Escape the Night (40 page)

“Miss Lavin,” the youth repeated. His face was stone.

Pogostin smiled. “Thank you.”

Leaving, the youth caught the next elevator down and then disappeared into the subway, clutching his package in both hands.

“Oh, he
remembers
, poor bastard—just not consciously …”

Englehardt stopped the tape.

Watching, Martin saw the stiffness of his body. “I must have Carey's tape,” he said tonelessly. “And Levy must never know I have it.”

Martin let him wait for a moment. “Easy as Pogostin,” he said casually.

Englehardt's pupils widened. Martin knew this as a sign of tension: in earlier years, he would not have been so insolent. He kept looking down at the smaller man, impassive.

Englehardt's face went cold. “Bring it to me,” he said.

It did not matter if the blond hair came from bottles, he thought; she was beautiful.

“Miss Lavin?”

“Yes.” She smiled. He swelled with hope; the day might be better. Her eyes were so blue. “Are you the messenger?”

“I am José—Joseph Figueroa.” Remembering the package, he thrust it out. “I have this from Dr. Pogostin.”

It came out “Pogosteen.” But she smiled again …

“Thank you so much. Dr. Levy was
very
concerned that this be here this afternoon.”

“I hurried …” He shifted from side to side.

“Was there something for me to sign?”

“Oh, yes.” He handed his clipboard across the desk, leaning forward to point out the correct line. She reached out, turquoise bracelets tinkling. Her perfume smelled like lilacs; her mouth made a bow as she signed.

“Is that all?”

“Well, yes …”

She smiled quickly. “If you'll excuse me, then,” she said, and took the package into the doctor's office, locking the door behind her.

Carey scribbled on the tablecloth, in crayon. “What is it?” Noelle inquired.

“An elephant.”

“With marbles for eyes?”

Carey drew a tail. “They're shoe buttons.”

Noelle watched him. When Carey did not smile, she asked, “Still want to go?”

Carey shrugged. “We're here.”

He looked up and around, hoping that the seven-thirty clutter of Un Deux Trois would lighten his unease. Waiters rushed among close tables jammed with pairs and foursomes animated by their sprint toward curtain time: tonight, the tony café decor—long mirrors flashing from gold walls, crystal chandeliers and ceiling fans dropping from black ceilings down into the noise and smoke, a long wooden bar flanked by palm trees—seemed like a rotogravure, redolent of someone else's dazzling past. Seeing no ugly stranger, Carey resumed drawing on the butcher-paper tablecloth, supplied with crayons by a clever management to divert the jangled nerves and stomachs of their patrons.

He could not remember tusks …

“Damn Phillip,” he said aloud. “It's like he's falling apart.”

Noelle flicked at her bangs. “I'm sorry you can't remember.”

Carey glanced at the nearest tables, two couples close on either side; so much noise surrounded them that they were private. “There's something all around me I just can't get hold of.” He looked back at Noelle. “
They
know, and won't even tell me
why
I feel this way …”

She touched his hand. “They must have reasons.”

Picking up the crayon, Carey began drawing tusks.

Englehardt held out the certificates. “Van Dreelen and Carey,” he said softly, “belongs to you.”

Prolonging the moment, Barth continued staring at the Manhattan of light and shadow suspended silent in his window, silver rectangles without a base. With reluctant fascination, his gaze moved slowly toward the papers which would at last deliver him, after so many years of striving, his whole
persona
.

John Carey's firm …

Phillip Carey's signature, as trustee for Peter Carey.

Touching the papers, he felt smaller, withdrew his hand. “Why like this?” he demanded.

“Pardon?”

It was dark in his suite of offices. Englehardt's face looked yellow, their solitude was bitter in Barth's mouth. He remembered opening John Carey's letter, alone.

