The Lure

by Felice Picano

  Click. Click. Click. It went.

  And ended in a short piercing scream that tore from her insides, into her mouth, and rushed at Noel, tearing the fabric of his night vision with that hand in the air before him still, now and forever, that hand clutching for air, as he heard the deep, awful sounds below halfway between a thud and the splat of a smashed melon.

  He was hurling himself down the iron fire stairway, suddenly released, he didn’t know how or why, racing, swerving to get down, reaching the place where the fire escape ended in a ladder. He jumped onto it, dangling on it, seeing the wet paved alley below him, people in uniforms and jackets standing around, red flashes over the opposite walls, on faces, as though a hundred flashlights were bobbing, shaking. He let go of the ladder, dropped with a thud to the ground, pushed through them all to get to her.

  She was a broken doll. Her dress ripped up to her hips. One leg bent under her, the other at an angle that couldn’t be right. Her head turned away from him, as though spurning him once more. Hair covering her face like a black cloth.

  Someone was kneeling beside her. He looked up, shouted to someone else. Nothing he yelled made sense to Noel.

  Eric was there, too, facing him across her body, not looking down at her. His hands were still bound. Two men held his shoulders from behind. He was looking at Noel with utter contempt.

  “She’s still alive,” someone said loudly. “Where in hell is that ambulance! Radio the hospital to be ready for her!”

  Another siren was approaching. The crowd was shifting now, moving to let some people through. He saw Eric staring at him, accusing him, indicting him for what had happened, knowing that Noel had done it, all of it, from the beginning to now, to this. Men in white were sliding around on either side of her. Everyone forced back away from her. Something like cloth slid under her. Then lifted, it must be a net. Her body jiggled slightly, her face was still turned away, still covered with her beautiful hair. The crowd dispersing now. People muttering around him. Eric just standing there, standing there, accusing him.

  The acid came on him again, making him shut his eyes to the glare. He was still standing when he opened them. Only now something was in his right hand. Stupidly, dizzily, uncomprehending, Noel looked at it—a glittering curved edge of sharp metal. Pointed. Deadly.

  “Now’s your chance,” someone whispered.

  “He killed your girl,” someone else said, then stepped back.

  The red lights picked out Eric’s figure. Flashlights wavered, only on Eric.

  “I’d tear him to pieces,” another voice said, receded fast.

  “He’s all yours.”

  “He killed her.”

  “Get ’im, Lure.”

  “He’s to blame.”

  “You let her die.”

  “Get him. He deserves it.”

  “Rip him up. He made you a queer.”

  “We won’t stop you.”

  “He’s all yours.”

  “Get him.”

  The knife felt like a burning ember melded to his hand.

  “Get him back for all the others.”

  “Kill him, Lure.”

  “We won’t stop you.”

  The heat of the knife was unbearable. But he couldn’t drop it, couldn’t shake it, couldn’t let go of it.

  “Kill him now.”

  “He made you a fairy.”

  “He made you kill her.”

  “You let her die.”

  “He’s to blame.”

  Nothing to cool off the heat in his hand, racing up his arm, burning his elbow, his shoulder, his neck, his fingers. Nothing to ease the burning but to push it into something soft, wet, fleshy.

  “Rip him to pieces.”

  “Get him, Lure.”

  “Kill him.”

  “Kill him.”

  “Kill! Kill! Kill!” the chorus whispered around him insidiously as he lunged around Eric, trying to stop them, to shut them up.

  “KILL! KILL! KILL!” they whispered into every pore of his skin, every nerve ending of his muscles, as Noel reeled forward to sink the knife where it would stop the voices and cool the incredible burning heat in his hands. The voices urging him, urging him, insisting, insisting, before he went mad from the pain and the heat-and Noel lunged…

  He saw Eric’s face only inches away, not the mask of monstrousness, not the icy presence of death, but a terrified brother, held-down sacrificial victim, lamb ready to be slaughtered.

