Cities of the Red Night

when they shook hands in Dimitri's air-conditioned office ... wall-to-wall blue carpet, a desk, leather-covered chairs, a picture of the Parthenon on the wall, everything neat and impersonal as a room in the Hilton.

Dimitri raised one eyebrow. 'I infer you disapprove of our politics, Mr. Brady. For myself I disapprove of any politics. Please understand that I stand to gain nothing from this investigation. My political superiors want the whole thing dropped ... a few degenerate foreigners ... it's bad for the tourist business.'

Jim blushed sulkily and looked at his shoes and turned one foot sideways.

'What about this witness you got?' I asked.

Dimitri leaned back in his chair behind the desk and put the tips of his fingers together. 'Ah yes—Adam North, the perfect witness. Survived his perfection because he was in custody. On the morning that the Green boy was killed, September eighteenth, young North was arrested with a quarter-ounce of heroin in his possession. When I saw the laboratory report I ordered him placed in isolation. The heroin he had been buying from street pushers was about ten percent. This was almost one hundred percent. It would have killed him in a matter of seconds.'

'Well, if they would kill him to shut him up about something, why let him know about it in the first place?' Jim asked.

'A searching question. You see, he was a sort of camera from which a film could be withdrawn and developed. But first the bare bones, later the meat. Adam North had been approached by someone fitting'—Dimitri glanced at me—'your description of Marty Blum, and offered a quarter-ounce of heroin plus a thousand-dollar bonus to be paid in two installments to witness a magical ritual involving a simulated execution. He was suspicious.'

Dimitri turned on a tape recorder. 'Why me?' said a stupid surly young voice. It went on.

'Sot his character from a comic strip says I am a perfect. 'A perfect what?' I ask him. 'A perfect witness,' he tells me. He has five C-notes in his hand , 'Well, all right,' I say. 'But there is a condition,' he says. 'You must promise to refrain from heroin or any other drug for three days prior to the ceremony. You have to be in a pure condition.' 'Promise on my scout's honor,' I told him and he lays the bread on me. 'But one more thing,' he says. He gives me a color picture of a kid with red hair who looks sorta like me. 'This is the subject. You will concentrate on this picture for the next three days.' So I tell him 'Sure' and split. And would you believe it, with five hundred cools in my pocket I can't score for shit nowhere no way. So when the chauffeur comes to pick me up in a Daimler I am sick as a dog.'

Dimitri shuts off the tape recorder. 'He was driven to a villa outside Athens where he witnessed a bizarre ceremony culminating in the hanging of the Green boy. Back in Athens he was given the quarter-ounce of heroin. He was on his way back to his girl friend's apartment when the arrest was made.'

'It still doesn't make any sense,' Jim said. 'They drag him in as a witness, God knows why, then knock him to shut him up.'

'They did not intend to shut him up. They intended to open him and extract the film. Adam North was a perfect witness. He is Jerry's age, born on the same day, and resembles him enough to be a twin brother. You are acquainted with the symptoms of heroin withdrawal ... the painful intensity of impressions, light fever, spontaneous orgasms ... a sensitized film. And a heroin overdose is the easiest of deaths, so the pictures registered on the sensitized withdrawal film come off without distortion in a heroin O.D.'

'I see,' said Jim.

'It's all here on the tape, but I think you would like to see this boy. He is, I should tell you, retarded.'

As we are going down in the elevator, Dimitri continued. 'There is reason to suspect a latent psychosis, masked by his addiction.'

'Is he receiving any medication?' I asked.

'Yes—methadone, orally. I don't want his disorder to surface here.'

'You mean that he could become a public charge?' I asked.

'More than that—he could become a sanitary hazard.'