“Do you feel privileged?”
“It’s a privilege. But I have to tell you, man to man, that I’m scared. It’s hard to concentrate when you’re scared. If you have a great idea, you wouldn’t have to scare me for me to really be impressed.”
“Man to man. Man to man. You use that expression to imply frankness, Mr. Lounds, I appreciate that. But you see, I am not a man. I began as one but by the Grace of God and my own Will, I have become Other and More than a man. You say you’re frightened. Do you believe that God is in attendance here, Mr. Lounds?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you praying to Him now?”
“Sometimes I pray. I have to tell you, I just pray mostly when I’m scared.”
“And does God help you?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think about it after. I ought to.”
“You ought to. Um-hmmmm. There are so many things you ought to understand. In a little while I’ll help you understand. Will you excuse me now?”
“Certainly.”
Footsteps out of the room. The slide and rattle of a kitchen drawer. Lounds had covered many murders committed in kitchens where things are handy. Police reporting can change forever your view of kitchens. Water running now.
Lounds thought it must be night. Crawford and Graham were expecting him. Certainly he had been missed by now. A great, hollow sadness pulsed briefly with his fear.
Breathing behind him, a flash of white caught by his rolling eye. A hand, powerful and pale. It held a cup of tea with honey. Lounds sipped it through a straw.
“I’d do a big story,” he said between sips. “Anything you want to say. Describe you any way you want, or no description, no description.”
“Shhhh.” A single finger tapped the top of his head. The lights brightened. The chair began to turn.
“No. I don’t want to see you.”
“Oh, but you must, Mr. Lounds. You’re a reporter. You’re here to report. When I turn you around, open your eyes and look at me. If you won’t open them yourself, I’ll staple your eyelids to your forehead.”
A wet mouth noise, a snapping click and the chair spun. Lounds faced the room, his eyes tight shut. A finger tapped insistently on his chest. A touch on his eyelids. He looked.
To Lounds, seated, he seemed very tall standing in his kimono. A stocking mask was rolled up to his nose. He turned his back to Lounds and dropped the robe. The great back muscles flexed above the brilliant tattoo of the tail that ran down his lower back and wrapped around the leg.
The Dragon turned his head slowly, looked over his shoulder at Lounds and smiled, all jags and stains.
“Oh my dear God Jesus,” Lounds said.
Lounds now in the center of the room where he can see the screen. Dolarhyde, behind him, has put on his robe and put in the teeth that allow him to speak.
“Do you want to know What I Am?”
Lounds tried to nod; the chair jerked his scalp. “More than anything. I was afraid to ask.”
“Look.”
The first slide was Blake’s painting, the great Man-Dragon, wings flared and tail lashing, poised above the Woman Clothed with the Sun.
“Do you see now?”
“I see.”
Rapidly Dolarhyde ran through his other slides.
Click. Mrs. Jacobi alive. “Do you see?”
“Yes.”
Click. Mrs. Leeds alive. “Do you see?”
“Yes.”
Click. Dolarhyde, the Dragon rampant, muscles flexed and tail tattoo above the Jacobis’ bed. “Do you see?”
“Yes.”
Click. Mrs. Jacobi waiting. “Do you see?”
“Yes.”
Click. Mrs. Jacobi after. “Do you see?”
“Yes.”
Click. The Dragon rampant. “Do you see?”
“Yes.”
Click. Mrs. Leeds waiting, her husband slack beside her. “Do you see?”
“Yes.”
Click. Mrs. Leeds after, harlequined with blood. “Do you see?”
“Yes.”
Click. Freddy Lounds, a copy of a Tattler photograph. “Do you see?”
“Oh God.”
“Do you see?”
“Oh my God.” The words drawn out, as a child speaks crying.
“Do you see?”
“Please no.”
“No what?”
“Not me.”
“No what? You’re a man, Mr. Lounds. Are you a man?”
“Yes.”
“Do you imply that I’m some kind of queer?”
“God no.”
“Are you a queer, Mr. Lounds?”
