The Book of the Dead (19 page)

T
he prisoner known only as A sat on the bunk in solitary 44, deep within the Federal High-Risk Violent Offender Pretrial Detention Facility—the Black Hole—of Herkmoor. It was a cell of monastic spareness, eight feet by ten, with freshly whitewashed walls, a cement floor with a central drain, a toilet in one corner, a sink, a radiator, and a narrow metal bed. A fluorescent bulb, recessed into the ceiling and protected by a wire cage, provided the cell’s sole light. There was no switch: the bulb went on at 6 A.M. and went off at 10 P.M. High up on the far wall was the room’s only window, deep and barred, two inches wide and fifteen inches high.

The prisoner, dressed in a neatly pressed gray jumpsuit, had been sitting on the mattress for many hours in utter stillness. His slender face was pale and without expression, the silvery eyes half hooded, white-blond hair combed back. Nothing moved, not even his eyes, as he listened to the soft, rapid sounds filtering from the cell next door: solitary 45.

They were the sounds of drumming: a tattoo of extraordinary rhythmic complexity that rose and fell, sped up and slowed down, moving from metal bed rail to mattress to the walls, toilet, sink, bars, and back again. At present, the prisoner was drumming on the iron bedstead rail with an occasional slap or turn played out on the mattress, while making rapid popping and clucking sounds with his lips and tongue. The endless rhythms rose and fell like the wind, working into a machine gun-like frenzy and then dying back into a lazy syncopation. At times, it almost—but not quite—seemed to come to a stop: except that a single ostinato
tap… tap… tap
indicated that the beat went on.

An aficionado of rhythm might have recognized the extraordinary diversity of rhythmical patterns and styles coming from solitary 45: a kassagbe Congo beat segueing into a down-tempo funk-out and then into a pop-and-lock, moving sequentially through a shakeout, a wormhole, a glam, then into a long pseudo-electroclash riff; then a quick eurostomp ending in a nasty, followed by a hip-hop twist-stick and a tom club. A moment’s silence… and then a slow Chicago blues fill began, evolving into innumerable other beats both named and nameless, twining and intertwining in an eternal braid of sound.

The prisoner known as A, however, was not an aficionado of rhythm. He was a man who knew many things—but drumming was not one of them.

And yet he listened.

Finally, half an hour before lights-out, the prisoner known as A shifted on his cot. He turned toward the headrail, gave it a cautious tap with his left index finger, then another. He began tapping out a simple 4/4 beat. As the minutes went on, he tried the beat on the mattress, then the wall and the sink—as if testing them for timbre, tone, and amplitude—before moving back to the bed rail. As he continued to beat out a 4/4 time with his left finger, he began beating a second rhythm with his right. As he played this simple rhythmic accompaniment, he listened intently to the outpouring of virtuosity next door.

Lights-out arrived, and all went black. An hour went by, and another. The prisoner’s approach subtly changed. Carefully following the drummer’s lead, A picked up an unusual syncopation here, a three-against-two beat there, adding them to his simple repertoire. He meshed his own drumming ever more closely into the web of sounds coming from next door, taking cues from his neighbor, picking up the tempo or lowering it according to the drummer’s lead.

Midnight, and the drummer in cell 45 continued—and so did the prisoner named A. A found that drumming—which he had always dismissed as a crude, primitive activity—was curiously pleasing to the mind. It opened a door from the tight, ugly reality of his cell into an expansive, abstract space of mathematical precision and complexity. He drummed on, still following the lead of the prisoner in 45, all the while increasing the complexity of his own rhythmical patterns.

The night wore on. The few other prisoners in solitary—there were not many, and they were far down the hall—were long asleep. Yet still the prisoners in 44 and 45 drummed on together. As the prisoner named A explored more deeply this strange new world of external and internal rhythm, he began to understand something about the man next door and his mental illness—as had been his intent. It was not something that could be put into words; it was not accessible to language; it was not reachable by psychological theorizing, psychotherapy, or even medication.

Yet nevertheless—through careful emulation of the complex drumming—the prisoner in 44 began to reach that place, to enter the drummer’s special world. On a basic neurological level, he began to understand the drummer: what motivated him, why he did what he did.

