We walked through the studio to Flood’s place without talking. I found a place to sit down and lit a smoke, trusting Flood to find an ashtray for me someplace. I took out the Goldor file and stared at the cover—I didn’t want to open it just yet. Flood sat down across from me on the floor. “Burke, tell me what’s wrong.”
My hands were all right by then but I guess my face wasn’t. I didn’t say anything and Flood just let me smoke the cigarette in peace. She moved closer and just leaned her body weight against me without saying anything. I felt her warmth and strength next to me and the calmness that came with it. After a few minutes I handed her the cover of the file.
“Everything about Goldor’s in here,” I told her.
“Isn’t that good? Isn’t that what you went to find?”
“Yeah, but I found something else too. I think he’s our man, the man with the lead to Wilson.”
Flood looked questions at me, gave me her soft smile. “Don’t smile, Flood. He’s not someone we can make a deal with.”
She said, “Tell me,” and I did the best I could. She sat there not moving a muscle while I took her all the way through that videotape. She didn’t ask me how I got to see it—she could see it wasn’t important anymore, if it ever had been. She absorbed the story like a good boxer taking a body punch—she moved into it to get something she could understand, something that would make sense. “The woman knew she was going to die.” It wasn’t a question.
“I don’t know.”
“She did. She died with honor. You must have seen that, Burke.”
“If she did what the freak wanted, would she have lived?”
“Would she have wanted to?”
“We’ll never know, right? She has people—she won’t have to worry about resting in peace wherever she is. That’s why we don’t have a lot of time. Goldor is on the spot—he’s marked. If this city had vultures, they would be hovering over his house right now, you understand?”
“Yes,” said Flood, “but does he understand?”
“I’m told not—I’m told he doesn’t believe anything can get to him. Everything about him is supposed to be in this file. We’ll see.”
“What do you want to do?”
“I want to make it like I never heard of this freak,” I told her. “And I want to cancel his ticket—watch him die, have him understand that he is going to die just like that girl did—find the field his tree grew in and dig up the roots and pour salt in the ground.”
“It’s not wrong to be afraid,” Flood said, thinking she understood.
“Flood, for chrissakes, I know that—I probably know that better than anyone you’ll ever meet. You ever watch a pro football game—ever see how those guys come over to the sidelines and take a hit off an oxygen bottle so they can go back and do their work? That’s what I do with fear. It makes me smart—it’s the fuel I run on. You don’t understand—you didn’t see the tape.”
“I don’t want to see it.”
“That won’t help. Damn it, Flood—I didn’t want to see it either, but even if we never saw it it would still be—it will always be, even if this maggot is dead and gone.”
“Like Zen?”
“If a tree falls in the forest . . . maybe so—I don’t know.”
“I’m not afraid of him,” she said, “he’s just a man.”
“Flood, there is just no place for people like you where I live. Good for you, you’re not afraid—you going to protect me?”
“I can.”
“Not from this—it’s inside of me, it’s inside all of us. What he did—people do it. Rich people pay for it with money and poor people just do it and pay the freight in some mental hospital or prison. People do it—not animals, not birds—people. If you’re not scared of it, it just means you can’t see yourself there. It doesn’t mean it isn’t there.”
“Maybe it’s because he’s so rich—there’s so much strength when you have money . . .”
“It’s not money, Flood, it’s power. When I was in Africa once, in Angola before they kicked out the Portuguese—I was near the airport in Luanda and the rebels were getting closer and it was time to get out. The soldiers were all over the place and they were searching luggage, you know, to find contraband—ivory carvings, diamonds, hard currency. Two of them opened my bags on the ground. Nothing in there, but they found the malaria pills I had with me. One of them opened the bottles and just poured them out on the ground, right in front of me, smiling in my face all the time. There was nothing I could do except act stupid and confused. That made them happy—I would get malaria and I wouldn’t even understand how it happened. That was enough for them, that much power—for some people, it’s not enough. There’s a line you cross—and once you cross it you never get back. Then you’re not human anymore.”
