The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 2 Read online

  * * *

  Thank you for downloading this eBook.

  Find out about free book giveaways, exclusive content, and amazing sweepstakes! Plus get updates on your favorite books, authors, and more when you join the Simon & Schuster Teen mailing list.

  CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE

  or visit us online to sign up at

  eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com/teen

  * * *

  TO

  G.W.R.

  (AS BEFORE)

  APOLOGIA

  POOR ZEBULON FINCH! • A man named Héctor cements him into a hidden space beneath one of the World Trade Center skyscrapers, where Zebulon begins to write his confession. • Born in 1879 to the well-heeled dynamitier Bartholomew Finch and the dour Abigail Finch, but raised by stifling tutors, he runs away at age fourteen. • Eager for adventure, he joins Chicago’s Black Hand gang and falls in love with Wilma Sue, a prostitute at Patterson’s Inn. • He mistreats her, she vanishes, and he steals an Excelsior pocket watch—Wilma Sue’s heart, he comes to think. • Heartbroken, he dedicates himself to extortion, terrorizing those he calls the “Triangulinos,” proud Italian immigrants with triangle tattoos. • On May 7, 1896, he is assassinated by the Black Hand’s Luca Testa (or so he believes!), who’d warned him, You gotta have fear in your heart.

  Zebulon’s mysteriously resurrected body is dredged from Lake Michigan and sold to Dr. Whistler’s Pageant of Health, helmed by the Barker. • Renamed the Astonishing Mr. Stick, Zebulon is used as a human pincushion to sell miracle tonic. • He befriends Little Johnny Grandpa, a prematurely aged boy. • Johnny helps Zebulon relearn how to speak, first with a futile trinket called the Little Miracle Electric Mexican Stuttering Ring, and second with the word “indefatigable.” • While defending Johnny from the Barker, Zebulon discovers la silenziosità, an ability to force others to glimpse their future demise, but that also forces Zebulon to endure the Uterus of Time, a tantalizing look at a death he cannot have. • Medicine-show skeptics jail Zebulon in Xenion, Georgia, where he uses la silenziosità to help the unhinged General Hazard. • Released, Zebulon is visited by the wealthy Dr. Cornelius Leather, who pleads for Zebulon to decamp to Boston for medical study. • Instead, Luca Testa hunts down Zebulon and delivers unnerving news: He wasn’t Zebulon’s killer! • The Barker, tired of Mr. Stick, contrives a lucrative way to do away with Zebulon—a duel. • In the chaos, however, Johnny is killed, the Barker is maimed, and Zebulon absconds to Boston.

  Dr. Leather houses Zebulon and uses a Revelation Almanac to track “meat etiquette”—experiments intended to unveil Zebulon’s mystical secrets. • He shows Zebulon the People Garden, where he studies corpses in assorted states of decay. • Zebulon finds comfort with Leather’s kindly wife, Mary, who is dedicated to her daughter, Gladys. • A scolding teenager named Merle arrives with shocking news: She is the daughter of Zebulon and the deceased Wilma Sue! •Leather’s obsession grows and drives the family, now including Merle, toward financial ruin. • Leather begins wearing an oxygen-delivery helmet called the Isolator, which emits a haunting rasp: Hweeeeee . . . fweeeeee. . . . • A dinner with the influential Dr. Cockshut is a fiasco. Leather, desperate to prove himself, cuts open Zebulon’s stomach at the table. • Merle persuades Zebulon to flee under cover of night; there is no time to fetch the Little Miracle Electric Mexican Stuttering Ring. • Mary and Gladys are left to uncertain fates.

  Zebulon and Merle take refuge in Salem, Massachusetts, until the ireful Merle flees. • Unmoored, Zebulon seeks out General Hazard, who has died, but his daughters, the Hazard sisters, welcome Zebulon to Sweetgum Plantation. • WWI begins, and Zebulon chooses battlefield annihilation; he uses the sisters’ connections to enlist in the Marine Corps. • In France, he befriends Burt “Church” Churchwell, meets would-be poet Jason Stavros, and learns to accept the shell-shocked J.T. “Piano” O’Hannigan. • Church’s Theory of 17 hypothesizes that Zebulon must rescue as many people as he has killed. • Zebulon, though, is forced to renounce the theory to save the life of Church, who is badly disfigured but survives.

