“Why would anybody be afraid of getting killed?” he asks. That’s a line from Your Genial Ghost, and it was supposed to be a rhetorical question, but in fact death is not at all what Koo fears now. His imagination crawls instead with images of pain, images of humiliation. He’s afraid they’ll hurt him in some awful way, and he’s afraid he won’t be brave in front of them. He’d hate to live the rest of his life remembering himself groveling on the floor in front of these bastards.
What if they do something to his throat or his mouth, so he can’t talk? What if they blind him or scar him in some awful way? What if they cut him—he’s always been afraid of knives, sharp things.
“We’ve got nothing to fear but fear itself—and that big guy over there with the sword.” The Zombie Goes to College. He keeps trying to reassure himself—they haven’t done anything to him yet, have they? They haven’t even threatened very much. But Koo remembers the look on that one guy’s face, the bearded son of a bitch who showed him the gun way back at the beginning. He’s probably also the one who hit him when the sack was over his head. And he doesn’t talk, he just stands there and glares at Koo like he’d prefer Koo’s head on a platter, with an apple in his mouth.
If only they wanted money. He’d been afraid earlier that they’d ask too much, but now he believes he could somehow have raised any amount they wanted. Ask for money, you bastards, and I’ll find it, one way or the other I’ll buy my way out of here. “Will you take a post-dated check?” Anything; ask for something I’ve got, ask for something that makes some kind of goddamn sense.
Ten political prisoners. The Feds won’t do it, Koo is convinced they won’t do it, and why the hell should they? Koo has no illusions about his “friendships” with generals and senators; one of the perks of being a general or a senator is to hang around with famous show biz people, and one of the perks of being a famous show biz celebrity is to hang around with generals and senators. “They come out ahead on that deal,” Koo says, but he doesn’t really mean it. He’s always enjoyed the company of VIPs, playing golf with them, going on hunting weekends, cruising on their yachts, visiting at their ranches, and he knows damn well they’ve enjoyed him just as much, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to release ten weirdos and crazies in return for one Koo Davis.
They won’t do it. No negotiation with terrorists, that’s been the official position for years, and Koo has always agreed with it, and even where he is now he still agrees, because if you give in to these bastards it just encourages more of them.
Well, what encouraged this bunch?
Shit; Koo doesn’t want to sit around thinking about it. He just wants to go home, back to his life, back to being what he’s good at. He’s no good at sitting here in the semi-dark, wondering what’s going to happen next. “My mother didn’t raise me to be a hostage.”
What will they do when the Feds say no? They won’t quit, not right away. They’ll try to pressure the Feds to change their minds, won’t they? And how will they do that? Koo knows how, but doesn’t want to know, he doesn’t want to think about it. He wants this over with, and he doesn’t see any good way for it to end. If this is reality encroaching on his happy private world, he doesn’t think much of it.
He also wishes to hell he had his pills. He’s not what you could call addicted to sleeping pills, but he does more often than not take one or two little capsules before going to bed. Sleeping pills, prescription, from his doctor; in addition to all the other pills he takes every day. He doesn’t know what the rest of them are for, and he doesn’t want to know. He’s simply made it clear to his doctors that he’s too busy to get sick, he can’t keep coming down with a lot of sniffles and aches, he’s got schedules, appointments, deadlines, he’s booked two full years into the future. So they give him these pills, and he takes one red-and-green every morning, and two whites after every meal, and a black-and-yellow every Wednesday and Saturday, and—
Well, he’s got a lot of pills, except they’re all back at the Triple S studio, in his dressing room, packed away in the brown leather carrying case made to his specifications by Hermes. And even somebody who never took sleeping pills would find it hard to doze off in Koo’s present position. Koo is awake, wide awake. He doesn’t know what time it is, but it must have been hours since the last light faded in the swimming pool water. He ought to sleep, if only to keep his strength up for whatever is ahead, but he just can’t. When he turns off the lights, the fears swarm worse than ever in his mind, like worms, each carrying another horror. The lights are on a dimmer, so now he has them at their lowest setting, and he’s lying on the long built-in couch with two blankets over him, but his mind just won’t slow down. He’s afraid, he’s goddamn afraid.
