“What smell, Bobby?” asked Mark.
“I’d shit in my pants, Mark,” Bobby said, wincing. “I had shit in my pants and had to listen to them taunt me as they threw buckets of water on me and their laughter as they drove back to Charleston. You should have heard the cheer go up when I screamed that I would leave.”
“Why didn’t you tell anybody, Bobby?” I asked. “Why didn’t you tell the Bear, or the tac officer, or even one of the nice guys in the R Company cadre?”
“Why don’t you go fuck yourself, Will!” he shouted at me. “See, Will, when I was riding back in the trunk of that car that night, smelling my own shit and vomit and piss, I decided that I didn’t want to be a part of that school. I didn’t want any goddam part of it. I didn’t want to wear the ring of that goddam school. See, boys, I still wake up some nights having nightmares in which these ghouls are coming toward me with matches. Laughing and with matches and gasoline all over the room. One thing I remember from that night. Every one of those bastards wore the ring. Every single one of them. They were all ‘Whole Men.’ All part of the system.”
“That’s not part of the system, Bobby,” I said defensively. “You’re describing something none of us ever heard about, that we didn’t even know was part of the Institute. This is an outlaw group that doesn’t have anything to do with the Corps, Bobby. It’s mean in the barracks, Bobby. God knows, you know that better than anyone. But there are limits. These people exist outside the laws of the Corps. I swear the Corps doesn’t even know about these guys.”
“You got dealt some bad cards, paisan,” Pig said, squeezing Bobby’s arm. “Anybody would have quit.”
“Where was the house, Bobby?” Mark asked, his face set in a deep, troubled scowl. “We’ve got to know where the house is or we can’t do a thing.”
“I don’t know where the house is,” Bobby said. “I’ve told you everything I know.”
“Everything, Bobby?” I asked. “Have you told us everything that you can remember? I think this group might still be around the Institute and periodically take a kid out of the barracks and do to him what they did to you. We don’t know how to find them or how to stop them. We don’t know anything about them really. This is the first time we’ve been positive that they exist. Were any of them from R Company? Did you recognize any of their voices? Did any of them call each other by a first name? Or a nickname?”
He dropped his eyes and folded his hands around his glass of beer. His testimony had taken a fearful emotional toll, and I realized as I looked at him and awaited his answer that there still was a gentle frailty and vulnerability to Bobby Bentley that he would carry all his life.
“That night I didn’t recognize a single voice,” he said. “I’m sure none of them was from R Company. When you’re a knob, you begin to recognize the voices of all the upperclassmen who work you over from day to day. I’m positive I didn’t know a single one of them. Not until last year.”
“Last year?” Mark said, puzzled.
“I was sitting here in this bar with my girl friend. Her name’s Susie and she’s from Greenville. Sometime when you’re up I’d like to introduce her. She and I were sitting talking about things. You know, things like marriage, kids. Serious things. Nice things. I had just ordered another pitcher of beer when I heard the voice.”
“Whose voice?” we asked simultaneously.
“I didn’t know then, but it was a voice from that room. It was the voice of the meanest guy in that room. The most brutal voice from that night. It was a deep, cruel voice with a heavy Southern accent.”
“How can you be sure it was the same voice?” Pig asked.
“Because I know,” he said.
“How do you know?” Mark insisted.
Bobbys eyes filled up with rage and humiliation as he said, “I know because I pissed in my pants when I first heard the voice. Right here in this booth. Right in front of Susie.”
There was a long silence among us. Mark, Pig, and I had all placed our hands beneath the table, a subconscious gesture, because we did not want to taunt or hurt Bobby with our rings.
“Who was it, Bobby?” Mark asked at last. “Who was the motherfucker?”
“I saw him when he got up. I didn’t recognize him but Susie asked a friend of hers who’s a bartender in here. The guy’s name is Dan Molligen, and he’s in his last year of law school at Carolina.”
“He was the first battalion commander our knob year,” Pig remembered. “A real first-class prick.”
“No shit,” Bobby said.
