files?'
'No. Not yet.'
'Where do you keep these famous files, anyway?'
'Hidden.'
'Here in the house?'
'Upstairs. I'll show you. They're locked up. Eddie has a key. I have a key. And I'll show you where there's another one. Nobody else has ever seen the files.'
'I'm flattered.'
'You should be. I take my responsibilities with the data that I've gathered very, very seriously.'
This was an interpretation of Rutka's activities that would have been challenged through clenched teeth by many in Albany, but I was now his security consultant and not his conscience, or linguist, and I let it go.
'How did you compile these files?' I said. 'How do you dig up all this dirt on people?'
'I'm surprised to hear you call it dirt,' he said, looking annoyed. 'That's a retrograde term I'd expect to hear from a person who has internalized his or her own homophobia.'
'That's what I meant. It's dirt to them.'
'Exactly. So, Strachey. You're a detective. If you were going to build up a set of files on homophobic closeted people, how would you go about it?'
'I'd keep my eyes open and ask a lot of questions wherever gay people congregated. I'd stake out cruising areas and see who turned up. I'd make myself available to people who wanted to sell information that somebody somewhere would consider damaging. And of course I'd cultivate in-the-know gay people who share my beliefs about outing or who might be brought around to my way of thinking.'
He nodded. 'You've got it.'
'I'd build up a network of informants, too. In the police department, among the press, maybe in the area's hotels and motels, where lots of gay people are employed, and closeted gay people show up for trysts wearing shades and red wigs that don't fool sharp-eyed nosy desk clerks and room-service waiters and busboys.'
Another nod.
I said, 'I guess the motives of your informants don't count for much. Just so they deliver the goods.'
He looked at me with both eyes and said gravely, 'I occupy the high moral ground in this. It doesn't matter if many of my informants don't. They can deal with their own consciences. I'll deal with mine. I think of tips from sleazy people as just that tips, leads. I would never out anybody on the say-so of just one person, even if that person was sincere and reliable-which some of them are. They aren't all scuzzbags.
'That's why it pisses me off that people say I use McCarthyite tactics. Joe McCarthy was reckless and sloppy. He'd go after somebody on the basis of anonymous calls or letters from crackpot organizations. I would never do anything like that. The idea of it makes me sick.'
When I thought about it later, Rutka's indignantly drawn fine distinction between his approach and Joe McCarthy's kept blurring in my mind. But as Rutka sat there on a sunny Wednesday morning shaking his head in disgust over McCarthy's failure to double-check his sources, he came across as the consummate professional: exacting, judicious, fair-minded, wise: the Benjamin Cardozo of outing.
I said, 'Well, John, whatever I might think about your outing campaign and the way you go about it, you've convinced me that I can rely on your skills as a researcher-reporter. That's quite a data bank you must have stored away up there. And I guess I agree it's all but certain that the name of the person who shot you is buried somewhere inside those files. So if I'm going to help keep you from getting shot again, we should get to it. It's time for me to take a look at those files.'
Rutka seemed to pause for just an instant to consider the gravity of the step he was about to take, and then he swung both feet onto the floor, sat up, and reached for my hand. end user
5
Rutka slid up the stairs backwards on his seat, pushing himself upward with the good foot. On the second floor he pulled himself upright and hobbled into a dim bedroom with drawn shades that had been a teen-aged girl's in the early seventies and had been frozen in time: orange shag throw rug; pink chenille bedspread with a heap of stuffed animals on the pillows; a stack of Carole King records; an Osmond Brothers poster on the wall; some group photos showing the Handbag High cheerleaders hoisting their pom-poms and thrusting up their breasts with military precision.
'Your sister's room?'
'You are good.'
Rutka unzipped the belly of a stuffed hippopotamus and pulled out a set of three keys. 'Now you know where a set of keys is, in case I'm not here.'
Down the hall, he unlocked the attic door with two of the keys and we climbed up, him on his seat. The wall of dry heat that hit us when we got to the top felt like a visit to Khartoum. I helped support Rutka and we bent low so as not to have our skulls pierced by roofing nails. Past the piles of old furniture and boxes labeled 'XMAS' and 'GRANDMA,' at what I took to be the rear of the attic if my orientation was correct, was an old World War II- vintage desk.
A light bulb on a wire dangled overhead. Heaps of old Cityscapes and Queerscreeds were on the floor off to one side, and on the other stood a two-drawer metal filing cabinet. The heat was awful under the uninsulated shingled roof, and Rutka switched on a box floor fan that just blew the hot air around; I tried to remember the Arab word for the madness caused by this type of wind.
Rutka used a third key on his chain to unlock the file cabinet. Down below a phone began to ring, but Rutka gestured to never mind. 'The machine will pick it up.' He perched on the edge of the desk and said, 'This is it. The famous files.'
I slid open the top drawer. It was jam-packed with file folders arranged alphabetically by outee.
'The ones with the red tags have already been done,' he said.
'I'd have expected an up-to-date guy like you, John, to be computerized.'
'My financial resources are not unlimited, despite what I'm paying you. I'll stay here while you look through them. You'll probably have some questions.'
We were both sweating now from the heat. The main effect of the fan was to dry the sweat on our body surfaces and blow occasional droplets onto the stack of files I spread out on the desk. My neck itched and we both stank. Rutka seated himself on an old kitchen chair next to the desk and made notes in the margins of a file he retrieved from a desktop box labeled 'CURRENT' while I spread out the A's.
'What's that?' Rutka said, listening.
I heard it too, the sound of glass breaking, a bottle or jar smashing.
We listened.
'I'll check,' I said.
Before I even made it to the stairwell, a smoke alarm down below began to wail. I hurtled down to the second floor, and even faster to the first, where dark smoke was boiling into the kitchen. Out on the back porch, flames, fed by what smelled like gasoline, were roaring up from the floor. The glider cushions were ablaze, and even the M amp;M's, drenched by the blazing fluid, were melting and popping in the billowing fire and smoke.
I grabbed the canister fire extinguisher by the kitchen door, yanked the release handle, and directed the hose at the conflagration.
White foam shot out with enough force to make me bobble the awkward tube, but I regained my aim and sprayed the glider and floor repeatedly with the retardant chemical. The flames vanished in spots, only to spring up again when I shifted my aim.
Hacking and gasping and weeping from the smoke, I doused the area with chemical until the fire was extinguished. I found a phone in the kitchen, dialed 911, and asked for the Handbag Fire Department to come out and make sure the fire was out. Then I examined the damage.
Rutka, having made his way down from the attic, appeared in the hallway leading to the kitchen and peered at me with a look of horror.