  …Lunged and stopped, feeling his insides twist to a bone-grinding halt, requiring every single minute connection of bone to skeletal muscle to skin to stop the lunge.

  Heard, as though from miles away, the metallic clatter of something at his feet. Saw before him Eric’s face becoming his own, then Alana’s, Randy’s, Monica’s.

  Someone was saying harshly, coldly, clearly: “Take this one away. Book him. Come on. What are you waiting for? Move!”

  Eric disappeared, hustled away into the back seat of a police car, pushed inside. He stared out the back window, trying to see Noel, before he was shoved back into the seat, and the car shot away, past the narrow opening of the alleyway, and was gone.

  Noel was motionless, floating, in release. He’d met the test, felt its power, the programming that could not be controlled. And had beaten it.

  Something wet hit his left eye. He reached up; it felt like mucus. Someone else moved in front of him swiftly, rapidly spit at him. Then another. And one more.

  He let them, let the phlegm slide down his cheeks and nose and chin. The shadows flitted away. The red revolving lights thinned out, were finally gone, and he was alone in the alleyway.

  “C’mon, honey. We got to go now.”

  A hand reached up to touch him.

  He didn’t move. She brought a tiny silver handkerchief in front of him and tenderly wiped off his face. “We got to go now, Noel. We got to go to the hospital. Come on, Noel. Rick has a car. He’ll drive us.”

  Suddenly the release, the relief was gone. He saw the hand groping for a hold in the air, once more heard the scream, the sound of her landing on the sidewalk. Everything came back clearly—with anguish.

  “Come on, Noel.” Veena was tugging at him. “Your woman’s hurt. She’s hurt bad.”

  14

  In the hospital waiting room Rick Chaffee brought a pill and a glass of water to him. The drug was Thorazine, he said, and would bring Noel down from the trip and back to normal. Noel declined it, but Veena took one.

  A young intern—a fan of Veena’s, he said—came into the big room to tell them Alana was already in surgery, where she’d been taken as soon as she’d arrived. Didn’t they want to go somewhere else, where it was quieter than the emergency waiting room? Noel didn’t care, but Rick was in charge, and since there were a great many people staring at Veena in her silver-lamé outfit, she, too, thought it might be a good idea. Up a flight of stairs was an anteroom that looked like a small living room: two sofas, a chair, a Danish Modern affair. But it was quiet, private. And within a few minutes the Thorazine had already begun to work on Veena. She stretched out on the couch. Rick covered her with his tuxedo jacket, which looked incongruous.

  Noel didn’t sleep, or even close his eyes. He didn’t need the Thorazine, he knew. Even though the eight hours that LSD was supposed to last were only half over, he had come down from the drug completely when he had dropped the knife meant to take Eric’s life in the alleyway of the Window Wall. His vision had settled, no afterimages, no extra dimensionality to objects, none of it. But he was exhausted. The most he could do was to sit in the large chair, watching Veena sleep, watching Rick read one magazine article after another, and feeling the quiet around them.

  At ten minutes after five in the morning, the same young intern who had brought them to the smaller room opened the door and quietly told them that Alana had died on the operating table. Veena woke up as he talked to Rick. All Noel could understand were disconnected words: “Massive hemorrhages.” “Unexpected complications
.” Before the intern had gotten out of the door, the still sleepy-eyed disco star had broken out into wails of weeping, and it required all three men, another sedative, and almost a half hour before she was well enough to leave the hospital.

  Noel told the intern he wanted to see Alana, and was directed to a post-op room one story above them.

  Someone had brushed her hair back. There wasn’t a bruise or scar on her face or neck or shoulders that he could make out. She lay as though asleep on the portable bed. He looked at her, touched her lips, felt how cold they were, then saw the paperlike consistency of her skin, always so alive and glowing before, and knew she was dead. He hadn’t expected her to live. He had known in that unforgettable moment that he’d seen her hand clutching for a grip in the night air that she couldn’t survive, that she was lost to him, long before he heard her scream, long before he saw her body twisted on the sidewalk, long before he was told. Seeing her now was mere confirmation.

