The Comedy is Finished (11 page)

There was nothing personal about it. There
was
nothing personal in it. The fact that Davis had been Mark’s choice of subject—so subtly inserted into Peter’s mind during the early discussions that Peter now believed Davis to have been his own idea—mattered little. In truth, Davis
was
the best bargaining chip they could have obtained, since government officials and other people closer to the center of power were all so much more carefully guarded.

True, Mark had reasons to hate Koo Davis for himself if he wanted to dwell on them, but that wasn’t the point. Mark had left all that personal stuff behind, he was out of those emotional quagmires now, he behaved on the basis of logical necessity
only
. Whatever
happened to Koo Davis, it would be due exclusively to the impersonal logic of the situation. Revenge, hatred, none of that would make any difference.

On balance, in fact, it was marginally better that Davis be alive. One or two more tapes should still be made—without the jokes. And it was tactically better that Davis remain a living redeemable counter in the game. So Mark’s decision to save his life had also been logical, an immediate decision among alternatives, and not the result of any misplaced emotional reaction. He had done the right thing for the right reason.

At precisely three o’clock, a blue Dodge Colt rolled by, a white cloth fluttering flaglike from its antenna. Mark leaned forward to watch, hard-edged leaves brushing his bearded cheeks and the jungly smell of the shrubbery rich in his nostrils. No other car trailed the Colt.

The white Ford Granada eased by in the opposite direction at three minutes past the hour. Mark watched it out of sight.

At five past three he stood, stretching in the dark, his ankle-bones cracking. He waited there, in the darkness, and two minutes later the Impala came along, Peter at the wheel. Mark trotted out to the road, Peter stopped, Mark slid in on the passenger side, and Peter accelerated again, toward the freeway entrance.

“Blue Dodge Colt,” Mark said. “Went through on the dot. Nobody followed it.”

“Good. That package of yours smells.”

Mark glanced at the brown paper bag on the back seat. “Can’t,” he said. “It’s very securely sealed in a Baggie.”

“It smells,” Peter insisted. “Sniff for yourself.”

Mark sniffed; there was a faint aroma, at that. “Maybe you farted.”

Peter’s mouth corners turned down. He was not amused. He steered them onto the freeway, then accelerated to sixty. There
were fewer than half a dozen vehicles anywhere in sight. Peter said, “It’s a stupid gesture anyway, even if you’re right.”

“They’ll understand,” Mark said. “And I will be right.”

“And if you’re wrong?”

Mark shrugged. “Then it’s cost me one Baggie and one cassette. Besides, they’re already being cute.” And he told Peter about the white Granada.

Peter obviously didn’t like that. “What’s the matter with them? Don’t they realize we don’t
have
to do this?”

“They can’t help themselves. They’ve just got to play Counterspy.”

Peter drove along, drumming his fingertips against the steering wheel. “Who knows what else they’re doing? We’ll call it off,” he decided. “We’ll phone them, tell them to do it right or not at all. They’re the ones want Davis alive.”

“No, Peter. Let them do it again later? They still won’t be straight with us, you’ll just give them more time to get set up. We do it now.”

“I’m not interested in being caught.”

“None of us is.”

Peter gave him a sidelong look. “You just want to use your Baggie.”

“There’s that, too.” Then Mark pointed forward. “In the right lane.”

The Colt was moving at the modest forty miles an hour specified by Mark, and there seemed no other vehicle pacing it. Staying in a middle lane, Peter hung well back, and waited.

The San Diego Freeway north of Sunset Boulevard runs between two low barren treeless hills with virtually no buildings and an almost total lack of secondary roads. There’s only one freeway exit before the Valley itself, five miles to the north. It’s a strange landscape for the middle of a major metropolitan area, and it’s
quite dark at night. At one of the darkest spots, near the top of the long straight slope down toward the Valley, Peter drove forward to flash his high beams into the Colt’s rearview mirror.

The Colt at once braked hard, swerving off onto the shoulder of the road. Peter did the same, dropping farther back, and the two vehicles stopped about four lengths apart. The Colt’s driver’s door opened, but from his angle Mark couldn’t see what was happening. “Is he getting out?”

“No. He put the case on the ground.”

