Lady Slings the Booze

by Spider Robinson

  In a cavern, in a canyon, excavating for a mine…

  On the far side of the pipe were two steel ladders. One was bolted onto the side of the pipe itself; the other was secured to the far wall and led up to the access hatch and Penn Station. I approached that one carefully, brandishing the Talisman with my finger poised over the “ruin-it” button, watching for the first flicker. When I got as far as the top of the ladder without a reading, I went back down again, and shone my flashlight back at the other ladder, up its length.

  There was an inspection plate up at the top of that pipe.

  I slid the circle of light back down the side of the pipe, centered it.

  Death was in there. Death, and worse than death. All this was real. The intuitive certainty I had braced with so much guesswork had been as reliable as my intuitions always were.

  Did that mean my jinx was still reliable too?

  All at once I wondered why I was so sure I was not being irradiated as I stood there. Sure, it made sense that The Miner would want his mines undetectible—but just how much radiation was going to escape from this crypt, to what detector? Consolidated Edison maintenance men wouldn’t carry Geiger counters. (I had the vague idea Con Ed handled city water system maintenance; I later learned that’s wrong.) I remembered someone who was provably smarter than Edison, and I started to tell Arethusa to stick her head back into Brooklyn and ask Tesla for a Geiger counter. Then I remembered that The Miner had had to bring the bomb down here and install it himself. It would not be hot. Calm down, Joe! I mean, Ken.

  Oh, a CO’s life is not a happy one. How had I ended up holding the sack? I had gone to Nam a corporal, come back a private, albeit a private with a Silver Star. My genre was mysteries, not spy stories. Damn Lady Sally for needing a genius gumshoe to solve her puzzles for her. Damn The Miner for existing.

  I got out my drop cloth and unfolded it. It seemed to be made of cobwebs, but Lady Sally had sworn that nothing I was liable to encounter could tear or abrade it. From a tiny bundle it unfolded out so big I was able to refold it with two layers on the bottom and a third to slide under. I placed it on the spot I’d already dusted with my own body. “Be careful coming under, Arethusa,” I said. “Don’t get dirty if you can help it.”

  She was careful. Pris, on the other hand, pointedly ignored the drop cloth and picked a nice dirty spot to wriggle under. She was costumed and made up as the blind beggar with the Seeing Eye dog; the fresh grime added color to the effect. Also odor. People would tend to leave the blind beggar alone.

  “Okay, the corridor just above the manhole checks out clean,” I said. “Let Ralph go first. He’s got the best nose, and will be the least upsetting to anyone coming the other way. When you get to the Station proper, fan out and pick spots where you can keep an eye on the approach without being seen. If you see a live one, do nothing. Just jungle up, wait for my transmission, and get ready to tail him when he comes back out. Arethusa, look me in the eye.”

  She did so. In the weak light she was so beautiful my heart hurt.

  “Tell me what you will do if I have trouble—if The Miner spots me and kills me, or captures me.”

  She kept looking me in the eye. “I will stay where I am, and mourn quietly, and tail him when he emerges. He will not spot me. He will not lose me. And I will not kill him until Lady Sally says I may.”

  I kissed her. Thoroughly. As if it was the last time. Then I gave her the Talisman, so that Pris would have both hands free. “Pris,” I said then, “you get the manhole cover. Ralph, you go through first and sniff for trouble—but don’t advance until Arethusa gives you the green light, got it?”

  The manhole cover did not want to yield; for a moment I was afraid it was dogged down from above. But Pris reasoned with it. It let go with a sound like a dinosaur being killed. Before I thought the opening large enough, Ralph Von Wau Wau was through it. Pris slid the heavy cover aside and followed him. In a moment she reached down and hauled Arethusa up bodily after her. “See you in a little under eight hours, Ken,” she called back down softly.

  “Don’t get spotted coming back here,” I cautioned pointlessly.

  The cover groaned back into place and seated with another baritone squeal.

  I touched my tongue to the crevice between two teeth. “Testing,” I said. “All units, report!”

  “Unit one,” Pris’s voice said clearly from everywhere at once.

  “Unit two,” Arethusa’s lyrical voice sang.

