The Butcher's Theatre (80 page)

“Looking for this?” said someone.

His heart shot up into his chest, collided with the roof of his mouth. Unexpelled breath stagnated painfully in his chest.

Outline in the doorway, backlit by the foyer bulb. Some guy, hat, long coat. The light glinting off eyeglasses. The fuzz of a beard.

The guy came closer. Smiling. Grinning.

“What the hell—”

“Hi, I’m Dr. Terrific. What seems to be the problem?”

He could see teeth. A grin.

Too weird.

Oh, shit, Dr. Terrific: D.T. The D.T.‘s.

A Delirium Tremens Demon. You always heard about it hitting some other guy, never thought it would happen to you. He remembered the warning of the Brazilian doctor

with the soft, wet hands: Your liver, Mr. Wilbur. Easy on the daiquiris.

Off the sauce, he promised himself, first thing tomorrow morning. Three squares a day, more B vitamins …

“Looking for this, Mark?” repeated the D.T. Demon, extending the Turkey bottle.

Definitely hallucinating.

Poisoned hash. Laced with something—LSD … The demon in the hat grinned wider. Looking awfully goddamned real for a hallucination …

Wilbur sat down on the edge of the bed, closed his eyes, rubbed them, opened them again, hoping to find himself alone.

He didn’t.

“What the hell—”

The demon/man shook his head. “Talk respectfully, Mark.”

Using his name, as if he knew him intimately, were part of him. Like one of those cartoons he’d watched as a kid. This is your conscience speaking, Mark.

He waved it away. “Up yours.”

The demon reached into his coat, pulled out something long and shiny. Even in the dimness, Wilbur knew right away what it was.

Knife. Biggest goddamned knife he’d ever seen—blade had to be close to a foot long, maybe longer. Gleaming metal Made, pearl handle.

“Respectfully, Mark.”

Wilbur stared at the knife glinting light. Cold and clean and cruel and real … Could this be real? Oh, God—

“I’ve missed your stories about me, Mark. I feel as if you’ve abandoned me.”

And then he knew.

“Listen,” he forced out, “I wanted to. They wouldn’t let me.”

The man kept grinning, listening.

A hundred shrink interviews reeled through his head: Buy time, goddammit. Establish a bond. Empathy.

“Censorship—you know what it’s like,” he said. Forcing a smile—oh, Jesus, how it hurt to smile. That knife … “I did

several stories—you want to see them, I can show them to you—out in my desk in the living room.” Slurring his words, sounding like a drunk. Be dearer!

“In the living room,” he repeated. Front room, make a lunge for the door …

“Another thing, Mark,” said the grinning bastard, as if he hadn’t heard a word. “You called me a butcher. That implies sloppiness. Crudeness. I’m a professional. A real scientist. I always clean up afterward.”

No, no, no, make this go away-—got to get out of this room, this goddamned room, make a run for it…

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“Despite that, I’ve really missed those stories, Mark. We had a relationship. You had no permission to end it without consulting me.”

The man in the hat and long coat came closer. What a weird face, something wrong with it—off kilter, he couldn’t place it… . Hell with that—don’t waste time wondering about stupid things.

Buy time.

“I know what you mean. I’d feel the same way if I were you. But the system stinks, it really does.” Now he was jabbering. Going on about New York, the Chosen People, how both of them were victims of Zionist censorship. The grinning man just standing there, bottle in one hand, knife in the other. Listening.

“We can work together, Doctor. Tell your story, the way you want it told, a big book, no one will ever know who you are, I’ll protect you, once we’re out of this stinking country no more censorship, I can promise you that. Hollywood’s crazy for the idea. …”

The grinning man didn’t seem to be listening anymore. Distracted. Wilbur moved his aching eyes down from the off-kilter face to the asshole’s hands: the Turkey bottle in one hand, the knife in the other. He decided to go for broke, wondered which one to grab.

The knife.

He readied himself. A long moment of silence. His heart was racing. He couldn’t breathe, was suffocating on his own fear … Stop that! No negative thinking—buy time.

Distract the asshole again.

“So,” he said, “tell me a little about yourself.”

The grinning man came closer. Wilbur saw his eyes and knew it was useless. Over.

He tried to scream. Nothing came out. Struggled to get up off the bed and fell backward, helpless.

Paralyzed with fear. He’d heard that animals about to be ripped to shreds by predators slipped into protective paraly—

The mind shut off. Anesthesia—oh, Lord, he hoped so. Make me an animal, numb me, take away these thoughts, the waiting …

The bearded face hovered over him, grinning.

