Strange Wine

by Harlan Ellison

  He paused a moment, shivering with distaste, and approached the first section of bookcases. He was startled to discover they weren’t actually bookcases, but orange crates, stacked one atop the other, with hardcover and paperback books jammed in carelessly, dust jackets torn, packed as closely as files in a government office. Bird thought of Jews crammed belly-to-butt in boxcars, on their way to Belsen.

  Genre designations had been scribbled on the sides of the orange crates with magic marker. He could barely read the handwriting. He finally deciphered miztornz as “westerns” and slouglles as “slaughter.” The former orange crates were filled with paperbacks by people with such first names as Al, Lee, Brace, Prong, and Luke. The latter crates seemed to be an endless series of novels about people called the Butcher, the Executioner, the Tormenter, the Bloodluster, and the Fink.

  He kept walking.

  Finally, at the extreme rear of the basement, beneath water pipes dripping into pits and pools formed by the continuous patter of rusty droplets of sewer overflow, he found a dozen orange crates hastily identified as “sci-fi.”

  And there, between a copy of The Giant Rutabaga That Performed Unspeakable Obscenities on Pittsburgh and the Ballantine paperback edition of The Best of Ed Earl Repp, he found one copy of Bad Karma & Other Extravagances. He bent toward the book and reached for it with the reverence of a supplicant at Lourdes. A spider clambered over the spine of the volume and raced away into the darkness.

  Bird withdrew the hardcover book from the orange crate. It was covered with mildew. Silverfish had performed unspeakable obscenities on the pages no giant rutabaga could ever have imagined in its kinkiest moments.

  Alone in the basement of Brentano’s, Cordwainer Bird began to sob softly. He held the book to his naked chest and rocked it back and forth like a mother with a Thalidomide baby.

  Then, in the cryptlike confines of that basement, there was a soft trilling sound; an ominous note sustained beyond measuring; almost unhuman, certainly not mechanical; the warning sound of powers about to be unleashed.

  The blue of Bird’s eyes seemed to darken.

  Clutching the book, he spun on his heel and moved swiftly toward the staircase. By the time he reached the steps he was running. He took the steps three at a time, seeming to bound from riser to riser with the ease of an astronaut on a moonwalk. He reached the top at full speed and paused only a moment, legs apart, fist clenched, head turning this way and that as if seeking them.

  Coming toward him, down an aisle from the ADULT GAMES and PLACE MATS section, an elderly woman leading a group of large, muscular men sporting eyepatches and tattoos approached rapidly. “That’s him!” the woman yelled. The heavyweights moved past her and bore down on Bird. He recognized her: Brentano’s book buyer!

  Instantly, he dropped into what seemed to be an incredibly relaxed posture. He placed the book on a counter nearby and permitted his now open hands to fall to his sides. But his eyes were the color of the Bay of Mexico just off Madeira Beach, Florida, at evening, with a squall approaching.

  The first of the muscled men reached Bird and clapped a hand the size of home plate at the Polo Grounds on his shoulder. “I got ’im, Miz Jararacussu,” the behemoth said gutturally.

  What happened next happened so quickly, no one was later able to describe the actual motion. But it seemed as if Bird laid his fist against the attacker’s sternum, bent at the knees, and twitched his hips. The behemoth was suddenly catapulted backward through the air, a scream torn from his throat. He flailed helplessly as his trajectory carried him over two tables of books of poetry by Rod McKuen. He thundered through the merchandise–which fluttered into the air as light as beignets from the Café du Monde in New Orleans and settled like faerie snowflakes on a February morning in Vermont–and, still screaming, he hit the far wall. He lay there in a hideously twisted pile of arms, legs, and trailing visceral material. The surgeon’s report later verified that the impact of Bird’s movement had shattered the spleen, liver, gall bladder, pancreas, kidneys, and pylorus. The heavyweight had also, inexplicably, contracted sugar diabetes. An intern suggested it was from the exposure to McKuen.

  But at that moment, in Brentano’s, no one laughed. The elderly woman began shrieking. “Take him! Take him!” And then three of her side-boys converged on Bird from three different aisles. He stood waiting, still loose-limbed in that relaxed posture preceding the flight of the phoenix.

  “Huey, Dewey, and Louie,” Bird said, smiling tightly.

