The Comedy is Finished

by Donald E. Westlake

  “All right,” Ginger said. “Start from the beginning.”

  The beginning was to repeat that self-identification, and go on from there: “We are holding, as a prisoner of war, a collaborator named Koo Davis, and have demanded in exchange for his return the release of ten political prisoners in American jails. The official response has been a farcical television broadcast, in which seven of these ten have been obviously, blatantly forced to claim they do not want to be released.

  “The American public will not be deceived, and the People’s Revolutionary Army is not deceived. Does the U.S. government think it can fool the world? Can seven out of ten people not want to leave prison? The staging of this mockery was as clever and professional as we might expect from an organization with all the resources of the United States government behind it, but the result can’t hold up. Simple reflection will show that it can’t be true.

  “Therefore, our demand remains the same. The ten people on the list will be removed from their prisons and flown to Algeria, where they will be free to make any statements they choose. If any of them wish to return to prison, of course they may, but let’s hear them say it once they are free of the threatening power of the United States government.

  “The speed with which the government’s comedy was assembled shows that our original deadline was not too tight. This is Thursday night. By noon tomorrow, California time, the government will announce its decision. If the answer is no, Koo Davis dies. If the answer is yes, the government will then have twenty-four hours, until noon on Saturday, to release the ten prisoners and place them on public view in Algeria. If the government fails, Koo Davis dies. There are two deadlines; noon tomorrow for the government response, noon Saturday for the release of the prisoners. Fail to meet either deadline and Koo Davis dies. There will be no more negotiation. A second television farce like the first will result in Koo Davis’ immediate death. As a demonstration that our patience is exhausted, and that the comedy is finished, we are enclosing one of Koo Davis’ ears.”

  “Good God, Peter!” Larry cried.

  Clapping his hand over the microphone, Peter said to Ginger, “Did that stupid exclamation get on the tape?”

  “If it is, I can erase it.” Ginger was noncommittal. “You really mean to do this, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Even though you know none of those people on television were forced.”

  “The laughing has to stop,” Peter said.

  “So you do intend to kill Davis.”

  “To strengthen our credibility in the future.”

  “Credibility.” Ginger shrugged slightly, then said, “And the ear?”

  “Peter won’t do that,” Larry abruptly said, angry and scornful. It wasn’t like Larry to show scorn and he was awkward at it, the result looking more like petulance. Turning to Peter, he said, “You’d have Mark do it, go cut the man’s ear off, but Mark isn’t here, he’s run away. Can you do it yourself?”

  “I intend to.” Getting to his feet, Peter said, “You two come along, to hold him down.”

  26

  Koo opens his eyes from confused dreams of family and flight, to find Joyce looming over him, staring down at his face with great intensity. Orienting himself, seeing the mirrored ceiling with himself and Joyce reflected in it like a bad genre painting, Koo clears his husky throat and says, “The soup lady.”

  She blinks, as though she’d been lost in thought, then turns to look over her shoulder at the door. “We don’t have much time,” she says.

  “We don’t?”

  “I’m getting you out of here.”

  Koo sits up, astounded. “Careful now,” he says. “I’m the one tells the jokes.”

  “It isn’t a joke. I’m a...a double agent.”

  A crazy. Koo pastes a happy smile on his face. “That’s terrific,” he says, in the style of the ultimate naïf. “A double agent. Afterwards, you’ll be able to collect unemployment insurance twice a week.”

  “They signaled me during that television show.”

  “Is that right? Fancy that.”

  “I can see you don’t believe me, but it’s true. Didn’t you notice the one thing he said that wasn’t about anything? St. Clair; he said, ‘Two-thirteen Van Dyke.’ Remember that?”

  As a matter of fact, Koo does; it had been an unexpected anomaly in the middle of the program. But the program itself had been such a catalogue of horrors that Koo—and probably everybody else watching it—had promptly forgotten that quick enigma. “What is it, your code name?”

  “A phone number.” There’s something about the very intensity of her manner that forces him to believe her. “The two-thirteen is the area code.”

