It went down very smoothly, hit bottom, vibrated, bounced, and diffused instantly throughout his system. He felt it in every nerve and muscle, in every organ, in each blood vessel. Abruptly, he felt revitalized. He had not changed; it was just that suddenly his warranty had been renewed—and unconditionally.
He stretched as he had not stretched since he was seventeen. Gustav-Adolf followed suit. They stared at each other conspiratorially.
“Tonight ve go to see my lidtle Bambi,” said Papa Schimmelhorn. “Vhen I giff her X-rated cuckoo-clock, und tell how I am full of vinegar for fife hundred more years, maybe she forgiffs me for not saying I am married und about Mama. But now—” He hoisted Gustav-Adolf to his shoulder. “—ve haff all afternoon, so ve take a valk to visit Cherry Blumenheimer, who iss nice und pink und who has a pretty lidtle Siameser pussycat. Ve both haff fun.”
And in the dining room directly overhead, Mama Schimmelhorn removed the microphone of an otherwise unnecessary hearing aid which she had pressed against the floor, straightened in her stiff black dress, brandished her stiff black umbrella, and hissed, “So! Shtill you vant to feel naked vomen vithout die clothes, und for fife hundred years! You chust vait—ve fix!”
* * * *
For a moment, she simply stood there, breathing fire and looking like a cross between Whistler’s Mother and the Day of Judgment. Her doubts had reawakened a few days previously, on the Sabbath, when Papa Schimmelhorn had absentmindedly pinched the invitingly round bottom of Miss Jasmine Jorgensen, Heinrich’s secretary. She had begun to wonder, not only about the sincerity of his conversation, but just what he was up to. Now she knew. “Traitor!” she muttered. “So you do not tell dot you are married!” And suddenly she found herself regarding Bambi Siracusa—her bete noire of the weeks just passed—not as a home-wrecker, not as the quintessence of female depravity, but as frail sister equally betrayed.
She waited until she saw Papa Schimmelhorn and Gustav-Adolf turn the corner. Then she phoned Mrs. Siracusa. She was not warmly greeted, and it took some minutes for her to convince Bambi of her good intentions. She declared that she did not know that Papa Schimmelhorn had been posing as a bachelor. She apologized for invading Bambi’s boudoir, for doing so in the company of Pastor Hundhammer, and for assaulting her with an umbrella. She expressed her sympathy for an innocent young woman who had so cruelly been deceived.
“You really got yourself a handful, Mrs. S.,” said Bambi, stretching her warm hundred and sixty pounds reminiscently inside her pink peignoir. “I’m sure glad you called. It’s real tough when an old goat like him, with all sorts of experience, takes advantage you might say of a little girl like me, who was a for-real virgin almost till I got hitched to Siracusa, God rest his nasty soul!”
“Experience?” cried Mama Schimmelhorn. “For sixty-three years, und vunce in der old country vith a female shtring qvartet! Und now he fixes it so he lasts fife hundred years more. It iss an oudraitch!”
Bambi choked over the beer she was sipping, sputtered, and finally said, “H-how’s that? Come again?”
“He iss a chenius,” Mama Schimmelhorn informed her—and then she told her all about how the Schimmelhorn subconscious operated, and about his inventions which even great scientists couldn’t understand, but which always worked, and she detailed the successful experiments she had overheard.
“You wouldn’t shi—I mean, kid me? Would you, Mrs. S.?”
Mama Schimmelhorn assured her that she would not.
There was a sudden silence. Bambi Siracusa was a high-survival type in an extremely tough society. Where Papa Schimmelhorn saw only five hundred years of good clean fun, and Mama Schimmelhorn the threat of five centuries of sordid sin, she at once smelled money—and a lot of it.
Her mind began to function as swiftly and efficiently as any Schimmelhorn invention. “Why, that dirty, lowdown, horny male chauvinist pig!” she exclaimed. “Mama, you got any notion what the old bastard’s up to?”
“He vants to live fife hundred years to play with naked vomen,” replied Mama Schimmelhorn accurately enough.
“You’re goddam well right! And that’s not all. He and the rest of the old goats are going to keep it all themselves! You tell me, like why can’t he give some of it to us girls? Why can’t we go screwing around for five hundred years? I’ll tell you why! Because that’s how they’ve always treated us, that’s why!”
