I moved on to the walls and chipped at the joins between the stones with a chunk from the broken column. I got nowhere. The granite blocks had been keyed together with molten lead poured between the cracks. This cistern had stood for a couple of thousand years at least – unlikely it was going to come down in the next day or so. Made me wonder what’d be left from our own civilisation a couple of millennia from now, aside from plastic bags, car tyres and divorce statistics.
Okay, so the one way out was up and through that hole; only, the roof was well out of reach. I looked up at it. I thought maybe, if it rained enough, the place might fill with water and we could swim out. But the stonework was stained with mineral deposits up to a height level with my hip – a high-water mark that wasn’t near high enough even if there was a convenient flood that arrived before we died of starvation.
There were no doors. We had no tools. No food. No fire. No means of contact with the outside world.
Masters read my thoughts. ‘Yeah, I know. I’ve had most of the day to think about it and I keep coming up with dead ends, too.’
‘Interesting choice of words,’ I said. ‘What about Cain?’
‘We told him where we were going, but not when to expect us back. Might take a few days before he raises the alarm and when he does, it’s not like he’s going to send a rescue here to this place. Hell, I don’t even know where here is.’
‘So then it’s up to us,’ I said, lost in my own thoughts. I found myself staring at the bones neatly laid out on the mound of earth and collapsed stonework. A couple of frogs hopped between some ribs. Masters, despondent, went to oversee our water-storage facilities.
I went over and picked through the scraps of rotting clothing that remained. From the style and age, I figured that the skeleton inside them belonged to a guy who had fallen into this place around three years ago. The bones themselves were dry and clean, without being brittle. A farmer, or maybe a shepherd. The poor sap had landed hard and snapped his tibia and fibula. At least Masters and I had both been spared that kind of injury. I wondered how long he’d managed to hold on. Perhaps he’d died quick.
I moved what was left of his jacket. There were other skeletons mingled with his – four, to be exact. I picked up one of the skulls for a closer look. It was small, the size of a large walnut, pointed at one end, with four yellow interlocking, chisel-like teeth. ‘Rats,’ I said, thinking aloud.
‘You say something?’ Masters asked.
I looked up, dropped the skull into the drink. ‘What? Nope. The frogs, most like . . .’ Given Masters’ fear of rodents, my thinking was not what she needed to hear right at the moment. When this guy was dying – or if he was lucky, after he’d gone and collected his harp – rats had paid him a visit. Maybe like him they’d accidentally fallen in. I gave the hole above another glance. Maybe the guy’s distress as he lay slowly dying had brought them running. Whatever, the animals had feasted on him.
I continued the walk around, doing it a step at time like I was pacing out a crime scene. I found quite a few more bones belonging to critters that had probably just fallen in rather than been summoned by the prospect of fresh meat: the remains of a couple of snakes, half-a-dozen squirrels, a couple of rabbits, plus seven more rat skeletons. There was also a large mound of bat guano in one corner. It crawled with bugs. There were no bats here now. Maybe they made their home in the cistern during the warmer months. The whole pet-cemetery thing didn’t bother me so much. What did worry me was that all these animals had died here, which meant they’d been unable to find a way out. And if snakes and, especially, rats hadn’t been able to escape this place, what chance did Masters and I have?
We were cold and hungry. And both of us knew this would be just the beginning of the ordeal. Night had come down five hours ago. The stars were bright enough to throw a thin shaft of ghost light through the hole. We sat huddled together in the shaft for the meagre comfort that being able to see our own noses provided. The rest of the cistern was immersed in a darkness thick enough to ladle into a bowl. Masters’ teeth were chattering. ‘You mind turning the heater up?’ she stuttered.
Gladly. I wrapped my arms around her and squeezed.
‘I haven’t th-thanked you,’ she said as we clung together.
‘Thanked me for what?’
‘Yafa. When that bitch was all over me. You tried to stop her.’