“All soldiers act evil,” Flood said. “That’s the way they’re trained. Everything is black and white, friend or enemy. They don’t think, they just obey—”
“And when they rape some helpless woman after a battle, is that obedience?”
“That’s evil too. A lot of soldiers do evil rotten things, but when they’re no longer soldiers there’s no need for them to be evil. They can stop.”
“Goldor is no soldier, Flood—his marching orders are in his head.”
“You talk like you know him. You were only watching an evil film—you don’t know him.”
“I know him, all right . . . There was a kid once, a few years ago. A sort of halfwit, you know? Halfass burglar. The Man kept catching him, kept putting him in the can—like meat on a hook in a freezer, hanging up to be cured so it’s fit for people to eat. And every time he goes to the joint he listens to those degenerates talk how about they’re going to kick some woman’s ass until she gets on the street for them and makes them some money, or how they’re going to pull a train on some retarded girl down the block—every sicko fantasy in the world. And this kid listens—he don’t say much, not because he has enough smarts to keep his mouth shut but because nobody ever listens to such a lame. So he gets out again, right? As soon as he gets on the street he hits a housing project to do another of his dumb penny-ante burglaries. He goes in a window and it turns out to be a bedroom. There’s a woman sleeping there and she wakes up. If she’d screamed or tried to fight him he would have run away. But this woman, she read too many books—she tells him, ‘Don’t hurt me, I’ll do anything you want, but please don’t hurt me,’ and for the first time in his pitiful life he’s in control—he’s got power. He is a fucking god right there in that bedroom—and every evil thing he ever heard about in the joint floods his tiny brain. He puts the woman through every kind of change he can think of. He stays there for hours with her, just power-tripping. And when he leaves there’s a Coke bottle sticking out of one side of the woman and a wooden spoon sticking out the other. He doesn’t kill her, doesn’t take a thing from her apartment. And the next time he goes prowling, he’s not looking to steal—you understand me? He crossed that power-rush line and he can’t ever step back over it—he has to live on that other side until he stops living. He’s not a man anymore, not a person.”
“How could you know this?”
“I knew that kid,” I told her, “I talked to him”
“In prison?”
“No. He was in a juvenile prison, one of those dumps they call a training school for delinquents. No, I met him on the street—and I talked to him just before he died.”
“Couldn’t he have been locked up for the rest of his life?”
“There’s no such thing. He’d sit in his cell and draw pictures of women with blunt objects sticking out of them—or he’d do like another freak, a guy I did know in prison. This guy had a little tape recorder and he’d prowl around the blocks until he heard some kid being raped and then he’d just roll up and record the sounds and go back to his cell and play the tape and giggle to himself and jack off all over the walls. Sooner or later the parole board’s going to cut that freak loose too. And then he’ll do
some cutting-loose of his own.”
“How did that other kid die?”
“He jumped off a sixteen-story building,” I said, letting her think it was suicide.
“Oh. And Goldor . . . ?”
“What he does is more addictive than any heroin. But there’s more to him than just being a sicko. He believes in what he does—you can tell. The way he smashed that woman—it was because he was so angry. So much hate because she wouldn’t see the Way—you know, like the Tao. The perfect way—pain for life. And we have to find a way to make him tell us something,” I said, thinking how hopeless it was.
“Maybe if we—”
“Forget it—I know what you’re thinking. He would beat us, Flood. You could kill him easy enough, but could you really torture him? He could outwait us—he’d know we don’t have his feeling for pain—he’d know he could survive. He just wouldn’t believe we would kill him.”
“You remember that guy in the alley? When I—”
“You going to castrate him, Flood? The problem’s not in his balls, it’s in his head—he wouldn’t be any different gelded. Even the threat wouldn’t make him talk to us.”
“We have to try.”
“We are going to try, but first we have to read all this stuff and then make it disappear. Then I have to sleep, and then see some people. And then I have to—”
“Burke, you want to sleep first?”
