MAX WAS BACK in a couple of minutes to let me know James and Gunther had vacated the immediate area. He touched his eyes and made a circle in front of his face, parallel to the ground, to let me know he was going out to see what happened to them. I told him I’d wait right where I was and sat in the empty warehouse. I didn’t enjoy the quiet. My first thought was that Gunther’s reaction had been unprofessional, that they were amateurs who had blundered their way into a weapons contract and didn’t know how to move from there. But it wouldn’t wash. They were professionals all right-but professional scam artists, not gunrunners.

If I could get my hands on a valid End Use Certificate, I wouldn’t need the likes of Gunther and James to do the merchandising for me. Any damn fool with money can buy all the weapons he wants in this country. The real money was out there for transportation and delivery, not outright purchase. The ten-grand deposit was all the money that they meant to change hands-sort of an international version of the Pigeon Drop game, except instead of an envelope stuffed with newspaper I’d get a phony Bill of Lading, F.O.B. London, telling me I was the proud owner of a bunch of nonexistent weapons. You can’t really cheat an honest man, someone once said, and they were right. Those lames thought I’d make the deposit an investment in my own ripoff scheme and steal the guns for myself. It told me two things-they thought I had some real contacts in Africa from the Biafra episode, and they thought I was a thief. Like most losers, they were about half-right.

So why did I tell them I’d get back to them? One reason was that I didn’t want them to do anything stupid, and James might have thought the con was still running for them. But there was something else, something I couldn’t isolate in my mind. They must be good for something, maybe something connected to this whole Cobra business, but I didn’t yet see exactly what or how.

I knew one thing, though: in the joint, the major child molesters and the neo-Nazis had one thing in common: they all wanted to be part of “law enforcement.” One of them-he had been running a school “for disturbed kids” with sodomy as therapy-told the Prof that he was working for the FBI. When the Prof played him along, he said he had a code name and everything-that the lawyer who came to see him regularly was really a Bureau agent. He told the Prof that he was gathering information about rival kiddie-porn dealers and passing it along. Just a good citizen. I didn’t think anything about it-it was just good information to have. But when I saw this creep buddy-up with a guy who called himself Major Klaus, I knew they had to have something in common. One of the mistakes I make sometimes is to lump all freaks together in my mind-like there are brand names for certain kinds of humans. I should know better. My survival instincts told me to keep James and Gunther on the hook, but a connection to the Cobra wouldn’t come to the front of my thinking. It was just lurking somewhere in the back. I didn’t press it. Whatever instincts, intuitions I had had kept me alive so far. From experience, I figured when it was time for the connection it would come to me.

While I was trying to dope out how they came to connect me with African work (and giving it up as a bad job because a lot of people knew something about that craziness-diamonds that weren’t there and starving kids that were), Max rolled back. He gestured that the two losers had been picked up in a cab about ten blocks from our base. He didn’t bother to find out where they went since it wouldn’t mean anything to us. I could see Max was still up for battle, pumping fire inside but handling it well. If you didn’t know what to look for, you wouldn’t see anything, but I did-this hadn’t been the first time. He followed the cab back to the taxi garage in the Plymouth. I turned in the hack, picked up my four hundred bucks from the half-a-grand deposit with the dispatcher (he returns all but a yard as the rental fee), and we headed home.

I could see Max wasn’t down to normal operating temperature yet, so I started telling him about this Cobra freak and Flood and what I wanted to do. The more we talked about how we’d pull it off, the calmer he got. Except when I told him how it all started, with me hitting that horse at Yonkers for a grand from Maurice. That he simply refused to believe, so I told him to go to Maurice’s and pick up the money himself and hold it for me. I wouldn’t even have to call Maurice and let him know Max was authorized to make the pickup-Max the Silent has a better reputation for honesty than the Orthodox Jews in the diamond industry. Max is often used as a courier for that reason, plus the fact that ripping him off would be past the capabilities of your average SWAT team. Max only moves money or things like money-jewels, paper, computer printouts. He won’t move dope, and people know better than to ask him anymore. He’s not bonded, so all you get for your money is his word. To a warrior like Max, that means you get your stuff or his life. Uptown when they want stuff delivered, they have guys in fancy uniforms who have passed polygraphs, given their fingerprints and all that-down here we have Max the Silent.

I told Max that finding the Cobra would be the real problem, and he made the sign of maggots under a rock again, then shook his head, held his hands toward the sky, and snapped his fingers like a magician pulling things from thin air. I got it. Maggots don’t come from outer space, they’re on the earth for a reason. They only move in the direction of decay-they help it along, eventually make it disappear and then they move on again. Like an old-time burglar told me once, explaining why he never worked with dope fiends, “Dead meat brings flies.” The Cobra had to be swimming in slimy waters or he’d stick out like an honest man at a political caucus.

That didn’t narrow the search much. Some people think slime is subject to zoning laws. They pick some part of a city and call it the Tenderloin, or the Combat Zone, or the Block, or even the Red Light District if they have a blue nose. Assholes. You don’t need a Ph.D. in sociology to understand slime. Slime needs fresh meat to live, and if you don’t bring it around, the slime goes shopping. The uptown glitzo who gets ready for Saturday night by slipping a vial of cocaine into the glove compartment of his Mercedes can’t see the slime lapping at his hubcaps. He pays his money and the money gets passed around until it coagulates into a movable mass. All money moves. Dope money moves into a pipeline, and at the other end you get loan-shark cash on the streets and kiddie-porn operations in the basements. The glitzo goes to his hip party and whips out his vial of nose candy and shows the other jerks that he’s connected-he’s down with the program.

A few blocks away, some dirtbag pimp passes his vial around in an after-hours joint. He got the money for his dope out of the body of some thirteen-year-old runaway who thought the smooth-talking man in the Port Authority Bus Terminal was going to make her a star.

Yeah, they’re both connected-to each other.

I move through slime like a poacher on some rich man’s estate. I take what I can. Whatever money’s out there is as much mine as any dirtbag’s. Some of them don’t like it-most of them don’t know it. I guess some people are still waiting for a man to walk on water. I wish them a lot of luck-I walk on quicksand. One time when I was a kid in the juvenile prison I made the mistake of telling one of those half-assed counselors what a bitch it was growing up in the orphanage-the miserable punk told me you have to play the cards they deal you, like that was supposed to bring on a flash of insight and make me into a good citizen. As I got older and kept doing time I began to realize that maybe the counselor had been right-you do have to play the cards they deal you-but only a certified sucker or masochist would play them honestly.