Pipsqueak

by Brian M. Wiprud

  “So, why not take a break from all this mayhem, Angie? Take a week or so off, visit your friends in Germany. I’d go too, but I’ve got those snakes to—”

  “Oh, no, you don’t! You don’t get rid of me that easy.”

  “Look, Angie, I don’t know what’s going to happen next. This could get uglier, and I don’t want—”

  “Well, what about what I want?” She pulled her hand from mine. “You were the one who was kidnapped! I know you’re always getting all protective of me, but I worry about you too, darn it.” She grabbed me by the lapels, her nose reddening and her eyes glistening. “So I’m here, by your side, got it? Thick and thin, okay? I’m not letting them get you.”

  I slipped my arms around her waist and smiled. “I half hoped you’d say that.”

  She smirked, sniffed, and kissed me. “You half knew I would.”

  We continued walking, arm and arm, down 19th Street, past the high school and the housing project, and turned down Tenth Avenue.

  “Besides,” Angie injected, “I couldn’t go to Germany now, anyway. I just learned something exciting from Peter.” She gave my arm an enthusiastic rub. “You know Princess Madeline?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, the celebrity benefit she’s going to? Wearing my earrings? The benefit is day after tomorrow, in the evening. Peter’s going, and he has an extra pair of thousand-dollar tickets, but he can’t find any clients that don’t already have tickets.” Angie’s pace was getting bouncy with excitement. “So: You and I are going!”

  “Great.” I might even have sounded enthusiastic. Ah, the enduring allure of royalty. And to think that if I hadn’t spit Scope all over the Salvation Army, I’d have nothing to wear.

  Chapter 25

  The next day, I dropped in on Dudley. He was tickled pink by my report on the effectiveness of the Dudco™ Card.

  “Your card—or should I say you, Dudley—really saved my keister.” I handed him the card.

  “I hate to say I told you so, Gawth, but . . .” he chortled. “Anyways, I thank you for field-testing it. You didn’t feel any electric charge yourself, am I right?”

  “Not a bit. And I’d be honored to field-test it again. If you have any others around . . . What’s that, Dudley? That purplish thing.”

  “What’s what? That?” Dudley pointed his tiny scalpel at the innards of a red-breasted nuthatch he was busy eviscerating. “That’s the ventriculus. That’s what grinds up all the seeds.”

  I craned to get a better look through his giant magnifying glass. Dudley sat almost motionless, his hands resting on a block of wood. He was in full surgical garb: mask, rubber gloves, gown, headlamp, etc. All the action was taking place in a space the size of a nickel. The bird was pinned onto a paraffin block, wings spread.

  “I thought the gizzard ground up the seeds,” I said through my mask. He made me wear one too. I didn’t rate the whole ER garb, though.

  “You don’t think zoologists really use the term gizzard, do you? Gizzards are something Granny cooks a mess of for Jethro. And here’s another gem of knowledge. This yellowish thing is the pancreas, the reddish bit is the spleen, and the green thing is the gallbladder. And did you realize that nut-hatches are the only birds that habitually climb down tree trunks headfirst? That’s how you can tell a nuthatch in the wild.” Dudley pinned back some flesh and picked up some snips, clipping off the nuthatch’s spine just below the skull. In birds this small, the skull stays inside the mount, the contents of which must be carefully tweezered away.

  “Where’d this bird come from?”

  “The grille of a Pontiac.”

  “You must have some incredible network to find these things.”

  Dudley snorted. “It’s called ‘the Web,’ ragpicker. One of these days, you’re going to be doing all your business on it.”

  “I’m holding out as long as I can.” My coral-snake hunt was going poorly, and I was afraid that the Web might prove indispensable. “Fortunately, I don’t have any competition.”

  “You still listen to the Opry on the radio? Gawth, you have many, many customers out thay’uh you’re not reaching. If you’d only let me cook you up a Web site.”

  “Would this site have self-defensive uses, like a Dudco™ Card?”

  “Perhaps.” Dudley smiled over his shoulder at me. “What would you do if you didn’t have me to look after you? Me and Angie?”

  “Don’t forget Otto.”

  “Yes, and Otto.” Dudley suddenly pulled back from his magnifying glass and frowned at a corner of the room. “I have to say, I’m greatly saddened by Vito’s demise. Very fond of him, despite how infrequent our meetings.”

