Wilt in Nowhere (8 page)

Being up at the cabin overlooking Lake Sassaquassee with the quads wasn’t making
Uncle Wally feel even slightly safer. Not that it was a cabin. As Sheriff Stallard had
said Wally Immelmann had built himself an ante-bellum mansion there and had felled
nearly every tree for half a mile around the place because Auntie Joan was frightened of
bears and wasn’t going to go walking in the woods where she couldn’t see if there were bears
about. And beyond the open space she’d insisted on his erecting an extremely strong wire
fence to make sure as hell bears didn’t get in and start marauding around the house and
coming through the picture windows that looked out over the terrace and the swimming-pool
(she wasn’t swimming in the lake because she’d heard there were snakes that swam too, water
moccasins and cottonmouths) and the barbecue area and all. It was the ‘all’ that excited
the Wilt girls. And had always excited Wally which is why he had taken such pains and paid
so much to collect it.

‘That there is a Sherman tank. Went right through the Second World War,’ he told them
proudly. ‘Up Omaha Beach on D-Day with General Patton–they say he rode into battle on
it–and on all the way to Berlin. Well, not right to Berlin because that General Montgomery
chickened out taking the city but it got pretty damn close. Best battle tank there was. Now
over here is a Huey ‘copter with a Puff the Magic Dragon in the door. Knocked the sh…knocked
the charlies out in ‘Nam like they didn’t know what hit them. That gun could fire thousands
of rounds in no time at all. And this here is a howitzer that was with General MacArthur in
Korea and when that baby fired, those yellow-bellies knew that Uncle Sam meant business.
Same with this baby.’ He indicated a flame-thrower. ‘Went in on Okinawa barbecuing
Nips like–’

‘Barbecuing whats?’ Emmeline asked.

‘Japs,’ said Uncle Wally proudly. ‘Shoots flame out the nozzle here and zaps a guy and
you got a turkey roast up and running on the hoof. Those bastards were torched in their
hundreds. And this here is a napalm bomb. You know what napalm is. It’s great stuff. Like
cooking oil and jello. You want a village fry-up all you need do is drop one of those
and–boom!–you’ve got a charlie roasted better than anything you’ve ever seen. Now this is
a missile I got from Germany when we won the Cold War. Put a nuclear warhead on that
sweetheart and a town five times the size of Wilma you wouldn’t even find on a map it would go
so fast. The Russkies knew that, which is how we saved the world from Communism. They weren’t
going risk nuclear annihilation, no way.’

All over the grounds there were the mementoes of terrible wars but the pride of Uncle
Wally’s military collection was a B-52. It stood on the other side of the house where it
could be seen through the picture window even at night with lights set in the ground shining
up on it, a black monstrous bomber with fifty-eight missions over Vietnam and Iraq painted
in symbols on the side; it was, as Wally said, capable of flying twelve thousand miles
and dropping an H-bomb that would take out the biggest city in the world.

‘What does ‘take out’ mean, Uncle Wally?’ Josephine asked with seeming innocence. But
Wally Immelmann was too immersed in his dream of a world made safe by mass destruction to
notice.

‘It means first you get the blast wave and second the fireball and third you get
radiation and fifteen, sixteen million people dead. That’s what it means, honey. Used to
keep them flying round the clock, the Strategic Air Force, and all ready to go if the
President of the US of A pressed the button. Course we got better weapons now but in their
day that baby ruled the sky. And the world. We don’t need anything that big now. Got ICBMs
and Stealth bombers and Cruise missiles and neutron bombs and stuff no one knows about that
can cross the Atlantic like in less than an hour. Best of all there’s lasers in outer space
that can fry anywhere on earth at the speed of light.’

By the time they got back to the house Uncle Wally was in a genial and generous
mood.

‘Those girls of yours are smart, real smart,’ he told Eva who had been watching rather
nervously from a distance. ‘I’ve been giving them a history lesson why we win wars and
nobody can get near us technologywise. Isn’t that so, girls?’

‘Yes, Uncle Wally,’ said the quads in unison. Eva looked at them suspiciously. She
knew that unison. It was a portent.

That night while Uncle Wally was watching baseball and having his fifth bourbon on the
rocks, and Eva and Auntie Joan were talking family back in England, Samantha found an old
portable tape recorder in Wally’s romper room. It was a reel-to-reel one with an
automatic cut-out when the tape came to the end and it had a four-hour reel on it. By the
time Wally and his wife staggered up to the bedroom it was running under the doublewide.
And Wally wanted a hump.

