by Ian Rankin
“That sounds,” Hoffer said, finishing the hooch, “like a crock of twenty-karat-gold-plated shit.”
“There are papers in the safe.”
“And you can open it?” I nodded. “Go on then.”
He followed me to the telephone. There were a lot of scribbles on the message pad, a lot of numbers and letters. I found what I wanted and tore the top sheet off, taking it with me to the wall safe.
“Bullshit.” Hoffer sneered disbelievingly as I read from the sheet and started turning the dial. I pulled on the handle and opened the safe slowly.
I looked inside, knowing if he wanted to see, he’d have to come right up behind my back. I could feel him behind me. He was close, but was he close enough? If I swung at him, would I connect with anything other than air? Then I saw what was in the safe. There were papers there, and a tidy bundle of banknotes.
But there was also a snub-nosed revolver, a beautiful little .38. I made my decision, but made it too late. The butt of a gun connected with the back of my head, and my legs collapsed from under me.
I woke up cramped, like I’d been sleeping in a car. I blinked open my eyes and remembered where I was. I looked around. The pain behind my eyes was agony. I wondered if Hoffer had been in there and done some do-it-yourself surgery while I’d been out.
Maybe a spot of trepanning.
I was in a bright white bathroom with a sunken whirlpool bath and gold taps. I was over by the sink, sitting on the cold tiled floor with my arms behind me. My arms were stiff. I looked round and saw that they were handcuffed round a couple of copper water pipes beneath the sink. My feet had been tied together with a man’s brown leather belt.
Most disconcerting of all, Hoffer was sitting on the toilet not three feet away.
He had his trousers on though. And he’d put the toilet lid down so he’d be more comfortable. He had my money belt slung over one shoulder, and he was leafing through some documents.
“Well, Mike,” he said, “looks like you were right, huh? Some fucking business, handed five mil by the government. Thank you very much and shalom. Jesus.” He patted his jacket pocket. “Yet the scumbag only kept five thou in his safe. Still, it’ll buy a few lunches. And thanks for your donation.” He tossed the money belt toward me. “I’ve left you the traveler’s checks. I don’t want to get into any forgery shit. Not that they accept traveler’s checks where you’re headed.”
I rattled the handcuffs.
“Good, aren’t they? New York PD issue. Before they went over to plastic or whatever shit they use now. Look, I’ll leave the key over here, okay?” He put it on the floor beside him. “There you go. It’ll give you something to do while you’re dying. Of course, you may already be dying, huh? I whacked you pretty good. There could be some internal hemorrhaging going on.
See, I know about hemophilia, I did some reading. Man, they’re this close to a cure, huh? Genetics and stuff. Fuck all those liber-als trying to stop laboratory experiments. Mike, we need more of those lab animals with holes drilled in their scrotums and wires running through them like they’re circuit boards or something.”
“Circuit boards don’t have wires, Leo. At least, not many.”
“Ooh, pardon me, Professor.” He laughed and rubbed his nose. I knew he’d done some drugs since I’d last been conscious, but I couldn’t tell what. He was feeling pretty good though, I could see that. Good enough to let me live? Well, he hadn’t killed me yet. He stood up and opened the medicine cabinet.
“All this organic shit,” he muttered, picking out bottles and rattling them. He half-turned toward me. “I get a fucking earache when I fly. And it’s all your fault I’ve been doing so much flying of late.”
“My heart bleeds.”
Now he grinned. “You can say that again. So Kline set you up, huh?”
“Provost says he didn’t.”
“Well, somebody did. As soon as I heard you’d been asking the producer and the lawyer what clothes Eleanor Ricks usually wore, I knew the road you were going.”
“Then you’re cleverer than me.”
“Whoever paid you knew what she’d be wearing, didn’t they?”
“Yes.”
“Well, Mike, that kind of narrows things down, doesn’t it?”
It struck me that the problem was I hadn’t let myself narrow it down enough. Too late now, way too late . . .
“So,” I said, “you know I’m a hemo. And you’re right, a simple knock on the head might just do it.”