“Vomen’s Lib!” proclaimed Mama Schimmelhorn. “Dot’s vhat ve need!”
“You can say that again, Mama! And I know just the girl can help us out. Her name’s Val Canicatti. She heads up the Fa.—that is, she’s the Woman’s Lib boss in these parts. I’ll get it set up right away. We’ll get together and have a snort. She’ll tell us what to do.”
“I vill not shnort,” said Mama Schimmelhorn, “but I vill maybe drink a cup of tea.”
“Okay we’ll have ourselves a tea party. You just stay put, honey. She’ll send a car for you. You think the old man’s going to be around?”
Mama Schimmelhorn replied that the old man had gone out chasing pretty pussycats, and Bambi, indignantly, promised that Women’s Lib would snake her safely out of there before he could show up again.
They broke off the conversation with mutual expressions of affection and esteem. Mama Schimmelhorn, taking a drop of Mogen David to quiet her nerves, phoned Pastor Hundhammer and poured out her sorrows to him also, shocking him profoundly and causing him to cry out against Papa Schimmelhorn’s profanation of the Biblical three score years and ten. However, he did remark that it would indeed be miraculous if a man could live five hundred years to serve the Lord—and Mama Schimmelhorn, reminded just in time of his masculinity, said nothing to him about the part the Women’s Liberation Movement was going to play in the chastising of her husband.
In the meantime, Bambi very excitedly had phoned Vala Canicatti, of whom—like everybody else—she stood in terror. Born somewhere between Macao and Harbin, of ancestry unknown, Mrs. Canicatti had grown up speaking any number of exotic languages—each with a vaguely foreign accent—and practicing any number of little known and illegal arts. Her finishing school, where World War II had found her, had been one of Shanghai’s fanciest and most expensive bordellos. There, after the Liberation, she had been discovered by a quartermaster colonel, who had purchased her, taken her back to Kansas City as a trophy of war, and married her. He had survived for several weeks before perishing in a household accident, and had been followed, in rather swift succession, by a Little Rock dentist, a Phoenix real estate broker, and a Beverly Hills investment consultant, all of whom had obligingly left her everything of which they died possessed. Finally, in New Haven, she had married Luigi “Lucky Looey” Canicatti, of whom she had been genuinely fond, and whose willing helpmate she had been until he too passed on, surprisingly of natural causes. At that point, she had simply taken over, and one or two male chauvinists who had disputed the succession had ended up in concrete coffins under several fathoms of polluted water. She was known as “the Godmother”, and her word was law.
Perhaps because she had done nicely in what was ostensibly a man’s world, the idea of posing as the local head of Women’s Lib delighted her. As those who knew her knew better than to trick her, she never doubted that there was at least an element of truth in Bambi’s tale. But where Bambi had smelled only money, she instantly smelled power. Graciously, she promised to send a limousine after Mama Schimmelhorn, and to join them for tea.
First though, she phoned the representative of a discreet but prosperous South American import-export firm, headed by a former executive of the S.S., which traded in illicit pharmaceuticals. Then she called up an unlisted number and made arrangements for an old acquaintance, now working for a major Iron Curtain country, to get in touch with her. Finally, after issuing the necessary orders to her mafiosi, she rummaged through her wardrobe for clothing which would make her mor
e plausible in her new role, and settled on a pair of striped bellbottomed pants, a turtleneck red-white-and-blue sweater with a peace symbol on it, and a loudly checked sports coat of the late Mr. Canicatti’s.
In the meantime, Pastor Hundhammer had not remained idle. As soon as Mama Schimmelhorn hung up, he had called his favorite parishioner and financial mainstay, Heinrich Luedesing, to tell him the exciting news, and Heinrich had immediately pounced on the trans-Atlantic phone to inform his wife’s Cousin Albrecht, Managing Director of S.I.V.A., a gigantic chemical combine in Zurich. Miss Jasmine Jorgensen, listening in on her extension, had at once taken a coffee break so that she could tip off a groovy boy friend named Howie, who worked for a dubious detective and industrial security agency, and whom she had managed somehow to confuse with James Bond. And a young man in Cousin Albrecht’s office surreptitiously sent a coded cablegram to the Vice-President of a Dutch cartel which was S.I.V.A.’s most formidable rival. By the time Vala Canicatti’s limousine arrived to pick up Mama Schimmelhorn, forces of an astonishing rapacity and ruthlessness were zeroing in on Papa Schimmelhorn and his S.O.D.O.M. Serum.
