Private Demons

by Robert Masello

  So could this be officially sanctioned business? Lucien wondered. Yang was there, in uniform, in a ministry car. But as Lucien had already learned, Yang was everywhere on the Thai waterfront. And everything else pointed to illicit trafficking.

  The foreman was labelling the crates as quickly as he could, slapping the braces up against the box closest to Lucien and whisking the spray paint back and forth. Lucien could see the first line now: “A.C.S. Ltd.” The company was unfamiliar; he’d have to ask Epstein in New York to run it down. The second line, when it came, was also unknown to him: “Lady Birch Farms.” Epstein could look into that one too. What he wouldn’t be able to explain was why this routine labeling work was being done so furtively, at the last minute, and under cover of darkness. For that, there was really only one explanation—and unless Lucien was mistaken, only one possible cargo.

  The braces went up for the third and fourth lines: the crates were marked as “Ag—Gin. Lot.” Which meant, “Agricultural—Ginger and Lotus.” Just like the smaller hampers that had fallen from the net. The destination was “LPL.” Liverpool. At first glance, it might seem an unlikely destination for such produce. But Lucien knew there was a sizable, and growing, Asian population in England. It was possible—certainly plausible—that such stuff would be profitably imported.

  Though not as profitably as the drugs—heroin, probably—that he suspected were concealed in this shipment.

  Which was going out on a Gold Prow ship. This could all prove useful, once he returned to New York, in his maneuverings to gain control of Gold Prow. He was glad that he had made this little tour of the harbor after all.

  Now he had only to manage his retreat without being spotted. He was turning on his heel, about to slip behind the Mitsubishi containers, when he heard Yang say, “Who the hell . . .” He thought he’d been seen, and turned quickly to deal with the consequences, but Yang wasn’t looking in his direction at all.

  “I found her down the dock, behind a spool of cable.” It was one of the workers talking.

  And Lucien knew who he had to be talking about.

  “You found her . . . on the dock?” Yang said, also in Thai.

  “Behind a spool of cable.”

  Lucien heard the footsteps approaching, just before the worker, clutching Hallie by one arm, entered his narrow field of vision.

  Hallie looked angry, probably as much with herself as the situation. She glared at Yang, who appeared dumbfounded.

  “Who are you?” he asked her, in English now.

  “A tourist,” she said. “Who are you?”

  Yang plucked at his mustache. “What are you doing here?”

  “Touring.”

  “Touring,” he repeated, gravely, “the docks . . . late at night . . . dressed like that.”

  Hallie had on a short skirt, open-toed shoes, a silk blouse . . . and the Princess Ring Lucien had just given her. It wasn’t a very convincing explanation.

  The other workers had stopped what they were doing, and gathered around the parked station wagon, to watch. Yang clearly didn’t know what to do next

  And for that matter, neither did Lucien. Part of him wanted to step out of the shadows right now . . . and part of him knew it would be best to assess the situation first, and act only at the most strategic moment.

  “Who do you work for?” Yang said, coming closer to her.

  “Who do I work for?” Hallie said, in a puzzled tone. “I work for a modeling agency, in New York. It’s called Visage. Have you heard of it?”

  Lucien saw her eyes dart quickly around the dock, no doubt looking for him. He receded further into the shadows. Was their boat still there? he wondered. If he didn’t know that, he wouldn’t know which way to make their escape.

  “Look,” Hallie said, “I can see you guys are trying to get some work done here, and I’m sorry to have interrupted. Now if you’ll just let go of my arm, I’ll be glad to let you get back to it.” She turned slightly, but toward the end of the dock. It was enough to lead Lucien to believe that the boat was still waiting for them there.

  “Oh, you don’t have to worry about that,” Yang replied, looking her up and down. “There’s plenty of time . . . for everything we have to do.” He looked at the worker holding Hallie’s arm, and cocked his head toward the station wagon.

  Lucien stepped briskly out of the shadows, and with a broad smile said, “Good evening, Yang. I see you work at night too.”

