Halfway across the Colden Gate Bridge, sitting beside a beautiful rich dame with a gigantic and very unstable neck driving the car, it came to me: the name for my serial about a private eye in Babylon. I would call it Smith Smith Versus the Shadow Robots. What a great title! I was almost beside myself with joy.
“What is it?” my client said who hadn’t spoken in a couple of minutes as we drove along.
I started to say outloud the title of my serial. It was involuntary but I was able to stop it after the first word blurted itself out.
“Smith—” I said, stopping the rest of the words by sitting a mental elephant down on my tongue.
“Smith?” my client said.
The neck of the chauffeur looked as if it were about to twitch. I sure as hell didn’t want that.
“I just remembered that a friend of mine’s birthday was yesterday and I forgot all about it,” I said. “I was going to give him a present. His name is Smith. A wonderful guy. A fisherman. He’s got a boat down on the wharf. I grew up with his son. We went to Galileo High School together.”
“Oh,” my rich blonde client said with a slightly bored tone to her voice. She didn’t want to hear about a fisherman named Smith. I wondered how she would have reacted if I had finished what I started out to say: Smith Smith Versus the Shadow Robots.
I would have found it very interesting to see how she would have handled that one. Thank God I only said the word Smith. I might have been out a client or even worse that neck might have gone into action.
The neck was relaxed now, just driving the car across the bridge.
A freighter was going out on the tide.
Its lights floated on the water.
“I want you to steal a dead body,” my client said.
The Morning Paper
“What?” I said because a what was certainly needed at this time and nothing else but a what would be adequate for the situation.
“I want you to steal a body from the morgue.”
She didn’t say anything else.
She had very blue eyes. Even in the semidarkness of the car the blue was easy to see. Her eyes were staring at me. They waited for me to respond.
The neck waited, too.
“Sure,” I said. “If the money’s interesting enough I’ll have Abraham Lincoln’s body on your doorstep tomorrow with the morning paper.”
That was exactly what she wanted to hear.
The neck wanted to hear it, too.
“How does a thousand dollars sound?” she said.
“For a thousand dollars,” I said, “I’ll bring you a whole cemetery.”
Beer Tastes on
a Champagne Budget
The lights of San Francisco looked beautiful shining across the hay from where we were sitting in a little bar in Sausalito.
My client was enjoying a beer.
She took a great deal of pleasure from drinking it. She didn’t drink the way you’d expect her to. There was nothing lady-like the way she handled her beer. She drank beer like a longshoreman on payday.
She’d taken her fur coat off and underneath she was wearing a dress that showed off a knockout figure. This whole thing was just like a pulp detective story. I couldn’t believe it.
The neck was out in the car, waiting for us, so I felt a little more relaxed around her. If I wanted to I could use the word champagne without fear of the unknown. The world sure is a strange place. No wonder I spend so much time dreaming of Babylon. It’s safer.
“Where is the body you want stolen?” I said, watching this delicate-looking rich dame belt down a gulp of beer. Then belch. “You really enjoy your beer, don’t you?” I said.
“I have beer tastes on a champagne budget,” she said.
When she said champagne I involuntarily looked around for the neck. Thank God it was in the car.
“Now about this body you want,” I said.
“Where do they keep bodies?” she said as if I were a little slow.
“A lot of places,” I said. “But mostly in the ground. Do I need a shovel for this job?”
“No, silly,” she said. “The body’s in the morgue. Isn’t that a logical place to keep one?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’ll do.”
She took another huge gulp of beer.
I motioned to the cocktail waitress to bring us some more beer. While I did this my client finished off the one that was in front of her. I think she’d just set the world record for a rich woman drinking a beer. I don’t think Johnny Weissmuller could have gone through a beer any faster.
The waitress put another beer down in front of her.
I was still dabbling in an Old Crow on the rocks that I had ordered when we first came into the place. It would be my only drink. I wasn’t much of a drinking person: a drink now and then, and one was my limit.
She went at the second beer with the same relish she had applied to the first beer. She was right when she said that she was a beer drinker.
“Do you think you can handle stealing a body from the morgue?” she said.
“Yeah, I can handle it,” I said.
Then something popped up like a shooting gallery rabbit in my mind. Peg-lcg had told me that she’d looked at the body of the dead prostitute for possible identification as a relative but said it wasn’t the right person and she’d been very cold about the whole thing as if looking at dead bodies was a normal part of her day.
I thought about her crying when she left the morgue.
This was getting interesting.
Playing it casual, I said, “Who’s the body you want me to steal from the morgue?”
“Who it is isn’t important,” she said. “That’s my business. I just want you to get the body for me. It’s the body of a young woman. She’s upstairs in the autopsy room. There’s a four-unit storage space for corpses built into the wall. She’s on the top left side. She’s got a Jane Doe tag on her big toe. Get her for me.”
