The Throat

by Peter Straub

  “Have you already been inside the theater?”

  “No,” he said. “I saw the plans. They’re on file at City Hall, and this morning I went down there to check them out.”

  “What am I supposed to do when I ‘surprise’ him?”

  “That’s up to you, I guess,” Tom said. “All you have to do is hold him still long enough for me to get to you.”

  “You know what I think you really want to do? I think you want to stick a gun in his back while he’s unlocking the chain, march him downstairs, and make him take us to the notes.”

  “And then what do I want to do?”

  “Kill him. You have a gun, don’t you?”

  He nodded. “Yes, I have a gun. Two, in fact.”

  “I’m not carrying a gun,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t want to kill anyone again, ever.”

  “You could carry it without using it.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll carry the other gun if you come inside the theater with me. But I’m not going to use it unless I absolutely have to, and I’m only going to wound him.”

  “Fine,” he said, though he looked unhappy. “I’ll go in with you. But are you absolutely clear about your reasons? It’s almost as if you want to protect him. Do you have any doubts?”

  “If one of those three turns up at the theater tonight, how could I?”

  “That’s just what I was wondering,” Tom said. “Whoever turns up is going to be Fielding Bandolier-Franklin Bachelor. Alias Lenny Valentine. Alias whatever his name is now.”

  I said that I knew that.

  He went to his desk and opened the top drawer. The computer hid his hands, but I heard two heavy metal objects thunk against the wood. “You get a Smith & Wesson .38, okay? A Police Special.”

  “Fine,” I said. “What do you have, a machine gun?”

  “A Glock,” he said. “Nine millimeter. Never been fired.” He came around the desk with the guns in his hands. The smaller one was cupped in a clip-on brown holster like a wallet. The .38 looked almost friendly, next to the Glock.

  “Someone I once helped out thought I might need them sometime.”

  They had never been sold. They were unregistered—they had come out of the air. “I thought you helped innocent people,” I said.

  “Oh, he was innocent—he just had a lot of colorful friends.” Tom pushed himself up. “I’m going to make the coffee and put it in a thermos. There’s food in the fridge, when you get hungry. We’ll leave here about eight-thirty, so you have about three hours to kill. Do you want to take a nap? You might be grateful for it, later.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’ll be around. There are a few projects I’m working on.”

  “You have somebody watching the theater, don’t you? That’s why we’re not already on the way there.”

  He smiled. “Well, I do have two boys posted down there. They’ll call me if they see anything—I don’t think our man will show up until after midnight, but there’s no sense in being stupid.”

  I carried the revolver upstairs and lay down on the bed with my head propped against the pillows. Three floors below, the garage door squeaked up on its metal track. After a couple of minutes, I heard a steady tapping of metal against metal float up from inside the garage. I aimed the revolver at the dormer window, the alligator, the tip of Delius’s pointed nose. Fee Bandolier aroused so much sorrow and horror in me, such a mixture of sorrow and horror, that shooting him would be like killing a mythical creature. I lowered my arm and fell asleep with my fingers around the grip.

  7

  BY EIGHT-FIFTEEN we were back in the Jaguar, heading south toward Livermore Avenue. My stomach was full, my mind was clear, and because Tom’s .38 hung on its clip from my belt, I felt like I was pretending to be a cop. A fat red thermos full of coffee stood between us. Tom seemed to have nothing on his mind but driving his pampered car. He was wearing black slacks and a black T-shirt under a black linen sports jacket, and he looked like Allen Stone without the beard and the paranoia. In more or less the same clothes, black jeans, one of Tom’s black T-shirts, and a black zippered jacket, I looked like a middle-aged burglar. About twenty minutes later, we were moving past the St. Alwyn, and five blocks farther south, the Jaguar slowly cruised past the front of what once had been the Beldame Oriental. On the far side of the street, a black teenager in a Raiders sweatshirt and a backward baseball cap squatted on his haunches and leaned against the yellow brick wall of a supermarket. When Tom glanced at him through the Jaguar’s open window, the teenager shook his head sharply and bounced to his feet. He flipped a wave toward the Jaguar and started walking north on Livermore, rolling from side to side and tilting his head back as if listening to some private music.

