“I warn you,” he said more sharply, “your bargaining position is weak. One reaches a point of diminishing returns, where it would be cheaper and more convenient to have you killed.”
I looked at Melliotes. His glowing eyes were on Kilbourne. He hefted the gun in his hand, and asked a question with his knitted black eyebrows.
“No,” Kilbourne said to him. “What is it that you want, if not money, Mr. Archer? Women perhaps, or power, or security? I could find a place in my organization for a man that I can trust. I wouldn’t waste my words on you, frankly, if I didn’t happen to like you.”
“You can’t trust me,” I said, though the fear of death had dried my lips and tightened the muscles of my throat.
“That’s precisely what I like about you. You have a certain stubborn honesty—”
“I don’t like you,” I said. Or maybe I croaked it.
Kilbourne’s face was expressionless, but his white fingers plucked petulantly at each other. “Melliotes. We’ll give Mr. Archer a little longer to make up his mind. Do you have your pacifier?”
The man in the linen suit stood up in eager haste. His brown hand flicked into a pocket and came out dangling a polished leather thing like an elongated pear. It moved in the air too fast for me to avoid it.
chapter 22
I was walking in the gravel bed of a dry river. Gravel-voiced parrots cawed and flew in the stiff painted air. A girl went by me on silent feet, her golden hair blown out behind by her movement. I stumbled after her on my knees and she looked back and laughed. She had Mavis’s face, but her laugh cawed like the parrots. She entered a dark cave in the bank of the dry river. I followed her gleaming hair into the darkness.
When she turned for a second laughing look, her face was Gretchen Keck’s, and her mouth was stained with blood. We were in a hotel corridor as interminable as time. Little puffs of dust rose from her feet as she moved. The dust stank of death in my nostrils.
I picked my way after her through the debris that littered the threadbare carpet. Old photographs and newspaper clippings and black-edged funeral announcements, used condoms and love letters tied with pink ribbon, ashes and cigarette butts brown and white, empty whisky bottles, dried sickness and dried blood, cold half-eaten meals on greasy plates. Behind the numbered doors there were shrieks and groans and giggles, and howls of ecstasy and howls of pain. I looked straight ahead, hoping none of the doors would open.
The girl paused at the final door and turned again: it was Cathy Slocum, beckoning me. I followed her into the jasmine-scented room. The woman lay on the bed under a black police tarp. I drew it back from her face and saw the foam.
Someone fumbled at the door behind me. I crossed the room to the casement window and flung it open. The door-latch clicked. I looked back over my shoulder at the charred featureless face. I said I didn’t do it. The calcined man walked towards me, his footsteps soft as ashes. I leaned far out of the window and looked down: far down in the street, the cars marched in antlike procession. I let myself go, fell into wakefulness.
The blood was pounding in my brain like heavy surf on a deserted beach. I was lying on my back on something neither hard nor soft. I raised my head, and a lightning flash of pain blazed in my eyeballs. I tried to move my hands; they wouldn’t move. My fingers were in contact with something coarse and damp and insentient. I lay still for a while, hoping the coarse numb surface wasn’t my own skin. Cold sweat tickled the sides of my face.
There was yellow light in the room, which came from a high wire-netted window in the canvas-covered wall. I looked down at my immobilized arms and saw that they were bound in a brown canvas straitjacket. My legs were free; not even trousers covered them, but I still had my shoes on. I drew them up and rocked myself to a sitting position on the edge of the cot. A bolt snapped back, and I stood up facing the leather-padded door as it swung open.
Melliotes came into the room. A tiny gray-haired woman loitered behind him. He was wearing white duck trousers and a white Mediterranean smile. Black curling hair like persian lamb covered his naked torso from collarbone to navel. The insteps of his bare feet had a growth of thick black fur.
“Well, well. Good morning again. I hope you enjoyed your rest.” His grimace parodied the genial host.
“Your accommodations are lousy. Take this off.” I was ashamed of my voice, which came out thin and dry.
