Peaceable Kingdom (mobi) (6 page)

Which now lurched forward a pace or two. Evidently there was no zoom lens and Tricky Dick Three was carrying it nearer to the bed on its tripod.

It was still no closeup, but better.

The woman who still looked ninety-nine percent like Greta moaned but did nothing to resist as the guy with the knife snipped away the shoulder-straps to her bra and then sawed through the center. Her breasts shuddered free. The nipples were pale pink, large, blending away into the paler breast flesh. Just like Greta’s.

The man cut through the waistband of her panties and pulled them out from under her.

Like Greta, a real blonde.

Howard gulped his scotch. The goddamn movie just wasn’t made for sipping.

The whole idea that this was Greta he was watching—that it even could be Greta—scared the bloody shit out of him. There was something about it so fucking ironic and infinitely more perverse than he’d ever dreamed—maybe even more than he’d ever wanted to dream—that you had to wonder. All these gruesome images. All these years collecting this stuff. All these years searching, looking for . . . what?

Death, obviously.

It had to be. The experience of violent death in which he was both observer and yes, participant. Participant in that he’d bought and paid for this particular tape, he’d sort of even financed the thing in a way. Allowed it to be. He and others like him.

Okay, he’d done it a thousand times.

But now it was someone he knew, someone he’d screwed every which way to Sunday who was going to get seriously hurt here, and you had to wonder.

It was just possible he’d bitten off more than he could chew.

He was about to find out. In spades.

Because Dickie Number Three was lurching forward with the camera again, coming closer, as Dickie Number Two put the clippers back in the pocket of his greasy jeans and grabbed her by both her arms—unfortunately standing in front of her, the asshole—pulled them up over her head and held the wrists pinned to the bed.

Her struggles were feeble, the drug still working.

Until Dickie Number One leaned over with the sharp serrated knife and carved an X on her left breast, the center of the X the center of her nipple, blood pooling up and oozing down her side as she screamed and struggled in earnest, adrenalin kicking in and beating hell out of the sedative so that Dickie Three had come out from behind the camera to grab her legs and hold them while Dickie One carved the right side of her the same as he’d done the left
.

And then it was all three of them
.

Dickie Two working on her fingers and toes with the clippers, snipping at the joints, joints popping off all over the bed, Dickie One finding imaginative gourmet ways to carve living flesh with a serrated knife and Dickie Three generally relegated to holding down whatever part of her they were busy on at the moment
.

While Howard stared open-mouthed and trembling. Twitching. Scotch forgotten. Bolted to his chair.

For twenty-five minutes of this.

Until the coup de grace.

At which point he stood up.

Shouting. The scotch dribbling down to the wall-to-wall carpet.

“Fuck! You motherfucking cocksucking
assholes!
”

They’d decided to shoot the end of it right up close.

Finally, thought Howard, a close-up.

He giggled. Excitement and terror and scotch all kicking in at once. An extremist cocktail.

Oh, my God, Greta, I’m going to watch you die
.

On the screen Dickie Three ran gut-bobbing back to the camera and hauled it forward until it stood just three feet from the now-blurry blood-drenched sheets and the glistening red body on the bed that still breathed in and out and tried to move, just barely.

He focused the camera.

And Howard realized two things simultaneously.

One, it was not Greta.

And two, it was not murder.

And he could have killed the whole bunch of them right then and there for a moment, tracked them down and hacked them to fucking bits, for putting him through this.

Not Greta. And not death.

Oh, the girl was a look-alike all right, very similar, but they had left her face pretty much alone all this time except for slashes across the cheeks and shit, the nose was wrong, the eyes were slightly wrong, the cheekbones a bit too prominent—and now that he thought about it, now that the spell was broken, he realized he’d been stupid ever to have thought it could be Greta in the first place, because Greta was the same age as he was or maybe slightly less and this girl was hardly out of her twenties, the age she was then, the age she remained in his imagination.

He felt like a total fucking idiot.

Damned if he didn’t know a latex appliance when he saw one.

They were good. Very good. Worthy of Tom Savini. Probably expensive too. Maybe even state of the art. But a motionless closeup camera is a goddamn merciless thing and you could see where the living flesh stopped and FX began as clearly as though they’d signposted them.

So that when the knife slit her open and the hand slipped
into what was supposed to be Greta’s chest and pulled out what was supposed to be Greta’s beating heart but was not Greta’s heart nor anybody’s nor even Greta, Howard was already on his feet.

Cursing. Mad. Dispirited and disappointed as hell.

And ripped off again.

A week later he thought, well, it was still one hell of a movie, marked it, and added it to his collection.

A month later he saw her.

Really saw her.

She was walking down Central Park South half a block from his apartment just as he was leaving and she looked right at him without the slightest sign of recognition and he damn near walked into a uniformed doorman hailing a taxi—because the Greta he remembered, the almost-Greta in the film, had been an attractive woman, sure, but this Greta, this older, graceful Greta of the perfect legs and silk Armani jacket was absolutely stunning.

What in the hell had happened to her?

He could barely get her name out.

“Greta?”

“My God. Howard.”

And her smile was all he needed to ask her out to dinner.

Miraculously, she accepted.

Over duck with truffle sauce at Cafe Luxemborg on the Upper West Side he told her nothing about the very strange movie experience he had recently had and everything about investing—the kick of winning big when his choices were successful, playing down his utter fury at the occasional inevitable defeat. He told her stories. About riding high on Apple and Nintendo and dumping Exxon at exactly the right moment.

And what was she doing?

