Acid Rock

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Being old hands at the rock festival routine, Maggot and the Dead Meat Lice, along with Vickie Stoner and their chauffeur, drove through the night to get to Darlington, a small village in the New York Catskills, where the concert would be held the next day.

Rooms had already been reserved at the town's one-and-only motel under the name of Calvin. Cadwallader, and there Maggot and company would dress tomorrow before being helicoptered to the concert scene to do their bit. They would also leave by chopper. This approach had come through experience, because they might literally be dismembered if they allowed their bodies to get into the clutches of their adoring-mostly young, mostly female, but all predatory-fans.

As the car rolled heavily away from Pittsburgh, Maggot sat in the back of the Rolls, Vickie next to him. From a compartment alongside the door, he took a pair of white gloves which he put on as carefully and ceremoniously as if he were a professional pallbearer. From the same compartment came the Wall Street Journal, an early edition which he had flown to him wherever he happened to be.

He opened the paper to the New York Stock

Exchange tables, after flipping on the airplanetype light in the right rear corner of the car. He began to run a glove-covered right index finger down the columns of type, which were printed bigger in the Wall Street Journal than in most other papers which carried stock prices.

Every so often, he would grunt. Vickie Stoner sat as close to him as his sense of hygiene would allow. Once she had gotten really close and he had simply pushed her back to her side of the seat as if she were a bag of groceries that had fallen on its side. The three Lice sat in a seat in front of them, chattering about music, girls, music, girls, and money.

Calvin Cadwallader grunted again. His finger rested on the name of a conglomerate. He opened the doorside compartment again and took out paper and a ledger pad and wrote down a figure.

«Sell,» said Vickie Stoner, who was able to see the name and number Maggot had written.

«Why sell?» Maggot asked. «It just went up a point.» For a moment, he forgot that he was talking to an idiotic, sex-strung groupie.

«That's right,» Vickie said, «and it's selling at thirty-six times earnings. And there's a Japanese company that's making a breakthrough on this outfit's main product and can produce it for half the cost. So sell, while you can still get out with a profit.»

She turned away from Cadwallader and looked through the window at the darkened, dismal Pennsylvania countryside.

«Why didn't my business manager tell me that?» Cadwallader asked.

«Probably he doesn't want you to sell until he unloads his first. Would you blame him? Sell.»

«How do you know so much about the market?» Cadwallader asked. «That is, if you do know anything about the market.»

«Right now, Maggot,» Vickie said, enjoying seeing him wince at the name, «I am worth seventy-two million dollars on the hoof. No one who is worth that much money is allowed to be ignorant or stupid. When my father dies, I should be worth a quarter of a billion dollars. Somebody's got to mind the store.»

Cadwallader was impressed. He began to rattle off the names of stocks. «Tell me the truth,» he said. «Your honest opinion.»

He named a soft drink company.

«Sell. The Russian contract is falling through.»

A drug company.

«Buy, They've got an oral contraceptive for men.»

A petroleum company.

«Sell. There's been a change in the return-ofcapital ruling on their dividends. After September first, you'll go for your lungs in income taxes.»

They discussed high finance all the way to Darlington. They ignored the Dead Meat Lice and talked all the way into the motel parking lot.

They were finally interrupted when the giant sedan rolled to a stop in front of the string of rooms they had rented. Maggot got out, followed by Vickie.

«Take the car over to that guest house on the other side of town,» Maggot told the driver. «But don't forget. Be back here at exactly five o'clock tomorrow. Have everything packed and the motor running. That's when our helicopter will get back from the field.»

«Yes, sir,» the driver said. He took a string of bags out of the trunk, put them on the ground, and then drove quickly out of the lot, lest anyone see and recognize the car.

Maggot and the Lice already had their room keys. As they walked toward the string of rooms, Louse Number One fell in alongside Maggot. «We all set for tomorrow?» «Right,» Maggot said. «Need any rehearsal time tonight?» «No,» Maggot said. «I don't have time.» «You don't have time? What's so important?» «Gotta ball that Vickie,» Maggot said. He walked away from the stupefied Louse and followed Vickie into her room; he was already fishing inside his small personal-items kit for his jar of Vitamin E capsules.

Not being old hands at rock concerts, Remo and Chiun left the next morning for Darlington, before the sun rose, and found that everyone in the Western world had had the same idea. Twenty miles from Darlington, the traffic stopped.

Like an ant trying to find his way past a puddle, Remo turned from road to road, from highway to back street, from throughway to country road. All the same. All filled to overflowing. No one moved.

It was 10 A.M.

Chiun sat looking out the passenger's window which was open, allowing the air conditioning to rush out, unimpeded by the complication of cooling Remo at all. «The highway system in your nation is very interesting,» Chiun said. «It works perfectly well until someone decides to use it. It must have taken much planning to build roads that are too big for light traffic and too small for heavy traffic.»

Remo grunted. He wheeled the car around and put it back onto the main highway. Still twenty miles to go to Darlington. Only three hours before the concert started.

Remo sat stalled in traffic. A black and white police car whizzed alongside him on the shoulder of the road, its overhead light whirring, its siren whooping occasionally.

