Count Geiger's Blues

by Michael Bishop

  Finesse, in starched seersucker and suspenders with brocaded roses on the elastic webbing, played Magnanimous Host. He spoke charmingly to Bari, confidentially man-to-man to Xavier, making pronouncements like “It’s no good winning if a loss would’ve up-spirited everybody more” and “A stitch in nine’s better than a hitch in the trenches.” He repeatedly sent his black waiter, Linzy, back to his darker barman, Geoff, for fresh cocktails, napkins, and servings of finger food, from tissue-thin cold cuts and cheeses to spicy-hot toothpick sausages. The atmosphere was one of casual formality. Casual in that Finesse was relaxed and jovial. Formal in that the other men, not only Linzy and Geoff but also a pair of prissily dressed young white guys, to whom Finesse did not bother to introduce Xavier and Bari, were so obviously at his disposal. The white guys, across from each other near the back, eyed the crowd for likely menaces: bodyguards, of course, even if they looked like uptight CPAs.

  “Glory!” Finesse yelled. “Another leg hit for Newton!”

  At just the third inning, the score was already 4-1, Cherokees. Vilified for years in the Urbanite as the architect of his team’s unending ineptitude, Finesse now hugely enjoyed its possession of first place in its division. That an ex-newspaperman, Xavier Thaxton, alias Count Geiger, was on hand to witness the latest chapter in the ongoing miracle only heightened his pleasure. The Cherokees were winning consistently. That proved that all those nitpicky sportswriters were ignorant shits. It had taken a decade, but at long last the verdict was in. Xavier was happy for the team’s fans, but utterly indifferent to Finesse’s stumblebum bliss. Bari, no baseball fan, was equally unmoved by the upturn in the team’s fortunes.

  “The pennant clincher,” Finesse said. “When do you all think it’ll be? Care to lay odds on the day, Count?” From the start, Finesse had insisted on calling Xavier Count, perhaps because the title elevated Xavier to the lordly peerage but also subtly reminded him of his debt to Uncommon Comics. “Come on, you all, lay me a wager.”

  “I have no idea,” Xavier said. “You wouldn’t make me bet an uneducated guess, would you?”

  “Sportswriters do. All the time. All the time.” He appealed to Bari. “Come on then. Pick a day, Bari honey.”

  “I hate baseball,” Bari said. “Even when it’s exciting, it’s boring. That isn’t nonsense, it’s true. The only reason I’m here, sir, is so that you and Xavier—”

  “The Count,” Finesse corrected her.

  “—you and the Count”—a half-apologetic smile for Xavier—“could meet.”

  “And we have,” Finesse said. “A historical run-in. If you’re bored, Bari child, you may leave with no fear of bruising my feelings.”

  “Oh no,” Bari said. “I’ll stay. What happens between you fellas could make up for all the crotch-tugging and tobacco-spitting down there.” She crossed her miniskirted legs, sipped at the murky amber orangeness of her Manhattan. She could go, but her departure would violate a crucial tenet of her Suthren sense of decorum (in a way that devouring Xavier erotically on the back seat of a taxicab, once upon time, had not). So she stayed, frowning on the between-innings antics of the team mascot, a costume-party Cherokee who led cheers from atop the dugout and made ritualistic fun of the umpires. Glancing sidelong across Finesse’s chair, Xavier saw that she was having a hard time maintaining her charade of aloof interest in the game. The tension of their reunion, he felt, also played a role in her distraction.

  The Dodgers were at bat. Their first two hitters had grounded out. Now the third batter was up, his count stalled at 3-2 after a tedious run of foul tips. Bari, Xavier saw, had set her drink on the floor. Now she was hugging herself in the vast wingback, her knees drawn up and her head lolling against its cushion, like a sleepy waif at an overlong adult party. Seeing Bari that way, Finesse cupped her knee with one hand and winked at Xavier. Xavier tried to remp him. Was there lust in his apparently avuncular, but oddly ambiguous, behavior toward Bari? Or malice toward Xavier? Xavier got nothing back from him but waves of goodwill, as if his enjoyment of the game had drowned his deeper feelings in combers of psychic energy and a deafening tidal white noise.

