The Erection Set

I had played stickball on the street and fallen off the ice truck on the far corner. It was paved now, but then it had been hardpan, grooved by the iron-shod wheels of horse-drawn wagons and chain-driven Mack trucks. Once they had gaslights set between the curb and the sidewalks and we used to hang from the crossarms and scratch ourselves like apes to show off in front of the girls. It wasn’t much brighter now, the dirty glass streetlamps barely illuminating their own bases. I eased down the pavement, pulled in at the shabby old frame building with the 901 painted on the second step of the porch, cut the motor and got out. Sharon followed me, saying nothing, then her hand slipped into mine and squeezed. Her fingernails bit into my skin and her palm was sweaty. I pushed the doorbell and waited.

Nobody answered. I pushed the button again. I tried the third time and was reaching for the doorknob when a voice came out of the blackness at one end of the porch and said, “What took you so long, Dog?”

“Ferris,” I murmured softly. “You haven’t got a very elaborate factory here, friend.”

“But the product is highly refined, easily packaged, the demand enormous and the profit tremendous. Shall we go inside?”

He was old now, but the years had touched him lightly. If he shuffled in an elderly manner it was an artificial gesture and when he knew I realized it he smiled and let the cat in him take over. His hair was thin and gray, his clothes baggy and worn, but there was a muscular lankiness to his body that meant old habits didn’t die easily and he had kept himself in shape even though it wasn’t necessary any longer.

When I introduced Sharon he rubbed the back of his neck while he said hello, the old signal that meant he had to be satisfied with her status before he’d go any further. If I was in a squeeze and she was part of it, he was ready to pull the trigger on his own booby trap and he was alerting me to be ready to cut and run out of the line of fire.

I said, “Bravo, buddy,” remembering the answer signal and watched him relax. “She’s part of my new team now,” I explained.

“Sure,” he told me. “Times have changed, but they really don’t change at all. What’s that French saying?”

“The more things change the more they remain the same,” I said. “I thought you’d be dead by now, Ferris.”

“Only the excitement died. I woke up one morning and decided the world was worth neither saving nor destroying. Even fine hatreds and the sheer love of pleasure become boring under the monotonous onslaught of time.”

“Then why come back?”

Ferris eased himself down into a chair and when he leaned back the worn tweed jacket hiked up a little bit over the bulge of the guns he wore on either side of his hip. A matched pair of German 9 mm. P-38s, I remembered.

“A couple of reasons,” he answered, his brown berrylike eyes looking at me closely. “First, I owed you one for taking that bullet instead of me on that last job in Berlin. The second was sheer curiosity. I wanted to see how an old retired pro would react when the big one was dumped in his lap.”

“Don’t shit me, Ferris.” There was a cold snap in my voice I couldn’t help.

He nodded, the berry eyes laughing at me. “You’re still sharp, boy. You shouldn’t have retired. Yep, there’s another reason. The world is polluting itself to death. You can treat sewage, cap chimneys and go back to returnable bottles, but nobody stops the kind of pollution we were a part of. I thought maybe you could give it a try.”

“When did you get interested in ecology?”

“The day a young man I knew and trained told me he was escorting a multimillion-dollar shipment of H to the States and smelled an intercept. We arranged a switch, but he wasn’t careful enough and got himself killed in a restaurant in Marseilles.”

“And I got tagged for the job.”

“You were a natural for it; boy. I gave it all your earmarks, but since you got the name, I decided to give you the game and let you take it from there. I’m too damn old for the fun and games and money doesn’t mean a thing to me anymore. You’re still young enough to enjoy it all.” He glanced at Sharon, still smiling with his eyes. “Unless you’re really retired.”