The Colt’s door closed, and the car at once spurted away, throwing gravel in its wake, leaving behind a small brown-leather case with a handle; it was about the right size and shape to carry two liquor bottles. Peter drove forward, stopped next to the case; Mark opened the door, picked it up, then slammed his door and Peter accelerated.

The case opened like a book, revealing in the faint glow of the map-light a dark blue plush interior separated into more than a dozen small compartments; it reminded Mark of cliff dwellings in photographs. A folded sheet of paper proved to contain the doctor’s instructions; Mark put it away in a pocket and returned his attention to the case.

Each compartment contained a bottle or box, with a small plush strap across to keep the contents in place. Mark murmured to himself, “One of these buttons?” His thumb stroked the chrome snaps on each of the straps, feeling for one to be different. “No; they didn’t have time for structural changes. In one of the bottles.”

Peter meanwhile was driving rapidly down the slope toward the Valley, where the Ventura Freeway crossed this one, in an interchange with almost limitless options. While Mark went through the bottles, opening each, emptying the contents into his palm and then returning them, Peter took the exit ramp for the Ventura
Freeway east, then switched back to the San Diego Freeway north, then at the last instant took another downramp to the local streets. His rearview mirror told him that no one had followed him through all his maneuvers.

Mark had finished his first scanning of the case by now, and had found nothing. He was frowning at it, thinking it over, stroking his beard, considering the possibilities. Peter said, “Nothing?”

“I don’t believe it. Wait a minute.
Inside
a capsule!” He reached for a bottle, shook a dozen or more large capsules into his palm, then picked them up one at a time, shaking each next to his ear before putting it back in the bottle propped on his lap. The capsules were red and green, opaque, and contained something with the consistency of coarse sand; a faint rattling sound could be heard inside each.

Except one. Mark nodded in satisfaction when he reached it. “Right,” he said.

Peter seemed honestly surprised. “Did they really?”

“Really.” Dumping the rest of the capsules back into the bottle, Mark broke open the odd one, and there in his palm was the transmitter, a tiny bug no bigger than a shirt button.

“Those stupid bastards,” Peter said.

A cold rage lived deep within Mark, ready to be stirred by almost anything. It was rising now, making his face bonier beneath the beard, making his voice softer and colder. “What we
should
do,” he said, “is dump this whole case out into the street and let
them
decide if he dies first or they deal first.”

“No,” Peter said. “As long as he’s alive and unhurt, they have to be cautious against us.”

Mark held up the hand with the bug in it. “Like this?”

“Devious, but cautious. Go ahead and use your package.”

“Right.” Tucking the bug into his shirt pocket, Mark closed the
pill-case and put it on the back seat, then brought forward the brown paper bag, which seemed fairly heavy. He opened the bag, then reached in to remove the twisty sealing the Baggie within. When the Baggie was opened, a stench filled the car.

“Jesus!” said Peter.

“Won’t be long.” Mark dropped the transmitter into the Baggie, sealed it again, and closed the paper bag. “Stop at a mailbox.”

They drove another two blocks, then Peter angled to a stop by a mailbox. Mark got out, dropped the paper bag into the mailbox, and then they drove on.

Koo Davis is sick and scared, he thinks he’s dying, and he’s stuck here in some kind of awful comedy. He asks himself: Do I deserve this? His stomach is so painful he can’t stand it; in fact, he keeps passing out from the pain, particularly if he tries to move. His head hurts, his throat is on fire, perspiration streams from him and yet his mouth is so dry his tongue feels like a foreign body, some lumpy dry sausage cluttering up his head. I’m dehydrating, he tells himself, with useless medical assurance. But he’s tried asking for water, and they’ve given it to him, and he’s learned the hard way that he can’t keep it down.

But the comedy is, there’s some clown here talking to him about politics. This guy, and a woman Koo hadn’t seen before, cleaned him up and cleaned up the room and have both spent a lot of time with him ever since, and have even told him their names—or anyway they’ve told him names they’ll answer to, theirs or somebody else’s. Larry and Joyce. Joyce just stands around looking worried, in traditional sickroom fashion, but this schmuck Larry
talks
.

