“We're all going for a nice drive,” Mrs. Brussels continued in the same implacably insane voice. “If we're all good, no one will get cut. If we're not good, Marie will get cut first, and then we'll cut whoever was bad.” Now I had the belt all the way off. I sharpened the cheap metal tongue on the concrete floor.
“I'm going upstairs,” Bruner announced.
“Not by yourself, you're not,” Mrs. Brussels said curtly. “You just wait. Pete, Jackie, keep them together.” Feet shuffled as Pete and Jackie pushed the children into a tight group. At the far end of the warehouse I could see fat black shoes and small bare feet. “What do you say, Marie?” Mrs. Brussels asked, Miss Manners gone berserk.
“Thank you,” said a tiny voice.
“And what else?”
“We'll be good.”
“I only hear one voice,” Mrs. Brussels said threateningly.
“We'll be good,” the children chorused raggedly.
“Let's go, Max,” Mrs. Brussels said. A moment later I heard the two of them climbing the circular iron stairway to the foreman's office.
That left Pete and Jackie, and they had their hands full with the kids. They mumbled resentfully at each other and herded the children toward a corner, and I found what I was looking for.
It had to be right. Nothing else could be that big. Trucks the size of this one took lots and lots of whatever the hell they ran on.
After I'd rubbed the tongue of the belt against the concrete a few more times, I tested the point. It was sharp enough to puncture my left index finger, which it promptly did. I sucked on the finger, swallowed yet more blood, and shoved the new point at the end of the tongue against the bottom of the fuel tank. This was my week for petroleum products. I was sweating and bleeding at the same time, and my eyes kept clouding over.
Rust or no rust, it wasn't easy. While I was working the spike back and forth, trying to make a hole, the door swung open and closed. Marty had come back in.
“I found the car,” he announced proudly. “It was right in front.” Then he paused. “Where are they?” he asked.
“Upstairs,” either Pete or Jackie said. “Scamming the loot, probably.”
“We'll see about that,” Marty said quietly. “Anyway, I slashed his tires. He's not going noplace.”
“I thought he was already gone,” either Pete or Jackie said.
“Ummm,” said Marty, sounding less certain, and at that point I punctured the bottom of the tank, and diesel fuel poured out onto my face.
“You saw the car?” Bruner boomed at Marty from the top of the stairs.
“Right where he left it,” Marty said. “But it's totaled.”
“Then he's still around,” Bruner said. “Jackie, you dipshit, get out there and find him.” I heard Bruner's shoes click as he came down the circular stairway.
I positioned the yellow plastic bucket beneath the stream. The gasoline hitting the bottom of the bucket made a sound I hadn't anticipated, a rattling noise like someone pissing on a tin roof.
“What's that?” Mrs. Brussels asked.
“Oh, for Christ's sake,” Bruner replied. “Stop imagining things. We'll need the truck at the end.” That was the truck I was under.
“No, listen,” Mrs. Brussels said insistently.
I hoisted the bucket until it touched the bottom of the tank. Now it sounded like someone pissing into a pond. The bucket was getting heavier, and the smell of petroleum made me choke.
“He's here,” Bruner said wildly. He'd given up on poise. “Son of a bitch, he's here. Get Jackie back. No, skip it. Go get him. Kill the motherfucker.”
The bucket was full. I hoisted it away from the hole in the tank and shoved the tongue of the belt into the hole as hard as I could. The stream stopped and the belt dangled down from the tank like a rattler anesthetized in mid-strike.
They were so busy looking around the other end that I could climb back on top of the truck without being heard. It was harder than it had been the first time because I had the bucket in my hand. I gave up and heard the children crying, and then I didn't give up. Back on top, bucket in hand, I waited.
Marty was the first one I saw. From the far end I heard the children being organized again. It had to be Pete. My breath was coming in ragged gasps, and I put one hand over my mouth to silence myself.
“Nobody,” Marty said after a cursory look around, his bald spot gleaming. He sounded relieved. He wasn't being paid enough for this. Heaving a sigh, he moved away from beneath me and into the darkness.
“Bullshit,” Bruner said from some distance. “You didn't look carefully enough. He's here.”
