Recoil (39 page)

As Mathieson approached he saw the camera swing toward him. He looked straight into the lens and felt atavistic rage; he hoped it showed.

Homer was distributing coffee in plastic containers. His face under the stocking mask looked weirdly distorted. Mathieson took a cup of coffee and sipped it; he looked up and found the tripod-mounted camera panning past him and he contrived a grim smile for it before it went past.

Roger locked the camera in position, left it running and stepped around in front of it, showing only his back to the camera but adding his bodily presence to the group's number. Then he backed out of range and returned to the camera and picked it up to carry it down the hill and take a group shot from another angle.

Benson said, “You mean this is all you want from us? Just some film of us standing around drinking coffee?”

“It'll do the job,” Mathieson said.

John Fusco snorted. “You're a little crazy if you think Frank Pastor's going to get scared out of his shoes just by seeing some movies of the four of us together. He was never scared of us before. Why should he start now?”

“Because we never organized ourselves against him before. We were always solitary targets. I want to convince him we're unified against him.”

He went across to the porch of one of the half-decomposed buildings and picked up the stack of placards. While he carried them back to the group he saw Roger setting up the camera above the road. It wasn't cranking.

He put the placards down. “I doubt any of you has much experience with cue cards but we've got a few lines for each of you to read. You'll be on camera while you talk but I want to rehearse these performances before we put them on film. It'll have the best effect if it doesn't look like you're reading the lines. Try to be as natural as you can. If you can't get your mouth around the wording, put it in your own words. All right, let's start with Walter.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

New Jersey: 10–14 November

1

H
E SAT HUDDLED BY THE BOATHOUSE ON THE PIER, THE COLD
wind shot sprays of foam off the lake into his face; he sat with his arms wrapped around his knees and did not move when he heard the car enter the driveway.

He heard the front door slam. Homer bringing in the groceries. Mathieson didn't stir.

The sun filtered weakly through a brittle haze. Pointed reflections ran along the surface of the water. All around the lake the trees were stark and bare. On the far shore a boy rode his bicycle along the road. There was no other sign of life.

It was a while before he was disturbed. He heard the glass doors slide open and someone's footsteps on the path.

“Time to feed Mrs. Pastor, I believe.” Vasquez.

He didn't move.

Vasquez's hand fell on his shoulder. “Come on, get up. You'll catch pneumonia.”

He shook the hand off.

“Don't be silly, Mr. Merle.”

When he still didn't look up Vasquez sat down beside him. “Having second thoughts, are you?”

“Everybody's entitled to a mood now and then.”

“You're a thousand miles past the point where you could have turned back, if that's what you're contemplating. Think of your own wife—what will happen to her if you don't carry it through. Your own child as well.”

“I had no idea she'd be pregnant, Diego.” His speech sounded rusty in his own ears: slow, painful, searching for words. “An innocent unborn child. It's harder to sink lower than that.”

“I'm sure Genghis Khan was innocent in the womb.”

“Don't patronize me with ad-lib aphorisms.”

“Come on, Mr. Merle, it's time to take her supper to her before it gets cold. Or give me the key and I'll be waiter tonight.”

“No. I'm the only one who goes in there.”

“As you wish.”

He got to his feet; suddenly he was very cold. He began to shiver.

2

He rubbed his eyes and watched the mixture cook up on the stove. When it was heated he drew it up carefully into the syringe. He switched off the heat.

He felt the others' eyes on him when he carried the syringe through the hallway, holding it up ahead of him like a uniformed doctor. With his free hand he turned the keys in the locks; then he went into the room, careful not to brush anything with the needle.

She rolled over on the bed and stared at him. Her eyes were utterly blank.

3

On his way into the living room he paused by the thermostat. It was on its highest setting. He rubbed his hands together and buttoned his sweater all the way up.