“No.”
“Are you going to write more lies about me, Mr. Lounds?”
“Oh no, no.”
“Why did you write lies, Mr. Lounds?”
“The police told me. It was what they said.”
“You quote Will Graham.”
“Graham told me the lies. Graham.”
“Will you tell the truth now? About Me. My Work. My Becoming. My Art, Mr. Lounds. Is this Art?”
“Art.”
The fear in Lounds’s face freed Dolarhyde to speak and he could fly on sibilants and fricatives; plosives were his great webbed wings.
“You said that I, who see more than you, am insane. I, who pushed the world so much further than you, am insane. I have dared more than you, I have pressed my unique seal so much deeper in the earth, where it will last longer than your dust. Your life to mine is a slug track on stone. A thin silver mucus track in and out of the letters on my monument.” The words Dolarhyde had written in his journal swarmed in him now.
“I am the Dragon and you call me insane? My movements are followed and recorded as avidly as those of a mighty guest star. Do you know about the guest star in 1054? Of course not. Your readers follow you like a child follows a slug track with his finger, and in the same tired loops of reason. Back to your shallow skull and potato face as a slug follows his own slime back home.
“Before Me you are a slug in the sun. You are privy to a great Becoming and you recognize nothing. You are an ant in the after-birth.
“It is in your nature to do one thing correctly: Before Me you rightly tremble. Fear is not what you owe Me, Lounds, you and the other pismires. You owe Me awe.”
Dolarhyde stood with his head down, his thumb and forefinger against the bridge of his nose. Then he left the room.
He didn’t take off the mask, Lounds thought. He didn’t take off the mask. If he comes back with it off, I’m dead. God, I’m wet all over. He rolled his eyes toward the doorway and waited through the sounds from the back of the house.
When Dolarhyde returned, he still wore the mask. He carried a lunch box and two thermoses. “For your trip back home.” He held up a thermos. “Ice, we’ll need that. Before we go, we’ll tape a little while.”
He clipped a microphone to the afghan near Lounds’s face. “Repeat after me.”
They taped for half an hour. Finally, “That’s all, Mr. Lounds. You did very well.”
“You’ll let me go now?”
“I will. There’s one way, though, that I can help you better understand and remember.” Dolarhyde turned away.
“I want to understand. I want you to know I appreciate you turning me loose. I’m really going to be fair from now on, you know that.”
Dolarhyde could not answer. He had changed his teeth.
The tape recorder was running again.
He smiled at Lounds, a brown-stained smile. He placed his hand on Lounds’s heart and, leaning to him intimately as though to kiss him, he bit Lounds’s lips off and spit them on the floor.
21
Dawn in Chicago, heavy air and the gray sky low.
A security guard came out of the lobby of the Tattler building and stood at the curb smoking a cigarette and rubbing the small of his back. He was alone on the street and in the quiet he could hear the clack of the traffic light changing at the top of the hill, a long block away
.
Half a block north of the light, out of the guard’s sight, Francis Dolarhyde squatted beside Lounds in the back of the van. He arranged the blanket in a deep cowl that hid Lounds’s head.
Lounds was in great pain. He appeared stuporous, but his mind was racing. There were things he must remember. The blindfold was tented across his nose and he could see Dolarhyde’s fingers checking the crusted gag.
Dolarhyde put on the white jacket of a medical orderly, laid a thermos in Lounds’s lap and rolled him out of the van. When he locked the wheels of the chair and turned to put the ramp back in the van, Lounds could see the end of the van’s bumper beneath his blindfold.
Turning now, seeing the bumper guard . . . Yes! the license plate. Only a flash, but Lounds burned it into his mind.
Rolling now. Sidewalk seams. Around a corner and down a curb. Paper crackled under the wheels.
Dolarhyde stopped the wheelchair in a bit of littered shelter between a garbage Dumpster and a parked truck. He pulled at the blindfold. Lounds closed his eyes. An ammonia bottle under his nose.
The soft voice close beside him.