  Lucien appraised the situation with a glance—one man holding Hallie, five loosely scattered behind Yang. No firearms that he could see. He did not look at Hallie.

  “I’m told you’re not happy with the deal we struck.”

  “Calais, you son of a bitch.” Yang was looking from one of them to the other, trying to put it together . . . wondering, perhaps, if there were any other confederates lurking about. “No, I don’t like the deal we struck,” he finally said.

  “I gave you everything you asked for.”

  “You gave me . . .” and he lowered his voice, almost spitting the words out, “those dreams.”

  Lucien showed no comprehension.

  “I’d heard the stories about you . . . now I know they’re true. And don’t pretend you don’t understand me. Those fucking dreams, Calais—I want you to take those fucking dreams back.”

  “Gladly,” said Lucien affably. “And you can return what’s mine to me.”

  Now he turned to Hallie, as casually as if they had met by chance on the street, and put his hand out to her arm. The worker holding onto her looked to Yang for instructions, and Yang said, “It’s not going to be that easy, Calais.”

  The dockworker tightened his grip.

  Without taking his eyes from Hallie’s, Lucien laid his own hands gently over the worker’s. A moment later, the man screamed, and dropped to his knees. Lucien was still holding the index finger that he had suddenly pried back until it broke. The man screamed again, while Lucien kept up the pressure on his digital nerve. The worker’s face was contorted with anguish and rage.

  Lucien turned back to Yang, still holding onto the finger. “Your dreams can also become worse, Yang . . . much worse. Don’t let that happen.”

  “I’m not about to.” He pulled from the back of his belt, where Lucien hadn’t seen it, a small-caliber pistol, and disengaged the safety.

  Lucien whispered to Hallie to get behind him. Then, by twisting the index finger in such a way as to impinge on the radial and median nerves, he forced the dockworker, gasping in pain, to stagger to his feet, and stand in the way of Yang’s gun.

  Yang, with a wave of the pistol, directed the men behind him to fan out. Lucien knew he couldn’t give them time to work their way around and behind them.

  “Dreams can become real,” Lucien warned, and before Yang could reply, he viciously twisted the dockworker’s finger and shoved the man, screaming in agony, straight at Yang. The two collided, the gun went off, the worker collapsed.

  Lucien grabbed Hallie; they ran.

  “Fuck! Go get them!”

  The workers, flummoxed by the shooting, waited a precious second before heeding Yang’s order.

  “Get them!”

  Another shot rang out, banging off an empty handcart.

  They heard the dockworkers chasing after them. They raced down the pier, the wet cement crunching under their shoes.

  “Start the engine!” Lucien shouted, in Thai, hoping the boatman could hear him and understand what he was saying. Why hadn’t he ever perfected his Thai?

  Hallie was right at his side, running like a pro, one hand holding her short skirt even higher up her thigh.

  “Over here!” she said, veering to the other side of the dock. “The boat’s over here!”

  They scrambled past a stack of produce crates, and Lucien knocked them over with one hand as he passed. Someone close behind them cursed, and fell.

  Lucien heard the sputtering chug of the canopied boat.

  Hallie got to the edge of the dock first, spun around,
and dropped off the side.

  A hand snagged the back of Lucien’s shirt. “Go!” he shouted at Hallie.

  He whipped around—it was the square-headed foreman—who lashed at his face with the stenciling brace. Lucien ducked, but the metal tip still gashed his cheek. Lucien chopped him in the neck with the edge of one hand, then cracked his kneecap with a straight kick. The foreman fell, with another worker already struggling over him. Lucien grabbed the man by his arm, and using his own momentum, propelled him all the way over the edge of the dock. Limbs flailing, he splashed into the water.

  Two more were already coming.

  Lucien turned again; the boat was about six feet from the dock. Hallie was shouting, “Jump!”

  Lucien did; with his arms held out like wings, he leapt into the night air, and landed, with a muffled whump, on top of the fringed canopy. The boat lurched—but the canvas held. The old man kicked the engine into high gear, and jerked the wheel toward open water.

