Lady Slings the Booze

by Spider Robinson

  During all this her voice kept switching from one side of me to the other, apparently at random. I found myself tending to look at whichever one of her was not speaking at the moment. How often in life do you get to watch someone actually listen to themself? Once in a while they would look at each other, and I would get slightly dizzy thinking about that. “God, it’s a good thing you weren’t quints,” I said. “You’d starve on one paycheck. What a fascinating life you must have had. Be having. To be in two places at once…”

  “It has its ups and downs,” she said.

  “Is it hard to run two bodies at once?”

  “Is it hard running only one?”

  “Well, I’ve nothing to compare…oh. I see what you mean. Silly question. I’m beginning to understand something, I think.”

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “Well, from the moment I met you, you came across as…what’s the word? Assured? Confident? The first thing I knew about you—” I paused. “No: the first thing I knew about you was that you look very good naked. But the next thing was…what’s that stupid phrase they keep using on talk shows? You feel good about yourself. That’s rare in anybody, and especially in women. But it makes sense. Most of us keep constantly doing reality checks. We study how other people react to us, to reassure us that our senses aren’t lying to us. We send out little sonar pulses all the time, and study the echoes that come back to see if we’re all right. If enough people tell us we’re drunk, we lie down. You don’t do that. You’ve got your sensory reality check, all the time. It makes you just a little healthier, a little saner, than most people.”

  “And a little more prone to folie à deux, maybe,” she said seriously. “That’s part of why I decided to let myself fall in love with you, I think.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I am very self-confident. And sometimes both of me are dead wrong. I believe you are smart enough to know when, tough enough to make me believe it, and sweet enough to make me like it.”

  I blinked. “That’s a tall order.”

  She smiled. “You’re a tall man. And I’m worth the trouble.”

  I did not argue either point.

  “And besides,” she said, “you didn’t flinch when you found out I have two bodies. Most of the people I’ve told did. One client got depressed at the thought that he was only getting half my attention.”

  “The man’s a fool,” I said. “The evidence is clear: you’ve got twice as much attention to give as a solo. It only makes sense. You’ve got two brains to use.”

  “See what I mean? If I let myself love anyone less perceptive than you, I’d be in terrible danger of developing a split personality.”

  I made a pun which on reflection I will not repeat, and one thing led to another, and then we took a nap. I don’t care what the Raging Bull thought: this is the way to prepare for a fight.

  WE conspirators all got together again at six P.M. to have half an hour of final choreography and dress rehearsal while traffic through Reception was at its lightest. Then there was a long period during which Time insisted on tailgating instead of passing, no matter how far I pulled over to let it by. Backstage jitters. Arethusa tried to get me to eat at least a little, but I prefer to go into combat on an empty stomach. It makes you mean and quick, and improves your chances in case of a belly wound. We seven held one last brief meeting at eight P.M., exchanged last-minute thoughts and good wishes, and took our positions.

  Then there was nothing but waiting and worrying. After a while I realized I’d discovered a way to make time run slow myself, without a magic watch.

  Despite my war talk, I had never killed a man in cold blood before. I had killed an indeterminate number in combat, in Viet Nam, somewhere between six and a hundred thousand or so. You let off a whole lot of rounds in a hopeful spirit, and seldom get to reel the target in and inspect it afterward. But I’d seen many men in pajamas fall at the same time I fired, and had confirmed six kills, one of them by knife. I could live with them, and any others I might have caused there. (Whether we “belonged in” Nam being quite irrelevant.) In peacetime I had killed twice, both times in self-defense, taking a couple of slugs myself on the latter occasion. I could live with both of them, too. But with more difficulty. I’d killed one of them with my hands. It takes a hundred years longer than it does on TV, and lends itself well to nightmares.

  But this would be my first planned and paid assassination. From private eye to hooker to hit-man, in under twenty-four hours.

