The 4 Phase Man (2 page)

Jerry couldn’t look at the man.

“You are never alone, Jerry,” the man said firmly.

“Never off duty.” He paused. “Never safe.”

He looked into the ashamed boy’s eyes. “Jerry?”

“Yes, Herb?”

“For you to be what we know you can be,” he said gently, “for you to do what we know you can do, you must never let up. Never take unnecessary chances. Never”—he hesitated—“allow any vulnerability.”

He smiled supportively. “Do you understand, son?”

“I…”

“We never get second chances, my boy. Never.”

“I understand,” the mortified but committed boy muttered.

“Good, son. Good.”

“Mister? Mister? What you want?” she whispered.
“Possos?”

“Lock the door.” She did, as he sat on the bed. “Now take off your clothes.” She slowly undressed.

Xenos lay back on the bed, propped against the pillow, his heavy boots pushing against the fragile footboard. He
didn’t undress, didn’t move, just lay on top of the covers… watching.

Her blouse. Her skirt. Her skin.

No reaction, no reaching out to her or quickened breathing; no masturbation or vulgar commentary.

Just his eyes darting back and forth along her body. Probing. Examining. Devouring.

“Turn around,” he whispered.

Shrugging, she did as she was told.

“Ayfaristo
, Eleni. Thank you.”

The man’s voice seemed to trail away as if he was momentarily transported away from the small brothel into a place of, well, Eleni couldn’t really describe it. But she knew it must be a better place than she’d ever seen. Then, like a horse throwing off flies, he was back.

He nodded toward a chair after a few long minutes. “Put that by the door and sit down.”

Puzzled, but sensing the barely suppressed violence of the man, she did as she was told. Then watched as the man fished around in his boot. He pulled out a wad of drachmas and the biggest knife she’d ever seen. He loosened his shirt, unholstering a large chrome and steel revolver.

Petrified, she felt like screaming for help; stopped only by an unreasoned logic that no sound would ever escape her lips if she tried. And the certainty that she would be dead a second later.

Xenos noticed her discomfort, shook his head sadly, then tossed her the wad—50,000 drachmas, almost three times the going rate for all night. He turned on his side, put the knife under the pillow—still gripped in his right hand—cocked the gun, then laid it across one of his boots.

“If anyone tries to get in before morning,” he said in a tired voice as he closed his eyes, “you stop them. For at least thirty seconds.
Parakolutheô
?”

She nodded. “I … understand.”

“If you don’t,” he said through a yawn, “pray to your God that they kill me.” He settled himself more comfortably on top of the bed. “You can get dressed if you want to.”

And he was asleep.

She quickly dressed, never taking her eyes off his sleeping form. No matter how he tossed or turned (and his sleep
was
deeply troubled), the right hand never came out from under the pillow and the expression on his face never reflected any of the inner turmoil that his body clearly spoke.

Eleni readjusted the chair so that it was jammed under the doorknob as a brace against any unexpected opening, then moved to the window, barely moving the curtain aside to peek down at the street as twilight crept across it.

Every ten minutes or so, she would move to the door, listen closely to the sounds of urgent couplings in the rooms around hers, to soft footfalls on the threadbare carpet; to anything that might spell a threat.

And she did that for the remainder of the night.

Praying and wondering in equal measures throughout.

The dream came right away, before his breathing could shallow and even; before his body could settle and unwind. As always, it came with blinding speed and life-crushing impact.

He stood in the sanctuary of the hundred-year-old temple. The men in their dark suits, gray beards,
tallisim
and
kepas
in place, swaying to their own rhythms as the ancient prayers were recited. An odd cacophony of English, Yiddish, Russian, and German mutterings rising out of them.

Upstairs, the women sat. More still, more controlled than the men; they prayed with equal fervor but less demonstrably, as was the tradition. The old women in black, the middle women in navy or pale blues, the young women and girls in a few bright colors. But all had their shawls over their heads, their hands cupped over their eyes, their mouths moving almost silently with their prayers.

