Godchild

by Vincent Zandri

  “Maybe you should calm down, Keeper,” Tony said. “You’ve had a tough — ”

  “It doesn’t change what I saw!” I shouted. But what I really wanted to shout out was how Barnes had hired me to find his wife, how he most likely had attempted to have the both of us killed. And now that he knows I’m in town hiding his wife, he wants to have me busted. But I couldn’t say a word about it. Not a single word. All in the interest of preserving the Tony Angelino Experience.

  “You know what I’m getting at, Ryan,” I insisted. “Because you were there. You took my testimony. Your man took a description of the car.”

  Ryan crossed his arms at his chest. He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at the floor. His expression was the same one I recognized from the cemetery a few days before when I first spotted the black Buick. It was a tight-lipped smile. More like a smirk I would have gladly knocked off his face, if I’d had the energy and if it wouldn’t get me busted.

  “Obsessive-compulsive disorder,” Ryan said, with a shake of his head. “That’s all this is. Severe O.C.D. It causes people to be unable to distinguish between actually witnessed events and things they just imagined. It’s nothing to be ashamed about. I once worked on a case about a guy who got fired from his job because he was always late for work. At this specific spot near his home, he imagined himself running over a little kid. I mean, the crazy bastard would drive around the block something like twenty-five times to make sure he hadn’t made roadkill out of some innocent kid who existed only in his mind. Eventually he killed himself. And that’s what worries me more than anything. The mock staging of your death this time can simply be the prelude to something slightly more real and certainly more permanent next time.”

  “You’ve been under a lot of strain, Keeper,” Tony said, eyes wide, taking a step forward, once again holding out his hip flask for me. “You need some rest.”

  I knocked the flask away, onto the floor.

  “Barnes is behind all this,” I said, lying back on the bed again, my head on the pillow, a distinct dizziness settling in. “Just like he’s behind the attempted murder of his own wife. Barnes is behind everything. He owns Reel Productions. This isn’t rocket science, and you can’t go around protecting him just because he’s your client.”

  “What attempted murder?” Ryan said. “What the hell is he talking about?”

  “He’s delirious,” Tony said, looking at me with wide, shut-the-hell-up eyes.

  Then the bed-spins started kicking in.

  “Look, it’s not that we don’t believe you,” Tony explained, bending over, picking up his flask from off the terrazzo floor. “It’s just that there’s no evidence to suggest the man working for Barnes is the same man who killed Fran.”

  “You can find him in the employ of Richard Barnes,” I said.

  But it was no use. If Tony, my advocate, didn’t believe me, then you could bet Ryan wouldn’t believe me either. So what was the point? And besides, the room had begun to spin like crazy, my head getting suddenly heavy. The red pills, I thought. The red pills weren’t Tylenol after all. The red pills must have been sedatives.

  Ryan took another step forward, closer to the bed. “All we know about Barnes’s wife is that she is officially reported missing. Richard seems to believe you know of her whereabouts. Now, why in the world would he make such an accusation, Mr. Marconi?” He slid his thumbs inside his black belt. “We have witnesses at the airport and at the Hertz rent-a-car who claim they saw two people matching your descriptions only three days ago. We have what looks like your signature on the credit slip.”

  “Now, just a moment, Detective Ryan,” Tony said. “There’s no reason in the world to believe my client has any knowledge whatsoever as to the location of Mr. Barnes’s wife.”

  There, I thought. Finally Tony said something I wanted him to say. No, that’s not right either. For a change, he said what I needed him to say. Maybe he was covering for me after all. He knew goddamned well I was hiding Renata. And yet there was still the possibility that he was going to bat for me. Maybe in the end he was playing Ryan like a well tuned fiddle, sometimes stroking him lightly, other times playing him hard as hell.

  Despite my trouble focusing, I kept my eyes on Tony, as though he were running a shell game. And in a way, he was.

