The Comedy is Finished

9

Mark Halliwell crouched in shrubbery on a front lawn, completely invisible. His lips stretched in a smile as he watched the slow-moving car ease along Sunset Boulevard, obliviously passing his hiding place. The police were so predictable, so inept. This car was as anonymous as it was possible for a white Ford Granada to be, but at this hour of the morning here in this residential section of Brentwood there was virtually no traffic, so any car traveling at five miles an hour on the four-lane-wide winding roadway of Sunset Boulevard would be bound to call attention to itself.

They were, of course, taking down—probably on film—the license numbers and particulars of all the cars parked in the neighborhood. After the delivery car had gone by at three o’clock, they would return to see what car was missing, and then have a description to broadcast to police waiting at every freeway exit for miles around. Mark, who almost never smiled in the presence of other people, luxuriated in a broad taunting grin as the Granada went by. Safe in the thick ornamental shrubbery on this lawn, he’d be invisible even if they were using infrared. He watched the Granada out of sight, then settled back to wait.

Mark burned with a pure fire. He knew what he wanted, and how to get it. The people who made pain in the world would be stopped. The uncaring, the smug, the self-confident, the lofty, too high and mighty to think about the people down below; they would all be toppled from their pedestals, and afterward the world would be clean. No more hatred, no more pain, no more suffering, no more pity. No need for pity in a world without pain.

“You don’t feel sorry for me, you only feel sorry for yourself!” They’d both written that, in an exchange of letters, each accusing the other, and Mark had thought, If we make a joke of it, perhaps we can get past all this despair and love one another, mother and son at last. But he hadn’t made the attempt, nor had she; neither ever spoke of the coincidence, the same sentence in both letters, crossing from bedroom to bedroom. Had she failed to notice the identity of the words? He knew she read his notes, she quoted selected pieces back at him out of context in her own subsequent writings. This was at a later stage, after the screaming and crying, when he was in high school, in the larger apartment with her own bedroom, so she was no longer sleeping on the convertible sofa in the living room. (How he hated her out there, heavy, humid, unconscious, imprisoning him in his room with her presence.) She had started leaving him notes on his pillow about cleaning his room, washing up after himself in the kitchen, putting out the garbage, and he’d responded at first with scrawled remarks at the bottom of her notes, placed on her pillow at night while she was out working at the bar. But soon what he had to say was too extensive for the remaining corners and margins of her notes, so he bought his own paper with money stolen from her purse, and the correspondence began.

Tonight, Mark had been the one to find Koo Davis, and now his mind kept filling with that extraordinary scene. After he’d heard Larry at last go to bed—without checking Davis—he’d got up again to see to Davis himself. The man’s jokey treatment of the cassette still rankled; it was time he learned that everybody was serious.

Mark had expected to wake Davis, maybe put a little respect into him—not slap him around, Larry always overstated things—but he hadn’t at all anticipated what he’d actually found. There was good reason to believe he’d in fact saved Davis’ life. What irony!

He’d gone down to the utility room, moved all the empty wine cartons concealing the door, unlocked and opened it, and there was Davis bubbling and strangling in a lake of his own vile vomit, his bloated red face streaked with it, his arms and legs twitching like an impaled bug. The stink of the place! And the helplessness, the terrible gross flabby weakness, of the man gargling and retching on the couch. Mark had rolled him over, pounded his back, got Davis at last breathing again, and had then gone off to wake Peter, who would have to decide what to do next.

The action had been instinctive, saving Davis’ life. Now, after the event, would he repent at leisure? A dead Koo Davis would make no more tapes, of course, but he’d still be usable as a counter in the negotiations. The other side needn’t know of his death until it was all over. And mightn’t it be better, simpler all around, for Koo Davis to be dead? In imagination now, Mark saw himself not enter the room, not save Davis’ life, but instead close the door, walk away, and never tell anyone he’d been down there that night.

There was nothing personal about it. There was nothing personal in it. The fact that Davis had been Mark’s choice of subject—so subtly inserted into Peter’s mind during the early discussions that Peter now believed Davis to have been his own idea—mattered little. In truth, Davis was the best bargaining chip they could have obtained, since government officials and other people closer to the center of power were all so much more carefully guarded.

True, Mark had reasons to hate Koo Davis for himself if he wanted to dwell on them, but that wasn’t the point. Mark had left all that personal stuff behind, he was out of those emotional quagmires now, he behaved on the basis of logical necessity only. Whatever happened to Koo Davis, it would be due exclusively to the impersonal logic of the situation. Revenge, hatred, none of that would make any difference.

On balance, in fact, it was marginally better that Davis be alive. One or two more tapes should still be made—without the jokes. And it was tactically better that Davis remain a living redeemable counter in the game. So Mark’s decision to save his life had also been logical, an immediate decision among alternatives, and not the result of any misplaced emotional reaction. He had done the right thing for the right reason.

At precisely three o’clock, a blue Dodge Colt rolled by, a white cloth fluttering flaglike from its antenna. Mark leaned forward to watch, hard-edged leaves brushing his bearded cheeks and the jungly smell of the shrubbery rich in his nostrils. No other car trailed the Colt.

The white Ford Granada eased by in the opposite direction at three minutes past the hour. Mark watched it out of sight.

At five past three he stood, stretching in the dark, his ankle-bones cracking. He waited there, in the darkness, and two minutes later the Impala came along, Peter at the wheel. Mark trotted out to the road, Peter stopped, Mark slid in on the passenger side, and Peter accelerated again, toward the freeway entrance.

