The Comedy is Finished

by Donald E. Westlake

  He still doesn’t know why the goddamn Vietnam thing was different, but fairly early on he understood it was different. Maybe the slant-eyed gooks were the same (he wasn’t even sure about that anymore), and maybe the American uniforms were the same, but the kids inside that olive drab were something else. They laughed at the space-shot jokes and the bureaucracy jokes and the sex jokes (“I was supposed to do a nude centerfold for Cosmopolitan but it didn’t work out. They said all the interesting parts were behind the staple.”), but there were tried-and-true lines they didn’t laugh at. “The General’s being terrific to us all. He’s gonna watch Dolly for me while I go up all by myself to the rest camp at Khe Sanh.” They gave him a polite chuckle. They didn’t want to embarrass him, the sons of bitches, and they were polite to him!

  You’re polite to a comedian, you’re killing him.

  Then, when Vietnam ended, you couldn’t throw an asparagus spear without hitting six hypocrites. But not Koo; he wasn’t sure why he even had these convictions, but he’d stick by them. The career was thinning out, TV sponsors weren’t picking up their options, it was getting tougher to find writers whose material Koo could even understand, and he began to think long thoughts about retirement. He remained steadfast through the Nixon resignation and the Ford pardon, he even stuck when nobody invited him on that goddamn aircraft carrier in New York on Bicentennial Day; July 4, 1976, the Tall Ships, and Koo watched it on television. He’d offered to work for the Ford campaign, and they’d gently let him down, and it wasn’t till later he figured it out; Koo Davis had become a reminder of too much bad history. Koo Davis!

  But what did it for him at last was the investigations into the CIA, where it was made public that for several years in the sixties they’d had a phone tap and a mail check on him! On Koo! And when the asshole involved was asked by the Senate Committee why Koo Davis, the answer was that Koo had a lot of liberal friends. Did have.

  Right after that came the revelations about the CIA experiments on human beings in hospitals, and that just put the icing on the cake. Maybe nobody else remembered what the Second World War had been all about, but Koo did, and he got mad: “The purpose of the experiments was to see if a human being could live without a brain. It turns out he can, if he’s in the CIA.” And when it occurred to him he was now telling anti-government jokes, he realized the time had come to end his own long war. Back to civilian life, back to the home front, back to the world he’d left behind.

  “And if you don’t like the show, folks, you’ll get a full refund at the door. But I know you’re gonna love it, and now I gotta go get ready, we’re in kind of a hurry today, the manufacturer is recalling my pacemaker.”

  With a grin, with a wave, Koo tosses the mike to a waiting stage-hand and trots off. “It’s a good audience,” he tells somebody on the way by, but that’s just words, he doesn’t even know who he’s talking to. They’re all good audiences for Koo Davis, they’ve been good audiences again for a year now. The split is over, the trouble’s over, everybody’s a good guy after all, and Koo is happy to relax once more into who he really is; a funny man, a funnyman, a good comic, an honest uncomplicated human being, living like every comic in the eternal Now, the Present, the Hereheisfolks, the Nowappearing. It’s a good life, safe at last, and it’s always happening right Now.

  Koo has three minutes to drink a little ice water, get the makeup adjusted, have a quick last look at the script, play a little grabass with Jill, and then come out stage center into a group of eight tall lean dancing girls and his opening line of the show: “I can remember when legs like that were illegal.” Now, he moves briskly along a cable-strewn alley created by the false walls of stacked sets, toward the door to a corridor leading to his dressing room, and as he reaches that first door somebody on his left says, “Mr. Davis?”

  Koo turns his head. It’s one of the scruffy bearded young crew members; these hairy sloppy styles never will look to Koo like anything but shit. Behind the kid is a side exit from the studio, the red Taping light agleam above it. Koo is in a hurry, and he wants no problems. “What’s up?”

  “Look at this, Mr. Davis,” the kid says, and brings his hand up from his side, and when Koo looks down he is absolutely incredibly dumbfounded to see the kid is holding a pistol, a little black stubby-nosed revolver, and it’s pointed right at Koo’s head. Assassination! he thinks, though why anyone would want to assassinate him he has no idea, but on the other hand he has in his time played golf with one or two politicians who were later assassinated, and in his astonishment he opens his mouth to holler, and the kid uses his free hand to slap Koo very hard across the face.

