The Comedy is Finished (12 page)

Joyce comes in from time to time with a cool damp cloth to put on Koo’s forehead. It helps a little, but the cloth gets as burning hot as his head within seconds. She comes in now with two wet cloths, puts one on his forehead, and swabs his face and neck with the other. Larry pauses in his monologue, and Koo whispers to Joyce (he can’t talk anymore, not with this throat), “Thanks. It’s better.”

“Good. They’ve gone to get your medicine. They’ll bring it soon.”

She’s said that before, but Koo can’t work out what she means by it. Are they going to the drugstore for aspirin? They can’t go back to Triple S, can they? “Excuse me, we’re the people kidnapped Koo Davis, we came to get his pills.” Makes no sense. Koo would like to ask her what she means, but the question won’t phrase itself; his mind wanders before he can figure out how to ask her anything.

He drifts away now while she’s still dabbing at his stubbly cheeks—he hasn’t shaved since yesterday—and when he drifts back she’s gone, the Larry doll has been wound up again, and a hint of gray smears the water beyond the window; it’s becoming tomorrow.

He went to sleep with some question half-formed in his mind, but he wakes up with another one all ready, on the tip of his tongue. He turns his head a little and whispers, “Larry.”

“—into the communal pot, and—Did you say something?”

“Question.”

“Of course, Koo.” Larry’s sincere intern’s face comes closer. “What is it?”

“Not an insult,” Koo whispers. He can only bring out fragments of the sentences in his mind. “Really want to know.”

“I understand, Koo. I promise I won’t be insulted. What do you want to ask?”

“If you like—Russia—so much—why
don’t
you—go live there?”

Larry doesn’t look insulted, but he does look astonished. “Russia? Koo, what does Russia have to do with anything?”

“Commie—Communist—”

“Marxist, you mean.” Larry smiles with indulgent understanding. “Marxism isn’t Russia, Koo. Russia is at least as decadent and far more repressive than the United States. What we’re talking about is a
new
order, something never seen on the planet before, a wedding of people and resources, and finally the salvation of the planet itself. Koo, do you think it’s an
accident
that the developer of the aerosol spray can was a friend of Nixon’s?”

This non sequitur is so striking that Koo can only stare at Larry in admiration. “I could use you—as a writer,” he whispers, and the door is burst open and in marches the mean one, the tough guy with the beard. Koo first notices, in amazement and sheer
unalloyed pleasure and delight, that in the tough guy’s hand is Koo’s pill-case! By Christ, they’ve done it! Salvation is at hand! But then Koo notices that the guy is raging mad, and his delight turns to fear. Something bad is coming.

It is. The guy slaps the pill-case onto a counter and says, “There it is.” Pointing at Koo he says, “And you don’t get it.”

A terrible weakness runs through Koo’s throat and into his eyes, and he can only stare, beaten down, unable anymore even to wonder why.

But Larry asks the question Koo might have asked: “Mark? You won’t give him his medicine?”

“Not yet,” Mark says. (So now Koo knows another name.) “Not for a while yet.”

“But why not?
Look
at the poor man!”

“You look at him.” Mark, the son of a bitch, leans over Koo and speaks loudly and angrily into Koo’s face: “We didn’t have to deal with them at all. We could have left it up to them, either release those people and get you back, or fuck around until you’re dead. That’s what
I
wanted to do.”

You would, you bastard, Koo thinks. He stares in fear and hatred up at the angry face.

“But we were
humanitarian
,” Mark says, twisting the word and giving a contemptuous quick glance over his shoulder at Larry. “We got your goddamn pills. But could they play it straight? They could not. They bugged the case, they put a directional transmitter in it. I
knew
they would. And
you’re
going to pay for it.” Turning to Larry, whose face shows he’s full of protests, tough guy Mark says, “Out.
I’ll
watch our beauty for a while.”

Larry will argue, but he won’t win; Koo can only watch, sharing Larry’s helplessness as he says, “Mark, you can’t ex—”

“I can. Go complain to Peter, and see what good it does you.”

Koo stares across the room at his case. His stomach burns, it burns as though charcoal briquettes are smoldering there. Even a bastard like this fellow Mark wouldn’t act like this if he understood the pain. Would he? I’m not going to cry, Koo promises himself, blinking.