  Well, at least I’d found love…

  Which, I admitted to myself in those last nervous minutes, was the real reason I had voted for Christian Raffalli’s death. The world was better off without him or his magic watch, sure. But if he had not raped my newfound love, in my helpless presence, I might have settled for, say, breaking his elbows and muting him. Or even simply taking his watch from him and arranging for him to be committed as a dangerous psychotic to someplace very secure. I was sure Lady Sally could arrange something like that with a phone call. Collect.

  Instead, I wanted him dead.

  I decided I would whack him on the head with my blackjack after I killed him. That way it would be just as gratuitous, as pointless, as sapping me had been—

  Which started me thinking about that for the first time. How perfectly unnecessary it had been to sap me. A private eye isn’t surprised much to be hit on the head; it kind of goes with the territory. But Raffalli had never hit any of his other victims before, male or female, as far as the tapes showed. The emotional logic suddenly seemed skewed to me. If he was going to hit a guy, I thought, you’d think he’d do it at the start of his run of fun and games, to prove to himself that he was invulnerable. Not after he’d established that…

  I reran the sequence in my mind, and a horrid suspicion dawned on me. I’d had a momentary sense impression of ghostly fingers touching my wallet and then the sap beside it in my back pocket. What if he had taken out the wallet and examined its contents? My fucking PI license was in there. If he found that, his logical move was to pat me down for weapons, find the sap—

  —and give me a good clip, to keep me from thinking about the wallet!

  I was in the darkened stairwell of one of the two “priest’s holes.” I broke a thumbnail lighting up my watch. It said 8:45. Raffalli didn’t usually show up until at least nine. There should be time to go out into Reception, establish through Mary that the coast outside was clear, and slide outside to warn Arethusa, waiting together in Mike’s van. Despite my sudden sense of terrifying urgency, I loosened my .45 in its holster, made sure the safety was off, checked my other weapons, took a quick glance through the peephole in the door at the top of the stairs, and started to ease the door open—

  As I did, the front door opened and Arethusa Number One came in, looking bright-eyed but confident and plausible.

  Show time…

  MIKE Callahan was sitting behind the Reception desk, his cigar in his teeth and his big hands out of sight. He saw me crack my door, but pretended he hadn’t. He and Arethusa began improvising conversation, as per plan. Time slowed, as if by Raffalli’s watch, while I hesitated, balancing the risk of warning him against the need to warn them that he might be on to us. As I decided to chance it, I heard the front doorknob start to turn again, and time went from zero to sixty in no time at all. I eased my door shut, fitted my eye to the peephole, and addressed a long and complicated prayer to a God I hadn’t believed in since the day I found Uncle Louie. In essence, I asked Him to retroactively order the Universe so that Raffalli had been too cocky to bother checking my wallet, and had simply disturbed it in removing and replacing the blackjack. I added a detailed memo reminding Him of the kind of luck I’d been having for the last twenty years, and broadly hinting that consistency was the something-or-other of small Minds. And I believe I concluded with a promise that if He just let me have this one small murder, I’d never ask for a favor again. It seemed a reasonable request at the time.

 
; All this in the interval it took Raffalli to get the front door open and step inside. Mike and Arethusa One were still chattering. To save my life I couldn’t tell you what about. My darling turned and looked at Raffalli as she talked, giving him a good clear look at her face, smiling at him with just enough english on it to be sure she had his attention. Then Arethusa Two came in the door behind him, her timing perfect. She made enough of a noisy production out of it to make Raffalli turn and glance at her. As he saw her face, he froze in momentary surprise, just as I’d planned. Then he turned around again to confirm that the same woman was on two sides of him, just as I’d planned.

  As he did, I came through that secret door fast and silently behind him. To my right, I caught a flicker in my peripheral vision of Priscilla doing the same on his other flank, as planned. Arethusa One had by now ducked silently behind the desk, according to plan. Mike was holding down on Raffalli with the sawed-off shotgun, just as planned. Raffalli was doing what almost anyone will do if you draw down on them with a twelve gauge: flinging up both hands in a futile but uncontrollable attempt to ward off buckshot.

