Brain Drain Read online

  He pressed stop, rethreaded the spool and put the machine on rewind. The tape spun back rapidly. The machine had belonged to the dealer. Many pushers had them. A tape could help give them protection. It could raise a little blackmail money. It had many uses.

  Before the tape rewound completely, he pressed stop again. Then play.

  “Hello, hello, hello. I’m so glad you’re all here.” The voice was silky high, like a drag queen’s. “I suppose you’re all wondering, wondering, wondering what lovelies I have for you.”

  “Money, man.” This voice was heavier and deeper. “Bread, baby. The mean green.”

  “Of course, lovelies. I wouldn’t deprive you of sustenance.”

  “For a dealer, that’s the level truth. Totally level.” A girl’s voice.

  “Hush, hush, lovelies. I’m an artist. I just do other things to live. Besides, the walls have ears.”

  “You probably put ’em there, mother.”

  “Hush, hush. No negativities in front of my guest.”

  “He the one that want something?”

  “Yes, he does. His name is Mr. Regal. And he has given me money for you all. Much money. Lovely money.”

  “And we ain’t gonna see but a spit of it.”

  “There’s plenty for you. He wants you to do something in front of him. No, Maria, don’t take off your clothes. That’s not what he wants. Mr. Regal wants you, as artists, to share your creativity with him.”

  “What’s he doin’ with the pipe?”

  “I told him that hash helps creativity.”

  “That dude be goin’ through a full ounce. He gotta be blind now.”

  And then the voice. That chilling flat monotone. Waldman felt a cramp in his legs from kneeling down near the tape. Where had he heard a voice like that before?

  “I am not intoxicated, if that is what you suspect. Rather, I have full control of my senses and reflexes. Perhaps this inhibits my creativity. That is why I smoke more than the normal amount, or what you would consider normal, man.”

  “You jive funny, turkey.”

  “That is a derogatory term, and I have found that for one to tolerate such language often leads to further abuses of one’s territorial integrity. Therefore, desist, nigger.”

  “Now, now, now, lovelies. Let us make pretty. Each of you will show your art to Mr. Regal. Let him see what you do when you are creative.”

  The tape sounded blank except for shuffling feet. Waldman heard indistinguishable low mumblings. Someone asked for “the red,” which Waldman assumed was paint. At one point, someone sang an off–key tune about oppression and how freedom was just another form of deprivation and that the singer needed copulation badly with whomever she was singing to, but she didn’t want her head messed with. “Just My Body, Baby” seemed to be the title of the song.

  The flat voice again. “Now I noted that the painter seemed highly calm when working, and the singer seemed aroused. Is there an explanation for this, faggot?”

  “I hate that word, but everything is so lovely I’ll ignore it. Yes, there is a reason. All creativity comes from the heart. While the face and sounds may be different, the heart, the lovely heart, is the center of the creative process, Mr. Regal.”

  “Incorrect.” That flat far–away voice again. “The brain sends all creative signals. The body itself—liver, kidney, intestines or heart—plays no part in the creative process. Do not lie to me, queer.”

  “Hmmmm. Well, I see you’re into an insulting bag. Heart is only a phrase. Hardly do we mean a body organ. Heart is that essence of creativity. Physically, of course, it comes from the brain.”

  “Which part of the brain?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Continue.”

  Waldman heard a heavy banging of feet and assumed it was a dance. Then there was a chopping sound.

  “Sculpture, lovelies, might be the ultimate art.”

  “It looks like a male reproductive organ.” The flat voice.

  “That’s a work of art, too. You’d know, if you ever tasted it.” Giggle. The fag.

  There were a few mumbled requests to pass a pipe, probably filled with hashish.

  “Well, there you have it.” The fag.

  “Have what?” The flat voice.

  “Creativity. A song. A dance. A painting. A piece of sculpture. Perhaps you would like to try, Mr. Regal? What would you like to do? You must remember of course that to be creative you must do something different. Difference is the essence of creativity. Come on now, Mr. Regal. Do something different.”