‘Sounds out of character,’ I replied. ‘I’m usually all for a little girl-on-girl action.’
Masters punched me in the arm. After a while she said, ‘At the time, when it was happening, I felt angry and degraded. I just stood there, frozen.’
‘Try not to let it worry you. From what you’ve just told me, you played smart, played dead.’
‘I guess . . . Now, in this place, the assault – the helplessness I felt – doesn’t seem so important. But if I ever get my hands on that goddamn freak show . . .’
‘Can I watch?’
I earned another couple of punches. Masters’ teeth stopped chattering. She was warming up, which was good. She was also expending excess energy, which was bad.
I remembered the gun in my mouth and the shock of the click, click, click. ‘Did you get a good look at the odd-looking handgun I was chewing on?’ I asked. ‘Ever seen one of them before?’ It was all angles and bumps – a distinctive weapon.
‘No. You’re right, though. It was an odd-looking thing.’
‘It was Israeli. Called a Barak. They designed it for their armed forces, but the weapon didn’t catch on.’
‘Israeli,’ she said. ‘Now, there’s a word that keeps popping up. And, while I think about it, so does the word “Mossad”.’
Masters was right about that, but I still found it hard to believe those jerks were on its payroll. The Mossad I knew, Israel’s secret external security agency, was arguably the toughest and most determined organisation of its type in the world, their agents steeled by a fight to the death with neighbours committed to their homeland’s destruction. They were hard-asses, not psychopaths.
‘Hey, I’ve got one Jewish joke. Want to hear it?’
‘Like I can escape,’ she said, teeth chattering.
‘Okay – so it’s the close of the tax year and the IRS sends an inspector to audit the books of a synagogue. While he’s going through them, he turns to the rabbi and says, “I notice you buy lots of candles. What do you do with the wax drippings?”
‘“Good question,” says the rabbi. “We save them up and send them back to the candle-makers, and every now and then they send us a free box of candles.”
‘“Really,” replies the auditor, disappointed his tricky question had a practical answer. “What about all these bread wafers? You’re going to have crumbs, what do you do with them?”
‘“Ah, yes,” replies the rabbi, realising the inspector’s trying to trap him with an unanswerable question. “We collect them and send them back to the manufacturer, and every now and then they send us a free box of bread wafers.”
‘“I see,” says the auditor, now determined to fluster this smart-ass rabbi. “Well, Rabbi, what do you do with all the leftover foreskins from the circumcisions you perform?”
‘The rabbi responds, “Here, too, we do not waste. What we do is save the foreskins and send them to the IRS. And then they thoughtfully send us back a complete prick.”’
Masters got her teeth under control. ‘Please don’t make this any harder than it already is. Hunger and exposure I can deal with . . .’
‘Y’know, seriously, and not that I’m going to send in a complaint about it, but I don’t understand why those assholes didn’t just put a bullet in our brains before dropping us down here.’
‘Vin, if we’re still down here in a week’s time, we might wish they had.’
Thirty-one
We must have both dozed off eventually despite the cold and hunger, because when I woke, the darkness had disappeared and the rest of the cistern had materialised. Masters and I were spooning on the damp eart
h.
Through the hole above, morning delivered a triangle of sunlight that hung high on the wall. Masters had been calling out in her sleep, dreaming. I lay still for another twenty minutes, all my joints locked up solid with the wet cold, thinking long and hard about Korean barbecue beef. Her dream having passed, I listened to her breathing and wondered how the fuck we were going to turn this one around.
Masters finally woke, stretched a little, and said, ‘Jesus, I feel like shit.’
‘Shit we’ve got plenty of. Lucky you didn’t ask for coffee.’
She groaned and lay still – in my arms.
‘What happened to Richard?’ I asked.
‘What?’
‘You were dreaming. You kept repeating, “It’s over, Richard. Take a hike.”’
‘Yeah, right.’
‘Seriously, you had a dream.’
