The Old Turk's Load (4 page)

The Brain in the Jar
A

fter the clams and Bloody Marys, Kelly began to feel chipper. He was needling Norbert, a die-hard Yankees fan, about the Amazin’Mets when the stool beside him scraped the sawdust floor and a pale face loomed through the underwater light.

“Lloyd. Is this an office visit?”
“I had some business in the area.”
To Kelly, Lloyd Chamberlain was a man adrift. Blond, fey, and

smooth, Lloyd was a trust funder from some wealthy New England family, supposedly working as an artist. But Lloyd had gotten into acid and contagious-looking splotches of paint, then speed and no paint at all. He was dealing now, not that he needed the money, and had replaced painting with talking, always talking, only occasionally about art. If there was a genetic predisposition to the low life, this poor bastard had it. Kelly pitied him, vaguely liked him, hoped he’d turn himself around, but saw nothing wrong with using him in the meantime. Lloyd was on the street a lot. Saw things. Knew people.

As far as Lloyd was concerned, it was Kelly who was the odd man out. Unless you actually
were
a narcotics agent or a jazz musician, you should
not
dress in shiny black shoes, dark sport coats, and skinny ties. Still, the private detective was a decent companion— stolid, a good listener. And he could handle himself.

Kelly finished his drink, and Lloyd proposed they mosey downtown. He and Helen were having people over that night and she wanted him out while she got the place together. The two of them could hang for a while, then Kelly could come over to his pad. That suited Kelly. Prior to the mess with the German he’d done a difficult divorce case—a lot of surveillance and not much sleep—and was now serious about laying low. An afternoon of moderate drinking followed by an evening of Chamberlain’s arty and intellectual friends didn’t sound strenuous. Plus, there would be Helen. Kelly had a thing for Lloyd’s wife.

They had dark beers, hard cheese, and raw onions in the company of dozing cats and muttering geezers at a place in the Village. As the students began drifting in they moved west, toward Lloyd’s “business,” stopping at My Office on Hudson, a dingy railroad car of a joint with only two other customers. Lloyd and Kelly stood way down at the end, under the TV around the corner from the men’s room, facing the front door, a distant rectangle of pearly light in the gloom. Kelly ordered two Schaefers.

Lloyd was in a pathologically chatty mood, even for him, probably because he was cranked. Kelly listened patiently. Finally he said, “There’s something green stuck between your teeth.”

Lloyd stopped talking, stared at the other man intently, then walked out of the bar. Kelly lit a cigarette and waited. Lloyd returned fifteen minutes later and pushed Kelly around the corner into the phone booth by the men’s room, pulling a plasticene envelope of dirty white powder from his pocket. He made two minuscule piles of the stuff on the flap and held them up to his nose with one hand.

THE OLD TURK’S LOAD
33

The thumb and slender ring finger of the other held the half-length of blue-and-white-striped soda straw and the index finger blocked the nostril as he sucked up one of the piles. Second pile in the other nostril. His back stiffened. He offered the envelope to Kelly.

Hitting the street again, they stopped at one more run-down gin mill for another toot, perfectly timed to catch the receding wave of the first, before heading across town to Lloyd’s apartment. On the way, Lloyd told him about a lifer in the army, a platoon leader in ’Nam, who’d gotten all shot up. Which was when the helicopter came down, a big flying, stainless steel state-of-the-art operating room, and scooped him up. Just shoved the regular medevacs out of the way and sucked the mangled body up inside it and disappeared.

Kelly looked over at Lloyd, who caught the look and said, “No. I actually know this guy. I mean I know about the guy whose identity they stole and put him into. I read the b-book about what they’re doing.”

Something in his voice. “What’re they doing, Lloyd?”

