EVERYBODY'S FAVORITE DUCK

by Gahan Wilson

  Frenchy looked up, got strength from somewhere, and went on.

  ‘We got particular clients, Mr Weston, very particular, the kind of people you’ve got to hop around if you’re going to keep them happy, and they’re the kind you have to keep happy, Mr Weston, you really do, because these people take themselves really seriously, you’ve no idea how seriously they take themselves. They’re dangerous, Mr Weston, you don’t fool around with people like this, believe me, you don’t spoil their party.’

  Frenchy paused and took the neat, squared hankie out of the pocket of his tuxedo and got it mussed patting at his forehead as he watched the memory of himself walking Mr King from the entrance toward table nineteen.

  ‘So I figured, there goes my job, but what can I do? Because this guy scares me more than the first one did, so I’m walking the Chinaman in, and then,’ he paused and looked at me, ‘and then I see it happening. These people here,’ he paused again and waved around at the empty room, ‘I see them staring at him; first they’re surprised, and then they’re angry, and then—and this is what I hadn’t expected, see?—all their eyes got big, see? Like little kids, bulging out of their sockets with the whites showing, and they all pulled back from the tables and pressed against the backs of their chairs. They’re cringing, see? And it comes to me all of a sudden that these people here are scared of him, too, Mr Weston, that maybe they’re even more scared of him than I am, probably, because they know, because they’re experts in being bastards, see? They’re world class! So they know, better than maybe any other crowd you could get together, that he is worse than they are, and what that means if you follow it through it that he is the worst there is!’

  He dabbed at his brow once more, then noticed the rumples he’d made in his handkerchief by doing it and carefully smoothed them out before returning it to its pocket.

  ‘And that’s it,’ he said. ‘No more trouble. Everybody pretends that none of it ever happened and they leave the two of them alone from then on without a single other look at either one of them. It’s like they all signed a kind of a pact, all these people. The two guys had their lunch and talked over whatever it was they talked over and left and nobody’s brought them up since. Except now, for you.’

  ‘Did you hear anything they said, Frenchy?’ I asked.

  He looked at me wide-eyed and shook his head.

  ‘I never went near the table again, Mr Weston, believe me. The only staff that went near them was their captain and his staff, and once M’sieur Tomas stopped by and chatted with them for maybe five minutes, but I don’t know what about. It looked like something complicated. Probably it was something about the food, some bitch or some rave about the sauce, or how this or that isn’t as good as the one they had somewhere else, or how it’s better. That’s what the clients usually talk about with M’sieur Tomas. Okay? So that’s it. That’s all I know.’

  Then he frowned and looked into space.

  ‘There was something the old Limey did,’ he said. ‘Before he came in the dining room, before I saw him. He left two shopping bags with the girl in the check-room, just like an ordinary person—crazy, right?—and they weren’t the sort of shopping bags you’d figure a guy like that would carry, if you figured a guy like that would carry shopping bags at all; one was from Waldo World, for God’s sake, where the duck is! And the other was from Athenee, the jewelers. Suzie couldn’t believe it. She said——’

  Frenchy’s eyes froze looking over my shoulder and then went back to me.

  ‘And now I see M’sieur Tomas has returned, so I’d really appreciate it if you wouldn’t mind leaving, Mr Weston, because if you hang around it’ll look like we’re talking too much and I’d have to try a lie on M’sieur Tomas and he sees through the damn things every time.’

  ‘It must make it hard, being a headwaiter,’ I said, visibly handing him some folding money during a handshake good-bye, both because he’d earned it, and because that’s what customers do to maître d’s who’ve done a good job and it would probably help Frenchy’s standing a little if Tomas saw me doing it.

  I headed for the entrance and saw M’sieur Tomas had planted himself by its side and was giving the once-over to the latest entries in his reservation book. He was distinguished-looking, I’ll hand him that, but the black of his hair was far too deep and flawless for his age, and in my opinion he overdid the haughty carriage number, carrying his head and shoulders as high and proud as if they were a brass bust of Napoleon.

