EVERYBODY'S FAVORITE DUCK

by Gahan Wilson

  He produced a Polaroid shot of a tiny, birdlike dark man wearing a gray kaftan and turban, and I could remember when an outfit like that would have drawn a second look in New York. He was all curled up tight on a dirty, bloody flight of steps in full fetal posture, but he still looked dangerous. I took the photo and held it out to Athenee.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’m a detective, too, so I have to ask. Why were you keeping something like this in your attic?’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s a very good question, mademoiselle,’ said Bone.

  ‘Really,’ said Athenee, her glare in full force, ‘I had almost forgotten how tiresome you two can be!’

  Ashman looked from Bone to me and back again.

  ‘Say, look, she didn’t have anything to do with it,’ he said. ‘The guy broke in from the roof; he forced the trap door and busted a weird knife with a wavy blade doing it. Paley says you call it a kris.’

  Then he studied the expressions on our faces.

  ‘You guys seem surprised,’ he said.

  ‘Relieved, Ashman,’ I said. ‘What you’re looking at here, on my face, is relief.’

  — 7 —

  BONE AND ASHMAN AND I sat in the back of yet another government limo while Ashman’s man Paley drove it slowly down Park Avenue because there was no way to move down Park this time of day except slowly unless you let loose with a siren, and the clowns who equipped the car apparently figured a siren would be far too crude for a vehicle this classy.

  ‘That rifleman was in place within a quarter hour of my little chat with Frenchy,’ I said. ‘And his being there shows they got everything out of him, down to the detail about the shopping bags.’

  ‘It must have been some firm questioning,’ said Ashman.

  ‘Quite so,’ said Bone, as we turned into Fifty-fifth Street. ‘And the answers very much disapproved of. Le Rond-Point is over there, Mr Paley. To the left, with that modest little awning which is ever a sure indication of gourmet pretensions.’

  Paley double-parked, probably out of habit because he was a government man, and we piled out and then bunched up in a clump at the door because it wouldn’t open. There was a little bunch of pale flowers and a handwritten note fixed to the grillwork with a gold and purple ribbon.

  ‘A little funeral bouquet,’ said Bone. ‘How very Old Country.’

  ‘I can’t read the note,’ said Ashman, ‘because it’s written in French.’

  ‘A positively insufferable example of restaurant snobisme,’ said Bone. ‘It informs us that the management is desolate, but the restaurant is closed due to a death in the family.’

  He cocked an eye up at me.

  ‘This could have its sinister implications, Weston,’ he said.

  ‘Get around to the back of the place, Paley, and keep an eye on the rear exit,’ said Ashman and turned to us as Paley hurried off. ‘I don’t have a warrant, of course, but I think you’ll agree we have grounds here for a strong suspicion that a crime may be in progress on these premises, am I right?’

  ‘Absolutely, officer,’ I said.

  ‘Okay,’ said Ashman, and producing a little wallet with an assortment of fancy metal equipment in it, he had the lock picked and the door opened in nothing flat. An alarm went off, of course, but Ashman fished around, found a switch under a curtain to the left of the door, and flipped it off with the same little kit.

  ‘I don’t know why people don’t hide those things better,’ he said.

  ‘Especially master criminals,’ I said.

  The place was dark, so we turned the lights on as we went. There’s something slightly spooky about a completely public place, such as a restaurant, when it’s abandoned; it just doesn’t seem right not to have any of the usual cast around.

  ‘There’s a coat hanging in the checkroom,’ said Bone, so I ducked in to frisk it and came up with a couple of envelopes containing routine bills addressed to an Arnaud Verne.

  ‘It’s Frenchy’s’ I said.

  Bone flipped the switches which turned on the chandeliers and table lamps in the restaurant’s main dining room. Everything was neat and tidy, all ready for the next serving, but nobody was home. All in all it was a little like coming aboard a really fancy version of the abandoned Marie Celeste. Bone frowned and raised his nose and Ashman and I followed suit.

  ‘Something’s cooking,’ Ashman said.

