Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy (20 page)

“This is Ezra Pound of the Fair Play for Bad Ass Committee,” the midget said, shifting his story now that he had the victim on the line. “Your name has been given to us as a leader of the scientific community, and, quite frankly, we are looking for all the distinguished support we can get for our next full-page ad in the Sunday
News-Times-Post.
I assume you’re aware of the plight of Bad Ass,” he said significantly, bluffing, of course (but with some assurance, since every place in the world had some plight or other by 1984).

“Oh, yes, of course,” Dr. Dashwood said evasively. “Why don’t you send me your literature and I’ll give it a careful reading.”

“Doctor,” the midget said sternly, “if you were living in Bad Ass, wouldn’t you want action now?”

“Well, undoubtedly, but if you’ll just send me your literature …”

(“Oh, Ace, darling,
darling,”
a female voice near the phone said distinctly.)

There was a startled pause; the midget deliberately let it drag out until the doctor spoke again.

“Er, mark the envelope to my personal attention. You can be sure that the Bad Ass crisis has been very much on my mind. Terrible, simply terrible. But ah now I must be back to my business—”

(“Fuck my cunt, Ace! Oh, fuck my cunt!”)

“Doctor,” the midget said sternly, “are you
fornicating
while you’re talking to me? Is that your answer, sir, to the desperate people of Bad Ass?”

(“Now, now!!!” the voice screeched. “Oh Jesus Jesus Jesus NOW!!!!!!!!”)

Beautiful, the midget thought; I couldn’t have called at a better time. “Dr. Dashwood,” he said stiffly, “I don’t think you are really the sort who will add
stature
to the Fair Play for Bad Ass Committee.” He hung up jarringly.

Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful.

He set off for the post office and Stage Two of his campaign, smiling all the way—except once when he encountered one of the giant women, walking her enormous Saint Bernard, and he prudently crossed the street.

On March 2, 1984, Simon Moon found a peculiarity while scanning the Beast’s memory banks for the Chicago police.

There seemed to be two possible totals for the number of police officers in Chicago.

Simon was intrigued. He began searching all the Chicago police records. What he found was so interesting that he mentioned it to Clem Cotex, whom he happened to be meeting for lunch that day.

Cotex was not concerned with things as mundane as police records, so it took a while before he heard what Simon was saying.

“Hold it,” Clem said when it finally registered. “Did you say 198?”

“Yes, exactly,” Simon said. “There are pay vouchers for 198 officers less than there are uniforms for. In other words, there are 198 cops in Chicago who aren’t being paid. Weird, huh?”

“One hundred ninety-eight,” Cotex repeated, eyes wide. “The exact number … Were they all over the department, these extras, or were they clustered?”

“That’s even stranger,” Simon said. “They’re all in the Red Squad….”

   That same day Markoff Chaney was hiding in a coffee urn at Orgasm Research, hatching further mischief.

The clock struck midnight; the cleaning women left; and out crept Chaney with an evil grin.

Alas, he was not the only intruder that night, for as he padded lightly down the hall he suddenly heard a hoarse voice in one of the laboratories.

“Better than human, are you, you @*)@’&¢ing #$%&’#er? Better than human, my %$#&! Take this, you $%#)*$#-eating #$%%$*er!”

The voice was near inarticulate with rage, but it was clearly that of a jealous male, as any ethologist would easily recognize. Markoff slowly opened the door and peeked around the corner.

There in the dim light, fully dressed and in his wrong mind, stood the idol of millions, the world’s leading rock guitarist, Knorton (“Grassy”) Knoll, feverishly working with a monkey wrench upon an object the likes of which Markoff Chaney had never seen—a Giacometti robot with a gigantic human phallus.

“I’ll take you apart, you $%$#,” the demented rock musician was muttering. “I’ll tear your
$%$@¢
out by its roots, I will.” And he continued his assault, gargling and panting like one obsessed—which he was. “Man against machine,” he gasped. “First they out-think us, now they out-fuck us. It’s time for all-out war, by $%*@$….”

Markoff watched, silent as a cat, until the hebephrenic cuckold was finished with his foul work, and the machine stood, a heap of scrap metal, with the phallus removed. Then, after the musician slouched off into the night, the midget crept into the room and carefully wrote on the wall in stark purple crayon:

Spur-of-the-moment inspiration was his specialty.

   “In the typical Beethoven
scherzo
,” Justin Case explains with precise emphasis, “the elements are so mingled that, even though some may be the musical equivalent of cries of pain or grief, the total construction is both grotesque and gay.”

Like most rock musicians, “Grassy” Knoll was a Second Circuit neurogenetic type, quite incapable of the Machiavellian mentations of Third Circuit schemers like Markoff Chaney. When “Grassy” carried Ulysses away from Orgasm Research, he planned only on throwing it in the first garbage can he passed. On the spur of the moment, he threw it in an alley instead.

There it was found by a cat named Acapulco Gold—an ugly yellow Tom belonging to San Francisco’s best-known gossip columnist. The cat, with typical perversity, dragged it home.

The columnist was at work on a book of reminiscences
(The Roving I
, he planned to call it) when his wife staggered in from the kitchen, white-faced but with a devilish grin. “Honey,” she said coaxingly, “come see what the cat dragged in….”

Now, it so happened that the columnist was (like most writers in capitalist society) abominably underpaid, and, like Hassan i Sabbah X, he knew a one-of-a-kind item when he saw it. “This,” he pronounced, “will bring a pretty penny, when I find the right buyer.”

He found the right buyer at police court only two nights later, when a tip informed him that the notorious Eva Gebloomencraft had been arrested again, this time for putting laughing gas in the air-conditioning system at a benefit concert for the Epileptic Liberation Front.