“He can tell us where the house is. We’ll find out from Molligen.”
“One more question, Bobby,” I asked. “Just one more. I know this has been real hard for you. But how many of those guys were in the room that night? Do you remember the number?”
He drained a glass of beer and rose to leave. A light sweat covered his forehead. He said one brief, unequivocal word, “Ten,” stood, and said good-bye.
“What do we do now?” I asked when he had gone. “We’ve got all weekend.”
Mark slammed his fist down on the table and said, “Molligen.”
Chapter Thirty six
We spent the rest of the day learning all there was to know about Dan Molligen. I was surprised by how quickly we adapted to the tactics of surveillance. Mark, in particular, displayed extraordinary—heretofore unperceived—skills in the craft of reconnaissance. In five phone calls to friends, he discovered that Molligen was unmarried and lived alone in a section of small brick duplexes on a hill above the University. He was in the top ten percent of his class, an assistant editor of the Law Review, and had a job waiting for him in the prestigious Columbia law firm of Sanders and Quackenbush when he graduated. He was engaged to a girl from Converse whose father owned a large department store in Spartanburg. Mark also discovered that Molligen was left-handed, smoked unfiltered Lucky Strikes, had worn braces until he was fourteen, and drove a late model XKE with the South Carolina license plate CL39-260.I found out that he was cordially disliked by most of his classmates at the law school, hung around mostly with Institute graduates, and still practiced sword manual in front of his bedroom mirror.
Pig found something more important still; he found Dan Molligen. He was studying in the law library, hunched over a set of massive brown books, and making careful notations in a small black book. Pig and I watched him for an hour, feeling ill-dressed and uncomfortable in the wrinkled civilian clothes we had brought with us. Mark left to go shopping. I kept reminding Pig that we didn’t want to hurt Molligen; we just wanted him to reveal the location of the house where The Ten took those freshmen marked unworthy to wear the ring.
It grew dark, and still Molligen remained fixed at his desk, poring over his law books with remarkable powers of stillness and concentration, oblivious to our hostile presence. Mark returned with a shopping bag held tightly in his hand. We gathered outside the law school, and Mark whispered a plan.
“Will, you stay here and watch Molligen,” he said. “When he gets up to leave, follow him to his car without being seen. You call this number and tell us he’s on his way home.”
“How will I know he’s on his way home?” I asked. “What if he has a date or something?”
“He’s different from you, Will,” Mark said. “He’ll probably do something odd like take a shower before he goes out. Anyway, we’ve got all night.”
“What number is this?” I asked, staring at the piece of paper Mark had handed me.
“It’s Molligen’s number,” Mark explained.
“You can’t break into his fucking house, Mark!” I protested.
“You just call when he gets into his car,” Mark answered.
“How are you going to make him talk?” I asked, growing more and more frightened.
“I wanted to kick his nuts in, but Pig had a better plan,” Mark said.
“We used to catch guys in our neighborhood from rival gangs,” Pig said delightedly. “We devised a sure-fire way to make ’em tal
k, and it’s perfectly humane. That is, if they survive.”
“Why are we doing all this?” I asked. “Let’s stop now before we get into trouble we can’t get out of.”
“Now’s the interesting part,” Pig said, his excitement mounting. “What if the cavalry turned back to the fort when they heard the Indians attacking the wagon train, paisan? There wouldn’t be nothing running around today but a bunch of bare-assed Indians hassling buffalo. Just think of it, no pizza parlors, no Volkswagens, no weight rooms. See, we’re the cavalry and this is like a movie. It’s fun, man. Fun. Look here, Will.”
From the large paper bag Mark held, Pig snatched a huge coil of thick rope.
“We came here because you brought us up here, Will,” Mark said. “You dealt us into the game, and now we’re going to finish it. You can help us if you want or you can pussy out on your roommates. It’s your choice. But I want you to remember that Pig and I were the ones that grabbed Poteete off the railing that night. I know you think you’re a lot more sensitive than us, but we’d like to find those guys as much as you would. Maybe more.”
