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“Get free time on TV?”
“No.”
“Be interviewed on radio?”
“No!”
“Like to have trials and lawyers arguing whether a man can be tried for proxy-murder…”
“No!”
“…that is, attacking, shooting a humanoid machine…”
“No!”
Booth was breathing fast now, his eyes moving wildly in his face. Bayes let more out:
“Great to have two hundred million people talking about you tomorrow morning, next week, next month, next year!”
Silence.
But a smile appeared, like the faintest drip of saliva, at the corner of Booth’s mouth. He must have felt it. He raised a hand to touch it away.
“Fine to sell your personal true real story to the international syndicates for a fine chunk?”
Sweat moved down Booth’s face and itched in his palms.
“Shall I give you the answer to all, all the questions I have just asked? Eh? Eh? Well,” said Bayes, “the answer is—”
Someone rapped on a far theater door.
Bayes jumped. Booth turned to stare.
The knock came, louder.
“Bayes, let me in, this is Phipps,” a voice cried outside in the night.
Hammering, pounding, then silence. In the silence, Booth and Bayes looked at each other like conspirators.
“Let me in, oh Christ, let me in!”
More hammering, then a pause and again the insistent onslaught, a crazy drum and tattoo, then silence again, the man outside panting, circling perhaps to find another door.
“Where was I?” said Bayes. “No. Yes. The answer to all those questions? Do you get worldwide TV radio film magazine newspaper gossip broadcast publicity…?”
A pause.
“No.”
Booth’s mouth jerked but he stayed silent.
“N,” Bayes spelled it, “O.”
He reached in, found Booth’s wallet, snapped out all the identity cards, pocketed them, and handed the empty wallet back to the assassin.
“No?” said Booth, stunned.
“No, Mr. Booth. No pictures. No coast-to-coast TV. No magazines. No columns. No papers. No advertisement. No glory. No fame. No fun. No self-pity. No resignation. No immortality. No nonsense about triumphing over the dehumanization of man by machines. No martyrdom. No respite from your own mediocrity. No splendid suffering. No maudlin tears. No renunciation of possible futures. No trial. No lawyers. No analysts speeding you up this month, this year, thirty years, sixty years, ninety years after, no stories with double spreads, no money, no.”
Booth rose up as if a rope had hauled him tall and stretched him gaunt and washed him pale.
“I don’t understand. I—”
“You went to all this trouble? Yes. And I’m ruining the game. For when all is said and done, Mr. Booth, all the reasons listed and all the sums summed, you’re a has-been that never was. And you’re going to stay that way, spoiled and narcissistic and small and mean and rotten. You’re a short man and I intend to squash and squeeze and press and batter you an inch shorter instead of force-growing you, helping you gloat nine feet tall.”
“You can’t!” cried Booth.
“Oh, Mr. Booth,” said Bayes, on the instant, almost happy, “I can. I can do anything with this case I wish, and I wish not to press charges. More than that, Mr. Booth, it never happened.”
The hammering came again, this time on a locked door up on the stage.
“Bayes, for God’s sake, let me in! This is Phipps! Bayes! Bayes!”
Booth stared at the trembling, the thundershaken, the rattling door, even while Bayes called very calmly and with an ease that was beautiful:
“Just a moment.”
He knew that in a few minutes this calm would pass, something would break, but for now there was this splendidly serene thing he was doing; he must play it out. With fine round tones he addressed the assassin and watched him dwindle and spoke further and watched him shrink.
“It never happened, Mr. Booth. Tell your story, but we’ll deny it. You were never here, no gun, no shot, no computerized data-processed assassination, no outrage, no shock, no panic, no mob. Why now, look at your face. Why are you falling back? Why are you sitting down? Why do you shake? Is it the disappointment? Have I turned your fun the wrong way? Good.” He nodded at the aisle. “And now, Mr. Booth, get out.”
“You can’t make—”
“Sorry you said that, Mr. Booth.” Bayes took a soft step in, reached down, took hold of the man’s tie and slowly pulled him to his feet so he was breathing full in his face.
“If you ever tell your wife, any friend, employer, child, man, woman, stranger, uncle, aunt, cousin, if you ever tell even yourself out loud going to sleep some night about this thing you did, do you know what I am going to do to you, Mr. Booth? If I hear one whisper, one word, one breath, I shall stalk you, I shall follow you for a dozen or a hundred or two hundred days, you’ll never know what day, what night, what noon, where, when or how but suddenly I’ll be there when you least expect and then do you know what I am going to do to you, Mr. Booth? I won’t say, Mr. Booth, I can’t tell. But it will be awful and it will be terrible and you’ll wish you had never been born, that’s how awful and terrible it will be.”
Booth’s pale face shook, his head bobbed, his eyes peeled wide, his mouth open like one who walks in a heavy rain.
“What did I just say, Mr. Booth? Tell me!”
“You’ll kill me?”
“Say it again!”
He shook Booth until the words fell out of his chattered teeth:
“Kill me!”
He held tight, shaking and shaking the man firmly and steadily, holding and massaging the shirt and the flesh beneath the shirt, stirring up the panic beneath the cloth.
So long, Mr. Nobody, and no magazine stories and no fun and no TV, no celebrity, an unmarked grave and you not in the history books, no, now get out of here, get out, run, run before I kill you.
He shoved Booth. Booth ran, fell, picked himself up, and lunged toward a theater door which, on the instant, from outside, was shaken, pounded, riven.
Phipps was there, calling in the darkness.
“The other door,” said Bayes.
