“I’m Lionel. Lionel Salkind.” My throat was dry again. “I don’t know anything about a Belur package.”
“I hear you.” His voice was still soft and thoughtful. ” Dixie , get his shirt off. Don’t untie him. Cut it away if yer have to.”
Dixie took out a sheath knife. The blade was sharpened to a wicked tip, and it gleamed in the light. He cut my shirt and undershirt efficiently from top to bottom, laying the cold flat of the blade lovingly against my skin as he finished. Scouse whistled when he saw the pattern of scars on my chest and stomach.
“Been through the wars, haven’t yer? Mebbe you need them pills after all. I’ve seen road maps with less lines on ’em than your belly. I bet you don’t want more there, do yer? I can understand that. But let’s do one little check before we start — just to make sure.”
He nodded. Dixie took his cigarette out of his mouth and applied it without warning to my shoulder. I yelled at the pain and tried to writhe away from the red-hot ash. I couldn’t move more than a few inches in any direction. Scouse nodded.
“All right. Just checking. Wouldn’t be worth doing anything to yer, would it, if you’d already had a go with the Belur Package? All right, now let’s have a little chat.”
He pulled a chair forward and sat down facing me. I noticed that the woman was standing absolutely motionless. Her cheeks were flushed, and she was biting her lip as though under some great tension.
“Are you going to stand there and let them torture me?” I said desperately. “Can’t you see they have the wrong man?”
Scouse turned to her as I spoke and saw the intense, rigid posture. He swore and stood up again. “Pudd’n, get Zan out of here and into another room. Take her downstairs.”
She went without speaking, but at the door she turned and gave me a long, unfathomable look. I could tell that she didn’t want to go, but she would not argue with Scouse. As soon as she was gone, he took a black case from his pocket. He removed from it a small phial and a hypodermic, and laid them on the top of the piano stool.
“That was crude with the cigarette, eh? I know.” He leaned forward to look again into my eyes. “An’ it left marks, an’ that’s never a good idea. I keep telling Dixie when he wants to have a go with the knife, there’s better ways. Let me tell you what we’ll be doin’ instead.”
He picked up the hypodermic, plunged the needle through the rubber stopper of the phial, and drew about one c.c. of clear liquid into the syringe.
“This won’t leave a mark — only the needle point. What it will do is set up a stimulation to the nerves round about where we make the injection. The pain nerves, mainly. Would yer like to negotiate with me for where we make the first puncture? Yer might not believe me, but I don’t get my kicks out of hurting people, not like some people here — providing I can get what I want some other way.”
He had brought the needle forward to within an inch of my right thumb. I was rigid with fear. It was a scene from a nightmare, to be tortured to give up information that you didn’t have. Blood from a stone. The cigarette burn on my shoulder pulsed with pain, like a promise of worse to come.
“I’m Lionel,” I said desperately. “Lionel, not Leo.”
“I hear you.” Scouse was nodding agreeably. “An’ if you were Lionel, an’ not Leo, why there’d be no point puttin’ a hard squeeze on you, would there? But how am I to know that? All I can do is make you a little proposition. You find a way to prove that you’re Lionel Salkind, an’ not Leo Foss, an’ I’ll stop — for the moment. I’ll go away an’ think things over a bit more.” He turned to Pudd’n, who had come back into the room. “Do we have the report in yet on Valnora Warren?”
“Got it this morning. She didn’t know anything useful.”
“Mm.” Scouse looked at Dixie , “She was probed right?”
“All the way to the end. Nothing.”
“Right.” Scouse turned back to me. “So it’s up to you. If you are Leo, you know where the Belur Package is. An’ I want to know. An’ if you’re Lionel, you’d better prove it — right now.”
Prove I was Lionel. My brain was refusing to function. We had always known the differences, known them exactly. But everybody else said we were the same — even people who knew us well. I’d never persuade Scouse with talk of a half-inch height difference, or a pound or two in weight.
My skin felt chilled, and I had broken out into a fine, all-over sweat. I thought desperately, closing my eyes to concentrate. And I saw, like a ghost image on the inner darkness, the regular lines of green marching beetles, as I had first seen them in the hospital basement. I gasped.
“How much do you know about Leo?” I burst out, straining forward in my chair.
“A fair bit — a lot less than we’d like to, obviously.”
“You know his background?”
“Most of it.” Scouse was frowning.
“Then I can prove to you that I’m Lionel.”
“How?”
I laughed, high-pitched and nervous. “I’m a concert pianist. There’s no way that Leo could fake that. Let me play that piano, and you’ll see.”
Scouse was frowning harder. “Foss never played the piano according to my file on him. But it could be wrong. He may have had lessons.”
“Look, lessons wouldn’t be enough. You have to understand the enormous difference between a good professional and an amateur. It’s huge.” Even as I spoke I worried about my own lack of recent practice. The restricted circulation in my hands for the past hour would make things worse. But I was itching to get at that piano more than I had ever wanted anything.
Scouse was shaking his head. “I don’t know. I don’t think I could tell the difference between a good pianist and an average one.”
“Maybe you can’t. But he can.” I jerked my head towards Pudd’n, who had been standing there scowling.
“Nobody told me you were a concert pianist,” he said accusingly. “You were just ’avin’ me on when you said I was good, wasn’t yer?”
“No, I wasn’t — you are good, and you could be a lot better. You should take it more seriously.”
“Never mind that,” said Scouse. “Could you, Pudd’n? Could you really tell if he’s a professional or an amateur?”
Pudd’n was nodding his head reluctantly, “Yeah. If he’s that good, I’ll know it. There’s things he’ll not be able to fake. Nobody could.”
“But if he tries faking…” said Dixie . He made a little upwards motion with his cigarette.
“He’ll wish he hadn’t,” Scouse said. He nodded to Pudd’n. “All right, untie him. An’ keep an eye on ’im — don’t forget what happened to Des an’ Jack.”
When the ropes were off I lurched to my feet, hardly able to stand. I had pins and needles in my forearms, and cramps in my calves and feet. The piano stool was the right height but I fussed with it anyway, chafing at my hands and trying to relax them to get some feeling into my fingertips. I was too cold, and I put my jacket on over the sweaty, ruined shirt.
“All right, no stallin’,” said Scouse.
“I’m not. My hands don’t feel right yet — I was tied too tight.”
“Tough. Just get on with it.”
I looked at Pudd’n, who was standing impassively beside the piano. Dixie was behind me, his sheath knife out and ready to be used if I made a wrong move.
So what should I play? It wouldn’t do to handle a delicate piece that Pudd’n might play better than I would (I still suspected that all the emotion had gone from my playing). It had to be something where I could pull out all the stops and hit him with pyrotechnics. If the technical difficulties were hair-raising enough, he’d never notice that the playing was cold.