The Killing Game (7 page)

“Chiaroscuro,” Holliday said. “The juxtaposition of dark and light.”

“Nice vocabulary, Wendy.”

She blushed again and turned toward the door. “I guess I’ll see you in class, right?” she said over her shoulder.

“Looking forward to it,” I nodded, fighting to keep my eyes level.

Gregory was sleeping when his cell rang from the bedside table. He tried to ignore it until his eyes caught the clock: 10.17 a.m. He never slept past eight …
why did I
…

The horrors of his night flooded into his head.

You fart while you screw, little ones that leak out.

The goddamn woman, the slut who’d insulted him. It was all her fault, making him need a whore, leading to getting stopped by the goddamn cops. Then the filth, shame, humiliation.

Step out of the car please
…

The smell of shit was everywhere.

Officer—

… no not here no not now
…

What happened after that?

GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE GODDAMN CAR.

My pants—

Officer, please, I can’t—

What happened next?

It’s one of them pervert magazines, Horse. Something called
Women in Agony.

Gregory moaned. The phone rang a third time.

If you jam rubber balls in their mouths, it doesn’t leave room for your dick.

You stink like a sewage factory, poopy. Go home and learn how to use a toilet.

What happened next? What happened next?

The phone rang again. The answering machine came on. “
Leave a number and I’ll get back to you
.”

“
Gregory?
” a voice said, worried. “
Gregory? Are you all right?
”

Ema.

“
Gregory? Are you there? Please pick up if you are. I’m so worried that you—
”

He grabbed the phone. Pushed the thoughts of last night from his head. Ema was the current problem.

What happened next?

“I’m here, Ema. What the hell’s wrong now?”

A pause as his sister swallowed hard. She hated it when he cursed. “I’ve been … worried about you. We had breakfast scheduled for nine-thirty. I waited a half-hour and left.”

“Why didn’t you call from the restaurant?”

“I was afraid you might be ill. I didn’t want to wake you.”

“I simply forgot to set my alarm, Ema. I’m fine.”

“You never oversleep.”

Gregory felt his guts cinch up. “I never tell you when I oversleep because you’ll fucking think I have sleeping sickness.”

“I couldn’t eat at the restaurant,” she said. “I just had coffee. Why don’t you come over and I’ll fix us a healthy breakfast.”

“I can’t, Ema. I have so much to do today and—”

“Grigor, you have to eat. And you know you won’t unless I—”

“It’s Gregory, Ema. G-r-e—”

“It pops out when I get worried. I’m sorry, Gregory. I worry about my little brother too much; it’s stupid.”

Christ, Gregory thought,
Grigor
. The fucking name was a dozen years gone, but poor addled Ema still used it several times a year.

“You’re not stupid, Ema, you have a big heart,” Gregory said, wishing she had a brain to match. He did a high-speed inventory of his systems, finding hunger: if he didn’t eat he’d get a headache. And if he didn’t see Ema this morning, she’d want to make up the missed meal tomorrow at one of her goddamn restaurants. If he ran over now he’d be free of her for days.

“Let me get dressed,” he said. “I don’t want a big breakfast, Ema. Toast and honey, right?”

He went to the garage. His car stank of shit. And the brown stains were soaked into the fabric of his seat. He went back in the house and called a cab.

Fifteen minutes later Gregory’s taxi was winding past brick and wood structures with large front windows and decorative plastic doors, Ema’s suburban housing complex.

Ema lived but two miles distant from Gregory. When he had received his inheritance, she had tried to get him to buy a home on her street, but he had shot that idea down immediately, knowing Ema would be visiting every day, plates of cookies or stuffed cabbage rolls in hand.

She was at the door as he arrived –
probably watching for me since I hung up the phone
– and he submitted to another crushing, smelly hug, her pendant pressing against his belly. But he endured, smiling through every second.

“Why did you come in a cab?” she asked. “You weren’t in a wreck, were you?”

“Just some mechanical problem.”

Ema’s living room was a warehouse of girly-type things overlaying the simple Colonial furniture; rag dolls on the couch, a throw pillow on a rocking chair, the words
LOVE CHANGES EVERYTHING
embroidered on its multicolored surface, a dozen kinds of cutesy magazines. There was a pink bookshelf of mysteries, biographies of Hollywood celebrities, and several running feet of true-life crime books. The television was on, though muted, Ema incapable of life without TV. She had a set in every room, an endless display of talent competitions, cop dramas, cooking programs and home-shopping options.

