Mindfield, p.9
Mindfield, page 9
Kellen sat on his bed and dialed. The phone rang once and Brad answered, sleepily. Kellen thought about hanging up. But he asked for Margot.
“No, no, I’m awake,” she said. “I was just reading the audition script for the kazillianth time.”
He reassured her as to his well-being. He told her he’d found the divorce papers in one of his attic storage boxes; he’d arrange to get them to her. They talked for a few minutes, but the thought of Brad beside her, pretending not to listen, depressed him. Margot in one bedroom, Kellen in another, Sarah in the living room — he guessed he wasn’t making much of a hit with that one.
But when they rejoined over their coffee, she said, “I like the way you still love her.”
“It’s funny, after the divorce, we got closer in a way. Once the pressure was off.”
“So why the divorce?”
“I shut her out too much. I was controlling.”
“And she, I assume, was faultless.” Here’s your opening, detective, put the lash to your ex.
“Pretty much so. Except she used to hide my cigarettes.”
“How cruel. No wonder you divorced her.”
Sarah was perched on the arm of an easy chair, waiting, smiling nervously. She wanted him to do something, touch her.
“There were lots of reasons it ended. She wanted children. I . . . ah, that never happened.” He took a gulp of coffee. “Doctor told me I’m the last of my line. She’s pregnant now. I’m happy for her.”
He paused, thought. “Basically, I guess, it fell apart because I couldn’t let her get inside me. I couldn’t seem to tell her about Coldhaven. She said there were too many dark rooms.”
“Maybe she was afraid to explore them.” She added softly, “I’m not.”
He looked at her uncertainly. She held his eyes, telling him it’s okay, unable to say it in words.
He put down his coffee mug and bent to her and kissed her. She got up and raised herself on her toes and pressed herself to him, and they kissed again.
She drew back and read his question and told him yes with her eyes. She wanted him. She felt it urgently, shamelessly. She pressed her head to his trembling shoulder, and said:
“Don’t think I usually do this.” She felt foolish and laughed. “I want some respect.”
They came together again in a tender twining of lips, and she felt the hardness of him — and the crueler hardness of his service revolver moving against her right breast.
“I want you to take the holster off,” she said huskily. “It’s spoiling the moment.”
He stood back and looked at her and shook his head and laughed. He kissed her again, long and soft, until their lips and tongues seemed to fuse in the heat. Then he took her hand and they walked to the bedroom.
There, in the dimness, she undressed, shyly, sensing him looking at her, sensing his uncertainty, feeling her own. She watched him place his change and his house keys on a dresser near the closet door, and slip his gun harness over the doorknob.
As Kellen hung his pants in the closet he heard a whining alarm in his head. He felt a strange, unbalancing sensation, and heard distant, unintelligible voices calling, and thought: Oh, no, God, no.
“Remember that he killed your father.” You must kill, you can kill, you must kill, he killed your father, and the gun barks and jumps, and the killer is a thousand images of broken glass.
He came back into darkness and the bedroom, and heard his own strangled gasp. He saw Sarah looking at him, bent forward, hands behind her at the bra fasteners.
“Kellen?”
You scream. “It’s not real! Nothing is real! What are you doing to me?” You hurl the gun at the wall and the wall billows and becomes a curtain, and you run past it, you run, you run, a door, a hall, walls shrinking toward you, and the men are coming behind, the men in white . . .
He saw her naked form moving toward him.
Another lurch.
Stairs, a final door to freedom, and you burst from darkness into sudden blinding sunlight, and the leafy arms of trees reach out for you, and you hear grunts and oaths, and they’re gaining, gaining . . .
And it was over.
She pressed her body to his, and felt the trembling in his chest and the sticky hot sweat on it.
“What is it?”
He waited for a few seconds, then said, “I thought they’d never stop. I was flashing back to Coldhaven.”
“Are you all right now?”
“Yeah.”
Sarah clung to him, fearful of the powerful demon that seemed locked in Kellen’s soul.
