The Fall Guy

by Ritchie Perry

  The euphemism slayed me, confirmation of Otto’s death not coming as a surprise but adding fuel to my mounting anger. It was Biddencourt’s attitude which really got through to me, his smug complacency as he talked about having Otto tortured to death. He was so confident that he was immune from retribution that I just had to show him how wrong he was. Mentally I encased myself into a shell where only three things mattered — survival, escape and settling accounts with Biddencourt. For the first time in my life I had a worthwhile ambition.

  Unaware of the fate I was busily dreaming up for him Biddencourt had taken Joao aside and was whispering in his ear. After a few seconds Joao left the kitchen while Biddencourt came back to stand in front of me. Pepe was still over by the window, shaking his head muzzily. Deliberately Biddencourt brought out a cigarette from a platinum case and lit it with what had to be a gold-plated lighter.

  ‘Of course, your case is rather different from Otto’s,’ he said meditatively. ‘This time I know most of the answers before I put the questions. I merely need your confirmation on a few points. What’s more, despite my earlier threats, I don’t think I shall have to use physical coercion to make you co-operate. You see I’ve another prisoner as well as you.’

  I kept my face expressionless, helped in this by the advance warning the screaming had given me. Nevertheless it required every vestige of control to keep my voice steady when I spoke.

  ‘Who is it?’ I asked, although I’d long since known the answer. ‘I hadn’t realized I was only part of the collection.’

  ‘If you wait a minute you’ll be able to see for yourself,’ Biddencourt answered.

  The bastard was really enjoying himself, loving the way he could manipulate other people’s lives with a flick of his little finger, but I had to hand him one thing. Whatever his other faults Biddencourt was certainly thorough.

  Footsteps were coming down the stairs and it was a physical strain to turn my head slowly as Joao brought Lydia into the kitchen. I daren’t look Lydia in the eye, only glancing briefly in her direction before I returned my gaze to Biddencourt. Just the same I’d taken in her dishevelled hair, the purpling bruise on her cheek and her tom clothes. All of a sudden breathing was no longer automatic but something to learn anew, my throat feeling swollen to twice its normal size. There was no question of my being able to speak.

  ‘Take a good look at her,’ Biddencourt ordered.

  Numbly I did as I was told, struggling to keep my face impassive. For her part Lydia was standing like a zombie, half leaning against Joao who had one hand inside her dress, her blank, glazed eyes showing she was in a state of shock.

  ‘You pick your girlfriends well,’ Joao said broadening his smile. ‘She was a bit stand-offish at first but Pepe and me soon made her see things our way.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Pepe concurred from the window, the

  first time I’d heard him speak. ‘She’d do anything for us now.’

  Carefully I swivelled my head to face him.

  ‘That’s what whores are for,’ I said, forcing the words out. ‘They provide a service.’

  Lydia gasped behind me and I was glad I couldn’t see her expression. If she wasn’t in shock already she would be soon.

  ‘She’s nothing more than a whore to you?’ Biddencourt asked. Although he was off-balance he didn’t believe me.

  ‘We had a business arrangement,’ I lied pleasantly, feeling like a latter-day Judas. Someday I might be able to explain to Lydia that it was for her own good.

  ‘Bring the woman over here,’ Biddencourt told Joao, keeping his eyes on me.

  Quickly I ran through the list of instructions to the various parts of my body. Eyes indifferent, hands deliberately unclenched, breathing slow and regular, this was the way I was going to stay, whatever happened to Lydia in the next few minutes. Joao was holding her arms behind her, grinning at me over her shoulder, a grin he’d pay dearly for if I had any say in the matter. Biddencourt gripped the front of Lydia’s already ripped dress and tugged downwards so Lydia was naked to the waist, her terrified, shallow breathing making her breasts heave. Her eyes were alive again, flashing a mute appeal which I daren’t respond to, and I lowered my gaze.