  And now a bag gets pulled down over his head from behind, a burlap bag smelling of moist earth and potatoes, and cable-like arms are grabbing him hard around the upper arms and chest, imprisoning him, lifting him, lifting his feet off the floor. He’s being carried, there’s a sudden rush of cooler air on the backs of his hands, they’re taking him outside. “Hey!” he yells, and somebody punches him very very hard on the nose. Jesus Christ, he thinks, not hollering anymore. Now they’re punching me on the nose.

  2

  Peter Dinely watched the blue van with Joyce at the wheel jounce slowly over the speed bumps at the studio exit and turn right toward Barham Boulevard. Were Mark and Larry in the back, out of sight? Did they have Koo Davis back there? Peter gnawed the insides of his cheeks, willing Joyce to look this way, give him some sort of sign, but the van turned and drove unsteadily away, an enigmatic blue box on small wheels, its rear windows dark and dusty. Peter followed, in the green rented Impala, the ache in his cheeks a kind of distraction from uncertainty.

  The habit of gnawing his cheeks was an acquired one, chosen deliberately a long long time ago and now so ingrained he could no longer stop it, though the inside of his mouth was ragged and even occasionally bleeding. If he ever could stop chewing on himself he’d be glad of it; but then would the blinking come back?

  Peter was thirty-four. To break an early habit of blinking when under pressure, he’d been chewing his cheeks in moments of tension for fifteen years. Eleven years ago a dentist had reacted with horror, telling him the interior of his mouth was one great raw wound, since when he had stopped going to dentists.

  Now, Peter followed the blue van west on Barham Boulevard, and it wasn’t until the turn onto Hollywood Freeway northbound that he could angle into the middle lane, run up next to the van, look over at Joyce’s tense profile, and tap the horn. She looked at him almost with terror, not seeming to understand what he wanted—or possibly even who he was—until he gave her an angry questioning glare while pointing with jabbing fingers at the back part of the van. Then she gave a sudden jerk of understanding, and an exaggerated nod. Yes? he asked, demanding with head and face and arm, and she nodded again, with a small tense smile and a quick jerky wave of the hand.

  All right. All right. Peter became calm, his shoulders sagging, his jaw muscles relaxing, the blood oozing into his mouth, his foot easing on the accelerator. The Impala dropped back and tucked in once more behind the blue van. Everything was going to be all right.

  The house was in Tarzana, up in the hills south of the Ventura Freeway. Peter waited behind the van as Joyce stopped at the gate and her hand reached out to ring the bell in the metal pole beside the driveway. There was a pause—up above, Liz must walk to the kitchen, ask for identification through the speaker, receive reassurance from Joyce, then press the button—and then the wide chain-link gate slowly opened and the van jolted up the hill. Peter followed, seeing in the rearview mirror the gate automatically swing shut.

  At the top, the blacktop driveway leveled off into a flat area in front of the wide garage. Next to it, the house was a broad ranch-style in brick and wood; as the two vehicles came to a stop, Liz came out its front door. She was naked, her long lean body hard-looking, her eyes hidden behind large dark sunglasses. It was Liz’ style to be aggressive and challenging; neither Peter nor any of the others would remark upon her nakedn
ess.

  Getting out of the Impala, Peter opened the rear doors of the van and there they were. Koo Davis, head still enclosed in the burlap sack, lay face down on an old double-bed mattress. Mark, bearded and stolid, sat at this end of the van, his feet stretched out over Davis’ legs, while worried-looking Larry perched uncomfortably up front by Davis’ head. “Very good,” Peter said. “Get him out of there.”

  Davis didn’t speak as they helped him out to the blacktop; Peter, taking his arm to assist, felt the man trembling. “Just walk,” he said.

  Liz led the way into the house. When she turned her back the scars were visible; twisted rough-grained white lines that would never take a tan, criss-crossing down the middle of her back.

