“Please, do it now,” she whispered, her teeth biting into my shoulder near the clavicle. “Please now, right now. I want you inside.” She rubbed my sides with the palms of her hands. She rubbed me like kindling sticks.
A fire ignited. I could feel it spreading through my body. I entered her for the first time. I slid inside slowly, but I went as deep as I could go. My heart was pounding, my legs felt weak. My stomach was taut and I was so hard it hurt.
I was all the way inside Christine. I knew I’d wanted to be here for a long time. I had the thought that I was made for this, for being in this bed with this woman.
Gracefully and athletically, she rolled on top of me and sat up proud and tall. We began to rock slowly like that. I felt our bodies surge and peak, surge and peak, surge.
I heard my own voice crying yes, yes, yes. Then I realized it was both our voices.
Then Christine said something so magical. She whispered, “You’re the one.”
Part Three. The Cellar of Cellars
Chapter 54
Paris, France
DR. ABEL Sante was thirty-five years old, with longish black hair, boyish good looks, and a beautiful girlfriend named Regina Becker, who was a painter, and a very good one, he thought. He had just left Regina ’s apartment, and was winding his way home on the back streets of the sixth arrondissement at around midnight.
The narrow streets were quiet and empty and he loved this time of day for collecting his thoughts, or sometimes for not thinking at all. Abel Sante was musing on the death of a young woman earlier today, a patient of his, twenty-six years old. She had a loving husband and two beautiful daughters. He had a perspective about death that he thought was a good one: Why should leaving the world, and rejoining the cosmos, be any scarier than entering the world, which wasn’t very scary at all.
Dr. Sante didn’t know where the man, a street person in a soiled gray jacket and torn, baggy jeans had come from. Suddenly the man was at his side, nearly attached to his left elbow.
“Beautiful,” the man said.
“I’m sorry, excuse me?” Abel Sante said, startled, coming out of his inner thoughts in a hurry.
“It’s a beautiful night and our city is so perfect for a late walk.”
“Yes, well it’s been nice meeting you,” Sante said to the street person. He’d noticed that the man’s French was slightly accented. Perhaps he was English, or even American.
“You shouldn’t have left her apartment. Should have stayed the night. A gentleman always stays the night-unless of course he’s asked to leave.”
Dr. Abel Sante’s back and neck stiffened. He took his hands from his trouser pockets. Suddenly he was afraid, very much so.
He shoved the street person away with his left elbow.
“What are you talking about? Why don’t you just get out of here?”
“I’m talking about you and Regina. Regina Becker, the painter. Her work’s not bad, but not good enough, I’m afraid.”
“Get the hell away from me.”
Abel Sante quickened his pace. He was only a block from his home. The other man, the street person, kept up with him easily. He was larger, more athletic than Sante had noticed at first.
“You should have given her babies. That’s my opinion.”
“Get away. Go!”
Suddenly, Sante had both fists raised and clasped tightly. This was insane! He was ready to fight, if he had to. He hadn’t fought in twenty years, but he was strong and in good shape.
The street person swung out and knocked him down. He did it easily, as if it were nothing at all.
Dr. Sante’s pulse was racing rapidly. He couldn’t see very well out of his left eye, where he’d been struck.
“Are you a complete maniac? Are you out of your mind?” he screamed at the man, who suddenly looked powerful and impressive, even in the soiled clothes.
“Yes, of course,” the man answered, “Of course I’m out of my mind. I’m Mr. Smith-and you’re next.”
Chapter 55
GARY SONEJI hurried like a truly horrifying city rat through the low dark tunnels that wind like intestines beneath New York ’s Bellevue Hospital. The fetid odor of dried blood and disinfectants made him feel sick. He didn’t like the reminders of sickness and death surrounding him.
No matter, though, he was properly revved for today. He was wired, flying high. He was Death. And Death was not taking a holiday in New York.
He had outfitted himself for his big morning: crisply pressed white pants, white lab coat, white sneakers; a laminated hospital photo ID around his neck on a beaded silver chain.
He was here on morning rounds. Bellevue. This was his idea of rounds anyway!
There was no way to stop any of this: his train from hell, his destiny, his last hurrah. No one could stop it because no one would ever figure out where the last train was headed. Only he knew that, only Soneji himself could call it off.
He wondered how much of the puzzle Cross had already pieced together. Cross wasn’t in his class as a thinker, but the psychologist and detective wasn’t without crude instincts in certain specialized areas. Maybe he was underestimating Dr. Cross, as he had once before. Could he be caught now? Perhaps, but it really didn’t matter. The game would continue to its end without him. That was the beauty of it, the evil of what he had done.
Gary Soneji stepped into a stainless-steel elevator in the basement of the well-known Manhattan hospital. A pair of porters shared the narrow car with him, and Soneji had a moment of paranoia. They might be New York cops working undercover.
The NYPD actually had an office on the main floor of the hospital. It was there under “normal” circumstances. Bellevue. Jesus, what a sensational madhouse this was. A hospital with a police station inside.
He eyed the porters with a casual and disinterested city-cool look. They can’t be policemen, he thought, Nobody could look that dumb. They were what they looked like-slow-moving, slow-thinking hospital morons.
One of them was pushing around a stainless-steel cart with two bum wheels. It was a wonder that any patient ever made it out of a New York City hospital alive. Hospitals here were run with about the same personnel standards as a McDonald’s restaurant, probably less.
He knew one patient who wasn’t going to leave Bellevue alive. The news reports said that Shareef Thomas was being kept here by the police. Well, Thomas was going to suffer before he left this so-called “vale of tears.” Shareef was about to undergo a world of suffering.
Gary Soneji stepped out of the elevator onto the first floor. He sighed with relief. The two porters went about their business. They weren’t cops. No, they were dumber and dumbest.
Canes, wheelchairs, and metal walkers were everywhere. The hospital artifacts reminded him of his own mortality. The halls on the first floor were painted off-white, the doors and radiators were a shade of pink like “old gum.” Up ahead was a strange coffee shop, dimly lit like a subway passageway. If you ate in that place, he thought to himself, they ought to lock you up in Bellevue!
As he walked from the elevator, Soneji caught his own reflection in a stainless-steel pilar. The master of a thousand faces, he couldn’t help thinking. It was true. His own stepmother wouldn’t recognize him now, and if she did, she would scream her bloody lungs out. She’d know he’d come all the way to hell to get her.
He walked down the corridor, singing very softly in a reggae lilt, “I shot the Shareef, but I did not shoot the dep-u-tee.”
No one paid him any mind. Gary Soneji fit right in at Bellevue.
Chapter 56
SONEJI HAD a perfect memory, so he would recall everything about this morning. He would be able to play it back for himself with incredible detail. This was true for all of his murders. He scanned the narrow, high-ceilinged hallways as if he had a surveillance camera mounted where his head was. His powers of concentration gave him a huge advantage. He was almost supernaturally aware of everything going on around him.