Oasis of Night

by J. S. Cook

  He isn’t dead, he isn’t dead, he isn’t dead. “No accident.”

  “Nope. No accidents downtown. I dunno who told you that, but they gave you a wrong number.”

  “Thanks, Dan.” I hung up and thought about what Dan had just told me. There was no accident and Sam Halim hadn’t been killed downtown.

  So where was he?

  Chapter 9

  I WAITED at the Heartache Cafe while Picco and his men scoured the city for Julie. It wasn’t inconceivable that she would try to skip town like she’d done before, working her way across country by rail or hopping a Greek freighter to Athens to meet up with Octavian. There were a dozen different ways she could escape, and Picco’s men couldn’t be everywhere. There was nothing I could do about it, not with Chris gone and nobody to mind the store, so I stayed put, gnawing my fingernails and waiting for the phone to ring.

  It was well past four that afternoon when something finally broke. The Cafe was nearly empty and I had just brought a load of dirty dishes to the kitchen when the phone at the end of the bar went off. “Heartache Cafe, this is Jack.”

  “This is Sergeant Picco. Miss Fayre is in custody.” The line went dead.

  “Wait, Picco—where did—ahhhh!” I hung up. I wondered where they’d caught her—at the railway station, waiting to board a train, or maybe hanging around the waterfront, hoping to catch the attention of some unwary Greek willing to give her passage to Europe?

  I didn’t have time to do too much musing, because just then Chris came in. His clothes were rumpled and dirty, like he’d been rolling in the gutter, and there was a cut over one eye. His lip was bleeding. He threw himself into a chair and buried his face in his hands.

  “Hey… you okay?” I pried his hands away from his face. “What happened? Did a runaway truck do this?”

  He laughed mirthlessly. “Sergeant Picco’s fist did it.”

  “Oh, boy. Chris, don’t you know you can get jail time for assaulting a police officer?”

  “I was there when they brought her in. I was at the desk, asking for Picco, and he comes in with Julie in handcuffs.”

  “Stay here. I’m gonna get a wet cloth for your face.” I ushered out the single remaining customer and turned the Open sign to Closed on the door, then went through to the kitchen to get a wet cloth. Dave was finishing the clean-up from lunch, but I told him to go on and gave him the rest of the day off with pay. I figured Chris wouldn’t want an audience for this sort of thing.

  “You should have seen her, Jack.” He submitted to my inept ministrations and let me clean the blood off his mouth. “She looked at me like she never saw me before.”

  “It’s not your fault, Chris.” It sounded weak and stupid, but what else could I say? I wasn’t about to launch into a big speech about how some people are just sick and wrong inside. He was already a victim.

  “Was it true?” He caught hold of my hand, the one holding the cloth. “What you told me about Julie—about the poison and all that stuff—was it true, Jack?”

  The expression in his eyes cut me to the heart, but it was better that he heard the truth from me. It was all going to come out at the trial anyway. “Yeah, Chris. It’s all true.”

  He nodded. “She’s no good. She was never any good.” He let go of my hand. “Jack, do you think… I mean, there’s going to be a trial, right?”

  “Yeah, Chris. There’s going to be a trial.”

  “But what about Octavian? He put her up to this! If it wasn’t for him, Julie would have never done—” He stopped. “Yeah. Maybe I should keep telling myself that, huh?”

  I laid my hand on his shoulder and squeezed gently. “It isn’t your fault. Chris, you gotta believe me.” I cupped his cheek in my hand. “Don’t crucify yourself because of this. You didn’t know. Nobody knew about Julie. She had everybody fooled.”

  I invited Chris to stay with me for a few days, but he said he’d rather go on home, and I let him. I offered to drive him the couple of blocks to his apartment, but he said the walk would do him good. Watching him like this, seeing him tear himself up inside because of a no-good dame, was doing a number on me. I figured the best thing to do was go upstairs and lie down.

