Catch Me: Kill Me

by Hallahan, William H. ;

  Two terrified bureaucracies that reluctantly were squeezing each other’s windpipe.

  It was a long wandering path back to that rainy afternoon—a week ago, was it?—when he had found Kotlikoff’s briefcase confronting him on his own desk. The fox in the chicken coop. He remembered his premonition and was unable to decide if he was sorry he’d opened it, sorry to have been captured by the nets of Hillel, sorry to have been drawn into the mind of Kotlikoff.

  He watched Rostov go and wondered why he was letting him go. He saw both sides: why Rostov should be free; why he should be captured. He thought: how intellectual.

  He recalled Kotlikoff. That was the brain no one wanted: the truth-telling, Cassandra-tongued brain populated with words none wanted. He thought, too, of Amy Kotlikoff, looking out at the slowly falling night drizzle, unaware that the last hope for her husband’s survival was now bumping a bulky suitcase down the gangway of a nearby freighter.

  Rostov had reached the bottom of the gangway and was laboring toward the customs officials. As he crossed the breadth of the pier shed, he passed a man leaning on a pillar—a florid-faced man wearing a florid tie. The man ignored Rostov. His eyes were fixed on the deck at the top of the gangway. He watched only Leary. The bearer of another—maybe final—message from Gus Geller. Clearly, Napletano had not talked.

  In the booth, Gus Geller smiled.

  Several times, he touched the golden hair of her forearm with stroking fingers and nodded happily at her presence, so pink, so plump, so placid. He oozed contentment, for behind their thick lenses his eyes were happily roving over her deep cleavage. Softly he quelled several burps in his cheeks.

  Leary sat at the bar and watched Geller and, watching, remembered the open hotel window in Rome. He watched Geller’s face, flushed with drink and excitement; saw the liver freckles; saw the sagging turkey’s wattle over his collar, the turkey-claw hands, the face old and lonely, gnawed by time: twilight of a pariah, a collection of belches, farts, food stains, lust, and savage, unprincipled mayhem, a mischief-maker in the walls and wainscoting of civilization.

  Geller ordered two more from the barmaid, his companion now squirming a plump stockinged foot up under his trouser cuff. Soon, now, Geller would take that short, body-bumping, giggling stroll around the corner to his hotel room, there to open his package of spectacular human pudding: he smiled happily.

  “Mommy wants you, honey,” said Leary. He pushed two ten-dollar bills into her cleavage. “Say good night to Gramps here—or would you rather show me your ABC card?”

  As she silently walked toward the door, Leary sat down next to Geller and moved close to him, pressing him against the wall.

  Geller watched him with his unblinking bird’s eyes.

  Leary said: “I have a message for you, Geller. And here’s a clue.” The ice pick in his hand arched back and drove down into the booth table between the thumb and forefinger of Geller’s left hand. It rocked back and forth on its point.

  Leary said: “A message from Bobby Whispers himself. Come back from a Roman grave.”

  Geller said nothing, staring fixedly at Leary.

  Leary said: “The police over there are exhuming the body right now—and Potkin’s, too. And they’ve been questioning your four animals for hours about a total of nine murders, including Gabriele Napletano’s. Guess who they’re pointing their bloodstained little fingers at. Russia’s own little American bounty hunter and butcher-in-chief. Gus Geller himself.”

  Leary stood up and leaned over the table to Geller: “Do us all a favor and stick this in your ear.”

  He flicked the standing ice pick and left it there, rocking on its point in front of Geller like a metronome.

  Someone stumbled on the stairs around midnight. A voice murmured softly. Brewer, wondering how Abbott had gotten out of his room, stepped into the hallway.

  In the faint vigil light at the head of the stairs, under the illuminated sign with its screaming red letters, EXIT, he saw a woman on her knees, crooning as though in prayer. He recognized her lace handkerchief: Flo, kneeling next to the sprawled form of her husband. She rocked his limp shoulder.

  “Come on, honey, just a few more steps. Rudy, come on. You’ve cut your face. Come on. Take a deep breath.”

  “Push him back down the stairs,” said Brewer. “That’ll wake him up.”

