by Stephen King
Escobar and the Bride of Frankenstein drew apart. Escobar put his cigarette back in his mouth and smiled sadly at Fletcher. “Amigo, you are lying.”
“No,” he said. “Why would I lie? Don’t you think I want to get out of here?”
“We have no idea why you would lie,” said the woman with the narrow blade of a face. “We have no idea why you would choose to aid Núñez in the first place. Some have suggested American naiveté, and I have no doubt that played its part, but that cannot be all. It doesn’t matter. I believe a demonstration is in order. Heinz?”
Smiling, Heinz turned to his machine and flicked a switch. There was a hum, the kind that comes from an oldfashioned radio when it’s warming up, and three green lights came on.
“No,” Fletcher said, trying to get to his feet, thinking that he did panic very well, and why not? He was panicked, or almost panicked. Certainly the idea of Heinz touching him anywhere with that stainless steel dildo for pygmies was terrifying. But there was another part of him, very cold and calculating, that knew he would have to take at least one shock. He wasn’t aware of anything so coherent as a plan, but he had to take at least one shock. Mr. Maybe I Can insisted that this was so.
Escobar nodded to Ramón.
“You can’t do this, I’m an American citizen and I work for The New York Times, people know where I am.”
A heavy hand pressed down on his left shoulder, pushing him back into the chair. At the same moment, the barrel of a pistol went deep into his right ear. The pain was so sudden that bright dots appeared before Fletcher’s eyes, dancing frantically. He screamed, and the sound seemed muffled. Because one ear was plugged, of course—one ear was plugged.
“Hold out your hand, Mr. Fletcher,” Escobar said, and he was smiling around his cigarette again.
“Right hand,” Heinz said. He held the stylus by its black rubber grip like a pencil, and his machine was humming.
Fletcher gripped the arm of the chair with his right hand. He was no longer sure if he was acting or not—the line between acting and panic was gone.
“Do it,” the woman said. Her hands were folded on the table; she leaned forward over them. There was a point of light in each of her pupils, turning her dark eyes into nailheads. “Do it or I can’t account for the consequences.”
Fletcher began to loosen his fingers on the chair arm, but before he could get the hand up, Heinz darted forward and poked the tip of the blunt stylus against the back of Fletcher’s left hand. That had probably been his target all along—certainly it was closer to where Heinz stood.
There was a snapping sound, very thin, like a twig, and Fletcher’s left hand closed into a fist so tight his nails cut into his palm. A kind of dancing sickness raced up from his wrist to his forearm to his flopping elbow and finally to his shoulder, the side of his neck, and to his gums. He could even feel the shock in his teeth on that side, or in the fillings. A grunt escaped him. He bit his tongue and shot sideways in the chair. The gun was gone from his ear and Ramón caught him. If he hadn’t, Fletcher would have fallen on the gray tile floor.
The stylus was withdrawn. Where it had touched, between the second and third knuckles of the third finger of his left hand, there was a small hot spot. It was the only real pain, although his arm still tingled and the muscles still jumped. Yet it was horrible, being shocked like that. Fletcher felt he would seriously consider shooting his own mother to avoid another touch of the little steel dildo. An atavism, Heinz had called it. Someday he hoped to write a paper.
Heinz’s face loomed down, lips pulled back and teeth revealed in an idiotic grin, eyes alight. “How do you describe it?” he cried. “Now, while the experience is still fresh, how do you describe it?”
“Like dying,” Fletcher said in a voice that didn’t sound like his own.
Heinz looked transported. “Yes! And you see, he has wet himself! Not much, just a little, but yes … and Mr. Fletcher—”
“Stand aside,” the Bride of Frankenstein said. “Don’t be an ass. Let us take care of our business.”
“And that was only one-quarter power,” Heinz said in a tone of awed confidentiality, and then he stood aside and refolded his hands in front of him.
“Mr. Fletcher, you been bad,” Escobar said reproachfully. He took the stub of his cigarette from his mouth, examined it, threw it on the floor.
The cigarette, Fletcher thought. The cigarette, yes. The shock had seriously insulted his arm—the muscles were still twitching and he could see blood in his cupped palm—but it seemed to have revitalized his brain, refreshed it. Of course that was what shock treatments were supposed to do.
