The Throat (54 page)

Without
mentioning Tom Pasmore, I told him about Elvee Holdings and William
Writzmann. "The only Writzmann in the book was Oscar, on Fond du Lac.
So I stopped in to see him, and as soon as I said that I was looking
for William Writzmann, he called me a tricky bastard and tried to
clobber me."

"He
tried to hit you?"

"I think
he was sick of people coming around his place to talk about William
Writzmann."

"Isn't
William in the phone book?"

"He's
listed at Expresspost, on South Fourth. And so are the other two
directors of Elvee."

"Who may
or may not be real."

"Exactly,"
I said. "But there was another reason I wanted to find William
Writzmann."

John
Ransom sat slouched into his chair, his feet up on the table, drink
cradled in his lap. He watched me, waiting, still not sure how
interesting this was going to be.

I told
him about seeing the blue Lexus beside the Green Woman. Before I
finished, he lifted his feet off the table and pushed himself upright.

"The
same car?"

"It was
out of sight before I could be certain. But while I was looking up
Elvee Holdings, I thought I might as well find out who owned the Green
Woman."

"Don't
tell me it's this Writzmann character," he said.

"Elvee
Holdings bought the bar in 1980."

"So it
is Writzmann!" He put his glass down on the table, looked at me, back
at the glass, and picked it up and bounced it on his palm, as if
weighing it. "Do you think April was killed because of the damn
history
project
!"

"Didn't
she talk to you about it?"

He shook
his head. "Actually, she was so busy, we didn't have that much time to
talk to each other. It wasn't a problem or anything." He looked up at
me. "Well, to tell you the truth, maybe it was a problem."

"Alan
knew that it had something to do with a crime."

"Did
he?" John visibly tried to remember the conversation we'd had in the
car. "Yeah, she probably talked more to him about it."

"More to
him than to you?"

"Well, I
wasn't too crazy about these projects of April's." He hesitated,
wondering how much he should say. He stood up and began yanking his
shirt down into the waistband of his trousers. After that he adjusted
his belt. These fussy maneuvers did not conceal his uneasiness. John
bent down and grabbed the glass from the table. "Those projects got on
my nerves. I didn't see why she'd take time away from our marriage to
do these screwy little things she'd never even get paid for."

"Do you
know how she first got interested in the Blue Rose business?"

He
frowned into the empty glass. "Nope."

"Or what
she managed to get done?"

"No
idea. I suppose Monroe and Wheeler took away the file, or whatever,
this morning, along with everything else." He dropped his hands and
sighed. "Hold on. I'm going to have another drink."

After
John had taken a couple of steps toward the kitchen, he stopped moving
and twisted around to say something else. "It's not like we were having
trouble or anything—I just wanted her to spend more time at home. We
didn't fight." He turned the rest of his body and faced me directly.
"We did argue, though. Anyhow, I didn't want to talk about this in
front of the cops. Or my parents. They don't have to know that we were
anything but happy together."

"I
understand," I said.

John
took a step forward, gesturing with his glass. "Do you know what it
takes to put together an art collection like this? When April had a
lull in business, she'd just hop on a plane to Paris and spend a couple
of days hunting down a painting she wanted. It was the whole way she
was raised—there were no limits for little April Brookner, no sir,
April Brookner could do anything that came into her head."

"And
you're angry with her because she left you," I said.

"You
don't get it." He whirled around and went into the kitchen. I heard
rattles and splashes, the big freezer door locking on its seal. John
came back and stopped at the same point on the rug, holding his glass
out toward me, his elbow bent. Clear liquid slid down the sides. "April
could be hard to live with. Something in her was off-balance."

John saw
the dark spots on the carpet, wiped the bottom of the glass with his
hand, and drank to lower the level. "I was the best thing that ever
happened to April, and somewhere inside that head of his, Alan knows
it. Once she married me, he relaxed—I did him a real favor. He knew I
could keep her from going off the deep end."

"She was
a gifted woman," I said. "What did you want her to do, spend all day
baking cookies?"

He
sipped from the drink again and went back to his chair. "What was this
gift of hers? April was good at making money. Is that such a wonderful
goal?"

"I
thought she didn't care much about the money. Wasn't she the only
postmodern capitalist?"

"Don't
fool yourself," he said. "She got caught up in it." He held the glass
before his face in the tips of his fingers and stared at it. A deep
vertical line between his eyebrows slashed up into his forehead.

John let
out a huge sigh and leaned forward to rest the cold glass against his
forehead.

"I'm
sure she was grateful for the stability you gave her," I said. "Think
of how long you were married."

His
mouth tightened, and he clamped his eyes shut and leaned over, still
holding the glass to his forehead. "I'm a basketcase." He laughed, but
without any cheer. "How did I ever make it through Vietnam? I must have
been a lot tougher then. Actually, I wasn't tougher, I was just a lot
crazier."

"So was
everybody else."

"Yeah,
but I was on a separate track. After I graduated from wanting to put an
end to communism, I wanted something I hardly understood." He smiled,
wryly.

"What
was that?"

"I guess
I wanted to see through the world," he said.

He
exhaled with what seemed his whole being, making a sound like one of
Glenroy Breakstone's breathy final notes. "I didn't want any veils
between me and whatever reality was. I thought you could sort of burst
out into the open." He let out that long, regretful sound again. "You
understand me? I thought you could
cross
the border
."

"Did you
ever think you got close?"

He
jumped up from the chair and turned off the lamp nearest him.
"Sometimes I thought I did, yeah." He picked up his glass and turned
off the lamp on the far side of the couch. "It's too bright in here, do
you mind?"

"No."

