“Wha’d’ya think?”
I shrugged. “Sounded crazy to me.”
Sautin grunted and smirked at the same time, taking a moment to pull off the bottle. He thrust it across the table in my direction and I took it without comment. I knew this snake bit, so I choked down a shot, staring at the man behind the desk as the whiskey burned a trail from my throat to my stomach.
“Right,” he said. “Crazy like a fuckin joke, or a riddle?”
I shrugged again and attempted to relax in the big leather chair. After all, I was his man, the guy he counted on to get things done. What had I to fear?
Plenty.
He cleared his throat and put two fingers to his lips. They looked very dry, parched to the point of cracking. He rubbed one burning red eye before speaking. And when he did it was in a monotone that never varied.
“Had a dream, Jess,” he began. “Least that’s what I thought it was the first time. Now I know it’s a vision.” He cracked his knuckles and leaned into a crouch over the desk. Facing me like a mad tiger. The light cast horrifying shadows into the depths of his face and I shrunk back in the chair though he appeared not to notice. I knew he had though; Sautin’s not one to miss weakness.
“The bitch brought it on,” he breathed quietly, tapping his desk with a well-manicured forefinger.
“What bitch?”
He grinned, leaned back in his chair, and dug momentarily in his coat pocket. He pulled out the scrunchie I’d taken from his secretaries’ house and flipped it onto the center of the desk. “Smells the same,” he said, raising his eyebrows as if I should understand every word.
I tried to buy some time. “The chick who watches the kid?” Just for a second the mask faltered and I saw the slavering monster lurking just below the skin. A nerve ticked at the corner of its mouth.
“Her name’s Annie Frenoit. Economics student from Verdun, France.” He smiled menacingly. “Or at least that’s the front. She’s a Babylonian whore in actuality.” He must have seen my expression change because he smiled broadly, his sales pitch smile. “You did read it,” he beamed. “I wasn’t really sure until right now.” He paused and looked over my shoulder. “Used to be better at judging people,” he whispered.
Another long draught followed on the tail of this comment and he pushed the bottle closer to my end of the desk. I took it more willingly this time. “Ya remember the day we came back from the Dragons, doan’cha?” and I nodded. It was more than a still shot; it was a whole slow reel of film in my mind. “The night before that I had a dream for the first time in my life. The first fucking time.”
I knew he was begging the question and I took another hard swallow. “A dream?” I had to ask.
“Yeah. Something that convinced me of the thing you’re gonna do.” I tried not to betray the adrenaline rush of panic those words elicited. Sautin leaned farther over the desk, his brows crunching together as if a kernel of rock-hard thought was coming dislodged.
“This is the thing, Jess,” he said. “I don’t dream, ever. Not when I was a kid and not since. When I sleep I’m a bank vault; I wake up and it’s as if things froze in place while I’ve been down. Also,” and he pointed his index finger at me. I saw it was shaking too. “I ain’t religious; got no time for that bullshit. I do according to my best interest; that’s my religion. Business is it…but you know that already. You gotta understand what I’m gonna ask you to do is the most important thing I’ve ever asked…the only thing now.”
I just nodded dumbly and kept my mouth shut. He was rambling and I’d never known him to before. He was also plenty drunk though his voice controlled it better than most. The guy has more tricks than a rich magician.
“You dream, Jesse?” he asked suddenly, as if to catch me off guard, which it did. I nodded, shrugged my shoulders at the same time.
“Sometimes. Not much. Never seemed important…”
Sautin laughed again, rubbed a finger against the incessant tick in the corner of his mouth. “The separation ‘tween me and thee…” he whispered, glancing off to the corner of his dark office. I pretended not to have heard.
