Gascoyne Read online

  “That’s on there too,” he says, “in advance.”

  “What?”

  “Destroying state property and littering the public right-of-way a sixth time. They said you’d do it.”

  Well that’s just too damned much to take so I step back into the car and blast off without signaling and dial Chester as fast as the old dial allows.

  “Chester where the hell’s O’Mallollolly now?”

  “Not sure boss.”

  “What do you mean not sure? You’re being paid to know these things Chester and you’d better get smart damn quick.”

  “Sure boss but I can’t help it. We never heard from Gifford again and when I sent out Willy I never heard from him either. I mean I can send twenty people after O’Mallollolly but—”

  “Okay Chester then you just tell me where you think he is right now.”

  “I’d guess Police Tower. What’s the matter boss?”

  “A state trooper stopped me for speeding.”

  “Holy shit!”

  “Yeah,” I say, “and this is going to stop right now before it really gets started. I’m going down to Police Tower right now and I want you to have Gilman and Gary and Albert waiting at the corner of Ninth and Broadway in ten minutes, got it?”

  “Yeah boss but—”

  “But what Chester?”

  “Well just that why not wait for the election?”

  “Drive the speed limits for three months, are you out of your mind Chester? No, O’Mallollolly’s on his way out starting right now, I’ve let him have a free hand till now but what has he done with it but try to bite the gift horse? No siree, out!”

  *

  I hang up about where the Skyway goes up in the air and where you can first see Police Tower downtown and where I’m going to make sure all hell breaks loose. I roll down the window and throw out all the rest of the goddamn bananas which makes me feel a little better, calm enough that I can think some. The trouble with characters like O’Mallollolly is you never know what they’re like until you get them in and I’ve known the bastard for a hell of a long time. I could see this coming after the election but I figured it was best to let him go as long as he kept out of my way and then dump him the next election with a minimum of fuss, but now it looks like he wants a big fuss and that’s what he’s going to get. Why just now that doesn’t make much sense except that his big head is like a ripe tomato and maybe this is the moment it goes rotten. He’s one of those guys who just doesn’t exist if he doesn’t feel important and he must have decided he wasn’t feeling important enough. But how the fool could forget the Scandal of ’59 is beyond me. Short memory, these guys with big heads.

  I turn off the Skyway onto the Infracity Expressway doing about ninety and about lose my uppers when I glance at the rearview and see a little blue Porsche right on my tail and after a moment I make out about four people inside it and then the license number which I can’t believe my own eyes is the same as the silver Porsche I totaled not too many hours ago. What the hell is going on around here? Either somebody’s got an angle I don’t know about or I’ve got problems.

  I pump the brakes and pull the Kaiser right into the slow lane with the Porsche sitting right on my tail like I was pulling it, and I brake some more and shoot her down the Broadway off-ramp at Seventh Street. Gary and Albert are waiting on the corner like they’re supposed to be.

  “Hop in back,” I say. “Where the hell’s Gilman?”

  “Don’t know boss.”

  “That door doesn’t work,” I say to Gary who’s near to busting a gut trying to get in the left rear door, “use the other one.”

  “What’s all this about boss?” Gary asks.

  “Just a little talk with O’Mallollolly, that’s all.”

  In a second Gilman hops around the corner and spots the car and climbs in the front seat. I shove her into drive and she coughs and misses a couple of times and off we go and in the rearview I can see the blue Porsche pulling out of a parking space it ducked into when I stopped. I run down Seventh Street and catch the green arrow onto the Infracity on-ramp but just in the nick of time because the Porsche hits it red but runs through anyway. I floor it up the on-ramp with the supercharger on but with the extra load in the car she’s a little sluggish and so I’m only doing sixty when I merge left between two school buses burning up our tax money and it looks like seventy’s about tops as I work my way over to the third lane and decide to keep on that one.

