The Frumious Bandersnatch

by Ed McBain

  “Al Martino, huh?” Ollie said.

  He’d never heard of him, either.

  “Yeah, he was a big recording star. Well, I think he’s still around, in fact.”

  “1966, that’s a long time ago,” Ollie said. “I hope she can still find the sheet music. Lots of these people who were big hits in the fifties and sixties, they just disappear, you know.”

  “But lots of them are still around,” Patricia said.

  “Oh sure.”

  “And better than ever.”

  “Oh, I know.”

  “The older they get, the better they get. Look at Tony Bennett.”

  “You want me to learn a Tony Bennett song for you?”

  “No, I want you to learn ‘Spanish Eyes.’ Just for me. So you can play it for me when you come up the house.”

  “You got a piano?”

  “Oh sure. My brother plays piano.”

  “I’ll be happy to learn ‘Spanish Eyes’ for you.”

  “You promise?”

  “I promise.”

  “You’ll like it. It’s a very lovely love song.”

  “I like lovely love songs,” Ollie said.

  “It’s the next exit, you know,” she said.

  “Pardon?”

  “You get off at the next exit.”

  “Oh. Right, right.”

  The next exit was Hampton Boulevard, and Hampton Boulevard was one of the worst sections in Riverhead. The population on Hamp Bull, as it was familiarly called, was largely Puerto Rican and Dominican; the local cops joked that around here English was the second language. The Hamp Bull Precinct was nicknamed The Dead Zone, and for good reason; it was worth your life to walk around here after dark, even if you were a policeman. Drug-infested and crime-ridden, the ten square blocks encompassed by the precinct were at the very top of the Commissioner’s list of Red Alert Areas. Ollie swung the car off at the exit sign, and drove up the ramp.

  He said nothing for several moments.

  At last, he said, “So this is where you live, huh?”

  “1113 Purcell,” she said, and nodded.

  “How long you been living here?”

  “I was born here.”

  “Your folks, too?”

  “No, my parents were born in Puerto Rico. Mayagüez. You make the next left.”

  Ollie nodded.

  Young men were standing on every street corner.

  “My brother and my sisters were born here, though,” Patricia said.

  “1113, you said?”

  “The project up ahead.”

  “Got it.”

  He pulled the Impala next to the curb. Some young guys wearing gang bandannas were playing basketball under the lights in the playground. They turned to watch as Ollie came around to let Patricia out on the curb side. In a seemingly casual move, he unbuttoned his jacket and flipped it open to show the holstered Glock. Patricia caught this, but said nothing. She watched as he locked the car.

  “No wonder you worried about getting raped all the time,” he said.

  “Kept me on my toes, that’s for sure,” Patricia said, and smiled. “But I’ve got Josie now,” she said, and patted the tote bag hanging at her side.

  “Can I give you some advice?” Ollie asked. “Man to man?”

  “Man to man, sure,” she said.

  “There used to be a time when the shield and the gun meant something. You flashed the tin, you pulled the gun, it meant something. Which building?” he asked, and offered his arm.

  “You gonna walk me home?” she asked, looking surprised. “Gee.”

  “If I lived here,” Ollie said, “I’d even walk myself home.”

  Patricia laughed.

  “I’m used to it,” she said.

  “That’s because you still think the shield and the gun mean something. They don’t, Patricia. You flash the buzzer nowadays, it’s an invitation for some punk to shoot you. You pull your Glock, that’s only telling some punk to show you his bigger AK-47. We’re outnumbered and outgunned, Patricia, and there’s too much money to be made in dope. So don’t count on Josie, ever, and don’t count on your shield, either.”

  “What should I count on, Oll?”

  “This,” he said, and tapped his temple with the forefinger of his right hand. “We’re smarter than any of them. That’s all you have to remember.”

  “But throw back your jacket and show the weapon, anyway, right?” she said knowingly.

  “With some of them, it still works,” he said.

