Count Geiger's Blues (21 page)
*
It was after midnight when Xavier and Bari reached her atelier; stripped of garments, her second-floor studio was as bare and cold as, well, as an EleRail platform. Bari stopped to light the space heater, and she and Xavier sat down among the throw cushions in front of it. Xavier hoped the space heater would warm Bari’s heart faster than it was working on the frigid air swirling through the loft.
“Please take off that hood.”
Xavier pulled it off with a yank, as if it were a gauze pad Velcro’d to a wound. Bari smoothed his hair back down, less from any tender impulse, it seemed, than from irritation with the way he looked. Under this touch, he shuddered.
“What’s the matter?” he said.
“You think—I mean, you
really
think—you’re Superman.”
“Count Geiger.”
“Forget the brand name. You think you’re a bona fide stalwart. Don’t you?”
“Bari, I have . . .
abilities
. I didn’t ask for them, and I didn’t want them, but suddenly I have them. Three shots couldn’t kill me. Tonight—”
“You rescued a woman under attack. Fine. I can’t rebuke you for that.”
“For what, then?”
“For acting like a pulp goon on steroids after you’d disabled her muggers.”
Not wanting to, Xavier smiled. A mistake. Bari scooted back and kicked him in the leg with the side of her foot. The kick didn’t hurt. What hurt was the reproachful glint in her eyes
“Funny, eh? You think hanging those guys up like bananas was clever?”
“It impressed The Mick.”
“A sixteen-year-old kid with a retropunk sensibility.”
“And the station cop was grateful.”
“You saved his ass from a neglect-of-duty indictment and a lawsuit. And he’ll get credit for arresting those jerks. Of course he’s grateful.”
“What’s wrong, then?”
“That hang-’em-high gambit. Idiot grandstanding. Pure comic-book cliché. A by-the-numbers brutality that you think was original and cute.”
“Sorry,” Xavier said. “But Salonika’s finest got them down in respectable shape, all things considered. ’S far as I could see, anyway.”
“Tell me this: Is that kind of cheap showboating what you’re going to pull every time you warp-shift into superhero mode? If it is, count me out, Count Geiger. I’m not into teen power trips that take off from funny clothes and self-aggrandizing violence.”
“Nope. Funny clothes alone do it for you.” He could be as reckless in his speech as she seemed to think he had just been in his actions.
Bari only stared at him.
“You want me to go?”
“Please. The danger of stalwartly abilities, Xave, the curse if you like” —finally sounding almost tender— “is that you’ll come to depend on and use them, even when they’re not called for. Fillips like that chandelier trick are despicable. I liked you better when a beautiful tone poem by Debussy gave you the gout.”
“It still might,” Xavier said. “I don’t know what’s happening to me. I haven’t been myself for nearly two years.”
“Good night.” Bari scooted forward and kissed his temple. “Don’t be seduced into shabby exhibitionism by a God-given talent, even if it’s a new one.”
*
Going home, hooded again (more to hide his real identity than to strut as Count Geiger), Xavier thought that Bari’s warning—“Don’t be seduced into shabby exhibitionism by a God-given talent”—had a broader application than she knew. It could apply to Bari herself. Who was more prone to what she’d warned him against than a fashion designer? Especially one with a complicated creative and profit-sharing agreement with a powerhouse comic-book company?
Then, as if from a disregarded nook of his subconscious, up surged a Nietzschean apothegm:
“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.”
The problem wasn’t Bari’s: the problem was his.
It dismayed Xavier, once home, to find that The Mick had waited up. Smite Them Hip & Thigh was on the CD player. The cut programmed to play and replay was “Count Geiger’s Blues.” Its beat, melody, and lyrics pounded Xavier like a brutal aural surf. He begged The Mick to turn the player off and go to bed. The Mick did both, reluctantly.
Alone again, Xavier sedated himself with a stiff drink.
I have become Count Geiger, he thought.