  Yang skidded to a halt at the edge of the dock. Lucien saw the gun in his hand. He fired, but the bobbing of the boat threw off his aim; the bullet ripped through the canopy and went on into the water on the other side. He fired again, and the bullet whizzed past Lucien’s head.

  “Stay down!” Lucien cried.

  They were almost out of reach of the harbor lights.

  “Calais, you’ll die for this!” Yang bellowed. “You’ll die for this, Calais!”

  The little boat chugged on, into the protective darkness of the outer harbor.

  There was the orange flash of another shot, which went far astray.

  The canopy creaked under Lucien’s weight, slowly swayed to one side, and collapsed. He was dumped into the boat, among a pile of bent rods and torn canvas, and half on top of Hallie.

  “Jesus!” she said, from under the tangled canopy. “What the hell is going on?”

  Lucien struggled to sit upright, pulled the canvas away from Hallie’s shoulders.

  “What the hell happened out there?” She looked at Lucien, eyes wide, mouth open, still panting. “You’re bleeding,” she said, reaching out to touch his cheek. “Are you shot?”

  He shook his head.

  “Are we okay now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He nodded.

  The old man in the Pittsburgh Pirates cap looked at them, and his ruined boat, with despair.

  Lucien wiped the blood from his cheek, and said to the old man, “I am going to buy you any boat you want.” He repeated it in French.

  The old man, appearing unconvinced, turned back to the wheel.

  “Well?” Hallie said. “Start talking. I almost got killed for you just now. Aren’t you at least going to tell me what for?”

  Lucien didn’t know what to say, or where to start.

  “Come on, Calais. You owe me that much.” She looked him straight in the eye. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

  Lucien shrugged, and pushed the canopy away from his legs. There was only one thing he could think of to say at the moment. So he went ahead and said it.

  “I love you?”

  CHAPTER

  11

  The overhead fan revolved slowly, stirring just enough of the night air to rustle the papers on Dr. Krit’s desk, and tease the cowlick at the back of his head. The light from the kerosene lamp, used to conserve the clinic’s electricity, shed a warm, yellow glow over the patients’ charts, international aid documents, and the letter received that morning from the office of L.C. Carriers in New York.

  It wasn’t the first letter the clinic had received from them. Ever since Kevin Molloy had been admitted to the clinic, L.C. Carriers had sent regular queries, asking for information on his status and enclosing, as had been done with this one, a check for 50,000 baht toward his medical expenses. It was much more than the clinic had spent on him so far—with burn patients, time was probably an even more important element of the healing process than skin grafts and painkillers—but the money was needed all the same. Father Brendan called it “a gift from God,” and said it was the Divine way of bringing something good, something that would enable the clinic to help many others, out of something so terrible as what had happened to the sailor at the end of the hall. Father Brendan had spent many hours by Molloy’s bedside, listening to his ravings and strange confessions.

  Dr. Krit put the check in the fishing tackle box they used as a safe, then deposited the box in the one drawer of the desk that locked. He glanced at the clock; it was four A.M. It would be two more hours before his watch was over and the head nurse at the clinic came on duty. It was a regular rotation that they all performed, but that didn’t make it any easier to stay awake. He yawned widely, stretched his arms, and leaned back in the chair to catch the gentle breeze provided by the fan.

  For hours, the clinic had been as still and quiet as a graveyard, but now he heard, from far down the hall, a low moaning. It wasn’t hard to guess who it was. Molloy had been found sitting up in his bed again that very afternoon, with the bare stalks of his legs thrown over the side; with a gauze patch over his missing eye, and a white froth on his lips, he had been making the motions of someone tilling an oar, methodically, relentlessly, as if shackled to it. Even in his weakened state, it had taken two of the nurses to get him to lower his arms and lie back down on the bed. Dr. Krit had had to give him a shot of Demerol—fifty cc’s this time—high up on his left arm; it was one of the few places he had enough remaining flesh and muscle to accept the needle. And then, though they hated to have to do it, they had bound his arms to the bed frame again to keep him from getting up and doing some further harm to himself.

