“You got him?” she asked.
The thug - because he fit that description perfectly - smirked, then went around to the back of his car, fingering the release for the trunk. I hadn’t left the sanctuary of the Hummer yet, so I couldn’t see what Hannah was laughing at as she looked down.
“Jennifer, come here,” she called out, waving me over.
I wanted to vomit. Run. Refuse. Instead, of course, I got out and walked up to join them.
There was a man in the trunk, bound and gagged, looking the worse for wear after being in the trunk for three hours, but still alive, squirming. Something about him looked familiar ...
“Jennifer, meet Jeff Minsky. Nice of him to agree to this meeting, isn’t it?” She motioned to the thug. “Haul him out of there.”
The kidnapper lifted Minsky out easily, but Minsky couldn’t stand - he fell to the sand, then managed to push himself up to his knees, making frantic noises behind his gag.
Hannah gazed down at him impassively, eyeing him as if he were some ugly but amusing little dog. “You know, Jeff,” she said after a few seconds, “the people who’ve already invested in Yank! didn’t find your little stunt very amusing.”
He shook his head back and forth so violently that he almost fell over again, catching himself at the last second.
But he froze and went quiet when the thug handed Hannah a gun.
She eyed it critically, hefted it, pretended to aim along the barrel, made a motion with her thumb that I figured was probably flicking off the safety. “You’ve been a thorn in my side for too long.”
Jeff started to cry behind the gag; his sobs came out as stifled grunts.
Hannah considered the gun for another moment... then held it out to me.
I stared from the gun to her and back to the gun, in utter disbelief. She was surely joking, not serious, not—
“Take it,” she said.
I did.
It was heavier than it looked, and I nearly dropped it.
“Use both hands,” Hannah said. She was clearly experienced in these things.
I wrapped both hands around the grip. I was shaking, but even I couldn’t miss at this range.
“Now shoot him.”
“I don’t know how to use it.”
“Just point it and pull the trigger. It’s got a hell of a recoil, so be prepared for that.”
I wondered how many times she’d done this, maybe even in this same place, with this same enforcer for the investors’ money. How many had she killed herself? How many people knew? If I refused, would I be the next victim?
I thought the answer to that was obvious.
So I tried to lift the gun, to point it at the man on the ground below me, a man who’d tried to compete with Hannah Ward and who found himself sobbing on the desert floor as a result. My fingers felt too weak to tear a piece of paper, let alone pull the trigger that would end a man’s life (and save mine).
I had to try something else. I flipped the gun around and tried to smile as I returned it to Hannah. “I think this should really be your moment, Hannah. I’m afraid you’ll regret it if I do it.”
But she didn’t take the gun. Instead, she gently pushed the barrel back until it was pointed at Minsky again, and said, “Pull the trigger and you’ll be producing Yank!”
“But you ...”
“I’ll stay on as Executive Producer, but it’ll be your baby.”
There it was: everything she knew I wanted. I’d be making movies fresh out of college. The American Dream, the Hollywood dream, my dream. If I just pulled the trigger.
“Jennifer,” she said, as I struggled with the gun, “this is how the industry - hell, the whole world - works.”
I was surprised at how sad she sounded just then, as if she still had a speck of conscience, as if some tiny part of her was still capable of guilt and regret and sanity.
But I knew that wasn’t the case. It was another movie lie.
I braced myself and pulled the trigger.
<
~ * ~
PAUL McAULEY
I Spy
/ SPY FOR a living. That’s why I know what you are. That’s why I know what you do. That’s why I humbly lay this confession at your feet.
~ * ~
Childhood is supposed to be the happiest time of your life, and once they have put it behind them, for most people it is. They remember the good times. They remember Christmas and birthdays. They remember sunny days and freedom and laughter. But my childhood was a hell with no redemption. I grew up resenting the way my schoolmates were cosseted and aimed towards adulthood by caring parents. I had to find my own path. It was no easy one.
My father was a Polish ex-airman. He had fled the Nazis when the tanks rolled over the border in September 1939. He was not a coward. He wanted to get out so he could have his revenge on those who had destroyed his country.
He joined the RAF and flew more than fifty sorties against the Luftwaffe at the height of the Battle of Britain. After the war he settled down and became an accountant. He was well respected in the little Gloucestershire town where we lived. He was a prosperous small businessman. He was a war hero. But he was also a violent bully. He missed the certainties of war and hated the contingencies and random mess of civilian life. He became a martinet who exerted fanatical and rigid control over his family.
Everything in our little bungalow had its place and everything had to be kept spotlessly clean. Meals had to be provided punctually. His clothes had to be ironed and starched in a certain way and had to be laid out for him each morning in the correct manner. He spent most of his evenings at the British Legion club. He drank heavily and came home and beat his wife after he failed to fuck her. He stood in the doorway of the bedroom of his only son and cursed him and listed perceived transgressions and the punishments he would deliver. In this he was as methodical as in everything else. He devised a tariff of discipline which he carried out to the letter.
