Wallflower

by William Bayer

  But even as Janek was awed by the powerful image before him, his head began to whirl with a kaleidoscopic array of other images in the room. Below the portrait, arranged upon an odd piece of furniture set within the niche, he saw a number of anomalous objects he could not make out clearly in the red light. Something about them was important. He wanted to decipher them, and was about to move closer to do so, when his eyes, drawn around the room, fastened onto the curled figure of a man lying on the floor at the foot of the bed in a puddle of dark liquid.

  Leo!

  The moment it registered on him that Leo Titus was lying there, probably dead in a pool of his own blood, the radio strapped to his belt began to squawk. A second later he heard Aaron's voice.

  "Shit, Frank! She's coming now, fast!"

  Gotta get out of here!

  Hearing a sound behind, Janek turned in time to see a short, slim, bald-headed figure, dressed top to bottom in black, ice pick in hand, poised in the doorway to the room. A second later the figure, weapon raised, was rushing at him through the reddish gloom.

  Janek feinted to the left. At the same time he reached for the Colt strapped to his ankle. Too late. Before he could crouch, his attacker was upon him, plunging down the weapon.

  He knew he'd been hit. No pain, but he could feel the steel strike the bone of his shoulder and then his right arm hanging limp. His only chance now, he knew, was to get to his gun with his left hand. He knelt and struggled for it even as he saw his assailant step back two paces, produce a second ice pick, raise it, and thrust at him again.

  He ripped the Colt from its holster and, hand trembling, fired at the advancing figure. The pain was coming upon him now, a great wave of pain that filled his head with delirium. He fired a second time, directly into his adversary's body. And in that same split second, when he saw the body blasted back across the room and knew for certain that it was a woman, the pain smashed into him; he felt a wave of nausea and understood that on her second foray she had stabbed him in the throat.

  He could feel the blood gushing out of him. And then, as his legs collapsed slowly, he was seized with the certainty that he was going to die.

  He came to in an ambulance. He knew it was an ambulance because there was a white-coated medic leaning over him, working on his throat, a siren was blasting directly above, and Aaron was crouching by his head, whispering encouragement.

  "Hang in there, Frank. Just a block from Lenox Hill Emergency."

  "Aaron . . ."

  "Frank?" Aaron's face was above him now, slightly blurry but recognizable.

  "It was Archer, wasn't it?"

  Aaron shook his head. "Wasn't her. But don't worry." Aaron smiled. "You got her. You blew the little bitch away."

  "Then who?" But before Aaron could reply, Janek felt himself sinking back into a pit of pain. "Tell Monika—"

  Oh-oh—I'm passing out.

  When he woke again, he was on his back, naked beneath a sheet, being wheeled rapidly down a tiled basement corridor. Kit Kopta was by his side.

  "Kit . . ."

  "Right here, Frank."

  "Who?"

  "Don't worry about that now. You're going to be all right. The surgeons'll fix you up."

  Surgeons. . . . Christ, it hurt!

  Perhaps he dreamed it, though later he would tell people he woke up terrified during the operation, felt the heat of the lights on his face, saw the surgeons and nurses in their pea green smocks and masks, felt the probe of their instruments as they worked on his shoulder and his throat. And then seeing something in their eyes that told him he had a chance to live, he resigned himself and slipped back into a fuzzy chemical-induced sleep.

  Kit was beside him when he came to in the recovery room. He could feel the tight grip of her hand.

  "You're going to be okay, Frank. I've got some good news for you, too. Aaron got hold of Monika. She's flying in tonight."

  "Great . . ." he murmured.

  "Your arm should be all right. A week here, a week at home, and that should do it. As for your throat—well, another quarter inch and she'd have waxed you. She didn't, thank God!"

  "Who was she?" His voice sounded strange to him, raw, hoarse, a mere whimper that sent pulses of pain shooting through his brain. He tried to sit. "Who?" he demanded.

  "Take it easy, Frank. Lie back. She was the girl downstairs, the one who rented the basement apartment. She'd been Archer's patient in Connecticut."

