‘Station director? This crud?’
Rex held up the crud’s wrist. ‘Behold the watch.’
‘Ooh,’ said Laura. ‘He’s got one just like mine.’
Rex was rooting through the slumbering cabby’s pockets. He found the car keys and availed himself thereof. ‘Give him an hour or so please, barman. Then awaken him gently and present him with the bill. He’ll settle up with you,’
The barman fixed Rex with a real one-eyed blinder. ‘What do you take me for?’
Rex turned up his hands in all innocence. ‘You know who I am. The chap off the telly.’
‘Yeah, I guess so.’
‘And so, farewell.’ Rex plucked out his sunglasses. Perched them on his nose. Took Laura by the arm and bade adieu to the Tomorrowman Tavern.
‘Wake up, asshole,’ said the barman clouting Bill from his stool.
Rex drove the cab with considerable skill. There were two good reasons for this. The first being that he had driven such motor cars before, and the second that he had consumed only the barest minimum of champagne. The woman in the back, who was wildly diving amongst Rex’s purchases, was a different kettle of fish altogether.
‘1010 Van Vliet Street, wasn’t it?’ Rex asked. A beautiful woman’s address being something that was never likely to slip his mind.
‘First on the left after the Graceland Shopping Mall. Rexy, can I keep this scarf?’
‘Of course you can. The Graceland Mall, wasn’t that the one on the newscast?’
‘That’s the one. Wasn’t that terrible about Mojo and Debbie’s baby being kidnapped by aliens and everything?’
‘Terrible.’ Rex shook his head. There was an awful lot he didn’t understand about this strange world. But little by little he would piece it all together. Time was on his side, after all. Because, after all, no-one had, as yet, told him that Presley City was going to be little more than blackened rubble in just two days time.
Perhaps if they had he would have been trying just a little harder and not preparing himself, as he was, for a long night of fornication.
Rex hung a left and cruised into Van Vliet Street.
‘Do you have any mint-flavoured body-rub in?’ he asked. ‘Or should I stop off and buy some?’
‘Now just you see here,’ said I. ‘You can’t saw my head off, and you know it.’
‘Oh yeah? And for why?’
I thought faster than a fly-half in a fire storm. ‘Well for one thing at least an hour’s past since you said you would and you haven’t yet.’
‘That don’t mean nothing,’ said Ed Kelley. ‘This could be a flashback.’
Johnny Dee nodded in agreement. ‘Or you could be dead already. Or we could have left you for dead. There’s loads of possibilities.’
I guessed there was. This wasn’t your everyday kind of detective novel after all. ‘Is this a flashback?’ I asked.
‘No. It’s just bad continuity.’ Ed revved up the chain-saw. ‘Say goodbye, sucker.’
‘No. Hang about.’
‘Say goodbye.’
‘Say goodbye, chief.’
‘Goodbye.’
‘Nice place you have here.’ Rex was favourably impressed. He had expected some sordid den with a big wardrobe, a lot of shoes and a bed laid for business. But this was much much more. The apartment was sumptuous. And it was extremely elegant. A Bakhtiari carpet of Qashqai design, interwoven with ivory cabochons, smothered the floor with a profusion of golden palmettes. Beside the long window stood a George III satinwood side-table, edged with rosewood and fashioned in the distinguished style of Hargraves of Hull. On this a large collection of frosted Lalique glassware captured the light to perfection.
In one corner a mahogany sofa rose upon cabriole legs, its Aubusson tapestry upholsterings augmented with hassocks of antique paisley. In another, a chair by Carlos Bugatti, all walnut, tooled vellum and burnished pewter, glowed a dusty bronze.
Against the far wall a cocktail cabinet, fashioned to resemble a Louis XV secretaire, twinkled grandly. Upon its ‘rouge royale’ marble top stood a row of baluster wine goblets.
Rex was particularly taken with the Wurlitzer 600 Model jukebox, noting the elaborate grille of nickel-plated Art-Deco-type scrolls and the way the Lucite rods of the Model 24 had been reduced to straight green verticals in a manner he considered most pleasing.
‘Can you manage all right there?’ Laura was scarcely visible beneath the better part of Rex’s purchases.‘Sure you didn’t forget anything?’
