The Comedy is Finished (30 page)

But at that point he ran out of words and stopped. She looked at him, waiting, and saw that he was helpless, trying in vain to find the right combination of words. After half a minute of silence, while the fear built in her, she gave him a sad smile and said, “There’s no soft way, is there? So just say it, whatever it is.”

“They cut off his ear.”

She stared at him, at first failing to understand the meaning of those words, and then she heard herself laugh, as though it was a joke: “They didn’t!”

“I’m sorry. They want to show the world how tough they are.”

“They—His
ear
?” It was still meaningless, incomprehensible. “That’s—That’s like savages, it’s primitive man, it’s...”

“Once people lose the social thread,” he said, obviously telling her something he deeply believed, “they’re capable of anything.”

“But his—” Floundering toward something recognizable, she said, “Is there another message?”

“Not his voice. A new voice.”

“I want to hear it.”

“Ms. Rayne, I don’t—”

“And I want to see the ear.”

She wasn’t going to be stopped, and he must have seen that. With another sigh, he shrugged and said, “Come along, then.”

In the workroom were three men: Jock Cayzer, the tape technician, and Maurice St. Clair, the FBI Deputy Director from Washington, whom Lynsey hadn’t yet met but had seen on that television
program. As Lynsey and Mike Wiskiel walked in, the technician was saying, “—interesting about this tape.” But then he stopped, as the three men became aware of Lynsey’s presence.

St. Clair, big and meaty and red-faced, lunged up from the folding chair he’d been sitting on, shouting, “For Christ’s sake! Mike, Mike—”

“It’s all right, Murray,” Wiskiel said.

She had already seen the box. That had to be it, sitting alone on a worktable, a small black box bearing the stylized white letters “i magnin.” As Wiskiel went through the stupid formalities of introducing Lynsey to St. Clair, she crossed directly to the box, opened the lid, and looked inside.

How awful. How pitiable. It was small, wrinkled, pale, fleshy, stained with rust-colored dry blood, and utterly pathetic. Lynsey pressed her palms onto the table to both sides of the small box, clenched her jaw, stood unblinking, and gazed into the box.

The men had become silent, and it was Jock Cayzer who came over to stand beside her, saying nothing, also looking into the box. Quietly, Lynsey said, “It’s so small.”

“Well, it’s off a living man,” he said, “so it would have bled some; that’d shrink it.” His manner was calm, sympathetic but unemotional, reducing this horrible thing to something that could be looked at, discussed, absorbed into one’s mind and memory.

She needed that. She needed something to make this
ordinary
, so she could go on from it. “I’ve never seen a thing like this before,” she said.

“Oh, I have.” And still he was calm, judicious, merely reporting a fact.

“Tell me about it.”

She felt him glance at her, study her profile, make a decision about her. Then he said, “Some of the boys back from Nam, they
brought Cong ears with them. Anyway, they
said
they were Cong ears, and they were sure ears. And what they mostly looked like was dried peaches.”

“This one is fresher.”

“Yes,” he said, and reached out as though casually to close the lid on the box.

She looked at him, seeing a man who was truly strong without making a point of it. “Thank you,” she said.

“My pleasure, Ms. Rayne.”

“May I hear the tape?”

“Of course.”

The technician already had it cued up, and this new harsh voice snarled from the loudspeakers with its self-serving self-righteousness. Lynsey listened unmoving—she was deadened, at least for now, free from high emotional reactions—and at the end she said, quietly, “They are just beasts, aren’t they?”

Cayzer said, “The television broadcast must have been a shock to them.”

Obviously uncomfortable, St. Clair said, “Miss Rayne, there just wasn’t any way to soften that blow. I mean, telling these bastards what answers we got from their former friends. We simply had to tell them the truth.”

“I realize that.” Then she sighed, and shook her head, and said, “What happens now?”

“We’ll send this tape to Washington,” St. Clair told her, “for the next response.”

“But there
is
no next response, is there?”

St. Clair frowned unhappily at her—the third man in five minutes to wonder if she could survive the truth—and then he said, “Myself, Miss Rayne, I can’t think of any.”

“What they ask is impossible.”