  O’Mallollolly’s probably got his telescope trained on us right now from Police Tower and I fiddle with the rearview which always jiggles out of place and spot the Porsche behind, second lane, and something else moving up fast, lanes three and four, and in a minute I can see it’s a very even formation of six black and white state trooper cars which glide past the Porsche and come right up to my rear and sit there. O’Mallollolly’s getting the big guns out all right though he’s sure forgot to check with the owner first. I don’t say anything to the boys about what’s behind because I can see that Albert is already getting a little stiff.

  There’s a funny thing about this Kaiser I own which is it behaves fine if it’s just me inside but with anybody else all sorts of things start happening for no goddamn reason at all. Well old Gilman is sitting there in the front seat beside me minding his own business with that sort of freeway glaze over his eyes when bang the glove compartment door pops open and my jar of Micro-Mice rolls out right into his lap. He sort of stares at it like it was a knife in his stomach and then groans a little and picks up the jar and looks inside. “Mice!” he screams and starts rolling down the window. I lean over and grab the jar away and put it back into the glove compartment which causes me to lose control of the car and ends up that I pull the thing so far right that I cross both right lanes and go up on the shoulder and blow into kindling wood one of those No Stopping signs, but by that time I’m back into control and soon get the thing running in a straight line again in the right direction.

  Gilman puts his feet up on the glove compartment door to keep that from happening again but I can see old Albert in the back is in trouble trying to roll down the window which like the door it’s in doesn’t work. “Use the other one,” I say and Gary catches on and rolls down his window and Albert vomits out that side and fortunately for us not inside the car, but I imagine the rear quarter panel is a big mess.

  Just then Marge calls.

  “Hi Marge.”

  “Hello dear, say, I’m still being followed.”

  “Don’t worry about it Marge, it happens every day. Where are you now?”

  “Having lunch at the FAT PHEASANT AND OLD GREYHOUND GRILL AND RESTAURANT overlooking Lake Lobotomples,” she says.

  “Jesus Christ do you know what things cost there Marge? About five times what they are anywhere else around there,” I say and I know what I’m talking about since I own the joint.

  “I know dear but the chairs are soft and the view nice and the music is relaxing—”

  “Look Marge take my advice right this minute and get out of that clip joint and run down the road about a mile to a little place made out of an old trolley and called STEVIE’S SENSATIONAL SANDWICHES where you can really eat well for nothing, pay a dollar and you come out of there absolutely bloated.”

  “Bloated? Well dear I don’t think I really want to get bloated, you know, just a bite to eat.”

  “It’ll cost you five bucks just to look at a glass of water, I swear. I mean look Marge you’re up there on a business trip and not a pleasure cruise and if you want to live high off the hog why do it on your own time.”

  “Dear. You say this is a business trip,” she says.

  “That’s right.”

  “Well what am I supposed to get out of it?”

  “Hell Marge all I can say is you ought to be grateful since you’re getting a free tour of Mt. Pastiche National Forest and it’s not costing you a damn cent.”

  “Well dear that’s all very nice. Mt. Pastiche National Forest is a beaut
iful place. I love it. I love the trees. I love the mountains. I love—”

  “Calm down Marge.”

  “Shut up. I love the lakes. That’s why I have come up here about five times a year for the last ten years. And that’s why a free tour of the place is a really new and exciting experience. I expect to throw myself in the lake with joy any moment now.”

  “Finished?”

  “Yes,” and then she goes and hangs up.

  Damn that woman I say to myself, she’ll be calling me up and asking me to send up a Brink’s armored car with sacks of silver dollars next thing. She’ll have us all on the streets pretty soon the way she’s going. I’ll bet she unloads fifteen bucks in the FAT PHEASANT.

