Farnsworth’s Revenge

Chapter One A Fine Fix I told myself my life needed more silliness. But the thing is, when you hook up with silliness in real life, it isn’t all that funny. At least, not to me. You, you’d probably get a kick out of it. You see, at this particular time, my outward circumstances were far too serious. I was on the run, and the silly part was, I wasn’t entirely sure why. If you’re going to demand that my story make sense, you might as well stop here and return this book for a full refund. That is, provided you didn’t borrow it or swipe it or download it from Zero-Buck dot com. Mind you, I don’t mind. Going viral isn’t the worst that could happen to me, at this point. Good thing no one bothers to look for you in a tacky two-star hotel on the rue Mouffetard. The fellow at the desk kept my passport, but then the passport isn’t really mine, is it? (The more information, the sillier it gets.) Sharing a WC with a ragtag collection of local pimps and drug peddlers and the occasional misdirected tourist is a small price to pay for anonymity. You get a crapper and a sink. If you want to shower, you ask the clerk to book a ten-minute drizzle for you in the drafty little bath downstairs. Maybe silly isn’t the word. Pathetic? According to the news reports, Interpol had grabbed my mentor and partner in crime, Dr. Dieter Zittpopper, after we’d both fled separately to Europe. I was beginning to suspect that wasn’t his real name. The high-toned charitable foundation I’d headed (in name only) had melted down to reveal its rotten core as a money laundry for anonymous folks in the Secret Government. The plan all along, I eventually guessed, was to set me up to take the fall for their misdeeds. Summoned by mysterious benefactors to Switzerland at the last moment, I was then furnished with an escape route, a fake passport, and a small wad of highly spendable euros. At the meeting place in the foothills above Geneva, I found out more than I wanted to know about who was behind the scam, including but not limited to Valerie aka Vivi aka VV, a willowy, flesh-and-blood, fire-haired babe from my recent past whom I should have avoided when she so generously gave me an opening. And there by her side was none other than my long-disappeared father, the mystery man, the investment-scheme mastermind whom both crimestoppers and crooks were looking for but none of them could apprehend, much less prosecute. He was either the force behind the scam that ensnared me or simply a lucky latecomer who skimmed off its profits. Even though, as I often say, paranoia is just a heightened state of awareness, I was not sufficiently paranoid to think that he’d engineered it all from the beginning. But I had no trouble believing that, learning his son had stumbled into the weeds, he’d found a way to make hay. I never found out, and he was gone again. With Valerie or without, I didn’t know that either. As far as I knew, there was not yet a warrant for my arrest. Evidently I was not a suspect so much as a “person of interest.” And no telling what Zitts might be telling them at this moment so he could cut a better deal for himself. Let’s just say I wasn’t going to schedule any public appearances. There’s something about a minimally furnished hotel room in an overpriced city where you can’t afford to go out that gives a person time to reflect. I started to think about Felicia. I didn’t want to think of her as my ex, because she’s not ex, at least not yet, I don’t think. In her mind, are we still married? Does she think I’m never coming back? Ever since we’d gotten together, I’d kept her in the dark about my business dealings. In the beginning, it was because I had no idea what was going on. Then, after I began to suspect there were rats in the back room, I told her as little as possible so she wouldn’t be implicated. Especially since I still don’t know who was pulling the strings. I would have liked to put our relationship in a locked drawer somewhere, like a cherished piece of family jewelry, something I could come back to and fondle lovingly. Not exactly the way you should treat people. And she was my only link to getting money after the euros ran out. Yes, that’s right, I use her. Is that love because she permits it? Is any contact better than none? I’d been keeping in touch with her by clandestine means. Despite our forced separation, she was aiding and abetting my flight from the Keppelhoffer mess. Does she think I’m an embezzler? Does she still love me even though she now knows I hid my growing suspicions about my employers from her? Two days ago, her coded email said Farnsworth had contacted her (I’m not sure just how). He said he wanted a meeting, and right away. He was in the south of France. Did he know I was in Paris? Didn’t his request imply he knew I was more or less in the neighborhood? He should be thanking me, but I feared he had more sinister intentions than a pleasant chat. I was pretty sure he