It suddenly occurred to him that they were going to kill him. It suddenly occurred to him that today was the day he was going to die.
Oh God, forgive me, he thought. Oh God, don’t do this to me, please. Not here, not now. Not at the hands of these terrible white-faced men.
The man who had been sitting astride Joe’s back now dropped on his knees onto Joe’s shoulders, pinning him down to the ground. At the same time, the other man groped his hand between Joe’s legs, and took hold of his testicles. He gave them an agonizingly hard squeeze, and Joe yelled, ‘No.!’ and tried to twist himself around.
‘It’s your choice, my friend,’ said the man who was kneeling on his shoulders. ‘Life ... death, it’s all up to you.’
‘I have a wife,’ Joe told him, with nose-blood running out of the side of his mouth. ‘I have a family.’
‘Should this make a difference?’ the man asked him.
‘I’m asking for a little compassion, that’s all.’
‘Compassion! That’s rich! You would have gladly seen us fry!’
‘For God’s sake,’ Joe choked.
‘I don’t think so,’ the man replied.
At that moment, the man who had been squeezing Joe’s testicles ferociously burrowed his head between Joe’s thighs, dragged his penis backward and downward, and gripped it in his mouth. Joe grunted in terror, and humped his back, but the man clung on, his teeth clinging tenaciously to the rim of his glans.
Joe was shaking with shock and disgust. ‘What the hell do you want?’ he kept repeating. ‘What the hell do you want?’
‘You want it bitten off?’ the man asked him, in a suggestive, oily tone. ‘My friend just adores to bite them off.’
To make his point, the white-faced man sank his teeth into the sensitive skin of Joe’s penis just a little deeper, and lasciviously licked around the end of it. Joe’s stomach knotted up with fear and revulsion and the taste of blood.
He could hardly think. His mind was like a television screen filled with static, turned to top volume. He couldn’t see, he couldn’t hear. Every one of his senses seemed to be blotted out by an endless crashing roar.
He had been frightened for his life before: once in an automobile crash, and once on a flight to Niagara Falls, when his plane had been struck by lightning. But nothing like this. This was misery and terror and utter humiliation, all mixed up together. He found himself praying that his family would never find out what had happened to him. Better to be lost forever, in a shallow grave in the forest, than for Marcia to discover what these white-faced men had put him through.
He was still praying when the man who was sitting astride his shoulders slid two long metal tubes out of his inside pocket. Without a word, without any hesitation at all, he positioned one of the tubes above the middle of Joe’s bare back. It made an indentation in his white, plump flesh.
‘You know what it says in the Bible,’ the man told Joe, conversationally. ‘Man cannot live by bread alone.’
‘Wha–?’ said Joe; and it was then that the man pushed the tube so hard that it penetrated Joe’s skin, and Joe felt it run cold and sharp right into his body. It touched him somewhere right inside him, and he felt tissues snag and nerves thrill with unexpected agony. He tried to fight, but teeth crunched into his penis, so deep that he felt as if they would bite it in half. In spite of the agony that the needle was inflicting on him, in spite of the sheer exquisite pain of having that thin tube sliding into his body, pricking and digging at his kidneys, he gripped the soil with both hands and squeezed his eyes tight shut and tried to think of anything else but pain.
Which was impossible, of course – because the next thing he knew, a second tube had been pushed into the other side of his back, deep through skin and muscle and fatty tissue. He screamed, although he couldn’t hear himself screaming, and then his sinuses exploded in a hideous sneeze – blood and earth and twigs and vomit.
He thought he heard somebody laughing – a high, shrill, maniacal laugh. He thought he heard thunder, but it was only the blood roaring through his brain.
He felt a sweet, intense agony in his kidneys, an agony that convinced him that he was dying. He didn’t know whether to join in the laughter or to sob with pain.
He dived deep into unconsciousness, and as he lay unconscious, the two white-faced men bent over him, sipping with intense concentration at the thin metal tubes that protruded from his bare back. All that disturbed their sipping was an occasional twittering from a bird in the trees above, and the distant droning of an airplane.
