Steel Beach (38 page)

How to get information out of somebody that doesn’t want to talk? That’s the question I’d asked myself before I started this escapade. The obvious answer is torture, but even I draw the line at that. But there’s torture and then there’s torture. If a man had spent most of his life watching passively as endless images marched by right in front of his face, spent every waking hour watching, how would he react if the plug was pulled? I’d find out soon enough. I’d read somewhere that people in sensory deprivation tanks quickly became disoriented, pliable, lost their will to resist. Maybe it would work with the Grand Flack.

Brenda and I spent a silent half hour sitting in chairs not too far from each other that might as well have been on other planets. When she finally spoke, it startled me. I’d forgotten she was there, lost in my own thoughts.

“She was going to use that thing on us,” she said.

“Who, Cricket? You saw it fall out of her hand, right? It’s called a goofball. Knocks you right out, from what I’m told.”

“You were told right. It was awful.”

“I’m really sorry, Brenda. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“It was. I asked for it. I deserved it.”

I wasn’t sure about that, but it
had
been the quickest way to show her what we’d narrowly averted. That’s me: quick and dirty, and explain later. She thought about it a few more minutes.

“Maybe she was just going to use it on the Flacks.”

“Sure she was; she didn’t expect to find
us
there. But you didn’t see her handing out pairs of glasses. We’d have gone down with the Flacks.”

“And she’d have left us there.”

“Just like we left her.”

“Well, like you said, she didn’t expect us. We forced her hand.”

“Brenda, you’re trying to apologize for her, and it’s not necessary. She forced my hand, too. You think I
liked
cracking her on the head? Cricket’s my friend.”

“That’s the part I don’t understand.”

“Look, I don’t know what her plan was. Maybe she had drugs on her, too, something to make the Flacks talk right there. That might have been the best way, come to think of it. The penalties for…  well, I guess for head-napping, it’s going to be pretty stiff if they catch me.”

“Me, too.”

I showed her the gun I’d bought from Liz; she looked shocked, so I put it away. I don’t blame her.
Nasty
little thing, that gun. I can see why they’re illegal.

“Just me. If it comes to it, you can say I held that on you the whole time. I won’t have trouble convincing a judge I’ve lost my mind. Anyway, you can be sure Cricket had some plan of attack in mind, and she improvised when we entered the picture. The story’s the thing, see? Ask her about it when this is all over.”

“I don’t think she’d talk to me.”

“Why not? She won’t hold a grudge. She’s a pro. Oh, she’ll be mad, all right, and she’ll do just about anything to us if we get in her way again, but it won’t be for revenge. If cooperation will get the story, then she’d rather cooperate, just like me. Trouble was, this story is too big to share. I think we both figured out as soon as we saw each other that one of us wasn’t walking out of that room. I was just faster.”

She was shaking her head. I’d said all I had to say; she’d either understand it and accept it, or look for another line of work. Then she looked up, remembering something.

“What you said. I can’t let you do that. Take the rap, I mean.”

I pretended anger, but I was touched again. What a sweet little jerk she was. I hoped she didn’t get eaten alive next time she met Cricket.

“You sure as hell will. Stop being juvenile. First revenge, then altruism. Those things are for very special occasions, rare circumstances. Not when they get in the way of a story. You want to be altruistic in your private life, go ahead, but not on Walter’s time. He’ll fire you if he hears about it.”

“But it’s not right.”

“You’re even wrong there. I never told you what we were going to do. You couldn’t be held responsible. I went to a lot of trouble to set it up that way, and you’re an ungrateful brat for thinking of throwing all my work away.”

She looked as if she was going to cry again, and I got up and got a drink. Maybe I wiped my eyes, too, standing there in the kitchen tossing down a surprisingly bitter bourbon. You’d think they’d do better at two thousand per night.

When the Grand Flack had had two hours with nothing moving to look at but the flickering lights cast on the other walls by the screen behind his head, I stuck my own head into the room, wondering if I could manage to keep it attached to my shoulders by the time this was all over. He looked at me desperately. His whole face was drenched with sweat.

“This series is one of my
favorites
,” he whined.

