She retreated into the living room saying, “Make it fast, or I’ll call the police.”
Bruno stood in the center of her living room and nodded calmly, realizing that he would have to work up to what he had to do.
“I want nothing!” she shouted.
There was no turning back now.
“You heard me? Nothing at all. I just want to be left alone.”
Bruno was silent.
“You heard me? Nothing at all.”
He looked into her once youthful face, pale and lightly freckled. Her red hair was short and unstyled. Her sweater suggested sagging breasts. Motherhood had taken its toll, yet she was probably only in her late twenties.
She waited a moment, then said, “You want me to sign a paper?”
“You know he’s dead?” Bruno asked. He felt little or nothing for her. He did not know her at all, he told himself, because he had not needed to know her to do what he had to do.
“I read about it.”
“Where are your sons?” he asked.
“They’ll be home from school any time now,” she said. “They’re in fifth and sixth grade,” she added, as if that might help her establish some bond with him. He knew what she was trying to do, so it wouldn’t help her at all. He looked into her eyes and felt nothing. Not shame, pity, nor sympathy.
“How nice,” Bruno said, eliciting an expression of relief from her face. These three would all be in one place, for a quick finish, but Felix had wanted her to see her sons go first.
“I’ve got to put these on you,” Bruno said, taking the handcuffs from his suit pocket. He had worn his new, blue suit for the occasion.
The last Mrs. Lytton stepped back. “What?” she asked in a rising voice. “What is this? You a cop or somethin’?”
“Or something,” he said, shoving her back as she suddenly came forward. She stumbled but kept her footing and tried again. “Hands out,” he said, blocking her. She glared at him and moved to get by him again. He pushed her back harder, but she stayed upright. “Hands out,” he said again.
She was breathing quickly, eyeing him fearfully, looking to his left and right for a way past him.
“Hands out!” he shouted.
She came at him again. He slapped her across the face with his right hand, but she kept on, trying to tackle him with her body. He reached low and punched her in the stomach.
She stood up with a sudden intake of breath, trembling, then cried out as he slipped on the cuffs. Twisting the bracelets by their center links until she cried out from the pain, he backed her up to the sofa and forced her to sit down.
“Feet together,” he said, kneeling down as he took a set of cuffs from his other pocket. His new suit would hang better without their weight. All three garments had arrived with their jacket pockets sewn shut to keep their shape; but he had pulled out the threads because he would need the pockets, even if using them would stretch the fabric. “With quality materials,” the tailor had told him, “it is recommended the pockets stay sewn shut. Okay?” Bruno had said yes. He had never heard of such a thing, but he had begun to worry about the problem.
The cuffs went loosely around her small ankles. There was some blood on her wrists, he noticed as he stood up.
She sat forward suddenly, breathing hard. “Why?” she demanded, looking up at him.
“Be quiet,” he said, speaking to his own suppressed turmoil more than to her.
She was staring at him, and he realized that he wasn’t particularly enjoying any of this; but it would be different with his own targets, he told himself. He would care about them.
“Mr. Lytton said to tell you,” Bruno recited as he stepped back, “that he always knew you had slept around, and that the boys were not his.” He looked directly into her eyes as he spoke, as Felix had instructed, and wondered if somehow Felix might also be looking out at her.
“But they are his!” she cried. “I swear! And there’s nothing I want.”
“I don’t care, lady,” Bruno said. “None of my business. Got any tape?”
“Then why?” she asked pleadingly. “What do you want from me?”
Bruno turned away, hurried into the kitchen, and rummaged around in the drawers until he found a roll of duct tape.
“Who are you?” she asked as he went back out into the living room.
“Felix sent me.”
“But why?”
Bruno pulled off a long piece of tape. It made the usual ripping sound of a fresh roll.
“He just wants to get back at you, if you must know,” he said.
“Get back at me?” she mumbled as Bruno covered her mouth and wrapped the piece around her head, then pushed her back into the cushions.
Her eyes now stared at him in terror, seeking his gaze, as if somehow that would restrain him.
Bruno heard the front door open. She tried to stand up, but fell back into the sofa. A boy came into the room, followed by another. They stopped and stared at the intruder. Then they saw their mother.
“Ah!” cried the older boy. He was dark-haired and thin, and leaned to one side, as if he had grown too fast and was still getting used to it.
The younger one whimpered. He was pudgy, a full head shorter than his brother.
“Hello, boys,” Bruno said as he put the roll of tape in his pocket and walked up to them, struck the smaller boy across the right side of his head, then pushed him down on the carpet and put his foot down on his neck. The boy gagged and struggled to get out from under. As the older boy gaped, Bruno grabbed his right hand and twisted his arm behind his back. He cried out as Bruno forced him to his knees. Bruno pushed him down flat on his stomach and sat down on him with enough force to take wind out of his lungs. He put the boy’s limp arms behind his back and took out the roll of tape. Ripping free a long piece, he bound the boy’s hands together and stood up.
The younger boy was still down on his back, struggling for breath. Bruno knelt down on the carpet and tried to grab his wrists. “Lemme go!” the boy cried out. Bruno hit him across the face with his fist, and the boy lay still. Bruno turned him over and taped his wrists behind his back.
