" . . . remember what I told you, kid: life is a shitstorm—and when it's raining shit the best umbrella you can buy is art."
—Pedro Carmichael to Martin Louder.
In the film Tune in Tomorrow,
written by William Boyd
"Ken," I said automatically.
"Yes, Joe," she said. "Whenever anyone but Mary is listening, and for as long as you tell me." She nestled her head into the hollow of my throat and licked me. "My Ken doll. Anatomically correct. Well, somewhat exaggerated, like Barbie." She took the evidence in hand. "Men aren't built like this in real life."
"I yield to superior experience," I said. "But up until last night I thought Barbie's chest measurement was exaggeration too." She purred. "Yours are round, of course. Well, rounded, uh . . . look, for reasons I won't go into just now, I'm pretty good at guessing what people are going to do next—"
"I'm certainly giving you enough clues," she said, and gave me one as subtle as a shotgun blast.
"Right, and I'm certainly prepared to cooperate any way I can—but my thinking was, it might be useful to have some coffee first."
"Huh. I follow your thinking."
"Yes, you do. I hate to take the time . . . but it could enhance the experience."
"I'm all for that," she agreed. Without stopping what she was doing, she made a long arm behind her and, without looking, located a brown earthenware mug sitting on cup-warmer. She passed it to me. I took a sip.
You know how coffee never quite tastes as good as it smells? This tasted better. I burned my tongue, and kept sipping. Soon I was gulping.
The secondary effects took a little longer to hit, but they were just as striking. Visually it was as if the photographer had changed from Bob Guccione to Annie Leibovitz: all the Vaseline burned off the lens, and everything came into crisp (but somehow not "sharp") focus. Soundwise it was like somebody switched in Dolby C and all the hiss went away, leaving the highs intact. In terms of state of mind, a good ten years (no: a bad ten years) melted away. I was strong and brave, and there was hope; for once I didn't need to tell myself that maybe tomorrow would be better.
"Where does Mike get this stuff?" I asked.
Arethusa's answer was what lawyers call nonresponsive.
I raised no objection. She was raising a fairly substantial object herself.
God, could love of puns be venereally transmitted?
Hors d'oeuvre! Order in the courting! . . . Put the witless on the stand, in the box, and make him swear . . . Raise your rite gland! . . . Do you swear to tell the hole truth . . . an muff an' butt the truth? . . . I dew, so help me—God! . . . You're on 'er: I move for a Miss-trial . . . Erection sustained . . . We'll take a short recess . . . direct your attention to Exhibit A . . . An in-tight-ment has been laid, on my client . . . Would you care to cross eggs?—Ah'm in! . . .You're witness . . . Madam for men, does the jury have its fur dicked?. . . . Bang! Bang! Bang! . . . Bailiff, ejaculate that man!
The prostitution rested . . .
(My defenses had been resting through the whole trial.)
Once in a while, the afterglow can be as good as the orgasm. You've been that fortunate, haven't you? This time it was better. I'd never shared it before. Among a thousand other feelings was a fine sweet sadness, pity for the poor man I used to be, the hundreds of thousands of hours I'd wasted. I did math in my head: more than three hundred and five thousand hours I'd lived without her. How?
Yeah, part of my head was saying, For Chrissake, Quigley, she's a hooker! But I'm happy to say that even then, when I was just realizing this hooker's hook was set in me, the rest of my head answered with my heart: Yeah and if I'm really lucky, she won't think of a PI as marrying down . . .
I know. I'm trying to tell you that an experienced prostitute, after five minutes' conversation and two sexual acts, not only told a client she loved him, but meant it—and you don't believe me. Subsequent events proved the point, but I won't get to them for a while. All I can tell you now is, I have trouble believing it to this day myself. At that point in my life, my only proven talents were for entertaining absurd thoughts, lying, and surviving violence. Yet Arethusa read my mind a few times and decided to love me. It forces me to conclude that even back then, I must have been a fairly decent guy.
What I'm sure of is that I never doubted her, then or ever. It took days for it to occur to me that another man in my position might have interpreted those four words as merely a professional politeness.
