EVERYBODY'S FAVORITE DUCK

by Gahan Wilson

  ‘The clothes closet!’ he said.

  ‘I suppose it’ll give us a minute,’ I said.

  ‘No, no—that’s not what I mean, Weston!’ he snapped. ‘Check the back of it! Behind those silly regal robes!’

  I did, as quickly and as skillfully as I knew how, and he was right as usual and the rear wall of it slid to one side just as sweet as you could wish for.

  ‘It’s an elevator,’ I shouted. ‘It’s a goddamn elevator!’

  At once Bone was crowded in it beside me and I was pushing the top button—there were just two buttons, UP and DOWN—just as we heard the door to the throne room cave in, and the elevator only barely managed to get started up when its outside doors were pounded in hard enough to bang them against the bottom of the cage and knock it a little sidewise, but that didn’t stop the elevator from going up after an initial falter and a little noisy grating against the back of the shaft, and after that it rose slick and fast because the thing down there didn’t have the brains to grab at its cables, which we were both afraid it would do, though I will admit it did seem to take a long, long time before we got high enough for its howls to fade away.

  — 11 —

  THE ELEVATOR DOORS OPENED, with an Alice in Wonderland kind of logic, on another closet, although a much more conventional one, containing tweeds and soft felt hats instead of golden robes and crowns. We stepped out into it and the elevator closed behind us and was in turn covered by the silent slide down of a paneled oak wall which matched the others in the little room.

  I felt Bone stiffen beside me and turned to see him frowning at a suitcase, a nice old alligator-hide number.

  ‘Good heavens!’ he said. ‘Look at that! It’s incredible!’

  ‘That description might be a little strong,’ I said, but I looked it over since he’d asked me and failed to find anything particularly incredible about it until I spotted the faded gold initials stamped on a flat bit of leather sewn near its handle: E. B.

  ‘Is it possible?’ I asked.

  ‘That is my suitcase!’ said Bone, and then he straightened and pointed at the shelves and hangers. ‘These are my clothes!’ He stepped forward, opened the closet door, and waved at the space beyond. ‘This is my bedroom!’

  I followed, did a quick look around, then headed for the floor-to-ceiling windows for a long, slow gape at what turned out to be the glories of Park Avenue below.

  ‘We’re in the confounded Presidential Suite!’ roared Bone, and he doesn’t often roar so it means something when he does. ‘I could have been slaughtered in my sleep any time that mad villain took the whim! Those agency people are fools! I’ve been drafted by total incompetents!’

  He didn’t exactly stride—at his age it just isn’t possible—but he came close to it, crossing the floor of the bedroom. He’d thrown open the door to the big living room and had started to continue his near-stride across that, probably with the idea of near-striding entirely the hell out of the Barton Towers and away forever, when he suddenly brought himself up short, as did I, because seven men wearing dark glasses and three-piece suits of varying shades of gray were very firmly and skillfully pointing large guns at us.

  ‘That may be your bedroom,’ I said to Bone, ‘but I think this has stopped being your living room.’

  ‘Down on the floor,’ said one of the men.

  ‘Spread out,’ said another.

  I was all for cooperating, and had even got started, but Bone, standing as straight as he was able, and distributing his glare evenly on all concerned, said, ‘Never.’

  This seemed to have a bad effect on the three-piecers, but what they would have done about it, if left on their own, will have to remain a mystery forever because at that exact moment the outer door was opened by one of the marines they kept there for that purpose and a hearty-looking man wearing a much better tailored gray suit than any other present breezed in with a great air of authority and a lot of instructions.

  ‘Boys, boys—put up your guns at once!’ he said, waving his big, pink hands as he issued orders. ‘Good grief, don’t you know that’s Enoch Bone? Okay, now, you all leave us alone and keep on tidying up. You, Silverman, get on the phone in some other room to One and tell them to keep flying him around up there in the air where it’s safe; we don’t want him waiting in the lobby. Mr Bone, Mr Weston, please accept my apologies; I see our ID photos on you are really out of date! Do let’s sit down by the window, here, and catch up. My name is Hewliss, Ben Hewliss, I head up the agency; do my best, but things like this just happen.’

