Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said Part 8

"Where to?" Jason demanded, moving away from McNulty exactly, he realized, the way Kathy had moved away from him. She had learned this, too, from the McNultys of the world.

"You don't have anything to charge him with!" Kathy said hoa.r.s.ely, clenching her fists.

Easily, McNulty said, "We're not going to charge him with anything; I just want a fingerprint, voiceprint, footprint, EEG wave pattern from him. Okay, Mr. Tavern?"

Jason started to say, "I hate to correct a police officer--" and then broke off at the warning look on Kathy's face-- "who's doing his duty," he finished, "so I'll go along." Maybe Kathy had a point; maybe it was worth something for the pol officer to get Jason Taverner's name wrong. Who knew? Time would tell.

"'Mr. Tavern,' " McNulty said lazily, propelled him toward the door of the room. "Suggests beer and warmth and coziness, doesn't it?" He looked back at Kathy and said in a sharp voice, "Doesn't it?"

"Mr. Tavern is a warm man," Kathy said, her teeth locked together. The door shut after them, and McNulty steered him down the hallway to the stairs, breathing, meanwhile, the odor of onion and hot sauce in every direction.

At the 469th Precinct station, Jason Taverner found himself lost in a mult.i.tude of men and women who moved aimlessly, waiting to get in, waiting to get out, waiting for information, waiting to be told what to do. McNulty had pinned a colored tag on his lapel; G.o.d and the police alone knew what it meant.

Obviously it did mean something. A uniformed officer behind a desk which ran from wall to wall beckoned to him.

"Okay," the cop said. "Inspector McNulty filled out part of your J-2 form. Jason Tavern. Address: 2048 Vine Street."

Where had McNulty come up with that? Jason wondered. Vine Street. And then he realized that it was Kathy's address. McNulty had a.s.sumed they were living together; overworked, as was true of all the pols, he had written down the information that took the least effort. A law of nature: an objector living creature--takes the shortest route between two points. He filled out the balance of the form.

"Put your hand into that slot," the officer said, indicating a fingerprinting machine. Jason did so. "Now," the officer said, "remove one shoe, either left or right. And that sock. You may sit down here." He slid a section of desk aside, revealing an entrance and a chair.

"Thanks," Jason said, seating himself.

After the recording of the footprint he spoke the sentence, "Down goes the right hut and ate a put object beside his horse." That took care of the voiceprint. After that, again seated, he allowed terminals to be placed here and there on his head; the machine cranked out three feet of scribbledon paper, and that was that. That was the electrocardiogram. It ended the tests.

Looking cheerful, McNulty appeared at the desk. In the harsh white overhead light his five-o'clock shadow could be seen over all his jaw, his upper lip, the higher part of his neck. "How's it going with Mr. Tavern?" he asked.

The officer said, "We're ready to do a nomenclature filepull."

"Fine," McNulty said. "I'll stick around and see what comes up."

The uniformed officer dropped the form Jason had filled out into a slot, pressed lettered b.u.t.tons, all of which were green. For some reason Jason noticed that. And the letters capitals.

From a mouthlike aperture on the very long desk a Xeroxed doc.u.ment slid out, dropped into a metal basket.

"Jason Tavern," the uniformed officer said, examining the doc.u.ment. "Of Kememmer, Wyoming. Age: thirty-nine. A diesel engine mechanic." He glanced at the photo. "Pic taken fifteen years ago."

"Any police record?" McNulty asked.

"No trouble of any kind," the uniformed officer said.

"There are no other Jason Taverns on record at Pol-Dat?" McNulty asked. The officer pressed a yellow b.u.t.ton, shook his head. "Okay," McNulty said. "That's him." He surveyed Jason. "You don't look like a diesel engine mechanic."

"I don't do that anymore," Jason said. "I'm now in sales. For farm equipment. Do you want my card?" A bluff; he reached toward the upper right-hand pocket of his suit. McNulty shook his head no. So that was that; they had, in their usual bureaucratic fashion, pulled the wrong file on him. And, in their rush, they had let it stand.

He thought, Thank G.o.d for the weaknesses built into a vast, complicated, convoluted, planetwide apparatus. Too many people; too many machines. This error began with a pol inspec and worked its way to Pol-Dat, their pool of data at Memphis, Tennessee. Even with my fingerprint, footprint, voiceprint and EEG print they probably won't be able to straighten it out. Not now; not with my form on file.