  “Well, no one’s gone in through the front yet, anyhow,” Tom said.

  “Who’s that?” I indicated the swaggering boy.

  “That’s Clayton. When we get to the alley, you’ll see Wiggins. He’s very reliable, too.”

  “How did you happen to meet them?”

  “They came to visit me one day after seeing a story in the Ledger. I think they were about fourteen, and I believe they took the bus.” Tom smiled to himself and turned off to the right. Directly ahead of us on the left was a white building with a sign that read MONARCH PARKING. “They wanted to know if the story in the paper was true, and if it was, they wanted to work for me.” Tom turned into the garage and drove up to the STOP HERE sign. “So I tried them out on a few little things, and they always did exactly what I asked. If I said, stand on the corner of Illinois Avenue and Third Street and tell me how many times a certain white car goes past you, they’d stand there all day, counting white cars.”

  We got out of the Jaguar, and a uniformed attendant trotted toward us on the curved drive sloping down to the lower floor. He saw the Jaguar and his face went smooth with lust. “Could be any time between two and six in the morning,” Tom said. The attendant said that was fine, he’d be there all night, and took the keys, barely able to look away from the car. He went into his booth and returned with a ticket.

  Tom and I walked out of the garage into the beginning of twilight. Grains of darkness bloomed in the midst of the fading light. Tom turned away from Livermore, crossed the street, and led me into the alley at the end of the block. Ten feet wide, the alley was already half in night. A tall boy leaning against a dumpster up at the far end straightened up when we moved in out of the light. “Wiggins?” Tom asked. “Nope,” said Wiggins, his voice soft but carrying, “but check that chain.” He gave Tom a mock salute and sauntered off.

  Tom moved ahead of me as the boy slipped out of the alley by the other end. Thirty feet along, opposite a high brown half-louvered fence, stood the long flat windowless back of the Beldame Oriental. Whorls of spray paint covered the gray cement blocks and surrounded the two wide black doors. I came up beside Tom. The thick length of chain that should have joined the two doors hung from the left bracket, and the padlock dangled from the right. Tom frowned at me, thinking.

  “Is he in there?” I whispered.

  “I think I should have sent Clayton and Wiggins down here right after you did your Dick Mueller act. I thought he’d wait until the end of his shift.”

  “To do what?”

  “Move the papers, of course.” At what must have been my expression of absolute dismay, he said, “It’s just a guess. He’ll come back, anyhow.”

  He pulled at the right bracket, and both doors moved forward a quarter of an inch and then clanked to a stop. “Ah, there’s another lock,” Tom said. “I forgot that one.” Until Tom spoke, I had not seen the round, slightly indented shape of the lock beneath the bracket.

  From the inside of his jacket he pulled a long dark length of fabric, held it by one end, and let its own weight unroll it. Keys of different sizes and long, variously shaped metal rods fit into slots and pockets all along the heavy, ribbed fabric. “Lamont’s famous kit,” he said. He ben
t forward to look at the lock and then took a silver key from one of the pockets in the cloth. He moved up to the door, poised the key, and nudged it squarely into the slot. He nodded. When he turned the key, we heard the bolt sliding back into its housing. Tom put the key into his jacket pocket, rolled up the length of fabric, and slid the fabric into a pouch on the inside of his jacket. I vaguely saw the shape of the Glock’s handle protruding from a soft, glovelike holster just in front of his right hip.

  “Try the penlight,” he said, and both of us pulled from our pockets the narrow, tubular flashlights he had produced just before we left the house. I turned around and pushed up the switch. A six-inch circle of bright light appeared on the brown wall opposite. I moved the light sideways, and the circle swept along the buildings across the alley, widening as it moved toward the other end. “Good, aren’t they?” he said. “Lot of power, for a little thing.”

  “Why would he come back, if he already moved his notes?”

  “Dick Mueller. He’ll imagine that Mueller will try to outfox him by showing up early, and so he’ll show up even earlier.”

  “Where would he put the notes?”

