by Anne Rice
“I can do it,” Toby said. “I can kill them.”
His employer looked at him. His eyes were dead the way Toby’s mother’s eyes used to die. The old man drank half a glass of wine and wandered back into the bedroom.
Toby went and looked down at him. The smell made Toby think of his mother and father. The dead glassy gaze of his employer as he looked up at Toby made him think of his mother.
“I’m safe here,” the old man said. “This address, nobody has it. It’s not written down anywhere at the restaurant.”
“Good,” said Toby. He was relieved to hear it, and had been afraid to ask about it.
In the wee hours as the new clock ticked on the sideboard in the little kitchen, Toby studied all the deeds and both the business cards, and then he slipped the cards into his pocket.
He woke up Alonso again and insisted that he describe the men he’d seen, and Alonso tried to do it, but finally Toby realized he was too drunk.
Alonso drank more wine. He ate a dried crust of French bread. He asked for more bread and butter and wine, and Toby gave him these things.
“Stay here, and don’t think of anything until I come back,” said Toby.
“You’re just a boy,” said Alonso. “You can’t do anything about this. Get word to my mother. That’s what I ask. Tell her not to call my boys on the coast. Tell her, the Hell with them.”
“You can stay here and do as I say,” said Toby. Toby was powerfully exhilarated. He was making plans. He had certain specific dreams. He felt superior to all the forces collected around him and Alonso.
Toby was also furious. He was furious that anyone in the world thought he was a boy who could do nothing about this. He thought of Elsbeth. He thought of Violet with her cigarette on her lip, dealing the cards at the green felt table in the house. He thought of the girls talking together in whispers on the sofa. He thought over and over of Elsbeth.
Alonso stared at him.
“I’m too old to be defeated in this way,” he said.
“So am I,” said Toby.
“You’re eighteen,” said Alonso.
“No,” said Toby. He shook his head. “That’s not true.”
Alonso’s guardian angel stood beside him, staring at him with an expression of sorrow. This angel was at the limit of what he could do. The angel of Toby was appalled.
Neither angel could do anything. But they didn’t give up trying. They suggested to Toby and to Alonso that they should flee, get the mother from Brooklyn and get on a plane for Miami. Let the men of violence have what they wanted.
“You’re right that they’ll kill you,” said Toby, “as soon as you sign these papers.”
“I have nowhere to go. How do I tell this to my mother?” asked the old man. “I should shoot my mother, so that she doesn’t suffer. I should shoot her and then shoot myself and that would be the end of it.”
“No!” said Toby. “Stay here as I told you.”
Toby put on a recording of Tosca, and Alonso sang along with it and was soon snoring.
Toby walked for blocks before he went to a drugstore, bought a black cosmetic hair rinse, and unflattering but fashionable black-rimmed tinted glasses, and, from a table vendor on West Fifty-sixth Street, an expensive-looking briefcase and, from another vendor, a fake Rolex watch.
He went into another drugstore, and he bought a series of items, little items no one would notice, such as plastic devices people use to place between their teeth when they sleep, and lots of the soft rubber and plastic offered to help people line their shoes. He bought a pair of scissors, and he bought a bottle of clear nail polish and an emery board for trimming his nails. He stopped again at a vendor’s table on Fifth Avenue and bought himself several pairs of lightweight leather gloves. Handsome gloves. He also bought a yellow cashmere scarf. It was cold and it felt good to have this around his neck.
He felt powerful as he walked along the street, and he felt invincible.
When he came back to the apartment, Alonso was sitting there anxiously, and the music was Callas singing Carmen. “You know,” Alonso said, “I’m afraid to leave.”
“You should be,” said Toby. He began polishing his nails and filing them.
“What on earth are you doing?” Alonso asked him.
“I’m not certain yet,” said Toby, “but I notice when there are men in the restaurant who have polished nails, people notice it, especially women.”
Alonso shrugged.
Toby went out to get some lunch and several bottles of excellent wine so that they could make it through another day.
“They might be killing people at the restaurant now,” said Alonso. “I should have warned everyone to get out.” He sighed and put his heavy head in his hands. “I didn’t lock up the restaurant. What if they go there and gun down everybody?”
Toby merely nodded.
Then he went out, walked a couple of blocks, and called the restaurant. No one answered. This was a terrible sign. The restaurant should have been crowded for dinner, with people grabbing for the phone and jotting down evening reservations.
Toby reflected that he’d been wise to keep his apartment a secret, to make friends with no one but Alonso, to trust no one just as he had trusted no one when he was growing up.
Early morning came.
Toby showered and put the black tint in his hair.
The employer slept in his clothes on top of Toby’s bed.
Toby put on a fine Italian suit that Alonso had bought for him, and then he added the accoutrements so that he didn’t look like himself at all.
The plastic bite device changed the shape of his mouth. The heavy frames of the tinted glasses gave his face an expression that was alien to it. The gloves were dove gray and beautiful. He wrapped the yellow scarf around his neck. He put on his only and best black cashmere overcoat.
He’d fitted his shoes with plenty of material to make him look taller than he was, but not by much. He put the two automatic weapons in his briefcase, and the small handgun he put in his pocket.
