The Frumious Bandersnatch

by Ed McBain

  “That’s what the book said.”

  “Gee,” Patricia said.

  “I think it suits you,” Ollie said. “Would you care for another soufflé?”

  IF THE THREE people on the boat had been hired by Central Casting, they’d have been labeled The Hunk, The Pretty One, and The Nerd.

  The Hunk was driving the boat.

  His name was Avery Hanes.

  Tall and somber looking, with curly black hair and dark brown eyes, he was muscularly built—not because he’d ever done time but simply because he worked out regularly. Like the other two, Avery was wearing black jeans, a black sweatshirt, and black running shoes. Later tonight, he would put on one of the masks. But for now he was enjoying the mild May breezes that blew in off the stern of the boat, riffling his hair, touching his face like a kiss. Avery had once worked for the telephone company and then had sold electronics at The Wiz. Then he’d got the job at Lorelei Records on St. John’s Av. The gig tonight was sort of related.

  The Pretty One was Avery’s girlfriend.

  Some five-feet-six-inches tall, twenty-four years old, redheaded and green-eyed and freckled and lithe and lean and wearing for the job tonight the same black jeans and Reeboks and black sweatshirt without a bra. Her name was Kellie Morgan, and she was here because this had to look like a nice little boating party cruising up the river and not some people intent on mischief. She was here because a pretty face in the crowd had a way of stilling the most dire fears. She was here because her boyfriend Avery had told her this would be a piece of cake that would be over and done with by Tuesday night at this time, and there was nothing to worry about because it was all planned to the minute and no one would get hurt and there’d be a quarter of a million bucks for the three of them to split when all was said and done.

  The Nerd had straggly blond hair and intense blue eyes and contact lenses over those eyes. He looked like a man who might be an accountant for a small private firm, while actually he was an excon who’d been paroled only five and a bit more months ago after having done time for 1st Degree Robbery, a Class-B felony punishable by a prison term not to exceed twenty-five years. That didn’t mean Calvin Robert Wilkins wasn’t smart; it merely meant he’d been caught. He wasn’t as smart as Avery, but then again he didn’t have to be. He’d got along just fine until the bad break that night of the bank heist when he got a flat tire during the getaway. He’d tried to ride out the flat, but the tire fell all to pieces and shreds, and suddenly he was riding on the rim with sparks flying and the fuzz gaining, and before you knew it his luck ran out completely and there he was upstate, wearing a number. He’d been paroled from Miramar shortly before Thanksgiving. Until just before Christmas, he’d been working as a dishwasher in a deli on Carpenter Avenue. Then he’d found the job at Lorelei Records, which was where he’d met Avery.

  The boat they were on was a Rinker 27-footer powered with a 320-hp Bravo Two that could juice up to almost forty-three miles per at top speed. There was an aft cabin with an oversized mattress, and the dinette seating in the lounge could convert to a double berth, but they didn’t expect to be sleeping on the boat.

  If everything went as planned tonight, by this time Tuesday, they’d all be sleeping in their own little beddie-byes.

  If everything went as planned.

  TOM WHITTAKER was program director for radio station WHAM. He was telling Harry Di Fidelio—Bison’s Vice President of Radio Marketing—that the question his station recently had to ask themselves was whether they should skew their targets younger or still go for the mother/daughter double play.

  “It wasn’t an easy decision to make,” Whittaker said. “With all these new uptempo releases, we all at once had a responsive audience for teen-based pop and hip-hop acts.”

  “So which way are you going?” Di Fidelio asked.

  “Well, we’ll continue to beam primarily to our twenty-five to thirty-four base. But what we’ve done over the past few months is expand our focus to the eighteen to twenty-four demographic. We’re trying to get away from that image of a thirty-something station. We want our listeners to think of us as dynamic and youthful instead.”

  “That makes sense,” Di Fidelio said, and then got down to what Bison was paying him for. “We think Tamar will have a broad base among the thirty-somethings as well as the younger group. Her appeal is what you might call universal.”

