The 10th Victim Read online

  The 10th Victim

  Robert Sheckley

  For Alissa

  1

  She might have been any man’s fatality: Caroline Meredith, a slim and lissome young lady seated pensively behind a high mahogany bar, her slim legs wrapped enraptured one around the other, her long, exquisitely carved face (reminiscent of antique jade, yet colored the faintest of ivories) directed downward into the unfathomable depths of her Martini. Statuelike, yet disturbingly alive, clad in the loveliest of silks, and with a jet black sable coat flung carelessly over her superb shoulders, she might have stood for all that was fine, good, and desirable in the strangely disparate city of New York.

  Or so the tourist must have thought. He stood entranced, ten feet from the plate glass window of the bar in which the beautiful Caroline sat staring into the depths of her drink. He was a Chinese—a bird’s nest salesman from Kweiping, to judge by his white sharkskin suit, shantung tie, and brocaded shoes. Slung around his neck was a large camera—a Bronica, to all but the initiated.

  With elaborate carelessness the wily Oriental lifted his camera and snapped a picture of a gutter to his left and of an excavation to his right. Then he focused on Caroline.

  He performed various operations with the camera’s mechanism. Things whirred and buzzed, and a panel in the side flipped open.

  Into this opening, with the speed of a conjurer, the inscrutable celestial deftly slipped five hollow-point bullets, and closed the aperture. Thus, technically, his camera was no longer simply a camera; but neither was it simply a gun. It was now a gun-camera, or camera-gun; or, to use the proper (though recently coined) slang term, it was a convertible; which is to say, one of that class of objects designed to perform two unrelated functions.

  Loaded for bear, the Yellow Peril moved toward his target with light quick steps. Only slightly asthmatoid breathing might have betrayed his purpose to the casual eye.

  Still the lovely Caroline kept both her pose and her poise. She lifted her drink; within there was no sibyl, but the next best thing: a tiny mirror. In it she watched with interest the actions of the killer from Kwangtung.

  The moment of truth was now fast approaching. The Chinese took aim; and Caroline, with an impressive show of reflexes, hurled her drink at the window just an instant before the son of heaven got off his shot.

  “Oh! Really now! I say!” the Chinese said. (Although born on the left bank of the Hungshui River, he had been educated at Harrod’s.)

  Caroline said not a word. One foot above her head there was a starred hole in the plate glass window. On the other side of the window was an embarrassed Chinaman. Caroline dropped to the floor before the fellow could fire again, and scooted toward the rear like a bat out of hell.

  The bartender, who had been watching the action, shook his head with admiration. He was a football fan himself, but he loved a good Hunt.

  “That’s one for you, kid!” he called after the speeding Caroline.

  Just then the bird’s nest salesman burst into the bar and raced to the rear in pursuit of the beautiful running girl.

  “Welcome to America,” the bartender called after him. “And happy hunting.”

  “Sank you, I am so preased,” the Yellow Devil replied politely, while sprinting full out.

  “You gotta hand it to them Chinks,” the bartender remarked to a customer at the far end of the bar. “They got manners.”

  “Another double Martini,” the man at the end of the bar replied. “But this time put the twist of lemon peel on the side. I mean to say, one doesn’t like to have a big ugly slice of lemon floating around as though one’s drink were a Planter’s Punch or some such vile concoction.”

  “Yes sir, terribly sorry, sir,” the bartender said with evident good nature. He mixed the drink with care, but all the time he was wondering about that Oriental Hunter and his American Victim. Which of them was going to get it? How would it turn out?

  The man at the bar must have been reading his mind. “I’ll give you three to one,” he said.

  “On who?”

  “The chick over the Chink.”

  The bartender hesitated, then smiled, shook his head, and served the drink. “Make it five to one,” he said. “That little lady looked to me like she knew a thing or two.”

  “Done,” said the man, who also knew a thing or two. He squeezed a fractional drop of oil over the pellucid surface of his drink.