  “Admit it,” she said.

  “Okay, it still works sometimes.”

  “Who’s Steve?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Who’s Steve?”

  They were walking up the concrete path to her red brick building. Some teenage boys and girls were sitting on the stoop, under a lamp swarming with the first insects of the season. One of the boys seemed about to say something, either to Patricia about her splendid tits or Ollie about his splendid girth, but he spotted the Glock and cooled it. Ollie gave him a look that said Wise decision, lad, and walked Patricia into the hallway. In this city, especially on Hamp Bull, too many bad things happened in hallways.

  The tiled walls were covered with graffiti.

  So were the elevator doors.

  “Would you like to come up for a while?” she asked.

  “Thanks, no, it’s late,” he said.

  “I had a wonderful time,” she said.

  “So did I, Patricia.”

  She looked into his eyes. Her face seemed suddenly forlorn.

  “Will I ever see you again?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?” he said, genuinely surprised. “Why not?”

  “Well,” she said, and shrugged, and then opened her hands wide to indicate the building and the hallway and the graffiti. “This,” she said.

  “Where you live is where you live,” he said, and shrugged.

  The elevator door slid open.

  The elevator was empty.

  Ollie put his foot against the door to hold it.

  “Well, thanks again,” Patricia said, and took his hand, and then reached up to kiss him on the cheek, surprising him again.

  “Listen, what are you doing Tuesday night?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “Wanna go see a movie?”

  “Sure.” She was still holding his hand. “Will you know ‘Spanish Eyes’ by then?”

  “I don’t think so. I won’t be able to ask Helen for the sheet music till Monday. My piano teacher. That’s when I have my piano lesson. Monday nights.”

  “Remember, it’s the Al Martino one.”

  “I’ll remember. Patricia…?”

  “Yes?”

  “I really did have a very nice time tonight.”

  “I did, too.”

  “So I’ll see you Tuesday, okay? Are you working Tuesday?”

  “Yes. The day shift.”

  “Me, too. So maybe we could go straight from the precinct…”

  “That sounds good…”

  “Grab something to eat…”

  “Okay. But nothing fancy like tonight.”

  “No, just a hamburger or something.”

  “Okay.”

  “And then go to the movies afterward.”

  “That sounds good, Oll.”

  “We’ll talk before then, find a movie we’d both like to see.”

  “Not a cop movie,” she said.

  “Definitely not a cop movie.”

  They were still holding hands.

  “Well…” he said. “Goodnight, Patricia.”

  “Goodnight, Oll.”

  She dropped his hand, and stepped into the elevator. He watched as she pressed the button for her floor, waved as the elevator door closed on her. He listened for a moment as the elevator started up the shaft.

  Smiling, he walked out of the building and down the steps past the teenage kids, and then up the path to where he’d parked the car.

  His jacket was s
till thrown back to show the Glock.

  “THIS IS HONEY BLAIR for Channel Four News, coming to you live from the ballroom deck of the River Princess, somewhere in the middle of the River Harb. In about a minute and a half, we’ll be privileged to see and hear Tamar Valparaiso, the rock world’s new singing sensation, performing live and in person the title song from her debut album, Bandersnatch. For those of you who may be wondering what on earth a bandersnatch might be, the word derives from Lewis Carroll’s poem ‘Jabberwocky,’ which some of you may recall from your childhood reading of Through the Looking-Glass. Remember sweet little Alice in Wonderland? Well, from what I understand…hold it, I’m getting a signal here…”

  Honey looked off camera, striking the familiar “Legs Slightly Apart” pose that had gained her millions of devoted viewers, mostly male, assuming as well the somewhat bewildered expression that made her appear like an innocent trapped in the wilds of TV-Land, a moue that seemed particularly appropriate to the song she was introducing.