An indeterminate time later she rolled off me, and we smiled at each other in silence for a while. When I thought I could stand it, I finished my coffee. The warmer had kept it just right.
"That one about, 'Would you care to cross eggs?'—'Ah'm in!' was really terrible," Arethusa said.
I blinked a few times. My defenses stirred in their sleep. "You can read my mind too?"
She shook her head, and her blonde hair whispered on the pillow. "Only then," she said. "And mostly just surface stuff. But clearer than with most men."
"Huh." I was thirty-five then; I'd been with whores. It never occurred to me to doubt Arethusa's last statement. Interpret that however you want.
Suddenly I giggled. "S'cuse me: I just pictured us forty years from now, and you said, 'You never talk to me any more.'"
She giggled too. "Vee haff vays uff making you talk," she said.
"You do indeed," I admitted. "Say, I just thought: is that 'you' singular or plural? I mean . . . that is—" Was I asking a rude question.
She twinkled. "How many of my bodies have you been in, you mean?"
"Well . . . Yeah. Yeah, I guess that's what I mean." The question didn't seem to offend her.
"One, so far."
"Oh. Uh . . .was it good for you both?"
Her twinkle became a full-scale pulsar, a brilliant smile that seemed to strobe just too fast to see. "Oh yes," she assured me.
Huh. "Huh. Interesting. Not the first time I've made love with two women at once—"
"I know," she said.
"—but on such occasions, they were both in the room at the time. Does it ever present any problem for you?"
"How do you mean?"
"Well . . . I picture myself in your shoes: one of me is down in the Parlor, chatting with the priest I saw, say—"
"Father Newman. I chat with him a lot."
"Okay, so you're discussing theology, let's say, and suddenly your other body has an orgasm. Do you ever lose the thread of the conversation?"
She giggled. "Well, no. Not usually. But it's funny you should ask that. Father Newman can always tell when that happens. Most people don't notice at all . . . but he always blushes. I think it's sweet."
So did I. "So Father Newman doesn't . . . uh . . ."
She shrugged. "I couldn't say. I've never performed for him. He hasn't asked me."
"Then he doesn't," I said positively. "Look, Arethusa . . . tell me if this is a snoopy question, okay?"
"I will, Joe," she said. "Always. The worst misunderstandings are the unspoken ones."
"Okay, then. I was just wondering . . . is there any special reason why . . . I mean, I guess it stands to reason . . ."
She knew where I was heading, and took me off the hook. "When it stands," she said, tweaking it, "it isn't interested in reason. I think I understand your question. See how close I come: you're wondering if one of my bodies is better than the other one at performing the art, and that's why I haven't swapped in the night, the way you think twins would . . . and somewhere in there is a subtext about, does the other one ever subconsciously resent the one that's better? Am I close?"
"It does sound silly," I admitted. "There'd be no point in swapping, would there? And how could either one be better?"
"As a matter of fact," she said, "you're partly right. This body is better at sex: that's why it's here. The other one's never had any complaints, but this one is special."
"I don't get it. How can that be?"
"Because artistic talent lies not just in the mind, or even the brain. In large part it's found in the upper spinal column."
"Really?"
"Skills, not 'talent,' excuse me. Skills are the flowers you get if you water your talent bush well enough. Like, if I took you and Oscar Peterson, and transplanted your brains, Mr. Peterson would find that he couldn't play a damn with your fingers. And if you sat down at the piano in his body, you'd find that you knew his whole repertoire—as long as you didn't think about it. You'd never be able to play those pieces with the same feeling he does—but you could impress a nonprofessional, because you'd have the spinal column where Mr. Peterson keeps his skills."
"Huh, I saw a guy once in a veterans' hospital. They said he didn't have enough forebrain left to take a decent tissue sample . . . but he could play any early Rolling Stones song you named on the guitar, note for note, and he was pretty good. Couldn't learn a new lick, though, no matter how simple."
