Merryll Manning Is Dead Lucky

by Johm Howard Reid

  Dune-Harrigan stood up and came towards me. The years had treated his body kindly. The rough, bald head was always ugly – now more so than ever – but there was still power in those great arms and those brawny hands.

  The professor used to wrestle – not those fake, well-rehearsed comedy turns you see on TV – but the real stuff. In a headlock, he could break your neck. He’d once picked me up like a bag of chaff, held me over his head and thrown me twenty feet. No excuse. He was just showing off.

  “And yet you come to me?” he asked.

  I didn’t understand him. “Io non comprendo.”

  “You won. I lost. I was eager to seek you out. Yet you come to me?”

  He’d walked around and was now well behind me. I had to turn my head. “I don’t like being shot at – with arrows or pens!”

  He was fumbling with the door. “What are you nattering about?”

  “Brunsdon’s bow. He wants it back.”

  Dune-Harrigan locked the door and held up the key before dropping it into his pocket. “I can’t fathom what you’re going on about,” he said. “All I know is that I’m going to thrash you. And then perhaps you will run away again – for another thirty years. Perhaps they will then give the prize to the runner-up.”

  My blood froze, but I stood my ground and faced him. Five times he’d wrestled me thirty years ago, and won every time – but he wouldn’t dare try it again? He was a bully, an egomaniac, but no fool. He was trying to scare me witless. That was his way. But I wasn’t about to let him know he was succeeding. Not a backward step! Not a single twitch of fear! Instead, I called his bluff: “Give me Brunsdown’s bow and open that door. I never want to see you again.”

  “Brunsdon, I remember vaguely. His bow? What bow?”

  I was beginning to believe him. Dune-Harrigan was so self-centered, he’d probably taken no notice of Brunsdon at all, let alone his bag of tricks.

  Thus I made the same mistake I’d made thirty years ago. I was thinking, not watching. I’d allowed my eyes to turn inward for a fatal second. He leaped forward. By the time I saw his hands coming at me, it was too late to step aside. I was jammed against his solid desk. In one rush, he wrestled me to the top of the desk and I was flailing around like an upturned beetle. My legs and arms were kicking out in all directions while he pinned me down with his hands and pressed the weight of his right arm into my throat.

  Scrabbling madly among the papers on the desk, my hand closed around a metal ruler. I slammed it against Dune-Harrigan’s head. He took no notice. His arm pressing against my throat stabbed my brain with more pain than I could bear. I was passing out. The room was spinning. My eyes refused to focus.

  Rousing myself for one last effort, I drew my hand back as far as possible and with every last ounce of my failing strength, I brought the sharp end of the ruler down against his left cheek, It actually cut across his ear, causing him to jump away in shock.

  Coughing and spluttering, I rolled off the desk and fell into its chair.

  Dune-Harrigan was shouting and screaming at the top of his lungs: “Malfatto, you have almost sliced my ear in half!” But his cursing was interrupted by an even louder and far more insistent knocking on the front door.

  Left with no choice but to answer the door, the professor was confronted by one of the university’s security guards who had heard the commotion and had actually bestirred himself to come and investigate.

  Dune-Harrigan was all pardons and excuses. “An accident,” he explained. “Demonstrating various hand-locks in Egyptian wrestling, you know. But we slipped against my desk. I’ve cut my ear and my friend’s had the wind knocked out of him.”

  The guard looked to me for confirmation, but I couldn’t speak. I tried to form words, but none came. I was gasping for air. To my dismay, I couldn’t even stand up. I waved my hand as a plea for help, but the idiotic guard, taking my wave as a friendly “hello”, turned his back on me and walked out the door.

  Quick as a tarantula, Dune-Harrigan closed the door and relocked it.

  I’d dropped the ruler – my only weapon – on the other side of the desk. My eyes sought vainly for a substitute. Nothing! Nothing at all usable except a shelf of colored glass paperweights. And now Dune-Harrigan was coming in for the kill. But surely he realized that in the event of a fresh ruckus, the guard was likely to return? No, you couldn’t trust Dune-Harrigan to think straight. That was not his way at all. He’d always act first, plan an alibi later.

