Count Geiger's Blues

by Michael Bishop

  Published only an hour or so behind the Urbanite’s morning edition, a special edition of the paper put the skybox fuss between Finesse and Xavier into its biggest headline. (The regular edition had given special prominence to the death of Carrie-Lisbeth Wilkins at Salonika General. Its sports pages had gone to bed with the Cherokees leading 10-7, and the homeboys had eventually eked out a 12-11 win in thirteen innings.) The story—by Alex Meisel, with whom Xavier had done a telephone interview—reported Count Geiger’s charge that Finesse was the heretofore clandestine power behind Environomics Unlimited. It also noted Finesse’s irate denial.

  Although Linzy Keene and Geoffrey Satterhedge, long-term employees of the Salonika Cherokees, were ready to corroborate in court the attempted-murder charge against Finesse, the only witness to link Finesse to the crooked waste-disposal company was Wilbon T. Stickney, a jobless teamster and pokehead lying delirious in the same hospital, Salonika General, treating the victims of the recent Therac 4-J radiation accident.

  Most pundits thought it unlikely that, even if he recovered fully, Stickney could pin this rap on a man as rich and influential as F. Deane Finesse.

  *

  “You caught bullets barehanded?” said The Mick, sitting at the dining-room table with the Urbanite’s special edition. “You ‘deflected’ bullets with ‘lightninglike karate chops’? Hey, that’s totally nool, unc. Totally.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You even caught a bullet between your teeth? Wow. Have I got a stud for a guardian or what?”

  “I didn’t do that. When Finesse’s goons opened fire, I remembered this guy who’d caught a bullet in his teeth on an old TV show. That memory steeled my nerve. Mikhail, you’ve got to quit skimming and pay more attention to context.”

  “Still. Snagging bullets barehanded ain’t too shabby. You could microminiaturize yourself and haul in escaping valence electrons like a flea-sized center fielder.”

  “I am out of work. I’ll keep that in mind as a career option.”

  “An improvement on your main job nowadays, would-be murder victim. First, Bowman tries to blow you away, and then the hirelings of the cryptofascist who fired him give it a shot too. Are you unpopular, or what?”

  “Fifteen shots,” Xavier said. “I remember them all.”

  “Nool. Did you remember that Bowman’s trial—like, his big-time stand on Salonika Law—starts next week?”

  If he had ever known, Xavier had forgotten. “Finish your Wheat Crisps and get out of here. You’re late for school.”

  Around noon, Bari met Xavier at First Stringers for a low-cal lunch. They weren’t an item again, but they weren’t just business associates either. Clearly, events of recent days had rekindled Bari’s qualified regard for him, while he had never lost his romantic feelings for her.

  Xavier wore sunglasses and, over his Suit, unprepossessing street clothes—to minimize the hubbub that often erupted when he went out in public nowadays. Bari sabotaged his good intentions, however, by showing up in an outlaw outfit of her own design, sort of Azzedine Alaïa meets a sweet Saint Torque, and thus crooking the neck of every male and curious woman within a three-block radius. The miracle was that Bari managed this feat without looking either showboaty or cheap.

  Even so, Xavier was exasperated. “You might as well’ve walked in naked on a pair of Manolo Blahnik heels.”

  “Pardon me.”

  “You know what I mean.” In the Bill Moyers room, they were watching the PBS series Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, the “Sacrifice and Bliss” episode, and signing autographs for patrons with enough chutzpah to intrude as they tried to eat.

  Signing away, Xavier concluded that Bari did not know—exactly, anyway—what he meant. She understood what impact her fashions, worn by another woman, might have on others, whether friends or detractors, but the notion that anyone besides a lover might view the same dress on her as provocative reached her only as an abstraction. It wasn’t innocence, for Bari knew as much about life and the world as he did. Rather, it was a singleminded uniqueness of focus.

  Signing the backs of used envelopes or soggy napkins, Xavier at last got a feel for her self-submerging mind set. Bari worked for herself, but the products of that work belonged to those who bought and wore them. She was a creator, not a customer, even when she wore an outfit of her own design.

  “Sign it Count Geiger,” a hefty young woman with a Goldfinger’s shopping bag said. “Not Xavier Thaxton.”