"Maybe that was Keith Richards," she said. "Whoever he was, he learned guitar before his injury. Anyway, it's kind of the same with me. This body started out with the most talent for the art, and it's spent the most time developing the skills, so it's better. Not so much better that a lot of clients notice it . . . but I notice. Nothing but the best for my Joe."
What do you say to something like that?
"And no, of course my other body doesn't resent this one. Does your left hand resent your right because it has better penmanship? And if such a thing were possible, I think this body would envy the other one. That one can play the piano—not as good as Mr. Peterson, but damned well—and that is about the only thing a person can do that I'm willing to admit might sometimes be even better than making love. I play here at least a couple of hours, most nights."
"I'd love to hear you play sometime," I said.
"That's not all you'd love. If we rate this body as a ten, at the art, I mean, the other one is about a nine point five. And it has certain digital skills this one lacks. If you're ever in the mood for something manual . . ."
"Most of what I enjoy is in the manual, yes," I tried to say, but she started tickling me before I got the fourth word out. And there was nothing wrong with her fingers. She could have made her own holes in a bowling ball.
Then they were gentle again, and shortly she was showing me an interesting new way to play "Chopsticks." Admittedly it's not a very demanding piece, but she played the hell out of it. Call it a nine point five. And after a while she went back to what her body did best.
It was indeed an Arethusa bulbosa: a solitary rose-purple flower, fringed with yellow . . . and I was a busy little bee.
Like I said, one of the favorite mornings in my memory.
From there the day got less wonderful, in gradual increments.
Well, it could hardly have helped it, now, could it? That's one of the sweetest parts of a morning like that. Knowing it will end, eventually, and never come back in just the same way again.
But the first increments were so small I scarcely noticed them.
I'd just asked her if she'd been born telepathic, and she'd said; "No more than most twins. I have dim half-memories of being two people." So I was going to ask what brought the change on . . . and there was a knock at the door.
All things considered, it could have been worse timed. "Come in," I said, suppressing a momentary impulse to pull a sheet over us first.
It was Doctor Kate, but it took me a second to recognize her. In her off hours she wore a sweatshirt and baggy comfortable slacks, and her hair loose around her shoulders instead of up in a doctor's bun. But the black bag and stethoscope were a dead giveaway. She approached me briskly, shaking a thermometer.
"Hi, Kate," I said. "I'm feeling much glorp." I won't reproduce the rest of the sentence because it sounded like a man trying to talk with a thermometer in his mouth. I raised my hand to adjust it like a cigar and she intercepted the hand to take my pulse, readying her stethoscope and getting out the blood-pressure gizmo with her other hand.
It's funny: right up until then my head hadn't hurt a bit.
By the time I had been pronounced fit to put my pants on, I had a reason to: Lady Sally arrived, looking indecently radiant for that hour of the morning in a soft cranberry silk kimono. She waited politely while Arethusa and I dressed.
I could see the sheaf of printouts in her hand, and the expression on her face, but I did not say, "I told you so." I even managed somehow to wipe the smug look off my face. Not an easy trick for a man who has just passed a night and a splendid morning with Arethusa. Doctor Kate reported that I was "all right," and I decided not to quibble.
Arethusa finished dressing, gave me a brief but emphatic kiss, said, "To be continued . . ." and started to leave with Kate. I took her arm, and she stopped.
"There's something I've been meaning to say to you since I woke up," I said, "and I keep getting side tracked. I love you too."
"You said it," she told me. "I heard you plainly." She turned and left. I watched until the door closed behind her. God gave women buttocks because sooner or later they have to walk away from us, and at least this way there's some consolation.
"I've listened to some of the tapes—and scanned the MacDonald book," Lady Sally said formally then. "I owe you an apology, Mr. Quigley."
"It'll be in my bill," I said. "But I'll double it if you don't stop calling me 'Mister.' It sounds like an insult on the firing range."
"I must ask you to take my word for it, Joe, that it is unusual for me to be required to apologize to a new employee twice within the first twelve hours of his employment."
"Well," I said, "I can't fault you for doubting the judgment of a guy who's just been laid out with his own sap."
