Fever City

by Tim Baker

  ‘You can never be too careful, Mr. Roselli . . . ’

  ‘Ain’t that the truth?’ He looks away then sucker punches me in the balls. ‘See ya, chump.’

  ‘We’re very sorry, Mr. Roselli, it won’t happen again.’ Barnsley pulls me back up to my feet and drags me through the front door, nearly stepping on the cat, which knows an escape route when it sees one. Roselli calls out. I slip my leg back, blocking the screen door from closing behind us. There is a flash of white as the cat leaps to freedom. Roselli shoves pass me, nearly tripping on my leg, racing after it. ‘Lily! Lily, come back, goddamn it.’ He loses a slipper as he disappears into the neighbour’s garden. Perfect. Both of us get away in the end.

  Barnsley heaves me across the porch and frog-marches me towards a patrol car. ‘You fucked up once too often, Alston.’

  ‘How the hell did you know I was here?’

  ‘Gillis radioed you in.’

  Well, what do you know? ‘The kid deserves a medal for looking out for me.’ I glance over at Gillis and nod my thanks.

  Gillis flips me the bird. ‘He wasn’t looking out for you, you dumb fuck, he was looking out for us. We’ve got families. Mortgages. How could we get by without Mr. Roselli’s help?’ Gillis opens the back door of the squad car with a mocking bow. If he weren’t in uniform, he would have mooned me. Barnsley slams me against the trunk of the squad car. ‘You’re stepping on all the wrong toes, Alston. If you don’t wise up, we’re going to have to order you some custom shoes . . . ’

  ‘Is this the part where I’m supposed to cry?’ There is the stern wood of a nightstick cracked across my skull. I hear a noise like a branch snapping. Then my face is in the lawn. Ants riot down there in the Forest of the Great Green Blades. Hard hands hoist me up, potato-sack me into the car. My eyes sting with the hot salt of blood.

  Robot voices invade my brain, the shriek and stutter of radio transmission wobbling through the shadows. Barnsley protests, spraying spittle in his fury. ‘ . . . The captain said what?’ Barnsley throws something. It slams against the dash then recoils backwards like a Slinky, the radio mic bouncing on its curly cord. Static protests its violent treatment. Gillis glances back at us. ‘What is it, Sarge?’

  ‘Fucking Schiller!’

  ‘What’d he say?’

  ‘We have to go to El Monte . . . ’

  ‘Why, Sarge?’

  ‘How the fuck do I know, it’s an order.’

  ‘Nelson Archer . . .’ My voice sounds like a radio signal from Mars. ‘66 Kenton, El Monte.’ Then we must have passed through an asteroid belt, because all further transmission is lost . . .

  CHAPTER 36

  Dallas 2014

  Being in Dealey Plaza is almost like standing on the moon. Wondrous and impossible; foreign yet intimately remembered, as if stepping into a recurring dream. This is the terrain of history, and there is a sense of awe and disbelief. It’s like visiting the Coliseum. But Ancient Rome is linked only by imagination. With Dealey Plaza, you have the Movie of the Week version of history.

  Despite the change in dress and vehicles, there is something eerily timeless about the location. It is the closest I have ever felt to stepping into the past. It’s not the tug of nostalgia or the allure of conservation; it is visceral. It creates a yearning to go back in time and stay there, to start over, to rediscover one’s youth; to avoid all your mistakes and to live your life once more; to be young again, to go on living forever, starting here in this most famous of killing fields.

  I take out my iPhone and begin the process of lining up my present with these images from yesteryear. I align myself with the trees and retaining wall; with the picket fence. This is the spot where the brake lights came on, just as the presidential limo was approaching the Grassy Knoll.

  The Grassy Knoll.

  A name that conjures up a children’s picture book, not a brutal public killing. A more famous location than the Sea of Tranquillity yet further from our comprehension than any heavenly body.

  The characters who have been captured around the mythic terrain of the Grassy Knoll have passed through conspiratorial analysis and the collective unconscious and entered into folklore.