“OK,” I said. “Where do you want the body after I get it?”
“I want you to take it to a cemetery,” she said.
‘That’s simple enough,” I said. “That’s where bodies end up, anyway.”
I ordered her another beer. She had already finished the second one. I had never seen a glass of beer look so empty, so fast before in my life. She practically breathed beer.
“Thank you,” she said.
“When do you want the body?” I said.
“Tonight,” she said. “Holy Rest Cemetery.”
‘“That sounds soon enough,” I said.
“May I ask what you’re going to do with it?” I said.
“Come on, bright boy,” she said. “What do you do with bodies in a cemetery?”
“OK,” I said. “I get the picture. Do you want me to bring along a shovel?”
“No,” she said. “You just bring the body to the cemetery and we’ll take care of the rest. AII we want from you is the body.”
When she said we, I assumed what it took to make a we was the neck.
I ordered her another beer.
Earthquake in
an Anvil Factory
“It’s now seven-thirty,” she said as we were sitting in the back seat of the limousine being driven back to San Francisco by the neck.
“I want the body at the cemetery at one A.M.,” she said very succinctly, not showing in the slightest the effects of the six beers she’d put away in record time.
“OK,” I said. “But if I’m late you can start without me.”
The neck twitched in the front seat.
“Just kidding,” I said.
“It’s very important that the body be there at one A.M.,” she said. She was sitting close to me and her breath hadn’t the slightest scent of beer to it. Also, after finishing the six beers she got directly back into the car without going to the toilet. I wondered where in the hell the beer had gone to.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll have the body there on time.”
“Good,” s
he said.
I paused before I spoke again. I wanted the words that I was going to use to be the right ones. I didn’t want any sloppy or inadequate words to come out of my mouth.
“I’II need half my fee up front,” I said. “And also, I’ll need three hundred dollars expense money. Some palms are going to have to be greased. I think you can appreciate the fact that stealing a body from the morgue is not your everyday run-of-the-mill thing. The city doesn’t particularly like to lose bodies. People are prone to ask questions. It takes money to provide the answers.”
“I understand,” she said.
I looked over at her.
Where in the hell was that beer?
“Mr. Cleveland,” she said to the neck driving the car.
The neck reached into his coat pocket and took out a roll of bills and handed them back to me. The roll contained exactly eight hundred dollars in one hundred dollar bills. It was as if they had read my mind.
“Is that satisfactory?” she said.
I almost fainted when the money was handed to me. It had been a long time like light-years to the nearest star. I hadn’t seen this much money since I’d gotten paid off for my automobile accident.
This was definitely the start of an upward trend in my life.
I couldn’t have been happier as I sat there driving across the Golden Gate Bridge and all I had to do to earn the money was to steal a corpse.
Then the neck spoke for the first time. A voice that sounded like an earthquake in an anvil factory came from the front of the neck that didn’t bother to turn its head toward me.
“Don’t fuck up,” the neck said. “We want that body.”
The
Private Detectives
of San Francisco
I didn’t take the neck seriously. Stealing that body would not be a difficult task at all. There would be nothing to it. It was as good as in the cemetery right now.
I felt wonderful as we went through the tollgate.
I was on top of the world.
Money again!
I’d be able to get some of my debts off my back and be able to have an office again and maybe even a part-time secretary. I could even afford an old car to get around in.
Things couldn’t have looked better for me at that time. I was looking at the world through rose-colored glasses. It didn’t even bother me that I couldn’t figure out where six glasses of beer had disappeared to in my fancy client. They were there someplace. That’s all I needed to know.
Something crossed my contented mind.
I couldn’t resist asking about it.
“By the way,” I said. “How did you hear about me? I mean, there are a lot more well-known private detectives in San Francisco. Why did you choose me?”
“You’re the only one we could trust to steal a body for us,” the rich blonde said. “The other detectives might have some scruples. You don’t have any.”
It was of course true.
I wasn’t offended at all.
I didn’t have anything to hide.
“Where did you hear about me?” I said.
“I have my sources,” she said.
“D0n’t fuck up,” the neck said.
Future Practice
I had them let me off at a fancy apartment building with a doorman a few blocks away from where I lived. I told them that’s where I lived.
They pulled up in front of the place and let me out.
The doorman looked curiously at me.
“Thanks for taking me home,” I said.
The neck turned toward me as I got out of the car and it spoke. “Why do you want to get out here?” it said. “You don’t live here. You live in a rat-trap a couple of blocks away. But maybe you need the exercise. We don’t care where you live. We just want that body at the south gate of Holy Rest Cemetery at one A.M. Sharp.”
I stood there not being able to think of anything to say.
Who were these people? How did they know so much about me? I didn’t think I was that popular.
“I’m practicing,” I said, finally. “Someday I’ll live here.”
The neck started to speak again, “Don’t—”
“I know,” I said “Fuck up.”
