Infinity One (11 page)

At the waters edge Janey, in a one piece black jersey swimsuit, was rambling in the shallow water. Barry set his lips in a firm position and was about to stride to her when he heard something in the thick brush of the hillside behind him. He turned. A wide swath of twisted bushes and scrubby grass was being agitated as something low and wide descended from above. Barry checked on Janey and saw her bend and skim a white pebble across the quiet water. He walked up toward the rattling underbrush. He jogged when he got to the rough path leading back toward their sea-edge home.

“The ocean looks like a great reservoir of sadness,” said Carnahan.

“What in the hell are you doing out here?” He hopped off the path and into the bushes. Carnahan was in there, tilted way over to the left and smoking a cigar.

“I just got a tip from a stoolie the Gores computer knows,” the bed told him. “This is a hot rip.”

Barry looked up toward the backs of the other three houses sharing this stretch of beach. “Have you been drinking bourbon again? Coming out here in the middle of the morning. Somebody’s going to see you.” He put a hand against the footboard and gave a tentative push.

“People are used to odd things in the suburbs, sweetheart,” said Carnahan. “Get this straight now. I just heard that Giacomo Macri has hired a couple of boys from Detroit to hit Rasmussen. It’s going to happen real soon.”

Barry stopped and put a shoulder to the redwood footboard. “Okay. Now go back uphill.”

“That’s a real Maxfield Parrish sky today, isn’t it?" remarked the big bed. “I’ve got to get more outside work.”

“When are these guys going to do it?”

“All I know is soon.”

Barry said, “I’m going to talk to Janey right now.”

“Okay, sweetheart. I won’t take the play away from you yet.” Carnahan grunted, made a high pitched whirring sound.

“They’re going to hear that, somebody is. What’s wrong?”

“It’s tough to get traction in this sandy ground.”

Barry put his shoulder to the bed and after a moment of straining Carnahan’s wheels took hold and he shot forward and began rolling, rattling, uphill and away.

The gulls on the rock all took off when Barry neared Janey. “You scared the birds,” she said.

“Janey,” he said.

“Now what?”

“Sometimes,” he said, “we’re judged by the company we keep.”

“True.” She ran two fingers of her left hand along her thigh, then picked up a pale orange pebble with the toes

of her left foot and flicked it into the foam of the ocean.

“What I mean is, sometimes when we play with fire, if you’ll forgive the cliche, we sort of get burned, as they say, I guess.”

“Also true. So?”

“Well,” said Barry, glancing at Connecticut across the water. “There’s a lot of crime around these days and it’s a problem.”

Janey frowned, her lips parted. “Listen, Barry.” “Yes?”

She shook her head. “Nothing, never mind.” She walked away from him, out into the water.

He hesitated, didn’t follow.

The doctor’s face faded from the phone screen on the living room coffee table. “Dr. Lupoffsky says it isn’t,” Barry called toward the kitchen.

Janey brought him a container of self brewing tea and placed it on the table. “Isn’t the Brazilian flu again?”

"I thought I had a relapse. But this is the Argentine flu.”

“At least it’s still South American. What are you supposed to do?”

“Same as with Brazilian flu. Stay home from work a couple of days, drink fluids,” Barry said. “Do I look particularly green to you, by the way?”

“No,” said his wife. “Should you?”

“Dr. Lupoffsky said the only thing that worried him was the green tinge to my face.”

“He says that to all his patients,” said Janey. “The color reception on his phone is out of adjustment.”

The phone sounded and Janey flicked it on. Bernard Hunzler appeared on the screen. “Barry there, he’s not in his office they told me?”

“Barry is sick today, Bernie.”

“Only take a minute, Jane,” said the gothic writer. “Hey, Barry, can you hear me?”

“I’ll take it,” Barry said, gently pushing Janey. away from in front of the phone screen. “Yes, Bernard?”

“Can’t we salvage
The Shadow Bride of Ledgemere,
Barry? Make it a series. The gothic adventures of Emily Frazier.” Hunzler grinned and his eyebrows drooped.

“No, we don’t want a new series at Flash Books right now. Just change the names and the plot and resubmit the outline.”

“I was hoping to get the $1500 right away. I’ve got to buy mother the electric blanket.”

“I thought it was a rabbit coat.”