  But damn, all this distracts me from what’s at hand and I find myself in the third lane when I ought to be in the far right because the Police Tower off-ramp is coming up damn fast so I scoot over right and everybody behind me starts edging over to the slow lane and I brake and roll down the off-ramp and go right onto Water Boulevard and then left a block later onto Avenue of Police Commissioner O’Mallollolly and run up that to Police Tower and bounce into the executive parking lot. I roll slowly past the nine black 1965 limousines and turn toward my parking slot near the side entrance. I pull up to it but damn if there isn’t some shriveled-up old fart crouching down digging out my brass nameplate with a hammer and chisel. I let a short one out of the air horn and then force him out of the way completely by running the Kaiser right up against the wall so he can’t get at the nameplate at all.

  We climb out of the car and I recognize the old man who’s dressed in overalls as former Police Commissioner MacWigo, 1955-59, who I got out with the famous Scandal of ’59. Nice that somebody found something for him to do around the old place though I can’t exactly approve of this particular odd job he’s got.

  “Your time has come GASCOYNE,” he says.

  “My time will come when I decide.”

  “They all say that, they all say that.”

  “My time will come when I decide.”

  Obviously we don’t see eye-to-eye on this matter so I give the sign to the boys and we start heading for the side entrance. Across the Avenue the six troopers’ cars have pulled up to the curb and all the troopers are standing on the sidewalk looking across at us, must be about thirty of them, and some are watching us through field glasses. I sort of suspect O’Mallollolly has told them to stand by conspicuously as a show of force but I think they’re really standing there waiting for the air to be cleared so they’ll know which side to jump to when jumping time comes.

  Just then the plate glass of the side entrance door goes crash and tinkles to the ground and three submachine-gun barrels stick out and wave around. “Drop boys,” I say and all of us fall down behind the big granite boulders of the Japanese garden God-knows-who decided to put there, damn good idea from our point of view.

  “All right GASCOYNE what do you want?” calls out some ignoramus.

  “In,” I say.

  “What?”

  “In!”

  “Goddamn speak up GASCOYNE.”

  “In! I-N!”

  Then I hear whispers inside the entrance saying, “He wants in he said.”

  “Why?” another voice calls out.

  “None of your goddamn business,” I say.

  “You’ve got to tell us why,” somebody else inside says.

  Then there are more whispers and I throw one of those little white garden pebbles at Gary and hit him on the head. He gives out a little scream but after awhile turns his head at me.

  “Psst!” I say. “In exactly thirty seconds we all open fire on the door.”

  “Ok—” he chokes, “okay boss.”

  Gary whispers to Albert and Albert to Gilman.

  The thirty seconds whip by pretty fast, I guess, since I don’t have a watch and I don’t think anybody else does either, and then me and Gary start pumping lead into the doorway. Gilman joins in but then Albert the ass faints. We keep on blasting away anyway until it looks like they’ve retreated from the entrance completely. I take a chance and stand up and of course nobody shoots at me. I can see over the parking lot and across the street the troopers are all laying down behind their cars.

  “Come on boys, charge!” I say and while Gilman picks up Albert and throws him over his back Gary and I move in on the entrance door and find the entrance and hallway and executive elevator completely abandoned by the defenders so we move in and take over. There’s a hell of a racket coming from upstairs however and I’m a little bit afraid of a counteroffensive or a trap or something, especially the way the executive elevator is sitting there, doors wide open and all ready and waiting.

  “I suspect this is a trap,” I say. “We’d better take the fire escape up.”

  “Anything you say boss.”

  We duck Albert’s head under the cold-water fountain and before we leave I reach in the elevator and push fifteen so they’ll think we’re coming up. The door snaps closed and up she goes.

  “Follow me,” I command and we go through a little door opposite the elevator and down into the boiler room and cross that and come out the other side of the building where the interior fire escape is. The thing’s rarely used because the doors are one-way in a way that if you go out you can’t get back in the building except through the executive suite fire escape door which has an external lock to which only I have the key. Just the same we listen a few minutes at the foot of the stairs for unusual sounds but hear nothing and so start up. About now, I’m thinking, the elevator ought to be up top and they’ll be wondering how we’re coming up, but all right since they’re probably thinking I’m working my way up one of the three main staircases, which I could do easily enough except that I like the element of surprise. I’ve got a hell of a lot of friends in this joint which O’Mallollolly is going to discover pretty soon if he doesn’t know it now though I will admit he’s probably got the whole top floor except for the Goon Squad in his pocket, but there’s a lot of country between there and the ground.

