By George C. Chesbro
The Mongo novels
THE LANGUAGE OF CANNIBALS
SECOND HORSEMAN OUT OF EDEN
THE COLD SMELL OF SACRED STONE
TWO SONGS THIS ARCHANGEL SINGS
THE BEASTS OF VALHALLA
AN AFFAIR OF SORCERERS
CITY OF WHISPERING STONE
SHADOW OF A BROKEN MAN
Other novels
BONE
JUNGLE OF STEEL AND STONE
THE GOLDEN CHILD
VEIL
TURN LOOSE THE DRAGON
KING'S GAMBIT
Writing as David Cross
CHANT
CHANT: SILENT KILLER
CHANT: CODE OF BLOOD
For Dorothy Ehrlich, Who always understood so much
The stories in this collection were previously printed in the following magazines:
"The Birth of a Series Character," The Writer, March 1989.
"The Drop "Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, October 1971.
"High Wire* Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, March 1972.
"Rage," Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, February 1973.
"Country for Sale," Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, June 1973.
"Dark Hole on a Silent Planet," Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, November 1973.
"The Healer,™ Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, August 1974.
"Falling Star," Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, November 1974.
"Book of Shadows," Alike Shayne Mystery Magazine, June 1975.
"Tiger in the Snow," Alike Shayne Mystery Magazine, March 1976.
"Candala," An Eye for Justice: The Third Private Eye Writers of America Anthology. New
York: Mysterious Press, 1988.
Copyright © 1990 by George C. Chesbro All rights reserved.
Mysterious
Press books are published by Warner Books, Inc., 666 Fifth Avenue,
New York, NY 10103
Printed in the United States of America First Printing: October 1990
10 987654321
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Chesbro, George C.
In the house of secret enemies / by George C. Chesbro p. cm.
Stories previously published, 1971-1988. ISBN 0-89296-395-6 I. Title. PS3553.H359I5 1990 813'.54 — dc20
Introduction: The Birth of a Series Character
Not infrequently I am asked how I came up with the idea for a private investigator who is a dwarf. In response to an invitation from Sylvia K. Burack to do a piece for The Writer, the magazine she edits, I attempted to address that question in the following article.
For most writers of so-called genre fiction the quest is for a successful series character — a man or woman who, already completely brought to life in the writer's and readers' minds, leaps into action at the drop of a plot to wend his or her perilous way cleverly through the twists and turns of the story to arrive finally, triumphantly, at the solution. Great series characters from mystery and spy fiction immediately spring to mind: Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, Sam Spade, Lew Archer, Miss Marple, et al. These characters may simply step on stage to capture the audience's attention, with no need for the copious program notes of characterization that must usually accompany the debut of a new hero or heroine.
Almost two decades ago, when I was just beginning to enjoy some success in selling my short stories, I sat down one day to begin my search for a series character. Visions of great (and some not-so-great) detectives waltzed through my head; unfortunately, all of these dancers had already been brought to life by other people. The difficulty was compounded by the fact that I didn't want just any old character, some guy with the obligatory two fists and two guns who might end up no more than a two-dimensional plot device, a pedestrian problem solver who was but a pale imitation of the giants who had gone before and who were my inspiration. I wanted a character, a detective with modern sensibilities, whom readers might come to care about almost as much as they would the resolution of the mystery itself. Sitting at my desk, surrounded by a multitude of rejection slips, I quickly became not only frustrated, but intimidated. I mean, just who did I think I was?
It was a time when "handicapped" detectives were in vogue on television: Ironside solved cases from his wheelchair and van; another was Longstreet, a blind detective. Meditating on this, I suddenly found a most mischievous notion scratching, as it were, at the back door of my mind. I was a decidedly minor league manager looking to sign a player who might one day compete in the major leagues. What to do? The answer, of course, was obvious: If I couldn't hope to create a detective who could reasonably be expected to vie with the giants, then I would create a detective who was unique — a dwarf.
Believing, as I do, that it's good for the soul as well as the imagination, I always allow myself exactly one perverse notion a day (whether I need it or not). I'd had my perverse notion, and it was time to think on. What would my detective look like? What kind of gun would he carry, how big would it be, and how many bullets would it hold?
Scratch, scratch.
Would his trenchcoat be a London Fog or something bought off a pipe rack? What about women? How many pages would I have to devote in each story to descriptions of his sexual prowess?
Scratch, scratch.
The damn dwarf simply refused to go away, and his scratching was growing increasingly persistent. But what was I going to do with a dwarf private detective? Certainly not sell him, since it seemed to me well nigh impossible to make anybody (including me) believe in his existence. Who could take such a character seriously? Who, even in a time of dire need, would hire a dwarf detective? Where would his cases come from? He would literally be struggling to compete in a world of giants.
Scratch, scratch.
No longer able to ignore the noises in my head, I opened the door and let the Perverse Notion into the main parlor where I was trying to work. It seemed there was no way I was going to be able to exorcise this aberration, short of actually trying to write something about him.
Observing him, I saw that he was indeed a dwarf, but fairly large and powerfully built, as dwarfs go. That seemed to me a good sign. If this guy was going to be a private detective, he would have to be more than competent at his work; he would need extra dimensions, possess special talents that would at least partially compensate for his size.
Brains never hurt anyone, so he would have to be very smart. Fine. Indeed, I decided that he was not only very smart, but a veritable genius — a professor with a Ph.D. in Criminology, a psychological and spiritual outcast. His name is Dr. Robert Frederickson. Now, where could he live where people wouldn't be staring at him all the time? New York City, of course.
So far, so good. The exorcism was proceeding apace.
Fictional private eyes are always getting into trouble, and they have to be able to handle themselves physically. What would Dr. Robert Frederickson do when the two- and three-hundred-pound bad guys came at him? He had to be able to fight. So he'd need some kind of special physical talent.
Dwarfs. Circuses. Ah. Dr. Robert Frederickson had spent some time in the circus. (In fact, that was how he had financed his education!) But he hadn't worked in any sideshow; he'd been a star, a headliner, a gymnast, a tumbler with a spectacular, death-defying act. Right. And he had parlayed his natural physical talents into a black belt in karate. If nothing else, he would certainly have the advantage of surprise. During his circus days he had been billed as "Mongo the Magnificent," and his friends still call him Mongo.
Mongo, naturally, tended to overcompensate, to say the least. He had the mind of a titan trapped in the body of a dwarf (I liked that), and that mind was constantly on the prowl, looking for new challenges. Not content with being a dwarf in a circus (albeit a famous one), he became a respected criminology professor; not content with being "just" a professor, he started moonlighting as a private detective.
But I was still left with the problem of where his cases were to come from. I strongly doubted that any dwarf detective was going to get much walk-in business, so all of his cases were going to have to come from his associates, people who knew him and appreciated just how able he was, friends from his circus days, colleagues at the university where he teaches and, for good measure, from the New York Police Department, where his very big brother, Garth, is a detective, a lieutenant.
I set about my task, and halfway through the novella that would become "The Drop," hamming it up, I discovered something that brought me up short: Dr. Frederickson was no joke. A major key to his character, to his drive to compete against all odds, was a quest for dignity and respect from others. He insisted on being taken seriously as a human being, and he was constantly willing to risk his life or suffer possible ridicule and humiliation in order to achieve that goal. Dr. Robert Frederickson, a.k.a. Mongo the Magnificent, was one tough cookie, psychologically and physically, and I found that I liked him very much.
And I knew then that, regardless of how he was treated by any incredulous editor, I, at least, would afford this most remarkable man the dignity and respect I felt he so richly deserved. I ended by writing "The Drop" as a straight (well, seriously skewed actually, but serious) detective story.
"The Drop" was rejected. The editor to whom I'd submitted it (he had published many of my other short stories) wrote that sorry, Mongo was just too unbelievable. (Well, of course, he was unbelievable. What the hell did he expect of a dwarf private detective?)
That should have ended my act of exorcism of the Perverse Notion. Fat chance! On the same day "The Drop" was rejected, I sent it right out again to another editor (after all, Mongo would never have given up so easily), who eventually bought it.
The next day I sat down and started Mongo on his second adventure. Mongo was no longer the Perverse Notion; I had created a man who intrigued me enormously, a man I liked and respected, a most complex character about whom I wanted to know more and who fired my imagination.
My Perverse Notion in that second story was to include a bit of dialogue in which Garth tells Mongo, after some particularly spectacular feat, that he's lucky he's not a fictional character, because no one would believe him. "High Wire" sold the first time out — to the first editor, and this time he never mentioned a word again about Mongo's believability. Nine more Mongo novellas followed and were published. In the tenth, "Candala," it seemed I had sent Mongo out too far beyond the borders defining what a proper detective/mystery story should be, into the dank, murky realms of racial discrimination, self-hate and self-degradation. I couldn't place "Candala" anywhere, and it went into the darkness of my trunk.
But Mongo himself remained very much alive. I was still discovering all sorts of things about the Frederickson brothers and the curious psychological and physical worlds they moved in; they needed larger quarters, which could be provided only in a novel.
Six Mongo novels later, Mongo and Garth continue to grow in my mind, and they continue to fire my imagination. In fact, that Perverse Notion proved to be an invaluable source of inspiration. Mongo has, both literally and figuratively, enriched my life, and he and Garth are the primary reasons that I was finally able to realize my own "impossible dream" of making my living as a writer.
"Candala" finally appeared in print, between hardcovers, in an anthology entitled An Eye for Justice.
It is always risky business to try to extrapolate one's own feelings or experiences into the cheap currency of advice to others (especially in regard to that most painfully personal of pursuits, writing). However, the thought occurs to me that a belief in, and a respect for, even the most improbable of your characters in their delicate period of gestation is called for. That Perverse Notion you don't want to let in, because you fear you will waste time and energy feeding and nurturing it for no reward, may be the most important and helpful character — series or otherwise — you'll ever meet in your life.
* * *
What I wrote is all well and good, and even true, but I might have included my strong suspicion that Mongo's birth was also strongly attended by the fact that I felt so much like a dwarf psychologically in the face of the awesome task of becoming a writer. And so we have the dwarf as metaphor for my own feelings of inadequacy as I tramped around in the puny foothills of what appeared to me to be the mountain of a towering and seemingly unscalable goal.
I can't help but wonder if Mongo does not owe a good part of his success to the fact that he may strike a similar chord in many readers, for it is the rare person who does not occasionally feel like a "dwarf in a world of giants" — giant people who press upon and threaten us in one way or another, giant problems that threaten to crush us. Perhaps Mongo, with his disdain for his "handicap" and his indomitable will to make the most of his talents, holds out to all of us the hope that, with courage, any of us may not only survive but prevail in that very large, occasionally cold and hostile environment that is our lives.
In Mongo's debut, it's obvious that I've recently returned from Italy and am anxious to make use of my impressions and travel notes.
The Drop
He was a big man, filled with a guy-wire tension and animal wariness that even his three-hundred-dollar tailored suit couldn't hide.
He came in the door, stopped and blinked, then walked over to my desk. I rose and took the proffered hand, waiting for the nervous, embarrassed reaction that usually preceded mumbled apologies and a hurried exit. It didn't come.
"Dr. Frederickson?"
Now, there are any number of disadvantages to being a dwarf, all compounded when you've chosen the somewhat unlikely career of a private investigator. I stand four feet eight inches in my socks. I've been told I don't exactly inspire confidence in prospective clients.
"I'm Frederickson," I said. "'Mister' will do."
"But you are the private detective who also teaches at the university?"
You'd be surprised at the number of people who get their jollies from playing practical jokes on dwarfs. For my own protection, I liked to try to size up people fast. He had manners, but I suspected they'd come out of a book and were things that he put on and took off like cuff links; it all depended upon the occasion. His eyes were muddy and the muscles in his face were tense, which meant that he was probably going to hold something back, at least in the beginning.
I put his age at around thirty-five, five years older than myself. I'd already decided I didn't like him. Still, there was an air of absorption about the man that suggested to me he hadn't come to play games. I wanted the job, so I decided to give him some information.
"My doctorate is in criminology, and that's what I teach at the university," I said evenly, determined to lay everything out in the open. "It's true that I operate a private practice but, to be perfectly frank with you, I haven't had that much experience, at least not in the field. I don't have a large clientele. Much of my business is specialized lab work that I do on a contract basis for the New York police and an occasional Federal agency.
"I'm not running down my abilities, which I happen to think are formidable. I'm just advising you as to the product you're buying."
I might have added that hidden beneath the brusque patina of those few brief words was the story of years of bitterness and frustration, but, of course, I didn't. I'd decided long ago that when the time came that I couldn't keep my bitterness to myself I'd move permanently to the protective cocoon of the university. That time hadn't come yet.
I waited to see if I'd scared my prospective client away.
"My name is James Barrett," the man said. "I don't need a list of your qualifications because I've already checked them out. Actually, I'd say you're quite modest. As a forensic lab man, you're considered tops in your field. As a teacher, your students are patiently waiting for you to walk on water. It was your work on the Carter case that finally — "
"How can I help you, Mr. Barrett?" I said, a bit curtly. Barrett was being oily, and I didn't like that. Also, he'd touched on the subject of my success, and that was a sore point with me. It's not hard to be a great civil servant if you've got a measured I.Q. of 156, as I have. It is hard to achieve in private life if you're a dwarf, as I am. And that was what I craved, private achievement in my chosen profession.
