Earth vs. Everybody (4 page)

“Yours of the 15
^th
inst. received, bzzzzz,” it said.

“What the…?” I
said.

I might as well
admit right now that I don’t understand electricity. Spit, I understand. And
dirt. And enriched flour. Those three things. Not electricity. If you can’t
hold it in your hand, or get it on your pants, I don’t get it. And if I did
understand electricity, I wouldn’t understand electricity that was wearing a
suit.

“You sent for me,
Boss?” asked Larry, nervously.

“I did.”

Larry lit up a
cigarette and started puffing on it. I could tell he was nervous. He wasn’t a
smoker. And he didn’t have any cigarettes. I guess it just shows what you can
do if you’re nervous enough. I reminded Larry out of the side of my mouth that
I was here. If things got rough, he could count on me. He told me to be quiet,
for God’s sake. I said I would. You got it, boss, I said. Quiet it is. Quiet
quiet quiet.

Mr. Theremin
started giving Larry hell about something he’d done wrong—some big operation
that hadn’t worked out right, or too much overtime being paid out in the third
quarter—something like that. I didn’t pay much attention. It wasn’t my
business. Pretty much nothing is. But I didn’t like seeing my boss taking it on
the chin like this.

I sidled over to
Larry. “You want me to slap him around a little, boss?”

“No!”

“Okay.”

I went back to
where I had been standing before and put my brain back on hold. It began
humming “The Girl From Ipanema”, as usual. I’m starting to get tired of that
song. And yet, it’s kind of catchy.

When I started
singing the song out loud, Mr. Theremin seemed to notice me for the first time.
He asked Larry who the big lug yelling in the corner was. Meaning me. Larry
said I was his new bodyguard, and that my name was Frank. Mr. Theremin and I shook
hands. I giggled uncontrollably as we shook.

Theremin asked me
if we had met before. I was pretty sure we hadn’t. I would have remembered a
ball of lightning in a suit, I’m sure. Usually when people say “Didn’t I meet
you somewhere before?” to me, I get cagey and say no. But in this case I really
didn’t remember meeting him before, so I didn’t just say no, I yelled it.

Mr. Theremin gave
me one more searching glance, then resumed chewing out Larry, screaming so loud
at one point during his tirade that Larry did a spit-take.

Theremin frowned.
“I told you not to do that in my office.”

“It’s my
trademark. It’s funny.”

“It’s funny on
your carpet. Not on mine.”

Theremin got up
from his chair and cleaned up the area around Larry. Then he looked at me. “Let
me vacuum up that dandruff. Fart out the window, please.”

“Yes, sir.” I
moved over to the window as requested and stood there quietly, wiping my nose
on the drapes.

Now I understood
why there were recycling cans all over the building. And why everybody had to
take their turn pushing a broom around the neighborhood. This guy was a real
neat freak. The fussiest guy I’d ever seen. The sooner I got away from him, the
better I’d like it. I’m not comfortable farting out of a window. I feel like an
idiot.

When the meeting
was over and we were walking back to Larry’s office, I said: “I notice the Big
Boss is made of electricity.”

“Yeah. 200,000
volts. More, if he’s mad.”

“He’s not from
around here, is he?”

“Him? Naw. He’s
from outer space.”

I wasn’t too
surprised to hear that. Most people from this planet aren’t made of
electricity. We’re made of meat or something. Pork, I think. And most of the
electricity we have around here can’t—or won’t—talk.

“He’s doing
pretty good for somebody who wasn’t born here,” I observed. “For a foreigner, I
mean.”

“I’ll say.
Self-made man, too, or so they say. I heard he came to this planet with
nothing. No money. No clothes. Didn’t even have a shape. Got his start as a
burglar, getting into people’s homes through power lines. He used the money he
got from that to start CrimeCo. Now he’s one of the richest formless alien
entities in the state. He still burgles occasionally, to keep his hand in, but
he mostly just does executive stuff now, like yelling at me.”