She relaxed. "Thank you for taking it that way."
"I'll let you off the hook," I said, "wipe that apology off the bill, if you'll answer one question."
"Ask away," she said.
"Why didn't you believe me?"
It's funny. She didn't move a muscle, flicker an eyelid . . . and somehow the temperature in the room went down a couple of degrees. After two seconds, she said, "Are you joking? The idea is so prima facie absurd that I can scarcely believe it even after it's been proven to me."
I shook my head. "That's not it."
By now it was cool enough in here that I was glad I was dressed. "It's not?"
"No way in hell. Anybody else I know, okay—the idea is so whacky it makes my own head hurt. But the menagerie you run here, with talking dogs and cigar-smoke sculptors and a setup out of the Arabian Nights—Christ, if Donald Duck walked in here and asked for service, you'd just take his hat and tell him to look for somebody that felt like getting down. A simple time machine shouldn't even have made you blink."
She shook her head. "If Donald Duck showed up, I should assume I was hallucinating. I'm willing to accept the fantastic-but-possible and take it in stride—especially once I've had my nose rubbed in it—but up until today I accepted the general consensus that altering the flow of time is simply an impossibility. Provincial of me, I admit, in light of subsequent evidence . . . but if a ghost should suddenly start haunting the place, or a perpetual motion machine be offered me for sale, I would react with the identical skepticism."
I nodded slowly. "I know what you mean. It's hard to strike a balance between keeping an open mind and being a sucker."
"You do it quite well."
I shrugged. "I have this curse. If good logic takes me to a place, and it happens to be in the Twilight Zone, I stay there anyway. I can't seem to reject an answer just because it's ridiculous. I'll give you an example. They had a weird one at a state pen upstate a few years ago. There was a break-in one morning. Three guys set off alarms cutting through a chain-link fence, ran like hell through the garden, and were seen running into the yard. Then the big sirens went off, and all the cons in the yard went into a huddle. They always do that when the horn goes off: the idea is, the guys on the edges of the huddle will stop most of the slugs.
So the screws sealed the joint tight, got the local cops in to help, and locked down the population one by one. Slow and easy, alert every second. And when they were done counting heads, the three guys were just . . . gone. All they found were their coats. The screws positively identified every human in the joint, and there was nobody that didn't belong there. The general suspicion was that the screws who said they saw the guys run into the yard were drunk or crazy. But there was that hole in the fence, and three sets of footprints through the corn."
"Let me see if I can guess this," Lady Sally said. "Three men broke out of the prison by running backwards to a prearranged hole. The witnesses all persuaded themselves they'd seen men running forwards, since what they actually saw seemed unreasonable."
I shook my head. "Nobody was missing. They checked ten times; they actually fingerprinted every con and every screw. So they left the place locked down and tore it apart, brick by brick. They got out the architect's plans and accounted for every cubic inch in the complex, one at a tine. They used dogs, and X-ray machines, and after a week they finally turned up exactly one possibility: a tunnel from the supplies shop to the outside, an old forgotten maintenance tunnel that dated back to before the place was a prison. It was supposed to be sealed off and it wasn't any more. So now they know how the three guys got out—except the warden's gotta ask himself three questions."
Lady Sally ticked them off. "Why would three men break into a prison and sneak right out again? How did they know of the tunnel's existence when the prisoners themselves didn't? And how did they get from the yard to the tunnel while the whole prison was crawling with triggerhappy guards?"
"Well, four questions, then," I said. "The other one was, how did they manage to get through the fresh cave-in at the far end of the tunnel? Experts dated it to the night before the break-in."
Lady Sally looked dubious. "Here we seem to be entering the realm of ghosts and perpetual motion machines again."
"Exactly. So after a week or two of waiting for the other shoe to drop—for a time bomb to go off or somebody to yell 'April Fool!'—the warden did the sensible thing. He put it out of his mind. As often as necessary. There were no prisoners missing; his ass was covered. He had the tunnel quietly resealed, made sure the cons didn't find out about it, and forgot the whole thing."
