Fever City (27 page)

The real absurdity is not that some people might actually believe an umbrella killed the president but that most people don't even know about the ragged history of US government-condoned human experiments and their consequent cover-ups; or its military labs' development of weapons of mass destruction with eccentric and unstable delivery systems. This knowledge has gone the way of the Slave Trade and the plantations, of the Trail of Broken Treaties. Of the Tulsa Race Riots . . . Buried by public indifference in the face of enduring official silence and lies, it is a denial bred from fear of prosecution, civil liability and class-action lawsuits. Thoroughly understandable—if you were the guilty party.

The leaves of the trees around me that are living witness to these events vibrate in the light breeze: whispering their message. And what they seem to say is: they did it. They got away with it. Like they always do.

H
astings checked the street again, then dragged the body out of the garage and into his car, which he'd parked in the driveway. This was always the hardest part: lifting all that dead weight. Getting it in the car fast before the neighbours notice. One time he had actually put his back out from the strain. He'd been barely able to drive. He was so bent over that his face was almost touching the steering wheel. Afterwards he had dropped himself off at a local hick hospital. They put him in traction, which only seemed to make it worse. A nurse gave him a number: a Japanese masseur. She walked on him, toeing pieces of his spine back where they belonged, fisting muscle out of the way, opening up tendons with knowing fingers. She gave him a set of painful exercises which he did every day. It wasn't just for his back, it was for his penance. His back hurt because he was alive when he shouldn't have been; because he killed to make a living. Because he was an evil man. His back hurt because his own body was scrambling to escape, mutinying from the tyrannical captain who forced it to live in stinking galleys; to present on deck each time there was an execution; to mount guard over the corpses and dispose of the bodies overboard without ceremony. Feeding the knowing sharks that followed his wake. Hastings was a killer because he had lost his soul. He was a ghost; butchered on the islands of the Pacific. The spasms of his back's muscles were simply early signs of rigor mortis, held at bay by a lousy layer of ice; a cheap trick by a second-rate mortician.

He dropped Walter Stark's body at Bluff Cove, the sea receiving it with restrained enthusiasm. The drive back was full of dark memories of meeting Betty Bannister at the Roosevelt in New York. Afterwards, she said she'd even run with him. She said they could meet up in Big Bear Lake, at the old ski lodge, three days after Dallas, before heading south. Staying in towns with mythic names. Acapulco. Veracruz. If they needed to head further south, they would. They'd go to Rio or Montevideo. To a place where the nights were warm and you could smell the ocean. A place with enough people not to be noticed; where sins from out of the past would never catch up with them. A place where they would be able to stay lost forever. And maybe even forget all they had done.

He turned on the car radio. Coleman Hawkins.
Midnight Sun
. Even at night, there would be no easy escape into shadows. Maybe this time it would be different. In only five days, they might be together on a dark road heading south. If he wasn't already dead.

He dropped the envelope at the mailbox on Wilshire, circled the block twice to make sure he wasn't being tailed, then headed back, parking three streets away from his place. He couldn't hear his own footsteps because of the nocturnal clamour of crickets and frogs, exultant under a waxing crescent. Their song seemed to surge as he approached the house, as though trying to remind him of the ancient superstitious warning: beware the deadly transit between the Hunter and the Frost Moons.

In the old days he would have listened to them.

But the old days were coming to an end . . .

They grabbed Hastings before the door was fully open, his key still in the lock, hauling him into the dark mass of the interior; fast fingers grabbing his neck, his arms; his hair. His ears were yanked downwards to the floor. Fists found spine and kidneys; knees smashed into his body as his wrists were twisted, captured and locked.

There was the bite and sting of metal traveling across his skin, catching and tearing in his hair.

Sensory dislocation.

And then he was snared, upside down, listening to the whine of grating rope as he rotated on its iron clasp, his hands bound behind his back.

The work was done.

The work-over was about to begin.

Hastings turned his face just in time, the rake of knuckledusters sliding along his cheek, somehow missing the holy trinity of jaw, cheekbone, teeth.

