Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

6 p.m. Nietfeldt follows the Mystery Couple inside a bodega. The pair moves up and down the store’s two aisles. He heads for the cooler and gets a bottle of Coke, a bag of chips. Just another paunchy citizen who can’t make it till dinnertime. He takes his booty to the counter. The couple lingers in one of the aisles. The clerk rings him up; he asks for a pack of Larks. Pays, asks for matches. A man comes in and buys an Examiner.

“Good idea,” says Nietfeldt, to no one special. He grabs a paper and eyes the pair. While he fishes his change out of his pocket he notices a coffeepot behind the counter, and he asks the clerk to fix him a cup. But when the coffee has joined the paper before him on the counter, he remains lamentably alone up there. He opens the freezer case and takes out an It’s-It.

“Maybe next time you should make a list,” says the clerk.

“I thought it was the impulse buys that paid the freight in a joint like this.”

At last they come up. Rice, dried beans. The simple life. Of course they could have had meat for the same price if they’d just walked to the Safeway three blocks away. Maybe on top of everything else they’re fucking vegetarians.

Nietfeldt takes his groceries and his coffee and steps aside to make room. He smiles. The woman gives him a polar stare. The man does not return the smile, turning to ask for a pint bottle of plum wine. Nietfeldt tries to recall the timber and cadence of General Teko’s voice on the “eulogy” tape, but that was a guy pretending to be black, and this is just another overeducated Caucasian who happens to be asking for sweet wine.

Field Marshal Cinque’s favorite drink, Nietfeldt suddenly recalls.

Later they get the news over the wire: LCpl. Andrew C. Shepard, USMC, received an operation on his left knee during his hitch.

Polhaus is ready to go upon hearing this. Far as he’s concerned, tomorrow’s the first day of the rest of his life. No more explaining to asshole reporters why he can’t pick up the trail of the SLA. No more providing daily briefings to Director Kelley. No more Lydia Galton wincing whenever Hank pours him out a couple of fingers of scotch.

He’s actually been asked if he’ll miss working on the case once it’s been closed. As if he were some sort of artist laboring over his magnum opus, stringing it along, afraid to move on to the next project. Well, federal agents don’t suffer from completion anxiety. And unlike an artist, he hasn’t imbued the final product with his own likeness, flattered himself so much that he wants to keep gazing at it. His labors on the case have left no impression on its specific set of facts at all. Find, interpret, conclude. Plus soothe and placate. Wheedle and cringe. Rage and fawn.

Nineteen months — suddenly this is it. He knows that where the Shepards are, Galton is. Has to be. He’ll take his chances with a(nother) false arrest. (The way these longhairs piss and moan. Sworn enemies of the State Apparatus but invariably shocked, outraged, and happy to avail themselves of the civil courts when wrongfully arrested.) If he loses her this time, that’s simply that. Not that he’s a pessimist, but he’s already planned his resignation from the Bureau in that event, put out discreet feelers in the field of corporate security. He’s seen the pastures out to which they put you.

And if he catches her? Director of the Bureau? Governor of California? Surely the case has prepared him for a career in politics, but he’s acquired a love of anonymity over the years, working under Hoover’s showboat directorate. Something satisfying about wielding power incognito. Polhaus never wanted to be a cop, because he hadn’t wanted to wear a uniform while he waited to get into plainclothes. Perhaps politics wasn’t for him. In addition to which, all that COINTELPRO stuff might come back to haunt him.

So maybe just the old routine, tossing his jacket over the back of his chair, eating his danish and drinking his coffee, bringing his newspaper into the bathroom with him. That’d be fine. Face the reporters one last time, their faces too familiar for him not to notice that they’d newly been stamped with bogus respect, tell them I told you so, and then throw them out into the street: The one who’d written that he looked “like a none-too-bright bloodhound whose quarry has just slipped out of reach.” The woman who’d called him “one of the last of the old breed” in a distinctly pejorative manner. The columnist who’d said that his “methods must be questioned and his motives, distrusted.” Gone at last!

Day three. For the first time agents have been positioned in the area around the clock. Nietfeldt and Langmo play chess through the night by the light of the dashboard, using a magnetic travel set. They’re both lousy players and spend most of their playing time either warning each other of lurking danger on the board or apologizing for taking each other’s pieces. Roger arrives for Susan at 10 today.

“Talk about banker’s hours. Wouldn’t harvest much cane for Fidel if they showed up in the fields after ten.”

Nietfeldt yawns.

11:30. A covered pickup stops outside 288 and turns on its flashers. A young Negro male exits the cab and climbs the stoop. He wears a white jalabiyya and matching kufi. That’s a new wrinkle. Out comes Mystery Man.

“Who’s the sheikh?” says Langmo.

Mystery Man takes cash from his pocket and together the two walk down the steps and to the truck, where the young man drops the gate and hauls a white joint compound bucket toward him. He removes the cover and takes from the bucket a fish, holding it by the tail. Mystery Man hands over some money and the young man wraps the fish in a couple of sheets of newspaper.

“He’d be better off selling that on Friday around here.”

“Right after Vatican Two my father started making hamburgers on Friday,” Langmo says. “Every Friday it was burgers: with cheese, with bacon, with Lipton onion soup mix mixed in, whatever, as long as they were dripping blood. Threw them on the grill. Liked to eat them on a kaiser roll. Enough of this fish shit, he said.”

“Hated fish.”

“He hated fish. Loved the Latin mass, but he hated fish.”

“I’m kind of attached to the old ways, myself.”

“Really?”

“I don’t kill myself or anything, you understand.”

The young man drives off as Mystery Man carries his fish and yesterday’s news up the steps.

At ten to one the door opens again and the Mystery Couple comes out. They’re dressed for a jog, in shorts and T-shirts.

Bockenkamp radios. “Anyplace they could hide a weapon under there?”

“Search me,” says Nietfeldt.

“Ho-ho. I mean, this is it. Now’s when we take them.”

Langmo’s bouncing in the passenger seat.

“Let them do their jogging. Wear them out a little. I’m sure as fucking hell not chasing them up and down these hills,” says Nietfeldt.

The couple starts trotting in the direction of the park.

Subjects rounding Alabama. South on Alabam. You copy?

Ten-four Car one, you got a print kit ready? ID this guy right away. Nip it in the bud if we’re wrong.

Progress, car two?

Still on Alabama. They usually, the routine is, down Alabama to Ripley.

Copy that, two.

Um, stand by. Stand by.

What’s up, two?

Subject male is stopping. Stone in his shoe or something, looks like. Subject female is continuing.

Shit. They’re not together, you mean?

Negative. You copy?

Car one, Base. Take up position on Folsom. They don’t join up we’ll take her fast so he doesn’t see.

copy.

Here he comes. Shit, he’s going flat out. Gonna have a heart attack.