Laugh Lines

by Ben Bova

  On that same foggy, drizzly day in November, Moriarty learned that his hunch was right. At the cost of his life.

  He was on a routine call to question a witness to a liquor store holdup in the Village when it happened.

  Moriarty stepped out of his vintage Pinto (the auto was his only discernible vice) in front of the liquor store in question. The street was slick from the chilly rain. Only a few people were passing by, and they all were hidden beneath umbrellas. Bunching his tired old trenchcoat around his middle, Moriarty got as far as the liquor store’s front entrance.

  He felt a sharp jab in his back, then a horrible burning sensation flamed through his whole body. He had stopped breathing before he hit the sidewalk.

  The umbrella-toting pedestrians stepped over his prostrate body and continued on their way.

  Twenty

  That evening, the cold November rain gave way to the season’s first snowfall. It was nothing much, as snowstorms go, merely a half inch or less of wet mushy flakes that turned to black slush almost as soon as it hit the streets. But the evening newscasts were agog with the story of the storm: coiffed and pancaked anchorpersons quivered with excitement while reporters at various strategic locations around the city—the airports, the train and bus terminals, the Department of Public Works headquarters, the major highway bottlenecks—stood out in the wet snow and solemnly reported how the city almost had been hit by a crisis.

  “Although the traffic appears to be flowing smoothly through the Lincoln Tunnel,” said the bescarfed young lady on Channel 4, “it wouldn’t take much more snow to turn this evening’s homeward rush into a commuter’s nightmare.” Behind her, streams of buses proceeded without a hitch into the tunnel.

  Channel 2’s stalwart investigative reporter was at the airport offices of the U.S. Weather Service, where he had collared a wimpy-looking meteorologist.

  “Why didn’t the Weather Bureau provide warnings of this potential disaster?” he demanded.

  The wimp’s eyebrows rose almost to his receding hairline. “What disaster? You call a half-inch snow a disaster? The Blizzard of ‘88 this ain’t!”

  Still, all the channels buzzed with stories about the snow, the most inventive being a satellite report from a ski resort in Vermont, where the slopes were still green with grass.

  The news of the storm smothered a human-interest story about a city police detective who had been the apparent victim of a senseless, purposeless murder. Thanks to the miracles of modern medicine, though, the detective had been revived from a state of clinical death and was recuperating in St. Vincent’s Hospital, in the Village.

  By morning the snow had been obliterated from the city by the ceaseless pounding of millions of buses, trucks, taxicabs, limousines, and pedestrians’ feet. The Department of Public Works had not had to call out a single snow plow or digging crew. Still the trains ran two hours late, and the morning backup of traffic at the bridges and tunnels was ferocious.

  Ferocious was the mood, also, of P. Curtis Hawks as he rode in his limousine through the crowded city streets to the annual board meeting of Tarantula Enterprises, Ltd. Vinnie DeAngelo, the Beast from the East, slept with the fishes ever since the fiasco of the cruise missile. Weldon W. Weldon, senile and crippled, still ran Tarantula from his infested jungle of an office. Webb Press—what was left of it—was now located in Brooklyn, in a building that had once been a fruit-and-vegetable warehouse. The place still smelled of onions.

  This meeting is the shoot-out, Hawks told himself. High noon. There isn’t room enough in this corporation for the Old Man and me. One of us has got to go, and it’s not going to be me. He shifted the pacifier from one side of his mouth to the other and sucked in his gut. Got to make a good impression on the board of directors, he knew. Got to make them see that the Old Man has run Webb into the ground.

  It would not be easy. But Hawks smiled a bitter, cold smile when he thought about his secret weapon. I’ll pin the Old Man’s balls to the table, or what’s left of them. And his own creature, Gunther God-Damned Axhelm, is going to do the job for me.

  “All rise.”

  From the front row of seats in the courtroom, Carl Lewis got to his feet together with everyone else as Justice Hanson H. Fish walked slowly, solemnly, in his black robes to his high chair behind the banc.