  “Los Angeles,” Koo says, in some surprise. “This very metropolis, in fact.”

  “I worked for them for a few years, and that’s always the way they got in touch with me. An area code, and a phone number done as a name. Van Dyke sometimes, and sometimes Lydgate. If I hear one of those names, and the area code, I know how to make contact.”

  “You dial the seven letters. Van Dyke.”

  “That’s right.” Looking uncertain for just a second, maybe even oddly saddened, she says, “It’s been years since they signaled me. A long long time.”

  “Probably, they were busy.”

  “I called them,” Joyce says, and double agent or not there’s something wild-eyed about her, something unhinged. “And they said I should get you out of here now.”

  “I agree with them.”

  “But we must be very quiet.”

  “I agree with you.”

  Holding a finger to her lips, she moves away across the room, opening the mirrored door, leaning out, then gesturing Koo to follow her, which he does.

  This is his first view of the rest of the house, and it’s disappointingly ordinary after that bedroom. There’s also the sound of surf, faintly, from a distance; is that why he dreamed about drowning in the ocean?

  The house is dim and quiet, but doesn’t have the echoing quality of a place without people. Koo is very aware of the unseen presences under this roof, unseen and hostile, as he creeps down the carpeted stairs behind Joyce. He’s scared, but at the same time this is exhilarating; finally he’s doing something.

  At the foot of the stairs Joyce pats the air at him—wait—then leaves briefly to reconnoiter. Koo is beginning very strongly to feel his vulnerability when at last she returns, waving him to come on.

  There’s a stone-walled living room through a broad doorway. Koo glances at it, and stops dead when he sees there’s someone in there! Liz, the tough one, is seated in an Eames chair, legs curled under her, either brooding or asleep. High again? Koo is afraid to move; won’t movement attract her attention?

  To his left, Joyce is urgently motioning to him: Come on, come on. He hesitates, then somewhere to the right a door opens and there are voices. In a sudden rush he crosses the open space to the shadowed areaway where Joyce is waiting.

  The voices approach. Koo listens apprehensively for Mark, but the first identifiable voice belongs to Larry, saying, “How can you justify this, Peter?”

  Peter’s voice says, “The Movement can’t be mocked. We can’t permit it.”

  They go past the areaway as a third voice, one Koo hasn’t heard before, says, “It’ll be interesting to see just how far you’ll go in practice, as opposed to theory.” This voice is nasty, angry, sarcastic.

  “As far as necessary,” Peter says. They’re just the other side of this wall now, apparently in the kitchen; Koo hears drawers being opened and closed. Peter says, “There was a knife here, a long carving knife. Where the hell is it?”

  A long carving knife? Koo presses his back against the wall, trying to be one more shadow among the shadows. What are they up to now?

  The nasty voice says, “Here’s a cleaver. Just the thing, I should think.”

  “All right, give it to me.” And one more drawer slams, then the three men march out of the room and start up the s
tairs.

  Joyce grabs Koo’s arm, tugs at him. Yes, yes. Those three are going up to where they think Koo is, and they’re carrying a cleaver; feet trembling in haste, Koo follows Joyce down another flight of stairs between living room and kitchen, and through a door into a sudden rush of cool moist air. Joyce closes the door, hurriedly but silently, and whispers, “Come on! We have to hurry!”

  “Check.”

  No outcry yet from above. They run out from under the cantilevered deck into thick sand, hard to move through. The ocean is out there, under a half moon in a clear black sky. Where is this place? No way to tell; it could be any one of a hundred spots between Newport Beach and Oxnard. Koo looks back, trying to guess where they are from the look of the houses, but Joyce pulls at his arm, crying over the surf. “Come on! Hurry!”

  “Yes. Right.” But she’s urging him directly toward the ocean, not along the beach. “Where—” The exertion of running through the sand is rapidly using up his strength. “Where—”

  “They have a boat. We’re supposed to meet the boat. Hurry!”

