The Neon Jungle

Chapter Eleven

Thomas Arthur Karshner came up out of sleep, up out of dreams of thirty years ago. His bedroom glowed with the soft yellow of sun against the closed blinds, and he knew it was late. He lay quite still, retasting the vividness of the dream, knowing it would fade soon, wanting to hold it as long as he could. It was odd how, these past few years, the past was becoming more vivid. A sign of age, perhaps.

This dream had been of Caroline. Warm, young, alive, lovely. Not the thick fleshy body he had buried in ’34, but the younger Caroline of those years right after the war. In the dream she had been looking for something in that New York apartment where they had lived. He had been helping her look. Yet she wouldn’t tell him what it was they were searching for. Some precious thing that had been mislaid. The loss of it had frightened her in some obscure way.

The dream faded and the apartment was gone, and all Caroline’s warmth dwindled to those few photographs, quite faded, of a slim woman in awkward outdated clothes. He lay and wondered what Caroline would think if she knew. How he would find the words to explain it to her, explain how it had come about.

You see, dear, it started in such a vague way. It wasn’t as though there was any signpost. He’d been pointed out to me. There can be a certain fascination in evil. That was back when they were nailing so many of them for income-tax evasion when they couldn’t get them on other counts, and it worried him. I didn’t know that, at the same time, I was being pointed out to him, pointed out as a man who could make arithmetic do sly tricks. It started as a small service I performed for him. It amused me to do it. It gave me, with my friends, an amusing notoriety. You see, Caroline, he is not the sort of man to leave you alone if you can perform a service he wishes to buy. His affairs, even then, were vastly complicated. He wished to use me for other small services, all legal, of course. Yet he had to know he could trust me. And he is a very uncomplicated man in personal relationships. A trustworthy person is a person who does not dare to hurt you. He framed me with the casual efficiency with which a riding master saddles a horse. I was restive under the bit, and he soothed me with what he called “a yearly retainer.” It soon became quite clear that he resented any work I did for others. My services for him became more and more extralegal, until at last the mere fact of having performed those services was as effective as the documentation of my private vices. For a long time I thought of myself as trapped. But I did not become truly trapped until I became aware of my comfort within the trap. My services were extralegal. In return I have received a silken existence, wine, steaks, brandy, cigars, and the touch of flesh when required, and the sense of power.

He permits me to take small liberties with him. To speak to him as an equal, almost. It is much the same way that a man might amuse himself by making a friend of his butler. I am the butler of his scattered household. I am the arranger, the smoother-out, the handler of funds, the taker of messages. I am required to devise little schemes that will make the household run more smoothly. It leaves him free to control policy. I keep his world in order.

I am very good at it, Caroline.

He can be at Las Vegas, Acapulco, Miami, New York, and know that while he is gone, things are conducted in an orderly fashion.

They call me the Judge, Caroline. I have cultivated a mild judicial manner, spiced with some tricks of force I have picked up from him. You would not recognize me.

I have profited, Caroline. In the past eight years he has acquired a passion for legitimate investment. I own blocks of stock in eight of his legitimate corporations. A chain of motels. Two large suburban shopping centers. A resort hotel. A small chain of liquor stores. A business block. Apartment houses.

Yet we continue most of our original sources of extralegal profit. Drugs, women, and gambling. A pretty trio. The marketing of thrills. On these mornings, Caroline, I tell myself that I am old and tired, and aware of my own filth. Yet I know, with a certain melancholy, that during this day I will become comfortably aware of my own cleverness, that I will take a cold pride in my tact and my managerial abilities, that I shall find some small place of weakness during this day, and use the power I have by decree, and enjoy the use of that power.

You saw that same flaw, didn’t you, Caroline? And that was what soured it all, at last. And he saw it too, and he has used it to his good advantage.

