“Smith,” said Madison, his hand shaking as he held the seashell, “I know I owe you a very great deal for saving me in New York. But could you do just one more favor and sail?”
“For Morocco?” Teenie said. “It’s the grass capital of the world!”
“I’ll inform the captain,” I said. I was very pleased. We would be an awfully long time at sea and Madison was now fully convinced he had to come along.
We sailed about midnight, heading out through the long narrow channel dotted with lights, our wake phosphorescent beneath the stars. The lights of Bermuda fell behind and before us stretched the broad Atlantic at its least tumultuous latitude, according to Captain Bitts. It would be a leisurely and pleasant cruise.
I would regain my health and vigor. What a blessing to not be bothered with women! That daily stint I had been on had worn me to nothing. What a glorious world it would be if I never again touched a woman!
Hugging that splendid thought to me, I went below to my sleeping cabin. I disrobed and climbed into bed. I stretched out, luxuriously alone and undisturbed.
A door opened!
I had never noticed it before.
It must be the door to the adjacent suite!
TEENIE WALKED IN!
“Hey!” I said in panic and alarm. “What are you doing here?”
“Oh,” she said, “the chief steward says he’s wise in the ways of the world. He has known all along that I am not your niece. They moved me this very evening to the suite next door where I would be handier to you. They always think of the owner’s comfort.”
She had on a wrap. She was untying it as she stood in the middle of the floor.
“Whoa!” I said in alarm. “You can’t be that hard up. This very afternoon I saw you go into a hotel with a man!”
“Oh, him,” she said with a gay laugh. “What an amusing lecher. He owns all the hotels in Bermuda, you know. I only went down on him and he had an absolutely awful time trying to (bleep). He liked it all right because I am a real expert, but all it did for me was get me heated up.”
She dropped her wrap off and stood there.
Then she took the clip off her ponytail and shook her hair out. She walked to the bed. “Move over,” she said. “You don’t think I’m going to sleep in there alone, do you?”
She climbed into the bed beside me.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “What about Madison?”
She laughed gaily. “Oh, Madison is a very sweet boy. But the trouble is, he loves his mother and wouldn’t think of being unfaithful to her. The thought of having intercourse with any other woman drives him up the wall.”
“You’re lying.”
“Ask him,” she said. “The only reason he tolerates me around is that he thinks of me as a kid. If Madison wasn’t that way, what do you think I’m doing here in your bed, Inky?”
I blinked. There was logic in what she said. Then I saw the flaw in it. “The ship is loaded with other men. Why pick on me?”
She looked at me with her too-big eyes. “Inky, I will level with you. This equipment of yours is too great to be neglected. I am absolutely determined to be faithful to you. I will only go down on the crew to keep in practice. But you get me for a snack in the morning, a piece in the afternoon and a full-scale banquet all night. How’s that?”
“NO!” I cried.
“Inky, the sports director this evening told me you were concerned I might kill myself. So if you don’t like my program for you, I will have no choice but to throw myself overboard.”
I shuddered. That would bring on a rap for murder.
“No,” I said.
“No what?” she persisted. “No overboard or no tail?”
“No overboard,” I said.
“Ah, that’s better. Now that we have things clearly understood, you seem a little limp. So I’ll just slip next door where I happen to have a prepared bong, bring it in, light it. . . .”
My head was spinning. What had I done to be punished like this? Factually, after that parade of women in the apartment, I never wanted to see another one again.
She was pushing the bong mouthpiece between my teeth. “Suck it in, old boy,” she said. “Now hold it like I taught you. Now another puff. This is Panama Red and it’s pretty jolty. I think I’ll have one, too.”
She exhaled the smoke into my face.
After a while, she lifted the sheet and looked. “Ah, that’s better, Inky.”
A puff of marijuana smoke floated upward. Her voice was clear, above the hiss of the sea. “Now, just lie there and I will show you some of the things I learned.”
A porthole cover was swinging gently. “There’s a certain little muscle that can go round and round. . . .”
A curtain undulated. “Oh, this white slavery is great. . . .”
Another puff of marijuana smoke blew out the port. “Oooooooh! Inky!!!!!”
Now and then, months later, when I had lots of time to think, I would look back on that night and wish forlornly that I had been my usual alert self, for those hours, I am sure, opened the door to all the hells I was going to walk through afterwards.
If I had just said NO! louder. But I didn’t.
Marijuana can make one awfully blind!
PART FIFTY-SIX
Chapter 4
Forlornly, I sat in the owner’s salon and stared at the two viewers.
I was pooped. The sports director had been absolutely raving. “Do you realize,” he said, “that if you insist on getting stoned at night, you have to exercise twice as long and hard to get rid of it the next morning? So get running before I have a dead owner on my hands!” He had worked me half to death and here, in the afternoon, I was barely able to sit in the overstuffed chair.
