Benighted (35 page)

He holds his hand out to help me up. I look at it for a moment, but I don’t take it. I push against the wall and get to my feet by myself.

THIRTY-THREE

A
lly has a car, an old vehicle with dents around the doors. For someone who loves good design as he does, the car must be a trial to him, a thing of little style and less beauty that he can just about afford. Its engine runs well; I can imagine him huddled under the hood in his free time, taking apart and putting together the few worn-out wires and cogs that he owns. We hesitate in the parking lot, pause by the doors. I keep looking at him. Then he digs into his pocket and throws the keys to me without a word.

We don’t speak as I drive to the hospital.

I park the car and keep the keys in my coat pocket, and we go in together. We don’t speak to the receptionist. I turn down a corridor and Ally follows. It’s quiet in here, the air is still and somehow without temperature. Time seems to get soaked up by it. The linoleum is old, curled up at the edges, and it shines. I wonder how many hours of a man’s life cleaning a single corridor takes up.

Ally and I don’t speak. He looks through windows on one side, I look on the other. We pass a couple of people cleaning, a slight black woman with her hair in a net, a Mediterranean-looking woman, stocky and middle-aged. I could stop and ask them if they’ve seen Steven, but they work with him, they’ll care if he disappears.

It’s Ally who finds what we’re looking for, a tall white man pushing a trolley with bottles of detergent and bags of waste. Ally sees him through a window, and calls to me with a quiet, “Hey.” He moves aside as I go to look through.

I hadn’t expected him to look so young. Fair hair, stocky, bent over his mop. I can see the side of his face, bent toward the floor, and I know it’s him. The features, the square forehead and wide jaw and rounded, narrow nose, they’re familiar. I can see why Carla thought for a moment that she recognized his brother’s face. He doesn’t look like David, though, not really. He’s big, Steven, muscular in a way that looks almost misplaced, an accident of build rather than the product of deliberate exercise. He doesn’t move like a big man, he doesn’t have Hugo’s deliberation, there’s no sense of strut or grace or power. Steven’s big like a teenager, loaded down with a body he isn’t sure how to use. I keep expecting him to bump into himself.

We wait for him to come into the corridor. He pushes the trolley ahead of him, and doesn’t really look at us, starts to steer around.

“Steven Harper?” I say.

“Yeah?” He stops the cart but keeps his hand on it. The trash bags swing.

“Come with us, please.”

He frowns. There’s a mild belligerence in his face, as if he was accustomed to orders he didn’t like, but no real fear.

“You’re under arrest. Come with us, please.” I take the DORLA card out of my pocket.

He studies it for several seconds before he turns and starts to run.

Ally catches him, pushes him against the wall. Though Ally’s fit, he’s also rangy and Steven’s bulk must outweigh him by pounds, and a struggle in these silent corridors is wrong—it’s like shouting in church, besides which, the outcome isn’t clear. So I take a shortcut. It’s only Ally who will see, and he knows the worst of me already.

It’s a few quiet paces to come up behind Steven and touch my gun to the back of his neck.

“Hold still,” I say. My voice is calm. I don’t feel anything but a quiet necessity. A year ago I might have made some crack, that the wards were overcrowded and I didn’t want to add to them, that I was curious to test the doctors’ skill. I might have made a joke about shooting him. “Hold still” is all I need to say. If he threatens us too much, I really might kill him.

Ally looks at the gun for a long moment before shoving Steven away from him and twisting his arms into the handcuffs.

“I’m going to put the gun in my pocket,” I say. “If you try to run again, I’m going to take it out.” The click of the safety catch is the loudest thing in the lulled, soundless corridor.

We push him through the lobby of the DORLA building, and no one stops us. He isn’t struggling. He keeps looking at me, his eyes on my hands, his big shoulders humped against us. His eyes are dull. We take the stairs down to the prisoners’ block, and he looks at his feet and descends with ponderous care.

There’s a murmur of conversation as we push open the door, which stops at the clang.

“Who have you got now?” Albin says. He stands away from the bars. His focus isn’t on Steven, but on Ally.

“Dr. Stein, I’d like your attention, please.” Carla sits huddled in her corner, her head wrapped in her arms.

Paul stands up, approaches. He opens his mouth as if to speak to me, but then closes it again with a look of helplessness. I suppose he wanted me to greet him.

“Do any of you recognize this man?” I don’t turn my head. I keep watching them as I ask.