  The hard sand of high tide line; Koo moves more quickly, Joyce dropping back. A boat? Koo trots forward, gasping, arms pumping, staring out at the black sea with its eerie line of phosphorescence forming and rolling and dying way out there in the cold dark. A boat? Seeing nothing, Koo turns his head to gasp another question, and behind him, rushing at him ahead of Joyce’s savage straining face, is dull moonlight striking yellow from the blade of a long knife. A knife held in her raised fist.

  “Jesus!” Koo backpedals, turning, tripping over his own feet, trying to run backward away from the slashing knife, throwing his arms up to fend it off, and the blade slices across his forearm, grating on bone, slitting the flesh like cutting through raw veal. There isn’t pain, not at first, but there’s the horrible knowledge; his flesh has been cut. Koo screams, falls backwards, rolls and rolls, blood spraying from his arm in red showers, and the panting mad girl lunges after him on all fours, stabbing downward, scraping the dull side of the blade along his ribcage, jabbing the knife into the sand, pulling it out with both hands, holding it high in both hands, following him on her knees.

  Koo is mindless with terror, gibbering, “Don’t don’t don’t don’t NO JEE-SUS!”

  “You’re tearing us apart,” he hears her mutter, through the crash of surf. “Tearing us apart.” And she struggles to her feet, the knife huge and straight and unbending in her hand.

  Koo tries to rise, falls back, throws his arms up again and she slashes twice, back and forth. Great triangular strips of flesh hang from his arms, and even in his agony the gag interpretation rises in his shocked mind: She’s filleting me. “Let me go! Let me go! I won’t tell!”

  She stops, the red-clouded knife hovering as she sways over him. “Peter would hate me.” Her eyes are also clouded, voice swollen as though her mouth and throat are already clogged with his blood. “We can survive if you’re dead.” And she drops on him, slashing down again, as Koo screams, the loudest harshest most final scream in the world—and all at once Joyce flings herself back from him, as though flying.

  No; she doesn’t fling herself, she is thrown. A black figure has come out of the ocean, moving with the speed of dark, a blur of vicious motion; it swarms over Joyce, compelling, irrevocable. Something dull and hard is in its upraised fist, thudding down, thudding again, over and over, the sound first dry and then wet.

  Koo struggles to get up, but can barely lift his head. His blood-streaming shredded arms have no strength. “Oh,” he whispers, in what was meant to be a cry for help. “Oh, God.”

  People now are running this way from the house. There’s no escape, no safety anywhere. The figure hulking over what had been Joyce turns to him, throwing away the dark sea-rock, dropping to his knees beside Koo, murmuring, “Easy. Easy.”

  Koo can barely recognize Mark in this beatific nurse, bending over him, carefully touching his arms. “Don’t,” he begs.

  “Lucky fat man,” Mark says, almost tenderly. “We’ll fix you at the house.”

  “Mark,” Koo whispers. “You’re all wet.”

  It’s true. From head to foot Mark is wet, as drenched with water as Koo is drenched with his own blood. Mark’s eyes gleam like that far-off phosphorescence. “I’ve saved your life,” he says, quick and low and triumphant. “It’s mine. We start fresh.”

  The other people are pounding across the beach, are nearly here. “Mark,” Koo whispers. “Help me.”

  “You’re mine again,” Mark tells him, slipping his arms under Koo’s body, preparing to lift him.

  “Help me. You’re the only one,” Koo whispers, and as Mark lifts him he faints.

  27

  The trouble outside roused Liz at last. She rose from the Eames chair, looking around in a dazed way like someone coming out of hypnosis, and became aware of blurred movement out on the beach, fitful in the dim moonlight, capering silhouettes against the far-off lines of wave-phosphorescence. Sliding open one of the glass doors, she stepped out onto the cantilevered deck to see the obscure cluster of figures split in two; while a part remained behind, involved with something flat on the beach, another part moved this way, weaving and tottering through the sand. Leaning on the rail, peering hard into the darkness, Liz saw that the thing approaching was a person, carrying another person. They approached, they entered the trapezoid of yellow lightspill from the house, and it was Mark, struggling through the soft sand. And in his arms; was that Davis?

