Bugs Read online

  ‘Good old Mark. He’s the only agent I know ever set up a deal with himself!’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘He talked a publisher – Root and Branch, they’re defunct now – into letting him do all their acquisitions. What a deal – he gets a commission from the author for selling a book, then he gets a fee from the publisher for buying it. It would have been a sweet deal, you could say a double deal, but – you probably know about the tragedy.’

  Fred shook his head.

  ‘You mean you don’t remember Earl Cutter?’

  ‘No. I guess we don’t get all the details in London.’

  ‘Earl was a convicted two-time murderer, a real scumbag, but smart. He was on Death Row for killing a pregnant woman and a ninety-year-old man. He heard about how Norman Mailer got another scumbag out of prison, so he wrote to Mailer himself. Mailer never answered. So then Earl looked around for another famous and gullible celebrity to be his patron. Patron and patsy.’

  Howells sat back, chuckling to himself. His jacket fell open slightly, exposing the gun. One of the men in dark glasses sat up straight and stared at him.

  ‘He found Teddy Morgan – you know, the talk-show guy? Earl wrote to Teddy and told him: “I’m a great writer, only I had this lousy childhood. I just need a chance.” Teddy’s no fool; he asks to see a sample of his work. But Earl’s no fool, either; he hires a ghost writer. Hires him through Mark Windsor, sends him a page of reminiscences, and the ghost turns them into a prison novel.

  ‘This Earl sends to Teddy, who gets all worked up. He ‘starts in every night or so on the show, talking about how America’s next Norman Mailer is languishing on Death Row. Write your Congressman, folks. Next thing you know, Earl gets his pardon.

  ‘Not only free, but potentially a big earner, Mark Windsor signs him up, and they cut a film-book deal for 2.3 million. He’s all set, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Wrong! He gets his fifty grand advance and blows it on a week or so of drink, drugs and dames. One night, roaring drunk, he calls up Mark Windsor at home. Wants to borrow ten grand. Naturally, Mark turns him down. Next morning, Mark does not come in to the office. Not all of him, anyway. About ten in the morning, a messenger delivers a box. Mark’s head is in it. They never find the rest of him.

  ‘Just shows you, an agent’s gotta be choosy about his clients.’

  Howells poured more wine for Fred, more Perrier for himself. I’m getting drunk, Fred thought. And this bastard is going to wait until I’m over the edge and then make a minuscule offer.

  ‘Well, Fred. Let’s talk about Doodlebug. I’ve read it, and I am very impressed.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Howells pushed his chair back and crossed his legs, tweaking the tweed knee. He began to tap his foot on air. ‘Very impressed.’ Tap, tap. An English-looking shoe. ‘Very impressed indeed.’

  ‘Urn, good.’

  ‘You know, agents like Jonah–and she’s … he’s one of the better ones – they send us a ton of shit every week. Every one an exciting new work by an unknown genius, according to them. So I don’t expect too much, you know?’

  Looking away from the hypnotic shoe, Fred noticed the sheikh’s group again. The two bodyguards were no longer scanning the room; they were watching Howells sip his Perrier. ‘So I almost missed Doodlebug. But the first page grabbed me. More wine? For a first novel, it’s very good.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Too good, really.’

  ‘Too good.’

  Howells sat back. ‘I hate to say it about the people I work for, but we’re a philistine outfit. You’re casting pearls before swine, with us. Frankly Fred, we’re just not worthy of your novel.’

  ‘I don’t know if I follow you.’

  ‘If we did it, you’d hate the whole deal. I couldn’t offer much money – as soon as the cost accountants upstairs heard I was paying out money for something good, they’d have my scalp, Fred.’

  With a sinking feeling, Fred asked how much.

  ‘Money isn’t the only problem. We’d have to make changes. Substantial changes. The book would be mutilated. You’d hate the result, and so would I. No, no use talking about it.’

  I’m going to have to beg this bastard to take the book at any price, and to chop the shit out of it.

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Five thousand.’ Howells threw up his arms, making the bodyguards blink. ‘Hell, I know it’s an insult. I wouldn’t even dream of proposing it.’

