The Blackbird

Eight

It is impossible to get breakfast at four o’clock in the afternoon. In fact, it’s impossible to get any meal at all, it being too late for lunch and too early for dinner. Grofield finally settled for an overdone hamburger, oily french fries and a wilted salad, washed down with plenty of coffee, and afterward was sorry he’d broken his fast at all.

The next half hour he spent at Holt Renfrew, a department store near the hotel, where he spent most of his government-issue hundred dollars fitting himself out with a complete set of non-broadcasting apparel. He considered leaving the store in new clothing, leaving all of the old stuff behind and walking quietly away, but he doubted it could be done right now. If some of Carlson’s friends weren’t watching him, surely some of Marba’s friends were. The thing to do was wait at the hotel until tonight, slip out under cover of darkness. So he left the store wearing the same clothes he’d worn in.

Going out the narrow door, carrying his package, he was bumped into by a man hurrying in, and there was a sudden sting on his left arm where he was bumped against. Maybe the man’s cuff link had sharp edges. Grofield looked after him in irritation, then went on out to the sidewalk and fell on his face.

He didn’t lose consciousness, that was the worst part of it, he just had no strength any more, no connection to any part of his body. His eyes had closed reflexively when he’d fallen, and were still closed, but he could hear the voices all around him and he could feel the new pains in his knees and left shoulder and nose, where he’d hit the concrete.

The voices around him were being startled, and then concerned. Hands touched him, people foolishly asked him questions such as “Are you all right?” He thought, If I were all right, I wouldn’t be lying here in the middle of the sidewalk, but it was impossible to say it. Impossible to say or do anything.

“I’m a doctor,” said a new voice, with a French accent, or more probably a French-Canadian accent. Hands, firm but gentle, rolled him over onto his back. A thumb lifted his eyelid and he found himself looking up at vague shapes. He couldn’t focus, he couldn’t get any of the shapes to come in clearly.

The doctor was touching him, checking his pulse, patting his chest, feeling his forehead, and finally he said, “This man has had an epileptic fit.”

Grofield wanted to frown. An epileptic fit? He didn’t have epilepsy, this doctor was a buffoon. But there was no way to tell him so.

The doctor was saying, “We must get him to a hospital at once. Does anyone have an auto handy?”

“I do, Doctor, right over here.”

“Good. If some of you would help lift him... ”

Grofield was lifted and borne away. Inside, his mind was still churning around, trying to figure things out. He hadn’t had an epileptic fit, this doctor had made a maybe understandable but definitely wrong diagnosis. Could his breakfast have had this severe an effect on him? Impossible.

The man who’d bumped into him. The sting on the arm. He’d been poisoned!

Good God! How much time did he have? Somebody would have to make the right diagnosis fast, if he was to be given the antidote. If there was an antidote.

There was a great deal of difficulty getting him into the car. They kept bumping parts of him against metal, shouting advice into each other’s ear, tugging him back out and starting all over again. Somebody even said, “Do you think we should wait for an ambulance?”

No no, thought Grofield, and the doctor’s voice echoed his sentiment, saying, “No, no. There is a certain urgency in cases like this.”

You betcha, thought Grofield, and with a final scraping heave they at last got him into the car, where he felt himself sprawled across the rear set. His legs were bundled in after him, like piles of laundry, and the door slammed.

After that it was all very fast. Car doors opened, and Grofield heard the doctor saying, apparently to the bystanders, “I’ll go along to the hospital.” There were murmurs of approval, and then the car jounced as people got into it, and then doors slammed. Grofield heard the engine start, felt the car back up, go forward, back up again, and at last begin to move steadily forward.

Grofield’s one still-open eye could see two round vague shapes, the heads of the driver and the doctor. Good Samaritans. Maybe Canadians were friendlier than people in the States.

The driver said, “How is he?”

The doctor said, “He’s all right. The overcoat gave you no difficulty?”

“None. It went right through the sleeve, just as you said.”

“You see? Sometimes I do know what I’m talking about.”

Grofield’s open eye was burning for lack of moisture. He hadn’t been blinking, it seemed as though he couldn’t blink, and it was beginning to get painful, distracting him from thinking about what they were saying up front. What would happen if his eye dried out completely?

Through the sleeve?

The driver was the one who’d poisoned him!

The doctor’s head turned and he grunted, saying, “Um. That’s no good.” Something like a cloud came at Grofield’s face, a thumb touched his eyelid, closed it down over his eye, left him alone with his thoughts.

They weren’t happy thoughts. The fact that he had given up the warmth and security of a long prison sentence for all this was particularly displeasing. He could be in prison right now, reading a magazine, smoking a cigarette, idly wondering what movie he would be shown tonight, instead of lying poisoned in the back of some stranger’s car, probably on his way to a shallow grave somewhere.

