The Guardian

by Christopher Kenworthy

  There was of course the danger that Carver might come after him if he guessed that Larry had more to tell. He had every reason to remember Carver’s uncanny skill and persistence in pursuit.

  No, he told himself as he swung out of the back door of his father’s pub in Islington, he had judged it perfectly. Enough of the truth to hurt, but not enough to let on he knew anything else.

  All the same, it would not hurt to be careful until Carver was out of town before putting himself about quite as freely as he would have liked.

  Damon was a new face in the district and a luscious one. He had dark, melting eyes and a round, boyish face despite the fact that he was over twenty. He had an attractive streak of viciousness in his makeup which gave an edge to what promised to become a most interesting relationship.

  Damon would do very nicely to wile away the days until Carver slung his hook, thought Larry to himself, and his step as he turned towards Damon’s admittedly scruffy little pad was bouncing and jaunty.

  The way to the flat was open and clear. A narrow side street – but the street lamps were bright and there were no obvious dark corners. He watched carefully, but nothing stirred.

  The entrance to the converted house was brightly lit, too. No shadowy figures lurked. To be on the safe side, though, Larry slipped into a doorway opposite and watched carefully for a full ten minutes, checking on the lighted window on the roof which provided the attic apartment with its light and a certain amount of bohemian charm. The setting, with the lights turned down, looked almost Parisian, Larry thought. He had been in Paris several times and once worked there as an artist’s model. He remembered the artist with a kind of affectionate contempt.

  When he was absolutely certain that the street and the lobby of the building opposite was safe, he crossed the road quickly, stood inside the doors to the building and waited again. It did no harm to be careful, he reckoned.

  When he was sure that he had not been followed to the apartment, and only then, he made his way up the stairs to the door at the very top.

  Even then, he was careful. He listened outside the door for a very long, silent time. From within came the sound of music playing, though not very loudly. From time to time, someone hummed in time with the tune. There was a sound of movement every now and again.

  Finally, he tapped on the door, and whistled softly. It was a kind of signal between lovers. The feeling of conspiracy heightened his desire.

  At the same time, he heard, just on the fringe of audibility, a whisper of movement on the stairs behind and below him.

  The door opened a crack, just as the whisper turned into a definite movement, and he pushed it open roughly and was inside with the door closed before whoever moved upon the stair had a chance to climb the last flight.

  All the same, it had been a close thing. Whoever was out there thumped against the door with a muffled grunt just as he got the bolts home. The door quivered, but he knew there was no chance of their getting in. The whole place was Victorian and the doors were made of two inch solid oak. Solid, he said to himself, as a rock.

  “Hello, Larry boy,” said Carver, an inch from his ear.

  Even in that moment of shock, Larry’s reflexes were sharp and true. He moved with the smooth expertise which comes from perfect training.

  In one flowing movement, he turned on his left foot, his right sweeping in a scything karate kick which would have punched a hole in a brick wall.

  Even before the kick had landed, he was already launching himself on the second movement, designed to remove him from the doorway, place himself in the middle of the room and give him room to fight.

  And then the lights went out. His foot collided with a piece of furniture, unbalancing him and making him windmill violently for proper position.

  While he was still out of balance, Carver hit him, once, in the solar plexus.

  When he came to, Larry was lying on his side. His hands and feet were pulled up behind him and fixed to a steel ring which was up behind his shoulder blades. The position held his shoulders, elbows and wrists painfully against the joint.

  At the same time, his ankles were clamped somewhere in the region of the small of his back. His waist was painfully constricted, and his calf muscles were jumping with cramp.

  A movement at the corner of his vision caught his attention, and he screwed his head round painfully until he could see Carver. The American was sitting in the only decent chair in the room, drinking coffee and smoking a long, thin cigar. In his hand was a magazine called Boy.

  Larry opened his mouth to ask where Damon had got to, but Carver saw that he had awakened, and put down the magazine to come and examine him. He had exactly the manner of the prison doctor who had treated Larry after his last gang rape in prison.

  A manner neatly judged between impersonal interest and fastidious distaste.

  “Damon? He’s out there on the stairs,” he told Larry. “I told him I wanted to visit alone with you a while and he opted not to be here. A wise decision, I think. Looks squeamish, does Damon.”

  Larry did not waste time asking what Carver wanted. He was too busy cursing his own ill advised remarks of the morning.

  Also, the cramp in his legs was beginning to spread from calf to thigh and from shoulder to forearm. It was as though some sadistic musician were turning the pegs to fine-tune the sinews of his arms and legs.

  “I can’t tell you any more than I knew this morning, you sod!” he said.

  Carver settled back cheerfully. His normally bronzed skin was even darker than Larry remembered. Slouched in the chair like a club member after a good dinner, he seemed completely at his ease.

  “You really read this muck?” he said, waving the magazine. “Or do you just look at the pictures and breathe hard?”

  Larry turned his head to stare at the magazine. Boy was full of young men wearing sullen expressions and thick coats of oil. It was an indication of Damon’s taste rather than Larry’s, but he saw no reason to make any concession to Carver.

  “Let me loose and I’ll tell you what I know,” he offered. It probably wouldn’t work, but anything was worth a try.

