The Erection Set

Even the cigarette burned. I took another drag and stamped it out. “No,” I said. “When I found out they hadn’t been hit I went classical. They loved every damn second of it and screamed for more. I know all the tricks, all the techniques, all the little nuances from foreplay to afterlove and I’ll be damned if I’m going to set you up for somebody else.”

“I know some tricks too.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I heard you telling Raul about them when I first saw you.”

“Jealous?”

“Nope. I even appreciate your attitude. Like total understanding. Why don’t you let your boy bust it for you and be done with it?”

“Because he may be dead.” The way she said it was so simple I should have known.

“Serviceman?”

“Yes.”

“Overseas?”

Sharon nodded and sipped at her coffee.

“When did you see him last?”

“The day he left. It was the day we became engaged. There wasn’t time to do anything else so he gave me this.” She held up her hand with the cheap little ring on it.

I said, “I’m sorry, kid.”

“That’s all right.”

“Love him?”

“I’ve always loved him.”

“Get letters?”

“No.”

“How long do you expect to wait?”

“Until I’m sure he’s dead.”

“Meanwhile?”

“I play my own tricks. And techniques. And nuances.”

I pushed out of my chair. “He doesn’t have much more time,” I told her.

“Yes, I know.”

Thunder rumbled outside the window and I walked to the French doors and looked down at the big-bellied city that squatted underneath me. Headlights of the cars probed through the darkness, their horns demanding pathways and tiny dark things scuttled across between traffic lights whose WALK and DON’T WALK became another commandment to the mice caught in the concrete maze of the city.

“When does the picture move out to Linton?” I asked her.

“The crew will be looking for location sites the end of the week.”

“You coming out?”

“I have to go.”

“The old house on Mondo Beach ...”

“Yes?”

“I’ll be there.”

“Dog ...”

I turned around and she was standing there in front of the chair with the nightgown in a puddle around her feet. She was a naked picture of beauty that made everything inside me tingle for a short second before it went sour. In the dim light she looked slippery and wet again, all gorgeous thighs and bushy-haired belly surmounted by high-aiming breasts, but I could see her teeth and I couldn’t tell if it was a smile or a laugh and I thought it was a laugh. I grabbed my coat and hat, grinned back a little bit and headed for the door.

It was raining out again. The night blanket of dark and haze cut all the buildings off like a soft, cheesy knife, muting the roar of the city lion to an angry growl punctuated by the irritated snarls of taxi horns at intersections where the red hadn’t quite changed to green. On the avenues, cars drifted by nearly empty buses, reluctant to get to their destinations, and what few people walked the streets huddled under the canopies of umbrellas or just walked, heads lowered, not caring where they went.

It’s a funny city, I thought. It only went in two directions, up and down and across. Somebody had laid it out like a grid on a tactical map and there it was. It didn’t go in circles like London; it didn’t ramble and squeeze and evacuate its bowels like Rome and Paris and Madrid ... it was just there going north, south, east and west unless you got to where they forgot directions and called it the Village, or Brooklyn, then it was something else. But when you said the City, it meant Manhattan, the head of the world octopus that was all computers and vaults and money and the big rich and the little poor and the idiots trying to make the poor rich and the rich poor to pocket the votes and not once did they know that you can’t do either one. You were either rich or poor, so enjoy it, citizens, and squawk your fucking heads off if you feel like it, only remember, it won’t do you any good at all. The poor try to take, the rich intend to keep and anybody who gets rich is going to damn well keep it because only idiots stay poor anyway. Like the alive stay alive and the dead stay dead.

And it’s funny to be dead. Civilization was nourished on the dead. Cultures and religions and even governments flourished on the dead. But all the dead do is smell. It’s the alive who can hurt you. But sometimes the dead smell in advance.

And that was a smell familiar to me. It was behind about a hundred yards and holding. In another few blocks it would come closer.

I had spotted him when I left Sharon’s and wondered what had happened to all that jungle knowledge I had supposed them to have. Hell, it was a setup, a plain simple setup all the way. I had laid on three alternates if they had spotted the first one and they had gone for the initial track. All my fancy prearranged signals on the alternates reported all clear so I didn’t have to sweat out being flanked.

There was only one guy back there.