“Some kind of bribery scheme maybe, to get a certain line of drugs into the hospital?”
“Maybe. But it seemed more threatening than that, almost like Greenstock could compel the Doc to do something bad against his will.”
I wanted to press for more information, but Ted began to turn a bit suspicious.
“Why’re we chewing up this old gossip? Tell me more about the slick way I took down that bastard Numendonia….”
I always tried to honour an individual’s passions as much as the next geek, but sometimes it’s hard work pretending to be interested. Especially when I was suddenly aching to tell PJ what I had learned.
Our waitress wore a transparent plastic carapace moulded to her naked breasts and torso, black lurex panties, tights and musketeer boots. Her hair was pouffed up and her makeup could’ve sustained a platoon of Calder gynoids. She carried an outrageously baroque toy blaster holstered at her hip. I didn’t know where to put my eyes.
I had decided to take Polly Jean Hornbine out for supper, rather than relay my news in my office. I chose the nearest franchise of La Semaine de Suzette, because it was a fairly classy low-budget place, and I was in the mood for French food.
The restaurant chain was named after one of the French zines that had gotten behind Hearst and his program shortly after the Brits came onboard. The French bande dessinée artists (and their Belgian stripverhalen peers) had joined the ranks of the utopian Funnypaper Boys with awesome enthusiasm and international solidarity. And in Germany, artists like Rodolphe Töpffer and Lyonel Feininger, and zines like Simplicissimus, Humoristische Blätter and Ulk weren’t far behind. And when the Japanese invented manga—
But like all geeks, I digress.
I knew that the waitresses at La Semaine de Suzette dressed like characters from their namesake zine. But during all my previous visits, their outfits had mimicked those of Bécassine and Bleuette, modest schoolgirls.
What I didn’t realize was that La Semaine de Suzette had also published Barbarella, starting in 1962, and that the waitress uniforms went in and out of rotation.
No matter how much you knew, it was never everything.
So now Polly Jean and I had to place our orders with a half-naked interstellar libertine.
It was enough to make Emma Frost blush.
Somehow we stammered out our choices. After Barbarella had sashayed away, I attempted to recover my aplomb and relate the revelations I had picked up from Ted Harmon.
PJ absorbed the information with dispassionate intensity, and once again I was taken with her quick intelligence. Not to mention her adorable face. When I finished, she said, “So a visit to this fellow Greenstock is next, I take it?”
I began sawing into my Chicken Kiev, which was a little tough. The chain keeps prices down by using vat-grown chicken, which is generally tender and tasty, but this meat must’ve been made on a Monday.
“That’s right. If we’re lucky, the trail will end there.”
She shook her head. “I can’t see it. If this were just a simple case of Dad refusing a bribe, there’d be no call for murder.”
“If it was murder—”
PJ’s temper flared again. “It was! And that could only mean a big deal, bigger than Greenstock and his company. You’ve got to find out who’s behind them!”
“I’m not leaving any tern unstoned, as the nasty little kid said when he was pitching pebbles at the shore birds.”
PJ relented and smiled at my bad joke. “Did you actually imagine I had never heard that one before?”
“No. But I did imagine that you would imagine that I would never be dumb enough to say it. And so it made you smile anyhow.”
“Touché…”
“Now let’s finish up. I’m going to take you to a show.”
“Which one?”
“The touring version of Metropolis.”
“With Bernadette Peters as Maria?”
“The one and only.”
“Let’s go!”
Was it cheating to have looked up PJ’s passions on the a-net? If so, I joined millions of other romance-seeking geeks.
After the show we ended up on the observation deck of the Agberg Tower of Glass. All of Centropolis lay spread out below us, a lattice of lights, and I felt the same epiphany experienced by Oedipa Maas in Thomas Pynchon’s The Cryonics of Blot 49, when she envisioned the alien spaceport as pure information.
This high, the air was chilly, and PJ huddled naturally into my embrace. We kissed for a long time before our lips parted, and she said wistfully, “This tower is the fourth-highest in the world.”
“But only,” I whispered, “until the completion of the Atreides Pylon in Dubai.”
The next day I took the trolley to the intersection of Kirby Avenue and Lee Street, to the HQ of MetamorPharma. Built in the classic Rhizomatic style pioneered twenty years ago by the firm of Fuller, Soleri and Wright, the building resembled an enormous fennel bulb topped with ten-storey stylized fronds. The fronds were solar collectors, of course.
Inside at reception, where giant murals featuring the corporate cartoon—the famed multicoloured element man—dominated the walls, I used the annunciator to rouse Taft Greenstock, sales rep, from whatever office drudgery he had been performing. In a few moments, he emerged to greet me.
Greenstock was a black man of enormous girth and height, sporting scraggly facial hair and an Afro modelled on Luke Cage’s, and wearing a polychromatic caftan and sandals. As he got closer, I smelled significant B.O. and booze. Aside from his sheer size, he was hardly intimidating. I had expected some kind of hard-nosed Octopus or Joker or Moriarty, the instrument of Hornbine’s murder, and instead had gotten a fourth-rate Giles Habibula.
I had been planning to show Greenstock a fake ID and profile I had set up on the a-net, and feed him a line of foma. But taking his measure as an unwitting proxy who might be frightened into spilling some beans, I shifted plans. After we shook hands and I showed him my NC license, I just braced him with the truth.
“Chum Greenstock, I’m here about the death of Dr. Harold Hornbine. We have cause to believe he was murdered.”
Greenstock looked confused, and began to sweat. I could smell metabolized gin. People passing in the lobby glanced at us curiously.
“I don’t know anything about that. He was just a customer. I deal with hundreds of medicos every week. He was fine the last time I saw him—”
“And what did you discuss with him during that visit?”
“A new product. A vaccine. KannerMax.”
“What’s KannerMax inoculate against?”
“It’s not for every child. It’s only recommended for those with certain chromosomal defects. I don’t know the hard scientific data, I’m just a salesman. I left him all the literature and a sample—”
Greenstock looked like he was about to collapse. I quit pushing.
“All right, that’s fine. You’ve helped me a lot, Chum Greenstock. I’ll be back if I have any further questions.”
I had the name of the compound that had seemingly been the catalyst in Hornbine’s murder. And murder I now indeed believed it to be. Greenstock’s visit introducing this new vaccine synchronized too well with Hornbine’s “heart attack.” The Doc must’ve learned something upon examination of the vaccine that earned him a death sentence.
Leaving the building, I knew just where to turn next.
Dinky Allepo.
Wonder Woman was sitting in Doc Savage’s lap, while Atom Boy rested on her shoulders. Godzilla was destroying Jonestown, home to the wacky Stimsons clan, while Maggie and Jiggs and Lil Abner and Daisy Mae applauded. Mutt and Jeff were herding approximately a dozen Felix the Cats toward the maw of Cthulhu. And my namesakes, Max and Moritz, were duking it out with Skeezix and Little Lulu.