He couldn’t move. He strained and strained, but he couldn’t so much as flex a muscle. The car jounced along, and he felt himself flopping on the back seat like a Raggedy Andy doll, and he didn’t know whether he wanted most to be terrified or enraged, so he was both.

It was frightening to die, and more so to die in darkness, among strangers, and foolishly. And it was infuriating to die foolishly, needlessly, caught up in other people’s intrigues.

Still, terror is stronger than fury, and by the time the car came to a stop at last Grofield was in near-panic. If he could have run, he would have run. If he could have begged, he would have begged. If he could have wept, he would have wept.

Hands touched him. He could feel, his senses were all in perfect working order, it was only somehow the chain of command from his mind to his body that had been broken down. He was helpless, but aware, the worst possible state.

He was dragged from the car, not very gently. Were they going to bury him alive? The fright that gave him was enough to drag from him a small moan, so small and high-pitched as to redouble his terror. Had that been his voice?

He was carried somewhere, jounced along uneven ground, then indoors. The pacing of his carriers was smoother, and he could hear the sound of their feet on the wooden floor.

He was dropped on something, something soft and scratchy, like an old sofa. He wished he could see, he wished he could open his eyes, and in straining to open them it seemed as though he did crack the lids just a little. A line of light seeped in, but not enough for him to really see anything.

A new voice said, “So you got him.”

“No trouble at all.” That was the doctor.

“How long before we can question him?”

“Not long. Perhaps ten minutes. He’s started to come around already.”

The thumb abruptly slid up his eyelid again, and Grofield could see. A face was leaning over him, studying him. Grofield could focus better now, could see that the face was middle-aged and heavy-jowled, with a bushy black mustache. The face said, “Yes. Maybe sooner.” It was the doctor.

The new voice said, “You weren’t followed?” Unlike the doctor and the driver, he didn’t have a French-Canadian accent, though his words were accented. A harsher echo than French, though. German? Not exactly.

The doctor’s thumb slid Grofield’s eyelid closed again, and from the sound of his voice he had turned and was walking away. “Of course we weren’t followed. Albert knows how to do those things.” He pronounced the name the French way, Al Bear, a character in a book for children.

Grofield could have kissed them all, Al Bear and the doctor and the new voice, kissed them and hugged them and handed out cigars. He wasn’t going to die! They weren’t going to kill him! It was only a temporary paralysis, only a thing they’d done to bring him here without a lot of fuss so they could ask him questions.

Ask away! Such inane gratitude did he feel, he would tell them anything. He was alive, they could ask whatever they wanted. What business was all this of his anyway? Ask, ask! He was impatient for the effects of the drug to wear off, so he could start answering questions.

In the meantime, the voices had moved farther away and he could no longer make out what they were saying. They were still in the same room, but a distance away and speaking softly. They undoubtedly understood that he could hear them, that he was conscious, and they probably had private things they wanted to say to one another. That was all right, that was understandable, he wasn’t offended by anything like that. He was alive, wasn’t he?

He certainly was, and his body was beginning to tell him so. His joints had started to tingle, the way frostbitten fingers do when they’re starting to warm up. But the tingle now wasn’t in his fingertips, it was in his elbows and knees and shoulders and ankles and wrists, in his knuckles and neck and crotch, in all the joints of his body, a tingling that was getting worse and worse. Life was coming back, all right, with a vengeance.

He moaned. It wasn’t planned, he would have preferred to stay quiet, but instead he moaned. And from across the room heard the doctor say, “Ah, here he comes now.” The sound increasing as though he was walking this way. “Are you back with us, Mr. Grofield?”

There were three shots. Somebody yelled. Somebody else cursed. A crashing sound might have been a door giving way. More shots. Something puffed into the sofa cushion near his left ear. There were screams and shouts and shots and running feet. A high-pitched yell was followed by a ba-dump, as though someone had fallen, heavily.

There was nothing Grofield could do but lie there. He swore an oath to himself that if ever he got the control of his body back he would punch the mouths of the first ten men he saw. Enough was enough, dammit!

His eyes opened. The lids lifted slowly, reluctantly, but they did lift, and he saw a large rustic room full of moose heads and fireplaces and scratchy-looking furniture. There was a smell of gunpowder in the air. The room, so far as he could see, was vacant, the shooting and shouting having moved somewhere into the distance. Far away, doors slammed, people yelled. An automobile raced away, squealing rubber.

Grofield moved his hands, small vague movements that went nowhere and did no one any good. He struggled to re-establish contact with his legs, and was finally rewarded with an increase in the tingling pain in his knees. Everything was stinging as though he’d been bitten all over by a million bees.

