by Dean Ing
The Englishman shook his head regretfully. "I am afraid that Lothar is aging rather rapidly, don't you know? Sometimes he seems to make rather ill-considered decisions."
Archbishop Beck shook his head, also in sorrow. "Not long for this world, then. However, undoubtedly, when he goes to his reward there will be more youthful hands to take the reins of his worthy organization."
Peter Windsor fixed his green eyes on the other man's face for a long calculating moment before he said, "Perhaps we should talk this over in more detail in the near future. I suspect that matters are coming to a head faster than some of us realize."
It was then that Jerry Auburn came up, recently refilled glass in hand, dark blue eyes with a faint glaze. He said, not quite slurring, "Hi, Peter. Done in any poor cloddies of recent date? Hi, Willy, saved any good souls lately?"
"All souls are good, my son," the Archbishop said unctuously.
"You ought to know; you must get a wide variety of them. The United Church will take anything into its ranks, down to and including animists."
The Archbishop was sadly forgiving. He said softly, "In my Father's house there are many mansions. We are all one in the loving eyes of God, be he called Jehovah, Allah, Brahma, Maya, or The Great Spirit."
Jerry said, taking another healthy pull at his drink, "Or Artemis and Pan, for the sake of the various witch cults. You'll adapt to anything to suck another faith into the United Church. If the Aztec religion was still in existence, you'd allow them to cut out the hearts of a few thousand victims each year. If the Canaanites were still with us, they could throw their firstborn into the flaming bronze maw of Ba'al."
"Surely, my son, this is not a subject upon which to jest." There was sorrow in the voice of the Prophet's right-hand man, but his eyes were narrow and cold.
"I wasn't kidding," Jerry said. "The archives don't record what long-dead con man first dreamed up religion and put nine-tenths of the human race on the sucker list, but he must have been a genius."
The Archbishop said, his long face expressionless, "I am neglecting my duties as the representative of a candidate member of the Central Committee. I must pay my respects to Harrington Chase. His devotion to the United Church is well known; only last week he contributed a million pseudo-dollars. If you'll forgive me."
When he was gone, Jerry said to Peter Windsor, "I hate to see you two getting together."
Peter said, "Oh, Willy's all right. I assume that most of us in the World Club are either agnostics or atheists, but we'll always have religion with us, and I'd rather see the United Church on our side than have it oppose us."
"Sometimes I wonder what our side is," Jerry said. He fixed his eyes on the tall Britisher. "Have you heard about the attack on me yesterday?"
The other looked worried. "Yes, I did, Jerry. Jolly good that you were able to thwart the beggar."
"Yeah, wasn't it? What I've been wondering about was who fingered me."
"What do you mean, dear boy?"
"I mean that it seems unlikely that cloddy went to all the trouble to get a job at the Hostaria dell'Orso just to take a crack at the first wealthy customer to come along. If he had, he would have polished someone else off long before I arrived on the scene. It's the most expensive restaurant in town and there's a fistful of millionaires and top politicians there every day. No, he was waiting for me. Somebody had tipped the Nihilists off that it was my favorite eating spot. I'd just got in to Rome the same day. And he was waiting."
Peter looked distressed. "What's your point, old chap?"
"All of a sudden, the Nihilists seem to be taking an extraordinary interest in members and candidate members of the Central Committee. It was only a few days ago that Harry Dunninger was knocked off by them, back in the States. If he hadn't been, sure as hell the Central Committee would have nominated him to full membership. With him eliminated, it looks as though either the Graf or the Prophet has a much better chance. If I'd been knocked off, both of them would have the chance."
"I don't follow you."
"I think you'd better try." Jerry Auburn's eyes had lost their alcohol sheen and were now very level.
The Englishman shook his head. "Really, old boy, I don't know what you're talking about."
"Your people had the contract to guard Dunninger. When the Nihilists raided his estate, four of the guards had been pulled off, weakening resistance so that overwhelming the defense was a cinch. Now, what I want to know is what contracts you people have with the Neo-Nihilists."
