Уолтер Тевис - The Steps of the Sun

“L’Ouverture,” I said, even though I could go to jail for it, “you should make your coffee with a Chemex. And I need fifty thousand in cash. I mean right away.”

“Benjamin,” he said, a bit sternly, “I like instant coffee. I embrace the modern world and live happily in it. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries do not interest me. Instant coffee is the drink of the times and I drink it with pleasure. I don’t keep cash around.”

“That’s a pity,” I said, and tried the coffee again. I needed the caffeine.

L’Ouverture shrugged, still smiling, and spoke in his honeyed old voice, “Snobbery is a waste of energy. The past is dead, Ben. Your father was an historian; mine was a basketball player. Father adapted the crane dance of his ancestors to varnished oak floors and sent me to Harvard, where I learned to prosper even as he had. He hated sports, hated the Olympics, hated abstractions. Sometimes he slept with a basketball beside him. I too delight in the real, the contemporary.”

It was seductive, but I knew Baynes too well to believe it. You’re a power jack-off , I wanted to shout, and the past is alive! Solipsist! The son of a bitch probably counted the votes of his Energy Committee with a hard on. “Look,” I said, “I’d like to go to a bank in the morning and get some cash. When can you have my accounts released?”

He smiled benignly. “Just have an extra croissant for breakfast, Benjamin, and go to your bank at ten. I’ll have Justice Flaherty call in a reversal. Where did you bring the uranium from? Fomalhaut?”

Jesus Christ! I thought, How does he know? It wasn’t Fomalhaut, thank God; it was Aminidab. Juno. But how did he know about Fomalhaut? From that geologist in Jamaica? Anyway, I didn’t fall for it. “Come on, L’Ouverture,” I said. “That’s not the deal.”

He shrugged and set his coffee cup down with an air of finality. “If you won’t tell me where the uranium comes from, there is no deal. I’m going to get some sleep.” He turned his face toward a doorway and called out, “All right out there.”

At first I thought he was hailing Morton, but I realized that was unlikely just as two men in brown suits came in the doorway, each holding a pair of handcuffs. The chair I was sitting on was low, in a sort of semi-Japanese way, and when I tried to jump to my feet I knocked over the table. L’Ouverture got out of the way just in time and I didn’t even get the pleasure of splashing him with hot coffee. They had me by the time I’d recovered my balance and was, ignominiously, in a semi-crouch like a small boy with a stubbed toe. The cuffs were of steel; I had one wrist cuffed to a wrist of each of those bastards in what seemed to be a single motion. They pulled me upright from my crouch. Private cops, probably. Cheap ones too.

One of them began to recite, “You have the right to remain silent…”

Baynes interrupted him. “No need,” he said. “Mr. Belson has no rights. He is not a citizen.”

“You son of a bitch,” I said.

“Take him to the Reagan Detention Center and book him for illegal entry.”

My stomach sank. From rebirth to the Reagan Stir. I checked the two out. Poker-faced. But one of them, the fatter, seemed under his stern patriot look to be troubled by something. “Okay,” I said, “let’s get out of here.” And then to L’Ouverture, who was still smiling amiably, who had almost certainly never stopped smiling, “You are one deceitful son of a bitch.”

He went on smiling. “Have a good day,” he said.

The Reagan Stir is way out past Arlington Cemetery, and a long haul. The cops ushered me out the door of Baynes’s house and down the block to where they had a little methane-powered Honda with D.C. plates. Twenty miles per hour, maximum. We all squeezed together in the front seat, which forced me to put my knees under my chin. But I didn’t feel as uncomfortable as the fat guy looked, sitting on my right with one arm and half his head out the window. We chugged along under the moonlight for about ten minutes, until we were approaching a woodshop, clearly an all-night one, at the corner of Constitution Avenue and D Street.

The fat guy with some effort pulled his head back in the car and I felt his soft belly mash against my side. The thinner one was driving with his left hand, his right being cuffed to my wrist. I really didn’t like this kind of physical intimacy one bit and I’d been repeating my mantra for the last two or three minutes. “Billy Bob,” the fat one said, “pull over at that store. I gotta use the restroom.”

“Can’t you wait ?” Billy Bob said, sounding a whole lot like my mother.

“Hell, no,” the fat one said. “I’ve been waiting back at that house for an hour and a half.”

“ Shit ,” Billy Bob said. I figured he was going to stop but, like mothers everywhere, was going to exact payment for it. “You might have used the toilet back there.”

“Billy Bob,” Fatty said, “pull over.”

Billy Bob drove up to the woodshop and parked. It took us a minute to get out the same door that we had all gotten in. I felt God had sent me this opportunity. I’d bet a million that whatever cops were at the stadium hadn’t told Baynes on the phone that I’d decked two of their number. As far as Fatty and Billy Bob were concerned, I was just an aging tycoon.

There was an old Chinese woman at the cash register inside who looked as if she had seen all there was to see and had built no small part of the Great Wall with her own rough hands. When the three of us came in as a conjoined trio, as it were, she was reading a comic book. She looked up, laid her cigarette on the edge of an overflowing ashtray, and waited.

“I need to use the restroom,” Fatty said, clearly ill at ease.

She nodded toward the far wall. A faded print of Mao surrounded by awed children hung there, and under it on a small hook a key.

There was no room for the three of us to walk abreast, but we managed to make it single file with a little shoving around and Fatty got his key. Getting back out the door was a bit confusing, but we made it. The shop was clearly an ancient gas station, with the restroom in back.

“Why don’t you piss against a tree, for Christ’s sake?” Billy Bob said.

“If I only needed to piss I’d a done it a quarter hour ago.” I was surprised at the uncowed quality in Fatty’s voice. He had apparently developed a sense of mission over this middle-of-the-night B.M. and he was riding it. Well, I was developing a sense of mission too, although not a cloacal one.

“How in hell you going to stay handcuffed and do that?” Billy Bob said.

“Let’s look it over,” Fatty said.

In back was a room with MEN on its door. Fatty unlocked it easily enough and flipped on a little ten-watt light inside. What a grubby-looking place, with wet newspaper on the cracked linoleum floor! And what a smell! The Chinese have one of the most admirable cultural histories in the world. Their cuisine—where it still exists—is right up there with the French. Hell, they make a fine spaceship. But they’re in the Middle Ages when it comes to toilets.

As a partner in this venture, so to speak, I could see right away that it was going to be a problem for Fatty. Had I been he, I would have found a dark lawn somewhere, dropped my pants and made the best of it. But either that hadn’t occurred to Fatty and Billy Bob, or it was far beyond Fatty’s sense of propriety.

The room wasn’t big enough for the three of us. The toilet faced the doorway. Fatty tried to cool it. He walked in, dragging me by my wrist halfway into the door, which opened outward. He turned around facing me and began to loosen his belt with his free hand, while getting himself into kind of a crouch. For a moment I panicked; if I had to watch this I would rather do a month in solitary.