A deep groan came from the mother. She stood up, then fell forward onto the rug and rolled to one side.
“Help!” cried the older boy.
The younger one was crying now.
The mother twisted her head to see. Good, thought Bruno. He wouldn’t have to turn her to face the scene. Felix had insisted she see everything before she went in.
He stepped to one side of the room, caught sight of himself in the mirror over the sofa, and turned away from the sudden stranger. His own uncaring was a pleasant surprise.
He closed his eyes and summoned a black pocket.
It appeared, about three feet across—irregular at first, then acquiring the shape of a mouth. Its lips opened, swelling like those of some giant lover whose reclining body was out of sight somewhere below the foundations of the house. He stared for a moment at the perfect blackness inside the mouth, imagining that it might swallow the world.
He went over to the older boy. He began to kick as he was lifted.
“Let me go!” he cried, twisting like a coiled spring.
The younger boy cried out loudly, “Ralphie—help me!”
Bruno carried the older boy to the pocket and threw him in. The boy screamed, then was silent.
Another agonizing groan came out of his mother. She rolled furiously on the carpet. Her wrists were bloody and bruised from her efforts to break free. She stopped when she saw him watching her.
“This is how Felix wanted it,” he said, following the script. “He wanted you to know. Understand?”
She groaned more deeply.
He went over and picked up the smaller boy, who hung limply as he was lifted, crying softly. Bruno brought him to the opening and dropped him into the darkness.
He stepped back and took a deep breath. His pulse was racing but he was sure that he would complete the job. The mother would soon be
with her boys, he told himself, expecting a rise of involuntary sympathy within himself.
He went over and picked her up. She squirmed and turned in his arms, crying out through the tape. Overheated now, he staggered over to the pocket, suddenly wishing that it might be lower. It was absurd that he couldn’t control this wretched detail. He had to lift her to his shoulders before she would go in. He got her feet inside, and let her slide away.
The monstrous liplike opening closed and faded away, cutting off her cries.
He went and sat down on the sofa, sweating as he told himself that he had performed all the details correctly.
It was over, he told himself as he breathed more easily. He had paid for the skill. It was now his to use as he pleased. Of course, he would never know if he would have lost it by disobeying Felix. What had Felix imagined in the details that he would never live to see, as the cuffed mother was reunited in the darkness with her sons and the air began to run out? Was that imagining all the satisfaction he had sought before his death? But it was Felix’s satisfaction, Bruno told himself, not mine. Felix had acted through him, leaving him little choice but to play the puppet. His own rewards were waiting to satisfy him, he told himself, and everything he had done would be worth the satisfactions still to come.
He sat back and wondered what Felix had not told him. After all, Felix had been his enemy.
Yes—but a bargain was a bargain; sealed and delivered. Felix had been right during the final exercises; heartlessness was achievable, and he had succeeded, both in the task and in his self control. He’d had very little before; now he had everything. Nothing else seemed to matter.
Bruno made a wish list of revenge. No more pathetic imaginings of how he would break hands and feet with a baseball bat, cut off thumbs and big toes and force them down throats, or present the deserving with a choice of which body parts to sacrifice in place of worse torments. No more frustrations from merely picturing the delights of vengeance. The hurling of his enemies into darkness only awaited his choice of time and place.
It was an outstanding menu.
Each elicited a resounding yes.
But who would go first?
There was a knock on his door. He went over and opened it without checking through the peephole.
Al, the bachelor superintendent of the apartment house, stood before him in his usual green jumpsuit, smelling of heavy cologne even though he never seemed to shave. He looked up at Bruno, then smiled and said, “Oh, you’re home. I wanted to ask you about the garbage and the recycles.”
“What about them?” Bruno said, gazing down at the stocky, sandy-haired man whose teeth were always piss yellow, and who always acted as if he were hiding something.
“Uh—you don’t put out any for a while now.” He tried to peer past Bruno. “Been away?”
Bruno felt a twinge of anger, and annoyance at himself for arousing the man’s curiosity. “You think I’m storing it all up in
here?”
Al seemed to sniff the air. “Can I come in and check?”
“You may not!” Bruno shouted, and the man stepped back suddenly.
Bruno struggled to remain calm. The man was an insect, scurrying around in his basement apartment, the lowest rung on a ladder of stooges that went up through managers and corporate landlords to the great masters who passed their wealth down through their generations like a disease.
“Well, sure, why not,” Bruno said, suddenly becalmed. “Come in and satisfy yourself. I’ve nothing to hide.”
The man gave him a puzzled look. Then he smiled and said, “Tough day—huh?”
Bruno nodded and stepped aside to let him in.
Al smiled. “You know I have to check up. It’s in the lease. You might have somethin’ to fix.”
Bruno closed the door.
“I got an eye for things need fixing,” the man said without looking back. “Tenants just live with small maintenance needs and don’t complain until it gets bad and costs more to fix. Less to catch things early. You know what I mean?”
“Sure,” Bruno said, “look around all you want.”
He sat down on the sofa and waited.
