“So, who’s your head mole in the Nihilists?”
The other stared at him. “We haven’t one. We have several plants among them but they’re not of enough importance for us to go to any great extent to infiltrate them. It’s just a matter of keeping the sods under observation. Had we gotten news that poor Harold Dunninger was to be kidnapped, we would have immediately informed him. The Graf, after all, is a loyal candidate member of the Central Committee.”
Jerry Auburn took him in for a long, cold moment. “We’ll see about that,” he said. He finished his drink with the stiff-wristed motion of the practiced drinker, turned on his heel, and headed for the bar, leaving the Englishman staring after him, boiling anger in his pale killer eyes.
Lee Garrett gave up at about one o’clock in the morning. She had done her best to make acquaintances, as ordered by Shelia Duff-Roberts, and had met perhaps a dozen of the members and candidates. She had spent the last half hour in the company of Nils Norden. From what she had gathered, the Scandinavian tycoon was on the fence so far as the divisions within the organization were concerned. If Chase and his colleagues were the right wing of the Committee, and Jerry Auburn was on the left wing, then Nils Norden must be thought of as the center. Not that she’d discussed the World Club with him to any extent. Largely, he seemed interested in conducting her back to her suite—and to bed.
By this time, she had learned the layout of this part of the Palazzo well enough that she had no trouble finding her way to her quarters. She sighed her weariness, kicked off her shoes, picked them up, and headed for the suite’s interior, her bedroom in mind. To get to it, she had to pass through the living room. She was surprised to find the lights were on.
Then she spotted Jerry Auburn sprawled on the fifteenth-century couch, his feet, shoes and all, up on one arm of the priceless antique. His inevitable glass was on a low table, within easy reach. He looked up at her.
“What is the meaning of this, Mr. Auburn?”
“Jerry,” he said. “If we’re to become lovers we must forget formalities.”
“Lovers!” She dropped her shoes onto the floor and slipped her feet into them. “If you came here to…”
He held up a weary hand. “Please. No indignation. I never rape girls. I’ve never had to. In fact, sometimes they rape me.”
She snorted and ran her eyes over his sturdy athlete’s body. “It’d take quite a mopsy to rape you, my friend.”
“I rape easily—a flaw in my character,” he explained, swinging his feet around and to the floor. “Sit down, Lee. I have something to ask you.”
“I’m tired,” she said. “I want to go to bed.” But she sat, taking one of the antique chairs, which was more comfortable than it looked. It would have to be.
“So do I,” he told her earnestly. “But we’ll get to do that later.” He pointed at the phone, the one she knew was bugged. Her eyes widened when she saw, sitting next to it, a muffler similar to the one she had utilized.
“Nobody’s listening in,” he said, reaching over and picking up his glass.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she got out.
He took back some of his drink. “You know, everybody’s been telling me that this evening,” he told her. “Peter Windsor, for instance. However, you’re reporting to someone. Whom? Don’t bother to deny it, honey. We often monitor the quarters of new employees, on the off chance that they’re an attempt to infiltrate the World Club. You’d be surprised how many elements would like to know its inner workings. By chance, the monitor in this case is an old family friend, indebted to my late father. He reports to me first—and sometimes I’m the only one he reports to. At any rate, honey, he tells me that your bug was muffled for a time. Obviously he couldn’t tell me whom you called, nor what you said, but he was aware of the muffler. So what is a nice girl like you doing with a sophisticated piece of electronic equipment and who were you calling, to report what?”
She glared at him angrily, even while her mind raced. “My mother!” she got out finally.
He closed his eyes in pain and pushed his left hand over his mouth. “Oh, come on now, honey.”
She said challengingly, “My mother is Rosamond Brice.”
