Tongues of Fire

by Peter Abrahams

  Rehv felt something gathering force in his body, not where he wanted it, but higher. It was a kind of laughter, building in his chest. An insane laughter that once begun would never stop, could never be stopped by him. His heart began to pound with it. His penis, his sexuality, his manhood as people used to say, were betraying him, were destroying the last hope for his own salvation and the salvation of his people. He had thought of everything but that: to be beaten by himself.

  The laughter pushed up his throat like a fist. He opened his mouth; and felt Paulette swing her body over his, and lower her huge, strong buttocks onto his face. “Lick,” he heard her say. And then: “Come on, man. I want that big Jewish cock inside me.”

  Suddenly, as his tongue touched her and he heard those words, he felt again the wild rush of blood to his groin, and he turned her over—she seemed to weigh nothing at all—and sank his penis deep inside her. He began to pound her body, and pound and pound. He heard her gasps and her cries. Their pores opened and cloaked their bodies in a common wetness, like giant twins in an amniotic sac. Her cries changed to soft whistling sounds in the back of her throat. He felt her great body slowly tire. He did not tire at all.

  And when he finally came it was so long and so painful he felt he was losing his insides. Like childbirth.

  Later he awoke. He heard Paulette snoring quietly beside him. Carefully he got out of bed and looked out through the slats of the venetian blinds. The night was completely still, except for the little wisps of vapor someone was exhaling across the street.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “I’m sorry,” Armbrister said. “I did all I could.”

  “Like hell you did.”

  “I did, Krebs. I really did.” Armbrister wore a solemn face that strove for compassion but did not quite achieve it, and so seemed ambivalent instead: the kind of face usually seen by unpleasant relatives on their deathbeds. “Confidentially, it was Bunting. Right from the beginning I could see his mind was made up. ‘The asshole got caught.’ That’s what he said whenever anyone spoke in your favor.” Armbrister looked down and began poking through the piles of paper on his desk.

  “What if I told you they’re trying to raise money by moving into drugs and prostitution?”

  Armbrister lifted a stack of files and peered underneath. “Why do you say that?”

  “I’ve been watching him.”

  “Who?”

  “Rehv.”

  Armbrister stopped shifting papers and raised his head. There was no longer the slightest ambivalence in the expression on his face. “You make everything very difficult, Krebs.” He had more to say, but he kept it to himself, staring coldly at Krebs while the thought unfolded in his mind. Then he sighed and again began pushing papers around his desk. “Ah. Here it is,” he said, holding up a white envelope. He handed it to Krebs.

  Krebs opened it. Inside was a check for $5,722.33.

  “Severance,” Armbrister said.

  Krebs took the check, his pen and pencil set, and his round mirror and left the building. On the way to the garage where he kept the car he went into a bar and ordered a scotch on the rocks. There was no one in the bar except the bartender, cutting his nails, and a middle-aged waitress dressed like an Eastern European folk dancer. Krebs drank his scotch and thought about Armbrister. He drank another and thought about Bunting. He had several more and thought about Isaac Rehv. People came in. They were hungry and thirsty. They smoked and laughed. They talked shop. Lunchtime. Krebs paid his bill and left.

  At the garage he asked for a rebate on his monthly payment.

  “We don’t give rebates,” the attendant said.

  “I’m not going to pay for twenty days of parking that I’m not using.”

  The attendant shrugged. “Sorry, bud.”

  Krebs got into the car and slammed the door shut. Something rattled in its innards, and the window slid down crookedly. He tried to roll it back up, but it was stuck. “Shit,” he yelled, alone inside the car. “Shit.”

  Krebs drove across town, over the bridge, toward home. Cold air rushed in through the crooked opening and swirled around him. He turned the heater to maximum and pressed on the accelerator. Alice. He could say it was a budget cut. Office politics. Personal jealousy. Maybe she wouldn’t bitch. There hadn’t been much bitching lately. She’d been cooking his dinner every night. They were sleeping in the same bed. They’d even had sex. When? Last week? She’d had an orgasm. She said.