Joe could feel their sipping, but he remained comatose. He thought that he was walking along a beach somewhere, with the breeze blowing steadily into his eyes, and gulls circling all around him. He was aware that somebody was following him, very close behind his right shoulder, so close that he felt he couldn’t turn around and confront him.
‘You could join us, you know,’ a voice whispered, a voice half blown away by the breeze.
He stopped, and whoever was following him stopped too.
He heard somebody say, ‘Mr Hillary? Mr Hillary?’
He turned around. He found himself face-to-face with a tall, angular man in a soft grey coat, a man with bone-white hair which whipped and curled across his face.
The man’s eyes were filled with red, like two glass inkwells brimming with blood.
‘Mr Hillary,’ he heard somebody say; and that somebody was him.
The man nodded, and slowly raised his right hand, so that his sleeve fell away from his arm. His wrists were thin and his skin was unhealthily white. ‘You could join us, you know,’ the man smiled, although he spoke like a stage ventriloquist, without moving his lips. ‘All the world is our dominion. The sins of the fathers, and of the sons, they all belong to us.’
Joe was cold with absolute terror. His heart was bumping slower and slower. Nobody had ever frightened him so much in his entire life.
‘Mr Hillary’ kept on smiling, and held his arm closer. It appeared that his skin was wriggling. Joe didn’t want to look, didn’t want to find out why, but he couldn’t help it. The man terrified him so much that he didn’t dare to look away.
‘Do I alarm you?’ the man asked. ‘Is there something about me which makes you feel uneasy?’
Joe stared at the man’s arm and realized that the wriggling movement was right inside his veins. In fact, on the inner side of his wrist, where his skin was thin and almost transparent, he could actually see what was causing it. Through the man’s veins, in a constant and sickening stream, grave-worms were crawling. They oozed and waggled down the inside of his arm, and around his elbow, and bulged through the veins on the back of his hand.
Joe slowly raised his eyes, toward ‘Mr Hillary’s’ face, and saw that the worms were even squeezing their way through the arteries in the side of his neck.
‘Mr Hillary’ grinned. ‘Do I frighten you, Joe?’ he asked him.
Joe took a sharp, cataclysmic breath. He breathed in blood and earth and ragged shreds of sinus. He tried to breathe again, but he couldn’t. His lungs were clogged. His trachea was blocked with leaves and fibre. And he was far too frightened.
His heart clenched, like a man clenching his fist, clenching it tight, and refusing to open it.
Oh God. Oh God.
But his heart refused to beat. And his lungs refused to breathe.
Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.
And then death came rushing in. Like black wings beating. Like a cellar door opening. And then there was nothing at all.
Eleven
Ralph pulled his car into the kerb at the end of Seaver Street, followed nose-to-tail by the metallic-purple ‘82 Eldorado which had escorted him all the way southward through the Combat Zone. He climbed out and locked the door, even though he realized how absurd it was, to lock the door of a three-year-old Volkswagen parked on Seaver Street. Absurd because (a) nobody on Seaver Street would want to steal it; and (b) even if they did, police department statistics showed that even models
with factory-fitted alarms were broken into and moving within 1 minute 58 seconds, usually quicker.
Somehow, however, he felt that his car wouldn’t be stolen today. Patrice Latomba was waiting for him on the sidewalk, flanked by six or seven of his lieutenants, including Bertrand, dreadlocked and black-spectacled and jumpy and wild, and a totally handsome young black man with a bald-shaved head and silver hoop earrings and a sleeveless leather jerkin, and an ex-boxer with puffy eyes and a squashed nose whom Ralph (with some sadness) recognized as Henry ‘The Hammer’ Rivers, one of his heroes from the days of black-and-white television with rounded corners. The Cassius Clay days: the Kennedy days.
He walked around his car and onto the sidewalk and Patrice was waiting for him, stony-eyed.
Ralph said, ‘I’m sorry. I want you to know that, before we say anything else at all. It was an accident, no more than that. But, your son’s dead, and I shot him, and I’m sorry.’
