The Tomb

by F. Paul Wilson

  He had checked in with his office; no calls of any importance waiting for him. The answering machine here had no messages waiting.

  He had a two-wheel, wire shopping cart with him, and in it a paper bag full of old clothing—woman’s clothing. He leaned the cart in a corner, then stripped down and got into a T-shirt and shorts. Time for his workout. He didn’t want to—he felt emotionally and physically spent—but this was the only thing in his daily routine he’d promised himself he would never let slide. His life depended on it.

  He locked his apartment and jogged up the stairs.

  The sun had done its worst and was on its way down the sky, but the roof remained an inferno. Its black surface would hold the day’s heat long into the night. Jack looked west into the haze that reddened the lowering sun. On a clear day you could see New Jersey over there. If you wanted to. Abe had once told him that if you died in sin your soul went to New Jersey.

  The roof was crowded. Not with people, with things. Appleton’s tomato patch sat in the southeast corner; he had carried the topsoil up bag by fifty-pound bag. Harry Bok had a huge CB antenna in the northeast corner. Centrally located was the diesel generator everybody had pitched in to buy after the 2003 blackout; clustered along its north side like suckling piglets against their mama were a dozen two-gallon cans of number-one oil. And above it all, waving proudly from its slim two-inch pole, was Neil the Anarchist’s black flag.

  Jack went over to the small wooden platform he’d built for himself and did some stretching exercises, then went into his routine. He did his push-ups and sit-ups, jumped rope, practiced his tae kwon do kicks and chops, always moving, never stopping, until his body was slick with sweat and his hair hung in limp wet strands about his face and neck.

  He spun at footsteps behind him.

  “Hey, Jack.”

  “Oh, Neil. Hi. Must be about that time.”

  “Right you are.”

  Neil went over to the pole and reverently lowered his black flag. He folded it neatly, tucked it under his arm, and headed for the steps, waving as he went. Jack leaned against the generator and shook his head. Odd for a man who despised all rules to be so punctual, yet you could set your watch by the comings and goings of Neil the Anarchist.

  Back in the apartment, Jack stuck six frozen egg rolls in the microwave while he took a quick shower. With his hair still wet, he opened a jar of duck sauce and a can of Diet Pepsi, then sat down in the kitchen.

  The apartment felt empty. It hadn’t seemed that way this morning, but it was too quiet now. He moved everything into the TV room. The big screen lit up in the middle of a comfy domestic scene with a husband, a wife, two kids and a dog. It reminded him of Sunday afternoons when Gia would bring Vicky over and he would hook up the Play-Station and teach the little girl how to shoot monsters or hunt for treasure. He remembered watching Gia putter about the apartment; he’d liked the way she moved, so efficient and bustling, like a person who got things done. He found that immensely appealing.

  He couldn’t say the same about the homey show that now filled the screen. He quickly flipped around the dial and across the cable, finding everything from news to reruns to a bunch of couples two-stepping around hip-to-hip like a parade of Changs and Engs dancing to a country fiddler.

  Definitely time for part two of Repairman Jack’s unofficial James Whale Festival. The triumph of Whale’s directorial career, Bride of Frankenstein, was ready to run.

  16

  “You think I’m mad. Perhaps I am. But listen, Henry Frankenstein. While you were digging in your graves, piecing together dead tiss-yoos, I, my dear pupil, went for my material to the source of life…”

  Ernest Thesiger as Dr. Praetorius—the greatest performance of his career—was lecturing his former student. The movie was only half over, but it was time to go. He’d pick up where he left off before bedtime. Too bad. He loved this movie. Especially the score—Franz Waxman’s best ever. Who’d have thought that later on in his career the creator of such a majestic, stirring piece would wind up doing the incidental music for turkeys like Return to Peyton Place? Some people never get the recognition they deserve.

  He pulled on a D12 T-shirt; next came the shoulder holster with the little Semmerling under his left arm; a loose short-sleeved shirt went over that, followed by a pair of cut-off jeans, and sneakers—no socks. By the time he had everything loaded in his mini-shopping cart and was ready to go, darkness had taken over the city.

