“Maybe he was looking for something.” Spencer went forward to the drums, “Petrol, maybe.”

  “He could have got as much as he wanted from The Spaceman!” Auden said suddenly intimately, “Listen, I heard that Bell was some sort of hero in Viet Nam or somewhere: that he saved a whole lot of people’s lives. Is it possible a guy like that—if he was only in it for the money—” He seemed a little embarrassed, “I got the impression that he was—” He shrugged, “You know, well—religious.” He looked at Spencer for a cackle of sarcastic laughter.

  Spencer said, “Really? I didn’t know you knew him.”

  “I didn’t. I just—” Auden said quickly, “I saw him at the door, you know, when he must have known he was going to get the chop and—” He kicked the first drum with his shoe and said before the sound came, “Petrol and goddamned plenty if you want it.” Auden said irritably, “I don’t know, do I?”

  The drum made an empty ringing sound.

  Auden said, “That’s funny.” He kicked the second drum, “They’re both empty.” He furrowed his brow and looked at the generator tank, “You don’t think Bell was down here loading up on ...” He said quickly, “Nah, it must be in the generator engine tank.”

  Spencer, interested, said, “What, you saw a cross around his neck or something?”

  “Of course I didn’t see a cross around his neck or something! People don’t wear crosses around their necks these days!” He looked at Spencer suspiciously, “Do they?” (Spencer said, “No, I don’t. Some people do though—”) “I just—” Auden said awkwardly, “Well, he—well—well, he looked up—didn’t he?”

  “Did he?”

  “Yeah! I was trying to get in a shot past him and I saw him and he had a sort of sick look on his face—you know, like those plaster saints you see outside churches-you know—” Auden put on a dyspeptic eye-rolling look of sanctity— “You know, that sort of look!” Auden said quickly, fixing his mind onto the more scientifically deducible truths of the world, “What would you say that tank on the generator would hold? About eighty gallons? That’s what the drums would hold.” He saw Spencer pondering something, “Look, forget I mentioned it, all right? I just thought that if he was what everyone said he was then if he was religious then it’d be a bit better for his family. All right? I’m not going soft or anything, I just thought—” Auden said angrily, “How the hell do I know? For all I know he could have just been looking at a fly on the bloody ceiling! For all I know he wasn’t religious at all—what the hell do I know about bloody religion anyway?”

  Spencer said quietly, “It’s certainly a very nice thought if you’re right.”

  “Yeah. Sure. Bloody lovely.” Auden snapped, “Look, let’s just check the bloody petrol tank and make sure the bloody stuffs where it should be, O.K.? That’s what the bloody manual says, isn’t it?”

  Spencer said encouragingly, “It’s a nice thought.”

  “Yeah. So is bloody sarsaparilla and goddamned ice cream!” Auden whipped off the cap of the petrol tank, sniffed inside the nozzle, and, satisfied at the appropriate odour of hydrocarbons, gave the tank a blow with his foot and said before it connected, “Full of petrol, just where it should be, full to the bloody gills with eighty gallons of high bloody octane super boom-boom quality bloody—”

  The petrol tank on the emergency generator made a hollow ringing sound.

  Auden, his attention to the Paradisal joys of the next world brought back to the menace of this one in an instant of sudden comprehension, said in a gasp, “Hell—!”

  *

  It was lovely, just like the War. In the foyer, the people had all gathered with their suitcases and they were sitting in the chairs and on the lounges and on the floor, talking quietly to each other and whispering. Some of them seemed to be praying.

  Through the open door of the office came and went a steady stream of white coated Scientific officers, fingerprint men and people from the Fire Brigade.

  Outside, the night was dark and warm and there were flashing lights and men in uniform moving about and gathering in little knots to confer and make plans. A few bedraggled monster suits lay in the corners of the foyer, discarded, and here and there, near them, fallen down placards advertising films and the last vestiges of peace.

  At the front desk, the night manager, an anxious, dark haired girl from Israel, was flicking through papers, organising lists for evacuation, and talking to the bell boys and the maids.

