Sherry popped the lid on a plastic bowl filled with vegetables sliced up into spears. But she suddenly stopped short. 'I forgot to bring anything to drink,' whined the Sherry-thing, who was sitting close to the head of the table, immediately to Richard's left. The meal that Richard had brought along consisted only of an extra thermos of coffee. He took a swig directly from the mouth of the thermos he had already opened—a shining metal silo—and then slid it over to Sherry, who just gawked at it for a moment, as if she were looking at some exotic artifact she had never seen before.
'Here,' said Richard, slapping the plastic cap of the thermos before Sherry's eyes, which no more recognized this 'particular object than they had the other. 'You can use it as a cup,' Richard explained.
'But—' Sherry started to say.
'Yes, I know,' said Richard with fatherly wisdom and understanding. Then he reached down into Sherry's purse on the floor between them, rummaged around inside it, and came up with a miniature bottle of vodka. He casually ran his hand along Sherry's leg before bringing the dwarf-sized bottle up to her. 'Go ahead,' he said to her. 'Everybody knows.' Sherry went ahead and daintily dumped the spirits into the plastic container, then quickly dropped the evidence of her alcoholism back in her purse before pouring in the coffee, awkwardly maneuvering Richard's shining metal thermos.
Barry the Great-Bodied One removed the first of several hamburgers from a sack that sagged heavily upon that banquet table. But his eyes were fixed across the table at what Kerrie was shoveling into her mouth from a field-style plate with attached covering.
'What are you looking at, Mr America?' said Kerrie.
'I'm just trying to identify that stuff you're eating.'
'It's leftovers.'
'Right,' said Barry with a world of doubt in his voice.
Further down the table Mary sat before the cardboard dish—square and shallow—of a microwaved meal. (Swedish Meatballs and Noodles in Gravy—her favorite, although she sometimes broke up the monotony with Salisbury Steak, topped with Mushroom Sauce, and Macaroni and Cheese.)
Harry wasn't eating, waving off Barry's offer of a hamburger. 'I've got plenty,' said Barry.
'I'm sure you do, thanks,' said the inscrutable Harry.
It was also lunchtime at the Metro Diner, and the place was packed. I didn't see the homicide detectives anywhere around. However, I knew they had run a check on my credit card activity: the gun shop, the clothes store, the... the... paper? (Did I buy a newspaper that night? If so, I wouldn't have used my credit card.) But even though I couldn't bring into my brain any other spending I had done, I couldn't shake the feeling that there was something else, something far more significant than paper, that was also being masked by those dark spots. In any case, I knew that soon the cops would be beating on my door, and it was imperative that Lillian made it up to my apartment before they did. My tactic for doing this involved a baseball bat that once served as my only means of 'personal protection'. Gripping this shapely piece of wood, I stood before my computer monitor as if I were facing a hated pitcher on a rival team. I wound up my swing and—
'All right, then,' said Richard. 'As we all know by now we have a problem.'
'No kidding,' said Sherry. 'What happened? You said that Frank was finished. Instead we've got one dead Polack.'
'These things don't always go according to plan,' said Richard.
'Yeah, like that girl, Andrea What's-Her-Name, ending up dead on your desk,' said Kerrie, who continued sporking a mysterious mash into her mouth. 'You said Frank would go quietly. Now it's a mess.'
'Before you leave the room to go vomit up your lunch, Kerrie, I'd like to point out that the problem wasn't with Domino—it was with Perry Stokowski. He was the mess.'
'How so?' asked Mary.
'To put it simply, Perry wasn't quite a full member of our family.'
'Please, Richard, I've got enough with my real family at home. I don't need to think in terms of a second family.'
'That's where you're wrong, Mary,' said Richard. 'Let me ask you something. Who do you prefer spending your time with, not to mention most of your extra time—those people at home... or us?'
Mary looked thoughtfully down at the empty microwave-proof container on the table before her.