I have become Count Geiger
.
I HAVE BECOME COUNT GEIGER. . . .
41
“Go Thou and Do Likewise”
At The Mick’s urging,
Bari, Howie Littleton, Xavier, and he met one morning at Salonika’s main police station to visit Tim Bowman, a prisoner in a basement holding cell of the fortresslike station, a sprawling structure decades old and architecturally at odds with the metal-and-mirror towers raised on the recent past’s wrecking-ball ruins. In the station’s echoey lobby, Xavier felt that he had stumbled under the portcullis of a medieval keep. It always surprised him that the cops here spoke Suthren-styled English rather than Breton, Gaelic, or Norman French.
“Y’all can’t go in to see him,” the desk sergeant told them. “One or two at a time’s the reg.”
Xavier had a painful ambivalence—his gut ached, his hands were cold—about visiting Bowman. It didn’t reassure him to have to forfeit the moral support of two other visitors or to send Bari in to talk to Bowman without him. At a computer as unsuited to this vaulted lobby as a halftrack would have been on a Putt-Putt fairway, the sergeant tapped in their names and waited for them to make up their minds.
“The Mick and I’ll go together,” Xavier said.
“’Kay,” the sergeant said. “Who’s first? Each set of visitors gets twenty minutes.”
“You and Mikhail go,” Bari said. “Howie and I have some business to discuss.”
I’ll bet you do, Xavier thought. The pair sat down on a railway bench near the front desk, then turned toward each other with rapt looks and animated hands. The Mick tugged Xavier’s sleeve, pointing him down a long hall toward a visitors’ reception area. A young black policewoman led them. The hall stank of floor wax, bleach, and cigarette butts in sand-filled canisters.
“In you go,” the woman said, admitting them and locking the door behind them.
Unlike in the movies, no upright glass shield divided prisoners from visitors at the powwow table. Nor would they have to use telephone receivers to talk to Bowman, who entered under guard through a rear door. He wore powder-blue jailhouse garb and cheap low-cut sneakers. (No cape, no Big Mister Sinister costume.) His carroty hair had been shaved to burr length, but the barber had left him a boyish forelock, which drooped greasily. He didn’t look much like a comic-book hood anymore, more like somebody’s neglected or abused redheaded stepchild.
“So. You’re
still
still alive,” Bowman said, sitting down and frowning at Xavier. “ ’Bout my damned luck.”
“One review,” Xavier said. “It didn’t get you fired. Trying to kill me was stupid, as close to self-destructively irrational as an act could be.”
“Experts shrink me,” Bowman said. “So spare me your amateur repetitions of the obvious.”
The Mick began to unbutton his shirt. The guard behind Bowman, a tall black man with oddly greenish eyes and a name tag reading lively, rapped his knuckles on the table. “Whoa, son, what you doing?”
Xavier was as curious as Officer Lively. It wasn’t hot in the visitation room, and surely The Mick hadn’t tried to smuggle in a metal file or a snub-nosed revolver for his hero. The Mick had that much sense. Surely . . .
“Only a comic.” The Mick pulled from his shirt a pristine copy of
Count Geiger
, issue one, in a clear plastic bag with a white backing board.
“He cain’t have no comic,” Lively said.
“I didn’t bring it to leave,” The Mick said. “I want him to sign it for me.”
“That ain’t authorized either. He cain’t have a pen ’cept for letter writing and legal documents. And when he’s done, he got to give it right back.”
The Mick pushed the unbagged comic across to Bowman. He gestured at Officer Lively’s shirt pocket, which held a dime-store ballpoint in a pocket protector. Lopsidedly smiling, Bowman began riffling the mint-condition copy of
Count Geiger
. “Let him use your pen,” The Mick said. “It’ll only be for letter writing?”
“You said a signature,” Lively said. “Not no letter writing.”
“Yeah,” The Mick conceded. “But a signature’s letter writing. You know, the letters of a name.”
