by Dan Simmons
Natalie Preston continued to stare straight ahead as her hands came up and slowly unbuttoned her blouse. She tugged it off and dropped it on the floor. Her large breasts in the old-fashioned white bra reminded Harod of someone . . . who? He suddenly remembered the airline stewardess two weeks earlier. Her skin had been as pale as this chick’s was dark. Why do they wear those plain, unexciting bras?
Harod nodded and Natalie reached behind her to unsnap the hooks. The bra slipped forward, down, and off. Harod stared at the brown areolae and licked his lips. She should play awhile before she began on him. “OK,” he said softly, “I think it’s time to . . .”
There was an explosion of noise and Harod swiveled in time to see the door crash inward, a large bulk of a body obscure the light from the hallway in time to realize that he had left the Browning in Maria Chen’s luggage.
Harod had started to rise, started to raise his arms, when something the size and weight of an anvil landed on top of his head and drove him down, into the chair, through the cushions, through the soft substance of a floor suddenly taking on the texture of tapioca, down into the warm waiting darkness beneath.
TWENTY-THREE
Melanie
Vincent was a hard boy to keep clean. He was one of those children who seems to exude dirt from every pore. His nails were rimmed with black an hour after I had him clean them. It was a constant struggle to keep him in clean clothes.
On Christmas Day we rested. Anne made meals, put holiday records on the Victrola, and did several loads of wash while I read passages from the Scripture and contemplated them. It was a quiet day. Occasionally Anne would make as if to turn on the television— she had watched six to eight hours a day before I met her— but then the conditioning would take over and she would find something else to do. I indulged in a few mindless hours of TV viewing myself the first week we were at Anne’s, but one night while watching the eleven o’clock news there was a thirty-second update on what they were calling the Charleston Murders. “State police are still searching for the missing woman,” read the young woman. I decided then that there would be no more television viewing at Anne Bishop’s house.
On Saturday, two days after Christmas, Anne and I went out shopping. She had a 1953 DeSoto stored in her garage; it was an ugly green vehicle with a grill that made me think of a frightened fish. Anne drove so hesitantly and cautiously that before we were out of Germantown I had her pull over and let Vincent take the wheel. She directed us away from Philadelphia, out to an expensive shopping mall in an area called King of Prussia— possibly the most absurd name I had ever heard of for a suburb. We shopped for four hours and I made several nice purchases, though none so nice, I fear, as the clothes I had left in the Atlanta airport. I did find a pleasant three-hundred-dollar coat— deep blue with ivory buttons— that I thought might help ward off the bone-chilling cold of the Yankee winter. Anne enjoyed buying me these few things and I did not want to stand in the way of her happiness.
That night I returned to Grumblethorpe. It was so pleasant in the candlelight, moving from room to room with nothing but the shadows and the faint whispers to keep me company. That afternoon Anne had purchased two shotguns at a sporting goods store in the mall. The young salesman with greasy blond hair and dirty sneakers had been amused at the naïveté of this older woman buying a gun for her grown son. The man had recommended two expensive pump shotguns— either the 12-gauge or the 16-gauge, depending upon the type of hunting Anne’s son was interested in. Anne bought them both, as well as six boxes of shells for each. Now, as I carried the candle holder from room to room at Grumblethorpe, Vincent oiled and caressed the weapons in the stony shadows of the kitchen.
I had never Used anyone quite like Vincent before. Earlier, I had compared his mind to a jungle and now I found the meta phor even more apt. The images that flitted across what remained of his consciousness were almost invariably ones of violence, death, and destruction. I caught glimpses of murders of family members— mother in the kitchen, father sleeping, an older sister on the tile floor of a laundry room— but I do not know if they were reality or fantasy. I doubt if Vincent knew. I never asked him and he could not have answered if I had.