“She came to me in the dream,” he said in the same tone, still looking off. It hardly appeared he remembered I was there. “It was her, the exchange student. Annie. But she was just the beginning. There was nothing but complete darkness. Like black, spilled ink. Then I could see crackling flashes of orange and red. I smelled smoke and suddenly realized a burning was takin place close by. I saw the outline of a city engulfed in smoke, great buildings tipped and shattered as if a bomb had just gone off. I walked through the wreckage, across streets filled with rubble and smoke. I could smell bodies burning, Jesse. When I got to the edge of the destruction I found a green field beginin at the smoking limit of the destruction and stretchin way on outta sight. It was then I noticed her standing right there beside me. I turned and knew her immediately; I said her name--not Annie, then--and she smiled. While I studied her, memorizing every line and curve of her face, she raised her right arm and pointed off into the field. I turned my eyes to follow. There was no longer any hint of green. What spread out before us now was as empty as a scorched desert except for one small spot a long way off. There seemed to be a smaller fire burning there, and I felt the girl take my hand. We lifted off the ground and rose up until we were directly above the smaller fire. When I looked down I saw the bodies, twisted and blackened and each one with my face. And all the heads were screaming, the bodies bound together in the shape of one word: Revelation. And I turned to the girl again. ‘For you,’ she said and disappeared. Just disappeared and that’s where it ended.” Sautin, finished, drummed his fingers on the desktop and pushed back deeper into his chair.
I didn’t know what to say. Only after several lost moments could I fashion any sort of reply. “So what do you make of it?” I asked.
“You read it, Jesse,” he said as if the point were very clear to anyone but the biggest imbecile. “We are at a monumental time and place in history. You have to take my word on this.”
“Okay.”
“Good. That’s good,” he whhispered, the maddened daze leaving his eyes momentarily. He clapped his hands together and just as quickly it returned.
“But I don’t know—” and Sautin cut me off with a wave of his hand.
“Oh yes you do.” He smiled horribly. “You’re going to kill her for me.”
And again I said the only thing I thought I could, “Okay.”
***
On the way home I knew I wouldn’t do it. I’d seen the girl and knew she didn’t have a damn thing to do with this lunacy. She was young, foreign, a student, for God’s sake. She had about as much to do with Sautin’s life and well-being as a New Testament at a synagogue. But I had no idea how to get out of what I’d told him. Sautin’s not the kind of guy who fucks around; when he says do something he means it. No questions. My life, as far as he was concerned, had been bought and paid for. Without him I was flat-ass on the street again. The little bit of money I had wouldn’t take me far, and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Sautin would find me; I knew that as well then as I do now. He may seem a small-time operator but there’s an evil surrounding him as real as flesh over bone. And this was his most important thing.
But I wasn’t quite ready to snuff it.
I’d gotten used to the apartment, the money, the lazy hours between jobs. He’d lulled me into a false sense of security, and as I walked alone down the busy streets in the CBD I knew I’d been misled. I could practically feel my grandmother walking along beside me, shaking her head as we went.
And I wondered if this was how it always happened. Does every lost soul suddenly wander unknowingly upon the truth, only after the moment of redemption is past? I slipped into a bar and ordered a drink.
Sitting there in my solitude I examined what he’d told me, and no matter how I rolled it around it didn’t make sense. He’d never dreamed and one dream was enough to bring this on? It was farfetched to say the l
east, but what did that matter? He believed it. Sure he was drunk but the vision (and I definitely know a little of the power of visions) had set him to this. Only then could I fully convince myself of his madness. I’d seen the girl, though only once, and fleetingly at that. There was nothing…it didn’t wash. But that wasn’t quite right.
There was something. I’d known it that day too. Just seeing her through the windshield of Sautin’s secretaries’ car, I’d known…
I thought back on the text. Sautin had called her the Whore of Babylon and that was the only direct reference I’d recognized. Of course there was the stuff about burning buildings but that was not so odd. Not coming from him, at least.
Was he, in this delusion, actually talking about stopping some Anti-Christ from being born? Had his twisted imagination set this up as a way of absolving himself of the crimes he’d committed? If it was, I didn’t see how; he’d wholeheartedly admitted his disavowal of religion. Even the thought of him reading Revelation seemed completely out in left field.
