In his dream, he had been too slow, and that was not a good thing, even in dreams that had never happened before. And of all people, it had been Mengele who had beaten him.
Mengele, the chief of the Auschwitz experimental block, the doctor they called the Angel of Death, the one who had gone almost mad trying to breed blue-eyed humans as a kennel master tries to breed drop-eared dogs.
They were in Mengele’s lab, it was Auschwitz, but Scylla was calm. He towered half a head over the death doctor’s five six, and more than that, the door was open, and the door led straight to freedom. Scylla had never been to Auschwitz, had never met Mengele, but in dreams such things happened, and this was happening.
“I’m in despair,” Mengele said.
“Why?”
“I cannot make the baby’s eyes come out with the proper shade of blue. Yesterday in frustration I threw a baby high into a fire. It was a terrible thing for me to do, letting my emotions get control like that.”
“Control is important for us,” Scylla agreed.
“I just thank God you’re here at this moment to help me.”
“How can I help you?”
“I need skin. I want to transplant skin, and you have just the shade I’m looking for.”
Scylla shrugged. “A patch of skin is nothing. Take it.”
“No, no,” Mengele explained. “A patch does me no good, I need all your skin, every bit of it, you must let me skin you.”
“I don’t think I’d like that,” Scylla told him, taking a quiet step toward the open door and freedom.
Mengele made no move to follow. “You must listen, it’s a great blessing I offer.”
Scylla shook his head. “Without skin people could see right through me.”
“That’s the blessing—don’t you understand, the world would see right through and you wouldn’t have to lie any more. Think of the weight that would lift—no more lies. No more point to lying, because there would be no skin to cover you and the world would know the truth when you spoke it. You have lied so much, admit it.”
“Yes.”
“And you long to end it, admit that too. You have so many fabrications going, don’t you want to sometimes scream the truth?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that is the chance I offer you. Everlasting truth. Peace. The rest only the honest ever know.”
“No.”
“Don’t let your emotions gain control.” He held out his tiny surgeon’s hands toward Scylla.
Scylla fled for the open door.
But he was too slow.
Mengele beat him to it, shut it, and it locked. They were alone in the lab now. Mengele began coming for him.
He, Scylla the rock, who could kill with either hand, began backing from the tiny lunatic. He, the great Scylla, retreating before nothing, a frail physician who couldn’t even make eyes come out the proper shade of blue.
“Why do you fear me?” Mengele wondered.
“I don’t. There is no fear in my body.”
Mengele held out his hands.
“I’ll use force,” Scylla promised.
“Oh please, please, none of that,” Mengele said, and with his tiny hands he led Scylla to a table, laid him down. “There will be no pain, I promise. I’ll just make a small cut from your forehead to the base of your neck and pull your skin right off. It won’t hurt any more than disrobing from a pair of pajamas.” He began to cut. “You see,” he said as the knife split Scylla’s skin, “there isn’t even any blood,” and he put the knife down, pulled the skin off. “Let me get you a mirror, your veins are quite beautiful,” Mengele said.
“No!”
“Here,” Mengele said, and he handed the mirror over.
Scylla managed one look at himself before he woke up blinking.
Wow.
He lay still, concentrating on the ceiling, winded, empty. He had no idea of what the dream indicated about the state of his mind, but he did know this: Whatever it was, it was getting very dark down there.
He rolled his muscled body out of bed and sat, rubbing his cold hands together. Scylla the sponge, he felt like. Scylla the soft.
Cut it!
He stood, grabbed his Scotch bottle (had it really been full when he started to bed last night?), and moved to the window of his room in the Raphael. He drank while he looked out at the Arc de Triomphe. What was the time? He glanced at his watch. Coming up to half-past five. After midnight in America, Janey would be dead asleep. If they ever made an Olympic event of sack time, Janey was a cinch to qualify. Beauty sleep.
