Dead Letter Drop

11

E. Scrutch came as a shock; the name which had haunted me through a long and slow day belonged to some 20 to 25 stone of very aggressive female. She was completely and utterly enormous, like something out of a comic cartoon book, except that she was real, standing there before my eyes in the computer room.

Her presence in the room diminished it, distorted the perspective like a scene from Alice in Wonderland. She had short dark hair, which served only to accentuate the size of her head, and this, whilst considerably larger than is normal for such an object, looked like an afterthought that had been plucked from the wrong-sized box, before being plonked, like a pimple, on the top of her bull neck.

She wore a badly cut full-length smock, which did nothing to disguise the total shapelessness of her body, and made it quite impossible to identify her breasts, stomach or even knees amid the enormous rolls of flesh that hung about her; were she horizontal, and a couple of hundred miles long, she would have been a geographer’s paradise. As she was, standing upright and about 64 inches tall, visions of paradise did not roll immediately into my mind.

She was staring at me with a pair of eyes that could have been glass, except they were bloodshot. ‘You want something?’ It wasn’t a question, it was a military command, barked out with all the softness and femininity of a sergeant major addressing the first parade of a platoon of new recruits.

‘No, don’t let me bother you.’

‘You are bothering me. I’ve got a lotta work to do and you’re the fourth schmuck to bother me in the last ten minutes. I’ve booked this room, so why doesn’t everybody fucking leave me alone?’ She stuck a finger in her ear, and twiddled it furiously; she then removed it, and started scraping a lump of wax from under her finger nail. Gaining access to this computer wasn’t going to be easy.

I tried the name-dropping trick once more. ‘Dr Yass is going to be upset — he’s asked me to get some work done for him by this evening.’

‘I don’t give a shit about that creep; got the worst-run campus in the country and the only way to get a fucking degree out of him is to be 5 foot 7, with blonde hair.’ She glared at me. ‘Either sex,’ she added.

Our heart-to-heart chat was interrupted by the emergence from the computer room of the operator. ‘I’ve fixed that tape drive — won’t give any more trouble now. I have to go home; my kid has to go to the hospital. I won’t be back for a couple of hours at least. Try not to break anything while I’m gone.’ He hurried off.

I felt that a new line of attack was required, since conventional and logical attempts to reason were likely to end in my physical ejection from the room. I didn’t say anything for some moments, and she stood blinking at me, like a toad eyeing a fly. I shrugged my shoulders and attempted to put on my ‘I’m actually a very nice guy’ expression.

‘You look like you need a good crap,’ she said.

They say that when a girl takes an interest in the condition of your clothes then she’s in the marriage stakes; I wondered if the same applied for an interest in the condition of one’s bowels. Her sheer size and physical ugliness weren’t my major worries; my eyelids were in good working order and in any emergency could be clamped shut. But I hadn’t learned how to shut my nostrils, and since I could smell her clearly from here, close up I reckoned she’d be pretty ghastly. But I steeled myself — somehow. ‘I like your dress,’ I said.

For a moment she looked like she’d been hit by a nuclear bomb. The moment passed and then she looked like she’d been hit by a passing car. That moment passed too, and she then looked like she’d been hit by a pillow-load of feathers. That moment passed too, and she looked like the back door of a Tiffany delivery truck had just burst open in passing her and showered her with one whole load of diamonds. ‘My dress?’

‘It’s very pretty.’ If ever, in its entire history, the British Secret Service had expected an agent to make the supreme sacrifice of all time, that moment, I felt, with not a little trepidation, might be about to come.

‘You like it?’ She was actually reeling in shock. It was probably the first compliment she had received in her 24-odd years on this planet and she was finding it difficult to handle.

‘I do. You look lovely when you’re angry. Don’t start being nice now.’

She just stood and looked at me. Then she put both her hands into her smock pocket and her eyes flooded with tears. I offered her a cigarette and she accepted; I lit it for her and put it in her mouth. Great crocodile tears came down. I waited until they’d subsided, and then laid it on further. ‘You look like you’ve had a rough time just recently.’

‘My boyfriend just ran off with someone.’

Now it was my turn to recoil in shock; even girls that looked like this had boyfriends? She began talking: he was 26 years old and had never had a girlfriend before. He was acknowledged as one of the most brilliant pupils MIT had ever seen; he was working on a design that was going to revolutionise the computer world; it was a design so brilliant it would make the current silicon chip micro-processors look as outmoded as the abacus. They’d been having a truly deep and meaningful relationship, and she slaved for him while he worked away. Then suddenly, last Thursday, he had run off to Ohio with a gay truck driver who’d helped him fix a flat tyre on his car.

