Tales of the Wold Newton Universe (16 page)

“This turn of events pulls the rug from under us, sweethearts,” Ralph said. “If Giftlippen or Smigma eyeball us, we’ll be candidates for the morgue. This blind-man-and-his-seeing-eye-dog act isn’t going to fool them. Not after our Kuwait adventure, heh, Weisstein?”

He was referring to that series of extraordinary events which I have chronicled as
The Shakedown of the Shook Sheik.

Ralph suddenly growled. Bird said, “Oh, oh!”

I turned. We were surrounded by seven Arabs. All wore dark glasses and were dressed in flowing robes. The faces of two were shrouded by their hoods, or whatever Arabs call them. But they were not concealed enough to prevent me from distinguishing the massive waxen features of the Doge under a fake beard and the prunish lineaments of his assistant. They were all barefoot, and the wind was blowing from us to them. That accounted for their being able to take Ralph by surprise. Their wide loose sleeves had been pulled over their hands, but we could see the silencers attached to automatics.

“You three gentlemen will walk onto the barque with us,” Smigma said in a thin high voice with a Polish accent. “Believe me, at the first sign of making a break, we will shoot you down.”

I looked around. A number of oarsmen were coming toward us. They would block off the view of the passersby. If we were shot, they’d doubtless just pick us up and carry us off as if we were drunks—a not uncommon sight during the festivals.

That Smigma had addressed us as “three gentlemen” told me that they knew Ralph’s identity.

We said nothing as we were conducted up the gangplank to the center of the boat. A hatch was raised and we were prodded down a ladder into a narrow cabin. Ralph could manage a ladder by himself. Another hatch gave entrance to the submarine attached to the bottom of the barque. We went past the small control room to a cell near the bow and were locked inside. This was so confined that we had no room to sit down. After a few minutes, we felt the craft begin moving and could detect faint vibrations as the propellers pushed us toward an unknown destination.

Ralph quit cursing himself for a dunderhead in six languages, including the Scandinavian. “I suspect, my esteemed but also dumb colleagues,” he said, “that Saugpumpe led us into this trap. Giftlippen would want to get me, his most dangerous antagonist, out of the way before he proceeded with his dastardly plot. So, he allowed his mistress to remain under our observation until the last moment.”

The only sound then was Bird banging his forehead on the steel bulkhead and muttering, “You cretin, you! Taken like a babe in diapers! Oh, the ignominy of it all!”

After a while, Ralph said, “You’ll suffer even more brain damage if you keep that up.” That was his way of subtly calling Bird a blockhead. There was one thing about Ralph. Though he had little hesitation in self-reproach, he hesitated even less in reproaching others.

We could do nothing. We couldn’t even see the control room, since our door was windowless. After an hour, we felt the sub slow down. Then it stopped, the door was opened, and we were ushered up the ladder. We emerged into a vast cavern illuminated by floodlights. The cave had no visible entrance, which meant that it was beneath the surface of the sea. Our craft lay next to a stone platform; almost level with the water. Near it was docked a much larger submarine. Like our vessel, it had no conning tower. Beyond it was a blue sausage-shaped bag of rubber or plastic about sixty feet long and ten feet wide.

Ralph said, “Aha! That sub is a World War I U-boat! I recognize it. It was stolen from the Kiel Marine Museum a year ago! Giftlippen plans far ahead of time, the cunning fellow. He’s removed the conning towers because of the extreme shallowness of the lagoon. Otherwise, the towers would project above the surface.”

“And the bag?” I said.

“To be towed behind the U-boat. It must contain a metal skeleton to keep it from collapsing. Also, compartments to be flooded for submersion. Plus others for transporting the loot and much of his gang back from Venice. Doubtless, he has a large crew planted there, ready to carry out his foul plot.”

Prodded by a rifle, we crossed the platform into a tunnel hewn out of rock. This led us for thirty paces to stairs also cut out of the rock. We ascended these into another tunnel made of stone blocks. A man pulled a lever; a section of the wall ground open. We entered a dungeon filled with rusty instruments of torture, a disheartening sight, passed through it and up a narrow, winding stone staircase, and came out through another wall-door into a kitchen. It looked exactly like the kitchen of a medieval castle, which, indeed, it was.

