by Darren Shan
“—That I had a soft spot for you, yes. But business is business.”
“You’d really have killed me?”
“I never lie about the important things, as your mother knew. That is why, even if she had lived to be a senile old woman, given to spurting out her darkest secrets to all and sundry, she would never have told about me.” He tapped the floor. “Fear is a great silencer, Al m’boy, especially if it is fear for one you love.”
He got up and offered me his hand. I refused it and struggled to my feet by myself. He smiled, asked if I could walk, opened the door when I said I could and gestured me through to a long corridor.
“Where are we?” I asked, glancing up at the flickering tubes overhead.
“A building,” he answered vaguely. “One of my many places of work. You do not need to know more.”
As we walked, Wami in front, me struggling to keep up, something he’d said struck me and I stopped. Wami looked back.
“You said I was your firstborn.”
His face split into an approving smile. “You are slow but not entirely witless.”
“You have other children?”
“Many. By many different women.”
“I have brothers? Sisters?”
“Forty-plus at the last count. Quite a few nephews and nieces too.”
The news left me reeling. I’d always believed I was alone in the world.
“Where are they?” I asked. “Here in the city?”
“Some, yes, but I have also sown my oats in the ports of strange and distant lands. You even have an Eskimo sister.” It was hard to tell if he was joking or not.
“Do you keep in contact with them?”
“I keep tabs on them. I do not have time for personal relationships.”
“Is that why you were following me? Why you were outside the Red Throat when I was attacked?”
He pondered his answer, then turned and beckoned me to follow, deciding on silence.
“What happened to the pair who jumped me?” I asked, shuffling after him.
“They await our pleasure.”
“They’re here?”
“I told you this was a place of work.”
We passed several doors before he stopped at one and entered. It was another dark room. He didn’t turn on the light until the door was closed. When he did, I wished he’d left it off.
The two men from the alley hung by chains from the ceiling, one upside down, the other horizontally. The latter had been disemboweled and his guts trailed over his sides like some long, pink mess that had been dumped there. His eyes had been gouged out and nailed to his nipples so he looked like an obscene alien from a cheap sci-fi movie. Most of the other’s face had been sliced away and a pin had been driven through his genitals, which stretched upwards tightly, suspended by a shorter chain, so that every time he moved he was in agony.
Both were still alive.
I turned aside and retched. Wami laughed and warned me not to vomit on his shoes. When I’d recovered, I asked who they were.
“That was my first question too,” he replied. “Tell me, did you really escort a white woman to the Ku Klux Klub?”
I nodded warily. “Yeah. So?”
“So these two fine, Caucasian queers were there and took it as a personal insult. By chance they noticed you in the Red Throat yesterday and decided to — as one so poetically phrased it before I removed his tongue—‘teach that fucking nigger some goddamn respect for his betters.’ ”
“They had nothing to do with Nic or the Fursts?” I asked, examining the face of the man who still had one.
“Nothing,” Wami said, sounding as disappointed as I felt. “Still, I thought it too good to be true. Life is rarely that simple.”
The man with no face groaned and twitched on his chains. Something — it may have been the remains of his nose — slipped from his forehead and landed in a pool of blood with a gentle plop.
“Will you for Christ’s sake make an end of those two?” I moaned.
“I have grown rather fond of them. I was thinking of keeping them on.”
“Just kill them!” I shouted.
Wami regarded me coolly. “Do not adopt such tones when addressing your father, Albert. You are not too old for a spanking.”
“Please,” I said sickly. “They can’t tell us anything and I can’t stand looking at them like that.”
Wami produced a knife and held it out. “Care to do the honors?” I stared at the knife, then the men, and shook my head. “You have killed before. Why shy away from these two?”
“I killed when ordered, when there was a reason.”
“You will be putting them out of their misery. Is that not reason enough?”
“They were a pair of fools but they didn’t deserve to be—”
Wami spun the knife around and reholstered it in the twinkling of an eye. “Then make no further entreaties of me. If you are incapable of dealing the final blow, I shall do so in my own good time. One must never expect another to extend the hand of mercy on his behalf.”
He strolled past the stricken pair — they sensed his presence and started groaning and writhing anew — toward a door set in the far wall of the room. I followed, steering as far clear of the anguished captives as I could. I found myself in a room with a mahogany desk and two leather chairs, one on either side. There was a computer in the corner and shelves filled with books behind the desk. I glanced over them, expecting tomes on torture and sadism, but they were mostly computer manuals, the odd thriller strewn among them.
“Sit,” Wami instructed, taking his place on the far side of the desk. I was glad to rest, but my sense of relief vanished when Wami produced a gun and aimed it at me. “I will use this if provoked. I will not shoot to kill — it should be obvious by now that I have no wish to harm you — but I will disable you without a second’s hesitation.”
“I’ll be still as a mouse,” I promised, stomach clenching in anticipation.
“You asked why I was at the Red Throat. It was not because you are my son. I was there in search of answers, hoping to trace a client through you.”
“What client?” I frowned.
He paused a second, then said, “The one who hired me to eliminate the Fursts.”
I came dangerously close to disregarding his warning and going for his throat. If I’d had a weapon of my own, I might have.
