Flood (22 page)

Pablo gestured to the shadows to bring the videotape monitor close to the table. I heard the sounds of a cassette being inserted, heard a switch flip, and the screen began to flicker. The overhead light went out. Sitting in the darkness, I saw:

A starkly lit room, all in black and white, with a shot of a longhaired woman seated on a straight chair in the center. The camera zoomed in and I saw the woman was held to the chair with a thick band around the waist and two more thinner ones crossing over her exposed breasts like bandoliers. She was naked except for a dark ribbon tied around her neck. The woman was saying something—biting off the words. There was no sound except for the hum of the machine and a slight tape hiss.

Suddenly she lunged forward, but the chair didn’t move. The camera panned down to the chair legs and you could see they were bolted to the floor, held down by metal brackets.

A man entered the frame, wearing a black executioner’s mask that extended down almost to his chest. He had a dog’s collar in one hand and a short three-lash whip in the other. The woman’s hands were free, and the man extended the dog collar to her. She spat on the extended hand, and the whip cut down across her exposed thighs. The woman leaped in the chair, bucking against her bonds, her soundless mouth wrenched open in pain.

The man approached again, holding out the dog collar. The woman flashed out her nails at him but he was too quick. He put down the collar and the whip and came closer, almost within striking distance. He was talking to her, using his hands in a be-reasonable gesture. The woman appeared to calm down, her eyes dropped to her waist.

The man came back to her with the dog collar. She shook her head no. He put it on the floor, shaking his head, then picked up the whip and came to her again. Another slash across her thighs, again she bucked and silently screamed. He tossed the whip aside and walked away from her, turning his back.

The screen flickered and I wondered if parts had been edited out. Then I saw the man close in on the woman until he was just beyond her reach. He crouched in front of her, like he was negotiating with a stubborn child, then gestured that he would set her free, pointing to something out of the camera’s view. The camera followed his hand to a leather-covered sawhorse, like carpenters use. He came over to the woman, unsnapped the bindings, and set her free. Again the sweeping gesture with his hand toward the sawhorse, like a headwaiter showing you to your table. The woman started in that direction, shaking her head to clear it—then suddenly the camera blurred as she tried to run. The man grabbed her by the hair and slammed her to the ground, driving a knee into her back—he punched her repeatedly with one black-gloved fist while holding her down with the other.

He stood up—legs spread, standing over her. His stomach moved in and out rapidly like he was breathing hard through the mask. He half-lugged, half-carried the woman back to the chair, positioned her in it like she was before and refastened the bindings. He stepped out of the picture, the camera zoomed in to the woman’s face. There was blood in the corner of her mouth, her eyes were scars. The man came back into the picture, again holding the dog collar and the whip. This time the woman didn’t move as he approached. He put the collar around her neck, and she sat there, slumped forward. Broken.

He said something to her and the whip flashed down again. The woman reached her hands up to her neck and buckled the collar, the masked man stepped forward and attached a bright metal chain to the collar. He stepped back, hands on hips. Taking the chain in one hand, he jerked the woman’s head, first in one direction, then another. He was showing the camera he could move her head with just a flick of his wrist.

Again he approached and knelt to unfasten the bindings again, all the time talking to the woman. But then he appeared to change his mind and got to his feet. He stepped out of camera range, and the camera came in to a close-up on her face again. Her eyes were dull.

When he stepped back into the camera’s view, he was naked from the waist down, standing out erect. His legs were muscular and altogether hairless. His feet were bare.

The camera went from the woman’s mouth to the man’s groin several times, panning slowly so the viewer couldn’t possibly miss the point. The man held the dog leash in one hand and the whip in the other as he walked closer to the woman. He jerked the leash so her head was yanked toward him, holding the whip ready in the other hand—she was being given a choice. She made her decision—her mouth opened and her nails flashed out and the camera blurred again.

The next shot showed the woman with her fingers still extended, breasts heaving. The screen also showed the man holding his testicles with both hands, bent at the waist. Then it went dark.

I reached my hand toward my cigarettes and was trying to get my breathing straight when the screen flickered into life again and the man approached, this time with only the whip in his hands. It came down, again and again, right through the woman’s upraised hands. Then the man threw down the whip and walked slowly out of the room, leaving her body running with blood.

