Flood

her warmth and strength next to me and the calmness that came with it. After a few minutes I handed her the cover of the file.

“Everything about Goldor’s in here,” I told her.

“Isn’t that good? Isn’t that what you went to find?”

“Yeah, but I found something else too. I think he’s our man, the man with the lead to Wilson.”

Flood looked questions at me, gave me her soft smile. “Don’t smile, Flood. He’s not someone we can make a deal with.”

She said, “Tell me,” and I did the best I could. She sat there not moving a muscle while I took her all the way through that videotape. She didn’t ask me how I got to see it-she could see it wasn’t important anymore, if it ever had been. She absorbed the story like a good boxer taking a body punch-she moved into it to get something she could understand, something that would make sense. “The woman knew she was going to die.” It wasn’t a question.

“I don’t know.”

“She did. She died with honor. You must have seen that, Burke.”

“If she did what the freak wanted, would she have lived?”

“Would she have wanted to?”

“We’ll never know, right? She has people-she won’t have to worry about resting in peace wherever she is. That’s why we don’t have a lot of time. Goldor is on the spot-he’s marked. If this city had vultures, they would be hovering over his house right now, you understand?”

“Yes,” said Flood, “but does he understand?”

“I’m told not-I’m told he doesn’t believe anything can get to him. Everything about him is supposed to be in this file. We’ll see.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I want to make it like I never heard of this freak,” I told her. “And I want to cancel his ticket-watch him die, have him understand that he is going to die just like that girl did-find the field his tree grew in and dig up the roots and pour salt in the ground.”

“It’s not wrong to be afraid,” Flood said, thinking she understood.

“Flood, for chrissakes, I know that-I probably know that better than anyone you’ll ever meet. You ever watch a pro football game-ever see how those guys come over to the sidelines and take a hit off an oxygen bottle so they can go back and do their work? That’s what I do with fear. It makes me smart-it’s the fuel I run on. You don’t understand-you didn’t see the tape.”

“I don’t want to see it.”

“That won’t help. Damn it, Flood-I didn’t want to see it either, but even if we never saw it it would still be-it will always be, even if this maggot is dead and gone.”

“Like Zen?”

“If a tree falls in the forest… maybe so-I don’t know.”

“I’m not afraid of him,” she said, “he’s just a man.”

“Flood, there is just no place for people like you where I live. Good for you, you’re not afraid-you going to protect me?”

“I can.”

“Not from this-it’s inside of me, it’s inside all of us. What he did-people do it. Rich people pay for it with money and poor people just do it and pay the freight in some mental hospital or prison. People do it-not animals, not birds-people. If you’re not scared of it, it just means you can’t see yourself there. It doesn’t mean it isn’t there.”

“Maybe it’s because he’s so rich-there’s so much strength when you have money…”

“It’s not money, Flood, it’s power. When I was in Africa once, in Angola before they kicked out the Portuguese-I was near the airport in Luanda and the rebels were getting closer and it was time to get out. The soldiers were all over the place and they were searching luggage, you know, to find contraband-ivory carvings, diamonds, hard currency. Two of them opened my bags on the ground. Nothing in there, but they found the malaria pills I had with me. One of them opened the bottles and just poured them out on the ground, right in front of me, smiling in my face all the time. There was nothing I could do except act stupid and confused. That made them happy-I would get malaria and I wouldn’t even understand how it happened. That was enough for them, that much power-for some people, it’s not enough. There’s a line you cross-and once you cross it you never get back. Then you’re not human anymore.”

“All soldiers act evil,” Flood said. “That’s the way they’re trained. Everything is black and white, friend or enemy. They don’t think, they just obey-”

“And when they rape some helpless woman after a battle, is that obedience?”

“That’s evil too. A lot of soldiers do evil rotten things, but when they’re no longer soldiers there’s no need for them to be evil. They can stop.”

“Goldor is no soldier, Flood-his marching orders are in his head.”

“You talk like you know him. You were only watching an evil film-you don’t know him.”

“I know him, all right… There was a kid once, a few years ago. A sort of halfwit, you know? Halfass burglar. The Man kept catching him, kept putting him in the can-like meat on a hook in a freezer, hanging up to be cured so it’s fit for people to eat. And every time he goes to the joint he listens to those degenerates talk how about they’re going to kick some woman’s ass until she gets on the street for them and makes them some money, or how they’re going to pull a train on some retarded girl down the block-every sicko fantasy in the world. And this kid listens-he don’t say much, not because he has enough smarts to keep his mouth shut but because nobody ever listens to such a lame. So he gets out again, right? As soon as he gets on the street he hits a housing project to do another of his dumb penny-ante burglaries. He goes in a window and it turns out to be a bedroom. There’s a woman sleeping there and she wakes up. If she’d screamed or tried to fight him he would have run away. But this woman, she read too many books-she tells him, ‘Don’t hurt me, I’ll do anything you want, but please don’t hurt me,’ and for the first time in his pitiful life he’s in control-he’s got power. He is a fucking god right there in that bedroom-and every evil thing he ever heard about in the joint floods his tiny brain. He puts the woman through every kind of change he can think of. He stays there for hours with her, just power-tripping. And when he leaves there’s a Coke bottle sticking out of one side of the woman and a wooden spoon sticking out the other. He doesn’t kill her, doesn’t take a thing from her apartment. And the next time he goes prowling, he’s not looking to steal-you understand me? He crossed that power-rush line and he can’t ever step back over it-he has to live on that other side until he stops living. He’s not a man anymore, not a person.”

“How could you know this?”

“I knew that kid,” I told her, “I talked to him”

“In prison?”

“No. He was in a juvenile prison, one of those dumps they call a training school for delinquents. No, I met him on the street-and I talked to him just before he died.”

“Couldn’t he have been locked up for the rest of his life?”

“There’s no such thing. He’d sit in his cell and draw pictures of women with blunt objects sticking out of them- or he’d do like another freak, a guy I did know in prison. This guy had a little tape recorder and he’d prowl around the blocks until he heard some kid being raped and then he’d just roll up and record the sounds and go back to his cell and play the tape and giggle to himself and jack off all over the walls. Sooner or later the parole board’s going to cut that freak loose too. And then he’ll do some cutting-loose of his own.”

“How did that other kid die?”

“He jumped off a sixteen-story building,” I said, letting her think it was suicide.

“Oh. And Goldor…?”

“What he does is more addictive than any heroin. But there’s more to him than just being a sicko. He believes in what he does-you can tell. The way he smashed that woman-it was because he was so angry. So much hate because she wouldn’t see the Way-you know, like the Tao. The perfect way-pain for life. And we have to find a way to make him tell us something,” I said, thinking how hopeless it was.

“Maybe if we-”

“Forget it-I know what you’re thinking. He would beat us, Flood. You could kill him easy enough, but could you