Count Geiger's Blues

by Michael Bishop

  “Stickney!” Xavier barked. “Stickney, wake up!”

  Stickney roused a little. His pupils, initially as large as dimes, shrank to the size of typewriter o’s. Then, aware that his apartment had been invaded, he lurched forward, banging his chair’s footrest down.

  “Who th’ hell’re you guys? Whad’re you awl doing here?”

  Xavier put a hand on Stickney’s arm and introduced himself and Mikhail. “Your door was unlocked. The Mick and I would like to ask you a few questions.”

  “Stupid, leaving th’ door unlacked! Go on, then—kill me.”

  “I don’t want to kill you. I want to know about Environomics Unlimited. Could you tell me about it, please?”

  “It’s defunk,” Stickney said, rearranging his Oriental robe. “Or leastwise my jab with ’em is.” He began to sweat, profusely. “Damn! My toe! It hurts somepin orful!” Stickney’s big toe, twitching noticeably, shone red, as if an angry wasp had injected it with venom. “It’s th’ gout, ’nother damned attack.” Stickney peered past Xavier at the TV. “Where’s my baxing video? I’ll ’clapse like a stove-in chimbley if that nephew of yores don’t turn it back on double damned quick.”

  Mikhail tripped back into the living room to restart the video of Eggshell Harrell lowlights. Xavier made him turn down the sound, but the mere sight of Harrell stumbling about disoriented or landing on the ringside press table satisfied The Mick’s curiosity and alleviated Stickney’s gout. His big toe had already stopped throbbing so vividly.

  “I can’t watch this garbage,” Xavier said.

  “Yeah. And I can’t not wortch it.”

  “Radiation exposure caused you to develop a type of the Philistine Syndrome, didn’t it, Mr. Stickney?”

  “Philistine Syndrurm?”

  “The ailment that got you tooting poke and indulging dozens of other twelfth-rate amusements to balance off the symptoms brought on by first-rate ones. Am I right?”

  “Whot?” Stickney looked craftily confused.

  “Look around. Evidence of your efforts to counter the syndrome is everywhere.” Xavier nodded at framed drawings on the wall behind the La-Z-Boy. Seven of the pieces consisted of penciled stick figures engaged in hard-to-identify consensual (or maybe not consensual) erotic (or maybe not erotic) acts. Clearly, Stickney had hoped that this inept homemade pornography (if that’s what it was, and, yes, it seemed to be) would forestall some of the metabolic fits triggered by his love of “classy” cutie-book photography. The boxing tape reversed the depredations triggered by Hee Haw reruns.

  A search of Stickney’s old vinyl-record albums turned up a collection of barnyard sounds—hogs in rut—to counteract acne attacks or diarrhea occasioned by listening to pre-Syndrome favorites, Lefty Frizell’s Greatest Hits, say, or Minnie Pearl Live! Other illness-offsetting albums were by artists whom Stickney, before going to work for Environomics Unlimited, had most likely despised: Engelbert Humperdinck, Luciano Pavarotti, Joni Mitchell, Don Henley. Other evidence that Stickney had taken his own approach to the treatment of his Syndrome was a plastic Coke bottle full of flowers on a nearby table—“flowers” such as desiccated milkweed pods, dandelions, and cockleburr stalks. Stickney had arranged them with no visible skill, but they still looked okay. Xavier knelt before Stickney . . . to block his view of Eggshell Harrell.

  “Working for EU, you often dealt with radioactive waste, right?”

  Stickney struggled to see around him. “Not awl that orfun. That was a partime jab for jes’ about ever’one who worked for ’em. If somepin better come up, we took it.”

  “The Miriam Finesse Cancer Clinic called on you twice in six years to dispose of radwaste. The first time you dumped it into a stream in the Phosphor Fogs—then fudged your documentation to make it appear you’d followed NRC guidelines.”

  “Yeah,” Stickney said. “Move over.”

  “He loses by a knockout, Will. You’ve already seen it. Now, why’d you hide that obsolete Therac 4-J in a warehouse on the far outskirts of the Cellar?”

  “Are them Silvanus County folks gonna die?” He had stopped trying to see the TV screen.

  “Some will. The young Wilkinses for sure, all three of them.”

  “Damn. Lissen. We didn’t know. What th’ hell’s a Therac 4-J anyhow? Gooz and me couldn’t tell cesium 137 from cesspool overflow. It ’uz a accident, plain and simple, what happened to them poor crackers.”

  Xavier shook his head. “How many other times did you fraudulently dispose of radioactive waste?”