And I’d told him I’d kill her.
Chapter 20:The Betrayal
Sautin hadn’t given me any time frame but he wasn’t gonna wait long. He’d grown progressively worse since the day back from Nine Dragons and things weren’t getting any better. He didn’t call me for anything. His secretary even phoned once, grilling me for any information as to the change in his behavior. I kept my mouth shut and got rid of her as quickly as possible. But just the few minutes I was on the phone brought back a memory that’d seemed ludicrous at the time, something brought up one night in the Chimes Street pad. One of the losers (I don’t even recall his name, just the fact that he had the most severe hair-lip I’ve ever seen), high out of his mind, had made a comment in jest that had resurfaced from time to time with me. He said he expected someone to show up at his door in the future (when he’d put aside the drugs and criminal activity, he was careful to explain through his hair-lip), an old man with a long, trailing beard. Typical, non-imaginative bullshit. The loser even forecast his son or daughter opening the door to the stranger and the stranger asking for him. The loser--he’d stopped laughing by this time—would approach the door, the stranger smiling all the while back at him. It wouldn’t be a cop or the FBI, that would be as clear as rain through a windshield, he’d said. The stranger would say nothing as he withdrew an old parchment, a scroll, from the folds of his coat. He would then grab the scroll at both ends and let the bottom fall away. And on it would stretch the wide array and classification of every offense, minor and major, a complete tally of all the shit the loser had piled on over the years. And at the bottom, a total.
The stranger’s scrawl at the bottom would contain two words: Your Life.
I’ve thought a lot about that over the years, more lately. Because maybe that fuck had his finger on more than he knew. I say this now because my scroll has finally been laid out and it might as well bear the very words he so readily expected.
**
Like I said, the moment I walked away from Sautin’s office, well before I slipped into the bar for a drink, I knew I wouldn’t do what he wanted. The other shit had been different, fucking over weirdoes and crooked dealers. That hadn’t seemed to matter. But I thought a lot about that girl floating in the ice chest. Maybe I tried to use that image as the justification for the things I’d done, as proof the world wasn’t fair or caring and you just had to grab whatever you could get your hands in the little while that you had, but I know now (now that I’ve come to my own senses) that it just ain’t enough. I was wrong, I’ve been wrong all along. A party to unjustifiable evil.
But there is one vague hope left. The lessons my grandmother taught me have refused to fade over the years. They’ve receded, sure, but eventually they’ve come back like the tide. I remember her story of Saul the Persecutor, of his intense hatred for this new sect, the Christians, until his startling redemption on the road to Damascus. How his name was changed to Paul, how the foundations of Christ’s teachings rode upon his shoulders thereafter.
Maybe I’m trying to change my name now.
Anyway…this is the last of it.
***
I did stake her out. I have certain routines and the last thing I wanted was for Sautin to get suspicious. He wanted the girl dead and he’d have her dead (either with or without me) unless I did something to stop it.
The money still came in on Fridays but there were no other assignments. As Sautin had said, this was the most important thing. He called me drunk in the night several times and I put him off with excuses I’d carefully contrived over the course of the days in between. I told him this was different; the girl was no crooked businessman or drug-dealer on the move. This was a young, female, French citizen who would raise a helluva stink once she turned up missing. I convinced him I was working on it, that it had to be done right. He even told me during one of these slurred conversations, when the clock was well into the midnight hours, that he’d thought about doing it himself, but some mysterious impulse had warned him away. He said it wouldn’t matter if she were holding the kid in her arms when he pulled the trigger. But I begged him off, told him to stand by his impulse (though in reality that had me plenty nervous in itself), frantically trying to convince him the situation was in hand, that what he wished done would be done in the greatest possible haste.
It worked. I bought some more time. Not much, but some.
