The Comedy is Finished (8 page)

“Wiskiel,” Mark said, while an old man in a Stetson said on-screen that they didn’t have much to go on so far. “He had something to do with Watergate.”

“Hush,” said Peter.

The announcer’s off-camera voice had returned: “Agent Wiskiel was asked if the ten named individuals would be released from prison.”

The scene cut from the old man in the Stetson to Wiskiel, a heavyset fortyish man with too much self-conscious actorish good looks. Wiskiel said, “Well, it’s early yet, and frankly I don’t recognize every one of those names, we’re not even sure yet they’re all
in
prison. If they are, it’ll be up to Washington to make a decision about their release. I don’t know if the kidnappers are watching—”

“We are,” Peter said. Joyce giggled, this time not repressing it.

“—but I hope they realize their time limit just isn’t realistic. I want to get Koo Davis back as much as anybody, but they’re asking for a decision that I just don’t think can be made in twenty-four hours.”

“Send them a finger,” Mark said.

Joyce shivered, not looking toward Mark, trying to make believe to herself that she hadn’t heard him. Mark frightened her whenever she was incautious enough to think about him; he was in the group but not of it, a cold separate presence, an anti-body. As much as possible, Joyce pretended that Mark didn’t exist.

On the screen, Agent Wiskiel was saying, “In the meantime, from the sound of that tape they haven’t up to this point actually harmed Koo Davis, and I’m very hopeful we’ll be able to negotiate some sort of agreement with these people. I’ll have to wait for word from Washington on the details, but it’s my guess we’ll have Koo Davis home and safe in a very short period of time.”

“In a box,” Mark said.

“
Hush
,” Peter told him, and Joyce flashed Peter a grateful smile, which he apparently didn’t see.

The television scene switched to the news-set in the studio, where the announcer spent some time telling the audience how
many famous people had publicly expressed their shock and outrage that a “great entertainer” like Koo Davis had been treated in such a barbarous fashion. An ex-President was quoted as referring to “this man who has brought the gift of laughter to millions.”

Next, the announcer went on to a description of the four people so far identified by the media out of the ten whose release had been demanded, and a picture of each of the four in turn was shown on the screen while a biased inaccurate brief biography was given. One was Eric Mallock, and it was during his biography that Liz’s name was mentioned:

“Eric Mallock, thirty-two, is currently in the Federal Penitentiary at Lewisburg in Kentucky, serving an indeterminate sentence on a number of convictions, including destruction of property and attempted murder. A member of a splinter group from the Weathermen, Mallock was captured in August of 1972 in Chicago when a building apparently being used as a bomb factory blew up, killing two people outright and severely wounding Mallock. Two associates of Mallock’s believed also to have been in the building at the time, Elizabeth Knight and Frances Steffalo, disappeared and have not been seen since, though Federal warrants are out for both women.”

“You’re in the news!” Peter cried, with his sardonic bark of laughter.

Liz made no answer. Looking at her profile, Joyce saw her as expressionless as ever. Joyce envied Liz that coolness. What was Liz thinking, seeing her lover’s face on the television screen after all these years? Nothing showed; and when the picture changed to another face, there was still not the slightest flicker from Liz.

Then, at the very end of the news story, Joyce had her own opportunity to react to a face on the screen; her own. Or was it her
own? “The police sketch of the woman calling herself Janet Grey” was plain, glum, anonymous. Peter made another mocking remark, which Joyce was too agitated to hear. Appalled, she thought, Is
that
what I look like? Gazing at that pale sketch, she felt the heat in her own face as she blushed, and was afraid to look away, lest she meet someone’s eye. If only she had some of Liz’s unconcern.

The blank-faced sketch seemed to stay on the screen forever; then at last it disappeared, replaced by the mobile face of the announcer, moving on to other stories. Rising, Peter switched on a floor lamp and turned off the TV. Obviously pleased with himself, facing the others with his back to the receding-dot light of the TV screen, he said, “They’ll produce. We picked the right horse, and they’ll trade.”

“You shouldn’t have let him do all those jokes,” Mark said. “I told you at the time, make him do it over, without the wisecracks.”

Peter shrugged; Joyce thought he showed astonishing forbearance with Mark. He said, “What difference does it make?”

