Any Minute Now (27 page)

That was when Preach showed up as he always did, without warning but, uncannily, at a crucial moment. He took Whitman aside. “Whatever you're thinking of doing, don't. If you open your mouth about this you can be sure no one will believe you. You'll be branded a madman; you'll become an object of derision. Your credibility will be shattered. Your life in this country—anywhere, for that matter—will be over.”

Whitman abandoned the Alchemists, kept his mouth shut, but from that moment on, despite Preach's assurances concerning the coming newer, better world, St. Vincent felt compelled to keep an eye on Whitman, lest he do something really stupid. “
You betrayed me,
” Whitman, the weak fucker, had said. “
You used our friendship. That's something I'll never forgive or forget
.” Monroe had been right about him after all—Whitman was altruistic, a contemptible trait that would not be tolerated by any true Alchemist.

To keep an eye on Whitman, he had contacted King Cutler, advised him to make Whitman an offer he couldn't refuse, and ordered him to keep Whitman busy out of the country, and in line.

And, fuck me, St. Vincent thought now, the sonuvabitch found a way to insinuate himself back into my business.

From what he'd gleaned there had been fallout from the aborted brief to take el-Habib into custody. Just the thought of that sent him into a paroxysm of rage. Seiran el-Habib's contacts inside Mainland China were key to the Alchemists' continuing plans. Any disruption of the content those contacts were supplying could not be tolerated. If there was a continuing danger to el-Habib it would surely be from the man whose demonic persistence in the Well St. Vincent had observed firsthand. Which was why he had messengered over the brief on Ibrahim Mansour to Hemingway's office, marked “Eyes Only from the Office of the President of the United States.” St. Vincent had deemed keeping Whitman occupied by sending him and his team off to Beirut the best option to ensure el-Habib's continued safety.

“… this has to stay between the two of us,”
Omar the Idiot was saying now
. “It's not an official op, which, as you know, we are forbidden by law to conduct on U.S. soil … Also I don't want her spooked.”

“Why in the world would she be spooked?”

“Because one of her best clients is Greg Whitman.”

That, of course, caused St. Vincent to come to full alert.

*   *   *

“A word,” Whitman said.

Charlie nodded, followed him out, down the hall, into one of the rumpled bedrooms.

How was it, Whitman wondered, that the Alchemists kept coming back into his life, ever darker, evil, bent on wholesale destruction? It was as if the hand of Fate was pulling him back into their orbit—St. Vincent's orbit—in order to put a stop to them. None of this was in his expression when he said to Charlie, “What the hell was that back there?”

“You know perfectly well what it was.”

“Alice was your responsibility. El-Habib was my interrogation.”

She looked him hard in the face. “No, you made Alice my responsibility.”

“There's only one head to this monster. Me.”

“Well, I've seen that monster, Whit. The real monster. Down in the Well that was you. So, really, what I was doing was saving you from yourself.”

“I don't remember that being part of your job description.”

“And I don't remember saving me as being part of yours.”

They stood toe to toe, so close their noses all but touched. Only once before had the tension between them reached this pitch—the night she had hit him, the night he had walked out.

His side ached where she had struck him; he hated that, hated them both for the damage they had inflicted on each other, but he could see no way for either of them to stop. You might as well ask the sun and moon to join hands, he thought.

“We are who we are,” she whispered.

“It is what it is,” he said.

“And never the twain shall meet.”

Afterward, neither of them could remember who said that last line, and perhaps it no longer mattered. Their Mexican standoff was shattered by the sound of a chair crashing. At once, both turned and, as one, raced back down the hall into the room where they had been interrogating Seiran el-Habib, but nothing was amiss there. He still sat on his chair, a mass of misery with no thought of standing, let alone running away. Still, protocol had to be observed, and Whitman called to Flix to come back and watch over their prisoner.

“The kitchen!” Charlie said, suddenly breathless.