  Carver smiled mildly. “You’ll tell me what you know anyway,” he said reasonably. “After the first hour or so, you don’t think the pain can get any worse. But it can. It does.”

  Larry knew, bitterly, that Carver was telling the truth. He rarely lied, and certainly there was no need for him to do so now.”

  He looked into his heart and found there only hatred for Carver. Perhaps a bit longer. Give him time to make up a convincing lie, at any rate. He tried to turn over and screamed aloud as the strain pulled at his tortured shoulder joints.

  “Hurts, don’t it?” said Carver, who had progressed from Boy to another publication called Jeremy with every appearance of interest. “Jesus! This is even worse, Larry. It’s awful. How can you?”

  Larry tried to ease his feet but succeeded in giving himself cramp in the thigh muscle. He managed to avoid screaming but could not repress a deep groan.

  Carver peered at him over the top of the magazine with an expression of amusement.

  “Hell, ain’t it, friend? Just pure deep pur-ga-tory. I saw them put a girl in one those things only a few weeks back. Then while she was in it, they raped her. Can you imagine what that was like for her?”

  Somewhere down in the depths of his being Larry found a spark of sympathy for the unknown woman. But his own arms and legs were on fire, now. He could feel the muscles hunching in his thighs, protesting against the savage restrictions, unable to ease themselves. He would have sold his hope of an after life that moment for one second of release from tension.

  “All right,” he moaned. “Let me loose, and I’ll tell you. But let me loose, you bastard! Let me loose!”

  For a second he thought Carver was going to do it. The American stood up, put down the magazine, and walked across the room to him.

  “What happened to Irene, Larry-bo
y? Where is she now? Who took her? How did they take her?”

  The pain was a lion, roaring along his nerves and tearing at his self control. His chest began to heave as the strained muscles of his shoulders passed their distress on to his ribcage.

  “In the end the diaphragm gets cramp,” Carver told him. “It won’t work for a while. You can’t breathe. Then the spasm passes, and it’s like coming back to life again. But you know it is going to come again, and then again. The first time, you think you are going to die. The third time you’re afraid you’re not. The woman I told you about? She died from a heart attack brought on by pure pain. Don’t sound possible, does it, Larry? But it is, and after about another half hour, you’re going to believe it. Ah!” he said, as Larry’s breath caught in his chest and the man began to writhe against his shackles. “Started already, has it?”

  He glanced at his watch and shook his head like a GP taking a pulse.

  “I am disappointed in you, Larry. I know you fancy yourself as a bit of a fitness freak. Thought you’d give me more of a run for my money.”

  *

  His cigar was out, and he produced a gold lighter from his pocket. There was a tiny click as he lit his cigar, and he held up the lighter to Larry’s agonised eyes.

  “Time was when I’d have worked on you a while with this, Larry. But I’ve learned since then. From real experts, Larry. The same experts who seem to have Irene, now. So I wouldn’t wait for any compassion to dawn in my heart, Larry. There ain’t any. I know what she could be going through because of you.”

  Terrified, Larry felt the beginning of a second spasm under his ribs. He opened his mouth to scream, but a lead wall seemed to have clamped itself across his midriff. Nothing happened. He could not draw breath nor expel it.

  “You could die in any of these spasms,” said Carver from far away. “If you die without telling me what you know, Larry, I’ll follow you to Hell and watch you burn there.”

  From the expression in his eyes he meant it and if anybody could find the way it was likely to be Carver. There was a pounding in Larry’s eardrums and his mouth opened and closed like a drowning man. Carver’s pitiless stare did not change, but, behind it, he was worried. If he had misjudged the man’s strength, he might well finish up with a corpse on his hands, no information, and an irate Sergeant Lovegod to placate.

  Very slowly, the knot of agony in Larry’s chest began to untie itself. At first painfully, and then more and more quickly, his ribs moved and he gasped in air.

  “I’ll tell you!” was the first thing he said, as the blood drained from his face. “Let me out, and I’ll tell you!”

  Carver leaned back in his chair.

  “You’re not listening, Larry-boy,” he said. “Talk first, relax second. And if I were you I’d hurry. You didn’t look any too good in that last spasm. Next one will be WORSE. And soon!”

  He reached for the lighter again, and Larry screamed at him.

  “I’ll talk! I’ll tell you! What do you want to know?”

  Carver shook his head, blowing out a Prince of Wales feather of smoke and garlanding the end with a smoke ring.

  “You tell me what I need to know, Larry. When I’ve heard enough I’ll let you out. Start now.”

  Slowly, in agonised bursts, the information came.

  “There’s a firm round here taking kids. Only the good looking ones. Only the ones without a family to look for them afterwards. So many going Mr Plod can’t cope anyway. Started with the gipsy kids, but that got hairy because the pikeys got an international ring of their own, in Italy and Yugoslavia.”

  Carver nodded. “I heard that myself. Go on.”

  “Lot of money in it. They take the kids off the street when they’re out late at night, and before dawn they’re across the water and on their way. After that I dunno. Ah! Oh, God!”

  Carver waited, watching carefully, while another spasm took him.