  Xavier obeyed. He and Bari had met not just to eat lunch, but to pay a sympathy call on the Wilkinses in the hospital. An earlier phone talk with Dr. Avery had confirmed that the couple would see him, and Xavier had asked Bari along as moral support. What did you say to parents who had lost a child?

  Outside First Stringers, strolling toward the hospital along Dogwood Boulevard, Xavier said, “You look great, but what made you choose that particular dress?” Passersby were rubbernecking.

  “I wanted to look cheerful for the Wilkinses. Not that they’re likely to care. I just wanted to give them something upbeat—sunny. Even if they only pick up on it, you know, peripherally.”

  “Bari, they won’t be able to pick up on it at all.”

  “Why?” She was startled. “What’s wrong?”

  “Every visitor has to wear a mask and a disposable gown. Throw-away slippers. No exceptions. To maintain a germ-free environment, it’s vital.”

  “Oh.” They turned onto Lower Juniper Street, a block or two from Salonika General. Bari squeezed Xavier’s arm with the crook of her elbow. “Actually, I also wore it for you.”

  *

  Dr. Avery, looking overworked, met Xavier and Bari in the corridor outside the radiation-poisoning ward. He directed them quietly aside to an eleventh-floor waiting room no bigger than a walk-in closet. “Look, I’ve been trying to reach you for an hour. I can’t let you see the Wilkinses. They’ve taken a bad turn, both of them, simultaneously. They’re failing. Neither is fully conscious. They’re on intravenous painkiller-relaxants. You could go in to look, I guess, but why?”

  “No,” Bari said. “No, we wouldn’t do that.”

  “Bless you for coming. From Philippi, only Dr. Woolfolk has dropped in. Everyone else from Silvanus County is scared to death they’ll be zapped by gamma rays. Some hazard exists, but, properly addressed, a small one. The only regular visitor any of these people has had is Mrs. Roving from the cancer clinic. She comes daily.”

  “What about Carrie-Lisbeth?” Bari said.

  “We have her in a lead-lined casket that Dr. Lusk, the liaison from reacts, sent down from Oak Ridge. We made her going as easy as we could. Her parents want to be buried in the Full Gospel Holiness churchyard on Lickskillet Road, where Larry Glenn’s father was buried. So that’s where they want Carrie-Lisbeth buried too.”

  “When?” Xavier said.

  “Soon. I don’t expect the Wilkinses to last another twelve hours. To keep from contaminating soil and ground water, they’ll also require lead-lined caskets—larger ones. They’re expensive. Frankly, reacts is having trouble procuring them.” Dr. Avery took Bari’s hands in his. “Thank you for coming, Ms. Carlisle.” He glanced at Xavier. “And you, Mr. Thaxton. I guess the Wilkinses won’t know, but it does mean, your coming—it means to me.” And he left them.

  *

  On the elevator down, Xavier and Bari were silent. So were two other passengers, a ward nurse and a patient in pajamas, robe, and slippers. On the seventh floor, two interns came aboard talking about an obscure jazz-fusion group. (Was there any other kind?) On the third floor, Mrs. Roving, in a teal pantsuit reminiscent of her clinic uniforms, entered.

  “Mrs. Roving,” Xavier said. “How are you?”

  “I’m all right,” she said dubiously.

  “Your day off?”

  Mrs. Roving looked sidelong at Xavier and Bari. “Let’s talk in the lobby.” She, Bari, and Xavier gazed fixedly, like manikins, at the arrow ticking off floors above the elevator door.

 
“Pat Metheny,” one intern said. “Earl Klugh. Like that.”

  “Cripes,” the other said. “You call that taste?”

  60

  The Suit (Revisited)

  “Di Pasqua suspended me yesterday,” Teri-Jo said, embarrassed that someone as plain and square as she was sharing a lobby sofa with Bari, of Bari’s of Salonika, and the stalwart Count Geiger. “If my instincts aren’t betraying me, it’s a prelude to my firing. Why? For negligence in hiring a waste-disposal firm. As if anyone else here searched as long and hard, or was under as much pressure, to find one.”

  “You’re being scapegoated,” Bari said. “It’s classic.”

  “Not that I didn’t buy the Environomics Unlimited scam. I did, the way a thirsty man guzzles the first cold glass of liquid set before him.”

  “You had help finding that ‘firm,’ ” Xavier said. “The chairman of the clinic’s board of directors—it appears—played a major role in sending EU to you.”