  There, standing on John Neely Bryan North Pergola—a name that teeters between Shakespearean grandeur and parochial pomposity—is the figure of Zapruder, imperious and aloof, watching the assassination like Zeus surveying the fall of Troy; a pagan idol about to receive blood offerings.

  By the curbside in front of the Grassy Knoll is the famous Umbrella Man, who pumps an open black umbrella into the air just as the shots rain down, as the president is hit; as he clutches at his throat with that gesture of terrible despair. Locked forever in the bright autumnal sunshine and the brilliant tones of Kodachrome and memory, the very incongruity of the preposterous Umbrella Man signals an intense alarm, like a stranger suddenly taking the father’s seat at the family dinner table.

  In the Zapruder footage, JFK appears to look directly at the Umbrella Man just prior to being hit. In that fraction of a second did the president see an eccentric or an enemy? Or did he not even notice the black umbrella, that sinister intimation of the storm cloud that was about to envelop the nation?

  The suggestion by some conspiracy advocates that the umbrella was an assassin’s tool, shooting poison darts or ice flechettes at the president, is frankly ludicrous. And yet it points to an even greater absurdity. At that very moment, in the apply-named Fort Detrick government facility they were attempting to develop exactly those kinds of weapons. When you play with the devil, you get what you deserve: bacteriological aerosols; platinum-tipped darts; ice flechettes; entomological warfare.

  Kennedy was not shot by an umbrella gun as he passed in his limo. But for half a century the nation was taken for a ride by the mad-scientist brolly brigade. Unauthorized vulnerability tests on the New York subway. Thousands of troops marched into atomic mushroom clouds or sprayed with Agent Orange. Shellfish toxin. Anthrax. Tularaemia and Sarin. This was the Cold War. A plague—including the Plague—on both your houses. Thousands of innocent civilians were cursed with contamination, used as unknowing guinea pigs in a host of experiments involving everything from the secret administration of LSD and nerve gas to medically-induced syphilis, hepatitis and cancer. Criminality and impunity triumphed. Human rights were trampled. Liability was ignored, blame denied, records destroyed.

  The real absurdity is not that some people might actually believe an umbrella killed the president but that most people don’t even know about the ragged history of US government-condoned human experiments and their consequent cover-ups; or its military labs’ development of weapons of mass destruction with eccentric and unstable delivery systems. This knowledge has gone the way of the Slave Trade and the plantations, of the Trail of Broken Treaties. Of the Tulsa Race Riots . . . Buried by public indifference in the face of enduring official silence and lies, it is a denial bred from fear of prosecution, civil liability and class-action lawsuits. Thoroughly understandable—if you were the guilty party.

  The leaves of the trees around me that are living witness to these events vibrate in the light breeze: whispering their message. And what they seem to say is: they did it. They got away with it. Like they always do.

  CHAPTER 37

  Los Angeles 1963

  Hastings checked the street again, then dragged the body out of the garage and into his car, which he’d parked in the driveway. This was always the hardest part: lifting all that dead weight. Getting it in the car fast before the neighbours notice. One time he had actually put his back out from the strain. He’d been barely able to drive. He was so bent over that his face was almost touching the steering wheel. Afterwards he had dropped himself off at a local hick hospital. They put him in traction, which only seemed to make it worse. A nurse gave him a number: a Japanese masseur. She walked on him, toeing pieces of his spine back where they belonged, fisting muscle ou
t of the way, opening up tendons with knowing fingers. She gave him a set of painful exercises which he did every day. It wasn’t just for his back, it was for his penance. His back hurt because he was alive when he shouldn’t have been; because he killed to make a living. Because he was an evil man. His back hurt because his own body was scrambling to escape, mutinying from the tyrannical captain who forced it to live in stinking galleys; to present on deck each time there was an execution; to mount guard over the corpses and dispose of the bodies overboard without ceremony. Feeding the knowing sharks that followed his wake. Hastings was a killer because he had lost his soul. He was a ghost; butchered on the islands of the Pacific. The spasms of his back’s muscles were simply early signs of rigor mortis, held at bay by a lousy layer of ice; a cheap trick by a second-rate mortician.

