The Creep (8 page)

"For an older client you may get him to
visualize
the cancer cells are cockroaches and he has to come up with every devious method in the book to kill them off. An older woman may see a white knight on a horse slashing at the cancer cells with a huge diamond-and-ruby-encrusted sword.

"Capture your client's imagination so they can actually
visualize
the devil they are trying to beat. Everyone has this
faculty,
it's just a question of being trained in how to use it. That's our job. We have the written proof; literally thousands of unsolicited testimonials, that I.O.H. has cured more people of cancer world-wide than any patent drug or medicine. Let's keep up the good work."

Harvey met Bishman all over town, up in the hills, the beach and always the Pasadena office on Wednesdays.

This particular session took place in the Hollywood Hills. Bishman went into an altered state, submerged himself in memories and allowed his subconscious mind to surface. He quickly started his regression:

The first time Bishman arrived in Manhattan he walked around early in the morning to check out the city that has engines in its blood. You see a side of the naked city at 5:30 in the morning you can't see at any other time. He walked past a store doorway where two immaculately dressed hookers were taking it in turns to go down on a guy. Behind them was a junkie, desperately trying to shoot up - probably struggling to find a vein that was still working.

Another junkie, sitting on the ground, shouted.
Startled,
the one trying to shoot up swung around and accidentally jabbed the needle straight into his buddy's eye. Blood shot out from the tiny hole for about seven feet in a tiny jet - and spurted all over the two exquisitely beautiful hookers
and
the guy getting the blow job.

Welcome to New York, pal
, thought Bishman.

Harvey let Bishman be motionless for the next ninety minutes. He studied his facial expression,
which was completely relaxed. He looked almost angelic. Harvey made a note about this, alongside seven other pages of observations, including some he'd previously made about paranoia,
hypoglycemia
and vitamin deficiency.

After f
loating around in a sepia haze f
or about ninety minutes and without prompting from Harvey, Bishman started his dialogue again.
More horrific revelations.
Still in New York - Harvey quickly picked that up - but surmised this was an account of activity some three years later:

Bishman had made an appointment over on the Lower East Side and, for sentimental
reasons,
he walked down Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, although it took him out of his way. Nostalgic thoughts raced through his mind. The last time he was here he'd seen Jimi Hendrix, the legendary guitarist and folk hero, in the back of a stretch limousine and Hendrix was absolutely out of it. There was no-one else around, all the windows of the limo were open and Hendrix just sat in the back seat, looking like death warmed over. It was awful. Bishman remembered reading about Hendrix live in concert. He came up on stage and strummed his guitar with the amps turned up on full volume and all the people on the front row ended up with broken ear drums and blood trickling from their ears. Next time Bishman read about Hendrix, he was dead.

It was early evening when Mark Townsend, a.k.a. Bob Bishman, arrived at the apartment, which was dirty and dingy, and not far
from a shanty town by Manhattan Bride Plaza, near Canal Street. The female occupants were a mother of two, who sold either herself or her kids to make a quick buck, and another woman of dubious repute, Diane.

There was no wallpaper on the walls and the floor did not have a carpet. The furniture was sparse and looked as though it had come from the trash.
It
had
. The smell of cats; o
r to be more precise, tom
cats' piss, was everywhere. The place reeked of it.

On the table there was leftover food. It looked like it had been there for days. Cockroaches the size of golf balls scoured the place for food. This was the ultimate in squalor. The people living there didn't even notice.

"Tell us again what we've got to do, so Diane can hear it for herself," Linda said lighting a cigarette.

Townsend suppressed a burp. "Like I told you yesterday, I know this guy who wants to set up a new business." He stubbed his cigarette out and lit another with the girl's lighter, hoping the smoke would kill the smell of the cats' piss.

"This guy supplies sex
retaries to companies. You and Diane can make a lot of money.
Much more than you're making now."
Townsend rubbed some ash into his pants.

"All you have to do is turn up at the office addresses that he gives you and
wait
arou
nd. You'll be told who to suck
and who to fuck." Diane was going to say something but took a sip of her TAB instead.