‘Rexy, you’re such a nice man.’
‘Laura. This is a most exceptional collection. How did you come by all this?’
‘Clients.’ Laura unloaded her cargo on to the sofa. ‘Little gifts from satisfied customers.’ Rex ran his finger along the ormolu-mounted record rack. It contained a collector’s dream. LPs. The Cray Cherubs, The Lost Teeshirts of Atlantis, Sonic Energy Authority, The Sumerian Kynges, The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing, Sunday Driver.
‘Laura.’ Rex drew himself to the business in hand. ‘Is there much you wouldn’t do for the $87,000 worth of merchandise you have there?’
‘Not much. Would you like to see the bedroom?’
‘Yes please,’ said Rex.
It would, of course, be unthinkable to actually put down in print what Rex and Laura got up to during the next hour. But then again, to fudge around it and simply cut to Rex lying on a bed wearing a big smile would be a severe cop-out. ‘Where do you keep your gerbils?’ Rex asked.
‘Goddammit, Barry, you cut that a tad fine.’ I rubbed at my wrists. There was a bit of chafing there, but nothing I couldn’t handle.
‘Sorry, chief. Got held up on a bit of business.’
‘A bit of business?’ We were back in my office. It was once more about five minutes before we set out for the alleyway behind the Love Me Tender massage parlor. And this time I wasn’t going to show up. You have to know how to keep ahead of this game if you don’t want to wind up in a wooden trenchcoat. ‘Better late than never, I guess.’ I really wanted to thank the little guy for saving my life, but I have a hard-bitten image to keep up. ‘Just try to stay on the ball in future,’ I told him.
‘Gotcha, chief.’ I knew that he had, and he knew that I knew. Or thought that he did.
‘Thanks, chief.’
‘Don’t mention it, Barry.’
‘So what are we going to do this time? Hit the alleyway in a hard hat?’
‘Nope. We are going to hit the bar.’
‘I don’t think Fangio’s has actually been built yet, chief.’
‘And who said anything about Fangio’s?’ I asked, like snow on a Russian’s boot. ‘Did you ever hear me describe Fangio’s?’
‘Can’t say that I did, chief. I wondered about that.’
I tapped my nose like solitaire was the only game in town. ‘It’s called keeping your options open. I never describe the bar, so I can use any bar any time without screwing up my contract. Pretty neat thinking, eh?’
‘Pretty neat, you ungrateful two-dollar bum!’
‘What’s that, Barry?’
‘Nothing, chief.’
Rex removed the crocodile clips and disconnected the car battery. He slipped out of the pony harness, withdrew the slim plastic tube and emptied the sticky gerbils back into their cage. The veal in the cling-film had now thawed out so he consigned it to the wastebasket.
I walked into the bar with more finagle than a ferret in a tinker’s trouser. A guy in a bell-bottomed jumpsuit flew by me at some speed and struck the sidewalk.
‘And stay out, ya turkey!’ The barman looked like he’d had a long day’s journey into night, although the monocle and the silk smoking-jacket were as natty as ninepence. He spied me out with his lone ogler. ‘Hi, Laz,’ he said. ‘Long time no see.’
I couldn’t argue with that. I strolled over to a bar stool, mounted up and set Barry down in an ashtray. The barman reinstalled himself behind the jump and enquired after my pleasure. ‘A hot pastrami on rye
and a bottle of Bud,’ I told him.
‘Coming right up.’
I took in the surroundings and kept them to myself. In less time than it takes to master the rules of Kabaddi, a steaming sandwich and a matching beer were pushed before me.
‘Twenty-five dollars.’ The Barman’s voice was lower than an ankle bracelet on a flat-footed pygmy.
‘Put it on my slate,’ I suggested.
‘Ho, ho, ho.’ The barman put his hands to his belly and made mirth. ‘You jest, surely? But no matter, the joke is well taken. See how I turn up the corners of my mouth as I tell you again, twenty-five dollars.’
‘Coming right up.’ I began to pat at my pockets as if I really meant it but the barman shook his head.
‘Sorry?’ I said.
