King of Diamonds

by Ted Thackrey

  Ample, but not gaudy.

  My warders dragged me to the center of the array and rested my full weight on my legs. The legs folded, which must have been the idea, and the angels followed the movement.

  “Sid, go for seawater . . . ”

  The angel who had been fastening my handcuffs to a floor bolt grabbed an oversize bucket that had been lying in the corner and hurried out, which told me his name—and the nature of the party game planned for me. Nothing new. The ARVN had used the technique to good effect during fast-and-dirty interrogations in ’Nam. But they hadn’t invented the procedure themselves.

  An American intelligence officer had come up with the idea as a kind of public relations gesture.

  Any deaths could be passed off as swimming accidents.

  “Okay, asshole,” Jack Soames said, grabbing my hair and bending my head back until I was looking up at him. “Listen up. We’re tired of screwing around with you, and if it was up to me we’d just drown you in the surf now and let it go at that.”

  I offered no resistance and let the good eye focus on a distant point well to the right of his head.

  It may have fooled him. But I don’t think so.

  “Thing is,” he went on, giving my head a little shake for emphasis, “you got something the Master wants—and that means we want it, too. In fact, we want it even more than he does, because with us it’s what you might call kind of a point of honor. You dig, asshole?”

  Well, yes and no.

  I kept the muscles limp and the face vacant while he shook my head again and got off one or two more lines of second-rate movie menace, but finally he got tired of it and let go. It was an improvement. My head lolled forward again and the restraining influence of the ring bolt was all that kept me from mashing my nose against the concrete. I didn’t really care. The first order of business was to get out of those handcuffs. For that I would need total concentration. And time.

  And a miracle. Sensation and motor function were gradually returning to the outer limits, but the kind of muscular control needed to defeat a steel handcuff requires near-perfect conditioning in addition to constant practice, and I had only half of what it took: Whatever conditioning I might have retained after a week or two fighting off the purple alligators in Dr. Flax’s acid-cum-hypnosis sessions had been scattered along with the rest of my marbles at the end of the interview with Gideon.

  No way.

  Besides—sour grapes—even the most advanced levels of muscle dynamics have their limits. No Jaho; no Jit Suryoko. And the cuffs seemed awfully tight.

  It was defeatist thinking. Death-cell thinking. Master Masuda would not have approved. But he was far away, and for the moment I seemed to have run out of ideas and maneuvering space simultaneously.

  The image of Angela’s face, vacant and biddable and drained of all human emotion, danced before me in darkness, and the ever-vagrant mind ran her at fast-forward speed through a hundred depraved scenarios with a voice-over of Gideon’s mocking laughter.

  Ah . . . better! The surge of fire-hot rage was all I might have hoped. Borne on its wave of adrenal fluids, I found that I could tense and relax the larger muscles of the legs and would have tested them further but for the danger of alerting Soames.

  It also seemed to make a difference in my thinking. No more passive acceptance.

  But it didn’t get me off the floor.

  And it didn’t get my hands loose.

  And it didn’t do much to solve another little problem that had just come to my notice, either: Suddenly I had an out.

  Something to say besides no.

  Before—during the questioning by Soames and later while Gideon was making his pitch—I’d enjoyed the dubious advantage of ignorance. I really didn’t have the answer to their questions about the diamond stash. Not a clue.

  And now I did.

  Or thought I did . . . which was just as dangerous.

  The diamonds didn’t belong to me and they hadn’t really belonged to Pete Palermo, either. Or to Angela. They were trouble. Death and destruction followed wherever they went, and if I could trade them for Angela’s freedom—not to mention my own—no one would blame me for doing it. To the contrary.

  But I couldn’t, and the reasons didn’t have a damn thing to do with Angela. Or me.

  The real problem was Gideon.

