Fraternity of the Stone

by David Morrell

  "I keep telling you, death's not at issue here. You'll survive."

  "Then why the hell should I talk?"

  "Because you're facing something worse than death. What's in your future, if you don't talk" - Drew scratched his beard stubble - "is brain damage. Permanent."

  The man turned pale.

  "You'll be a vegetable."

  "They should have told me."

  "Told you what?"

  "How good you are. Since the moment I woke up, you haven't stopped screwing with my mind. You've

  played a half-dozen personalities. You've kept me off-balance all the time. Crazy? Hell, you're as sane as they come."

  Drew turned on the engine again and shut the door.

  3

  Two sessions later, the man started answering questions. It took a while. He was semicoherent by then, and his statements were frequently garbled. But though forced to be patient, Drew at least felt confident that the man was telling the truth, for the carbon monoxide made him so groggy that it destroyed his inhibitions and in that respect was somewhat like sodium amytal. Two hours later, Drew had learned about as much as he figured he could expect.

  But he wasn't encouraged. The hit had been purchased in as professional a manner as it had been carried out. For obvious reasons, the rule was that the client was never directly involved with the operation. If something went wrong, if a member of the team was captured or decided to try to blackmail his employer, there wasn't any direct trail back to whoever had paid the bill. Instead, the client got in touch with a broker, who contacted a sub-broker, who hired the necessary talent and made sure that the job was done. Except for the team itself, none of the principals met face to face. Arrangements among the client, broker, and sub-broker were conducted by intermediaries, using neutral phones. Nothing was ever communicated on paper. Fees were transferred through anonymous Swiss or Bahamian bank accounts.

  As much as Drew could determine from what his prisoner told him, that procedure had been followed in this instance. The man convinced Drew that he'd been hired by what amounted to his agent, whose name he'd never learned. The agent knew where to get in touch with his talent, though his talent didn't know how to get in touch with him, and of course, the agent hadn't told his talent who was paying for the hit or why. A job was a job. Bizarre in this case, granted. However, the down payment had been generous.

  Drew had frequently needed to rouse the man from his stupor, using smelling salts from the medical kit. Now he let him drift off to sleep, making sure that he had ventilation.

  He brooded, discouraged. He'd desperately hoped to find the answers easily, but God had determined otherwise. His ordeal was to be prolonged. Yet another penance.

  All right, he'd tried but failed here. Still, the failure wasn't his fault; if he hadn't tried, he'd have been foolish. But now he'd stayed too long. He had to get moving. Boston. His contact, Father Hafer. He had to tell his sponsor what had happened. To warn the Church and be given sanctuary.

  He took the radiator hose off the end of the exhaust pipe, removed the sleeping bags from the back door, and closed it. As the man slept sickly beside him, Drew steered the van from the picnic grounds and continued through New Hampshire, heading southeast now, toward Massachusetts.

  4

  It was twilight when he came to Boston. He took his prisoner's wallet, then left the van and its unconscious occupant on the nearly empty top level of a parking ramp at Logan Airport. He had to do something with his prisoner, after all, and he had made promises. But that didn't mean he couldn't cause trouble.

  Dusk had turned to dark when he found a pay phone near a bus stop in front of the airport, and called airport security, telling them where the van was parked (he'd taken care to wipe off his fingerprints) and what they'd find inside.

  "He's a terrorist. I'm telling you, it's twisted, sick, perverted. You just ask him. He's got all these guns and - hey, he bragged about how he planned to hijack an overseas plane, make it fly to Florida, and crash on Disneyworld. Sick. So what could I do? Just put yourself in my place. I had to shoot him."

  Drew hung up. Smiling inwardly, he got on a downtown bus, paid the driver, and took a seat to himself in back. The other passengers stared with disapproval at his stubble and grimy clothes. They'd remember him, he thought, and imagined the activity back at Logan.

  Airport security's equipment would be sophisticated enough to trace even his twenty-second call, because a jamming device would keep the line open as if he'd never hung up. By now, a security team would have found the van, and another would be rushing toward that pay phone in front of the airport. They'd question people near it. Someone was bound to remember a disheveled, grungy-looking man in jeans and a padded outdoor vest coming out of the phone booth - and possibly even remember that the unshaven man had boarded a bus.

  He was leaving a trail. If he intended to disappear, he'd have to get off the bus and do something about his appearance, change it, improve it. Soon. Only then could he go to Father Hafer.

  He glanced out the back toward traffic in the Boston night. No flashing lights of pursuit cars sped this way. Not yet at least. But how long... ?

  The stores were closed; he'd have to wait till morning to get unobtrusive clothes. Meanwhile? Assessing his options, he rejected a hotel, even a sleazy one. Not the way he looked. All hotel clerks had memories. Right now, he needed camouflage.

