“Sure I’m sure, but hook it up right now—okay?”
Benek tried to smile. “Thanks again. You’re sure?” It was a sudden comfort to have a normal conversation about nothing important at all.
“There’s not much else I can do with it.”
“You could keep it as a spare, for when one of yours breaks down,” Benek said, and felt a twinge of guilt, since that would not help his neighbor’s plan for a quieter phone environment.
DeSapio shook his head and looked down at Benek’s slippered feet. “They never break down. We’ll both be dead before it happens with one of these. It’ll just sit in the closet. Better you use it, and give me some peace. Hey, we’ll both have some peace!”
He turned away and Benek shut the door. Then he put the box down on the floor and closed all the locks and the bolt again. He picked up the box and was starting toward his phone stand when the old phone rang. He dropped the box on the sofa and quickly picked up the receiver.
“Do it now!” DeSapio’s voice shouted at him.
“I will, I will,” Benek said. “And—I’m really sorry.”
“Show me!”
Benek was trying to sleep, but there was some kind of annoying bird chirping away in his living room, waking him every few minutes. Finally, he got up, went out into the living room, and saw his old black phone sitting next to the newly plugged-in chirper, which stopped as he reached to pick it up.
He stared at the old black phone, and it dawned on him that he could plug it into the extra jack somewhere under his bed and not have to run out into the living room to take a call. He could afford a second phone because he now had one. Lucky the old cord already had a jack adapter on it. DeSapio might not be able to hear the old phone from the bedroom. Better still, just to make sure, he would turn down the old black and pick it up only when he heard the chirper in the living room...
As he picked up the old phone and took it into the bedroom, he came fully awake and remembered his predicament and how all his efforts had come to nothing—and wondered again whether he had in fact been living in a delusion these last weeks. It almost always seemed that way after sleep. After a long one, he sometimes felt that his whole life had never happened.
What had he ever hoped to achieve in police work? At best he was trying to empty an ocean with a bucket. No, there were individuals he had helped, and one by one they would add up over twenty years, and that would have to be enough. No big heroics. Help people in their own lifetimes. The next crop would make all the same mistakes, but that would be their problem.
He plugged in the black phone next to his bed, set it on the bare wood floor, got back in under the covers and drifted, wondering again what he would do. His life would be in danger if he went to the house on Tenth Street; but he was pretty sure that Dierdre had to be able to see him during an attack; therefore she could be stalked and killed from behind. So what else was new? He would do it and keep quiet. And if he failed, then good luck to her; maybe a world of Dierdres would be more polite.
The black phone rang, rattling the floor. The new phone chirped discreetly out in the living room. He reached down and picked up the black receiver before it could ring again.
“Detective Benek,” he said out of habit.
“Not quite,” Captain Reddy’s voice replied. “Now, Bill, listen, please. Dierdre Matera came in and filed another statement with us, which says you’ve been harassing her ever since you first saw her at the church, and that you’re still doing it. Stay away from her, or we’ll advise her to slap you with a restraining order. Understand?”
“Yes, Captain,” Benek said tiredly, realizing that at this point he wouldn’t sound plausible denying anything to Reddy.
“You admit harassing her?”
“Why deny it? You’ve made up your mind. She’s clever, and to you it looks like the truth even though it’s a lie.”
“Just stay away. I’ll be in touch. We don’t just abandon our own, you know, but you must show me you’re serious about getting help. It’s there for you if you want it.”
“Thanks, Captain,” Benek said and hung up, convinced that Reddy wanted to help him but had to say the tough words to prepare the way, or had to have a record of trying to help one of his men before it became plausible to terminate him without provoking a hearing and appeals.
The black phone rang again. Benek picked it up.
“Now I’m not mad this time,” DeSapio said. “It only rang twice, for which I thank you. If you’re dead set on keeping the old phone, pick it up, look underneath, and turn off the ringer. You’ll still know you’re getting a call when you hear the new phone wherever you have it. The new phone. The one I won’t hear. Got it?”
“Just a moment,” Benek said, picking up the base and examining it. “There’s no on-off switch that I can see.”
“It’s a slide in the old models.”
Benek found it and slid it all the way to the left. “Found it.”
“Now hang up so I can call you back to check that it works. If it doesn’t, you’ll just have to toss the clunker. Get it?”
Benek hung up and waited. After a moment the chirper started in the living room; then the old phone gave a low whirring growl like a muzzled dog, but not enough for DeSapio to hear.
Benek picked it up. “Is that okay?”
“That’s just dandy,” DeSapio said, and hung up.
Benek lay back again, thinking about how effective Dierdre had been in protecting herself. But what could she do for herself in the long run? She might be able to extort money out of individuals through a personal campaign of intimidation and terror. If she worked hard at it, she might acquire some control over a group of individuals, but it would take a lot of tact and patience, and helpers.
A chill went through him, and he was sweating as he realized that she might be able to do it, but she would have to develop some discipline. Coring a priest, a derelict, Gibney, some people in a restaurant, and assorted animals was not being in control of herself. She could have tricked him into giving her the child she wanted, used guile and been patient instead of turning her basement into a dungeon.
