The Frumious Bandersnatch полностью

Her eyes turned fully upon him, a laser beam caught in a hot follow spot.

And she rapped out the words in exultant victory.

The rap ended.

The beast in its enraged red mask lay dead on the floor at Tamar’s feet.

Now there was only the B-flat note again, that single repeated bass note, and Tamar fluidly moving the tune into the bluesy figure of its opening melody.

Tamar’s eyes shone, her voice rang out. She was home, baby, she was home.

“Don’t nobody fucking move! ”

Saddam Hussein and Yasir Arafat were coming down the wide mahogany staircase.

TALL AND LEAN and with the easy stride of an athlete—which he most certainly wasn’t—Steve Carella came into the squadroom at twenty minutes to twelve that Saturday night, fresh as a daisy, and ready to go to work.

“It’s for you,” Andy Parker said, and handed him the phone.

Actually, it wasn’t for Carella.

It was for whichever detective happened to be on duty at the Eight-Seven at this hour of the night. But the Graveyard Shift was just beginning to meander in, and Parker was never too eager to catch a new case, so he considered himself officially relieved, and passed the call on to Carella, who was a bit bewildered by the precise timing.

“Carella,” he said into the phone.

“Hello, Carella,” a gruff, smoke-tarnished voice said. “This is Captain Jimson, Harbor Patrol.”

A jumper, Carella thought at once. Someone’s taken a dive off the Hamilton Bridge.

“Yes, sir?” he said.

“I just had a call from one of my people out on the water, a Sergeant McIntosh, aboard one of our thirty-six footers. At around ten-thirty, he responded to a distress call from the skipper of a cruise yacht called the River Princess …are you with me, Coppola?”

“It’s Carella, sir.”

“Sorry. The River Princess, some kind of party for a rock singer.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Two armed masked men boarded the boat around ten-fifteen and kidnapped her.”

Oh boy, Carella thought.

“You’re the local onshore precinct. Coast Guard has a DPB waiting to take you out there from Pier 39…”

“Yes, sir,” Carella said.

He didn’t know what a DPB was.

“…that’s on the river and Twelfth. How long will it take you to get crosstown?”

Carella glanced at the precinct wall map.

“Give me fifteen minutes, sir,” he said.

“The man you’re meeting is a lieutenant j.g. named Carlyle Apted.”

“Yes, sir. Sir, would you know who the singer…?”

But the captain had already hung up, and Cotton Hawes was just walking into the squadroom.

“Cotton,” he said, “don’t get comfortable. We’re up.”

COTTON HAWES felt right at home on the Coast Guard’s little 38-foot DPB. This was the kind of boat he’d commanded during his little war. Everybody in America had his own little war, and everybody in that war did his own little thing. Carella had trudged through mud as a grunt in the infantry. Hawes had stood on the bridge of a boat not unlike this one, grinning into flying bullets, spray and spume. Everybody in America who’d ever fought or merely served in any of the country’s innumerable little wars would never forget his own particular war, although sometimes he would like to. But there would always be more little wars and even some big ones, and therefore many more opportunities to remember. Or perhaps forget.

Cotton Hawes stood on the bridge of the cutter alongside Lieutenant Carlyle Apted, a man in his late twenties, he guessed, who had been summoned to the scene the moment Sergeant McIntosh realized he was dealing with a kidnapping here.

“Guess he figured this would get Federal sooner or later,” Apted said.

Then what are we ding here? Carella wondered. Let the Feebs have it now, and welcome to it.

“What you’re on now,” Apted told Hawes, perhaps suspecting that Carella didn’t really care to know, “is a Deployable Pursuit Boat, what we call a DPB. She’s a thirty-eight footer, designed to give the Coast Guard a new capability in the war against drugs.”

Another little war, Carella thought.

“What it is, you see, most of your illegal narcotics are smuggled in on these ‘go-fasts,’ we call ’em. They’re these small, high-speed boats that can carry up to two thousand keys of cocaine. But they can’t outrun our DPBs. Means we can intercept and board and make a sizable dent in the traffic.”