  “Well, it sure wasn’t Di Pasqua.” Funny how quickly she had dropped the man’s title, once on his chopping block. “He was in the dark too, flailing about. When I found, or thought I’d found, EU, well, he rejoiced as I had. The notion of running a background check never crossed our minds. How could anyone make money picking up toxic wastes and used radioactives if they didn’t actually dump the stuff? Pretending to be a waste-disposal firm was like pretending to be a junk dealer. If pretending, why not pretend to be something, well, glamorous?”

  “Isn’t there money in hazardous-waste disposal?” Bari asked.

  “Only if you’ve got lots of clients and the jobs are tough. Or only if, using EU’s strategy, you hire losers, pay them a pittance, use borrowed or stolen equipment, and dump as close to your pickup point as you think you can get away with.”

  “If EU did only your radium-waste and Therac 4-J disposal,” Xavier said, “there’s no way they could have stayed in business, even if they cut corners. And if they’d done other jobs for other area hospitals or businesses, wouldn’t someone’ve come forward by now to say so? No one—no hospital, no company—has done that.”

  “Environomics Unlimited was the monicker they used to deal with the Miriam Finesse Cancer Clinic,” Mrs. Roving said. “They used other names—Eco-Specialists Incorporated, Keep It Green Waste Services, Back-to-the-Earth Disposal Industries—to carry off the wastes of commercial firms. The point was to prevent easy cross-referencing and background checks. What these ‘companies’ all had in common, though, was the lie of safe disposal and the questionable expertise of Wilbon T. Stickney. Poor fella.” She rubbed a finger along the bottom of the sofa sectional. What if Finesse had had the lobby of Salonika General bugged?

  “How do you know all that?” Xavier asked her. “Can you document it?”

  “From Wilbon T. Stickney. And, no, I can’t. He just told me. And telling me exhausted him.”

  “Then we’ll need a statement from Mr. Stickney on tape,” Xavier said, “before it’s no longer possible to get one.”

  Teri-Jo Roving explained again that Stickney was incapable of talking to them. He might improve. Or not. He had a police guard on his tenth-floor room, which she had visited before stopping off at the third floor to talk to a friend. Although, as Count Geiger, Xavier might wangle his way in, there were no guarantees, and Teri-Jo felt that, now, more visitors would reduce Stickney’s chances of recovery. She’d been able to see him because of her role with the cancer clinic—staff in the hospital proper were still unaware of her suspension—and because she claimed a prior friendship.

  “After all, he duped me twice. Politely.” Teri-Jo stood up. “I’ve got to go. My son’s been in day care all morning. I’m taking him to the zoo. That’s one benefit to come out of this fiasco—the time to be a mother.”

  “What’s his name?” Bari likewise standing.

  “Chad. Chaddie. He’s a pistol.”

  Bari said, “Take him to see Splinters and Stilts, the giraffes. He’ll love them.”

  Teri-Jo said she would and told them goodbye. In the parking lot, where no one had yet tried to commandeer her assigned spot, she leaned her forehead against the warm metal over the door of her new Honda, a gift from Fletcher, and tried to imagine herself as a full-time mother. That would be good, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it?

  *

  Bari was ready to get back to her atelier, but Xavier made her sit back down beside him on the sofa section in Salonika General’s lobby. “Stickney needs a Suit,” he said. Bari could think of no intelligent response to this. “After the onset of my Philistine Syndrome, the Suit stabilized me, Bari. Its effectiveness began to wear off before Christmas, yes, but until then it provided some welcome relief. The Suit’s failing powers were reactivated by a reexposure to radiation on the Hazelton place. I’ve been fairly healthy—a stalwart, in fact—ever since.” Xavier took Bari’s hands in his. “We’ve got to put Stickney into a Suit, a Suit like mine. So he can come out of his death spiral and testify against Finesse. If not in court, then at least on tape.”

  “There aren’t any more Suits like yours,” Bari said. “Howie told me that when the city council passed that resolution outlawing Count Geiger impersonators, there was a quick citywide crackdown on costume sellers—from legitimate operators like Oconee Theatrical Supply to kink-and-slink merchants like SatyrFernalia. And Howie’s forbidden by that statute—everyone’s forbidden by it—to make any more Count Geiger costumes, except at your request. Howie says you can’t find a Suit to rent or buy anywhere in Salonika, except at exorbitant black-market prices. He’s already refused an attractive commission to reproduce it.”

