Carrion Comfort (61 page)

“Yeah,” I had Louis say, “I got something good here.” He reached under his shirt, pulled the pistol free, and shot Calvin in the stomach from two feet away. The tall boy did not go down. He staggered backward, put his hand to the hole in his coat front, and said, “
Fuck
, man.” The twins took one look and ran back toward Queen Lane. The twenty-year-old named Trout tugged a long-barreled revolver from under his coat. Louis swiveled, leveled the pistol, and shot Trout in the left eye. There was no way to muffle the noise.

Calvin had gone down to his knees in the street, holding his stomach with both hands and looking irritated. He grabbed at Louis’s leg when I tried to walk by. “Hey, Jesus fuck, man, why’d you do that?”

There were three sharp, flat sounds from the direction the twins had run toward parked cars on Queen Lane and something hit Louis in the upper part of his left arm. I blocked the pain for both of us, but felt the numbness there. He raised the pistol and emptied it in the direction from which the shots had come. Someone screamed and there was another shot, but no impact.

I had Louis drop the revolver and rip open Calvin’s coat, pulling the shotgun free. He stepped over and pried the pistol out of Trout’s clenched hand. Three more shots slapped from the direction of Queen Lane and something struck Calvin with the sound of a hammer hitting a side of beef. Incredibly, the tall boy still clung to Louis’s leg. “Oh, fuck, why, man?” he kept repeating softly. Louis shoved him away, slid the target pistol in his coat pocket, hefted the shortened shotgun, and ran for the side of the apartment building. There were no more shots from the direction of Queen Lane.

Vincent had cornered the girl in a burned-out row house not far from Germantown Avenue. He stood just inside the doorway and listened to her stumble around amid the charred timbers and tumbled stairways in the rear of the structure. The windows were boarded. As far as we knew, there was no exit except for the single doorway. I used the full force of my will to make Vincent move just inside the door and to squat in the darkness there, listening, sniffing the air, smelling the faint, sweet scent of the woman’s fear and moving the scythe blade gently back and forth.

Louis stepped through the side door of the apartment building, moving quickly so as not to silhouette himself against the lighter doorway. Those inside must have heard the shots. Or found the bodies on the third floor.

There were no shots as Louis moved quickly down the hall. He stopped outside the first room and peered in. There was no light. Something moved down the hall in the direction of the main stairway and Louis fired the shotgun, the recoil flinging his right arm up. He braced the short stock against his thigh to pump another shell into the chamber and then squatted, watching for shadows.

For a second I had the sense-impression overlay of the two young men, Vincent and Louis, more than a mile apart, squatting in almost identical positions, ears straining to hear the slightest sound. Then there was a flash and an echoing roar, plaster pelted Louis’s cheeks, and Vincent and I flinched reflexively even as I had Louis up and running toward the flash, firing, pausing to pump in another shell, running again.

There was the sound of footsteps on the littered stairs. Someone shouted from the second floor.

Louis squatted at the base of the stairs while I thought it out. Louis was eminently expendable. Already his reflexes had been dulled by the shock of the small bullet in his left upper arm. I would love to Use one of the others in the building, but that was too much to ask; already I was straining to keep Anne alert on the first floor of Grumblethorpe, hold Vincent in check in the burned-out row house, and keep Louis functioning. I wanted the blue-eyed Negro. I wanted him very badly. I also wanted to see the sheriff again, to get as close as possible. I had questions to ask of him, and possible uses for him after I received the answers.

A large handgun flashed from the next landing and a piece of banister splintered away. Louis crouched lower. There were four of them. Marvin, who had loaded a heavy revolver and laughed when the sheriff had asked for it back in the Community House. Leroy, the bearded one, who had been carrying a shortened shotgun identical to the one Louis now held. The sheriff, who had no weapon visible. And Jackson, the older Negro, who had been carrying a blue backpack. Also, G. B. and G. R., the young twins, might at that minute be returning with their cheap little pistols.

Louis ran up the stairs, stumbling once, missed a step and fell forward onto the second-floor landing. A shotgun blasted from fifteen feet away.

Something ripped at Louis’s scalp and the side of his face. I blocked the pain but used the back of his hand to touch his cheek and left ear. The left ear was gone. Louis extended the shotgun straight-armed and fired in the direction of the flash.

“God
damn
it,” shouted a black voice I thought was Leroy’s.

A handgun roared from the opposite direction and a bullet pierced Louis’s calf and struck a railing slat. I had him run in the direction of the handgun flash, pumping the shotgun by bracing it against his chest. Someone ran down the dark hallway ahead of him and then created a racket slipping and falling. Louis stopped, found a lighter shadow against the dark background, raised the shotgun. The figure rolled into a black rectangle of a doorway just as Louis fired. The muzzle flash showed the one named Marvin rolling out of sight even as the doorway splintered.

