“That’s not quite true. His story goes on.”
“We know he didn’t leave here. We know you’re the last person who saw him alive.”
“I’m afraid that’s not true either.”
“Given your track record, it’s not likely that we’ll believe you, is it?”
“I don’t know. I imagine your belief systems and mine are at variance. On my twelfth birthday I discovered a deep and powerful spirituality within me, and have acted according to its dictates ever since. It was like being touched on the cheek by a butterfly’s wing.”
“Unfortunately you touched someone on the cheek with something a little sharper than a butterfly’s wing. You’re a dab hand with a knife by all accounts. Wasn’t that why you were expelled from school? And didn’t your father kill himself on your twelfth birthday?”
For the first time, Andrei’s composure momentarily flickered, like a video transmission briefly losing its signal.
“And this spiritual awakening of yours includes murder,” Bryant pressed.
“Not at all. I have never killed anyone.” The dwarf’s features had recomposed themselves. He was in control once more. “I would not presume to hold the power over life and death. That responsibility is not in the charge of mortals.”
“Interesting. Tell me, do you think you are mad?” Bryant favoured surprising his suspects with the kind of blunt questions few officers ever asked.
“Never. I know I’m not.”
“How do you know?”
“Because everything I do is for a reason.”
“Of course. The Seven Points,” said Bryant, realization dawning on him. Jumping to his feet, he made a dash - a slow one, as Mr Bryant is rather old - toward the yellow silk curtain that closed the stage from the public. Andrei spun himself around and raised his whip, cracking it so that the end wrapped itself around Bryant’s wrist, but a moment later May was on him. The detectives never carried weapons but, knowing that Andrei was dangerous, May had borrowed Longbright’s taser. He cracked it across Andrei’s barrel chest, convulsing him.
“A bit more effective than Electra’s 30,000-volt static stunt,” he said as the dwarf fell to the floor. Bryant flicked back the curtain with his walking stick. There, writhing on the crimson-painted dais in the centre of the stage, was the Caterpillar Boy, a limbless green torso with an absurd rubber beak and bulbous articulated eyes.
Bryant tore at the plastic strips holding the exhibit’s mask tightly in place.
. Underneath it he found Michael Portheim, his face contorted in agony. His body had been painted green, and his arms and legs had been severed and neatly sutured at their bases. He was held in place on the dais by a single plastic strap.
“Federov was a medical student for two years in St Petersburg,” said Bryant, looking for something with which to cut Portheim free. “If that little fellow moves again, stick a few more volts up him.”
May looked at the Caterpillar Boy, aghast. “Why would he do such a thing?” he asked.
“Because of the Seven Points. Give me a hand here.” Bryant had found his Swiss Army knife, and used the blade to sever the strap. “I knew there had to be a reason why Andrei Federov was released by the Russian Security Service. They wouldn’t set a psychopath free and then allow him to leave the country without a purpose. He was dangerous, but he knew exactly what he was doing, and needed cover to operate as an agent.
“Portheim has a head full of counter-terrorist information that Federov needed to unearth and deliver, so he used a technique from the old country to get it. The immobilization of the prisoner by the removal of his limbs. He had to be kept alive until he’d given everything up. He had everything taken away from him except the Seven Points.” Bryant indicated his ears, eyes, mouth and nostrils.
“My God, the poor devil,” exclaimed May.
“The Seven Points,” said Bryant. “I realized that only one of the exhibits was reduced to relying on them. He had to be kept alive until he’d been drained of information. I imagine Mills is the only other person who knows the truth about what’s been going on here since the night he arrived.
“I’m willing to bet that Federov perfected his interrogatory technique in Russia. The difference was that there his victims died before anyone could get to them. Technically I suppose you could argue that he didn’t kill anyone - his countrymen let them die from their surgery.”
“All right, the RFFS want information, but I can’t imagine that they’d have asked Federov to put his victim on display in a sideshow, for God’s sake,” said May.
“Well, that was a bit of an own-goal on their behalf, I’m afraid,” said Bryant. “They branded him a psychopath when it suited them, but he became one.” The last of the plastic strips came away from Portheim’s mouth, and he was able to speak.
“He needs water,” said May. “He’s suffering from dehydration.”
Bryant handcuffed the dwarf to a tent-pole with Portheim’s strap, and May called for an ambulance.
“They can do miracles with prosthetic limbs these days,” said Bryant, not very reassuringly. “Of course, that will deprive the Caterpillar Boy of his career in showbusiness.”
“Let’s not use the term ‘Caterpillar Boy’ in Mr Portheim’s presence any more, Arthur,” May whispered.
“Tricky, isn’t it?” mused Bryant. “To define the exact point where sanity ends and madness begins.”
“In this job, yes,” agreed his partner, feeding the limbless spy water as his partner locked the devil-headed dwarf to a tent-post.