“I can’t—can’t sleep. This stuff . . .” I held out the Goldor file.
Flood stood up and shrugged off her robe. She held out her hand. “Just come and lie down with me. Sleep first—I’ll put the papers where they’re safe.”
I got up with her and went inside. She took my clothes off and pushed me back against the mats. She lay across me with her warm body, her chubby little hand rubbing the side of my face. She kept rubbing me, whispering that Goldor wouldn’t win . . . that it would be us, that she believed in me, that I would find a way for us. I got calm and quiet but still not sleepy. And Flood understood the last door for me to go through before I could fight this freak—she helped me inside her and softly and slowly took me past the murky darkness of my fears and into a gentle place where sleep finally came.
37
FLOOD AND I woke up together in the morning. My left hand was buried somewhere beneath her so I couldn’t see my watch, but the light outside told me it was well past sunup. Flood stirred against my shoulder, mumbled something I couldn’t understand. I bounced her gently with my shoulder until she came around. She opened her eyes and blinked at me. “You okay, Burke?”
“Yeah, and I’m ready to go to work. Let me just get cleaned up a bit, and I want to start on Goldor’s file.”
She rolled over onto her side so I could get off the mat, then lay back and closed her eyes. I watched her practice her breathing for a minute before I walked into her tiny shower. My face in the mirror startled me—it was healing but the lower jaw was all bluish-yellow—it would probably stay discolored for another few days. I used some of Flood’s mouthwash and then examined my teeth in the mirror—the stitches were holding.
When I went back inside, Flood was lying on her back, her legs in the air, toes pointed up. She was doing some kind of exercise where she split them until they were nearly parallel to the ground, then brought them together again, lowered them almost to the floor but didn’t touch it—she held them for a few seconds like that, then broke them again and started over. Her movements were so smooth they looked effortless, but they couldn’t have been. I waited until her legs were straight up again and grabbed an ankle in each hand. “You have thick ankles, Flood,” and moved my hands away from center to spread her legs again. They didn’t budge—I increased the pressure and watched the long muscles flex on the inside of her thighs. I could feel the strain in my forearms, and finally her legs started to yield. I pushed harder and suddenly her legs shot open and I fell forward right on top of her. But before I could land she whipped her legs back, doubled up her knees, and caught me on the pads of her feet. And then she tossed my entire bulk into the air like a seal playing with a ball. She caught me on the way down, giggling like a little kid. The second time I was headed down I flipped my shoulders back, landed on my feet, grabbed her ankles again and pulled her upside down and erect, facing away from me. But before I could do some giggling of my own she slammed into my ankles with the heels of her hands and I toppled over with her underneath. This time her damn laughing fit made it feel like I was lying on top of some rocky Jello. I rolled off, reached for a cigarette—she was still chuckling.
“Flood, you’re a clown, you know that?”
“What did I do?”
“Never fucking mind,” I told her, and tried to keep from laughing myself. She got up without using her hands and floated off to the shower. I got dressed, lit up another smoke, and took out the Goldor file. It was everything Pablo had promised: full name (Jonas James Goldor), date of birth (February 4, 1937, in Cape May, New Jersey), height (5’ 11”), weight (175), rap sheet (two arrests for assault, the last one in 1961, no convictions), military service (none), marital status (never married), mother’s maiden name, father’s occupation at time of Goldor’s birth (note that both parents were deceased. Too bad—I hated to have anything in common with him). A long list of corporations and partnerships in which he held an interest. Location of two known safe-deposit boxes in commercial banks. Copies of driver’s license, ownership registration certificates for four cars (a Rolls, a Porsche 928, a Land Rover, and a 500-series Benz sedan), copies of some cancelled checks written on two of his corporations, a copy of his 1979 IRS return (showing a gross income of $440,775 with a net of $228,000, all from a series of subChapter -S corporations, a pass-through tax trick so that he could be the sole stockholder and not be taxed corporately and individually). Also a floor plan of his house in Scarsdale, complete with all the switch-box locations for the electronic protection system. A note that said Goldor kept nobody but himself on the premises at night, but that he had a silent alarm setup connected directly to the local police station—and another note that said they didn’t know all the locations for the switches that would set it off. They even had a copy of a New York City carry-pistol license. Other random notes: Goldor was a health-food freak, gobbled tons of vitamins and supplements every day. Worked out regularly, had a complete gym with Nautilus equipment and a sauna in his basement. He had all his clothes custom-made, even his shoes. A gun collector, but not of modern weapons.
