Count Geiger's Blues (22 page)

42
Foiled Again

In the next few days, feeling totally free
of the Philistine Syndrome, Xavier moved to implement the stalwartly program that Bowman had suggested to him. He also heeded Bari’s warnings not to surrender to violence or the temptation to turn a heroic feat into a crude public spectacle. Sadly, he saw few ways to exploit his secret identity’s potential for Doing Good without publicizing the fact that a living proxy of one of the title characters in the UC Universe was altruistically patrolling Salonika’s streets.

Much of a stalwart’s effectiveness, Xavier reasoned, came from the reputation—the celebrity—of that character. The angel one knows is a more accessible resource than is an anonymous angel with no known home address and no track record as a crime fighter. The problem here, he figured, was discovering a way to trumpet Count Geiger’s achievements and potential without (1) turning him into a gaudy media freakshow and (2) wholly disrupting his private life as Xavier Thaxton. Xavier shared these thoughts with The Mick, who agreed with his assessment but who also felt that public awareness of the real-life Count Geiger would burgeon on its own as his uncle caught more thugs and aided more intended victims. Salonika’s law-abiding citizens would rejoice; formerly arrogant hooligans and crime lords would quail.

“No more make-it-up-as-I-go vigilantism,” Xavier said. “That episode at the EleRail station was a fluke because I was close enough to help and then manhandled the muggers unforgivably. Believe me, Mikhail, I’ll never do anything like that again.”

“Jeez, unc, they deserved what they got. At least you didn’t Goetz them.”

“And Ms. Lebeck, bless her, allowed us to let the station cop seize the roses for saving her. That kept my Count Geiger impersonation out of the
Urbanite
. Now, though, we need to publicize the Count’s role without hurting Ms. Lebeck or making Mr. Harp look foolish to his colleagues and bosses. Doing those things will establish me—Count Geiger, I mean—as a force for good in Salonika.”

The upshot of this talk was that The Mick placed an anonymous call to the McGill Building suggesting that a reporter interview a citizen named Blanche Lebeck about a mugging recently thwarted at the Bridgeboro EleRail platform. The reporter might also examine the activity log at Salonika’s central police station to see how city cops had recorded this event. Such a follow-up might prove illuminating.

When Walt Grantham assigned Alex Meisel (whose identity Xavier had borrowed at the Hazelton place) to investigate The Mick’s call, Xavier had a retroactive twinge of guilt. Two days later, though, this headline dominated the
Urbanite
’s front page:
SILVER AVENGER SAVES WOMAN AT BRIDGEBORO STATION
/
Assailants Allegedly Hung Up to Dry, Like Laundry
. Along with the story, Grantham ran a staff artist’s sketch of the muggers hanging from the yardarms of the chandelier:

Blanche Lebeck, a health-food store clerk, claims that on Wednesday night a hooded man in a silver leotard saved her health and her life by single-handedly halting a mugging by four assailants at EleRail’s Bridgeboro Station.

“I was terrified,” Ms. Lebeck said. “I’ve studied self-defense techniques, and I’m not usually a ’fraidy cat, but this was four real mean guys. I pulled out my Mace and started screaming. Really screaming.”

Ms. Lebeck, 38, says her screams summoned help from a silver-suited rescuer whose actions were a purposeful blur. In less than ten seconds, she estimates, he had disabled the three young men still in a condition to threaten her.

“I really shpritzed one of them,” she said yesterday. “He was already down. Then all four were up. This guy in the aluminum leotard carried them up a ladder and hooked them to a light fixture until the city cops got there.

“Guess you could say he kind of
foiled
the muggers’ plans,” Ms. Lebeck said. “That’s a joke I thought up later. Things weren’t at all funny as they happened, believe me.”

Ms. Lebeck’s description of the Silver Samaritan, who left before the police arrived, makes him sound like a costume-party refugee in the garb of the popular Uncommon Comics stalwart Count Geiger. But an agent of the Salonika-based UC comics company claims no knowledge of the man and adds that he must have been free-lancing.

“Sounds like an athletic guy with a social conscience,” the UC spokesperson said. “We don’t approve of vigilantism, of course, but if he gets in in touch with us and proves his identity as Ms. Lebeck’s rescuer, we might be willing to discuss a merchandising and public-relations deal with him.”

The story also dealt with other matters: the assailants’ names, backgrounds, criminal records, and present condition (satisfactory or better in every case); the brief absence from the station of EleRail security guard Tyrone Harp; and the police’s bafflement about the identity and quicksilver actions of the stalwart’s impersonator. But the last line in Meisel’s article read
, “Salonika can only benefit from the intervention of a real-life stalwart like the Silver Samaritan who saved Ms. Lebeck.”

Positive citywide reaction ensued. The sale of new and back issues of the Count Geiger series skyrocketed. Disk jockeys told jokes about, and made up contests centered on, UC’s popular character. Costume companies—including a shady Satan’s Cellar establishment called SatyrFernalia—reported brisk rental business in tinfoil suits. Many of these subsidiary impersonators appeared on street corners selling flowers, hawking steamed bagels, squeegeeing car windows, or even handing out religious tracts. A small army of anonymous nutzos telephoned talk-show radio hosts to “confess” that they were the modest Count Geigers who had saved Ms. Lebeck.

During this hullabaloo, it occurred to Xavier that a real-life stalwart could conceal his true identity by jumping headlong into a bramble thicket of such frauds or by standing so far off from the ruckus that no one would suspect him of caring a jot for such matters. Oddly, in the comic books themselves, superhero impersonators were genuine rarities, as if all the supporting-cast inhabitants of their fictional Gotham or Nick City had attended the same night-school course about the legal and moral indefensibility of trademark infringement. The result—in comic-book stories, that is—was that nobody in town but Batman dressed like Batman, nobody in town but Yellowhammer dressed like Yellowhammer. In the real world, though, stalwartly wannabes crowded the boulevards and side streets of Salonika like so many annoying decoys—too many to count, too many to winnow to get to the genuine article. In such an atmosphere, anyone claiming to be the real Count Geiger was hooted down as a liar or a fruitcake.

So far so good, Xavier thought, when events had reached this pass. Alex Meisel and the
Urbanite
have effectively publicized Count Geiger’s coming, and the joyriders, frauds, and mountebanks in Salonika have provided me a welcome measure of security. All I must now do is . . .
strike again
.