'You better not,' he said. 'When you quit smoking, you get fat.'
Later, he lay on top of the made bed with his hands crossed behind his neck, looking up into the darkness. It was a quarter to one in the morning, but he had never felt less like sleeping. It was only now, in the dark, that some disjointed memory of the time between finding Ginelli's hand on the seat of the Nova and finding himself in this room and on the phone to his wife began to come back to him.
There was a sound in the darkened room.
No.
But there was. A sound like breathing.
No, it's your imagination.
But it wasn't imagination; that was Heidi's scripture, not William Halleck's. He knew better than to believe some things were just his imagination. If he hadn't before he did now. The crust moved, like a rind of white skin over living flesh; and even now, six hours after Lemke had given it to him, he knew that if he touched the aluminum plate, he would find it was warm.
'purpurfargade ansiktet,' he murmured in the dark, and the sound was like an incantation.
When he saw the hand, he only saw it. When he realized half a second later what he was looking at, he screamed and lurched away from it. The movement caused the hand to rock first one way and then the other– it looked as if Billy had asked how it was and it was replying with a comme ci, comme !pa gesture. Two of the ball bearings slipped out of it and rolled down to the crack between the bench and the back of the seat.
Billy screamed again, palms shoved against the shelf of jaw under his chin, fingernails pressed into his lower lip, eyes huge and wet. His heart set up a large weak clamor in his chest, and he realized that the pie was tipping to the right. It was within an ace of falling to the Nova's floorboards and shattering.
He grabbed it and righted it. The arrhythmia in his chest eased; he could breathe again. And that coldness Heidi would later hear in his voice began to steal over him. Ginelli was probably dead– no, on second thought, strike the probably. What had he said? If she ever sees me again before I see her, William, I ain't never going to have to change my shirt again.
Say it aloud, then.
No, he didn't want to do that. He didn't want to do that, and he didn't want to look at the hand again. So he did both.
'Ginelli's dead,' he said. He paused, and then, because that seemed to make it a little better: 'Ginelli's dead and there's nothing I can do about it. Except get the fuck out of here before a cop . . .'
He looked at the steering wheel and saw that the key was in the ignition. The hick's keyring, which displayed a picture of Olivia Newton John in a sweatband, dangled .from a piece of rawhide. He supposed the girl, Gina, might well have returned the key to the ignition when she delivered the hand– she had taken care of Ginelli, but would not presume to break whatever promises her greatgrandfather might have made to Ginelli's friend, the fabled white man from town. The key was for him. It suddenly occurred to him that Ginelli had taken a car key from one dead man's pocket; now the girl had almost surely done the same thing. But the thought brought no. chill.
His mind was very cold now. He welcomed the coldness.
He got out of the Nova, set the pie carefully on the floor, crossed to the driver's side, and got in. When he sat down, Ginelli's hand made that grisly seesawing gesture again. Billy opened the glove compartment and found a very old map of Maine inside. He unfolded it and put it over the hand. Then he started the Nova and drove down Union Street.
He had been driving almost five minutes when he realized he was going the wrong way– west instead of east. But by then he could see McDonald's golden arches up ahead in the deepening twilight. His stomach grumbled. Billy turned in and stopped at the drive-through intercom.
'Welcome to McDonald's,' the voice inside the speaker said. 'May I take your order?'
'Yes, please– I'd like three Big Macs, two large orders of french fries, and a coffee milkshake.'
Just like the old days, he thought, and smiled. Gobble it all in the car, get rid of the trash, and don't tell Heidi when you get home.
'Would you like any dessert with that?'
'Sure. A cherry pie.' He looked at the spread-out map beside him. He was pretty sure the small bulge just west of Augusta was Ginelli's ring. A wave of faintness washed through him. 'And a box of McDonaldland cookies for my friend,' he said, and laughed.
The voice read his order back to him and then finished, 'Your order comes to six-ninety, sir. Please drive through.'
'You bet,' Billy said. 'That's what it's all about, isn't it? Just driving through and trying to pick up your order.' He laughed again. He felt simultaneously very fine and like vomiting.
The girl handed him two warm white bags through the pickup window. Billy paid her, received his change, and drove on. He paused at the end of the building and picked up the old road map with the hand inside it. He folded the sides of the map under, reached out the open window, and deposited it in a trash barrel. On top of the barrel, a plastic Ronald McDonald danced with a plastic Grimace. Written on the swinging door of the trash barrel were the words
PUT LITTER IN ITS PLACE.
