Holy Terror (10 page)

He looked up again. The window cleaner's cradle was lying on its side. The railings were very low, so there might be a chance he could pull it over. The only trouble was he would then be directly beneath it as it fell. It wasn't much more than a collection of planks and scaffolding guard-rails, but it would be quite enough to kill him.

All the same, he reckoned that pulling down that cradle would at least give him a chance of survival, which was more than Lieutenant Slyman would.

Seven or eight people had gathered on the sidewalk and were watching him. One of them called out, ‘Hey, man, do you need some help? Are you advertising something, or what?'

He kicked at the wall two or three times and managed to stop himself from swinging. He could have used some help but he knew that he didn't
have the time to wait for somebody to bring him a ladder. He braced his feet against the metal bracket on top of the awning. Then he took hold of the cable in his bloodied hands and yanked at it. By now the skin on the palms of his hands was in ribbons, and he blasphemed under his breath. But he managed to pull himself up a few inches and then let himself drop. He did it again, and again. The cradle banged against the railings every time he tugged it, but it didn't seem to show any signs of budging.

Trembling, soaked in sweat, he heaved himself up as far as he could manage. An even bigger crowd of onlookers had gathered now, including the restaurant manager in a white shirt and a fancy red vest.

‘Hey! You! What the hell do you think you're doing up there? You damage my blind, you moron, you're going to have to pay.'

Conor let himself go one more time, and this time the window cleaner's cradle toppled right over the railing. He heard a woman scream, and then he dropped onto the awning and rolled to the edge. He managed to swing himself over and jump down onto the sidewalk, just as the cradle crashed and clattered onto the canvas, ripping it away from its framework. Scaffolding poles and planks bounced everywhere, and the cable came snaking down like a bullwhip, lashing the leaves off one of the bay trees.

‘Looka my blind!' screamed the restaurant manager. ‘Looka my fucking tree!'

Conor shakily climbed to his feet. He loosened the cable clip and freed himself.

‘Who'sa going to pay for this?' the restaurant
manager demanded. ‘You know what this is going to
cost
?'

Conor slapped him on the shoulder, leaving a greasy, bloody handprint on his crisp white shirt. ‘Charge it to the NYPD,' he said. ‘They'll be here in a couple of minutes. But meanwhile, sorry, I really have to run.'

He rang the bell twice and Sebastian quickly opened the door for him, ‘Lacey called me,' he said, as he ushered Conor into the hallway. ‘She told me you'd probably come over.' He glanced left and right and said, ‘Nobody followed you, did they?'

Conor shook his head. ‘I checked the street before I came in here. Trust me, I'm an expert.'

Sebastian closed and bolted the door. He was tall, willowy and black. His head was shaved and he was wearing a gold braided headband and dangly gold earrings in the shape of leopards. His features were Abyssinian: high cheekbones, hooked nose and heavily lidded eyes. He was wearing a flappy white silk shirt and pants that could have been pajamas. He flowed along the hallway as if he were modeling them.

‘My God, Conor, you look like a vagrant. What's happened to your hands? Look, come into the bathroom and wash them. You're going to drip blood all over the carpet.'

The carpet was snowy white, so Conor could understand his anxiety. He went to the bathroom
basin and Sebastian ran the faucets for him. The bathroom was white, too, with gilded fittings, and a spray of gilded ostrich plumes in a mock-Etruscan vase. Matching white bathrobes hung from gilded hooks and there was a large print of a sulky Grecian athlete holding a discus where it mattered.

Conor looked at himself in the brightly lit mirror. His face was swollen and covered in big crimson bruises. He had split his lower lip so that he sported a little goatee beard of dried blood. One shirt-sleeve was torn and there were cross-cross streaks of grease all over his pants.

Sebastian held his head as if he were a child and washed his face with a large soft cloth. Then he gently took Conor's hands and sponged out as much of the dirt as he could. ‘We'd better put some iodine on these. You don't want to get some disgusting infection.'

Conor said, ‘Mother of God,' when Sebastian poured on the iodine. But he waited patiently while Sebastian wrapped his hands with surgical gauze.

‘So … am I allowed to know how you ended up like this?' Sebastian asked.