“No … I want to help …”
But Escobar was shaking his head. “We know Núñez will come to the city. We know on the way he will take the radio station if he can … and he probably can.”
“For awhile,” said the Bride of Frankenstein. “Only for awhile.”
Escobar was nodding. “Only for awhile. A matter of days, perhaps hours. Is of no concern. What matters is we give you a bit of rope, see if you make a noose … and you do.”
Fletcher sat up straight in the chair again. Ramón had retreated a step or two. Fletcher looked at the back of his left hand and saw a small smudge there, like the one on the side of Tomás’s dead face in the photograph. And there was Heinz who had killed Fletcher’s friend, standing beside his machine with his hands folded in front of him, smiling and perhaps thinking about the paper he would write, words and graphs and little pictures labeled Fig. 1 and Fig. 2 and, for all Fletcher knew, Fig. 994.
“Mr. Fletcher?”
Fletcher looked at Escobar and straightened the fingers of his left hand. The muscles of that arm were still twitching, but the twitch was subsiding. He thought that when the time came, he would be able to use the arm. And if Ramón shot him, so what? Let Heinz see if his machine could raise the dead.
“Do we have your attention, Mr. Fletcher?”
Fletcher nodded.
“Why do you want to protect this man Núñez?” Escobar asked. “Why do you want to suffer to protect this man? He takes the cocaine. If he wins his revolution he will proclaim himself President for Life and sell the cocaine to your country. He will go to mass on Sunday and fuck his coke-whores the rest of the week. In the end who wins? Maybe the Communists. Maybe United Fruit. Not the people.” Escobar spoke low. His eyes were soft. “Help us, Mr. Fletcher. Of your own free will. Don’t make us make you help us. Don’t make us pull on your string.” He looked up at Fletcher from beneath his single bushy eyebrow. He looked up with his soft cocker spaniel eyes. “You can still be on that plane to Miami. On the way you like a drink, yes?”
“Yes,” Fletcher said. “I’ll help you.”
“Ah, good.” Escobar smiled, then looked at the woman.
“Does he have rockets?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Many?”
“At least sixty.”
“Russian?”
“Some are. Others came in crates with Israeli markings, but the writing on the missiles themselves looks Japanese.”
She nodded, seeming satisfied. Escobar beamed.
“Where are they?”
“Everywhere. You can’t just swoop down and grab them. There might still be a dozen at Ortiz.” Fletcher knew that wasn’t so.
“And Núñez?” she asked. “Is El Cóndor at Ortiz?”
She knew better. “He’s in the jungle. Last I knew, he was in Belén Province.” This was a lie. Núñez had been in Cristóbal, a suburb of the capital city, when Fletcher last saw him. He was probably still there. But if Escobar and the woman had known that, there would have been no need of this interrogation. And why would they believe Núñez would trust Fletcher with his whereabouts, anyway? In a country like this, where Escobar and Heinz and the Bride of Frankenstein were only three of your enemies, why would you trust a Yankee newspaper reporter with your address? Loco! Why was the Yankee newspaperman involved at all? But they had stopped wonder
ing about that, at least for now.
“Who does he talk to in the city?” the woman asked. “Not who he fucks, who he talks to.”
This was the point where he had to move, if he was going to. The truth was no longer safe and they might know a lie.
“There’s a man …” he started, then paused. “Could I have that cigarette now?”
“Mr. Fletcher! But of course!” Escobar was for a moment the concerned dinner-party host. Fletcher did not think this was playacting. Escobar picked up the red-and-white pack—the kind of pack any free man or woman could buy at any newsstand like the one Fletcher remembered on Forty-third Street—and shook out a cigarette. Fletcher took it, knowing he might be dead before it burned all the way down to the filter, no longer a part of this earth. He felt nothing, only the fading twitch of the muscles in his left arm and a funny baked taste in his fillings on that side of his mouth.
