T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

That was the precise moment when the police cruiser rounded the corner behind me and the lights began to flash.

I had never in my life been in trouble with the law and had no reason to expect anything but courtesy and neighborly assistance from the two peace officers who emerged from the cruiser, thinking absurdly that they’d come to help us contact as many prostitutes as possible so as to make it easier for us to line up our interviews. Events proved otherwise. Events, in fact, moved so swiftly from that moment on that I didn’t really have a chance to make sense of them until much later. The two patrolmen, both short and stocky, with the barrel chests and bandy-legged gait of rugby players, converged on me where I stood arrested at the window of the Nash. The first of them — he looked to be Prok’s age, with a pug nose and inflamed features — strode directly up to me, and without saying a thing took hold of both my arms, jerked them round behind me and clapped two conjoined discs of metal over my wrists. In a word, handcuffs.

“But, but what are you doing?” I demanded. Or rather, stuttered. The rain was in my face, soaking the sleeves and shoulders of my jacket and infiltrating the pomaded weave of my hair, which sprang loose now in a sad barbaric tangle (in my urgency, I’d left both hat and overcoat in the room). “No, no, no, this is all wrong. You see, you, well, you don’t understand what—”

The second policeman — he was fair-haired, with pale eyebrows and a little mustache that vanished like Paul Sehorn’s when the lights of the patrol car illuminated his face — had taken up my position at Prok’s window. His rapping, with the business end of a nightstick, was more insistent than mine had been. The window rolled down and I saw Prok’s astonished face framed there a moment, and then the policeman had his hand on the door and was jerking it open. “Okay,” he said, “out of the car.”

All the way to the station house, as we sat wedged in on either side of the prostitute (Verleen Loy, five foot five, one hundred twenty-seven pounds, D.O.B. 3/17/24), Prok remonstrated with the patrolmen in his precise, wrathful tones. Did they know who he was? Did they know that the NRC, the Rockefeller Foundation and Indiana University supported his research? Were they aware that they were holding up vital progress toward understanding one of the most significant behavioral patterns of the human animal?

They weren’t aware of it, no. In fact, one of them — the red-faced policeman who had handcuffed me and subsequently shoved me up against the brick wall at my back for no earthly reason — swung round in his seat at this point and addressed the prostitute in a tone I could only think was both crude and offensive. “Hey, Verleen,” he said, grinning wide, “are we holding up progress here?”

The passing aura of a streetlight caught her face then. She had battered-looking eyes, teeth that seemed to have been sharpened to points. Her voice was reduced, hardly audible over the swish of the tires on the wet pavement. “You ain’t holdin’ up nothin’,” she said.

At the station house, things seemed to take a turn for the better. The night captain, though he was deeply skeptical, was impressed by Prok’s manner and his dress (and I think he took pity on me too, with my disarranged hair and hangdog look). After determining that Prok was who he claimed to be, the night captain allowed him to put a call through to H.T. Briscoe, Dean of the Faculties at IU. I stood there looking on, the handcuffs digging at my wrists, as Prok recited the number from memory and the night captain conveyed it to the operator.

It was past two in the morning. Verleen had been taken off and locked up in a cell somewhere, and I could hear the occasional shout or whimper emanating from the men’s cell block in the rear. I was frightened, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. I wasn’t yet twenty-three, I’d seen little or nothing of the world, and here I was, on the wrong side of the law and facing some sort of convoluted morals charge that would blemish my record forever, and I was already frantic over what I would tell my mother — what I would tell Iris, for that matter. Solicitation. Wasn’t that what they charged you with? What about Sodomy? Fornication? Corrupting the morals of a minor? I saw myself at the work farm, in prison stripes, shuffling out to rake the yard.

But then I heard Prok’s cool, collected tones as he explained the situation to Dean Briscoe, rudely awakened from his bed in a cozy room in a comfortable house back in the very Eden of Bloomington, and then I watched the night captain’s face as Prok handed him the phone and Dean Briscoe delivered his authoritative testimonial on the other end of the line, and it was only then that I knew the crisis had passed. Unfortunately, I never did recover my overcoat and hat, and we managed only six interviews on that trip, but on the positive side, it taught us a lesson — from then on, Prok never went anywhere without a letter from Dean Briscoe explaining his project and its validation by the highest authorities of Indiana University, said letter to be produced “in the event that the nature of his research takes him into localities where the purpose of what he is doing might not be clearly understood.”

Back safe in Bloomington, I gave Iris a truncated version of our little contretemps, tried to make a joke of it, in fact, though my psychic wounds were still open and festering, but Iris didn’t find the story amusing, not at all. We were taking dinner together at the Commons (the roast pork with brown gravy, fitfully mashed potatoes and wax beans cooked to the consistency of cud), and she’d innocently asked how the trip had gone. I told her, glossing over some of the seamier details, and winding up with an extended lament over the loss of my hat and overcoat (for which Prok would make allowance in my next paycheck, incidentally).

“Prostitutes, huh?” she said.

I nodded. The overhead lighting made a gargoyle’s mask of my face (I know because I was staring into my own reflection in a long dirty strip of mirror on the wall behind Iris). Outside, it was raining, a local manifestation of the same pandemic storm that had dogged us in Gary.

Iris’s face was very pale and her mouth drawn tight. She laid her knife and fork carefully across her plate, though she’d barely touched her food. When she spoke, her voice was thick with emotion. “Do you often go with prostitutes?”

“Well, no,” I said. “Of course not. That goes without saying.”

“Do you ever — do you sleep with them?”

I didn’t like the implied accusation, didn’t like the criticism — or belittling — of my professionalism and my work. And I was especially annoyed after what I’d been through the previous night. She couldn’t begin to imagine. “No,” I snapped. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Did you ever?”

“Iris. Please. What do you think I am?”

“Did you?”

“No. And if you want to know the truth I never laid eyes on a prostitute in my life till last night and I wouldn’t treat them, prostitutes, that is, any different from anybody else. As far as interviews are concerned. You know perfectly well that for the project to succeed we need everybody’s history, from as wide a range of people as we can manage to contact, ministers’ wives, Daughters of the American Revolution, Girl Scout leaders”—and here the image of Mac, naked, flitted quickly through my brain like one of the flecks and blotches on the screen when the projector first flicks on—“and, yes, prostitutes too.”

She looked away, caught in profile, her hair a small conflagration of shadow and light. “Did you ever sleep with anybody?” She spoke to the wall, her voice a whisper. “Besides me?”