by Sarah Lovett
Purcell gazed out at the approaching helicopter. “For his sake, pray he dies before he gets there.”
I live each day knowing I’ve caused suffering. I understand I will be called on to rectify my actions.
John Dantes to LA Weekly
12:41 P.M. The tunnel shook.
The bomb had exploded. Dantes’ first reaction was excitement—his second, regret. He noted these feelings, surprised; but emotions are fleeting and his determinism, his fatalism, quickly monopolized the moment. This was all part of the schema—the scenario set in motion years ago. Now it must be played out to its final act.
He felt the CO eyeing him darkly. Why weren’t the guards reacting to the explosion? Why were they moving with icy efficiency thirty feet below ground, where quakes and tremors should be cause for alarm?
The tunnel shook again, tilting, shimmering. Dantes stumbled, gasping.
The guards were staring at him, their faces filled with suspicion.
The lights were humming, fed by a steady flow of power. Perspiration beaded on Dantes’ skin, cast green by fluorescence in the subterranean tunnel that fed like a conduit between the federal building and the detention center. Abruptly, the U.S. marshals had decided to escort him from Roybal back to MDC. That was after he lost connection with Sylvia Strange.
“Fuck you,” he whispered. The whole thing enraged him—the marshals had told him he’d hung up on the psychologist and the bomb squad. They never stopped lying. God, they loved messing with the minds of prisoners, especially the smart ones, and the toughest inmates, the ones who were harder to break.
Dantes took a deep breath, pulling chi from the ground, letting it surge through his body to his brain, to his groin, to his feet. If the earth shook again, he would be ready.
He was no stranger in this underground hell. To get through UCLA, he’d worked as a sandhog. He’d drilled and pumped, he’d packed and trucked. He’d breathed the foul air of dark spaces.
“If a man wants to understand real wealth, true power, he needs to hold the earth’s resources in his hands, at least long enough to feel their weight,” Dantes muttered to himself. If a man craved the trebuchet of physical labor, sweat was the perfect complement to academia; and academia, with its gossip, its backbiting, its tenure, was the hardest and bloodiest labor of them all.
In his sandhog days, his underground work had included a piece of the current subway system, a share in the sewage system, and even a cut of Water & Power.
From fifty feet under, he’d seen the earth quake; the view was different when you were holding a thousand tons of earth and rock on your shoulders.
In answer to his thoughts, the earth moved again.
But this time, he registered the spasm as internal.
That explained the guard’s behavior.
Yes, this must be some kind of sympathetic reaction, he thought, as he dug his fingernails into his palms. Control was everything. The energy came like a wave, cresting, finally receding. But it left fear in its wake.
Dantes took a deep breath, orienting himself in space.
Black holes in the mind were a bad thing. That’s what the state did to those too quick to speak up. That was the stately tradition—cull out your dissidents, your radicals, your desperately poor, torture them, and label them mad like Goya’s lunatics.
Lunacy was something that happened to the misfits of any society. They did not fit in, hence they were labeled as unfit. If the label is repeated enough times, a man will come to believe it as truth.
I do not fit, he thought. I have never fit.
Instantly, his thoughts jumped, and he pictured the doctor’s face.
Someone prodded him from behind and the picture evaporated.
A voice asked why he walked with his hands out, as if he might stumble? He gave the guards some of their own medicine: he stared at them as if they were crazy.
Gulag, gulag, gulag . . . the word tumbled through his mind like a runaway hub.
His shackles, binding ankles and wrists together at his waist, made a dull, repetitive scuffling sound and gave him the look of a medieval prisoner wearing some inquisitional contraption. But he needed no bindings to remind him he was a hostage. He tried to stave off the rage. The passive aggression of the martyr was breaking through. He was being driven to this.
Dantes’ eyes held a crazy glitter, partly the result of the lights, partly the result of a blinding headache, which had stayed with him for days on end.
Flanked by U.S. marshals, he followed the course of the tunnel. Two guards met them at the heavy steel door that offered access to Metro. One of them whispered news of a bomb—an explosion.
