16. Wylie at the Drum
The Electric Drum was humming. Or rather, it would be more accurate to say that the Electric Drum was drumming up business at a steady rate. The Drum, as it was commonly known, was busy all the time since it had the two key elements that any successful bar needs - the right location and the right kind of clients, the drinking kind. The fact that the Drum was run by a bunch of wild young girls did not hamper the success of the business either.
There were many stories about the Drum but they weren't the kind that your wife liked to hear - not unless a blackmail letter accompanied the story. Many types of people passed through the doors of the Drum, some were upright and some were not so upright - the people, not the doors. However, all the previous clients of the Drum had had to face one inescapable fact - they had to open the doors first. For the first time in its history, a customer came through the batwing doors of the Drum and he did not have to open the door first. It was John Wylie.
Wylie pushed through the thronging crowd. The cacophony inside was deafening. It was a wonder that anybody could hear anything in there. But still, most people appeared to be carrying on conversations without any trouble at all. There was a large crowd gathered at the bar. One of the bartenders, a good-looking, red haired young woman[1], was engaged in what Wylie assumed to be some sort of a strange human ritual, at the bar. She was performing some kind of fast paced dance which involved various twirling bottles and glasses as well as a lot of shouting and cheering. The crowd was stomping its feet and loudly proclaiming their appreciation of the dancing. Wylie decided to give that a miss - when you were short, there were certain places that you learnt to avoid[2]. He walked to the other end of the bar and hauled himself on to a stool.
"Hey, we don't serve kids in here, the juice bar is on the next street!" jibed one of the others sitting at the bar. He looked to have been imbibing freely of the establishment's hospitality.
"My friend, you really shouldn't make me angry," Responded Wylie conversationally.
"Why? You think I wouldn't like it when you're angry?" responded the other.
"You might not like what I could do to you. Didn't your mother ever warn you not to pick a fight with a man who reaches only up to your groin?" replied Wylie with a wicked smile.
While the words may have reached the other immediately, it took a while for the meaning to sink in. Wylie could almost tell the moment since the other spluttered, glanced down hurriedly, stammered something incomprehensible, paid for his drink and moved over to the other end of the bar. One of the bartenders, a young woman, with blonde hair this time, walked over with a smile[3].
"Couldn't help overhearing what you said to that guy. Pretty neat trick, if you can pull it off!"
"I thought that was the whole idea?" grinned Wylie again.
The bartender laughed out loud. "You're a card, you are! What will be your poison?"
"Wouldn't that be the pharmacy? Or the hospital? Or even that little hole-in-the-wall diner over by Chryme Alley?" smirked Wylie.
"You're funny." But the woman didn't look amused. "What will you have to drink?"
"Oh, why didn't you say so? I'll have a Martian Red Rum, if you've got it?"
"Sure, coming right up!"
"So anything new going on in these parts?" inquired Wylie, making conversation[4]. Wylie idly wondered about the phrase "making conversation" - You didn't really make a conversation, you had one. Sort of like a baby. Now that he thought about it, it was exactly like a baby, at least for humans it was. You needed at least two people to have one - and sometimes, both people didn't want to have it but they still did. Interesting. He must remember to put that down in his journal later.
"Well ... nothing much, except for all that business with Boss Chu."
"You mean the city boss? Something happen to him?" Wylie was interested despite the pressing nature of his assignment. Boss Chu controlled the whole of Kabul City. It was true that he was a gangster but then again, maybe they had hit upon a good solution when they let the mobsters run the city. You at least didn't have to deal with the politicians who became goons (or the goons who became politicians) and your everyday street-corner variety thug too. You just had one kind of thug to deal with and you knew exactly where you stood with them - usually, being menaced at the end of some sort of weapon and having to hand over your cash, if they managed to corner you in a dark alley. That was far better than handing over your cash for inexplicable reasons, like social security or medicare[5]. A knife, on the other hand, was pretty solid. You saw it and you knew precisely why you were handing your credits over - because the thug at the other end of the knife might not have had the benefit of a good education and might not understand that "your money or your life" is not the same as "your money and your life".
Wylie wondered if perhaps this matter with Boss Chu was somehow connected to his search for Normal. Maybe Normal had been kidnapped - not that he could think of any particular reason for anybody in the Fifty Galaxies wanting to kidnap Normal. Unless of course, annoyance merited kidnapping these days, he mentally amended.
"Apparently, some guy's stolen something valuable from Boss Chu. Some say it's a microchip, others say it's microfiche ..."
"That sounds fishy."
"You're quite the comic aren't you? Maybe we should sign you up for an act here ..."
"Nah, I can't handle my liquor ... Plus, I'm on a job already, looking for a friend of mine. Normal, Normal Kint. You wouldn't happen to know him by any chance now would you?" Wylie asked the bartender, hopefully.