  Dewey reached the little man a fraction of a second before his associates. With a windmilling motion so swift no actual pattern could be discerned, Bird broke both his arms. Huey and Louie came at him from either side even as Dewey staggered away sidewise, flapping his broken arms like a VFW poppy salesman. As they careened toward him, Bird gave a bound and rose above their heads. The two heavyweights crashed into each other and Bird came down on their shoulders.

  Locking his legs in a scissors grip that pressed the faces of Huey and Louie together like young lovers, Bird tipped backward and applied pressure. The two attackers thrashed this way and that, trying to free themselves from Bird and from each other. Bird squeezed. In a moment both men turned blue and their legs gave out. As they fell, limp and gagging, Bird bounded free.

  The other eleven thugs took one look and ran shrieking. In their flight they knocked the elderly Mrs. Jararacussu to the floor. When she looked up, Bird was standing over her.

  “Permit me to assist you, madam,” he said.

  He lifted her overhead with one hand and held her there with her Lord and Taylor pantsuit jacket wrapped tightly within his fist.

  “Explain to me why this book,” Bird said, carrying her a few feet to the counter where he had placed Bad Karma & Other Extravagances, “is not stocked in the hundreds of copies, why it isn’t up front near the door where the best sellers can be found, and why it doesn’t appear with banners in your miserable front window?”

  Mrs. Jararacussu’s mouth tightened down into a thin black line. Bird thought of Helen Gahagan Douglas as She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed in the 1934 Merian C. Cooper-Ernest B. Schoedsack film; the best of the seven remakes of Haggard’s She.

  “It isn’t a best seller,” Mrs. Jararacussu said. It was the first time Bird had ever seen someone speak and sneer at the same time. It was fascinating.

  “Who says?”

  “The New York Times Best Seller list says so. Publishers Weekly says so. The New York Review of Books says so. Rex Reed says so. George Plimpton says so. Candida Donadio says so. Michael Korda says so. And I say so.”

  Bird’s nostrils quivered. Unwittingly, in rage at being held aloft like a Hebrew National salami being inspected for mold or a shochet’s illegible signature, she had named some of them. For the first time since the fever had taken him, he had a clue to their names, to their secret identities, their holiest invocations.

  Actually, she was only Helen Gahagan in those days. She later married into the name Douglas.

  “Tell your secret masters their days are numbered,” Bird said. His eyes were as black as raven wings. No longer a sweet robin’s-egg blue. “Tell them one of the slighted and snubbed has finally risen from the dust heaps of great wasted talent. Tell them to buy Fox Locks for their eyries. Tell them today is only the beginning. Go back to your puppet masters and warn them that no matter where they hide or run, Bird will seek them out and gift them with terrible justice!”

  “Rodomontade,” Mrs. Jararacussu sneered, saying.

  Bird reddened. She hung there from his fist, staring at him with nasty little wrinkles around her eyes. Cordwainer Bird. Four feet tall, thick black hair, eyes of robin’s-egg blue radiating the charisma of a Napoleon Bonaparte, the face of a handsome eagle. “You think I indulge in mere shabby braggadocio, eh?” He carried her, swinging, toward the front of the store. It was after hours. She had made sure everyone was gone. The doors were locked. Brentano’s was silent. “Then you shall see…and believe!”

  “Do your worst,�
�� she said. “Whatever technique you used on those simpleminded thugs won’t phase me. I’m made of sterner stuff, as you’ll see.”

  Bird carried her to an eleven-foot-high replica of Giacometti’s “Man Pointing” and hung her from the scythe-shaped left arm. “No,” Bird said, “jeet kune do would hardly be appropriate for the likes of you, a willing mind-slave of them. You’ve probably been conditioned against simple physical pain.” The scrawny arm of the Giacometti began to bend away from the body of the sculpture with the weight of the woman. Bird unhooked her and carried her across to a sturdier hook: Auguste Rodin’s “St. John the Baptist Preaching.” He hung her on the upthrust forefinger of the extended right hand.

  “When Bruce Lee and I studied together,” Bird said, “he made it clear to me that even the advanced techniques of jeet kune do might not work against the true emissaries of darkness. We sat together many a night in that little treehouse in Beverly Glen and discussed alternatives.

  “But first, before I extract from you the information I need, here is a demonstration of how Bird will cut the throat of the monstrous conspiracy you serve….”

  He went to the glass case on the wall that held the fire hose, the fire alarm, and the huge double-headed ax. With one sharp blow he shattered the glass and withdrew the ax.

