The Death Bird Contract, page 4
“All right,” he had said slowly. “All right, Major.” And he knew that would bum me because I had been only a Captain in the Pacific. “I have a job and a responsibility, and on this one I had to pick out the meanest bastard I knew.”
I had kept on looking at him because he had put it on the line. Here was a good man, stranded in Tulsa, with his false leg within reach. Tired, and his eyes heavily bloodshot.
“You are not even employed by the agency,” he had said. “You could try this, get hooked forever, and no sonovabitch alive would even ask where you went.”
That was when I had nodded, accepted the suit box, and gone walking out of the suite.
4
So—another Rubicon.
I blew out the small stone lamp in the teahouse, walked across the arching bridge, and snuffed out the lamps in the two Suji lanterns. Then I walked to the pine behind the cluster of black bamboos slanting in inky calligraphy, and switched off the concealed spotlights.
It was fully dark now, and I made a slight obeisance to the bodhisattva as I passed in the shadows before him and went up the footpath. Then I walked through the waterfall. Inside the cavern, with the muted sound of the fall changing pressure on my right eardrum (which was perforated), I shucked off the sweat-stained exercise drawers and jacket and the terrycloth robe and tossed them at the wooden bench outside the sauna hut. The only illumination in the cavern was the faint glow from the iron-bound circlet of near-molten stones inside, flickering on the misted front window.
When I had thrown three buckets of water over the glowing stones, I climbed up to the top bench and lay down. After ten minutes of moist heat, I went down to the damp board floor, dumped a bucket of icy water over my head, and scoured my body with rough salt.
Then I sat on the second bench. Sweat was sluicing out of me. I felt good and relaxed, with the feeling that most of the poisons contained in the supermarket foods were being nagged at, if not eliminated. I was not, however, flaked out like Pan in a steaming grove because once upon a time an impolite fellow had locked me inside a Barcelona steam room and nearly scalded me to death. Even in this small sauna on my remote Ozark estate, the front window, the door, and the roof were all breakaway.
After about forty minutes of the cleansing steam, I soaped well and went outside to unhook the thick rope from the front of the hut. Kicking out, I swung through the waterfall and dropped into the icy water of the pool. I came kicking swiftly up from the black depths of the water, but without distress, because all my pores were open, and I did not even feel the cold until I had shouted “hey!” after porpoising up out of the water.
In the top two stories of the nearest pagoda lantern, I kept towels and a fresh robe. As I crouched, buffing away the cold briskly, I was staring up at the faint radiance behind the stained-glass windows in my old castle. Then I went sprinting toward its warmth: Inside, before the ten-foot open fireplace, I had a big shot of Black Daniels, then prepared to leave.
It was quite a process because it involved changing my will, bank accounts, and local arrangements. When I came back, the tiny forests of citrus trees and bonsais would probably be dead. Certainly the mushroom beds of the albino death-caps, Amanita phalloides verna, would have dissolved into nothing, and my greenhouse experiments in hybridizing, grafting, and air-layering would be to no avail; the plants would all be dead.
Still, that’s what happens when you go off and leave things—private conceits and fancies—untended. As I went through the ritual of paperwork to blind addresses I was thinking of what might be ahead. At dawn, after seven hours of sleep, I drove down from my pine-crowned hill. In another three hours I was catching a plane for St. Louis.
5
As the airliner entered the traffic pattern before landing I reflected that St. Louis was not my favorite city. It may improve when they really try to filter their sewage, instead of dumping it raw into the Mississippi River, and get their Saarinen Arch built, and the more offensive slums razed, but I doubt it. St. Louis has the character of its own invincible ignorance; the very rich refuse to notice the cesspools as they promenade in formal clothes toward their balls and fetes.
These airborne reflections were confirmed as I took a cab downtown to a medium-cheap hotel. I characterize it that way because, while it smelled like whores, you didn’t actually see any slatterns in the halls. Upstairs, still dubious about the whole assignment, I stripped and changed into the clothes Pearsall had given me. They were all high-priced, but dirty and torn; and they indicated that their owner was a prince among pigs. And this, too, I had to bear because I had been ordered not to have them cleaned. My cover character was an errant scion.