Xenos would move among them, looking into their eyes, tasting their breaths, inhaling the women’s soapy-clean fragrances, feeling the submerged power of the men.

He stood for the longest time by his mother—who couldn’t have been there, since she had died years before—watching as she tried hard to suppress a grin of pride and, well, ownership, in her son below. It was the one comfort in the dream. A mother that he had barely known approving, supporting, loving.

He would move to his father, sitting proudly, stiffly, on the dais next to the president of the synagogue. His freshly altered suit—worn only for the most special occasions—paling in comparison to the other man s. But he prayed with more fervor, with an extra something that had been reserved for this moment when he would sit in front of the congregation. A proud father’s one and only embracement of his son’s accomplishments.

Xenos would reach out, try to touch the old man with the scar across his forehead from a soldier’s rifle butt. But he could never quite make it. Somehow, no matter how close the dream allowed him to move, it was never close enough. So his fingers would stretch and reach and beg; but never find the man whom he most wanted to please, whom he had most disappointed.

Then he would find himself standing beside his younger self.

Thirteen, clear-eyed, acne-strewn innocent face, studying the ancient text spread before him. Sneaking glances up to the balcony at his sister; to the side at his father; out at the men who knew the text by heart and who would criticize or praise his performance for years to come.

And he heard his voice—breaking and cracking with youth—singsonging the age-old words with as much feeling as he could. Praying that his fear of screwing up couldn’t be heard between the Hebrew and Yiddish.

“Vayomer, a’donai el Moishe. Koh tomar, el b’nai yisroyel. V’mru chi, ani, a’tem re-etem; keey, meen ha’shmiem.”

Then it began.

A slight trickle of blood from his left cheek where a knife would one day almost take his eye.

A crack and distortion in his right arm where grenade
fragments one day would destroy much of the bone, requiring three operations to repair.

Flames and the bittersweet smell of burning human flesh rising up from the floor, mixing with naphthalene from the napalming that he would barely survive.

As the blood and pain continued to leak out of the seemingly impervious boy all over the holy text, the faces would appear.

Iraqi, Russian, Palestinian, Vietnamese, South American, European, and Asian faces that just floated in the carmine-stained mist; quietly taking in the destruction of the boy who—as a man—would take their lives.

Or cause their lives to be taken.

They never spoke, never revealed so much as an expression or thought in their dead eyes. But they floated and they watched the piecemeal devastation of Xenos’s younger self.

Then all froze; all became stilled and quiet.

Xenos turned to his father, as he knew he must. For he was no mere observer in this dream/horror. He was dragged along on its vicious current with no more power to alter its path than he’d had to alter his own.

The old man stood, walked over to the boy, gently smoothed a vagrant lock of hair out of the now blind but still clear eyes, then turned to the man that the boy would, must, become.

“I have no son,” he said sadly yet firmly. He gestured at the slowly immolating boy.
“He
was my boy, my life, my future.” He sighed as his eyes locked with Xenos’s. “You’re just a corpse. A dead man. A stranger to me now and forever.”

He reached up, violently tearing the lapel of the best suit he’d ever owned. Shaking his head, crying unheard tears, then covering his eyes with his right hand as he began reciting the ancient prayer of mourning.

“Yis’kadal v’yiskadash, shme raboh.
There be some who have left a name behind them; whose remembrance is as sweet as honey in all mouths. People will declare their wisdom and the congregation will tell of their goodness.”

“And there be some who have no memorial; whose names have vanished as though they had never been. They lie at rest in nameless graves. Their resting places in far-off forests and lonely fields are lost to the eyes of their revering kin. Yet they shall not be forgotten.”

The old man lowered his hand, staring deeply into Xenos’s sad eyes. And the old man’s voice was firm as stone and hard as iron.

“My son is lost to me, now and forever. His name will be vanished, his memory as though he had never been.”

Then, as if on cue in this kaleidoscopic horror that haunted Xenos virtually every time he closed his eyes, the mother he had never known stood beside them, crying deeply, her voice begging.

