“Mr. Terwilliger,” a morose baritone voice called from down the hall. “We need to have a word.”
Ed turned and found himself looking into the beady eyes of Dan Berry. Ed wasn’t afraid of very many people, but he was absolutely terrified of the Commanding Officer of the Criminalistics Lab. Just hearing the man’s voice made his stomach tie itself in a knot. It was like being back in high school again, facing the principal after being caught skipping class.
“In my office,” said Berry. He walked briskly while Ed jogged to catch up, having some difficulty keeping up in his current condition. He very much hoped he could make it through a conversation with Dingleberry without vomiting all over himself. Rosemary looked up from her work to follow Ed with a deeply disapproving glare as he walked past.
Berry closed his office door behind them and took a seat behind his desk. Ed sat in the nearest of the other two chairs, a flimsy thing that had to be at least as old as he was. This is it, Ed thought. He knows about the drugs. Is he going to fire me or throw me in a cell?
Berry looked as calm as ever, but Ed noticed a vein in his forehead that he was sure hadn’t been quite so pronounced before. Maybe it’ll burst, he thought hopefully.
A vestigial Brooklyn accent gave Berry’s voice a hard edge. “I just wanted to say hello and have a chat. It’s been a while since we had a nice talk, since I haven’t seen you around. For two goddamned days.” He said the last words so sharply that Ed jumped.
Until this moment, it hadn’t crossed Ed’s mind to come up with a story, some excuse for not showing up at work. Lacking any preparation, he did the best he could. “It was, ah, bad fish, sir. I’ve been throwing up day and night.” That was the most plausible excuse he could come up with, considering the way he knew he looked. It might actually help his story if he threw up on Berry’s desk, which seemed a more likely possibility with every passing minute.
Berry clearly wasn’t buying a word of it. “Terwilliger, do you realize you’ve been out sick eight times in the last two months?” He paused just long enough for Ed to begin to stammer an answer, then went right on talking. “You don’t even bother calling in sick anymore. You just don’t show up. And when you are here, your work is lousy. Your cases are piling up. And you look like hell. Are you going to tell me that’s all because of bad fish?”
Ed swallowed. “Well, I’ve―”
“And don’t hand me any bullcrap about your personal life. Maybe this makes me a prick, but I don’t give a damn about what happens to you outside of this office. You’re collecting a paycheck from the city, you goddamn well better be doing your job!”
Strangely, Ed felt a glimmer of hope flare somewhere in his chest. If Berry was pummeling him over his work habits, surely it meant he didn’t know about the drugs.
“And then,” Berry continued, eyebrows descending even lower over his tiny eyes, “and then I find out that you’ve been talking quite a lot with Mr. Leonard. Do you know where Leonard is right now?”
“Um―”
Berry planted the point of his index finger on his desktop. “He’s in a goddamn holding cell downstairs, that’s where. And do you know why? I think you know why.”
Ed didn’t know what to say. Please don’t throw me in jail was the first thing that came to mind, but he doubted begging would save him. Don’t fire me.
“There are some things I will not tolerate in this department,” said Berry, “and you are one of them.”
Ed looked down at the floor for a moment. When he looked back at Berry, the gnome was sitting on the edge of the desk. Berry couldn’t see it, or didn’t notice it, but it laughed softly as he spoke. Its delight chilled Ed’s blood even more than Berry’s needle-sharp stare. Ed felt sweat dripping from his armpits beneath his shirt as a wave of nausea threatened to overcome him. Give me another chance, he thought fervently. He closed his eyes tightly and gripped the arms of his chair until his knuckles ached. Please, please don’t arrest me. You don’t know what I’m going through!
“I’ve decided―” Berry stopped in mid-sentence. Ed opened his eyes, wondering why he wouldn’t just make the pronouncement and be done with it. Berry was staring at the wall next to his desk, blinking rapidly. The gnome had disappeared.
Berry looked at Ed and jerked, as though surprised to see him there. His eyes suddenly came back into focus. “What the fuck?” he bellowed. “Terwilliger, what are you doing in my office? Who let you in here?”
