“Say,” Al said, “this is silly. Why should we be arguing about it when we’ve got the real authority right here?”
“Yeah,” Jerry said. “That’s right. Mr. Erskine, you’re a genuine professional writer, so you know all about these things. Which one of us is right?”
This is definitely a nightmare, Malcolm thought. I’m actually still back in ninth grade in that old bastard what’s-his-name’s class and I’m dreaming all of this. Soon I’ll wake up and I’ll be sitting behind that sexy little brunette again. Christ, what was her name?
“Mr. Erskine?”
“What? Oh, yes, sorry.” Reality. The sexy little brunette of long-gone days no doubt was now a mother and no longer sexy. Possibly she was no longer little or brunette, either. “Well, fellows, I have to admit this is not a subject I’ve ever investigated. You know, I’ve never written anything about United States government agencies.”
“Yeah, say, that’s right!” Jerry said. “So how did the Merskeenians say it?”
Malcolm cleared his throat a few times to give himself time to make something up. “Oh, well, actually their language had a special verb form for large collections of individuals acting either as a unit or separately. It didn’t really correspond to either the singular or the plural. Now that that’s out of the way, what are you fellows here for?”
“To protect you, Mr. Erskine,” Al said. “We’re going to take you into hiding to protect you against all the people who’re out to kill you. You know, kind of like that guy in England who all the Iranians wanted to kill.”
“‘Whom’ all the Iranians wanted to kill,” Jerry said immediately.
They turned to Malcolm again in mute appeal.
“Uh, I’m afraid Jerry’s right this time, Al. So how are you going to protect me? Lots of armed men surrounding the house all the time, maybe? Armed escorts wherever I go? That could be a bit inconvenient, but I guess I’m willing to put up with it if you are.”
Jerry and Al shook their heads. Al said, “No, like I — I mean, as I said, Mr. Erskine, sir, we’re going to do it the way the Brits protected their guy. We’re going to hide you away where no one will ever find you.”
A chill ran down Malcolm’s spine. “Uh, just where would that be?” Six feet under? “And who told you to do this?”
“Oh, don’t you worry, Mr. Erskine, sir. We’ve been doing this to folks for years, so we know what we’re doing. No problems, no pain. I guarantee.”
Jerry chimed in, “We can’t exactly tell you right out who’s behind this, sir, but I can tell you that it’s a lady you’ve met before who has played a major role in America’s return to pride, self-respect, and standing tall before the world.”
“Oh,” Malcolm said in relief. “Her.”
“‘She,’” Jerry corrected. “It’s kind of by way of being a personal favor to the lady.”
“Wait a minute!” Marlene said. “He can’t go into hiding. Erskine Enterprises will lose too much money!”
Jerry and Al turned to her.
“Must be Mrs. Erskine,” Jerry said to Al.
“That’s it. They said she was staying here,” Al said to Jerry.
“Anyway,” Jerry said to Al, “the channeler for a great being like Lukas of Aldebaran wouldn’t cohabitate with some bimbo he wasn’t even married to.”
“‘Cohabit,’ not ‘cohabitate,’” Al said.
“Oh, right. That’s what I meant.”
“If you twits are finished,” Marlene said, “I’m the former Mrs. Erskine. Remember that. Anyway, we can’t afford for Malcolm to go into hiding.”
“Can you afford for someone to blow him away?”
Marlene smiled happily while she thought about that image for a moment. “Depends on various things.”
“I’ll probably be able to do the second book even more quickly in hiding, beloved companion of my days and nights,” Malcolm said to her. “Make even more money even faster.”
“Okay,” Marlene said. “I’ll take care of things while you’re gone.”
“Could be a long time, ma’am,” Al said.
“Anyway,” Jerry said, “if he’s gone, whoever’s after him could very well decide to settle for offing you.”
“Yeah,” Al said. “Kind of a consolation prize, see.”
“So we’re taking you along,” Jerry said.
