Fortune of Fear Page 28

  The tower gave a shake. Then she stared blindly down at me, her mouth poised to start screaming again.

  I went on. “Working day and night, slaving into the tiniest hours before dawn, creeping out of the woodwork like a vile serpent, praying at black masses and enlisting all his friends, working secretly with a slyness only he is capable of, one person alone is seeking to corrupt the delegates with women and drugs, blackmail and threat, to crush that bill so thoroughly that it will never raise its head again.”

  I knew I had her attention. I had the attention of the mob of male students, too. It was a dramatic moment. I dragged out the suspense.

  When I was sure Miss Simmons’ every brain cell was glued to my speech, I added the death blow.

  “The secret enemy’s name,” I said, “is Wister.”

  She jerked upright in a dreadful spasm beyond any possible control.

  The pile of chairs started sideways.

  In slow motion the lofty tower fell, faster and faster.

  The chairs came all apart.

  Miss Simmons hit the floor!

  CRASH!

  There was a spatter of splinters and debris and then, with a mighty roar, the gang of students rushed on me.

  “He pushed her!” screamed one.

  “Get him!” screamed another.

  “Kill the (bleepard)!” howled a third.

  I had made a mistake. I had not realized that going amongst a gang of students was not dissimilar, today, to entering the hangar in Afyon. I had not come armed!

  Pummeling me and tearing at me, they bore me out. They got me to the top of a stairs.

  One ambitious soul plunged a hand into my ripping coat and got my wallet.

  “A FED!” he screamed. “A dirty, stinking, rotten FED!”

  That was all it took.

  They threw me over the stairwell.

  I hit with a thud.

  Outraged, they threw my hat and wallet at me.

  I outsmarted them. Before a single one could get down those stairs, I grabbed hat and wallet and sped like a leopard out of the building.

  The roars behind me diminished behind the drive of my General Services Officer boots.

  I got to 116th Street. I was just in time to catch an express train.

  As it closed its doors, only then did I start to laugh.

  I had done it! Actually, it had worked perfectly.

  If that bill passed now, she would jeer at Heller that it had gone through despite his most villainous plots. And if it didn’t pass I could certainly guarantee that his life from there on out would be a Hells not even he could live through.

  Riding along in the lurching, roaring train, I sucked my hand cuts quite contented.

  What is a little battering, after all? They tell you you have to be tough in the Apparatus. I was. And in a moment of triumph like this, the pain was almost nice.

  I had struck a blow that Heller would not soon forget and certainly could not possibly recover from.

  I had seen my duty. And I had done it. It was the Apparatus way.

  PART FORTY-TWO

  Chapter 2

  As the deadline approached for the UN Security Council meeting—2:00 PM on Friday—I was frankly getting frantic.

  Four days I had been in New York, four days I had been buzzing and hissing on the two-way-response radio, and no Raht.

  Workmen were still everywhere, trying to finish the whole job before the weekend cost the contractors overtime, and the apartment was a madhouse.

  I would make one last try. I scrunched down in the back of a closet that had been completed and, surrounded suffocatingly by wet paint, once more began to push and pull at the radio controls. I had not brought its manual and it was mostly hit or miss. There was a needle under glass on top of it and a red button there which should light. Trying to get more comfortable and avoid the paint, I accidentally touched it. It lit up! That was the first time that had happened. Had it been on when I had used these things before? Such radios came only in pairs: they were very simple rigs. The Department of the Army used them between generals so they had to be very elementary.

  I shook it to see if anything was loose.

  “Yes?” Raht’s voice!

  “You’ve been sleeping on the job!” I railed at him. “And this proves it!”

  “Officer Gris? Where are you?”

  “I’m in Africa, you idiot! Where did you think I was?”

  “You sound awfully loud to be in Africa, Officer Gris. You almost blew my ear out. But now I’ve turned my volume almost down to nothing.”