"The main thing is to help me get it set up. Once
it's
set up you'll get paid every day just for making sure girls turn up at the various offices. I
don' t
live in Manhattan so he'll send my money onto me wherever I am. I need someone like you two girls who will be reliable and make sure the deal comes together. The other point is that you two know lots of other working girls, you've got contacts." He stubbed the cigarette out before finishing it. A television was blaring away in another room. Cigarette smoke hung in the room but couldn't kill the reek of cats' piss and the uncleanliness of human habitation.

Townsend lay back in the scruffy armchair and blew a smoke ring, then blew a stream of smoke through it, almost perfectly. "You've already told me that you and the kids turn tricks, too. You've got nothing to lose.

"I want to make sure you all perform and we'll do that tonight and if I'm happy with tonight's performance, I'll meet the two of you tomorrow on 34th Street and Ninth Avenue and I'll introduce you to the guy. He's all right, but he needs reliable girls to make this work. Three weeks' hard work, then you can stop. Just make sure you have got other girls to turn up at the offices." Townsend paused and made
himself
comfortable.

"I've got it," said Diane excitedly, "We go in as sexretaries, not to type or answer the phone, but to service the johns. That's right isn't it? Gee! What a great idea. Sexretaries! Who came up with that idea?"

Townsend lit another cigarette, ignoring
the h
alf-finished one in the ashtray. 
“I
came up
with the idea and persuaded the guy on Ninth Avenue to exploit it. We all get a cut, if we get the project off the ground. That's why
I
need to try you out, to make sure you all perform." Townsend glanced at the two girls to elicit a response.

"You can use the other bedroom," said Linda, "
It's
empty now, our last room-mate left yesterday and we haven't found anyone to replace her yet. Who do you want to start with first?" Linda stood up and turned around as if to offer
herself
.

"I'll start with the kids,
then
you two can finish me off, one at a time. Have you got a plastic bag I can put all my clothes in? I don't want to get them dirty."

"I'll get the kids ready. Give me a shout when you're done with them, and I'll come in and show you what I do for a living," said Linda pursing her lips and smiling at the same time. As an afterthought she added. "The only plastic
bag I've got is one from the supermarket, there ya go,
will
that do?" She handed Townsend a large plastic bag.

Townsend got up and once again was hit by the ammoniac smell of human sweat and cats' piss,
I'll be fuckin' glad to get outta here,
he thought.

Townsend left there at 5:30 in the morning after having a forty minute shower. He left there satisfied - well satisfied!

Harvey dated and numbered every one of Bish
m
an
’
s sessions. Sooner or later a jigsaw puzzle would form and he would put all the pieces together. He was absolutely sure he hadn't heard the last of this story, but for the time being at least,
B
ishman's mind had hung out the "Do Not Disturb Sign."

The number of Federal Express overnight packages, faxes and information transmitted by modem from the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico to
Mainwarring’s
office in New Scotland Yard at Whitehall was impressive in volume and content. Some of it was sickening, some revealing, all of it important.

However, it needed sifting, sorting, reading and above everything, it needed assimilating, before handing it over to his dedicated team.

It was time for Detective Superintendent Howard Mainwarring to crack a bottle of claret and burn some midnight oil again.

What was nice, thought Mainwarring, was that Special Agent Dave Wead always enclosed some American stamps for his nine-year old son, Rolf.
Mainwarring always made it a point to reciprocate when he sent packets to Quantico.

Harvey was eminently successful. He dressed
in expensive clothes, dark Savil
e Row suits, Italian leather shoes and what Harvey would call born-again Christian Dior shirts. He also wore gold cufflinks, a gold tie bar, a Rolex Oyster and glittering diamond rings. He looked successful but he always had the top button of his shirt undone or his tie loosened or taken off completely, or something else that would give him a particularly relaxed and approachable demeanor.

Bill Harvey didn't have any academic qualifications. He didn't need them. He had picked up his understanding of psychology from life and he knew his subject inside out and backwards as well. He'd become the world's leading authority in hypnotherapy simply by
practicing
it every day of the week for the last thirty years. He began messing around with hypnosis when he was fifteen, he was now forty-five. You do one thing solidly for thirty years, and by the end, you find you're pretty damn good. Harvey was not just
damn good
, he was
brilliant
.