“They’re looking for a fucking B-BRAIN.” Flecks of white spittle dotted the corner of his mouth.
“Lloyd . . .”
“No. I read—I read the book and the fucking reports, too.” Kelly let him talk.
A top secret government organization had been working on this, Lloyd went on, since the end of World War II. They’d put the finishing touches on the technology just in time for Vietnam, which was perfect. What they needed,apparently, was a brain.They thought they were going to have to use car crash victims in their experiments but now the war provided an endless supply of mangled bodies with heads intact.That stainless steel chopper would swoop down and get the poor bastard and then they’d take out his brain— Kelly experienced a jangling flashback to Norbert’s hands on those clams—and keep it alive. Because what they needed was something to organize their computing devices.
“They’ve got all these Univacs running along, giant things, they fill up rooms. Some monitor electricity, some do the railroads and airlines. Some, they listen to telephone calls, see who’s calling who. Some keep track of charge accounts. Not to mention the military stuff. The thing is, it’s so much information that no machine can handle it. So they’ve been working on ways to wire human brains into the machines. Some are like traffic control, you know, switching devices, and some are like moles running through all this information for the Man.”
Despite himself, Kelly got the picture. Computers the size of houses with wires to brains in jars at the bottom of a deep gray canyon of chemical nutrient. Hadn’t there even been some movie?
“So they got this guy’s brain, but they didn’t get all the personality out.”
“How do you know they got him, Lloyd?”
“He’s been trying to fucking CONTACT me.” It was almost a wail. Lloyd had been getting coded messages on his telephone and electric bills. They looked like gibberish. He couldn’t figure them out. The poor bastard was on the ragged end of a weeklong speed run—couldn’t tell the traffic buzz from the one in his head.
Lloyd heard the thought, the way they sometimes could on crank. “Fuck you, Kelly. I didn’t say I b-believed it. I’m just laying it down the way I think about it. I think about it a lot. And how strange is it compared to all the other weird shit going on out there?
Weird shit. That was for sure.

Daddy’s Stash
T

he
foco,
their revolutionary cell, hung out at Gallagher’s place on the Lower East Side.The living was communal and informal, but the lifestyle was highly politicized, an ongoing planning session involving the core group—Kevin, Gloria, Leo, and Juan. Lloyd Chamberlain came and went, usually delivering drugs, and Irene hovered at the fringes as legal consultant, scrupulously avoiding firsthand knowledge of their plots and schemes. They all had their own places in the city, but they might as well have lived at Kevin’s, as much time as they spent there. Gloria slept with him regularly—at first. But as his head issues became apparent, she tailed off. He needed for her to be his “whore” or his “bitch” and that doggie-style thing was way too hung up. He was, she soon realized, damaged. A user, a hustler, a loser. For the rest: Leo lacked discipline, Lloyd was a drug addict, and poor Juan just wanted to be wherever Irene was.

Originally they’d bonded over their shared belief in the corruption and imminent failure of the establishment. All were certain that there were things they could do to hasten the inevitable end. The most radical group dedicated to this mission was a shadowy band of dedicated revolutionaries who called themselves the Motherfuckers. In the
foco
only Juan and Lloyd weren’t Motherfucker dropouts, Gloria and Irene by choice, Leo and Kevin because of their “adventurism,” which Kevin claimed was Motherese for having more brains than they—very unlikely in Gloria’s view. They bounced him because, no matter what Kevin said, they recognized him as a liability.

As far as Gloria was concerned, the Mother commitment to violent overthrow of the established order was too limited, too inflexible—suicidal, really, which was what made it sexy. Kevin was obsessed with doing something to impress them, to show them they’d made a mistake about him. So he was always talking about spectacular schemes like kidnapping someone from Mundi Enterprises or blowing up government buildings.

At this moment, for example, he was coiled on the edge of his ratty couch, intense and crazy. Gloria, he announced, would dress in maternity clothes, padded big, like seven or eight months pregnant. She’d come into a station house in obvious distress and ask to use the ladies’ room.Then she’d plant two sticks of dynamite hidden in the stuffing, along with a simple alarm clock detonator, behind the toilet or in the trash can.

Juan nodded eagerly, ready for anything. Leo was excited about doing something big with Kevin. Lloyd was off somewhere, but that was okay. No one really counted on him for anything except pot. Gloria contemplated walking around with dynamite taped to her, setting alarm clock detonators in a police station bathroom, while her accomplices waited, blocks away.

It was always the same pattern: Kevin concocting a bold scheme that involved someone else taking the risk. Not that it
THE OLD TURK’S LOAD
37

mattered. His plans never came to fruition. Irene would put her foot down, or Lloyd would show up with some acid and they’d all get distracted, or the idea would start to seem fatally flawed before it could be put into execution.

