Fear itself: a novel

by Jonathan Lewis Nasaw

  “Bitchin’.” Strum reached behind him, twisting in his chair so as not to break eye contact with Simon. There was something almost hypnotic about those eyes, those lashless, browless, naked eyes: you didn’t want to stare into them, but you didn’t want to look away either. He removed a ten-page printout from his printer tray.

  “I started with your basic Google, got three, four hundred hits. News stories, FBI press releases, conspiracy theories, the usual crap—I saved you a couple highlights. But there was one item caught my eye—a press release in Publishers Weekly on-line, that St. Swithin’s Press had bought the rights to Pender’s autobiography, and he’d be working with a freelancer named Arthur Bellcock.

  “Now, to tell you the truth, dude, when I sat down last night I didn’t think there was a chance in hell I’d be coming up with much. Kind of data you’re looking for, the real personal shit, you’re just not gonna find on-line, unless the guy’s some kind of freak or something. But I figured what the fuck, a name like Bellcock’s unique enough to be worth a shot.

  “Sure enough, I found his e-mail address, went in through the usual Microsoft Swiss cheese firewall, and downloaded his hard drive. He doesn’t appear to have started writing anything yet, or if he has, it isn’t on his computer—there aren’t even any notes.

  “What there is, though—bada-bing, bada-boom!—is a complete list of contacts Bellcock had to have gotten from Pender himself, dating back all the way to his childhood. Friends, family, names, addresses, phone numbers—” Strum waved the printout over his head. “—it’s all in here. I were you, I’d start with the sister.”

  “I appreciate the advice,” said Simon. “This Bellcock—would there be any way for him to tell he’s been hacked?”

  “Guy with a system like that? He wouldn’t even know he’s got mail, the little bell didn’t go ding-dong. Oh, yeah, I almost forgot—I also have that other address you wanted.”

  “What other address?”

  “Skairdykat at Netscape?”

  “Right, right. It slipped my mind, what with everything else going on.”

  “I can dig it,” said Strum. “Here you go, free of charge, as promised. Now, where did I—Oh, yeah.” Zap reached behind him, unpinned a rainbow Post-it from the corkboard on the wall behind his desk, and handed it to Simon. “The name on the account is the same as the screen name, but according to the ISP file, the phone line is registered to somebody named Gee—the address is on there.”

  “Thanks.” Simon slipped the Post-it into his pocket without looking at it. “Now, about that printout?”

  The two men were sitting face-to-face, almost knee-to-knee. Strum gave Simon the printout with one hand, took the satchel with the other, opened it, glanced in, nodded decisively. “Mercy buckets—a pleasure doing business with you, dude.”

  “Likewise,” said Simon. “I do need the bag back.”

  “Sure thing.” Zap twisted around in his chair again; as he started to dump Simon’s getaway money—ten thousand dollars in rubber-band-bound stacks of worn, nonsequential twenties—out onto his desk, he felt something hit him in the right side, just below the rib cage.

  Zap’s first thought was that Simon had punched him. “Dude!” he murmured reprovingly. Then he raised his right arm and looked down past his armpit to see what looked like a piece of dark wood protruding from his side. Confused—it had felt like a dull blow at first—he tried to lift his shirt for a closer look, but it wouldn’t lift; the fabric was pinned against his side by what he now realized was a wooden-handled steak knife. “Fuck, dude!”

  Simon, torn between drawing back so as not to get any blood on himself or the printout, or drawing closer so as not to miss anything, settled for shielding the printout with his arms as he leaned in to search Strum’s eyes for the first traces of fear. Instead there was only hurt and confusion.

  “Nothing personal,” Simon explained, as Strum clawed awkwardly at the serrated knife lodged in his liver; it must have been extremely painful, thought Simon. “I just can’t take the chance. You know what I look like, you know where I’m staying, and you know where I’m going. And I will be needing that cash—you did get greedy there, you have to admit that.”

  “I’m sorry,” Zap gasped, truthfully; he hadn’t a drop of irony left—just regret. He was sorry about having been greedy, sorry about dying, sorry about the whole bloody business, but most of all, he was sorry about the pain, which was so all-enveloping by now, so much larger than himself, that it was like being sorry for all the pain in the world, not just his own, but everybody’s.