  “I guess he was trying to help me, that he was a naturopath. I couldn’t be sure. For all I knew he was a retro.”

  “I should have thought of that.” Dudley wagged his head in self-reproach. “I knew he was into sonopuncture. So now the retros have what they want. They have your beloved Pipsqueak and whatever is inside him. Good riddance, I say. I guess it’s all over, then?”

  “Hmm. What does it mean if the cops are watching me? There’s been a graffitied blue van parked across the street from my apartment in an illegal spot all day without a ticket.”

  “They followed you?” Dudley said icily. “Here?”

  “Give me some credit. No, I went out the back way, climbed the wall into my neighbor Harry’s yard, and out their alley.”

  “By the smell, I’d say you’re not out of the wallow. The deputies are probably using you as bait.”

  I missed that first part, but let it slide lest I get the sardonic “ignorant Yankee” translation. “Yeah, but I’ll bet the retros know that. They’re loopy and larcenous, but they ain’t stupid. They sure fingered Angie and me at the Church of Jive, and they spotted Nicholas a mile away. Now they’ve vanished off the face of the earth since the cops found Cola Woman dead. Soda Boy. Whatever.”

  “Heard from your brother?”

  “Not a peep.” I crossed my fingers with one hand and knocked wood with the other. “So, level with me, Dudley. You don’t have to be specific or anything, but I have to know. Is any of this web the retros are spinning possible? Or are they just seriously deluded?”

  Dudley didn’t say anything for a while, though by the way he twitched his lips and angled his head, I could tell he was thinking.

  “Switch on the TV,” he finally said.

  I paused, then obeyed. It was a daytime talk show, and people were arguing.

  “Turn it on up,” Dudley barked over his shoulder.

  Doing so, I asked, “Well?”

  “Possible,” he whispered.

  “How possible?” I whispered in his ear, glancing back at a woman on TV throwing a chair at another woman.

  Dudley’s eyes pivoted away from the splayed little bird and locked onto my stare. “Possible indeed.”

  “And the color-flash conspiracy?”

  “Part of the American Gulag scheme.” His head wagged dismissively. “They’d given up on that by Sputnik. But . . .”

  “But?”

  “Well, in any case, HDTV, in my humble opinion, will decrease whatever flash effect there is now, beyond the optic nerve’s capacity to register the variety of distinct pulses of color usually associated with complex partial seizures and resultant phenomena like memory distortions and déjà vu. I mean, unless they actually show flashing lights, or do flash-frame editing. In Japan, a cartoon recently—”

  “I heard about that. Half the kids in Japan spazzed.”

  “Exaggeration. More like six hundred or so. It’s probably the complex partial seizures that the retros would be after, though. The kind of effect they would be after to control people’s perceptions and actions. So, again, in my humble opinion, the HDTV flash, while saturated, is well beyond the critical fusion frequency, and the added resolution should diminish the flicker effect, if anything. I don’t see how increased resolution could abnormally stimulate the LGN cortex.”

  “LGN?” I
had to try and keep him honest.

  “Lateral genticulate nucleus. See . . .” He held up a grayish raisin in his tweezers that was the nuthatch brain. “Bird’s got ’em too.” He dropped it into a stainless-steel bowl with other tiny bits of guts.

  “Uh-huh.” Clearly, a Popular Mad Scientist subscriber. “And is what they’re planning to do with the spheres good or bad?”

  “Shush!” A head of sweat rolled down his round face. “Probably bad.”

  I whispered even quieter. “Didn’t the NSA—”

  Dudley shot me a scornful eye.

  “I mean, didn’t they give up on that idea by the Beatles?”

  Dudley didn’t say anything. He just tilted his head in a way that I translated as a reluctant no.

  “Well, then.” My lips were practically touching his moist ear. “Shouldn’t somebody do something? They’re going to deploy this tone in a few days.”

  Dudley grinned weakly. “If they’ah not already doing something, then it’s already too late. You’d never be able to mobilize the, uh, appropriate government agency in such a short time.”

  “But—”

  “Gawth?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Not a damn ol’ thing you can do about it.”

