Mack Reynolds: Planetary Agent X

Ordinarily, Billy Antrim’s awakening was instantaneous, as a professional killer’s should be. But now his exhausted body resisted awakening. He muttered something, fretfully.

“Come on, come on, boy. I’m closing up.”

Billy Antrim felt a less than gentle hand shaking him. He came instantly alert, staring at the other, his blue eyes ice.

The attendant he had seen earlier in the other office pulled back his hand quickly. He said, stubbornly, “It’s closing.”

Billy swung his legs around and to the floor.

“Awright,” he muttered. “Gosh, I musta fell asleep.”

The attendant left and Billy made his way back to the dressing rooms and reacquired his belongings. Nothing had been touched.

This was the crucial point, now. Before returning to the entry office, he loosened the gun beneath his jacket, but then assumed a puzzled and repentant expression.

He approached the desk with its payment screen against which to press a credit card.

“Ay, Mac,” he said sorrowfully. “Guess what? I’m sorry, but it looks like I forgot my credit card.”

“Oh, yeah?” The attendant looked at him truculently. “I shoulda noticed. Why, you probably ain’t even got a adult card. Come on, boy. Get that junior I.D. out. You’re not talking yourself out of paying up. I seen dead beats before.”

Billy said doggedly, “I’m sorry, Mac, but like I told you. I musta left it home. I’ll pay you tomorrow.”

“I never even seen you before. I’m calling the police, sonny. Nobody’s walking out on this business.” He reached for a switch.

Billy Antrim had two alternatives. The butt of the gun was within inches of his right hand. But a new killing would bring down the fuzz-yokes, and they were already too close behind for comfort.

He said hurriedly, “Look. This here ring. It’s a star sapphire. I’ll let you keep it, until tomorrow. Then I’ll come back and pay off.”

The other’s eyes narrowed in greed. “Okay, boy. I trust you. You know how it is.”

“Yeah, sure,” Billy said bitterly. “I know how it is.” He turned and left.

His mother had given him the ring. Back when they had been flush once. He suspected it had been given to her by a male admirer, most likely a lover, but it was the only thing he still possessed to keep alive the memory of Ruth Antrim, the one person he had ever loved. Now it was gone.

What had happened to Ruth Antrim? After Big Luigi had shipped her off, Billy had never heard. She had probably written him, she would have written, but he suspected Luigi Agrigento had confiscated any such mail. Luigi at the time was amusing himself by educating the boy in the traditions of the Maffeo, and in the use of the gun, the knife, the sap.

It was dark on the street. Warily, Billy Antrim trudged along, portraying the schoolboy who had dropped off at a theater and was now making his way on home.

He had no time to be thinking of Ruth Antrim and Luigi Agrigento, but for the moment he couldn’t keep them from his mind. For the past three days fingers of doubt had been touching sensitive spots in his mind. While still a member of the Maffeo machine of Palermo, it had been easy enough to rationalize his way of life. The things he did were by order of Big Luigi himself, weren’t they? And Luigi Agrigento was the most important man on Palermo. It was as simple as that. What Big Luigi said was law.

But now, as a victim of the machine, rather than a cog in it, the injustice of the Maffeo way was more evident.

Billy Antrim sneered at himself, in sour self-deprecation. He was a rat on the run. Why not face reality? He was scum that the decent members of the race had to mop up. And then, contradictorily, he told himself in braggadocio that they’d have their work cut out in the mopping.

“One chance in a million,” he muttered.

It was getting too late for a schoolboy to be out. He’d be the more conspicuous by hanging onto the guise. He dropped the books into a waste disposal chute, straightened up and walked with a swagger, and as though he had already had two or three drinks before going out on the town seriously.

With luck, he decided, he might be able to crash a party. A party that would provide food and drink, though drink he could do without. Even at the most secure of times, a little alcohol went far with Billy Antrim. He could afford no blurred edges now.

He didn’t find the party, but he did as well.

A middle-aged, slightly overweight, overly-blonde, overly-dressed madonna of the cocktail lounges allowed him to pick her up. In fact, she couldn’t have been more obviously approachable had she dropped her handkerchief. She reminded him of someone, but he couldn’t finger the resemblance.

In their early preliminaries, she giggled archly and said, “I must be robbing the cradle. Why, you can’t…”

Billy was looking his most adult. “I know I look young. Always have. I guess when I get up into my fifties, I’ll be glad. Now it’s a pain in the neck. Anyhow, I’m twenty-five. And I’ll bet you’re not any older.”

She giggled again. “Well, to tell you the truth…”

“Call me Jimmy,” he said.

“All right. I’m Betty Ann. To tell you the truth, Jimmy, I’m twenty-five too.”

She was a good twenty years senior to that, Billy decided cynically.

“How about a drink?”

“We don’t have to go any further than in there, Jimmy,” she laughed, indicating the nearest auto-bar. “You know, I’m glad we met. I think we’re going to have fun. Wasn’t it a coincidence?”

It turned out that he had left his, credit card at home.

She laughed at that, too. At the edge of forty-three, Betty Ann had picked up the bills before. She didn’t particularly mind any more. Her need was for young men and to indulge it she had found long since that the best bet was to haunt the poorer sections of the city—and to be quick and willing to press her own credit card to the payment screen.

He spent the night at her apartment. Not that it did her much good. In spite of his youth, and what she had hoped would prove his prowess as a lover, it was as a deep sleeper that he turned out to be a veritable phenomenon. Betty Ann was disgusted.

In the morning she fed him breakfast, sitting across the breakfast nook from him, taking no more than coffee for herself.

In the light of day, without cosmetics, she was fully her age. Perhaps even a bit older in appearance than reality, for the past ten years had been hard ones, filled as they were with desperate attempt to halt the flight of youth in parties, in alcohol, in hard pursuit of Eros. It was all Billy could do to bring his eyes to her face, even as he wolfed a prodigious breakfast of six eggs, a full quart of milk, six or eight slices of bacon and as many of toast, with butter and marmalade.

He had placed who she reminded him of, now that he saw her in morning’s unkindly light. Ruth Antrim. His mother after playing the late hour shows; tired and disheveled and caring nothing—except for him, of course.

Betty Ann watched him wearily as he ate. “What did you plan on doing today?” she said finally. There was no girlish giggle in her voice now, only the weariness of a middle-aged woman who wouldn’t, who couldn’t, quite give up as yet.

He looked up at her, quickly looked down again. “I don’t know,” he said. Then, slowly, “You’re a lot of fun.”

“No, I’m not,” she said.

“Sure you are. Why don’t we just hang around here today? It’s my day off. We’ll hang around and have a lot of laughs.”

“And tonight you’d spend here again, eh?”

“Well, sure.”

“I’m afraid not, Billy.”

His eyes were blue ice. “The name’s Jimmy.”

“Kids named Jimmy don’t carry guns with the front sight filed away and the forepart of the trigger guard, so as not to get in the way of a quick draw.”