Gods help the Whiz Kid double, I thought. The deadly Countess Krak was going to end his days as soon as she was through with him! Oh, the poor double! Imagine being in the hands of such a murderous monster! I shuddered. But better him than me.
“Bang-Bang, if you will just step outside and make sure we’re not disturbed, I think I can make him talk.”
“Pretty bloody, eh?” said Bang-Bang. “In that event I’ll also take the cat: he’s pretty young to be watching violence, even if he does have a criminal record.”
The Countess Krak was taking off the double’s gag.
“Does that cat have a criminal record?” spluttered the double. “I thought he was a lawyer!”
“What’s the difference?” said Bang-Bang. “To his long list of murders, we now have to add kidnapping. But what’s going to happen now is too strong for him. I wouldn’t give two catnip mice for your life, kid. So answer the lady polite. The cat and I will be right outside and I’ll let him in again if you don’t sing.”
This was far too confused for the double. “I’m innocent. I don’t know anything.”
“Go along, Bang-Bang,” said the Countess.
Bang-Bang halted at the side door, holding it open. I couldn’t see anything but warehouse wall. “I’ll loosen up one of the old trap doors,” he said. “Just in case he doesn’t talk.” The cat jumped out and Bang-Bang closed the door.
“I don’t know anything,” said the double. “I just do what I’m told.”
“Ah,” said the Countess Krak, “but who tells you?”
My hair went straight up underneath my bandages. In sweeping horror, it was fully borne home to me that if this double knew the name of Madison, the Countess Krak would grab Madison. And if Madison was questioned, he would mention and describe the man he knew as Smith—me. And the Countess Krak would know absolutely that I was behind all this. I would be DEAD! The image of the sightless eyes of the yellow-man rose between me and the viewer. The blood in my eye tinted it red. I had to sit down as my knees began to shake.
“I won’t tell you who tells me,” said the double, buckteeth truculently protruding.
“Ah, well,” said the Countess Krak. “You leave me no choice.”
She reached down to a shopping bag and pulled out the hypnohelmet. She pulled it down over the horrified head of the Whiz Kid double and turned it on. He suddenly slumped in his bonds.
She picked up the helmet microphone. “Sleep, sleep, pretty sleep. You will now tell me the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, or be indicted for the felony of perjury. Who gives you your orders?”
“A man.”
“What man?”
“I don’t know.”
Krak took a recording strip and put it in the helmet slot and pushed the button to Record. “Now,” she said, “you will begin to tell me everything you know about becoming the double of the real Wister.”
The double began his tale. He was an orphan, born in Georgia. By government student loans he had gotten into the Massachusetts Institute of Wrectology. He was getting along when suddenly he was called in and told that a man wanted to see him. The man had offered him a job. Money and women. He was simply to follow orders and appear where he was supposed to and say what he was told to say.
He had wanted to know what about his school and the man said that would all be cared for, that he couldn’t fail.
The man had said that from time to time it might look like he was being put in jail but that wasn’t anything to worry about because there was a REAL person, Jerome Terrance Wister, and that if the chips fell the wrong way, it would be THAT one who would go to jail, finally.
He had wanted to know how come this fellow had the name Wister also; he had heard once that he had had a brother but had never known where he was. His own name was Gerry Wister and he dimly recalled the brother’s name was Jerome. But the man said not to worry about that, it didn’t make any difference.
“You mean,” said the Countess Krak, “that you believed that the man you were helping to wreck was your own brother?”
“Well, sort of,” the double replied, “but the man explained that they were just trying to make my brother famous.”
“By putting him in jail?”
“Well, there was all that money they offered me and the women they promised.”
The Countess Krak pushed the mike into her chest. “What primitives! No sense of honor!” Then, to him, “Continue.”
The double rattled on in the muffled way of the wholly hypnotized.
The Countess Krak was beginning to get impatient. She was tapping her foot. She had heard a lot of this history of racing and Atlantic City and Kansas before and the only difference now was that she was hearing it was all cooked up by somebody.
I was very, very nervous.
The double at length ran down.
“So what was the name of this man?” said the Countess Krak.
“I called him Ed.”
I began to breathe more easily. The double had had no dealing directly with Madison.
But then at the next question, my heart missed a beat.
“Who pays you?” said the Countess Krak.
She might hit pay dirt with this!
“Cash in an envelope.”
“What’s on the envelope?”
“Nothing.”
Her foot was tapping faster with impatience. “Is there anything IN the envelope except cash?”
“Only the receipt I sign and give back to Ed.”
“And what is on the receipt?”
“The amount. And I initial it.”
“Anything else?”
“Only the letters FFBO.”
“What do they stand for?”