  I waited for “Unit sree,” and nothing happened. “Ralph, God damn it—”

  “Sorry, boss,” Pris said. “He says the damn thing must not like dog spit. Ralph’s deaf and dumb as far as you’re concerned.”

  I fretted about that, but there was no solution. “Well, keep him in sight. Especially when the tail starts.”

  “He says not to worry, he’ll leave a trail.”

  I was too keyed up to be amused. “Let’s keep radio silence for the rest of the shift. If you do spot an incoming bogie, report after you’re sure he can’t hear you. I’ll still have plenty of warning.”

  They took me literally; I didn’t even get a roger-wilco. Silence descended like a damp fog. I couldn’t even hear their departing footsteps through the small holes in the manhole cover.

  Then it got even quieter than that.

  I was alone, in something very like a tomb or catacomb, with a live nuclear weapon of uncertain megatonnage. There was nothing for me to do but wait. If I was lucky, I had eight hours to kill…

  I moved the toolbox over behind the truss where it would not be seen by anyone approaching the bomb, glanced incuriously at its contents, and sat down on it. I switched my flashlight off and waited for my pulse to stop racing. I tried to anticipate contingencies, I tried not to be sleepy. I tried hard not to wonder if Arethusa’s luck was really as strong as my jinx. I tried very hard not to think about Manhattan tunnel rats.

  After about five minutes I sighed, switched the light back on, propped it on the toolbox, made sure I had several spare batteries, and got out GOOD BEHAVIOR, by Donald Westlake. There was no chance I would fall asleep before I finished it. I was determined to find out how Dortmunder got away from those mercenaries before I died.

  After a while my eyelids got heavy, so I closed them and lay down.

  WHEN I opened them again, the light was slightly better. I saw Arethusa sleeping beside me. For some reason, that did not please me. Beyond her I could hear Pris snoring. Someone else was moving around nearby, very near, and it didn’t sound like Ralph Von Wau Wau. I tried to lift my head and investigate, and found that I could not. I tried to worry about that, and could not do that either.

  Damn, I thought, Dortmunder was still in deep shit, and now I’ll never find out how he escaped…

  16. Half Life

  Shared despair is squared; shared hope is cubed (or better).

  —LADY SALLY MCGEE

  DISTANTLY I listened to the sounds he made, and deciphered them. He was handcuffing people to things. Shortly he got to me. He cuffed my wrists behind me, and my ankles to the bracing rod of the pipe truss. That was funny. How come he happened to have six pairs of handcuffs? Oh, of course. He was using ours. Thoughtful of us to have fetched them for him. That implied that he had taken my weapons too. A pity. I’m always losing guns I like.

  He rolled me over with his foot, and I got my first glimpse of him. Not a very good one; the light was poor and he was not in the center of my field of vision, which I could not move. He appeared to be in his fifties, balding and thin to the point of gauntness, with a beak that would have made a good head for a splitting wedge. I wished vaguely that I could see it used so. Arethusa and Pris were both cuffed by the ankles to the other truss, on their sides so they wouldn’t be lying on their cuffed wrists. Damn civil of him.

  He slid the needle in slowly, and so my magic skin accepted it.

  An antidote to whatever hypnotic gas he had piped through the holes in the manhole cover. We had forgotten that we were not t
he only ones in this game who played with hi-tech toys…

  Goody: now I could be terrified again.

  I sat up stiffly, and used that stiffness as excuse to move around enough to take inventory. Sure enough, my gun was gone, and my knife and brass knuckles and sap and belt and the contents of all my pockets. If I had fetched wallet or ID he’d have had that too. I didn’t even see the book. He squatted near me, carefully out of my reach, and when he saw that my eyes were tracking, he said, “’Allo.”

  Oh Christ, I thought, a Frenchman.

