The Cold Smell of Sacred Stone

by George C. Chesbro

But, of course, nobody was going to help me—certainly not if it meant getting in Mama Baker’s way. The freed patients of the D.I.A. clinic were content to wander aimlessly through their own private, tormented worlds, leaving Mama Baker alone with his sacrificial dwarf. The men were stepping around or over the corpses of two male nurses; one nurse had had his skull bashed in by something very heavy, and the other appeared to have been strangled.

  I just kept bob-bob-bobbing along through this Hieronymus Bosch world, and I finally managed to deduce that my upper body was wrapped in a canvas camisole and Mama Baker was schlepping me around by the back straps; I deduced this just before my bearer hung me up on a prong of a wooden coatrack he’d gotten from somewhere, and placed in the hallway near the elevator. All the doors in the place seemed to be wide open.

  “I’ll be right back, dwarf. I gotta find myself something real sharp to cut you with.”

  “Tegelmimp!”

  “Heigh ho, heigh ho,” Mama Baker sang as he walked away.

  The circus was definitely in town and playing to a full house inside my skull, with everybody using my brain as a trampoline. Still, if I hoped to survive my visit to the most peculiar madhouse that the D.I.A. clinic had become, I knew that I was going to have to find some relatively quiet and stable corner in my drug-sotted brain where I could think, plan, and will myself to act.

  I vaguely remembered making some kind of arrangements for my safety with Veil Kendry, but I couldn’t remember what the arrangements had been. I kept thinking of Road Runner cartoons: Beep-beep-beep. It didn’t make any difference; obviously, Veil wasn’t around. I hoped he wasn’t dead—but, no matter what he was, he couldn’t help me at the moment; it would undoubtedly be a matter of only a few minutes before Mama Baker found something he considered appropriately sharp and ceremonial with which to slit my throat.

  Or, if he got impatient, he might simply stick a hypodermic needle through my eye into my brain.

  I couldn’t understand why Veil hadn’t come to rescue me. I also couldn’t understand why Garth or Marl Braxton wasn’t helping me. All of the patients seemed to be wandering at will through the wide open spaces of the clinic, and I had to assume that Garth and Braxton were among them. It definitely seemed an appropriate time for Garth to employ some of the soothing words and gestures that had so impressed Braxton to calm down Mama Baker. Nor would I be displeased if somebody had taken the more expedient measure of simply smashing a chair over the man’s tattooed head.

  And I knew I was wasting precious time for thought by engaging in petulance and speculation as to why people I’d thought I could count on had not arrived to save me from the man with the crown of scar thorns around his head and JESUS SAVES carved into his cheeks.

  “Heigh ho, heigh ho, it’s off to work we go …”

  Ah, yes; thinking and planning time was over, and if I hung around on the coatrack any longer I was going to end up dead. Snow White was on his way back.

  The coatrack had been set up near the elevator, which I couldn’t use—but the elevator was near the stairs.

  “Heigh ho, heigh ho …”

  I bucked and wriggled in the air until I got my hips and legs swinging back and forth. At the apogee of a forward swing I bent my knees, then kicked up as high as I could; the coatrack tipped over, and I flew through the air to land hard on my back, with my head banging painfully against the floor. The wind was knocked out of me, and stars began to fill the DayGlo tunnels swirling around me. Just what I needed.

  “Heigh ho, heigh ho—hey, dwarf!”

  Mama Baker’s voice seemed to be right above me—and that had a remarkably galvanizing effect on my muscles and mind.

  “Sugtelmptph!” I shouted in panic as I struggled to my feet and wobbled off down one of the tunnels, through an open door, toward the stairs.

  Footsteps were coming up fast behind me; with the drugs in my brain and my arms strapped around my body, there was no way I was going to outrun the other man on the stairs. Baker was going to nab me, unless I did something ingenious—like trust that I maintained what in normal times was a pretty keen sense of balance, jump, drape the canvas-shrouded upper part of my body over the steel guardrail on the stairs and slide down. I banged painfully into the knob at the end of the first section of railing, fell back, and landed on my side.

  “Goddamn you, dwarf!” Baker was shouting as he scrambled down the stairs toward the first landing. “Stop! Stop, dwarf!”