Bambi Siracusa’s tea party was a great success. Mama Schimmelhorn had more or less expected the head of Women’s Lib to be a truculent, masculine creature with a deep bass voice. Instead, she found a woman who in her youth had certainly been very beautiful, and who even now—except for her wide Finnish cheekbones, her strange garments, and her cigar—looked like the expensively well-preserved widow of a successful broker or neurosurgeon. The Godmother was decidedly feminine. Even her black eyes did not betray her—as quite a number of interested males had discovered to their sorrow. Very demurely, she drank her tea—which she laced heavily with Lemon Hart rum—and listened to Mama Schimmelhorn’s tale of woe, commenting sympathetically in a softly musical voice. Her agate-eyed male attendants, who had served as chauffeur and footman aboard the limousine, showed by their deference exactly who was boss; and when she spoke of the cruel oppression so long endured by her sex, she gave no hint that her own interest in the male animal was, aside from its financial aspects, a bedtime one, or that she found Papa Schimmelhorn’s reputed potency quite as intriguing as his serum’s.
It took her only a minute to arrive at her decision. “That serum’s not all his, dear,” she told her guest. “Don’t ever think it is! There’s a community property law in this state, and you own half of it. Women’s Lib has lawyers who’ll handle all that for you. All you need to do is give me what they call a power of attorney so we can act for you.”
Mama Schimmelhorn, very much impressed, replied gratefully that that would be very nice indeed.
Mrs. Canicatti beckoned one of her mafiosi. “Get Woozy over here right away,” she ordered. “Tell him it’s for a power of attorney.” Then she poured Mama Schimmelhorn another cup of tea. “And I guess we’d better get your Dirty Old Man out of circulation for awhile,” she continued, with a twinkle in her eye. “I’ve got a sort of—well, a rest home, out in the country. The boys’ll take him there and keep him safe, just so he won’t have a chance to sell the serum out from under you. We’ll tell him how we’re acting in your behalf. Then, if he won’t give us the formula, we’ll get some of our women scientists to analyze it.”
“It serfes him right!” Mama Schimmelhorn said grimly. “But maybe you find it easier if die boys shtay home und you send a pretty girl inshtead.”
Both the Godmother and Bambi at once saw the wisdom of this argument, and Bambi—perhaps a bit too eagerly—volunteered to serve as decoy.
“Mama said a pretty girl, dear,” murmured Mrs. Canicatti. “We’ll send Diane from the—er—nightclub. She’s blonde, with a delicious figure—prime old-goat bait.… Pete!” she called over her shoulder. “You go get her. She can use my car to make the pickup. How soon can you have her here?”
“Maybe twenty minutes, Mrs. C.,” Pete grunted, “if she’s got her clothes on and no customers.”
The Godmother snapped her fingers, and he took his leave.
“But how’s she going to find him?” Bambi asked.
“He vas on his vay to visit Cherry Blumenheimer,” spat Mama Schimmelhorn. “She iss a bad girl who lives on—”
“I know the name,” interrupted the Godmother, her eyes narrowing. “She used to peddle—well, never mind.” She turned to the remaining mafioso. “Get on the horn, Romeo, and tell her what the score is. Tell her if he shows up to keep him till we call, then boot him out.… Don’t worry, honey,” she said to Mama Schimmelhorn. “He’s in the bag.”
The doorbell rang, and Bambi admitted Woozy the attorney, a long, cold, hairless being with the personality of a baited rat-trap and a briefcase of imitation lizard-skin. He listened to Mrs. Canicatti’s explanation, and quickly prepared a power of attorney in triplicate. Mama Schimmelhorn affixed her signature triumphantly, and Romeo and Bambi also signed as witnesses. Then Woozy slithered out, and the tea party resumed.
Very genteelly, the Godmother poured the tea, and Mama Schimmelhorn graciously accepted so generous a dollop of Lemon Hart in hers that, when Diane was ushered in a few minutes later, she was able to regard her not just dispassionately but with approbation.