“Not that we give a shit about you, ma’am,” Al said. “Don’t get us wrong. It’s just that society has a duty to keep great men like Mr. Erskine happy and untroubled.”
“I was wondering when society would realize that,” Malcolm said.
* * * * *
The four years of carefully controlled public appearances and uncontrolled abuses of power were drawing to a close. Soon it would be time once again to, as the press still put it so quaintly, face the voters.
Various people were thinking about this and making plans.
* * * * *
Every now and then, Gone sparked back to a partial awareness of the world around him. It was as though, Fancy thought, a small group of dying brain cells experienced a final few minutes of life just before sputtering out. It tended to happen when he saw Fancy mentioned on television, which he spent his waking hours watching.
“Look, Mommy,” he quavered, pointing in the general direction of the glowing screen. His finger slewed from side to side, but Fancy knew he wanted to draw her attention to whatever was on the television.
He was draped limply on the couch. She was sitting at the large conference table that took up most of the room. She was looking at a sheet of paper and drawing a line in pencil through the names listed on the sheet. One name after the other. A heavy, black line. Sometimes, she pressed so hard that the pencil point broke and she had to sharpen it again by shoving the end of the pencil in the electric pencil sharpener, a machine which calmed her down by giving rise to pleasant, awful fantasies.
“What now?” She looked up.
Felicia Finewine was on the screen. Gone liked her almost as much as Malcolm did, and unlike Marlene, Fancy was willing to indulge her husband in watching the beautiful if stupid newsreader because it kept him quiet.
Fancy hated the woman’s hair, though. Why didn’t she get it properly styled and permed and shellacked and chiseled?
Then she noticed the picture of Brother Harry hovering seemingly in the air behind Felicia’s luscious left shoulder. Fancy ignored the newsreader’s faults and concentrated on what she was saying.
“Some kooky guy from a weird saucer cult said today that former First Lady Fancy Away was a member of his organization way back when she was young.”
For an instant, Felicia looked surprised at the idea that Fancy had once been young, but then her deeply imbued professionalism reasserted itself, and she schooled her face to neutrality and continued. “The cult is starting a membership drive, and it plans to use the connection with Mrs. Away in its new publicity materials. The kooky guy says that he remembers when Mrs. Away was a real live wire.”
That was too much for Felicia, who stopped talking and stared at the teleprompter in disbelief.
“That bastard!” Fancy said.
“Bad word, Mommy!”
“Shut up.”
“Okay.”
Fancy ground the name “Harry” into the sheet of paper and then drew lines through it over and over, forcing the smashed pencil point deep into the wooden table beneath. “Bastard,” she kept muttering.
Fortunately, Gone was too interested in the commercial that had replaced Felicia Finewine to complain again about Fancy’s language. He was watching happily as the Western MagnaComm corporate logo changed to the new, even stranger one representing ColossoVerse, the company’s new name. A voiceover informed him that more details about the new organization would be forthcoming by way of the company’s recently acquired radio network, newspaper chain, and television network, the latter being the one he was watching.
Gone smiled happily. It was all the same to him.
* * * *
*
“I’m so bored! This place is driving me nuts! I’ve got to get out of here!”
How many times had Marlene said that? Malcolm had lost count. Three days had passed in hiding, and she had begun on the afternoon of the first day.
“This place isn’t so bad.” It was a pleasant enough suburban tract house in Virginia. If not for the humidity, the excess of small life forms, the lack of mountains and winter, and the accents of the locals, Malcolm could have imagined he was back in his ex-house in a middle-class suburb of Piketon. It didn’t help that their guardians wouldn’t allow Malcolm and Marlene to spend much time outside the house and restricted what outside trips they were allowed to make to short distances and short durations.
“How long will we have to stay here?” she asked.
“Until they feel my life isn’t threatened any more. I don’t know. Ask Jerry or Al.”
Marlene sneered. “Oh, sure, of course you like those two shitheads. They’re just like you. What’s that you’re working on? The second Business Secrets book, I hope.”