“Because he sounds like the winner,” Mark said. “He sounds like
he’s
got
us
.”

“You worry too much about the appearance of things.” Peter put a hand to his face, stroked his cheek with his fingertips, his expression pained. Joyce recognized that gesture; it meant Peter was troubled, struggling to retain control or composure. Joyce wished Mark would leave Peter alone, he had enough to think about as it was. “The important thing is,” Peter said, “the other side knows he’s alive and well. He’s our trading counter, and he has to be recognizable.”

“He made fun of us. He’s the star and we’re the stooges.”

“Mark, so what? Would you rather be on top, with the power, or on the bottom making fun?”

“
He’s
on top,” Mark insisted. “
He
has the power.”

“Then go downstairs and kick him a few times,” Peter said, obviously annoyed and bored. “Show him who’s in charge.”

Joyce was grateful when Larry chimed in then, awkwardly but earnestly changing the conversation, saying, “Um, Peter, what about the deadline business? What that FBI man said, that they can’t get an answer out of Washington in twenty-four hours. Do you think that’s true?”

Mark said, “They have to be pushed.”

Peter smiled easily at Larry. “We’ll send them another tape tomorrow night,” he said. “And this time we’ll let Mark direct the performance.”

Larry looked disapproving, but didn’t react directly. Instead, he said, “How much time will we give them, really?”

“We don’t know, really. The minimum time possible.”

“I wonder...” Larry said, musing, then said, “Peter? Do you think he’s trainable?”

Peter seemed amused. “Koo Davis? You want to orientate Koo Davis in dialectical materialism?”

“An intelligent brain is capable of seeing truth,” Larry said.

“Then give it a try,” Peter suggested. Joyce saw that he was mocking Larry, and that Larry knew but didn’t care. “Spend time with him tomorrow,” Peter said, “discuss the theory of labor. How much is a man worth who tells jokes for a living?”

“All men are worth the same,” Larry said.

Peter gave him a sly look. “More and more, Larry, your politics sound like religion.”

Mark said, “I’ll go look at Davis, check him one last time tonight.”

He means to do something cruel, Joyce thought, looking at Mark’s face, grim and angry behind the heavy beard. She was glad when Larry said, “I’ll go with you.”

Mark gave him a venomous look. “You can go instead of me,” he said, and walked away, toward his bedroom.

“Leave Davis alone for tonight,” Peter said. “He’s all right down there.”

“I didn’t want Mark to see him alone.”

“I know, Larry.”

Liz abruptly got to her feet, saying, “Mark’s right, we should push them, get this over with. Phone that number they gave, put Davis on, let Mark twist his arm. When they hear Davis holler, they’ll start to move.”

Peter shook his head, like a patient tutor with a backward pupil. “In the first place, they’d trace the call. In the second place, if we start with high pressure, where do we go from there? We begin calm, and we crank it up a bit at a time. If they stall we can still go way up. We can let Mark slice off his ears, for instance.” Peter chuckled, a low comfortable sound. “Can you imagine that round neat head without ears?”

Joyce, who preferred to be silent, was driven to speech now, saying in a pained voice, “You aren’t serious, Peter.”

“Of course not,” Peter told her, speaking easily, but Joyce watched his face and eyes, and she thought he might very well be serious, if the circumstances were right.

Liz said, “Peter. Do you want to fuck?”

He seemed to consider the question, without much enthusiasm. “Possibly.”

“All right, then. Goodnight,” Liz said, and walked from the room. Smiling slightly, Peter followed her.

Leaving Larry and Joyce. Open sexuality had been a postulate in the Movement in the early days, sexual relationships as a statement of political belief, so these five people had long ago completed the round of all the possible heterosexual couplings. But sex had
long since faded as a primary factor with any of them; these days, only Liz would raise the subject in public, and particularly in that aggressive way.

The introduction of sex in that manner and these circumstances left Joyce embarrassed and uneasy. She didn’t want Larry to feel obligated to make the same offer to her; she had no illusion that he might actually want to have sex with her. Casting about for a new topic, glancing over at the TV screen, she said, “Larry?”

“Yes?”

“Did that look like me?”

“Not a bit,” Larry said. He sounded surprised at the question. “To tell the truth, I thought they did those things better.”

“It must have looked
something
like me.”