“See you later, Mr. Card,” the fancy blonde said to me with six glasses of beer hidden somewhere in her beautiful body.
The car drove slowly away.
I watched it until it turned a corner and was gone.
The doorman started sweeping the sidewalk. He was sweeping very close to me. I moved on.
C. Card,
Private Investigator
I still hadn’t called my mother.
She was back from the cemetery by now.
I’d better get that done with. Also, I’d be able to tell her that I could repay some of the money that I had borrowed from her. Of course I wouldn’t tell her the size of my fee because she’d want more money than I wanted to repay her.
I was very much interested now in getting an office, a secretary and a car. My mother could wait. She was used to it. She wouldn’t do anything but put the money in the bank, and that’s the last place in this world where I wanted my money.
I needed an office that had
C. Card
Private Investigator
in gold on the door, and I needed a gorgeous secretary taking dictation.
Dear Mr. Cupertino,
Thank you very much for the five-hundred-dollar bonus for finding your daughter. It’s a pleasure to do business with a gentleman. If you ever lose her again, you know where to find me, and the next time it’s on the house.
Yours sincerely,
C. Card
And I needed a car so I could get around town without wearing holes in my shoes. There’s something about a private detective walking or taking the bus that lacks class.
It makes clients uncomfortable to meet a private detective who has a bus transfer sticking out of his shirt pocket. But right now I’d better call my mother.
I walked a couple of blocks to a phone booth.
I dropped a nickel in and then put the receiver up to my ear. There was no dial tone. I pressed the coin return but my nickel stayed inside the telephone. I clicked the telephone hook. Silence continued inside the receiver, and it was not golden. It was my fucking nickel.
God-damn it!
I was out a nickel.
Big business had fucked me over again.
I hit the telephone a couple of times with my fist to make the point that some people won’t take being robbed without putting up a fight.
I left the phone booth and walked hall a block.
I turned around and looked angrily hack al the telephone. An old man was standing inside the booth. He had the receiver in his hand and he was talking to somebody on the telephone.
You just can’t win.
I wondered if the old man was using his nickel or perhaps in some totally unjust way he had managed to make his call as the result of my nickel.
The only revenge I got out of the situation was the thought that if he was making that call with my nickel, I hoped that he was calling his doctor to get some relief from a hideous attack of hemorrhoids.
That was the only way that I was going to come out on top of this bad deal.
I turned around and walked to the bus stop on Clay Street. I was going to take the bus down to the morgue. I could have gotten a cab but I decided to take the bus as a sort of farewell bus trip because I was never going to have to ride a bus again.
This was the last time.
A young woman was waiting for the bus.
She was kind of good looking, so I decided to try out my new affluence by giving her a big smile and saying good evening.
She didn’t return the smile and she didn’t say good evening.
She nervously turned her back on me.
Suddenly the bus loomed up a block away.
A minute later I was sitting on the bus heading back down to the morgue. I got on the bus first and when I s
at down in a front seat, the young woman went to the back of the bus.
I’ve just never been a lady’s man but that was all going to change as soon as I stole that body and got the rest of my fee and became the most famous private detective in San Francisco, make that California, no, let’s make it America. Why settle for less than the whole God-damn country?
I already had a foolproof plan to steal the body.
Nothing could go wrong.
It was perfect.
So I settled back in my seat and started dreaming of Babylon. My mind slipped effortlessly back into the past. I was no longer on the bus. I was in Babylon.
Chapter 1 /
Smith Smith Versus
the Shadow Robots
Deep in the hidden recesses of his cellar laboratory hidden under the clinic that he used to lure unsuspecting sick people into only to change them into shadow robots, Dr. Abdul Forsythe was removing a person who had been changed into a shadow from his diabolical transformation chamber.
“This is a good one,” he said, examining the texture of the shadow.
“You’re a genius,” his henchman Rotha said, standing beside the doctor, looking at the shadow. After admiring his handiwork, Dr. Abdul Forsythe gave the shadow to Rotha who took it over and put it on top of a six-foot pile of shadows. There were a thousand shadows in the pile. There were a dozen or so piles in the laboratory.
Dr. Forsythe had enough shadows to create an artificial night large enough to take over a small town. He only lacked one thing to put his plot into action. That one ingredient was the mercury crystals that had just been invented by Dr. Francis, a humanitarian doctor who had devoted his life to good works in Babylon. He lived near the Ishtar Cate with his beautiful daughter Cynthia who had a half-sister named Nana-dirat.
Dr. Francis had invented the mercury crystals to power a rocket ship that he was constructing to fly to the moon with.
After Rotha had put the shadow of an unfortunate sandal maker, who’d come to the clinic to have a sore looked at but had stayed to end up as a shadow and part of a diabolical plan, on the pile, he returned to the side of his evil master.
Dreaming of Babylon Page 7