I was stunned. I
suddenly realized I had just solved the case of “The Amazing Electric Thief”!
My batting average had just rocketed up to .017! I briefly considered quitting
the crime game and going back to being a detective. Maybe I was on a roll.
Maybe I’d solve them all from now on. But after catching a glimpse of my dull
witless face in the mirror, I decided this was probably just a fluke. Something
that wouldn’t be repeated.

“The only other
thing I know about him,” Larry continued, “is that he doesn’t like being called
‘Buzzy’. So when you call him Buzzy, make sure he’s not around. When he’s
around he’s ‘Mr. Theremin’ or ‘Boss’. Not ‘Buzzy’ or ‘The Buzzmeister’.”

“Gotcha.”

I’d like to say
that that was the end of that, and that I thought no more about what I had seen
in the Big Boss’s office, and lived happily ever after as a crook, with this
being the happy ending of the book, or maybe the start of some great crime
adventure of mine—“The Unfired Crook Strikes Again” or something like that—but
it didn’t turn out that way. Much as I tried to fight it, my detective training
eventually kicked in. I found myself getting curious about this space alien who
lived among us and controlled all of our crime for us. Just because I wasn’t a
detective anymore didn’t mean I had stopped being nosy.

So, despite the
fact that it was none of my business, and no one was paying me to do it, and it
could bring me nothing but grief, I started to investigate. Discretely, of
course.

“May I help you?”
Buzzy asked, when I snuck into his office and began creeping along the floor on
my belly towards him.

“Is the elevator
broken?” he asked, when he saw me scaling the side of the building and looking
in his office window with five pairs of binoculars.

“Did you lose
something?” he asked, when he found me with my head in his car.

I always had a
glib answer to these questions, of course. You know me. But none of them were
very convincing. Just glib. After awhile I got the feeling Buzzy was beginning
to suspect me a little. But I didn’t have time to worry about that. I was too
busy snooping.

During the course
of this snooping, I noticed a secret inner office Buzzy had behind his regular
office. It had all sorts of odd looking furniture in it—furniture with no fixed
shape and plenty of extra plugs—and there were some paintings of electricity on
the wall (relatives, probably), and a poster I couldn’t quite read from the
window sill I was clinging to. I tried to gain access to this office, first by
telling Buzzy’s secretary that I was a Secret Inner Office Repairman, then, when
that didn’t work, by claiming to be part of the office. That didn’t work
either. I finally decided the inner office wasn’t important.

I began making
discrete inquiries about Buzzy among the other employees. “Have you noticed
anything odd about the Big Boss?” I would ask them. “Anything worth snooping
into?” Most said no, but one guy said he had seen something.

“Well, now that
you mention it,” he said, “I’ve noticed that he’s been spending a lot of time
investigating you lately.”

“Me?”

“Yeah, he’s got
us doing all kinds of background checks on you, questioning your neighbors, and
watching you pretty much around the clock.”

Well, that was
news to me. And pretty ironic too, when I thought about it. All the time I had
been investigating him, he had been investigating me! And it had been done with
such subtlety I hadn’t even noticed it. I noticed it now though—now that it had
been pointed out to me.

Now, when I
looked around a corner to snoop on Buzzy, I noticed all the faces looking back
around that same corner at me. With all of us taking notes and trying
unsuccessfully to be quiet.

And on my way
home, if I turned around quickly, I could see the whole company following me.
They were taking up most of the street back there. Couldn’t miss them, if you
knew what to look for.

Now, you would
think that this general lack of trust on both sides would have indicated that
my job might be in jeopardy. But no such thing, apparently. A month after I
started my investigations I was surprised to discover that I had been selected
to take part in the Organization’s biggest job of the year!

We were planning
to knock over the Central City Mint, the place where they make all the Yogi
Berra Quarters. And I was told I had been hand-selected by Mr. Theremin himself
to play a key role in this caper. This surprised and delighted me. I was
confused and proud.

Everyone involved
in the caper got packets that contained their individual instructions,
detailing the parts they would play in the operation. Mine said “Fall Guy” on
it. I hoped it didn’t mean that literally. I hoped it was just a code name for
something else. I was pretty sure it was.

