Dog Soldiers

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JUST AFTER DARK, WHEN HE HAD FINISHED THE SECOND BEER, Hicks looked down and saw Converse in the small gar den below him. When he switched on the reading light on his table, Converse looked up and saw him.

Converse came up the steps slowly, hauling a huge old-fashioned briefcase. He dropped the case on the floor and sat down heavily in a bamboo chair.

“I been carrying this forever,” he said.

He reached over, picked up the Portable Nietzsche which Hicks had set on the chair beside his, and inspected the front and back covers. There was something slightly contemptuous about the way he looked at it.

“You still into this?”

“Sure,” Hicks said.

Converse laughed. He looked wasted and flushed; there was pain in his eyes compounded of booze, fever, and fear.

“Jesus,” he said. “That’s really fucking piquant.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Hicks said.

Converse raised a hand to his forehead. Hicks took the book back from him.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t meet you on the beach. How’d you like the Oscar?”

“I been in worse.”

“Did you get laid?”

“Everybody asks me that,” Converse said. “No. I didn’t feel like it.”

“You were probably too scared.”

“Probably.”

Hicks lit a cigar.

“Too bad. You’d of liked it.”

“I should have been taken off thirty times. It’s a miracle I got that shit here.” Hicks looked down at the case and shook his head. “That’s about the sorriest piece of packaging I’ve ever seen. It looks like something out of the House on Ninety-second Street.”

“I was hoping you could help me with that.”

Hicks smiled. “O.K.,” he said. “What you got?”

Converse looked over his shoulder.

“Don’t do that,” Hicks said.

“Three keys of scag.”

Hicks had discovered that people disliked his looking at them directly and, out of courtesy, he often refrained. He looked into Converse’s eyes, engaging the fear he saw there. “I didn’t know we were that way. I thought you’d have something else for me.”

Converse stared straight back at him.

“We’re that way.”

Hicks was frowning down at the table.

“It’s bad karma.”

“Think of it in terms of money. You take it straight to Marge’s in Berkeley. We’ll pay you twenty-five hundred bills.”

“You and Marge? Who’s we?”

“That’s a story in itself,” Converse said. “If your stash is as good as you say, it’ll be easier than carrying grass.”

“It’s unmakable. I got a whole aircraft carrier with practically no one on it.”

“When do you get to Oakland?”

“Seventeen days, if we stop at Subic Bay.”

“Then there’s no problem. Deliver on the nineteenth. We’ll have Marge home all day. If there’s a hassle you can call the theater where she works after nine. It’s called the Odeon. Third Street in Frisco.” The thing is,” Hicks said, “you’re wasting your money. You ought to carry yourself.”

Converse shook his head wearily.

“I’m on all the shit lists. Mac-V doesn’t know whether I’m a Viet Cong spy or a poison toad. I wouldn’t want to carry a joint through.” Hicks smiled and rested his cigar on the Portable Nietzsche.

“Tell me about we. I’ll bet it’s just you, you bastard.”

“How could it be just me?” Converse asked. “How?”

He was about to look over his shoulder again. Hicks re strained him with a hand.

“I have reason to believe,” Converse said, “that this operation concerns the CIA.”

Hicks laughed in his face. Politely, he joined in the laughter.

“That’s folklore,” Hicks said.

“Certain individuals.”

Hicks tried to stare him down. It was not out of the question.

“Something else you better know,” Converse continued. “They know about you. They know you carry. Your name came up right away.”

“No,” Hicks said, after a moment. “You’re bullshitting me.”

“O.K.,” Converse said. “They know about you because I told them. In something like this, they have to know.”

“Oh, sure,” Hicks said. “I dig it.” He looked out over the darkened bay, gnawing his lip. “Something like this they’d have to know.” He looked back at Converse and found him feeling his forehead. “What are you doing to me?”

“Look,” Converse said quickly, “they absolutely will not bother you. You’re not supposed to know about them and they will not fuck with you if you deliver. Marge has twenty-five hundred bilk for you. It’s as simple as that.”

Hicks was smiling again.

“If I deliver, right? But if I don’t deliver — if I take you off because I happen to know you’re an asshole — then the roof falls in, right? CIA time.”

“Exactly,” Converse said.

“If I were you and I wanted to keep a carrier honest, I might make up a bullshit story about the CIA. But I wouldn’t try to lay it on a buddy.”

Converse had begun to appear slightly upset. “For God’s sake, Ray, what would I be doing in a score like this on my own? Where would I get the money?”

It occurred to Hicks that there would be absolutely nothing dishonorable in ripping him off. He would have brought it on himself. Perhaps he would think it was piquant.

“You’re terrific,” he told Converse. “I really can’t tell if you’re lying or not.”

“It doesn’t matter whether I’m lying or not. That’s the beauty of it. As it happens, I’m telling the truth.”

Hicks fidgeted in his chair.

“It’s a stupid expensive way to move weight. If the CIA needs the likes of you and me they’re not what they’re supposed to be.”

“Who is, these days?” Converse leaned forward in his chair; he seemed guileless. “Look, Ray — it’s certain people. Certain greedy people with CIA connections. They stand to make a tremendous profit and they can’t use their regular channels. They can afford good security. But they have to know who’s carrying for them beforehand.”

“Are you supposed to be good security?”

“No, no,” Converse said. “You. You are.”

Hicks was silent for a while.

