Split Code (11 page)

‘Don’t be mad, you’ve got a free shot. Go on. Hell, we only shot policemen in Liverpool.’

They all said go on, so I did it again.

This time Donovan, Hugo and Grover all kissed me, while the stall-owner snatched back the gun and broke it as if he planned never to use it again. Then he handed me over my bear.

It wasn’t quite as massive as Panadek in his gorilla suit, but it was a fairly near miss. I could see why takings might be low if they had to pass these things over too often. The cramp in my left arm explained why they didn’t run very much risk.

Silence fell on the Mallards, Sukey and Grover as six pairs of eyes switched hopefully back and forth between my face and the bruin’s. Grover said, ‘The men died. Jonah died them.’

‘They were just pretend men,’ I said, and knelt. ‘Everyone is to hold Joanna’s bear for a little. Grover hold it first.’

It was as big as Grover. He put it on its feet in the dirt, seized a ring on its chest and looking at us expectantly, tugged it.

‘My name,’ said a thick, oily voice next to Grover, ‘is dear old Brownbelly Bruin, your Lover Bear. Stroke your Lover Bear. Kiss your Lover Bear. Take your Lover Bear home to bed with you. And remember. Only Love beats Milk, baby.’

There was an assorted silence. Grover looked smug. Charlie and Bunty both looked queasy, for different reasons. Donovan, Johnson and Hugo all looked at one another, after which Johnson turned to the Greek and broke the silence by saying, ‘I want to buy all your bears. What’ll you take for them?’

For of course, that was how the absent Rudi Klapper had meant to arrange for his ransom for Benedict. By ensuring that the right talking bear and the guy with the M.M.A. badge got together.

I said, ‘Why didn’t the police think of that, then?’

‘They didn’t have Grover with them,’ said Johnson. He was still looking at Alexei the Grecian.

‘No sale,’ said Alexei. ‘I need them bears to run the stall with. They’ve stopped making them.’

‘O.K.’ said Johnson agreeably. He took out his wallet and flipped twenty dollars on to the counter. ‘We won’t take them away. That’s just for letting us pull all their talk-strings.’

‘Are you a weirdo?’ asked Alexei. ‘What good will them bears do with their strings broke? You cats piss off. You’re violating my privacy.’

In silence Johnson licked off another ten dollar bill. Alexei let it lie. He said, ‘The law says you win them bears by shooting. You win ‘em by shooting and you got the law on your side. You try to force me to sell them and I’ll get a patrolman down on your neck and I mean it, man.’

There were twenty-four bears on that stall. I’d been counting them.

‘There is no call to argue,’ said Hugo. ‘We summon the police. It is their business.’

It was, of course. But meanwhile the Mallard kids had set upon Grover, and Sukey was yelling for sustenance. I said, ‘Suppose you all take the kids off for a feed, and Donovan and I will shoot till you’re finished? It’s worth a try. The police’ll keep us for ever.’

‘You’re going to shoot?’ said Alexei. He looked flustered.

‘Two rifles, brother,’ said Donovan.

‘Three,’ said Hugo. ‘You two mommas go feed the family while Daddy goes hunting. There’s a card that says guest of the management.’

Charlotte took it, and she and Bunty pushed off with the children.

‘Three rifles?’ said Alexei cautiously.

‘Four,’ said Johnson stoically. He picked up a bill from the heap and pushed it over the counter. ‘You won’t reconsider?’

Alexei shook his head, and he was probably right. This way he couldn’t lose, anyway.

Although my back and left arm and elbows have never been quite the same since, I have sterling recollections of that competition.

We settled down side by side, Donovan and I, and started to shoot. So did Johnson. After a chain of disasters that threatened to shiver his glasses, Johnson dropped regretfully out while Donovan and I, with the occasional black, began winning bears slowly.

Hugo Panadek watched for two rounds, then took off his long leather tunic, revealing a silk jersey shirt with balloon sleeves over his fine shrink-wrapped gaberdine trousers. He picked up a gun, leaned over, sighted, and killed eighteen rustlers, pausing only to reload in a blur between corpses.

He received a bear, pulled its cord, and left it to talk while he loaded and fired a fresh volley. ‘My name,’ began the bear, ‘is dear old Brownbelly Bruin. Stroke your Lover Bear. Kiss . . .’

‘Jesus,’ said Donovan. ‘You train under John Wayne?’

