“What now, Harvey?” Robbie taunted.
“Down!” the old man commanded.
Robbie’s knuckles thumped on the table, and the two men dissolved in boyish giggles.
“I have tremendously powerful arms,” Harvey confided, his red-rimmed eyes sparkling with delight.
As he stood up to clear the table, Robbie gave David a sardonic wink.
David shook his head in wonderment.
“Oh, I drove them crazy! Wouldn’t stay put, wouldn’t keep my nose to the grindstone. But they couldn’t just fire me—couldn’t fire any of us, you see—because they were afraid we’d take what we knew to the Germans or the Russians.
“In order to study the effects of an atomic explosion in detail, they had to develop an ultra-highspeed motion picture camera. A thousand frames a second. The Mitchell Movie Camera was the fastest there was at that time—a quarter of a million dollars—but it would only do four hundred and fifty frames a second. The problem was the shutter. At the speed they wanted, the friction it generated simply ignited the nitrate on the film—literally blew it up. One day I was lying on the beach in Fort Lauderdale, Florida—completely AWOL, you understand—when the solution came to me. I went into a telephone booth and called my boss at Los Alamos. Jim McMahon—James Aloysius Xavier McMahon. Forget the shutter, I told him. Use a prism. Mounted on a spindle—a thousand frames a second, ten thousand frames a second, whatever you like. And that was it. That was how they solved the problem, and that was what got me my pension.”
Harvey, drinking steadily, had finished off the last half of a quart bottle of bourbon, with a little help from David. Robbie, listening morosely to stories he’d already heard a dozen times, stuck to beer.
“Jim said, ‘Harvey, what are we going to do with you? You know we can’t go on this way.’ ‘Give me a pension,’ I told him, and I’ll get out of your hair.’ And he said, ‘What are you talking about, Harvey? I can’t give you a pension.’ And I said, ‘Certainly you can, dear fellow. You know you can.’ And he did.”
He shuffled off to the kitchen and returned with a fresh bottle.
“Of course the devils didn’t tie it to any cost-of-living index.” He wiggled his toes. “I use it to buy a pair of handmade shoes every year. That’s all it’s good for now. Got addicted to them in Hong Kong. Was a gun-runner in China for more than a decade before the war, you know. Made a fortune in guns. It cost me my citizenship, of course, because—needless to say—they were being used against the British.”
Robbie rolled his eyes, said he had things to do, and disappeared down the central hallway.
“Harvey,” David said before he could get going on his next cycle of tales.
“Yes, dear boy?”
“You could let me walk out of here, couldn’t you?”
The old man frowned thoughtfully. “It would do no good, I fear. Robbie and the dog would run you to earth in minutes.”
“What about the Jeep or the pickup?”
He shook his head. “I don’t have the keys, and I don’t believe I could in good conscience let you have them if I did. Old-fashioned as it sounds, one must play the game, you know.”
“But it’s not my game, Harvey.”
“No, no, certainly not. You’re perfectly right to want to escape. For you, that is indeed playing the game. But I’m afraid asking me to collaborate with you is out of bounds. Puts me in an awkward position, you see. Morally speaking.”
“My own position is pretty awkward, don’t you think?”
“Not to worry, my boy. You seem a good lad to me, and I’ll do my best for you. Charles respects my judgment.”
David was tempted to point out that he’d said just the opposite a couple hours before but decided it would be impolitic to risk alienating him.
“I once spent a month in a jail in Singapore,” Harvey said, discovering a way after all to segue into his China memoirs.
David sighed, poured himself another drink, and listened respectfully, like a good lad, until Robbie reappeared half an hour later to announce it was bedtime.
“Bedtime!” Harvey exploded. “Don’t be absurd.”
“Not for you, old man. For him. You can stay up till dawn if you want to, but I have to be up early.”
“So go to bed and leave us in peace.”
Robbie sighed grimly. “Harvey, you stick to the plasma physics and the bookkeeping, and I’ll stick to security, okay? He has to go to bed so I can go to bed.”
“Oh, very well,” Harvey said in a huff, “take him away.”
“I intend to. Come on,” he told David.
David got up and preceded him down the hall.
“Last door on the right,” Robbie said.
David opened the door and entered a small bedroom furnished with a single bed.
Robbie stayed in the doorway. “Just so you’ll know, I’ll be roping the knob of this door to the one across the hall. It wouldn’t keep you in very long if you wanted to get out, but I’d be there in plenty of time to blow you away. Understand?”
“Yes.”
“You can also get out through the window, of course, if you’re ready to take on the dog. He’ll be there all night, and he knows what to do.”
David nodded.
“We’re really not set up for keeping prisoners,” Robbie added, as if apologizing for a defect in hospitality. Then he closed the door, and David heard him working at the doorknob. After a minute the door opened again as Robbie checked to see how much slack there was; evidently there was too much. He went back to work, checked a second time, and said, “Shit.”
David listened as he walked back toward the living room and kitchen. He returned with two pots tied together at the handles, which he looped over the rope. He shoved David’s door open, producing a satisfactory clamor, and closed it again.
