[Mike Hammer 14] - The Goliath Bone

by Mickey Spillane; Max Alan Collins

  Laugh at the old man if you want, but I fell asleep maybe half an hour in, and was having a perfectly good snooze when a sudden trumpet fanfare made me jump in my seat—I think everybody jumped in their seats.

  The theater resounded with brazen brass and the throbbing beat of kettledrums punctuated by clangs from monstrous gongs, rising in intensity as the lights came down onstage. Soon only the figure of the actor playing David remained, in pinpoint spotlight. His costume a simple shepherd's peplum tied with a rope, David held a crooked staff in one hand while a leather sling dangled from the other. The wild sounds diminished slowly until only a haunting, reedy, piping tune remained.

  The auditorium was pin-drop quiet, a very sophisticated New York theatergoing audience held as if hypnotized. Velda reached for my hand and squeezed it, her palm hot and sweaty.

  Despite some ill-at-ease moments earlier, the young pop star was in control now, facing an audience that he knew he had, his voice amplified but its tone soft and elegant, yet touched with power, and how much was him and how much the sound technicians, I could only wonder. He spoke, intimately yet commandingly, directly to the audience, as if each of them was the only other person in the room.

  David told the audience that he would soon have to face the consequences of his decision to abandon all armor and go out with no shield or sword to face the giant warrior, carrying only that simple child's toy, a slingshot. The crowd of seen-it-all New Yorkers was his.

  Then the lights came up and David was not alone anymore—he was center stage, with thirty Israelite soldiers at stage right, and thirty Philistine soldiers at stage left, all in heavy armor with swords raised high, as if prepared to begin a battle that a movie screen could hardly contain, let alone a stage.

  The soldiers cried out at each other in hostility that strained to be unleashed into warfare. No music now, just yelling and shouting in a dissonant symphony of hatred.

  Slowly, David's hand went up and the vocal cacophony ceased and again the theater fell silent.

  He stared toward the stage-left wings and said, "I came to meet Goliath!"

  A booming voice offstage rumbled throughout the theater: "And you shall meet Goliath!"

  A monster that took me back to Kong again stomped out from the wings, each footstep a small earthquake you could feel in your seat, a massive, vicious-looking figure promising incredible violence, a ten-foot helmeted giant in the full battle dress of the Philistines. His teeth shone through his full black beard like the mandibles of a great white shark and his eyes rolled weirdly in his head, as he surveyed the soldiers, and the upstart pipsqueak, in front of him. The spear in his fist was like a steering oar and the armor covering him was of polished copper. He was almost twice the height of David, and though his movements were not quite human, they were not quite not human, either...

  He let out a roar and took a step forward, the spear going back, poised to throw, and someone in the audience screamed. I glanced around, grinning to myself, thinking it was funny that this hokum could inspire a scream like that, only to see audience members clinging to each other, some standing, a few even clambering to the nearest exits.

  Velda's nails were biting into my palm.

  "Doll, it's a mechanical beast. Hey, a great show, but just a show."

  She shook her head, eyes huge, as she swung the arcs of black hair, checking to the sides and behind her. "Mike," she whispered, "look at the audience!"

  "Yeah, I know. They've been brainwashed by all the publicity."

  "But, Mike—"

  "Relax. It's make-believe, kitten."

  David was ready with his sling and Goliath stood poised not six feet from him, his armored animatronic chest heaving with mechanical breath.

  "Ladies and gentlemen," a voice boomed from the speakers.

  Everyone onstage, including the soldiers and David and his robotic adversary, froze. And certainly everybody in the audience did the same.

  From the wings strode Harold Cooke himself, in a tuxedo sharp enough for Fred Astaire.

  "I do apologize," he said, genial but serious. "Breaking the fourth wall is committing the cardinal sin in the theater. But the sins of the world David and Goliath lived in override any such petty concerns. I know what you came to see—you came to see Goliath."

  He strode over to the ten-foot frozen Philistine.

  "Son of a bitch is P. T. Barnum," I whispered to Velda.