'That's what it's all about, too,' Billy said. He was rubbing his hand on his leg and laughing. 'Just trying to put litter in its place… and keep it there.'
This time he turned east on Union Street, heading in the direction of Bar Harbor. He went on laughing. For a while he thought he would never be able to stop– that he would just go on laughing until the day he died.
Because someone might have noticed him giving the Nova what a lawyer colleague of Billy's had once called 'a fingerprint massage' if he had done it in a relatively public place– the courtyard of the Bar Harbor Motor Inn, for instance – Billy pulled into a deserted roadside rest area about forty miles east of Bangor to do the job. He did not intend to be connected with this car in any way if he could help it. He got out, took off his sport coat, folded the buttons in,and then carefully wiped down every surface he could remember touching and every one he might have touched.
The No Vacancy light was on in front of the motor inn's office and there was only one empty parking space that Billy could see. It was in front of a dark unit, and he had little doubt that he was looking at Ginelli's John Tree room.
He slid the Nova into the space, took out his handkerchief and wiped both the wheel and the gearshift. He got the pie. He opened the door and wiped off the inside handle. He put his handkerchief back in his pocket, got out of the car, and pushed the door with his butt to close it. Then he looked around. A tired-looking mother was squabbling with a child who looked even more tired than she; two old men stood outside the office, talking. He saw no one else, sensed no one looking at him. He heard TV's inside motel rooms and, from town, barroom rock 'n' roll cranking up as Bar Harbor's summer denizens prepared to party hearty.
Billy crossed the forecourt, walked downtown, and followed his ears to the sound of the loudest rock band. The bar was called the Salty Dog, and as Billy had hoped, there were cabs -three of them, waiting for the lame, the halt, and the drunk -parked outside. Billy spoke to one of the drivers, and for fifteen dollars the cabbie was delighted to run Billy over to Northeast Harbor.
'I see you got y'lunch,' the cabbie said as Billy got in.
'Or somebody's,' Billy replied, and laughed. 'Because that's really what it's all about, isn't it? Just trying to make sure somebody gets their lunch.'
The cabbie looked dubiously at him in the rearview mirror for a moment, then shrugged. 'Whatever you say, my friend -you're paying the tab.'
A half-hour after that he had been on the phone to Heidi.
Now he lay here and listened to something breathe in the dark -something that looked like a pie but which was really a child he and that old man had created together.
Gina, he thought, almost randomly. Where is she? 'Don't hurt her'– that's what I told Ginelli. But I think if I could lay my hands on her, I'd hurt her myself … hurt her plenty, for what she did to Richard. Her hand? I'd leave that old man her head … I'd stuff her mouth full of ball bearings and leave him the head. And that's why it's a good thing I don't know where to lay my hands on her, because no one knows exactly how things like this get started; they argue about that and they finally lose the truth altogether if it's inconvenient, but everybody knows how they keep on keeping on: they take one, we take one, then they take two, and we take three … they shoot up an airport so we blow a school … and blood runs in the gutters. Because that's what it's really all about, isn't it? Blood in the gutters. Blood …
Billy slept without knowing he slept; his thoughts simply merged into a series of ghastly, twisted dreams. In some of these he killed and in some he was killed, but in all of them something breathed and pulsed, and he could never see that something because it was inside himself.
Chapter Twenty-six
MYSTERY DEATH MAY HAVE BEEN GANGLAND SLAYING
A man found shot to death last evening in the cellar of a Union Street apartment building has been identified as a New York City gangland figure. Richard Ginelli, known as 'Richie the Hammer' in underworld circles, has been indicted three times– for extortion, trafficking and sale of illegal drugs, and murder – by New York State and federal authorities. A combined state and federal investigation into Ginelli's affairs was dropped in 1981 following the violent deaths of several prosecution witnesses.
A source close to the Maine state attorney general's office said last night that the idea of a so-called 'gangland hit' had come up even before the victim's identity was learned, because of the peculiar circumstances of the murder. According to the source, one of Ginelli's hands had been removed and the word 'pig' had been written on his forehead in blood.
Ginelli was apparently shot with a large-caliber weapon, but state-police ballistics officials have so far declined to release their findings, which one state-police official termed 'also a bit unusual.'
This story was on the front page of the Bangor Daily News Billy Halleck had bought that morning. He now scanned through it one final time, looked at the photograph of the apartment building where his friend had been found, then rolled the paper up and pushed it into a trashbin with the state seal of Connecticut on the side and PUT LITTER IN ITS PLACE written on the swinging metal door.
