“Those are just soldiers,” Jock Cayzer said. “We haven’t seen the general yet.”
“When we do, Jock,” Wiskiel said, “he’ll look a lot like them.” And he switched on the workroom lights.
The phone rang in the other room. “Not another one,” Lynsey said.
“I’ll get it,” Wiskiel said, and went back to the other room.
All phone calls were being taped, on equipment also in this workroom. A monitor was on, so Lynsey and the others in here could listen to both parts of the conversation, beginning with the click when Wiskiel picked up the receiver and said, “Seven seven hundred.”
The voice on the other end was young, male and very uncertain. It struck Lynsey that either of those young men in the photograph could conceivably sound like this. “Excuse me,” it said. “Is this the number for, uh, if you know something, if you want to talk about Koo Davis?”
“That’s right. This is FBI Agent Wiskiel here.”
“Oh. Well, uh, I think I’ve got something for you.”
“What would that be?”
“Well—It’s a cassette recording, I guess it’s from the kidnappers. It’s got Koo Davis’ voice on it. It’s pretty weird.”
The boy was twenty. A tall slender blond California youth, his name was Alan Lewis, he lived in Santa Monica with his parents, and he attended UCLA, where he was an assistant features editor on The Californian, the university’s daily newspaper. According to his story, he’d been watching television when a phone call had come from a woman who wouldn’t give her name but who said, approximately, “You can have a scoop for your paper. We have Koo Davis, we are holding him in the name of the people. Look in your car. On the front seat you’ll find a tape. It isn’t too late, the people still can win.”
“At first I thought it was a joke,” the boy explained. “But I couldn’t figure out who she was. She didn’t sound like any of the girls I knew. She sounded—I don’t know—”
Wiskiel suggested, “Older?”
“Yeah, I guess so. No, not exactly. Well, maybe older, but mostly, well, sad. You know? She was saying these things, ‘The people still can win,’ and all that stuff, but there wasn’t any pep in it. That’s why I finally figured maybe it was on the level, and I went out and looked in the car.”
Where he had found the cassette recording on the front seat, as promised. Having his own cassette player, he’d listened to part of the recording, but once he’d satisfied himself he was really hearing Koo Davis’ voice he’d immediately called the special number given on television. As to why he’d been chosen to receive the cassette, he could offer no explanation other than his job on the university paper: “She did say she was giving me a scoop.” Nor could he identify either the Identikit drawing of “Janet Grey” or the two men in the photograph.
In the workroom again, Lynsey and the others waited while the technician inserted the cassette, arranged to simultaneously record it onto his own tape, and pushed the Play button. After a few seconds of rustling silence the familiar voice began, abruptly, loud and clear and unmistakable:
“Hello, everybody, this is Koo Davis. To steal a line from John Chancellor, I’m somewhere in custody. To tell the truth I don’t know where I am, but it looked better in the brochure.”
There was a handy metal folding chair; weak-kneed, Lynsey dropped into it, trembling and astonished at her reaction to that voice, known in so many ways, personal and public. Until this instant, now, when the voice proclaimed so clearly that Koo was still alive and unharmed, she had been hiding from herself the fear, the terror, that he was dead, or that awful dreadful things were being done to him. Now, her sense of relief was almost as strong as if he were already home again and safe; she felt the blood rushing from her head, she felt the overpowering physical need to faint, and she fought against it, digging her nails into her palms. It wasn’t over; Koo wasn’t home; he wasn’t safe; she couldn’t relax, not yet.
The easy, confident, astonishingly cheerful voice went on: “The crowd here is a lot like television people. Floor managers. Stand here, do that, talk into the mike, read this script. I don’t know about these hours, though. Did you guys check this out with AFTRA?”
Lynsey felt Wiskiel frowning at her, and she elaborately and silently mouthed the explanation: “The union.” He nodded.
“Anyway, folks,” Koo was saying, suddenly speaking more quickly, as though one of the “floor managers” had off-mike ordered him to get on with it, “I’m supposed to say something here to prove I’m really me and not Frank Gorshin, so check with my agent Lynsey Rayne—are you sure this is the right gig for me, honey?—about the writer I call ‘The Tragic Relief,’ with the initials dee-double-u.”
At Koo’s mention of her own name, Lynsey’s eyes had suddenly filled with tears, which she determinedly blinked away. And when she saw Wiskiel again frowning at her she nodded at him, to say that Koo’s reference to The Tragic Relief had made sense to her.
“And now,” Koo was going on, “I’m supposed to read this statement. Here goes: I am being held by elements of the People’s Revolutionary Army—huh, think of that—and have so far not been harmed—except for the punch in the nose, let’s not forget about that. The People’s Revolutionary Army is not materi—Wait a minute. I don’t usually get words like this in my scripts. The only really big word I know is BankAmericard. The People’s Revolutionary Army is not ma-ter-i-a-lis-tic-ally or-i-en-ted—there—and so this is not a kidnapping in the ordinary capitalist sense. Well, that’s a relief. We have chosen Koo Davis not because he is rich—smart, very smart—but because he has made a career of being court jester to the bosses, the warmongers and the forces of reaction. You left out the Girl Scouts. Okay, okay. The United States, which trumpets endlessly about civil rights in other nations, itself has thousands of political prisoners in its jails. Ten of these are to be released and are to be given air passage to Algeria or whatever other destination they choose. These ten are to be released within the next twenty-four hours, or a certain amount of harm will come to me. I don’t think I like that part. Once the ten have been released and are safely at the destinations of their choice, I will be permitted to return to my normal life. If there is any delay, the People’s Revolutionary Army will take what action toward me it deems fit. The ten people are: Norman Cobberton, Hugh Pendry, Abby Lancaster, Louis Goldney, William Brown—who are these people?—Howard Fenton, Eric Mallock, George Toll—sounds like a VIP list at the bus station—Fred Walpole, and Mary Martha DeLang. This complete recording is to be played on all network and Los Angeles area radio and television news programs beginning at eleven o’clock tonight, and is to be played on all network radio and television news programs during the day and evening tomorrow. If it isn’t played according to these instructions, the People’s Revolutionary Army will take appropriate action toward me. These demands are not negotiable. So that was, uhhhh, the message from our sponsor. And from the way it looks here, my only hope is I flunk the audition and they send me home.”
6
Joyce and the others sat in the darkened living room together, all five of them, watching the eleven o’clock news on NBC, Channel 4. The lights outside the house were off, and through the long wall of glass doors at one side of the room moonlight reflected silver-gray from the breeze-ruffled surface of the pool. Beyond the pool and its cantilevered deck the Valley could be seen, a gridwork of dotted light-lines dividing the darkness into comprehensible bite-size chunks, while the greater darkness remained intact, surrounding and above.