Count Geiger's Blues

by Michael Bishop

  “I’m the nephew of the guy you shot,” The Mick said. “Mikhail Menaker, aka The Mick. I was at Goldfinger’s—with Uncle Xave—when UC was outing the DeeJay, Gator Maid, and Count Geiger. I popped my unc, so to say, even before you did.”

  “Oh.” Bowman looked at The Mick as if trying to match his features to those of a suspect in a grainy mug shot. “Yessir, I do remember. Ever ballsy, aren’t you? Crusader Kid. My condolences.”

  “For what?”

  “The genetic tragedy tying you to old Xave the Knave here,” nodding at Xavier: “King of the Komix Kickers.”

  “Listen, he’s actually a fan too. Sometimes he even likes—intellectually, you know—the music and lyrics of Smite Them Hip & Thigh. He’s evolved, catch? And if my uncle Xave’s evolved, there’s hope for the globe.”

  “So you’re a fan, eh?” Bowman asked Xavier.

  “Didn’t I recognize Big Mister Sinister? Didn’t I bring The Mick to talk to you, my would-be assassin?”

  The Mick turned to Xavier and deftly loosened the knot in his tie. “Show him, Uncle Xave.” The Mick fumbled at Xavier’s collar buttons. “Not only is he a fan,” The Mick told Bowman, “he’s a real-life stalwart. Swear to Jesus.”

  Lively stepped up and rapped the table again. “C’mon, now,” he said.

  “Your uncle didn’t sneak a comic in too, did he?”

  “It’s not a comic,” The Mick said. “Lookit here,” he ordered Bowman.

  Even Xavier looked. The Mick had exposed, under Xavier’s dress shirt, a V of crinkled foil, a porthole on his Count Geiger costume from SatyrFernalia. Xavier brushed The Mick’s hands aside, but the disclosure was a fait accompli. Bowman laughed. Lively gave him an angry scowl, as if he were a specimen of human vermin caught in a kiddie-porn investigation.

  “Well,” Bowman said, “I’d always figured you for a constipated fetishist.”

  “No more so than an adult male who openly wears a cape,” Xavier said.

  “We all have our reasons.”

  “At first it was a talisman,” The Mick went on. “The Suit, I mean. But now that he’s a stalwart, he wears it—secretly—for real. Vile-mannered Xavier Thaxton is really Count Geiger.” To Lively, The Mick said, “This is all confidential, though. Can’t we get some privacy here?”

  “You the dude what conked them rowdies t’ other night but what let Tyrone Harp take credit?” Lively asked Xavier.

  “You’ve got to sit on that,” The Mick said. “That’s classified gas. What if every crim in the city found out?”

  “You done told this one,” Lively said, waving at Bowman. “Make up yo’ mind. I’m here to keep visitation-room peace—not to pick up hush-hush crap to tattle ’round.” Looking deeply offended, he retreated to the wall and crossed his arms. “Time’s a-ticking,” he said.

  In a guttural whisper, The Mick explained to Bowman how Xavier had been able to expel the bullets fired point-blank into his gut. Breathing hard and zooming his hands, he related in detail Xavier’s one-man rescue operation at the EleRail station. Uncle Xave was a living stalwart, whether because of the SatyrFernalia Suit’s built-in properties or his uncle’s exposure to some strength-boosting natural phenomenon, The Mick didn’t know, but the stalwart part was definitely proven.

  “It’s a tribute to you that he is, Tim,” Mikhail said. “That’s the nifty-weird part.”

  Wait a minute, Xavier thought. Bowman tried to kill me.

  Agitated, Bowman apologized to Xavier for trying to kill him. He laid the blame for this act on his own insecurity-driven perfectionism, the jealousy and/or resentment of some of his UC staff, the entrepreneurial timidity of F. Deane Finesse, and the depression and disorientation that had overwhelmed him in the wake of his firing. A fair-minded person, he argued, would see his descent into Salonika’s sewers and his brief rampage in the McGill Building as evidence that he had, well, snapped.

  “Temporary insanity,” The Mick said. “That was it.”

  “You were a handy scapegoat for a man in my position,” Bowman told Xavier. “I’m glad you didn’t die.”

  “Me too,” Xavier said, feeling edified, stroked, and conned.