  “Oh, hey, she’s terrific,” Whittaker said, gobbling down his second helping of chocolate pâté with vanilla bean sauce and raspberries. “What I’m trying to say, though, Barry…may I call you Barry?”

  “Harry. Actually, it’s Harry.”

  “Harry, right, what I’m trying to say, Harry, is that it was merely a matter of re-examining our goals. A lot of Top 40 stations try too hard to pitch their product to both the kiddies and their parents, and the result is mass confusion. At Radio 180, we augmented our focus rather than radically change it, and we actually improved our ratings with demos who wanted to feel younger or who just wanted to listen with their kids.”

  “ ‘Bandersnatch’ should appeal to both,” Di Fidelio said.

  “Oh, hey, she’s terrific. I feel sure she’ll get hundreds of plays on our station.”

  If much of what Whittaker was saying sounded like total horseshit, that’s because much of it was total horseshit. Whittaker knew, and Di Fidelio knew, and—with the exception of the crew and the caterers and the black dancer who’d be playing the role of the Bandersnatch when Tamar performed the song later tonight—everyone on this showboat vessel knew that most Top 40 and rock radio stations today got paid by the record manufacturers, and in some instances by the performing artists themselves, to play their songs on the air.

  Moreover, this practice of Pay-for-Play, as it was called, was entirely legal provided the station mentioned on air that payment had been made. Usually, the deejay merely said, “This record was brought to you by Bison Records.” Whittaker knew, and Di Fidelio knew that the music industry was a twelve-billion-dollar-a-year business. They further knew that only three broadcasters controlled more than half of the top hundred radio markets in the U.S. There were 10,000—count ’em, Maude—10,000 commercial radio stations in the land, and record companies depended on about 1,000 of the largest ones to create hits and sell records. Each of those thousand stations added approximately three new songs to its playlist every week.

  Enter the independent record promoter.

  Hired by the record company, the indie got paid each time there was an “add” to the playlist of a Top 40 or rock station. Average price for an add was a thousand bucks, but the fee could go as high as five or ten thousand depending on the number of listeners a station had. All in all, the indies earned about three million bucks a week for their services.

  That was a lot of fried corn husks, honey.

  Whittaker knew, and Di Fidelio knew, and everyone connected with either Bison Records or WHAM—“Radio 180 on your dial!”—that a record promoter named Arturo Garcia, who worked for the indie firm of Instant Prompt, Inc., had made a deal with WHAM that guaranteed the station $300,000 in annual promotional payments provided its list of clients regularly made the station’s playlist. Morever, in certain special circumstances…

  Consider, for example, the case of Tamar Valparaiso’s debut album, Bandersnatch. What with Carroll’s original rhyming (which would certainly sound like hip-hop doggerel to many teenagers), and what with Tamar’s poundingly simple five-note melody (that would most certainly sound sexually-driven to many teenagers), the title-song single seemed poised, please dear God, to do what Alicia Keys’ Songs in A Minor had done in its first week, more than 235,000 copies for a debut album, #1 on both the Billboard Top 200 Album Chart and the R&B Album Chart, please dear God, let it happen!

  But just in case God wasn’t listening, and just in case all that legal payola didn’t do the trick, IPI (ever mindful of its guiding slogan, “The Tin Is in the Spin”) was paying WHAM—and each of forty other top stations around the
country—a $5,000 bonus for fifty plays in the first week of “Bandersnatch’s” release. That came to a hundred bucks a spin, and that was a whole lot of tin, man.

  To put it mildly, much was riding on the success of that album.

  Meanwhile, in the main stateroom of the River Princess, Tamar Valparaiso was getting into her scanty costume.

  EVER SINCE 9/11, and especially since the FBI began issuing vague warnings of terrorist attacks hither and yon but nowhere in particular, the Police Department had been on high alert for any possible threats to the city’s bridges. There were 143 men and 4 women in the Harbor Patrol Unit, which operated a municipal navy of twenty vessels, ranging in size from twenty to fifty-two feet. The workhorse of the HPU was the new 36-foot launch, which could travel up to thirty-eight miles an hour—more than twice the speed of the older vessels in the fleet. The Police Department had recently purchased four of these boats at a cost of $370,000 per. To the relief of taxpayers everywhere in the city, the boats were expected to last twenty years.

