Pipsqueak

by Brian M. Wiprud

  “You told me you were looking for Pipsqueak,” I grumbled.

  “It amounts to the same thing.”

  Roger Elk and Scuppy seemed highly amused.

  “Looking for Bookerman? Why?”

  “Insurance fraud. Chicago Mutual, like most insurers, doesn’t like paying out a lot of money on big double-indemnity life-insurance claims. They also don’t like accidents where the body is never recovered. Lost control, broke through a guardrail, spun out onto the ice, dropped through the ice into Lake Michigan. They paid it to Scuppy Milner Bookerman, his nephew and executor of his estate, and he used it to bankroll the launch of Fab Form. But they don’t pay out that kind of money without following up. They keep tabs on the benefactor for years, see what he does, try to figure if there’s been a scam. Lotta times, they manage to get their money back, people go to jail. They had a big, thick file on Bookerman and knew all about his efforts to regain his puppets. When one of their legions of researchers saw that one of the puppets was stolen in New Jersey, and someone was murdered in the exchange, and that you were in New York . . . well, let’s just say insurance companies don’t believe in coincidences. They hired me to check it out for a percentage, which amounts to a nice piece of change. That’s why I’m here.”

  Roger Elk’s smile was gone.

  A vein in Scuppy’s sizable forehead threatened to burst like a fire hose. Scuppy looked at his watch. “I’d better get upstairs.”

  “Tell me one thing,” I said, looking up at Roger. “Why tonight? Why here?”

  He grinned. “We’ve got a huge live-TV audience at rapt attention, and some of the most influential people in the nation are here. We influence them, they help influence the rest of America. Do you really think we wouldn’t be better off without video games, Web surfing, and reality TV?” Roger’s grin faded.

  “So, Scuppy and his boys twenty-four/seven on the boob tube?” Nicholas asked. “Or is that why Aurora Corporation has been buying up all those forgotten, bargain-basement AM radio stations all across the country? Going to one-better all those conservative talk-show hosts?”

  I gave Nicholas a cross look. “You didn’t tell me that part.”

  “Yeah, well, you weren’t exactly a wellspring of information either.”

  Roger Elk waved a hand at Bing and Bowler. “When you’re through, drop them in the counterweight shafts. Nobody will find them there for a while.” He trotted up the spiral stairs after Scuppy.

  “Hey, don’t I even get to know about Bookerman?” Nicholas complained loudly. “C’mon!”

  “Shaddup.” Bowler gave Nicholas a lazy slap across the face and turned to me, waving a set of handcuffs. “You. Get down here.”

  I methodically plunked down the steps, holding the Bat out of Hell guitar across my belly. I had been expecting the immobilizing fear, the twist in your gut that keeps you from doing anything counter to your best self-preservationist instincts. But the fear wasn’t there—yet.

  “C’mon, buster, we don’t got all night, you know.”

  Ultimately, it was the wisecrack that stung my fear into a savage anger. I got to the bottom step.

  Gun at his side, Bowler said, “Gimme that guitar.”

  So I gave it to him. With a sweeping diagonal uppercut to the jaw.

  A few teeth and a cloud of blood vapor replaced Bowler’s grin. Meat’s guitar resonated with a beautifully discordant chime.

  That one was for Fred.

  Bing swiveled his gun from Nicholas’s head and aimed it at me. I was still a step away with the guitar, and he fired at the same time Nicholas shoulder-slammed him. The ricochet pinged through the room. They both went down, the pistol clattering off to one side.

  I stepped over to where Bing was just grabbing his pistol, wound up, and delivered a golf swing to his head. The gun went off again as he crumpled back to the concrete floor, sparks bursting across the room where a circuit box got punctured. Lights flickered.

  That one was for . . . well, it was for Fred too, dammit.

  “Garth!” Nicholas hobbled to his feet, kicking the guns to the far end of the room, under some machinery. “Brilliant! Brilliant!”

  Bing’s cardigan covered his head, but there was a growing red stain on it. I turned back to where Bowler was sprawled, to make sure he was still down. Blood gurgled from his empty mandible, and one of his sleeves was torn. Time for a new bowling shirt.