Ed had no idea what to say. He stared at Berry, and Berry stared back at him. “You did. Sir.”
Berry pressed a button on his phone. “Rosemary, did you let Terwilliger in here? I want him the hell out of my office.”
“Does that mean I’m―”
“Get back to work, goddamn it!”
Ed nearly tipped his chair over in his hurry to make an exit. He ran past the secretary’s desk—Rosemary watched him go in utter confusion—and made his escape into the corridor. His relief at not being fired was almost enough to make his knees buckle. Somehow he made his way back to his office and collapsed into his chair.
The gnome must have done something to Dingleberry. It could not be coincidence that the creature had appeared at the very moment the man had come unglued. Questions raced through his mind. What had it done, and how? And why was it helping him now, after months of torment and mockery?
More importantly, where was he going to get his heroin now? The idea of making deals with strangers in dark alleys didn’t sit well with Ed, but he was out of options. Mind racing, he put his head down on his desk to think, and promptly fell asleep.
19
The Miracle of the Vistula
Tom got a call from Ed late Wednesday evening. Terwilliger sounded confused; he spoke gibberish and rambled from subject to subject. He said something about going to the city, then he veered off that subject and started talking about young girls and old men with no legs. Tom had never heard him like this. Putting down the phone, Kajdas locked up and hurried out to his car. Hell of a way to spend a Valentine’s Day, he thought.
At the corner of Fairfax and 3rd, Kajdas had to swerve to avoid a scruffy man in a t-shirt and a pair of torn bell-bottomed jeans who had decided to cross against the light. Tom couldn’t be quite sure at this distance, in the dark, but that person looked like a shaggy, unwashed version of Ed. When he turned to cast a nervous glance over his shoulder, Tom knew it was him. Ed tripped over the curb and continued on his way.
Tom’s car was blocking the intersection, and horns were beginning to honk. Kajdas muttered a four-letter word that he almost never used and spun the wheel to the left. The Electra’s turning radius was terrible, but he managed to get the car facing the way he wanted to go. By that time, Ed was nowhere to be seen. Tom cursed again—“God dang it!”—and scanned the dark storefronts along Fairfax. The only thing that appeared to be open was the Farmers Market, its white-shingled clock tower gleaming in the streetlights. Ed had to have gone in; there was no other way he could have vanished so quickly.
Tom pulled into the parking lot and pulled crookedly into the first space he found. He clobbered the car next to him with his door in his haste to get out, leaving a sizeable mint-green paint mark on the door. This elicited his third vulgar word of the day. The CBS eye gazed down at him from the side of the Television City building next door as he hurried across the parking lot.
The Farmers Market was nearly empty of customers. It looked like they’d be closing up soon. Tom walked as fast as he could, hoping he hadn’t lost him. This was exactly the kind of thing he’d been worried about. Ed had been drifting toward a crisis for months. As much as Kajdas wanted to help him as a friend, he was painfully aware that his responsibility to Ed went much deeper than friendship.
Kajdas made a wrong turn and found himself in a narrow alley adjacent to the Market. As he turned to go back in, a rustle of sound from the shadows gave him only a half-second’s warning before a diminutive figure stepped between him and the doorway. Tom took a step back, re
aching toward his shoulder holster with his right hand.
“Stop. Don’t you move.” It was Ed’s voice. Tom relaxed his grip on his automatic.
“Ed, thank God I found―” He stopped in mid-sentence when he saw the gleam of metal in Ed’s trembling hand.
“What’s under your jacket? Take your hand out of there.” Ed was shaking, his voice uneven and raspy. Something was seriously wrong with him. Tom slowly withdrew his empty hand and held it out to show Ed that he wasn’t holding his gun.
“Easy does it, buddy,” Tom said. “I didn’t know it was you, that’s all.”
“Why are you following me?” The redness in Ed’s eyes was evident even in the dim light of the alleyway.
