Carrion Comfort (90 page)

“Is that a way to counteract their . . . powers?” asked Natalie.

Saul adjusted his glasses and frowned. “No, not really. I doubt if there is any way to really counteract such an ability unless one had it himself. It would be interesting to test a variety of individuals in a controlled . . .”

“Then what
good
is it?” cried Natalie, exasperated. “It offers a chance . . . a
chance
,” said Saul, “to create a sort of distant early warning system in the ce re bral cortex. With the proper conditioning and biofeedback work, I think that I can use the theta rhythm phenomenon to trigger the posthypnotic suggestions to recall the data I’ve been memorizing.”

“Data?” said Natalie, “you mean all those hours at Yad Vashem and the Ghetto Fighters’ House . . .”

“Lohame HaGeta’ot,” said Saul. “Yes. Reading the dossiers Wiesenthal sent you, memorizing the photographs and biographies and tapes while doing auto-recall in a light, self-induced trance . . .”

“But what good will sharing all those other people’s pain do if it is no defense against these mind vampires?” asked Natalie.

“Imagine a carousel slide projector,” said Saul. “The Oberst and the others have the ability to advance that neurological carousel at will and insert their own slides, intrude their own organizing will and superego on that bundle of memories, fears, and predilections that we call a personality. I am merely trying to insert more slides in the tray.”

“But you don’t know if it will work?”

“No.”

“And you don’t think it would work with me?”

Saul removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “
Something
comparable might be possible with you, Natalie, but it would have to be uniquely suited to your own background, traumatic experiences, and empathic pathways.
I
could not create the hypnotic induction sessions to produce the necessary . . . ah . . . slides.”

“But if this stuff
does
work for you, it wouldn’t work on any of the mind vampires except your Oberst.”

“I would think not. Only he would share the common background necessary to flesh out the personae that I am creating . . . endeavoring to create . . . in these empathy sessions.”

“And it can’t really stop him? Only confuse him for a few seconds if all these months of work and EEG thingamagigs worked at all?”

“Correct.”

Natalie shook her head and stared at the twin cones of headlights illuminating the endless strip of asphalt ahead of them. “Then how can it be worth all of your time, Saul?”

Saul opened the dossier he had been studying of a young girl, white face, frightened eyes, dark coat and kerchief. The black pants and high boots of a Waffen SS man were just visible in the upper left of the photograph. The girl was turning toward the camera quickly enough so that her face was little more than a blur. In her right arm she carried a small valise, but her left arm clutched a worn, homemade doll to her chest. Half a page of typed German on Simon Wiesenthal’s thin stationery was all that accompanied the photograph.

“Even if it all fails, it was worth the time,” Saul Laski said softly. “The powerful have received their share of the world’s attention even when their power has been shown as sheer evil. The victims remain the faceless masses. Numbers. Mass graves. These monsters have fertilized our century with the mass graves of their victims and it is time that the powerless had names and faces— and
voices
.” Saul turned off the flashlight and sat back. “I am sorry,” he said, “my obsession may well be clouding my reasoning.”

“I’m beginning to understand obsessions,” said Natalie.

Saul looked at her in the soft light from the instrument panel. “And you’re still willing to act on yours?”

Natalie gave a nervous laugh. “I can’t think of any other way, can you? But every mile closer we get, the more frightened I become.”

“We don’t have to get any closer,” said Saul. “We can go to the airport in Shreveport and fly to Israel or South America.”

“No, we can’t,” said Natalie.

After a minute Saul said, “No, you are right.”

They changed places and Saul drove for several hours. Natalie dozed. She dreamed of Rob Gentry’s eyes and his look of shock and disbelief when the blade slashed across his throat. She dreamed that her father called her in St. Louis and told her that it was all a mistake, that everyone was all right, that even her mother was home and safe and well, but when she arrived home the house was dark and the rooms were filled with sticky spiderwebs and the sink was filled with a dark congealing liquid. Natalie, suddenly a little girl again, ran crying to her parents’ room. But her father was not there, and her mother, when her mother rose from the web-shrouded sheets, was not her mother at all. She was a moldering corpse with a face little more than a flesh-crusted skull carrying Melanie Fuller’s eyes. And the corpse was laughing.

