Part Two

In the fall of 1968, BD was calling himself Bobby Danton. He liked simple cover names that were easy to remember. He was back in the city where he’d been born and raised, and working the East Village where he had worked before.

BD was twenty-three, looked a couple of years younger, and could, if necessary, shave close, wear a shy smile, and pass for nineteen or even eighteen. It was a handy talent in his line of work. His hair was only down to his ears. He was growing a beard and mustache both because he had been here before and needed to hide his face and because it was hip.

His stash of grass was top grade and he was generous with it. The employer had rented him an apartment in a third-story walk-up on 7th Street around the corner from Tompkins Square Park. One Monday morning that October, he was having a little morning-after toss in bed with Rachel, a waitress from Stanley’s bar on St. Mark’s. They’d met the night before. He did some grunting, she moaned, and the noise attracted the attention of Marlene, his six-year-old German shepherd, who scratched at the door and barked three times.

When he came back from giving Marlene food and water and promising her a good long walk, Rachel was sitting up and lighting a joint. She was a singer. This morning she looked a little older than he’d guessed. “Your dog’s a jealous bitch,” she said but smiled nicely.

Aside from the big, secondhand bed, the room contained nothing but a used dresser with a lamp on it and a night table with a clock and a radio. “You don’t go in for decoration,” she observed, looking around and toking. “Most guys would put up a poster; maybe have a record or two lying around. This is what the artists call austerity.”

He remembered that Rachel, with her curly dark hair and ripe body, was also an artist’s model. In fact that’s what had first made him interested in her at Stanley’s. “You know Jason Finch?” he asked. “He does sculpture.”

“Jason doesn’t come around much anymore. All the artists are up at Max’s Kansas City. The Warhol crowd, too. Last year Warhol rented the Dom, that old Polish Wedding Hall upstairs from Stanley’s.

“He called the place the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. The Velvet Underground and Nico and all his other freaks were all over the place. Then, poof, he lost interest and they all went uptown. We still got plenty of freaks, just not those ones. How do you know Jason?”

He wanted to say, I knew his daughter, but recognized that would be stupid. Part of BD’s cover was that he studied architecture at Cooper Union. So he said, “We talked about him in class.”

She nodded and pulled her stuff together, got up, and went into the bathroom. She was heftier than he liked, a little older. But beer and gin and grass and a hit or two of hash laced with opium had smoothed the way.

While he waited for his guest to depart, he scratched Marlene’s ears the way he’d learned she liked and listened to mandolins and guitars on a distant stereo and car horns blasting on the street outside. Thinking about Judy Finch reminded him of his last tour in the neighborhood. Back then BD was twenty and just finished with his hitch in the army. The halfway house where he’d ended up when his family had dissolved one day had been good preparation for barracks society. He’d learned how to keep a proper distance, to protect his privacy.

College didn’t interest him. When he stopped by the house, a counselor who had known him when he was a resident said a private detective agency was looking for someone they could use for undercover work.

That was BD’s job the day he was trailing Jonathan Duncan. Little Johnny had changed his name to Ray and started living with a chicken hawk. He was sitting on a stoop making out with what looked like his twin but turned out to be a girl. They had an aura BD could still feel but couldn’t describe even to himself. He was surprised they hadn’t drawn a crowd.

When Rachel had gone, BD slipped a camera into his jacket pocket, clipped the leash onto Marlene’s collar, and left for work.

It was a beautiful morning with a lingering chill in the shadows and warmth in the sun. She was almost prancing at the end of her leash. He had inherited Marlene from another agent. They got along well and walking her was a great cover for being out and around.

On Avenue A, just inside the gates of Tompkins Square Park, was a lithe girl with vacant green eyes in a ballet skirt, halter, sandals, and maybe nothing else. She called herself Krazy Kid and he’d seen her a couple of nights before at a loft party on Avenue C.

“Hey, dog man,” she said.

He gave Marlene a sit command and she allowed herself to be petted. “How come your parents named you Krazy Kid?” he asked and the girl laughed quietly. He guessed that she was, maybe, sixteen and he didn’t even know her real name and had no reason to believe that anyone was looking for her. All he knew was that she was sweet and the guy he had seen her hanging on to was a scumbag. He liked to imagine himself rescuing people.

For the last couple of years while his face faded from local memory, his employers, Guardian Lamp Investigations (“Lost and runaway children our specialty and our mission”), had him out on loan to a private-eye firm in the Upper Midwest.

The last place he’d worked was Madison, where his name was Danny Bremmer and he was a clean-cut army deserter, a simple boy from Erie, Pennsylvania, hiding out because he didn’t want to go to ’Nam. One crash pad passed him along to the next like he was a sacred relic, and kids got snatched up and returned to their families in his wake.