Scylla dressed, walked downstairs, woke the concierge, got a ton of tokens. It was all an unnecessary precaution, because if he was tapped back home, what difference did it make if they’d bugged the Raphael on him? Habit. He felt better on the move.
Anyway, he needed the air. It was dark when he stepped outside and began hunting up a pay phone. He never worried about the night; he was big and bigshouldered, and he could kill with either hand, and sure, a mugger wouldn’t have any way of knowing that last, but still, he moved like an athlete and he had size, and muggers had never bothered him.
He found a spot near the Arc and after a good deal of pidgin French and dials and beeps and king-sized waits, finally he could hear Janey’s sleep-filled voice coming through. “Huh? Wha?—who? What time is... oh, never mind,” and then, finally, “Hi.”
“This is the answering service,” Scylla said. “Didn’t you leave a wake-up call?”
“A joke?” Janey wailed. “Three thousand miles in the middle of the night to make a funny? People have been jellied in aspic for less.”
Scylla began the segue into code now; at first it had irritated him, the inconvenience of it all. Now it was sort of a game you had to play at a party to humor the host. “Are you awake enough to take down some stuff?”
“Only partially, I’m afraid.”
“Partially” was the crucial word. “Wide awake” meant there was nothing much going on. “Partially” meant there were items that Scylla ought to know about. “I’ll sign off then. The reason I called was to tell you I’d be back three days early, but since you’re only partially awake, I won’t bother you with information like that. You’re not mad at me for waking you.”
“Never,” Janey said. “I had to get up anyway, the telephone was ringing.”
They ended on that joke, both hanging up, and then Scylla had ten minutes to wait. His return “partially” meant he would call again, to the pay phone in the basement garage of their apartment building. Ten minutes was how long it would take Janey to get roused, dressed, out the door, and gone.
It was still before six, and cold. Scylla shivered with it, and wondered why he had left his Scotch bottle back by his bed table, where it could do no one any good. He could not, as he paced the dead street, think of one good reason why he didn’t just quit and take off with Janey for London and rent or buy a little mews house maybe, and sit around watching the telly and visiting the greengrocer and living the way you were supposed to, happily ever et cetera.
To hell with Division not letting you quit until it wanted to retire you. If he were rich enough, if only somehow he could get like Croesus, he’d bribe his way out, or at least try, and if that didn’t work he could buy an island in the goddamn Pacific and fortify it and let The Division do its worst.
An island in the Pacific, Jesus—Scylla shook his head. Maybe it was a good thing he’d left the Scotch bottle back at the hotel, if that’s the way a few swigs were going to affect his thinking. Keep the Croesus notion, though; at least it gave him a culture hero to think about.
Scylla placed the second call, went through all the beeps and sounds again, and then he had Janey back. “Where are you,” Janey began, obviously upset.
“On the loose in gay Paree, it’s a very swinging place. Or is that London? Let’s go to London, I’d like that, would you like that?”
“I mean, exactly where? On the street, in a hotel? Why aren’t you asleep, it isn’t even six yet.�
�
“Dream woke me. I just took a walk.”
“You’re alone, then?”
“All.”
“You better be, you bastard. I hate it when you go on trips without me. How bad was it?”
“The dream?” Scylla shrugged his big shoulders. No point to lying. Janey always sensed that kind of thing, anyway, he had no way of knowing how. From his tone, probably. “Very. Extremely, even.”
“My doctor always recommends Scotch.”
“Didn’t work.”
“Get back here; that’s what I always recommend. The best cure I know is me.”
“Taken once every four hours.”
“Dream on—you’re not that young any more.”
“You’ll pay for that kind of talk, you tawdry bitch.”
“Call me Janey; all my friends do.”
Scylla listened, making sure that the upset was gone from Janey’s voice. Then he proceeded with the business at hand. “Why the ‘partially’?”
“Kaspar Szell was killed.”
“Wow.”
“I knew you’d say that.”
“When?” Scylla said.
