Holy Terror

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Conor, this is Ric,’ said Sebastian, flapping across and kissing the boy on the forehead. ‘Ric’s a dancer. Hugely talented. Hugely.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Conor, holding up his bandages. ‘Can’t shake hands.’

  Ric looked him up and down as if he were appraising a handsome but disheveled beast at a cattle market. ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘What happened to you?’

  ‘What would you like to drink?’ asked Sebastian. ‘I have some Stag’s Leap chardonnay that’s positively myumphl Unless you’d prefer something stiffer.’

  Ric let out a sardonic pfff! of amusement and Sebastian waved one of his sleeves at him in annoyance.

  ‘A whiskey would be fine,’ said Conor. ‘Do you think I could use your phone to call Lacey?’ He knew that Slyman wouldn’t yet have had time to set up a wiretap.

  ‘For sure.’ Sebastian handed him a mobile phone in a quilted gold cover. Conor’s legs were beginning to tremble and he sat down in one of the large cushioned armchairs. Sebastian went to the cocktail cabinet and filled up a huge cut-crystal goblet with ice.

  The phone rang for a long time before Lacey answered.

  ‘Hi. It’s me. I just made it to Sebastian’s place.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Lacey, in a cold, abstract tone. ‘He’s not here right now.’

  ‘Is Slyman still there?’

  ‘All right, then. I’ll tell him. Is everything OK?’

  ‘I’m fine. A little knocked about, but nothing serious.’

  ‘Good. I’ll let him know you called.’

  Conor switched the phone off. ‘The police are still round there. I’ll try calling again later.’

  ‘Well, do,’ said Sebastian. ‘I’m simply itching to know what this is all about. Hang on, I must get another bottle of wine out of the icebox.’

  While Sebastian went into the kitchen, Conor turned to Ric. ‘So you’re a dancer,’ he said. ‘Modem or classical?’

  ‘Whatever I can get. Tap, mainly.’

  ‘Have I seen you in anything?’

  Sebastian swept back in. ‘Ric was in A Chorus Line, weren’t you, Ric?’

  ‘Oh sure I was. In Buffalo. And what do you think the mathematical odds are that Conor ever saw A Chorus Line in Buffalo?’

  ‘Stranger things have happened, sweet cheeks,’ said Sebastian, handing Conor a huge Jack Daniel’s. ‘Besides, you were in Vaudeville Days, too, and that was on Broadway.’

  ‘Oh, yes. I forgot that starring role. I held a hoop so that a chihuahua could jump through it.’

  ‘Why do you always bring yourself down? How are you ever going to make any progress in show business if you’re always so self-deprecating? Show business is all about confidencel Pizzazz!’

  ‘God, you sound more like Deanna Durbin every day. Show business has nothing to do with confidence. Show business is all about freaky strokes of luck and kissing the right rear ends.’

  ‘You’ll have to forgive Ric,’ said Sebastian. ‘He’s the victim of an excessively well-balanced childhood.’ He sat down next to Conor and crossed his legs. He was wearing strappy gold sandals with little bells on them. ‘Now why don’t you tell us how you got into such a mess?’

  Slowly, Conor did. He felt exhausted now, shattered, and the events of the day were all jumbled up in his mind. But Sebastian thought it was all enthralling, especially the Brinks-Mat truck crashing into the Pond.

  ‘It is a mystery, though, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Those two people waiting outside your door. Do you think they had any connection with the robbery?’

  ‘Hell, Sebastian, I don’t know what to think. I haven’t any idea what they were doing there or what they wanted. All I know is that I started to talk to them and I lost twenty-nine minutes out of my day.’

  ‘That’s so weird,’ said Sebastian. ‘Maybe they were aliens. You have to be so careful about aliens. They take you up to their spacecraft and perform all kinds of strange sexual experiments on you.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ said Ric. ‘And how do you know? Has that ever happened to you?’

  ‘Me? I should have such luck.’

  ‘But wait a minute,’ said Conor. ‘Remember that Darrell Bussman met them, too, in another department, and he lost some time as well. Not as much as I did, but a few seconds maybe. One moment he was talking to them, then they were gone.’

  ‘Can you remember what they said to you?’ asked Sebastian.