“Not this again,” Albin says. He doesn’t speak with contempt; he sounds doleful.

“I’m not saying anything,” Steven says behind me.

I hear him flinch as Ally does something to him. “I wasn’t talking to you,” I say as calmly as I can. It shouldn’t be bothering me, the thought of them seeing me harry someone.

There’s a general shaking of heads, while Carla stays huddled, looking at him. She’s chewing her lower lip, white teeth biting into soft pink flesh; her skin is very pale under the lights.

“I know her,” Steven says. “That’s Dr. Stein, she works at the hospital, I know who she is.” He says it fast, with something like aggression, as if he thinks identifying Carla will put him in our favor.

“Ally, don’t,” I say without looking around. There’s no call to hurt him.

“I don’t know him very well.” Carla looks across to Albin’s cage. “He’s a janitor at St. Veronica’s, that’s all. Why are you arresting him?”

“Ally?” Paul says to me.

“What?” I’m irritated, pulled off course. There’s so much to get through before this can be over.

“That’s Ally.” Paul indicates Ally without looking at him. “Is he the one who called the apartment, the one you don’t want to talk about?”

I struggle for a moment before I remember. Yes, Paul’s heard his name, the day Ally called to warn me about the Molotov cocktail someone threw at us. We’ll have to ask the Harpers about that; there was a wave of vandal attacks after we started the purge, but that one came before it. It won’t surprise me at all if they had something to do with it. Paul heard me say Ally’s name, he asked me about him. I hear Ally shift behind me, look at Paul in front of me. There’s no way I can turn.

“That’s the one.” I say it as dryly as I can. I mustn’t sound shaken. Paul will see guilt, secrets. Ally will think I’m trying to push him out of my life, that I don’t want to mention him to my friends. And they’d have reason to. They would have reasons.

Paul studies him. My breath quickens, and I have a sudden impulse to step between them, block Paul out.

“Well,” my voice rings too high in the space, “I reckon we’ll put him in block D, Ally. Not with any of his associates.” This is important, Ally, it’s worth thinking about, we’ve got a hold over him if he doesn’t find out his brother’s here, and that’s useful information, you want this investigation to come out right, please think about what I’m saying…

“Don’t bother introducing us, I know who that is,” Ally says. I turn and see him standing there, behind his prisoner, and he’s standing still.

“Shall we take him to D, then?”

Nobody moves.

“Do you still not want to talk about it, Lola?” says Paul. “It seems like we’re running out of secrets.”

Please, Paul, keep quiet, remember where you are. You don’t know all my secrets. This one, I know now, I could have told him. If we’d been alone together, if we could have touched each other, I could have told him what happened between Ally and me, I could have tried to explain it. But with Ally standing right here, Paul must know I can’t talk about it. Telling Ally I hate the memories he pushed into my head is one thing. Saying it to another man in his presence is another. After everything that’s happened, all the good and the bad, I can’t do that to him.

“I don’t think so,” I say. “We’re not out of secrets yet.”

“Glad you remember where your priorities lie, princess.” Ally doesn’t look at me as he says it, he doesn’t take his eyes off Paul.

I turn to him, whisper as quietly as I can. “Speaking of priorities, Ally, can we please take the prisoner to block D and stop hanging around here?”

“Princess?” Paul says. “What happened to angel?”

Dear God. “Paul, for your own sake, I think you should stop it.” I try not to sound too much like I’m begging.

He looks at me. How can his eyes on my face still make my heart shiver? “It’s all right, Lola, I wasn’t really talking to you.”

“This isn’t a bar, for God’s sake.” I give up my careful phrasing. No one else is bothering. “Don’t keep starting something. You’re going to get your head kicked in. And Ally, if I find that you’ve done it, I’m going to be very upset.”

“Warning me off him?” Ally says. “Sweet.”

“Ally, can we talk about this somewhere else?”

“Lola doesn’t think you did it,” Ally says to Paul. They stare at each other. If this was a moon night, they’d be circling. No, they wouldn’t. Ally wouldn’t.

“She’s right,” Paul says.

“Why do you think she thinks that?”

Paul shrugs without relaxing his stance. “I don’t know. Maybe she’s brighter than you.”

“You think?”

“If you’re just looking for the nearest lyco to lock up and figure any of us will do, yeah, I think she probably is.”