Teenie, apparently, was breaking in her new bicycles, and Mad, for some reason, had cooped himself up in the library with an eye on the door, muttering about Mafia that might have sneaked aboard. I was terrified I might have to go swimming with her: my muscles were so gone, I would have drowned!
Heller was in his office at the Empire State Building. He and Izzy were going over Florida ground plans.
“I don’t see why you need such big alligator tanks,” Izzy was saying.
“Those aren’t alligator tanks. Those are spore tanks,” said Heller “The spores grow very fast but there have to be an awful lot of them and it takes tanks that big.”
“Well, alligators will get into them,” said Izzy. “I don’t see any alligator strainers.”
“These posts,” said Heller. “They’re a laser screen. They put an invisible curtain around the tanks. Nothing can get into them. The belts here take the spores up this ramp where they are dried and then they go into this hamper. At timed intervals they are blown up the stacks, reach the stratosphere and get carried by the upper winds. They clean up pollution, convert it to oxygen, and when they run out of food they perish.”
“I don’t see the fort,” said Izzy.
“Fort for what?” said Heller.
“Indians,” said Izzy. “You got to have some kind of fort for the settlers to retire into when the Indians burst out of their reservation.”
“Oh, we don’t need a fort,” said Heller. “We’re handling that problem with alligator cavalry.”
Izzy put his glasses on more solidly. He looked very closely at Heller. Then he said, with decision, “You’re joking with me again, Mr. Jet.”
“No,” said Heller. “Would I pull jokes on you, Izzy?”
“You have sometimes. It’s very trying, Mr. Jet. I lie awake wondering if I laughed in the right place. It costs me sleep.”
“No, listen, Izzy. This is one time I’m not teasing you. Look.” He unrolled a big layout. “J. P. Flagrant just roughed out these spreads and sent them in.”
The layout said:
RAISE THOROUGHBRED
RIDING ALLIGATORS
Take advantage of the latest craze. Why be left out when others are making the fortune that should be yours?
The prize
stud Bullroar auctioned for$105,000 just last week at Belmont!
Act NOW, NOW, NOW!
Phone Toll Free
A-L-L-I-G-A-T-O-R
Own Your Very Own Alligator Farm, Inc.
Ochokeechokee, Florida
“Well, I will admit sales have boomed since he came on. But who bought Bullroar for such a huge price?”
“That was another stroke of Flagrant genius,” said Heller. “He sold him to King Charles of England because it was such a short distance to fall off.”
“Is that why the corporation is now ‘By Appointment to His Majesty’?” said Izzy. “I thought I was just making progress in taking over governments.”
“Oh, that, too,” said Heller. “So now do you believe it about alligator cavalry?”
I pushed the viewer away. There was no point in getting all confused trying to figure out when Heller was serious and when he was joking. I knew that the spores were serious enough. But they wouldn’t hurt Rockecenter: they’d just give industry an excuse not to check any pollution they sent into the air. That would sell even dirtier fuel and make Rockecenter even richer.
I turned my attention to the other viewer.
The Countess Krak was walking down a hall in an apartment building, carrying a plastic shopping bag.
She went out the main entrance door.
I freaked! I had been so engrossed with Heller, I had missed what she must have been doing! That condo scene was unmistakable! It was where Madison’s mother lived!
Bang-Bang opened up the door of the old cab and the Countess Krak got in. Bang-Bang started the cab up and drove away.
“Any luck?” said Bang-Bang.
“Oh, he was the man, all right. But she’s too naïve to live, Bang-Bang. She thinks her son was a sensitive child. She thinks he’s dead.”
“Well, Jet did find an empty on the dock, that had been fired only minutes before. I think that plain-wrapper whirlybird was trying to arrest him for speeding, all right, and hazed him into the drink. And maybe they fired a shot into him as well. Or maybe they fired the shot, hit him and he went over the edge.”
“Well, we’re not going to get anything more out of Mrs. Madison.”
I flinched. Had the Countess Krak killed her?
“I think Jet’s right,” said Bang-Bang. “It leads straight to Bury.”
“She did mention,” said the Countess, “that just before he left that day, he had a call from a Mr. Smith.”
My blood congealed. Thank Gods, Mrs. Madison had never seen me personally that I recalled. But this was too close!
“There’s a million of those in New York,” said Bang-Bang.
“Somebody from Bury’s office,” said the Countess Krak. “I wish Jettero weren’t so set about not taking this Bury on.”
“It would mean a frontal assault on the whole Rockecenter outfit, including the government,” said Bang-Bang. “The casualties would be unacceptable.”
