"They think; they don't know," Althouse whispered.
"Disinformation at all levels," Everett replied. "It's inevitable. Our people hope they've convinced the KGB that they were wrong about an FCC Commissioner hiding behind the face of Simon Kenton."
"I'm resigned to being part of it," said the comedian. "But if they can alter my larynx properly along with the rest of it, I may show up as a retreaded top banana on TV again, one of these days. You can't beat the money."
Althouse: "And if they can't alter you enough?"
"Oh—I don't have to work. We'll get together again and gin up something for the three of us, maybe after the Commissioner's seven-year term is over."
"Could happen sooner than you think," Althouse said quickly. "I keep fingers into ABC surveys. It'd be easy to include a few items to find out who the public sees as enemies of terrorism. If the names vary widely or change quickly, I could see that the data gets published. Maybe an article in TV Guide."
"The point, Rhone, the point," said Everett.
"Isn't it clear? The point is, every charlie on earth should learn in time that it's the idea, and not the man, they're up against."
Everett cleared his throat. "And if you're wrong? If the same few names keep cropping up?”
"He'll falsify the data," chuckled the bandaged head.
"The hell I will," said Althouse with asperity. "I have some ethics. Nope, but I wouldn't publish the data, either. My ethics are, uh, flexible," he admitted.
"That's a relief," said the ex-Charlie George. "Your media theories have cost us all the parts we can spare. Oh, quit looking at me like that, Rhone, I'm not blaming you. You were right about the solution."
"And Everett was right about the odds against us," Althouse sighed.
"They ran out on D'Este," Everett agreed, adding, "and I'll miss the Charlie George Show."
"Just remind yourself it was all a lot of hype," Rhone Althouse said, grinning at the bandaged face for understanding. "When you think of the odds this funnyman beat, you realize he was never a very proper charlie."
Everett glanced at his watch. "Time for my ultraviolet treatment," he said, getting up.
"I'll see you here again, then?" said Althouse.
"For a few more days. Then I've got a date up in the high lonesome with a one-room cabin." He did not add, and a blonde I'm very fond of, who likes to ski when she isn't near a bed or a tennis court.
"In January? You're wacko, sire," Althouse laughed.
"There is that," said Everett, and sauntered out.
FRIDAY, 13 FEBRUARY, 1981:
Nearly three weeks crawled by before Everett's skin grafts satisfied the surgeons in Beverly Hills. The new finger would always be numb and stiff at the tip, and it would never leave a print. Fingerprints could be fashioned, but the technique was an outrage in time and money.
Maurice Everett gained almost no weight while in the clinic because the food all seemed to be vaseline in various disguises so the hell with it, and also because he daily performed all of the calisthenics he hated.
On a Friday evening, hair bleached afresh, implanted follicles flourishing in the graft at his temple, Everett bade his friend Byron Krause a brief farewell. "I'm going shopping," he crowed.
"Those are mighty domestic noises you're making," the ex-comedian called after him.
"Get your ear rebored," Everett called back, and walked on. He considered lingering to admit the truth; that he was feeling a call to upholster his cave, to ask a leggy lady bear to share it permanently, and intended to do so when he got the chance. No one knew his plans for the next week—except for Gina, of course. If he kept it that way there could be no slips, no vulnerability.
Engels had found him another superskate, a white virgin Mini-Cooper wearing Pennsylvania plates and sporty British car club badges as big as its hubcaps. It was, thought Everett, like pinning rhinestones on a gyrfalcon, but it would never be connected with Maurice Everett.
At an outfitter's store he found a down-filled bag that would zip onto his, laughing as he paid the ionospheric tab with Simon Kenton's charge card. He was remembering the night before his kidnapping, the first time he had found a grassy nook with Gina in the balm of a Southern California winter evening. ("Don't take off yuh coat, stranguh," she had deadpanned; "we could wind up half a mile from heah ...")
Browsing among the freeze-dried foods, he had no trouble choosing those Gina liked best. At three-kilometer altitudes above the ski lift near Tahoe, they would eat with the abandon of starving weasels.
At a bookstore he chose volumes they would both devour: Muir, Renault, Steinbeck, Sturgeon. The Lovecraft, he thought with a lewd grin, was for nights when the wind ululated in the eaves of the cabin, when she would nestle against him for more than physical warmth. Given enough books and dehydrated stroganoff, they might not come down for years.
Stroganoff. The Russian word provoked a thought-chain ending with David Engels. He stowed the packages in the Mini, using only the surface of his mind to begin the drive up Interstate Five where, at Sacramento, he would sleep.
Engels had visited him twice in the clinic. The first time there was only good news: Gina, railing against the rules of the game to Engels, who did not have enough clout with physicians to get her into Everett's room. The Commission, which accepted Everett's participation via tapes and proxies, though Engels had caught some meditative glances in conference. The press, which had gone baying off after false musks when it determined that Simon Kenton was not worth a great deal of investigative reportage.
On his last visit, Engels had been more subdued, with good news and other news. The good news was that Gina had not stopped demanding to see her man. Everett knew that much; they spent too much money on scrambler-equipped telephone calls for him not to know. After one plaintive call from Phoenix, Everett had threatened to send her a vibrator. At the time, she had questioned his taste in coarse humor.
And two days later she had sent him the most startling dirty greeting card he had ever seen. As usual, some yahoo had already opened it as a routine precaution. But when he first picked it up, Everett thought he was empathizing a facet of Gina Vercours he had not felt before. It was a thin buckram volume filigreed with silver, restrained and elegant. It should have been the poetry of Keats, but its title was Apotheosis of Tissues. Inside was one page of onionskin with the couplet:
Could silk or satin aspire to moa'
Than sepulchre for spermatazoa?
And behind that page were fifty more pages—all of facial tissue. He had cursed because his left hand was strapped to his hip, and he tended to kick his legs when he laughed.
The other news from David Engels was passing strange. A middleman from the Central Intelligence Agency had learned of some subtle backtracking into NBN visitors and consultants by a private-investigating firm. The firm's only mistake was in failing to realize early that its client was a foreign agency which they never did manage to identify.
Among the persons of interest was a big husky specimen named Simon Kenton. That was all Engels had. It might mean nothing. On the other hand, it suggested that Everett might be well-advised to pack a Browning parabellum and, Engels had tapped a stiletto forefinger on Everett's breastbone, to get goddam good with it.
Everett thought about that, off and on, all the way to Sacramento.
SATURDAY, 14 FEBRUARY, 1981:
Gina Vercours rubbed her hands together as she watched the blaze spread under seasoned wood. She had found the cabin exactly where he had said it would be, a few kilometers above the top of the chairlift, just north of the saddleback behind which lay the very nascence of the turbulent American River. She was supposed to meet him at the foot of the chairlift at Sunday noon but, knowing Maury, she didn't trust the canny bastard. He'd come sneaking up to the cabin a day early, more than likely, to lay out some fey greeting as a surprise. Well, she could play that game too.