Part 6 (1/2)

'Barbecuing whats?' Emmeline asked.

'j.a.ps,' 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.ds 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 andboom!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 s.h.i.+ning 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 ma.s.s 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 b.u.t.ton. 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 s.p.a.ce 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 n.o.body 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 s.e.x-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 G.o.ddam prostate or if you do I haven't heard that Dr h.e.l.lster 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 f.u.c.k!' said Uncle Wally. 'At your age you want me playing the old mouth-organ? Like whale blowing in reverse? s.h.i.+t. 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 p.u.s.s.y? 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.

'a.s.shole!' she shrieked. 'Jesus, are you insane trying to brown-a.s.s me? Oh no, you don't, Wally Immelmann. I'm f.u.c.ked 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 s.h.i.+t don't.'

'Sodomise? I wasn't trying to sodomise you,' said Wally, genuinely outraged. 'We been married all these years, thirty years, thirty G.o.ddam 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 bulls.h.i.+t. 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 G.o.d. 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 mora.s.s 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 f.u.c.king 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 s.h.i.+rt b.u.t.ton, 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 circ.u.mcised. 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 Was.h.i.+ngton. 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 G.o.d. 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 h.e.l.l don't want to see any footage of her taking a slash.'

'It gets worse...'