I followed her in the city, on campus. I became accustomed to her schedule: where her classes were, when she picked up and dropped off the kid. That was a big thing: I didn’t want the kid involved. It would complicate matters, and a mother (no matter how bad) was always a mother. If the kid disappeared too it might lead Sautin into doing something even more rash than what I had planned.
I wanted to keep that crazy bastard as sedate as possible, so I strung it out. But the call came again late last Tuesday night. Him again, worse than any previous time. He said he was out of fucking patience, that the dreams were coming every night, that they were getting worse. But now, he said, the burning bodies didn’t have his face any longer. They had mine.
I knew Annie would be dead within twenty-four hours if I didn’t make my move. But, luckily by then, I had everything finalized.
I just wasn’t sure she’d buy it, and of course it’d be impossible to get a kicking, screaming woman onto a plane in full view of security.
I went into action on Wednesday morning, first taking a bus to the airport and then paying cash for an Avis rental. A Kia so I could get into tight, nondescript places. I planned on taking her right after her field-study class let out. I’d checked the catalogue and by overlapping that with her scheduled routine, I figured they turned in current work on Wednesday mornings before going out to gather more information in the field. She wouldn’t be doing that part of it anymore, though. There was only one more thing to take care of, and for me, slipping into an empty house was no trouble at all.
***
UNO has a nice campus, plenty of trees, plenty of people milling about. The security crew is usually busy doing nothing more than handing out parking tickets and I’ve yet to read in the papers of violence or other mischief occurring there during the day. I had my bag, a small briefcase I take on certain jobs. It has everything I need plus enough space for priority items dependant on whatever it is I’m doing. That day it was a small white rag and a vial of chloroform. It’s not that hard to get if you know who to get it from. And the shit works.
She’d parked her car in a small lot just off from the stadium. She’d dropped off the kid earlier and wouldn’t be back to get him until a few hours after class let out. I parked the rental two spaces over from hers (I had parking passes to just about anywhere in town; Sautin knew a guy who specialized in such things), and I sat back to wait. As usual I wasn’t nervous. In fact, I’d been more nervous that morning just getting everything in gear. That’s the part that makes me a pro; when it’s time to do whatever it is to do, I settle into a groove and ge
t it done. Once committed to a course of action, there’s no time for second-guessing. Maybe it’s really this confidence that breeds my supposed invisibility. I don’t know.
Thirty-five minutes later I watched her walk down the sidewalk to the tree-lined path which led to our parking lot. There were a few other students ambling around but they were too concerned with their own business to worry with mine. She, on the other hand, just looked happy. Same as usual. I knew she’d seen my face that day back from Nine Dragons and I planned on hitting her quick with Sautin’s name to drain any tension or urge to flee. I was sure the secretary had told her more than she wanted to know about that sonofabitch.
I opened the Kia’s door when she set foot on the parking lot, leaving her class. She had about fifty feet to her car, an older model Sautin’s secretary had tossed out several months before, and I quickly unscrewed the lid on the chloroform and up-ended it on the rag. I held it loosely in my hand to keep it from drying out in the wind and got out myself, stepped away from the vehicle. She still hadn’t noticed me and that was just fine. People were scarce, but all it would take was a surprised shout to bring the few who were around to attention. I didn’t plan on giving her reason or time for any of that shit. People usually think that anyone who knows their name must be friendly. And I was, just not in any way she could imagine.
She had her head down, studying the cover of a textbook, when I called out. I stood just inside a fringe of shadow in the space between her car and mine, and when she looked up I was smiling. It worked and she smiled back, though her look was questioning. I was relieved to see a bright spark of recognition flow quickly into her eyes; I’d not been off the mark about her perception it seemed.
“Annie,” I said. I’ve always found the first name most effective. I wonder how many kids have been abducted because their parents were careless enough to have their name printed on their shirt or jacket. It’s a common reaction, whether you’re a child or adult; if someone calls you by name your guard comes down. It worked with her to perfection. Her brilliant smile grew wider, even though I could see the question mark remained in her eyes. Just that half-second allowed me to cover the remaining ground between us.