Black Heart, page 3
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right now he is sleeping and I want it kept that way. If there ever comes a time when he wakes I shall have to deal with him. But understand me, I do not want that unless it becomes unavoidaole.
'That is why the Monserrat woman must not be allowed to rabbit on to him about her suspicions, however vague they may be at this moment.' His arm dropped away from Khieu's shoulders. 'Now is the time of ultimate risk for us Now, when we are the strongest is when we are also the most vulnerable
'I will not be intimidated by chance. I - we went into this h ses nsques et penis. I have learned over the years not to add to that. Ilfaudrait suppnmer ce risque '
At that moment a force was rising in the room, an energy that had not been present a moment ago. It was as if the tall man had breathed some ancient and arcane incantation, summoning up a darkness that was more than night.
The young man with the black eyes, a predator's eyes, was on the move. Khieu had said his piece, his heart was calm; the ultimate decision had been made in another precinct
The tall figure's eyes fluttered closed as if he had in some way divorced himself from the increasing disturbance within the room. He took a breath, five seconds later allowing it to be expelled through his opened lips His ivory teeth gleamed. Prana.
'Like one tiny pebble thrown into a still lake gifted with perfect reflection Ripples on and on, outward, distorting, marring that perfection ' His voice, though low, sought for and gained ascendancy in the room 'Who may foresee the consequences then''
Within the silence the disturbance renewed itself, rising in power and intensity. The air seemed to vibrate with dark energy Khieu was almost at the door
'The reward of power is not for the timid.' The tall man breathed slowly, deeply The only certain way to avoid the npples is to remove the pebble, the potential source.'
He swung fully towards the windows as the door closed behind his back. He felt the calm returning slowly.
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Some men disappeared into bars, others into the desolate countryside. But when Thwaite could no longer deal with the pressure-cooker milieu he deliberately steeped himself in, it was to Melody's he went. To him it was like vanishing off the face of the earth.
She owned a attic apartment on Eleventh Street just off Fourth Avenue. Up there on the sixth floor, the space seemed enormous. She had had it painted in black enamel. Deep in the night, with the ceiling and all of the furniture shades of grey and blue, he found it cavelike and curiously comforting.
She buzzed him up from the lobby and he took the creaking industrial elevator with its open grill-work front, up to her floor. He massaged the bridge of his nose with two fingers. His meeting with Richter had not gone the way he had imagined it would. Somehow he had lost the initiative. He had been freaked by that sound and the sight of Richter throwing men from him as if shrugging off rain. Thwaite shivered slightly as if shaking off a bad dream.
Melody was waiting for him. She stood in front of her closed front door, a red silk kimono pulled hastily around her. She was a slim-hipped, small-breasted woman. Her straight black hair hung all the way down to the crease of her buttocks.
Her face was an almost perfect oval, with a small chin and a sharp nose with flaring delicate nostrils. She was not a classic beauty by any means, Thwaite thought, but she compensated for that in so many ways.
'What are you doing here, Doug?' In her voice were hidden echoes of other languages, eleven to be precise, including Russian, Japanese and at least three separate dialects of Chinese; that was how she spent her spare time. It gave her a sense of pride to be able to speak all the world's major languages. 'What d'you think?' he said tightly. 'I want in.' He began to move forward but Melody but a palm firmly against his chest, shook her head. 'It's a bad time. I -'
'No such thing.' Off the case and nowhere to go; he didn't care. He leaned on her.
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Melody fought him. 'Doug, would you please try to understand -
'We have an arrangement.' He didn't want to understand. 'I know but that doesn't mean you can come in any time you
,
'I don't give a shit if the Prince of Wales is in there,' he said finally pushing past her into the apartment. 'Get him the hell
out.'
Melody kicked the door shut, stared at him for a long minute. 'Christ,' she said under her breath. Then, louder, 'The least you can do is disappear.'