The yellow pages ad for the Midwest firm was a drawing of a figure in what might almost have been a cop’s uniform shining a flashlight into an alley where a teary-eyed, scared little girl huddled. In fact, the last runaway child he’d helped return (to a family of wealthy aluminum manufacturers terrified of scandal) was a seventeen-year-old, three-hundred-pound blob of fat with an insatiable appetite for methedrine and for whores who’d sit on his face.

When Krazy Kid said good-bye to the German shepherd and then to him, he went to the dog run and let Marlene off the leash. She bounded forward, stopped, seemed to watch a slightly stubby dog with some Doberman in him.

A little farther down the fence, staring through the dogs and trees and iron lampposts of this ragged-assed old-fashioned park, looking like he was gazing into the navel of the universe and was not pleased by what he saw, was a skinny black man with gray hair. He was dressed in ratty pin-striped dress pants and a turtleneck jersey. On his head was a broken-down velvet Borsalino that must once have belonged to a pimp.

BD guessed that at one time Chambliss had been that man. Right now, though, what he did mainly was deal, shoot junk, and climb fire escapes to break into the apartments of people who went to work during the day.

BD moved down the fence, keeping his eye on Marlene like that was his concern. When he was close, Chambliss—without shifting his gaze, without moving his mouth—said, “That one you was interested in?

Calls herself Aurora?”

Marlene was racing in an improvised pack up a dirt mound and down the other side. A woman called,

“Regal!” to the Doberman mix.

Chambliss said, “She’s in a political commune on Avenue B and Sixth Street, southeast corner. There’s some commie dyke runs it. They got pictures on the windows of Chairman Mao. I seen Aurora out shopping at the bodega around the corner. She does that every morning.”

A group of kids barefoot and in tatters came by ringing cowbells and chanting “Hare Krishna.” A police cruiser sped across 9th Street with its cherry-top flashing. The kids all screamed, “Pig” and gave the cops the finger.

Chambliss said, “I gave you the lead. You owe me twenty.”

“Friday.” BD just breathed the word but compared with the other man’s voice it felt like he was shouting. That was company policy; Chambliss got paid for the week on Friday.

Chambliss was silent for a long moment but BD knew he was going to speak again. He listened to the chants fading, to distant sirens, to the occasional yip and snarl from the dog run. Then he heard, “I hear some queer dude last night was asking about undercovers. Says he knew one was working the neighborhood a few years back disguised as a halfway house boy, calling himself BD. Wants to know what became of him.”

BD always kept a twenty folded thin in his pocket. He had it in his hand as Chambliss pushed away from the fence. The black man seemed as if he might have something more to add. Before BD could ask what that was, Marlene, bothered by Regal the Doberman mutt, took a bite out of his shoulder as the two of them began snapping and snarling. The mutt’s owner yelled her protest. As BD

looked that way, Chambliss ambled past, his hands hung at his sides. When he snapped up the twenty it was too fast for a human eye to follow.

BD’s living room had a sofa and chair from the Goodwill, a telephone, and not much more. Late that afternoon BD sat on the couch with his feet resting on the chair and talked to his boss. He rolled a joint as he spoke.

“Aurora Sun?” he said. “Formerly Marilyn Friedberg of Greenwich, Connecticut? She’s living at Ninety-three Avenue B. I started charting her daily routine this morning.

“Yeah, I’m sure. She’s stopped washing her hair and wearing dresses but it’s her. The photos are on their way up to you.”

BD paused, twirled the joint in his fingers, and said, “I got a question. About an old case from early sixty-five. You remember a queer rich kid named Jonathan Duncan who called himself Ray Light? We put a snatch on him, returned him to the bosom of his family. I’ve got reason to think the little freak is back.”

Marlene was stretched out on the floor. She raised her head and BD scratched her ears as his boss searched the files. It turned out that as far as Guardian Lamp Investigations knew nobody was looking for Jonathan Duncan. The boss wondered if BD had fond memories or something. That made BD angrier than he expected to be. He said, “I don’t feel a lot of sympathy for a spoiled fag who had some queen supporting him and had a girlfriend on the side and a rich family spends thousands of dollars to make him come home and be rich along with them again. It was my job to return him. And I did it. I just wonder if he’s back here and trying to fuck up our operation.”

Again he listened to his supervisor. “I am sticking to business and not letting things get personal,” he said.

“Aurora will be packed for shipping by Wednesday. Thursday at the latest.”

After he hung up and fired the joint BD thought of Ray Light and Judy Finch on the stoop. He remembered how he’d risked blowing his cover for no reason at all when he went up and asked them for a match.

Later, on the day they’d planned to do the snatch, he’d tailed the two of them, called in his location from pay phones as they sat on benches with her holding him, traveled arm in arm in a wide arc through the city. He forgot to breathe sometimes watching them.