After traversing a wide stone corridor, we came into a vast unfurnished room. We climbed up dusty staircases and presently were locked inside a twelfth-story stone cell. I looked through the steel bars of a small square opening in the southeast wall. The castle was set on a hill about fifty feet high. Since the rest of the country hereabouts was so flat, I deduced that the hill was artificial. The builder of the castle had piled earth here centuries ago.

The seaward side had been cut to make a perpendicular front and then a stone-block wall had been erected against it to prevent erosion (I couldn’t see this from my window, of course, but I found out these details later).

The castle was about half a mile from the shore. An arm of the lagoon a hundred yards wide extended from the shore to the base of the hill. It was the avenue for the sub which had brought us here. Once it, too, had been lined with great stone blocks, but many of these had fallen. A number jutted above the water just below the walls.

Ralph stood up on his hind legs by me. “You can see the islands from here,” he said.

Normally, he wouldn’t have been able to see that far. Dogs are shortsighted. But he was wearing contact lenses.

“Well, I know where we are,” he said. “In the ruined and long-abandoned castle of Il Seno. He was a thirteenth-century Venetian, confined by the Council of Ten to his castle. The Council didn’t mind his piracy as long as it was restricted to non-Venetian vessels. But Il Seno wasn’t very discriminating.

“His name, by the way, means ‘The Bight’ in Italian. And this little recess in the land was also called Il Seno. It’s still referred to by the locals as Il Seno del Seno. The Bight of the Bight. And here we are, the bitten among the bighters. A bitter pun, if you will excuse me.”

“The desperate among the desperadoes,” Bird said. “Okay, now what’ll we do?”

At that moment the Judas window in the steel door opened. Giftlippen’s enormous head appeared beyond it. “Have you any complaints about the accommodations?” he said in a deep baritone voice. He spoke in German with a Liechtensteiner accent.

“Cut the comedy, crook,” Ralph said. “What I want to know is what do you intend for us? I would have thought you’d have kaputted us at once.”

“What? And deprive me of the esthetic pleasure of forcing you to watch the rape of Venice?” Giftlippen said. “You, who screwed up my greatest coup? No, my shaggy friend, ever since you thwarted me in Kuwait, I’ve been planning this very scenario. I want you to view, as helpless spectators, my second-greatest coup. Actually, my greatest, since the Kuwait caper was a failure.

“You’ll see the whole thing. Here”—he handed a long telescope to me—“and you won’t be able to do a damned thing about it.”

He broke into a weird blood-chilling cackling. Bird said, “Sounds just like my uncle, Kent Allard, alias Lamont Cranston. I’ve heard Giftlippen has a fabulous collection of old radio-show records.”

“It
is
a recording,” Ralph said enigmatically.

“Tomorrow is the ceremony of the Marriage of the Sea,” Giftlippen said. “Ah, wait until you see the priceless wedding gifts the Venetians will be giving me. Of course, they don’t know about their generosity yet, and I regret to say that it will be one hundred percent involuntary. But it’s the gift that counts, not the intention.”

“And after the wedding?” Ralph said.

“Do you know the history of this chamber?” Giftlippen said. “It’s rather grim. This is the place where the daughter of a noble starved to death. Il Seno abducted her, locked her in it, and told her she could eat when she agreed to share his bed. She refused. I think it only esthetically appropriate that my greatest enemy suffer a like fate.”

He paused to chomp on some nuts.

“Legend has it that she ate her own flesh before she expired. A classic case of diminishing returns. Now! There are three of you, and I have a wager with my esteemed colleague, Smigma, that one of you will put off the inevitable for a while by dining upon the other two. My money is on you, von Wau Wau. You’re a dog, and dogs are always hungry. Your canine heritage will triumph over the human. You’ll eat your friends, though you may weep walrus tears while doing so.”

“By the heavens!” I cried. “You’re a fiend! You’re not human, you foul beast!”

“I’ll go along with that, pal,” Ralph said.

Bird snatched the telescope from me and drove its end through the window into the huge face. Giftlippen cried out and fell away. Smigma’s face, a safe distance away, succeeded his. He cursed us in Polish, and then the window was slammed shut.

“At least, he’ll never forget Cordwainer Bird,” the little man said. “His nose crumpled up like a paper cup!”

“I doubt he was hurt,” Ralph said. But he refused to elaborate on that statement.

