Strange Wine (25 page)

At that moment, Cordwainer Bird swore that if he could purge his soul of the hatred for the particular group that had crushed
his
soul so effectively, if he could bring
them
to their knees, he would devote the rest of his life to wrecking these other conspiracies of corporate and governmental complexity whose only purposes in life were to preserve and maintain power at the level they’d attained and to beat down human beings to the
service
of the systems.

He remembered a quote from Brendan Behan. “I respect kindness to human beings first of all, and kindness to animals. I don’t respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper, and old men and women warmer in the winter, and happier in the summer.” It was a flawed philosophy, and there were parts of it Bird did not subscribe to–there were too many roads already, and not enough land unflawed by concrete–but the tone was there; the tenor was right; the message was clear. Yes, from this moment on he would be considerably more than a writer, or a Fury bent on reclaiming his soul for personal reasons. From this moment on he would take up the mantle of Uncle Kent and Uncle Bruce Hagin, who had gone under the name G-8 when he had fought with his Battle Aces; and to some extent–though with greater sanity–Uncle Richard Wentworth, The Spider.

From this moment on the Bird would fly against the
new
forces of evil in the world.

His reverie was shattered by the shouting of the toothless old woman. Frustrated beyond endurance, she shrieked her hatred of the impossibly gigantic forces that had brought her low. As she scuffled back toward the door to the corridor down which her bleak room lay, she cursed them, without knowing who they were. She gummed her words. “God damn the Post Office! God damn the Social Security Administration!” She reached the door to the corridor and kicked it open with strength Bird could not have suspected lay in such a fragile body. The door banged against the inner wall of the corridor and hung there on its pneumatic door-closer. She staggered down the corridor toward her room, the cat padding at her heels. “God damn you Government! God damn you Herbert Hoover! God damn you Franklin Delano Roosevelt! God damn you Harry S. Truman! God damn you Dwight D. Eisenhower! God damn you John F. Kennedy, may you rest in peace! God damn you Lyndon Baines Johnson! God damn you, God damn you, God damn you Richard Shit Nixon! God damn you Gerry Ford! God damn you Jimmy Carter.” Bird’s view of the old woman was steadily being narrowed as the door closed with a sigh, but in the final instant before it closed completely he saw her shove open the door to her room, the cat got underfoot, she kicked it viciously, sending it out of sight through the inner doorway, and the last thing he heard, in an anguished howl, was, “God damn you…God!”

Bird stood trembling uncontrollably.

Then he heard a faint cackling beside him.

He was alone in the lobby.

“Uncle Kent?” he asked the emptiness, looking around.

“Huh? Who’s that?” The voice came out of nowhere.

“It’s me, Uncle Kent. Cordwainer.”

“Who? What? Are you The Black Master? Zemba? The Cobra? Who sent you? I have weapons, I still have weapons!”

“It’s
me
, Uncle Kent…your nephew, Cordwainer Bird.”

“You mean: it’s
I
, not
me
. Oh, you. What the hell’re you doing skulking around here? You out of a job again? I always told your momma you’d amount to nothing.”

“Uh, listen, Uncle Kent, I need your help.”

“Just what I thought, you little turd. Tryin’ to make another touch, eh? Well, forget it. I snitched my Social Security check before those damned old biddies could get at him. Heh heh, filched it right out of that damned hippie’s mailbag. Didn’t even see me workin’, did you? Heh, did you?”

“No, Uncle Kent, you were very subtle. I never saw a thing.”

“Damned right you didn’t. I’m as good as I ever was. I can
still
cloud men’s minds so they cannot see me! Wish it worked as well on those be-damned cats. One of the little monsters pissed up my pant leg.”

Bird could hear the sound of fabric rustling, as of someone shaking a leg. Still he could see no one.

“How’s chances we go upstairs to your room and talk, Uncle Kent?” Bird suggested. “I don’t need any money; I’m working on a case and I need some advice.”

“Well, why didn’t you say so; you take the elevator. I’ll just fiy up.”

“You can’t fly, Uncle Kent.”

“Oh. Yeah, yeah, right, I forgot. Okay, we’ll
both
take the elevator.”

“Uh, Uncle Kent?”