Beneath his restraint St. Clair was very angry. “And they
know
it,” he said. “In the first place, we
can’t
just talk half a dozen people out of jail against their will and deport them out of the country. Maybe in Russia you can do that, but not here. There’s such a thing as due process, and if we tried any such stunt there wouldn’t be a lawyer in the nation out of work for the next two years. And in the second place, even if we could do such a thing we wouldn’t, because what this son of a bitch Rock really wants is
other
buddies of his in Algeria to take revenge on those people for standing him up.”

“Showing him up,” Wiskiel said.

“Both.”

“So this is just propaganda,” Lynsey said. “They’re going to kill Koo and they’ll try to put the blame on the government.”

Wiskiel said, “So we’ve got to find them before they do it.”

Lynsey shook her head. “If the deadline isn’t real, if they’re going to kill him anyway, why would they wait?”

“One last propaganda blitz,” St. Clair suggested. “Another tape, or maybe even a phone call to a television station, something like that, just at the deadline. Davis will be useful to them right up until twelve noon.”

“But how are you going to find them? They left that house in Woodland Hills, and this time there’s no message from Koo.”

Wiskiel said, “We have one lead. There was something funny about the Woodland Hills house being so available, and we’re trying to find the owner.”

“
Trying
to find him?”

“He’s a rock musician named Ginger Merville,” Wiskiel said, “and he’s supposed to be in Paris on tour, but he and his tour manager both checked out of their hotel two days ago. The manager flew to Tokyo, where Merville is supposed to perform this weekend, but
Merville himself flew to New York. So far, we haven’t been able to find out where he went after that.”

“Ginger Merville.” Lynsey knew the name, knew something of the man’s career. She said, “Did you check with his agent?”

“One of my men saw him this afternoon. Or yesterday afternoon, I guess, by now. He didn’t know where Merville was.”

“Nonsense,” Lynsey said.

Wiskiel looked surprised. “Beg pardon?”

“The agent knows where Merville is,” Lynsey said. “People hide from their wives, their creditors, their employers and the police, but they don’t hide from their agents.”

“Are you suggesting the
agent
is part of it?”

“No, I’m not.” Lynsey paused, choosing her words carefully. She didn’t particularly want to antagonize Wiskiel and the others, but she wanted them to understand. “Back in the sixties,” she said, “when law enforcement was being used against the wrong people, many people lost the habit of cooperating with the authorities. A rock musician’s agent would undoubtedly have sour memories of the FBI.”

Wiskiel obviously couldn’t believe it. “To the extent,” he said, “that a legitimate theatrical agent would refuse to help us save Koo Davis? We
told
him what we wanted Merville for.”

“He didn’t believe you,” Lynsey said. “He assumed you were lying, which is something else lawmen did a lot in the sixties.” Maurice St. Clair was looking thunderous, she saw, while Jock Cayzer was almost but not quite grinning. Smiling thinly, she said, “It’s called chickens coming home to roost. You people treated the entire American public as an enemy population. You were the garrison force, foreign conquerors. And now you want cooperation.”

“But that’s all
over
now,” Wiskiel said. (St. Clair nodded emphatically.) “Whatever mistakes people made, excesses that maybe happened, they’re all over now.”

“Maybe,” Lynsey said. “Give me the agent’s name, I’ll see him first thing in the morning.”

Wiskiel was very angry about this, but there wasn’t much he could do. He glanced at St. Clair, who was also red-faced and angry, and who nodded curtly. “All right,” Wiskiel said. “His name is Hunningdale.”

“Chuck Hunningdale. I know him slightly.”

“Fine.” Apparently needing a distraction, Wiskiel turned away, saying to the technician. “When we came in you were saying something about the tape.”

“Yes, sir. It’s not like the other two.”

“In what way?”

“Well, it’s much better quality. Those other two, you could buy them in Woolworth’s. Not this one.”

“What’s so special about it?”

“Well, it’s high bias,” the technician explained. “The brand is TDK, which is very good, and it’s rated SA, that’s the highest quality there is. This is an expensive piece of tape.”

They were all interested now. St. Clair said, “Who could use that sort of thing?”

“Musicians. Record industry people. People who have professional recording and playback equipment in their own homes.”

Lynsey said, “Ginger Merville.”

But Wiskiel shook his head. “No, there wasn’t anything like that in Merville’s house.”

The technician said, “Excuse me.” When he had their attention he said, “I heard something else this time. In the tape. I’d like to try an experiment; all right?”