It was still possible that she might empty a prominent person in public and expose herself; but he could not count on it; the chance of people understanding what was happening before their eyes was remote. No one in the church had observed well enough to guess what had happened. He had barely managed it himself in the cellar, but the conditions had been very well defined, and she had told him. He sat up, convinced again that he had to kill her before she complained often enough to have him put away.
It was what a good cop had to do.
He stood across the street from her windows, staring at their yellow glow. His fear of approaching recalled the lethal thrill of her body, and he imagined that he would be violent, handcuffing her and forcing her to stare at a blank wall as he took her from behind. Unable to see him, she would be helpless as he spent himself. Then he would put a bag over her head and... could he kill her when she was helpless? Find out by trying, officer. He would probably get only one chance. She would certainly destroy him if she saw him. His only defense was to keep out of her line of sight, even in a mirror.
He started across the empty street, gripping the gun in his jacket pocket, telling himself that she was a monster because she could reach through the walls between human beings—necessary walls that prevented people from reaching into one another with their feelings, hatreds, and rages. It was enough that people could breach these defenses with words, which at least offered some kind of filter. Language gave moderate access to the minds of others; Dierdre’s way was to break in. It was terrible enough that people could hurt and kill with hands, feet, teeth, and weapons; but she was a monster because she could make violence flow directly from mind to mind, and she was determined to insure the survival of her power beyond its use in her lifetime. If there was any chance that she could pass it on, that was reason enough to end her life. No, her very existence was reason enough to kill a genuine witch.
He paused at the steps, still looking up at her windows. A silhouette passed across the curtains and he froze, realizing how vulnerable he was. What would he do? Knock down her door? Without the element of surprise, he would be lucky to get off a single shot. Even if he wounded her, she might still get him with her dying effort. An opportunity would show itself, he told himself, as hope rushed through him.
The lights went out in her windows, and went on in the hallway behind the front door. She was coming out! He gripped the gun and waited.
“Bill,” her voice said softly, and he saw her dark figure standing in the shadow under the stairs. She had gone out the back and come out through the basement hallway. “You’ll be brainless before the gun clears your pocket,” she said. “Why don’t we just go inside and talk.”
He turned and fled up the street toward Second Avenue. Not daring to look back, he knew that she was on the sidewalk behind him now, looking after him, building up to empty him. He started to run, hoping that he was already far enough away.
He reached the brightness of the avenue and hailed a cab, wrenched open the door as it stopped and threw himself into the back seat.
“Say, bo-ddy,” the driver said in a strange accent, “if you weird, I have gun.”
“I’m a cop,” Benek said, sitting back and catching his breath.
“Soore, soore. Where?”
Benek told him. The cab lurched forward and sped off toward the park. Benek steadied himself as the cab narrowly avoided cars, slipped into the park, and rushed through the dark trees toward the west side. Against all reason he imagined that she could somehow still see him, that she would find him inside herself, sooner or later, wherever he might go, that there was no wall between them because somehow, shamefully, he still wanted her, and something in her desired him with a horrible hunger, and that was enough to tangle them up with each other.
Not true, he cried within himself, denying the possibility that she had just now deliberately spared him.
He had simply been too quick for her. That was why he had gotten away. That was all. Nothing more. It was as simple as that.
The cab jumped up and down across several bumps, and it seemed to him, absurdly, that the lump of his fear was a strange mass that had grown into him from some other place. The driver turned on the radio. It played old love songs all the way home.
20
Seasonless lands, empty of people, lay before him. Vast oceans washed across inland deserts, mixing sands and dissolving salts, reanimating long suspended life. He had always been asleep, dreaming his life. He would get up and go to work as usual and nothing would have changed, proving that there was only darkness outside of himself, always waiting to be painted with wild, tumbling events...
There was an insistent knock on his door, and the reality of his predicament surged through him. He had come home and been unable to breathe, then collapsed on the bed, struggling to remain conscious, but did not remember when he had stripped down to his underwear and socks. He peered at the glowing clock by his bed and saw that it was only a few minutes before midnight. DeSapio had been here only a few hours ago.
He got up and crept out into the dark living room. The bare wooden floor creaked slightly under his feet as he went to the door and slowly peered through the open peephole.
It was Dierdre, dressed in a long black raincoat and carrying a shoulder bag. He stood still and waited, struggling to breathe and about to pass out again.
“Open the door, Bill,” she said loudly, then rapped three times.
A dog barked in the apartment across the hall. She was powerless as long as his door was closed, he told himself. All he had to do was keep quiet and she would go away. She was not strong enough to knock the door down; she would have to go away.
“Show some sense and open the door, Bill,” she said even more loudly, as if she were a girlfriend or a wife arguing with her man. He was grateful that he had not closed the peephole or turned on the lights; an open peephole in a lighted room would have been a dead giveaway.
Trembling, he backed away and sat down on the sofa, watching the yellow glow of the hall light shooting through the peephole in a long beam, as if from a distant lighthouse, striking the opposite wall.