Ally nods. “See, I think she’s stupid. I think she made it easy for you to con her. But then, she’s easy anyway. God knows, she’s easily had. But I guess you know that as well as I do?”

“Ally.” My hands are shaking so hard I can’t control them. They move to my gun of their own will. “Take the prisoner to block D right away, or God help me.” Steven Harper watches us with a withdrawn glare, taking it in. God damn Ally to hell for doing this to me, but damn Paul too for being stupid and starting it, and damn myself because I should have seen this coming. Not that my damning anyone will make much difference. In this white prison, I can’t see God forgiving any of us.

“We have a prisoner to deal with, Ally,” I say. “And since he killed two of us, I think you might try getting mad at him.”

“I didn’t kill anyone,” says Steven. “I didn’t kill any of you, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

My hand settles in my pocket. I hoped this wouldn’t happen; I was still foolish enough to want Paul to see me the way he thought I was. It isn’t possible anymore. My hand closes around the gun, and I let go of the last piece of me that hoped for better things.

“Harper, turn around.” I aim the gun at his wide, solid chest, and he takes a step back. “Out through the door and up the stairs. Ally, would you open the door for him? I don’t think he can work the lock in those cuffs.”

I don’t look at anyone as I escort them both into the corridor. I keep my eyes focused on the dull, dark metal, like a real agent of the law, like a woman with no one watching, like a woman on her own.

We lock him up in a cell by himself, no one to talk to, no one to tell him things. As we pass into the corridor, I grab Ally by the arm. He turns, towers over me. I let go, hold my fist against my stomach.

“If you ever do that again, I swear, Ally, I will kill you. You think this is about loyalty? What about the dead men, are you loyal to them?” I’m hissing at him, my voice echoless along the stairwell. “You want to call me names, do it to my face, don’t do it in front of the prisoners, don’t fuck up this arrest and this case, because I’ve worked my guts out to get this right and if you fuck it up now I’ll kill you.”

“I fuck it up? I wasn’t the one who started all this, princess. Kill your man downstairs if you want to keep the peace.”

“Don’t you dare start saying he started it. If you start pointing fingers like a kid, I’ll kill you.”

“You didn’t mind fingers when you were a kid.” His hand comes around my head, digging into my scalp, dragging me back. I struggle against him, staggering a little to keep my on feet, and I don’t answer, I don’t have anything to say that can take any of this away. He pulls my head down and his arm is behind me, forcing me forward. His face is twisted around the eyes, his lips are tight. Nausea rises in my chest. I struggle to keep breathing, one breath, another, if I can breathe calmly then this will stop, and I pull against his grip. He despises me for what I let him do to me, I know that now. I can’t blame him. I despise him for it, too, and myself, and if he despised what he did, how could he feel anything but anger at the person who didn’t stop him? We struggle on the landing, tussle like two kids fighting for space, but his arms are too strong and I can smell the gunpowder on his sleeve and I can’t get out of this.

I bring my knee up. It’s a familiar move, simple. I stare at him, feeling once again the adolescent wonder to find it’s so easy to stop a man twice your size in his tracks. It isn’t a hard blow, just a knock that makes him drop my head and stagger back a few paces, hunched over. “Been there, done that,” I say. All I can do now is hurt him. I turn and run down the stairs, don’t look at him. Even now, the habits of childhood are too strong for us and he lets me go without a curse because he can’t find the words to say what I am.

THIRTY-FOUR

T
hat night, I think of Steven. That big, imprisoned young man, trapped in his clumsy body. When he furred up, his size would make him formidable.

People look at my hands and change seats on the bus. No one likes the body I’m trapped in, either. I’ve evolved, I’ve picked up weapons to get me through the gauntlet: resentment, spite, a sharp tongue. But then, I didn’t have alternatives.

I make a decision.

Steven is asleep on a pile of straw. I knock the gun against the bars to wake him, tell him to get up. He demands to know where I’m taking him, and I aim the gun and march him downstairs without a word.

When I push him through the door to the free-rangers’ block, I find most of them asleep. They wake suddenly at the sound of the door closing, sit up, all of them on guard. It’s bright down here, the lights never go off.

Albin blinks at me. “What are you doing?”

I open the cell at the end, and send Steven inside. “I’m giving you a chance to save yourselves,” I say. Paul pulls himself to his feet, and I look at him for a moment. I can’t turn away from him. I have to close my eyes to break the connection before I can go back out.

