The Decoy (7 page)

'Then what?'

He snorts. 'Then you get scared. You think you've had enough. You're not sure what you're getting into.'

'Do I struggle?'

'Yes. You struggle deliciously. I put my hands around your neck to stop you struggling. Your neck's so small it only takes one hand to go all the way around. With my other hand I take off your panties.'

'Am I still struggling?'

'Oh yes. It's good. It makes me feel powerful. And when you stop struggling, when you go limp…'

'Yes?'

'You lie there with your legs apart and I get my cock out.'

'Yes,' she breathes. 'Your cock.'

'And I pull you onto it, but it's tight and I push and your little face is twisted with pleasure.'

'Go on,' she says.

'And I put my hands around your throat again and it's like I'm holding my own cock, my own huge cock. And I'm twisting and pushing and you're loving it.'

'More,' she murmurs. 'More.'

'And I twist and pull and it feels so—' His hands grip the arms of his chair. His body seems to shudder and convulse, so that for a moment Claire wonders if the chair is somehow electrified.

Then she realizes he's come in his pants.

His head sags. 'Listen to me,' the woman says. Her voice has changed. No longer seductive, but crisper, more authoritative. 'I'm going to count backwards from five. When I reach two, you will wake up.'

The man's head moves. He groans.

'When you wake up, you will remember everything you have told me.' She counts from five to one. 'Have some water,' she says dismissively.

The man reaches for his glass. He's shaking. Another man, an orderly of some sort, who has been sitting quietly in the shadows beyond the camera's reach, comes forward and gently helps him to his feet.

'I'll come and see him in a while,' the woman says. 'Put him on suicide watch.'

Frank presses a button and the monitor goes blank, the grainy image sucked abruptly into a white supernova in the middle of the screen.

'That's Dr Constance Leichtman. It's her I want you to meet.'

===OO=OOO=OO===

In the flesh she's both slighter and more poised than she had seemed on the monitor. She shakes Claire's hand, and nods at Frank with the easy familiarity of a colleague.

'That man,' Claire says, still shocked. 'Did he really murder that girl?'

Dr Leichtman shakes her head. 'No. It was a fantasy.'

'Thank God.'

'But he will,' she says matter-of-factly. 'When he finishes the prison sentence he's already serving for sexual assault on a child, he'll go out and kill someone. Unless he either accepts treatment or kills himself first. Now then' — Dr Leichtman sits at her desk, closes one file and reaches for another — 'Christian Vogler.'

She starts to read the file. While she reads she taps a cigarette from a pack of Merit and lights it. Eventually the file is closed. 'Right,' she says. 'Tell me about Vogler.'

Claire recounts the story of her meeting with Vogler yet again, while Dr Leichtman looks at her thoughtfully over a plume of smoke.

'Thank you,' she says when Claire's finished. 'You've been very helpful. You can go now.'

'Connie,' Frank says entreatingly.

'She isn't right,' the psychiatrist says quietly.

'Would you excuse us for a minute, Claire?' Frank asks.

Claire goes and waits in the anteroom, where Dr Leichtman's assistant glances at her incuriously, then turns her attention back to her keyboard.

She waits and waits. And after a while the assistant waddles off with a pile of papers.

Claire slips into the observation room and turns on the monitor. She doesn't use the joystick because the moving camera might alert them. So she can't see them, but she can hear what they're saying.

'… she has no records, no bank account, no social security number. We can invent a past for her. She can be whoever we need her to be.'

It's Frank. He sounds insistent. 'And she can act, Connie. I mean, she can
really
act. I've watched her.'

Dr Leichtman's voice cuts across his. 'Give me a break, Frank. They can all
act.
MAWs, they're called. "Model, Actress, Whatever." New York's full of them.'

'I think this one's different. She's—'

'She's also a civilian. There's the issue of control.'

'She's used to being directed. If she agreed—'

Abruptly, Claire switches off the monitor.

Don't think. Act.

The assistant is still out of the anteroom. Claire picks up a pile of letters from the printer. The assistant is black, fifty and overweight. And the voice … let's see.

Claire lets her posture sag and waddles into the doctor's office. Frank is looking out of the window. Dr Leichtman is blowing smoke rings and tapping one elegant shoe.