  Not too long ago, Sergeant Andrew McIntosh would have been wearing the same orange life vest over his blue uniform, but there wouldn’t have been a Ruger Mini-14 semiautomatic rifle lying across the dash. You broke those out only when you were going on a drug raid. Those and the twelve-gauge shotguns. Nowadays, with lunatics running loose all over the world, the heavy weapons were de rigueur for the course, as they said in old Glasgow, Scotland, from which fine city McIntosh’s grandmother had migrated.

  McIntosh was fifty-two years old, and he’d been driving boats for the HPU for twenty-two years now, before which he’d operated a charter fishing boat in Calm’s Point. Back then, watching the police boats pulling into the marina, he’d wondered what the hell he was doing ferrying drunken fishermen all over the Sound. He finally asked himself Why not give it a shot? Took the Police Department exam the very next week, asked for assignment to the Harbor Patrol the minute he got out of the Academy.

  Back then, the Police Department was still calling itself the Isola PD, even though precincts were located in all five sections of the city. Eventually, Calm’s Point, Majesta, Riverhead, and Bethtown rose up in protest, demanding equal rights or some such. The department, figuring it would cover all the bases and not cause any more riots than were absolutely necessary, began calling itself “Municipal PD,” and then “Metro PD,” and then “MPD” for short. Some of the older hands, however—McIntosh included—felt they had changed the name only because the acronym “IPD” for Isola Police Department was being translated by the ordinary citizenry to mean “I Peed,” a not entirely flattering descriptive image for stalwarts of the law rushing to the rescue.

  There was nothing suspicious about the twenty-seven footer moving slowly toward the Hamilton Bridge, except that she was cruising along with just her running lights on. No lights in the cabin or anywhere else on the boat. Well, that wasn’t too unusual, McIntosh supposed, but even so, in these difficult times he didn’t want to be blamed later on if some crazy bastard ran a boat full of explosives into one of the bridge’s pylons. So he hit a switch on the dash, and a red light began blinking and rotating on the prow of the launch, and he signaled to Officer Betty Knowles to throw a light onto the smaller boat ahead.

  Aboard the Rinker, Avery Hanes whispered, “Let me handle this.”

  Well, hell, he was the smart one.

  “WHY DO I have to be black?” Jonah was asking her.

  Tamar didn’t know what to answer the poor man.

  Because the good Lord intended you to be that way?

  She hated deep philosophical questions.

  Like when a reporter from Billboard magazine asked her what she thought of Mick Jagger, and she’d had to admit she didn’t know who Mick Jagger was. When the reporter explained that he was a seminal rock singer, she didn’t mention that she didn’t know what “seminal” meant. Instead, she told them she didn’t consider herself a rock singer, and besides she was very young. So, of course they asked what kind of singer she considered herself to be, and she’d had to admit she thought of her kind of music as mainstream pop. But a question like Jonah’s absolutely floored her. She’d never suspected till this very moment that he was so deep.

  What she was hoping was that nobody would be disappointed because she and Jonah wouldn’t be duplicating all the bells and whistles on the video, but of course how could they do that on a little boat in the middle of the river? Tonight, she’d be lip-synching, which was okay because everyone in the crowd was very hip, she guessed, and surely nobody expected her to really perform the entire video, did they? Shit, it had cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to shoot the thing with all the special effects and everything, so how could anyone expect a duplication of all that on this dinky little boat here, even though Barney kept calling it a “launch.” She certainly hoped nobody had such wild expectations in mind, which was a good title for a song and maybe for her next album, “Wild Expectations.” She certainly hoped they would appreciate her just lip-synching while she dry-humped Jonah.

  Jonah was as gay as a bowl of daisies.

  This was okay because he only came across that way when you were talking to him. Lisping and all, and sort of limp-wristed, a total caricature of a fag.

  “Why do I have to be black?”

  And a little limp flick of the wrist.

  Cause you unfortunate, amigo, Tamar should have said.

