Pipsqueak

by Brian M. Wiprud

  Naturally, I didn’t go out that evening with any change, but I punched my calling-card numbers, spoke to the operator, got the precinct number, and dialed again. I got through and asked for Detective Tsilzer. On hold, I sat down and waited, tapping a foot and hearing the orchestra start to play, probably an overture to get the audience seated. Biting a nail, I caught sight of a familiar figure trotting up the stairs in a tuxedo. I stood up suddenly, and he turned my way.

  “What are you doing here?!” he demanded.

  “What am I— What are you doing here? Do you know what’s going on?”

  “Shhh!” Nicholas strode over, a quieting hand in the air. He had a tag on one lapel that said CATERER and on the other a stick-on name tag that said RAOUL. “Yeah, they’re going to pull something off tonight. Bookerman is here.”

  “That’s not—”

  “Sir?” A voice in my ear interrupted.

  “Yes?” I said.

  “Detective Tsilzer is in the field. Can I take a message?”

  “Yes. Tell him Garth called, from Savoy Revue, and that he better get here quick. Emergency.” I hung up. That was next to useless.

  “Who was that?” Nicholas prodded.

  “The cops. Tsilzer. I called the detectives.”

  Nicholas threw up his hands. “A stroke of genius, Garth. You left a message? He’ll probably get it tomorrow.” Nicholas put both palms gently on my chest and showed me a Svengali eye. “Garth, no more fun and games. Fourth quarter, third and long, two-minute warning. Tell me, quickly, what you know.”

  Urgency had quashed any remaining qualms. “First off, the police say Bookerman is dead. So this impostor is working with Roger Elk to exploit some Russian tone spheres. They claim they can control minds with it. A lot of minds. Like, if they broadcast it tonight, they’ll—”

  Nicholas’s eyes lit up. “Of course. What’s with the squirrel?”

  “The final sphere, the one to complete the tone with the two others from Howlie and Possum, was in Pipsqueak’s head.”

  “Ah! How . . . never mind, later.” He patted my chest.

  “How’d you get in here, anyway?” I asked.

  “With the caterers. And you?”

  “With Angie and her famous designer boss.”

  “No time for these details.” His eyes pinched shut with concentration. Nicholas’s head was back to normal size now, and close up I could see where he’d put makeup over the scratches. His eyes popped open. “What else?”

  “Bookerman—or whoever he is—is the manufacturer of Fab Form, that awful health drink everybody loves. Made by Aurora Corporation, of Chicago. Roger Elk is Aurora’s attorney.” I snapped my fingers. “Hey. You know how that drink has become so popular in a short period of time? Popular starting from when Pipsqueak was stolen? They may have used the spheres to push their product. As a test. How else could something so vile—”

  “Enough. They’re going to use the tone during the band’s number, right?”

  “I dunno. Maybe. They might play it as part of a Fab Form ad.”

  “Got a photo ID?”

  “Like . . . what? A driver’s license?”

  “No, no. Get your wallet.”

  “What the—”

  “Just give me your wallet.”

  Amazingly, I did, and he quickly latched on to my video-rental card. “Perfect.” Nicholas rolled his own peel-and-stick name tag, stuck it on the back, and pressed the ID to my lapel. “That’s your stage pass.”

  “Say what?”

  “Everywhere we go, everywhere there’s somebody checking ID, gesture toward it and nod.”

  “You’re nuts. Nobody will—”

  “Just smile, nod, and wave two fingers at the ID. It’ll work, believe me. C’mon.”

  “I’ve got to get back—”

  “Back? What, are you kidding? We’ve got to get to Bookerman.”

  “He’s not Bookerman.”

  “Maybe yes, maybe no. But we’ve got to grab those spheres. Or at least one of them. And that means we have to get backstage, or to the control booth. Let’s go.”

  I stepped out of the phone cubby and headed for the stairs. “Sorry, Nicholas, but I’m not convinced these retros—or the naturopaths—aren’t just conspiracy cultists playing games.”

  My burning determination to get downstairs, grab Angie, and hightail it out of the Savoy was suddenly doused. Nicholas and I stared down. At the bottom of the stairs was Roger’s thug Mortimer, who was staring back up at us, his crew cut bristling like the mane on a junkyard dog. The puppy looked ready for business, not games.