John
walked around the table and switched off the lamp at my end of the
couch. Now the one light left burning was in a tall brass standard lamp
near the entrance to the foyer, and the flared, bell-like shape of the
lamp threw its illumination into a yellow circle on the ceiling. Dim
silver light floated in from the windows across the room.

"There
was this time I was doing hard traveling, going way in-country. I was
with another man, Jed Champion, superb soldier. We'd been traveling on
foot, mostly at night. We had a jeep, but it was way back there,
way
off the trail, covered up so it'd still be there when we got back."

He was
moving to a complicated pattern that sent him from the window to the
mantel to his chair, then past the wall of paintings to the open floor
near the brass lamp, and finally returning to the window, carving the
shape of an arrow into the darkness with his body.

"After
two or three days, we stopped talking entirely. We knew what we were
doing, and we didn't have to talk about it. If we had a decision to
make, we just acted together. It was like ESP—I knew
exactly
what was
going on in his mind, and he knew what was going on in mine."

"We were
working through relatively empty country, but there had been some VC
activity here and there. We weren't supposed to make any contact. If we
saw them we were supposed to just let them go their sweet way. On our
sixth night, I realized that I was seeing better than I had the night
before—in fact, all of my senses were amazingly acute. I heard
everything
."

"I could
practically feel the roots of the trees growing underground. A VC
patrol came within thirty feet of us, and we sat on our packs and
watched them go by—we'd heard them coming for about half an hour, and
you remember how quiet they could be? But I could smell their sweat, I
could smell the oil on their rifles. And they couldn't even see us."

"The
next night, I could have caught birds with my bare hands. I was
beginning to hear something new, and at first I thought it was some
noise made by my own body—it was that intimate. Then, right before
dawn, I realized that I was hearing the voices of the trees, the rocks,
the ground."

"The
night after that, my body did things completely by itself. I was just
up there behind my eyes, floating. I couldn't have put a foot wrong if
I tried."

Ransom
stopped talking and turned around. He had come back to the window, and
when he faced into the room, a sheet of darkness lay over his features
and the entire front of his body. The cold silver light lay across the
top of his head and the tops of his shoulders. "Do you know what I'm
talking about? Does this make any sense to you?"

"Yes," I
said.

"Good.
Maybe the next part won't sound totally crazy to you."

For an
uncomfortably long time, he stared at me without saying anything. At
last he turned away and went toward the fireplace. Cold light from the
window touched his back. "Maybe I wouldn't even want to be that alive
anymore. You're right up next to death when you're that alive."

He
reached the fireplace, and in the darkness of that part of the room, I
saw him raise an arm and caress the edge of the marble. "No, I'm not
saying it right. Being alive like that
includes
death."

He
turned from the mantel and walked back into the silver wash of light.
He looked as dispassionate as a bank examiner. "Not long before this, I
lost a lot of people. Tribesmen. We had two 'A' teams in our
encampment, one under me, the other under an officer named Bullock.
Bullock and his team went out one night, and none of them ever came
back. We waited an extra twelve hours, and then I took my team out to
look for them."

He had
stepped into the darkness between the windows. "It took three days to
find them. They were in the woods not far from a little ville, about a
hundred feet off the trail, in only moderately thick growth. Bullock
and his five men were tied to trees. They'd been cut open—slashed
across the gut and left to bleed to death. One more thing."

He moved
past the far window without turning to look at me, and the light turned
his shirt and skin to silver again. "Their tongues had been cut out."
John began moving toward the brass lamp, and now did turn, half in and
half out of the soft yellow light. "After we cut down the bodies and
made litters to carry them back, I wrapped their tongues in a cloth and
took them with me. I dried them out and treated them, and wore them
everywhere after that."

"Who
killed Bullock and his team?" I asked.

I saw
the flicker of a smile in the darkness. "VC cut out tongues, sometimes,
to humiliate your corpse. So did the Yards, sometimes—to keep you
silent in the other world."

Ransom
walked around the lamp and began heading back to the windows and the
wall of paintings.

"So it's
about the eighth night out. And then something says Ransom."

"I
thought it must have been my partner, but I tuned to his frequency, you
know, I focused on him and he wasn't making any more sound than a
beetle. He sure as hell wasn't talking."

"Then I
hear it again.
Ransom
."

"I came
around the side of a tree about twenty feet wide, and standing off a
little way under a big elephant fern like a roof, standing up and
looking right at me, is Bullock. Right next to him is his number one
guy, his team leader. Their clothes are covered with blood. They just
stand there, waiting. They know I can see them, and they're not
surprised. Neither am I."

Ransom
had made it past the windows again, and now he was stationed before the
fireplace, in the darkest part of the room. I could barely make out his
big figure moving back and forth in front of the fireplace.

"I was
in the place where death and life flow into each other. Those little
tongues felt like leaves on my skin. They let me pass through them.
They knew what I was doing, they knew where I was going."

I waited
for more of the story, but he faced the fireplace in silence. "You're
talking about going to bring Bachelor back."

I could
hear him smiling. "That's right. He knew I was coming, and he got out
way ahead of me." He was softly beating a hand on the fireplace, like a
mockery of self-punishment. "That way I was? He was like that all the
time. He lived in the realm of the gods."

I was
still waiting for the end of the story.

"Have
you ever experienced anything like that? Are you qualified to judge it?"

"Something
like that," I said. "But I don't know if I'm qualified to judge it."

John
pushed himself off the fireplace like a man doing a standing push-up.
He switched on the lamp on the end table, and the room expanded into
life and color. "I felt extraordinary— like a king. Like a god."

He
turned around and gazed at me.

"What's
the end of the story?" I asked.

"That is
the end."

"What
happened when you got there?"

He was
frowning at me, and when he spoke, it was to change the subject. "I
think I'd like to take a look inside the Green Woman Taproom tomorrow.
Want to come with me?"