  “It must be a skip wave,” I said. “I’m still in Africa and don’t you forget it. I can barely hear you! But this is no time to argue. Turn all three 831 Relayers off right away!”

  “If you want them off,” said Raht, “that must mean you are within two hundred miles of me. The direction needle . . .”

  I clicked the radio off hastily. He wasn’t going to trick me into telling him where I was and open up the trail. No indeed!

  I went into the chaos of the back room and got my three viewers and a portable TV. I went back into the closet. It was pretty uncomfortable, what with paint fumes and scratching fleas. But I knew I had to do my duty. The way of an Apparatus officer was hard, especially in this apartment.

  The viewers were still flared out, as it would take him a while to scale those antennas on the Empire State Building. But the TV set was live. All three networks were giving heavy coverage to the event.

  Some political commentator was giving a long rundown on the background of the measure and all the national battling that had gone on around the world. I smiled a superior smile: those national battlings had been done in bed at the Gracious Palms!

  After half an hour of suffocating and scratching, my viewers stopped flaring out and steadied down.

  Crobe’s came on first. He had some woman on a couch and was apparently psychoanalyzing her, for she was saying over and over how her three-year-old brother had raped her when she was sixteen. Crobe might or might not have been listening but his vision was exploring her genitalia in depth. He looked up once and, my, they had given him a beautiful office: whole shelves full of skulls and his psychiatric diploma framed in gold. But, beyond noting that he was far from a lost resource and that Bellevue seemed to be providing him with its best facilities, I had no interest today in Crobe. I turned his viewer off so it wouldn’t distract me.

  The Countess Krak was sitting in Heller’s Empire State main office. No, correction. She was lying on the floor, chin propped up with her hands, reading a book, The Food of Many Lands, according to the print across the page top. She was going over all the recipes of India. Then she made a clicking sound and the page turned. It startled me. Then I saw that it was just the cat. She started on the recipes of Indonesia.

  Heller’s viewer was showing the same TV program that I had on my portable TV, only Heller’s viewer was much clearer and the colors were better. Wise fellow. He had not gone in person this day. The women of the Gracious Palms would have been there and he would have had a bad time trying to explain all this to Krak.

  She looked sideways at Heller, sitting there in a chair. “You looked worried, dear. Is something wrong?”

  “It’s this UN thing,” said Heller. “I don’t like the lay of the land. From what the commentators say, it looks sticky. The measure I’m interested in passed the General Assembly. But to go into force it now has to pass the Security Council. The Security Council has fifteen members, but a single veto from one of the great powers can kill the bill.”

  “Great powers?” said Krak.

  “United States, France, United Kingdom, Russia and China. Even if nine members vote for it and just one of those five vetoes it, it’s finished.”

  “What is the measure, dear?”

  “Women’s rights,” said Heller.

  “Hmm,” said the Countess. She got up and sat down on a sofa near him. “I don’t really understand why they have to have a law to give wome
n rights. Women make their own rights. Why are you so interested in this, dear?”

  “It’s important,” said Heller.

  “Hmm,” said the Countess Krak.

  At that moment some crowd shots came on. There were mobs of women around the UN, carrying placards on poles, waving flags, singing, being cheer leadered.

  The camera focused on one group with huge placards and Heller gave a small laugh. The Countess looked at him sharply. He was smiling at the screen.

  One huge placard read:

  The UN Security Council

  Will Be Boycotted

  at the Gracious Palms

  If They Do Not Pass

  UN Resolution

  678-546-452

  The Countess looked back at the screen. The camera focused in on one huge poster this group was carrying. It said:

  In Memory of Pretty Boy

  The picture was a poor one but it certainly looked like Heller!

  The Countess said, “Who are those ladies, dear?”

  “Where?” said Heller.

  “Hmm,” said the Countess Krak.

  The cameras were working inside the Security Council room. A pan along the mural picked up the symbols of Peace and Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. Then the view traveled along the member representatives. They were getting busy.

