know where it is.”
“My brother put her up there. He told me.”
“And who is your brother?”
“A god damned Communist.”
“That’s a tough way to make a buck. I was just reading about the Red Chinese in Time. Their standard of living isn’t due to approach ours until the year 2000. But I meant who, not what.”
“Guy Mock.”
“Well, Brother Mock, what’s his connection to all this?”
“I said already, he’s a radical. Lives out there in Berkeley, all that. He knows these type of people. Gets all buddy-buddy with them.” Suddenly he sounded ridiculous to himself. He should have just gone for the 4 a.m. eggs. “Look, it’s not just her. It’s the other two too. The Shepards.”
“And they’re all up there right now?”
“No, they left about three months ago. But I’m telling you you can find them. You can track them down. Somebody’s seen them. You can question my brother. He’s got to know where they are. He’s trying to write a god damned book about them.”
Bricca thrust out his right arm dramatically, addressing his appeal to the diploma on the wall. “Do I take this sfatcheem seriously? Or do I just go out the back door and keep going until I wander into a hobo jungle somewhere and allow myself to be murdered for my Thorn McAn’s?”
“I’m the one, smart-ass. I could walk now.”
“No, you couldn’t. You could’ve. But like a good three-in-the-morning lush you had to speak right up. So now you have to sit. See, usually I get to go home soon to my empty little apartment and unwind sitting on my empty little couch waiting for the empty little test pattern to go away. But you just had to come in here and bend someone’s ear with this fucking story of yours. I only wish it had been your good pal Captain America. But he’ll be here soon enough, bright and early and shaven clean and happy-happy to be awake in the daylight like a normal citizen. Until he sees you. And then of course”—Bricca consulted a list of telephone numbers trapped beneath the rectangle of glass on his desk—“he’ll have the FBI up his ass too. Because if you really want to talk about this, you’re going to talk about it with the FBI.”