She arrived an instant before Whitman. When she'd left, Alice had been asleep in the chair, her head resting peacefully on her arms on the tabletop. Now the chair was on its side, as was Alice, who lay in a spreading pool of blood so dark it looked like oil. One of the kitchen knives, its blade bloodied, lay near one of her hands. She had slit her wrists the correct way, with longitudinal cuts along the veins, rather than across them.

Charlie ran to her, knelt in her blood to take her pulse, but it was too late, there was none. She sat back on her haunches. “Ah, hell.” Her voice was a harsh whisper. “I thought she was stronger than this. But she was just a little girl, lost and terrified.”

Whitman stood over her, staring at the back of her neck. “She was your responsibility, Charlie.”

“I know that.”

“You left her to make a name for yourself in Red Rover by interrogating el-Habib.”

“No.”

“A first step in taking over.”

“Oh, my god, you're crazy. This is like our last night together. I can't talk to you when you get like this.”

“Like what?” Whitman crouched down beside her. “And this isn't anything like that night. I'm your boss, Charlie. This is strictly professional.”

“Nothing is ever strictly professional with you, Whit. You weren't aware of it, but you made that perfectly clear down in the Well.”

Whitman waved aside her words. “You left your charge and she killed herself. How much intel was still left inside her that we should have gotten?” He put his head close to hers, but there was nothing intimate in his demeanor. “You were negligent. You let her get away, you let the mission get away.”

“Fuck you!” Charlie stood up and strode out without a backward glance.

*   *   *

It was very late, but St. Vincent had no desire to go home. Instead, he pressed a button on his desk and a wall slid back, revealing a monk-like cell, with a narrow bed consisting of a metal frame, a thin mattress, a set of undyed muslin sheets, and a walnut-hull pillow that would put a crimp in anyone's neck but his.

When St. Vincent went in, he was sealed off from the world, save for a small slit of a window left over from the time the space had been an executive toilet. Now, to use the facilities, St. Vincent was obliged to pad down the hall.

He shrugged off his suit jacket, stripped off his shirt and tie. Bare to the waist, he sat on the edge of the Spartan bed and stared at his hands, wrists placed on knees. Then his gaze drifted along the blue lines of his veins to the small tattoo on the inside of his left wrist: a triangle with a looped tail—the alchemical symbol for sulfur, one of the most important elements in the
arcana
, the secret of all life, according to Paracelsus, a sixteenth-century Swiss-born physician, birth name Theophrastus Philippus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim, who viewed medicine as being chemical in nature and believed that the key to human life, therefore, was alchemical.

St. Vincent's thumb rubbed back and forth over the symbol, as if to release some of its latent power. His stomach was growling but he would not eat; he was a man used to deprivation—savored it, even, as his mother had before him. He switched on the old black-metal gooseneck lamp he'd had since he was a kid, his bed then a bunk in the Streamline trailer parked behind the revival tent with its huge crosses, shining as if to impress themselves onto the sky.

He remembered sitting on the edge of his bunk, time after time, listening to the finale of his mother's sermons—her voice lifted to the very crosses painted on the tent top, worked to a fervent crescendo. In the eerie silence that would follow, the natural sounds of crickets and birds seemed soft, muffled, as if his mother's words had cowed them as well as her congregants.

In his mind's eye, he could see the tent slowly emptying, the people filing past his mother who had stepped down from the platform to shake hands, accept both praise and prayer, while her acolytes, who flanked her on either side, raked in the money. Then they, too, melted away and his mother, still covered in holy sweat, a fragrant dampness under her arms, between her thighs, mounted the steps of the Streamline, and entered the world made up of two inhabitants.

Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes still sparking the holy scripture as she sat down beside him and said, “How's my little man?” She put a hand on his thigh. “It's late. You're not asleep yet?”

“I was listening to you, Mother.”

This brought a smile to her face. It was a Pavlovian response; he hadn't even heard of Pavlov back then, but later he would come to understand the dynamic between them, though never completely, and never at its deepest level. He was too close to her, the experiences too subjective for rational dissection. And, of course, there was a part of him that refused to look at what would happen next.

