Tinker and Blue

by Frank Macdonald

  While the three people coming from the building struggled to get into the car, both Blue and Barney raced from their shadowed doorway, Blue jerking open the passenger door behind the driver. He and Barney jammed themselves through the door and onto the seat. When he got as settled as the circumstances permitted, Blue saw Capricorn in the front seat. Sitting beside Blue in the back seat was FBI Special Agent Bud Wise and beyond him, a soldier who was busily working a pillowcase over the agent’s head. Kathy peeled the car away from the curb with the fury of an Indy driver, and Blue began to laugh. By the time they pulled into the driveway behind the commune, his infectious laughter had tickled them all, all that is except for Wise.

  “You know what the other fellow says about laughter, don’t you?” Blue said, nudging Wise in the ribs as they guided him out of the car. “A joke can’t laugh at itself. Is that why you’re not laughing, Special Agent Wise?”

  59

  “It was Blue’s idea,” Tinker explained to the gathering around the commune’s kitchen table, unaware that those were probably the kindest words he would ever utter. “He wanted to make some kind of Trojan Horse to get people into the building to get Capricorn out. Kathy and I started talking about it on a smaller scale and we came up with the idea about the soldier but we needed time to work it out and practice it, so we took off out of the city for the weekend.”

  “But Mrs. Rubble said you moved out of her apartment,” Karma said.

  “We told her that so she wouldn’t worry about us, but we didn’t want her to know what we were up to, either” Kathy explained. “We practised all we could. Tinker rehearsed his character and I practised driving the car.”

  “It was Kathy who came up with the idea of covering the Plymouth with black MACtack so they’d have the wrong description of the car,” Tinker said, “then we were able to just peel it off when we got here and now there’s a two-tone Plymouth parked out back. She also wrote my script, five of them to be exact. What I should say if Wise said this, and what I should say if Parks said that. We tried to anticipate everything.”

  “I had a good actor to work with,” Kathy acknowledged, “but we had to wait until we could be sure that we had our story straight.”

  “Blue told us the story about Capricorn bugging the vice principal’s office and about the secretary,” Tinker said. “But because of the long weekend we had to wait until this morning to call the school in New York. Kathy pretended she was doing a research paper on changes in school administration over the past twenty years, and asked the secretary she spoke to for help. The secretary rhymed off the all principals and vice principals without even looking it up because she had worked for them all, and there weren’t that many. A vice principal by the name of James Connelly had been at the school the year Capricorn graduated so we figured it was his office that Capricorn bugged.”

  “Did Connelly really commit suicide?” Tulip asked.

  “Not as of four o’clock this afternoon,” Tinker said. “We called three James Connellys in New York before we got the right one, and I pretended to be doing research on families, asking about his children. He has one son, Jim Junior, who is twenty-two, although he didn’t want to talk about him much. My guess is he’s not in the Marines. Maybe he’s a hippie. Wouldn’t that be a gas. But it gave us enough information to go ahead with our plan for late at night when the office building would be pretty empty, and it would be too late for Wise to check out Tinker’s story.”

  “He wasn’t about to check out Tinker’s story,” Capricorn said. “He was convinced. I don’t know what Tinker told Wise before they came into the interrogation room, but in that room Tinker convinced me. If your oxygen engine doesn’t work out, you should give acting a try.”

  “I’ll bet he was good,” Kathy said. “A natural.”

  “Sounds to me like all Tinker was doing was acting like a prick. Hell, he’s been doing that all his life. So what did you think when you saw him?” Blue asked Capricorn.

  “First thought I had was ‘this is it, I’m a dead man.’ I hadn’t been allowed to sleep or drink or eat in I don’t know how long. I was already having hallucinations and fighting hard to hold on to reality, so when I saw the soldier come in with Wise, heard what they were saying, I knew I was in serious trouble. It was surreal, man, here’s this guy with a face and voice like Tinker’s, but a hard, cruel edge to it that was frightening. I couldn’t sort it out. I thought I was cracking up, but I was fighting to keep my mind. Finally, I convinced myself that it must be Tinker because it was the only hope I could find in all that madness, so I began trying to help him. He had been scaring hell out of me until that point, so I decided I may as well show it.”