  Look, I apologize, okay? I try to be as little bigoted as a New York private eye can be. Stereotypes are an excuse to keep napping. I have known good and bad in all races, colors, creeds and nationalities. Except the French. I know it’s just my personal experience; I’m sure there are lots of very nice French people. But every one I ever chanced to meet was crazier than a shithouse rat. I don’t know, maybe it has something to do with having had their asses consistently kicked by their neighbors for something like two centuries straight. They tended to come in two flavors: invincibly ignorant and right wing, or intellectual and more Marxist than Stalin. Both kinds were, even by New York standards, colossally rude. The only thing they seemed to agree on was that France, a place where Jerry Lewis is a genius and the urinals are kept out on the sidewalk, had produced the planet’s only true civilization.

  Of course, The Miner could be French Canadian. The only two Québecois I’d ever met were both decent guys, no more snobbish toward Americans than any other Canadian.

  I remembered my erstwhile employer, only a matter of days ago, asking me if I was related to that Inspector Clazoo. It now seemed a reasonable question.

  “Not now, Cato, you fuel,” I grunted.

  He got the reference and frowned. Swell: I’d annoyed him.

  “I nearly ’ad a ’eart attack when I first saw you,” he complained. “’As anyone ever told you that you resemble—”

  “Only every third person,” I said wearily. Yeah, that must have shaken him up a little, all right…

  I saw that I was on the other side of the pipe now, on the access side. I wondered how he had handcuffed Ralph. I glanced around, and didn’t see Ralph anywhere. Interesting. Did hypno-gas work on a German shepherd? Was Ralph alive and active somewhere above? Or was he dead in the corridor? I knew his tooth-transceiver didn’t trans…but did it ceive? I touched my tongue to the radio seed. “Okay,” I said. “We’re cuffed. Now what happens?”

  “Now I ask you questions,” he said.

  “Isn’t this the place where the villain has his big speech?” I said. “You’re supposed to try to justify yourself now.”

  One side of his mouth smiled. “I have read the same books, and seen the same films. The primary purpose of this speech is to give the ’ero time to get free and kill the villain. As I am not a villain, I must decline this honor.”

  “You’re sure?” I said. “The way I read you, you’ve been dying to gloat to somebody about this for at least five years now. Think of me as a preview audience.”

  “I ’ave no interest in the opinions of others,” he said. “Certainly not Americans.”

  “I was only born here,” I said. “Actually I’m Irish.” Whenever I wasn’t speaking, I had my tongue on that seed. It was hard to say why. It didn’t seem reasonable that Ralph could still be alive. Looked at one way, Lady Sally’s office was only a few yards away—it seemed I ought to be able to raise her with a loud shout. But in fact she was well outside the one-mile range of Tesla’s radio seed. I gave myself strict orders not to be seen glancing at my watch, not to let him guess that I was expecting eventual relief—but I sure wished I knew how soon eight A.M. would be here.

  He snorted. “You ’ave my sympathy.” He turned and went to the toolbox, which had been moved well out of my reach.

  The moment his back was turned I snuck a look at my watch, which thank God had a luminous display. Jesus Christ—a little after five! Almost three hours until relief. Five hours since I had kissed Arethusa.

  Maybe he was Canadian. Even at a dead run, with a military jet, he could not have gotten here from Europe this quickly. Toronto, maybe. No, Ottawa. The Canadian mine would not be in Ottawa, not if one of the terrorists was Québecois.

  I took what comfort I could from her gentle snoring.

  The Miner straightened up from the toolbox with a blowtorch in his hand. “Now for the questions.”

  He lit the torch with a clicker. The chamber brightened slightly. He adjusted the flame to a fuel-wasting bright tongue that shivered impressively, making the shadows shimmer.

  I had never thought to ask Lady Sally whether her magic body armor was proof against extreme heat, but I had the dismal certainty that I knew the answer. Impact was the only thing specified on the warrantee. As Tom Waits said, the large print giveth, and the small print taketh away.

  I had a major problem here. A Miner problem, if you will. Not only were all the lies I could think of wildly implausible…so was the truth. I could see myself trying to convince this guy that on the other side of that wall over there was a Brooklyn whorehouse run by a redheaded time traveler with terrific legs.

  Rats are less fussy than cats. They’ll accept their meat overcooked. Templeton was going to have his revenge.

  “If I were you,” the Frenchman said, raising his voice slightly to be heard over the hiss, “I would answer candidly. It will ’asten your death, and so we will both be ’appy.”