“But I know something that’d do it a lot better.” He came over, crouching in front of me. He had something in his hand.
When he unfolded it, I saw a short fat blade. It was a damned pocketknife.
“Beautiful, isn’t it? Look, there’s a serpent running down its back. That’s the trademark. Talk about Pittsburgh steel, man, this is a piece of steel.”
“What are you going to do?”
“You know what I’m going to do, D-Man. I’m going to demolish you. The death of a thousand cuts. Well, maybe just a dozen or so.”
I started to wriggle then, pulling at the pipes, trying to wrench them away from the wall. Kicking out with my tied-together legs. He just crouched there and grinned. His pupils were pinpoints of darkness. He swiped and the first cut caught me across the cheek. There was nothing for a second, then a slow sizzling sensation which kept on intensifying. I felt the blood begin to run down my face. His second slice got my upper arm, and a short jab opened my chest. I was still wrestling to get free, but it was useless. He hit my legs next, more or less cutting and stabbing at will. He wasn’t frenzied. He was quite calm, quite controlled. I stopped struggling, hard though it was.
“Leo, this isn’t any way to settle it.”
“It’s the perfect way to settle it.”
“Christ, shoot me, but don’t do this. ”
“I’m already doing it. Slice and dice. And . . . voilà!” He stood back to admire his work, wiping the blade on some toilet paper. I couldn’t count the number of cuts on my body. There were over a dozen. They all hurt, but none was actually going to bleed me dry, not on its own. But all together . . . well, all together I was in deep shit. My shirt was already soaked in blood, and there was a smear of red beneath me on the tiles.
“Leo,” I said. Something in my voice made him look at me.
“Please don’t do this.”
“The magic word,” Leo Hoffer said. Then he walked out of the bathroom.
“Leo! Leo!”
But he was gone. I knew that. I heard the front door close quietly. Then I saw the handcuff key. I stretched my feet toward it, but was a good ten to twelve inches shy. I slid down onto the floor, nearly taking my arms out of their sockets, and tried again, but I was still an inch or two away from it. I lay there, exhausted, pain flooding over me. Hemophiliacs don’t bleed faster than other people, we just don’t stop once we’ve started. I was a mild case, but even so there was only so much clotting my body could do for me. Leo must’ve known that. He knew so much about me.
“You sonofabitch!”
I sat up again and twisted the chain linking my cuffs. Every chain had its weakest link, but I wasn’t going to find it, not like this. I looked up. Resting on the sink were a toothbrush and tube of toothpaste, and a small bar of soap, like something you’d lift from your hotel room. Soap: maybe I could grease my wrists and slip off the handcuffs. Except that there was no give at all in the cuffs. I’ve always had skinny wrists, much skinnier than my hands. No way this side of the grave was I going to be able to slip my hands out, soap or no soap.
I sat back against the wall and tried to think. I thought of a lot of things, all of them brilliant, and in the movies one of them would have worked. But this was a bathroom floor in Seattle, and all I was doing here was dying.
Then the front door opened.
“Hey!” I yelled. “In here!”
Who did I expect to see? Bel, of course. I’d almost expected she’d follow me here, once she’d got Spike to the ho
spital.
“In here!” I yelled again.
“I know where you are, dummy,” said Hoffer. He stood in the doorway, hands on hips. He was a big bastard, but not as big as he looked on TV. He gave me a good look, like I was a drunk cluttering up the hall of his apartment building. He was deciding whether to kick me or throw me a dime.
He threw me the dime.
Rather, he stepped on the key with the tip of his shoe and slid it closer to me.
“Hey,” he said, “what’s life without a bit of fun? Now I want you to do me a favor.”
“What?”
He was fumbling in his pocket, and eventually drew out a small camera. “Look dead for me.”
“What?”
“Play dead. It’s got to convince Walkins, so make it good.
The blood looks right, but I need a slumped head, splayed legs, you know the sort of thing I mean.”