“Try anything you want,” St. Clair told him.

“Thank you, sir. What I’ve done, I’ve damped the bass and boosted the treble. You see, I’m not interested in the voice this time, but the
background. I’ll also have to play it louder. Listen behind the voice.” And he started the tape.

The voice sounded even more hysterical this way, very loud and with its low tones gone; reminiscent in a strange way of old recordings of Hitler making speeches. Lynsey tried to hear past this haranguing repulsive voice, tried to hear whatever it was the technician had found in the background...

...and there it was. Faint, irregular, slowly paced, a kind of rushing hiss, rising and falling, irregular but continuous. Lynsey frowned, listening, trying to figure out what it was. It sounded familiar, somehow: hhhhiiiiIISSSssssshhhhhhhhhhiiiiiiiiiIIIIIIIISSSSSSSSHHHHHHhhhhhhiiiissssSSSSSS—

“The ocean,” Jock Cayzer said.

The technician snapped his fingers. “I
knew
I knew it.”

“By God,” Wiskiel said, “you’re right. That’s what it is. Waves, on a beach.”

The technician switched off the tape, and they all looked at one another. Cayzer said, “A beach house somewhere.”

“Filled with professional recording equipment. But somebody didn’t know how to use it. They left a door open.” Wiskiel frowned, saying, “Does that narrow it enough? Who do we go through? Equipment suppliers. Jock, can we set that up with your people? First thing in the morning, we canvass every wholesale and retail outlet of high-quality recording equipment in the Greater Los Angeles area.”

“And repairmen,” the technician suggested.

“Right. We want the address of every customer with a beach house. Somebody must have installed that equipment, and somebody services it.”

St. Clair said, “Mike, it’s needle-in-the-haystack time.”

Cayzer said, “I could maybe put forty people on it, in the morning.”

While the others talked, Lynsey drifted over to the worktable again, unable to keep away from the small box and its grim contents, and now as she looked down into the box, holding the lid open with one hand, she suddenly laughed aloud, saying, “Why—! It’s a joke!”

Turning to smile broadly at the men, she saw them all staring at her. Feeling a kind of hysterical relief, she said, “It isn’t Koo.”

Wiskiel came forward, expression troubled, saying, “Ms. Rayne. I’m sorry, but no. There’s no way you can recognize an ear.”

“Oh, yes, there is.” She could hardly keep from peals of laughter. “You look at that ear,” she said. “Look at the lobe. You can take my word for it, Mr. Wiskiel, Koo Davis does
not
have pierced ears!”

Koo’s arms hurt. They don’t sting or burn, the way you’d expect from a cut, they
hurt
, with a heavy mean aching pain, as though he’d given himself a very bad bruise. Under the covers he can feel the bandages swathing him from wrist to elbow, and inside the bandages is the throbbing pain, as unrelenting as a cramp. And his side, right above his hip, where the knife went in, feels like the blade is still in there, cutting him apart.

Koo has been awake for some time, but he doesn’t want to admit it, not with Mark sitting right there on the edge of the bed. Who knows what Mark might do next? The goddamn boy can’t seem to make up his mind whether he wants Koo alive or dead, and Koo is in no hurry to get the latest bulletin. So he’s lying here under this mound of blankets, peeking at Mark from time to time through slitted eyes, and pretending to be asleep. While Mark just sits there, a bit to the right of Koo’s feet, hunched forward, brooding, gazing away at nothing in particular.

Koo remembers everything, and wishes he didn’t. Joyce, the only one he’d ever thought normal enough to maybe help him, had turned out to be the craziest of them all. The memory of that knife blade flashing in the moonlight is terrifyingly clear in his brain, and his arms hurt, his whole body
hurts
. Joyce was determined to kill him, and he’s been lying here trying to figure out why, and now he believes he’s worked out at last what she had in her excuse for a mind. She’d felt the kidnapping was causing too much stress for her pals and she wanted it to end—particularly after that show on
television—but the others wouldn’t agree to just quit. If she’d released Koo on her own hook they would have been sore at her, so she planned to get Koo out of the house and down to the water’s edge, kill him there and let the waves carry the body out to sea. Then, so far as her friends would ever know, Koo had escaped on his own and disappeared.