  “It’s okay,” replied Simon. He watched Strum sag in the chair, heard the wet fart and saw the stain spreading across the crotch of Zap’s orange cotton drawstring pants as the sphincters relaxed in death; he’d turned away in disgust even before the light had finished fading from those stoned, red-rimmed eyes.

  “I think I will take that hit now, though,” he added, reaching for the bong. “Dude.”

  5

  “Abruzzi. Have a seat.”

  For a man with no real power base left, and just over two months to go before retirement, Deputy Director Steven P. McDougal had himself one sweet office, thought Linda, doing her best to minimize her exhausted drop-foot shuffle as she crossed the expanse of the blue-gray carpet with the FBI logo in the middle and eased herself down into the handsome yellow wing chair set squarely in front of McDougal’s aircraft carrier of a desk.

  On the far side of the flight deck, McDougal, in shirtsleeves and a gorgeous blue shot-silk necktie, was canted back in his leather executive chair with his legs crossed casually at the ankle, reading a newspaper. “How are you feeling?” he asked without looking up.

  Once upon a time that would have been mere conversation; now Linda felt she had to sell the answer. “Fine, sir,” she said firmly. “Just fine.”

  The deputy director glanced at Linda for the first time, lowering his chin and peering over the half-glasses he wore balanced on the end of his patrician nose. “Pool tells me you’re settling in nicely.”

  “Settled, sir—I’m settled.”

  “Catch that spy yet?”

  Linda thought she saw a glint of amusement in those cool gray alpha-male eyes. “Yes, sir, I believe so.”

  He folded the newspaper smartly in half and handed it across the desk. It was the San Francisco Chronicle, Saturday, October 23.FBI FOILS KIDNAP ATTEMPT, screamed the banner headline,SERIAL KILLER IN BERKELEY? and ELECTRONICS HEIR SOUGHT were the sub-heads, and straddling the fold was a captioned photograph of Pender, beret comically askew, right arm in an air-cast and sling, being helped out of an ambulance. “Recognize anybody?”

  Linda raced through the article (Simon Childs, heir to the Childs Electronics fortune…brief struggle…authorities believe more victims…) until she found what she was looking for: fractured arm…treated and released—Pender was okay. She was more relieved than she would have expected, considering she’d only met the big galoot twice in her life. “I guess he had a hunch,” she said.

  “And it nearly got him killed,” McDougal snapped. “He was lucky. So were we—as you may be aware, lately the Bureau hasn’t exactly been getting the kind of press it once enjoyed. The director called me from home this morning—he said this is the first article in any newspaper in over a month that mentions the FBI without also including the words Waco or bungled.”

  “First rate,” replied Linda, though it seemed to her that the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation ought to have something better to do with his time.

  “There’s a problem, though.”

  Linda waited; then she realized that McDougal wanted her to state the nature of the problem. “Childs is still at large.”

  “Which is where Liaison Support comes in. You’re on point—you’ll be coordinating the investigation. I want you on it from now until Mr. Simon Childs is either dead or in custody. Because if he starts killing people again, this thing can go south fast, and we’ll lose all the ground we’ve gaine
d.”

  “Not to mention all the people he kills will be, like, dead,” said Linda.

  McDougal lowered his chin again and peered at her over the rim of his reading glasses for what seemed like an eternity. “Know who you remind me of?” he asked eventually.

  “No, sir.”

  “Pender—you remind me of Pender.”

  “Thank you, sir, I—”

  “He’s a major pain in the ass, too. Which is another reason I want you working this case—to keep him off it. When it comes to serial killers, Pender’s like nature—he abhors a vacuum.”

  “I understand.”

  Linda started to hand the newspaper back; McDougal gave her a little keep-it wave. “Tell Ed it’s for his scrapbook. And one more thing…” He reached under the desk and came up with a handsome blackthorn walking stick with an ivory handle and a ferrule of thin, beaten gold. “This is his—I gave it to him in seventy-five, that time he took a bullet for me. He loaned it back to me last year, when I had my old football knee replaced. I haven’t used it in months, though—would you give it back to him, thank him for me?”

  “Sure,” said Linda, taking the cane. It was both lighter and stronger than it looked, and the ivory grip was delicately mottled, like mutton-fat jade. “I didn’t know Pender’d been shot.”