They were in the living room-dining area of the house, and Malcolm was sitting at the table reading through a small pile of manuscript pages. He put his hands down quickly on the pages on the table and spread his fingers, trying to hide as much of it as possible. “Well, um, no, actually it’s fiction.”
“Christ, Malcolm! You never made any money from your fiction!”
“What do you think Business Secrets from the Stars is?”
“You know what I mean. So, what is this? Another novel no one will ever publish?”
Malcolm sighed. The sooner he told her, the sooner the shrieking would be over. “No, it’s a couple of short stories Jerry and Al wanted my opinion on.”
Understanding dawned. “They’re God damned writers? They’re God damned wannabe writers? Oh, Jesus, just what I need, two more of them!”
“What the hell does that mean, ‘two more of them’?” Malcolm shouted. “I’m no wannabe, you bitch! I’m the real thing! At least Jerry and Al recognize that, which is more than you ever did.”
Now that they were properly warmed up, Mr. and the former Mrs. Erskine happily resumed the kind of energetic dialogue that, during the years of their wedded nightmare, had kept so many of their erstwhile neighbors awake so far into the night.
Under the present circumstances, though, the shrieks and howls and insults instead brought two Secret Service agents running. They separated the contenders just after Marlene had pointed out that the bullet that had grazed Malcolm’s cheek had given him only a very small scratch and so it was pretentious of him to still be wearing a bandage over it after three days, and just before she tried to prove her contention that the scratch was surely healed by ripping the bandage off his cheek.
“Jesus, guys,” Jerry said in a loud whisper, holding Malcolm back by twisting his hands behind him in an exotic and painful hold he had learned from a certified sadist at the Secret Service training academy, “you want the entire neighborhood to hear you?”
“Yeah,” Al gasped, keeping Marlene at bay by dancing around vigorously so as to avoid her kicks and punches, thus diverting her attention from Malcolm, “Jeez... Christ... neighborhood... Ow!”
A basso profundo voice interrupted them. “Hey, how’re you guys doing?”
Everyone disengaged.
“Zip!”
“Agent Muchley!”
“Sir!”
“Well, hel-l-lo.”
“Mr. Erskine, Jerry, Al. Er, Mrs. Erskine.”
“He’s not available, Marlene,” Malcolm told her.
“They’re all available, dear.”
“Agent Muchley coordinated this mission, Mr. Erskine,” Jerry said. “You might say he was the éminence grise of our little enterprise.”
Al shook his head. “That’s not the phrase you want, Jerry.”
“Five bucks says it is.”
“You’re on. I’ll get my Merriam Webster’s,” Al said.
“Uh-uh. My Funk and Wagnall’s,” Jerry said.
“My God!” Marlene said
The two men strolled away together toward the basement they had converted into a study containing two desks and two laptop computers, arguing as they went the pros and cons of using foreign phrases in one’s fiction.
Marlene retreated into her peeve.
Zip Muchley beckoned to Malcolm to join him in the kitchen.
“Like a beer, Mr. Erskine, sir?”
Malcolm nodded, and Muchley took two beer bottles from the refrigerator, twisted the caps off both, and handed one to Malcolm.
Malcolm looked closely at the mouth of the bottle. There were no threads in the glass. This was not a screw-top bottle.
Malcolm sipped thoughtfully, wondering how the immense, upright Muchley would do against the immense, evil Mongo, if it should come to that. Jerry and Al, he suspected, would be pretty useless against Jimmy Flicker’s Director of Cosmic Outplacement. Muchley, though, might be another matter.
“You ever hear of a guy named Mongo, Zip? A really nasty, dangerous guy?”
Muchley frowned in thought. “Wasn’t he the guy in Flash Gordon? Evil Emperor of Outer Space, or something like that?”
“Close enough. Pretty good beer.”
“Yeah, I guess, if you like beer. Tell you the truth, though, Mr. Erskine, I normally don’t touch alcohol. It reduces fertility and testosterone, it messes up your brain, and it’s just not right, morally speaking.”
