The Royal Family

| 481 |

Past the buzzer, a revelation: Authority, in an ecstasy of sanctimonious prayer, would until the end of time keep busy destroying monsters. Tyler saw phony-wood desks, an industrial tape dispenser; staplers, and staple-removers everywhere. A vending machine’s front comprised a rectangular glass eye. Everywhere he looked, some poster or other explained how sad and tricky this world was: PARENTING IS DIFFICULT — TO HELP YOU COPE, TALK ABOUT IT. No wonder so many parents made mistakes, then.

That’s a nice poster, said Tyler to the secretary.

Sir, I’m actually quite busy this morning, the secretary said, adjusting her headset (that microphone should be closer to your mouth, Tyler wanted to explain).

Why, what a coincidence! cried Tyler heartily. So am I!

Well, then, said the secretary, how about if you do your job and I’ll just do mine.

Your job must be difficult, too, said Tyler, pointing to the poster.

Excuse me? the woman said.

Can I help you cope, baby? You feel like crying on my shoulder?

My, aren’t we hostile today, the secretary said. I hope you get busted big time.

On her desk, a buzzer rang.

All right, Mr. Tyler, she said. You can go in now.

With or without Vaseline? Tyler wondered aloud.

You’re disgusting, said the secretary. If you have any kids I hope we take them away forever.

No sweat, said Tyler. You and I can always make some more. I know how to do it. I’m an abuser from way back.

In the next room, tables and chairs were set up as if for a family conference. There were two baby seats. A pair of handcuffs hung from a pipe. There was a big white plastic crate of toys: trucks, a plastic bowling ball, miscellaneous government-issue snuggly things with flame-retardent stickers. Here, perhaps, the uncomprehending children were peeled away from their abusive parents.

Today the FBI was comprised of a man and a woman in business suits. They were very charming. Tyler could see that they knew how to deal with the public.

Dan Smooth sat facing them across the table, his fingers open like those of a small child playing patty-cake.

Tyler said: Are you okay, Dan?

I’ve had better days, but these FBI turds aren’t going to break me. I appreciate your coming by, Henry, I really do. The reason I’m late, well, I’m not actually late…

So what’s going on? said Tyler to the FBI agents.

Would you like some coffee, Mr. Tyler? the woman said.

No thanks. What kind of trouble is Dan in?

Three guesses, laughed Smooth greyly.

Just as when during a special session with Domino the living drops fall slowly from the candle, making a sizzling noise when they hit, then in warm silence spreading into the man’s flesh, the warmth becoming painful and tender, so the various burning stimuli which Tyler had already encountered in this place began to make his stomach ache. The ambiance of the situation, which many people would have called “serious,” preoccupied him more than he would have liked. Disposed, as always, to meet disrespect with defiance, he nonetheless decided that for the sake of expediency (that is, of a happy ending), he would accept some degree of degradation, like the Queen’s girls, who gave head to unwashed men and were always telling each other to be careful. This is not to say that he regretted his rudeness to the secretary, especially since her words had been uncalled for; in this deeper sanctum of officialdom, however, rank domination would probably have to be swallowed, in order to avoid a force-feeding.

Well, strictly speaking, Mr. Tyler, you’re not really a part of the actual investigation process, the FBI woman said.

Imagine that, said Tyler. Nice blouse you have on.

In other words, Mr. Tyler, we’re going to need some time alone with Mr. Smooth, for his own protection and ours.

Dan, you want me to stay or go?

Do what they want, his friend said dully. I’ve been through this so many times before. They always get their way…

Dan, are you okay?

You’re going to have to leave now, Mr. Tyler, the woman said. You’re welcome to take a seat in our waiting room if you’d like.

Count me in, said Tyler. That sure is the prettiest little waiting room I ever did see.

And, Mr. Tyler, I’d appreciate it if you let Sheila work. You seem to have made her upset.

Are you going to shoot me? said Tyler. I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country.

The FBI stood waiting for him to go, so he said: Dan, if you need me, call me.

The FBI man laughed and said: If you hear any screaming, come running in.

Tyler went back to the room of posters, winked at the tense, rigid secretary, and sat down as close to the door as he could. The secretary didn’t take her eyes off him. The FBI woman closed the door. Tyler watched the minute hand on the clock, smacking his lips as loudly and vulgarly as he could to irritate the secretary. He farted. — Terribly sorry, he said to the secretary. It’s a disease that all of us child molesters have. — The minute hand on the clock went round and round.

After a long time, the FBI man came out and said to Tyler confidentially while sharpening a pencil: This guy’s got nothing to worry about. There’s nothing to implicate him, not even remotely. He’s wasted his money on a lawyer. He’s not the suspect.

Well, that’ll make him happy to hear, Tyler replied.

The FBI man, who was old and somehow very affable-looking, went back into the room with the toys and handcuffs, but this time failed to close the door all the way. Tyler could hear much better now.

Well, basically what we’re trying to determine is what you think Henry Tyler was trying to do with these color photographs, said the FBI woman so sweetly.

Oh, so now you’re investigating him, too? came Smooth’s voice.

The affable FBI man said: He’s got a lot of stuff that shows girls dancing and stuff. We’re not concerned with that. But some of the stuff is very graphic: Nudes, genitals and stuff like that. And we generally find that photographers take pictures of what they like to look at.

In all the pictures — about sixty of them — the light was shining in the crotch, and it’s very exposed, the FBI woman said.

Do you know this young girl? the FBI man said.

That’s Sapphire, said Smooth. She’s a retarded prostitute.

Is she a minor?

If she were, that would be a felony section 311.3, now, wouldn’t it? replied Smooth with a shadow of his accustomed superiority. You see, I know California law as well as Numbers and Deuteronomy. But guess what? She’s twenty-something—hee, hee! And her vagina’s actually kind of—

So you’re saying that she isn’t a minor.

Can’t you tell from the flesh tones? It’s actually somewhat interesting if you look at that enlarged area there…

And what about this copper device?

I think it hides orgasms easier, and meets changes better, Dan Smooth whispered.

Now this Queen, this Africa female, I understand that she compelled Sapphire to engage in nonconsensual sex acts with—

You’re being tautological, you see. Compelled and nonconsensual refer to the same concept.

We’re not in grammar school anymore, Mr. Smooth. Although I do understand you have a penchant for grammar schools. Now, this Africa — or should I call her the Queen?

And the Queen honored and nourished us with her love, Smooth muttered.

So it went. They were very reasonable, and explained to Smooth their personal interest.

The nice old guy came out and permitted Tyler to rethink things a little, to warn him that when Dan Smooth fell, Tyler should be careful that he didn’t drag him down, too.

So you’re investigating me too, huh? said Tyler.

Not at this time, Henry, the FBI man said. You really have nothing to worry about. These photographs we’re referring to were actually confiscated from Mr. Smooth’s residence on Q Street in Sacramento. I understand you were a frequent visitor?

Yeah, I know where the toilet is, said Tyler.

Well, we don’t want to upset Mr. Smooth all at once, so for politeness’s sake we’re just asking him about the photographs as if they were yours. There’s a lot of felony count stuff here. Full frontal crotch shots of young children. I’m talking underage females, and some underage males. It’s really quite distressing, Henry.

Yeah, I’ll say, said Tyler. You think all those kids are virgins? Are there any wet split beaver shots of the young girls where you can get a good look at the maidenhead? I think that would be important evidence.

The FBI man shot him a nauseated look and walked away.

Meanwhile, in the other room, behind the half closed door, Tyler could hear the FBI woman saying to Dan Smooth very nicely: Well, from examining the files in your computer, it seems to me that you and Tyler were pretty, well, intertwined. I mean he wrote your resume.

Henry has always been a big help, said Smooth hoarsely.

Tweed men entered from the street, signing IN and OUT on the bulletin board.

Tyler heard the woman clear her throat, and then she said: And your activities with the fifty-two children on this list, you deny that you had carnal—

Listen, came Smooth’s voice, heartbreakingly honest in its anger, so unlike its usual patronizing oiliness. — You insult me.

We’re all adults in this room, Mr. Smooth, unlike the kids on this list. They’ll never get over what was done to them. But you’re old enough to stay calm and cooperate, don’t you think?

I—

Is there anyone at all in law enforcement who can vouch for you about this?

Third Precinct. They know me there.

I bet they do, the FBI woman sneered. Don’t you ever have nightmares about the faces of those poor, poor kids?

No matter what you think, I don’t hurt anybody and I never have. You should be aware that I cracked the Kaylin Kohler case…

Mr. Smooth, the information we have suggests classic sexual exploitation on a multiple level, and, besides, you’re already a registered sex offender.

Don’t you realize that anybody who’s a registered sex offender already bears the Mark of Cain? You can’t go after us or you’ll be punished sevenfold. Aren’t you ashamed, to go against Jehovah?

Mr. Smooth, we’re not really interested in your religious views. What we’re interested in is whether you engaged in repeated acts of sexual conduct with children under the age of eighteen and with children under the age of fourteen.

I want to tell you something. You can’t always say I’ve been a useful citizen. But I’m a good excuse to people who need to hurt themselves, and to witch-burners like you who—

Did you go meet with this young girl Sapphire in April? the FBI woman was saying, as Tyler sat there and the FBI man gazed lovingly into Tyler’s eyes

I don’t know, Smooth said.

Did your Queen procure underage minors for illicit sexual activity?

I don’t know.

Well, why don’t you try to remember, Mr. Smooth, the woman said. You really ought to try to cooperate with the investigation.

Why?

Because we have you dead to rights on penal code section 261.5, that’s unlawful sexual intercourse with persons under eighteen; and section 269, which is aggravated sexual assault of these children; and section 288, lewd and lascivious acts with minors including many, many counts of oral copulation and sodomy; and section 288.5, continuous sexual abuse of children; and section 289, penetration of genital or anal openings by foreign objects.

If you have me dead to rights, why don’t you arrest me?

The investigation is continuing, Mr. Smooth.

Call me Uncle Dan. Call me Daddy. Call me—

How about if I just call you scum?

You know, ma’am, I’m always joshing my friend Henry in the waiting room about his envious ears. But you have envious eyes. I saw how your face lit up when you looked at those crotch shots. I saw how you got so happy right then, because you wanted to think the worst of me and now you could. You can’t do without me—

Excuse me just a minute, Henry, the FBI man said, entering the waiting room, with the door gaping behind him. Over his shoulder he said: Mr. Smooth, when you walk out the door today, if we never see you again and you never see us again, you’ll be a happy man. Just tell us what these felony count child pornography photographs were doing in your house on Q Street.

I don’t know, Smooth said.

Did Henry Tyler take those pictures?

I don’t know.

Did Queen Africa take those pictures?

I don’t know.

The FBI man strolled back into the interrogation room, brought his face close to Smooth’s, and said: Let’s refresh our memory.

About what?

Well, what about this big grey box of Henry Tyler’s? See, all I’m saying is, tell the truth and be honest with us, and it’ll work out. Our only job is to seek the truth.

I don’t know.

You’re being consistently evasive to protect somebody’s interest.

Because I’ve sworn to protect my Queen.

And where is she?

I don’t know.

And what does she have to do with the big grey box?

I don’t know.

As long as everyone’s being so vague, we have to make certain assumptions. So where does Tyler do his color work?

Come on, Dan, the FBI woman interjected, and her laugh was as loud and inhuman as a trolleycar bell, I think you know. You’ve known him for years. He wrote your letters for you. You didn’t write that garbage.

Smooth was silent.

As busy as a hen in a blender, said the FBI woman brightly. Tyler wrote that, Dan. As busy as a chicken in a blender.

The affable FBI man came out and said to Tyler: Any child that’s been up to Dan Smooth’s house on Q Street is in danger of having been molested. Henry, I would never lose that thought.

Who else came over to your house on Q Street, Dan? the FBI woman was saying. Do you know anything about that?

She led Dan Smooth out. Smooth was red and sweating. The FBI man shook Tyler’s hand. When he saw Smooth’s sad and terrified face, Tyler wanted to kill those two tormentors.

| 482 |

You got time to come with me? Tyler said.

You a cop? said the used-up woman.

Not me, he sighed. Not me.

How far do you live?

Just past Harrison Street.

They started walking, and she said bitterly: Well, I guess you’re going to take me to the paddy wagon, right?

You don’t trust me much, do you? said Tyler.

I don’t even trust myself.

Well, I’ll take that as a compliment.

Why is that a compliment?

Because if I admitted that it wasn’t a compliment, then I might get hurt feelings, said Tyler with a wink.

The woman laughed. Then she said: So, if I was to just turn around and run right now, I guess you’d come after me with the sirens, right?

That’s right. What flavor of handcuffs do you want, strawberry or banana?

When Tyler was much, much younger and had first begun to meet street prostitutes, he’d mistaken for a miraculous capacity to instantly size men up, determining whether they were muff-divers, harmless old impotents, serial killers, rich men with deeper wallets than they let on, or undercover cops, what was actually circumstantial compulsion to render quick judgments: Here he is in the bus zone, with his window rolled down, and he wants me to get in the car and date him. I have five seconds to make up my mind. Some prostitutes, granted, did have built in bullshit detectors, like an old cop Tyler once knew who had looked him in the eye and instantly known he was lying. Tyler had only been fifteen or sixteen then. He’d been trying to impress the cop by saying he knew some street criminals he didn’t know. The cop’s eyes had flicked out some awful ray of instantaneous truth, and Tyler turned red. Then the cop turned away wearily. Nothing had been said. Domino was that intuitively excellent at times. But most of her colleagues just guessed fast, risking, risking, sometimes falling into chance’s jaws.

The whore cleared her throat. — We turn here, you said?

That’s right, sweetheart. Paddy wagon’s just around the corner.

