The Frumious Bandersnatch

by Ed McBain

And to show how annoyed he was, to demonstrate clearly and without ambiguity exactly how much he’d been insulted by her having denied his heartfelt compliments and sincere gropings, to indicate without a modicum of doubt precisely how mightily pissed off he was, with one vicious swipe of his right hand—which all at once looked rather like a claw—he slashed out at the skirt of her tunic, opening a slit from her waist to her thigh, down the lefthand side of the garment.

  Tamar backed away.

  He came at her again, this time clawing at the garment’s bodice, leaving in tatters a goodly portion of the fabric over her right breast. The pulsing beat behind them, insistent, a rap riff without words, a rap stroll without talk, he began stalking her now, closing and retreating, swiping and withdrawing, each new slash of either claw ripping more and more of her tunic away. Viciously, he slashed at her again—and missed! Seizing her advantage, Tamar shoved out at him, knocking him more completely off balance. He fell to the floor, and lay there as if dead, his hands and arms covering his head and his face. Tamar circled him cautiously…the quarter note, the quarter-note rest…and drew a sharp breath, breasts heaving on the quarter note again, again.

  Silence.

  She moved closer to him.

  Bent over him.

  A sudden blinding flash of light transformed the copper mask to one of sheer crimson and the creature on the floor became a fully realized raging beast that sprang to its feet and attacked again without warning.

  There was no question in this last minute or so of the dance that Tamar was struggling for her life. With each slash of the beast’s claws, as more and more of her garment was torn away to reveal the flesh beneath, she appeared to grow weaker and weaker until at last the beast seemed to become a dozen or more beasts, and the assault became not some college-boy adventure in the back seat of Daddy’s Ford but a realized gang-rape in the middle of a dark municipal park.

  Tamar reached out and up for something.

  Both hands closed around something.

  She struggled from her knees to her feet.

  The beast circled warily, ready to charge her again.

  Her eyes turned fully upon him, a laser beam caught in a hot follow spot.

  And she rapped out the words in exultant victory.

  “One, two! One, two! And through and through

  “The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!

  “He left it dead, and with its head

  “He went galumphing back.”

  The rap ended.

  The beast in its enraged red mask lay dead on the floor at Tamar’s feet.

  Now there was only the B-flat note again, that single repeated bass note, and Tamar fluidly moving the tune into the bluesy figure of its opening melody.

  “And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?

  “Come to my arms, my beamish boy!

  “O Frabjous day! Calloo! Callay!

  “He chortled in his joy.”

  Tamar’s eyes shone, her voice rang out. She was home, baby, she was home.

  “ ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

  “Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

  “All mimsy were the…”

  “Don’t nobody fucking move!”

  Saddam Hussein and Yasir Arafat were coming down the wide mahogany staircase.

  2

  TALL AND LEAN and with the easy stride of an athlete—which he most certainly wasn’t—Steve Carella came into the squadroom at twenty minutes to twelve that Saturday night, fresh as a daisy, and ready to go to work.

  “It’s for you,” Andy Parker said, and handed him the phone.

  Actually, it wasn’t for Carella.

  It was for whichever detective happened to be on duty at the Eight-Seven at this hour of the night. But the Graveyard Shift was just beginning to meander in, and Parker was never too eager to catch a new case, so he considered himself officially relieved, and passed the call on to Carella, who was a bit bewildered by the precise timing.

  “Carella,” he said into the phone.

  “Hello, Carella,” a gruff, smoke-tarnished voice said. “This is Captain Jimson, Harbor Patrol.”

  A jumper, Carella thought at once. Someone’s taken a dive off the Hamilton Bridge.

  “Yes, sir?” he said.

  “I just had a call from one of my people out on the water, a Sergeant McIntosh, aboard one of our thirty-six footers. At around ten-thirty, he responded to a distress call from the skipper of a cruise yacht called the River Princess…are you with me, Coppola?”

  “It’s Carella, sir.”

  “Sorry. The River Princess, some kind of party for a rock singer.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Two armed masked men boarded the boat around ten-fifteen and kidnapped her.”