After my own clothes were packed and bound in the suit box, I went back down and caught a cab to the Salvation Army. There, to a sweet-faced girl who was taking a break from tambourine thumping, I turned them in. I felt ashamed when she thanked me. In fact, for a minute there, I felt like blowing the whole duke and asking this lissome lieutenant to have dinner with me at the Chase-Plaza, and then tour Gaslight Square.
If my cover clothes hadn’t smelled so bad, I might have done it. Because this nice girl believed in something, and I was obviously worth saving. I could see compassion in her brown eyes, and that has wrecked more girls than Spanish fly. Anyway, I thanked her earnestly, promised that I would try to do less, if not better, and caught a cab to the Gilchrist Clinic in Clayton, where the swells and the Birchites abide.
This clinic was set in the middle of a forested glade, and even the trees breathed opposition to socialized medicine. The wheels of my cab whispered respectfully over the winding gravel drive, and the cabbie, who was obviously without class, took my tip, winked, and said hoarsely, “If it don’t work, buddy, I’ll pick you up tomorrow at the back entrance.”
I stood in weak sunlight, staring at him. “Now that’s a hell of a thing to say,” I remarked, and he slapped his meter flag down with all the assurance of a man who knows that it is rigged. When he laughed, I saw that he was beyond the help of any dentist.
“A rib. You’ll make it, friend,” he assured me, “because the beauty part of it is that these croakers don’t take no middle-class diseases.”
“Why you miserable bastard,” I said.
“Not necessarily,” he answered. He gave me an evil grin, and his cab sprayed gravel as he departed. His remarks shook me a little because, when you meet strangers, you can accommodate most remarks, but when they call you “friend,” without expression, then they really hate you. Filled with a sense of foreboding, I walked toward and past the chaste columns of the clinic; and the glass doors sighed pneumatically as they opened to receive me.
Because I wanted to seem worthy of treatment, I was nervous and nearly turned an ankle when I stepped onto the reception room rug. The glacially beautiful receptionist watched me do a small frug step, and her smile was wide but not encouraging. I went limping across a half acre of swampy broadloom and came to attention.
“I have an appointment with Dr. Thomas Gilchrist, Jr.,” I said. But as her alabaster neck turned, I knew that I must be lying. Because I even sounded like a Blue Cross case. Her neck stem twisted again, in question, and she bent her head. Her hair was a silver bubble.
“Your name, pliss?” she asked. When I said “John Snowdon,” she hesitated a second, flipped a switch, and said in a cultured monotone, “Mr. Snowdon is here to see Doctor Gilchrist, Jr.”
A voice came out of the plastic monitor, which was hidden behind the dead Hong Kong rubber plants. “Please send him back.”
That surprised her. I shrugged to indicate that it was just luck, and she pointed down a hall. “Room seventy-five, please.”
“Thanks.” I went the way she pointed and found a nurse in starchy white waiting in a cubicle.
“Doctor will see you soon,” she promised, and I said, “Thank you, bless Doctor” because I was tired of being spoken at.
She was caught with her assembly line manner showing, and she stopped. “Did I offend you?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “It’s just that I came in to be certified crazy, and everybody treats me normally.”
“Oh!” She nodded and took off down the aisle.
Doctor was with me almost immediately. He was a stocky man in a white smock, with narrow eyes in a puffy face. He nodded at me and flipped open the metal-clad tablet.
While he was reading in it, probably nothing, he asked idly if there was any particular reason for me to insult his staff. I said I was sorry if I had, and when he nodded, I saw a pink scalp streak in his thinning hair. Although I made him at no more than thirty-six, but a good liver, obviously, he was like a Strasbourg goose, who had a bad liver and a worse temper.
“I received … the information regarding you,” he said slowly as he lifted his country club gaze at me. “But it is not entirely clear, and perhaps … not ethical.” Then his head nodded like a meaty metronome. He was being deliberate, trying to remember the Hypocritical Oath.
