The Sex Sphere (6 page)

“Yay!”

“I’ll…get some.” Membrane had the habit of pausing dramatically in the middle of some sentences, as if to accumulate the necessary charge of sincerity to finish his…message.

He extracted two cans of Coke from the icebox under his plastic bar, a squat affair stamped in parquet repetitions. He gazed pleasantly at Sybil. “…Something for you?”

“Tomato juice?”

“V……8
^®
?”

“That will be fine. Can I see the note?”

“Certainly….”

Sybil waited awhile for the rest of the sentence, then plugged in another token.

“Can I see the note?”

Membrane was draped over his little bar, measuring out the Cokes and the V–8.

“Would you kids like a Milky Way
^®
?”

“Yay!!”

“Can I see the note?”

“It’s partly…”

“…in Italian,” Sybil interrupted, rising to her feet. “Show me the fucking note!”

“Your Mommy is…under stress.”

“BAAAAAAOOOOOOOOUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!”

“Poo an’ pee, poo an’ pee!”

“We’re all under stress, Mr. Membrane. And you aren’t helping much. My husband has been kidnapped, and you won’t even begin to discuss it. The facts! I need to know what’s going on!”

Membrane gave the children their Cokes, gave Sybil her thick red juice, then walked behind his desk, where he briefly rummaged.

“Here.”

Sybil took the piece of pink-brown paper. Butcher’s paper. There was a hole in the middle. She scanned down the page. It was written in English, and this is what it said:

“We have taken your tool. Alwin Bitter has been conscripted into the People’s Army, Division of Nuclear Weapons. Ransom him before it is too late. Your reply must be multiplied on papers drifting from the Embassy window. We await.
      
—
Brigate Rosse
”

“Who’s that?” asked Sybil. “
Brigate Rosse?
”

“That’s the Italian part. It means
Red Brigade
. But they aren’t.” Membrane’s unformed face held something sly.

“They aren’t the Red Brigade?”

“No. Everything’s wrong. The technique, the language, the…reply method. It’s not the Red Brigade at all. These days every kidnapper says he’s the Red Brigade just to…cause alarm. I’d be willing to bet that…”

“That?”

“
…these
fellows are just after some money. But…”

“But?”

“What
is
your husband’s occupation? To the best of your knowledge.”

“He’s a theoretical physicist. Unemployed. Not really unemployed. On a grant. He has a Humboldt grant to do research in Heidelberg this year. Next year we don’t know what we’ll do.” Sybil shot a glance over at the children, not really liking them to be in on all this. But they were absorbed in their comics, flipping the bright pages.

Membrane gazed meditatively at the ceiling. It was clear that he was already in possession of the few poor facts Sybil knew.

“Could your husband assemble a…nuclear device? An atomic bomb?”

“I don’t know. Probably. In grad school he used to talk about how easy it would be. He’s good at making things. But you said you don’t think he’s really in the hands of bombers.”

“Not…yet.”

“What do you mean?”

A long, thoughtful pause. “How much can you pay? To get your husband back.”

“Nothing. A few thousand dollars. Nothing, really.”

“That’s good.”

“Why?”

Membrane leaned across the desk, his Adam’s apple jutting out over his button-down Oxford-cloth collar and regimental-stripe tie. “I am going to tell you something in strictest confidence. Someone out there has enough nuclear fuel to build a hundred-kiloton bomb. Two months ago an LWR fuel-assembly truck was hijacked near Mestre. We have got to find that fuel.”

“What does that have to do with my husband?”

“We will use your husband for…bait. To flush out the
real
terrorists, the ones with the reactor fuel. In return…” He held a silencing hand up to the spluttering Sybil. “In return I give you my solemn word that your husband will be…freed unharmed. Look at this.”

He handed her a freshly mimeographed sheet of paper. A message in Italian. It was, Sybil realized with horror, the same as the papers she’d seen blowing up and down the sidewalk in front of the Embassy.

“You’ve already replied? What did you say? What does this say?”

Membrane picked up another copy of the message, cleared his throat and began sonorously to sight-translate.

“‘In the affair of Alwin Bitter. Greetings, revolutionary comrades. We, as Americans, feel sympathy for your woe. But freedom is not anarchy. Nor anarchy freedom. Professor Bitter is a man of peace, an atomic scientist. To think that his long and intimate association with weapons projects enables him single-handedly to build a bomb is fantasy. To take his close ties with the US Embassy for military involvement is gross self-deception. Do not harm this innocent man, or the gravest consequences will ensue. We stand prepared to pay a ransom of one million US dollars.’”

