The Eighth Day (28 page)

The next thing he knew, he was lying on the floor, still lashed to the chair, his mouth salty with the taste of blood. Kukoc and the Buddy/Buddy Guy picked him up and righted the chair.

Then they
lifted
the chair off the ground, tilted it forward, and dropped him on his face. It was “only” a four-foot drop, but he hit the floor like a pancake and one of his front teeth snapped off at the gum. The pain was indescribable, the sound sickening.

So much for the Turkish sense of humor.

They left him where he lay, stunned and drooling blood, and went off by themselves for a cigarette. Leaning against the tool bench, they talked quietly in Turkish while Danny stared at their feet. Asics and Tevas, with Kukoc a big pronator.

The floor was dusty and gave off a whiff of urine—not, to Danny’s way of thinking, a good sign. Obviously, he wasn’t the first person to be questioned in the little room.

A minute went by, and his chair was righted. The Buddy/Buddy Guy leaned into Danny’s face and shook his head in a way that was almost admiring. “That was so funny,” he said. “I had to laugh. But now you gotta get serious, okay? I forgive you for this.” He put a finger to his cheek. “I don’t blame you—you’re cornered, like an animal. But come on, man. Be smart. You piss off my friend, you’re gonna lose more than your tooth.”

Danny couldn’t help himself. He had a problem with authority, with people telling him what to do. Anyone with older brothers would understand. If you backed down too easily—if you showed them your throat—they’d go for your neck. So he sighed and braced himself and said, “Fuck you.” Because of the missing tooth, it came out, “Fuh-dju.”

Up went the chair—higher this time—and
down
. Once again, the fall was broken by his face. Once again, they righted him. His problem with authority was beginning to resolve itself.

“Buhhh-ddy, buhhh-ddy, don’t do this to yourself. It’s like, ‘Once a philosopher, twice a pervert.’ ” He chuckled. “I mean, Jesus, man! We haven’t even gotten to the questions. At this point, we’re just
socializing
!”

Danny bit the inside of his cheek to stop from trembling. His vision was blurred with tears, and he knew that he couldn’t handle this—not for long. He was a sculptor, not a commando. And, anyway, what was the point? Zebek would kill him no matter what he said or didn’t say.

“So,” Kukoc asked, assuming a formal tone, “how was your ride? Did you like it?”

Danny shook his head. “No.”

“Much better.” Kukoc paused, and Danny could almost hear the gears shift in his head. “So what were you doing in Uzelyurt?”

Danny couldn’t believe it.
What did they
think
he was doing in Uzelyurt?!
It wasn’t exactly a secret. He’d gone door-to-door, asking for Remy Barzan. But he sensed (from the blood, the pain, and the swelling) that a sarcastic reply would not help his cause. So he said, “I was looking for Remy Barzan.” As he spoke, his noticed that his jaw made a kind of clicking sound.
Not good,
he thought.

“Excellent,” Kukoc told him. “I give you simple questions, you give me simple answers. Now: why were you looking for him?”

Danny shook his head. “It’s a long story,” he said.

The Buddy/Buddy Guy waved his finger back and forth, as if it were a pendulum.

“We’ve got time,” Kukoc said.

Danny noticed that his accent was almost perfect, though he hadn’t really mastered the “vee” sound.
Give
was
gif
,
have
was
haf
,
we’ve
was
weef
. Danny repressed a crazy impulse to correct the guy and started talking: “About three weeks ago, a man named Belzer got in touch with me. Jude Belzer. That’s what he said.”

“Then what?” Kukoc asked.

“We met.”

“Where?”

“At the airport.”

“In Istanbul?”

Danny shook his head. “Washington.”

“And what did he want?”

“He wanted to hire me,” Danny said.

“To find Remy?” Kukoc suggested.

“No. He said someone was smearing him in the press.”

Kukoc and the Buddy/Buddy Guy exchanged a couple of words in Turkish. “You mean, making up lies?” Kukoc asked.

“Yeah. Like that. And putting them in the paper.”

Kukoc cocked his head to one side and then the other, looking skeptical. “And he comes to you because . . . you’re some big spook, right?”

“No.”

“You CIA? You MacGyver, my man?”

Danny wasn’t sure what he meant. Finally, he said, “No.”

“Final answer?” Kukoc demanded.

Danny got the joke but didn’t see the humor. “Who’s ‘MacGyver’?” he asked.

The Buddy/Buddy Guy laughed. “We get a lot of reruns,” he explained.