  He only stayed with her corpse for a minute before going down again. He no longer felt anything he could call an emotion.

  Rick dropped Veena off and drove Noel to his apartment, attempting to get him to stay with him and Jimmy. He resisted his offer. He wanted to be alone.

  It was already daylight when he entered his apartment. So he opened the window blinds, watered the plants, ran a fingertip along the wall to see if all the paint was dry, took a long hot shower, then feeling the exhaustion begin to catch up with him, lay down on the bed in the middle of the studio.

  He had two fleeting regrets—that Alana had not seen the apartment redecorated, and thus understood from how much it had been transformed, how much he had altered; and that he had not immediately accepted her offer to go to Paris, even with what had happened, and thus given her at least a moment of happiness.

  He tried to sleep, and instead remembered the entire evening in almost cinematic detail. It bothered him that she had died thinking that he had betrayed Eric. If spirits did exist after death, she would know differently: know that he had saved Eric from his worst enemy—Noel himself. Recalling the moment he had wanted so urgently to knife Eric, and how much he had resisted and why, Noel experienced again his release from Loomis’s control, his relief that he had fought it. It was an outburst that racked his body from head to toe as though he were in a fever chill.

  As he rose to find a handkerchief to wipe his face, his foot bumped and knocked down a parcel that had been leaned up against the wall near the door. Gerdes must have remembered how Noel had asked day after day for a parcel.

  It was too big for the cassette, but when Noel opened the multiple wrappings and got past the various envelopes and stapled sheaves of photocopied pages, the envelope in which he had given the tape to Priscilla Vega fell onto the bed.

  The cassette was wrapped with a handwritten note she had signed. By the time he received this, she wrote, she would be in San Juan. She had managed to tape everything they needed between Loomis and Gee. Taking the taxi, she had not gone home, but directly to the apartment of Wilson Martinez, a Hispanic congressman, to whom Buddy had already confided about Whisper and what he thought they were up to.

  Priscilla and her baby had stayed with the Martinezes for three days, until the cassette arrived in the mail at their East Harlem address. Noel did understand she couldn’t take any chances in mailing it either to herself or to him, didn’t he? Martinez had listened to the tape, read the new papers, and had called Lloyd Parnell, the police commissioner. Priscilla had given her testimony before Parnell and several lawyers. She might have to come back to do so again, if it came to trial. The tapes had been transcribed. All that was now required was for Noel to call the commissioner. Parnell would be waiting for his call—call him immediately at any hour. Even with all the evidence, Noel would have to testify to make the case against Loomis stick. Her postscript gave an address in Puerto Rico: he was to write if he wanted her.

  His first thought was to drop the envelope and all of its contents into the incinerator outside his door, let it go up in ashes and smoke. Alana was dead. Eric was alive. The psychological weapon hadn’t fired as it was supposed to. He wanted no more to do with it. He almost blamed Priscilla Vega for telling him what she had told him. Alana might still be alive if he hadn’t known. He would still have his illusions intact, and not this—nothingness.

  Then he held the cassette in his hand and knew he had to listen to it.

  There were background noises: silverware, dishes, voices, a baby gibbering, a woman soothing it in Spanish, then a distinct, low-toned man’s voice.

  “You’re certain he’ll do it?”

  Loomis answered. “No question about it. I told you, he doesn’t have a choice anymore. It’s set. He’ll do it.”

  “What’s in it for him?”

  “His job. A career. Eventually money, prestige. What he wants.”

  “I thought he was some kind of professor?”

  “He is,” Loomis replied, repeating it, careful, distinct, as though talking to a child. “We fixed it up between us.”

  “You and his boss? The guy that found him for you?”

  “That’s right. His department chairman. He’s the one who recommended this particular man.”

  “You and this boss of his are real tight?”

  “Let’s just say we have the same friends and connections.”

