“Let me see those.” And he got hold of one about blowing up trains. And then another about the art of infiltration. Heller started to laugh.
“Are you pleased, kid?”
“Fantastic,” said Heller.
“Oh, I’m glad you’re pleased, kid. I just thought I was being a little bit selfish. You see, it makes me feel less degraded.”
Bang-Bang recovered his USMC fatigue cap and put it on. Then he got an Army fatigue cap and put it on over it, hiding the Marine one.
Then Bang-Bang got down on all fours and crept to the other side of the tree and peered out with exaggerated care. He was clowning!
“Spies,” said Bang-Bang. “A Marine spying on the Army! Get it, kid?”
Heller was laughing. He was laughing very hard. But I knew he wasn’t laughing at the same thing Bang-Bang was.
Suddenly I knew how Izzy Epstein must have felt when the catastrophe he had dreaded struck. This Earth espionage technology was probably pretty crude. But it was espionage technology. It would make my job so much harder!
I hastily wrote another dispatch to the New York office repeating my earlier order to find Raht and Terb and promising torture along with extinction if they didn’t comply! Heller had to be stopped!
PART NINETEEN
Chapter 3
About the only thing different about Friday was that they had a different command post and iced soft drinks in a bucket!
What a way to go to college! Lying around on the lawn, watching the girls go by. Well, it was Bang-Bang who did most of the girl watching. Heller was getting caught up on grammar school and high school and college. But Bang-Bang did enough girl watching for both of them. Still, what an idyllic scene. How pastoral! Disgusting!
Saturday, however, was different. Bang-Bang had disappeared somewhere, some muttering about drilling. But Heller reported to some hall and began to take “counseling examinations” to determine which subjects and what part of them he should be tutored on.
I had slept late and when I did the scan through, I simply ignored his rapid pen movements on the exams he was doing. He is always showing off. I sped straight through to an interview he was having with some assistant dean.
“Agnes,” the assistant dean was calling over his shoulder. “Are you sure that marking machine is in repair?”
A voice floated back. “Yes, Mr. Bosh. It has been flunking its quota all morning.”
Mr. Bosh, an intense-eyed young man, fiddled with the big stack of completed exam papers he had and then looked at Heller. “There must be some mistake here. Your grade transcript said these were all D average and these exams are A average.” A very severe glint came in his eye. “There is something unexplained here, Wister.”
“Sometimes students have been known to date the wrong somebody’s daughter,” said Heller.
Mr. Bosh sat up straight and then beamed. “Of course, of course. I should have thought of that. Happens all the time!”
Chuckling to himself, he bundled the exam papers up and marked them, “To be microfilmed for student’s file.” “Well, Wister, all I can say is, you’re off the hook. There are no weak spots here to be tutored, so we will simply mark that completed in your admission requirements. All right?”
“Thank you very much,” said Heller.
Mr. Bosh leaned forward and said in a low voice, “Tell me, just off the record, you didn’t knock her up, did you?”
Heller leaned over and whispered, “Well, I’m here for my senior year, aren’t I?”
Mr. Bosh went into howls of laughter. “I knew it, I knew it! Oh, priceless!” And with great camaraderie, he shook Heller’s hand and that was that.
There was something in Bosh’s attitude that irritated me. Possibly the way he was beaming at Heller. There was nothing that remarkable about Heller’s passing: he had had several days and several long evenings in the lobby to review those subjects and, to him, it must have been a sort of ethnological study of how some primitive might view these things. There was nothing remarkable at all about a postgraduate combat engineer of the Voltarian Fleet passing a few lousy kiddie subjects like perverted quantum mechanics. It made me quite cross, really. Spoiled my faith in these Earth people—not that I’d ever had any. Just riffraff.
I walked around the yard for a while. Two of the children were picking grapes and I accused them of eating more than they picked and after I’d gotten them crying real good, kicked them and felt better.