  Every inning, the Cherokees’ lead grew by a run or two. Soon, Finesse was talking earnestly to Xavier, leaning over to share dull confidences, humidifying Xavier’s space with a mist of exhaled scotch and the medicinal reek of throat lozenges. He congratulated Xavier for his recent heroics, including the sting in the Hemisphere (“Another gut-check win”), and he noted that on its evening news WSSX had attributed the arrest of the Environomics Unlimited con artist ultimately responsible for the disaster in Philippi to Xavier’s clever detective work.

  “Plus you made a brave call from Stickney’s hell-hole apartment, the paper said.”

  “Nothing brave about it, sir. The men in the front office posed about as much danger as a coven of piano teachers.”

  “But you and yore little brother—uh, nephew—whatever he is—you fellas went into the Cellar. Right?”

  “Yessir, but—”

  “Yessirbutt, yessirbutt, yessirbutt.” Finesse’s singsong implied friendly mockery. “You did it. Went in there after dark. So yessirbutt what? Come on. Don’t false-modesty me, Count. You caught the guy who caused that radiation accident, right?”

  It surprised Xavier how angry this badgering, disguised as admiring solicitude, made him. “Actually, the guy ‘ultimately responsible’ for the screw-up in Philippi may have been you, Mr. Finesse.”

  Finesse’s lower jaw dropped like the hinge on a hot-dog bun.

  “Mr. Stickney told me you were his boss,” Xavier went on. “He said you once personally handed him his pay.”

  “That bastid,” Finesse said. “That two-bit stoolie bastid. A dadblamed liar. A dope fiend. A pokehead.” With each epithet, he flicked Xavier’s chin. “A blame-shifting crook. B’lieve a thing he says ’n’ you’re as sick as he is, Count.”

  “He’s your dupe, sir, your designated fall guy.”

  So big grew Finesse’s eyes that their green irises seemed primed to drop into the bags dissolutely pouching them. He looked over at Bari, still asleep. He noted the places of his bodyguards. Side by side at the leather wet bar, Linzy and Geoff were watching the game on television. In fact, Finesse was making a rapid 360-degree assessment of the situation. Xavier shifted into remp mode again and reflexively lifted his arm to ward off Finesse’s surging anger. Finesse seized Xavier’s forearm, levered him out of his chair, and shoved him into the skybox’s long tinted window. Xavier struck the shatter-resistant polymer and rebounded from it so that he faced not only Finesse but also the bodyguards and barmen. Geoff and Linzy tried to ignore what was going on, but the bodyguards drew down on Xavier with guns from under their coats—two CPAs with lethal Desert Eagle automatic .357 Magnums equipped with baffled suppressors.

  “Hold it, Mark. Hold it, Bud.”

  Retreating from his near-ballistic rage, Finesse put a finger to his lips and nodded at Bari, as if killing Xavier were forbidden because the noise would wake her. He wasn’t afraid of Xavier, the so-called living stalwart. And Bari . . . Bari was an overworked couturière in need of her “inspiration rest.”

  “You had Stickney misdirect at least two radwaste shipments,” Xavier said, feeling a sweat curl slither down his spine inside the near skintight lamination of his Suit. “The Therac 4-J ended up in Silvanus County where—”

  “Shhhhhh,” Finesse hissed, waving a hand and looking down at the playing field. “Damn you, son, shhhhh!”

  “—twenty unsuspecting people where contaminated. Several years ago, you had Stickney and some other fool dump radium-implant charges on Deke Hazelton’s property, not far from the reactors at Plant VanMeter.”

  “Sweet Jesus!” Finesse blurted.

  A Dodger homer had triggered this outburst, not Xavier’s synopsis of Finesse’s alleged criminal activities. Two antlike figures in blue jogged from base to base ahead of the home-run hitter. On the Scoreboard in center, an animated caricature of the Cherok
ee pitcher shed sweat and tears. Finesse muttered obscenities.

  “You’re ranking member on the cancer clinic’s board of directors,” Xavier said. “When you finally learned from Dr. Di Pasqua about Mrs. Roving’s trouble getting rid of Dr. Huguley’s old radwaste, you had someone telephone her posing as an officer in Environomics Unlimited. Arrangements were made, and Stickney dumped the stuff in Placer County, as near to Plant VanMeter as he could get without giving himself away to Con-Tri’s security force. The point of your—”

  “Dog it! Can you b’lieve sech self-destruction? Morrison’s th’owing the bastids rabbit balls. Damn!” Beside Xavier at the window, he gazed down on the second Dodger in a row to park a slow change-up and to circle the bases. Despite these back-to-back homers in the top of the eighth, the Cherokees continued to lead, 10-5. Maddeningly, Finesse found the prospect of a Dodger comeback a bigger personal affront than he did Xavier’s reconstruction of his role in illegal waste dumping.