  For some reason that was the signal for both Ashman and myself to draw our guns. Bone headed for the kitchen, with us on his heels, pushed open one of the brightly polished swinging doors, and a rich smell of thyme and garlic and meat flowed out with the motion.

  ‘Not a light on in the whole place,’ he said. ‘Not one.’

  ‘Smells like roast pork,’ said Ashman. ‘Really mouth-watering.’

  Bone reached in and groped around on the wall until banks of lights flickered on, one by one, starting from over our heads and working their way to the far edges of the big room.

  ‘Keep very much on the alert,’ he said.

  His nose lifted like a hound on the trail, Bone walked across the kitchen to one of the largest ovens in a bank of them stretching across the back wall. He looked around, located a large rag, and used it to open the oven. In it was the biggest baking pan I’d ever seen, filled with some huge, hulking thing.

  ‘My God, that smells good,’ said Ashman.

  ‘I expect I could have handled that some years back,’ said Bone, ‘but in my present state of decrepitude it might prove rather too heavy for me to manage. If you two gentlemen will take hold of the rack, one on either side, and pull it out a half foot or so, we’ll have a better idea of what we’re looking at. For heaven’s sake, please do try to avoid pulling it out far enough to tilt it and spill it out onto the floor.’

  By now I had a fair idea of what we were tugging into view, but Ashman apparently didn’t because his expression was only one of mild curiosity until the rack got about a foot and a half out and the front end of the pan was clear of the oven. At that point the look on his face changed dramatically and so did the color of his skin because what we were looking at, all brown and crispy and roasted to perfection, was Frenchy Verne with an apple in his mouth.

  There was a brief pause during which, I think understandably, all our eyes were fixed on Frenchy’s glistening face, and during that moment someone with a very good sense of timing slipped into the kitchen and turned out all the lights.

  ‘The devil!’ snapped Bone.

  ‘At your service, Enoch Bone!’

  It was an actor’s voice, full and deep and rolling, with a great snarl whipping through the name at the end. I felt Bone start and stiffen in the darkness beside me.

  ‘Spectrobert,’ he said, putting a lot of sneer into it. ‘Still up to your usual cheap theatrics?’

  There was a soft hiss in the air followed by a sharp clang against one of the ovens in back of us, and I saw a glittering in the air dangerously close to my nose which was followed by a bang and a clatter on the floor.

  ‘Get low,’ I whispered. ‘He’s throwing chef’s knives.’

  ‘There’s got to be a lot of those in a place like this!’ Ashman whispered back.

  We’d barely bunched ourselves behind a counter when, one right after the other, like tumblers in a circus, three monster-bladed meat cleavers thunked neatly into the butcher block mounted onto its top.

  ‘Mine landed a little less than an inch from my face,’ I whispered. ‘How about yours?’

  ‘The same,’ said Ashman.

  ‘He’s playing with us, the scoundrel,’ growled Bone. ‘He’s got one of those infernal gadgets that sees in the dark. Shoot him, Weston.’

  ‘I’d love to,’ I said. ‘But I bet he isn’t where I think he is.’

  As if to bear me out, there was a sort of metal avalanche at the far end of the kitchen, and then, even before the last clattering of the first died out, another crash and banging sounded at the room’s other end.

  ‘Sounds like two train collisions,’ sai
d Ashman.

  ‘Hush!’ hissed Bone. ‘Listen!’

  I could barely make it out for the ringing in my ears, but as I strained to hear it came clearer: a kind of heavy, sloppy gurgling.

  ‘Whatever it is,’ said Ashman, ‘it sounds disgusting.’

  Then from all directions, the stench hit us; it was as if a thick, sour cloud were pouring in at us from every filthy kitchen in the world, and it was growing stronger and more sickening with each breath we took.

  I shifted my crouch in a try to peer better into the dimness from where the second clattering had come and would have tumbled to the floor if I hadn’t grabbed the counter because my foot had slipped from under me with a kind of Cossack kick because it had suddenly lost all traction. I reached down to what had been sparkling clean tile moments before, touched it with my fingers, and found it was covered with a fatty, putrid slime.

