I closed my eyes. “Oh, go ahead and shoot,” I said. “I really can’t take any more.” And at that moment I think I really meant it.
Nothing at all happened. I lay on my back, head against the pillow, eyes closed, hands folded over my breast, already laid out you might say, and absolutely nothing happened.
Well, it wasn’t up to me to make the next move. I was done. I went on lying there.
Napoli said, “Chester, you don’t impress me.”
I continued to lie there. My eyes continued to be closed. But my despair, if that’s what it was, had already been diluted by my unsinkable liking for life, and I could feel myself beginning to tense up again. I had shut down like this out of conviction, but I was staying shut down as a kind of technique, mostly because I couldn’t think of anything else to do.
Napoli, with irritation finally creeping into his voice, said, “This is ridiculous. I have thirty-five minutes to get— Chester, I don’t have to give you a break.”
“A break?” I said. I didn’t open my eyes, because I knew if I was looking at him I wouldn’t be able to talk. Keeping my eyes shut and my body still, it was almost like talking on the phone, and I can talk to anybody on the phone. So my eyes were shut as I said, “You call that giving me a break? Getting a lot of wrong ideas into your head about who I am and what I’ve done, calling me a liar when I just so much as hint at the truth, sending people around to threaten me with guns, you threaten me with your teeth for God’s sake, you think—”
“Now just a—”
“No!” I was thrashing around in the bed by now, waving my arms to make my points, but my eyes stayed squeezed shut. “Ever since Tommy was killed,” I yelled, “one God damn fool after another comes after me with guns. Nobody asks me what I’m doing, oh, no, everybody knows too God damn much to ask me anything, everybody’s so God damn smart. Those clowns in the garage, and then Abbie, and then whoever shot at me, and now you. You people don’t know what you’re doing! You’re so God damn smug, you know—”
“Keep your voice down!”
“The hell I will! I’ve been pushed around long enough! I’ve got a—”
I stopped because a hand was clamped over my mouth and I could no longer talk. The hand was also over my nose and I could no longer breathe. My eyes opened.
One of the new hoods was standing over me, his arm a straight line from his shoulder to my face. He was leaning a little, pushing my head deeper into the pillow. I blinked, and looked past his knuckles at Napoli.
Napoli at last had stopped smiling. He was looking thoughtful now, studying me with his arms folded and the side of one finger idly stroking the line of his jaw. He seemed to be thinking things over.
I needed to breathe. I said, “Mmmm, mmm.”
“Shut up,” he said carelessly, and went back to thinking.
“Mm mmm mmmm,” I said.
“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe there is a different explanation.”
Things were turning a darkish red. There was a roaring deep inside my skull. I began to thrash around like a fish in the bottom of a boat.
Napoli pointed at me the finger with which he’d been stroking himself. “That won’t do you any good,” he said. “You just be quiet and let me think.”
“Mm mmm mmmmmmm!” I said.
“We saw you with Frank Tarbok,” he said. “We followed you and the other two from your place. Now you talk about the clowns in the garage as though you don’t know Frank, as though you don’t work for him, don’t know anything about him. Is that possible?”
I scratched feebly at the hand between me and air. Far away, up through the red haze, the hood looked uncaring down the length of his arm at me. I tugged at his pinkie, to no avail.
Napoli was still talking, slowly, thoughtfully, considering all sides of the matter. I could no longer make out the words, the roaring in my head was too loud, it blotted out all other sounds. But through the darkening haze I could still see him, see his mouth moving, his brow furrowed in thought, his eyes gazing into the middle distance. How civilized he looked, but the red haze was closing in and I could no longer make him out clearly.
My head was a balloon, a red balloon, being filled up and up, filled up and up, the pressure increasing on the inside, the pressure increasing too much, the pressure increasing.
The last thing I heard was the balloon exploding.
16
How had I gotten so tiny? Swimming upside down in a cup of tea, warm orange-red tea, rolling around, needing air, wanting to get to the surface but sinking instead to the bottom of the cup. White china cup. Looking up through all the tea at the light in the world up there, knowing I had to get out of this cup before I drowned. Before somebody drank me. Holding my breath, orange-red in the face, the weight of the tea too much for me, pressing me down. Straining upward, pushing against the bottom of the cup, and then everything confused. Had the cup broken? I was falling out the side, tea splashing all around me, white cup fragments, falling out, falling down, landing hard on elbow and shoulder and cheek.
I was on the floor surrounded by legs, feet, and even though I was awake now I cowered as though I was still tiny and the feet would crush me. My left arm was pinned under me, but I managed to get the right arm up over my head.
Then hands were holding me, lifting me, voices were jabbering, and the confusions of the dream faded away, leaving the confusions of reality in their wake. When last I’d heard from the real world, somebody was strangling me.
I was placed on the bed and the covers drawn up over me. People were speaking, but I kept my arm up over my head and didn’t look at anything or listen to anything until Abbie touched my shoulder and spoke my name and asked me how I was. Then I came out slowly, warily, like a turtle in a French kitchen, to see Abbie sitting on the bed and leaning over me, with a lot of people I didn’t like in the background.
Abbie asked me again how I was, and I muttered something, and the leader of the pack came forward to say, “I want you to know that wasn’t intentional, Chester. I don’t do business that way.”
I looked at him.
“I hope there’s no hard feelings,” he said, and the expression his face wore now was concerned. Not that I believed there was ever any relationship between what he was thinking and what his face showed.
I looked at Abbie, and she gave me a look that said, “Be circumspect.” So I looked back at Solomon Napoli and said, “No damage done.” My throat was a little hoarse, so that my voice rasped a little, slightly undercutting the meaning of my words, but not so much that he couldn’t ignore the discrepancy, if he chose.
He chose. “That’s good,” he said. He glanced at his watch, gave me a smile that I guess was supposed to be friendly, and said, “I missed my meeting to be sure you were all right.”
“I’m all right,” I said.
“Good. Then we can get back to what we were talking about. Miss McKay?”
So Abbie squeezed my hand and went away, leaving me once again with Napoli and his two elves. Napoli seated himself in his bedside chair once again and said, “I’ve been thinking over what you said, and it’s entirely possible you’re telling the truth. It could be you’re just an innocent bystander in all this, you don’t work for Droble at all.”
Droble. Was that one of the names Detective Golderman had asked me about? It seemed to me it might have been, but I was in no condition to pursue the question. I didn’t really care one way or the other.