I listen in, I watch. It isn’t a secret that I’m watching the prisoners, it can’t be, because there I am, my head clamped between earphones, waiting. And it’s known that I moved Steven Harper from block D into his present company. Nobody says anything about it. Possibly I’m contagious, possibly they’re embarrassed, there are lots of reasons why people would wish to avoid me nowadays, but I start to wonder if the real reason is that they’re stumped. Nothing out of any of the captives, and Seligmann, the prize, the one that got away, is out in the ether, tantalizlingly there but invisible. There have been other arrests, mine are not the only ones. People whose hate mail we’ve been ignoring for years, people we knew sprayed curses on the walls of our building, people with records for moon loitering. Jerry, my client and Paul’s, the wino who brought us into contact, is locked up, awaiting trial, him and dozens like him. No bail, no release before trial, no outside contact, it’s an across-the-board decree from the highest in our ranks. There have been a lot of distraught friends and family in our lobby, demanding to know whether we have this person or that in our confines; a few of them got put in the cells, too, the aggressive ones, the ones who provoked attendants into deciding to take the fight out of them. It’s very stupid to annoy a DORLA agent in such times.

And still, nothing. No confessions, no good evidence, no end in sight. And somewhere on the sidelines there’s me, doing unaccountable things. I brought in the free-rangers, after all.

A day passes with not much exchange. Paul lies on his back in the straw, his hand over his eyes. He doesn’t say anything, and it becomes clear, after a while, that he’s suffering from a migraine. Everyone stops their desultory conversation about the food they’ve been given—which Steven was putting the odd comment into—and tries to stay still; they pass him some of their straw, which he doesn’t seem to have the energy to arrange; Carla makes him drape Albin’s jacket over his eyes, to shut out the light. I watch this for half an hour, biting my thumbnail, pulled this way and that. In the end, I get up, go to a storage cupboard, go into their cell block, stepping as softly as I can.

They look at me without a word.

“This is the best we can do,” I say. “First-aid kit. There’s a couple of painkilling things in there, I don’t know how they’d work.” I push it through the bars of Carla’s cell. “I’ve counted what’s in there. If I find there’s more missing than should be…” I need a threat, but I can’t threaten to send in interrogators, to withhold food, to play white noise to keep them awake at nights. I could, but I can’t bear to. “Then I’ll report myself to my boss for letting you misuse government-issue drugs, and they’ll pull me out of here and you’ll lose your last link.” I speak as quietly as I can. Paul lifts the edge of the jacket off his eyes, freezes for a moment as the light gets in and then lays it down again.

Carla looks at me, her face uncertain.

“Thank you.” It’s Albin speaking, his voice surprised but not without courtesy.

With a sudden wrench, Paul sits up. His face convulses as he does, he puts his hands on either side of his head as if to hold it together. “I just want you to know,” he says, hoarse, “that the last migraine I had, the one I had when you were there, that was after we knew someone had seen us in the garden. We didn’t know it was you.” His head is sinking down, his hands clench in his hair, but his eyes, a little crossed, stay on me. “The others thought I should stop seeing you. They thought I was endangering us. But I wouldn’t. That’s where that migraine came from, because they wanted me to leave you. And I wouldn’t.”

His face is white against the tiles, and he sags down again, covering his eyes. He lies still.

“Well,” I say. My voice shakes a little. “Now I know.”

I turn around and leave without saying anything else.

“Does anyone know you’re here?” Albin asks Steven.

“No.” He doesn’t move his head as he talks.

“Did they charge you with anything?”

He frowns at Albin. “Charge me? They just pulled me in here.”

Paul lies with Albin’s jacket folded under his head. His eyes are half open, his tentative fingers are rubbing at his temples in precise, masseur’s circles.

“That’s pretty bad for you,” Albin says. He sits leaning against the wall, his neat legs trailing across the straw, one hand resting in his lap. It’s an informal posture for him, asymmetrical. He looks at Steven with amiable concern. “Hard to know what to tell them.”

“What’d they do to your face?” Steven hunches. He isn’t facing Albin; he looks sideways to talk, his eyes on the scar Ellaway put onto Albin’s face months ago.

Albin shrugs. “Like I said, it’s hard to know what to tell them.”

Steven frowns, rubs his fists together. He drops the conversation.

I don’t watch when the interrogators go down. I take off the headphones and walk quietly back to my office.

Ally isn’t among them.

That doesn’t make it any better.

