Control, Page 29

  Because the last time, the last time, was a downer. The last time he’d almost got killed, almost got beat to death by the cop with the blue eyes. He wasn’t human was why he could do it, nobody else alive could stand up and take it when he made his hand into a fist and his arm into a club—

  —but the blue-eyed cop had taken it, had kept on coming, had almost killed him.

  Couldn’t be human. Couldn’t be real. Must have been something else, a bad dream somehow living, somehow beating him to death on that rooftop.

  Billy Boy stared out through the snow. Get rid of those thoughts, bad thoughts can haunt you, can bring you close to crazy, give you nightmares—

  —Billy Boy hated it when he got like this, when the heebie-jeebies came, it was all luck, luck would make him fine again, make him brave again—

  —not “again”—

  —bullshit to “again”—

  —he was brave now.

  He stepped out onto the roof, looked around. The usual crap, the turret where the elevator went; far across, a ladder, a metal ladder curving over the side and down. Billy Boy let the door close behind him and started for the curving ladder, for the steps down, for a run through the snow, for a talk with the Duchess…

  … now he sensed something. Nobody else would have but he did. Nothing moved, no sound, but he knew, all right, he knew. Slowly he turned toward the turret.

  The one with the blue eyes was standing there.

  Holding a gun.

  Billy Boy stared across toward the ladder, back toward the door and the ladder was freedom, but to get to the ladder he had to go close to the turret and the door was behind him, right behind him, just a quick step behind him. Billy Boy went for the quick step, grabbed the knob.

  Locked.

  He whirled.

  It was a nightmare, it was a nightmare, the cop was coming toward him now, silent in the snow, coming step by quiet step.

  And there was murder in his eyes.

  Billy Boy tried to run, stopped fast—

  —because now the gun was raised. Raised and pointing dead at him. And now the blue eyes were narrowing. Billy Boy could see the tension starting in the trigger finger and he screamed “Shit—shit don’t—don’t fucking do it shiiiiit!!” But what good did screaming do when it wasn’t human, when what was after you was something else, something different, something that if you made your hand into a fist and your arm into a club, it didn’t care—

  Just then Trude burst through the door hollering, “You put that goddam thing down!”

  “Get away from him. —He’s my prisoner—”

  “—-you get away, he’s my patient—”

  “—this is police business—”

  “—and this is government business, now put that down!—”

  Pause. Then, slowly, as Billy Boy watched, the arm holding the gun went down.

  Trude turned. “Are you all right?”

  Billy Boy nodded.

  The blue suits were on the roof now and Trude was storming at them— “—one of you must have left his door unlocked—he could have gotten out no other way—I’ll deal with that later, now take him back and calm him, give him food, make him warm—” then a wild look of exasperation came over him. “Never mind, I will tend him, no one can do anything correct here but me—” and he took Billy Boy by the arm, turning back to the cop saying, “You go to my office and you stay till I come, you are in a lot of trouble, I promise you.” Then he said, “Come along, William,” and they went back to the room.

  “Why did you try and escape?” Trude asked quietly, when they were alone. “Because you didn’t want to go back anymore?”

  Billy Boy nodded.

  “Well, I’m your friend, William, I always have been, but I would never make you suffer pain. I can only protect you if you are my patient. If you don’t want to be my patient, you have done bad things, William, people have died. I can handle the police as long as you are mine, but if you want that ended, consider it ended. I’ll send the one from the roof here to take you.”

  ‘Ton keep him away!”

  “Are you sure? Don’t make a hasty decis—”

  “—the fuck away!”

  “Whatever you want, William, I’ll go deal with him now. You must rest, you must relax. In a few hours, I will need you.”

  Trude watched as Billy Boy lay back down. Then he left the room, listened as the door locked, went to his office and said, “It could hardly have gone better, don’t you agree?”

  “I don’t frankly give a shit how it went,” Eric said. “You got what you wanted, now it’s my turn. I want to know what you did to Edith Mazursky.”

  “What we tried to do would be a more accurate way of putting it. We tried an experiment, but we failed.”

  “I don’t think you failed,” Eric said.

  “What you think,” Leo Trude replied, “is of titanically little consequence to me. Back at your apartment I told you the gist of what I’m doing. William Winslow can reach Theo Duncan. We had hopes of reaching Edith Mazursky.”

  “With Rosa Gonzales.”