  Post-war Prohibition finds Zebulon running hooch in a Tin Lizzie auto for bootleggers John Quincy and Mother Mash—until the KKK hangs both of them. • Zebulon nonetheless delivers their last shipment to New York City, where he moves into a squalid apartment with the jobless Church, who now wears a prosthetic cheek. • A man known as the Bird Hunter begins murdering flappers, and Detective Roseborough suspects Zebulon. • Zebulon pursues the Bird Hunter, only to discover that he is Dr. Leather. • Just as Leather is about to divulge the secret behind Zebulon’s extended death, Roseborough arrives and kills Leather.

  The notoriety of the Bird Hunter case leads to a Metrotone newsreel produced about Zebulon. • Enticed by fame, Zebulon abandons Church for Hollywood, where he catches the fancy of movie star Bridey Valentine; they become lovers. • Bridey’s passion is to produce an epic script she’s written called In Our Image. • After Bridey begins having cosmetic surgery, Zebulon, too, seeks out physical repairs, from director (and avid taxidermist) Maximilian Chernoff. • The treatments fail. • Seeking peace, Zebulon brings Church to Hollywood, only to watch Bridey try to seduce him. • Zebulon tosses Church into a cab and finally has sex with Bridey, which robs him of his procreative organ.

  Out of the blue, Merle calls Zebulon. She is nearby, held for ransom by the morphine dealer Sandy. • Zebulon kills Sandy and rescues Merle, though she rejects him for the Barker, who has reinvented himself as a burlesque promoter. • Despite being pursued by police, Zebulon escorts Bridey’s melancholy daughter, Margeaux, to a school dance. • Margeaux’s humiliation results, and Margeaux steers her mother’s Yankee Doodle roadster into the ocean. • Margeaux drowns; Zebulon cannot. • A young man drags Zebulon to the beach and tells him that Pearl Harbor has been bombed. • Will he enlist? • Zebulon thinks another war might be just the ticket. •How much longer, after all, can his Excelsior-watch heart keep ticking?

  PART SEVEN

  1941–1945

  In Which Your Hero Is Indoctrinated Into Matters Of Blood And Soil And His Breadcrumbs Are Lost In The Blackest Forest.

  I.

  ADOLF HITLER WAS A HANDSOME devil. It is a fact obscured by a half century of reckless caricature: his tenacious ball-peen chin lathed into a pusillanimous nub, his modest nose protracted to a frankfurter proboscis, his imperial cranium inflated with hot air. Distortions like these muddle objective autopsies. Hitler—take my word for it—was not lumpish. The brash asymmetry of his jaw suggested a brawler’s grit. His eyes were the passionate azure of a revolutionary. His ears were elfin, the one tell of his artist’s disposition. Had der Führer’s passions been channeled into pursuits more, shall we say, romantic, his scowl would have been one destined for T-shirts.

  My Dearest, Dutiful, Patient Reader might be reading this one hundred, one thousand, one million years into the future, yet still I feel you cringe at the possibility that your Zebby has gone anti-Semite. Oh, darling worrier! You paint my disdain with too meager a brush. You should know by now that I am anti-Human, certain to my corroded core that our species, Jew to Gentile, true-blue to hateful, and black to tan, deserves extinction. I, our worst specimen, would volunteer to go first, if only Gød, that waggish hangman, would let me hang.

  Let me try to resist aggrandizement. I admit to being oblivious to Hitler’s magnetism when a mousy member of a clandestine arm of the U.S. Government removed the dictator’s photo from a dossier marked J-1121 and asked me if I could identify him.

  If you have tracked my insipid saga this many pages, Reader, you will be unruffled to learn that by January 1942, I found myself in
the cold custody of Uncle Sam. After having flopped from the ocean grave of sweet, bitter—bittersweet—Margeaux, I’d taken the gee-whiz counsel of the young buck who’d rescued me and, after slapping down sand-crusted dollars for a set of clean clothes, had slunk, paranoid and fearful, to the Army recruiting center in Malibu. Not two days had passed since I’d killed a drug dealer named Sandy (plus an inexact number of his goons) while rescuing my morphine-addled daughter, Merle; the quicker I could be shipped off to foreign shores, the better.