  “Not awl that many. Most o’ th’ time, we ’uz getting rid of hormless shit, filling the woods up with broke-down equipment, used syringes, old drugs. ’Cept for six or eight other places, that chunky nurse’s concer clinic was th’ only place that gave us hot crap to hawl. Swear to Gawd.”

  “Who’s behind Environomics Unlimited? Who paid you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come on, Stickney.”

  “ ’Fie talk about it, I’ll likely get kilt for spilling it out.” He chuckled mirthlessly.

  “Just like Larry Glenn Wilkins. That was his reward for spilling out that deadly cesium cake. Who paid you?”

  Stickney vented a sour sigh. “I don’t care. It don’t matter no more ’fie’m dead or alive. Dead’d be a blessing.”

  “Who?” Xavier said, smacking his fist against the chair arm.

  “F. Deane Finesse. He ’uz th’ big cheese behind the firm, th’ guy who wanted th’ radwaste from six years back dumped upcountry next to Plont VonMeter.”

  “Finesse?” The Mick said. “The big shot on the cancer clinic’s board of directors? The prez of Uncommon Comics?”

  “Swear to Gawd. Wunst, he paid me. Paid me out cosh on a sidewalk outside th’ Hemisphere. Finesse it was, you’d better b’lieve it. He had a grudge on—mebbe still does—’gainst ol’ Con-Tri.”

  “Holy schmoly,” said The Mick, sidekickishly.

  “I’m sick,” Stickney said. “As sick, in my way, as them Silvanus County folks. But who cares? Who cares ’fie die in this orful rathole?”

  “Put your radiation detector on him,” Xavier said, and The Mick obeyed. The counter began clicking like a caffeine-crazed typist. “My God.” Xavier told The Mick to stick with Stickney while he went down the hall to telephone the police, to report that he had found Environomics Unlimited’s disposal agent. The men in the office were still playing their game. The thinnest, who had four more pie wedges, appeared to be gloating.

  “‘What was the code name of the U.S. military’s assault on the forces of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega?’ ” read the man facing the door.

  “Operation Just Cause!” cried the gloating Asian. “Hai yah!”

  “Buffalo dung,” said the third player.

  As unobtrusively as possible, Xavier made his call and returned to Stickney’s apartment. Stickney had fallen asleep, again. His boxing tape was rewinding, again. The Mick stared blurrily at the stick-figure pornography on the wall. His eyes had begun to water. He pinched his nostrils to ease the burn from the pokeweed stench and the stale acridity of Stickney’s B.O. He obsessively shifted his Geiger counter from one hand to the other, and Xavier agreed that, yes, they could probably leave this rathole even before the cops arrived: Stickney wasn’t going anywhere.

  In Jarboe Lane, Xavier and Mikhail walked meditatively: two shadows in a cramped, starless tunnel.

  “Finesse,” The Mick said. “Betcha ol’ Tim Bowman’s gonna love that piece of scandal.”

  Xavier, thumbs hooked inside two of his belt loops, remped the neighborhood for hostility or danger, but registered none.

  “Boy, that place was the cheesiest,” The Mick said. “You’d have to be a skidder with like complete and utter antinoolity to camp there.”

  “Flamingos,” Xavier mused. “A few plastic flamingos would’ve perked it right up. . . .”

  57

  The Rap on Mr. Finesse

  To few people but UC’s employees and immoderate fans li
ke The Mick was F. Deane Finesse solely the owner and publisher of Uncommon Comics. To Finesse himself, the comic-book business was mostly a gratifyingly profitable sideline. Indeed, some viewed him as the South’s foremost entrepreneur and his surname as synonymous with Salonika (although, today, if the prompt in a word-association test were Salonika, more would say Bari than Finesse). According to current received historical mythos, the city had begun as a trading post and river port established in 1788 by Philippe Jean Yves Paul Finesse, one of several French volunteers with General Lafayette at Jamestown Ford, and elsewhere, during the American War of Independence. Today, then, Finesse’s name appears on everything in the city from street signs to pocket parks to cancer clinics.

  The morning after visiting Stickney in Jarboe Lane, Xavier called the Urbanite and asked for Donel Lassiter. He asked Donel for as much information—the “straight skinny”—about F. Deane Finesse as Donel could extract from the newspaper’s files, computer or otherwise. He invited Donel to his Franklin Court condo that evening to reveal his findings. Donel arrived on time. Moved, he hugged Xavier and then The Mick, as if they had been freed after long prison terms. The Mick retreated to his room with a homemade milkshake. Finals were approaching, and he actually wanted to prepare.