The infamous Eva did not get called right away; the columnist had to sit through a dreary hearing on a black man who had caused a riot in a bar, throwing sixty fits and screaming that only a few minutes ago he had been a white atomic scientist at Los Alamos. When this obvious lunatic was finally removed from the court in a straitjacket (still shouting atomic secrets which he had evidently learned somewhere in the early stages of his delusion), Eva’s case was called.

Ms. Gebloomencraft, the only daughter of the most defiant and unrepentant Nuremburg war criminal, had been the holy terror of the international jet set ever since she reached puberty in the 1960s. Imagine the mind of Markoff Chaney in the body of Raquel Welch; good, you’ve got dear Eva. It was she who had spiked the punch with aphrodisiac PCPA at the Spanish embassy in London,
precipitating an orgy and several subsequent suicides among members of Opus Dei. She and she alone who smuggled Norman Mailer in drag to a top-secret strategy meeting of the Radical Lesbians. She again who hired the best freelance electronics experts to obtain tape recordings of J. Edgar Hoover’s boudoir adventures, and then sent them to Rev. Martin Luther King. (That gallant
naïf
, alas, destroyed them.)

Eva saw the possibilities of the Wildeblood relic as soon as the columnist broached the matter.

“Hot shit,” she said, eyes dancing.

Banana Nose Maldonado ate silently. He ate three kinds of cheese and pepperoni and black olives and sliced red peppers and anchovies for antipasto. Then he ate beef fillets in parmigiana and a side of lasagna, drinking occasionally from the Chianti glass. He did not speak until after he had finished the last sip of the wine and pushed back his plate.

“Proceed,” he said.

“The food was excellent, don,” said Starhawk, pushing back his own plate.

Banana Nose nodded formally, smiling. “Proceed.”

“You got a box of sugar today,” Starhawk said. “With some cocaine on top. You went to a hell of a lot of trouble to get it. Three guys got dead.”

“Imagine that,” said Maldonado. “You know a great deal about my private business.”

“Two of the guys were supposed to get dead,” Starhawk said. “But one of them was a thick Irishman and he didn’t die easy. The funny thing is, what with the excitement and all, he got shot once with the wrong gun. He was only supposed to be shot with his partner’s gun. It was supposed to look like they shot each other, fighting over the coke.”

“Son-of-a-bitch,” Maldonado said, softly as a prayer. “They tell me you’re a thief. They didn’t tell me you’re the Invisible Man. What were you doing, riding around in one of my boy’s back pockets?”

“You was to ask me,” Starhawk said, “I’d guess that your boys goofed up twice. After they got excited and shot Murph with the wrong gun, they forgot something.”

“Yes? Tell me?”

“They forgot to leave some of the coke behind. After all, that was supposed to be what Murphy and Mendoza were fighting over. You probably told them to leave a sizable amount.”

“Not a sizable amount. It doesn’t take much to cause two pigs to fight and kill each other.”

“The reason the cops had to be offed,” Starhawk said, “is that they didn’t treat you with proper respect. Trying to sell you your own merchandise, at street prices. They should have been satisfied with a commission, the way I see it. You can’t afford for guys to get out of line like that, it’s bad for business. And I kind of figure you also didn’t
like it that they were trying to cut each other out. So you decided to off both of them and just take your stuff back. The fuck, you probably got a grudge against cops going back seventy years or more.”

Maldonado nodded sadly. “My mistake was I didn’t imagine what a crazy son-of-a-bitch this Murphy was. He was coming to the meet with a box of shit and thought he could just laugh at me afterwards.”

“Hell,” Starhawk said. “You’re old, right, and you own a lot of respectable businesses. He didn’t think you had the stones to kill a cop anymore, is all. And he didn’t know Mendoza was planning to hijack him and had already contacted your boys for a price on the coke. So he couldn’t guess you’d set it up that two crooked cops shot each other.”

“We are all very careful,” Maldonado said, “and we all make mistakes. So, you come into this as the man Mendoza hired to hijack Murphy. Let me ask you—why do you come to me and talk of the standard commission for returning the snow? You could be on a plane right now, and sell it at street prices somewhere, and nobody the wiser. What does Maldonado have for you?”

“I bought an airplane ticket, first thing this afternoon. Then I started thinking. With Murph and Mendoza dead, I need new friends, and there just aren’t that many cops I am that close to. Don, I want you to be my friend.”

“The coke is worth at least three hundred fifty grand on the street. Standard commission is thirty-five grand. You are sure you will not later regret losing so much to make a new friend?”

“Don,” Starhawk said, “nobody ever regrets making a new friend.”

“It is agreeable to me,” Maldonado said. “Will you have some more Chianti?”

“Only a little,” Starhawk said. “It is bad for the reflexes.”

The letter was sent out May 1, 1984, to the White House and all the major media. It said:

And so on. POE had come into materialization again—caused by the same historical and neurogenetic forces.

“I think it’s a hoax,” said President Lousewart, who was really, of course, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Stuart, a.k.a. Hassan i Sabbah X.

“Can we be
sure?”
asked Mounty Babbit, who was now naught else but a walking automaton, controlled by the
quantum information system that had been a Vietnamese Buddhist.

“We can never be sure,” said Vice President Squeeze, who used to be Robert Pearson. “This is an absolute piss cutter.”

There was a depressed silence.

“How did our karma ever land us here?”
asked Hassan i Sabbah X.

Even Ped Xing wasn’t sure of the answer to that.

“Well,” Hassan said. “Let’s distribute the fucking money. This just accelerates what we had in mind all along….”

“We can’t do it,” Pearson said. “You’d be assassinated before the day is over.”