He cocked an eye at her. “I know Rosamond Brice. Or did. She doesn’t look old enough to be your mother. And, what’s more, she doesn’t act like a mother. She’s been in more beds than I’ve been in automobiles. And when she comes to town the local distilleries put on an extra shift.” Lee went to the bar and poured herself a drink from the first bottle that came to hand. She took down a quick snort and made a face. Absinthe. She poured some water into it and returned to her chair.
She said defiantly, “My mother and father weren’t married, but for a time they evidently had a somewhat hectic love affair. For some reason, she agreed to have a baby. By the time I came, the affair was waning. Mother couldn’t bother with me; I interfered with her good times. But father wanted me and raised me. We loved each other very much. After he died, I became friends with Rosamond although we’re worlds apart as a rule. When I told her I was to work for the World Club, she told me that they’d probably bug my rooms and gave me a muffler so that we could talk without being overheard. She knew about mufflers because she always uses one. She’s afraid of jealous wives, sweethearts, or whoever, listening in on her calls to lovers.”
He looked at her for a long disbelieving moment.
She came to her feet and said, “Oh, hell; come on. I suppose this was inevitable.”
“Come on where?” he said.
“To the bedroom. I’m going to rape you a little.”
Chapter Nineteen: Roy Cos
Roy dreaded getting up, but that feeling of dread was now a daily occurrence. He couldn’t bring himself to face the coming day. How long had it been now—a couple of weeks? More than that. At least he was giving the bastards a run for their money. One of the newsmen had told them that Oliver Brett-James, in Nassau, had been fired by the outfit issuing the Deathwish Policy Roy had signed up for. Evidently, the cosmocorp’s executives blamed the Englishman for not spotting potential trouble in the offbeat Roy Cos and his manager. Long before this, they had begun losing money on the deal. Not only were the premiums eating them up, but the so-called Deathwish Wobbly was spending his million pseudodollars per day at an unprecedented rate. How many people did he have on his payroll now? Over twenty, Roy supposed, counting the stenographers down in the offices on the floor below—a payroll of more than two hundred thousand pseudodollars a day! If he wasn’t feeling so damned depressed, he might have laughed. Imagine Roy Cos spending over a million a week on his staff.
Mary Ann, on the pillow next to him, said, doing her best to keep the anxiety from her voice, “Something wrong, darling?”
He looked over at her. Mousy of face, Mary Ann Elwyn might be, but a mouse of very special attractions. It was the first time in his life that he’d had a deep involvement that went beyond mere sex.
“No, not really,” he told her.
She looked at her wrist chronometer. “You’re supposed to hear that Tri-Di singer this morning for the United Church broadcast.”
“Yeah,” he said, staring up at the ceiling. “What was his name again?”
“Stevie Summers. He’s the current big thing in nostalgia folk song revivals.”
Roy sighed and said, “How’s Forry getting along with the hotel manager?”
She laughed shortly. “He’s reversed the flow of crap, you might say. The first few days, guests were moving out wholesale when it was learned that the Deathwish Wobbly was staying here. Evidently, they expected the whole New Tropical Hotel to be bombed flat or something. But that didn’t last. Thrill seekers zeroed in wholesale. One of Ron’s friends who works in the lobby says the manager is turning down bribes that run up to a thousand pseudodollars for reservations. Same old story—thousands of silly dizzards would give their right arms to be on hand when the Graf’s men get to you. I mean if,” she added contritely.
“Sorry.”
He ran a weary hand back through his shaggy, faded brown hair. “Nothing to be sorry about,” he told her. He dug around for something else to postpone getting out of bed. “How’d that girl check out?”
“The one who got in with the reporters yesterday? She’s evidently what she said she was, a celebrity hound. She wanted to see you in person, wanted to try to get your autograph. The guards shook her down just like everybody else and she had nothing remotely resembling a weapon, so they let her through. Supposedly, she was a reporter.”
“If she could get past all of our security, so could somebody else,” he said bitterly.
“We’d better go and check out this Stevie Summers, darling.”
