Cities of the Red Night (6 page)

I tossed the deck onto the coffee table. She locked the door behind me.

*   *   *

Later that evening, over a joint, I interviewed a nice young gay couple, who simply
adored
Jerry.

“Such a sweet boy…”

“So understanding…”

“Understanding?”

“About gay people. He even marched with us.…”

“And look at the postcard he sent us from Athens.” It was a museum postcard showing a statue of a nude youth found at Kouros. “Wasn't that cute of him?”

Very cute, I thought.

*   *   *

I interviewed his steady girl friend, who told me he was all mixed up.

“He had to get away from his mother's influence and find himself. We talked it all over.”

*   *   *

I interviewed everyone I could find in the address book. I talked to waiters and bartenders all over the SoHo area: Jerry was a nice boy … polite … poised … a bit reserved. None of them had an inkling of his double life as a coke pusher and homosexual transvestite. I see I am going to need some more heroin on this one. That's easy. I know some narco boys who owe me a favor. It takes an ounce and a ticket to San Francisco to buy some names from the junky chick.

Seek and you shall find. I nearly found an ice pick in my stomach. Knock and it shall be opened unto you. Often it wasn't opened unto me. But I finally found the somebody who: a twenty-year-old Puerto Rican kid named Kiki, very handsome and quite fond of Jerry in his way. Psychic too, and into Macambo magic. He told me Jerry had the mark of death on him.

“What was his source for the coke?”

His face closed over. “I don't know.”

“Can't blame you for not knowing. May I suggest to you that his source was a federal narc?”

His deadpan went deader. “I didn't tell you anything.”

“Did he hear voices? Voices giving him orders?”

“I guess he did. He was controlled by something”

I gave him my card. “If you ever need anything let me know.”

*   *   *

Mr. Green showed up the next morning with a stack of photos. The questionnaire I had given him had been neatly filled out on a typewriter. He also brought a folio of sketches and a green knitted scarf. The scarf reeked of death.

I glanced at the questionnaire. Born April 18, 1951, in Little America, Wyoming. “Admiral Byrd welcomes you aboard the Deep Freeze Special.” I looked through the photos: Jerry as a baby … Jerry on a horse … Jerry with a wide sunlit grin holding up a string of trout … graduation pictures … Jerry as the Toff in the high school play
A Night at an Inn.
They all looked exactly as they should look. Like he was playing the part expected of him. There were about fifty recent photos, all looking like Jerry.

Take fifty photos of anyone. There will be some photos where the face is so different you can hardly recognize the subject. I mean most people have many faces. Jerry had
one.
Don Juan says anyone who always looks like the same person isn't a person. He is a person impersonator.

I looked at Jerry's sketches. Good drawing, no talent. Empty and banal as sunlight. There were also a few poems, so bad I couldn't read them. Needless to say, I didn't tell Mr. Green what I had found out about Jerry's sex and drug habits. I just told him that no one I had talked to had heard from Jerry since his disappearance, and that I was ready to leave for Athens at once if he still wanted to retain me. Money changed hands.

*   *   *

At the Athens Hilton I got Dimitri on the phone and told him I was looking for the Green boy.

“Ah yes … we get so many of these cases … our time and resources are limited.”

“I understand. But I've got a bad feeling about this one. He had some kinky habits.”

“S-M?”

“Sort of … and underworld connections.…” I didn't want to mention C over the phone.

“If I find anything out I'll let you know.”

“Thanks. I'm going out to Spetsai tomorrow to have a look around. Be back on Thursday.…”

*   *   *

I called Skouras in Spetsai. He's the tourist agent there. He owns or leases villas and rents out apartments during the season. He organizes tours. He owns the discotheque. He is the first man any traveler to Spetsai sees, and the last, since he is also the agent for transport.

“Yes, I know about it. Had a call from Dimitri. Glad to help any way I can. You need a room?”

“If possible I'd like the room he had.”

“You can have any room you want … the season is over.”

*   *   *

For once the hovercraft was working. I was in luck. The hovercraft takes an hour and the boat takes six.