“Can you hear me? You’re almost there.” The blindfold fold off now. “Blink if you can hear me.”
Dolarhyde opened his eye with a thumb and forefinger. Lounds was looking at Dolarhyde’s face.
“I told you one fib.” Dolarhyde tapped the thermos. “I don’t really have your lips on ice.” He whipped off the blanket and opened the thermos.
Lounds strained hard when he smelled the gasoline, separating the skin from under his forearms and making the stout chair groan. The gas was cold all over him, fumes filling his throat and they were rolling toward the center of the street.
“Do you like being Graham’s pet, Freeeeedeeeee?”
Lit with a whump and shoved, sent rolling down on the Tattler, eeek, eeek, eeekeeekeeek the wheels.
The guard looked up as a scream blew the burning gag away. He saw the fireball coming, bouncing on the potholes, trailing smoke and sparks and the flames blown back like wings, disjointed reflections leaping along the shop windows.
It veered, struck a parked car and overturned in front of the building, one wheel spinning and flames through the spokes, blazing arms rising in the fighting posture of the burned.
The guard ran back into the lobby. He wondered if it would blow up, if he should get away from the windows. He pulled the fire alarm. What else? He grabbed the fire extinguisher off the wall and looked outside. It hadn’t blown up yet.
The guard approached cautiously through the greasy smoke spreading low over the pavement and, at last, sprayed foam on Freddy Lounds.
22
The schedule called for Graham to leave the staked-out apartment in Washington at 5:45 A.M., well ahead of the morning rush.
Crawford called while he was shaving.
“Good morning.”
“Not so good,” Crawford said. “The Tooth Fairy got Lounds in Chicago.”
“Oh hell no.”
“He’s not dead yet and he’s asking for you. He can’t wait long.”
“I’ll go.”
“Meet me at the airport. United 245. It leaves in forty minutes. You can be back for the stakeout, if it’s still on.”
Special Agent Chester from the Chicago FBI office met them at O’Hare in a downpour. Chicago is a city used to sirens. The traffic parted reluctantly in front of them as Chester howled down the expressway, his red light flashing pink on the driving rain.
He raised his voice above the siren. “Chicago PD says he was jumped in his garage. My stuff is secondhand. We’re not popular around here today.”
“How much is out?” Crawford said.
“The whole thing, trap, all of it.”
“Did Lounds get a look at him?”
“I haven’t heard a description. Chicago PD put out an all-points bulletin for a license number about six-twenty.”
“Did you get hold of Dr. Bloom for me?”
“I got his wife, Jack. Dr. Bloom had his gall bladder taken out this morning.”
“Glorious,” Crawford said.
Chester pulled under the dripping hospital portico. He turned in his seat. “Jack, Will, before you go up . . . I hear this fruit really trashed Lounds. You ought to be ready for that.”
Graham nodded. All the way to Chicago he had tried to choke his hope that Lounds would die before he had to see him.
The corridor of Paege Burn Center was a tube of spotless tile. A tall doctor with a curiously old-young face beckoned Graham and Crawford away from the knot of people at Lounds’s door.
“Mr. Lounds’s burns are fatal,” the doctor said. “I can help him with the pain, and I intend to do it. He breathed flames and his throat and lungs are damaged. He may not regain consciousness. In his condition, that would be a blessing.
“In the event that he does regain consciousness, the city police have asked me to take the airway out of his throat so that he might possibly answer questions. I’ve agreed to try that—briefly.
“At the moment his nerve endings are anesthetized by fire. A lot of pain is coming, if he lives that long. I made this clear to the police and I want to make it clear to you: I’ll interrupt any attempted questioning to sedate him if he wants me to. Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” Crawford said.
With a nod to the patrolman in front of the door, the doctor clasped his hands behind his white lab coat and moved away like a wading egret.
Crawford glanced at Graham. “You okay?”
“I’m okay. I had the SWAT team.”
Lounds’s head was elevated in the bed. His hair and ears were gone and compresses over his sightless eyes replaced the burned-off lids. His gums were puffed with blisters.