  He was a victim, sure. No question about it. The abused and abandoned child becomes the vengeful and manipulative adult. Tragic. I could even identify a little. The sudden realization that the good guys aren’t always going to win, and that God’s plan for us may require you to take the big fall can be a real mind-warper. It had been for me.

  So . . . let him have the damn stones?

  I thought about it and tried to imagine how it would be and offered myself all the facile rationalizations and backed them up with the more subtle and sophisticated ones I’d learned in apologetics. And stood back for a moment or two, and knew I was spinning my wheels.

  Not on this earth.

  Which narrowed the options down to just one. As I had known it would, I suppose, from the beginning. So, all right already. Vikings of old believed a man’s rank in the hereafter depended on how big an honor guard he was able to take with him, and my own was already at squad strength or more. Not too bad for a nonviolent type.

  And there was always a chance of posthumous recruitment. If Gideon’s remarks about the casino meant what I thought they did, my friends might be busy breaking his rice bowl right now—and that would be the end of the Temple of the Eternal Flame. No money, no power. No power, no Master.

  And no miracles.

  Gideon might have the inner resources to survive such a debacle for the second time in his life. But I doubted it and had my own ideas about the direction his megalomaniacal fancies might take when the trees finally began to fall.

  Any day is a good day to die.

  And there are worse ways to go than being drowned in a bucket of seawater.

  Time passed, and I tried to turn my mind off.

  The angel that Soames had sent to fetch a pail of water didn’t seem to be in any hurry about getting it, so I concentrated on a high-frequency sound that seemed to be a permanent part of the cellar environment, like the dirt. Thrumming, just a few cycles short of a hiss, filled all the interstices of audibility that are the normal background static of life and made the atmosphere oppressive in the way that a blanket can oppress on a hot day. Sound pollution is a recognized hazard of the industrial age. People lose their hearing little by little, in imperceptible increments, from the cumulative effect of background noise in steelyard and factory. They bleed from nose and ears when exposed unshielded to the resonance of a rocket engine. But between the two extremes there is a middle ground that is just as deadly to the faculties—a vast plain of frustration where the processes of thought are stunted and denied nourishment by sound of such low level that it devours the synaptic capacity while denying its own existence.

  Try to follow the first page of something by Kant sometime in a room filled with Muzak, or check your income tax return in the presence of a noisy air conditioner.

  “Go see what the fuck is keeping Sid,” Soames said.

  “Christ, Jack! He just—”

  “Go, goddammit! Do like I tell you and get his no-good ass back down here. I’d like to get this over with before my clothes go outta style.”

  “Blessed be!”

  “Blessed be.”

  The angel plodded away into the gloom without further argument, and Soames sighed audibly. Sound effect of the weary warrior. The workman worthy of his hire. But drowsy.

  “You know, Preach,” he said when we were alone, “I almost hope you hold out on us when the boys get back. You been a real pain in the butt—and I think it would be a big mistake to let you live.”

  I laughed. Dumb, but I couldn’t help it.

  Soames sighed again and kicked me casually in the ribs. I swayed but couldn’t fall over. The handcuffs wouldn’t let me.


  “Still think it’s funny?”

  I did, but it seemed the wrong time to say so.

  “No offense,” I said. “And forgive me if I don’t seem to enter into the spirit of the occasion—but it was just such a ridiculous thing to say. Take my advice, Soames: Leave the con games and the hustle to people who are good at it. Like your brother-in-law. And Gideon. And never play poker with strangers. You just don’t have the right equipment.”

  He kicked me again, but with less force. This time I didn’t taste blood in my mouth.

  “You stupid prick,” he said in a peculiar tone of indifference tinged by puzzlement. “You think the Master wants you dead? Bullshit. If he wanted you dead, you’d be dead. Right now.”

  Soames took a step to his left, into my range of vision, and leaned against the wall to light a cigarette.

  “Trouble with smartass sonsabitches like you,” he went on, expelling smoke along with the words, “you don’t know a legit offer when you hear it.”

