Free Live Free

The Laughter Of The Gods

“Are you all right?” the witch asked Stubb.

“I’m about blind, and my head hurts.”

“Blind?”

“They took my specs.” The waxen-faced little detective rubbed his eyes, then his temple. “Or maybe they just dropped off when Cliff sapped me. Wait till I get that son of a bitch alone.”

“You must tell me what befell you.”

“Madame S., I’m about to puke. Right now I don’t have to do one other damn thing.”

“It is important, or at least it may be so. Tell me!”

“Wait a minute.” Shakily, Stubb got to his feet, one hand at his throat. “Well, I’ve had it.”

“Had what, you fool?”

“The gold watch, the handshake, the testimonial dinner, the scroll signed by our chairman, the stucco bungalow in Florida, the whole damned schmeer. Point me at a toilet.”

“There is none. If you are sick you must swallow it.”

“I was talking about me. You know, climb in, pull the handle. Hey, what the hell!” His forearm had brushed the breast of his trenchcoat. Reaching inside, he drew out his glasses. “Son of a bitch.” He wiped the thick lenses on his sleeve. “Cliff must have stuck them in there. Or the girl did. Sure, I bet it was her.” He put them on with an expression of satisfaction and looked around at the bare room, the rusty tin chairs, and the witch. “Say, what happened to your eyes? Have you been crying?”

“Mr. Stubb, you are the most irritating man I have ever encountered, and I have encountered a great many such men. Forget my eyes—they are plants that must be watered if they are to grow. Will you please tell me what happened to you? I repeat that it may be of importance, and I remind you that you are in my employ.”

“Madame S., except for expenses, you’ve never given me a nickel.”

“I have very little money, but I assure you that you will be paid. Though it is doubtful now, very doubtful, that you will ever be in a position to render me the slightest service.”

“We’ll see about that.”

“Then let me hear no more complaints. Tell me!”

“I did already. I got the gold watch—the all-day thirtybuck tour. I got shanghied. I got—”

“Yes?”

Stubb pulled one of the folding chairs across the gray, splintered floor and sat down. “I got the case I’ve been waiting for all my life, I guess. The big time. Rich, lovely girl not even as tall as I am.” Suddenly his face twisted into a snarl as real as any savage little beast’s. “Don’t you sneer at me, sister. She was!”

“I was not ridiculing you,” the witch told him. “Nor did I look at you in any way different from the way I now look.”

“Okay.” He relaxed, taking off his glasses and polishing them automatically on his sleeve. “Only maybe she wasn’t really rich. Maybe somebody was slipping her the bread to put up a front. She’d gone to some good schools, though. She talked like it.”

“You loved her.”

“I wanted to,” Stubb said. “But it was … Hell, you’d never understand, Madame S.”

“I would try.”

“It was like … I don’t know. The Late, Late Show when you get up and yawn and empty the ashtrays because you know it will be over in a minute. Everything was perfect, just perfect, except I knew—oh, hell!”

“What is it?”

“I should have told you right off. Free’s dead.”

“You are certain?” The witch’s eyes opened so wide that for an instant Stubb could see the fires behind them.

“Pretty sure. They said so, and they showed me a picture. He was lying on a concrete floor, and there was a lot of blood.”

“But you did not see him.”

“No, I didn’t actually see the body. So yeah, it could have been faked. I don’t think it was.”

“Perhaps not. Yet those like Free so often reappear long after they have been counted among the dead. Someone struck you, I think.”

“Cliff Rebic. You don’t know him. I’ve worked for him, off and on. He sapped me too. He’d told the kid, the bellhop, to come back with tea for the girl. I forgot about that. I looked around, and Cliff sapped me.”

“Unfortunate.”

“You bet. When I came to, he had cuffs on me, and a blindfold, and he was sitting with me in the back of a car. I could smell his aftershave. The girl was driving. She had great perfume, and anyway, every so often they said something. He was working for her, or at least working for the people she worked for. Okay, that’s how they suckered me. What’s your story?”

“It is really not much different from your own. Today I defrauded a certain one, the namesake of one who possesses much authority, below. This I did knowing his name, yet thinking nothing of it. He sent—”

The door flew open; and Barnes, still naked except for a bandage over his eyes, staggered blindly through it. The man who had pushed him from behind tossed a bundle of clothing after him. He tripped over one of the tin chairs and fell.

“What the hell,” Stubb said. “How’d you get so screwed up?”

“Is that you, Stubb?”

“Sure it’s me. Hold still a minute.” Stubb’s short, dirty fingernails scrabbled at the adhesive tape, ripping it away with much of Barnes’s eyebrows.

Barnes yelped.

“Best way to do it. Get it over with fast. Now wait till I get my pocket knife out and I’ll cut you loose.”

The witch said, “They permitted you to keep such a thing?”

“Sure. What could I do with it? It wouldn’t cut those cuffs, and anyway I couldn’t get at it.”