  There was an inch of cigarette left in Biddencourt’s hand and he delicately tapped off the ash before he ground it on Lydia’s shoulder, his eyes not leaving mine for a moment, not even after she started screaming and tried to wrench herself free from Joao’s grip. He kept the cigarette pressed against her until there was the faint, sweet smell of burning flesh in the air and all the while I stared at the strained sinews of Lydia’s throat, trying to eliminate awareness of her screams. When Biddencourt removed the cigarette he left behind a red, blistered area the size of a shilling and Lydia was slumped forward, her screams converted to hysterical tears.

  Anger and sympathy weren’t emotions I could afford for the time being and I did my best to push them into my subconscious, saving them for future reference. It was far more important Biddencourt shouldn’t realize what I’d been thinking, not until the time came when I wasn’t tied to a chair. He’d lit another cigarette and looked rather despondent about my lack of response. According to his book I should have been heaping outraged, hysterical abuse on his head instead of sitting passive and unperturbed. At least, this was the way I hoped I appeared to him.

  ‘Personally, I prefer an ashtray,’ I said, striving to reinforce my pose of cynical unconcern. ‘I find it’s far less wearing on the nerves.’

  The slight shake in my voice and the nervous flicker of my left eyelid were perfectly permissible. To Biddencourt they should indicate fear, nothing more, and I was the only one to know they were the outward manifestations of inner storm. During the few seconds the burning cigarette end had been held against Lydia’s skin I’d learned a lot about myself. I was an emotional man after all. Anger, compassion, love, they’d all come easily to me and, above all, hatred, an all-consuming lust to drown the memory of Lydia’s screams with those of the men responsible. But my brain remained remote and untouched, ticking over like one of IBM’s top computers. What had happened, why it had been done, what I could do about it, these were questions to be shelved. The first priority was to keep us both alive.

  Chapter 6

  Biddencourt exhaled smoke through his nose, a glint of what could have been respect in his eyes.

  ‘You’re a cold-blooded bastard,’ he said, the pot calling the kettle black. ‘You really don’t give a damn what happens to the woman.’

  ‘Don’t let me fool you,’ I told him. ‘You’ve persuaded me it would be wiser to talk than have you mess around with her any more. Just ask away. I’ll give the answers.’

  To fill out the new, amenable image I gave Bidden-court a big, open smile which cost me two or three days’ calories to produce. He didn’t believe me any more than he was intended to.

  ‘Tell me about Reece,’ he said softly.

  ‘Well, I did meet him the once,’ I admitted. ‘It was on the plane from Porto Alegre to Rio Grande. He was sitting directly across the aisle from me.’

  ‘This was the only occasion you met?’ Biddencourt queried.

  I nodded confirmation, radiating patent dishonesty.

  ‘What did you talk about?’

  ‘I can give you our conversation verbatim,’ I said obligingly. ‘I said, “Would you like to borrow my paper bag?” Reese just said, “Aaaooouugh,” then he rushed off to the lavatory. It was a very rough flight.’

  A smothered snigger from the window showed Pepe couldn’t be all bad but the language Joao used did nothing to revise my opinion of him. Of the three Biddencourt was by far the most impressive. All he did was smile tightly and tap the ash from his second cigarette of the session.

  ‘Please, Philis,’ Lydia implored, her voice hysterical as she anticipated the next move. ‘Tell him what he wants to know.’

  This direct appeal came closer to breaking through my defences than the screams had d
one earlier and I had to bite my tongue to hold back as Biddencourt leaned forwards. Lydia flinched and began to struggle, Joao gripped her tighter and pulled her elbows further back, Pepe moved away from the window for a better view, and I tried to stop my teeth from grinding. An inch from Lydia’s nipple the cigarette halted.

  ‘Take her back to her room, Joao,’ Biddencourt said, withdrawing the cigarette. ‘We’re not going to get anywhere this way.’