'That is what it's all about,' he said.
'What, mister?' It was a little girl of about six with ribbons in her hair and a smear of dried chocolate on her chin. She was walking her dog.
'Nothing,' Billy said, and smiled at her.
'Marcy!' the little girl's mother called anxiously. 'Come over here!'
'Well, 'bye,' Marcy said.
'Bye, hon.' Billy watched her cross back to her mother. the small white poodle dog strutting ahead of her on its leash, toenails clicking. The girl had no more than reached her mother when the scolding began– Billy was sorry for the girl, who had reminded him of Linda when Lin was six or so, but he was also encouraged. It was one thing to have the scales tell him he had put back on eleven pounds; it was another – and better – thing to have someone treat him as a normal person again, even if the someone happened to be a six-year-old girl walking the family dog in a turnpike rest area … a little girl who probably thought there were lots of people in the world who looked like walking gantry towers.
He had spent yesterday in Northeast Harbor, not so much resting as trying to recover a sense of sanity. He would feel it coming… and then he would look at the pie sitting atop the TV in its cheap aluminum plate and it would slip.
Near dusk he had put it in the trunk of his car, and that made it a little better.
After dark, when that sense of sanity and his own deep loneliness both seemed strongest, he had found his old battered address book and had called Rhoda Simonson in Westchester County. A moment or two later he had been talking to Linda, who was deliriously glad to hear from him. She had indeed found out about the res gestae. The chain of events leading to the discovery, as well as Billy could (or wanted to) follow it was as sordid as it was predictable. Mike Houston had told his wife. His wife had told their oldest daughter, probably while drunk. Linda and the Houston girl had had some sort of kids' falling-out the previous winter, and Samantha Houston had just about broken both legs getting to Linda to tell her that her dear old mom was trying to get her dear old dad committed to a basket-weaving factory.
'What did you say to her?' Billy asked.
'I told her to stick an umbrella up her ass,' Linda said, and Billy laughed until tears squirted out of his eyes… but part of him felt sad, too. He had been gone not quite three weeks, and his daughter sounded as if she had aged three years.
Linda had then gone directly home to ask Heidi if what Samantha Houston had said was true.
'What happened?' Billy asked.
'We had a really bad fight and then afterward I said I wanted to go back to Aunt Rhoda's and she said well, maybe that wasn't such a bad idea.'
Billy paused for a moment, and then said, 'I don't know if you need me to tell you this or not, Lin, but I'm not crazy.'
'Oh, Daddy, I know that,' she said, almost scoldingly.
'And I'm getting better. Putting on weight.'
She squealed so loudly he had to pull the telephone away from his ear. 'Are you? Are you really?'
'I am, really.'
'Oh, Daddy, that's great! That's… Are you telling the truth? Are you really?'
'Scout's honor,' he said, grinning.
'When are you going home?' she asked.
And Billy, who expected to leave Northeast Harbor tomorrow morning and to walk in his own front door not much later than ten o'clock tomorrow night, answered: 'It'll still be a week or so, hon. I want to put on some more weight first. I still look pretty gross.'
'Oh,' Linda said, sounding deflated. 'Oh, okay.'
'But when I come I'll call you in time for you to get there at least six hours before me,' he said. 'You can make another lasagna, like when we came back from Mohonk, and fatten me up some more.'
'Bitchin'!' she said, laughing, and then, immediately: 'Whoops. Sorry, Daddy.'
'Forgiven,' he said. 'In the meantime, you stay right there at Rhoda's, kitten. I don't want any more yelling between you and Mom.'
'I don't want to go back until you're there anyway,' she said, and he heard bedrock in her voice. Had Heidi sensed that adult bedrock in Linda? He suspected she had– it accounted for some of her desperation on the phone last night.
He told Linda he loved her and rang off. Sleep came easier that second night, but the dreams were bad. In one of them he heard Ginelli in the trunk of his car, screaming to be let out. But when he opened the trunk it wasn't Ginelli but a bloody naked boy-child with the ageless eyes of Taduz Lemke and a gold hoop in one earlobe. The boy-child held gore-stained hands out to Billy. It grinned, and its teeth were silver needles.
'Purpurfargade ansiktet,' it said in a whining, inhuman voice, and Billy had awakened, trembling, in the cold gray Atlantic-seacoast dawn.