And now it’s affecting his digestion. For the last hour or so his stomach has been feeling worse and worse, and he’s been refusing to admit that he might have to throw up. Ignore an upset stomach, he believes, and the chances are it’ll go away by itself. Brood about the goddamn thing and the first thing you know you’ll up-chuck.
Well, this time the theory isn’t working. He’s not brooding about his stomach, God knows, he’s brooding about his fear of the unknown, but something is making the stomach worse and worse, in fact insistent, in fact it is going to happen, in fact he’d better get the hell to the toilet right—
He makes it; barely. He hasn’t eaten much since he’s been here, and only had the one small glass of whiskey, so what the hell is all that coming out of him? Smells as bad as it looks. Koo keeps flushing the toilet, keeps bringing up more, keeps flushing the toilet, and when at last it’s all over he’s so weak he can barely stand. He reels over to the sink, rinses out his mouth, staggers back to the couch, plucks at the blankets, gives up with only his legs covered.
Jesus, he feels awful. Perspiration is pouring out of him now, his face and chest and arms are greasy with it. Foul-smelling perspiration, as though he hadn’t bathed in a month. Is this the smell of fear?
The stomach again. “There’s nothing left!” But, oh, God, it won’t take no for an answer. He can’t walk, he scurries on all fours, he only partly makes it this time. Oh, Jesus, Jesus, what is this stuff?
For a while, this time, he lies on the floor afterward, waiting for strength to return. Got to wash out the mouth, it tastes so bad. The perspiration runs along his body, his shirt is sopping wet. Finally he crawls to the sink, struggles upward, rinses his mouth, crawls to the bed, climbs into it, doesn’t even try for the blankets.
He’s shivering, and he’s hot, and the skin of his temples is burning. The skin is burning.
This isn’t fear. What in the hell is this? Some goddamn flu, maybe, there’s always some goddamn flu going around. What a hell of a time to get sick.
Then he wonders, What’s in those pills I take all the time? Jesus, do I really have something? What a joke—after all these years, it turns out I really need all my pills.
At the next attack, he can’t leave the couch, but he manages to turn his face over the side.
8
It was one-thirty in the morning, and Mike Wiskiel had been asleep less than an hour, when the phone rang with news of the next development in the Koo Davis kidnapping. Mike mumbled into the phone, muttered a few words of explanation to his half-asleep wife, and stumbled back into his clothing. He’d had a couple quick bourbons before going to bed, which made him even groggier now, and the first time he went out to the garage he had to go back into the house for his keys.
His car, a maroon Buick Riviera, was a barely restrained beast in his uncertain hands. It lunged from the garage, swayed dangerously as it made the turn out of the driveway, and raced heedlessly down out of the quiet sleeping residential hills of Sherman Oaks. In an all-night taco joint on Ventura Boulevard Mike got a rotten cup of coffee to go, and up on the Freeway heading east he gradually came awake.
It had been a strange experience earlier tonight, listening to that Koo Davis tape. Mike was just old enough to remember Koo Davis as a regular week
ly voice on the radio, so listening to that tape had been for him an eerie double-layered experience in which present drama and past comedy, his own middle-aged self sitting there in that Burbank office and his past self as a skinny child sprawled on the living room carpet in his parents’ home in Troy, New York, had combined like a movie montage in his emotional reactions. He’d found himself smiling, ready to chuckle, ready to laugh out loud, half expecting to hear the old regulars from that distant radio program—the sharp-tongued nasal-voiced script girl constantly correcting Koo’s grammar or pronunciation, the get-rich-quick brother-in-law with the voice like mashed potatoes and the endless series of goofy inventions and dumb money-making schemes, the bad-tempered neighbor with the weirdly roaring power mower—and it had been very hard to replace those voices (and his own childhood idea of what those people must look like) with the faces and the unfunniness and the grim intentions of the Identikit girl and the two sullen young men.