“I think this sucks,” he said finally. “When I saw you last you were as skittish as a cooze, and now you’re an operator from the CIA.”

“You wanted to carry weight,” Converse said. “I got you weight.”

“I may just have to tell you no, buddy.”

Converse was trembling, and Hicks watched him with concern.

“Then we both go,” Converse said softly. “It’s too late for that.”

Hicks brushed aside the blue haze of his cigar and felt suddenly that he was trying to dispel more than cigar smoke. Converse’s fear was almost palpable. Hicks was impressed.

“You deliver,” Converse insisted, “and you split. You don’t wait for a meet. You just take your money.”

Hicks waited for him to go on.

“I’m a very timid person. I’m cautious. I’m a virtual paranoid. I’ve been around this place for a while and I know how this shit works. If it weren’t a really cool number I wouldn’t go near it.”

“I didn’t know you were such a money freak.”

Converse shrugged.

“I suppose it’s the way we’re brought up.”

“I thought you were a moralist. You and your old lady — I thought you were world-savers. How about all these teenyboppers OD-ing on the roof? Doesn’t that bother you?”

“We’ve dealt with the moral objections,” Converse said.

Hicks slumped down in his chair and leaned his chin on his fist, watching Converse.

“Let me tell you something funny,” he said. “I met Mary Microgram in Frisco last year.”

Mary Microgram was a girlfriend of Converse’s. They had parted bitterly.

“You know what she told me? She told me you said I was a psychopath.”

Converse looked chastened.

“It must have been some drunken piss-off. I really know better than that.”

Hicks laughed.

“You bad-mouth me. You threaten me with the fucking CIA and claim you turned me. Then when you need honesty and self-discipline you come to me.”

“When I was with Mary,” Converse said, “I was very fucked up.”

“It’s outrageous,” Hicks said. “I was hurt.”

A burst of automatic-weapons fire sounded from across the bay. Searchlights played on the water, sweeping the line of palms on the far shore. Converse turned wearily in the direction of the noise.

“Sappers?”

“There ain’t no sappers,” Hicks said. “It’s all a beautiful hoax.”

Why not, he thought. There was nothing else going down. He felt the necessity of changing levels, a little adrenalin to clean the blood. It was interesting and kind of scary. Converse and his old lady would be a scene; he had never seen her.

“I’ll carry your scag, John. But you better see I get treated right. Self-defense is an art I cultivate.”

Converse was smiling.

“I didn’t think there was ever much question about it.”

“No,” Hicks said.

Converse looked at the briefcase.

“You have anything you want in that case,” Hicks said, “take it with you now. Otherwise just leave like it is.”

“Just like that?”

“Like it is.” Converse went downstairs and brought up two cans of beer and two large gin and tonics. When he had taken a sip of the cold drink, he began to tremble again. “You’re mad,” Hicks told him, “a great mind — warped — twisted.” It was an old movie line they had played with twelve years before in the Marine Corps.

Converse seemed particularly elated. He raised his glass.

“To Nietzsche.”

They drank to Nietzsche. It was adolescence. A time trip.

Another burst of fire came from the opposite shore.

“I better get back to the Oscar,” Converse said. “I’ll miss curfew.”

Hicks set his empty beer can down.

“What did you come here for? If I’m a psychopath, what are you?”

Converse was still smiling.

“I’m a writer. I wanted to see it.” His eyes followed the searchlights on the bay. “I suppose there was an element of guilt.”

“That’s ironic.”

“Yes,” Converse said. “It’s distinctly ironic.”

They fell silent for a while.

“I’m tired of being bothered,” Converse said. He rested his hand on the briefcase. “I feel like this is the first real thing I ever did in my life. I don’t know what the other stuff was about.”

“You mean you enjoy it?”

“No,” Converse said. “I don’t mean that at all.”

“It’s a funny place,” Hicks said.

“Let smiles cease,” Converse said. “Let laughter flee. This is the place where everybody finds out who they are.”

Hicks shook his head.

“What a bummer for the gooks.”

Converse looked at his watch and then rubbed his shoulders as if he were warming them.

“You can’t blame us too much. We didn’t know who we were till we got here. We thought we were something else.” He took a large swallow of gin and tonic. “Hey, did you hear about the elephants?”

Hicks smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “The poor elephants.”

“The poor elephants,” Converse said. They laughed together in the dark.

Converse’s face was as wet as if he had been immersed. The drink was making him sweat.

“It’s a Buddhist country. They must have a fantastic traffic in the transmigration of souls. Elephants and missionaries. Porpoises, sappers, lizards. Listen,” he said suddenly, “I’m cold. Is it cold?”

“It’s your fever. Go see the duty master-at-arms across the road. Maybe he can get you a ride to the gate.”

Converse stood up and turned his back on the briefcase.

“You’d better be careful,” Hicks told him. “It’s gone funny in the states.”

“It can’t be funnier than here.”

“Here everything’s simple,” Hicks said. “It’s funnier there. I don’t know who you’re running with but I bet they got no sense of irony.” Converse stood over him, a bit unsteadily. He swung his arm in a broad gesture. “As of now it can rain blood and shit,” he said. “I got nowhere to go.”

He walked down the wooden steps carefully. His sore right arm swung liberated; he felt gloriously free. As he reached the bottom step, it occurred to him that Hicks was probably a psychopath after all.