Lively chuckled wanly. Then he reached over Bowman’s shoulder and liberated the comic from him. Keeping an eye on Bowman and The Mick, he examined the comic. Eventually, he held the comic up by its stapled spine and gave it a careful shake. When nothing dropped or fluttered out—no check, no escape instructions, no map—he returned it to Bowman and grudgingly yielded his ballpoint.
“Sign it for the kid,” he said. “And then give me back my pen. In this push-paper place, a guy got to have his pen.”
Surprise: Bowman opened the comic and autographed it neatly on the premier issue’s premier story’s title page. This act, Xavier realized, automatically increased the issue’s resale value at least tenfold. (What sentimental value did it have for The Mick? Xavier was less sure about that.) Bowman returned the pen to the guard and shoved the comic back to The Mick, who opened it to study the autograph.
Lively folded his arms and stepped back against the wall in a game attempt to erase himself from the room as thoroughly as would a eunuch in a seraglio. But Xavier had no doubt that if anything else about this meeting struck Lively as fishy, he would step in again. The Mick had no similar hunch. He put a hand on Xavier’s arm and leaned toward the man.
“Hey, Tim, my uncle’s noodlebrain review came out months ago. He don’t even feel that way now.”
“
‘Doesn’t,’
” Xavier said. To Bowman he added, “And I don’t.”
“Forgive me, kid,” Bowman said, ignoring Xavier. “But who the fuck are you, and why should I care?”
For once in his fitful career as a human imposter, The Mick was taken aback. Bowman had challenged him. Why? He was a fan, congenitally nool, an ally with the artist against society’s bloats, boxes, and zombies. He might not be Officer Lively’s blood kin, but he was obviously
Bowman’s
bro. Was he going to have to spell that out? Didn’t his comic-book smuggling and his smart-ass enchantment of Officer Lively bespeak his noolness?
“I’m the nephew of the guy you shot,” The Mick said. “Mikhail Menaker,
aka
The Mick. I was at Goldfinger’s—with Uncle Xave—when UC was outing the DeeJay, Gator Maid, and Count Geiger. I popped my unc, so to say, even before you did.”
“Oh.” Bowman looked at The Mick as if trying to match his features to those of a suspect in a grainy mug shot. “Yessir, I
do
remember. Ever ballsy, aren’t you? Crusader Kid. My condolences.”
“For what?”
“The genetic tragedy tying you to old Xave the Knave here,” nodding at Xavier: “King of the Komix Kickers.”
“Listen, he’s actually a fan too. Sometimes he even likes—intellectually, you know—the music and lyrics of Smite Them Hip & Thigh. He’s evolved, catch? And if my uncle Xave’s evolved, there’s hope for the globe.”
“So you’re a fan, eh?” Bowman asked Xavier.
“Didn’t I recognize Big Mister Sinister? Didn’t I bring The Mick to talk to you, my would-be assassin?”
The Mick turned to Xavier and deftly loosened the knot in his tie. “Show him, Uncle Xave.” The Mick fumbled at Xavier’s collar buttons. “Not only is he a fan,” The Mick told Bowman, “he’s a real-life stalwart. Swear to Jesus.”
Lively stepped up and rapped the table again. “C’mon, now,” he said.
“Your uncle didn’t sneak a comic in too, did he?”
“It’s
not
a comic,” The Mick said. “Lookit here,” he ordered Bowman.
Even Xavier looked. The Mick had exposed, under Xavier’s dress shirt, a V of crinkled foil, a porthole on his Count Geiger costume from SatyrFernalia. Xavier brushed The Mick’s hands aside, but the disclosure was a
fait accompli
. Bowman laughed. Lively gave him an angry scowl, as if he were a specimen of human vermin caught in a kiddie-porn investigation.
“Well,” Bowman said, “I’d always figured you for a constipated fetishist.”
“No more so than an adult male who openly wears a cape,” Xavier said.
“We all have our reasons.”
