No Way Back (43 page)

This Gordon Kramer merely grins. His mouth moves, and he says words that I can’t understand, and it takes a moment to realize he has spoken these words in Russian. I am about to curse at
him, but then there’s something wet on my face, a handkerchief pressed violently against my nose and mouth by the driver, who is now standing behind me; and the smell cuts like turpentine,
chemical and metallic, and then I’m being shoved into the limousine, and my forehead slams against the top of the door frame, and then everything goes black.

The dream starts like this.

I am in a dark house. The house is familiar, but it is not mine. I walk up a spiral staircase.

Even though the house is not mine, and it is dark, I am not afraid. It feels right to be here, in this house – this dark house, climbing this long staircase.

I stop at the landing at the top of the stairs. Far off, at the end of a hall, I see a door.

I walk to the door. The floorboards creak beneath my feet. I turn the knob, and enter.

I am in a child’s room. A boy’s room: blue wallpaper, a Superman action figure on the bureau, a plastic Tupperware container filled with Matchbox cars.

The boy is asleep on his bed. He is breathing. He is alive. He is lit by moonlight. He wears blue flannel pyjamas with grey feet. He has blond hair, too long for a boy; and when I lift him from
the bed, and carry him, still sleeping in my arms, his head lolls, and his hair hangs down.

He doesn’t wake. He breathes softly. I carry him through the dark hall, to another door. A line of yellow light glows beneath it. Through the door, I hear a sound. A rumble, like
machinery, or distant thunder.

My hands are full of little boy, and so I push the door with the bottom of my shoe. It opens easily.

Now I know the sound that I heard. Running water. It gushes from a faucet and pours into an overflowing bathtub. It sluices over the side of the tub, and onto the white floor tiles, where it
gathers an inch deep.

There is a man leaning over the tub. He wears dark clothes. His hair is long and black, straight and past his shoulders. Stringy hair, dirty hair, like a man who has been dead for a very long
time.

He speaks to me without turning. ‘You’ve brought your boy,’ he says. Then after he speaks, I wonder if he said the words aloud, or if I am just listening to his thoughts.

I step into the bathroom, and my shoes splash in the water. I carry the boy to the stranger. His back is to me.

‘His name is Cole,’ I tell the man dressed in black. ‘He’s my son. My only son.’

‘Put him in the water,’ the stranger says. I crane my neck to try to see the stranger’s face. But it remains hidden. I see only long dark dead hair.

‘I don’t understand,’ I tell the stranger.

But he doesn’t answer. I feel myself moving, carrying the boy to the bath, despite my wish to remain still. I bend over the kneeling stranger, and I lay Cole gently in the water. He
floats, still asleep, on the surface.

‘Leave us now,’ the stranger says.

I step aside.

The stranger reaches down to the boy. I stare at the stranger’s hand as it pokes from his black sleeve. It is bone. No skin on it.

He lays his bone hand on Cole’s chest, and shoves down on the boy with surprising violence.

The little boy is pushed to the bottom of the tub. His eyes open, and he tries to scream, but the sound is inaudible, just a bubble that floats from his mouth and breaks on the surface. He sucks
water. His eyes open wide. He screams silently, shaking his head back and forth. His tiny fingers scratch at the stranger’s bone hand. The boy breathes water into his lungs.

The stranger holds down the boy. The man is strong and relentless. The struggle is brief: the boy kicks and flails his arms, but he’s pinned to the bottom by the bone hand. I watch the
boy’s face as the life leaves him. He stares at me as he dies, his eyes still open wide. When the boy’s fingers stop twitching, the stranger lifts his bone hand. The corpse floats to
the surface.

‘You can have him now,’ the stranger says, still not turning to me. ‘He is your son.’

‘Be gentle,’ a man’s voice says softly in my ear.

When I open my eyes, I’m not in a bathroom, and it’s not the black-haired stranger that speaks. There’s no water at my feet, no bathtub, no little boy.

I’m sitting in a chair. The room is very cold, and I’m shivering, and everything around me is blurry and out of focus. I try to rub the grit from my eyes, but my arm is stopped by a
restraint. I can’t move. I’m bound to the chair.

My eyes focus. The room is wood panelled, with heavy wooden shutters in the windows, blocking the sunlight. There’s a big desk, a filing cabinet in the corner, a diploma on the wall. I
know the place: Dr Liago’s office.

‘Is he awake?’ another voice says – a woman’s.