He unlocked the front door and said: Pretty big paddy wagon, huh?

Hey, I remember you. Ain’t you the old Queen’s boyfriend?

I was. How’s the new Queen working out?

Oh, I ain’t supposed to talk about that stuff. I mean, it’s not cool. New Queen’s not the same as the old Queen. With the new Queen a girl could get in serious trouble.

That means it’s Domino, right?

You ain’t stupid. Now, whatcha wanna do? You wanna date me or what? If you want me to take care of you, you gotta pay me five bucks extra, ’cause five bucks is the Queen’s percent. You come home without the Queen’s percent, honey, you better not come home.

He locked the door behind them, and she started to take off her clothes.

You miss your Queen? he said.

Now there’s a mine-field of a question, the whore said. I told you already we have a Queen…

You miss the Queen? The real Queen.

Even if I was to say nothing, you’d probably snitch to the Queen and get me in black with her. I don’t wanna be in black with the Queen. Don’t think I don’t know you. You’re just another of those suck-up guys. When the Queen spits in our mouths, we swallow ’cause that’s our job. When she spits in your mouth, you like it. You’re a pervert. Now where’s my money?

So since I’m going to snitch on you even if you keep quiet, you might as well tell me what you think, sweetheart. Here’s twenty and five for Domino. Do you miss your Queen or not?

And if I did? What the fuck good would that do? And another thing the Queen said, she said we have to call the old queen just plain Africa now, ’cause that’s her name and she’s not Queen no more. And nobody’s supposed to say Domino like you did. That’s a serious offense. I’m warning you. You gotta be careful. If she hears a girl say Domino, she’ll take her and — and…

And what?

I’m not gonna talk about it. I saw it one time. I don’t want to think about it.

How’s Strawberry doing?

I haven’t seen her.

How about Beatrice?

She’s fine. Bea’s cool. Bea can get along with anybody.

And Justin?

Justin’s turned mean. Please please please don’t tell anyone I said that… But I still have my magic charm. It’s like a car antenna that Bernadette stole because she’s my friend, and then the Queen took it and made love to it so it’s alive from Maj. And I keep it hidden with my Mark of Cain. And Justin he knows…

And Sapphire?

Oh, she lets Sapphire hang around. That girl’s out of Protective Services now, ’cause she’s not a minor. Anyways, Sapphire can’t do no harm…

Listen. If I find the Queen, you have any message for her?

The woman burst into tears. — Tell her I love her. Tell her she’s my Mama and please come back…

And I want you to tell Sapphire—

Oh, what time is it? I got a regular waiting for me. I love you, baby. Okay, I wanna go take care of that guy.

He let her out and stood watching as she fled. It was dark across the roofs of Harrison and Folsom Streets with yellow residential lights glowing unhealthily all around. Then he went to bed. In the morning he was not quite lonely because he had the sunny company of rusty fences.

| 483 |

After that, all the whores he met were sullen and suspicious. — Whatcha up to? they might say. You datin’? but if he asked: You wanna come to my place? they’d say: No, you have to come to my place. — That Queen, they’d say, she just a black widow spidah. — He saw one of them across the street from the pay phone at Seventeenth and South Van Ness and watched her approach him; she looked familiar; but when he greeted her she just walked on. At Capp Street there were none; at Mission Street there were half a dozen, but they all stood within protective knots of men who watched for enemies.

You lookin’? a man said to him. You lookin’?

Nope, said Tyler. Just lookin.’

Late at night it was now, almost midnight, and enough alcohol lived inside him now to give his step a slight roll as he passed under the rhythmically thudding cars at the steel bridge at South Van Ness, and the used car lot, fissured like a mongoloid’s tongue, was so blue beneath the streetlights like the inner world of a detergent commercial; and a radio quietly talked to itself. Not a soul was anywhere in that world except the sleeping-bagged homeless pupae in the most discreet nests that they could find, and, of course, people in cars; at the red light, a grimacing woman rested her map on the steering wheel two steps from him, the light on in her station wagon; she was determined not to exist for him, and equally determined to keep him from existing for her — well, fair enough. Blue pulses came from a TV in a window.

| 484 |

He wandered past the Hall of Justice where at that moment a judge was saying: Your swap surrender day would be October seventh. You have a warrantless search condition. There is a two hundred dollar fine to the indemnity fund. Based on your ability to pay, there’s a forty dollar probation fee… and Tyler crossed the street, entering the office of Mr. Cortez the bail bondsman.

What can I do for you, brother? asked Cortez with a knowing look.

My name’s Henry Tyler. I’m looking for a black lady named Africa Johnston whom I think you might have bailed—

Say, aren’t you the private detective?

Yeah.

I knew I’d heard of you. Who was it now? I think maybe Mike Hernandez in Vice dropped your name one time. Well, you know, Henry, with the market contraction right now we’re all going through some hard times. I wish I could use you. Most of the time we don’t have to hire a detective, because the family will lose their money, so they want to track the guy down.

Narrowing his eyes, Tyler said: You don’t quite get it, Mr. Cortez. Nobody’s hiring me. I’m just looking for her because I—

Well, it’s a free country, so I wish you good sport in your looking, laughed Mr. Cortez. I really can’t help you. Peace, brother.

| 485 |

In search of that priceless jewel of sources, the neighborhood snitch, he revisited the abandoned warehouse in Oakland where the Queen’s outcasts used to sleep, shoot up, hide and dream. It was August eighth, the day before Irene’s birthday. In the parking lot with the black cloth on his head, peering through the ground glass of his view camera, Ken the street photographer was saying to a whore so sincerely: You’re beautiful. That’s beautiful. — Tyler crawled under the dogeared flap of sheetmetal and found mounds of yellowed newspapers which dated back to the time that Deng Xiao Ping had still been alive, but which seemed to be wet with fresh spittle or some other substance. These burrows were all ringed round by concrete blocks. In the Queen’s day there’d been mattresses. — Anybody home? he called desolately. There had never been any signal to announce oneself to the Queen because her eyes and ears would have already done the announcing long before any visitor could have spied her out, but, remembering Domino’s call sign, he kicked the wall four times. He waited. Then he scraped one of the concrete blocks along the floor as loudly as he could. Nobody answered; nobody lived there anymore except for an ancient black lady he’d never seen before who whispered: ’Member I kept sayin’ there was somebody there? I miss the place, creeps and all.

| 486 |

But Beatrice with her smell of soap and cigarette smoke saw him one evening when it was already late enough for the fat red stripes on the back doors of ambulances to turn a cold purplish-black in the darkness, much less vivid than the purple lips of Beatrice who now rushed over, simultaneously lisping and croaking in her half-harsh, half-babyish voice: Henry, I come running, running! She had lost weight.

Hello, baby, he said.

Can I be your wife?

Sure you can, Bea.

Am I your wife? You said I’m your wife, so give me money!

Yeah, sure, Bea. Business isn’t so great for these days, but I can scrape together a couple of bucks…

Thank you, Henry. Now I know I’m your wife. You gotta always give your wife money. And that money you gave me before, I lost it at the bus ’cause somebody took my purse, so I couldn’t buy my baby his operation. You know, his tripas, his guts, they doan stay in his insides, so I got to go to the hospital, and get a ticket for way in line, maybe one-two, three-four hours so they can fix my baby. But he’s too far anyway; he’s way down in Mexico. I won’t never go back down there. Too far from my Mama. My Mama is my Queen. My other Mama said, Doan let him play outside ’cause he’s not strong, and maybe his tripas gonna get dirty. — But she’s dead like Irene, so I guess she didn’t really say that but I wish she was here to tell me what to do and how to live. She was a good Mama, just like my Queen. I always respect her so much. He’s a good baby, too, name Christian, just like you and me when we were babies, always playing, always good, like even you, even me. And my Queen says…

You never told me about your baby.

He’s a bastard.

Is his father one of your customers?

One night four men robbed me and cut me and beat me up, and then all night fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, and that’s how I got this bastard.

Is he a nice kid?

I doan know, said Beatrice with a cheery shrug.

They went to the Imperial Motel where she started to go down on him and he said: No, I don’t need it! but she snarled, bent his fingers back until they hurt, and did her job.

Thank you, he said wearily.

Thanks for nothing.

She opened her legs like the low spread-out buildings of Mexicali. Realizing that she actually wanted it, he went down on her. She reeked of excrement. When her orgasm came, tears exploded from her eyes.

Seconds afterward, her every word high-contrast and blatant like Mexican signs urgent red on yellow, like Mexicali grapes green and black shining in the sun, she told him that she was alone, that she’d fled from Domino and the others, that all her dreams told her that the Queen was dead.

| 487 |

Two decades before, when Tyler was just learning his trade, a wise old private eye had explained: Here’s the way you get information. Drugs. If you’re trying to get somebody’s rap sheet, well, people who need quick cash have always been for hire, whether it’s the phone company or whether it’s somebody who has access to computers or what. In other words, I don’t have access to rap sheets but I know people who do. We don’t jack each other on that stuff. It’s just like Mobil and Shell. We need each other, and we can’t all have everything. I know a guy who has access to unlisted numbers…

Tyler possessed his own list of such people. He called every one of them, and could hardly believe that these were the same “sources” who’d been so grandly infallible in years before.

| 488 |

Tightly gripping his heavy and reliable old telephone, made back in the monopoly days when such devices were rented, not owned, he called Mike Hernandez in Vice, who had first brought him knowledge of Dan Smooth so long ago. Usually he got that detective’s answering machine, but this time he reached the man himself, who jovially said: Yeah? as shouts of office glee rang out in the background — some party, some practical joke; maybe it was April Fool’s Day…

Mike, it’s—

Henry, old chum! How’s the life? You ever find that Queen of the Whores you were bugging me about last year? I figure she’s probably related by incest to the Loch Ness Monster…

That kind of rings a bell, said Tyler.

Listen, what can I do for you? Things are kind of in chaos around here, so I—

Wondered if you guys had picked up a Miss Africa Johnston.

What’s her social?

No social.

What do you mean, no social?

I took her prints, but even the FBI couldn’t find a match.

Then she must not be a U.S. citizen.

She’s a—

One of your whores?

Yeah, said Tyler, narrowing his eyes.

Look, buddy. I’ve been in Vice for fourteen years. If she’s been in the business, she has to have been busted. Now misdeameanors drop off the record, for the most part, within ten years. That’s the paperwork Reduction Act. But I’m sure if she’s in the life, as they say, then she must have committed some felonies. She’s the one you were looking for last year, right?

Yeah, but I found her. She exists. She—

Okay. Then you lost her. Listen, buddy, gotta go, but let’s have a drink sometime. Happy trails, eh?

| 489 |

He tried the National Death Index, current up to three months before, and by then it had been four months, and she wasn’t there, not on that computer-web version, at least. (Irene was there.) Well, why should the Queen be there? He called the San Francisco Department of Health but they didn’t have any death certificate, either. (They had one for Lily.)

| 490 |

Well? the tall man had said.

All right, Tyler had said. (She had been missing for less than twenty-four hours back then.) — So if she’s arrested on the street, she’ll be brought in and booked, and they’ll keep one copy of that booking in the jail and send another copy to the state and another copy to the FBI. I guess we’d better not go to the FBI, so that leaves the state and the jail. Now, Mr. Cortez checked out Eight-Fifty Bryant and found nothing, so we’ll go to the state. You have any quarters? Lemme make a few phone calls…

You don’t even have any quarters? Man, you are solid horseshit.

Well, we’re billing a hundred and fifty, two hundred grand a year, but usually they don’t pay in quarters, Justin. Still, if you have the patience it’s kind of good. In other word, you’re doing twelve—

Will you stop babbling like a fucking crackhead bitch?

Ordinarily they pay in million dollar bills, laughed Tyler. He left the tall man and broke a five on a shot of whiskey at Jonell’s bar. He got three dollars back. One he used for a tip, and the barmaid brightened. When he asked her to transform the other two bills into quarters, she smilingly obliged. He tried to smile back, but couldn’t.

What’s wrong? she said.

Oh, just a minor emergency, he chuckled, showing his stained teeth. He went back into the darkness near the men’s restroom where the pay phone was and began calling various minions of the state of California, confident of imminent success.

Later, when he stepped back onto the street, the tall man was gone and three drunken Brady’s Boys laughed at Tyler, shouting: God save the Queen! His car was in the towing yard, so he took the bus home and stayed up all night trying to do an extended trace…

| 491 |

The Queen of the Tenderloin is really three people put into one person who’s the illegitimate son of the Queen of England, explained the crazy whore, whose eye-blinks were more numerous even than late afternoon Tenderloin pigeons. In the thirties she was a teenager and then a movie star. In the forties she married the Duke of Windsor by mistake. But when she was aspiring to be a movie star she abandoned seven children. My grandmother is one of those children. That’s why I’m dyslexic with a not very well formed thyroid gland connected to my urine by electricity. And the name of the Queen, the one and only true Queen, is and always has been Domino. You know why? Well, first of all, the strongest woman of all is a male that’s stuck in a female’s body. Then there’s the second sort of men who just dress as women, just to snoop around and see what men do to women. Isn’t that lucky for them? But Domino’s the first kind. She has a penis. She rapes me. She’s my Queen.

| 492 |

The Hotel Liverpool on Turk Street had been taken over by Romanians since the last time he’d stayed there, which had been a good six or seven years ago. Tired burly middle-aged men worked in Reception and mopped the floors. When he saw somebody mopping the floors he was impressed. Upstairs, of course, the same old carpet lingered on, fuzzed, linted, worn and grimed, with pale stain-islands of urine and beer and toothpaste. Thirty-five by the day, one forty-five by the week. His room was spacious. On its blue walls some creative tenant with a felt tip marker had portrayed whores in fishnet bras and fishnet stockings, and then all around the lintel marched well-rendered ants and spiders. There was an attached bathroom with a tub and toilet; on its walls one of the middle-aged men had too frugally attempted to whitewash away those magnificent insect studies, but as only one coat of paint had been employed the great spiders still lurked, more cunning and sinister now than ever, because they seemed to be hiding themselves in ambush.

