your friends and you've been drinking. What I should have said was that it would be very foolish for you to leave here. The Colonel wants you because he wants me, and he is not careful with his prisoners. When he pumps you full of Ecstasy and starts burning off your fingers, you'll tell him everything he wants to know.'
Jonny picked up a crystal carafe and slopped some wine into a glass for himself. Conover pushed his glass forward, but Jonny ignored it and the smuggler lord had to pour for himself.
'In any case, you're better off staying away from the Croakers,' Conover said.
'What does that mean?'
'Just what I said,' Conover replied.
'The Croakers are all right. They're just trying to help people.'
Conover rang a silver bell by his plate. Young African men in white jackets began clearing away the plates from the table. 'Why is it Americans always insist on making everything into a cowboys and Indians movie? Just because you label one group the Bad Guys, you immediately assume that the group they are in conflict with are the Good Guys. The world isn't that simple, son.'
'You think the Croakers are the Bad Guys?' Jonny asked.
'I didn't say that. But they are destabilizing southern California far more effectively than the Alpha Rats or the Arabs could ever hope to.'
Jonny leaned his elbows on the table. His dinner churned with the liquor in his stomach. 'The Croakers are the only effective force we have against the Committee.'
Conover gestured to one of the waiters and dessert was served: a raspberry torte like a lacquered sculpture. 'The Committee is a fact of life. What we do, you and I, all the dealers and smugglers, is poetry. Haiku. A form defined by its restrictions. The sooner you learn to work within those restrictions, the happier you'll be.'
Jonny tossed his fork onto the plate and stood up. Wisps of vertigo floated around the inside of his skull. 'Thanks for dinner. I'm going to get some sleep.'
As Jonny started out of the dining room, Conover called to him.
'You know I'm doing all I can, don't you?'
'I know,' said Jonny, without turning around.
'And you believe me when I tell you I'm trying to locate your friends.
'Yes, I do.'
'And you have to know I'm right about the Colonel.'
'I know about all that,' Jonny replied quietly. 'I just don't know if I care anymore.'
He drank from the bottle of gin he had taken from his room. He stood in a darkened storage room, the third one he had explored that night, a refuge from his latest failed attempt at meditation.
The room was silent; the air musty. Light danced on a circular dais at the far end. A Camera Obscura, he saw. There was a worn metal wheel mounted on the wall. When he spun it, the brilliant panorama of Los Angeles swept across the dais like a video on fast forward. He focused the image on Hollywood, moving the wheel until the luminescent tent of his home slid into view, glowing beyond palm trees and neon. For a while, he found it comforting, but soon he felt pangs of self-consciousness, imaging himself a peeping-tom getting his kicks.
Is this how we look to the Alpha Rats? Jonny wondered.
Padded Zero-G crates with five year old shipping codes from some lunar engineering plant were stacked against the far wall.
Jonny took another pull from the gin, slid one of the crates to the floor and opened the top. Inside were a dozen smaller boxes, each packed with capsules in blister pack, two capsules to each blister.
The manufacturer's code indicated that the red capsules were an inhalant form of atropine. The purple capsules were unmarked, but Jonny had seen them before. His stomach tightened. It was a popular combination in some circles: atropine and cobrotoxin nitrite.
Holy shit, he thought. What's an engineering company doing with Mad Love?
He tore open one of the packs, slopping gin on floor, and popped a purple capsule under his nose. The cobrotoxin came on like a slow-burning volcano, boiling along the surface of his brain, not enough to kill him or cause permanent damage, just enough to cop the killing euphoria from the cobra venom. His body was molten glass and treacle. No flesh, no bones, just a sizzling mass of plasma, fried eyes and melting genitals. His brain bubbled like magma. Thirty seconds later, he popped the atropine and the inside of his skull iced over. The room exploded into negative as white glacier light blazed behind his eyes and shot down his spinal column. His nerves (he could feel each individual fiber, vibrating in harmony like some kind of cellular choir) were cut crystal and gold. 'A las maravillas,' he said. This was it. Zen. Oneness. How could he have forgotten? Anger, greed and folly were gone, replaced with a heightened awareness that was what he had always imagined enlightenment to be like.
Then the feeling was gone.
When he could move, he tore two more capsules from the pack and repeated the process. A few years before, Mad Love had been a big problem for Jonny. He had avoided the stuff for years, neither dealing nor using it. In some ways it had been easy; Mad Love was almost impossible to find in the street, at any price, since the Alpha Rat takeover of the moon. Yet, here he was with hundreds of hits.
He felt expansive, filled with love for his fellow man, wanting nothing more than to share his good fortune with the world. Jonny laughed. It was the drugs talking to him, he knew. He did not want to share this with anybody. Stumbling to his feet (the atropine causing his muscles to fire erratically) he pulled down more crates, taking a quick inventory of his stash.
The first three containers were empty, but the fourth held another bonanza: twelve more boxes of Mad Love. He grabbed for more crates, caught the glint of something shining dully on the wall.
Gilt wood. He pulled the boxes away, could see the carved frame.
Then- Blue Boy. The original.
He ran his fingers over the old lizard skin paint, from the plumed hat to the goldleaf frame. There was a catch at the edge. He pushed it and the painting swung away from the wall with a faint click. Behind it were shelves piled high with books and a bulging manila folder. Jonny picked up the foxed folder, took it back to the Camera Obscura and dumped the contents on the dais. It was several seconds before Jonny understood exactly what he was looking at. He fingered a yellowed Social Security card, shiny with wear. Then in the pale Los Angeles nightscape, he turned the pages, rapt, reading a collage version of the life of Soren Conover.
A driver's license from Texas, two thousand and ten. Discharge papers from the United States Army, nineteen fifty-seven. Passports: British, Belgian, Egyptian, all under different names. Ancient news clippings concerning drug wars in Central America and the collapse of the government's genetic warfare programs. Photos on some of the older documents showed a handsome oval-faced man in his thirties, with intelligent eyes and a nose that had been broken more than once. Jonny double-checked any dated documents he came across, trying to find the oldest. From what he had seen so far, he was calculating Conover's age at around one hundred and fifty, possibly one hundred and sixty years.
There were photostats of OSS documents, brittle with age.
Conover had apparently been involved with an operation to assassinate the Russian head-of-state in the early nineteen-fifties.
The American president had canceled the operation and pensioned Conover off. There was nothing from the nineteen-sixties or seventies, but from the eighties, there were several letters on CIA stationery bearing Conover's signature, along with a report marked 'Confidential.' The report carried no date, but detailed the workings of a Honduran-based CIA drug operation helping to finance right-wing revolutionary and counter-revolutionary forces in Central America. There was a black and white photo of men in jungle fatigues standing before mortar tubes and M-60 machine guns. One tall man held a cigarette in a short black holder. The hand-lettered date on the back of the photo read: 1988. It occurred to Jonny that if these documents were genuine, then Conover had been in the drug business for close to one hundred years.
That's a long time to do one thing, Jonny thought. He continued through the papers as the silent city light played over them, and wondered at the process of the smuggler's life. How he had parlayed those CIA drug contacts into his own private business. Jonny found the gin bottle by the boxes of Mad Love, took a drink and laughed.
He and Conover had something in common, he now knew. Conover was a smuggler lord now, but once he had been like Jonny, an agent gone native.
'Rogue elephant' they called it, right?
