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to the mess with the German he’d done a difficult divorce case—a lot of surveillance and not much sleep—and was now serious about laying low. An afternoon of moderate drinking followed by an evening of Chamberlain’s arty and intellectual friends didn’t sound strenuous. Plus, there would be Helen. Kelly had a thing for Lloyd’s wife.
    They had dark beers, hard cheese, and raw onions in the company of dozing cats and muttering geezers at a place in the Village. As the students began drifting in they moved west, toward Lloyd’s “business,” stopping at My Office on Hudson, a dingy railroad car of a joint with only two other customers. Lloyd and Kelly stood way down at the end, under the TV around the corner from the men’s room, facing the front door, a distant rectangle of pearly light in the gloom. Kelly ordered two Schaefers.
    Lloyd was in a pathologically chatty mood, even for him, probably because he was cranked. Kelly listened patiently. Finally he said, “There’s something green stuck between your teeth.”
    Lloyd stopped talking, stared at the other man intently, then walked out of the bar. Kelly lit a cigarette and waited. Lloyd returned fifteen minutes later and pushed Kelly around the corner into the phone booth by the men’s room, pulling a plasticene envelope of dirty white powder from his pocket. He made two minuscule piles of the stuff on the flap and held them up to his nose with one hand.
THE OLD TURK’S LOAD 33
    The thumb and slender ring finger of the other held the half-length of blue-and-white-striped soda straw and the index finger blocked the nostril as he sucked up one of the piles. Second pile in the other nostril. His back stiffened. He offered the envelope to Kelly.
    Hitting the street again, they stopped at one more run-down gin mill for another toot, perfectly timed to catch the receding wave of the first, before heading across town to Lloyd’s apartment. On the way, Lloyd told him about a lifer in the army, a platoon leader in ’Nam, who’d gotten all shot up. Which was when the helicopter came down, a big flying, stainless steel state-of-the-art operating room, and scooped him up. Just shoved the regular medevacs out of the way and sucked the mangled body up inside it and disappeared.
    Kelly looked over at Lloyd, who caught the look and said, “No. I actually know this guy. I mean I know about the guy whose identity they stole and put him into. I read the b-book about what they’re doing.”
Something in his voice. “What’re they doing, Lloyd?”
    “They’re looking for a fucking B-BRAIN.” Flecks of white spittle dotted the corner of his mouth.
“Lloyd . . .”
“No. I read—I read the book and the fucking reports, too.” Kelly let him talk.
A top secret government organization had been working on this, Lloyd went on, since the end of World War II. They’d put the finishing touches on the technology just in time for Vietnam, which was perfect. What they needed,apparently, was a brain.They thought they were going to have to use car crash victims in their experiments but now the war provided an endless supply of mangled bodies with heads intact.That stainless steel chopper would swoop down and get the poor bastard and then they’d take out his brain— Kelly experienced a jangling flashback to Norbert’s hands on those clams—and keep it alive. Because what they needed was something to organize their computing devices.
“They’ve got all these Univacs running along, giant things, they fill up rooms. Some monitor electricity, some do the railroads and airlines. Some, they listen to telephone calls, see who’s calling who. Some keep track of charge accounts. Not to mention the military stuff. The thing is, it’s so much information that no machine can handle it. So they’ve been working on ways to wire human brains into the machines. Some are like traffic control, you know, switching devices, and some are like moles running through all this information for