  Long legs flashing, sable coat clutched beneath one arm, Caroline ran past the tawdry splendors of Lexington Avenue and fought her way through a crowd gathered to watch the public impalement of a litterbug on the great granite stake at 69th and Park. No one even remarked on Caroline’s progress; their eyes were intent on the wretched criminal, a lout from Hoboken with a telltale Hershey paper crumpled at his feet and with chocolate smeared miserably on his hands. Stony-faced they listened to his specious excuses, his pathetic pleas; and they saw his face turn a mottled gray as two public executioners lifted him by the arms and legs and lifted him high in the air, positioned for the final plunge onto Malefactor’s Stake. There was a good deal of interest just then in the newly instituted policy of open-air executions (“What have we got to be ashamed of?”) and not much current interest in the predictably murderous antics of Hunters and Victims.

  Caroline ran on, her blonde hair swinging free like a bright flag of uncertain import. Less than 50 feet behind her, puffing slightly and perspiring faintly, came the heathen Chinee, his camera-gun gripped in both his hairless hands. His stride did not seem particularly rapid; and yet, bit by bit, with the immemorial patience of the children of Han, he was overtaking the beautiful young girl.

  He risked no shot as yet; to fire without definite aim was frowned upon, and to kill or maim a bystander, no matter how accidentally, was shameful, and would constitute an irrevocable loss of face as well as a stiff fine.

  Therefore he held his fire and clutched to his chest that instrument which was capable, through the perverse ingenuity of man, of simultaneously creating a copy and destroying the original. A close observer might have noticed a premonitory digital tremor, as well as a slightly unnatural stiffening of the man’s neck muscles. But this was only to be expected, since John Chinaman had a mere two Hunts under his belt, and was therefore a rank beginner in the most important social phenomenon of the age.

  Caroline came to Madison Avenue and 69th Street, cast a quick glance around her, went uptown past the Craven Chicken Delicatessen (Catering for up to 50 people; prices on request) and then stopped suddenly. Panting heavily and beautifully, she saw an open door just past the Craven Chicken. Instantly she entered and raced up the steep steps to the second floor, where she found herself upon a crowded landing.

  At the far end of the landing she saw a sign: Gallerie Amel: Objets de pop-op revisité. And she knew at once that she was in an art gallery—a place she had always planned one day to visit, though under somewhat better circumstances. …

  Still—one kills where one can and dies where one must, as the old saying has it. Therefore, without a backward glance, Caroline pushed her way to the head of the line, ignored the outraged mutters of the incensed standees, and showed a card to the uniformed attendant who was controlling and calming the human traffic.

  The attendant glanced at the card, with one of which each Victim (as well as each Hunter) is issued, allowing them Emergency Rights of Ingress or Egress while actively and legally engaged in saving their own lives or destroying another’s. He nodded. Caroline took back her card and entered the gallery.

  She forced herself to slow down, to pick up a catalogue, to make some attempt to control her breathing. She put on a pair of glasses, pulled her coat more tightly around her rounded shoulders and moved slowly through the conjoined roo
ms of the gallery.

  Her glasses, lightly tinted, were the recently devised “See-Around” model, which afforded the wearer an approximation of 360-degree vision, with minor but annoying blind spots at 42 and 83 degrees, and with an area of distortion extending straight ahead from 350 to 10 degrees. But even though the glasses were annoying and capable of producing severe headaches, there was no denying their usefulness. For through them Caroline spotted her Hunter some 30 feet behind her.

  Yes, it was he, her own Asiatic plague, his white suit drenched with perspiration and his shantung tie pulled slightly awry. But his lethal camera was still clutched tightly to his chest, and he moved forward with the relentless stalk of a feral beast, his eyes narrowed from slits to crannies and his smooth high forehead creased in concentration.

  Caroline moved with casual haste, putting a crowd of art viewers between herself and her North Kwangtung nemesis.

  But John Chinaman had seen, and now he moved straight toward the crowd behind which Caroline had taken refuge. His lips were tightly compressed, and his eyes had narrowed still further, to the point where he could see very little.