He pointed and Booth wheeled to stumble in a new direction to stand swaying by yet another door, putting one hand out—
“Wait,” said Bayes.
He walked across the theater and when he reached Booth raised his flat hand up and hit Booth once, hard, a slapping strike across the face. Sweat flew in a rain upon the air.
“I,” said Bayes, “I just had to do that. Just once.”
He looked at his hand, then turned to open the door.
They both looked out into a world of night and cool stars and no mob.
Booth pulled back, his great dark liquid eyes the eyes of an eternally wounded and surprised child, with the look of the self-shot deer that would go on wounding, being shot by itself forever.
“Get,” said Bayes.
Booth darted. The door slammed shut. Bayes fell against it, breathing hard.
Far across the arena at another locked door, the hammering, pounding, the crying out began again. Bayes stared at that shuddering but remote door. Phipps. But Phipps would have to wait. Now…
The theater was as vast and empty as Gettysburg in the late day with the crowd gone home and the sun set. Where the crowd had been and was no more, where the Father had lifted the Boy high on his shoulders and where the Boy had spoken and said the words, but the words now, also, gone…
On the stage, after a long moment, he reached out. His fingers brushed Lincoln’s shoulder.
Fool, he thought standing there in the dusk. Don’t. Now, don’t. Stop it. Why are you doing this? Silly. Stop. Stop.
And what he had come to find he found. What he needed to do he did.
For tears were running down his face.
He wept. Sobs choked his mouth. He could not stop them. They would not cease.
Mr. Lincoln was dead. Mr. Lincoln was dead!
And he had let his murderer go.
Yes, We’ll Gather at the River
At one minute to nine he should have rolled the wooden Indian back into warm tobacco darkness and turned the key in the lock. But somehow he waited because there were so many lost men walking by in no special direction for no special reason. A few of them wandered in to drift their gaze over the tribal cigars laid out in their neat brown boxes, then glanced up suddenly surprised to find where they were and said, evasively, “Evening, Charlie.”
“So it is,” said Charlie Moore.
Some of the men wandered off empty-handed, others moved on with a nickel cigar unlit in their mouths.
So it was nine thirty of a Thursday night before Charlie Moore finally touched the wooden Indian’s elbow as if disturbing a friend and hating to bother. Gently he maneuvered the savage to where he became watchman of the night. In the shadows, the carved face stared raw and blind through the door.
“Well, Chief, what do you see?”
Charlie followed that silent gaze beyond to the highway that cut through the very center of their lives.
In locust hordes, cars roared up from Los Angeles. With irritation they slowed to thirty miles per hour here. They crept between some three dozen shops, stores, and old livery stables become gas stations, to the north rim of town. There the cars exploded back to eighty, racing like Furies on San Francisco, to teach it violence.
Charlie snorted softly.
A man passed, saw him standing with his silent wooden friend, said, “Last night, eh?” and was gone.
Last night.
There. Someone had dared use the words.
Charlie wheeled to switch off the lights, lock the door and, on the sidewalk, eyes down, freeze.
As if hypnotized, he felt his gaze rise again to the old highway which swept by with winds that smelled a billion years ago. Great bursts of headlight arrived, then cut away in departures of red taillight, like schools of small bright fish darting in the wake of sharks and blind-traveling whales. The lights sank away and were lost in the black hills.
Charlie broke his stare. He walked slowly on through his town as the clock over the Oddfellows Lodge struck the quarter hour and moved on toward ten and still he walked and was amazed and then not amazed anymore to see how every shop was still open long after hours and in every door stood a man or woman transfixed even as he and his Indian brave had been transfixed by a talked-about and dreadful future suddenly become Here Now Tonight.
Fred Ferguson, the taxidermist, kin to the family of wild owls and panicked deer which stayed on forever in his window, spoke to the night air as Charlie passed:
“Hard to believe, ain’t it?”
He wished no answer, for he went on, immediately:
“Keep thinking: just can’t be. Tomorrow, the highway dead and us dead with it.”
“Oh, it won’t be that bad,” said Charlie.
Ferguson gave him a shocked look. “Wait. Ain’t you the one hollered two years ago, wanted to bomb the legislature, shoot the road contractors, steal the concrete mixers and earth-movers when they started the new highway three hundred yards west of here? What you mean, it won’t be bad? It will, and you know it!”
“I know,” said Charlie Moore, at last.
Ferguson brooded on the near distance.
“Three hundred little bitty yards. Not much, eh? But seeing as how our town is only a hundred yards wide, that puts us, give or take, about two hundred yards from the new superroad. Two hundred yards from people who need nuts, bolts, or house-paint. Two hundred from jokers who barrel down from the mountains with deer or fresh shot alley-cats of all sorts and need the services of the only A-l taxidermist on the Coast. Two hundred yards from ladies who need aspirin—” He eyed the drugstore. “Haircuts.” He watched the red-striped pole spin in its glass case down the street. “Strawberry sodas.” He nodded at the malt shop. “You name it.”
They named it all in silence, sliding their gaze along the stores, the shops, the arcades.
“Maybe it’s not too late.”
“Late, Charlie? Hell. Cement’s mixed and poured and set. Come dawn they yank the roadblocks both ends of the new road. Governor might cut a ribbon from the first car. Then … people might remember Oak Lane the first week, sure. The second week not so much. A month from now? We’ll be a smear of old paint on their right running north, on their left running south, burning rubber. There’s Oak Lane! Remember? Ghost town. Oops! It’s gone.”