Thwaite went through the lo.ng living room, heading to the left and the kitchen. He rummaged through the refrigerator before realizing he wasn't hungry. He sat down heavily on a chair, put his forearms on the glass-topped dining table. He realized he wasn't much of anything these days. Take now, for instance. Why the hell was he here in a whore's apartment when he should be at the office ... or home.
He heard quiet voices, the front door close. He put his head in his hands and thought about nothing, which was easier. He grunted when he heard Melody come into the kitchen. He did not look at her, heard instead her throwing pots and pans around just as if she were a miffed housewife.
'You've got some hell of a nerve, you know that?' she said with her back to him. 'I don't know how I ever got myself into this position.'
'You fuck men for a living, remember?' Thwaite said nastily and was instantly sorry.
Melody spun around, her cheeks flaming with shame. 'Yeah. And I'm the one you're with, Doug. It's convenient for you to forget that. Why don't you just go home to your wife and kid?'
He dug his thumbs into his eyes until he saw white spots jumping. 'Sorry,' he said softly. 'I didn't expect you to be with someone, that's all.'
'Oh, what did you expect?'
He looked up. 'I didn't think about it. All right?'
'No,' she said, coming towards him. 'It's not all right. We have the same kind of arrangement you have with other people
3i
around town, I imagine, except with me you don't take money. Okay, I accept that. I have no choice. But when it conies down to you scaring off my bread and butter, I have to draw the line.' 'Don't tell me where to draw the line!' he screamed, leaping up so quickly that she jumped back. 'I make the rules around here. I'm your lord and master and if you doubt that for a minute then think about me taking you downtown and booking you!'
'And spite yourself?' Her voice was rising as well. 'Don't make me laugh. You know a good thing when you feel it. Free fun. It's got to be more than you get at home!'
'You stay out of that!' he screamed. 'I won't warn you again.' 'I'm tired of your warnings, Thwaite. I'm tired of you. Just leave me alone, why don't you? I'll give you a percentage of the take instead. Just fuck someone else.'
'Goddamn you!' He rushed at her from around the table. 'What's the matter?' she goaded. 'I'm offering you part of the gross. Isn't that enough to assuage your larcenous heart? That all you bastards seem to do down at the precinct anyway, work out schedules of pay-offs.'
She did not, perhaps, understand how deeply she had pricked him until the last instant. She saw the murderous look in his eye^ and backed up against the counter, reaching behind her with one hand for the bread knife in its long wooden sheath.
But he was already upon her, batting the weapon away from her with a stinging slap. He hit her across the face and she put up both arms. He pried them aside, bending her backward at the waist.
'Bastard!' she cried. 'Bastard!' Until she saw that he was weeping as he fought with her. 'Doug,' she said softly.
'Why don't you do something else with your time, for the love of God!' he sobbed, his big head coming down against her breasts, her raised hands touching tentatively his dark hair then, feeling his convulsions, hugging him to her warm body. She kissed his forehead, whispering, 'It's all right,' as much to herself 'as to him.
Her real name was not Melody, of course. She had been born Eva Rabinowitz in a tenament not more than a mile awav fron^
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where she now lived. But only Thwaite knew that. He had come across her during a particularly thorny homicide investigation and, for a time, it appeared she was his prime suspect, hence the background check he ran on her.
'You went to Barnard, graduate school at Columbia,' he had said to her once. 'Why do you do what you do?'
'I graduated with my Ph.D. and nothing else,' she had said. 'I felt like the emperor with his new clothes. I had nowhere to go and nothing to do. You know I was brought up with no money. Now I make as much as I could possibly need.' She shrugged. 'Sometimes a lot more. I can afford to give myself whatever I want.' Her grey eyes had regarded him steadily. 'And what about you?' She seemed to have a way of being able to cut through all the layers of bullshit, until the bones were laid bare. Early on Thwaite had seen what a brilliant mind she had not only for languages; he envied her that very much. 'What do you get out of being a cop?'
