Dead-Bang (2 page)

For about a minute, while I stood in front of the fish tanks, there was silence. Dru didn't say anything as I reviewed part of the history, some of it extraordinary, of recent days.…

2

The name Emmanuel Bruno, only twelve months ago less widely known than that of Elvira Snull, who had lived alone growing beans in the Ozarks for forty-two years before being discovered by an Internal Revenue agent, was now a name almost as instantly recognizable to the man on the street as his own. At least it was if he read newspapers or listened to radio or watched television, or probably if he merely went to church once in a while.

For Emmanuel Bruno, an ex-MD who had been kicked out of the AMA but who in his lifetime had become many other kinds of “Doctor,” an infuriatingly opinionated yet paradoxically open-minded genius without enough sense to conceal his irreverence for orthodoxy, authority, dogma, and even reverence, was the developer—inventor, discoverer, formulator—of Erovite. And few experiments in the history of human trial and error have caused more unexpected comment and commotion, more hueing and crying, more praises for and inveighing against, since the day when Adam first whispered to Eve, “So who's going to know about it?”

You would almost think Erovite had something to do with s-e-x, wouldn't you? Well, there, as the old phrase goes, was the rub. It was known that Bruno had, during research occupying many years of his life, developed a liquid formula, apparently filled with all kinds of strange gunks, which had—for not quite twelve months—been marketed by a small local pharmaceutical company as a tonic, alleged to be a euphoriant, harmless but effective psychic energizer, and even a possible cure for, or at least alleviative of, many ills that afflict mankind.

During the first two or three months after the product went on sale across the country, it appeared that Erovite did indeed do most, or at least much, of what the manufacturer—and Emmanuel Bruno—claimed for it. If the stories that then began to appear could be believed, encouraging and occasionally remarkable, if not actually astonishing, results were reported by most of those who used Erovite for more than a few weeks.

In virtually all cases a similar pattern was reported: a gradual increase of energy and sense of well-being, greater alertness, even what many insisted was a detectable improvement of memory and mental acuity. After more prolonged use, habitual catnappers required less sleep, while insomniacs began drifting to slumberland minutes after their heads hit the pillows. Such real or imagined troubles as “the nerves,” “low back pain,” “rheumatiz,” and “the blahs” diminished, for some disappeared entirely. All this at a time when Orthodox Medicine, despite its near success in eliminating disease, death, and decay entirely, found itself faced with millions of citizens sicker than dogs, many of whom perversely keeled over and died like flies dipped in medically safe DDT.

But worse was to come. For, finally, toward the end of the period when Erovite was available to all who could afford to pay forty dollars a bottle, the most dramatic and hard to believe—and apparently unforgivable and impermissible—developments occurred, or at least were reported. Not only did many imbibers of Erovite report complete recovery from various minor ailments and apparent immunity to common colds and the variously named and numbered “flus,” but here and there across the land isolated individuals began to claim improvement in their previously chronic or incurable illnesses.

This, of course, was an impossibility. An incurable illness is, according to no less an authority than the American Medical Association, incurable. It follows that
nothing
can cure such an illness, not quacks, herbalists, pharmacognosists, elves, faith healers, or even God, so certainly the incurable could not be cured by so simple a thing as a combination of various gunks named Erovite.

It is helpful to recognize that, in the lexicon of Organized Medicine, an incurable disease is any malaise, sickness, trauma, external or internal rash or disorder, or other condition unaccompanied by
rigor mortis
, which cannot be cast out by a duly licensed graduate of an AMA-approved medical school. Anyone not an MD, who by design or accident cures a chronic or incurable disease, is a quack or an elf, who therefore must be—in order to protect the sick and dying from his unethical and unlicensed greed—prevented from experimenting upon people, and if possible imprisoned, so that his illegal actions may be punished and the people may be safe. And may return to their MD's, who have pronounced their diseases incurable, for proper treatment.