Bald head gleaming, Hugo pooped the hood in the butt and dispatched the fifth and the sixth with a flourish. ‘At home,’ he said, ‘we shoot chamois on mountain tops. These are for children.’

Half an hour from that moment he had ten Brownbelly Bruins beside him. I had four and Donovan five, and around us was the biggest crowd in the Park, with the uptight faces of all the other stallholders behind them. Johnson did a great job pulling the strings in a kind of canon effect. They all said the same thing: it was the best mass advertisement for love and milk since Cleopatra.

It was not, however, serving any other purpose whatever. It began to seem depressingly clear that the four of us had outsmarted ourselves. The Shoot-Out, no doubt, was the rendezvous. But whatever the plan, Brownbelly Bruins could have played no part in it.

My fractured right arm agreed. The spring in my rifle deserved to go into Mrs Eisenkopp’s Wig’n Lite hairpiece. At the end of the next round, I proposed to retire, lock, stock and barrel.

I was still shooting when Hugo claimed his next bear. I saw Alexei stretch up to lift one, and heard Johnson walk up and stop him. ‘No. Not that one. Not the shelf this time.’

I potted the rustler in the hotel window. Alexei said, ‘What?’

Johnson said, ‘What about the bear on the ground over there? Let’s take that fellow next.’

I potted the stooge through the bar-flaps.

Donovan fired his last shot and craned, with Hugo, over the counter. He said, ‘I didn’t see any bears on the goddam . . .’

I couldn’t help it. My eye followed theirs down to the floor instead of watching my target.

Alexei, stooping, lifted a bear from the ground. It had a badge on its bosom. I shot, and missed the guy in the waterbutt.

Alexei straightened, holding the bear in both arms like a parcel. With a bang and a flash, the little tin guy in the waterbutt shot back with a red light, and missed me.

He got Alexei, though. Alexei bellowed.

We all looked at him. There was blood all over his arm, and even more on the bear, which he had dropped on the counter in a blizzard of guaranteed sterilized kapok. Alexei had only been winged. But the Brownbellied Bruin would speak no more; for it had been drilled cleanly through the brown belly.

We taught those rustlers a lesson. The waterbutt killer had gone. But the next little tin hoodlum got three pellets bang in the stomach and went offstage bent like a hairpin, while Hugo managed to hammer the Wells Fargo hatchetman twice. Then he said, ‘For Chrissakes, what are we doing!’ and flung the rifle down and dashed to where Johnson had already plunged through the scattering crowd, towards the distant form of a man whose black, curly hair I had seen retreating like this once before, just after he’d thrust Benedict into a trash bucket.

The smoking tin cutouts were guiltless. It was Rudi Klapper, of the Carl Shurz Park, who had shot Alexei, and shot also the one bear which had been hidden from casual custom. Set aside with an M.M.A. badge in its fur to await another M.M.A. badge to claim it. Because recorded inside, of course, was the kidnap message.

I scooped up the wreck of the bear and took to my heels after Johnson.

I lost him. I couldn’t see Donovan. A red wooden buggy appeared flying a streamer saying ‘Missy’s Wonderland’ and with three familiar heads crammed into it. I took a flying leap and landed in Donovan’s lap just as it rocketed off at top speed through the Park, with Hugo’s bald head lowered over the wheel. I said, ‘It was Rudi Klapper. Where is he?’ One wheel ran up a tree root and down again.

Donovan said, ‘Will you take your bloody bear out of . . . Thanks. He jumped on the Transcontinental Adventure Train.’

‘What?’ I said.

‘He’s crossed the pond on the train to the parking lot. We have to get round fast, if we’re to catch him,’ said Johnson.
‘Christ,
watch the . . .’

He didn’t bother to finish. Behind us, a twenty-foot cluster of balloons rose in the air, over a blaspheming and recumbent balloon man. An ice cream and pretzel stall rocked and there was a small crunch as we went over a set of low railings. There was a smell of fish, and a sound of squealing and splashing. Hugo turned abruptly left, missing two shining grey shapes lumbering out of a swimming pool, grinning.

A rubber ring, descending, pinned our Missy flag to its mast, stinking of dolphin. Donovan uncovered his eyes and covered them again as a chain of antique cars approached, full of children. Hugo spun the wheel and the buggy plunged into a garden of sheep, angora rabbits and llamas, which spat before bolting.

Hugo drove between trees in hysterical lunges. We came out into the open and there ahead was the parking lot, with Johnson’s Mercedes in it. And far beyond it, near the entrance, a low grey Dodge pulling out slowly, with its near front door open and Rudi Klapper racing towards it. We fell out beside the Merc. Johnson said, ‘Joanna, come with me. You two, get up the Sky Ride and watch.’