  He gave me just the right amount of nod for someone he’d never seen in his life, and the last I saw of him he was gliding toward his maître d’ with a questioning look under faintly raised eyebrows, so it looked as if Frenchy would have to try a lie or two on him after all.

  — 6 —

  I MISS PHONE BOOTHS generally and I missed one now in particular because a display of brass and ivory jewelry on the sidewalk was crowding my left foot and a wobbly pyramid of pretend transistor radios was leaning on the right one, and because sticking my head into the funny little box the phone was bolted into wasn’t muffling the sound of a passing truck and I could barely hear Bone’s voice over the crumby little receiver which was, of course, partially broken.

  ‘In full regalia?’ he was saying. ‘The Mandarin marched into the restaurant in broad daylight in full regalia?’

  ‘Actually, they keep it kind of dark in the restaurant,’ I said, trying to make myself heard over an argument which had just broken out between a futuristic bicyclist delivering messages and an elderly Wall Street type, ‘I think it has something to do with wrinkles. Yes, he did. If you’d seen it I bet it would really have taken you back to the old Limehouse days. Frenchy said he had on his cap with the coral ball on top and his dragon robe and the whole damn works, just like he was dolled up for a meeting of the Council of Seven, all of whom, the way it’s going, are probably in fine shape instead of drowned in that submarine.’

  ‘The audacity of it,’ said Bone. ‘The gall! What is that infuriating ruckus in the background? Never mind. So he’s back!’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘And that makes another big one we didn’t kill, after all, and now they’re together, so it’s worse than before. Life can be pretty unfair.’

  ‘I don’t like that other business,’ he muttered.

  ‘The second shopping bag?’ I said. ‘I bet you don’t like it, and I don’t like it either. I never heard of Athenee’s, but in Elmsville we tended to miss out on the news of a lot of swank openings; that was one of the best things about living there. I’m standing across the street from the place right now; it’s all big windows framed with shiny, glitzy steel and full of really pretty clothes. It looks very posh, and it takes up the whole ground floor of a little old-timey building, and there’s something flickering in an open window on the third——’

  I stopped because the little pyramid of radios had suddenly flown apart for no visible reason and the jewelry dealer on my other side had given a funny little hiccup and slumped in his burnoose all over the sidewalk. There wasn’t any sound of shooting, just that of the breakage and the dying.

  ‘Get Ashman here,’ I said, and then I left the phone without further instructions because a large hole had opened up in the telephone’s front, once more without the hint of a gunshot, and I started heading across the street toward the building which housed the sniper, as it had occurred to me that since everything else in the area was a potential target, that might be the safest place to be.

  I tried to make my path of progress as varied and confusing as I could by cute dodgings and duckings and I used delivery trucks and the cars of suburbanites for cover as much as I could, but that didn’t stop interesting patterns of holes and gouges from appearing in the tar directly behind and before me as I moved along, again all of it without any noise at all except for the impacts and rippings, and by the time I’d made my way to the front door of the place, Madison Avenue had taken quite a beating.

  Nobody in the store had noticed any of this preamble so it c
ame as quite a big surprise to everybody when I burst through the door shouting things like, ‘Police!’ and, ‘Where’s the stairs?’ and there were a number of screams and the usual sort of confusion you’ve got to expect if you barge into a place waving around a large automatic pistol.

  I hurried over to the stairway entrance at the rear of the store, lunged through it, and raced up two flights as fast as I could. I was lucky enough to reach the third story before the sniper left and that gave him the chance to demolish the section of the wall which had been directly behind me the instant before I’d thrown myself down flat on the steps. Up close like that the lack of any sort of gunshot noise was really spectacular considering the damage, but now that I was this close I could hear a series of little clicks under the cracking and smashing of the wall and woodwork, so I expressed my feelings about that by throwing a number of rounds in the clicks’ general direction.

