Interface

Three

Age had shrunken the door from its frame, so it rattled discreetly under the timid knuckles. Alex Kolinski, fully clothed from the waist up, paid no attention. Instead, he spoke to the girl kneeling beside the ancient, broken-down double bed.

“Keep it up, bitch,” he said in a monotone, as if training a dog. The timid knuckles sounded against the door again.

“Mr Kolinski?” The voice from the hall was female, Negro south, frightened. “It’s the telephone, Mr Kolinski. It’s... Mr Hariss, Mr Kolinski.”

Kolinski looked up unwillingly, like a man disturbed in the midst of an absorbing book. He had a prognathous jaw and heavy ridges of bone around the eyes, making them deep-set. But it was not a stupid face, nor was there anything Neanderthal about his body. The neck which supported the hominid face was surprisingly unmassive.

“Mr Kolinski...”

“All right, goddammit!” he burst out. “Tell him...”

A sudden spasm of cruel ecstasy stilled his voice. He plunged his hands into the thick, lifeless hair of the girl on her knees beside the bed. Dandruff speckled the scalp around the center part.

“Oh, yeah! That’s it!” exploded Kolinski in a hoarse, thickened voice.

From the hall came the timid rapping again. “Mr Kolinski, he... he said it was important.”

But Kolinski was finished. He stood up to dry himself with a corner of the sheet. The girl stared up at him from eyes which looked huge in her famished countenance. She had a face that had once been astonishingly beautiful. Even now, haggard and drawn, it was patrician of nose and striking of facial bone. A thoroughbred face. The eyes were dark, very dark-circled also, wet with tears even though they met his gaze without shame.

“Alex, can I have it now?”

Kolinski standing above her like a sated storm trooper, jerked his belt tight. “I’ve got a phone call.”

“But afterwards, Alex.” An almost childish hope of reward curved her thin lips. “Afterwards you’ll let me have it.”

“We’ll see, bitch.”

The girl put her face down in her arms, like an exhausted distance runner. The arms were thin. She was dressed in a strapless flannel nightgown so only her long narrow well-shaped feet, bare against the cold linoleum floor, were visible.

“Alex, please, you promised...” When he stepped away without answering, she raised her head from her arms to cry after him, “Alex, please!”

He paused in the doorway to look back at her. He laughed.

“Sweat, bitch,” he said.

He went out.

The girl remained motionless after he had gone. Finally, she climbed wearily to her feet, like a housewife summoned by the phone in the middle of scrubbing the kitchen floor. She was tall and would once have been fashionably slender, now was angular and thin under the washed-out, faded nightdress. Despite her height, she could not have weighed as much as Pamela Gardner.

She walked back and forth in the center of the room with quick, jerky strides. Her face worked with passion or pain. She stopped abruptly in mid-stride to stare at the single straight-backed chair which, with the bed and the narrow, gaudily pink dresser, gave the room its only furniture.

Kolinski’s three-hundred-dollar overcoat was tossed carelessly over the back of the chair.

“Oh, thank God! Thank God!” the girl exclaimed in a low voice.

She bent over the coat to stroke it with an almost feline motion, like a cat licking its paw so it can wash its face. She did not try to go through the pockets. Instead, she turned away quickly to the dresser.

From the top drawer she got a white candle stub about three inches long. She lit it, dripped wax on the top of the dresser next to myriad shiny places where other blobs of wax had been scraped away. Next to the candle she laid a blackened tablespoon with the handle bent in a crude S-shape, and an empty ten-cc syringe with the needle already attached.

The girl went back to the bed, sat down on the edge of it where Kolinski had sat. Sitting, she fidgeted and shivered. Only muscles standing out along the side of her narrow jaw like molded strips of putty kept her teeth from chattering. Her face looked aged under the lank, sweat-dampened hair. Her sweat had a sweetish smell, like the dried sweat in dancers’ leotards not laundered often enough.

Sitting there, waiting, she kept monotonously flexing her left hand like an athlete squeezing a handball to strengthen his fingers. Twice she stopped to look anxiously at the veins inside the elbow, where the masses of scar tissue from needle tracks were. Some of the more recent tracks were ulcerated. She had long since stopped using Preparation H in an effort to shrink and minimize the marks.

The girl gave a low moan of either pain or frustration. The skin was so calloused that the veins had not really come up beneath it.

She extended the arm, palm up, and began gently slapping the scarred inner elbow with the fingertips of her right hand. The left hand kept spasmodically flexing as she did. Frustrated need made her hips writhe slowly on the bed in a terrible travesty of sexual arousal.