He had the doors open already. He flung the bear in and switched on the ignition. I dived in behind him. I slammed the door.

Rudi Klapper jumped into the Dodge.

Johnson switched on the ignition again.

Rudi Klapper slammed his door. The Dodge revved up and began to move, fast.

Johnson switched on the ignition again. The dashboard glowed green in his glasses. Without a word, he grabbed and fastened his seatbelt.

The Dodge, accelerating, shot to the gates of the park.

Johnson tried the ignition again and then, his hands on the wheel, turned and looked at me.

I said, ‘I think you need to fasten the bear into its safety-belt.’

With infinite care, my father’s friend Johnson leaned over and ripping out both ends of the belt, clipped them round the sagging fur paunch of the Brownbelly Bruin. Then with equal care he switched on the ignition.

With a roar, the engine fired. The tyres squealed as the car hurtled forward. They squealed again as it stopped with a jolt at the feet of a Saggy Baggy Elephant standing placidly in mid-road, demanding our parking-ticket.

I yelled out of the window while Johnson jerked backwards and sideways to get round the obstacle. The Saggy Baggy sidestepped thoughtfully and leaning its elbow on the window, began to make a long, muffled statement in Brooklynese.

Johnson reversed again, nearly taking its rubber trunk with him, and this time scraped round and down the road to the highway.

There was no sign of the Dodge, and there were fifteen container trucks passing. We got out on the tail of the last one, and weaving from lane to lane raced for five or six miles before being flagged down for good, by the State troopers. Johnson’s explanation, with the burst teddy bear tidily strapped into the pullman beside him, was a miracle of courteous forbearance in the face of raucous incredulity.

We drove under escort back to Missy’s American Wonderland and found a lot of screaming coming down from the Sky Ride. Investigation disclosed that Hugo and Donovan had been up in the cable cars for twenty minutes plotting the Dodge’s itinerary, in aid of which Hugo had cut off the power.

We introduced him to the police as the designer of Missy’s Golden American Wonderland, and the police became suddenly interested. We all repaired to Hugo’s office, having sent word to Bunty and Charlotte and visited both The Great Shoot-Out and Alexei in the First Aid Room. All the bears had disappeared from the ground by the stall where we had left them. The State trooper who had asked the most questions said, ‘And you think this was the bear you were meant to win, if the kidnap had really taken place?’

I said, ‘I suppose so. Or at least, Klapper thought so.’

‘Then,’ said the trooper with impeccable deduction, ‘the message inside must have contained something he thought would give him away?’

‘Who can tell?’ Johnson said. His glasses looked soulful.

‘Well, I can,’ said Hugo Panadek. ‘If you’ll give me a while with a tool or two. He’s smashed the spindle, but the rest is mostly all right, I shouldn’t wonder.’

We made our statements while Hugo worked, and then Bunty and Charlotte arrived, with six kids and three new boyfriends, and Missy’s catering staff sent in a stack of hamburgers.

I was on my fourth when Hugo said, ‘Well. I think that does it,’ and set something in motion.

From inside the last Brownbelly Bear a new voice spoke: a guttural voice, quite unlike that of the Lover Bear we all knew and were sick of.

The voice said,
‘Mr and Mrs Booker-Readman, I have your son. He is nailed in a box, without food and drink and with enough air to last him until midnight tomorrow.

‘At eight o’clock tomorrow night, you will come to the tree nearest this stall, and leave beside it a paper carrier bag containing four million dollars in old bills. If you tell the police, no one will collect the money and your son’s box will never be found. He’ll starve and suffocate, Mr and Mrs Booker-Readman, if l am arrested, or if I even suspect you have set a trap for me.

‘So bring the money. Do as you’re told. And you’ll have your son back. He’s very upset, Mrs Booker-Readman, and very cold and very hungry. And he’s going to stay that way, till he’s paid for. Remember - no police.’

Someone, I don’t know who, put an arm briefly round my crumb-strewn sweater. The patrolman said, ‘Well, that’s freaky. Why should he stick his ass out to smash up that message? It don’t tell us nothing!’

‘It does,’ I said. ‘The accent. It tells us the accent is Russian. And that goes with the man in the car. The man who had the Dodge ready and out in the parking lot. I thought I recognized him, but I couldn’t be sure. I’m sure now.’