  A wave of relief swept over me and I began breathing again. The first round was definitely mine, with Lydia temporarily removed from the firing line, but I shuddered to think what this had cost. It had always been a gamble, not least because once I’d convinced Biddencourt that Lydia meant nothing to me beyond a good lay there was no reason he shouldn’t have killed her straight away. Unsavoury as the thought was, I hadn’t expected them to kill a woman as attractive as Lydia until it was essential, probably not until they disposed of me, and, as events had turned out, I’d been vindicated. Now it was up to me to ensure we weren’t killed for a long, long while.

  *

  The essence of torture, as I understood it, was that it should be tailored to individual needs, as much psychological as it was physical. Biddencourt, however, held total disdain for finesse, placing all his faith in acute, physical pain. This technique had probably worked with Otto and he could see no reason why it shouldn’t have the same results with me. Unfortunately, from Biddencourt’s point of view, he wasn’t to know I didn’t have nearly so many of the answers as he expected.

  Quite early on, before there was any real need to tell the truth, I let Biddencourt know everything about Reece’s visit to Santos and how I’d been blackmailed into working for him. My aim was to present him with the entire truth as I knew it, to tell it in such a manner he’d think I was lying and had a great deal more to tell. I had to create the impression of concealing something from him, to establish myself as someone too valuable to kill. Admittedly, this line meant I was going to be badly hurt, tortured for information I didn’t have but this was a hell of a sight better than Lydia and myself being dead. Or so I hoped.

  As Biddencourt had suggested Joao was cast in the role of torturer in chief, with Pepe as his faithful Indian assistant. First, however, Biddencourt used the cigarette originally destined for Lydia, stubbing it out on my wrist. This was exceedingly painful and I had no inhibitions about screaming. Perhaps some people would have sat and suffered the injury without a wince but, to my mind, they’d be absolute idiots, just asking to have something worse done to them. To go along with the screams this was when I babbled out everything I knew. After my apparent indifference to Lydia’s maltreatment the capitulation was far to sudden and Biddencourt didn’t believe a word I said. This meant it was all over bar the shouting and that was all going to come from me, together with gasps, groans, shrieks and anything else I could think of to express my feelings.

  Three hours was an awfully long while to have people doing the kinds of things which were done to me, deliberately designed to break my will, and, if I’d had anything left to tell, Biddencourt would have learned it in half the time. Before any further questions were asked there was the softening-up process, Pepe steadying the chair while Joao worked me over, calmly, methodically and impersonally. There was a lot of blood on his hands by the time he’d finished and, as all of it had come from my nose and mouth, I was glad there wasn’t a mirror handy. Not that it would have been much use because my eyes had ceased to focus properly.

  Then came the questions, going on and on, interspersed with various indignities inflicted on my person. Mainly Biddencourt wanted to know about Otto, Reece and a man called Pawson, my answers invariably proving to be unsatisfactory. At first I was in agony but gradually, almost imperceptibly, the pain eased and I slipped into a dreamy half-world where nothing really mattered until, eventually, it was someone else being tortured while the real me floated above, watching dispassionately. It must have been about then that I first lost consciousness.

  *

  Immediately I came round properly I wished I’d postponed the awakening for a year or two, pain signals flashing in from all parts of my body, arriving so fast it took me a minute to interpret them all. My face was closest to the sorting office in my brain so it received priority. I still didn’t have a mirror handy but my features didn’t feel like part of the old head I used to take around with me to grow hair on. This new face was a swollen, misshapen monstrosity, extremely tender to the touch and with a nasty taste of dried blood in the mouth where one of the teeth had been removed. Farther down was my body, minus a lot of skin where Joao had practised some fancy knife work, decorated with the odd cigarette bum and, worst of all, a lot of bruising where my kidneys had been patted with a rubber truncheon. The sum total of these injuries was a lot of pain I could well have done without but, on the credit side, all my limbs could be moved and seemed to bend only in the appropriate places. This was important. I was going to hurt whether I lay still or hobbled around and I preferred to hurt while I escaped from the farmhouse.