  Indicating his star attraction with a dramatic sweep of a hand, Cooke bellowed, "You came to see the real Goliath—and now you shall! From the Valley of Elah, where he has lain for thousands of years ... behold Goliath, the giant warrior of the Philistines!"

  And with that, Goliath strode to centerstage, with a whirring of moving parts and the rush of air pumps and a clanking of armor as David backed up, though the other soldiers stayed at attention. The towering figure, with uncanny human ease, reached down and tore off the armor that had covered his right limb from hip to knee ... and there was the bone!

  Shining, gleaming white, glistening wet as if with some natural lubricant, fully functional and perfectly fitted into the hip and knee joints and, as disgusting as it was, the effect was startling, almost as if the flesh had been torn off in battle and you were seeing the massive femur that allowed the great warrior to carry on.

  Goliath threw back his head and roared with deep disturbing laughter, and though Cooke or his director had contrived the moment, the result felt real—at least it did to the woman across the aisle from me, who fainted ... and to all the audience members slumping down in their seats, or clinging to the stranger next to them in utter fright, and in particular those who ran for exits when the ghastly giant bared his teeth again, and looked out into the audience as if trolling for victims.

  Where was Fay Wray when you needed her, to calm this beast down?

  Harold Cooke was smiling, and reveling in his audience's discomfort the way a roller-coaster owner relishes it when record numbers of his patrons upchuck. Cooke seemed about to take his leave and unfreeze the action and let the famous story play out when four men in tuxedos came rushing out of the audience, two up the stairs at either side of the stage, in a sudden assault that looked utterly ridiculous but wasn't.

  They each had a heavy tool in hand, a crowbar or a wrench, and some confederate at the theater must have conveniently left a toolbox or two where these intruders could find them, because the checkpoint getting into the theater had been better than at that NYU research facility. A diabolical yell of "Allahu akbar!" shrilled from the tallest one, who led the charge as they ran to the giant Goliath, their makeshift weapons about to swing at the leg joints.

  Whether they were attempting to destroy this symbol of their defeat or reduce it to a mechanical pile of rubble so they could retrieve the Goliath bone as a trophy of a fallen past hero, I have no idea, because something went terribly wrong after the first swipe of a crowbar. The electronic engineering had created an animatronic actor unprepared for improvisation, and the programming that made Goliath behave collided with whatever plans the men had, as everything came apart, Goliath crashing down without even a pebble being flung at him, landing facedown hard on the four attackers, creating a terrible massive percussive series of sounds from metal and bone and plastic and flesh and electronics and blood.

  I was close to the stage, but still had to fight to get through the panicking crowd, who were doing their own King Kong impression trying to jam into the exits, sixteen hundred theatergoers reviewing the play with screams of terror.

  When I got up there, I found another casualty, not apparent from the audience: a detached massive arm, including the hand bearing the enormous spear, had pinned Harold Cooke to the stage floor.

  The showman should survive—the arm had just missed coming down on his head—but a lot of bones besides Goliath's were broken or even crushed.

  He looked up at me past a chunk of armor with a horror-stricken expression.

  "You people are right," I said. "No business like show
business—I'll try to get somebody over here to help you."

  Security guards were belatedly making it onto the stage.

  Cooke swallowed and nodded; the perfect silver hair was crooked—damn thing had been a toupee. "The bone ... the bone...destroyed?"

  The femur had shattered under the weight, the Goliath bone he'd invested in just a worthless clutter of white fragments and dust.

  "Yup. And this publicity I don't think you'll love."

  Stage managers and crew members were scrambling around, security guys, too, assorted frantic people on cell phones, summoning ambulances and police. A house doctor was on hand and he was dealing with Cooke, but they'd need a damn crane to lift that arm off him.

  Under the twisted and scrambled metal that had been Goliath were four men. Three were very dead. Things were seeping out of their pierced bodies, and one seemed to be broken in half. The other one was still alive, and his eyes were hating me as I grinned at him.

  I knelt and said, "You fell for a gag, chum—got yourselves killed over a lousy piece of machinery. That's not even the real bone."

  His dark eyes were fading.