“Okay?” she said.
“Yes.” He stroked her hair slowly, still shaking. “I heard my voice screaming,” he whispered. “Why is it coming back? Why now?”
“Do you want a cigarette?”
“Just be with me.”
They clung to each other for a few more moments, then she took his hand and led him to the bed and pulled him gently onto it.
She would send her heat to him. It would melt his pain.
She laid him back on the bad and held him and kissed his face, and ran her hands over his body, and kissed his neck, his chest, his stomach, his hips, and she felt his body shudder and soften and move. She took him in her mouth until he was alive with her. Then she slowly journeyed back up his trembling body, and they joined in a hunger of tongues, turning, turning, his hands on her, caressing. She felt lush and wet, felt her loins melting against his, and wanted more of him, all of him.
She was astonished at herself, her need to give was urgent, and within was an organic mix of lust, loving, healing, and revenge — the revenge against Marcel, a lover far distant and different, more cold and powerful in bed.
She was shocked at Kellen’s gentleness.
She had expected the alleged controlling. A fleeting query: What kind of lover had Margot been to him?
Sarah raised herself above Kellen’s supine form. In sudden astonishing ripeness, she wanted completion, and gasped as she brought him inside her. She closed her eyes and kissed him deeply and shuddered as the explosions came. She clutched him and whispered, “Oh, please come now.”
Eddie Comacho moved slowly out of the closet, low, with his gun up. He crouched almost mesmerized at the closet doorway, feeling his armpits sweat, his tongue ragged and dry. He held his gun on the lust-blinded, undulating forms on the bed, and with his other hand fingered the keys that Kellen had placed on the dresser.
He rejected them, and, bending low, stepped carefully to the door, watching them writhe.
As Eddie slipped through the narrowly open doorway, Kellen cried out, a profanity of release.
Sunday, ten a.m.
Church bells pealed, sharp and high in the cold air, awakening him. Sunlight teased him through the icy window. Sarah’s hair was splayed over his shoulder, her sleeping head there, her breath warm on his chest. His mouth tasted like a newly tarred road, cigarettes all evening, cigarettes and love-making and coffee, and after that, cigarettes and love-making and a bottle of wine until four in the morning.
He’d talked to her about his childhood dreams, of being something important to his father, a son to make him proud. Don’t ever become a cop, his dad said a year before his death. No life insurance. The city had left his widow and son a miserly gratuity in death benefits.
Yes, he’d talked to Sarah about his father. Without pain. The only hero figure of his life. He told of how the agony of his loss carried into his teens, how he’d heard of Satorius, everyone at college talking about him, the miracle-maker.
Said he’d fix Kellen right up. And now Kellen couldn’t remember the facts of his father’s death. Electrical lobotomy.
Kellen and Sarah had tried to analyze those three quick, clicking snapshots of last night: more clues to the past; Kellen had tried to escape from the padded room, from Satorius and the men in white.
The young Kellen had screamed: Nothing is real! What are you doing to me?
Something very important had happened on that summer day, and was trying to leak out, seeking escape from the buried mind.
Before they’d fallen asleep, Sarah had importuned him. You have to give evidence. Please. For those poor people. For yourself . . .
Could he ever bring himself to do that? Expose himself to the whips and pillories of public scorn? No, he couldn’t endure that . . .
He slipped his arm out from under Sarah — she didn’t stir — and got up to answer the knocking on the door, grabbing his terrycloth robe. Mao yawned at him from the easy chair in the living room, and stretched.
When he opened the front door, it came back to him: Sunday. Plans had been made.
Raolo Basutti, in a parka and mittens and toque, was standing there with shy eleven-year-old Mario, similarly clothed. On the street was their family Ford, a toboggan strapped to the roof. Thérèse was in the front seat. The motor was running.
“You don’t look ready,” Raolo said.
“Gee, is it that time?”
He thought of Sarah in the bedroom, felt perplexed, awkward. This was a social dilemma for which he was little armed by experience.