"And you became involved in this somehow?"
"About six months later I was hanging out at the One Seven with a gold shield I know named Murphy. He had a good set of prints on a liquor-sticker, a guy that knocks over liquor stores. But when he ran 'em through the computer it came out you got the wrong guy, that guy's doing life upstate, been there thirty years. Shit, Murph says, I thought those prints were good. So I say, maybe they got the wrong guy up there in the joint. Murph says no way, it happens they just printed every guy in that can fresh a few months ago. And he tells me the funny break-in story, and before he gets to the end, I tell him that the tunnel was blocked at the end."
Lady Sally held up a hand. "This is the point at which I'm supposed to try and solve it myself. Give me a minute." She went into what is called a brown study, for the life of me I don't know why, and played with the puzzle for maybe twenty seconds. Then she looked up and said, "I surrender. I can work out unlikely scenarios for how some of the individual phenomena were produced, but the overall motivation baffles me."
I smiled. "I usually charge a beer to finish the story. You'll love it: even Donald Westlake could never have made up something so brilliantly bent:
"The three guys that broke into the can were inmates."
Her jaw dropped satisfactorily. In less than three seconds I saw the tumblers start to click into place. Suddenly she began to laugh. She had a great laugh onto her. Stuff jiggled.
"The way I reconstruct it, a lifer stumbled across that tunnel and managed to unseal it. It must have taken him weeks, with no guarantee it was worth the trouble—but one night he found himself on the outside, in a ravine. So he walked through the forest, and stole some clothes off a clothesline, which they still have up there, and went into town. I'll bet he had him a good night. But a little before dawn he was trying to hitch out of town, and all of a sudden it came to him that he was cold and broke and scared stiff. So he turned around and sneaked back into the joint, and went to bed.
"From then on, whenever he got restless, he'd sneak out and have himself a night on the town, with money he had some friend wire him care of General Delivery. Then he'd sneak back in before morning headcount. Left a dummy in his bed, just like in the movies. He had the comfort and security of the joint, no bills, no taxes, easy work, and he could step out whenever he wanted. It must have taken a lot of the sting out of a life sentence."
"I imagine so," Lady Sally said, still laughing.
"Sooner or later he just had tell somebody. Somebody he trusted not to screw things up, not to get himself caught on the outside, or stay out and miss head-check, or brag on the inside. Then one day there were three of them. A secret club, like.
"And one day they all came back at dawn and found the tunnel collapsed . . .
"What could they do? They broke into jail, with civilian coats over their grays. When the cons went into a huddle, they dumped the coats."
A fresh wave of laughter shook the Lady. "And they had the sheer unadulterated crust to unseal the tunnel again and clear the cave-in, and go right back to business? My God, you must have done yourself a bit of good solving that one, Joe!"
My smile went away, and I sighed. About one time in three they say something like that. "Well, no." My head was hurting a lot now.
Her laughter tapered off. "Why on earth not?"
"Well, you see," I said, "it's like I told somebody recently: I'm a genius . . . but I've got the worst luck in the world."
"What went wrong?" she asked, locking sympathetic.
"Well, I told Murph my idea, and he got excited . . . and we took it to the Warden. He's very impressed, very excited. So he asks, how do I figure out which three cons, and how do I prove it on them? So I say, no problem: the one thing we know is that Murph's booze-bandit perp is one of them; just confront him about the tunnel and sweat him and the job is done. He's in his sixties, how hard could it be?"
"He wouldn't break?" Sally said.
"Worse. He was able to prove that at the time of the robbery, and for twelve hours in either direction, he was under constant observation in the prison hospital. Coronary. So they checked, and the goddam tunnel was still blocked. Murph did get a bad set of prints. But there was no way to shut the old guy's mouth after they told him about the tunnel, and about forty seconds after they sent him back to his cell, the whole joint knew about it. They never did nail the three guys, and the Warden decided it was all my fault."
Lady Sally looked stricken, "Oh, how ghastly for you."