  He walked down Amsterdam Avenue to where Bahkti’s grandmother had been attacked last night, found a deserted alley, and slipped into the shadows. He hadn’t wanted to leave his apartment house in drag—his neighbors already considered him more than a little odd—and this was as good a dressing room as any place else.

  First he took off his outer shirt. Then he reached into the bag and pulled out the dress—good quality but out of fashion and in need of ironing. That went over the T-shirt and shoulder holster, followed by a gray wig, then black shoes with no heels. He didn’t want to look like a shopping-bag lady; a derelict had nothing to attract the man Jack was after. He wanted a look of faded dignity. New Yorkers see women like this all the time, in their late sixties on up toward eighty. They’re all the same. They trudge along, humped over not so much from a softening of the vertebrae as from the weight of life itself, their center of gravity thrust way forward, usually looking down, or if the head is raised, never looking anyone in the eye. The key word with them is alone. They make irresistible targets.

  And Jack was going to be one of them tonight. As an added inducement, he slipped a good quality paste diamond ring onto the fourth finger of his left hand. He couldn’t let anyone get a close look at him, but he was sure the type of man he was searching for would spot the gleam from that ring a good two blocks away. And as a back-up attraction: a fat roll of bills, mostly singles, tight against his skin under one of the straps of his shoulder holster.

  Jack put his sneakers and the sap into the paper bag in the upper basket of the little shopping cart. He checked himself in a store window: Well, he’d never make it as a transvestite. Then he began a slow course along the sidewalk, dragging the cart behind him.

  Time to go to work.

  17

  Gia found herself thinking of Jack and resented it. She sat across a tiny dinner table from Carl, a handsome, urbane, witty, intelligent man who professed to be quite taken with her. They were in an expensive little restaurant below street level on the Upper East Side. The decor was spare and clean, the wine white, dry, cold, the cuisine nouvelle. Jack should have been miles from her thoughts, and yet he was here, slouched across the table between them.

  She kept remembering the sound of his voice on the answering machine this morning … “Pinocchio Productions. I’m not in right now”… triggering other memories further in the past …

  Like the time she’d asked him why his answering machine always started off with “Pinocchio Productions” when there was no such company. “Sure there is,” he’d said, jumping up and spinning around. “Look: no strings.” She hadn’t understood all the implications at the time.

  And then to learn that among the “neat stuff” he’d been picking up in secondhand stores was a whole collection of Vernon Grant art. She found out about that the day he gave Vicky a copy of Flibbity Gibbit. Gia had become familiar with Grant’s commercial work during her art school days—he was the creator of Kellogg’s Snap, Crackle, and Pop—and she swiped from him now and again when an assignment called for something elfin. She felt she’d found a truly kindred spirit upon discovering that Jack was a fan of Vernon Grant. And Vicky … Vicky treasured Flibbity Gibbit and for a while her favorite expression had been “Wowie-kee-flowie!”

  She straightened herself in her chair. Out, damned Jack! Out, I say! She had to start answering Carl in something more than monosyllables.

  She told him her idea about changing the thrust of the Burger-Meister place mats from services to desserts. He was effusive in his praise, saying
she should be a copywriter as well as an artist. That launched him onto the subject of the new campaign for his biggest client, Wee Folk Children’s Clothes. There was work in it for Gia and perhaps even a modeling gig for Vicky.

  Poor Carl … he’d tried so hard to hit it off with Vicky tonight. As usual, he failed miserably. Some people never learn how to talk to kids. They turn up the volume and enunciate with extra care, as if talking to a partially deaf immigrant. They sound as if they’re reading lines somebody else wrote for them, or as if what they’re saying is really for the benefit of other adults listening and not just for the child. Kids sense that and turn off.

  But Vicky hadn’t been turned off this afternoon. Jack knew how to talk to her. When he spoke it was to Vicky and to no one else. There was instant rapport between those two. Perhaps because there was a lot of little boy in Jack, a part of him that had never grown up. But if Jack was a little boy, he was a dangerous little boy. He—

  Why did he keep creeping back into her thoughts? Jack is the past. Carl is the future. Concentrate on Carl!

