The Frumious Bandersnatch (3 page)

To put it mildly, much was riding on the success of that album.

Meanwhile, in the main stateroom of the
River Princess,
Tamar Valparaiso was getting into her scanty costume.

 

EVER SINCE
9/11, and especially since the FBI began issuing vague warnings of terrorist attacks hither and yon but nowhere in particular, the Police Department had been on high alert for any possible threats to the city's bridges. There were 143 men and 4 women in the Harbor Patrol Unit, which operated a municipal navy of twenty vessels, ranging in size from twenty to fifty-two feet. The workhorse of the HPU was the new 36-foot launch, which could travel up to thirty-eight miles an hour—more than twice the speed of the older vessels in the fleet. The Police Department had recently purchased four of these boats at a cost of $370,000 per. To the relief of taxpayers everywhere in the city, the boats were expected to last twenty years.

Not too long ago, Sergeant Andrew McIntosh would have been wearing the same orange life vest over his blue uniform, but there wouldn't have been a Ruger Mini-14 semiautomatic rifle lying across the dash. You broke those out only when you were going on a drug raid. Those and the twelve-gauge shotguns. Nowadays, with lunatics running loose all over the world, the heavy weapons were
de rigueur
for the course, as they said in old Glasgow, Scotland, from which fine city McIntosh's grandmother had migrated.

McIntosh was fifty-two years old, and he'd been driving boats for the HPU for twenty-two years now, before which he'd operated a charter fishing boat in Calm's Point. Back then, watching the police boats pulling into the marina, he'd wondered what the hell he was doing ferrying drunken fishermen all over the Sound. He finally asked himself Why not give it a shot? Took the Police Department exam the very next week, asked for assignment to the Harbor Patrol the minute he got out of the Academy.

Back then, the Police Department was still calling itself the Isola PD, even though precincts were located in all five sections of the city. Eventually, Calm's Point, Majesta, Riverhead, and Bethtown rose up in protest, demanding equal rights or some such. The department, figuring it would cover all the bases and not cause any more riots than were absolutely necessary, began calling itself “Municipal PD,” and then “Metro PD,” and then “MPD” for short. Some of the older hands, however—McIntosh included—felt they had changed the name only because the acronym “IPD” for Isola Police Department was being translated by the ordinary citizenry to mean “I Peed,” a not entirely flattering descriptive image for stalwarts of the law rushing to the rescue.

There was nothing suspicious about the twenty-seven footer moving slowly toward the Hamilton Bridge, except that she was cruising along with just her running lights on. No lights in the cabin or anywhere else on the boat. Well, that wasn't
too
unusual, McIntosh supposed, but even so, in these difficult times he didn't want to be blamed later on if some crazy bastard ran a boat full of explosives into one of the bridge's pylons. So he hit a switch on the dash, and a red light began blinking and rotating on the prow of the launch, and he signaled to Officer Betty Knowles to throw a light onto the smaller boat ahead.

Aboard the Rinker, Avery Hanes whispered, “Let me handle this.”

Well, hell, he was the smart one.

 

“
WHY DO I
have to be black?” Jonah was asking her.

Tamar didn't know what to answer the poor man.

Because the good Lord intended you to be that way?

She hated deep philosophical questions.

Like when a reporter from
Billboard
magazine asked her what she thought of Mick Jagger, and she'd had to admit she didn't know who Mick Jagger was. When the reporter explained that he was a seminal rock singer, she didn't mention that she didn't know what “seminal” meant. Instead, she told them she didn't consider herself a rock singer, and besides she was very young. So, of course they asked what kind of singer she considered herself to be, and she'd had to admit she thought of her kind of music as mainstream pop. But a question like Jonah's absolutely floored her. She'd never suspected till this very moment that he was so deep.

What she was hoping was that nobody would be disappointed because she and Jonah wouldn't be duplicating all the bells and whistles on the video, but of course how could they do that on a little boat in the middle of the river? Tonight, she'd be lip-synching, which was okay because everyone in the crowd was very hip, she guessed, and surely nobody expected her to really
perform
the entire video, did they? Shit, it had cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to shoot the thing with all the special effects and everything, so how could anyone expect a
duplication
of all that on this dinky little boat here, even though Barney kept calling it a “launch.” She certainly hoped nobody had such wild expectations in mind, which was a good title for a song and maybe for her next album, “Wild Expectations.” She certainly hoped they would appreciate her just lip-synching while she dry-humped Jonah.

Jonah was as gay as a bowl of daisies.

This was okay because he only came across that way when you were talking to him. Lisping and all, and sort of limp-wristed, a total caricature of a fag.

“Why do I have to be black?”

And a little limp flick of the wrist.

Cause you unfortunate,
amigo,
Tamar should have said.

Jonah hadn't done any talking on the video, and he certainly wouldn't be doing any talking tonight, either. Even Tamar herself wouldn't be talking until after the record played and they danced to it. Then she'd do the interview with Channel Four, and whatever other interviews she had to do with all the press people out there, and then they'd call it a night and hope for the best.

The video had premiered last night on all four music channels during their prime-time debut spots—

“I meant why does the
beast
have to be black?” Jonah asked.

Another philosophical question.

He was sharing the main stateroom as a dressing room with her, but that was okay because he was gay, and she didn't mind if he saw her naked boobs. She was half-naked in the costume, anyway, which she guessed was the whole point of the video, to expose herself as much as possible without getting arrested. She had to admit that she somewhat enjoyed all that screaming and yelling whenever she made a personal appearance, part of which she knew was for her voice—she really felt she did have a very good mainstream pop style and a very good vibrato besides—but part of which was for the way she shook her considerable booty,
muchachos.

“So?” Jonah asked.

One hand on his hip.

Pouting little look on his face.