  ‘The bastard’s flooding the place with grease,’ I said. ‘And he’s been saving the stuff for years from the stink of it.’

  Then that big, full actor’s voice boomed out of the darkness again.

  ‘Are you enjoying the presentation of our spécialité for tonight, Monsieur Bone?’ it said. ‘I most sincerely hope so for I have created it with you very particularly in mind—Detectives Flambés!’

  ‘Get your guns ready,’ whispered Bone, grimly. ‘If you have any spares, get them ready, too!’

  Then, along the walls of both ends of the kitchen at once, great banks of flame shot up from the floor, licked at the ceiling and started to spread immediately from both directions, sputtering and sparking toward the center, toward us.

  ‘There!’ cried Bone. ‘Look before you! I thought he couldn’t resist a moment of triumphant visibility!’

  Lit suddenly by a blue-green sea of flames from the grease fire, his shadow huge and wobbly behind him on the kitchen wall, Chef Tomas stood before us, his hands clawed out for the doors leading to his restaurant, staring at us over his shoulder with his teeth showing in a wide, fixed grin which made him look like some kind of a demon under his high, white cap. If he’d dived through the door then we might have frozen, it was such a strange, wild kind of sight; but it was he who was frozen.

  Ashman and I had our guns ready and we fired at will, which was often, making smoky holes which sprouted red snakes down what had been the spotless white cloth of Tomas’s jacket, but I knew at once we’d done very wrong when he jumped and slumped but somehow didn’t fall.

  Bone stood suddenly, clawing at the counter for support, his eyes flashing, and I never, not in all the years I’ve worked with him, even discounting how those new deep lines in his face made it look like an Eskimo mask, saw him show such fury.

  ‘You’ll pay for this, Spectrobert!’ he roared, waving his forefinger wildly in the air. ‘Mark that, blast you! Be waiting for it!’

  I grabbed hold of him because the flames were closer, almost upon us, and somehow managed to keep both of us upright as I worked our way through the thick, black smoke, closer and closer to the door, by grabbing the edges of things as they came into reach. Bone ignored all this and continued to howl and rage as I hauled him along.

  ‘I’ll avenge him, you scum! Fear my retribution, you wretch!’

  ‘What the hell is all this?’ Ashman asked behind me. ‘The son of a bitch is dead, isn’t he? Look!’

  He fired another shot into the bloody chef’s jacket and the body jerked where it stood.

  ‘Stop!’ I said. ‘Don’t do that!’

  Now we were next to the corpse, so I shifted Bone to my other side and reached out to the body and tugged hard at its arm.

  ‘Help me get him loose,’ I said. ‘We’ll have to lift him a little. He’s been stuck up here on some goddam meat hooks.’

  ‘Jesus!’ said Ashman.

  We hauled him off the wall and with Ashman lugging the body and me lugging Bone, we pushed our way through the doors and into the restaurant, and the damnedest thing was it still looked so lovely and peaceful out there you almost wanted to sit down for lunch.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ I said. ‘Outside the building. He may have the place mined with explosives, he may have it ready to fill with poison gas. With that creep anything is possible.’

  Going out, we crossed paths with some firemen in the hallway, so the blaze must have tripped some alarm. Since they’d made it safely inside, and since none of them were turning blue, I figured that was probably that so far as mines or poison gas were concerned, but I didn’t blame myself for worrying about such things; not with Spectrobert.

  Ashman laid the body on the sidewalk and there, staring up at us, still wearing that weird, broad grin, was the same face I’d seen earlier that afternoon when I thought I was looking at the famous Chef Tomas but was actually looking at Spectrobert in yet another flawless disguise. I bent down close to the face and talked to it as gently as I could what with all the confusion going on around the two of us.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘but if I had this rubbish on, I’d want you to get rid of it for me.’