I stared at him. Was he playing with me? Hard to tell. His eyes were dark, mostly unfocused. He looked like he could burst into song or tears. He looked a bit confused.
I let my head slump against my chest. He fired off a few shots from different angles, and even clambered up onto the toilet seat to take one. The noise of the camera motor winding the film seemed almost laughably incongruous. Here I was bleeding like a pig while someone took snuff photos from a toilet seat.
“That’s a wrap,” he said at last. “Hey, did I tell you? Joe Draper’s going to make a documentary of my life. Maybe we’ll talk about my charity work, huh?”
“You’re all heart, Leo.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
He turned to walk away, but then thought of something. He kept his back to me as he spoke.
“You going to come gunning for me, Mikey?”
“No,” I said, not sure if I meant it. “I’m finished with that.”
I found to my surprise that I did mean it. He glanced over his shoulder and seemed satisfied.
“Well,” he said, “I’ve done some thinking about that, too. See, I could break your hand up a bit, take the fingers out of the sockets, smash the wrist. But the body has a way of repairing itself.”
“I swear, Leo, I’m not—”
“So instead of that, just in case, I’m putting contracts out on your parents. If I buy it, they buy it too.”
“There’s no need for that.”
“And your friend Bel, too, same deal. My little insurance policy. It doesn’t exactly cover everything, but it’ll have to do.”
He made to walk away.
“Hoffer,” I said. He stopped. “Same question: are you going to come gunning for me?”
“Not if you stay dead. Get a fucking day job, Mike. Stack shelves or something. Sell burgers. I’m going to tell Walkins I wasted you. I’m hoping he’ll go for it. I’m losing my best client, but this ought to help.” He patted his pocket again, where the money was. “I may tell a few other people too.”
I smiled. “You mean the media.”
“I’ve got a living to make, Mike. With you dead, I need all the publicity I can get.”
“Go ahead, Hoffer, shout it from the rooftops.”
“I’m going.”
And he went. I got the key, but even so it was hell unlocking the cuffs. How did Houdini do it? Maybe if you could dislocate your wrist or something . . . Eventually I got them off and staggered out of the bathroom, only to fall to my knees in the hallway. I was crawling toward the door when it opened again, very slowly. I saw first one foot, then the other. The feet were dressed in shit-kicker cowboy boots.
“Michael!” Bel screamed. “What happened?”
She took my head in her hands.
“Got a Band-Aid?” I asked.
TWENTY-NINE
Hoffer went back to New York with nine and a half grand in his pocket and Provost’s papers in his case.
He didn’t know if he’d ever do anything with those papers.
They were worth something, no doubt about that. But they were dangerous too. You only had to look at the D-Man to see that.
The press were going to town on the Seattle story. Shoot-out at the home of the Disciples of Love. Hoffer could see there was a lot the authorities weren’t saying. Even so, it didn’t take long for the majority of the bodies to be identified as current and ex-employees of the security services. The explanation seemed to be that Kline, an embittered ex-employee, had somehow persuaded some of the current staff to work for him, and the whole lot of them were involved in some dubious way with the Disciples of Love. Sure, and the Tooth Fairy lives on West 53rd.
Nobody was mentioning the ten mil or the Middle East.
Hoffer didn’t go to the office for a couple of days, and when he did he thought better of it after half a flight of stairs. After all, heights gave him an earache. So he retreated instead to the diner across the street. The place was full of bums nursing never-ending cups of coffee. They’d discovered the secret of life, and they were tired of it. A couple of them nodded at Hoffer as he went in, like he was back where he belonged.
Donna the waitress was there, and she nodded a greeting to him too, like he’d been there every day without fail. She brought him coffee and the phone, and he called up to his secretary.
“I’m down here, Moira.”
“Now there’s a surprise.”
“Bring me the latest updates and paperwork, messages, mail, all that shit. We’ll deal with it here, okay?” He put down the phone and ordered ham and eggs, the eggs scrambled. Outside, New York was doing its New York thing, busy with energy and excess and people just trying to get by if they couldn’t get ahead.