  He dropped Walter Stark’s body at Bluff Cove, the sea receiving it with restrained enthusiasm. The drive back was full of dark memories of meeting Betty Bannister at the Roosevelt in New York. Afterwards, she said she’d even run with him. She said they could meet up in Big Bear Lake, at the old ski lodge, three days after Dallas, before heading south. Staying in towns with mythic names. Acapulco. Veracruz. If they needed to head further south, they would. They’d go to Rio or Montevideo. To a place where the nights were warm and you could smell the ocean. A place with enough people not to be noticed; where sins from out of the past would never catch up with them. A place where they would be able to stay lost forever. And maybe even forget all they had done.

  He turned on the car radio. Coleman Hawkins. Midnight Sun. Even at night, there would be no easy escape into shadows. Maybe this time it would be different. In only five days, they might be together on a dark road heading south. If he wasn’t already dead.

  He dropped the envelope at the mailbox on Wilshire, circled the block twice to make sure he wasn’t being tailed, then headed back, parking three streets away from his place. He couldn’t hear his own footsteps because of the nocturnal clamour of crickets and frogs, exultant under a waxing crescent. Their song seemed to surge as he approached the house, as though trying to remind him of the ancient superstitious warning: beware the deadly transit between the Hunter and the Frost Moons.

  In the old days he would have listened to them.

  But the old days were coming to an end . . .

  They grabbed Hastings before the door was fully open, his key still in the lock, hauling him into the dark mass of the interior; fast fingers grabbing his neck, his arms; his hair. His ears were yanked downwards to the floor. Fists found spine and kidneys; knees smashed into his body as his wrists were twisted, captured and locked.

  There was the bite and sting of metal traveling across his skin, catching and tearing in his hair.

  Sensory dislocation.

  And then he was snared, upside down, listening to the whine of grating rope as he rotated on its iron clasp, his hands bound behind his back.

  The work was done.

  The work-over was about to begin.

  Hastings turned his face just in time, the rake of knuckledusters sliding along his cheek, somehow missing the holy trinity of jaw, cheekbone, teeth.

  But the blow still sliced the inside of his mouth against his incisors, still forced the scatter-spray of blood. He worked on the tear inside his mouth—the only thing that might save him. He swirled and spat out blood and saliva; thick and wet. He forced more up out through his nose. He gagged and choked on it. And then he waited.

  The vocabulary of interrogation is known to all. There were only two possible responses to his theatrical display.

  Go easy.

  Or finish him off.

  ‘Go easy, we need him to talk . . .’

  Hastings hung there, slowly rotating, the twin drip of sweat and blood tambouring onto the floor. There was the murmur of consultation, then the stillness of decision. He tensed his stomach muscles just in time for the kick, twisting with the movement, sending the power in the blow away from his body, but grunting as though it had scored maximum impact. The force travelled off the skirting strike, yet still he could feel what was behind it; why it had half-missed. There was real anger there. Hatred. Something irrational yet targeted, dedicated to hurting him. The voice came to Hastings’s rescue. ‘Go easy, I said . . . ’

  In the silence, Hastings’s body spun its way to a halt, the rope protesting with a slow, grinding whine. There was a moment’s pause—absolute stillness—and then the rope recommenced the journey back to where it had come from, condemned by the physics of torture, turning him anticlockwise, the constant backwards and forwards spinning motion creating a separate nausea, another level of discomfort to add to the clenching pain of the cuffs and the rope, the loose cuts inside his mouth, and the racketing silent ache of bruised body organs and muscle; everything magnified in this upside down world of agony.

  Hastings struggled for an answer to a single question. Not why or what, but who.

  The angry kicker was a clue: this was personal as well as professional.

  A strange, rolling noise approached his hanging body through the darkness. Hastings didn’t look towards it. He had witnessed enough interrogations to know what the colossal mistakes were, and acknowledging the presence of something new and strange entering the torture chamber was one of the worst types of errors: it prepped you for pain. For terror.

