Kirby's Last Circus Page 15

Kirby saluted and hit the brakes. There were no brakes. Kirby ran over Admiral Doldrum. The red cage teetered and capsized. Its door flew open, and into the light of the arena leaped something out of a nightmare. It was huge, it was tawny, it was sinewy, and it was pissed off. It had a bushy black mane, its slitted yellow eyes shone like foxfire, its cruel, scythe-like fangs gleamed ivory in the blood-red velvet of its cavernous mouth, and it stood on its hind legs to emit a great grating sound that billowed the canvas of the big top—Genghis—Genghis, the bad mother, free at last! Wolfgang von Meisterrassen’s eyes popped to the size of Volkswagen hubcaps. He screamed, “Ach, dunger!” as he lit out in the general direction of the Black Forest. An enormous white cloud of sawdust blossomed in his wake and Genghis plunged enthusiastically into it. Big Momma, the four and one-half ton African pachyderm, thoroughly mesmerized by these frantic activities, sat on the bandmaster’s foot. The bandmaster made desperate gestures for assistance, and the band, quick to note the brisk tempo of his motions, responded with “Under the Double Eagle.” Admiral Doldrum struggled groggily to his feet, his trousers torn half-off, his gold braid-trimmed shorts flashing, as an excited roustabout rushed up, saluting. He said, “Sir, you had a man doing mechanical work this afternoon…”

  Admiral Doldrum snapped, “There were several!”

  “This was the one with his fly open.”

  “Yes! Now hear this: What else has he fucked up?”

  “Well, sir, we ain’t exactly sure, but the cotton candy machine just blowed a pink bubble the size of Hindenburg, and the Mayor of Grizzly Gulch is lost in it! They’re in there with bloodhounds, trying to locate the poor sonofabitch!”

  Kirby headed for the exit, assessing the situation as he went. Chaos reigned unchallenged—Pethermopper and Metherpopper were belaboring each other with tent-stakes, Cleopeo had seized Goolenkranz by the testicles and she was dragging the kicking, screaming foreigner into the night, whistles blew, sirens wailed, there was a distant rhythmic booming that Kirby interpreted as being the beginning of the Grizzly Gulch holiday fireworks display, and Admiral Doldrum was tearing frenziedly at his collar, bellowing, “Now hear this: All hands prepare to abandon ship!”

  The capacity audience was on its feet, men doubled over with laughter, women weeping uncontrollably, children leaping up and down, tiny fists clenched, shrieking delightedly. Kirby heard a man say, “Good God, what a show—I’m coming back tomorrow night!” Another said, “After this, the Battle of Armageddon will be a flop!” Another said, “Billy Graham, eat your heart out!” A stout fellow with a notebook grabbed Kirby by a coveralls sleeve. “Sir, you’re with this circus?”

  Kirby said, “Right about now, I kind of doubt it.”

  The stout man said, “Well, I’m a feature writer with the Chicago Globe, and I’m here to tell you that this presentation eclipses all the Democratic National Conventions I’ve ever seen!”

  There was a sharp, crackling sound from high above as the top of the tent split open. Zamaroff and the scrawny black cat tumbled end-over-end into the net, both sheathed in ice.

  Dixie Benton appeared, her pigtails flopping saucily. She rushed to Kirby, throwing her arms around him, squealing, “Oh, Birch Kirby, you’re something else—all of us have known it, but, so help me, we were never prepared for back-to-back maneuvers like these!”

  Kirby glanced over his shoulder at the net where Zamaroff was getting his bearings. “Let’s blow this madhouse before that big Russian rams a balalaika up my ass!”

  Dixie said, “Yes, right about now you just have to be number one on the KGB’s shit parade! I’ve picked up your suitcase and I’ve moved my car into the lion’s area!”

  As the BMW made its way through the ecstatic midway mob, Kirby watched the night skies lighting up with the Smoky Abe Matthewson pyrotechnics show, and he noted that the Grizzly Gulch No Sox had blanketed the circus area. They carried pistols, every one of them. Nightlife Nesbitt poured the beam of a high-powered flashlight into the BMW’s interior, grinned, winked, snapped Kirby a salute, and waved the vehicle toward the three-lane highway.

  Thirty-Six

  In the lounge of the Rest and Recreation Motel, the bartender had glanced dubiously at Dixie Benton, then at Birch Kirby. He’d said, “I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t serve your daughter.”