  Stop, dwarf? He had to be kidding me. “Mflkmpiph!” I screamed as I got to my feet, did another perilous dive and bellyflop up onto the railing, and slid down to the next landing. This time there was no knob to halt my descent—which simply meant that I sailed right off the railing and slammed hard against the opposite wall in the stairwell.

  Baker’s shoes clattered on the steps, descending on me. I looked up, saw something flash in his right hand as he raised it to strike …

  I ducked under the swinging scalpel blade, once again managed to get to my feet, and flung myself on the railing. But this time I had been off balance, and had lunged too hard; I was sliding down the railing, but I was leaning too far over, slipping …

  An instant before I would have slipped over the railing and escaped from Baker the hard way, in death, strong hands gripped the straps on the back of the straitjacket and pulled me back over the railing, set me down on the stairs.

  “Mongo!”

  “Elmptak!”

  “You son-of-a-bitch, I’ll kill you too!” Mama Baker screamed as he rushed the rest of the way down the stairs and slashed at Veil.

  There was a most satisfying sound of Veil’s fist colliding with Mama Baker’s jaw. I savored that sound for a few moments, then decided to reward myself for my strenuous labors with a little nap.

  I had vague recollections of very nasty things, but they all seemed to have happened a long time ago, in a prehistoric nightmare time. At the moment the most pressing thing I had to deal with was a splitting headache. Very gingerly, I opened one eye—and winced as a pinkish-white razor blade of light stabbed through to my brain. Gradually, I became accustomed to the light and saw Mr. Lippitt and Veil floating in the middle of it, at the foot of my bed.

  And then I remembered what had happened.

  I started to sit up in bed, and almost fell out of it when pain exploded inside my skull, momentarily blinding me. I cried out, and hands grabbed me and pushed me back up on the bed, eased my head back on the pillow.

  “Take it easy, Mongo,” Lippitt said. “You’ll be all right, but you’re not ready to jog around the park yet. First you have to recover from that psychotropic cocktail of LSD, Thorazine, and scopolamine Slycke shot you up with. Also, you have a slight concussion. You’ve been out of it for close to two days.”

  “Two days?!” That got my eyes open again. This time I found myself looking up into the smiling face of a handsome woman I judged to be in her early fifties. She winked at me.

  “You’re in the clinic infirmary,” Lippitt said. “This is Dr. Fall—the new director of the clinic. You’ll be in good hands here.”

  “You can call me Helen, Dr. Frederickson,” the woman said. “I believe you’ll be feeling fine after a few more days of rest. In the meantime, if you need anything, just push the button at the side of your bed.”

  Helen Fall patted me reassuringly on the arm, then walked from the room. I glanced back and forth between Lippitt and Veil, who had taken up positions on opposite sides of the bed. “What the hell happened?” I croaked.

  “What do you remember?” Lippitt asked, running a leathery hand back over the top of his completely bald head.

  “I was supposed to meet Slycke at eleven at night up in his office. I found the door to the building open, and I went in. I didn’t like the feel of the situation. I was on my way out to go with Veil to get RPC Security and call you when I got cold-cocked. I remember being carted around in a straitjacket by a psychotic patient by the name of Mama Baker who was getting ready to open up my throat. I re
member taking myself off the hook, so to speak, and then getting down the stairs … to Veil.”

  “I was almost too late,” Veil said tightly. “Mongo, I got the first beep, at ten after. And then I got another beep twenty minutes later. It was when I didn’t get a third one that I ran to the building, and found the front door open. I figured the elevator might be just a bit too public, so I started up the stairs. I was about halfway up when I heard all this shouting and commotion above me, so I decided I’d better put a move on.”

  “The son-of-a-bitch had my apartment bugged,” I said with disgust. “Slycke knew all about our security arrangements; he was the one sending you the signals, while he was giving me that hot shot and otherwise taking care of business upstairs. What happened serves me right for being so stupid. When I get out of here, I’m going to order myself a custom-made dunce cap.”

  “Better order two,” Veil said. “I should have considered the possibility of your apartment being bugged.”

  “No dunce cap for you. But it’s a damn good thing you got there when you did; about two seconds later, and you’d have had to mop me up off the ground floor.”