  The interior of the house was cool with central air-conditioning. Pale green carpet on all the floors muffled sound. While Joyce and Mark stayed behind, Peter and Larry guided Davis through the house, following Liz. In the kitchen, she opened a narrow door and they went down a narrow staircase to the left. Here, beneath the house, were the utilities, in a small square concrete block room without frills. Cardboard wine cartons were messily piled in one corner, behind the pool heater. On a side where it wouldn’t be expected was a door, which Liz opened, revealing a fairly long narrow room which extended out from the house underneath the sun deck as far as the swimming pool. At the far end of the room was a thick glass picture window, with the green-blue water at the deep end of the pool restlessly moving against its other side. Daylight filtering through that water made a cool gray dimness in here, until Liz touched a switch beside the door which brought up warm amber indirect lighting.

  The first owner of this house had been a movie director, who had added several ideas of his own to the architects’ plans, including this room, in which it was possible to sit and have a drink and get a fish-eye view of one’s guests swimming in the pool. The director had enjoyed this idea so much he’d had the setting written into one of his movies, and shot the scene in this room.

  The room was plain but comfortable, with maroon cloth on the walls, low overstuffed swivel chairs, dark carpeting, soundproofed ceiling, built-in bar sink and refrigerator, several small low tables, and in one corner a door leading to a small lavatory, with shower, sink and toilet. In readiness for Koo Davis, the refrigerator had been stocked with simple foods, more ready-to-eat food was stacked on the shelf above it, some plastic plates and cups and spoons had been placed on a table, and even a plastic decanter filled with inexpensive Scotch had been provided.

  Once they were all in the room, Larry pulled off the burlap bag, and Peter looked at the familiar face of Koo Davis. His sense of accomplishment was so strong that this time he had to bite his cheeks not to ease tension but to keep himself from smiling.

  Davis had had a nosebleed, which had stopped, leaving smudges of brown under his nose and along his left cheek. He looked frightened but cocky, as though he’d decided his game plan was to tough it out.

  Larry, of course, reacted big to the nosebleed, saying, “Oh, we’re sorry about that! Your nose!”

  Davis looked at him in mock astonishment. “You’re sorry about my nose? If you’ll notice, you took the whole body.”

  Peter said, “If you’ll notice, you’re in a room with one door, which we’ll keep locked. You have food there, drink there, and a toilet over there.”

  Glancing around, Davis said, “Okay if I open the window?”

  “This isn’t a joke,” Liz told him. She had removed her sunglasses, and her eyes and voice were as hard as her nude body.

  Davis grinned at her. “I’ll be able to identify you later on,” he said. “Anyway, I’m looking forward to the lineup.”

  “That fine, Koo,” Peter said, permitting himself a small grin. “You keep your spirits up.” To Liz and Larry he said, “Come on.”

  Davis, suddenly less jocular, said, “Do I get a question?”

  Amused, Peter said, “Which question? Why? Who? What?”

  “I thought kidnappers didn’t want to be recognized. Unless they figured to kill the customer.”

  Jumping in, looking very intense, Larry said, “We’re not going to kill you, Mr. Davis.”

  “Assuming things go well,” Peter said. “Assuming everybody is sensible, Koo, including you.”

  “That’s a big relief,” Davis said. Terror was pulsing just beneath his cocky surface, like a kitten under a blanket. “As long as I go on being sensible, I’m okay, right? I mean, sensible like you people.”

  “That’s right,” Peter said.

  3

  “So here I am on the bricks,” Mike Wiskiel said. He felt goddamn sorry for himself. “Lemme tell ya, Jerry, the worst word in the English language is the word ‘retroactive.’ You can forget all about ‘it might have been’ and ‘nevermore’ and all that crap, the word is ‘retroactive.’ It’ll fuck ya every time.” And he swallowed another mouthful of vodka and tonic, while Jerry chuckled his friendly, agreeable, meaningless realtor’s chuckle.

  Mike Wiskiel was a little drunk, at four in the afternoon; not for the first time. He’d spent the morning talking to women who’d sent in eleven bucks for a scalp-invigorator that when they’d tried it made their hair fall out, and by lunchtime he’d seen enough bald women to last him the rest of his life. So he’d come here to the club for a quick game of tennis and the Daily Special lunch—today it was avocado followed by abalone, washed down with a Napa Riesling—and then he’d run into Jerry Lawson in the bar and here he still was, sitting at a table by the tinted-glass windows, having another little drink, at four on the clock in the pee em. And at this moment he and Jerry were the only members present in the bar.