  “It’s a good story—you ought to get him to tell it to you sometime. If he offers to show you his scar, though, I’d respectfully decline.”

  Linda, stubborn to the end, deliberately avoided using the cane when she pushed herself up from her chair after McDougal dismissed her, or taking advantage of it as she left the office, but on her way back to the car she found herself leaning more and more heavily on it. And although it was a little too tall for her, it made enough of a difference—she felt so much more stable, and was better able to clear the ground with her toes—that when she reached the DOJ-AOB, she didn’t think twice about using it on the short walk to the first elevator, or the long walk from the second elevator to her office.

  By then it was a done deal—Linda was hooked. The first time she tried to make it to the ladies’ room unaided, she had to go back for the cane—walking without it now felt like tottering along a tightrope in a high wind—and by the end of the day, Linda and her cane were inseparable.

  Which, Linda realized belatedly, was probably why McDougal had given it to her in the first place. Still, she couldn’t help thinking that Pender and/or Dolitz might have had something to do with it as well. Sneaky bastards that they were.

  6

  Lying on his back, glued to the bottom of the tub from the back of his shaved scalp to the skin of his ass and testicles, with his arms and legs splayed out and glued to the sides of the tub, even the slightest shift of position is excruciatingly painful for Nelson. He can’t move, he can’t sleep, and worst of all, if there is a worst, with his lips sealed, he can’t even scream.

  And unlike Wayne Summers, Nelson Carpenter has no imaginary cello to play, no Bach suites committed to memory. For most of his life he has focused his attention and his energies so intently on his phobias that he has no other real interests, no driving passions, no inner resources to draw upon in order to distract himself from this waking nightmare. His only respites come during the spells of panic-and-sleep-deprivation-induced psychosis that overtake him for ever-lengthening periods of time, at ever-shortening intervals.

  Small wonder, then, that by late morning Nelson is spending most of his time in a long hallucinatory doze, reliving the death of Simon’s grandfather over and over again. It doesn’t get any easier, either, starting with the shame of being caught in flagrante when the old man walks in on the boys during a meeting of the Horror Club.

  Meeting—that’s what they still call it, anyway, though by this point in their adolescent development an observer would be hard put to distinguish the game they play at every session from a good old-fashioned homosexual tryst. Nelson, in fact, would be just as happy to skip the horror phase entirely, but Simon seems, not just to enjoy it, but to need it: no horror, no sex, Nelson has learned, and wearing as it is on his psyche, he is willing to put up with the former for the sake of the latter.

  So here he is in Simon’s room late one Friday afternoon in December of 1963, a few weeks after his thirteenth birthday. It’s dusk, the curtains are drawn, the room is dark except for the conical beam of Simon’s eight-millimeter Bell and Howell projector and the flickering black-and-white images of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari unspooling against the back of Simon’s bedroom door, and the only sounds are the crepitating whirr of the projector and the muffled, rhythmic grunting of the boys humping on the floor so the squeaking bedsprings don’t give them away.

  And that’s how the old man finds them. Once again, lying glued to his bathtub, Nelson hears the film clicking through the Bell and Howell, smells the characteristic projector odor of hot bulb, warm celluloid, and burnt dust, sees Grandfather Childs standing in the shockingly open doorway with an appalled expression as the images from the film flicker, wavy and distorted, against his white shirt front, his ashen face, his glabrous scalp.

  The worst beating of Simon’s life begins then and there, as Nelson scrambles for his clothes and dashes out of the house half-naked, past an openmouthed Missy and a frowning Ganny Wilson. Not that old man Childs would dare lay a finger on him—his father’s a lawyer and none too fond of his neighbor. Nelson is barred from the premises forever, though, and Simon is forbidden to contact him—also forever.

  Forever lasts two days, which is how long it takes for Simon to recover enough from the beating to be able to leave his bedroom. They meet in Nelson’s old tree house; Simon shows him his bruises and makes him swear an oath of revenge. It’s all very dramatic, but a little hard for Nelson to take seriously.

  Not Simon, though: Simon is deadly serious—and he has a plan. Everybody has a weakness, he tells Nelson, a crack in their armor; everybody’s afraid of something. In the old man’s case, it’s fire: Grandfather Childs is deathly afraid of fire. They’ll have to be very, very patient, though, Simon informs him—they’ll have to wait two whole weeks, until Missy goes home with Ganny for her pre-Christmas sleepover.