  “That’s what finally convinced Wise, I think,” Tinker said. “I’m sure of it. Seeing Capricorn that scared was as close as he had come to getting his hands on me in five days, so he decided to leave me alone with Capricorn.”

  Capricorn looked into the empty soup bowl in front of him. “Just one more small bowl then let me sleep for a week.”

  “Hell, the way you attacked that first bowl, we could of filled it with meat and you wouldn’t of noticed,” Blue said.

  —

  People began drifting off to bed until only Tinker and Blue were left at the kitchen table. They shared an awkward silence during which Blue busied himself by making them a pot of tea, setting a cup for each of them, then sat across from his friend. Tinker was still in the uniform that he and Kathy had bought in a surplus store, but the sharpness of the soldier who had marched into the FBI offices had relaxed into an open collar and comfortable slouch. Blue realized that he was being studied as well. “What?” he asked.

  “Blue, where in the fuck did you come from tonight? I think if I stepped off a space ship on the moon, you’d be there.”

  “You got that right, buddy, but I really wasn’t much help. You pulled our arses out of this fire, I’ll give you that. Between me, you and the other fellow, I wouldn’t of thought of that soldier idea in a million years, but you did. Your whole escape plan taught me what it’s like to be humble, buddy. I don’t like it one bit. But I’ll get over it.

  “We’ve been through some great times together, but this one, if the Lord spares us, to quote the other fellow, takes the ribbon. But I’ll tell you this much, when we get home, we’re going to have to divide this story in two, then shrink it in a washing machine just to make it a believable lie.”

  Blue refilled their cups, complaining and apologizing about the vegetarian tea that they drank in the commune. “Their friend Herbal can’t hold a candle to our buddy King Cole back home, can it?”

  “Blue,” Tinker said. “I’ll bet you never drank five cups of tea in your life, so how did you become such an expert?”

  “Tea’s important back home. You don’t have to drink it to see that. Especially at times like this. This is like the time my father got caught in the cave-in at the mine. Nobody got killed, but we didn’t know for a while. When the old man finally got pulled out from under all that coal, black as a Protestant’s sins, as the other fellow says, the first thing my mother did, even before she let the doctor look at him, was pour him a cup of King Cole. You’ve just come out of a bit of a cave-in yourself, you know, so I’m doing what the old lady would of done, that’s all, because you’ve still got a ways to go before you’re out of this mess, you know.”

  “What do you mean?” Tinker asked, taking a more appreciative sip from his cup.

  “When you have a leak in your tap you call a plumber, but who do you call when you have an FBI agent in your basement? Have you worked that part out yet? You can’t keep him like he was some kind of stray dog that followed you home, you know, although I don’t think his mother would miss him any if you did. But I bet there isn’t a cop asleep in the state of California tonight. They think Wise is worth saving, so that tells you what kind of IQ is out there, the kind that pulls triggers, that’s what kin
d.”

  “Maybe not. Capricorn told me those weren’t FBI agents in that building with Wise, they were bodyguards, thugs that work for Fucdepor Petroleum. The building even belongs to Fucdepor. The FBI haven’t been lying when they’ve been denying knowing anything about a manhunt for me or Capricorn.”

  “Damn! We’ll have to keep that part out of the story when we get back home. The FBI makes it much better. By the way, we could both get out of this city and be on our way now if we wanted to. Do we?”

  “Do we what, Blue?” Tinker asked uncertainly.

  “Do we want to get out of it, this city, this mess? The two of us and the Plymouth could, you know, get out. A couple of dumb Canadians. You know what I mean!”

  “Blue, are you serious?”

  “No, but it has to be said, just so we know we’re both in this together. Buddy, we are trapped by our own nobility, so we have to lay low and let her blow, to quote the other fellow. We’ve still got an FBI guy in the basement. The best thing for you to do is go back to the tunnel. It’ll give you something to do for eight hours a day in a place nobody will be looking. It’ll keep you from making mistakes. Me, I’ll just keep on with the band and hope we don’t become a major curiosity for the FBI. If I’d of known what you were up to, I could of kept my mouth shut and stayed out of this mess, you know, all those things I said in the newspaper and on the radio. So it’s all your fault, buddy, which is just the way I like it. So how do we get rid of a breathing body?”