  Our combined efforts had the air so full of plaster dust the effect was like a bleached pea-soup fog and since that made us both blind I decided to forge right ahead, sending regular bullets into the white blank in front of me where I kept hearing those clicks, and in no time at all there was a yell and a clatter which did my heart good. Then I heard a faint monkey scuttle I couldn’t locate and a bump overhead followed by a shaft of light beaming down like a sunbeam through sandy water, so he’d made it through the roof trap.

  I threw a couple of shots that way to discourage lurking, climbed a dinky metal ladder set into the wall, and popped my head into the sunlight just in time to see the tag end of a thin, shiny rope zip up and over the edge of the roof of the next building, two more stories of smooth wall rising up without a handhold from where I stood.

  I walked over and patted the bricks here and there for a possible grip on the theory that you never know what will happen if you give it that little extra try, and though this time that didn’t work out, I did manage to spot some nice little smears of blood the clicker had left here and there on the way up, and a stroll back to the trap showed me a splotchy little trail of the stuff on the asphalt and gravel of the roof.

  Back inside, the air had more or less cleared of plaster, and in the dust that had come down earlier you could see our footprints. Mine were big, and that was no surprise, and his were tiny and thin, but that was no surprise either because I knew that the Mandarin’s best scouts and sneak killers had always been small, elastic little bastards who we’d learned could flatten their bodies like rats in order to squeeze themselves into place you’d ordinarily swear were safe.

  I heard a clumping and a clatter on the stairs and looked up to see Ashman’s bulldog face peering at me over the landing. He and a big guy with a long, grim jaw standing in back of him had their guns out and pointing.

  ‘Good,’ I said, ‘you’re quick. Do it again and have someone check the building to the north. I wounded the guy and there’ a chance he may still be working his way down or even have stopped.’

  Ashman turned and passed that on to the fellow behind him, addressing him as Paley, and then came up and joined me and that’s how the two of us saw the gun and said ‘Wow!’ at the same exact instant.

  It was a kind of rapid-fire rifle but with a whole lot of ideas deserving wows, including two circular clips with a double row of ammunition on either side of its firing chamber, and a silencer which looked like a big round ball of sponge rubber and which I knew for certain worked like a charm.

  ‘I’ve never seen a weapon like this,’ said Ashman.

  ‘Try going up against it if you want to really appreciate it,’ I said.

  He bent down over it, carefully, not touching a thing, then he gave a nod and a small grin.

  ‘I think this explains a little something that really had us puzzled,’ he said.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘You may not have noticed because you were too busy trying to keep alive,’ said Ashman. ‘But following your track we noticed there weren’t any bullets on the scene. Not one. Lots of damage, lots of holes, but nothing for ballistics. Take a look at these weird tips pointing out of the magazines.’

  I leaned over his shoulder and saw what he meant. Instead of lead or metal jackets, the bullets were made out of something transparent but cloudy.

  ‘My guess is they self-destruct after doing the damage,’ he said, ‘but somebody built them so cute they don’t do it before. I can’t wait until the lab gets hold of them. Working out their composition must have taken some pretty fancy calculations.’

  ‘These are very fancy people,’ I said. ‘And they’ve had years of peaceful retirement to think up new nasty tricks, so be ready for a lot more calculations.’

  We were halfway down the ground flight when I heard Bone’s voice and almost stopped dead on the stairway.

  ‘He’s here?’ I said.

  ‘We couldn’t stop him,’ said Ashman. ‘I think he was worried about you.’

  I opened the door and there he was, decked out in an old checked Inverness cape I’d only seen in photos, and a cane and wide-brimmed hat I remembered seeing many times in person. He turned and all the wrinkles in his face creased into a smile when he saw us.

  ‘I’m glad to observe you continue to be the successful man of action, Weston,’ he said.

  ‘I can still duck bullets if I have to,’ I said. ‘It looks like you’ve become something of a man of action yourself.’

  ‘I have dropped a few affectations of my middle age,’ he said, ‘and am quite the gallivanter in my later years.’