  That was all that Noel needed to hear. He glanced at the clock: eight fifteen. He dialed the number Priscilla had written, the commissioner’s private line.

  Wilbur Boyle. It was all he could think of as he waited to be put through, heard Parnell rasp that a car was on the way, they would convene the hearing immediately. Wilbur fucking Boyle! Which explained the agency. Which explained how Loomis knew all about him…which explained…had someone been killed just to get his attention that morning, riding along the West Side Highway? Who was Kansas anyway? An operative who’d somehow betrayed Loomis? Or was he just some hapless bum they’d found sleeping in the warehouse because he had nowhere else to go? Did it really matter? What was important was that between Boyle and Loomis they’d set up the trap for him. He’d been controlled from the first. He’d never had a chance against them.

  Son of a bitch! He’d been the one who’d been lured!

  15

  “I think we’ve heard enough to consider this preliminary hearing fairly satisfactory, gentlemen,” Parnell said.

  Everyone else at the large oval table looked toward the far end where Loomis was sitting as though not a word said in the chambers for the past two hours had anything whatsoever to do with him. Next to him was Carl Russo, the attorney who would probably defend him if criminal charges were brought after the upcoming departmental trial. Russo was known to be a PBA agitator. He spoke for his client now.

  “Naturally I will have to see all of your substantiation.”

  “Naturally, Mr. Russo,” Parnell said wearily. “I’m certain Mr. Kirsch will be happy to present you with the rather massive amount of evidence we now possess.”

  Andrew Kirsch would present the evidence against Loomis at the departmental trial. He was an up-and-coming figure in the ranks, an old enemy of Russo’s, the commissioner had explained to Noel.

  “You understand, Loomis,” Parnell said, “that in light of all this, your unit is disbanded as of now?”

  The Fisherman came back from his reverie and nodded that he understood. It was one of the few times since they had entered the chamber that he seemed to have heard anything that was said. Most of the time he stared beyond Russo’s head, past one of the two guards in the room, as though trying to see out of the little cross-barred window.

  Silence. Even the stenographer had stopped clicking on the little lap-held machine. Everyone seemed to enjoy the quiet. Noel was startled by a plantive honk from a car horn somewhere below them.

  “About bail,” Russo suddenly said, leaning over the table. The stenographer began clacking away at her machine again.

  “I’m afraid not,” Parnell sai
d.

  “We have some pretty serious charges here,” Kirsch added.

  “You’ll have to secure an indictment then,” Russo said.

  “Don’t need it,” his adversary replied. “These are intradepartmental matters.”

  “All preliminary charges are PD related,” Parnell said. “Misuse of departmental funds, conspiracy to take the life of a PD officer…” He let his words trail away, obviously disgusted with the whole business.

  They had just finished listening to the tape Priscilla Vega had made and especially the final street-corner portion in which Loomis and the man he called Gee had settled on a payment time, and amounts. Even with all the noise of a busy afternoon midtown street, their words had come through clearly. Damningly. Everyone in the room had been silent after that.

  Noel took another sip of coffee from the Styrofoam cup, listened as the two police attorneys began to skirmish over procedural details. But that couldn’t hold Noel’s interest long. He knew he was supposed to stay until Parnell left. He knew he was the key witness. He had nothing to say except yes and no. But it was the most damning evidence so far. Now, while they traded jargon and technicalities, Noel stared at Loomis.

  Not directly at him, but off to one side slightly, the way he looked indirectly at stars in a night sky, to see the vague distant outlines more clearly.

  The Fisherman certainly looked no different from the man Noel had first encountered in the abandoned Federal House of Detention, or, more memorably, sitting in Noel’s apartment that late Sunday morning in March, rocking back and forth, reading the sports section of The New York Times just before he made his offer—which wasn’t really an offer at all—to Noel. The slat-back chair was gone now, the apartment was completely changed. Noel himself was so transformed he could no longer remember what he had thought that morning. Only Loomis was the same.