Holy Terror (23 page)

The bodyguard twisted around, his fist clenched, his arm cocked up like a pistol hammer. But Conor
tapped him on the shoulder, said, ‘Hey! You've forgotten something, haven't you?' and punched him in the stomach, very hard; and then gave him an uppercut which pitched him backward into the doorway of Sammy's office.

Sebastian climbed to his feet, clutching the back of his head. Ric dusted off his polo shirt.

‘Beginners,' sneered Sebastian. ‘I've been learning karate for seventeen years. I could have been a second Bruce Lee.'

‘Gypsy Rose Lee, more like,' put in Ric.

‘Never mind about that,' said Conor. ‘Let's get going. Sammy?'

Sammy nodded, his eyes still wide and his mouth still hanging open.

‘How about hailing us a couple of taxis? Could you do that for us?'

‘Taxis? Fuh shaw.
Two
taxis, is that what you want?'

Hetti went over and stood next to Ramon: Hypnos and Hetti, the double act, close together again.

‘So what is this all about, Chief O'Neil?' asked Hypnos. He was trying to sound controlled but his voice was quivering.

‘It's what we call the end of the line, Mr Perez. You stole the contents of my customers' safety deposit boxes. Now I want them back.'

‘Or else?'

‘Or else Lieutenant Slyman finds you sitting on his doorstep with enough
prima facie
evidence to send you to the slammer for a very long time. Conspiracy, theft, blackmail … extortion.'

‘You'll have to prove all of that.'

‘Oh, I will, believe me. Fll prove it to the point where you and Ms Slanic don't have any conceivable chance of release. How does fifteen years' prison sound to you? Think how old you're going to be, the day they let you out.'

‘Fuck you,' said Ramon.

‘I see,' said Conor, laying a hand on his shoulder. ‘Never lost for words.'

Hypnos reached into his coat pocket and took out a small folded packet of aluminum foil. ‘Mind if I take a snort?' he asked Conor. ‘All this aggression … it's totally stressed me out.'

‘What is that?'

‘What do you think? Just a little recreational talcum powder.'

Conor noticed that Hetti was half smiling, in spite of her fiery cheek. He thought:
something's wrong here … Why are they both so cool about this
?

Ramon unfolded the foil. Inside was less than half a teaspoonful of brownish-white powder.

‘See? No surprises. Just a little nose candy.'

‘Let me take a look at that.' Conor held out his hand and Ramon gave him the foil. With some hesitation, Conor sniffed at the powder. But with no hesitation at all, Ramon Perez stepped up and blew it into his face, and then at Sebastian and Ric and Sidney.

Conor said, ‘
Shit!
What the hell are you—!'

The walls revolved sideways. The floor tilted onto its end. And then the whole theater silently collapsed inside of his head.

* * *

He was dreaming, he was floating, he was spinning around in circles. He was high in the air, up above a circus tent. He was sleeping in his own childhood bed, with the crucifix hanging on the wall above it, the crucifix that always frightened him so much. He was horrified by Christ's emaciated body, but at the same time he felt such pity for Him, such compassion, that he used to kneel on his pillow and touch His wounds, and promise to save Him, no matter what. He even brought Him food, tiny crumbly pieces of cookie or pound cake, and tried to feed them into the statue's mouth, so that at least He wouldn't die of starvation.

‘I'm sorry, Jesus,' he used to say, and he was saying the same thing when he opened his eyes. ‘I'm sorry. I'm truly, truly sorry.'

‘You're
sorry
?' said a sarcastic voice.

He blinked. The light was so strong that it was difficult for him to see who was talking to him. But gradually the fuzziness came into focus, all the images collected themselves together.

He was sitting on a hard wooden chair in a plain yellow-painted room. In front of him stood a tall white-haired man in a black three-piece suit, wearing tiny sunglasses with sapphire-blue lenses.

The man leaned forward and peered directly into Conor's eyes. ‘Y'all awake?' he asked, in an echoing voice. ‘Good, you're awake. I was worried for a while there. Thought you might sleep for the rest of your natural life.'

Conor looked around in mystification. There was nothing in the room to indicate where he might be. It was sunny outside and he could hear traffic in the street below but a parchment-colored blind had been drawn down over the window. There were no pictures on the walls but darker rectangles on the wallpaper showed where pictures had once hung. In the far corner stood two other men, also dressed in black suits and black turtlenecks, one of them thin and ascetic looking, the other crewcut and ruddy cheeked. On a small canvas chair sat another man, heavily built, with a head like a knuckle of pork. His legs were crossed and he was waggling one immaculately polished black Oxford in time to his relentless gum-chewing.