I hated my mother more than my father because she never complained or stood up to him. She explained away the bruises as falls. Our neighbours accepted this because she was so prone to narcolepsy and epileptic fits she was not allowed a driving licence.
She was a mouse of a woman. Someone who should have protected me and could not even protect herself. She had no friends in the town. She was an only child and her mother was widowed. My father forbade her to have any contact with her meagre family. She was allowed out only to shop. My father would ring from the office at odd times to interrogate her.
I grew up fearful and quiet. I had been taught to speak only when spoken to. Any hint that I might be lying brought swift and terrible punishment. My father once broke a broom handle on my head because he thought I had stolen a £10 note. He later found it on the bureau and beat my mother for misplacing it. The world was constantly thwarting him.
I had concussion for three days. I did not mind. The world was pleasantly out of focus. Everything seemed an inch from my grasp. For the first time in my life my sleep was deep and dreamless.
My father was a burly man. Drink coarsened his face and added a swag to his belly but he remained hale and hearty until he died. He had excelled in all sports as a young man. Although he could easily have afforded a car he walked everywhere. He walked at the same fast pace whether it was raining or gloriously sunny.
I took after my mother. I was slightly built and short. My eyesight was poor. My father forced me to do Canadian Air Force Exercises each morning. He made me use Indian clubs to build up my muscles. They had little effect. He could circle my upper arms with his fingers. Once I tried to defend my mother because he was still beating her after she had been knocked unconscious. Blood was coming out of her ears. He threw me the length of the living room with a flick of his arm.
I learned how to evade the worst of my father’s anger. I found many places to hide. Sometimes I spent the night away from home. The beatings I received upon my return
were fearsome but they were a small price to pay for a respite from my father’s drunken rages and the aching quiet of my mother’s fear. I found that if I pretended not to care about the beatings my father would lose interest. In truth he was getting old. He had married late. He had been fifty when I was born. There had been another child ten years before that. My brother had died when only two months old. He had been my father’s true heir. My father blamed my mother and often told me that I was a mistake. It was the only one of his cruelties that I believed long after his death.
I did not seek out friends. I was mostly left alone at school. I was too weird for the bullies to bother with and too scary for the other misfits. A few of the teachers recognized my intelligence and tried to draw me out but I refused to respond.
I turned in essays and other work on time but otherwise I drifted through school. There was nothing to hold my interest. I spent most of my time daydreaming. I drew elaborate patterns inside the covers of my exercise books. Classes dragged slowly towards release at four-fifteen each afternoon. The school was a grammar school with public-school pretensions. It displayed silver trophies in a glass cabinet next to the door to the headmaster’s study. The names of the dead of two world wars were engraved on walnut shields hung in the assembly hall. The names of those who had gone on to university were painted on varnished pine boards that lined the main corridor. In its traditions and discipline I saw only a weak reflection of my father’s regime. I despised it.
I spent most of my free time as a teenager reading science fiction and Marvel comic books. I read Alfred Bester’s Tiger! Tiger! and Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human. I read Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land and John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos. I loved Roger Zelazny’s Amber series of novels. They were about an ordinary man who discovered that he was a powerful prince of a hidden realm realer than our own world.
I used this raw material to construct my own fantasies. I was an orphan of star sailors who had abandoned or lost me for complex reasons. I was an experimental subject unknowingly adopted by my parents. Although I was outwardly an ordinary boy I would slowly realize my powers. I would be able to read minds or move objects by mental power. I would be able to see into the future and amass a vast fortune. I would be able to hypnotize girls and do whatever I wanted with them (the phrase he bent her to his will woke a particular thrill for me). I would found a new religion and be surrounded by loyal friends and beautiful compliant women. I would allow my mother and father to be employed in some lowly and humiliating position.
I read James Tiptree Jr’s story “Beam Us Home”. My father did not own a television and I knew nothing about Star Trek but the story rang true at a deep level. For many weeks I dreamed that a great golden ship would one day sweep down out of the sky and hover over my town. Everyone would be tested and everyone but me would fail. I would rise in a beam of light to the wonder of all.
And then there were the comics. Their dramas were centred on weaklings or cripples who were imbued with secret identities and superpowers. Spider-Man - his alter ego a misunderstood teenage loner like me. Iron Man - a millionaire afflicted with a near-fatal heart ailment. Thor - otherwise a cripple. The X-Men -mutant teenagers who hated the difference their superpowers bestowed upon them.
Unlike the X-Men I wanted to be different. I knew that I was better than those around me. I was better than the ordinary teenagers who had loving homes and went on dates and were good at sport. I could not believe that my suffering and my father’s punishments were for nothing.