Louis pumped, extended the shotgun around the corner, and squeezed the trigger. Nothing. He pumped and fired again. Nothing. I had him throw the useless weapon even as the handgun flashed again and something struck Louis hard on the left collarbone, spinning him around. He struck a wall and slid to the floor, pulling out the long-barreled pistol as he fell. There was another shot, high, striking the wall three feet above Louis’s head. I helped him aim carefully, very carefully, precisely where the muzzle flash had been.

The pistol did not fire. Louis fumbled for a safety catch, found a lever, pushed it down. He fired twice toward the corner and then rolled to his left over his dead arm, struggling to his feet.

Louis ran into someone, felt the breath go out of himself and heard it go out of the other man even as the two crashed into the corner. I knew from the size of the figure that it was the sheriff. I raised the pistol until it touched his chest.

Light exploded into our eyes. Louis backed away and I had the frozen image of the sheriff standing there, triggering the electronic flash on the camera at his side. There was a second flash, a third; Louis tried to blink away blue retinal echoes, and I turned him toward the real threat, pistol extended, but too late; even as we turned and squinted through blue haze the gang leader was crouching with the heavy revolver braced in both hands, squeezing, squeezing.

I felt no pain but sensed the impact as the first bullet caught Louis in the groin and the second one struck his chest with the sound of splintering ribs. I would have Used him still if the third bullet had not struck him in the face.

There was a loud rushing noise and I lost the contact. As many times as I have experienced the death of someone I was Using, it remains an unsettling experience, like being cut off in mid-conversation on the telephone.

I rested a moment, sensing only the hiss of the heater, the scabbed face of the life-size doll, and the now-audible whispering of the nursery walls. “
Melanie
,” they called.
“Melanie, there is danger. Listen to us.”

I listened even as I returned my attention to Vincent.

The noises in the back of the charcoal-smelling row house had all but stopped. The girl had nowhere to go.

I felt the adrenaline surge through Vincent’s powerful body as he stood, hefted the balanced deadliness of the scythe, and moved surely and silently toward her through the darkness.

T
hey operated on Saul Laski on Monday afternoon. He was unconscious about twenty minutes and woozy for another hour. When he was aware of his surroundings— the same small cell he had been in since Sunday morning— he peeled back the dressings and inspected the incision.

They had cut into the fleshy part of the inside of his lower left arm, about three inches above the faded tattoo of his camp number. The surgery had been competently carried out, the stitches carefully done. Despite the postoperative soreness and swelling, Saul could make out a lump that had not been there before. They had inserted something about the size of a thick quarter beneath the large muscle of his forearm. Saul replaced the dressings and lay back to think.

He had had much time to think. It had been a surprise when they had not released him or used him for some purpose on Sunday morning. He was certain that they had brought him to Philadelphia for a reason.

The helicopter had landed at a remote section of a large airport, and Saul had been blindfolded and transferred to a limousine. From the stops and starts and muffled street sounds, he was sure that they had driven through busy parts of the city. Once he heard the hum of bridge metal under tires.

They had bumped across a rough area before stopping. If it had not been for city sounds— a distant siren, shouts, the rush of a commuter train moving up to speed—Saul would have thought they were out in the country. Not the country then, but an open, muddy, rutted area in the middle of a city. An empty lot? Construction site? Park land? He had gone up three steps before being led through a door, right down a narrow corridor, right again. He had bumped the wall twice and something about the feel of it and the echoes in the narrow room made him believe he was in a trailer or mobile home.

The cell was less sturdy and impressive than the one in Washington. There was a cot, a chemical toilet, a small ventilator grill through which came muted voices, occasional laughter. Saul would have killed for a book. It was odd how the human organism adapted to almost any condition, but he could never get used to going entire days without reading. He remembered as a boy in the Lodz ghetto how his father had taken it upon himself to list available books and set up a sort of lending library. Sometimes those who were being shipped to the camps brought the books with them and Saul’s father scratched the title off the list with a sigh, but usually the tired men and sad-eyed women returned them religiously, sometimes with a bookmark still in place. “You will finish it when you return,” Saul’s father would say and the people would nod.

Two or three times Colben came in to carry on a halfhearted interrogation, but Saul felt the man’s lack of interest. Like Saul, Colben was waiting. Everyone in the complex of trailers was waiting. Saul could feel it. Waiting for what?

Saul used the time to think. He thought about the Oberst, Melanie Fuller, Colben, Barent, and the unknown others. For years he had labored under a basic and fatal misperception. He had thought that if he could
understand
the psychology of such evil that he could cure it. He realized that he had been searching for the Oberst not only for his own clouded personal reasons, but also with the same eager scientific curiosity that an immunologist at the Centers for Disease Control would try to track down and isolate a new and lethal virus. It was interesting. Intellectually stimulating. Find it, understand it, cure it.

