by John Shirley
Something distracted Gribner from his brooding. A noise? No, the lack of a noise. Everett was supposed to be taking a bath. The kid had been in there for twenty minutes and no sound of running water yet. He’d come home all sooty again. Playing in the basement. What was it he got into down there that left him so grimy?
Gribner rose, causing the Pekingese female, Randi, to sputter sleepily as she was dislodged from his lap. He stood, stretched, and went toward the bathroom. Louie was outside the door, crouching, tail thumping slightly. He sat watching the door like a terrier watching a rat hole, making almost inaudible sounds in his throat.
A grating sound came from the bathroom; it wasn’t a toilet or tub noise. It wasn’t the pipes—after years in the same apartment, Gribner knew the pipes’ dissonant singing by heart. It was the sound of some unguessable animal, growling.
Louie backed away from the door.
Gribner reached for the knob, hesitated as his hand grasped the cold metal. He’s not my kid, he thought. Wouldn’t be right to barge in on him. He’s a house guest.
He heard a squeak, the sound of bare flesh against porcelain.
And then the growling again.
But maybe it was a moan. Maybe the boy had fallen and hurt himself. Using this convenient rationale, Gribner opened the lockless bathroom door and looked in.
The grating noise had recommenced. It was like the turning of a great iron hinge, with an undertone of throaty warning.
Everett was on his hands and knees in the tub, naked, staring transfixed at the bathtub drain.
He was clearly completely unaware of Gribner. Or ignoring him utterly. His eyes didn’t waver from their fix on the rust-flecked metal throat of the drain. Gribner glimpsed something red and bright glimmering there. Maybe a bug.
Everett was tense in the bone-dry bathtub; knees red, knuckles white. Everett’s small circumcised penis was erect. Slowly, never removing his eyes from the drain, Everett moved his right hand back, balancing on the flat of his left. He began to massage his penis—unthinkingly, no expression of pleasure showing on his face—eyes still locked on the drain.
And then the grating growling came from the drain. It was a deep, echoey sound this time. It was answered. The answer came from Everett’s slightly parted, foam-flecked lips.
Gribner was breathing shallowly. There was a band of coldness contracting around his temples. He hadn’t been so afraid since he’d told Benny the Twitch to drop his gun, and Benny had raised it and fired instead. Gribner had returned fire, and his aim had been better than Benny’s.
But now all he could do was quietly back away.
He was careful to make as little sound as possible as he backed out of the bathroom and closed the door. He didn’t want to disturb Everett. He didn’t want Everett to look at him.
But it had to stop.
He felt safer now, with the closed door between them.
He raised a fist and pounded on the door. “Everett! Hey, I thought I told you to take a bath!”
Another deep, grating, echoey growl began—and stopped midway.
A moment later the sound of water splashing into the bathtub made it possible for him to relax, to breathe again.
Louie was still staring at the door.
The phone rang. Moving mechanically, Gribner answered.
“You want the report now?” It was Leibowitz.
“Uh—sure.”
“The boy was cut up pretty much the same as the others. Except for the chewing—”
“The what?”
“You didn’t look very close, huh? Kid’s genitals were chewed away. And I’m telling you chewed, Lieutenant…I figure this guy’s got a dog. Only—it’s not exactly like—bite marks.”
“Chewed…If not a dog, a man?”
“Not a man. Not a dog. Some big animal. Not sure what yet.”
“Hey—save the rest of the report until tomorrow.”
Gribner hung up.
He wasn’t sure, but he thought he heard the growling coming from the bathroom again. The growling of some big animal.
FOUR
An unseasonable heat had come to the city. The heat was sticky and it trapped the smog under a windless inversion layer. To Lanyard, out walking Thursday afternoon, the air seemed gray-blue, the color of dead skin. He could feel it palpably when he rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. It had the oiliness of insecticide.
Eyes burning in this miasma, he walked from the Hilton in midtown Manhattan, down the Avenue of the Americas to Thirtieth Street. He turned west to walk through a district of furriers—raw skins hang in windows, brushed furs as yet untanned, their rough sides like the scabrous skins of scalping victims. A taxidermist’s window displayed a whole fox and a golden eagle frozen in motion, glassy-eyed.