  The Uptown Belles ceased their Nazi tromp, and our ears were filled with the machine-room hum. Nobody upstairs would have heard the shots over that racket.

  I propped Meat’s guitar against a shaft. That’s when I noticed the bullet hole through the soundboard. I eased down onto the ground to keep from falling.

  “Okay, Garth, take it easy.” I felt Nicholas’s hands massaging my shoulders. “Breathe into your sleeve. You’re hyperventilating. Attaboy, easy, now.”

  I’m not sure how much time passed, but it was only a minute before Nicholas broke the calm.

  “Okay, now. Stand up, Garth. We still got work to do.”

  I looked over at the two sprawled retros. “They dying?” The question was completely academic. It’s not like I spent any time thinking about how many people they may have killed or which one killed Vito or Marti. I really didn’t care.

  “Probably not.” I saw that Nicholas had one of his hands free and that the handcuffs still dangled from one wrist. “There’s nothing we can do about that now. Look, Garth, if they’re trying to kill us, don’t you think that this thing with the spheres needs stopping? They wouldn’t be going to all this effort if the spheres didn’t have some effect.”

  “Listen!” I held up a finger at the ceiling. Ever so faintly, and echoey, I could make out a drumbeat and Scuppy’s wailing voice. “They’re playing.”

  “Shit!” Nicholas ran for the stairs.

  “Wait. The elevators.” I pointed to a panel on the wall, from which conduits piped throughout the room to hydraulic pumps and motors. At the panel, there was a diagram, and it quickly became evident that a series of three-position (UP–STOP–DOWN) lever switches were manual overrides to the elevators. Not only were they unnumbered, but they were locked with small padlocks.

  Nicholas patted his pockets and shrugged. “They took my lock pick.”

  I grabbed a fire extinguisher from the wall, one of those big, old silver jobs.

  “What are you doing?”

  “This is the first switch. It should be the first elevator, right?”

  Nicholas looked overhead and then back at me. He smiled. “Sure.”

  Raising the extinguisher over my head, I brought the bottom edge down on the padlocked switch. I hit it again, and then again. The third time was a charm.

  Chapter 30

  A ngie told me later about the series of events that unfolded onstage.

  The lights came down, the Uptown Belles did their fanfare and left the stage. Princess Madeline and her pal Compton Stiles followed, making a brief introductory welcome, assisted by a nonmusical and teleprompted appearance by Speed Wobble, who for the moment were there just to hype their music segment later in the show. “So without further ado . . .”

  Then the curtains at the back of the stage parted to the tippity-tap of a snare drum, followed by some tinkling ivories, full lights, and blaring horns. The Swell Swingers were building up a head of steam. As the lights came up on the band, fulgent Scuppy was shimmying center stage. Applause swelled from the audience, and Scuppy rewarded them with a Hollywood wink. Angie noticed a music stand not far behind him. On it was a row of three dull, black spheres, sized from navel orange to small lime. A wee redheaded mallet was in the top pocket of Scuppy’s cream dinner jacket.

  The dancers reemerged from the wings in sequined zoot suits, and a dance routine started to take shape at the band’s feet.

  As the band wound up its intro, Scuppy danced over to the spheres, and with an impish grin he gave each a tap.

  My Angie was no fool. As soon as Scuppy appeared onstage, she re
gistered that I hadn’t returned to my seat and knew something was up. Angie stuck her fingers in her ears but noticed a ripple effect across the heads in the audience. She described it as a mass twitch that nobody but her seemed to notice.

  That’s when Scuppy started to sing “Blinking Light,” the retro anthem we’d heard at the Gotham Club.

  He’d gotten to the first refrain when there was some commotion in the orchestra pit, but Angie couldn’t make out what it was.

  From over the whir and peal of the motors, rotors, cables, and shafts in motion, Nicholas and I heard an excited murmur behind us.

  “Maybe we should try the next switch,” Nicholas said as we looked over our shoulders. The entire orchestra pit, replete with excited musicians, was sinking into the far end of the room. Our abductees hungrily scanned the unfamiliar surroundings for any sign of either culprits or escape.