“Maybe you should, ah, invite us in, Kel. It’s kinda cold out here.” Raolo beckoned to his wife, who got out of the car.
“Yeah, yeah, sure,” Kellen said, standing aside, waving them in.
If she awakes, she’ll hear the voices; she’ll stay hidden in the bedroom. He wasn’t ashamed, but he didn’t want to embarrass her.
Thérèse kicked her boots off at the mat and kissed Kellen on the mouth. “Whew. Where’d you celebrate last night? Got coffee on?” She spoke French; English was to her an unwieldy, awkward tongue. She’d been an east-end welfare worker, and before that a farmer’s daughter from Beaupré, near Quebec City. She was full of verve and bounce, still in love with Raolo after thirteen years of brick-solid marriage. But she was out of love with his job. One avoided talking cop-shop around her; the subject tended to ignite her short fuse.
“Coffee, it’s on its way,” Kellen said. Guatemalan drip. He’d have to come up with an excuse for not joining them. But he’d promised the day to Mario.
He pulled the boy’s toque off and tousled his sandy hair.
“Did they really shoot at you?” Mario said.
“Yeah, but I caught the bullets with my teeth and spit them out.”
“Oh, sure.” He laughed.
Kellen liked to spoil Mario, bestowing on him a parental affection he would never have a chance to give to his own; he’d wanted children, it wasn’t just Margot. He blamed Satorius, without proof, for his sterility.
“These guys treating you all right?” Kellen took the role of godfather seriously.
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Hear you aced your grammar test.”
Raolo said, proudly, “Ninety percent ain’t bad. Listen, Kellen, if you want to do this some other day —”
“It’ll be good for him.” Sarah’s voice. Kellen had just turned to go to the kitchen, and saw her standing at the bedroom doorway, covered to mid-thigh in one of his white dress shirts.
She came toward the Basuttis, smiling, offering her hand. “Hi, you’re Raolo Basutti, aren’t you, the partner in crime. I’m Sarah Paradis.”
Raolo uneasily took her hand.
“Ah, and that’s Thérèse,” Kellen said. “Raolo’s wife. And Mario.”
Sarah shook each hand in turn, and said she was delighted to meet them all. To Mario she said, in French, “Did you bring your sleigh?”
“Yeah, we’re going to Beaver Lake.” Mario picked up Mao, petting him. The cat lay limp in his arms, feigning indifference.
“I’d join you if I didn’t have to work,” Sarah said.
The phone rang. Kellen darted for it, a digression.
“H’lo.”
“That you?” Juley LeGiusti.
“Yeah, it’s me.”
“Wanna come to the store?”
“You open already? It’s Sunday morning.”
“So? You been to mass?”
He heard the bells outside scolding him. He put his hand over the mouthpiece, and said to Raolo, “It’s Juley the Juice.”
“What’s he got?”
Thérèse slowly shook her head. “Oh, God, here we go.”
Sunday, eleven-fifteen a.m.
Thérèse was a woman unafraid to speak her mind, and her silence in the car as they drove to Juley’s was foreboding and oppressive. Kellen could sense her barometer falling. They’d promised her that after this little side-trip, they’d head up the mountain, get in at least a couple of hours on the toboggan run.
They pulled up in front of Le Marché Beaver, and Thérèse and Mario waited in the car while Kellen and Raolo went inside.
Juley took them into his main theater, safe from prying ears. Thirty plastic chairs and a screen. They walked up a small flight of stairs to the projection area, behind a curtain. Reels of film were arrayed on a table. The place smelled musty, rancid.
The setting didn’t bother Kellen. He felt clean and whole and well. Cleansed somehow by Sarah, purified by her. No inner tremors so far today. She’d urged the four of them out of his house; she would shower and go to work from there, and — she whispered this to him as the coffee dripped — in case he was free this evening, so was she.
They’d decided on dinner. Kellen would prepare it. He wasn’t bad in the kitchen, he’d immodestly announced.
