The Comedy is Finished

36

Peter hung up. He stood a moment, thinking, his fingertips resting lightly atop the telephone receiver. His teeth ground softly, absent-mindedly, almost tenderly, against his cheeks. Bright sunlight flattened the view of beach and ocean into a two-dimensional snapshot, simple in composition and overexposed. A few small boats bobbed far off, in the water. What would it be like to be a person on one of those boats? Peter concentrated, trying to push his mind, his particularity, out through his eyes and across the intervening space and inside the head of a person on one of those boats—that boat, right there. Feel the movement, taste the salt spray, grab the cold chrome rail, smile broadly with uncut cheeks and gaze toward shore with easy amused pity for those people mired there.

Liz said, “It won’t work.”

Peter looked at her with cold distaste. His army. Liz, standing near him, narrow and pinched and dead for years. And Larry over at the foot of the stairs, forehead deeply puckered with worry, mouth open like a victim of brain damage. Peter’s army. He said, “What won’t work?”

“All that car to the airport business. They’ll mousetrap us along the way.”

“We’ll have Davis.”

“We don’t have him now,” she pointed out. “Mark has him, and he won’t give him back.”

Peter’s fingertips left the telephone and moved up to touch his cheek, reassuringly. Perhaps it was only this pain that kept him going. “We’ll go talk to Mark,” he said. “Maybe he’ll listen to reason.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“We’ll shoot the lock out of the door.” In suddenly savagery, Peter said, “In any case, the first chance I get, the first chance I get, Mark dies.”

Lynsey watched Mike’s face while he talked with the man called Dinely, and the instant he hung up the phone she said, “What are you going to do?”

His face closed down when he looked at her. “I’m going to stop them,” he said.

“Please, Mi—Uh, may I call you Mike?”

He seemed surprised. There was an occasional unexpected boyishness in him that confused Lynsey. He said, “Sure. Mike. Why not?”

“Mike,” she said, knowing it was important that communication between them remain open, knowing she was likely to be the only effective restraining influence on him, “Mike, I hate it when I see you turn off that way. You look at me and I can almost hear you saying to yourself, ‘Bleeding heart liberal.’ ”

“Oh, well,” he said, moving his hands in awkward embarrassment, and the fact that he even blushed, faintly and briefly, confirmed that she’d been right.

“It’s true,” she said. “And we have to get past it. For instance, you know I don’t care more about the criminals than I do about the victim; certainly not in this case.”

His grin acknowledged the point. “Old habits die hard,” he said.

“Yours, or mine?”

“Both.” He nodded, heavy and thoughtful. “You’re right. I look at you and I see somebody who doesn’t want me to do the most effective job.”

Honesty deserves honesty. She said, “And I look at you and see somebody who’s dangerous because he thinks it’s a game.”

“But it is a game,” he said. “It’s all moves and counter-moves; dangerous, you play it for keeps, but it’s a game.”

“No,” she said. “It’s all right for the criminals to think it’s a game, they’re sick, that’s why they’re on the wrong side of the law. But if you think the same way, then the game becomes more important than the people. You’d sacrifice Koo to win the game.”

“I don’t know how to answer that,” he said. “I know you’re thinking about the mistake I made—”

“No, I wasn’t,” she said, surprised. “I mean, that’s part of it, but I wasn’t thinking about that. That didn’t give me my belief, it was just confirmation of what I already believed.”

“Which is?”

“All right,” she said. “Using your terms, that it’s a game. You think the point of the game is to capture or kill those people over there. And I think the point of the game is to get Koo back, alive and well.”

“We want to do both,” he said. “Naturally.”

“Naturally. But if you had to sacrifice one for the other, you’d kill Koo to capture the people, and I’d let the people go to save Koo. And that’s the difference between us.”

He looked bleak. “I won’t lie to you,” he said. “You’re absolutely right.”