  She drained her wine and stared at Carl. Good old Carl. Gia held her glass out for more wine. She wanted lots of wine tonight.

  18

  His eye was killing him. He sat hunched in the dark recess of the doorway, glowering at the street. He’d probably have to spend the whole night here unless something came along soon.

  The waiting was the worst part, man. The waiting and the hiding. Word was probably out to be on the lookout for a guy with a scratched eye. Which meant he couldn’t hit the street and go looking, and he hadn’t been in town long enough to find no one to crash with. So he had to sit here and wait for something to come to him.

  All ’cause of that rotten bitch.

  He fingered the gauze patch taped over his left eye and winced at the shock of pain from even the gentlest touch. Bitch! Damn near gouged his eye out last night. But he showed her. Fucking-ay right. Bounced her around good after that. And later on, in this very same doorway, when he’d gone through her wallet and found a grand total of seventeen bucks, and seen that the necklace was nothing but junk, he’d wanted to go back and do a tap dance on her head, but figured someone would’ve found her by then.

  And then to top it all off, he’d had to spend most of the take on eye patches and ointment. He was worse off now than when he’d rolled the bitch.

  He hoped she was hurting … hurting real good. He knew he was.

  Should never have come east, man. He’d had to geese Detroit after losing it with a pry bar on that guy changing a tire out by the interstate. Easier to get lost here than someplace like, say, Saginaw. Bad part was he didn’t know nobody.

  He leaned back and watched the street with his good eye. Some weird-looking old lady was hobbling by on shoes that looked too small for her, pulling a shopping basket behind her. Not much there. Ain’t worth the trouble of a closer look.

  19

  Who am I kidding? Jack thought. He’d been trudging up and down every West Side street. His back was killing him from walking hunched over. If the mugger had stayed in the neighborhood, Jack would have passed him by now.

  Damn the heat and damn the dress and most of all damn the goddamn wig. I’ll never find this guy.

  But it wasn’t only the futility of tonight’s quest that was getting to him. The afternoon had hit him hard.

  Jack prided himself on being a man of few illusions. He believed in a balance of life and based that belief on Jack’s Law of Social Dynamics: For every action there must be an equal and opposite reaction. The reaction wasn’t necessarily automatic or inevitable; life wasn’t like thermodynamics. Sometimes the reaction had to be helped along. That was where Jack came into the picture. He was in the business of making some of those reactions happen. He liked to think of himself as a sort of catalyst.

  Jack knew he was a violent man. He made no excuses for that. He’d come to terms with it. He’d hoped Gia could eventually come to understand it.

  When Gia had left him he’d convinced himself that it was all a big misunderstanding, that all he needed was a chance to talk to her and everything would be straightened out, that it was just her Italian pigheadedness keeping them apart. Well, he’d had his chance this afternoon and it was obvious there was no hope of a common ground with Gia. She wanted no part of him.

  He frightened her.

  That was the hardest part to accept. He had scared her off. Not by wronging her or betraying her, but simply by letting her know the truth … by letting her know what Repairman Jack fixed, and how he went about his work, and what tools he used.

  One of them was wrong. Until this afternoon it had been easy to believe that it was Gia. Not so easy tonight. He believed in Gia, believed in her sensitivity, her perceptiveness. And she found him repugnant.

  A soul-numbing lethargy seeped through him.

  What if she’s right? What if I am nothing more than a high-priced hoodlum who’s rationalized his way into believing he’s one of the good guys?

  Jack shook himself. Self-doubt was a stranger to him. He wasn’t sure how to fight back. And he had to fight it. He wouldn’t change the way he lived; doubted he could if he wished to. He’d spent too long on the outside to find his way back in again—

  Something about the guy sitting in the doorway he just passed … something about that face in the shadows that his unconscious had spotted in passing but had not yet sent up to his forebrain. Something …

  Jack let go of the shopping basket handle. It clattered to the sidewalk. As he bent to pick it up, he glanced back at the doorway.