Thwaite sat back on the couch. 'I've been in the department for almost twenty years. Homicide. I've been there almost ten.' He shook his head. 'Christ, but it's full of dirty deals. I heard about all of 'em, you know, while I was still in the academy.' He smiled, a touch wistfully, sadly even. 'I promised myself I wasn't gonna get involved in all that shit.' He looked away from her. 'But that was school, you know. I was young then. No idea what the world was really like. But I found out real soon.'
His eyes lifted, swung back to her. 'My first collar as a uniform was a bad one. Bastard pushing smack near two schools, one of them a Junior High. I was hot. I saw the kids he was feedin', had to get the ambulance for one little girl.
'So I wanted this one bad. I got him, did everything right. Read him the Miranda in English and Spanish just in case. He was holdin', all of that.
'But the bastard had enough muscle to hire a lawyer who knew his way around the courts. He plea-bargained and the judge was lenient... socially conscious and all that. Sonuvabitch was out on the streets in six weeks. Six weeks. Can you believe it?'
He shrugged. 'But that was only the beginning. The graft, the
B.E.-B
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dirty dealing was all around. There was no place you could walk without stepping in shit.
'I began to think of myself as a rat in the sewer. I d come home and shower for a half an hour in water hot enough to scald.'
'But you kept at it,' Melody said without reproach. 'It was what I was trained for. Outside the department, I'd be a functional idiot.' He put his hands together. 'Then I got married, my wife wanted a house. We had a kid. And so on. The bills were piling up .. .just like they were for everyone. But then one morning I came into the precinct and took a look around me. There were some guys who seemed all right even though I knew they were in the same situation as I was. Then there were others who seemed to be breaking their backs, old before their time.
'I didn't want that for myself. Basically I think of myself as an honest guy.' He shrugged. 'Who knows, maybe that's just a form of selfpreservation. I put the arm on low-lifes here and there. It's okay with them, it's okay with me. I'm making the best of it, see. At least I'm getting something back for the gruelling hours I spend in that cesspool.
'And Homicide is the worst of them all because everyday you feel the madness drugs like horse and methedone put into these people causing them to murder in an emotionless and offhand way.' His voice was a whisper now. 'And every day I feel reduced some more.'
Moira Monserrat was crying. She had arrived at Tracy's house in the midst of a driving rainstorm and done nothing more than walk unsteadily upstairs and, seeking out the big double bed, had thrown herself headlong onto its giving surface.
She had slept fitfully only to awake in the middle of the night with a sharp cry, her fists clutched to her breast. Breathing like a bellows; heart pounding painfully. What had she heard? What had awakened her? A presence. A tendril of a dream, reaching out to scrape along her shoulder.
Oh, John, she thought. Where are you now to protect me from myself?
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His deep rich voice filled her mind again, bringing with it warmth and life. 'I know you down to your core,' he said. 'I just hope ... I often think about what it's like for you ... after j go home to Mary. I still love her, you know.'
She smiled. 'In a way I don't mind. You're a loyal person, John. It's one of the qualities in you I love the most. I could no more imagine you abandoning your family than I could you hurting me.'
He kissed her tenderly. 'But with you I feel alive. I know I have enough strength to fulfil the dream Tracy's constructing for me.' He gave a low laugh, then, squeezing her fondly. 'You know, sometimes I think he ought to be the candidate. Yes, I have the experience. But he's the one with the brilliant mind. He's a unique kind of architect, all right. He knows people in a manner that's sometimes scary. He's rarely bluffed and never wrong in his evaluations.'
'Then why is he working for you? You make it sound as if he could clean up on his own.'
'That's a good question, Moira, and I'm not sure whether even I know the answer.' He rolled over so that he could look directly into her eyes. 'He was in Southeast Asia. But not as an ordinary grunt. He was some kind of ultrasensitive spook. Special Forces, I'd guess. I've never gotten any details out of him and I wouldn't try.
'But I do know one thing. He had a lot of power once. A great deal of power.'
'What do you think happened?'