  “Other than sculpture and dancing and painting and singing?”

  “Oh yes, that would be lovely.” The fag.

  “I don’t know what to do.” The flat voice.

  “Well, let me give you a hint. Often the beginning of creativity is copying what’s already been done, but in a different way. You build creativity by copying in a different medium. For instance, you change a painting into a sculpture. Or vice versa. Look around. Find something and then change it into a different medium.”

  And suddenly there were screams and awful tearing sounds, cracking bones and joints that came apart like thick, soft balloons stretched too far. And the wild desperate screams of the singer.

  “No, no, no, no. No!” It was a wail, it was a chant, it was a prayer. And it wasn’t answered. Snap! Pop! And there were no more screams. Waldman heard the heavy crunch of plaster, and it hit the ground with a splash. Probably in a pool of blood. Plaster, then splash.

  “Lovely.” The flat voice. This time it echoed through the room. Then the door closed on the tape.

  Inspector Waldman rewound the tape to where the screaming had begun. He played it forward, watching the second hand of his watch. A minute and a half. All that done by one man. In eighty–five seconds.

  Waldman rewound the tape and played it back. It had to be one man. There were the voices of the four victims and their references to their guest, their one guest. He listened carefully. It sounded like power tools at work but he did not hear any motors. Eighty–five seconds.

  Waldman stumbled trying to straighten up. He had been kneeling too long for his fifty–year–old frame. You knew you were getting old when you couldn’t do that anymore. A young patrolman with a happy, glad–to–meet–you smile entered the basement room.

  “Yeah?” said Waldman. The patrolman’s face was familiar. Then he saw the badge. Of course. It must have been the model for the recruiting poster. Looked just like him, right down to that artificial friendly grin. But that couldn’t be a real badge. The commercial artist hired by the police department, some radical freak, had done his defiance bit by giving the poster model a badge number no one had—“6969,” which meant an obscenity.

  And this patrolman, now smiling at Waldman, had that number.

  “Who are you?”

  “Patrolman Gilbys, sir.” That flat voice. It was the voice on the tape.

  “Oh, good,” said Waldman pleasantly. “Good.”

  “I heard you were on the case.”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Waldman. He would put the suspect at ease, then casually get him to the station house, and stick a revolver in his face. Waldman tried to remember when he had last cleaned his pistol. A year and a half ago. No matter. A police special could take all sorts of abuse.

  “I was wondering what you meant by a horror scene? You were quoted as such in the newspapers. You didn’t mention creativity. Did you think it was creative?”

  “Sure, sure. Most creative thing I’ve ever seen. All the guys down at the station house thought it was a work of art. You know, we ought to go down and talk to them about it.”

  “I do not know if you are aware of it, but your voice is modulating unevenly. This is a sure indication of lying. Why do you lie to me, kike? I assume it is kike, unless, of course, it is kraut.”

  “Lie? Who’s lying? It was creative.”

  “You will tell me the truth, of course. People talk through pain,” said the phony patrolman w
ith the glad–to–meet–you smile and the obscene badge from the recruiting poster.

  Waldman stepped back, reaching for his gun, but the patrolman’s hand was squeezing his eyeballs. His hands couldn’t move and in the red, blinding pain, Waldman told the patrolman the truth. It was the most uncreative horror Waldman had ever seen.

  “Thank you,” said the phony patrolman. “I took it right from the poster, but I did not think copying someone else’s work was creative. Thank you.” Then, like a drill press, he pushed his right hand through Waldman’s heart until it met his left hand.

  “So much for constructive criticism,” the flat voice said.

  CHAPTER TWO

  HIS NAME WAS REMO and they wanted him to show his press pass. They wanted him to do this so much that Brother George stuck the barrel of a Kalashnikov automatic rifle under his right eye and Sister Alexa put a .45 caliber automatic in the small of his back, while Brother Ché stood across the room aiming a Smith and Wesson revolver at his skull.

