The Doorkeepers (3 page)

Frank Mordant and the suntanned man took an arm each and tried to lift her on to her feet. Immediately her knees buckled, but Frank Mordant pulled the rope until it was tight around her neck again, and then she was forced to stand up.

“You're choking me,” she pleaded. “Please don't choke me. I can't stand anything round my neck.”

“Well, there's one way to relieve that choking feeling,” smiled Frank Mordant, “and that's to slacken the rope. Here, Tun,” he beckoned the Malay-looking man. “Do us a favor and bring us over that little stepladder, please.”

The Malay carried over a small wooden stepladder and set it down right in front of Julia. He paused for a moment, and scrutinized her through his bright shining glasses. His eyes were dark brown and deeply curious, as if he were looking
at an exhibit in a natural history museum. He stared into her eyes and then down at her naked body.

Frank Mordant gave the rope another sharp tug. “If you climb the stepladder, Julia, the rope will be slacker. The higher you go, the slacker it will get.”

“You can't do this,” Julia protested. “You just can't do this.”

“And who's to say that we can't?”

“The law! This is assault!”

Frank Mordant thought about that, and then he said, “Yes, you're right. It
is
assault. But I don't think that the law is going to be able to help you, do you?”

“Let me
go!” she screamed at him.
“You're sick! You're totally sick! If you don't let me go right now, mister
…!”

“You'll what?” said Frank Mordant, and the slowest smile broke over his face as he watched her remember what he said about the underlay.

“Let me go,” she breathed. “Please let me go. I won't tell anybody what happened here.”

Frank Mordant tugged on the rope again. She reached up and tried to force her fingers between the noose and her neck, but it was far too tight.

“Please don't do this. Please let me go. I'll do anything you want me to do. Please.”

“You're already doing what I want you to do. Now, why don't you take a step up the ladder and give yourself a little slack?”

He pulled the rope harder and in spite of herself she let out a horrible, high-pitched cackle. He pulled again and she felt as if she was going to choke. She reached out with her right foot and found the bottom rung of the stepladder and climbed on to it: and then, with her left foot, the second rung. The rope relaxed, and she was able to gasp in three or four mouthfuls of air.

“Mr Mordant, I don't know why you're doing this …”

“My dear, you don't
have
to know. All you have to do is to play your part.”

“Is this personal? Is there something I've done to upset you?
If there is, I'm sorry. I'm really, truly sorry, and I swear to God that I'll make it up to you.”

Frank Mordant looked at her with those hooded blue eyes and she thought for a moment that she saw the slightest hint of compassion.

“Mr Mordant, if I did anything wrong,
anything,
I'll put it right. I have people back home who are going to be worried about me. My mother, my father. My brother. They're good people, Mr Mordant, you can do what you like to me but don't make them suffer.”

The suntanned man with the white hair turned to the others and spread his hands wide in mock bewilderment. “Why do they always do this? Why do they always get so sentimental? You'd think they'd eff and blind and kick their legs about, wouldn't you? I mean, that's what
I'd
do, if somebody was doing it to me.”

The Malay didn't take his eyes off Julia, but he said, with a slight smile, “That's because you're afraid of dying, Roy. You know what the next world has in store for you.”

Julia had made a mistake. What she had seen in Frank Mordant's eyes wasn't compassion at all. If it was anything, it was simply a predatory flicker, like a snake refocusing before it strikes. Frank Mordant wound the rope around his arm and took up all of the slack that Julia had given herself by climbing up the stepladder. “Don't,” she gargled. “Please don't.”

The dark-skinned man with the hooked nose looked impatiently at his wristwatch. In the middle of her terror, Julia realized that he was bored. The thought of that was so awful that her eyes filled with tears. She was naked, utterly humiliated, choking, and he was
bored.

“Let me go!”
she screamed. “
I can't stand this any longer! Let me go!”

Frank Mordant yanked the rope hard. “You can't stand it any longer? Then take another step up. Go on! That's the only way you'll get any slack!”

