'Help me!'
It was a sobbing gasp. Bishop glanced toward it. He saw a willowy white kid, the only other white guy in the cell. His face was as pale as paper. His lips were as dry as dust. And that stare, that wild stare of his, was full of terror.
'He's gonna kill me! Please!'
Bishop put his hand over the kid's face and shoved him. 'Get the hell away from me,' he said.
The kid fell backward onto his butt. He scrambled onto his knees, grabbed Bishop's hand. 'Please! I don't want to die! My father will pay you! I swear!'
The kid had a round, soft face, a floppy mop of brown hair. He had full sensuous lips and deep sensitive eyes. His hands were delicate with long fingers. They gripped Bishop's hand hard. His voice cracked.
'I didn't mean anything! Really. I was just scared, that's all. They just scared me! Please! You're a white man. Please!'
Bishop yanked his hand free. 'Get the hell away from me or I'll kick you in the head,' he said.
'But he'll kill me!'
Bishop kicked him in the head-not hard, just a few harrying blows around the temple to drive him away again.
Throwing up his arms for protection, the kid retreated in a crouch. He sank onto the floor, his back against the bunk across the narrow aisle. He buried his pale face in his delicate hands. He sobbed. 'Please. Please.'
The Mexican on the bunk across the aisle was lying on his side, his back to them. He looked over his shoulder. 'Shut up, Maricon, ' he said to the kid.
The kid went on sobbing.
Now, with a sort of dreamy slowness, another man heaved around the bunk bed at the end of the row. He came lumbering toward them.
This one was a hulking figure, big-bellied, slump-shouldered, broad. His head was squashed and shapeless. It looked like a giant glob of clay that had been hurled down- splat!- on top of his neck. Marble eyes glowered out of the clay as he approached. Bishop glanced down instinctively and saw the clay-headed man was gripping a sharp strip of metal in his doughy right fist.
He thought, well, the kid was telling the truth anyway. This monster was definitely out to kill him, all right.
The Mexican on the bunk across the way shook his head in exasperation. He rolled back onto his side, his back to the action. The enormous muscleman on the bunk over Bishop's let out a deep laugh- heh, heh, heh. He was happy to have some entertainment.
Bishop lay as he was, his fingers laced behind his head again. He watched the clay-headed man stalking toward the kid step by slow step. He sighed. What a bunch of fucking lowlifes. It depressed him to be locked up in the same cell with them.
The kid looked up from sobbing. He saw this Clayhead guy coming for him. He shrieked like a girl and flung himself at Bishop again. His voice was a ragged, high-pitched scream:
'Ple-e-e-ease!'
He gripped the edge of Bishop's bunk desperately.
But now Clayhead was on him. He let out an animal growl and grabbed a handful of the kid's floppy mop of hair. He yanked it so the kid's face turned up toward him. The kid gaped up at the squashed features with his mouth in a wide frown like a fish's mouth. Somewhere in that shapeless mass of flesh above him, there was a killer smile and those marble eyes gleaming. The kid stared at those eyes helplessly, waiting to die. Clayhead held the metal blade low and aligned it with the kid's jugular, to make sure he cut just the right place.
'Oh for Christ's sake,' Bishop muttered. He reached out irritably and broke the clay-headed man's arm.
He broke it at the wrist, grabbing it in both his hands, twisting it back and around. The snap of the bone was like pistol fire. The metal blade pattered quietly against the cell's concrete floor.
Clayhead screamed. He grabbed his broken wrist and started reeling back up the aisle, banging from bunk to bunk, whooping and roaring. At the end of the aisle, he fell down and writhed.
The kid, released from his grip, fell down too. He curled trembling into a ball on the floor, his orange jumpsuit stained at the crotch and bottom.
There was a loud buzz and the cell door opened, and the deputies came rushing in, as serious and self- satisfied as if they'd arrived in the nick of time.
8.
I'm not sure-I'm never really sure-whether my own story is worth telling here, whether it's worth interrupting the main action with it. The romantic doings of my admittedly callow existence at that time seem pretty unimportant compared with the working out of Weiss's fate and Bishop's. Still, we all did converge in the end, and while I don't know-even all this long time later-whether I had any effect on what happened to the others, I do know that what happened to them, violent and terrible as it was, changed my life for- ever. In any case, as I say, we all did converge, so I guess my part in these events has to be told. I promise to get through it as quickly as I can.
To begin with, the main thing you have to know is I was in love. Her name was Emma McNair. She was a student at UC Berkeley, where her father was an English professor. She had an adorable heart-shaped face and witty green eyes and… Well, I guess it doesn't matter what she had, does it? The point is I met her one night in a pizzeria called Carlo's. I fell in love with her on the spot, convinced on the spot that she was my second soul, fashioned for me at the Creation. Before we parted, she wrote her phone number on a Carlo's coaster for me, and I promised to call her right away. Only I never did. That very night I became entangled in an affair with my superior at the Agency, Sissy Truitt. Day after day I didn't call Emma, because night after night I was with Sissy.
Now at this point-the point where Weiss suddenly left town and Bishop got thrown in jail and all-at this point I was already tired of Sissy in a thousand ways, but in one way I wasn't. She was older than I was by at least ten years, and she knew some sexual tricks that would've been illegal if the sort of people who made stuff like that illegal had ever heard of them, which they couldn't have or they wouldn't have been that sort of people. Me at that age: I was basically a penis with an idea for a human being attached. I wanted to leave Sissy and be with Emma, but I couldn't because of the things Sissy did with me in bed. I despised myself for this. In fact, I despised myself for my entire approach to Sissy, the way I pledged my loyalty to her at the same time I plotted to escape her as if she were some kind of Communist regime or something. Sissy was not a bad person at all. She was sweet and gentle and motherly, and so hungry to have a man in her life, she was even willing to settle for me. I liked her. I really did. I was just tired of her, that's all. I was tired of her and I was in love with Emma, my second soul.
Last night, the night before Bishop went to jail, I managed to get away from her somehow. I told her some lie or other. I haven't the stomach to remember what it was. Anyway, I drove out to Berkeley. I went to Carlo's. I figured Emma had come in there once; there was at least some chance she would come in again. Somehow, attempting to bump into her 'accidentally' seemed less dishonest than calling her or going to her house while I was still involved with Sissy.
So there we find me, in Carlo's, at a corner table. Drinking a beer. Pretending not to watch the door.
It was Thursday night. The place was packed, noisy with talk and laughter. The chairs around the chunky wooden tables were full of kids from the university, kids not much younger than I. My gaze-my melancholy gaze- traveled over them: athletes pointing their chins and fingers at one another, shouting friendly insults back and forth; intellectuals talking vehemently nose to nose, as if they were disagreeing rather than working out the variations of a single ideology; outcasts in baggy clothes with sullen frowns and big ideas; and bright-eyed Businessmen and Businesswomen of Tomorrow who smiled across their pizzas as if they would be bright-eyed forever.
I gripped the handle of my beer mug, sipped the surface of my beer. I had been one of these very students not so long ago, one of the intellectual ones. I had been planning to continue on through graduate school, to become a college professor and write bad smart novels that critics praised and no one read, just like Emma's father did. God knows what lonely impulse of delight had led me to take a year off, to take a menial job at Weiss's agency. But there I found myself, working at a place and with people who seemed to have erupted whole out of the hard- boiled detective fiction I had loved since I was a boy. I wasn't one of those hard-boiled people. I knew that. But