He put the cigarette between his lips. Escobar leaned further forward and snapped back the cover of his gold-plated lighter. He flicked the wheel. The lighter produced a flame. Fletcher was aware of Heinz’s infernal machine humming like an old radio, the kind with tubes in the back. He was aware of the woman he had come to think of, without a trace of humor, as the Bride of Frankenstein, looking at him the way the Coyote in the cartoons looked at the Road Runner. He was aware of his heart beating, of the remembered circular feel of the cigarette in his mouth—”a tube of singular delight,” some playwright or other had called it—and of the beat of his heart, incredibly slow. Last month he’d been called upon to make an after-luncheon speech at the Club Internacional, where all the foreign press geeks hung out, and his heart had beat faster then.
Here it was, and so what? Even the blind found their way through this; even his sister had, there by the river.
Fletcher bent to the flame. The end of the Marlboro caught fire and glowed red. Fletcher drew deep, and it was easy to start coughing; after three years without a cigarette, it would have been harder not to cough. He sat back in the chair and added a harsh, gagging growl to the cough. He began to shake all over, throwing his elbows out, jerking his head to the left, drumming his feet. Best of all, he recalled an old childhood talent and rolled his eyes up to the whites. During none of this did he let go of the cigarette.
Fletcher had never seen an actual epileptic fit, although he vaguely remembered Patty Duke throwing one in The Miracle Worker. He had no way of knowing if he was doing what epileptics actually did, but he hoped that the unexpected death of Tomás Herrera would help them to overlook any false notes in his own act.
“Shit, not again!” Heinz cried in a shrill near-scream; in a movie it might have been funny.
“Grab him, Ramón!” Escobar yelled in Spanish. He tried to stand up and struck the table so hard with his meaty thighs that it rose up and thumped back down. The woman didn’t move, and Fletcher thought: She suspects. I don’t think she even knows it yet, but she’s smarter than Escobar, smarter by a mile, and she suspects.
Was this true? With his eyes rolled up he could see only a ghost of her, not enough to really know if it was or not … but he knew. What did it matter? Things had been set in motion, and now they would play out. They would play out very fast.
“Ramón!” Escobar shouted. “Don’t let him fall on the floor, you idiot! Don’t let him swallow his t—”
Ramón bent over and grabbed Fletcher’s shaking shoulders, perhaps wanting to get Fletcher’s head back, perhaps wanting to make sure Fletcher’s tongue was still safely unswallowed (a person couldn’t swallow his own tongue, not unless it was cut off; Ramón clearly did not watch ER). Whatever he wanted didn’t matter. When his face was where Fletcher could get at it, Fletcher struck the burning end of the Marlboro in Ramón’s eye.
Ramón shrieked and jerked backward. His right hand rose toward his face, where the still-burning cigarette hung askew in the socket of his eye, but his left hand remained on Fletcher’s shoulder. It was now tightened down to a clamp, and when he stepped back, Ramón pulled Fletcher’s chair over. Fletcher spilled out of it, rolled over, and got to his feet.
Heinz was screaming something, words, maybe, but to Fletcher he sounded like a girl of about ten screaming at the sight of a singing idol—one of the Hansons, perhaps. Escobar wasn’t making any noise at all and that was bad.
Fletcher didn’t look back at the table. He didn’t have to look to know that Escobar was coming for him. Instead he shot both hands forward, grabbed the butt of Ramón’s revolver, and pulled it from its holster. Fletcher didn’t think Ramón ever knew it was gone. He was screaming a flood of Spanish and pawing at his face. He struck the cigarette but instead of coming free it broke off, the burning end still stuck in his eye.
Fletcher turned. Escobar was there, already around the end of the long table, coming for him with his fat hands out. Escobar no longer looked like a fellow who sometimes did the TV weather and talked about high bressure.
“Get that Yankee son of a bitch!” the woman spat.
Fletcher kicked the overturned chair into Escobar’s path and Escobar tripped on it. As he went down, Fletcher stuck the gun out, still held in both hands, and shot it into the top of Escobar’s head. Escobar’s hair jumped. Gouts of blood burst from his nose and mouth and from the underside of his chin, where the bullet came out. Escobar fell flat on his bleeding face. His feet drummed on the gray tile floor. The smell of shit rose from his dying body.
