Mission Earth Volume 4: An Alien Affair Page 12

  Accordingly, with shaking hands, I went to my mattress and reached within. Some days ago, when Silva had come, thirty thousand bucks had remained in this hiding place. If I just gazed upon them and caressed their crispness, life might once more begin to flow through my higher nervous centers and make them less nervous.

  My hand didn’t contact anything!

  I threshed it about.

  Still nothing.

  Alarmed now more than ever, I threw the mattress on the floor. I tore the bed apart. I took a knife to the box springs.

  NO MONEY!

  It was gone.

  I lay down in the wreckage and had my epileptic fit.

  It didn’t help.

  I banged my head against the wall. That didn’t help, either. But some time later, I woke up and found that it was a bright day.

  Coffee. Maybe several cups of coffee would steady my nerves. I managed to phone down and get the order placed. I took a shower and then found out I was standing in it with my clothes on.

  By the time I had remedied this and had my pants turning into ice on the terrace, breakfast had arrived.

  Unthinkingly, I opened the paper.

  Buckteeth!

  A two-column picture!

  Madison had once more made the front page!

  WHIZ KID SUES OCTOPUS

  ___________________

  TEN-BILLION-BUCK BANG

  The attorneys of the Whiz Kid—Boggle, Gouge & Hound—today filed suit against Olympian Octopus Oil Company for a cool ten billion bucks, the largest malfeasance civil suit in history. Rockecenter attorneys Swindle and Crouch, when reached, said, “No comment.”

  The financial world today was rocked by the spectacle of Octopus actually being sued. Stocks fell. Dow Jones dropped 230 points. The other six of the Seven Brothers hastily denied connection and complicity but informed sources implied they would soon be added due to their inextricable interlocks and total control by Octopus.

  The Whiz Kid stated, “Octopus cannot help but be included in my campaign to bring honesty and integrity into the way faculties discriminate against students. Octopus heavily endows MIW, which makes oil a party to conspiracy to conspire with multiple malice and breach of breaches. By canceling my scholarship and depriving the college restaurant of my services, chaos has been caused, irreparable and condemnatory. If Octopus can callously deny students second helpings of rice pudding, the whole American way of life is threatened. Fascism will flourish and all will tremble at the tyranny. . . .”

  Oh, there was more! And the vendor, knowing my habits, had a five-foot stack of newspapers outside my door.

  The shouts and roars of student riots on the TV were so loud, I couldn’t understand the news vendor who kept asking me for his money. I had to close the door on him.

  Madison had blown it!

  That was very plain indeed. He was obviously going to tailor the Whiz Kid into a deathless symbol of revolt against Big Oil.

  How Heller must be sniggering this morning!

  Although I loathed to do it, I approached my viewer. It was my duty and the way of the Apparatus officer (hard though it may be to always have duty as a goal). Besides, I was too shaken up to do more than collapse in front of the screen, hoping that this did not reveal a diagnosis of masochism in me.

  PART THIRTY-ONE

  Chapter 7

  Heller was riding in a public cab. By his reflection in the partition, I could see he was wearing a tan tweed suit, a puffed-out silk tie and, over it all, a cordovan-leather trench coat. Really elegant. I tried to make out where he was going by the passing winter scenery he seemed to be admiring so much. They were on some sort of a turnpike. He was catching glimpses of sunlit water to his left.

  The Statue of Liberty! Way over there. And beyond it, back and across the bay, Manhattan!

  Babe Corleone—he was on his way to see Babe Corleone!

  Sure enough, they soon exited from the turnpike and shortly were threading their way through the impressive high-rises of Bayonne.

  He told the cab to wait and shortly was greeting a somewhat uncertain Giovanni.

  “She ain’t very happy today, kid,” said Giovanni. “Maybe you ought to postpone seein’ her.”

  “Can’t wait,” said Heller.

  Giovanni shrugged. He went to the living room door and knocked and then opened it.

