The Comedy is Finished

him work it through for himself. Her part would be to make it absolutely clear she wasn’t going away.

And at last he sighed and shook his head and said, “Okay. I was sent out here to not tell you, but you’re right, if you were family I’d have no choice.”

But at that point he ran out of words and stopped. She looked at him, waiting, and saw that he was helpless, trying in vain to find the right combination of words. After half a minute of silence, while the fear built in her, she gave him a sad smile and said, “There’s no soft way, is there? So just say it, whatever it is.”

“They cut off his ear.”

She stared at him, at first failing to understand the meaning of those words, and then she heard herself laugh, as though it was a joke: “They didn’t!”

“I’m sorry. They want to show the world how tough they are.”

“They—His ear?” It was still meaningless, incomprehensible. “That’s—That’s like savages, it’s primitive man, it’s...”

“Once people lose the social thread,” he said, obviously telling her something he deeply believed, “they’re capable of anything.”

“But his—” Floundering toward something recognizable, she said, “Is there another message?”

“Not his voice. A new voice.”

“I want to hear it.”

“Ms. Rayne, I don’t—”

“And I want to see the ear.”

She wasn’t going to be stopped, and he must have seen that. With another sigh, he shrugged and said, “Come along, then.”

In the workroom were three men: Jock Cayzer, the tape technician, and Maurice St. Clair, the FBI Deputy Director from Washington, whom Lynsey hadn’t yet met but had seen on that television program. As Lynsey and Mike Wiskiel walked in, the technician was saying, “—interesting about this tape.” But then he stopped, as the three men became aware of Lynsey’s presence.

St. Clair, big and meaty and red-faced, lunged up from the folding chair he’d been sitting on, shouting, “For Christ’s sake! Mike, Mike—”

“It’s all right, Murray,” Wiskiel said.

She had already seen the box. That had to be it, sitting alone on a worktable, a small black box bearing the stylized white letters “i magnin.” As Wiskiel went through the stupid formalities of introducing Lynsey to St. Clair, she crossed directly to the box, opened the lid, and looked inside.

How awful. How pitiable. It was small, wrinkled, pale, fleshy, stained with rust-colored dry blood, and utterly pathetic. Lynsey pressed her palms onto the table to both sides of the small box, clenched her jaw, stood unblinking, and gazed into the box.

The men had become silent, and it was Jock Cayzer who came over to stand beside her, saying nothing, also looking into the box. Quietly, Lynsey said, “It’s so small.”

“Well, it’s off a living man,” he said, “so it would have bled some; that’d shrink it.” His manner was calm, sympathetic but unemotional, reducing this horrible thing to something that could be looked at, discussed, absorbed into one’s mind and memory.

She needed that. She needed something to make this ordinary, so she could go on from it. “I’ve never seen a thing like this before,” she said.

“Oh, I have.” And still he was calm, judicious, merely reporting a fact.

“Tell me about it.”

She felt him glance at her, study her profile, make a decision about her. Then he said, “Some of the boys back from Nam, they brought Cong ears with them. Anyway, they said they were Cong ears, and they were sure ears. And what they mostly looked like was dried peaches.”

“This one is fresher.”

“Yes,” he said, and reached out as though casually to close the lid on the box.

She looked at him, seeing a man who was truly strong without making a point of it. “Thank you,” she said.

“My pleasure, Ms. Rayne.”

“May I hear the tape?”

“Of course.”

The technician already had it cued up, and this new harsh voice snarled from the loudspeakers with its self- serving self-righteousness. Lynsey listened unmoving—she was deadened, at least for now, free from high emotional reactions—and at the end she said, quietly, “They are just beasts, aren’t they?”

Cayzer said, “The television broadcast must have been a shock to them.”

Obviously uncomfortable, St. Clair said, “Miss Rayne, there just wasn’t any way to soften that blow. I mean, telling these bastards what answers we got from their former friends. We simply had to tell them the truth.”

“I realize that.” Then she sighed, and shook her head, and said, “What happens now?”

“We’ll send this tape to Washington,” St. Clair told her, “for the next response.”

“But there is no next response, is there?”

St. Clair frowned unhappily at her—the third man in five minutes to wonder if she could survive the truth—and then he said, “Myself, Miss Rayne, I can’t think of any.”

“What they ask is impossible.”

Beneath his restraint St. Clair was very angry. “And they know it,” he said. “In the first place, we can’t just talk half a dozen people out of jail against their will and deport them out of the country. Maybe in Russia you can do that, but not here. There’s such a thing as due process, and if we tried any such stunt there wouldn’t be a lawyer in the nation out of work for the next two years. And in the second place, even if we could do such a thing we wouldn’t, because what this son of a bitch Rock really wants is other buddies of his in Algeria to take revenge on those people for standing him up.”

“Showing him up,” Wiskiel said.

“Both.”

“So this is just propaganda,” Lynsey said. “They’re going to kill Koo and they’ll try to put the blame on the government.”

Wiskiel said, “So we’ve got to find them before they do it.”

Lynsey shook her head. “If the deadline isn’t real, if they’re going to kill him anyway, why would they wait?”

“One last propaganda blitz,” St. Clair suggested. “Another tape, or maybe even a phone call to a television station, something like that, just at the deadline. Davis will be useful to them right up until twelve noon.”

“But how are you going to find them? They left that house in Woodland Hills, and this time there’s no message from Koo.”

Wiskiel said, “We have one lead. There was something funny about the Woodland Hills house being so available, and we’re trying to find the owner.”

“Trying to find him?”

“He’s a rock musician named Ginger Merville,” Wiskiel said, “and he’s supposed to be in Paris on tour, but he and his tour manager both checked out of their hotel two days ago. The manager flew to Tokyo, where Merville is supposed to perform this weekend, but Merville himself flew to New York. So far, we haven’t been able to find out where he went after that.”

“Ginger Merville.” Lynsey knew the name, knew something of the man’s career. She said, “Did you check with his agent?”

“One of my men saw him this afternoon. Or yesterday afternoon, I guess, by now. He didn’t know where Merville was.”

“Nonsense,” Lynsey said.

Wiskiel looked surprised. “Beg pardon?”

“The agent knows where Merville is,” Lynsey said. “People hide from their wives, their creditors, their employers and the police, but they don’t hide from their agents.”

“Are you suggesting the agent is part of it?”

“No, I’m not.” Lynsey paused, choosing her words carefully. She didn’t particularly want to antagonize Wiskiel