'Would you sign these, Doctor?' Claire, or rather, now, the assistant, asks.

Leichtman makes a little gesture of irritation. 'I already did today's post,' she says, reaching out her hand to take them. Then she looks more closely at the hand holding the letters and glances up at Claire's face.

'That diet's doing you good, Joyce,' she murmurs. 'Well, well.'

Frank turns round from the window. When he sees that it's Claire his eyes light up.

===OO=OOO=OO===

'All right,' Dr Leichtman says at last. 'Tell her. That can't do any harm.'

'About a month ago,' Frank says, 'I asked Dr Leichtman if it was possible to design an operation' — he pauses, searching for words — 'a covert operation, in which a suspect would reveal whether they had the correct psychological make-up to be our killer. Dr Leichtman thought that it might be, if the killer had sufficient trust in the person he was revealing himself to.'

'Theoretically,'
Dr Leichtman murmurs from the desk. 'I said it was
theoretically
possible.'

'You mean like entrapment?' Claire asks incredulously.

'Not the sort of entrapment
you
do,' Dr Leichtman says. 'This would be a rather more sophisticated process. I think of it as being like a series of snakes and ladders. The suspect would have to actively climb successive ladders of self-incrimination — without any inducement from the decoy, of course — while at the same time avoiding various snakes, or actions which would eliminate them from suspicion. Do you see?'

'I think I can just about follow that,' Claire says sweetly. Something about the way the doctor talks down to her is pissing her off, just a little.

'We've looked at some candidates,' Frank says. 'Mostly women, for obvious reasons. Undercover police operatives. Connie hasn't… We don't think we've found the right person yet.'

'It won't be easy. The decoy will have to make up the script as they go along,' Dr Leichtman says.

Frank says to Claire, 'Where are you?'

Immediately she answers, 'In a street.'

'Where does the street lead?'

'To a jeweller's shop.'

'Why are you going there?'

'To sell my crown.'

'Why do you want to sell your crown?'

'To buy a canoe.'

'What's the canoe for?'

'To get back to China.'

'Yes, yes,' the psychiatrist says impatiently, breaking across them. 'She's fluent, granted, but it's fluent
nonsense.
Our decoy needs to know what she's doing.'

'You could teach her that part,' Frank says.

Claire breaks the silence first. 'Whoa,' she says, 'wait a minute. Why would
I
want to get involved with something like this?'

'Civic duty?' he growls. When she doesn't respond, he says, 'Money, then. We'd pay you a detective's salary for as long as it takes.'

'I want a green card,' she says slowly.

'That's Immigration's—'

'A green card and a salary. That's my price.'

'If I might interrupt your negotiations for just
one
moment,' Dr Leichtman says behind them. 'There isn't going to be any green card, because there isn't going to be any operation.'

They turn to look at her, and she stares back at them across the desk. 'It's completely out of the question,' she says.

Connie Leichtman stares at Claire for a long time. A very long time. She busies herself lighting a cigarette. 'Tell me about your family,' she says through a mouthful of smoke.

It's nine o'clock the next morning. Reluctantly, Dr Leichtman has cleared her diary. Her purpose, she's told Claire, is to get inside the girl's head and have a poke around, to see just how tough she really is.

'Unless, of course, you'd agree to be hypnotized,' she said a little wistfully. 'We could do this really quickly if you'd agree to be hypnotized.'

'No,' Claire had said. She isn't sure yet how much she trusts this doctor.

'Your family,' Dr Leichtman says again.

'My parents separated when I was four,' Claire says evenly. 'My mother tried to look after me, but she couldn't cope. So I went to stay with my dad in London.'

'But that didn't work out?'

'We've been through this,' Claire mutters.

The psychiatrist waits.

'It didn't work out, no. I didn't… My stepmother found me difficult to live with.'

'A personality clash.'

'It would have been.' For the first time there's a note of anger in Claire's voice. 'If she'd had a personality.'

Dr Leichtman makes a note. 'So you were put into care,' she says. 'You had foster parents.'

'I had people who looked after me for money. Like a hotel guest, except I couldn't check out.'

'I see.'

'
What
do you see?'

Dr Leichtman ignores her. 'And that's when you discovered acting?'

