The Müller-Fokker Effect (30 page)

Skeeter turned on a light. It was dead quiet in the hotel room. The faint woodpecker sound of a machine-gun, twenty floors below, competed with Wes’s cautious breathing—his two friends held theirs.

‘Guess I had a bad dream. Is it—all over down there?’

‘No sir. Looks bad, Wes.’ Skeeter two-fingered his pack of Luckies up from his shirt pocket, flicked one into the air and caught it in his mouth. ‘Looks like the nigras is taking over.’

‘Just say that again, mister, and I’ll have your guts hanging on the Christmas tree
.’ A chair scraped in the adjoining room. ‘Who’s in there?’

‘Nobody, Wes. Just some of the boas. Oh yeah, and a couple Secret Service agents. They said they got to pertect you cause you’re a presidential candidate. I guess they already evacuated the President.’

‘Get them
OUT!
And bring everybody else in HERE.’

Wes stood up and gripped the bottom edge of his denim jacket, to steady himself. His knees didn’t feel too good. When the group of White Shirts filed in, he looked hard at every face. ‘Line ‘em up over there.’

‘FALL IN AT ATTENTION!’

‘All right, men.’ Wes began to pace, avoiding certain configurations in the carpet pattern. ‘We know who’s with us and who’s agin
now
, don’t we? Like the Klan. Look what they did to Merle and them boas. You know why? I’ll tell you.

‘Because under them fancy hoods, the Ku Klux Klan is nothing but a bunch of full blood niggers!’

‘Sir?’

‘I know it’s hard to believe, but there’s no other explanation.

Besides, I got
proof
. Documentary evidence that the Klan numbers among its members no fewer than fifty coal-black leaders! I got their names right here!’

What he waved was the hotel menu, but since his men were all at attention, they couldn’t gaze directly at it. He paced the entire pattern three times, then turned to face them again.

‘I’ll tell you something else I know.
I know there is a nigger in this very room, passing for one of us!’

Everyone jumped.

‘Is it me, Wes?’ ‘Who is it, Wes?’ ‘A real nigger?’ ‘’Tain’t me, is it, Wes?’

‘SHUT UP AND GET BACK TO ATTENTION!’

Pete Willis, a sickly smile on his narrow head, stepped forward. ‘Is it me, Wes?’

‘Yep. It purely is, Pete. But I’m not letting anyone take
my
word for it. I’m going to show you all scientific proof!’

Wes strode over and grabbed a handful of Pete’s thick blond curls.
‘First
, kinky hair!’

‘But Wes, I ain’t…’

Without warning, Wes threw his hardest punch. The taller man staggered back, blinking. Blood spurted from his nose.

‘Second
, no bone in his nose!’

At a signal, someone laid a piece of pipe across the small of Pete’s back. As he fell to his knees, his hands went out instinctively. Wes seized one and held it bent back, thumb in the palm to keep the fingers fanned.
‘Third
, take a look at them fingernails.
Purple fingernails are a scientific proof of black blood.’

The men all looked, imagining purple in Pete’s quite ordinary fingernails.

‘Take this nigger and throw him out the window.
I MEAN RIGHT NOW!’

They obeyed. Wes turned away and pretended to study a wall map. Not that he didn’t want to watch it. It was just that he had a little smile to hide. The whole fingernail business had been a ruse, but with a purpose.

It stood to reason the niggers would have put more than one spy among his key officers. And only a fool could have not noticed how many men, as soon as he mentioned purple fingernails,
looked at their own hands!

It was nearly dawn, and still no one stirred in the headquarters of Cumminism. But it was a cinch that Pé had to come out of there sometime.

It was a cinch they had to go away sometime. It was still the same car, the same people. That meant they were working alone. For the time being no one else knew they were working on the case. Whenever they left to get a meal, he’d be ready.

Fouts settled his crinolines about him, peeled an Almond Joy, and watched the Early Bird movie,
Blowup.

At dawn, Grover noticed for the first time Amy’s new glasses. Their pearly frames gave a softness to her sleeping face, and brightened her lovely eyes when she awoke.