<
~ * ~
HARLAN ELLISON®
All the Birds Come Home to Roost
HE TURNED ONTO his left side in the bed, trying to avoid the wet spot. He propped his hand against his cheek, smiled grimly, and prepared himself to tell her the truth about why he had been married and divorced three times.
“Three times!” she had said, her eyes widening, that familiar line of perplexity appearing vertically between her brows. “Three times. Christ, in all the time we went together, I never knew that. Three, huh?”
Michael Kirxby tightened the grim smile slightly. “You never asked, so I never mentioned it,” he said. “There’s a lot of things I never bother to mention: I flunked French in high school and had to work and go to summer school so I could graduate a semester late; I once worked as a short-order cook in a diner in New Jersey near the Turnpike; I’ve had the clap maybe half-a-dozen times and the crabs twice ...”
“Ichhh, don’t talk about it!” She buried her naked face in the pillow. He reached out and ran his hand up under her thick, chestnut hair, ran it all the way up to the occipital ridge and massaged the cleft. She came up from where she had hidden.
That had been a few moments ago. Now he propped himself on his bent arm and proceeded to tell her the truth about it. He never lied; it simply wasn’t worth the trouble. But it was a long story, and he’d told it a million times; and even though he had developed a storyteller’s facility with the interminable history of it, he had learned to sketch in whole sections with apocryphal sentences, had developed the use of artful time-lapse jumps. Still, it took a good fifteen minutes to do it right, to achieve the proper reaction and, quite frankly, he was bored with the recitation. But there were occasions when it served its purpose, and this was one of them, so he launched into it.
“I got married the first time when I was twenty, twenty-one, something like that. I’m lousy on dates. Anyhow, she was a sick girl, disturbed before I ever met her; family thing, hated her mother, loved her father - he was an ex-Marine, big, good-looking - secretly wanted to ball the old man but never could cop to it. He died of cancer of the brain but before he went, he began acting erratically, treating the mother like shit. Not that the mother didn’t deserve it... she was a harridan, a real termagant. But it was really outrageous, he wasn’t coming home nights, beating up the mother, that sort of thing. So my wife sided with the mother agai
nst him. When they found his brain was being eaten up by the tumour, she flipped and went off the deep end. Made my life a furnace! After I divorced her, the mother had her committed. She’s been in the asylum over seventeen years now. For me, it was close; too damned close. She very nearly took me with her to the madhouse. I got away just in time. A little longer, I wouldn’t be here today.”
He watched her face. Martha was listening closely now. Heartmeat information. This was the sort of thing they loved to hear; the fibre material, the formative chunks, something they could sink their neat, small teeth into. He sat up, reached over and clicked on the bed lamp. The light was on his right side as he stared toward the foot of the bed, apparently conjuring up the painful past; the light limned his profile. He had a Dick Tracy chin and deep-set brown eyes. He cut his own hair, did it badly, and it shagged over his ears as though he had just crawled out of bed. Fortunately, it was wavy and he was in bed: he knew the light and the profile were good. Particularly for the story.
“I was in crap shape after her. Almost went down the tube. She came within a finger of pulling me onto the shock table with her. She always, always had the hoodoo sign on me; I had very little defence against her. Really scares me when I think about it.”
The naked Martha looked at him. “Mike ... what was her name?”
He swallowed hard. Even now, years later, long after it was ended, he found himself unable to cleanse the memories of pain and fear. “Her name was Cindy.”
“Well, uh, what did she do that was so awful?”
He thought about it for a second. This was a departure from the routine. He wasn’t usually asked for further specifics. And running back through the memories he found most of them had blurred into one indistinguishable throb of misery. There were incidents he remembered, incidents so heavily freighted with anguish that he could feel his gorge becoming buoyant, but they were part of the whole terrible time with Cindy, and trying to pick them out so they would convey, in microcosm, the shrieking hell of their marriage, was like retelling something funny from the day before, to people who had not been there. Not funny. Oh, well, you’d have to be there.
What had she done that was so awful, apart from the constant attempts at suicide, the endless remarks intended to make him feel inadequate, the erratic behaviour, the morning he had returned from ten weeks of basic training a day earlier than expected and found her in bed with some skinny guy from on the block, the times she took off and sold the furniture and cleaned out the savings account? What had she done beyond that? Oh, hell, Martha, nothing much.
He couldn’t say that. He had to encapsulate the four years of their marriage. One moment that summed it up.
He said, “I was trying to pass my bar exams. I was really studying hard. It wasn’t easy for me the way it was for a lot of people. And she used to mumble.”
“She mumbled?”
