Carrion Comfort

by Dan Simmons

  They stopped at an entrance to a real alley. Marvin pointed at the fourteen-year-old. “Monk, tell what happened, man.”

  The boy put his hands in his pockets and spat into the frozen weeds and tumbled bricks of a vacant lot. “Muhammed, he and the three others, they got to right here, you know? I come after them but wasn’t there yet, you know? It was, like, Christmas at the Pit, and Muhammed and Toby was doing a little coke, you know? They left without me to make another score at Zig’s brother’s place, you know? In Pulaski Town, right? But, like, I was so fucking stoned I didn’t see ’em leave and come running after them, you know?”

  “Tell about the white dude,” said Marvin. “Fucking white dude, he come out of the fucking alley here, give Muhammed the fucking finger. Right here, about. I be half a block down the fuckin’ street, hear old Muhammed say, Shit, you believe this shit? Little fucking white dude right there, flipping off Muhammed and three brothers.”

  “What did he look like?” asked Natalie. “Shut up,” snapped Marvin. “I ask the questions. Tell her what he look like.”

  “He look like shit,” said Monk and spat again. Hands still in his pockets, he wiped his chin on his shoulder. “Little honky motherfucker look like he been dipped in shit, you know? Like he been eatin’ garbage for about a year, man. You know? Stringy hair, like. Sort of like dirty vines hangin’ down over his face, you know? All streaked, all over, like he be all bloody or something. Shit.” Monk shivered.

  “Are you sure he was white?” asked Natalie.

  Marvin glared, but Monk laughed loudly and said. “Oh yeah, he white. He one white honky motherfucking monster. That no lie.”

  “Tell her about the sickle,” said Marvin.

  Monk nodded rapidly. “Yeah, so this white dude, he run down this alley. Muhammed, Toby, and them, they stand there like they don’t get it, you know? Then Muhammed he say, get him, and they all run in there, you know? Not packing anything. Just their knives, you know? Don’t matter. They gonna cut that little motherfucker up good.”

  “Tell her about the sickle.”

  “Yeah.” Monk’s eyes seemed to glaze over. “I hear the noise and come up here and look in. Don’t run or nothing, you know? I figure, shit, on probation with that King Liquor thing, don’t need no murder shit, you know? So I just look in to watch the shit go down. But this white dude, he ain’t the one bleeding, dig? He got this big sickle thing . . . like in the cartoons?”

  “Which cartoons?” asked Natalie. “Shit, you know, old dude with the skull and stick with a sickle on it. Like a hourglass too, you know? Comes to get dead folks in the cartoon. Shit.”

  “A scythe?” said Natalie. “Like they used to cut wheat with?”

  “Yeah, shit,” said Monk and pointed at her. “Only this honky monster motherfucker, he be cuttin’ down Muhammed and the bros. He fast. Oh, shit, he fast. I see enough, I hide right there . . .” He pointed at a large Dumpster. “I wait ’til he done, you know? And then wait ’til he gone a long time. I don’t need that shit, man. Then, when it get light, I go tell Marvin, you know?”

  Marvin crossed his arms and looked at her. “Got enough, babe?”

  It was very dark now. Far down the alley, Natalie saw the lights and traffic of what had to be Germantown Avenue. “Almost,” she said. “Did he . . . did the white dude kill all of them?”

  Monk hugged his arms and laughed. “You fucking know it. Took his fucking time, too. He like it.”

  “Were they decapitated?”

  “Huh?”

  “She means did he cut their heads off,” said Marvin. “Tell her, Monk.”

  “Fuck yes they capitated. He fuckin’ sawed they fucking heads off with that sickle and shovel. Stuck the heads on the parking meters out on the avenue, you know?”

  “Dear God,” said Natalie. Snowflakes pelted her face and froze on her cheeks and lashes.

  “Wasn’t all,” said Monk. His laughter was so ragged that it verged on being sobs. “He cut their fucking hearts out, man. I think he ate them.”

  Natalie backed away from the alley. She turned to run, saw nothing but bricks and darkness everywhere, and stood stock-still.

  Marvin took her by the arm. “Come on, babe. You coming back with us. Time to tell us. Time to talk.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Beverly Hills

  Saturday, Dec. 27, 1980

  Tony Harod was deep in an aging starlet when the call came from Washington.