“Get the kids into the truck,” Mrs. Brussels said. “Open the door.”
The door she meant could only mean the airplane door, and the truck she meant could only be the one I was on top of. It was the closest to the door.
“What about her?” Bruner asked.
“We'll get her before we roll,” Mrs. Brussels said. “It's not as though she could go anywhere. Or maybe we'll just let her burn. Now, open the damn door.”
A quiver ran through the metal skin of the truck, and I looked down to see Pete pulling open a hatch at the back of the refrigerated compartment. The children huddled there in their sheets, small heads bent downward. Pete pulled the hatch open, and the children, with Marie bringing up the rear like a good group captain, started to climb in. I ducked back. There was nothing I could do without hurting the kids.
Then I heard a ratchety sound and looked to my left. Bruner was pulling on a chain that connected two iron pulleys, one above the door and one below. The pulleys were anchored to the wall with heavy bolts. The chain ran from the floor to the ceiling.
The chain didn't move easily. Bruner was hauling himself off his feet to pull it downward, and he shouted something that I couldn't understand. A moment later, Mrs. Brussels came around the front of the truck and joined him. She'd stopped looking chic some time ago. She added her weight to his, and the door began slowly to rise.
Pete was pushing the kids into the back of the truck. Jackie was outside, looking for me, and God only knew where Marty was. Things weren't going to get any better.
I steadied the yellow plastic bucket with one hand and used the other to fumble in my pocket. When I had the little box I wanted and when I had slid it open, I said, “Hey, Max,” and tossed the contents of the bucket over his head.
He looked up at me as though I'd risen from the dead. Mrs. Brussels backed away like she was on wheels, and I grabbed five of the Mountain's wooden matches all at once, lit them, and threw them at Max Bruner.
He exploded into flame with a scream like a jet landing. I smelled the cashmere burning as he wheeled around, still screaming, and flailed his immaculately tailored arms in a useless attempt to beat out the fire. With his hair on fire he gave me a horrified look and stumbled against Mrs. Brussels. She was his last hope in life, and he wrapped his flaming arms around her, spending his final breaths on a confused mix of prayers and curses. The skin on his face was beginning to melt, and he clung to Mrs. Brussels in an embrace of desperation and fire. There was a little pattering sound, like rain on a roof, as they toppled to the floor and Maalox tablets from Bruner's pocket skipped over the pavement.
She clawed at his eyes with her long nails, but he didn't feel it. The spots where the diesel fuel had splashed onto her linen jacket blossomed into blue flame, and the two of them rolled over the floor like the man and wife in a Hindu funeral pyre. Her screams mingled with his, an octave above, and more profane.
They crackled and fizzled as I climbed down from the truck. Their tortured voices punched holes in the sound barrier. Pete was long gone, running for dear life toward the other end of the warehouse. Bruner and Mrs. Brussels had stopped rolling and were burning like a bonfire of autumn leaves as I wrenched open the door in the back of the truck and said to the kids, “Go. Get out of here. Wait outside. Damn you, scram.”
The far door of the warehouse opened and closed. Marty an
d Pete were gone. The kids stared up at me with eyes that had seen everything. I was nothing new. I had blood dripping from my forehead and vomit all over the front of my shirt, but I was nothing new. They had seen two of me every day. Marie, closest to the door, shook her head and summoned up a word. “No,” she said.
“It's over,” I said, fighting a rising sense of futility. “They're dead. Beat it. The door's over there.”
Marie extended blood-streaked arms to restrain the others.
“Please,” I said. I could smell fire in human hair and Bruner's burning jacket. Bruner's lungs emptied with something that was too late to be a word. It was the rattle at the end of the world. “Go,” I said. “Get out of here. Damn you, it's over. You're safe now.” They looked up at me with the hopeless eyes of sacrificial lambs. They knew what happened to someone who ran away, and they weren't budging.
“Fine,” I said, giving up, “if you're not going to go, wait right here.”
I left them there and headed for the circular stairway leading to the foreman's office. As I climbed the iron stairs I found myself replaying a conversation I'd had with Jessica a century ago and wondering what had become of the softy who wouldn't light fire to Junko's pimp.
