The Killing Lessons

by Saul Black

  Out of sheer desperation she spent another hour dipping into and out of the traffic enforcement footage. RVs. RVs. More RVs. What was she even looking for? A driver wearing a T-shirt that said MURDERER? Time and again she returned to the zoo footage. The dark-haired guy in the Raiders shirt watching Katrina. She was sure it was him. But she couldn’t stand her own intuitive certainty. It meant she was looking at the man who might even now be doing what he did – again, for the ninth or tenth or for all she knew fiftieth time. It made her powerlessness collusive, as if by looking at his image and knowing it was him she were giving him permission – encouragement, even – to carry on doing what he was doing.

  It was four thirty a.m. when she laid her head down on her desk and closed her eyes. Her skull was throbbing – from the hours of fruitless concentration, yes, but from the vodka and cigarettes that had kept her company through the night. Her cold, which the excitement had occluded, revved up its symptoms. Her head pounded. Her skin was sore.

  Blasko had changed his mind. He’d seen sense. He’d remembered who she was, what she was capable of, what she’d done. Of course he had. He’d done the right thing.

  Experimentally, Valerie sat up and raised her hands in front of her face. They were shaking. They shook all the time now. Have to watch that. Make an effort. Keep them busy. Especially in front of Carla Fucking York.

  Two hours after she’d crawled into bed (alone, alone, alone; shedding the skirt was like an act of self-ridicule) and fallen into fraught sleep, she was woken by the sound of her cell phone.

  And the information that would change everything.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Angelo had known, struggling into extra layers, that he wasn’t going to make the fallen tree. I don’t know how far, Nell had said. A mile, I guess. A mile. It had practically killed him just putting on the additional clothes. But what else was there to do? If there was a way, he had to try, if only for her sanity.

  He’d managed ten paces with the walking stick – then collapsed. The day was bright blue and glaring white around him. Indifferent beauty. He’d got up again. A mile would take him, what, three hours?

  Keep going, Sylvia, had said. Come on. It’s like that film, Touching the Void. They’d watched the movie together. The climber who’d walked all the way down the mountain on a broken leg. The guy had managed it by picking out landmarks – a particular rock or snowy hummock – a few paces ahead, then setting himself the challenge of just getting to that. Then he’d select another spot a few feet away and aim for that, and so on, until, having done this countless times (in agony), he’d made it all the way back to base camp.

  Angelo had tried. Just five more steps. Just six more. Just three more.

  But less than thirty paces from the cabin he’d been reduced to crawling through snow that came up to his elbows.

  He didn’t have the requisite psychology. The Touching the Void climber, whilst astonishing, had always struck both him and Sylvia as a psychopath or suffering from a version of autism – or at the very least devoid of human warmth and realism. Sylvia conceded as much, now.

  You would be so much better at this than me, he’d said to her through his pain. Sylvia had always had more strength and courage than him. Sylvia had always had more of all the good stuff than him. Integrity. Honesty. Empathy. Depth. She should have been the novelist. Except what she didn’t have was the desire for public affirmation, for peer acknowledgement, for glowing endorsements, for fame. Unlike him. Unlike him, what she had was quiet sufficiency and the ability to take pleasure in a life without shallow social back-slaps or professional flattery. What she had was the ability to love, and be loved – and for that to be enough. She conceded that, too, when he’d given up, collapsed on his side in the snow. She conceded it as she conceded all her merits: not with self-satisfaction, just with a smile and a shrug. The truth was the truth, and there was no point denying it.

  All right, my love, she’d said, as he’d begun the return struggle to the cabin. All right, you tried.

  The worst thing had been seeing Nell unsurprised by his return.

  I’m sorry, he’d gasped, his face wet with pain. I’m so sorry.

  Now, no matter how many ways he looked at it, the situation didn’t change. They were stuck here. Her, courtesy of the broken ankle (fractured hip, too, he suspected; and the pain when she breathed in said a rib had cracked as well); him, at the mercy of L5 and S1. Two cripples, no meds, no phone, no transport. He hurt my mom. Every minute that passed testified that no one had found her yet.