wanted to screw me back, in what I hoped was only a figurative sense. You would think old Farnsworth would have no need of revenge. After all, I was the one who caused the love of his life to be literally dug up from her premature grave at Forest Lawn and restored to her honored place at his side. Weren’t the two of them even now blissfully tooling around the Mediterranean on his yacht—only because of me? I’d procured her in the first place. And, yes, I’d caused her to be buried. He did blame me for that. Technically, I was not her original owner. She was purchased on Hector’s credit card. But he would not have gone to the trouble of ordering a seven-thousand-dollar-plus rubber doll if I hadn’t needed a sexy prop to make Felicia jealous. Yes, making her jealous was Hector’s idea originally. And my idea to dress the doll up to look like the most famous pair of t**s in Hollywood and drive her around town in a hastily borrowed Bentley actually did have the intended effect. On the plus side, Felicia was indeed jealous. On the negative side of the equation, she wrongly assumed (as Hector rightly warned me she would) that I was Monica LaMonica’s latest boy-toy. But all that did was make me look like a gold-digging gigolo, which if I wasn’t so hot for Felicia I’d probably have settled for. I mean, it would have been a step up from my failed careers as a hacker and then lowly car jockey. And it wouldn’t have been half as illegal as the later messes I got myself into. All that was silly enough at the time. Trying to make your (intended) girlfriend jealous with a rubber doll seemed innocent, good fun. But look at the consequences. Far from fluff. Well-laid plans gone awry, for sure. And the worst part, I wasn’t getting laid at all, even though I was getting the credit and the blame. This bed sags in the middle, the mattress long past its prime. The light fixture on the ceiling is full of dead flies. Since I was not finding much humor in my reflections, a nap would be just the thing, if I could stop obsessing. The Pseudo Monica’s not being flesh and blood but silicone and steel did not deter Farnsworth at all in his affections. In fact, the P.M.’s not being human was probably a big plus as far as he was concerned. Remember, before he was fixated on her, he’d directed all his attentions to his shaggy Persian cat Lascivia, who used to be semipermanently installed on his lap. Hey, he was the boss. At least he wasn’t asking any of us to sit there. (Perhaps I was the only one of us to refer to the effigy of Monica LaMonica as the P.M. It amused me to think a casual observer from the UK might assume I was talking instead about the late great Maggie Thatcher. But my P.M. never wore a twinset—not, that is, until much later in this story.) I thought Farnsworth was the least of my worries. Back when I parked cars for him at the hotel, he was my nemesis. Everything was my fault, in one way or another, if you listened to him—including the demise of his cat, which I merely witnessed. Bruno’s jaws did the work. I just scooped her up and drove her to be stuffed, on Farnsworth’s orders, as any loyal company man would do. Why does the world have to be so complicated? Unable to nap, I slipped down to the corner café. It was a sunny afternoon in late August, that time of year when bourgeois Parisians, indeed most of middle-class Europe, are off on extended family vacations. (Seaside-dwelling Brits call them the “bucket-and-shovel brigades.”) So the city is yielded up to throngs of tourists in shorts from the States wandering around the Louvre like mice in a maze, ignoring the unfamiliar paintings on the walls as they sniff their way toward the Mona Lisa cheese. Forsaking a table on the sidewalk, I took a seat at the bar. I resumed my thoughts of Farnsworth and the P.M. and his puerile pelt-toy as I sat sipping a Pernod and watching the TV. It took me one sip to decide it was not going to be my signature drink. They bring you a little pitcher of water along with your shot of golden liqueur. You pour it in, and the mixture looks just like cloudy piss. But it tastes like licorice. Now, the French like licorice-flavored toothpaste, and I’m guessing the drink came first, so that should tell you something. There’s no way these days to avoid the scrolling news ticker. Stock markets all over the Western world were racing for the bottom of the tank. It was like some contest among the scum-sucking bottom feeders of the global economic ecosystem to see which of them could find a tasty morsel in the filthy accumulation of their own greedy s**t. I should have been relieved, or at least unconcerned. I had no money in the market. But problem was, I had almost no money anywhere. (Felicia was staking me from the profits of her business, a business I’d set up for her, so I didn’t feel I was taking advantage all that much. But either her loyalty or her cash reserves would get tapped out, sooner or later.) Oddly, in thinking of