  “I’m thinking about that,” Tom said, and grasped the bracket and opened the right half of the double doors. “Shall we?”

  I looked over his shoulder. In ten minutes the street lamps would switch on. “Okay,” I said, and moved past him into the pure darkness of the theater.

  As Tom closed the door behind us, I switched on the penlight and ran it over the dusty cement wall to our right and found the single black door in front of us that opened into the main body of the theater. To my left, wide concrete steps led down into the basement. “Over here,” Tom said. I swung the light toward the door he had just closed and zigzagged it around until I found the interior indentation, painted over with black, that matched the one on the outside. “Good, hold it there,” Tom said, and relocked the door. I trained the yellow circle of light on him as he unfolded the cloth, inserted the key, and packed the kit away into his jacket again.

  “You know, those notes might still be here. Fee might have come over here from Armory Place right after we called and unlocked the chain to make it easier to get in tonight.”

  He switched on his light and played it over the door. He held the beam on the doorknob and switched off the penlight as soon as he took the handle. I also turned off mine, and Tom opened the door.

  8

  AFTER THE DOOR CLOSED BEHIND us, Tom placed the tips of his fingers in the small of my back and urged me forward into a dimensionless void. I remembered a long stretch of empty floor between the first row of seats and the back exit; in any case, I knew that all I was stepping toward so cautiously was the aisle; but it was like being blind, and I put my hands out in front of me. “What?” I said, whispering for no rational reason. Tom nudged me forward again, and I took another two cautious steps and waited. “Turn around,” Tom whispered back to me. I heard his feet moving quietly on the bare cement of the theater’s floor and turned around, less out of obedience than fear that he was going to disappear. I heard the knob turning in the exit door. If he goes out, I thought, so do I. The door swung open an inch or two, and I realized what he was doing—a distinct line of grayish light shone along the edge of the door. He opened the door another few inches, and a column of gray light shone in the darkness. A shaft of the rough cement surface of the cement floor, painted black and lightly traced with dust, opened like an eye in front of the shining column. We would be able to see anyone who came into the theater.

  He gently shut the door. Absolute blackness closed in on us again. Two soft footsteps came toward me, and his hand whispered against cloth as it slid into his pocket. There was a sharp click! and a round beam of yellow light, startlingly well defined and so physical it seemed solid, cut through the darkness and picked out the last two seats in the first row. “Tom,” I began, but before I got any further, he had snapped off the penlight, leaving me with the shadow image of the raised seats. The floor moved under my feet like the deck of a boat. Over the shadow-flash image of the chairs, the hot beam of light hung in my eyes like the ghost of a flashbulb, increasing the darkness.

  “I know,” Tom said. “I just wanted to get a general idea.”

  “Let’s just stand here for a couple of minutes,” I said, and pressed the burning circle in my back against the wall. The floor immediately stopped swaying. Through the jacket, the cool roughness of the wall seeped toward my skin. I remembered the walls of the Beldame Oriental. Red, printed with a raised pattern of random, irregular swirls, they were stony, as abrasive as coral, sometimes sweaty with a chill layer of condensation. I bent my knees to concentrate the pressure on the hooks and ratchets, flattened my palms against the rough stipple of the cement, and waited for details to swim up out of the blank dark wall in front of me. Tom’s soft, slow breathing at my side seemed indistinguishable from my own.

  A sense of space and dimension began to shape the darkness. I began to be aware that I stood near one corner of a large tilted box that grew smaller as it rose toward the far end. After a time, I could make out before me the raised edge of the stage as a slight shimmer, like rays of heat coming up off a highway. This disappeared as Tom Pasmore moved in front of me and then returned when he moved quietly away up the side of the theater. I heard his footsteps dampen but not disappear as he left the cement apron extending from the first row of seats to the stage and stepped onto the carpeting. The shimmer solidified into the long swelling shape of the stage, and the seats gradually became visible as a dark, solid triangle fanning up and out from a point a few feet from where I stood. Tom’s face was a faint, pale blotch up the aisle.

  At the far end of the theater was another aisle, I remembered, and the wide space of a central passage, probably mandated by the fire department, divided the rows of seats in half.