  Oh boy, Carella thought.

  “You’re the local onshore precinct. Coast Guard has a DPB waiting to take you out there from Pier 39…”

  “Yes, sir,” Carella said.

  He didn’t know what a DPB was.

  “…that’s on the river and Twelfth. How long will it take you to get crosstown?”

  Carella glanced at the precinct wall map.

  “Give me fifteen minutes, sir,” he said.

  “The man you’re meeting is a lieutenant j.g. named Carlyle Apted.”

  “Yes, sir. Sir, would you know who the singer…?”

  But the captain had already hung up, and Cotton Hawes was just walking into the squadroom.

  “Cotton,” he said, “don’t get comfortable. We’re up.”

  COTTON HAWES felt right at home on the Coast Guard’s little 38-foot DPB. This was the kind of boat he’d commanded during his little war. Everybody in America had his own little war, and everybody in that war did his own little thing. Carella had trudged through mud as a grunt in the infantry. Hawes had stood on the bridge of a boat not unlike this one, grinning into flying bullets, spray and spume. Everybody in America who’d ever fought or merely served in any of the country’s innumerable little wars would never forget his own particular war, although sometimes he would like to. But there would always be more little wars and even some big ones, and therefore many more opportunities to remember. Or perhaps forget.

  Cotton Hawes stood on the bridge of the cutter alongside Lieutenant Carlyle Apted, a man in his late twenties, he guessed, who had been summoned to the scene the moment Sergeant McIntosh realized he was dealing with a kidnapping here.

  “Guess he figured this would get Federal sooner or later,” Apted said.

  Then what are we ding here? Carella wondered. Let the Feebs have it now, and welcome to it.

  “What you’re on now,” Apted told Hawes, perhaps suspecting that Carella didn’t really care to know, “is a Deployable Pursuit Boat, what we call a DPB. She’s a thirty-eight footer, designed to give the Coast Guard a new capability in the war against drugs.”

  Another little war, Carella thought.

  “What it is, you see, most of your illegal narcotics are smuggled in on these ‘go-fasts,’ we call ’em. They’re these small, high-speed boats that can carry up to two thousand keys of cocaine. But they can’t outrun our DPBs. Means we can intercept and board and make a sizable dent in the traffic.”

  Carella hated boats. He hated anything that moved on water. Especially DPBs, which seemed to move faster than any damn thing he’d ever seen on water. When he used to bathe his infant twins—lo, those many years ago—even the floating rubber duck in the bathtub made him seasick. Well, perhaps that was an exaggeration. But he was feeling a bit queasy now, and he was also fearful that all that dark greasy water splashing over the bow might be polluted. His face wet, his hair flying in the wind, he wondered what a nice boy like himself was doing on a swiftly moving vehicle in the middle of a deep river on a shift that had just barely begun.

  Tonight, Carella felt—and therefore looked—more like a beloved professor of economics at a municipal college than a detective. Hatless, dark-haired and brown-eyed, the eyes slanting downward to give his face a so
mewhat Oriental appearance, he was wearing an orange-colored life vest over dark brown slacks and matching loafers and socks, a blue button-down shirt, a brown tie, and a tweed jacket that was, in truth, a bit too heavy for the mild weather and a bit too shabby for the sort of party that had been interrupted out there on the River Princess. He was frowning. Well, he was more than frowning. In fact, he looked as if he might throw up. Unamused, he stood on the deck of a tossing peanut-shell vessel, braving the raging briny while two old sea-faring types chatted it up and grinned into the wind.

  Hawes, on the other hand, was in his element.

  Dressed somewhat casually, even for the midnight-to-eight A.M. shift, he was wearing his life jacket over blue jeans, a crew neck green sweater, a zippered brown leather jacket, and ankle high brown boots. He had not expected to be pulled out onto the River Harb tonight—in fact, he’d been planning to do a field follow-up on some bikers he suspected were involved in a liquor store holdup, and he figured the protective coloration might help him. Actually, though, his costume would have fit in beautifully at Tamar Valparaiso’s launch party, where many of the music industry’s moguls were similarly dressed.

