Festival of Fear (6 page)

‘Kevin,' Mr Le Renges repeated, unimpressed.

The slaughterman leaned forward and unclipped the Presa Canario's collar. It bounded forward, snarling, and I took a step back until my rear end was pressed against the stainless steel vat. There was no place else to go.

‘Now,
kill
!' shouted Mr Le Renges, and stiffly pointed his arm at me.

The dog lowered its head almost to the floor and bunched up its shoulder muscles. Strings of saliva swung from its jowls, and its cock suddenly appeared, red and pointed, as if the idea of tearing my throat out was actually turning it on.

I lifted my left arm to protect myself. I mean, I could live without a left arm, but not without a throat. It was then that I had a sudden flashback. I remembered when I was a kid, when I was thin and runty and terrified of dogs. My father had given me a packet of dog treats to take to school, so that if I was threatened by a dog I could offer it something to appease it. ‘Always remember that, kid. Dogs prefer food to children, every time. Food is easier to eat.'

I reached into the vat behind me and scooped out a huge handful of pink gloop. It felt disgusting . . . soft and fatty, and it dripped. I held it toward the Presa Canario and said, ‘Here, Cerberus! You want something to eat? Try some of this!'

The dog stared up at me with those red reflective eyes as if I were mad. Its black lips rolled back and it bared its teeth and snarled like a massed chorus of death rattles.

I took a step closer, still holding out the heap of gloop, praying that the dog wouldn't take a bite at it and take off my fingers as well. But the Presa Canario lifted its head and sniffed at the meat with deep suspicion.

‘
Kill
, Cerberus, you stupid mutt!' shouted Mr Le Renges.

I took another step toward it, and then another. ‘Here, boy. Supper.'

The dog turned its head away. I pushed the gloop closer and closer but it wouldn't take it, didn't even want to sniff it.

I turned to Mr Le Renges. ‘There you are . . . even a dog won't eat your burgers.'

Mr Le Renges snatched the dog's leash from the slaughterman. He went up to the animal and whipped it across the snout, once, twice, three times. ‘You pathetic disobedient piece of shit!'

Mistake. The dog didn't want to go near me and my handful of gloop, but it was still an attack dog. It let out a bark that was almost a roar and sprang at Mr Le Renges in utter fury. It knocked him back on to the floor and sank its teeth into his forehead. He screamed, and tried to beat it off. But it jerked its head furiously from side to side, and with each jerk it pulled more and more skin away.

Right in front of us, with a noise like somebody trying to rip up a pillowcase, the dog tore his face off, exposing his bloodied, wildly-popping eyes, the soggy black cavity of his nostrils, his grinning lipless teeth.

He was still screaming and gargling when three of the slaughtermen pulled the dog away. Strong as they were, even they couldn't hold it, and it twisted away from them and trotted off to the other side of the killing floor, with Mr Le Renges' face dangling from its jaws like a slippery latex mask.

I turned to the slaughtermen. They were too shocked to speak. One of them dropped his knife, and then the others did, too, until they rang like bells.

I stayed in Calais long enough for Nils to finish fixing my car and to make a statement to the sandy-haired police officer. The weather was beginning to grow colder and I wanted to get back to the warmth of Louisiana, not to mention the rare beef muffalettas with gravy and onion strings.

Velma lent me the money to pay for my auto repairs and the Calais Motor Inn waived all charges because they said I was so public spirited. I was even on the front page of
The Quoddy Whirlpool.
There was a picture of the mayor whacking me on the back, under the banner headline HAMBURGER HERO.

Velma came out to say goodbye on the morning I left. It was crisp and cold and the leaves were rattling across the parking lot.

‘Maybe I should come with you,' she said.

I shook my head. ‘You got vision, Velma. You can see the thin man inside me and that's the man you like. But I'm never going to be thin, ever. The poboys call and my stomach always listens.'

The last I saw of her, she was shading her eyes against the sun, and I have to admit that I was sorry to leave her behind. I've never been back to Calais since and I doubt if I ever will. I don't even know if Tony's Gourmet Burgers is still there. If it is, though, and you're tempted to stop in and order one, remember there's always a risk that any burger you buy from Tony Le Renges
is
people.