Barrett sensed my displeasure and made an apologetic gesture. I swallowed hard. I was the one who'd been pushing, and it was time to make amends.
"I'm sorry, Barrett," I said. "I'm out of line. You see, I run up against too many people who go out of their way to spare my feelings. You don't see many dwarfs outside the circus, and deformity tends to make people uncomfortable. I like to clear the air first. I can see now that it wasn't necessary with you."
The fact of the matter was that I had once been one of the dwarfs people see in the circus; eight years while I was studying for my degree.
"Mongo the Magnificent," which looked better on a marquee than "Robby Frederickson." Mongo the Magnificent, The Dwarf Who Could Out-Tumble the Tumblers. A freak to most people. The memory made my stomach churn.
"Dr. Frederickson, I would like you to go to Europe and look for my brother."
I waited, watching the other man. Barrett wiped his brow with a silk handkerchief. To me, he didn't look like the type to worry about anyone, not even his brother. But if it was an act, it was a convincing one.
"Tommy's a few years younger than myself," Barrett continued. "The other end of a large family. A few months ago he took up with a woman who was, shall I say, a bad influence on him."
"Just a minute, Mr. Barrett. How old is your brother?"
"Twenty-five."
I shrugged, as if that was the only explanation needed.
"I know he's of age, and can't be forced into doing anything. But this problem has nothing to do with age."
"What is the problem, Mr. Barrett?"
"Drugs."
I nodded, suddenly very sober. We'd established instant communications, Barrett and I. That one obscenity, drugs, spoke volumes to me, as it does to anyone who has spent time in a ghetto or on a college campus.
"I'm still not sure I can help, Mr. Barrett," I said quietly. "Addiction's a personal hell, and a man has to find his own road out."
"I realize that. But I'm hoping you'll be able to give him a little more time to find that road. Tommy's an artist, and quite good, I'm told by those who should know. But, like many artists, he lives in a never-never land. Right now he's on the brink of very serious trouble and he must be made to see that. If he does, I'm betting that it will wake him up."
"I take it the serious trouble you're talking about is in addition to his habit."
"Yes. You see, Tommy and Elizabeth — "
"Elizabeth?"
"Elizabeth Hotaling, the girl he took up with. In order to support their habit they started trafficking, smuggling drugs in and out of Italy, selling them to tourists and students. Nothing big — they're not Syndicate — but big enough to attract the attention of Interpol. My sources, which are impeccable, assure me that he'll be arrested the next time he crosses the border, and that he'll receive a very stiff sentence."
I wondered who his sources were, and if Barrett knew that my own brother, Garth, was a New York detective, and a Narco at that. I didn't ask.
"Mr. Barrett, your brother didn't have to go all the way to Italy to feed and support a habit. New York's the drug Mecca of the world."
"Tommy found out that I was considering turning him into the health authorities here for forced treatment."
"Well, that's not going to work over there. Europe isn't the United States. The Europeans take a dim view of drug users and pushers, especially when they're Americans."
"That's why I want you to find him," Barrett said, producing a thick file folder and placing it on my desk. "I know you can't force him to come back, but at least you can warn him that they're on to him. That's all I want you to do — tell him what I've told you. I'll pay you five thousand dollars, plus expenses."
"You want to pay me five thousand dollars for finding a man and delivering a message?"
Barrett shrugged. "I have the money, and I feel a responsibility toward my brother. If you decide to take the job, I think this dossier may help. It has samples of his paintings, as well as descriptions of his habits, life-style, and so on."
Something smelled bad, but I'm as corruptible as the next man. Probably more so. Still, I seemed determined to scare Barrett off. "You're very thorough, Mr. Barrett. But, why me?"
"Because you have a reputation for being able to establish a rapport with young people. If I sent some tough guy over there, Tommy wouldn't listen. I'm betting that if he'll listen to anyone, it'll be you."
I flushed at the mention of tough guy; Barrett might have been talking about Garth, all six feet two inches of him.
I'll take the job, Mr. Barrett," I said. "But you'll be charged the normal rates. I get one hundred dollars a day, plus expenses. If I can't find your brother in fifty days, he's not to be found."
"Thank you, Dr. Frederickson," Barrett said. There was just a hint of laughter in the man's voice, and I couldn't tell whether it came from a sense of relief or something else. "There's a round-trip airline ticket inside that folder, along with a check for one thousand dollars. I trust that's a sufficient retainer."
"It is," I said, trying as best I could to keep my own feelings of elation out of my voice. It had been some time since I'd seen that much money all in one place.
"Dr. Frederickson — " Barrett studied the backs of his own hands. "Since time is so very important in this matter, I had hoped that you — well, I'd hoped that you could get on it right away."
"I'll be on the first plane," I said, reaching for the telephone. I allowed myself a smile. "One advantage of being my size is that it doesn't take you long to pack."
* * *
I landed in Rome, checked in at a hotel near the Vatican, and immediately began making the rounds of the art galleries. An artist, especially a young one, would probably be in either Florence or Venice; a drug user and pusher in Rome. Besides, if Tommy Barrett was as good as his brother said he was, and if he was making it, the chances were that some of his work would be surfacing in the Rome galleries.
I was checking the stuff in the galleries against the art samples in the dossier Barrett had given me. I was looking for work with Tommy Barrett's style or signature, preferably both. If I got no lead on him in Rome, then I could try Florence, Venice, or maybe Verona. Then there were the jails to be checked out; after that the cemeteries.
I made no effort to shake the man who was following me, mainly because I was curious as to his reasons. He looked young, big, and strong, a professional on his way up. He was good, but not that good.
I decided to lead him around a bit. Following the example of my feet, my mind began to wander.
I was still wondering who Barrett's sources were, and how he had found out about me. I certainly didn't have that many references, not the kind Barrett would know. My light had been hidden under a test tube for most of my short career.
I'd always been interested in criminology, and nature had partially compensated for her small joke by endowing me with a rather impressive I.Q. that put me in the so-called genius category. All of which doesn't make it any easier to reach the groceries on the top shelf of Life's supermarket.
Of course, there isn't a police force in the world that would hire me on a regular basis and, even if there was, I wouldn't want it. Garth was a public servant because he wanted to be; me, because I had to be. And there was the difference.
It had often occurred to me that I was merely trying to overcompensate for the fact that my brother had been born normal and I had not. But I knew it was more than that. Part of it boiled down to the fact that I had the same needs and shared the same hungers as all men, a yearning for self-respect, for simple human dignity.
All of which tends, at times, to make me a little paranoid. But it wasn't paranoia that had put the man on my tail, and paranoia didn't explain why Barrett had been willing to pay five thousand dollars for the somewhat ephemeral quality of rapport.
On the other hand, I didn't anticipate that much difficulty in tracking down Tommy Barrett. Dead, alive, or imprisoned, I was fairly confident I'd be able to catch up with him. His dossier revealed him to be an artistic, highly sensitive individual, intelligent but lacking the guile necessary to elude the police or me for very long.
Also, Tommy Barrett's life-style and mode of dress limited him in the places he could safely go without immediately attracting attention. Add to that the fact that I speak passable Italian. I figured my chances of finding an expatriate American in Italy were pretty good.
I scored on my fifth stop — Tommy Barrett's work, style and signature, was propped up in the window. The young girl in the store was cooperative; the artist lived in Venice. Fifteen minutes later I was on my way to the train station.
I decided it was time to get rid of my tail and, at the same time, try to get some line on who he was and why he was still following me.
A few years before, I'd almost been killed by a pervert who had a thing for dwarfs. After that, I'd taken steps to make sure it never happened again. I knew every nerve and pressure point in the human body.
The years in the circus had toughened my own muscles, and I had kept them that way. Knowledge of anatomy was my ultimate weapon, and karate had provided me with a delivery system.
I went down a quiet side street, ducked into an alley and immediately flattened myself against the side of the building.
My friend arrived a few moments later. It's doubtful he knew what hit him. I shifted my weight forward, thrusting the stiffened fingers of my right hand deep into the man's solar plexus, just beneath the rib cage. He bounced once on his face, then lay still.
I worked quickly, dumping the contents of his pockets out onto the ground. I found a small, blurred tattoo on the inside, fleshy part of his thumb that I recognized as a Sicilian clan marking. Minor Mafia. His clothes were dusty, as though he had recently walked through a field of grain. There was a small spiral notebook. I slipped it into my pocket and walked hurriedly from the alley.
* * *
I got off the train in Mestra, a small town a few kilometers from Venice where I had found comfortable lodgings on previous trips to Italy, and which was relatively free from the summer tourist crush.
It was too late to go into Venice that day so I checked into a hotel, rested awhile, then went out for some pasta. Later, I settled down in my room with a brandy to go over the small notebook I had taken from the man I'd decked in the alley.
It didn't take me long to decide there wasn't much in the book that would be of use to me. Most of the pages were filled with crude obscene drawings. There were the names of women, each name accompanied by a sort of sexual rating that I suspected was more wishful thinking than the result of actual research. On the last page was the neatly lettered notation, "823dropl0." I put the notebook on my bed stand and went to sleep.
I got up the next morning and took a cab to the outskirts of Venice, then got on a water bus. If Tommy Barrett was in Venice, I had a pretty good idea of where I'd find him, this time of day, in the middle of the tourist season.
I got off at St. Mark's Square, then pushed my way through the crowds to the central pallazza itself. I took the elevator to the top of the clock tower and got off on the observation deck. I glanced once more at the dossier photos, then took the binoculars I'd brought with me out of their case.
I didn't need them; even without the glasses I could see Tommy Barrett standing in front of St. Mark's Basilica, directly beneath its famed four horses. Elizabeth Hotaling was with him, shilling his sketches to the shifting knots of people that would gather around him for a few minutes watching him work, then drift on to one of the many other artists at work in the pallazza.
Easy cases make me nervous. I descended and attached myself to a group of Barrett's current admirers. Gradually, I worked my way to the front, where I had a clear view of the artist and his girl friend. Elizabeth Hotaling caught my eye and smiled. I smiled back.
The girl in front of me matched the photograph in the dossier, but that was all. The rest of Barrett's description just didn't fit. True, there was a toughness about her, in the way she moved and handled herself. But I was positive that once she'd been tougher, and that most of that quality had been burned out of her; what remained now was only an aura, a lingering memory, like the smell of ozone in the air after a thunderstorm.
She was beautiful, but she had more than that: a confidence, a sense of presence that could only have come from a variety of experiences she certainly hadn't gotten in the middle of St. Mark's Square.
Tommy Barrett, from what I could tell by simply looking at him, wasn't in the same league. Not as far as experience was concerned. They contrasted, yet somehow they matched perfectly. I guessed they were happy together.
Of one thing I was certain: Neither one of them used drugs, at least not on a regular basis, and even then not the hard stuff. I can spot most serious heads a block away, if not by needle tracks then by the pupils of the eyes, the pallor of the skin, nervous mannerisms, or any one of a hundred other traits that are apparent to the trained observer.
Whatever the couple's problems, drugs wasn't one of them. And, if Tommy Barrett was a notorious pusher, what was he doing in the middle of St. Mark's Square peddling charcoal sketches to tourists?
And what was I doing in Italy?
There was no doubt but that the elder Barrett had lied. But why? It seemed I had inherited a puzzle along with my retainer, and the shape of that puzzle was constantly changing. I decided to try some new pieces.
I stepped forward and touched Elizabeth Hotaling gently on the arm, then leaned toward Tommy Barrett.
"Excuse me," I said quietly. "I'm Robert Frederickson. I wonder if I could talk to you privately? I won't take much of your time."
"I don't bargain on the price of the sketches, mister," Barrett said without looking up. His tone was not hostile, simply businesslike.
"The sketches are two dollars apiece, Mr. Frederickson," the girl said. "That really isn't very much, and it's the best work you'll find around here. If you're interested in oils, we'd love to have you visit our apartment. I make excellent cappuccino."
"I'm sure you do, Miss Hotaling, and I'd like to see Mr. Barrett's work, but first I'd like to talk to you."
I waited for the reaction that came; the man and woman exchanged quick glances. I followed up my lead. "You're Elizabeth Hotaling and you're Tommy Barrett," I said, indicating the two of them. "I'm here to deliver a message from Tommy's brother."
Barrett suddenly paused in the middle of a stroke, then carefully placed the piece of charcoal he'd been working with into the chalk tray of his easel. He slowly turned on his stool, away from the crowd. I walked around to the front of him, the girl trailing a few steps behind.
"Who are you?" Barrett said softly, his eyes searching my face.
"I gave you my name. I'm a private detective from New York. As I said, your brother sent me here to deliver a message."
"Mister, I don't have a brother."
I can't say I was surprised. That was the way the case had been going. Now the trick was to discover who the man in my office had been, and what game he was playing. I decided to go slow with Barrett and the girl; reactions were proving more reliable than words.
