Holy Terror (19 page)

They went back to Sebastian's apartment and played the cassette on his elegant Bang and Olufsen tape deck. The voice of the blackmailer was very indistinct: he had obviously covered the telephone mouthpiece with a scarf or a handkerchief. There was no question that he was trying to sound like Conor: his voice had the same thoughtful pacing and the same resonant timbre, and there were one or two attempts to use the kind of Irishisms that Conor might have used – ‘You'll not be wanting to keep me waiting, will you?'

But they all agreed that it wasn't Conor. ‘It could be Ramon Perez,' said Sidney. ‘It's a long time since I talked to him, but there's kind of a Spanish lisp to it, don't you think?'

‘Sounds more like a Southerner to me,' said Ric. ‘And a gay Southerner, at that.'

Conor said, ‘That doesn't help us much. And the only contact address he gives is my own lawyer, Michael Baer.'

‘Did you manage to talk to him yet? Your lawyer?'

‘He's in court for the rest of the day. But I left him a message.'

‘Play the tape again,' said Ric.

‘We've heard it a hundred times already,' Sebastian protested. ‘God, I thought
Cats
was boring.'

All the same, Conor played the tape again.

‘There!' said Ric.

‘Where? What? What are you talking about?'

‘
There
, in the background. Don't listen to the voice. Listen to the background.'

Sure enough, when they strained their ears, they could faintly hear music playing, and an extraordinary
whumping
noise.
Whump
and
whump
and shuffle and
whump
.

‘That's a rehearsal,' said Ric. ‘Whoever made that call was making it from a theater, someplace backstage. Listen, play it again, that is definitely dancing. Very ragged dancing, too. A pretty big ensemble, maybe twenty or thirty people, and a lot of them are out of sync'

‘So he must have called from a theater where a musical's being rehearsed?'

‘That's right. They're rehearsing a musical. And a big musical, too, if they have that many dancers. And a
new
musical, if they're that much out of step. What do you think, Sebastian?'

Sebastian gave an airy wave of his hand. ‘I think you missed your vocation. You should have been a detective, instead of a dancer. Ric the Dick.'

Ric played the cassette again, and then again, keeping his ear pressed to one of the speakers. ‘I'm sure I know this number. Pve heard it before. One of my friends played it to me, about three or four months ago. It came from some show he was hoping to audition for.'

‘Can you remember anything about it?'

‘No … but I can call him.'

They waited while Ric sat crosslegged on the floor with the telephone in his lap and punched out his friend's number. Conor said to Sidney, ‘Sebastian's right … I should let Ric solve this whole case on his own. He has contacts in places where I didn't even know there were places.'

Ric's friend answered. ‘Tyne! It's Ric. Yes. Wonderful.
Won-der-ful
. Well, terrible, if you really want to know the truth. Tyne, listen, heart, you remember that musical you were going for – yes, that's it, the one at the Rialto. What was it called?'

‘
Franklin
,' he told Conor, with his hand over the receiver. ‘A musical based on the life of Benjamin Franklin, God help us.'

‘Yes, I know about that,' Eleanor put in. ‘George Kranz, with a book by Felix Steinberger. One of my juveniles has a part in it.'

‘Tyne – what was that song you sang? That's right – the lightning one.' He listened for a while, nodding, and then he covered the receiver again and said, ‘That's it … I was right,' and haltingly he started to sing along with his friend on the phone.

‘
There's a storm brewing between us

Lightning and thunder they're threatnin' to crack us apart

But I'll fly my kite

Up into the night

Carryin' the key to your heart
.'

Conor nodded. ‘It's the same melody. The same as the tune on the tape.'

Isn't it just awful?' said Eleanor. ‘If it doesn't close in three days, I'll give up smoking. If it doesn't close in ten days, I'll give up breathing.'

‘That doesn't matter,' said Conor. ‘What matters is that Ramon Perez made his call from the Rialto; so that's where we're likely to find him. It's logical when you think about it. Where does a vaudeville act go to hide? No better place than the theater district. That's where their friends are. That's where they can move around backstage without attracting attention.'