  He amused himself by imagining the questions that his prisoner would have to answer when the security officials found him. What kind of story would the man invent to explain the bullet-proof van, the weapons, the radio equipment? Whatever the story, Drew thought, the one thing the man didn't dare refer to was the monastery.

  He recalled the exhilaration he'd felt when talking to his prisoner, when making his speech to airport security. After six years of relative silence, talking had made him feel strangely good. His mood changed abruptly as he asked himself why he'd bothered to leave his prisoner in the van.

  Well, I couldn't very well have taken him with me.

  No, of course not. But...

  I had an option.

  Yes, but you didn't take it.

  In the old days...

  True. When you fought for your life on the hill, you killed your opponent. (Mea culpa.) But here you had a choice.

  At once the implication struck him. In the old days, he wouldn't have allowed the man to live.

  5

  Despite the changes in the world while he'd been away, one aspect at least remained the same. Or possibly it too was worse. Boston's Combat Zone.

  After leaving the bus, he headed toward downtown Boston, walking through streetlight-haloed darkness along the city's weirdly angled streets (the legacy of the haphazard 1600s, a city planner's nightmare), passing chrome-and-glass structures next to historic brick-and-board facades, their interiors no doubt stripped and varnished, filled with hanging plants and Oriental rugs.

  But as he ventured farther into the city's labyrinth, the buildings became oppressive. Pride gave way to neglect. He reached the jungle of the predators. The scavengers. The Combat Zone.

  Prostitutes, twenty feet apart, lined both sides of the streets. Despite the cold October night, some wore tight skirts, often leather, hitched above their knees, or slashed long dresses that bared the skin up to a buttock.

  As Drew walked past, they squinted at him, assessing.

  "Hey, sweet thing."

  "How'd you like your string pulled, love?"

  Drew studied them as they studied him, scanning their faces, searching for a faint suggestion that this or that woman could be of use to him.

  A garish yellow car screeched to a stop beside him. Drew pivoted on guard, gripping the Mauser beneath his padded vest. He blinked, startled, as a woman in the passenger seat exposed her breasts, the nipples encircled by lipstick, and raised her eyebrows in question.

  Drew felt an unfamiliar tingle in his groin. He shook his head fiercely. She laughed and turned to the man beside her, who rai
sed a beer can to his mouth and stomped on the gas pedal, roaring away.

  He struggled to subdue the perverse swelling. His sex drive had disappeared effortlessly in the monastery; now, within hours of returning to the world, it was back. He forced himself to continue walking, searching, but Arlene's face came vividly to his memory.

  A young black woman attracted his attention. Her thick dark hair was cropped close, like a boy's. Her breasts swelled beneath a Celtics sweatshirt; above it, she wore an open plastic coat. But what attracted him was that she kept pinching in distress at what appeared to be a rip in the calf of her panty hose. The gesture evoked his sympathy.

  As he approached, her eyes flickered. She straightened, jutting out her breasts.

  "Have you got a place?" Drew asked.

  "What for?"

  "It has to have a bed."

  "What for?"

  Drew frowned. He couldn't believe that he'd made a mistake about her.

  "Be specific," she added. "What are you asking me?"

  He understood. "Entrapment? You're afraid I might be a cop?"

  She blinked her long eyelashes. "Now why would a cop want to bother me?"

  "It's been so long I forgot. I'm supposed to ask how much. If I'm the one who mentions the money, you can't be charged for soliciting."

  "How much for what?"

  "To spend the night."

  "And what do you want to do for the night?"

  She wouldn't believe the truth, he realized, so he made a proposition.

  "Oh." She relaxed. "Is that all? For a minute, I thought you looked kinky. All I can say is you must have a high opinion of yourself if you think you can do that all night. Fifty bucks."

  Even six years ago, that price would have been low. "For all night?"

  "Hon, one thing at a time. Maybe. We'll see." She tapped him gently on his stubbled cheek. "But we'll have to do something about that sandpaper."

  "That's part of the idea."

  The glint returned to her eyes. "Just follow me."

  6

  She led him two blocks over, to a dingy apartment building with grime on the bricks and dust on the windows. The concrete front steps were spotted white with bird droppings.

  At the door, she paused. "Now, love, what you have to know is my boyfriend lives in the apartment next door. So in case you're the kind who enjoys the rough stuff... "

  "He and two pals with baseball bats pay us a visit." "There you go. I knew you'd understand." They entered a musty vestibule and went up two creaky flights of stairs, the bannister wobbly. She unlocked a door to a small apartment and spread out her arm in a gesture of welcome. "Home is where the heart is. The den of inequity."

  Noticing the pun, Drew suddenly realized that she was intelligent beyond being street smart. "You've been to college?"

  "Yeah, the school of hard knocks. But if it's loving you want to learn about, I'll teach you tonight." She grinned and shut the door. The room was small but neat and attractive. "You'll notice I didn't lock us in, just in case my boyfriend has to pay us a visit. There's booze in the cabinet. Scotch, rye, bourbon. Beer in the fridge. It all costs extra. I've even got a place to send out for sandwiches, but that costs extra too."