“We’re not responsible for what The Ten does,” I said desperately. “We’re getting in too deep. We’re not responsible for stopping it.”
“I want to know what they did to Poteete,” Mark said darkly, “and I want to know who did it. Pearce, I don’t give a shit about. I’ve never even talked to Pearce, but Poteete was in my platoon.”
“We’ve got to find out who the Indians are, paisan,” Pig added. “We’re the heroes, man. The fucking heroes. We can break The Ten just by getting Molligen in there to talk some good shit to us.”
“Will,” Mark said, cupping the back of my head with his large right hand and drawing me closer to him, “do you remember how scared we all were after Hell Night? Do you remember being so scared that none of the knobs would go down to the latrine because we thought we might meet an upperclassman? Do you remember us peeing in the sink and then cleaning the sink with Ajax? Do you remember being that scared? Well, how scared do you think you’d have been if someone had thrown gasoline on you and threatened to set your ass on fire? I’m not going to hurt Molligen, Will. I promise you that. But I’m going to scare him as bad as he scared Bentley. And I’m not going to lose one night’s sleep over it.”
“Don’t pussy out on us now, paisan,” said Pig.
I said, “I’ll call you when Molligen leaves the library.”
I came to admire my quarry’s powers of concentration during the next two hours as I studied him from across the room. Once he looked up and saw me watching him, but I quickly diverted my eyes to a point above his gaze, as though I were engaged in some indissoluble dilemma of the law myself. I worried, fearing that he could recognize me later, but he did not seem the least bit suspicious of me. Why should he? I thought. There was no reason for him to believe that three seniors from the Institute were stalking him. It was hard enough for me to believe. He was a portrait of stillness for the most part. He studied in perfect silence with his small, narrow eyes . . . cadreman’s eyes.
At ten o’clock he began collecting his legal pads, placing them carefully into his briefcase; then he returned the law books to their places on the shelves. He checked his watch. Then to my amusement, he gave himself a military shirt tuck, put on his sport coat, and walked briskly out the front door of the law school. I watched him from a library window as he made his way to the parking lot and unlocked his Jaguar. The phone was ringing at his house before he left the parking lot. It rang only once. Mark Santoro answered it.
“It’s all set, Will,” he said. “As soon as we get him in the trunk, we’ll pick you up behind the gymnasium.”
“The trunk?”
“It’s the part of the automobile where the spare tire is usually found.”
Mark was laughing as he hung up the phone.
It was over an hour before I saw my car pull into the parking lot behind the gymnasium. During my wait, my mind teemed with infinite dramas and innumerable possibilities of things that might have gone wrong at Molligen’s house: suspicious neighbors, dogs, cruising patrol cars, a desperate struggle in the darkness that could have left my roommates badly injured, or even the simple bad luck of Molligen spending the night out with his fiancee. It also occurred to me that what we were doing could not only get us kicked out of the Institute; we could also be sent to prison. The law, unless it had changed significantly during the last unnerving hour, insisted on rather stern treatment for kidnapers. Pig was driving and barely slowed down as I climbed into the front seat. I was shaking.
“Did you get him?” I asked breathlessly, hoping they had not.
“It was a work of art,” Pig said. “I wanted to take him down in my famous death hold but the number one paisan here”—he motioned with his thumb at Mark—“crumpled him without a fucking sound using his handkerchief.”
“A handkerchief?” I said, puzzled.
“Soaked in chloroform by the master chemist,” Mark said. “Chemistry majors learn some useful shit, Will. You’d probably have tried to knock him out with a Norton anthology.”
“When will he wake up?” I asked.
“He’s probably awake now but he won’t be too active for a while. Anyway, he’s tied up, gagged, and stuffed in his mattress cover,” Mark said, as we passed through Cayce, nervous about cops.
“Where are we taking him?” I asked.
“Do you remember when we went hunting with Commerce and Tradd in the Congaree swamp? That was Thanksgiving break of our sophomore year,” Mark answered.
“That’s where we’re going,” Pig said. “Me and Mark figured out a little scenario to get Molligen to talk.”