  Connecticut! What the hell was going on?

  "But was she . . . the one? You know. Was she—?"

  Kit was nodding. "Sure looks that way. I just got off the phone with Aaron. They went through her apartment, found ticket stubs, ice picks, caulking guns, glue. Sullivan's shitting in his pants. Because you solved it, Frank. You did it, you brilliant son of a bitch! You solved Happy Families!"

  "Archer, she—"

  Kit shook her head. "She didn't know anything. That's what she says. The girl was fixated on her, and . . ."

  He felt his eyes starting to close. He struggled but couldn't keep them open. Kit's voice was distant now, as if in the back of a deep cave. "Rest, Frank. We'll talk later. Aaron'll be here soon. He'll explain. . . ."

  When he woke nauseated and agitated in a darkened room, there was a moment of clarity. "You solved it." Had Kit actually said that?

  Was it possible?

  How could he have solved it?

  How?

  7

  WALLFLOWER

  Diana Proctor, braced like a West Point plebe, stood rigid in the garden just outside the window. Back arched, eyes forward, head straight, chin down—in this exaggerated posture her nose was but inches from the glass.

  Beverly Archer, sitting in the consulting room, glanced at her and smiled. The rain, running down Diana's young and ardent face, streaked her cheeks like tears. The girl's hair, cut close and butch, hung limp like wet black yarn. Her gray T-shirt, bearing the word TRAINING in small block military letters, clung sopping to her rib cage and chest.

  What a sight! You'd think the poor thing would have to move, but there she stood still as stone just as she'd been ordered. She was shivering; no surprise, since she'd been standing out there for nearly forty minutes and still had twenty more to go. Rain or shine, a sentence was a sentence; an hour had been decreed, and an hour would be served. A fat little alarm clock, standing on tiny feet, was perched upon the windowsill. Diana's eyes were fastened to its taunting face, her features frozen, locked. That, too, had been ordered. If the eyes were permitted to drift, the strings of control would weaken. In a matter of this kind control was everything. Obedience and control.

  To Beverly the glass between them, transparent yet impenetrable, symbolized their relationship: intimately bound yet separate and apart. Here she sat within, sheltered and warm, flipping casually through a magazine, while Diana stood less than a foot away, braving the elements as she performed her penance. The polarity was perfect, Beverly thought, and best of all, Mama would approve.

  She remembered: Mama zippering her into an oversize snowsuit, then pulling the collar up above her head so her face was encased as well. "Better be good, Bev, or I'll zip you up forever. . . ."

  She glanced again at Diana. Poor girl! But Diana craved hard discipline, reveled in it. It was discipline that had made her strong, that would make of her a perfect steely tool. With a person like Diana, discipline was the only way. Break her; control her; then build her up again. Take the raw killer rage and forge it to your need. Train her; teach her obedience; then she will serve you and Mama, too. Then she will be better than a bullet, better even than a knife.

  She remembered: "Learn to be an archer, Bev," Mama said. "Find your arrow, sharpen it up, string it to your bow, and let it fly. It'll travel far and true, hit your targets again and again. . . ."

  Beverly rose from the black Eames chair, set down her magazine, and moved to the window. She stared straight at Diana, trying to distract her, make her eyes flicker a moment from the clock. Not a blink. Good gir
l! Beverly was proud. Perhaps Diana's nipples twitched a little against the drenched gray cotton of her shirt, but her eyes, disks of sky blue ice, held firm.

  Twenty minutes later Diana, trembling, stood before Beverly in the office. Her skin, so very pale, glistened with rain and sweat.

  "Tonight you learned something," Beverly said. The girl nodded. "What?"

  "That I can do it," Diana whispered, still shaking with chill.

  "Do what? Go on, girl—speak." Beverly intentionally tightened her lips to make her mouth appear authoritative.

  "That I can do as I'm told."

  "And that's important. Why?"

  "Because there'll come a time—"

  "Maybe soon."