“You bastard,” I muttered, feeling tears prick my eyes as I thought of the boy I’d held in my arms. “He was a child. Little more than a baby. How could you—”
“Please,” Wami yawned, “spare me the sermon. You have killed in the past. The men you murdered were also children once.”
“It’s not the same.”
“Of course it is. Age is irrelevant.”
“A man who’d kill a child…” I glared at him contemptuously, remembering my vow to murder the one responsible. Wami must have seen something of that in my eyes because his expression darkened.
“I am not the villain you want,” he said. “If I had not killed them, somebody else would have. If you seek vengeance, seek the architect, not the hired gun. Do not waste your hatred on a mere messenger boy, which is all I was.”
“Why them?” I snarled. “Why Breton Furst?”
He shrugged. “That is what I hope to find out. I had no direct contact with my employer. I received a cryptic message — to shadow the Fursts but only kill them when ‘the one I would know’ appeared. My curiosity was piqued, so I set up camp and waited. Then you turned up.”
“Somebody knew I’d go after Breton?”
“It appears so.”
“And they didn’t want me talking to him.”
“Apparently not.”
“But they didn’t want you to kill him before I met him.”
“If you continue stating the obvious, I shall have to administer a slapping.”
“They wanted me to witness the execution,” I went on, ignoring him. “We were both set up.” I stared at the killer
. “Why?”
“If I knew, I would not have been trailing you around the city.”
I thought about it in silence. Whoever it was must have known Wami and I had met, or else they couldn’t be sure that Wami would recognize me. They knew that Breton Furst was connected to Allegro Jinks, and that I would find out and go after Furst. I didn’t know how anybody could be that clued in to what was going on, but more worrying was what else the puller-of-strings might be arranging. Wami was right — he wasn’t the man I wanted. Someone had to pay for the death of the boy, but it should be the one who ordered the hit, not the triggerman.
We discussed it further but neither of us could pinpoint a viable suspect. I told him what had been happening with my investigation, how Nick had been at the Skylight the night of his sister’s death, but we both agreed that the Hornyak brother couldn’t have set up something this elaborate. Wami was half-tempted to pay him a call and find out exactly how much he knew, but I convinced him that more might be gained by shadowing Nick than torturing him.
With night falling, Wami returned to the torture chamber and told me to wait in the corridor outside. He didn’t spend long on the Red Throat pair, and when he came out he was dragging two black body bags, one of which he nudged across to me. We hauled them through the building to a parking lot. Wami disappeared into the neighboring streets, returning with a hot-wired car, into which we dumped the bodies. He then tied a blindfold over my eyes so I wouldn’t know the location of his hideout and off we set for the Fridge.
Five minutes into the journey Wami stopped, removed my blindfold and swapped places with me. He said he didn’t like driving. Motorcycles were his vehicle of choice. He commented wryly on how endearing it was that his son’s favored mode of transport mirrored his own, but I saw nothing cute in that.
As we neared the morgue my mind turned to Tom Jeery’s empty casket and I asked when he’d left the note. He didn’t know what I was talking about.
“The ‘Out To Lunch’ note,” I reminded him.
“I have no casket in the Fridge,” he said.
“Sure you do. When you killed off Tom Jeery you hired a casket and pretended…” I trailed off. “Didn’t you?”
He shook his head.
I slowed down and pulled over, despite the fact that we were within rifle range of the Fridge. “But it’s there. I checked it. There was a note—‘Out To Lunch.’ ”
Wami sniffed. “A staff prank. The ghouls of the Fridge do many strange things with the bodies in their care.”
“But there wasn’t a body, only a name—Tom Jeery.”
He frowned. “Different person, same name?”
“No. The Car—” I stopped. An empty casket. Tom Jeery’s name. Somebody eager to push father and son together.
“How many people know about you and me?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I have always been adept at keeping secrets. One or two from the old neighborhood might have linked Paucar Wami to Tom Jeery, as the gossiping biddy did, but if so, they have kept it to themselves. Otherwise the only one who knows is…” He made a face and groaned.
I waited for him to say the name. When he didn’t, I did, to have it out in the open.
“It’s The Cardinal, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” he sighed. “He knows of all my children.”
“The Cardinal told me about the Tom Jeery casket,” I said, and at that the killer turned to stare at me. For a short instant I saw the poise evaporate from his eyes, and realized that he was just as shaken by this as I was.
We agreed that I’d have to confront The Cardinal. He was a master at covering his tracks. If he had staged Nic’s death, the execution of the Fursts and our meeting, the only way to reveal the truth would be to take our findings directly to the ogre and challenge him with them. I was less than thrilled by the thought.
“What if he doesn’t take kindly to my accusations?”
“If this is one of his games, he will expect a confrontation, since he hired you to unmask the killer.”
“And if he says it wasn’t him?”
“We shall take it from there.”
“You still think he might be innocent?”
“The game is certainly one The Cardinal might play,” Wami said. “Were I not involved, I would be quick to point the finger. But we go back a long way. Hiring me to kill the Fursts was an act of contempt. I do not think The Cardinal would abuse me so openly.”