  I was still coughing and shaking. And there was nothing I could use to defend myself – nothing I could throw at Dune-Harrigan except the stupid glass paperweights – and a fat lot of good they’d do. He’d merely to step aside. But far better to go down fighting than simply chuck in the towel. I seized the nearest of the paperweights, a crudely amateurish statuette of Anubis, the jackal god, gaudily painted and colored – the sort of expensive trash that tourists bring home from the souvenir shops at Cairo.

  To my surprise, even allowing for the fact that it was fashioned from glass, Anubis was surprisingly heavy.

  And to my even greater surprise, Dune-Harrigan stopped dead in his tracks, his body shaking, his eyes widening in fear.

  Now Anubis was a fearsome god in the underworld. The Ancient Egyptians shuddered at even the very mention of his name because his duty was to weigh the deceased’s heart in the balance. And if that heart didn’t tip the scales in your favor, you were doomed to spend eternity in hell.

  The Dune-Harrigan of old had not only openly pooh-poohed such superstitions, but actively trod them underfoot.

  Maybe he’d picked up a few scruples in the last thirty years? I raised my arm.

  “Fermo! Fermo! Stop, I beg you!”

  Puzzled, I examined the little garishly colored god far more closely. Then it hit me. The professor was up to one of his old tricks. No wonder he was so desperate to win that $8,000! He was smuggling genuine relics out of Egypt, disguised as trashy, modern souvenirs.

  But now he had an even better reason to get rid of me! I actually saw him kill a man once. A thief in Cairo who tried to steal what the good professor himself had already stolen.

  Maybe I could bluff my way out? I balanced the powerful little god in the palm of my hand. “Unlock the door, professor, and open it up real wide.”

  He did so.

  “Now let me tell you one little thing,” I continued, trying not only to find the right eyetie words, but even just to speak. “You and I both know you possess a whole boatload of this stuff, both legitimate and smuggled. Both stunningly on display and extremely well hidden in your house. I could have turned you in a thousand times in thirty years and earned myself some real nice, real easy cash rewards.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  I swallowed hard. The old fool wouldn’t understand, but I told him anyway. “Because I respect you.”

  To my intense surprise, a great light dawned on his ugly – and now bloody – old face. “Si, io comprendo!”

  I’d underestimated him. “A man may rat on his friends,” he proposed, “but he respects his enemies, eh?”

  “Yes.”

  He sat down heavily. “You can put that down!” he said, nodding towards Anubis. “I wasn’t going to hurt you anyway.”

  Oh, no! Not half! I pointed at my lacerated throat. My ears were thrumming and my eyes spilling so many tears that I could barely see which way the room was spinning.

  “You’re woefully out of practice, my dear enemy. You’ve forgotten absolutely everything I took such pains to teach you!” He put his fingers to his ear for a moment, and then pulled them away. His fingers were sticky with blood. “Damn! Thanks to you, I’m obliged to take a walk to First Aid.” He smiled – his teeth glittering like a serpent: “You’d better come with me. We can talk on the way. It will be safe enough. Nobody understands Italian in this place. Yes, we do have an Italian department. It boasts all of a dozen students – all twelve of them and their tutor currently confronting their utter lack of knowledge in
Little Italy, N.Y.”

  I helped him close up the museum for the day and we then made our way to First Aid. Again, he took the trouble to re-assert that he knew nothing of Brunsdon and his disappearing crossbow. This time, I believed him.

  When we finally reached First Aid, we found the nurse had received a call to the gridiron field and would be tied up for at least half an hour. We sat in her pillbox of a waiting room, jammed in with two students – a gangly youth with broken spectacles and a bleeding nose, and a young woman who kept us all alert by weeping uncontrollably.

  True to form, Dune-Harrigan paid no heed to his audience, but commenced a hearty account (in Italian) of the joys of living in Ancient Thebes.

  Even with a clear head, I would have found it a challenge to decipher five or six words out of a breathless ten, but with my brain spinning like a Ferris wheel, I just leaned against the wall and let him talk on and on, undisturbed. But suddenly he said something that bothered me. It was the simple phrase, “Of course, I haven’t been back there since.”

  Where was he talking about? Back where? He’d gone on a few sentences before I interrupted, “Where are you talking about, professor? The Valley of the Kings?”

