East is East

There were two motels in ciceroville, “gateway to the Okefenokee Wilderness,” and both were on the order of refugee camps as far as Detlef Abercorn was concerned. The first, Lila’s Sleepy Z, featured a miniature golf course in the middle of the parking lot and a café with a hand-lettered sign in the window offering breakfast for 990, with unlimited refills of coffee and grits. It was booked solid. The other place, the Tender Sproats, enticed the weary traveler with a swimming pool filled to the coping with what appeared to be split pea soup. Abercorn thought of all those billboards along Interstate 80 touting homemade split pea soup, as if anyone in any condition would ever actually want split pea soup beyond the first spoonful. This was an improvement: here you got to swim in it. He shrugged and pulled into the lot.

It wasn’t as if he was planning to spend much time in the swimming pool anyway. His job was on the line here—his whole career. Forget the le Carré, the six-pack and the air-conditioned room alive only to the soothing flicker of the color TV; from here on out it was more like James M. Cain, a cup of piss-water doused with iodine, sweat, sunburn and aching joints. He’d had a call early that morning from Nathaniel Carteret Bluestone, the regional head in Atlanta. Real early. Six-thirty A.M. early. He was never at his best at 6:30 A.M., but he’d been out past two tramping all over the island with Turco and the sheriff and about six hundred yapping dogs on the lukewarm trail of Hiro Tanaka and when he picked up the phone he was so exhausted he could barely think.

N. Carteret Bluestone had wanted to know why Special Agent Abercorn was bent on making a mockery of the INS. Had he seen the morning papers? No? Well, perhaps he’d find them instructive. The Nip—Japanese, Bluestone corrected himself—was front-page news all of a sudden. Abercorn tried to explain that the papers were a day late at Thanatopsis House, but Bluestone talked right over him, quoting the headlines in an acidic tone: “‘At Large 6 Weeks, In Jail 6 Hours’; ‘Score 1 for the Japanese, 0 for the INS’; ’Jailbreak on Tupelo Island: Alien Makes It Look Easy.’ ” And what was this about Lewis Turco attacking some woman and making wild—and litigious—accusations? It was a mighty sorry way to run an investigation, mighty sorry.

Abercorn couldn’t argue with him there, except maybe to add that “sorry” was far too tame an adjective. He could have offered excuses—it was the sheriff’s people who’d let the suspect go; be

hadn’t attacked anybody and couldn’t answer for Turco; everybody down here talked like Barney Fife and had an IQ to match—but he didn’t. All he said was, “I’ll do my best, sir.”

Bluestone opined that his best seemed to fall short of the mark. Far short.

“I’ll do my damnedest, sir,” Abercorn said.

There was a pause on the other end of the line. “You do that,” Bluestone said finally. “And this time, handcuff the suspect to your own goddamned wrist. And do me a favor—”

“Yes?”

“Swallow the key, will you, so it comes out with the rest of your shit.”

News of the second call, the one from Roy Dotson, didn’t reach him till nearly four in the afternoon. And why not? Because he was out in the boondocks, sifting through the mudholes of Tupelo Island, as if anybody believed it would do any good. If they were looking for frogs they would have been in heaven. Or mosquitoes. The temperature was up around a hundred, the sun had ground to a halt directly overhead and he thought he was just about to die from the stink when one of Peagler’s deputies came sloshing toward them with the news that they were wasting their time. The suspect had fled the island. And where was he? In a sharecropper’s shack? Hitchhiking to Jacksonville? Digging his chopsticks into a plate of shaved beef and onions at a sukiyaki joint in downtown Atlanta? No. He was in a swamp, another swamp, a swamp that made this one look like a wading pool.

And so here he was at the Tender Sproats Motel in Ciceroville, Georgia, Gateway to the Okefenokee Wilderness. It was seventhirty at night and the neon sign glowed against the darkening sky in a halfhearted imposture of civilization. Lewis Turco was asleep in the passenger seat, reeking like a sewage plant. Mud encrusted his boots, clung to his fatigues, caked his beard and hair. They’d had a falling-out over the Dershowitz incident and hadn’t spoken more than ten words to each other all day. The moment the bulletin came through on Tanaka, Turco had dropped his stick (he’d been beating the bushes, literally), and without a word turned and stomped back to the big house, where he flung his gear into the Datsun and settled into the passenger seat. By the time Abercorn got there he was unconscious.