Don Winslow: The Trail to Buddha_s Mirror

“Now it used to be that you couldn’t mix chickenshit in water because it would lose its juice, but with Pendleton’s process, not only can you mix it with water, but you get something like triple the effect.

“Naturally, this would make a nice little item on AgriTech’s shelf. I might even buy you some for Christmas. You could rub it on your dick, although I doubt the stuff could be that good.”

“Thank you.”

“But don’t get your hopes up, because just when Doc Guano gets this close,” said Graham, holding his thumb and forefinger a sliver apart, “to inventing Supershit, he goes off to this conference and meets Miss Wong.”

“Is that really her name?”

“Do I know? Wong, Wang, Ching, Chang, what’s the difference?”

“Yeah, so? Doctor This, Doctor That, what’s the difference? I’ll bet you AgriTech has more than one biochemist.”

“Not like Pendleton, they don’t. Besides, he took his notes with him.”

Neal could see it coming and he didn’t want this job. Maybe Robert Pendleton didn’t want to finish his research, he thought, but I want to finish mine. Get my master’s and go on for the old Ph. D. Find a job in some little state college somewhere and spend the rest of my life reading books instead of running dirty errands for the Man.

“Have the cops pick him up for theft, then. The notes are AgriTech’s property,” Neal said.

Graham shook his head. “Then maybe he’d be too unhappy to play with his test tubes anymore. The AgriTech people don’t want their professor in the slammer; they want their chickenshit in the pot.”

Graham took the bottle off the table and poured himself another drink. He was enjoying himself immensely. Aggravating Neal was almost worth the terrifying flight over, the endless trip to Yorkshire, and the hike up that damn hill. It was good to see the little shit again.

“If he doesn’t want to come back, he doesn’t want to come back,” Neal said.

Graham tossed back the whiskey.

“You have to make him want to,” he said.

“You mean ‘you’ in the collective sense, right? As in ‘one would have to make him want to.’”

“I mean ‘you’ in the sense of you, Neal Carey.”

All of a sudden, Neal Carey felt a lot of sympathy for Dr. Robert Pendleton. Each of them was shacked up with something he loved-Pendleton with his woman and Neal with his books-and now they were each being pulled back, kicking and screaming, to the chickenshit.

Because of him, they get me, Neal thought, and because of me they’ll get him. It’s all done with mirrors. He reached for the bottle and poured a healthy drink into his coffee cup.

“What if I don’t want to?” he asked.

Graham started rubbing his fake hand into his real one. It was a habit he had when he was worried or had something unpleasant to say.

Neal saved him the trouble. “Then you’ll have to make me want to?”

Graham was really working on the hand now. Pissing Neal off was fun, but extorting him wasn’t. However, the Man, Levine, and Graham had agreed that Neal had been shut up with his books too long, and if they didn’t get him back into some kind of action, they would lose him. That happened sometimes; a first-class UC-an undercover guy-would be put on R-and-R after a tough job and never come back. Or, worse, the guy would come back dull and rusty and do something stupid and get hurt. Happened all the time, but Graham wasn’t going to let it happen to Neal. So he had come to fetch him for this dumb, chicken-shit job.

“You been away from Columbia for what, a year now?” Graham asked.

“About that. You sent me on a job, remember?”

Neal sure as hell remembered. They had sent him to London on a hopeless search for the runaway daughter of a big-time politico-just to keep his wife content and quiet-and he had screwed up and actually found her. She was hooking and hooked, and he had wrenched her off her pimp and the junk and delivered her to her mother. Which was what the Man wanted him to do, but the politician was sure as hell pissed off, so Friends had to pretend that Neal had screwed them over, too. And so he had “disappeared.” Happily.

“Can you do that?” Graham asked. “Just take off from gradu-ass school like that?”

“No, Graham, you can’t. Friends of the Family fixed it. What am I telling you for? You’re the one who fixed it.”

Graham smiled. “And now we’re asking you for a little favor.”

“Or you’ll unfix it?”

Graham shrugged a that’s-life shrug.

“Why me?” Neal whined. “Why not you? Or Levine?”

“The Man wants you.”

“Why?”

Because, Graham thought, we ain’t going to sit around with our hooters in our hands while you turn yourself into a hermit. I know you, son. You like to be alone so you can brood on things and get happily miserable. You need to get back to work and back to school-back with some people. Get your feet back on concrete.

“You and Pendleton are both eggheads,” Graham said. “The Man figures he’s been paying for your expensive education for jobs just like this one.”

Neal took a hit of scotch. He could feel Graham pulling in the line.

“Pendleton’s some sort of biochemist. I study eighteenth-century English Lit!” Neal said. Tobias Smollett: The Outsider in Eighteenth-Century Literature: Neal’s thesis title and a sure cure for insomnia. Except, that is, for eighteenth-century buffs. Both of them would love it.

“I guess all eggheads look alike to the Man.”

Neal tried a different tack.

“I’m out of shape, Graham. Very rusty. I’ve worked maybe two cases in the last two years and I screwed both of them up. You don’t want me.”

“You brought Allie Chase home.”

“Not before I botched it up and almost got us both killed. I’m no good at it anymore, Dad, I-”

“Stop being such a crybaby! What are we asking here? You go to San Francisco and find the happy couple, which shouldn’t be too difficult even for you, seeing as they’re in the Chinatown Holiday Inn, Room ten-sixteen, right there in your file. You get the broad alone, you slip her some cash, and she dumps him. She’s no dope. She knows that money for nothing is better than money for something.

“Then you buddy up to Pendleton, have a few shooters with him, listen to his sob story, and pour him onto a plane. What’ll it take? Three, four days?”

Neal walked over to the window. The rain had let up a little bit, but the fog was heavier than ever.

“I’m glad you have this all figured out, Graham. Are you going to do my research for me, too?”

“Just do the job and come back. You can spend the whole summer here at the Mildew Hilton if you want. You have to be back at school September ninth, though.”

He reached into his case and pulled out a large manila envelope.

“The schedules and book lists for your-what do you call them?-your seminars. I worked it out with Boskin.”

Graham is so damned good, Neal thought. Old Graham brings the prizes with him and dangles them in front of my nose: seminars, book lists… You have to hand it to him-he knows his whores.

“You’re too good to me, Dad.”

“Tell me about it.”

So there it is, Neal thought. A few days of sleazy work in California, then back to my happy monk’s cell on the moor. Finish my reading, then back to graduate school. Jesus, this double life of mine. Sometimes I feel like my own twin brother. Who’s insane.

“Yeah, okay,” Neal said.

“I’m telling you,” Graham said, “this one is a grounder, easy throw to first, out of the inning.”

“Right.”

So maybe it’s time to come down from the hill, Neal thought. Ease myself back into the world with this sleazy little job. Maybe it’s too easy up here, where I don’t have to deal with anything or anyone except writers who’ve been dead for a couple hundred years.