Using Vincent was rather like riding a high-spirited horse; one had only to release the reins to get the beast to do what one wished. He was incredibly strong for his size and frame, almost inexplicably so. It was as if great surges of adrenaline filled Vincent’s system at the most mundane of times, and when he was truly excited his strength became almost superhuman. I found it exhilarating to share this, even in a somewhat passive way. Each day I felt younger. I knew that by the time I reached my home in southern France, possibly in the next month, I would be so rejuvenated that even Nina would not recognize me.
Only bad dreams about Nina spoiled those days after Christmas Eve. The dreams were always the same: Nina’s eyes opening, Nina’s face a white mask with a dime-size hole in the forehead, Nina sitting up in her coffin, teeth yellowed and sharpened, blue eyes rising in their empty sockets on a tide of maggots.
I did not like these dreams.
On Saturday night I left Anne on the first floor of Grumblethorpe, watching the door, while I curled up on the roll-away in the nursery and let the whispers carry me into a half-sleep.
Vincent went out through the tunnel. It suggested images of birth: the long narrow tunnel, rough walls pressing in, the sweet, sharp smell of soil not unlike the coppery scent of blood, the narrow aperture at the end, the quiet night air seeming like an explosion of light and sound.
Vincent glided across the dark alley, over a fence, through a vacant lot, and into the shadows of the next street. The shotguns remained behind in Grumblethorpe’s kitchen; he carried only the scythe— its long wooden handle shortened by fourteen inches— and his knife.
I had no doubt that in summer these streets would be teeming with Negroes— fat women sitting on stoops and chattering back and forth like baboons or staring dully while ragged children played everywhere and loose-boned males with no work, no aspirations, and no visible means of support ambled off to bars and street corners. But to night, deep in the belly of a harsh winter, the streets were dark and quiet, shades pulled on the narrow windows of the narrow houses and doors closed in the flat fronts of row houses. Vincent did not move like a silent shadow, he became one— sliding from alley to street, street to empty lot, empty lot to yard with no more disruption to the stillness than a dark wind would bring.
Two nights before he had tracked the members of the gang to a large old home bound around by empty lots, a long stone’s throw from the elevated train whose embankment cut through this part of the ghetto like some overgrown Great Wall, a futile attempt by some more civilized group to wall in the barbarians. Vincent nested in the frozen weeds by an abandoned car and watched.
Black shapes moved in front of lighted windows like caricatures of darkies in a magic lantern minstrel show. Eventually five of them emerged. I did not recognize them in the dim light, but that did not matter. Vincent waited until they were almost out of sight down the narrow alley by the railway embankment and then he slipped along behind. It was exhilarating to share that silent stalking, that almost effortless glide through the darkness. Vincent’s eyes worked almost as well in near total darkness as most people’s do in daylight. It was like sharing the mind and senses of a strong, sleek hunting cat. A hungry cat.
There were two colored girls in the group. Vincent paused when the group paused. He sniffed the air, actually picking up the strong, animal-like scent of the bucks. It is no longer polite in the South to use that word, but few words apply as well. It is a simple fact that a Negro male is quick to excite and as thoughtless of his surroundings as a stallion or a male dog near a bitch in heat. These two colored girls must have been in heat; Vincent watched as they copulated there on the shadowy embankment, the third boy also watching until his turn came, the girls’ bare, black legs opening and closing against the bobbing haunches of the thrusting males. Vincen
t’s entire body surged with the need to act then, but I made him look away, wait until the boys were finished with their lust, the girls gone calling and laughing— as guiltless and guileless as sated alley cats— toward their own homes. Then I unleashed Vincent.
He was waiting when the three turned a corner at the base of Bring-hurst Street near the abandoned shoe factory. The scythe took the first boy in the stomach, passed through his body, and caught on the spine coming out. Vincent left it there and went for the second one with his knife. The third one ran.