‘Aw, come on, honey pie,’ he said. ‘We aren’t getting any younger and–’

‘Speak for yourself,’ said Auntie Joan. She wasn’t in a good mood. Eva had told her that
Maude, who was Auntie Joan’s sister, had decided to become a lesbian and was living with
a gay who’d had a sex-change operation. That wasn’t the sort of family news she wanted.
Wally humping her wasn’t what she wanted either. Could be something to be said for
becoming a lesbian.

‘I am speaking for myself,’ Wally said. ‘Only person I can speak for. You don’t have a
goddam prostate or if you do I haven’t heard that Dr Hellster I go to in Atlanta speak about
it. He tells me I got to keep it up or else.’

‘Keep it up? You haven’t got it to keep up. Leastways I haven’t noticed it lately. You
sure you haven’t left it in the bathroom along with your hairpiece? Like trying to get some
action out of a sea slug.’

‘Yeah,’ said Wally, evidently ignoring the comparison with difficulty. ‘And I’m
not likely to get it up if you don’t give me some foreplay.’

‘Foreplay? You think a woman’s got to do the foreplay? You’ve got the wrong woman if you
think that. You’re the one supposed to do the foreplay. Like with the tongue and all.’

‘Sweet fuck!’ said Uncle Wally. ‘At your age you want me playing the old mouth-organ?
Like whale blowing in reverse? Shit. This is no time to be making cracks like that.’

‘Well, it isn’t the time to be asking me to go down on you either.’

‘I wasn’t talking about going down. Last time you did that must have been around the time
of the Watergate hearings.’

‘Tasted like it too,’ said Auntie Joan. After more argument she agreed to lie back and
pretend Wally was Arnold Schwarzenegger on barbiturates, something that slowed him
up.

‘Only thing slowing me up is finding the thing,’ said Wally. ‘Like going down Oak Creek
Canyon on a wet night and no flashlight. You sure you still got a pussy? That surgeon didn’t
do a total when you had that hysterectomy?’

In the end he found what he had been looking for. Or thought he had. Auntie Joan put him
right.

‘Asshole!’ she shrieked. ‘Jesus, are you insane trying to brown-ass me? Oh no, you
don’t, Wally Immelmann. I’m fucked if you’re going to sodomise me. You want to do that with
someone, find yourself a guy who likes it that way. I sure as shit don’t.’

‘Sodomise? I wasn’t trying to sodomise you,’ said Wally, genuinely outraged. ‘We been
married all these years, thirty years, thirty goddam years, I ever tried to sodomise
you?’

‘Yes,’ said Auntie Joan bitterly. ‘Yes, you have and don’t I know it. Dr Cohen says
it’s–’

‘Dr Cohen? You been telling Dr Cohen I’ve been sodomising you? I’m not hearing this. I
can’t be!’ Wally yelled. ‘Telling Dr Cohen…Jesus.’

‘I didn’t need to tell him. He’s got eyes in his head. He could see for himself and he was
disgusted. He says it’s against the law. And he’s right.’

Wally was no longer interested in humping. He was sitting bolt upright in the
doublewide.

‘Against the law? That’s bullshit. If it’s against the law how come gays are doing it all
the time and we got an epidemic of Aids?’

‘Not that law. The Law of God. Dr Cohen says it’s there in the Bible. ‘Thou shalt not–”

‘The Bible? What’s Dr Cohen know about the Bible? That New Jersey kike think the Jews
wrote the Bible, for Chrissake? He’s got to be crazy.’

‘Wally dear, who else?’ said Auntie Joan, seizing the initiative now that Wally was
off her and into a morass of ignorance. ‘Who else wrote the Bible?’

‘What you mean, who else? Genesis did, and Joshua and Jonah. Guys like that. That’s who
wrote the Bible.’

‘You’re forgetting Moses,’ said Auntie Joan smugly. ‘Like in Dr Moses Cohen. Jews,
Wally dear. Jews. The Bible was written by Jews. Hadn’t you noticed?’

‘Jesus,’ said Wally Immelmann.

‘Him too. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. All Jews, Wally, and that’s the gospel.’

Wally slumped down on to the bed. ‘Sure, sure I know all that,’ he said with a whimper.
‘And you have to go and tell Dr Cohen I make a habit of sodomising you. You’ve got to be
crazy and I mean out of your head altogether. Clinically.’

