Part Thirty-Seven, Chapters Three and Four - Gris Likes to Whap Little Boys

Gris has stayed up all night watching the Countess Krak making inane conversation with the airplane passenger in the seat next to her, but he's not letting his lack of sleep slow him down.  "The glow of the gold had entered into my soul.  The yellow energy coursed like precious perfume through my nerves and lent power to my limbs."

I guess if you're an author and someone confronts you with a line like that, you explain that it's the sleep-deprived character bungling a simile, not you.

Chapter three is mostly Gris yelling at people, waving money at them, and promising more riches to come if they do what he says.  He rings up the cab driver and gets taken to the hospital, then once again interrupts Dr. Prahd's nightly session of statutory rape and orders him to make up an excuse to spend a whole day inoculating some crewmen.  Then it's back to the base, where Gris promises Captain Stabb and the Antimancos some piratey action at last, "the greatest robbery this planet has ever heard of!"  Of course, he'll need to get his crew properly immunized before heading out...  Finally, Gris draws up some work plans for the construction crew, mysterious plans that aren't shared with us, but which apparently will be straightforward enough.

And that's pretty much it for that chapter.  Well, aside for a heartbreaking farewell.

I went down and opened the storeroom door and crooned for three hours over that precious gold!  I would not have it long.  I would have to make this joy of communion last.  It saddened me that after today I would never see it again.

But if all went well today, I would have the MONEY!

TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY-FIVE MILLION DOLLARS!

Money is POWER!

Given that much, I could ruin whomever I chose.  At will!  Including Heller or Krak!

Or blow it on whores.

Eventually, "The urgency of undone things at last wrenched me away," and Gris spends the first two pages of Chapter Four engaging in some Gun Porn.  The short version: he has a shotgun, a nice shotgun, he calls "The Brute."  He has a revolver that shoots carbine rounds.  He sticks an undercover revolver in his ankle holster.  And then he obsoletes all of it by adding a half-dozen Fleet Marine "maximum-damage" grenades and a Voltarian blastgun that can "cut a man in half at a thousand yards if you waved it right."

Gris decides to go with his "main" identity as Sultan Bey when he chooses his passport, and tries on a heated ski suit made of black silk.  Gris eats breakfast and gets angry when the staff eventually serves him cold food.  Then he gets angrier when he hears the intolerable sound of children's laughter coming from outside.  It's "the James Cagney look-alike" and "the Rudolph Valentino look-alike," flying a kite Utanc must have given them.  Gris gets even more angrier.

Then inspiration struck again!  A brilliant idea flashed down from the blue!

Is Gris getting bombarded by thetans?  Suddenly auditing seems like a reasonable investment.

Said "brilliant idea" is to buckle on a pistol, sneak up behind the kite-flying boys, and...

Suddenly I stretched out a hand hardened with karate practice.  I str

When the hell did Gris learn karate?  And why didn't he try to use those skills to take down Miss Pinch last book?

I struck!  Right, left!

As my stance and balance were absolutely textbook, I could not fail to hit.

WHAP!  One little boy flying to the right.

WHAP!  One little boy flying to the left.

RIP!  One kite straight down into the tree.

With calculated cunning, I had not knocked either boy out.  I wanted the resultant screams.

They screams exactly according to plan.

And what's this plan, you ask?  To lure Utanc out so Gris can explain how he "found" the kids playing with Utanc's stolen emerald locket.  He's immediately foiled when Utanc counters that she keeps her jewel case locked, so Gris had to be the one to have stolen it.  She throws gravel at him, and to add insult to injury reveals that the real emerald was in her safe, so what Gris was worried about was "a fake and a rather bad one at that."

So the last couple of chapters in which Gris freaked out about being pickpocketed?  Extra pointless.

Now, you might be wondering if karate-chopping unsuspecting little boys and trying to blame a theft on them is the worst thing Gris does in this book.  And the answer is: of course not.  This is just child abuse.  He hasn't even killed anyone in this book yet.  And you'd better believe it's going to get much, much worse.


Back to Chapters One and Two

Forward to Chapters Five and Six