The Bialy Pimps (59 page)

But in all the confusion of the rat invasion and then the rushed evacuation, the bomber seemed to have escaped. He was nowhere to be found.
 

Captain Dipshit, on the other hand, had held his ground. He emerged from the lobby moments later, beaten and bitten but still very much in attendance.
 

The sergeant brushed his hands together, wondering how to salvage something, anything, out of tonight. He had led a bogus drug raid, had been locked out of the scene of a live-on-TV terrorist attack gone wrong, had watched as one of his officers was caught unaware and coldcocked with a chair, and after all of that, had allowed the perpetrator to sneak away. Worst of all, his ineptitude had been broadcast to millions of viewers around the globe. The captain would probably bust him down to emptying parking meters in gang territory. It was one hell of a way to start the new year.

“Well,” he said to Captain Dipshit, “at least we can close
your
case.” He looked around. “Where are your lawyers?”

“Shat upon heavily,” said Captain Dipshit.
 

The sergeant pulled a brown clipboard from his car. Clipped to it was a single sheet of paper. Across the top, above many blank lines for writing out testimony, was the single word STATEMENT.

“This is just a record of what you’ve seen,” said the sergeant. “You don’t need your lawyers here, because you’re the accuser. Now, if you would, please describe the acts of violence that you have seen here at... ” He looked up at the molded plastic sign above the storefront, then enunciated as he wrote. “... Bingham’s... Bagel... Deli.”

But before Captain Dipshit could answer, a voice from behind him said, “Excuse me, but I’m the owner of this place. What’s happened here?”

This is too rich,
thought Captain Dipshit. He wouldn’t just cripple the place in front of the crew; he’d get to do it right in front of Bingham himself. Talk about your successful New Year’s resolutions.

He spun to face the owner and found nobody behind him. Then movement caught his eye, and he looked down to find himself face-to-face with the man who had spoken. It was Little John. He was sober, with his hair combed and his beard trimmed. And he was wearing a tuxedo.
 

Captain Dipshit’s feet began to move him backward. He was mumbling. He fumbled to reach behind him, pawing for something to hold onto. Then he struck the police cruiser and walked his hands blindly along it, never taking his eyes off of Little John. John cocked his head, curious. Captain Dipshit mumbled something again, something about devils and spells and evil. Then, once he was clear of the cruiser, he turned and took off at a sprint.
 

Over the course of the next few minutes, the police swore and Little John told everyone that he owned the place and many hands were shaken. The sergeant decided that he and Jenkins and Greene were on thin ice and then called the captain, who, judging by the sergeant’s half of the conversation, wasn’t pleased. The police packed their car and told the crew that they had all apparently lived to fight another day.
 

When the cruiser was gone, everyone patted John on the back, saying that he’d saved their bacon. It was nice. John was just as insane sober as he was drunk, only in a much more polite and refined way. It was like hiring a butler with dementia.
 

Beckie sighed. She had the sloth on her back, its hairy arms around her neck like a mink stole. Under one of her own arms was the plastic form of Swannie. The whole situation was comfortable and fun and generally all well and good, and the evening felt wrapped up with a nice little bow. But then 1999 threw her its second wrench in what was proving to be a wrench-filled day.
 

Shortly after Little John had begun walking toward Java Jive to get a mild-mannered, civil, polite and refined café latte, Beckie turned to see another person approaching and could only say one word before passing out.

If anything, the sloth seemed to disapprove.

The bomb, the Shadow realized with the smirk of someone who views danger as amusing, would have spilt the store in two. The old fuel oil tank was as rusty and ill-maintained as the steel drum of Edgar’s Inedible Restaurant Grease that had been out back since the Pizazzle’s days, and the bomb’s force would have sliced right into it. The tank would have crumpled like an old beer can and then...
Boom!