  “We’ll have to let him go, Blue, and he’ll give a pretty good description of me to the papers, so I better stay away from the tunnel, maybe just stay here. Christ, we didn’t even need Wise to make our getaway. Nobody tried to stop us. That’s how useless the bastard is,” Tinker said. “Having him in the basement must be what it’s like to have the clap. You can’t tell anybody you’ve got it and you’re too embarrassed to go to someone to get rid of it. The shit we got into back home was never like this, was it?”

  “Nope, but it’s good to know we’re not wanted dead or alive.”

  60

  Dawn was a grey wash in their bedroom when Blue made his way there, noticing, as he sat to take off his sandals, that Karma was already roughing out her eighth life. It was vague and undefined and Blue was too tired to play guessing games. Instead, he collapsed into the bed beside Karma, the events of the past few days swirling around his mind like a flock of gulls over the summer fishing boats of home, noisy and patternless. He finally slipped away from them into sleep like someone sinking without resistance into the sea. There, dreams awaited in which the house they were in was surrounded by an army of FBI agents in flak jackets and bullhorns, calling his name with deadly menace.

  —

  “Blue! Blue, wake up!”

  Called up slowly from sleep by the sound of his name, Blue opened his eyes fully expecting to encounter a bedroom full of police with guns pointed, hoping he would give them a reason to shoot.

  The room was empty, but Capricorn’s voice, accompanied by a series of sharp raps, came from beyond the four walls and the door that he and Karma had acquired with their move across the street. He was alone in the bed, and the light in the room told him the time was late afternoon. He threw the bedclothes off, pulled on his jeans and opened the door. Capricorn stood there holding a copy of The Subterranean, telling Blue they needed to talk.

  “Where did Peter? get his information for this article,” he asked.

  “From Tulip and whatever factory manufactures his weird ideas, I suppose. Why?”

  “He says here that I was caught trying to break into the Turd’s office, that they even brought a bomb squad in to check the place out. This article got me to rethink the whole phony interrogation. That was one of the questions Wise and those other guys wanted to know, why I was breaking into that office, although they were much more anxious to know where Tinker was. But Blue, I wasn’t breaking in, I was locking up the office, taking my time, doing it carefully to keep from scratching the lock so no one would know I had been there.”

  “So?”

  “So if they had a bomb squad check the building out, then maybe—”

  “—they weren’t looking for bugs.” Blue finished Capricorn’s thought and the two of them let its implications sink in in silence. He was wide awake now, and barely able to keep up to his own thoughts. “If those microphones are still there, we got ourselves a real Arabian stallion here, something really worth trading, and according the Economics class I took, anybody who’s got something to trade can always make a deal.”

  But to find out, Capricorn told Blue, someone would have to drive the van down to the Fucdepor Towers and park within a couple of blocks of the building, then monitor the radio to see if Reggie-the-Turd’s office and phone were still on the Human Rainbow Commune’s airwaves. “Public broadcasting at its best,” Blue concluded when Capricorn gave him a crash course in radio surveillance and reel-to-reel recording in the back of the van while it was parked behind the commune.

  Blue volunteered to be the one to drive the van to the Fucdepor Tower, test the recording equipment and come back. “If it’s still working, then I’ve an idea cooking in my head,” he told Capricorn. “We’ll see if it’s fully baked by the time I get back. In the meantime, take good care of our guest. He got us into this mess, but he may be just the guy to get us out, too.”

  61

  “Open up,” Blue instructed a blindfolded Wise. “Come on now, you have to keep your strength up, as the other fellow says,” he continued, working the spoon against the FBI agent’s mouth. Wise spewed the contents in a series of dry spits. “I know, I know, sunflower seeds take some getting used to.”

  “Why don’t you just kill me and get it over with,” Wise snarled.

