Kroger, smiling, brings the needle up to the left eye, maybe an eighth of an inch from the pupil itself. Gilrein closes his lid, pulling on the muscles as hard as he can.
“Not too much contraction,” Kroger warns. “We don’t want to puncture the eyeball itself.”
Gilrein feels a single, sharp prick around the corner of his eye, just a poke, retracted immediately.
“Now, Mr. Gilrein,” Kroger says, “I’m going to ask you what happened to my book. And if you tell me, we will be done with our work for the day.”
Gilrein keeps his eyes closed, but he can feel and smell the breath again, impacting on the center of his face. Another quick, light jab of the needle, but this one closer to the eyeball and this one drawing a run of blood.
“Where is my book, Mr. Gilrein?”
The words I don’t know explode in a stunted, softened scream inside his mouth, in the newly sealed interior, all nasal, undifferentiated, close to meaningless anywhere but in his brain. But he yells them anyway, over and over, until he becomes aware of the laughter, the sound of all three of them laughing, the noise of their amusement overlapping and blending into a chorus of pathetic and overdone tittering.
He opens his eyes, sees Kroger shaking his head, feels Blumfeld’s arms trembling with something like glee.
Kroger breaks away from the joy of his meatboys, cocks his head to the side, and says, “Ignorance is not always bliss, is it Mr. Gilrein?”
Then he turns to Raban and says, “He knows nothing. Take him away from me.”
And as Blumfeld unlocks the handcuffs and starts to haul Gilrein out of the chair, Kroger adds, “And give him a pair of scissors for his troubles.”
13
They dump Gilrein on the corner of Dunot Boulevard. They don’t bother to stop the car, just slow to a roll, throw open the back door, and heave him into the street, where he lies motionless until the Bamberg turns the corner. He anticipates a gunshot, though there’s no logic to his expectation. If the meatboys were going to kill him, they would have done it elsewhere and lost the body in the Benchley River or up at Gomi Scrap & Salvage.
Gilrein manages to get up on all fours, then slowly climbs to his feet. He needs to get to a hospital, to get the sutures removed and his mouth checked out. He tries to remember if this is Dr. Z’s night at the free clinic. Dr. Z is the favored physician of every cop in town, known for his willingness to lose paperwork and his liberal attitude regarding the keys to the clinic pharmacy. Gilrein is fairly sure that the doc will handle this odd emergency with the speed and discretion it deserves, even though the patient is no longer on the job.
He moves to the curbstone and sits down for a minute to think. He hangs his head, stares down at the gutter between his knees, breathes through the nose and touches his lips, pulls his fingers away immediately at the sting and draws a fresh run of blood. He takes a handkerchief from a pocket and presses it over his mouth.
When he looks up, he realizes that the building opposite him is 33 Dunot, one of the oldest precinct houses in Quinsigamond, officially closed down for years now, but still owned and maintained by the city. There’s a light glowing somewhere on the first floor and through one of the narrow front windows that bows out toward the sidewalk, Gilrein can see that he’s being watched.
The figure behind the window suddenly stands and begins to signal to Gilrein, motioning for him to come inside. And Gilrein understands, in spite of his wounds and the cumulative effects of the past twenty-four hours, that August Kroger had him dumped here on purpose, a message, a vivid little epistle for the proprietor of the Dunot Precinct House.
He gets up and starts to cross the street, staring at the details of the building and remembering all the hours he spent idling in the car outside, waiting for his wife to finally exit her office and join him, never telling him very much about the events of her shift. And never once confiding anything revelatory about her shift commander, her boss and mentor, the man behind the window now waving slowly out at Gilrein, Emil Lacazze.
There was a time when there appeared to be no case that Inspector Lacazze could not unravel using his Methodology. During his first season of total autonomy he began to accumulate successes like a mad and compulsive collector. Word started to spread through Bangkok Park, horrible, whispered fables about the voodoo cop, the mojo bull, the dark priest with his candle and his mirror, his sweet wine and terrifying eyes, and, worst of all, his voice, this noise that came out of his throat in a bark and jumped inside of you, broke into your head, found a way inside your brain no matter what you did and repeated word after word after word until you were ready to chew your own arms out of the cuffs and run into the night, screaming like the devil had his hands around your heart.
Because of her proximity to Lacazze, Ceil couldn’t help picking up her own, somewhat smaller reputation as the mysterious woman behind the black-magic lawman, a Cassandra with gun and badge whose scrubbed beauty only made her more of an enigma. The Grenada Street Popes called her La Bruja Blanca, while the Tonton Loas christened her La Putain du Prêtre. And, though Gilrein never knew it, even Willy Loftus’s Castlebar Road Boys spent more than one drunken sunrise both fantasizing and fearing an imagined Q & A session with the Rose of Dunot. At the height of Lacazze’s ascendance, the neighborhood mayors began to debate, first separately and then in tandem, whether this new force of nature eroding their landscapes of graft and vice shouldn’t perhaps be either co-opted or eliminated. As always, the first choice was to send in a shooter or two. How hard could this guy be to whack, living all alone down in this empty station house, insultingly over the rim of their mutual borders?
Peker the Turk, in his usual showboat manner, offered to shoulder the contract personally. Paco Iguaran and Willy Loftus disagreed, both seeing the possibility of enormous and diverse profits if the Inspector could be negotiated into retiring from the department and consulting for the other side.
Ultimately, however, the debate proved moot. Within a year of commandeering the precinct house and establishing the Eschatology Squad, Inspector Lacazze came to dance with the entity that would not only prove his equal, but when all was said and done, confirm its superiority.
Lacazze welcomes Gilrein as if they were old friends who’ve been separated too long by cruel circumstance. He actually greets the taxi driver in the doorway with a weak bear hug, then steps backward, keeping the hands on Gilrein’s shoulders, inspecting Kroger’s handiwork on the lips with a shake of the head and the sad but not really surprised tsking sound of a disappointed schoolteacher.
The Inspector steers Gilrein by the elbow, moving him through the squad room, a little too fast past Ceil’s old desk, and into Lacazze’s office, the Methodology chamber. The room is dim and stale, musty and outrageously cluttered. But this isn’t what strikes Gilrein as he’s eased down into position atop the shoe-fitting stool. It’s the simple fact of seeing it all in person, witnessing what, until now, he’d only imagined based on bits and pieces pulled from conversations with his wife. All of the components he’d amassed are present — the blackboard, the stacks of notes held down by wooden apple paperweights, the liturgical candle and the chalice on the desk, the fun-house mirror on the far wall — but none of the chamber’s furnishings match up to their imagined corollaries. Everything’s off at least a little, larger or smaller or in a different place.
Even the Inspector’s voice, mumbling as he rummages in a bottom desk drawer, has a different timber to it. These words—miserable bastards … where did I put it—have a higher pitch, a different rhythm to the prosody, than Gilrein had ever allowed for.