Peter Windsor flushed in indignation. He said strongly, "Really, Auburn, your suggestion is inadmissible."
Jerry's voice was winter cold. "I'm asking you if you have contacts with the Nihilists. If you tell me no, and through my people I later find out that you have, your organization is mud in the World Club, chum-pal. Remember that I'm a member of the Central Committee. All by myself I can blackball the Graf from ever becoming a full member. I think I could throw enough weight to have him tossed out of the World Club entirely. And that would hardly fit in with your plans, would it, Windsor?"
"Now, see here, Jerry," Peter Windsor said hurriedly. "You're getting off onto the wrong foot. Of course, the Graf has infiltrated the Nihilists, along with all other subversive organizations. A great deal of our work is espionage. We infiltrate everywhere, especially into organizations having any sort of political connotations."
"So, who's your head mole in the Nihilists?"
The other stared at him. "We haven't one. We have several plants among them but they're not of enough importance for us to go to any great extent to infiltrate them. It's just a matter of keeping the sods under observation. Had we gotten news that poor Harold Dunninger was to be kidnapped, we would have immediately informed him. The Graf, after all, is a loyal candidate member of the Central Committee."
Jerry Auburn took him in for a long, cold moment. "We'll see about that," he said. He finished his drink with the stiff-wristed motion of the practiced drinker, turned on his heel, and headed for the bar, leaving the Englishman staring after him, boiling anger in his pale killer eyes.
Lee Garrett gave up at about one o'clock in the morning. She had done her best to make acquaintances, as ordered by Shelia Duff-Roberts, and had met perhaps a dozen of the members and candidates. She had spent the last half hour in the'company of Nils Norden. From what she had gathered, the Scandinavian tycoon was on the fence so far as the divisions within the organization were concerned. If Chase and his colleagues were the right wing of the Committee, and Jerry Auburn was on the left wing, then Nils Norden must be thought of as the center. Not that she'd discussed the World
Club with him to any extent. Largely, he seemed interested in conducting her back to her suite—and to bed.
By this time, she had learned the layout of this part of the Palazzo well enough that she had no trouble finding her way to her quarters. She sighed her weariness, kicked off her shoes, picked them up, and headed for the suite's interior, her bedroom in mind. To get to it, she had to pass through the living room. She was surprised to find the lights were on.
Then she spotted Jerry Auburn sprawled on the fifteenth-century couch, his feet, shoes and all, up on one arm of the priceless antique. His inevitable glass was on a low table, within easy reach. He looked up at her.
"What is the meaning of this, Mr. Auburn?"
"Jerry," he said. "If we're to become lovers we must forget formalities."
"Lovers!" She dropped her shoes onto the floor and slipped her feet into them. "If you came here to…"
He held up a weary hand. "Please. No indignation. I never rape girls. I've never had to. In fact, sometimes they rape me."
She snorted and ran her eyes over his sturdy athlete's body. "It'd take quite a mopsy to rape you, my friend."
"I rape easily—a flaw in my character," he explained, swinging his feet around and to the floor. "Sit down, Lee. I have something to ask you."
"I'm tired," she said. "I want to go to bed." But she sat, taking one of the
antique chairs, which was more comfortable than it looked. It would have to be.
"So do I," he told her earnestly. "But we'll get to do that later." He pointed at the phone, the one she knew was bugged. Her eyes widened when she saw, sitting next to it, a muffler similar to the one she had utilized.
"Nobody's listening in," he said, reaching over and picking up his glass.
"I don't know what you're talking about," she got out.
He took back some of his drink. "You know, everybody's been telling me that this evening," he told her. "Peter Windsor, for instance. However, you're reporting to someone. Whom? Don't bother to deny it, honey. We often monitor the quarters of new employees, on the off chance that they're an attempt to infiltrate the World Club. You'd be surprised how many elements would like to know its inner workings. By chance, the monitor in this case is an old family friend, indebted to my late father. He reports to me first—and sometimes I'm the only one he reports to. At any rate, honey, he tells me that your bug was muffled for a time. Obviously he couldn't tell me whom you called, nor what you said, but he was aware of the muffler. So what is a nice girl like you doing with a sophisticated piece of electronic equipment and who were you calling, to report what?"