"Shall I book him?" the uniformed officer asked McNulty.

"For what?" McNulty said. "For being a diesel mechanic?" He slapped Jason convivially on the back. "You can go home, Mr. Tavern. Back to your child-faced sweetheart. Your little virgin." Grinning, he moved off into the throng of anxious and bewildered human men and women.

"You may go, sir," the uniformed officer told Jason.

Nodding, Jason made his way out of the 469th Precinct police station, onto the nighttime street, to mix with the free and self-determined people who resided there.

But they will get me finally, he thought. They'll match up the prints. And yet--if it's been fifteen years since the photo was taken, maybe it's been fifteen years since they took an EEG and a voiceprint.

But that still left the finger- and footprints. They did not change.

He thought, Maybe they'll just toss the Xerox copy of the file into a shredding bin, and that will be that. And transmit the data they got out of me to Memphis, there to be incorporated in my--or rather "my"--permanent file. In Jason Tavern's file, specifically.

Thank G.o.d Jason Tavern, diesel mechanic, had never broken a law, had never tangled with the pols or flats. Good for him.

A police flipflap wobbled overhead, its red searchlight glimmering, and from its PA speakers it said, "Mr. Jason Tavern, return to 469th Precinct Police Station at once. This is a police order. Mr. Jason Tavern--" It raved on and on as Jason stood stunned. They had figured it out already. In a matter not of hours, days, or weeks, but minutes.

He returned to the police station, climbed the styraplex stairs, pa.s.sed through the light-activated doors, through the milling throng of the unfortunate, back to the uniformed officer who had handled his case--and there stood McNulty, too. The two of them were in the process of frowningly conferring.

"Well," McNulty said, glancing up, "here's our Mr. Tavern again. What are you doing back here, Mr. Tavern?"

"The police flipflap--" he began, but McNulty cut him off.

"That was unauthorized. We merely put out an APB and some figtail hoisted it to flipflap level. But as long as you're here"--McNulty turned the doc.u.ment so that Jason could see the photo--"is that how you looked fifteen years ago?"

"I guess so," Jason said. The photo showed a sallow-faced individual with protruding Adam's apple, bad teeth and eyes, sternly staring into nothing. His hair, frizzy and corn-colored, hung over two near-jug ears.

"You've had plastic S," McNulty said.

Jason said, "Yes."

"Why?"

Jason said, "Who would want to look like that?"

"So no wonder you're so handsome and dignified," McNulty said. "So stately. So"--he groped for the word-- "commanding. It's really hard to believe that they could do to _that_"--he put his index finger on the fifteen-year-old photo--"something to make it look like that." He tapped Jason friendlily on the arm. "But where'd you get the money?"

While McNulty talked, Jason had begun swiftly reading the data printed on the doc.u.ment. Jason Tavern had been born in Cicero, Illinois, his father had been a turret lathe operator, his grandfather had owned a chain of retail farmequipment stores--a lucky break, considering what he had told McNulty about his current career.

"From Windslow," Jason said. "I'm sorry; I always think of him like that, and I forget that others can't." His professional training had helped him: he had read and a.s.similated most of the page while McNulty was talking to him. "My grandfather. He had a good deal of money, and I was his favorite. I was the only grandson, you see."

McNulty studied the doc.u.ment, nodded.

"I looked like a rural hick," Jason said. "I looked like what I was: a hayseed. The best job I could get involved repairing diesel engines, and I wanted more. So I took the money that Windslow left me and headed for Chicago--"

"Okay," McNulty said still nodding. "It fits together. We are aware that such radical plastic surgery can be accomplished, and at not too large a cost. But generally it's done by unpersons or labor-camp inmates who've escaped. We monitor all graft-shops, as we call them."

"But look how ugly I was," Jason said.

McNulty laughed a deep, throaty laugh. "You sure were, Mr. Tavern. Okay; sorry to trouble you. Go on." He gestured, and Jason began to part the throng of people before him. "Oh!" McNulty called, gesturing to him. "One more--" His voice, drowned out by the noise of the milling, did not reach Jason. So, his heart frozen in ice, he walked out.

Once they notice you, Jason realized, _they never completely close the file_. You can never get back your anonymity. It is vital not to be noticed in the first place. But I have been.