“What now? Boy, you have become one be-damned nuisance, always asking stupid questions, why is the grass green, how many grains of sand in the Gobi, how high’s the moon.”

“You once told me how many grains of sand there were in the Gobi.”

“I did? Hmmm. Well, what is it this time? Can’t it wait till we take the elevator upstairs and get settled?”

“Uncle Kent, this building doesn’t
have
an elevator.”

“It doesn’t, that’s peculiar. I could have sworn it had an elevator. What floor do I live on?”

“The tenth.”

“Well, you take the elevator, and I’ll just fly up.”

“I knew this Bird fellow had been a tv writer who punched a lot of producers because they
allegedly
altered his work, but as far as I knew for
certain
, he was just another of those hack sci-fi writers. We were doing a book of his called
Where Do You Hide the Elephant in a Spaceship?
It was a paperback original, a bunch of his stories. George, his editor, was off to the National Book Awards in Washington, D.C. and I got a call from this Bird nut, and he wanted to see the galleys of his book before it was printed. Well, for God’s sake, I’m an
executive editor
, not some lackey; so I told him I couldn’t be bothered sending out galleys to just
any
one who called up and demanded them. Then he started screaming that he was the
author
and he used the vilest language I’ve ever heard. Why, I didn’t even know such things
could
be done with a vacuum cleaner. So I just hung up on the little twerp; I mean, I had a handball court reserved at the Club, I couldn’t be hanging around the office all day listening to that kind of abuse! After all, I’m an
executive editor!
How did
I
know the copyediting had been farmed out to one of our 100 Neediest Cases at the Menninger Foundation? It wasn’t
my
fault the book was set in Urdu.”

Excerpt from diary notes of the late Skippy Wing walker, former Executive Editor, Avon Books, New York; used as source material in the New York magazine article, “Portrait of a Publishing Punk: The Four-Storey Swandive of Li’l Skippy; Did He Jump or Was He Eased Out of the Industry?” by Aaron Latham;
16 February 1976

Kent Allard’s room was bare. Spartan. The walls had been painted dead white. So had the ceiling and floor. Also the inside of the door to the corridor and the inside of the empty clothes closet. Also the windows. Light from the bitter winter’s day outside barely filtered through the paint.

The Shadow had once told his nephew he liked it that way. “Spend so damned much time in the dark, hanging out in alleys and doorways, always sitting shivering on fire escapes, jumping out be-damned windows, never really had a chance to get to use a door in my adult life, I want it white in here. White!” His nephew understood the urgencies of Uncle Kent’s declining years. He never thought it odd.

Now they sat on the floor, facing each other, cross-legged. Bird had a vagrant wish that Uncle Kent would put at least a stool or campaign chair in the room, but the old man had acquired his abilities in the Orient, and he practiced self-denial, even at the age of eighty-one. Bird put the wish out of his mind; it was the least he could suffer, to get some help from this once-great champion of Good and Truth and Decency.

“You still ticked-off at me for not showing you how to cloud men’s minds?” The Shadow asked.

“No, Uncle Kent. I understand.”

“Heh.
Sure
you do!
Sure
you do! Every time I showed someone I trusted how to do it, he turned into a creep. That be-damned Oral Roberts, for instance, and his buddy, what’s his name, Willy Graham…
Billy
Graham! That’s it, Billy Graham! Pukers, both of ’em. But they sure can cloud men’s minds. Don’t do too bad with women’s minds, neither. And what about those Watergate tapes. Mind-clouding if I ever saw it! If I was fifty again, hell, if I was
sixty
again, even
seventy
, by damn! I’d have had them Ehrlichburger and Haldeburger by the heels.” He paused in his ranting and looked at his nephew. “Cordwainer? What the hell are you doing here? Did you learn to cloud men’s minds? I never saw you come in.”

“We came in together, Uncle Kent. I need your help.” He hurriedly added, to forestall a familiar conversation, “I don’t need any money. I need some advice and some good solid Shadow-style deductive thinking about a clue.”

“A clue! By God and Street and Smith, a
clue!
Feed it to me, boy! Just drop it on me! Let me have it! A clue, by damn, a clue! I
love
clues.” And he began coughing.

