The Key to Midnight (30 page)

“Pick up your drink,” he said ominously. “I made it for you.”

“You make me sick.”

“Then why do you come?”

“Slumming.”

“Pick up your drink,” he said sternly.

She spat in his face.

This time he did knock her down. She sat on the floor, stunned. Carrera quickly pulled her to her feet. With one big hand on her throat, he pinned her against the wall.

She was crying, but her eyes shone with perverse desire.

“You’re sick,” he told her. “You’re a sick, twisted little rich girl. You have your white Rolls-Royce and your little Mercedes. You live in a mansion. You’ve got servants who do everything but crap for you. You spend money as if every day is the last day of your life, but you can’t buy what you want. You want someone to say ‘no’ to you. You’ve been pampered all your life, and now you want someone to push you around and hurt you. You feel guilty about all that money, and you’d probably be happiest if someone took it away from you. But that won’t happen. And you can’t give it away, because so much of it is tied up in trusts. So you settle for being slapped and humiliated and debased. I understand, girl. I think you’re crazy, but I understand. You’re too shallow to realize what great good fortune you’ve had in life, too shallow to enjoy it, too shallow to find some way to use your money for a meaningful purpose. So you come to me.
You
come to me. Keep that in mind. You’re in my house, and you will do what I say. Right now, you’ll shut up and drink your vodka and tonic.”

She had worked up saliva while he’d been talking, and again she spat in his face.

He pressed her against the wall with his left hand, and with his right hand he grabbed the drink that he had fixed for her. He held the glass to her lips, but she kept her mouth tightly shut.

“Take it,” Carrera insisted.

She refused.

Finally he forced her head back and tried to pour the vodka into her nose. She tossed her head as best she could in his fierce grip, but at last she opened her mouth to avoid drowning. She snorted and gasped and choked, spraying vodka from her nostrils. He poured the rest of the drink between her lips and let her go as she spluttered and gagged.

Carrera turned away from her and picked up the mixture of orange juice and raw eggs that he had made for himself. He drank it in a few swallows.

When he had finished his drink, Marie was still not recovered from having been force-fed hers. She was doubled over, coughing, trying to clear her throat and get her breath.

Carrera seized her by the arm, dragged her to the bed, and pushed her facedown against the mattress. He pushed up her skirt, tore at her undergarments, shucked off his own robe, and fell upon her savagely.

“You’re hurting me,” she said weakly.

He knew that was true. But he also knew that she liked it this way more than any other. Besides, this was the only way he liked it.

The power to inflict pain was the ultimate power.

Sexual power over women was as important to him as financial, psychological, and sheer physical power. Before he finished with Marie Dumont, he would hurt her badly, degrade and humiliate her, demand things that would disgust her and leave her feeling totally worthless, because that would make him feel godlike.

As Marie wept and struggled beneath him, he thought of Lisa-Joanna. He wondered if he would have the chance to do to her all that he was now doing to Marie. The very thought of it made him drive even more ferociously into his current willing victim.

When he had first seen the Chelgrin girl twelve years ago, she had been the most beautiful and desirable creature he’d ever encountered, but because of who she was, he had not been able to touch her. Judging by the photos taken in Kyoto, time had only improved her.

Carrera ardently wished that Dr. Rotenhausen’s treatment would fail this time, and that Lisa-Joanna would then be passed to him for disposal. There was a risk that a second mindwipe would leave her with the mental capacity of a four-year-old, and the thought of a four-year-old’s mind in that lush body appealed to Carrera as nothing else ever had. If she ended up that way, he would tell them that he had killed her and buried her, but he would keep her alive for his own use. If he possessed her in such a retarded state, he would be able to dominate her and use her to an extent that he had never been able to dominate or use anyone, including Marie Dumont. She would be his little animal, and he would train her to perform some amazing tricks.

Under him, Madame Dumont was screaming. He was hurting her too much. She had her limits. He didn’t care about her limits. He pushed her face against the mattress, muffling her cries.