“It wouldn’t be very modest to take it off.” He looked down at the little woman. “He should have something on in the presence of ladies. Isn’t that right, Miss Macon?”
She wore a white nurse’s uniform. The top of her gray cropped head came just above his waist. Her owlish eyes smiled up into his glowing black ones, and she giggled.
I aimed my head at the hairy abdomen, and rushed him. His feet skipped lightly aside like a matador’s. His knee caught the side of my head and caromed me against the padded wall. I sat down on the floor and got up again. The little woman giggled:
“He’s violent, doctor. Acts like a mental all right, don’t he?”
“We know how to deal with him, Miss Macon.” To me he said: “We know how to deal with you.”
I said: “Take this off.” When I closed my mouth, my back teeth ground together of their own accord.
“I don’t see how I can. You’re in a disturbed condition. It’s my responsibility to keep you out of mischief for a while, until you grow calmer.”
She leaned against his thigh, twisting her miniature hand in his canvas belt and looking up admiringly at the source of such fine talk.
“I’ve killed one man,” I said. “I think you’ll be the second.”
“Listen to him,” she simpered. “He’s homicidal all right.”
“I’ll tell you what I think,” Melliotes said. “I think a hydro treatment would do him a world of good. Shall we give him one, Miss Macon?”
“Let’s.”
“We’ll give you a hydro treatment,” he said between the smile.
I stood where I was, my back against the wall.
He took a bunch of keys from the keyhole and struck me with them sharply across the face.
“You’ll be the second,” I said.
He swung the keys again. I lost the beat of time in their harsh jangling. The lightning blazed ferociously in my head. A drop of blood crawled down my face, leaving a wet snail track.
“Come along,” he said, “while you can see to come along.”
I went along. To a room like a burial vault, white-tiled, windowless and cold. The morning light fell through a skylight in the twelve-foot ceiling and gleamed on a row of chromium faucets and nozzles along one wall. He held me by the shoulders while the woman unbuckled the straps across my back. I tried to bite his hands. He jangled the keys.
He pulled the jacket off me and tossed it to the woman. She caught it, rolled it up and stood against the door with the bundle clasped in her arms. There was a gleeful little waiting smile on her face, the smile of a baby that had not been born.
I looked down at my arms. White and shrunken, they were unbending slowly like snakes in the early spring. A ram of water hit me, flung me onto the tiled floor and rolled me against the wall. I sat up gasping. Above the roar of the water, the woman let out a laugh of childish pleasure.
Melliotes was leaning easily against the opposite wall. Waterdrops glistened like dew in his personal thicket. One of his hands held a nozzle attached to a white rubber hose. The other rested on a chromium wheel in the wall. Cold water gushed in my face.
I moved toward him on hands and knees, sideways, with my face averted. Water rushed under me and laid me on my back. I twisted onto my feet and jumped for him, was stopped in midair and dropped, forced back to the wall. I stood up again.
He took another nozzle from its hook, sighted along it like a sharpshooter. “Look at this one,” he said. “My prettiest fountain.”
A tiny stream of water sprang across the room and stung my chest. When I looked down, a six-inch letter M was printed in red on m
y skin, oozing droplets of blood.
“Speaking of killing, as you were,” he said, “this little fountain will kill.”
I moved across the room and got one hand on his throat. He shook me off and I staggered, almost too weak to stand. The heavier stream of water pounded me back to the wall.
“It will kill,” he said. “It will blind.”
“Do it to him,” Macon said, with girlish whinnyings.
“I’d like to. But remember we have to stay on the right side of the law.” He said it seriously.
The water took my legs from under me, rapped my head on the wall. I lay where I fell until the door slammed shut and the key turned in the lock. Then I sat up. My chest and stomach were covered with red welts turning blue. And I was wearing his monogram.
The door was made of white enameled steel tightly fitted into the frame. It opened outwards but was knobless on my side. I hit it twice with my shoulder and gave up.
