The Diaries - 01 (47 page)

Bruno screamed his
name.
 
Luc moaned.
 
Bruno looked to the American.
 
“He’ll bleed to death!”

The man nodded and
stepped to the sink.
 
He carried the roll
of paper towels around and out of Bruno’s vision.
 
Cloth being ripped was soon followed by
screams and then, once again, the unmistakable sound of the duct tape being
pulled from its roll.
 
Luc’s screaming
then stopped.
 
The man walked to the
sink, washing blood from his hands.

“There,” he
said.
 
“The bleeding has been
stemmed.”
 
He placed his hands on his
hips, staring at Bruno.
 
“Was that a
setup last week at the book store?”

Bruno forced his
mind to think, tearing clumsily through the layers of alcohol, to the night in
the book store, to the night he almost died.
 
“A setup?” he asked softly, his French accent heavy.
 
“We only wanted the money.”
 
Bruno did his best to hide the fear from his
eyes.

“Bullshit,” the
American answered, his gaze steeled upon Bruno.
 
“And I want you to tell me everything, from the beginning.”
 
He stepped around Bruno, doing something that
caused Luc to shriek in pain, afterward stepping back into Bruno’s field of
vision.
 
“Start talking or I’ll make this
night the most painful of your miserable lives.”

Bruno breathed
heavily, growing more lucid, his fear starting to be outweighed by the growing anger
coursing through his body.
 
“Who do you
think you are?” he shouted at the American.
 
“You are nothing, a
petit
morceau
de
merde
!
 
Do you know who we are?
 
Who we’re with?
 
We’re fucking Glaives and you will be killed
twenty ways from Sunday for this!”

The American shivered
as if he were scared, laughing afterward.
 
“To me, Bruno, you look like a fat-ass, low-level bully who is completely
and thoroughly defeated.
 
And where are
your brother Glaives now?”
 
The American
waited with arched eyebrows.
 
“If you
hope to die somewhat peacefully, I’d suggest you start talking.”

Bruno spat at him.
 
“Your little bitch did not die peacefully,”
he said lowly, with a snarl.
 
The
seemingly unflappable American straightened, narrowing his eyes.

“Yes, we were sent
to kill you, but the cunt had a gun…too bad for you she couldn’t hit shit.
 
She died whimpering like a beaten dog.
 
She was nothing but a cheap whore, and I fucked
her before we killed her, and she liked it, coming again and again.
 
She wanted it, you faggot American, from a
real man.”
 
Bruno set his jaw, false
bravado oozing from his every pore.

The man glared down
at Bruno, his eyes glistening, making Bruno feel good that he had touched a
nerve.
 
He stayed that way for nearly a
minute, taking deep breaths, his eyes locked with Bruno’s.
 
But the long bout of silence, and the man’s
unyielding icy stare, made Bruno, in the back of his mind, begin to think that
he might have just made a mistake.
 

After the pause,
the American nodded once, as if finally digesting what he’d just heard.
 
He crossed the room and went into his bag.
 
He cupped something in his hand and again
locked eyes with Bruno.
 
The damp eyes
were gone, now darkened and hardening by the second.
 
“Tell me everything, Bruno.
 
Start with who sent you to kill me.
 
Was it Jean
Jenois
of the DGSE, or the Glaives?”

“Fuck…you.”

“Speak now,
Bruno,” the American said with a twisted grin.
 
It was clearly a warning.

Bruno only glared.

The American moved
to Bruno’s left as something long and silver glinted in the kitchen light.
 
Through his drunkenness, Bruno felt his ear
being tugged by the lobe.

“I’d stay very
still if I were you, dickhead,” the American murmured.

Searing, burning
pain emanated from the lower portion of his ear, moving upward as Bruno
realized with sheer horror that this madman was slicing his ear off.
 
Bruno tried to keep still, hoping the pain
would decrease, but it actually worsened as the blade went higher.
 
The American was humming as he worked, like a
madman barber simply going about his daily business.

“Good bit of
cartilage here at the top.
 
Ball your
fists.
 
This may hurt a little.”

Before he clenched
his eyes shut, Bruno saw the man’s arm moving back and forth in a sawing
motion.
 
His ear canal clearly picked up
the crunching sound as the razor worked its way through the sinew.
 
There was a slight jerk and the American laughed.

“There we go.
 
Not bad at all for my first time.”

Through the shroud
of intense pain, Bruno opened his eyes.
 
The man displayed his ear,
cauliflowered
from
numerous fights, dangling it like one might a set of keys.
 
He tossed it in Bruno’s lap as the Frenchman
felt his bowels turn watery.

The American’s
smile disappeared.
 
“There’s another ear,
ten fingers, and then I go to the toes.
 
After that, well, I’ll let you guess.”
 
Bruno’s brother Luc, in intense pain of his
own and listening closely, moaned once and then fell unconscious.

Bruno’s face shook
as he stared, horrified, at his ear before he vomited into his lap.

“Man, that really
smells,” the American said.
 
“Start
talking or I keep cutting.”

Bruno stared up at
the American, strings of spittle dangling from his lower lip.
 
His fear and pain again turned to rage.
 
One cut ear could not—
would not
—break him.
 
He
reached deep into his throat, snorting loudly until he was able to spit a wad
of snot in the man’s direction.
 
This
time, though, the man was ready.
 
He
dodged the fluid with an amused look on his face, moving forward once again.

“Okay,” the
American said as he moved behind Bruno.
 
“I see how we’ll have to play this.”
 
The crunching sounds started again as he quickly removed the other ear.

Again, Bruno vomited
a sour mélange of stomach bile and vodka into his lap, covering the freshly
liberated ears as the American stepped aside to avoid the spatter.
 