Mark looked at the furniture piled up against the door. Both night-tables were there, upside down on the floor, with drawers from the built-in dressers stacked among the night-table legs. A wicker bathroom hamper, weighted with all the bottles and tubes from the medicine chest and bathroom storage shelves, lay on its side atop the drawers; beyond it, the mirror, cracked and splintered by Peter’s bullets fired through the door, reflected a crazy quilt pattern of white wicker. Above that were the reflection of Mark’s newly naked somber face and the image of Koo, frightened and exhausted, seated on the bed in the background. “The television set next,” Mark said, and moved across the room.

Koo said, “Mark? What’s going to happen?”

“They’re going to try and break in. We won’t let them.”

“I mean, after that.”

“We’ll know when we get there, Koo.”

Mark didn’t like that question, because he not only didn’t know the answer but didn’t want to know the answer. The astonishment of having actually had a pistol fired at him by Peter had forced him to a sudden awareness of his true position, so that now he knew he was living minute by minute, even second by second. He didn’t recognize himself anymore, and without identity he couldn’t begin to think about direction. He was like a person waking from a three-week binge to find himself in the hospital, fed and dry but charged with a variety of felonies about which he has no recollection; this moment is bearable, but any conceivable movement from here is bound to be a change for the worse.

Various wires led from the back of the television set into the darkness of the closet. Mark traced the power-lead, treating that with respect and carefully unplugging it from the wall outlet, but the other wires—aerial, external speakers—he simply ripped loose, then carried the heavy set over to place it on top of the hamper, leaning back against the shattered mirror. Then he turned to look around the room for more barricade material, ignoring Koo’s questioning gaze.

He had always thought of himself as separate from other human beings, isolated and alone, but he’d been wrong. Now he was estranged; in this current situation, he was the only person on the face of the Earth that both sides wanted to shoot at.

There was nothing else to pile against the door. Either what was already there was heavy enough to do the job, or it wasn’t. Since for Mark all potential endings were bad ones, it hardly mattered whether the barricade held or not; to some extent he was doing all this merely because it was the most appropriate action under the circumstances.

So long as he remained in this room, so long as the stalemate continued outside between Peter and the authorities, then Mark still had one lifeline, one thread tying him to the human race; this complex, absurd, contradictory, useless, incomprehensible relationship with Koo Davis. Last night, suicide had seemed the only possible choice, because that moment had been unbearable. Now, the present instant had its nourishing qualities—if he didn’t know better, he’d almost think he’d become happy—so he had lost the thirst for destruction, self or otherwise; still, when the black wave did eventually get here, as it would, he would close his eyes uncaring.

Should he take his father with him?

“Mark! Mark!” It was Peter’s muffled voice, followed by a knocking at the door. “Mark, can you hear me?”

Koo sat up straighter, sending Mark a frightened look. Turning casually to the door, Mark rested his hands on the waist-level television set, smiling with easy familiarity at his fractured images in the broken mirror. He wasn’t particularly worried about Peter shooting through the door at him; those last bullets had penetrated the wood and cracked the glass, but they hadn’t entered the room with any force. Mark called, “Yes, I can hear you.”

“We made a deal with them, Mark.”

Mark waited, but apparently Peter expected him to comment, and the silence lengthened. Mark had no comment, he didn’t live on the same level of reality as Peter, so he merely waited, mildly, for Peter to speak again.

“Mark! Did you hear me?”

“Yes, I heard you.”

“They’ll give us a plane. They’ll give us a clear route to the airport.”

Mark smiled at the silliness of it. In his mind’s eye he saw the sharpshooters on the rooftops, the curve or corner where the car would of necessity briefly slow to a crawl, the side windows starring and splintering all together, and suddenly everybody in the car dead but Koo. Turning to Koo, Mark grinned and pantomimed a sniper with a rifle shooting down from a rooftop. Koo looked blank, then suddenly nodded in comprehension. “Right,” he said. “But with my luck, the guy’d sneeze.”

“With my luck, so would I.”

“One bullet,” Koo said. “Right through the both of us.”

“You’re an incurable romantic, Koo.”

“Oh, I can be cured. I can be cured.”

Peter’s ragged voice sounded again: “Mark! There isn’t time for this!”

Mark shook his head at Koo, and turned back to the door. “Go away, Peter,” he called. “There’s nothing going to happen here.”