  Lori stood beside Carl on one side, Ralph and Scarlet Dean were on his other side. Mrs. Bunker was at the table where the defense attorneys—all five of them—sat. Both Mrs. Bee and Scarlet were decked out in the latest fashion: the toothpaste-tube look. Their dresses were tight enough to asphyxiate, and shirred, niched, pleated—wrinkled—so that they looked like the last moments of a toothpaste tube that had been squeezed to death. Skirts were midthigh and so tight that they could barely walk. Alba Bunker wore all white, of course, while Scarlet Dean was completely in red. Between them they wore enough jewelry to ransom a planeload of OPEC oil ministers.

  Lori, as usual, ignored the weekly fashion and had dressed in a sensible plaid suit with a light green turtleneck beneath the jacket. Her skirt was knee-length, her jewelry confined to a small pair of earrings and matching copper bracelet and necklace.

  Woody Balogna wore his best suit, which still looked ten years old and badly in need of a cleaning. He sat at the table for the plaintiff, with a single odd-looking attorney who represented the sales force.

  Woody’s lawyer was dressed in a deep blue velvet leisure suit, the kind that had gone out of style with Alan Alda, countless ages ago. A western-type string tie was pulled up against his prominent Adam’s apple, cinched by a lump of turquoise big enough to be used in a shot-put contest. The man’s wide-brimmed cowboy hat rested on the table before him, next to a battered slim leather case that looked like the saddle bag of an old Pony Express rider. Apparently it contained all the notes and papers he had brought to the courtroom. He had a rugged, seamed, weatherbeaten face and long flowing dark hair with a wild streak of silver in it. He looked as if he had not shaved that morning; his jaw was covered with grayish stubble.

  Mrs. Bunker’s five defense attorneys all wore traditional gray flannels and Ivy League ties painted on their starched white shirts. Their faces were shaved clean and scrubbed glowing pink. They looked young, confident, yet serious. Their briefcases were huge and thicker than parachute packs. Mrs. Bee looked nervous, though, and kept glancing over her shoulder toward the door that opened onto the corridor as if the one thought in her mind was to get up and flee from the courtroom.

  Carl thought the courtroom was strangely empty, considering the importance of the case. No news reporters, no TV lights, hardly anybody in the visitors’ pews at all except for the few Bunker employees and himself. And no jury. Both sides had waived their right to a jury trial; this case would be decided by Justice H. H. Fish alone, in his impartial wisdom. And then appealed, of course, by the loser. The lawyers saw the prospects of many years of high-priced work ahead of them.

  While the bailiff read the title of the case and the charges, Carl studied the judge sitting up there above them all. His utterly bald head looked like a death’s skull glaring down at them. Carl felt his easy confidence in the unassailable righteousness of the Cyberbooks project begin to melt away under the baleful glower of the judge’s implacable eyes.

  “Motions?” asked the judge.

  One of the defense attorneys popped to his feet. They all looked so much alike that Carl thought they might be clones.

  “Move to dismiss,” said the attorney in a clear, crisp voice. “This suit is without grounds and totally irrelevant . . . .”

  “Motion denied,” snapped Justice Fish.

  The young lawyer looked surprised. He sat down.

  “Opening statements,” the judge said. “Plaintiff?”

  The westerner gangled to his feet. He was tall and lean as a fencepost.

  “What we’ve got here,” he drawled, “is a clear case of a deliberate, intentional—I might even say evil and pernicious—attempt to eliminate the jobs of a whol
e flock of hardworking, loyal, and faithful employees, and to substitute in their place a heartless, soulless, newfangled machine whose only purpose is to make money for the greedy employers of these poor and long-suffering working men and women.”

  The lawyer’s words shocked Carl. How could he describe Cyberbooks that way? It wasn’t true. None of what he was saying was true.

  But then he saw the expression on the judge’s face. A benign smile, such as saint might bestow on a nativity scene.

  We’re in deep trouble, Carl belatedly realized.

  Detective Lieutenant Jack Moriarty opened his eyes and saw a smooth, featureless expanse of pastel blue. I must have made it to heaven, he said to himself.