‘I don’t remember it.’
‘Just before you woke up, you were struggling with something, and it was making you angry. You called out Richard’s name a couple of times. “You lying fucker”, something like that. I think “asshole” was in there somewhere, too. Sure sounded to me like you were talking to Richard. Who else could it have been?’ I noticed the dripping sound had all but stopped. ‘You can tell me. You know, Anna, dreams are a window into your heart.’
‘Jesus, Vin . . .’
‘Okay, then – into your soul. Somewhere, at any rate.’
‘It’s over.’
‘What’s over?’
‘Richard and I. Short and not so sweet.’
‘You want to tell me what happened?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Look, my intention was to ride off into the sunset when all this finished. It’s not like you’d have been expecting a wedding invitation. Anyway, as I think you might have guessed, not everything was happy in paradise. We had a fight. You were right – he didn’t appreciate me looking through his case notes, going through his computer files. Caught me in the act, basically. Accused me of espionage – spying on him for you on behalf of the plaintiffs. We argued about his position, about the effect the case was having on so many people. Like your friend Tyler, for instance.’
‘What happened to all the crap about attorneys, the system?’ I asked.
‘I haven’t changed my point of view, but there’s a difference between defence and running interference. And, yes, you were right about Richard when you said I didn’t know him. We had a fling in a beautiful city a few years back. That’s all it was. That’s where we should have left it.’
I had nothing to say – at least, nothing she’d appreciate hearing. I was somewhere between breaking into applause on the one hand, and being angry at her for putting me through the mill on the other. Her feelings weren’t my fault, but her engagement to Wadding was nonetheless a kind of punishment directed squarely at me. And if she’d gone through with it, married the jerk, she’d have been stuck with him. I recalled the last time I’d seen Wadding, the confrontation we’d had when he was coming out of the elevator at the Charisma. It’s the way she shudders when she comes.
Masters squeezed my hand. ‘Don’t say anything, please, Vin. I’m annoyed with myself enough as it is . . . Well, I suppose we should get up.’
‘You got a pressing engagement someplace?’
Masters shifted her arm beneath her head, but otherwise didn’t move.
‘So why didn’t we go the distance?’ I asked. ‘The real reasons. And don’t give me any of that tyranny-of-distance bullshit.’
Masters turned to face me. ‘You want the real reason, Vin? It was too intense, our relationship. The way we met, the investigation at Ramstein, the shooting of the Vice-President, the car accident, and then the recovery.’
I was about to interrupt when she held up a hand to stop me.
‘Y’ know, I’ve had a little speech prepared for this moment – if it ever arrived. So don’t interrupt me. If you do, I’ll forget it.’ She got it set in her head before continuing. ‘I lost myself when I was with you. I wanted to know what you were doing when we weren’t together. And when we were together, I almost couldn’t bear it – the tearing apart afterwards. And then we’d be back on opposite sides of the planet again and all I’d be able to think about was you. I couldn’t function, even after we’d agreed to call it quits. My feelings for you were destructive and I needed badly to move on. I wanted less passion, Vin . . . and I wanted more control. Control over myself, mainly, but also over whoever I was with.’
I let that sink in. She was right about the passion – the depth of feeling. It consumed a lot of my time and energy too. And still did. ‘Can I ask you something?’
‘I’ll let you know after you’ve asked it,’ she replied.
‘Why Wadding?’
‘Honestly? I don’t know. He was Johnny-on-the-spot, I suppose. He was good-looking, wealthy, great career prospects . . . He was the kind of guy I always thought I’d end up marrying. He fit the mould. My mom and dad were going to love him.’
‘What about you? Were you going to love him too?’
‘We’d had romance, I felt secure with him . . . I believed – wanted to believe – that love would develop further down the track.’