  “Maybe you could testify for him, Uncle Xave.”

  “Easier to do alive than dead. If he’d killed me, he’d’ve blown any hope of my coming in as a friendly witness.”

  “I’m sorry,” Bowman said again. “Really.” (Behind him, Lively shifted and sighed.) “A stalwart—a Stalwart for Truth—would do that, though,” Bowman said. “Sit on his natural antagonisms to help a persecuted underdog.”

  “What else would he do?” The Mick prompted Bowman.

  “Whatever’s noble. Mr. Thaxton, you’re a critic with educated tastes, educated opinions. You’re also a man capable of changing his mind. You reassessed Uncommon Comics, your nephew says. You also have reassessed me. That’s admirable. If you do have stalwartly powers, use them to promote the general welfare. Shun the dehumanizing adrenaline rush of strong-arm heroics and easy coercion. Eschew violence. Use your gifts to ennoble the masses. Champion the Good, the True, the Beautiful.”

  Officer Lively turned his shoulder to the plaster wall and spat on the floor.

  “That’s a positively Nietzschean program,” Xavier told Bowman.

  “You may not believe this, but that program is what I was trying to fulfill in every story I ever wrote or edited for UC. So my plea, if you are in fact a bona fide stalwart, is simple. It’s this: Go thou and do likewise.”

  “Amen,” The Mick said.

  When Mikhail and Xavier had exhausted their twenty minutes with Bowman, Bari and Howie Littleton arrived to visit him. Xavier gave Mikhail cab fare home and strolled back to the McGill Building. No sense in wasting another twenty minutes in the station house just to debrief Bari and her hunky-looking but wussy-souled partner when they returned from their visit. Besides, about the only subject he could imagine the three of them discussing was the coming boom in UC-inspired ready-to-wear, about which, frankly, Xavier did not give a damn. He and Bari could talk later.

  42

  Foiled Again

  In the next few days, feeling totally free of the Philistine Syndrome, Xavier moved to implement the stalwartly program that Bowman had suggested to him. He also heeded Bari’s warnings not to surrender to violence or the temptation to turn a heroic feat into a crude public spectacle. Sadly, he saw few ways to exploit his secret identity’s potential for Doing Good without publicizing the fact that a living proxy of one of the title characters in the UC Universe was altruistically patrolling Salonika’s streets.

  Much of a stalwart’s effectiveness, Xavier reasoned, came from the reputation—the celebrity—of that character. The angel one knows is a more accessible resource than is an anonymous angel with no known home address and no track record as a crime fighter. The problem here, he figured, was discovering a way to trumpet Count Geiger’s achievements and potential without (1) turning him into a gaudy media freakshow and (2) wholly disrupting his private life as Xavier Thaxton. Xavier shared these thoughts with The Mick, who agreed with his assessment but who also felt that public awareness of the real-life Count Geiger would burgeon on its own as his uncle caught more thugs and aided more intended victims. Salonika’s law-abiding citizens would rejoice; formerly arrogant hooligans and crime lords would quail.

  “No more make-it-up-as-I-go vigilantism,” Xavier said. “That episode at the EleRail station was a fluke because I was close enough to help and then manhandled the muggers unforgivably. Believe me, Mikhail, I’ll never do anything like that again.”

  “Jeez, unc, they deserved what they got. At least you didn’t Goetz them.”

  “And Ms. Lebeck, bless her, allowed us to let the station cop seize the roses for saving her. That kept my Count Geiger impersonation out of the Urbanite. Now, though, we need to publicize the Count’s role without hurting Ms. Lebeck or making Mr. Harp look foolish to his colleagues and bosses. Doing those things will establish me—Count Geiger, I me
an—as a force for good in Salonika.”

  The upshot of this talk was that The Mick placed an anonymous call to the McGill Building suggesting that a reporter interview a citizen named Blanche Lebeck about a mugging recently thwarted at the Bridgeboro EleRail platform. The reporter might also examine the activity log at Salonika’s central police station to see how city cops had recorded this event. Such a follow-up might prove illuminating.