“Yeah. She’d walk around, making remarks you just knew were crummy, but she’d do it under her breath, just at the threshold of audibility. And me trying to concentrate. She knew it made me crazy, but she always did it. So one time ... I was really behind in the work and trying to catch up ... and she started that, that...” He remembered!. “That damned mumbling, in the living room and the bedroom and the bathroom ... but she wouldn’t come in the kitchen where I was studying. And it went on and on and on ...”
He was trembling. Jesus, why had she asked for this; it wasn’t in the script.
“... and finally I just stood up and screamed, ‘What the hell are you mumbling? What the hell do you want from me? Can’t you see I’m busting my ass studying? Can’t you for Christ sake leave me alone for just five fucking minutes?’”
With almost phonographic recall he knew he was saying precisely, exactly what he had screamed all those years ago.
“And I ran into the bedroom, and she was in her bathrobe and slippers, and she started in on me, accusing me of this and that and every other damned thing, and I guess I finally went over the edge, and I punched her right in the face. As hard as I could. The way I’d hit some slob in the street. Hard, real hard. And then somehow I had her bedroom slipper in my hand and I was sitting on her chest on the bed, and beating her in the face with that goddamn slipper ... and ... and ... I woke up and saw me hitting her, and it was the first time I’d ever hit a woman, and I fell away from her, and I crawled across the floor and I was sitting there like a scared animal, my hands over my eyes ... crying ... scared to death ...”
She stared at him silently. He was shaking terribly.
“Jesus,” she said, softly.
And they stayed that way for a while, without speaking. He had answered her question. More than she wanted to know.
The mood was tainted now. He could feel himself split - one part of him here and now with the naked Martha, in this bedroom with the light low - another part he had thought long gone, in that other bedroom, hunkered down against the baseboard, hands over eyes, whimpering like a crippled dog, Cindy sprawled half on the floor, half on the bed, her face puffed and bloodied. He tried desperately to get control of himself.
After some long moments he was able to breathe regularly. She was still staring at him, her eyes wide. He said, almost with reverence, “Thank God for Marcie.”
She waited and then said, “Who’s Marcie?”
“Who was Marcie. Haven’t seen her in something like fifteen years.”
“Well, who was Marcie?”
“She was the one who picked up the pieces and focused my eyes. If it hadn’t been for her, I’d have walked around on my knees for another year ... or two ... or ten ...”
“What happened to her?”
“Who knows? You can take it from our recently severed liaison; I seem to have some difficulty hanging on to good women.”
“Oh, Mike!”
“Hey, take it easy. You split for good and sound reasons. I think I’m doomed to be a bachelor ... maybe a recluse for the rest of my life. But that’s okay. I’ve tried it three times. I just don’t have the facility. I’m good for a woman for short stretches, but over the long haul I think I’m just too high-pressure.”
She smiled wanly, trying to ease what she took to be pain. He wasn’t in pain, but she had never been able to tell the difference with him. Precisely that inability to penetrate his facade had been the seed of their dissolution. “It was okay with us.”
“For a while.”
“Yeah. For a while.” She reached across him to the nightstand and picked up the heavy Orrefors highball glass with the remains of the Mendocino Gray Riesling. “It was so strange running into you at Allison’s party. I’d heard you were seeing some model or actress ... or something.”
He shook his head. “Nope. You were my last and greatest love.”
She made a wet, bratting sound. “Bullshit.”
“Mmm. Yeah, it is a bit, ain’t it?”
And they stayed that way, silently, for a while. Once, he touched her naked thigh, feeling the nerve jump under his hand; and once, she reached across to lay her hand on his chest, to feel him breathing. But they didn’t make love again. And after a space of time in which they thought they could hear the dust settling in the room, she said, “Well, I’ve got to get home to feed the cats.”
“You want to stay the night?”
She thought about it a moment. “No thanks, Mike. Maybe another night when I come prepared. You know my thing about putting on the same clothes the next day.” He knew. And smiled.
She crawled out of bed and began getting dressed. He watched her, ivory-lit by the single bed lamp. It never would have worked. But then, he’d known that almost from the first. It never worked well for an extended period. There was no Holy Grail. Yet the search went on, reflexively. It was like eating potato chips.
She came back to the bed, leaned over and kissed him. It was the merest touch of lips, and meant nothing. “Bye. Call me.”
“No doubt about it,” he said; but he wouldn’t.
/>
Then she left. He sat up in the bed for a while, thinking that it was odd how people couldn’t leave it alone. Like a scab, they had to pick at it. He’d dated her rather heavily for a month, and they had broken up for no particular reason save that it was finished. And tonight the party, and he was alone, and she was alone, and they had come together for an anticlimax.
A returning. To a place neither had known very well. A devalued neighbourhood.
He knew he would never see Martha again.
The bubble of sadness bobbed on the surface for a moment, then burst; the sense of loss flavoured the air a moment longer; then he turned off the light, rolled over onto the dried wet spot, and went to sleep.
Psychomania: Killer Stories Page 45