Wami drove me home — once we’d dropped off the bodies and collected my bike from behind the Red Throat — and set me down outside Ali’s. He kept the engine running while I got out and didn’t linger once I closed the door, pausing only to roll down the window and say he’d call tomorrow for an update. Then he was gone.
I took my time climbing the stairs, wheezing painfully.
Somebody was waiting for me outside the door of my apartment. My first thought — trouble. I began to edge away quietly. Then I recognized the shapely legs of Priscilla Perdue.
“About time!” she snapped as I shuffled up the final steps. “I’ve been waiting for ages. Ten more minutes and I’d have… What on earth happened to you? You look like you fell through a shredder.”
“I should be so lucky,” I grimaced.
She hurried forward. “Give me the key,” she commanded, then opened the door and guided me through. I wanted to collapse into bed and sleep but she was having none of it. She henpecked me into the bathroom and had me disrobed down to my boxers before I knew what was happening. She wet a sponge and wiped the worst of my cuts and bruises. It would have been highly erotic if each swipe hadn’t elicited a stream of gasps, winces and curses.
“Why don’t you just run a cheese grater over me!” I roared.
“Don’t be such a baby,” she replied calmly. “This has to be done. By rights you should see a doctor. There could be internal injuries.”
“There aren’t.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I’ll take a gamble. Shut up and rub.”
Next came the antiseptic — my roars must have been heard in Zimbabwe — then the bandages. After that she wrapped a robe around me and led me through to the living room, where she left me on the couch while she brewed coffee.
“You should have been a nurse,” I mumbled.
“That would have meant facing crybabies like you every day.”
“If you’d taken the beating I have…”
“We can’t all be big, brave boys who go around settling our differences with our fists, can we? Let me guess — somebody insulted your mother?”
“As a matter of fact, you’re due the credit.”
She laughed. “Don’t tell me you were defending my honor.”
“Not exactly. A couple of your friends from the Kool Kats Klub decided to teach me a lesson, to deter me from setting foot on their hallowed turf again.”
“No!” she gasped, immediately contrite. “The dirty sons of… Give me their descriptions. I’ll find out who they are and have them disbarred.”
I coughed guiltily. “No need. They won’t do it again.”
“Was this why you skipped our date?” she asked.
I stared at her blankly.
“We were supposed to be stepping out together last night,” she reminded me. “You said you’d call.”
I smiled sheepishly. “Sorry. I forgot.”
She slapped the back of my head. “You’re a no-good son of a diseased mongrel, Al Jeery. I should have left you as you were. That’s the last time I’ll do a good deed for—”
“Please,” I interrupted as she stormed for the door. “Don’t go. I’ve had things on my mind.”
“Such as?” she sneered.
I silently debated how much I should tell her and decided on a morsel of the truth. “You heard about the Fursts, those people who were killed?”
“Of course,” she said, face softening. “That was awful. The poor children. Whoever did that should be taken out and…” Her lips shut slowly, then opene
d to form a fascinated O. “Some of the reports mentioned a survivor, a man who tried to save the boy.” She looked at me questioningly and I nodded. She covered her mouth with a hand.
“Breton Furst was on duty at the Skylight the night of Nic’s murder. I believe he was connected. I went there to question him. Before I could…”
Priscilla sank to the floor and took my hands as I briefly ran her through the horror of that nightmarish day. She said nothing and kept her head lowered. When I finished, she looked up and there were tears in her eyes.
“I’m sorry, Al.”
“Don’t be silly,” I smiled. “You couldn’t have known.”
“But I should have guessed something was wrong. I assumed you just stood me up, thinking — as usual — that I was the center of the world and nothing happened that didn’t revolve around me. God, it must have been awful. Then you get pulped by a pair of my friends. Then I turn up and…” She stood. I was amazed and rather flattered by how upset she was. “I’ll leave and let you recuperate in peace.”
“No,” I said quickly, pulling her back. “I want you to stay.”
She stared at me, then said in a voice as soft as velvet, “The night?”
My heart almost exploded, but I was in no shape — either physically or mentally — for sexual entanglement. “Well, a couple of hours at least,” I muttered.
Priscilla sat on the couch, leaned forward and pressed her lips to mine, gently. “OK,” she sighed. “I’ll stay. For a while. And we’ll see how things go.”
“Sounds good,” I agreed, then returned her kiss as gently as she’d kissed me.
17
I felt a lot better Monday than I’d feared. The worst of the bruising had subsided and although I was tender from top to toe it was nothing I couldn’t live with. Some light exercise, a healthy breakfast, a brisk walk around the block and by eleven I was ready to take on God himself. Since the supreme being wasn’t available, I caught a cab to Party Central to see The Cardinal.
I was in luck — his secretary could fit me in at two. I wandered the halls of Party Central, catching up on what had been happening during my absence. Breton Furst was the talk of the establishment, but hardly anyone knew of my involvement with him. I asked if Furst had any close friends in Party Central — I wanted to learn more about him — but nobody I spoke to had known him personally. Mike, who was on his lunch break, said Jerry and Furst were good buddies, but Jerry was on sick leave. Mike said he’d tell him to give me a call when he returned.
