The Comedy is Finished

On the front seat you’ll find a tape. It isn’t too late, the people still can win.”

“At first I thought it was a joke,” the boy explained. “But I couldn’t figure out who she was. She didn’t sound like any of the girls I knew. She sounded—I don’t know—”

Wiskiel suggested, “Older?”

“Yeah, I guess so. No, not exactly. Well, maybe older, but mostly, well, sad. You know? She was saying these things, ‘The people still can win,’ and all that stuff, but there wasn’t any pep in it. That’s why I finally figured maybe it was on the level, and I went out and looked in the car.”

Where he had found the cassette recording on the front seat, as promised. Having his own cassette player, he’d listened to part of the recording, but once he’d satisfied himself he was really hearing Koo Davis’ voice he’d immediately called the special number given on television. As to why he’d been chosen to receive the cassette, he could offer no explanation other than his job on the university paper: “She did say she was giving me a scoop.” Nor could he identify either the Identikit drawing of “Janet Grey” or the two men in the photograph.

In the workroom again, Lynsey and the others waited while the technician inserted the cassette, arranged to simultaneously record it onto his own tape, and pushed the Play button. After a few seconds of rustling silence the familiar voice began, abruptly, loud and clear and unmistakable:

“Hello, everybody, this is Koo Davis. To steal a line from John Chancellor, I’m somewhere in custody. To tell the truth I don’t know where I am, but it looked better in the brochure.”

There was a handy metal folding chair; weak-kneed, Lynsey dropped into it, trembling and astonished at her reaction to that voice, known in so many ways, personal and public. Until this instant, now, when the voice proclaimed so clearly that Koo was still alive and unharmed, she had been hiding from herself the fear, the terror, that he was dead, or that awful dreadful things were being done to him. Now, her sense of relief was almost as strong as if he were already home again and safe; she felt the blood rushing from her head, she felt the overpowering physical need to faint, and she fought against it, digging her nails into her palms. It wasn’t over; Koo wasn’t home; he wasn’t safe; she couldn’t relax, not yet.

The easy, confident, astonishingly cheerful voice went on: “The crowd here is a lot like television people. Floor managers. Stand here, do that, talk into the mike, read this script. I don’t know about these hours, though. Did you guys check this out with AFTRA?”

Lynsey felt Wiskiel frowning at her, and she elaborately and silently mouthed the explanation: “The union.” He nodded.

“Anyway, folks,” Koo was saying, suddenly speaking more quickly, as though one of the “floor managers” had off-mike ordered him to get on with it, “I’m supposed to say something here to prove I’m really me and not Frank Gorshin, so check with my agent Lynsey Rayne—are you sure this is the right gig for me, honey?—about the writer I call ‘The Tragic Relief,’ with the initials dee-double-u.”

At Koo’s mention of her own name, Lynsey’s eyes had suddenly filled with tears, which she determinedly blinked away. And when she saw Wiskiel again frowning at her she nodded at him, to say that Koo’s reference to The Tragic Relief had made sense to her.

“And now,” Koo was going on, “I’m supposed to read this statement. Here goes: I am being held by elements of the People’s Revolutionary Army—huh, think of that—and have so far not been harmed—except for the punch in the nose, let’s not forget about that. The People’s Revolutionary Army is not materi—Wait a minute. I don’t usually get words like this in my scripts. The only really big word I know is BankAmericard. The People’s Revolutionary Army is not ma-ter-i-a-lis-tic-ally or-i-en-ted—there—and so this is not a kidnapping in the ordinary capitalist sense. Well, that’s a relief. We have chosen Koo Davis not because he is rich—smart, very smart—but because he has made a career of being court jester to the bosses, the warmongers and the forces of reaction. You left out the Girl Scouts. Okay, okay. The United States, which trumpets endlessly about civil rights in other nations, itself has thousands of political prisoners in its jails. Ten of these are to be released and are to be given air passage to Algeria or whatever other destination they choose. These ten are to be released within the next twenty-four hours, or a certain amount of harm will come to me. I don’t think I like that part. Once the ten have been released and are safely at the destinations of their choice, I will be permitted to return to my normal life. If there is any delay, the People’s Revolutionary Army will take what action toward me it deems fit. The ten people are: Norman Cobberton, Hugh Pendry, Abby Lancaster, Louis Goldney, William Brown—who are these people?—Howard Fenton, Eric Mallock, George Toll—sounds like a VIP list at the bus station—Fred Walpole, and Mary Martha DeLang. This complete recording is to be played on all network and Los Angeles area radio and television news programs beginning at eleven o’clock tonight, and is to be played on all network radio and television news programs during the day and evening tomorrow. If it isn’t played according to these instructions, the People’s Revolutionary Army will take appropriate action toward me. These demands are not negotiable. So that was, uhhhh, the message from our sponsor. And from the way it looks here, my only hope is I flunk the audition and they send me home.”

