Diedrich actually did obey orders. He stared blinking at the sock. He looked very desperate. He said, not a whisper, but a voice so low Bennett could barely hear it, “Daniel Foster.”
What? Bennett felt a terrible cold knife run up his back. Was this whole thing an elaborate scheme aimed at him, not at Diedrich after all, but at Colin Bennett, to get him to confess to the awful thing he’d done? Daniel Foster, in the water tunnel, when the lights went out, and the sound of the rushing water came.
Bennett could hear the sound of the rushing water in his ears. It was so loud he could barely hear himself over it. He said, “What was that name? What about that name?”
Now Diedrich turned his bitter, despairing, hate-filled, enraged eyes on Bennett. “Curtis threw him away,” he said, his voice strangled again, as though he’d just had another treatment with the sock. “He killed him, and covered it up, and made him disappear from the world as though he’d never been!”
“Diedr—”
“But he did exist! I loved him! I loved him, and we were going to—”
He’d half-risen in his agitation, and now he fell back and stared at the ceiling. “My letters came back, unknown. I phoned, Central America, oh, no, nobody of that name here. But I kept asking, and met people, and later on I found out, I found out from people on the crew, it was an accident! The kind of accident you get from people who don’t care about other human beings! Greedy, inhuman! An accident! And they covered it up, and threw him away like a dead dog, and he’s so powerful, Curtis, he’s so powerful, that nobody can touch him! I can touch him! I’ll get him, and I’ll get him, and I’ll get him, and we’ll see how powerful he is.”
Diedrich turned blazing eyes on Bennett. “He hires you scum, he can hire thousands of you scum, and it doesn’t matter. You can kill me in this room, you’re going to kill me in this room and we both know it, but it doesn’t matter. Curtis is going to pay. He is going to pay.”
Bennett stared at the man on the floor. What could he possibly do with this news? Mr. Curtis wants the answers to two questions, and I just gave him the answer to the first, but now what about the other? Can I give him that answer, ever?
“Mr. Curtis, this man, this organization behind this man, they’ve been after you for years now, they’ve been plaguing you for years now, because they blame you for a horrible crime you don’t know anything about, that I did, that I hid from you, not from them, I’m the cause of your troubles, Mr. Curtis, there’s the answer to your question, and can I have that job now, that we talked about?”
Now, for the first time, Bennett did allow the door to the future to slide fully open, allowed himself to look through. And for the first time, he saw that, in that future, there was no Jerry Diedrich.
15
Jerry felt the difference. In the air in the room. Through all of this, through the terror, and the pain, and the helpless rage, there had always been some faint hint, some touch of the possibility of belief, that he would live through this, that something would happen, some rescue, or that this man actually would believe he was safe in dumping Jerry somewhere, alive, after he’d finished with his questions.
But not anymore. Some chill had entered the room, the chill of death. Jerry didn’t know why, or exactly at what point it had come in, but it was here now, and all at once his situation was a million times worse. Before, there’d been, however unrealistically, a sliver of hope. Now, it was gone.
Could he get it back? Could he return to wherever they’d been before, no matter how dreadful that had been? He looked at the hooded eyes of the other man, his slightly puffy and unhealthy cheeks, his blunt-fingered hands, the shambling strength of his body, and even though the man was the same brute he’d been before, there was also something new in him now, something implacable and unreachable.
Oh, could he get back to the way it was before? Feeling his throat close up again with pain and terror, he croaked, “Why do you do his work? Why do you do his dirty work?”
The man shook his head. He seemed to think about what to answer, or whether to answer at all. Then he sighed, and it was as though he felt he owed Jerry something, some return for murdering him; which scared Jerry even more.
“You’re wrong, you know,” the man said. “You got hold of the wrong idea. You know about the blind men and the elephant?”
This was a surprise. Was it hope again, a return to human contact? Jerry said, “Each blind man thinks it’s a different animal. They touch different parts, the trunk, the tusks, the leg.”
“You got hold of a part, and you got it wrong,” the man said, “and that’s the story, that’s your whole story right there.” He chuckled a little, and his meaty shoulders moved. “You’re a lesson in the dangers of prejudice, that’s what you are.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Of course you don’t. Richard Curtis is a rich man, and he goes his own way, and he don’t give a damn about you, so all you can see is he must be an evil sort of person.”
“He is.”
“He doesn’t know a thing about Daniel Foster, you know,” the man said.
Jerry looked at him. Some sort of wound seemed to open up in his heart, something hollowing and mean. He said, he whispered, “What do you know about it?”
“I was drinking, you see,” the man said. “Not justifying myself, excusing myself, you understand that. It’s just I was a drinking man in those days, and it made me careless sometimes.”
Barely daring to breathe, feeling that new emptiness in his heart, Jerry whispered, “You were there?”
“I swear to you, on my manhood,” the man said, “I had no idea he was still in that tunnel. I didn’t know all those planks and such were in there. Boyo, I was fired. I been out of work ever since, and only because what I did to the turbines. Do you think, if Richard Curtis knew I flung a man down that shaft, he’d take my side?”
Jerry could only stare at him, helpless, knowing he was hearing the truth, and knowing the truth was worse than anything he’d ever imagined.
The man said, “I’ve been a guilty fellow and a beaten fellow for a long time. My marriage broke up, I was blackballed everywhere. Not looking for sympathy, you know what I’m saying, but I’ve been punished. Oh, you can believe that. You wanted somebody punished for what happened to your friend, well, you got your wish.”
“If Curtis didn’t...” Jerry began, but then didn’t know what it was he even wanted to ask.
The man nodded at him. “Curtis knew you were there,” he said. “For a long time, Mr. Curtis, he’s known you were out there, a thorn in his side. A mosquito, but a bad mosquito. You know, he didn’t say to me to kill you, that isn’t the sort of man we’re talking about here. He said to me, Colin, find out who’s the traitor in my camp, and for the love of God, Colin, find out what this fellow Diedrich has against me.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Jerry said. He couldn’t look at the man anymore.
“Well, so I’ve done the job,” the man said. “Haven’t I, Jerry Diedrich?”
“Yes.”
“I’m a willing worker, you know, I’m deserving of trust. I’m deserving of a second chance. Don’t you think so?”
“You’ll get your second chance,” Jerry said, not trying to hide the bitterness he felt.
“Well, but there’s the rub,” the man told him. “I’ve given Mr. Curtis the information on this fellow Hennessy, so he’s pleased with me for that. But can I answer his other question? Can I tell him why it is you’ve been hounding him all this while?”