“No!” Avidol, don’t do this! He is your son! You cannot—

“I have no son, was the old man’s simple, pained,” inelastic reply. “He is a stranger to me.
Yis’kadal v’yiskadash, shme raboh.
”

And the scene would grow dark, insubstantial, as Xenos would reach out—through—the image of his father. Would be racked with a soul-deep pain that threatened to do what countless evil men’s bullets could not do.

Destroy the man he had become.

As the scene would shimmer, blink from existence, then repeat itself in even greater strikes of torment and anguish.

He awoke with a start, instinctively grabbing the person he sensed above him by the neck, pulling the person down, his knife pressed hard against the exposed throat.

“Emai Eleni!”

A quick glance around the tiny room confirmed that they were still alone.

“What is it?”

“Soldiers,” she whispered urgently. “Downstairs!”

“Have you seen the bastard or not? the lieutenant spat out in Greek through his thick Cypriot accent as two enlisted men held the bartender’s arms behind him.”

“I know nothing,” the bartender slurred out from somewhere in his battered face.

A baseball bat to the groin was the lieutenant’s response.

As the man collapsed to the floor, the soldiers began kicking him.

The lieutenant casually turned to the nearest prostitute, a trembling girl in her early twenties.

“Listen, grandmother,” he said to the old woman in broken English so that he would not be understood by his men. He may have been speaking to the old woman, but his eyes never left the girl in front of him as his bat began to work its way beneath her skirt. “We do business here. I give you piece of commander’s reward, yes? You get rich, I get richer, an enemy of the state is removed, and your girls stay…” The bat lifted the skirt, then tore it away. “… Charming.
Parakolutheô
?”

A commotion upstairs caught his attention and he drew his pistol. The soldiers with him cocked their weapons and looked nervously at the stairway. An almost endless moment later the bodies of the two soldiers who had been sent upstairs came rolling down.

Blood still spurting from gaping wounds in their throats.

“Attention!” the lieutenant ordered. But it wasn’t necessary. His men couldn’t have been more aware of the gore and threat in front of them if they’d tried.

It came from two weeks of “hunting the Devil.”

“Attention,” the tense man called out in Greek. “This is Lieutenant Kazamakis of the Cypriot Provisional Guard. You will immediately surrender all weapons and slowly come down the stairs, hands above your head.”

No answer.

Knowing what his men did not, he repeated the order, in English this time.

“Yeah, right,” came the slow atonal reply.

The soldiers shivered at the lack of humanity in that voice. Some overturned tables or moved into the cover of doorways. Others crossed themselves and prepared to die.

“If you do not surrender immediately, we will be forced to come up and get you, the lieutenant said with less strength than he would have liked.”

“The stairs are in front of you. Come ahead.” A pause that seemed to last many lifetimes. “I’m waiting.”

“Spiros, Hector!
Ketagatay kati!”

But the men the lieutenant had ordered forward just looked at each other, looked at their friends bodies in the stairwell, then slowly shook their heads.

Before a reprimand could be issued, new orders contemplated or screamed out, a new sound filled the room.

Heavy footsteps coming
down
the stairs.

The lieutenant grabbed the old woman, holding her in front of him as a shield. Men crouched, lay flat, their fingers pressing on the triggers with ninety percent of the force necessary to fill the air between them and the stairway with a solid wall of lead.

“Don’t die for this, boys,” Xenos’s voice called out from very near the bottom of the stairs.
“Tota esos na say afisso na zis.”

One of the soldiers near the back of the taverna dropped his weapon as he ran out the door.
“E zoe enai glikeah!”

“Open fire!” the lieutenant screamed, and the air was shattered by the remaining seven AR-15s emptying their clips into the wall by the stairway.

After ten seconds of violent noise, a silence filtered into the place. No one moved. No one spoke. Everyone prayed that it was over.

Silently the lieutenant ordered two men forward to check it out. When they hesitated, he carefully aimed his pistol at them and gestured again. With more caution than any of the others had ever seen before, the two men reluctantly crept forward, into the stairwell.

Less than a minute later they returned, carrying an empty pair of climbing boots and a small cassette recorder.