“But that’s so misleading,” Sybil cried. “It makes him sound like an important bomb specialist! They’ll never give him up!”

“They’ll…have to give him up,” Membrane said with a faint smile. “Word spreads fast in Rome. No matter who has him now…the real terrorists will come and get him.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Orali and Rectelli

It was bad sleep, there on a pile of rags somewhere beneath the Colosseum. My body was immobile with exhaustion, but my brain was racing…trying to find a way out, trying to find a next move. There were lots of dreams. Here’s one of them:

***

I’m outside the Colosseum, running down endless streets with shuttered doors. Finally I find a café-bar which is open for the early workers. No one inside will talk to me or even look at me. In the back there is a billiard table, and arched doors leading down. On the green baize lies a dead man, crumpled like a bag of garbage. His legs are missing…not really missing, just stripped of meat. Butchered. The man behind the zinc bar is cooking a greasy cannibal stew. He passes out huge glass mugs of beer, bubbles a-tick. The mugs are so big and so clear you could almost go skin-diving in them. He won’t give me one, just shakes his head. Then into each of the mugs he ladles a chunk of fresh-cooked leg-meat. I recoil and rush out through those arched doors in back.

I’m running down a slope, down the radius of a series of concentric circles, heading deeper and deeper underground. It’s an invisible underground Colosseum. Demons peer at me from odd nooks and crannies. A rumble of voices all around. There are thousands of us drifting down toward the impossible center.

In the half-light I pause in front of an…exhibit, some kind of recess in the wall where a tasty bit of knowledge might be served, something about quarks and quantum chromodynamics…but instead there’s a gray-white demon with a swollen tick’s body. He scrambles about, then splits a vent and spews hot liquid on me. It’s foul, with lumps, stinking and stuck to my body, marking me for all to see. Somewhere below, Minos is waiting to judge me….

***

I woke with a start. I knew where I was. My back was killing me, and my hurt finger throbbed. I looked at my watch. Quarter of ten. Lafcadio still sat on the sofa, guarding me with the robot and the machine gun on his lap. He hadn’t noticed yet that I was awake, and I studied him through slitted eyes.

His dry black hair stuck out from his head in asymmetrical tufts and auras. There was a festering scab-crust along the outer curve of his left ear. His skin was a sallow yellow, blued along the jawline by sixteen-o’clock shadow. His mouth was a thin twisting line, never quite at ease, never quite unamused. It was as if he were constantly holding back both screams and laughter. He kept his eyes squeezed almost shut, possibly in an effort to valve down the boom and bustle of consensus reality.

He wore a plain black suit, shiny with wear, and a stained white shirt with no necktie. The suit pockets bulged with worthless objects. Now as I watched he fished out a sheet of paper with some sort of geometric diagram and studied it intently, turning it from side to side like a monkey would. His hands were off the machine gun…but this did me no good, as the chain fastening me to the wall was so short. Yawning loudly, I sat up.

Lafcadio put away his diagram, whispered to his robot, and then smiled at me in a friendly sort of way.

“
Stavvi Minòs orribilimente, e ringhia: essamina le colpe ne l’intrata; giudica e manda secondo ch’avvinghia
.” Apparently he spoke no English…strange for a physicist, but not impossible, especially in Italy.

“I’m sorry.” I threw out my hands. “I can’t understand you at all. I only know about twenty words of Italian.
Non capisce
.”

But that didn’t stop him. He wanted to talk. He had something on his mind. “
Luna
,” he said, molding an ass-shape in the air. “
Baciare e entrare
.” He made the traditional hand-gesture for coitus, the erect right index finger bustling about in the loop of left thumb and forefinger. Apparently he was asking if I liked sex.

“Sure.
Molto bello
. Me and my wife every night.” Smilingly I pumped the air with both fists, as if lifting myself up and down on a bed.

Lafcadio went to the door of our stone room and peered out. Was he going to set me free? Tell me a secret? Sexually assault me?

“
Ecco
,” he said, laying his gun down on the sofa and stepping close to me. He fumbled for something in his pants pocket and then brought it out. A tiny bean or seed it looked like, lying in the center of his dirty palm.