  Tari Easten was forty-two, at least twenty years too old for the part she wanted in The White Slaver, but her breasts were the right age and shape for the part. Looking at them from beneath as she labored over him, Harod thought he could see the faint pink lines, where her breasts met her rib cage, showing where the silicone gel had been injected. The breasts were so artificially firm that they barely wobbled as Tari worked up and down, throwing her head back in an excellent simulation of passion, mouth open, shoulders thrust back. Harod was not Using her, just using her.

  “Come on, baby, give it to me. Come on. Give it to me,” panted the aging ingenue whom a 1963 Variety had called “the next Elizabeth Taylor.” Instead, she had been the next Stella Stevens.

  “Give it to me,” she breathed. “Shoot it in me, baby. Come on, come on.”

  Tony Harod was trying. Sometime in the past fifteen minutes their passion had descended through mere friction to real work. Tari knew all of the right moves; she performed as well as any porno starlet that Harod had ever directed. She was a perfect fantasy, anticipating his every wish, giving pure plea sure with every touch, centering the entire act around the self-centered penis worship she had learned long ago resided in every male. She was perfect. Harod thought that he might as well have been screwing a knothole for all the involvement and excitement he felt.

  “Come on, baby. Give it to me now,” she panted, still in character, bobbing up and down like one of those cowgirls on the mechanical bull at Gilleys.

  “Shut up,” said Harod and concentrated on reaching an orgasm. He closed his eyes and remembered the stewardess on the flight from Washington two weeks earlier. Had that been the last one? The two German girls playing with each other in the sauna . . . no, he didn’t want to think about Germany.

  The harder they both worked, the less erect Harod became. Sweat dripped from Tari’s breasts onto his chest. Harod remembered Maria Chen going cold turkey, three years past, the sweat on her brown, nude body, the small nipples erect from the cold water Harod sponged on her, droplets beading in the black triangle of her pubic hair.

  “Come on, baby,” whispered Tari, sensing triumph, perking up like a trail-savvy pony seeing the stable ahead. “Give it to me, baby.”

  Harod did. Tari moaned, thrashed, let her whole body go rigid in simulated ecstasy that would have guaranteed a Lifetime Achievement Award if they gave Oscars for orgasms.

  “Oh, baby, baby, you’re so good,” she crooned, hands in his hair, face against his shoulder, breasts brushing back and forth against him.

  Harod opened his eyes and saw the phone light blinking. “Get off,” he said.

  She nestled against him as he told Maria Chen that he would take the call.

  “Harod, this is Charles Colben,” growled the familiar bully’s voice. “Yeah?”

  “You’re flying out to Philadelphia to night. We’ll meet you at the airport.”

  Harod pushed Tari’s hand away from his groin. He stared at the ceiling. “Harod, you there?”

  “Yeah. Why Philadelphia?”

  “Just be there.”

  “What if I don’t want to?”

  It was Colben’s turn to be silent. “I told you guys last week, I’m out of this,” said Harod. He glanced at Tari Easten. She was smoking a mentholated cigarette. Her eyes were as blue and empty as the water in Harod’s swimming pool.

  “You’re out of nothing,” said Colben. “You know what happened to Trask.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That means there’s a vacancy in the Island Club steering commi
ttee.”

  “I’m not sure I’m interested anymore.”

  Colben laughed. “Harod, you poor dumb fuck, you just better hope to hell that we don’t lose interest in you. The second we do, your fucking Hollywood friends are going to be trooping out to Forest Lawn for another memorial ser vice. Be on the two A.M. United flight.”

  Harod carefully set the receiver down, rolled out of bed, and pulled on his monogrammed orange robe.

  Tari stubbed out the cigarette and looked up at him through her lashes. Her sprawled posture reminded Harod of a low-budget Italian nudie flick that Jayne Mansfield did not long before she’d lost her head in an auto accident. “Baby,” she breathed, obviously almost overwhelmed with satisfaction, “you want to talk about it?”

  “About what?”