  The president of the Security Council this month was Russian. He had a big, square face and Mongolian eyes. He brought the meeting to order by banging his fist on his desk. Through the translator who was putting it out on the networks in English, the Russian said, “I call this waste-of-time meeting to order.”

  “Oh, oh,” said Heller.

  “I had to come all the way back from Yakut in Siberia,” continued the Russian, “just to attend this special meeting. And all because the silly General Assembly passed some silly nonsense.”

  “Oh, oh, oh!” said Heller.

  “So I read it,” said the Russian. “‘UN Resolution’—which is not resolved and if it is resolved I go back to Siberia—‘678-546-452.’ Whereas, et cetera, to wit: ‘RESOLVED: WOMEN HAVE THE RIGHT NOT TO BE THERMONUCLEAR BOMBED AND NOT TO BE FORCED TO SHUT UP BY SLAPPING OR TORTURE.’”

  “That’s a good resolution,” said the Countess Krak. “It’s the first sensible law I’ve heard on this planet. I’m amazed it isn’t in force already. But you seem very interested, dear. Did you have something to do with it?”

  “It’s a political matter,” said Heller.

  “Hmm,” said the Countess Krak.

  The Russian was talking again. “We will now have the debate. I will be the first one to debate. So listen, Comrades: It is well known that the only workers who can be made to do any work are women. If the women did not do all the work, men would have no time to sit around and drink vodka. But,” and he fixed the other members with a ferocious glare, “you know and I know and everybody knows and Karl Marx who had an awful married life knew, too, that if you don’t slap women they talk all the time, day and night. And if they talk, talk, talk, where goes the Five-Year Plans then, right? And if they make the Five-Year Plans fail, they are counterrevolutionaries and ought to be thermonuclear bombed once and for all so we could have some peace. And that’s all there is to it, Comrades. This resolution would undermine the already undermined theory of Marxist Leninism. Russia votes against it—nyet, nyet, nyet—and spits on it, too. So there is no point in debating further or even voting, as a great power has vetoed it. Meeting adjourned!” And he got up and put on his fur coat and stamped out of the hall where a regiment of KGB guards got him into a helicopter and away.

  “Oh, blast, blast those Russians!” said Heller. “The girls will be SO disappointed after all their hard work!”

  “What girls?” said the Countess Krak, very alert.

  “And there goes any chance I had with Miss Simmons!” said Heller. “Confound those Russians!”

  The Countess Krak said, very loudly, “WHO is Miss Simmons?”

  Heller came out of it. He looked at the Countess. “What?”

  “I said, ‘WHO is Miss Simmons?’”

  “My teacher in Nature Appreciation. That’s the class I have to personally attend each Sunday.”

  “Oh, is that what you have been doing Sundays? I notice that you use the words ‘have to attend.’ However, I have been told personally by Izzy that you are going to the university just wonderfully and all without attending any classes whatever. Bang-Bang tells me that you are just doing splendidly in the ROTC, and yet you don’t have to attend any drills or ROTC classes. Now, WHY, Jettero, do you have to attend the Sunday class of this Miss Simmons?”

  Heller said, “She forced me into it.”

  The Countess Krak said, “Jettero, I can understand completely why she is infatuated with you, but I cannot for the life of me see why you are infatuated with her.”

  “I’M NOT!”

  “Jettero, you need not be defensive. You are not being accused of anything. I just want to know why you are infatuated with her.”

  “I HATE the hussy!” said Heller.

  “Oh,” said the Countess Krak, “be very careful of hate. The poet says it is the closest neighbor of love.”

  “Oh, Gods, he didn’t know Miss Simmons! Listen, that woman is working day and night to wreck my plans. She is not only going to fail me, she is tearing around demanding that others flunk me!”

  “Jettero,” said the Countess Krak, “maybe you had better tell me about this very exactly.”