And that was it, except for some blue onionskin pages typed with an ancient IBM Model-B using italic type. A psychiatric profile, obviously prepared by Pablo at long distance from the subject. I scanned it once quickly, then settled down to read:
“Goldor from relatively wealthy family, sent to British boarding school from age nine to fifteen, when he returned to the States. Return probably occasioned by death of his father. Managed a variety of his father’s holdings, gradually at first, then took exclusive control just prior to death of his mother when he was about twenty. Obsession with hairlessness probably traceable to preoccupation with bodybuilding (note: body builders routinely shave all body hair so as to better display muscular development and vascularity). No validatable information concerning early development. Runs a variety of sex-oriented businesses concurrently with more legitimate enterprises. Projects image of power and dominance in business relationships.”
Then came these underlined words: “What follows is, at best, an educated guess. This represents theorization absent sufficient data and should be so weighted.” Then a lot of mumbo-jumbo about “homosexual ideation,” “situational impotence,” “unresolved Oedipal conflicts,” “sadistic obsessions which the subject believes he tightly controls,” “suspect enuresis, fire-setting, cruelty to small animals, classic triad,” “possibility of iatrogenic therapy prepuberty,” “grandiosity bordering on belief in omnipotence,” “utterly self-contained,” and “functioning psychopath.”
I was still reading when Flood came
back wearing one of her robes, this time a bottle-green job with wide black piping on the sleeves. I handed her the stuff without a word and sat and smoked while she read through it. It didn’t take her long. “You know what this stuff means?” she asked.
“Yes—remember, a lot of it is just guessing.”
“I understand some of it—enuresis is bed-wetting, right? But what’s this classic-triad stuff? And what does iatrogenic mean? And—”
“Hold up a minute, Flood. The classic triad is the kid who wets the bed, sets fires, and tortures small animals, especially his own pets. If all three things are going on with the same kid the odds are in favor of him pulling a homicide or two before he grows up. And iatrogenic means a therapeutic treatment that makes a disease worse, like pouring salt on a wound. The whole thing boils down to Goldor being a confirmed degenerate, someone who can never get better no matter what you do with him—or to him.”
“Is this just words, or does it help us?”
“I don’t know. Most of the time it would mean a lot of nothing, but the people who put this together know what they’re doing.”
“They say he’s a functioning psychopath. I thought all psychos were just looney—you know, off the wall.”
“You know what a psychopath is, Flood?”
“I guess not.”
I got to my feet, walked over a few paces and turned to face her. “Imagine you got thrown into a totally dark room, okay? You can’t see a thing. What’s the first thing you do?”
She didn’t hesitate. “Reach out my hands to see where the walls are.”
I reached out my own hands. “Right, you want to find the limits of your environment. Less fancy—you want to know where you stand, what’s going on. That’s why some kids act so bad when you put them in institutions . . . they don’t know the limits and they don’t know how to ask, so they act up so people will step in and show them. But a psychopath, you throw him in a blacked-out room and you know what he does?”
As Flood looked up at me I wrapped my arms around my biceps like I was giving myself a hug. “A psychopath has everything he needs right inside himself. He doesn’t need an environment, doesn’t have to work with it. He doesn’t see people, he sees things. And he could move these things around or throw them out and break them the same way you might rearrange furniture.”
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