Gascoyne Read online

  But at least the Widow Roughah is beginning to see the value of telling the truth now and then and there’s reason to suppose this might become a habit. What I really want to see is that insurance policy to make sure she’s on the level about that and because somewhere in the back of my mind Roughah and insurance policy are rubbing together in an unusual way and I want to know why.

  Now the little gold disk with the eight-digit number on it is still a mystery and judging from what has happened so far it’s the key to a hell of a lot more than meets the eye at first glance. The number’s trying to say something but it’s just not coming through very clear. I take the little coinlike thing out of my pocket and hold it up in the skyway glare so as to be able to read the number: 95400329. I notice an odd symmetry in it as it begins with a nine and ends with a nine and has two zeros smack in the middle with the remaining four numbers being two pairs of neighboring numbers, five-four and three-two. What’s it trying to say? Whatever it is must be pretty damn significant.

  About then some idiot coming the opposite direction on the Skyway jumps the center strip and goes end over end clear across into our slow lane and piles into a moving van and the whole shooting match plows through the side railing and sails off the Skyway into the SKYWAY VIEW HOMES FOR FAST-LIVING FAMILIES TRACT and the last I see of them is an orange glow down below out the rearview. Somebody down there’s going to have something to talk about over breakfast. That’s about the fanciest one I’ve seen in a long time and I get to see quite a few because one of the advantages of being on the road all the time is you pretty often find yourself in a front-row seat for freeway spectaculars.

  Suddenly out of the blue a couple of pieces slam together like they always belonged that way. The butler did it, as O’Mallollolly said, and why not? Grant, the old fool, is dead and of course he couldn’t have done it but he’s in no position to argue and now all I have to do is get Grants’ body and make up fingerprints and a little evidence here and there and the Widow Roughah gets her insurance money and me my cut, like shooting ducks in a barrel. That’s a solution to make everybody happy and it tidies up one end of the Roughah business real nice. Of course I’m still wanting to know who really did it but that’s something there’s no real rush about. Just then the phone rings. It’s Marge.

  “Hi Marge, where are you calling from?”

  “The Wolverine Lodge dear, and I’ve got a beautiful room. View of the pine trees, the lake, Mount Pastiche with the sun coming up all over it, everything.”

  “For how much?”

  “Twenty-five dear, very cheap.”

  “Well I don’t know about that. That sounds pretty expensive to me Marge; Didn’t they have any cheaper rooms?”

  “Oh just one for fifteen practically in the basement,” she says.

  “Did you look at it?”

  “Of course not dear. The nice man at the desk told me frankly it just wasn’t suitable. Right above the boiler room and just under the kitchen,” she says.

  “Just the same you shouldn’t take other people’s word about these things Marge, it may have been a perfectly nice cosy little room and all you really needed was a bed for the night. They just wanted you to use one of their expensive rooms. Is that twenty-five dollars for a single?”

  “Oh no dear, it’s a double.”

  “A double? What did you want a double for?”

  “They didn’t have any singles left,” she says.

  “Oh. How was your trip up?”

  “Oh just marvelous.”

  “No more car trouble?” I ask.

  “Not a bit. And it wouldn’t have mattered anyway.”

  “Oh?”

  “Well dear I was very lucky. It seems that the nice boy who keeps the bar at Crankcase Grade Summit had to come up to Wolverine Camptown to pick up his car which broke down there.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well so I offered him a ride, and in fact I was so tired yesterday afternoon and really rather smashed that I just let him do the driving and I sat back and relaxed and enjoyed the scenery.”

  “Well now Marge really I don’t think you should carry around strange men. After all that car is worth almost six thousand dollars and we can’t have it insured for everybody’s uncle to drive, and you know how these teen-agers are.”

  “He’s not a teen-ager dear,” she says. “He’s twenty-three and quite grown up.”

  “Did he drive safely?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “How long did it take you from the summit to the lodge?”

  “Oh let me see now. About three hours,” she says.