Strong young men in tank-top shirts, new shoes, and neatly pressed jeans asked him for spare change. Sweating, he took off his sweater in the prickly heat and turned east to Third Avenue, which he followed down to the Bowery area, in search of the Ninth Precinct station. He had an appointment with Gribner at three. He regretted walking. He felt tired and confused, and began to suspect he was lost. Had Gribner said the station was at Fifth Street and Second Avenue, or second Street at Fifth Avenue? He should have written it down.
In front of the boarded-over buildings, young black men in striped hats drew small crowds for Three-Card Monte: “Say my man ten get you twenny just pickuh red card outuh th’ black, wherezuh red card who wantsuh bet—I pay with a smile if you in—checkitout an’ don’ make me shout!” Hollow-eyed women in dirty blouses forlornly hawked books no one would want, scratched sixties records, and down-at-heel shoes, all on frayed blankets spread out in the shade.
Lanyard passed a burned-out building. He paused to peer into the gutted storefront that had once made up most of the building’s first floor. The windows and doors were gone, and no one had troubled to board them over. Between two blackened window frames someone had spray-painted: DETH TO LNDLRDS!! LNDLRD TRCHED BLDG FR INSURANCE!! 3 DED IN FIRE!! The spray paint was red and gaseously air-blown at the edges, like writing in fire. Lanyard was startled to see a child moving through the black interior of the building. Two children, one white and one Puerto Rican, preschoolers in shorts and T-shirts and tennis shoes, giggling, whispering urgently to one another as they clambered through the dead-black rubble. Each carried a stick which they poked into sumps of melancholy violet water that had collected in the craters of the ashen floor. The children were anomalies of color and animation in the dead, monochromatic, almost lightless interior; the walls were black, the rubble on the floor was black; the ceiling was black and where fire had eaten holes in it black wires dangled down. It was like the lava fields he’d seen in Eastern Oregon; like one of the cooled-lava tunnels that led deep into the dead volcano. Desolate and primeval.
A cloud covered the sun. Now the cloud moved away, and from behind Lanyard light struck the second story of the burned-out building’s façade; the lower half of the ruin was still in shadow, the light partly occluded by the buildings across the street. A ray of sunlight entered the lifeless window at the second story and slanted through a burn hole in the floor, striking down through the ceiling over the ground floor to splash across the face of the red-haired white boy just as he and his companion turned to squint at the street. The boy’s face, shining in this momentary brilliance, showed crisscrossing red and blue lines, applied with finger paints, in an almost cubistic variation of Indian war paint. At least, Lanyard took it to be Indian war paint, then.
On the child’s face was an expression Lanyard had once seen on the face of a ferret that had snarled at him from its hole in the bank of a certain pond a long time before—a pond in which he’d almost drowned, later, panicked by a ghostly face he thought he’d seen in the murky water.
The child’s face began to fade into the gloom as another cloud blocked the sun. The children turned away to poke with their sticks at a puddle, just under a gutted TV set lodged crookedly in the jagged r
ubble at their feet. Lanyard thought he glimpsed something pale and rubbery reach up from the water to grasp the stick, to tug at it almost playfully. The children giggled and sprang back. Lanyard decided his eyes were playing tricks. He turned away.
Farther down, the street was raucous with the calls of sidewalk vendors, the constant churn of traffic, the periodic hysteria of sirens, the clatter and grind of street construction. Normally, the activity would have pleased him. Today it was an unhealthy swarming, like the scuttling of cockroaches surprised late at night in the kitchen when the light is suddenly turned on. Like something that had crawled up from underground.
To his left, a street crew worked behind wooden barriers, using picks to clear hard-packed dirt from around a tangle of rusty pipes. Beside the work crew was a shaft dropping between vertical planks into pitch darkness. The air over the shaft wavered, distorted by the release of heat. But there was no plume of steam. What was giving off the heat?
Lanyard remembered the torrid air roiling from the old utility access door behind the furnace. In the room where the boy had been disemboweled.
For a moment he stood stock still, gazing at the dark pit beside the sidewalk, thinking: This unnatural heat—this weather itself—was it created underground? Like a fever in the city’s body. Some underground sickness.
He shook his head and smiled.