“More coffee?”
“Thanks, Donna.”
She’d been serving him for a year, best part of, and still she never showed interest, never asked how he was doing or what he’d been doing. He’d bet she didn’t even remember his name.
He was just a customer who sometimes made a local call and tipped her well for the service. That was it. That was all he was.
Jesus, it was going to be hard getting by without the D-Man.
The parents, he should never have talked to the parents.
They’d made the guy too real, too human. They’d stripped away all the cunning and the menace and had confronted him with photos of a gangly awkward youth with skinny arms and a lop-sided grin. Photos on the beach, in the park, waving from the driver’s seat of Pop’s car.
He should never have gone. He hadn’t explained what he was doing there. He’d mumbled some explanation about their son maybe being witness to a crime, but now nobody could find him.
They didn’t seem to care, so long as he wasn’t hurt.
No, he wasn’t hurt, not much. But he’d done some damage in Washington State.
Hoffer knew the parents weren’t the only reason, but they were an excusable one. He didn’t really know why he hadn’t killed the D-Man. Maybe he didn’t want another death on his hands. He’d told Michael Weston he’d never killed anyone. That wasn’t strictly true.
Hoffer had been killing himself for years.
The papers, of course, did not connect the D-Man to any of the stuff about Kline and Provost. Hoffer could have done that for them, but he chose not to. Instead he was biding his time. He was waiting for a lull in the news, when empty pages and screen time were screaming out to be filled. That was the time for him to step forward with his story and maybe even his photos, all about tracking down the D-Man and killing him. There was no body to show, of course, so Hoffer must’ve disposed of it in some way.
He’d think of something.
Meantime, he fed on the newspapers, on fresh twists about a man admitted to a local hospital with a gunshot wound. Of a mystery woman who dumped him there. Then there was Provost’s luxury Seattle town house. How to explain the blood on the bathroom floor or the pair of metal handcuffs hanging around a water pipe?
“Better than the movies,” he said to himself, just as Donna arrived with his food.
“You say something?”
&
nbsp; “Yeah,” said Hoffer, “I said would you go to the movies with me some night?”
“In your dreams, sweetheart,” she said, “in your dreams.”
part four
THIRTY
Not only did Spike walk out of that hospital having said nothing about how he came by his injuries, not only did he find that his bills had been taken care of, but he tracked down the authorities holding on to the Trans Am and managed to wheedle it out of them. He sent me a photo by the usual route. It showed Jazz and him leaning against the car. Scrawled over the photo were the words A little piece of heaven.
Me, I claimed I was a tourist attacked by assailants who were after my traveler’s checks. Nobody really cared, they were too busy keeping an eye on the affair out on the Olympic Peninsula.
Everyone had a theory. They were all far-fetched and they were all more feasible than the truth. Well, all except the one published in the Weekly World News.
A package arrived one day at Sam Clancy’s hospital bed. It contained his Walkman with a tape already inserted and ready to play. I didn’t know what Sam would do with Jeremiah Provost’s confession. It wasn’t really my concern, not anymore.
As soon as we could, Bel and I got out of the U.S.A. Back in London, we spent a night in a hotel, then she headed back to Yorkshire. She had a lot of stuff to clear up. She wondered if I knew anyone who’d buy half a ton of unwanted weaponry.
Oh, I could think of a few people.
*
*
*
It was a drizzly London morning when I turned up at the offices of Crispin, Darnforth, Jessup. I shook rain out of my hair as I walked up the stairs. I knocked on the door before entering, and smiled as I approached the secretary’s desk.
“Mr. Johns, please.” She frowned and removed her spectacles.
“Is he expecting you?”
“I’m not sure.” She waited for me to say more, but I just stood there smiling and dripping water onto the pastel pink carpet.
“I’m afraid he can’t see anyone without an appointment. He’s very busy today.”
“He’ll see me.” I could see my smile was beginning to irritate her. She stuck her glasses back on, pushing them up the bridge of her nose.
