The Sleepless

by Graham Masterton

  Victor glanced down at Dr Moorpath’s smoking body; then he glanced back at the parapet.

  ‘Where’d he jump from?’ Victor asked.

  Michael nodded. ‘The top of that crest. He was already standing there when I got up here. I talked to him. I asked him to come down. But there was nothing I could do.’

  Victor looked down at the body yet again. ‘He was standing on top of that crest, and he jumped all the way over there? Come on, Michael, that’s at least – ‘

  Michael said, ‘Yes?’ and stared intently at Victor, and then mouthed ‘later’ – trying to show him that he didn’t want to discuss what had happened to Dr Moorpath in front of these two security guards.

  ‘Oh,’ said Victor, looking back down to the ground. ‘I see what you mean.’

  Two doll-sized medics were hurriedly wheeling a trolley out to the place where Dr Moorpath had fallen. The guards said to Michael and Victor, ‘Come on, you two bozos. The police are going to want to talk to you.’

  Victor said, ‘Listen, friend, you don’t call us “bozos”. You call us “doctor” and you call us “sir.” ‘

  The guard let out a long sigh, as if he really didn’t give a shit. ‘Come on, then, doctor and sir. The cops are waiting to talk to you two bozos downstairs.’

  Sixteen

  Michael had just finished making photocopies of Joe Garboden’s assassination pictures when his office door opened without warning. He stuffed the last picture into its envelope and switched off the Xerox. To his surprise, it was Edgar Bedford, the grand old man of Plymouth Insurance. Edgar Bedford was stocky, bull-necked, with white crinkly hair. He had a large, handsome head, but his face was marred with crimson-and-white blotches that always reminded Michael of corned-beef hash. Too much sun, too many skin-peels, too many six-ounce martinis.

  He was wearing a tuxedo and a black bow tie, and he smelled of Xeryus aftershave, a young man’s fragrance which jarred with his appearance. He put his head around the door, and looked this way and that, and then smiled the smile of a man who has no need whatsoever to be ingratiating to anybody.

  ‘Ah, Rearden,’ he said. His voice was thick and oddly indistinct, like a poorly recorded soundtrack. ‘You’ve been working late.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I’ve just been winding up the O’Brien investigation, sir.’

  ‘Well ... sad business all around.’ Edgar Bedford walked into the centre of the room, and peered at some of the memos on the wall. ‘And I’m particularly sad to lose Joe.’

  ‘You heard about Dr Moorpath?’ asked Michael, trying not to sound provocative.

  Edgar Bedford nodded. ‘I knew Raymond for twenty-five years. We used to play golf together. Very sad indeed.’

  Michael shrugged and said, ‘He’d been under quite a bit of a strain, that’s what I heard.’ (Watching – in his mind’s eye – Raymond Moorpath spinning and burning in mid-air, and screaming in pain.)

  Edgar Bedford turned and fixed him with a watery-eyed stare. ‘Yes,’ he said, after a while. ‘That’s what I heard, too. You’ll – er – finish up this O’Brien thing, won’t you, and have it on my desk as soon as you can?’

  ‘I was wondering if you wanted me to stay on,’ said Michael.

  Edgar Bedford frowned at him, as if he didn’t understand what ‘stay on’ could possibly mean.

  Michael took a breath, and then said, ‘Now this is finished – this O’Brien thing – maybe you can find me something else.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Edgar Bedford. ‘That was one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you.’

  ‘Well, fine – I’m willing to take on another case. I think I’ve got my psychological difficulties pretty well licked.’

  Edgar Bedford didn’t seem to be listening. He looked around until he found a typist’s chair, which he rolled across to the centre of the room. He sat down, and folded his arms, and looked up at Michael with an expression that Michael had never seen on anybody’s face before. Contemptuous, proprietorial – but anxious, too – as if he didn’t hold Michael in any respect whatsoever, but was worried that Michael might upset the carefully orchestrated balance of Bedford life.

  ‘I’m going to tell you something, Michael. My family have dominated Boston society for nearly a hundred years.’

  ‘I’m aware of that, sir.’

  ‘You know how we did that? You know how we acquired such influence?’

  ‘Well, sir, I’m pretty sure that you’re going to tell me.’