  When Walt Grantham assigned Alex Meisel (whose identity Xavier had borrowed at the Hazelton place) to investigate The Mick’s call, Xavier had a retroactive twinge of guilt. Two days later, though, this headline dominated the Urbanite’s front page: SILVER AVENGER SAVES WOMAN AT BRIDGEBORO STATION / Assailants Allegedly Hung Up to Dry, Like Laundry. Along with the story, Grantham ran a staff artist’s sketch of the muggers hanging from the yardarms of the chandelier:

  Blanche Lebeck, a health-food store clerk, claims that on Wednesday night a hooded man in a silver leotard saved her health and her life by single-handedly halting a mugging by four assailants at EleRail’s Bridgeboro Station.

  “I was terrified,” Ms. Lebeck said. “I’ve studied self-defense techniques, and I’m not usually a ’fraidy cat, but this was four real mean guys. I pulled out my Mace and started screaming. Really screaming.”

  Ms. Lebeck, 38, says her screams summoned help from a silver-suited rescuer whose actions were a purposeful blur. In less than ten seconds, she estimates, he had disabled the three young men still in a condition to threaten her.

  “I really shpritzed one of them,” she said yesterday. “He was already down. Then all four were up. This guy in the aluminum leotard carried them up a ladder and hooked them to a light fixture until the city cops got there.

  “Guess you could say he kind of foiled the muggers’ plans,” Ms. Lebeck said. “That’s a joke I thought up later. Things weren’t at all funny as they happened, believe me.”

  Ms. Lebeck’s description of the Silver Samaritan, who left before the police arrived, makes him sound like a costume-party refugee in the garb of the popular Uncommon Comics stalwart Count Geiger. But an agent of the Salonika-based UC comics company claims no knowledge of the man and adds that he must have been free-lancing.

  “Sounds like an athletic guy with a social conscience,” the UC spokesperson said. “We don’t approve of vigilantism, of course, but if he gets in in touch with us and proves his identity as Ms. Lebeck’s rescuer, we might be willing to discuss a merchandising and public-relations deal with him.”

  The story also dealt with other matters: the assailants’ names, backgrounds, criminal records, and present condition (satisfactory or better in every case); the brief absence from the station of EleRail security guard Tyrone Harp; and the police’s bafflement about the identity and quicksilver actions of the stalwart’s impersonator. But the last line in Meisel’s article read, “Salonika can only benefit from the intervention of a real-life stalwart like the Silver Samaritan who saved Ms. Lebeck.”

  Positive citywide reaction ensued. The sale of new and back issues of the Count Geiger series skyrocketed. Disk jockeys told jokes about, and made up contests centered on, UC’s popular character. Costume companies—including a shady Satan’s Cellar establishment called SatyrFernalia—reported brisk rental business in tinfoil suits. Many of these subsidiary impersonators appeared on street corners selling flowers, hawking steamed bagels, squeegeeing car windows, or even handing out religious tracts. A small army of anonymous nutzos telephoned talk-show radio hosts to “confess” that they were the modest Count Geigers who had saved Ms. Lebeck.

  During this hullabaloo, it occurred to Xavier that a real-life stalwart could conceal his true identity by jumping headlong into a bramble thicket of such frauds or by standing so far off from the ruckus that no one would suspect him of caring a jot for such matters. Oddly, in the comic books themselves, superhero impersonators were genuine rarities, as if all the supporting-cast inhabitants of their fictional Gotham or Nick City had attended the same night-school course about the legal and moral indefensibility of trademark infringement. The result—in comic-book stories, that is—was that nobody in town but Batman dressed like Batman, nobody in town but Yellowhammer dressed like Yellowhammer. In the real world, though, stalwartly wannabes crowded the boulevards and side streets of Salonika like so many annoying decoys—too many to count, too many to winnow to get to the genuine article. In such an atmosphere, anyone claiming to be the real Count Geiger was hooted down as a liar or a fruitcake.

  So far so good, Xavier thought, when events had reached this pass. Alex Meisel and the Urbanite have effectively publicized Count Geiger’s coming, and the joyriders, frauds, and mountebanks in Salonika have provided me a welcome measure of security. All I must now do is . . . strike again.

  43

  First Stringers Refined

  Work for the general weal, Xavier counseled himself. Eschew violence, disdain all nonessential showboating, champion the True and the Beautiful. Well, it wasn’t only street crime, pokeweed addiction, and various ill-publicized white-collar atrocities that plagued Salonika. It was also self-destructive eating habits, poor hygiene, Neanderthal racial and sexual attitudes, and execrable public taste, broadly speaking, in all those aesthetic areas under the purview of his Fine Arts editorship.

