THE PRIVATE ASSHOLE

The name is Clem Williamson Snide. I am a private asshole.

As a private investigator I run into more death than the law allows. I mean the law of averages. There I am outside the hotel room waiting for the corespondent to reach a crescendo of amorous noises. I always find that if you walk in just as he goes off he won’t have time to disengage himself and take a swing at you. When me and the house dick open the door with a passkey, the smell of shit and bitter almonds blows us back into the hall. Seems they both took a cyanide capsule and fucked until the capsules dissolved. A real messy love death.

Another time I am working on a routine case of industrial sabotage when the factory burns down killing twenty-three people. These things happen. I am a man of the world. Going to and fro and walking up and down in it.

Death smells. I mean it has a special smell, over and above the smell of cyanide, carrion, blood, cordite or burnt flesh. It’s like opium. Once you smell it you never forget. I can walk down a street and get a whiff of opium smoke and I know someone is kicking the gong around.

I got a whiff of death as soon as Mr. Green walked into my office. You can’t always tell whose death it is. Could be Green, his wife, or the missing son he wants me to find. Last letter from the island of Spetsai two months ago. After a month with no word the family made inquiries by long-distance phone.

“The embassy wasn’t at all helpful,” said Mr. Green.

I nodded. I knew just how unhelpful they could be.

“They referred us to the Greek police. Fortunately, we found a man there who speaks English.”

“That would be Colonel Dimitri.”

“Yes. You know him?”

I nodded, waiting for him to continue.

“He checked and could find no record that Jerry had left the country, and no hotel records after Spetsai.”

“He could be visiting someone.”

“I’m sure he would write.”

“You feel then that this is not just an instance of neglect on his part, or perhaps a lost letter?… That happens in the Greek islands.…”

“Both Mrs. Green and I are convinced that something is wrong.”

“Very well, Mr. Green, there is the question of my fee: a hundred dollars a day plus expenses and a thousand-dollar retainer. If I work on a case two days and spend two hundred dollars, I refund six hundred to the client. If I have to leave the country, the retainer is two thousand. Are these terms satisfactory?”

“Yes.”

“Very good. I’ll start right here in New York. Sometimes I have been able to provide the client with the missing person’s address after a few hours’ work. He may have written to a friend.”

“That’s easy. He left his address book. Asked me to mail it to him care of American Express in Athens.” He passed me the book.

“Excellent.”

Now, on a missing-person case I want to know everything the client can tell me about the missing person, no matter how seemingly unimportant and irrelevant. I want to know preferences in food, clothes, colors, reading, entertainment, use of drugs and alcohol, what cigarette brand he smokes, medical history. I have a questionnaire printed with five pages of questions. I got it out of the filing cabinet and passed it to him.

“Will you please fill out this questionnaire and bring it back here day after tomorrow. That will give me time to check out the local addresses.”

“I’ve called most of them,” he said curtly, expecting me to take the next plane for Athens.

“Of course. But friends of an M.P.—missing person—are not always honest with the family. Besides, I daresay some of them have moved or had their phones disconnected. Right?” He nodded. I put my hands on the questionnaire. “Some of these questions may seem irrelevant but they all add up. I found a missing person once from knowing that he could wriggle his ears. I’ve noticed that you are left-handed. Is your son also left-handed?”

“Yes, he is.”

“You can skip that question. Do you have a picture of him with you?”

He handed me a photo. Jerry was a beautiful kid. Slender, red hair, green eyes far apart, a wide mouth. Sexy and kinky-looking.

“Mr. Green, I want all the photos of him you can find. If I use any I’ll have copies made and return the originals. If he did any painting, sketching, or writing I’d like to see that too. If he sang or played an instrument I want recordings. In fact, any recordings of his voice. And please bring if possible some article of clothing that hasn’t been dry-cleaned since he wore it.”

“It’s true then that you use uh psychic methods?”

“I use any methods that help me to find the missing person. If I can locate him in my own mind that makes it easier to locate him outside it.”

“My wife is into psychic things. That’s why I came to you. She has an intuition that something has happened to him and she says only a psychic can find him.”

That makes two of us, I thought. He wrote me a check for a thousand dollars. We shook hands.