  "—soon, when you'll order me—"

  "To perform a mission."

  "Yes. And then I must perform it exactly as you tell me."

  "Without deviation."

  "Without any deviation. And then I must return, stand before you as I'm standing now, and report to you everything I did."

  "Everything, accurately, in scrupulous detail."

  "In the most scrupulous detail," Diana affirmed.

  "And so your task tonight—?"

  "Was to show I can obey you without questioning, that I'm capable of doing what you tell me, exactly—"

  "And correctly."

  "Yes."

  "To serve me and obey."

  Diana nodded. "Serve and obey."

  The girl drew in her breath. When she spoke again, she lowered her eyes, as was her habit whenever she uttered an opinion of her own. "I believe tonight I have shown you I can," she offered hesitantly.

  Beverly smiled, rose, stood before Diana, patted the girl gently on the head. "Yes, my dear. We're coming along nicely now." She toyed a little with Diana's stringy, dripping hair. "Down to your room now, off with those nasty garments, towel your hair, put onsomething nice and clean, then join me in the bedroom for a cup of tea."

  At Beverly's gesture of dismissal, Diana raised her eyes, gleaming with incipient tears. "Thank you, Doctor," the girl whispered, then, quick as a cat, scooted from the room.

  Afterward Beverly stood alone in the office, thinking about the next phase of Diana's training, the next degree of obedience she would instill. The control must be remote, she thought. Following orders with me hovering about is easy. Total submission beyond my sight—that will be something else.

  She had always believed that the concept came to her on a certain rainy afternoon when she was fifteen years old, came just after a crack of lightning revealed the inky blackness that lay beyond the fine, tight gray fabric of the sky.

  A romantic fantasy most likely, although perhaps it really had come to her then, at least in some rudimentary form. She knew well from her studies of human psychology that life-changing ideas often seem to strike like bolts delivered from above.

  But it was not as if she were actually seeking some means of reprisal at the time. Nor was she worrying over one or another slight the way she so often did. Quite the contrary. So perhaps it was because she wasn't trying to figure out a way to squash her enemies that a method of revenge came to her, heaven-sent if you will, and then, of course, it was so perfect, so beautiful she had no choice but to devote the remainder of her life to seeing if it was actually possible to bring it off.

  Get someone else to get them for you. There it was in a nutshell, so to speak, and, like so many great notions, startlingly simple once you thought of it.

  But there was a special element to this particular notion, the craft and cunning of it that always made her smile. The thin, tight, knowing, masking, taunting smile that said she knew something the others didn't and was harboring a plan that would see them all in hell. No matter what you do to me, the smile said, no matter what you say, what insults you heap, what humiliations you force me to endure, in the end I'll get you back, and now, even as you torment me, I know exactly how I'm going to do it, too. Yes, that's what her thin, tight, knowing, masking, taunting smile said.

  Mama knew. "Be an archer," she said. "Find an arrow; string it to your bow."

  Mama, of course, had been playing with words, making a pun out of their name. What Mama meant was: go for the weak spot -- which had always been Mama's way. But Beverly thought her own approach was far more cunning. Find someone else to do your dirty work. Get yourself a human tool.

  It took her years to find Tool, and when she finally did, the moment she laid eyes on it was one of the most ecstatic of her life.

  There she is! she said to herself. That’s her! I can see it now, can see her doing all the things I've been dreaming of. Yes, no question, that's her, I know it, she's the one!

  Then she peered at the girl a second time to make sure she was right.

  It wouldn't do to pick out the wrong person just because so many years had passed and she'd grown impatient to settle up her scores. She'd waited this long; another year, even another decade wouldn't matter if Tool was right. But on second look, and third! and fourth!, she was still convinced the girl was perfect. The tool she'd been looking for had been delivered. Beverly felt her head surge with power the way she imagined the cockhead of some prehistoric man had once swelled with potency when he stared at a rock and realized for the first time that he could use it to crush a rival's skull.