  “Hold it right there, Carson.” He jabbed a log that was his finger at me, lumbering up the stairs.

  I backpedaled to Nicholas, pointing. “Yow!” I didn’t have to elaborate.

  Nicholas grabbed me by the lapel, jogging me down a corridor to a door marked STAIRWELL.

  “Carson!” boomed from somewhere behind us.

  We took three steps at a stride up to the top landing and heard a door below fly open. Darting through the door at the next floor, we were just in time to catch the Uptown Belles in leggy, spangled regalia, filing from their rehearsal space around the corner, away from us.

  “They’re headed for the stage. Let’s follow.” Nicholas grabbed a wood doorstop idle on the floor and kicked it under the stairwell door. He tilted a nearby chair under the doorknob for good measure.

  Size-fifteen shoes tromped up the stairs.

  “How’ll we get backstage? Who are we, what will we say?” I whispered.

  Even before I finished talking, and even before the door next to us strained from the weight of Mortimer’s bulk, Nicholas’s eye was caught by a glass case on the wall. He pulled a gun.

  Not a firearm-type gun but, as I quickly observed, a lock-pick pistol, which looks like a miniature, truncated caulking gun but tipped with a pair of metal prongs. “A little tool of the trade,” Nicholas said with a wink.

  As Mortimer’s footsteps boomed back downstairs, Nicholas made quick work of the lock and swung open the case.

  “That’s . . . that’s Meat Loaf’s!” I gawked.

  “Whatever.” Nicholas lifted out the black and red electric guitar, emblazoned with the Bat Out of Hell album cover and Meat Loaf’s signature. “The band forgot their guitar player. Skippy needs his guitar man. You.” Nicholas thrust the guitar into my hands and prodded me onward.

  “Scuppy, Scuppy Milner,” I corrected.

  We caught up with the rear of the Uptown Belle train leaving the rehearsal space. Toting ostrich-feather fans, collectively they resembled a giant pink caterpillar trotting down the hall. The prop master was at the end of the caterpillar. He heard our approach and turned to look. This cardiganed man with orange hair, bifocals, and ashen, wrinkled face saw that we weren’t one of the statuesque pinup gals and gave us a hound-dog stare.

  Guitar held high, we smiled, doing our best to keep pace with the long, curvaceous legs ahead.

  Mr. Prop, unfazed by us, turned his sad eyes back on the girls, uttering a mordant, unprovoked epithet: “Musicians!”

  “Mortimer will sound the alarm! They’ll be looking for us when we get down there,” I rasped over my shoulder at Nicholas. I noticed that he managed to keep me ahead of him. To use me as a shield?

  In a stairwell going down, the taps on the girls’ shoes clacked on the concrete steps like so many billiard balls, so we couldn’t hear if any footsteps were coming down behind us. But we made it down to the stage level, following the girls like part of their entourage.

  For all the refinements elsewhere in Savoy Revue, backstage looked like any other backstage, except vast. That is to say, something like a well-frequented basement or garage, masonry walls hung with electrical boxes, ropes, winches, cables, and pipes. It was dark and crowded with performers and techies preparing for curtain. So many people were whispering in the gloom that the collective hiss was like a cobra convention. A stage coordinator eyed us over her clipboard, but before she got the c
hance to question us, Nicholas pulled me around a corner into a narrow side hall lined with cubicles and doors. Halfway down we saw the Cummerbund Squad chatting calmly in a pool of light outside a door with a star on it. They were in matching plaid tuxes and didn’t seem on the alert.

  “Keep moving, Garth!” Nicholas growled.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I dunno, but if you stop, they’ll notice. It’ll look suspicious. Put these on.” A pair of spectacles was shoved in my free hand. Nicholas’s faux ones without the glass. I slipped them on and hoped that my epoxy-strength hair gel would complete the disguise. Last time I saw the Cummerbunds, I was in retro garb with well-frazzled hair.

  As we drew near, Nicholas whispered something inaudible, and there was no time to get a clear translation. So as we approached the Cummerbunds, they drew apart to let us pass. I felt Nicholas’s hand on my elbow, and he yanked me to a stop in front of one of the Plaid Four.

  Nicholas wheeled around. “Excushe me, but thish idiot from the orchestra needsh a guitar string.” Nicholas had shoved Kleenex inside his upper lip and cheeks, and his eyes were wide as pie pans. “Musicians! Now he wantsh to see whether one of yoush Swingers gots one he cansh borrow? Hmm?”