“Why not a press conference, something they could
see?
”

“‘Work is play for mortal stakes,'” Englehardt quoted. “Robert Frost. In answer to your question, Phillip Carey is not, at the moment, fit for public display—particularly a signing ceremony which would inflame and forewarn Peter, drawing attention to his outcry before you've confronted him, quietly, with his very limited alternatives. Surely, at a later point, you will grace this acquisition with some appropriate event. But this is a
coup d'état:
it's crucial to strike quickly …”

The man was rambling; Barth had come to recognize his tension. “Do you
own
Phillip Carey, dammit, or just
rent
him?”

Englehardt smiled hastily. “Circumstances change,” he soothed. “People lose the power to help, or even die. ‘If something can go wrong—'”

“‘—it will,'” Barth snapped, pointing at the certificates. “His signature isn't witnessed.”

Englehardt paused. “That,” he answered carefully, “is yet another bit of ceremony we can ill afford.” He spread his hands. “Remember that
I
secured the signature you need, by means of certain pressures.
Your
only vulnerability becomes some public link between Phillip and me, where my prior connection to the Careys might be probed. You see,” he continued smoothly, “the reason I've kept my name off both your payroll and all records for the gallery is the reason I obtained Phillip's signature without a witness. None is required; Phillip Carey is not about to assert that his own signature is forged—particularly when, as I will ensure he does, Phillip deposits
your
check in
his
account, evidencing consideration for the sale. Yet
you're
totally insulated from anything I've done.” His cadence eased. “The successful aide survives only by preventing error. The moment I put you at risk, or permit
you
to do so to me, my career ends.”

Barth hesitated; once more the face of his dead father flashed before him.

“Of course,” Englehardt concluded, “my
job
ends when I present you with the alternatives of owning Van Dreelen and Carey or letting Peter Carey own it. The
choice
must be yours—to succeed John Carey, or turn away.”

Flicking on Barth's laser lamp, he aligned both contracts neatly on Barth's green blotting pad, and turned his back.

Barth looked down.

Illuminated, the smooth white papers shone with the magic of their gift: he could take John Carey's firm, and all of its history, into his hands.

Van Dreelen & Carey …

Carey & Barth.

He picked up the pen. As he did so, the same shocking image of his father's face circled back, piercing his brain.

John Carey would not do this …

Barth looked up.

“I trust you brought the check,” Englehardt said to the window. He was utterly still. “Imagine the expression on young Carey's face when you show him the certificates.”

Hastily, Barth scrawled his name.

With twenty thousand other people, Carey and Noelle watched an empty stage at one end of Madison Square Garden.

“Le-e-thal …” Below them, the crowd had begun chanting.

“Le-e-thal …”

They had found seats on the mezzanine, high above the vast cement floor. Carey watched the crowd; Noelle stared at the blue curtain covering the runway to the bare wooden stage. “Just letting it build, isn't he?”

“It's the second coming,” Carey said. “No warm-up act.” He kept scanning the faces.

“Le-e-thal …”

The clothes and pigment and features were unique to this city: Hispanics and aging hippies; olive-skinned Mediterraneans sharing black curly hair with Eastern Europeans; a few blacks and Asians; Barnard women in sweaters and jeans; punk rockers; the rude and abrasive shoving others as self-contained as only the drug-addled or New Yorkers in a crowd can be, some bearing candles or smoking dope, all standing, milling restlessly, watching the blue curtain, the focus of their energies.

“Le-e-e-thal …” The chant grew louder and more drawn out with each hypnotic repetition.

“Le-e-e-thal …”

The chant spread through the crowd, each roar wafting smoke and heat, the fetor of dope and sweat and bodies, up into the vast, echoing darkness of the rafters …

Carey's eyes narrowed.

“L-E-E-E-THAL …”

The silent apartment echoed with Pogostin's voice.

The six-year-old Peter had frightened him, and now Levy could not sleep.

He sat up in bed.

On a tape, locked inside his desk, Charles Carey lived again, and then died with Peter's memory.

He turned on the light.

Charles Carey could not wait.

Next to Carey, a spaced-out woman in rimless glasses began rocking to some inner rhythm. He ignored her, watching a wedge of uniformed cops with nightsticks rush into the bodies jostling on the floor to extract three men who had been fighting for a patch of cement and a woman who had fainted from drugs or the pressure around her. More cops ringed the stage, facing the tumult on the floor or in the multitiered oval of seats that rose on all sides, surrounding them with noise.