Natalie jerked awake, her heart pounding. They were on the Interstate. It seemed light outside. “Is it dawn yet?” she asked.

“No,” said Saul and his voice was very tired. “Not yet.”

Into the Old South and the cities were constellations of suburbs along the Interstate bypasses: Jackson, Meridian, Birmingham, Atlanta. They left the Interstate system at Augusta and took Highway 78 across the south third of South Carolina. Even at night the landscape became recognizable to Natalie— St. George where she had gone to summer camp when she was nine, that endless, lonely summer after her mother had died, Dorchester where her father’s sister had lived before she died of cancer in 1976, Summerville where she used to drive out on Sunday afternoons to take photographs of some of the old estates—Charleston.

Charleston.

They came into the city on the fourth night of their travels, shortly before four
A.M.
, in that breathless hour of the night when the spirit does indeed seem weakest. For Natalie, the familiar scenes of her childhood appeared tilted and distorted, the poor, neat neighborhoods of St. Andrews somehow as insubstantial as poorly projected images on a dull screen. Her home was dark. There was no For Sale sign in front, no strange car in the drive. Natalie did not have the foggiest notion of who had handled the disposition of property and possessions after her sudden disappearance. She looked at the strange-familiar house with its small porch where she and Saul and Rob had sat and discussed the silly myth of mind vampires over lemonade five months earlier, and she did not have the slightest urge to go in. She wondered who had inherited her father’s photographs— the Minor White and Cunningham and Milito and her father’s own modest prints— and she was amazed to feel sudden tears scald her eyes. She drove down the street without slowing.

“We don’t have to go into the Old Section to night,” said Saul. “Yes, we do,” said Natalie and headed east, across the bridge, into the old city.

There was a single light on in Melanie Fuller’s house. In what had been her room, second floor front. It was not an electric light, nor even the soft glow of candle, but a sick pulse of weak green like the corrupt phosphorescence of rotting wood deep in swamp darkness.

Natalie gripped the steering wheel tightly to stop her shivering. “The fence in front has been replaced with that high wall and double gate,” said Saul. “The place is a fortress.”

Natalie watched the pale green glow ebb and flow between shutters and shades.

“We don’t know it’s her,” said Saul. “Jack’s information was circumstantial and several weeks old.”

“It’s her,” said Natalie. “Let’s go,” said Saul. “We’re tired. We’ll find a place to sleep today and get some place tomorrow where we can leave our stuff set up without a chance of it being disturbed.”

Natalie put the station wagon in gear and moved slowly away down the dark street.

They found a cheap motel on the north end of town and slept like the dead for seven hours. Natalie woke at noon, feeling disoriented and vulnerable, fleeing from complex and urgent dreams in which hands grasped at her through broken windowpanes.

Both of them tired and irritable, barely speaking, they bought fast food chicken and ate in a North Charleston park near the river. The day was hot, in the eighties, and the quality of sunlight was as unrelenting as overhead lights in an operating room.

“I suppose you shouldn’t go out in the daylight,” said Saul. “Someone might recognize you.”

Natalie shrugged. “They’re the vampires and we end up the night dwellers,” she said. “Doesn’t seem fair.”

Saul squinted out against the sun glare across the water. “I’ve been thinking a lot about that deputy and the pilot.”

“What about them?”

“If I hadn’t made the deputy put in that call to Haines, the pilot would still be alive,” said Saul.

Natalie sipped her coffee. “So would Haines.”

“Yes, but I realized at the time that if I had had to sacrifice
both
the pilot
and
the deputy, I would have done it. Just to get at one man.”

“He killed your family,” said Natalie. “Tried to kill you.”

Saul shook his head. “But these were noncombatants,” he said. “Don’t you see where this leads? For twenty-five years I’ve despised the Palestinian terrorists in their checkered
kefiyas
, striking out blindly at innocents because they are too weak to stand up and fight openly. Now we have adopted the same tactics because we are too weak to face these monsters.”

“Nonsense,” said Natalie. She watched a family of five picnicking near the water. The mother was warning the preschooler to stay away from the riverbank. “You’re not dynamiting air craft or machine-gunning buses,” said Natalie. “We didn’t kill that pilot, Haines did.”