Or maybe it wasn’t the glasses at all. He leaned toward her, feeling the warmth of her leaning toward him…it wasn’t hard, in this fresh light, to pretend they were kids again…in Dad’s car…

His elbow brushed the radio button.

‘…tional emergency. President Reagan has already been evacuated from the city. There is a strong possibility that if the riot is not brought under control by noon, General Weimarauner will call for artillery and bombing.

‘Now I’ll turn you over to Bill Burgens, who I think is somewhere by the banks of the Potomac. Bill?’

‘…noise down here is terrific, Dave…you hear is the…playing
Dixie
. The whole city seems to have gone mad, and even the Army doesn’t seem to…from where I’m standing I can see the whole shopping district ablaze, that’s about…miles away, so you can imagine…and here come two soldiers carrying a color TV set. I guess they confiscated it from looters, but it’s hard to…and say, here’s a lady whose entire family was killed by a grenade. Husband, brother, and…how many children was it, ma’am?’

‘Yes.’ A tiny, exhausted voice.

‘How many was it? Four or five?’

‘Four or five, what difference does the number…?’

‘And how do you feel about this, ma’am? I’ll bet you just feel terrible, don’t you? Must be a great shock.’

Grover switched it off. ‘We’re too late, Amy. It’s the end!’ Tears ran down the tributaries under his eyes. Shaking his fist at the building, he screamed, ‘You win, Russky! You win,
JOE STALIN AND BENEDICT ARNOLD!’

‘Grover, we still have What’s In The Safe.’

He thought about it a moment, regaining his natural color. ‘What a grand idea, Amy. They may get us in the end, but mean- while we’ll blow that traitor soldier and all his secret codes and radios to
aitch ee double toothpicks!’

It was the first time he’d ever sworn or cursed in front of her, and Amy realized what a strain Grover must be under.

‘But how can we go and get What’s In The Safe?’ she asked. ‘Our quarry might fly.’

‘Don’t you worry,’ he said. ‘It isn’t really in the safe at all,
it’s right here in the car!
I moved it yesterday—had a feeling it might come in handy!’

And so saying he hugged her till she gasped, and grinned so hard she thought his dentures would explode in her face.

The two little sisters of the Amish conferred over their patient.

‘I’ve seen a lot of labors,’ said Sister Mary Jane firmly, ‘and that woman isn’t having a baby.’

‘But how can you be sure? Maybe with big people it’s different.’

Without going into physical details, which she could not delicately do, Sister Mary Jane could not explain. ‘There’s no—dilation,’ she said finally. “Nothing at all. What’s more, I have a feeling that woman is dying.’

‘Dying! We must save the child!’

‘Impossible. A Caesarian without instruments? What’ll I use, a steak knife?’

‘Nothing is impossible with God, little sister,’ said the older woman patronizingly. ‘However,
there is one alternative we haven’t mentioned.’

‘Luckily we’ve brought a syringe.’

The hijacker introduced himself as Vladimir Barnes, a Soviet agent. Bert and Marilyn tried once more to explain it to him: there just wasn’t enough fuel to get to Cuba. Hal, the pilot, showed him the fuel gages and some calculations.

‘That’s all we have, honest, mister. About enough to get us as far as Atlanta—with a lot of luck. Cuba’s just too far away! Why didn’t you grab a plane going to Miami?’

The hijacker stopped smiling. ‘I’m not accountable to you!’ he snapped. ‘Fly the damned plane to Cuba and no excuses!’

Bert tried again. ‘Look, we’ll make you a deal. We’re almost over Washington now. Let us set down there, and we’ll forget all about that gun—and everything you said. What could be fairer than that?’

‘CUBA!’

‘But you could hijack another plane out of Washington…’

‘
I GOTTA BE IN HAVANA BY TONIGHT!’

Marilyn wept, leaning her forehead against Bert’s wings. ‘Are we really out of fuel?’ she whispered.

‘Yeah. We’ve been circling Washington for an hour already. I don’t know whether this guy’s stupid or just nuts.’

