The Comedy is Finished

by Donald E. Westlake

  Except one. Mark nodded in satisfaction when he reached it. “Right,” he said.

  Peter seemed honestly surprised. “Did they really?”

  “Really.” Dumping the rest of the capsules back into the bottle, Mark broke open the odd one, and there in his palm was the transmitter, a tiny bug no bigger than a shirt button.

  “Those stupid bastards,” Peter said.

  A cold rage lived deep within Mark, ready to be stirred by almost anything. It was rising now, making his face bonier beneath the beard, making his voice softer and colder. “What we should do,” he said, “is dump this whole case out into the street and let them decide if he dies first or they deal first.”

  “No,” Peter said. “As long as he’s alive and unhurt, they have to be cautious against us.”

  Mark held up the hand with the bug in it. “Like this?”

  “Devious, but cautious. Go ahead and use your package.”

  “Right.” Tucking the bug into his shirt pocket, Mark closed the pill-case and put it on the back seat, then brought forward the brown paper bag, which seemed fairly heavy. He opened the bag, then reached in to remove the twisty sealing the Baggie within. When the Baggie was opened, a stench filled the car.

  “Jesus!” said Peter.

  “Won’t be long.” Mark dropped the transmitter into the Baggie, sealed it again, and closed the paper bag. “Stop at a mailbox.”

  They drove another two blocks, then Peter angled to a stop by a mailbox. Mark got out, dropped the paper bag into the mailbox, and then they drove on.

  10

  Koo Davis is sick and scared, he thinks he’s dying, and he’s stuck here in some kind of awful comedy. He asks himself: Do I deserve this? His stomach is so painful he can’t stand it; in fact, he keeps passing out from the pain, particularly if he tries to move. His head hurts, his throat is on fire, perspiration streams from him and yet his mouth is so dry his tongue feels like a foreign body, some lumpy dry sausage cluttering up his head. I’m dehydrating, he tells himself, with useless medical assurance. But he’s tried asking for water, and they’ve given it to him, and he’s learned the hard way that he can’t keep it down.

  But the comedy is, there’s some clown here talking to him about politics. This guy, and a woman Koo hadn’t seen before, cleaned him up and cleaned up the room and have both spent a lot of time with him ever since, and have even told him their names—or anyway they’ve told him names they’ll answer to, theirs or somebody else’s. Larry and Joyce. Joyce just stands around looking worried, in traditional sickroom fashion, but this schmuck Larry talks.

  “You’re a bright man, Koo, you’ve seen a lot of the world, you must have seen the terrible inequity in the way different people live. Infant mortality in Central America, for instance, is so much higher than in the United States. Yet we all live on the same planet, don’t we? In the last analysis, we’re all a part of the same community. And the resources are there, Koo, everybody could have a decent life, enough food, proper shelter, a decent rewarding life. What stands in the way? Koo, isn’t it obvious? It’s the method of distribution, Koo, you can see that.”

  And: “Did you know Thomas Jefferson said America needed a new revolution every twenty-five years? Because otherwise the country would stagnate into just another power, just another nation like all the others.”

  And: “Marx tells us the means of production belong to the workers, and if you think about it you can see where that makes sense. The tenant farmer, the sharecropper, is the clearest example. His work makes the land productive. His ongoing work, clearing, seeding, crop rotation, makes the land productive for the long term and makes it increase in value in the only way that value matters, which is increased production. But he has to pay a portion of that production to someone else, who doesn’t work the land, who doesn’t have any connection with the land except a deed that says he owns it. Why does he own it? Because he bought it or inherited it from somebody who had the same relationship with it; that piece of paper. And if you trace it back, sooner or later you get to the man who started the piece of paper, and he either stole the land from somebody else or he made it his in the first place by working it. Of course land should belong to the farmer who works it and makes it productive, there really can’t be any argument about that. So let’s take the same concept into the factory.”

  It isn’t bad enough that Koo is kidnapped, that he’s sick and possibly dying; he also has to be nattered at by some soapbox birdy. If I throw up again, Koo promises himself, then somehow, somehow, I’m gonna throw up on him.