The masked man returned, erect again. Two minutes later? A half hour? No way to know. But this time he was holding a black Luger in one gloved hand. Again he approached. Cautiously. Slowly.

The gun was leveled at the woman’s face. He must have said something because she appeared to reply. The camera moved in close so all we could see was the woman’s face with the shadow of the pistol across one cheek. The gun pulled back and the camera pulled back with it, and then we just saw the woman tied to the chair, looking straight ahead, her lips pressed tight together. There was a bruise showing in one corner of her mouth. Suddenly she was slammed back against the chair, bounced forward, and lay still. Her head dropped against her chest. Her body jerked spastically, once, twice.

The man in the executioner’s mask entered the picture again—he walked over to the woman’s side and jerked the leash, pulling her head back so it was facing the camera again. Her mouth was open, so were her eyes—there was a starburst hole in her forehead. The screen filled with her face so the viewers would know they had paid for the real thing. And then it went black.

I reached for a cigarette as they pushed the videotape monitor back into the shadows, but my hands wouldn’t work. Pablo came back to the table, looked across at me.

“Lucecita?” I asked.

“Si, hermano. Comprende?”

“He
sells
this?”

“He sells this, and more like it. We are told he has some in color and some even with sound.”

“How does he get people to film this? It’s a cold-blooded homicide, not some sex rap.”

“He does it himself,
compadre
—that was Goldor in the mask,”

“Then he’s bought himself a life sentence.”

“How? We cannot prove a thing. We can prove that it was our Lucecita who died, but how to prove that it was Goldor himself? Besides, a life sentence is insufficient.”

“So is a death sentence.”

“I agree, we all agree. We have discussed this and there was debate. But we will not imitate our oppressors. We are Puerto Ricans, not Iranians.”

“I understand. You’ll tell me where to find Goldor?”

“Oh, yes—and we will do better than that. We have a dossier, complete. It will be handed to you when you get out of the cab later on. And then there is no more from us, you understand?”

“Yes.”

“We are not in a race, Burke. We will not interfere with your work. But you must move quickly—we are almost ready.”

“Understood.”

“In return you will tell us anything you may learn. That is all we ask.”

“Agreed.”

There was nothing more to say. We shook hands, the overhead light went off, and I followed Pablo out the door into the corridor. Another man took me up the stairs to the front door where the
lobos
still prowled. I started to walk through them as I had done before, and found myself held in place. I didn’t resist, just stayed within the group until I heard a car come down the block. The gypsy cab again.

The pack parted and I climbed in the back. The driver didn’t ask me where I was going and I didn’t say anything. I didn’t open my eyes until I felt the cab crossing the Third Avenue Bridge into Manhattan. The driver took the East Side Drive to Twenty-third Street, turned over to Park Avenue South, spotted an all-night cab stand, and pulled over to the curb. As I got out, he handed me a legal-sized envelope and drove off.

I walked over to the cab stand, checked the first cab. I gave him an address within half a dozen blocks of Flood’s studio.

I tried to close my eyes during the ride, but the videotape kept replaying inside my eyelids.

36

THE LEGAL ENVELOPE full of Goldor information had disappeared into the side flap of my jacket by the time I got out of the cab. The pay phone was right where I remembered it, and Flood answered on the first ring.

“It’s me, Flood, I’ll be there in a couple of minutes. Come downstairs and let me in.”

“Are you okay? What’s wrong?”

“I’ll tell you when I see you—just do it,” I said, and hung up.

I looked at my watch to avoid thinking about what Flood had heard in my voice—it was past three in the morning.

I walked right up to Flood’s door like I had a key, reached for the handle and it opened. I was so distracted that I didn’t bother to ring for the elevator, just let Flood walk up the steps ahead of me—but I snapped out of it and stopped her halfway up the first flight and motioned her to be quiet. It stayed quiet. We were alone.

We walked through the studio to Flood’s place without talking. I found a place to sit down and lit a smoke, trusting Flood to find an ashtray for me someplace. I took out the Goldor file and stared at the cover—I didn’t want to open it just yet. Flood sat down across from me on the floor. “Burke, tell me what’s wrong.”