  Jerry Lawson was a real estate agent, and probably Mike’s closest friend out here, apart from the people at the Bureau. Mike had met him—Jesus, almost a year ago—when he’d been transferred to the L.A. office and had made the exploratory trip to find a new house for Jan and the kids. He’d walked into the real estate office on Ventura Boulevard, and the first thing he’d ever said to Jerry was, “I know you from someplace,” and he remembered thinking, Jesus, maybe this guy is on the hot list. But Jerry had gripped and said, “I’m the guy shot June Havoc in The Sound of Distant Drums,” and wasn’t that L.A. for you? Your real estate man turns out to be a one-time actor.

  And a good friend. Jerry had found them a perfect house, up in the hills in Sherman Oaks, and had even put up Mike’s name for his country club, El Sueno de Suerte, here in Encino. Of course, it’s true that in Los Angeles realtors keep in closer touch with their former clients than elsewhere, since the average turnover of a middle-level-and-up house in that city is two and a half years, but Mike was convinced in this case it was more than the usual business friendship. He and Jerry enjoyed tennis together, drinks together, poker and barbecue and a good laugh together, and the wives got along, and even the kids from both families didn’t seem to hate each other one hundred percent of the time. Jerry’s friendship had helped a lot to soften the blow of having been transferred out here through no fault of his own. After all those years, back on the bricks.

  He repeated it aloud. “Back on the bricks. I tell ya, Jerry, I had it made at the Head Office, it didn’t matter who the Director was. They knew I was a reliable man, they knew I was loyal, they knew I delivered. ‘I don’t want excuses, I want results,’ that’s what the Director used to say, and nobody ever heard an excuse from me.”

  “I know,” Jerry said sympathetically, though he could only know what Mike told him. “You got your nuts in the wringer, that’s all. That’s all that happened.”

  “Retroactive,” Mike said, dealing with the word as though it were a pebble he was moving around in his mouth. “ ‘Do this,’ they said, ‘it’s your patriotic duty.’ ‘Oh, yessir,’ I said, and salute the son of a bitch, and I go do it, and when I come back there’s some other son of a bitch in there and he says, ‘Oh, no, that wasn’t patriotic, it was illegal and you shouldn’t of done it.’ And I say, ‘Why I got my orders right here,
I’m covered, I got everything in black and white, this is the guy told me what to do,’ and they say, ‘Oh, yeah, we know about him, he’s out on his ear, he’s in worse trouble than you are.’ So that guy’s ass is in a sling and my nuts are in a wringer and Al Capone is up there at San Clemente in a golf cart. And who’s loyal now, huh? Who do you trust now, the shitter or the shit-upon?”

  “It’s a tough racket,” Jerry said. He was a terrific sounding board, he never confused the conversation with a lot of dumb suggestions.

  “You’re fuckin A,” Mike told him, and turned to point at Rodney the barman. “Twice again,” he called, and the beeper in his jacket pocket went EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE. “Shit,” Mike said, under the noise of the machine, and reached to shut it off.

  Jerry looked interested. “The office?”

  “More fuckin bald women,” Mike said, and twisted around the other way to holler over at Ricci the waiter, “Bring me a phone, will ya, Rick?”

  The phone came first. Ricci plugged it into the jack under the window, then went off to get the drinks while Mike phoned the office.

  “Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

  “Extension twelve.”

  A few burrs, and then: “Agent Dodd.”

  “Mike Wiskiel here. I was just buzzed.”

  “Hold on, Redburn wants you.”

  The drinks arrived while Mike was holding on, and he signed for them with the receiver tucked in against his shoulder. Jerry said, “What’s up?”

  “Dunno yet.”

  Ricci took the tab away, Mike slugged down about a third of the new drink, and the voice of Chief of Station Webster Redburn came on the line: “Mike? Where are you?”

  “At the club, Wes. I spent all day on that mail fraud case, I just came in for a little late lunch.”

  “Forget the mail fraud and lunch,” Redburn said, and went on to tell him what had happened. Mike’s eyes widened as he listened, and he knew there’d be no more paperwork, no more routine slog, no more bald women and low-IQ bank robbers and stolen cars, no more day-by-day boring bullshit, not for hours, not for days, maybe even not for weeks. “So get there fast,” Redburn finished.