  “If he steps funny, we’ll blow him to hamburger,” Sister Alexa had said.

  No one wondered why this man who said he was a reporter failed to be surprised when the hotel room door opened. No one suspected that just not talking while waiting for him was not enough silence, that tense breathing could be heard even through a door as thick as that one in the Bay State Motor Inn, West Springfield, Mass. He seemed like such an ordinary man. Thin, just under six feet tall, with high cheekbones. Only his thick wrists might have told them something. He seemed so casual in his gray slacks and black turtleneck sweater and soft, glove–leather loafers.

  “Let’s see it,” said Brother Ché as Brother George closed the door behind him.

  “I have it somewhere,” said Remo, reaching into his right pocket. He saw Brother George’s right index finger squeeze very close on the trigger, perhaps closer to firing than Brother George knew. Sweat beaded on Brother George’s forehead. His lips were chapped and dry. He drew air into his lungs with short choppy breaths that seemed to just replenish the tip of his supply of oxygen, as though he dared not risk a complete exhale.

  Remo produced a plastic–covered police shield issued by the New York City Police Department.

  “Where’s the card from the Times? This is a police card,” said Brother George.

  “If he showed you a special card from the Times, you should start wondering,” said Brother Ché. “All New York papers use cards issued by the police.”

  “They’re a tool of the pig police,” said Brother George.

  “The cards come from the police so the reporters can get past police lines at fires and things,” said Brother Ché. He was a scrawny man, with a bearded face that looked as though it had once been bathed in crankcase oil and would never be fully clean again.

  “I don’t trust no pig,” said Brother George.

  “Let’s off him,” said Sister Alexa. Remo could see her nipples harden under her light white peasant blouse. She was getting her sexual jollies from this.

  He smiled at her, and her eyes lowered to her gun. Her pale, pottery–white skin flushed red in the cheeks. Her knuckles were white around the gun, as if she were afraid it would do its own bidding if not held tightly.

  Brother Ché got the card from Brother George.

  “All right,” said Brother Ché. “Do you have the money?”

  “I have the money if you have the goods,” said Remo.

  “How do we know we’ll get the money if we show you what we’ve got?”

  “You have me. You have the guns.”

  “I don’t trust him,” said Brother George.

  “He’s all right,” said Brother Ché.

  “Let’s off him now. Now,” said Sister Alexa.

  “No, no,” said Brother Ché, stuffing the Smith and Wesson into his beltless gray pants.

  “We can get it all printed ourselves. Every bit of it the way we want,” said Sister Alexa. “Let’s stick it to him.”

  “And two hundred people who already think like us will read it,” said Brother Ché. “No. The Times will make it international knowledge.”

  “Who cares what someone in Mexico City thinks?” said Sister Alexa.

  “I don’t trust him,” said Brother George.

  “A little revolutionary discipline, please,” said Brother Ché. He nodded for George to stand by the door and for Alexa to go to the closed bathroom door. The curtains were drawn over the window. It was twelve stories down from the window, Remo knew. Brother Ché nodded for Remo to sit at a small glass–and–chrome coffee table.

  Sister Alexa brought a pale, bespectacled man out of the bathroom. She helped him lug a large black cardboard suitcase with new leather straps to the coffee table. He had the wasted look of a man whose only sunshine had come from overhead fluorescent lights.

  “Have we gotten the money?” he asked, looking at Brother Ché.

  “We will,” said Brother Ché.

  The pale man opened the case and clumsily put it on the floor.

  “I’ll explain everything,” he said, taking a stack of computer printouts from the suitcase, laying out a manila envelope which proved to have news clippings, and finally a white pad with nothing on it. He clicked a green ballpoint pen into readiness.