  They disappeared beneath her, under the deck, and she went back inside, turning the corner from the living room to the central hallway in time to see Mark struggle up the stairs from the beach door. That was Davis in his arms, unconscious or dead, and both men drenched with water and blood; survivors of some water cult’s sacrificial rite. Daubs and spatters of blood painted Mark’s face, like a marauding Iroquois. Davis was smeared all over with blood, some dripping and spraying as Mark jolted up the stairs. Liz saw the knife-hilt angling from Davis’ side just as Mark reached the first floor; she stared at it, not understanding anything she saw, and on the way by Mark said, “Bandages. Tape. Anything.”

  “Yes.” But she’d been so self-involved till now that she’d barely registered her surroundings, and couldn’t remember in this strange house where the bathrooms were. She hesitated, looking back toward the living room, then ahead toward the kitchen.

  Meantime, Mark continued on up the stairs toward the second floor, hurrying and yet trying not to shake Davis more than absolutely necessary. The second floor; that’s where the bathroom would be. Liz followed, while blood drops polka-dotted the gray staircase carpet.

  At the head of the stairs Mark turned left, through the open doorway into the room where they’d been keeping Davis, while Liz half-instinctively went right, fumbling for a light-switch on the wall, clicking into existence a large bland bedroom with an open mirrored door off to the right. Through that she found the bathroom, a long elaborate double-sinked room with masses of storage space, most of it empty. But there were gauze bandages, there was adhesive tape, there were first-aid powders and ointments; she grabbed up a double armful and hurried to the other room, where Mark had laid Davis out on the bed, and now she saw his forearms, which didn’t look human anymore. “Jesus God,” she said, more awed than repelled.

  Mark, his face grimly expressionless, slapped the supplies out of her arms onto the bed. “Cloth,” he said. “Clean cloth.”

  “Yes.” Back to the bathroom she went, this time gathering up white towels and a handful of small white facecloths. In the bedroom again she found Mark tenderly folding down the flaps of flesh on the lacerated arms, sprinkling antiseptic powder on them, wrapping gauze to keep them in place. Dropping the cloth on the bed Liz said, “What happened?”

  He didn’t seem to hear her. “Scissors,” he said.

  Scissors. A third trip to the bathroom, and she brought back other things as well, aspirin and witch hazel, not knowing what Mark might need. “Strips of ta
pe,” he said, as she walked into the room, not looking up from what he was doing. One forearm was now completely wrapped in gauze, like a mummy, like a Red Cross volunteer; he was working on the second.

  She cut strips of tape, but as he prepared to tape the gauze on the first arm they both saw the blood already seeping through. A strange sound came from Mark’s throat then, a kind of animal noise, half bark and half whine. And he stopped, he seemed directionless all at once, as though someone had pushed a button that disconnected him from his motivations. In the humming silence he hesitated, rocking slightly, looking down at the spreading stains of blood.

  Liz said, “More gauze,” to prompt him into movement, but he shook his head: “Isn’t any more. Used it up.”

  She looked around at the jumble of things on the round purple bed. “These,” she said, holding up the small facecloths.

  “Yes.” The solution didn’t make him pleased, or excited, it merely reactivated him. He took facecloths, folded them around the bleeding arms, wound lengths of adhesive tape to hold them in place. Watching, Liz said, “Not too tight. The circulation.”

  He ignored that. He ignored everything but what was already in his head. Finishing the arms, he went to work on the wound in Davis’ side. He said, “Blankets. We have to keep him warm.”

  The mirrored walls were in fact doors; she searched, and behind one mirror was a linen closet with sheets and blankets, all in tones of red and purple and orange. She helped Mark move Davis closer to the middle of the bed and then they put blankets over him, so many that by the time Mark was satisfied it looked like a great fat man lying there on the round bed; Old King Cole, perhaps, exhausted from his revels. But a very pale reveler, with very shallow breaths.

  Liz and Mark were on opposite sides of the bed, from spreading the blankets. They both stood a moment, gazing at the unconscious man, and Liz was about to ask again what had happened when Mark, his manner cold and dismissing, said, “That’s all.”