  Babe was dressed in a light gray lounge suit. She was pacing back and forth, the width of the huge living room, pausing to look out the picture window at the wintry sunlight on the park. She did two turns before she said, “Show him in.”

  Heller entered.

  Babe faced him with cold gray eyes, all six feet six of her expressing a wish to snap at him.

  “And what have you got to say for yourself today, young man? Did you or did you not understand me when I said to knock off your god (bleeped) bad publicity? Now, don’t interrupt. Not fifteen minutes ago, on that phone,” she pointed, “in this,” she pointed at the floor, “my own living room, I have had to listen to fifteen solid minutes of the mayor’s wife concerning YOU!” She pointed. “Now, don’t interrupt me. I know you have some lame, contemptible, god (bleeped) cock-and-bull story made up to account for THOSE!” And she pointed at a stack of morning New York papers. “The only thing that was good about it is that she has a cold and can’t talk very long!

  “Now, Jerome, this carousing around with criminal reporters must cease. And it must cease at once! Now, don’t interrupt me. I know I have been busy. I know that I have not taken the time to work and slave like I should to bring you up properly. But that is NO excuse at all!

  “Jerome, the very idea of going to court is NOT done! It is not done at all, Jerome! It exposes one to public ridicule. It costs one respect! And you have got to get the idea you should be respected!

  “Jerome, you cannot keep running around with reporters and running off to courts! Courts are crooked, Jerome. They are not places you should be in! Now, don’t interrupt!

  “Jerome, this is very wearing and tiring on me. I know I have been neglectful. But Jerome, you don’t sue people you don’t like. You get a proper heater and you rub them out. Only weaklings and fools and idiots go rushing off to courts. You want justice, the only way you get justice is to buy yourself a proper rifle, learn how to shoot it and, with a proper telescopic sight . . .”

  “Please!” cried Heller. “Please, can I interrupt?”

  “No. What do you want?”

  Heller was extending a packet to her. It was wrapped in silver paper and it had a black ribbon around it. “I have a present for you!”

  She took it, somewhat softened, but she said, “It will do you no good at all to try to get out of it with some gingillo. No trinket could possibly compensate for what I have to put up with on your account from the mayor’s wife! I have exhausted my vocabulary trying to tell her you are just a good boy gone slightly wrong. . . .”

  “Open it!” said Heller in desperation.

  “All right,” she said frostily. “Just to please you and spoil you, I will open it.”

  She shook a stiletto out of a sleeve holster and used it to cut the black ribbon. She knifed off the silver paper. She opened it up.

  She stared at it.

  She turned it over to be sure there was no mistake. She looked back at it. She looked at Heller, her eyes round.

  “The passport of GUNSALMO SILVA!”

  It dawned on her.

  She rushed to Heller and threw her arms around him. “You KILLED him!”

  “Not exactly,” said Heller, kind of smothered. “He sort of blew himself up!”

  “Oh, you DARLING BOY!”

  She drew back. She looked at the passport again. Then she said, “YIPPEE!” and went whirling around the room in a twirl she must have learned on the chorus line.

  Then she sank down in a chair. “Ave Maria, ‘Holy Joe’ is at last avenged!” She began to cry.

  Then after a while she bashed at her eyes with some tissue and began to stab bu
ttons.

  Staff came pouring in, looking like she had rung a fire bell. She held up the passport.

  “Gunsalmo Silva is dead!”

  They cheered until I had to turn down my sound volume.

  She went over and showed the passport to “Holy Joe’s” portrait. She reeled off a volley of Italian, telling him the turncoat was dead and his soul could now rest in peace and promising a huge Mass as soon as she could.

  Then she turned to her staff. “Quick, quick, get Jerome some milk and cookies!”

  She made Heller sit down in her own favorite chair. They got him milk and cookies.

  Babe was planning a party and a Mass.