*   *   *

I went right to work. Jim, my assistant, was out of town on an industrial-espionage case—he specializes in electronics. So I was on my own. Ordinarily I don’t carry iron on an M.P. case, but this one smelled of danger. I put on my snub-nosed 38, in a shoulder holster. Then I unlocked a drawer and put three joints of the best Colombian, laced with hash, into my pocket. Nothing like a joint to break the ice and stir the memory. I also took a deck of heroin. It buys more than money sometimes.

Most of the addresses were in the SoHo area. That meant lofts, and that often means the front door is locked. So I started with an address on Sixth Street.

She opened the door right away, but she kept the chain on. Her pupils were dilated, her eyes running, and she was snuffling, waiting for the Man. She looked at me with hatred.

I smiled. “Expecting someone else?”

“You a cop?”

“No. I’m a private investigator hired by the family to find Jerry Green. You knew him.”

“Look, I don’t have to talk to you.”

“No, you don’t have to. But you might want to.” I showed her the deck of heroin. She undid the chain.

The place was filthy—dishes stacked in a sink, cockroaches running over them. The bathtub was in the kitchen and hadn’t been used for a long time. I sat down gingerly in a chair with the springs showing. I held the deck in my hand where she could see it. “You got any pictures of him?”

She looked at me and she looked at the heroin. She rummaged in a drawer, and tossed two pictures onto a coffee table that wobbled. “Those should be worth something.”

They were. One showed Jerry in drag, and he made a beautiful girl. The other showed him standing up naked with a hard-on. “Was he gay?”

“Sure. He liked getting fucked by Puerto Ricans and having his picture took.”

“He pay you?”

“Sure, twenty bucks. He kept most of the pictures.”

“Where’d he get the money?”

“I don’t know.”

She was lying. I went into my regular spiel. “Now look, I’m not a cop. I’m a private investigator paid by his family. I’m paid to find him, that’s all. He’s been missing for two months.” I started to put the heroin back into my pocket and that did it.

“He was pushing C.”

I tossed the deck onto the coffee table. She locked the door behind me.

*   *   *

Later that evening, over a joint, I interviewed a nice young gay couple, who simply adored Jerry.

“Such a sweet boy…”

“So understanding…”

“Understanding?”

“About gay people. He even marched with us.…”

“And look at the postcard he sent us from Athens.” It was a museum postcard showing a statue of a nude youth found at Kouros. “Wasn’t that cute of him?”

Very cute, I thought.

*   *   *

I interviewed his steady girl friend, who told me he was all mixed up.

“He had to get away from his mother’s influence and find himself. We talked it all over.”

*   *   *

I interviewed everyone I could find in the address book. I talked to waiters and bartenders all over the SoHo area: Jerry was a nice boy … polite … poised … a bit reserved. None of them had an inkling of his double life as a coke pusher and homosexual transvestite. I see I am going to need some more heroin on this one. That’s easy. I know some narco boys who owe me a favor. It takes an ounce and a ticket to San Francisco to buy some names from the junky chick.

Seek and you shall find. I nearly found an ice pick in my stomach. Knock and it shall be opened unto you. Often it wasn’t opened unto me. But I finally found the somebody who: a twenty-year-old Puerto Rican kid named Kiki, very handsome and quite fond of Jerry in his way. Psychic too, and into Macambo magic. He told me Jerry had the mark of death on him.

“What was his source for the coke?”

His face closed over. “I don’t know.”

“Can’t blame you for not knowing. May I suggest to you that his source was a federal narc?”

His deadpan went deader. “I didn’t tell you anything.”

“Did he hear voices? Voices giving him orders?”

“I guess he did. He was controlled by something”

I gave him my card. “If you ever need anything let me know.”

*   *   *

Mr. Green showed up the next morning with a stack of photos. The questionnaire I had given him had been neatly filled out on a typewriter. He also brought a folio of sketches and a green knitted scarf. The scarf reeked of death.

I glanced at the questionnaire. Born April 18, 1951, in Little America, Wyoming. “Admiral Byrd welcomes you aboard the Deep Freeze Special.” I looked through the photos: Jerry as a baby … Jerry on a horse … Jerry with a wide sunlit grin holding up a string of trout … graduation pictures … Jerry as the Toff in the high school play A Night at an Inn. They all looked exactly as they should look. Like he was playing the part expected of him. There were about fifty recent photos, all looking like Jerry.

