She was naked beneath. Slowly, she stretched her arms over her head so that her breasts lifted beguilingly. Then she brought her hands down over the length of her body, caressing herself, her hips undulating, as Barney looked on, his hands chained together. It was a strangely familiar motion. Had he seen it before?
"I'm going to free your bonds now, Mr. Daniels," she purred.
"Allah be praised," Barney said. He was sweating hard in his woolen monk's robe.
She pressed one of her breasts into Barney's mouth as she unlocked the handcuffs. He did not take his lips from her as his hands searched out and found the treasure they were looking for. Then he moved his mouth away from her shiny wet nipple and wrapped it over the opening of the hip flask he had raised and was now emptying into his gullet. "Great stuff," he said appreciatively.
Gloria pulled him over to the bed and sated herself on him. As she came, screaming, Barney's hand fumbled over the surface of the nightstand for the bottle of tequila she had waiting for him. He took a swig, careful not to knock the bottle on Gloria's still thrashing head.
"That was great," she said dreamily.
"Best tequila I've ever had," Barney said.
"You don't care for me at all, do you?" Her voice grew suddenly cold.
Barney shrugged. "As much as I care for anything else," he said.
It was the truth. He would sit on Gloria's white Disneyland bed and fake love with her and let her dictate the part he would play in her little drama, because he had no other part to play. Barney's part had been left in Puerta del Rey a lifetime or two ago, and what he had now was his tequila, and nothing more.
He had gotten into this on a drunken whim and now he was a prisoner as sure as if he were in jail. It was a plush prison, to be sure, but a prison nonetheless, and Barney knew the sentence would be death, either from Gloria X and her trained seals or from the two men who had tried to help him.
He didn't want help. He didn't care if his death came soon or late. It was already long overdue. He had already been dead for a long, long time.
So why was he thinking about Puerta del Rey again? There was no answer to that most elementary question, the only question he ever asked: What happened? What happened? He forced his mind away from it. He made himself concentrate on the satin cushions around him on the bed, and on the tequila, and the tequila and the tequila.
And before the bottle was empty, the world was good and fine with Bernard C. Daniels.
Then he smelled the lilac perfume. "Wake up," Gloria said, shaking him. "It's night."
"Hell of a time to wake up."
"It's time."
"Time for what?"
"For killing Calder Raisin." She smiled, her lips stretched tight across her teeth. Blurred through Barney's drunken vision, her face appeared to him like a grinning death's head skull through a misty fog. "I had you moved here when I heard you'd made contact with your CIA friends."
"Don't have friends in the CIA," he said, his mouth still fuzzy.
"Those two on the corner. My men saw you. But now they don't know where you are, so they won't be able to help you, poor baby. You're going to have to kill poor Calder all by yourself." She patted his cheek. "Get up now. You have an appointment with Mr. Raisin at the Battery."
"What if I don't kill him?" Barney asked.
"Then you don't get the thousand dollars, darling," she said sweetly. "And you lose your life very painfully in the process. You know what 'painfully' means, don't you? Do you remember the pain, Mr. Daniels, or has the scar on your stomach healed completely?"
He leaped at her. "What do you know?" he demanded. "Tell me!" But her bodyguards were in the room, and pulled him away from the woman as she shrieked laughter as cold and shrill as the wail of a banshee.
There were no television cameras on the pier, as the two black reporters dressed in neat black suits had promised Calder Riaisin back at the hospital. Nor were there any microphones on the creaking boards of the deserted place where a group of demonstrators was supposed to be waiting for him.
As soon as the limousine filled with overly friendly reporters deposited Raisin at the pier and sped away into the darkness, he knew the black reporters were fakes and he had been brought to this isolated spot to be killed.
Calder Raisin shook his head. He had been warned.
A man was waiting for him, sitting on the planks, his back resting against a barnacle-encrusted dock support.
Only one man, thought Calder Raisin. But then it would only take one man to kill him. It was his own fault, Raisin reprimanded himself, for not listening to the young white man at the hospital rally. Well, there wasn't much he could do now. He would just try to get it over with as fast as he could.
"What you want?" Raisin asked, turning up the collar of his bathrobe to protect himself from the wind. He shifted his weight from one hospital slipper to another to fend off the chilly wind. His hands were stuffed deep inside the pockets of the robe from which, at the bottom, a half-inch of hospital gown protruded.
"I said, what you want," Raisin repeated. "Look, you gonna kill me or what?"
Barney looked up, first at Raisin, and then off over the glistening black water.
"See here. I didn't come all this way to stare at New York Harbor with you. Now, you gonna 'sassinate me, or I going to walk away?"
Barney looked out over the water. It reminded him of a giant inkwell. A place where all the words of his life could be obliterated in an instant. Words like honor. Decency. Love. Words he had lived by once, when he had had a reason for living. One jump, and he could be as dead and as meaningless as those words. The water would swallow him up, and the remains of Barney Daniels would disappear into it. The water. The cold, bleak, unforgiving, welcome water.
"Snap to, boy," Raisin said," bending over to slap Barney on the shoulder. "It's cold out here. You gonna freeze."
Barney stared out over the water.
Raisin's voice softened. "Hey, want to grab a cup of coffee somewheres?" the portly black man asked.
But Barney only stared.
Raisin picked up his red terrycloth slipper and bounced it on Barney's head. "Look alive, man," he shouted. "What is this stupidness? I get hauled out here in the middle of nowheres, getting the crap scared out of me 'cause I thinking you gonna kill me, and now you ain't about to do nothing. You on junk, boy?"
Barney didn't answer.
"You wasting my time. I got a sick-in demonstration going, so if you ain't going to rub me out, I better get back to it 'fore I die of the cold."
Barney offered Raisin his flask. "Have a drink," he said. "It'll warm you."
Raisin drank. "Man, what is that shit? Tastes like poison."
"Tequila," Barney said, regaining possession of the silver container. "But it could have been poisoned."
"Sure as hell tasted like it."
Ignoring the crass comment, Barney lifted the flask to his lips and let the liquid pour down his throat. "I could have poisoned you, you know," he said.
Raisin shrugged.
"Your wife wants me to kill you."
"Lorraine? What she want to do that for? Who gonna pay the bills on that split-level money-eater in Whiteyville?"
"Not Lorraine. Gloria. Your wife. The blonde."
"My wife ain't no blonde," Raisin protested. "Leastways she wasn't four days ago. Lorraine look mighty silly a blonde. I gonna slap her silly if she done dyed her hair. Blonde. Hmmph."
"Gloria," Barney said, louder.
"I don't know no Gloria, stupid white ignoramus. You done come down here to kill the wrong man. Good thing you spaced out."
"Her name is Gloria, I tell you," Barney shouted, "and she's paying me a thousand dollars to kill you."
Raisin hopped up and down, his jaw thrust forward. "Well, then, you do that, smartass. You just try and kill me." He put up his fists. "Weirdo white junkie."
"Oh, get lost," Barney said.
"I ain't leaving till you 'pologize for calling my wife a white woman."