  “I’ve personally managed to persuade Barnes to hold off his dogs on the assault charge for now, Keeper,” Tony went on, his voice sounding as though he were talking through a cardboard tube. “But I won’t be able to keep him at bay for long. There are time limits to these things.” He turned to Ryan. “But as far as your accusations on the location of Renata Barnes, Mike, I find them outrageous and unfounded.”

  “We’ll see,” Ryan said, in that same through-the-tube voice. “Until Barnes presses charges, you’re off the hook, Keeper. For now I’ve asked Tony to stay on your ass. Until whatever is going on with you calms down a little.”

  “Perfect,” I mumbled, but I couldn’t be sure if I was dreaming the words or not.

  Ryan started for the door. But then he stopped.

  “Oh,” he said, “and there’ll be one more thing.”

  I stared up at the ceiling. I felt like I was falling. But not afraid to fall.

  “I’ll need your weapon and your license.”

  The wall-mounted lights behind the bed reflected off the smooth white surface of the ceiling like two shiny circles. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Tony walk over to the closet near the door to the room. He reached inside, grabbed my shoulder holster and the .45 it held from the hook. Then he approached the bed and the nightstand beside it. He opened the drawer, pulled out my wallet, slid out the laminated pistol permit, and shut the drawer. “Why don’t I hold on to this stuff until this blows over,” he said to Ryan. “There’s no reason to make this official until we have to make it official, capisce?”

  Ryan thought about it for minute. “Okay,” he said. “But if anyone asks, it’s your ass I’m gonna point my finger at, Angelino.”

  “Fair enough,” Tony said, giving me a wink.

  I was too tired to wink back. But not too tired to see Tony go through the pockets of my leather jacket, taking my car keys, stuffing them into his pocket along with a book of matches that had the Airport Days Inn printed on it. He made eye contact with me, coughed into his hand, and gave me a telltale wink. I became convinced then that he was playing along, going as far as he could to keep Ryan amused and satisfied. I was also convinced he had to play the game as delicately as possible in order to save his own ass and, in the long run, mine.

  He turned to the young cop. “Look, Mike,” he said. “This is just a temporary setback for Keeper. You have to understand all he’s been through. For instance, did you know he wasn’t even eighteen years of age when he survived the Attica uprising…” He went on and on, just like that, explaining and detailing the more violent portions of my life—from the four-day-and-night Attica Prison siege in 1971, to Fran’s hit-and-run, to my trouble with former Commissioner for Corrections Wash Pelton only a few years ago. He started in on it all as though it would explain why I’d officially gone off the deep end. But as Tony’s voice thinned out and trailed off into silence and the circles on the ceiling joined together, I fell off the edge of the world.

  Chapter 53

  It’s hours before she realizes he’s gone.

  No.

  That’s not right either.

  It’s hours before she actually misses him.

  She knew he was gone from the moment he left. From the very second he claimed he saw the Bald Man on the television, then grabbed his jacket and his pistol and left the room, locking the dead bolt behind him.

  What is it, this obsession with a bald man?

  She is nearly done with the manuscript. Just a few fleeting pages away from the ending of her story. Charlie’s life-and-death story.

  Just in time too, because she hears footsteps now, coming down the exterior hall. More than one set of footsteps. It’s two in the mor
ning. It’s got to be Keeper. But who else could be with him? At this hour? She knows she should get up from the desk, walk over to the window, pull back the curtain just enough to get a glimpse at them. But she’s got only a page to go.

  One more page.

  The page on which Charlie dies.

  All over again.

  Chapter 54

  This time when I woke up, I was in a completely different room.

  This room colder than the last.

  Smelly.

  Like a pile of rain-soaked worms.

  A big narrow room full of beds, like an infirmary.

  The head of my bed was pressed up against a wide window. A sunbeam shone in through the uncovered glass, making a bright yellow parallelogram on the floor between my bed and the one directly to my right. In the near distance, the voice of a man begging for a cigarette. “Gimme a cigarette,” the man repeated over and over. “Gimme a cigarette.”

  My head wasn’t hurting anymore.

