The Inspector stares at the manacles. They’re not police issue. Probably imported.
“No one said anything about handcuffs,” he says, but Mr. Clairvaux goes into a furious head-shaking spasm.
“No cuffs, no test. House rule. No exceptions.”
“But I—”
“Look, I’ve had people go crazy in the middle of the procedure, all right? Had a woman bite straight into my shoulder. Now, luckily she wasn’t a carrier. But I won’t take that chance again. So if you want me to check you out, kneel down, sit back on your ankles, and lock the bracelets in place.”
The Inspector considers calling the whole thing off, then takes the cuffs, fastens his left wrist, fumbles a bit but manages to secure the right.
Mr. Clairvaux inspects and says, “Thank you. I wish it wasn’t necessary but you have to understand. This is a very unorthodox practice. I never know who is coming through that door.”
The Inspector nods, closes his eyes, tries to concentrate on past history. Then he opens his mouth as wide as he can.
Upon taking his initial vows of the Society of Jesus, Emil Lacazze was dispatched on his virgin mission and began traveling to the more remote island tribes around the globe. Armed with only his rigorous intellect and a beautiful but rugged Nagra tape recorder, he was charged with developing a study of myth stories and rituals in the native tongue of each culture under investigation. But halfway through his assignment — lodged at St. Leon’s Parish in the heart of the Palmer Peninsula, and in the middle of recording the startling sounds of a village folk chant that depicted the raunchy intricacies of a particular breed of penguin’s mating dance — Lacazze received word he was being redeployed to America. And so he came to reside in the comfortable if less challenging confines of St. Ignatius College in Quinsigamond, where his miles of audio tape were to be transcribed, analyzed, and archived.
Disappointed but surprisingly obedient, Lacazze shouldered his new duties as special-collections curator in the Horwedel Library. Paradoxically, it is at this juncture, when the story transports to a local milieu, that the rumors mutate and become hazy. According to some accounts, upon his arrival at St. Ignatius, Lacazze developed an obsessive interest in administrative power. Over time, some would say this interest became pathological. Other, more reasoned sources claim that Lacazze was simply a convenient scapegoat, that he threw his meager support to the wrong side in a vicious coup to unseat the Trinity, the trio of Jesuit fathers that jointly presided over the college. Whichever the actual case, the results were the same — the Trinity slapped down the insurrection with their standard and brutally effective talent for suppression. In a post-midnight purge, Lacazze quite literally found himself out on his ass, thrown roughly into the backseat of a chauffeured Rolls Royce Silver Spur alongside his prepacked black duffel bag, wondering in four languages how he could have been so mistaken.
The beauty of the purge became evident later, when it was understood that simultaneously across town at police headquarters, the commissioner’s office was having its own family squabble. A power climber named Waldegrave, who’d been promoted too far and fast up to Internal Affairs detail, began nosing into a series of alleged ties strung awkwardly between the department, City Hall, various neighborhood mayors, and even St. Ignatius College. Before the stupid bastard could write the first page of his IA briefing notes, one of Chief Bendix’s shadow creatures from Bangkok set up a classic prisoner swap. As if delineated by the semiotics of some edgy cold war spy movie, representatives from the blue shirts and the black robes met at a designated early-morning hour in a gritty chamber inside Gompers Station. The Jesuits took Waldegrave back up the hill with them. And the department was handed Emil Lacazze.
“Just what we need,” Chief Bendix is supposed to have remarked, “a horny smart guy in a black suit. Does anyone know, can he type?”
Rarely if ever in the whole of his wildly blessed career had Bendix ever been more off the mark. After the prisoner swap it was assumed that Father Lacazze would hang on till pension time as a pathetically overqualified file clerk and substitute secretary, rotating forever between traffic reports and the dispatch desk, maybe cataloging over in the evidence locker, a position that sometimes utilized competent spelling skills.
But Lacazze had learned a dear lesson at St. Ignatius concerning the ways and means of power grabs. He courted the chief like an obsessed lover and offered his unique intelligence at the department’s disposal round the clock, playing Joseph to Bendix’s pharaoh. Even a bloody hack like the old chief soon came to see what a natural resource Lacazze could be, and Lacazze was made the chief’s aide-de-camp, advising on everything from restructuring mob payments to improving public relations. As his fortunes rose, Lacazze’s position and title and duties became vague and finally unknown. He was seen as a one-man think tank, a policy interpreter who never revealed his own opinion, a close reader of the daily Zeitgeist and a compromise broker whose commission of privilege went unspoken. If, in the beginning, he was a conduit of varying power bases, in the end he became an entity unto himself, a force that orbited the common arrays of rank and influence and took from each what he needed. A free agent of sorts, he turned himself into the department’s Rasputin, until no one really knew who, if anyone, he reported to.
He can feel the tester’s breath on his face. Can smell sugar and bong water.
Mr. Clairvaux’s fingers come to the sides of the mouth, push in and dimple the cheeks, as he says, “Whatever happens for the next few minutes, try to continue breathing regularly.”
The Inspector feels the needle penetrating the tongue, piercing the mucous membrane, exploding through the sea of epithelial cells and forcing, cutting its way into the networks of striated muscles, ripping through fat and nicking its way past salivary glands, inexorably rooting toward a place just short of the hyoid bone.
It begins as the bite of a viper, the fang piercing into the soft meat of the tongue like a fat razor. Then it changes to an insect sting. From an enormous and hideous wasp, a wasp mutated to the size of a falcon. And then the sting grows into a burn. As if the tongue has been taken from the head and pinned to the red heating coil of an electric stove. As if it has been swaddled in jellied gasoline the way you might engulf a frankfurter in ketchup.
This is a different kind of pain, rarer than one can imagine, working its way, in a geometric progression, to some level of torture without demarcation. This pain breeds, births smaller versions of itself and dispatches them downward to the heart and to the groin on their own missions of agony, but never diminishes at the source. And when the distress can’t seem to grow any worse, it finds brand-new planes of excruciation to colonize.
His resolve vanishes and the Inspector begins to scream.
Emil Lacazze’s unique status was cemented into unheard-of entitlement when he was allowed to annex the ancient, abandoned, and vermin-ridden station house on Dunot Boulevard, at the border of Bangkok Park. With funds left uninked in the line items of the police budget, he turned it into his own home and office. He set up a single room as living quarters on the second floor, a spartan studio more suited to a cloistered Trappist than a once-worldly Jesuit.
Downstairs, in the former precinct commander’s office, he invented a chamber that was part analyst’s study, part priest’s confessional, and part inquisitor’s sweatbox. Lacazze kept a generic gunmetal desk in the center of the room. Behind the desk was a slat-back schoolmaster’s chair on rollers and behind the chair a wood-frame, grammar-school-style chalkboard that could pivot on a center axle and swing wholly over to its opposite side. In front of the desk was a small shoe-fitting stool, a low, vinyl-covered seat attached to an angled rubber pedestal that slanted to the floor. The walls of the room were left bare, in places showing cracked horsehair plaster, but the floor was littered with reams of stacked notepaper, all of it filled with what was either Lacazze’s illegible handwriting or some sort of idiosyncratic shorthand or code. Many of these piles reached two feet high and were weighted in place by a variety of red-painted wooden apples fitted with rawhide wicks for stems.