He opened the window to let the smell out. The room quickly filled with flies.

It wasn’t a bad place, though. The lock on the door was solid, and the dresser had all its drawers.

He went out to search for the Queen, street by street. The Tenderloin was nothing but a blighted, darkened, stained place in his heart. Shadows oozed beneath the signs of the Oriental massage clubs. Returning in the darkness, he learned where the entomological inspiration on the wall had come from, for upon that sea of mildew called “carpet” sailed a goodly fleet of cockroaches.

Seven o’clock, eight o’clock, night. His throat was raw; maybe he was crying in his sleep. Night, then night. (When the crazy whore finally believed and accepted that the Queen had been taken, she cried: No hope for my electricity! then threw herself headfirst out of a fourth-storey window.) Early in the morning his sleep was ended by the cheeps of a backing truck almost drowned out by rain, while somewhere nearby the new Queen was butt-fucking the other girls with dildoes. He parted the grimy curtain and saw that the streetlamp still burned; at that instant a pale seagull occluded that fierce yellow globe and then flew on up Mason Street. His eyes watered and he sneezed. A fly crawled on his hand. On the street, a man shouted. A pigeon uttered its liquid purring from some nearby window-ledge. Two leaners stood under the awning of the Greek food place because it was not yet seven-thirty and so the Greeks didn’t know or care that their home island was being used by non-payers. He listened to the rain. The sidewalk sweepers were all wearing yellow raincoats. The streetlamp was the same color. He had a sore throat.

His mind fled down long halls made longer and spookier by the peephole’s lens. He yearned for the lamp’s warm shadows.

It rained all day. Finally he flicked the switch and watched the lamp’s groping wings of light and shadow upon the wall’s sad blue sky.

That night Red was loudly singing: Baby, baby, oh-h-h-h-h, bay-bee in the street-garbage. Someone had smeared an immense brownish-red turd across the sidewalk where Red pranced.

Halloween dawned rainy. He feared Halloween because it was the day of the dead. Now that his Queen was gone, she wouldn’t be able to protect him anymore from Irene’s ghost. He found a Gideon’s Bible, but it spoke to him artificially, like Irene’s drab voice on the telephone toward the end, her sad voice which told him nothing; which was why for her, because she had never really let him into her heart, he’d begun to cultivate dislike, even hatred, thinking to kill his love and make the sadness go away, the result being that he ached for her when he thought of her, and whenever he saw her was cold to her (as was she to him) and he longed to get away from her; his wish being gratified, he then immediately despaired once again. By seven o’clock the bearded old panhandlers with top hats and cane were already leaning or squatting under papered-up windows, sharing cigarettes, rubbing their eyes, too hung over to sing. In the hallway a new tenant, longterm most likely from all the trouble he was going to, had been banging and creaking already for over an hour, trying bullheadedly to fortify his door with screw-eyes and padlocks.

Just before eight the sun came out. The tops of the grubby old brick buildings looked almost handsome in that new light. Somebody was vacuuming. A black-and-white eased softly round the corner, stalking criminals and undesirables. A man crept across the sidewalk, his face and cigarette angled straight down.

On Mission and Fifteenth he saw Beatrice with a little bag of bananas, and she greeted him gladly, so he put his arm around her and asked where she was off to. She said: In Mexico my people teach me how to feed the dead ones who we love. Now I want to do that for Mama my Queen.

What do they do?

They make like a little house and fill it with fruits and mole and stuff for the dead people. You have to go in the window.

Where are you going to do that?

In the tunnel, you know, by South Van Ness.

I get it.

Because I believe.

You believe that the dead people come?

Maybe I doan know if I believe or if I doan. My Mom does, my first Mama, but she passed away. There are signs that tell you that the dead people arose. Like the animals are nervous, or a little bug running like around for the food. They say the bug is the dead person coming back for his stuff. If you eat before the dead, you get a stomach-ache.

And then noon and sunny and cool were the labels for this moment of Tyler’s life. The smell of piss and dirt from the pigeon-trees in front of the bus terminal were almost garden-fresh; piss-rain even if from drunks and unclean persons had brought out the good smell of soil even in that abused earth studded by cigarette butts. Downtown’s cubescape coolly shadowed the emboldened Halloween ghouls already creeping out from under the tombstones which roof the collective unconscious — let’s be psychoanalytical! The woman at the Greyhound desk was witch-garbed. Two Brady’s Boys came as themselves, standing shinyshoed, the senior partner telling the other: You don’t wanna cover the same pattern. You have a sector. We’re working P Sector today. — But Tyler hardly ever saw Brady’s Boys anymore. Having accomplished their mission, they’d dwindled away. (He thought about burglarizing their headquarters to search their files, but by the time he’d gotten his courage or recklessness to full steam the office had closed.) The film guy downstairs at Adolph Gasser’s had come as a robot comprised of silver-painted cardboard boxes, his circuit-board heart upon his breast. Up First Street came a woman dressed as a cow, with an immense pink rubber udder suspended from her crotch, the many nipples thrashing like keys upon a jailor’s belt.

A thin black boy in goggling sunglasses clung to a fire hydrant in the style of a praying mantis.

As he stared at the hydrant, Tyler felt himself begin to succumb to a terrible sense of filth and death because he had passed through here for too long; that was all anyone could do in that world, pass through: stay, and it ate you; go, and you were gone; and while you were there your alternatives were the stale and stuffy stench inside or the smell of piss outside — actually, it wasn’t that bad; he was forgetting the Vietnamese restaurants, the sheer beauty of the night women decked out for maximum sexual recognition; in other species that was most often the role of the male — but he could not deny that whenever he came out of one of those hotels he felt as if he just escaped being stifled, or as if he could practically unpeel from his face, like the gauze curtains in some bar which halftoned the passers-by into quasi-silhouettes, a film of congealed malice and despair; and whenever he went back inside, it was worse. Still, he had bars. Who could fail to value the Cinnabar’s late afternoon goldenness, its warmth like the inside of a whiskey bottle? — And I don’t mind being unable to explain it, said the television; would you call this a miracle? — Outside, rotten bananas, gorgeously black and yellow like some scrambled tiger, lay on top of the pay phone.

| 493 |

The Queen was gone, but the world did not end. The Tenderloin half opened one eye, smelled itself, scratched itself, and went back to sleep. (I’m the last to go to sleep and the first to get up, bragged a sad vig; he was almost the last of the Brady’s Boys.) Time will not stop. Living in the past is as illegal as possessing a fellow citizen’s rap sheet. Once upon a time, the Tenderloin used to be the Barbary Coast with its Chinese opium dens, which now have gone, obliterated in the great fire after the quake of 1906, and now the Tenderloin, too, with its danger and its hard, vibrant blackness has begun to slip away. Japanese high-life hotels and jazz clubs punctuate the streets. And Capp Street without the Queen, that was like some old Roman amphitheater revivified by the shouts and laughs of little Arab schoolgirls. Time-blasted columns rise everywhere around them, and, like the thistles and flowers, the girls don’t care. They form in a circle and dance around their teacher to cassette music played loud on a ghetto blaster, singing Arab disco songs. San Francisco without the Queen forgot the Queen. She’d been an interesting chapter, to be sure, as unforgettable while she lasted as the sensations of unlucky johns who sat clutching their balls, clipboards on their knees as they waited for the pain to pause so that they could complete their health questionnaires. — Wait a minute, said the lady behind the glass. Her muffled voice called the petitioners back and back. Children cried in the corner, playing with plastic toys which stank of anger. A little boy screamed. Domino was there too. She experienced a fiery feeling whenever she made urine. She pushed her blonde hair up, wrinkled her forehead and scowled at the baby. She was thinking about some money which she’d heard was hidden under a certain old man’s mattress. She wondered whether she could get him to stand up beside the bed so that he wouldn’t notice while her hand explored the boxsprings. Of course she could hold him close to her and give him a good suck to distract him while she… Meanwhile Chocolate smiled and swirled her high heels, her eyes getting bigger and more frightened by the moment. Chocolate was wearing a black rayon windbreaker which she believed made her look glamorous. It stank of the streets. She got up when her name was called, slung her purse over her shoulder, brushed her hair back with one hand, stuck out her chin and approached the appointment window where a plastic bottle and a key attached to a theftproof plastic block were waiting for her. She took these items to the women’s toilet, which she unlocked with the key, then entered. Groaning with pain, she pissed into the plastic bottle. Then came the doctor, then the prescription, and three days later she’d forgotten all about it.

| 494 |

His uninvited guest, the FBI man, sat down in the chair once occupied by Irene during that ill-fated chicken dinner so long ago now when John had advised him to find another girlfriend and Irene had remained so sad and silent. Tyler could scarcely prevent his face from splitting open with rage, to see another person sitting in her chair. It seemed like desecration to think of Irene in front of this intruder, so he tried to think about something else. Into his mind came an image of the genital-less child on the family sculptural column of the Pacific Stock Exchange. The hypocrisy of that rendering charged him with a salutary Canaanite bloodlust; he longed to sink his teeth into the FBI man’s throat.

They gazed out the window at the fog for a while, and then the FBI man said: May I ask you something?

Shoot, chuckled Tyler. Or is that the wrong thing to say to a G-man?

What do you honestly think of Dan Smooth?

I honestly think that he has sacrificed himself and others for something beyond human comprehension. You can put that in your case report.

Let’s keep this on the level, the FBI man said. You want to worship snakes or hug a tree, you can do that on your own time. I don’t have a problem with that. This is a free country. But come down to earth for a minute, Henry. Let’s talk about Dan Smooth. First of all, anything to do with kids will get to me. I just love kids.

So does Dan Smooth bugger little kids? Is that what you’re asking me?

Well, does he, Henry?

I wish you the best of luck in your investigation.

Just answer me this. Do you like him? Do you approve of him?

Not particularly. There. I answered you honestly.

This guy is in trouble, Henry. You know that. Felonies up the kazebo.

Is that dorsal or ventral to the blazzazza?

All you have to do is cooperate.

Said the spider to the fly. Hey, I hear the Bureau is so behind the times today, still back in the 1950s and 1960s that they use three-by-five index cards. Is that just a rumor?

You’re a private detective, Henry, said the FBI man. In a very loose sense, you could be said to be part of this justice system of ours. Now, Henry, this is a case about justice. This is good against evil, Henry. Which side do you stand on?

As long as we have professionals on both sides, drawled Tyler, this great justice system of ours will be in good shape.

| 495 |

Tyler refused to cooperate with the FBI partly because after that first interrogation flanked by the posters which warned PARENTING IS DIFFICULT the memory of Dan Smooth’s face sat heavy on his chest. No matter what Smooth had done, he would not betray him. Perhaps Smooth’s semicontrovertible arguments that as it was he had already betrayed Irene, the Queen, his mother and John swayed his unconsciousness’s deliberations in the direction of silence, which after all defined the ethos of the entire royal family.

| 496 |

Biting his lip, he telephoned Detective Hernandez again.

Yo, buddy, what’s up? Any luck with that broad you were checking out?

Still looking, said Tyler. I had something else I wanted to ask you about. You remember that Dan Smooth guy you turned me onto that time?

Oh, hey, Danny Smooth! Do I remember? Do frogs catch flies? Hoo, boy, is that old lech in a heap of trouble! Kind of sorry to see him go down in a way, because he did help us out a few times, but them’s the breaks. You can’t be messin’ around with twelve-year-old nookie.

Well, Mike, I was wondering if there’s anything we can do for the guy. You know, he—

Henry, my very good chum, listen up. Dan Smooth knew what he was doing and he deserves whatever he’s going to get. He’s seen it coming for years. I know, because he told me. You know what I think? A guy can get away with things and keep getting away with things for so long, and then one day some insignificant little episode wraps around his ankle, and then he can’t get away with a damned thing more, because he’s done, kaput. Know what I’m saying? Dan Smooth is at that stage, Henry, and there is nothing that you or I or anybody can do except maybe grease the drop he’s gonna fall through after the hangman puts the noose around his goddamn stinkin’ child molestin’ neck…

| 497 |

What sort of proof do you want? he gently asked the telephone.

What do you mean? the woman said. Just proof.

In a hit-and-run homicide, is a fingerprint on a car enough to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt? I mean, for a probation revocation hearing, yes, but…

Mr. Tyler, I really don’t understand.

All right. Do you want eight-by-ten glossies of the two of them having intercourse, or will it be enough for me to call you up and tell you that I saw them going into such-and-such a motel together for one hour in the middle of the afternoon?

I—

Do you want to know or don’t you want to know? I’m not trying to bully you, ma’am. This is what I say to all my clients.

I… I guess if you tell me you saw them together in a hotel, that would — I mean, I…

I understand. What you never want to do in a situation like this is to go halfway. Better either to resolve to trust your husband absolutely, or else you gotta go for the nitty-gritty. It’s so hard to know anything, I mean really know anything. There’s always another explanation if you want to believe it enough. Let’s say you see the two of them humping under the covers; maybe you can convince yourself he’s helping her find her car keys—

Mr. Tyler, do you really have to be so graphic?

Sure I do. Lemme give you another example. Let’s say you’re in love with somebody who maybe doesn’t even exist and you — and you — oh, forget it.