As he walked away, David called out, “Have a nice day,” and was answered by a dry chuckle.
David went over to examine the hinges on the door. As he’d hoped, the pins weren’t completely seated. Working on the one at the top, he managed to get the edge of a quarter in between the head of the pin and the shoulder of the hinge, but he didn’t have enough leverage to force it up. It was a useless idea anyway; if he managed to get the pins out, there’d be no way to take the door off without setting those pots a-clonking.
He sat down on the bed and considered the rest of the room. The side wall would probably be flimsy enough to cut through with a penknife—if he had a penknife; any other way would be too noisy. The ceiling and floor were even more hopeless, and the heating vent might have offered an escape route for a badger on a diet. He got up, turned off the light, and went over to the window. The Beast, comfortably curled up on the ground below, raised his head to give him a friendly grin, all good cheer until it was time to tear him to pieces.
David looked over at the bed. Throw a blanket over the dog and immobilize it? Oh sure. Go to it, 007.
With a sigh, he considered the window itself, which consisted of two sliding panes. He turned the lights back on, went to the bed, stripped off a blanket, folded it in half twice, and put it on the floor at one side of the room. Then he lifted one of the window panes out of its track and slipped it inside the blanket. After studying this arrangement for a moment, he got the other blanket, folded it, and put it on top. He contemplated adding the mattress, but decided it was too risky; one suspicious thump or scrape of bed-frame would put him out of business.
Taking a deep breath, he stepped into the middle of the blankets. The crunch of breaking glass was barely audible, even to him. He carried the top blanket back to the bed, unfolded the second, and smiled down at enough lethal weapons to arm a platoon. He’d correctly guessed that most of the shards would be dagger-shaped, and trusted to luck that at least one would come with a reasonable haft. One did, and he wrapped it in a sock and tied it off with a shoelace. It made a formidable-looking weapon.
As he pulled off his shoes and got into bed, he wondered what the hell he was
going to do with it.
It was the sound of running footsteps in the hallway that woke him up four hours later—running footsteps, hoarse cries, sounds of a struggle, something crashing to the floor. And then a mushy explosion that rocked the mobile home on its blocks. Sitting up, paralyzed but quiveringly alert, David listened, mouth dry, eyes straining in the darkness. Something slithered to the floor in the living room with a plop like a wet sack. There was a slow, heavy dripping.
He groped gingerly for the knife on the floor beside the bed and went to the door to listen. After a few moments the floor in the hallway creaked, and he backed up. The creaking continued until it was level with his room. Whoever was standing there seemed to be contemplating the meaning of the rope strung between doorknobs.
The pots clonked softly.
David retreated to the bed and, suffocating with terror, watched as the knob turned and the door opened a crack, straining against the rope.
An outdoor scent swept in through the crack, drawn by the open window.
The scent of crushed weeds.
The rope squealed thinly against the metal as the pressure increased.
Something inside David’s head seemed to part with a twang.
CHAPTER 29
In his dream, he belonged to a strange sort of literary club, and its officers were accompanying him on a tour of its library, housed in a barn-like metal building. He stood with them before a revolving carrel that displayed an assortment of newspapers, and someone read out a headline: Local man found behind wall.
David looked for the headline but couldn’t find it. They kept repeating it insistently, but, as far as David could see, it just wasn’t there.
“Haven’t you read this story?” someone asked indignantly, and he admitted he hadn’t. The others received this news with shocked disapproval.
“Surely you can’t expect people to read everything,” he protested, but evidently they did. Each member was supposed to be familiar with the collection in complete detail.
“You’ll have to wait down there while we decide what to do about this,” he was told. David stepped down into a pit about three feet below floor level, and they proceeded to discuss his case as though he wasn’t there.
As they talked, it became clear that they considered his omission a very serious offence indeed, one that couldn’t be overlooked or excused. Even expulsion from the club wasn’t a sufficient remedy. Finally David realized they were talking themselves around to a point where they had no choice but to kill him. As they calmly discussed the details of his execution, David backed away and discovered that the building was indeed a barn—it was part of a prison farm. It was cold, and behind him he could hear the clanking of cow bells.
He found a way out—a massive locked stone that sat like a plug in the wall. Knowing he only had moments in which to escape, he inserted his member’s key in the lock and tried to turn it, but it was frozen from disuse, and the key bent like tin in his fingers.
David turned over in the bed and woke up to find the room flooded with early morning light. In the icy draft from the window, the door was tugging gently against the rope. Except for the restless murmur of the two pots, still in place, the house was ominously still. He pulled on his shoes and picked up the knife, which had miraculously fallen to the floor without shattering. After listening at the door for thirty seconds, he quietly called out Harvey’s name and then Robbie’s.
Getting no response, he used his foot to force the door open while he sawed through the rope. After the pots clattered to the floor, he waited for a reaction through a full minute. Then he stepped into the hallway, turned toward the living room, and saw that it had been transformed into a slaughterhouse. Blood blossomed and drooled on the walls like gouts of paint in an abstract expressionist painting. Furniture and floor were awash in a stew of burst organs, intestines, feces, and urine, from which protruded almost unidentifiable limbs, shattered bones, huge shapeless hunks of meat.
