The Sleepless (38 page)

Patrice said, ‘Don’t let’s talk about it, okay? Talking won’t bring him back. Aint nothing won’t bring him back.’ 

Ralph said, ‘Which is your apartment?’ 

Patrice turned around and pointed. ‘Right up there. Third storey. But they’ve drawn the drapes. You can’t see nothing.’ 

Ralph stepped back on the sidewalk and examined the stained, redbrick apartment block. The balconies were much narrower than he had expected – scarcely wide enough to accommodate a couple of chairs. But he knew that front-door assaults were always murderous. He had seen far too many uniformed officers shot down on Roxbury landings, and he wasn’t at all keen to be the next in line. 

‘Have you talked to them lately?’ he asked Patrice. 

‘I tried. But they don’t seem to show no sense of reason, man. They say they want their money and that’s it. They don’t care who’s got it.
I
have to find it for them. Shit man, I’ve tried, I’ve put all the feelers you can think of. But I don’t know who’s got it. Jesus, if I did, they could have it now.’ 

Ralph said, ‘They’re on the phone?’ 

‘That’s right.’ 

‘And there’s two of them?’ 

‘No more than that, for sure.’ 

Ralph said, ‘How long since they slept?’ 

‘Not since yesterday, man. We’ve been talking to them all of yesterday; and all of last night; and all of this morning.’ 

‘Both of them?’ 

‘Sure. They both got different voices. One of them sounds like Salem or Marblehead, know what I mean? Upstate, classy. That real weird drawl. The other one sounds more like regular Boston.’ 

‘They must be pretty tired.’ 

‘You tell me, man. They don’t
sound
tired. Neither of them.’ 

Ralph thought for a while, and then he said, quite sharply, ‘You don’t know where the money is, right?’ 

‘Man, if I knew –’ 

‘Okay, okay, I believe you,’ Ralph interrupted him. ‘But you don’t know who these guys are, either? I mean, you have no idea at all? Not even a clue?’ 

‘Nobody I ever heard of, and that’s the 18-carat truth.’ 

Ralph rubbed his forehead with his fingertips. ‘I didn’t even know that anybody else was involved in this operation, apart from Jambo DuFreyne and Luther Johnson and all of the preppie connection, Harvard and Harvard Med and MIT.’ 

‘Man, I didn’t even know
that
,’
said Patrice. ‘I knew that Luther was dealing; but everybody knew that Luther was dealing. I mean, that’s his job.’ 

‘So what’s the situation now?’ Ralph asked him. Tense, anxious, out of place. The good-looking black was watching him with eyes of unwavering hatred, and Henry ‘The Hammer’ was shuffling and ducking his neck and punching his fist into the palm of his hand. 

‘They’ve been hurting Verna,’ said Patrice, in a tight, off-key voice. ‘I don’t know how much, I don’t know how. I heard her on the phone and she was screaming. I never heard nobody scream like that. They say they’re going to kill her if I don’t bring the bag by twelve o’clock, no ifs or buts.’ 

Tears suddenly sprang into Patrice’s eyes; and Ralph looked at him, and got caught by something completely unexpected. For the very first time in his entire career he understood that the people he was policing were human; and that they were just like him; and that they wept and cared, even if they were burglars and racketeers and drug dealers and pimps. It wasn’t a question of forgiving. It was up to juries to forgive. But it was a question of understanding; and Patrice cried; and Ralph understood; and this was the man whose baby he had killed. 

Ralph said, ‘I’ll get her out. I’ve got some rope and a hook in the car.’ 

‘And that’s it? Some rope and a hook?’ 

‘That’s it. Provided somebody can direct me into the apartment directly above.’ 

Verna suddenly opened her eyes and felt excruciating pain in her wrists and ankles with her cheek pressed against the kitchen table, she could just see the square yellow electric clock on the kitchen wall and she found it both distressing and relieving that she had slept for less than twenty minutes. Distressing because she had needed to sleep for very much longer; and while she was asleep, she had at last been free from the prurient tortures that Bryan and Joseph had kept inflicting on her. But relieving because there were still two and a half hours to go until noon, when Patrice had promised to return the money. 