6

Joyce and the others sat in the darkened living room together, all five of them, watching the eleven o’clock news on NBC, Channel 4. The lights outside the house were off, and through the long wall of glass doors at one side of the room moonlight reflected silver-gray from the breeze-ruffled surface of the pool. Beyond the pool and its cantilevered deck the Valley could be seen, a gridwork of dotted light-lines dividing the darkness into comprehensible bite-size chunks, while the greater darkness remained intact, surrounding and above.

The Koo Davis kidnapping was the major news story, the lead-in piece. The newscaster announced the fact of the kidnapping and then the cassette tape was played, in its entirety, while on the screen a photograph appeared, a publicity still; a smiling Koo Davis face, in color, confident and successful.

Joyce hadn’t listened to the tape before it went out, and she didn’t really listen now. This wasn’t her part of the work, and it didn’t interest her to know the details. She was content to be the one who entered the straight world, got the jobs, drove the van away from the studio, delivered the tape to the boy in Santa Monica, made the easy informational phone calls. And here in the house she was the den mother, she made the dinner, washed the dishes, did the laundry.

For Joyce, the group in the darkness around the flickering TV light was like some wonderful kind of camping out. In her childhood, in Racine, where the winters were so long and so cold, “camping out” had mostly meant what were known as “overnights”: half a dozen giggling girls on mattresses or folded blankets on a living room floor, the host parents far away in their own part of the house, the girls clustering together like tiny delighted animals at the dry hidden warm bottom of the world, whispering and shushing at one another, young small bodies in the nightgowns trembling with exhilaration.

It was the group that Joyce loved, the very idea of being part of a group. In her childhood she had been a Brownie, later a Girl Scout and for a while simultaneously a Campfire Girl, also member of a Junior Sodality at church, the 4-H Club, other groups at school and college; and tonight she sat with her feet curled up under her at one end of the sofa, the complete group around her, the television offering its flickering light to the room, and she was back where it had all begun: an “overnight,” with friends. Her hand over her mouth so no one would know, her eyes on the screen without seeing it, her ears ignoring the loping cadence of Koo Davis’ voice, she giggled.

When the tape came to its end—“and they send me home”—the Koo Davis photograph on the screen was replaced by film of an office, where two men stood behind a desk while several photographers snapped their picture and newsmen asked them questions, some extending microphones. A voice said, “In charge of the investigation into the Koo Davis kidnapping is Chief Inspector Cayzer of the Burbank Police. Representing the FBI is Michael Wiskiel, Assistant to the Chief of Station of the Los Angeles office of the FBI.”

“Wiskiel,” Mark said, while an old man in a Stetson said on-screen that they didn’t have much to go on so far. “He had something to do with Watergate.”

“Hush,” said Peter.

The announcer’s off-camera voice had returned: “Agent Wiskiel was asked if the ten named individuals would be released from prison.”

The scene cut from the old man in the Stetson to Wiskiel, a heavyset fortyish man with too much self- conscious actorish good looks. Wiskiel said, “Well, it’s early yet, and frankly I don’t recognize every one of those names, we’re not even sure yet they’re all in prison. If they are, it’ll be up to Washington to make a decision about their release. I don’t know if the kidnappers are watching—”