She glared at him angrily, even while her mind raced. "My mother!" she got out finally.
He closed his eyes in pain and pushed his left hand over his mouth. "Oh, come on now, honey."
She said challengingly, "My mother is Rosamond Brice."
He cocked an eye at her. "I know Rosamond Brice. Or did. She doesn't look old enough to be your mother. And, what's more, she doesn't act like a mother. She's been in more beds than I've been in automobiles. And when she comes to town the local distilleries put on an extra shift."
Lee went to the bar and poured herself a drink from the first bottle that came to hand. She took down a quick snort and made a face. Absinthe. She poured some water into it and returned to her chair.
She said defiantly, "My mother and father weren't married, but for a time they evidently had a somewhat hectic love affair. For some reason, she agreed to have a baby. By the time I came, the affair was waning. Mother couldn't bother with me; I interfered with her good times. But father wanted me and raised me. We loved each other very much. After he died, I became friends with Rosamond although we're worlds apart as a rule. When I told her I was to work for the World Club, she told me that they'd probably bug my rooms and gave me a muffler so that we could talk without being overheard. She knew about mufflers because she always uses one. She's afraid of jealous wives, sweethearts, or whoever, listening in on her calls to lovers."
He looked at her for a long disbelieving moment.
She came to her feet and said, "Oh, hell; come on. I suppose this was inevitable."
"Come on where?" he said.
"To the bedroom. I'm going to rape you a little."
Chapter Nineteen: Roy Cos
Roy dreaded getting up, but that feeling of dread was now a daily occurrence. He couldn't bring himself to face the Coming day. How long had it been now—a couple of weeks? More than that. At least he was giving the bastards a run for their money. One of the newsmen had told them that Oliver Brett-James, in Nassau, had been fired by the outfit issuing the Deathwish Policy Roy had signed up for. Evidently, the cosmo-corp's executives blamed the Englishman for not spotting potential trouble in the offbeat Roy Cos and his manager. Long before this, they had begun losing money on the deal. Not only were the premiums eating them up, but the so-called Deathwish Wobbly was spending his million pseudo-dollars per day at an unprecedented rate. How many people did he have on his payroll now? Over twenty, Roy supposed, counting the stenographers down in the offices on the floor below—a payroll of more than two hundred thousand pseudo-dollars a day! If he wasn't feeling so damned depressed, he might have laughed. Imagine Roy Cos spending over a million a week on his staff.
Mary Ann, on the pillow next to him, said, doing her best to keep the anxiety from her voice, "Something wrong, darling?"
He looked over at her. Mousy of face, Mary Ann Elwyn might be, but a mouse of very special attractions. It was the first time in his life that he'd had a deep involvement that went beyond mere sex.
"No, not really," he told her.
She looked at her wrist chronometer. "You're supposed to hear that Tri-Di singer this morning for the United Church broadcast."
"Yeah," he said, staring up at the ceiling. "What was his name again?"
"Stevie Summers. He's the current big thing in nostalgia folk song revivals."
Roy sighed and said, "How's Forry getting along with the hotel manager?"
She laughed shortly. "He's reversed the flow of crap, you might say. The first few days, guests were moving out wholesale when it was learned that the Deathwish Wobbly was staying here. Evidently, they expected the whole New Tropical Hotel to be bombed flat or something. But that didn't last. Thrill seekers zeroed in wholesale. One of Ron's friends who works in the lobby says the manager is turning down bribes that run up to a thousand pseudo-dollars for reservations. Same old story—thousands of silly dizzards would give then-right arms to be on hand when the Graf's men get to you. I mean if," she added contritely. "Sorry."
He ran a weary hand back through his shaggy, faded brown hair. "Nothing to be sorry about," he told her. He dug around for something else to postpone getting out of bed. "How'd that girl check out?"