  Trays of steaming hot cups of coffee were being brought out from the hastily reopened kitchen, and pretty soon, there would be soup.

  They had moved her piano down from upstairs into the centre of the foyer and Carole began for the second time since 7 p.m. her repertoire of wartime tunes: The White Cliffs Of Dover, We’ll Meet Again, Keep Smiling Through, and the one her husband had liked best: Together.

  It was lovely.

  People were actually listening.

  *

  It was a little after 8 p.m. and, somewhere in the hotel, as the guests and staff waited for the evacuation that was not going to come, eighty gallons of petrol were missing.

  Outside, in the street and in the rear carpark, the firemen and their officers, told of the news, shook their heads in the steadily freshening wind in from the sea and fell ominously silent.

  16

  The truth had come to him in whispers in the darkness. In the darkness The Spaceman had heard the whispered truths of the young and middle-aged and, louder, he had heard the dry rasping of the old—survivors from another generation—as they struggled to comprehend.

  He had heard them behind him in the movies, heard the girl say in a gasp to her boyfriend, “He’s going to shoot her!” The middle-aged say with an affected yawn, “Oh, sure, now they get marooned in space and there’s a flying saucer that—” Heard the old say, “I don’t understand: why did he hire someone to murder his wife when he could have just divorced her?” Heard children say—

  The whispers in the dark had told him. He had begun going to the cheaper seats to hear not the soundtrack, but the voices behind him interpreting reality.

  “You watch, the convicts are going to break into a house, hold the woman hostage and get her husband to—”

  “They’re going to—”

  “He’s got a gun!”

  “The monster’s going to sit with the girl, you watch— and then she’ll give him a flower and he’ll go off and then—”

  “Here goes the priest. He’ll walk up to the space craft and they’ll disintegrate him and then the tanks will start firing—”

  “I know what’s going to happen. What’s going to happen is—”

  “If that was me up there I know what I’d do ...”

  “I know what I’d do—”

  Reality. Successions of images run on the surface of the brain from childhood. Flickerings of a strange internal language, anticipations of actions from celluloid clues, pervasive propagandas for ethical and unethical behaviour, learned responses for artificial situations—

  “If that ever happened to me in real life ...”

  The Spaceman had made it real life.

  Lam: intimations of madness courtesy of the psychiatric movie firm of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Wong: greed courtesy of every Big Job movie ever made with additions of The Sting and uninterrupted television effluvia of big business mechanisations and swindles. Jensen Ho: a simpler soul. The Convicts Have Your Family movies of the fifties. The Yakuza: The Godfather—a chance to make money to increase their empire when, in reality, all the empire could ever want would accrue from their capital invested safely in the nearest bank at ten percent base rate interest. The Spaceman himself—The Beast Abroad.

  Every movie ever made on the subject proved that the world never came to an end, that the meteor never hit.

  The hotel foyer across the road was full of people believing it.

  George Bell ...

  The innocent dupe Sent to The Chair for a Crime He Did Not Commit.

  Whispers, clues, reflections of reality, reality itself ...

  The Spaceman, sitting in his car with the briefcase containing his asbestos suit next to him, smiled.

  The Movies.

  The only mistake he had made had been not to kill Wong earlier.

  The Spaceman saw someone he knew crossing from the hotel towards him and he got out of his car, still smiling, to say hullo.

  *

  In the Detectives’ Room, making notes on his pad in an effort to avoid the disgusting spectacle of Auden eating noodles at the next desk, O’Yee said, “Harry, this whole thing is beginning to sound to me like the plot of half a dozen classic movies rolled into one. The only thing it hasn’t got so far is Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca walking off into the airport sunset with Claude Rains in the last reel.” He saw Feiffer glance up at him from his desk with a heavenward gazing look on his face and said quickly, “No, I know I see everything through goddamn silver screen glasses, but you just try it out.” He looked at Spencer and found he had his interest. “This business with the street cleaner: you think about it for a moment.” He stood up and held his hands out like a director calling for silence on the set, “Here’s this scene at dawn in a deserted street, right? Big hotel or building of some sort right by. A slight wind blowing papers around—no titles, no music, the audience all settled down with their popcorn bags unopened—and then pan to this fucking great flying saucer—gasp from audience—but they know it’s a science fiction film, so gasp stops. We show that the flying saucer is made of plywood. The popcorn bags start rustling—then wham! here’s this guy in a space suit standing next to it. End rustling. Hold that shot for a moment. Then, start music, there’s a street sweeper or two wandering up the street—a bit of comic relief—only it isn’t funny because we know—because it’s film, that the street sweepers are going, somehow, to get the chop—”

