Escape the Night (46 page)

In one last terrible moment, Barth saw his father's face. “
No
…”

“So what would you do, Clayton?” Englehardt concluded, and pulled the trigger.

CHAPTER 17

Carey inched the stranger along the path he ran with Noelle.

They moved in darkness. Arc lights bathed the traverse in a swath of yellow running forty feet to their right; night wove the trees in front of them into a twisted maze, obscuring the lights of Central Park West. The night grew colder; the maze thinned; the stranger's footsteps plodded toward the lights. Carey aimed the revolver at his back.

“Keep moving …”

Cabs sped by on the traverse; headlights stabbed the trunks of trees and patches of dead grass; tires hummed and went and came again.

A car braked, squealing.

“
I'm losing control
…”

Carey could not turn: captor and imprisoned, he must always watch the stranger. Dull rhythmic pounding drove pain from his skull through his eyes and the cords of his neck, sapping strength from his legs. “Hurry up …”

“
Faster, Daddy
…”

Slivers of memory, a gift from Levy, exploded from his subconscious.

“
Peter!
”

Carey fought them; he must not be distracted.

Levy was dead.

He must always watch the stranger.

His palm was scraped raw; the gun rubbed sweat into it. He did not know if he could pull the trigger.

A prowl car cruised the corner of his eye; he tensed to shout.

“
Go to the police, and he'll kill her
…”

Its taillights vanished around a curve.

They kept walking.

The lights loomed higher and closer; the broad shoulders of the stranger moved toward them, catlike but too slow.

“Faster …”

His steps kept falling in the same deliberate beat.

“Faster, damn you …”

The man did not seem to hear.

The path rose; there were street sounds; the lights grew square and large. They passed beneath a bower of dead branches.

Carey watched his back.

The traffic noise grew nearer; the two men walked in tandem. Abruptly, the stranger wheeled on him.

Carey could not fire, shouted, “
Stop!
”

A streetlight caught the stranger's crooked smile of contempt. In a slurred voice, he said, “We can take the subway now.”

Carey shot one look past him. The stone entrance to the park; the Aristocrat across the street; the doorman, waiting …

The stranger was pointing to the subway entrance on the corner of West 72nd Street.

Carey slid the gun into his overcoat pocket, gripping its butt. “We'll use a cab.”

“So you can take me to the police?”

“I said I wouldn't do that.”

The stranger shook his head. “I don't want some cabbie remembering my face, or writing where he dropped us. This way it's just the two of us, alone.”

A woman in furs passed behind them on the sidewalk, walking a poodle. Under his breath, Carey asked, “Where are we going?”

The ugly man still smiled at him. “SoHo.”

Englehardt despised Clayton Barth for his ugliness in death.

It upset him, altered his balance. He had never killed a man, and then looked into his face.

Barth's head lolled; his arms flopped on both sides of the chair. His eyes still stared at Englehardt with the shock of his betrayal.

Englehardt thought of Phillip. There was bile in his mouth.

His first instinct was to run.

Turning away, he breathed deeply. He could not leave Martin in the grasp of Peter Carey, for Martin knew his name.

He walked back to Barth, seized him by the hair, and gently laid his head on the desk. His hand trembled …

He would no longer see Barth's face.

He did not wish to see the face of Peter Carey, so much like his father's. But the circle of fate was closing fast …

He began pacing.

Once more he picked up the revolver he had used to murder Barth.

Walking around Barth's chair, he knelt, and took him by the hand.

Carefully, systematically, he put Barth's fingerprints on the barrel, stock and trigger, while his skin was still warm. The revolver would be Barth's alone: his own gloves would leave no trace.

Standing, he walked back past the desk, to the far side of the room.

There was a board of wall switches. One by one he flicked them off until a single overhead lamp cast a pool of light in front of the elevator. His desk was swathed in darkness.

He walked toward it.

The drawer was still open. At the rear, behind the second revolver, was a cassette recorder. Englehardt took the tape from his pocket and slipped it into the recorder. Punching the button marked “playback,” he felt the first welcome rush of confidence: so carefully edited, the tape would serve him well.