Vasquez looked up from his crossword puzzle. “Another day or two and you should be able to begin withholding the drug until she begins to need it. It shouldn't take very long before she's convinced beyond all doubt that she cannot survive without having the injection at regular intervals. You'll have to impress the mythology on her.”

Roger said, “What mythology?”

“Drug addiction is in large part psychological, you know.”

Roger looked at Homer across the checkerboard. “What's he talking about now?”

Vasquez said, “Those stories you've heard about addicts dying from cold-turkey withdrawal are largely hokum. Of all the deaths attributed to heroin, virtually none has been caused by withdrawal. It's a painful process to be sure but rarely a deadly one. It isn't the physical need for the drug that controls the victim—it's the mind. The mind becomes convinced that survival is impossible without the drug. If she weren't aware it was heroin that was being injected into her veins, she'd realize only that she felt sick in the absence of injections. She'd feel terrible but she wouldn't know why. Given enough time, her sickness would pass. She'd return to normal health and never entertain the desire for another shot of heroin—because she'd never know it was what she'd been receiving in the first place. Do any of you understand what I'm saying?”

Mathieson said, “I always understood it was a physical addiction.”

“To a great extent it is. But the mind needs to be aware of it. The human mind is the great betrayer.”

Homer cleared his throat. “Can't we talk about something else?”

“No. We must be clear on this. We cannot flinch from it. This thing must be done in such a way that her knowledge of absolute need becomes the overriding factor in her life. We must continually reinforce her conviction that she has become a hopelessly addicted slave to whom the withholding of her regular injection would be unthinkably agonizing.”

Mathieson sat down. Vasquez stared at him. “By letting her go a bit too long between shots you will let her feel the touch of withdrawal anguish. Merely a taste of it. You cannot make the final move until you've accomplished that.”

Mathieson rubbed his face with both palms.

Vasquez's voice softened. “Actually I'd worry more if you weren't having such a strong reaction to these events. If you took them in stride I'd have to put you in the same category of subhuman existence to which verminous cretins like Frank Pastor belong.”

Mathieson let his hands fall onto the arms of the chair and leaned his head back against the cushion. “Roger, we'll want to film some close-ups tomorrow of the scabs on her arms. The needle tracks.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

New York City: 16 November

1

T
HIS TIME THE MESSENGER WAS A RETARDED YOUTH WITH
a club foot; there was no information in him. Ezio signed for the package and Cestone escorted the limping messenger to the elevators.

It contained a single reel of 16mm film. Ezio set up the projector on the pool table and unrolled the screen against the book shelves. Frank shut the door and turned off the lights. Enough illumination came through the closed Venetian blinds to thread the projector. Ezio set up the speaker box and plugged in the wires.

Frank said brutally, “Enjoy the show, folks.”

It began with a close-up of Anna. Apparently she was sitting in a chair; the frame showed only her shoulders and head. She looked contemptuously toward the camera and then away.

It was in color with good resolution: very professional. But Anna's movement, her turn away from the camera, was sluggish and her eyes looked dull. She looked doped, Ezio thought. He glanced at Frank to see whether the same thought had occurred to him but Frank stared unblinkingly at the screen and the quiet anger in his face registered no change; he had been in a deadly calm for ten days now—running things with chilly precision but an utter absence of visible feeling. It was a state in which Ezio had never seen him before.

The image of Anna remained on the screen for several seconds in complete silence; there was only the grind of the projector and the hum of the speaker. Ezio was about to check the sound system when abruptly Edward Merle's voice boomed, filling the room.

“She is, as you see, quite alive.”

There was a sudden cut: a daylight close-up of Merle, looking into the camera. Ezio felt Frank stiffen. He reached for the volume knob and turned it down a bit.

“She'll stay alive if you do certain things. First, you're to cancel immediately the contract on my life and my family. I want you to spread the word where
everybody
hears it. I want it to be heard where it will be reported back to me. In addition, you will similarly cancel the contracts on these three men: Walter Benson.”