Take fifty photos of anyone. There will be some photos where the face is so different you can hardly recognize the subject. I mean most people have many faces. Jerry had one. Don Juan says anyone who always looks like the same person isn’t a person. He is a person impersonator.

I looked at Jerry’s sketches. Good drawing, no talent. Empty and banal as sunlight. There were also a few poems, so bad I couldn’t read them. Needless to say, I didn’t tell Mr. Green what I had found out about Jerry’s sex and drug habits. I just told him that no one I had talked to had heard from Jerry since his disappearance, and that I was ready to leave for Athens at once if he still wanted to retain me. Money changed hands.

*   *   *

At the Athens Hilton I got Dimitri on the phone and told him I was looking for the Green boy.

“Ah yes … we get so many of these cases … our time and resources are limited.”

“I understand. But I’ve got a bad feeling about this one. He had some kinky habits.”

“S-M?”

“Sort of … and underworld connections.…” I didn’t want to mention C over the phone.

“If I find anything out I’ll let you know.”

“Thanks. I’m going out to Spetsai tomorrow to have a look around. Be back on Thursday.…”

*   *   *

I called Skouras in Spetsai. He’s the tourist agent there. He owns or leases villas and rents out apartments during the season. He organizes tours. He owns the discotheque. He is the first man any traveler to Spetsai sees, and the last, since he is also the agent for transport.

“Yes, I know about it. Had a call from Dimitri. Glad to help any way I can. You need a room?”

“If possible I’d like the room he had.”

“You can have any room you want … the season is over.”

*   *   *

For once the hovercraft was working. I was in luck. The hovercraft takes an hour and the boat takes six.

Yes, Skouras remembered Jerry. Jerry arrived with some young people he’d met on the boat—two Germans with rucksacks and a Swedish girl with her English boyfriend. They stayed at one of Skouras’s villas on the beach—the end villa, where the road curves out along the sea wall. I knew the place. I’d stayed there once three years earlier in 1970.

“Anything special about the others?”

“Nothing. Looked like thousands of other young people who swarm over the islands every summer. They stayed a week. The others went on to Lesbos. Jerry went back to Athens alone.”

Where did they eat? Where did they take coffee? Skouras knew. He knows everything that goes on in Spetsai.

“Go to the discotheque?”

“Every night. The boy Jerry was a good dancer.”

“Anybody in the villa now?”

“Just the caretaker and his wife.”

He gave me the keys. I noticed a worn copy of The Magus by John Fowles. As soon as anyone walks into his office, Skouras knows whether he should lend him the book. He has his orders. Last time I was there he lent me the book and I read it. Even rode out on a horse to look at the house of the Magus and fell off the horse on the way back. I pointed to the book. “By any chance…”

He smiled. “Yes. I lent him the book and he returned it when he left. Said he found it most interesting.”

“Could I borrow it again?”

“Of course.”

*   *   *

The villa stood a hundred feet from the beach. The apartment was on the second floor—three bedrooms off a hall, kitchen and bathroom at the end of the hall, balcony along one side of the building. There was a musty smell, dank and chilly, blinds down. I pulled up the blinds in all three bedrooms and selected the middle one, where I had stayed before. Two beds, two chairs, coat hangers on nails in the wall.

I switched on an electric heater and took my recorder out of its case. This is a very special recorder designed and assembled by my assistant, Jim, and what it won’t pick up isn’t there. It is also specially designed for cut-ins and overlays, and you can switch from Record to Playback without stopping the machine.

I recorded a few minutes in all three rooms. I recorded the toilet flushing and the shower running. I recorded the water running in the kitchen sink, the rattle of dishes, and the opening and closing and hum of the refrigerator. I recorded on the balcony. Now I lay down on the bed and read some selections from The Magus into the recorder.

I will explain exactly how these recordings are made. I want an hour of Spetsai: an hour of places where my M.P. has been and the sounds he has heard. But not in sequence. I don’t start at the beginning of the tape and record to the end. I spin the tape back and forth, cutting in at random so that The Magus may be cut off in the middle of a word by a flushing toilet, or The Magus may cut into sea sounds. It’s a sort of I Ching or table-tapping procedure. How random is it actually? Don Juan says that nothing is random to a man of knowledge: everything he sees or hears is there just at that time waiting to be seen and heard.