‘Of course. But I could use a drink first.'

Sebastian led him into the living room. He had completely remodeled it since Conor had last been here. The walls were painted in a faded, distressed pink and the limed-oak furniture looked as if it had come from an old French farmhouse. On one of the couches lolled a handsome bare-chested boy of 18 or 19 with golden curls and a dark blue sarong wrapped around his waist, reading a copy of
Variety
.

‘Conor, this is Ric,' said Sebastian, flapping across and kissing the boy on the forehead. ‘Ric's a dancer. Hugely talented.
Hugely
.'

‘Sorry,' said Conor, holding up his bandages. ‘Can't shake hands.'

Ric looked him up and down as if he were appraising a handsome but disheveled beast at a cattle market. ‘Jesus,' he said. ‘What happened to
you
?'

‘What would you like to drink?' asked Sebastian. ‘I have some Stag's Leap chardonnay that's positively
myumphl
Unless you'd prefer something stiffer.'

Ric let out a sardonic
pfff!
of amusement and Sebastian waved one of his sleeves at him in annoyance.

‘A whiskey would be fine,' said Conor. ‘Do you think I could use your phone to call Lacey?' He knew that Slyman wouldn't yet have had time to set up a wiretap.

‘For sure.' Sebastian handed him a mobile phone in a quilted gold cover. Conor's legs were beginning to tremble and he sat down in one of the large cushioned armchairs. Sebastian went to the cocktail cabinet and filled up a huge cut-crystal goblet with ice.

The phone rang for a long time before Lacey answered.

‘Hi. It's me. I just made it to Sebastian's place.'

‘Sorry,' said Lacey, in a cold, abstract tone. ‘He's not here right now.'

‘Is Slyman still there?'

‘All right, then. I'll tell him. Is everything OK?'

‘I'm fine. A little knocked about, but nothing serious.'

‘Good. I'll let him know you called.'

Conor switched the phone off. ‘The police are still round there. I'll try calling again later.'

‘Well, do,' said Sebastian. ‘I'm simply itching to know what this is all about. Hang on, I must get another bottle of wine out of the icebox.'

While Sebastian went into the kitchen, Conor turned to Ric. ‘So you're a dancer,' he said. ‘Modem or classical?'

‘Whatever I can get. Tap, mainly.'

‘Have I seen you in anything?'

Sebastian swept back in. ‘Ric was
in A Chorus Line
, weren't you, Ric?'

‘Oh sure I was. In Buffalo. And what do you think the mathematical odds are that Conor ever saw
A Chorus Line
in Buffalo?'

‘Stranger things have happened, sweet cheeks,' said Sebastian, handing Conor a huge Jack Daniel's. ‘Besides, you were in
Vaudeville Days
, too, and that was on Broadway.'

‘Oh, yes. I forgot that starring role. I held a hoop so that a chihuahua could jump through it.'

‘Why do you always bring yourself
down?
How are you ever going to make any progress in show business if you're always so self-deprecating? Show business is all about
confidencel
Pizzazz!'

‘God, you sound more like Deanna Durbin every day. Show business has nothing to do with confidence. Show business is all about freaky strokes of luck and kissing the right rear ends.'

‘You'll have to forgive Ric,' said Sebastian. ‘He's the victim of an excessively well-balanced childhood.' He sat down next to Conor and crossed his legs. He was wearing strappy gold sandals with little bells on them. ‘Now why don't you tell us how you got into such a mess?'

Slowly, Conor did. He felt exhausted now, shattered, and the events of the day were all jumbled up in his mind. But Sebastian thought it was all enthralling, especially the Brinks-Mat truck crashing into the Pond.

‘It
is
a mystery, though, isn't it?' he said. ‘Those two people waiting outside your door. Do you think they had any connection with the robbery?'

‘Hell, Sebastian, I don't know what to think. I haven't any idea what they were doing there or what they wanted. All I know is that I started to talk to them and I lost twenty-nine minutes out of my day.'

‘That's so
weird
,' said Sebastian. ‘Maybe they were aliens. You have to be so careful about aliens. They take you up to their spacecraft and perform all kinds of strange sexual experiments on you.'