  Veil smiled thinly, shook his head. “You and your buddy were putting on quite a show, Mongo. I could see you while I was running up. There you were sliding down the railing, falling off, and sliding down another one … and all the while this maniac with a scalpel is clomping down the stairs, trying to catch you. It was a sight to see.”

  “I’m really happy Mama Baker and I kept you amused, Veil. Sprinting up those stairs must have been tiresome.”

  Veil laughed. “You should have seen the look on his face; he was really getting frustrated.”

  “The look on Mama’s face was the last thing I wanted to see, Veil, I assure you. And he wouldn’t have been frustrated much longer if you hadn’t gotten to me when you did.”

  “Yeah, well, I should have followed you in like I’d wanted to in the first place. It’s the last time I ever listen to you.”

  I turned to the old man with the soulful eyes and bald head. “So Slycke was K.G.B.?”

  “An informant, not an officer,” Lippitt replied with a faint note of anger in his voice. “A traitor. He’d probably been feeding information to the Russians for years. They were blackmailing him. From what we’ve been able to turn up in the past twenty-four hours, it looks like they had the goods on him as a homosexual; he frequented some pretty heavy leather bars in the city. They probably entrapped him with K.G.B. personnel, took photographs and made tape recordings, and then threatened to expose and ruin him if he didn’t cooperate by giving them information about who was in the clinic, and what went on there. That’s the way these things usually work.”

  “What the hell’s such a big deal about being a homosexual?”

  Lippitt shrugged. “It’s no big deal, as long as you don’t care if people know you’re one. Slycke cared very much; he had a wife and four children. The bars he patronized specialize in some pretty gruesome activities. It means I was almost certainly right about the connection with Prolix; it was Slycke who provided the information about Garth—”

  “Garth!” I said, sitting up. Pain sloshed around inside my head, and I swayed. Veil grabbed for me, but I pushed his hands away. “Where’s my brother?!”

  Lippitt and Veil looked at each other. “He’s missing, Mongo,” Veil said at last.

  I looked at Lippitt. “Missing?”

  The Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency nodded. “He’s not here, and he’s not anywhere on the hospital grounds. He’s missing, along with another patient by the name of Marl Braxton.”

  “Oh, shit,” I said.

  “Lie down, Mongo.”

  “You’re sure … he’s not …?”

  “We’re not sure of anything, Mongo—except that he’s not here at the hospital, and the police haven’t found him wandering on the roads in Rockland County. The same with Marl Braxton. Everyone else is accounted for, so we’re assuming for now that Garth and this Braxton took off together. There’s also a male nurse who hasn’t shown up for work for two days, and who doesn’t answer his phone—but we’re not sure if that’s connected with any of this. He wasn’t on duty when all of this happened.”

  “Tommy Carling?” I said.

  “Yes,” Lippitt replied, his eyes and voice registering surprise. “How did you know?”

  “Just a guess; Carling was Garth’s nurse on the day shift. You know, Braxton’s supposed to be very dangerous. I never saw him do anything violent, but—”

  “Marl Braxton is indeed dangerous,” Lippitt said in a flat voice. “I’ve reviewed his file.”

  “What’s his story, Lippitt? I know information about Braxton is classified, but—”

  “Marl Braxton is fifty-five years old, although he looks at least a decade younger,” Lippitt said evenly. “During the Korean War he organized and operated in a special, very secret unit which came to be known as Reprisals.”

  “He was an assassin?”

  Lippitt nodded. “Of sorts. Reprisals could include assassinations, but they could also be other things—depending on what it was the North Koreans had done that called for reprisals. The North Koreans are a tricky bunch, and they started doing sneaky little things to annoy us and our allies after we sat down to negotiate with them at Panmunjom. That’s when the Reprisals unit was set up. Marl Braxton was the principal operative in his own unit, and he was very good at what he did. Then the North Koreans caught him. They had him for five years, and he was severely tortured—with acupuncture techniques, of all things. First they ruined any chance he would ever have for a sex life, and then they ruined his mind. We eventually got him back in a swap of prisoners, but by then he’d become hopelessly damaged goods. He continued to carry out reprisals—killings; but he was carrying them out against our own people—people Braxton felt had betrayed him, or who were guilty of crimes that were only fantasies in Braxton’s mind. When he does decide to kill, he’s cold and calculating—which makes him far more dangerous, in a way, than the patient who wanted to kill you, Mongo. Marl Braxton gives no warning; but when he decides that a person should die, for whatever reason, that person usually dies. Over the years, the prognosis hasn’t changed; he will never respond to treatment.”

