Strange Wine (24 page)

“Now,” Cordwainer Bird said. “Now you’ll tell me where their headquarters is located. Not the mind-slaves, not the puppets like yourself…but the leaders. The head of the conspiracy.”

“Never…” she whispered.

“Oh, yes. Now.” And he went and searched out what he needed and came back to her, and held it up for her to see. Deadlier than any martial art, capable of extracting information from Mt. Rushmore. “Tell me.” She said nothing, and he opened the book and began to read.

Within a page, she was babbling, begging him to stop.

Bird hated to sink to their level, hated to use weapons this vile and unholy; the effect on the mind of the victim was so pronounced, so clearly debilitating that only under the most severe conditions would he even contemplate such horror. He laid aside the copy of
The Prophet
by Kahlil Gibran and gave Mrs. Jararacussu another drink of water.

She was very nearly incoherent.

Finally, by speaking softly and reading passages from W. S. Merwin and Joyce Carol Oates and William Kotzwinkle and Randall Jarrell, he was able to bring her back to a semblance of rationality.

“Now,” he said, “where are they hidden?”

She tried to speak, but her lips were dry and cracked. A mad coruscation of lights flashed in her eyes. Kahlil Gibran could do that to an unstable personality.

Bird searched behind a counter until he found a pack of Kleenex. He moistened a handful of tissues and wet her lips. She began speaking, but Bird could barely hear her. He leaned close as she hung there from the Rodin, and after a moment he was able to make out her words.

“I never knew. I never actually read any of it. They promised me I’d never have to read any of it. This is the first time I’ve…it…it was horrible. Is
this
what I’ve been making people buy? I’m so ashamed…so terribly ashamed, Mr. Bird.”

For an instant Cordwainer Bird’s chill expression softened. “I understand. Consider this the first moment of your new life. Now, quickly, where do
they
headquarter themselves?”

“You’ll find them under the lady–”

The first burst of machine-gun fire tore away her throat. Bird threw himself sidewise, skidded through the snowflake mound of McKuen booklets, and came up running. Behind him he could hear the thunder of assault boots on the floor; he tried to separate the sounds and made an estimate of at least half a dozen attackers. There was nothing he could do for Mrs. Jararacussu. Her own people had silenced her. He dashed for the front window of Brentano’s, leaped up into the display case, grabbed the great ax, and swung it at the glass. He needn’t have bothered. A rain of machine-gun bullets shattered the front window to his left and began tracking right to him. He flung himself down and rolled, under the trajectory of the slugs, straight out through the window and into the snow-filled avenue.

He cast one quick glance behind him. Yes, six of them. Hooded, carrying Brens and machine pistols, dressed in black-and-white. And Bird saw one other thing.

But the moment was done; he raced away down the silent, darkened length of Fifth Avenue.

When the hooded assassins leaped from the shattered window, scattering shredded, slime-dripping chunks of best sellers onto the sidewalk, Fifth Avenue was empty. It was as though the little man had levitated or dematerialized himself. But he still loomed large in their thoughts; they would remember him.

And Cordwainer Bird would remember the other sight he’d glimpsed in that stolen moment: the sight of
their
agent, the demonic Mrs. Jararacussu, hanging like a slaughtered carcass from the forefinger of Rodin’s masterpiece.

“Cordwainer Bird’s genealogy is in the inset (upper right-hand corner). E. B., as noted on the main chart, is the Earl of Burlesdon, Robert Rassendyll, the fifth earl. Two of his descendants were Ralph Rassendyll and Rudolf Rassendyll (of
The Prisoner of Zenda
and
Rupert of Hentzau
). Ralph and Rudolf were cousins. “Ralph married R. D., or Rhoda Delagardie. Rhoda’s descent is more detailedly traced in the chart and Addendum 2 of
Tarzan Alive
. Her first, and brief, marriage to Lord John Roxton (of Doyle’s
The Lost World, et al
.) resulted in one child, Richard Wentworth or R. W., The Spider. She remarried, to Ralph, and the Rassen-dylls moved to New York, where Ralph managed the American affairs of a giant British firm. She bore him Allard Kent Rassendyll (A.K.R., The Shadow) and Bruce Hagin Rassendyll (B.H.R., G-8 of G-8 and his Battle Aces). Her youngest child, Rhonda, did not engage in flamboyant outlawry, but she was a family black sheep. Despite her parents’ objections, she married Jason Bird, a part-Jewish acrobat and vaudeville night-club comedian…. “Jason’s father was Richard Cordwainer Bird, an Irish photographer. His mother was Millicent, daughter of a Dublin Jew, Leopold Bloom. (See James Joyce’s
Ulysses
for a perhaps overly detailed account of Bloom. See also
Tarzan Alive
for his relationship to the Greystokes, of whom Tarzan is the most outstanding member.)