  “Wrong elevator.” I threw the first switch past the STOP position into the UP position, the resultant jolt tossing musicians from their seats and toppling more than a few music stands. Horns collided with clarinets, and a pair of cymbals slid into the kettledrum.

  “Allow me?” Nicholas brandished the fire hydrant.

  Angie later recalled that no sooner did the orchestra pit go quiet than it suddenly got louder again, and heads of musicians with tousled hair and fists of sheet music appeared over the rim of the pit.

  The Swell Swingers saw something was amiss but played on.

  The Uptown Belles were all on their backs on the floor, fans high and waving, when they suddenly submerged like so many synchronous swimmers. A flash of confusion—a shade of red—swept over Scuppy’s face as he watched the Uptown Belles disappear below the boards in an unscripted stage direction.

  Peter put a hand on Angie’s forearm. “What’s going on down there?” he growled.

  According to Angie, that was the moment she knew for certain that I was okay.

  “Oops,” Nicholas and I said collectively, putting the platform of sprawled, feather-floundering Belles into reverse.

  It was at this point that anybody paying attention got the idea that something was wrong. With ample hand gestures, camera operators spoke rapidly into their microphones. Electricians and gaffers jogged down the side aisles toward the back of the arena.

  Heads among the audience swiveled, interchanging quizzical glances.

  The Swell Swingers’ tempo began to falter, but Scuppy urged Rob Getty and the band back into rhythm, belting out the refrain as he danced over to the three spheres, his red mallet poised.

  Angie put her fingers in her ears again.

  Scuppy no sooner hit the first sphere than he and his ensemble began to sink below stage. He stumbled, grabbed the music stand, and all three spheres tumbled to the floor. The Uptown Belles reappeared on all fours.

  “Got ’em!” Nicholas shouted as the platform overhead lowered, a dropped drumstick clattering down and landing at our feet.

  Off to the side, on the gantry leading from the stage door, footsteps clanked into view in the person of Mortimer, followed by Detective Tsilzer, two electricians, several uniform cops, and a gang of men in dark suits, earmuffs, and radios.

  “Now what?” I nudged Nicholas.

  Before Nicholas could reply, we were distracted by something else falling from the platform, an outstretched hand clutching air in its wake.

  It was a small, opaque sphere, a little bigger than a Ping-Pong ball. Charcoal gray and spinning, it fell very slowly at first, like a feather that might just float away.

  “Nicholas!” I pointed at the sphere. “Your ears!” I shouted at him, plugging my own with my fingertips.

  The new arrivals on the gantry saw me pointing and froze when they saw the falling sphere. Everybody knew it for what it was.

  I held my breath as I watched the sphere pick up speed. But it was still falling no faster than a hanky when it struck a pulley.

  The feather turned into a bullet. When it hit the pulley, it suddenly ricocheted like a gunshot. You couldn’t see it, only hear it as it twanged off a vertical shaft, chinked off the floor, pinged off the wall, clanked off the gantry, twanged off another shaft, and suddenly slowed in an arc toward the ceiling. It was like one of those hard rubber Super Balls, seemingly defiant of gravity. I could feel the vibration from the sphere in my joints and solar plexus. The descending squad on the gantry was doubled over, clutching their heads. Except Mortimer, who had his fingers in his ears and an evil eye on me.

  Completing a wide, lazy arc through the air, the sphere hit the concrete floor next to the metal stairs. There was a flash of blue light and a concussive force that hit me like a bucket of warm water. In fact, for a few moments afterward, it felt exactly as if I were soaking wet. I didn’t actually hear anything, because my hands were clamped over my ears. But a haze of smoke hung in the air, and as it lifted, the point of impact was a lattice of fine cracks in the concrete. Next to that, the metal stairs were warped like they’d been subjected to extreme heat. No debris.

  The platform overhead jolted with a clatter to a stop, and the musicians started to stumble off, some bleeding from their ears. Scuppy pushed past them to the police and wheeled a finger down at Nicholas and me. If looks could kill.

  “Them! They ruined the show—arrest them!” he shouted, the vein on his forehead wriggling like a night crawler. The uniform cops were still recovering from the sound of the bouncing sphere and couldn’t hear him. The dark suits seemed only concerned with pushing past the musicians and onto the platform. Mortimer rushed forward, and Scuppy Milner grabbed him by the lapel. “Get them!”

