The Throat (94 page)

"But if he
moved the notes to some other safe house, all he has to do now is kill
Dick Mueller." I placed my hand on my forehead, seeing horrible things.
"Oh, God. It might already be too late."

"Mueller's
safe," came Tom's voice from the darkness beside me. "I called his
house last night. His answering machine said that he was on vacation
with his family for the next two weeks. He didn't say where."

"But what if
Fee called him? He'd know…" It didn't matter, I saw.

"He still has
to come back," Tom said. "He knows
somebody's
trying to blackmail him."

That was
right. He had to come back. "But where did he put those notes?"

"Well, I have
an idea about that." I remembered Tom saying something like this
earlier and waited for him to explain. "It's an obvious last resort,"
Tom said. "In fact, it's been in front of our face all along. It was
even in front of his face, but he didn't see it either, until today."

"Well, what
is it?"

"I can't
believe you won't see it for yourself," Tom said. "So far, you've seen
everything else, haven't you? If you still don't know by the time we're
done here, I'll tell you."

"Smug
asshole," I said. We separated again to probe the rest of the theater's
basement.

On a
hydraulic platform beneath the stage, I found an organ—not the "mighty
Wurlitzer" that would have appeared in a billow of curtains before the
start of features in the thirties, but a tough, bluesy little Hammond
B-3.

The old
dressing rooms on the basement's left side were nothing but barren
concrete holes with plywood counters to suggest the twelve-foot mirrors
and rings of light bulbs that had once stood along their far walls.

"Well, now we
know where everything is," Tom said. Back in the office, Tom led me
past the glimmering robes and pushed the rack back into place. We went
back out into the lobby, and he relocked the door. I started toward the
entrance we had used on our way out, but Tom said, "Other side."

His instincts
were better than mine. From the far side of the theater, we would be
invisible to anyone entering through the back door, while he—Fee—would
be outlined in the column of gray light the instant he came inside. I
walked past the altar and pulpit to the padded doors on the far side of
the lobby and let us back into the darkness.

We moved
blindly down the far aisle, touching the backs of the seats for
guidance, moving through total blackness, a huge coffin, where every
step brought us up against what looked like a solid, unyielding black
wall that retreated as we moved forward.

Tom touched
my shoulder. We had not yet reached the wide separation between rows in
the middle of the theater, but could have been anywhere from the third
row to the twentieth. The black wall still stood before me, ready to
step back if I stepped forward. I groped for the worn plush of the
chair beside me, pushed down the seat, and slid into it. I heard Tom
moving into the seat directly in front of me and sensed him turning
around. I put out my right hand and felt his arm on the back of the
seat. I made out the faint shape of his head and upper body. "All
right?" he asked.

"I usually
like to sit closer to the screen," I said.

"We're
probably in for a long wait."

"What do you
want to do when he comes in?"

"If he comes
through the exit door, we do what we have to do until he settles down.
If he checks the place out with a flashlight, we get out of our seats
and crouch down here in the aisle. Or we flatten out under the seats. I
don't think he's going to be very thorough, because he'll be confident
about being the first one here. The point is to get him comfortable.
Once he sits down to wait it out, we split up and come toward him from
opposite ends. Silently, if possible. When we get close, scream your
head off. I'll do the same. He won't know where the hell we are, he
won't know how many of us there are, and we should have a good chance
to take him."

"What happens
after that?"

"Are you
thinking about disarming him and taking him to Armory Place? Do you
think he'll confess? Or that we'd ever walk out of Armory Place? You
know what would happen."

I said
nothing.

"Tim, I don't
even believe in the death penalty. But right now, the only alternative
is to get out of here and go back home. In a couple of years, maybe ten
years, he'll make a mistake and get caught. Is that good enough?"

"No," I said.

"I've spent
about fifteen years working to get innocent men off death row—saving
lives. That's what I
believe
in. But this isn't like anything else I
know—it's as if we discovered that Ted Bundy was a detective with so
many fallbacks and paper trails that he could never be brought to
justice in the normal way."

"I thought
you said you weren't interested in justice."

"Do you want
to know how I really see this? I don't think I could say this to anyone
else. There aren't many people who would understand it."

"Of course I
want to know," I said. By now I could dimly make out Tom's face.
Absolute seriousness shone out of him, along with something else that
made me brace myself for whatever he would say.

"We're going
to set him free," he said. As a euphemism for execution, the phrase was
ludicrous.

"Thanks for
sharing that," I said.

"Remember
your own experience. Remember what happened to your sister."

I saw my
sister sailing before me into a realm of utter mystery and felt Tom's
psychic assurance, his depth of understanding, strike me like a tide.

"Who is he
now? Is
that
worth saving?
That person is a being who has to kill over
and over again to satisfy a rage so deep that nothing could ever touch
it. But who is he, really?"

"Fee
Bandolier," I said.

"Right.
Somewhere, in some part of himself he can't reach, he is a small boy
named Fielding Bandolier. That boy passed through hell. You've been
obsessed with Fee Bandolier even before you really knew he existed. You
almost made him up out of your own history. You've even seen him. Do
you know why?"

"Because I
identify with him," I said.

"You see him
because you love him," Tom said. "You love the child he was, and that
child is still present enough to make himself visible to you, and he
makes himself visible to your imagination because you love him."

I remembered
the child who came forward out of swirling dark, on his open palm the
word that cannot be read or spoken. He was the child of the night,
William Damrosch, Fee Bandolier, and myself, all of whom had passed
through the filthy hands of Heinz Stenmitz.

"Do you
remember telling me about your old nurse, Hattie Bascombe, who said
that the world is half night? What she didn't say was that the other
half is night, too."

Too moved to
speak, I nodded.

"Now let's
get to the important stuff," Tom said.

"What?"