  ‘We acquired that influence by making the right friends. That’s how we did it. We made the right friends. We were good to the people who could help us and we were unforgiving with those people who tried to do us down.’

  Michael nodded, as if he fully understood what this lecture was all about.

  Edgar Bedford paused for a while, and then he said, ‘I’m no fool, Rearden, whatever you take me for. In your own way, you’re one of us, and that makes you charmed. But being charmed doesn’t mean that you’re invulnerable – and being charmed doesn’t mean that you can do what you like, and poke your nose into business that doesn’t concern you. So I’m telling you now – you wrap up this O’Brien report – accidental death – satisfy the underwriters – and maybe we’ll think of keeping you on.’

  Michael stood in front of Edgar Bedford with Joe’s assassination photographs held behind his back.

  ‘All right, Mr Bedford,’ he said. And Edgar Bedford fixed him with watery, washed-out eyes, and Michael knew that the floor was opening up, right beneath his feet, but he refused to look, he refused to fall.

  Whether Edgar Bedford had sensed Michael’s moment of apprehension or not, he stood up, and rolled away the typist’s chair, and tried to smile. ‘It’s the making of friends, Rearden, that’s what makes the world go round. I’ll look forward to reading your report. By the way, Joe’s funeral is Saturday, 11 a.m. at Wakefield Crematorium. It’s odd, that, I wouldn’t have taken him for a Wakefield man, would you? But I guess that I’ll see you then.’

  When Edgar Bedford had left, Michael stood in the twilit copying-room for two or three minutes, and thought of Raymond Moorpath climbing into the air. That’s how we did it, Edgar Bedford had said. We made the right friends.

  He called Patsy. He didn’t tell her about Raymond Moorpath. She was finding it difficult enough as it was, with his prolonged absences, and Joe being killed, and Dr Rice being injured (he hadn’t yet told her that Dr Rice was dead, too). What was more, the television news channels were making a meal of the Boston race riots, and every bulletin was crowded with live footage of firefights and ambushes and buildings burning, and terrified children running for their lives.

  The mayor had called in National Guard reserves and SWAT squads, but every new initiative seemed to fuel the rioting more. Decades of anger and malice and alienation were stacked up like a bonfire, and every attempt to suppress them was like throwing on canfuls of gasoline.

  ‘You’ll be happy to hear that Edgar Bedford has told me to wrap this whole thing up,’ said Michael. ‘I should be finished by the weekend. Then I’ll come on home.’

  ‘Jason misses you,’ said Patsy. ‘And I miss you, too. I know what I said about the money ... but somehow it doesn’t seem so important any more.’

  Michael didn’t know what to say. He thought about Megan, sliding down from her wheelchair. He thought about wiping her face. He could have cried, he felt so ashamed of himself.

  ‘Plymouth might give me more work later. I don’t know. I’ll have to see.’

  ‘Maybe you could finish that board game you were working on.’

  He swallowed. He had tears in his eyes. ‘Yes, sure. Maybe I could.’

  At three o’clock in the morning, the phone rang. He sat up in bed, sweating, frightened. He had been dreaming again. The same dream, with the President walking toward him, smiling, his hand held out. And his own voice, very slow-motion, Nooooo Mr Pressiddennnt doonnnn’t coommme neaaaarrr mmmeeee –

  The phone kept on ringing and it took him a while t
o realize where he was, and where the phone was, and to pick it up.

  ‘Michael?’ said a harsh, Boston-Irish twang. ‘This is Giraffe.’

  ‘Giraffe? Do you know what time it is?’

  ‘Three-oh-three. Can you get yourself around to my apartment – like directly?’

  ‘You mean now?’

  ‘The sooner the better. This is important, Mikey. This is what we’ve all been looking for.’

  He wasn’t confident of finding a taxi at that time of night, so he drove himself to Thomas Boyle’s apartment and parked across the street. The night wind was warm, and there were still a few night owls strolling on the sidewalks. A man was standing next to the mailbox on the corner, his face shaded by a hat. He stood with his arms by his sides and he didn’t move. Michael hesitated for a moment, and thought about accosting him, but then he decided that it was probably safer not to. What, after all, could he say? ‘You look like one of the white-faced men that my friend thinks are responsible for assassinating famous people since way back when? What are you doing here?’