I called the taxi driver and wanted to know when the Hells he was going to complete delivery of Utanc and he told me it was all on schedule. That made me feel a lot better. Watching that (bleeper) Heller being whistled into his room every night by gorgeous women had been getting to me more than I had admitted. And that I never actually saw him doing anything with them made it even worse! One’s imagination runs riot sometimes!
Only the possible early arrival of Utanc gave me morale enough to go back and watch what was happening around Heller. But all he was doing was trotting around a track in a running suit, not even making good time. He stopped and watched a football squad being mustered up, apparently lost interest and resumed his running. How can anybody just run for a couple of hours? What do they think about?
I went outside again, and after a long delay in locating him, talked on the phone to the hospital contractor who said the earth-moving was almost finished, the water, electrical and sewage ready to place and he’d be into pouring foundations tomorrow. So I couldn’t find anything to rag him about beyond being at the building site working when I was trying to call him.
It was late evening, Turkish time, by now. There was a sort of fascination about watching Heller. I desperately longed for a time when I would see him curl up in a ball, preferably in agony, and die and yet, so long as I did not have the platen, he carried my life in his careless, brutal hands. So I hung on to the viewscreen and raced the strips forward to the present.
Heller was going down in the elevator. He was dressed in a casual dark suit but there was nothing casual about the way he was acting.
He rushed out of the elevator and burst into Vantagio’s office. “It’s here! It’s here! The car I want is here!”
Vantagio was in a tuxedo, apparently all ready for a Saturday night rush not yet started. “Well, it’s about time! Babe mentions it every day and ever since you spaghettied Grafferty she’s been insisting it be the best. Where is it? Out front or down in the garage?”
“Garage,” said Heller. “Come on!”
Vantagio needed no urging. He went rapidly out of his office, followed by Heller, and into the elevator they went and down to the garage.
“It better be a beauty,” said Vantagio. “I got to get this action completed so I can have some peace. Been over a week since Babe told me to buy you a lovely car!”
At the garage elevator exit, there stood Mortie Massacurovitch. Heller introduced him to Vantagio. “I been workin’ double shift,” said Mortie. “I couldn’t get here until this evening. But there she is!”
Standing in the middle of the vast pillared structure, surrounded by sleek limousines of the latest model, stood the old, shabby, paint-worn-off, cracked-window Really Red Cab of decades ago.
It looked like a piece of junk that had been shoveled in.
“Where’s the car?” said Vantagio.
“That’s the car,” said Heller.
“Oh, come off it, kid. A joke’s a joke but this is serious business. Babe will just about tear my head off if I don’t get you one.”
“Hey,” said Heller, “this is a great car!”
“This was built when they really built cabs!” said Mortie.
“Kid, this isn’t any joke? You mean you are really proposing I buy this piece of scrambled trash for you?”
“Hey,” said Mortie, “the company ain’t charging hardly anything!”
“I’m sure they wouldn’t dare!” said Vantagio. “You ought to give the buyer twenty-five smackers to get it towed to a junkyard!”
&nb
sp; “Oh, come on,” said Mortie. “I’ll admit she don’t look like no limousine. But I had quite a time trying to get the company to agree to sell it. It’s sort of a keepsake. Like old times. Tradition! Of course, you can’t keep it red or run it as a Really Red Cab in competition and you can’t have its taxi license—that’s expensive and stays with the company. But it’s a perfectly legal car and the title would be regular.”
Vantagio had looked inside. He backed off holding his nose. “Oh, my God.”
“It’s just the leather,” said Mortie. “They didn’t have vinyl in them days so it’s real leather. Of course, it’s kind of rotted and saturated a bit. But it’s real leather.”
“Please,” said Heller.
Vantagio said, “Babe would kill me. She would have me whipped for two or three hours and then kill me with her bare hands.”
“I got orders that you can have it cheap,” said Mortie. “One thousand dollars and that’s rock bottom.”
“Quit torturing me!” said Vantagio. “I got a tough night ahead. This is Saturday night and the UN is hotting up—in just two weeks it is reconvening! Kid, have you got any idea—”
“Five hundred,” said Mortie. “And that’s absolutely rock bottom.”