  Said Donel, “You really think Finesse is behind the accident in Silvanus County?”

  “Yes. Also, the misdirectioning of used radium implants to the Hazelton farm,” Xavier said.

  Donel told Xavier that a rumored clean-up operation on the Hazelton place would begin tomorrow. Preliminary tests on the section of Placer Creek identified by Xavier as contaminated showed measurable traces of radiation. An associate of Dr. Lusk’s from the Oak Ridge Associated Universities had found gamma-radiation levels from one to ten roentgens per hour at and around the canister-filled rock pool in the creek. Water flow diluted these measurements, but drinking from or swimming in the creek, on Hazelton’s farm in particular, was potentially risky.

  “Why would Finesse involve himself in a penny-ante scam like a misdirected radwaste shipment?” Donel asked.

  “Lots of penny-ante scams, taken together, can amount to a sizable wad,” Xavier said. “Tell me what you have on Salonika’s wealthiest citizen.”

  “Second wealthiest. Letitia Bligh Brumblelo, widow of Prather Brumblelo, founder and CEO of KudzuCo Enterprises, tops him in that category.”

  KudzuCo, an organization begun in the late 1950s, specialized in the processing and recycling of kudzu, the run-amok Japanese vine introduced as a soil-erosion measure and as fodder and forage for cattle. KudzoCo converted the leaves of this ubiquitous plant into everything from loose tea to attic insulation to shawls to wallpaper paste to skin astringent to infield tarps to pet food to jeep fuel. KudzuCo had conversion facilities and subsidiary divisions from Louisiana to North Carolina. So, to give Mr. Finesse his due, Xavier decided, it was hardly a knock to call him less wealthy than Prather Brumblelo’s widow. KudzoCo was the thirteenth largest business in the U.S., a financial colossus.

  “Of course, Finesse is no bush leaguer himself,” Donel said. “In addition to Uncommon Comics, he owns”—he read from a printout—“the Salonika Cherokees, Finesse Chemical, Goober Pride Foods, Cherokee Software, and Oconee-Oregon Transport Systems. He’s also on the board of directors of dozens of foundations, libraries, public utilities, historical societies, and medical institutions, including the Miriam Finesse Cancer Clinic, which he dedicated to his mother’s memory in 1959, six years after her death of ovarian cancer.

  “More: He has partnerships in, or links to, the publishing and communications industry, the construction industry, corporate Hollywood, the pharmaceuticals industry, and, as you know, the fashion industry. Uncommon Comics recently licensed Bari’s of Salonika to make design use of the copyrighted costumes of some of its stalwarts for a line of ready-to-wear clothing, exempting only the costumes of the Decimator and Count Geiger, the former because of its importance to the UC empire and the latter because a new Nick City ordinance forbids anyone to impersonate you.

  “Finesse has been married four times,” Donel rattled on. “He is currently a bachelor . . . with two sons and four daughters, all grown, all living somewhere other than Oconee. In the winter, Finesse dresses only in black. On the opening day of baseball season, though, no matter the temperature, he begins wearing white-linen plantation suits or lightweight seersucker ensembles, often with a Panama hat and a silver-tipped walking stick. He often escorts—dates would overstate his level of commitment—women two, three, or even four decades younger than he. Over the past several years, he’s spent as much time traveling abroad or networking on the West Coast as he has overseeing his financial empire here in Salonika.

  “The world at large knows F. Deane Finesse just as you and I do, Xavier, as a curmudgeonly sports enthusiast and a high-profile humanitarian businessman. Ex-wives and disgruntled ex-employees depict him as tight-fisted and petty, a control freak with a two-ton ego and featherweight verbal skills. He succeeds, detractors allege, by projecting a charismatic aura of menace and willpower. In conversation, his speeches are either gnomic or nonsensical, depending on your view of the man. It sometimes seems he needs a translator.” Donel stopped, looking up from his printouts to see what effect his words were having on Xavier. “What else did you want to know?”

  “Oconee-Oregon Transport Systems. What’s that?”

  “OOTS? A cross-country trucking line from Oconee to Oregon and vice versa.”

  “Does Finesse have any stake in Environomics Unlimited, the bogus hazardous-waste-disposal firm?”

  “Nobody but Wilbon T. Stickney, the guy you sicced the police on, knows much at all about Environomics Unlimited—if it exists. And Stickney—get this—is in a secure area of Salonika General being treated for a kind of radiation poisoning and an unknown piggyback ailment that kept the police from jailing him.”