Farnsworth I found a kind of inspiration. When I’d worked for him at the hotel—with Hector as my immediate supervisor—the old prune was a man of mystery. He was way past retirement age, but he wasn’t about to quit. Every day you’d find him in that sumptuous paneled office, dressed to the nines in aristo attire, his silver hair pomaded just right, his nails neatly manicured, and enough bling flashing on his wrists and fingers to show he knew just how much jewelry a man could get away with—that is, a watch that cost twenty K, a solid gold bracelet, and a diamond ring with a stone that was anything but dinky, on his pinky. There was the unfortunate episode with the cat, and he weathered that loss with the guts of a Roman soldier. Granted, he fell totally for the rubber babe and was the only one of us who’d ever had her carnally (if that term even applies to tunnels of Venus made of latex). He was crushed emotionally when we had to bury her—which in itself seemed for a good cause. We had to convince the tabloids that Monica was dead so that she could break her contract on The Edge of Endlessness and retire in anonymity to the woods of Tennessee with her high-school sweetheart Merle. (That’s right, with an e, like Oberon or Norman. What—not into trivia? You’re following the wrong guy.) Merle had no other option. It was me who ruined her political career. I really get that it’s not all about me, except when it is. When Hector, Audrey, and I came up with the plan to literally bury the P.M., it seemed like a win-win scheme. Everybody got what he or she wanted—including, not least of all, me. I could finally prove to Felicia that I hadn’t turned pro in the d**k department. We hooked up and would have lived happily ever after—that is, if the ever-after hadn’t gotten so damned complicated. Farnsworth was far more attached to the doll than I ever imagined. He was one of the few players in the game at that point who rightly guessed we’d put the lookalike in a ground in place of the star. And he hated me for it. That’s when his fury got the best of him, he had that stroke, and he had to quit his job at the Palms. I visited him at Happy Manor or whatever that place was called. And from his senseless rant I thought his perverted old brain was just about cooked. But he’s the one who in his apparent delirium warned me about the Dutch. Better than anyone, he foresaw the snares that would eventually entrap me. His paranoia was working overtime, but I just thought he was a raving loon. Having the past buried turned out to be my ace in the hole. I ended up tipping the cops to Monica’s wrongful “death” as a neat way of avoiding confessions to much larger crimes they hardly knew about as yet. As I was making my escape to Europe, the LAPD was digging her up. Then an anonymous bidder bought her at auction and—presto—the tabloids were running pictures of the Hollywood star sunning herself on the deck of Hugo’s boat, the Shameless Palms. But anyone who was a party to the original caper knew that Monica was hiding behind a new identity as Louise Jones, reclusive tenant of a triple-wide mobile home in the backwoods of sour-mash Bourbon country. Anyone who was anyone in this thing—and fortunately there weren’t many of us—knew right away that it was the doll in those paparazzi telephotos of the boat anchored off St. Tropez. (I wonder how much the old coot paid. How much is a fake-but-compliant significant other worth?) But Monica’s fans wanted her to be alive—and, like readers of tabloids and conspiracy theorists everywhere, they believe what they damned well want to believe, and don’t confuse them with the facts. However fervently they may have prayed for her return to daytime TV, they were thrilled and titillated to read about her days toasting her bare t**s in the Mediterranean sun as her doting Onassis puttered away in the hold (or whatever yachties do when they aren’t busy steering). Clarity must have returned to Hugo’s brain. They say the love of a good woman can do that. And maybe a silicone surrogate will work just as well. (Or better? I’ll have to ask him.) So it was Hugo Farnsworth’s damned resilience as a persistent human horndog which impressed me that day as I watched the Dow Jones chart snake through the sludge of the world’s money pit. Farnsworth’s grit, that’s what I need. He knew what he wanted, and he went after it. Shamelessly. Traveling is risky, but so is staying in one place, even if it’s an unremarkable dump, for very long. I’ll go see the old fool. If anyone is in touch with his silly side, it’s Hugo. Start by confessing my admiration for his life choices, tell him how fit he looks, how she hasn’t aged a day. Go along with the game, pretend she’s real, even converse with her, if that’s how he wants it. Best meet the challenge head-on. If he suspects where I am, I can’t have him tipping off the authorities. I want him inside my tent, ejaculating out. But he wanted to screw me. I knew it.