‘Oh, really?' said Ric. ‘And how do
you
know? Has that ever happened to you?'

‘Me? I should have such luck.'

‘But wait a minute,' said Conor. ‘Remember that Darrell Bussman met them, too, in another department, and he lost some time as well. Not as much as I did, but a few seconds maybe. One moment he was talking to them, then they were gone.'

‘Can you remember what they said to you?' asked Sebastian.

Conor shook his head. ‘The woman didn't speak
at all. The man just lifted up his hand and said, “Do you know me?” and that's all I remember. Maybe he said more. He must have done, but I couldn't tell you what it was.'

‘Describe them,' said Ric.

‘I can do better than that. I can draw them.'

Sebastian brought him a gold mechanical pencil and a sheet of white writing-paper. Quickly Conor repeated the sketches he had shown to Salvatore.

Ric took the sheet of paper and frowned at it. ‘You were right, Sebastian. They
are
aliens.'

‘I'm – uh – not exactly an artist,' Conor told him.

‘No, no. Joking aside, you've pretty much caught them.'

‘Caught them? You
know
them? You're putting me on.'

‘Ric knows
everybody
,' said Sebastian, showing his claws. ‘He gets around New York like a dose of the flu.'

Ric sat up straight, rewrapping his sarong. ‘The woman's tall, right, about thirty-five years old, white face, totally black eyes like she's a zombie or something? The guy looks like he's Latino, sharp clothes, curly hair, Little Richard mustache?'

‘Absolutely dead right. That's them. You don't happen to know what their names are?'

‘Sure I do. Ramon Perez and Magda Slanic. He's Mexican and she's Romanian. Leastways, she always
said
that she was Romanian. She had a thick accent but as far as I'm concerned it could have been anything. Greek, Russian, who knows? They were a weird pair, didn't talk too much, and when they did you weren't too sure what they meant. I haven't seen
them for over a year, not since
Vaudeville Days
closed down.'

‘They were involved in
Vaudeville Days
, too? They're entertainers?'

‘That's right. Their stage names were Hypnos and Hetti.'

Conor pressed the heel of his hand against his forehead. He couldn't think why it hadn't occurred to him before.
Hypnotists
, for Christ's sake. They had simply put him into a mesmeric trance, and made him do whatever they wanted him to do. That's where his twenty-nine minutes had disappeared.

Ric said, ‘They were amazing hypnotists, Hypnos and Hetti. But they weren't audience friendly, if you know what I mean? They used to make people do all these really humiliating things on stage, like wet their pants or swear at their wives or burst into tears because they thought they were kids and they'd lost their mommy at the market.

‘I really had the feeling that they
hated
their audience, you know? They never knew when to draw the line. They once made a woman lick the soles of her husband's shoes.'

‘They must have hypnotized Darrell, too,' said Conor. ‘I only knew half the code to open the strongroom, but he knew the other half. Do you think they could have made him tell them what it was? I mean, just like that, snap, in the blinking of an eye?'

‘You're joking, I hope. Those two could make you do anything, whether you wanted to do it or not. You know that myth about hypnotism – that you can never make anybody do anything against their will?
That's so much bullshit. We had a backstage party the night
Vaudeville Days
opened, and Ramon made this middle-aged make-up artist take off all of her clothes and dance on the table with a pink feather duster sticking out of her ass. I left. I mean, quite apart from the fact that I don't like women with no clothes on, it was
wrong
, you know? It was degrading. It was morally wrong.'

Sebastian brushed an invisible mote of dust from his knee. ‘Ric's quite the religious fundamentalist, isn't he, when he gets going? Mind you, he's more interested in fundaments than he is in religion.'

Conor said, ‘The Mexican guy – what was his name, Perez? – he was carrying a large bag. They must have hypnotized me into opening up the strongroom and emptied out all the safety deposit boxes they took a fancy to.'

‘But how would they know which boxes to choose?' asked Sebastian.

‘I don't know. We have a list of who rents which box. It's stored in the company's database, but it's strictly confidential and it's encrypted.'

‘They might have gotten you to download it for them,' Ric suggested. ‘After all, they had plenty of time.'