"What is it?" he asked McNulty, feeling despair. They were playing games with him, breaking him down; he could feel, inside him, his heart, his blood, all his vital parts, stagger in their processes. Even the superb physiology of a six tumbled at this.

McNulty held out his hand. "Your ID cards. I want some lab work on them. If they're okay you'll get them back the day after tomorrow."

Jason said protestingly. "But if a random pol-check--"

"We'll give you a police pa.s.s," McNulty said. He nodded to a great-bellied older officer to his right. "Get a 4-D photo of him and set up a blanket pa.s.s."

"Yes, Inspector," the tub of guts said, reaching out an overstuffed paw to turn on the camera equipment.

Ten minutes later, Jason Taverner found himself out once more on the now almost deserted early evening sidewalk, and this time with a bona fide pol-pa.s.s--better than anything Kathy could have manufactured for him . . . except that the pa.s.s was valid only for one week. But still .

He had one week during which he could afford not to worry. And then, after that.

He had done the impossible: he had traded a walletful of bogus ID cards for a genuine pol-pa.s.s. Examining the pa.s.s under the streetlights, he saw that the expiration notice was holographic . . . and there was room for the insertion of an additional number. It read seven. He could get Kathy to alter that to seventy-five or ninety-seven, or whatever was easiest.

And then it occurred to him that as soon as the pol lab made out that his ID cards were spurious the number of his pa.s.s, his name, his photo, would be transmitted to every police checkpoint on the planet.

But until that happened he was safe.

PART TWO

Down, vain lights, shine you no more! No nights are black enough for those That in despair their lost fortunes deplore. Light doth but shame disclose.

7

Early in the gray of evening, before the cement sidewalks bloomed with nighttime activity, Police General Felix Buckman landed his opulent official quibble on the roof of the Los Angeles Police Academy building. He sat for a time, reading page-one articles on the sole evening newspaper, then, folding the paper up carefully, he placed it on the back seat of the quibble, opened the locked door, and stepped out.

No activity below him. One shift had begun to trail off; the next had not quite begun to arrive.

He liked this time: the great building, in these moments, seemed to belong to him. "And leaves the world to darkness and to me," he thought, recalling a line from Thomas Gray's _Elegy_. A long cherished favorite of his, in fact from boyhood.

With his rank key he opened the building's express descent sphincter, dropped rapidly by chute to his own level, fourteen. Where he had worked most of his adult life.

Desks without people, rows of them. Except that at the far end of the major room one officer still sat painstakingly writing a report. And, at the coffee machine, a female officer drinking from a Dixie cup.

"Good evening," Buckman said to her. He did not know her, but it did not matter: she--and everyone else in the building--knew _him_.

"Good evening, Mr. Buckman." She drew herself upright, as if at attention.

"Be tired," Buckman said.

"Pardon, sir?"

"Go home." He walked away from her, pa.s.sed by the posterior row of desks, the rank of square gray metal shapes upon which the business of this branch of earth's police agency was conducted.

Most of the desks were clean: the officers had finished their work neatly before leaving. But, on desk 37, several papers. Officer Someone worked late, Buckman decided. He bent to see the nameplate.

Inspector McNulty, of course. The ninety-day wonder of the academy. Busily dreaming up plots and remnants of treason . . . Buckman smiled, seated himself on the swivel chair, picked up the papers.

TAVERNER, JASON. CODE BLUE.

A Xeroxed file from police vaults. Summoned out of the void by the overly eager--and overweight--Inspector McNulty. A small note in pencil: "Taverner does not exist."

Strange, he thought. And began to leaf through the papers. "Good evening, Mr. Buckman." His a.s.sistant, Herbert Maime, young and sharp, nattily dressed in a civilian suit: he rated that privilege, as did Buckman.

"McNulty seems to be working on the file of someone who does not exist," Buckman said.

"In which precinct doesn't he exist?" Maime said, and both of them laughed. They did not particularly like McNulty, but the gray police required his sort. Everything would be fine unless the McNultys of the academy rose to policy-making levels. Fortunately that rarely happened. Not, anyhow, if he could help it.

Subject gave false name Jason Tavern. Wrong file pulled of Jason Tavern of Kememmer, Wyoming, diesel motor repairman. Subject claimed to be Tavern, with plastic S.

ID cards identify him as Taverner, Jason, but no file.