The Plant

March 8, 1981

Dear Ruth,

Just lately you've been harder to reach on the phone than the President of the United States-I swear to God I'm getting to hate your answering machine! I must confess that tonightthe third night of “Hi, this is Ruth and I can't come to the phone right now, but...”-I got a little nervous and called the other number you gave me-the super. If he hadn't told me he'd seen you going out around five with a big load of books under your arm, I think I might have asked him to check and make sure you were okay. I know, I know, it's just the time difference, but things have gotten so paranoid here lately that you wouldn't believe it. Paranoid? Weird is a better word, maybe. We'll probably talk before you receive this, making ninety per cent of this letter obsolete (unless I send it Federal Express, which makes long distance look like an austerity measure), but if I don't narrate it by some means or other I think I may explode. I understand from Herb Porter, who is nearly apoplectic (a condition I sympathize with more than I would heretofore have believed, following l'affair Detweiller), that General Hecksler's escape and the murders which attended it have made the national news the last two nights, but I assume you haven't seen it-or didn't make the connection-or I would have heard from you via Ma Tinkerbell ere now (prolix as ever, you see-would that I could be as succinct as Zenith's faithful custodian Riddley!). If you haven't heard, the enclosed Post clipping (I didn't bother to include the centerfold photo of the asylum with the obligatory dotted line marking the dotty General's likely route of escape and the obligatory X's marking the locations of his victims) will bring you up to date as quickly and luridly as possible.

You may remember that I mentioned Hecksler to you in a letter only six weeks ago-something like that, anyway. Herb rejected his book, Twenty Psychic Garden Flowers, and provoked a barrage of paranoid hate-mail. Joking aside, his bloody escape has created a real atmosphere of unease here at Z. H. I had a drink with Roger Wade after work tonight in Four Fathers (Roger claims that the owner, a genial man named Ginelli with a soft voice and these odd, gleeful eyes, is a mafioso) and told him about Herb's visit to me that afternoon. I pointed out to Herb that it was ridiculous for him to be as frightened as he obviously is (it's sort of funny-under his steely Joe Pyne Exterior, the resident Neanderthal turns out to be Walter Mitty after all) and Herb agreed. Then, after a certain amount of patently artificial small talk, he asked me if I knew where he could get a gun. Mystified-sometimes your ob'dt correspondent is amazingly slow in making the obvious connections, m'dear-I mentioned the sporting goods store five blocks from here, at Park and 32nd.

“No,” he said impatiently. “I don't want a shotgun or anything like that.” Here he lowered his voice. “I want something I can carry around with me.”

Roger nodded and said Herb had been into his office around two, feeling him out on the same subject.

“What did you say?” I asked him.

“I reminded him that the penalties for carrying concealed weapons without a permit in this state are damned severe,” Roger said. “At which point Herb drew himself up to his full height [which is, Ruth, about five-seven] and said, 'A man doesn't need a permit to protect himself, Roger. '”

“And then?”

“Then he walked out. And tried you. Probably tried Bill Gelb as well.”

“Don't forget Riddley,” I said.

“Ah, yes-and Riddley.”

“Who might just be able to help him.”

Roger ordered another bourbon, and I was thinking how much older than his actual forty-five he is coming to look when he suddenly grinned that boyish, winning grin that so charmed you when you first met him at that cocktail party in June of '80-the one at Gahan and Nancy Wilson's place in Connecticut, do you remember? “Have you seen Sandra Jackson's new toy?” he asked. “She's the one Herb should have gone to for black market munitions.” Roger actually laughed out loud, a sound I have heard from him very seldom in the last eight months or so. Hearing it made me realize again, Ruth, how much I like and respect him-he could have been a really great editor somewhere-perhaps even in the Maxwell Perkins league. It seems a shame that he's ended up piloting such a leaky craft as Zenith House.