In his possession, the Chelgrin girl would learn the limits of joy, and she would be thrust beyond the limits of pain in order to learn total, unquestioning obedience. She would know extreme terror, and from terror she would learn to be eager to please. He would use her until he had explored every permutation of lust, and then he would share her with Paz. Finally, when there was nothing left to demand of her, when she had endured every degradation, Carrera would beat her to death with his hands. He would take at least an entire day to murder her; in her prolonged agony, he would find a pleasure so intense that bearing up under it would be as challenging as bearing up under any weight he had ever put on his barbells.

Borne away by his fantasy of absolute domination, he almost killed Marie Dumont. He realized that he was jamming her face so hard into the pillows that she couldn’t breathe. He let her up just enough to allow her to gasp for air.

He happily would have killed her, but at the moment, disposing of her body would have been a serious inconvenience. He would soon have to leave for Saint Moritz.

That was where his true destiny lay. In Saint Moritz. With the Chelgrin girl.

The winter tempest
Blows small stones

Onto the temple bell.

 
—BUSON, 1
77
5-1
7
83

After getting no sleep in Tokyo, Alex and Joanna also slept little and poorly on the flight to London. They were tense, excited about their new relationship, and worried about what might await them in England. To make matters worse, the plane encountered heavy turbulence, and they lolled in their seats as miserably as seasick cruisers on their first ocean voyage.

When they landed at Heathrow, Alex’s long legs were cramped, swollen, and leaden; sharp pains shot through his calves and thighs with every step. His back ached all the way from the base of his spine to his neck. His eyes were bloodshot, grainy, and sore.

From the look of her, Joanna had the same list of complaints. She promised to get down on her knees and kiss the earth—just as soon as she was certain that she had enough strength to get up again.

Alex found it difficult to believe that less than twenty-four hours ago, he’d experienced the greatest ecstasy of his life.

At the hotel they unpacked none of his suitcases and only part of one of hers. The rest could wait until morning.

She had brought two handheld hair dryers. One was a lightweight plastic model, and the other was a big old-fashioned blower with a metal casing and a ten-inch metal snout. A small screwdriver was in the same suitcase, and Alex used it to dismantle the bulkier of the two hair dryers. Before leaving Kyoto, he had stripped the insides from the machine and carefully fitted a gun into the hollow shell: the silencer-equipped 9mm automatic that he had taken off the man in the alleyway more than a week ago. It had passed through X rays and customs inspection without being detected.

He took a large tin of body powder from the same suitcase. In the bathroom, he stooped beside the commode, put up the lid and the seat, and sifted the talc out of the can, through his fingers. Two magazines of extra ammunition had been concealed in the powder.

“You’d make a great criminal,” Joanna observed from the doorway.

“Yeah. But I’ve done better being honest than I’d ever have done on the other side of the law.”

“We could rob banks.”

“Why don’t we just buy control of one?”

“You’re a regular stick-in-the-mud.”

“Dull,” he agreed. “That’s me.”

They ate a room-service dinner in the suite, and at ten o’clock London time, they crawled under the covers of the same bed. This time, however, before they slept, they were too exhausted to share more than a single chaste goodnight kiss.

Alex had a strange dream. He was lying in a soft bed in a white room, and three surgeons—all in white gowns, white face masks—stood over him. The first surgeon said, “Where does he think he is?” The second surgeon said, “South America. Rio.” And the third said, “So what happens if this doesn’t work?” The first surgeon said, “Then he’ll probably get himself killed without solving our problem.” Alex grew bored with their conversation, and he raised one hand to touch the nearest doctor, hoping to silence him, but his fingers suddenly changed into tiny replicas of buildings, five tiny buildings at the end of his hand, which then became five
tall
buildings seen at a distance, and then the buildings grew larger, became skyscrapers, and they drew nearer, and a city grew across the palm of his hand and up his arm, and the faces of the surgeons were replaced by clear blue sky, and the city wasn’t on his hand and arm any more but below him, the city of Rio below him, the fantastic bay and the sea beyond, and then the plane landed, and he got out. He was in Rio. A Spanish guitar played mournful music. He was on vacation and having a good time, having a very good time, a memorable and good, good time.

