I yanked April down, trying to keep the Prince between us and whoever was shooting. The Prince pitched to the floor right in front of us. Another slug tore into his body as we crouched behind him. He’d fallen facing us, and there was no doubt that he was dead.
I still couldn’t see who’d done the shooting. It had come off to one side, from the hallway beyond the door. The door had evidently been opened without any of us noticing. Now a small chair was hurled from the same direction. It struck the button operating the crematory trapdoor mechanism with deadly accuracy. I felt the floor give way beneath us. April screamed and clutched at me.
The roar of the flames reached my ears. Sudden heat, as if from a blast oven, assailed me. The body of the Prince slid past me, down into the waiting flames. I felt myself starting to fall.
Waves of heat reached up for me, sucking me down. Somehow I managed to grab at the edge of the opening. It wasn’t so much a handhold as a precarious grip maintained by my fingers. It was too tenuous to allow me to pull myself back up. There was too much weight tugging me downward—-not only my own, but April’s as well. She’d grabbed me for support, and now she was dangling over the flames, her arms wrapped around one of my legs the only thing that was keeping her from being consumed.
My fingers dug into the smooth metal flooring. April tried to pull herself higher, using my body as a ladder. The object of her first grab for support was an unfortunate choice. It almost sent the two of us hurtling down into the fire.
“No!” I yelled. “Don’t try to pull yourself up by that!”
“Sorry. But really, this is no time to worry about your manhood being threatened.”
“Threatened is one thing. Torn off is something else again. Try to get a grip on my hip,” I suggested.
She managed it. Slowly she pulled herself up higher. I felt as if my fingers were about to snap off. She got both arms around my shoulders and clutched at my waist with her knees. Her shroud had slipped away with the initial sucking from the furnace, and now her nude body was as ardently clutching me as it had been before when we’d made love. My own shroud was wrapped around my neck like a muffler. April tried to pull herself farther up by grabbing it and almost choked me to death.
Realizing her mistake, she transferred her grip to my nose. Using it for leverage, she raised her knees to my shoulders and settled there for a moment. Then she flung herself over the edge of the pit to the safety of the solid floor beyond.
With April’s weight off my back, my lungs rediscovered what it was like to breathe. My fingers were still numb and my arm muscles felt like they’d been stretched on the rack, but for the first time now I was able to chance moving one hand farther over the edge to get a grip with the hand itself instead of just the fingers. I inched my other hand up alongside of it. A little more inching and I had the leverage I needed. I pulled myself up so that my shoulders were level with the edge and sprang to safety.
April was still lying there getting her breath. I stretched out beside her for a moment, catching up on my own respiration and circulation. Finally we were both rested enough to get to our feet.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said.
“Our clothes—” she reminded me.
“The hell with them.”
“But I don’t even have a shroud to cover myself like you do.”
“Come on. This’ll do for the two of us.” I held my aims wide with the shroud and wrapped it around both of us.
For an exit, it was quite an entrance. The bright sunlight blinded us for a moment as we stepped outside. When I finally was able to focus, the first thing I saw was a whole bunch of faces staring at us with their mouths hanging open. After a while I was able to distinguish Donna Carper and Happy Daze and Misty Milo and Voluptua and Dwight Floyd Rank and Winthrop Van Ardsdale among them.
They had three or four cabs lined up and were evidently about to depart in them. Without asking, I grabbed one of them for myself and April. As it pulled away, I looked at the group standing there from the side window.
One of them, I could be sure now, was Castor Oil. But which one? And why should Castor Oil have tried to kill me? Weren't we supposed to be on the same side? Or, at least, weren’t Castor Oil and Stevkovsky supposed to be on the same side? I could see why he’d killed Ex-Lax, but why me? The question was still in my mind after I dropped off April - taking her up to her flat under cover of the shroud and then coming back down to the cab alone (something we probably couldn't have gotten away with anywhere else, but in Hollywood hardly anyone noticed) - and continued on to my hotel. Yes, why should Castor Oil have tried to kill me?
I learned the answer when I finally gained the privacy of my hotel room. I didn’t even have a chance to discard the shroud when the phone rang. It was Putnam. He had a very interesting little tidbit of news for me. My corpse had been stolen!
It's bad enough being dead without being kidnapped. “Is nothing sacred?” I asked Putnam. Evidently not. My cadaver—really Viktor Stevkovsky’s--had been filched from the Washington graveyard in which it had been buried. Someone had dug it up in the dead of night and now there was only a big hole where once my bones had presumably been laid to rest. “It’s nice to feel wanted,” I told Putnam, “but who -?”
“The Russians! Who else? They probably did a post-mortem on the body, and that means they know now that Stevkovsky is the one who’s dead and that you’re really an impostor impersonating their impostor impersonating you.”
“Come again.”
“They know you’re really Steve Victor and not Stevkovsky pretending to be Steve Victor. That means that Castor Oil knows and is probably out to kill you. I'd be very careful if I were you.”
“How is it you're always just a smidgeon late coming up with these warnings, Putnam?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Just that Castor Oil has already been very hostile toward me. Very hostile indeed. Castor Oil killed Ex-Lax and now his mission in life seems to be to make me the burnt toast of the town.”
“And your mission is to get Castor Oil—dead or alive!” Putnam reminded me.
After he’d hung up I pondered the assignment. Before I could “get” Castor Oil, I had to find out who Castor Oil was. The fact that they were dead ruled out Prince Juv Satir (he was Ex-Lax, anyway) and Louis Ching. I could rule out April Wilder, too. She’d come too close to being a victim of Castor Oil to be Castor Oil. That left the following:
Donna Carper. She’d set up the telethon at which an attempt had been made on the life of Ex-Lax. As Ella Hooper’s right hand girl, she wielded a lot of power in Hollywood. Ostensibly she leaned to the right of Reagan, but as Putnam had once pointed out, that might well be an excellent cover-up for Commie espionage and propaganda activities.
Dwight Floyd Rank. The same theory about the right wing applied to him. Also there was that nagging suspicion at the back of my mind that he might somehow have been responsible for that house rolling down the mountain. If he was Castor Oil, could he have spotted my deception even that far back?
Misty Milo. Was it passion? Or was it espionage with her? Certainly she'd been giving me a big play since I'd come to Hollywood. Had it merely been a way of keeping tabs on me until she was ready to dispose of me? I could easily have been scalded to death in that shower. Had Misty set me up for it deliberately?
Happy Daze. Along with Misty, he d been responsible for drawing me back into our little circle of intrigue. Was his boffo buffoonery a cover-up for Castor Oil?