The man in the blue sunglasses walked around in a circle. Then he sat down in a minimalist steel-and-canvas chair, his fingers steepled, and stared at Conor with an expression that was half contemptuous, half amused.

‘What's happened?' asked Conor. He had a raging sore throat. ‘What am I doing here?'

‘You are here, sir, so that I can take a good look at you,' the man told him, in a throaty Missouri accent. He was strikingly handsome. He had a high, broad forehead and a long straight nose and a sharp movie actor's jawline. His skin, however, was dead white, and as dry and flaky as filo pastry. Although he was so handsome, his head was disproportionately large for his body. He was both fascinating and repelling, like the beautiful woman whom Conor had once met whose arms and legs had been horribly scarred by fire.

‘Who are you? I thought I was—'

‘You thought you were in the Rialto Theater. Yes, sir, you were. But you took a leap, my friend. A quantum leap from there to here; and here you are.'

Conor didn't know what to say. The man in the blue sunglasses continued to smile at him and the two men standing in the corner murmured like gossiping monks and the man with the head like a pork knuckle continued to chew gum and waggle his foot.

At last, the man in the blue sunglasses said, ‘You really don't know who I am, do you? That just goes to show that publicity isn't worth squat. I'll bet they could have put up a poster of me, a hundred feet high, right in the middle of Times Square, and you still wouldn't know who I am.'

‘I guess that you're something to do with Ramon Perez and Magda Slanic.'

The man let out an operatic ‘
ha
!' of total contempt. ‘Hypnos and Hetti? Those two? I rescued those two from destitution. They were down as low as a man and woman can go, before I picked them
up, and showed them that they still had a part to play in God's great purpose.'

‘Who
are
you?' Conor repeated.

‘You seriously don't recognize me?' said the man, pointing to his own face. ‘You and I have been on the same TV news reports. Maybe I look better on the small screen.'

The man's face suddenly fitted into place. ‘I know you now. You're that religious terrorist. Branch.'

‘The Reverend Dennis Evelyn Branch to you, sir. And “religious terrorist” isn't exactly the lifestyle description I'd choose. You might just as well call Moses a religious terrorist.'

‘Moses didn't plant bombs in public buildings, as far as I remember.'

‘Moses did worse! Moses brought down floods, and locusts. Moses brought down the angel of death. Moses didn't need no
bombs
.'

‘So what's going on here, Reverend Branch? How did I get here?'

‘Oh, Hypnos worked one of those little tricks of his. And as for what's going on … you don't need to know that, Mr O'Neil. All you have to know is that fate has involved
you
– you personally – in the single mightiest crusade that this world has ever known.'

‘Crusade? I don't know what you're talking about.'

Dennis Evelyn Branch scratched the back of his hand, loosening a dry fragment of white skin. He lifted his hand to his mouth and tore it off with his teeth, and distastefully chewed it. ‘The day will come
when you and I can stand hand in hand in a world of
in-finite
harmony. A world where no man ever raises his fist to his brother.'

‘Listen, I'm sorry, but I don't want to stand hand in hand with you
anywhere
.'

‘Well, I'm sorry, too, because you don't have any choice no more. The Lord has picked you out, in His mysterious way, and you know what happens to those who show reluctance to serve the Lord.'

Conor stood up; but Pork Knuckle immediately stood up, too, and gave that aggressive forward shrug of his suit-shoulders that bouncers always do when they're getting ready to hit you.

‘Please, Mr O'Neil,' said Dennis Evelyn Branch. ‘I'd consider it a favor if you sat down. I don't have a whole lot of time. As you probably saw, the FBI have discovered that I'm here in New York and me and most of my people have to leave before five o'clock if we're going to catch the flight to where we're going. I don't relish spending the rest of my life locked up in maximum security with some tedious obsessive like the Unabomber.'

Conor remained standing. ‘I don't understand what you want from me,' he said. ‘I don't have any of the contents of those safety deposit boxes. I got caught up in this robbery by accident and all I'm trying to do is get the cops off my back.'

