The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (81 page)

Ferro was relieved he was about to retire. He did not want to risk losing Jamey; all the nights Ferro had to spend alone with Paulie waiting for drops or shipments might jeopardize their love. Jamey had been edgy about Paulie. Jamey did not like “rough trade” and Paulie was the roughest. Jamey was afraid Paulie might hurt him. Ferro had to laugh. Paulie did what Ferro told him. Paulie never questioned Ferro’s orders.

The reappearance of worthless Lecha, his mother, was another sign it was time for him to retire with Jamey and enjoy life far from smugglers’ paths and jeep trails. Ferro would leave the stink of old women behind in the old ranch house. He would finance Jamey’s calendars, and later they might branch out and publish a magazine or books. The subject of the books wouldn’t matter so long as they were not about women. As book publishers they would travel the world together.

The return of Lecha plus Jamey’s “cop cakes” pals were reason enough to leave town. Ferro did not trust the so-called artists Jamey snorted coke with. Jamey never stopped to think, did he? Where did these “artists” get money for coke? Bullshit artists were what they were. Undercover cops had plenty of money. Jamey had laughed at Ferro’s wild imagination. Tucson was full of “trust fund” artists, didn’t Ferro know?

Ferro wanted to savor each moment and all the pleasure he could get with Jamey. Ferro and Jamey. He can think of nothing else. Ferro wants to stop all of Jamey’s nights on the town without him. Suddenly that seems like the answer. There were important details he could not work out when his mind was always whispering, “Jamey, Jamey.” It seemed funny how Jamey had eclipsed all else—the return of the old women, the rise of Max Blue, or the rumors out of Mexico. Just the sound, the thought, of Jamey’s name gave Ferro a chill along his spine until something flashed bright in his brain. Ferro is consumed with pleasure as long as Jamey is close by. But if Jamey happened to be out, then the first burst of pleasure at his memory was immediately followed by the most terrible feelings of doubt and fear that somehow Jamey and his love would be lost. Jamey carries the beeper Ferro gave him, but it isn’t always on, and Jamey isn’t always near a telephone. Ferro tries to avoid confrontation over the beeper. Jamey laughs and says his friends think he’s a drug dealer because of the beeper. That showed what his pals were thinking about, Ferro said, although they had agreed not to quarrel over Jamey’s “friends” anymore. Jamey wanted to tell his friends, but Ferro had forbidden it. Jamey had wanted to announce to everyone he was Ferro’s love slave and that’s why he wore the beeper.

Jamey finds a great deal of amusement in Ferro’s suspicions and fears. Jamey is able to manage with his friends quite safely. One of the Cop Cakes calendar group was the undercover man called Perry. Jamey laughed and laughed because Perry the undercover cop loved to snort
coke. Perry sells twenty-four-hour notice of police or drug strike-force raids in Pima County. Perry always takes his pay in ounces of cocaine. Jamey says the coke is for personal use, but Ferro suspects Perry the Pig sells half grams to other Tucson cops. Jamey finds straight men, especially straight men in uniforms, very exciting. Ferro sneers. Perry the Pig isn’t straight. Straight men did not pose nude in the positions Perry had taken with the other men for the Cop Cakes calendar.

“Touchy, touchy,” Jamey says, and laughs at Ferro’s hatred of Perry.

Jamey did not worry himself the way Ferro did with suspicions and questions. Jamey called it second-guessing or paranoia.

“Ferro, you can’t start thinking like that. Sure Perry might be a decoy. But he’s not. Perry is a cop who sells information because he wants the money. It’s that simple.”

Ferro does not argue, but he does not think bad cops or spies are that simple. Blond, dumb Jamey. Ferro doesn’t bother to point out that Perry sells information at below the current market value. Let smartass Jamey Boy learn the hard way. The Perrys of the world claimed to sell the secrets for the money; but the sums they accepted betrayed their true motive, which was not greed but revenge. Traitors were driven by the strongest human impulse, the deepest human instinct—not for sex or for money but to get even. Secret crimes or hidden injuries required secret and hidden acts of vengeance. Ferro was no stranger to the pleasurable sensations revenge excited—the exquisite pulse-surges behind both eyes and the tingling in the groin while the scalp prickles and sends a chill down the spine at the instant vengeance is performed. Ferro was willing to bet the undercover cop got a hard-on every time he “leaked tips” about planned raids and stakeouts. As “cop cakes” went, Perry’s pinup photo had been forgettable; his ass was flat and he had a pencil prick. Perry had begun as “Officer January,” bare assed in department-issued SWAT gear, brandishing a riot stick. In riot helmet and gas mask, Officer January appeared anonymous and cruel. The joke had been on the Tucson Police Department. All the cop beefcake shots on last year’s calendar had included badge numbers and squad-car numbers for blow jobs. Internal memos had been sent to all precinct chiefs from department of internal affairs investigators requesting photographs of all uniformed officers under their command. The latest edition of the Cop Cakes calendar had been comedy shots—tricks of photography in which the Tucson police chief’s head appeared on the nude body of a sexually aroused
male with a nightstick up his hairy ass. The comedy calendar had been a best-seller in adult bookstores in Salt Lake City and Phoenix and had made the national television news. According to Arizona’s senators, the comedy calendar was an outrage and an attack on police and law enforcement in the United States.

The Tucson chief of police had been forced to hold a news conference televised on the national evening news to deny that the nude men on the Cop Cakes calendars were presently or had ever been law enforcement officers for the Tucson Police Department. The chief said pornographers’ actors and models had posed for the calendar, and all rumors about rampant homosexuality among police officers were untrue. The chief said he had been especially disturbed by rumors that neatly trimmed mustaches signaled gay cops. The chief had declined to discuss the photograph with the nightstick. The department was not taking the calendar lightly; when police were under attack in Arizona, then the whole American way was endangered. Law and order was threatened by these subversives—homosexual artists who printed their filth on calendars to incite disrespect for the law and contempt for the police and court system.