I get out my camera and take pictures of the three rooms, the bathroom, and the kitchen. I take pictures from the balcony. I put the machine back in the case and go outside, recording around the villa and taking pictures at the same time: pictures of the villa; a picture of the black cat that belongs to the caretaker; pictures of the beach, which is empty now except for a party of hardy Swedes.

I have lunch in a little restaurant on the beach where Jerry and his friends used to eat. Mineral water and a salad. The proprietor remembers me and we shake hands. Coffee at the waterfront café where Jerry and his friends took coffee. Record. Take pictures. I cover the post office, the two kiosks that sell imported cigarettes and newspapers. The one place I don’t record is in Skouras’s office. He wouldn’t like that. I can hear him loud and clear: “I’m a landlord and not a detective. I don’t want your M.P. in my office. He’s bad news.”

I go back to the villa by a different route, covering the bicycle rental agency. It is now three o’clock. A time when Jerry would most likely be in his room reading. I read some more of The Magus into the recorder with flushing toilets, running water, my footsteps in the hall, blinds being raised and lowered. I listen to what I have on tape, with special attention to the cut-ins. I take a walk along the sea wall and play the tape back to the sea and the wind.

Dinner in a restaurant where Jerry and his friends ate the night they arrived. This restaurant is recommended by Skouras. I take my time with several ouzos before a dinner of red snapper and Greek salad, washed down with retsina. After dinner I go out to the discotheque to record some of the music Jerry danced to. The scene is really dead. A German countess is dancing with some local youths.

*   *   *

Next day there was a wind and the hovercraft was grounded. I took the noon boat and after six hours was back in my room at the Hilton.

I took out a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label duty-free scotch and ordered a soda siphon and ice from Hilton room service. I put Jerry’s graduation picture in a silver frame on the desk, assembled the questionnaire, and put the tape recorder with an hour of Spetsai beside it. The waiter came in with the ice and soda siphon.

“Is that your son, sir?”

I said yes because it was the easy thing to say. I poured myself a small drink and lit a Senior Service. I started thinking out loud, cutting into the tape.…

“Suspected to be involved in some capacity: Marty Blum, a small-time operator with big-time connections. Was in Athens at or about the time young Jerry disappeared.

“Helen and Van—also in Athens at the time. Van was trying to get a permit to run a disintoxication clinic on one of the islands. He didn’t get it. Left Athens for Tangier. Left Tangier for New York. Trouble at immigration. Thought to be in Toronto.” What did I know about these two birds? Plenty. “Doctor Van: age, fifty-seven; nationality, Canadian. Dope-pushing and abortions sidelines and front for his real specialty, which is transplant operations. Helen, his assistant: age, sixty; nationality, Australian. Masseuse, abortionist, suspected jewel thief and murderess.”

The Countess Minsky Stahlinhof de Gulpa, known as Minny to her friends and sycophants: a heavy woman like a cold fish under tons of gray shale. “White Russian and Italian descent. Stratospherically wealthy, near the billion mark. The source of her wealth: manipulation of commodity prices. She moves into a poor country like Morocco and buys up basic commodities like sugar, kerosene, and cooking oil, holds them off the market in her warehouses, then puts them back on the market at a higher price. The Countess has squeezed her vast wealth out of the poorest people. She has other interests than money. She is a very big operator indeed. She owns immense estates in Chile and Peru and has some secret laboratories there. She has employed biochemists and virologists. Indication: genetic experiments and biologic weapons.”

And what of the Countess de Vile? “De Vile: very wealthy but not Gulpa’s strata. A depraved, passionate and capricious woman, evil as Circe. Extensive underworld and police contacts. On close terms with Mafia dons and police chiefs in Italy, New York, Morocco, and South America. A frequent visitor at the Countess de Gulpa’s South American retreat. Several unsolved missing-person cases, involving boys of Jerry’s age, point to the South American laboratories as terminal.”

I glanced through the questionnaire. “Medical history: scarlet fever at the age of four.” Now, scarlet fever is a rarity since the introduction of antibiotics. “Could there have been a misdiagnosis?”