"I'm sure you must know this man," I said carefully, watching Barrett. "He's big, over six feet. Snappy dresser. He talks good, but you can tell — "
The description was meager but it had an immediate effect on the young painter and his girl friend. Elizabeth Hotaling let out a strangled sob and struck at my back with her fists. The blows didn't hurt but they did distract me long enough to enable Tommy Barrett to bounce one of his wooden easel frames off the side of my head, knocking me to my knees. Barrett grabbed the girl's hand, dragging her after him into the crowd.
The blow had dazed me. Still, I would have been up and after them if it had not been for the man kneeling over me, his knee digging into the muscles of my arm.
Even in this rather untenable situation, pain shrieking through every nerve end in my body, I couldn't help but admire his technique; it was beautiful. To the crowd it must have seemed as though he was trying to help me; only I could see the ugly black sapper he pulled from beneath his sport coat, or the short, hard stroke that slammed into the base of my skull.
* * *
The smell of rotting fish finally woke me up. I was dangling over the edge of a walkway between two buildings, my face about four inches above the surface of a particularly foul-smelling, stagnant stretch of backwater from one of the canals.
I had no idea how the man had gotten me here. Probably, he'd simply picked me up and carried me off. After all, in this day and age, who asks questions just because you're carrying around a dwarf?
One thing was certain: The man knew his trade, and if he'd wanted me dead I'd be at the bottom of the canal instead of just smelling it.
There had been no need to find Tommy Barrett because Tommy Barrett hadn't been hiding. Anyone could have done what I had done so far, but I had been chosen to do it, which meant that I was, if not the star of the opera, at least first tenor. Why?
I was sure I'd never seen the man in my office in my life and I hadn't been busy enough to make that kind of enemy. I tried to make some connection with my work at the university but couldn't. I doubted any parent would go to these lengths because I'd failed a student.
I was hurting. I managed to drag myself out through the labyrinth of alleys to the main square, then got on a water bus. It was late. There wasn't a cab in sight back at the main terminal, and the buses had stopped running. Despite my disheveled appearance, I managed to hitch a ride back to Mestra.
It was time to call Garth. As much as I hated to admit it, Big Brother's help was needed. Actually, what I needed was information, and that information, if it existed, would most likely be found on a police blotter. But it could wait. Figuring the time differential, Garth would be just getting out of bed, and there wasn't much he could do for me there. Besides, I needed sleep myself if I hoped to make any sense over the phone.
I stumbled into my room and immediately knew something was wrong; the empty space on the night stand where I had placed the notebook caught and held my attention like a gun bore aimed at my belly.
Grimacing against the pain in my head, I made a quick check of the room. It didn't take me long to discover that the lock on my suitcase had been sprung. Nothing was missing. My clothes were a bit rumpled, but it almost seemed as if the searcher had made a conscious effort to leave everything as he had found it, despite the fact that I would certainly know he had been there because of the missing notebook. That produced a discordant note inside my head, but things up there were already so out of tune that I didn't give it much thought; I hurt too much.
I went into the bathroom and filled the sink with cold water, then plunged my head in and gingerly scrubbed at the caked blood where the blackjack had bounced off. I blew bubbles beneath the water to take my mind off the pain. I owed somebody, I thought; I certainly did owe somebody.
The two policemen were waiting for me when I came out.
They looked like Abbott and Costello. Both men had their guns drawn and pointed at me. Costello was down on one knee, his arm extended straight out in front of him as though he was preparing to defend against the Charge of the Light Brigade. I almost laughed; instead, I muttered a long string of carefully selected obscenities.
Neither man said anything. Abbott jiggled his gun and Costello rose and went to my suitcase. The fat man groped around inside the lining for a few moments, then smiled. Mad genius that I am, it suddenly occurred to me whoever had taken the notebook wasn't entirely dishonest.
Like a pack rat, the man had felt compelled to leave something behind to soothe my ruffled feelings. Like the plastic bag filled with heroin that Costello was now holding in his hand.
"You're making a mistake," I said. The words blurred on my tongue. "Do you think I'd be stupid enough to leave a bag of heroin laying around in an empty suitcase? Look at the lock; it's been jimmied."
"The condition of your luggage is no concern of ours, signor," Abbott said evenly. His tone belied his comical appearance. He was a serious man, and he hated me. It was obvious that somewhere along the line he'd picked up more than a passing interest in people he suspected of pushing drugs.
"My name is Frederickson; Dr. Robert Frederickson. I'm a private detective. I didn't put those drugs there. I've never seen that plastic bag before in my life."
"We'll have plenty of time to work these details out, signor. In the meantime, you should know that the boy you sold drugs to this afternoon is dead."
"What boy?" I whispered.
"The artist. We found his body in an alley. He had died from an overdose of the heroin you sold him. Fortunately, we have many informants. It was not difficult to find a man of your — "
He hesitated, embarrassed. I rushed to fill in the silence. "What about the girl that was with him?"
"Venice has many alleys, signor."
Little tumblers were clicking in my brain, tapping out a combination that spelled a prison cell. Or death. I was glad I hadn't eaten. As it was, I was fighting off a bad case of the dry heaves. I was sure that whoever was framing me wouldn't stop here, and I wasn't anxious to wait around to see what other surprises were in store for me.
"Signor, you are under arrest for possession of heroin and for the murder of Thomas Barrett."
Costello came for me and I reacted instinctively, trying to imagine myself back in the center ring, where the punishment for bad timing might be a broken bone or the mocking laughter of the crowd, but never a bullet in the brain.
I drove the point of my shoe into Costello's shin, then leapt forward, tucking myself into a ball, rolling, then exploding into the side of Abbott's knees. Abbott crumpled over me, shielding me for a moment with his body from the death in his partner's hand.
I didn't stop. I used the momentum from my first rush to carry me over into another roll, then planted my feet under me and leaped head first for the window, closing my eyes and balling my fists to minimize any injuries from the flying glass. I opened my eyes just in time, reaching out and grabbing the edge of the steel railing on the fire escape outside the window. That saved me from a five-story fall.
I broke my reverse swing by shortening the extension of my arms and using my right hip to absorb the shock of my body falling back against the railing. Glass was showering all around and I could smell the odor of my own blood.
There was the ugly sound of a gunshot, then the whine of steel striking steel. It was still Circus all the way. There was no time to climb down, so I dropped; story by story, breaking my fall at each level by grabbing at the railings.
My left shoulder went on the last level, yanked out of its socket. I hit the sidewalk in free fall, immediately flexing my knees and rolling. After what seemed an hour or two of rolling around like a marble I came to a stop in an upright position against a garbage can that must have been filled with concrete.
Abbott was leaning out the window of my room, peering down into the darkness. My left arm with its dislocated shoulder was useless, and my legs hurt like hell, but I could tell they weren't broken. I allowed myself a small smile of satisfaction.
I wasn't dead, which meant I must have made it. I got up, ducked into an alley, somehow managed to climb a fence and kept going, keeping to the alleys.
A half mile away I sat down to rest and think.
Mongo the Magnificent? Mongo the Village Idiot. I'd been had. And now I was a fugitive. I tried to rationalize why I had run, reminding myself that my frame was being nailed together by a master. That was true enough, but the real reason was pride.
Pride? A foolish thing, perhaps, to risk one's life for. Still, for me, pride was my life — or the only thing that made life worth living. Pride was the stuff oiling the gears that kept me going in a giants' world.
Pride made me care. The matter might have been cleared up while I was in custody, but it would have been done by somebody else. I would leave my prison cell a miserable, stupid dwarf who had been used as a pawn, a little man who had been made a messenger of death. I wanted to know who had involved me in Tommy Barrett's death. And why. I wanted to find out for myself.
The fact that I had run would be taken as conclusive evidence of guilt, and I could probably expect to be shot the next time around. Given my rather quaint physical characteristics, I figured I didn't have too many hours of freedom left.
I needed a phone. I knew where there was an American Express office open twenty-four hours a day and I hurried there. I knew it was risky to put myself inside four walls, but I couldn't see where I had any choice, not if I wanted to do something with the time I had.
I tried not to think of the surrounding glass or the fact that the office only seemed to have one door as I entered and walked up to the clerk on duty.
I gave him the number I wanted to call. The lines were free and it rook him only a few moments to make the connection with New York. He motioned me to one of the booths lining the opposite wall. I went into the booth, closed the door, and squatted down on the floor, bracing my back against the wall.
"Garth?"
"Mongo! What the hell are you doing waking me up in the middle of the night?! And what's the matter with your voice?"
"Listen, big man, you're lucky I can talk at all," I said. I tried to sound nasty so we could continue playing our family game, but I couldn't. His voice sounded too good. "Garth, I'm in trouble. I need your help."
"Go ahead," Garth said. I could tell he was wide awake now. His voice was deadly serious.
"I need information on a man who may or may not be named James Barrett. It's probably an alias, but I want you to check it out for me anyway. Find out if there is a James Barrett with a record, and get back to me as soon as you can. I'll give you a number where — "
"I just left one James Barrett about four hours ago," Garth said. He sounded puzzled. "Jimmy Barrett is my partner."
"Describe him."
"About five foot eight, eyes: blue. Hair: none. He's pushing retirement. Part of his left ear lobe is missing — "
I suddenly felt very sick and my arm was beginning to throb.
"And he has a son," I finished. My voice was barely a whisper.
"Yeah," Garth said. "Tommy. Nice boy. Barrett says the kid's an artist, apparently pretty good. The last I heard he was spending the summer in Italy. What does that have to do with you?"
"He's dead," I said too loudly. "What it has to do with me is that I helped kill him."
There was complete silence on the other end of the line. Slowly, my voice stretched thin by pain and fatigue, I filled Garth in on where I was and what had happened. My own words seemed alien to me, a shrieking whine emanating from some broken tape recorder inside my soul. The words hurt, and I used that pain to lash myself for my own gullibility and incompetence, for not smelling the set-up earlier and maybe preventing the death — or deaths — that had occurred. Finally it was over and Garth's voice came at me, soft but laced with rage, punctuated with heavy breathing.
"All right, Mongo, I know who the man is from your description. His name is Pernod, Vincent Pernod, and he's one of the biggest drug men around, a contractor for the Mafia. You've just had a taste of Pernod's sense of humor and style of revenge."
"Why Barrett, and why me? And what's the connection with the girl?"
"Jimmy and I have spent the last eighteen months trying to run Pernod down, which means building a case. The pressure was building on him to the point where New York, his most lucrative market, was being taken away, and it was only a matter of time before we nailed him.
"Pernod doesn't take kindly to that kind of treatment and obviously he decided to do something about it. Killing Tommy Barrett was his way of getting at my partner; destroying you in the process was his way of getting at me. Add to that the fact that Elizabeth Hotaling is, or was, Pernod's ex-mistress and you begin to get a picture of how dirty the water is that you've been swimming in."
My knuckles were white where I had gripped the receiver. Pernod had had me pegged perfectly. He'd been sure I wouldn't contact Garth until it was too late, and he'd been right.
"Tommy met the girl down at the precinct station. He'd come to see his father about something and Elizabeth Hotaling was waiting while we grilled her boyfriend. You saw the results."
My brain was beginning to play tricks on me. I was having acid-flashes of memory; Pernod in my office, the man and woman in the pallazza, the sapper bouncing off" my skull. My rage was growing, exploding hot splinters of hatred.
"He has Italian help," I said, thinking of the two men I'd run into.
"Sure. He has a farm outside Rome, somewhere near Cinecitta," Garth said absently. "There's a small airstrip there, and we think that's how he gets his drops."
"Drops?"
"Drops — drug shipments. They bring the raw stuff in by plane from Lebanon and Turkey, then — "
"I've got it," I said. That explained the grain on the suit of the man who'd been following me.
"Now listen, Mongo," Garth continued evenly. "You haven't killed anyone, except maybe yourself if you keep running around loose. I have contacts there, and I know the department will put me on the first plane out of here. When the Italian authorities find out you've been messing with Pernod they'll more than likely give you a medal. I don't want them to give it to you posthumously, which means you turn yourself in now. Do I make sense?"
He made sense. I told him so and hung up. I was dialing the local police when I happened to glance in the direction of the clerk. I hung up and stepped out of the booth.
"Excuse me," I said, pointing to the calendar on the wall, "what's today's date?"
The clerk glanced up at the calendar, then ripped off the previous day's sheet.
"August twenty-third, signor. I forgot to change it."
I mumbled my thanks and headed out the door. The clerk yelled after me, asking something about my arm. I ignored him. August 23rd: 8-23. Now I knew why they'd wanted the notebook back. 823drop10. Pernod was expecting a drop this day, either at ten in the morning or ten in the evening.
I planned to do some dropping myself.
* * *
I found a DKW I could drive, crossed the wires, and was off, heading for the open country southeast of Rome. It would take some fast driving over rough terrain, but I figured I could make it if I didn't slow down for the towns.