  Now, the effects of the earlier shot must have worn off. The moaning became louder, and more anguished.

  Krit debated what to do—turning a burn victim into a drug addict was doing him no favor—but he also didn’t want the whole ward awakened. And he didn’t want Molloy to suffer any more than he had to. Just looking at him—at his translucent skin, his scorch marks, his suppurating eye socket, which had to be bathed at least twice a day—was enough to convince anyone that here was an example of suffering at its most extreme. It was amazing to Krit, from what little he’d been told of the explosion and the subsequent days on the open sea, that the man had survived at all.

  Maybe Father Brendan had a point, and God had preserved this man, after all, for some mysterious purpose all His own.

  There was another cry from down the hall, and Dr. Krit made up his mind; going to the dispensary and opening the supplies cabinet, he took a clean syringe—one of the largest available—and filled it with another fifty cc’s of Demerol. One thing the Calais money had done for the clinic was increase their supplies of medications, bandages, antibiotics; normally, all these things had to be rationed with great care. With his kerosene lamp in one hand, and the syringe, held upright, in the other, Dr. Krit went down the hall, past the cubicles in which the other patients—thirty of them now, a full house—were sleeping, and into the open doorway of Kevin Molloy’s room.

  He was lying on his back, just as he’d been left, a white sheet pulled taut up to his armpits; with his one eye, he was staring at the wall across from the foot of his bed. There was a crucifix mounted there, though Krit couldn’t tell if he was looking at that . . . or at something else, something only he could see, in his mind’s eye.

  “Feeling the pain again, are you?” Krit said softly as he put the kerosene lamp down on the nightstand; there was a Bible, a bedpan, and a plastic cup, with a bent straw, on top of it. “I’m going to give you something for it,” Krit said, “something that’ll help you get back to sleep again.” He took a look at his watch, so that he could note the time of the injection on Molloy’s chart. It was exactly 4:14.

  Molloy whimpered, and turned his head on the pillow. “Help me,” he whispered, urgently. “Get it off of me . . . help me.”

  “I’m going to help you,” Dr. Krit said soothingly while holding the syringe towa
rd the light from the lamp and testing the plunger. “I’m going to give you something for the pain.”

  “No . . . no . . . get it off of me first. I can’t stand it anymore. Get it off of me first.”

  “Get what off of you?” Krit asked. Was the sheet too tight?

  “Get it off of me,” Molloy insisted, jerking his chin in the direction of his chest. “Get it off of me first.”

  Krit glanced down at the white cotton sheet, and for the first time noticed a slight bulge about halfway down. Was there something that had been left on top of the poor man? Still holding the syringe in one hand, he lifted a corner of the sheet and neatly folded it back.

  Coiled on Molloy’s stomach, as comfortably as if it had been sunning itself on a rock, was a serpent, such a deep green color it was almost black. Its scales glistened in the light of the kerosene lamp. It lifted its head, and hissed at Krit.

  He jumped back in horror, and his free hand fell on the lid of the bedpan. He grabbed hold of it, and held it in front of himself like a shield. The serpent bared its fangs. Krit tried to push at the snake with the tin lid, hoping to knock it off of Molloy. But the snake simply lunged at the metal, then drew itself up for another strike. Krit shoved the lid at its head again, and as it lunged, he swung his other hand in a wide circle and stuck the syringe into its lower body. He didn’t have time to depress the plunger before the snake felt the stab and lashed downward at his retreating hand.

  The needle stayed upright, stuck deep beneath the scales; the snake’s head bobbed around it, uncertainly, not sure what to make of this. Then, abruptly, it turned back to Krit.

  In that instant, he could have sworn he saw a human intelligence balefully glaring from those bulging eyes.

  Slowly, the snake uncoiled itself on Molloy’s bare abdomen, and descended headfirst to the linoleum floor tiles. Krit stepped back, still clinging to the lid of the bedpan. Molloy was as still as a stone, his one eye staring in terror at the snake.