  “They’re telling me we’ve got forty seconds,” she told the microphone and the millions of people who would later be watching the Eleven O’Clock News. “I was saying that Tamar’s rendering of ‘Bandersnatch’—if you remember the poem—has nothing to do with childhood fun and games. In fact, what this emerging diva boldly addresses here is the attempted rape of an innocent…ten seconds, they’re telling me, you can already see the lights beginning to change behind me, in eight, seven, six, five seconds…ladies and gentlemen, here’s Tamar Valparaiso with ‘Bandersnatch’!”

  On the video, the song was introduced with a repetitive bass note strummed on a synthesizer, no melody as yet, just a resounding B-flat note repeated against an animated yellow sky with pastel colored clouds and whimsical budding flowers and fanciful floating insects, a children’s garden of delights, with the only sound that of the insects’ whirring wings and the resonant synthesizer bass note.

  Here on the ballroom deck of the River Princess, the speakers picked up the same repeated note from the video, yes, but of course there wasn’t any animated garden. Instead there was only a playful display of lights suggesting the innocence of childhood, and suddenly, in a pale saffron spot that bathed Tamar in its ivory-yellow glow (on the video, she materialized in a field of blooming white flowers) she appeared now from nowhere, it seemed, wearing a short creamy-white tunic, palms flat on her thighs. On both the video and here in this simpler performance aboard the launch, she looked directly out at the audience, raised her hands in open-fingered surprise, grinned in delight at the magnificence of this sparkling new fairyland-day, and began singing a melody she herself had written, a tune that played around a blues figure, hinting at misery to come, but which—unlike real blues—stayed rooted in the key of B-flat for the first stanza.

  “ ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

  “Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

  “All mimsy were the borogoves,

  “And the mome raths outgrabe…”

  AVERY HANES was anticipating a swim platform running athwart the boat on the stern, with a narrow vertical ladder going up to the lower deck. Instead—and he considered this a stroke of absolute good fortune—a loading platform was in place on the boat’s port side, and a proper ladder with side rails and steps, instead of rungs, was pointed up at a forty-five-degree angle toward the boat’s second level where, he knew, cocktails had been served earlier tonight. The action now was on the lower deck, the ballroom level, the main deck salon where dinner and dessert had been served to a hundred and twelve guests who now sat watching Tamar Valparaiso performing on the parquet dance floor, all unaware. It would have been riskier to board the yacht on that main deck, bursting into the midst of the party, so to speak, although surely this was what they intended to do, anyway. But it would be far better to board on the second level, so handily made accessible by whichever Gods were in charge tonight, and work their way down by stealth to where they eventually wanted to be.

  “The masks,” Avery told Kellie, and she went below to fetch them as he eased the Rinker in alongside the loading platform and cut the engines to idle speed.

  BETWEEN STANZAS one and two, there was a four-measure interlude in the unrelated key of G, punctuated by drum beats and slashing, off-beat, E-minor power-chords on electric guitars. The drum beats grew louder and more insistent as the synth picked up the B-flat note again, more ominous-sounding now, and Tamar’s almost-blues melody reached out with the words of the second stanza, her voice tremulous, her brown eyes wide and darting uneasily, the lights behind her becoming dark and swirling as if in anticipation of a sudden storm.

  “Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

  “The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

  “Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun

  “The frumious Bandersnatch!”

  BISON RECORDS had used twelve different rubber masks during the shooting of the video, changing colors, shapes, and sizes to achieve the morphing effect they were looking for, the transmogrification of an insistent date-rape hazard into a crazed and violent beast intent on rape and possibly murder.

  There were only three masks aboard the Rinker tonight, and they would not be used for effect, merely for disguise.

  Avery handed one of them to Kellie.

  He himself pulled another one over his head and face.

  Cal Wilkins put on the last one.

  Kellie took the wheel of the boat.

  Both men lifted AK-47s from the deck, came through the gate on the transom entry, and stepped onto the loading platform.

  In the ballroom, Tamar Valparaiso was about to soar into the third stanza of “Bandersnatch.”

