The Comedy is Finished

material Koo could even understand, and he began to think long thoughts about retirement. He remained steadfast through the Nixon resignation and the Ford pardon, he even stuck when nobody invited him on that goddamn aircraft carrier in New York on Bicentennial Day; July 4, 1976, the Tall Ships, and Koo watched it on television. He’d offered to work for the Ford campaign, and they’d gently let him down, and it wasn’t till later he figured it out; Koo Davis had become a reminder of too much bad history. Koo Davis!

But what did it for him at last was the investigations into the CIA, where it was made public that for several years in the sixties they’d had a phone tap and a mail check on him! On Koo! And when the asshole involved was asked by the Senate Committee why Koo Davis, the answer was that Koo had a lot of liberal friends. Did have.

Right after that came the revelations about the CIA experiments on human beings in hospitals, and that just put the icing on the cake. Maybe nobody else remembered what the Second World War had been all about, but Koo did, and he got mad: “The purpose of the experiments was to see if a human being could live without a brain. It turns out he can, if he’s in the CIA.” And when it occurred to him he was now telling anti-government jokes, he realized the time had come to end his own long war. Back to civilian life, back to the home front, back to the world he’d left behind.

“And if you don’t like the show, folks, you’ll get a full refund at the door. But I know you’re gonna love it, and now I gotta go get ready, we’re in kind of a hurry today, the manufacturer is recalling my pacemaker.”

With a grin, with a wave, Koo tosses the mike to a waiting stage-hand and trots off. “It’s a good audience,” he tells somebody on the way by, but that’s just words, he doesn’t even know who he’s talking to. They’re all good audiences for Koo Davis, they’ve been good audiences again for a year now. The split is over, the trouble’s over, everybody’s a good guy after all, and Koo is happy to relax once more into who he really is; a funny man, a funnyman, a good comic, an honest uncomplicated human being, living like every comic in the eternal Now, the Present, the Hereheisfolks, the Nowappearing. It’s a good life, safe at last, and it’s always happening right Now.

Koo has three minutes to drink a little ice water, get the makeup adjusted, have a quick last look at the script, play a little grabass with Jill, and then come out stage center into a group of eight tall lean dancing girls and his opening line of the show: “I can remember when legs like that were illegal.” Now, he moves briskly along a cable-strewn alley created by the false walls of stacked sets, toward the door to a corridor leading to his dressing room, and as he reaches that first door somebody on his left says, “Mr. Davis?”

Koo turns his head. It’s one of the scruffy bearded young crew members; these hairy sloppy styles never will look to Koo like anything but shit. Behind the kid is a side exit from the studio, the red Taping light agleam above it. Koo is in a hurry, and he wants no problems. “What’s up?”

“Look at this, Mr. Davis,” the kid says, and brings his hand up from his side, and when Koo looks down he is absolutely incredibly dumbfounded to see the kid is holding a pistol, a little black stubby-nosed revolver, and it’s pointed right at Koo’s head. Assassination! he thinks, though why anyone would want to assassinate him he has no idea, but on the other hand he has in his time played golf with one or two politicians who were later assassinated, and in his astonishment he opens his mouth to holler, and the kid uses his free hand to slap Koo very hard across the face.

And now a bag gets pulled down over his head from behind, a burlap bag smelling of moist earth and potatoes, and cable-like arms are grabbing him hard around the upper arms and chest, imprisoning him, lifting him, lifting his feet off the floor. He’s being carried, there’s a sudden rush of cooler air on the backs of his hands, they’re taking him outside. “Hey!” he yells, and somebody punches him very very hard on the nose. Jesus Christ, he thinks, not hollering anymore. Now they’re punching me on the nose.

2

Peter Dinely watched the blue van with Joyce at the wheel jounce slowly over the speed bumps at the studio exit and turn right toward Barham Boulevard. Were Mark and Larry in the back, out of sight? Did they have Koo Davis back there? Peter gnawed the insides of his cheeks, willing Joyce to look this way, give him some sort of sign, but the van turned and drove unsteadily away, an enigmatic blue box on small wheels, its rear windows dark and dusty. Peter followed, in the green rented Impala, the ache in his cheeks a kind of distraction from uncertainty.