Vantagio tried to walk away. Heller got him by the arm. “Look, real quarter-inch steel fenders and body. Look, Vantagio, real bulletproof windows! See those stars in them? They stopped real bullets just a while ago.”
“Two hundred and fifty,” said Mortie. “And that’s rock rock bottom.”
“Kid,” said Vantagio, “please, for God’s sake, let me go upstairs and call the MGB agency, let them send over a red sports car.”
“This cab,” said Heller, “is a real beauty!”
“Kid, let me call the Mercedes-Benz agency.”
“No.”
“Alfa Romeo?”
“No.”
“Maserati. Now, there’s a good car. A real good car,” said Vantagio. “I can get one custom built. Custom built and bright red, kid. A convertible. I’ll fill it full of girls.”
“No,” said Heller.
“Oh, che il diavolo lo porti, kid, you’re going to get me killed! I wouldn’t even dare put that in this garage! It’s just an ancient wreck!”
“It’s an antique!” cried Mortie. “It ain’t no wreck! It’s a bona fide antique!”
Vantagio stared at him. Then he went on pacing.
Mortie pressed on. “You put that cab in the Atlantic City Antique Auto Parade and it’ll win a twenty-five-thousand-dollar prize. I guarantee it! Antique cars are the rage!”
Vantagio stopped pacing. “Wait. I’ve just had an idea. If we put that car in the Atlantic City Antique Auto Parade . . .”
“And filled it full of girls dressed in costumes of the 1920s,” prompted Heller.
“And put guys on the running boards holding submachine guns,” said Vantagio.
“And prohibition agents in 1920 costumes chasing it,” said Heller.
“And painted ‘The Corleone Cab Company’ on the doors,” cried Vantagio, “Babe would LOVE it! Tradition! And a million bucks’ worth of advertising! Right?”
“Right,” said Heller.
“Now, you have to do what I tell you, kid. Right?”
“Right.”
“Choose this as the car.”
“Like I was saying,” said Mortie. “The price is one thousand smackers.”
“Five hundred,” said Vantagio, “providing you can get it to this address. And I’ll buy its cab license later from your company.” He was scribbling on the back of a card, Jiffy-Spiffy Garage, Mike Mutazione, Newark, NJ.
“Can I drive it and monkey with the motor?” said Heller.
“Oh, hell, yes, kid. It’s your car. Just so long as you make it available for the parade and just as long as you let Mike Mutazione put it in new-car condition before you park it in here. You see, I can tell people it’s for the parade and the UN diplomats will be happy on cultural grounds. They love to see tribal customs preserved.”
A new voice was heard. “Hey, where’d this battle casualty come from?” It was Bang-Bang.
“That’s the car you’re going to drive,” said Heller.
“Don’t try to snow me under, kid,” said Bang-Bang. “I’ve had a tough day trying to teach the Army the difference between their left feet and their (bleep).”
“Look, Bang-Bang,” said Heller, pointing to a star in the glass.
“Hey, that’s a 7.62-mm NATO round. See, it dropped down into the ledge outside. Belgian FN? Italian Beretta? Flattened the hell out of it. Bulletproof glass!”
“And fenders. Quarter-inch steel,” said Heller.
Vantagio tapped Bang-Bang. “As long as you’re working for the kid, go over to Newark with this cabby and tell Mike what to do. Use the same material but replace everything! New bulletproof glass, new upholstery, beat the body out, paint the whole car orange and put ‘The Corleone Cab Company’ on the doors. Make it all look brand-new. Even the motor. Tell him to do it in a hurry so the kid can have his car.”
“I ain’t supposed to leave New York,” said Bang-Bang.
“It’s Saturday night,” said Vantagio.
“Oh, that’s right,” said Bang-Bang.
“I’ll go, too!” said Heller.
“No, you won’t,” said Vantagio. “It’s going to be a busy night and I want you in the lobby for a while. And I told two South American diplomats you’d be pleased to meet them. And there’s something else you got to do.”