Afterward, there’s a kind of lull. They sit in their cages, separate, each concerned with their own bruises. I didn’t watch, I couldn’t, but now I stare, wide-eyed, trying to see the remnants of every blow. It doesn’t look too bad, I tell myself, there’s no permanent damage done. Hard questioning, with the occasional slap to remind them that they’re helpless. Steven’s nose is bleeding, he keeps touching it with the back of his hand, always surprised to find new blood there.

“Put your head back,” Carla says. “Pinch the bridge of your nose.”

He looks at her, creases his face and then does as she says.

“No, the bridge. Higher up. No, not like that, like this, look.”

Steven studies her.

Carla sighs. “No, farther back.”

He cranes his head, his hand blocking his field of vision. Carla shakes her head, points, looking as if she’s trying not to call him stupid.

I’m seeing what Steven sees. There really isn’t a difference between how she does it and how he does.

Carla points one more time, then lowers her hand as if tired, gives him a brief, dead-eyed smile that wouldn’t convince Leo.

It’s the smile that does it, and her posture. Something in the way she lays her hands in her lap. I see suddenly, and with a slight sense of shock, that she’s doing it on purpose.

The nights should be getting shorter—we’re past the solstice—but on my pad of blankets, each night seems longer than the last.

“You know, you were talking in your sleep,” Albin tells Steven.

“Yeah?” Steven rubs his head, looks at Albin’s worn, imperturbable face.

“Yeah, you were.” Paul is standing up, leaning against the bars, stretching one leg out behind him.

“What was I saying?”

There’s a definite pause before Albin shrugs. “Oh, nothing really.”

He doesn’t say it convincingly.

I play the tapes over. Steven’s a sound sleeper, he hasn’t said a word.

“Do you think we might get out again if there’s another power failure?” Albin asks Sarah.

She looks at him, dark-eyed. “Yeah. And maybe it’ll rain keys as well.”

“You got out during a power failure?” Steven says. He leans forward.

Albin shrugs. “It was a while ago.” I have to hand it to him, he can sound nonchalant in a prison cell. “Nothing major.”

Steven glances around. There’s nothing for him to see. “I guess that’s why they’ve got me here,” he says.

I raise my hands to the headphones, look at the switchboard, the camera, anything that might not be recording this. The green light is on, but I want to break the camera open to see if it’s working.

“What, you got out during a power failure?” Albin looks only mildly interested.

“No, I mean, loitering. Being outside, yeah?”

“Well, yeah.” Albin shrugs again, unimpressed. “That’s mostly what they lock people up for.”

“Yeah, but I mean, I was really—out, you know?”

“Everyone who’s out is out, kiddo.” Sarah glares at him. She’s been huddled in a corner for the last hour; her eyes are still wet. Her voice is too high. “You think it’s something special?”

Steven glares back at her, turns to Albin. “How much have you been out?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Can’t really remember when we started.”

“You been doing it for years, then?”

“How come you work in a hospital?” Albin says.

“What?”

“How come you work in a hospital?”

Steven rubs his hands together. “I don’t know. Tried to train as a nurse, once.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t do that.” Carla’s voice is soft, musical. The edge to it is narrow as a scalpel.

“What? Why not?”

Carla shrugs, smiles. She tries to toss her hair out of her eyes, manages quite well despite her sprained neck. “Well, you wouldn’t be very good at it, would you?”

Steven sits back, stares at her, too startled even to scowl.

“Well, I saw the floors after you’d cleaned them.” Carla sighs, as if he’d asked. “And the way you crashed around the beds, disturbing the patients, it wasn’t very good. I don’t think you had what it took.”

“What the—what the fuck do you know about it?” Steven manages. This pretty, well-spoken woman has decided to insult him for no reason. I’d be upset, too.

Carla shrugs, gesticulates, her hand waving through the air like a dancer’s. His back turned to Steven, Albin leans forward, watching. Carla smiles, her white little teeth glittering, her eyes crossed like a cat’s, her head at a dizzy angle. I can see her hand, tangling straw behind her back, but Steven just sees a smiling mask, and the wheeling, drunken pitch of her voice could be mistaken for carelessness. “Come along. You don’t think no one saw you take them, do you?”

“What the—what are—” Steven gets to his feet, goes up to the edge of his cell, but there are bars and then space, Paul’s cell is between them, and he can’t loom over her so far away. Paul sits cross-legged underneath them, one fist resting against the other.