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"What can I say to him? He knows I'll wait," Nick laughed. I spent the night in the Ever Hard Baths -- (homo- sexuality is the best all-around cover story an agent can use) -- where a snarling Italian attendant creates such an unnerving atmosphere sweeping the dormitory with infra red see in the dark fieldglasses. ("All right in the North East corner! I see you!" switching on floodlights, sticking his head through trap- doors in the floor and wall of the private rooms, that many a queen has been carried out in a straitjacket.... ) I lay there in my open top cubicle room looking at the ceiling... listened to the grunts and squeals and snarls in the nightmare halflight of random, broken lust.... "Fuck off you!" "Put on two pairs of glasses and maybe you can see something!" Walked out in the precise morning and bought a paper.... Nothing.... I called from a drugstore phone booth... and asked for Narcotics: "Lieutenant Gonzales... who's calling?" "I want to speak to O'Brien." A moment of static, dangling wires, broken connections... "Nobody of that name in this department.. . Who are you?" "Well let me speak to Hauser." "Look, Mister, no O'Brien no Hauser in this bureau. Now what do you want?" "Look, this is important.... I've got info on a big shipment of H coming in.... I want to talk to Hauser or O'Brien.... I don't do business with anybody else...." "Hold on.... I'll connect you with Alcibiades." I began to wonder if there was an Anglo-Saxon name left in the Department.... "I want to speak to Hauser or O'Brien." "How many times I have to tell you no Hauser no O'Brien in this department.... Now who is this call- ing?" I hung up and took a taxi out of the area.... In the cab I realized what had happened.... I had been occluded from space-time like an eel's ass occludes when he stops eating on the way to Sargasso.... Locked out.... Never again would I have a Key, a Point of Intersection.... The Heat was off me from here on out... relegated with Hauser and O'Brien to a landlocked junk past where heroin is always twenty- eight dollars an ounce and you can score for yen pox in the Chink Laundry of Sioux Falls.... Far side of the world's mirror, moving into the past with Hauser and O'Brien. |