But the next time he approached a repair trench, he crossed the street to avoid it. And he skirted subway stations, as if afraid they might erupt some unguessable predator. He pictured the brutal head of a moray eel darting from an undersea crevice.
Blinking through perspiration, Lanyard stopped at the corner of Third Street and the Bowery. Lost in thought, he’d walked too far. Thinking sometimes made him unthinking.
Fifth Street and Second Avenue. Gribner had definitely said Fifth Street and—he froze, eyes locked on a deserted building on Third Street, diagonally across from his corner.
Something had moved—had moved strangely—behind one of the empty windows on the second floor.
It was an old building, old as a steam locomotive, and the faces of imps looked brokenly down from the square granite false front. Most of the windows had been broken out and boarded over. To the right was a vacant lot piebald with knee-deep heaps of trash, chiefly liquor bottles. Trash and garbage, some of it melded by time and weather into monochromatic brown heaps, bunched in the old building’s doorways. The first-floor windows were closed off with stapled flaps of flattened cardboard boxes; the sidewalk was littered with chunks of fallen cornices. Lanyard stared in fascination at one of the lower windows, where the cardboard flaps overlapped. The flaps were moving, bending outward. A man’s hand emerged, groping, from between two of the flaps. It was followed by another hand, wrists, arms, and between them, wriggling, widening the gap, was a grisly matted head. It was an old man—or a young one, prematurely aged—pressing out head first. He pulled himself out, clawing and elbowing ahead. He popped from the slats and clanked on all fours through tin and glass debris. Lanyard relaxed: The man was just another tramp. The tramp stood, shakily, and turned like a crazily bent weathervane, to shout at the window what sounded like “COMUNGORYUHFUGGINSHIDUNB ASTUD-UNSTOPYERTGUXNERDIPSLEFUGGINSHIDS!” As if in reply to this invocation, another tramp pressed lobster hands and a blocky face out the same cardboard flaps, legs popping free last. Now two tramps stood shouting at the cardboard flaps. Apparently in response, a third derelict struggled through the gap in the blinded window, upper parts out first—it was like a grotesque birth, as if the derelict building were distilling an essence of itself. A fourth wino began to emerge. He was tubbier than the others, and dirty. His potbelly stuck in the thick cardboard flaps, and the other three, laughing, staggering, tried to pull their friend free, and succeeded only in wedging him more firmly. He wriggled spasmodically, face down, yelling: “FUGGINBASSUDSSUNSUHBITC
HES YUH KILLIN ME YUH KILLIN ME FUGGUN BASSUDS YUH KILL ME,” so loud that heads turned two blocks away. Finally the old coot popped out, glop, onto the sidewalk. His friends helped him to stand and all four staggered off, howling drunk, leaning on one another, stopping to urinate every thirty feet.
Lanyard laughed, and felt lighter. Some of the unplaceable aura of the sinister seemed to have left the street. It was simply a place of neglect, classic human deterioration.
He walked back uptown, toward Fifth Street. Passing closer to the building, he glanced at it once more. Something about one of the red spray-painted scrawls of graffiti itched at the back of his memory. Hurriedly, he dismissed the scrawl from his mind. Only much later, that night, lying in bed, would he seem to see it again, superimposed over the flickering negative landscape on the back of his eyelids: a crudely spray-painted approximation of an ancient mystical sign. The sign of Ahriman.
“SORRY THE AIR-CONDITIONER’S broken,” Gribner said, his tie fluttering in the wind from the fan on the dented file cabinet. The fan rotated jerkily, and when it faced Lanyard, seated opposite Gribner, it riffled the pen-scrawled forms in the desk’s In basket. “This heat is funny, isn’t it? I guess it happens now and then…every few years, in the fall…”
Lanyard murmured something inarticulately affirmative. He could see that Gribner wasn’t thinking about the weather at all.
“You got any kids?” Gribner asked suddenly. He put his elbows on the stained blotter of the wooden desk. He wore a sweat-soiled white shirt, sleeves rolled up. His pipe lolled loosely in his shirt pocket—he hadn’t cleaned it properly, and half-charred tobacco spilled from it when he moved, flecking the report spread out on the blotter.