  Heller told her about needing a diploma so people would listen to him and how Miss Simmons hated nuclear physicists and had forced him to take an optional on Nature Appreciation, which she herself taught. Then he drew a long breath and told her in detail about following her into Van Cortlandt Park, finishing off the attackers and taking Miss Simmons to the hospital. And how, in the new term, they had released her from the psychiatric ward so she could resume teaching.

  The Countess Krak nodded gravely. “I understand it completely now. She walked into that park well knowing there were unscrupulous men about and lured you after her. She is the kind of woman who craves to be raped. Oh, I am afraid this has gone far enough, Jettero. I knew all the beautiful women on this planet would be after you and I now know that my worst fears have been realized. I could forgive that Miss America thing, but this has gone on and on right under my nose every Sunday.”

  “Please,” begged Heller. “If I take you to the theater and buy you a dozen roses and get up first every morning for a week and get the room warm, will you, in return, stop talking about Miss Simmons?”

  “Hmm,” said the Countess Krak. She got up and went into the secretary boudoir.

  She paced up and down. Then she suddenly sat on the edge of the couch and punched a button and had Mamie on the phone promptly.

  “Mamie,” she said, “it has happened. I’ve got to have your advice.”

  “Certainly, dearie. You just tell Mama Mamie.”

  “He is so disturbed that I am absolutely certain he has become infatuated with another woman and it may hold him on this planet. We are not married yet. I MUST get him away. What should I do?”

  “Scratch her eyes out,” said Mamie, promptly.

  “Hmm,” said the Countess Krak. “Well, thank you. I was just checking to see how it was done on this planet. How is business?”

  “Just fine, dear. Now that my name is up in lights, we’re playing to a full house every night. Don’t you worry your pretty head about this place, dear. I’ve got these stage-door Johnnies shoveling out the diamonds like a rainstorm. That’s a mighty cute sailor you got there. You just get that (bleepch) under your fingernails and rip away. And give her a kick in the slats for me. Never let a good man get away, dear. They’re (bleeped) hard to find!”

  I went into alarm. This was not coming out the way I had expected. And although I had always suspected that when women talked privately together they plotted things, I had never understood their conversation was that bloodthirsty.

  Oh, I
would have to watch this carefully.

  And then I experienced a surge of hope. Maybe I could get the Countess Krak for murder!

  PART FORTY-TWO

  Chapter 3

  She was on the phone again. She got the number of Empire University and asked for Miss Simmons.

  Of course, they didn’t know which “Miss Simmons” amongst all their 18,005 students and 5,002 faculty. The young man said so with some asperity.

  “This is a life-and-death matter about one of her students,” said the Countess.

  “Then she must be a teacher,” said the young man’s voice. “What does she teach?”

  “Nature Appreciation,” said Krak.

  “Wait a minute, please.” Then he came back on the line. “You must mean Jane Simmons, Ph.D., D.Ed., Teachers College. She teaches Nature Appreciation 101 and 104 also.”

  “Does she have a student named Jerome Terrance Wister?”

  “Thank God for computers. Yes, ma’am. But it says here that she’s recommending he be expelled.”

  “Dangerous stuff, hate,” said the Countess.

  “I beg pardon?”

  “I said, what is her home address so I can advise the next of kin?”

  “It’s that bad, is it?” said the young man. And he gave it to her very promptly. It was in Morningside Heights.

  The Countess Krak opened up the wardrobe. She looked over her clothes. She chose a scarlet suit with an enormous pearl button holding the jacket closed. She got out some red gloves and red Moroccan leather boots.

  Murder. She obviously planned murder!

  Over it all she draped a black sable short cape. That confirmed it. She looked just like an assassin pilot to me. Visions of her red heels stamping that yellow-man into the floor back at Spiteos swam around me. Frantically, I wondered what I could do.

  The sickening realization that I was about to lose an ally made me feel faint. And I had so carefully prepared it all, too.

  Then I realized I could call my friend Police Inspector Bulldog Grafferty. I knew where the murder would occur. Maybe I could get her walked in on red-handed, with the corpse of Miss Simmons still quivering in its pools of mangled blood.