“Jason and Rhonda’s only child was Cordwainer Bird. Cordwainer was born in 1934 in Painesville, Ohio, in a rooming house near a theater. (Not, as some maintain, in the women’s room of the theater.) Cordwainer grew up in Ohio, though not very far. His growth stopped when he reached the height of four feet….

“When TV producers and directors ruined his scripts, he punched them in the mouth and went on to write science fiction. He has gathered together more awards, Hugos and Nebulas, in that field than any other writer. He has won the Edgar Allan Poe award from the Mystery Writers of America. He…then became a mainstream novelist and a militant foe of evil. Though he is nowhere near as tall as his ancestors and relatives, the Scarlet Pimpernel, Rudolf Rassendyll, the Shadow, Doc Savage,
et al
., he has their heroic spirit and their dedication to fighting wickedness. But, unlike these heroes of an earlier age, who fought to preserve The Establishment, he fights to
destroy
The Establishment. One of The Establishments anyway.”

Excerpt from
Doc
Savage:
His Apocalyptic Life
by Philip José Farmer (revised paperback edition; Bantam Books, 1975)

He needed help, advice; that was paramount and obvious. He decided to call on his Uncle Kent. The old man was still lucid, from time to time, and this
had
to be one of those times. He took the IRT uptown, spending his time in transit breaking the nose of a female dip whose hand kept wandering into his hip pocket, and reading the arcane messages left in orange, purple, black, and green by RIKKI TIKKI 101 on the walls, deck, overheads, and windows of the subway car. He disembarked at 116th Street, bounded up the stairs of the station, pausing only momentarily to kick senseless three Pedestrians of the Apocalypse who were mugging a seventy-year-old arthritic washerwoman, charged out of the subway kiosk, crossed Broadway through the speeding traffic, and headed for his uncle’s apartment building.

Allard Kent Rassendyll, who had long ago changed his name to Kent Allard, and then changed it again a hundred times–depending on what case he was involved in–but who had always been just one man–The Shadow–was now eighty-one years old, and fallen on hard times. On several occasions, when his nephew Cordwainer discovered that the old man had hocked his fire opal ring, the mysterious Girasol, he had scraped together the money necessary to reclaim it, and had returned it, taking special care to leave it in a drawer or under a sofa pillow so the old man would not realize how much in Cordwainer’s debt he was. He was a proud old man, and deserved–Bird firmly believed–nothing but honor and dignified twilight years, in return for the decades he had spent as America’s foremost archenemy of evil. It was fortunate his memory was spotty: pawning and finding the ring ten times in six years might otherwise have seemed odd to that once razor-sharp analytical mind.

Under the name Phwombly, a variation on one of the aliases he had employed in the Thirties, he lived in one awful room in an apartment building on West 114th Street between Broadway and the Henry Hudson Parkway. About this building, the kindest description that could be summoned was, perhaps, that it had known less crummy days.

In the early Twenties it had been an elegant example of gracious Uptown West Side Manhattan living. Ten stories high, four huge apartments to a floor, with a common foyer decorated in the then-stylish manner of
L’Exposition des Arts Decoratifs
in Paris, it had been a residence of wealthy and graceful society
mavens
whose descendants had inevitably moved downtown to Gracie Mansion and other loci of power.

Now, as Bird approached the structure, it looked like nothing so much as the fever-dream of an architectural Quasimodo. It was dark and weathered, beaten down, street-level windows boarded and barred. What had once been a canopy was now a tattered battle flag of a war no one had even known was being waged. But the impecunious Columbia students, the penniless Puerto Rican immigrants, the frustrated blacks, and the gone-to-rot septuagenarians in what The Great Society called “their sunset years” had won that war. Uncle Kent’s building was a wreck. A shambles. A prison of dead dreams.

As Bird stepped into the dingy lobby through a leaded glass door hanging by one ornate hinge, he was assaulted by the piping shrieks of old women.
A stridency of termagants
, he thought.
A daisy chain of shrews. A spike of shrikes
.

The lobby was jammed with ancient, withered, tiny little women, all of them in bedroom slippers and faded wrappers. Their voices crackled and shattered against the marble walls of the lobby. They seemed to be knotted up around one man, a figure in blue, wearing a cap. It took a moment for Bird’s eyes to adjust to the dimness of the lobby–all light bulbs in the ceiling had been broken out eternities earlier–before he realized it was a postman.