She tried to shake her head and say no, but he wrenched the rope again and this time she saw stars winking in front of her
eyes. She climbed up another step, and then another, and now she was only one step from the top.

“You won't get away with this,” she whispered. “I swear to God that you won't get away with this.”

Frank Mordant pulled the rope one more time. “You wanted to be in television, didn't you?” he asked. He didn't sound sarcastic, or triumphalist. He simply sounded pleased for her. “You wanted to be famous? Well, believe it or not, your wish is about to come true. You're going to be seen by thousands of very appreciative viewers, for years to come! Who knows, you're probably going to be a television classic!”

She took the last step on to the top of the ladder. Her head was only about six inches from the ceiling, but the rope was utterly taut. Frank Mordant knelt down, lifted the black cover on the couch, and tied the other end of the rope around it. He did it so deftly that Julia could tell he had done it before.

For a long moment they all stood in a strange tableau: Julia on top of the stepladder and the four men watching her. The noose was so tight around her neck that she could hardly swallow, and her breath came in thin, distinct whines. She reached up with both hands and clung tightly to the rope, terrified that Frank Mordant would take the stepladder away.

“They'll see this all over the world, Julia. Germany, the Germans love this kind of thing, although they won't admit it. Holland, very broad-minded, we always get excellent sales figures in Holland. Japan … well, you know what the Japs are like. They'd pay to see a slug being stepped on. And America, of course. Huge market in America. Perhaps someone will recognize you, you never know.”

“Please”
Julia begged him. Then she couldn't hold it together any longer, and she wet herself. Frank Mordant stepped back a little way and said nothing.

Julia tried to think about her mother and father. She tried to picture their faces, if only to say goodbye to them. She tried to think about her brother Josh. She tried to see the house, and the verandah, and the dogs running out to meet her. But all she could see was the ceiling of Frank Mordant's flat, and all she could think about was choking.

“Please, don't do this. Please.”

Frank Mordant approached her and tugged away the step-ladder. Her toes curled, reaching for it – and then, when she realized that it had gone, her legs frantically pedaled in mid-air.

“Acchhh”
was all she could manage to say. She held on to the rope but her arms were aching already and she was so close to hysteria that it seemed as if her last remaining strength were ebbing out of her, as if her fingers couldn't grip anything any more.

Her hands slipped down the rope an inch. She managed to cling on a few seconds more and then they slipped another inch. The noose was now so tight around her neck that she couldn't even manage a choking sound. If she could only lift herself up a few more inches. If she could only reach the hook. But she knew it was hopeless. She knew that she was slowly suffocating and there was nothing she could do to save herself.

Frank Mordant and his companions remained quite still, although their eyes were wide and their faces were transfigured by an undisguised hunger, so that they looked more like gargoyles than men. The dark-skinned man repeatedly licked his lips, no longer bored. The Malay had his hand in his pants pocket and his fly was moving rhythmically up and down. The heavily built man had broken out into a glittering sweat.

Only Frank Mordant seemed unmoved, watching Julia spin slowly around on her rope, her legs swimming through the air.

Julia's right hand slipped from the rope above her head. She tried to raise it again, but she didn't have the strength. Almost immediately afterward, her left hand slid another inch down the rope, burning her fingers. Then another inch. She couldn't hold on any longer, and somehow she didn't even want to try. She said
God forgive me
inside of her head, and then she let go.

The last thing she thought of was a daisy that she had once tried to pick, when she was only two years old. She could see it quite clearly, right in front of her. She reached out for it, but before she could touch it the petals flew away, and disappeared for ever into the darkness.

Josh was having an unexpectedly busy morning. After he had cured Mrs Delorme's pedigree Pekinese of its bouts of hysteria last month, word of his healing abilities seemed to have spread from Mill Valley to Corte Madera and Sausalito and even into San Francisco.

Waiting on the verandah outside his kitchen were five assorted people with five assorted dogs and cats, a woman with a cloth-covered birdcage, and a small boy with something in a cardboard box. It was a hot, airless day, and one of his clients was fanning her Siamese cat with a rolled-up copy of the
National Enquirer.