  “I didn’t think they tasted that bad,” Blue said, dipping the spoon back into the bowl. “If I was a Nazi, I would of left the husks on, and then you’d know what tasting bad really means. But we got a bigger problem than sunflower seeds. We called the FBI, eh, and said we were holding you hostage and that we wanted a million bucks for your release. Know what they said? ‘Keep him.’ Well, I’m a bit of a horse trader myself, so I know when to come down a little in the price of an old minker, but I had to come all the way down to ten dollars and you know what they said? ‘Keep him!’ Looks like they may be looking for a million dollars from us to get them to take you back, so we don’t know what to do with you, see. Now take some more. They’re good for you. Besides, when you’re finished, we’re going for a little drive together, but only one of us is coming back.”

  —

  Special Agent Bud Wise was in his third day of captivity in the Human Rainbow Commune, a relationship as unappealing to the hostage-takers as to the hostage himself.

  The first morning, Blue had made his way to Fucdepor Towers where he parked across the street and settled into the back of the van to test the eavesdropping equipment. Following Capricorn’s instructions, he soon heard voices, recognizing one of them as belonging to Reginald Regent III because of the petroleum president’s angry interviews after he had been mistakenly arrested as Tinker. Staying at his listening post until the office closed and Reginald Regent III himself had left the building, the subject of Tinker never came up. Instead, Blue had recorded numerous conversations between the president and his underlings, as well as several phone calls. Three of the phone calls were to or from presidents of other oil companies, and judging from their conversations, price-fixing sounded like the thrust of their talks. From his economics class in high school Blue understood that price-fixing was shady business, a way for companies that could not form a monopoly because of anti-trust laws to form a monopoly on prices by fixing the price artificially high and keeping new competitors out of the business. It was the kind of stuff that could be turned into a scandal, he figured, but it had nothing to do with Tinker’s problems.

  On his way back from Fucdepor Towers,
it became clear to Blue that the Fucdepor employees who had been left handcuffed together when Tinker and Capricorn made their escape had pooled their powers of observation, creating a composite sketch of Tinker that was portrait perfect. The sketch of Tinker’s face, along with a mug shot of Capricorn, was on the front page of every publication. And an FBI agent was missing – a hostage – so now the FBI, which wasn’t involved before, was seriously involved now.

  Back at the house, listening to the tapes again, there was clearly nothing that remotely incriminated Reginald Regent III in the orders to capture Tinker, seize his plans for the oxygen engine, then have him disappear.

  “I couldn’t believe they weren’t talking about it,” Blue told Capricorn. “The fact that these people weren’t talking about it is the same as an admission of guilt as far as I’m concerned. Unheard melodies are sweeter, to quote the other fellow, and what I unheard today was a guilty bastard who wants to kill my best friend saying nothing at all about it.”

  “We can’t take somebody’s silence to the police, Blue,” Capricorn pointed out. “We need evidence. Maybe tomorrow.”

  —

  Tomorrow brought more of the same. Blue sat out in the van, parking across the street from Fucdepor Towers before 8 a.m., a box of new tapes beside him. The whole day passed without a single conversation in Reginald Regent III’s office that hinted that the oil company boss had ordered Tinker to be destroyed like one of the old minkers Farmer and he used to truck around.

  The day wasn’t a total waste Blue decided as he drove home at the end of the office day humming the lyrics to the ninety-ninth verse of “The Red Lobster.” He had had the foresight to bring his guitar along for company on the second day, along with a six-pack of beer and some alfalfa sandwiches that Karma had thoughtfully made for him, and which he fortified with slices of ham from a deli along the way. His guitar, the beer and food made the monotony bearable, providing Blue with the understanding that he would never allow himself to work in an office. After two days of feeling like a fly on the wall of Fucdepor’s head office, he felt he knew about as much as he would ever need to know about nine-to-five jobs in a suit and tie, and what he knew was that it was just too frigging boring. He had been right, he decided, to waste his time in school learning about horses instead of history. Good marks would have led him to college, and college would have led to an office just like Fucdepor’s where he would be trapped for the rest of his life waiting for a gold watch and pension instead of unleashing his creativity. That understanding was inspirational.