At last he reached the penthouse. The thickly carpeted corridor was silent. He waited until the elevator doors had closed behind him, and then walked quickly along to the receptionist’s office and pushed his way through the double doors. There was a different girl sitting there today – a pretty Vietnamese girl in a shiny turquoise blouse.
‘Excuse me, sir,’ she protested, as Frank came in. ‘Mr Lasser isn’t seeing any more visitors today.’
‘Oh, he’s going to see me.’
‘No, no. He give strict instruction.’ The girl rose from her seat but Frank walked around her triangular glass desk and pushed her gently but firmly back down.
‘Stay there. Don’t say a word and don’t call anybody, you got me?’
‘You can’t go into Mr Lasser’s office! Mr Lasser will be so angry!’
‘Look at me,’ said Frank. ‘You don’t think I’m angry? I’m very angry. Compared to me, Mr Lasser is Mr Sunny Personality of the Year.’
‘Please – if I let you in, I will lose my job here.’
‘In that case, I’ll be doing you a great favor, believe me.’
He reached across her desk and ripped the cord out of her phone. ‘You don’t call anybody and you stay right here, OK?’
Then he went to the doors of Charles Lasser’s office and threw them wide open.
Twenty-Eight
Charles Lasser was standing in the middle of the room in his shirtsleeves, his shoulders hunched, grasping a golf club. His head was wreathed in cigar smoke, so that it appeared for a moment as if he didn’t have a head at all. Then he looked up, and the smoke swirled away, and he was staring directly at Frank with eyes that glittered like nail heads.
‘Who the hell let you in?’ he demanded. ‘Kim Cu’c!’
‘Mr Lasser, please, I try to stop him.’
‘It’s not her fault,’ said Frank. He took a few steps toward the window so that his back was covered.
Charles Lasser lowered his head again, hesitated, and then putted his golf ball under his desk. ‘You’re going to have to leave, Mr Bell. I have nothing to say to you. Besides, you’re putting me off my stroke.’
‘You may not have anything to say to me, but by God, I have plenty to say to you.’
‘Oh, yes? I thought you would have been far too busy writing funeral speeches for your friends.’
‘Jesus, you’re twisted. If it hadn’t been for you, my friends wouldn’t be dead.’
‘You’re out of your mind, Mr Bell. You think I killed them? What on earth makes you think that?’
‘Because you’re a goddamned sadist and you know damn well who was financing Dar Tariki Tariqat – it was you. And you bombed my office right after I came here and warned you about Astrid. You didn’t bomb any of the studios; you didn’t bomb the executive cottages – no, you bombed my office, and if I hadn’t stepped out for a minute you would have killed me, too.’
‘You want me to go bring security, Mr Lasser?’ asked his receptionist.
Charles Lasser shook his head. ‘Don’t worry, Kim Cu’c. I can deal with Mr Bell. Mr Bell is suffering from delusions, that’s all.’
He walked back to his desk, which was a huge mahogany construction with carvings of satyrs’ heads and bunches of grapes and fluted pillars. He parked one substantial buttock right on the edge of it, and sat there smiling at Frank, occasionally slapping the shaft of his golf club into the palm of his hand.
Frank said, ‘Why don’t you admit it? You bombed my office, didn’t you? You organized all of these bombings. This was nothing to do with child-abuse victims getting their revenge, not really. This was you getting your revenge on the entertainment business.’
Charles Lasser grinned. He seemed to have too many teeth, and even though they were perfect, they were yellowed by nicotine. ‘That’s a great theory, Mr Bell. I have to give you ten out of ten for creativity. I can’t say that Star-TV hasn’t profited from this terrorist campaign, and we’ve been very lucky so far that they haven’t targeted us. But you’re giving me far too much credit. I never would have had the brains to think of it, myself, and I certainly wouldn’t have had the courage to carry it out.’
‘You had the courage to break Astrid’s nose.’
‘What? Didn’t I make this clear to you the first time? I don’t know anybody called Astrid.’
‘You beat up on her today. Don’t try to deny it; it won’t work. I just left her at the Sisters of Jerusalem, waiting for treatment.’