He was in his middle twenties, a long-haired, bespectacled street type obviously working the Christmas overflow for a few dollars to supplement what he earned at some honest job downtown. And now he stood with his back to the wall, letter box receptacles behind him, a double-tiered unit set flush with the wall and referred to, in postal parlance, as a gang box unit. The old women had caught him as he’d begun to disperse the mail. His postal key on its long chain was still inserted in the lock of the master door of the upper tier. The master door had been pulled down but before he could begin to drop mail into the receptacles from above they had swamped him. Now he was pinned flat.

Bird edged around the mob, stood half-concealed by a marble pillar, and tried to decide whether to help the postal official or not. His mind cast back over all the
do not roll, fold, crush, crease, or bend
mail that he had received rolled, folded, crushed, creased, and bent. Also dropkicked. In the moment of hesitation, the postman screamed, “Ladies, ladies! I’m not going to deposit this mail till you all get the hell away from me! Please!”

There was panic in his face, and his voice labored to sound commanding, but there was a discernible crack in every syllable. The old women pressed closer for a moment, swaying in on him like telegraph vines aching for a message; spittle and madness were everywhere. Then, abruptly, there was a chilling sound that filled the lobby. It came from nowhere and everywhere, according to tradition. A voice as menacing, as sepulchral, as a cry for revenge from beyond the grave. It rose above the babble and its timbre held the vibrations of supernatural authority (though Bird detected a faint croaking far back in the glottis). WHO KNOWS WHAT EE-VIL LUUUURKS IN THE HEARTS OF GRUBBY, VENAL OLD WOMEN WHO WEAR SUPPORT HOSE? THE SHUH-ADOW KNOWS! And then there was a chilling laugh that rose and rose and spiraled and soared and twisted like smoke from a pillaged city; a laugh that penetrated marble and steel and human flesh and froze the thoughts in the brain. One of the lenses of the postman’s eyeglasses cracked.

Bird did not move. The old women, many of them clutching their cats, did not move. The postman did not move. Then, slowly, with fear, with the caution of a lemming herd brought to awareness at the final fatal moment that it was about to tumble over a cliff, the throng moved back gingerly. They cleared a space around the petrified postman.

“What the hell kind of a nuthouse
is
this?” he mumbled, lens shards tumbling down one cheek. There was no answer. So he began to tremble. GET ON WITH IT, NITWIT, the voice said, and it was a command not to be ignored. The postman pulled loose the key from the master door, inserted it in the lower tier door, opened the metal plate, and began very quickly depositing Social Security checks in their proper receptacles. Bird watched; not the postman, or the old women huddling together, but the darker corners of the lobby. He thought he detected movement, a swirl of smoke, a whisper of dark cloth, an eddy of wind, a substanceless substance coming in his direction.

Finally, the postman finished his chores, locked the tier doors, and bolted through the mob and out the open front door, into the winter chill, even as the old women surged forward. Bird thought of the scene in
Zorba the Greek
where the old ladies wait for Bouboulina to die so they can confiscate her possessions: black-clad creatures crouched in bright-eyed mercilessness. They rushed the gang boxes and opened them hurriedly, withdrawing the checks that would permit them to have one meal of hamburger and onions tonight instead of canned pet food. One by one, then in clots, then in large groups, then again one by one, they rushed away from the mailboxes, clutching their cats, bedroom slippers making whispering sounds against the marble floor. Doors slammed and the sounds of skeletal shufflers climbing the stairs were all that remained…save for one old woman.

She stood in front of her open mailbox, her stick-thin hand inside the aperture, feeling, feeling. Her hand came up empty. Her check was not there. The beneficent government had fucked up. Tears stood in her tired eyes. Her body slumped into an exhausted S. Her shoulders trembled. She dropped her cat. It slipped around her feet and looked up at her. Bird felt helpless; he clenched his teeth; an auto graveyard junk compacter squeezed his insides. Who had brought this old woman to this place, this condition? It wasn’t just age and being useless and unwanted, it was some entropic force, some nameless conspiracy of inarticulate inhumanity that reduced people to being open bird mouths, raw nerve ends, naked animals, husks deprived of visions, flesh waiting to rot. It wasn’t just that some bureaucratic fiefdom had slipped a cog. That could happen. No system is perfect. It was that this lined and discarded creature had been brought to a final state of subsistence where one day’s delay of her check could render her helpless and terrified.