The habit of gnawing his cheeks was an acquired one, chosen deliberately a long long time ago and now so ingrained he could no longer stop it, though the inside of his mouth was ragged and even occasionally bleeding. If he ever could stop chewing on himself he’d be glad of it; but then would the blinking come back?

Peter was thirty-four. To break an early habit of blinking when under pressure, he’d been chewing his cheeks in moments of tension for fifteen years. Eleven years ago a dentist had reacted with horror, telling him the interior of his mouth was one great raw wound, since when he had stopped going to dentists.

Now, Peter followed the blue van west on Barham Boulevard, and it wasn’t until the turn onto Hollywood Freeway northbound that he could angle into the middle lane, run up next to the van, look over at Joyce’s tense profile, and tap the horn. She looked at him almost with terror, not seeming to understand what he wanted—or possibly even who he was—until he gave her an angry questioning glare while pointing with jabbing fingers at the back part of the van. Then she gave a sudden jerk of understanding, and an exaggerated nod. Yes? he asked, demanding with head and face and arm, and she nodded again, with a small tense smile and a quick jerky wave of the hand.

All right. All right. Peter became calm, his shoulders sagging, his jaw muscles relaxing, the blood oozing into his mouth, his foot easing on the accelerator. The Impala dropped back and tucked in once more behind the blue van. Everything was going to be all right.

The house was in Tarzana, up in the hills south of the Ventura Freeway. Peter waited behind the van as Joyce stopped at the gate and her hand reached out to ring the bell in the metal pole beside the driveway. There was a pause—up above, Liz must walk to the kitchen, ask for identification through the speaker, receive reassurance from Joyce, then press the button—and then the wide chain-link gate slowly opened and the van jolted up the hill. Peter followed, seeing in the rearview mirror the gate automatically swing shut.

At the top, the blacktop driveway leveled off into a flat area in front of the wide garage. Next to it, the house was a broad ranch-style in brick and wood; as the two vehicles came to a stop, Liz came out its front door. She was naked, her long lean body hard-looking, her eyes hidden behind large dark sunglasses. It was Liz’ style to be aggressive and challenging; neither Peter nor any of the others would remark upon her nakedness.

Getting out of the Impala, Peter opened the rear doors of the van and there they were. Koo Davis, head still enclosed in the burlap sack, lay face down on an old double-bed mattress. Mark, bearded and stolid, sat at this end of the van, his feet stretched out over Davis’ legs, while worried-looking Larry perched uncomfortably up front by Davis’ head. “Very good,” Peter said. “Get him out of there.”

Davis didn’t speak as they helped him out to the blacktop; Peter, taking his arm to assist, felt the man trembling. “Just walk,” he said.

Liz led the way into the house. When she turned her back the scars were visible; twisted rough-grained white lines that would never take a tan, criss-crossing down the middle of her back.

The interior of the house was cool with central air-conditioning. Pale green carpet on all the floors muffled sound. While Joyce and Mark stayed behind, Peter and Larry guided Davis through the house, following Liz. In the kitchen, she opened a narrow door and they went down a narrow staircase to the left. Here, beneath the house, were the utilities, in a small square concrete block room without frills. Cardboard wine cartons were messily piled in one corner, behind the pool heater. On a side where it wouldn’t be expected was a door, which Liz opened, revealing a fairly long narrow room which extended out from the house underneath the sun deck as far as the swimming pool. At the far end of the room was a thick glass picture window, with the green-blue water at the deep end of the pool restlessly moving against its other side. Daylight filtering through that water made a cool gray dimness in here, until Liz touched a switch beside the door which brought up warm amber indirect lighting.

The first owner of this house had been a movie director, who had added several ideas of his own to the architects’ plans, including this room, in which it was possible to sit and have a drink and get a fish-eye view of one’s guests swimming in the pool. The director had enjoyed this idea so much he’d had the setting written into one