  “About the project, of course, silly,” she giggled. “Sure,” said Harod, standing at the bar and pouring himself a tall glass of orange juice. “It’s called The White Slaver, based on that paperback that was near all the checkout counters last fall. Schu Williams is directing.

  We’re bud geted at twelve million, but Alan expects us to run over, a million up front plus a straight cut.”

  Harod knew Tari was close to an unsimulated orgasm now. “Ronny says I’m perfect for the part,” she whispered. “That’s what you pay him for,” said Harod and took a long gulp of orange juice. Ronny Bruce was her agent and pet poodle.

  “Ronny said you said I’d be perfect.” There was a hint of a pout in her voice.

  “I did,” said Harod. “You are.” He smiled his crocodile smile. “Not for the lead, of course. You’re twenty-five years too old, you’ve got cellulite on your ass, and your tits look like they each swallowed a softball.”

  Tari let out a sound as if someone had hit her in the stomach. Her mouth moved, but no words came out.

  Harod finished his drink. His eyelids were very heavy. “Thing is, we’ve got a bit part for the girl’s middle-aged aunt who’s out searching for her. Not much in the way of dialogue, but she’s got a good scene where some Arabs rape her in a bazaar in Marrakesh.”

  The words began to come. “Why you cocksucking little dwarf-bastard . . .”

  Harod grinned. “I’ll take that as a maybe. Think about it, baby. Have Ronny give me a call and we’ll do lunch.” He put down his glass and padded off to the Jacuzzi.

  “Why a flight in the middle of the night?” asked Maria Chen when they were somewhere over Kansas.

  Harod looked out at darkness. “I suspect they’re just pulling my strings.” He leaned back and looked at Maria Chen. Something had changed between them since Germany. He closed his eyes, thought of his own face carved on an ivory chess piece, opened them again.

  “What is in Philadelphia?” asked Maria Chen.

  Harod framed a wise-ass comment about W. C. Fields, then decided he was too tired to be flippant. “I dunno,” he said. “Either Willi or the Fuller woman.”

  “What do you do if it’s Willi?”

  “Run like hell,” said Harod. “I expect you to help.” He glanced around. “Did you pack the Browning the way I said?”

  “Yes.” She put away the calculator she had been using to figure a wardrobe bud get. “What if it is the Fuller woman?”

  No one was sitting within three rows of them. The few others in the first-class section were asleep. “If it’s just her,” said Harod, “I’ll kill her.”

  “You will or we will?” asked Maria Chen. “I will,” snapped Harod. “Are you sure you can?”

  Harod glared at her and had the distinct tactile image of his fist slamming into those perfect teeth. It would be almost worth it, arrest, exposure, everything, just to break through that fucking Oriental composure. Just once. Slug her and fuck her, right here in United first class, LAX to O’Hare to Philly. “I’m sure,” he said. “She’s a goddamn old lady.”

  “Willi was . . . is an old man.”

  “You saw what Willi can do. He must’ve flown straight from Munich to Washington to waste Trask like that. He’s fucking crazy.”

  “You don’t know about the Fuller woman.”

  Harod shook his head. “She’s a woman,” he said. “There’s no woman in the world as mean as Willi Borden.”

  Their connecting flight arrived in Philadelphia half an hour before dawn. Harod had not been able to sleep, the first-class section had been freezing all the way from Chicago, and the inside of Harod’s eyelids felt as if they had been coated with gravel and glue. It made his mood even more murderous to note that Maria Chen looked fresh and alert.

  They were met by three disgustingly clean-cut FBI types. The leader— a handsome man with a butterfly ban dage and fading bruise on his chin— said, “Mr. Harod? We will take you to Mr. Colben.”

  Harod handed his carry-on bag to the handsome agent. “Yeah, well get a move on. I want to get to a bed.”

  The agent handed the bag to one of the others and led them down escalators, through doors marked NO ACCESS, and out onto the tarmac between the main terminal and a private hangar complex. A smeary streak of red and yellow in the cloudy east promised sunrise, but field lights still glared.