Karshner got out of bed slowly, standing like a plump red-faced child in his blue-and-white striped pajamas. In the bathroom he ran the brisk humming razor across his red face, the warm head biting off the white stubble with small crisp sounds. He lowered himself gruntingly into the hot tub, soaping the worn sagging body. He toweled himself harshly, brushed the white hair, clothed himself in white nylon underwear, in black silk socks, in handmade cordovan shoes, in a heavy creamy French linen shirt, in muted sapphire cuff links, in deep maroon knit tie, in the pale gray summer-weight suit. From the top of the bureau he took an alligator wallet, a small stack of change, a gold pen, and a gold key ring and placed them in the proper pockets.

Armed for the day, he phoned down to the desk. There had been two calls. He wrote the two phone numbers on the desk pad, then hung up and used the other telephone for the calls, first closing the small switch in the line that activated it. He paused before dialing the first number. It was not a good number to call from this phone. The world of electronics had made telephones unsafe. He held the phone in his hand, finger motionless in the first hole of the number, then shrugged and dialed the number. A woman answered.

“Karshner speaking,” he said.

“Oh, sure. Hold on a sec.”

The man came on the line. “Judge, I want to see you.”

“That’s very interesting. If you’re eager I shall be finishing my breakfast in forty minutes. I shall be at the Walton Grill, last booth on the left. I can give you five minutes.”

The booth was dark-paneled, the table linen sparkling white. The walls between the booths were low. The young girl poured his second cup of coffee. “Thank you, my dear,” Karshner said, patting his lips with the heavy napkin. As the girl walked away he saw Brahko coming down the wide aisle between the booths wearing a distressing shirt. He resented having to talk to Brahko, resented any dealing with the more muscular division of the organization. Brahko was dark, and there was a handsome — in fact, almost a noble — look about the upper half of his face. But the chin faded meekly toward the collar and Brahko could cover his large yellow-white teeth only by distorting his lips oddly, like a man about to whistle. And, of course, he wore distressing shirts.

He sat down with a shade too much heartiness. “Good morning, Judge.”

“Please don’t phone me, Brahko. I don’t like it. Who is that woman?”

“Don’t get sweaty, Judge. She’s all right. She’s a good kid.”

“Don’t phone me. Is that clear?”

“I phoned you when I got this. It was in with the collection this morning. Take a look.”

Karshner unfolded the piece of paper, aware that Brahko was watching his face carefully. He did not permit his expression to change as he read it. “The young man is astonishingly literate,” Karshner said. “A pleasantly careful young man. You could learn from him, Brahko.”

“I figured anything that might foul up the setup, you ought to know about, Judge.”

Karshner continued as though he had not been interrupted. “A careful young man up to a point. Aiding the young girl out of her difficulties yesterday was astonishingly stupid. I am afraid he is erratic. I was aware of that when he insisted on the very melodramatic way of enlisting the services of his accomplice. Yet he’s been quite effective.”

“Can you do anything?”

Karshner lit a corner of the note and placed it in the glass ashtray. When it had burned away, he puddled the fragments with the end of the burned match.

“You have informed me, Brahko.”

“Sure, but are you going to do anything?”

“It is unfortunate that one of your... ultimate consumers should be a member of the same household. It could attract unwelcome attention. The young man is quite correct about that. However, his proposed solution is as devious and erratic as his method of acquiring the services of the butcher.”

“I don’t get it, Judge.”

“His own act imperils the operation to a greater extent than the child’s addiction. I believe we must consider new methods of wholesale distribution.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Should the child be cured, Brahko, she will at some point report that our young man took care of her needs. She will also report her other source or sources, but that need not concern us. What does concern us is that our young man is going to receive some unwelcome attention when the child becomes penitent.”

Brahko nodded slowly. “I get it. He shouldn’t have got her a fix.”

“Correct. By doing so, he impaired his value to us, and rendered his own suggestion invalid. The action we take must be more direct. I suspect that it is a matter that we can turn over to Guillermo for necessary action.”

Brahko stared at him. “Say, like it says in the note, the kid is only seventeen.”

“I don’t believe that has deterred Guillermo’s operations in the past. I believe you should contact him, Brahko. She should be quite pliable. Tell him that it will be wise to hand her over to one of the more distant establishments. Norfolk, Memphis, Jacksonville. And he should induce her to leave a parting message. A plaintive little note. ‘Do not try to bring me back.’ Guillermo knows the procedure. And perhaps a letter from her mailed from some distant point.”

