The Complete Roderick (68 page)

‘This kind of behaviour is very destructive,’ Indica said. ‘You’re a bunch of silly little boys. I suppose my ex-husband put you up to this. Well, you can tell Hank Dinks for me,
it won’t work.
It doesn’t matter how many hairdryers he smashes,
I am not coming back to him.
Now you can just clear out, all of you.
Move!’

No one spoke. Here and there a hammer dropped to the floor (where everyone was now looking). One man, who’d been tearing up a copy of Indica’s book, now fell to his knees, kissing the book and weeping. A few others felt suddenly the nakedness of their arms and rolled down their sleeves. A general shuffling and edging towards the door began, and soon the place was almost clear.

Roderick came out of his corner. Indica, I –’

‘You! God damn it, will you stop following me?’ She brought up the pistol smoothly, clasped it in both hands and aimed carefully at a point between those terrifying eyes.

‘Are you going to shoot me?’ he asked, and stopped.

…
running through a dead wood, some trees charred by lightning,
that was how the dream went.
In a clearing she saw a figure, a man in red armour, head to toe. He didn’t move, and gradually she realized that he was rusted fast, covered with red rust. Opening her fly, she pulled out an enormous oil can and went to work, annointing him all over. The rust dripped and ran, now it was blood. Suddenly his iron arms gripped her, squeezing her so tight she could hardly breathe. ‘Don’t scream,’ he said. ‘The woods are like tinder, one scream could set off a conflagration. Through the visor she could see the glowing eyes. She screamed
…

She started to put the gun away. ‘Who are you? Who are you?’

‘I’m your –’

‘Indica! Indica!’ It was Mr Shredder, calling from the spiral stairs. ‘Come up here, quick. Something’s happened.’

She went up at once to the little green office. A man lay on the green carpet, with a priest squatting next to him.

‘It’s Hank,’ said Shredder. ‘I was just showing him our nerve centre when the mob showed up.’

‘Hank? I don’t understand.’ Was that blood or oil on the priest’s fingers?

‘Same lunatic in that mob must of let off a gun,’ said Mr Shrudder. ‘Hank’s dead.’

Father Warren looked up. ‘He gave his life for us, for all of us. Now his fight must go on! We must go on smashing, smashing, smashing the machines!’

Mr Shredder looked alarmed and stood in front of his computer terminal. ‘I think we’ve had enough talk about smashing things today.’

The priest stood up. ‘Oh, I don’t mean literally smash machines with hammers. Those poor men today got the message a little wrong. No, we must smash the machines
inside us,
smash the
idea
of the machine.’ He held out a hand to Indica. ‘Won’t you join us? I know that in your heart you feel Hank was right – this is your fight too. Join the New Luddites.’

‘You don’t have to be so paternalistic, Father.
You
go smash the
machine inside
you
if you want,
I
happen to think it’s a screwloose idea.’ She turned to make her exit.

‘With you or without you,’ he said, ‘we’ll win.’

‘Over my dead body.’

Mr Kratt turned off the TV news and picked up his cheap cigar. It had gone out. ‘Well, bub, your little plan to reunite the Dinkses doesn’t seem to have worked out too well. Unless you figured on a riot and the guy getting killed.’

Jud Mill leaned forward suddenly, the long striped wings of his shirt collar crackling with the movement. He thrust out a lighter. ‘In the media management business, you gotta expect surprises. You notice I managed to get a clear shot of the cover of Indica’s book in that news item? And the title is mentioned twice.’

‘Kind of tough though for Fishfold and Tove, losing their big name.’

‘Well, sir, I been thinking about just that problem, and I think this priest, this Father Warren, is going to take over the Luddite leadership. You put him under contract now and you can get him cheap, get all the books you can out of this little movement before they get boring. Too bad the cops didn’t arrest Indica though, you can always get a lotta mileage out of the big name family murder angle.

‘Now about this next book on your list,
Red Situation,
what is it, a spy thriller kind of thing? I guess we could always pretend the author was really in the CIA or MI5 or something, but people are getting tired of authenticity too; we need a better angle.’ Mill sat back, shirt collar crackling, and looked at the world through half-moon reading glasses. ‘I understand this author is sitting in Nassau sending all this stuff in via satellite to a typesetting computer, right? What if we just shot down the satellite and blamed Russia? I know it’s expensive, but –’

‘Hell, bub, you’d be starting a war.’