Raolo had chuckled salaciously as they walked into Le Marché Beaver. “She’s the lawyer, right? You dirty hound dog.” Kellen had smiled smugly.
“Sit,” said Juley.
“Prefer to stand,” Kellen said. “What couldn’t you talk about on the phone?”
“I hope I’m appreciated for this.”
“Yeah, Juley. Give.”
“Okay, a stripper says two guys in ski jackets, one of them had his arm kind of bandaged, showed up Friday night at the Club S’Extasie.”
“One of Johnny Ronce’s joints,” Raolo said.
“They were met there by a Dr. Tom Luk. Ex-Saigon, whom Johnny’s helping him with his papers. Checks Johnny’s girls for, like, the clap. The stripper’s name is Linda, don’t know where she lives, but she goes on duty at one this afternoon. Linda as in Lovelace.”
Kellen nodded. “Where do we find this Tom Luk on a Sunday?”
“I dunno. He’s, like, a illegal alien.”
“Did you see your brother-in-law like I asked?”
Juley lowered his voice, although the door was closed. “I mighta seen him at a get-together last night at my uncle’s.”
“You might have talked to him?”
“The impression I get is, like, they’re friends of the Family, but they ain’t in the Gambino organization. These gentlemen are, like, from the South, New Orleans, Atlanta, like around there.”
“That’s, like, all?”
“What am I, gonna tell Johnny and the boys I help the bulls out, I give them the total dope on everyone because I got a friend on the force I like?”
“Think of it as a license to pimp, Juley.”
As they walked back through the shop, Raolo said, “Jeez, I forgot, we got no one to fill on Sundays. I have that Budget guy coming all the way up from Iberville in half an hour.”
“Well, we have to catch that dancer, too. Linda.”
“Okay, let me handle this,” Raolo said.
When they returned outside, Thérèse was standing outside the car, glaring at them, arms folded. Mario was strolling around, sneaking looks at the partially curtained windows of the sex shop.
Kellen stayed back beside Mario, away from possible shrapnel, as Raolo explained to his wife that they may have to stop by the office for about half an hour first. Hour at most. Then just one other quick stop, and they’re away.
Thérèse said, “I thought this was your day off.”
Kellen couldn’t hear what Raolo said next, something apologetic. But Thérèse was suddenly walking away toward Mario. “No, that’s too late. He has hockey practice this afternoon. I don’t suppose you’ll be at that, either.” She grasped Mario by the arm and dragged him away from the windows. Angrily. “Get away from that filth.”
“Okay, look, drop me off at the station,” Kellen said. “And I’ll —”
“Oh, no, I wouldn’t want to split up the two loyal partners.” She pulled Mario to the Ford. “Get in, we’re going sledding.” She went to the driver’s side. Raolo tried to follow her.
“Jesus Christ, just go to the goddamn station,” she said, and as she sat behind the wheel, a final shot, her voice quavering: “You’re supposed to be his father. When the hell do you ever see him?”
Mario looked at his dad from inside the car, struggling to smile, as if to say: It’s okay, I understand.
Raolo and Kellen speechlessly watched the car pull abruptly from the curb and speed away, toboggan on roof, sleigh in the backseat.
“Roses tonight, pal,” Kellen said.
Sunday, eleven-forty a.m.
From his desk at the station he tried to phone Sarah at her office — for no reason, really, just to hear her voice, a form of pinching oneself, seeking proof of the reality of her, and of the long fervent night. He got her answering service. He tried her home; her recorded greeting was businesslike, her other voice, reserved for strangers and clients. But it was enough.
He was truly feeling better. No shakes, no inaudible voices so far today. He had allowed himself a vulnerability and, in doing so, found new resources, strength. He felt emotionally scrubbed and scoured.
Thoughts of her intruded fitfully as he listened to Raolo debrief the car rental agent from Iberville.
“How much was this weekend rate?” Raolo said.
“Seventy-four dollars a day plus insurance, no mileage. They didn’t have no credit card, I t’ought that was strange. For those type of guy. Looked like businessmen.”