At the moment Josh was dealing with a mournful black Labrador called Valentino, whose sight was failing. Valentino was sitting on Josh's breakfast table while his mistress stroked him and petted him and chain-fed him with Reese's Pieces. His mistress was a short round woman with greasy iron-gray hair fixed in a bun. She wore dangly hooped earrings, enormous red and yellow shorts and Birkenstocks.

Josh remarked, “You really shouldn't keep on feeding him candy. Dogs get dehydrated by chocolate. Apart from that, you're totally screwing up his reward system. If he gets continuous candy, just for sitting around, how's he going to know when he's done something good?”

“He's like me. He's so much like me. We both need constant reassurance.”

“I see,” Josh nodded. He didn't argue. So far as he was concerned, dogs were exactly the same as humans. In fact, he thought that all animals were exactly the same as humans, and that was part of the secret of his success. Unlike most
veterinarians, he understood that all animals wanted out of life was fun, sleep and food, with an occasional flurry of irresponsible sexual activity.

He peered into Valentino's eyes with an ophthalmoscope. There was no sign of cataracts or any eye disease. Valentino was simply suffering from the effects of old age. “What sort of problems has he had?” asked Josh.

“Bumping into things, mainly. You know, chairs, doors. And he doesn't get the same pleasure out of TV any more.”

“Well, him and me both. But there's nothing wrong with his eyes apart from long-sightedness, which happens to most of us when we grow old.”

“He's going to need
glasses!”

“Technically speaking, yes. But, as yet, they don't make prescription glasses for dogs.”

“They
should.
I mean, don't you think they should?”

Josh gave Valentino a reassuring pat. “You're right. They should. But there's the little difficulty of getting them to read a sight-chart. All the same, you can still help Valentino to improve his sight. You could try some Bates Method exercises, and see if they sharpen him up.”

“How do I do that?”

“Well, Dr Bates was a New York ophthalmologist who invented all kinds of exercises for giving you better sight without glasses. Like splashing your eyes twenty times in warm and cold water every morning; and covering your eyes with your hands for ten minutes twice a day, so that they get a little rest; and blinking as much as possible. You could help Valentino to do all of those things. Oh, yes – and don't let him watch television with the lights off.”

He made a quick note of seven Bates Method exercises on a big yellow legal pad. “There … if he doesn't improve in a couple of weeks, bring him back to see me.”

Valentino's mistress hefted him off the table and on to the floor. Valentino immediately saw himself in an old gilt-framed mirror propped up against the wall and jumped back in fright.

“Try to take him out more, too,” Josh suggested. “It helps
your eyes if you keep on varying the distance of the things you're focusing on. Lamp-post one second, street the next. See what I mean? Street, lamp-post. Lamp-post, street. It gets the eyes working.” He didn't add that both Valentino and his mistress looked as if they could urgently use some exercise.

He opened the kitchen door and let them out into the garden. Immediately, a tall wiry-haired man in khaki shorts stood up and started to drag a snarling muzzled bull terrier across the verandah, leaving claw marks in the redwood boards.

Josh said, “Wait up a moment. Does this guy bite?”

“Yes
sir”
said his owner, proudly. “Anything from a mailman's leg to a Cadillac's tailpipe. The cable company were digging up the street once, and he bit right through one of their shovels.”

“OK, then, bring him on in. But make sure you keep his muzzle on.”

“Well, sir, that's going to be kind of difficult. I brought him in for a tongue abscess.”

At that moment, a police car drew up in the street outside, beside the white picket fence. A dark-haired deputy climbed out of it, and walked toward the front door, around the corner of the house, where all the bougainvillea hung down. Josh heard the doorbell ring and a door slamming as Nancy went to answer it. He hesitated for a moment, curious to know what was going on, but then the bull terrier began to snap and snarl and chase its own tail and he had to take it into the kitchen.