My hands were all right by then but I guess my face wasn’t. I didn’t say anything and Flood just let me smoke the cigarette in peace. She moved closer and just leaned her body weight against me without saying anything. I felt her warmth and strength next to me and the calmness that came with it. After a few minutes I handed her the cover of the file.

“Everything about Goldor’s in here,” I told her.

“Isn’t that good? Isn’t that what you went to find?”

“Yeah, but I found something else too. I think he’s our man, the man with the lead to Wilson.”

Flood looked questions at me, gave me her soft smile. “Don’t smile, Flood. He’s not someone we can make a deal with.”

She said, “Tell me,” and I did the best I could. She sat there not moving a muscle while I took her all the way through that videotape. She didn’t ask me how I got to see it—she could see it wasn’t important anymore, if it ever had been. She absorbed the story like a good boxer taking a body punch—she moved into it to get something she could understand, something that would make sense. “The woman knew she was going to die.” It wasn’t a question.

“I don’t know.”

“She did. She died with honor. You must have seen that, Burke.”

“If she did what the freak wanted, would she have lived?”

“Would she have wanted to?”

“We’ll never know, right? She has people—she won’t have to worry about resting in peace wherever she is. That’s why we don’t have a lot of time. Goldor is on the spot—he’s marked. If this city had vultures, they would be hovering over his house right now, you understand?”

“Yes,” said Flood, “but does
he
understand?”

“I’m told not—I’m told he doesn’t believe anything can get to him. Everything about him is supposed to be in this file. We’ll see.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I want to make it like I never heard of this freak,” I told her. “And I want to cancel his ticket—watch him die, have him understand that he is going to die just like that girl did—find the field his tree grew in and dig up the roots and pour salt in the ground.”

“It’s not wrong to be afraid,” Flood said, thinking she understood.

“Flood, for chrissakes, I know that—I probably know that better than anyone you’ll ever meet. You ever watch a pro football game—ever see how those guys come over to the sidelines and take a hit off an oxygen bottle so they can go back and do their work? That’s what I do with fear. It makes me smart—it’s the fuel I run on. You don’t understand—you didn’t see the tape.”

“I don’t want to see it.”

“That won’t help. Damn it, Flood—I didn’t want to see it either, but even if we never saw it it would still be—it will always be, even if this maggot is dead and gone.”

“Like Zen?”

“If a tree falls in the forest . . . maybe so—I don’t know.”

“I’m not afraid of him,” she said, “he’s just a man.”

“Flood, there is just no place for people like you where I live. Good for you, you’re not afraid—you going to protect me?”

“I can.”

“Not from this—it’s inside of me, it’s inside all of us. What he did—people do it. Rich people pay for it with money and poor people just do it and pay the freight in some mental hospital or prison.
People
do it—not animals, not birds—people. If you’re not scared of it, it just means you can’t see yourself there. It doesn’t mean it
isn’t
there.”

“Maybe it’s because he’s so rich—there’s so much strength when you have money . . .”

“It’s not money, Flood, it’s power. When I was in Africa once, in Angola before they kicked out the Portuguese—I was near the airport in Luanda and the rebels were getting closer and it was time to get out. The soldiers were all over the place and they were searching luggage, you know, to find contraband—ivory carvings, diamonds, hard currency. Two of them opened my bags on the ground. Nothing in there, but they found the malaria pills I had with me. One of them opened the bottles and just poured them out on the ground, right in front of me, smiling in my face all the time. There was nothing I could do except act stupid and confused. That made them happy—I would get malaria and I wouldn’t even understand how it happened. That was enough for them, that much power—for some people, it’s not enough. There’s a line you cross—and once you cross it you never get back. Then you’re not human anymore.”

“All soldiers act evil,” Flood said. “That’s the way they’re trained. Everything is black and white, friend or enemy. They don’t think, they just obey—”

“And when they rape some helpless woman after a battle, is that obedience?”

“That’s evil too. A lot of soldiers do evil rotten things, but when they’re no longer soldiers there’s no need for them to be evil. They can stop.”

“Goldor is no soldier, Flood—his marching orders are in his head.”

“You talk like you know him. You were only watching an evil film—you don’t know him.”