“So look at the tape later,” I said.

“It’s not the
same
, dammit! I’ve already heard the story line.”

I thought it was a bit of luck to have one of his favorite soap operas playing just when I needed a lever to pry information out of his head, then I thought it over, and realized that whatever was playing at the moment was bound to be his favorite. He watched them all.

“I missed David and Everett’s big love scene.
Damn
you.”

“Are you ready to answer some questions?”

He started to shake his head—he had a little movement from the neck stump, up and down, back and forth—and it was like a hand took his chin and forced it up and down instead. I guess it was the invisible hand of his addiction.

“Don’t run off,” I said. “I’ve got to get another witness.” I turned around, and bumped into Brenda, who’d been standing behind me. She wasn’t wearing her mask and I thought about getting angry about that, but what the hell. She was in it as an accessory, unless I could make my duress theory stand up in court. Which point I hoped never to reach.

We pulled up chairs on each side of the big screen and turned him around so he could see it. I thought this might take a long time, as his eyes never left the screen, never once looked at us, but he was quite good at watching the show and talking to us at the same time.

“For the record,” I said, “have you been harmed in any way since we took you on this little trip?”

“You made me miss David and Everett’s—”

“Aside from that.”

“No,” he said, grudgingly.

“Are you hungry? Thirsty? You need to…  is there a drain on this thing? A waste dump of some kind? Need to empty the beer cooler?”

“It’s not a problem.”

So I had him answer a few more questions, name rank and serial number sort of things, just to get him used to responding. I’ve found it’s a good technique, even with somebody who’s used to being interviewed. Then I got around to asking the question this had all been about, and he told me pretty much what I’d expected to hear.

“So who’s idea was it to assassinate Silvio?” I heard Brenda gasp, but I kept my eyes on the Flack. He pursed his lips angrily, but kept watching the screen. When it looked as if he might not answer I reached for the patch cord and the story came out.

“I don’t know who told you about it; we kept security tight, just the inner circle knew what was going to happen. I’d like his name later.”

I decided not to tell him just yet that nobody had told me. Maybe if he thought he’d been betrayed he’d pull no punches. I needn’t have worried.

“You don’t care about whose idea it was, though. You don’t care. All you need is someone who’ll admit to it. I’m here, so I’m elected to break the story, so let’s just say it was me, all right?”

“You’re willing to take the blame?” Brenda asked.

“Why not? We all agreed it was the thing to do. We drew lots to select a culprit to stand up for the crime, and somebody else lost, but we can work that out, just so I get time to warn them, get our stories straight.”

I looked at Brenda’s face to see how she was reacting to this, both the story itself and the blatant engineering of the story between me and the man who bought the hit. What I saw made me think there was hope for her in the news business yet. There is a certain concentrated, avid-for-blood look that appears on the faces of reporters on the trail of a
very
big story that you’d have to visit the big cat house at the zoo to see duplicated in its primal state. From the look on Brenda’s face, if a tiger was standing between her and this story right now, the cat would soon have a tall-journalist-sized hole in him.

“What you mean is,” Brenda went on, “you had someone picked out to go to jail if someone ever uncovered the story.” Which meant she still hadn’t completely comprehended this man and his church.

“Nothing like that. We knew the truth would come out sooner or later.” He looked sour. “We’d hoped for later, of course, so we’d have time to milk it from every possible angle. You’ve been a real problem, Hildy.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“After all we’ve done for you people,” he pouted. “First you get in the way of the second bullet. Serves you right, you getting hurt.”

“It never hurt. It passed right through me.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Those bullets were carefully planned. Something about penetrating the forehead, the cheek, something like that, spreading out later and blowing out the back of the skull.”

“Dum-dums,” Brenda said, unexpectedly. She looked at me, shrugged. “When you got hit, I looked it up.”

“Whatever,” the Flack continued. “The second one spread out when it hit
you
, and did way too much damage to Silvio’s face,
plus
getting your blood splattered all over him. You ruined the tableau.”

“I thought it was pretty effective, myself.”

