Philip Roth - Operation Shylock

“What happened to it?” I asked.

“Please, don’t insult me too much. I don’t carry a gun, the cancer has knocked the shit out of my body, the drugs, you’re right, they’re no good for the brain, they fuck up your nature, and, on top of everything, I am in awe of you — that’s true and always will be. It’s as it should be. I know my place vis-à-vis you. I’m willing to take shit from you that I never took before in my life. I’m a little powerless where you’re concerned. But I happen also to understand your predicament better than you give me credit for. You’re blitzed too, Phil, this isn’t the easiest situation for a classic Jewish paranoid to handle. That’s what I’m trying to address right now — your paranoid response. That’s why I’m explaining to you who I am and where I’m coming from. I’m not an alien from outer space. I’m not a schizoid delusion. And however much fun it is for you to think so, I’m not Meema Gitcha’s Moishe Pipik, either. Far from it. I’m Philip Roth. I’m a Jewish private detective from Chicago who has got cancer and is doomed to die of it, but not before he makes his contribution. I am not ashamed of what I have done for people up until now. I am not ashamed of being a bodyguard for people who needed a bodyguard. A bodyguard is a piece of meat, but I never gave anybody less than the best. I did matrimonial surveillance for years. I know it’s the comic-relief end of the business, catching people with their pants down, I know it’s not being a novelist who wins prizes for excellence — but that’s not the Philip Roth who I was. I was the Philip Roth who went up to the desk manager at the Palmer House and showed him my badge or gave him some other pretense so I could get to the registration book to see that they had actually signed in and what room they were in. I am the Philip Roth who in order to get up there would say I was a floral-delivery person and I gotta be sure this is personally done because the guy gave me a hundred dollars to get it up there. I am the Philip Roth who would get the maid and make up a story for her: ‘I forgot my key, this is my room, you can check downstairs that this is my room.’ I am the Philip Roth who could always get a key, who could always get in the room — always .”

“Just like here,” I said, but that didn’t stop him.

“I am the Philip Roth who rushes into the room with his Minolta and gets his pictures before they know what’s happened. Nobody gives you awards for this, but I was never ashamed, I put in my years, and when I finally had the money, I opened my own agency. And the rest is history. People are missing and Philip Roth finds them. I’m the Philip Roth who is dealing with desperate people all the time, and not just in some book. Crime is desperate. The person who reported them is desperate and the person who is on the lam is desperate, and so desperation is my life, day and night. Kids run away from home and I find them. They run away and they get pulled into the world of people who are scum. They need a place to stay, and so the people take advantage of that. My last case, before I got cancer, was a fifteen-year-old girl from Highland Park. Her mother came to me, she was a mess, a lot of tears and screaming. Donna registered for her high school class in September, went for the first two days, and then disappeared. She winds up with a known felon, warrants for his arrest, a bad guy. A Dominican. I found this apartment building in Calumet City where his grandmother lived, and I staked it out. It was all I had to go on. I staked it out for days. I sat upwards of twenty-six hours once without relief. With nothing happening. You have to have patience, tremendous patience. Even reading the newspapers is chancy because something could happen in a split second and you might miss it. There for hours and you have to be inventive. You hide in the vehicle, you sit low in the vehicle, you pretend you’re just hanging out like anybody else in the vehicle. Sometimes you go to the bathroom in the vehicle — you can’t help it. And meanwhile I am always putting myself in the criminal’s mind, how he’s going to react and what he’s going to do. Every criminal is different and every scenario I come up with is different. When you’re a criminal and you’re stupid, you don’t think, but if you’re a detective you have to be intelligent enough to not-think in the way this guy doesn’t think. Well, he turns up at the grandmother’s finally. I follow him on foot when he comes out. He goes to make a drug purchase. Then he comes back to the car. I make a pass by the car and there she is — I make a positive identification that it is Donna. It turned out later that he was doing drugs in the car himself. To shorten a long story, the car chase lasted twenty-five minutes. We’re driving about eighty miles an hour down side roads through four Indiana towns. The guy is charged with sixteen different counts. Eluding police, resisting arrest, kidnapping — he’s in deep shit. I interrogated the girl. I said, ‘How you doin’, Donna?’ She says, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, my name is Pepper. I’m from California. I’ve been in town a week.’ This nice Highland Park high school girl of fifteen has the intelligence of a hardened con and her story is perfect. She’s been gone eleven months, and she had a fake birth certificate, a driver’s license, a whole bunch of fake IDs. Her behavior indicated to me that this guy was using her for prostitution. We found condoms in her pocketbook, sexual devices in the car and things.”

I thought, He’s got it all down pat from TV. If only I’d watched more “L.A. Law” and read less Dostoyevsky I’d know what’s going on here, I’d know in two minutes what show it is exactly. Maybe motifs from fifteen shows, with a dozen detective movies thrown in. The joke is that more than likely there’s a terrifically popular network program that everyone stays home for on Friday nights, and not only is it about a private investigator who specializes in missing kids but it’s a Jewish private investigator, and the episode about the high school girl (sweet cheerleader, square parents, mind of her own) and the addict-pimp abductor (dirty dancer, folkloric grandmother, pitted skin) was probably the last one seen by Pipik before he’d hopped on the plane for Tel Aviv to play me. Maybe it was the in-flight movie on El Al. Probably everybody in America over three years of age knows about how detectives shit in their cars and call the cars vehicles, probably everybody over three in America knows exactly what is meant by a sexual device and only the aging author of Portnoy’s Complaint has to ask. What fun it must be for him putting me on like this. But is the masquerading relentless for the sake of the shakedown, or is the shakedown a pretext for the performance and all the real fun in the act? What if this isn’t simply a con but his parody of my vocation, what’s now known to mankind as a “roast.” Yes, suppose this Pipik of mine is none other than the Satiric Spirit in the flesh, and the whole thing a send-up, a satire of authorship! How could I have missed it? Yes, yes, the Spirit of Satire is of course who he is, here to poke fun at me and other outmoded devotees of what is important and what is real, here to divert us all from the Jewish savagery that doesn’t bear thinking about, come with his road show to Jerusalem to make everyone miserable laugh.

“What are the sexual devices?” I asked him.

“She had a vibrator. There was a blackjack in the car. I forget what else we had.”

“What’s the blackjack, a kind of dildo? 1 suppose dildos are a dime a dozen on prime time by now. What the Hula-Hoop used to be.”

“They use blackjacks for S & M. For beating and punishing and things like that.”