“We have to let them speak to Davis on the phone. They have to know he’s alive before they’ll deal.”

Mark made no response. To Koo he said, “Come over here. Lean your weight against this stuff.”

Getting to his feet, Koo said, “We expect visitors?”

“They’ll shoot the lock off in a minute.”

“What an exciting life you lead.”

Peter again: “Forget what happened before! Everything has changed now! We need him alive, he’s our passport!”

“It’s nice to be needed,” Koo commented, leaning his back against the hamper and the TV set.

“Mark!” came Peter’s hysterical voice. “For the last time!”

“Promises, promises,” Koo said.

The sound of the shot wasn’t terribly loud, but the vibration of its impact pulsed through the jumbled pieces of the barricade like a preliminary earthquake tremor, and Koo’s side twinged painfully. “That’s a bigger gun,” Mark said.

“You suppose they got nukes?”

The second shot thrummed into the door; bottles tinkled together inside the hamper.

Seated at the small desk in the crowded trailer, Mike looked up when the radio operator called, “Mr. Wiskiel!”

“Yes?”

“Report of shooting from the house.”

“No,” Lynsey said; too low for anyone to hear but Mike. The color drained from her face, as though she might faint, and he noticed how clawlike her hands became when she clutched at the edge of the desk for support.

Mike concentrated on the radio operator, saying, “Anybody hit?”

“No, sir. They want to know what’s their response.”

“We don’t shoot first,” Mike said. “But we return fire.”

“Mike, please!” Lynsey’s whisper was shrill with urgency.

For her benefit, Mike added, “And nobody fires at sounds. We only respond to direct attack.”

“Yes, sir.”

The radio operator turned back to his seat, and Mike held a hand up to stop Lynsey’s protests before they could start. “Listen,” he said. “The guy hasn’t called back. You know what that probably means.”

“You can’t be sure what’s going on in that house,” she said. “They might be arguing among themselves.”

“Fine. If they are, and if Koo Davis is alive, then he’s still where Merville said he was—in an interior room without windows. Firing from outside the house won’t endanger him.”

“You can’t be sure where he is!”

“I can’t be sure of anything till it’s over,” Mike said. “But I’m not prepared to order my people not to respond when attacked.” Picking up the phone, he added, “I’ll talk to them again.”

“Good.”

But they weren’t answering. He let it ring eighteen times, then all at once the line went dead. When he dialed again, he got a busy signal.

“More shooting at the house,” the radio operator said.

Mike slammed the phone into its cradle; pushing back from the desk, he said, “I’m going down there and see what’s what.”

“I want to come with you.”

He looked at her wryly. “What choice do I have?”

“None,” she said.

After Larry shot the telephone, he felt foolish but defiant. He stood there with the revolver in his hand, the shattered phone on the living room floor, and Peter came blundering down the stairs, his voice high-pitched with a new querulousness, crying, “What’s the matter with you? What’s the matter with everybody?”

“We can’t take anymore,” Larry told him. “It has to end.”

Peter stared at the phone. “You utter fool! Now how can we deal with them?”

“Oh, Peter, do you still believe in it all?”

Larry no longer believed. His long morning of thought had led him at last to the understanding that it had all been a mistake, a stupid tragic mistake. He was remembering now something he hadn’t thought of in years; a motto on the wall of his parents’ bedroom back home, cut from some old magazine by his mother and put in a frame from Woolworth’s: Things done in violence have to be done over again. Why had he never read that, or remembered it, or understood it? Why had he always behaved as though meaningful change in the world must be instantaneous, violent, and total?

Hell is paved with good intentions, and Hell was where Larry now found himself. Good intentions had led at last to mere absurdity; himself pushing on a barricaded door, armed with a revolver, trying to get at a terrified old man. Shame and self-disgust had grown in him while he and Peter pressed uselessly at that door. The endless insistent ringing of the telephone had finally been the last straw, and this emptying of the revolver Larry’s last violence. “I’m giving myself up,” he said. “You do what you want. I’m giving myself up.”

