by E. Z. Rinsky
I take the machete from Courtney’s trembling grip, toss it as hard as I can into the darkness, then hand him his pistol. Courtney’s eyes are wide and he’s breathing too fast. He’s not as solid as he was last time we worked together. He’s having a little freak-out. Can’t make him go in alone.
“Let’s go in,” I say.
I put my shoulder into the cracked front door, pistol drawn, and it opens into a narrow hallway. Both walls and the ceiling are draped in red velvet. The floor is some kind of tile that’s as black as tar. The hallway is lit with red bulbs. There’s a naked guy sitting on the floor, a few feet from the door. He has a shock of sunflower-blond hair, and doesn’t seem to notice us. Next to him is a woman with a ton of eyeshadow, wearing only lace panties.
I bend over and shove the picture of Rico in front of the blond guy’s face.
“You seen this guy? Or a bunch of dudes wearing khaki?” I ask. He seems to be taking a while to process our presence, the photo . . . struggling to fit these different pieces into a coherent narrative. I ask the woman, who looks at me like I’m speaking Mandarin. Between them is an Advil bottle filled with what I’m guessing isn’t Advil. I snatch the bottle from the dude, unscrew the cap to confirm: It’s filled with some sort of toxic looking blue pills. I shove it in my pocket; maybe just saved their lives.
“Check the GPS,” I tell Courtney.
Courtney pulls it from his pocket. “We’re like thirty feet away, but it could be above or below us.”
We continue down the hallway, pass a few more people, most wearing nothing but blank, slightly bummed-out expressions. Most look young. High school young. Some awful Marvin Gaye remix is pounding through speakers mounted on the ceiling. Despite it being the middle of the summer, there’s hot air blasting from central heating. The air tastes stale and recycled. We pass two hairless naked forms of indeterminate gender intertwined in a sophisticated knot, one of the party’s flabby buttocks rising and falling in sync with the music.
“I think this is some kind of sex party,” whispers Courtney.
“Your powers of observation are unparalleled,” I say, then prod a butt cheek with my shoe. “Hey, excuse me.”
A girl looks up at me. Her eyes are vacant, and there’s dried blood caked around her nostrils. I show her the picture of Rico. “You seen this guy?” I demand. When she doesn’t respond, I waggle my Magnum and ask again.
The girl studies the picture for way too long before saying “Yeah.” She licks her lips slowly like rediscovering their taste. “I saw him.”
“How long ago? Was he with some other men all dressed the same?” I say.
She shrugs, as her partner continues probing her torso with his mouth.
“I dunno.”
“Is there someone in charge here?” asks Courtney.
I glare at him: Does it look like someone’s in charge here?
The woman blinks at us. “Y’all cops?”
Courtney shakes his head adamantly. “No, no. Nothing like that—”
“Then fuck off.”
I could force the issue, but she doesn’t seem to have much left to offer.
The hallway doesn’t end, just curves around and around until we end up back at the entrance. We start around again, but this time we try one of the curtained doorways leading off the hallway. Courtney pulls the drapes back and I grip my gun tightly, but there’s no room behind it—just a velvet-draped ascending stairwell, the same width as the hallway. We climb the steps, which lead into another identical hallway, also smattered with orgiasts. Most are too busy to notice us, the few that do glare at us like we’re aliens. Rico is not among them.
The hallway smells of incense, vanilla, opium smoke, and a pastiche of sex-related fluids. Only furniture is an occasional velvet-upholstered ottoman. A girl of probably seventeen is unconscious, strewn awkwardly across one of the ottomans. Another man who looks nearly limp is propped up by his partner against a flannel wall, and being treated like a piece of meat. There’s a woman on the cold black floor wearing a dopey grin as she touches herself.
Courtney is way past mortified. He has his hands deep in his pockets, like to avoid contamination. His face has taken on the corpselike green of a seasick sailor, and each new sight seems to jar him like a wave ramming the hull.