“Chust right for der Dirty Old Man,” she declared. “You vill haff no trouble.”
Diane’s briefing was short and to the point. She and her driver were to lurk near Cherry Blumenheimer’s residence until they spied their quarry. Then Diane was to flirt with him, tell him how muscular and masculine he was (a move suggested by Mama Schimmelhorn), and invite him to a week-end house party. She was to phone them as soon as the mission was accomplished.
When she was gone, Mrs. Canicatti poured again, and began asking questions about how the Schimmelhorn genius functioned. These, of course, Mama Schimmelhorn could not answer. She repeated what she already had told Bambi—that, great as his inventions were, neither he nor anybody else had ever duplicated one of them.
“In that case,” said the Godmother, “we’d better not take any chances, had we? When we drive you home, I’ll just pick up the serum he’s already made, so our scientists can start in analyzing it. You do know where he keeps it, don’t you?”
Mama Schimmelhorn replied that she did indeed—that she had hurried to his workshop as soon as he left the house.
They toasted the cause of Women’s Liberation in tea and rum, and in less than half an hour Diane called in. She had had no trouble persuading Papa Schimmelhorn, she informed Mrs. Canicatti breathlessly, and—My God! who was this super-Santa anyway? They’d been in the car together only five minutes maybe, and here she was already black and blue all over—and he’d—he’d brought along his tomcat!—and anyhow they were on their way back to the Mansion, and here he was trying to p-p-pull her back out of the phone booth!
The Godmother hung up, commending her, and told Mama and Bambi what she’d said; and Mama Schimmelhorn, now slightly tiddly, commented that Gustav-Adolf vas a good cat, who caught rats und mices. All the way home, in Bambi’s car, she chuckled wickedly at the thought of how she and her allies were going to fix Papa, and without hesitation she delivered the pickle-jar with its remaining contents to the Godmother.
“Bye-bye!” she called after them. “Pretty soon I call you ofer und ve haff tea again.”
* * * *
The Mansion of the Canicatti Family was precisely that—a great, pillared house built in the mid-nineteenth century by an ex-Governor of Connecticut and inhabited for many years by a Chief Justice of the State Supreme Court, whose whiskered portrait—to the amusement of its present residents—still glared disapprovingly from the far wall of its great dining room. Now its spacious grounds were fenced forbiddingly and closely guarded.
As the car, driven by Romeo, turned into its shaded drive, Bambi looked a little apprehensively at Mrs. Canicatti. “Are—are you going to—?” she began uncertainly. “I mean, Mrs. C., is th
ere any chance of the old guy getting, well, like hurt!”
The Godmother smiled dreamily. “Bambi honey, I’m going up to change into something a lot more comfortable. Let’s see—there’s that mutation mink housecoat out of Neiman-Marcus, the one that’s split up to my waist each side and right up from my bellybutton in the front. And then we’ll find out if what everybody’s saying about your antique friend is true, and if it is—well, Women’s Lib won’t do him any harm, I promise you!”
Bambi suppressed a sentimental sigh. The assurance of Papa Schimmelhorn’s continued physical well-being did not quite console her for the fate she saw immediately ahead of him.
The door was opened by Georgie “Goofball” Capotino, big and broken-nosed and very carefully tailored, who came as close to being a second-in-command as the Godmother would permit. “Hey, Jeez, Mrs. C.,” he grunted, “you sure latched onto a weirdo this time. Diane’s got the old cluck upstairs. You won’t believe it—they’re playin’ games. What is the deal, anyhow?”
“Big money,” snapped Mrs. Canicatti. “What else’s new?”
“Howie phoned,” he told her. “Just a quarter hour ago. I don’t get it, but he said the old lady called her preacher and talked about some medicine like it makes you live a thousand years, and the preacher he rang up the old guy’s boss, and he got right through to some great big outfit back in Switzerland. Howie said to tell you the world’s out.”
“Merde!” said the Godmother under her breath, adding a Cantonese expletive so imaginatively pornographic that, translated, it would have shocked even her present audience. “I didn’t think of that! Well, we’ll do the best we can. Bambi, you phone Mama right away and tell her a crew of male chauvinist bastards are after Papa’s secret, and she’s to make sure they get in touch with me. Give her my personal number. Now get with it!”
The Second Reginald Bretnor Megapack Page 23