'Doctor, I want you to meet my friend Mister D the Agent, and he's a lovely fellow too.
('Some time he don't hardly hear what you saying. He's very technical.') The doctor reached out his abbreviated fibrous fingers in which surgical instruments caught neon and cut Johnny's face into fragments of light.
'Jelly,' the doctor said, liquid gurgles through his hardened purple gums. His tongue was split and the two sections curled over each other as he talked: 'Life jelly. It sticks and grows on you like Johnny.'
Little papules of tissue were embedded in the doctor's hands. The doctor pulled a scalpel out of Johnny's ear and trimmed the papules into an ash tray where they stirred slowly exuding a green juice.
'They say his prick didn't synchronize at all so he cut it off and made some kinda awful cunt between the two sides of him. He got a whole ward full of his 'fans' he call them already.
'When the wind is right you can hear them scream in Town Hall Square. And everybody says 'But this is interesting.'
'I was more
Lee looked from the picture to the face, saw the flickering phosphorescent scars—
'Yes,' he said, 'I know you—You're dead
So the boy is rebuilt and gives me the eye and there he is again walking around some day later across the street and 'No dice' flickered across his face—The copy there is a different being, something ready to slip in—boys empty and banal as sunlight her way always—So he is exact replica is he not?—empty space of the original—
So I tailed the double to London on the Hook Von Holland and caught him out strangling a naked faggot in the bed sitter—I slip on the antibiotic hand cuffs and we adjourn to the Mandrake Club for an informative little chat—
'What do you get out of this?' I ask bluntly.
'A smell I always feel when their eyes pop out'— The boy looked at me his mouth a little open showing the whitest teeth this Private Eye ever saw—naval uniform buttoned in the wrong holes quilted with sea mist and powder smoke, smell of chlorine, rum and moldy jockstraps—and probably a narcotics agent is hiding in the spare stateroom that is always locked—There are the stairs to the attic room he looked out of and his mother moving around—dead she was they say—
dead —with such hair too—red.
'Where do you feel it?' I prodded.
'All over,' he said, eyes empty and banal as sunlight —'Like hair sprouting all over me'—He squirmed and giggled and creamed in his dry goods—
'And after every job I get to see the movies—You know—' And he gave me the sign twisting his head to the left and up—
So I gave him the sign back and the words jumped in my throat all there like and ready the way they always do when I'm right 'You make the pilgrimage?'
'Yes—The road to Rome.'
I withdrew the antibiotics and left him there with that dreamy little-boy look twisting the napkin into a hangman's knot—On the bus from the air terminal a thin grey man sat down beside me—I offered him a cigarette and he said 'Have one of mine,' and I see he is throwing the tin on me
—'Nova police—You are Mr. Snide I believe.' And he moved right in and shook me down looking at pictures, reading letters checking back on my time track.
'There's one of them,' I heard some one say as he looked at a photo in my files.
'Hummm—yes—and here's another—Thank you Mr. Snide—You have been most cooperative—'
I stopped off in Bologna to look up my old friend Green Tony thinking he could probably give me a line —up four flights in a tenement past the old bitch selling black-market cigarettes and cocaine cut with Saniflush, through a dirty brown curtain and there is Green Tony in a pad with Chinese jade all over and Etruscan cuspidors—He is sitting back with his leg thrown over an Egyptian throne smoking a cigarette in a carved emerald holder—He doesn't get up but he says: 'Dick Tracy in the flesh,' and motions to a Babylonian couch.
I told him what I was after and his face went a bright green with rage, 'That stupid bitch—She bringa the heat on all of us—Nova heat—' He blew a cloud of smoke and it hung there solid in front of him—Then he wrote an address in the smoke—'No. 88 Via di Nile, Roma.'
This 88 Nile turned out to be one of those bar-soda fountains like they have in Rome—You are subject to find a maraschino cherry in your dry martini and right next to some citizen is sucking a banana split disgust you to see it —Well I am sitting there trying not to see it so I look down at the far end of the counter and dug a boy very dark with kinky hair and something Abyssinian in his face
—Our eyes lock and I give him the sign—And he gives it right back—So I spit the maraschino cherry in the bartender's face and slip him a big tip and he says '
And I say 'Up yours with a double strawberry phosphate.'
The boy finishes his Pink Lady and follows me out and I take him back to my trap and right away get into an argument with the clerk about no visitors stranezza to the hotel—Enough garlic on his breath to deter a covey of vampires—I shove a handful of lire into his mouth 'Go buy yourself some more gold teeth,' I told him—
When this boy peeled off the dry goods he gives off a slow stink like a thawing mummy—But his asshole sucked me right in all my experience as a Private Eye never felt anything like it—In the flash bulb of orgasm I see that fucking clerk has stuck his head through the transom for a refill—
Well expense account—The boy is lying there on the bed spreading out like a jelly slow tremors running through it and sighs and says: 'Almost like the real thing isn't it?'
And I said 'I need the time milking,' and give him the sign so heavy come near slipping a disk.
'I can see you're one of our own,' he said warmly sucking himself back into shape—'Dinner at eight'— He comes back at eight in a souped up Ragazzi and we take off 160 per and scream to stop in front of a villa I can see the Bentleys and Hispano Bear Cats and Stutz Suisses and what not piled up and all the golden youth of Europe is