And now something else had happened; but what? “We’ve heard from them again,” was all Jock Cayzer had said on the phone.
When Mike arrived the office contained, in addition to Jock and Lynsey Rayne, an elderly stoop-shouldered man with a Sigmund Freud goatee, and another agent from the local Bureau Headquarters, Dave Kerman. Lynsey Rayne, who had been here all along, was apparently prepared to stay until Koo Davis was released; surely service above and beyond the call of an actor’s agent. She was gaunt and hollow-eyed by now, but showed no sign of weakening resolve.
Was there something sexual between this woman and Koo Davis? Of course, Davis was an old man and Lynsey Rayne probably wasn’t much over forty, but even an old man likes to have a woman around, and the real Mrs. Davis was more than three thousand miles away. Lynsey Rayne wasn’t behaving like a simple business associate, but did that necessarily mean it was sex? Somehow the style of her reaction wasn’t like the tenterhooks fear of a loved one. She was more like...like an intensely involved nurse, like the competent older sister in a parentless household, or (farther afield, maybe ridiculous) like the bomber squadron commander in World War Two movies, waiting by the landing field to see how many of his “boys” have made it “home.”
Jock Cayzer introduced the dapper bearded man. He was Doctor Stephen Answin, Koo Davis’ personal physician. “I came as quickly as I could,” the doctor said. He had a habit of ducking his head, as though apologetic, shooting quick glances over the tops of his spectacles, but the hesitant self-conscious manner was belied by his appearance; the goatee was as neat as a freshly clipped hedge, and his blue cashmere suit, raw silk ascot and gleaming pointed-toe shoes (all crying out their origin in male boutiques along Camden or Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills) suggested a rather dandyish self-assurance.
“The kidnapper’s due to call back soon,” Jock said, looking at his watch.
Mike said, “Call back? You’ve got an appointment?”
“To talk to the doctor. Come listen.”
They trooped into the workroom, where all incoming calls were being put on tape. An FBI technician named Menaged was there, with the earlier conversation already cued up. He played it, and Mike listened to the voices.
Receptionist: “Seven seven hundred.”
Caller (cold emotionless male voice, in something of a hurry): “This the Koo Davis number?”
Receptionist: “Yes, sir.”
Caller: “Davis is sick.”
Receptionist: “Beg pardon?”
Caller: “You’ve got two minutes on this call, then I hang up. We checked Davis a while ago, and he’s all of a sudden in bad shape. We didn’t hurt him, but he’s sick. He’s throwing up, sweating, can’t move. He’s muttering something about pills in a dressing room. Is he on some kind of maintenance medicine?”
Receptionist: “Sir, I couldn’t possibly—”
Caller: “Not you. This is going on tape, right? Get Davis’ doctor, get those pills if he’s got pills. I’ll call back at two o’clock.”
Receptionist: “I’m not sure I can—Hello? Hello?”
The technician switched it off, saying, “He’d hung up by then.”
Mike checked his watch, and it was not ten minutes before two. Turning to the doctor, he said, “Does that make sense to you?”
“I’m afraid it does, yes.”
“Davis is on some kind of medicine? What does he have?”
“It isn’t that simple,” the doctor said. Between his assured appearance and his bashful manner it was hard to get a coherent reading on the man, but Mike suspected in him a kind of embarrassment. Why?
The doctor was going on, saying, “If Koo were a diabetic, or had leukemia in remission, something along those lines, it would be much easier to define for you what the problem is. Let me explain; Koo Davis is not a young man. He’s sixty-three, but he refuses to behave as though he were. He pushes himself far too hard, and he doesn’t want to be hampered by illness in any way. He was medically unfit during the Second World War, you know, and one of his problems was with his digestion. He takes— I admit he takes a great deal of medicine. Half the things I’ve prescribed are to counteract the side-effects of some of the other things. He’s lived that way for years, and so long as he has his medicines he can continue in the same fashion for many years more. But it has been a long long time since his stomach, his liver, his intestines, have been asked to deal with his food, for instance, in a completely natural way. They can’t do it. Until he gets his medication, he won’t be able to eat a thing, he won’t be able to sleep or have proper elimination or even breathe without difficulty. If he doesn’t receive his medicines, and I would say proper medical care, within the next several hours, the consequences could be very serious.”