“She broke her hip over the weekend and she’s confined to bed.”

Janey pulled the red cellophane tag on the tea cup and the tea began to steam. Barry said, “Change the names and the title, Bernard.”

“The Shadow Towers of Woodville”
said Hunzler. “How’s that sound?”

The front door of the house was pushed in and two men in tan jumpsuits stepped over the threshold. They had net stockings with paisley patterns pulled over their faces. One aluminum revolver was in the gloved right hand of each man. “Okay, Big Wally,” said the man moving into the room. His stocking mask was sky blue.

Into the phone Barry said, “Call the police.”

“What kind of title is that for a gothic?”

The other gunman, the backup man, jerked the phone cord from its baseboard slot. “We got no orders on the dame. Just you, Rasmussen. We hit here after ten, when the schmuck who lives here is at work.”

Janey swallowed. “He’s not Wally Rasmussen. He’s my husband.”

“Into the bedroom, lady,” said the man with the sky blue mask.

“I’m not Rasmussen,” said Barry. “Her husband is home sick today. It’s me.”

“Sure, sure, Rassmussen,” said the other gunman. His stocking mask was fire pink. “Look, you’re dealing with the real old established Mafia here. We aren’t amateurs. Giacomo Macri set this all up perfect. He even used a computer. Bam, we fly in, bam, we hit you, bam, we go

back home on that new Penn Central train. It’s lovely.”

“Look at him,” insisted Janey. “Does he look like Rasmussen?”

“Sure. A little greener than in his photos, but more or less. Well, not that much maybe but we haven’t got time to fool around. We’re already one bam behind.”

“Didn’t you hear him say Macri used a computer on this,” said the other masked man. “Those things don’t make mistakes. Rasmussen is supposed to be here weekdays after ten, so this is him. You want to be gunned down standing or sitting, Big Wally?”

“Okay, punks, grab some ceiling,” said a harsh, faintly Irish voice. The bedroom door was swinging open. “Drop the roscoes and reach.” Carnahan, still unmade and rumpled, rolled up to the opening. From beneath his box springs two black .45 automatics were pointing.

“Who’s under there?” asked the fire pink gunman.

“The name is Carnahan, sweetheart. Drop the rods.”

The man let his pistol fall, but his partner did not. He dived to the side and started firing at Carnahan.

Carnahan’s two automatics roared at once with a tremendous sound. The gunman was hit in the left side, but he kept on shooting. The big bed was having trouble squeezing through the doorway. He had to tilt himself up partially sideways and that put him at an awkward angle. The wounded gunman put four bullets into Carnahan’s underside.

Barry had jumped up at the first shot and rushed Janey across the room, down on the floor and away from the shooting. “Into the kitchen,” he told her now.

The masked man who’d given up his gun grabbed it up and ran for the front door as Carnahan began shooting again. “This isn’t going as programmed,” he said as he left.

His partner got off one more shot at Carnahan’s still exposed mechanism and followed out the front door.

The living room was sharp with the scent of gunpowder. Barry waited for a moment, then stood. “You okay, Janey?”

She hugged herself, said, “Yes. You?”

“Seem to be.”

Carnahan gave a rasping cough. His voice was dim when he asked, “Hey, are you two kids okay?”

Barry approached the bed. “I’ll get you unstuck and we’ll have you repaired, Carnahan.”

One of Carnahan’s automatics dropped from his retractable metal hand. “No, sweetheart, it’s too late for repairs. Too late for tears. I figure I can kiss tomorrow goodbye.”

Janey got to her feet and came toward her husband. “We have some talking to do, Barry,” she said. “I’ll call the police now.”

“No,” Barry said. “We’ll talk first, then call the police.” “The big sleep,” said Carnahan. “The big sleep.” He made a low ratcheting sound and ceased to function.

We are born to play a certain role. The fortunate in life find that role one of their own choosing ...

The social worker sat primly, knees together, hands in lap. She looked the part, with short, sensible hair, round-lensed glasses and large, kind, brown eyes.

The old woman in the rocker looked
her
part too, perhaps almost too much: snow white hair, bifocals, knitting, cat. “It’s the Packerhaus method,” she said. “Perhaps you’ve heard of it?” She was smiling at her two front doors.

“Mmmh,” the social worker replied, looking troubled.

“Meow,” said the cat.