  “But—”

  “Switch off the TV, Gawth. Get yourself a cream soda. I’ll take a Fab Form.”

  Chapter 26

  Over the next twenty-four hours, life was pretty dull by comparison. Otto and I finished cleaning up the damage to the apartment. No Nicholas. No assaults, kidnappings, or gunplay. It seemed Pipsqueak and the retros had gone off to bother someone else, and we were grateful for the distraction of the imminent Princess Madeline event where Angie’s jewelry was to be displayed.

  The gala fete: a benefit for Princess Madeline’s pet charity, the Head Trauma Foundation. Her inspiration was the death of her sister from brain injuries sustained in a car accident, a fatality that research funded by her foundation had since made preventable. She had most recently joined forces with Compton Stiles, a popular screen actor made more so by his current predicament. The handsome leading man was wheelchair-bound after a mountain bike had thrown him into a gully. Together, they blazed a crusade for the wider use of helmets. The current focus for the foundation was treating head injuries among children. Their object was to raise enough cash from a huge benefit to establish the Princess Madeline House, a rehabilitation facility for kids with damaged noggins.

  Oracles of Celebville were predicting this to be the “it” New York benefit of the season.

  Aside from the Princess and Stiles, the guest list included many stellar types, including possibly (perhaps, maybe) the last performance of the aging British group Speed Wobble. Rap stars, quarterbacks, fashion designers, news anchors, ex-Presidents, Special Musical Guests—like that. A big deal, and Angie had a right, I suppose, to be excited about a brush with so many famous people. All because her famous designer employer (infamous among his peers for being an insufferable boor) couldn’t get anyone to go with him. Unless you count the fashion model he’d hired to showcase his gewgaws. Make no mistake: Inviting Angie served his purposes. She was to be a walking billboard for his jewelry too, much of which Angie had fabricated for him based on his designs. The way Peter had it planned, she was supposed to change earrings and necklace every hour or so to help push the range of their product line. Any indignities that one might have perceived from this scheme Angie obviously deemed worth the price of admission to the mother of all elbow rubs.

  “Garth, take your tux to get Martinized. And order a limo,” Angie yelled from the depths of her closet, from whence shoes ejected like balls at a batting cage.

  “A limo?” I laughed, brushing off my tux. Sure, it was maybe a little wrinkled, but nothing a steaming in the bathroom wouldn’t fix. Besides, I have always suspected that dry cleaners do nothing more than press and fumigate (with that noxious chemical) to make you think your suit has actually been cleaned. I can’t get my brain around the idea of cleaning something without the aid of liquids, water in particular.

  “A LIMO,” boomed definitively from the shoe vault. “There’ll be cameras, photographers out front. One doesn’t pull up in a cab.”

  “Can’t one ride with Peter?” I picked at a gravy scab on the jacket cuff.

  “Not how it’s done, Garth. Order the limo, will you please?” Her voice was getting strained.

  “You think the TV cameras are going to swivel our way as we step upon the red carpet? I mean, what’ll they say? ‘And here comes Fine Jeweler Angie, artisan for Peter, with her companion Garth, World Famous Taxidermy Dealer’?”

  “Honeybun?! I’m going to eviscerate you where you stand, with wire snips, darling, if you keep shoveling this shinola!”

  I went into the bathroom, turned on the shower full-hot, hung the tux on the back of the door, and sealed the steam chamber.

  When I entered the living room, I was still more than a little dismayed by all the open space and the loss of what used to be. Particularly Fred. The realization of the loss put a lump in my throat. Otto had done an admirable job making the mess go away and was currently in the process of reglazing the front shop door with new panes. He’d already replaced the hinges, reset the door, and reconstructed the broken doorjamb. New locks and knob were still in their packaging on the bar. He was a man of some handy talents, and many annoying habits, like the inane humming of tuneless Russian folk melodies.

  Actually, we should have had the landlord do the work, but then we’d have waited a week with only cardboard between the mean streets of NYC and us. As is relatively common practice hereabouts with no-see-um landlords, you fix it yourself and deduct the cost of the materials from your rent. Still cheaper than if he had to pay someone to do it, not that our landlord acknowledges that when he sees the cost, flips out, and is desperate to get in touch to discuss the particulars. That’s a switcheroo I look forward to. A little payback for the times the boiler is on the fritz, it’s subzero February, and he’s in Montego Bay, outta touch. So there.