“All right.” He swung his legs out over the side of the bed. Ignoring his bedroom slippers, he went over to the chair where he had thrown his clothes the night before and began to dress. Mary Ann got up too and went to the closet. The prole clothes she brought forth were as similar to his own as possible.
She looked over at him. Roy Cos had lost the extra ten pounds or so of weight and now looked drawn rather than pasty of face. The sunbaths on the roof, which Forry Brown had insisted upon, had wiped away the pallor. It came to her that Roy must have been quite good-looking as a young man. Twenty-five years of inadequate diet and exercise hadn’t done him any good, nor had the long hours of sitting around small, drab rooms arguing political economy, night after night.
Forry Brown and Ferd Feldmeyer were in the living room with three of the guards who bore short, stocky Gyrojet automatic carbines. Dick Samuelson, in particular, carried his with a practiced ease. It had turned out, when the weapons were first procured, that Dick had spent a hitch in the Skyborne Commandos, and he’d taken over the duty of instructing his less knowledgeable Wobbly colleagues in their use.
Also present was a rather vague-looking young man, somewhere in his early twenties. He bore a guitar and was looking both impatient and bored. His fans might have swooned over him, Roy decided, but he looked like nothing more than a gangly kid.
Forry, dressed identically to Roy, and looking somewhat ludicrous in prole attire, squinted through tobacco smoke at his employer. He said, “This is Stevie Summers. I promised him five thousand to sing one song as a preliminary to you roasting the Prophet.”
“It ain’t the money,” the singer said. “I hate that sapsucker.”
Roy nodded, went over to his desk, and took up a little red pamphlet, thumbed through it to the page he sought, found it, and handed it to the boy.
“This is a book of old IWW songs,” he said. “This is the one I wanted you to sing. It was written by one of the early Wobblies, Joe Hill, who was executed in Utah for a crime he didn’t commit because he was a radical. You sing it to the tune for the old hymn, In the Sweet Bye and Bye.
“Gotcha,” the boy said. He looked over the lyrics for a moment, then began to strum and sing. To Roy’s surprise, the singer’s voice, though soft, grasped with appeal.
Long haired preachers come out every night,
Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right;
But when asked how ’bout something to eat
They will answer with voices so sweet:
You will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.
And the starvation army they play,
And they sing and they clap and they pray,
Till they get all your coin on the drum,
Then they tell you when you’re on the bum:
You will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.
Workingmen of all countries unite,
Side by side we for freedom will fight;
When the world and its wealth we have gained
To the grafters we’ll sing this refrain:
You will eat, bye and bye,
When you’ve learned how to cook and to fry
Chop some wood, ’twill do you good,
And you’ll eat in the sweet bye and bye.
The boy ended with a bang on the strings, looked up and grinned. “After that, the Prophet’ll want to crucify you.”
“That’s the idea,” Roy said. “He’s lined up with the other side. We want to make that clear.” He looked at the folk singer. “That old radical song is kind of primitive as propaganda goes but it won’t put you on anybody’s shitlist, will it? The Prophet throws a lot of weight. With me, it doesn’t make any difference. He’ll have to stand in line if he wants to take a crack at me.”
Stevie Summers shook his head, “The kids I sing for don’t go for this holy-roller fling. So far as we’re concerned, he can bugger himself with a wood auger. By the way, my old man’s a Libertarian. I’ve heard a couple of your bleats on Tri-Di. Your two organizations oughta get together.”
“There’s been some talk about it,” Roy nodded.
Forry said, “We better get ready for that press interview.” He took young Summers by the arm and led him to the door, going over details about the broadcast.
Roy sat down at his desk and looked unhappily at the pile of mail before him. He thumbed quickly through it. There was nothing from anyone he knew. All strangers.
He said to Mary Ann, “You want to go through this and spread it around to the girls for the standard answers? By the way, how come I haven’t met any of the stenographers?”
