"A vitamin," she said.
"I'm not drinking that," he said. It looked like whipped brownish gelatin. She had brought it to him in a very old shrimp cocktail jar, the kind that comes prepacked with heavy sauce and miniscule shrimp. The jars were often used afterward as drinking glasses. She had taken the jar out of a stainless steel box set on the kitchen counter. The box was plugged into a wall socket.
"I wouldn't drink that with a gun at my head," said Hallahan.
"I didn't think you would."
"You're damned right I won't. That stuff is funnier-looking than a cyanide cocktail."
Pam Westcott smiled. Then she leveled Hallahan onto the couch. Rape, he thought. Of course, that would be impossible considering his feelings toward Pam Westcott. It was impossible for a woman to rape a man who wasn't properly aroused. Especially Jim Hallahan, who hadn't been properly aroused since he saw the doctor's bill for his last child.
He pushed at her with just enough force to move her away. But she didn't move. He pushed harder at Ms. Westcott. She held him with one arm.
All right, Hallahan thought. I'm pushing fifty and not in the best shape of my life, but I can sure push away a Boston Times reporter. Especially one holding me with one hand and a shrimp cocktail glass with the other.
The holding arm got a hand around to squeeze his nose. He couldn't breathe. This woman was holding him with ease. He tried punching. His hands were pinned. He brought a knee up into her groin. This was a fight for life. The knee struck but she only growled.
Jim Hallahan opened his mouth for a desperate breath of air. In came the brownish goo. It tasted like liver left out for a day in the sun, then blended with butterscotch pudding. He retched but his mouth was clamped shut. He swallowed his own vomit.
His head moved as if someone was spinning it at the end of a long rope. The rope got longer and longer and longer and his head was at the end of it.
He was in a dark place and heard his father's voice begging him not to leave, then it was his mother's voice and then like a dream of going out from darkness to light that hurt his eyes. His eyes hurt terribly. Someone was shining great lights into his eyes.
"Turn off the lights," he said. He was thirsty and hungry. There was nothing in his belly to quench the hunger. Pam Westcott sat next to him purring. He smelled her. She smelled reassuring and safe. His own clothes, on the contrary, smelled bad. Smelled different. Somehow they made him very hungry. "Do you have anything to eat?" he asked.
"Would you like a martini?"
The idea made Hallahan turn up his nose. He stretched. He yawned. Pam Westcott licked his face.
"I have something I know you'll like. Be back in a minute, kitten." Hallahan sat up with a slow ease. Hungry, yes. But also more alive. He realized that he had thought about the Bureau almost every moment since he had joined. He noticed the most startling fact of his life, that at that moment, he didn't care about the FBI at all, and he felt very good about it.
It didn't matter whether he turned on the FBI or not. It didn't matter whether he rose to the top of the organization or not.
Food mattered. Safety mattered. Reproducing mattered, provided he got the right scent
He smelled it before he saw it, but knew the smell. It was a heaping delicious bowl of lamb intestines dripping in its own tasty blood.
He devoured it and licked himself clean. When he was finished, he saw Pam Westcott smiling at him. He smelled something very stimulating and when she turned her back he knew what would be wanted and taken.
They went into the bedroom, however, as if they were humans.
In the days that followed, he remembered an old joke about how if you were black on a Saturday night you'd never want to be white again. Well, this was like Saturday night every night and every morning. There were needs; they were met; and then there were more needs.
The biggest difference was that there was no worry. You felt hostile at times. Every now and then when you sensed a flame you felt frightened. But you did not carry fear over in your imagination and let it lead to worry.
Death was death. Life was life. Eating was eating. When he saw his family the night after he had stayed with Pam Westcott, he didn't want to stay at home anymore. He saw his youngest son cry and what seemed strangest of all he didn't care as much as when he used to see a hurt animal. There was nothing.
Moreover, he couldn't understand why his son was so upset. His mother would provide food and shelter. What was this boy doing tugging at his sleeve? Jim Hallahan cuffed him and sent the tyke tumbling across the room.
Then he stalked out of his house and went to the office. He started work with salivating gusto. He had something to look for. A wounded Caucasian with a torn belly.
Every hospital had to be checked. Every doctor had to be checked. This was his order to his subordinates. He wanted that man, a young white man, with dark hair and eyes, and very thick wrists.
"Sir, what's the crime he committed?"
"Just do what you're told," said Hallahan. It was hard sitting with these men now. But Pam had taught him a trick. When things got very hard, eat bloody hamburger or steak, beef liver or kidneys. That would hold the hunger for the flesh of men. There was nothing to worry about because soon there would be all the flesh he would want.
Jim Hallahan knew this would be so. For now he had a leader far more powerful than even J. Edgar Hoover used to be.
Her name was Sheila, and she wanted that white man alive.
"He's wounded and probably been admitted to the hospital in the last two days?" Hallahan said.
"Yes," Sheila Feinberg had said.
"That's not the best of leads," said one of Hallahan's men.
"Drop everything else and find that man," said Hallahan.
"Yes, sir. Is there something wrong with my tie?"
"No," said Hallahan, opening a drawer in which raw liver was kept. "All of you get out now."
Outside his office one of his men asked the others, "Did he growl? Or was that my imagination?"
CHAPTER SIX
Mrs. Tumulty had a whale of a story. She wasn't going to gossip it away over some fence in the South End to amuse Mrs. Grogan or Mrs. Flaherty. She was on her way to the North End.
If Boston was an American melting pot, it was as melted as Europe with boundaries between different groups. There were the Irish in the South End, Italians in the North End, Blacks in Roxbury and only court orders for busing made any of them mix, and then only unwillingly.
Mrs. Tumulty strode purposefully through the streets of the North End with its strange-smelling foods and long names that ended in vowels. Her imagination had people behind glass windows of shops secretly doing all sorts of sex acts. She imagined stilettos in people's purses and jackets.
She saw people talking with their hands. "Except for their names," Mrs. Tumulty contended, "you can't tell the Eyetalians from the Jews and, after all, who would want to?"
To Mrs. Tumulty the country was filled with too many un-Americans. These included Yankee Protestant families who weren't really American enough.
She had some complaints about her church too. Too many Eyetalians. She always thought of them as sort of imitation priests, not the real thing. To Mrs. Tumulty, tolerance and intergroup understanding meant talking to people whose parents came from Cork or Mayo, different counties in Ireland, no matter how painful it was, people whose parents, you knew, kept chickens in the kitchen.
When the big scare about the man-eaters began, with all the talk about changing the basic nature of the human body through chromosome action or something like that, Mrs. Tumulty knew the television people were only covering up.
Foreigners always acted like that. Wasn't she telling you all the time? Foreigners with bumpy noses. Dark foreigners. Even yellow-haired Swedes. The most degenerate people on the face of the earth.