‘I tell you I didn’t tell him. He could see for himself when I went for my cervical and
he was disgusted. You should have heard what he said about men who did that sort of thing.
Had me take a blood test.’

‘Don’t tell me!’ yelled Wally and of course she did. At length and in the most explicit
detail while he kept interrupting her with threats of what he was going to do to her. Like
divorce her and he knew some guys who would fix her for good.

‘Big deal!’ Auntie Joan shouted back. ‘You think I haven’t got myself insurance? Dr
Cohen gave me the name of a lawyer, a real good one, and I’ve seen him. You make one move
against me, Wally Immelmann, and you’re going to see what dope I’ve sworn on you. You
wouldn’t believe it.’

Wally said he couldn’t believe a wife would do a thing like that, betraying her husband
to a fucking doctor and a lawyer. They continued shouting until he was exhausted and
lay back in bed wondering what he was going to do. One thing was certain. He was going to
have to change his doctor and go to Dr Lesky. It was the last thing he wanted to do. Dr Lesky
believed in abortion. It wouldn’t look good going to a doctor like Dr Lesky and being the
Deacon of the Church of the Living Lord. Living Lorders didn’t go to abortionists and he
wasn’t going to that clinic for blacks and down-and-outs. You got more diseases there than
cures. Even the doctors contracted them. Like Immelmann Enterprises going on welfare.
Wally lay in the darkness and tried to think how to get round Dr Cohen. Being a Deacon and
having it thought he was a sodomist wasn’t going to do him any good in Wilma at all.

What the Drug Enforcement Agents had been installing in the Starfighter Mansion wasn’t
doing him any good either.

‘We’ve put double bugs in every room and that way when he scans he finds one but he
misses the other. That’s only activated when we want it on so the scanner won’t pick it
up first time. He won’t scan twice because he’ll have found the first one and they never
check again,’ the electronic device expert told the meeting. ‘And the way we know when to
turn the number 2s on is we’ve got video cameras so small they make a fly’s eye look big. No
way you can spot them. They show us who’s there and the audios pick up every word. If this
guy is running any racket we’ll get the proof. The only way he can talk in private is
outside in the open air and even then he can’t be too sure. Could be behind a shirt button,
any place. So we’ve got his vehicular transportation all tapped and his house so tight we
can tell if he washes behind his ears or been circumcised. Only thing puzzling me is why
we’re going to all this trouble with this guy. I mean, this is Mafia equipment we’ve
installed and this has got to be small beer.’

‘Could be very big,’ Palowski said. ‘Our information from Poland is that this stuff is a
new super high-grade designer from a Russian laboratory. No need to grow it and it’s a
thousand times more addictive than crack. Street value into gigabucks and as easy to
make as speed. Easier. Which could explain why Sol is missing. Lose a sample like that and
you lose your life. Which is almost certainly what’s happened to him. Now, Sheriff
Stallard says Immelmann Enterprises is diversifying into pharmaceuticals. That’s
the rumour he’s heard. Some German firm is interested in investing with him and they’ve
been investing in Russia too. That’s why the interest in Washington. My guess is this
could be a subversion gambit. Militarily the Russians are out of the game but if they can
infiltrate a designer drug of this calibre they don’t need a war to win.’

‘That guy is paranoid, I swear to God. He’s got Russkies on the brain,’ the electronics
expert said afterwards.

It was an opinion shared by Sheriff Stallard when Baxter reported that the
Starfighter Mansion had been wired for S&S like sight and sound.

‘You mean when Wally Immelmann…when Mrs Immelmann goes to the bathroom some guy’s
going to be filming her on the can? I don’t believe it. And I sure as hell don’t want to see
any footage of her taking a slash.’

‘It gets worse…’

‘Worse? Nothing could be worse than Joanie…Where’s the fucking camera? And don’t tell me
they’re shooting from below. I’ll throw up.’

‘No, it’s a straight angle,’ said Baxter. ‘But they can zoom in. I mean, Sheriff, they’re
using space technology in there.’

‘You can say that again,’ said the Sheriff, still obsessed with the thought of Auntie
Joan on the toilet. ‘What do they think there is to zoom in on? Those guys some sort of
perverts? I mean, they’ve got to be. They’ll be breaking every obscenity regulation
there is. And what the hell do they want filming in there?’

‘Just in case Wally tries to flush the stuff down. They want a record of it. And that’s
another thing. They’ve brought in the Shit Squad.’

‘You’ve told me,’ said the Sheriff. ‘Pretty apt damned name for the bastards. I couldn’t
put it better myself.’