  “Oh fuck,” said Harod with feeling. It was an expensive six-passenger he li cop ter, streamlined and striped orange and white, rotors turning slowly, navigation lights blinking. One agent held the door open while the other stowed Harod’s and Maria Chen’s luggage. Charles Colben was visible through the open door. “Fuck,” repeated Harod to Maria Chen. She nodded. Harod hated to fly in anything, but he hated helicopters the most. At a time when every fifth-rate director in Hollywood spent a third of his bud get leasing the dangerous, insane machines, buzzing, swooping, and hovering over every shot like demented buzzards with Jehovah complexes, Tony Harod refused to fly in them.

  “Isn’t there any goddamn, fucking, son-of-a-bitching ground transport?” he screamed over the slow whoop-whoop of the rotors.

  “Get in!” called Colben.

  Harod made a few final comments and followed Maria Chen into the thing. He knew the rotors had at least eight feet ground clearance, but there was no way a sane person walked under those invisible blades without adopting a low, crablike walk.

  They were still fumbling with seat belts on the cushioned rear bench when Colben swiveled his chair and gave a thumbs-up signal to the pilot. Harod thought the man at the stick was straight out of central casting—worn leather jacket, thin, craggy face under a red cap, eyes that looked like they had seen combat and were bored by anything less. The pilot spoke into his headset mike, pushed forward on a stick with his left hand, pulled backward on a stick with his right hand, and the chopper roared, rose, pitched nose down, and taxied forward a steady six feet above the ground. “Aw, shit,” muttered Harod. It felt like they were riding a board atop a thousand ball bearings.

  They reached a zone clear of the hangar and terminal, exchanged babble with the tower, and shot forward and up. Harod glimpsed oil refineries, a river, and the incredible bulk of an oil tanker beneath them before he closed his eyes.

  “The old woman’s here in town,” said Colben. “Melanie Fuller?” said Harod. “Who the fuck you think I mean?” snapped Colben. “Helen Hayes?”

  “Where is she?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “How did you find her?”

  “That’s our business.”

  “What happens next?”

  “We’ll tell you when it’s time.”

  Harod opened his eyes. “I like talking to you, Chuck. It’s sort of like talking to your own fucking armpits.”

  The bald man squinted at Harod and then smiled. “Tony, baby, I happen to think that you’re a piece of dogshit, but for some reason Mr. Barent thinks that you might belong in the Club. This is your big chance, punk. Don’t blow it.”

  Harod laughed and closed his eyes.

  Maria Chen watched as they flew along a winding, gray river. The tall buildings of downtown Philadelphia receded to their right. Roughhouses and the brick-brown grid of the
city, stitched with expressways, spread out to their right while a seemingly endless expanse of park, low hills stubbled with bare trees and pockets of snow, paralleled the river to the left. The sun rose, a golden searchlight wedged between horizon and low clouds, and hundreds of windows on high-rises and hillside homes threw back the light. Colben put his hand on Maria’s knee. “My pilot’s a Vietnam vet,” he said. “He’s like you.”

  “I’ve never been to Vietnam,” Maria Chen said softly. “No,” said Colben and slipped his hand up toward her thigh. Harod seemed to be asleep. “I mean he’s a Neutral. Nobody messes with him.”

  Maria Chen tightened her legs, blocked the FBI man’s advancing hand with her own. The other three agents in the cabin watched, the man with the bruised chin smiling slightly.

  “Chuck,” said Harod, eyes still closed, “you left-handed or right-handed?”

  Colben scowled. “Why?”

  “I was just curious if you were going to be able to keep pulling your pud after I break your right hand,” said Harod. He opened his eyes. The two men stared at each other. The three agents unbuttoned their coats in a movement that seemed to have been choreographed.

  “Coming in,” said the pilot.

  Colben removed his hand and swiveled forward. “Put us down near the communications center,” he said. It was an unnecessary command. A small city block in the middle of a run-down neighborhood, all row houses and abandoned factories, had been enclosed by a high wooden construction fence. Four mobile homes had been connected to each other near the center of the lot and a scattering of cars and vans were parked on the south side of them. One of the vans and two of the mobile home units had micro wave antennas on the roof. There was a landing site already marked with orange plastic panels.

  Everyone except Maria Chen duck-walked out of the range of the rotor blades. Harod’s assistant walked upright, carefully setting her high heels between puddles and patches of mud, her posture giving no hint of tension. The pilot stayed with the machine and the rotors kept turning.