Patrice said, ‘Don’t let’s talk about it, okay? Talking won’t bring him back. Aint nothing won’t bring him back.’
Ralph said, ‘Which is your apartment?’
Patrice turned around and pointed. ‘Right up there. Third storey. But they’ve drawn the drapes. You can’t see nothing.’
Ralph stepped back on the sidewalk and examined the stained, redbrick apartment block. The balconies were much narrower than he had expected – scarcely wide enough to accommodate a couple of chairs. But he knew that front-door assaults were always murderous. He had seen far too many uniformed officers shot down on Roxbury landings, and he wasn’t at all keen to be the next in line.
‘Have you talked to them lately?’ he asked Patrice.
‘I tried. But they don’t seem to show no sense of reason, man. They say they want their money and that’s it. They don’t care who’s got it. I have to find it for them. Shit man, I’ve tried, I’ve put all the feelers you can think of. But I don’t know who’s got it. Jesus, if I did, they could have it now.’
Ralph said, ‘They’re on the phone?’
‘That’s right.’
‘And there’s two of them?’
‘No more than that, for sure.’
Ralph said, ‘How long since they slept?’
‘Not since yesterday, man. We’ve been talking to them all of yesterday; and all of last night; and all of this morning.’
‘Both of them?’
‘Sure. They both got different voices. One of them sounds like Salem or Marblehead, know what I mean? Upstate, classy. That real weird drawl. The other one sounds more like regular Boston.’
‘They must be pretty tired.’
‘You tell me, man. They don’t sound tired. Neither of them.’
Ralph thought for a while, and then he said, quite sharply, ‘You don’t know where the money is, right?’
‘Man, if I knew –’
‘Okay, okay, I believe you,’ Ralph interrupted him. ‘But you don’t know who these guys are, either? I mean, you have no idea at all? Not even a clue?’
‘Nobody I ever heard of, and that’s the 18-carat truth.’
Ralph rubbed his forehead with his fingertips. ‘I didn’t even know that anybody else was involved in this operation, apart from Jambo DuFreyne and Luther Johnson and all of the preppie connection, Harvard and Harvard Med and MIT.’
‘Man, I didn’t even know that,’ said Patrice. ‘I knew that Luther was dealing; but everybody knew that Luther was dealing. I mean, that’s his job.’
‘So what’s the situation now?’ Ralph asked him. Tense, anxious, out of place. The good-looking black was watching him with eyes of unwavering hatred, and Henry ‘The Hammer’ was shuffling and ducking his neck and punching his fist into the palm of his hand.
‘They’ve been hurting Verna,’ said Patrice, in a tight, off-key voice. ‘I don’t know how much, I don’t know how. I heard her on the phone and she was screaming. I never heard nobody scream like that. They say they’re going to kill her if I don’t bring the bag by twelve o’clock, no ifs or buts.’
Tears suddenly sprang into Patrice’s eyes; and Ralph looked at him, and got caught by something completely unexpected. For the very first time in his entire career he understood that the people he was policing were human; and that they were just like him; and that they wept and cared, even if they were burglars and racketeers and drug dealers and pimps. It wasn’t a question of forgiving. It was up to juries to forgive. But it was a question of understanding; and Patrice cried; and Ralph understood; and this was the man whose baby he had killed.
Ralph said, ‘I’ll get her out. I’ve got some rope and a hook in the car.’
‘And that’s it? Some rope and a hook?’
‘That’s it. Provided somebody can direct me into the apartment directly above.’
Verna suddenly opened her eyes and felt excruciating pain in her wrists and ankles with her cheek pressed against the kitchen table, she could just see the square yellow electric clock on the kitchen wall and she found it both distressing and relieving that she had slept for less than twenty minutes. Distressing because she had needed to sleep for very much longer; and while she was asleep, she had at last been free from the prurient tortures that Bryan and Joseph had kept inflicting on her. But relieving because there were still two and a half hours to go until noon, when Patrice had promised to return the money.
She thought for a moment that Bryan and Joseph might be dozing, too. But the moment she opened her eyes, and tried to wrestle herself into a more comfortable position, Bryan appeared, blood-eyed, white-faced, filing his nails with the kind of file that you usually found in Christmas crackers.