At seven o’clock in the morning, he was awakened by a loud pounding. At first he thought the sound was inside his head, but it was real.

Joanna sat up in bed beside him, clutching the covers. “What’s that?”

Alex strove to shake off the last shroud of sleep. He cocked his head, listened for a moment, and said, “Someone’s at the door to the hall, out in the drawing room.”

“Sounds like they’re breaking it down.”

He picked up the loaded pistol from the nightstand.

“Stay here,” he said, getting out of bed.

“No way.”

In the drawing room, dim gray daylight seeped in at the edges of the closed drapes. The writing desk, chairs, and sofa might have been sleeping animals in the gloom.

Alex felt for the light switch, found it. He squinted in the sudden glare and held the gun in front of him.

“There’s no one here,” Joanna said.

In the foyer, they found a blue envelope on the carpet. It had been slipped under the door.

As Alex picked it up, Joanna said, “What’s that?”

“A note from the senator.”

“How do you know that?”

He blinked at her. Even after nine hours of sleep, he was still fuzzy-minded.

“How?” she persisted.

The envelope was unmarked by typewriter or pen, and it was sealed.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Instinct, I guess.”

London was rainy and cold. The bleak December sky was so low and heavy that the city seemed to huddle beneath it in expectation of being crushed. The tops of the tallest buildings disappeared into gray mist.

The taxi driver who picked up Alex and Joanna in front of their hotel was a burly man with a neatly trimmed white beard. He wore a rumpled hat and a heavy green cardigan. He smelled of peppermint and rain-dampened wool. “Where can I take you this morning?”

“Eventually,” Alex said, “we want to go to the British Museum. But first you’ll have to lose the people who’ll be following us. Can you do that?”

The driver stared at him as if unsure he had heard cor- rectly.

“He’s perfectly serious,” Joanna said.

“He seems to be,” said the driver.

“And he’s sober,” she said.

“He seems to be.”

“And he isn’t crazy.”

“That remains to be seen,” said the driver.

Alex counted out thirty pounds to the man. “I’ll have thirty more for you at the other end, plus the fare. Will you help us?”

“Well, sir, they tell you to humor madmen if you meet one. And it seems especially wise to humor one with money. The only thing that bothers me—is it coppers watching you?”

“No,” Alex said.

“Is it coppers, young lady?”

“No,” Joanna said. “They’re not good men at all.”

“Sometimes neither are the coppers.” He grinned, tucked the bills into his shirt pocket, stroked his white beard with one hand, and said, “Name’s Nicholas. At your service. What should I be looking for? What sort of car might they be using?”

“I don’t know,” Alex said. “But they’ll stay close behind us. If we keep an eye open, we’ll spot them.”

The morning traffic was heavy. Nicholas turned right at the first corner, left at the second, then right, left, left, right.

Alex watched out the back window. “Brown Jaguar. Lose it.”

Nicholas wasn’t a master of evasive driving. He weaved from lane to lane, slipping around cars and buses, trying to put traffic between them and their tail—but at such a sedate pace that his passengers might have been a couple of frail centenarians on their way to their hundred and first birthday party. His maneuvers were not sufficiently dangerous to discourage pursuit. He turned corners without signaling his intent, but never at even a high enough speed to splash pedestrians standing at the curb, and never from the wrong lane, which made it easy for the Jaguar to stay with him.

“Your daring doesn’t take my breath away,” Alex said.

“Be fair, sir. It’s London traffic. Rather difficult to put the pedal to the metal, as you Americans say.”

“Still, there’s room for a bit more risk than this,” Alex said impatiently.

Joanna put one hand on his arm. “Remember the story of the tortoise and the hare.”