Mary Ann came over from her own desk, carrying a letter. She said, “Forry doesn’t want them on this floor. Two of them are Wobblies, but the others are outsiders. For all we know, the Graf might be able to get next to one of them. It’s just as easy for a woman to take a crack at you as a man.”
Roy shook his head but said, “I guess you’re right. What’s that?”
She put the letter down before him. “It’s from Wobbly headquarters in Chicago.”
Billy Tucker, who was also dressed identically to Roy Cos, said, “Oh, oh. I was beginning to wonder when we’d get a kick from the Agitation Committee. Some of those speeches Ferd has been writing for you aren’t exactly the standard message the Wobblies have been making for the last century or so.”
Roy ripped open the envelope and quickly scanned the letter.
“I’ll be damned,” he said. “I’ve been promoted from national organizer to a member of the Agitation Committee.” He looked up at Mary Ann. “That’s our executive committee, headed by the national secretary. He wants me to attend a meeting being organized by Synthesis.”
“What in the hell’s Synthesis?” Dick Samuelson said. He was lounging against the wall, next to the door to the corridor, his carbine under his right arm.
Roy grunted and said, “A new outfit that’s trying to get all the radicals together. The whole shebang: Libertarians, Nihilists, Wobblies, the Anti-Racist League—everybody but those Eurocommunist slobs.”
The door buzzed. Samuelson readied his gun and checked the identity screen. It was Forry Brown.
The newsman came in followed by Ferd Feldmeyer, who was carrying a sheaf of papers. The speechwriter, like all the others of the team, was in prole dress identical to that worn by Roy. It had been one of Forry’s ideas. The whole team dressed exactly alike. As they invariably moved in a tight group whenever they were in public, a hit man, at any distance at all, would have his work cut out telling which one was Roy. Roy had protested, particularly in the case of Mary Ann, but she had overruled him. As with the grossly fat Ferd and the king-sized Billy Tucker, there was small chance that even a myopic assassin would confuse her with his target, but the whole crew of them being dressed alike wouldn’t help him any.
Forry, noticing the letter in Roy’s hand, said, “What spins?”
“I’ve been made a member of the Agitation Committee. They want me to attend a special meeting that’s being held in an attempt to
amalgamate all radical groups.”
“That’s out. No more public appearances,” Forry told him sourly. “From now on, I’ve made arrangements for your broadcasts to be made from right here. The fuzzies stationed at your last rally picked up two armed men before they even got near enough to you for our boys to be needed. Next meeting, there’d be more than two, and it’s just a matter of time before one or more of them gets within firing range. From now on, you don’t leave the New Tropical Hotel. You don’t even leave this floor.”
Roy said, “I’ll have to attend that Synthesis meeting, if the national secretary wants me to.”
“Screw the national secretary. Let him represent the Wobblies. He’s expendable; you’re not. You’re the Deathwish Wobbly and you’ve put your message over more widely than all the rest of your outfit put together since it was first started.”
Roy shook his head, feeling tired all over again. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do, Forry, but I’m a member of an organization, not just a one-man agitator. I take orders from our elected officials just like Billy and Dick here do.”
The little newsman shrugged angrily but gave up and fished a cigarette pack from a jumper pocket.
Ferd Feldmeyer tossed his sheaf of papers on the desk before his employer “Here’s the United Church broadcast. I played it the way you said, stressing the fact that the Wobblies have nothing against religion per se since a man’s relationship with his God is his personal business. But when organized religion intrudes on politics, it’s no longer a matter of religion. They’re as vulnerable as any other political organization.”
Roy Cos was quickly scanning the speech. He said, “You used some concrete examples—the Roman Catholic Church, during the Middle Ages in particular, Islam, Shintoism in Japan, and all other religions that have supported class-divided society down through the ages?”
“Sure, sure,” Feldmeyer said, running his obscenely obese hand back through thinning blond hair. “Practically every large church—once it got big—has supported the status quo. And the Prophet’s United Church is no exception.”
Deathwish World Page 27