Bird slid across the floor and clapped the old man on the back. After a few minutes the coughing subsided, Kent Allard wiped the tears out of his eyes, pushed his tongue back into his mouth, and whispered, “I’m fine. Just fine. What’s this clue you’ve got?”

Quickly going over the events of earlier that day, the insidious placement of his latest book in Brentano’s cryptlike basement, the attack by Mrs. Jararacussu and her thugs, the revelation of the clue to their whereabouts, the seek-&-destroy team that had butchered the unfortunate pawn Jararacussu, the escape…Bird capped the recapitulation with a repeat of the whispered words that had been the last gesture of
their
mind-slave, Mrs. Jararacussu. “She said: ‘You’ll find them under the lady–’ and she was cut off in mid-sentence. There was more. What does it mean to you, Uncle Kent? You know New York better than anyone.”

“Well, Billy Batson knows the subway system better’n me, but I know everything else, that’s for certain.”

“So what does it mean to you?”

“Pornography, that’s what it means to me, boy! Under the lady, indeed. That’s what’s wrong with the world today, too damned much smut. Why, when I was your age, Margo Lane and I had a nice, clean, decent relationship. I’d take her out to Steeplechase Park every once in a while and we’d go in the tunnel of love, and that was as close as
we
ever got to all this jiggery-pokery.”

“Whatever happened to Margo Lane, Uncle Kent?”

He looked bitter. “She ran off with Bernard Geis.”

He would talk no more about it, so Bird let it drop.

“I don’t think it was a smutty reference, Uncle Kent. I think she was talking about a location. What does ‘under the lady’ bring to mind besides pornography?”

The old man thought for a moment. His tongue slipped out of his mouth.

Suddenly, his face lit up. His weary old eyes sparkled. “By damn!”

Cordwainer sat forward. “What’ve you got?”

“It
wasn’t
Bernard Geis, it was one of his Associates.”

Cordwainer slumped back. It was no use. The old man simply couldn’t keep his thoughts together. He started to get up. “Well, thanks, anyway, Uncle Kent.”

The Shadow stared up at him. “Where the hell you think you’re going, boy? I haven’t told you the location yet!”

“But…I thought…”

“You thought the old man simply couldn’t keep his thoughts together, didn’t you?”

Cordwainer sat down again. He looked humbled.

A soft smile came to the old man’s face. “Well, I’m a bit fuzzy, nephew, that’s for certain. You don’t have to be kind about it. I know. It’s hard being old and useless, but I love you, you little twerp, and I’m not so fuddled I don’t know you’ve been getting my ring out of hock all these years. So I owe you a big one. And I’m going to tell you something that no one else knows. But it’s the answer to your problem.”

Cordwainer stared intensely at his uncle. There was an ineffable sadness in the old man’s face that he had never before seen. And The Shadow began to speak.

“It was, oh, I guess the summer of 1949, just after I finished the case of ‘The Whispering Eyes,’ when Margo started
nuhdzing
me about getting married. Well, I was set in my ways, I wasn’t home much, she was always complaining about my coming in and out through the windows, and I just couldn’t see it working out. So we started tapering off. That went on for about eight years. We did things slower in those days. Then Geis started up that gawdawful ballyhoo press of his in 1958, with non-books by Art Linkletter and those other mushbrains, and Margo had been doing some public relations work for him, and damned if she didn’t meet one of his Associates, a clown named Bruce Somethingorother. Started seeing him on the sly. When I found out about it, she was already pretty much under the spell of all that glamour and glitter. She was out every night doing The Twist and hanging around with all the people we’d spent years whipping and imprisoning.”

He was staring at the white floor, now turning gray as the dim daylight faded into dusk outside.

“I found myself getting jealous. It never happened before. I…I never really knew how much she meant to me. She was always just good old Margo Lane, friend and companion; we used to do the town when I was in my Lamont Cranston disguise; she looked really terrific in an evening gown…”

He paused to collect his thoughts. It was almost dark in the empty room now, but Bird thought he saw tears in the old man’s eyes.

“I trailed them one night. They went to a secret place where they met with others in the publishing business, and there was…there was…” He found it difficult to even speak the words. Then he straightened, snuffled loudly, and said, “There was an orgy. I slipped in and…and…dealt with them.”