  “What offer was that?”

  “Throw in with the Master. Join us! Oh, yeah . . . ” He waved a hand through the growing pall of smoke. “The room’s tapped—on the Master’s orders, natch—so I heard all of it. Every word that was said.”

  That surprised me a little, and I couldn’t help trying to satisfy my curiosity. “Including the words about you?” I said.

  This time it was his turn to laugh. “You mean, about how I happened to go to work for the Master?” He laughed again and waved the cigarette at me. “The dope and Doc Flax and alla that? Of course! What the hell you think, I can’t remember that? I’m some kind of a zombie over here, and me running the whole security lash-up for the Temple? Christ, Preach, that’s just for the funny papers. Get real.”

  “But if you know . . .?”

  “They did me a favor! Biggest favor one person can do another. I was going crazy out there, working with Suleiman and trying to keep up with that Looney Tunes wife of mine. Oh, don’t get me wrong; ’Dita’s the greatest. Smarter than hell and a real tiger in the sack. But there they was, the both of them, able to think rings around old Jackhandle Jack. I felt like some kind of trained ape.”

  He took in another lungful and sighed it out reflectively.

  “But then ’Dita met the Master. And everything changed for us.”

  “I just bet it did.”

  He looked at me without expression. “That,” he said, “is how people get false teeth.”

  “Go on—scare me.”

  The expression didn’t change, but he didn’t kick me in the face, either, and after another lungful of smoke he went on.

  “At first I was pissed, sure,” he said. “Natural enough. I figured he was competition, and here he was, beating my time with my own wife.”

  “But he wasn’t doing that?”

  Soames made an impatient gesture. “Didn’t have nothing to do with that,” he said. “Nothing at all. It wasn’t sex—not just a roll in the kip—it was a whole new life. A new way of looking at the world.”

  “And all it took to get you to see it was a few drops of lysergic acid and a shot of hippopotamus tranquilizer.”

  That finally earned me another kick. But once again, his heart didn’t seem to be in it.

  “I never claimed to be no genius,” he said. “What was I, ever? A street-tough guy who tried to win all his arguments by kicking ass. So, all right, I didn’t understand at first and even when the Master—with ’Dita helping him—explained the deal, I wasn’t listening. So, they had to call in Doc Flax for help. So, what? The point is, in the end I listened. And learned. Which is a hell of a lot more than I can say for you, pally.”

  He smiled at me almost sadly, and I wondered how long it had taken him to sell himself that version of reality. Not that it mattered. He believed it now.

  “So, I guess maybe that’s what really bugs me about you now, Preach. Because you’re supposed to be so fucking smart—and you can’t even see what a hell of an offer the Master’s making you here.”

  “An offer I can’t refuse. Right?”

  Another kick; not so casual this time.

  “Keep running the mouth,” he said, “and you’ll wind up doing your underwater breathing with one lung.”

  “Sounds complicated.”

  “For sure.”

  The half-smoked cigarette landed on the floor and he ground it out under the sole of his shoe.

  “The hell of it is,” he said, straightening and moving out of sight again, “you’re the first one ever held out so long—especially when you got Doc Flax in the act with his mythical mother-lode mindfuck—and I think it worries the Master. A little, anyway. Makes him wonder if there are any more like you.”

  I twisted my head, trying to see him, but it was no go. He’d moved too far.

  “Soames,” I said, “my name is legion. Depend on it.”

  That got a snort of laughter.

  “Legion,” he said. “The unclean spirit, according to Saint Mark. Or spirits, more than one of them, if you read Luke’s version. Sure! Bet I know my Bible as well as you do, Preach. Christ, would you believe—”

  But I never found out what I was supposed to believe.

  The sentence ended in something that was not a word; a soggy thump, followed almost at once by the sound of a body collapsing on the concrete floor.

  I wrenched my head and body to the left, sawing against the cuffs and twisting to see what had happened.