Up ahead, Remo could see the first signs of disintegration of the crowd's discipline. People were getting out of their cars. Some were climbing on car roofs to play cards. Others were beginning to huddle together, rolling marijuana joints. Car doors opened as if a fire drill had been called. Remo groaned. The traffic would never move now.

«Perhaps if we walk,» Chiun said. «It is a good day for strolling.»

«Perhaps if you just leave things in my hands, we will get there,» Remo said sharply.

«Perhaps,» Chiun said. «And then again …» he added. But Remo did not hear the rest of the sentence. He was watching in his rearview mirror the approach of another police car. This one was an unmarked Chevrolet, a red light flashing inside the car on the dashboard. It gave Remo an idea. He said a few words to Chiun.

Both got out of their car and moved over onto the road shoulder. Remo waved his arms over his head at the onrushing detective's car, which finally screeched to a halt near Remo's toes.

The driver rolled down Ms window.

«What the hell are you doing, Mac?» he shouted. «Get out of the way. This is police business.»

«Right,» Remo said, approaching the driver. «Right you are.» Chiun walked around to the passenger's side of the car.

Remo put his hands on the driver's door, noting with dismay that the passenger's side door was locked. «But listen, man,» Remo said, «like wow, this is important too.»

«Well, what is it?» the detective said anxiously, moving his right hand across to the left side of his rumpled gray suit.

«It's important, I tell you,» Remo said.

The policeman looked at him, his attention totally distracted from Chiun.

«So?» the cop said.

«Man, I want to make a citizen's arrest. You see all these people around here. Man, they are all smoking pot. Now, unless I miss my guess, that is against the laws of New York State and Nelson Rockefeller. I mean, man, like all these people, they ought to be good for seven to fifteen under your new law. I want to swear out a warrant for their arrest.»

The policeman shook his head. «Can't do anything about it, fella. We've been told to lay off.»

«Is that any way to build respect for the law?» Remo asked.

«Those are the rules,» the detective said.

«In that case,» Remo said, «have you got a match? I mean, the lighter's like busted in my car and my grass is just sitting there, getting old and cold and sad and old. If I don't get a match, I'm just gonna waste away.»

«Waste, you son of a bitch,» the policeman said. He jammed the car angrily into drive and sped off, his rear wheels kicking gravel and pebbles back at Remo and Chiun.

Remo watched him leave, then turned to Chiun.

«You get it?»

Chiun brought his hand from behind his back.

It held the red blinking light from the car's dashboard.

«How'd you open the door?» Remo said. «It was locked.»

«Clean living,» explained Chiun.

«Let's go,» Remo said.

Back in the car, Remo wired the light to the two clips behind the cigarette lighter of his rented auto. The light began to rotate and flash.

Remo pulled off onto the shoulder, stepped on the gas and zoomed off toward Darlington. Acid rock freaks waved at him as he sped down the road. Some of them, already stoned, wandered out into the shoulder of the road and Remo was forced to swerve his way through them like an open field runner.

«Not so fast,» Chiun said.

«Concentrate on the centrality of your being,» Remo suggested.

«What does that mean?» Chiun asked.

«I don't know. It's what you always tell me.»

«And good advice, too,» Chiun said. «I shall concentrate on the centrality of my being.» He lifted his legs up onto the front seat of the auto and folded them into his meditation position. He stared straight ahead out the window. Ten seconds later his eyes were closed.

Remo would have sworn Chiun was asleep, that is, until he almost sideswiped a car moving out onto the shoulder, and Chiun said:

«Careful, lest you kill us both and leave Mr. Nilsson with nothing to do.» As he spoke, he opened his eyes and looked out the side window. An elderly man with gray hair, carrying a doctor's bag walked rapidly along the shoulder of the road. Chiun saw him, watched him for a moment and nodded to himself. He turned toward Remo but

Remo had not seen the man. Chiun started to speak, then changed his mind and closed his eyes again. Why tell Remo anything? Particularly about an upstart House.

Gunner Nilsson looked up at the car whizzing past him and felt a distaste for soft Americans. Walk where they could run; ride where they could walk. No matter. Only a few miles left and he had plenty of time. Today he would not fail.

Maggot had breakfast in bed, Vickie at his side.

«What do you really think about Christmas trees as a tax shelter?» he asked, munching on a soy-flour roll.

«Not bad, if you're prepared to wait five years for some return,» she said. She reached toward her canvas bag and fished a hand inside it. She pulled out a vial of blue pills and her face lit up with pleasure.

«Why not eat?» Maggot said. «There's plenty for both of us.»

«Sure, Maggot, sure. But I always have my morning tonic.»

She took out one of the pills, but on its way to her mouth, it was intercepted by Maggot's hand.

«Eat, I said.» He tossed the blue pill off toward a corner of the room, then picked up a roll and stuffed it into her mouth.

Vickie Stoner looked at Maggot with a new sense of appreciation. In bed, he wasn't much, nothing like that short-haired straight, Remo. But the thoughtfulness was nice.

«Come on,» Maggot said. «Eat that roll and let's kick around those soybean futures.»