  Jonah hadn’t done any talking on the video, and he certainly wouldn’t be doing any talking tonight, either. Even Tamar herself wouldn’t be talking until after the record played and they danced to it. Then she’d do the interview with Channel Four, and whatever other interviews she had to do with all the press people out there, and then they’d call it a night and hope for the best.

  The video had premiered last night on all four music channels during their prime-time debut spots—

  “I meant why does the beast have to be black?” Jonah asked.

  Another philosophical question.

  He was sharing the main stateroom as a dressing room with her, but that was okay because he was gay, and she didn’t mind if he saw her naked boobs. She was half-naked in the costume, anyway, which she guessed was the whole point of the video, to expose herself as much as possible without getting arrested. She had to admit that she somewhat enjoyed all that screaming and yelling whenever she made a personal appearance, part of which she knew was for her voice—she really felt she did have a very good mainstream pop style and a very good vibrato besides—but part of which was for the way she shook her considerable booty, muchachos.

  “So?” Jonah asked.

  One hand on his hip.

  Pouting little look on his face.

  He was perhaps six-feet-two-inches tall, with a dancer’s firm abs, and strong biceps and forearms from lifting girls considerably heftier than Tamar, thighs like oaks, an altogether wonderful specimen of a man, but oh what a waste! He had good fine facial features, too, a pity they’d been covered by all those masks he had to wear on the video, and would be covered by masks tonight as well—not the same masks, of course. They’d used maybe ten or twelve different masks during the shoot, so that it looked like the Bandersnatch was changing form each time he—or it, more precisely—violated her or tried to violate her, rape or attempted rape as the case may have been, who knew? All these videos were supposed to be somewhat mysterious and murky, like adolescence itself, thank God that was behind her.

  She was glad her video wasn’t about a black guy going to jail while his chick moped around looking mournful and forlorn. She was glad it wasn’t about a drive-by shooting, either, which a lot of the rap groups thought was entertainment. One of the Bison veeps had wanted the title song on the debut album to be something called “Raw Girls,” and he’d suggested that they shoot the accompanying video in a high school locker room, with all these young chicks, white, black, Latino, coming in and stripping down to their underwear as they got ready for a soccer game. Tamar had gone directly to Barney Loo
mis to tell him she wouldn’t do any video that looked like a G-rated version of Debbie Does Dallas, and she wouldn’t sing any song called “Raw Girls,” either.

  Tamar knew exactly what she wanted to be.

  Tamar knew exactly where she was going.

  “SORRY TO BOTHER YOU, sir,” McIntosh said. “Everything okay here?”

  Standing on the bow of the police launch, Officer Knowles was playing the boat’s spotlight around the chest of the man at the wheel of the Rinker. Something they taught you when you began training for the HPU. Unless the suspect was a known perp, you kept the light out of his eyes. Courtesy, Service, Dedication. That’s what the decal on the side doors of all the police cars in the city said. That’s what it said on the side of Harbor Charlie’s cabin, too. Courtesy. Meant you kept the light out of a person’s eyes, unless he was a perp.

  Avery Hanes was about to become a perp in an hour or so, but Officer Knowles didn’t know that yet, and neither did Sergeant McIntosh, at the wheel of the police launch, or Officer Brady, standing in the stern with his hand resting casually on the butt of the Glock holstered on his hip, just in case this guy driving the Rinker turned out to be some Al Qaeda nut determined to blow up either himself or something else, or else some drug runner or something. These days, you never could tell.

  “Everything’s fine, Sergeant,” Avery said, because he was the smart one, and he’d seen the stripes on McIntosh’s uniform sleeve.

  “Saw you runnin with all your lights off,” McIntosh said.

  The launch was idling alongside the Rinker, which had come to a dead stop on the water.

  “Ooops. Thought I had them on,” Avery said, and flicked the dashboard switch that turned the running lights on and off, clicking it several times to make sure, and then turning to look at McIntosh with a slightly puzzled shrug.

  “I meant in the cabin,” McIntosh said.

  “I’ll turn them on if you like,” Avery said. “Such a nice night and all, so many stars, thought we’d take advantage. They shine so much brighter without any lights.”