  I passed by the bar on my way upstairs, and I lingered for a minute, looking at the bottles. Maybe one drink wouldn’t be so bad? It would help me sleep, for sure. I could mix in a little sugar and some hot water and make myself a toddy—a nice hot drink would send me right off into dreamland, and anyway, it was only one, so where was the harm in that? I unscrewed the top of a bottle of Gordon’s London Dry Gin and sniffed it. A green smell like trees and turpentine. The taste would be astringent on the tongue, and it would burn as it went down, a subtle flame that glistened on the lips….

  My nostrils filled with the scent of hospitals and medicine, and in my mind, I saw it all again: the small room with its white walls, the gleaming metal stirrups, the crackling white paper on the examination bed, and the lingering smell of blood. Judy, oh God! Judy. I took hold of her hand, but she was already cold, and her vacant face gazed up at the ceiling with an expression of astonishment and wonder, whispering to me as the life drained out of her. Above the waist, she might have been a worshipful sylph gazing upon the faces of her gods; below the waist was a mess of congealed blood, rotting tissue, and death.

  I put the bottle back and went upstairs.

  I UNDRESSED and lay down on the bed, staring into the artificial darkness of the afternoon, the ceiling fan turning slow arabesques above my sweating head. A slight breeze from the harbor teased the window blinds, allowing sudden, unexpected shafts of light to peer into the room. My thoughts went around in my head like a Coney Island carousel. I had just managed to drift off when I heard someone banging on the Cafe door downstairs. The banging got louder and more insistent, so I threw on some clothes and went to see who it was.

  “We’re closed! Go away!”

  “Open the door, Stoyles!”

  I recognized that voice. “Picco.” I threw open the door, and the young sergeant stood there in civilian clothes. “What the hell do you want?”

  “Can I come in?” He seemed to be trying his best to be civil.

  “Yeah, sure, come on in.” The spectacle of Picco politely wiping his feet on the Cafe’s welcome mat made me smile. I ushered him to a chair and put on a pot of coffee. “What time is it?”

  “Nine thirty.”

  The proximity of his voice nearly sent me out of my skin. He’d trailed me into the kitchen. “Picco! Goddammit, don’t do that.”

  “I daresay he told you—Chris.”

  “That you and him had a dust-up? Yeah, he told me.”

  “I wanted to make sure you knew I didn’t want to get into it with him.” Picco sighed. “We brought her in to headquarters, and he was there, waiting. I told him to get out of the way, but he wouldn’t move.” Picco’s pale eyes were troubled. “I think he wanted me to hit him. He came at me and I had to defend myself.”

  I believed him. “Yeah. Chris is pretty broken up about the whole thing.” I took a long look at him. “That’s not why you came here, though, is it?”

  “No.” He leaned against the counter. “Julie Fayre already pleaded guilty. She doesn’t want a trial.”

  “She doesn’t want a trial.” I knew immediately what he was getting at. “So she’ll be sentenced.”

  Picco nodded. “As soon as possible.” He nodded toward the percolator. “Your coffee is boiling over, Jack.”

  I snatched up the pot and fetched two cups. “She’s looking at murder… and that means the death penalty.”

  “That’s exactly what it means.” He accepted a cup of coffee from me and added cream and sugar. “I wanted to let you know. Maybe you can tell Chris. I don’t… I’m not sure if there’s anything I can do to….” He shook his head. “Sorry.”

  “Phonse, when they… what do….” I gazed into my coffee. “I guess nobody’s been stoned to death here for a while, huh?” It wasn’t even funny, but it was the best
I could do.

  Picco’s face was carefully expressionless. “She will be executed according to the prescribed method.”

  “Jesus, Phonse.”

  He put down his cup. “I’d better be going. Jack, I only came by to tell you—I didn’t want you to hear it from the papers, seeing how Chris knew her and everything.”

  I saw him to the door and locked it behind him. The Cafe suddenly seemed stark and empty.

  How the hell could I tell Chris his girlfriend would die by hanging?

  FROM ARREST to admission of guilt to summary judgment didn’t take very long at all, and by the end of August, Julie Fayre was set to climb the scaffold. They don’t hang people in public anymore—at least not around here—but it still had that tang of subtle horror to it.