“I hear it can lead to the smoking of marijuana, too.”
“Really? Wow! I didn’t know that. See? One more reason to stay away from the stuff. I just thought I should have some now so that we could perform some male bonding.”
Why don’t you go perform some bonding with Marlene? Malcolm thought. I’m sure she’d find the idea more appealing than I do. “That’s important to you, is it?”
“Oh, sure. It’s one of the reasons we won the Cold War. Real man-to-man bonding, but without any of that pansy kissing the Russians go in for. That’s why they lost.”
Future historians will be in your debt, Malcolm thought.
“Okay.” Muchley put his beer down half finished. He washed his hands carefully in the kitchen sink and dried them for a long time on the towel hanging over the sink.
“There!” he said finally, looking satisfied and relieved. “Now, then, Mr. Erskine, we’ve got that out of the way, so let’s get to what I wanted to tell you about.”
Malcolm had finished his own beer. He pointed at the one Muchley had put down. “You want the rest of that? Or a fresh one?”
Muchley shook his head emphatically.
Malcolm took another beer from the refrigerator and opened it the wimpy way, with a bottle opener.
“You see, sir,” Muchley said, “I was ordered to keep you safe by a certain great lady you’ve already met.”
“Oh, yes, Jerry explained that to me. Or maybe it was Al.”
Muchley looked disappointed. “They didn’t tell you why, did they?”
“No.”
“Great! I get to do that! See, she knew for sure that there were assassins out there looking for you.”
“That’s interesting. How did she know that for sure?”
“Oh...” Muchley waved a hand in a gesture signifying vagueness. “She has her sources, which are different from our sources. Anyway, she didn’t call me in until she received the results of an opinion poll she had had commissioned, having to do with presidential preference.”
Jesus, Malcolm thought. “Showing that a certain great lady would have a good chance at becoming the first woman president?”
“Exactly, sir. But it also showed that she would never win the Republican nomination unless she had committed herself to just the right running mate, someone the younger, more entrepreneurial party members really look up and feel speaks for them.”
“I could think of a few names,” Malcolm said. “Industrialists, Wall Street jackals. Oh, sorry. They prefer to think of thems
elves as sharks.”
Muchley shook his head. “Only one name does the trick: Malcolm Erskine.”
Malcolm choked on his beer. “Holy shit, fuck, and damn!”
Muchley stiffened. “Of course, you’ll have to clean up your language first, sir. Anyway, through the information she’s gathered from her own sources, the, uh, the lady we’re discussing was able to give us some good leads as to the identity of the hit men, and even who was behind them, so we’re pretty confident that we’ll be able to track them down quickly. You shouldn’t have to be stuck here too much longer. Then we can take you and your, er, lovely wife —”
“Ex-wife!” Marlene shouted from half a house away.
“Ex-wife,” Muchley said, lowering his voice almost to inaudibility, “back home and you can go on with your vital work of teaching America the wisdom of the Merskeenians and cleaning up your vocabulary and preparing for your brilliant political future, sir.” He straightened suddenly and saluted. “I look forward to serving under you, sir!”
Malcolm raised his bottle to Muchley in response. Honor of the regiment, he thought. God, King, and country. Or Queen, God, and country, as it might soon be.
* * * * *
Two days later, Malcolm was taking a break from his non-labors by watching the news on television. He was paying little attention to the news itself. Rather, he was fantasizing about the anchorwoman. It was Felicia Finewine.
He had already forgiven her for her long-ago betrayal with the ghastly Grossbuck and for being married to Johnny Aggressive. What eyes! What a mouth! Why did she have to hide so much of herself behind that frustrating desk? Since television stations and networks so obviously hired their anchorwomen for their looks anyway, why didn’t they do such viewers as Malcolm a favor and dress the anchorwomen in bikinis and show them full length? He wondered if it would do any good to write to them with that suggestion.
Business Secrets from the Stars Page 27