Tom took a slow, even breath. He had a great deal of experience facing unstable and dangerous people, but generally not while they were holding firearms. “You called me a little while ago, remember?” Ed lowered his weapon slightly. “I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“Of course I remember calling you.” He paused. “I called you?”
“You didn’t sound right on the phone. I wanted to stop by and see if I could help you.”
“You can’t help me.”
Maybe he was right, but Tom knew he had to try. If anything happened to Ed, Wensel would have Tom’s head on a—no, that wasn’t fair to Ed. Tom pushed away the thought. Kajdas was responsible for him, and that was that.
“Listen, I can help you. Let’s put that thing away and go sit down and talk. You can get through this. You just have to convince yourself that you can. This is all just the drugs, messing with your mind.”
Ed lowered the gun another fraction of an inch. His face was glistening with sweat. “Today’s my birthday,” he said.
“It is?”
“I don’t know how to stop, Tom. I... can’t. I don’t think I can pass his test.”
“Test?” Best to pretend he was making sense. “You can do anything you set your mind to. We’ll figure it out.” Tom was doubtful now that Ed would shoot him, although he wasn’t willing to bet his life on it.
“It talks to me all the time. I can’t stop, or it’ll take control of me.”
Talks to him? Some kind of hallucination? Or a second personality, perhaps? Albert would be interested to know about that. If Ed was a candidate for the Summit project—but no, Kajdas couldn’t do that to him. “It’s not real,” he said. “No one is talking to you except me.”
“It wants me to... to shoot you. Right now. It hates you.”
“It’s not real. Don’t listen to it. It can’t control you.”
Ed squeezed the gun grip until his hands shook. “No! Get out! Get out of my head!” He shut his eyes and lowered his head, teeth bared in a snarl. All at once the strength left his legs. He crumpled to the pavement and cradled his head in his hands, the gun hanging from its trigger guard by one finger. Tom eased toward him to try to take the weapon away, but as his fingers brushed the grip, Ed suddenly jerked it away and glared at Tom with deep suspicion.
“It hates you. It says it’ll go away if I kill you.” Ed pointed the weapon at Tom’s face.
“Listen to yourself. What you’re hearing isn’t real, okay? Shooting me isn’t going to make it stop. Let’s just get you home, all right?”
Ed pointed the Ruger at him for a moment longer, shaking so hard that Tom thought he might pull the trigger by accident. Finally, though, Ed clenched his jaw and lowered the gun with a visible effort.
“It’s gone,” Ed said weakly. “But it’ll be back. It always comes back.” He struggled to stand up. Tom put an arm around him and half-carried him back to his apartment. The three block walk took a long time.
“How about a glass of water?” Tom asked. Ed tensed visibly as Kajdas moved toward the sink, then relaxed again when he opened the cupboard to get a glass. Ed sipped his water and seemed to be listening for whatever apparition had been talking to him earlier.
“I need to clean up.” Ed started for the bathroom, clutching at walls and furniture to stay on his feet. He pulled the gun out of his belt and placed it on top of the television.
“Where do you keep it, Ed?”
Ed stopped, turned around, looked at Tom uncertainly.
“The drugs. I want you to show me where they are. We’re going to get rid of them.”
“I already did. That’s the problem.”
Ed turned away from him and staggered into the bathroom. Okay, Tom thought, maybe it’s too early for that step. He listened as Ed ran water in the sink to wash his face. Any suspicious noises in there, and he would break that bathroom door down before Ed knew what hit him. But all he heard was the sound of water sloshing in the sink. After a few minutes, Ed came back out and eased himself into his blue armchair.
“Do you believe in miracles, Ed?”
Ed looked up at him testily.
“I want to tell you a story,” Kajdas continued, “about something called the Miracle of the Vistula.”
“Fistula?”
“Vistula,” said Kajdas. “It’s a river in Poland.”
“No stories,” Ed grumbled. “I feel lousy.”