But the blow still sliced the inside of his mouth against his incisors, still forced the scatter-spray of blood. He worked on the tear inside his mouth—the only thing that might save him. He swirled and spat out blood and saliva; thick and wet. He forced more up out through his nose. He gagged and choked on it. And then he waited.

The vocabulary of interrogation is known to all. There were only two possible responses to his theatrical display.

Go easy.

Or finish him off.

‘Go easy, we need him to talk . . .'

Hastings hung there, slowly rotating, the twin drip of sweat and blood tambouring onto the floor. There was the murmur of consultation, then the stillness of decision. He tensed his stomach muscles just in time for the kick, twisting with the movement, sending the power in the blow away from his body, but grunting as though it had scored maximum impact. The force travelled off the skirting strike, yet still he could feel what was behind it; why it had half-missed. There was real anger there. Hatred. Something irrational yet targeted, dedicated to hurting him. The voice came to Hastings's rescue. ‘Go easy, I said . . . '

In the silence, Hastings's body spun its way to a halt, the rope protesting with a slow, grinding whine. There was a moment's pause—absolute stillness—and then the rope recommenced the journey back to where it had come from, condemned by the physics of torture, turning him anticlockwise, the constant backwards and forwards spinning motion creating a separate nausea, another level of discomfort to add to the clenching pain of the cuffs and the rope, the loose cuts inside his mouth, and the racketing silent ache of bruised body organs and muscle; everything magnified in this upside down world of agony.

Hastings struggled for an answer to a single question. Not why or what, but who.

The angry kicker was a clue: this was personal as well as professional.

A strange, rolling noise approached his hanging body through the darkness. Hastings didn't look towards it. He had witnessed enough interrogations to know what the colossal mistakes were, and acknowledging the presence of something new and strange entering the torture chamber was one of the worst types of errors: it prepped you for pain. For terror.

Fear was the ally of the tormentor, just as anger was the ally of the sufferer. Imagination magnifies agony. Anger terminates it. And that's what the tortured crave from the very beginning of their ordeal: not an end to the questioning but an end to life itself.

The only thing more astonishing than how much pain and suffering a human can endure is how easily human life can be snuffed out. People were impossibly stoic and resilient and at the same time incredibly fragile—that had always been the paradox of human life, of the species that can bestow such loving tenderness one moment and such vicious cruelty the next.

Hastings had been forced to learn this through the prism of war. His dark knowledge forewarned and armed him. Even harnessed and swinging upside down, he felt somehow in control. He was aware. He was watchful and waiting. Through his fluttering eyelashes he could see a reflection in one of the windows, but it didn't make sense at first: a strangely shifting half-figure.

There was the stutter of rolling thunder again, like the heavy mass of a supercell storm building on the horizon, and then Hastings understood.

A wheelchair.

Old Man Bannister was back on his feet—so to speak.

‘Good work.'

‘Thanks, Mr. Ba . . . '

There is the crack of something unforgiving and then the shriek of hallucinogenic pain. ‘Silence!' Hastings caught a glimpse of an exposed ulna bone before blood rushed in to cover it up, like an adulterous wife pulling the sheet up in flimsy protection against the explosion of flashbulbs.

A riding crop from the sound of it. The Old Man's weapon of choice.

A rearing horse. A terrible accident. A face split open like an overripe fig. Nightmare photos held in ink-soiled hands. This is what sold newspapers today. Not simple murder but carnage so gruesome it was beyond all human imagination. Cruelty so extreme, it could never be conjured by mere thought or theory—but only by bloody action. For once an evil deed is enacted, it becomes incarnate; proliferative. It is like splitting the atom. There is never any turning back. January 1947. Elizabeth Short. His welcome to Los Angeles. Jack the Ripper for the Atomic Age.

Hastings woke up to the sound of the taboo tapping of his blood against the hardwood floor. It was a very bad sign to have blacked out that early. Loss of consciousness was the emergency exit for further along in the interrogation; the opt-out clause: deliberate conceptual annihilation.

