Soma Blues Read Online Free PDF Page A

you’re being detained?”
    “To hell with that,” Hob said. “Let her sweat.”
    “You’re a hard man, Hob Draconian,” Fauchon said, but he was smiling.
     
     

 
    6
     
     
    The next morning, just after Fauchon had gotten through notifying Bower’s next of kin, a brother in England, there was a call for him from the New York police. It was a Lieutenant Gherig, a man Fauchon had spoken with several times. The two men were cooperating on international drug smuggling, bypassing the DEA, of which they had a none-too-good opinion, and exchanging information in an attempt to get a handle on an elusive business.
    After the usual civilities, Gherig said, “Reason I called, Fauchon, I’ve come onto a curious case, and I was wondering if you had anything similar. At first I thought it was opium. …”
     
    If you want opium in New York, Chinatown is still the place to go. Back in the 1800s, the Chinese fought two wars with the English to keep opium out of their country. The English were persistent: All those poppy fields in India needed markets. And the man-in-the-street Chinaman loved the drug. First Canton was the capital of the export trade, then Shanghai, then Hong Kong. But times changed by the 1970s. Why go through all that hassle with opium—lighting the pipe, taking a hit or two, then cleaning the pipe and starting all over again—when you could get the effect multifold concentrated in heroin? Heroin could be made anywhere, and its market was vastly wider than that of opium. Then cocaine had its vogue, and the days of natural substances seemed over. Chinatowns all over the world provided the main markets in the twentieth century. And for other exotic natural substances. Thus it was no surprise to Lieutenant Gherig that an unidentified man had been found dead of an overdose in one of those dens that sprang up as fast as you knock them down in the vicinity of Chatham Square
    “But this guy’s no opium user,” the sergeant in charge of the detail told Gherig as they stood on East Broadway and Clinton, their faces turning red and blue in the flashing police car lights.
    “How do you figure?” Gherig asked.
    “Take a look at him,” the sergeant said. “It ain’t pretty, but it’s instructive. He’s in fifteen A.”
    Gherig went inside the tenement, climbed up five steps flanked by two overflowing garbage cans filled with rotted oranges and Chinese newspapers. The front door, with its reinforced steel mesh over what had been a window, was unlocked. Gherig went down a long corridor with cracked linoleum beneath, peeling paint above, forty-watt lightbulbs overhead lighting his way. There were a couple of old Chinese women at the foot of the stairs, and they gabbled at him and pointed up the stairs. Gherig mounted the sagging stairs, up one hopeless floor after another, Chinese children with opaque dark eyes staring at him from doors opened on chains, his stomach protesting because it was less than a month since the hernia operation. At times like this the glamour of his profession escaped him entirely. Up another floor—the fourth? Death is no respecter of the hernias of senior lieutenants, to say nothing of their varicose veins. On the fifth floor there was only one Chinese, a man of middle age in a soiled white suit and Panama hat. “Inside there,” he said to Gherig, pointing to an open door at the end of the hall.
    “Who’re you?” Gherig asked.
    “I’m Mr. Lee, the landlord’s agent. A tenant telephoned me. I got here as fast as I could.”
    “Where’d you come from?”
    “Stuyvesant Town.”
    “You got here faster than I did from First Precinct.” Gherig walked to the door. The white-suited Chinese followed.
    “Lieutenant,” Lee said. “Could I just have a word with you before you go in?”
    Gherig turned. A big, solid man, he seemed to have about twice the bulk of Lee and stood a head taller.
    “What do you want, Lee?”
    “I just want to tell you,” Lee said, “that neither the