“Are we going to bury him up to his neck in quicksand?” I asked nervously. “No kidding, boys, why don’t we let him go now before this thing gets any more serious? We’ve already stepped into some deep shit and if anything goes wrong . . .”
“I just wish we were near the ocean,” Pig said, ignoring me completely. “Did you ever see that movie where they buried Blackbeard up to his neck in the sand and watched the tide come in and drown his ass? I bet we could get Molligen to talk then.”
“He’ll talk and he’ll talk fast,” Mark assured us.
My hands were trembling against the dashboard and my eyes followed the sweep of the headlights as we moved along the soft rolling hill country of the South Carolina Piedmont and inhaled the resin smells of dense pine forests. We were streaking down back roads and sparsely traveled highways that cut through a wilder, more primitive South Carolina. We were twenty miles outside the Columbia city limits when I spoke in a voice I barely recognized. “Pig, Mark,” I said, “I want us to stop this right now. I’m asking you to stop it. Before we do something we can never undo. I know I was the one that got you to come up here, but I thought we were just going to talk to Bentley. I didn’t know it would lead us to Molligen. I didn’t know it would lead us to all this. 1 thought it would just prove how goddam smart I am. I didn’t mean for it to go this far. I swear I didn’t and I’m scared. I’m scared worse than I’ve ever been in my life.”
Mark reached under the seat and pulled out a bottle of Jack Daniels he had stolen from Molligen’s house. He took a long deep swallow, tilting his head back against the seat. Passing the bottle to me, he said, “Shut up, Will. I don’t want to hear you whining for the rest of the night. It makes me nervous.”
Angrily I snatched the bottle from him and said, “This is what I get for rooming with the fucking Mafia.”
“Drink some bourbon,” Mark muttered. “It’ll help kill that bird who lives in your stomach.”
“What bird?” I asked.
“That chicken,” he said.
I took a long swallow, too long. I gagged and spit the bourbon onto the floorboards. I took another drink and another.
“What’s the plan?” I said, wiping my chin with my sleeve, calmer now. “I’ve got to know the plan so I can help.”
We were entering the deep s
wamp country of the Carolinas, an ominous unsteady land threaded with ink-black creeks and covered with virgin groves of cypress and water oak. The sharp, pure blaze of starshine illuminated the swamp. Far from cities, we moved into the heart of the Congaree. The liquor was making me brave, and I faced the world with a strange, exhilarating wildness unknown to me, known only to those who have stepped into the realm of lawlessness and found an unnatural strength and power in the taste of its forbidden fruits. We could hear Molligen begin to thump around in the trunk like a large fish we had thrown in alive and fresh from the sea.
“Do you remember the railroad tracks that ran by the place where we camped with Commerce?” Mark asked.
“Sure,” I answered. “We put pennies on the tracks to let the train flatten them out.”
“We’re going to tie him on the tracks and wait ’til a train comes,” Mark said calmly. “Then we’ll find out about the house, about his sex life, and about how many warts his mother has on her fat ass.”
“That’s nuts,” I screamed. Even liquor could not grant me that much courage in a single night. “That’s fucking crazy and you and Pig have gone out of your goddam dago gourds.”
“Shhh, Will,” Mark warned, making a motion toward the trunk, “speak lower so that bastard doesn’t hear.”
“Hey, paisan,” Pig whispered. “We’re not going to really tie him to the tracks the train uses. Don’t you remember that old set of tracks that hasn’t been used for years that runs right beside the new tracks? We’re going to tie him up on the old tracks. It’s perfectly harmless, paisan.”
“If he doesn’t die of a heart attack,” I said. “Why don’t you guys get a summer job with the Inquisition?”
“I thought of it myself,” Pig boasted. “We did it to a guy in my gang who broke the code up in The City. He cussed in front of my mother. I was just going to kill him, but I wanted him to suffer before he died and have time to repent. We hogtied him to a siding where the trains run out to Long Island. He fainted when the train came by. We thought he was deader than shit. But I revived him.”