I knew it, Dantes thought, beginning to laugh.
He stumbled when a CO brought a baton down sharply against his back.
The masters were displeased with their servant.
The pounding behind his skull increased in intensity as he rode the elevator to the Siberian world of his pod. A condemned man, he walked the antiseptic hall to his cell. The door slid open, manipulated electronically; when he passed the threshold, it clanged shut again. He slid his fingers through the steel mouth in the door, staring out at bare walls. The silence was eerie. He was alone in an area equipped to hold twenty-eight men.
All this security, money spent, measures taken, for one solitary man.
Federal tax dollars at work.
All this fuss for the Calbomber, the Getty bomber, the History bomber.
The Feds were stupid. They’d proven their inadequacy time and time again: Ruby Ridge, Waco, Heatherwade. They didn’t have a clue.
Which meant he had to take measures, he had to find his own way out of this mess. Well, he was working on it. He sat down on the bed, running his fingers along the hairline fracture between mattress and wall. He felt nothing but rough plaster.
No new deliveries.
Dantes paced, acutely aware of the sound of water dripping across the pod in the tiny shower stall. It stood open, without curtain or door. Just in case he decided to drown himself, hang himself, cut himself. As if suicide was his style.
He heard heavy footsteps, listened to insults bounce around this steel and concrete world. A correctional officer came into view. The man he recognized—and had nicknamed Ciacco, the Glutton—for his thick, muscle-bound neck and the flaccid rolls around his waist, his bird head, the nasty glint in his dumb eyes, the cloud of garlic and grease that always hovered around his fleshy lips.
Ciacco, Dante Alighieri’s disfigured and ravenous friend; a companion of childhood and youth, who foresaw the violent future of a city corrupted by gluttony, by hunger, by the depravity of unrestrained appetite for the fat of the land, and for power, always for power. It is those “men of good reason” who fall deepest in hell when the sins are judged and the punishments meted out, Dantes thought.
“Who are the ‘men of good reason’ today?” Dantes called out to the guard. “Do they recognize themselves?”
“Asshole murderer.” Ciacco made a show of strolling back and forth in front of Dantes’ cell, freely showing off the spectacle of his stupidity. He was unusually dumb for a federal CO. Resentment smoldered in the man like a punk. Dantes provided focus for that emotion.
“What you looking at, Dantes?” Ciacco growled. “You expecting somebody else? Florette maybe?” The CO’s lips curled up. “Don’t hold your breath.”
But eventually, Ciacco bored himself. After he’d gone, voices colored red by frustration rolled down the hallway into the pod.
Dantes moved carefully to the sink. Lowering his head, he splashed water on his face—at the same time he moved a stealthy hand under the sink along the wall. His fingers encountered the rough edge of paper. He was just able to grip the card, freeing it from its hiding place. Making a fist, he crushed the paper.
The television set—mounted on the wall opposite the cell—jerked to life. Dantes cringed. The artificial sounds and sights drove him crazy. Yet he craved news of the outside world, of his city.
She was his city, after all. He’d touched every part of her—even here, locked away in hell.
He began to shake. At first it was a tremor, but it built uncontrollably.
On screen, the picture changed manically, the work of the COs. A news flash, via remote. An explosion at Beaudry Street. Several victims critically injured, one dead.
An LAPD detective.
Again and again the news footage was replayed: his childhood home shattering into fragments. Home sweet home.
He saw nothing else but the house as it splintered, exploding into a million pieces.
The faces of the dead and the injured merged: he couldn’t escape the wide, innocent gaze of Jason Redding’s ghost.
He knew he would meet these phantoms in hell.
Dantes took a shuddering breath, and the electricity shot through his body.
He cried out in pain. His eyes rolled back in his head, his body began to shake violently as one thought streaked through his brain.
The doctor . . . she’d found the messenger.
Horrible, high-pitched laughter bounced off the concrete walls of the prison pod. The sound curled and jumped and rode to hysterical heights. Who could make such an awful noise?
