Without Prejudice (33 page)

He rifled through the magazine, finding a monoton-ous succession of other pornographic scenes – women licking ejaculate with artificial smiles, or feigning orgasmic pleasure as they were penetrated. It was tawdry stuff: the models were heavily made up and past their prime, the colour of the photos garish. Overall, the effect was of an earlier era – like the furtive skin mags of the 1950s. Which seemed peculiar in the twenty-first century, when mainstream movies showed acts of sexual congress as though they were another form of breakfast. But he supposed pornography must have been a staple of prison life; after so many years inside, Duval was probably addicted to the stuff. Perhaps, too, after an adult life spent in prison, he didn’t even want a live woman, such was the power of the fantasy sexual life he’d been forced to build during all the years when he didn’t have a real one.

The second magazine was different. He saw right away that it went far beyond standard pornographic terrain into something darker – and violent. The women here were victims rather than colluders, handcuffed to the uprights of beds, tied up with cord, held down by two, even three men. On one page a teenage-looking blonde girl on all fours screamed in pain as a policeman’s nightstick was stuck in her anus; another page showed a pudgy woman, opening her mouth to fellate a shaven-headed man while he held a Bowie knife to her throat.

This was about pain, not pleasure, or rather about the pleasure pain gave the perverted. Robert was repelled by the relentless sadism.

He kicked the magazines back under the bed but took the bible, stuffing it into his jacket pocket. Out in the kitchen Jermaine was sitting at a table in the corner, eating cereal and reading the
Sun Times
.

‘Find anything?’ he asked without looking up.

‘Nothing that tells me where he might have gone.’ He wasn’t going to ask Jermaine’s permission to take the bible.

‘If you find him, tell him I can’t have him back. Not after he took Lemar’s car.’

‘I wonder if he’s gone to Mississippi.’

Jermaine looked startled. ‘Why there?’

Robert shrugged. ‘I don’t know – Vanetta always talked about it. Duval told me he’d never been; he sounded like he wished he had.’

‘Ain’t no family there no more.’ He tipped his bowl and spooned some milk into his mouth. Between swallows he said, ‘Can’t see it myself.’

‘Maybe not.’ He stood awkwardly in the doorway. ‘If you hear from him could you let me know?’ There was a message pad by the wall phone, and he wrote down all his numbers – Evanston, cell phone, work, and the dunes. ‘One of these numbers will find me.’

‘Sure,’ said Jermaine, his eyes on the
Sun Times
.

He felt an urge to get Jermaine to look at him. He asked, ‘When did Duval take Lemar’s car?’

Jermaine stopped reading and looked annoyed. ‘Wednesday. He’d been gone by then, but he must have come back during the day and taken the keys.’

‘It’s an Impala, right? Maroon colour.’

‘That’s my car. Lemar’s got hisself a golden oldie. A Bonneville.’

‘A
Bonneville
?’ His voice had risen sharply.

‘That’s right.’ Jermaine stared at him like he was crazy. ‘What’s it to you?’

But Robert was already moving towards the front door.

Robert’s greatest fear was coming true. Duval must be with Anna. Duval
had
been out to the dunes – Poindexter had seen the car. In his mind’s eye an image of Anna flared up. On Anna’s face pain erupted like sizzling grease, and a knife neared her throat.
Please don’t hurt her
.

Outside he ran to his car, then realised he didn’t have any idea where to go next. As he jumped in the driver’s seat, he tried to harness his racing thoughts. Down the block a car honked, and a girl ran down the front steps of a bungalow, dressed to go out. He hated living now in a parallel universe of trouble – a sealed capsule holding Duval, Anna and himself, separated from the normal lives of the people in this city. He tried to hang on to a sliver of hope that Anna was not with Duval, and that his first instinctive fear was right and she’d gone off with someone. But he knew it wasn’t true.

He looked at the bible on the seat next to him, then picked it up and started checking the pages that had their corners turned down.

Genesis
with lines underscored in pencil:
The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it
.

No help at all, and he moved to the next one, ripping a page in his haste. He found Isaiah, similarly marked:
You will be like an oak with fading leaves, like a garden without water
.

A waste of time. Other passages were underlined throughout the book, and Robert forced himself to go through them methodically, turning the pages as fast as his fingers allowed. But the passages all seemed meaningless, and Robert felt increasingly panicked by the clock ticking in his head.

Then he reached the Song of Solomon, where Duval had put a large X in the margin. Robert scanned the lines impatiently, then suddenly stopped:

You are a garden locked up, my sister, my bride; you are a spring enclosed, a sealed fountain.

The garden again. He almost didn’t believe it – it was so obvious.

He turned the key so hard the transmission made a harsh grinding sound and almost stalled. ‘Calm down,’ he shouted aloud at himself, and this time the engine caught. He pulled out so sharply he almost hit a car parked on the other side of the street.

Stony Island was a wide boulevard, divided by a litter-filled middle strip. At 71st Street there were railroad tracks, disused he hoped, and the light went his way in any case. He remembered the cross street as lined by stores, and the location of his paediatrician until he was ten or so – Vanetta had taken him here for shots and check-ups. In the waiting room all the other kids always seemed to have their parents with them. He hadn’t cared then – Vanetta was as good as a parent as far as he was concerned.

He let these stray memories flood in – anything to distract him from his near-panic. He was certain he was right about where Duval had gone, but he dreaded what he would find.
You are a garden locked up . . . my bride.

At 67th the McDonald’s where Vanetta had often taken him until his father intervened to limit their forays into the black South Side, was gone. Across the street the park began that stretched down to the Museum of Science and Industry, its golf course touching this corner with the fourth green, where he and Mike, sole white kids on the course, used to get nervous of the junkies gathered across the street in front of one of the neighbourhood’s crummy hotels.