Are you okay? the woman whispered. I thought this was about my problem but somehow it’s starting to feel like it’s about you, I mean, I…

Because you can’t ever know anything. What if the woman you love doesn’t even have a social security number or fingerprints? Then how can you believe anything? So maybe you want those eight-by-ten glossies so that years from now if you ever regret divorcing him and your mind starts trying to be kind you can take ’em out of the drawer and see how ugly they look together and then you’ll believe, yeah, this was real; this happened.

I see.

What’s your religion?

I’m a Catholic.

Then you do see. Because don’t all those crosses and relics and holy pictures help you believe? Don’t they make it all real?

I feel like we’re kind of going on a tangent here, Mr. Tyler.

All right. Well, let me just say one more thing. The reason that Jesus worked miracles was to provide material proof that what He was saying was true. If you feel bad when you get those photos, just remember that proof is a miracle. It’s a spiritual thing. Because it’s so goddamned hard to get proof of anything, and even with proof I sometimes…

Mr. Tyler?

Yeah?

Is there anything I can do to help you?

I’m sorry. I know I was going off on tangents like you said. Chalk it up to professional enthusiasm. Tell you what. I feel embarrassed now. How about if I follow your husband and the other woman for nothing? I mean, I…

| 498 |

Lifting his head, he could just see above the wooden railing the rival lecterns whose black nameplates read respectively DEFENDANT and PLAINTIFF.

Henry Tyler, said the voice of judgment.

Here.

V. T. & R. Credit, Incorporated, said judgment.

Represented, came the hearty, remorseless voice of his enemy, whom he’d never met until now. He and his enemy were sitting alone together in the front row, inches from that forehead-high railing whose sign commanded NO GUM, FOOD OR DRINKS IN COURT. His enemy was a pale, somewhat flabby young man in a blue blazer. Perceiving Tyler’s inspection, his enemy rewarded him with a sincere and indeed rather sweet smile whose only odious quality, if any, would have been its self-confidence. Tyler could not help liking him. His enemy’s colleagues, the agents who’d haunted and infested Tyler’s telephone for months now, who’d nagged, then warned, then threatened, and finally, in a stunning abrogation of their personalized ill will, offered to negotiate for pennies on the dollar, just so they could close Tyler’s case, these ghosts had never meant any more to him than entities which must be kept off; they shamed him and he dreaded them, for which cause he’d been rude to them, faithful to his cardinal axiom that one’s only choice lies between belligerence and cravenness. Now all that lay buried deeper than Irene’s bones. He loved his enemy. He longed to turn the other cheek.

We do have stipulated judgment forms that you will be required to fill out, said the official voice.

The previous case had finished now. A businessman had come in rolling an immense flat tire, Exhibit T. A cop had held the courtroom door open as he came. The door closed; the cop stood scratching his thigh beneath the holster. Now the tire was gone; likewise the businessman with his anger, his shame, his sweaty armpits and tire-grimed hands. — Judgment suspended, ruled the court.

And Tyler himself, he hung suspended above his own future, just as he had throughout that instant longer and more barren than infinity when he had watched his twitching fingers begin, in utter disobedience to his will, to strain toward Irene’s thigh for the very first time; just as he had when, learning from his mother that Irene was dead, he’d resolved to be faithful to her forever; just as he had when the tall man had led him down that dark and dripping tunnel to the Queen and he had allowed himself to believe in her, giving up his gun and kneeling to receive her saliva; just as he had when she’d offered him the false Irene to love and he’d accepted; just as he had when he’d known that he could not love the false Irene anymore; just as he had when he’d accepted the Mark of Cain as his own emblem of damnation and integrity forever; just as he had when the Queen had offered him her soul, her magic, her heart and her cunt; just as he had when he’d realized that she was doomed; just as he had when she’d left this earth and he’d searched ever more unavailingly; just as he had when Dan Smooth had turned to him in need; just as he had when Irene’s ghost rushed back into his arms to love and hate and smother him; just as he had when, understanding that the Queen, Sunflower and Sapphire were all holy by virtue of being degraded unto the very death, he’d resolved likewise to go in the highest, lowest direction he could, determined at the eleventh hour to make something of himself, to become “authentic” or honest or purified or more like one of those three prostitutes, no matter what it cost him; and now the next thing was about to occur. He knew that it was a trivial thing, but still it was the next thing.

He did not feel present anywhere anymore. Did this constitute a failure spiritual or otherwise? Sapphire had been present only in the most unearthly way. Sunflower had died sleepy and confused. Only the Queen had continued ever aware.

He did not understand what he should do now. He needed his Queen — oh, how he needed her! If only he’d thought to ask her more questions, or—

Summoned, Tyler and his creditor approached their respective lecterns. Tyler felt shabby. Erect, his creditor proved more resplendent yet from the waist down — wool slacks, shiny shoes. He required no Mark!

And suddenly I get served with these papers, Tyler explained, hardly listening to himself. So I actually got so upset that I just stopped payment. You know how it is, your honor.

Knees apart, his creditor nodded sympathetically, gazing into Tyler’s eyes. Tyler admired him more and more.

So, uh, the way I see it, your collections people violated the law, Tyler concluded. For an instant he felt awed by his own righteousness, but then his creditor’s shining eyes made him sleepy, submissive, ready to settle on any terms.

His new friend said: Mr. Tyler, we can either request a continuance to find out what they promised on the phone, or we can resolve this matter right now…

Tyler discovered a sign which read: DO NOT ARGUE, QUESTION OR INTERRUPT EACH OTHER. When his turn came round again, he tried to respect the sign, and said: Look, I don’t want to be a jerk or anything. Just tell me what you think we should do.

If you want to compromise with me, replied his friend in a tone of the utmost kindness. I can certainly take a down payment. Meanwhile, what I’m gonna do is request a continuance. But my question is, we called you several times and—

Well, I don’t know about the several times, Tyler lied, hanging his head.

Mr. Tyler, you’re not to interrupt.

Sorry, Your Honor, I just…

Yeah, Mr. Tyler, I understand, his friend told him sympathetically. But all you had to do was call us. V. T. & R. is always just a phone call away. Anyway, that’s history. Here’s the balance you owe, and I’m gonna…

Tyler stopped listening. He longed for the moment when all the muffled underwater voices would cease, and his creditor would sit down next to him again in the front row, drooping his wrists between his thighs, gazing lovingly into space. Or maybe they’d meet in the corridor and go out afterward for a drink at the Wonderbar. His creditor wanted to help him; his creditor would save him—

| 499 |

Past the body-piercing shop Haight Street begins to steepen, and at Baker commences the plateau called Upper Haight, with Buena Vista Park a slanted wall of green on the left, bearing its loungers, panhandlers, sleepers, tourists, map-readers, and bus-watchers; here it was on an afternoon of sweetness infused with the perfectly pitched almost painful bugling of bus brakes and the smell of just-cut grass that Tyler, paying homage to a compulsion he could not control, went into the bead store and bought some pewter and bone beads. An hour swirled by like the new Queen slowly unwinding the chain from her wrist as the latest bitch in trouble knelt, not daring to gaze upon her tattooed glitter-frescoes. He sat on the grass and strung unhappiness on a piece of silver wire.

A boy with long blond hair and eyes whose lids resembled Tyler’s tattered leather wallet sat beside him and said: Where are you staying?

Capp Street.

Oh. Oh.

And what are you about? sighed Tyler, stringing beads.

Meeting you! — and with this the boy thrust out his hand and left it hanging weirdly in midair until Tyler took it. It felt like white bread soaked in milk.

I like how your hand feels, said the boy yearningly.

Well, glad you enjoyed it, said Tyler. You have anything to tell me before I go?

You’re going? You’re going?

Yep.

Where?

To pick up some prostitutes.

Boys or girls?

Girls.

Girls! said the boy, stunned.

See you, said Tyler, but the boy didn’t answer.

Nodding at the blonde stubble-headed girl whose skull was tattooed or dyed with sky-blue stars, at the cat-quick skinny runaways who giggled and then suddenly spilled out shrill obscenities like blowfishes puffing themselves menacingly against some threat; bowing to black girls whose dreadlocks were chased in gold — not as many tie-dyed people as ten or twenty years ago; the thing now seemed to be short hair and T-shirts — Tyler strolled, playing with his beads.

At Shrader Street he noticed two Brady’s Boys excitedly pacing, one saying to the other: See that guy in the trenchcoat? He’s a pickpocket. He used to work for the Queen. Let’s bust his ass! — Sutro Tower’s red and white backbone rose headlessly above the Victorian houses, its hollow vertebrae blue with sky. At the end of Haight Street, Golden Gate Park drew its green line against the evil world. More people stationed themselves on the grass than he remembered, cigarette smoke rising at a slow slant between coughing and spitting heads and greasy little backpacks and ball caps pointed backward. They shared cartons of french fries. Sometimes a man would stride across the grass, his shirt opened to the tanned or tainted flesh, and another shirt tied around his waist, and pigeons would flock around his head. In a year or so, just as Strawberry had prophesied on that day when the tall man came home from the hospital, our local government would build a fence here to keep them out. A boy in a cap, a hooded sweatshirt and tall rubber rainboots which came up to his knees struggled in the hot sun, dragging his pack behind him; sighing, he threw it down and lay on it. A girl dressed in blue denim from head to toe wandered past him, sipping from a paper cup.

Why don’t you sleep in the park? said the hooded boy to the girl.

Tried that once but it’s too cold.

It’s not so bad. Anyone can do it.

Tyler listened, strangely excited and encouraged, he didn’t know why.

It’s a secret, the boy went on. The manager he don’t know I sleep here.

What time does he get there?

Eight o’clock. I hear the first bus, and then the second bus, and then I know I gotta be awake and out of here.

On a bench, three Brady’s Boys were looking at a tourist map, one of them laughingly reciting: There’s scum on the streets! We got right on our side! — But the second Brady’s Boy, who was older, sadly shook his head and said: It’s called rapport, guys. You don’t want treat ’em like crap. You wanna develop ’em.

Sighing, Tyler clattered his beads.

| 500 |

The pink form said in English and Spanish:

— NOTICE TO DEFENDANT—

YOU ARE BEING SUED BY PLAINTIFF

To protect your rights, you must appear in court on the trial date shown…

Let’s see, there was his small claims case number: 97SC08089…

It was some bank in South Dakota this time. His other credit card company used them.

DEFAULT ON A REVOLVING CHARGE ACCOUNT DATED 22/20/93

A. _x__I have asked defendant to pay this money but it has not been paid.

Maybe I’ll challenge the venue, he muttered to himself. Bastards.

Oh, the hell with it. I’ll just default.

For a moment, he imagined himself in court, looking into his debtor’s eyes. Then he said to himself: Hell, I don’t care what they think.

One of the first indications that a person is becoming an addict is that he loses interest in others. A love-addict masks this symptom by virtue of the addiction itself, which is others.

He still had his computer, on whose monitor sailed a pretty screen saver depicting the outer planets. Accessing Webscape Crawler, he grimaced at the familiar connecting noise and ran a nationwide credit check on himself.

Oh, fuck, he said. This really is not too good.

Hardened in his defiance, like any sinner destined for hell, which must be as hot as the Greyhound station in Marysville on a July day, Tyler had long since walled his pallid heart away from embarassment, so that when Irene was still alive he’d tortured her with endless declarations of that submission which really is not submission at all since it insists on being accepted; he’d yielded himself to what he believed was Irene, but in reality was nothing but his own terrible passion which drove him day after day to telephone Irene and leave such messages as: Irene, I wanted to tell you how happy I was to hear your voice on the answering machine last night because you know that I love you so much; I’m passionate about you, Irene; Irene, I wish I could be the ground you walked on. Irene, I’m yours. I belong to you. — Did he know or care that John could call in from work at any time and by pressing two keys of the touchtone phone play back every recorded message? Once when he and John and Irene were all staying at Mrs. Tyler’s house in Sacramento, Irene and John had gone home a day early due to a crisis at John’s office, and the lovesick man stayed on with his mother, then left a message for Irene (who was out buying oranges, halibut and long green beans in Chinatown) that he had slept last night between the sheets she’d slept in and on her pillow found two long, beautiful strands of her black hair which he would keep forever; he felt happy uttering these words for the record, or at any rate relieved; but as soon as he’d hung up, sadness welled up through his chest, flooding and drowning his heart, rising into his throat so that he almost choked and then burst out of his eyes in very painful tears; rising still higher, it flooded his skull, sinking into his brain to make him almost drunk; he stared at the telephone, licking his lips, craving to take the receiver into his hand and dial Irene’s number again (it hadn’t even been five minutes). He didn’t call her for the rest of the day. That night at seven and then at eight and at nine he glanced at the phone but it did not ring. When he went to bed he brought the telephone close, just in case, but she never called. The next day he was so sad and anxious he felt almost crazy. He wanted to dial her but said aloud: Don’t you have any shame?

(Oh, he was entirely capable of shame. One windy afternoon when John, Irene, Tyler, the dog and Mrs. Tyler drove across the Golden Gate Bridge for a stroll on Stinson Beach, Irene had walked alone, looking squat and disheveled as she sand-trudged with her head down, her hair messed up, her legs braced apart, a bulky sweater further widening her; and John was chatting quite cheerfully with his mother while Tyler tried to be good but never quite succeeded in dragging himself into the breeze-snatched conversation (which had to be shouted, almost, against the sea-roar), so he gradually allowed air currents to guide him closer to the dark wet sand-edge and found Irene beside him. He stroked her hair. She neither smiled, nor spoke, nor moved away. For a good quarter-hour they walked side by side, he feeling dull and almost angry at Irene, who possibly felt the same; on the way back, uphill through the windy dunes, John had dropped behind to throw sticks into the ocean for the dog, and Mrs. Tyler gasped to Irene: I’m not so young anymore; you’re so strong; and she grasped her daughter-in-law’s shoulder. — Oh, come on, said Irene, shrugging her off, and marched ahead alone. Tyler hung his head, humiliated by Irene’s rudeness to his mother.)