  Bone settled in a chair, after a significant pause, but I remained standing in back of him in a kind of guardian position. It had been proper etiquette for Ben Hewliss to introduce himself, but it borders on false modesty when a national monument acts as though you need to learn his name. Hewliss had been running his agency, everybody thought of it as his, through six different administrations, and he’d been a powerful factor in every one of them. He was a large, rumpled man with a big, skillful smile stretching from one side to the other of his wide, open-seeming face, and I never could figure out if he couldn’t quite hide the foxiness in his eyes, or if he let it show on purpose.

  ‘I don’t mind saying you boys have given us some pretty fancy worrying,’ said Hewliss, leaning close to Bone and then smoothly leaning back when he saw Bone didn’t like it. ‘The whole bunch of you just vanishing, and Greyer dead; good grief, it had us climbing walls! Then Ashman calls in five minutes ago—he’ll be here as soon as he can make it; they relayed him to me in the car coming over—and tells me how he and his bunch surfaced in a tunnel in Central Park, the one next to the merry-go-round; tells me how they just missed drowning like rats and how the whole damn area’s near to flooded with water that came out after them; said as how you boys were probably dead and gone in that awful place, but, good grief, here you are! It’s wonderful! How’d you ever do it? And turn up here? How did you ever manage to turn up here, Mr Bone?’

  Bone told him and though Hewliss didn’t get any less folksy, the story turned him from a friendly farmer type to the tough, backwoods sheriff variety in pretty quick order, especially the part about the elevator.

  ‘Silverman?’ He’d pulled out and unfolded a pocket intercom and was talking into it. ‘Get some frogmen here on the double, on the triple, the best, and they may have to do some fancy climbing, and they’ll for damn sure have to do some fancy blowing up. And fly those trick-wall experts in pronto. How’d he take it up there on One? Good. Maybe he can have a little snack. Let them know we’re shifting him to the other bedroom in the suite just for the afternoon. I know he won’t like it, but it has to be done.’

  He snapped his gadget shut and studied us.

  ‘We’ll cork that shaft you boys came up in, and we’ll cork it good,’ he said, and shook his head. ‘It’s a mercy you found it, boys, it’s a proper mercy. I’ve got reports on what you’ve said of these folks, Mr Bone, about these devil people you’re stirred up about, the Chinaman, the Frenchman, and the Limey, and I had my doubts as to them being behind that awful business in D.C., but no longer, sir. I am now convinced those are the villains. My blood runs cold when I think what might have happened if you and Mr Weston, here, hadn’t wrecked their game. Say, you boys are up for medals on this, don’t think you aren’t. The president might have been killed! In there! This very night!’

  ‘The One you keep mentioning is then Air Force One,’ said Bone.

  ‘Right,’ said Hewliss, nodding. ‘President Parker will be arriving when we get things in place. Mrs Parker was all set to come with him, only when the boys were clearing out those secret walls they uncovered some of the original wallpaper in two of the halls and she’s had it copied and is mad to put it up. I can tell you that woman’s worked wonders with the old homestead!’

  ‘You can’t be serious,’ said Bone. ‘You’re going to let him stay here? In this suite? After what Weston and I discovered?’

  Hewitt leaned forward and then quickly leaned
back because he remembered Bone hadn’t liked it the first time.

  ‘But you scotched it, Mr Bone,’ he said, bringing back the smile. ‘You stopped them cold. They had a direct connection, but it’s gone because of you. Look, you heard me asking for the secret-panel experts—you hear everything—the president won’t sleep here until it’s all been checked to a fare-thee-well. Another thing, Mr Bone, it’s important to grasp this, the president just loves stopping at the Presidential Suite of the Barton Towers, especially while being the president, you understand? It makes it all kind of official for him. Do you follow me on this?’

  ‘You have explained yourself properly, at last, Mr Hewliss,’ said Bone, standing. ‘You are both guardian and courtier, and the duties overlap. I see your men filing out of both Mr Weston’s bedroom and mine with our belongings. We are, of course, to be lodged elsewhere.’