  Suddenly she remembered. “I’m sure he will have a funeral. Yes, we must plan for that. Silva’s funeral. He had a brother and uncle. Now, what can we do for Silva’s funeral? A big floral display. That’s it. In the shape of a black dog. Giorgio, make sure it is ordered. Oh, yes. I will attend also. And I will think of some way to get the mayor’s wife to attend. Now, what will I wear? White and scarlet? Maybe just scarlet. A scarlet veil. . . . No, no, I must get a better idea than that! Giorgio, call my dress designer. Order him to design the most festive thing he can think of for a funeral! Oh, will this put the mayor’s wife in her place. She’ll come in something dowdy. Oh, do have another cookie, Jerome.”

  Italians! It took two solid hours before they even began to settle down.

  At last, the important phone calls had been made and probably it was ripping all through the vast east and west and international Corleone organization that “Holy Joe’s” murderer was dead. And just when it looked like the excitement was over, somebody called to state that Silva was in the New York City morgue and that there wasn’t a single bone in his body that remained unbroken and it all started up again and this fact chased the other the length and breadth of the Corleone empire around the world. Telegrams of congratulations began to flood in on their basement RCA and Western Union machines from as far away as New Zealand, from ships at sea and aircraft in flight.

  The coils of printout began to mound up on the floor at Heller’s feet, Babe reading aloud every message, eyes bright, with animated elocution.

  At length, Heller said he had to get back to New York to make sure the cat was fed. But Babe made him stay. Cats could wait. Young boys, she knew, were always hungry and she stuffed him full of lunch.

  After he got through his third plate of spaghetti, he said, “There’s one more thing.” He took out of his pocket a card I had seen him remove from Black Overcoat’s wallet. I suspected that that was the major reason he had come to Babe’s. “Can you tell me who this man is?” Babe read it. She frowned, thinking. “Inganno John Scroccone? I seem to have heard it. I can’t remember where. Giovanni!” And when he appeared, “Put this into the computer and see what you get.”

  Giovanni came back from the basement. “He’s the chief accountant of Faustino Narcotici, body lice on a louse.”

  “Jerome!” said Babe, shocked. She looked at him. “You are associating with the wrong people! Jerome, you must continue to be careful of your reputation.”

  I wondered for a moment why he didn’t tell her he had killed the guy. And then I realized that Heller really hadn’t told anybody anything at all.

  With a shock, I became certain he knew he was being watched. He was afraid of being caught in a Code Break. The grenade! That was why he couldn’t and wouldn’t tell even Bang-Bang how Silva had died. No grenades of such power and type existed on Earth. That would have to be it. Any normal man would have bragged and bragged about it. And he was being so closemouthed it was even slopping over into not mentioning the other three hits!

  “Jerome,” she said, “I faithfully promise to stop neglecting you. Blood will tell and you proved that today. But upbringing has a lot to do with it, too. Now, as a good mother, I should pay more attention to your vital needs and, of course, resist temptation firmly not to spoil you at the same time. You are so accustomed to my shameful neglect that you were even going to leave here, unfed, and continue to run about in rags like some street urchin.”

  She got out a pen and poised it over the snowy linen tablecloth. “Now, first, of course, you need a brand-new wardrobe.” She wrote that down. “And then a string of polo ponies—that encourages you to be a gentleman when you hit other boys over the head with a mallet. Yes, definitely polo ponies.” She wrote that down. She thought a bit.

  Heller would have spoken but she sensed it and shushed him with a hand gesture. “Oh, it’s wintertime. You will need some new ice skates.” She wrote that down. “And then, of course, it will soon be spring. So you will need a new baseball bat.”

  Heller would have spoken again but this time she shushed him directly. “No, no more racing cars. Not one, Jerome. You may think this is harsh but my ears cannot possibly stand to hear one more word about racing from the mayor’s wife!”

  She thought for a bit. “I was going to add the old Capone villa in Miami Beach but you’re getting that for Christmas and I want to keep it as a surprise. Part of being a good mother is not to spoil a boy all at once.”