Wilbur choked out a feeble squeak, covered his face so as not to see the knife, scrambled to fill his mind with thoughts, images, memories, anything that could compete with the pain of waiting.

God, how he hated knives. So unfair—he was an okay guy.

The hand with the knife never moved.

The one with the bottle did.

The Ali Baba closed at midnight, but Al Biyadi slipped the waiter some dollars and he and Cassidy were allowed to sip another pistachio milk as the lights went out around them.

Quite a few dollars, thought Shmeltzer, as he watched the waiter bring them a plate of cookies topped off by a sonata of bows and scrapes.

Cassidy took a cookie and nibbled on it. She seemed bored, no expression in the sexless face. Al Biyadi drank, consulted his watch. Just another couple out on a date,

but Shmeltzer’s instincts told him something was up—the shmuck had looked at the watch fourteen times during the last hour.

The more he studied them, the more mismatched they seemed—the sheikh in his tailored dark suit and shiny shoes, Cassidy trying to feminize herself with that upswept hairdo, the dangling earrings and lacy dress, but ending up far short of success. Touching the sheikh’s arm from time to time but getting only half-smiles or less.

Shmuck was definitely nervous, his mind somewhere else.

A young dark-haired woman dressed in white work clothes

and equipped with a mop and pail emerged from the back of

the restaurant, knelt, and began cleaning off the sidewalk.

Al Biyadi and Cassidy ignored her, kept playing out their

, little scene.

Waiting? For what?

The Latam couple had paid their check and left the restaurant ten minutes ago, conferring briefly with Shmeltzer before walking off hand in hand, north on Salah E-Din. To the casual observer a goyische twosome, headed for fun in a suite at the American Colony Hotel.

Al Biyadi looked at his watch again. Almost a nervous tic. Cassidy put the cookie down, placed her hands in her lap.

The scrubwoman dragged her mop closer to their table, making soapy circles, then right up next to them.

She knelt, kept her hands moving, her narrow white back to Shmeltzer. He half-expected Al Biyadi to say something nasty to her—guy was class-conscious.

But instead he looked down at her, seemed to be listening to her. Tensing up. Nodding. Cassidy making a grand show of looking off in the distance.

The scrubwoman dragged her pail elsewhere, scrubbed for a few seconds, then disappeared back into the restaurant. Half the sidewalk was still dirty. Al Biyadi slapped down more bills, pinned them under the candle glass, got up, and brushed off his trousers.

Cassidy stood too, took his arm. Squeezed it—through his binoculars, Shmeltzer could see her fingers tightening like claws around the dark fabric.

Al Biyadi peeled them off, gave her a tiny shake of the head, as if to say not now.

Cassidy dropped her hands to her sides. Tapped her foot.

The two of them stood on the sidewalk.

Moments later, Shmeltzer heard sounds from the back door of the restaurant. The door opened, freeing a beam of ocher light and kitchen clatter. He pressed himself into a dark corner and watched as the scrubwoman, now dressed in a dark dress, walked out and fluffed her hair. Short girl—petite. Pretty profile.

She began heading north on Salah E-Din, duplicating the Latam couple’s route.

Shmeltzer could see she was a bit flatfooted, could hear her shuffle. When her footsteps had died, he moved forward, looked at her, then back at the Ali Baba.

The restaurant’s front lights had been turned off. The waiter was folding up tablecloths, extinguishing candles, collapsing tables.

Al Biyadi and Cassidy began walking north, too, following the scrubwoman.

They passed within two meters of him, keeping up a good pace, not talking. Shmeltzer radioed the Latam couple. The woman answered.

“Wife, here.”

“They just left, followed a short woman in a dark dress, shoulder-length dark hair, early twenties. Ali three of them coming your way on Salah E-Din. Where are you?”

“Just past Az-Zahara, near the Joulani Travel Agency.”

“Stay there. I’ll take up the rear.”

He put the radio under his beggar’s robes, back in the pocket of his windbreaker, cursed the heat and all those layers of clothes, and followed a block behind.

Goddamned caravan.

Sheikh and girlfriend kept walking fast. A few stragglers were still out on the streets—lowlife, porters and kitchen help from the Arab hotels going off-shift—but he found it easy to keep an eye on his quarry: Look for a female head bobbing next to a male. You didn’t see many men and women walking together in East Jerusalem.