  “So what’re you gonna do first?” The Mick asked.

  “Visit First Stringers,” Xavier said.

  “But you hate the scuzzy vittles they push there.”

  “Exactly.”

  On a busy Saturday afternoon, costumed as Count Geiger but feeling as elegantly distinguishable from his brummagem impersonators as the real Santa Claus would be from a department-store brigade of shabby “helpers,” Xavier strolled alone to the split-level fast-food factory called First Stringers. All stained tile and murky chrome, it occupied a vast asphalt lot across the street from Oconee Tech, an urban university renowned for producing “agrarian engineers” and NCAA Final Four basketball teams. Today, the lines at the hot-dog and cheese-steak counters ran dozens of people deep because Tech was hosting a conference gymnastics meet in its field house. Xavier drew only a few goggle-eyed stares—three or four guys in line wore cheapjack versions of his Count Geiger getup—as he snaked through the impatient diners to the office of the executive manager, on whose door hung a baseball home plate on which someone had stenciled HARRY BEDICHEK / HERE TO SERVE.

  “I’m Count Geiger,” Xavier told Bedichek. “The real one.”

  “How do I know that?” said Bedichek. “Anybody could make such a claim. Did you see all the other Count Geiger doofuses out there?”

  “Try to throw me out,” Xavier said. “You look moderately well ripped. Come on. I won’t take a swing at you.”

  “In fact, I’m a body builder. I could accidentally break your arm or something.”

  Xavier had a scoll-like document on his person. He removed it, flattened it on Bedichek’s desk, and signed it. “This is a release form. It abjures my right to file a lawsuit should your best efforts to eject me from First Stringers result in any injury to my person, up to and including loss of consciousness and death.”

  “‘Up to and including loss of consciousness and death,’ ” Bedichek read aloud. “Never seen one of these before, but I guess it’s in order.”

  “It is. Try to throw me out.”

  Bedichek sashayed around the desk and walked around behind Xavier. Although leery of some cunning subterfuge, Xavier held his ground.

  “Please don’t shoot me or club me in the head,” he said. “Your efforts to dislodge me should be confined to orthodox bodily exertions.”

  “Sure. I’m thinking, is all.” Bedichek slid his arms under Xavier’s, lifted them, and locked his hands behind Xavier’s head in a full nelson. “’S ’at okay? Can I do that?”

  “Sure,” Xavier said. “Go ahead.”

  Bedichek tried to frog-march Xavier out the door. Oofing and twisting, he pushed and pushed, but Xavier had planted his feet, and his upper
body was able to flex against, or yield to, Bedichek’s exertions without suffering a muscle pull, a ligament injury, or a cracked bone. Bedichek couldn’t budge him. “You’re a goddamned pile of granite,” Bedichek said, breathing hard. “Or your shoes are magnetized. Something.” When Bedichek let go, Xavier took his slippers off and invited Bedichek to try again. The results of this new struggle were identical to those of the first, except that now Bedichek stumbled around his desk, collapsed into his swivel chair, and looked up aggrievedly at Xavier. “You’ll leave eventually, won’t you?”

  “Of course. Who’d want to spend the night here? Now, do you believe I’m Count Geiger? The real Count Geiger?”

  “I suppose so. What’s the point?”

  “I’m urging your adoption of healthful menu changes here at First Stringers.”

  “Menu changes?”

  “Baked chicken breast, raw vegetable slices, fresh fruit juices. If you’re amenable to a full-scale grease-reduction effort, Mr. Bedichek, we’ll do just fine.”

  “A full-scale what?”

  “First Stringers’ reputation and popularity rest on a viscous foundation of grease, but Suthreners’ eating habits are in flux and health consciousness is the new watchword among the cognoscenti. Eventually, profits will rise, particularly since you won’t have much retooling to do in your kitchens.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “Another thing: It would cosmopolitanize the ambience of your dining rooms if you kept your TV sets tuned to fare other than Gilligan’s Island. Keep the set in one dining room locked on PBS, the set in another on the Nature Channel, and so on. These simple adaptations would harmonize—”