30
The Girl in the Cage
The stairs were steeper than they'd seemed, or maybe I was just weak. I had to stop part of the way up and catch my breath. The sound of cars starting outside told me that Marty and Pete and Jackie had abandoned ship and were heading for whatever hidey-holes they thought they'd be safe in. Bruner and Mrs. Brussels were flaming away, producing an extravagant amount of foul-smelling smoke. I hoped the tongue of the belt was securely wedged into the bottom of the truck's fuel tank. Otherwise, my next surprise would be an explosion that could spread both me and the kids over the neighborhood like peanut butter.
At the top of the stairs was an iron door. It was ajar. I shouldered it open and found myself in an office that was awful in its normalcy. A gray metal desk faced the window overlooking the warehouse. With an almost hallucinogenic sharpness I saw the paper blotter positioned dead center on top of it and a wicker wastebasket at the left corner. There was a Pirelli Tire calendar, at least ten years old, on the wall. A naked girl hugged a large black tire as though it were the second coming and she hadn't had her first.
Bruner must have been left-handed, I thought irrelevantly as I stepped into the room. The son of a bitch had wadded papers up with his left hand and tossed them into the basket to the left. Two of the desk's drawers were gaping open. Both of them had locks and keyholes, the worthless residue of past security. That was where the cash had been, the cash that was now burning in Bruner's and Mrs. Brussels' pockets.
Other than the desk and the wastebasket and the calendar, the office contained nothing more than an old wooden coat rack, a map of the U.S. pinned to the back wall with brightly colored thumbtacks, and four pairs of rubber galoshes lined neatly against a yellow line on the floor. Beyond the galoshes was a door. Like the one I'd already come through, it was made of iron.
She, they'd said, she was up here. The one missing child. Well, she wasn't here, so she had to be on the other side of the door. And maybe she was Aimee and maybe she wasn't, but there was no way to find out without opening the door.
My hand was shaking so badly that I had to pull it back and flex it before I turned the knob.
The room on the other side of the door was bigger than a closet, but just barely. It was also dark. I slapped at the wall to the right of the door and finally hit the switch. That was when I saw the cage.
When you want to ship a dog on an airline, they give you a cage. If you don't have a very big dog, the cage is large enough to let it sit down without scraping its head against the top. Or maybe not. The cage I was looking at was of the latter variety. Woofers might have found it spacious.
Actually, I smelled it before I saw it. Even before the light flooded the little room I smelled the stench of abandonment and desolation. My eyes adjusted to the light and I found myself staring through wire mesh at the crouched figure of Aimee Sorrell.
Her mother wouldn't have recognized her. Bent double on knees and elbows, she wore a diaper that was fastened with an oversize safety pin, a final humiliation. Her knotted hair obscured her face even though she was looking up at me. There were three bright orange dog dishes in the cage. One held what looked like dog food, one held water, and the third was overflowing with human waste. Aimee obviously hadn't been a good girl by Mrs. Brussels' standards, and my heart overflowed with a jumbled mixture of grief and pride.
“Aimee,” I said to the yellow-haired thing on its hands and knees, “we're going home.”
Aimee narrowed her eyes and yelped in panic. I remembered what I looked like. Aimee's eyes through the bleared tangle of yellow hair were as blue as a summer sky and as empty. She backed away into the far corner of the cage, her hands clawing at her face, at her eyes, trying to banish me to the land of nightmares.
“I’m your friend,” I said. “I’m going to take you home.” I got down on my hands and knees so I wouldn't be taller than she was: it's a trick you do with dogs. Very slowly, so as not to frighten her further, I unfastened the catch on the outside of the cage and pulled the door open. “Come on out,” I said very softly.
Instead of coming out, she squeezed herself more tightly into the corner. Her mouth was wide and open, and a high, sustained tone came from it, like an organ with a dead man's nose pressed against the highest key in the treble clef. There was no vibrato in the tone at all.
“Aimee,” I pleaded into the horrid, unwavering sound, “I'm your friend.” I reached a hand into the cage, opened it, and turned it to show her that it was empty. “Come out,” I pleaded, “come out. We'll go home to Kansas City.”