Lynsey Rayne, having had her little “victory” over the question of the transmitter, had finally agreed to go home and get some rest, leaving Mike free to supervise the tracking operation from the office. There’d been no positive result from the sweep at the Sunset Boulevard end, so the transmitter was their last shot at the basket. Mike suspected Jock Cayzer had private doubts about the wisdom of using the transmitter, but that was why Jock was local and Mike federal; you had to know when to play hardball if you wanted to get into the big leagues. And at any rate, if Jock did have qualms, he kept them to himself.

One of Jock’s people had come in with plastic cups of orange juice, and Mike had surreptitiously spiked his from the pint of hundred-proof vodka he kept in the glove compartment of his car, so he was feeling more relaxed now, more alert and sure of himself. He was in radio contact with the two monitor vans, and from their first reports things were going well; the subject car appeared to be moving in a fairly straight line northwestward across the valley. There’d be no attempt at visual contact until it came to rest.

The workroom, where Mike and a radio technician sat together at a table, was filling up with people; mostly men, with a sprinkling of women. Assembling here were uniformed and plainclothes officers from Jock Cayzer’s force, plus FBI agents from the Los Angeles office, waiting for the suspects to settle back at last into their nest, which at exactly twenty-three minutes to four they did.

“Been in one place now for over a minute,” the voice said from Van Number One. “I think they’ve lit.” The voice maintained the
proper tone of professional detachment, but underneath the excitement could be heard.

It was infectious excitement, vibrating in the very air of the workroom, in the quick bright-eyed glances people gave to one another, in their inability to remain seated quietly in one place. Mike felt it as a kind of tingling sensation in the tips of his fingers, in his throat, buzzing through his body. They were going to wrap it up, they were going to put it on ice even before the statutory twenty-four hours and the FBI’s official entry into the case. Beautiful. Beautiful. Washington, here I come.

It was another five minutes before the vans, moving cautiously, announced the location: “Intersection of White Oak Street and Verde Road, Tarzana.”

“Can you give us a house address?”

Two minutes later they had it: 124-82 White Oak Street. Two of Jock’s people got busy on telephones, and Jock came back with the result. “Family called Springer. Gerard Springer, forty-six, engineer out at Cal-Space. Wife, four kids. Owns the house, bought it five years ago.”

Mike frowned. “That doesn’t seem right. Unless they’ve invaded the house. Could be they’re holding the family.”

“At this hour of the morning,” Jock said, “there’s no way to check, find out if the kids’ve been at school, if Springer’s been at work.”

“Aerospace engineer, huh? Deep cover agent, do you think? Surfaced for this job?”

Jock Cayzer shook his head. “Mike, I do believe anything is possible.”

Five hours of surveillance at the Springer house produced nothing out of the ordinary. Gerard Springer himself drove away at seven-forty, in a red Volkswagen Golf, taking with him two of the children.
Two more children, dawdling and carrying bookbags, left at eight-oh-five. FBI agent Dave Kerman entered the premises at eight-thirty-five, showing ID from Pacific Gas and Electric and claiming to be a repairman looking for a potential gas leak; on his return to the mobile headquarters a block away he said, “It can’t be right. I’ll swear there’s nothing going on in there.”

Mike said, “Then they must have dumped it. Either they found the transmitter or they just dumped the whole package. Let’s go take a look.” And when they drove past the Springer house Mike and Jock Cayzer both said, at the same instant, “The mailbox.”

In the mailbox they found the brown paper bag, and inside the bag was the transmitter, with a piece of human dung, inside a sealed plastic bag. Also another cassette. With an uneasy tremor beneath his anger and humiliation, Mike traveled back to Burbank to listen to this new tape.

It was shorter than the first, and the voice was not that of Koo Davis, but was recognizably the same as the individual who had done the phoning. It said: “I’m taping this ahead of time, and I’m having a nice shit ahead of time, too, because I know what you people are like. You have no ethics. You have no morality. You think you’re on the side of good, and therefore it’s impossible for you to do wrong. You’ll promise not to plant a bug on us, but you
will
plant a bug on us. And I’ll find it. And I’ll send it back. I’m talking to
you
, Michael Wiskiel, I remember you from Watergate. We’ll be listening to the radio news all morning. Until we hear an apology from
you
, Michael Wiskiel, in your own voice, Koo Davis gets no medicine.”