We turn through countless hallways, draped entryways, all basically the same, only some contain ascending stairs, some descending. At one point the GPS says we’re right on top of the bag, but the room is empty. It isn’t long before I have no idea if we’re above ground or below, or which direction I’d go if I wanted to leave. Check my watch. Only twenty minutes have passed but it feels like we’ve been in here for hours already.
Every corridor has the heat blasting—I guess it might be comfortable in here if you’re naked, but my T-shirt is drenched in sweat and I’d kill for a glass of ice water.
We wander through hallway after hallway, getting more and more anxious that the GPS misled us, or they found the chip and buried it in one of these walls to throw us off their trail. Keep passing the same places over and over, or at least it feels like that. I have this uneasy thought that we’ll keep wandering through these halls for years without making progress. Or that we’ve already been doing this for years, but can only remember the last few minutes, like two goldfish. So we keep thinking the next bend will hold what we’re looking for, even though we’ve walked each of these corridors thousands of times already.
Finally, we encounter a change in the uniformity. A series of descending, curved stairways lead to the first true door we’ve seen here. It’s a simple wood door made of unfinished pine. Reminds me of a pauper’s coffin. At this point, I’m pretty sure we’re well below ground level.
Courtney and I exchange a look, and then, keeping the pistol aimed straight ahead, I pull on the handle with my off hand. Another fucking hallway. This one has a mattress on the ground though. Two men and two women are—surprise—naked; limbs, mouths, phalluses entangled in an arrangement that it’s hard to imagine is giving anybody pleasure. A third guy is naked and watching, and by all physiological indications, enjoying himself. Rico is not among them.
They’re either so into it, or so fucked up, that they don’t even care when we barge in.
“Hey, excuse me,” I say. One woman half glances at me, but then returns to the task at hand. “Anybody here seen a bunch of dudes wearing khaki, with a pink duffel bag?”
Nobody answers.
Courtney is still standing in the doorway, gazing at the ongoing spectacle with morbid curiosity, like it’s some horrible deformity.
“What about this guy?” I demand. I grab the shoulder of the voyeur and put the picture of Rico in front of his face. He’s more coherent than the others, but also not so keen on the interruption. But he can’t contain a flicker of recognition as I give him no choice but to absorb the image of Rico’s face.
He’s seen him.
“What did you see?” I ask. The participants on the mattress either don’t notice or care that they’re no longer being observed.
“Fuck off,” he whines. I’m hungry, thirsty, exhausted and sweaty—patience is an increasingly scarce resource on planet Frank.
I grab his shoulder and ram him against the velvet wall. “Dude, what are you doing?” he shrieks and he spits in my face. My face must betray something, because he instantly apologizes.
But the damage has been done. My vision is red and sideways, and I think I can hear my neurons holding a memorial service for whatever was left of my patience. He’s not entirely in the wrong: Some corner of my psyche is aware of that even as I switch my grip to his neck and knock the back of his head against the wall.
“I’ve had a pretty shitty evening,” I growl, squeezing the air out of him. “If you don’t tell me what you saw, I’m going to take it all out on your face.”
“Frank.” Courtney is behind me, trying to peel my hands off his neck, but I box him out. Courtney must give this guy a pretty convincing he’s out of control look, becau
se his resolve dissolves like warm butter.
“He went in there,” he gasps, nodding to the end of this hallway, which terminates in another door.
“Did he come out?” I ask, squeezing harder.
“Don’t remember.”
“He went in alone?”
“No . . .”
“Who did he go in with?”
“A guy in a mask,” he squeaks. “Wearing white.”
I look over my shoulder at Courtney and we exchange a look.
“Did they leave?”
“The one in the mask. He left.”
“When.”
“Get off me man!”
I slam the back of his head against the wall, as if to jog his memory.
“Maybe an hour ago.”
“Thanks,” I say, releasing my grip. He drops to the floor and coughs.
I turn, and Courtney and I pass through the writhing mounds on the floor, like Moses parting a swamp of flesh, until arriving at the second door. This one is thick steel, practically a blast door.
I look at Courtney, then try knocking. Ready my pistol in case someone opens. Try again. Nothing.