  I didn’t open the Heartache on the morning of Julie’s execution. I figured Chris had enough to deal with. Since neither Chris nor I were related to Julie, we weren’t allowed to attend her execution, which would take place inside the prison walls. We weren’t even allowed to be present in the waiting room, and no matter how much I pleaded, the warden refused to reconsider.

  “I’m not an unkind man, Mr. Stoyles, but look at it from my point of view. What do you think would happen if every man jack who wanted to could come and watch an execution?”

  Julie was due to be executed at exactly midnight, and since I figured Chris could use the company, I picked him up at his place late in the afternoon and brought him home with me. He was more animated than I’d ever seen him, talking loud and waving his hands around—maybe that was his way of coping with the situation. He wasn’t making much sense, but I let him talk if that was what he needed to do.

  Dave had come by earlier in the day to see if I needed anything. He’d left a cold supper in the fridge for us, and I made a mental note to let Chris have whatever he wanted to drink, and as much of it as he needed.

  There wasn’t really anything to say, and we both knew what we were waiting for, so we passed the time listening to the radio and playing cards, but it didn’t help much. The hours seemed to crawl by while we pretended interest in The Doyle Bulletin or our poker hands.

  Around ten thirty, Chris suddenly got up from his chair, walked to the bar, and stopped, both hands pressed flat on the polished wooden surface. “I can’t take it, Jack.”

  I approached him and laid my hand on his back. “I know.” I smoothed the taut muscles. “I know.”

  “She deserves it—I know she does—but I can’t—Jesus Christ, none of this seems real!”

  I fished out a bottle and poured him a double scotch, straight up. “Here. Get outside of that.”

  He stared at the whiskey like he’d never seen it before. “Jack, do you think it hurts?” He picked up the glass, his hand shaking, and downed the whole thing in one go. “When they—you know, the trap door there—they drop the bottom out—”

  “Chris.” I didn’t want to answer him. I’d seen a guy hanged once, back in 1937 at San Quentin. As far as deaths went, it was messy, shocking, and unpleasant. “Don’t do this to yourself.”

  “Will it be quick?” He kept his gaze focused on the polished surface of the bar. “They just sort of jerk the thing out from under you, right? And you fall through?”

  I refilled his glass and pressed it gently into his hand. “That’s right. You just fall through.”

  “Do they die right away?”

  I rubbed the back of his neck; the muscles felt like knotted cords. “Yeah,” I lied, “of course they do. It’s over quick. She won’t feel a thing.”

  He turned around, eyes full of tears. “You promise?”

  “I promise, baby.” I took him in my arms and just held on to him. “I promise.”

  At eleven thirty we checked that all the doors were locked and went upstairs to my apartment. Chris wasn’t saying much. He’d only had two drinks, but he stumbled on his way up the stairs, clinging to my arm. By then I think he was so far gone in grief that he couldn’t really see or feel much of anything.

  I sat beside him on the bed, and pretty soon we both got really quiet. He asked me if I could turn out the light, so I did. We sat there in the dark, listening. The city noises filtered into the room through the open window: passing cars, a bicycle, a man whistling a sea chanty. The clock ticked closer to the appointed hour, and I remembered it: San Quentin, midnight, and a cold mist from the Bay clinging to everything.

  I’d come up from Frisco just for it, and I was grateful for the chance to walk with him as far as they would let me go. We’d grown up together, he and I, had gone into the service as young men just out of school, but somewhere along the way, I’d lost track of him. He got down on his luck, took to drinking heavily, and beat his young wife to death one night in a fit of drunken rage. Yeah, it was the same old story. At the foot of the scaffold, he reached to shake my hand, but I dragged him close to me, holding him. In the back of my brain, I had some weird idea that if they saw how much I loved him, they would turn him loose. He hugged me and made some kind of joke, and then the guards were taking him away and he put his hand on the railing and started the climb.

  Everybody says there are ten steps to the gallows, and when a man walks up those ten steps, he thinks about all the things that he’s ever done wrong in his life—repents of his sins, I guess you could say. I think that’s a load of bull. I watched him walk it and I saw his face, and there was nothing there but naked horror. He didn’t mind dying—I knew him—but he was afraid of pain, and worse, he was afraid of making a fool of himself, of crying out or begging them for mercy that wasn’t theirs to give.