  Auden said with a mouthful of noodles in his mouth, “Crap!”

  Auden was the sort of guy O’Yee always got behind in the movies. O’Yee said automatically, “Would you please be quiet. Thank you.” He raised his finger to show the scene was continuing, “Then after a little bit of business, kapow! the Spaceman’s real and he starts moving and—” O’Yee began shambling towards Spencer with his finger pointed like a gun, a glazed expression in his eyes.

  Spencer said, “Gosh, that’s really good.”

  “—and then, build up the tension so the audience is grasping the popcorn bag harder and harder and harder ... and then—whoosh! Out comes the fire and it envelops the poor old innocent street sweeper, covers the screen in fire, the fire rushes out at the audience, going all sorts of yellow and red and—and then: TITLES!”

  Spencer said enthusiastically, “I’ve seen that one! It was called—”

  Auden said with a grunt, “It was called every rotten movie you ever saw.”

  Feiffer said to O’Yee, “Go on.”

  “And we call it The Spaceman. Right?” O’Yee turned to Auden with an accusing look in his eyes, “Isn’t that what everyone calls him? Why the hell not The Arsonist or the goddamned murderer or—”

  That was an easy one. Auden said with a noodle on his chin, “Because he’s dressed in a fucking space suit, that’s why!”

  “Right! Why?”

  “What do you mean “why”?” Auden said, “Because he’s—” He looked at Spencer, “I don’t know why. Because he needs protection from the flames?” He recovered quickly, “Anyway it isn’t a space suit, it’s a firefighting suit that just happens to look like a space suit!”

  Feiffer, his eyes on O’Yee, said slowly, “Which is why, since it was a firefighting suit he stood next to a fire engine when he shot the sweeper.”

  Auden said, “I thought you said he stood next to a flying saucer.” He said, “Oh.”

  O’Yee said, “And then, on the scene comes Lam and Wong. Lam is the respectable, vaguely neurotic type—let’s call him Joan Crawford—”

  Auden muttered, “Shit,” saw O’Yee glare at him and pretended the reference was to the quality of the noodles. Feiffer said, “And Teddy Wong?”

  “Bette Davis. And, in this movie, Bette Davis—”

  Spencer said brightly, “My mother used to watch those movies on late-night television. Bette Davis was always the rotten one and she wanted something from Joan Crawford—an inheritance or something—and she was always trying to convince the doctors and Joan Crawford herself that she was around the bend by, you know, tape recordings of dead relatives and—”

  Feiffer said, “And messages on windows and cigarettes and—”

  O’Yee said triumphantly, “Right!”

  Spencer said quietly, “Life mirroring art Auden muttered, “What the hell does that mean?”

  O’Yee rubbed his hands together, “Right! And then those two film producers Kong and Wu get the chop in plain sight of everyone in the Palm Court Room—Jack the Ripper strikes in Victorian London. Then Shimada and Mukherjee get terrified out of their minds in their room and urged off downstairs into the foyer where the million dollars in the case—the Big Job movie. Goldfinger at Fort Knox, all the George Segal movies ever made—the old Nazi treasure in the lake bullshit—and then—”

  Feiffer said, “And then The Spaceman burns the money to ash. Why?”

