East is East

That was it. That was enough. Suddenly Hiro was moving, head down, back to them, walking with purpose and determination, as if he belonged here, just another artist out for a stroll on the grounds. Directly ahead of him was the parking lot, with its cars and pavement, shrubs and trees and flowers in plucked beds, the big house rising above it in the near distance: it wasn’t the direction he would have chosen. “Patsy!” a woman’s voice cried behind him, “Clara!” And then one of the men shouted, “Vodka and gin!” This was followed by a general roar and a spate of lubricious laughter.

“Just heading over ourselves!”

“Join us?”

“Join you? We’ll lead the way—better yet, we’ll race you!”

Whoops and more whoops.

“Last one”—out of breath—“last one there’s a rotten egg!”

Hiro kept going, dog, women and tennis trio fading away in his wake, certain that at any moment the hue and cry would rise up to engulf him. The drive curved through the trees in front of him and a huge forsythia bush rose up to block the house from view. He saw a Toyota, an American car that looked like a Toyota, and a Mercedes—a big, royal blue Mercedes sedan—parked at the curb with its trunk open. And then, as the grass gave way to pavement under his feet and the shouts at his back subsided to a trickle of giggles and guffaws, something Ruth had said came back to him: It’s got a trunk the size of the Grand Canyon.

The rest was a whirl—deliberate, but a whirl nonetheless. There were more voices, men’s voices, and movement off to his left. It was now or never. Fighting the urge to run, he crossed the pavement in crisp, businesslike strides—movement behind the forsythia now, legs, shoes, a gabble of voices—and in one clean motion threw himself into the trunk of the Mercedes as if he were tumbling into bed. Things gouged and poked at him—fishing traps, a camp stove—but he didn’t have time to worry about it. He lifted his right hand from the depths of the trunk and took hold of the steel ribs of the lid, and then, as casually as if he were pulling the covers up over his head, he pulled it closed.

The Whiteness of the Fish

Son of a bitch. son of a fucking bitch. the humiliation level here was climbing like a rocket. What had it taken them, six weeks to catch this joker? Six weeks to nail one sorry slump-shouldered fat-assed Nip who looked like he was about twelve years old. And now, when it was all over, when he’d been hauled in, reamed out and locked up like a hamster in a cage, the yokels turn around and let him go. Yeah. Right. And now what, call out the National Guard?

Lewis Turco was angry. He was incensed. It was getting dark and things were looking grim. Nobody knew anything, least of all the half-wit deputy who’d opened up the door to take the prisoner to the ferry and discovered an empty cell. Oh, the cell had chairs in it, all right, stacked up under the window, and the window had a couple bars left in it too, but it was empty space, one hundred percent Nipless. And then he’d asked his buddy about that, but his buddy had been out back taking a leak and so they figured they’d better tell the sheriff, and now here they all were, running around like mental defectives, shouting in everybody’s face. Meanwhile, the light was nearly gone, the artistic types were milling around on the patio enjoying the show, the dogs were back over there in Niggertown and the sheriff looked like he’d just chewed off a piece of his own ass and swallowed it. And the Nip—the Nip was probably halfway to Hokkaido. The incompetence of these people. The shit and stupidity. Jesus.

And these artists. Christ, they made him want to puke. Aberclown sucked up to them, especially the little Jew bitch who’d been hiding the guy all along—hiding him and then lying about it, just to jerk them off. Big joke. Ha, ha, ha. There she was now, right in the thick of it, cradling a drink and giving everybody that wide-eyed innocent look, pure as Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, what would she know about it?

He would have found out. If Aberclown had only let him go, he would have found out a hundred and five percent of everything she ever knew, from her daddy’s ATM number to how many hairs she had on her twat—he’d been in on some cold interrogations, men and women both, VC as hard and silent as stones, and nobody knew how to put the fear into them like he did—but with her it wasn’t an interrogation, it was a tea party. He’d sat there for two sweaty stinking hours with Aberclown and the sheriff and it was all he could do to keep himself from taking her by the hair and jerking her head back till her throat opened up like a slow drain with a snake down it. Damn. But Aberclown and the hick sheriff treated her like a senator’s wife or something and she threw out a couple crumbs and that was it. She hadn’t told them the half of it. Why should she? She was an artist, right?