  “Three hours? He must have driven very slowly.”

  “Oh no dear, we stopped for a little picnic for a couple of hours, the weather was so nice at the other side of the pass.”

  “Umm. What are you doing now Marge?”

  “Just lying in bed watching the sun come up, you know, and digesting my breakfast. The air is so good up here that all you want to do is lie around and breathe. Exhilarating!”

  “Well now Marge don’t forget what I sent you up there for in the first place.”

  “Yes, I’ll get up to Condor’s Crag late this afternoon I expect. At the moment I’m just too exhausted. My whole body just sort of aches all over, very pleasant—”

  “Whatever from Marge?”

  “The altitude dear. Its effects are quite penetrating.”

  “Funny I’ve never felt that before.”

  “Well that’s just the way you are,” she says.

  “Okay Marge I’ve got to go.”

  I hang up pretty peeved at her for throwing my money around like that and also acting as if she’s on vacation and not on an errand. Time and money don’t grow on trees and that’s one thing she ought to know by now, and of course it’s very illuminating about her the way she starts slowing down and spending money as soon as she’s out of sight. Well she’ll get hell when she gets back as if she didn’t know it.

  Pretty soon I reach the place where the Skyway comes back down to the ground on the edge of the wheatlands and where you can first see the towers of Fort Frigge Army Base which everybody in town thinks is a big storage dump for things they’re going to use in the next war but the place is really a cover for NON-PROFIT DEFENSIVE ZOOLOGICAL WARFARE SYSTEMS INCORPORATED which is one of these government contractors with special milking privileges because we were able to talk the government into believing there was nobody else around with enough brains to do the job, no little trick that one was. Most of the joint is stuck under the ground or in places that look like warehouses and we’ve got about five thousand people working there secretly, but so that nobody gets suspicious and wondering why so many Ph.Ds in defensive zoological warfare are in the area they’ve put up a big fancy Agriculture Department Testing Station just down the road and they let it out that since there’s nothing these days for the zoological warfare people to do they give them work on peaceful plants and animals.

  The Fort Frigge off-ramp sign pops up and I pump the brakes and slip over into the slow lane and shoot down the ramp and turn left at the bottom and roll through the underpass and wind up at the gendarme’s office at the Fort Frigge Main Gate. A corporal takes down my license number and takes a gander at my driver’s license and gives me a visitor’s pass and waves me through. They’re pretty casual about letting you in so they won’t attract too much attention but they’re damn careful about letting you out if they let you out at all, and they always pretend they don’t know you.

  I slip the Kaiser into the G slot beside a huge building that’s supposed to have nothing in it but mothballed jeep pistons but the place really sits on top of the whole NON-PROFIT DEFENSIVE ZOOLOGICAL WARFARE SYSTEMS ADMINISTRATION AND LABORATORIES which go straight down into the ground for a hell of a long ways.

  I climb out of the car and hoof it over to the main entrance of the building and give my visitor’s pass to an army security Pfc who gives me a little form to fill out. I tell him I haven’t got my glasses wit
h me so he fills it out for me and pushes a button and opens a wooden hatch in the floor behind his desk and helps me into the hole which is almost too small for me. I get my feet planted firmly on the wooden rungs of the ladder, and since I’ve been through this about ten times before I don’t really mind that he’s picked my pockets, they give it all back to you when you leave.

  I start climbing down the wooden ladder and he closes the hatch over my head. I’ve got about fifty feet down below which is enough space and time for them to take pictures and weigh me and measure me and take X-rays and fingerprints without me supposed to notice anything unusual and in fact I wouldn’t even know what they’re doing if a friend inside hadn’t told me all about it. And of course the rungs are unevenly spaced so you’ve got to keep your mind on what you’re doing if you don’t want to break your neck.