“Bang-Bang,” said the Countess Krak, “pull up beside the next phone kiosk you see. I’m going to phone Swindle and Crouch and ask for Mr. Smith.”
He stopped by a delicatessen on East 45th Street and she made the call.
“Smith?” the Swindle and Crouch receptionist said. “We have no Smiths.”
The Countess Krak went back to the cab. “The other address I got was 42 Mess Street. Drive down there, Bang-Bang.”
This was certainly hard on my exhausted nerves.
Bang-Bang bounced off assorted vehicles and got them to 42 Mess Street.
It was now just a deserted loft. The Countess stirred around through the papers on the floor. It had all manner of scrap Whiz Kid releases. But the furniture, the phones, the news lines all were gone. The place had degenerated to an empty ruin.
As they drove back uptown, the Countess Krak said, “Well, so far as we can tell, J. Walter Madison is dead and we have shut down the operation, at least there in that place. But we do know one thing for sure.”
“What’s that?” said Bang-Bang.
“Madison’s mother states that Madison worked directly under a Mr. Smith from the office of Swindle and Crouch. That office doesn’t have a Mr. Smith. Somebody knew Madison was dead or missing and closed 42 Mess Street before anybody else suspected he was gone. I’ve got the hour and date of the last press releases they issued. That was probably this same Mr. Smith that called his mother. So the one thing we know for sure is that somewhere in this mess there is a man who is using the fictitious name of Smith.”
Bang-Bang said, “That’s not very much.” I disagreed. I thought it was absolutely, HORRIBLY TOO MUCH!
“It’s enough to keep me looking,” said the Countess Krak.
Oh, Gods, was I glad I was at sea!
But wait. I couldn’t stay at sea forever. Even though I had no place to go, I knew that sooner or later I would have to make a stand.
If the Countess Krak was allowed to go on running around loose, one day she would connect it all up to me and then, no matter where I was, I would be a goner.
It was her fault, after all, that I was at sea.
And only because, through incompetent help, I had not nailed her before.
If I were ever to get out of this, I would have to overcome all odds, forget past failures and finish off the Countess Krak.
That was as vivid to me as the ache which plagued my bones.
I was not just sitting here, helpless.
I glared at the two-way-response radio. With it I could issue an order to Raht.
If I gave him a wrong order and he missed, she would kill him and then I really would be helpless. So I had to be very careful if I told Raht to do anything.
So the question remained: What could I tell Raht to do that would GUARANTEE her end? I must think of something.
PART FIFTY-SIX
Chapter 5
Day followed day as we made our way across the smooth and picturesque sea. It was progressing toward the end of April, a calm part of the year, and we were in the calmest part of the Atlantic. The water was blue, the sky was blue, the yacht was white, the clouds were white. Captain Bitts, when I commented to him that I saw no ships, informed me that this was the most unfrequented belt in the whole ocean. Even the whales had a chance, he said, and sure enough, on the fifth day we saw one—a monster—much to Teenie’s delight.
And that wasn’t all that was delighting Teenie. That very night she plagued me with questions about how could whales possibly do it? Was their equipment in proportion to the rest of them?
“They lay eggs,” I said.
“They do not,” she said. “They are mammals. They do it just like we do.”
“No, you don’t, Teenie,” I said. “I am exhausted. Go to your room and sleep just this one night. Between you and the sports director I don’t know whether I’m going or coming.”
“Well, all right,” she said. “But just let me settle this one question of zoology. I found this book in the library and it simply did not show the vital elements. On such subjects I am quite an expert, you know: it was my major at Bassar. To complete my education, I must establish the relative proportions of whales.”
“Oh, Gods,” I said. “What now? Teenie, will you PLEASE go to bed and stop pestering me!”
She was standing there with the end of a white-edged ruler thoughtfully caressing her lower lip. “If I could establish your relative proportions, I could get some idea of that of whales. So if you will just let me measure you, I promise faithfully to go to bed.”
Oh, Gods. “Well, (bleep) it, go ahead then,” I said, “but don’t be all night.”
Her robe fell on the floor as she said, “Oh, fiddlesticks, Inky. I can’t do it. It wouldn’t be fair to whales. You’re just a dishcloth.”
The starburst chandelier glowed dimly in the ceiling. “To keep my part of the bargain and go to bed,” she said, “you’ll have to cooperate. Take a few puffs of this Hawaiian. That won’t hurt you.”
A cloud of marijuana smoke rose up.
&
nbsp; The ruler was lying on the floor. I said, “Wait! Wait! You have a bargain to keep!”
The stars shone through the open port. “Ooooooh!” groaned Teenie in a shuddering voice as marijuana smoke poured out.
Voyage of Vengeance Page 18