  Xavier mulled this, a fresh indictment of the sensitivity marking his behavior of late, as if his whole personality rested on that quality. He should have stayed with Stickney until the cops arrived. Stickney’s nodding head and slurred speech—from his grogginess and stink—had signaled that he needed medical attention. Instead, he’d gotten himself and The Mick out of Satan’s Cellar as fast as possible.

  “Donel”—Xavier beating back these self-recriminations—“does Finesse have any reason to wish Consolidated Tri-State ill?”

  Donel flipped through his stapled printouts. “Until construction began on Plant VanMeter, he belonged to Con-Tri’s board of directors. The president of Con-Tri had him removed shortly after company stockholders thwarted a try by Finesse Chemical to acquire a majority interest in Con-Tri. The year you came to the Urbanite from Atlanta, Finesse left Con-Tri’s board of directors. He left it kicking ’n’ screaming, but he left, and, very soon after, Plant VanMeter came fully on line.”

  “Ah.”

  The Mick rejoined them, carrying his milkshake cup in one hand and a dog-eared copy of The Selected Prose and Poetry of Jonathan Swift in the other. “‘Nor do I think it wholly groundless,’ ” he read, “‘that the Abolishing of Christianity may perhaps bring the Church in Danger.’ I don’t get it.” He slurped at his cup. “I mean, is this guy for real or a total poked-out charl?”

  “Charl.” Xavier felt a tad charlish himself. “Charl this, charl that.” He appealed to Donel. “Where do these retropunk upstarts get the term, anyway?”

  “The Ten Commandments,” Donel said. “Ben Hur. Major Dundee. Or, a tad later on, Chiefs.”

  What? Xavier thought. Then the answer opened like a night-blooming flower, and he had a vision of Tim Bowman, heavily armed, shooting three slugs into him at point-blank range. Sweat popped out on Xavier’s upper lip, a line of tiny liquid domes.

  Charlatan Heston.

  “I’d like to meet Finesse,” he said. “What are my chances?”

  “Finesse seems to be in town,” Donel said, “but he doesn’t exactly run an open-door operation anywhere. Wha
t can you offer him?”

  “Nothing. An accusation, I guess.”

  “Then your chances are zilch. He won’t want to see you.”

  “Grab a hang strap,” The Mick said. “Have Bari get you to him, Uncle Xave. Would she be an instant in, or what?”

  Xavier looked at Mikhail, a whiz kid who’d just blown a fuse: “No, she wouldn’t. We’re kaput. Bari may not want anything to do with me.”

  “Get real, unc. It’d tickle her to help you bring a charl like old F. Deane down.”

  “Not if it killed her fashion-franchising of UC characters.”

  “Hey, doin’ good’s a bigger kick for her than making money. You know that?”

  Xavier could only shake his head.

  The Mick continued to astonish: “And you keep forgetting that Uncle Xave is also Count Geiger. Even if Bari can’t or won’t do the intros, Finesse’d love to meet him. I mean, the sorry old fart gets his ego revved rubbing hips with fellow hotshots and media stars. Besides, Count Geiger’s really just a big-name field hand on the old UC plantation. If you stalled out on other stuff, you could even talk business.”

  “Thank you, Mikhail,” Xavier said sincerely. “Apply that same level of brain power to your finals and you’ll ace them all.”

  “Maybe not. Once past the second book of Gulliver’s Travels, Swift and me don’t exactly mesh.”

  58

  Skybox

  Less than two months into the season, the Salonika Cherokees had an unheard-of, for them, .632 winning percentage. They had just begun an important home stand against the Dodgers. Xavier and Bari sat high above the tawny diamond of the infield and high above the soothing fan-shaped green of the outfield—where, not long ago, Count Geiger and the Salonika city police had carried out a successful sting.

  Tonight Xavier had a fresh perspective on the ballpark and on his role as an urban stalwart. He and Bari were guests in F. Deane Finesse’s skybox, a bulletproof bunker tiers and tiers above home plate. Along with Finesse, they occupied the middle three wingbacks in a row of seven posh chairs before the skybox window. Behind them, as Xavier had noted earlier, the rear wall was lined with photographs of past and present Cherokee players, each black-and-white photo alternating with a full-color portrait of a UC stalwart. Legendary center fielder Moses Hammacker stood between an E = MC2 poster and one of the DeeJay throwing a 45-rpm record like a discus. Little Vin Caputo, meanwhile, was fielding a fungo batted by a club-wielding Warwoman. (Bizarre.)