‘Laz,’ he said. ‘I notice that you are hatless and currently sporting the open-necked look. I have reason to believe that if I were to ask you the time you wouldn’t be able to accommodate me. Am I correct?’
I hung my head, which I also nodded sombrely as I hung it.
‘I spy some chafing upon your wrists, suggestive of hand-cuffery. Bruising to the cheek and, I believe, cranial damage caused, I would guess, by the retractable section of one of those cast-iron fire escapes. How am I doing so far?’
‘You are the Brahma of Baker Street reborn.’
‘My thanks. And so it is my conclusion that you are at present a man without funds, dearly ignorant of the axiom that “there is no such thing as a free lunch”.’
I rose to take my leave. ‘You got me fair and square,’ I told him.
‘Sit down!’ ordered the barman. ‘I haven’t done yet.’ I sat back down. The barman fixed me with the kind of stare you could roast weenies on. ‘I’m not a hard man,’ he continued. ‘It’s just that I get real fed up with bozos like you trying to rip me off all the time. I have a business to run here and I ain’t no charity. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do. You have obviously suffered considerable ill treatment and you are stony broke. Just this once I am going to break the habits of a lifetime and take your IOU.’
I hung my head even further. Sometimes you meet a guy with just so much plain humanity that it makes you feel humble. I choked back a heartfelt tear.
‘I’ll date it for the day after tomorrow, if that’s OK?’ I said.
Rex switched off the suction pump, hung up the miner’s helmet, divested himself of the fisherman’s waders and laid his snorkel aside. He was just scooping the lard out of the trout mask when there came a violent knocking at the bedroom door.
‘Let me in,’ Laura demanded. ‘I’m fed up with sitting out here reading the newspaper.’
I finished my fifteenth bottle of Bud and pushed my plate away. ‘Those Bigfoot noses really blow you out,’ I observed.
‘You wouldn’t care for a wafer-thin mint?’ the barman enquired.
‘No, I wouldn’t. I’ll take a large Jim Beam.’
‘Coming right up.’
I chivvied Barry round the ashtray with a hot cigar butt and pondered fleetingly. Things weren’t looking too good for me. I had come up real short on the gratuitous sex and violence so far. And there wasn’t even a sniff of the now legendary trail of corpses that I’m known and loved for. What I needed now was a really violent interlude to liven up the otherwise turgid plot.
The barman passed me my Jim Beam. ‘Keep your head down, Laz,’ he advised. ‘I smell big trouble.’
The front doors swung open like a piper at the gates of dawn and two of the biggest guys I’d ever seen swaggered in wearing more black than a Valentine Dyall fan-club dinner.
Now I don’t know much about running gags from books previous that I ain’t been in, but it seemed to me that one of them was toting a 7.62 M134 General Electric Minigun, which in my books generally spells schadenfreude. I saw the barrels begin to spin and that’s when I snatched up Barry and whipped out the trusty Smith and West Wittering.
The big guy with the big gun strafed the place. I’d never seen so many shots go in so many directions all at the one time. Dudes started falling, dames started screaming. Bullets riddled the bar-top. Glasses shattered, bottles exploded. I came up firing. I let off three straight into the gunman’s chest but he didn’t look like he felt death coming on. He just kept pumping away.
The barman took the dive for cover as half the bar-counter went the way of all flesh, only faster. There was a hell of a lot of smoke about and a great deal of noise. At a time like this a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. And if you think that’s take a powder, then you don’t know old Laz too well. As The Maniacs Came Killing (A Lazlo Woodbine thriller) I rolled three more into the trusty Smith and West Point and took up a manly pose.
‘Ease up on the populace, creeps,’ said I with more heroism than an entire Bruce Willis season.
A whole bunch of muzzles turned in my direction. But like Elvis Costello, my aim was true. I hit the gunman right between the windows of his soul and he went down with a lot of sparks and techno-flash that I for one wasn’t expecting.
His buddy didn’t seem too concerned about that and reached down for the big gun. I let him have two rounds in the top of the head, just to be social.
I could see the holes. But they didn’t appear to be causing him much in the way of alarm. He came forward at me through the smoke and he wasn’t smiling. I emptied my piece into his chest. ‘Barry,’ said I. ‘Get us the Hell out of here.’