Then they turned back toward 4th Street and he knew they were headed to the spot where the snatch was set to go down. For a moment he wanted to catch up and warn them, to be part of what they were and run off with them.

Instead he made the call and Ray Light got taken off the street, right on schedule. The next morning Judy’s father walked her to school. The day after that she was gone.

That had been his first assignment. He was a lot more professional now and nothing like that had happened since. Tuesday he was up early staking out the address on Avenue B, confirming what Chambliss had said about Aurora Sun’s morning schedule.

By that evening the Friedbergs had seen the photos of a barefoot waif in an oversize muumuu and confirmed that this was their daughter. The snatch was set up for the next morning. It was all going very smoothly.

He started drinking that night at the Annex opposite the north corner of Tompkins Square Park. There he met some people he kind of knew and ended up at a crash pad where the air was so full of pot and incense smoke that it felt like you needed to part it like beaded curtains. Something had been added to the grass. The walls were moving.

Then he saw what appeared to be Ray Light looking just as he had the day he got snatched. With Light was a crowd of very thin, pale, and amused people. They wavered in the candlelight, stared at him, and made kissing mouths.

BD watched as Ray stepped forward. Only when the figure was right in front of him did he realize it was actually Judy Finch.

“How’s it going, BD,” she asked. She was taller than he remembered and much thinner.

“The name’s Bobby Danton,” he said.

“Cut the shit, BD,” she replied and smiled. “You’ve been asking about me. You want to know where I went? After you kidnapped Ray and then starting hanging around in front of our house, my parents thought I was going to be snatched. They were getting divorced and to keep me safe I got sent to an all-girl school in fucking Vermont. Two and a half years of subzero hard time. Thanks to you.”

She spoke in a loud clear voice that everyone around could hear over the music. Later he found out she was studying acting. The pupils of her eyes were like pinpricks.

“Doing a lot of meth?” he asked.

“Uh-huh. Another thing you need to answer for. Brought up in the East Village and the most I’d done was a couple of tokes of grass and a sip or two of Daddy’s booze. One semester at school and I had an extreme speed need.”

She took out a matchbook, stuck it in his shirt pocket, and said, “This is Ray Light’s number. He always talks about that vision you had of our future. You need to call him.” By the time he could react, she and everyone with her were gone.

A few years before when they had snatched Ray Light, BD was around the corner in a phone booth. He’d just made the call that set the operation in motion. The car with the kid facedown in the backseat sped right past him.

For an instant it was as if he were in Ray’s head. In that moment he saw three figures: one in denim and short hair, one in leathers, one in flowing robes. They stood on a stage amid bright light and flowing color. He knew the three were Ray and Judy and him.

The next morning BD and Marlene watched from a block away as Aurora walked to the local bodega. He gave the signal and a woman from Guardian Lamp came up behind Aurora while a man suddenly stepped in her way. She didn’t even yell when they hustled her into the car that rolled up the street. Then someone appeared and snapped a picture of them. A woman shouted, “Kidnapping pigs!”

“Nazis!” yelled a man and threw a beer bottle against the front window as the car jumped a light and sped away.

“Hey, dog man,” said a familiar voice. BD turned and someone took his picture. Krazy Kid and her sleaze of a boyfriend were there. She spat at him. The boyfriend had a camera. He took another shot. BD went at them. Marlene snarled. They ran but not before getting one last shot of him and his dog. When he got home, someone waited across the street and watched him go in the front door. BD packed everything he owned into two suitcases. He looked out the front windows and saw a couple of guys standing in doorways on the block. He called Guardian Lamp.

“Someone talked,” said the boss.

“Chambliss,” said BD. The whole thing was a setup. He should have known that when Chambliss said someone was looking for him.

“You trusted him too fucking much,” said the boss. “I’ll send a car around to pick you up. We got stuff to discuss.”

The issue of The East Village Other with pictures of BD on the front pages and “Undercover Cop” in headlines hadn’t yet hit the street and been reprinted in hippie enclaves everywhere. But BD knew that his career was over.

He waited downstairs in the front hall. When the car pulled up, he came out the door of his building. Someone stepped up to him saying, “Press. I’d like to talk to you.” But Marlene with one growl and an aborted lunge took care of that.

No one else came near them. He put his luggage in the trunk and got in the backseat with the dog. He wondered how he’d take care of her.

Somebody shouted, “That’s him!” as the car pulled away. Someone took a picture of him. He took the matchbook with Ray Light’s phone number out of his pocket.

BD remembered something about what Judy had called his vision. He knew that the three figures were Ray Light, Judy Finch, and him. But he hadn’t been able to tell which one of them he was.