He was perhaps six-feet-two-inches tall, with a dancer's firm abs, and strong biceps and forearms from lifting girls considerably heftier than Tamar, thighs like oaks, an altogether wonderful specimen of a man, but oh what a waste! He had good fine facial features, too, a pity they'd been covered by all those masks he had to wear on the video, and would be covered by masks tonight as well—not the same masks, of course. They'd used maybe ten or twelve different masks during the shoot, so that it looked like the Bandersnatch was changing form each time he—or
it,
more precisely—violated her or tried to violate her, rape or attempted rape as the case may have been, who knew? All these videos were supposed to be somewhat mysterious and murky, like adolescence itself, thank God
that
was behind her.

She was glad her video wasn't about a black guy going to jail while his chick moped around looking mournful and forlorn. She was glad it wasn't about a drive-by shooting, either, which a lot of the rap groups thought was entertainment. One of the Bison veeps had wanted the title song on the debut album to be something called “Raw Girls,” and he'd suggested that they shoot the accompanying video in a high school locker room, with all these young chicks, white, black, Latino, coming in and stripping down to their underwear as they got ready for a soccer game. Tamar had gone directly to Barney Loomis to tell him she wouldn't do any video that looked like a G-rated version of
Debbie Does Dallas,
and she wouldn't sing any song called “Raw Girls,” either.

Tamar knew exactly what she wanted to be.

Tamar knew exactly where she was going.

 

“
SORRY TO BOTHER YOU,
sir,” McIntosh said. “Everything okay here?”

Standing on the bow of the police launch, Officer Knowles was playing the boat's spotlight around the chest of the man at the wheel of the Rinker. Something they taught you when you began training for the HPU. Unless the suspect was a known perp, you kept the light out of his eyes. Courtesy, Service, Dedication. That's what the decal on the side doors of all the police cars in the city said. That's what it said on the side of Harbor Charlie's cabin, too. Courtesy. Meant you kept the light out of a person's eyes, unless he was a perp.

Avery Hanes was about to become a perp in an hour or so, but Officer Knowles didn't know that yet, and neither did Sergeant McIntosh, at the wheel of the police launch, or Officer Brady, standing in the stern with his hand resting casually on the butt of the Glock holstered on his hip, just in case this guy driving the Rinker turned out to be some Al Qaeda nut determined to blow up either himself or something else, or else some drug runner or something. These days, you never could tell.

“Everything's fine, Sergeant,” Avery said, because he was the smart one, and he'd seen the stripes on McIntosh's uniform sleeve.

“Saw you runnin with all your lights off,” McIntosh said.

The launch was idling alongside the Rinker, which had come to a dead stop on the water.

“Ooops. Thought I had them on,” Avery said, and flicked the dashboard switch that turned the running lights on and off, clicking it several times to make sure, and then turning to look at McIntosh with a slightly puzzled shrug.

“I meant in the cabin,” McIntosh said.

“I'll turn them on if you like,” Avery said. “Such a nice night and all, so many stars, thought we'd take advantage. They shine so much brighter without any lights.”

“Where you bound?” McIntosh asked.

“Back to the marina.”

“Where's that?”

“Capshaw Boats. Fairfield and the water.”

“Off Pier Seven, would that be?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Who've you got aboard, Captain?”

“My girlfriend and my best man. We're getting married in June, wanted to check out the River Club.”

“Nice venue,” McIntosh said.

“Yes, sir, it sure is. Might be too expensive for us, though.”

“Well, sorry to've bothered you,” McIntosh said. “Enjoy the rest of the evening.”

“Thank you, sir. Did you want me to put on those cabin lights?”

“No need.”

Knowles turned off the spot. The waters went instantly black. McIntosh eased the throttle forward, and the police launch pulled away from the Rinker. On the stern, Officer Brady took his hand off the Glock's butt.

 

J. P. HIGGINS
was holding forth on the various types of videos on the air these days. He was Bison's Executive VP in charge of Video Production, and he was obviously impressing the foreign affiliates who'd been invited to tonight's launch party. The man from Prague didn't understand English as well as Bison's people from London (well, of course not) and Milan, or Paris and Frankfurt, but he was nonetheless hanging on every word because he hoped to learn how to promote the “Bandersnatch” video in his own country, now that the flood waters had subsided, and once the video and the album were released there. One drawback was that Tamar Valparaiso was virtually unknown in the Czech Republic. Well, she was virtually unknown here as well. But that was why Bison had spent a pot full of money on the video, not to mention all the publicity and promotion preceding tonight's launch party when—in exactly one hour by the Czech's imitation Rolex watch—Tamar Valparaiso herself would be performing with the very same dancer who'd accompanied her on the video.

There was a palpable air of expectation.

Something big was going to happen tonight.

Just how big, none of the assembled guests could ever possibly imagine.

Higgins was a man in his early forties, and he liked to think he'd learned all there was to know about video production by the time he was thirty. Convincing the foreigners gathered around him was a simple task. He concentrated instead on trying to sell his savvy to a young black girl wearing what appeared to be nothing but three chain links and a diamond earring, sitting on a hassock alongside their man from London.

“Your cheapest video to shoot is what I call your ‘Pool Party' video,” Higgins said, trying to catch the black girl's eye, but she seemed absorbed in her chocolate pâté, which was the exact color of her barely covered breasts, topped with a pair of red raspberries, the dessert, not her breasts. “One of the execs at any label is sure to have a house with a swimming pool. You go to that house, you set up your cameras around the pool, you decorate the premises with girls in bikinis and guys in thongs, and then shoot your artist against a backdrop of all these half-naked young people writhing in time to the music. You don't have to worry too much about lighting because you're shooting in broad daylight. Only thing you have to worry about is airplanes flying overhead. But that's the same as on any daytime shoot.”