  But I had some time left with him: "The world'll laugh at you for the idiots you are. Few minutes from now, you'll be dead, but paradise is waiting, right? Think again. I'm going to make sure they bury you with a pork chop tied around your damn neck."

  Then his eyes filmed over. Nobody on this stage had ever had better timing than me.

  Velda and the kids were among the only audience members left when I came down from the stage.

  "Mike," Velda asked, "what were you saying to that son of a bitch?"

  "Aw, I was just comforting him. Anybody for Sardi's?"

  A few days later, a cold rainy Sunday, I made arrangements with Dr. Charlene Hurley to quietly and discreetly swap the real Goliath bone for the duplicate in her possession. She had no way of knowing that the real relic was on the ocean's floor, buried in a watery grave with another dead Goliath. That was news I needed to break to her personally, and not on the telephone, nor in her apartment where the kids might intrude.

  We set it up for 3:00 P.M., and through Mr. Rogers, certain security measures were lifted. I told Charlene that the exchange being made today needed to stay confidential, so the sophisticated scanning in that high-tech visitors' circle outside the sleek steel door of her lab needed to be shut off for the afternoon. She had said that would be no problem.

  I hoped she'd taken me literally and turned that surveillance off for the entire afternoon, because I arrived an hour and a half early. And I didn't come in through the front entry with its security checkpoint: I availed myself of the way in that Mr. Rogers had pointed out to me, weeks before. I allowed half an hour, and brought some tools along, to get through the closed-off construction workers' latrine, then took the rear stairs down to the lower floor.

  On Sunday the hallway of metal doors was as dead as Dr. George Hurley. I used a key card I'd been provided on one of my early trips to the lab and the steel door slid open and I went in to the big, sterile stainless-steel chamber. She was standing at one of the metal lab tables where she had four Mylar-enclosed ragged-edged brown documents spread out for examination with a magnifying glass.

  The sound of the door opening had alerted her, and she was facing me as I entered, smiling at her, nodding. The door slid shut behind me. She wore a white lab coat as usual and slacks, and yet her beauty was undeniable, the big brown eyes and the golden blonde curls looking almost white under the fluorescents. Even the curves of her full-breasted, slim-waisted, full-hipped body couldn't be blunted by the scientist's garb.

  "Mike," she said, her half-smile guarded, "you startled me ... you're early.... "

  "I figured you'd probably be here already, working. Hope you don't mind."

  "No, not at all."

  I was beside her now. I nodded toward the documents. "More dead language stuff?"

  "No, this is Hebrew. Ninth century B.C.E."

  "What's that?"

  "Before the Common Era. We don't use the B.C. designation anymore."

  I pointed. "What's that one you're examining?"

  "A widow's petition. Seeking the rights to her husband's property, primarily a wheat field."

  "Kind of fitting."

  She gave me a troubled glance. "I expected you to be carrying a big cardboard box, Mike."

  I shrugged and grinned. "I'm afraid I have to disappoint you, Charlene. The only relic I brought is me. And the only artifact is this—"

  I slipped my hand under my trench coat and inside my suit coat and came back with the .45. I held it at my waist, casually, but pointed it right at her.

  I'll give her this much. She didn't argue. The beautiful brown eyes assumed a coldness, like polished agates, and her mouth a hardness that took some of its beauty away. But there were no denials.

  "Your husband mentioned that you were Jewish and that you'd spent time as a young woman in Israel in a kibbutz. But so have a lot of American Jews. So when I first heard of this terrorist outfit, the Kakh, it didn't even cross my mind that you might be part of it."

  She folded her arms. Her chin came up. "The Kakh is a patriotic Israeli organization. We are not terrorists."

  "The State of Israel disagrees. So do I. The Kakh was in on this from the beginning, torturing and killing that Arab driver in Israel. Then, working through your Chicago contact, Kaddour, you arranged for a shooter to come to New York, and you provided the NYU ID papers he carried as a cover. Papers or not, he had al-Qaeda written all over him—literally, in the case of his Rada Rey tattoo—and his first job was to take a controlled potshot at your own daughter. Your own damn daughter, Charlene!"

  One eyebrow came up in a tiny facial shrug.