  The guy was young with short blond hair—and had a white gauze patch over his left eye. Jack felt his heart notch up its tempo. This was almost too good to be true. Yet there he was, keeping back in the shadows, undoubtedly aware that his patch marked him. It had to be him. If not, it was one hell of a coincidence. Jack needed to be sure.

  He picked up the cart and stood still for a moment, deciding his next move. Patch had noticed him, but seemed indifferent. Jack would have to change that.

  With a cry of delight, he bent and pretended to pick something out from under the wheel of the cart. As he straightened, he turned his back to the street—but remained in full view of Patch, whom he pretended not to see—and dug inside the top of his dress. He removed the roll of bills, made sure Patch got a good look at its thickness, then pretended to wrap a new bill around it. He stuffed it back in his ersatz bra, and continued on his way.

  About a hundred feet on, he stopped to adjust a shoe and took advantage of the moment to sneak a look behind: Patch was out of the shadows and following him down the street. Good. Now to arrange a rendezvous.

  He removed the sap from the paper bag and slipped his wrist through the thong, then went on until he came to an alley. Without an apparent care in the world, he turned into it and let the darkness swallow him.

  Jack had moved maybe two dozen feet down the littered path when he heard the sound he knew would come: quick, stealthy footsteps approaching from the rear. When the sound was almost upon him, he lurched to the left and flattened his back against the wall. A dark form hurtled by and fell sprawling over the cart.

  Amid the clatter of metal and muttered curses, the figure scrambled to its feet and faced him. Jack felt truly alive now, reveling in the pulses of excitement crackling like bolts of lightning through his nervous system, anticipating one of the fringe benefits of his work—giving a dirtbag a taste of his own medicine.

  Patch seemed hesitant. Unless he was very stupid, he must have realized that his prey had moved a bit too fast for an old lady. Jack did not want to spook him, so he made no move. He simply crouched against the alley wall and let out a high-pitched howl that would have put Una O’Connor to shame.

  Patch jumped and glanced up and down the alley. “Hey! Shut up!”

  Jack screamed again.

  “Shut the fuck up!”

  But Jack only crouched lower, gripped the handle of the sap tighter, and screamed o
nce more.

  “Awright, bitch!” Patch said through his teeth as he charged forward. “You asked for it.”

  Jack heard the anticipation in his voice, could tell he liked beating up people who couldn’t fight back. As Patch loomed over him with raised fists, Jack straightened to his full height, bringing his left hand up from the floor. He caught Patch across the face with a hard, stinging, open-palmed slap that rocked him back on his heels.

  Jack knew what would follow, so he’d been moving to his right even as he’d swung.

  Sure enough, as soon as Patch regained his balance, he started for the street. He’d just made a big mistake and knew it. Probably thought he’d picked an undercover cop to roll. As he darted by on his way to freedom, Jack stepped in and swung the sap at Patch’s skull. Not a hard swing—a flick of the wrist, really—but it connected with a satisfying thunk. Patch’s body went slack but not before his reflexes had jerked him away from Jack. His momentum carried him head first into the far wall. He settled to the floor of the alley with a sigh.

  Jack shucked off the wig and dress and got back into his sneakers, then he went over and nudged Patch with his foot. The creep groaned and rolled over. He appeared dazed, so Jack reached out with his free hand and shook him by the shoulder.

  Without warning, Patch’s right arm whipped around, slashing at Jack with the four-inch blade protruding from his fist. Jack grabbed the wrist with one hand and poked at a spot behind Patch’s left ear, just below the mastoid. Patch grunted with pain. As Jack applied more and more pressure, he began flopping around like a fish on a hook. Finally he dropped the knife.

  As Jack relaxed his hold, Patch made a leap to retrieve the knife. Jack had half expected this. The sap still hung from his wrist by its thong. He grabbed it and smashed it across the back of Patch’s hand, putting all of his wrist and a good deal of his forearm behind the blow. The crunch of bone was followed by a scream of pain.

  “You broke it!” He rolled onto his belly and then back onto his side. “I’ll have your ass for this, pig!” He moaned and whined and swore incoherently, all the while cradling his injured hand.