The Shadow saw it in his mind with perfect mathematical clarity, watching the progression of the milliseconds-duration blast through his knowledge of thermodynamics, metallurgy, and of course, explosives. The force would have punched right through the fuel-oil tank, and the force of that secondary explosion would have split the main beam as well as most of the other beams in the basement. There were natural gas lines in the area, too. The store, and perhaps a good portion of the block, would have gone up in one huge fireball.

Of course, he never would have allowed that to happen.

It had taken mere seconds to disable the device, and the only real imperfection in the otherwise pristine mission had come when the kid had almost seen him from across the basement. But there were ways to deal with that, too, had it become a problem.

And how had he known about the bomb? Why, it was his business to know. He
always
knew where the bombs were planted, and he
always
knew when the water was poisoned and how many men with the guns were hiding around him. It was a sense he had. It was a gift.
 

The Shadow knows.

He told those who asked that he had a sixth sense about these things, but nobody
really
knew how it was. Nobody
could
know. It was just how he was wired. He supposed he was a bit like Superman. A little bit of super to go with his hero.

His super ability was the reason the Shadow was given all of the important assignments, why he was granted huge projects on faith which seemed, by any logical standards, to be completely foolhardy. It was how he had established and maintained contacts in the most remote corners of the globe, how anything he could ever want was his for the asking, and why women found him irresistible. It was why he was nicknamed Shaft, Colombo, and McGyver. It was how he could hide at the bottoms of swamps, without food or air, and how he could fight twenty men and come out without a scratch.

Some of the others asked the Shadow why he would bother with such a mundane task as this one, involving a deli in the armpit of the midwest – disarming bombs, keeping lawyers and authorities at bay, and so forth. The Shadow replied that he had his reasons, and the others knew better than to ask the Shadow anything twice. For his own part, the Shadow knew things that the others could not know or could even conceive of – endless permutations of causes and effects, events unfolding in a rich tapestry of chaos. The Shadow saw through the chaos to the reality of it all. It was all calculable – mathematically calculable – and there were events in the future which, given certain starting conditions, mathematically
had
to turn out in certain ways.

And these things, these consequences, the Shadow knew.

He was arrogant, and the others never tired of reminding him of it. But the Shadow was good, and as long as he stayed good, he could brag about his houses or his yachts or his fancy friends all he wanted. He could dance on the edge of danger, tottering on the brink of telling too much, because when you had a résumé like the Shadow’s, who would really believe you anyway?
 

He liked the game, but sometimes things got dicey. And when that happened, and he needed to fall back into his smoke-and-mirrors life away from the outside world for a while, he could vanish without a trace. Sometimes he would slide silently out of society, and sometimes he even had to fake his own death. It was really all six of one, half a dozen or the other. Whether he disappeared into thin air or planned a public scene with a team of actors playing police and paramedics, the effect was the same. Up in smoke or down with a weighted coffin? In the end, it was up to his whims.

The Shadow waited until the commotion overhead died down before leaving the basement. He was not concerned with the rats. The rats knew to keep their distance.

Taking his time, savoring the moment, he slipped outside and into the parking alcove. The winter air was crisp, and smelled fresh. Around the corner, in the alley connecting High Street to Pearl Alley, he could hear the sounds of voices. Three of them were police officers. He waited until the officers left (noting that he would need to visit them and the blonde kid’s lawyers later), but for now, he had other business to attend to.

He waited until the one the others were calling Little John left, then turned the corner and into view. Beckie saw him first. She gasped.

“Ted!” she screeched, and then collapsed into unconsciousness.

The Shadow snugged his cap, adjusted his shoulder bag, and smiled.

Philip stared at Ted for a while, not really surprised that he was back from the dead. Nothing surprised him anymore. Ted could have arrived riding the Loch Ness Monster and Philip wouldn’t have blinked. He would simply have high-fived Nessie and then fired up a joint.
 

When Beckie came to and the sloth had regained its footing, the barrage of questions began.

“Hee-hee!” laughed Ted. “I read in the paper that I was supposed to be dead!”