Within ten minutes I had my arm around her; she did smell ghastly. Within fifteen minutes Einstein had vanished from her thoughts and we were kissing passionately. Her breath was gruesome, and the only way to avoid it was to clamp my lips so tightly to hers that we made an airlock between our mouths. I kept to the inside of her lips as best I could, since the outsides were covered with rough hair. The only mitigating fact about this poor creature was that the skin on her body was as soft and supple as any could be; I tried to imagine she was someone else, someone stunningly beautiful, but it was hard.

Her smock slipped down, and her bra was soon eased up over her head and tossed out of sight. Her breasts were utterly gigantic, hanging and quivering like water-filled balloons and capped with nipples like ashtrays. She pulled me down onto her, and it was like tumbling into a half-full water bed; she groaned and moaned, clutched at me, clamping fingernails that felt like the jaws of bulldozers into my back. Every now and then she broke her mouth away to make little grunts and squeals that gave me the illusion I was lying in a muddy bog in the middle of a farmyard during an earthquake. Suddenly she started shaking like a road drill, the tempo accelerating by the second; great gulps of air shot out of her mouth with a high-pitched whistle, and she started at the same time to fart vehemently.

To try and remove my mind from this hideous reality, I allowed myself to lapse into a dream that I was strapped to the engine casing of a diesel bus in a traffic jam. She emitted one huge final sigh, released the iron jaws from the small of my back, let out one final cannon volley of a fart, and sank back onto the floor, completely and utterly spent. I leaned forward; she gave me a huge soppy grin, and plunged into sleep.

I got myself dressed, covered her up as best I could, then let myself into the computer room, which the operator had left unlocked. It took me some while to check through the machinery, and even then I wasn’t sure if what I was going to do would bring everything to a grinding halt or not. There was only one way to find out; I pulled out a printed circuit board: the computer didn’t die on me; I pulled a chip out of it, and replaced it with my own, then put the PCB back in. To my relief there was no perceptible difference in the running of the computer. I went back into the VDU room and settled down to work.

My luck held good, and within a few minutes my little plastic friend was cheerfully telling me all it knew as fast as I could absorb it.

Unfortunately it was less lucid than I had hoped, and at the end I had a vast array of numbers that were completely meaningless to me. Basically there were several sets of numbers, the first being 1 to 105, the second being 1 to 115, the third being 1 to 119. the fourth 1 to 130, and on up to the highest one, 1 to 442. Each number was divided into four, six or eights parts, but I could at first find no common denominator between them.

I had no idea what they might refer to — whether it be the neutrons in particles of some mineral, or the numbers of families in Central Park on any given Sunday, or a new secret formula for reconstructing Noah’s Ark. I started to work methodically through each number; 1, A, B, C, D; 2, A… My first clue came at the first number 14 I came to: A appeared all right, as did C and D. but there was no B. I discovered the same to be the case with all the other 14Bs. They simply did not register.

A couple of hours had passed, and I had eyeball disease coming on from looking at all the figures. I was anxious to leave before the operator returned, and before Sleeping Beauty awoke; I was going to adopt the cowardly method of ending an affair — by disappearing. If I was going to do it I would have to do it fast, since she was showing signs of stirring. And yet I was loath to tear myself away from the computer; I wanted desperately to unravel the mystery. This little silicon chip that Dr Orchnev, whoever he might be, had seen fit to deliver to me as his last act on earth — it must have meant something to him. One hell of a lot. 14B. I wrote the number down and stared at it; it meant nothing; I used to see a 14B bus in London; or was it a 44? Went along Piccadilly then up Shaftesbury Avenue; or somewhere like that. I prodded and tapped at the plethora of keys. Maybe there was something I had to do to this computer that I had forgotten; maybe I should wake E. Scrutch and enlist her help. I thought about my salary; it wasn’t that great; the hell with it. I collected the chip and slipped out of the room, out of the building and into the bitterly cold night air.

When the cold comes on the Northeastern seaboard it really comes and temperatures of 15 and even 20 below are not uncommon. The temperature must have been down in this region now; the air hurt my lungs and the dew on the ground had frozen hard; the roads were going to be treacherous and I had a long drive ahead.