“I know him, all right . . . There was a kid once, a few years ago. A sort of halfwit, you know? Halfass burglar. The Man kept catching him, kept putting him in the can—like meat on a hook in a freezer, hanging up to be cured so it’s fit for people to eat. And every time he goes to the joint he listens to those degenerates talk how about they’re going to kick some woman’s ass until she gets on the street for them and makes them some money, or how they’re going to pull a train on some retarded girl down the block—every sicko fantasy in the world. And this kid listens—he don’t say much, not because he has enough smarts to keep his mouth shut but because nobody ever listens to such a lame. So he gets out again, right? As soon as he gets on the street he hits a housing project to do another of his dumb penny-ante burglaries. He goes in a window and it turns out to be a bedroom. There’s a woman sleeping there and she wakes up. If she’d screamed or tried to fight him he would have run away. But this woman, she read too many books—she tells him, ‘Don’t hurt me, I’ll do anything you want, but please don’t hurt me,’ and for the first time in his pitiful life he’s in control—he’s got
power.
He is a fucking god right there in that bedroom—and every evil thing he ever heard about in the joint floods his tiny brain. He puts the woman through every kind of change he can think of. He stays there for hours with her, just power-tripping. And when he leaves there’s a Coke bottle sticking out of one side of the woman and a wooden spoon sticking out the other. He doesn’t kill her, doesn’t take a thing from her apartment. And the
next
time he goes prowling, he’s not looking to steal—you understand me? He crossed that power-rush line and he can’t
ever
step back over it—he has to live on that other side until he stops living. He’s not a man anymore, not a person.”

“How could you know this?”

“I knew that kid,” I told her, “I talked to him”

“In prison?”

“No. He was in a juvenile prison, one of those dumps they call a training school for delinquents. No, I met him on the street—and I talked to him just before he died.”

“Couldn’t he have been locked up for the rest of his life?”

“There’s no such thing. He’d sit in his cell and draw pictures of women with blunt objects sticking out of them—or he’d do like another freak, a guy I
did
know in prison. This guy had a little tape recorder and he’d prowl around the blocks until he heard some kid being raped and then he’d just roll up and record the sounds and go back to his cell and play the tape and giggle to himself and jack off all over the walls. Sooner or later the parole board’s going to cut that freak loose too. And then he’ll do some cutting-loose of his own.”

“How did that other kid die?”

“He jumped off a sixteen-story building,” I said, letting her think it was suicide.

“Oh. And Goldor . . . ?”

“What he does is more addictive than any heroin. But there’s more to him than just being a sicko. He
believes
in what he does—you can tell. The way he smashed that woman—it was because he was so angry. So much hate because she wouldn’t see the Way—you know, like the Tao. The perfect way—pain for life. And we have to find a way to make him tell us something,” I said, thinking how hopeless it was.

“Maybe if we—”

“Forget it—I know what you’re thinking. He would beat us, Flood. You could kill him easy enough, but could you really torture him? He could outwait us—he’d know we don’t have his feeling for pain—he’d know he could survive. He just wouldn’t believe we would kill him.”

“You remember that guy in the alley? When I—”

“You going to castrate him, Flood? The problem’s not in his balls, it’s in his head—he wouldn’t be any different gelded. Even the threat wouldn’t make him talk to us.”

“We have to try.”

“We are going to try, but first we have to read all this stuff and then make it disappear. Then I have to sleep, and then see some people. And then I have to—”

“Burke, you want to sleep first?”

“I can’t—can’t sleep. This stuff . . .” I held out the Goldor file.

Flood stood up and shrugged off her robe. She held out her hand. “Just come and lie down with me. Sleep first—I’ll put the papers where they’re safe.”

I got up with her and went inside. She took my clothes off and pushed me back against the mats. She lay across me with her warm body, her chubby little hand rubbing the side of my face. She kept rubbing me, whispering that Goldor wouldn’t win . . . that it would be us, that she believed in me, that I would find a way for us. I got calm and quiet but still not sleepy. And Flood understood the last door for me to go through before I could fight this freak—she helped me inside her and softly and slowly took me past the murky darkness of my fears and into a gentle place where sleep finally came.