~ * ~
Were you already living in the town? Did you select me? Were you moulding me through those fantasies? Were you beginning to turn me into your disciple?
I will prove myself worthy of you. I will show you that I am capable of deeds of true and absolute justice. I will show you how I triumphed over my father.
~ * ~
I practised telepathy. I tried to control the flight of birds by willpower. I shuffled packs of cards and tried to guess their order. I collected coincidences and wondered if the whole world was a conspiracy. I imagined that it was peopled by actors in a drama centred on me.
I was sixteen. I cut an eccentric figure around town. I craved attention but was too introverted to seek it out. I thought that people would recognize and love my uniqueness. In this respect I was not unlike other teenagers.
In summer I wore an orange jacket and green trousers. In winter I topped this off with a quilted navy blue anorak. Like everyone in the seventies I wore my hair long. I did not often wash it. It was greasy and spangled with dandruff. I had thick-lensed National Health spectacles with thin blue metal rims. I cultivated a wealth of acne by long sessions of pinching and prodding before the bathroom mirror.
I was given no pocket money except for a few odd coins my mother managed to hoard from her meagre housekeeping. I spent her gleanings on second-hand Panther and Pan paperbacks at jumble sales. It left a little over for the bag of chips I shared with the pigeons in the park by the church. After I had used up the public library I needed to steal to get my fix of pulp thrills. I stole Marvel comic books from the revolving wire rack in the newsagent’s. I stole Four Square and Star paperbacks from Woolworths’ bargain bins. I wrapped my books and comics in plastic bags and hid them in various places in the bungalow’s unkempt garden.
I did not know that comics and science fiction were popular culture. I knew nothing about popular culture. We did not own a television. My father kept the radiogram permanently tuned to Radio 4 and listened only to the evening news. I believed that the books and comics were schemes for an ideal world which would one day rise through the quotidian. I believed that they contained secret messages that only the Illuminati could understand.
I began to patrol the town at night soon after I took up shoplifting. I was looking for secrets. I did my homework early and went out after my father left for the British Legion club. Sometimes I followed him. He revealed nothing. It was not until later that I discovered his secret.
But there were plenty of places of interest. I planned my excursions like military operations. I haunted the common. I made furtive raids on the perimeter of the American airbase. I walked the corridors of the hospital. I wandered about the yards of the factories that backed on to the railway line.
I picked up a pair of binoculars in one of the jumble sales. The magnification ratio was feeble and both lenses were badly scratched. It did not matter. I watched ordinary domestic routines through lighted windows. I knew where all my classmates lived and where their girlfriends lived. I watched them in bus shelters or chip shops or in the patch of waste ground where they drank Blackthorn cider and VP sherry. I knew where the older teenagers went in the woods above the town. I knew that the dairy regularly tipped unsold milk back into its tanks. I knew that stolen goods were distributed in the yard of the Prince of Wales pub by the bus station after hours. I knew where dope was sold and I knew who bought it.
I made notes on different coloured paper. I made elaborately coded dossiers. I believed that they held the key to all of the town’s secrets. All I had to do was scry the patterns.
There were other rewards. Sometimes I glimpsed through half-drawn curtains a girl or a woman taking off her clothes. I saw Janice Turner take off everything but her bra, and then she turned and with one hand reached behind her long white back and began to unfasten the strap and with the other switched out the light. She was one of the girls at the High School who were rumoured to “do it”. She became the subject of my humid private fantasies for weeks afterwards.
Spying did not satisfy my need to know things. The sixth form had its own house in one corner of the school grounds. It was easy to bunk off school between lessons without being missed. I knew the routines of the householders and always carefully checked that they were out by telephoning them before going into action.
It was surprisingly easy to break into houses in those days. Very few people had burglar alarms or security loc
ks. I avoided houses with dogs. People hid spare keys under flowerpots or doormats. They hung them on strings inside letterboxes. In summer they left windows open.
I took nothing. I wanted only to be in the spaces inhabited by ordinary lives. It was like being on stage in an empty theatre. I read letters and bills. I found diaries. I learned all their dirty little secrets. I printed my authority on the commonplace domestic interiors through minor transgressions. I lay in the fragrant beds of teenage girls and masturbated with their underwear around my penis. I pissed in baths but washed it away afterwards. I walked naked around other people’s houses.
Although I took nothing from the houses I broke into, I sometimes found rabbits and other small pets in sheds or out-houses. Once I found half-a-dozen new-born kittens blindly moving over each other in a cardboard box lined with newspaper. I killed these helpless creatures in various slow and interesting ways using the dissection kit I had been issued with for biology classes. I smeared their blood on my face. Sometimes I drank a little of it. The thick salty taste made me ill. I was not yet worthy. I left the remains of these small sacrifices in various places at the edge of town. I impaled them on bamboo canes or on branches of certain trees. I was marking the place as my own.
Psychomania: Killer Stories Page 19