  I grunted a laugh. "That was no miss on an attempted hit—the shooter hit that handbag, just like he was supposed to, an action meant to scare your daughter and stepson and convince your husband that the Goliath bone was too dangerous to hold on to. Would Kakh have used it for recruiting and morale building? Or would you have really let Israel take charge of it, with you and your husband doing the research?"

  She spoke calmly, evenly. "My husband was a good man. But he did not share my enthusiasm, my beliefs, for a cause that I think, Mike, you know in your heart is a righteous one."

  "If you expect me to equate Israel with the Kakh, I'd sooner equate the USA with the Ku Klux Klan. You're a zealot, lady, just like the maggots who took down the Trade Towers. No difference—just a different shade of crazy."

  Her eyes flared, her nostrils, too. "You're wrong. I'm a soldier, and our cause is just."

  "Did you love your husband?"

  That, at least, shook her a little. "Of course I did."

  "But it didn't stop you from shooting him, when he found out what you were up to—and that kill you did yourself, Charlene. In that alley in the Village, where he stood close enough to his loving wife for her to shoot his brains out all over the bricks."

  Now the eyes settled down, half-lidded orbs watching me carefully. "Sacrifices must be made for the greater good."

  "You took Kaddour out, too, didn't you? That Arab patsy that Kaddour sent here from Chicago, and then sent back again, cleaned up all your other loose ends, like those three expendable black guys in Harlem, right? But that made Kaddour a loose end himself, particularly when I got his name out of your shooter and sicced the FBI boys onto the case."

  She smiled. Laughed. "Now you have me killing people in Chicago. I seem to get around."

  "You do. Your daughter mentioned at the David and Goliath opening the other night that you've been out of town for a dead-languages seminar. I had Captain Chambers check up—that seminar was at the Drake Hotel in Chicago. Then I had some Windy City PIs I use do some further checking—the afternoon Kaddour was killed, you attended none of the meetings."

  She unfolded her arms, put her hands on her hips, her chin still up, quietly defiant, with a beauty that still shouted. "That doesn't sound like evidence."<
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  I raised the .45 a notch. "Does anything you've heard or read about me make you think I give a shit about evidence? You're not a soldier with a righteous cause, you're a monster who gives a righteous cause a bad name. If I were younger and quicker, maybe a bunch of people would still be alive, maybe even your husband—hell, you were the one who set up that attempted kidnapping of your kids! It was in a goddamn apartment building you and your husband owned! You would endanger your own kids and use them as pawns in your personal fucking chess game."

  A tiny shrug was her defense. Then she added, "Only Jenna is mine. Matthew was George's. And if you think I don't know that they are fucking each other, you underestimate my abilities as a historian and scientist."

  I gaped at her. "So, then—Matt would be the next Hurley to reside in a gold vase for scattering in the Valley of Elah? You're a dead-languages expert, all right—you speak the language of death fluently. Shit, I don't care what country you represent, lady. I don't care about your politics and I don't even care about that lovely body of yours, and nice try on the seduction, by the way. You got a rise out of me, but I don't go into a marriage by cheating the night before."

  Her mouth curled up at both sides in a smile both beautiful and snide. "Don't be so smug, Hammer. You're the king of ends justifies the means. How can you condemn what my group does in a world where the Islamic extremists want not only me but my entire country exterminated?"

  I shook my head. "I'm just one guy who balances the books now and then, not a group or a government. You? You're the plague. You're evil, lady. I dumped the Goliath bone in the Atlantic Ocean, but I'll make you another candidate for the Valley of Elah. Only I'll make sure they scatter you in a different part than your husband's ashes. Out of respect to him."

  I thought she was there alone. I knew a little storeroom opened off one end of the big shiny chamber, but it never occurred to me some asshole accomplice of hers would sneak up behind me and try to clobber me with the butt end of a .22.

  But at least I heard him at the last second, and spun, and just as the nondescript balding guy in the blue smock swung his hand up to hit me with the gun butt, I bashed him in the left temple with the heel of the fist clutching the grip of the .45, like I was pounding a nail. He was dead almost instantly, collapsing in a pile.