A Talent For The Invisible (v1.1) Read online

  Freezing, the women both asked, “Are you Mr. Hovarth?”

  “Yes, I am ladies. The one and only Hovarth.”

  “Isn’t this your shop?”

  “Nono, ladies,” explained Hovarth, “that’s one of my works of art. I’m the leading house artist in the Western Hemisphere. In fact, the only other rival I have in the whole world is Mok of China I and he works mainly in pagodas.” To Conger he said, “I smell a cash transaction here. See you later.”

  Conger continued on. The first gallery in the next block was devoted to living tableaux. The leading man in the biggest pastoral was suffering from hay fever and kept dropping his sheep. Next came a shop devoted to laminated garbage, then a gallery offering giant gag cartoons and miniature billboards.

  “See the invisible man!” shouted someone around the corner.

  Slowing his pace, Conger turned the corner and discovered a gallery called Orlando’s Invisible Art Boutique. The shop looked to be empty of artworks, though fifteen tourists were inside browsing.

  In the middle of this block was the place Canguru had told him about. It was a long thin two story building, with a gallery below and a loft studio above. On the one small ground level window was printed Inza’s/Gadget Art.

  The first small room of Inza Day-Lewis’ gallery was given over to what a dangling sign described as Responsive Paintings. The paintings were large oils. About a dozen of them hung round the egg-colored room.

  “Hello, boob,” said a large portrait of a 19th Century American Cavalry officer. “What can I do you for?”

  Conger ignored the painting, strolling on through the room. Most of the other paintings were Western scenes, roundups, buffalo hunts, roping contests.

  “Oh, I get it,” said the responsive oil. “The old cold shoulder, huh. You probably go in for garbage art or maybe those godawful houses of Hovarth’s.”

  The next room was filled with hand-painted appliances. There was no one here either. Stopping beside a Hawaiian scene vacuum cleaner, Conger, turned to look at the general. “Where’s Miss Day-Lewis?”

  “How’s that again, jerko?”

  Conger approached the painting again. “I’m looking for the girl who runs the place.”

  A stream of salty liquid squirted out of the general’s decorations and into Conger’s right eye. “Ho ho,” responded the painting. “Right in the puss.”

  Stepping back out of range, Conger said, “I like a picture with a sense of humor. How much?”

  “You couldn’t afford it, clunk. I’m out of your class. Why don’t you settle for a waffle iron with views of Vermont in winter painted on it.”

  “I’d like to talk it over with Miss Day-Lewis. Where is she?”

  “Upwards,” said the general. “Mucking around in her atelier. She’s built like a couple of sacks of modeling compound that have been left out in the rain. Your best bet is to stick around down here and chew the fat with me, dumbo.”

  Conger found the stairs and climbed up to the loft.

  Inza Day-Lewis’ studio was bright and cluttered. Responsive paintings, with their inner workings in various stages of completion, leaned on easels and against walls, gutted appliances sprawled all over the realwood flooring, random gadgets were heaped in three separate mounds.

  Spread out on the floor at the foot of the nearest easel was a fat girl in her late twenties. She lay on her back, breathing in slow dry breaths. A bright stain that wasn’t paint was spreading on the chest of her smock.

  Conger knelt beside the dying girl. “Who?”

  “You can’t,” rasped Inza, “you can’t … trust a Chinaman … I promised to keep quiet … but … some bastard from Am … America is coming … couldn’t trust … me …”

  “Do you know where Sandman is?”

  Now there was a pause between each breath in and each breath out “I know … I know where the Chinaman is going … I know …”

  “Where?”

  “They… theydon’t know I know… I wasn’t there … whentheytalked . . . but … butthey told the Indian … they …” The pause after the last breath out grew longer and longer. The girl sank into herself as her life faded out.

  Conger stepped up and back.

  The detatched handle of a heavy vacuum came swishing down to crack against the side of his head.

  CHAPTER 11

  He answered one more question before he awoke. “I don’t know what she meant by the Indian,” Conger said as he opened his eyes. He was still in the dead girl’s studio, but the day had lengthened.