All the guys at
work looked sad when they found out I had been selected for the job. Some
busted out crying. I wondered what it was all about. I asked one of them but he
just cried louder.

Shifty said it
was nice knowing me. And I said it sure as hell was. It was about time somebody
noticed how nice it was knowing me. I didn’t think to ask what he meant by that
until months later. It was too late by then.

So that’s how, on
the day of the robbery, I found myself standing outside the Central City Mint,
as the rest of the gang ran out of the building carrying sacks of shiny new
quarters. As they passed me they handed me whatever incriminating evidence they
had on them—masks, notes, guns, even fingerprints somehow. I put the
fingerprints in my pocket. This was my chief role in this caper—to collect
everything in one spot so that in the event our men were caught they wouldn’t
have any incriminating evidence on them. It would all be on me. And I would be
safe too, because… because… I took out my packet and read my individual
instructions again, frowning.

After the rest of
the guys had all gotten safely away, and I found myself still standing there
alone holding all the incriminating evidence, shifting some of it occasionally
so I could hold it better, and looking through my instructions again, it
occurred to me that I didn’t know what I was supposed to do next. They had
carefully briefed me up to this point, but either they hadn’t told me what to
do next, or I had forgotten it. And my instruction packet didn’t mention
anything about me getting away at all.

By this point the
police had begun arriving on the scene, and the guys who worked at the Mint
were all jumping up and down and yelling and pointing at me, so I figured I’d
better do something, even if it wasn’t strictly according to the approved plan.
It looked to me like I was going to have to start improvising at this point. I
hated to do that. That wasn’t the way we did things at CrimeCo (formerly Crime
& Sons). But I didn’t know what else to do.

I turned and
started to move away from the front door of the Mint. I figured that would be a
good start. To get away from here. Go stand in front of some other building—one
that hadn’t just been robbed. But before I could go five feet I stepped into an
open hole in the pavement and fell for a half a mile. At least, it seemed that
far. Might have been less. There had been a large water leak the day before and
it had eaten out a lot of the ground under the sidewalk. The city hadn’t gotten
around to fixing it yet and had just put a traffic cone there to warn people—a
cone that would explain the whole thing. I guess it was this cone that I had
tripped over. I wondered, as I fell, if I was setting some kind of record. I
mean, what was the record for falling to your death before this? Then,
suddenly, I stopped wondering about anything. Then I hit the bottom.

When I regained
consciousness and realized where I was, and what had happened to me, I started
looking for a way to get back up the shaft. I saw a handhold about forty feet
above me, but I couldn’t quite reach it, not even after I took off my coat and
stood on it. I was still thirty four feet short. I thought of yelling for help,
but then I remembered there were only cops up there. I didn’t want their help.
Not today, anyway. Anybody but them.

While I was
thinking over my predicament, the police started looking down the hole and
shouting at me to come out of there. I didn’t think they could see me—it was
pretty dark where I was—so I decided to play possum. Pretend I wasn’t there. Or
that I was dead. Maybe they’d go away if they thought I was not there and dead.
I tried to be as quiet as I could. I even shifted over a little to my right
where it looked like it was darker and quieter.

“Did you hear
something?” asked one of the policemen.

“Probably just a
possum,” said a voice from far away.

That’s when they
started shining lights down my hole. I tried to edge a little closer to the
side, and, even though I was already at the bottom, I somehow managed to fall
another twenty feet. More lights shined down the hole. More playing possum.

After they hadn’t
heard any noise from me for awhile—I had quit shifting around to better spots
by then, and my burping fit had stopped, and my stomach had stopped
growling—some of the cops started wondering if I was still down there. The
bottom of the shaft might connect to the sewer or the subway or something. I
might be long gone by now. I could be anywhere—maybe even sitting in their
offices with my feet up on their desks making long distance telephone calls, or
sitting in their living rooms watching TV with their wife and kids, while they
were wasting their time here looking into empty holes.