'You can't lie to me, Mary. Or to the rest of us. We are your family. We are the only family that any of us have. Oh, some of you may have spouses or someone you live with, even children. But they aren't your family. Why do you think you're sitting at this table with us? It wasn't by chance, I can tell you. It's because I chose you.'
I had to call time-out back at my apartment because I had forgotten to unplug my computer. My purpose wasn't to start a fire in that old building but to get Lillian's attention. (And no, Kerrie, I would not be going quietly—I would go with quite a bit of noise and mayhem.) After I had dealt with the potential threat of an electrical fire, I finally swung my bat. Disappointingly, it made only a spider-web pattern of cracks in the computer screen. (Downstairs in the diner, amidst all the lunch-hour chewing and chattering, my first hit went unnoticed. Strike one.) My next swing was dedicated to Andrea and the others who had been done in by Richard. I connected well with the monitor and sent it into the farthest bleachers, where Richard sat sipping coffee from a thermos on a sunny afternoon. In short order the monitor was just a pile of glass and plastic lying on the floor. Beside it was the keyboard whose teeth I then smashed with a lusty surge of madness. A momentary hiatus of conversation ensued in the diner below, as well as a suspension of service on the part of Rudy and the waitresses. And Lillian at last glanced upward toward my apartment.
'You may have hired all of us, Richard. But that includes Perry,' argued Mary. 'You said yourself that he wasn't a member of this family of yours.'
'I said he wasn't a full member. I thought he would have become so in time. But I didn't think it would take so long to wean him off that music nonsense on which he wasted so much of himself. He wasn't fully focused on the one important thing in all our lives—The Job. That caused him to let his guard down. Now he's gone, rest in peace.'
'Excuse me, Richard, but none of what you're saying accounts for Frank Dominio. If there was ever someone who wasn't one of us, it was Frank. Why in the world did you "choose" him?'
'Frank?' said Richard. 'He was one of the family too... in a red-headed stepchild capacity. The truth is we really needed Frank. Please don't take this personally, any of you. That is, each of you has your uses. Otherwise you wouldn't be here. But Frank had something the rest of you don't, including myself. It was just a matter of time before he brought it to us. None of us could have come up with that.'
'You mean that idea of his?' said Sherry.
'That's right.'
'What was so great about that?' Sherry continued to badger. 'You told us to give it the cold shoulder. It seemed to me that was exactly what it deserved.'
'Barry,' said Richard, turning to his right. 'Would you enlighten her?'
Barry swallowed a cheek-stretching mouthful of macerated bread and meat, with extra-extra ketchup. Then he held up the remains of the object in his hand.
'Do you know what this is, Sherry?'
'Yeah—it's a hamburger, or what's left of one.'
'It's also Frank's idea. But even he didn't realize that. Here's the analogy. It wasn't so long ago that some stroke of genius caused the creation of these ground slabs of beef and fat inserted between two pillowy pieces of bread. Of course it was only some time later that the full lucrative potential of this edible invention was realized. Could any of us have invented the hamburger? Not likely.'
Sherry suddenly smiled, a mouthful of coffee and vodka almost spilling forth. 'But we would sure know how to market the things,' she practically cried out.
'Billions and billions of them,' added Kerrie.
Swine, swine, swine, etc. Each utterance of this word was accompanied by a smashing blow upon the metal box of my modem. Then I dropped my bat, abandoning this primitive means of destru
ction, and went to work on the beast's entrails in the fashion of my new-born self—tying the transistors into the tiniest knots with only a twitch of my mind, melting wiring boards and decimating the soul of that thing—those diabolical chips—on an atomic level. Nobody was going to get into my mind through that infernal machine. And you, Richard—you knew, you knew my idea was brilliant, that I was worth more than all the rest of you. But you let me contort myself into a mass of obsessive doubt and self-loathing. Laugh while you can, you swine.
Mary was in fact tittering at her end of the table, while Richard was outright guffawing in a deep dark tone. Even Harry cracked a crooked grin. It was so nice to see such a happy family. But the magic moment died when Kerrie spoke up, hesitantly asking, 'But wasn't there a lot more documentation to Frank's idea? Don't we need that?'