Sidney said, ‘What are you going to do? You can't go after them unprepared. They'll put you into a trance as soon as you look at them, and then God knows what they'll make you do.'

‘Well, I'm ready, Sidney,' said Conor. ‘If I need to be prepared, prepare me.'

‘It's going to take at least two days to make you capable of even the minimum amount of hypnotic resistance.'

‘Then what are we waiting for?'

At 7:09 p.m. Conor managed to get through to his lawyer, Michael Baer, in the Oak Bar at the Plaza. He reckoned it was highly unlikely that Slyman had thought of setting up a wiretap there. In the background he could hear the tinkle of cocktail glasses and the deafening sound of egos colliding.

‘Michael, what's happening?'

‘People are sending me money, that's what's happening. Over sixty-five million dollars at last count.'

‘For Christ's sake, Michael, sixty-five million dollars? We can't accept sixty-five million dollars. We can't accept
any
of it.'

‘Conor, we can't
not
accept it. These people want their private papers and their property back and they don't want anybody else involved, especially not the police.'

‘But this makes us part of a conspiracy to blackmail.'

‘You think I don't know that? But let's worry about that when somebody makes a complaint. Meantime we're dealing with people who are
prepared to pay sixty-five million dollars for their personal privacy, and I can tell you something for nothing: I'm a whole lot more frightened of them than I am of the law. I'm not ready to trade in my Gucci loafers for cement boots, not just yet.'

‘Christ,' said Conor, and pressed his hand to his forehead.

‘There's only one problem – two or three people are insisting that you show them samples of their property in person. You can't blame them. They've been asked to hand over anything up to five million dollars, and they don't want to find that they've been hoaxed.'

‘How can I do that? I don't
have
their property.'

‘I don't know. I'm ignoring them for now. I don't know what else to do.'

‘What are we supposed to do with all of this money?'

‘Well, I had two calls from our friends yesterday afternoon, just to make sure that the deal's in shape.'

‘Did they give you any indication who they were?'

‘Not a clue. The guy didn't try to disguise his voice, though. I'd say southern. Alabama, Louisiana, something like that.'

‘How about a contact number?'

‘Unh-hunh. As soon as I receive all of the payments, I'm supposed to make an electronic transfer into their bank account.'

‘Which is where?'

‘Oslo.'

‘Oslo, Minnesota?'

‘Unh-hunh. Oslo, Norway.'

‘Oslo,
Norway
?'

‘It's supposed to be sent to the Fjords Finanskompaniet, Karl Johansgate, into a business account registered in the name of J.A.S.'

‘Michael, this is insanity.'

‘All right, it's insanity. But if you've been telling me the truth, this scam is absolutely nothing to do with you. As your lawyer, my advice to you is to stay well out of it. Let the ransom money be paid: let the property be given back. Then you can start to prove that you weren't involved.'

‘It's not as easy as that. I have to prove it, for sure. But I have to prove it so publicly and so convincingly that Slyman won't dare to come near me any more. Either that, or—'

‘Either that or what?'

‘Either that or I do unto him what he's been trying to do unto me, and make sure that I do it first.'

‘Conor, you're Irish. You should know better than anybody else that violence never solved anything.'

‘Sitting on your duff waiting for the sky to fall in, that never solved anything either.'

Conor and Sidney spent the next forty-eight hours closeted together in one of Sebastian's bedrooms, with the shades pulled down. Sidney put Conor in and out of trances so often that he didn't know whether he was sleeping or waking. Time seemed to flicker past like a landscape seen from a train, with frequent plunges into the blackest of tunnels.

Sidney taught him how to induce hypnosis in other people – how to speak more softly when he wanted to engage the listener's closer attention, how
to speak more slowly when he wanted a listener to think more carefully.

He taught him how to use subtle cues to make his subjects behave the way he wanted them to – how to move his head to the left when he talked about livelier things; and how to move his head to the right when he talked about sleep, and comfort, and trance – so that after a while his subject would automatically learn to relax when he inclined his head to the right, and perk up when he inclined to the left.