  “Ever hear of this girl before?” Apted asked him.

  He had given up on Carella as a lost-cause landlubber.

  “What’s her name?” Hawes asked.

  “Tamar Valentino,” Apted said.

  “No. Is she famous or something?”

  “Not to me,” Apted said.

  “Me, neither,” Hawes said. “Steve!” he yelled over the roar of the wind. “You ever hear of a singer named Tamar Valentino?”

  “No!” Carella yelled back. “Who is she?”

  “The one who got snatched,” Apted said.

  “If she got snatched, she must be somebody,” Hawes said reasonably.

  Carella was wondering if the FBI had already been notified.

  “I HAVE TO tell you the truth,” Sergeant McIntosh said, “I been with the Harbor Patrol Unit for twenty-two years now, this is the first time I ever caught a kidnapping.”

  “We don’t catch many of them onshore, either,” Hawes said.

  “I know, anything we catch—other than immediately address-able—we’re supposed to notify the onshore locals. But ain’t a kidnapping federal stuff?”

  “It could become,” Carella said.

  “I mean, wouldn’t this be considered ‘Special Maritime and Territorial’ jurisdiction?”

  “I really don’t know,” Carella said.

  “I know the Great Lakes are covered,” McIntosh said, “and the St. Lawrence River, and prob’ly the Mississippi and the Hudson…”

  “I couldn’t tell you.”

  “Anyway, what I did was raise the Coast Guard, who I figured would know.”

  “Did they?”

  “No.”

  “The way I figure it,” Carella said, “there’s a state line down the middle of the river, and if the boat crossed that, then the Feds come in automatically.”

  “Sometimes they come in if the case is really high profile,” Hawes said. “Like if this rock singer is somebody really important.”

  “Who is she, anyway?” McIntosh asked.

  “Somebody named Tamar Valentino,” Hawes said.

  “Never heard of her.”

  “Me, neither.”

  “So scratch the FBI.”

  “Unless the boat crossed that state line,” Carella said.

  “Excuse me, gentlemen,” a man in a white uniform said, breaking into the little intimate law enforcement circle. “I’m Charles Reeves, Captain of the River Princess. I’m sorry to interrupt, but we’ve got a hundred and twelve guests aboard this vessel and we’ve been sitting here dead in the water ever since the incident occurred, waiting for some sort of clear indication that we can begin moving her back to port. Is there anyone here who can…?”

  “You can move her,” Carella said.

  “You are, sir?”

  “Detective Stephen Louis Carella. Eighty-seventh Squad.”

  “And you are authorized to…?”

  “It’s our case, yes,” Carella said, and thought, So far. “This is my partner. Detective Cotton Hawes.”

  “Then I’ll get the engines started,” Reeves said dubiously.

  “Yes, that’ll be fine,” Hawes said.

  “We should be docking in about half an hour,” Reeves said. “Will you be finished here by then?”

  “Finished?”

  “What I’m asking is will I be able to disembark the passengers? The yacht was only leased for the night, you know, not the entire month of May.”

  Carella looked at him.

  “I mean, we all have jobs to do,” Reeves said. “I’ve never had anything like this happen before on any vessel I’ve commanded. Never.”

  “It’ll be all right, sir,” Carella said. “Why don’t you go get your engines started?”

  Reeves hesitated a moment longer, as if there were something more he wished to say. Then he merely nodded and went off toward the pilot house.

  “You don’t plan to talk to all hundred and twelve of these people, do you?” McIntosh asked.

  Carella was wondering the same thing.

  EVERYBODY wanted to go home.

  What had started out as a nice party on a nice boat on a nice river had turned into some kind of Fellini nightmare with people in masks running around doing violence to the same pretty young girl.

  Nobody seemed to agree on exactly quite what had happened.

  Given that eye witnesses were notoriously unreliable, this bunch seemed to be more untrustworthy than most. Perhaps they’d been plied with too much alcohol before the occurrence (though the promised champagne toast had to be forsaken, given the unforeseen circumstances) or perhaps the lighting had been too dim or the power of suggestion too strong. Tamar and the young black dancer had, after all, been engaged in some pretty realistic although terpsichorean violence, and all at once two other black guys…

  The witnesses were all convinced the kidnappers were black…

  …came marching down the grand stairway there, brandishing machine guns, and yelling for nobody to fucking move.