But there would be no antibodies for this plague bacillus.

For years Saul had been aware of the research and theories of Lawrence Kohlberg. Kohlberg had devoted his life to studying ethical and moral development. For a psychiatrist steeped in postwar psychotherapy theory, Kohlberg’s musings seemed simplistic to the point of childishness, but lying in his cell listening to the whisper of ventilation, Saul realized how much sense Kohlberg’s theory of moral development made in this situation.

Kohlberg had discovered seven levels of moral development— supposedly consistent through disparate cultures, times, and places. A Level One was the essential infant— no sense of good or bad, all actions regulated by needs and wants, actions inhibited only by negative stimuli. The classic pleasure-pain basis for ethical judgments. By Level Two, humans responded to “right and wrong” by accepting the authority of power. The big people know best. A Level Three person was fixated on rules. “I followed orders.” Level Four ethics were dictated by the majority. A Level Five person devoted his or her life to creating and defending laws that best served the widest common good, while defending the legal rights even of those whose views the Level Five person could not accept. Level Five people made wonderful A.C.L.U. lawyers. Saul had known his share of Level Fives in New York. Level Sixes were able to transcend the legalistic fixation of Level Fives, focusing on the common good and higher ethical realities across national, cultural, and societal boundaries. Level Sevens responded
only
to universal principles. Level Sevens appeared to be represented by the occasional Jesuses, Gandhis, and Buddha’s.

Kohlberg was not an ideologue— Saul had met him several times and enjoyed his boyish sense of humor— and the researcher enjoyed pointing out simple paradoxes arising from his own hierarchy of moral development. America, Kohlberg had said at one cocktail party at Hunter College, was a Level Five nation, established and founded by the most incredible assortment of practical Level Sixes in any nation’s history, and was populated primarily by Level Fours and Threes. Kohlberg stressed that in day-to-day decisions we often ranged
below
our highest level of moral development, but we
never
went higher than our developmental level. Kohlberg would sadly cite the inevitable destruction of all Level Sevens’ teachings. Christ handing his legacy to the Level Three Paul, the Buddha being represented by generations of priests never capable of rising above Level Six and rarely reaching that.

But the one thing Kohlberg never joked about was his later research. He found— to his early amazement and disbelief, fading to acceptance and shock— that there was a Level Zero. There were human beings beyond the fetal stage who had no moral bearings whatsoever; not even plea-sure/pain stimulus was a reliable guide to these people— if “people” was what they were.

A Level Zero could walk up to a fellow citizen on the street, kill that person on a whim, and walk away without the slightest trace of guilt or afterthought. Level Zeroes did not want to be caught and punished, but did not base their actions upon avoidance of punishment. Nor was it a simple case of the plea sure of the forbidden criminal act outweighing fear of punishment. Level Zeroes could not differentiate criminal acts from everyday functions; they were morally blind. Hundreds of researchers were testing Kohlberg’s hypotheses, but the data seemed solid, the conclusions convincing. At any given time, in any given culture,
one or two
percent of the population was at a Level Zero stage of human moral development.

They came for Saul on Monday afternoon. Colben and Haines held him while a third man injected him. He was unconscious in three minutes. When he awoke later with a headache and sore left arm, someone had inserted something in his flesh.

Saul inspected the incision, shrugged, and rolled over to think.

It was sometime Tuesday, he did not know when, that they released him. Haines blindfolded him while Colben spoke. “We’re going to let you go. You’re not to go six blocks in any direction beyond the place where we release you. You’re not to use the telephone. Someone will be in touch later to tell you what to do next. Talk to no one who does not speak to you first. If you break any of these rules, it will go hard on your nephew Aaron, Deborah, and the children. Do you understand this perfectly?”

“Yes.”

They led him to the limousine. The ride lasted less than five minutes. Colben pulled the blindfold off and pushed Saul out the open door.

Saul stood on a curb and blinked stupidly in the dim afternoon light. He looked too late to make out the license plate on the retreating limousine. Saul stepped back, bumped into a black woman carrying a shopping bag, apologized, and could not stop grinning. He walked along the narrow sidewalk, taking in every detail of the brick city street, worn shops, gray clouds . . . a paper blowing against a copper-green lamppost. Saul walked quickly, ignoring the pain in his left arm, crossing against the light, waving inanely to a cursing trolley driver. He was FREE.

Saul knew it was an illusion. Undoubtedly some of the people he was walking past on the street were watching
him
, following him. Some of the passing cars and vans almost certainly carried humorless men in dark suits, whispering into their radios. The bump on his arm probably contained a radio transmitter or explosive device or both. It simply did not matter.