“I don’t know,” came the muffled reply.
“FFBO. That’s all?”
“That’s all.”
My hair was standing up. FFBO stood for Fatten, Farten, Burstein and Ooze, the advertising and PR giants that handled the Rockecenter accounts and employed J. Walter Madison for this particular black PR campaign. Oh, the careless, stupid fools! Their accounts department was out-security!
And then I was greatly heartened. I had just remembered what Bury had told me. You had to be in the advertising world itself to know what FFBO stood for. It was even a test of being a professional advertising man!
The Countess drilled some more. But that was all she learned.
Satisfied at last, she got on to other work. “Now, you are going to do something,” she said. “You are going to go into Superior Court and stand before the judge and you are going to state that every crime Jerome Terrance Wister is supposed to have done, you did. You owe it to the honor of your family. So you will do it without fail. You will state this in such a way that Jerome Terrance Wister will be absolved of all past charges and any current ones. It is YOUR face that is known on TV and in pictures and you will convince the judge that this is so. This includes marriages and adultery and the rape of a minor. And if anybody tells you to do different, you won’t. Understood?”
“Yes.”
“Now, you will also write a full confession that this is all a put-up job and will begin the moment you awake and I give you paper. Understood?”
“Yes.”
“Now you will forget you have been kidnapped or hypnotized and will think you came to me with this as your own idea and you will stay with us and not run away until you appear in court. Understood?”
“Yes.”
She clicked off the helmet and removed it from his head. He was looking around dazedly, trying to find something.
The Countess untied him. She gave him pen and paper and sat him at a small table in the van and he began to write.
She put the helmet in her shopping bag. She went outside.
I was wringing wet with sweat. What could I do to keep my world from totally caving in?
Bang-Bang was sitting on an old box, the cat beside him.
“Bang-Bang,” said the Countess Krak, “what does
‘FFBO.’ stand for?”
“I dunno,” said Bang-Bang. “Some deodorant maybe?”
“Is there any Mafia mob with those initials?” said the Countess.
“Nope,” said Bang-Bang. “But when they ship things, they go ‘FOB’ It means ‘Freight On Board.’”
“That’s not it. What did you do with his wallet?”
“Right here,” said Bang-Bang. “Nothing in it. Just a few bucks and student cards.”
The Countess went through it. She shook her head. “Well,” she said, “we’ll get busy and find out. It must stand for something.”
“There’s Peegrams VO Scotch,” said Bang-Bang. “And the cat and I could use some.”
“Not yet,” said the Countess Krak. She sat down on another box and took a pad out of her purse. “Poor Jettero must be going mad out there, wondering. I’m writing a radio message calling the yacht in. We’ve got the double and tomorrow he’ll appear in court. The yacht won’t be in until after that occurs, so it’s perfectly safe. So you send this radio to Captain Bitts and tell him to dock in New York. What was the pier he said? Oh, yes. Pier 68, West 30th Street. By the time he gets there it will be tomorrow evening and the phony Whiz Kid will be on his way to jail.”
She wrote it. She handed it over. Bang-Bang walked away.
I could not believe my luck!
She didn’t recall Judge Hammer Twist would not be in court tomorrow! He’d be at the Aqueduct race track! Or she thought foolishly he would return for an important case the way they would on Voltar. But no Earth judge would ever put his duty before his pleasure.
Oh, thank Gods for this sloppy, slow court system! Heller would not only be picked up but would be safely in Bellevue and maybe even dead before she ever got her confession before the judge!
The seizure of Heller would drive her out of her mind! And if they killed him, she’d be so griefstricken, she’d be no menace to anybody!
I might not know where she was. But I was saved after all!
I reached for the phone to call Grafferty.
That yacht would be MET!
PART FIFTY-FOUR
Chapter 2
The next morning my eyes hurt and I only gave Heller’s viewer a quick glance. He was staring at the ceiling, apparently still in his bunk, and I thought, go ahead and daydream, Heller, it will turn into a nightmare before sunset today.
I had something else to do before we met the yacht. It is always best to play things safe.
If the Countess got to Madison before I got to Heller, J. Warbler would undoubtedly identify me and I would be dead.
My bandages had been changed: Adora had been certain that I would scare the lesbians last night if I had a boot-blacked face. I dressed in some khaki outing clothes, hoping somebody would think I was a veteran from the wars or maybe some street shootout.
I grabbed a cab.
At Madison’s 42 Mess Street offices, all was at the usual high hubbub.
It was not a good time to try to persuade Madison to go into hiding. He was in utter euphoria. They had a huge blowup on the wall. It said:
SEX-STARVED BEAUTY
KIDNAPS WHIZ KID
TRAINS CAT TO
EFFECT SNATCH
In front of 50,000,000 American housewives, the notorious sex outlaw Wister . . .