  “Look,” Xavier said. “At the expense of a cancer clinic named for your mother, you made a small, almost meaningless profit. You put the general public in jeopardy—the Hazeltons and their neighbors, a drudge named Wilbon T. Stickney. In that first case, you must have wanted to make Plant VanMeter look like the guilty party if anyone ever found high levels of radiation in the area. Stickney’s effort was scientifically sloppy, but you wanted to get back at Con-Tri, not only for rebuffing Finesse Chemical’s takeover bid, but for unseating you from their board of directors.”

  Finesse said, “Gratefully shut yo’ mouth.” (Gratefully?) “Garavaglia’s leaving Morrison in! Where do I get these eptless lineup shufflers anyway?”

  Xavier remped the skybox. The two bodyguards—Mark and Bud—tensed, their baffled weapons trained on him. One man radiated a vague discontent with the other’s opinion of him; the second wanted to exult in the violent feedback of Xavier’s exploding skull. Jesus. As for Linzy and Geoff, they emitted only mild alarm. To see Xavier blown away would have horrified them, briefly, but the prospect of his murder wasn’t enough to make them cry “Stop!” or run for help.

  And Bari? Xavier remped her too. Her dreams rippled past in vivid swatches, which wouldn’t piece together. She was recharging her psychic batteries, heedless of any danger. Xavier tugged Finesse’s sleeve. “Sir, forget the game. People from Silvanus County are dying from radiation poisoning. You triggered the chain of miscalculations that made them sick—you, nobody else, no matter how far away from the disposal process or its results you try to place yourself.”

  “Damn you!” Finesse appealed to his bodyguards: “Stifle this fool.”

  Bari stirred. The flickering of her eyelids was one interesting event in a swirl of developments. One bodyguard took a shooter’s stance. Across from him at the rear of the skybox, his counterpart hurried to offer cover, positioning himself to shoot at Xavier, who stood between the wingbacks. Finesse’s lips framed a jutting sneer. Xavier realized that some stalwartly aspect of himself was slowing time, as if he had given everyone a drug inducing a grand lethargy, every person in the skybox an ice statue thawing toward life. Xavier could have walked among them the way a curator strolls from statue to statue in a closed museum. A slug from a bodyguard’s pistol inched toward him, haloed by a red flash and a nimbus of almost motionless muzzle smoke: beautiful, scary.

  Once, years ago, Xavier had seen a daredevil on a TV program called “Can You Believe It?” catch a slug in his teeth. The bullet had been fired from a stationary handgun about forty or fifty feet away, across a studio soundstage. The daredevil had stationed himself in front of the handgun, a plastic appliance in his mouth to absorb the bullet’s impact, and it hurtled between his lips to lodge in the unlikely vise of his teeth. This stunt had amazed Xavier. If it was real, there was no margin for error. If it was an elaborate put-on, to boost ratings, it betrayed its audience. Another problem was that the audience’s fascination—hell, even his own—had struck him as tawdry and voyeuresque, its credibility as entertainment tainted by the promise of the daredevil’s death. If the slug shattered the appliance in his mouth, it would either burst out the rear of his skull or rattle around in his cranium like a pea in a gourd.

  Anyway, a drum roll had sounded. The gun fired. The daredevil’s braced head snapped back as if someone had slugged him. The camera zoomed in. There, between his teeth, more like a bitten-off pencil eraser than a deadly piece of ordnance, was the bullet whose flight he’d halted. The daredevil had braved death, defying the humdrum, the quotidian, the stodgy, and Xavier, although skeptical of what he had just seen, could not help admiring the man. . . .

  The bullet coming toward Xavier looked like an underpowered fly, bumbling forward on a low rising curve. A second bullet emerged from the .357’s muzzle, the third right behind it, so that the other bodyguard, driven to it by his partner’s action, squeezed off two slow-motion shots of his own. Xavier sidestepped the first slug, which hit the bullet-proof window and ricocheted across the bunker to dimple Warwoman’s arm (on a poster), as the barmen dove like dreamily delayed albatrosses behind the bar. The second slug, which seemed to pick up speed as it flew, Xavier grabbed out of the air and hurled into the carpet. The other slugs, each buzzing faster than the one before, Xavier dodged or slapped aside.