“GPS says it’s in on the other side. Twenty feet straight ahead.”
Courtney sinks to his knees to inspect the lock.
“What is it?” I ask. “Can you get in?”
“It’s a very heavy lock, but no magnets,” he says. “Industrial make. Not custom. I can do it.”
While Courtney fishes his tools from his red acrylic bag, I shoo the fornicators out of the hallway, then sink to the black floor. God I’m hungry. Have I really not eaten since leaving Sampson’s this morning? That feels like another life.
Courtney is deep in concentration, working on the lock. Stethoscope chest piece on cool metal, eyes half closed.
A man in white, wearing a mask . . .
I lean back against the velvet wall. The floor is rock hard, but the walls are pretty comfy, padded like a loony bin. I shift around to get comfortable and doze off.
Courtney taps my shoulder. I was out cold despite the cocktail of adrenaline and dread swishing in my head.
“I opened it, Frank.” Courtney also looks exhausted.
I wince as I stand up, my right butt cheek adamantly informing me that it didn’t appreciate that angle.
I hold my Magnum out in front of me, and push the door in with my heel.
Before I can see anything I’m hit with a wave of scent. Some kind of incense that’s so pungent and spicy that I feel a heaviness in my lungs when I breathe it in. It’s not unpleasant—reminiscent of freshly cut wood—but the potency is overwhelming.
We both just stand there for a moment, looking into the darkness, waiting for someone to jump out of nowhere and attack us. When nobody does, I ease my way in, and some lights in the ceiling pop on automatically. Courtney steps in to join me, and the spring loaded door swings closed behind us.
The small room bears little relation to the red curtained hallways. The floor is spotless polished bronze. Beside the doorway, on the floor, is a gold-gilded basin underneath a sink—a place to wash your feet as soon as you enter. The walls are all covered in an ornate series of etched symbols, behind them inked veins of blue and red.
“Looks the same as the lines in the book,” I say.
Courtney nods.
The incense smell is coming from a smoldering pile of ash in the middle of the floor, set on a small stone.
Courtney kneels beside it, inspects the potpourri. Inhales deeply.
“Frankincense, myrrh . . .” he says.
“What?” I ask.
“I used to work in a spice shop,” Courtney says. “These are resins that are rarely used today. They were very common in the ancient Mediterranean. The Israelites burned these in their holy temple in Jerusalem. Incense offerings to God.”
“It’s still smoldering. Must be recent.”
“The guy in the hall said the guy in the mask rushed out . . .” muses Courtney.
There are two metal chains on the ground to my left, fastened to the wall. The chains end in what look like elaborate dog collars, made of leather and intricate metalwork.
“Court, come look at these,” I say.
He abandons the spices and joins me. Slips two pairs of latex gloves from his satchel and hands one to me. I know what the gloves mean.
He thinks this is a crime scene.
He picks up one of the collars and inspects it for a few moments. Tugs on the chain connected to it, first gently, then hard. It’s definitely bolted into the wall.
“Tell me these were for someone’s pet pit bulls,” I say.
“I’m afraid not,” he says, suddenly dropping the collar and approaching the wall at the point where the chain is fused in. He drops to his knees, squints at something, then turns to me looking unsettled. “There’s an indentation in the wall around the welding,” he says. “Looks like someone tried to scrape out the wall using a link from the chain itself. If I had to guess, this is at least a couple months’ worth of scraping.”
I grimace.
He returns to examine the collars, while I make my way to the far wall. I’d initially thought it was as solid as the others, but as I near I see it’s in fact a hanging curtain. I pull it back, and from the light behind me I see it’s a second room of at least equal size.
Please let the money be in here . . .
“Just like the tabernacle,” I hear Courtney say behind me. “Two rooms—the antechamber . . .”
The lights click on in the second room and I stop hearing anything Courtney’s saying.
To my right is a stone worktable, cluttered with tools. On my left is a sort of drafting table, beside which is a massive cubic filing cabinet—the kind an artist might use to store thin photos or drawing paper.