“Almost two weeks ago in Manhattan. The Yorkville section. He was in a car and another guy tried cutting around and they smashed into an oil truck. Total incineration. I think that’s why the news took so long getting around. Identification wasn’t all that easy. He was using the Hesse name, and besides, nobody ever heard of him anyway. But it’s done. You still there? You’re not saying a word.”
Scylla grunted.
“Upset?”
“I guess—I don’t really know. I can’t take it all in yet.”
“Is it going to cause that many changes?”
It already had. He couldn’t be sure, but probably there was some connection with the death in New York and the Chen business—even though Chen was simply a free-lance assassin, still, somebody had to do the hiring. And then, of course, poor Robertson had mentioned a South American call informing him that there would be a new courier. Scylla thought a moment; he had to make an answer, but there was no point in troubling Janey with specifics; just a general truth would do. “Many changes? Only everything.”
“Wow,” from Janey.
“Conservatively speaking,” Scylla said.
10
“Cold?” Levy asked.
Elsa shook her head, no.
They were sitting on a rock by the lake in Central Park. Below them, their rowboat moved lightly as bursts of evening winds skittered along the water. Levy knew she was lying, because, in the first place, he had a sweater on and she didn’t and he was cold, so there was no way she could avoid being just the least bit uncomfortable. And it was getting colder because his stupid tooth was hurting worse. It always did when the weather chilled. It was that front tooth on the top, and he did his best to cover the cavity with his tongue: They really ought to be getting back, he knew. But they’d been sitting there for an hour now, since the sun had started leaving, and it had just been so damn terrific that he didn’t want to be the one to tear it.
Elsa put her arm around him. “Not so cold now,” she said.
Levy kissed her gently. At first he had been rough with her, because he thought she wanted that, manliness, machismo; a girl this gorgeous must have seen her share of winners, and he wanted to measure up. But she’d shied from that, and after a night or two of necking he realized that what she wanted was what he was: tender. Oh, he didn’t look it—he looked angles and bone, sharp-elbowed, much too clumsy to be soft. But it wasn’t so. He liked necking, he even liked holding hands. Although that was probably against the law nowadays for anyone under thirty. Not that screwing was so terrible; Levy had done some of that too, though not with Elsa, not yet, anyway. Screwing was fine and orgasms glorious, but, at least in his limited experience, it was also rough and quick, too rough and too quick, and where sex was concerned, he was never in a hurry. Sometimes, in the back of his mind he realized that he was probably very good at sex and that if he had been handsome, he would have been as much in demand as a caterer at holiday time, but he wasn’t handsome, and it wasn’t so terrible.
Elsa touched his cheek. “Such a lovely face,” she whispered.
“Everybody says that,” Levy told her. “Even on the streets, strangers come up to me.”
In the darkness, she smiled at him, ran her tongue along his lips.
“That’s very inventive,” Levy said. “Do it again, why don’t you, just to be sure you’ve got it.”
She ran her tongue along his lips again.
“I take pity on waifs and weirdos, you’re a very lucky girl.”
She put both her arms around him now. He could feel her body trembling.
“Hey, you’re just freezing. We really ought to be turning the boat in anyway.”
“Let me freeze, I’ve just loved this so, just talking, go on.”
Levy kissed her neck softly, grazed it with his lips.
“Homer Virgil,” she said. “Before you asked was I cold, you were telling about him. Was he famous, your father?”
“Old H.V.? Well, not like Ann-Margret or Donny Osmond, but for an historian he did okay.”
“Such a terrible name for a child.”
“That was my grandfather’s doing—he gave all his kids terrible names—see, he was the principal and head teacher and chief cook and bottle washer in this little Midwestern school, and he claimed that it didn’t matter, all anybody heard was the Levy part anyway.
There weren’t a whole lot of Jews in central Ohio in those days, believe me. He loved the Greeks and the other oldies. One of my uncles had Herodotus for a middle name. He’s dead now, my uncle—I don’t mean to imply that’s what killed him, but it couldn’t have helped him a whole lot either.”