And then I kissed her. It was a small kiss at first, nothing passionate. But it was like a pilot light beneath the furnace because suddenly there was a whomp and the main burners lit up and our hands began to move. Her fingers unhooked the buttons on my fly. I did the same to hers. Her shirt came out. Her tongue. I ripped the crotch from her underwear getting them off. An ear. Her hair. Her tongue. A handful of ass – hers. I wanted to eat her, climb inside her. She pulled my hair, cupped my testicles. There was an explosion building with each hurried breath.
I heard a splash. And then another. Ignored it. A third splash. Masters screamed. With ecstasy, I thought – until I got an accidental knee in the nuts a couple of seconds later. She was pushing me away, pointing, glaring in horror at something moving around in the water.
‘Jesus, Anna, you really know how to –’ I saw the eyes first, two red coals the size of cigarette embers swimming a figure-eight in the gloom, getting oriented. Rats.
A black shape sat up on its scrawny hind legs in the shallow water and nibbled at something between its front claws. The animal sniffed at the air, ran around in a circle, then swam for the dead man’s bones. It climbed onto the dirt and rubble, took up a position on top of the human skull and crouched. It squealed next, a high-pitched sound like nails down a blackboard. Its buddies formed up around it, answering the call.
We glared at each other across the shallow lake: them and us. The fuckers appeared to be waiting for something. Probably for us to hurry up and die.
‘Ever eaten rat?’ I said out loud for their benefit as I stood up. ‘They say it tastes like rat.’
One of them squealed. Masters had pulled her clothing together and was sitting with her arms wrapped around her knees like any moment she might start rocking.
I wondered what had brought the animals. Did they smell us or hear us? Or did they just happen to fall in, lemming-like, following the boss rat there sitting up on the skull?
I had woken with half an idea in my head – a way to get out. The granite in the walls was harder than the marble columns. I walked towards the rats, which scampered back into the water before I had the chance to use one of them as a football. I then picked up two of the broken granite blocks from the dead guy’s final resting place and took them over to the column. Using one as a hammer and the other as a chisel, I started chipping away below the high-water mark where the stone might be a little softer. The outer layer of marble, about a quarter of an inch thick, flaked off reasonably easily but, like an onion, there was another layer beneath, this one not so compliant. ‘Anna,’ I called. ‘Need a hand here.’
After a little consideration, Masters came over, wary, keeping a lookout for her own personal nightmare, but the rats were lying low, out of sight, biding their ti
me.
Seven hours and six pulverised granite blocks later, what remained of the column where I’d been chipping away reminded me of an apple core. We just had to take out the centre and my theory held that the column should fall, bringing down enough of the unsupported roof and in such a way that we’d be able to climb out. Of course, the whole roof might also collapse and crush the juice out of every living thing below it – a thought that had begun to dawn on me at about hour five.
When Masters was back hugging the wall furthest from the column, I started taking out the last three inches of marble, hefting rocks at it from a couple of yards away. I missed the target more times than I hit it. The light faded, leaving Masters and me with three rats that kept us awake all night with their inconsiderate squeaking and squabbling. Fighting, perhaps, over who was going to take that first irresistible bite.
This was our second night in the cistern, and it went by a second at a time, all forty-three thousand two hundred of them. And now each one of those seconds was like a splinter under the fingernails. Masters screamed when one of the rats jumped over her feet into the water. The scream was F-16-like. The rodents kept their distance after that, no doubt fearing permanent hearing damage.
The sun came out eventually, mercifully, and lit our tomb. I was up with the first rays, surveying the remains of the column. I chose five granite blocks I knew I could throw a couple of yards, lined them up and waited for the light to increase. Masters took up her position against the wall.
I threw the first block. Missed. Second block struck a glancing blow, below the sweet spot. Third block missed. Same with the fourth block, disappointing my inner quarterback. I threw the fifth block. It struck clean.
The top two-thirds of the column dropped away, struck the base with a boom, rolled, splintered, the pieces splashing into the water with such force that the vibration came up through the rock floor. I reached Masters in two jumps.
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