  They looked at Nicholas like a gang of country-club golf pros encountering the groundskeeper’s assistant. My face went prickly. Nicholas’s aping was way over the top, I thought, and surely we were dead meat.

  Cummerbund #1 snorted at Nicholas, eyed my guitar, and gave me the once-over. I gulped.

  “Nice guitar. I don’t see any broken strings.”

  “Almost broken,” I blurted. “Up here. You can’t see. It’s, uh, wound around the peg. It’ll break soon as I start to strum.” I was nodding furiously.

  “Musiciansh!” Nicholas threw up his hands, nodding at the other Cummerbunds in nonexistent commiseration.

  Cummerbund #1 rolled his eyes, letting them come to rest on Nicholas. He leaned on the door and turned the knob. “This guy needs a guitar string. Got any?”

  The Swell Swingers were decked out in baggy blue sharkskin suits, black shirts, and purple ties. Some sat at lighted mirrors, primping. Others sat backward on folding chairs in the middle of the room, smoking and chatting. The walls were yellow, the furnishings Spartan and strewn with instrument cases. Scuppy was not there.

  A Swinger with a small beard, flat-crowned fedora (brim up), and sharp blue eyes stood up from the center of the room. He started backing toward an open guitar case. “Which string?”

  “Oh. Well, it’s the, uh . . . G-string, of course.”

  A locker-room laugh bounced around the Swingers, and a rivulet of sweat slalomed down my back. Comments like “Sure,” “I like that string,” and “Hubba-hubba” erupted from the other musicians.

  “One G-string coming up.” Sharp Eyes approached me with a smile and a coil of wire that was the string. “Whoa, wouldja look at this guitar!”

  “What guitar?” The bandleader, Rob Getty, came in the room smelling faintly of booze. “What’s going on? We’ve got a gig in thirty minutes, fellas. Look sharp.”

  “Who’s the squares?” Scuppy strolled in and stood next to me, holding a small suitcase and a music stand. I noted that the stand was fitted with three hemispherical cups of different sizes.

  “Broken string. Just came in for a G-string . . .” I muttered, and turned to go.

  “Wait, wait, wait.” Scuppy pulled me back by my biceps. “You don’t get away that easy. Let’s see that banjo. Baby! Signed by Meat?”

  “Musiciansh!” Nicholas blurted, and got a withering round of furrowed brows from the gang.

  “You know Meat?” Getty pointed.

  “Wait, I know this guy,” Sharp Eyes said. “You’re . . . whatsisname . . . that guy. You know, he played with Meat. He had that crazy mustache or something.”

  “Right,” Getty snapped his fingers, turning to me for an answer.

  Perspiration cascaded down my shoulder blades as I once again considered my wasted youth. Beetles, not Beatles. I had no idea how to answer.

  “That’s right,” I said, nodding, smiling as best I could, backing to the door. “Gotta go. Thanks for the string. Catch you after the show, okay?”

  I got to the door and saw that Nicholas and the Cummerbunds had abandoned me. Traffic was heavy in the narrow hall, opposing streams of talent and crew headed for their battle stations, and my retreat was blocked by another band moving toward the stage. Their wardrobe was variously of leather, T-shirts, headbands, hairy chests, buckskins, granny shades, and long, teased hair.

  “Comin’ through,” one of them groaned.

  “What’s this!” one leather-faced, toad-mouthed British rocker exclaimed, hand extended at my guitar. “Derrick, ’ave a look!”

  “’Scuse us,” I heard Rob Getty announce, closing the dressing-room door.

  “My, my, my!” Derrick backtracked, looked at the guitar, then at me over his granny glasses. “Meat give you that, did he? You should keep that in a glass case.”

  I was confronted, of course, with Bart Derrick and Liam Madden, lead singer and drummer respectively of Speed Wobble. Via the miracle of hi-fi, they played my first slow dance in the junior-high gym, as well as my first run at the bases, a hot box where—as I wistfully recall—I was tagged out rounding second.

  “Derrick, m’boy, you know who this is? It’s that fella. You know the one. He played with Meat.”

  “Aw, yeah, right you are.” They nodded at me, waiting for my response. “He ’ad that mustache thingy—”

  “That’s me,” I chirped.