  Siren. Stop. Police. Krebs pulled over. Automatically he reached for his wallet, had his hand on it before he remembered the little yellow card was no longer inside: Armbrister had it.

  “Do you know how fast you were going?”

  Krebs shook his head. He didn’t want to play quiz games. He didn’t want the trooper to smell his breath.

  “You should always know your exact speed when driving a vehicle.” There was a silence while the trooper waited for Krebs to say something.

  “If you’re going to give me a ticket, then do it,” Krebs said at last.

  “You just made up my mind,” the trooper said.

  Krebs left the turnpike and entered the town where he and Alice had lived since their marriage. He stopped at the bank, deposited the check, and drove toward the suburb they shared with other members of their income group, although they did not know any of them except to say hello. Many of the streets were crescents; in his neighborhood they had been named after trees—Maple Crescent, Elm Crescent, Beech Crescent. Krebs lived on Willow Crescent, a short street that curved very slightly at one end and had no willows. A spruce tree grew on the front lawn at number thirty-nine. At the top its needles were turning orange and brittle, and falling whenever the wind blew. Krebs raked them up on Sundays.

  He saw that Alice had not left him enough space in the driveway, and parked on the street. He went into the house. Mail lay scattered on the floor in the front hall—five or six letters, all written by computers. In the living room the pillows had not yet been plumped up; last night’s dishes were where they had been last night. She probably sleeps all morning, he thought as he climbed the stairs, and starts neatening the house ten minutes before I come home.

  The bedroom door was closed. Krebs stood outside, testing phrases in his mind. “I’ve resigned.” “I couldn’t work there anymore.” “We came to a parting of the ways.” “I’ve been let go.” “I’ve been fired.” “Wake up, lazy bitch, this is going to make your day.” He heard laughter in the bedroom: surprised, happy laughter. At first he did not realize it was hers. He threw the door open.

  Alice was in bed with a man. On the bed. The covers had fallen to the floor. The noise of the door startled them. They turned. Krebs had never seen the man before. He was young, with long blond hair and a blond beard. “Oh, my God,” Alice said, and lifted her leg awkwardly to climb off the blond man. Krebs moved in and started hitting.

  Alice twice with the back of his hand. Face. Breast.

  The blond boy moved between them. He was bigger than Krebs. Maybe that gave him the courage to ball his hands into fists. “Don’t,” Alice screamed. “He’ll hurt you.” Belly. Belly. Belly. The blond boy tried to defend himself. Chin. He felt Alice behind him, tugging at his arms. He turned and punched very hard at the middle of her face. Her eyes rolled up as she fell across the bed. She bled on the sheets. The blond boy backed into a corner, hunched. His penis had gone very small and pale. Krebs wanted badly to hit him again; it was a deep physical need, as though his fist was the source of desire. But he knew that once started he would not stop, and he fought to control his passion while the boy trembled in the corner and Alice lay still on the bed. He turned and walked out of the house.

  He drove. Willow Crescent to Poplar Crescent. Poplar Crescent to Spring Drive. Spring Drive to Mariposa Road. Mariposa Road to the turnpike. The turnpike to Trenton. In Trenton he stopped and bought a bottle. He drank and drove. Philadelphia. Baltimore. He thought of driving to California. He turned back. He switched on the radio. He tried to sing
along with the songs it played, but he didn’t know the words, and his voice sounded hoarse and ugly. He went into a bar in Philadelphia. It was full of black people. He drank. No one talked to him. He went into another bar, full of white people. He drank. No one talked to him. He said something to the waitress because she had a hard little mouth and a hard little ass like the girl who brought him coffee. The manager asked him to leave. He sat in the car and tried to remember the name of the girl who brought him coffee, and where she lived. She was smart, and hard. She’d been waiting for him to make the first move, but he never had because they didn’t go for hanky-panky at the office. He’d been a good little boy, so good he’d lost the chance to dig his fingers into that hard little ass. He passed out.

  A dog howled. A cat screamed. He woke up and vomited on the seat, his clothes, his hands. He lay in it, too weak to move. The dog howled. The cat screamed. He sat up, started the car, and drove home. The sun rose, small, cold, and far away in the east, but the light it cast was very bright. It hurt his eyes. He felt the vomit congealing in his hair and under his collar. He smelled his smell.