  Jerry Ting, the China II agent, was crouched a few feet in front of him, smiling, his chubby fingers flicking over the contents of Conger’s kit.

  “You’ve got to hand it to American ingenuity,” he said. “This truth stuff of yours works better than ours.”

  From a flat on his back position Conger elbowed up until he was face to face with the smiling Chinese. Immediately behind Conger rose a man-high pile of discarded appliances. Far across the room sat Big Mac, a stungun resting on his knee and a blaster pistol further up on his lap.

  “Next time I’ll leave you teetering,” Conger said to Ting.

  “Oh, listen, Jake,” said the smiling Chinese, “I appreciate that. I admire a guy who can save a sworn enemy even after he’s tried to do away with his girl. You American spies tend to be sentimental. If you rated spies on a scale of 1 to 10 for sentimentality I’d have to …”

  “Stop the horsecrap,” put in Big Mac. He had a deep voice which rattled in his throat as he spoke. “Give him another truth shot and let’s find out what else he knows before we skrag him.”

  “The Agrarian Espionage Forces has its best people on this,” said Conger as he sat up and inched back toward the pile of undecorated appliances. “Does Sandman work exclusively for AEF?”

  “He’s in it as a business,” replied Ting, smiling still. “AEF pays good, so he does a few jobs for us. But as I understand it he’s also worked for 1/2 Ethiopia, New Newfoundland …”

  “Shut up, peckerhead,” said Big Mac from his wing chair. “He’s supposed to tell us things. That’s how an interrogation works.”

  “You’ve met Sandman, huh?” Conger asked the Chinese.

  Ting smiled more broadly, pressed a finger to his lips. “He gets cranky if I talk too much.”

  “Jesus,” said the black agent. “Do I have to give this jerkoff his next shot myself?” He rose up out of his pseudowicker seat.

  Conger went straight back on his buttocks into the pile of appliances.

  The junk—robot waffle irons, singing tea kettles, automatic bread boxes, 10-speed bun warmers, etc.—came toppling forward onto him and the smiling AEF agent.

  Diving, Conger grabbed his kit away from the Chinese. He sent himself rolling away from the tangle of mechanisms.

  “Don’t move, wiseass,” ordered Big Mac.

  Conger moved, caught up an easel and hurled it.

  Big Mac’s blaster sizzled and an unfinished responsive painting, after crying “By jingo!”, crackled into ashes.

  “Don’t kill him yet,” said Ting from under the scatter of metallic junk.

  “I forgot what hand I had the stungun in.”

  Conger was behind a high bookcase now, rubbing on the special lotion he needed to turn invisible.

  “Get out from under that crud,” Big Mac told his Chinese partner, “so we can stalk that whackoff.”

  In the nearest corner of the room was a kitchen area, partially screened by canvas flats with incomplete buffalo hunts painted on them. Conger ran for there.

  Big Mac shot again.

  The robot stove yelped and turned red hot, then sooty black.

  “Mac, be careful,” cautioned Ting. “You used your blaster once again.”

  “Yeah, I’m sorry. Let me see. Left hand, stungun. Right hand, blaster. Okay, I got it straight,” said Big Mac. “Hey, asswipe, come out before I make another error and fry your jelly.”

  Conger, probably because of the truth drug the
y’d shot into him, was having trouble bringing off the invisibility illusion. He gritted his teeth, made another try. “There,” he said to himself, “that’s got it.” He moved away from the kitchen area, then reached back and tipped over one of the buffalo screens.

  Big Mac fired the stungun this time. It made a low ponging sound. The other buffalo canvas toppled.

  By then Conger, unseen, was at the clutter of discarded appliances closest to the black agent. He selected a heavy stew pot, lifted it up and swung it at Big Mac’s skull.

  “Hey, poltergeists,” said Ting, getting to his feet in time to see the pot three inches short of Big Mac’s head.

  There was a thunk and Big Mac said, “Diddlysquat,” before slumping to his knees.

  Conger bicycled backwards to avoid the toppling agent. Suddenly he fell over. He’d tripped on the body of the dead girl. When his spine hit the floor Conger had an odd dizzy feeling.

