On to Chapter 12

“That’s not the point,” said Arthur, “the point is that I’m a perfectly normal Penguin, and my friend here is rapidly running out of limbs!” - Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Don’t jostle me. This is hard enough damn it! Stop that. Am I talking to myself here?” Exasperated, Hargrove finally looked up from the device, to which he had been attaching the speaker and video monitor leads. The images flickering to life on the small portable television in front of them and the sparkly crackling of the speakers interrupted any potential reply to his question.

Shirley gave him a curious look, and Hargrove realized that there was no one near enough to jostle him. The closest person, in fact, was Marty, a good five feet away. The others were in quiet conversation across the room, and only Shirley had noticed that he was ready. Marty whistled softly and looked around the room. With a shudder, Hargrove returned to the task at hand, as the group gathered around him.

Thousands of dollars worth of audio and visual equipment had been procured at a snap of Gunter Tang’s bejeweled fingers. The technological cornucopia had been arrayed before Hargrove, who knew very little about technology, but who had spent the afternoon muttering to himself about spoils, and fruits, and labour, and generally trying to work out which cables to stick into which parts of the other things. In the motherland, you held wires together and wore the tin foil antenna hat, pointing your head this way and that until the scrambled picture resolved itself, with young women and old men blurring together into a sort of potluck of propaganda. Tasha would have cried to see Hargrove waist deep behind the audio mixer, setting up the automated microwave relay, amplifier, the digital recording devices and the video capture equipment. The curious large man, Horace, had helpfully informed Hargrove that this equipment could amplify fly farts in the deepest jungles of Brazil, if you could plant the microphone securely enough. The importance of this fact completely escaped the famed detective; there was no need to listen to insect bowels in far flung lands, not when there was such a ready source so near.

No matter: it was done, although Hargrove would not have guaranteed the operation of the plethora of recording devices. The television cleared, showing gigantic yellow stalks rising the length of the screen vertically.

"It is in a field of wheat?” Rockefeller asked, cocking his head to the side, squinting. “No! A wicker prison! We are lost.”

“This is no prison,” Hargrove said grimly, remembering the dark year in Zurich, “I speak from experience.” He took the joystick that he had found in Felix’s jacket, and pulled back on it. The shot on the television widened back, revealing a straw broom. “The broom closet – as I suspected all along.” A minute of maneuvering followed, revealing the dimensions of the closet – the door shut, filled with various implements of the janitorial trade. “Ah, tools of honest labour!” breathed Hargrove in admiration.

Tang and Rockefeller grunted their disgust in unison. The perfectly coifed detective recovered first, his voice again calm and silky. “Get us out of this ramshackle poorhouse immediately. We haven’t time to waste touring the offices of the peasantry.”

A thousand things came to Hargrove’s lips, but he held his tongue. The one thing that the disgusting capitalist had right was the lack of time. Time for Ida, time for Candace, time for Moxie: Hargrove’s mind raced. How to escape this prison? Hargrove quickly ascertained that ramming the door was useless. The little six legged slug-like remotes were quick and adapted well to difficult terrain, but they simply didn’t work up enough momentum in the space available to even scratch the door, let alone bang it, or open it. His hand brushed one of the buttons on the joystick, and the screen jolted upwards, a flash of silver pincer sparkling back towards the camera.

“What was that?” Asked Shirley dreamily, and snuggled closer into the well-dressed capitalist detective. Rockefeller murmured something soothing and meaningless into her ear, and cupped her buttock, his hand tensing to squeeze.

“No!” gasped Hargrove, recoiling in horror, but too late. Rockefeller clenched, and Captain Will ripped loose a gaseous, toxic, cloud that settled in the room like Hargrove’s first wife had settled into his meager possessions. Actually, thought Hargrove through a fit of choking and coughing, the nausea was familiar. Gradually, the tears cleared his vision, and he forced himself back to the task at hand. Right button: silver flash, a claw spit out and hooked back out of sight. Left button: the view raised and tilted downwards, as the legs extended in a forward leaning hop. The joystick’s trigger had no obvious effect, so Hargrove ignored it, assigning his tremendous intellect to the problem.

“The air vent,” said Horace, behind Hargrove.

Hargrove’s face wrinkled as his famed Marxist brain cycled through scenario after scenario, each wilder and more complex than the last. His tongue jutted out. “Hop that, spin, land here,” he muttered, “catapulting me to that shovel, over that air vent and onto this plate…” His eye caught strayed on a metallic plate. “Paper! Bring me paper and pencil, this is complex and I’ll only get one chance!”

“…The air vent,” repeated Horace.