  “Thanks a bunch, Brewer.”

  Brewer bent over Rudy and looked at him. He was unconscious, faintly breathing in an alcoholic coma. His body seemed boneless when Brewer moved him, limp as an old coat. In two quick pulls, Brewer sat him up and then pulled him over his shoulders. He carried the wasted body down the hall with ease, smelling his breath rank with alcohol and decayed teeth. Flo hurried ahead to unlock the apartment door, then fussed at Rudy’s cut face as Brewer carried him across the disheveled room and spilled him across the bed.

  The bedside lamp threw a rosy warm light by which she examined his face. “Oh, he’s going to have a bad bruise. I thought he’d cracked his skull.” She pulled off his shoes and socks, sighing. “His feet are stone cold. He has no circulation in his feet at all. Look how blue they are.”

  “There are faster ways to do the job,” said Brewer. He felt a moment of envy for Rudy, absolved from all responsibility, a skeleton dancing in a skin, beyond the demands of life and reality. And when he died—soon, it seemed—there would be at least one to weep.

  Brewer saw an artist’s easel in the corner with a blank canvas on it. Then he looked at the ruined face. Losers always leave a legend of incredible gifts wasted, an army of might-have-been geniuses who chose not to create, their unuttered gifts looming larger in others’ imaginations than the greatest works of great men.

  Brewer went back to his apartment and poured himself a drink. He sat down to finish thinking things out, slowly adjusting his mind to his future. He saw himself a gaunt yellow dog, loping across empty lots, making an art out of survival, and he felt again the familiar presence of fear chilling his gut.

  “What are you sitting in the dark for?”

  “I like it.”

  “Got a drink?” She lit a cigarette, the flaring match lighting her face, painting a fiery glow on the gullies and puffy planes. She looked years older to Brewer, infinitely wearied. “I thought he’d cracked his skull. Honest to God, Brewer, I thought he was dead.”

  “You’re leading a rotten life, Flo.”

  “Well,” she said. “Now we’re even. You have a drunk on your back just like I have one on mine.”

  “Whoopee.”

  “Don’t do it, Brewer. Drunks get under your skin, just like puppies or idiots. Just like birds with hurt wings. And they appoint you their keepers. Then they drag you down. You have to get out of here. I can see you sinking further every day. You’re going to get stuck. Just like me.”

  “It’s not so easy, Flo.”

  “The only thing that keeps you here is you, Brewer. Whatever you have to do, do. It’s worth any price.”

  Brewer lit a cigar. They both watched the tip of it glow as he puffed on it.

  “You know what’s going to happen to Abbott, Brewer? It’s the same old story. One day—any day now—the police will come and they’ll cover him with a black oilcloth. Then they’ll strap the body down and drive it off to the morgue, where they’ll cremate it. Then they’ll bury the ashes with a free basket of flowers, and a few days later someone else moves into Abbott’s room and does the same thing—every night he’ll bundle himself off to bed with his bottle of Tiger Rose until the morgue wagon comes. Every month a few more die in here like that. Like rats in a wall.”

  “What about Rudy?”

  “Rudy, too. I can’t bury him. And someday, me.”

  He watched the faint red mask of her face light up as she drew on her cigarette. “How about a refill, Brewer?”

  “Sure.” He noticed that there was no pattering on his window ledge. The rain had stopped.

  It was Flo’s warning or Abbott’s bottle, or Willie’s palsied han
d or Rudy’s blue feet, or just Flo’s red, clenched face lit briefly by a match in a dark room: it was something that had stirred within him; something that refused to live here any longer in this brown coffin, with living tombs of flesh all about; something that refused to lie down and die here while others uptown, on the take, on the make, lesser men, lived on hummingbirds’ tongues and farted through silk.

  For Brewer, the road back marched right down an eight-story wall. He decided to go down it or fall down it. Tonight: he was going to come back with Kotlikoff or not come back at all.

  At two he went to Abbott’s room.

  “What time is it?” asked Abbott.

  “It’s time to earn your pension.”