  “I’ll specifically request him to create a duplicate for me. And I’ll give it to Stickney.”

  “What makes you think Howie would oblige you?”

  “Why wouldn’t he?”

  “He doesn’t like you. He may believe—with reason—that depriving you of a change of stalwartly underwear would also deprive you of your . . . your stalwartliness.”

  “Then you could make me a spare.”

  “I could. I would. But the material’s a chemically treated metallic fabric produced in limited quantities at the Du Pont Experimental Station in Delaware. It’s expensive, and it would take at least a week to have an order approved and shipped to me. I’d need another two or three days to turn the fabric into a serviceable garment.”

  “Stickney may not last that long.”

  “Exactly. Maybe you could find a black-market costume in Satan’s Cellar. On the other hand, maybe you couldn’t.”

  Xavier had heard enough. He pulled Bari up and led her through the lobby to the elevators. They waited until they were the only two people to board an ascending car. On the ride between the first and fifth floors, Xavier stripped to his Suit. He handed his street clothes to Bari to stash in the oversized bag that she had carried with her. On the sixth floor, two people were waiting. Seeing Count Geiger, minus cowl and slippers, they nodded a bemused hello and let the doors close on them without boarding. Xavier and Bari continued their ride to the tenth floor.

  Once there, it wasn’t hard to find Stickney’s room. A cop stood at the far end of the corridor, directly under the radiation-sickness ward, guarding it. A heavy irony here was that the guard had been stationed to keep Stickney from escaping when it was more to the point to protect Stickney from the Machiavellian devices of F. Deane Finesse. But maybe this tall, baby-faced officer could do both.

  “We’d like to see Mr. Stickney,” Xavier said. “If, of course, he’s up to it.”

  “Sure.” The cop boggled mildly at the sight of Count Geiger in his stocking feet. “Just don’t expect a lot of chitchat from him.” The laxity of the officer’s vigilance was disturbing, but Bari and Xavier took advantage of it to enter the room.

  Between the raised safety rails of his bed, Stickney lay hooked to an IV drip and an oscilloscopic blood-pressure monitor. He was breathing shallowly, his complexion’s natural ruddiness thinned to the color of dilute
d milk. He looked even worse than he had in the La-Z-Boy in his foul-smelling Jarboe Lane flat.

  “Mr. Stickney,” Xavier said.

  “Will,” Bari said. “Will? Can you hear us?”

  No response. None. Xavier initiated a process quite familiar to Bari: he began to skin out of his Suit.

  “Xave, what’re you doing?”

  “Shhhh.” Over the past few months, he’d grown wondrously adept at rapid ecdysis. “You’re going to help me put this on him,” he whispered, his Suit draped over his arm like the molt of a hammered-metal iguana. “Now.”

  “But he’s hooked to all that”—Bari looked flummoxed— “stuff.”

  “Then we’ll take a lot of care.” They did. Bari removed the abbreviated hospital gown in which Stickney was dressed, while Xavier, as stark as a sinewy male in an old roadhouse film, held aside the blood-pressure-monitor line and inserted Stickney’s feet into the scaly leotard’s legs. He wriggled the garment up to Stickney’s hips with some alternating tugs, and Bari helped him get the Suit’s elastic torso on Stickney’s arms and flaccid upper body. They achieved their goal without wholly disconnecting Stickney from his lifelines or setting off a monitor alarm. He wasn’t as nattily attired—as wrinkle-free—as they would have liked, but he didn’t look too uncomfortable, either.

  “You folks all right?” It was Stickney’s police guard. He had stuck his head in the door. At the sight of Count Geiger nude—except for his socks—the cop blushed. Stepping all the way into the room, he gripped his gun butt. “What’s going on here anyway?”

  “Don’t,” Bari said. “We’re unarmed.”

  “Speak for yourself.” But Xavier snatched Stickney’s gown away from Bari and wrapped it around himself. “We’re testing an experimental medical procedure, that’s all,” he told the officer.

  “You’re not doctors.”

  “Ms. Carlisle’s expertise obviates the need for a diploma, and I hold two doctorates, one in comparative lit, one in mass media. Please evaluate the procedure on its results, not on the unorthodox credentials of its implementers.”