I reached the car park and found my car door frozen solid. I heated my key with my cigarette lighter; after a few moments’ reluctance it slipped into the lock and turned. The windows had half an inch of ice on them; rather than chisel away at them, I took the lazy way, of starting the engine and turning the de-mister on full. In my jacket and shirt it was too cold to sit in the car and wait for the air to warm; I reckoned it would take a good ten minutes. A smoke-shop was open across the road, so I went over to get some cigarettes and something to chew on the journey.

Inside was harsh white lighting but there was a welcoming warmth from an oil heater; a fuzzy baseball game blared noisily from an elderly television in a corner above the counter, whilst the proprietor and a customer struggled to have a conversation above the racket. I stood there while they talked.

‘But that wasn’t the year for the Bruins.’

‘Sure to hell wasn’t. Remember when the Maple Leafs came down?’

‘Sure I remember —’ The proprietor broke off for a moment and turned to me. ‘Yeah?’

‘Do you have any English cigarettes?’

‘Sorry, what d’yer say?’

‘Do you have —’ I broke off in mid-sentence. There was a vivid flash outside, followed by a sharp, deep explosion not more than a hundred yards away and in the direction from which I’d come.

‘English, did yer say?’

The proprietor hadn’t noticed.

‘Holy Jesus — you see that?’ The customer, a short fat man in a battered flying jacket, spun round. Even without his cab parked at the kerbside, one could have guessed his profession.

‘See what?’ said the proprietor.

‘Great damn flash!’ He ran out the door.

‘Got Players — you want tipped?’

I gave him the money and followed the cabby out. There was a column of flame rising from the parking lot; cars were stopping in the road and people were sprinting towards the flames; there were smaller balls of fire all around, as if blown from a huge firework. It didn’t take me more than a second glance to know for sure that the car that was burning was mine.

With people converging onto the parking lot it would have been difficult to have slipped away at this moment, so I moved over too, playing the part of an amazed onlooker; I didn’t have to act too hard to look amazed.

‘Stop a bus — they got fire extinguishers,’ said a voice.

‘Little late for that, I reckon,’ said another.

‘Anyone in there?’

‘I sure hope not.’

‘What the hell happened to that?’ There were voices everywhere.

‘Must have been a short in the wiring.’

‘Buick isn’t it? I had a Buick caught fire once. Damnedest car I ever had.’

‘That was no short in the wiring.’

‘Hell no — you hear the explosion?’

The car was literally ripped to shreds; the doors had been blown away and the roof was torn from the front pillars and was swaying up and down on the rear pillars like a grotesque drawbridge. The flames roared, vividly illuminating the parking lot.

The fire engines turned up and then the ambulances. Ambulance men rushed around and seemed distressed that there weren’t any bodies, mutilated or otherwise, to be found; they spread out and searched the vicinity, like some bizarre game of hunt-the-thimble.

Eventually the crowd started to disperse, and I dispersed with them. I walked and kept on walking. I was feeling very sick indeed, at the thought of the near miss, at not having checked the car, at the knowledge that somehow, someone had followed me here to Boston and I hadn’t noticed. I walked into a bar and ordered a large bourbon, straight up.

I leaned against the counter, took a gulp and lit one of my new cigarettes. The bomb must have been attached to the exhaust or part of the engine; with a heat trigger device. I thought hard. I had hired the car on one of my false licences, so no one would be able to trace it back to me. How the hell did anyone know I was in Boston? Nobody knew where I was going — except Sumpy; and no, it just wasn’t possible — there was no way she could be involved. And yet… nobody could have tailed me, so someone knew, unless by a million to one shot someone had spotted me in Boston. Possible, but unlikely, and then they wouldn’t have known my car, unless they’d actually seen me drive into the parking lot. No. It wasn’t possible; and yet, equally, it wasn’t Sumpy. But someone knew. In Belfast a mistake could have been made, a bomb put under the wrong car; but car bombs weren’t a feature of American life and the coincidence was just too much to swallow. No way.

Someone was going to an awful lot of long lengths to get rid of me and I wanted to know who, because when I found out who, then I might be able to find out why, and when I had found out why, I figured I might be able to cure them of this unpleasant craving.

Right now it was ten o’clock at night; I had no change of clothes and I was in an even stranger than usual city; I felt pretty damn uncomfortable. I left the bar and hailed a cab to the airport, and watched out the back window for a long way before I could be sure we weren’t being trailed and I could relax a little.

The bourbon began to give me an agreeable lift, and at the airport I discovered that the last flight to La Guardia, New York, had been delayed due to engine trouble and there was a seat available.