He checked out twenty minutes later and had headed south again. He stopped at a quarter of eight for a huge country breakfast and then could eat almost none of it when he opened the newspaper he had bought in the dispenser out front.
Didn't interfere with my lunch, though, he thought now as he walked back to the rental car. Because putting on weight again is also what it's really all about.
The pie sat on the seat beside him, pulsing, warm. He spared it a glance and then keyed the engine and backed out of the slanted parking slot. He realized that he would be home in less than an hour, and felt a strange, unpleasant emotion. He had gone twenty miles before he realized what it was: excitement.
Chapter Twenty-seven. Gypsy Pie
He parked the rental car in the driveway behind his own Buick, grabbed the Kluge bag which had been his only luggage, and started across the lawn. The white house with its bright green shutters, always a symbol of comfort and goodness and security to him, now looked strange– so strange it was really almost alien.
The white man from town lived there, he thought, but I'm not sure he's come home, after all– this fellow crossing the lawn feels more like a Gypsy. A very thin Gypsy.
The front door, flanked by two graceful electric flambeaux, opened, and Heidi came out on the front stoop. She was wearing a red skirt and a sleeveless white blouse Billy couldn't remember ever having seen before. She had also gotten her hair cut very short, and for one shocked moment he thought she wasn't Heidi at all but a stranger who looked a little like her.
She looked at him, face too white, eyes too dark, lips trembling. 'Billy?'
'I am,' he said, and stopped where he was.
They stood and looked at each other, Heidi with a species of wretched hope in her face, Billy with what felt like nothing at all in his– yet there must have been, because after a moment she burst out, 'For Christ's sake, Billy, don't look at me that way! I can't bear it!'
He felt a smile surface on his face– inside it felt like something dead floating to the top of a still lake, but it must have looked all right because Heidi answered it with a tentative, trembling smile of her own. Tears began to spill down her cheeks.
Oh, but you always did cry easy, Heidi, he thought.
She started down the steps. Billy dropped the Kluge bag and walked toward her, feeling the dead smile on his face.
'What's to eat?' he asked. 'I'm starved.'
She made him a giant meal– steak, salad, a baked potato almost as big as a torpedo, fresh green beans, blueberries in cream for dessert. Billy ate all of it. Although she never came right out and said it, every movement, every gesture, and every look she gave him conveyed the same message: Give me a second chance, Billy– please give me a second chance. In a way, he thought this was extremely funny – funny in a way the old Gypsy would have appreciated. She had swung from refusing to accept any culpability to accepting all of it.
And little by little, as midnight approached, he sensed something else in her gestures and movements: relief. She felt that she had been forgiven. That was very fine with Billy, because Heidi thinking she was forgiven was also what it was all about.
She sat across from him, watching him eat, occasionally touching his wasted face, and smoking one Vantage 100 after another as he talked. He told her about how he had chased the Gypsies up the coast; about getting the photographs from Kirk Penschley; of finally catching up to the Gypsies in Bar Harbor.
At that point the truth and Billy Halleck parted company.
The dramatic confrontation he had both hoped for and dreaded hadn't gone at all as he had expected, he told Heidi. To begin with, the old man had laughed at him. They had all laughed. 'If I could have cursed you, you would be under the earth now,' the old Gypsy told him. 'You think we are magic– all you white men from town think we are magic. If we were magic, would we be driving around in old cars and vans with mufflers held up with baling wire? If we were magic, would we be sleeping in fields? This is no magic show, white man from town -this is nothing but a traveling carny. We do business with rubes who have money burning holes in their pockets, and then we move on. Now, get out of here before I put some of these young men on you. They know a curse – it's called the Curse of the Brass Knuckles.'
'Is that what he really called you? White man from town?'
He smiled at her. 'Yes. That's really what he called me.'
He told Heidi that he had gone back to his motel room and simply stayed there for the next two days, too deeply depressed to do more than pick at his food. On the third day– three days ago – he got onto the bathroom scales and saw that he had gained three pounds in spite of how little he had eaten.
'But when I thought it over, I saw that that was no stranger than eating everything on the table and finding out I'd lost three pounds,' he said. 'And having that idea was what finally got me out of the mental rut I'd been in. I spent another day in that motel room doing some of the hardest thinking of my life. I started to realize they could have been right at the Glassman Clinic after all. Even Michael Houston could have been at least partly right, as much as I dislike the little prick.'
'Billy . . .' She touched his arm.
Скачать книгу [0.13 МБ]
Пирамида