  “Yes, yes, of course the Valley of the Kings. Where in blazes did you think?”

  “You haven’t visited the Kings,” I hazarded a guess, “for five or ten years?”

  “Yes, yes! Where do you think I’m talking about?”

  “You haven’t been to Egypt for ten years?”

  “Nearer twelve. A man doesn’t like to travel at my age, and I never did like flying. It’s bad for the health.”

  “Then where did you buy your Anubis and all your other new baubles?”

  I thought his face would explode. If it were not for our two witnesses – the weeping woman and the gangly youth – he’d surely have attacked me again.

  “There’s always been a fair-sized, international black market in Egyptian relics, eh, professor?”

  “What if there is? It’s nothing new!”

  “But now it’s far better organized,” I said. “And if you’re mug enough to buy contraband from organized crime, you’re going to pay. And continue to pay!”

  “Si, si! I promised Mr. Julio eight thousand dollars, to be exact.”

  “You’re mad! Mr. Julio is not the local Mafia boss for nothing. He’ll expect more than that. Much more!”

  “Yes, information. So I have given them information. I have told them how to enrich themselves with eighty thousand dollars.”

  “My eighty thousand?”

  He smiled.

  “The eighty thousand I intend to win on 80 Questions?”

  He was laughing now. “Si, si! That eighty thousand.”

  But I wasn’t fazed. If he intended to frighten me, he’d not succeeded. Probably lying his head off anyway. But I would have the last laugh, “And what about your eight thousand, professor? The eight thousand you owe for Anubis and his friends? How will you pay for them?”

  “Simple! I will disappear. Simply disappear!”

  7

  Having spent the weekend nursing my throat, by Monday night I could breathe and talk almost normally. I was still pretty sore, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me taking a seat with the audience at the taping of the next segment of 80 Questions. I needed to know who and what I was up against.

  Only seventeen other early arrivals were already seated. Even the set itself was deserted except for a couple of cameramen and the extra-friendly floor manager, Brian “Bingo” Frobisher, who spotted me straightaway. He didn’t just wave but stepped right across the set. “Hoped you’d be here,” he said. “You’re early!”

  “It seems that’s all to the good,” I replied, noticing how heavily his owlish face was creased with worry lines. Even in the half-lit auditorium, his skin looked hot and sweaty. “What’s up?” I asked. “Another love letter?”

  Sure enough, I guessed right! Without speaking, he handed it over: You ignored the warning. You saw the happening. This is your final warning.

  “All of you get this one?” I asked. “Same people as before?”

  “Sedge is all cracked up. He says he won’t go on. Can you talk to him?”

  I was smug. “I think I can set his mind at rest.”

  “Convince him that pen was fired at you. Not him!”

  “I don’t think it was fired at anyone. I’ve come back to the official explanation: Just some member of the audience fooling around. It has nothing to do with the love letters and their ignored the final warning scenario. In fact, I now know who’s sending these little love notes.”

  “For instance?”

  “Professor Dune-Harrigan, that’s who!”

  “But he’s out of the contest now, so why’s he still sending them?”

  “To cover his tracks. If he stopped now, we’d know for sure it was him.”

  We found Sedge in his dressing room at the end of a bleak corridor on the other side of the stage. He was not alone. Monty Fairmont, the producer, was there, already clothed in his regulation blue dustcoat. Plus his pal, Ace Jellis, the lardy-dah director. Plus the sponsor, Peter Tunning, still wearing his wrap-around celebrity, dark glasses. Plus the winsome, impeccably groomed, super-cool cutie-of-all-tasks, Spookie Williams.

  Good old Bingo Frobisher and I just managed to squeeze ourselves in. As for sitting down, that was impossible. No room in the room! It had just the one chair – occupied by Sedge – plus one battered dressing table which also served as a desk. There was also an old but bulky wardrobe, a large, full-length mirror and a rusty wash basin. That was it. No windows, no pictures, no flowers, no framed photos of smiling celebrities.

  Sedge was all dressed up in his usual bright purple suit. Fully made-up too, his skin reflecting that light olive tan considered so essential for TV. Spotlighted by the mirror, he seemed a garish oddball in our sober-suited, anemic-fleshed company.