“The Packerhaus method. I believe I heard you to say that you were familiar with the name but not fully cognizant of all the details?”

The social worker waved a hand. “Something like that. It’s rather a shock to have one pop out at me in that way and then learn .. .” She let the sentence trail away, wishing she could herself.

“Fine,” the old woman said. She had been knitting, apparently, instead of listening. One of the front doors opened and a man in uniform rapped gently on the varnished frame. “Meter reader.”

The old woman looked up from her knitting, smiling. “In the basement,” she said. “Just come right through, Frank.”

The uniformed man smiled in return and moved across 
the living room on a small rectangular platform. A door at the far side opened to receive him.

The social worker gulped. “He didn’t walk,” she said. “He was riding on a sort of little cart”

“The Packerhaus method is not perfect.” The old woman looked at her severely. “And please note, my dear, that neither I nor Col. Packerhaus ever once said it was. He was my cousin, did I tell you that? But it gives, in the felicious phrase the Colonel coined, ‘a living memorial to the living.’ That became the motto of the company he founded when he left the Army Graves Registration Service, you know.”

“No,” the social worker said humbly. “I didn’t.”

“The Colonel conceived of his method as a means of assuaging the grief of the sorrowing parents, wives, and sweethearts; but it was not really well suited, as he used to say subsequently, to a military application. So many soldiers are damaged by death.”

The meter reader re-emerged from the door he had entered and glided across the room again, tipping his cap.

“Your grandfather . . . didn’t your grandfather come through that door a minute ago?”

“My father.” The old woman nodded, rocking. “A wonderful man, looking for a light for his cigar. That’s what he does, mostly—looks for a light.” She sat rocking and knitting after pronouncing this, half waiting for the social worker to reply, half listening for the tea, kettle. After a time an old man with a cigar in his fingers entered the room on a platform like the meter man’s. He wore drooping black trousers and a loose white shirt, and looked like Mark Twain and a little like Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The social worker jerked slightly on seeing him, and he asked her for a match; he had a deep, resonant voice.

“You shouldn’t smoke, Papa,” the old woman said. And to the social worker, “It’s the Packerhaus method. I believe I told you?”

“You mean he’s not just a doll?”

“Oh no.” The old woman shook her head, smiling. He’s 
a living memorial. By which the Colonel and I mean that it is really he. Aren’t you you, Papa?”

He was looking under an antimacassar for matches.

“The Packerhaus method,” the old woman continued, “preserves the entire brain by saturating it with a phenolic resin. Then an exterior source of voltage powers the nerve impulses.” She leaned forward confidentially, lowering her voice. “He can’t breathe, you know. I don’t keep matches in the house, but sometimes he remembers that he can light his cigar from the stove element. Then he finds out he can’t draw on it, and it makes him very angry.”

The social worker was watching the old man’s back. “If he can’t breathe, how can he speak?”

“A fan,” the old woman said. “A fan in the base forces air past his vocal cords. The tube runs up his leg.”

“Meow,” said the cat.

Turning around the old man asked for a match again in his deep voice; the social worker said she had none and he left.

“Not back to the stove, I hope,” the old woman said. “He’ll lift off my tea kettle and forget to put it back. I always made tea for him when he was ill. Did I tell you that?”

The social worker shook her head and asked, “He can still move?” She looked faint.

“Of
course
he can still move. That was the other half of Col. Packerhaus’s great discovery. Muscles, you know, will still respond to an impulse after death. We used to do it with frogs’ legs and a galvanic cell when I was a little girl in school—no doubt you modems have more advanced methods.”

“I seem to remember something like that in biology,” the social worker said weakly.

“The Colonel’s fluid preserves this attribute, you see— at least for a long time. It’s based on formaldehyde like the old fluid, but it contains vitamins and proteins in solution, and oxygenators, and ever so many other things. You may have smelled the formaldehype the first time you met Papa, but no doubt you thought it was after shave lotion.”

“I think I must be going.” The social worker looked around vaguely for her bag.

The old woman smiled. “Oh no, not yet. I’ll be leaving myself soon. Papa had stomach cramps—did I tell you that? Just like Frank, who used to come around for the gas company. That’s funny, isn’t it: stomach cramps and the gas company.” There was a knock at the door and the old woman called, “Not now, Frank. We’re talking.”