  ‘The suite directly below this one, sir.’ Hewliss rose and we started for the door. ‘It’s practically a duplicate.’

  ‘But not quite as good,’ said Bone. ‘Otherwise, what’s the point of being president?’

  The door was marine-opened and Hewliss led us to the elevator at the far end of the bank.

  ‘It’s for staff only,’ he said, as we glided down. ‘Services just this floor and the one beneath it. The two floors together make up the high-security area. Perhaps you’d like to have a look-see at our command area before you get settled? It’s right next door to your new quarters. We want you handy to the action, sir.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Bone, and we were led into a ceiling-lit, high-tech security paradise which was a lookalike extension of the agency’s downtown digs except that here they seemed to go in more for tv monitors. One wall was entirely covered with them, and they were all on, every damned one of them.

  ‘It makes me ill to look at all those miserable, ugly little pictures,’ said Bone.

  ‘You’ll need the knack, I’ll hand you that,’ said Hewliss. ‘Helps if you sort of let your eye rove and not get fixed on any one image. Right now over here’s the coverage of the suite upstairs, not much going on except agents vacuuming and dusting. You’ve probably noticed we didn’t think to put a camera in that damned closet with the elevator you boys discovered, but we’ll take care of that. Here’s the hall and I see the frogmen have turned up, and, yes, by golly, there’s Ashman with them.

  He unfolded his little pocket intercom.

  ‘Ashman?’ he said, and Ashman’s tiny images, three of them seen from three points of view, looked up and listened. ‘Hewliss here. Good to see you. Bone and Weston are with me in Command and both okay; tell you about it later. What’s up?’

  ‘I was really happy to hear you two made it, Mr Bone, Mr Weston,’ Ashman said in tinny stereo from some overhead speakers. ‘I’m going with the frogmen, sir. I want to have a look at the other end of that place.’

  ‘Go to it. Over and out,’ Hewliss said, folding up his intercom and continuing his little guided tour of the television screens. ‘Then, Mr Bone, Mr Weston, here’s the hotel entrance, lobby, elevator up, all that. And over here we’ve got the left bank of monitors on Air Force One, the president’s plane. Interior stuff here, executive cabins, pilot’s cabin, and so on, and exterior view here, from all those places.’

  ‘What is that?’ asked Bone, pointing.

  The little read-out underneath identified the image on the screen Bone had singled out as being the view from the left of the central executive cabin. It showed sky, clouds, and a funny little violet-colored blotch on the lower-right corner. The blotch seemed to be coming closer, and Hewliss leaned over and tapped the shoulder of a man wearing an earphone and trying to keep track of a control panel packed with dials and screens.

  ‘How about the radar?’ Hewliss asked him.

  ‘Nothing, sir,’ the man said, and yet the blotch had become bigger.

  ‘You have a way of coming across things, Mr Bone,’ said Hewliss. ‘I swear you do.’ He flipped open his intercom and tapped out some code on its pad. ‘Pilot One? This is Hewliss. Do you read me? Over.’

  ‘Yessir,’ said the pilot, tinny, like Ashman, but mono. ‘Over.’

  ‘You see that thing? To port? Around nine o’clock? Over.’

  There was a pause during which we heard the sounds of the plane’s engines and various clicks and clatters from the pilot’s cabin, and then, ‘Yesssir. Only it doesn’t quite look real, sir. It’s like I had something in my eye. And I’m not picking it up on radar. Maybe it’s an illusion. Over.’

  ‘Yeah, well, we’re having the same illusion down here,’ said Hewliss. ‘Fly away from it and see what happens. Over.’ He tapped the shoulder of the man on the table. ‘Bring that thing up on a couple of other screens,’ he told him. ‘Bring it about three times up on one and fill the screen with it on the other.’

  He did, but all that happened was that you saw a bigger violet blotch. It changed its position as our point of view altered from the pilot’s turning.

  ‘Look,’ said Hewliss, ‘it’s getting smaller as he pulls away. So it’s really there; it’s a something.’

  ‘Do you have weapons on that plane?’ asked Bone.

  ‘No,’ said Hewliss. ‘Better. It’s escorted.’ He spoke to the pilot. ‘Bring in the fighters,’ he told him, ‘with instructions to destroy that thing. And you continue getting the hell out of there. Over.’