“I’ll tell you want it looked like,” Larry said, coming over and sitting at the other end of the sofa. “It looked like a
category
of person which includes you, but it didn’t look like you. It looked like someone who might be you for two seconds from a block away, but then you’d say, ‘Oh, no, that doesn’t look like Joyce at
all
.’ ”

“It’s not that I’m being vain.” Joyce was always afraid people would think her too feminine. “It was just that she looked—dead.”

“It wasn’t accurate,” Larry told her. “I promise.”

She offered him a quick grateful smile. “Thank you.” Then, looking at his earnest face, all the doubts she tried to keep buried came rushing into her mind, and she cried, “Larry, is it really going to work? Will it all come
out
somewhere?”

“Of course.” He was surprised, and it showed. “We’ve had victories,” he said. “We’ll have more.”

“Yes,” she said, concealing her doubts.

But he leaned closer, saying, “Do you mean you fight without believing in the inevitability of success? Don’t you know, historically, we
must
win?”

“Yes, of course. It just seems so long sometimes.” Then she smiled at him, knowing he needed the reassurance more than she did. “And I seem so short. Goodnight, Larry.” She patted his knee, and got to her feet.

“Good night, Joyce.”

“Don’t bother about Davis tonight,” she told him.

“No, that was just to protect him from Mark. He’s all right down there, he’ll keep until morning.”

“My
brain
is happy to be here,” Koo Davis says, “but my feet wanna be in Tennessee.” That’s a line from
Saturday Evening Ghost
, one of a series of comic spook movies Koo made in the early forties. Portraits with moving eyes, chairs whose arms suddenly reach up and grab at the person seated there, wall panels that open so a black-gloved hand can emerge clutching a knife; and Koo Davis moving brash and unknowing through it all. It was a genre then, everybody did the same gags: the candle that slid along a tabletop, the stuffed gorilla on wheels whose finger was caught (unknown to him) in the back of the hero’s belt so he’d be tiptoeing through the spooky house with this gorilla rolling along behind him, the hero pretending to be one of the figures in a wax museum. The audiences didn’t seem to care how often they saw those gags, and a recurring bit in Koo’s movies was the point where he would suddenly
notice
all those weird things around him, and become terrified. Koo’s bit of going from oblivious self-assurance to gibbering terror was one of his most famous routines, so much so that Bosley Crowther wrote in a review, “No one can make panic as hilarious as Koo Davis.”

I’m scared, Koo thinks, but he doesn’t say it aloud; it ain’t that hilarious. Remembering how often he simulated fear in all those movies, and later on television, he’s surprised at how different the real thing is. Of course, like everyone else he’s known brief moments of fear in his life—mostly on those USO tours—but what he’s feeling now is steady, growing, ongoing. He’s afraid of these people, he’s
afraid of what will happen, he’s afraid of his own helplessness, and he’s afraid of his fear.

“Why would anybody be afraid of getting killed?” he asks. That’s a line from
Your Genial Ghost
, and it was supposed to be a rhetorical question, but in fact death is not at all what Koo fears now. His imagination crawls instead with images of pain, images of humiliation. He’s afraid they’ll hurt him in some awful way, and he’s afraid he won’t be brave in front of them. He’d hate to live the rest of his life remembering himself groveling on the floor in front of these bastards.

What if they do something to his throat or his mouth, so he can’t talk? What if they blind him or scar him in some awful way? What if they cut him—he’s always been afraid of knives, sharp things.

“We’ve got nothing to fear but fear itself—and that big guy over there with the sword.”
The Zombie Goes to College
. He keeps trying to reassure himself—they haven’t done anything to him yet, have they? They haven’t even threatened very much. But Koo remembers the look on that one guy’s face, the bearded son of a bitch who showed him the gun way back at the beginning. He’s probably also the one who hit him when the sack was over his head. And he doesn’t talk, he just stands there and glares at Koo like he’d prefer Koo’s head on a platter, with an apple in his mouth.

If only they wanted money. He’d been afraid earlier that they’d ask too much, but now he believes he could somehow have raised any amount they wanted. Ask for money, you bastards, and I’ll find it, one way or the other I’ll buy my way out of here. “Will you take a post-dated check?” Anything; ask for something I’ve got, ask for something that makes some kind of goddamn
sense
.