  It just felt heavy, like my brains had been replaced with wet cement.

  But no real pain to speak of.

  I moved my hands, my feet, my legs. I breathed in and swallowed. When I sat up and turned to look out the window, the bright sun stung my eyes. But then my eyes adjusted and I could make out a wide piece of glass reinforced with chicken wire. I also made out the vertical iron bars that covered the window on the outside. Because I’d been placed on the top floor of the building, I saw only the highest level of the concrete parking garage directly across from the lot and what I immediately recognized as New Scotland Avenue, the main north-south artery that ran smack-dab down the middle of what had to be the capital district Psychiatric Center campus.

  The bastards must have transferred me overnight while I was passed out.

  I knew that they kept us here under lock and key and constant observation.

  House arrest.

  In the loony bin.

  “Excuse me, sir,” came a voice from beside my bed. A meek, mousy voice.

  I turned back around. The man to my right was sitting up. “Do you know what time it is?” A middle-aged man with a round clean-shaven face, thin lips, and a hooked nose. His hair was thin if not balding, cut over stick-out ears, parted with precision on the left-hand side of his round skull. He was rubbing his left wrist where a wrist-watch should have been.

  I went to look at my own watch.

  The watch was gone.

  All my things were gone —clothes, watch, jacket, shoes.

  All of it.

  The only thing I had left was my boxer shorts and a white dressing gown that tied down the front. I remembered Tony taking my gun and my license. But what I had no recollection of was him taking the clothes off my back.

  “Time,” the man said again. “Do you know what time it is?”

  I turned back to him. “No, pal,” I said, “I don’t.”

  “What would you say then?” he asked. “If you had to guess. The time, I mean.”

  A slight sickness bubbling up from my stomach.

  A distinct nausea that went with waking up in a nuthouse.

  I had to breathe and get my bearings.

  I tried to turn off the Mickey Mouse voice of the little man and concentrate on the dozen beds pushed up against the hospital-white wall directly across from me, the half dozen or so beds to my left, and the equal number to my right. Dozens of men laid out either on their backs, snoring away, or curled up in fetal position. All of them still caught up in the midst of some drug-fed sleep.

  “Please,” the mouse said again. “The time.”

  I turned to him. “For all I know,” I said, “it could be four in the afternoon.” But I knew it had to be early morning.

  “Oh my,” said the man, “I have to be getting to work.” He swung the sheets and covers off his bed, revealing a pair of skinny white legs peppered with curly black hair. “You’re new here,” he said. “But where are my manners?” He reached inside the opening of his gown. He pulled his hand back out, his little fingers pressed together, as if pretending to hold something in them. “Edward Pukas,” he said. “That’s P-U-K-A-S. My card.”

  Poor bastard. With a name like that, no wonder he went nuts.

  I pretended to take the pretend card in hand and stuff it into the pretend pocket of my pretend suit jacket.

  “I’m a stockbroker,” Pukas said, lifting a pair of eyeglasses set in heavy black frames from the table between our beds. He slipped them on.

  “What’s yours?” he asked, the muscles in his face doing all sorts of contortions, constrictions, and contractions, as though to get used to the weight of those glasses.

  “What’s my what?” I said, now searching the entrance and exit ways for who might be manning them. As far as I could see, no one. But mounted to the walls, in the corners, video surveillance cameras.

  “What’s your game? You know, what do you do?”

  Suddenly the four televisions mounted high up on the opposite wall, set between the video cameras, spontaneously turned on to the Today show. The bright face of the manikin pretty broadcaster beamed live, directly to the psycho ward. “I’m self-employed,” I went on, trying to shrug him off. “Securities.”

  “Securities,” he said, “as in stocks and bonds?”

  “Securities as in life and death,” I said.