  Conor shook his head. ‘The woman didn’t speak at all. The man just lifted up his hand and said, “Do you know me?” and that’s all I remember. Maybe he said more. He must have done, but I couldn’t tell you what it was.’

  ‘Describe them,’ said Ric.

  ‘I can do better than that. I can draw them.’

  Sebastian brought him a gold mechanical pencil and a sheet of white writing-paper. Quickly Conor repeated the sketches he had shown to Salvatore.

  Ric took the sheet of paper and frowned at it. ‘You were right, Sebastian. They are aliens.’

  ‘I’m – uh – not exactly an artist,’ Conor told him.

  ‘No, no. Joking aside, you’ve pretty much caught them.’

  ‘Caught them? You know them? You’re putting me on.’

  ‘Ric knows everybody,’ said Sebastian, showing his claws. ‘He gets around New York like a dose of the flu.’

  Ric sat up straight, rewrapping his sarong. ‘The woman’s tall, right, about thirty-five years old, white face, totally black eyes like she’s a zombie or something? The guy looks like he’s Latino, sharp clothes, curly hair, Little Richard mustache?’

  ‘Absolutely dead right. That’s them. You don’t happen to know what their names are?’

  ‘Sure I do. Ramon Perez and Magda Slanic. He’s Mexican and she’s Romanian. Leastways, she always said that she was Romanian. She had a thick accent but as far as I’m concerned it could have been anything. Greek, Russian, who knows? They were a weird pair, didn’t talk too much, and when they did you weren’t too sure what they meant. I haven’t seen them for over a year, not since Vaudeville Days closed down.’

  ‘They were involved in Vaudeville Days, too? They’re entertainers?’

  ‘That’s right. Their stage names were Hypnos and Hetti.’

  Conor pressed the heel of his hand against his forehead. He couldn’t think why it hadn’t occurred to him before. Hypnotists, for Christ’s sake. They had simply put him into a mesmeric trance, and made him do whatever they wanted him to do. That’s where his twenty-nine minutes had disappeared.

  Ric said, ‘They were amazing hypnotists, Hypnos and Hetti. But they weren’t audience friendly, if you know what I mean? They used to make people do all these really humiliating things on stage, like wet their pants or swear at their wives or burst into tears because they thought they were kids and they’d lost their mommy at the market.

  ‘I really had the feeling that they hated their audience, you know? They never knew when to draw the line. They once made a woman lick the soles of her husband’s shoes.’

  ‘They must have hypnotized Darrell, too,’ said Conor. ‘I only knew half the code to open the strongroom, but he knew the other half. Do you think they could have made him tell them what it was? I mean, just like that, snap, in the blinking of an eye?’

  ‘You’re joking, I hope. Those two could make you do anything, whether you wanted to do it or not. You know that myth about hypnotism – that you can never make anybody do anything against their will? That’s so much bullshit. We had a backstage party the night Vaudeville Days opened, and Ramon made this middle-aged make-up artist take off all of her clothes and dance on the table with a pink feather duster sticking out of her ass. I left. I mean, quite apart from the fact that I don’t like women with no clothes on, it was wrong, you know? It was degrading. It was morally wrong.’

  Sebastian brushed an invisible mote of dust from his knee. ‘Ric’s quite the religious fundamentalist, isn’t he, when he gets going? Mind you, he’s more interested in fundaments than he is in religion.’


  Conor said, ‘The Mexican guy – what was his name, Perez? – he was carrying a large bag. They must have hypnotized me into opening up the strongroom and emptied out all the safety deposit boxes they took a fancy to.’

  ‘But how would they know which boxes to choose?’ asked Sebastian.

  ‘I don’t know. We have a list of who rents which box. It’s stored in the company’s database, but it’s strictly confidential and it’s encrypted.’

  ‘They might have gotten you to download it for them,’ Ric suggested. ‘After all, they had plenty of time.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have done anything like that, I’m sure, even if I was hypnotized. I couldn’t have. It’s so much against my training.’

  ‘I told you, Conor: Hypnos and Hetti can make people do anything. They can even make people kill themselves, if they want to. Hypnos always used to boast that he hypnotized Sonny Bono into skiing into a tree.’

  ‘Why the hell would he want to do a thing like that, even if he could?’

  ‘Oh, there was supposed to be some mob connection. Bono trod on too many influential toes, and that was the cleanest way to get rid of him. Hypnos said there were others, too – really big names. And the beauty was that nobody could ever prove if he was lying or not.’

  ‘All right, then,’ said Conor. ‘Supposing for the sake of argument that I did download the list for them … how come the other robbers had a list, too? And a list which sounds as if it was substantially the same as Hypnos and Hetti’s list?’

  ‘Maybe somebody hacked into your computer and sold it to them on the black market.’

  ‘That’s a possibility, I guess. But it doesn’t explain why they were two separate attempts to rob Spurr’s strongroom literally within hours of each other.’

  ‘Coincidence,’ Sebastian suggested. ‘I was mugged twice on the same block once. Do you know what I said to the second mugger? “If you want my money it’s no good threatening me. Go and chase after that scumbag down there.”’

  Conor said, ‘I don’t think it was a coincidence at all. I think there’s a whole lot more to this than meets the eye.’

  ‘Well, the two robberies couldn’t have been connected. Why storm into a store to steal a whole lot of safety deposit boxes if you know that they’re already empty?’

  ‘Exactly. But none of this really makes any difference, not to the cops. They’re convinced that I cleared out those boxes and I don’t have any way of proving them wrong. My only witness is in a coma and he can’t remember what Hypnos and Hetti did to him, either.’

  ‘In other words, you’re up your neck in very deep doodoo.’

  ‘There’s only one way out of this. I have to find Hypnos and Hetti – preferably with some of the stuff still in their possession.’

  ‘So what kind of stuff are we talking about?’

  ‘I don’t have any idea. It could be emeralds, it could be dope, it could be title deeds. What customers keep in their safety deposit boxes is their own business.’

  ‘Supposing they don’t have the stuff on them? Or supposing they do, but you can’t prove that it came from Spurr’s? I mean, nobody’s going to put up their hand and say, “Oh, yes – that three-pound package of Colombia’s purest, that’s mine!”’

  ‘In that case, I’ll have to find a way to make them confess.’

  Ric smiled and shook his head. ‘Ooh no, I don’t think so. Not those two. They’d have you in a trance before you even got to the first question.’

  ‘Beat them with rubber hoses, that’s what I say,’ put in Sebastian. ‘How about another drink, Conor? You look terrible. You’re going to have two gorgeous black eyes tomorrow.’

  ‘Do you have any idea where Hypnos and Hetti might be?’ Conor asked Ric.

  ‘Not any more. They used to rent a loft in TriBeCa, but I don’t think they live there any longer. I’ll tell you what I could do, though. I could give you Eleanor Bronsky’s number. Eleanor used to be their agent. Maybe she knows where they are.’

  Conor couldn’t have a shower that night because of his hands but Sebastian ran him a deep, hot bath and he sat in it for nearly twenty minutes, with his eyes closed.

  He dreamed that he was walking along an empty, echoing corridor. Right at the very end stood two dark figures. He knew that he had every reason to be afraid of them, but he kept on walking toward them. He had almost reached them when he realized that they weren’t two figures at all, but one, two people intertwined like a tree.

  For some reason this filled him with dread, and he turned to run. As he did so, however, there was a deafening metallic clang and a huge door shut in front of him, blocking his escape.

  He knocked and knocked, knowing that the two people that were one person was gradually approaching him. But no matter how hard he knocked, he couldn’t make a sound any louder than a gentle tapping.

  He opened his eyes. It was Sebastian, coyly tapping at the bathroom door.

  ‘Didn’t mean to disturb you. Would you like me to wash your back?’

  Chapter 8

  That night, he dreamed one bad dream after another. He fell down elevator shafts, he ran down tunnels, he was trapped under suffocating heaps of blankets. In spite of the air conditioning, Sebastian’s apartment was stifling, and he woke up again and again, smothered in sweat. Pretty little clocks were ticking and chiming everywhere, and he found it almost impossible to get back to sleep.

  At six o’clock a huge dumpster parked outside and garbage collectors started to throw trashcans around. It sounded like the 1812 Overture. As stiffly as a 70-year-old he climbed out of bed and hobbled to the kitchen where he made himself a cup of arabica coffee and listened to the portable television at very low volume, so that he wouldn’t wake up Sebastian and Ric.

  He turned to the early-morning news. After an item about a shootout at a grade school in the Bronx, Lieutenant Slyman appeared. He was standing beside the torn awning of Manzi’s restaurant, his face made devilish by the red flashing lights of firetrucks and squad cars.

  ‘… Conor O’Neil was one of the most skilful and experienced officers in the New York Police Department … today he has also shown himself to be one hundred per cent ruthless and determined … he has successfully engineered a robbery which may have netted him over a billion dollars … if you have any knowledge of his whereabouts, don’t try to approach him … Just call this number … I have already been told that the owners of the missing property are prepared to pay very substantial rewards for its return …’

  ‘Hey, maybe we ought to turn you in,’ said Ric, who had been standing behind him in the kitchen doorway. ‘Sebastian and I could use some extra cash.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Conor. ‘If I can find this Hypnos and Hetti, I’ll make sure that you get the credit for it.’

  Ric came into the kitchen. He was wearing a short purple robe and a hairnet. He took a giant-sized guava juice out of the icebox and drank it straight out of the carton. ‘Don’t you worry about that. Sebastian and I will get our reward in Heaven.’ He sat down and peered at Conor closely. ‘My God,’ he said. ‘You do look a fright.’

  Eleanor Bronsky’s office was on the fourth floor of a narrow 1930s building on Broadway, a block and a half north of Times Square. Conor walked there, in spite of the heat and humidity, because he didn’t want to risk being recognized by some smartass taxi driver who might have watched this morning’s news. He knew from his police experience how closely taxi drivers scrutinize their fares. Scrutinize them and instantly categorize them: out-of-towner, tourist, minor celebrity, Wall Street broker, crack addict, drunk, harmless lunatic, dangerous lunatic and worst of all, parsimonious tipper.

  He crossed Times Square through a host of fluttering, hopping, scabrous pigeons. He was wearing only a white T-shirt and beige canvas pants, no socks, but the perspiration still dripped down his cheeks. Today’s forecast was a high of 103. People had been collapsing in the streets.

  He reached the narrow doorway and pressed the button marked BRONSKY THEATRI
CAL REPRESENTATION INC. A down-and-out in a filthy brown shirt was sitting on the step with a small, panting mongrel on the end of a string.

  ‘Spare some change?’ he asked. His eyes were crusted and he was missing most of his teeth.

  Conor gave him a dollar bill. He pressed the bell again. There were two cops on the opposite side of Broadway, leaning against their squad car and talking casually to an ice-cream vendor. The sooner he got inside the building the better.

  ‘You’re in trouble, aintcha?’ said the down-and-out. ‘I can always smell a man in trouble.’

  ‘Thanks for your consideration, but I’m fine.’

  ‘They’re after you, ain’t they? They’re on your heels.’

  A ditsy little girl’s voice came out of the intercom. ‘Who whizzit?’

  ‘Jack Brown. I’m a friend of Ric Vetter. He called you before?’

  ‘You want a word of advice?’ said the down-and-out. His dog gave Conor the most hopeless look that he had ever seen from man or beast. Conor didn’t answer.

  ‘The word of advice is: two into one does go, and when they do, you’d better watch your ass.’

  ‘What?’ asked Conor, but then the door buzzer went, and he pushed his way into the gloomy hallway, leaving the down-and-out sitting outside. There was a strong smell of gas and mold inside the building. On the right was a battered row of disused mailboxes, their doors hanging open. On the left was a tiny elevator with a powder-blue-painted door. Up ahead rose a staircase covered in grim green linoleum with metal protective edges, but on the second-story landing shone a stained-glass window, pure art deco, of an airliner flying over the ocean, accompanied by seagulls. In a decrepit building like this, it was weirdly ritzy and romantic.

  Conor took the elevator up to the fourth floor. It clanked as if it were being winched up by Quasimodo. There was a small, dim mirror at the back of the elevator and he took off his Ray-Bans so that he could look at himself. Both of his eyes were so swollen that they were almost closed, and his lips looked like two large slices of raw pig’s liver.