I was well beyond any limitations imposed by pain, hunger or exhaustion. My mind and senses were very clear, and I was running on the most efficient fuel of all: high-octane, one-hundred-proof hate. That hate made it a personal thing, a demand that I be the one to put Pernod away. Pernod had used me to kill another human being, and that act required a special kind of payment that only I could collect.
Garth's unintentional directions were right on the money. It was 8:30 when I finally spotted Pernod's ranch from a bend in the road at the top of a hill, about twenty minutes outside Cinecitta. It was a spread of about one hundred acres or so, and the air strip ran right up to the rear of the wood and brick farmhouse. The fields of grain glowed golden in the morning sun. It would have made an idyllic scene were it not for the electrified wire surrounding the whole, and an armed guard at the only gate.
I drove the rest of the way down the hill, past the gate. I waved to the stony-faced guard, who stared right through me. I drove around another bend, pulled the car off to the side of the road and sat down in the grass to think.
If there was a drop coming in, I was sure Pernod would be in the house waiting for it. The problem was getting to him without getting myself killed. The fence was about seven feet high, with an additional foot of barbed wire crowning the top. With two good arms I might have tried to fashion a pole and vault it. In my present condition there was no way. I would have to meet the guard head on.
The area in back of me was wooded. Using my belt, I strapped my useless left arm in close to my body, then stepped back into the trees and made my way back toward the guard. I stopped when I was about twenty yards away, picked up a stone and hurled it at the fence. The wire greeted the stone with a shower of electric sparks and a high-pitched, deadly whine. The guard came running down the road.
He was carrying a sub-machine gun, Russian made, which meant it had probably come from somewhere in the Middle East along with a shipment of drugs. It also meant to me that I was right about the drop that morning. Nothing else would justify the risk of arming a roadside guard with such a weapon; a man standing by a gate with a sub-machine gun would be sure to arouse suspicion, and could blow whatever cover Pernod maintained. No, something — something very big — was coming in, and I suspected it could be Pernod's retirement nest egg.
I had to get close to the man, and the gun in his hand meant I had very little margin of error. I doubted that another ruse would work; any sound from me and he'd simply spray the trees with machine gun fire. I would have to go to him.
I waited until he was about fifteen yards beyond me, then took a deep breath and exploded from the line of trees. Suddenly, the scene seemed to shift to slow motion inside my brain. I was running low, my right arm pumping wildly, my eyes fixed on the spot at the base of the man's skull I knew I must hit if I was to get him before he got me. But he'd heard me, and his finger was already pressed against the trigger of his weapon as he began to make his turn.
The muzzle of the gun described an arc, bucking, firing a shower of bullets that kicked into the trees, the circle of death coming closer and closer. The muzzle finally zeroed in on me and I left my feet, arching my back and thrusting up my arm in a desperate effort for height. An angry swarm of steel whirred by beneath me, and then I was at his head. There was no time to do anything but aim for the kill.
I twisted my body to the side, tucked in my left leg, then lashed out, catching the point of his jaw with my heel. The man's head kicked to one side and I could hear a dull click. He fell as I fell."
I landed on my left side and was almost swallowed up by a white hot flash of pain that must have ascended all the way from hell. Somehow I managed to get to my feet, crouched and ready to move in case I had missed. I hadn't.
The hot barrel of the gun had fallen across the man's arm and was scorching his skin, but he didn't move. The click I had heard had been the sound of the man's neck breaking.
I turned and glanced in the direction of the farmhouse. Two figures were running toward the road. Both carried machine guns. I grabbed the dead man's weapon and sprinted back to the shelter of the trees.
They wasted no time examining the body of their dead comrade. The moment they saw him they dropped to the ground on their bellies, their guns pointed into the woods. My mind told me they couldn't possibly hear me breathing; my fear insisted I take no chances. I held my breath. It was like Old Home Week; one man was the one who'd been tailing me in Rome, the other the one who'd slugged me in Venice.
They were patient. It was ten minutes before the older man finally signaled the younger to move out. Both rose to a crouch and began moving off in opposite directions, still keeping their guns trained into the woods on the left and right of me. I crawled forward on my belly up to a large oak at the very edge of the road, then straightened up and flattened myself against the trunk.
I was not at all sure I could even fire the gun with one arm, at least not with the accuracy I would need. Add to that the fact that any move I made would require exquisite timing and you come up with a situation that was not exactly favorable. Still, my adrenaline was running low and I had no desire to simply pass out at their feet. Besides, I hadn't come this far to fight a defensive action.
Now the men were about twenty-five yards apart, on opposite sides of the tree, and still moving. In going for an attacking position, I had crawled into a cul-de-sac; sooner or later the angle would be reduced to the point where one of the men would spot me. It was time to make my move.
I knew if I swung on one man the tree would protect me from the other, at least for a few seconds. I decided to go after the older, more experienced man first. He was the most dangerous. I braced the gun on my hip and swung to my right.
"Freeze! Both of you! Freeze, or this man dies!"
Of course, they were going to hear none of it. Bullets beat an obscene tattoo on the trunk behind me while the man in front of me tried to drop to one side.
I had anticipated it. I cut loose with a quick burst and the older man's body danced in the air like a bloody rag doll.
Immediately I pressed back against the tree, counted to three, and rolled around the back to the opposite side. The other man had done exactly what I had expected, running down the road to the other side of the tree. I stepped out on my side and pressed the trigger, catching him in the belly, blowing him backwards.
He was dead before he hit the fence but that didn't soothe my sensibilities. I shielded my eyes from the twitching figure stuck with electric glue to the deadly wire mesh.
It occurred to me that I had killed my first man — plus two others for good measure — in the space of the last ten minutes. Oddly enough, I felt strangely unaffected by the blood and death around me; I kept thinking of a young man struggling for life while a man plunged a needleful of eternity into his veins.
I figured the odds were better than even that one of the men I had killed had held that needle; the other two had probably held Tommy Barrett down.
But the man responsible for it all was still alive and free. I glanced in the direction of the farmhouse; it was perfectly quiet. I looked at my watch and found it had been shattered. I figured the time at around 9:30, which meant I had only a half hour before the plane landed. I had to get to Pernod before help arrived.
I reloaded one of the guns from ammunition I found in the older man's pocket, then went through the gate. I knew it would be safer to work my way down through the grain fields, but I figured I couldn't afford the time.
Keeping low, trying to ignore the pain in my left arm, I zigzagged down the rutted road to the house. I expected to hear — or feel — a volley of shots at any moment, but none came; there was only the lazy singing of crickets. I reached the house and came up hard against the side, just beneath a window. I rested a few moments, sucking air into my lungs, trying to right the landscape around me, which had a maddening tendency to spin.
I suspected a bullet between my eyes might be the reward for looking in that particular window so I resisted the impulse and crept around to the other side of the house.
There was another window. I counted slowly to one hundred, then looked in.
Elizabeth Hotaling was tied to a chair, a gag in her mouth. Her face was very pale, her eyes wide and red. Pernod was standing over her, a knife pressed against her throat. It looked as if the arsenal had been depleted.
"I'm here now, Pernod," I said quietly. "I just killed off your zoo." I kept the gun out of sight. I was curious to see if Pernod would move away from the girl. He didn't.
"Get in here, Frederickson," Pernod said tightly. "I want to see the rest of you. If I don't, I kill the girl."
"You're an idiot, Pernod," I said evenly, allowing myself a short laugh for effect. I cut it off quickly as I felt it building to hysteria. I didn't look at the girl. "That girl is the only reason you're alive right now. Besides, she's your girl friend, not mine.
Chop her head off if you want. In any case, the second her blood spills, you're dead."
Pernod smiled uncertainly. For a moment I thought he was going to drop the knife. I was wrong. Pernod pressed the point into the soft flesh of the girl's throat and blood blossomed. I groaned inwardly.
"I don't believe you, professor. I don't believe you'd let a young girl die if you could prevent it. But we'll compromise. If I can't see you, I want to see the gun I know you're carrying. I want to see it now!"
The knife point dug deeper, fractions of an inch away from the girl's jugular. I pressed the loading lever on the side of the gun and the magazine dropped to the ground. I tossed the rest of the weapon through the window. Pernod reacted as I'd hoped, leaping at the gun, picking it up and aiming it at the window.
It was a few seconds before he realized there was no magazine. By then I was over the ledge and into the room, standing in front of the girl. Once again, my left arm had come loose from its impromptu sling. I let it dangle.
Pernod laughed. Apparently he thought he was in charge of the situation. He glanced once at the knife he still held as if to reassure himself.
"All right, dwarf," Pernod said without a trace of the manners I remembered, "stick that good arm behind your back and lay down on the floor."
"If you put the knife down I won't kill you, Pernod," I breathed. I straightened up and smiled.
Pernod blinked in disbelief before rage gorged his eyes and he came at me. I ducked under the knife and kicked out at his knees. It was a glancing blow, not enough to cripple him. Pernod stumbled and sat down heavily on the floor, a stunned expression on his face. He stared at me stupidly.
"Stay down, Pernod," I said, fighting down my own blood lust. "Stay down."
I didn't really want him to, and he didn't. Switching the knife to his other hand, Pernod rose and lurched toward me. This time I let him get close, feeling the blade of the knife cutting through my shirt and slicing across the skin over my ribs.
But I had the shot I wanted. I brought the side of my hand down hard on the bridge of his nose, breaking it cleanly. In the same motion, my hand described a lightning arc and drove those shattering fragments of bone up behind Pernod's eyes and into his brain.
It was almost over, and almost was the key word. I couldn't let up now, not even for a moment. If I did, I would be finished but the job wouldn't. I quickly took the gag out of Elizabeth Hotaling's mouth and untied her.
"You — you're the man. He called you — "
"Mongo," I said. "Just Mongo."
She was in shock, which was just as well, because I had nothing to say to her. I felt completely empty, devoid of anything I could put into words. I covered her with a blanket and headed for the door, stopping just once to look back and meet her gaze. The look in her eyes stunned me, and I wondered, now, if that was how other people would also look at me.
A dwarf? Yes. But also a killer, a dangerous man. Never mind the circumstances. Never fool with Mongo. Once I had thought that look was what I wanted. Now I wasn't sure at all, and I wondered how much of myself I had paid for the look in the girl's eyes. And whether it was worth the price.
Clouds had eaten at the sun while I'd been in the house and it looked as if it would rain. I thought I heard the wail of sirens in the distance but I couldn't be sure. It was almost time. I crouched down in the morning to wait for the plane.
The reluctant editor mentioned in the introductory article was Ernest M. Hutter, a friend and early mentor who was among the first to begin actually buying my short stories and offering encouragement. But he wasn't about to buy "The Drop." If he ever understood that a certain bit of dialogue between Mongo and Garth in the following story was inspired, as it were, by him, he never let on. The important thing to me was that he sent a check.
High Wire
I'd been lecturing on Suzuki's technique of identifying individuals through lip prints and was turning to a chart I'd drawn on the blackboard when I caught a glimpse of the man standing just outside the door to my classroom. I stopped in mid-sentence, momentarily disoriented, suspended in that spiritual never-never land that appears when widely disparate worlds of the mind collide. It had been a few years since I'd seen Bruno Jessum.
I dismissed my graduate seminar and motioned for Bruno to come in. The students filed out slowly, casting furtive glances at the huge tattooed man who stood shyly to one side. I half smiled; my students were just getting used to the fact that their professor was a genuine, card-carrying, four-foot-eight-inch dwarf, and now their classroom had been invaded by a man who looked for all the world as if he'd just stepped out of a circus. Which, of course, he had.
The smile was ephemeral; I was happy to see Bruno, but he jogged memories I'd just as soon have forgotten. I extended my hand and he shook it, staring down at me with the same soft, gentle eyes that had always seemed misplaced in the giant body.
"It's good to see you, Mongo," Bruno said uneasily.
I motioned for him to sit down and I sat beside him. "Circus in town, Bruno?" I was trying to put him at ease. I always knew when the circus was in town, although I avoided it as one always avoids something that causes pain. Old habits die hard.
"Yeah. Been in ten days. Foldin' up tomorrow."
Bruno obviously had something on his mind, but it looked as if it was going to take him a while to get around to it.
"I have a friend who keeps a bottle in his desk, Bruno. Would you like a drink?"
Bruno shook his head, which seemed to have the effect of loosening his tongue. "Gee, Mongo, you look funny here. I mean, Mongo the Magnificent teachin' a bunch of college kids. Know what I mean?"
"Yes," I said evenly. I knew what he meant.
"I heard you was some kind of a doctor."
"Ph.D. It's just a degree. I'm a criminologist. I was going to school during the years I worked for the circus. You could say Mongo the Magnificent was supporting Dr. Robert Frederickson."
"I heard you was a private detective, too. I went to your office and your secretary said you was up here teachin'." Bruno's eyes shifted away from mine. "I thought I'd come up and say hello."
It was more than that, but I figured Bruno would tell me in his own good time. Actually, I didn't regret the delay. I was having trouble concentrating. Bruno had brought with him the smell of animals, sawdust and greasepaint. It was like a drug, focusing the blurry edges of my life.