The inevitable flaw was they were scared. Especially Kevin. When you blew up buildings people got killed. Other people hunted you down. So they muddled along, Kevin ranting and scheming, Leo aping Kevin, Juan adoring Irene, and Irene and Gloria putting their efforts into funding and delivering legal aid for antiwar demonstrators and conscientious objectors, the only useful accomplishment of the
foco
to date.

Now this. Maternity bombs.
She’d been a fool to let Kevin know about Daddy’s stash. Instead of figuring out how to get it—instead of helping her to get it—and fence it, and use the proceeds to start
focos
in major cities, greased with lawyers and funds, Kevin did nothing. Said nothing. Talked darkly of “the right time.” Instead of seeking the advice and counsel of the group, he was using all the power and intimidation he could muster to get her to keep quiet, to keep it from them. Did he really believe she couldn’t see through him? Did he imagine this dynamite business was going to distract her? Yet here he was tonight, working harder to sell it than she’d ever seen him.
“The pigs won’t have a clue. We head north and into Syracuse —I’ve got people up there—and do it again. Other groups will see how easy it is. That’s when things’ll get interesting. We’ll be the spark. And here’s the kicker”—he glared around intently, trying to judge whether they were worthy conspirators—“I’ve got funding for this one. An old friend. A guy whose life I saved in jail. It’s a long story, but”—he produced a fat wad of bills—“three grand. Enough to get us a set of wheels that can’t be traced. Enough to set us up again somewhere else.This is going to
happen,
people, if we want it to. All I need is for you to tell me. Is this what we
want
?”
She could see it clearly now. It was all a diversion.The bastard intended to steal Daddy’s stash for himself. That was what all that prying and digging had been about. Or he’d get some other people in, serious criminal types who knew how to maximize an asset. Whatever it was.
While Gloria stewed, the “whatever” waited in Richard Mundi’s safe.

Helen and Kelly
T

here was a crowd at Lloyd and Helen’s that night. Friends of Helen’s with long dresses, armpit hair, sandals. A couple of brothers in wide-brimmed hats, bell-bottoms showing under long coats, studiously avoiding one another. A few cutting-edge radicals from the Motherfuckers, keeping regally to themselves, and another bunch of activists, Lloyd’s buddies, who’d made their stand in the kitchen, as far away from the Motherfuckers as they could get, in company with various writers, drug addicts, actors, and a tight knot of what looked to be graduate assistants standing around the stove. Why did intellectuals always go to the kitchen?

The Chamberlains had the second floor of a building on the corner of Sixth, with a large central window onto Avenue B, and they’d knocked the walls out, so it was now a loft space. Most of the far wall, away from the stairs, was fronted by boards on sawhorses loaded with potluck food: loaves of homemade bread, salads, vegetable and grain stuff in heavy clay bowls. Kelly considered himself lucky to discover a tinfoil tray of chicken wings that someone had brought over from the local Chinese takeout. He nibbled for a while, had a beer. Lloyd gave him a handful of teeny little reds. He took a few and gave the rest to an anorexic blonde who definitely looked wigged. She smiled and said, “
Gaww
.”

The pills went down and down, trying their hardest, but they still couldn’t get him back on the wave. His brain kept trying to tell him who it thought he was.

He did slow circuits of the big room, getting a face here, a snatch of conversation there, passing easily in the crowd but stopping conversation when he stood with a group of three or four.Although he couldn’t possibly have been a narc,his presence invariably elicited hostile silence. It was the shoes, mostly, as Lloyd had told him many times.

Lloyd, who’d opted to stay with the speed, did a couple of turns with Kelly, then started moving faster and faster, until he disappeared completely from view. Kelly found himself in the kitchen, standing near a group whose number had grown, the way a mob gathers around two guys fighting in the street.

In this case it was a linebacker-size dude with shoulder-length hair and a rakish mustache, and a lissome, very put-together girl— B-school or law firm—with a most beguiling way of wrinkling the corners of her eyes. It gave her a certain lightness of being, as if she were tuned in, underneath it all, to some cosmic joke.

What she was saying, however, was anything but funny. Kelly thought it might have been a lover’s quarrel cloaking itself in political debate.The guy was invoking the grinding poverty of Guatemalan peasants, and she was saying, basically, fuck that. The realities of the post-scarcity economy proved they were never going to get theirs until the system changed.