On Wednesday morning Barry placed a phone call to Manny in California. It had to go via Brussels, and it wasn’t put through until five that evening. Mark Weese, Nancy Rome and I were playing three-way gin in the lounge off the lobby when Barry Driscoll joined us as soon as the phone call was over. He had a dull stare, a sagging jaw and trembling hands.
“How is dear Manny,” Nancy Rome asked.
“I learned something new,” Barry said. “I learned it is possible for a man to scream in a whisky baritone. He didn’t roar. He screamed.”
“So what’s the deal?” Mark asked.
“If they are gone for good, we stay here and we shoot them all over again. It’s the only way to cut losses. You and me, Joe, we go off salary. We work for free. If we have any objection, we can get out of the industry.”
Nancy stared at him. “But Mighty Morgan is in no shape to work!”
“I tried to explain that. He kept yelling at me to get Morgan sobered up. I said he should ship me a new lead. He said we peddled the deal with Morgan aboard, so that is the way we shoot it.”
“So what do we do?” I asked him.
“We sit here and we pray we find those cans, Joe.”
After the four of us had sat there for maybe fifteen minutes making wild guesses as to what could have happened to the cans, Jules Boudreau came smiling in, accompanied by a tall Belgian official in a resplendant uniform, and a withered, timid, apprehensive native in a mustard brown tweed suit originally designed for a much larger man.
The native was a traveling merchant from Matadi. He had been picked up in the native quarter of Brazzaville when an informer told the French police of a strange story the man was telling. The French had released him to the Belgians for interrogation. The man had taken an early ferry across the Congo River. It is a twenty-minute ride from Leopoldville to Brazzaville. He had seen two tall natives, well dressed, each carrying two large, cheap, heavy suitcases. They had come aft and opened the suitcases near the rail, and had proceeded to hurl a great many large silvery disks into the broad river. They sank immediately. When all were gone, the strangers had closed the empty suitcases and walked slowly away.
The ritual had mystified the merchant and, being a stranger in this part of the land, he had asked about it in the bazaars.
I went and got an empty can out of stores and took it down to them. Even before his response was translated, I could tell from the way his face lighted up that this was exactly what he had seen dropped into the river. They had been dropped out near the center. No, he could not identify the two men. He had not looked at them closely. They were strangers to him. They were dressed as clerks of the government, or bookkeepers in small places of business.
When he had been assured the man was not lying, Barry gave him a reward of 500 francs, which both astonished and delighted the man.
Jules soon disabused Barry of any attempt to retrieve the tapes. It was a deep murky river, with fast currents and a bottom of gluey mud. There were no divers. Nothing had ever been recovered from it.
When the four of us were alone again, Barry said, “But it’s so damned pointless! What good does it do anybody?”
Nancy, with an odd expression, said, “Maybe it’s a kind of primitive justice, Barry. Maybe they thought Morgan was the boss man. He gives that impression. They knew we were here to do the films. That lovely child threw herself into the river. So...”
“It could be a form of primitive artistic criticism,” Mark Weese mumbled.
“Let’s everybody make funny jokes,” Barry said. “We’re cooked. There’s only one thing left to try, and that’s to get Morgan out of his stupor. Somehow. One time I directed a snake-pit movie. We did some research at the funny farm. I saw people there acting like he does now. They called them catatonics.”
“Maybe Manny can ship us a head shrinker,” Nancy said.
“Tomorrow,” Barry said, “I shall try to think. Today has been all I can take. Tonight I drink. Tonight I abuse my ulcer. Where’s that waiter?”
About six hours later, when all good people were in bed, I found myself tiptoeing with tipsy guile along the hotel corridor, with Nancy Rome’s hot little hand clasped in mine. We were whispering and giggling. It does not matter where we were going, or what had led up to this venture, or whether, once it was interrupted, anybody ever got a rain check.
Just as we were passing Kirk Morgan’s door, the sound came through the dark heavy wood. Now I’ve worked westerns, and once I saw a stunt bungled so badly a horse snapped its spine. As it struggled to get up, it screamed. I had never been so rattled by any sound in my life. It’s eyes were mad and rolling, and it screamed and screamed until somebody located a real bullet and put an end to it.
This was almost the same sound, a high, wild, tearing scream. It stopped, and when it began again there was a sickening liquidity to it, a bubbling, gargling, strangling sound. And then there was silence. I was cold sober. I stared at Nancy. Her eyebrows were right up to her hair line, and she was sober too, now and she was sinking her nails into my hand.
I tried the door. It was locked. After I bounced my shoulder off it one time, I knew ten of me couldn’t crash in that way. I sent Nancy to round up Barry Driscoll and I went down and roused a sleepy, surly, indignant manager. They were getting very tired of our little group. He came up with a pass key. Barry and Nancy were waiting there for us. The manager opened the door and turned on the lights, walked stolidly over to the bed, stared down for perhaps two-tenths of a second, then whirled and departed like a good wingback running an off-tackle fake. He no longer looked indignant.
After I took a look, I wouldn’t let Nancy look. I made her go back to her room. Barry and I waited out in the corridor for the doctor. His name was Dr. Arcenaux. He examined Kirk Morgan and pronounced him dead.
You will remember the dramatic coverage in the newspapers, about how Kirk Morgan had contracted some tropical bug, but had insisted on completing the SAFARI series before he folded, and how the warm, human executives of El-Bar, after viewing the series, had decided that Kirk Morgan had been so ill a posthumous release would do his critical reputation no good; and so, in honor of his memory, they had vowed never to release those forty scripts done under such valorous conditions. (Actually, Manny is making a forlorn effort to get some of his bait back by jamming the market with reissues of old junk, before the public forgets who Kirk Morgan was.)
Yet somebody has to tell the truth.
After various documents were signed and verified and authenticated, and the body had been taken down and out through the rear to a place where it could be kept refrigerated until it could be shipped to the Pastures of Heaven, California Branch, Barry and I had a drink with Dr. Arcenaux in Barry’s room. The doctor was brisk, young and tidy, with a pair of extremely cold blue eyes.
“Without the medical doubletalk, Doctor,” Barry said, “what was the cause of death?”
“Pneumonia.”
“Who are you trying to kid?”
“I never make jokes about my profession, Monsieur.”
“I’m sorry all to hell, but it didn’t look like pneumonia to me.”
The doctor raised an eyebrow. “You are qualified in medicine, Monsieur? All germs, all viruses, work more quickly in Equatorial Africa. The fluids came quickly into the lungs, perhaps filling them in a mere matter of hours beyond the point where life could continue.”