  She checked her list to see that she had everything down. She said, “Good.” She drew a big circle around the notes on the tablecloth. “That settles it. Now, with your new wardrobe, you’ll have to have something very quickly for the Silva funeral. . . . A red tuxedo and cape. Yes, that will do. It won’t clash with my gown. Here, have some more cookies, Jerome.”

  A faint honking had been going on, from out in the street. Babe suddenly yelled, “Giovanni! What the hell is all that honking out there?”

  Giovanni popped in. “It’s a New York taxi. He says he’s been waiting for the kid here for three hours.”

  “Well, blood of Christ, pay the (bleepard) off! You think I’d send Jerome back to town in a public cab? Tell Battitore to get out my limousine! You think my own son is some kind of a bum? And you tell that Battitore to get the back seat nice and warm. You want Jerome to catch cold?” She turned to Heller. “Now, what were we talking about? Oh, yes. An increase in allowance . . .”

  That was too much! Outraged at all this attention and adulation Heller was getting, I turned off the viewer and hid it from my sight. There is a point where even masochism pales.

  I thought I’d better see what the radio and TV had to say about this “mighty deed” he was bragging to everybody about. I listened to several news broadcasts. Aha! Not a mention of it!

  I stretched my credit with the news vendor and got the afternoon papers. There had been nothing in the morning papers. But in one afternoon one there was a little notice wedged in amongst the latest fashions. It said:

  MIDTOWN

  CONTEMPORARY GARB

  A body, identified as that of one Gunsalmo Silva by dental plates and fingerprints, was found in the small hours of last night on Fifth Avenue, apparently having fallen from the Baltman and Company roof. Silva was clothed in what had apparently been a woman’s black dress. One wonders if this is the latest fashion trend now emerging.

  That put things in their proper perspective. The newspapers never lie. They always tell the exact truth in things of this kind, and things of all kinds, for that matter. The Rockecenters and Madisons take care of that!

  I felt a little better. I was no longer twitching and I didn’t have to keep my mouth tight to suppress the tiny screams which sought to issue from my throat.

  My lot was very difficult. I was broke. Heller and some unknown had robbed me. Miss Pinch didn’t have a clue as to how to be a petty-cash cashier.

  Somehow, trembling, abandoned and alone, I would struggle further along the sadistic road of thorns some people laughingly call life.

  Lacking a crystal ball, I thought no further shocks lurked ahead, at least today.

  I was wrong!

  PART THIRTY-TWO

  Chapter 1

  Sirens were sounding in the street. There seemed to be an awful commotion going on. Despite the cold, I went out on the terrace and looke
d down at Fifth Avenue.

  Military vehicles! Drawing up around the hotel!

  White-helmeted and -belted MPs leaping out to set up a machine gun on the corner!

  I drew back. A movement on a nearby building caught my eye.

  Snipers in white helmets and belts!

  They were laying their weapons directly at this terrace!

  My Gods, I gasped—the US Army has discovered I’m an extraterrestrial! They’ve got me trapped! They’re closing in!

  I hastily withdrew inside the penthouse.

  A thundering on the door!

  I’m dead!

  Bravely, as one walks the last mile, bare-chested to the bullets, already in so low a state I did not care whether I lived or died, I threw the door open.

  It was a bellhop.

  His face was chalk white.

  “Is a Mr. Inkswitch in?” he said.

  Life without money wasn’t worth living anyway. “Why not?” I said.

  Crash!

  Out of the stairwell, out from around the potted palms, out of the elevator, came MPs with assault rifles, running low.

  They knocked the bellhop aside like he was a rag doll!

  They burst past me!

  They overturned the chairs, smashing them!

  They yanked open closet and bathroom doors, leaping back with rifles pointing in case anyone came out.

  They fired short bursts into mattresses!

  They jabbed their rifles into clothes.

  They raced out on the terrace with a crash of potted palms and took positions commanding the surrounding terrain.

  An officer stood firmly before me. He was backed up with two MPs who had their Colt .45s on me. He gave a signal. An MP began to shake me down. He got my wallet. He handed it to the officer.