“She's got something called the Rainy Night Friend,” he said, still laughing. “It's silver-plated, and almost the size of a mortar shell. Fucking thing fills her whole purse. There's a flashlight set into the blunt end. The tapered end emits a cloud of tear-gas when you press a button-only Sandra says that she spent an extra ten bucks to have the tear-gas canister replaced with Hi-Pro-Gas, which is a hopped-up version of Mace. In the middle of this device, Johnny boy, is a pull-ring that sets off a high-decibel siren. I did not ask for a demonstration. They would have evacuated the building.”

“The way you describe it, it sounds as if she could use it as a dildo when there were no muggers around,” I said. He went off into gales of half-hysterical laughter. I joined him-it would have been impossible not to-but I was concerned for him, as well. He's very tired and very close to the edge of his endurance, I think-the parent corporation's steadily eroding support for the house has really started to get to him.

I asked him if something like the Rainy Night Friend was legal.

“I'm not a lawyer so I couldn't tell you for sure,” Roger said. “My impression is that a woman who uses a tear-gas pen on a potential mugger or rapist is in a gray area. But Sandra's toy, loaded up with a Mace hybrid... no, I don't think something like that can be kosher.”

“But she's got it, and she's carrying it,” I said.

“Not only that, but she seems fairly calm about it all,” Roger agreed. “Funny-she was the one who was so scared when the General was sending his poison pen letters, and Herb hardly seemed aware any of it was going on... at least until the bus driver got stabbed. I think what freaked Sandra out before was that she'd never seen him.”

“Yes,” I said. “She even told me that once.”

He paid the tab, waving away my offer to pay my half. “It's the revenge of the flower-people,” he said. “First Detweiller, the mad gardener from Central Falls, and then Hecksler, the mad gardener from Oak Cove.”

That gave me what the British mystery writers like to call a nasty start-talk about not making obvious connections! Roger, who is far from being anyone's fool, saw my expression and smiled.

“Didn't think of that, did you?” he asked. “It's just a coincidence, of course, but I guess it was enough to set off a little paranoid chime in Herb Porter's head-I can't imagine him getting so fashed otherwise. We could have the basis of a good Robert Ludlum novel here. The Horticultural Somethingor-Other. Come on, let's get out of here.”

“Convergence,” I said as we hit the street.

“Huh?” Roger looked like someone coming back from a million miles away.

“The Horticultural Convergence,” I said. “The perfect Ludlum title. Even the perfect Ludlum plot. It turns out, see, that Detweiller and Hecksler are actually brothers-no, considering the ages, I guess father and son would be better-in the pay of the NKVD. And—”

“I've got to catch my bus, John,” he said, not unkindly. Well, I have my problems, dear Ruth (who knows better than you?), but realizing when I'm being a bore has never been one of them (except when I'm drunk). I saw him down to the bus stop and headed home.

The last thing he said was that the next we heard of General Hecksler would probably be a report of his capture... or his suicide. And Herb Porter would be disappointed as well as relieved.

“It isn't General Hecksler Herb and the rest of us have to be worried about,” he said-his little burst of good humor had left him and he looked slumped and small, standing there at the bus stop with his hands jammed into the pockets of his trenchcoat. “It's Harlow Enders and the rest of the accountants who are going to get us. They'll stab us with their red pencils. When I think about Enders, I almost wish I had Sandra Jackson's Rainy Night Friend.”

No progress on my novel this week-looking back over this epistle I see why-all this narrative that should have gone into Maymonth tonight went ended up here instead. But if I went on too long and in too much novelistic detail, don't chalk it all up to prolixity, my dear-over the last six months or so I have become a genuine Lonely Guy. Writing to you isn't as good as talking to you, and talking to you isn't as good as seeing you, and seeing you isn't as good as touching you and being with you (steam-steam! pant-pant!), but a person has to make do with what he has. I know you're busy, studying hard, but going so long without talking to you has got me sorta crazy (and on top of Detweiller and Hecksler, more crazy I do not need to be). I love you, my dear.

Missing you, needing you,

John