Charles Lasser sighed in exasperation. ‘I’ve been in meetings all day. We’re launching nine major new series next season. I don’t have the time to break girls’ noses.’
Frank approached him, so close that Charles Lasser could have struck him with his golf club if he had wanted to. ‘I warned you,’ said Frank. ‘I warned you that if you touched Astrid one more time, I’d come back, and that I’d make sure that you never hurt her again.’
‘So you did. But read my lips, Mr Bell. I didn’t know any girl called Astrid when you first came here, and I haven’t made the acquaintance of any girl called Astrid in the meantime. All right. So somebody’s broken Astrid’s nose. I sympathize, I really do, whoever Astrid may be. But you’ll have to go looking for somebody else to threaten, because it wasn’t me.’
Frank pulled the .38 out of his inside pocket. The hammer got caught on the lining, which tore. He pointed the gun at Charles Lasser’s face and cocked it.
‘Christ Almighty,’ said Charles Lasser.
‘Yes,’ said Frank. ‘Christ Almighty. May Christ Almighty forgive you for what you’ve done, for all of the innocent people you’ve killed, and for beating up on Astrid just for your own enjoyment. You’re a sick man, Mr Lasser. You murdered my son, you murdered my friends, you murdered women and children who hadn’t even begun to live out their lives.’
‘Kim Cu’c,’ said Charles Lasser, without taking his eyes off the muzzle of Frank’s revolver. ‘Call security.’
‘Police, too, Mr Lasser?’
‘Are you deaf or something? I said call security. No police. Impress that on security, too – no police.’
‘What, are you scared?’ Frank asked him, even though his own hands were shaking and he found it difficult to keep it aimed at Charles Lasser’s head.
‘I’m not scared of anything, Mr Bell. Never have been, and never will be.’
‘That’s because you’ve never had to face up to someone your own size.’
‘So what are you going to do? Shoot me? Then what? You’ll spend fifteen years on death row and then they’ll give you a lethal injection.’
‘Not if I don’t kill you. Not if I simply shoot your balls off.’ With that, Frank slowly lowered the gun and pointed it between Charles Lasser’s legs.
Charles Lasser took a deep breath. ‘I’m telling you . . . I don’t know a girl called Astrid. I haven’t hurt any girl called anything.’
‘Well, you’re a pretty convincing liar, I’ll give you that. Kim Cu’c, don’t you go for that door! First of all we have to give your boss here a refresher course in “Girls I Have Busted the Noses of.” Maybe you don’t know Astrid by that name, Mr Lasser, but she came to see you today and you beat her very, very badly – the worst I’ve ever seen any woman beaten, not that I’ve seen very many. She’s five feet four, brunette with pale blue eyes. She has a pattern of moles across her chest like Andromeda and she always wears an emerald ring. Now, does that jog any memories? It was only this afternoon when you busted her nose, after all.’
Charles Lasser’s mouth opened, very slowly, and then closed again. ‘You . . .’ he began, but then he had to take two deep breaths to compose himself. ‘Who the fuck have you been talking to?’
‘I haven’t been talking to anybody. I saw Astrid for myself.’
‘Astrid? Is that what she says her name is?’
‘Then you do know her?’
Charles Lasser didn’t answer. His breathing was becoming increasingly labored, and he was almost chewing his breath with his perfe
ct yellow teeth. Frank didn’t really know what to do – whether to shoot him in the head or shoot him in the balls or whether to turn around and leave him gasping. He seemed to have struck him harder by describing what Astrid looked like than he could ever have done with a .38 bullet.
‘I want your assurance,’ said Frank, growing bolder.
‘What?’
‘Here and now, I want you to give me your assurance that you’ll never see Astrid again.’
Charles Lasser shook his head in apparent disbelief. ‘My assurance? How can I give my assurance?’
‘It’s simple. I count to five. If by the time I count to five you say “I promise that I’ll never see Astrid again,” I put the gun away and I leave. If you don’t, I blow your balls off.’