  ‘Yet’ felt irrelevant. The more Angelo gleaned the more certain he was that Nell’s mother was dead. Murdered. He’d had to ask the questions delicately. Detail brought the whole thing up in the kid, huge, unassimilable. Blood. She kept saying her mom was bleeding. Every time the word left her mouth it was as if another bone in her broke. Her face lost its bearings. Shock renewed itself. He’d had to keep easing back. Eventually he’d stopped trying to build the picture of what had happened. And in any case, since no amount of narrative changed their predicament, what was the point in getting it? Whether the woman was dead or not, there was still nothing to do but wait. If Nell’s brother had escaped or survived he would have got help. The house had a landline and cellular reception. There were neighbours a mile away. And given that no help had come, there was only one conclusion to draw.

  He’d splinted her ankle as best he could. Two bits of flat wood he’d found amongst the chopped logs and kindling bound with shreds torn from one of the towels. He hadn’t known what he was doing, but he held to the idea that anything that helped keep it still couldn’t make matters worse.

  He was perpetually exhausted. The sciatica wouldn’t let up. He kept testing it. Kept getting the same blinding result: Stop trying to move. Filling a cup with water was a gruelling ordeal. Replenishing the wood-stove an odyssey that left him drenched in sweat, shaking, sick. The only favour his condition did him was that the grotesque spectacle of it absorbed the girl’s attention for a little while. He could see that a remote part of her registered his suffering, her distant sympathy circuits were still trying to fire. But all the circuits were dimmed, blotted out by the giant thing that had happened to her, that would not go away, that had taken up colossal and tyrannical residency in her changed world. The grim mathematics were plain. A mother didn’t tell her child to run away from her protection unless she knew she had no protection left to give.

  Sylvia came and went. When she was there, it was bearable.

  I can’t be here all the time.

  Angelo believed there was a finite allowance granted to the dead. Precious currency, to be spent wisely.

  ‘I know you don’t want to,’ he said to Nell, ‘but you should really try to eat something. You must be starving.’

  It was late evening. She was lying on her right side in the sleeping bag with her back to the stove. She had a choice between pains, he knew. Lying on her side eased the pain of breathing but increased the pain in her ankle. Lying on her back turned down the pain in her ankle, but made every breath a precise, mean stab.

  ‘Nell?’

  She shook her head. He could see what an effort even the most minimal interaction was for her. He could see that what had happened devoured every gram of consciousness. She was condemned to replay what she had seen, over and over. Some part of her, for the rest of her life, would always be replaying it. If she lived to be a hundred the reel would still be running. It was her legacy, now.

  ‘I need to go to the bathroom,’ she said.

  This had occurred to him. He’d been dreading it.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘No problem. I’ll carry you on my back.’

  She thought about that.

  ‘Can I use your stick?’ she said.

  If she fell… If she fell… Oh, God.

  ‘Sure you can,’ he said. ‘Just be very, very careful.’

  She had to think it through. It would require getting her one good leg under her and pulling herself up wit
h her arms via the sink. In other words—

  Her scream told both of them everything they needed to know. It was impossible. She could get upright, but even with the stick taking the weight of the bad leg, moving forward under her own power was unbearable. The ribs made every jolting step agony. She’d never make it.

  She lay back down, sweating, in tears, sobbing.

  ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Hey, come on now, don’t cry. We’ll work something out. Hold on. Just give me a minute to think. They used to say I was a smart guy. I’m sure I can figure something.’

  After a few moments, he said: ‘If I get you to the bathroom, will you be able to sit on the toilet?’

  But for a little while she was inconsolable. The shame and the weakness on top of everything else. He was worried she would wet herself. (At least wet herself. He didn’t have it in him to ask her if peeing was all she needed to do.)

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Here’s what I think we should try. We unzip the sleeping bag and get that out of the way. Then I’ll pull you on the mat. We’ll deal with the rest when we get there. How’s that sound?’