Looking lovingly down at the little lump, Lafcadio began…blowing kisses at it. Pursing his lips and making coaxing noises.

“
Smeep smeep. Smeep smeep smeep
.”

The little sphere seemed to twitch, to grow a bit.

“
Smeep smeep
,” went Lafcadio, pausing to grin and nod encouragingly at me. I was supposed to help.

“Smeep,” I went, dry lips puckered. “Smeep smeep smeep.”

“
Smeep smeepy
.”

“Smeepity smeep smeep.”

The little ball grew, its surface flowing. In a way, I felt like I was being hypnotized, or having a hallucination. But yet the…
presence
growing and taking shape in crazy Lafcadio’s cupped palms seemed real enough. Another
order
of reality, I thought, when suddenly…

There was the crash of footsteps, an explosion of gunfire, and Lafcadio pitched toward me, his chest gushing blood. With what must have been his last act of volition, he passed the magic sphere to me. It shrank back to the size of an orange-pip. I pocketed it as I stepped back from the intruders.

They were two very short men with guns, burr haircuts and big jaws. They looked like a couple of the “snoids” R. Crumb used to draw, amoral little goblin-men who live in sewers and assholes. They wore matching gray mechanic’s overalls with nametags.
Orali
and
Rectelli
. One had a machine gun and one had a sawed-off shotgun. They didn’t look like police.

Or act like them. The snoid with the machine gun rapidly emptied out Lafcadio’s pockets, making a growing mound of newspaper clippings, pages ripped out of books, drawings of circles, pornographic photos, dead flashlight batteries, orange rinds, squeezed-out tubes of ointment, and balls, balls, balls. There must have been fifteen or twenty little balls, some wood, some metal, some rubber. Ball bearings, Ping-Pong balls,
bocce
balls, gumballs, and even a tiny Earth-globe pencil sharpener. But none of them seemed to be alive like the one I’d pocketed.

The snoid with the sawed-off shotgun stepped over and blasted the chain connecting me to the wall. Pieces of metal and concrete flew up, catching me on my good cheek. It stung viciously. I could feel the wet of blood. I was scared to touch my face, scared that some of it was gone.

They began hustling me out of the room, not noticing that my ankles were still manacled together. I stumbled and fell forward. Somewhere outside, the shrill
do-so, do-so, do-so-do-so-do-so
of an approaching police car sounded. The shotgun fired off a blast between my legs…OH!…and then my ankles were free. There was blood and smoke everywhere. I was half-deaf from the gun-blasts.

The snoids got me upstairs, and before I knew it, we were in a purple Maserati convertible, doing 120 kph through Rome traffic, the police somewhere far behind. A beautiful Sophia Loren look-alike was driving. The snoids called her Giulia. It sounded like they were telling her to drive faster.

I was in the front next to Giulia. The death seat, as regards traffic fatalities. Each snoid kept a gun-barrel on my neck. The way the car was whipping around was just unreal. It was like watching Cinerama.

“Please, Giulia,” I moaned. “Please slow down.”

She answered without looking over. Thank God she had the sense to keep her eyes on the road.

“
Calmo
.”

The full beautiful lips made the second syllable into a kiss. The voice, damped and deepened by two luscious swells of mammary tissue, was like a caress. Poised between two kinds of death, I fell in love. Cautiously I touched my cheek. It was only an abrasion after all, already scabbed over. A stroke of luck.

A bridge flew under us. To the left I could see the Castel Sant’ Angelo, beautiful in the mild April sun.

We fishtailed around one of the vegetable-green Roman buses and took a hard right in a controlled four-wheel skid. I wished the car had a solid roof, or at least a roll bar. Giulia was not really a very good driver.

Now we were on a wide street parallel to the Tiber. A nontourist street with cheap department stores and dress shops. A
Supercortemaggiore
parking garage was coming up on our left. With a horrible wrench, Giulia heeled the car over, cut through three busy lanes of traffic and skidded into the garage entrance. I kept worrying that one of the snoids’ guns would go off by accident. Distractedly I put my hands to my face and fingered my scabs.

Inside the garage they seemed to be expecting us. In the rear wall a giant metal mouth yawned open. An elevator for cars. We powered in. And finally stopped. Behind us the two halves of the elevator door
whumped
together. In the pit of my stomach I felt the descent begin.