“Thank Elvis for Cricket. Then, as if you hadn’t done enough, here you are
breaking the law
, making me break the story two weeks early. We never thought you’d break the law, at least not to
this
extent.”

“So prosecute me.”

“Don’t be silly. That would look pretty foolish, wouldn’t it? All the sympathy would be with you. People would think you’d done a public service.”

“That’s what I was hoping.”

“No way. But there’s still time to get the right spin on this thing, and do us both a lot of good. You know us, Hildy. You know we’ll work with you to get a story that will maximize your readership interest, if you’ll only give us a few things here and there in the way of damage control.”

There were a few things going on here that I didn’t understand, but I couldn’t get to the questions just yet. Frankly, though I’ve seen a lot of things in my career, done a lot of things, this one was about to make me gag. What I really wanted to do was go out and find a baseball/6 field and play a few innings using this terrifying psychopath as the ball.

But I got myself under control. I’ve interviewed perverts before, the public always wants to know about perverts. And I asked the next question, the one that, later, you wish you could take back, or never hear the answer to.

“What I can’t figure…  or maybe I’m dense,” I said, slowly. “I haven’t found the angle. How did the church expect to look
good
out of all this?
Killing
him, that I understand, in your terms. You can’t have a live saint walking around, farting and belching, out of control. Silvio should have seen that. Think how embarrassed the Christians’d be if Jesus came back; they’d have to nail the sucker up again before he upset too many applecarts.”

I stopped, because he was smiling, and I didn’t like the smile. And for just a moment he let his dreamy eyes drift from the screen and look into my own. I imagined I saw worms crawling around in there.

“Oh, Hildy,” he said, more in sorrow than in anger.

“Don’t you oh Hildy me, you coffee-table cocksucker. I’ll tear you out of that box and shit down your neck. I’ll—” Brenda put a hand on mine, and I got myself back under control.

“They’ll put you in jail for five hundred years,” I said.

“That wouldn’t frighten me,” he said, still smiling. “But they won’t. I’ll do time, all right. I figure three, maybe five years.”

“For murder? For conspiracy to murder
Silvio
? I want the name of your lawyer.”

“They won’t be able to prove murder,” he said, still smiling. I was
really
getting tired of that smile.

“Why do you say that?”

I felt Brenda’s hand on mine again. She had the look of someone trying to break it gently.

“Silvio was in on it, Hildy,” she said.

“Of course he was,” The Grand Exalted Stinking Baboon’s Posterior said. “And Hildy, if I’d been a vindictive man, I could have let you run with the first story. I almost wish I had. Now I’ll never enjoy David and Everett’s…  well, never mind. I’m telling you as a show of good faith, prove we can work together again in spite of your backstabbing crimes. Silvio was the one who suggested this whole thing. He helped interview the shooter. That’s the story you’ll write this afternoon, and that’s the story we always intended to come out in a few weeks’ time.”

“I don’t believe you,” I said, believing every word of it.

“That’s of little interest to me.”

“Why?” I said.

“I presume you mean why did he want to die. He was washed up, Hildy. He hadn’t been able to write anything in four years. That was worse than death to Silvio.”

“But his best stuff…  ”

“That’s when he came to us. I don’t know if he was ever a true believer; hell, I don’t know if
I’m
a true believer. That’s why we call ourselves latitudinarian. If you have different ideas on the divinity of Tori-san, for instance, we don’t drive you out of the church, we give you a time slot and let you talk it over with people who agree with you. We don’t form sects, like other churches, and we don’t torment heretics. There
are
no heretics. We aren’t doctrinaire. We have a saying in the church, when people want to argue about points of theology: that’s close enough for sphere music.”

“ ‘Hum a few bars and I’ll see if I can pick it up,’ ” I said.

“Exactly. We make no secret of the fact that what we most want from parishioners is for them to buy our records. What we give them in return is the chance to rub elbows with celebrities. What surprised the founding Flacks, though, is how many people
really do believe
in the sainthood of celebrities. It even makes some sense, when you think about it. We don’t postulate a heaven. It’s right here on the ground, if you achieve enough popularity. In the mind of your average star-struck nobody, being a celebrity is a thousand times better than any heaven he can imagine.”