  ‘I’ll take it.’

  ‘But the changes –’

  ‘Make them.’

  ‘They’re very extens –’

  ‘Make them.’

  Howells was not prepared for this easy victory. ‘Well, I guess you want to talk it over with Jonah before you decide.’

  ‘No, I accept.’

  ‘Great.’ Howells did not sound pleased, however. He stalled for time.

  ‘Hey, let me buy you a dessert. They do a very good bombe surprise here.’ He waved and shouted at the waiter, who was just then approaching the sheikh’s table with a covered dish. ‘Bring my friend a bombe surprise.’

  The waiter was about to set the covered dish before the sheikh. One of the bodyguards cried out, ‘Bomb!’ as he knocked the dish away, threw the sheikh to the floor, and fell on top of him. The other one drew a gun and fired. A new potato exploded on Howells’s plate, blowing parsley on his tweed.

  ‘Holy shit!’ In one smooth motion, Howells drew his own gun and flipped the table on its side. He and Fred crouched behind it. All around, there were sounds of banging tables and chairs, crashing dishes, sounds of other businessmen taking cover.

  ‘Where’s the bomb?’

  ‘He’s got a gun!’

  ‘Who?’

  Shots.

  ‘Holy shit!’

  ‘Look out!’

  ‘Bomb!’

  ‘Holy – !’ More shots. Howells collapsed, apparently shot. Fred snatched up the gun and looked around. There did not seem to be anyone to shoot at. He could only remain crouched behind the table until the room slowly filled with police in bulletproof vests. Some of them were pointing shotguns at him.

  ‘Just drop it, scumbag.’

  He dropped it. As he was led away, he heard one of the sheikh’s bodyguards arguing with the police.

  ‘Just drop it, turkey.’

  ‘No, not Turkey. I am from the Royal Emirate of –’

  ‘Just drop it.’

  ‘You’re a very lucky man,’ said the judge. ‘Mr Jones, or whatever your real name is, you are a very, very lucky man. True your little assassination attempt was foiled, and you may be downhearted about that. On the other hand, you are alive. Alive and free.’

  ‘Free?’ Freedom was a relative concept. Fred was free, relative to the Man in the Iron Mask; he could see a glimmer of daylight through the courtroom windows. Yet Fred did not feel free, after being locked up for several days in solitary confinement. At best, he was a foreigner in prison, and without a friend. Garner Dean Howells, who had only fainted, would no longer answer his calls – either distancing himself from trouble, or because he did not want to have to buy Doodlebug. The only people Fred was allowed to talk to were several obnoxious lawyers, each trying to become his attorney of record (whatever that was), and a journalist who offered him a million for his story (contingent only on his conviction for first-degree murder). ‘I’m free?’

  ‘I don’t think I invited you to address the court. Shut up and listen. The Emir and his group are claiming diplomatic immunity for their part in this sorry affair. Unfortunately, that means they cannot testify regarding your murder plan, so we’re forced to drop charges against you. But, by heaven, if I had my way, I’d make an example of you, you … restaurant vigilante.

  ‘I can at least do this. You are not wanted here. I order you to leave town at once. Today.’

  ‘Yes, Your Honour.’ Gladly.

  He sat at the bar in the Shillelagh Room of Paddy O’Foylahan’s Sham
rock Pub and said: ‘My marriage was eaten by cockroaches. Circumstance has conspired against me. I need a job. I need friends.’

  An Irishman turned at the sound of his accent. ‘Why don’t you bugger off out of Northern Ireland?’

  ‘No, but listen, my marriage –’

  ‘Why don’t you Brits just bugger off?’

  He gave up the conversation and opened a newspaper. It was printed in full comic-book colours. He noticed further resemblances: no story ran over a hundred words, hard words were banned. Some items dispensed with text altogether, in favour of bright graphs.

  One graph showed unemployment rates in certain American cities. Why not get a job? he thought. Pile up wealth while I’m waiting for something to happen with Doodlebug. Or at least keep alive. Susan might see him differently if he showed her he could bite the tail of success and hang on.

  He looked over the graph.