  She watched him with growing horror as he moved toward her, past her, and stopped at the door that led to the front window. He used one of the blades of the ax to spring the lock. The door swung open. “You wouldn’t dare!” she yelled.

  But he would. As she screamed her hatred and defiance, the little man bounded up into the window of Brentano’s and with the skill of a Matawatchan, Ontario tree topper swung the fearsome ax over his head and buried it in a stack of Harold Robbins novels. There was an abortive shriek of pain as the blade cleaved the top half-dozen volumes. A strange sound, akin to that of a blood-gorged Amazonian killer plant being cut in half. As though they had a life never granted by the Supreme Deity, the Robbins novels groaned and howled and spurted pages as Bird hacked them to pieces. Mrs. Jararacussu set up a sympathetic wailing as he went from stack to stack, killing the Peanuts books, the necrophiliac Susann/Segal collaboration, the West bibble-bibble, the tomb-robbing exploitation of the Frank privacy invasions. Mrs. Jararacussu’s eyes rolled up in her head, and from the front window came the gurgle and cacophony of dying trash.

  And when he was done, and his sweat dripped to mingle with the green slime and ichor the books had spurted, Bird threw down the double-bladed ax and came to her. She was only semiconscious now, but a dash of cold water from the drinking fountain brought her around. Now she stared at the little man with fear: a full and swamping realization that she faced a power as strong as the one she served.

  “Now,” Cordwainer Bird said. “Now you’ll tell me where their headquarters is located. Not the mind-slaves, not the puppets like yourself…but the leaders. The head of the conspiracy.”

  “Never…” she whispered.

  “Oh, yes. Now.” And he went and searched out what he needed and came back to her, and held it up for her to see. Deadlier than any martial art, capable of extracting information from Mt. Rushmore. “Tell me.” She said nothing, and he opened the book and began to read.

  Within a page, she was babbling, begging him to stop.

  Bird hated to sink to their level, hated to use weapons this vile and unholy; the effect on the mind of the victim was so pronounced, so clearly debilitating that only under the most severe conditions would he even contemplate such horror. He laid aside the copy of The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran and gave Mrs. Jararacussu another drink of water.

  She was very nearly incoherent.

  Finally, by speaking softly and reading passages from W. S. Merwin and Joyce Carol Oates and William Kotzwinkle and Randall Jarrell, he was able to bring her back to a semblance of rationality.

  “Now,” he said, “where are they hidden?”

  She tried to speak, but her lips were dry and cracked. A mad coruscation of lights flashed in her eyes. Kahlil Gibran could do that to an unstable personality.

  Bird searched behind a counter until he found a pack of Kleenex. He moistened a handful of tissues and wet her lips. She began speaking, but Bird could barely hear her. He leaned close as she hung there from the Rodin, and after a moment he was able to make out her words.

  “I never knew. I never actually read any of it. They promised me I’d never have to read any of it. This is the first time I’ve…it…it was horrible. Is this what I’ve been making people buy? I’m so ashamed…so terribly ashamed, Mr. Bird.”

  For an instant Cordwainer Bird’s chill expression softened. “I understand. Consider this the first moment of your new life. Now, quickly, where do they headquarter themselves?”

  “You’ll find them under the lady–”

  The first burst of machine-gun fire tore away her throat. Bird threw himself sidewise, skidded through the snowflake mound of McKuen booklets, and came up running. Behind him he could hear the thunder of assault boots on the floor; he tried to separate the sounds and made an estimate of at least half a dozen attackers. There was nothing he could do for Mrs. Jararacussu. Her own people had silenced her. He dashed for the front window of Brentano’s, leaped up into the display case, grabbed the great ax, and swung it at the glass. He needn’t have bothered. A rain of machine-gun bullets shattered the front window to his left and began tracking right to him. He flung himself down and rolled, under the trajectory of the slugs, straight out through the window and into the snow-filled avenue.

  He cast one quick glance behind him. Yes, six of them. Hooded, carrying Brens and machine pistols, dressed in black-and-white. And Bird saw one other thing.

  But the moment was done; he raced away down the silent, darkened length of Fifth Avenue.

  When the hooded assassins leaped from the shattered window, scattering shredded, slime-dripping chunks of best sellers onto the sidewalk, Fifth Avenue was empty. It was as though the little man had levitated or dematerialized himself. But he still loomed large in their thoughts; they would remember him.