Slowly, carefully, A took a measured foray into altering the rhythm along certain experimental pathways, to see if he could take the lead, induce the drummer to follow him for a moment. When this experiment proved successful, he very subtly began to alter the tempo, morph the rhythm. There was nothing sudden in his approach: every new beat, every altered rhythm, was carefully controlled and calculated to lead to a desired result.

Over the space of another hour, the dynamic between the two prisoners began to change. Without realizing it, the drummer became no longer the leader, but the follower.

Prisoner A continued to alter his own drumming, slowing it down and speeding it up by infinite degrees, until he was certain he was now setting the rhythm; that the Drummer in the cell next door was unconsciously following his tempo and lead. With infinite care, he then began to slow his own drumming: not in a steady way, but through speedups and slowdowns, through riffs and changeovers he had picked up from his neighbor, each time ending at a slightly slower tempo—until he was beating out a down-tempo as slow and sleepy as molasses.

And then he stopped.

The man in solitary 45, after a few tentative, lost beats, halted as well.

There was a long silence.

And then a breathy, hoarse voice came from cell 45. “Who… who are you?”

“I am Aloysius Pendergast,” came the reply. “And I am pleased to make your acquaintance.”

An hour later, blessed silence reigned. Pendergast lay on his bunk, eyes closed but still awake. At a certain moment, he opened his eyes and scrutinized the faintly glowing dial of his watch—the one item prisoners were allowed, by law, to keep. Two minutes to four in the morning. He waited, now with his eyes open, and at exactly four o’clock a brilliant pinpoint of green light appeared on the far wall, dancing and jittering before gradually settling down. He recognized it as the output of a 532nm green DPSS laser—nothing more than the beam from an expensive laser pen, aimed through his window from some concealed spot far beyond the prison walls.

When the light had stopped trembling, it began blinking, repeating a short introduction in a simple monophonic cipher, compressed to keep transmission short. The introduction was repeated four times, to make sure Pendergast recognized the code. Then, after a pause, the actual message began.

TRANSMISSION RECEIVED
        STILL ANALYZING OPTIMAL ROUTES FOR EGRESS
        CHANGE OF VENUE MAY BE REQUIRED ON YOUR END
        WILL ADVISE ASAP
        QUESTIONS FOLLOW—COMMUNICATE VIA PRIOR PROCEDURE
        DESCRIBE YARD PRIVILEGES AND SCHEDULE
        OBTAIN MATERIAL SAMPLES OF GUARD UNIFORM, SLACKS AND SHIRT

The requests and questions went on, some strange, some straightforward. Pendergast made no move to take notes, committing everything to memory.

At the last question, however, he started slightly.

ARE YOU WILLING TO KILL?

With that, the laser light vanished. Pendergast rose to a sitting position. Feeling under the mattress, he extracted a hard, frayed piece of canvas and a slice of lemon from a recent meal. Removing one shoe, he carried it to the sink, ran the water, placed a few drops into the soap depression, and dipped the shoe into it. Next, he squeezed the juice of the lemon slice into the water. With the piece of canvas, he proceeded to strip the shoe of some of its polish. Soon, a small amount of dark liquid stood in the enamel depression. He paused a moment in the gloom to make sure his movements were undetected. Then he unmade the corner of his bed, tore a long strip of sheet from beneath the tuck, laid it out on the rim of the sink. He removed one shoelace, dipped its previously sharpened and split metal edge into the liquid, and began to write in a fanatically small, neat hand, leaving a pale script on the strip of cotton.

By quarter to five, he had finished answering the questions. He laid the sheet on the radiator until it was baking hot, which darkened and fixed the writing; then he began to roll it up. But as he did so, he paused, and then added one more small line at the bottom: “Continue to keep a close eye on Constance. And be of good cheer, my dear Vincent.”

He baked on this last part of the message, rolled it tight, and inserted it into the drain in his cell. Then he filled his slop bucket at the sink and poured it down the drain, repeating the process a dozen times.

One hour to wake-up. He lay down on the bed, folded his hands across his chest, and went instantly to sleep.

M
ary Johnson swung open the oversize door to the Egyptian gallery and stepped inside, feeling around on the cold marble wall for the light switches. Although she knew the technicians had been working late hours on the tomb recently, by six in the morning they were always gone. It was her job to unlock the area for the subcontractors, turn on the lights, and make sure all was well.