Bruno leaned his head back, gasping for air
as he dry heaved.

The American bent
over, hands on his knees, at eye level with Bruno.
 
“I ask again: are you going to talk?”

Bruno actually
smiled, his brown teeth flecked with remnants of the small amount of food from
his stomach.
 
He’d show this American
what tough was.
 
The American, though,
matched his smile.

“Yeah, that’s why
I started with the ears.
 
Not too many
nerves there.
 
Let’s try something else,
something that
will
hurt.”

Again going into
his bag, Bruno heard a whirring as the American hefted something.
 
When the man turned, he saw what he was
holding.

A small cordless
drill.

Bruno’s stomach
began to make noise loud enough to be heard back in Metz, churning violently as
it contradicted his own forced bravado.
 
Without hesitating, the American tightened the chuck around the thin
bit, pressing it to Bruno’s left kneecap.
 
His eyes flicked up to catch Bruno’s; they were sparkling with glee.
 
Bruno could see the man’s cheeks widen as his
grin emerged.
 
Then the man pulled the
trigger on the drill.

The pain lasted
only a few seconds, a deep, center-abdomen pain unlike Bruno had ever
experienced in his life, giving him an understanding of why the ancient
Egyptians thought the soul existed behind the stomach.
 
The carbide-tipped drill cut into Bruno’s
kneecap with ease as the Frenchman watched in horror.
 
But it was after the drill bit cleared the
kneecap, when it broke through into the soft, fleshy area it was designed to
protect…it was then that Bruno Florence screamed and quickly passed out.

Without any
reference on how much time had passed, Bruno felt his face being slapped, opening
his eyes to see the American standing over him.
 
“I need you awake,” the American said calmly.
 
He watched as the man removed the thin drill
bit, dropping it into his pocket and removing a much larger one.
 
The man cocked his eyebrow.

“You didn’t think
that was it, did you?”
 
He laughed
heartily, speaking through the laughter.
 
“That was just the
pilot hole
.”

Bruno was on the
verge of fainting again after realizing what was about to happen.
 
The new drill bit was very large, the
diameter of a ring finger.
 
The madman
stepped to him with a wadded-up kitchen towel.
 

“Bite down on
this.”

Readily, Bruno
opened his mouth and bit down on the towel.
 
When he did, the intruder stepped in front of him and revved the drill
at full speed, pressing it into the trickling hole created with the smaller
bit.
 
Tiny chunks of bone flew as Bruno’s
muscles tensed to the point of almost tearing the duct tape.
 
Bruno clamped down on the towel, not
believing what was happening to him as he watched the 18-volt drill struggle to
make such a large hole in his knee.
 
Again, when the drill broke through, the spinning bit pushed into the
center of the knee, causing a different, far worse pain to become evident.
 
The American let it whir in the hole he had
created, pushing it back and forth like a woodworker might in a freshly punched
piece of hickory.
 
The man lifted his
head to view Bruno’s face and, as he did, he began to twist and twirl the spinning
drill, wrecking what was left of the area behind Bruno’s kneecap as blood and
bits of gristle flew through the air.

There was no more
vomit; Bruno didn’t pass out.
 
Instead,
after the madman removed the drill, Bruno let the towel tumble from his mouth and
cried like he had once cried as a little boy.
 
It was a cry of a helpless person, intermixed with Bruno’s cries for his
“
maman
”.

The man
disappeared for a moment, reemerging with a bar of white soap.
 
He pressed it onto the freshly drilled hole,
making Bruno scream again.
 
The American
twisted the soap back and forth before pulling it away and examining it.

“Perfect.
 
As good as a cork.”
 

His crying not
ceasing, Bruno watched the bearded man as he snatched the dish towel and wiped
down the drill, seemingly in no rush.
 
He
was utterly insane and completely serious, and Bruno’s ear holes and knee hurt
more than anything he might imagine.
 
He
was drunk and beaten and, with a resigned nod, he lowered his head and began to
talk, spittle and drool falling from his mouth.
 

Luc, who had again
gained his consciousness but remained curiously quiet during the torture
session, also responded openly when questioned.

***

Once he’d learned
all he needed to know, Gage pulled the stove all the way out, then set to work
with two trip flares, string, and the wire cutters.
 
Due to the two brothers’ transparent
confessions, Gage promised them a fighting chance to survive.
 
If they could escape from his death
contraption—and he knew they couldn’t—they could live.
 
A quick death was too good for them anyway,
and Gage needed to cover his tracks, at least long enough to finish his
mission.

Bound back to
back, Gage tethered taught string from both men’s arms and legs.
 
He did this on both sides of their body,
using an extra chair as a makeshift pulley.
 
This was done to prevent the men from trying to escape, with severe
penalties for an inch of movement in either direction.

The strings from
each side converged at one main string, leading behind the stove.
 
Attached to the main string were both
military pull-tab flares, the safety pins removed.
 
It would take only fourteen ounces of
pressure to ignite each flare, which would subsequently ignite the natural gas
flooding into the room from the stove line that Gage removed on his way out.

Before he left,
Gage opened two windows to provide air into the gas laden room.
 
“This way you won’t die from a lack of
oxygen, and there won’t be an explosion—just a nasty fire,” he said as he taped
Bruno’s mouth shut.

Luc fell
unconscious around sunup, for the final time.
 
By 8:00 a.m. he was dead from shock and a loss of blood.
 
Bruno tried as best as he could to remove the
tape that bound his wrists, but the American had done too good of a job in
securing him in place.
 
His sobs of
frustration were never heard by anyone and, by lunchtime on Sunday, he was
thoroughly defeated.
 
With one final
desperation attempt, he tried to free his hands.
 
There was no use.
 
He was a dead man.