‘I’m trying, chief.’
‘Try harder, dammit.’
‘No can do, chief. I’m all used up. Sorry.’
‘Sorry? What are you saying?’
The guy in black came forward through the smoke. He was torn up real bad from all my gunfire. All sorts of bits were falling off, exposing lots of snazzy metalwork and futuristic circuitry the likes of which I had never seen the likes of.
‘Dead or alive, you’re coming with me,’ he said, which seemed to ring a bell somewhere.
‘Do something, Barry.’
‘I’m trying, chief. Oh damn.’
It’s a funny thing the way podoeroticism has never really caught on in the West, what with sex being so popular and all. We spend half our lives searching each other’s bottoms for erogenous zones, while all the time there are two dirty great big ones lurking inside our socks. Of course, the Chinese cottoned on to it centuries ago. But then, as Hugo Rune said, ‘not much slips past the damn Chinese when it comes to jigger jig’.
Rune once took tea with a mandarin in Peking and he comments in his diary:
The meal itself was a pretty lightweight affair consisting of a meagre forty courses, but made tolerable by the court concubines who, whilst the great lord and I took sup, lifted our robes at intervals and fanned our privvy members with their hair.
Sadly he neglects to mention whether they also gave his feet a bit of a squeeze.
Rex had always been something of a ‘leg man’ and very much of a ‘foot man’. And so, at this particular moment, when Laz was finding himself somewhat up against it, Rex was indulging in a little foot fellatio and thinking instep.
The big guy hit me just the one time. But that was enough for me. I joined the feathered legions and took to the air. I only wish that someone had opened the exit door before I passed through it.
Rex took time-out. If you want the earth to move for you, it’s best that it starts with small tremors and works its way slowly up the Richter. As Rex was currently at about five on the scale of ten he left Laura to steam gently and made for the cocktail cabinet. His naked feet left perfumed imprints upon the Bakhtiari carpet and his upraised wanger bobbed before him.
He reached the cocktail cabinet and leaned over it to scoop up a couple of two-hundred-year-old goblets.
As he did so a jolt of static electricity hit him right in the tip of his unrestrained bobber.
‘Ooooooooooh!’ howled Rex, collapsing into an untidy heap.
‘Oh’ and ‘ouch’ I howled as I hit the alleyway. I landed in a heap of cardboard boxes, shredd
ed paper and polystyrene which had evidently been laid out for the purpose and prepared to come up fighting.
Rex made with the crossed eyes and suitably pained expression. Clutching himself he crawled back to the cabinet and ran a tentative hand over the woodwork. Nothing. It had been well and truly earthed.
Rex fiddled with the raised carvings. There had to be something in there. And of course there was. A click, a swish and a panel slid away to reveal a . . .
“TV terminal.’ Rex made a puzzled face. ‘Now what do we have here, then?’ He rose to his feet, padded silently back across the room and gently closed the bedroom door. Returning, he examined the terminal.
Beneath the small screen was an intricate keyboard system, although nothing Rex hadn’t seen before. He jacked it up and watched as a station logo which meant nothing to him appeared on the screen.
Rex tapped at the keyboard and requested access to the menu. Access was politely denied. ‘INSERT CARD’ flashed upon the screen.
‘Hmm,’ went Rex. ‘Insert card.’ He glanced about the room. If it was ‘insert card’ then it was probably ‘insert Laura’s card’. Laura’s card was no doubt in her handbag. Her handbag was in the bedroom.
‘Bother,’ whispered Rex. ‘But hold on there.’ He reached over to his jacket, which had been thrown down with no particular care for its value, and pulled out the captured billfold. ‘There is a card in here, unless I am very much mistaken,’ he said.
‘Unless I am very much mistaken, Barry,’ said I, ‘We are in serious difficulty here.’
‘No more bullets for the trusty Smith and Welshman, chief?’
‘You got it, little guy. And the way he did what he just did I find most discouraging.’
‘You mean the way he walked out right through the wall rather than bothering with the doorway, chief?’
‘That and the big gun he’s carrying, yes.’