  There was a spate of aeronautical-type gobbledegook back and forth from the speakers, and two jet fighters glistened into view. They began shrinking at once because Air Force One was leaving the vicinity as quickly as possible, but we saw them swooping down and throwing a lot of fire at the splotch with no particular effect. Hewliss leaned down over the man at the table.

  ‘You got a kind of telescope at the rear,’ he said. ‘Train in on all that. Bring it up before we lose our fix on those planes.’

  The man’s hand flickered over his controls and two of the monitors started showing long-distance shots of the fighters still figure-eighting in on the splotch, still not seeming to be able to do it any damage.

  ‘If those boys can just keep that damn thing busy,’ said Hewliss, ‘I’ll settle for that.’

  Then there was a bright flash and we had only a brief glimpse more before the angle changed hopelessly and we lost view of the fight altogether, but that was enough to show us that while one of the planes was still going hell for leather after the splotch, the other one was just gone with no trace at all.

  ‘Mr Hewliss, sir,’ came the pilot’s voice over the intercom. ‘We’re landing. We’ll be safe on the ground in a moment. And I think we’re damned lucky to have made it. Over.’

  Hewliss sighed and leaned hard on the chair back of the man at the table.

  ‘You got that right,’ he said.

  — 12 —

  WITH FIVE RESTAURANTS in the Barton, you’d think they’d have managed to make at least one of them good, but the only impressive thing about their main room, La Salle d’Or, is the total on the check they hand you after you’ve worked your way through the meal. I’d wanted to take Athenee to a better place for lunch, since it had been so many years since our last one, and since she knows the difference between a good meal and what they serve at La Salle d’Or, but the president was going to see Bone and me ‘sometime’ that afternoon, so I was staying in the building in order to be within a lackey’s dash of his suite.

  ‘Bone says the flying blotch has got to be a production of the Professor,’ I said, leaning back as the waiter removed by hors d’oeuvre dishes and cutlery from the wrong side. ‘He says the Mandarin’s a brilliant scientist, all right, but his expertise leans to what Bone calls the “fiendish biological,” whereas this thing appears to be high physics. And your father, while no slouch at whipping up cute murder weapons and nifty burglar tools, is only a clever handyman compared to those other two.’

  ‘He is right,’ said Athenee. ‘Papa is no scientist, and, outside of breeding those winged monsters of his, the Mandarin has never
been all that clever with flying things. Of course there was that ribbed cape with which he glided off the tip of a skyscraper when the police thought they had him cornered; but then his mechanical pterodactyl was a complete disaster.’

  The captain brought the entrée then and I suppose I should tell you I recall clearly what it was since I’m supposed to be better than average at noticing things and filing them away, but the truth is the only thing I really remember about that lunch is how Athenee looked; how her jaws moved when she chewed, how her throat rippled when she swallowed, and I could recite you word for word everything she said.

  A lot of it was brand new to me; for example, the fact that her father had taught her early how to steal, the same as you start to teach a ballet dancer when it’s still a little kid.

  ‘He began by having me sneak around his study while he worked, to see if I could find a bonbon which he’d concealed somewhere inside the room,’ she told me. ‘If I could locate it without his hearing me it was mine, but if he caught me making the slightest sound he would take the candy from its hiding place and drop it into a large tank of piranha which he kept by his desk. They particularly loved chocolate-covered coconut.

  ‘Of course I learned a lot from the books on thievery in his library, and more from working with the collection of safes and man traps in his workshop, but the heart of his teaching was practical experience. He would, for instance, put me outside the walls of the estate at dusk and if I wanted dinner—which, being a growing child, I most certainly did—I had to make my way back in, entirely unobserved despite the many locks and alarms, ancient and modern, which he changed daily for my benefit.’

  ‘Kind of tough,’ I said.

  ‘It was, in its way, lovingly done. By the age of thirteen I was by far the most accomplished cat burglar operating on the Cote d’Azur. Of course it was all marvelously entertaining; it was far better than hopscotch and tag and hide-and-seek all rolled into one.