Well, films had not worked out for her. He’d guessed as
much, naturally. She’d hung around L.A. for a couple of years and then moved into real estate. She had a few other interests, she said, on the side. And she was doing pretty well from the look of it.

And no, she wasn’t married.

And no, she wasn’t engaged.

There wasn’t even a boyfriend. At least none that she was telling him about.

And he couldn’t help but wonder if she still got into the same kind of rough stuff in the bedroom as she did in the old days. The thought of it made his mouth water a whole lot more than the duck did, and the duck was the best there was.

And it looked like maybe he was going to find out.

He could tell she still found him attractive. Her body language, the way she looked at him and listened, everything told him she did.

Well, he was still attractive. Why not?

And she . . . utterly beautiful. Success, he supposed, had made her beautiful. The rough city edge to the voice was completely gone. What was left was a deep, resonant purr that made him think of wild warm nights on Caribbean shores, of jungle terraces, of heat and sweat and strange, exotic passions.

In the limo they drove south from the restaurant toward her midtown hotel. The theatres all along Broadway and Eighth Avenue were letting out and traffic was heavy. They talked over splits of champagne. Of old mutual acquaintances barely recalled. Halfway there and stalled in traffic she leaned over and brushed his lips with hers. She smelled lightly of Aliage or something similiar. Her lips were soft, more generous than he remembered.

“You’ll come up?”

“Of course. Absolutely.”

He was impressed. The hotel was one of the best in town and her room was nothing less than the penthouse.

She opened the door and they stepped inside into darkness and she turned to face him, came into his arms, and her mouth was hot and sweet, broke free and locked the door behind him and turned on the lights, the huge bright living room springing into focus, took off her jacket and stood there in front of him smiling, and he thought how strange it was, that he should be here about to make love to a woman who only a month ago he’d thought was going to die—and die horribly—all across his video screen.

Life was very odd.

“I’m glad you’re here,” she said, stepping toward him again.

“Believe me. So am I.”

“It took a while, you know.”

He was about to ask her
what did
when they stepped out of the bedroom, out of the darkness there.

Three heavy men in jeans and teeshirts. Beer guts hard, straining their belts.

Even a month later and without the masks they were all too familiar.

And a whole lot uglier than he imagined.

One moved behind him to the door. The others flanked her.

“I told you I had a few sidelines,” she said. “Other interests. And I definitely recalled your other interests. I remembered them vividly in fact. I knew you’d be answering the ad sooner or later. Being you, how could you resist it?”

She laughed. “You’ve become a very private person over the years, you know that, Howard? But then, the rich are always insulated—protected—aren’t they? I ought to know. It took me ten years to become . . . protected enough for this. An address was all I needed for you, but no one had one anymore. Who’d have thought you’d be here in New York playing the stock market? You could barely count your change when I knew you.”

She sighed and caressed his cheek. Her hand was warm.

“In the long run this was really much cheaper than hiring a private detective. And a lot more fun, too. We just ran the ad and waited. We even made a little money. Didn’t we, gentlemen.”

They smiled. It was not a nice thing to see.

The door to the bedroom opened. The girl who stood there in her white silk camisole was familiar too. The last time he’d seen her she was covered with blood. Now, of course, she was smiling.

“My sister. Doreen, meet Howard. Did you notice the family resemblance, Howard? Didn’t you find it striking?”

“What do you . . . ?”

“What do I want? I want to make a movie, of course. Just like we did in the old days. You see I remember how you treated me too. Come here.”

She stepped past her sister into the bedroom. The two men followed her. The third prodded Howard in the back with a thick horny knuckle. He had no choice but to follow.

She turned on the lights. They were klieg lights. So that suddenly he was in the spotlight.

A 35mm camera stood on a tripod in the corner of the room.

The king-size bed was covered in plastic.

Thick
plastic.

He knew when the guy behind him pushed him onto it.

He tried to scream but one of them stuffed a dirty white rag into his mouth and tied it off with a white silk scarf while the two other men grabbed his wrists and hitched them to the bedposts, and then to his feet, not even bothering to take off his wingtips first, working very efficiently as though they did this all the time and he looked up and saw Greta’s sister, the image of her younger self holding up two four-inch stainless-steel fishhooks for him to see, putting them down on the night table and picking up a bone handled razor, showing him that, and then Greta at the beautiful antique bureau touching up her lipstick in the mirror, stripping slowly down to her filmy black bra and
panties cut high on the hip just the way he liked them, putting on the black half-mask, the same as her sister was wearing now and turning, the scalpel gleaming in her hand.

“What do you think?” she said. “Can we go ninety minutes?”

The guy behind the camera nodded.

“Sure. If you’re careful.”

Greta smiled. The generous lips smiled down at him. While Howard thrashed uselessly on the bed.

“You see, Howard. The real thing does exist. Only you’re not going to get it mail-order.”

The camera whirred.

The clapboard clapped.

Greta walked into the frame.

“Action,” she said.

The night was moonless and quiet save for the crackling of the fire and the liquid tiltback of the Tangleleg whiskey which they passed between them and Faro Bill Brody drawing hard on his Bull Durham and the moans and heavy breathing from Chunk Herbert and the snort and paw of horses and the voices of the men. Their talk had turned to luck, good and bad. The men were of the opinion that theirs had taken a far turn for the worse this day for who could have guessed at Turner’s Crossing that the stage would be filled with lawmen and citizens with guns drawn and ready and a posse just out of sight behind them. They had robbed the same stage at the same place at the same time of day three weeks running and never known a problem.