Douglas Mikan, pale, sick-looking in a dark-blue suit and tie, rocking a little with both hands pressed tight against his wishbone.
And nearest me and the door, Nick Pendarves in his usual gray work clothes, three or four days of beard stubble flecking his cheeks, the backbar lights glinting off the barrel of the 9mm automatic in his hand.
It was dead quiet in there. And dead still. All of them were frozen in position, looking at me. You could smell the fear; it came off all but Pendarves in a thick shimmer that was almost palpable. You could feel the tension too, as brittle as a layer of frost on grass.
Pendarves broke both the stillness and the silence. He waved the pistol in my direction-a sudden, convulsive movement of his arm. It seemed to set off a spasmodic reaction in the right side of his face; nerves and muscles twitched riotously from temple to jaw, like a nest of worms stirred up under a thin covering. The effect was chilling.
He said, “Canino, right? Art the fart,” in a thick, slurred voice. But he wasn’t drunk. The thickness was the product of emotions writhing as chaotically as the nerves and muscles in his face. “Come on in, Art the fart. Join the party, the water’s fine.”
He’d cracked completely under the strain-the last breakdown in a catalytic string that so far had demolished the Lujacks and Frank Hanauer. But Pendarves’s was the worst of all, the kind that creates monsters out of men and situations like this one. It happens so often nowadays that it has lost its once-stunning edge of horror, become almost a cliche: Just another crazy with a loaded gun and a mad-on against the world.
Unless the crazy happens to be sitting ten feet away, and the loaded gun is pointed at you.
My body seemed to constrict, draw in on itself-so sharply that I could feel the pressure in my head like a sudden migraine. I took half a dozen slow stiff paces, angling away from him toward the tables. I could see the rest of the room then: empty booths, empty floor. It didn’t look as though he’d shot anybody yet.
Before I got to where the others were clustered I stopped; I wanted a little distance between me and anybody else. “Hey, Nick,” I said, and licked my lips, and put on a bewildered little smile. “What’s the idea of the gun?”
“We’re having a party,” he said. He wasn’t smiling; he didn’t sound happy about it. He sounded mad as hell.
“Sure, Nick. A party. What you need a gun at a party for?”
“Stupid question. What’s a gun good for, huh?”
“You tell me.”
“Shoot somebody with,” he said. His eyes, underslung by sacs of loose gray flesh, were bright and hot. “That’s what a gun’s good for. Shoot people with, right?”
Douglas Mikan made low moaning sounds. He was still cradling himself, eyes squeezed tightly shut.
“Shut up, Doug,” Pendarves said.
The moaning stopped.
I said, “How long’s the party been going on?”
The question seemed to interest him. His gaze flicked past me to the others, settled on Ed McBee. “Hey, Ed. How long’s the party been going on?”
“Hour and a half,” McBee said in a dull, bruised voice. His face, and the faces of the others, showed the terror and strain of those ninety minutes. But there was something else reflected in each face, too-betrayal and utter despair. They had trusted Pendarves, believed in him, and he had turned on them in the most terrible of ways. No matter what else happened here tonight, an integral part of their lives-their sanctuary and their carefully nurtured illusions-lay in ruins around them.
“What’s it going to be, Nick?” I said. “An all-night party? That what you have in mind?”
“All night? Uh-uh. Not that long.”
“How long, then?”
“Until I get tired of it.”
“Then what?”
“You’ll find out. Everybody will.”
“Sure. But while it lasts, what do you say we keep it small, just those of us here now? What do you say we lock the door, don’t let anybody else in?”
“No,” he said.
“Too many people spoil a party-”
“No, goddamn it, I said no!” The right side of his face went through another series of spasms. His arm jerked a little too, and I was afraid he might fire the gun involuntarily; he had it aimed in my direction. Rusty Tin Man of Oz gone haywire: unpredictable, deadly. “Sit down, Art the fart. What the hell you standing up for? Sit down like everybody else.”
I didn’t argue with him. I pulled a chair away from one of the tables, positioned it so that nothing separated us but a dozen feet of empty floor. When I sat down I put both feet flat on the linoleum and both hands on my knees, bowed my back forward, and held that position.
Pendarves watched me with his hot eyes. Then he said to Mikan, “Doug, I need a smoke. Get me a smoke.”
Douglas just sat there rocking.
Pendarves elbowed him, hard enough to make him grunt and pop his eyes open. “Oh, God,” he said.
“Shut up. Get me a smoke. You know where they are.”
“Nick, please, I’m sick-”
“You fat slob, do what I told you!”
Whimpering a little, Mikan fumbled a package of Pall Malls out of Pendarves’s shirt pocket, shook a cigarette loose, and managed to insert it into a corner of Pendarves’s mouth.
“You want me to smoke it dry, fatso?”
Douglas fished a Bic from the pocket, lit the cigarette. It took him half a minute; he dropped the lighter twice, flicked the wheel half a dozen times before he was able to spark the flint. Then he had to hold the Bic in both hands to keep the flame steady.
“Stupid bastard, you almost singed my eyebrow. What’s the matter with you, Doug? Huh?”
“I’m sick, I’m sick-”
“And I’m sick of you, whining all the time. Be a man, for Christ’s sake. Art the fart’s a man, aren’t you, Art the fart?”
I didn’t say anything.
“I asked you a question. You a man or what?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I’m a man.”
“Hear that, chubby? He’s a man. You be one too.”
Mikan mumbled something that I couldn’t hear.
“Right,” Pendarves said. “Now go get me a beer. I’m thirsty. Make it a Bud … no, what the hell, something imported. A Beck’s. Make it a Beck’s.”
Douglas pushed himself off the bar. One of his feet struck a stool and nearly upset it; he fell heavily to one knee, moaning again. Pendarves said, “Clumsy bugger. Get up, get my beer,” and Mikan got up and stumbled away to the far end of the bar where the hatch was.
Pendarves quit looking at him; his eyes were on me again. “Hey, Art the fart. You want a beer too?”
“Sure,” I said. “I could use one.”
“Beck’s or Bud?”
“Beck’s.”
“Anybody else want a snort? On me?”
Silence. Then old man Vandermeer said, “Let us go, Nick. We’ve never done anything to you, we’re your friends. Please let us go-”
“Shut up, old man. You and your fucking history. Shut up, you hear me?”
Vandermeer shut up. He seemed to shrink and shrivel where he sat, like a slug doused with salt.
Douglas was behind the bar now. Sweat shone on his round face, stained the front of his shirt. The beer cooler was almost directly behind where Pendarves was sitting; Mikan got it open, bent out of sight, came up again with two bottles. Pendarves still wasn’t looking at him. He could have leaned forward with no effort at all and cracked Pendarves over the head with one of the bottles. But even if the idea occurred to him, he didn’t do it. Poor sad broken Douglas Mikan did not have enough courage to act to save his own life.
There was an acrid taste in my mouth-the taste of hate. I made myself sit poker-faced, so what I was feeling wouldn’t show; Pendarves’s gaze remained fixed on me, left eye half-closed in a squint. The cigarette was still pasted wetly in that corner of his mouth, the smoke from it curling upward into a kind of obscene halo.