“I’m so happy you’re all right,” Ema said. “I was worried when you didn’t show.”

“You worry too much. I’m a grown-up.”

“I know. But it’s like I always told Dr Szekely: Even when Gregory’s fifty, he’ll still be my baby brother.”

Gregory fought to keep from rolling his eyes. Ema nodded toward the rear of the house. “Let’s eat in the kitchen as it’s so sunny.”

“Just toast and honey for me,” Gregory said. He’d said it earlier, but telling Ema not to cook was like telling a fish not to swim.

Gregory followed Ema to the kitchen, too bright for his eyes, sun streaming painfully through the window. He looked to the table and saw tomato slices, onion slices, link sausages, biscuits from a can, and a blue porcelain bowl full of thick yellow goo. He stared, feeling his stomach begin to foam.

“Is that mamaliga?” he whispered. The pendant glistened between Ema’s fat breasts as she picked up the bowl and brought it near, as if offering Gregory a gift. He smelled fumes coming from the pile of cheap, filthy and inescapable Romanian porridge.

He turned away. “Get rid of it. I can’t look at that shit.” Gregory’s hands clenched into fists and blood roared in his ears. He slapped the bowl from Ema’s hands. It spun to the floor and shattered, the thick cornmeal porridge breaking into pieces.

“IF YOU WANT ME TO STAY YOU’LL GET THAT SHIT AWAY FROM ME!”

“I’m s-sorry,” Ema said, her voice trembling. “S-so sorry, Grigor. I only wanted to make you happy. I only w-want—”

“STOP WITH THE FUCKING GRIGOR!”

Bawling as if her world had exploded, Ema turned and ran from the kitchen. Her toe caught in the rug and she stumbled to the floor and lay there crying.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry…”

Gregory ran his options. He had to tell her he was sorry. Ema had made the sickening slop, but now he was the one who would have to apologize. The Moron World went by rules that were inside-out.

He walked to his sister and leaned to touch her back. “Are you all right, Ema?”

A shiver ran through her body. “I’m so sorry I made you mad. I always do stupid things. I’m so ashamed.”

“I’m the one that’s sorry, Ema,” Gregory said, his expression blank since Ema’s face was in the carpet. “I shouldn’t have gotten angry.”

“Hold me, Gregory,” Ema wailed, trying to roll to sitting, the pendant flapping across her skin, into the folds of her breasts. Tears streamed down her cheeks. “Please hold me, Gregory. No one ever holds me.”

Gregory felt his skin crawl, but lowered himself to the rug and wrapped his arms around his sister as far as they would reach. Her body heaved with sobs and her odor rose to his nose and mingled with the smell of the mamaliga splattered across the kitchen floor. The smells turned to the stink of shit and Gregory fought the urge to retch.

“I never want to hurt you,” Ema wailed in English, then the same in Romanian, the old native tongue rising unbidden through tears and fear. “Hold me, Grigor,” Ema bawled, clutching at Gregory’s surrounding arms and making him wish he could disappear into the air.

What happened next?

Gregory escaped after a depressing half-hour. The smell of Ema and the mamaliga and all the female odors of the house had fired up a shrieking pain that pounded his temples. He returned to his house to try again to clean his car, but grew livid with anger once more: the stains had set and the smell had gotten worse in the heat of the garage.

There was no sign of the porn magazine the cops had found and brandished, as if it never existed except as a whip to flay him with. That seemed odd, and Gregory looked beneath the seats, in the glove box. The fucking thing was nowhere to be seen, nothing in the car but a stench as thick as cold mamaliga.

He had to sell the car, his beautiful creamy Avalon. He could never get the stink out. A thirty-five-thousand-dollar car turned to dross by the morons. The two cops were subhumans from the robot caste and Gregory would grind them beneath his heel as if he was stepping on ants.