'We'll see. Maybe we do and maybe we don't. We do want to cover all the bases, don't we, Harry?'
'Yes, sir,' Harry replied. Everyone else grew quiet.
'Do you think you can work as well without Perry's assistance?'
'It'll be better without him,' said Harry. 'It was because of him that the Andrea What's-Her-Name thing went badly. I never said anything.'
'I know,' said Richard. 'I didn't blame you.'
'He was a worthless drug addict,' said Harry. (As an addendum to Harry's remark, I should mention that it was Perry's syringe in his glove compartment that gave me the idea for the intravenous mode of his murder.) After Harry had finally gotten that bit of bile out of himself about Perry's dope fiendery, he looked over at Sherry and said, 'No offense.'
The eyes of the Sherry-thing glared at Harry. 'It's not the same thing,' she hissed. 'My name is Sherry. And I am an alcoholic! Got it?'
'Uh, yeah,' said Harry, who obviously couldn't have cared less one way or the other.
Lillian was finally knocking on my door and calling out my name. I had left the door slightly ajar, causing it to push open easily and allowing Lillian to exercise her landlord's privilege to investigate what all the noise was about in her tenant's apartment. Cautiously she entered the kitchen through the backstairs door. By the time Lillian was inside I had absented myself from visibility. The last thing I wanted was to put a scare into the only person who came close to being family to me. (You were right to a certain extent, Richard—I was as alienated as the rest of you from my own blood relations.)
Lillian did draw a startled breath when she first spied the mutilated machine lying about my apartment floor. I had pushed most of the pieces aside, creating a path to lead her straight to my desk and the shoe box that was waiting there for her. She picked up the box and mouthed the words written on its lid that addressed the package to her. She then reached under the apron she was wearing and from within her waitress's uniform produced a pocketknife. It was no Buck Skinner Hunting Knife but a business-like instrument nonetheless. Good for you, Lil, I thought. After pulling the blade from its slot, she cut the packing tape wrapped around the shoe box, lifted off the top, and gazed upon the stack of packets which constituted the whole of my worldly worth. 'My god,' she gasped. Quickly putting two and two together, she said aloud, 'I guess this means I won'tbe seeing you any more, Frank. Good luck to you.' Lillian looked so sad as she replaced the lid back on the box and cradled the package under her arm.
Before leaving my apartment, locking the door behind her with her landlord's key ('Thank you, Lillian Hayes'), she turned for a moment to look around the place. She could not possibly have seen me as I watched her from my niche of the non-living. But somehow she fixed her eyes, if briefly, on the exact spot where I was looking back at her. Then she was gone, and I shifted my visual and auditory attention back to the gathering in the Great Hall.
'One more thing,' said Mary. 'I assume we're not doing this just so the company can make a pile out of it and leave us with, at most, some miserable little "bonus"?'
'As the head of this family I must withhold from you, for your own good, mind you, the full details of this venture. For now let me just say that things are going to get a little rickety around here once Barry's plan for restructuring the company is put in place—all of this having been done, of course, at the behest of the CEO and seconded by all of senior management. There just may be a period of declining profits visited on this house due to a chaotic work environment. Soon the stockholders will begin making sounds of discontent and start pawing the ground like a herd of unfed cattle looking for some new cowboys to run the ranch—people with fresh ideas and special plans. Before you know it... we will be the company.'
But one thing at a time, they agreed.
First things first, they agreed.
And that first thing was Domino, who could queer this whole business if they didn't get to him before the cops did.
That was your cue, Harry. And I'd be keeping a special eye on you.
