Nowhere by Thomas Berger Read Free Book Online

before the firing squad. Other people kill, torture, mutilate, yet never hear a word of criticism, but let me just take a little drink and I’m a criminal.” He bent in the ever so careful movement of the drunk and deposited the empty bottle in a little wastecan under the desk. Then he went to an opened suitcase that lay on the bed and began to root through the clothing therein. “Rats,” he gasped, growing more desperate and eventually hurling the valise’s contents onto the coverlet. “Did you bring only one bottle?”
    “I wasn’t even permitted to bring a change of clothing,” I told him indignantly, remembering my plight. “I assume I can get outfitted on one your local accounts.”
    “This is your luggage,” he said in disgust. “It beat us here from the airport.”
    “Mine?” Except what I was wearing, tan corduroys and a knitted shirt in dark green, my own wardrobe, such as it had been, had perished in the explosion in New York. That Rasmussen had had time to collect the contents of this valise suggested that he had prepared for my mission far in advance of my being informed of it. The realization did nothing for my souring mood.
    “Kindly get away from my possessions,” I told McCoy. “I gather you have just drained the bottle the Firm included for my own medicinal uses.”
    McCoy sank to a seat on the edge of the bed. “If I don’t get another drink I’m going to die.”
    And he had only just finished a pint of ardent spirits!
    “What you need, my friend,” I told him, “is rather a thorough drying out. I don’t know whether Saint Sebastian has a chapter of the good AA folk, but you must take all possible measures towards eventual teetotalling. I’m no bluenose when it comes to drink, but—”
    He had begun to shake violently. “You f-f-fucking idiot,” he murmured. “I’m dying.” With one great hug of his midsection he hurled himself onto the carpet, writhed fiercely, then went still and silent. I was relieved to see he had passed out: I should have been ill put to deal with delirium tremens.
    I looked through the clothes provided for me. Alas, Rasmussen’s taste, if he had selected them, was deplorable. The jacket was of that madras which is altogether innocent of India, in an awful blue-and-red plaid that has no reference to Scotland. The polyester trousers celebrated the principal bad-taste colors, kelly green, turquoise, and magenta. The loafers were of artificial leather and adorned with tassels. I had not traveled in some years, but I wondered whether the Firm’s idea of typical American tourist attire was up to the minute in an age when quiche and pasta primavera had become popular even in the hinterlands.
    I looked down at McCoy. Could he be genuinely ill? For the first time I actually thought about his having, good God, chug-a-lugged a pint of whiskey in the time it took me to rise on the elevator! I retrieved the empty bottle from the wastecan.
    The label identified its late contents as having been no brand of potable spirits but rather an after-shave lotion cutely packaged to resemble a pint of Scotch. I sniffed at its neck: the odor was certainly lethal.
    I knelt and searched for a pulse at various places on McCoy’s body. I could not find one, nor could I find a house phone when I rose, and when I dashed down the hall to the elevator, there was no response to the finger I pressed repeatedly against the button.
    I found a stairway behind an unmarked door at the end of the corridor and hurled myself down it, two steps per vault. Having miraculously reached the bottom without breaking a bone, I burst into the lobby.
    The corpulent functionary behind the desk leered at me. “Aha, I knew you would change your mind and want the boy after all!”
    “Quick,” I cried, “a doctor! Mr. McCoy has been poisoned.”
    “That is not possible. He only just went to his room.”
    “Don’t argue with me! He’s dying of poison, I say. Call a doctor!”
    The concierge reached