“Shhh!” hissed Marty, mesmerized by the sheen of concentration on Hargrove’s face. “I’ve seen this look before! Don’t interrupt him now!” Tang snapped his fingers again, and a pad and pencil materialized at Hargrove’s elbow. Horace sighed, and sat back. In seconds, his face was beatifically composed, his eyes unfocused and his breathing even.

Hargrove’s fit of engineering bravado faded, leaving him with the realization that he had dropped out of state schooling to join the ranks of field labourer’s, where he first learned of Marxism, and later to enlist in the defense of the motherland. Not only was his knowledge of ballistics limited, but he had suddenly forgotten what he’d even had in mind in the first place. Desperate to not look inferior before Rockefeller, he blurted the first thing that came to mind. Scrunching up the paper authoritatively and slapping the pencil down on the table, his finger stabbed out at the small television set. “The air vent!” he said, “Of course. No prison can hold this detective.” Except that one in Bolivia he thought, remembering gingerly those four painful years wasted.

Ignoring the snort from behind him, Hargrove moved the remote to a position in front of the air vent. With a silver flash, the remote hooked the vent cover from the wall. Hargrove let out an involuntary hoot. So this, he thought, was the lure of Nintendo! Steeling himself against the addictive pleasure, a pleasure that he knew to have wasted countless western lives, he continued. A hop, and the camera leaned into the black chasm, then steadied, the only light visible the silver reflections from the light in the broom closet, revealing a tunnel which became abruptly dark a few feet away.

“Be careful,” began Horace, “this is not a very auspicious…”

But Hargrove had jammed the joystick forward, like countless ten-year-old amateur car racers. The rasp of metal on metal echoed back hollowly, and the blackness rushed towards the screen. There was a loud metallic boom, and the sound of the remote’s feet was replaced by the rushing of wind and the occasional banging.

“It’s falling,” said Shirley. “I hope Felix built his props solidly!”

The remote rattled down what must have been several stories worth of air duct. With a final boom, the remote picked up light, spinning wildly across the television set. The remote rolled through a vent on a lower floor, bounced, a room flying across the screen – floor, wall, ceiling, wall, floor – and then it came to rest upside down underneath what looked like a sofa. The joystick no longer did anything but cause an audible whirring of servos, the remote’s legs flexing uselessly in the air. The camera faced into the center of the room, and the audio seemed to be functioning. Horace stepped around Hargrove, and with a disdainful look cast back at the detective, casually flipped the small set so that the picture was right way up.

“What now?” Tang asked Hargrove. Hargrove’s reply was interrupted by the audio feed from the remote.

“What was that?” Footsteps. A leg passed into view, a figure bent down and replaced the grate. “Building is crap. Builders cut corners everywhere, these days.”

Another set of legs, and another figure settled into an upholstered chair across from the sofa.

“Make yourself at home,” the first voice said, sarcastically, the legs growing gigantic as they approached the couch. The couch springs groaned and creaked above the remote, as the speaker sat.

A second voice, farther away, and behind. “Drink?”

The figure on the chair waved his hand dismissively. The voice from above said “Rum and coke, for me. Yes, in here. Sit, sit – are we all here?”

“All but the man from Shanghai.” The figure on the chair, this time. Hargrove leaned forward. There was something about that man, something familiar – the resolution on the television set was poor, but something in the voice or the figure triggered something in the boundless recesses of his experiences.

“And the other, of course, of course. Not them – but we’ll address that soon enough.” There were other sounds of people settling into chairs, and the occasional pair of legs darkened the screen, and the figure above the camera stood. Hargrove reached forward and turned up the sound with the dial on the amplifier. The voice boomed again, echoing around the room.

“Gentlemen, not all of you have met, naturally. I am James Haughtenburg, bastard love child of Steven Speil...well that isn’t important. As you know, I have, in the past, been your sole contact for the group – most of you know me by voice only. You all, here in this room, represent what is left of Heirs of Executives in Motion Pictures. You all know BFG Jr. Wapkaplet, so I’ll turn the floor over to him.” There was a loud creaking and rustling, as the speaker settled back into the couch above the remote.

Hargrove snapped his fingers, startling Shirley, who stiffened, choking the air anew with a thunderclap and its accompanying thick cloud. Rockefeller tutted sympathetically, and wrapped his arm around her protectively. “Of course!” Hargrove said.

“Of course what?” asked Tang, leaning forward.

“BFG Jr. Wapkaplet!” said Marty, “the old man, remember, he said…”

“The envelope,” Shirley said. She took a deep breath, her eyes wide. “So Graves…”

“Be quiet, for god’s sake,” said Rockefeller, waving his hand at the others, “I can’t hear a thing.”