All of which was said with the doctor’s combination of confidence and sheepishness, though it did seem to Mike that a true sense of unease came through the mixture. As perhaps it should; what the doctor was saying was that Koo Davis was a prescription junkie, a man hooked on preventive medicines, who simply couldn’t live his normal life without them.
All of which had been created by this doctor, or by several doctors; or created by Davis with their acquiescence. There was undoubtedly some ethical ambivalence in the position in which Doctor Answin now found himself. “These consequences,” Mike said, not particularly interested in smoothing things for the doctor, “how serious could they be?”
“He won’t live.” The doctor blinked behind his stylish spectacles, shrugged his shoulders, spread well-washed hands crosshatched with thick black hairs. “Within a week, possibly a bit more, he would simply die, from starvation, from shock, from any number of complications and contributing factors. In less time than that, in say two days, there could be irretrievable damage. Koo’s health is a very delicate balance, between what his body can stand and what he insists on doing. We have made it possible for him to exceed his body’s potential for years; this event could be extremely damaging.”
Mike said, “What about these pills?”
“I’ve got them,” Lynsey Rayne said. “As soon as that—creature—was off the phone, I called Ian Komlosy, head of Triple S; got him out of bed. He sent someone to open the studio and let me into Koo’s dressing room. His pill-case is in the other office.”
Jock Cayzer said, “It seems to me the most important thing here is to get this man together with his medicines.”
“It would be best if I could see him as well,” Doctor Answin said, ducking his head.
“I doubt we can swing that, Doctor,” Jock told him. “And if they did let you see him, they’d probably want to keep you right along with him.”
“I wouldn’t permit you to go,” Mike said. Then, remembering the twenty-four hours weren’t yet up, he was still merely an advisor, he added, “And I don’t believe Jock would either.”
“Sure not,” Jock said. “But, Doctor, I will want you to talk to the fellow, when he calls back.”
“Make them let him go,” Lynsey Rayne said. Her gaunt face looked as though she too were about to be
critically ill. “They can’t keep him if he’s sick, they’ll have to let him go, start all over again with someone else.”
“I doubt they’ll see it that way,” Mike told her.
“Then let me talk to them. Doctor Answin, you tell them; it isn’t just the pills, it’s medical attention, it’s his age, it’s all the risk involved.”
Mike said, “Miss Rayne, that fellow said on the last call he wouldn’t talk more than two minutes, obviously to keep us from putting a trace on the call. He’ll surely do the same thing when he calls back. Doctor Answin should tell them the truth, answer questions as truthfully—and briefly, Doctor, please—as he can. If there’s time, he can make an appeal for Mr. Davis’ release, but you know and I know it won’t do any good. If we do convince them Davis is in critical danger, they’ll tell us that simply reinforces the tightness of their deadline. Negotiations of this kind aren’t easy under any circumstances. If we tell them Koo Davis is a goner unless they release him, we’re handing them a gun they can put at our heads.”
“Then release those people,” Lynsey Rayne said. “Ten leftover radicals, my God, what difference can it make anymore? Let them go to Algeria, anywhere they want, good riddance.”
“I’m sorry, Miss Rayne,” Mike said. “Nobody in this room can make that decision. And so far, I don’t even think all ten have been positively identified, so it might be a bit early to characterize them all as simply harmless ‘leftover radicals’.”
“Whoever they are,” she said, “getting them out of the country has got to be a good idea. Is Koo’s life worth keeping these people in prison?”
“I don’t know,” Mike said. “We hope to get Washington’s answer to that question tomorrow.”
As he was speaking, the phone rang. Everyone stopped, looking at the tape reels suddenly turning, listening as the technician turned up the sound.
The Comedy is Finished Page 7
