The iron fingers went into my throat. Then Rigby was holding him, had taken Feilding’s right arm and done something to it, so that Feilding cried out in pain and fear. There was a sharp cry — and the dagger dropped gleaming upon the carpet, upon which, instantly afterwards, fell prostrate in death the Prince Prospero. His head cracked, and I felt it crunch. The light flashed upon the barrel of a revolver, but Holmes’s hunting crop came down upon the mans wrist, and the pistol clinked upon the stone floor.
Quick as a flash he snatched up Cedar’s gun and, levelling it with both hands, he worked the trigger. Bang! Bang! He shook me off with a furious snarling noise, giving me a terrific blow in the chest, and presented the revolver at my head. He fell to one side against a wall, a slug whispering as it tore past him. Suddenly shot after shot rang out in succession. Special Agent Fox was wounded and fell, but the concentrated fire which all four FBI men poured into the telephone booth made mincemeat out of Johnson. ‘Bang!’ went a pistol. The chopper raked the room swiftly from end to end and the air filled with plaster and splinters. Not so far overhead, an ME-109, pinned by searchlights, suddenly broke out of cloud cover and swooped in.
‘Wake up you! Hey, I’m talkin’ to you!’ The red face of Mr Danton was glowing at him through the hatch, over an unpardonable heap of bowls. ‘Five minutes I been watching you, you washed one dish, what the hell is dis? Just answer me that, what the hell is dis?’
There was no answer; Roderick could only keep his eyes down and work harder until Mr Danton went off to find a waitress without a hairnet or a cook putting too much parsley on the potatoes, until the hatch slid closed and the violence could begin, Dacca-dakka-dakar! and Kerang! silent slaughter amid the screams of ordinary business.
The hatch slammed open and a waitress in Wedgwood blue dumped in a trayload of bowls before passing on to scream at the cook over the steam table:
‘Picking up, picking up! Dave? That’s two Chow-downs and one Upboy, a chopped duck liver together with a Mister Frisk hold the gravy… Dave, that’s only one Chow-down, I ordered two, come on, come on, the customer’s waaaiiting.’
Roderick could see the cook cursing and dishing up, almost flinging food over the high steam table where waitresses were visible only as hands and blue rabbit-ears.
‘Ordering a chef’s special… side of fried shrimp…’
‘I got no shrimp, shrimp finish, kaput!’ the cook screamed. Like everyone else here, he seemed unable to move anything without slamming it down, to say anything without screaming. When Roderick had first come to work here, he’d imagined that somehow the customers were causing all the noise. After all, Danton’s Doggie Dinette did cater for mainly high-class and pedigree dogs, well-known for their constant yipping and snapping. Could it be that humans were catching this canine hysteria and transmitting it to the Dinette kitchen, as a kind of psychic rabies?
Not at all. Dave the cook (in a rare quiet moment) explained: ‘Everybody yell in kitchen, in every kinda rastorunth across over world, is it were? Good kitchen, lots yell. Bad kitchen, no yellings. No yellings, waitress drop tray, insult castomer. Cook burn finger, cut off eye. Bad.’
But Roderick never got used to the noise. Whenever there was a lull in his work, he would step out into the alley to sit on a garbage can and meditate. Sometimes he would have a quiet conversation with Allbright.
Allbright was a garrulous drunk who wandered often into this quiet alley to piss, to drink or now and then to search the garbage cans. But he was never too busy to stop and talk, as now:
‘Well well well, if it isn’t our friend, the automatic dish-washer. Still claiming to be a robot? I forget your name.’
‘Roderick Wood. And I am a robot.’
‘Yes yes well who isn’t? Chateaubriand said he realized he was only a machine for making books, we’re all poor damned machines for some purpose or other, some pathetic, useless… Even you, washing dishes for dogs. Nothing wrong with that, honourable profession as any. Don’t let ’em look down on you, kid.’
‘The dogs?’
‘Honourable profession as any, skink sexer, awning historian, salad auctioneer, you stick to it. Learn your trade. A man with a trade is going somewhere. He’s going over to the other side of town to fix some poor goddamned machine. Only he needs the bus fare.’
Roderick said nothing. Allbright appeared to doze for a few minutes, then said, ‘Anyway, I’m a poet.’
‘Anyway?’
‘And that gives me the right.’
‘What right?’
‘You name it, that gives it to me.’
‘I’ve never met a live poet before,’ Roderick said, not that Allbright looked fully alive. ‘I thought all poets were dead.’
Allbright almost looked at him. ‘No, you’re thinking of the other people. All poets are alive, and that gives them every right.’ He turned and shook his fist at the empty alley. ‘You hear, you, you bastards! Every right!’
Roderick watched him stagger off to fight shadows, and finally fall asleep in his usual corner next to an enormous metal bin full of rusty coathangers.
‘A poet.’ Roderick was impressed. Poetry! Life!
Life for Roderick was limited in most dimensions. He worked long hours at Danton’s Doggie Dinette on a ‘split shift’. Danton cursed him and kicked him and paid very poorly, but where else could he work? He was a robot without a social security card.
The Dinette was close to the bus station where he had arrived in the city, and not far from the ancient hotel where he watched TV or recharged his batteries, or read books from the rack at the local drugstore. Some nights he would turn off the light and pretend to himself that he was sleeping, but he was only watching the dim yellow rectangle of light over the door, listening to the groan of sagging floorboards in the corridor as people walked by in ones and twos all night.
Most nights he simply read one book after another; he might before dawn get through two or three like Call Me Pig, Doc Bovary’s Wife, The Ego Diet, Ratstar II, God Was My Co-conspirator, Dream New Hair, Sink the Titanic!, Dragons of Darkwound, or Aversion for Happiness. He could shift easily from a spy thriller like The Pisces Perplex to a guide to courtroom-drama therapy, Make a Federal Case Out of It; and on to an unusual medical theory in Your Eyes: Do They Leak Light? They were all one-night stands, forgotten in the morning when the first stack of dirty bowls rattled through the hatch.
‘Sonnenschein, initial D?’ asked the hospital receptionist, and touched her keyboard. ‘No visitors except the immediate family, it says here.’
Roderick said, ‘Well, I’m almost family.’
‘Sorry.’
‘If you’re a poet, why don’t you read me one of your poems?’
‘Oh no. Oh no, you don’t.’ Allbright waggled a dirty finger in admonition. ‘You don’t catch me that way. Read you one of my poems? For nothing?’
‘Why not?’
‘Against union rules.’
After a moment, Roderick asked how much a read poem would cost.
‘How much have you got?’
It added up to a dollar and forty-seven cents, exactly enough. Allbright read from the book of his memory: