Holy Terror

by Graham Masterton

  Conor stared back at him for a while, then switched off the PC and sat with his head bowed.

  ‘Well?’ asked Sebastian. ‘Got what you wanted?’

  Conor shook his head. ‘I still don’t know why he needs all this money. But I can guess he’s planning something pretty damned terrible.’

  They talked late into the evening. Apart from Eleanor, they were all hungover with burundanga poisoning, and from time to time Conor felt strange hallucinatory waves. When he looked out of the window, he thought he saw his mother in the street below, returning from the market with her shopping. She looked up at him and her face was blurred against the summer sunshine. She waved, and he waved back. He thought he saw his father, exhausted after a night shift, sitting with his head bent, as if it was his fault that innocent people had been mugged and robbed and stabbed in the subway.

  Most of all, though, he felt the persistent ache of fear. The fear of what Dennis Evelyn Branch and his men might do to Lacey. It gripped his mind like a cold-cast engineering vise and it wouldn’t let go.

  Eleanor must have sensed what he was feeling because she reached her hand across and stroked the back of his knuckles. ‘You always have to believe that things are going to work out right,’ she told him. ‘They did for me.’

  ‘But, for you, look how long it took. How many years.’

  ‘The years don’t matter, Conor, You’ll learn that, when you get older. Five minutes of bliss is worth fifty years of loneliness.’

  By ten or eleven o’clock their minds began to clear. They ordered Korean take-out – stuffed cuttlefish, vermicelli with beef and cucumber, and the cabbage and mung bean pancakes known as bindae duk.

  Conor slept fitfully that night. He kept trying to think of ways in which he could find out where Dennis Evelyn Branch was keeping Lacey; and how to track down Ramon Perez and Magda Slanic. When he was captain of detectives, he had a whole force to help him, and a computer database that could tell him at any one time which officer was where. Now he felt as if he were stumbling around in a blindfold.

  All the same, there were still plenty of routine inquiries he could follow up. He could go back to the Rialto Theater tomorrow to see if anybody in the cast of Franklin had any idea where Hypnos and Hetti might be hiding out. He would also ask Eleanor to call up every theatrical agent she knew to see if they might still be on somebody’s talent list. And Ric, when he recovered, might be able to help with more contacts in the cabaret business.

  He closed his eyes and said a prayer that his mother had taught him, asking the Blessed Virgin for guidance and strength.

  At 6:30 in the morning, Sebastian’s mobile phone rang. After a moment’s conversation, he came into Conor’s room and gently shook his shoulder.

  ‘Are you awake? It’s for you.’

  Conor frowzily sat up. On the other side of the room, buried under a blanket, Sidney whuffled and turned over like an old dog in his basket.

  ‘Mr O’Neil? This is Victor Labrea speaking. I think that the Reverend Branch may have mentioned my name.’

  ‘That’s right. What do you want?’

  ‘There’s a little errand that I want you to run for me this morning. A certain gentleman wants sight of certain letters.’

  Conor said nothing but, ‘Go on.’

  ‘I’ve arranged for him to meet you by the entrance to the Children’s Zoo in Central Park at 11:35 precisely. He’ll be wearing a Panama hat with a red headband and he’ll be carrying a copy of this week’s edition of New York magazine.’

  ‘I see. Are you going to tell me what his name is?’

  ‘No need for that. All you have to do is introduce yourself and give him two sample letters. Then walk away.’

  ‘How do I know it’s safe?’

  ‘Easy. We have the rest of the letters and this gentleman would rather cut off his own dick with a pair of blunt scissors than have those letters made public.’

  ‘Is that all I have to do?’

  ‘That’s all. If you go down to Mr Speed’s mailbox you’ll find the letters waiting for you there.’

  ‘How did you know I was here?’

  ‘You don’t think Magda recognized your friend Ric Vetter? Come on, Mr O’Neil, you used to be a detective. Anyhow – ciao for now.’

  ‘Don’t hang up! Before I do this, I need to know that Lacey’s safe.’

  ‘She’s safe, take my word for it.’

  ‘You haven’t hurt her, have you?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘If she’s safe, then let me talk to her.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so.’

  ‘Listen, Labrea—’

  ‘Listen, yourself, Mr O’Neil. Your girlfriend’s fine. But before you start getting funny ideas, just bear in mind that she’s being taken care of by a couple of friends of mine who are training as plastic surgeons. They’d just love to have the opportunity to work on somebody as lovely as Lacey. A nip here, a tuck there. Maybe a breast reduction.’

  ‘I’ll find you, I mean it, and I’ll kill you.’

  ‘You won’t find me and even if you did you wouldn’t kill me. You’re a fine upstanding Catholic, O’Neil. You wouldn’t murder anybody in cold blood, even me.’

  ‘You’d be worth going to Purgatory for, believe me.’

  Victor Labrea gave a hissing little laugh. ‘Purgatory! Don’t you just love it!’

  Conor took a deep breath. ‘listen, I won’t meet this guy at the zoo today until I’ve had the chance to talk to Lacey.’

  Victor Labrea was silent for a while. Conor thought that he could hear him licking his lips, or maybe it was his dentures clicking. ‘All right,’ he said, eventually. ‘I’ll have her call you in five minutes. But keep it short, OK? And – you know – keep it clean.’

  ‘You bastard.’

  Victor Labrea hung up and Conor waited and waited for Lacey to call. Even though he was expecting it, when the phone rang he jumped.

  ‘Hello? Lacey?’

  There were a few blurred, crunching moments while the phone was handed over. Then Conor heard Lacey say, ‘Conor? Is that you?’ in a voice like ice-crackled milk.

  ‘It’s me, baby. Are you OK? They haven’t hurt you, have they?’

  ‘They just smashed their way in, Conor. I didn’t know what was happening. I tried to call you but I couldn’t.’

  ‘But they haven’t hurt you? Touched you, or anything?’

  ‘No, they haven’t. But they’ve been threatening all kinds of things. Please, Conor, you have to do what they say.’

  ‘Where are you? Do you have any idea? Just say yes or no.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is it an apartment?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘An old building or a new building? Say first or second.’

  ‘First.’

  ‘Is it quiet or noisy? Say red for quiet or white for noisy.’

  ‘Mostly red.’

  ‘Are there any unusual sounds that you can hear? Like helicopters, or river traffic? Say hungry or thirsty.’

  ‘Hungry, Every few minutes.’

  The phone went dead. Conor looked at it for a moment and then dropped it on the bed.

  He sat for a long while with his head in his hands. He felt like his father. Yet there was something in the back of his mind. A vision, or an instantaneous flash of a vision. The blink of an eye. The door opened and Magda Slanic stepped out, confronting him. He made an effort not to look at her, in case she hypnotized him. He took Sidney’s advice and looked beyond her, into the dressing-room, and he saw crumpled silk blouses and filmy black bras and discarded black thongs. And they distracted him. They had distracted him. Sexually, he was ashamed to admit. But he had seen the room in greater detail than that. His mind like a camera had seen all of the room, everything in it, and it was all still there.

  He shook Sidney awake. ‘Sidney… there’s something you have to do for me.’

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Seven. Well, six fifty-four.’

 
‘I never open my eyes until nine. I’m retired, remember.’

  ‘Sidney, I really need your help.’

  At last, with his hair sticking up at the back, and his eyes as glutinous as two freshly opened clams, Sidney sat up. ‘What is it, for Pete’s sake?’

  Conor sat down on the bed beside him. ‘We’re looking for Hypnos and Hetti, right?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘They won’t be going back to the Rialto Theater, so what we have to do is track them down.’

  ‘You’re the detective, Conor. You track them down. I’m nothing but a hypnotist; and a retired hypnotist at that.’

  He pulled the blanket over his head and started to breathe with exaggerated harshness.

  Conor waited for a few moments, and then he said, ‘I have this feeling … are you listening, Sidney? I have this feeling that I saw something. A clue. Maybe not even a clue. An indication, I don’t know.’

  Sidney sat up again. ‘What indication?’

  ‘When Magda Slanic opened the door of dressing-room eleven … I didn’t want to catch her eyes because I was afraid that she was going to hypnotize me … but I saw the whole dressing-room, in intense detail, and I really have this feeling that—’

  ‘I know. You really have this feeling that if I could hypnotize you, then you’d remember it all. Am I right?’

  ‘You’re right,’ Conor admitted. ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘Because I’ve had people coming to me for thirty years trying to remember stuff that they’ve lost. “It’s there someplace, I put it right down” – “It’s on the tip of my tongue” – and they’ve paid me to hypnotize them to find out what they’ve forgotten. Sometimes it works out good. You help them to locate a wedding ring, or a piece of jewelry. Then it’s all kisses and free champagne.’

  ‘Sidney, hypnotize me. Take me back to yesterday afternoon, when we went to the Rialto. Take me back to the moment when Hetti opened the door.’

  ‘I don’t think so, Conor. You’ve already had your cerebral cortex messed up by burundanga. It’s not going to do you any good, especially in your state of mind.’

  ‘I don’t have a choice, do I?’

  Sidney dragged his blanket aside and stood up. He was wearing a long pink T-shirt with a red stencil of the Golden Gate Bridge on it. His toes were as dry and hairy as tree roots. ‘OK … if that’s what you want. Sit quiet. Sit still. Breathe deeply. Try to relax.’

  ‘I’m relaxed,’ Conor told him.

  ‘Oh, no you’re not. In fact you’re very tense. But that isn’t a problem. You need to learn negative things as well as positive things. You need to learn that you can forget things even more easily than you can remember them. Do you know what Erickson used to say to me? In teaching students at medical school, you can tell them, most impressively, “The exam will be held on Thursday in room seventeen in building C and it will begin at two p.m.” And as you turn to leave the classroom you can see the students leaning toward each other and saying “What day?” “What room?” “What building?” “What time?” They heard what you said, but they immediately forgot it.

  ‘The information is there, though, and it’s still possible to retrieve it. You simply have to relax and go back to the most memorable moment immediately preceding the incident that you want to remember.’

  ‘I tried to hypnotize the cab driver,’ said Conor. ‘It didn’t work so I tipped him and climbed out of the cab. Ric went to the stage door and rang the bell.’

  Sidney sat beside him. ‘Then what happened?’ he asked. With the tip of one finger he stroked the knuckles of Conor’s right hand. The feeling was soothing and disturbing at the same time: men didn’t normally touch each other like this.

  Sammy opened the door – Conor could see him nodding his head and moving his lips, but he couldn’t hear what he was saying. Now they were following Sammy into the theater. Conor was quite aware of Sebastian’s apartment all around him, quite aware of Sidney’s presence, but he was walking along the theater corridor, too, as clearly as if he were actually there.

  ‘You reach the dressing-room door,’ said Sidney. ‘You hesitate for a while. Then the door opens and Magda Slanic appears.’

  I see her. She’s all dressed in black.

  ‘She’s trying to hold your attention. But forget about her. Move past her into the room and take a look around. Do it slow. Take all the time you need.’

  Conor went into the dressing-room. On the back of the couch was the cascade of clothes that he had seen before. On the dressing-table was a jumbled array of foundation creams and lip glosses and eyeliners. He found that if he scrutinized them very carefully, he could even read the brand names on them. Revlon, Christian Dior, Oil of Olay.

  I see clothing. I see cosmetics.’

  ‘What else do you see? Do you see any letters, any tickets, any pieces of paper?’

  Three empty vodka bottles. An ashtray. A crumpled pack of Marlboro. A half-eaten chocolate fudge cake in an Entenmann’s carton. Something else. A bottle of tablets. He leaned forward and peered at the label. Ms Magda Slanic. Phenelzine. Kaufman Pharmacy, Lexington Avenue and 50th Street, NY 10022. Telephone 755 2266.

  He blinked and he was out of his trance. ‘Give me that pen,’ he told Sidney. ‘I have to write this down before I forget it. Phenelzine.’

  At that moment there was a soft knock at the door and Eleanor put her head in. ‘I heard you talking… I couldn’t sleep.’

  ‘Come on in,’ said Conor. He passed her the slip of paper on which he had written the name of Magda Slanic’s prescription. ‘Do you have any idea what this is?’

  ‘Monoamine oxidase inhibitor,’ she nodded. ‘It’s a fairly common type of antidepressant. My sister used to take it after her husband left her. The creep.’

  ‘So Hetti’s depressed,’ said Sidney. ‘Who wouldn’t be, the kind of life she’s living?’

  ‘That’s not the point,’ said Conor. ‘Depression is a long-term condition, right? From what I saw of that bottle, there were only a few capsules remaining. That means that Hetti may soon be going back to the Kaufman Pharmacy for more.’

  ‘You’re not suggesting we stake it out?’ asked Sidney, although there was a hint of excitement in his voice.

  ‘Are you kidding? The Kaufman Pharmacy is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No, I can do better than that. I know most of the guys that work there. When I was on undercover work, I was always in and out for coffee and a sandwich. All I’m going to do is ask them to call me the next time Magda Slanic makes an appearance.’

  ‘It sounds like kind of a long shot to me,’ said Eleanor.

  ‘It is. But long shots are the only kind of shots I’ve got.’

  Chapter 19

  He was early for his appointment in Central Park. It was crowded outside the entrance to the Children’s Zoo: a party of schoolkids had arrived, and they were chasing each other around and screaming and laughing. Conor stayed up against the wall and kept his eyes open for the man in the Panama hat.

  Two cops walked slowly past him, and one of them eyed him up and down suspiciously. He almost felt like saying, you don’t have to worry about me, officer. I’m not a pedophile, I’m just a garden-variety fugitive.

  At 11:35 precisely, a slightly built fiftyish man in a white short-sleeved shirt and sunglasses appeared. He was wearing a Panama hat with a red headband and carrying a magazine under his arm. He stopped in the middle of the chaos of children, and looked around nervously.

  Conor didn’t step out and introduce himself right away. He checked the surroundings for anybody who looked as if they might be a plainclothes cop or a bodyguard or even a hit man. But all he could see were nannies with grizzling children and harassed teachers and a cleaner with a Walkman doing a balletic rap dance while he collected up cigarette butts.

  Eventually, Conor left the shadow of the wall and weaved his way through the scuffling children, knocking sharply against the man’s elbow. The man swung around and said, ‘Hey—!
’ but he instantly recognized Conor and took an unsteady step back.

  Conor held up a large yellow envelope. He didn’t have any idea who the man was or what his papers contained, but he was twitchy and clearly exhausted, and his anxiety was pitched like a dog-whistle, undetectable to anybody but him, but keeping his nerve endings constantly on edge.

  ‘When the money’s gone through, I get everything back? That’s the deal, right?’

  Conor said nothing. He simply didn’t know what to say. He handed over the envelope and the man tore it open and peered inside. ‘Shit,’ he said. Then he looked up at Conor and shook his head. ‘I used to think you were some kind of a hero. That’s rich, isn’t it?’

  Conor said, ‘Just organize the payment, OK? The sooner this is all over, the better.’

  ‘You goddamned crook,’ the man snarled at him.

  Conor would have given anything to be able to tell him the truth. But all he could do was turn and walk away, leaving the man standing amidst the children with his envelope clutched in his hands. Conor thought: I may seem like a crook, but God alone knows what sins are revealed in those papers, that you’re prepared to pay $5 million to get them back.

  He was walking toward the 64th Street entrance when suddenly he heard a child’s voice cry out, ‘Daddy!’

  Every daddy in the English-speaking world is called Daddy, so he kept on walking. But then he heard pattering footsteps coming up behind him. He turned, and it was Fay. Dark haired, wide eyed, in a pink summer dress, all arms and legs and tooth-braces.

  ‘Hey, I can’t believe it! It’s the sugar plum fairy!’ He picked her up and swung her around and held her tight.

  ‘Daddy, what are you doing here? Mommy said you were locked up in prison!’

  ‘Prison? Me? Phooey! Only criminals get locked up in prison!’

  ‘I saw you on the news. They said the cops were looking for you.’

  He squinched up his nose. ‘Complete mix-up. You know how stupid the cops are. I should know. I used to be one.’ He narrowed his eyes against the bright sunlight and looked around. ‘Where’s your mother? You’re not on your own, are you?’