  Even Jonah Wills, Tamar’s dance partner, was convinced the two guys who’d kidnapped her were black. Perhaps this was because they were both entirely dressed in black: black denims and black sweatshirts and black running shoes and black leather gloves. Their AK-47s were black, too, which might have contributed to the overall impression of black power. Then, too, Jonah himself was black—although this wasn’t an accurate description of his color, which was more closely related to the mahogany of the stair rail than the color of anthracite, say, or obsidian—and his presence on the dance floor, muscles rippling and gleaming, wearing a mask quite different from the Hussein and Arafat masks the intruders were wearing, might also have contributed to the consensus of opinion that there were now three black men molesting this poor blond white girl wearing hardly anything at all.

  Or perhaps the words “Don’t nobody fucking move!” hadn’t sounded ofay enough to this largely white crowd, although in truth the black-to-white ratio here tonight was larger than you’d find at similar glittery events hither and yon throughout this fair city. Then again, this was the music industry here.

  Even so, everybody wanted to go home.

  Having inherited this cockamamie case from Parker—who was already nursing his third beer in a bar around the corner from his apartment, and chatting up a blonde he didn’t realize was a hooker—Carella and Hawes were reluctant to let anyone go just yet, not until they had a clearer picture of just what the hell had happened here. They were mindful of the fact that the FBI might be coming in behind them, and they didn’t want to hear the usual crap the Feebs laid down about “inefficient and insufficient investigation at the local level.” So they went through the facts—or the perceived facts—again and again until they were able to piece together a more or less scenario-by-committee, not unlike many of the movies one saw these days
, where a hundred and twelve writers shared screen credit, except that it was by now almost two in the morning.

  The party guests unanimously understood that the black guy in the mask that kept changing color and shape throughout the course of the song was supposed to be some kind of mythological beast, some kind of Bandersnatch, in fact, since that was the name of the song, though the man did warn his son to beware the Jabberwock, my son, didn’t he? So maybe the beast was a Jabberwock or even a Jubjub bird. What ever the damn thing was, it was something to be shunned, man, as subsequent events were all too soon to demonstrate.

  Most of the guests agreed, too, that the police should have been called while Tamar’s partner was throwing her all over the dance floor and tearing her already flimsy nightgown, or whatever it was, to tattered ribbons, never a cop around when you needed one. Neo-realism was one thing, but here was this big muscular guy tossing around this little thing who couldn’t weigh more than a hundred and ten pounds, if that, in an utterly convincing attempt to rape her. It didn’t help that she was blond and he was black, the stereotype reinforced. What he was doing to her on that dance floor was intolerable.

  So it was with considerable relief that the audience, black and white alike, saw Tamar wrap her tiny defenseless little hands around thin air, saw her grasp whatever imaginary something she was grasping (a vorpal sword, as it turned out), and rise up against this vicious animal, was what he was! who was determined to violate and despoil this flower of virgin maidenhood. “One two! One two!” they all agreed, “and through and through, the vorpal blade went snicker-snack! He left it dead,” they further agreed, “and with its head, he went galumphing back.”

  The witnesses they questioned all seemed somewhat puzzled as to who exactly the “he” in the lyrics was since Tamar was very much a “she,” especially now that she was standing there tall and proud but bedraggled in her tattered underwear, or whatever it was, with half her admirable attributes hanging out for all and sundry to see. (This was a point that would spark considerable debate in the days to come, but Carella and Hawes didn’t yet know the kind of notoriety this case would inspire; for now, they were just two working stiffs doing their jobs, and trying to protect their asses from Federal flack down the line.) In any case, just as Tamar’s father, or whoever he was, her guardian perhaps, finished congratulating her on having slain the Jabberwock (instead of the Bandersnatch, by the way, after whom the song was named) and just as everything was back to normal again, with all the creatures gyring and gimbling and all the mome raths…