‘Well, I'm aware of that,' said Dennis Evelyn Branch, scratching deep inside his left sleeve. But the whole point is that you
did
get caught up in it. You shouldn't have been so conscientious, should you? I guess you forgot that you weren't a boney-fidey policeman any more, that's what happened. You
kind of got intoxicated by the thrill of the chase, didn't you?

‘If you'd have let that Gary Motson get away, you wouldn't be up to your neck in this situation now.'

‘Gary Motson, that was his name?' Conor still pictured him as the Angel Gabriel.

‘Gary Motson, that's right. Well, he's not anybody in particular. He's just some coach-class hood that your partner knew. An inveterate sticker-upper of liquor marts and corner convenience stores. Exactly the kind of fall guy we were looking for … until
you
came along, of course, and gave us a fall guy of real quality … someone the police were absolutely salivating to get their hands on.

‘
Sal-i-vating
,' he repeated, picking a piece of skin from between his teeth.

Conor slowly sat down. ‘My
partner
knew him? My partner Salvatore Morales?'

‘That's the man. Very helpful. Very courteous. I was sorry to hear what happened to him.'

‘I don't get this. Salvatore knew this Gary Motson
before
the robbery?'

‘Of course,' said Dennis Evelyn Branch, with obvious pleasure. ‘We needed somebody to take the blame for the missing safety deposit boxes, didn't we? It's what you call laying a false trail.'

‘I don't believe that Salvatore would have gotten involved with anything like this,' said Conor.

‘You don't? Then you don't know how weak people can be. That's one of the things I'm crusading for, Mr O'Neil, to make us all strong again. Your partner had a gambling habit, I'll bet you didn't know, and he was into the bookmakers for more
than you can imagine. Not only that, his mother had cancer of the tongue and he owed the hospital tens of thousands of dollars. There was something else, too: he hated Spurr's for giving you the job that he believed was rightfully his, and there is no man easier to suborn than a man who is poisoned with jealousy.'

Conor lowered his head. It all fitted into place now. How else had Gary Motson acquired a list of safety deposit boxes? How else had he known where the wall-safe was?

Dennis Evelyn Branch said, ‘We got to hear of your partner through one of our disciples, who does a little money-lending on the side. We put a proposition to your partner and he accepted it. He told us how to get into the strongroom, and in return we were going to give him a very healthy retirement plan. Pity he'll never collect it.'

‘What about this Gary Motson character?'

‘That was your partner's idea. A second robbery, to distract attention from the first. He offered Gary Motson a third share in whatever he and that black individual could steal from Spurr's safety deposit boxes. He even volunteered to act as a hostage to help them get out of there safely; and to make it look less like an inside job. Gary Motson loved that touch, poor sap. He didn't know those safety deposit boxes were empty, any more than you did. He wouldn't have made any money out of that raid, but at least he would have got away. He and that black individual were supposed to go to Canada for a spell – and they would have done, if you hadn't been so –
phewjf!
what can I call it? – all-fired hot on the job.'

He paused, and lifted one white, almost-invisible eyebrow. ‘Still, we mustn't gainsay the ways of the Lord, must we? As it turns out, everybody thinks that
you
committed this robbery, and all of the owners of those safety deposit boxes have come to you to get their goodies back. And it's all been working very well, thanks to that very co-operative lawyer of yours.'

He burrowed into his cuff with his teeth and pulled off another strip of translucent skin.

Conor glanced at Pork Knuckle and said, ‘What's to stop me from going to the police and telling them all this?'

‘Three reasons – apart from the fact that I could kill you here and now. Of course I don't want to do that, because who's going to pay blackmail money to a dead man? Number one, the police would drop you the second you walked in through the precinct door – or, if not, they would make sure that you accidentally suffocated in your cell. Number two, even if you survived, nobody would believe you. Hypnotists came in and made you open the strongroom?
Hypnotists
? I don't think so! Not only that, you have money problems of your own, don't you? What with your divorce, and your new apartment, and your pretty new girlfriend to take care of. Just think of the way that a jury might look at it. Your partner was prepared to betray his trust to straighten out his debts. Who's to say that you weren't prepared to do the same? I don't know what your partner said to Gary Motson, but I gather from what I hear on the news that Motson's going to testify that you were involved in the conspiracy, too. I know you weren't.
But I'm not going to testify on your behalf, am I? And you only have one witness to your hypnotism story, Darrell Bussman, and he's in hospital in a coma and unlikely to recover.'