Steve Erickson - Tours of the Black Clock

“Mr. Philip Jainlight doesn’t move around a great deal these days,” Johnson answers, his eyes on mine. Next to him Blaine never speaks. His face never moves, a big passionless lug, his feet planted squarely and his arms hanging at his sides. In his midthirties or so, his hair’s already thinning and his face has little patches of broken blood; he might have had his last drink a week ago and the smell of Jim Beam still rises from him like heat. “Look,” Johnson is still talking, and he moves his eyes from mine to Hanks’, “folks have been looking for this boy three years now. He’s a big boy. Pretty hard not to notice a boy this big for three years. For a boy this big to get along three years he’d have to have a lot of luck, a very big city to get lost in, and some big help keeping under wraps. I’d say anyone giving him that kind of help, well, in the eyes of the law, that kind of person’s called an accessory.” His eyes are steady on Hanks’.

“Is that right,” Hanks snarls back. He’s lost patience with the entire episode. “Go get your extradition papers,” he snaps, “you’re out of your territory here,” and Johnson snaps back, “Out of our territory? Where do you think this is,” looking at the club around him, “Mexico?” Hanks then turns to the big one standing behind Johnson and says, “You. Why don’t you talk to your partner here. Clarify things.”

“No use talking to him,” I start saying, and everyone turns to me as though to say, Who are you and what business of this is yours? But the havoc’s running down my chin: “No use talking to him at all. It’s obvious who’s the brains of this operation and he’s not it.” Blaine just stands motionless and expressionless with his arms dangling at his sides; not a spasm of tension runs through him. “He’s the muscle of the operation and that’s all he is. He’s one of those characters who can’t take two steps in life without tumbling into it and knocking it the fuck over. Look at him. Does he even understand what the fuck I’m saying?” Hanks and Johnson are watching me like I’ve gone crazy, they look at the havoc like it’s the flow of a strange black fluid from some crack in my head. I’ve now crossed the space between me and this Blaine and I’m standing toe to toe with him; he may be an inch shorter than I but no more, he’s the only person I’ve ever known who measures up to me. I loathe the bigness of him, the big brainlessness of him; I loathe the grotesque outsizedness of him. “You fucking stupid jackass,” I hiss in his face, “big man, big man. Why don’t you say anything? No use talking to you, anyone can see that.” Hanks is grabbing at my arm and I shake him off, and everyone around us is stunned. “Use it,” I say to the big man, and who knows if anyone understands what I mean, let alone him; but I mean the violence: Big is the violence in you , “use it.” He doesn’t even quiver, his eyes dead and dull. Hanks grips me by the arm and literally pulls me back from Blaine’s face, and he has a look that’s alarmed and shaken. Johnson has the same look. Billy’s dumbfounded, and all the rest of them: well fuck all the rest of them. You too Leona, I want to scream across the room. I’m all havoc now.

“Go upstairs,” Doggie just says, somewhere between a whisper and a croak.

Some time later I’m upstairs in his office and he comes in. I’m looking out his windows at the city trying to see the things I once saw. “You’ve got to get out of here,” he says the moment he walks in. He says it calmly and insistently, without panic. I won’t be back, I tell him. He says, “I don’t mean the club, I mean you’ve got to get out of the city, you’ve got to get out of the country. You could go to Canada but those guys will follow you to Canada. Better South America.”

South America? What will I do in South America?

“I can’t see you again, kid,” he says. He pulls from his desk a wad of cash and peels me out five hundred dollars, just like that. I don’t want it, I tell him, but he shakes his head. “This is business,” he says, “this is five hundred dollars that says I don’t see you again.” He pauses. “Killing blood, you don’t shake that. Killing a stranger, killing your enemy, that you shake maybe . But not blood.”

My blood was strange, my blood was the enemy.

“Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t,” he says, “I’m not passing judgment. Maybe your father is one son of a bitch, I don’t say he isn’t. All the more reason you’re not going to shake it, not without putting lots of places between you and the more the better. So here’s some funds, and here’s one more ride. Billy?” Billy comes in the door. He doesn’t even look at me. “You’re going to give the kid a ride,” Hanks says to him, “no funny stuff. Anywhere in New York City he wants to go, train station, the docks. No funny stuff .” Billy doesn’t do or say anything for a moment until he understands the boss expects an answer, and then he nods. I turn from the window to look at Hanks; the office seems dark and distant. My ears pound with time and momentousness. I ask if I can make a phone call.

When Kronehelm answers I say it’s time to relocate the business to homesoil after all. When I put down the phone and look up, Doggie’s nowhere to be seen. It’s just Billy leaning in the door waiting. No funny stuff, Doggie said, but Billy’s laughing just the same, all the way to Gramercy Park in the middle of the night.

“THE NEXT FORTY-EIGHT hours are spent with Herr Kronehelm plotting my escape from America. He’s been taken by surprise at the new change in plans, and is still two weeks away from getting his own affairs in order before he can leave. I’ve made it clear that I can’t and won’t wait two weeks. In my head I have a whole scenario in which Johnson and Blaine show up sooner or later. My clothes in my apartment, my typewriter, my books and the money I stashed there the past year, all that’s lost now since I don’t dare take a chance going back there or sending anyone else. The five hundred bucks I didn’t want to take from Doggie Hanks I’m very happy to have, on further reflection, though it also feels something like a disgrace. Of course I don’t mention it at all to Kronehelm, rather I hit him up for an advance.

During the day Kronehelm’s arranging things with various people. He gets me passage on a cargo ship that’s disembarking tomorrow morning at dawn. His connections in Europe will have a visa waiting for me in Cherbourg when the ship arrives in about five weeks. From there I’ll get a train to Paris; from Paris a train to Vienna probably by way of Munich. Kronehelm’s translator will be waiting for me there; not long after that Kronehelm himself will arrive. It sounds like he’s got everything figured out. I suppose he believes I’ll be under tight rein, there in a strange city in a strange country. It’ll be just like right now, the two of us — well, I guess the three of us with the translator — sitting in a cozy apartment in Vienna where all the curtains are closed, shuffling around in bathrobes and creating the literature of love, gangsters and America. In the meantime here in New York City I peer through the curtains to the street below; there’s a jeweler’s shop, a diner, a little flower shop up at the corner of Third Avenue. No Johnson and no Blaine. In these forty-eight hours, the winter that’s hung back for almost a month arrives suddenly. Like a cat with a bird it takes autumn in its teeth and squeals with it, thrashes it against the ground until nothing’s left of it but blood and feathers. One miserable wind disperses the rest. A few hours later the windows form ice.

I have another eighteen hours of lying low.