  Behind me and a little to one side, Jack Soames lay on his back, eyes closed and jaw agape.

  Something big and purple had happened to the side of his head.

  And above him, favoring me now with a jack-o’-lantern grin while still holding the sand-and-sock bludgeon that had produced such a remarkable result, stood Willie Axe.

  “Hey, there, Preacher,” he said. “Think you might could use a little help?”

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  Does it acknowledge the existence of your own conscience and logical faculties, and encourage you to use them . . . or does it require an indefinite suspension of disbelief?

  TWENTY-SIX

  Explanations had to wait while we attended to basic housekeeping.

  The key to my handcuffs was in Jack Soames’s coat pocket, and I helped Willie gag and bind him—using his own socks and twisted strips torn from his shirt—as soon as I was free. Willie didn’t think it was strictly necessary.

  “Has that half-hour look,” he said. “I still got me a kind of a nice touch with the soft sap, y’know?”

  I allowed he surely did at that, but insisted on the extra precaution nonetheless, and then moved on at once to Subject B.

  “What did you do with the angels?”

  Willie grinned again and turned away into the gloom, beckoning me to follow.

  I tried to stay close. Whatever else Gideon might have done for the old South Bay Plaza, he didn’t seem to have spent any money lighting up the basement. But Willie had some kind of built-in radar.

  “Got my own private little hidey-hole down here,” he said. “Got to—see, I mind the boiler. Gives ’em hot water and even steam heat upstairs during the winter. Only you got to be damn careful about that boiler . . . ”

  He turned abruptly, and I barely avoided banging into a wall.

  “Creeper, that thing is. Safety valves ain’t worth a shit, all corroded and full of crap and corruption. So, you got to go adjust the pressure knob every few hours, turn it back down where it ought to be. Or the whole fuckin’ place goes up. Boom!”

  We made another turn and stopped at a rough-carpentered wooden door set into a fresh-looking cinder-block wall.

  “Built this myself,” Willie said with more than a touch of pride. “Kind of fun doing it, too. Took me back. My old man was a bricklayer, worked some with block and all, and tried to teach me, but I was too fuckin’ smart, y’know? Already had me a big career going, running the numbers, so it didn’t take. Old guy’d really get a laugh, seeing wh
at I done here. But I really enjoyed it.”

  The room was intended to be secured by a padlock, but that item was hanging loose in the hasp. Willie opened the heavy door with the flourish of a stage magician turning a cageful of mice into elephants and faced me with another grin that seemed to demand a standing round of applause.

  Overdone, perhaps. But you couldn’t fault his style. Willie had arranged the two angels in tandem on the floor, arms raised to embrace a solid-looking insulated pipe and secured at the wrists with silver Duct tape.

  Both still seemed to be sleeping.

  “Had to tunk ’em a little harder’n I did ole Jackhandle Jack,” Willie explained. “In more of a hurry, y’know. And anyway, I’m getting older. Can’t take so many chances like I could once’t . . . ”

  One of the angels was about my size, and we untaped his hands and undressed him before binding him back in position hugging the pipe, using more of the Duct tape to make sure he couldn’t move his feet or ankles, and trussing his friend similarly before going to work on gags and blindfolds.

  They slept through it all. Like angels.

  “Guess the troubles here in the temple must be even bigger than you figured, huh?”

  Willie’s face was somber and only a little worried, and I made my answer as honest as I thought the traffic would bear—feeling every bit the double-dealing bastard I knew myself to be.

  “Gideon has a few problems,” I admitted.

  “Blessed be!”

  It was as much explanation as he seemed to want, and I was grateful. But guilty. Willie Axe had undoubtedly saved my life, and I wanted to level with him. Wanted to tell him he was perhaps the only sane inhabitant of a lunatic asylum run by its craziest inmates and that it was time to run for his life. But the best I could do was to refrain from echoing the blasphemous benediction and point out the obvious.