  And Cordwainer Bird would remember the other sight he’d glimpsed in that stolen moment: the sight of their agent, the demonic Mrs. Jararacussu, hanging like a slaughtered carcass from the forefinger of Rodin’s masterpiece.

  “Cordwainer Bird’s genealogy is in the inset (upper right-hand corner). E. B., as noted on the main chart, is the Earl of Burlesdon, Robert Rassendyll, the fifth earl. Two of his descendants were Ralph Rassendyll and Rudolf Rassendyll (of The Prisoner of Zenda and Rupert of Hentzau). Ralph and Rudolf were cousins. “Ralph married R. D., or Rhoda Delagardie. Rhoda’s descent is more detailedly traced in the chart and Addendum 2 of Tarzan Alive. Her first, and brief, marriage to Lord John Roxton (of Doyle’s The Lost World, et al.) resulted in one child, Richard Wentworth or R. W., The Spider. She remarried, to Ralph, and the Rassen-dylls moved to New York, where Ralph managed the American affairs of a giant British firm. She bore him Allard Kent Rassendyll (A.K.R., The Shadow) and Bruce Hagin Rassendyll (B.H.R., G-8 of G-8 and his Battle Aces). Her youngest child, Rhonda, did not engage in flamboyant outlawry, but she was a family black sheep. Despite her parents’ objections, she married Jason Bird, a part-Jewish acrobat and vaudeville night-club comedian…. “Jason’s father was Richard Cordwainer Bird, an Irish photographer. His mother was Millicent, daughter of a Dublin Jew, Leopold Bloom. (See James Joyce’s Ulysses for a perhaps overly detailed account of Bloom. See also Tarzan Alive for his relationship to the Greystokes, of whom Tarzan is the most outstanding member.)

  “Jason and Rhonda’s only child was Cordwainer Bird. Cordwainer was born in 1934 in Painesville, Ohio, in a rooming house near a theater. (Not, as some maintain, in the women’s room of the theater.) Cordwainer grew up in Ohio, though not very far. His growth stopped when he reached the height of four feet….

  “When TV producers and directors ruined his scripts, he punched them in the mouth and went on to write science fiction.
He has gathered together more awards, Hugos and Nebulas, in that field than any other writer. He has won the Edgar Allan Poe award from the Mystery Writers of America. He…then became a mainstream novelist and a militant foe of evil. Though he is nowhere near as tall as his ancestors and relatives, the Scarlet Pimpernel, Rudolf Rassendyll, the Shadow, Doc Savage, et al., he has their heroic spirit and their dedication to fighting wickedness. But, unlike these heroes of an earlier age, who fought to preserve The Establishment, he fights to destroy The Establishment. One of The Establishments anyway.”

  Excerpt from Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life by Philip José Farmer (revised paperback edition; Bantam Books, 1975)

  He needed help, advice; that was paramount and obvious. He decided to call on his Uncle Kent. The old man was still lucid, from time to time, and this had to be one of those times. He took the IRT uptown, spending his time in transit breaking the nose of a female dip whose hand kept wandering into his hip pocket, and reading the arcane messages left in orange, purple, black, and green by RIKKI TIKKI 101 on the walls, deck, overheads, and windows of the subway car. He disembarked at 116th Street, bounded up the stairs of the station, pausing only momentarily to kick senseless three Pedestrians of the Apocalypse who were mugging a seventy-year-old arthritic washerwoman, charged out of the subway kiosk, crossed Broadway through the speeding traffic, and headed for his uncle’s apartment building.

  Allard Kent Rassendyll, who had long ago changed his name to Kent Allard, and then changed it again a hundred times–depending on what case he was involved in–but who had always been just one man–The Shadow–was now eighty-one years old, and fallen on hard times. On several occasions, when his nephew Cordwainer discovered that the old man had hocked his fire opal ring, the mysterious Girasol, he had scraped together the money necessary to reclaim it, and had returned it, taking special care to leave it in a drawer or under a sofa pillow so the old man would not realize how much in Cordwainer’s debt he was. He was a proud old man, and deserved–Bird firmly believed–nothing but honor and dignified twilight years, in return for the decades he had spent as America’s foremost archenemy of evil. It was fortunate his memory was spotty: pawning and finding the ring ten times in six years might otherwise have seemed odd to that once razor-sharp analytical mind.