That is the noise that lunatics make.
His body contracted, his muscles shortened spastically. He fell stiffly to the concrete floor of his cell, where he trembled and vibrated as violently as an epileptic wracked by seizure.
“It’s me,” he screeched again and again. “I’m the lunatic.”
And then his tongue, swollen and filling the back of his throat, shut off the words as he began to choke.
Are you naïve and cocky and grandiose enough to believe you’ll return from the devil’s lair with a neat package: WAIS-R, MMPI-2R, inventories and interview tapes, hell, even a Rorschach? Pencil and paper answers. Psychometric scales. Intuitive connections. All adding up to that elusive, intangible key to unlock a man’s psyche, his very soul. You think you’ll find truth? Don’t bet on it.
Letter from John Dantes to court-appointed psychiatrist
1:19 P.M. The helicopter had barely touched down while Church and the other bomb victims were loaded on board. Now Sylvia watched as the craft took off again, veering toward west Los Angeles and the hospital at UCLA. The rotors cut the air with an urgent thwack-thwack.
On a very different frequency, she heard the shrill voice of a female reporter. She turned away from Sweetheart—away from the sight of the bombed-out house—to stare at a slender woman in a gray three-piece suit; the reporter was speaking quickly into a camera: “—at least three injured, all critically, and authorities are obviously concerned about additional booby trap devices—although, as of yet, the FBI has offered no official cause for this explosion—”
Sylvia wasn’t listening. Her attention had been drawn to a man, maybe eighty feet away, who was crossing the yard of a one-story yellow house on the other side of Beaudry. He had a baseball cap riding low over his face, his eyes were hidden behind sunglasses, he moved with an easy stride, dodging around curious spectators. The fingers of his left hand were looped around the strap of a leather backpack.
As he turned his head to look her way, sun glinted off the metal frames of his glasses. He raised one finger in salute.
“It’s him,” she said, as the man disappeared behind the house. She took off, ignoring Sweetheart’s protests. She dodged a woman stepping off one of the fire trucks and hopped a low fence, crossing the front yard of the yellow house, where weeds flourished in clumps. A flash of white streaked her way, and she yelled at the furious poodle, but she didn’t stop.
She could hear footsteps behind her; glancing back she saw Sweetheart keeping pace, neck in neck with a uniformed LAPD cop. The dog turned its fury on the new intruders, but Sylvia didn’t see what happened because she was already rounding the back of the house, moving rapidly now, propelled by adrenaline.
The yard was fenced, but the one-by-fours had listed, allowing trespass in several places. From the corner of her eye she noticed a weathered doghouse, socks dangling from the line, a storage shed, but the clatter of metal cans drew her attention toward the far boundary. Catching her sleeve on wooden splinters, she squeezed through an opening where two boards were missing. The next yard was a clone of its neighbor except the wooden fence had been replaced with a four-foot-high block wall.
The wall wasn’t stopping the man as he vaulted into the air, landing easily on the other side. The back of his head, the baseball cap, seemed to taunt. Without looking back, Sylvia called out to Sweetheart. She thought she heard him reply.
By the time she reached the wall her quarry had disappeared. She plunked her butt down and swung her legs across rough cinder block. She was no longer within the residential neighborhood, but instead she found herself in a culvert; wide enough for two vehicles, it ran for a long block, then cut beneath an old, abandoned overpass. Here, the noise of traffic on the Hollywood Freeway had the liquid pulse of blood sluicing through a vital artery.
A chain-link fence marked the opposite side of the culvert.
Two choices: over the fence, or jog toward the underpass. She chose the latter, moving slowly, scanning the area for any sign of the man with the backpack—hoping Sweetheart and the officer were hot on her trail.