  IT WAS STRANGE how all tension left her the moment she began performing. She knew she had them, each and every one of them, could tell by the pin-dropping silence out there that they were hanging on every word she sang. She was hanging on to each word herself, for that matter, caught in the suspense of the moment she alone had created, waiting for whatever was going to happen next, just like when she was a kid listening to stories her mother told her, and then what, Mama, and then what?

  There was the insistent B-flat note again, pulsing from the speakers left and right. She imagined that sound magnified a thousandfold, visualized herself singing on the stage of a vast arena, hundreds of thousands of fans cheering and whistling as she stamped around the stage in her flirty little tunic, wanting more of her, ever more of her, screaming for more of her.

  Behind the screen on her left, she could see Jonah looking all muscular and masculine and macho in the clay-colored mask he wore for his entrance, waiting to come on, just waiting to burst onto that dance floor and tear off all her clothes.

  “He took his vorpal sword in hand:

  “Long time the manxome foe he sought—

  “So rested he by the Tumtum tree,

  “And stood awhile in thought…”

  AS THEY CLIMBED the ladder to the second deck, Avery glanced upward to the sun deck and the pilot house above, where he could see two uniformed figures busily performing nautical tasks, half-turned away from where he and Cal tried to flatten themselves against the side of the yacht so that no one listening to the big performance in the ballroom would catch sight of them in their rubber masks. They reached the second deck of the launch undetected, paused for an instant, but only an instant, to listen to the music coming from the main deck…

  “So rested he by the Tumtum tree,

  “And stood awhile in thought…”…and then, AK-47s in hand, moved into the lounge.

  The space was empty now, bottles gleaming behind the bar, bar stools bolted to the carpeted deck. Abruptly, the singing from the deck below ended. Now there was only a steady beat that sounded to Avery’s garage-band ears like a quarter note, a quarter-note rest, then two more quarter notes as they started for the wide mahogany staircase that led down to where Jonah, in a mask quite unlike the ones they were wearing, burst onto the dance floor.

  THIS PART OF “Banders
natch” was straight hip-hop, harsh and relentless, the repeated quarter notes in the background serving as a sort of submerged pulse that seemed slower than the Lewis Carroll lines, making the talk seem crammed over it, word after word crowding into the stanza, but always covertly in time.

  “And, as in uffish thought he stood,

  “The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,

  “Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,

  “And burbled as it came!”

  And here indeed did Jonah come whiffling from behind that tulgey screen erected at one side of the dance floor, wearing the grotesque clay-colored mask, red pin-spots knifing the air to catch the eye sockets as if they were belching flame or spouting blood, burbling as he came.

  And now they danced.

  Oh, how they danced!

  On the video, Tamar and the beast danced for three solid minutes while he tried but failed to defile her. Here on this small parquet floor, they danced an abbreviated version, to be sure, but none the less violent for its brevity. Silently they struggled, the insistent beat in four behind them, Jonah at first insinuating himself upon her in oily intimidation, muscles gleaming, confident of his advances and his allure, Tamar surprised and timorous, but suddenly intuiting intent and beginning to back away from him, which signaled the first blinding light change and—

  The audience gasped.

  Where an instant earlier there had been a neutral gray mask covering Jonah’s face, almost benign in appearance, a slight smile on the mouth…well, perhaps he was behaving like an overly ardent suitor, perhaps he had drunk a wee bit too much, but this playful creature certainly wasn’t anyone a girl in a creamy-white tunic need worry about, was he? Not on a lovely day like today, when the borogoves were all mimsy and the mome raths were out-grabing all over the place.

  But now, in the blinding flash of an instant, that nice little fraternity brother who just a heartbeat ago had been beseeching a kiss or negotiating a copped feel was suddenly wearing a tarnished copper mask, and his genial smile had been replaced by something more closely resembling a smirk or a snarl, as if the little girl singing her heart out here had somehow offended him by spurning his advances.