6
I have to confess that I was as much relieved as I was enraged by the revelations of infamy that the lunch-meeting of The Six had afforded my long-distance eyes and ears. Not that they proved themselves to be any more swinish than I had imagined them to be. They couldn't possibly have done that. But my image of them had always been that of a pack of beasts whose deeds were performed somewhat haphazardly, directed by a low animal instinct that sniffed out creatures who were not of their breed and marked them for a mindless savaging. Given this conception of their brutish nature, I was naturally driven to respond in kind with plans for a very basic style of massacre, although one for which I had accessorized myself to the hilt with all the appropriate gear and suitably dark attire. Therefore, what a surprise—at once disturbing and delightful—to discover how well these beings knew what they were about.
Disturbing because they had schemes and strategies and an ambitious end in sight. They had turned out to be a tribe of true fiends, a devilish cabal, a Machiavellian mob with Richard as The Prince who commanded a court of hench-persons.
Delightful for the very same reasons. I found it so satisfying to have my worst suspicions about The Six, formerly Seven, finally, unequivocally confirmed. They were indeed a bad lot. My murder-filled mind—driven by an obsessive-compulsive engine of emotion which the nonafflicted cannot hope to comprehend, spinning itself on a carousel of Fear, Hate, Humiliation, and divers other riderless horses of my personal apocalypse—had not gone too far in its violent fantasies.
Yet fantasies were all they amounted to. Even when I began making preparations to behave in accordance with my raging impulses, which, I concede, were a bit overblown for having been planted so deeply within me and suppressed far too long—the situation was still at the stage of daydreams and play-acting. And the Day of Domino was destined never to arrive—not as I had originally conceived it as a bullet-fest on Monday morning. (Who can say if I would actually have gone through with it?) That day had not only been pushed back (due to circumstances beyond my control and still obscure to my mind, however much I sought them out); it had also been drastically altered in its possibilities.
Let's step back for a moment. Frank Dominio was a man of hyper-charged and off-kilter imagination, no denying it; but he had always been held back by his fears and inner demons. Domino, on the other hand, was not only completely warped, he also belonged to a class of demon himself. Both of them did share many like qualities. Among these was an eagerness to get started on a project, if only to put it behind them as soon as possible. Thus, my work, our work, was not deferred until Monday but began as Wednesday passed into Thursday (EDT). And short work it was that we, 'I' for the sake of convenience, made of Mr Stokowski.
I giggled like a child on Christmas morning as I tackled each task with respect to Perry the Piano Player, Perry the Jazz-Creep (big deal if his penchant for music was deep and genuine, rather than the put-on I took it to be), and, as Harry called him, Perry the Worthless Drug Addict. The whole business of that night was, for me, therapeutic in a way that none of the pills or psychiatric services I had consumed over the years had ever been.
An
d that was exactly the problem: I was so satiated by the job I had done on Perry Stokowski that I feared I might lack the Will to follow through with the others on my gun-shop shopping list. So where would that have left me? What becomes of an ontological anomaly—that is, my own miracle-working self—when he begins to feel that his WORK, in fact, IS DONE? The dark constellations spread across the sky during the final hours of that night, along with the sooty stains that appeared when the sun rose, an hour late, the following day, did not strike me as happy portents of what lay in store for me once I had played out my purposes in the, so to speak, grand scheme of things.
Hence my relief—and double-hence my delight—at having my sheer ferocity of Will renewed by the Gang of Six at their truly revelatory lunch-meeting on Thursday afternoon. The game would now go on, and my salvation, at least for a time, was assured.
The only consternation that remained had nothing to do with Richard's foul family, with their degeneracies and devices, their sleazy comic-strip machinations, their hideous façades which hid faces that could not be countenanced. No, that was not the problem. The only source of shock left to me was that of my own lingering innocence and naiveté, the fondness I had for keeping my hot head in the cool sand. I had not given those swine nearly enough credit... and my credit card could not have ordered nearly enough firepower to obliterate the things that transpired in their closed-door sessions, not to mention the ever-hatching horrors which such meetings were designed to propagate, the monstrous things that popped up and hopped about, just waiting for those doors to open onto the world. This sort of thing had been going on since doors were invented... and they happened everywhere and at all times since the first hominids got together to 'take a meeting'.