She thought for a moment that Bryan and Joseph might be dozing, too. But the moment she opened her eyes, and tried to wrestle herself into a more comfortable position, Bryan appeared, blood-eyed, white-faced, filing his nails with the kind of file that you usually found in Christmas crackers. 

‘Hungry?’ he asked her. 

She swallowed dryly. ‘I could use a drink of water. And my wrists hurt something terrible. I can’t even feel my hands.’ 

Bryan nodded, as if he quite understood. ‘These things are sent to try us.’ 

Joseph appeared, frowning distractedly. ‘I lost one of my pipes,’ he said. 

‘You probably left it in the living-room,’ said Bryan. ‘You want to fetch Verna some water?’ 

‘I’m sure I left it in here.’ 

‘Fetch Verna some water, will you? We don’t want her dehydrating. Bad for the system. Thickens the blood. Sours the adrenaline.’ 

‘Couldn’t you just untie me?’ Verna pleaded. ‘I promise I won’t try to get away.’ 

Bryan shook his head. ‘We’ll be needing some nutrition pretty soon.’ 

‘I could cook you something. I’ve got plenty of pork chops in the icebox.’ 

Joseph was filling up a cup at the sink. He yelped with laughter. 

‘We don’t eat pork,’ Bryan explained. 

‘I got steak, then, and beans. I got tuna.’ 

‘We don’t eat steak and we don’t eat beans and we don’t eat tuna,’ said Joseph. He brought the cup of water across the kitchen and lifted Verna’s head so that she could drink. Most of the water poured out of the side of her mouth, but she managed to swallow enough to relieve her thirst. 

She rested her head on the table again. Joseph stayed close beside her, so close that she could
smell
him, a dimly decaying, floral smell, like dying roses in a dried-up vase. 

They didn’t eat steak and they didn’t eat beans and they didn’t eat tuna. Verna didn’t care to ask them what they
did
eat, in case she didn’t like the answer. Besides, she had already learned not to provoke them, either of them. They were strangely formal in their behaviour, but they had already inflicted enough pain on her for Verna to know that their capacity for cruelty knew no limits whatsoever. 

She couldn’t understand how anybody could want to hurt another human being so much – especially since neither of them seemed to derive any pleasure out of it, not even a faintly sexual pleasure. Whenever they hurt her, whenever they touched her, they did it in such a matter-of-fact way that she felt completely characterless, a piece of flesh that they were torturing not because they bore her any ill will, but for some incomprehensible ritual of their own. 

They didn’t hate her, she could sense that. They didn’t even dislike her. In fact, they talked to her in such a teasing, friendly way that she could almost believe that they had grown fond of her. 

That was what made their cruelty all the more terrifying. That was what scared her more than anything. 

There was something else that disturbed her. Something else that had penetrated her consciousness like a shard of broken glass stuck in her foot. Most of the time she had been too confused and too hurt and too exhausted to think about it. But it kept digging into her mind again and again. 

They hadn’t slept. She had seen them together, she had seen them apart. Just when she thought that one of them might be resting, he reappeared, smiling, his eyes as blood-red as rubies. 

She had the oddest feeling that they
never
slept. 

The big black woman in the blue floral dress opened her french windows for Ralph and showed him out onto the narrow balcony. At one end of the balcony was a wicker chair with a half-collapsed seat and a frayed cushion. ‘This is where I habitually sit,’ she told him. ‘That’s when the fires aren’t burning and the bullets aren’t flying.’ 

At the other end of the balcony was a collection of earthenware pots, filled with a mixture of brightly-coloured flowers and herbs – thyme, Italian parsley, cilantro, basil and sage. ‘And this is my garden, my pride-and-joy.’ 

‘That’s real nice,’ Ralph remarked. ‘Nice to see something grow.’ 

He leaned over the edge of the balcony and he could see the balcony of Patrice Latomba’s apartment, fifteen or sixteen feet below. There was a red bicycle on it, and some tall nettle-like plants growing in rusty cooking-oil cans, plants which looked suspiciously like
cannabis sativa.
He gripped the metal railing which surrounded the balcony, and shook it. It seemed firm enough. 