Back when I used to go to the motion picture theater, before World War Two, before films deteriorated into the obscene, mindless claptrap I read about today, I would always enjoy the scenes of frightened colored servants. I remember seeing Birth of a Nation as a child and laughing when the colored children were terrified by the sight of someone in a sheet. I recall sitting in a five-pfennig theater in Vienna with Nina and Willi, watching an old Harold Lloyd film that needed no subtitles, and roaring with the crowd at the dull-witted fright of Stepin Fetchit. I remember watching an old Bob Hope movie on television— before the vulgarity of the 1960s made me give up television forever— and laughing out loud at the white-faced fear of Bob Hope’s colored assistant in some haunted house farce. The second of Vincent’s victims looked like one of these film comedians— huge, white, staring eyes, one hand raised to his open mouth, knees together, feet splayed. Back in Grumblethorpe I laughed aloud in the silence of the nursery even as Vincent used his knife to do what had to be done.
The third boy escaped. Vincent wanted to go after him, strained to go after him like a dog pulling hard at a leash, but I held him back. The Negro knew the streets better and Vincent’s effectiveness lay in concealment and surprise. I knew how risky this game was, and I had no intention of squandering Vincent after all the work I had put in on him. Before bringing Vincent back, however, I let him have his way with the two he had already accounted for. His little games did not take long and they satisfied something that still lurked in the deepest part of the jungle inside his skull.
It was after he removed the jacket of the second boy that the photograph fell out. Vincent was too busy to notice, but I had him set down his scythe and pick up the photograph. It was a picture of Mr. Thorne and me.
I sat straight up in bed in the Grumblethorpe nursery.
Vincent returned immediately. I met him in the kitchen and took the photograph from his stained and grimy fingers. There was no doubt— the image was fuzzy, obviously a section enlarged from a larger photograph— but I was quite visible and Mr. Thorne was unmistakable. I knew at once that it had to be Mr. Hodges’s doing. For years I had watched that miserable little man and his miserable little camera taking snapshots of his miserable little family. I had thought that I took the necessary precautions to avoid being in his pictures, but obviously this had not been the case.
I sat by candlelight in the chill of Grumblethorpe’s stone and brick kitchen and shook my head. How had this come into the possession of the young Negro? Obviously someone was searching for me, but who? The police? How could they have any inkling that I was in Philadelphia? Nina?
Nothing I could think of made any sense at all.
I had Vincent bathe in a large galvanized tub that Anne had bought. She brought in a kerosene heater, but it was a cold night and the steam rose from Vincent’s white flesh as he bathed. After awhile I went over and helped to wash his hair. What a picture the three of us must have made— two dignified aunts bathing the gallant young man just home from the wars, flesh steaming in the cold air while candlelight threw our shadows ten feet tall on the rough-hewn wall.
“Vincent, my dear,” I whispered as I rubbed the shampoo into his long hair, “we must find out where the photograph came from. Not to night, my dear, the streets will be far too busy to night when your handiwork is discovered. But soon. And when you find who gave the colored boy that picture, you will bring that person here . . . to me.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Washington, D.C.
Saturday, Dec. 27, 1980
Saul Laski lay in his steel tomb and thought about life. He shivered in the chill from the air-conditioning, raised his knees toward his chest, and tried to remember details of a spring morning on his uncle’s farm. He thought about golden light touching the heavy limbs of willows and about a field of white daisies beyond the stone fortress of his uncle’s barn.
Saul hurt; his left shoulder and arm hurt constantly, his head throbbed, his fingers tingled with pain, and the inside of his right arm pulsed with the pain of all the injections they had given him. Saul welcomed the pain, encouraged it. The pain was the only dependable beacon he had in a thick fog of medication and disorientation.
Saul had become somewhat unhinged in time. He was sometimes aware of this but could do nothing about it. The details were there— at least up to the second of the explosion in the Senate Office Building— but he could not set them in sequence. One minute he would be lying on his narrow bunk in the chilly stainless steel cell— inset bunk, air conditioner grill, stainless steel bench and toilet, metal door that slid up into the wall— and the next minute he would try to burrow into cold straw, would feel the cold Polish night air coming through the cracked window, and would know that the Oberst and German guards could be coming for him soon.