  I reach the bottom of the ladder with a lot of splinters in my hands and kick myself for forgetting the gloves I always mean to bring. The ladder ends in a small floodlighted room which is where army security leaves off and NONPROFIT DEFENSIVE ZOOLOGICAL takes over. One wall of the thing which is about ten by twenty-five feet is completely covered with a security poster with letters in white against black seven feet tall reading “SHHHHH!” and underneath in very small white letters SECURITY IS YOUR BUSINESS. ALSO YOUR JOB.… Why they put it here I don’t know since the regular employees come in an easier way but maybe they couldn’t find anybody who’d have the thing in his office, pretty clear why.

  I go through a small door left into the reception office and a girl behind a typewriter is already looking over the stuff the Pfc sent down and the photographs and X-rays and things taken on the way down the hole.

  “Mr. GASCOYNE,” she says in that snotty voice these typing chicks sometimes get, “I see you’ve gained two pounds since you were last here.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why?” she asks looking at me through thick glasses and with poisonous bright lipstick and a golden ball-point pen held up in the air at an angle like she doesn’t give a living fart whether the X goes in the Yes box or the No box, I hate the type and she ought to know better than to ask me personal questions. I’ll have to fire this number.

  “Constipation,” I say.

  Her glassy wet eyes twitch an upper lid or two and her pen descends to the paper like a pin into a voodoo doll.

  “We must be very careful you know Mr. GASCOYNE. Very careful indeed.”

  Moments like this I pride myself on saying nothing at all. She goes and stamps a pass form and lovingly crunches a number slip onto it with a stapler that she bangs like she was delivering a fatal judo punch and then she grinds a finger into a button like she’s hoping somehow it’ll make a bomb go off somewhere.

  After a second the secretary of Dr. Phialson, the man I want to see, clanks in and clips a little red SHHH! badge to my lapel which is to remind people I don’t have a security clearance, not that I need one, and it even glows in the dark in case they have a power failure down here. Then she puts the loop end of a long chain around my neck and puts the other end around hers which is to make sure that an uncleared person such as I am or any other visitor is always with his escort. All the chains themselves have a special security classification and must be kept in safes when not in use which enables the number of visitors in the place at one time to be monitor-confirmed and also if somebody finds a chain laying around it’s pretty damn clear something fishy’s going on somewhere.

  When we get all harnessed up we start to pull out of the reception office and I turn around to give Miss Poison a last nasty look and she looks up and makes a grimace and sticks out her tongue and goes “Phffsst!”

  “Grrfgh!” I reply with an appropriate gesture and march out.

  We enter a hallway about twenty feet wide and a half-mile long and walk down it a ways and go past another security poster which shows in bright blue the mouth of a man sneezing with germ droplets flying everywhere with the caption “Keep Your Mouth Shut” with the usual pitch about security underneath.

  “Turn left here,” says Miss Chain.

  “Thanks for warning me.”

  We clank around a corner and go down a narrow corridor a ways until we get to another big hallway and turn right and run smack into what looks like all hell breaking loose and about to mow us down at the same time. Miss Chain yanks the chain and we whip back around the corner for protection but I peek over her head and look at what’s coming. The first thing that runs by looks like a cross between a large crocodile and a boa constrictor on eight legs with TOP SECRET stenciled on its side screaming its head off and probably moving at about 20 mph. Then right on its tail comes a small flock of jabbering white doves that keep crashing into the walls and lights but still moving down the hall pretty damn fast. Suddenly one of them shrieks especially loud and they all start crapping all over the place but the funny thing is when the turds hit the floor or anything solid they explode in a bright red flame burning very large holes in the walls and floors, I wonder what they’ve been fed.

  A black cloud of some little insect whizzes by next leaving behind a bad smell that makes my eyes water and makes me think I’m going to lose my last night’s sardine dinner but the smell goes away pretty fast. Then right off, this huge white fluffy round thing about seven feet in diameter comes staggering down the hallway on four tiny little feet underneath and then I see its little bitty face right square in the middle of this round ball and I realize the damn thing’s a white rabbit with a weight problem. It sort of bounces from one side of the hall to the other making the walls shake and then this secretary steps out across the hall to see what all the commotion is about and the large round white rabbit trips and knocks her down and rolls right over her and keeps on rolling down the hall out of sight while the secretary crawls back into her door.