But the legs were moving. Slowly, very slowly, but moving. He slid them leftward, away from the sofa back, toward the floor, and was rewarded at last with a thump as his left foot dropped off the edge and hit the floor. The right leg moved more slowly, but at last it too cleared the edge and drooped floorward, though his position didn’t let it reach all the way.

With every second now, his physical shape was improving. The drug, whatever it was, was wearing off more and more rapidly. The stinging and tingling was easing, too.

Could he sit up? He moved his arms some more, not effectively, then took hold of the top of the sofa back in both hands and slowly pulled himself upward. There was one bad instant of no balance, a sort of threshold between lying and sitting, but he struggled past that point and there he was sitting up.

He was resting a second before trying the major operation of standing when a door to the right opened and three men walked in with drawn guns in their hands. None of them was the doctor.

Grofield looked at them, too worn out even to wonder what this bunch had in mind for him. In the middle of the floor a man was lying on his face, and across the way a door hung broken from its hinges, exposing a view of wintry mountains. Grofield had no way of knowing where he was or who anybody was or what anybody wanted. He had never been so helpless in his life, and was tending to react to it by simply giving up, on the basis that if it won’t do any good to struggle, don’t struggle.

One of the three men went directly to the gaping front door, the second went to the man lying on the floor, and the third came over to Grofield. Grofield looked up at him and was astonished to see it was Ken.

Ken said, “You all right?”

“Drugged,” Grofield said. “Wearing off.”

“Good.” He put his gun away and walked over to the second man, who was a stranger to Grofield, not Charlie. “How’s this one?” he asked.

“Dead,” the stranger said. He’d taken the dead man’s wallet and was leafing through it. “Driver’s license,” he said. “Made out to Albert Beaudry.” He pronounced Albert the English way.

“Don’t know that name,” Ken said. “Let’s see his face.”

The stranger rolled the dead man onto his back, and they both studied his face a minute. “New to me,” the stranger said.

“Me too,” Ken said. He looked over at the doorway, but the third man — also not Charlie — had gone on outside, so he turned to Grofield instead. “You strong enough to stand?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you get a good look at this guy before?”

“I didn’t get a good look at anybody. I’ve been out of it since they got hold of me.”

Ken shook his head. “You’ll never know,” he said, “how much I dislike working with amateurs.”

“Fire me,” Grofield said. “Go ahead, I can take it.”

“Forget it, Grofield. Come over here and see do you recognize this guy.”

“We used to be on a first-name basis, you and I,” Grofield said, trying to struggle to his feet.

The stranger came over and helped Grofield up, holding onto his arm so he wouldn’t fall over again. Ken said, “That was back when you were acting cooperative. Come over here.”

Grofield and the stranger weaved over there, and Grofield looked down at the face of the dead man. “He bumped into me on my way out of Holt Renfrew,” he said. “That’s when he drugged me.”

“Did you ever see him before?”

“No.”

“Did you hear them talking at all?”

“Sure. I was never really out, just paralyzed.”

“Did you hear anything to tell you who they work for, what they wanted?”

“Nothing. Just that they wanted to question me.”

“Did they question you?”

“They didn’t get around to it. You people showed up too soon.”

Ken nodded, looking grumpy, and glanced around the room. “Whose package is that?”

It was what Grofield had just bought, full of the new clothing, and it was standing now against the wall near the broken door. Grofield looked at it and said, “I don’t know. Theirs, I guess.”

“You’re a lousy liar, Grofield,” Ken said. “It’s yours. You were planning a runout.”

“Who says it’s mine?”

The stranger holding his arm grinned and said, “I do, pal. I watched you buy it.”

Grofield looked at him. “Oh,” he said, then flared up, saying, “If you were tailing me like that, how come you let those guys take me away?”

“I wasn’t tailing you,” the stranger said. “I dropped into the store to see what you were doing. Once I saw, I left again.”

“We were waiting for you to make your move,” Ken said. “We were gonna give you a little rope, then reel you in.”

“You people are sadistic.”

“We just want you to understand,” Ken told him, “that you’re with us for the duration.” He pointed a finger at Grofield. “You make any more moves toward running out on us, Grofield, we’ll pack you up and ship you back home to stand trial on that armored car job.”

Grofield shrugged. “All right. You’ve got me sewn up.”

“That’s right. Let’s go back to the hotel.”

“Okay.”

They started out, the stranger still helping Grofield stay upright, and Grofield said, “What about my package?”

“Leave it,” Ken said. “We’d rather you wore what we gave you.”

“Yeah, I guess you would.”

“It’s for your own protection,” the stranger said cheerfully. “If you’d had those other duds on, we’d never have rescued you.”

“Rescued me,” Grofield said. “So this is what it’s like to be rescued.”

They led him out to the car.