Anka

‘
T
hat's all of them?' asked Grace, as Kasia came down the stairs, carrying a bundled-up blanket in her arms.

‘The very last one,' said Kasia. She lifted the corner of the blanket to reveal a boy of about three years old, with a white face and bright red lips and curly black hair. His eyes kept rolling upward and off to the left, and his chin was glistening with dribble. This was little Andrzej, who was suffering from cerebral palsy and a heart murmur.

‘Thank God for that,' said Grace. ‘Now let's hope they knock this terrible place down.'

She took a long look around the hallway: at the faded, olive-green wallpaper and the stringy brown carpet, and the sagging red vinyl couch where visitors were supposed to sit. The windows on either side of the front door were tinted yellow, so that even the air looked as if it were poisoned.

‘So many children have suffered here,' said Kasia. ‘So much misery. So much sadness.'

‘Come on,' said Grace. ‘Let's get out of here. It's a long drive to Wrocław.'

‘Your husband is coming this evening?'

‘He missed his connecting flight to New York, but he'll be here by tomorrow morning. He's bringing Daisy with him.'

‘Oh! You will be so pleased to see her!'

Grace smiled, and whispered, ‘Yes.' It had been over a month since she had last seen Daisy, and she had missed her so much that she had been tempted more than once to give up the whole project and fly back home to Philadelphia.

But each time she had revisited the twenty-seven children in the Katowice orphanage, she had known that she could never abandon them. Ever since she had first been taken to see them, seven months ago, she had been determined to rescue them.

As Kasia had said, ‘These children, they are not unhappy. To be unhappy, you have to know what it is like to be happy, and these children have never been happy, not for one single moment, from the day they were born.'

Last September, as the poplar trees of southern Poland had been turning yellow, Grace had been visiting the industrial city of Katowice to take photographs for a
National Geographic
feature on ‘Newly Prosperous Poland.' But on her last evening, at a crowded civic reception at the Hotel Campanile, she had been approached by Kasia Bogucka and Grzegorz Scharf.

Kasia was anorexically thin and very intense, with cropped blonde hair and high angular cheekbones and startlingly violet eyes. Grzegorz was much more reserved. He wore rimless spectacles and a constant frown, and although he couldn't have been older than thirty-five, his hair was receding, and he had a middle-aged tiredness about him, as if he had witnessed more misery than he could bear.

‘We work for a charity for disabled childs,' Grzegorz had explained. ‘Both physical disabilities, if you understand, and also mental, in the brains.'

‘You
must
come with us to see the Cienisty Orphanage,' Kasia had pleaded with her. ‘You must take pictures, so that people will know.'

Grace had sympathetically shaken her head. ‘I'm sorry. My flight leaves at eleven tomorrow morning. I won't have the time.'

‘Then,
please
– why don't you come now?'

It had been well past nine. Grace had been wearing her red cocktail dress and red stiletto heels, and she had already drunk two and a half glasses of champagne. Outside, the night was black and she could see raindrops sparkling on the hotel windows.

‘I am beg you,' said Grzegorz. ‘These childs, they have no hopes, none at all.'

Even now, she couldn't really explain why she had decided to go. But ten minutes later, she had found herself in the back of a Polonez station wagon with no springs, jolting her way along a rutted road toward the south-eastern outskirts of Katowice. Grzegorz had lit a cigarette, and when he had wound down the window to let out the smoke, the rain had come flying into her face.

After fifteen minutes' driving, they had reached a scrubby, desolate suburb, with only the illuminated sign of a Statoil gas station for a landmark. Off to the right-hand side of the road there was a tall stand of fir trees. Beyond the fir trees, Grace had been able to make out an overgrown garden, with overturned shopping carts in it, and a large square house, with peeling purple stucco on its walls.

Grzegorz had driven up to the front of the house, and parked. It had stopped raining now, but water had still been gurgling down the drainpipes. The three of them had climbed the steps to the front door, but even before Kasia had been able to knock, it had been opened by a plump, round-faced woman with a headscarf and a tight checkered overall. Her eyes had looked like two raisins pushed into unbaked dough.

