The Comedy is Finished

bobbed far off, in the water. What would it be like to be a person on one of those boats? Peter concentrated, trying to push his mind, his particularity, out through his eyes and across the intervening space and inside the head of a person on one of those boats—that boat, right there. Feel the movement, taste the salt spray, grab the cold chrome rail, smile broadly with uncut cheeks and gaze toward shore with easy amused pity for those people mired there.

Liz said, “It won’t work.”

Peter looked at her with cold distaste. His army. Liz, standing near him, narrow and pinched and dead for years. And Larry over at the foot of the stairs, forehead deeply puckered with worry, mouth open like a victim of brain damage. Peter’s army. He said, “What won’t work?”

“All that car to the airport business. They’ll mousetrap us along the way.”

“We’ll have Davis.”

“We don’t have him now,” she pointed out. “Mark has him, and he won’t give him back.”

Peter’s fingertips left the telephone and moved up to touch his cheek, reassuringly. Perhaps it was only this pain that kept him going. “We’ll go talk to Mark,” he said. “Maybe he’ll listen to reason.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“We’ll shoot the lock out of the door.” In suddenly savagery, Peter said, “In any case, the first chance I get, the first chance I get, Mark dies.”

Lynsey watched Mike’s face while he talked with the man called Dinely, and the instant he hung up the phone she said, “What are you going to do?”

His face closed down when he looked at her. “I’m going to stop them,” he said.

“Please, Mi—Uh, may I call you Mike?”

He seemed surprised. There was an occasional unexpected boyishness in him that confused Lynsey. He said, “Sure. Mike. Why not?”

“Mike,” she said, knowing it was important that communication between them remain open, knowing she was likely to be the only effective restraining influence on him, “Mike, I hate it when I see you turn off that way. You look at me and I can almost hear you saying to yourself, ‘Bleeding heart liberal.’ ”

“Oh, well,” he said, moving his hands in awkward embarrassment, and the fact that he even blushed, faintly and briefly, confirmed that she’d been right.

“It’s true,” she said. “And we have to get past it. For instance, you know I don’t care more about the criminals than I do about the victim; certainly not in this case.”

His grin acknowledged the point. “Old habits die hard,” he said.

“Yours, or mine?”

“Both.” He nodded, heavy and thoughtful. “You’re right. I look at you and I see somebody who doesn’t want me to do the most effective job.”

Honesty deserves honesty. She said, “And I look at you and see somebody who’s dangerous because he thinks it’s a game.”

“But it is a game,” he said. “It’s all moves and counter-moves; dangerous, you play it for keeps, but it’s a game.”

“No,” she said. “It’s all right for the criminals to think it’s a game, they’re sick, that’s why they’re on the wrong side of the law. But if you think the same way, then the game becomes more important than the people. You’d sacrifice Koo to win the game.”

“I don’t know how to answer that,” he said. “I know you’re thinking about the mistake I made—”

“No, I wasn’t,” she said, surprised. “I mean, that’s part of it, but I wasn’t thinking about that. That didn’t give me my belief, it was just confirmation of what I already believed.”

“Which is?”

“All right,” she said. “Using your terms, that it’s a game. You think the point of the game is to capture or kill those people over there. And I think the point of the game is to get Koo back, alive and well.”

“We want to do both,” he said. “Naturally.”

“Naturally. But if you had to sacrifice one for the other, you’d kill Koo to capture the people, and I’d let the people go to save Koo. And that’s the difference between us.”

He looked bleak. “I won’t lie to you,” he said. “You’re absolutely right.”

Mark looked at the furniture piled up against the door. Both night-tables were there, upside down on the floor, with drawers from the built-in dressers stacked among the night-table legs. A wicker bathroom hamper, weighted with all the bottles and tubes from the medicine chest and bathroom storage shelves, lay on its side atop the drawers; beyond it, the mirror, cracked and splintered by Peter’s bullets fired through the door, reflected a crazy quilt pattern of white wicker. Above that were the reflection of Mark’s newly naked somber face and the image of Koo, frightened and exhausted, seated on the bed in the background. “The television set next,” Mark said, and moved across the room.

Koo said, “Mark? What’s going to happen?”

“They’re going to try and break in. We won’t let them.”

“I mean, after that.”

“We’ll know when we get there, Koo.”

Mark didn’t like that question, because he not only didn’t know the answer but didn’t want to know the answer. The astonishment of having actually had a pistol fired at him by Peter had forced him to a sudden awareness of his true position, so that now he knew he was living minute by minute, even second by second. He didn’t recognize himself anymore, and without identity he couldn’t begin to think about direction. He was like a person waking from a three-week binge to find himself in the hospital, fed and dry but charged with a variety of felonies about which he has no recollection; this moment is bearable, but any conceivable movement from here is bound to be a change for the worse.

Various wires led from the back of the television set into the darkness of the closet. Mark traced the power- lead, treating that with respect and carefully unplugging it from the wall outlet, but the other wires—aerial, external speakers—he simply ripped loose, then carried the heavy set over to place it on top of the hamper, leaning back against the shattered mirror. Then he turned to look around the room for more barricade material, ignoring Koo’s questioning gaze.

He had always thought of himself as separate from other human beings, isolated and alone, but he’d been wrong. Now he was estranged; in this current situation, he was the only person on the face of the Earth that both sides wanted to shoot at.

There was nothing else to pile against the door. Either what was already there was heavy enough to do the job, or it wasn’t. Since for Mark all potential endings were bad ones, it hardly mattered whether the barricade held or not; to some extent he was doing all this merely because it was the most appropriate action under the circumstances.

So long as he remained in this room, so long as the stalemate continued outside between Peter and the authorities, then Mark still had one lifeline, one thread tying him to the human race; this complex, absurd, contradictory, useless, incomprehensible relationship with Koo Davis. Last night, suicide had seemed the only possible choice, because that moment had been unbearable. Now, the present instant had its nourishing qualities— if he didn’t know better, he’d almost think he’d become happy—so he had lost the thirst for destruction, self or otherwise; still, when the black wave did eventually get here, as it would, he would close his eyes uncaring.

Should he take his father with him?

“Mark! Mark!” It was Peter’s muffled voice, followed by a knocking at the door. “Mark, can you hear me?”

Koo sat up straighter, sending Mark a frightened look. Turning casually to the door, Mark rested his hands on the waist-level television set, smiling with easy familiarity at his fractured images in the broken mirror. He wasn’t particularly worried about Peter shooting through the door at him; those last bullets had penetrated the wood and cracked the glass, but they hadn’t entered the room with any force. Mark called, “Yes, I can hear you.”

“We made a deal with them, Mark.”

Mark waited, but apparently Peter expected him to comment, and the silence lengthened. Mark had no comment, he didn’t live on the same level of reality as Peter, so he merely waited,