They passed Az-Zahara Street, walked right by the Joulani Agency where the Latam couple was waiting, invisibly, and the American School for Oriental Research, and continued toward the Anglican Cathedral of Saint George and its four-steepled Gothic tower.

Just above the cathedral they reunited with the scrubwoman, exchanged words that Shmeltzer couldn’t hear, and made their way—a strange threesome—east, then south, down Ibn Haldoun. The street was narrow and short, dead-ending at Ibn Batuta and the front facade of the Ritz Hotel.

But they stopped short of the dead end, walked through a wrought-iron gate into the courtyard of an elegant old walled Arab house, and disappeared.

Shmeltzer waited across the street for the Latam couple to arrive, saw them enter the mouth of Ibn Haldoun and trotted up the street to greet them. The three of them retreated twenty yards up Ibn Haldoun, away from the glare of street lamps.

“All three of them in there?” asked the man.

Shmeltzer nodded. “They entered just a minute ago. Do you know anything about the building?”

“Not on any list I’ve seen,” said the woman. “Nice, for a street scrubber.”

“She resembles the first three Butcher victims,” said Shmeltzer. “Small, dark, not bad-looking. We’ve been thinking they plucked their pigeons right out of the hospital, but maybe not. Maybe they make contact during medical visits, arrange to meet them later—money for sex.” He paused, looked back at the house. Two stories, fancy, carved stone trim. “Be nice to know who owns the palace.”

“I’ll call in, put in for a Ministry of Housing ID,” said the woman, removing her radio from her purse.

“No time for that,” said Shmeltzer. “They could be doping her up right now, laying her out for surgery. Call French Hill, tell them the situation and that we’re going in. And ask for backup—have an ambulance ready.”

He looked at the man. “Come on.”

They sprinted to the house, opened the gates, which were fuzzy with rust, entered the courtyard, Berettas drawn.

A front-door back-door approach was called for but access to the rear of the house was blocked on both sides by Italian cypress growing together in dense green walls. Returning their attention to the front, they took in details: a single door, at the center; grated windows, most of them shuttered. Two front balconies, the courtyard planted nicely with flower beds. Maybe a subdivision into flats—most of the big houses in Jerusalem had been partitioned—but with only one door there was no way to know for certain.

Shmeltzer waved his gun toward the door. The Latam man followed him.

Locked. The Latam guy took out picks. This one was fast; he had it open in two minutes. He looked at Shmeltzer, waiting for the signal to push the door open.

Shmeltzer knew what he was thinking. A place this fancy could have an alarm; if it were the kill spot, maybe even a booby trap.

Too old to be doing this, he thought. And to save an Arab, yet. But what could you do—the job was the job.

He gave the door a push, walked into the house, the Latam man at his heels. No ringing bells, no flurry of movement. And no shrapnel tearing through his chest. Good. Saved for another day of blessed existence.

A square entry hall, round Persian rug, two more doors at the end. Shmeltzer and the Latam man pressed themselves against opposite walls, took one door each, jiggled the handles.

The Latam guy’s was open. Inside it was a spiral staircase, uncarpeted stone.

Shmeltzer walked up it, found the landing at the top boarded up, the air dust-laden and smelling of musty neglect. He tried the boards. Nailed tight, no loose ones. No one had come up here tonight.

Back down to the ground floor, signal to the Latam guy to try the second door. Locked. Two locks, one on top of the other. The first one yielded quickly to the pick; the second was stubborn.

The minutes ticked away, Shmeltzer imagined drops of blood falling in synchrony with each one. His hands were sweat-slick, the Beretta cold and slippery. He waited as the

Latam man potchked with the lock, thought of the scrubwoman, naked on some table, head down, dripping into a rug… .

Too damned old for this shit.

The Latam guy worked patiently, twisting, turning, losing the tumblers, finally finding them.

The door swung open silently.

They stepped into a big dark front room, gleaming stone floors, heavy drapes blocking rear windows, swinging Dutch doors leading to a corridor on the right. A low-wattage bulb in a wall sconce cast a faint orange glow over heavy, expensive-looking furniture—old British-style furniture, stiff settees and bowlegged tables. Lace doilies. More tables, inlaid Arab-style, an oversized inlaid backgammon set, a potbellied glass-doored breakfront full of silver, dishes, bric-a-brac. A guitar resting on a sofa. Ivory carvings. Lots of rugs.