The nurse beside him moved an IV stand so Graham could come close. Lounds smelled like a stable fire.
“Freddy, it’s Will Graham.”
Lounds arched his neck against the pillow.
“The movement’s just reflex, he’s not conscious,” the nurse said.
The plastic airway holding open his scorched and swollen throat hissed in time with the respirator.
A pale detective sergeant sat in the corner with a tape recorder and a clipboard on his lap. Graham didn’t notice him until he spoke.
“Lounds said your name in the emergency room before they put the airway in.”
“You were there?”
“Later I was there. But I’ve got what he said on tape. He gave the firemen a license number when they first got to him. He passed out, and he was out in the ambulance, but he came around for a minute in the emergency room when they gave him a shot in the chest. Some Tattler people had followed the ambulance—they were there. I have a copy of their tape.”
“Let me hear it.”
The detective fiddled with his tape recorder. “I think you want to use the earphone,” he said, his face carefully blank. He pushed the button.
Graham heard voices, the rattle of casters, “. . . put him in there,” the bump of a litter on a swinging door, a retching cough and a voice croaking, speaking without lips.
“Tooth Hairy.”
“Freddy, did you see him? What did he look like, Freddy?”
“Wendy? Hlease Wendy. Grahan set ne uh. The cunt knew it. Grahan set ne uh. Cunt tut his hand on ne in the ticture like a hucking tet. Wendy?”
A noise like a drain sucking. A doctor’s voice: “That’s it. Let me get there. Get out of the way. Now.”
That was all.
Graham stood over Lounds while Crawford listened to the tape.
“We’re running down the license number,” the detective said. “Could you understand what he was saying?”
“Who’s Wendy?” Crawford asked.
“That hooker in the hall. The blonde with the chest. She’s been trying to see him. She doesn’t know anything.”
“Why don’t you let her in?” Graham said from the bedside. His back was to them.
“No visitors.”
/>
“The man’s dying.”
“Think I don’t know it? I’ve been here since a quarter to fucking six o’clock—excuse me, Nurse.”
“Take a few minutes,” Crawford said. “Get some coffee, put some water on your face. He can’t say anything. If he does, I’ll be here with the recorder.”
“Okay, I could use it.”
When the detective was gone, Graham left Crawford at the bedside and approached the woman in the hall.
“Wendy?”
“Yeah.”
“If you’re sure you want to go in there, I’ll take you.”
“I want to. Maybe I ought to go comb my hair.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Graham said.
When the policeman returned, he didn’t try to put her out.
Wendy of Wendy City held Lounds’s blackened claw and looked straight at him. He stirred once, a little before noon.
“It’s gonna be just fine, Roscoe,” she said. “We’ll have us some high old times.”
Lounds stirred again and died.
23
Captain Osborne of Chicago Homicide had the gray, pointed face of a stone fox. Copies of the Tattler were all over the police station. One was on his desk.
He didn’t ask Crawford and Graham to sit down.
“You had nothing at all working with Lounds in the city of Chicago?”
“No, he was coming to Washington,” Crawford said. “He had a plane reservation. I’m sure you’ve checked it.”
“Yeah, I got it. He left his office about one-thirty yesterday. Got jumped in the garage of his building, must have been about ten of two.”
“Anything in the garage?”
“His keys got kicked under his car. There’s no garage attendant—they had a radio-operated door but it came down on a couple of cars and they took it out. Nobody saw it happen. That’s getting to be the refrain today. We’re working on his car.”
“Can we help you there?”
“You can have the results when I get ’em. You haven’t said much, Graham. You had plenty to say in the paper.”
“I haven’t heard much either, listening to you.”
“You pissed off, Captain?” Crawford said.
“Me? Why should I be? We run down a phone trace for you and collar a fucking news reporter. Then you’ve got no charges against him. You have got some deal with him, gets him cooked in front of this scandal sheet. Now the other papers adopt him like he was their own.