The Frumious Bandersnatch полностью

“Do you remember when this writer Ira Levin wrote a book called A Kiss Before Dying, where the last chapter is this girl gets pushed off the roof? Well, right after the book was published this girl in real life fell off a roof someplace in New York, and she had a copy of the goddamn book in her pocket! Something like that, you know?”

“Sure, we’ll push Tamar off the roof.”

“Come on, Barney…”

He was calling me Barney by then.

“…I’m talking about something spectacular. Something that will make headlines.”

“Like what?”

“Like she gets smacked around by some goon in a disco…”

“No, no.”

“…or somebody’s stalking her…”

“That won’t make headlines.”

“…or she gets kidnapped or something,” Avery said, and we both looked at each other.

There’s that moment, you know?

There’s that moment when you realize this is it.

Avery suggested fifty thousand dollars as the ransom, but I said we’d never find anyone to do it for that kind of money, so he said, “Okay a hundred, how does that sound?” and I said that still sounded too low, one minute he’s talking about spending ten million dollars in as many cities, and now he’s down to a hundred grand! I told him that would sound phony as hell, and besides, no one would risk a kidnapping for a lousy hundred thousand dollars! So we batted it back and forth until we hit on two-fifty, which was, after all, a quarter of a million dollars, a not unreasonable asking price for someone who was not yet a star.

I don’t think he was playing me, do you think he was playing me? I mean, I don’t think he knew all along that he was the one who’d be doing the actual kidnapping, I don’t think he was bargaining for a higher fee. There was an innocence about Avery…well, he double-crossed me later on. But at the time, I think he genuinely was just so enthusiastic about the idea, just into it, you know, working with me to find what would sound like a reasonable ransom demand, not too low, not too high, two hundred and fifty thousand dollars had just the right ring to it, the way the whole idea seemed absolutely right.

But then we faced the reality.

Never mind the fifteen minutes of fame. Who were we going to find who’d risk getting caught doing something as serious as a kidnapping? And who could we trust to keep quiet if they got caught? Who could we trust not to say that Barney Loomis of Bison Records had engineered the kidnapping of his own young recording artist?

“You could trust me, ” Avery said.

I looked at him.

“I’d do it,” he said.

Q: When did you hatch this brilliant scheme?

Little touch of sarcasm there, Carella thought. Be careful, Nellie. He’ll spook and tell you to go to hell, no more questions.

Q: Mr. Loomis? When did you and Mr. Hanes decide that he would be the one to carry out the kidnapping scheme?

A: It must have been in March sometime. We set everything in motion in March. That was when he found the house at the beach…

Q: The house at the beach?

A: South Beach. He rented a house there. To take Tamar to. He had his team together by then, he told me they were both experienced people, it should go off without a hitch. As a matter of fact, it did. Though I have to tell you I could have killed whoever that was with him on the night of the launch, when he slapped Tamar…

Q: The name Calvin Wilkins still doesn’t mean anything to you, is that correct?

A: I never heard of him.

Q: And the first name Kellie?

A: No. Whoever it was, the deal was nobody lays a finger on her, Avery knew that. Keep her for forty-eight hours, collect the ransom—which was really his fee for his role in all this—and then let her go safe and sound. That was the deal. He knew all the details of the launch party, I’d provided him with those, he even had a floor plan of the River Princess. It was frightening as hell when they came down those stairs, wasn’t it? Did you see the Channel Four tape? It looked real as hell, didn’t it?

Q: It was real, Mr. Loomis.

A: Well, certainly. To the observer, it looked real, especially when that idiot hit Tamar’s partner with the rifle and then slapped her, I could’ve killed him. But it was all fake, you see, it was all a hoax, you see. We kept reminding ourselves of that all the time we were planning it. It’s a hoax, stupid, it’s a hoax.

Q: Yes, but it was real.

A: It only became real when he double-crossed me. Asked for a million instead of the two-fifty we’d agreed upon. Well, sure, he saw what was happening, I’m sure he was glued to that television screen day and night. Tamar had her fifteen minutes of fame, all right, in spades. It worked, you see! She was a diva overnight!

“A dead one,” Nellie said.

And Loomis buried his face in his hands and began sobbing again.

BERT KLING felt uncomfortable because the comic was telling jokes about black people. Even holding hands with Sharyn Cooke, even sitting at a table with her and Artie Brown and his wife, Kling felt uncomfortable. Maybe that was because he was the only white man in the place.