“She’s pretty young.”

“Brahko, the softness of your heart astonishes me. Or is it that you hate to lose one of your consumers?”

“Maybe you ought to check before you make it an order, Judge.”

Karshner sat very still for a moment. He looked at Brahko in utter silence until the man shifted uneasily and said, “I just meant that maybe there’d be some other way of—”

“You aren’t handling yourself well, Brahko. The phone call. The unknown woman. Your obvious nervousness. You make me wonder how adequately you are performing.”

“Judge, I was just—”

“See Guillermo today, Brahko. That’s all.”

Brahko stood up. Karshner watched him leave, and then signaled to the girl to bring more coffee. He bit the end from his first cigar of the day. He wondered what the young Varaki girl was like, and then forced that thought from his mind. It was much safer to think of them as factors in some vast complicated equation. That young man, Lockter, could be removed just as readily, and no damage done. If they took him in and he talked for ten days to police stenographers, he could not tell them anything that could be construed as evidence against anyone higher up in the organization. Lockter could topple the peddlers, but there were always peddlers. It was the old immutable cycle of supply and demand. If the supply channels collapsed, demand pressure would bump the price back up again to the place where new peddlers would accept the risk.

Guillermo’s people would handle the child correctly, using the drug the way you entice a kitten with a scrap tied to the end of a string. He finished his third cup of coffee and wished, with a certain regret, that he had told Brahko that he would contact Guillermo himself. That would have given him a chance, while speaking to Guillermo, to indicate that a small favor would be appreciated. It had been quite a long time now. Longer that ever before.

There was, of course, the problem of getting word to Lockter. A strange young man. A strange glitter about him, like knife blades. A flawed young man. Too fond of intrigue for the sake of intrigue. He should be told that it was out of his hands, and he should be informed that his procuring of the drug for the child was astonishingly stupid. Given that little morsel, Rowell would enjoy long talks with Lockter.

He remembered the last time he had spoken to Rowell. The memory made his cheeks burn dully. Rowell had elbowed him into a corner of a hotel lobby, out of sight behind the public phone booths.

“Patties up, Judge.”

“Take your hands off me!”

“Now, Judge,” Rowell had said soothingly, and made of the business of searching him a brutal game, roughing him up with ease of long practice, elbow under the chin to click the teeth sharply, hard knee bruising the thigh, hand thudding hard over the kidneys, so that Karshner’s hat had fallen to the dusty floor, and his eyes had filled with tears, and he gagged for breath.

“You can’t do this to me!”

“Why, I just did, Judge. You want special treatment when I brace you? You figure you’re better than any little punk in your organization? You look just the same to me, Judge. Why don’t you sue me or something? Upstanding citizen assaulted by police brutality. Why don’t you tell me you’ll see that my badge is lifted or something? Isn’t that the usual line? Better pick up your hat, Judge.”

He had started to pick it up, and then turned around so that he wouldn’t be facing away from Rowell. He picked up his hat, brushed it on his sleeve, and hurried down the steps to the side door of the hotel followed by Rowell’s laughter. The incident had made him think of schoolyards of long ago. Tommy Karshner crying helplessly. They used to get him in a circle and push him back and forth until he fell.

The Judge left his usual generous tip and got up from the booth. It was nearly noon. He decided to take a short walk to settle his heavy breakfast, and then drop in his offices, the offices of the Johnston Service and Development Corporation, check the mail, and then go over to the sedate Johnston Athletic Club for prelunch cocktails and perhaps a few hands of bridge. Another hour at the office in midafternoon should be enough to take care of the routine. As he walked he again felt a lingering regret that he had not arranged to contact Guillermo himself. It involved a slight loss of dignity to go to Guillermo with only that one obvious reason. And suddenly he realized that one of Guillermo’s people might be ideal to use to contact Lockter and give him the word. The two functions of informing Lockter and setting up the young lady’s trip might be best handled simultaneously. It involved fewer contacts. He lengthened his stride a bit and compressed his stomach muscles and squinted ahead into the June sunshine.