  But he could see that his Victim was not in the crowd. She had eluded him, she had gone. … Ah, even so! A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. Past the crowd there was a single door. Upon seeing it, he arrived at the solution to his problem in a sudden satorilike flash of intuition, with no need for the tedious intermediate steps of Western-style logic. She had gone in there! And so, grimly, but with a faint hint of future compassion, he also went in there.

  He found himself staring at a display of wax dummies—real wax, apparently, the same substance that had been used in the Time of the Ancients. He stared at the dummies, decompressing the muscles around his eyes to afford himself better vision. The figures were all of women, very attractive (by Western standards) and scantily clad (by any standards). They seemed to be portraying various postures of a dance of some sort. “Strip-tease,” the placard proclaimed, “the Spurious Metamorphosis. 1945: Age of Innocence; 1965: Rust and Moth; 1970: Renascence of Cartilege; 1980: Informal Defiance of Formality. …”

  He gazed upon this scene, and found it barely comprehensible to eyes trained to recognize the beauty of lacquered forests, miniature stillborn rivers, stylized clutching cranes. … But there was one thing he did recognize.

  One of those models, the third from the left, had a long blonde bang half hiding her face; and at her feet was that telltale black sable coat.

  The celestial hesitated no longer. His camera-gun was raised and positioned. He touched the firing stud and blasted away, three shots grouped in a two-inch circle around the midriff; nice work by anybody’s standards.

  So it was done, he had accomplished the kill, he had succeeded, he—

  One of the wax dummies on the far end of the line came suddenly and disconcertingly to life. The dummy whirled; it was Caroline, half clad, the upper half of her comely body concealed only by a strangely shaped metal brassière reminiscent of the one worn by Wilma, the legendary wife of Buck Rogers.

  Caroline’s was a more practical garment than that archetypical brassière of yore; for as she faced the startled Hunter, each breast piece fired a single shot. And the Hunter barely had time to say, “Even so, one begins to understand,” before he keeled over, as dead as yesterday’s mackerel in today’s fish store.

  A number of onlookers had, of course, been looking on. Now one remarked to another: “I consider that a vulgar kill.”

  The spoken-to replied: “Not in the slightest. It’s a campy kill, if you will forgive the archaism.”

  “Neat but gaudy,” the first replied. “One could, I suppose, call it a fin de siècle kill. Eh?”

  “Most assuredly,” the second onlooker replied, “if one had a taste for baggy-pants analogy.”

  Crushed, the first onlooker turned away with hauteur and began examining a retrospective display of NASA products.

  Caroline retrieved her black sable (which several women in the audience had recognized as dyed muskrat), blew smoke from the twin recessed barrels of her breast-piece guns, pulled her clothing into order, picked up her coat, and stepped down from the mannequin dais.

  The crowd, for the most part, had ignored the entire business; these were the genuine art lovers who would not allow their esthetic contemplations to be disturbed by minor and external matters.

  A policeman arrived with all deliberate speed, walked up to Caroline and asked: “Hunter or Victim?”

  “Victim,” Caroline said, and gave him her card.

  The policeman nodded, bent down over the Chinese’s body and removed his wallet. Within it he found a similar card. Upon it he marked a large X. On Caroline’s card he punched a star-shaped hole beneath a row of similar holes, then handed her back her card.

  “Nine hunts, eh, miss?” he said in an avuncular manner.

  “That’s right, Officer,” Caroline said demurely.

  “Well, that’s real nice going and you made a real nice kill,” the policeman said. “Not a messy butcher’s job like some people do. Personally, I like to see a good workmanlike job, in killing or cooking or repairing shoes or anything else. Now then, what do you want to do about the prize money?”

  “Oh, just have the Ministry credit it to my account,” Caroline said.

  “I’ll notify them,” the policeman said. “Nine kills! Just one more to go, huh?”

  Caroline nodded. By now a small crowd had formed around her, pushing the policeman out of the way. They were all women; a female Hunter was not unknown, but was still rare enough to cause attention.