Another cut: Benson was there, looking into the camera, showing his teeth—in defiance.

“… John Fusco.”

Fusco, his hair gone gray, his eyes hidden in shadow, his jaw squared in determination.

“… Paul Draper.”

Draper's fine hair moved slowly in the breeze like seaweed. He stared blankly at them from the screen.

Ezio heard Frank murmur, “So they're in this together.”

There was another tight shot of Anna; another setting—it looked like a bedroom; Ezio saw a barred window at the edge of the frame. She was sitting on the edge of the bed. The camera moved and the image jerked: The camera was being hand-held and perhaps this was a different photographer's work; the resolution was less clear. Anna got up and walked slowly to the window and the camera followed her, panning across the room. It was as if she had been told to stand up and walk to the window; she obeyed listlessly. At the window she was in silhouette. The camera zoomed forward slowly until her torso's outline filled the frame. Just before it went to black there was an abrupt cut to a close-up of an arm.

“You'll notice the punctures in the flesh above the vein. These are the tracks of mainline needles.” The voice was harsh and cold.

The camera drew back, tipping upward; Anna's face came into the picture. So it wasn't a fake; that was really her own arm.

“At the moment her maintenance dose has been increased steadily to five nickel bags per day.”

Ezio gripped his head in both hands.
Jesus
.

Abruptly Walter Benson was on the screen. He talked straight into the camera. Ezio had no trouble recognizing the reedy voice. “I've got a bullet in my back from your contract. It won't happen again, and we're going to tell you why.”

Cut: Now it was Draper, speaking with slow gravity. “There are more of us than you can ever handle. We want you to know that.”

And then Fusco. “We've had it, Pastor. One more move against any of us …”

Cut to Merle: “… and we all come down on you like a ton of bricks. That's a promise.”

Now there was a repeat of the opening shot; Anna, head and shoulders, first looking into the camera and then, as if in woozy disgust, looking away. The camera moved up slightly and began to zoom forward through the window beyond her; it kept her head steadily in the frame in the lower corner but she went gradually out of focus as the image went out through the window and picked up a scene of abandoned shacks, barren gray earth, rock-studded hills beyond. At the foot of the slope the camera discovered a knot of men milling slowly about. The lens zoomed forward to high telephoto resolution. Ezio counted five men in the picture: He recognized three of them; the other two were not in focus.

There was a cut that disoriented him momentarily; the camera seemed to be prying its way through a group of people, pushing foreground figures away to the sides, finding more people beyond. Draper looked at the camera and made an obscene gesture. Fusco made a fist. Benson, with an ironic twist to his mouth, lifted a plastic cup toward the camera as if in toast, and then drank. Merle was coming down the slope from a cabin above them; the camera focused on him until he moved into the group. In the background two other figures moved in and out of the view—Ezio realized they were wearing stockings over their heads. Both of them wore pullover sweaters, dark slacks, dark shoes and leather gloves. Six so far, he thought. Then the camera steadied and a seventh man appeared at one side of the frame. He did not face it; Ezio had an impression of bulk, a full reddish beard, long unkempt hair. The man milled among the others, keeping his back to the camera, and soon went out of sight to one side.

The camera cut to another view of the group, taken from a point slightly above them; Merle's voice startled Ezio from the speaker. “These are a few of our group. There are others. You'll notice that you can't recognize three of the people you've seen in these pictures. Remember that. These three are close friends of ours. They've joined us to fight you. You don't know who they are, and therefore you can't reach them before they reach you.”

Close-up of Merle; behind him nothing but a blank off-white plaster wall. Talking directly into the camera.

“We've grown into a sizable force. You're not dealing with helpless individuals anymore. We took your wife to prove a point. You're vulnerable. You're just as vulnerable as we are. Your wife and your unborn child are at our mercy. We've made a hopeless heroin addict out of her in a matter of weeks, with carefully controlled increasing doses. We can do a lot worse than that if you force it.”