Oh Jesus God, I thought.
“As a matter of fact,” he said as his conscience wanned up, “I have been asked by high authority, it is true, to keep you here and induce … in you, a full-fledged addiction to opiate drugs. Is that your understanding?”
“Yes, Doctor,” I said, knowing that it wouldn’t work in a thousand years, not with this baby Jesus. And I wondered who had goofed.
The doctor shook his head again and flipped up the lid of his tablet again. “You must understand that I recognize the source of this request, but …”—he shrugged his shoulders—“when I am asked to isolate a patient for three weeks and give him these very large dosages of narcotic drugs …”
“Doctor,” I asked, “may I use your phone for digit dialing?”
“Sir?”
“Long distance, Doctor, straight line.”
“Certainly.”
“Good. Will you ask the platinum goddess out there to give us a straight line?”
He stared at me and twitched his stethoscope. Picked up the phone, asked for an outside line, and handed it to me. I dialed the number, and asked to be connected to Neal Pearsall. He said “all right?” in my ear.
“I’m calling from the city Mark Twain once said he could buy for a million dollars,” I said, “but decided not to. And I am in the office of the doctor, but getting only forensic medicine. If the thing is going to work, it must be at Lex or Cowtown. Which and when?”
“Cowtown, noon tomorrow,” said Pearsall, and he hung up.
The doctor was watching me, and I took a $20 bill out of my wallet and dropped it on the treatment table. After telling him to put it into the good fight to limit medical school graduates, I went down the hall and out of the clinic. In two hours I was on another plane, this time to Fort Worth.
6
The Public Health Service Hospital in Fort Worth was a complex of weathered white brick buildings and frame outbuildings sprawling over several acres of rolling hills. A high metal mesh fence with barbed wire on the top surrounded the whole elaborate hospital facility. When my cab stopped at the barred central gate office, a guard stepped out and I told him that John Snowdon wanted to see Dr. Fenton.
In a few seconds, the guard got telephone clearance, wrote me out a lapel pass, and my cab went up the winding drive and around to the back of the administration building. An orderly was waiting there, and he took my bag and asked me to follow him down the stairs. In the basement, we walked along an echoing tunnel for what seemed a quarter of a mile. Four heavily barred gates were unlocked, then locked as we went along, and after we had gone through the first barricade, we began to pass men in clean, much-laundered khaki pants and shirts.
Finally we stopped before what seemed to be administrative offices, still underground, and my orderly-guide spoke briefly to the receptionist and left me. She instructed me to pin the pass on my jacket, then turned to her switchboard. Dr. Fenton would see me. I walked down to his office and found a chunky, heavy-shouldered man, who was tamping a pipe and looking tired.
We shook hands, and he waved me to a chair and closed the door. “Mr. Snowdon,” he said briskly as he returned to sit in his own chair and lift one foot to the corner of his desk, “I am always interested in heroes, but I just want to be sure you know what you are doing.”
“I do a lot of silly things, Doctor,” I said, “in my line of work.”
He nodded irritably. “Yes, yes, I understand that you are a highly regarded spook of some kind because the instructions regarding you came from very near the throne. But such instructions are unique and, medically speaking, stupid, even if they accomplish their purpose. Do you know what our ascertainable recovery rate is, here and in Lexington, from real addiction?”
“No.”
“Less than 2%, and if you quote me I’ll say you are psychotic. Even that figure may be too high because our follow-up system is lousy, and our voluntary sign-in-and-out method further louses up the statistics.”
Dr. Fenton had a red face, and it had been out in the weather a lot. With a slight shock, I realized that he was actually concerned about me, personally, and that put him in almost a different profession from the banker-type doctor I had talked to in St. Louis.
“I’ve read a good bit of the literature, Doctor, and figured the odds.”