‘You’re pathetic,’ said Charles Lasser. ‘Do you know that, Mr Bell? You’re completely and utterly sad. You don’t even know what the fuck you’re asking me to do, do you?’
Frank was confused. ‘I’m telling you to leave her alone, that’s all! Is that so difficult to understand?’
Charles Lasser started to laugh – the loud, desperate laughter of somebody who finds the world so ridiculous that he can’t think what else to do. ‘I don’t know where you belong, Mr Bell. I think you’re too crazy even for a nuthouse.’ Then abruptly he stopped laughing. ‘You’re not going to kill me, though, are you? You’re not even going to shoot my balls off. Let me tell you this, Mr Bell: any man who walks into my office with a gun and threatens me with it, he’d better fucking use it or else he’s going to pay.’
‘I don’t need a gun,’ Frank retorted. ‘All I have to do is tell the media about you and Astrid.’
‘Tell them what? The cops have interviewed me already. I don’t know any Astrid.’
‘But you know a girl with an emerald ring and a pattern of moles like Andromeda.’
Without any warning at all, Charles Lasser got off the edge of his desk, took two steps toward Frank, and whacked at his wrist with his golf club. The gun flew out of his hand and tumbled on to the carpet. Frank turned around, and as he did so, Charles Lasser whacked him again, right across the side of his head.
At first he couldn’t open his eyes. He had a cracking headache, worse than any headache he had ever experienced before. He felt as if his skull was actually split open, just above the bridge of his nose.
Eventually he managed to open his left eye. He was lying in the back of a panel van, with a corrugated aluminum floor, between stacks of khaki boxes and cheap gray removers’ blankets. The van’s roof was made of amber-tinted fiberglass, through which he could make out a dark shadow and a narrow band of sunlight, as if it were parked in a garage, or under a bridge. He struggled to sit up and realized that his wrists were tightly tied up behind him, and his ankles, too. His right eyelid felt like it was glued together, and he could feel a map of sticky blood all over his face.
‘Jesus,’ he said. The pain in his head was almost unbearable. He thought of rolling over on to his side, but he was afraid that it would hurt too much. Instead he tried to concentrate on who he was and what he was doing here. ‘Frank Bell,’ he croaked, after a while. And when he said that, he remembered Charles Lasser hitting his wrist, but that was all.
He had no idea how long he had been lying here. It was obviously daylight, but it could have been the following morning. He felt stomach-empty sick, but he hadn’t eaten anything before he had gone to see Charles Lasser, and the blow to his head could be making him feel nauseous. That, and the oily chemical smell that permeated the back of the van.
He managed to lift up his head a couple of inches. Not only was he tied up, hand and foot, but he was wearing a thick blue canvas vest. Raising his chin a little more, he could see that the vest had deep pockets in it, and that the pockets were filled with putty-colored blocks that looked like Play-Doh.
He let his head drop back. He was all dressed up like a suicide bomber.
About five minutes later, he lifted up his head again. It was gloomy in the back of the van, but there was enough light for him to be able to read the stenciled words on the side of the khaki boxes. IMI – Handle With Care. It didn’t take an explosives expert to work out that there were enough demolition blocks in here to bring down a sizeable building.
‘Hey!’ he shouted.
He waited, but there was no answer. ‘Hey!’ he shouted again, and kicked his heels on the floor.
Still no answer. ‘Get me out of here! Do you hear me? Get me the hell out of here! The cops are going to come looking for me! Do you hear me? I told the cops where I was going!’
He listened and listened. He could faintly hear traffic, and the sound of an airplane. He lowered his head again. He could only imagine what Charles Lasser had planned for him. This van was probably going to be used for Dar Tariki Tariqat’s next attack on the entertainment industry, and when it blew up, he was going to be inside it, dressed like a martyr. If there was enough left of him for the crime scene team to identify, it was probably going to be assumed that he was a member of Dar Tariki Tariqat, too.
Why the hell hadn’t he pulled the trigger when he’d had the chance? He had thought that he had been angry enough to kill Charles Lasser, after the way that he had beaten Astrid, but maybe the truth was that he would never be angry enough to kill anybody. He was a comedy writer. The worse things got, the funnier they were. He couldn’t even stop himself from thinking what his friends would say, when he was blown to smithereens. ‘That was Frank all over.’