  Koo sleeps or dozes or loses consciousness from time to time during this endless lecture, and there are weird intervals when he’s neither awake nor asleep, but somehow floatingly present, and everything takes on the strange glow of fantasy; the calm persuasive stupid voice, the absurdity of a window facing only water, the long narrow dimly lighted room, the remaining stinks of his sickness, it all swirls together and he becomes Captain Nemo in the Nautilus, sailing through the limitless green oceans, sailing on and on, noiseless and omnipotent, gliding through the echoing ocean depths to save the world.

  Yes, it all makes sense now; Captain Nemo will save the world, will give each man and woman and child his own portion of the planet, marked off on a grid, like a great monster checkerboard in green and brown, grassy green and dirt brown, green grass and brown dirt, and all the tall slender silent people with the solemn big eyes and the silent gratitude standing on the checkerboard, each person on his square, all around the world. And Captain Nemo sailing through the sky in his submarine, while the rain pours down on all the people, and the water crashes through the window, and now Koo is in the submarine, rising through yellow water toward the surface, and here he is on the hot wet sticky sheet atop the couch, with the water still imprisoned beyond the unbroken window—wasn’t that smashed? he remembers something; no, it’s gone—and the calm earnest reasonable intense committed intelligent thoughtful stupid voice going on and on.

  Other times, his mind is clear, and he thinks his own thoughts within the persuasive drone. He knows this is what they call brainwashing, and he wonders if they poisoned him on purpose, to weaken his resistance. Their surprise and shock seemed real, but it could have been just an act. And in any event, what this guy is talking is straight party line, right enough.

  The thing is...the thing is, the goddamn Vietnam thing might have been a mistake, and everybody now knows it was a mistake, but that doesn’t mean the worldwide Communist conspiracy doesn’t exist. It exists, all right, and now Koo’s gotten tangled up in it; they picked him, he knows they picked him, because he broke his no-politics rule. So here’s a rule about rules: Break the other guy’s rules if you want, but don’t break your own.

  Those ten names he read into the cassette. A couple of them rang a bell, reminded him of headlines from a few years back, but clearly the whole crowd is part and parcel of the Communist plot. These people exist, they really do, and Koo now realizes what went wrong. The trouble was, the American government and the American intelligence community, starting from the time of Joe McCarthy and coming right on up, has played the part of the boy who cried wolf. They were seeing Commies and pinkos and fellow travelers and Comsymps and all those other chowderhead words under every bed, and the result is, too many people now don’t believe there’s a wolf out there at all. But there is, by Jesus, and just at the moment he’s got Koo by the ankle.

  Joyce comes in from time to time with a cool damp cloth to put on Koo’s forehead. It helps a little, but the cloth gets as burning hot as his head within seconds. She comes in now with two wet cloths, puts one on his forehead, and swabs his face and neck with the other. Larry pauses in his monologue, and Koo whispers to Joyce (he can’t talk anymore, not with this throat), “Thanks. It’s better.”

  “Good. They’ve gone to get your medicine. They’ll bring it soon.”

  She’s said that before, but Koo can’t work out what she means by it. Are they going to the drugstore for as
pirin? They can’t go back to Triple S, can they? “Excuse me, we’re the people kidnapped Koo Davis, we came to get his pills.” Makes no sense. Koo would like to ask her what she means, but the question won’t phrase itself; his mind wanders before he can figure out how to ask her anything.

  He drifts away now while she’s still dabbing at his stubbly cheeks—he hasn’t shaved since yesterday—and when he drifts back she’s gone, the Larry doll has been wound up again, and a hint of gray smears the water beyond the window; it’s becoming tomorrow.

  He went to sleep with some question half-formed in his mind, but he wakes up with another one all ready, on the tip of his tongue. He turns his head a little and whispers, “Larry.”

  “—into the communal pot, and—Did you say something?”

  “Question.”

  “Of course, Koo.” Larry’s sincere intern’s face comes closer. “What is it?”