  Just a second later four guys in white coats and gloves and masks rush by like bats out of hell followed by a gun bearer, and a character with a foam fire extinguisher putting out the little fires. Next comes a little man dressed in black, nosing around everywhere and then he sees me and my SHHH! badge and comes over and says without even introducing himself or trying to find out who I am, “You have just committed a serious security violation by watching what passed pass.”

  So then I remember he’s the security officer.

  “Now I want you to relax,” he says looking me in the eye, “just relax and look me in the eyes. That’s it. Now we all have bad dreams now and then and that’s just what you’ve had.”

  “Sure,” I say just to make the guy feel better, though he ought to know who I am and that I’m a busy man and don’t have time for dreams of any kind. He babbles on like that for a few minutes while Miss Chain caresses the back of my neck until I agree in a counterfeit sleepy tone that I haven’t seen a damn thing. He shakes my hand and runs off and Miss Chain and I go on our way. All I can think is that if I were a taxpayer I’d sure be pissed off at the poor state of organization in this joint, but of course the secret of getting profits out of these nonprofit things is to get the government so confused they don’t know where the money goes and pretty soon they don’t care either.

  We turn a couple of corners and run past a guy killing flies with a bugbomb and then step into an office and old Miss Chain picks up a little wooden knocker and gives a big brass gong a whack. There are about ten girls typing and when they hear the noise they all look up from their typewriters and start pulling big SHHH! hoods, which are white with red lettering and tiny air holes, over their desks and bodies and heads and zip themselves up inside and that way conceal all the classified material laying around. We cross through them and go into the private office of Doc Phialson who’s in charge of the whole shooting match and he’s at his desk asleep over the comics section of the morning Times.

  “Dr. Phialson?” says Miss Chain. “Oh Doctor?”

  He’s clearly a deep sleeper and so she gives the desk a little push and he opens his eyes and raises his head and mumbles, “
Quitting time is it already?” Then he sees me and says, “GASCOYNE!”

  I almost forget that it’s a security violation for two people of different security classifications to shake hands and so does he but we stop in time.

  “GASCOYNE! Sit down!”

  Well I go and sit right down in the chair beside me forgetting completely about Miss Chain and so I give her a nasty jerk on the neck which throws her against the wall with a crash that really rattles her marbles and I stand up to help her but damn if she doesn’t fall to the floor which pulls me off my feet and I end up on the floor too under the chair I was sitting on two seconds before and bruised all over the place.

  “Sorry,” I say.

  “That’s all right,” she says, “it happens all the time.”

  We make it back on our feet and Miss Chain passes her end of the chain to Doc who loops the end over his neck and then disconnects the thing in the middle and plugs my end into a special socket on his desk in front of me. Miss Chain staggers out of the room, what a nasty job she’s got, must be a tough bitch all right.

  “Well GASCOYNE what the hell are you doing down here?”

  “Well I’ll tell you.”

  So I tell him about Nadine’s boyfriend with the ear trouble.

  “That’s a new one,” he says, “a one-legged octopus.”

  “Says he picked it up in the wars.”

  “Did he now? Well he’s lucky to get back from the wars at all. Not many come back, you know. They like to use them up. Saves money and time and they learn a lot in the field. Can’t have a lot of boys coming back who haven’t had the full treatment, and that doesn’t leave much choice.”

  “Can this thing be cured?” I ask.

  “Presumably not. Otherwise they wouldn’t have sent him back.” He picks up a fine wire-mesh cage with a spider in it and tosses it from hand to hand. “However it would be worth trying a three-time daily rinse with a very strong solution of Tide detergent, the washday miracle. Also I should recommend mashing up a half peanut and adding to it a small quantity of aspirin or Miltown, but most of all I’d have the boy run out and buy himself a very large hat.”