“Oh,” Danny said. “You mean TV.”

Kukoc nodded.

“I’m an artist,” Danny told him. “Sometimes, I do investigative work. For law firms and stuff. Part-time. Mostly, I go to the courthouse. Look for records. Like that. But . . . look, you know all this stuff, so—”

Kukoc shook his head. “I don’t know any of it.”

“Well, Zebek does. He knows all about it.”

Kukoc and the Buddy/Buddy Guy snapped into focus. “ ‘Zebek’?”

“Yeah,” Danny replied, puzzled by the change in his questioners’ demeanor.

“
Zerevan
Zebek?”

“Right.”

“What do you know about Zerevan Zebek?” Kukoc demanded.

“I was working for him. That’s why I’m here!”

Kukoc flushed and swore beneath his breath. Then his anger spilled over, and he clapped his hands against Danny’s ears—hard. It shouldn’t have hurt so much, but it took him completely by surprise, and, once again, Danny’s eyes welled up with tears.

“You fuck with me?” Kukoc shouted.

“No!”

“You said you’re working for this . . . Jew—this Belzer guy!”

“No,” Danny replied. “He’s not Jewish. I mean, how would I know—”

“You
said
he was Jew!” Kukoc insisted, his voice rising.

“No. I
said
he was ‘Jude.’ It’s different.”

“Jew? Jewed? I ask you again: You fuck with me?”

“No!”

“Okay.” Kukoc took a deep breath, as if to emphasize that he was doing his level best to get control of his anger. “So,” he said. “This Jew?
He
hired you?”

“Yes, but—” Danny replied.

“Or was it Zebek?”

“That’s right! It
was
Zebek, but—”

Bam!

He never saw what hit him. Suddenly his jaw snapped shut on his tongue, something flared behind his eyes—and he was out. For how long he couldn’t tell. A few seconds. A minute. Half an hour. He had no way of knowing.

When he came to, he was lying facedown with his head at the end of the cot, watching a fly dervishing on the concrete floor.
Death spiral,
he thought.
Spinout.
Nearby he heard a hiss of air, followed by the unmistakable sound of a match being struck. Then nothing. Kukoc cursed. Danny turned his head to see what they were up to, and what he saw drained the color right out of his face.

Kukoc and the Buddy/Buddy Guy were standing at the tool bench, trying to light a propane torch. Danny heard himself say, “Hey,” his tone identical to Rodney King’s in the aftermath of the LA riots.
Can’t we just get along?

Then a second match, and a third, with Kukoc becoming angrier and angrier. The torch was out of gas.
Thank you, Jesus!
Swearing, Kukoc tossed the canister onto the bench and said something to the Buddy/Buddy Guy. Coming to Danny’s side, Buddy/Buddy shook his head in disbelief and said, “This must be your lucky day. Propane’s a bitch.” Then he pulled Danny’s shoes and socks from his feet and bound his ankles with tape. The air was cool and luxuriant on the soles of his feet.

“Wha . . . what are you doing?” Danny asked.

Kukoc came to the foot of the cot, holding a length of rusted pipe in his hands. “No more bullshit, my man. I told you: First I ask a question, then you give an answer.”

“But—”

Crouching at Danny’s side, Kukoc adopted a friendly and confidential tone. “Look—my friend—I’ll be honest with you. After this, I got nothing left.”

“This”? What “this”?

“After this, it’s an acetone bath and we dump you on the road with a note in your mouth. So help me out. . . .”

“I will! I want to!”
“Acetone bath”? What’s acetone?

Kukoc got to his feet, and the Buddy/Buddy Guy locked on Danny’s ankles, hard. In the long moment of silence that passed between them, Danny heard Kukoc take a deep breath.
A solvent,
Danny thought.
Like nail-polish remover. It dissolves things.
Then the length of pipe slammed into the soles of his feet, crushing the nerves. Danny’s mouth flew open in a gasp that was so far gone it couldn’t become a scream. Then Kukoc hit him again and again, pounding the arches and turning the nerves in his feet to pulp.

“Falakka,” the Buddy/Buddy Guy explained, as if he were a tour guide. “That’s what it’s called.”

“Who is the Jew?” Kukoc shouted.

It was insane. And as soon as it stopped, they were going to dissolve him.

Pain is its own jagged landscape, laced with crevices in which the victim seeks shelter, believing from one moment to the next that he has escaped, that the ordeal is over, that it must be over, that the body can’t handle any more. But it does. The body endures, and so does the pain.