‘Sure, but probably a limited war, and maybe only an international crisis. Meanwhile we get maximum worldwide coverage of our boy and his book, “The Book the Russians Trie’d to Stop!”’

Mr Kratt exhaled a cloud of oily smoke. ‘All sounds kind of crazy to me.’

‘But all part of the creative evolution of a literary property, and I do mean creative. Hell, I once got an author to sue himself for plagiarism – claimed a book he did under a pseudonym was ripped off. Of course the judge had him committed for psychiatric observation and the author ended up spending a year in a looney bin, but then we got
a great
book out of that,
Call Me Schizo …
yes, he ghosted that one for himself …’

‘For the last time,’ said the sergeant, ‘are you a Ludder or a Libber?’ He was counting change from Roderick’s pocket into a large envelope. ‘You gotta be one or the other.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you gotta. What were you doing when we arrested you?’

‘I was standing watching some guy painting on a wall. He was painting, “I bring you not peace but an electric carving knife”.’

‘Sounds like you’re a Ludder. Sit over there, after you sign for your twenty-nine cents.’

Over there was a long bench against the wall. Luke was there already, his saffron suit torn and dirty. Roderick sat between him and a fat man.

‘Are you all right, Luke? That cut on your forehead –’

‘Never felt better, Rickwood. Thinking of forming an escape committee, maybe digging a tunnel while we wait.’

‘But we’re on the tenth floor.’

‘Always some excuse to do nothing. Rickwood, don’t you realize?
Everybody’s on some floor or other.’

A
policeman took Luke out of the room. Roderick now noticed that the fat man was having an argument with his handkerchief. That is, he had drawn a face on the cloth and draped it over his hand to make a puppet.

‘The way I see it,’ said the man, ‘machines are responsible for almost every human problem today.’

The handkerchief coughed. ‘Bullshit, man. If you think machines are trouble, just look at the dumb bastards running them. Machines aren’t good or bad themselves, they don’t make the problems. Take a plough.’

‘Why don’t you take a flying plough yourself?’

‘A plough,’ said the cloth firmly, ‘feeds the hungry, man. You call that a problem?’

‘Sure, overpopulation. And don’t give me that old jive about a machine being no better or worse than the man who uses it, I heard that a hundred times. But can you tell me a tank ain’t evil? A guided missile?’

‘Okay, but who made them? Evil people. Get rid of evil in the human spirit,’ shrilled the handkerchief, ‘and you get rid of the so-called evil machines.’

‘You got it backwards, rag-head. Get rid of the machines and people won’t have to be so evil. They can be more – more human, like.’

The cloth made a face. ‘To be human
is
to be evil, you dumb twat! Get rid of the human race and you sure as hell get rid of all evil.’

‘Oh sure, and who benefits? The same damn machines that are exploiting us now!’ The fat man burst into tears, but the handkerchief remained unmoved.

‘That’s it, blame the machines for everything. Sometimes the human race reminds me of – of that cop over there, typing with two fingers Slow. Real slow.’

‘Stop it! Just stop it!’

‘You’re all sleepwalkers and bums. Gimme machines any time, at least they’re clean.’

A policeman called Roderick’s name and led him to a door at the end of the room. At the door, he looked back. The fat man was using the handkerchief to blow his nose.

The door led to a small office with dingy green walls, a scarred table with a folder on it, and a window that seemed smeared with shit. A single bare lightbulb with an enamel reflector hung over the single wooden chair. Two men watched Roderick from the shadows.

‘Sit down, Bozo.’ He sat down. ‘What do you think of our interrogation room?’

‘It looks like something out of the movies, heh heh.’

‘Heh heh, you hear that, Cuff? We got us an intellectual anus here.’

‘Yeah, lieutenant, a real sage sphincter.’

The beating seemed to go according to old movie arrangements, too; Roderick even glimpsed a rubber hose. He began to regret being equipped with pain circuits; it was hard not to begin disliking these policemen, who were probably only doing some kind of duty.

They played all the games he remembered from childhood, from the school playground: stand up sit down; no means yes and yes means no; and sorry I hit you oops sorry I hit you again …

‘Look at him,’ said the one called lieutenant. ‘Look at that innocent face, you wouldn’t think a face like that could do anything, would you? I mean does he really look like a guy that would rape a girl, stab her to death, chop up the body and hide the pieces in –’

Cuff was reading the folder on the table for the first time. ‘Uh, lieutenant. This is a different suspect.’