“Luther,” she whispered, “what have you done?”

She knew! But then she always knew. “There was someone in the crowd,” he said. “A lost woman coming to you to help her find God. I snuck out and watched her.”

“She was a wanton woman.”

“Yes.”

“The sight of her drew you.”

“Yes.”

His mother's eye were upon him. “She was evil, and you were evil, Luther.”

“She was, Mother. And I was.”

His mother's dark eyes seemed to grow in size, to become luminous, like the moon gleaming in the sun's reflected light. “You need to be punished, Luther.”

“Yes, Mother. I do.”

 

26

“What is this?” Julie picked up a black latex hood. It came down over the face. Two small holes had been punched for the nostrils; above and below were zippers where the eyes and mouth would be. Up high on the forehead were two protrusions that Julie took to be horns.

“The hood?”

Julie nodded. “That, and what was underneath it.”

“The SIG Sauer. I have a permit. In my line of work you can't be too careful. The cops didn't disagree.”

“I hate guns.” Julie shuddered. “Any guns.”

“Then don't go near it, and for god's sake don't touch it.”

“Don't worry, I won't.”

“Good girl.” Sydny nodded. “Now back to the mask.” She was still holding the bustier and tap pants. “Do you find it interesting?”

“I find it frightening. What are these horns for?”

“Those are for another evening. You're only a beginner here.”

Julie shook her head. “It's nightmarish.”

Sydny smiled a secret smile, so that Julie felt compelled to say, “What?”

Sydny stepped out of the closet, drew the drapes over the windows, effectively sealing them off from the outside world. “Do you know
Story of O
?”

“Should I?”

“It's a novel—a great one, a groundbreaking story—written by Pauline Réage, a writer who up until the novel's publication no one had heard of. In fact, for many years it was assumed by critics and intellectuals—mostly men—that Pauline Réage was a pseudonym for a man, because only a man could write about such sexual debauchery. Of course, they were proven wrong. The writer was a woman named Anne Cécile Desclos.”

Sydny circled back to where Julie stood in the entrance to the closet. “The heroine's name—O—is the shortest possible, though her name is Odile. She is rarely called that. So. O could also stand for object or orifice.”

Julie stared at Sydny wide-eyed. “What happened to O?”

“Adventures.” Sydny's eyes sparkled in the warm lamplight. “The preface was titled ‘Happiness in Slavery.'”

“How is that possible?”

Sydny shrugged. “It's a way of life, of stripping away the layers of civilization that bind all adults, layer by painful layer. It's a way of arriving at the nature of things.”

“I don't understand.”

“You will.” Sydny put a hand on Julie shoulder. “Most people are under the impression that sex is pleasure.”

“It seems to me it is. Or should be.”

“Then why are you so afraid of allowing yourself an orgasm?”

“I … I don't know. It's complicated.”

“No, it's the opposite of complicated. Having an orgasm means letting go—everything you cling to: guilt, fear, shame, the terror of doing something unforgivable.”

“I equate sex with love, with happiness.”

“No, you don't.” Sydny shook her head. “You equate sex with humiliation, ineptitude, manipulation, and—what am I leaving out? Oh, yes, lies.” Sydny was as unflinching in her gaze as she was in what she was saying. “Happiness is an ideal, something you've been told you need to work hard toward, when, in fact, happiness is nothing more than exercising an illusion.”

“You're saying it's not real. That I can't be happy?”

“Not at all. But it can't be reached until you understand that sex is power. Happiness lies in understanding the true nature of things. Otherwise, what are you? A slave to the illusions you create for yourself.”

“Sydny, you're scaring me.”

“Only because that new thing you crave is not yet understandable to you. It's alien, frightening. But think. The so-called laws you grew up with were all meant to inhibit your passions, to drive them underground so they would seem filthy, immoral. But I will tell you this: the only true way to a woman's heart is along the path of torment.”