That was it. In the profound silence that followed the harsh self-righteous voice, Mike sighed and said, “Lynsey Rayne is going to have my head on a platter.”

Trying to distract himself, Larry Crosfield sat in his bedroom and wrote in his notebook, the most recent in a series of notebooks he’d kept over the years. He wrote:

The dreadful paradox, of course, is the absolute necessity to do evil in order to bring about good. To make the world a better place, one must be worthy. To be worthy, one must strive for sainthood (in the non-clerical sense of
total commitment
to unattainable but appropriate ideals), and yet the lethargic and static forces of Society are so powerful that it requires, specifically requires, extra-social acts in order to promote change. One must do evil
while knowing it to be evil
and at the same time one must strive for sainthood. This paradox—

No. Larry couldn’t go on, he couldn’t stand it any longer. It was after nine o’clock, news broadcasts blared from radios throughout the house, cold-eyed furious Mark was standing guard over Davis and wouldn’t let anybody in the room with him, and neither Peter nor anybody else seemed capable of doing anything about it.

But something
had
to be done. Putting away the notebook, Larry went out to the living room, found Peter pacing back and forth there amid the radio noise, and forced himself into the other man’s awareness by standing directly in his path. Peter gave him a distracted irritable look, and Larry said, “Peter, listen to me.”

Peter turned away. “Why?”

Following, Larry said, “What if they
don’t
apologize?”

“They
will
.”

“But what if they don’t? Are you really going to let Davis die, with his medicine right here?”

“The ball’s in their court.” Peter was steadily, compulsively, stroking his cheeks, his face seeming more gaunt than usual, and he wouldn’t meet Larry’s eye. “They’ll have to come through.”

“But what if they don’t?”

“They will.”

“Give me a time limit,” Larry insisted. “Peter, what time do we give it up and let Davis have his medicine? Ten o’clock?”

“No.”

“When, then? Ten-thirty?”

“Larry,” Peter said, pressing his cheeks with the backs of his fingers, “Larry, I can’t set a time on it. They have to come through, that’s all. If we back down, how can we negotiate later?”

“If we let Davis die, what do we negotiate
with
later?”

Peter violently shook his head, as though being attacked by bees. Desperately he said, “We have to stand by our promise, we have to, that’s all. Mark’s right.”

“You’re afraid of Mark.”

“I
agree
with Mark!” Peter yelled, but he wouldn’t meet Larry’s eye. And he wouldn’t set a time limit. He would do nothing, in fact, but pace the floor, stroking his cheeks and staring at the walls and refusing to be a
leader
.

Through the glass wall Larry could see Joyce and Liz out beside the pool; Liz in a yellow dashiki and dark glasses lay on a chaise longue, while Joyce in jeans and an orange T-shirt sat rather tensely on a pool chair beside her. If leadership couldn’t function under present conditions, perhaps democracy could. Of if not democracy, precisely, then some sort of pressure group. Larry knew that Mark would not listen to either himself or Joyce, but if he could get Liz
to join them, might not all three together have some effect? Abandoning Peter, Larry slid open one of the glass doors and went out to the pool, where a portable radio spoke of life on Earth: Jew versus Arab, Greek versus Turk, Christian versus Muslim, Catholic versus Protestant, white versus black.

Joyce smiled wanly over Liz’s unmoving body. “How are you, Larry?”

“Terribly worried about Davis,” Larry told her. “Peter’s just simply abdicated his leadership function.” Pulling another chair over by the two women, he sat down and said, “If the three of us went to Mark, our combined weight might make him see some sense.”

But Joyce shook her head, with the same wan smile. “Don’t count Liz,” she said. “She’s tripping. I’m her buddy.”

“She’s what?” Looking down at Liz, seeing now the unnatural stillness of the face behind the large-lensed dark glasses, seeing the blotchy redness of the usually tanned skin, Larry said, “My God. We’re all going crazy.” It had been two or three years since any of them had dropped acid; that had been a phase, like open sex, like hop, like the sixties themselves. Larry hadn’t even known there was acid left in anybody’s possession.

“It’s a strain,” Joyce said. “It’s a strain on all of us.”