Saul’s pockets were empty so he walked up to the first man he saw— a huge, black man in a worn red mackinaw— and asked for a quarter. The black man stared at the strange bearded apparition, raised a massive hand as if to swat Saul away, and then shook his head and handed Saul a five-dollar bill. “Get help, brother,” growled the giant.

Saul went into a corner coffee shop, changed the five for quarters, and used the pay phone in the foyer to call the Israeli Embassy in Washington. They could not connect him with Aaron Eshkol or Levi Cole. Saul gave his name. The receptionist did not audibly gasp, but her voice tone shifted as she said, “Yes, Dr. Laski. If you can hold one minute I am sure that Mr. Cohen would like to speak to you.”

“I’m calling from a pay phone in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,” said Saul. He gave the number. “I’m out of quarters, can you call me back so we can keep this line open?”

“Of course,” said the Israeli Embassy receptionist.

Saul hung up. The phone rang, the receiver buzzed once when he lifted it, and the line went dead. He moved to a second phone, tried to make a collect call to the Embassy, and listened to the second line go dead.

He stepped out onto the sidewalk, walking aimlessly. Moddy and his family were dead. Saul had known it in his heart, but now he
knew
it. They could do little else to him now. Saul stopped, looked around, tried to spot the agents following him. There were few white men visible, but that meant nothing; the FBI had black agents.

A handsome black man in an expensive camel coat crossed the street and approached Saul. The man had strong, broad features, a wide smile, and large mirrored sunglasses. He carried an expensive leather briefcase. The man grinned as if he knew Saul, stopped, and removed a deerskin glove before offering his hand. Saul took it.

“Welcome, my little pawn,” the man said in perfect Polish. “It is time you joined our game.”

“You’re the Oberst.” Saul felt a strange rippling, shifting sensation deep inside himself. He shook his head and the feeling faded somewhat.

The black man smiled and spoke in German. “Oberst. An honorable title and one I have not heard in too long a time.” He stopped in front of a Horn and Hard art restaurant and gestured. “You hungry?”

“You killed Francis.”

The man idly rubbed his cheek. “Francis? I’m afraid I do not . . . oh yes. The young detective. Well . . .” He smiled and shook his head. “Come, I will treat us to a late lunch.”

“You know they are watching us,” said Saul. “Of course. And we are watching them. Not the most productive of activities at the best of times.” He opened the door for Saul. “After you,” he said in English.

“My name is Jensen Luhar,” said the black man as they sat at a table in the almost empty restaurant. Luhar had ordered a cheeseburger, onion rings, and a vanilla malt. Saul stared at a cup of coffee.

“Your name is Wilhelm von Borchert,” said Saul. “If there ever was a Jensen Luhar, he is long since destroyed.”

Jensen Luhar made a curt motion with his hand and removed his sunglasses. “A matter of semantics at this point. Are you enjoying the game?”

“No. Is Aaron Eshkol dead?”

“Your nephew? Yes, I am afraid he is.”

“Aaron’s family?”

“Also deceased.”

Saul took a deep breath. “How?”

“As far as I can tell, your Mr. Colben sent his pet Haines and some others to your nephew’s home. There was a fire, but I feel sure that the unfortunate family was dead before the first flames were lit.”

“Haines!”

Jensen Luhar sipped from his long straw. He took a large bite of cheeseburger, delicately dabbed at his mouth, and smiled. “You play chess, Doctor.” It was not a question. Luhar offered Saul an onion ring. Saul stared at him. Luhar swallowed it and said, “If you have any feel for the game, Doctor, you must appreciate what is going on at this moment.”

“Is that what this is for you? A game?”

“Of course. To view it as anything more would be to take life and oneself far too seriously.”

“I’m going to find you and kill you,” Saul said softly.

Jensen Luhar nodded and took another bite of his cheeseburger. “Were we to meet in person, you would certainly try. You have no choice in the matter now.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that the esteemed president of what is euphemistically known as the Island Club, a certain Mr. C. Arnold Barent, has conditioned you to fill that single purpose— killing a film producer whom the world thinks already dead.”

Saul sipped cold coffee to hide his confusion. “Barent did no such thing.”

“Of course he did,” said Luhar. “He would have had no other reason for seeing you in person. How long do you think your interview with him lasted?”

“A few minutes,” said Saul. “A few hours is more likely. The conditioning would have had two purposes: to kill me on sight and to make certain that you would never be a threat to Mr. Barent.”

“What do you mean?”

Luhar finished the last of his onion rings. “Play a simple game. Visualize Mr. Barent and then visualize yourself attacking him.”

Saul frowned but did so. It was very difficult. When he recalled Barent as he last saw him— relaxed, tanned, sitting on the ship’s balcony overlooking the sea— he was amazed to find a blend of friendship, plea sure, and loyalty stirring in him. He forced himself to imagine hurting Barent, swinging a fist toward those smooth, handsome features . . .