The woman was no longer in her chair, but she had no intention of approaching Fletcher. She ran for the door, fleet as a deer in her dark shapeless dress. Ramón, still bellowing, was between Fletcher and the woman. And he was reaching for Fletcher, wanting to grab him by the neck, throttle him.
Fletcher shot him twice, once in the chest and once in the face. The face-shot tore off most of Ramón’s nose and right cheek, but the big man in the brown uniform came on just the same, roaring, the ciga rette still dangling from his eye, his big sausage fingers, a silver ring on one of them, opening and closing.
Ramón stumbled over Escobar just as Escobar had stumbled over the chair. Fletcher had a moment to think of a famous cartoon that shows fish in a line, each with his mouth open to eat the next one down in size. The Food Chain, that drawing was called.
Ramón, facedown and with two bullets in him, reached out and clamped a hand on Fletcher’s ankle. Fletcher tore free, staggered, and fired a fourth shot into the ceiling when he did. Dust sifted down. There was a strong smell of gunsmoke in the room now. Fletcher looked at the door. The woman was still there, yanking at the doorknob with one hand and fumbling at the turn-lock with the other hand, but she couldn’t open the door. If she’d been able to, she’d have already done it. She’d be all the way down the hall by now, and screaming bloody murder up the stairs.
“Hey,” Fletcher said. He felt like an ordinary guy who goes to his Thursday-night bowling league and rolls a 300 game. “Hey, you bitch, look at me.”
She turned and put her palms flat against the door, as if she were holding it up. There was still a little nailhead of light in each of her eyes. She began to tell him he mustn’t hurt her. She started in Spanish, hesitated, then began to say the same thing in English. “You mustn’t hurt me in any way, Mr. Fletcher, I am the only one who can guarantee your safe conduct from here, and I swear I will on my solemn oath, but you must not hurt me.”
From behind them, Heinz was keening like a child in love or terror. Now that Fletcher was close to the woman—the woman standing against the door of the deathroom with her hands pressed flat against its metal surface—he could smell some bittersweet perfume. Her eyes were shaped like almonds. Her hair streamed back above the top of her head. We’re not just fucking around, she had told him, and Fletcher thought: Neither am I.
The woman saw the news of her death in his eyes and began to talk faster, pressing her butt and back and palms harder and harder against the metal door as she talked. It was as if she believed she could somehow melt herself through the door and come
out whole on the other side if she just pushed hard enough. She had papers, she said, papers in his name, and she would give him these papers. She also had money, a great deal of money, also gold; there was a Swiss bank account which he could access by computer from her home. It occurred to Fletcher that in the end there might only be one way to tell the thugs from the patriots: when they saw their own death rising in your eyes like water, patriots made speeches. The thugs, on the other hand, gave you the number of their Swiss bank account and offered to put you on-line.
“Shut up,” Fletcher said. Unless this room was very well insulated indeed, a dozen ordinary troops from upstairs were probably on their way now. He had no means of standing them off, but this one was not going to get away.
She shut up, still standing against the door, pressing it with her palms. Still with the nailheads in her eyes. How old was she? Fletcher wondered. Sixty-five? And how many had she killed in this room, or rooms like it? How many had she ordered killed?
“Listen to me,” Fletcher said. “Are you listening?”
What she was undoubtedly listening for were the sounds of approaching rescue. In your dreams, Fletcher thought.
“The weatherman there said that El Cóndor uses cocaine, that he’s a Communist butt-boy, a whore for United Fruit, who knows what else. Maybe he’s some of those things, maybe none. I don’t know or care. What I know about, what I care about, was he was never in charge of the ordinaries patrolling the Caya River in the summer of 1994. Núñez was in New York then. At NYU. So he wasn’t part of the bunch that found the nuns on retreat from La Caya. They put three of the nuns’ heads up on sticks, there by the water’s edge. The one in the middle was my sister.”
Fletcher shot her twice and then Ramón’s gun clicked empty. Two was enough. The woman went sliding down the door, her bright eyes never leaving Fletcher’s. You were the one who was supposed to die, those eyes said. I don’t understand this, you were the one who was supposed to die. Her hand clawed at her throat once, twice, then was still. Her eyes remained on his a moment longer, the bright eyes of an ancient mariner with a whale of a tale to tell, and then her head fell forward.
