Bahr saw the red dripping blot on the front of Chard’s coveralls as the whole wall began to flare from the burning cards. He saw the death-white face, the eyes wide with fear. “Just get me to a doc, Julie . . . .”
“You’re a dead man,” Bahr said. “You wouldn’t last five minutes if we moved you.” He shook his head, lifted the stunner. “The breaks, kid.”
One violent, tearing epileptic lunge, and it was over. Silence, the crackling of the fire, waves of heat from the wall. He heard a noise break from Kocek as he turned the power off on the stunner, put it back in the holster. “Get out to the car,” Bahr said. “I’ll get Carmine.”
Kocek bolted through the door. Sick, rotten, depraved Kocek seemed eager to get away from him.
He thought suddenly of the upstairs. There was something . . . He shook his head, his mind blanking. All he could think of now was get out, hurry, get out! It did not occur to him to wonder why he could not go back upstairs. He could not remember what was up there. Upstairs was empty . . . that was it . . . empty.
In the eerie crackling light of the spreading fire, Bahr grinned suddenly, but he did not know why.
The meeting at dawn was short and tense. The principals were Bahr and Kocek, adults, and three celebrities from the toughest of Trivettown’s KMs. The place of the meeting was a two-car garage in the Trivettown residential section. Bahr’s Volta, with Carmine bound and gagged on the floor, filled half the garage. In the other half there was a work bench, and a nondescript array of woodworking tools, hedge clippers, and two disposal cans. The bench was curiously stained.
There was the usual exchange of greetings and explanations. Kocek, who knew the KMs, did most of the talking, with Bahr silent, watching the one called Joel cleaning his carefully trimmed nails with a tiny gleaming knife. Bahr had heard of Joel by reputation. Now, meeting him, he felt an almost irresistible urge to take the pale, smiling youngster by one scrawny ankle and smash his brains out on the floor. It was just amazing how thoroughly he hated him at first sight.
Kocek negotiated with the girl, who was in charge of proceedings, a thirteen-year-old who was noticeably pregnant. Joel would work at so much an hour for four hours, after which the rates doubled at four hour intervals. If those terms were not satisfactory there would be no deal. Joel was a specialist, but the girl was a business woman. The third noteworthy, a stocky, hard-faced bully, kept a hand in a pocket and never took his eyes off Kocek while he talked to the girl.
Joel, of course, was different. He was strange, pathologically strange, and he made Bahr’s skin crawl. His hands were very soft and white, like a girl’s, but his eyes were vulture eyes. Bahr had seen such eyes once or twice before, and he always hated them.
Then the arrangements were completed, and Kocek and the bully dragged Carmine out of the car. Bahr noticed that Joel’s eyes began to brighten when he saw Carmine’s struggling figure; he stood up, studying Carmine’s face, and an odd little professional smile crossed his waxy, almost doll-like face.
Carmine was conscious, his eyes blazing hate at Bahr as he was lifted onto the workbench.
“You can make it easy on yourself, if you want to,” Bahr said. “You know what I want to know.” Behind the gag Carmine’s face twisted almost out of shape, his eyes narrowing to slits. Bahr stepped forward, his fist back, but Joel said, “No!” and stopped him cold.
“You’ll have to leave,” the girl said. She and the bully moved between him and Carmine. “Don’t worry. He’s in good hands.”
Behind them, Joel expertly finished wiring Carmine down to the workbench, viewed him for a moment with a clinical eye, and then snapped open a black doctor’s bag and began selecting appliances.
“All right,” Bahr said, suddenly cold. “Let Kocek know when he breaks.”
“You’ll hear from us,” the girl said.
She opened the garage doors, and Bahr backed out. It was almost seven o’clock, and he had to get back to New York through morning traffic. He thought of Carmine and the good hands he was in, and he should have felt good, but he didn’t; he just felt hollow and cold and weary.
“He’ll break,” Kocek assured him as they moved into traffic. “We’ll find out who put him up to it.”
Bahr didn’t answer. Who put Carmine up to it didn’t seem important any more, nor did the interview with Adams that was now facing him in two hours with no sleep to support him. He drove through the gloomy drizzling rain, trying to remember something about a woman whose face he could not see, and a long corridor, and an elephant.
In the darkened room, Harvey Alexander lay immobile, staring fixedly at the ceiling, and he smelled the smoke long before he felt the heat of the fire. He tried to move his arms; the muscles responded, but slowly, sluggishly, and he fell back against the couch, panting at the effort.
There were many things he did not understand, many pieces that did not fit, but the long hours of waiting in darkness, helpless and immobile, had given him time to think, and slowly the picture had come clear. Now he understood things, and it was a wellspring of satisfaction and a bitter defeat at the same time. He had heard the shots and screams of the pogrom on the floor below, and then the silence, and then the smoke and glowing heat, and he realized that understanding, even knowing, was not good enough now that it came too late.
There was no one down below who could help him now.
Slowly, he tried again to flex his muscles. It was a major effort just to breath, an impossible feat to sit up on the couch, but he managed it. He felt the floor with his bare feet. Then he tried to stand, and felt his knees buckle, and fell heavily onto the floor.
It was useless. The place was a smoke-filled oven; already he could see the yellow brightness of the flames in the crack under the door. He knew the truth now, and it was possible that he knew things that nobody else knew, but he would never be able to tell anyone, to use that information. It was useless to fight any more, but he tried.
Slowly, he hitched himself up on his elbows, began inching his way across the room toward the hall.
He had almost reached the window when he blacked out momentarily, choking on the acrid fumes from the fire down below, and he saw the uselessness of it.
He had been running for too long. Now there was no more chance to run.
Chapter Fourteen
There was no chance to run, Libby realized, when she saw Adams’ feet propped up on her desk. Somehow, in her mind, there had always been the idea that at the last moment she would be able to run away, somehow avoid facing it, call it all off and start with a clean slate, but she saw now with a sort of horrified fascination that she had been deluding herself. The elevator had closed behind her and gone back down below. The office secretary had seen her. Adams had seen her.
She couldn’t run now, or ever.
She turned on her most charming smile, her most friendly and sincere smile, her you-don’t-know-how-insanely-happy-(hebephrenic)-I-am-to-see-you smile, with a little sex thrown in, even though, as she looked at him, Adams gave her the same cold sick feeling in her stomach he always did. All she could actually say was, “Good morning, there.”
Adams of course was not taken in, and Libby was instantly angry with herself for trying to fake her way through the opening. Adams was laying for her. He had made up his mind already what he was going to say and think and listen to; any attempt to ignore the fact would simply debase her a little more. She knew her only hope now was to beat him to the punch and keep feeding him answers before he could get the questions out. And Julian was not there. Where in hell was he?