'Oh, I don't think anyone but Tracy really knows. It's my guess, however, that he walked away from it. Maybe he saw too much death. Underneath it all, Tracy's a sensitive man. But he's troubled as well. His position with me was carefully thought out, I now realize. He's close enough to the power - he manipulates it still - without being in its centre. For the time being, it's what he wants or needs. When he sorts things out, though, it may not be enough.'
Moira was alarmed. 'He wouldn't turn against you.'
'Tracy?' John laughed. 'Good God, no. Tracy's even more loyal than I am, if that's possible. No, we've become something
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more than friends even. We're family. I want you to remember that.'
And so Moira had. At the moment of John Holmgren's death, when panic and terror had gripped her, it was the only thing she remembered.
Now standing in the kitchen of Tracy's house, she knew that John had been right in his assessment of him.
Oh my God, John, she said silently. What will I do without you?
Fighting back the tears, she opened the wood-framed windows over the sink, dispelling the musty air. She liked this place. It was neat and homey, filled with old, well-worn furniture that exuded a personal history like a scent.
The cedar-cabineted kitchen led directly into the dining room. A dark wood table with spindle legs with partly covered by a handmade mat of some nubbly cotton material. A pair of Cambodian candlesticks stood on it. In the highboy hutch in one corner, she saw several boxes of long ivory candles, glasses and dishes along with a crowd of Cambodian artifacts.
Moira knew Cambodia to be one of Tracy's passions. She wondered what had happened to him out there. Ifjohn had been right, perhaps it was something awful, a secret buried away in his past.
She went slowly into the large bright living room beyond, allowing the essence of the place to seep in. The blackened fireplace was filled with a nineteen-inch TV.
The space before the fireplace as well as the mantel was made of local tile in green and blue squares. On the wide mantel itself sat a rather large Buddha. It was lacquered in gold, though its obvious age had caused the dark wood from which it had been carved to peek through here and there in ill-defined streaks.
Moira stared into that enigmatic face. To her it had an otherworldly cast to it; she did not associate it with the face of a human being. Still a quality it possessed caught her. The morning light slanting in burnished one side of the face, throwing the other half into shadow. She picked out more details the longer she looked until she had the impression she was no longer staring at a man-made object.
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With an effort, she turned her attention elsewhere. She went across the room to the caramel corduroy sofa, its pillows cloudy with use. She knelt atop it, pulled one of the pillows to her, hugging it against her chest. She stared out the windows directly behind the sofa. Across the rutted dirt road was what appeared to be a rather large apple orchard, the trees lined in perfect rows like a marching band. Beyond was the tassle-topped brush of a wide cornfield.
She threw open the window, closed her eyes as the soft breeze brushed her cheeks and hair. She inhaled deeply of the rich summer scents.
Curled up on the sofa, her cheek against the edge of the fluffy pillow, she cried for real now, feeling the awful ache of loneliness, of displacement, of a creeping kind of unreality she seemed powerless to stop, knowing that there was life out there, all around her, and she was not a part of it.
'This is the last time I will see you.'
Tracy gave a start. 'What d'you mean?'
Mai looked at him levelly, her black eyes glossy. 'Something has happened to you.'
Outside the chatter of Chinatown waxed and waned, unabated.
'I don't know why you insist on still living here. You have more than enough money to '
'I don't think,' she said quietly, 'that this is any of your concern now.'
Tracy knew that he had hurt her just by walking in the door. What did she know about him that he himself had failed to see? He walked across the dimly lit room and took her into his arms. She was small and delicate with a flat face and enormous eyes. She had seemed more animal than human to him the first time they had met at the dojo, her whiplike grace and speed, the almost gentle touch she had in throwing her opponents to the resilient wooden floor.
'Come on, Mai,' he said, cajoling. He smiled. 'Let's go out. We can get some dim sum. I want to have a good time.'
She turned her head up to him. 'Already it has the feel of the
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last night.' She smiled thinly, that odd almost twisted expressic r, she knew hid the beauty of her face. 'Remember, I know wh t it's like. I was there.' She meant Southeast Asia during the war. 'You have that feel about you now.'