Precisely, he angled the desk lamp away from his face, so that its streak of light ran across the blotter to illuminate the head of Clayton Barth.

He sat, closing the drawer.

For one final moment, he reviewed his plan; the ritual soothed him, like the fingering of rosary beads. By instinct, he reached into his right breast pocket, and touched the check with Phillip Carey's signature. Phillip …

He shut his eyes. Shooting him, Martin had smiled.

There could be no misstep now, no failure of his nerve. He must frighten Peter Carey, as he could not frighten his father, until Carey lost control.

His own control must be like iron.

Slowly, Englehardt forced himself to look across the desk, at the head of Clayton Barth.

Blood trickled onto the blotter.

Englehardt rose and left the room.

Noelle Ciano was past tears.

She had strained at the ropes that bound her, desperate for the sound of Peter's voice, until her wrists bled and her shoulders and the muscles of her stomach ached with the cramping pain that robbed her legs of feeling. She smelled urine and no longer cared. Her eyes and heart were dry.

The man would kill her now.

Perhaps she was dying for Peter's memory.

Time had slipped from her in the dark with the hope of living. She knew only pain and blackness; there was no daylight or the taste of wine, or the scent of Peter's skin.

She hoped he would not know the despair of becoming an animal.

Would he live, she wondered suddenly, and have a child? Would he reach for its mother in the darkness of the night?

Her throat caught; for one split second Peter Carey smiled in her mind, alive again.

Footsteps.

“Peter?”

She could not die now, just as she had found him.

A metallic scraping sound, the door opening …

Tears came to her eyes, and then a thin hand touched her.

Martin's hatred drew him on.

He led Carey up the steps from the subway, emerging in a trickle of passengers at the corner of Spring Street and Sixth Avenue. They stopped, facing a triangular park of brick and benches and bare trees; night made it stark and soulless, a piece of modern sculpture. No passengers looked up as they passed; unwitting and uncurious, they dispersed along dim cobblestones and the two men stood alone.

The gun dug into his back. “Move,” Carey whispered.

Martin felt Carey breathing on his neck.

Slowly, he turned down Spring Street. Pain throbbed through his face and skull, nothing to the pain of his emasculation.

Perhaps she was already dead.

Martin was not sure; Englehardt killed through him alone, just as he himself had entered Noelle through Peter Carey, passion without risk. He did not know if Englehardt could murder whom he touched.

Martin's stomach twisted. He still wanted the woman; he would prove himself by taking Carey.

A flag flapped above them; Martin felt the gun jerk, heard the quick hiss of Carey's breath.

If she was still alive, he could take Carey as she watched.

He knew his weakness from the subway.

Deliberately, he had picked a local; head ringing and mouth trickling blood, he had staunched his hate by watching each new stop stretch Carey to the breaking point. The train squealed to a standstill, loaded and unloaded its meager burden, and then lurched forward again, flickering and half-empty, stopped as a few passengers trooped on and off, started and stopped, stopped and started, and still Carey faced him with the gun in his pocket, white knuckles grasping a center pole, so stiff and fearful of losing him that he lost track of where they were until they had arrived at SoHo, and Martin had smiled at the useless gun, saying, “We can get off now, Peter,” as if to a stupid tourist.

Carey's eyes had never left his face.

Englehardt would not permit such concentration; he was bringing Peter Carey to be killed.

Englehardt could not let Carey have him.

Martin wondered what price the small man would exact for his failure, what wounds and psychic cruelties. There would surely be some penalty; in the matter of Phillip Carey, he had pushed Englehardt much too far.

He must show him that his skills had not eroded.

Crossing Wooster Street, he slowed.

Carey did not like these streets; Martin had learned this by watching him with the woman. She had stopped to read the poster; Carey had stared up at the tangle of fire escapes hanging over the narrow streets until Martin sensed the warehouses tumbling down on him. Martin would use this now, to drain Carey of the crazy energy that had sustained him in the park, replacing it with fear.

“Faster …”

Carey's voice was ragged. A couple passed them on the other side, hailing a taxi.

Martin slowed still more as they turned down Greene Street.