‘Ah, Panna Bogucka,' she had said, as if she hadn't been entirely pleased to see her.

‘I hope you don't mind, Weronika. I brought a photographer with me.'

The plump woman had eyed Grace with deep suspicion. ‘She is not going to take any pictures of me? What happens here, this is not my fault. I do my best but I have no nurses and you know how little money they give me.'

‘Weronika . . . I just want her to take pictures of the children.'

Weronika had clucked in disapproval, but had stepped back to allow them inside. Grace had noticed how worn out her shoes were. The hallway had been dimly illuminated by a chandelier with only two of its six bulbs working, and it had been deeply chilly. It was the smell, though, that had affected Grace the most. Boiled turnips, and damp, and urine-soaked mattresses, and something else – some sweetish, nauseating stench, like rotten poultry.

‘The Cienisty Orphanage was first opened after the war,' Kasia had explained. ‘In those days there were so many children who had no parents, and nobody to take care of them. But now they use it for children with anything from cystic fibrosis to cerebral palsy to Down's syndrome. What do you call it? A garbage dump, for children that nobody wants.'

‘Aren't they given any treatment?' Grace had asked her.

Grzegorz had let out a bitter laugh. ‘Treatment? You are meaning
therapy
? There is nobody even to wash them, and to change their clothes, and to give them foods. Nobody even
talks
to them. They are forgot, these childs. They are worse than being orphans. They are worse than dead people.'

As they were talking, a girl of about seven years old had materialized from one of the side rooms, as silent as a memory. She had approached them very cautiously, to stand only three or four feet away, listening. She had been painfully thin, with straight brown hair and huge brown eyes. She had been wearing a black tracksuit that was two sizes too big for her, and soiled red slippers that were almost gray.

She had been clutching a doll. The doll had a white china head, with a wild shock of white hair, but a strange and beautiful face. Most dolls have a blank, witless stare, but this doll looked both serene and knowing – as if she were alive, but far too shrewd to let anybody know.

‘What's your name, sweetheart?' Grace had asked the little girl. At the same time, she had lifted her Fuji camera off her shoulder, and removed the lens cap. She had understood at once why Kasia had wanted her to take pictures. There could be no more graphic way to explain what these children were suffering. It had all been there, in the little girl's eyes. The loneliness, the constant hunger, the bewilderment that nobody loved her.

Weronika had tried to put her arm around the little girl's shoulders, but the little girl had twisted herself away.

‘This is Gabriela. Say “
dobry wieczór
” to the ladies and the gentleman, Gabriela.'

Grace had hunkered down in front of Gabriela and reached out her hand. ‘Good evening, Gabriela. How are you?'

Gabriela had lowered her chin, but had kept on staring at Grace with those enormous dark eyes.

Grace had taken hold of the doll's hand, and shaken it. ‘
Dobry wieczór
, dolly! And what's
your
name?'

Kasia had asked her the same question in Polish. Gabriela had hesitated for a moment, and then she had whispered, ‘Anka.'

‘Anka? That's a nice name. Do you think that Anka would mind if I took her picture?'

Again, a long hesitation. Then Gabriela whispered something and Kasia translated. ‘Anka does not like to have her picture taken.'

‘Oh, really? I thought all pretty little girls like to have their picture taken.'

Gabriela had looked around, as if she had been worried that somebody might overhear what she was whispering. ‘My grandmother gave her to me, before she died. My grandmother said that I must keep her close to me, day and night, and especially at night. And I must never let anybody else hold her, and I must never let anybody take her picture.'

Grace had stood up, and laid her hand gently on top of Gabriela's head. ‘OK, have it your way. I just thought Anka might enjoy being famous.'

Kasia had said, ‘Come and take a look at the other children. They will give you plenty of photo opportunities, I promise you.'

Grace had waved goodbye to Gabriela and Anka, and Gabriela had waved Anka's hand in reply.

‘What an odd little girl,' Grace had remarked, as they followed Weronika and Grzegorz down a long, poorly lit corridor.