  The hike up the stairs is so exhausting we have to stop at the third-floor landing to catch our breath for about five minutes and I’m thinking maybe we ought to try to force open one of the fire escape doors and commandeer a service elevator. I’m not used to this sort of exercise though I’ve been getting a lot of it these last days, still it seems to be harder rather than easier, and at the rate we’re going it’ll take us two hours to get to the fifteenth floor.

  Still I decide it’s worth a little more of a try so we hike up to the fifth floor and by putting our ears against the door we gather there’s a big commotion going on inside and after we’re well enough rested we stand back and start blasting away at the hinges, metal flying all over the place. Gilman’s revolver all of a sudden falls apart into about seven pieces but since Albert’s sitting down not being able to take the noise and trying to swallow an aspirin without water, Gilman borrows his.

  We blast away some more and pretty soon the door collapses and I shout “Charge!” and we charge in, and what a mess is there. Desks and filing cabinets are overturned all over the place and cops and secretaries are taking potshots at each other from behind them and all sorts of stuff is flying through the air like lamps and small office machines and bundles of paper. But because the racket’s so bad and we come in at the end of a hallway nobody really notices us and all we’ve got to do is pass through two office doors to get to an elevator. We get down on hands and knees and crawl along the hall a few feet to an office door and pop in there where we find ourselves without much choice confronting a heavily armed group momentarily engaged in lining up metal office chairs with foam rubber seats and setting the seats on fire and rolling them flaming across the hall into an apparently enemy office. I approach the guy I take it is in charge and who I’ve seen before but never met and I’m not sure if he knows who I am, perhaps to my advantage.

  “What’s the situation?” I ask.

  “Well,” he says, “the O�
��Mallollolly forces seem to be getting the upper hand. At the moment they control an expanding pie-shaped sector that includes Birth and Death Certificates, Payroll, both lavatories and the janitor’s closet, also a small strategically located enclave in the snack bar kitchen. But there’s an element of uncertainty here which is that the expanding O’Mallollolly forces seem to be broken into several factions.”

  “Hmm.”

  “But even all this is in doubt because we’ve heard rumors about GASCOYNE water reinforcements from the sixth floor.”

  “I see. Who controls the elevators?”

  “As far as I know at the moment,” he says, “a small independent group from Parking Meters, third floor, that’s gone completely mercenary.”

  “Thanks pal,” I say and we work our way through the office to the other cross-corridor and when we get there all we have to do is turn right and go a few steps, must be a truce area because things are pretty calm. I push the Up button and watch the numbers light up as the elevator comes down from the seventh floor. The doors open and the thing’s filled with about five guys with submachine guns looking pretty businesslike.

  “Fourteen please,” I say, pulling Gary and Gilman and Albert in behind me. They’re a little timid about this crowd I can tell.

  “What’s it worth to you, the fourteenth floor?” the guy at the controls asks as he closes the door.

  “Not a damn cent, just get this thing going,” I say.

  “Who the hell do you think you are?” the joker asks.

  “GASCOYNE,” I say.

  He looks me over and pushes the fourteen button and up we go, that’s the sort of respect I like accorded to my name, which is as good as hard cash in most situations. We hit floor fourteen and out we go and things are quiet up here like on a normal day, except that just peeking in one office I can see everybody’s either on the telephone or helping move desks and filing cabinets into barricades. We slip out the fire escape without any trouble and climb the stairs to fifteen where I unlock the executive fire escape door and we push our way into the executive bedroom, nobody else there.