  I lied quickly. “I will answer any question you ask fully and responsively and with great honesty if you’ll answer me a couple of quick easy ones, first.”

  He glanced at his own watch. “Ver’ quick.”

  “You’ve been fairly sophisticated so far. Why not use scopolamine? Nothing else you’ve done is crude.”

  By God, the flattery got to him, canceled my Clouseau reference, won me a tiny morsel of goodwill. “I am sorry. One of life’s infernal details, a side effect of the gas I used on you. For the next twenty-four ’ours or so, scopolamine would kill you. I regret the crudity, but I must know what you know. I promise I will kill you the moment I am sure you ’ave been ’onest and…q’est-ce que vous dit?…forthcoming.”

  “Did you kill my dog?”

  He nodded sadly. “I believe so. I could find no pulse in ’is t’roat. The dog’s metabolism is so small, you see.” He gripped the torch, and shadows danced. “To work.”

  “One more,” I begged. “How did you take us?”

  “Ah,” he said, “of course you would wish to know. Pressure switches under the floor of the corridor trigger the gas. Then an alarm is sent.”

  Shit! A simple mechanical linkage, too unsophisticated to alarm Tesla’s Talisman. By the time it had started to glow, no one was awake to push the button.

  “What if a legitimate maintenance man came along?”

  “I know the schedule of maintenance, and shut the system down at those times.”

  “And what if he opened that inspection plate?”

  “’E would find that ’e lacked the proper tools. It is now sealed with European bolts. If I found wrench marks on them at my next inspection, I would prepare an accident for ’im.”

  With a wave of horror, I realized that my friends had gone down within seconds of assuming radio silence at my command! They had lain there unconscious, yards away from me, for hours—for however long it had taken The Miner to come investigate…while I sat in the dark, reading Donald Westlake.

  Shrewd work, General Taggart, sir. Armed only with invulnerability, a death ray and a magic talisman, you managed to cobble up a fiasco.

  In my mind’s ear I seemed to hear Lady Sally say contemptuously, You don’t want me—I’ll give you a chit to see the chaplain…and then say lovingly, Arethusa is your luck…

  My luck was out cold. Her other body was not as heavily drugged but still drowsing under a sleeping pill, and the consciousness that might have roused it and raised the alarm was wholly stunned. This Frenchman inten
ded to kill her local body. Would her hypnotized self manage to find its way back home to Brooklyn? I had never had time to question her closely about the effects of separation on her telepathy…

  Don’t depend on your luck, said an old Master Sergeant in my mind. (Very old: he’d been in Nam over a year and a half when I met him.)

  Okay, what were my assets?

  As far as I could see they totaled two, both potential rather than immediately available. If I could con him into reviving Arethusa—say, by claiming that only she possessed certain crucial information—then maybe she could make the mental leap to Brooklyn (if you see what I mean), shake her other body awake, and bring armed reinforcements within minutes. Wouldn’t he be surprised when she came through that wall? Which suggested my only other asset: sole possession of the knowledge that a section of wall opened onto Lady Sally’s office. If I could only fling something through that wall!

  I no longer had any items on me to throw even if I hadn’t been cuffed, and the toolbox was out of reach, and with my ankles cuffed too I could not even kick a shoe that far. Even if I could, what were the chances that Lady Sally was in her office at five o’clock in the morning? If she came in and found a shoe on the carpet, would she interpret its significance?

  All this went through my head in the few seconds The Miner gave me to absorb the humiliating ease of my defeat. Then he was approaching me with that blowtorch and I stopped thinking about abstract hypothetical situations. “Thank you,” I said, and continued quickly, “Well, I won’t hold you any longer, uh—” I paused, doing it in the way that triggers someone to insert their name so they won’t hold up your sentence.

  He didn’t bite. “You may call me ‘Doc,’” he said.

  He set my own flashlight on the truss, to illuminate his working area: me. It was now theoretically possible, if I heaved up and twisted at just the right instant with great luck and skill, to grab my flashlight and shine it in his eyes. Even in fantasy, I couldn’t see myself lobbing it over that pipe and into just the right section of wall. With one hand tied behind my back, maybe, but…