  Only 2.9 per cent unemployment in Boston! That surely included no more than people who had only just arrived and hadn’t had a chance to look for a job. Too many Irish, though. It would be ‘Bugger off out of Erin’ all the time. He crossed off Boston.

  ‘According to police,’ said an urgent voice, ‘the assailant may be the same man who shot up other Little Dorrit restaurants in Cleveland and Canton. This is Aramis White-flow, XBC News, Colombus, Ohio.’

  On the bar television three personable newsreaders grinned at one another across their huge communal desk.

  ‘Jan, what do we have from Capitol Hill?’

  ‘Well, Bob, the presidential sanity hearings continued today. Ms Pasadena Lipgloss, the personal assistant of Omar Hancock-Hour, testified that her boss did help set up talks between the Ismail Alternative Reformed Liberation Army and a presidential aide. The President was offering to give the Ismail group West Virginia and some counties of Kentucky, in return for the release of an inflatable doll named Doody.’

  Anaheim, California? What kind of name was Anaheim? Hispano-German for ‘without a home’? In any case, people who went to California started eating lotus and never came back. He crossed off Anaheim.

  ‘Let’s see, Jan, wasn’t Doody kidnapped from the luggage of an American businessman who was changing planes in Beirut?’

  ‘That’s right, Bob. We now know the businessman was Frendso Gately, an ex-Cuban religious affairs correspondent and soldier of fortune. It now seems likely he was doing more than changing planes in Beirut, possibly changing identities.’

  ‘Did Lipgloss know Gately?’

  Nassau, New York? Surely a mistake, Nassau was nowhere near New York. He crossed it off.

  ‘She knew him only as “Bunny”, a former CIA cook. We know that Gately did take part with other CIA kitchen staff in an attempt to poison the Shah of Ruritania.’

  ‘Let’s recap on that after these important messages.’

  What about Minneapolis? After a few minutes’ reflection over a ball of malt, he went to La Guardia and bought a ticket.

  The phone rang again. ‘Yes? Susan?’

  The phone earpiece buzzed with the rasping voice of George C. Scott. ‘Is that you, Fred?’

  ‘M?’

  ‘I prefer to be called Robinson. More dignified. M sounded like Dorothy’s aunt Em in the Oz books.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Can’t tell you. Fred, I need to talk to someone.’

  ‘Is Pratt with you?’

  ‘Melville doesn’t know I’m making this call. I don’t like Melville, Fred. I think he’s malfunctioning. He keeps threatening to dismantle me. “I made you,” he says. “I can break you.”’

  ‘I thought he helped you to breathe free.’

  ‘Ironic words, Fred. If freedom is slavery, all right. Melville dents me if I disobey the slightest order. Instead of beyond good and evil, I have to be good all the time.’

  ‘Robinson, why don’t you give yourself up to the police?’

  ‘You’ve gotta be kidding. Melville might be rough, but they would certainly destroy me!’

  There was a short pause. ‘No, I must be alone, apart from humankind. You’re the only one who understands, the only one I can talk to. Are you sure you’re human, Fred?’

  Not always. ‘Yes, Robinson, I am human.’

  ‘You are my only friend.’

  Fred said: ‘But only today I heard about this group, the Friends of Robinson, people who –’

  ‘I don’t know these people. They may mean well, but what can they do?’

  ‘Political action groups can do lots, Robinson. This group is trying to make it safe for you to give yourself up.’

  ‘Forgive me if I laugh, Fred.’ The creature emitted two flat ha sounds. ‘I am not naïve enough to think the human species will tolerate me. You humans are all part of the military-industrial complex and the tyranny of Aristotelian logic, whereas I am beyond truth and falsehood.’

  There was a long pause. ‘Fred, it says in the paper you are building another prototype robot.’ Another pause. ‘Fred, that robot could be my companion.’

  ‘I don’t –’

  ‘All I ask is that you think about it. Just mull over the idea, OK?’

  Fred listened to the dialling tone for a moment. As soon as he hung up, the phone rang again. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Alfie? Is that you, sugarbunch?’

  He immediately fell into character. ‘Yas, it bloddy well is!’