Yes, Skouras remembered Jerry. Jerry arrived with some young people he'd met on the boat—two Germans with rucksacks and a Swedish girl with her English boyfriend. They stayed at one of Skouras's villas on the beach—the end villa, where the road curves out along the sea wall. I knew the place. I'd stayed there once three years earlier in 1970.

“Anything special about the others?”

“Nothing. Looked like thousands of other young people who swarm over the islands every summer. They stayed a week. The others went on to Lesbos. Jerry went back to Athens alone.”

Where did they eat? Where did they take coffee? Skouras knew. He knows everything that goes on in Spetsai.

“Go to the discotheque?”

“Every night. The boy Jerry was a good dancer.”

“Anybody in the villa now?”

“Just the caretaker and his wife.”

He gave me the keys. I noticed a worn copy of
The Magus
by John Fowles. As soon as anyone walks into his office, Skouras knows whether he should lend him the book. He has his orders. Last time I was there he lent me the book and I read it. Even rode out on a horse to look at the house of the Magus and fell off the horse on the way back. I pointed to the book. “By any chance…”

He smiled. “Yes. I lent him the book and he returned it when he left. Said he found it most interesting.”

“Could I borrow it again?”

“Of course.”

*   *   *

The villa stood a hundred feet from the beach. The apartment was on the second floor—three bedrooms off a hall, kitchen and bathroom at the end of the hall, balcony along one side of the building. There was a musty smell, dank and chilly, blinds down. I pulled up the blinds in all three bedrooms and selected the middle one, where I had stayed before. Two beds, two chairs, coat hangers on nails in the wall.

I switched on an electric heater and took my recorder out of its case. This is a very special recorder designed and assembled by my assistant, Jim, and what it won't pick up isn't there. It is also specially designed for cut-ins and overlays, and you can switch from Record to Playback without stopping the machine.

I recorded a few minutes in all three rooms. I recorded the toilet flushing and the shower running. I recorded the water running in the kitchen sink, the rattle of dishes, and the opening and closing and hum of the refrigerator. I recorded on the balcony. Now I lay down on the bed and read some selections from
The Magus
into the recorder.

I will explain exactly how these recordings are made. I want an hour of Spetsai: an hour of places where my M.P. has been and the sounds he has heard. But not in sequence. I don't start at the beginning of the tape and record to the end. I spin the tape back and forth, cutting in at random so that
The Magus
may be cut off in the middle of a word by a flushing toilet, or
The Magus
may cut into sea sounds. It's a sort of
I Ching
or table-tapping procedure. How random is it actually? Don Juan says that nothing is random to a man of knowledge: everything he sees or hears is there just at that time waiting to be seen and heard.

I get out my camera and take pictures of the three rooms, the bathroom, and the kitchen. I take pictures from the balcony. I put the machine back in the case and go outside, recording around the villa and taking pictures at the same time: pictures of the villa; a picture of the black cat that belongs to the caretaker; pictures of the beach, which is empty now except for a party of hardy Swedes.

I have lunch in a little restaurant on the beach where Jerry and his friends used to eat. Mineral water and a salad. The proprietor remembers me and we shake hands. Coffee at the waterfront café where Jerry and his friends took coffee. Record. Take pictures. I cover the post office, the two kiosks that sell imported cigarettes and newspapers. The one place I don't record is in Skouras's office. He wouldn't like that. I can hear him loud and clear: “I'm a landlord and not a detective. I don't want your M.P. in my office. He's bad news.”

I go back to the villa by a different route, covering the bicycle rental agency. It is now three o'clock. A time when Jerry would most likely be in his room reading. I read some more of
The Magus
into the recorder with flushing toilets, running water, my footsteps in the hall, blinds being raised and lowered. I listen to what I have on tape, with special attention to the cut-ins. I take a walk along the sea wall and play the tape back to the sea and the wind.