  They babbled their appreciation, and Caroline accepted it graciously for several minutes. But then she found that she was very tired. No normal person ever becomes completely inured to the emotional drain of a kill.

  “Thank you all very much,” she said, “but now I really must go home and lie down. Mr. Policeman, would you mind terribly sending me the Hunter’s necktie? I’d like it for a souvenir.”

  “To hear is to obey,” the policeman replied promptly, and he cleared a way for her through the maddening throng, which followed her all the way to the nearest taxi.

  Five minutes later a small bearded man wearing a corduroy suit and French pumps entered the room. He gazed around, bewildered, at the empty gallery; hadn’t they said this show was going to be a sellout? Never mind. He began examining the exhibits.

  He nodded knowingly as he passed the various paintings, statues, and exhibits. He stopped when he came to the Chinese corpse, sprawled in the middle of the floor and still bleeding slightly. He stared at it long and thoughtfully, looked for and did not find it in his catalogue, and decided it must have arrived too late to be listed. He looked closely, thought deeply, and then made up his mind.

  “Merely architectonic,” he stated authoritatively. “Effective, perhaps, but only barely this side of maudlin.”

  He passed on into the next room.

  2

  What is so fair as a day in June? Today we can answer that question both qualitatively and definitively. Fairer by far is a day in Rome in mid-October, when Venus is ascendant in the House of Mars, and the tourists, lemminglike, have completed their mysterious annual migration and are now (most of them) homeward bound to the dank and wretched lands that gave them birth.

  Some of these seekers after sunlight and the illusion of warmth stay on, however. They give their pitiable excuses: a play, a party, a concert one should not miss, an audience with this one or that one. But the real reasons are always the same. Rome has an ambiance, puerile yet unmatchable. Rome hints at the possibility of becoming the main actor in the drama of one’s own life. (The hint is false, of course; but the stolider northern cities do not even possess the hint.)

  Baron Erich Seigfried von Richtoffen was thinking of none of this. His features portrayed little except an habitual irritation. Germany annoyed him (slackness), France disgusted him (filthiness), and Italy both annoyed and disgusted him (slackness, filthiness,
egalitarianism, decadence). He came to Italy every year; despite its irreparable faults, it was one of the least revolting places he could think of. And besides, it had the annual International Horse Show in the Piazza di Sienna.

  The baron was a superb horseman. (Had not his ancestors trampled peasants into the mud beneath the ironclad hooves of their destriers?) He was in the stables now, and he could hear a fanfare of trumpets as the mounted carabinieri paraded through the piazza in their resplendent uniforms.

  The baron was extremely irritated just at the moment, for he was standing in his stocking feet and waiting for one of the grooms (you can never find those fellows when you need them) to bring back his boots. The accursed fellow had been gone for 18 minutes, 32 seconds, according to the Accutron on the baron’s wrist; how long did it take to shine a pair of boots? In Germany (or rather, in the town Richtoffenstein, which the baron considered the only remaining fragment of the true Germany), boots could be shined to near perfection in an average time of 7 minutes 14 seconds. This sort of delay made a man want to weep or rage, or intimidate someone, or do something. …

  “Enrico!” the baron shouted, in a voice that could have been heard as far afield as the Campo di Mars. “Enrico, blast your eyes, where are you!”

  Someone calling, no reply. … In the piazza, a fancy dude of a Mexican was bowing to the judges. It was the baron’s turn next. But he had no boots, damn it, he had no boots!

  “Enrico, you scum, advance yourself to this place on the instant or there will be blood shed this night!” the baron shouted. It was a long sentence to shout, and he was quite winded at the end of it. He listened for a reply.

  And where was the elusive Enrico? Under the grandstand, putting the final gloss on a pair of riding boots so beautiful that they could not help but put any rider to shame. Enrico was a wizened old man, originally from Emilia, brought to Rome by popular demand. It was generally acknowledged that no one knew as much about the art of polishing (not even those adepts who followed the Zen Approach to the Art of Gloss) as Enrico.