‘Hungry?’ he asked her.
She swallowed dryly. ‘I could use a drink of water. And my wrists hurt something terrible. I can’t even feel my hands.’
Bryan nodded, as if he quite understood. ‘These things are sent to try us.’
Joseph appeared, frowning distractedly. ‘I lost one of my pipes,’ he said.
‘You probably left it in the living-room,’ said Bryan. ‘You want to fetch Verna some water?’
‘I’m sure I left it in here.’
‘Fetch Verna some water, will you? We don’t want her dehydrating. Bad for the system. Thickens the blood. Sours the adrenaline.’
‘Couldn’t you just untie me?’ Verna pleaded. ‘I promise I won’t try to get away.’
Bryan shook his head. ‘We’ll be needing some nutrition pretty soon.’
‘I could cook you something. I’ve got plenty of pork chops in the icebox.’
Joseph was filling up a cup at the sink. He yelped with laughter.
‘We don’t eat pork,’ Bryan explained.
‘I got steak, then, and beans. I got tuna.’
‘We don’t eat steak and we don’t eat beans and we don’t eat tuna,’ said Joseph. He brought the cup of water across the kitchen and lifted Verna’s head so that she could drink. Most of the water poured out of the side of her mouth, but she managed to swallow enough to relieve her thirst.
She rested her head on the table again. Joseph stayed close beside her, so close that she could smell him, a dimly decaying, floral smell, like dying roses in a dried-up vase.
They didn’t eat steak and they didn’t eat beans and they didn’t eat tuna. Verna didn’t care to ask them what they did eat, in case she didn’t like the answer. Besides, she had already learned not to provoke them, either of them. They were strangely formal in their behaviour, but they had already inflicted enough pain on her for Verna to know that their capacity for cruelty knew no limits whatsoever.
She couldn’t understand how anybody could want to hurt another human being so much – especially since neither of them seemed to derive any pleasure out of it, not even a faintly sexual pleasure. Whenever they hurt her, whenever they touched her, they did it in such a matter-of-fact way that she felt completely characterless, a piece of flesh that they were torturing not because they bore her any ill will, but for some incomprehensible ritual of their own.
<
br /> They didn’t hate her, she could sense that. They didn’t even dislike her. In fact, they talked to her in such a teasing, friendly way that she could almost believe that they had grown fond of her.
That was what made their cruelty all the more terrifying. That was what scared her more than anything.
There was something else that disturbed her. Something else that had penetrated her consciousness like a shard of broken glass stuck in her foot. Most of the time she had been too confused and too hurt and too exhausted to think about it. But it kept digging into her mind again and again.
They hadn’t slept. She had seen them together, she had seen them apart. Just when she thought that one of them might be resting, he reappeared, smiling, his eyes as blood-red as rubies.
She had the oddest feeling that they never slept.
The big black woman in the blue floral dress opened her french windows for Ralph and showed him out onto the narrow balcony. At one end of the balcony was a wicker chair with a half-collapsed seat and a frayed cushion. ‘This is where I habitually sit,’ she told him. ‘That’s when the fires aren’t burning and the bullets aren’t flying.’
At the other end of the balcony was a collection of earthenware pots, filled with a mixture of brightly-coloured flowers and herbs – thyme, Italian parsley, cilantro, basil and sage. ‘And this is my garden, my pride-and-joy.’
‘That’s real nice,’ Ralph remarked. ‘Nice to see something grow.’
He leaned over the edge of the balcony and he could see the balcony of Patrice Latomba’s apartment, fifteen or sixteen feet below. There was a red bicycle on it, and some tall nettle-like plants growing in rusty cooking-oil cans, plants which looked suspiciously like cannabis sativa. He gripped the metal railing which surrounded the balcony, and shook it. It seemed firm enough.
‘I think they’ve got her tied up in the kitchen,’ said Patrice. ‘She was screaming a couple of times and that’s where the screaming was coming from.’
The Sleepless Page 27