  "I bet," Drew said. "No booze. But I'm starving. Anything that doesn't have meat. Tomato and lettuce sandwiches. Three, no make it four. Milk." He scanned the room, his stomach rumbling, as she used the phone to order the food. A small Zenith television, a Sony stereo, a sofa, a director's chair.

  "Is that the bedroom?" he asked, pointing toward a door.

  She laughed. "You think you're in the Ritz? That's the closet. Over there's the john. Excuse the expression. The sofa's the bed. Just lift the cushions and pull that sucker out."

  He did so. At once he heard the rustle of cloth behind him. Alarmed, he turned. Too late. With practiced efficiency, she'd dropped her plastic raincoat, tugged off her Celtics sweatshirt, and was now yanking down her leather skirt.

  He raised a hand. "No. What I said I wanted to do - I lied."

  She froze in an awkward crouch, her skirt down around her knees, wearing only panty hose, her pubic hair showing darkly through them. Her eyes blazed. Stooped as she was, her breasts dangled, making her look vulnerable. "What?" Furious, she straightened. "What?"

  Her breasts and hips showed creamy stretchmarks against the smooth chocolate skin, evidence that she'd once had a child.

  "It's not what I had in mind. I wanted to explain on the street, but I didn't think you'd - "

  "Hey, I told you. Any rough stuff, anything kinky and - " She raised a fist to slam it against the wall of the room.

  "No! Stop!" Drew held up his arms. He knew that the walls were so thin that shouts would be as disastrous as her pounding.

  He strained to speak softly. "Please, don't do it. Look, I'm backing away. I'm nowhere close. You've got nothing to be afraid of."

  "What the hell?"

  "I meant exactly what I said on the street. I want to spend the night. That's all. To have a bath. To use your razor and make myself presentable. And go to bed. And sleep."

  Her eyebrows arched. "You're into baths? I'm supposed to wash you, is that it?"

  "Not at all." Though he tried not to look at her pubic hair, his body betrayed him. After all, he hadn't seen a woman, let alone a naked woman, since 1979, and he couldn't help feeling attracted to her. But he had to resist, and struggled to focus on her dark boyish face, ignoring her breasts. "Please, I wish you'd put some clothes on."

  "Now that," she said, but her voice was no longer angry, "is kinky for sure. You mean to tell me" - she posed suggestively, her eyes amused, sticking out one hip - "you don't like what you see?"

  "If it helps you to understand, I'm... or almost was... a priest."

  She narrowed her eyes. "So what? A friend of mine, she does two priests a week. I believe in equal opportunity. I don't discriminate."

  Drew laughed.

  "There, that's the idea. Loosen up, huh?"

  "Really, how much for the night? But no sex."

  "You're serious?"

  He nodded.

  "Would I have to leave?"

  He shook his head. "In fact, I'd prefer it if you stayed."

  "If that isn't weird." She calculated. "Okay, then, two hundred bucks." The furtive movement in her eyes suggested that she expected him to argue.

  "That's just about what I have." He pulled out the wallets he'd taken from the man on the hill and the one in the van, tossing money on the pulled-out bed.

  "You never heard of a hotel?"

  He gestured toward his dirty clothes. "Like this? I'd be remembered."

  "And you don't want to be remembered?"

  "Let's just say I'm shy."

  Her smile became a sober reassessment of him. "And love, you're also cool. Okay, I read you now. No need to fret. You're safe here. Have your bath."

  "But if it's all the same to you," Drew said.

  She opened the closet, pulling out a housecoat.

  "I'd feel better if... "

  She turned to him, putting it on.

  "You were in there with me."

  "Oh?"

  "Yeah, I've got some questions for you."

  7

  And, he didn't add, he wanted to keep her in sight.

  In the bathroom, he took off his grimy vest. She sat on a chair in the corner and lit a joint.

  "You sure you don't want a drag?" she asked.

  "It goes against my religion."

  "What does, relaxing?"

  "Dulling my senses."

  She chuckled. "We wouldn't want to do that."

  Hot water trom the faucet cascaded into the bathtub, raising steam that coated the mirror above the sink.

  Drew put his clothes on the shelf behind him, unobtrusively shoving his Mauser beneath the padded vest. The act of stripping in front of her wasn't difficult. Physical shame had never been one of his - what was the slang from the old days? - hang-ups.

  "Not bad," she said, judgin
g his physique, then inhaling sharply, retaining the smoke. "A little gaunt in the haunches." She gestured with the joint. "A little skinny in the ass. If I had your rear end, I'd have to go on welfare. All the same, not bad."

  Drew laughed. "I owe it all to diet and exercise."

  "Exercise? Hell, you look like one of those guys that runs."

  Drew's chest warmed; he'd been a passionate runner. "Yeah." He smiled. "Jim Fixx, Bill Rodgers."