  “My daughter?”

  “Yes, sir—no minors served, sir.”

  Dixie had said, “It must be these fucking pigtails.” She’d unbuttoned her sweater, hoisted her blouse, dropped her blue jeans, and given the bartender a ten-second belly dance. She’d said, “You know any minors who can do that?”

  The bartender had knocked over a quart of Chivas Regal. He’d said, “No, ma’am—what can I do for you, ma’am?”

  Dixie had tossed a fifty dollar bill onto the bar. She’d said, “You can get us a drink, you can have Max Livershank play ‘Meditation’ from ‘Thaïs,’ you can make arrangements for a single-bed room, and you can keep the change.”

  Max Livershank had never heard of ‘Meditation’ or ‘Thaïs,’ either, but he’d played a rousing medley of ‘Ragtime Cowboy Joe,’ ‘When It’s Apple Blossom Time in Normandy,’ and ‘Beautiful Isle of Somewhere.’ Then Dixie had gone to the telephone booth where she’d spent nearly an hour scribbling rapid notations into a pocket-size notebook.

  Now their motel room was dark except for the occasional yellow flare of Dixie’s lighter and the cerise glow of their cigarettes. Dixie was saying, “I’ve talked to Langley, Washington, and Chicago, and the pieces are falling into place—we’re seeing now the things you’ve probably known for a week. Don’t you think it was dangerous, keeping us in the dark? How long in advance had you mapped your course of action?” Kirby yawned and Dixie said, “Yeah, I know, trade secrets. Kirby, this is hard to grasp—it took you about five minutes to undo months of expert KGB planning! You destroyed the Kremlin’s carnival of death, operated by as hairy a cadre of arch-fiends as has ever slithered from behind the Iron Curtain! Just a few minutes—one man—one man against we don’t know how many—probably fifty!”

  Kirby said, “Somehow, I don’t see Admiral Doldrum as an arch-fiend.”

  Dixie snorted. “Doldrum? Doldrum was an archscrewball! He was chucked out of the United States Navy on a Section-Eight more than forty years ago!”

  “Why?”

  “He was wacko! He thought he was an Admiral!”

  “So? You can be wacko and still be an Admiral.”

  “Doldrum was a swab-jockey! Early this spring he was in Sarasota, Florida, and so were the Russians, assembling this caper. Doldrum was going around town, telling tall tales about his having commanded a Pacific carrier force, and the Soviets cozied up to him. They’d just purchased the bankrupt Dipperbrine Circus at auction, and he was made to order for their requirements, a not particularly bright American citizen that they could manipulate, the ideal figurehead. They took him under their wing, they professed to believe his sea yarns, they appointed him general foreman and ringmaster, they guaranteed him a regular pay-check and three squares a day, they bought him a few flashy uniforms, and they owned the gullible bastard! The woods is full of people like Doldrum—they’ll go to the moon on a manure wagon if they can give orders. He was an excellent investment—he did a bang-up job without having the slightest notion of what the hell was actually going on behind the scenes. He fronted for the circus, believing that it was owned by a Chicago conglomerate, and that it was sucking up a bundle of money in Grizzly Gulch.”

  “When it wasn’t.”

  “Kirby, a conservative estimate would be that it was costing the KGB ten grand a day to keep its circus bedded down in that field.”

  “Expensive.”

  “Oh, no, not at all—a bargain at five times that figure, when you consider the magnificent opportunities presented by little Grizzly Gulch, an out-of-the-way town if ever there was one!” Kirby nodded, having nothing to say, and Dixie continued. “The KGB had brought in English-speaking professionals, a highly efficien
t nucleus trained by the Circus of Moscow—people knowledgeable of circus life and expertly schooled in the arts of terrorism and sabotage. These were the powers behind the throne, they ran things the Kremlin’s way, and Doldrum never knew the difference.” Dixie consulted her notebook briefly. She said, “In late March, the circus headed northwest from Sarasota, doing one-night stands in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Kentucky—just enough to establish credibility as a legitimate entertainment unit, but Grizzly Gulch, Illinois, was its destination from the moment it rolled across the Florida line!”

  “The entire crew was KGB?”

  “No, not all—possibly fifty percent. There’ll be a lot of screening and sorting-out in the next few days. Langley is certain that Caviar handled this affair, and it’s equally certain that he’s slipped through the net.”

  “Caviar—you said he’s a sharpie.”