  I could now just about make out the curved backs of the nearest individual seats, and I had a dim sense of the width of the aisle. Beneath the pale smudge of his face, Tom was a black shape melting in and out of the darkness surrounding him. I followed him up the aisle toward the front of the theater. When we reached the last row, Tom stopped moving and turned around. A metallic glint like a slipperiness in the air marked the panel in the lobby door. Looking down, we could see a great soft darkness over the stage that must have been the curtains.

  The gleam of the metal plate disappeared as he put his hand over it, and the door yielded before him in another widening column of shining gray light.

  The lobby was filled with hazy illumination from the oval windows set into thick doors opposite leading out to the old ticket booth and the glass doors on Livermore Avenue.

  Two chest-high pieces of wooden furniture stood in the place of the old candy counter. Even in the partial light, the lobby seemed smaller than I had remembered and cleaner than I had expected. At its far end, another set of doors with metal hand plates led into the aisle at the other side of the theater. I went up to the furniture where the candy counter had been, bent down to look at a round carving in what I thought was the back of a shelf unit, and saw ornate letters in the midst of the filigree. I took out my penlight and shone it on the letters, INRI. I pointed the light at what looked like a lectern and saw the same pattern. I was standing in front of a portable altar and pulpit.

  Tom said, “Some congregation must use this place as a church on Sundays.”

  Tom went toward a door in the wall next to the pulpit. He tried the knob, which jittered but would not otherwise move, unrolled the burglar kit, peered at the keyhole, and worked another key into the slot. When the lock clicked and the door opened, Tom packed away the kit and peered inside. He took out his light, switched it on, and with me behind him went into a stuffy, windowless room about half the size of Tom’s kitchen.

  “Manager’s office,” he said. The penlights picked out a bare desk, a small number of green plastic chairs, and a wheeled rack crowded with shiny blue choir robes. Four cardboard boxes stood li
ned up in front of the desk. “Do you suppose?” Tom asked, running his light along the boxes.

  I went through the chairs and knelt in front of the two boxes at the center of the desk. The open flaps had been simply laid shut, and I opened those of the first box to see two stacks of thick blue books. “Hymnals,” I said.

  I played my own light along the other boxes while Tom started moving things around behind me. None of the boxes showed anything but ordinary wear, no rips or holes made by busy rats. All four would hold hymnals. I checked them anyhow and found—hymnals. I stood up again and turned around. The rack stuffed with choir robes angled out into the room. Tom’s head protruded above the rack, and the circle of light before him shone on a plywood door almost exactly the color of his hair. “Fee always liked basements, didn’t he?” Tom said. “Let’s take a look.”

  9

  IWALKED AROUND THE RACK as Tom opened the door, and trained my penlight just ahead of his. A flight of wooden stairs with a handrail began at the door and led down to a cement floor. I followed Tom down the stairs, playing my light over the big space to our right. Two startled mice scrambled toward the far wall. We descended another three or four steps, and the mice darted into an almost invisible crevice between two cement blocks in the wall on the other side of the basement. Tom’s light flashed over an old iron furnace, a yard-square column of bricks, heating pipes, electrical conduits, rusting water pipes, and drooping spiderwebs. “Cheerful place,” he said.

  We reached the bottom of the steps. Tom went straight ahead toward the furnace and the front of the theater, and I walked off to the side, looking for something I had glimpsed while I watched the mice scramble toward the wall. Tom’s light wandered toward the center of the basement; mine skimmed over yards of dusty cement. I moved forward in a straight line. Then my beam landed squarely on a wooden carton.

  I walked up to it, set down the thermos, and pushed at the edge of the flat top. It moved easily to the side and exposed a section of something square and white. I slid the top all the way off the carton and held the light on what I thought would be reams of paper arranged into neat stacks. A lunatic message gleamed back into the light. Black letters on a white ground spelled out BUYTERVIO. Above that, in another row of letters, was MNUFGJKA. TWO other nonsense words filled the top two rows of the carton. “Buytervio?” I said to myself, and finally realized that the carton contained the letters once used to spell out the movie titles on the marquee.