BFG Jr. Wapkaplet, the figure in the chair in the center of the screen, had leaned forward, and was addressing the room. “Oh sit down, Jim, you puff of hot wind. You are all here today because I wanted you here. In the past, you left things to me. You were unwilling, or unable to play more active roles in achieving our goal, so I did it. I did what had be done, things you loafers didn’t even want to know about, wouldn’t have had the guts to do, but that’s done with now. We have a problem.”

“Now wait a minute! What have you done?” The voice was panicked, and accompanied by a general rustling and shifting in chairs. “I admit,” the panicked voice continued, “that in the past I may have…”

“May have what, Andy?” Wapkaplet Jr. interrupted. “May have desired the power and riches of your old man, desired his hold on the informational intake of society, his power to control the American government through the votes of the people? But. But didn’t want to actually do anything about it personally, right? So you were willing to join HEMP, but only as long as I did everything. Does that,” Wapkaplet was sneering now, “sum up your position well enough? For everyone else too?” He looked around at the now silent room. “Fine. We have a problem. Not me: We.”

A new voice this time, quieter, and businesslike. “What have you done?”

“First things first. I want us all committed - there can be no backing out, now. So we should all know each other. Frank BFG Jr. Wapkaplet, BFG Movie Studios. Call me Junior. You all know James, and we all know who he is affiliated with.” He inclined his head at one of the chairs. “Andy Coppola. Again, rather obvious. Jimmy Stutten, Little Idea Pictures over there. Over by the door, Brad and Peter Scott, the Dreamscape twins. And of course, you - Harry Stiles, from Manchester Films. We all want the same thing, except James, who wants the love of his father as well.” Junior gave a sharp laugh. “Sorry, James, we can’t help you there.”

The monitoring room was dead silent, save for Hargrove’s mad scribbling.

Harry’s quiet voice again: “Fine. So what have you done? And who is the ‘Man from Shanghai’?”

Junior stood, and began to pace. “I’ve done what we all agreed was required, removed certain…impediments to our inheritance, created the seeds for the removal of the various boards, and found tools to facilitate our transition into the places of our fathers. As we agreed: and you didn’t want to know how I did it, but I’m going to tell you now anyway. The man from Shanghai is Hoa I Ch’ii, the Feng Shui Detective. He was hired as an outsider to find us dirt on our Fathers, to follow them, take pictures, and create files we could use as blackmail. What he discovered, amongst other things, was that our fathers have been having dealings with TOKE.”

Tang choked, and burst to his feet. Rockefeller soothed him with a few murmured words and he settled back down to listen.

“What the hell is TOKE?” demanded Jimmy. “What the hell is it with all these anachronisms, anyway? Are there more of these? Can I sign up with CRACK, and fight the HASH PIPE people who are trying to take on the forces of SHOOTING UP? Society of Hippie Omnipotent Overlords Taking Insider, er, Nasty, um,” Jimmy was straining, at the limit of his vocabulary now, “Genocidal, er, Upside down, oh what the hell.” He sat down.

“Acronyms, stupid. Your schooling was an anachronism. TOKE stands for Tran Omnipresent Kalei…well it’s kind of a crappy name,” another choke from Tang, “but the point is that we were going to lose our fortunes, our homes, in a series of sick mergers between the big picture studios and this TOKE organization. I have been working closely with Sync Offant. Mr. Offant, you may not know, for not many did, wasn’t the owner of Ultimate pictures. He is the heir to Ultimate pictures, which is fully owned by his grandfather, Gosling Offant, and therefore one of us. Although our studios have played at being at war in the media, he has been wrestling for control of Ultimate for years. We control the much of the media, after all – everything they have to say is by our design. He has been deep, deep undercover with these people.” There was shocked rustling in the speakers, and amongst the watchers. When the rustling stopped, Junior continued. “He was supposed to report in before this meeting, but was clearly unable to; for unknown reasons. We are looking into this. This Feng Shui detective has been out of touch for some time, after informing us that he would also be deeply undercover.”

Hargrove looked over at Shirley, who looked shocked, yet comfortable. “I never knew!” she said helplessly. Rockefeller smiled an oily smile and stroked her hair.

“Is this our problem?” asked Harry Stiles. “Surely this isn’t the extent of our difficulties. Please tell me you haven’t disturbed all of us to sort this out.”

“No,” Junior said, “no, this isn’t the extent of our difficulties.” He paused, and looked around again.

