The Comedy is Finished

couch with two blankets over him, but his mind just won’t slow down. He’s afraid, he’s goddamn afraid.

And now it’s affecting his digestion. For the last hour or so his stomach has been feeling worse and worse, and he’s been refusing to admit that he might have to throw up. Ignore an upset stomach, he believes, and the chances are it’ll go away by itself. Brood about the goddamn thing and the first thing you know you’ll up-chuck.

Well, this time the theory isn’t working. He’s not brooding about his stomach, God knows, he’s brooding about his fear of the unknown, but something is making the stomach worse and worse, in fact insistent, in fact it is going to happen, in fact he’d better get the hell to the toilet right—

He makes it; barely. He hasn’t eaten much since he’s been here, and only had the one small glass of whiskey, so what the hell is all that coming out of him? Smells as bad as it looks. Koo keeps flushing the toilet, keeps bringing up more, keeps flushing the toilet, and when at last it’s all over he’s so weak he can barely stand. He reels over to the sink, rinses out his mouth, staggers back to the couch, plucks at the blankets, gives up with only his legs covered.

Jesus, he feels awful. Perspiration is pouring out of him now, his face and chest and arms are greasy with it. Foul-smelling perspiration, as though he hadn’t bathed in a month. Is this the smell of fear?

The stomach again. “There’s nothing left!” But, oh, God, it won’t take no for an answer. He can’t walk, he scurries on all fours, he only partly makes it this time. Oh, Jesus, Jesus, what is this stuff?

For a while, this time, he lies on the floor afterward, waiting for strength to return. Got to wash out the mouth, it tastes so bad. The perspiration runs along his body, his shirt is sopping wet. Finally he crawls to the sink, struggles upward, rinses his mouth, crawls to the bed, climbs into it, doesn’t even try for the blankets.

He’s shivering, and he’s hot, and the skin of his temples is burning. The skin is burning.

This isn’t fear. What in the hell is this? Some goddamn flu, maybe, there’s always some goddamn flu going around. What a hell of a time to get sick.

Then he wonders, What’s in those pills I take all the time? Jesus, do I really have something? What a joke—after all these years, it turns out I really need all my pills.

At the next attack, he can’t leave the couch, but he manages to turn his face over the side.

8

It was one-thirty in the morning, and Mike Wiskiel had been asleep less than an hour, when the phone rang with news of the next development in the Koo Davis kidnapping. Mike mumbled into the phone, muttered a few words of explanation to his half-asleep wife, and stumbled back into his clothing. He’d had a couple quick bourbons before going to bed, which made him even groggier now, and the first time he went out to the garage he had to go back into the house for his keys.

His car, a maroon Buick Riviera, was a barely restrained beast in his uncertain hands. It lunged from the garage, swayed dangerously as it made the turn out of the driveway, and raced heedlessly down out of the quiet sleeping residential hills of Sherman Oaks. In an all-night taco joint on Ventura Boulevard Mike got a rotten cup of coffee to go, and up on the Freeway heading east he gradually came awake.

It had been a strange experience earlier tonight, listening to that Koo Davis tape. Mike was just old enough to remember Koo Davis as a regular weekly voice on the radio, so listening to that tape had been for him an eerie double-layered experience in which present drama and past comedy, his own middle-aged self sitting there in that Burbank office and his past self as a skinny child sprawled on the living room carpet in his parents’ home in Troy, New York, had combined like a movie montage in his emotional reactions. He’d found himself smiling, ready to chuckle, ready to laugh out loud, half expecting to hear the old regulars from that distant radio program—the sharp-tongued nasal-voiced script girl constantly correcting Koo’s grammar or pronunciation, the get-rich-quick brother-in-law with the voice like mashed potatoes and the endless series of goofy inventions and dumb money- making schemes, the bad-tempered neighbor with the weirdly roaring power mower—and it had been very hard to replace those voices (and his own childhood idea of what those people must look like) with the faces and the unfunniness and the grim intentions of the Identikit girl and the two sullen young men.

And now something else had happened; but what? “We’ve heard from them again,” was all Jock Cayzer had said on the phone.

When Mike arrived the office contained, in addition to Jock and Lynsey Rayne, an elderly stoop-shouldered man with a Sigmund Freud goatee, and another agent from the local Bureau Headquarters, Dave Kerman. Lynsey Rayne, who had been here all along, was apparently prepared to stay until Koo Davis was released; surely service above and beyond the call of an actor’s agent. She was gaunt and hollow-eyed by now, but showed no sign of weakening resolve.

Was there something sexual between this woman and Koo Davis? Of course, Davis was an old man and Lynsey Rayne probably wasn’t much over forty, but even an old man likes to have a woman around, and the real Mrs. Davis was more than three thousand miles away. Lynsey Rayne wasn’t behaving like a simple business associate, but did that necessarily mean it was sex? Somehow the style of her reaction wasn’t like the tenterhooks fear of a loved one. She was more like...like an intensely involved nurse, like the competent older sister in a parentless household, or (farther afield, maybe ridiculous) like the bomber squadron commander in World War Two movies, waiting by the landing field to see how many of his “boys” have made it “home.”

Jock Cayzer introduced the dapper bearded man. He was Doctor Stephen Answin, Koo Davis’ personal physician. “I came as quickly as I could,” the doctor said. He had a habit of ducking his head, as though apologetic, shooting quick glances over the tops of his spectacles, but the hesitant self-conscious manner was belied by his appearance; the goatee was as neat as a freshly clipped hedge, and his blue cashmere suit, raw silk ascot and gleaming pointed-toe shoes (all crying out their origin in male boutiques along Camden or Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills) suggested a rather dandyish self-assurance.

“The kidnapper’s due to call back soon,” Jock said, looking at his watch.

Mike said, “Call back? You’ve got an appointment?”

“To talk to the doctor. Come listen.”

They trooped into the workroom, where all incoming calls were being put on tape. An FBI technician named Menaged was there, with the earlier conversation already cued up. He played it, and Mike listened to the voices.

Receptionist: “Seven seven hundred.”

Caller (cold emotionless male voice, in something of a hurry): “This the Koo Davis number?”

Receptionist: “Yes, sir.”

Caller: “Davis is sick.”

Receptionist: “Beg pardon?”

Caller: “You’ve got two minutes on this call, then I hang up. We checked Davis a while ago, and he’s all of a sudden in bad shape. We didn’t hurt him, but he’s sick. He’s throwing up, sweating, can’t move. He’s muttering something about pills in a dressing room. Is he on some kind of maintenance medicine?”

Receptionist: “Sir, I couldn’t possibly—”

Caller: “Not you. This is going on tape, right? Get Davis’ doctor, get those pills if he’s got pills. I’ll call back at two o’clock.”

Receptionist: “I’m not sure I can—Hello? Hello?”

The technician switched it off, saying, “He’d hung up by then.”

Mike checked his watch, and it was not ten minutes before two. Turning to the doctor, he said, “Does that make sense to you?”

“I’m afraid it does, yes.”

“Davis is on some kind of medicine? What does he have?”

“It isn’t that simple,” the doctor said. Between his assured appearance and his bashful manner it was hard to get a coherent reading on the man, but Mike suspected in him a kind of embarrassment. Why?

The doctor was going on, saying, “If Koo were a diabetic, or had leukemia in remission, something along those lines, it would be much easier to define for you what the problem is. Let me explain; Koo Davis is not a young