JUDGE ARNE FOUND A BIG SCARE inside his copy of the Cop Cakes comedy calendar. Somehow, someone had got hold of a color negative from a roll of the judge’s “sensitive snapshots.” The color-film processing plant was fully automated—the judge took care to know important facts. The judge had paid the film-lab receptionists fat tips each time he had picked up one of his rolls of “fun film.” The judge would have to have a word with the lab manager—unless there was a security problem at the Owls Club. Fortunately, the yokels at the Tucson Police Department had been so stunned by their own “pinups” they had not noticed that Judge Arne’s “pinup” for the month of August was no trick-photography shot. Printed from a single negative, the color print clearly showed the federal judge merrily penetrating his own basset hound. For September, the Cop Cakes comedy pinup had been the Pima
County sheriff superimposed over the figure of a man with his fly open and half-hard cock poking out, holding a stuffed owl in both hands. The judge did not like the use of the stuffed owl. The owl might be coincidence, but the judge did not think so. Whoever had found the color print of him with the dog had found it at the Owls Club. Because only members and honored guests knew that stuffed owls were one of the dominant motifs in the club’s decor.

The judge had to smile at himself and his maturity. Twenty or even ten years ago he would have been in a cold sweat, paralyzed with fear of detection; instead he had been secretly quite pleased with the bold, exotic figure he had made on the calendar. He could easily imagine hundreds of young men locked in bedrooms nude and gazing at the calendar on the wall hypnotized or weak with pleasure. Trick photography indeed! But the “weak link” in the chain had to be located. The judge would have to go to the Owls Club on a regular basis again and familiarize himself with the regulars and the pretty homeboys off the street. He would be careful not to partake, but merely to sip cognac downstairs in front of the oversize color TV. Since he had been appointed to the federal bench, the judge had had to stay at home with his photography and basset-hound stud. The judge liked to say delicately to old friends he was now retired from all that—as if the wave of his hand swept away all the rose-bud rumps of all the brown street boys. Still the judge had regulars who were more worldly-wise than the light-fingered street boys. The blond University of Arizona boys were Midwestern hustlers who could swing both ways for a few bucks extra. The brown ones knew their place, the white ones didn’t. But wasn’t that what increased police spending was for? Alleys and vacant lots across Florida and the Southwest were littered with human refuse from the Midwest and Northeast—cast-off white men, former wage earners from mills and factories. Remnant labor-union ideas made older workers dangerous in times of national unrest. Now there was the chaos spreading across Mexico. The refugees were thick as flies in barbed-wire camps all along the U.S. border.

The judge was scheduled for golf on important matters. The senator would be part of the foursome as would the chief of police. The senator had flown in from Washington with a top-secret briefing concerning internal American security as well as security along the international border with Mexico. Of course the judge had been privy to classified documents because of his military friends in high places at Ft. Huachuca. The Cop Cakes comedy pinup might not be such a light matter at the judge’s security-clearance renewal. But secretly the judge did not think
they would bother to pursue such a trivial matter as trick photographs that libeled the police and courts. Over the years the judge had learned a great deal about lie-detector tests and the evaluators of the testing. The judge knew that the worst offenders remained serene, absolutely innocent in their own minds because the victims had always started the trouble. The judge thought the Tucson Police Department had botched the whole affair because they had been too quick to issue absolute denials that the calendar of nude cops had ever existed. Too many people in Tucson were like the judge and secretly subscribed to “art books and art calendars” for the discriminating male. The judge had breezed through all inquiries by the press concerning the comedy calendar. The judge had brushed aside the whole matter; trick photography could show anything—the public should not be misled.

The judge was not being premature when he put the finger on one of the “regulars” at the Owls Club. He was used to inhabiting a world in which one lived in dread of the plain envelope with no return address or the series of awkward phone calls. The Cop Cakes calendar had been a subversive act, not a simple act of blackmail. A storm of lawlessness was surging at the edges of respectable life in the United States. The judge thought the golf game might be a good opportunity to raise the subject of a large donation from the senator’s foundation to help southern-Arizona law enforcement. The volatile political situation in Mexico made donations imperative, especially since Arizona State government was nearly bankrupt.

The senator’s staff had printed briefings, which were stupid and useless on the golf course. Max had only glanced at his copy, then had stuffed it in his golf bag. Max hated the pretensions of sleazy politicians such as the senator. Max particularly enjoyed how conducting business on the golf course disrupted all the smoothly oiled routines; Max had exposed more rough edges and hidden dangers during a golf game than the best spies and informers could gather in weeks. The golf game interrupted conversations—the senator would just get puffed up to begin one of his “order and control at home, order and control abroad” speeches and
whack!
Max Blue had teed off, sending a lovely arcing ball hundreds of yards down the fairway to the edge of the green. The golf ball soared like a bright white bird, though occasionally the arc of the ball had reminded Max of the spring rain arching down from the clouds. The sight of the ball’s perfect flight, the ball’s absolute accuracy, silenced even the biggest assholes, such as the senator. Max could not imagine why the senator was alive at all. The senator was stupefied with greed.

He had stared blankly as Max explained the near-hypnotic quality of golf’s graceful marriage between physics and geometry. The senator’s aides had telephoned all week, begging for a golf game with Max.

Max had begun seriously to question what value
this
U.S. senator or any other U.S. senator had any longer. The U.S. Congress made laws and more laws. But laws meant nothing without enforcement. In today’s world, judges were a better buy; they gave more for the money than other politicians or the police. More and more often the senator had come for help and to ask small favors.