For what it was worth—nothing, as it turned out—the Buddy/Buddy Guy wasn’t really into it. Danny caught a glimpse of his face and saw in an instant that the violence scared him. His lips were drawn back in a grimace, and he looked ready to puke. Which frightened Danny even more, because he was the one being beaten.

It took a while, but he got the story out. Everything from the Admirals Club to the chase through the cistern, Terio’s suicide, and Father Inzaghi’s defenestration. The information poured from him in bursts and cries and screams, the sequences mixed up by the non sequiturs that found their way into Kukoc’s questions. How much of what Danny said was intelligible he had no idea—probably less than half. But after he had repeated the story half a dozen times, Kukoc finally got the point. “Jude Belzer” was an alias that Zebek had used in his dealings with Danny—and Danny had fled Zebek a few days earlier to warn Remy Barzan in the hopes of saving both their lives.

Danny faded out of consciousness and when he faded back in heard Kukoc and the Buddy/Buddy Guy arguing briefly in Turkish—or maybe it was Kurdish, Danny couldn’t tell. “Ohhhhhhhh . . .” Kukoc said in response to some point Buddy/Buddy made, his voice a realization siren tinged with regret. “No shit. . . . You think?”

Danny heard the pipe clatter against the concrete. Then his torturers left, and he was alone in the room, lying on the cot with his drool strings and pain.

Through it all, an amusing thought occurred to him. It was that there must be something
to
reflexology, because the pain that he felt was everywhere. It wasn’t just his feet. It moved through his body like an old vaudeville tune, tap-dancing up and down his spine, tenderizing every nerve it touched. He could feel his feet swelling like overripe tomatoes, skin cracking, fluids seeping. His mouth felt as if he’d been chewing razors, and his heart pounded in bursts, racing from one freeze-frame to the next.

Looking up, he saw a rectangle of light behind the kilim on the wall. For a moment he thought he was hallucinating, then realized that the kilim must be hanging over a window. Morning, then. And he’d been beaten stupid.

Eventually, the pain gave way to numbness, which opened up the emotional space he needed to be truly frightened. Finished with the debriefing, his captors had gone off to set up the acetone bath they’d promised to give him. Find a vat, mix the chemicals . . .

That it had been a
debriefing
(rather than an interrogation) was apparent. Obviously, Zebek wanted to know how much Danny knew—after which Danny became a disposal case.

Galvanized by the prospect, he struggled with the bonds that held him and finally succeeded in freeing his hands. Breathless, he sat up on the cot and stripped the tape from his ankles. Time to go. With a deep breath, he swung his feet to the floor, and—

!!!

Jesus Christ!
His feet were the size of pillows, the texture of jelly. Even the lightest touch was agonizing. With a gasp, he jerked his feet from the floor—fell back on the cot and thought,
That’s it. I’m dead. There’s no way out.

He must have fallen asleep—or maybe he just lost consciousness—because the next thing he knew, the Buddy/Buddy Guy was crouching beside him, holding a little plastic bucket. Danny eyed the bucket, wondering what it held. Acid? Acetone? His body tensed, then relaxed as Buddy/Buddy dipped a sponge into the bucket and squeezed it. He wasn’t wearing gloves or goggles.

“Buhhh-ddy,
Buhhh-ddy
,” he crooned, “you should be more careful.” Gently he cleaned the blood from Danny’s face, then washed his feet, running the cloth between each of the toes. It was tender and painful, all it once, and made Danny wonder if this was some kind of preburial ritual practiced by the Kurds.

Finally, the Buddy/Buddy Guy rolled Danny’s socks onto his feet and tried to put on his shoes. No way. He disappeared, returned with a big pair of rubber sandals. He slid these onto Danny’s feet, then buckled them up as a parent might for a toddler. Then he helped Danny up and, with an encouraging smile, guided him to the door. It was slow going, with Danny mincing along like a Chinese woman with bound feet.

The door opened onto a blazing sun. When his eyes adjusted, he saw that he’d been held in a stone shed beside an enclosure for farm animals. The Buddy/Buddy Guy led him around to the side of the building and gestured toward the passenger seat of a bright green John Deere Gator. Despite the pain he was in, Danny chuckled with surprise. The Gator was the identical twin of the little utility truck that Caleigh’s parents used on their ranch in South Dakota. Seeing Danny’s expression, Buddy/Buddy grinned, and it occurred to Danny that maybe they weren’t going to kill him, after all.