  It took a long time, but eventually they made it to the bathroom. It cost him a lot. He was in tears himself, silently, by the time they got there. He lay on his side for a moment, gasping, the nerve in his leg jangling.

  ‘I can do it,’ she said, through her misery. ‘I can do it myself.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘I can do it. You have to go away.’

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘But I’ll be right outside the door. You shout if you need me, OK?’

  He did not look, though he was terrified she’d fall. She sobbed, continuously, a misery like that thin rain that could last all day. He could picture her small shut face suppressing the pain, the contortions pulling her pants down and getting onto the toilet seat would require. It was a great relief to him to hear the flush. He wondered how long she’d been lying there by the stove plucking up courage to tell him she needed to go. The colossal courage children needed for these things.

  By the time they made it back to the stove both of them were spent. They lay a few feet apart. Her embarrassment was still coming off her, an aura of distressed energy.

  ‘Well, it’s probably going to make me faint,’ he said, ‘but I’m going to try to heat something up. Let’s see what we’ve got in here.’

  Before his abrupt incapacitation he’d lugged a few boxes of supplies over the bridge on foot, in defiance of the sheriff. (The sheriff. What he wouldn’t give to see that guy right now.) The cabin’s two tiny cupboards had enough in them, he guessed, for maybe ten days, if they ate sparingly. Apart from a dozen eggs and a stale white loaf nothing fresh, but there was canned stuff that would stop them starving for a while. It was a mercy that the faucets still yielded apparently drinkable water, although he supposed they could melt snow in a pan on the stove if they had to. How many days could you go without food? He stopped himself wondering.

  ‘OK,’ he said, shuddering from what crawling to the cupboard had taken out of him. ‘We’ve got soup. We’ve got dried pasta. We’ve got canned tomatoes, canned peaches, canned ham, canned beans, canned sweetcorn. We’ve got Fig Newtons. No idea why we have those. I don’t even like them. We’ve got olive oil. We’ve got rice. Dried chillies. Two bulbs of garlic… I have to say, none of this is exactly making my mouth water.’ He reached further back into the cupboard. ‘Although wait a second. What’s this? Coq au vin. In a can? OK, I’m going to heat this up. I’ll make some pasta too. Do you know what coq au vin is?’

  When she didn’t answer he looked over at her. Tears were streaming. She hadn’t made a sound.

  He remembered her pale legs and narrow sternum when he’d undressed her. It had made him picture her mother drying her after a bath, with a huge towel that would have felt good, that would have smelled to the child of home and safety and love. He knew, by contrast, how he must seem to her: a crazy old cripple living in a hut. He’d spent half his life finding what he believed were the right words. Getting it right at the level of the sentence, he’d said, countless times, in interviews. There was no getting it right here. He couldn’t think of a single thing to say that wouldn’t make it worse.

  He stood, bent over his stick, watching her, the can a dead joke in his hand.

  What do I do? What the fuck do I do?

  There’s nothing you can do, Sylvia said. Except keep her alive. There’s nothing you can do except take care of her.

  Saying nothing, he turned to the stove. He had no idea where the can opener was.

  THIRTY-NINE

  There was no time in the basement. Time didn’t pass. Claudia was confined to an endlessly burgeoning present of the bare bulbs and the furnace’s exhalation. That was something, that there was warmth. She sat with her back to its radiant heat. Its comfort was a betrayal. It testified to her body, to her incarceration in her skin, to the reality of her flesh and blood and the impossibility of escaping the things that would happen to it. Care for her body wedded her to fear for its suffering. She’d read somewhere: You don’t believe in the soul until you feel it struggling to escape the body. She would have settled for that, to have her spirit or essence let loose. She’d go like a wisp across the Atlantic Ocean to her parents’ house in Bournemouth, spend her disembodied days moving around the solid lives of her family like a cat around its owners’ legs.