  When he reached thirty-nine Willow Crescent it was mid-morning. Sunny and cold, with an ice blue sky. Alice’s car was gone. He parked in the driveway and walked past the dying spruce tree, into the house. No Alice. No blond boy. He lay across the bloodstained sheets and fell asleep.

  He dreamed of Alice. She was driving on the turnpike, singing a song. There was a man lying in the back seat, but she didn’t know it. He sat up. Isaac Rehv. He touched the side of her neck. Alice turned and smiled at him, smiling and smiling. She twisted around to kiss him. The car veered toward the guardrail. Alice laughed.

  Krebs awoke the next morning. He showered and shaved and put on clean clothes. He noticed that most of Alice’s clothing was gone. He went outside, cleaned the inside of the car with hot soapy water and a sponge, and drove to the bank. Alice had withdrawn every cent.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  On a Monday, his day off, Isaac Rehv woke up early and went to the library. At the foot of the stone steps a short bowlegged man was roasting chestnuts and rocking rapidly from side to side, either to fight the cold or because his bladder was full. Rehv bought a bag of chestnuts for his breakfast. Automatically the little man’s hands, turning blue at the fingertips, filled the bag and gave Rehv his change; the man himself was absorbed in his rocking, his dark eyes far away, as far away as the Mediterranean, Rehv thought. He climbed the stone steps, his mind on what he and the chestnut man had in common.

  Inside he found an empty table and gathered a pile of books. He read about nutrition during pregnancy, fetal growth, birth, babies, childhood development. For Lena he had known very little about these things. He had relied on Naomi. Now he would rely on himself.

  He read quickly, bent over the black formations arranged in endless rows on the white pages. He felt hurried, pressed, as though another pair of eyes was chasing his across the paragraphs. He had thought of leaving La Basquaise to give himself more time, but Paulette’s expenses were very high. Even with the money he earned there he would barely have enough. He had years, he knew, but so little time. His back hurt. He ignored it and kept reading. After a while he became aware of a rhythmic creaking noise, close by, and suddenly realized that he was rocking back and forth, like the little man outside.

  Later the words began lining up in phrases, theories, counter-arguments that he had seen before. Rehv made a list of vitamins Paulette should be taking and foods she should be eating. He rose, stretched, and went off for more books: books on cattle and water, Kordofan and Darfur, guns and ammunition. He read.

  “You deaf, or something?”

  Rehv looked up and saw a slight, angry old man who wore a brown uniform several sizes too big. “What?”

  “Closing time, that’s what.”

  Outside it was night. The chestnut man had gone. Rehv felt the stone steps through the soles of his shoes, cold, as though cut from huge blocks of ice. As he started down, his eye caught a movement in the shadows behind a marble column. He was turning to look when something hard poked him in the middle of his back, where the pain was worst. A voice whispered: “Don’t move.” Male. American. Tense. He didn’t move.

  “Down the stairs,” the voice said. “Slowly. Be smart.” Poke.

  He walked down the stairs, feeling the man behind him, although they were not touching. “Right.” Poke. They walked north, in single file but too close for strangers. A young couple approached, arm in arm and gazing into each other’s eyes, about to kiss. He could cry for help, spin, dive, tackle. Poke. The young couple kissed, went by.

  “Right.” They turned onto a street. Forty-sixth. How was it done? A thrust of the elbow, a quick pivot, the edge of the hand. He had seen it hundreds of times in the movies. “Don’t even think about it,” the voice said. Poke.

  They came to a car parked by the curb. “Stop.” He stopped. “Get in. The driver’s seat.” It was an American car, not big, not new. He did not know the make. He tried to read the license plate but the car had been parked in the dark margin between two streetlamps, where their cones of yellow light did not quite meet. He could read none of the numbers; he was unsure even of the state; it did not appear to be New York.

  He opened the door and sat behind the wheel. The man got in the back seat. “You’re going to drive.” Rehv glanced down and saw there were no keys in the ignition. He waited for the man to give them to him. He did not hear the sound of fingers searching in a pocket, or clinking metal. He felt a little breeze touch the back of his head. And then nothing.