His hand lifted the receiver; he overruled his hand. At six that evening the tension within him locked him almost breathless, so he dialled Irene’s number and got a busy signal. He felt a sickening illicit thrill, as if he had heard her micturating behind a closed door. She was there at that moment. (No matter that it might have been John.) Irene was talking to someone. Could it be Jesus? Had she been just then guaranteed a ticket to Heaven? Slightly eased, he was able to resist phoning her for another two hours. At 8:01, he called and Irene answered. She said that she was busy. She was very nice to him. She chatted with him for nearly fifteen minutes, after the third or fourth of which he felt his desperation begin to ebb. For the remaining ten minutes he felt amazed and thankful to be his old self. Irene had saved him. He told her this, at which she laughed lightly and said: I never knew I was so powerful! — He babbled: Now I know how my heroin junkie friends feel when they fix. They call it getting well. You’re my drug, Irene. You’re my best, best drug. — That was how he spoke to her. She laughed and seemed to like it (although really she might have felt uncomfortable; she might have even hated him). She said it always calmed her to talk to him. That night he won a victory against himself: he insisted that he need not tell her anymore that he loved her. If he had, she would merely have woodenly replied thank you. He left the conversation gracefully, feeling not exactly happy, but immensely relieved. Five or ten minutes after he was alone again, with the darkness outside, the tension began to return. He almost panicked. It was a sickness. He remembered how when he’d been learning to swim, aged eight or nine, they’d told him to tread water and he was all right until suddenly the water didn’t hold him up anymore and he was going under, drowning, not knowing why. Now with Irene he was terrified by what was happening to him. Above all he was terrified of his own evil.

The next day he called her answering machine and said: Irene, last night I had a fever and a sore throat and I, uh, I dreamed that I was sucking your breasts, which were full of very hot, sweet, thick, whitish-yellow, sweet milk that glowed in the dark and tasted like vanilla. In my dream, your milk soothed my throat. I woke up and my sore throat was better.

He hesitated, then went smoothly on: The other news is that I can either come in on Friday and take you out for lunch, or I can wait until Saturday and meet you at any time you wish. Please call me and let me know.

Irene did not return that call.

The next day he called her answering machine and said: Irene, please forgive me. I’m sorry. I’ll try to control my feelings better. I’ll try not to call you every day anymore. I won’t call you unless you call me. I’m just calling now because I didn’t hear from you about lunch. If you feel uncomfortable around me now, I won’t bother you anymore, I swear, Irene. Just let me know your plans. I’m sorry I’ve been so stupid. I haven’t felt like this since I was sixteen. I feel so idotic and angry at myself and so miserable. I don’t know why this had to happen. Don’t stop being my friend.

Irene had not returned that call, either.

| 501 |

There was a Cambodian girl he knew who looked a little like Irene.

He put his hand on her thigh. All day she let him hold her hand; she’d held his hand back; she’d snuggled up into his arms. He began to stroke her thigh. He stroked her hair.

You like to touch my hair? she said.

Your hair is so soft, he said.

(She had to stay home to care for her parents. Her sister she didn’t trust so much.)

Now his hand was right between her legs, and he was rubbing her mons veneris which he could feel through the polyester slacks which were getting damp there. Imperceptibly she opened her thighs a little more. He stroked, and they never looked at one another.

You like to touch that? she finally said.

So much, he said.

She put her hand on his hand and drew her fingers across his as he masturbated her.

A moment later she moaned. That animal happiness of hers thrilled him.

But then she said: It’s making me nervous.

Sometimes he called her on the phone to give her compliments. As soon as he had hung up, he felt sad and miserable inside. Once he called her back five minutes again and she seemed just as happy to talk to him as ever. He felt happy, too. Then the conversation ended, and he hung up and felt miserable again.

| 502 |

Speak when spoken to, you little bitch, chuckled Domino, slapping Sapphire across the face.

Doan hit back! whispered Beatrice, for whom running away had not worked out.

| 503 |

Mr. Brady? said Tyler.

How the fuck did you get my number? This is an unlisted number. This is a business number.

Unfortunately, it was in a new CD-ROM product that just arrived today, said Tyler.

Wait a second, said Brady. Do I know you?

Do you know me, boss, or do you just believe that you know me, or do you believe that I believe that you believe that I know you?

Henry fucking Tyler! boomed Brady in high delight. This San Francisco voice reminded him that he had fond memories of the Ritz Carlton Hotel, of the bells from Grace Cathedral mingling with the trolleycar bells. — Well, how the blazes are you, old son?

Can’t complain, Mr. Brady. And you?

I personally am doing quite well, said Brady. This Feminine Circus thing, well, everyone just loves it. Feminine Circus is going places, son.

Well, how about that, said Tyler.

We ran a lot of marketing experiments, said Brady. We tested the product within an inch of tolerance. And you know what, Henry?

What? said Tyler.

The goddamned product held up.

Well, I’ll be, said Tyler.

Cut to the chase now, said Brady. What do you need?

Where’s the Queen, Mr. Brady?

Which Queen? laughed Brady. Don’t tell me that even you ended up falling for that horseshit you snookered me with…

That’s a mixed metaphor, boss. Well, no. I guess it could just be an odd one.

I don’t have time to screw around, said Brady.

Okay, boss, but I do. So where’s the Queen?

What do you really want? Brady said wearily.

I want the Queen back. I want my Queen.

You’re a nutcase, Brady growled. Falling for some skanky little black bitch who never even existed. It’s not going to happen, Henry. Take a hint. You’re nuts. You’re in dreamland. Now, let me ask you something. Are you just a nut, or are you going to make yourself a dangerous nut?

I’ll say just one word more, Tyler said. Please.

This is embarrassing, said Brady. Now, Henry, I’m sorry for you, but I’m going to have to let you go now…

| 504 |

Toward the end of November he dated Beatrice again. (Outside, two kinky-looking, fat-buttocked cops were helping a weeping woman into an ambulance, the one at her elbow, leading her up the ramp; nobody was in any hurry so any other passengers must have died.) He asked about the Queen. Beatrice whispered that she was too afraid to revisit that subject, but Strawberry was up in Sacramento now, and Sacramento was far enough away from Domino and Brady that Strawberry might feel safe…

But she didn’t. When he finally tracked her down, she wasn’t hooking downtown or in Oak Park anymore; she was doing three months in Rio Consumnes for parole violation. Her real name was Naomi Luisa Ehernberger. Inmates whose last names began with any letter between A and M inclusive were allowed visitors on Saturday mornings, provided that their behavior had been apathetic or assiduous. He drove down from Sacramento in Dan Smooth’s car at seven on a bright cool leafy Saturday morning with scarcely any traffic to hinder him. He took Route 99 south to the exit for Elk Grove Boulevard and then pulled into the first service station he saw and got directions to the prison. The cop at the door sent him back to the car twice, the first time because he’d dared to show up with his wallet in his pocket, and the second time because there were too many keys on his keyring. These contraband items having been rendered inoffensive, the cop at the door slowly read his visiting application slip twice, disparaged his penmanship, and motioned him into the hallway where after waiting in a line of quiet patient people he met a second cop who scrutinized his application slip and sent him upstairs where after showing the application slip and his driver’s license to an old desk cop who stamped his hand WDF for Women’s Detention Facility he had the pleasure of settling into one of the many white plastic chairs which faced the television’s advertisements for wonderful cars with almost no money down and easy hazy future obligations; he stayed there for about half an hour, until they called for all persons whose hands had been stamped WDF to line up. He followed his peers across the parking lot past the high fence with the sign MALE PRISONER INTAKE to the Women’s Detention Facility upon the ivied walls of whose exercise yard another sign read NOTICE: IT IS UNLAWFUL TO COMMUNICATE WITH INMATES IN THIS FACILITY. Inside the cafeteria where he was going to meet Strawberry, another sign prohibited the inmates from attempting communication with the food servers, and Strawberry would tell him in that place the women weren’t suposed to talk to each other, either. They had ten or fifteen minutes to eat, four to a table, and the administration didn’t want any fights. Tyler showed his application slip to a pretty deputy behind glass, then went to the bathroom because the deputy had just announced that anybody who needed to use the toilet during the visit would not be allowed to come back. A hale, whitehaired old man stood straining over the toilet. Tyler heard three or four staccato drops of liquid splash into the bowl. — Weren’t hardly worth it, laughed the man with a wink, leaving the toilet to Tyler, who after a more volumetrically successful urination returned to the waiting hall to discover that beside the panoramic window-view of steel seats and telephones a door had been opened permitting egress to the cafeteria into which uncertain women in yellow or red institutional shirts were now advancing, each searching for her visitor. Later, when Tyler met Chocolate at the Wonderbar and told her where he’d been, she asked what color shirt Strawberry was wearing, and when he said yellow, Chocolate looked sad and said: She’s in the bad place. Poor thing. — Camelia Dorm, he said. — That’s the worst, Chocolate said. That’s the fishbowl place where they don’t trust you. Screws watching you everywhere.

(That was almost the last time he saw Chocolate. He saw her once more a month later in lacy black, limping eagerly after the tall man who, pushing a stolen shopping cart heaped with stolen women’s clothes, scarcely glanced at her. A car slowed, and the tall man said to the driver: You lookin’? —Naw, just lookin’, said the driver, and sped off. The tall man cursed. Tyler was too heartsick even to call out. He watched them vanish down Sixteenth Street.)

At the prison the other visitors were embracing their women, and when he saw Strawberry approaching him, tanned, overweight, tense and glum, he thought that she would embrace him, too, the way she always did at the Queen’s or in the Wonderbar, so he was actually stupid enough to have begun to outstretch his arms to her when he saw that she had another visitor, an old regular who sometimes entertained her down in Stockton, a half-toothless ex-con who loved Strawberry and had taken the risk of coming here — luckily, they hadn’t checked his record this morning; otherwise, he’d have been busted. — Strawberry flew into his arms, gazing apprehensively at Tyler.

Hi, Henry, she said tonelessly.

Seeing that she feared the ex-con’s jealousy, Tyler shook the man’s hand and talked exclusively to him for a moment or two, then said: Well, listen, if you two need some privacy maybe I’ll just sit over at this other table for a bit. Take your time.

Just five minutes, said the ex-con, very friendly now that Tyler had put him first.

Tyler sat gazing at nothing for fifteen minutes until Strawberry called him over.

How’s everything? he said.

Fine.

Beatrice says to tell you she loves you.

Strawberry shrugged.

Dan Smooth’s in trouble.

So what?

Are they treating you okay?

Fine.

How many girls in your dorm?

Fifty-nine. Five toilets. We get up at four in the morning for breakfast and sometimes there’s a long line for the toilet, but otherwise it ain’t bad.

Look, you’re kind of my family, so I… You got any friends in here?

I just keep to myself, Strawberry said. She sat anxiously gazing at the ex-con, so Tyler turned to him and for five minutes the two men spoke of beer and whiskey and Delta towns. Tyler asked the ex-con if he ever got into San Francisco much and the ex-con said he didn’t. Tyler told him to come to the Wonderbar and he’d buy him a drink.

Well, I don’t go drinking that much on my own anymore, the ex-con said. When Strawberry’s there I kind of keep in line. Otherwise I seem to get myself in trouble.

Yeah, I understand, said Tyler. Well, you’re a lucky man to have Strawberry to look after you.

Strawberry hung her head.

Strawberry, he said, I need to know something. There’s a lady I’m looking for — a lady I love. I think you know who she is.

Don’t, said Strawberry, weeping. Please don’t.

A guard came over to their table and said: Calm yourself down now. You don’t want to go upsetting everybody else.

Just tell me this, Tyler said. Can I keep looking? Is there any hope?

Do you have any idea what would happen to me if Domino heard that we had this conversation?

Well, said Tyler to the ex-con, I’m sure that you and Strawberry have a lot to talk about, so I’ll be on my way. Strawberry, I’ll put ten dollars in your account.

Good to know you, said the ex-con, accepting Tyler’s hand.

The Queen used to say I always kept a dirty clod of dirt in my mouth, Strawberry laughed desperately.

You miss her, too, don’t you?

She was so good to Sapphire. I used to cut out curtains from paper and glue them into little cardboard boxes to make dollhouses for Sapphire but she never played with ’em ’cause she…

Wasn’t she good to you, too? he bullied her. Wasn’t she good to all of us?

You were leaving, the ex-con said. I already shook your hand.

Tyler went out. — I want a Queen with number eighteen trisomy syndrome, he muttered with a laugh. Or a hyperactive microcephalic girl…

| 505 |

At eight-thirty the next morning it was sunny and cool, and while somebody with a long-handled swab washed the windows of Pancho Villa’s until they were as sparkling mirrors, a black man and a Chicana woman argued on the far side of the street. Tyler had seen the woman working on South Van Ness a couple of nights ago. The man had a stick. First they launched at one another the small arms fire of curses, gradually more highly charged. — Don’t you threaten me or I’ll tell the Queen, you S.O.B., the woman snarled, raising her arms, at which the man got her in a chokehold and started dragging her away by her neck, shaking her as a hunting dog does some still struggling duck. Joyously he shouted: There is no Queen anymore, you ignorant bitch! The old lady beside Tyler shook her head, enjoying every minute of it. When Tyler was younger he had once tried to break up a similar scene in which the man pulled a knife on the woman, but at his approach the woman had thrown one arm around the man, shaken her fist, and told him to mind his own fucking business, while the one with the knife chuckled and sneered. Now Tyler was more like the woman on the sidewalk who was enjoying herself so much, the formulaic head-shakings merely an easy sacrifice on the altar of that enjoyment, the only distinction (and, in the long view of things, not a very important one) being that he didn’t enjoy watching it at all. In short, he didn’t get involved.