Vladimir Barnes wondered if the crew were stupid or just nuts. Clearly they were unused to taking orders. How to make them understand that he had to be in Havana by eight p.m.; that he had no money to get on another flight? But they would probably offer him money, and then, after they were safe on the ground, turn him in to the authorities. No, there was no way but to make them press on southward.

For months he had been hanging around Minneapolis trying to get a lead on a certain CIA man, of whom Barnes knew only that he was a chess player and an assassin. Now, at the last moment, he learned the CIA man was in Cuba, and within hours of assassinating one of the most valuable men in the world—the Albanian naturalist, Prof. Aa, a chess Grand Master.

At eight o’clock, in the ballroom of the Hotel Hoy No Hay in Havana, the finals of the Communist International Chess Tournament would begin. It was there (if Barnes’s information was correct) that the CIA man would try to murder Aa—thus destroying Albania’s chess prestige in the eyes of the world.

The plan was simple: Aa always opened with the ‘Albanian Defense’ opening, moving the queen’s knight first. Knowing this, the CIF man would have substituted for the piece a tiny, live, envenomed seahorse.

Diabolical! Vladimir Barnes shuddered to think of the scene in the ballroom if he should not arrive in time…

Prof. Aa, an enormous, beef-colored man with white cropped hair, sits down with difficulty. The gilt chair keeps trying to skid away from under his roundness. The other man, ‘Air CIA’, whose face is featureless, makes a pretense of being finicky. He must adjust all the pieces and dust them off before the game commences. And makes the sinister substitution. He has drawn black. Now, polite and expressionless, he waits for Aa to begin.

How did CIA get here? He is himself a chess genius. Some months ago, he slipped into the Soviet Union and entered the first playoffs. Calculating each step, he deliberately draws a game or two to put himself in different ‘rounds’—moving inexorably up the long branched chain of games to face Aa in the finals.

Aa punches the clock. His pink sausage fingers hover over the queen’s knight—but then perhaps choose a conventional king’s pawn opening.

CIA is in trouble. He must now quickly force the master to move that knight. Already it is beginning to wilt—will it still be standing and alive in four or five moves?

The game draws on; the: knight continues to wilt. Other players at other tables are taking the full time limit over their moves; not so the CIA man. Aa moves quickly, too, confident by now that he is up against a rank amateur. The idiot seems to be offering piece after piece for the taking, without gaining any any visible advantage.

Finally, on the eighth move, CIA offers his queen to the Albanian’s knight. Aa hesitates. Can this be a trick? He runs through the possibilities like a computer sorting punched cards. Finally, too bored to go on, he seizes the knight.

‘Aa!’

The gilt chair goes over, skidding across the parquet to clatter against a potted palm. Aa leaps to his feet holding the wriggling knight up to the light.

‘Hippocampus…’ he muses, and sprawls across the board.

Then CIA—does what? Pretends concern? Tries to slip away? Draws a gun and shouts (unnecessarily, to the roomful of immobile, engrossed men), ‘Nobody move!’

Marilyn sighed. ‘Guess there’s only one thing to do.’ Unbottoning her uniform jacket, she walked toward the muzzle of Barnes’s gun.

‘Mr Barnes, J want to make a deal with you. If you’ll let us land in Washington…’

When she was fully naked except for her cap the hijacker grinned again, showing his full pink gums. ‘A good idea, miss. I won’t guarantee anything…but we’ll see.’ He started unhooking his cummerbund—an easy job, for it was turned around back to front.

‘But, Wes, we known old Travis a
long time
. Hell, he was our old buddy in Mud Flats..’

‘Skeeter, you just shut your mouth and throw that body out the window. He was a nigger and you know it.’

‘But Wes! We done kilt near the whole general staff of the White Shirt organization. Ain’t nobody left now but you and me. Are you sure they was
all
niggers?’

‘No back talk, Skeeter!’ Wes picked up his automatic. ‘Else I might get to wondering why
you
are such a stubborn, nigger-loving son bitch.’

And of course he was wondering that already.