I'd been born with a small body and a big mind, statistically speaking. After a childhood devoted primarily to consuming vast quantities of food, I had discovered there wasn't much I could do about the small body, but having a measured I.Q. of 156 made it difficult to accept any of the roles society usually metes out to people like myself. True, I'd ended up with the Statler Brothers Circus, but Nature had smiled, endowing me with improbable but prodigious tumbling skills. It made me a star attraction, but I wanted more and I'd worked for it. I'd always been interested in the criminal mind and, as I explained to Bruno, I'd used my circus earnings to finance my education, eventually earning my doctorate and an assistant professorship on the faculty of the New York City college where I teach.
Not bad for a dwarf, but pride does funny things. I was — and am — a good teacher, but that still left me on the public payroll, so to speak. Some men — my brother, Garth, for example, a cop on the New York police force — are there because they choose to be. I'd longed for the bloodletting of the marketplace and had managed to obtain a license as a private investigator. Clients weren't exactly forcing the city to repave the sidewalk outside my office, but I was reasonably happy, and that's not to be discounted.
"I haven't changed that much, Bruno," I said quietly. "I'm still your friend. You used to be able to talk to me."
Bruno cleared his throat. "I saw your picture in the paper a few months ago. You were in Italy. Said you helped break up some drug ring. I thought maybe you could help me."
"I can't help you, Bruno, unless you tell me what the trouble is."
"It's hard," Bruno said in a voice so low I could hardly hear him. "It's about Bethel."
Bethel Jessum, Bruno's wife, was petite, beautiful, but with the mind of a child — a mean child.
"She's been running around on me, Mongo," he continued, "and I don't know what to do about it. It's driving me crazy."
I studied the other man's face. Pain was etched there, and I thought I saw him blink back tears. I felt as if Bruno had put me in a box and was closing the lid. I don't normally handle divorce cases, not because I can't use the money but because they don't interest me. The fact that I knew Bethel as well as I knew Bruno only served to complicate matters. Of course, I had just finished reminding Bruno that he was my friend; now I had to remind myself.
"You want to know who she's seeing?"
Bruno shook his massive head. "I know who she's seein'. Half the time they meet right in front of me."
I winced. "It's not as hard as it used to be to get a divorce, Bruno. At least not in this state. All you have to do is establish some kind of residence, then state your grounds. You don't have to prove adultery. I have a friend who's a lawyer — "
"You don't understand," Bruno said sharply. "I don't want a divorce. I love Bethel, and I want us to stay together."
"You know who she's seeing, and you don't want a divorce. Why do you want a private detective?"
It might have been a hint of impatience in my voice, or simply what Bruno considered my stupidity. In any case, he nailed me with his eyes in that way only an intensely gentle man can manage. "I didn't say I wanted a private detective, Mongo. I said I thought maybe you could help me. As a friend."
"I'm sorry," I said softly. "Go ahead."
"Last winter in camp we picked up this guy who calls himself Count Anagori. Real good. Works the high wire. Statler saw him at a tryout and signed him on the spot. He's headlinin' now."
"What's his real name?"
"Don't know. Guess a guy who walks the wire like he does don't need no other name. Ain't unusual. I never knew your real name until I saw it under that picture."
It figured. Circus people are an insulated group, held together like electrons in an atom by strange, powerful bonds; a man's name wasn't one of them.
"Anyway," Bruno continued, "Bethel and this count guy hit it off real well together, like I told you. He's a good-lookin' man, sure, with lots of manners. But he's no good for her. Havin' a fancy European accent doesn't make you good for a woman. He's gonna hurt her sooner or later, and I want her to see that. I want her to see what a mistake she's makin'."
"I still don't understand what you want me to do, Bruno," I said gently.
"You got an education. You know all the words. I thought maybe you could talk to her, make her see she's makin' a mistake." The tears in Bruno's eyes were now a reality, and he made no effort to wipe them away. "Would you do that for me, Mongo?"
Knowing Bethel, words weren't going to do much good, but I couldn't tell that to Bruno. Instead, I told him I'd talk to his wife after the show that evening.
Bruno's face brightened. "I'll leave a ticket for you at the stage door. Best seat in the house."
"Then I'll see you up on the swings?" I wanted to sustain the mood. When I knew him, Bruno had been one of the best catchers around. His smiled faded.
"Don't work the trapeze anymore. Got scared. Happened all of a sudden. One day I just couldn't go up there anymore. Statler hired me as a clown."
I was sorry I'd asked.
* * *
Bruno had been right; it looked as if the count was up in the world in more ways than one. His name was on every circus poster in town. It seemed odd to me that a talent like that should have been discovered in a winter tryout camp, but I didn't give it much thought; the fact that Count Anagori might be a late bloomer didn't seem to be part of the problem.
I walked around to the side of Madison Square Garden and went in the stage door; it was like stepping back through time. Charlie Ruler was in a straight-backed chair, riding herd. Charlie was ageless, like an old prop the circus packed away at the end of a run and carried on to the next town. His pale eyes were watery and now almost colorless, but his grip was still strong.
"Mongo! Bruno said you'd be here but I didn't believe it! How's the one and only superdwarf?"
I grinned and slapped Charlie gently on the back. We talked for a few minutes, and I could hear the house band starting. Charlie got on the phone and a few seconds later Bruno came hurrying down the corridor leading from the arena floor. He was dressed, but the wide grin beneath the paint was real. For a moment I thought he was going to pick me up and whirl me around. He didn't act like a man whose wife was cheating. He reached for me and I backed away good-naturedly.
"Easy, Bruno. You have to remember that I'm basically undernourished."
"It's all right, Mongo!" Bruno was practically breathless. "Everything's all right! Goin' to see you was the smartest thing I ever did in my life!"
"I'm flattered, but I haven't got the slightest idea what you're talking about."
"Bethel!" Bruno absentmindedly put his hand to his mouth. His fingers came away blood red.
"Take it easy, Bruno. Slow down and tell me what you want to say."
"Funny, the way it worked out," he said, taking a deep breath and slowly letting it out. His joy was like that of a small boy who has won a reprieve from the woodshed. I was beginning to suspect that his shift from catcher to clown might have involved more than a bad case of nerves; heights, over a long period of time, can do funny things to a man's head, even the best of them. "Right after I talked to you I told Bethel you were comin' to see her. That's when she said everything was going to be better."
"Just like that."
"Well, not exactly. At first she laughed, made fun of both of us. Then she went off to see Anagori."
"How do you know that?"
Bruno flushed. "She always went to meet him that time of day. Anyway, about half an hour later she comes back and tells me she's sorry. Asks me to forgive her! Can you imagine Bethel asking anybody to forgive her for anything?"
I couldn't, but the question was obviously rhetorical. I also couldn't imagine her having such a rapid change of heart. "What did she look like?"
"Real pale. Shakin' like a leaf. Guess it hit her all of a sudden. I'm sorry if I put you to any trouble."
"No trouble, Bruno. It's always good to see an old friend. I'd still like to see Bethel."
Bruno looked up sharply. "Why?" His voice was sharp, suspicious, as though the mere suggestion threatened to upset some delicate balance he had made in his mind.
"Just for old time's sake," I said easily. "She was my friend, too."
The music was playing louder, and I knew Bruno was supposed to be out on the Garden floor. Bruno knew it, too.
"Uh, can't we make it some other time?"
"You're folding tomorrow.
Bruno avoided my eyes and shuffled his feet. The sharpness was gone from his voice, and now he was just a man asking me to understand something he couldn't understand himself
"I'll spell it out for you, Mongo. Bethel doesn't want to see you, at least not tonight, not here. I guess maybe she's ashamed of the circus, now that you're a college professor and all."
"Is that what she said?"
Bruno shook his head. "I'm just guessin'. I only know she made me promise to tell you not to try to see her tonight. Maybe tomorrow, when she's not so upset. We'll both come see you and maybe have a drink together. Okay, Mongo?"
"Sure."
"Mongo, I really feel bad about all — "
"Forget it," I said, smiling. "You'd better get in there before Statler has you selling peanuts."
I felt like the mouse who'd just removed the thorn from the lion's foot. Bruno grinned, mumbled something about seeing me again real soon and ran back down the access tunnel to the arena floor. I absentmindedly took my ticket from Charlie, who was discreetly standing back in the shadows, and headed for the seats.
It was an odd sensation, reentering that world, even as a spectator. People stared at me, as though the circus was the last place they would expect to find a dwarf as one of them. I found the seat Bruno had reserved for me and sat down, cloaking myself in the shadows as the last of the paraders exited and the lights dimmed.
The first two acts weren't much by professional standards, and it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps the circus was an outmoded institution in an age of nuclear terror, guerrilla warfare in the streets and mass refugee camps that no one could seem to find a way to eliminate. Yet the circus staggered on, and apparently there were enough throwbacks, enough men of skill, to keep it on its feet a little longer. From what I'd heard, the count was one of them. I was anxious to see him perform. His connection with the Jessums only sharpened my anticipation.
Now the spotlight swung up to the ceiling, glinting off the thin wire strung here, then sweeping back and forth to reveal the platforms to which it was anchored. A balance pole, heavily taped in the middle, was in place, waiting for its master to take it and step out into the air.
"Ladies and gentlemen! Before we bring on the great Count Anagori, let me introduce another great performer, one of the finest circus acrobats of all time, a man who is our guest here tonight. Ladies and gentlemen, let's have a round of applause for . . . MONGO THE MAGNIFICENT!"
The light struck at me like a snake, blinding me. I immediately experienced two conflicting emotions: disgust and elation. Together, they made a heady brew. I slowly stood up and acknowledged the applause, which was surprisingly hearty considering the fact that Mongo the Magnificent is not exactly Richard Burton. For just a moment I experienced yet another emotion that I thought had been purged from my system forever — the desire, the need, to perform, to please, to entertain. I quickly sat down.
The light swam away, flowing swiftly over the heads of the people in front of me and coming to rest on the quivering base of a rope ladder leading up into the darkness.
"Ladies and gentlemen! Statler Brothers Circus takes great pride in presenting the incomparable . . . COUNT ANAGORI!"
I leaned forward as the band struck up a lively march. Nothing happened. The musicians went through the short piece, then started again. Still nothing happened; the ladder hung limp in an otherwise empty pool of light. Halfway through the third coda the music died, along with the light. For a few seconds there was utter darkness, etched only by a few electronic screeches as someone fumbled with the microphone.
"Ladies and gentlemen! We give you the peerless . . . PAULA!" Music and light, and a very young and attractive Paula came bounding out and immediately went into an exciting mix of adagio and acrobatics. She was good, but my mind turned from events in the center ring as I pondered the question of just what had happened to the count. No performer, and especially a headliner, ever pulls a no-show unless there's a very good reason. I couldn't help but wonder whether the count's reason might have had something to do with Bruno and Bethel Jessum.
I rose and started down the concrete ramp toward the access tunnel leading to the dressing areas, but slowed down as I neared the entrance. After all, where did I think I was going, and why? Bruno wasn't even a client; and even if he were, his last message to me had been friendly but unmistakably clear: Butt out. The fact that the count hadn't shown up for his evening stroll didn't give me the right to poke my nose into that business. Pushy, I'm not.
There was a popcorn butcher with a full tray of wares dogging it near the tunnel entrance. He'd been staring at me, and I dislike people staring at me almost as much as I dislike moral dilemmas; the two taken together can make me quite insufferable. I walked up to him, gave him a quick and nasty critique of his parentage and manners and stalked back to my seat.
Paula was followed by a dancing elephant. I decided there was no comparison and went back to brooding over the mystery that seemed to exist nowhere but in my own mind, searching for some connection between Bruno's mercurial shift in moods, a performer who didn't perform, and adultery that supposedly stopped at the mere mention of my name.
I might have thought some more if it hadn't been for the two pistol shots. I was up and racing out of the stands while most of the crowd was still trying to blame the ugly sounds on the whip hanging in the elephant trainer's hand.
There was already a crowd clustered around the door to the Jessums' dressing room; they stood and stared as though there were a performance going on inside. I pushed my way through to the front and gagged. Bethel was sprawled across a small, scarred dressing table, her blood-soaked chest thrust forward. Somebody had shot her in the heart. Somehow Bruno looked even more the clown, sitting upright in a ratty armchair with his painted smile and most of the left half of his skull splattered on the ceiling. There was the smell of burnt powder in the air, emanating from the barrel of the gun trapped in Bruno's lifeless fingers. I had seen quite enough.
* * *
"You still don't buy suicide, do you?"
The cold professionalism in Garth's voice grated on my nerves. I glanced up at the figure of my brother sitting next to me on the concrete apron of the center ring in the deserted arena. My eyes still hurt from the exploding flashbulbs of the police photographers, and the night smelled of blood.
"I told you what happened earlier."
Garth shrugged his shoulders, and I suddenly realized that the only reason Garth had stayed behind was to soothe what he assumed was my hurt at losing a friend. The realization generated a dual reaction of gratitude and resentment.