David hadn’t taken it all in. With his first glance and the first wave of the stench, he was on his knees, giving up the thin remains of the previous night’s dinner. When there was no more to give up, he crawled back into his room and sat down with his back to the door, his stomach and his mind heaving as he tried to swallow down and obliterate what he’d seen and smelled.
After a few minutes he stood up on rubbery legs and walked over to the window. The dog seemed to have abandoned its post, but he had to be sure before climbing out. Gnawing on his lower lip, he considered the pros and cons of calling it. He had to know if the dog was nearby, but he was reluctant to break the silence that enclosed the house like a dome—was reluctant to see what else besides a dog might be summoned by a call. The choice was to leave by way of the hall, and he knew he was never going to open that door again.
He leaned out of the window and whispered the dog’s name, knowing he couldn’t be heard—and terrified of being heard.
“Beast!” he croaked, his throat scorched raw by what he’d brought up.
When nothing moved and nothing answered, he climbed over the sill, slid to the ground, and stood leaning shakily against the house.
Robbie’s gun would be in the living room, and David wanted it. He’d never wanted anything more in his life.
Thinking about it, he was certain the front door was open. He hadn’t seen it, but the hall had been frigid and breezy. He wondered if he could go to the door and look into that charnel house, commanding his eyes to see nothing but a chunk of black metal. He decided he was going to have to try.
He circled to the front of the house, closed his eyes for a moment, and swallowed. As he started up the steps, his stomach lurched, and he had to stop, shut his eyes again, and remind himself that there was a treasure buried in that three or four hundred pounds of offal—a lovely, lethal treasure in matte black steel. Then he went in.
He was in luck. The gun was just inside the door and only partly buried under an unidentifiable mass of flesh and clothing. He kicked it away, and it skittered across the floor. Bending over it, he found he couldn’t bring himself to pick it up, glistening with slime. He tore a curtain from a window, wadded it up, grabbed the gun, and got out of there, his stomach in an upheaval that wasn’t going to be suppressed this time. He made it to the side of the house before he was down in the dirt retching again.
It was a while before he was aware of anything outside of his own body, shivering and icy with sweat, so he didn’t hear the car thumping its way up the road. But he raised his head groggily when he heard the car door slam. He rubbed the gun down with the curtain, got to his feet, and stumbled around the corner of the house.
A stranger stood frozen halfway up the front steps, gulping and staring white-faced into the living room.
“Hold it,” David gasped, holding the gun up in both hands.
The man turned and staggered as if the command had been a shot. Goggling at David in abject terror, he crossed his arms protectively across his chest, and it was obvious he thought David was responsible for the carnage inside.
“Charles,” David hissed. “You motherfucker.”
With the gun aimed at Charles’s chest, he squeezed on the trigger. He squeezed until his hands shook—for the moment completely insane. Then he looked down at the gun, puzzled until he figured out what was wrong, and thumbed the safety catch off.
“Hey, man,” Charles whimpered, “I don’t even know you.”
“You know me,” David said. “You were going to kill me.”
“I wasn’t! I swear to God!”
Staring at him, David gradually calmed down. “You’re Charles?” he asked doubtfully.
“Yes, but I swear to God I don’t know you.”
Looking at him, David found it hard to believe that this man was to have decided his fate. With his slight build and his smooth, characterless face, thick glasses, and receding chin, he might have been an assistant manager of a supermarket. He looked like a nineteen-year-old wearing the clothes of an older, more
sophisticated brother—fawn-colored suede sport coat, tan silk shirt, and jeans.
“You’re Charles?” David asked again.
The boy gazed at him in blank terror, his lower lip trembling.
Still holding him under the gun, David looked around and saw a brilliantly polished red Corvette parked nearby.
“Get in the car,” he said. Charles moved tentatively away. “In the car,” David repeated.
Charles, his hands raised, circled around him toward the Corvette.
“Get in the passenger side and crawl over the gear box to the driver side.”
David followed him into the car and told him to start driving.
“To where?”
“To wherever you came from.”
The young man started the car, turned around, and headed down the track.
“Where are we?” David asked after a few minutes.
“Where are we? We’re about ten miles north of Winslow.”
“That doesn’t mean anything to me. Where’s the interstate?”
“You mean I-70? It’s another ten miles past Winslow.”
“Okay.” David sighed, thinking of the expressway: another world entirely, a broad swathe of civilization, with clear paths leading to motels, restaurants, department stores, theaters. “You grow marijuana up there?”
Charles blinked for a moment, thinking. “Yes.”
“A lot of money?”
“A lot of money,” he agreed. “A fortune.”
“Harvey and Robbie were going to kill me if you said the word.”
Charles ran his tongue over his lips but said nothing. “I’m going to take your car. All right?”
“All right.”
“You can buy another one, can’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I won’t say anything to anyone about your operation up here.”
“Okay.”
“You understand? You can forget all about me.”
“Okay.”
David thought for a moment. “How far have we come?”