“L-E-E-THAL …”

“General admission,” Carey muttered to Noelle. “Let 'em stomp each other for a ringside seat—it's cheaper.”

She nodded. “We're better off up here.”

The spaced-out woman began clapping to herself. Carey watched the crowd pressing toward the stage, to the precipice of reason, screaming even louder …

His father screamed:
“I'm losing control …”

“L-E-E-THAL …”

“Daddy …”

Levy wept alone.

A child's stricken cry rang through his office, again and again.

“Daddy … Daddy …”

“Charles!”

The tape clicked off: a trembling Levy realized that he had cried out to a dead man.

Desperately, he fought back panic.

He must warn Peter.

What he had heard, and a young boy's memory had rejected, was more terrible than his worst imaginings.

Shaking, he groped for the telephone.

Carey's telephone rang once, twice. There was a click.

“Hello,” the tape began, “this is Peter Carey …”

Leaning against Noelle, Carey fought waves of nausea.

“L-E-E-THAL …”

“You okay, Peter?”

“Just hot.” He tried concentrating on the press of bodies near the stage, half hysterical as some roadies made a teasing ritual of setting up the amplifiers and drums. “It's scary,” he murmured, “to think how easily these people could get a gun in here.”

“L-E-E-THAL …”

“See someone weird?”

The door opened
…

“Nothing.” In the tumult, Carey struggled to identify his flashes. “It's the Sutcliffe effect—he's certainly getting what he wants.”

The lights dimmed.

“L-E-E-THAL …”

The crowd lit candles, rocking more fiercely with their rhythmic ululations, half entreaty and half animal demand. Below, a man with purple hair was passed from shoulder to shoulder, waving wildly, toward the front.

“L-E-E-THAL …”

The man hurtled forward.

“
Peter!
”

Sutcliffe burst onto the stage.

Martin slid softly through the outer door.

Closing it behind him, he crept to the second door, placing his bag beside him, and put on gloves.

He slipped his key into the lock, turning it until he heard a click.

Slowly, softly, he opened the door.

An old man was sitting at his desk, holding a telephone. Tears glistened on his face.

Martin froze in startled recognition.

The old man looked up. His mouth opened, closed, opened again. “I saw you.”

The familiar voice sounded thinner yet. Martin watched his pale hand reach out to grasp a tape cassette. His eyes followed Martin's. “This?”

Almost imperceptibly, Martin nodded.

Doug Sutcliffe began chanting into the tumult:

“
Ride the subway
…

Girls look away
…”

“LE-E-THAL …”

Sutcliffe stalked to the front of the stage in a jumpsuit unzipped to the waist, twisting, undulating, waving them closer, whipping the cord of the microphone he shouted through as Lethal set down an electric pulse that filled the Garden and seized the crowd, now clapping with it and writhing on the floor, hurling the purple-haired man as their collective sacrifice ever closer to the stage until Sutcliffe waved him to the front and the man screamed to the crowd to keep him going.

“
Go faster, Daddy
…”

Carey clapped both palms to his head; Sutcliffe screamed his pain:

“
My brain starts ticking like a bomb
…”

Fighting for control, Carey saw the body of the purple-haired man flash through the flickering candles as the crowd threw him to the front.

Fifty feet, forty, thirty …

“
I'm lethal
…”

Twenty …

“Le-e-e-thal …”

“Le-e-e-thal …”

From the shoulders of the crowd, the purple-haired man screamed out at Sutcliffe.

“
Peter!
”

Sutcliffe looked up at him, mouth falling open.

The man pulled a long black cylinder from his coat and fired.

Kneeling, the ugly man pulled a black revolver from his bag, and smiled.

The office was dim, hushed. Levy realized that the last sound he would hear in life was the firing of a gun.

So odd, not to know what this sound was like.

He could not stop weeping: he would die feeling tears on his face.