  Everything was going splendidly. By this point nearly all of the potential disasters I’d envisioned had conclusively failed to occur. All that remained was the purely nominal chance that Priscilla and/or I would fuck up what we both did best, and had rehearsed perfectly fifteen times that afternoon. I’m a fairly cocky guy myself, when it comes to physical violence, and Priscilla was as good a partner as I’ve ever had. In my mind I was dealing with the problem of dissecting him before I ever reached him.

  Priscilla reached him a toasted pubic hair before I did. I’m better at quick than I am at fast. She took him perfectly, at right wrist and elbow simultaneously, and locked down. I was expecting him to turn involuntarily in her direction, allowing for that. Even so I took him higher up on the arm than she had, bracketing his left elbow with my hands. I didn’t want there to be the slightest chance that I’d brush a sleeve past that watchstem and cause it to twist. I had no sure way to know which direction would be fatal. I felt my grip firm up, knew that come hell or high water I could hold him for the second it would take Arethusa Two to put her .38 into his short ribs, and began to exult.

  Nonetheless I kept my eyes firmly fixed to that infernal watch. Time was again passing in great long slow microseconds; I had time to study the thing. I observed for the first time that it had the usual three hands, and a three-place digital readout in the center that I had taken for a manufacturer’s logo. I deduced that he needed to keep track of elapsed time while in time-stop mode, for some reason. I noted the subtle geometric pattern of the chasing on the casing. I saw that the stanchions for the wristband were an integral part of the casing, not welded-on afterthoughts. It was not a real antique pocket watch, but a modern product made to look a little like one—probably because it needed to be larger than any conventional watch without drawing attention to itself. By the time I realized, looking down his arm at it, seeing it from an angle, that the stem was a single solid integral piece, incapable of twisting, he had already gotten his palm folded and his ring finger more than halfway to the stem. It had to be there for something. If it wasn’t a twistable dial, then it was a pushbutton…

  I threw everything I had into shaking his arm, trying to snap it like a whip. But you cannot move something the size and mass of an arm faster than a nerve impulse can travel down it. With sick certainty I knew I would fail. I was sorry I’d never found the time to ask how Lady Sally managed to light her House without visible bulbs. It was a good trick, and now I’d never know the answer. I thought of that, rather than think about the fact that I had probably killed my beloved, killed us all. I was still in hyperdrive. I even had time to realize for the first time that when he had cheated in his arm-wrestling match, he could not possibly have used his right hand to twist a watchstem. The crucial detail I’ve overlooked always turns out to have been right under my nose, big as life. Jinx my ass—I was a jerk!

  And then his fingertip reached the stem and the room changed.

  EVERYTHING changed. Everything but me. Instantly. The room, the lighting, the smell, the ambient sound, the temperature—even my body itself, with no perceptible transition, was at a different height from the floor, in a different position.

  It was not a good position. I could not comprehend it fully right away, but it was uncomfortable to the point of pain, and that told me all I really needed to know for now. I stopped thinking about it, and the surroundings, and concentrated on Raffalli for the moment.

  As a general rule, I like my opponents confident. It inclines them toward carelessness. But he had the kind of confidence that is earned. That shook me more than I like to admit. I might have been in more danger, more immediate danger, if he’d been hysterical with fear. But I also might have managed to turn that instability to my advantage. This man was not afraid of me at all…and the one thing I knew was that he was smarter than I was. I’d proved that.

  And that was my own knife he had in his hand. A very good knife. Very sharp. I’d honed it myself less than an hour ago…

  So what sustained me? Nothing but the awareness that my whole life had been a preparation for a confrontation like this.

  “I’ve always liked this scene, Raffalli,” I told him cheerfully.

  He was amused. “‘This scene’?”