"She was stringing him along," Garth said, "Playing games with his head. Some women are like that. I'll bet she was snuggling up with the count five minutes after she gave her husband this bit about 'forgiving her.' This time she got more than she bargained for. She pushed and he flipped. Simple as that. You saw the gun in his hand."
"Somebody could have put it there."
"Who? The count? You already checked him out."
It was true; the first thing I'd done after recovering from the initial shock was to go after Anagori. It hadn't taken long to find him, or at least find out where he was — in the hospital. It turned out he'd twisted his ankle just before he was scheduled to go on and had insisted on going for X-rays. It was understandable; the count's ankles were his bread and butter. However, that eliminated the prime suspect. The accident had occurred a half hour before the double killing.
"Because Anagori didn't kill them doesn't mean that someone else didn't."
"Or that they did."
"Okay," I said tightly, rising to my feet.
"Hey! It's your turn to buy coffee!"
"I'm going to do some checking. Statler still stay at the same place?"
Garth came over to where I was standing. His eyes gleamed with the cold light of a policeman's curiosity. "Yeah," he said. "He's in the Plaza, uptown. At least that's the address he gave me. What do you want with Statler?"
"I want the show's stop list. I want to know where the circus has been and where it's going."
"What the hell for?"
I wished he hadn't asked. I had no answer.
"You're fishing, Mongo," Garth continued, "looking for something that isn't there." He paused, and when he continued his voice was softer. "You're blaming yourself for what happened. There's no way, brother. No way that works out. First Jessum tells you he wants you to talk to his wife, then he tells you to stay away. You were the one who said he seemed unstable. It's not your fault if he suddenly decided to kill the old lady and blow his own head off."
"Yeah," I said, turning away and heading for the exit. "You've got a rain check on that coffee."
Garth was right, of course. I was blaming myself for what happened, primarily because I kept remembering how close I had come to going all the way down the access tunnel. I might have prevented it.
Garth was also right when he said it looked like a clear-cut case of murder and suicide. Still, I had an itch down deep in my soul. Asking Statler for the show's stop list and combing those cities for a man with a motive for killing the Jessums might be like chasing a rainbow, but at the moment I felt I needed the exercise.
I went out the stage door, turned right on the empty street.
Somebody else was looking for exercise; the man behind me was coming up fast, almost at a trot. I don't like people coming up fast behind me. I stepped to one side to let the man pass and almost blacked out with pain as the knife skewered me, it's point slicing white hot into the flesh of my side, scraping along my ribs like fingernails on a blackboard and emerging four inches from the point of entry. I twisted with the force of the blow, taking the knife with me. At the same time I reacted instinctively, smashing the side of my stiffened left hand into my attacker's kidney. The man grunted and went to one knee. He seemed surprised, but that was about all. He slowly rose and stared at me, his pale green eyes absolutely expressionless.
I happen to have a black belt, second Dan, in karate, and usually when I hit a man in the kidney he stays down. This man was no mugger. He knew how to absorb pain; a professional, with skills at least the equal of mine. There was no doubt but that the man intended to kill me, and the knife in my side having effectively neutralized my usual bag of tricks, it didn't seem beyond the realm of possibility that he was going to succeed.
Blood was squeezing past the sharp metal plug in my side, my shirt and jacket were soaked, and I could feel the sticky warmth spreading. Dwarfs not having that much blood to begin with, I as beginning to feel dizzy — and cold, very cold.
However, the man had no intention of allowing me the simple dignity of bleeding to death. I watched, fascinated, as he slowly reached into his jacket and pulled out a pistol. Carefully, deliberately, he began to screw on a silencer. His pale eyes never left mine. He moved as if he had all the time in the world, which was understandable since the street was empty and it was obvious that I wasn't going anyplace. Despite the blank screen of his face, I knew the man was enjoying himself; all of the best are endowed with generous streaks of sadism, and this one had to be at the top of his profession. It was my time that was running out, not his, and he liked that. Vaguely, I wondered which of my enemies could afford this guy.
I couldn't stand to see the man so happy. I decided to give the sand in the hourglass a little kick.
I reached across from the opposite side, grabbed the handle of the knife and yanked the blade from my flesh. For just a moment pain pierced through the pervading numbness of my body. Pain was life and, for the moment, I found that reassuring. I didn't have time to gauge the balance of the knife — I could see the small hole of the gun's bore pointing between my eyes — so I could only hope that one of my lesser-known skills hadn't deteriorated over the years. The man's finger was tightening on the trigger as I reared back and flung the knife out into the darkness that was rolling over me from all sides.
* * *
I awoke in a place that smelled more like a hospital than heaven. Nor did Garth bear the slightest resemblance to an angel.
"I assume I'm to live."
"Which is more than can be said for the other guy." Garth was shaking his head. "You got him right in the heart. Not exactly dead center, you understand; about two inches into the left auricle. Of course, you're out of practice."
I twisted uncomfortably. My side was stiff and sore and there were two needles hanging out of either arm. I didn't need my brother's sarcasm.
He let out a long, low whistle. "Mongo, you're not to be believed! A criminology professor, gymnast, former circus great, black belt karate expert, and private detective who just happens to be a dwarf knife-throwing expert. Be thankful you're not the product of some guy's imagination; you'd be rejected by every editor in town."
I wasn't amused. "Who was he?"
The smile left Garth's face. "The Compleat Professional. No ID, no mug shots, acid burns on his fingertips. He'd even ripped the labels out of his clothing. We figure he was a big chicken coming home to roost. You've got to admit you've made a few enemies in your short career. Big ones."
"Uh-huh. Where's the circus?"
Garth thought for a moment. "Albany. Don't tell me you think — "
"Feel like going for a ride?"
"Where?"
"Albany."
"You've got to be kidding."
"How serious is this cut?" I knew the answer before I asked the question. I could feel the tape over the stitches in my side; flesh wound, bloody but not disastrous.
"You lost a lot of blood and they think there's still danger of infection. They said about a week."
"With the shortage of hospital beds they're going to keep me here a week?"
"Ah, but there's also a shortage of dwarf black belt — "
"Knock it off", Garth," I said tensely. "I have to see that circus. That's where the key is. I know it. I feel it. I want to see it, and I want to see it tonight. If you don't want to take me, I'll walk."
I started to walk, or at least I gave it some thought. I swung one leg over the bed and willed that the rest of my body should follow. For a moment it seemed as if my head would reach the floor before my feet, but then there were Garth's arms reaching for me, all twelve of them.
I got out three days later, thanks largely to my natural dislike for hospitals and the nurses' inability to track me through a labyrinth of hospital wards, laboratories and corridors. Garth threatened to take me to Albany in my hospital gown, but my natural dwarf charm finally won him over. I promised to sit quietly and do nothing but watch, on the condition that he buy the candy apples.
* * *
We parked on State Street and headed for the Washington Armory. Once there, Garth automatically started toward the rear. I grabbed his arm and directed him back to the lines forming at the main entrance.
"You're not going back to say hello to your cronies? You want to stand in line with the masses?"
"Right. Maybe I'll go back later. Right now I just want to get lost in the crowd."
"You're getting paranoid."
"Uh-huh. You just run interference."
Garth was humoring me, but I didn't have to remind him that New York's Finest still hadn't come up with the identity of my attacker, or his motive for wanting to kill me. That left the strange series of incidents connected with the circus, including the deaths of Bruno and Bethel Jessum. I was convinced I had somehow been dealt a hand in a game I hadn't even known existed; it was a deadly game, and I was going to lie very low until I learned the rules.
The cashiers and ticket takers were strangers, local people hired for the occasion. Once inside the armory, I pushed Garth's six-feet-plus into a large knot of people and dived in after, flowing along with the crush. It was tight quarters, but it made for anonymity, something I valued very highly at the moment. Ten minutes later I found seats that satisfied me, high up in the darkness. I immediately took out my field glasses and began to scan the arena. After five minutes I put them away and sank down in my seat to wait for the parade.
"See anything?"
"Yeah," I said tightly. "A bunch of people waiting for the circus to begin."
"And what is your conclusion, Sherlock?"
"Hippies are out and the Great Silent Majority is in. What the hell do you expect? I don't even know what I'm looking for. I just know it's here."
I made no attempt to disguise the impatience in my voice. I could feel hot flashes of fever running up and down my body, sapping my strength; I felt like a pinball machine about to register TILT.
"Easy, Mongo. Easy. If I didn't take your hunches seriously, I wouldn't be here." Garth paused and grunted. "How's your side?"
"It's fine." It hurt like hell. The few days I'd stolen from the hospital were going to cost me, but this had to be done; circuses move on, and personnel change.
The first clean notes of a circus piece cut through the smoky haze of the arena as a team of clowns bounded out into the center ring and immediately went into an overripe slapstick routine. I put the glasses back to my eyes and scanned the opposite side of the hall. This time I found a familiar face. Garth's voice was strained and low.
"You look like hell, Mongo. That white on your face isn't greasepaint, and if I don't get you home into bed it's liable to become permanent."
"Uh-huh." I handed Garth the glasses and pointed to a white-garbed figure moving in the aisles on the opposite side. "Check him out."
Garth put the glasses to his eyes and adjusted the focus. "The popcorn salesman?"
"Right."
"Nice clean-cut fellow out to make a buck. What about him?"
I took the glasses away from Garth's eyes, waiting until I had his full attention. "That same man was pushing popcorn in the Garden."
"Maybe there's good money in it. So?"
"So, concessionaires don't travel with the circus; they're all locals, the same ones that work ball games, carnivals, and so on. There's just no reason why that man should come one hundred fifty miles to sell popcorn. He'd make more on welfare." I hesitated a moment, groping for the connections. "In fact, I ran into him at the entrance to the access tunnel. I'll lay you ten to one he was there to watch out for me, to keep me from going in. Look at him; he's not trying to sell anything — he's using that tray as a prop."
Garth squinted through the glasses. "You're right," he said quietly. "That badge is probably a phony, too."
At last Garth was listening, truly listening. The trouble was that I didn't have too much else to say. I decided to let my tongue go for a walk and see where it would take me.
"Now, pick up on this," I said quickly. "Bruno didn't kill his wife, and he didn't shoot himself. They were killed because . . . because of their connection with me. I couldn't tell whether it was the fever or reasonable logic, but a picture was forming in my mind, a very ugly picture.
"Bruno's reasons for coming to me were real. His wife was running around and he didn't want to lose her. His mind was going and he thought maybe I could stop it merely by talking to her. He told this to Bethel and she laughed at him. That is, she laughed until she talked to Anagori. Are you following me?"
Garth said nothing. He was following me.
"When Anagori found out Bethel knew me and that I was coming to see her he blew. Why? Because I might also see him, and he couldn't risk that. He put a big scare into Bethel and she went into her act with Bruno, the idea being to head me off. Probably he figured I'd go home again."
"Then Statler gave you the celebrity treatment."
"Right. And Anagori panicked. He faked an injury to stay off the wire. The Jessums had become a liability to him because of their connection with me, so he sent someone to kill them while he was in the hospital."
"Someone like a phony concessionaire?"
"Someone like a phony concessionaire. Then, to tie up any loose ends, he sent a torpedo after me precisely because he was afraid I might not go for the coroner's verdict."
"Why? Who is Anagori, what's his operation, and why run it from a circus anyway?" Garth asked.
The questions hung in the air unanswered. "I'll let you know when I see Anagori."
Garth nodded tensely and leaned forward on the edge of his seat. "I'm going to round up some local help."
"Negative," I said quickly. "Sooner or later that other torpedo is going to be around here. Without you I'm naked as a bird. Let's wait until we find out the whole story."
Garth didn't like it, but I was right and he knew it. He leaned to one side, half shielding me.
"Just don't pass out on me."
"Not likely." It was, but there didn't seem any percentage in stressing the point. I took deep breaths, rationing my strength.
I watched Paula perform her act, but the hall had an annoying tendency to slide in and out of focus.
"Ladies and gentlemen! Statler Brothers Circus proudly presents . . . that master of the high wire . . . COUNT ANAGORI!"
The count had the impact and presence of a laser beam as he sprinted from the wings, a long, black silk cape billowing out behind him. He was rewarded with the greatest homage an audience can bestow upon a performer, a breathless gasp of astonishment and anticipation. Anagori paused once in the circle of light, released the cape and was halfway up the rope ladder before the cloth finally settled on the floor. I leaned forward, squinting into the bank of bright lights that followed him, lighting his way to the platform sixty feet above the floor of the armory. The hall suddenly righted itself with a sharp jolt as the adrenaline squirted into my bloodstream, staving off the effects of the fever.
I had hoped for the exhilarating shock of instant recognition. It didn't come. As far as I could tell, the man standing on the platform was a total stranger.
His elan, the electricity of his stage personality, made him seem larger than life. I judged his height at around six feet, his weight somewhere around one hundred eighty pounds. Age was more difficult, but I guessed he was in his early thirties, like myself. Every muscle rippled beneath his crimson tights.
"Who is he?" Garth's voice was strangled.
I could do nothing but shake my head, uncertainty falling around me, chilling me like a cloak of ice.
"Damn it, Mongo! Who is he?"