“Mad,” I said, trying to get his attention, “I’ve got to talk to you about something important.”
“Don’t bother me, Smith. I’m handling the hottest story since Julius Caesar raped Cleopatra in a rug. Empires could fall on this.”
“I’m sure they could,” I said.
“What if it turned out to be the president’s wife!” he said ecstatically. “Hey, Hacky! I just got an idea!” And he went rushing off to stir things up in his already earth quaking staff room.
I could only hang around. They wrote up tomorrow’s headlines wherein all the wives of Washington joined the wives of Kansas in demanding the Whiz Kid be given diplomatic privileges in their beds, canceled that in favor of mobs of minors in California lining up in hope of being raped by the Whiz Kid, abandoned that and got out new headlines to the effect that a nationwide cat hunt was going on to find the cat and get him to tell all. They put that on the wire.
“The animal angle always gets them,” said Madison, sinking down at his desk, utterly spent but happy. “The day after, the cat will tell all in the most sexy details you ever imagined!”
“Madison,” I said, “I have to warn you that danger is in the air. Would FFBO tell anybody who it was who handles this account on the Whiz Kid?”
“Oh, I doubt they would,” said Madison. “Professional jealousy. It would be giving my name a plug, you see, and they are too consumed with envy to do that. The answer is 18-point NO.”
“Nevertheless,” I said, “it might leak out that you were the account executive. Mad, there are some things you don’t know about the REAL Wister. He has killed fifty-five men since he has been around here.”
“WHAT?”
“Fact. I’ve counted them up. He added fifteen just the other day by blowing up the docks at Atlantic City. Fifty-five dead men, Madison. And you could be number fifty-six.”
“Holy gunsmoke!” said Madison. “Billy the Kid only killed twenty-one! Say, do you realize that the real Wister is sneaking up on Wild Bill Hickok’s seventy-six? Lord above, that Wister really is outlaw potential! I thought I was stretching his capabilities. Now he’s stretching my credulity! Fifty-five men. Wow! Smith, I think I really can build this man up to immortality. No doubt of it at all!”
“Mad,” I said, “please listen to me. I will spell it out. Your life is in danger!”
He was thoughtful. Then he said, “It wouldn’t be the first time my life has been threatened. It sort of goes with the job of a PR.”
“Mad,” I said, “this isn’t just a threat.” I looked at him. I had a sinking feeling that I was getting no place. Then I had a brilliant idea. “You want to know how dangerous this fellow is?”
“Yes, indeed! Might make good copy.”
“All right,” I said. “Call Narcotici’s personnel department and try to buy a contract on the real Wister.”
“Hey, that makes a good headline: 18-point Contract Out On Whiz Kid . . .”
“Mad, not phony headlines. This is for real. Get a solid bottom under your news for once. Make the call.”
“Novel idea,” said Madison. “I’ll do it.” He reached for the phone and connected with the personnel department. “Personnel,” he said, “this is FFBO. I’d like a quote for a contract on Jerome Terrance Wister. . . . Yes, I’ll hold.” He turned to me, “For some reason they’re shifting the call.” He returned to his phone. “Yes, that’s right. A contract on Jerome Terrance Wister.”
I couldn’t hear the other end of the call. Madison was listening. Then his eyes went round. Then he went white. He hung up, staring into space.
I said, “Well, what did they say?”
His attention was very hard to get. I had to repeat my question three times.
Finally he said, “We’re in trouble. They shifted my call to Razza Louseini, the consigliere. He wanted to know if I was the one who pushed their men on to Wister last fall. I didn’t know they’d lost nineteen of their mobsters and a million bucks. They’re furious. I hope they didn’t recognize my voice.”
“How so?” I said, secretly delighted at his depressed state.
“Razza Louseini said that if they found out who had gotten them into that mess, they had orders to put a contract out on him!”
“You see?” I said triumphantly. “Wister is dangerous.”
“Oh, I think I could handle the real Wister,” Madison said. “I’ve met him and talked to him. He’s a nice fellow, really. What I’m worried about is the Narcotici mob.” He stirred himself and focused his eyes on me. “Look, Smith. Promise me you’ll keep it secret that I was the one behind it. You can’t live in New York or even the US with the Mafia gunning for you.”
Oh, I p
romised him faithfully that his secret was safe with me. But only the bandages on my face could hide the glee I felt. I now knew how to persuade Madison to make himself scarce if I had to. He was sitting there, kind of white, glancing uneasily out the window. Then he took his finger and loosened his collar which must have seemed too tight. The hand was shaking.