"The one who got in with the reporters yesterday? She's evidently what she said she was, a celebrity hound. She wanted to see you in person, wanted to try to get your autograph. The guards shook her down just like everybody else and she had nothing remotely resembling a weapon, so they let her through. Supposedly, she was a reporter."
"If she could get past all of our security, so could somebody else," he said bitterly.
"We'd better go and check out this Stevie Summers, darling."
"All right." He swung his legs out over the side of the bed. Ignoring his bedroom slippers, he went over to the chair where he had thrown his clothes the night before and began to dress. Mary Ann got up too and went to the closet. The prole clothes she brought forth were as similar to his own as possible.
She looked over at him. Roy Cos had lost the extra ten pounds or so of weight and now looked drawn rather than pasty of face. The sunbaths on the roof, which Forry Brown had insisted upon, had wiped away the pallor. It came to her that Roy must have been quite good-looking as a young man. Twenty-five years of inadequate diet and exercise hadn't done him any good, nor had the long hours of sitting around small, drab rooms arguing political economy, night after night.
Forty Brown and Ferd Feldmeyer were in the living room with three of the guards who bore short, stocky Gyrojet automatic carbines. Dick Samuelson, in particular, carried his with a practiced ease. It had turned out, when the weapons were first procured, that Dick had spent a hitch in the Sky-borne Commandos, and he'd taken over the duty of instructing his less knowledgeable Wobbly colleagues in their use.
Also present was a rather vague-looking young man, somewhere in his early twenties. He bore a guitar and was looking both impatient and bored. His fans might have swooned over him, Roy decided, but he looked like nothing more than a gangly kid.
Forry, dressed identically to Roy, and looking somewhat ludicrous in prole attire, squinted through tobacco smoke at his employer. He said, "This is Stevie Summers. I promised him five thousand to sing one song as a preliminary to you roasting the Prophet."
"It ain't the money," the singer said. "I hate that sapsucker."
Roy nodded, went over to his desk, and took up a little red pamphlet, thumbed through it to the page he sought, found it, and handed it to the boy.
"This is a book of old IWW songs," he said. "This is the one I wanted you to sing. It was written by one of the early Wobblies, Joe Hill, who was executed in Utah for a crime he didn't commit because he was a radical. You sing it to the tune for the old hymn, In the Sweet Bye and Bye.
"Gotcha," the boy s
aid. He looked over the lyrics for a moment, then began to strum and sing. To Roy's surprise, the singer's voice, though soft, grasped with appeal.
Long-haired preachers come out every night,
Try to tell you what's wrong and what's right;
But when asked how 'bout something to eat
They will answer with voices so sweet:
You will eat, bye and bye. In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay, You'll get pie in the sky when you die.
And the starvation army they play. And they sing and they clap and they pray,
Till they get all your coin on the drum, Then they tell you when you're on the bum:
You will eat, bye and bye, In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay, You'll get pie in the sky when you die.
Workingmen of all countries unite.
Side by side we for freedom will fight;
When the world and its wealth we have gained
To the grafters we'll sing this refrain:
You will eat, bye and bye, When you've learned how to cook and to fry
Chop some wood, 'twill do you good, And you'll eat in the sweet bye and bye. The boy ended with a bang on the strings, looked up and grinned. "After that, the Prophet'll want to crucify you."
"That's the idea," Roy said. "He's lined up with the other side. We want to make that clear." He looked at the folk singer. "That old radical song is kind of primitive as propaganda goes but it won't put you on anybody's shitlist, will it? The Prophet throws a lot of weight. With me, it doesn't make any difference. He'll have to stand in line if he wants to take a crack at me."
Stevie Summers shook his head, "The kids I sing for don't go for this holy-roller fling. So far as we're concerned, he can bugger himself with a wood auger. By the way, my old man's a Libertarian. I've heard a couple of your bleats on Tri-Di. Your two organizations oughta get together."
"There's been some talk about it," Roy nodded. Forry said, "We better get ready for that press interview." He took young Summers by the arm and led him to the door, going over details about the broadcast.