Bare and treeless, it was narrower than the others—only arc lamps, corrugated-iron doors and garbage bags, the metal signs of rag merchants. Fire escapes climbed seven-story buildings on both sides, blocking the sky.

The gun slid to his neck.

“Don't worry, Peter.” Martin's voice was soothing. “We're getting close.”

He wondered what Englehardt had waiting for Peter Carey.

There would be some final shock to snap his self-control; some playing with light and darkness, Carey's fears and nightmares. Perhaps the woman …

Martin would pause before he killed him, savoring the climax of their drama.

He stopped at the door to the gallery. “We're here,” he said softly.

Carey stepped through the door.

Vague, frightening shapes receded toward the wall. He jerked up the revolver …

The shapes did not move.

The stranger walked between them. “Wait,” Carey shouted. A coiled dragon appeared to his left.

Carey's eyes adjusted to the light.

Dark and vast, the room was filled with statuary that menaced from all angles. Shadows fell on other shadows until they took on a human aspect, and the stranger, now still, became one of them. There was no sound.

“Wait,” Carey repeated softly.

Aiming the revolver at the stranger's back, he surveyed the room. It was widest to his left, cluttered with statues at odd distances. Ahead, an aisle had been cleared, leading straight to an open service elevator on the opposite wall, covered in burlap and pads.

The stranger began walking toward it.

Slowly, Carey followed him inside.

The elevator closed. “Hands on the door,” Carey snapped. “And don't move.”

The stranger leaned forward, the flat of each palm pressed above his head. Carey held the gun to his back.

Rumbling, the elevator started up. Carey heard the cables straining with its weight, thought of his faceless enemy, waiting.

The elevator kept rising.

Abruptly, it lurched. Carey's knees buckled, free hand catching his fall, and then the elevator came to a stop.

“Don't move,” Carey repeated. His voice was taut.

The door opened.

They were splashed in yellow.

Blinking, Carey saw the stranger, framed in the door with his arms raised, crucified by light.

“Hello, Peter.”

The voice echoed from some great distance. The stranger moved toward it.

Carey stepped from the elevator, and blinked.

He stood in a circle of light, staring into the massive outline of a loft, darkness so vast that for an instant it seemed they were outdoors on a starless night. A beam stabbed from the wall of black.

His eyes followed it to a small wooden desk.

Barth's head lay on it, facing Carey. Blood ran from the temple.

Noelle Ciano sat on the other side.

She was blindfolded. From the darkness, a gloved hand pointed a gun to her head.

It had no face or body.

From deep within him, Carey cried, “
Who are you?
”

The despair in Carey's voice crossed forty feet of darkness.

Englehardt no longer trusted his own: films and photographs had not prepared him for this presence, so close to Charles Carey that it seemed to replace memory with the impact of their meeting.

“That, Peter, you can never know.”

His throat was dry. He saw Carey blindly pointing the revolver; Martin tensed in front of him; blood trickling down Barth's face; the blindfolded woman leaning toward her lover's voice—a frieze of light and darkness. He could not think …

Carey called out, “
Noelle!
”

She tried to stand, hands tied behind her. Her mouth opened.

Englehardt pressed the gun to her temple.

Carey stepped toward him.

“Wait.” Englehardt reached for his normal tone. “Startle me in any way, and Miss Ciano will die in the reflex of my finger.”

He saw Martin dip one shoulder, Carey's gun twitch back to him. Englehardt nerved himself on. “I hope to persuade you, Peter, that I need not harm Miss Ciano at all. What I'm about to propose is a rather complex trade. If you agree, I will simply take the man who brought you here, and vanish from your life.”

Carey moved closer behind Martin. Englehardt paused to let Martin count the sound of each step; preparing to use the tape, this moment helped him plan. “Your intelligent consent demands that you appreciate the components of the trade, and time requires that I be blunt. To begin with, you no longer own the firm left you by your grandfather. You'll recognize, of course, the head of Clayton Barth. Last night, he purchased your firm from Phillip Carey for ten million dollars.” His voice was sardonic. “His heirs own it now.”