She found an open trench located between orange hazard cones, yellow construction signs, and lifeless earthmoving equipment. A hydraulic drill had devoured huge mouthfuls of hard, rocky earth to a depth of ten or twelve feet below street level. Deep in the hole, the exposed end of a massive drainpipe, which was at least six feet in diameter, protruded from the debris. The connecting joint (if it existed) was still buried, providing one way in, perhaps one way out.
“It’s part of the old drainage system from the teens or the twenties.” Sweetheart came to a halt by her side, lifting his face, reminding her of a hound tasting the air for a scent. He was breathing easily in contrast to the uniformed cop hard on his heels.
Instead of retreating, Sweetheart braced himself between barricades and swung his body out and over the opening. He released his grip, dropping to land feetfirst in a half inch of brackish water.
“Throw down your flashlight,” he called to the cop who now stood on the edge of the ditch, shoulder to shoulder with Sylvia. When the cop complied, Sweetheart caught the flashlight with one hand, switching on the powerful beam so that light flooded the obscure concrete tunnel. He stepped inside, disappearing quickly—like a very large rabbit down a hole.
On impulse Sylvia followed. She landed off-center, stumbled, then regained her balance. Pain fired nerves. Drawn by the light of the flashlight, now roughly ten feet inside the drainage pipe, she moved forward. The toxic smell hit like a door in the face.
Sweetheart, lost in shadow, turned as she approached.
“Watch your back,” he whispered.
The massive, crumbling pipe was perfect for an ambush. It appeared to contract and expand as light bounced off its surface, twisting planes and angles, distorting distance. With each meter traveled, the stench—chemicals and human waste—became increasingly unbearable.
Their progress was further hindered by man-made debris, protruding branches, skull-sized rocks. Where water had seeped through cracks, the ground turned to mud.
They traveled deep into the pipe—fifty feet, sixty-five, seventy—until any remnant of daylight from the opening no longer penetrated.
A sharp sound echoed from somewhere ahead.
Sweetheart picked up speed.
Sylvia had to stay close to the light to avoid tripping over obstacles. Here the noise of the city’s surface had disappeared; the earth enclosing this pipe was absorbing all traces of civilization.
She began to break a sweat, heartbeat picking up pace. She almost plowed headfirst into Sweetheart. He’d come to a sudden stop. There was a click, and the world went black.
A familiar scuttling sound.
“A rat,” he whispered hoarsely.
&n
bsp; Still he didn’t move.
They stood in silence, close together, and Sylvia strained to hear what he heard. The faintest sound tugged at her consciousness, audible the way a blinking light was visible—at intervals. This noise was stealthy, soft, indistinct.
As if someone was trying not to breathe.
The hair on the back of her neck stood at attention. She shuddered, glad for Sweetheart’s company in this claustrophobic world. Now, the odd pungent smell of molding earth was strongest, and the air was thick with dust.
Was that the faint breath of eucalyptus?
Another sound. Muffled, eerily indistinct.
A footstep?
Followed by a sharp cracking noise.
Sweetheart snapped on the torch—the pipe flooded with light. Sylvia squinted into the sudden, blinding brightness, barely able to make out the professor as he lunged forward.
She pressed back against the wall of the pipe.
That’s when she saw the shadow moving just ahead of Sweetheart.
There. Gone.
Sweetheart pursued. She followed, crouching down where the space narrowed to half its size. She fought back the fear of this claustrophobic space—and the fear of the man they pursued.
For several seconds, she lost Sweetheart as he turned out of sight; then she reached the same angle of pipe—and turned—to collide with him.
“Dead end,” he growled. “Where the hell did he go?”
He shone the light on their surroundings, letting the beam play slowly over roots that reached through cracks in concrete like dark fingers. Here, the pipe had been intentionally widened until it reached an area of roughly twelve feet square.
Abruptly Sweetheart seemed to realize he wasn’t alone; he gripped Sylvia’s arm, and the strength of his fingers worked as a ground.
“I’m okay,” Sylvia breathed. She was aware of water, dripping steadily, like a heartbeat in the earth. “How far did these pipes go?” she whispered, brushing cobwebs from her face. “Where does it come out?”