  “Hey, there he is,” cried Ting. He scurried toward the collapsing Big Mac to borrow one of his guns.

  Conger had turned visible. He didn’t wait to try for invisibility again.

  Hopping up, he turned and ran.

  He went down the loft stairs, jogged through the gallery.

  Just short of the general he slowed, halted. There on the right hand wall was a responsive painting of a glum-looking Indian chief. “The Indian,” said Conger. He jerked the large portrait free of the wall, stowed it under his arm.

  “If you’re going to thieve something,” remarked the general, “you ought to grab a picture with some class. Now I’ve never had anything against our red-skinned brothers. However …”

  Conger was out and on the walkway. He slowed, trying to look relaxed, give the impression he’d bought the huge unwrapped Indian.

  He was nearly to the next corner before Ting hit the street. The Chinese agent ran about ten feet, became aware of the twenty or so people sharing the walk and decelerated to a brisk stride. His smile returned and he even paused an instant to pat a little golden-haired boy in a guerilla suit.

  At the corner Conger turned right and ran for half a block. No one had paid him much attention so far. There was a throbbing light strip immediately above him. Artists & Writers’ Pub the sign said, pointing into an alley. Conger went that way.

  Overhead he heard a new sound, a hovering whine. He glanced up to see an aircruiser dropping down ahead of him, almost scrapping the plastic bricks on each side of the narrow alley.

  A lyric poet and a muralist emerged from the pub. “Holy moley!” said the poet when he noticed the descending hopper.

  Conger heard steps behind him and knew, without turning, that Ting had found the alley. The cruiser blocked him from going ahead.

  “She has nice bone structure,” said the painter.

  “No, no, much too thin,” said the poet. “I say, give me a Rubensesque woman every time. A Rubensesque woman, a loaf of sprouted-wheat bread, a flask of …”

  “Come on and get in,” Angelica suggested to Conger. She had opened the left hand boarding door.

  Conger waved goodbye to the hesitant Ting and squeezed around the ship to climb in. “Nice seeing you again.”

  The hopper began rising. “I was going to come in after you in another few minutes. I figured you’d come up with a way to get out of the studio on your own, though. I don’t like to be too intrusive.”

  On the control panel of the ship a monitor screen was mounted. It showed now Big Mac stumbling around the loft, rubbing at his head.

  “NSO knew about Inza, too,” said Conger.

  “Since about the time you did. One of our field men planted that scan bug in there early this morning. I got here after they’d killed her, too late to stop them,” said Angelica. “By the way, why are you carrying that big picture of a Navajo Indian?”

  “I’m hoping he can tell us where to go next,” said Conger.

  CHAPTER 12

  As the hopper skimmed the twilight jungle Conger fiddled with the huge painting he had swiped.

  Angelica, who had set her aircruiser on an automatic course back to Rio, sat turned toward him with one slender hand resting on his shoulder.

  “When I was watching that poor girl’s studio on the monitor, Jake; I could see you,” she said. “But that couldn’t be, at that distance, because I’m immune.”

  “A good part of the time the invisibility trick doesn’t fool television gear,” said Conger, “or an assortment of other electronic devices. As the 21st Century progresses it gets tougher and tougher to be an invisible man.”

  “Did you volunteer?”

  Conger poked another section of the Indian painting’s frame. “Yeah, at the time it seemed like more fun than a desk job. You know how things look to you when you’re still in your twenties. And then I’d gotten to know Vince Worth.”

  “He was killed, wasn’t he?”

  After several seconds Conger answered, “I guess he was.”

  “You’re not sure Worth is dead?”

  “Well …” The ornate picture frame made a low clicking sound, the speech box behind the canvas began to talk.

  “… seems like that’s redundant, Mac,” said the recorded voice of Jerry Ting.

  “You’d get along a lot better in life, slopehead, if you didn’t always question orders,” said the black AEF agent.

  “Still, Mac, AEF paid Sandman all that dough to bring Enzerto back to life. That wasn’t— what?—not more than five months ago. Now they want him dead again.”