“Hell, they haven’t built the cell that can keep me in!” Bird said. He began inspecting the room, testing the steel bars, tapping the walls. Presently he went back to the bars, of which there were three. They were about a half-inch in diameter, a foot long, and set into holes drilled in the stone. Bird grabbed one with both hands and braced his feet against the wall. He pulled mightily, the muscles coiling like pythons beneath his skintight shirt. The shirt split along the biceps and across the back under the pressure. The bar bent as he pulled. Sweat ran out, soaked his clothes, and fell onto the floor to form a little pool. And the bar popped out.

Bird fell backward but twisted and somehow landed on his feet. “Like a cat!” he cried, and then, “Begging your pardon, Ralph!”

“My dear fellow, I don’t share the common canine prejudice against felines,” Ralph said. “Oh, occasionally my instincts catch me off guard when a cat runs by, and I go after him. But reason quickly reasserts itself.”

“That’s quite a feat of strength,” I said. “But even if you get the other bars out, so what? It’s a fall of a hundred feet to the base of the castle. And fifty more if you should miss the slight projection of the cliff. Not to mention the boulders sticking out of the sea at the bottom.”

“There are birds that can fly but can’t dive. And birds that can dive but can’t fly. This Bird can do both.”

“I admire your confidence but deplore your lack of good sense,” I said.

“Don’t be such a Gloomy Gus, sweetheart,” Ralph said. “Anyway, it’s better to go out like a smashed bulb than flicker away while your battery dies by agonizing degrees.”

“It’s no wonder Giftlippen denigrated your novel,” I said.

“The most unkindest cut of all,” Ralph said, wincing.

Bird laughed and bent, literally, to the Herculean task of ripping out the other bars. After much groaning and panting and screech of steel riven from stone, plus a miniature Mediterranean of perspiration on the floor, the way was open.

“Disbarred like a shyster!” Bird cried triumphantly. The window was too small for any person of normal size to wriggle through. Bird, however, wasn’t handicapped in this respect. In fact, what some would regard as a handicap was in this case an advantage. If he’d been larger, he could not have gotten through the window.

“But how in the world can you launch yourself from the ledge?” I said. “The window is flush with the outer wall. By no means can you attain an upright position on it. Surely, you don’t plan on dropping headfirst from it?”

Bird eyed the opening, said, “Get out of the way,” and backed to the door, which was directly opposite the window.

“I’ll get you guys out of this mess,” he said. “Never fear.”

As I shouted a protest, he ran at blinding speed across the room and dived through the window. I’ll swear he had no more than half an inch clearance on all sides. I expected to see him bash his head against the stone, much like those cartoon characters who attempt a similar feat. But he sailed through and disappeared. For a moment we stood stupefied, like drunken stand-ins; then we rushed to the window. I got there first and stuck my head through the window. Behind me, Ralph cried, “For heaven’s sake, Weisstein! Tell me, tell me, is he all right?”

“So far, so good,” I said. “He’s still falling.”

Even as I cried out to Ralph, Bird cleared the edge of the cliff by a hair’s breadth. Then he was hurtling down alongside the cliff. I expected to see him strike one of the two boulders at the sea’s edge. But he shot between the two, disappeared, and the water spouted up after him.

I said, “He went in cleanly. But who knows what the impact of the water after that fall will be? And if the bottom is shallow...?”

I waited for a sign of him while Ralph, reverting in his excitement, barked. I looked at my watch. Twenty seconds since he had plunged through the blue-green surface. Sixty seconds. At one hundred and thirty seconds, I withdrew my head and looked sadly at Ralph. “He didn’t come up.”

“Look again.”

I turned just in time to see a black head break loose. And, a moment later, a brown arm wave at me. “He made it!” I shouted. “He made it!” I grabbed Ralph’s two front paws, pulled him upright, and we danced around and around together.

Finally, Ralph said, “You’re not following properly. Let me down.”

I did so. Ralph recovered his breath, then said,
“Voilà un homme!”

For the benefit of my readers who don’t understand French, this means, “What a man!” I recognized it as the phrase uttered by Napoleon after meeting the great Goethe. And, unworthy emotion, jealousy struck again.

Ralph, of course, smelled it. “My dear fellow,” he said, “there’s no blame attached to you. I’m sure that if you weren’t too big to get through the window, you would have tried it. If you’d also been crazy. Bird was small enough, and insane enough, to attempt it. Let us hope that...”