He tried to distract himself but images of Anna – writhing, crying out in pain – kept streaking through his head. He glanced leftwards as he crossed 63rd Street, once a byword for the ghetto at its worst, and thunderously noisy from the ‘L’, the city’s elevated train system, long torn down. At 60th he had to stop for a red light, perched on what had been the symbolic frontier between Hyde Park and the black ghetto. He was about to run the light when he saw a patrol car down the block.

When the light changed the car ahead was slow to turn left, and he honked his horn, then accelerated down to the southeast edge of the Midway, turning in front of an advancing bus, being honked at himself for his careless driving.

He was back in Hyde Park, but he felt a surreal estrangement as he sped north along Blackstone Avenue – the English Channel, lined by houses that showed the maddening variety of American architecture a century before. Another image raced before his mind’s eye, of Anna naked, bleeding from the throat.

At 57th he failed to break, distracted by how close he was to his intended destination, and was almost hit by a UPS van that swerved, braked, then continued with another telling-off blast of the horn. He parked by a hydrant without second thoughts, forty feet north from the old Christian Science church; he was far beyond precaution now. The blocks of pavement squares as he ran back down the street seemed tilted against him, and he wondered if it was the swelling summer heat or his imagination.

The Church was set back from the street, fronted by grey pillars the height of the adjacent four-storey building where Robert had lived as a boy. It had a centred dome on its roof which was invisible from the front. The dark wooden front doors were disproportionately small, held shut by a locked chain wrapped through their handles. He pulled hard on them, but the chain held firm. When Robert peeked inside through the space between them he could only make out the last row of pews.

Running to the side of the building, he started down the thin alleyway that filled the five-foot gap between the church and its neighbour, first of a row of brick houses stretching north along Blackstone Avenue. Halfway back, a high gate blocked the way, topped by barbed wire that made climbing over it impossible. He pushed against the gate in frustration, and to his surprise it gave way, its padlock falling off as the gate swung open.

He slowed down now, walking cautiously along the side of the church, conscious of the click-click-click sound of his heels on the concrete walk. The light was indirect, but as he reached the back of the building he saw the sun falling onto the ground ahead of him, and turning south had to shield his eyes against the fierce, blinding rays.

He was standing in a small walled yard where he had never been before. But he knew it well. The tree, now cut down, had been just across the far wall, in his own back yard. He remembered climbing it repeatedly to fetch their whiffle ball, then looking down at the little patch of overgrown grass and concrete where he now stood. He was in the Secret Garden.

The rear door to the church was ajar. He peered in, but at first he couldn’t see a thing, the contrast too great between the yellow glare outside and the lightless interior of the derelict building. Gradually, large amorphous shapes became distinguishable, like prehistoric mammals emerging out of the mist. He could make out rows of wooden pews facing him, and high up in the back a balcony with a protective railing.

He stepped inside carefully, a wooden board creaking under his foot. To his right he saw two overturned chairs and sheets of music spilled on a dusty floor. The air was thick with damp, swamp-like. To his left, as he turned slowly, there were two other chairs that had not been overturned.

Anna was sitting in one of them.

Was she alive? Her chin sagged, and his first thought was, she’s given up, though he could not have said exactly what that meant. Her legs were stretched out before her – he recognised the toffee-coloured slacks and tan sandals. Above her waist she was only wearing a bra.

Only a bra
? Oh, Christ, he thought, but then he saw her chest move as she exhaled – she was alive. As he went towards her he saw that Anna’s arms were behind her, over the back of the chair. She had been tied up expertly with the kind of white cord they used back in Primrose Hill as a laundry line. Peggy Mohan had been tied up with the same kind of cord.

Anna must have heard him approach, for she lifted her head up and her eyes widened. He was about to speak when she motioned with her eyes towards the back of the church. He nodded, putting his finger to his lips, and looked out towards the lines of empty pews. He could see nothing in the vast arena of un-occupied space. Then he noticed on the other chair a butcher’s knife, its blade flat on the seat of the chair like a calculated reminder.

He picked it up, then went behind Anna’s chair, where he sawed vigorously until the cord between her wrists gave way and her arms fell loose.

‘Where is he?’ he said quietly in her ear.

She was rubbing her wrists carefully, trying to drive the blood back into circulation. ‘I don’t know,’ she said in a dull voice. He realised she was in shock.

‘Did he hurt you?’

She shook her head.

‘Did he—?’

She shook her head again; she knew exactly what he’d meant.

Then she said in a cracked, frightened voice, ‘He took me to the dunes – he thought you’d be there for the weekend. He got scared off when Tina Poindexter came by, so he drove me here. He said you’d know where to find us.’

‘Is he in there?’ He gestured with his head at the pews.

‘I heard something moving in the balcony.’

‘Here’s what I want you to do. Go out that way there—’ he pointed to the exit he had come in, where a v-shaped wedge of light slanted through the door – ‘and then go round to the street. At the corner there’s a restaurant. Get them to call 911 right away.’

‘But—’

‘No buts. Do what I say. Understand?’

She nodded, and got up slowly from the chair, looking as if her legs might give way. He saw her blouse, crumpled in a heap on the floor, and picked it up and handed it to her.

‘What about you?’ she said, sounding afraid again. She was putting her shirt on slowly. Too slowly.

‘I’ll be right behind you. Now get out of here. Quick.’

When he heard her go out the door, he turned towards the pews. He knew he should go, too, but he stood there, stock still. Though he waited, he heard nothing. Maybe Duval had gone, slipped out some other way, or tiptoed out while Anna had her head down. Go to Mississippi, thought Robert. Standing near the former site of the altar, it seemed like a secular benediction.
Take the Bonneville and get out of town. Go anywhere, but for God’s sakes, go
.