I turn to the woman. I recognize her. She has short grey hair, cropped close in a middle-aged matronly dyke style. Her colourless grey eyes stare at me without expression. How can this be?
It’s Doc Curtis, my shrink from back in California. She stands beside Dr Liago, the little man with the white beard. What are they doing together? Why is she in Florida?

‘I came to see you,’ she answers, and I realize that I spoke the question out loud. ‘I came to help you. You need help. Things have gotten out of control.’

‘What’s happening?’ I ask. I remember now: the airport, Gordon Kramer, his missing finger, the limo driver, the chloroformed handkerchief...

‘You need our help, Jimmy,’ comes that gruff, familiar voice. I try to turn to it. But my chest is bound to the back of the chair. I hear footsteps on the wooden floor, and then
Gordon walks into view.

‘What are you doing?’ I ask.

‘Jimmy, you fucked up,’ Gordon says.

‘Is it Jimmy then?’ Doc Curtis asks. ‘Still Jimmy Thane?’

‘That’s what it says,’ Liago explains. He holds a sheaf of typewritten pages in his hands, and he’s scanning the pages quickly, flipping through them, searching for
something. ‘“Jimmy Thane”, it says.’

‘But we tried that,’ Doc Curtis begins. ‘And look at what—’

‘Just do what it says,’ Gordon interrupts. ‘Don’t ask questions. Do exactly what it says. Jimmy Thane.’

Doc Curtis pushes her lips together. She wants to argue, but she knows better.

Dr Liago walks to his desk. On the surface is the metal Samsonite that Gordon Kramer brought to the airport. The doctor clicks the latches on the suitcase and opens it. He takes out a roll of
black fabric. He pushes the suitcase aside, and unfurls the fabric on the desk, revealing a set of syringes strapped by elastic. He removes a glass vial from one of its pockets, and chooses a
syringe. He tears open the sterile wrapping, removes the plastic cap, and fills the syringe with liquid from the vial. When the syringe is full, he holds it to the light, and taps.

‘What are you doing?’ I say, with growing alarm. ‘Gordon, what is he doing?’

‘Jimmy, you know you fucked up, don’t you? We’re just trying to help. You want to stay alive, don’t you?’

‘What are you going to do to me?’

‘You should have listened,’ Gordon says. ‘You had everything, Jimmy. He gave you everything. A job, a wife, money. What the fuck were you
thinking
, you stupid
asshole?’

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. I’m not quite sure what I’m sorry about, but it’s clear that I’ve done something awful. ‘Just let me go. Let me go back home.
I won’t fuck up again, Gordon. I promise.’

‘Too late now,’ Gordon says. ‘You’ve gone off the rails, my friend. Off the fucking rails. Just like the real Jimmy Thane would have done. Out of control. Completely
unreliable.’ He turns to Liago. ‘You did too good a job, Doc. Just like the real Jimmy Thane.’

‘Thank you,’ the doctor says weakly, but he sounds more frightened than pleased.

Gordon Kramer has done wicked things to me in the past. He has punched me in the face when I lied to him; he has stuck my head in a toilet bowl when he caught me doing heroin; he has chained me
to a fire sprinkler in an underground parking garage; he has locked me in a forty-five-day rehab programme in San Bruno against my will, threatening me with jail if I refused to be committed; and
he has poured $10,000-worth of my hard-earned wealth down the kitchen sink in the form of cocaine, after he searched my house and found it in the cupboard, behind the Honey Nut Cheerios.

But what is happening now is an entirely new level of sponsor intervention. With Gordon’s blessing, Dr Liago is walking to me with a syringe held in front of him, the needle
glistening.

Liago says: ‘This won’t hurt, Mr... ’ He stops. After some hesitation he says, ‘Mr Thane.’ He taps the syringe. ‘Not if you remain very still.’

I look down. Both my arms are strapped to the chair with black electrical tape, but they are wrist-down, veins hidden.

Liago says, ‘Help me loosen this. Keep him still.’

I try to wrench my arms free. I shake violently and yell, ‘Let me go!’ I strain against the tape.

Liago stands in front of me, watching me flail. He looks at Gordon.

Gordon issues a loud rasping command. His words make no sense, until I realize they’re in Russian. Someone behind me answers in the same language, and the limousine driver appears just
behind my shoulder. He no longer wears the ridiculous chauffeur’s cap – that should have been my first clue, when I saw him, that silly hat, which no real driver still wears, not for
the last fifteen years – and he walks around my chair, takes out a pocket knife, and slices through the electrical tape binding my right arm.