  He rapped at Thomas’s door with his knuckles in case Megan was asleep and the doorbell woke her; but it was Megan who answered. ‘Hallo, Michael, how are you?’

  He took her hand and squeezed it. It was an acknowledgement that what they had done together had been induced by ‘Mr Hillary’, and not by any lust for each other. But it was important for them both to stay friends.

  Thomas and Victor were sitting at the dining-table, drinking coffee and talking to a huge, handsome black man in a green djellaba. He rose up when Michael came in, and held out both hands.

  ‘Mikey, this is Matthew Monyatta, of the Olduvai Black Consciousness Group.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Michael. ‘I think I’ve seen you on television.’

  Matthew grinned. ‘I expect you have. Now and again they need a black revolutionary to give their programmes some political balance.’

  ‘Do you want some coffee?’ asked Thomas. ‘Matthew has something pretty important to tell us.’

  ‘It’s a little early for me,’ Michael told him. ‘And, by the way, I think we’re being followed and watched. There’s a guy hanging out across the street ... I can’t be sure, but he looks like the same guy who was watching my apartment, too.’

  Matthew said, ‘Oh, yes, you’re being watched, all right. Everybody who threatens the white-white men is being watched. Twenty-four hours of the day.’

  ‘The white-white men?’ asked Michael.

  ‘That’s what people call them in Africa and the Middle East. It’s because of their faces. Once seen, never forgotten. White, with their eyes shaded.’

  ‘What did you say the other evening?’ Michael asked Victor. ‘Something about the lily-white boys?’

  ‘The lily-white boys, they’re one and the same people,’ Matthew nodded. ‘It’s what you might call an irony. Their faces are white, their skin is white, but their souls are as black as night.’

  ‘Do you know who they are?’ asked Michael. He could hardly believe what he was hearing.

  Matthew nodded. ‘I surely do. That’s why I telephoned Lieutenant Boyle here, as soon as I saw his news conference on the television.’

  ‘Tell Michael what you told me,’ said Thomas. ‘Tell him about the bones.’

  Matthew reached into the neckline of his djellaba and produced a soft grey leather bag. He loosened the drawstring that kept it fastened, and spread a dozen small white bones onto the tabletop.

  ‘These are the bones. Witch-doctors used them in Kenya to foretell the future and to divine the secrets of the past. Three weeks ago I cast the bones and the bones warned me that the white-white men were restless.’

  ‘How did they do that?’ asked Michael, trying not to sound too sceptical. But it was only four o’clock in the morning, and he had expected something more believable than bones.

  Matthew drew the palm of his hand across the bones and they rolled over and changed their pattern. ‘I know what’s going on in your mind, Michael. You think the bones are primitive; and you think the bones are nothing but black man’s superstition. Who can tell the future from a dead rooster? Who can tell the past from bones alone? But I was taught how to use these by a witch-doctor who lived close to Olduvai, and this witch-doctor had been taught to use them by the witch-doctor before him, and so forth, and so on, right back, over a thousand years, the same knowledge, the same psycho-kinetic skill, even before they had a scientific name for it.

  ‘The bones are the same as dowsing-rods; but they don’t sense water. Instead, they sense a person’s spirit – and when a person’s spirit is disturbed, or restless, the bones twitch, and jump, and shift of their own accord. The white-white men have very powerful spirits, spirits which affect the whole of human society, so when the white-white men are restless – well, the bones pretty soon warn you about it.’

  ‘And this is what happened three weeks ago?’ asked Thomas, making notes in a springbound notebook.

  ‘This is what started three weeks ago,’ said Matthew, ‘and the bones have been getting more twitchy ever since. I knew that something wicked was coming this way, I knew that somebody important was going to die. But the bones didn’t give me no clue as to whom it might be, they were real confused; and so when Mr O’Brien’s helicopter came down like that, and everybody was killed, there was nothing I could do but mourn. I couldn’t be sure that it was the white-white men who had done the deed, although I had my suspicions, because the bones were literally leaping that day, dancing on the table like little dead men. And then, of course, I saw them.’

  ‘You saw them?’ asked Thomas. ‘You saw the white-white men?’

  Matthew hesitated, and lowered his head. When he spoke, his voice was much more subdued. ‘I saw them down at Patrice Latomba’s.’