  Then he heard a faint humming sound, and a rhythmic beeping. He tried to turn his head and found that there was no difficulty with it. It’s not heaven, he realized as he focused on a bank of electronic monitoring instruments, their screens showing a steady heartbeat and breathing rate. He felt slightly disappointed, immensely relieved. I’m in an intensive care ward. His detective’s brain concluded it was St. Vincent’s Hospital, in the heart of Greenwich Village.

  For an immeasurable length of time he lay in the bed unmoving, reliving in his mind those last few minutes in front of the liquor store. Whoever had attacked him, it was no random act of violence. The perpetrator knew who he was, and had followed him to the liquor store. Of that Moriarty was certain. It was the Retiree Murderer; the method of operation fit, and so did the fact that the victim—himself—owned a few shares of Tarantula Enterprises, Ltd.

  “Welcome back to the living!”

  Moriarty turned his head toward the heartily cheerful voice and saw a grossly overweight black man in a white doctor’s smock with a day’s stubble on his fleshy, wattled face. He’s got more chins than the Chinatown phone directory, Moriarty said to himself.

  “I am Dr. Kildaire,” said the medic in a lilting Jamaican accent. “And no jokes, if you please.”

  For all his unlikely appearance, Kildaire was a first-rate physician. Moriarty learned that he had been clinically dead when the ambulance had brought him in.

  “A very rare poison, the kind you only see in the tropics. Distilled from the sap of a jungle flower known in Brazil as the Rita Hayworth orchid, for some obscure reason. Lucky for you I spent my military service in Central America; I bet I’m the only M.D. this side of the Panama Canal who’d recognize the symptoms of Rita Hayworth poisoning.”

  They had restarted Moriarty’s heart and detoxed his bloodstream. Brought him back to life, quite literally. Moriarty mumbled his embarrassed thanks, then asked how the poison was administered.

  “The murderer jabbed you with a sharp instrument, right between your shoulder blades. Might have been a needle coated with the toxin. Might even have been a thorn from the plant itself. Did you get a look at him?”

  Moriarty closed his eyes briefly and relived the scene. Yes, the sharp pain in his back. He was falling to the sidewalk—no, the entryway of the liquor store. It was all going black. But he had turned his head to glance over his shoulder and he saw a man in a blue trenchcoat, shapeless brimmed hat pulled down low, umbrella in one hand. For the barest instant he had looked into the eyes of his murderer.

  “I saw him,” Moriarty said. “I’d know him if I see him again. I’d know those eyes of his anywhere.”

  In all honesty, Weldon W. Weldon had not expected to be stabbed in the back. He sat in his powered wheelchair at the head of the long gleaming conference table and listened with growing incredulity to Curtis Hawks’s tirade.

  “ . . . and with all due respect,” Hawks was telling the board of directors, the blistering acid of scalding irony dripping from his words, “in this time of crisis we need a CEO who is physically and mentally sharp enough to repel the pirates who are trying to take over this corporation.”

  Hawks was pacing up and down the length of the long polished table, forcing the directors who sat on that side of it to turn in their chairs to follow him. The head of Webb Press was wearing a military-style suit vaguely reminiscent of a World War II general named Patton. Even down to his glossy calf-length cavalry boots and the fake ivory-handled revolvers buckled to his waddling hips.

  “Snotty ungrateful sonofabitch,” Weldon muttered to himself. I streamline his operation for him, get Webb Press ready to shift over to electronic publishing, and he rewards me with this stab in the back.

  “ . . . and to show you just what kind of senility we’re dealing with here”—Hawks had raised his voice to a near shout—“let me introduce you to the vaunted efficiency expert that was foisted on me, the superbrain who was given carte blanche by our beloved CEO to wipe out most of Webb Press’s staff and move our base of operations out of Manhattan altogether!”

  He snapped his fingers, and the flunky sitting next to the conference room’s only entrance jumped to his feet and opened the leather-padded door. There was a slight commotion in the outer room, and then two burly men in white uniforms led in Gunther Axhelm, who was securely wrapped in a straitjacket.