  O’Yee said, “So Bette Davis, the rotten one, knows the truth, that someone else has it in for her—that there’s a double cross—you know, that for example the doctor she’s in cahoots with: the one feeding Joan Crawford the poison is secretly—”

  Spencer said, “You’re saying that Wong had some sort of deal going with The Spaceman concerning the million dollars—”

  Feiffer said, “And the Japanese Yakuza—”

  “—to steal the million dollars—”

  O’Yee said, “Yeah. And The Green Slime. The poor honest Joe Doakes intimidated into helping because his family is in danger from the convicts—”

  Auden said, “I saw that one. It had that character who played Ben Casey on TV in it.” He looked at Spencer, “You know, man, woman, birth, death, infinity ...” Spencer, not a great television watcher, met him with a blank look, “You know, and then wham! the hospital doors fly open and in comes—” Auden said irritably, going back to his noodles in a funk, “Aw, forget it!”

  O’Yee said definitely, “It’s a whole lot of movie plots. It all sounds like—”

  Feiffer, echoing the Commander’s words, said quietly, “Just like the plot of a sci fi movie ...”

  “Like a whole mass of movies, Harry! Like every movie you ever saw!”

  Feiffer said, “And Bell?”

  O’Yee said, “I don’t know.” He paused for a moment, “Gary Cooper in High Noon?” He turned to Auden, “That was the one where the townspeople all kicked Marshal Kane in the face and he was left to fight the bad guys alone and—”

  Auden said, “I’ve seen High Noon! What do you think I am? Everyone’s seen High Noon!”

  Feiffer said, “If Bell was innocent.”

  “If he wasn’t why did he warn everyone in the office?” Feiffer said, “Maybe. If he was innocent, just who are the townspeople who kicked him in the face supposed to be? Us?”

  “Maybe, yes!” O’Yee said in appeal, “God Almighty, Harry, everyone who’s ever met Bell claims he was the bravest man who ever lived. Maybe if everybody says it—”

  Feiffer finished for him, “Maybe it’s just our dirty, suspicious little minds. Right?”

  “Maybe. Yes.”

  Feiffer, smiling faintly, said, “O.K., O.K., so you’re telling me the whole thing is a combination of what? The Day The Earth Stood Still or Invasion Of The Martians, Hysteria or whatever all those Davis Crawford films were called, High bloody Noon and—and what?”

  “No, I think all that was just the sub plot that surrounds the thing.” O’Yee said with the easy criticism of a lifelong cineaste, “No, I think whoever came up with all this sold it to people like Wong and the Yakuza and to a lesser extent The Green Slime because all these stories are so well known and so hackneyed as to be immediately recognisable as reality. When in fact they’re not reality at all, but what people who have spent their lives going to movies and being influenced by them have come to think of as reality!” O’Yee said, “It’s like all this violence on television: if you spent all your childhood and life watching it you begin to think that the normal, the usual, the only method of dealing with any sort of slight emotional upset is to start drawing pistols and killing people.” O’Yee, in full flight, said, “What I think is that The Spaceman has a really genuine, original idea of his own behind all this and he’s only used the movie plots to sell the idea to the idiots he needed to help him with it.”

  “Then why did he burn the money?”

  “Because it didn’t matter. The million dollars prize was straight out of a movie. What he really wanted—” Realising it, O’Yee said, “Christ Almighty, how much more obvious can he get? Not only was the idea of taking the million in a glass case straight out of a movie—Topkapi or something—the goddamned money was movie money itself! It was the cost of ten minutes filming of a movie!”

  “The elusive forty five million dollars.” Feiffer said, “If the million was the prize Wong thought he was going to get—”

  O’Yee said, “According to what the Companies Squad and Ashwood told you, it’s a fair bet that even if he didn’t get that he would have got the managership of the Empress of India when the Yakuza took it over.”

  “The Green Slime said Wong knew about the forty five million. He said he mentioned it.”

  “Maybe he did.” O’Yee said, “Maybe The Spaceman told Wong to say it.” He said quietly, “That’s from a movie too—and it’s called The Sting—a little bit of fiction that makes the whole thing sound real, big and pointless to try and fight against. Only this time it wasn’t a fiction!”

 

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