‘I think they’ve got her tied up in the kitchen,’ said Patrice. ‘She was screaming a couple of times and that’s where the screaming was coming from.’ 

‘Okay,’ Ralph nodded. ‘And your kitchen is in the same location as the kitchen in this lady’s apartment, right?’ 

‘That’s right.’ 

‘Okay,’ Ralph repeated, trying to sound cheerful. ‘Nothing to do then but do it.’ 

He went back into the woman’s apartment, and picked up the heavy grey rope which he had brought downtown in the trunk of his car. Patrice and the woman watched him in silence as he deftly tied a clove hitch around the railing, and tugged it hard to test it. Then he lifted his .44 from its shoulder holster, opened the chamber, spun it, closed it, and cocked it. 

‘You’ll take care who you’re aiming at, won’t you?’ asked Patrice. ‘You already took my child, don’t take my woman, too.’ 

Ralph looked at him hard-eyed and said nothing. He could have refused to come down here altogether, and he could still turn his back on this situation here and now, although he wasn’t going to say so. His adrenaline was rushing and he was ready for anything. All he wanted to do was swing off this balcony and kick ass; and even uppity talk from Patrice Latomba wasn’t going to stop him. 

‘Say a little prayer,’ he said; and the woman crossed herself and said, ‘Hallelujah, hallelujah,’ and Patrice stared at him as if he were truly mad, which he probably was. 

He wrapped the rope around his left wrist. Then he climbed up onto the railing, and balanced there, with his legs apart, his back to the street, which was nearly seventy-five feet below him. He kept his .44 raised in his right hand. This was it. This was what being a man was all about. He heard the distant knock-knock-knocking of a semi-automatic rifle, and looked around, and Seaver Street was all devastation and thick brown smoke, and
this
was what he wanted, this danger, this warlike landscape, this overwhelming sense that he could make a difference. 

He let out a scream which frightened even himself. Then he jumped backward off the balcony rail, launching himself into space. He kicked out once against the wall, to throw himself out even further, then he was swinging down onto Patrice’s balcony, still screaming like a madman. He caught his ankle on Patrice’s balcony rail, knocked over his bicycle, spun, swung, but then he went right through Patrice’s french windows, with a splintering explosion of glass and glazing-bars, and found himself tumbling across the living-room, wrapped up in white net curtains like a shroud. 

He struggled to his feet. His left cheek was cut, and there was blood dripping steadily from a long laceration on the heel of his right hand, all across the rug. But – coughing – he managed to disentangle himself from the curtains and out into the hall. The kitchen door was slightly ajar, and he could smell cigarette smoke and hear somebody saying something. He hesitated for a moment, but then he burst into the kitchen, his .44 held out rigidly in front of him with both hands, and screamed out, ‘Freeze!’ 

The two young men in dark glasses were standing either side of the kitchen table. They looked completely unsurprised. One of them was smoking a cigarette, blowing the smoke in thin streams out of his nostrils, while the other one was filing his nails. 

Verna Latomba still lay bound tightly to the table, naked, bruised, her ankles and her wrists hogtied up behind her. There was a herringbone pattern of cuts on her back, and her buttocks and upper thighs were splattered with dried white wax. 

She tried to look around, to see who it was. ‘Patrice?’ she called, in a breathy, expectant shrill. ‘Patrice, is that you?’ 

Ralph slowly stepped forward, keeping his gun aimed between Joseph’s eyes. When Verna saw who it was, she whispered, ‘
You
?’ 

‘Let’s just say that I owe Patrice a favour,’ said Ralph. Bryan stopped filing his nails and dropped his file into the pocket of his coat. 

‘I said freeze!’ Ralph roared at him. 

The young man lifted both his hands. ‘We’re frozen, for Christ’s sake, we’re frozen.’ 

‘Put your hands on your head,’ Ralph instructed them both. ‘Put your hands on your head and turn yourselves around. I said, turn yourselves around.
Facing the wall, comprendez
!’