He looked at his employer’s knapsack. It was black leather, very fine. So he slung it over his shoulder.
He went to the house before the sun came up. A woman he’d never seen before opened the front door. She smiled at him and welcomed him in. No one else was in sight.
He took the automatic weapon from his briefcase and shot her, and he shot the men who came running down the hall towards him. He shot the people who thundered down the stairs. He shot the people who seemed to run right into the gunfire as if they did not believe it was happening.
He heard screaming upstairs and he went up, stepping over one body after another, and shot through the doors, breaking big holes in them until everything was silence.
He stood at the very end of the hall and waited. Out came one man cautiously, gun visible before his arm and then his shoulder. Toby shot him immediately.
Twenty minutes passed. Maybe more. Nothing stirred in the house. Slowly, he made his way through every room of it. All dead.
He gathered up every cell phone he could find, and put them in the leather shoulder bag. There was a laptop computer there, and he folded it up and took it too, though it was a little heavier than he wanted it to be. He cut the wires to the computer desk, and to the landline phone.
As he was leaving, he heard the sound of someone crying and talking in a low pathetic voice. He kicked open the door and found a very young girl there, blond with red lipstick, crouched down on her knees with a cell phone to her ear. She dropped the phone in terror when she saw him. She shook her head, she begged in some language he couldn’t understand.
He killed her. She fell down dead instantly and lay there as his mother had lain on her bloody mattress. Dead.
He picked up her phone. A gruff voice demanded of him, “What’s happening?”
“Nothing,” he said in a whisper. “She was out of her mind.” He slammed the phone shut. The blood coursed hot through his veins. He felt powerful.
Now he made his wa
y again very fast through every room. He found one man wounded and moaning and he shot him. He found a woman bleeding to death and he shot her too. He collected more phones. His knapsack was bulging.
Then he went out, walked several blocks, and caught a taxi.
It took him uptown to the office of the lawyer who had handled the transfer of the property.
Affecting a limp as he walked and sighing as if the briefcase weighed too much, and the shoulder bag were dragging him down, he made his way into the office.
The receptionist had just unlocked the door, and smiling, she explained her boss had not come in yet, but would come any minute. She said the yellow scarf around his neck was beautiful.
He slumped down on the leather couch and, carefully removing one glove, he wiped his forehead as though a terrible ache were bothering him. She looked at him tenderly.
“Beautiful hands,” she said, “like those of a musician.”
He laughed under his breath. In a whisper, he said, “All I want to do is go back to Switzerland.” He was very excited. He knew that he was lisping as he whispered because of the plastic bite plate in his mouth. It made him laugh, but only to himself. He had never been so tantalized in all his life. He thought for one split second that he understood the old words, “the glamour of evil.”
She offered him coffee. He put back on his glove. He said, “No, it will keep me awake on the plane. I want to sleep over the Atlantic.”
“I can’t recognize your accent. What is it?”
“Swiss,” he whispered, lisping effortlessly because of the device in his mouth. “I’m so eager to go home. I loathe this city.”
A sudden noise from the street startled him. It was a pile driver beginning the day’s work on a construction site. The noise was repetitive and shook the office fiercely.
He winced in pain, and she told him how sorry she was that he had to endure this.
In came the lawyer.
Toby stood up to his full commanding height and said in the same lisping whisper, “I’ve come on an important matter.”
The man was immediately afraid, as he let Toby into his office.
“Look, I’m moving as fast as I can,” said the man, “but that old Italian’s a fool. And he’s stubborn. Your employer expects miracles.” He rummaged through the papers on his desk. “I have found out this. He’s sitting on a teardown just a few blocks from the restaurant, and the place is worth millions.”
Again, Toby almost laughed, but he didn’t. He took the papers from the man, glancing at the address, which was that of his hotel, and shoved them in his briefcase.
The lawyer was petrified.
There were clanging noises from outside, and huge reverberating shocks as if heavy loads of material were being dropped to the street. Toby saw a big white painted crane when he looked out the window.
“Call the bank now,” Toby whispered, struggling over the lisp. “And you’ll find out what I’m talking about.” Again he almost laughed to himself. And it came across as a smile to this man, who instantly punched in a number on his cell phone.
The lawyer cursed. “You guys think I’m some kind of Einstein.” His face changed. The man at the bank had answered.
Toby took the cell phone out of the lawyer’s hand. He said into the phone, “I want to see you. I want to see you outside the bank. I want you to be waiting for me.”
On the other end the man gave his consent immediately. The number in the little digital window on the phone was the same as the number on one of the business cards in Toby’s pocket. Toby closed the phone and slipped it in his briefcase.
“What are you doing?” asked the lawyer.
Toby felt total power over the man. He felt invincible. Some vagrant wisp of romance prompted him to say, “You are a liar and a thief.”
He took the small gun out of his pocket and shot the man. The sound was swallowed by the booms and clatters from the street.
He looked at the laptop computer on the desk. He couldn’t leave it. Awkwardly he jammed it into the shoulder bag with the others.
He was loaded down, but he was very strong with good broad shoulders.