  Thomas’s pencil paused over his notepad. ‘Was this before Verna Latomba was murdered, or afterwards?’

  ‘I saw them there, I saw them with Verna. She was all tied up, and they’d been hurting her. Dropping candlewax on her, cutting her with knives.’

  Thomas stared at him. ‘You saw them with Verna, you saw them doing that, and you didn’t call the police? Matthew – you could have saved her life!’

  Matthew looked back at him defiantly. ‘The white-white men told me to mind my own business. Don’t you think that hurt, walking out like that? Don’t you think that I was ashamed? Ashamed of myself, ashamed of my race, ashamed of my cowardice?’

  ‘But, Jesus, Matthew –’

  Matthew banged his fist on the table. ‘You don’t know what you’re dealing with! These aren’t mafiosi, or Yardie gangs, or Chinese tongs! These are the white-white men!’

  Michael looked away. He was embarrassed by Matthew’s outburst, but he was also embarrassed by his own thoughts. The white-white men? For Christ’s sake. Was this what Thomas had dragged him out of bed for? To listen to all of this superstitious babble? Yet Matthew seemed like such a proud man, a man of such strength and character.

  Thomas said, with great gentleness, ‘Come on, Matthew, tell me. What makes the white-white men so much worse than the Mafia?’

  Matthew took a deep breath. ‘You really don’t understand, do you? The Mafia have honour, the Mafia have religion, the Mafia have codes of conduct. Maybe they’re killers, maybe they deal in drugs and prostitution and gambling. But they have pride, they have family loyalty, no matter how perverted that pride and that loyalty may be. The white-white men have none of that. The white-white men are guilty of every sin that it’s possible for anyone to be guilty of. Every excess. Every cruelty. And that’s what they are – the most cruelest creatures on God’s earth, the very personification of all evil.’

  ‘And you saw Verna Latomba in the hands of these men, and you didn’t make any attempt to save her?’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘Are you proud of that?’

  ‘No, I’m not. But there was nothing that I could do; and nothing that anybody else could have done. An
d if I’d crossed them, believe you me, they would have been coming after me, too, like sharks out of hell, for ever and ever, until they got me. I tried to kid myself that it was nothing more than a little bit of drug business between Patrice and Luther Johnson and the white-white men. I don’t know whether you even know this, but the white-white men, they’re heavily into drugs, not because of the profit, mind, but because of the social disruption that drugs cause. That’s why they like to sell to MIT students and Ivy Leaguers ... that’s what your Ivy Connection is all about. You sell crack to a kid on Blue Hill Avenue, what real difference does it make? He doesn’t have no social influence, he’s just one more sad statistic. But you sell crack to a physics major or a would-be lawyer or an up-and-coming young politician – then you cause some damage. Then you start destroying hundreds of lives, thousands, for the price of one.’

  Victor said, ‘What made you call Lieutenant Boyle tonight?’

  ‘Guilt, I guess. And the facts you put out in that press conference of yours, which made me one hundred per cent sure that it was the white-white men who killed John O’Brien and Elaine Parker and that insurance friend of yours. You said that they were all marked in the same identical way, with the puncture holes deep in their backs – well, my blood just turned to ice-water. Because nobody does that, except the white-white men – just like Count Dracula leaving the famous fang holes in women’s necks.’

  Michael said, ‘Where do they come from, these white-white men? I mean, who exactly are they? Are they aliens, or what?’

  Matthew gave a loud bellow of bitter laughter, and banged the dining-table with his fist. ‘You could say that! You could say that! Aliens, I like that!’

  ‘Come on, Matthew,’ said Thomas. ‘This isn’t a joke.’

  ‘Oh, yes it is,’ Matthew retorted. ‘It’s a joke on you. If you thought that your white Western civilization was free of all of its obligations from times gone by, then it’s a joke on you. How many Jewish Americans go back to Israel, to meditate and to pray? How many black Americans go back to Nigeria, and Sierra Leone, to think about their roots? How many Irish go back to Ireland, and Germans to Germany, and Neapolitans to Naples? We are all inextricably entangled, every one of us, in what we are, and what our ancestors were – and that’s the fine thing about humanity, and race, and we should all be proud of it, and not ashamed.’