“And they permitted me to reclaim my handbag. But poor Ozzie has been stripped to the skin.”

“They threw his stuff in with him,” Stubb pointed out.

“I guess I did it myself,” Barnes said. “I mean, mostly I took off my own clothes.” He was rubbing his wrists.

The witch observed, “You have a tale to tell.”

“All right, but I want to get something on my tail first. Jesus, can’t you at least shut your eyes?”

“As you wish. See, I hold my bag before them.”

Barnes picked up a pair of check pants and swore.

“They rip you off?”

“I’ll say they did. These are mine.”

“Hey, you’re right. Your old suit. Didn’t you lose it in that hospital?”

Barnes nodded. “A sailor named Reeder took it.”

“And you went out while the blackout was still on and rolled some other guy for his.”

“No, I didn’t. I got it from a store. Hey, look—Fruit of the Loom! They even found my old underwear.”

“Nifty. I hope they washed it. Put it on.” Stubb stroked his chin. “You know, Ozzie, they’re not as smart as they think they are, or they would only have bandaged one eye.”

Barnes was feeling the pockets of his suit. “Yeah, I lost my glass one, and it’s not here, either. You could tell, huh? When I read the label?”

“I could tell whether you looked at the label or not. Now put the damn clothes on—Madame S.’s getting tired of holding up her bag. They must have gotten their hands on this Reeder. That or he was working for them all along. You haven’t seen him since we skipped the hospital?”

“Hell, yes, I saw him. I tagged him a good one in the lobby of the Consort for taking my stuff.”

“No problem, then. They knew we were in the Consort. A house dick spotted me eating breakfast there this morning. He told Cliff Rebic, and Cliff would have told them. They might have known it even earlier—”

“But they did!” The witch interrupted, speaking from behind her purse. “That girl—she worked for Illingworth. He brought me here.”

“You mean Sandy?” Stubb asked.

“Yes. That Alexandra Duck.” The witch hesitated. “Perhaps she did not know. I would have sensed it, I think, and I did not.”

“Illingworth’s the guy that publishes those magazines?”

“He says so, yes.”

Stubb said, “I doubt if he was working for them himself before this morning. She said they called him then. But they knew to call him—hell!”

“You have thought of something?”

“Just Mrs. Baker. They put a tail on her. Maybe even one of Cliff’s guys. The two girls went to grill her, and he watched to see where she’d go. Or they staked her out themselves. She went to the Consort to talk to us. You can put down your bag now—Ozzie’s got his pants on.”

The witch lowered it. “And now you, Ozzie. Why were you brought in naked?”

“I don’t think I’m going to tell you that.”

“Oh, really?” The witch’s face twisted in the suggestion of a smile. “Mr. Stubb has told his story.”

“I didn’t hear it.”

“You will, if you wish—from me, if not from Mr. Stubb himself. But from Mr. Stubb surely.”

“I’m still not going to tell you what happened to me. That’s my business!”

“If you will answer just one question, I will desist, at least for the time being. Was it something you are now ashamed of?”

Barnes nodded.

“So for Mr. Stubb also. He was given—might I call it the opportunity of a lifetime?”

Stubb said nothing.

“And he failed. He was brave, yes. And intelligent too, though he would call it smart. But at the crucial moment, distracted. It was not so much different for me. I too …”

“You looked the wrong way too?” Stubb patted his pockets. “Anybody got a cigarette?”

“No. But I failed. I was shown deities—the ultimate deities, so was I told. And they were as I had always believed they would be, Phra the Sun; Khepri, who is Life; Ked, God of Earth; Nu of the Waters, of the Waters of Chaos. But it was all wind.”

“I never believed in religion myself,” Barnes said. “But if they hurt you, I’m sorry.”

“You sacrifice to Kuvera, the Lord of Treasure,” the witch told him. “Also to Isis of Erech. And because you know nothing of them, they drive you as with scourges.”

Stubb said, “It doesn’t sound like you did so well yourself.”

“I did not. The worst thing is not to be ignorant of the gods. The worst is to mistake those who are not gods for them. At the very moment when I thought to be elevated, I found myself mocked and reviled. If it had been only the laughter of men and women, I should not have cared. I have heard that many times, and it is but the rattle of pebbles in an empty jar. But I heard the voices of the gods—of Mana and Skarl and Kib, and Sish, the Destroyer of Hours. Or of whatever the true gods may be.”

Barnes touched a finger to his lips. “Somebody’s coming.”

All three fell silent, listening to the footsteps. The door opened, and a middle-aged man in a duffel coat came in. He looked cold—there was snow on his shoes, and the white touch of winter on his cheeks, and a little frost had begun to form on the barrel of the Thompson submachine gun he carried.

“Good evening,” he said. “I thought you might appreciate an explanation of what’s happened to you and where you’re going.”