  I flipped through the Yellow Pages, looking for Limousine. The phone rang and I picked it up reflexively, feeling a little dread as I did so. I’d promised myself to screen all calls for a while, just to steer clear of bizarre retros, Nicholas, and the like.

  “Professor?! It’s Stuart Sharp out in New Hope. I still got that bug. You never came up to look at the bug. And the bone, don’t forget the bone.”

  “Sorry, Stuart, we’ve had a bit of trouble down here, and I couldn’t get up there.”

  “Trouble? What kind of trouble? You mean trouble trouble?”

  I sighed, not having the energy to give him the real scoop. “A break-in. Stuff was damaged, the front door broken, like that. I’m also under the gun to come up with some snakes for a museum.”

  “Wow. Price of doing business in the city, huh? Too bad. Sorry to hear it. You got insurance?”

  “Not as much as I should have. Turns out between our apartment insurance and Angie’s business policy, we can cover some of it and if nothing else get money for new furniture. Since we have a good source for free used furniture, I can use some of that money to buy new stock.”

  “Gotta get fully insured, Garth. If you had a fire, you could be ruined!”

  “It’s at the top of my to-do list, Stuart. So what about this bug?”

  “Well, now, look, here’s the thing. The reason I was calling, Carson, is that I’m going to be in your part of the woods later today on a shop run. Want I should bring the bug and bone to show you?”

  My mood brightened. I was curious enough that I knew he’d get me out to New Hope eventually, while at the same time I didn’t want to make the effort only to be disappointed. “By all means, Stuart, bring them by. I can show you what’s left of my collection.”

  “Sounds good. I got your card and address. Say five o’clock?”

  “Fine. But no later, okay? We’re going out soon after that.”

  “Sure.” He hung
up, and I dialed a limo service.

  Then another.

  Then another.

  The three I called were booked solid at this late date, except for town cars, which I knew wouldn’t suffice. I could have gone on calling and probably found one but decided to improvise. I rescued my tux from the steam bath, took the car keys, and headed out to a costume shop and a detailer.

  Chapter 27

  The Savoy Revue Theater, like the Empire State Building, is a New York City art-deco landmark. It is the very antithesis of today’s multiplex monastic cells. Savoy Revue seats almost six thousand. More stadium than movie theater, and more Carnegie Hall than stadium, the accouterments include plush red velvet seats, jazzy purple carpets, and gold-painted ceiling. You’d think that as a cinema, Savoy Revue would be echoey and remote, like watching a TV way down at the bottom of a well. Not so: The seating layout and acoustics are ingeniously designed. Angie and I once had orchestra seats to see a director’s cut of Blade Runner, and the venue for that epic pic was finally simpatico with the grandness of the art.

  Going north on the avenue, backups started forming in the left lanes where the detour signs were directing commoners. Actually, the traffic wasn’t so bad, because all the cabs and commercial drivers knew better than to use the avenue on a Savoy Revue gala night. Straight ahead, two blocks from our target, the avenue was closed to the public. We motored toward a wall of blue police sawhorses and were eyed suspiciously by a phalanx of waiting cops, their arms folded. On the nearby sidewalk, a knot of dime-store paparazzi strained to see if we were someone recognizable. I think they were particularly excited by the lack of any barrier to their prying lenses. It had been a balmy fall day, so we decided to arrive in the Lincoln top down. Nobody popped a bulb at us.

  A cop approached the driver’s door, and Otto produced our ticket and proof of passage from under his chauffeur’s cap. Our Russki was looking spiffy in the chauffeur’s uniform I’d rented, even if it was a tad on the large side. Rubbing his mustache, the patrolman eyed the ticket, then Angie and me in the backseat. Not being recognizable celebs, the officer kindly asked to see identification. We complied, he checked our invite with the lists, and he acknowledged our passing grade with a shrug and a numbered ticket tucked under the wiper. Otto was instructed to drive into line behind the limos backed up all the way across the nearest cross street. Once he dropped us off, he’d hang a right onto a street closed for the occasion. That’s where he’d wait for the end of the event, after which all the drivers would come around the block to pick up their charges in the order they had dropped them off.