  Abbott lay on his pillow in whorls of old gray hair, his eyes still closed against the sudden light, his face white, his lips barely pink. He looked dead.

  On his bureau was a picture of Millie, a pretty woman with a trim figure, wearing her circus tights, smiling at Brewer, smiling at the room and at the pants over the chair and at the coffin-colored walls. She had a gay smile.

  Abbott opened his red eyes, then threw back the blanket. Up, crouched, he pulled on his pants over his shrunken bare buttocks, then sat to put on faded rayon clock socks and to lace on his new white crepe-soled sneakers. He picked up his sweatshirt and warmup jacket. “Let’s go.” He walked down to Brewer’s apartment, bare to the waist still, a skinny, prematurely aged man and a potential folk hero.

  They sat in a low light and talked in low voices, reviewing their plans while Abbott ate crullers and drank a pot of coffee.

  “Look, Abbott, this guy is liable to conk out on us. He’s a diabetic. So what we do is take him directly to this doctor’s office and let him check him out. Okay?”

  Abbott looked at the card. “Sure; Dr. Simmonds. Okay. What else?”

  “No rain,” said Brewer.

  “I noticed.”

  “How about those slates?”

  “We’ll see.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Well, we can do a couple of things. If they’re really wet and it’s raining, we can always sit down saddle-style and hump ourselves across. Or, I can bring a rag mop.”

  Brewer lowered his face and smirked. He had a vision of Abbott in his pork-pie hat and his striking white sneakers strolling adroitly across that roof at three A.M., mopping as he went. He laughed. He laughed until his eyes were wet.

  Abbott, with a doubtful smile, watched him while eating another cruller. “You like that?”

  “Yeah, Abbott. I really like that.” Still chuckling, Brewer put on his sneakers and put another pair for Kotlikoff inside his jacket. When they’d gone through their list together for the last time, they left the building on quiet crepe-soled shoes.

  The van crept through the streets in a heavy fog that had settled over Manhattan. Visibility was limited to only a few feet.

  “What does this do to those slate tiles?” asked Brewer.

  Abbott shrugged. “We’ll see.”

  “You said that.”

  They parked down the street from the office building, away from the Soviet Mansion. They stowed various tools in their belts and pockets, then walked briskly to the front of the office building and paused before the locked revolving door.

  “Hey,” said Abbott, surprised. “They locked the door.”

  “Just like home.” From his belt, Brewer pulled a long tool that looked like a giant pair of pliers. “Firemen’s best friend.”

  “What’s that do?”

  “It opens a locked door in less than three seconds. Count to three.” He stooped over the lock in the base of the door, closed the jaws around the cylinder and twisted. The entire lock came away like a cork from a bottle. He dropped it into Abbott’s hand. Reaching up to the top of the door, he yanked out the second lock.

  “What do you call it?”

  “Bullnose puller.” He pushed the revolving door and entered the lobby, with Abbott right behind him. The elevator carried them to the seventh floor, and there they walked along the dark corridor, guided by a pencil flashlight, Brewer counting doors as he went. “This must be it.”

  “Yeah.” Abbott held the flashlight as Brewer deftly twisted the lock cylinder free and let it fall to the floor. They entered the office—a suite of three rooms, the center one of which Brewer entered to go to the window. He checked the frame for a lock, then opened it a few inches. The heavy metal frame moving in its metal casement made the steel chains ratchet in their channels. He opened it the rest of the way slowly, softly.

  “Here, Abbott. You look and see if you can spot the peak of the roof down there.”

  Abbott leaned out and looked down. “Jesus, it’s like sticking your head into a box of cotton.” He stared down into the fog and darkness. “Nah. It’s invisible, but it’s got to be there—right straight down about twenty-five or thirty feet. That won’t be bad. We can haul ourselves up twenty-five feet to this window.”

  “Check again. You don’t see a window below us, do you?”

  “Nah. It’s too dark to see through that fog.”

  “Shhhhh. Sounds carry. Let’s move this desk out of the way, and those chairs.” The chairs were put on the desk and the desk pushed up against a wall. “Leave it wide open.”