  “Manning here feels the dart was accidentally let loose by some member of the audience fooling around. It has no connection whatever with our love letters,” Bingo announced without any preamble. “And Manning also is sure as hell that old Dune-Harrigan is the responsible party for all these said ‘love’ letters we’ve all been receiving.”

  “Manning tracked him down?” asked Sedge eagerly.

  “Sure I did! We won’t have any more trouble from him. He’d be mad to try it again.”

  “Why not?” asked Monty Fairmont in his soprano voice.

  “And why, oh why, did he do it?” Jellis echoed in his lardy-dah voice.

  “To throw a scare into you all,” I explained. “That’s Dune-Harrigan all over. He wanted to make you all so nervous, you’d lose the plot. And at the same time, it would make him feel really confident that he’d get away with any tricks he’d pull to put himself in the lead.”

  “Sounds feasible!” agreed “Bingo” Frobisher.

  But producer Fairmont was not convinced. “But Harrigan lost, man! He lost!”

  “Yes, what was his game? What was his game?” Jellis echoed, “That’s what I can’t understand.”

  “Look! I know Dune-Harrigan. I know what he’s capable of. Do you think this is my natural voice? Dune-Harrigan had his hands around my throat and was choking the life out of me!”

  “You know him?” cried Spookie Williams, losing her cool. “That’s just not possible!”

  “Sorry to spoil your research. It was thirty years ago maybe. But the old leopard hasn’t changed his spots. He’s mad. Raving mad! Sending another set of threats is just the sort of mad thing that a crazy – ”

  “I want him stopped!” Sedge exclaimed. “Stopped right now! Stopped dead!”

  “You’ve got it!” I assured him.

  “No more threats?” Sedge persisted.

  “No more threats!”

  But they didn’t believe me. All show people are deadly superstitious. But after I told them a bit more about D-H, they finally calmed down. Sedge even decided to go on with the s
how. We all filed out of his dressing-room, ostensibly so he could get himself ready – though what additional preparations were necessary, I couldn’t fathom. Spookie Williams remained behind, allegedly to calm the last of his nerves.

  8

  Monty Fairmont’s budget didn’t run to a professional warmer-up. It was Sedge himself who delighted the audience with some quick quips and randy repartee: “How many lovely ladies over thirty are here tonight? None? I didn’t think so. Aren’t we lucky, men? Any Scotsmen here tonight? I had a Scotch friend once. A beer truck ran over him. It was the first time the drinks were on him. Did you hear about the postman and his canary? He trained the canary to deliver mail to window-boxes at a Rooming House. One day, canary never came back. It teamed up with a ventriloquist and gave the postman the bird…”

  Whoever was writing Sedge’s stuff, I was amazed he hadn’t received any threatening notes. I felt like writing him one myself.

  “Let’s hear some cheers now... Come on, I know all you lovely people can cheer much better than that. Let’s really lift the roof off now… That’s the way! I knew you could all do it! Now if you keep your eyes on this TV screen just above your heads here, you’ll see all the things that our producer wants you all to do. See, he’s got it up now: CHEER. So let’s have another really big cheer… That wasn’t bad. Certainly more solid than your first effort. But I’m still sure you can all do much better than that. Try it again!... That was better. Much, much better! APPLAUSE. Let me hear some really solid clapping… That wasn’t too bad!, but you’ve got to really let yourself go. Put more heart into it! Lots more heart! Lots!”

  “Can we stand up?” some eager attendee asked.

  “Sure you can stand up.”

  “Whistle?”

  “That’s fine by me! Now last but not least: LAUGH. Let me hear some real big belly laughs. Smiling’s no good. Our lovely viewers at home can’t hear you smile.”

  Tonight’s contenders were into New Orleans (jazz), Eden (gardening), Washington (politics), Broadway (stage plays and musicals), Geneva (prominent people), Athens (Olympic sports), the Swiss Alps (mountaineering, camping). It sounded promising, but it turned out to be a really dull show. All the contestants played safe. They just sat back and patiently waited for their own turns, all keen to score high marks on their own topics. Nobody was game to potentially lose any points by butting into a different topic except for the jazz man who made one lucky strike into prominent people and thus boosted his final score to sixteen correct answers out of sixteen questions. If ever there was a weak race to the finish line, this was it!