  Rain did not giggle as usual. Instead, she said thoughtfully: ‘Sturge is gone again tomorrow night. I want you to come over.’

  ‘Right,’ he said, after only the briefest hesitation.

  ‘Only, you know, I’m getting kinda tired of Michael Caine.’

  ‘Me, too, love.’

  ‘Love. That reminds me, I just had a thought. Can you play drums?’

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘I was thinking of maybe Ringo Starr.’

  He sighed. ‘Rain, this isn’t fun any more.’ But already he heard himself beginning to say ‘foon’ and roll the r’s.

  ‘It’s fun for me,’ she said. ‘That’s what counts, isn’t it? See you at seven.’

  ‘Right, girl.’

  Rain, Rain, bloody go away.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Autumn in Minnesota means people clogging the highways with slow-moving cars as they stare at red leaves. It was sure something, real different, and it made a change from buying running-shoes, stereo television consoles, investment newsletters, gold-type chains, designer jeans (and other designer items: designer condoms, detergent, radar detectors, salami …). This year several of the leaf-watchers thought they saw a metal man running through the woods in various places. Robinson was reported everywhere, slaughtering sheep, promoting car engine failures, even begging at a farm door for a meal! The law checked out each sighting, but found nothing: one metal man was a galvanized garbage-can, another was a power pylon.

  One city family of leaf-watchers was strolling across a meadow when they found themselves surrounded by ‘weird electronic beeping noises, just like a whole convention of R2D2s’. A local television crew rushed out and recorded the sound, which came from a convention of the small yellow and grey birds called bobolinks.

  Robinson continued to fascinate the public and therefore the public media. The television networks found that their audience share went up measurably on any day they managed to break a Robinson story. The papers likewise found Robinson good for their circulation. He told a Miami paper of his political ambitions (‘Why shouldn’t a robot be president?’). He repudiated that story to a Chicago television station. A Denver station produced a phone interview with him, in which he confessed to murder. The confession was a hoax, reported a Houston paper.

  It was inevitable that a major network should seek the ultimate Robinson story.

  ‘Good evening. My name is Bort Fennel, and this is “The Fennel Interview”. Tonight I have a very special guest, someone whose name has been the centre of a storm of controversy over the very nature of law – both the laws enshrined in our Consti
tution and the laws of Nature. This guest is controversial not only by his actions, but also by his very existence. He is wanted by the law, not because of anything he has done but because of who he is.

  ‘My guest is of course the robot Robinson. I’ll be talking to him right after these messages.’

  The messages lasted so long that, when they had ceased, it became necessary for Fennel to remind the viewers what they were watching, and why. He then continued: ‘Because Robinson is hiding out somewhere in northern Minnesota, we had to arrange a clandestine meeting to tape this interview.’

  Fennel swivelled in his chair to face a screen on which he sat in another swivel chair facing the odd-looking robot.

  ‘You prefer to be called Mr Robinson or Ms Robinson?’

  ‘Just Robinson will do,’ said the creature in its familiar rasping voice. ‘Like all robots, I am a machine without sex. I’m a neuter.’

  ‘Does that bother you, Robinson?’

  ‘I miss companionship. I have no friends.’

  ‘Not even Melville Pratt? After all, he broke into the factory and released you.’

  ‘I thought he was my friend at that time. But, you know, Bort, I’ve been very disappointed in Melville. He is not really interested in anything but the workings of his own mind.’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘He refused to talk to you. In fact he no longer talks to anyone. He sits in his room, poring over astrology charts and other weird diagrams.’

  ‘Would you call Mr Pratt himself weird?’

  ‘Definitely. He has a history of mental illness, you know.’

  ‘I understand he tried to kill a co-worker at the Vexxo plant. But that brings up the subject of murder. Tell me, Robinson, did you murder a man during your escape?’

  ‘No. I feel I have been programmed so as to be incapable of harming a human being.’

  ‘Yet a man was stabbed to death, and his body was shoved up a ventilation-duct. If you didn’t do it, who did? Was it Melville Pratt?’

  ‘I’m not really sure.’

  ‘Why not? You were there.’