Al checked the bedroom, bath, and kitchen, then came out into the living room and said with a smile, “Looks okay. You shoulda said right off you’d been away and had no garbage.”
“Yeah, I should have told you at the door.”
“Sorry to disturb you. More people should be so clean and easy on the fixtures as you. You know they leave stoves on and faucets dripping and toilets unflushed? And what they do to stain and scratch the floors! You think they were running a butcher shop, with some carpentry on the side.”
Bruno smiled.
“You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve seen in my years,” Al said, rolling on. “You’d laugh, but I want to scream every time I make a list of all the repairs.” He began to move back and forth like a duck in a shooting gallery.
What did the creep expect? A tip for accusing him of being a pig?
Al paused and seemed to look around as if he had lost something. “Say,” he said, “didn’t you ask me where to put out old computers and electronic stuff? Didn’t you have an old tape player you wanted to lose? Got rid of it?”
Bruno nodded, recalling the museum of dead electronics his closet floor space had become. The pockets had removed that nuisance. Al, of course, wanted the stuff to sell for junk, but he was too late.
“Hey man,” Al said, “can I ask you somethin’?”
Bruno nodded.
“When I parks my car coming back from groceries... you know, down by the stairs down into my apartment, I leave my bags by the door and go park the car where I see a space, and when I come back the groceries are gone. One out of three times. Usually roasts, steaks, chops...”
Bruno’s rage rose up through his calm. “You think I take them? What is it? Do I look like a thief?”
“No! No! I only thought you might have seen who does it.”
“You suspect me. How can you be sure?”
“Hey man, I was only askin’.”
“You know, you’re right,” Bruno said as he got up.
“What do you mean, man?” Al asked as Bruno came around behind him.
“Keep looking,” Bruno said, pointing in front of the coffee table.
Al glanced back at him with a nervous smile and said, “Hey, you ain’t weird, are you? I don’t go that way, you know.”
“Right there,” Bruno said, “that’s where I put all the garbage— and your groceries.”
“What the hell—” Al said as the pocket formed in front of him.
Bruno shoved him forward, wishing it could be one of the pockets he had opened for his garbage. Al tripped and went in too quickly to cry out. A choking shout came back as the pocket faded.
Later that month, a man resembling Al, probably a relative, quietly took his place. Bruno heard one of the first floor tenants, an aging seamstress, asking about Al in the lobby. The new super shrugged and said, “I think he ran off with some woman. I knew he was seeing somebody because I asked him if she had a friend or a sister. Anyway, I’m here now.” He sounded happy about the chance.
“Yeah,” said the woman. “I guess he finally got lucky with all that cologne.”
Larry Braddock had cracked Bruno’s skull in the schoolyard. Bruno missed six months of seventh grade and got held back a year. Today, Braddock worked for a large computer firm, and was sometimes in the news for his wizardry. Bruno went to the company’s office building and clocked his comings and goings.
Larry had fattened. He sometimes brought a full box of pastries back from lunch. He had lost hair, but what was left he had let grow long, orangutan style. Bruno noted that he never returned directly to his office when he came back from lunch; he first used the men’s room in the lobby. Bruno followed him inside, and at once knew why. The fat man left a bad odor that he would have been too embarrassed to leave where his coworkers would be able to attribute it to him. Larry schedu
led his life around a flatulence-concealment plan.
Bruno noted that few people used the facility in the lobby, especially during the lunch hour, so it clearly had not escaped Larry’s notice that people were just going out to lunch when he was coming back, or were late, thus giving him a reliable privacy.
After repeated shadowings, Bruno arrived in the accounting firm’s lobby dressed in a suit and a hat pulled down low over his forehead. The young woman at the reception desk had just left for the Ladies’ facility. The security guard was down the hall in his office, eating a sandwich at his desk, glancing out into the hall once in a while. Bruno slipped past his view when the guard looked down at his food.
Bruno paused at the Men’s door, opened it a crack, and knew at once by the odor that his prey was in its stall. He pulled the Out of Order sign from under his belt, hung it on the doorknob, then went in and locked the door behind him.
He stood there, noting that only the handicapped stall door was closed. Bulky Braddock clearly preferred this oversized section at the far end of the bathroom, for the handbar and the convenient height of the bowl.
Bruno fingered the blackjack in his right hand pocket, wondering how much the suit jacket was going to stretch from the heavy objects he was making it carry. Maybe he should just get more suits, and rotate their use. It mattered, but he needed the pockets.
He listened. Braddock was coughing heavily as he stood up and readied to come out. Bruno turned to the sink as if to wash his hands, and waited. Braddock wasn’t the worst of his old enemies, and he almost felt sorry for him.
Would Larry even remember him?
There was a massive flush. The wide door flew open and crashed against the wall, and Braddock came out, tightening his belt as his odor, somewhat hydrated, spread out from the stall. He stopped, probably startled by the presence of another person in a bathroom that he had come to regard as his own during these hours.
Bruno turned to face him—and felt only a distant hatred. At once he knew that he didn’t want to spend his rage all at once, on a figure who was now more humorous than villainous.
“Hello, Larry,” he said.
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