Don DeLillo - Running Dog

"Lightborne, how are you? Always a pleasure to speak to a knowledgeable person, what with all these second-raters who work for me."

"I understand the business is getting tight, Richie. I mean legally speaking, as far as successful prosecutions."

"They'll never find me. I have too much paper floating around. I'm very well hidden, believe me. Holding companies in four states. Dummy corporations. I don't exist as a person. I'm not in writing anywhere. I'm sitting behind all that paper."

"Legal fronts, wonderful."

"So speak," Armbrister said, his high-pitched voice seemingly on the verge of cracking.

"Remember the business we talked about some months ago."

"Sure."

"It's hot again," Lightborne said. "I got a phone call that sounds encouraging."

"You're encouraged."

"It could be nothing."

"I'm still interested. Full-length movies. First-run. The field's been denied me so far. Some bad luck. A series of small incidents. Organized crime, you know. The families. They're involved in full-length."

"It could be nothing, Richie."

"But the trail is hot again."

"It's warm. I'd say warm, realistically."

"What do you need, Lightborne?"

"To show some money."

"All my money's tied up in cash."

Lightborne realized he was being called upon to laugh and with an effort he managed to do this.

"Hey, I bought a plane," Richie said. "I'm going to Europe to do some business. We gutted the whole passenger section and redid it. It's big, it seats thirty-one, a DC-nine. Maybe I'll stop in New York on the way back. We'll get serious about this thing."

"I know Europe well," Lightborne said with no particular conviction.

"First we go to England to look at the theater setup. Then Hamburg or Stockholm, I forget which, for the shops, to see if we can push our rubber line. Then maybe Amsterdam for bondage items, to check out their expertise."

Lightborne was suddenly exhausted and wished only to stretch out on his cot and go to sleep. He stared into the dimness, nodding to the rhythms of the voice on the other end. There was a remark, a brief expectant silence, and then Richie's manic laughter came swimming across the continent.

"Ha ha," Lightborne said at the first opening.

The next day he walked into a railroad diner near Chinatown. He was a couple of minutes late and breathing heavily as he hurried the length of the room and sat next to Selvy at the counter.

"We discussed footage, you recall."

"Yes," Selvy said.

"Would he be interested?"

"Oh, he'd be interested."

"Tell him it could be on."

"I'll tell him."

"Tell him to forget about past failures."

"It's on. I'll tell him."

"Never mind the stuff from the jungle, tell him."

"This is different," Selvy said.

"Of course it's still sight unseen. It's still a question of plausibility."

"You were the chief skeptic, last time we talked about it."

Lightborne ordered soup and absently ran the edge of a matchbook under his fingernails.

"Common knowledge there was a steady flow of women in and out of the SS guard rooms in the bunker," he said. "All told there were hundreds of people in the bunker. It was an elaborate operation, running the country from down there, what was left of the country."

"All those people, things could happen, you're saying."

"On the other hand when we talk of the old boy himself, this is when I become highly skeptical once more."

"Hitler."

"He was too feeble to take part in anything like that. He was partially paralyzed, he was under sedation much of the time. In his last days he wasn't well at all. Eva Braun. Eva Braun certainly wasn't a candidate for a mass sexual exercise. Not the type. Of course she liked movies. She once worked for a photographer. But that's of little matter."

"Very little," Selvy said.

"On the other hand there were the early days with Geli Raubal. His niece. Story goes he forced her to model for dirty pictures. Close-ups and such."

"Who drew the pictures?"

"He did," Lightborne said.

"Hitler."

"So you have this pornographic interest. You have the fact that movies were screened for him all the time in Berlin and Obersalzburg, sometimes two a day. Those Nazis had a thing for movies. They put everything on film. Executions, even, at his personal request. Film was essential to the Nazi era. Myth, dreams, memory. He liked lewd movies too, according to some. Even Hollywood stuff, girls with legs."

"You're building a case. You're tilting."

"It could be nothing."

"You're a student of the period."

"Did I say that?"

"I believe I recall, yes, you said that."

"You see, he's endlessly fascinating. The whole Nazi era. People can't get enough. If it's Nazis, it's automatically erotic. The violence, the rituals, the leather, the jackboots. The whole thing for uniforms and paraphernalia. He whipped his niece, did you know that?"

"Hitler."

"He used a bull whip, story goes."

Lightborne broke a saltine cracker and dropped the pieces into his tomato soup.

"Not that I don't remain skeptical," he said. "I remain highly skeptical."

"About the existence of the film itself or just the people taking part, their rank and such?"

"About both of those plus one other thing, which is the commercial prospects such a document would have. I call it a document to dignify it. Is there really any demand for such a thing? Is this what people want out of pornography? Maybe it's too historical. Maybe it _is_ a document. I'm asking myself. What do people want? Is there a strong fantasy element involved? Will this kind of material help people upgrade their orgasms?"

Selvy couldn't help laughing.

"I like your walking stick," he said.

"Someone noticed. You're the first. Up until now, nobody saw it. I paid money. This is African wood, right here. The handle is a monkey if you notice."

"Nice stick, very."

Lightborne called for the check, noting that his companion had only a cup of coffee before him on the counter.

"Don't bother," Selvy said. "He pays."

"And you think there's a chance he'd be interested."

"Oh, he'd be interested all right. I know it for a fact."

The routine. Cab, terminal, plane, terminal, car. He moved through it apart from other people, sitting in aisle seats, standing at the edge of waiting lines, unobtrusively watchful, last on, first off. He found a place for his car on Potomac Avenue and headed into the building, skirting two small boys playing on the stairs outside his apartment.

"Hey, you the landlord?"

"No."

"Where you belong?"

"Hey, white."

"What you be doing here?"

"Hey, white."

"Where you belong then?"

He took a shower and waited for time to pass. He didn't mind the waiting. Somewhere to be at 1500. No one he knew, or might talk to in the intervening period, would ever suspect the nature of his business. It was carried on beneath the level of ordinary life. This is why it made no difference where he lived. It was all the same, mere coloration for the true life, for the empty meditations, the routine, the tradecraft, the fine edge to be maintained in preparation for-he didn't know what. In preparation for what?

He lived in the off-hours. He created his own operational environment, having little outside direction, no sense of policy. Periodically he reported to a house near the Government Printing Office, where he was given a technical interview, or polygraph, or lie detector test.

He was a reader. He read his man. There was nothing cynical in his view of the world. He didn't feel tainted by the dirt of his profession. It was a calculated existence, this. He preferred life narrowed down to unfinished rooms.

That afternoon at three Selvy stood outside a restaurant on M Street, Palacio de Mexico, as the limousine approached and the back door slowly swung open. There was a fully grown St. Bernard on the front seat next to the driver and three St. Bernard puppies mauling each other across the length of the rear seat. Lomax had squeezed himself into one of the jump seats and he motioned Selvy toward the adjoining one.