  Lying in the bathtub thirty-six years later, Nelson relives it one last time. He’s in his own bedroom, waiting for Simon’s call. He’s trying to study, but his eyes skim the print of his American history textbook uncomprehendingly. The phone rings; he snatches it up before his parents can answer. “Hurry up,” says Simon—that’s all, just the two words and the click of the receiver in Nelson’s ear.

  The onset of Nelson’s acrophobia is still a few years off; he has no trouble climbing out his bedroom window, cutting through the backyard and across the patio to Simon, waiting at the back door.

  “He’s in the shower,” Simon whispers urgently. Everything’s ready—they’ve dry-run it a dozen times in the last two weeks, when the house was empty. As they race through the kitchen, Simon grabs the box of safety matches from the drawer next to the stove; Nelson grabs the big turkey-roaster pan from the cabinet under the counter and the newspaper from the kitchen table, and races up the wide stairs after Simon, who’s already emerging from his room carrying his straight-backed metal desk chair. They hurry down the hall and through the open door of the master suite. The moment is electric; even Nelson is more excited than afraid as he helps Simon jam the chair under the knob of the bathroom door; on the other side of the door he can hear the shower running.

  “Care to do the honors?” Simon whispers. Nelson shakes his head. Simon gives him a suit-yourself shrug and takes the newspaper from him, rolls it into a cone, lights it, and as it begins to catch, carries it over to the wall socket where Grandfather Childs’s prize Tiffany lamp is plugged in. After unplugging the lamp, scorching the plug, the wallpaper under the socket, and the socket itself, Simon retraces his steps, scorching the carpet until he reaches the bathroom door again. He holds the torch to the crack under the door until the fire threatens to burn his hand, then, with a con
juror’s flourish, drops the flaming Chronicle into the roasting pan.

  And as the sound of the running water stops abruptly and the room begins to fill with smoke, Simon backs away to join Nelson over by the doorway. Together they watch, wide-eyed with excitement as the doorknob begins to turn as if by magic, then rattles frantically. A moment later—bam!—the door shudders, the chair wobbles. Bam, bam, bam again; Nelson pictures the old man throwing himself against it. A shiver of fear runs through him, but the door holds, the chair holds. Nelson can hear the old man screaming now: eeee, eeee, eeee—a high-pitched, keening sort of sound.

  “Listen,” giggles Simon, putting his arm around Nelson’s waist, giving his love handle a little squeeze; “listen, he’s squealing like an old woman.”

  “An old woman,” Nelson agrees. “C’mon, let’s—”

  But before they can carry out the rest of the plan (ditch the ashes, put the matches, the baking pan, and the chair back where they belong, then take a powder before the old fart figures out the bathroom door is no longer mysteriously jammed; old fart, old lamp, old wiring, electric fire—hey, it happens, you know?), the door stops shuddering, the sound of the old-womanly keening dies away, and they hear a heavy, meaty thump, followed by a breathy, gasping gurgling, followed in turn by…

  By nothing. By the soft crackling of the newspaper in the roasting pan. But from inside the bathroom, not another sound, until they are standing together in the bathroom doorway a few minutes later, looking down at a bald old man lying in a pool of blood, his throat cut from ear to ear, and a straight razor clutched in his lifeless hand, at which point Simon turns to Nelson, and in a voice filled more with awe than with fear, guilt, or rancor, says, “Sometimes you get lucky, Nellie—sometimes you just get lucky.” And sometimes you don’t. Something drags Nelson out of his hypnotic doze. Pain—it’s pain: his right leg, glued slightly higher to the side of the tub than the left, is beginning to work itself loose. He is encouraged briefly—then the pain begins to build. It’s a whole new order of misery, exfoliation by gravity, the fine hairs on the side of his calf being ripped out in agonizing slow-mo. He tenses the leg, holds it up against the pull of gravity for as long as he can, breathing shallowly through his nostrils. Eventually, though, the muscles tire, the leg sags, the torture begins again. Tears swim in his eyes, blurring the midnight blue wall tiles, but even the release of a good cry is denied to Nelson—if his nose stops up, he will surely suffocate.