The man glanced across the street, saw Tyler, and winked. He yelled: No rub wit’ the Capp Street hoes!

What’d he say, what’d he say? whispered the old lady beside him in fascination.

Well, ma’am, explained Tyler, I think he was telling me not to use condoms if I have sex with the prostitutes on Capp Street. Or else he might have been suggesting that he doesn’t believe I use condoms when I have sex with the prostitutes on Capp Street. Those are the two possibilities that occur to me. Which one do you think is right?

The man came over to them and the lady’s face slammed shut and Tyler said howdy.

Why you standing on the corner like that? the man said to him. You make me nervous. If you stand on the corner you might get popped.

That’s okay, said Tyler. My name’s Mr. Popcorn.

The black man laughed and walked away, muttering over his shoulder: You stupid honky sonofabitch.

| 506 |

Since that first descent into the royal tunnel now so long ago, Tyler’s wounds, trivial though perhaps they were, had never stopped bleeding; in everything he did, he left behind a dark and sticky spoor of sadness which predators could follow. Brady smelled it from the first. That was why he sent Tyler a videocassette meant to humiliate him. Having had no news of the Queen for so long, Tyler took the black plastic cartridge in his hand with helpless dread. After the football game on television cut off, superseded by the now rewound footage, static sizzled with blue harshness on the screen, and then abruptly the tunnel appeared again, or one like it. A procession was approaching. There they were, all the street whores he’d once known, proceeding down a dark passage, each with a bridle in her mouth — a detail which Brady’s slapper, who enjoyed the classics, had gotten out of Herodotus. Brady had dressed the Queen as a slave, in rags and chains. She had a black eye, and her front teeth were knocked out. It was probably all faked, just virtual reality, one of Brady’s nasty jokes. The camera zoomed in. Now he could see that the whores were being required to balance turds on their heads. Most of them were crying. The Queen wasn’t allowed to speak anymore, so she couldn’t comfort them — Brady had threatened to cut her tongue out if she did — and the turd had been placed on the back of her head so that she had to bow her face to keep it from falling. Her eyelids were like cigarette-burned curtains trying to keep out the light.

| 507 |

I keep thinking that she’s somewhere and needs our help, he said, but I don’t even know where to look. It’s all so hopeless. Just for a second I’ll believe that she’s alive and is waiting for us to get her out, and then I’ll come to my senses and…

Oh, shut up, said Smooth. Nice view, huh?

A lady was pushing her infant in a stroller. Tyler couldn’t tell whether the baby was a boy or a girl. But to Smooth it didn’t matter.

Sacramento’s in my blood now, Smooth said. I like this house. I like Q Street. Do you like Q Street?

(Sacramento may be dull but it is centrally located, they say, because westward lies San Francisco only an hour and a half away, unless traffic is terrible; eastward lies skiing and waterskiing at Lake Tahoe; northeastward and southeastward we can also quickly strike the “gold country”—Tyler for his part well remembered a boyhood visit to the Empire Mine whose main shaft slanted down infinitely, buttressed and skeletonized with barrel-ribs, stays, rusty corsets fabricated according to the envisonings of long-dead engineers. Silver droplets of yesterday’s rain leaked through the soil and then transected that endless square shaft, wriggling on a beam of its cold lights. The boy smelled dirt, gravel and old metal. This was earth. This was where he must go.)

I said, do you like Q Street? You know what the FBI calls this house? They call it the Q Street compound.

I hope that makes you feel important.

Don’t be a goody-goody, Henry, said Smooth, whose words remained as always long and slow and unstoppable like a string of cylindrical wine cars on some old train. — Fill up that glass of yours. I love living in Sacramento. But I don’t want to die here. I’d rather die in San Francisco. It sounds more sinful, don’t you think?

But is there any chance that the Queen, uh—

That’s a perfect thought. That thought is as fresh as a young boy’s anus.

Smooth, I—

You had your chance and you didn’t use it, I’m sorry to say. You could have taken her somewhere if you’d really cared, but you know what, Henry? Your envious ears got in the way. You never loved her. You only loved Irene. And for once I’m not trying to be cruel; I’m just speaking the truth.

Would you stop it?

You want my help again, don’t you? Hey, you want me to be a bloodhound on the trail of the Queen’s abductors? Buddy, I’m a private eye from way back! Send me into any men’s room and I’ll sniff the urinal to get their traces. Are they fresh traces? I’ll wonder aloud… Let me see. — Somebody drank a lot of coffee recently, I’ll say to you. It’s got a real strong odor to it. How would those wine connoisseurs put it? Well, a strong Java nose, let’s say, not light and fruity at all, nothing fancy — he’s not one of your espresso men — moving on to a bold finish in the low register with overtones of beer and something meaty, maybe roast beef, maybe a hamburger. And you’ll say thank you, case closed. You’ll say—

Oh, shut up, you twisted sonofabitch.

She’s gone, Henry. Get it? We know that. From her prophecies. Was she ever wrong?

Never.

And what did she say?

But that’s bullshit, Dan, just to give up on someone because—

Then don’t give up. You’re the private detective. You know how to find lost people. Or at least you should know, Sherlock.

Knowing that if he did not patiently persist and bear the other man’s insults, still another hope would be closed — remembering likewise the Queen’s fantastic notions on the virtue of undeserved suffering — he controlled his despairing rage and said: What about Domino?

What about her?

She’s got to know something.

Look, Henry. Domino’s as much a victim in all this as anyone. I don’t care how evil you think she is.

But it doesn’t add up. She—

That avenue is closed, Henry. It’s closed even to me. Domino and I have an agreement not to see each other anymore. It’s too painful for both of us.

Now what’s that supposed to mean? Were you in on it, too?

Paranoia will get you everywhere.

I’m going to talk to Domino.

That’s better. It’s better to be confronted with your failures at every turn. You’ll see. Tell me what she smells like these days…

Why?

Why what?

Why don’t you care about Africa?

I’ll bet you just wish you had the guts to punch me, don’t you? But you’re afraid you might lose information.

Tyler, feeling almost unbearably disgraced and humiliated, burst out: Whatever you and I talk about, and it’s been this way every goddamned time, I always have the feeling that it’s useless…

As it is. And you know why? Because you’re useless. You remember when I told you that I could see from your mouth that you like to go down on women? Well, now let’s talk about your teeth, Henry, your lying, grinning teeth. You lie through your teeth, you know that? If you ever said anything straight and honest it would choke you coming out of your crooked soul. — And Smooth, fixing his blinking, bleary eyes on him as best he could, brought his face closer and closer until Tyler was trapped in the stench of his breath and cried out: Now you’re just goading me again — for nothing. And you always tell me I don’t like you, and you do everything you can to make that true.

At least I got you off the topic of the Queen, so grin and bear it. But you’re avoiding the issue, because in addition to your envious ears and your lying teeth you have a coward’s heart. Have another shot, said Smooth, refilling his own glass first. — There’s ice in the freezer. I accuse you, Henry Tyler. I accuse you of letting down everyone you ever loved or had a tie to, of failing the Queen, betraying your brother, seducing and torturing your sister-in-law, neglecting your mother, rejecting Domino — oh, I could go on and on. The one thing I’ll say for you is that you’ve run your little business into the ground; that shows some integrity. You see, Henry, if I could get you angry then you wouldn’t be sad about other trifling points. Isn’t that how it works? Or are you a man like me who can be angry and sad at the same time?

And whom didn’t you let down, Dan?

Oh, almost nobody. You, Domino and the Queen, I suppose. I like to believe I never let you down, Henry. So don’t start kvetching and asserting that I’m letting you down now. All this has a higher purpose.

I don’t get it. I mean, I—

Know what those FBI turds told me? Let’s say you have your dick up some eight-year-old boy’s ass and it slips out. You know, accidents happen. And so you put it back in and… Well, that’s an additional felony count right there, even though you hadn’t even finished. Can you get that?

Dan, when you talk that way you’re just smearing yourself with filth. It’s as if you—

So I’m letting you down.

It has nothing to do with letting me down. I’m trying to tell you not to—

And you think, and the FBI thinks, and everybody except the Queen thinks that I let those kids down. Well, did I?

Can we just for one minute make this about the Queen and not about you and me?

Isn’t this a religious experience, Henry? Can’t you see God in my shit? And you know what makes you so dishonest? God’s speaking now, so you’d better listen. I’m telling you loud and clear, boy, that the reason you’ve let everyone down is because you can only love completely what you don’t have.

Tyler was silent.

You had her! You had her and she loved you!

I had whom?

Why didn’t you kill yourself? Then you could have been with Irene, at least. Maybe if you hurry up and do it you can still catch up with the Queen before she turns into fog—

Don’t think I haven’t thought about it, Tyler muttered.

You’ll never do it. She told you to travel, so you’ll travel. I’ll do it long before you.

You know as little as I do, said Tyler, how all this will end.

| 508 |

Through interviews with former friends, associates and intimates, [CENSORED] learned of numerous allegations that Smooth had had sexual relations with boys and girls younger than 16 years of age, including oral, vaginal and rectal penetration. These allegations would later arise in the Bureau’s affidavit in support of the search and arrest warrants.

| 509 |

He wandered into the public defender’s office on Seventh Street and waited behind the counter, staring at the wall inset with a window made of pigeonholes, some empty, some overstuffed with swollen folders. — What’s it on for tomorrow? Your case I mean, the receptionist was saying to a sad defendant. — Department Eighteen, the defendant said. — All right then. — The defendant cleared his throat. — You don’t have a message for me, do you? he asked so sadly. — No sir. And what can I do for you, sir?

I’m looking for a lady named Africa Johnston, Tyler said wearily. I was wondering if she… Oh, forget it.

| 510 |

He knew that the ringleaders of Domino’s crew didn’t go to the Wonderbar anymore after what had happened between the old Queen and Heavyset (oh, so you saw that tall nigger called Justin? the owner remarked to Tyler one afternoon. On account of what he did to me, there’s a warrant out for his arrest! and Tyler felt almost shocked at the vicious self-satisfaction which shone from Heavyset’s face), but one day he spied Domino, dressed from head to toe in glittering silver, drinking alone at the bar at the Naked Eye on Mason Street, on her face a strange, haughtily dreamy expression, as if she were so far lost now that she could barely find her way back to herself; while in the padded lounge-nooks behind her sat three or four of her prostitutes, solemn and anxious.

Well, she said drily.

How’s everything, Dom?

The streets belong to me, the blonde said pompously. She sighed and said: Only thing is, I don’t want ’em.

Well, what do you want?

Good pussy, drawled the blonde, and the other whores clapped their hands over their mouths and laughed.

Domino, he said, please, do you know where the Qu — I mean, where Africa is?

Fuck, that’s just her trick name, said Domino. How can I keep track of some other bitch’s trick names?

I love her. I’m looking for her. That’s all.

Yeah, well what do I care about your love? What good’s it do me?

If I got some money together would you—

A grand’ll work, laughed Domino (and the other whores giggled and whispered: Did you hear what she said to Henry?). Until then I don’t want you talking to me. I don’t want you even coming around.

If I’m going to scrape up a grand for you, I need some proof that what you’ll tell me is worthwhile.

I don’t give a fuck for proof! the blonde snarled. I don’t care if you come back or not.

You must have altered your money-loving ways then, he said. Or maybe you just don’t know anything.

Look, she said. I used to like you okay. You always treated me like an equal. Henry, listen to me. That bitch is dead. And I don’t want you ever, ever to mention her in front of me again. And I don’t want to ever see your face again. I can’t stand to even look at you.I…

Then she slammed her face into her hands and sat there, rocking and trembling, until he was safely gone.

| 511 |

In the upper Tenderloin, before the Aloha Spa (Oriental Massage & Sauna), with its painted green palm trees on yellow, he asked two cute black whores from Oakland: You know Africa?

Darkskinned? Oh, her! Used to be the Queen. Yeah, yeah!

She got killed?

She got killed.

Are you sure?

You mind standing away from the door? one of the whores said.

You mind standing a little closer to the door? Tyler said politely.

He half expected to get screamed at or punched, but the whore, whose sarcasm detector had a dead battery, obligingly moved closer to the door. He then felt impelled to honor his end of the bargain.

Yeah, the other whore said. That Maj you be talkin’ about, she got offed by a runaway car. You know, a hit-and-run. I saw the blood in the street…

Uh-uh, the first whore said. She got some kinda growth tumor in her eye and it formed into cancer. I saw it for myself.

| 512 |

When you take a street whore into your car, you actually carry two passengers — a woman and her addiction.

Excuse me, but I don’t really know you, the whore said. I don’t like your face. You make me nervous.

Well, I don’t know whether to take that as a compliment or not, Tyler said.

It ain’t no compliment, the whore said. You got an evil face. You look like an axe murderer.

All right, then, it’s not a compliment, he said. Where do we go from here? You want to get out of the car? I can let you off here.

In this rain? the whore said. I’m soaked and you want me to go back into the rain? Can’t you see how wet my pants are? And I swear I ain’t pissed my pants; it’s the rain.

It happens sometimes, said Tyler.

How much you gonna gimme?

Nothing. I’m doing the Queen a favor, is all. You just got of jail and I’m driving you home to her. That is, if you want to go home.

Ain’t no Queen no more. Don’t you know that?

I don’t believe it. Anyway, Domino’s the new Queen, didn’t you hear?

Oh, her, the whore sneered.

Who told you the Queen’s dead?

Everybody knows it.

Has anyone seen her dead?

Of course not, ’cause they burned her body. They destroyed the evidence. That’s what they always do.

So no one you know has actually seen her dead, Tyler pursued.

I think you ought to give me some money because it’s my first time, the whore said.