  It had been a gray day, the kind of sad, warm, unbearably humid day when the sky's the color of old pewter and the air's so close your brain feels soggy and your joints begin to ache. The kind of day when you don't feel like meeting new people because even the sight of the ones you already know drives you up the wall. You want to scream, that's the kind of day it was, but you don't, don't show even a smidgen of your pain because you're a professional, a shrink, a clinical psychologist, certified and sane and socialized and analyzed, so you just smile your thin, tight, masking smile and go in to meet the new patient.

  There she sits, tense, coiled, twenty years old, five feet two inches tall, 110 beautifully conditioned pounds, hair black like a witch's, eyes so hard and blue they make you think of ice. And yet there's something vulnerable about her, too, a visible yearning, a need, and you grasp at once she's got a craving you can satisfy.

  She's a murderess.

  "Another little murderess, Bev," Carl Drucker tells you as he hands you the file. Carl pretends to hold the folder as if it were too hot to handle, and his sheepdog's eyes twinkle when he enunciates "murderess." Carl always feigns amusement over the most dangerous patients, but he doesn't fool you. He's scared of them, so frightened he'd surely wet his pants if he had to be with one of them alone. Poor Carl. For all his training, evil still confuses him. He knows in his brain that there's no such thing, there's only antisocial behavior, but he doesn't really know it the way you do, deep down in your gut.

  "Seems our new Missy Perfect chopped up mommy and granny, little sissy, too. The old story, Bev. Strict family. Religious nuts. Wouldn't let the girls watch TV, let alone go out on dates. Mommy was stupid. Granny ruled with the strap. So one day Missy broke, took the old wood ax, and chopped 'em up."

  Another twinkle from Carl. Better watch it, Carl. Don't want to end up on my list, do you?

  "Why the sister?" you ask. As if you didn't know!

  "Oh, Bev—why's the grass green? Jeez, you've been around. Sissy was there. She probably ragged her. 'Diana's gonna get it, Diana's gonna get it, neah, neah, neah!' So, while you're chopping the authority figures, you might as well chop up the taunting little bitch, too. But it's interesting, come to think of it, there weren't any men around?" Carl, stroking his wimpy mustache, assumes his Great Psychiatrist pose. "She went for the ladies, split their heads, then gave 'em each a couple of chops between the legs. Split, split, split. She's a little sickie, I can tell you. Sue Farber tried talking to her, couldn't even get close. We thought you'd do okay with her, though. More your type, Bev. Wanna give it a shot?"

  Sure. Why not? It's what you do for a living, work with disturbed young females all day long, and you know the offende
rs aren't that much different from the nice polite college kids either. The bottom line is usually pretty much the same, a snake ball jangle of angry sexual confusion working its way out through eating disorders, and, in this case, good old matricide.

  "You'll take a look?" You nod. Carl's eyes twinkle. "That's my girl. Diana Proctor's her name." He strokes his wimpy mustache. "Good luck, Bev. And don't take any sharp instruments in there with you. Heh-heh-heh."

  Poor Carl. He knows they're all incurable. He knows he's running a warehouse for psychotics and the state's rehabilitation policy is so much crap. Hell, you're lucky if you can get one of them to construct a coherent "feelie" in the OT shop, let alone relate to you on a therapeutic basis. But Carl doesn't care. He's beyond all that. He's a proper civil servant now. Maybe there was a time when he wanted to save the world, effect great cures, write up great cases, apply psychiatric theory to social problems, reform penology, rehabilitate irreversibles. But he gave up on all that long ago. He thinks you've given up on it, too, doesn't know that you're here looking for a tool and that in about five minutes you're going to find yourself one in young Diana Proctor, murderess.

  How did she know? Even now she couldn't tell you, though Diana had been in continuous training with her for more than a year, and there'd been five years of weekly therapy sessions before that, before she could get her out of Carlisle and under full-time supervision.

  It was the whole gestalt, she often told herself, recalling the moment of their first encounter, so clear in her mind it could have taken place within the hour instead of years before.