Dinner in a restaurant where Jerry and his friends ate the night they arrived. This restaurant is recommended by Skouras. I take my time with several ouzos before a dinner of red snapper and Greek salad, washed down with retsina. After dinner I go out to the discotheque to record some of the music Jerry danced to. The scene is really dead. A German countess is dancing with some local youths.

*   *   *

Next day there was a wind and the hovercraft was grounded. I took the noon boat and after six hours was back in my room at the Hilton.

I took out a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label duty-free scotch and ordered a soda siphon and ice from Hilton room service. I put Jerry's graduation picture in a silver frame on the desk, assembled the questionnaire, and put the tape recorder with an hour of Spetsai beside it. The waiter came in with the ice and soda siphon.

“Is that your son, sir?”

I said yes because it was the easy thing to say. I poured myself a small drink and lit a Senior Service. I started thinking out loud, cutting into the tape.…

“Suspected to be involved in some capacity: Marty Blum, a small-time operator with big-time connections. Was in Athens at or about the time young Jerry disappeared.

“Helen and Van—also in Athens at the time. Van was trying to get a permit to run a disintoxication clinic on one of the islands. He didn't get it. Left Athens for Tangier. Left Tangier for New York. Trouble at immigration. Thought to be in Toronto.” What did I know about these two birds? Plenty. “Doctor Van: age, fifty-seven; nationality, Canadian. Dope-pushing and abortions sidelines and front for his real specialty, which is transplant operations. Helen, his assistant: age, sixty; nationality, Australian. Masseuse, abortionist, suspected jewel thief and murderess.”

The Countess Minsky Stahlinhof de Gulpa, known as Minny to her friends and sycophants: a heavy woman like a cold fish under tons of gray shale. “White Russian and Italian descent. Stratospherically wealthy, near the billion mark. The source of her wealth: manipulation of commodity prices. She moves into a poor country like Morocco and buys up basic commodities like sugar, kerosene, and cooking oil, holds them off the market in her warehouses, then puts them back on the market at a higher price. The Countess has squeezed her vast wealth out of the poorest people. She has other interests than money. She is a very big operator indeed. She owns immense estates in Chile and Peru and has some secret laboratories there. She has employed biochemists and virologists. Indication: genetic experiments and biologic weapons.”

And what of the Countess de Vile? “De Vile: very wealthy but not Gulpa's strata. A depraved, passionate and capricious woman, evil as Circe. Extensive underworld and police contacts. On close terms with Mafia dons and police chiefs in Italy, New York, Morocco, and South America. A frequent visitor at the Countess de Gulpa's South American retreat. Several unsolved missing-person cases, involving boys of Jerry's age, point to the South American laboratories as terminal.”

I glanced through the questionnaire. “Medical history: scarlet fever at the age of four.” Now, scarlet fever is a rarity since the introduction of antibiotics. “Could there have been a misdiagnosis?”

All this I was feeding into the recorder in pieces, and a lot more. An article I had just finished reading when Mr. Green came into my office. This was an article on head transplants performed on monkeys, the Sunday
Times,
December 9, 1973. I now took it out of a file and read parts of it into the recorder. “Monkey heads transplanted onto monkey bodies can now survive for about a week. The drawing above portrays controversial operation. ‘Technically a human head transplant is possible,' Dr. White says, ‘but scientifically there would be no point.'”

My first meeting with Mr. Green: the smell of death, and something shifty about him. From talking to Jerry's friends, I found out that this was a family trait. They all described him as hard to figure or hard to pin down. Finally I turned on the TV. I played the tape back at low volume while I watched an Italian western with Greek subtitles, keeping my attention on the screen so I was subconsciously hearing the tape. They were hanging a rustler from horseback when the phone rang.

It was Dimitri. “Well, Snide, I think we have found your missing person … unfortunately.”

“You mean dead?”

“Yes. Embalmed, in fact.” He paused. “And without his head.”

“What?”

“Yes. Head severed at the shoulders.”

“Fingerprints check?”

“Yes.”

I waited for the rest of it.

“Cause of death is uncertain. Some congestion in the lungs. May have been strangulation. The body was found in a trunk.”