  But the lax white flesh that usually provoked the living to ignore me drew scrutiny when I queued among healthy young men with dazzling Southern California tans. I avoided their glares by studying the cheery banners (SMACK THE JAPS! GIVE THE HUNS HELL!) until I was called to sit opposite a recruiter. Rotten luck. His suspicion stunk like sewage. Sadness and regret over Margeaux’s death rendered me a careless stammerer, and, without thinking, I supplied my real name. He promptly excused himself and whistled for assistance, and before I could skedaddle, a posse of MPs had pinched me, and off to the local jail I was lugged.

  They were not my first cell doors, and yet they made me afraid, both of a long (centuries long?) incarceration and of the guinea-pig procedures to which I might be subject by hot-to-trot medicos. Concurrently, I knew that embracing fright was the only option. You gotta have fear in your heart had been Luca Testa’s reverberant reminder that fear—for myself, yes, but more powerfully for select others—was the single taut rope to humanity from which I dangled.

  In that holding cell I feared, and fiercely, my friend, fiercely!

  Shock, however, became the emotion du jour when I was brought before interrogators, government clowns in tailored suits, and saw that they had a file on me, and goodness, was it a brick. With horror I watched them pass around such artifacts as a blurry group photo of my beloved Seventh Marine Regiment in a French trench and magazine pages detailing my parasitic fastening to the arm of Bridey Valentine—grotesque grandstanding I ought never have done. Each flash of image was a pounded nail.

  “Please,” was all I could say. Say? No, beg. “Please put it away.”

  Their questions, however, were more cagey than accusatory. Who else knew the truth about me? Why had I been enlisting? What were my political affiliations? Easy queries to satisfy, but for once I kept my cold lips sewed shut. As reward, I was stripped, photographed from every angle (including ones emphasizing my peckerless groin), showered, deloused, decked in prison stripes, and robbed of my every possession, right down to the Excelsior pocket watch, surrogate heart of my dearest departed Wilma Sue: tick, tick, tick.

  “It is no weapon,” beseeched I. “Let me keep it? Show me mercy?”

  The Excelsior was dropped inside an envelope that was licked, sealed, and bagged.

  My carcass, bereft enough to feel filleted, was tossed into the empty stomach of a paddy wagon. I let the hum of pavement lull me into a stupor. Hours became days; hundreds of miles we drove, if not thousands. The vehicle’s stale asceticism drew contrast with the fireworks spectacle of war, the neon jitterbug of Harlem, the floodlit marquees of Hollywood, and afforded me time to bid farewell to what had been, on balance, a colorful death. I guessed that where I was headed would be more achromatic. It was red lights and stop signs and gas-station breaks I cursed, for at every pause I swore I heard the clack of women’s heels—Wilma Sue, Merle, Bridey, or Margeaux?—approaching to demand recompense for how I’d maligned them.

  Years later, it seemed, the paddy wagon parked and the back doors opened. I was cold and numb and befuddled. The whimsical green fronds of palm trees had been replaced by alien veils of brilliant white snow, and the distant obelisk of the Washington Monument was a rocket ship built to fire my troublesome corpse to Mars.

  That just might work, thought I.

  My closed-mouthed captors marched me through a nondescript doorway, between saluting soldiers, past bolt-locked checkpoints, down sentried stairwells, and into a long, low-ceilinged basement of cafeteria tables and benches, a room concrete gray and cigarette-smoke brown, yet pulsing violet from overhead tubes soon to be marketed as “fluorescents.” The only daubs of color were orange ceiling stains from plumbing leakage.

  It was a vault built to survive a bombing, and, at the same time, it sucked away all will to live. I was told to sit. I sat. My escorts exited. I looked at the other tables, where a dozen men dressed in identical outfits of loosened black tie and rolled white shirtsleeves wolfed cigarettes and grimaced into paper cups of coffee. Fluorescents made their skin yellow; nicotine made their teeth yellow; they gestured with yellow pencils at yellow file folders containing yellow paper. All the while, perspiring men in civilian clothing sat opposite, gobbling their fingernails and nickering in fright.

  Presently I received my own shirt-sleeved chaperon of wearying mediocrity—late thirties, muscle-less, balding, wire eyeglasses, black tie, sweat-stained collar. So interchangeable was he with his associates that the bloom of red ink inside his breast pocket seemed a dazzling rose boutonnière. He padded his tedious way across the tedious room, sat, and slid aside the tedious ashtray to make room for his tedious briefcase. He dialed the combination locks, withdrew the bulging J-1121 dossier, showed me the aforementioned photo of Hitler, and then, satisfied that I was not a vegetable, introduced himself.

