Free Twinkle, Twinkle, "Killer" Kane by William Peter Blatty Page A

caught her eye and now he wafted her a quite innocent smile. “What was that you said, my dear?”
    “I’m trying to build an image, fairest. Now please don’t make any waves.” Suddenly Hesburgh saw the man, saw Alice still staring.
    “Oh, what a perfectly marvelous ‘peace dove,’” she cooed, starting to move away. “I think I’ll wander over—”
    “Back!” Hesburgh grabbed her arm and held her. “It’s a ringtailed hawk!”
    “Oh, honestly! ” whined Alice. “Nolan, people are watching!”
    As Hesburgh looked to see who might be watching, she escaped. Simultaneously a burly man in uniform backed into him, his nose deep in a brochure. Both men turned.
    “Oh, pardon me, ” said the man in uniform, “I was—” He stopped and stared at the Senator. It was General Lastrade. He made an elephantine attempt at feigning surprise at the encounter. “Why, Senator Hesburgh! ” he clucked. “I never dreamed you were an art lover!”
    The Senator’s eyebrows gathered like the dark clouds of a storm. “And I never dreamed that you wore crepe-soled shoes! You lightning-billed egret! What the hell do you mean creeping up on me here in a hallowed hall of culture! I will hear no special pleading for your bomber appropriation! ”
    “You do me wrong, sir, wrong! ” The expression on Lastrade’s face was an exemplar of outraged innocence.
    Hesburgh was about to retort but he suddenly spied Alice chatting gaily with the man whom she’d been ogling the moment before. “Alice!” he barked sternly, and hastened toward his wife.
    Lastrade looked deep into the eyes of the Ephebe and grunted, “I blew it!”
    The Ephebe made no reply, a phenomenon to which it owed its continued survival as an integral work of art.

Chapter 7
    Captain Groper knew the difference between himself and a Persian rug. The bane of his life was simply that others had never recognized the distinction. Am I a zoom? a cup of pudding? he would ask his pillow every night until he grew surfeited with the answer, which was never the one he wanted. Fresh out of high school he’d sold insurance, rising to dizzying heights of obscurity capped by the day when his boss clapped his back and told him, “Groper—you’re okay.” Then Groper read T. E. Lawrence, somehow connected it to Beau Geste, which he read six times within a week. Soon after that he joined the Air Force in the vague and visionary hope that they would assign him to find the “Blue Water,” and that when he’d found it, the world would find him. But from the beginning he’d been an adjutant, a crisply uniformed in-basket; still a Persian rug. Cutshaw was not a rug, he knew, nor any of the other inmates. He hated them for that.
    He sat in his office reading poetry when the call came from Miss Mawr. She would not speak to him, however; that was his Karma; he’d expected it. She wanted Colonel Kane. Groper decided that it sounded urgent and went seeking his commander.
    Ten pensive days had passed at the mansion. Colonel Kane had left instructions that he was not to be disturbed except in case of an emergency, then locked himself in his quarters. During his retreat the Slovik mansion gave off an air of fretting restlessness, of being at loose ends, shifting on its foundations from haunch to massive haunch, waiting for Kane to emerge. Cutshaw had pounded on his door several times, but got no answer. He seemed rueful and chagrined, and, after the third day, slightly frantic. He took to writing messages on useless scraps of paper and then slipping them under Kane’s door. One of the messages stated that “Tawdry Groper eats unblessed venison!” Another issued the challenge, “I can prove there is a foot!” And still a third made the comment that “There is nothing less attractive than a caribou that pouts!”
    Kane never made an answer. And Cutshaw grew more frantic. Once he stood outside Kane’s door wailing, “Heeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaathcliiiiiiiiifffff!” over and over for half