  “Jesus, you got to let me out of this thing! Please, I’m begging you, stop the pain!”

  “Children,” said Carver pensively. “Blonde boys and girls, going to Africa. Being put in those things themselves to teach them obedience. You wanna get out of that, Larry-baby, you earn your goddam way out! Talk!”

  Larry was weeping with the pain.

  “I don’t know anything else! There’s a firm, that’s all! A foreign firm! They pay a grand a time for the right kids. Five hundred for fingering them. No questions asked! Just a phone number and a dead letter drop at a station.”

  “And you, Larry? How much have you earned so far?”

  There was a death in that voice, and Larry’s stomach gave a squirm which had nothing to do with the cramp.

  “Nothing! Nothing! I never fingered any kid! I don’t mess with kids; you know that, Carver, you shit! Oh God, not again! Oh, please!”

  Carver unlocked the manacles and watched while the man threshed about, unable to use his hands even to relieve the constrictions on his ribs. But the threat of death was removed. At least death by suffocation from the cramps.

  He stood up and moved around, made restless by the suffering of the man on the floor. He had not been boasting when he told Alison Sugrue that he had endured the agonies of the bilboes himself. The memory of the pain made it impossible to watch Manning with the detachment he had tried to show.

  “What’s the number?” he asked.

  Manning looked up at him face twisted.

  “How do I get these things off my legs?” he asked.

  “By telling me the telephone number of the foreign firm,” said Carver. He held up a steel key.

  “It’s not over yet, Larry-boy. You’re not away out of it just for the sake of a little pain, baby. Pain is where I come from, you know?”

  Larry said: “Let me get my diary out, then?”

  “Where is it? I’ll get it for you,” Carver said. When Manning began to paw at his hip pocket he bent forward and missed the flicker in th e man’s eyes.

  As Carver came close to him, Manning struck with ferocity and speed. His hand, stiffened in the classic karate “sword of bone”, chopped viciously at the side of Carver’s neck.

  To Carver, it was like being hit with a cleaver. He saw the blow start, and had time to bend his head a fraction. The blow still connected – though with his skull and not the softer tissue of his neck.

  Half stunned, he rolled sideways and Larry, hampered with the leg irons, missed on his follow up stroke. He fell forward across the floor and onto the steel key.

  Then, desperate to get his legs free of the crippling constriction of the irons, he made the mistake of grabbing at the key.

  Carver was on him like a tiger. Even in the soft rawhide shoes his foot was a battering ram, taking the prostrate man in the side of his head. There was a muffled click, and the twisting, straining body suddenly went limp.

  Carver stood over it and cursed in a hissing undertone. That misjudged kick had been a killer – and, sure enough, it had killed.

  To be sure, he bent and felt for the carotid artery at the wide of the twisted neck. It was still.

  Without haste, he unlocked the feet from the ankle irons, and released the stout leather belt which he had added to the device to make sure it stayed solid. He had no regrets for the death of Larry Manning. The man had preyed on other young men of his own sexual preferences ever since he had been at school. He had seduced, blackmailed, subverted and even recruited first his schoolmates and later his victims into trafficking with their own bodies and with heroin.

  Like his counterparts in the States, Larry Manning liked to start his addicts early. It had been over a schoolroom cocaine ring that he had first come to Carver’s notice, and he had got worse as he went on. While Manning lived, the world had been a dirtier place.

  But he had the first lead to the people who might know where Irene was, and he had died without divulging it.

  Carver searched the body carefully, but finished up with very little. There
was a diary, sure enough. It had a few telephone numbers, but the numbers were identified only by initials. He could hardly expect Manning to have been obliging enough to list his foreign contacts under S. D. for slave dealer.

  Amused at the notion, Carver flipped through the book to the S section. Then the faint grin left his lips.

  He went to the telephone on a wicker table by the door and dialed a number.

  The phone rang four times and was answered.

  “Sigmund Dark,” said a pleasant voice. “Hello?”

  “I am phoning on behalf of a mutual friend,” said Carver in a high pitched, breathy voice. “A friend called Larry.”

  There was a short silence. Then: “I have no friends called Larry. Possibly you have the wrong number?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Carver, anxiety oozing out of his voice. “I have it here just as he wrote it down. S.D. oh-one-nine-three...”

  “I have no friend called Larry,” said the voice with markedly less patience. “You will have to go back to your friend and find out what number he really meant to give you. And now good...”

  “I can’t ask him again,” said Carver sharply. “He’s dead.”

  The phone at the other hand was replaced gently, and he stood staring at the silent receiver. Then without breaking the connection, he put it back to his ear and waited.

  After a count of perhaps five hundred, the receiver at the other end was lifted again. There was a short silence and then the voice said warily “Hello?”

  “You’re going to have to talk to me in the end,” said Carver, still high pitched and emotional. “Why not now, before the police get involved?”

  The receiver was replaced yet again, and a further period of silence ensued, this time longer. Then the unknown man tried once again to use his telephone.

  “Hello? Hello?” The rest was rattled a few times, and since Carver remained silent, there was an attempt to dial a number.

  Carver let Sigmund Dark go through the pointless routine, and then said: “Hello?”