“You’re a bright man, Koo, you’ve seen a lot of the world, you must have seen the terrible inequity in the way different people live. Infant mortality in Central America, for instance, is
so much
higher than in the United States. Yet we all live on the same planet, don’t we? In the last analysis, we’re all a part of the same community. And the
resources
are there, Koo, everybody could have a decent life, enough food, proper shelter, a decent rewarding life.
What stands in the way? Koo, isn’t it obvious? It’s the method of distribution, Koo, you can see that.”

And: “Did you know Thomas Jefferson said America needed a new revolution every twenty-five years? Because otherwise the country would stagnate into just another power, just another nation like all the others.”

And: “Marx tells us the means of production belong to the workers, and if you think about it you can see where that makes sense. The tenant farmer, the sharecropper, is the clearest example. His work makes the land productive. His
ongoing
work, clearing, seeding, crop rotation, makes the land productive for the long term and makes it increase in value in the only way that value matters, which is increased production. But he has to pay a portion of that production to someone else, who doesn’t work the land, who doesn’t have any connection with the land except a deed that says he
owns
it. Why does he own it? Because he bought it or inherited it from somebody who had the same relationship with it; that piece of paper. And if you trace it back, sooner or later you get to the man who started the piece of paper, and he either stole the land from somebody else or he made it his in the first place by
working
it. Of
course
land should belong to the farmer who works it and makes it productive, there really can’t be any argument about that. So let’s take the same concept into the factory.”

It isn’t bad enough that Koo is kidnapped, that he’s sick and possibly dying; he also has to be nattered at by some soapbox birdy. If I throw up again, Koo promises himself, then somehow, somehow, I’m gonna throw up on
him
.

Koo sleeps or dozes or loses consciousness from time to time during this endless lecture, and there are weird intervals when he’s neither awake nor asleep, but somehow floatingly present, and everything takes on the strange glow of fantasy; the calm
persuasive stupid voice, the absurdity of a window facing only water, the long narrow dimly lighted room, the remaining stinks of his sickness, it all swirls together and he becomes Captain Nemo in the Nautilus, sailing through the limitless green oceans, sailing on and on, noiseless and omnipotent, gliding through the echoing ocean depths to save the world.

Yes, it all makes sense now; Captain Nemo will save the world, will give each man and woman and child his own portion of the planet, marked off on a grid, like a great monster checkerboard in green and brown, grassy green and dirt brown, green grass and brown dirt, and all the tall slender silent people with the solemn big eyes and the silent gratitude standing on the checkerboard, each person on his square, all around the world. And Captain Nemo sailing through the sky in his submarine, while the rain pours down on all the people, and the water crashes through the window, and now Koo
is
in the submarine, rising through yellow water toward the surface, and here he is on the hot wet sticky sheet atop the couch, with the water still imprisoned beyond the unbroken window—wasn’t that smashed? he remembers something; no, it’s gone—and the calm earnest reasonable intense committed intelligent thoughtful
stupid
voice going on and on.

Other times, his mind is clear, and he thinks his own thoughts within the persuasive drone. He knows this is what they call brainwashing, and he wonders if they poisoned him on purpose, to weaken his resistance. Their surprise and shock
seemed
real, but it could have been just an act. And in any event, what this guy is talking is straight party line, right enough.

The thing is...the thing is, the goddamn Vietnam thing might have been a mistake, and everybody now knows it was a mistake, but that doesn’t mean the worldwide Communist conspiracy doesn’t exist. It exists, all right, and now Koo’s gotten tangled up in it; they
picked him, he knows they picked him, because he broke his no-politics rule. So here’s a rule about rules: Break the other guy’s rules if you want, but don’t break your own.

Those ten names he read into the cassette. A couple of them rang a bell, reminded him of headlines from a few years back, but clearly the whole crowd is part and parcel of the Communist plot. These people
exist
, they really do, and Koo now realizes what went wrong. The trouble was, the American government and the American intelligence community, starting from the time of Joe McCarthy and coming right on up, has played the part of the boy who cried wolf. They were seeing Commies and pinkos and fellow travelers and Comsymps and all those other chowderhead words under every bed, and the result is, too many people now don’t believe there’s a wolf out there at all. But there is, by Jesus, and just at the moment he’s got Koo by the ankle.