"I don't know . . . I'm not sure. Not yet."
Extremely confident, eschewing the traditional equipment checks, the count hefted his long balance pole and stepped out onto the thin, metal umbilical cord that was all that remained between life and a rather messy death on the concrete below; the count used no safety net. My hands trembled as I lifted my field glasses to my eyes and adjusted the focus; the figure of the count blurred for a moment, then sprang into focus. I blinked away a few drops of sweat and stared hard.
Anagori was good, incredibly good. He danced on the wire, pivoting and swinging back and forth, his face a mask of indifference. He might have been practicing in the middle of a gymnasium.
Yes. His face — dark, intense and brooding for all its indifference — was somehow familiar, but who was he, and where had I seen him?"
One thing was certain: Count Anagori had not developed his skills overnight. He had started at a very early age. A man like that isn't discovered in a Florida tryout, not unless he goes that route intentionally. Knowing Statler, the idea of where Anagori came from had been quickly submerged in the sea of dollar signs implicit in the artist's skills.
I left the man's face and concentrated on his style; his smooth, flowing motion and muscular control, his repertoire of moves. Somewhere . . . somewhere I had seen someone else move like that, many years before.
"You still don't know who he is?" Garth's hand was resting on the butt of his gun inside the waistband of his trousers.
"No," I said. Then, as an afterthought: "Nyet."
Nyet? Nyet!
Once again I was cold, cold as the brutal wind blowing across the Russian steppes. Suddenly I knew who Count Anagori was and why he was here.
"Vladimir Denosovitch Raskolnikov."
"Who?"
Garth had leaned close, but other things were happening now, emotions bringing on reactions I couldn't control. The name had brought with it images: the mutilated head of Bruno Jessum staring with dead eyes at the equally dead body of Bethel; the pale eyes of the killer who had left his knife in my body.
Two innocent people killed because of an accident, a coincidence. Two innocent people dead because Vladimir Denosovitch had simply picked the wrong circus in which to work.
Rage gripped me by the neck and shoulders, pulling me up out of my seat. Garth grabbed at me but it was already too late. I had already cupped my hands to my mouth.
"Raskolnikov!"
Raskolnikov froze on the wire, then swayed, his pole bouncing up and down like an antenna in a hurricane. The crowd moaned; somewhere to my right a woman screamed. Raskolnikov regained his balance and headed back toward the platform.
At the same time something whistled past my ear, collided with the steel beam behind my head and sang off into the darkness. Garth's gun exploded in my other ear and I turned in time to see the white-coated man drop his machine pistol and grope at the hole Garth had opened in his belly. Even as I watched, life blinked out in the man's eyes and he toppled forward, his blood soaking into the popcorn he had dropped in the aisle.
I looked back up to the platform; Raskolnikov was gone. The rope ladder was still, which meant he hadn't come down. He was still up there, hiding somewhere in the darkness of the steel latticework supporting the roof of the armory.
People were milling and screaming. Garth struggled to make his way down through the crowd, his gun in one hand and his police shield in the other. I knew he wasn't going to be successful in what he was trying to do. By the time he got reinforcements, Raskolnikov would be gone.
Where? How? I scanned the ceiling. The armory lighting system was old. Even with all the houselights on there were still patches of darkness staining the roof like squares on a checkerboard.
At the far end of the armory, high up in a large field of night, was a long bank of frosted windows left partially open for ventilation. In my mind's eye I could see Raskolnikov walking the girders, zig-zagging back and forth through the patches of darkness, making for those windows. If I remembered correctly, there was a sloping roof outside. Raskolnikov would find a way to get to the ground.
I had no idea how a man dressed in red tights would manage to hide in the streets of Albany, but if Raskolnikov was who and what I suspected, I knew such small details had already been anticipated and planned for. Statler would be out one high-wire walker, and the police one killer; but if I was right, there was a good deal more at stake. I had a strong hunch Raskolnikov's talents ranged far beyond those of a mere circus performer.
High up as we were, the first tier of supporting girders was just behind and above my head. I tried to ignore my lightheadedness and the ache in my side as I leaped up and grabbed the lower lip of the first I-beam, swinging myself up and over until I was sitting astride it. The throbbing hurt beneath the thick bandage suddenly exploded into a fireball of scorched nerve endings and I bit into my lower lip to keep from screaming. Still, the wrench to my freshly stitched wound was not entirely unrewarding. I had traded dizziness for searing pain. In view of where I was going, I did not consider it an entirely bad bargain.
I heard Garth yelling at me from somewhere below, but I didn't look down. Frankly, I don't like heights; still, the only thing between a killer and his freedom was a certain four-foot-eight-inch dwarf. I had to cut Raskolnikov off from his escape route. I could only hope that I could bluff the other man long enough for Garth to get some help. I knew a great deal depended on how much Raskolnikov knew — or didn't know — about the seriousness of my knife wound; the Russian wasn't likely to hang around very long for a dwarf that could be blown off his perch by a moderately strong whistle. Ah, well. It was time to find out just how unbelievable I was.
I clung to the currency of my pain, using it to buy my way up the interlocking maze of girders to the very top tier. Occasionally the sounds of the crowd below drifted up but, for the most part, I moved in a sea of silence broken only by the scrape of my shoes on the steel. Sweat poured off me, but it was the special dampness, the thick, warm wet in my side, that worried me most.
I headed for the bank of windows as fast as I could, balancing with my arms, taking a straight route. It was reasonable to assume that Raskolnikov had taken his time, moved carefully along his route, and that I was ahead of him. Reasonable? My life depended on it. In a few moments I would find out if he had been as reasonable as my assumption.
I passed into the lake of darkness covering the windows. If Raskolnikov was already there, waiting in my path, I was dead. It would simply be a matter of waiting behind one of the vertical beams, then pushing me as I passed. In my condition, I'd be able to offer no defense.
I stepped quickly through the dark tangle of girders. Raskolnikov wasn't there. I chose a wide girder about seven feet from the windows and sat down hard, bracing my back against a vertical beam.
That was it. I was broke. My physical and emotional bank accounts were empty. I was a hollow shell filled with whispers.
i didn't say i wanted a private detective i want you as a friend you were my friend want you everything's all right, mongo coming to see you was the smartest thing i ever did she asked me to forgive her forgive her i love her love her
I could feel laughter bubbling in my throat, frothing on my lips like specks of foam. I swallowed it and tensed, suddenly knowing that I was no longer alone. Raskolnikov was moving somewhere out in the darkness. I also knew that it would be Raskolnikov who would be alone if I didn't find some new source of strength to tap. I was slumping forward, slipping off the girder.
I closed my eyes, gritted my teeth and slapped my side. Strength returned to my legs and I wrapped them securely around the girder.
Raskolnikov was moving laterally, from my right to my left. He had to have spotted me on the way up, and I guessed he was angling for an attack. Talk was the only weapon left in my arsenal. I knew it was not so much what I said as how I said it that was important. The other man had to come past me to get to the windows, and I had to convince him I was strong enough to stop him.
"You're a long way from home, Vladimir Denosovitch." I listened to the echo of my voice in the empty vault of the ceiling. It was all right, much stronger than I had any right to expect, and Raskolnikov had stopped moving. I imagined I could hear the sound of heavy breathing, but I was not sure whether it was the other man or my fever. "The trip ends here."
Finally his voice came, almost indistinguishable from the whispers in my mind. He'd been trained to the height of perfection; a Russian, he spoke English with just the slightest trace of an accent.
"I have to get out, Frederickson. You know that. I don't want to kill you, but I will if I have to."
"You already tried that once, and your man couldn't handle the job. And you ordered the Jessums killed. Are you telling me you've had a sudden change of heart?"
There was a long silence, and I wondered whether he had detected the weakness in my voice or knew I was simply playing word games.
"I'm a professional, Frederickson. Surely you realize that. I do what I have to do, but I don't kill when there's no reason."
"There wasn't any reason before. You didn't have to kill the Jessums. The chances are I would never have recognized you, not after all these years. I remembered and made the connections because you forced me to. You panicked. That was hack work, Vladimir Denosovitch. Second-rate."
"That was a mistake," Raskolnikov said after a long pause. There was an edge to his voice. "Now the situation has changed. It's no longer necessary to kill you; it would serve no purpose. It is necessary that I escape."
"You're that valuable?"
"I am that valuable. What has happened thus far should have convinced you of that."
"Then you're as good an agent as you are a high-wire walker?"
"I leave such judgments to my superiors. I'm coming now, Frederickson. Get out of my way."
"No!" My own voice sounded detached from me. I could only hope it carried the force I'd intended. "You come close enough for me to see you and you'll look like Bruno Jessum."
"You've been investigated. I know you rarely carry a gun."
He was right, and my only chance was that he was as much a professional as he said he was. "Wrong again, Vladimir Denosovitch. Your men couldn't have had more than five or six hours to do their checking, the time between your talk with Bethel and my show at the circus."
"What are you talking about?" For a moment, Raskolnikov sounded almost as confused as I was scared. "We checked you after you killed our operative."
"Patchwork job, Vladimir Denosovitch." I said lightly. "You probably used local talent. If you want to stake your life on that report, go ahead. Personally, I'd rather keep you alive."
He was thinking about it, exactly what I wanted him to do. But not too much. Talk. I had to talk.
"You know, I remember the first time I saw you, Vladimir Denosovitch. You were good then, but I must admit you're even better now ..."
My tongue kept going but, in my mind, I was suddenly back in Russia.
There were sounds behind me. Raskolnikov was moving.
"The Moscow Circus is the best in the world, Vladimir Denosovitch," I said quickly. "Too bad you never made it."
The shuffling stopped. I'd hit pay dirt, his pride.
"My country needed me elsewhere."
"As a spymaster setting up and coordinating a nationwide intelligence-gathering net. Beautiful. Everybody's watching everybody else at the U.N. and the embassies while the big boss himself is off performing for the kiddies at a Saturday matinee. Beautiful, Vladimir Denosovitch! Was that your idea?"
"You're guessing," Raskolnikov said softly. "Most of this is your imagination." I had a feeling our conversation was rapidly drawing to a close.
Hot flashes: Russia, city after city, command performance after command performance. Then, in the central city of Chelyabinsk, where my guide said: "This one will be great. This one walks the wire."
Afterward, Vladimir Denosovitch Raskolnikov and I had drunk vodka together.
"But I'm right, aren't I, Vladimir Denosovitch? You're big. As big as they come. They trained you, set you up with false residency papers and smuggled you into Florida. Your assignment was to establish an intelligence drop route corresponding to the stop route of whichever circus picked you up. That circus happened to be Statler's."
"You're thinking out loud." His voice seemed much closer to me now, but I couldn't turn even if I wanted to. My head and shoulders seemed part of a single granite block. It was all I could do to keep talking.
"You couldn't have begun to put all this together before a few minutes ago," Raskolnikov continued. "Not before you called my name."
Which was why, now, he did have to kill me. As long as the secret of the route was safe, it could continue to expand and operate. Raskolnikov would disappear back into the vastness of Russia and somebody else would be sent to take his place. I was the only one left, besides Raskolnikov, with all the pieces to the puzzle.
"You're badly hurt, Frederickson. Very badly hurt."
Time had run out. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Raskolnikov standing beside me, his arms wrapped around the girder on which I was leaning. There was almost a trace of sympathy in the other man's voice — sympathy and chagrin at being held up for so long by a man who couldn't even stand.
He braced himself with his legs and placed his hands on my shoulders, pushing me forward and to the side. My arms and legs were now hanging limp and useless. I could see my blood flowing out onto the girder, dripping down into the darkness.
"My brother knows," I whispered hoarsely. "We've been talking about this for days. He'll make the same connections and backtrack along the circus route. The ring is smashed."
"No," Raskolnikov said. "There was no time. I'm sorry, Frederickson. I truly am. You are a very brave man."
I didn't find the sincerity in his voice any comfort. It was almost over now, and I vaguely wondered whether or not I would faint before I hit the sharp wooden and steel angles of the seats below.
Then Garth's shot caught Raskolnikov in the throat. It was a good shot, considering the fact that Garth had a bad angle leaning into a half-opened window and was firing into the shadows.
Raskolnikov gargled on his way down. There was the ugly sound of a body breaking on the seats, screams, then silence. I could see Garth in front of me, struggling to get his body through the window.
Good show; but considering the fact that I was already most of the way off the girder, I didn't think he was going to get to me in time.
It was the first time I'd been wrong all day.
Here's a piece about chemical manipulation of behavior, among other things. Long-suffering Garth may have his problems here, but years later I will really lay this situation on him in the novel The Cold Smell of Sacred Stone.
Rage
Slow day; anathema to a criminology professor moonlighting as a private detective. I had a graduate seminar to teach later in the afternoon, but my lecture was prepared and I was in my downtown office, staring out my second-floor window, hoping for some business to blow in off the street. I had to settle for my brother.
Someone else was driving the unmarked car, but it was Garth — all normal six feet two inches of him — who got out on the passenger's side, then walked stiffly across the sidewalk and into the building. I ran my finger over a water spot on the glass. It wasn't unusual for Garth to drop by for coffee when he was in the neighborhood, but this time there had seemed a tension — an urgency — in the way he moved that was incongruous. I went out by the elevator to meet him.