  “Yes, a genius, beyond doubt. Blizzardo was probably Caviar’s major-domo with the circus.”

  “Blizzardo—the midget who swiped the bandmaster’s baton—the guy with the trained dog act—that half-pint bastard?”

  “Little, but brilliant, with the instincts of a pit viper. He was well-protected—every one of those Dobermans was attack-trained! If the black cat hadn’t decoyed his dogs, taking him could have been a bloody business!” Dixie paused to swallow hard. “Of course, we’ll never really be one hundred percent sure about Blizzardo.”

  Kirby said, “Blizzardo will talk—they’ll squeeze him until he leaks.”

  “Huh-uh. When our people closed in on Blizzardo, he made a run for it—he tried to cut through the tent of Jeannette, the Shark Woman.”

  “Oh-oh!”

  “Yes, he didn’t make it—all they found was one shoe and his belt-buckle!”

  Kirby paled and changed the subject. “The black cat came in mighty handy—extremely fortunate coincidence.”

  “Nothing coincidental about it—that black cat has been with the CIA for years!”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Uncle Tom.”

  “So, you’re still looking for Caviar, and this Tofchitsky.”

  “Caviar will be somewhere in Chicago—that’s been established as his base of operations. Tofchitsky—God knows, but I imagine that we’ll hear more of him—he’s a hard-hitter, all muscle.”

  “The lion-tamer, Wolfgang von Meisterrassen—was he a Commie?”

  “Undoubtedly—he’s out of East Germany.”

  “Uh-huh—well, he should be halfway home by now.”

  “No, he was arrested for speeding on his way through Swamp City.”

  “What was he driving?”

  “I didn’t say he was driving. I said he was speeding.”

  “Were Goolenkranz and Cleopeo working with the KGB?”

  “No, but both are in the Grizzly Gulch cooler—Goolenkranz filed a rape charge against Cleopeo.”

  “Well, hell, they can’t throw Goolenkranz in the can because he was raped!”

  “They didn’t—Goolenkranz bit the Grizzly Gulch Police Chief in the neck!”

  Kirby stretched and yawned. “All right, very interesting, all of this, but I don’t get the ‘carnival of death’ label—if Blizzardo had steered clear of Jeannette’s tent, nobody would have gotten a scratch.”

  Dixie Benton’s laugh was brief and brittle. “Good Jesus, Kirby, but for your blitzkrieg, Washington, D.C., would be a smoking pile of rubble at this very moment!”

  “That would be bad.”

  “Yes, and half of this nation’s major politicians would be buried in its ruins! That would be worse!”

  Kirby shrugged. “Well, of course, that would depend on which half got buried. How were the Russians going to destroy Washington?”

  Dixie shuddered a delicate little shudder, and Kirby studied the rhythmic ripple of her breasts. She said, “The circus cannon that you converted to scrap-iron was a wolf in sheep’s clothing—it was a highly sophisticated weapon, built in Russia’s Minsk Armament Works, shipped to Cuba on a freighter, and smuggled into the Florida Keys one piece at a time by Cuban fishing boats. It was capable of launching a rocket-propelled, nuclear-tipped missile, and after tonight’s performance, when the Smoky Abe Matthewson Day fireworks exhibition was in high gear, it would have gone unnoticed in the aerial display! That’s why it had to be ‘Smoky Abe Matthewson Day plus twenty-three hours’—they wanted the cover of the big fireworks show!”

  “Cover or no cover, they’d never have brought it off! Our defense network would have spotted the missile on its way in!”

  Dixie shook her head impatiently. “Not a chance, not a ghost of a chance! Our early-warning facilities are geared to detect the approach of missiles hailing from outside our borders, certainly not from Grizzly Gulch, Illinois! Try to imagine the resultant confusion, the bewildering questions—was the missile one of ours—was this an accident—what, where, how, why, whom? And all of this, mind you, with the very nerve center of the country obliterated!. Why, my God, Kirby, it would have been a scene out of a Three Stooges movie—we wouldn’t have known if our asses were punched or bored!”

  “Yeah? Well, it looks like a lot of extra mumbo-jumbo to me—the circus and all the sleight-of-hand! Why didn’t they just haul their cannon into some cornfield and blaze away?”

  “It wouldn’t have been quite that simple—there were complex navigational calculations that required considerable time. Such a weapon, parked in a cornfield, would have attracted attention. More than that, think of the corn they’d have damaged!”