  But by then I’d noticed who he’d been talking to and so I wasn’t listening to him anymore, I was looking at her, and I realized, in spite of what I’d said to Bone on the subject, I’d been hoping all along that the name Athenee meant her in spite of the probable complications.

  ‘You still look good,’ I said. ‘You’re probably the most beautiful woman in the world.’

  She smiled and damn it if my chest didn’t do what it always did. Her hair was still dark as a heroine’s out of Poe, and here eyes still startled me with their blueness, and damn if I didn’t blush when I realized she was still wearing the perfume I’d told her I liked back in Algiers.

  ‘I’m glad you got out of that nasty snake pit,’ she said. ‘I hated to let him throw you in there, but otherwise he would have killed you.’

  ‘I tried to hold it against you for years but could never make it stick,’ I said. ‘Besides, you did sneak me the rope.’

  She looked down, then looked back up.

  ‘I have missed you, John,’ she said, saying it Jean, like she always did. ‘I tried to find you.’

  ‘I put a lot of effort into being hard to find,’ I said. ‘There were a number of people I didn’t want to find me. Your father, for example.’

  ‘Athenee says,’ observed Bone guardedly, ‘that she has not seen or heard from her father since the business in Dahomey.’

  ‘It is true,’ she said. ‘I was furious with him for what he tried to do to you. But I had to make arrangements before I left him because with someone like my father one always has to make arrangements, even if one is his daughter, n’est-ce pas?’

  ‘Or he’s liable to kill one,’ I said. ‘So now you’re a simple businesswoman and all you do is run this classy shop, which is nothing more than the honest, above-board operation it appears to be.’

  She shrugged.

  ‘It sounds silly, I admit it,’ she said, but then she lifted her chin and looked me square in the eye. ‘All the same, it’s true!’

  Bone sighed.

  ‘I regret raising certain points, mademoiselle,’ he said. ‘Forgive me; I am, after all, a detective. What about the recent visit of the extremely unpleasant gentleman who recently called himself Dr Hackett, but who, I imagine, the three of us present think of still as the Professor? Obviously both you and your father were familiar with his criminal exploits, simple professional interest alone would have dictated that; but I am surprised to learn you are acquainted with him. I had thought up to n
ow that all of your sinister activities were always entirely independent of one another’s, that there was no association between you. What was the purpose of his call on your establishment?’

  She threw a glare at Bone, one of the old-time glares I well remembered, but he only smiled benignly back like someone’s dear old grandfather.

  ‘All right,’ she said, forcibly composing herself. ‘So you know about that. Very well, he did come by—my God but he is a hateful creature—only I never met him before. It is the first time in my life I saw him and I hope it will be the last.’

  She turned and looked at me.

  ‘I swear it, John,’ she said.

  She turned back to Bone.

  ‘He was buying a bracelet, a very expensive one, and made some fuss about it until one of the girls got hold of me,’ she said. ‘Of course I knew him from photographs the moment I saw him, the old horror, and he lit up with a nasty grin the moment he saw me. I suppose he was proud of himself for tracking me down. But we only talked about that stupid bracelet. So I think that’s all there was to it, really; I think he just wanted to see for himself if I was that Athenee, the daughter of Spectrobert.’

  She paused and looked around at us.

  ‘There it is, then,’ she said. ‘I’ve spoken it—there’s the horrifying name that frightened all of France, eh? All the world. I haven’t said it in years. It’s been nice not saying it.’

  She shook her head and sighed.

  ‘Anyhow,’ she said, ‘once he was positive about his little triumph—I had the little mole on my left cheek removed; you used to call it my beauty spot, John, but I saw him see the scar with his sharp old eyes all right—he took his bracelet and left, the vile old villain, and that’s it. C’est ca.’

  The door of the store opened and Ashman came in, which made me realize I hadn’t noticed he’d left.

  ‘You got him, Weston,’ he said. ‘You got him good. We found his body on the stairs. I swear I don’t know how he managed to climb up that silk rope of his. I thought you might like a look at him, so here’s the latest in up-to-date forensics.’