"Sorry ... thousands of people come in here daily. Can't keep track of 'em all ..."
Wylie's spirits plummeted like a stalled rocketship. He'd been pinning his hopes of finding somebody at the Drum who might have seen Normal. Now it was back to combing the streets and the streets of Kabul City didn't turn up anything good when they were combed.
"Now there's the kind of name that you don't forget often - Normal Kint! Bet there can't be two Normal Kints in the whole planet. I met a guy by that name just earlier today ..." said a man sitting a couple of stools down from Wylie, breaking in on his gloomy reverie.
"Well there ya go - you can always find what you're looking for at the Drum," said the bartender, moving away to attend to another customer.
Wylie leaned forward, peering past the other patrons sitting at the bar, trying to find the man who'd spoken. The speaker was a big man with a shock of straw blond hair turning white. Something about him screamed cop but then again, nobody probably would hear that over the really loud shirt that he had on. Wylie nodded at the guy.
"Oh, you met Normal? Today, you say? Let me buy you a drink ..."
"Why, thank you kindly! If you don't mind, I'll join you over there - this shouting around people business can be hard on this old throat of mine," replied the man, getting up from his bar stool.
"By all means," responded Wylie, signalling the bartender, "Another of whatever my new friend is having!"
"My name's Carruthers, John Carruthers. I'm a policeman."
"You don't say! I wouldn't have taken you for a cop at all. I'm John Wylie - I am an agent. I represent street artists, find new talent, that kind of thing ..."
Carruthers nodded noncommittally. "Sounds good. So what's your interest in Kint?"
"He's married to one of my employees. She returns home from a trip and he's gone! She was really worried about him and I thought I'd ask around and try to find him ..."
"Trying to do my job for me, eh?" the cop raised a quizzical eyebrow.
"Well ... we weren't sure if he was really missing or if he'd just gone off somewhere and forgotten to leave a note for his wife. Somebody I met said that they'd seen him here. So I came over here ..."
"He's not here, that's for sure! The last I saw him, he was on a bus bound for Donagar. But it's funny how he'd go off to Donagar without letting his wife know ..."
Wylie could almost see the mental machinery slowly lumbering into action in the cop's cranium. "Oh, I'm sure something or other must have come up. Maybe he did leave a note but Katy, his wife, never found it. You know how it is ..." he said hurriedly, attempting to divert any further interest in the affair on the part of the law.
"Yeah, in my line of work, half the time the MP, that's what we call a missing person," he confided as an aside to Wylie, "is back at home by the time their loved ones file a report and go home. There we'd be searching high and low for them, and the next day we get a call saying, 'Oh it's OK, they came back last night - they'd gone out for a pizza.' Why can't they let us know immediately, I ask you?"
"I know. People, I tell you! Anyway, thanks for the information. Guess I'd better get back to the office and let Katy know that Normal's fine," remarked Wylie, putting a few credits on the counter and sliding off his stool.
"Yeah, thanks for the drink! Look me up any time you're here again. I'm usually here most evenings when I'm off duty."
"Will do!" replied Wylie, and then strode out with a cheery wave to the cop. He had to keep down the urge to break into a run towards the nearest hoverbus stop. Donagar? What possessed that confounded, careless, canine-stealing crack-brained cretin to go to Donagar? Did he have the dog with him still? Wylie had been tempted to ask the cop about the dog, but it hadn't seemed wise to arouse his suspicions further. Even cops sometimes tumbled on to things[6]. He just hoped that the blasted dog was safe!
[1] All the bartenders at the Drum were young, good-looking and of the female persuasion. This was the long sought after golden formula to get men to drink far more than was good for them.
[2] If you were smart, you learnt this by observing your surroundings. However, there is nothing like a good stomping to stamp a lesson indelibly on your mind, as many a dwarf and midget would tell you.
[3] They didn't serve smiles at the Drum though they might walk over with one - smiles were free and so don't make any money.
[4] A scientific method for making conversations has not been discovered yet - this is the kind of secret for which scriptwriters and novelists, not to mention aspiring Romeos, would pay a fortune.
[5] It was better to see your money go and know that you'll never see it again than to see it go and be told that you'd see it again someday, and then never get to see it again anyway.
[6] For some strange reason, the one thing that cops most often stumbled upon was the location of the nearest doughnut shop. This curious phenomenon had been observed with regards to not just human cops, but policemen everywhere in the Fifty Galaxies[7].
[7] Some of the worlds in the Fifty Galaxies did not have doughnuts but it was remarkable how many did - fried batter with a hole in the middle seemed to be as much of a universal constant as the concept of zero.