“Kids?” Lanyard looked up dully. He felt thick-headed. “No. Oh, I’ve got some nephews. Used to take care of them occasionally. Why?”
Gribner’s fishy blue eyes met Lanyard’s. “Isn’t it pretty common for kids to start acting weird like…like right before puberty? Ten or eleven or twelve, round that age?”
“I’m no expert on child psychology. I understand they can get a little odd as their chemistry starts to change. Why?”
“Taking care of a nephew of my own. He acts sort of strange. Never mind…I guess.”
“You find any link between the victims yet?”
Gribner looked down at the report, shaking his head. “No, we sure haven’t, and it’s pretty ticklish around here, I’m telling you, pressure’s building up: Find the killers. So far we’re pretty sure it’s more than one. And whoever they are, they’re careful not to leave fingerprints, not to be seen.”
Lanyard glanced up, saw one of the uniformed policemen, hatless, his jacket on the back of his swivel chair, reading a copy of the New York Post. The tabloid’s banner headline screamed: BOY BUTCHERED IN BASEMENT. A smaller headline for another article said: MINDER CLEARED IN DRUG CHARGE.
“You read the article in the Post—?” Lanyard began.
He was startled when Gribner interrupted him with uncharacteristic avidity: “Sure I read it, yeah! Listen, it’s got me down, the way they have this tone that says the police are hardly trying—it’s implicit, you know?—and they’re trying to make money, selling papers by panicking everyone, implying the killers are out there waiting for just any—”
“No, no—I was going to ask you if you’d read the article about Minder. What’s it all about? I had dinner with the guy the other night. Neither he nor anyone else mentioned drug charges…He did, however, mention knowing you.”
“Joey Minder?” He waved his hand airily. “Oh, I guess somebody found a little light dope at his place during the raid last year. They dismissed the charges because the search warrant didn’t—”
“Raid? What raid?” Lanyard felt the stirrings of alarm.
“Ah…Joey had one of his wild parties.” Gribner’s smile was faintly apologetic. “Some girl didn’t want to play, so to speak, and I guess one of Joey’s friends was a little drunk and tried to force her. She called it attempted rape—though he didn’t get very far with her—and her parents are friends with the D.A. The D.A.’s
kind of a prude. We had a go-round over a pornographer, when I was working in Vice. The D.A. wanted to prosecute him, and I said we have bigger fish to fry, like a certain pusher and a child pornographer. But for some reason the D.A. picked on this guy who was in my territory, and who was a friend of Joey’s. Joey paid for the guy’s attorneys and he got off. Anyway, the D.A. raided Joey’s place because there was a rumor he’d kidnapped some girl and had her there. Turned out to be sheer bullshit. They found a little opium, some hash. Not much. No big deal.”
“What about these ‘wild parties’?”
“Not much relevant to what we have to talk about, Lanyard. Anyway, if I was a rich playboy I’d have wild parties, too. Me, I got a meshugge old lady who goes to spiritualists, and two dogs. Joey’s got a lot more, and he plays hard. People get jealous, they make up stories about people they envy. I’ve seen no evidence he’s raped anyone or any of this other stuff.”
“I understand he’s a friend to the police. That he donates to their relief funds, and special retirement funds and—”
“Hey, Boxell!” Gribner shouted, waving at someone he saw over Lanyard’s right shoulder. The main room of the Ninth Precinct station was divided into sections by a wooden railing. The walls were dirty green and bare. There was an old manual typewriter on the corner of every desk. Moving down the center aisle between two railed-off sections, a heavyset uniformed cop grinned and tossed his hat at Gribner.
“Eat my hat, Gribner!”
Gribner caught the hat, a flicker of humor showing in his eyes, though his face was deadpan. “You going in the back to check your still, Boxell?”
They exchanged friendly digs for a while, and Lanyard realized that Gribner had called to Boxell as a means of evading his question.
Lanyard thought about Madelaine and wondered if she were through with her audition. Probably. Suddenly he was in a hurry to be free of Gribner.
Lanyard stood, and Gribner turned back to him, a smile fading. “Well, Lanyard, here’s the report. Give us your professional opinion, if you really want to be of help.” He slid the sheaf of papers across the desk. “We checked out that tunnel. Didn’t find a goddamn thing.”