  First I tugged out the plastic gadget in his mouth that had held it in that grin, and in the process discovered that the damned thing had served a double purpose as a nasty and efficient gag, then I took a firm hold of the nose, which was made of some rubbery stuff, worked it back and forth to loosen the extensions glued to the forehead and cheeks so I could pull it loose and free it along with the moustache and the better-than-you brows which arched over his eyes, and when I got rid of that and wiped off some other junk, I closed the eyes of the tired, dead, Irish cop face that doing all that had uncovered.

  ‘Paley!’ said Ashman, exploding the name and crunching his hands into fists. ‘The dirty bastard made us kill Paley!’

  He stared down at him, taking deep, raggedy breaths, and then he stood, stuffing his hands in his pockets almost hard enough to push them through the cloth and I could see he was well on his way to being as mad as Enoch Bone.

  — 8 —

  NEEDLESS TO SAY, everybody had a lot of questions to ask us since all police organizations tend to put top priority on the murder of one of their own, and it was a good thing Bone and I had a member of their agency as a corroborating witness in the business because they might never have really believed us, deep down inside, if we’d charged in there alone and slaughtered poor Paley all by ourselves.

  This was my first sight of their new headquarters, since it had been built during my retirement, and I have to say all those escalators running smoothly up and down through floorsful of postmodern interiors created a much snappier impression on a visitor than the old brick pile they used to skulk around in a few blocks further on downtown.

  The slick new architecture was only part of the act, however, merely the setting for the bright and shiny high-tech equipment which was built into their new digs and which starred a monster computer lovingly referred to as CLAMP, for Crime Listing and Monitoring Program.

  We were gathered in the office of Fred Greyer, Ashman’s superior and head of their agency’s New York City section. Greyer probably parted his hair with a ruler, and I wouldn’t be in the least surprised to learn he’d been born wearing a three-piece suit without a wrinkle in it. I also suspect that deep down in Greyer’s heart, he believed that odd people such as Bone, and possibly even myself, should be taken out and shot for being confusing to logical, orderly minds.

  Greyer was hunched over a keyboard plugged into CLAMP because one question leading to another had eventually turned all of them into questions about the Professor, the Mandarin, and Spectrobert, and since the machine’s big speciality was digging up information on unpleasant people and keeping track of their activities, all of us were very interested to see what the big machine would come up with.

  It was easy enough for Greyer to get CLAMP to print a fat, bulky file on Spectrobert; the Frenchman had always loved headlines so much that if he had nothing else going he’d pass the time by writing letters to the newspapers in his trick vanishing
ink threatening to steal the Eiffel Tower. But both the Mandarin and the Professor were very private people and the section head had been typing inquiries about the two of them for the better part of three hours without getting much more than a few sketchy little lines of input.

  Ordinarily I would imagine Greyer does a pretty good job of giving people the impression he is unflappable and that under his pinstripes there lurks a core of steel, but now he was in the classic position of the man whose favorite puppy dog just stands there in the middle of the carpet and won’t do its clever little tricks, and he looked a little flustered.

  ‘With all due respect, Mr Bone,’ he said, ‘I find it hard to believe these other two people could be the towering criminals you say they are and yet make such a small impression on CLAMP. This Chinese fellow, for instance, who you say recently went by the name of, ah, Mr King . . .’

  ‘Not only his most recent name, Mr Greyer,’ said Bone. ‘I believe I said it has been strongly hinted it may also have been his earliest, back in the London docklands before the war, when he first became known to the Western authorities, excluding, apparently, those supplying information to your CLAMP. It may even be his genuine appellation.’

  ‘Be that as it may,’ said Greyer, ‘if he’s been behind a tenth of the crimes and terrorist activities you’ve attributed to him in the testimony you’ve given me today, here in this office, it’s impossible that CLAMP wouldn’t have a larger body of data on him. I mean it is directly connected with the filing systems of every major police force in the free world, and indirectly, so to speak, with those in the communist territories, so he’d just have to turn up more than he has. The same goes for the man you like to call the Professor, Mr Bone. There’s just no way these people could carry on the wide-ranging criminal activities you’ve described and leave so small a trace.’