So, those individuals popping up across the land like human corks bobbing to the surface in a sea of misery, to claim among other things that long-stiff arthritic joints were loosening and pain was diminishing, that a skin cancer was visibly and unmistakably shrinking, that bone-deep weariness was lessening as energy returned, that approaching evidences of senility were in slow but sure retreat, could not be other than grievously mistaken.

In the official AMA view there existed only three possible explanations for the increasingly numerous reports of such improvement or cure. First, the individual, not being a trained diagnostician, was deluded and only imagined improvement, or else there had been nothing wrong with him in the first place. Second, if he'd really been sick and was now less sick, the improvement was due to “spontaneous remission,” which is a medical term meaning he's-better-but-quit-bugging-me-about-it. Or, third, the improvement was due to the delayed but happy result of previous treatment by a medical doctor, perhaps in 1940.

Such a subversive and probably poisonous substance as Erovite, then, would have to be carefully tested and examined by medical doctors and researchers, possibly for as long as a hundred years. There was sudden and quite violent opposition to the unrestricted sale of Erovite. The possible dangers inherent in its continued use were discussed at great length via newspapers, magazines, radio, and television. Increasingly it was denounced by experts and others who know about such things. Erovite, and Emmanuel Bruno, were in trouble.

But that trouble, emanating from Organized Medicine—from the AMA and the FDA and the Department of HEW and other concerned alphabets and individuals—was as nothing compared to the fury and denunciation and threats of damnation that, at first temperately but with gathering might and mania as the months wore on, were hurled against Bruno and Erovite by God Almighty. Or, rather, by the Almighty's spokesmen on Earth, which is the same thing.

In sum, Bruno was being attacked not only by the leaders of Organized Medicine but by the leaders of Organized Religion as well. Could a man possibly have found himself in a more precarious position, unless tied to a stake with the faggots lit and pierced by a poisoned caduceus?

Well, there was a reason for this part of it, too. At the same time when rational doubt was weakening much medical dogma, the Church—not entirely, but primarily the Christian Church—was finding its Omniscience and Authority being increasingly questioned. And, interestingly, questioned for very similar reasons. To make matters worse, there was in progress what was alleged to be a sexual revolution.

In the official Church view, sexual revolutions are not good. The Church takes a very dim view of sexual revolutions. Some say it takes a very dim view of sexual anythings. Yet there was arising what many considered a saner, healthier view to replace the rack on which sex had been stretched for upward of sixteen centuries. More and more of the faithful were wondering why, if sex was taboo and sinful in so many terrible ways, as they had been solemnly assured by God's spokesmen, God Himself had made it so stupendously delicious. Certainly it wasn't painful. At least, not usually.

Then along came Erovite. And with it, catastrophe.

For one fact about Erovite soon became strikingly evident: whether or not it made people feel better or worse, whether or not it cured or killed them, it was, unquestionably, an astonishingly potent aphrodisiac.

As practically everybody knows, an aphrodisiac is a euphemism for “lots of fun,” but it is commonly thought of as a substance which, when ingested, gives rise to inner and even outer tumult, to lascivious thought, venery, tumescence, and palpitations, to thoughts of and desire for sexual downfall. Inevitably, when thumping and burning with such palpitations and desires, many so afflicted did, in their weakness, indulge in the act which temporarily obsessed them as a swell idea.

Long before this,
long
before, the Church had made it clear to all with ears to hear or eyes to see that it was strength to use those ears for hearing and eyes for seeing, even to joyously employ legs and arms and noses for functions natural to legs and arms and noses, but it was always carnal weakness and often an abomination to use the organs of sex for sex, they somehow being more carnal than carnal ears and eyes and noses, which may seem strange, but is all right, for the Church works in strange ways its wonders to perform.

Thus when reports began to come in about men delighting—or occasionally terrifying—their wives, or vice-versa as sometimes occurred when a woman had been on Erovite for a few weeks and her hubby had not; and of individuals slowly waking to wide-eyed libidinousness after an apparently total sexual anesthesia of years; or of prodigious feats of evil which almost had to be lies; and of that now famous orgy in the old folks' home, why, then, you can bet your boots, it became plain to those who care deeply about such things that something had to be done to stop this spreading evil lest the stiffs rise up in mortuaries and begin eyeing each other lustfully. Better that all the stiffs should stay dead; for why gain life only to lose it?