‘For most people, going into a trance is a pleasant surprise. They think that they direct their own associative processes, like a bus driver directs a bus. But most mental activity is autonomous, and when you persuade people really to relax – not to talk, not to move, not to make any sort of effort – not even to listen to you talking if they don't want to – they're totally amazed to discover that their mental processes go on flowing all by themselves. This is what trance is.'

From time to time, Ric or Eleanor would come in with mineral water or fruit juice. Sidney wouldn't allow coffee because it was too stimulating. They ate nothing but sandwiches which Eleanor and Ric made for them. Ham, cheese, salad and plenty of apples and bananas.

There were no clocks in the room, and they would take a break whenever they felt like it.

Toward evening, at the end of the second day, Conor was trying to persuade Sidney to relax when Sidney suddenly said, ‘You've got it. You can do it.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘I mean that you can hypnotize almost anyone.'

‘How do you know?'

‘Because – just now – you almost managed to hypnotize me. You're a very good student.'

‘I'm flattered.'

‘You don't have time to be flattered. You can induce a hypnotic trance, yes. But now you have to learn how to be resistant yourself. You have to learn what a hypnotist is trying to do to you, and make sure that you deflect him. You remember that taxi driver? You think of him. Whatever you said, he didn't directly contradict, but he kept steering the conversation the way he wanted it to go. If you believe that somebody is trying to hypnotize you, you can resist them by externalizing your thoughts. Don't try to think about it as an inner struggle, or a mental wrestling match, because the moment you concentrate on what's going on inside of your mind you've already lost.

‘Don't pay any attention to what the hypnotist is saying to you. Don't answer yes or no, no matter how harmless his questions appear to be. If you do have to answer, say that you don't understand the question and ask him to explain what he means. Put him on the defensive. Break up the pattern of his induction. And keep changing the subject. If he asks you what you enjoy doing, what makes you feel happy and relaxed, tell him instead about things that upset and irritate you and make you angry.

‘Interrupt him. Ask him irrelevant questions. “Where did you buy that sport coat?” “What time is it?” “Have you ever been to Delaware?” Don't give him time to set up a trance-inducing rhythm of speech.

‘Beware of the double bind. You remember that I said to Eleanor, “Do you want to fall asleep now or later?” That question presupposed that, whatever happened, she would fall asleep. Your answer to a question like that should be, “I'm not going to fall asleep at all.” Not, “I don't want to fall asleep,” or, “I wasn't planning on falling asleep.” Don't even consider sleep as an option.

‘Keep up a high level of physical activity. Take quick, shallow breaths. Walk about. Sit down, and then immediately stand up again. Walk out of the room, if that's possible, and walk back in again. Move close to the hypnotist and then quickly move away again, so that he has to keep refocusing his eyes. Turn your head away from him, look someplace else. Go round behind him.

‘Watch for any distracting touches or repetitive movements. Don't shake hands, whatever you do. In fact don't allow him to touch you in any way – a hand on the shoulder, anything.

‘Most of all, don't ever try to resist a skilled hypnotist on his own terms. Don't try to out-think him, because to do that you have to keep still and concentrate and that's just what he wants you to do. Now … let's try that in practice.'

Shortly after 11 p.m., Sidney said, ‘I could use a drink. How about you?'

‘You mean we're finished?'

‘For now. You've got a good handle on the theory. All you have to do now is keep practicing.'

‘Who should I practice
on
?'

‘Anybody you like. Passers-by. Store assistants.
Bank tellers. Friends. Enemies. You'll soon get to the point when you can put people into a trance in the middle of an ordinary conversation. I was at a mental health convention in San Diego once, and I saw a clinical hypnotherapist put a consultant pyschiatrist fellow diner into a trance during dinner. He ate all the best pieces of steak off the fellow's plate and then he said, “You're feeling so full … you really enjoyed that steak,” and then he woke him up.'