The veins did not come up. The girl started to cry.

Down the hall, standing at the pay phone and listening to the voice of Walter Hariss, Alex Kolinski was scratching his ass through his trousers. Twice he tried to interrupt. When he finally made it, he talked so fast that little flecks of spittle dotted the black plastic of the phone and the grey peeling wall behind it.

“I don’t give a shit about your long view or your overall plans on this, Walt. You and I have had different aims from the beginning. That’s all right, we’ve been able to work around that. But you’re the one who insisted we bring that fucking Neil Fargo into it, because you thought you could milk him for info about old man Stayton and to give yourself protection at the same time. Protection!” He spat out the word. “Sure, you’re protected. And also we don’t have any fucking...” He checked himself over the word he had been going to use, said, “merchandise,” and went on, “to sell, and no additional capital to...”

He stopped. He had to, Walter Hariss was talking again. Kolinski listened for perhaps thirty seconds, nodding impatiently, then broke in again.

“All right, sure, Fargo would say that whether he was in it with his fucking buddy Docker or not. And besides—” He broke off, said in a different voice, “Wait a sec...”

He lowered the receiver so he could look to his left. The pay phone was in the narrow first-floor hall of the flophouse, just a few feet from the office door. The office itself was a square cell with a waist-high glass-front cage much like a theater ticket-taker’s case. Chicken wire was embedded in the glass, which had a round hole cut through it at head-height for talking. The glass could be slid up from inside for the passage of money across the counter.

“Hey you!” yelled Kolinski. “Aunt Jemima!”

Behind the hole in the glass appeared the face of a beady-eyed black girl in her early twenties. She had short frizzled black hair that gleamed wetly under the office’s single strong unshaded bulb. It was a round, rather pushed-down face with very thick lips covered with incongruous coral-red lipstick. It was a young face which already could have been surprised by nothing except kindness.

“Yes, sir, Mr Kolinski?”

“Go downstairs and check the mail.”

“But Mr Kolinski, mail was delivered an hour ago! Ain’t gonna be no more mail in that box now jes’ cause—”

“Get to fuck down there!” yelled Kolinski.

A pink tongue came out over the fat coral lips. The face disappeared, to reappear in a few moments after the heavy hardwood door beside the glass cage had opened. This had been accompanied by the rattling of withdrawn deadbolts. The girl waddled out. She had on a short skirt that showed fat black thighs above dimpled knees. Under the dirty pink sweater were bulbous breasts as firm as cows’ udders.

“I goin’, Mist’ Kolinski.” In her nervousness, her speech regressed to North Carolina or perhaps Georgia.

Kolinski stood stock-still with the receiver in his hand as she waddled by. She went down the narrow stairwell. Kolinski watched her retreat in the round fly-specked mirror set at an angle above the turn of the stairs. He watched her all the way down to street level. Watched her pull open the street door and go out.

He lifted the receiver, resumed his staccato delivery as if there had been no interruption.

“Just getting rid of the nigger. And besides, you may be protected but I’m hanging out in the wind with my dick flopping. I’ve worked like a fucking dog getting a street distribution system set up—”

“Nobody could have worked harder, Alex,” said Hariss’ voice smoothly.

“It’s what I’m telling you. My half of this one-seven-five, placed with our Mexican distributor for more merchandise, would have been worth nearly a mil on the street, and I—”

“You talk as if that money is gone.”

“Isn’t it?”

“I’m at the Bush Street garage, I took the liberty of telling Blaney to set your street people into operation before I saw Fargo. They’re covering the depots. Of course if Docker has a car—”

“Fargo will find that out soon enough — if Fargo is playing straight with us.”

“As we’re playing straight with Fargo?” Hariss chuckled at his own remark. Kolinski ignored it; his face had gotten thoughtful. Intelligence gleamed in his deep-set eyes.

“But if he had a car, he wouldn’t have had to take a fucking bus away from Bryant Street, would he? No, Walt, goddammit, I think he’s holed up somewhere! Shit, that much... merchandise, he can only dispose of it here or in LA or in Seattle. He couldn’t find buyers with enough bread anywhere else.”

“If he stays on the coast.”

“They’d eat him alive back East, and I think he’s smart enough to know it. Shit, he was smart enough to knock us over.”

“Exactly what I’ve been telling you, Alex. I think we’ve a very good chance of recouping. I’ll expect you at Bush Street in a few minutes to direct operations.”