But the main event is between them, suspended from a wire clothing line. It’s Rico hanging upside down, naked, fingertips grazing the floor. I only recognize it as Rico because of the cracked, yellow hands and acne on the cheeks. But the form is loose and empty. It’s only his skin. Beneath him is a basin, like the one in the other room, filled with what must be his entrails. Around the basin radiates a gradient of freshly dried drops of blood. Nearest Rico, the floor is almost entirely dark maroon.
Courtney is at my side, breathing heavily.
“Oh my god. Is this—”
“Yes.” I swallow. “Rico.”
I tear my eyes from Rico, to the stone worktable. On a wooden shelf above it are an X-acto knife, a long butcher’s blade, a chain mail glove—the kind butchers use, rubber gloves—still wet—and a blue-handled Phillips-head screwdriver. There’s a corkboard mounted over the worktable with pins hammered into it. Hanging off the board are several collars of leather interwoven with metal—all variants on the ones in the other room.
On the table is a single object, a waxy mask the color of milk. Sunken cheeks and fat chin . . . It’s a mask of Rico’s face.
My legs feel wobbly. I’ve seen my share of crime scenes, but this is a different animal entirely.
It’s so deliberate . . .
I put my hands on the worktable to steady myself.
“Frank!” Courtney is beside me. “Put your gloves on!”
I slowly pull them on, while he takes a pack of antibacterial hand wipes from his bag and carefully rubs down the stone counter.
I stare at the stone surface and take several deep breaths. Swallow the revulsion in my chest.
“Okay, okay, okay,” Courtney is saying, mostly to himself. “We have a lot of data here Frank. Let’s be methodical. Gather data now, analyze it later. TSP. Thoughtfulness, subtlety, patience. TSP.”
He mutters this mantra to himself as he puts the tube of wipes back in his bag and removes his notepad and spy camera. While he snaps photos of Rico, of the tools, of the mask, I force myself to look around the rest of the room.
Gather data. Dispassionate. Just pretend you’re a robot.
There’s another mural on the ceiling
. Blue and red stripes, symbols that look like hieroglyphics. My eyes trace the dizzying lines on the ceiling. Each square inch is unbelievably detailed: dots the size of pinpricks. I have to look away—feels like a quick-onset migraine—similar to the feeling I had earlier when I looked in the book.
Just like Oliver Vicks’s writing. Did he make this before he went to prison?
This is some kind of workshop. But to what end?
Stone worktable, drafting table, file cabinet . . .
Behind Rico’s hanging form there are more basins on the gold floor, filled with a clear fluid that smells vaguely reminiscent of the aquarium. Saltwater? Brine?
“Courtney, what is this place? What happened here?”
“I don’t know,” Courtney mumbles. “Torture?”
“Why would he torture Rico after he brought him back everything he asked for?” I do a 360 of the chamber, trying to straighten out some objective facts about this scene, pretend the flayed carcass belongs to some kind of animal.
Pray that Sophnot kills us quickly.
“Could Oliver Vicks have done this?” I mutter, feeling some pieces of this afternoon starting to slide into place. I force my brain to replay all the details of the botched exchange, now able to reframe them with more confidence that Rico was telling the truth. His fear was authentic.
I approach the drafting table on the far side of the room, behind Rico’s form. The birch tabletop has built-in straightedges, and the angle can be adjusted with a series of knobs which connect it to the base. It’s a sturdy, professional piece of equipment.
I’ll bet you find something like this in every architecture firm.
I turn to the filing cabinet. Each sliding drawer is exceedingly narrow—this is probably meant to hold photographs or documents. With a latex-gloved hand, I pull a shelf from the middle open. Inside is a folded piece of yellow-orange leather, the kind the books were bound in. I remove it from the drawer and unfold it. It’s an uneven blobby shape, about a square meter of material. A large rectangle has been cut out from the center. A piece of paper clipped to one of the corners is a passport-sized photo of a young man and a little tag with a number.
My attempt at dispassion crumbles. I feel like I’ve been kicked in the nuts. Stomach goes numb, knees quiver like a pair of yolks frying in oil.