  “There’s always a lot of fluctuation in politics, clutchbutt. As of today they want him knocked off.”

  “We could have saved a lot of money …”

  “Soon as we finish up here in the colony we got orders to travel up to Central America, to Urbania, and finish off Enzerto,” said Big Mac. “Seems he’s become real friendly with the junta there, which is not good.”

  “Okay by me, Mac. I was only …”

  “Come on, buttwipe, we got to make another check of the streets. In case our invisible man or that beanpole broad show up.”

  “She’s not so skinny, Mac. She’s sort of cute in an odd sort of way,” said Ting. “How are we going to see the …” The gallery door opened and closed. Only silence came out of the painting.

  Setting it away behind him, Conger said, “That would be Avo Enzerto, the old agronomy professor who led the opposition to the junta. I didn’t know he was alive again.”

  “Why do men keep saying I’m skinny?”

  “I haven’t said that,” Conger told her. “They have different tastes in China II.”

  “For my height I’m about the average weight. I don’t want to be any heavier.”

  “Nobody wants a fat secret agent.”

  After frowning a while longer, the pretty girl smiled. “Yes, NSO knew Enzerto was alive, although we didn’t hear about it until a week or so ago.”

  “Do you know where he is now?”

  “Enzerto has sided in with the junta,” answered Angelica. “At least to the extent of working on an experimental food set up the junta is running. Running with considerable aid from us, from the United States government. If only those money people would be a little more curious. We might have been onto this Sandman thing months ago.”

  “Whereabouts are the food experiments going on?”

  “In northern Urbania, I think. They’ve got a series of dome farms out in a stretch of reclaimed swamp. The whole complex is known as Pharmz.”

  “Catchy,” he said. A large dusk-colored bird flew across their path.

  Conger watched it flap safely away into the oncoming night. “There should be a teleport station around here someplace. We can land there and get on to Urbania.”

  “We?”

  His eyes still on the diminishing bird, Conger said, “I’ve decided I like working with you.”

  “It’s those hairbreadth rescues that impress you.” She leaned, kissed him once on the cheek.

  “Why do you think Worth may not be dead?�
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  “He’s probably dead. The description of Sandman I got …”

  “A tall gaunt man in his middle thirties. That would fit Vincent X. Worth, wouldn’t it?”

  “Or Sir Thomas Anstey-Guthrie.”

  “Or Omar Kavak.”

  “Who added him to the list?”

  “NSO. Kavak is another tall thin—in fact, some of his former colleagues at the Prague Life Cycle Study Center call him downright skinny—tall thin biologist. He disappeared during a foxhunt in Free Ireland #2, while chasing a robot fox. He could very well be Sandman, since his politics and abilities fit. He’s a better bet than Sir Thomas, we think.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s a pretty good possibility Sir Thomas is living in the Bahamas someplace under the name of Juan Tizol with a very zoftig ex-lab assistant of his. We’re investigating further.” Conger took the girl’s hand. “Vince was a health nut. He’s the one who got me started on jogging and health foods. This is a very small point, but when I searched the villa, the room Sandman has used as a lab, I found a kelp pill.” The pretty girl laughed. “A lot of people use those, Jake. Why at the New Lisbon teleport station you can get them out of a vending machine. A packet of kelp pills and a Portuguese fado all for one escudo.”

  “Yeah, that’s true,” admitted Conger.

  “Maybe,” suggested Angelica, “you’re hoping Worth is alive because you miss him.”

  “I am awfully sentimental,” he said. “According to Jerry Ting.”

  “He’s perceptive. When I first met you I thought you were cold and aloof.” She reached out and made adjustments to the controls. “There. That’ll get us to the closest teleport station.” Putting both her hands on his shoulders, she said, “But I think of you differently now.”

  Conger took hold of her as the hopper banked gently to the left.

  CHAPTER 13

  Conger wasn’t sure if the gnats and mosquitoes could see him or not.

  Usually the complex body lotion which rendered him invisible also served as an insect repellent. The insects who inhabited the lush swamp surrounding the Pharmz complex seemed able to seek him out with no trouble.