He regarded me over the pipe bowl for quite a while, then shook his head, leaned forward, and shoved a sheaf of typed pages at me. They were in quadruplicate, a quit-claim against the hospital, its staff in general, and Dr. Fenton in particular. For any “unfortunate, deleterious, or unforeseen harm and/or permanent distress or injury I might contract” from the treatments and procedures I had requested. I was interested in the fact that my cover name, John Ardleigh Snowdon, was bracketed with my real name, Joseph Liam Gall, and I asked Dr. Fenton who would have access to the papers.
“Only myself and the medical director,” he said. “I typed them out myself this morning, and after signature—if you’re stupid enough to sign them—I will personally put them in the safe.”
“You’re a pretty fair typist,” I commented.
“Sure, sure,” he said. “I also take in light laundry and sell kindling by the small sack. Do you want to sign?”
“Yes,” I said, and he picked up the phone and asked the receptionist to come in and notarize something. She came, watched me sign every copy, and then signed and dated the instruments and impressed the Great Seal of the Sovereign State of Texas. When she was gone again, Dr. Fenton put all the copies in a manila envelope, sealed that, and scribbled something on the front of it.
“All right,” he said. “First, security for you in this lockup. We have a lot of federal prisoners here, some on the addiction side in the shooting gallery, and some on the psycho side. Is there any chance that you could be spotted, or your work jeopardized?”
“Possibly. Most of my work is out of the country, but I have operated inside it. Before I get turned loose in any ward, I’d like to have everybody in it screened.”
Dr. Fenton nodded and tapped the pipe stem against his teeth. “Right. If I’m to do what has been requested, I want you for three weeks, and I reserve, always, the right to terminate treatment if it is medically indicated. Okay?”
I nodded, because I was liking the man better all the time. He did not have, somehow, that air of cloistered infallibility with which most doctors cloak themselves.
“So you go into a private room in Ward Six, Disturbed, and I’ll keep you there for ten days. The walls are padded, the light’s on all night, and nobody but myself will enter your room. Will that bug you?”
“Probably,” I said.
He must have thought it was a normal response because he nodded and went on. He was a scowling, intense man with reddish hair that was graying at the temples.
“After we run the tests on your general physical debility, I will start you on five grains a day and run you up until I establish an initial tolerance. When you are fully addicted, I will determine the lowest housekeeping dosage and we’ll turn you into the shooting gallery—after the people there have been screened, of course.”
“Look … I’m asking out of ignorance. While all this is going on will I feel too rocky to study, go through dossiers, familiarize myself with the argot…?”
“Too rocky?” Fenton’s craggy face altered, and he laughed so hard that he had to pound on the desk. “Mr. Snowdon, sir spook, my main doubt is that you can become a representative addict. Those cats upstairs in our shooting gallery are so much smarter than the medical staff of this hospital that I brace myself twice a day before I walk into it.”
“No kidding?”
“No kidding. We once had a tall, lugubrious bastard from Wyoming, and don’t ask me how a cowboy gets a dope habit. But this cat made his own keys from imprints he had lifted from the set on an orderly’s belt, stole a white jacket from our laundry, and was making late, late night rounds in the women’s ward for three weeks before we caught him. Nearly screwed himself to death.”
I was laughing involuntarily, and that set Dr. Fenton off again. He hammered on the desk helplessly.
“Know how we caught the bastard? He was so sapped by his good works that he started writing prescriptions for methyl testosterone. And our pharmacy honored five of them.” Dr. Fenton slowed down; his paunch was still heaving. “And the whole thing damned near got us an international black eye because our medical director was about to release a paper to the journals about the marvelous three-week period of calm and contentment in our women’s wards, ascribing it to group therapy.”
“Well, it was, in a way,” I said, and Fenton used his forefingers to flick tears out of the corners of his eyes.
“Mr. Snowdon, you’ll have no paucity of ideas here, and your mind will usually be marvelously clear. Since you brought it up, I’ll just add that several years ago, in our sister hospital at Lexington, Kentucky, a talented joy-popper celebrated Christmas by picking every lock in the joint, even unto a modern, multitumblered safe, without leaving a fingerprint. And passed out to his confreres unlimited amounts of opiate drugs and high-proof alcohol.”