  They took the elevator to the roof, and when the roof door opened, there stood before them the three barrels.

  “Piece of cake,” said Brewer. “You didn’t have to walk them up any steps.”

  Abbott put on his gloves and went to work. He wheeled the three barrels onto the elevator with a handtruck, and as the elevator descended he checked the contents of the barrels. They got off this time at the eighth floor, Brewer walking with the pencil light, Abbott wheeling one of the barrels behind him. When Brewer found the door he sought, he twisted the lock out and opened it.

  They carefully, slowly opened the window to mute the sound of the ratcheted chains in the casement. “I’m just about positive we’re above that window,” said Abbott. “Can’t see doodly poop.” With considerable care and by the light of the pencil flash, Abbott laid out the two scaffold hooks, like two giant question marks of steel that were to be hung over the windowsill. At the end of each hook, he’d already rigged and lashed a series of pulley blocks and a bosun’s chair with three-quarter-inch line.

  Brewer felt the tic in his cheek start twitching again; his heart began to thump heavily with dread when, in almost complete darkness, Abbott straddled the windowsill. He lifted one of the scaffold hooks, with its block and seat dangling, and lowered the hook into position; it rested like a bent finger over the sill. He stepped back into the room to get the other hook. Again he straddled the sill and lowered the seat outside of the window and rested the hook over the sill. A dark shadow on the sill, he seemed to Brewer always about to lean too far out and fall.

  Brewer touched the squirming tic in his cheek, damp now with mist and perspiration—a gravely ill man waiting to be wheeled into the operating room for a very chancey operation.

  Abbott stepped back in. The two lines rigged to the bosun’s chairs were part of the running footage coiled in each of the two barrels. He shoved the barrels up under the window so that the lines could feed unimpeded out of the barrels as the two chairs descended. Then he put several other coils of rope around his neck and tied a third bosun’s chair to his belt.

  He leaned his head near Brewer’s ear and whispered. “Listen, there’s no sense crapping around, Brewer. Don’t stop to think or you’ll get buck fever. Just sit on the sill, stick your legs out and climb down the hook and into the chair. Go.” He turned and stepped one leg out through the window, sat and lifted the other leg over. For a brief moment he sat facing out over the invisible city; then, turning, he gripped the hook and lowered himself. His faint silhouette disappeared.

  Brewer was alone in the dark office. His cheek was twitching almost like a stutter as he struggled his wet hands into his gloves. He took a deep breath, stepped to the window and forced hims
elf to put one leg out through the window. He stopped. It was his last chance to back down. He could still take the elevator to the street and go back to the Complex and his bed. There he could spend the rest of his life dreaming of what might have been.

  He insisted: he demanded: he ordered his fear-hunched body to go down the hook, down the rope and into the chair. He made himself think of steak dinners, booze and cigars, the challenge of the chase, his stripes back on, his restored identity like a light in a lantern, making him glow with life and purpose again.

  He swung his other leg out and sat on the sill, his feet dangling far above the ground. Turning decisively, he gripped his hook, his belly lying on the sill. Both legs arced downward until his knees hit the wall. Dangling, he clung with both hands to the hook, his feet groping for the line. They couldn’t find it. Had the knot unraveled and the chair fallen? He was dangling from a hook with no line. Fear urged him to climb back up into the window. Panicked, he kicked and swung his legs over nothingness.

  “Easy, easy, easy.” Abbott touched his left sneaker, guiding it to the rope. Brewer fought his fear, made his body relax, then hang straight down, both feet reaching for the seat. There: one foot was on the seatboard; now, the other. He lowered his legs in through the seat and sat.

  He was shaken by the physical weakness he felt, heart pounding, breath wheezing, sweat soaking him everywhere. He couldn’t have held on much longer. Worse, he’d almost panicked, had almost lost conscious control—almost fallen.

  “If I live through this, I’m going to go to church every Sunday.”

  “You’re okay,” said Abbott. “You made it. Now it’s just an easy slide down. Start feeding the line through the block.”

  Brewer felt the middle chair; Abbott had already lashed it to the other two seats. They were to go down like a double-line scaffold.