“Oh, no, you’re not! No, you’re not! If we’re going to get out of this, we have to show a united front.”

Larry stared. “Get out of this? Peter, we’re going to die here today!”

“I’m not!” Peter’s eyes were open wide and glaring, and pink spittle flew with the agitation of his speech. “I’m going to live, I’m going to come back, I’m going to go on.” Then he blinked down at the destroyed telephone. “Extensions,” he muttered. “We can still make a deal.” And he hurried away to the kitchen.

Weary, Larry sagged onto the sofa and sat there leaning forward, head drooping, the empty revolver held slackly between his knees. He didn’t care what happened now.

Peter came back from the kitchen, calmer and colder. “Well, you’ve done it,” he said. “The phone’s out of order.”

“It doesn’t matter, Peter.”

“It does matter! Larry, I’m not going to finish here. I’m getting out, and you’re going to help. You’re going to.”

Apathetic, Larry looked up. “What do you want?”

“Convince Mark to come out. You can do it. We can’t force our way in there. Convince him we just need Davis as a hostage, so we can get away. Convince him nobody’s going to get hurt.”

“Mark knows you mean to kill him.”

“Not anymore,” Peter said. He came across the living room, closer to Larry. “It’s true, I swear it. You know what the circumstances were, but now they’ve changed. I won’t hurt Mark. He can just let Davis out if he wants, he can stay in there by himself. Or he can come along, and he’ll be perfectly safe. But we need Davis.”

“You don’t have the phone anymore.”

“We’ll show Davis out on the deck. We’ll have a white flag of truce, and we’ll let them see Davis on the upstairs deck.” Peter abruptly dropped onto the sofa next to Larry, his gaunt-cheeked face anguished and intent. “Please, Larry,” he said. “Please! I can’t end here!”

Larry had to look away, embarrassed by this nakedness; that Peter should beg, and particularly that he should beg him. “Peter, it won’t do any good. Mark won’t listen to me, he never has.”

“You can try. Just try.”

Larry closed his eyes. Would it never be possible to stop? “I’ll try,” he said.

*

The highway side of the house was windowless, avocado in color, and contained only the door leading in from the carport. Mike and Lynsey drove past this featureless wall, and Lynsey said, “It looks like a fortress.”

“Fortunately, appearances are deceiving.”

All normal traffic had been diverted from this part of the road. Nearly three hundred police officers were here, representing half a dozen commands, including the State Police, the FBI, the County Sheriff’s Department, and even a few men from Jock Cayzer’s Burbank force. Several police cars were parked across the highway from the house, with uniformed men carrying rifles and shotguns as they waited on the far side of the cars.

More men, more uniforms, more guns, more official cars, were down on the beach itself, at the nearer barricade. The civilian spectators had been moved farther back, behind a second line of sawhorses, but here there was still a crowd; grim-faced, well-armed and obviously becoming impatient. Mike and Lynsey left the Buick, walked to the barrier, and stood next to one of the Sheriff’s Department sharpshooters, who was watching the house through the scope of his rifle. Mike said, “Anything happening?”

“There’s a woman in that upstairs room. I get an occasional glimpse of her. That’s about it.” Then he offered the rifle, saying, “Want to see?”

“Thanks.” Mike peered one-eyed through the scope, found the house, the upper deck, the glass doors. There were curtains; was that movement behind them? He couldn’t be sure. Lowering the rifle, he said to Lynsey, “Want to look?”

She shook her head, gazing at the rife in distaste. “I can see well enough. Thank you.”

“Sure,” he said, and raised the rifle to look again.

*

Liz stopped looking out the window at the police. Letting the curtain fall back into place, she walked from the bedroom to the hall, where Larry was leaning against that other door, talking in his stodgy well-meaning manner at Mark, who was not answering; probably not even listening. Liz said, “You’re wasting your breath.”

Larry turned away from the door. He looked haggard. “I know. Peter insisted.” Shaking his head, he said, “I wish it would end. I wish it was over.”

Liz spent her last smile. “You want it to end? It can end right now.”

He frowned at her. “What do you mean?”