  Fear was the ally of the tormentor, just as anger was the ally of the sufferer. Imagination magnifies agony. Anger terminates it. And that’s what the tortured crave from the very beginning of their ordeal: not an end to the questioning but an end to life itself.

  The only thing more astonishing than how much pain and suffering a human can endure is how easily human life can be snuffed out. People were impossibly stoic and resilient and at the same time incredibly fragile—that had always been the paradox of human life, of the species that can bestow such loving tenderness one moment and such vicious cruelty the next.

  Hastings had been forced to learn this through the prism of war. His dark knowledge forewarned and armed him. Even harnessed and swinging upside down, he felt somehow in control. He was aware. He was watchful and waiting. Through his fluttering eyelashes he could see a reflection in one of the windows, but it didn’t make sense at first: a strangely shifting half-figure.

  There was the stutter of rolling thunder again, like the heavy mass of a supercell storm building on the horizon, and then Hastings understood.

  A wheelchair.

  Old Man Bannister was back on his feet—so to speak.

  ‘Good work.’

  ‘Thanks, Mr. Ba . . . ’

  There is the crack of something unforgiving and then the shriek of hallucinogenic pain. ‘Silence!’ Hastings caught a glimpse of an exposed ulna bone before blood rushed in to cover it up, like an adulterous wife pulling the sheet up in flimsy protection against the explosion of flashbulbs.

  A riding crop from the sound of it. The Old Man’s weapon of choice.

  A rearing horse. A terrible accident. A face split open like an overripe fig. Nightmare photos held in ink-soiled hands. This is what sold newspapers today. Not simple murder but carnage so gruesome it was beyond all human imagination. Cruelty so extreme, it could never be conjured by mere thought or theory—but only by bloody action. For once an evil deed is enacted, it becomes incarnate; proliferative. It is like splitting the atom. There is never any turning back. January 1947. Elizabeth Short. His welcome to Los Angeles. Jack the Ripper for the Atomic Age.

  Hastings woke up to the sound of the taboo tapping of his blood against the hardwood floor. It was a very bad sign to have blacked out that early. Loss of consciousness was the emergency exit for further along in the interrogation; the opt-out clause: deliberate conceptual annihilation.

  Something prodded him in the shoulder.

  He could smell the leather as the riding crop rose towards his ear. A flick of the wrist and Hast
ings would lose it.

  ‘I will only ask you once: what did you do with Stark?’

  ‘Dropped him in the ocean.’

  ‘Where’s the file?’

  ‘What file?’

  For the first time in the interrogation Hastings was caught unawares. The punch seemed to come out of nowhere. He didn’t even feel the change in air pressure. It was suddenly inside him, like an internal explosion. Then it was all over. His cry, shaped as much by surprise as pain, echoed back at him from off the floor below his head.

  ‘I am going to ask you once more. I warn you, if you lie, you will never leave this room alive. But it will be days before it’s over. Long, hard days . . . ’ The Bannister Way. ‘Now tell me—where is the file?’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘I warned you not to play games.’

  ‘There are three files!’

  The silence of intrigue. Old Man Bannister was hooked. But how much time had he really bought? ‘Go on . . . ’

  ‘The files are in my car, under the backseat. There’s Marilyn Monroe and Eva Marlowe . . .’

  ‘And the last one?’ The riding crop tapped him. He couldn’t just give up the name like that. He had to wait until the Old Man asked again. Or he lost an ear. ‘Whose file is it?’

  He swallowed, not from fear but relief. ‘Your wife’s, Mr. Bannister . . . ’

  A breathless hush. Had he overplayed his hand? Hastings closed his eyes, trying to anticipate what was about to come next. The riding crop. A fist. If he were lucky, the swirling twist of a bullet. He closed his eyes and tried to think of Susan but all he could think of was Mrs. Bannister. Imposter, adulterer; maybe even a killer. Just like him. Face it, he told himself, Susan was a lie. Betty Bannister was the one. She always had been. She was also his express train to Hell.

  He caught the glint of a well-honed knife. He tightened his stomach muscles, opened his jaw and hunched his shoulders, trying to protect his neck as much as possible.