Your first time what?

My first time with you.

So that’s what you think, is it?

Yes it is.

Well, you can think whatever you want, said Tyler. He’d given up trying to ask her anything.

I’m tellin’ you, I’m broke, the girl said.

By now the car stank of her, the smell of unwashed flesh, dirty socks, excrement and wet clothes.

So you want me to drive you to Capp Street or not? he said.

You wanna drive me up to Market Street first so I can get me some french fries and a burger? I’m hungry.

I don’t have time right now, sweetheart, he said. But I’ll take you to Domino if you want.

You won’t buy me a burger? It won’t take but five seconds. We can go through the drive-through lane. Turn here. I said take a right here. You missed it. What’s your fucking problem? Now go back and make that turn. I tole you I’m hungry.

Tyler, glancing for a moment into her scared and angry eyes, understood that she had been recently raped.

| 513 |

That was about the time that he gave up trying to make his car payments. It was the anniversary of his mother’s death. He continued to make inquiries about the Queen, even though the weary silences and insistent avowals of others conspired to uproot the last feebly growing shoots of his hopes. Everybody acted as though he were forcing the issue. He thought to himself: Why shouldn’t it be forced? I’m just disappointed that Smooth is too much of a mess to follow this through… — He was already two months late on his rent, and just as the heads of old locomotives sometimes resemble praying mantis heads or the beaked helmets of robot angels, so his landlord’s face came in his dreams to assume a strangely metallic appearance because Tyler was afraid of him and hated himself, hence deserved to be a mantis’s prey and he could not hide from fate the way that John and Celia could when they attended foggy windy Sundays of street fairs less festive than commercial: booths selling, or trying to sell, robot T-shirts, custom-made wine corks, earrings which resembled fishing lures, elaborate bongs with carven faces inset with colored glass… But he was still chasing, still hunting. He showed everyone photographs of his Queen.

| 514 |

He saw the tall man one Sunday morning in Berkeley when he was buying a ticket to be sped underneath the Bay to San Francisco. Sliding in three successive bills for a $2.45 fare to Sixteenth and Mission, Tyler clicked on the downward-pointing blue arrow to reduce the value of his investment by five-cent increments. When the coins came clattering back out, the tall man approached him with a murky gaze and said: You got twenny-five cents?

Sure, Justin, said Tyler. Why the hell not?

He gave the tall man a quarter.

Where’s the Queen, Justin?

What’s the use?

I visited Strawberry up in Rio Consumnes.

What’s the difference?

Where you headed? said Tyler then in a conversational way.

I can’t say, said the tall man. No place good.

Well, I hope your return trip is better.

It won’t be, said the tall man.

All right, said Tyler, wearily narrowing his eyes. I get it.

I can’t handle it, the tall man said. I still be thinkin’ about it. Now beat it. I don’t wanna never talk with you no more.

Tyler waved sunnily and went through the turnstile. When he turned, he saw the tall man mouthing and re-mouthing the words Just twenny-five cents more while turning away from the ticket machine, into which of course he had delivered no coins, and he began to walk upstairs. He saw Tyler looking at him and said with what might have been ironic servility: Hey, thanks, bro. Gonna get me a forty double up…

Tyler went downstairs to the tracks, angry and saddened.

| 515 |

You never call me or talk to me, an arch teenage voice was saying on Dan Smooth’s answering machine. I gave up on you long ago.

The FBI tracked the originating telephone number and extended the investigation.

| 516 |

[CENSORED] It is clear that Smooth sexually abused minor males and females at the Q Street compound, in addition to having consensual sexual relations with several adult females (misdemeanor counts of prostitution). A number of Smooth’s former friends provided affidavits detailing these sexual relations, including the sexual abuse involving [CENSORED]. [CENSORED], an employee of the Children’s Protective Services Agency, provided the Bureau with a cassette tape of an interview she conducted with a child named Sapph [CENSORED] who repeatedly visited the Q Street compound. This child detailed an incident of sexual abuse involving three counts of oral copulation with a minor and [CENSORED]. This child testified about her experience at the [CENSORED]. Also, during conversation between an informant and Henry Tyler during the week of December 21, Tyler admitted that he knew of Smooth’s sexual abuse of this minor female. The Bureau’s behavioral expert [CENSORED], in a December 2 memoranda to the Bureau, opined that “Smooth may continue to make sexual use of any minor male or female children whom he can lure into the compound.”

| 517 |

That’s very very interesting, he muttered, switching on his computer. That’s where the death records would be kept…

He stared at the screen for a very long time without doing a search. Then he switched the computer off.

| 518 |

Tyler was at the Wonderbar getting drunk. All the barmaids he knew had gotten fired. There weren’t any girls inside.

Have you seen my little streetbird? asked old Jack, clutching at Tyler’s shoulder despairingly.

Which one is she again?

You know her. She’s the most beautiful one of all — you know, the one who…

The old drunk in the cowboy hat interrupted them, shouting: Hey! Hey! Hey! until everyone looked up. — I was in this little old bar in the Ozarks and this gal six foot seven named Sal, she taught me how to jitterbug. Hey! Pay attention! I seen bar fights. I seen ’em. I seen everything.

Yeah, I get it, Tyler said to Jack. But what does she look like?

Some days she says she’s eighty-five percent Sioux Indian and fifteen percent black. Other days she’s fifty percent Indian and fifty percent Irish. I say she’s fifty percent liar. But I don’t care. She’s my streetbird.

I’m trying to find somebody myself just now. I really don’t have all day. You mean Strawberry? I know where she is. You mean Domino?

Strawberry? said Jack in confusion (and ordinarily Jack, that piercing-eyed yet half-blind old ex-welder who sucked his wrinkled cheeks in against his skull whenever he looked a man up and down, was as quick to generalize as the Cantino map of 1502, which, showing parrots on Brazilian coast, named that entire country the Land of Parrots). Well, I don’t rightly… Strawberry! Yeah. That’s her. But to me, you know, she’s just my little streetbird. You should see her when shes flying high — Henry, you know what I mean — and then she’s happy and beautiful it just breaks my heart. There are times when I’d give her everything, and I have. Yes I have. And that girl doesn’t give a damn for me. Well, none of ’em care anyhow. You know that. Don’t you know that? They’ll just say whatever to get all they can out of you. They’re so ruthless — why, they’d set you up to be killed if it would benefit ’em for five minutes. Goddamned whores. But I don’t care. I don’t care, and now I can’t find her.

Strawberry’s in jail, said Tyler. I’ve got to go.

Strawberry? What do you mean Strawberry? Now her name comes back to me. It was Lily! You’ve got to help me, Henry, because Lily’s the one I love. Lily’s my—

Lily’s dead, said Tyler. But what’s the difference? You can’t even remember her goddamned name.

And he went out. They’d impounded his car. He must have parked incorrectly or something. He had a headache. He inhaled the smoke of burning trash cans and of his dead and burning Queen.

| 519 |

He called the district attorney’s office where after several wearisome recorded pushbutton choices he finally had the option of speaking to a real live operator, which meant that he was treated to a fifteen-second blast of classical music, followed by the voice of a firm but pleasant woman saying: That extension does not answer. Please try again later. Goodbye! — He tried again later, three times. Then he tried the criminal investigation number. Nobody there had ever heard of any Africa Johnston.

| 520 |

The Cambodian girl who provisionally resembled Irene, the one whose mons he’d rubbed through the polyester, sent him a letter which ran:

TO: HENRY!!!

I got you letter on 02-23-97, that is very nice of you letter, and I am very thank you to hear all those words from your heart.

I hope I see you again as a good friend and I feel so sorry that I can’t give you any love more than a good friend.

Thank you

SOEUN

He kept that letter for a long time. Then he tore it into strips which issued from his opening fingers into separate trash cans, because he was afraid of being unfaithful to the Queen or Irene…

Later that day he was on Kearney Street and saw John and his colleagues all in a football huddle, deciding where to go for drinks. As he passed them, they stared at him with the bright round goldish eyes of pigeons.

We’ve got fifteen PEMEX engineers working on the project, he heard John say.

Tyler’s face turned crimson. He waved to John without looking and hurried off, walking and walking until he’d come all the way down to Sixteenth across from the Roxie Theater, practically in the doorway of Ti Couz which was too loud or too busy for John except on weekends when John liked to feel free. Tyler watched cloud-cream glowing down on the slate-blue sky of twilight, lamps already shining in a row halfway up the height of each street-block’s dwelling-crystal. Now the clouds were going yellow. People rushed to dinner, cars peered troll-eyed ahead, and buses, almost friendly in shape, rolled up and down before him. A huge group of tourists received birth from a Dodge van and gathered in front of Ti Couz, reading the menu aloud.

The next morning John telephoned him.

Yeah, he said.

How’s business? John said.

Fine.

Don’t bullshit me.

You’re wrong. You’re trying to force the issue, John, and everybody’s always saying I’m forcing the issue but—

How are you doing, Hank?

All right, he said, his heart aching, remembering not Irene at all, strangely enough, but the Queen standing before the mirror with her arms raised, affixing the pink plastic curling set that Beatrice had gotten her, her armpits full of darkness.

Bullshit, said John.

How about you, John? How’s Celia? How’s business?

Listen, Hank, his brother said. What do you need to get your life together?

Oh, hell, said Tyler. I, uh—

I’m not asking this for you, John continued in a shriller voice. I don’t give a damn about you. But I promised Mom before she died. I’m doing it for Mom.

All right, great. You’ve done your duty to Mom. Now let her bones and my bones and Irene’s bones rest in peace, said Tyler, slamming down the receiver savagely.

| 521 |

My slaves know what to do when they’re in there, don’t they? drawled Domino.

The reaching arms in the cage, the stroking Queen, the strange squeals and squeaking in parallel with the black dildo that stank, still gave off an insect hive impression. A woman muttered: Well, it stinks because you haven’t… — Yes, she was talking about the Queen’s long black shiny dildo in that cage filled with women playing with each other. Beatrice with quick and fearful side-smiles told the Queen she loved her.

Snapping her whip in the air, Domino chuckled, I’m not just going to break the sound barrier, I’m going to break the skin barrier.

A shaved head began gliding up the Queen’s thighs.

Let me just pet you, Domino purred. You’re such a gentle little thing. You’re so…

That hurts, the girl said.

Speak when spoken to, Domino chuckled, slapping her across the face.

Walking slowly around her little cherubs, her little girls (who included a whore as wide as Australia), her little toys — how nicely they played for her! — she admired rosy arms and legs in the cage, tongues and laughs, swollen labia. They’d all forgotten the old Queen, she was sure. (But I am starting to feel better about myself, she mumbled. I don’t think about myself as much as I used to.) And, indeed, it would be surpassingly easy for us to forget the old Domino as well — which is to say, the young Domino, the runaway. Go back fifteen years and see her barefoot and dirty. The pale unsmiling face kept blinking, lost, the blonde hair tarnished, as she sat there in the American Embassy in Mexico City, cradling a dirty blanket about her. The tall boy in the white shirt, grimacing, took a pen out of his pocket. — First you tell me one name, then another, he said. Is there anyone else?

Please let me think, she whispered. Please. Leave me alone and let me think.

Oh, so there is another father? said the clerk.

Mr., uh, Northway. Please. This time it’s for real. He’s my real father. His name’s Mr. Northway and I know he lives on Northway Lane…

Oh, so now you want me to call Mr. Northway on Northway Lane. No, I won’t call him. I’ve had it. It’s too much.

Yeah, I’m Northway, Tyler would have said, butting his way into the conversation. I’ll take custody of my daughter right now. Come on, honey, I’m taking you home.

Hey, who the fuck are you? slurred the girl in semiconscious alarm.

You can call me Dad, Tyler would have said, grabbing her hand and pulling her out before she shredded his cover story any further.

They got in the elevator and she said: You gonna hurt me?

No, Domino, Tyler sighed. No, probably not.

They went out. The guard gave them back their passports, and they passed through the tall steel gate.

You wanna french me? said the girl vaguely.

Sure, said Tyler, popping an antacid. I know French. Ne pencher pas au dehors means don’t pinch the whores.

But none of that happened; nobody came along to rescue Domino until the old Queen did and by then it was already too late.

And so, kneeling outside the door and mewing like mice, they welcomed their long-thighed new Queen coming out from the closet to whip their tattooed flesh with black movements and gritting teeth while their friends kept singing and giggling and kissing each other, laughing in the cage, Queen Domino now leaning on the cage, black-clothed with her black eyes peeling blue-black jewels away from their souls, positioning shining leather girls in each other’s arms, terrifying them with her stranger’s teeth, wide open lips, applying jewel-like bruises down their tattooed backs, hugging them, shaking breasts, playing, rubbing the triple-pink lips, pinching and licking buttocks, devouring alike the wise and the lovely heads, the shadowed eyes, Strawberry’s heels clicking on the floor, Bernadette’s fat heart-shaped buttocks (she could have been any old varicose slut with sneakers and a slave’s upturned eyes). A whore knelt, cage-shadows on her flesh, praying to the Queen’s apples…

I reach into that little place right inside of me, Domino said to them. I feel everything. I am everything. I’m your Queen.

She slowly sank her fingernails into Strawberry’s nipple until the woman screamed. She drank the cool feel of Bernadette’s navel.

We’re playing with each other, she whispered, because we’re reaching inside…

Terrified, Chocolate cleared her throat.

I’ve always been a showgirl, Domino murmured to them all. Every time you walk onstage, every time you do a lap, every time you rise some man, that’s about bravery. Then he has to cough the fuck up—not necessary money, but something. And so do you. If I can sit here and spread my legs for money and not know any of these people, can you take off your bras? Can you let me stick my dildoes up you? Can you suck me? I guess that would depend on what you wanted, wouldn’t it? But I’m telling what what I want — oh, you sluts, you cunts, you fucking whores!