Now my head hurt and I was getting depressed. "It just keeps turning out like that. Over and over. Ninety-five percent of my work is the most boring shit in the world, rent-paying stuff . . . and when the other five percent comes along, the interesting stuff, I wince. Because I know I'll solve it, and I won't make a dime. Once in a while, something really special like the Favila business comes along, and I get to be a laughingstock. A laughingstock, broker. It's like I was a TV private eye, and the scriptwriters have to keep me broke enough to stay in the stupid job without making me an idiot."
"That sounds maddening," Lady Sally said. "To have your life run by scriptwriters—ugh!" She shuddered.
I got up and paced the room. "And the damn thing is, it isn't necessary. I love the good parts of my job so much I'd stay in it if I was rich." I lit a smoke. "I'd just cut down on the part that involves Polaroids. And the insurance work. And the skip tracing. Well, most of it, actually."
Lady Sally's voice was soft. "To enjoy as much as five percent of your work makes you an unusually fortunate man for this time and place."
"I know," I said, pacing and smoking.
She nodded. "But the figure, however much above average, is unacceptably low, I know. That's why I opened this menagerie, as you called it." She stroked her chin meditatively. "Well, if things work out, perhaps you could work here part-time. Ninety-five percent of the time."
I snorted. "A PI working out of a whorehouse? Give me a break. They'd pull it after three episodes and replace it with a sitcom. Besides, if Arethusa is a fair sample, I'm not sure I could qualify to fold the towels around here."
"In terms of mechanical skills, on a scale of ten, Arethusa rates about an eight," she said. "On her best day, with her best body."
I stopped pacing.
"But I employ ones and twos here, too, Joe. Mechanical skills aren't all that important. In terms of attitude, Arethusa is at least a nine, and nobody here is below seven."
"Jesus Christ," I said. "If you've got a ten-ten in the House, I hope you require a preliminary physical for all his or her clients."
"Regardless, I'm sure we could find a place for you here. Possibly even some work involving the skills you already have. Never mind; give it time. We'll talk again after . . . after the events of this evening."
I nodded sourly. "After the terrific buildup I just gave you, you must be really looking forward to having me around tonight. Just what you need on a caper like this: a jinx."
"Stop that!" Lady Sally snapped.
"Stop what?"
"Belittling yourself. If it truly needs doing, let someone else do it. I could call Cynthia if you like, she's quite good at it."
My shoulders slumped. I went back to the bed and sat down to stub out my cigarette. When I had mashed it dead, I said, more to myself than to her, "I just get so tired of giving people five pounds of coffee . . ."
"Beg pardon?"
"Sorry. My expression for, 'a gift that turns out to be a pain in the ass.' Somebody gave me five pounds of coffee once. Terrific coffee; that was the worst part. You can't drink more than a pound before it goes stale, but four pounds isn't enough to be worth selling. I figured out later, the time I spent giving it away, half a pound or so at a time, I could have bought myself two pounds of great coffee. But I just couldn't make myself throw it away . . ." I lit another Lucky and started pacing again. "Look, Lady, I want to give you a gift. You gave me a gift, you gave me a chance to meet Arethusa, and I want to give you back a closed-case, you see? But the thing is, I keep going over it in my head, and I can't come up with any way my jinx could possibly screw this up where I'm the only one who gets screwed. Do you understand?"
"No," she said.
"On the Favila case, the only one who ended up suffering was me. With that prison-break thing, the Warden got shafted too. Not to mention the three guys who lost a perfectly good tunnel—don't think I don't feel guilty sometimes about what I did to them, just so I could try to look clever. But you see, if this goes sour tonight, we're all screwed: me, you, Arethusa . . . both Arethusas . . . Pris, Tim, everybody. Once he knows we're on to him, I don't see any way he can let us live. We'll know his name, what he looks like, and what he can do. He couldn't even be sure how many of us know—his smart move would be to torch the whole place, clients and all."
"You're not scaring me," she said. "You're impressing me, but I've handled dangerous snakes before."
"Not with my luck around," I said sourly, spraying smoke.