My arm flies free –just for an instant. The limo driver grabs it with two huge hands. He wrenches my wrist violently down, twisting it and exposing the white skin of my forearm. He presses
my arm down, holding it rock-steady against the wooden chair.

‘If you move, it will take longer, and it will hurt,’ Dr Liago says. Gordon Kramer rasps, ‘We’ll chloroform you again, if you keep this up, Jimmy.’

My head throbs from the first ether handkerchief. I don’t want any more. I stop struggling.

‘Are you going to kill me?’ I ask.

‘God, no, Jimmy,’ Gordon says, with a smile. ‘We’re just going to make everything better.’

Liago says, ‘Make a fist please.’

I do. ‘Why are you doing this to me?’ I ask.

‘To make you happy,’ Liago says. ‘That’s what he wants. To make you happy.’

‘Who wants?’

He doesn’t answer. He taps the vein near the bend of my arm. I look away, and I feel a prick, and then liquid spurts into my vein. My arm feels heavy. The heaviness creeps upwards, into my
shoulder, and into my head. ‘There,’ Liago says, sounding immensely satisfied. ‘There, there. You’ll be very relaxed in a minute, Mr Thane. Then we can begin our
therapy.’

Indeed, I am relaxed. And before I can answer him, my eyes flutter shut. I hear my own heartbeat, and my own breathing.

I am dreaming now. It’s a violent dream. In the dream, I hear crashing glass, and the screams of Doc Curtis and the limousine driver, and then Gordon’s voice speaking rapid guttural
Russian, and then a pounding noise. The noise pounds again, beside my ear. Pots banging, or firecrackers, or a mallet striking an anvil.
Bang bang bang.
Right next to me.

Some part of my mind – that little glimmering portion that hasn’t shut down – deduces that these pounding noises are not mallets or anvils. They are gunshots. They are very
close to me.

Bang
, says a gun. Disturbing my sleep.

Bang
.

There’s screaming now, and then another
bang
, and then the screaming stops, and finally I can rest.

How long do I sleep? I do not know, but when I wake, I’m seated in the same chair, soaked with sweat, despite the humming air conditioner that blows freezing air on the
back of my neck. I feel nauseous. My shirt sticks to my skin. I try to move, but I’m bound in place. I look down at my right arm. It’s the only part of my body that is not taped down.
There’s a little bruise on the vein near my elbow.

‘Well, look at this,’ says a familiar voice. ‘Like Lazarus rising from the dead.’

I follow that familiar voice, and focus on the blurry figure seated in the overstuffed leather chair – the same chair where I spent so many hours, talking to Dr Liago. It’s Agent Tom
Mitchell. He looks cool and casual, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his feet stretched out before him, crossed at the ankle. ‘How do you feel right now, Mr Thane?’

I feel like there’s a power drill behind my skull, and someone is using it to try desperately to drill his way out. ‘I don’t feel too good,’ I say. My voice is hoarse, my
mouth cotton.

I look around the room. Gordon Kramer is lying, face down, in a pool of blood that has spread from his skull. The pool is not growing; he’s been dead for a while.

So too has Doc Curtis, who is missing half her face, which I believe was blown off by a heavy-gauge shot delivered from close range. Dr Liago is in the corner, slumped against the wall, in his
own bloody puddle. I can’t see the limousine driver, but I’d lay odds that his driving days are over.

‘You don’t look too good either,’ Mitchell says, still using that ridiculous Southern accent –
ee-thah
– even though I am perfectly aware that
his
Georgia isn’t the place that grows peaches and debutantes.

Someone is pacing behind me. I try to turn, but I’m strapped to the chair, and I can’t rotate my body. As if to be polite, Ryan Pearce, the big Grizzly Adams from the morgue, steps
into view and waves at me.

‘Hello,’ he says, cheerfully.

‘What’s going on?’ I ask Agent Mitchell.

‘I was about to ask you the same question,’ Mitchell says. ‘Why are all these people tying you to a chair and injecting you with magic potions?’

‘I don’t know,’ I say. Which is the truth.

‘But you do know why I’m here, don’t you, Mr Thane? Or whatever your name really is. You know who I’m looking for, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where can I find that person?’

‘I don’t know.’

He shakes his head. ‘Now, see, I have a hard time believing that. I’ve been tracking Ghol Gedrosian for many years. Too long, if truth be told. I’m getting very close to him. I
know him now. He’s like a friend to me. I’ve read his emails, I’ve seen his private papers, I’ve listened to his cellphones. And you know what I think? You want to know what
all the evidence tells me?’