  I swallowed hard, found that my mouth had gone dry. “And this is the man who’s with Garth.”

  “Maybe they’re together, maybe not. The police in the county have been notified, as well as the NYPD. There’s a Missing Persons bulletin out for both Braxton and Garth.”

  “I would think you’d have them put out an APB for Braxton.”

  “We can’t have the police put out an APB for Braxton without questions being asked about his background, and things like the Reprisals unit aren’t matters we like to see discussed in the newspapers. Also, the police might want to try and interrogate Braxton after they picked him up; not good for Braxton, not good for us—and potentially deadly for any police officer who tried too hard to pick him up, or pushed him too hard afterward. Let’s see how far we get with the Missing Persons bulletin. The police are simply supposed to notify us immediately if they spot either Garth or Braxton.”

  “I have to call my parents,” I said huskily.

  “I already have,” Lippitt said. “They’re taking it well. Your parents, as you well know, are strong and positive people. They’re grateful for the fact that you’re alive. I apologized to them for not removing Garth from the clinic as soon as I suspected something might be wrong. I apologized to them, Mongo, and I now apologize to you.”

  “You don’t have anything to apologize for, Lippitt. You immediately let Veil know what your suspicions were, and he let me know. At the time, I thought you were out of your mind. You gave me the information, and I should have paid more attention to it. It certainly does explain why Slycke was so paranoid about me.”

  Veil said, “Sure. Slycke was caught between a rock and a hard place. He was forced to take orders from, and feed information to, h
is K.G.B. controller. In the beginning, he may have thought that Mr. Lippitt was on to him.”

  “Which I wasn’t,” Lippitt said, anger and disdain resurfacing in his tone. “I only became suspicious when Garth first showed signs of regaining consciousness, and then the two operatives at Prolix took off.”

  Veil grunted. “The K.G.B. must have been leaning on Slycke hard from the beginning to keep them up to date at all times on what was happening with Garth. But you were right here all the time, Mongo, keeping a close eye on things, and they perceived you as a threat to their interests—for whatever reasons. You even mentioned to Slycke the possibility of removing Garth from the clinic, and that must have had the Russians climbing the walls. They didn’t miss any of the implications of what was happening to Garth as a result of the NPPD poisoning, and they wanted to keep a close watch on all developments. They ordered Slycke to cut you out of the picture, which he tried to do.”

  “And then you started to make some very heavy noises, Mongo,” Lippitt said. “Not only did you make it clear to Slycke that you still intended to remove Garth from the clinic, but you threatened to investigate his private life. You must have really rung his bell with that one, and he couldn’t tolerate the danger of being exposed a second time.”

  “Which was why I ended up being carted around by Mama Baker,” I said. I was thirsty. Veil poured me a glass of water from a pitcher on a table beside my bed. I drank it down, sighed. I was feeling better—better, for certain, than the man who had tried to kill me would ever feel. “I thought I saw Slycke with a needle stuck in his brain. Was that real?”

  Lippitt nodded. “We don’t know whether his controller ordered him to kill you, or whether it was his own idea. We’re leaning toward the theory that Slycke thought it up on his own, since he was the one who felt most immediately and personally threatened; the K.G.B. could have gotten rid of you in a number of other ways. No matter whose idea it was, it seems that Slycke got caught in the same trap he’d set up for you. He knew about this Baker’s obsession with killing dwarfs, and he figured he’d simply arrange for Baker to nab you ‘by accident’ after you’d sneaked into the clinic for an unauthorized visit to Garth. He probably sent the nurses off on some errand before he went down to ambush you. He used your beeper to signal Veil at the appropriate times while he took you upstairs and shot you up with those drugs. Then he opened up the secure unit—and got ambushed himself, with nobody around to help him. He’d juiced up the men in that unit beforehand; the blood of Baker and the other patients in the secure unit showed definite traces of amphetamines … definitely not the medication of choice for disturbed and violent men.”