Beckie was blinking, rubbing her eyes. “And you’re not?”

Jenny pushed her way to the front, interested for the first time in Army Ted and what he had to say. “I saw you get hit,” she said, poking him in the chest with a finger. “I saw you die.”

Ted held his arms out to the side, surrendering. “Well as you can see, I’m alive. You’re saying the guy still looked just like me even when you got up close? Do I have a twin?”

Jenny stopped. Suddenly, after convincing herself that she had seen the crash as if through a telescope, she had her doubts. The others had asked her if she was sure, and she thought that she had been. The hat, the bag, the shorts, the jaywalking... it
had
to have been Ted.

“I... I didn’t get up close,” she said finally. “I couldn’t.”

Ted shrugged:
There you go!
 

But that had been the point all along, hadn’t it? If he had to fake his death (and he had, for reasons which only the Shadow knew) he needed people to see his “death” and report it. And of course, he couldn’t let these people get too close lest they realize that the face of the bus was padded and that the blood came from pouches of dyed, cornstarch-thickened water. He always required a diversion to keep them at bay. The spiel was always the same. They’d report his death; they’d never bother to report his resurrection. They figured Ted would do that himself, of course.

“So...?” Darcy began, but she couldn’t decide how to finish.

Ted shifted his weight in that way of his, the body language sign that he was about to tell one of his ridiculous, outlandish tales.

“So I’ve gotta tell you,” he said, grinning so hard it looked painful. “Do you want to know where I’ve been while I’ve been ‘dead’? Because this is fantastic. I was called to South America to bust up a group of heroin smugglers. And while I was there, you wouldn’t believe who I met. Mel Gibson! Now, he and I used to share a room back in his early days, and he was there shooting a movie. It’s called
The Rock Cartel.
Of course, they were portraying some of the nastier aspects of a certain country’s government, and since
our
government has this agreement with them, the CIA swooped in and shut it all down. Hee-hee! But anyway...”

He spun his yarn, all of which was entirely true, and watched as the crew became bored and rolled their eyes. And this was very good. They would continue to believe the life he had play-acted for Beckie. They would continue to think of him as a nutty old guy with a drab wife, a run-down house, and delusions of grandeur.
 

After he finished his story, Ted stood for a moment, adjusting his bag and cap, smiling stupidly at the others. Then he turned to look into Bingham’s. He saw the lobby, empty save the television cameras (which, come to think of it, were probably still on), the props, the splintered chairs, the overturned tables, and a few scattered rats. The music was off. Had they gnawed the wires to the stereo? Or had they turned it off because they’d left the lobby for the time being, and it was only sensible to conserve power to save on your electric bill?

“What happened here?” Ted asked.

Philip shook his head. He couldn’t help but smile. He thought of Captain Dipshit, the customers, and the agents and suits in their garments made of live rats. He began to snicker, then to chuckle in earnest.

“What?” said Beckie.

“Did you see Angela? With the rats in her hair?”

Beckie spat a little laugh. “Yeah. And I think she peed herself.”

That made both of them laugh harder.
 

Philip turned to the Anarchist. “You kept asking how it would end?” he said. “Is this...
”
He fought to keep a hold of himself, to at least finish the sentence. “... pretty much how you thought it would happen?”

The spell of normality finally broke, and Philip, Beckie, and the Anarchist all began doubling over, snorting laughter, fighting for breath. It wasn’t just funny, though it
was
funny. The laughter was catharsis. They’d been wound up so tight over the past days, hours, and minutes that they had to release a safety valve. And once the valve was open, the laughter wouldn’t stop. It came out like cannon fire.

Between gasps for air, the Anarchist said, “I guess... we don’t have to... worry!... if the next batch of employees will...
fuck it up
!” With this his abdomen contracted and he was laughing so hard he was crying, drunkenly clutching the building’s cool stone wall for balance.

Then Tracy began to join in, and Mike, and Slate, and Darcy.