  “Noooooo!” Bari cried. The sound of this cry restored the natural flow of time. Bari was on her feet. “Stop! Stop!”

  Having hoped to see Xavier dead, the bodyguards stopped firing, then began shooting at him again. Although unable to track the unfolding parabolas of these shots, Xavier dodged or parried them with an ease that made him realize how quickly he could get used to this. Who wouldn’t enjoy the total invulnerability imparted by stalwartliness? Who wouldn’t be corrupted? The bodyguard Bud had fired all nine rounds in his .357’s magazine, bodyguard Mark a total of six, and Xavier still stood. He warned Bud not to reload. He warned Mark that if he fired again, he would seize his weapon and break his trigger finger. “If for nothing else,” he told Finesse, “you’re under arrest for attempted murder, sir.”

  “Attempted murder? I didn’t lay a hand on you. You threatened me. My fellas here were just doing their—”

  “What rot.” Bari walked into Xavier’s arms. “These men”—nodding at Bud and Mark—“could’ve taken out a whole platoon, firing like that. At your cruel bidding.”

  “Hey there,” Finesse said. “You were asleep until the shooting started.” He turned to his bodyguards again: “That man” —thrusting a finger at Xavier— “moved on me in a very unfriendly, a pugilistic fashion. Am I telling it straight, fellas?”

  “Yessir,” the bodyguards said together.

  “That ain’t how it happened.” Linzy, from the rear of the skybox. “You said ‘Stifle the fool,’ and them ’ere goons gave it a try. Missed, though, Gawd knows how.”

  “Nigger, you’re dead,” Finesse told Linzy.

  “Mebbe. But you’re dead too. I’ll tell what I has to say to anybody. Say it in court, even. Geoff will too, won’t you you, Geoff?”

  “I guess so,” Geoff said. “Probably.”

  Finesse’s goons put up their guns and fled by opposite doors. “Lemme call down to security,” Linzy said. “They’ll get ’em.” Finesse paid no heed. The Dodgers had scored two more runs. Garavaglia, his manager, had yanked Morrison. The score was 10-7, with two outs, a runner on, and a new pitcher warming up. The scoreboard animated a Cherokee pitcher soaking in the showers.

  “Talent but no artistry,” Finesse mumbled. “My boys are ’ bout as reliable as” —waving disappointedly— “paid hep.”

  “To the central stationhouse,” Xavier said.

  “Count, I stay to the end. A good owner does that.”

  “Mr. Finesse, forgive me, but right now I’d sooner sit down with an L. Ron Hubbard novel.” Xavier dragged Finesse from the skybox. Bari followed gratefully. In the perimeter concourse, Xavier glanced back at her with a twinge of self-questioning dread. “Was that all right?”

 
Bari hurried to catch up. “Was what all right?”

  “The way I . . . no, the way the Count handled that.”

  Bari hooked her arm through his. That was her answer.

  In the stands, the fans vented a mighty groan that rolled through the concourse like the lowing of slaughter-bound cattle. “They’ve blown it,” Finesse said. “That’s it for Garavaglia. The eptless bastid’s history. . . .”

  59

  A Singleminded Uniqueness of Focus

  The stadium’s security police caught Finesse’s bodyguards in a locker-room tunnel one floor below entrance level. A shootout, deafening there, had left Bud winged in the arm and a security cop scalded along the jaw by a ricochet. No one else was hurt, and the shootout had concluded in minutes.

  As Xavier learned from the next day’s Urbanite, Finesse did not spend the night in jail. He used his one telephone call to reach his attorneys, and his presence in the stationhouse provoked a lionizing stir, for he outspokenly supported law-enforcement agencies and gave generously to police causes. He had disagreed publicly with Chief Millard Rapp’s demand for stricter local gun controls, casting himself as both a skeet shooter and a hunter, but his stance on this issue had never tarnished his image with the cops in the street. So after his attorneys made his $100,000 bail less than ten minutes after his indictment, Finesse left the station like a medieval crusader spurring off to war to the cheers of his castle’s householders.