  For the time being I wasn’t going anywhere. The fact that Lydia was still a prisoner lent urgency to the situation but other considerations came first. I needed a chance to recuperate, to work out the routine of the house and, above all, to find a way out. In any case, there was no immediate danger, of this I was sure. When Biddencourt had finally called a halt to Joao and Pepe’s exertions I’d been in a bad state after repeated submersions in the sink. The three of them had been talking while I lay in my own, personal pool of water on the flagstones, only vaguely aware of the voices above me. Nevertheless, my subconscious had grabbed hold of one snatch of conversation, replaying it again and again until I woke up on the bed. Gordinho’s name had been mentioned several times, and in a manner which proved he was the man in charge, the person ultimately responsible for my present predicament, something which seemed eminently logical now I thought about it. I still didn’t know what Reece had mixed me up in, only that this had nothing to do with the British Treasury, but it was obviously something important and Gordinho had a happy knack of popping up wherever big money was concerned. His involvement also accounted for several things which had puzzled me, especially the reason why I’d been left unmolested in Porto Alegre. This had had nothing to do with my gun play at the Scirocco Club, Gordinho had merely wanted to discover my exact connection with the Otto before he took any drastic steps against me. And it was to Gordinho I owed my life, temporarily at least, not to my own cleverness. Lydia and I were alive simply because Biddencourt didn’t dare kill us without Gordinho’s prior authorization.

  *

  The main obstacle to escape wasn’t my physical condition or the locked door but the three men left to guard Lydia and myself. Although Biddencourt and Pepe had departed, presumably to confer with Gordinho, Joao had been reinforced by the two men I’d last seen in police uniform. Three armed men would take a lot of getting past, the odds against me far too high for my liking, but I couldn’t afford to delay action for too long. By midday I decided I’d waited long enough, that my gaolers were less of a threat than the prospect of an execution order from Gordinho, and I was actually examining the door when I had the piece of good fortune I so richly deserved.

  The sound of a car engine starting up wasn’t world shattering in itself but it had me over to the window in a flash, in time to see the Kombi bouncing away from the farmhouse with two men aboard. Rapid calculation on my fingers told me that two from three left one, a far more satisfactory state of affairs as far as I was concerned. I had no means of forecasting how long the Kombi would be away, probably not for any appreciable length of time, but I hoped I’d have enough time to deal with the remaining guard.

  To achieve this I had to escape from the room and there were plenty of clever ways of doing it. I could have tried to dislodge the bars across the window, for instance, but they were set in solid concrete and I didn’t have a fortnight to spare. The same went for tearing up the floorbo
ards or chipping through the walls. As a reasonably civilised member of society I was accustomed to using doors and I could see no good reason for changing the habits of a lifetime. Not unless I had to, that is.

  Just the same I had no illusions about the outcome of an attempt to entice my guard into the room. A spot of quiet lock picking was called for and the simple, mortise lock was child’s play for someone who’d spent his adolescence at a mixed boarding school. The contents of my pockets had been removed but I didn’t have to look far for tools, only as far as the bed in fact. Beneath the mattress the base of the bed was a wire mesh of springs, tightly coiled springs about eight inches long which hooked on to one another. The wire was a trifle thick for my liking and it took me a good quarter of an hour to straighten half of one of the springs, leaving the rest for a handle. The lock itself required less than five minutes to deal with, then I had to lock the door again. There were bolts on the outside and, without a hacksaw, there was absolutely nothing I could do about them.

  This disposed of the easiest way out, now I had to use my ingenuity. Removing one of my shoes I began to hammer at the door, shouting at the top of my voice. I soon had a sore throat and an aching arm but there was some consolation. The noise had Joao rushing upstairs like a bat out of hell, mightily displeased at being disturbed. Indeed, some of the epithets he was using as he approached the room were enough to make me blush.

  ‘Stop that row,’ he bellowed as he reached the door. ‘Otherwise I’ll fix you so you can’t make any noise.’

  For a brief moment I was tempted to take him up on the offer, then common sense prevailed.

  ‘Isn’t it about time I had something to eat and drink,’ I asked through the peephole. ‘I haven’t had anything since yesterday morning.’