  “Oh, that sort of securities,” he said, bobbing his head, half smiling, half frowning, not at all sure which emotion he wanted to go with. “Great business. Wave of the future. Going to be ten billion people in the world in the next ten years. Ten billion, my friend. Do you have any idea what that means? Do you have any idea the amount of security each individual is going to require as his personal space becomes more and more confined? Do you have any clue as to the demands all those people will have on the food supplies of this nation, of the world? Not to mention the pestilence and the disease, the infestations that will attack the starving little children in the night, eating their eyes out like maggots. Yes sir, securities is the business to be in.”

  I felt like slapping Mr. Pukas.

  But then the double doors crashed open to a small gang of men and women dressed in white, pushing carts and carrying black plastic trays, shouting, “Good morning, people!”

  As they approached us with their carts, I had to wonder how I’d gotten here in the first place. I figured that Ryan must have ordered it. But then, had Barnes gone ahead and pressed charges? Whatever the case, I knew that it would take Tony at least a day for him to counter the order, get me released on bail or my own recognizance or whatever they do inside the nuthouse. In the meantime, I had to wait it out. I had to hope and pray that Renata stayed put. I had to hope and pray that no one, save Tony, found her.

  Two orderlies —the first a short white man with a goatee and long sideburns, the second a very large black man with tattoos running down the length of his right arm —stood at the foot of my bed.

  “Nice to have you with us, Mr. Marconi,” Short Goatee said, approaching me with a little paper cup in his hand. The kind used for dispensing meds. “Will you be breakfasting in or out today, sir?”

  Funny.

  “How about breakfast in bed?” Goatee went on, handing me the cup with an identical set of red pills to the ones the nurse had given me the night before. He bent just slightly at the knees, brought his lips to my right ear. “Now, you listen to me, motherfucker,” he said. “I know who you are and I know why you’re here and if you fuck up for even a second, even for one split second of time…if you so much as spit, fart, or cough, I’ll bust your ass and toss you into the rubber room. Do I make myself perfectly clear, Mr. Marconi? Because, if I don’t, my pal Leon has ways of making the blind see.” He stood up. “Don’t you, Leon baby?”

  Leon smiled and flexed the biceps on his right arm. It nearly popped out of the white T-shirt. Nice bedside manner, these two orderlies.

  “Everybody understand one another?” Short Goatee said, straightening back up.

  �
�Cozy,” I said, tipping the contents of the paper cup into my mouth, chasing it with the cup of water Leon handed me.

  I smiled at Short Goatee, winked at Leon.

  As they approached Mr. Pukas with the med carts, I rolled over, turned my back to them.

  “But I have to be back at work in less than an hour,” I heard Mr. Pukas say.

  “Sure you do, Eddy,” Short Goatee responded, as I stuck my left index finger in my mouth, scooped out the meds, stuffed them in between the mattress and the box spring, just like I’d seen someone do in a movie once.

  “Please, don’t do this,” I heard Mr. Pukas say as I rolled over onto my back to get a better look. Out of the corner of my right eye, I saw Leon walk to the head of the bed, saw him hold Mr. Pukas down flat on his back while Short Goatee undid the zipper on his white pants and pulled out his sex. I saw him stuff it into Pukas’s mouth.

  “And if you bite me, Mr. Pukey Eddy Pukas,” he said, not even bothering to muffle his voice, “there’ll be no milk or cookies for dessert. Do we understand each other?”

  “Gimme a cigarette,” came the voice of a crazy old bastard.

  “Suck it,” came the voice of Short Goatee.

  Chapter 55

  For almost three hours I pretended to pass in and out of sleep.

  I snored a couple of times when Leon and his little buddy passed by.

  For the sake of realism.

  As for Mr. Pukas, he passed out not long after his interlude with Short Goatee. He lay on his side, curled up under his blue hospital blanket, the thumb of his right hand stuffed inside his mouth like the perpetual four-year-old these sadistic bastards had reduced him to.

  On more than one occasion, I thought about just taking my chances. Getting up, heading for the double doors, walking out. But I knew that when those video monitors caught me in their lenses, those men in white would come running. I’d be dragged down, thrown in restraints, tossed into some kind of lockdown.