  He was in the hospital. Paulette lay naked on a bare table, her legs spread, her stomach huge. “It’s coming,” she screamed. The doctors and the nurses left the room. He called after them and ran to the door. It was locked. “It’s coming.” Paulette pushed. The ball inside her quivered and moved slowly toward the opening between her legs. “Help me.” He reached inside her, felt a hard roundness. “Gently.” He pulled on it gently. It stuck. He twisted it carefully and pulled some more. Suddenly it began to slide, wet and slippery, out of her body and into his hands. Abu Fahoum’s head. He dropped it and ran to the door, and beat on it with his fists. Paulette began to laugh. “Come back,” she called. “There’s more. I’ve got another one for you.” He beat harder on the door.

  He had a headache, a strange headache at the back of his head. It was digging tunnels of pain down his neck as if trying to join forces with the ache in his back. He didn’t want to be alone with the pain, so he opened his eyes.

  He was in the gallery. Home. The Hungry Warriors—Napoleon, Genghis Khan, Eisenhower, Rommel, and General Gordon—were gone. In their place stood a small platform, crudely built of unfinished plywood. It supported a tall wooden beam that almost reached the ceiling. At the top was another beam, much shorter, which stuck out over the platform at a right angle. From it hung a noose.

  A man sat on the platform, watching him. He was a sandy-haired man, with thick eyebrows that were much darker and not at all hidden by the aviator-style glasses he wore. Rehv thought he had seen him before, and was about to ransack his brain for the memory when he felt something biting into his wrists and realized that his hands were behind his back. He tried to move them but could not. He looked down and saw that his legs were tied with electrical wire to the legs of a card table chair, and that he was naked. Sweat began to pool in his armpits: He felt a little drop of it trickle down his ribs. He ran his eyes quickly over the gallows, searching for some sign that it was art. Screwed to one side of the platform was a small plastic sign: “Olé.”

  “Totally useless,” the sandy-haired man said. “No trapdoor, no diagonal support, rope’s too thin. You couldn’t hang a pygmy with it.” Standing up, he approached Rehv and spoke to him in a tone that indicated the preliminaries were over. “My name is Major Kay,” he said. “I’m conducting an investigation for the U.S. government. I have some questions to ask you. If you cooperate there will be no unpleasantness,
and it will be over very quickly. I don’t want to hurt you, but I will if I have to.”

  But from the excitement that crept into his voice and the look in his eyes Rehv knew that he did want to hurt him. “I don’t believe the U.S. government conducts its affairs like this.”

  Major Kay raised the back of his hand. It trembled close to Rehv’s face for a few moments before he lowered it in jerky stages. “Then you’re very naive,” Major Kay said, a little thickly. Something in his tone made Rehv think that he had stopped his hand only because he did not want to take the edge off his anticipation so soon: He wanted it to build. Rehv felt another drop of sweat trickle across his ribs, but he tried to keep his voice calm and even.

  “You don’t look very military to me,” he said. Major Kay wore a heavy black sweater, blue jeans, and tennis shoes smeared with black shoe polish; he needed a shave. “Have you got some identification?”

  Major Kay smiled down at him, a smile Rehv did not like at all. He reached into his back pocket and drew out a snub-nosed revolver. He pointed it at Rehv’s face, and very slowly brought it closer and closer until it touched the tip of his nose. Looking into Rehv’s eyes, he held it there, and then pushed the barrel into his right nostril. “This is my ID,” he said softly. “Do you understand? Nod if you understand, Isaac.”

  Rehv nodded, tilting his head slightly up, slightly down. Major Kay took advantage of the descending motion to drive the barrel a little farther into his nostril. “Now you’re starting to cooperate.” He withdrew the barrel and replaced the gun in his pocket.

  Rehv felt warm liquid dribble from his nose and onto his upper lip; and he felt the chill in his torso from the cold sheet of sweat that was slowly covering him. He looked at Major Kay: A rosy flush had risen in patches to the surface of his cheeks. What was being drained from Rehv’s body was somehow nourishing the other man.