The Comedy is Finished (40 page)

Koo looks down in astonishment. Mark’s eyes are half-open, barely conscious; the blood pulsing from the forehead gash is rich and dark. And the room is filling with people; cops in uniform, plainclothesmen, men with pistols and rifles in their hands.

“Mister Davis! Mister Davis!”

Koo raises his head, seeing a face he saw on television. This face is saying, “Mister Davis, thank God you’re alive! I’m Michael Wiskiel of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

“Yeah, yeah, I caught your pilot. Is there a doctor in the house?”

“Mister Davis, we’ll get you medical care at—”

“Not for me. For this boy here.”

Wiskiel’s expression, when he looks at Mark, becomes stern, disapproving: “Somebody get that creature out of here.”

“Wait wait!” As hands start reaching, Koo leans over Mark’s head, spreading his own aching arms protectively above the boy’s body. “He’s not—Listen, he’s not what you think.”

Before Wiskiel can respond to that, he’s shoved
unceremoniously to one side, and there’s Lynsey Rayne. She’s crying, she’s laughing, she’s yelling out loud, and now she drops to her knees in front of Koo and flings her arms around him hard enough to about knock him out. “Koo! Koo! Baby!”

Koo’s painful arms go around her, he pats the back of her head, he says, “Hello, Lynsey. Hello, darling.”

“You’re alive!” Leaning back to look at him while still holding him tight, her face shiny and tear-streaked and beaming with a huge smile, her glasses crooked on her nose, she says, “I didn’t really believe it anymore, Koo. I’d given up. I was sure you were dead.”

“Me, too.”

But people are pulling at Mark again, and the boy has become conscious enough to struggle with them, feebly. Clutching Mark’s arms, Koo says to the cop-faces all around, “What are you doing? What’s the idea?”

Wiskiel, standing over them, says, “Mister Davis, your ordeal is over now. Let that fellow go.”

“No. He’s—” And Koo is aware of Mark looking up at him, eyes glinting in the bloodied face. “He’s my
son
.”

“Koo, Koo.” It’s Lynsey, patting Koo’s cheek, looking at him in maternal worry, saying, “Koo, don’t. You’ve been through so much—”

Squatting down next to Lynsey, the FBI man says, “Mister Davis, it’s normal for kidnap victims to become emotionally involved with their captors, dependent on them.”

“I’m telling you, it’s true. He’s not—” But can he claim Mark wasn’t part of the kidnap plot? Things are about to get very complicated, Koo can see that, but first things first. “He’s my son, and he stays with me.”

Mark mutters, barely loud enough for Koo to hear, “You’re gonna hate yourself in the morning.”

“You shut up,” Koo tells him.

Lynsey says, “Koo? Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

“I don’t have the first idea what I’m doing, Lynsey,” Koo says, absently patting Mark’s cheek, “but one thing is definite, and no fooling. This is my son. He’s my own absolute son, and I want you to be nice to him. He’s the only person I’ve ever met who needs love more than I do.”

“Yeah, but will you respect me in the morning?”

The audience roars; they’ve heard the line a hundred times, over the radio, on the big screen, on the tube. And now in person. And it’s always a scream.

But he thinks of Mark as he says it, and a look of concern briefly crosses his features. The custody, the trial—and what will come after? What kind of life will they have, separately or together?

But as the laughter crests and starts subsiding, as the big light turns toward him and the camera dollies forward on its track, the next line rises to his lips, the next gag; and the cloud that crossed his features passes. The audience leans forward.

Koo Davis is home.