And she was happy, coasting the long curves of back and pussy, until Bernadette started lifting her hands and going a-a-a-a-a-a-a-aaaaaah—

Oh, she’s going into one of her convulsions, said Domino, bored. Forget it! The ritual’s ruined.

Domino’s reign was supposed to go on forever. But one night when she was walking across the freeway in her dazzling silver hotpants, a car swerved toward her. With a started cry, Domino raised her hand to her mouth, then began to back away just as the car struck her. That was months later, long after she’d been established and other amusing things had happened. (She was real cranky, Chocolate later recalled. I was, like, I didn’t wanna be on the other side from that bitch.)

| 522 |

On the anniversary of Irene’s death the false Irene was out selling pussy on Eighteenth and Capp when a gentleman picked her up, a nice old gentleman she knew named Brady, who paid well for a quick no-nonsense suck. She’d just been beaten up by two tall black men, and told him so. He grinned a little and said: Why don’t you girls stick together more and protect each other?

We used to do it like that, she said, but the girls have changed. They’re usin’ too much. You just can’t trust another girl no more.

| 523 |

As for Beatrice, she finally went back to Mexico where she wore pink cotton dresses and walked slowly in the heat, swaying from side to side.

| 524 |

Here in America we aren’t willing to treat each other as human beings anymore, Smooth was saying, standing in the air-conditioned darkness with a cigarette flame shooting like escaping treasure from his lips.

Tell me about it, said Tyler.

And you know what? When I cross this burning earth — hey, asshole, are you listening to me? I said: When I cross this burning earth…

You’re drunk, Dan. Don’t call me an asshole.

You’re the one who’s going to cross the earth. Your Mark is shining tonight.

I’m not going anywhere, Tyler muttered.

You’re going to get you an education, boy. Remember what the Queen said?

The Wonderbar was louder and noisier now that Loreena had gotten fired. In the corner beside Tyler, a drunk resembled a Brady’s Boy snoozing at headquarters, chin on hand, in an armchair by the wall of recycling cartons.

So what if I’m drunk? Are your ears getting envious, Henry? Don’t interrupt me. I needed to tell you how irritatingly commonplace it’s now become to hear such stupidi-ties as: Speaking as a woman, I find this piece of pornography offensive.

You don’t like women much, do you, Dan?

You know I like twats! And that sister-in-law of yours, I—

Go to hell, Dan.

I never felt that women understood me. When I was in my twenties I used to… I…

What would the Queen have done? Tyler asked himself. And then he knew. He put his hand on Smooth’s shoulder. He said: I’m listening.

He’d already kept Smooth company for two hours in the Mother Lode, whose tinsel purple and green resembled seaweed. Even though it was Friday, the disco ball had remained still. They’d sat among the easy transvestites and the hard transvestites drinking their beers, made-up men’s made-up faces expressionless beneath the powder as their bloody-red lips made O’s and they crossed their big thighs in their shimmery miniskirts. There was one genetic female in the place, an uneasy soul who seemed to be realizing only gradually that she was the sole representative of her gender. Meanwhile, Smooth’s utterances grew charged with enthusiastic and increasingly incoherent bitterness. Tyler was torn between boredom and pity.

They’re funding the attack, said Smooth, shaking off his hand. I’m sure Brady’s in on it. So it’s very very duplicitous what they’re doing. Do you even care? Justin cares. Our Queen would have cared, but she’s in the same place as your sister-in-law.

Tyler bit his lip.

Your fucking sister-in-law. That dead rotten fucking sister-in-law bitch. That cunt. That whore. That she. What does she have to speak as a woman for?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, said Tyler, scratching his face.

She’s saying: If you disagree with me, you’re disagreeing with half the human race. And I’d wager that she knows half the human race no better than I do. It’s a cowardly and dishonest attempt at intimidation, is what it is. And I find it very sad that such words pit one group against another when right now we all need to help each other because we’re all under attack, and if you don’t agree, you can just go eat your dead sister-in-law’s twat…

Are you okay, Dan?

What the fuck do you mean, am I okay? I’m under investigation and this jerk asks me if I — if I…

Let me drive you home, Dan.

Aren’t we being schoolboyish? And you expect me to go on feeding you with my divine wisdom — my, I’d never have thought it! And those FBI turds… There’s nothing that’s okay the way it is.

All right, Dan. Here we go. Door’s wide open.

And the Queen—

Lean on me for a minute there.

And you and your envious ears—

Lean back so I can put your seat belt on, Dan.

The Queen, Henry.

Yeah, the Queen.

Do you read the Scriptures?

You must have asked me that a hundred times.

I think she made it easier to make changes, to like experiment, try and be somebody better. And now I… Although I can’t believe it, either. I’m on your side, Henry, but she’s truly gone. I love you, Henry. I want myrrh and aloes to wrap up inside her shroud. I want to lay her in a new tomb and wait for her to rise. I want to believe in fucking miracles. Isn’t that rich? As if that asshole up in the clouds would ever give anybody with the mark of Cain a break!

You’re wrong there, Dan. He put the mark of Cain on us to save us, and you know it. He said: If anyone slays Cain, vengeance shall fall upon him sevenfold.

I don’t give a shit. I need miracles, Smooth wept.

I know, said Tyler, seeing with his soul’s eye the Queen’s soul leaping tall and slender and stiff into a smoky yellow sky.

And I know what that brother of yours would say. He’d say, Let’s keep the Queen out of this. But that won’t do any good, Henry, because you’re going to have to live without Irene and without the Queen for the rest of your whole goddamned life. You’re going to have to live with yourself, Henry, you poor sad bastard. I feel so sorry for you, I just pity your stinking guts…

All right, Dan. Here we go. Now, when we get to your house, I’m going to need your key so I can let you in. Do you know where your housekeys are?

They’re in Irene’s twat, Henry. They’re jammed up your victim’s cunt. She died because she hated you. You wouldn’t leave her alone and she was so desperate to get away from you that she—

Tyler switched on the radio.

| 525 |

On August ninth, which was Irene’s birthday, two black girls approached the counter giggling and whispering, and the righthand one, who was very pretty and dark and full-breasted, said to the man: Excuse me, but are you helping anybody?

Nope, the man said. The sign beside him said: ALL SALES FINAL.

Where the long glass counter started was at the partition that said LOAN DEPT., behind which, attended by a dozen safes, a nighthawk of an old woman sat watching the world with jaundiced eyes.

Beneath that stretch of counter, harmonicas large and small slept on blue felt, some of them cheap, made in China, and a few grand Hohners as silver as the barrel of a Colt Python, cold mirror-silver chased with floral swirls as folkishly stylish as the designs on the immense silver belt buckles sometimes seen in Mexico.

Can you play them harmonicas? asked the girl shyly.

The man folded his arms. — Nope, he said.

How come this little one’s only twenty dollars and this big one’s a hundred and seventy-three dollars?

Well, the man replied, that’s like asking the difference between a Cadillac Fleetwood and a Cadillac Whatchamacallit.

Oh, said the girl.

She looked at the harmonicas for a while, then said: Why’s this big one a hundred and seventy-three dollars and this little one’s two hundred dollars?

I can’t rightly say, the man answered.

The wall behind the counter was hung with banjos and guitars, some black-lacquered. After those, just behind the man, rifles and shotguns leaned barrel up in a long row like prison bars. Within the region of glass case which touched the man’s belly were the pistols and revolvers, beautiful, black, silver and grim.

Can I hold one of those? pleaded the girl laughingly.

Nope, said the man.

I have I.D.

Let’s see it, then.

I’m nineteen.

Then you’re not old enough.

Please?

Nope.

I’m not going to buy it, I promise. I just want to look.

If you can’t buy it, what’s the use of looking? the man said, pleased with his own logic.

I just want to know what it feels like to hold a gun, the girl whispered with lowered eyes.

Her friend screeched mirthfully: Don’t you let her, mister!

Nope, said the man calmly.

The two girls fled. When they were safely outside the store, the pleader turned around and outstretched her tongue.

Can I see that Browning there? said Dan Smooth. What is it, a Buck Mark?

Nope. That’s a Browning Challenger III.

Ah, so it is, said Smooth, flicking his driver’s license down onto the glass counter. The man took it between two fingers and studied it with all the weary thoroughness of an immigration agent inspecting passports. Then he unlocked the counter and took out the dark, gleaming thing with its walnut grips.

Beautiful, said Smooth. But I might not have the guts, you see.

Oh, yeah, said the man. That’s almost new.

How much?

Three twenty-nine.

Uh huh, said Smooth wisely, setting the gun down. At once, the man secreted it under glass again.

Those homeless people still living in the tunnels around the corner? he asked.

Nope.

I see, said Smooth, looking the man in the face. And why’s that?

Why do you want to know?

Business reasons, Smooth explained.

There’s nothing, the man said. Just the traces of ’em. Just the traces of people having been there.

(Down the counter, an 1898 silver dollar caught Smooth’s glance.)

We’ve been around fifty years, the man volunteered unexpectedly. Them homeless, they’ve been around fifty thousand years.

Shame on you, said Smooth with a wink. I’ve told you a million times not to exaggerate.

The man smiled politely.

Of course you never saw a small black woman named Africa in one of those tunnels, Smooth said. Of course you never went inside…

Nope.

How much for that Ruger? said Smooth.

You can have it for four hundred. It’s a 1945 original.

I didn’t know they had Rugers in 1945.

Nope, said the man.

Well, said Smooth, raising his left eyebrow. Then why not three hundred?

Nope.

He took out his wallet. — Here’s two seventy-five for the Browning.

Three hundred.

Nope! screamed Smooth gleefully.

| 526 |

Tyler set off the metal detector. — If you do that three times I’ll have to arrest you, joked the deputy. Now go stand over there.

All right, said Tyler. Once you arrested me, I guess I wouldn’t set it off anymore, would I?

Striding across the new granite flagstones, he arrived at the computer printout and looked up the name, XREF, floor, cell, and pod number. There was no release date. At considerable taxpayer expense they’d installed an aquarium and sandblasted the rock wall with kitschy foliage.

Beaming lawyers turned their backs to the public who had to wait. There were two lines, one for the public and one for the lawyers. The line for the lawyers moved. The one for the public didn’t.

Another lawyer appeared.

The old lady ahead of Tyler said: I’ve been waiting for my entire lunch hour to see my daughter. I’ll probably have to leave soon. Can you hold my place while I feed the parking meter?

Sure can, ma’am.

I’m going to be late for work. Excuse me. Thank you, sir.

She hobbled out. When she returned five minutes later, the public line had not moved an inch, and another lawyer with a big fat grin had stepped into the fast line.

Look what just walked in, the old lady said. There goes another fifteen minutes.

Half an hour later another lawyer walked in, and the old lady said: Screw this! and walked out.

An hour later, Tyler had reached the head of the line.

What is it? said the policeman behind glass.

I’m here to see Daniel Clement Smooth, please, said Tyler. This is his reference number, his floor, his cell, and his pod number.

Oh, today’s his court date, said the cop. No visits allowed today. Come back again another day.

| 527 |

Tyler called his friend Buddy Lopez at the public defender’s office. Perhaps Lopez wasn’t quite his friend after all, for it took him awhile to place Tyler. Finally he said: Okay, I get it. Yeah. You’re the one who… Hey, didn’t I help you out on the Louise Nugent case?

No, lied Tyler, I kind of figure I helped you out.

You did? What did you do for me?

I got you the tape that proved that Louise was hit over the head before she slit that guy’s throat.

And how did you do that?

No offense, chum, said Tyler, but if your memory’s really that bad, you’re going to forget it all before the next time I call you. So let’s just say I told you and you already forgot. How does that grab you?

Why, you impudent sonofabitch. What do you want?

You familiar with the Dan Smooth case?

What about it? That asshole doesn’t need a public defender. He’s got a house. He’s got assets. Let him liquidate his assets and hire an attorney. Scuttlebutt is, they have him dead in the water. Crimes against children and all that. That’s gonna be one helluva case. Pretty juicy details if you ask me. Hey, you know what I heard? In that compound of his on Q Street, they found three dildoes covered with blood. They’re doing the DNA tests now. And you wanna hear the kicker? These dildoes are tiny, man. They had to’ve been used on kids. Little kids.

Who knows? said Tyler. Maybe Smooth was into consensual S & M with midgets. Innocent until proven guilty, right?

You’re quite the party pooper, said Lopez.

Yeah, there’s a sourpuss like me at every Roman circus. How much time do you figure he’ll do?

Well, with time, everyone relaxes. Even a case with a lot of news coverage just becomes another matter in court with the passage of time. If you know the process, Henry, first comes the initial public outcry. The D.A. can beat his chest and demand the death penalty, and when the case gets settled, it could be for something mild the newspapers might be appalled at. And this ain’t no death penalty case, so…

Five years?

Maybe twenty, if he’s lucky. Multiple cases. Multiple victims. For something like this, maybe the statute of limitations will never run out.

| 528 |

Dan Smooth lay dreaming that he was watching his niece make a sand castle. She said: It’s got to be dark inside, ’cuz the King hates the sun.

Why is that? said Smooth, resting a hand on the child’s buttock.

I dunno. The name of this castle is Virgin Castle — no, Mayflower Castle. The name of the King is King James. That’s my daddy.

Ah, Smooth said. Do go on.

And this rock is Mommy and this stick is you and this stick is me. We’re the royal family. And now it’s snowing, and a big monster — a BIG monster — is going to kill everybody. First he kills Daddy, then Mommy, then the Queen, then you, then me. Now I want to make everybody alive again, but the sand castle’s too messy. Let’s make up another game.