"Give me that
thermos you've been carrying around. I don't want to be asleep when he
finally gets here."

I handed him
the thermos, and he poured some of the coffee into its top and drank.
When he had finished, he passed the thermos back to me. I didn't think
I would ever sleep again.

He's psychic
,
I thought. It was as if Tom Pasmore had seen into my mind. I felt
intense gratitude and another, darker emotion combining resentment and
fear. Tom had probed into private matters. My early memories, those
that had refused to come on command in front of my old house or my
family's graves, came flooding into me. One of these, of course, was
Heinz Stenmitz. Another, equally powerful, was my sister's last day of
life and my brief journey across the border into the territory from
which she had never returned. I had never spoken of these moments to
Tom—I had just learned of one, and of the other I never spoke, never,
not to anyone. Every particle of my consciousness fled from it. That
moment could not be held in the mind, because it held terror and
ecstasy so great they threatened to tear the body apart. Yet some
portion of the self retained and remembered. While knowing nothing of
this, Tom Pasmore still knew all about it. My resentment vanished when
I realized that he had read a version of it in one of the books I had
written with my collaborator; he was smart and perceptive enough to
have worked out the rest by himself. He had not probed: he had just
told me what he knew. I sat in the dark behind Tom, realizing that what
had sounded like sentimental froth made me chime with agreement— I
wanted to release Fee Bandolier. I wanted to set him free.

I sat in the
dark behind Tom Pasmore, wide awake and
loose in time
. Forty years
collapsed into a single endless moment in which I was a child watching
a movie called
From Dangerous Depths
while a huge blond man who smelled
like blood ran his hand over my chest and spoke the unspeakable, I was
a soldier in an underground room staring at an altar to the Minotaur, a
greenhorn pearl diver unbuttoning the shirt of a mutilated dead man
named Andrew T. Majors, a shred of infinite being speeding toward an
annihilating ecstasy, a wounded animal in St. Mary's Hospital, a man
with a notebook walking through a city park. I turned around to look
six rows back and saw myself kneeling before Heinz Stenmitz, doing what
he wanted me to do, what I thought I had to do to stay alive.
You
survived
, I said silently,
you
survived everything
. His pain
and terror
were mine, because I had survived them. Because I had survived them,
they had educated me; because they were a taste always in my mouth,
they had helped to keep me sane in Vietnam. What was unbearable was
what had to be borne. Without the consciousness of the unbearable, you
put your feet where Fee had placed his, or ended up as unaware as Ralph
Ransom. I thought of John, whose life had once seemed so golden to me,
peering into the depths of Holy Sepulchre, and of the closed-off place
where his readiness for experience had taken him.

I thought for
a long time of what had happened to John Ransom.

I don't know
how long Tom and I sat waiting in the dark theater. After I started
thinking about John, I got restless. I stood up to stretch and pace the
aisle. Tom never left his seat. He sat without moving for long periods,
as if we were at an opera. (Even when I am at the opera, I have trouble
sitting still.) After two or three hours in the dark, I could make out
most of the stage and the great hanging weight of the curtain, without
being able to see individual folds. When I looked back, I could see the
shape of the double doors into the lobby. All of the seats more than
four or five rows ahead of me congealed into a single object. I got
back into my seat and leaned back, thinking about Fee and John and
Franklin Bachelor, and after half an hour had to get up and swing my
arms and walk down toward the stage and the curtains again. When I got
back into my seat and settled down, I heard a noise from the other side
of the theater—a creak. "Tom," I said.

"Old
buildings make noise," he said.

Half an hour
later, the back door rattled. "What about that?" I asked.

"Uh huh," he
said.

The door
rattled again. Both of us were sitting up straight, leaning forward.
The door rattled a third time, and then nothing happened for a long
time. Tom leaned back. "I think some kid saw that the chain was
unhooked," he said.

We sat in the
dark for another long period. I looked at my watch, but the hands were
invisible. I crossed my legs and closed my eyes and was instantly in
Saigon, the restaurant not the city, trying to tell Vinh about John
Ransom. He was working on the accounts, and he wasn't interested in
John Ransom. "Write a letter to Maggie," he said. "She knows more than
you think." I came awake with a jerk and felt under the seat for the
thermos. "Me, too," Tom said.

The ceiling
ticked. A footstep sounded in the lobby. The ceiling ticked again. Tom
sat like a statue. Write a letter to Maggie? I thought, and realized to
whom I could write a letter about John Ransom. She was probably a
person who shared certain of Maggie's gifts. Time wore on. I yawned. At
least an hour passed, second by slow second. Then the alley door
rattled again.

"Wait for
it," Tom said.

There was an
unendurable silence for a few seconds, and then a key slotted into the
keyhole. The sound was as clear as if I stood on the other side of the
door. When the door swung open, Tom eased out of his seat and crouched
beside it. I did the same. Someone walked into the space between the
alley door and the theater exit. The exit door cracked open an inch,
and gray light filtered through the crack. It opened wider, and a man
stepped into the column of gray light and became a silhouette. He
turned to look behind him, exposing his profile in the column of gray
light. It was Monroe, and he had a gun in his hand.

Monroe
stepped forward and let the exit door close behind him. The dark shape
of his body moved a few steps alongside the stage. He stopped moving to
let his eyes adjust. Tom and I crouched behind the seats, waiting for
him either to take a seat or to check to see if his caller had already
arrived. Monroe remained standing in the far aisle, listening, hard.
Monroe was good—he stood next to the stage for so long that my legs
began to cramp. The hot circle below my shoulder blade started to
throb. Monroe relaxed and pulled a police baton from his belt. A beam
of light flew from the end of the baton and darted from the middle of
the front seats to the rear doors on his side, then to the wall six or
seven feet down from John and me.