“Blue Dodge Colt,” Mark said. “Went through on the dot. Nobody followed it.”

“Good. That package of yours smells.”

Mark glanced at the brown paper bag on the back seat. “Can’t,” he said. “It’s very securely sealed in a Baggie.”

“It smells,” Peter insisted. “Sniff for yourself.”

Mark sniffed; there was a faint aroma, at that. “Maybe you farted.”

Peter’s mouth corners turned down. He was not amused. He steered them onto the freeway, then accelerated to sixty. There were fewer than half a dozen vehicles anywhere in sight. Peter said, “It’s a stupid gesture anyway, even if you’re right.”

“They’ll understand,” Mark said. “And I will be right.”

“And if you’re wrong?”

Mark shrugged. “Then it’s cost me one Baggie and one cassette. Besides, they’re already being cute.” And he told Peter about the white Granada.

Peter obviously didn’t like that. “What’s the matter with them? Don’t they realize we don’t have to do this?”

“They can’t help themselves. They’ve just got to play Counterspy.”

Peter drove along, drumming his fingertips against the steering wheel. “Who knows what else they’re doing? We’ll call it off,” he decided. “We’ll phone them, tell them to do it right or not at all. They’re the ones want Davis alive.”

“No, Peter. Let them do it again later? They still won’t be straight with us, you’ll just give them more time to get set up. We do it now.”

“I’m not interested in being caught.”

“None of us is.”

Peter gave him a sidelong look. “You just want to use your Baggie.”

“There’s that, too.” Then Mark pointed forward. “In the right lane.”

The Colt was moving at the modest forty miles an hour specified by Mark, and there seemed no other vehicle pacing it. Staying in a middle lane, Peter hung well back, and waited.

The San Diego Freeway north of Sunset Boulevard runs between two low barren treeless hills with virtually no buildings and an almost total lack of secondary roads. There’s only one freeway exit before the Valley itself, five miles to the north. It’s a strange landscape for the middle of a major metropolitan area, and it’s quite dark at night. At one of the darkest spots, near the top of the long straight slope down toward the Valley, Peter drove forward to flash his high beams into the Colt’s rearview mirror.

The Colt at once braked hard, swerving off onto the shoulder of the road. Peter did the same, dropping farther back, and the two vehicles stopped about four lengths apart. The Colt’s driver’s door opened, but from his angle Mark couldn’t see what was happening. “Is he getting out?”

“No. He put the case on the ground.”

The Colt’s door closed, and the car at once spurted away, throwing gravel in its wake, leaving behind a small brown-leather case with a handle; it was about the right size and shape to carry two liquor bottles. Peter drove forward, stopped next to the case; Mark opened the door, picked it up, then slammed his door and Peter accelerated.

The case opened like a book, revealing in the faint glow of the map-light a dark blue plush interior separated into more than a dozen small compartments; it reminded Mark of cliff dwellings in photographs. A folded sheet of paper proved to contain the doctor’s instructions; Mark put it away in a pocket and returned his attention to the case.

Each compartment contained a bottle or box, with a small plush strap across to keep the contents in place. Mark murmured to himself, “One of these buttons?” His thumb stroked the chrome snaps on each of the straps, feeling for one to be different. “No; they didn’t have time for structural changes. In one of the bottles.”

Peter meanwhile was driving rapidly down the slope toward the Valley, where the Ventura Freeway crossed this one, in an interchange with almost limitless options. While Mark went through the bottles, opening each, emptying the contents into his palm and then returning them, Peter took the exit ramp for the Ventura Freeway east, then switched back to the San Diego Freeway north, then at the last instant took another downramp to the local streets. His rearview mirror told him that no one had followed him through all his maneuvers.

Mark had finished his first scanning of the case by now, and had found nothing. He was frowning at it, thinking it over, stroking his beard, considering the possibilities. Peter said, “Nothing?”

“I don’t believe it. Wait a minute. Inside a capsule!” He reached for a bottle, shook a dozen or more large capsules into his palm, then picked them up one at a time, shaking each next to his ear before putting it back in the bottle propped on his lap. The capsules were red and green, opaque, and contained something with the consistency of coarse sand; a faint rattling sound could be heard inside each.

Except one. Mark nodded in satisfaction when he reached it. “Right,” he said.

Peter seemed honestly surprised. “Did they really?”

“Really.” Dumping the rest of the capsules back into the bottle, Mark broke open the odd one, and there in his palm was the transmitter, a tiny bug no bigger than a shirt button.

“Those stupid bastards,” Peter said.

A cold rage lived deep within Mark, ready to be stirred by almost anything. It was rising now, making his face bonier beneath the beard, making his voice softer and colder. “What we should do,” he said, “is dump this whole case out into the street and let them decide if he dies first or they deal first.”

“No,” Peter said. “As long as he’s alive and unhurt, they have to be cautious against us.”

Mark held up the hand with the bug in it. “Like this?”

“Devious, but cautious. Go ahead and use your package.”

“Right.” Tucking the bug into his shirt pocket, Mark closed the pill-case and put it on the back seat, then brought forward the brown paper bag, which seemed fairly heavy. He opened the bag, then reached in to remove the twisty sealing the Baggie within. When the Baggie was opened, a stench filled the car.

“Jesus!” said Peter.

“Won’t be long.” Mark dropped the transmitter into the Baggie, sealed it again, and closed the paper bag. “Stop at a mailbox.”

They drove another two blocks, then Peter angled to a stop by a mailbox. Mark got out, dropped the paper bag into the mailbox, and then they drove on.