‘All suspects are the same, Cuff, you should know that.’

‘I mean this guy is from the Shopping Piazza beef.’

‘Then why do I tie him in with the Snowman Killer? Why? Why? He’s not the Moxon’s chauffeur?’

‘Nope, he’s clean.’

Lieutenant turned on normal lights. He was a normal-looking man, despite the propeller beanie he wore, no doubt to give himself character. ‘Isn’t that just it, though? He’s clean, he’s
too
clean. Anybody this clean has to be hiding something big.’ He tapped the side of his nose. ‘And
this
tells me he’s the Snowman!’ The tapping finger slowed, stopped, began exploring the interior of a nostril.

The finger pointed at Roderick. ‘All right,
you.
I’m gonna ask you one question and one question only. I want you to listen good. Were you at a party at the house of Everett Moxon, just before Christmas?’

‘Yes I was.’

The two cops exchanged a look.

‘Did you leave that party with a woman?’

‘Yes.’

‘A woman named Judi Mazzini?’

‘No, Connie McBabbitt.’

The two policemen groaned, withdrew to the other side of the room, and argued. ‘We had such a good case too, lieutenant.
Sergeant Placket says he even mentioned an electric carving knife. And he was at the party –’

‘Sergeant Placket is a kind of a sophisticated bowel, if you ask me.’

A fat man was waiting by the counter when Roderick collected his twenty-nine cents.

‘How’s the handkerchief?’

‘Mister, you got some problem? Huh?’

‘Sorry, I thought you were another fat guy, I mean someone else.’ Now he could see the man was a stranger, deeply tanned and wearing a cowboy hat. ‘I was kind of dizzy there, not feeling too well.’

‘Roderick Wood,’ said the counter sergeant. ‘Sign here.’

Somehow Roderick managed to lift the heavy pen and scrawl his name; to drag himself to the elevator and lean on the button. The fat cowboy got on the elevator with him.

‘You better take it easy there, partner. You look plumb sick.’

‘No I … feeling dizzy I

‘Guess I better take you into protective custody then.’ The man handcuffed Roderick’s left wrist to his own right.

‘What? Mm? Eh?’

‘The name’s O’Smith, I’m a kinda bounty hunter. And there sure is a good price on your little old microchip head, son.’

‘Uh?’

‘Yep, I know who you are, I know all about you, how they built you over at the University, how they sneaked you off to live with them Dinkses over in Nevada, then when they split up you went to Nebraska to live with Ma and Pa Wood, then finally you hightailed it up here to the big city, I know all that.’ They left the elevator and O’Smith gave a friendly nod to the desk sergeant on their way out.

It was night-time, to Roderick’s surprise. But he would have been just as surprised by daylight. Time, after all, was, is, has past, would be, will have been passing …

‘I been following your trail for some time, son. Mr Kratt and Mr Frankelin wanted you real bad, you’re gonna make their fortune. After you make mine, that is. Come on, the car’s right across the street here. Careful on the ice, don’t want you to fall down and wreck any of that high-tone hardware. You might not
believe it to look at me, but I got a few artificial parts myself, I -hey! What’s that gol-durned fool think he’s doin’? Hey!’

A car with no lights careened around a corner, fishtailed, picked up speed, and drove straight at them. At the last minute, the driver hit the brakes and threw the car into a skid.

Roderick was aware of being thrown into the air and falling in snow. He lay on his back, watching the stars. One by one, they went out.

The four boys from Digamma Upsilon Nu got out of their car and looked at the victims.

‘They look dead to me. Jeez, this guy’s lost his arm!’

‘My old man’ll kill me, drunk driving with no lights - and hit and run.’

‘We haven’t run yet.’

‘No but we’re gonna. Hey look, this stiffs got the other one’s arm. In a handcuff! Cops!’

‘Yeah, hey, there’s the station right there. Aw Jeez, we’re all gonna be in trouble.’

Someone bent with a match over Roderick. ‘This ain’t no stiff, it’s a dummy, look the wig’s coming loose, you can see metal.’

‘And this arm is artificial - the other one must be a dummy too. Or something.’

As if by a prearranged plan; they loaded Roderick, with O’Smith’s right arm, into their car and drove off. In a fraternity famed for practical jokes, there would always be some use for a realistic dummy.