Some were taken in by this argument. Some were not. But if sheer volume of sound and words and fury could have carried the day, those who proposed the argument would surely have carried it well out of sight; for, although there were minor disagreements, once the truth about Erovite's appalling ability to increase the power and strength and vigor of man's sexual desires and abilities—apparently raising his lower nature higher than it had ever been before, maybe even raising it almost as high as his higher nature—all those opposed to, or fearful of, or even kind of suspicious of sex, spoke out against it as one.

Except for Festus Lemming—whose voice was the loudest of all, who volcanically damned sex of any kind, sex right-side-up or upside-down or sideways or back-to-back, with your clothes on, and who denounced at great and intimate length every conceivable nuance of sex, taking as his text and authority the Holy Bible—nobody suggested in public that Emmanuel Bruno should be stoned to death without delay.

Others in the holy chorus dwelled somewhat less on sex, but paid at least as much, if not more, attention to Bruno and Erovite. It was agreed that every atom of Erovite should be destroyed, but as for Bruno they could not, being good Christians mostly, go so far as to agree completely with Lemming's suggestion. Something, of course, would have to be done about Bruno, but the mind of mere man could not think of anything sufficiently horrible. So, God would have to do it.

That, basically, was the message, and it came in loud and clear from first a hundred and then a thousand pulpits and ecclesiastical podiums. Priests and preachers and pastors and innumerable minor popes reared back and roared, at first in isolation, individually, and at last in one great booming mass. The Church spoke, and it spoke in a voice of thunder.

And the Church said, as usual: No!

Condensed—
much
condensed—the message was: as for sex, any kind of it was a dubious virtue; and it rampant and unrestricted by properly appointed restrictors was
very
bad; thus Erovite, which led to more of it when there should be less of it, was
very
bad; and Emmanuel Bruno was anathema, doubled and redoubled.

In the past four or five weeks, aside from the hullabaloo about Erovite itself, two names had been spoken and shouted and screeched and sung; perhaps more than any other two names in a similar span of time throughout history. One, of course, was Emmanuel Bruno. The other was his chief opponent, the now-number-one spokesman for the forces of decency and the angels, Festus Lemming—but we'll get to Festus later.

I stood in front of the tropical fish tanks for a few more seconds, watching the guppies poking each other's lower natures, then turned and walked back to my chocolate-brown divan and looked at Drusilla.

“Emmanuel Bruno, huh?” I said.

3

By nine-fifteen
P
.
M
. I had put on my shoes—I'd been lolling before the television set in canary yellow socks, and slacks, of course, and a loosely knitted short-sleeved white sports shirt—and strapped on my gun harness, fully loaded Colt .38 Special snug in its clamshell holster. Carrying a cashmere jacket that matched the slacks and socks, I walked from my bedroom into the living room, feeling dressed to watch a tennis match, but probably not for what I was going to do. Probably not, because I still hadn't the faintest idea what I
was
going to do.

Dru and I had carried on a short question-and-answer session during the two or three minutes I spent in the bedroom—it did seem a shame that the first time I spoke to her in my bedroom she was in the living room—and I'd learned a little more not only about Erovite but of events immediately preceding her arrival at my door.

She lived in a suite at the Westchester Arms in Los Angeles, her father in Monterey Park just a hop outside of L.A. Earlier this evening she'd spent some time with her father at his home. Near sundown he had received a phone call from a Mr. Strang and soon afterward left to meet him. Dru drove to her suite, where perhaps an hour later a messenger delivered the note she'd shown me. By the time Dru read the message, the boy who'd brought it was long gone.

I sat by her on the divan, lit a cigarette, and said, “O.K., all we've got, so far, is the note and the call from this guy Strang. What did he want? He a friend of your father's?”