“We caused him to die,” said Saul. “Think a minute, Natalie. Assume that all of them— Barent, Harod, the Fuller woman, the Oberst— all of them— were aboard the same commercial airliner with a hundred uninvolved civilians. Would you be tempted to end it with a single bomb?”

“No,” said Natalie. “Think,” said Saul. “These monsters have been responsible for hundreds— thousands—of deaths. The death of another hundred innocents brings it all to a close. Forever. Would it not be worth it?”

“No,” Natalie said firmly. “It doesn’t work like that.”

Saul nodded. “You’re right, it does not work like that. In thinking that way, we would become one of them. But in expending the life of the pilot, we have started down that road.”

Natalie stood up angrily. “What are you trying to do, Saul? We talked about this in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Caesarea. We knew the risks. Look, my
father
was an innocent bystander. So was Rob— and Aaron and Deborah and the twins— and Jack— and . . .” She stopped, folded her arms, and looked out at the water. “What are you trying to do?”

Saul stood up. “I’ve decided that you’re not going to go ahead with the next part.”

Natalie whirled and stared at him. “You’re crazy! It’s our only chance at the rest of them!”

“Nonsense,” said Saul. “We simply haven’t come up with a better way yet. We will. We are in too much of a rush.”

“Too much of a rush!” shouted Natalie. The family near the water turned to look at her. She lowered her voice but spoke in an urgent whisper. “Too much of a rush? We have the FBI and half the country’s cops looking for us. We know one time—
one time
— when all of these sons of bitches are going to be together. Every day they get stronger and more cautious and we get weaker and more frightened. There’s just the two of us now and I’m scared so shitless that in another week I won’t be able to function at all . . . and you say we’re in too much of a goddamn rush!” She was shouting again by the time she finished.

“All right,” he said, “but I’ve decided that it does not have to be you.”

“What are you talking about? Of course it has to be me. We decided that on David’s farm.”

“We were wrong,” said Saul. “She’ll
remember
me!”

“So? We will convince her that a second emissary has been sent.”

“You, huh?”

“It makes sense,” said Saul. “No it doesn’t,” snapped Natalie. “What about all those stacks of facts and figures, dates and deaths and places I’ve been memorizing since Valentine’s Day?”

“They’re not that important,” said Saul. “If she is as insane as we suspect, logic will have little impact. If she is coldly rational, our facts are too few, our story too flimsy.”

“Oh,
great
, goddamn it,” said Natalie. “I’ve been screwing my courage to the sticking point for five months to be able to do this, and now you tell me it’s not necessary and wouldn’t work anyway.”

“I’m not saying that,” soothed Saul. “I’m simply saying that we should take some time to look at alternatives and that I don’t believe you are the right person to do it in any case.”

Natalie sighed. “All right. What do you say we don’t talk about it until tomorrow? We’re tired from the trip. I need a good night’s sleep.”

“Agreed,” said Saul. He took her arm and squeezed it lightly as they walked back to the car.

They decided to pay two weeks’ rent on the cabin with adjoining rooms at the motel. Saul carried his biofeedback equipment in and worked until nine when Natalie made him stop for some dinner she had made.

“Is it working?” she asked.

Saul shook his head. “Biofeedback is not always successful in the easiest of cases. This is not easy. I am convinced that the things I have committed to memory are ready to be recalled by posthypnotic suggestion, but I have not been able to set up the trigger mechanism. The theta rhythm is flatly impossible to replicate and I’ve not been able to stimulate the alpha peak.”

“So all of your work’s been for nothing,” said Natalie. “So far, yes,” agreed Saul. “Are you going to get some sleep?” she asked. “Later,” said Saul. “I’m going to work on this for a few more hours.”

“All right,” said Natalie. “I’ll make us some coffee before I go back to my room.”

“Fine.”

Natalie went to the small kitchen area, boiled water on a hot plate, poured an extra half spoonful in each cup of coffee to make it extra-strong, and carefully mixed in the precise amount of phenthiazine Saul had shown her in California in case she had had to sedate Tony Harod.