  His name was Allen Rigby, and he undertook my case with all the emotion of someone taking out the trash. Like everyone else in the 1940s, Rigby smoked, but he did so as if the fate of the free world depended on it. The functionary lit a second cig off the first’s smolder, and gestured with it at the room. He spoke as if a puppeteer’s hand were operating from up his ass, giving so little inflection to his words that I had to demand that he repeat them.

  “You’re at OSS,” said he.

  “Oh-what-what?”

  “Office of Strategic Services. An intelligence agency.”

  I was jumpy and at a disadvantage. My defense, as ever, was rudeness.

  “Intelligence, eh? Someone should inform those goons in L.A. who manhandled me.”

  Nicotine had withered the lobes of Rigby’s brain designed to detect sarcasm.

  “They had to make sure you weren’t a double-agent SS operative.”

  “An excess operative? What is that, a triple agent? A quadruple agent?”

  “SS.” He exhaled smoke. “You do know what the SS is?”

  On top of all other indignities, I had to feel stupid? I shrugged my disinterest.

  He regarded me, blank as a sheet, then took up a clipboard.

  “Define these terms: ‘Deutschland.’ ”

  “ ‘Deutschland.’ ” I rubbed my chin. “Deutschland, Deutschland. By Jove, I know! It was where Dorothy Gale met her Wizard.”

  Rigby made a check mark. How about that? I’d aced it!

  “ ‘Aryan,’ ” said he.

  “ ‘ Aryan.’ . . . That, I believe, is a species of bird. No—a brand of tobacco. No, no—definitely a bird.”

  Another check mark. Why, I was faring splendidly!

  “ ‘Rudolf Hess,’ ” said he.

  “The full name of Santa’s red-nosed reindeer. This is enjoyable, Rigby. Ask me another!”

  To the contrary, Rigby set the clipboard several feet away, as if it were infected. Had my answers been insufficient? I could, at least, depend on the man’s comatose civility: He lit a third, perhaps fourth, cigarette and began to lecture with such remedial slowness that I identified the weight on my head as a dunce cap.

  “The men who arraigned you in California were X-2, OSS counterintelligence. Their counterpart here in Washington is SI, Secret Intelligence. There’s also R&A, Research and Analysis; they’ve got a man who can estimate bomb damage to European railways by tracking the price of oranges in Paris. MO is Morale Ops, anti-propaganda. Recently they air-dropped German songbooks over Nazi soldiers and hid in the lyrics advice for deserting. Finally there’s SO, where I work—Secret Ops. That one we can’t talk about so freely.”


  Now our disquisition was skipping off into worrisome woods. Some sort of plot was afoot, and my death, as you know, was already overplotted. Deportation and destruction, that was all I wanted as punishment for my evil deeds! Rigby paused to ash his cig, and I slapped my thighs (the right thigh, blown apart in 1918 but taxidermied in 1939, made a thunk) and stood into the violet vapor.

  “ ’Tis a pity we must part, for as a conversationalist, sir, you scintillate. But as it is clear that my aptitudes and proclivities do not align to government standards, I shall monopolize no more of your time. Before I take leave, your colleagues cadged from me a golden pocket watch of sentimental value. Might you know where I can collect it?”

  From the briefcase Rigby removed a stapled packet, and, in his deadpan, he read, “Alexander Griffith. Aka ‘Sandy.’ Forty-four. Dead on the scene, December 6, Los Angeles County, California. Cause of death, gunshot to the chest. Firearm recovered reported to be Griffith’s own. Multiple witnesses identify the gunman as a suspect approximately seventeen years of age calling himself  ‘Zebulon Finch.’ ”

  Rigby indicated the packet.

  “There are more pages,” said he.

  I dropped back onto the bench.

  “Say what you want,” growled I. “Your X-2 chums took plenty of photographs. My corpse is a bag and the cat is out of it. Why do you hold me here?”

  “OSS doesn’t hold anyone. The choice is yours.”

  “Choice? I think the word you mean is ‘blackmail.’ Tell me what it is you want.”

  Rigby squared the paper edges. He was a crackerjack edge-squarer.

  “I am not at liberty to say.”

  “So I am to wait, is that it? In this dungeon?”

  Rigby’s face was a blank chalkboard across which I wished to squeal my fingernails. I gnashed my teeth and, to my surprise, a single comma of sympathy contracted upon Rigby’s forehead. He lowered his already low voice.