  “I’ve read it or seen it a million times. Everybody has. It means, don’t go to the bathroom, the climax is coming. The villain gets the hero in his clutches. Then he lectures. He explains how he committed the crime, so he gets to brag and the audience doesn’t get cheated of the solution. He tells the story of his life, justifies himself just enough so the viewer gets the point that this is his own dark side we’re talking about here. He slaps the hero around just enough to lose audience sympathy for good. And then the hero kills him.”

  He was smiling broadly. “Too bad life ain’t a bad movie.”

  “No, it’s not. But they have that scene in good movies, too.”

  “Tonight we do the punk version. Where the hero dies. The modern audience likes a cruel twist. It’s called realism.”

  “Tell it to Darth Vader, asshole.”

  “I must admit that a few of the plot twists have been reminiscent of a bad movie,” he said, still smiling. “I couldn’t believe it when I checked you out today. Sure enough, you were that Joe Quigley. The Favila case. I knew you’d be waiting for me tonight. That one of the few minds on earth capable of both deducing and believing what I’ve accomplished should chance to be a customer here is…well, if this were a movie I’d be demanding my money back. Instead, I’m going to play Editor.” The smile became a grin. “You’re an implausible character, Quigley. I’m going to cut you. Pun intentional.”

  “You’re history,” I said. “By dawn you’ll be marine biology. I’m going to flush you down a toilet. For hours.”

  While I talked tough to try and cheer myself up, my surroundings were soaking in. As I spoke, I was inventorying the environment for liabilities and potential assets. Well before I invoked Darth Vader, I’d finished the job. The results were not encouraging.

  He and I were alone. In a room I recognized. Master Henry’s Dungeon. No, I was mistaken, the swing set and the Stairway to Hell were nowhere to be seen: it must be Cynthia’s Dungeon. I was secured firmly by wrists and ankles to some kind of bondage cross, in an X shape. I strained against the bonds, first covertly and then overtly, and satisfied myself that I could not break them. It wouldn’t have helped a lot if I had. I was completely unarmed. Even my best-hidden weapons will not stand up to a skin search, and he had made one. Leaving me in my skin.

  Can you think of a worse nightmare than being naked and helpless in a fully equipped S&M dungeon with a guy who’s raped your lover, wants you dead and has your own knife in his hand? Even a beleaguered movie hero usually has at least a nailfile or something. I didn’t have a place to keep one.

  As far as I could see, I had a single item on the asset si
de of the ledger. We were running in realtime. Somewhere outside this room, my friends were even now observing that Raffalli and I were gone, and taking steps to find us.

  Slim comfort. Their first guess would probably be that he had taken me somewhere outside the House. We all knew he was cocky, but this was almost unreasonably audacious. Brilliantly so—

  Wait—he didn’t know about Mary!

  Did he? Electronic surveillance was surely not something a sane madam would advertise to her customers, however necessary it was for their own protection. Surely he had searched the House at least once, during Stop-Time—but would he have had any plausible reason to search the fourth floor, once he saw it was not used for business? The Snoop Room was several boring doors from the stairs.

  We’d already killed a good sixty seconds in conversation since he’d restarted time. Priscilla was quick as a fly and fast as a cheetah. It was possible that she was just outside that door right now—

  —getting ready to do what?

  Was there any chance that even she could get that door open in utter silence, and sneak up on him so carefully that he never got even a split second’s warning?

  In the movies, maybe.

  I couldn’t even cue her accurately. The Dungeon was soundproof.

  “Well, I hope you won’t be too disappointed,” he went on while my mind raced, “but I have no intention of playing out the scene in the conventional manner. I decline to die. I won’t explain my watch even to a dead man breathing—especially not one who looks so much like a reporter. And I haven’t met anybody since my mother died to whom I felt any impulse to justify myself.”

  That I could believe. His vocabulary and diction were excellent, only the single word “ain’t” earlier hinting at lower-class origins—but he had never troubled to scrub off the heavy Brooklyn accent that was a much broader hint. He’d learned good speech simply to make himself understood better. He didn’t give a damn what anybody thought of him.