Claire laughs bitterly. 'That's where all this is leading, is it? I couldn't cope with my own life, so I started to pretend I was living someone else's. Case closed.'

'Well?
Is
that the way it was?'

'No. I'd discovered something I was good at, that's all.'

'A talent which your foster parents no doubt encouraged.'

'Did they fuck. They called me a liar, mostly.'

Dr Leichtman makes another note. 'But you managed to get a scholarship to a Performing Arts School.'

'Yes. When I was twelve.'

'Tell me about that.'

'I got a stage school scholarship when I was twelve,' Claire parrots. 'There. Now I've told you.'

'No, you haven't,' Dr Leichtman says mildly.

She waits out Claire's silence.

'I loved it,' Claire says eventually. 'More than I'd ever loved any of my foster families. Is that the sort of crap you want to hear? It was like an ordinary school, but with acting as well. Speech, movement, dance, even how to choreograph a fight. It had a good reputation in the business. Casting agents used us whenever they needed young actors.'

'And you were a star pupil.'

'Was I?'

The psychiatrist reaches into a folder and pulls out a sheaf of faxes. They're covered in Day-Glo stripes of yellow highlighter. Claire recognizes the headline on the topmost one.

Her reviews. Dr Leichtman must have moved fast to get these sent overnight.

'"Claire Rodenburg. A wonderful debut as Alice in Wonderland,"' Dr Leichtman reads aloud. 'Here's another: "This production was greatly enlivened by the mesmerizing performance of Claire Rodenburg, a star in the making if ever I saw one." "Claire Rodenburg's ravishing presence." "A daring and sexually charged Desdemona, brilliantly brought to life by Claire Rodenburg, lights up the stage." "In a cameo role Bertolucci has cast young English actress Claire Rodenburg, of whom film insiders say we will be hearing much more shortly." Why didn't we, Claire?'

'Why didn't we what?'

'Why didn't we hear much more of you?' She drops the pile of faxes onto the desk. 'You'd almost made it. You were on the brink of major success. Yet you gave it up and came here, where nobody knows who you are. Why?'

'I'm not the first actress to come to America.'

'Oh, if you'd taken yourself off to Hollywood and had your tits fixed I could understand it. But you didn't come here in search of fame, did you? It's something else.'

'I'd been at stage school for nearly ten years. When other kids were going off to Europe and Australia for their vacations, I was trekking round auditions and go-sees. Why shouldn't I want to travel? Maybe in a few months time I'll be in Mexico or Sydney.'

'Maybe.'

There's another silence.

'Are you accusing me of running away from something?'

'Is that what happened?' the psychiatrist bounces back at her.

The silence lengthens. When Claire speaks, her voice is low, her eyes focused on something over Connie's shoulder. 'I know what you're getting at. This decoy work. You… well, you don't have to be a shrink to work out what that's all about. I'm re-enacting the story of my childhood, aren't I? Finding men who betray their wives, just as my father betrayed my mother, and punishing them for it. Punishing them for the fact that no-one ever loved Claire Rodenburg.' A single tear rolls, glistening, down her left cheek. She dabs at it quickly with the back of her hand.

Dr Leichtman says calmly, 'Very good, Claire. But if it's a shrink you're after, look in
Yellow Pages.
I spent seven years studying forensic psychiatry, and I've got better things to do with my qualifications than listen to bullshit.'

Claire frowns.

'And spare me the tears,' the psychiatrist says, taking a box of tissues out of a drawer and tossing them across the desk. 'You learned
that
trick before you learned how to ride a bicycle.'

Claire takes a tissue and blows her nose.

'Come on.' Dr Leichtman gets up. 'Let's go for a walk. I need some air.'

===OO=OOO=OO===

By air, she'd evidently meant nicotine.

They walk slowly. Although it's early, the heat is already oppressive.

'Is what you do
fair?'
Dr Leichtman asks.

Claire shrugs. 'Life isn't fair. Men sleep around. If I get paid money to help their wives find that out, what's the big deal?'

The psychiatrist stops and grinds out her cigarette stub. Absent-mindedly she puts another cigarette in her mouth, then taps her pockets. 'Damn. I've left my lighter behind. Do you…?'