The elevator doors sighed open — Garth's face was ashen, his eyes two open wounds. He pushed past a young couple, glanced once in my direction, then rushed into my office. I went after him, closing the door behind me. He had already stripped off his jacket, and the black leather straps of his shoulder holster stood out like paint stains on the starched white of his shirt. He took the gun from its holster and slid it across my desk. "Find a drawer for that, will you, brother?" Garth's teeth were clenched tightly together and the voice behind them trembled.
"What's the matter with you?"
"Put it away!" Now Garth's voice boomed. His fists slammed down on the plastic surface of the desk top. A stack of books on the corner teetered and fell to the floor.
Angry men and guns make a bad mix. As a cop, Garth knew that better than anyone. I walked quickly around to the other side of the desk, opened a drawer and dropped the gun into it.
Garth sat down hard in a straight-backed wooden chair. He planted his feet flat on the floor and gripped the edges of the seat. Instantly the flesh around his knuckles went white. His head was bent forward and I couldn't see his face, but the flesh of his neck was a fiery red, gorged with blood. I could see his pulse, framed by muscle cords that looked like steel rods implanted just below the skin.
I spoke very quietly. "You want to talk, brother?"
Garth, in some soundproofed prison of rage, couldn't hear me. He suddenly sprang to his feet, grabbed the chair and flung it across the room, snapping a pole lamp in two and mining an ugly hole in the plaster wall. The shattered pieces fell to the floor; instant junk. In the same motion Garth spun around and with one sweep of his hand cleared the top of my desk. A heavy glass ashtray made another hole in the wall about a foot too low to be a perfect match for the other. Considering the fact that my office wasn't that large to begin with, I estimated that a complete renovation was going to take about three more minutes. I walked up to Garth and grabbed his arm. That was a mistake.
Now, I have a black belt, second Dan, in karate, and am reasonably proficient in a number of the other lesser-known martial arts; when you're a four-foot-eight-inch dwarf you develop a predilection for such things. Still, a man my size must rely on anticipation, leverage and angles, factors that don't normally spring to mind when you're merely trying to calm down your brother. Consequently, I found myself standing on my toes, Garth's hands wrapped around my neck. The whites of his eyes were marbled with red, while the dilated pupils opened up and stared at nothing, like black circles painted on canvas by a bad artist.
I knew I had only a few seconds to act. At the least, I could very well end up with a cracked larynx; at worst, there was the very real possibility I was going to end up as one dead dwarf, killed by my own brother. I didn't like the options.
I was floating in an airless void, Garth's features spinning before my eyes. I extended my arms, then drove my thumbs into the small of his back, just above the kidneys. That didn't do much except make him blink. I smashed my stiffened fingers up into the nerve clusters in his armpits. The animal that Garth had become grunted; his grip loosened, but it was nothing to cheer about; I still couldn't breathe. Finally I raised one hand up between his arms and poked at his larynx. Garth gasped and his hands came loose. I collapsed to my knees, my lungs sobbing for air. I managed to reach the shattered chair at the opposite end of the room. I grabbed one of the broken chair legs and spun around, prepared to bounce the splintered wood off my brother's skull. It wasn't necessary. Garth was leaning against my desk, staring uncomprehendingly at his hands. His face had changed color like a traffic light, from a brilliant crimson to a sickly yellow-white. His gaze slowly shifted to where I was poised like a statue, my improvised club raised in the air.
"Mongo . . ." Garth's voice was a muffled whisper of pain.
"I hope you feel better," I said, trying to sound sardonic. It didn't come out that way. It was hard for me to sound sardonic with a bruised voice box that felt as if it had been pushed back somewhere in the vicinity of my spinal column.
Garth's lips moved, but no sound came out. He was across the room in four quick strides, trying to lift me up in his arms. Enough is enough — I pushed him away with the chair leg. I was building up a little anger of my own, but it vanished as the door suddenly opened. The man who stepped into the room was of medium height, with close-cropped, warm-yellow hair that tended to clash with his cold gray eyes. I wondered if he dyed his hair.
Garth glanced at the man, then quickly turned back to me. His face was a pleading exclamation mark as he shook his head. The movement was almost imperceptible, but I thought I'd received the message.
"Who the hell are you?" I said to the man in the doorway.
Oddly enough, my voice sounded quite normal, with just the right seasoning of surprise. It hurt only when I swallowed.
"Name's Boise," the man said, surveying the damage. "I came looking for my partner here. Saw your name on the directory down in the lobby. Didn't know Garth had a brother."
Or that the brother was a dwarf, judging from his expression. I knew that look from scores of experiences with potential but unsuspecting clients. I didn't like it. Boise wasn't exactly getting off on the right foot with me.
"Garth doesn't feel well," I said. "Why don't you tell MacGregor I've taken him home? I'll call in later and let him know how Garth is."
Boise didn't move. "What happened?"
"I'm redecorating."
"Must be expensive," Boise said without smiling.
"Look, Boise," Garth said tightly, turning to face the other man, "my brother's right. I can't cut it the rest of the day. Cover for me, okay? I'll be in tomorrow."
Boise glanced once more at the wreckage of the room, then shrugged and walked out into the corridor. A few moments later I heard the whine of the elevator and Boise was gone.
"Where'd you pick him up?"
"We were assigned as a team for a case I've been working on," Garth said without looking at me. He had begun to tremble. "I don't know why. Look, get me out of here, will you?"
I went to the desk, took out Garth's gun and slipped it into my own pocket. Garth didn't object. He wheeled and walked out to the elevator ahead of me. I glanced at the clock as I closed the door. Less than ten minutes had passed from the time Garth had walked into my office. It struck me that Boise was a very impatient man.
* * *
"Where are you taking me?"
"I don't want you to think I'm being touchy," I said, guiding my compact out of the parking garage and into the cacophony of New York's midmorning vehicular insanity. "Still, the fact remains that you did try to kill me back there, and I don't even owe you money." I glanced sideways. Garth's face was stony, his eyes fixed straight ahead. "You knew enough to dump the gun," I said seriously. "That was smart, but a man doesn't do something like that just because he's feeling a little annoyed. I saw you get out of that car. You looked like Lon Chaney Junior running from a full moon. You climbed right out of your tree, and my guess is that it's not the first time something like this has happened. It's happened before, and you've done nothing about it. That's not so smart. It doesn't take a master detective like myself to figure out that you need a vacation — a long one — and some medical attention. I know a good shrink who teaches up at the — "
"Pull over a minute, will you?"
I debated with myself for a few moments, decided there was no sense in possibly provoking another attack, and pulled over to double-park beside a No Standing sign.
"You're right," Garth said, still staring straight ahead of him. "It has happened before — four times in the past three weeks. Each time it gets worse. I can't think of any words to tell you how sorry I am about what happened back in your office, so I'm not even going to try. But I am telling you I can't go to a hospital or see a shrink. Not yet."
"Like hell!"
Garth shook his head. Still, he remained calm. There was no sign of the terrible rage that had wracked him just a few short minutes before, but my neck still hurt. "Look," Garth said quietly, "you yourself said I knew what was happening. I know I need rest, and I'm going to take it. You can take me to anyone you want, and I'll cooperate fully, but just give me four days."
"What happens in four days?"
"I have to testify before the grand jury — with Boise. I have to be there. It's very important."
I grunted and slammed the car into gear. Garth reached out and touched my arm. I tensed, ready to drop him, but his touch was very gentle. "Just listen, Mongo." I put the gears in neutral but left the engine running. "Have you ever heard of anethombolin?"
I'd seen the word somewhere but couldn't place it. I said so.
"Anethombolin is a hormone produced naturally in the body under certain conditions," Garth continued. "Recently it was synthesized. Among other things, anethombolin may provide a cure for asthma, male infertility, high blood pressure and a host of other ailments. It also induces spontaneous abortions, and that's what makes it potentially worth millions. I say 'potentially' because, so far, nobody has come up with a way to control certain very unpleasant side effects. A New York laboratory named Whalen Research Associates has spent a lot of money trying to find ways to neutralize those side effects, and they've developed a lot of patents along the way. With the liberalized abortion laws, you can see what a drug like this would mean to some people here in this country, not to mention its value to the governments of underdeveloped, overpopulated nations like India. Because a lot of the work was government-financed, agreements were made that would provide for controlled, low-cost distribution. Those agreements go out the window if some other company comes up with the same thing, and that's exactly what may have happened.
"A few months ago an outfit calling itself Zwayle Labs announced that it was on the verge of developing synthetic anethombolin fit for human consumption. Whalen claimed that Zwayle couldn't possibly have done the work without violating one or more of the patents Whalen holds — in other words, industrial espionage. A secret investigation was ordered, the results to be presented to a grand jury. I pulled the case, and Boise was assigned as my partner because he'd worked on similar cases before. We started the preliminary undercover work and discovered possible leaks on Whalen's staff. The nature of the business makes it all very tentative, but we did find prima facie evidence of industrial espionage and patent violation. What's needed now is a full-blown investigation, but first our evidence must be presented to the grand jury. If it isn't, a lot of time will have been wasted, not to mention the fact that an injustice will have occurred."
That would have sounded naive — even funny — coming from a lot of cops I know; coming from Garth it didn't.
"Patent law. That sounds like a job for the feds."
"It is, but some aspects of the case come under our jurisdiction. Besides, we were asked to cooperate. We did the groundwork."
"Why can't Boise testify?"
"He can and will, but it's a very sticky deal, and the grand jury is going to want to hear corroborative testimony from either one of us. In other words, Boise needs me and I need Boise if we're going to make a case. Do you understand?"
"No. It sounds like a hell of a way to run an investigation."
"Industrial espionage and patent violations are very difficult things to prove — you'll just have to take my word for that. In any case, I must be at that hearing, and my testimony isn't going to mean much if they have to wheel me in from the psycho ward."
"I don't buy it, Garth. I saw you back there. You're not going to do anybody any good if you're dead — or if you're responsible for making somebody else dead."
"That's not going to happen, brother." Garth's voice was harder now, determined. "Four days. That's all I need. After that, a long rest. Agreed?"
Actually, there was nothing on which to agree. I couldn't make Garth enter the hospital and he knew it. He was asking for my cooperation — in effect, my approval, my belief that he could control the strange fires in him long enough for him to complete a task he had set for himself
"Most of the work is done?" I asked.
"Right. Now it's mostly just a matter of waiting around for the hearing."
"Full checkup when it's finished?"
"Full checkup."
I didn't like it, but I made no move to stop him when he opened the car door and stepped out into the street.
"I'll need my gun, Mongo," Garth said quietly.
It was true. If Garth would have a tough time testifying from a psychiatrist's couch, he'd have an even tougher time explaining how and why his dwarf brother took his gun and wouldn't give it back. I took the gun out of my jacket pocket and gave it to him.
* * *
I hate hospitals. I'd spent too much time in them as a child while doctors struggled to cope with the results of a recessive gene eight generations removed. The hospitals ran through my childhood like trains through a station. I stayed the same.
Now it was my brother, strapped to a bed in a psychiatric ward, too doped up even to recognize me.
I made arrangements to have him transferred to a private room and took a cab down to Garth's precinct station house. MacGregor, Chief of Detectives, was floundering around behind a desk strewn with stacks of coffee-stained papers. He was wearing his usual harried expression.
"What the hell is my brother doing up in Bellevue?"
"Easy, Mongo," MacGregor said. "I was the one who called you, remember? How is he?"
"Drugged right up to his eyeballs. I asked you what happened."
"I'm not sure. We're still trying to sort everything out. Garth called in sick yesterday. He came in this morning to go over some paperwork with Boise. You knew he's been working on a big case?" I nodded. "Your brother and Boise were having coffee," MacGregor continued. "A few minutes later Garth comes out and gets into an argument with Lancey over some little thing. Anyway, your brother wouldn't let it go; he broke Lancey's jaw for him, then he tries to pistol-whip Q.J. Took four guys to get him down. We called the hospital, and then I called you. We're just as anxious to know what happened as you are." MacGregor leaned forward confidentially. "He really wigged out, Mongo. You had to be here really to appreciate what he was like. Boise says he's been acting funny for some time now."
"Is that right? What about the case Garth was working on? The grand jury is supposed to hear it day after tomorrow. What happens now?"
"Nothing. They won't be hearing anything from this department."
"Why can't the hearing be postponed until Garth is better?"
"Because it wouldn't make any difference. Boise says we don't have a case."
"Now why would Boise say a thing like that?"
"Ask him."
* * *
I did.
"You know about that?" Boise asked.
"Garth mentioned it to me."
Boise carefully stirred the coffee in front of him. The sound of the spoon bouncing off the sides of the cup grated on my nerves. "There was never a case to begin with," he said evenly. He punctuated the sentence by dropping the spoon on his saucer. "I hate to be the one to have to tell you this, but this whole affair was a result of paranoia on your brother's part, and that's all."