“In addition to gathering data, Sync and I decided to hire an assassin to help with the required removals. Spare me your moralizing, Andy, Jimmy – this is precisely why you weren’t kept in the loop. It was the only way. And most importantly, it’s done.” He took a deep breath. “This is where the difficulties arise. The assassin was hired by Sync; I don’t know who he hired, and Sync was the only contact. In the last couple of days, however, there has been a number of disturbing disappearances. I wouldn’t have connected the two, except that a girl was killed yesterday – a girl I was using to blackmail my father.”

“What are you saying, you fool!” shouted Jimmy, “that you’ve lost control of a killer? Who knows us? What would he want with us? What does this have to do with me?”

“Sit down, Jimmy. I’m saying that something must have happened to Sync. This assassin isn’t cheap – we owe him money. But I don’t know how to get in touch with him, and he must be sending us a message. I couldn’t leave you not knowing. What the hell is that?” Junior had spotted the remote.

His face loomed suddenly large in the screen, and the view on the television set shifted madly as he picked the remote up and shook it. There was a crash; a bounce and everything went dark, only a steady crackling sound remaining.

There was a almost a minute of stunned silence in the equipment filled monitoring room, as Hargrove and the other eavesdroppers stared at the black screen, broken by Shirley’s voice. “Where is Horace?” They all looked around. Shirley was right – Horace was gone. Tang looked confused. “Horace?” he called, but there was no answer.

Hargrove sat back. “The pieces are beginning to fit,” he said. “But where do the world operatives fit here? We don’t have all the pieces yet. Wapkaplet must have known something. Graves must have some answers too. This could be catastrophic news for socialism! It’s a propaganda war now.”

“That may be, Mr. Hargrove, but this changes everything!” Gunter Tang said. “TOKE has clearly been talking to the wrong people. I wouldn’t want to act to soon, in case this sorry lot fails, but if they succeed – HEMP needs a TOKE! It is the future of America, the future of the world. I have much to do. I will be in touch, Mr. Rockefeller. I must find Horace. The servants will see you out.” And he swept out of the room, the clicking of his footsteps echoing hollowly down the hall.

“TOKE is part of the problem of course,” Hargrove said bitterly, “they’ll work with anyone if there is profit. This is bigger than Ida and Wapkaplet, now, but we must learn more if we are to soothe Candace’s heart.” Visions of Candace’s chest heaving with sadness made Hargrove’s breath temporarily ragged.

“I will meet you later,” said Rockefeller. “I have an appointment I must attend. Shall we meet this evening? Spago’s…say, eight?” There was a delighted squeal from Shirley. Hargrove’s guts boiled. Spago’s, eatery of the rich and useless, the lagoon in the oasis of American Capitalism. He wanted to turn the offer down, but clearly he would lose Shirley if he did, and he still needed her knowledge of Hollywood. He would certainly have to acquiesce, no matter how painful the evening would be. Marty alone did not have the knowledge he needed. Marty – where was Marty?

Rockefeller left with the servant, who promised to return for the others.

“Has anyone seen Marty?” Hargrove asked. Shirley looked around, as if waking from a pleasant dream. “Marty?” she said, “No. Where did he go?”

“I have him,” came Horace’s voice, from the dark shadows beyond the wet bar. There was no servant left in the tone though, it was all business. Hargrove and Shirley spun around, to see Horace emerge from the shadow; Marty slumped in a heap at his feet.

“Horace?” choked Hargrove.

“Not quite,” said Horace, “as your overly clever friend here discovered. ‘Horace’ is what the linguistically challenged call me. My name is Hoa I Ch’ii. I am the Feng Shui detective; I must say I’m disappointed in you, Mr. Hargrove. Your reputation has both preceded and exceeded you. You are also standing in a spot of very dubious quality. The hallway outside allows demons to travel in direct paths from the streets in front of this house – culminating in a crossing path precisely where you are. Things don’t look good for you – at all.” He brought a long, straight blade from behind his back, and leveled it at Hargrove.

Hargrove drew back, trying to fit the Feng Shui detective into the puzzle, as well as devise his escape plan. The last time he’d reached for his beloved Webley, the large Mongol had moved like lightening. A distraction! Hargrove glanced down, to where Marty’s shirt was straining and writhing.

There was a bang from behind, and before anyone could look, Hargrove was grabbed, and the muzzle of a gun was thrust past his head. “Back off, my dark stupid friend,” said Graves, “this one is mine, see? And I ain’t done with him yet.” The gun went off with an explosive crack, deafening the famed detective, and the rap of the butt across the back of his skull brought back the darkness, and the penguins.

On to Chapter 12

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