“Come along and watch,” she said, and went back into the bedroom.

“There she is!” Mike said. He was still watching through the rifle scope.

“I see her,” Lynsey said. “She’s coming out.”

The woman was pushing open the sliding door, stepping out to the sunlight, a slender blonde girl, raising her arm and pointing in this direction. Startled, Mike said, “She has a gun! She’s—” he saw the gun jerk up in her hand “—going to—” he heard the shot, he heard the sudden grunting sound, he looked around to see the sharpshooter, the man who’d loaned him his rifle, falling backward with astonishment on his face, his hands reaching for his chest. “My God!”

From the bedroom doorway, Larry yelled, “Liz! For God’s sake, don’t!”

Out on the deck, in plain view, Liz turned about and shot once at the police line in the opposite direction along the beach to her left. Then she turned back to shoot again to the right.

*

Half a dozen men fired. Staring through the scope, Mike saw glass shatter beside the girl, but saw that no one had hit her; all firing too hastily, too unexpectedly. The gun in her hand, pointing this way, jumped again.

No. Mike’s finger found the trigger, his cheek nestled against the wood stock, the butt formed comfortably against his shoulder, he squeezed, and the rifle kicked against him. He blinked, brought the barrel down, saw the girl staggering back against the glass doors, and knew she had been hit solidly in the body. There was more and more firing all around him now, a growing fusillade, but he knew it was his bullet that had struck home.

At the sound of the first shot, Peter leaped to his feet from the living room sofa, staring around in terror and disbelief. This wasn’t the right way! He started instinctively toward the glass doors leading to the cantilevered deck, wanting to see what had gone wrong, but then the firing started in earnest, and two of the glass panels ahead of him shattered as they were hit. “No no no!” Peter cried, backing away, making patting motions at the outer world with both hands. Not like this! Not like this!

Mike wanted more. Hurrying to stay ahead of everybody else, but at the same time striving to be meticulous, accurate, correct, he squeezed again. Yes! High on the right side of her chest, puffing a ragged red-black hole, straightening her against the glass door when she might have fallen forward. And again, the cartridge leaping from him to her, embedding in her body, thumping in, holding her in place, not letting her fall.

Thump. Thump. Thump. Like spikes into rotten wood, like stakes into soft clay, he pounded the wads of metal into her flesh, watching each bloody crater blossom. Forty or fifty guns were rattling now, light-reflecting glass shards were spraying, the bedroom curtains were whipping and snapping as though in a high wind, other men’s bullets were biting into that body, but it was still first and foremost his. Thump. He spaced them, timed them, placed them to keep her upright, prevent her from falling. Blood and meat obscured the details of her now, someone else’s magnum cartridge swept the top of her head away as though with a scythe, but Mike kept punching, punching, punching into the torso, seven, eight, nine, ten—and the rifle didn’t kick. That was when he knew it hadn’t fired, it was empty, and at last the ragged thing on the porch toppled forward, jerking as it was hit several more times on the way down.

The bedroom was full of buzzing. Angry metal bees swarmed everywhere, stinging and biting, knocking Larry down as he tried to run through the bedroom door into the hall. Eleven bullets struck him, leaving him broken, impaired, profusely bleeding, unconscious, but alive.

Peter, mad with fear, clawed at the carpet, trying to dig down through the living room floor. Blood and saliva ran from his open mouth, tears ran from his eyes, and all he could hear was everything in the world breaking, cracking, splitting, shattering as the bullets flashed through the rooms. He lay chest-down on the floor, gasping, staring wide-eyed at nothing, scrabbling with raw fingertips, shredding his nails, until something burned the back of his neck; a spent bullet, hot from its journey through the air. Screaming, Peter leaped up into the trajectory of half a dozen more.

*

Mike lowered the rifle. The shooting went on and on, like strings of firecrackers on Chinese New Year, the officers around on the roadside firing now as well, pumping hundreds of bullets into the featureless front wall. Mike, breathing heavily, as dazed as though he’d come out of a movie house to bright sunshine, turned and saw Lynsey staring at him in shock, comprehension and rejection.