  And we were at midnight. The clock on the Basilica tower chimed, and Chris made a strangled noise and started up. I caught him at the bedroom door; he fought me but I held on.

  “Goddammit, Jack, let me go!”

  “I can’t do that, Chris. You know I can’t do that.” I wrapped my arms around him, and he sagged against me, all the fight gone out of him.

  If the initial drop breaks the condemned person’s neck, a hanging death is quick, almost instantaneous. If the neck doesn’t break, the death can take as long as twenty minutes. The tolling of the cathedral’s bells seemed to measure out the end of Julie Fayre’s life.

  I held Chris in my arms while he cried, and when he turned his head to seek my mouth, I didn’t refuse him. We lay together on my bed, kissing and touching, and when he took my hand and guided it to the warm bulge of his clothed erection, I didn’t refuse him that either.

  I wasn’t stupid, I knew this wasn’t love or anything like it. I knew it was comfort, and I knew he needed something from me, something I was glad to give. I stripped him tenderly and laid him down and smoothed my palms down the warm expanse of his beautiful body, following those caresses with warm kisses and murmured words. I pressed my mouth to the center of his chest and licked each of his nipples gently, teasing each tiny nub to hardness. I parted his thighs and took his swollen cock into my mouth and sucked him, while he shivered and wept above me, his hands clenched in my hair. His body rode the swelling tide of pleasure, strong thighs contracting, hips pumping, and I reached around to cup his tight buttocks, holding him close to me.

  His breathing quickened and his hands slid out of my hair to clench at his sides. “Jack… oh Jack, I’m gonna come… you come with me, Jack….”

  I let his cock slip out of my mouth. I lay on top of him and kissed him, and we rocked together, rubbing ourselves on each other, bodies shuddering toward the end. Then a bright light burst inside my head and I came so hard I saw stars. In a stroke or two, he was there too, crying out as his cock pulsed his hot seed over my belly and chest. He shivered down to sanity, and we lay there for a long time, the breeze from the window cooling our bodies.

  “You said his name.”

  “Huh?” I turned my head and gazed into Chris’s eyes. There were tears clinging to his lashes.

  “You said Sam Halim’s name, Jack.”

  “No, Chris, you’re wrong. I couldn’t ha
ve.” Sam Halim, with his big, dark eyes and his gentle hands and his voice—Sam Halim, who was missing and presumed dead, except I didn’t really believe that.

  “You did.” He traced the outline of my lips, consummately gentle. “Any idea where he is?”

  “No.” I sighed. “No, I… have some ideas, but… no, Chris. I don’t know where he is.” Maybe he had gone back to Cairo.

  Chris’s gaze was steady. “Then you should go and look for him, Jack.”

  He didn’t need to say the rest. I knew exactly what he meant.

  I knew.

  WHEN I woke up the next morning, Chris was gone, but he’d left a note on the pillow: Thanks for everything. You’re a true friend. I knew he would be all right. It would take a while and he’d feel pretty rotten in the meantime, but he would be okay in the end. That’s the thing about people. We’re resilient because, really, when you get right down to it, we don’t have any other choice.

  I made a pot of coffee and took a cup to one of the tables in the back. A boy had already been around with the morning papers. I made a mental note to stash them as soon as I’d finished reading them—the last thing Chris needed was to see the news of Julie’s execution splattered all over the front page—but when I unfolded The Daily News, I got the shock of my life: RICKETTS FIRED, RESULTS OF POLICE PROBE, and underneath, in smaller type, Constabulary sergeant took bribes, freed prisoners.

  I’d hardly had time to digest it when someone knocked at the door. Dave looked out from the kitchen, but I told him I’d get it. I threw off the lock, and there was Sergeant Picco, spit-shined and as neat as a pin. He was almost civil, for a change. “Stoyles.”

  “Don’t stand in the doorway, Picco. Come on in.”

  He grimaced. “Thank you.” He stepped across the threshold and looked around him with an expression of distaste. By now I knew it was just something he did—a part he was playing, a way of pretending he was above all this sin and transgression.