“At first it was a talisman,” The Mick went on. “The Suit, I mean. But now that he’s a stalwart, he wears it—secretly—for real. Vile-mannered Xavier Thaxton is really Count Geiger.” To Lively, The Mick said, “This is all confidential, though. Can’t we get some privacy here?”
“You the dude what conked them rowdies t’ other night but what let Tyrone Harp take credit?” Lively asked Xavier.
“You’ve got to sit on that,” The Mick said. “That’s classified gas. What if every crim in the city found out?”
“You done told this one,” Lively said, waving at Bowman. “Make up yo’ mind. I’m here to keep visitation-room peace—not to pick up hush-hush crap to tattle ’round.” Looking deeply offended, he retreated to the wall and crossed his arms. “Time’s a-ticking,” he said.
In a guttural whisper, The Mick explained to Bowman how Xavier had been able to expel the bullets fired point-blank into his gut. Breathing hard and zooming his hands, he related in detail Xavier’s one-man rescue operation at the EleRail station. Uncle Xave was a living stalwart, whether because of the SatyrFernalia Suit’s built-in properties or his uncle’s exposure to some strength-boosting natural phenomenon, The Mick didn’t know, but the stalwart part was definitely proven.
“It’s a tribute to you that he is, Tim,” Mikhail said. “That’s the nifty-weird part.”
Wait a minute, Xavier thought. Bowman tried to kill me.
Agitated, Bowman apologized to Xavier for trying to kill him. He laid the blame for this act on his own insecurity-driven perfectionism, the jealousy and/or resentment of some of his UC staff, the entrepreneurial timidity of F. Deane Finesse, and the depression and disorientation that had overwhelmed him in the wake of his firing. A fair-minded person, he argued, would see his descent into Salonika’s sewers and his brief rampage in the McGill Building as evidence that he had, well,
snapped
.
“Temporary insanity,” The Mick said. “That was it.”
“You were a handy scapegoat for a man in my position,” Bowman told Xavier. “I’m glad you didn’t die.”
“Me too,” Xavier said, feeling edified, stroked, and conned.
“Maybe you could testify for him, Uncle Xave.”
“Easier to do alive than dead. If he’d killed me, he’d’ve blown any hope of my coming in as a friendly witness.”
“I’m sorry,” Bowman said again. “Really.” (Behind him, Lively shifted and sighed.) “A stalwart—a Stalwart for Truth—would do that, though,” Bowman said. “Sit on his natural antagonisms to help a persecuted underdog.”
“What else would he do?” The Mick prompted Bowman.
“Whatever’s noble. Mr. Thaxton, you’re a critic with educated tastes, educated opinions. You’re also a man capable of changing his mind. You reassessed Uncommon Comics, your nephew says. You also have reassessed me. That’s admirable. If you do have stalwartly powers, use them to promote the general welfare. Shun the dehumanizing adrenaline rush of strong-arm heroics and easy coercion. Eschew violence. Use your gifts to ennoble the masses. Champion the Good, the True, the Beautiful.”
Officer Lively turned his shoulder to the plaster wall and spat on the floor.
“That’s a positively Nietzschean program,” Xavier told Bowman.
“You may not believe this, but that program is what I was trying to fulfill in every story I ever wrote or edited for UC. So my plea, if you are in fact a bona fide stalwart, is simple. It’s this:
Go thou and do likewise
.”
“Amen,” The Mick said.
When Mikhail and Xavier had exhausted their twenty minutes with Bowman, Bari and Howie Littleton arrived to visit him. Xavier gave Mikhail cab fare home and strolled back to the McGill Building. No sense in wasting another twenty minutes in the station house just to debrief Bari and her hunky-looking but wussy-souled partner when they returned from their visit. Besides, about the only subject he could imagine the three of them discussing was the coming boom in UC-inspired ready-to-wear, about which, frankly, Xavier did not give a damn. He and Bari could talk later.