  “This is the biggest story you’re ever going to get,” he told Remo. “Bigger than Watergate. Bigger than any assassination. Much bigger than any CIA activity in Chile or the FBI’s wiretaps. This is the biggest story happening in America today. And it’s a scoop.”

  “He’s already here to buy,” said Brother Ché. “Don’t waste time.”

  “I’m a computer operator at a sanitarium on Long Island Sound in Rye, New York. It’s called Folcroft. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it.”

  Remo shrugged. The shrug was a lie.

  “Do you have pictures of it?” asked Remo.

  “Anyone can just walk up and take pictures. You can get pictures,” said the man.

  “The place is not the point,” said Brother Ché.

  “Right, I would guess,” said the man. “I don’t know if you’re familiar with computers or not, but you don’t need all that much information to program them. Just what’s necessary to the core. However, four years ago, I began to do some figuring, right?”

  “I guess,” said Remo. He had been told it was three years ago that Arnold Quilt, thirty–five, of 1297 Ruvolt Street, Mamaroneck, three children, M.S. 1961 MIT, had started his “peculiar research” and was being watched. The day before, Remo had gotten Arnold Quilt’s picture. It did not capture the utter lack of natural light on his face.

  “Basically, and I’d guess you want to simplify it this way, I suspected I was being given a minimum of information for my job. Almost a calculated formula to deprive me of any real reference point outside the narrow confines of my job. I later calculated that there were thousands like me and that any function that might lead a person to a fuller understanding of his job was separated in such a way that all cognitive reference was negated.”

  “In other words, they’d have three people doing what one could do,” said Brother Ché, seeing the man called Remo idly glance toward the shaded window. “One person might get to understand a job fully, but if you have three doing it, none of them ever finds out exactly where he fits in.”

  “Right,” said Remo. He saw the tension go out of Sister Alexa’s breasts.

  “Well, we are separated in a half–dozen lunchrooms, so that people working on the same program do not associate with each other. I ate with a guy who did nothing but calculate grain prices.”

  “Get to the point,” said Brother Ché impatiently.

  “The point is the purpose of this Folcroft. And I started calculating and looking. I would move to different lunchrooms. I became as friendly with Dr. Smith’s secretary—Dr. Smith, he’s the director—I became as friendly with her as I could, but she was a stone wall.”

  He should get to know Smitty, thought Remo, if he really wants to know a stone
wall.

  “I’m sure the reporter would be more interested in what you found than in how you found it. You can lay that out later. Tell him what you found,” said Brother Ché.

  “Talk of illegal undercover. There is an organization operating in America today that is like another government. It watches not only crime figures but law–enforcement agencies. Do you wonder where all the leaks are coming from? Why one prosecutor will suddenly turn on his whole political party and start indicting bigwigs and things? Well, look no further. It’s this organization. A lot of what this group does is blamed on the CIA and FBI. It is so secret I doubt if more than two or three people know about it. It exposes terrorist rings, it makes sure the police get tougher inside the law. It’s like a secret government set up to make the Constitution work. A whole government.”

  “Tell him about the killers. That’s news.”

  “Their killer arm. You would think they would be most vulnerable there, because you’d have ten, twenty, thirty killers roaming around who know what they’re doing, right?” said the pallid man.

  “Hopefully,” said Remo.

  “Well, they don’t have a whole pack of killers. I can prove it right here,” he said, touching a green–striped computer sheet. “There’s one killer, and he’s connected to more than fifty deaths that I could find. It’s incredible the things he can do. Swift in, out, no trace of him. Fingerprints showing up that in no way check out anywhere else. This person is so sure and so quick and so final and so neat that there is nothing like him known in the Western world. He gets into places that are incredible. If I didn’t know better, I would swear that this force, which we have listed as R9–1 DES, can go up and down building walls.” Remo noticed that the man’s eyes were lit with that special office–work sort of joy that comes when someone discovers the muffler file is in the Chevrolet folder.

  “Anything about his personality?” asked Remo. “Loyal, courageous, competent, leader of men?”