Something prodded him in the shoulder.

He could smell the leather as the riding crop rose towards his ear. A flick of the wrist and Hastings would lose it.

‘I will only ask you once: what did you do with Stark?'

‘Dropped him in the ocean.'

‘Where's the file?'

‘What file?'

For the first time in the interrogation Hastings was caught unawares. The punch seemed to come out of nowhere. He didn't even feel the change in air pressure. It was suddenly inside him, like an internal explosion. Then it was all over. His cry, shaped as much by surprise as pain, echoed back at him from off the floor below his head.

‘I am going to ask you once more. I warn you, if you lie, you will never leave this room alive. But it will be days before it's over. Long, hard days . . . ' The Bannister Way. ‘Now tell me—where is the file?'

‘Which one?'

‘I warned you not to play games.'

‘There are three files!'

The silence of intrigue. Old Man Bannister was hooked. But how much time had he really bought? ‘Go on . . . '

‘The files are in my car, under the backseat. There's Marilyn Monroe and Eva Marlowe . . .'

‘And the last one?' The riding crop tapped him. He couldn't just give up the name like that. He had to wait until the Old Man asked again. Or he lost an ear. ‘Whose file is it?'

He swallowed, not from fear but relief. ‘Your wife's, Mr. Bannister . . . '

A breathless hush. Had he overplayed his hand? Hastings closed his eyes, trying to anticipate what was about to come next. The riding crop. A fist. If he were lucky, the swirling twist of a bullet. He closed his eyes and tried to think of Susan but all he could think of was Mrs. Bannister. Imposter, adulterer; maybe even a killer. Just like him. Face it, he told himself, Susan was a lie. Betty Bannister was the one. She always had been. She was also his express train to Hell.

He caught the glint of a well-honed knife. He tightened his stomach muscles, opened his jaw and hunched his shoulders, trying to protect his neck as much as possible.

There was the whistle of velocity as his body careened out of control, speeding through space like a comet, smashing into the sky. Then the world tipped upside down and he was compelled by the arrogance of gravity; crushed by it and sent crashing back to earth. His legs showered down after him, battering against wood. Pain erupted between his ears. The sky had become the earth. And the earth had become his tormentor, stepping on his bones.

He was of no further use to them. It was already the endgame. This was it. The Long Goodbye. Crisscross. Another line drawn through an already deleted name. All that was left were the practical details. He was interested in a detached way in what was going to happen next. What sorrowful grave were they preparing for him? The noble boom of sea surf or the hollow flop of wet cement? Maybe a pig-iron furnace in an off-hours foundry down south. Or the hog farm of some Okie. Or would they simply leave him in the desert to be picked over by the blazing sun? By ravenous wildlife. Too lazy to even shovel out a shallow grave.

B
arnsley hauls me out of the car, thrusts me towards a house. Schiller turns, swearing when he sees me. ‘Jesus, Mary and fucking Joseph, what happened to Alston?'

‘Resisting arrest.'

‘What are you talking about?'

‘Grand theft auto.'

Schiller palms Barnsley in the chest, almost toppling him. ‘Get those cuffs off him, you moron.' He tugs me after him when I'm free. ‘Can you still think?'

‘Arithmetic is out . . . '

‘At least you can talk . . . ' He yanks me to the front door. ‘Because you're going to have plenty to say about this.' A young man in his early twenties looks at me with surprise and some shock. He turns to Schiller. ‘What happened to him?'

‘He fell over your doorstep . . . ' Schiller leads me inside, sits me down at a laminated kitchen table. On a counter opposite, a television shows images of the Bannister Estate, the sound turned down. ‘Alston, meet Nelson Archer . . . '

I stare at him. How is it possible? He puts a glass of water down in front of me. ‘Let me take a look at that wound . . . ' He looks up at Schiller. ‘Captain, I should file a complaint . . . ' He walks over to a counter. ‘Police brutality.'

‘Give it a rest, he's not even one of you people.'