Striving for calm in his writhing guts, he made himself walk to the utility sink in the corner to soak his hands in de-greasing soap.
No
, Gregory revised as his palms rubbed beneath the water. It wasn’t the ants. The real problem was the anthill. It wasn’t the two morons who had savaged him, it was the process that had created them, made them feel invincible. They were a Blue Tribe. Their own form of dress, symbols, rituals, special pledges and codes … all tribal.

Gregory returned to the cool of his house and recalled lessons from history. When one tribe wanted to inflict great hurt on another tribe, they killed its chief, a symbolic beheading of the entire tribe. Behead your enemy and jam his head on a pike, a dripping and fly-encrusted trophy that said
I Win, You Lose.

Gregory suddenly felt a delicious calm in his tormented belly. He would humiliate the police, the Blue Tribe. It would take work, it would take planning, but he would behead the Mobile Police Department.

He would kill its Chief.

Moarte
. Death.

“I think I have all the information I need for my article, Dr Szekely,” the young reporter said. She clicked off her recorder and closed her pocket-sized notepad. “Is there anything else you want to add?”

Dr Sonia Szekely stared across her paper-strewn desk at her questioner: blonde, blue-eyed, skin the hue of a spring peach. The reporter wore a loose and flippy miniskirt, tank top, pink running shoes over short white socks, and represented the newspaper of a local university.
I’ve got plenty to add
,
Szekely considered saying.
If you’ve got the stomach for it, which I doubt.
Instead, Szekely looked down at her age-wrinkled hands, fought her need to light a cigarette, and regarded the reporter with bemusement.

“How old are you, my dear?” Szekely asked. Her eyes wandered past the reporter to her overloaded bookshelves holding such titles as
Ceauşescu’s Orphanages: a History of Hell
,
The Pathology of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome
and
Psychic Damage in Early Childhood.
Other titles were in Romanian.

“I’m twenty, Doctor. Almost twenty-one. Why?”

“The worst of what I’m telling you happened before you were born. The wretched
Ceaușescu
regime in Romania, the plight of the orphans, the decades of horror and human wreckage—”

“I got that, Doctor. About how Cacesku—”

“
Ceaușescu
,” Szekely corrected. “Nicolae
Ceaușescu
.”

“Sure,” the reporter nodded, flipping open her notepad to glance inside. “
Ceaușescu
wanted to grow the country’s workforce so he outlawed birth control and demanded large families, but the country was so desperately poor the children couldn’t be cared for and were placed in state-run orphanages.” The reporter wrinkled her button nose. “Nasty places.”

“Yes,” Szekely nodded, thinking,
They were more than nasty, miss, they were hell on earth, a dark bloom of evil that poisons to this day.

“But what does my age have to do with that nasty moment in history, Doctor?”

Szekely felt her legs propel her to standing. Heard her voice grow loud.

“It’s not history!”

The reporter’s eyes went wide. Szekely waved her hand in apology and sat down again. Took a deep breath.

“Forgive me. My work means reliving events of that time almost daily. Plus I’m a bit fearful you’ll view these orphanages as having no more hand in our present lives than a faded newsreel from World War II. Yet they’re with us today. That’s the real story.”

The young woman frowned. “But if the Romanian orphanages have been changed and the children saved—”

“Physical salvation differs from psychic salvation. Physically, the children may have been removed from conditions of horror, but in many cases the horrors have not been removed from the children.”

“Sure, Doctor. Some poor kids probably have nightmares and things. I know I would if I’d started life like that.”

Szekely began to speak but closed her mouth. The intern reporter had most likely grown up in a bright home with a green lawn and white picket fence. Enjoyed large and healthy meals each day. Generations of adoring family would have surrounded and coddled her. Her bedroom held toys and dolls and lace curtains, cool in summer and warm in winter. She would have spoken at two years of age, walked at three, been in school at five. Interacting with her fellow humans would have been as natural as giggling.

Could the young woman in any way comprehend what happened to children who grew up in a box with no human interaction? Wallowing in their excretions? Feeding on slop, like hogs? Could the pretty young thing ever envision what some of these broken children became as they aged? It was an impossible task. Szekely knew; she had been studying such children for years and was herself still capable of awe at the horrors inflicted on the innocent.

Szekely looked into the eyes of the reporter, the woman’s pencil now tapping the notepad. She was impatient to get to her next assignment, something to do with a circus in town.