  Angie reports that the sudden disappearance of the Swell Swingers, the jumble of Uptown Belles, and the dismay of technicians had the audience at the verge of some mass reaction. What hung in the air was a sense of imminent danger, as though anyone or anything might suddenly fall through the floor, victim of the Great New York Collapse. Some of the men in the audience stood, searching the perimeter for an escape route, and ushers standing by the exits pulled at their bow ties uncertainly. Women collected their purses, bracing for what might happen next.

  Then came the sound of the sphere exploding below stage. A deep thud shook the whole building. A fading dissonance followed, a cross between a distant bell tower and resonating stemware. Five thousand people jumped to their feet and turned. A rush for the doors was on.

  Many would argue—or agree—that success in the entertainment realm is not so much the result of an excess of talent as it is a keen sense of timing, of recognizing opportunities for what they are and capitalizing upon them. Celebs during interviews sometimes betray modesty and refer to this aptitude as luck.

  Many would also argue that riots are ephemeral phenomena. As easily as they can be triggered, they can just as easily be thwarted. The catalyst to either is often something simple: a shout, a car honk, a flashing light. The stage was set for stampede and tragedy at the crowded Savoy Revue.

  A pair of spotlights targeted the air over the stage. Sharp white beams shot from the back of the auditorium to the stage, and at the pivotal, decisive moment, all eyes turned away from the doors. Lowering slowly on invisible wires, dressed in butterfly outfits, were masters of the stage and sleight of hand: Glenn and Keller.

  “And for our next trick . . .” Keller’s oaken voice boomed.

  Mortimer reached into his coat.

  Nicholas and I, staring up at the troops on the catwalk, started to back into the corner, looking for a place to run that wasn’t there.

  A flash of silver was in Mortimer’s hand, and the next thing I knew that silver came down on Scuppy’s wrists.

  Handcuffs.

  Milner’s surprise resonated through the room like the ping of the sphere, his jaw unhinged like adjustable pliers. “No, Mortimer. Them, not me!”

  Mortimer pulled something else from his pocket, but it was gold, and it was a badge, which he put into display from the top pocket of his jacket.

  “But . . .” Milner looked
to Tsilzer and the uniform cops for help. All he got in return was the half-lidded stare of men already doing the paperwork in their heads.

  “Sorry, Scuppy. Party is over,” Mortimer grunted. He waved the electricians toward the stairs, and in a moment they and their dirty looks were down with us at the switches putting the stage back into one piece. The roar of laughter and applause from the audience was snuffed out as the platforms whirred into place.

  The detachment of dark suits filed off the elevator platform with the spheres wrapped in big white pillows and duct tape. Mortimer pointed at us.

  “You two. Get up here.” He then turned to Detective Tsilzer and exchanged words. The uniform cops were cuffing the rest of the band.

  “He’s a cop.” Nicholas, walking to the steps, shook his head at the ground.

  “Can’t be,” I said, picking up my guitar by the neck. “Brute like that? He doesn’t seem the type.”

  Nicholas waved a finger at me. “What you know about types, Garth, wouldn’t fill a gnat’s bladder.” Or that of a nuthatch, even.

  We ascended the steps and stood before the expanse of Mortimer’s back, which blocked our passage. He was talking in a rumbling tone to Tsilzer. When he finally turned around, his moon face puckered into a frown, the short hairs on his neck and that white forehead scar flaring. I realized now that it must have been Mortimer’s back I’d glimpsed at the police precinct when I gave my statement to Tsilzer. He eyed us like a couple of pesky flies mired in his banana split.

  “You two monkeys just about screwed the pooch.” He glanced over to where some of the dark suits were seating two spheres carefully into a foam-filled briefcase. “And we lost the Pipsqueak sphere.”

  I looked up at his badge. A banner across the bottom read FEDERAL AGENT. Across the top it read NSA, which either meant Numismatic Society of America or National Security Agency. I didn’t notice any of the telltale stamp fatigue on his tongue, so I assumed the latter.