The skylight was frosted glass reinforced with wire netting. But it was a good twelve feet off the floor, beyond the reach of any human leap. I tried climbing the wall by way of the taps and nozzles. All that got me was a shower-bath I didn’t need. I closed the tap I had accidentally opened and watched the water with loathing. It ran into a central depression in the floor, where it was caught by a drain. The drain was covered by a circular metal screen. The screen lifted out when I got my fingernails under it. I squatted over the four-inch pipe which was the only way out, and wished I was a sewer rat. A soggy idea moved in my head like a half-drowned animal.
There was another way out of the white room. It was hermetically sealed, built to hold water. If I could fill it with water, I might be able to float myself up to the skylight. A dangerous experiment, but not so dangerous as staying where I was, waiting for Melliotes to think of other games. The first thing I had to do was plug the drain.
I took off my shoes and socks and crammed the toe of one shoe into the opening, wadding the socks around it. Then I turned all the taps on full. Water hissed and gushed and splattered from the wall. I dodged it as well as I could; Melliotes had given me a bad case of hydrophobia. Standing in the furthest corner, I watched the water creep up over my ankles, up to my knees, all the way up to my waist. In fifteen or twenty minutes I was afloat.
It was pleasantly warm, and I gradually lost my fear of it. I lay on my back and waited for the ceiling to come closer. When I raised my head, I could hear the trapped air hissing out through the cracks around the skylight. After a long time, during which I rose surely and imperceptibly with the water, I was close enough to the ceiling to reach it with my hand.
I trod water and swung a fist at the skylight. Without intending to I pulled the punch; if my fist went through I knew I’d mangle my hand. The blow cracked the reinforced glass but rebounded ineffectually.
I took some deep breaths and dove for one of my shoes. The water was clear and still except where the incoming streams bubbled and tumbled from the nozzles in the wall. A shaft of sun angled down from the skylight and turned the liquid mass to a cube of pale green light. I stroked along the floor and got my hands on the extra shoe. My ears were aching from the pressure of tons of water above me.
There was a sudden movement in the water, a tremor and vibration that turned my stomach over. Something I hadn’t counted on was happening to my plan; it looked as if I’d cleverly arranged to die like a rat in a well. I started for the taps to turn them off. But first my lungs needed air and there wasn’t much left at the top. With the shoe in my hand I gathered my legs for the upward push.
Another tremor shook the water and me. A metallic crackling sounded from the direction of the door. It had been built to hold water, but not an entire roomful of the stuff. As I turned in swimmer’s slow-motion the white door bellied out like a sail and disappeared in a churning rush and welter. The released weight of the water pushed me after it. My free hand reached for something to hold on to, and closed on liquid nothing.
I was swept through the empty doorway, banged against the opposite wall of the corridor, somersaulted along it. I caught a door-frame with one hand and held on while the water tore at me. The current slowed almost as suddenly as it had begun, and the level of the water subsided. I found the floor and braced myself in the doorway.
Melliotes was in the room with the woman. She was struggling in the water, splashing with arms and legs. He bent over her and lifted her in his arms. She clambered on him, a hairless pink monkey gibbering piteously. My shoe was still in my hand; it was a Scotch walking shoe with an iron-shod heel, and I used it on the back of Melliotes’ head. He fell in the shallow water with the woman clinging to him. Father chimpanzee and child.
I looked around the room. The woman’s white uniform, an up-ended wastebasket, a scattered bunch of flowers, papers and oddments of clothing, floated in the ebbing tide. There was a white oak desk, a leather armchair and couch, all marked by the water. A piece of office stationery on the desk bore the letterhead: ANGEL OF MERCY NURSING HOME. HYDROTHERAPY AND COLONIC IRRIGATION. PRIVATE ROOMS FOR PATIENTS, DR. G. M. MELLIOTES, PROPRIETOR. A Venice address and phone number.
The heavy red drapes at the window dragged soddenly. Through the slats of the Venetian blind I could see a sunlit lawn bright with flowerbeds and deckchairs. A thin old man in tropical cotton was walking from one chair to another, if you could call it walking. He moved erratically, in several directions at once, as if the terminals of his nervous system had been cut. Fortunately he was in good hands. The Angel of Mercy Nursing Home could give him a permanent cure.