Pain was a beacon. The few minutes of clarity in those first days after the explosion had been forged by pain. The intense pain after they set his broken collarbone; green surgical gowns in an antiseptic environment that might have been any surgery, any recovery room, but then the cold shock of white corridors and the steel cell, men in suits, colorful ID badges clipped to pockets and lapels, the pain of an injection followed by dreams and discontinuities.
The first interrogations had offered pain. The two men— one bald and short, another with a blond crew cut. The bald man had rapped Saul’s shoulder with a metal baton. Saul had screamed, wept with the sudden pain of it, but welcomed it— welcomed the clearing of fogs and vapors.
“Do you know my name?” asked the bald man. “No.”
“What did your nephew tell you?”
“Nothing.”
“Who else have you told about William Borden and the others?”
“No one.”
Later—or earlier, Saul was not sure— the pain gone, in the pleasant haze after injections:
“Do you know my name?”
“Charles C. Colben, special deputy assistant to the deputy director of the FBI.”
“Who told you that?”
“Aaron.”
“What else did Aaron tell you?”
Saul repeated the conversation as completely as he could recall it. “Who else knows about Willi Borden?”
“The sheriff. The girl.” Saul explained about Gentry and Natalie. “Tell me everything you know.”
Saul told him everything he knew.
The fog and dreams came and went. The steel room was frequently there when Saul opened his eyes. The cot was built into the walls. The toilet was too small and had no flush lever: it flushed automatically at irregular intervals. Meals, on steel trays, appeared when Saul slept. He ate the meals on the metal bench, left the tray. It was gone when he awoke from his next nap. Occasionally men in the white attendants’ uniforms came through the metal doorway to give him shots or to take him down white hallways to small rooms with mirrors on the wall he was facing. Colben or someone else in a gray suit would ask questions. If he refused to answer there were more shots, urgent dreams in which he desperately wanted to be friends with these people, and told them what ever they wished to hear. Several times he felt someone— Colben?—slide into his mind, the old memory of a similar rape rising from forty years before. These times were rare. The shots were frequent.
Saul slid backward and forward in time; calling to his sister Stefa on his Uncle Moshe’s farm, running to keep up with his father in the Lodz ghetto, shoveling lime onto bodies in the Pit, drinking lemonade and talking to Gentry and Natalie,
playing with a ten-year-old Aaron and Isaac at David and Rebecca’s farm near Tel Aviv.
Now the drug-induced discontinuities were fading. Time stitched itself together. Saul lay curled on the bare mattress— there was no blanket, the air through the steel grill was too cold— and thought about himself and his lies. He had lied to himself for years. His search for the Oberst had been a lie— an excuse not to act. His life as a psychiatrist had been a lie, a way to remove his obsessions to a safe, academic distance. His ser vice as a medic in three of Israel’s wars had been a lie, a way to avoid direct action.
Saul lay in the gray hinterland between drug-induced nirvana and painful reality and saw the truth of his years of lies. He had lied to himself about his rationale for telling the Charleston sheriff and the Preston girl about Nina and Willi. He had secretly hoped that they would act— removing the burden of responsibility for revenge from him. Saul had asked Aaron to look for Francis Harrington not because he was too busy, but because he secretly wanted Aaron and the Mossad to do what had to be done. He knew now that part of his motive for telling Rebecca about the Oberst twenty years ago had been the secret and self-denied hope that she would tell David, that David would handle things in his strong, capable American-Israeli way—
Saul shivered, raised his knees to his chest, and stared at the lies that were his life.
Except for rare minutes such as when he had resolved in the Chelmno camp to kill rather than be taken into the night, his entire life had been a paean to inaction and compromise. Those in power seemed to sense this. He understood now that his assignment to the Pit detail in Chelmno and the rail yards at Sobibor had been more than chance or good luck; the bastards with power over him had sensed that Saul Laski was a born kapo, a collaborator, someone safe to use. There would be no violence from this one, no revolt, no sacrifice of his life for the others— not even to save his own dignity. Even his escape from Sobibor and from the Oberst’s hunting preserve before that, largely had been due to accident, allowing events to sweep him along and away.