  “Not an insult,” Koo whispers. He can only bring out fragments of the sentences in his mind. “Really want to know.”

  “I understand, Koo. I promise I won’t be insulted. What do you want to ask?”

  “If you like—Russia—so much—why don’t you—go live there?”

  Larry doesn’t look insulted, but he does look astonished. “Russia? Koo, what does Russia have to do with anything?”

  “Commie—Communist—”

  “Marxist, you mean.” Larry smiles with indulgent understanding. “Marxism isn’t Russia, Koo. Russia is at least as decadent and far more repressive than the United States. What we’re talking about is a new order, something never seen on the planet before, a wedding of people and resources, and finally the salvation of the planet itself. Koo, do you think it’s an accident that the developer of the aerosol spray can was a friend of Nixon’s?”

  This non sequitur is so striking that Koo can only stare at Larry in admiration. “I could use you—as a writer,” he whispers, and the door is burst open and in marches the mean one, the tough guy with the beard. Koo first notices, in amazement and sheer unalloyed pleasure and delight, that in the tough guy’s hand is Koo’s pill-case! By Christ, they’ve done it! Salvation is at hand! But then Koo notices that the guy is raging mad, and his delight turns to fear. Something bad is coming.

  It is. The guy slaps the pill-case onto a counter and says, “There it is.” Pointing at Koo he says, “And you don’t get it.”

  A terrible weakness runs through Koo’s throat and into his eyes, and he can only stare, beaten down, unable anymore even to wonder why.

  But Larry asks the question Koo might have asked: “Mark? You won’t give him his medicine?”

  “Not yet,” Mark says. (So now Koo knows another name.) “Not for a while yet.”

  “But why not? Look at the poor man!”

  “You look at him.” Mark, the son of a bitch, leans over Koo and speaks loudly and angrily into Koo’s face: “We didn’t have to deal with them at all. We could have left it up to them, either release those people and get you back, or fuck around until you’re dead. That’s what I wanted to do.”

  You would, you bastard, Koo thinks. He stares in fear and hatred up at the angry face.

  “But we were humanitarian,” Mark says, twisting the word and giving a contemptuous quick glance over his shoulder at Larry. “We got your goddamn pills. But could they play it straight? They could not. They bugged the case, they put a directional transmitter in it. I knew they would. And you’re going to pay for it.” Turning to Larry, whose face shows he’s full of protests, tough guy Mark says, “Out. I’ll watch our beauty for a while.”

  Larry will argue, but he won’t win; Koo can only watch, sharing Larry’s helplessness as he says, “Mark, you can’t ex—”

  “I can. Go complain to Peter, and see what good it does you.”

  Koo stares across the room at his case. His stomach burns, it burns as though charcoal briquettes are smoldering there. Even a bastard like this fellow Mark wouldn’t act like this if he understood the pain. Would he? I’m not going to cry, Koo promises himself, blinking.

  11

  Lynsey Rayne, having had her little “victory” over the question of the transmitter, had finally agreed to go home and get some rest, leaving Mike free to supervise the tracking operation from the office. There’d been no positive result from the sweep at the Sunset Boulevard end, so the transmitter was their last shot at the basket. Mike suspected Jock Cayzer had private doubts about the wisdom of using the transmitter, but that was why Jock was local and Mike federal; you had to know when to play hardball if you wanted to get into the big leagues. And at any rate, if Jock did have qualms, he kept them to himself.

  One of Jock’s people had come in with plastic cups of orange juice, and Mike had surreptitiously spiked his from the pint of hundred-proof vodka he kept in the glove compartment of his car, so he was feeling more relaxed now, more alert and sure of himself. He was in radio contact with the two monitor vans, and from their first reports things were going well; the subject car appeared to be moving in a fairly straight line northwestward across the valley. There’d be no attempt at visual contact until it came to rest.