She swiped at my hand with claws I hadn't known she possessed, and my wrist began to bleed. “Good girl,” I said, resisting the urge to yank my arm back. “Come on. Please, please, come on. Aurora's waiting.”
For the first time something happened inside the blue eyes that might have passed for understanding. She looked rapidly from my bleeding hand to my eyes and then back again. The glance she gave me drilled holes through the back of my head.
“You're such a good girl,” I said, babbling on automatic pilot. “No one else has been so good. That's why they had to put you into the cage. Come on, Aimee. Aimee, let's go-”
I extended the raked, bleeding hand toward her. She looked at my face and then back down at the hand and then at my face again.
“Take it,” I said, turning the hand palm-up. “Take my hand, and get out of the cage.”
She hissed like a snake, but she didn't claw at me. I was smelling fuel again, and some clear, rational square inch of my brain was thinking about an explosion. “Please, darling,” I said, “Mrs. Brussels is dead. Birdie is dead. Max is dead. They can't hurt you now.”
She had stopped shrilling. “SaSaSaSa,” she said. In her mind it might have been a sentence. She saw the blood on the back of my hand and recoiled and then looked from my open hand to my eyes again and realized that she had done it. “No,” she said. She locked her eyes onto mine and reached up very slowly with one hand, took her hand in mine, and pressed the place where I was bleeding against her cheek.
“Come,” I said, drawing my hand away, but keeping hers in it. The blood was a bright smear on her pale cheek. “Come. They're dead. We're leaving.” The smell of fuel was growing stronger.
“Aimee,” she said, not letting go of my hand. Her voice sounded rusty. But she'd said the word that meant “her.”
“Aimee, Aimee, Aimee, yes, Aimee,” I said. “I'm Simeon. Please, let's go. There's a fire down there. I have to get you out of here, out of here so I can take you home.”
She crawled six inches toward me, upsetting the dish with the water in it. Then she stopped cold. “Aimee’s a good girl,” she whispered fiercely.
“Aimee’s the best girl in the world,” I said. I was crying. “Aimee’s
the best girl in the whole wide world.”
She watched me cry for a moment. Then, with great deliberation, she nodded. “With you,” she said, “I'll go with you.”
More quickly than I would have believed, she'd crawled out of the cage. When she stood upright, her legs trembled and gave way beneath her, and she had to grab at my waist to keep from falling. I put one hand on her head and said, “All we have to do is go down the stairs.” I dropped my hand to her shoulder and steadied myself to turn and take her with me.
Her shoulders went as rigid as iron. She pushed at the hand on her shoulder. “Eeeeeee,” she said, dropping to her knees again. I pulled my hand from her shoulder, but she wasn't paying attention to my hand or to me or to anything to do with me. She was backing into the cage on hands and knees, her eyes on something behind me, mad and wide and clear and empty as water, and the skin-splitting Eeeeeeeee sound flowed from her mouth in a rippling ribbon of anguish. I turned and saw that I'd betrayed her.
A flap of burned skin hung from Mrs. Brussels' chin, and her hair was gone. What was left clung to her head like the charred remnants of a burned-over cornfield. The left side of her face was a water balloon, a single enormous, distended blister. Her designer clothes were blackened and shriveled by the fire that had consumed Bruner, but the gun in her hand was steady and her eyes were ancient and fierce and lashless and remorseless. They were an alligator's eyes. Aimee's scream had decayed into a kind of dog-kennel whuffling.
“Sweet,” Mrs. Brussels said between blistered lips. “Very sweet. Aimee. Come out of there.”
Aimee, eyes closed, crawled out of the cage. Once out, she froze on her hands and knees, her forehead pressed to the floor in abject submission.
“Over here,” Mrs. Brussels commanded. “Come to Momma, you little bitch.” And Aimee crawled past me as though I weren't there and went to Mrs. Brussels.
“So it was Aimee,” Mrs. Brussels said. The words were slurred with pain. “That was what Max said.” She reached down and twined her fingers into the matted hair and pulled the child upright. Aimee's eyes were squeezed shut.
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