“I know you feel lousy, and that’s why you need to listen. I’m going somewhere with this.” He took a seat on the couch. “It was 1920. The Bolsheviks were consolidating their power in Russia. I’ll call them the Reds, because that’s what people were calling them back then. Their enemies, the Whites, were losing their fight against Communism. This was the end of the Russian civil war, before the Soviet era. Germany and Austria-Hungary had lost the war in 1918, and the Bolsheviks were struggling against the Germans for control over Poland. You with me so far?”
“Mmm,” said Ed. He seemed to be trying to pay attention.
“There was a man named Jozef Pilsudski, an important guy in Poland at the time. He’d already gone a long way toward unifying Poland, which had only just become a sovereign country again with the Treaty of Versailles, and in the beginning of 1920 he made an agreement with the Ukraine to combine their forces to fight the Reds. They called themselves a commonwealth. Their armies marched against the Reds and occupied Minsk and Kiev. They were doing pretty well at this point.”
Ed’s attention seemed to be wandering, so Tom decided to accelerate the narrative.
“The Reds fought back, driving the armies out of both cities and pushing them almost all the way back to Warsaw. They didn’t plan on stopping there, either. The Reds intended to continue their push all the way across Europe. Everybody in the world was convinced that it was all over for Poland. But Pilsudski decided he was going to drive the Reds out of there.
“There was a young corporal in the Polish army by the name of Tomasz Kajdas.”
Ed was coming around a bit. “Kajdas,” he said. “Your father?”
“None other. He was about twenty when the big battle happened. Very young. Devoted to the cause of Polish independence. They all were, all of Pilsudski’s men. What happened next would come to be called the Battle of Warsaw. Pilsudski conducted a series of counterattacks along the Vistula. He led a small army that struck deep into Soviet territory to separate their reserves from the main front. It was a stupid plan. Simplistic. No one thought it would ever work. The Russians even got hold of the plan ahead of time and dismissed it as something no one would be dumb enough to try. Well, it did work, and the Soviets were defeated. The Poles called the victory a miracle, and it really was, if you think about it. Tens of thousands of dead or captured Soviets, less than five thousand dead Poles. Who knows how far Communism might have spread if the Reds hadn’t been defeated at the Vistula? Think about that.”
“What did you father do in the battle?”
Tom grinned, pleased that Ed was interested. “That’s the best part of the story. My father was out in front of Pilsudski’s force, scouting the terrain and checking out the occupied villages they came to. Let me tell you, Ed, the things they found in these little villages were terrible. When the Bolsheviks occupied a territory, they did ever
ything they could to demoralize the people. Rape, murder. One of the places the Poles liberated was a little town just east of Warsaw on the Bug River, a place called Wlodawa. The people there were living in terror of the Bolsheviks. Hang on a minute.”
Tom’s back was sore from hauling Ed up the steps to his apartment. He got up and went to the kitchen for a stretch and a glass of water. He continued talking as he filled his glass.
“What was I saying? Ah, Wlodawa. While he was scouting, my father found a young woman in a barn who was hiding under the straw. There were two little girls with her. The woman had been beaten; she was covered in bruises and had a broken arm. It took him a while to convince her that he wasn’t going to do anything nasty to her, but it helped that he wasn’t speaking Russian. Her name was Sabina.” Tom returned to the living room with his glass of water. “Can I get you anything? More water?” Ed shook his head, then winced in pain at the movement. Tom leaned against the wall to calm his back. Sometimes it hurt him to sit down for too long. “Where was I?”
“Sabina,” Ed said.
“Right,” said Tom. “She’d been a prisoner in her own home for weeks, she and her older sister and the two little ones—they were her sister’s kids. The Red soldiers had broken down the door and killed her father and brother on the spot. Sabina’s mother had passed away years before. Well, those soldiers made themselves at home in that house. They kept Sabina and her sister and the two kids as prisoners. I can’t even tell you everything they did to those girls because my father would never tell me. Not that I would want to know.” Tom would never forget the pain and palpable hatred that had filled his father’s eyes as he’d told the story. It was only after the death of Tom’s mother that his father would even discuss it.
“That’s horrible.”
Forest of the Mind (The Book of Terwilliger 1) Page 17