  The workroom, where Mike and a radio technician sat together at a table, was filling up with people; mostly men, with a sprinkling of women. Assembling here were uniformed and plainclothes officers from Jock Cayzer’s force, plus FBI agents from the Los Angeles office, waiting for the suspects to settle back at last into their nest, which at exactly twenty-three minutes to four they did.

  “Been in one place now for over a minute,” the voice said from Van Number One. “I think they’ve lit.” The voice maintained the proper tone of professional detachment, but underneath the excitement could be heard.

  It was infectious excitement, vibrating in the very air of the workroom, in the quick bright-eyed glances people gave to one another, in their inability to remain seated quietly in one place. Mike felt it as a kind of tingling sensation in the tips of his fingers, in his throat, buzzing through his body. They were going to wrap it up, they were going to put it on ice even before the statutory twenty-four hours and the FBI’s official entry into the case. Beautiful. Beautiful. Washington, here I come.

  It was another five minutes before the vans, moving cautiously, announced the location: “Intersection of White Oak Street and Verde Road, Tarzana.”

  “Can you give us a house address?”

  Two minutes later they had it: 124-82 White Oak Street. Two of Jock’s people got busy on telephones, and Jock came back with the result. “Family called Springer. Gerard Springer, forty-six, engineer out at Cal-Space. Wife, four kids. Owns the house, bought it five years ago.”

  Mike frowned. “That doesn’t seem right. Unless they’ve invaded the house. Could be they’re holding the family.”

  “At this hour of the morning,” Jock said, “there’s no way to check, find out if the kids’ve been at school, if Springer’s been at work.”

  “Aerospace engineer, huh? Deep cover agent, do you think? Surfaced for this job?”

  Jock Cayzer shook his head. “Mike, I do believe anything is possible.”

  Five hours of surveillance at the Springer house produced nothing out of the ordinary. Gerard Springer himself drove away at seven-forty, in a red Volkswagen Golf, taking with him two of the children. Two more children, dawdling and carrying bookbags, left at eight-oh-five. FBI agent Dave Kerman entered the premises at eight-thirty-five, showing ID from Pacific Gas and Electric and claiming to be a repairman looking for a potential gas leak; on his return to the mobile headquarters a block away he said, “It can’t be right. I’ll swear there’s nothing going on in there.”

  Mike said, “Then they must have dumped it. Either they found the transmitter or they just dumped the whole package. Let’s go take a look.” And when they drove past the Springer house Mike and Jock Cayzer both said, at the same instant, “The mailbox.”

  In the mailbox they found the brown paper bag, and inside the bag was the transmitter, with a piece of
human dung, inside a sealed plastic bag. Also another cassette. With an uneasy tremor beneath his anger and humiliation, Mike traveled back to Burbank to listen to this new tape.

  It was shorter than the first, and the voice was not that of Koo Davis, but was recognizably the same as the individual who had done the phoning. It said: “I’m taping this ahead of time, and I’m having a nice shit ahead of time, too, because I know what you people are like. You have no ethics. You have no morality. You think you’re on the side of good, and therefore it’s impossible for you to do wrong. You’ll promise not to plant a bug on us, but you will plant a bug on us. And I’ll find it. And I’ll send it back. I’m talking to you, Michael Wiskiel, I remember you from Watergate. We’ll be listening to the radio news all morning. Until we hear an apology from you, Michael Wiskiel, in your own voice, Koo Davis gets no medicine.”

  That was it. In the profound silence that followed the harsh self-righteous voice, Mike sighed and said, “Lynsey Rayne is going to have my head on a platter.”

  12

  Trying to distract himself, Larry Crosfield sat in his bedroom and wrote in his notebook, the most recent in a series of notebooks he’d kept over the years. He wrote:

  The dreadful paradox, of course, is the absolute necessity to do evil in order to bring about good. To make the world a better place, one must be worthy. To be worthy, one must strive for sainthood (in the non-clerical sense of total commitment to unattainable but appropriate ideals), and yet the lethargic and static forces of Society are so powerful that it requires, specifically requires, extra-social acts in order to promote change. One must do evil while knowing it to be evil and at the same time one must strive for sainthood. This paradox—