  Kirby said, “Hold it right there! They intended to blow Washington, D.C. off the map, but they couldn’t fuck up one cornfield?”

  Dixie sighed. “Apparently you don’t understand. Most of the corn grown in southern Illinois is ticketed for Mother Russia! Russia needs every damned kernel she can get!”

  Kirby groaned and rolled over. He said, “Y’know, I got a hunch that Jane Fonda is mixed up in this.”

  Dixie slapped him on his bare back. She said, “Kirby, you were nothing short of superhuman tonight! You were as a thousand men!”

  “Kiddo, you should have known me when I was seventeen.”

  “I’m not talking about your sexual performance—I’m talking about the way you derailed those Soviet devils!” Her smile was humorless. “Oh, but weren’t they cute with that God damned cannon of theirs? If you want to conceal something, just park it under somebody’s nose! They hid it by placing it on public display and using it every night of the week with five thousand people looking on! Caviar’s operation was beautifully planned! The instant the missile was airborne, they’d have vanished into the woodwork and we wouldn’t have apprehended one of the murderous bastards!”

  “So where do you go from here?”

  “Obviously we have to nail Caviar. Langley is working on the theory that Caviar and Tofchitsky have joined forces in Chicago, and they’ll make a tough combination to corral! Caviar is the KGB’s most brilliant, Tofchitsky their most violent, probably a psychopath. If we can grab the two of them we’ll have set the KGB back a light year!”

  “Where were the Russians storing their missile?”

  “You spent most of the evening sitting on it. It was in that big oblong packing case—a multi-megaton device that would have rattled the entire eastern seaboard.”

  “Incidentally, what happens to Kenyali and Genghis?”

  “They’ll be transfered to Brookfield Zoo in Chicago. Oh, by the way, the KGB’s transmitter was bolted to the bottom of Genghis’s cage where snoopers weren’t likely to venture. You snapped its antenna-lead when you towed Genghis out of the lions’ area.”

  “How come the Grizzly Gulch No Sox were running around, waving pistols?”

  “The No Sox are CIA operatives, a SWAT team, in essence.”

  “That figures. They sure as hell weren’t baseball players—except maybe the Hannistan kid. He showed genuine promise.”

  “The CIA purchased one of the Southern Illinois Association’s two expansi
on franchises, and installed it in Grizzly Gulch. That way, with more than twenty highly skilled operatives on the roster, we’d have firepower when things came to a head.”

  “And they wore their uniforms to the circus so they’d be identifiable to one another in the event of a shootout.”

  “Right.”

  “Matilda Richwell—was she injured?”

  “No. Matty has a weakness, as you know, but that serves to mask her efficiency. She’s a fine agent, one of our best, and she should be in Chicago by tomorrow. We’ll need her on this Caviar-Tofchitsky chase.”

  “One more question—did they ever get the Grizzly Gulch Mayor out of that cotton candy bubble?”

  “Yes, but he was a broken man.”

  “Damned shame.”

  “Not at all—he was a Communist sympathizer—one of the reasons the circus chose Grizzly Gulch.”

  “Well, I guess that does it. So much for the fucking Bolsheviks.”

  “Don’t you believe that, Kirby, not ever! During those Kremlin pow-wows, nobody says, ‘If we conquer the United States’—they say, ‘When we conquer the United States’! They’ll keep coming at us, attacking from every possible angle on every conceivable front—cultural, financial, athletic, you name it! We’re up against the most implacably dedicated enemy this country has ever faced! Our gutless politicians won’t permit a counter attack on any level, so we’re forced to parry without thrusting, cutting them off at the pass, trying to stay ahead of them, hoping they’ll change their ways.”

  “Something like trying to stay ahead of a king cobra, hoping it’ll take up crocheting.”

  “Give me eight-to-five and I’ll bet on the cobra.”

  Kirby was beginning to doze off when Dixie snapped on the nightstand lamp. He opened his eyes to find her studying him, a wry smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. She said, “Don’t overdo it, big fella.”

  Kirby said, “I’ve already overdone it! Let’s get some sleep for Christ’s sake!”

  “You know what I’m talking about, buster—you’ve spread this backwoods-oaf bullshit about as thick as you can spread it! You haven’t asked one damned question that you didn’t know the answer to days ago! Birch Kirby, you bastard, just who the hell are you?”