He waited and waited and gradually the throbbing in his head began to subside, although his wrists and ankles were tied too tightly and they began to feel cold and numb. He wondered if Astrid had seen a doctor at the Sisters of Jerusalem. He wondered if she was wondering where he was. He wondered if anybody was wondering where he was.
He thought about Dusty and Henry, in Pigs, about writing a story in which Dusty thought that Henry was kidnapped, except that he wasn’t really kidnapped, he was hiding because Dusty had called him ‘the stupidest thing since a single sock-suspender.’
He thought about The Process, and the susurration of the desert sand. You may never pass this way again in a lifetime. You have crossed the street, my friend, and you can never go back.
Maybe an hour later, he heard voices outside. He thought about shouting out but then decided against it. The voices went away.
He might have slept for another half-hour, although he wasn’t sure. Suddenly he felt somebody shaking his shoulder.
‘Wake up!’
He opened his eyes. It was Danny. He looked pale and worried and his hair was sticking up at the back, like it used to do when he first woke up in the morning. He was still wearing his funeral suit.
‘Danny?’
‘Wake up, we haven’t got much time!’
‘Am I dreaming this?’ Frank asked him.
‘No . . . turn over.’
‘What?’
‘Turn over, on to your front.’
Frank hesitated. He couldn’t decide if he was dreaming this or not. But Danny had saved him back at the Sunset Marquis, hadn’t he? And what had Nevile said, that spirits always stay close to the family they love? He rolled over, grunting with pain.
‘Keep very, very still,’ said Danny. ‘I’m going to untie your knots, but it’s very difficult.’
Frank’s face was pressed against one of the corrugations in the floor, and he had an agonizing pain in the small of his back. He was trembling, but he managed to keep still while Danny tried to untie him.
Danny said, ‘It’s trying to move things, that’s what I’m not very good at. I can touch things, but I can’t really feel them.’
Over twenty minutes went past. Frank couldn’t feel Danny’s fingers at all, only coldness, like a soft icy draft blowing through the crack in a window, in winter. But he could feel the cords that tied his wrists, and millimeter by millimeter they were working loose.
‘Danny, even if you can’t do this, I want to thank you for trying.’
>
‘I can do it, Daddy. Just keep still.’
‘You know how much I love you, don’t you? You know that I never meant to hurt you?’
‘I know.’
The cord jerked looser, and then suddenly the knot unraveled and Frank’s hands were free. He rolled around again, on to his back, and managed to sit up. Danny was kneeling next to him, smiling.
‘You’re something, you know that? You’re really something.’
‘I’m always close by, Daddy. I can’t let anybody hurt you.’
Frank shook his head. ‘I was the one who was always supposed to look after you.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Danny. ‘In proper families, everybody looks after everybody else.’
‘Danny,’ said Frank, and his eyes filled up with tears. He reached out to hold him close but Danny folded up and disappeared, as if he were as insubstantial as a silk scarf. Frank sat still for a few minutes, rubbing the circulation back into his wrists. Then he leaned forward and started untying his ankles.
Another two hours passed in silence. Then suddenly there was a loud bang and the back doors of the panel van were unlocked. Somebody said, ‘Here you go, sir. Step up on this.’ The van was shaken from side to side, and then the door was closed.
Frank looked up. Charles Lasser was standing amongst the boxes, looking down at him. He was wearing a baggy suit of natural-colored linen, with a large green handkerchief crammed into the breast pocket.
‘You’re awake, then, Mr Bell?’ he said in a voice as rich as fruitcake.
Frank didn’t answer.
‘I guess you’re interested to know how long you’ve been here. Well, I can tell you. Almost fifteen hours. The time is twenty minutes before noon.’
‘The cops know that I came looking for you,’ said Frank.
‘No, they don’t. Nobody knows that you came looking for me.’
‘Astrid knows.’
‘How many times? There is no Astrid.’
‘Oh, really? So what was it that upset you so much when I described her?’
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