Vantagio was signing papers that Mortie had been holding out. He counted five hundred into his palm.
Mortie and Bang-Bang jumped into the cab and with a roar, smoke and clatter were gone.
Vantagio and Heller got back into the elevator. “Now we got to go up,” said Vantagio, “and phone Babe and tell her what a great idea I had. No, on the other hand, you phone her from your suite and tell her you thought it up. Tradition is the key to her character, kid. And when you mix tradition and sentiment, it’s a winner every time. Old ‘Holy Joe’ got his start running hooch in cabs just like that!”
“You’re a wonder,” said Heller.
“Yes, you do what I tell you and you’ll be in the money every time. Just remember that, kid.”
I was baffled, utterly baffled. What was Heller doing with two cars? He already had that old Cadillac being specially rebuilt and didn’t seem to be in any rush for it, yet here was this cab being rushed through. For once, some sixth sense—which you can’t do without in the Apparatus—told me that this went beyond the Fleet toy fetish. I writhed. (Bleep) him, he was going too fast! Too fast! He could finish up and accomplish something and ruin me!
PART NINETEEN
Chapter 4
Because I knew that on Sunday, coming right up, he was going to have his first Nature Appreciation class with Miss Simmons—who, I was sure, would do him in—I was not terribly interested in what happened to Heller the rest of that Saturday night and scanned him only lightly.
The two South American diplomats were completely unimportant. Vantagio brought them over to Heller and introduced them—they had names about a yard long. Heller was wearing a silk and mohair tuxedo with diamond cuff links and studs but these two South Americans put him to shame with black embroidery on their powder blue tuxedos and lace all over their chests: it heartened me to see Heller outdone.
They had an International Bank loan to build a lot of bridges and they’d heard Heller was a student engineer and they didn’t think the bridges would stand up. So they showed him some drawings and he told them to float both ends of the bridges so the earthquakes couldn’t affect them. He even drew them some little sketches to show their contracting firm. But I knew it was all silly—a bridge crosses water, you don’t stick its ends in the water. But South Americans are polite and they went away beaming. Riffraff.
The only other thing that happened was also disgusting. Stuffumo and the kris-wielding deputy delegate that Heller had unfairly disarmed so
ught him out where he sat behind some palm frond—he sat there often as it half hid him from the door.
They had an ornate box and they were both holding on to it. Both speaking English in chorus, they stood in front of him and said, “Thank you for your mediation on the treaty subject of Harlotta. Our two countries have united to give you a token of appreciation. There has never been such peace.”
They opened up the box and there, in purple velvet, lay a Llama .45-caliber, large-frame automatic pistol finished in gold damascene and gold butt plates, with the coats of arms of their two countries intertwined with a heart. Some engraver had been working overtime at vast expense! It had extra magazines and fifty shells. It also had a back belt holster with a white dove of peace and Prince X engraved on it. Aside from the fact that it was all chased with gold instead of being black, it looked just like a gangster gun, an Army Colt .45.
Heller thanked them and they went away beaming.
It absolutely ruined my dawn sleep! The idea of getting a beautiful weapon like that for some petty, trifling, cheap trick! And he had obtained it unfairly, too! Masquerading under a false identity. “Prince X” indeed! He was just a Fleet combat engineer with middle-class origins like mine. I even outranked him! What an awful waste of a fine handgun!
So, as I say, I was really looking forward to Miss Simmons!
Around nine in the morning, New York time, the interference went off in his suite. But was he bustling out to go to his Sunday class? No! He was certainly taking a perverted angle on Nature Appreciation!
The first thing that came on the screen was the back of a girl’s neck. She was a brunette and she was evidently lying face down on the sofa, head to one side, arm trailing limply to the rug, the very picture of exhaustion.
Heller was stroking the back of her neck, sort of working at it with his thumbs. There was a silver pitcher on a nearby table and, in peripheral vision, I could see that he was wearing a white bathrobe and sitting on the edge of the couch above the half-naked girl.