  It had been, she supposed, hours. After they’d pulled down the security grille they’d left her and gone upstairs. At first, after she’d forced herself to stop crying (she could always, throughout her childhood, throughout her life, force herself to stop crying; it was one of the reasons, she’d assumed, she was unlikeable) there was only fear. Maximal fear. That every sound was the sound of them coming back. Her entire being devoted itself to listening. There was no room for anything else.

  But she was human. After a while portions of consciousness were hived off for other business: seeing if she could lift the grille; searching her pockets for something to work the padlock (though her inner realist told her it was only in movies that locks were ever picked); scouring the cage for something – anything – of use, for defence, for escape. Not that the search turned anything up. She had a couple of quarters and a dime in her jeans pocket. Useless. Her cell phone and bag were gone. They must have taken them before they put her in the box. Her bag, anyway. She held on to the golden straw of possibility that she’d dropped her phone in the struggle and they’d missed it. Had a repeated vision of someone finding it, of Ryan calling, of the wretched dots of her disappearance beginning to join up. But even if she had dropped it (the realist again) who would be walking that stretch of road at this hour, whatever hour this was? She’d been there on a mild early evening and not seen a soul on foot. This was America: roads were for driving, not walking. Walking was Third World, unless you were doing it in the wilderness, with a backpack and a baseball cap, to burn carbs.

  Only rape.

  Just rape.

  It was obscene to be able to think that, to hope for that. It was also (there was nothing wrong with her brain, there was no stopping it) a measure of what there was beyond rape, in addition to rape. What there was when rape was merely the starting point. There was death, yes. But there was everything between rape and death. Between rape and death was torture. An indefinite landscape. A journey that could be made to seem endless. A journey – she had a confusion of unbearable images – so ugly and exhausting it could make you want death, crave death, beg for death. Which they wouldn’t give you. Not giving you death was the whole point of torture.

  These were her thoughts. Her mind was her enemy.

  She ran her fingertips around the grouting in the wall at her back. Crumbling mortar. A loose brick. The start of many loose bricks. A hole. Escape. Freedom.

  But the mortar didn’t give. Her fingertips came away sore.

  Floorboards then. Nails. A protruding rusty nail she could jab into the smaller one’s eye.

  But there were no protrudi
ng nails, rusty or otherwise.

  ‘You’re lucky,’ Paulie said, appearing halfway down the basement stairs.

  Claudia started. Involuntarily flattened her back against the wall, elbows tight to her ribs, fists clenched. Her own movements had distracted her, blocked out the sound of the door up there opening. Suddenly he was there – and all her powers of reason fell apart.

  ‘You’re so lucky. He’s sick.’

  The space in the basement came alive, a bristling guarantee of his ability to move through it. To her. He was holding an iPad in his right hand. It made her imagine him in an Apple store, talking to a sales assistant. Stores. Malls. People. Life. Everything you’ll never see again.

  He came down the remaining stairs.

  ‘It’s the flu,’ he said.

  Claudia didn’t want to look at him. She didn’t want to look at him for fear of what else she’d see. The knife. The gun. Any of the innocent objects that would do what they did, what they were designed to do. To her.

  Paulie was at the grille. She couldn’t press herself any harder against the wall. The furnace purred.

  ‘I did these,’ he said, touching the screen into life and beginning to finger-swipe through its files. ‘He forgets that. He doesn’t understand. How would he get these if it wasn’t for me?’

  The screen lit his face. A fond smile had formed on his mouth. He might have been looking over photos of a favourite vacation. He stopped. The smile expanded into a grin. Small, nicotine-stained teeth. ‘Oh yeah,’ he said, ‘I remember this one. This one was the best.’

  He touched the screen.

  Ugly sound bloomed. A woman’s half-strangled screams.

  He turned the screen towards Claudia.

  Claudia couldn’t move. The world drained away. There was nothing except her trying and failing not to look.

  The footage was shaky. Of course it was. His compressed excitement. The naked dark-haired woman’s gagged face a wreck of tears and blood, her arms spread, ropes around her wrists. The men’s shadows over her bare flesh. Xander’s shoulder. His hands. The serrated knife. Their silence louder than her screams.