He found himself laughing again under his breath as he stared at the dead man. He felt wonderful. He felt marvelous. He felt as he had felt when he imagined himself playing the lute on a world-famous stage. Only this was better.
He was deliciously giddy, as giddy as he’d been when he’d first thought of all these things, these bits and pieces of things which he’d garnered from television crime dramas and occasional novels, and he forced himself not to laugh but to move on quickly.
He took all the money in the man’s wallet, some fifteen hundred dollars.
In the outer office, he smiled lovingly at the young woman. “Listen to me,” he said, leaning over the desk. “He wants you to leave now. He’s expecting, well, some people.”
“Ah, yes, I know,” she said, trying to look very clever and very approving and very calm, “but how long should I be out?”
“The day, take the day,” said Toby. “No, believe me, he wants you to.” He gave her several of the man’s twenty-dollar bills. “Take a taxi home. Enjoy yourself. And call in the morning, you understand? Don’t come in before calling.”
She was charmed by him.
She went out with him to the elevator, very elated to be with him, such a tall young man, such a mysterious and handsome young man, he knew this, and she told him again that his yellow scarf was gorgeous. She noticed his limp but pretended not to notice.
Before the elevator doors closed, he gazed down at her through the dark glasses, smiling as brightly as she smiled, and said, “Think of me as Lord Byron.”
He walked the few blocks to the bank, but stopped a few yards from the entrance. The thickening crowd almost knocked him aside. He moved to the wall, and he punched in the number of the banker on the phone he’d stolen from the lawyer.
“Come outside now,” he said in his now practiced lisping whisper, as his eyes moved over the crowd before the bank’s entrance.
“I am outside,” the man said gruffly and angrily. “Where the Hell are you?”
Toby easily spotted him as the man shoved the phone back into his pocket.
Toby stood looking about himself in amazement at the speed of those moving in both directions. The roar of the traffic was deafening. Bicycles whizzed through the sluggish rumble of trucks and taxis. The noise rolled up the walls as if to Heaven. Horns blared and the air was full of gray smoke.
He looked up at the slice of blue sky which gave no light whatsoever to this crevice of the giant city, and he thought to himself he had never been so alive. Not even in Liona’s arms had he felt this vigor.
He punched the number again, this time listening for the ring and watching for the man, almost lost in this ever-shifting glut of people, to answer.
Yes, he had his man, gray haired, heavy, red faced now with fury. The victim stepped to the curb. “How long do you want me to stand out here?” he barked into the phone. He turned and walked back to the granite wall of the bank and stood to the left of the revolving door, looking around coldly.
The man glared at everybody passing him, except the lean bent-over young man who limped as if because of his heavy shoulder bag and briefcase.
This man he didn’t notice at all.
As soon as Toby moved behind him, Toby shot the man in the head. Quickly he shoved the gun back in his coat and, with his right hand, helped the man slide down the wall to the pavement, with his legs out in front of him. Toby knelt solicitously right beside him.
He took out the man’s linen handkerchief and wiped his face. The man was dead, obviously. Then in plain sight of the unseeing crowd, he took the man’s phone, his wallet, and a small notebook from his breast pocket.
Not a single person passing had paused, not even those who were stepping over the banker’s outstretched legs.
A flash of memory surprised Toby. He saw his brother and sister, wet and dead in the
bathtub.
Emphatically, he rejected this memory. He told himself it was meaningless. He folded the linen handkerchief as best he could with one gloved hand, and laid it across the man’s moist forehead.
He walked three blocks before catching a cab, and left the taxi three blocks from his apartment.
Toby went upstairs, his fingers shaking as he held the gun in his pocket. When he knocked on the door, he heard Alonso’s voice. “Vincenzo?”
“You’re alone in there?” he asked.
Alonso opened the door, and pulled him in. “Where have you been, what’s happened to you?” He stared at the darkened hair, the tinted glasses.
Toby searched the apartment.
Then he turned to Alonso and told him, “They’re all dead, the people who were bothering you. But this is not finished. There was no time to get to the restaurant and I don’t know what’s going on there.”
“I do,” said Alonso. “They fired all my people and closed the place up. What in Hell are you telling me?”
“Ah, well,” said Toby, “that’s not so bad.”
“What in the world do you mean they’re all dead?” Alonso asked.
Toby told him everything that had happened. Then he said, “You have to take me to people who know how to finish this. You have to take me to your friends who wouldn’t help you. They’ll help you now. They’ll want these computers. They’ll want these cell phones. They’ll want this little notebook. There’s data here, tons of data about these criminals and what they want and what they’re doing.”
Alonso stared at him for a long time without speaking, and then he sank down in the only armchair in the room and ran his fingers through his hair.
Toby bolted the door of the bathroom. He kept the gun with him. He laid the heavy porcelain top of the toilet tank against the door, and he took a shower with the curtain open, washing and washing until all the dark tint was gone from his hair. He smashed the glasses. He wrapped up the gloves, the shattered glasses, and the scarf and put them in a towel.
When he came out, Alonso was talking on the phone. He was deeply absorbed in his conversation. He was talking in Italian or a Sicilian dialect, Toby wasn’t sure. He’d picked up some words at the restaurant, but this stream of words was much too fast.