She snatched the cigarette from my hand and made it go away somehow. I was so startled I let her get away with it. "Is it something about the muscles themselves that does it?" she wondered. "Some side effect of all that tugging at the base of the brain?
"What do you mean?"
"Why are so many large, muscular men superstitious? You'd think a strong man wouldn't need to be. In many cases, of course, stupidity is a reasonable theory . . . but you're not stupid."
"Thank you," I said stiffly.
"Joe, listen to me. I have been forced to believe in a watch that makes time stop when you twist the stem. If you'll produce one and let me test it, I shall undertake to believe in a ghost or a flying saucer. I am even willing to imagine, for purposes of theoretical discussion, a presidential candidate suited for the job—but the day I concede the existence of such a thing as a 'jinx,' a scarlet chap with a beard, a tail and a pitchfork will place an order for twenty billion pairs of ice skates! If you are feeble-minded enough to want to believe in good and bad joss, the Constitution so entitles you—but have the decency not to try and spread the virus. I'd rather go into this fight with one foot in a bucket than with a hoodoo on my back . . . and if you really do think that Bad Luck has nothing better to do then follow you around, perhaps you should just leave this to the rest of us."
I flinched as if she had hit me. No, actually: if she had hit me, I wouldn't have flinched. I flinched as if she had wounded me.
Which she had. Instead of shooting back, I did something unusual for me. I sat down, and rubbed at the back of my aching head . . . and tried to think. She gave me as long as I needed.
Did I believe in Bad Luck?
I certainly had a lot of evidence. My career history to date was an unbroken succession of spectacular failures. Time and again, I had managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, often by only a hair's breadth. Everybody agreed it wasn't my fault: just consistently bad breaks. Lately it had been getting to the point where if somebody mentioned my name, they were as likely as not to add, " . . . poor bastard," after it. There goes Joke Wiggly, the impotent dick.
Well, was I going to accept that?
How many times had I heard other guys, other PIs especially, complain about their bad luck . . . and known what they really meant by that was their stupidity or poor preparedness?
I remembered my friend Murph telling me about a squeal he caught one time on the West Side. Neighbors had complained about an apartment that literally smelled like shit, so of course he arrived expecting to find one or more stiffs. Instead he found an old retired guy who was in the habit of keeping a couple of open buckets of his own shit around the house. "The guy spent forty years of his life workin' in the sewer," Murph explained to me, "and it got good to him."
Had I reached the point where I was making my own bad luck, because being in the shit had gotten good to me?
All at once I remembered what I had just told Lady Sally about invisible scriptwriters plotting my life for me. Could it be that I was manufacturing bad luck for the same reason TV detectives did: so I wouldn't become too successful to remain in the third-rate low-rent job I loved so much?
Had I fallen in love with the romantic image of myself as a loser, a perennial fall-guy, because it gave me an excuse to be as fatalistic and weary and cynical as Sam Spade or Philip Marlow?
I don't usually dig that deep into myself. I think I might not have, the night before. Before I made love with Arethusa . . .
I stopped rubbing at my head, and looked Lady Sally square in the eye.
"You are looking at a walking disaster," I said.
She waited.
"And tonight, it is going to fall, like an express train from a great height, onto the testicles of . . . what is his name, anyway? I can't keep calling him 'that scumbag.'"
She smiled, and the room became prettier. "Yes, you may. But his name is Christian Raffalli. And I have just come as close as I ever shall to feeling sorry for him."
"Don't commit yourself," I advised. "You haven't seen what I'm going to do to him yet."
"Whatever it is, I shall not pity him," she said positively. "I'm not keen on rapists in general—but to rape, here, calls for a specially twisted mind. By my lights, creatures who hurt my friends are not human beings."
"Uh . . . listen," I said. "Just how tight are you wired with the man across the river? I mean, do we have to give this Raffalli to the cops? And does he have to be healthy at the time?"
"What guy?" she asked.
I smiled. She smiled. We smiled together.
"Impotent dick," my ass! Just ask Arethusa; she'd tell you . . .
From there on, the day improved again for a while.