All this I was feeding into the recorder in pieces, and a lot more. An article I had just finished reading when Mr. Green came into my office. This was an article on head transplants performed on monkeys, the Sunday Times, December 9, 1973. I now took it out of a file and read parts of it into the recorder. “Monkey heads transplanted onto monkey bodies can now survive for about a week. The drawing above portrays controversial operation. ‘Technically a human head transplant is possible,’ Dr. White says, ‘but scientifically there would be no point.’”

My first meeting with Mr. Green: the smell of death, and something shifty about him. From talking to Jerry’s friends, I found out that this was a family trait. They all described him as hard to figure or hard to pin down. Finally I turned on the TV. I played the tape back at low volume while I watched an Italian western with Greek subtitles, keeping my attention on the screen so I was subconsciously hearing the tape. They were hanging a rustler from horseback when the phone rang.

It was Dimitri. “Well, Snide, I think we have found your missing person … unfortunately.”

“You mean dead?”

“Yes. Embalmed, in fact.” He paused. “And without his head.”

“What?”

“Yes. Head severed at the shoulders.”

“Fingerprints check?”

“Yes.”

I waited for the rest of it.

“Cause of death is uncertain. Some congestion in the lungs. May have been strangulation. The body was found in a trunk.”

“Who found it?”

“I did. I happened to be down at the port double-checking the possibility that the boy may have left by freighter, and I saw a trunk being carried aboard a ship with Panamanian registry. Well, something about the way they were carrying it … the disposition of the weight, you understand. I had the trunk returned to customs and opened. The uh the method of embalming … unusual to say the least. The body was perfectly preserved but no embalming fluid had been used. It was also completely nude.”

“Can I have a look?”

“Of course.…”

*   *   *

The Greek doctor had studied at Harvard and he spoke perfect English. Various internal organs were laid out on a white shelf. The body, or what was left of it, was in a fetal position.

“Considering that this boy has been dead at least a month, the internal organs are in a remarkable state of preservation,” said the doctor.

I looked at the body. Pubic, rectal and leg hairs were bright red. However, he was redder than he should have been. I pointed to some red blotches around the nipples, crotch, thighs and buttocks. “What’s that? Looks like some kind of rash.”

“I was wondering about that.… Of course it could have been an allergy. Redheads are particularly liable to allergic reactions, but—” He paused. “It looks like scarlet fever.”

“We are checking all hospitals and private clinics for scarlet fever admissions,” Dimitri put in, “… or any other condition that could produce such a rash.”

I turned to the doctor. “Doctor, would you say that the amputation was a professional job?”

“Definitely.”

“All questionable doctors and clinics will be checked,” said Dimitri.

The preservative seemed to be wearing off, and the body gave off a sweet musky smell that turned me quite sick. I could see Dimitri was feeling it too, and so was the doctor.

“Can I see the trunk?”

The trunk was built like an icebox: a layer of cork, and the inside lined with thin steel.

“The steel is magnetized,” Dimitri told me. “Look.” He took out his car keys and they stuck to the side of the trunk.

“Could this have had any preservative effect?”

“The doctor says no.”

Dimitri drove me back to the Hilton. “Well, it looks like your case is closed, Mr. Snide.”

“I guess so … any chance of keeping this out of the papers?”

“Yes. This is not America. Besides, a thing like this, you understand…”

“Bad for the tourist business.”

“Well, yes.”

I had a call to make to the next of kin. “Afraid I have some bad news for you, Mr. Green.”

“Yes?”

“Well, the boy has been found.”

“Dead, you mean?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Green.…”

“Was he murdered?”

“What makes you say that?”

“It’s my wife. She’s sort of, well, psychic. She had a dream.”

“I see. Well, yes, it looks like murder. We’re keeping it out of the papers, because publicity would impede the investigation at this point.”

“I want to retain you again, Mr. Snide. To find the murderer of my son.”

“Everything is being done, Mr. Green. The Greek police are quite efficient.”

“We have more confidence in you.”

“I’m returning to New York in a few days. I’ll contact you as soon as I arrive.”

The trail was a month old at least. I was fairly sure the murderer or murderers were no longer in Greece. No point in staying on. But there was something else to check out on the way back.