  “Di’n’t you used to play wid Stevie Winwood?” Bart stroked his chin.

  “Don’t be silly,” Liam scoffed. “That was Pat Thrall.”

  “No, it was Kasim that played wid Winwood,” Bart countered. “But you are right, this ’ere’s the other bloke.”

  Liam gave Bart a derisive shove. “Kasim played bass for Cheap Trick, y’fool.”

  “Gotta go, boys.” I started to drift down the hall. “We’ll, you know, rap after the show.” As I approached escape velocity, I ran smack into Roger Elk.

  The sweat on my back breached the belt line.

  Roger Elk looked me square in the face, turned, and continued on his way to the dressing room, into which he vanished.

  I couldn’t believe it: He didn’t recognize me. I was beginning to feel somewhat Teflon holding Meat’s guitar, and I made for the stage area. As I approached, the stage coordinator leapt up from her stool, waving her clipboard at me. I hesitated.

  “C’mon, this way! Take your place. Let’s go!” She held back a black curtain in the rear stage wall, and as I drew near I saw a door there.

  “Right in there. Curtain in sixty seconds! Let’s go!”

  Without any other direction, I did as I was told, and when the door closed behind me, I heard the bolt flip. Pausing, I tried the knob. Locked.

  Before me was a steel spiral staircase down a brick shaft to a landing and catwalk that went right. The only available light was coming from below. Clutching Meat’s guitar, I slowly descended until I could peak into the lighted room.

  Imagine the propeller room in a battleship. Or a mite’s-eye view inside a pocket watch. The room was a three-story brick vault, shiny steel shafts extending the width and height of the room, the ends fixed with giant pistons, pinions, gears, and chains.

  “Come on down, Junior, an’ join the campfire,” Bing’s voice called up to me. I couldn’t see him at first, but he and Bowler stepped out from under the catwalk, lazy pistols in their hands. Nicholas was with them, wrists shackled by cuffs in front of him.

  “The Four Lads only look dumb,” Nicholas called out. “They ID’d us. Might as well come down, Garth.”

  Chapter 29

  Bing held a pistol to Nicholas’s head. Bowler, still in that same Lucky’s Speed Shop shirt with the two red dice, twirled a set of handcuffs. “You two pixies have been a genuine nuisance,” he sneered. “For the last time.”
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  I started down the gantry, then down the metal steps to the machine-room floor. Overhead, I heard what sounded like goose-stepping Nazis. I looked up at the wooden, joisted ceiling and saw that the verticals of the steel shafts ran up to platforms connected to the ceiling. The stage was overhead, and the shafts, cables, pulleys, and chains operated a complicated system of stage elevators. Gantry catwalks overhead served as access for the troupe to various elevators. The Nazis, I assumed, were the Uptown Belles opening the show with their high-kick signature fan dance. From below stage, Lord of the Dance would sound like a die-stamp factory.

  The subbasement level where we stood was strictly for the mechanics and maintenance people. Hither and yon were yellow signs warning of imminent mechanical peril.

  “Now what?” Nicholas shrugged at our captors.

  They didn’t have to answer. A latch clicked, and down the spiral staircase behind me came Roger Elk and Scuppy, the former in a tight little tuxedo, the other in a cream dinner jacket with shoulder pads built like Jane Russell. Sporting smug grins, they rested their forearms on the railing and admired their captives. I stopped at the top of the short stairs separating me from the clutches of Bing and Bowler. I lifted the guitar sling from over my head.

  “They may think they’ve been a big nuisance,” Roger Elk began, “but like raccoons, they are too easily caught.”

  “I’m curious, Roger.” Scuppy folded his arms, projecting his voice like there was a stage audience to please. “I’m curious about what keeps our two chums going. What did they want?”

  “Well, Scuppy, the one—Garth, the one with the guitar—wanted the squirrel puppet. Can you imagine?”

  “The puppet?! Is it valuable?”

  “Not particularly. Obviously, it is to him.”

  “That’s going to cost him dearly, wouldn’t you say? And how about the other one? The one with the swelled head?”

  “I’m not sure what he wanted. I’m not sure it matters.”

  “I dunno. Mind if I ask him?”

  “Go right ahead.”

  Nicholas answered before he could ask. “Cards on the table. I’m looking for Bookerman.”