Something small and clammy and furious scratched at my legs. I moved away from her. I didn’t like to touch her.
“He’s drowning,” she cried. “I can’t turn him over.”
Melliotes was spreadeagled on the wet-dark carpet, his face in a puddle of water. I looked at the bloody back of his head and felt no pain. I took him by an arm and leg and flipped him over. The whites of his eyes were showing, threaded with red. His chest was heaving like a tired dog’s.
The woman minced around the desk and opened a drawer. She came back toward me holding Melliotes’ gun in both her hands. I didn’t intend to die in that company, and I slapped it down. She growled in the back of her throat and hugged her meager breast with pipestem arms.
“I want my clothes,” I said. “And put something on yourself. I can’t stand the sight of you.”
Her mouth opened and closed, opened and closed like a fish’s. I picked up the gun and she did as she was told. She opened a closet door and pulled a cotton dress on over her head. My clothes were scrambled on the floor of the closet.
I waved the gun at the woman. “Now go away.”
She went, with a backward look at the man on the floor. The pathos of their parting plucked at my heartstrings. I put on my clothes.
chapter 23
The gun was a .38 calibre S. and W. revolver with a six-inch blue steel barrel, serial number 58237. I shoved it into the pocket of my jacket. Melliotes’ striped linen coat was draped over a hanger in the closet. In its inside pocket, I found both my automatic and my wallet. I put them where they belonged and made for the door. Melliotes’ breathing had slowed down, but he was still sleeping the sleep of the sapped.
My shoes squished on the floor of the corridor. There were heavy doors on either side, all of them closed and locked. The hallway was as dim and ugly as the one in my dream. The only light came from a curtained door at the far end. I had it open and one foot on the porch when someone cried out behind me. It was a woman’s cry, muffled by thick sound-proofed walls. I went back into the building.
“Let me out.” The consonants were blurred and only the vowels came through: “Lemmeow,” like a hurt cat’s yowling. “Pleaslemmeow.”
The cry was louder at one door than at the others. When I shook that door, the woman said: “Who is it? Let me out.” Mavis again. My heart sank into my boots and bounced back into my throat. The burnt child can’t stay away from the fire.
I said under my breath, “To hell with you, Mavis,” but those were only words.
What I did was go back to Melliotes and take his keys and try them on the door till I found the one that opened it. Mavis stood back and looked at me, then moved into my arms with a little tearing sigh. “Archer. You came.”
“I’ve been here for some time. I seem to be fairy-godfather-in-residence.”
“Anyway, you’re here.”
She walked backward into the room and sat down weakly on the cot. It was a cell much the same as the one that I had occupied, complete with wire-screened window and padded walls. The angels of mercy took good care of their patients.
“What kind of a clientele does Melliotes have? The wet-sheet set?”
Pale and distraught, she looked a little mental herself. She moved her head back and forth, and her eyes swung back and forth as if by their own great weight. “I’ve never been here before.” And in the same tone, quiet and forlorn: “I’m going to kill him.” There were flakes of dried blood on her lower lip where she had bitten it.
“There’s been too much killing already. Buck up, Mavis. This time you’re going to Mexico for sure.”
She leaned forward blindly, her small head against my thigh. Her hair parted at the nape and fell forward around her face like two bright wings. From that hiding place she whispered: “If you’ll go with me.”
We were back where we had left off. The yacht and the water-chamber, Kilbourne and Melliotes, were characters and scenes in a morphine dream. I remembered the fire-blunted features of Pat Reavis, and backed away from her. “I’ll go as far as the airport with you. I’ll even buy you a ticket, one-way.”
“I’m afraid to go by myself.” Her voice was a wisp, but her eyes were bright behind the web of hair.
I said that I was afraid to go along. She stood up suddenly and stamped one high-arched foot on the hard composition floor. “What’s the matter, Archer, have you got a girl somewhere?”
She was a very bad actress, and I was embarrassed. “I wish I had.”
The Drowning Pool Page 18