“Your father is also dead?”
“He is also dead. Cerebral hemorrhage. Out of the blue, totally unexpected.”
She watched him in the darkness.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
He hesitated, wondering if he could go on, clear it up, but it was doubtful that she knew; she hadn’t been in the country then, and even if she had, she would still have been a kid, and besides, H.V. hadn’t been that famous.
She kissed him very hard, then quickly stood, stretched her arms high. Babe watched. It was a clumsy gesture, but on Elsa even clumsy was pretty.
Then things stopped being so pretty, because as Elsa smiled and whispered “Come,” and started for the boat, there was a sudden sound from the bushes behind them, and the limping man appeared for the first time, back-handing Elsa in the face, knocking her off balance and down.
Levy watched it, and it was as if he had been a spectator to a street play—it came so quickly there was no chance for involvement, just spectating, and there she was, his one true woman, being beaten by a savage limping man. “Hey!” Levy shouted, and started after them, but too late, because there was another sound from the bushes behind him, and then the big-shouldered man was spinning him around and crashing a fist into Levy’s face.
Levy staggered, blood spurting, but he didn’t go down, and his nose felt broken, and Elsa was being pulled toward the bushes now, the limper trying to yank her purse free and Levy started to say “Let him have it!” but the big-shouldered man never let him get it out, because he kicked Levy hard in the stomach and Levy gasped, crashed to his knees on the rock, and then went to all fours as the other man hit him again, hard across the cheek, and Levy rolled down. The big-shouldered man pulled him toward the bushes, started grabbing for Levy’s wallet, and Levy instinctively made a protective move, which was stupid, because all it got him was a knee slammed into his back, and the blood from the first punch was smearing now, his tongue stinging of salt, and it was his fault, he shouldn’t have stayed late in the park, only tourists were that dumb, and he lay very still while the attacker tried getting his wallet, but he was having trouble, Levy’s back pocket was buttoned and the guy couldn’t rip it clear
fast enough, so he kneed Levy in the back again, hit him again across his broken nose, and Levy started coughing from the blood, and he could hear Elsa almost crying, and if that limping son of a bitch was touching her he’d—he’d—
—he’d what?—
—nothing—not a goddamned thing—if they wanted to rape her he was helpless, or even if they just wanted to pound the shit out of her on general principles he was helpless, his nose was broken, he felt as if his ribs were smashed, and they could do what they pleased, he was helpless—
Helpless! The word forced its way past the blood and into his brain, and the reality of it was so humiliating that Levy somehow found it in himself to kick at the big-shouldered guy, and he landed a good one, and the enemy cried out, and that was a triumph, you couldn’t deny that, but unfortunately it didn’t last long enough because as Levy tried to make it to his feet and over to Elsa the big-shouldered guy was back, all business now, banging away with big hands at Levy’s face, swelling it out of shape until Levy fell, half-conscious.
Then they were both standing over him, the limper with Elsa’s purse and the big-shouldered guy with Levy’s wallet. “We have your wallets and we have your names, and addresses.” The limper patted Elsa’s purse. “And if you report this to the police, we will know and we will come for you.”
Elsa was crying now.
“And next time will be bad,” the big-shouldered man said. “You understand ‘bad’?”
Levy lay there.
Then the muggers were gone.
Levy slowly crawled toward Elsa. “... Were you...” was what he said. Touched, he meant, molested.
She shook her head, no. She understood him; that was the truly splendid thing about them—they understood each other. Everything. “The purse only.” She began to come apart then, the reaction setting in. “Just the purse,” she said again. “I’m fine.”
Levy held her very close. “Both fine,” he managed. He didn’t want to ever let go, but when he started smearing her with his own blood, there wasn’t much else he could do...
11
Doc
I don’t think I’m going to send this, which somehow frees me to write it, but if I do, remember I’m not myself, I mean, I’m a little off my feed, I’m not going bonkers or anything.
Marathon Man Page 8