  Gasps went around the long conference table. Cigars fell out of hanging mouths. Pouchy eyes widened. They all knew Axhelm, by reputation if nothing else. They knew of his Prussian precision and the ruthless thoroughness of his operations. What they now saw was a wild man, red-rimmed eyes and drooling maniacal grin, straitjacket stained with spittle, baggy gray hospital drawers and bare feet. Even his crew-cut blond hair seemed askew.

  “This is the result of breathing too much of the glue that he himself demanded we use in binding our books, instead of the glue we normally used. It has cost Webb Press roughly a hundred million dollars; it’s cost Gunther Axhelm his sanity.”

  Of course, Hawks had made certain that Axhelm had all the glue he wanted to sniff in the private hospital where he had stashed the loopy Axe. That, and a steady diet of Gene Kelly videos.

  Axhelm suddenly shouldered free of his two handlers and, with a deranged shriek, ran to the conference table and jumped atop it. Two directors tumbled backwards in their chairs and fell gracelessly to the floor. The others backed away in sudden fright.

  But Gunther Axhelm meant them no harm. In his bare feet he capered along the table in a mad parody of tap dancing, the strap ends of his straitjacket flapping away, singing at the top of his lungs in a decidedly Teutonic accent, “Be a clown, be a clown, all the world loves a clown . . . .”

  The Writer

  In his miserable roach-infested room in the welfare hotel, the Writer pored over the current issue of Publishers Weekly that he had stolen from the local branch of the public library.

  The State had stepped in and taken charge of his life. When the drugged-out staff of the warehouse had tried to burn the building down (with materials and helpful instructions from the management, incidentally), the apparatus of the State wheeled itself up in the form of (in order of appearance) Fire Department, Police Department, Bureau of Drug Enforcement, the Public Defender’s Office, Department of Rehabilitation, Bureau of Unemployment, and the welfare offices of the state of New Jersey and the City of New York, borough of Queens.

  Now he lived in a crumbling welfare hotel in Queens, detoxified, unemployed, and seething with an anger that seemed to grow hotter and deeper with every passing useless day.

  But now it all focused down to a single point in space and time. For in his trembling hands he saw how and why it would all come together.

  BUNKER SALES FORCE SUIT

  OPENS IN FEDERAL COURT

  The headline in Publishers Weekly caught his eye. Bunker Books. They were in a courtroom. All of them. The publisher, the editors. Out there in a public courtroom, where any member of the public could come in and see them, face to face.

  With an immense effort of will, the Writer forced his hands to stop trembling so he could read the entire article and learn exactly where they would be and when.

  As he finished reading, he looked up and saw a single ray of light shining through the filth that covered th
e room’s only window. The shaft was blood red. Sunset.

  The Writer smiled. Where can I get a gun? he asked himself.

  Twenty-One

  It was not easy being the son of Pandro T. Bunker. Junior sat in the last row of the half-empty courtroom, listening with only half his attention to the testimony being given up on the witness stand. No one sat near him; he had the entire pew of seats to himself. None of the sales people in the audience wanted to be seen sitting near the son of the publisher. And all of his dad’s people, including his mom, were up in the front.

  But Junior smiled to himself. They all think I’m just the owner’s son, he told himself. They all think I’m a spoiled brat who doesn’t know nothing and gets everything handed to him on a silver tray. I’ll show them. I’ll show them all. Even Mom and Dad.

  Junior’s work in the office, as a special assistant to the publisher, had not been terribly successful. Most of the editors either distrusted him as a snoop for his parents or belittled his intelligence. After weeks of being alternately ignored and avoided, he transferred to the sales department just in time for Woody’s lawsuit to explode in everybody’s face. Naturally, the sales people regarded him as a pariah.

  But Junior leaned back on the hard wooden bench of the courtroom and grinned openly. I’m smarter than they think. I’m smarter than any of them.

  Up on the witness stand, Woody Baloney was being questioned by the cowboy lawyer the sales department had brought in from Colorado.

  “And what, in your professional estimation, will be the result of the Cyberbooks program?” asked the cowboy, his weathered, crinkle-eyed face looking serious and concerned.

  “The result?” Woody said, glancing at the judge. “We’ll all be tossed out on our butts, that’s what the result will be!”