  Trude nodded. “An insanely difficult little child. Most of the ultrasensitive we find are children, either chronologically or mentally. And they are impossibly difficult to locate. Most are frauds or insane. You have to take what you can get.”

  “And you took Rosa Gonzales and tried to get her to control Edith Mazursky.”

  “That was our intention, but, of course, we never made contact.”

  “You keep indicating that. Personally, I’m kind of titanically sure you’re bullshitting me.”

  Trude whirled away, poured himself some coffee, sipped from the steaming cup. Then he said, “You’re a very arrogant young man.”

  “Oh boy, is that praise from Caesar.”

  “You want answers—answers you’ll get—but you’ll get them only once from me so you’d best listen to your elders!”

  Eric listened.

  “Rosa Gonzales’s mother went to a fortune teller. She brought Rosa along. The fortune-teller was a lookout for me. She recognized the child’s potential sensitivity. The child was brought here and we tried to make contact with the Mazursky woman. Mazursky was of no special interest to us—we had no notions of having her do anything once we controlled her—she was simply the person the Gonzales child connected with, as Billy Boy connects with Duncan. We were just using her, to see what would happen, to see if we could really do what we thought we could. But as I said, nothing worked, we failed, and there is no point to talking any more about Rosa Gonzales, she was a psychotic, dead now, and of no loss to anyone.”

  “Like I’m sure the Duchess is dead now, and of no loss to anyone. The Duchess found both Billy Boy and Gonzales for “You’ve been doing excellent homework—yes, she found them both—I have a number of lookouts, but the Duchess found these two—for which she was well paid.”

  “She should have been—because you didn’t fail—you reached Edith Mazursky and fucked her mind around.”

  “Believe what you choose—but understand this—if you were right, it wouldn’t matter. If I drove Edith Mazursky to take her life, well, of course, that is too bad for her immediate family, but in terms of what I’m doing, it matters not at all. And don’t tell me she was one of God’s good creatures, generous and kind to small animals—because Humanism was always a dubious concept, one which fortunately is dying day by day. And don’t tell me she was a painter, because until recent centuries, artists were treated as little more than lepers, a position I don’t find all that flawed. What matters today, all that matters today, is survival. And survival means weaponry. Superior weaponry. Period. End.”

  “I’m sure glad you’re on our side,” Eric said. “When you’re done here, you might consider running the Red Cross.”

  Trude was about to reply when a nurse with light brown hair scurried in and Eric couldn’t make sense of what she said, something to do with trouble with the sound of the wind, but whatever it was, Trude slammed do
wn his coffee cup and stormed out of the room.

  Eric picked up the phone, dialed Sally Levinson, spoke fast. “I promised you I’d call you so I am. The man responsible for the suicide is named Leo Trude, he’s a doctor at Sutton Hospital. He looks like Henry Kissinger but not as warm.”

  “Was that a joke?” Sally asked.

  “I don’t feel like making jokes,” Eric told her. He was about to say “Good luck” or “I’ll see you” or something. For whatever reasons, he said “Good-bye.”

  He paced around after that because he had not slept in a day and a half and he knew he had to keep moving or drop. He felt rotten, reflexes slow, and that was too bad, because back in his apartment the “arrangement” he had struck with Trude involved Eric getting Billy Boy to be more agreeable in exchange for which Trude promised to hand over the giant when he was done with him.

  Except Eric knew that was bullshit—Trude gave away ice in only very cold winters, and Billy Boy was obviously a prize to be kept. So Eric was going to have to be ready to use force, and you needed reflexes to do it well

  Trude was in the doorway then. “If you want to watch from the control room, I have no objection.”

  As they started out of the office, Eric said, “I didn’t think you could make someone do, in hypnosis, things they wouldn’t do ordinarily.”

  “In the first place, I can’t be bothered with your misconceptions,” Trude replied. “And please, don’t worry yourself in this case. Theo Duncan is a murderer; at half-past two in a house on Gramercy Park, he killed Nelson Stewart. In very cold blood…”

  6

  The Murderer

  Two hours before his death, W. Nelson Stewart was in a wonderful mood—except for the manure. The whiff of it was simply numbing, enough to buckle the knees of a Samson, and he was certainly no strongman. Nelson sat trapped in his carriage as traffic came sharply to a halt on Broadway.

  Nelson took off his rimless glasses, cleaned them, put them back on, readjusted them carefully.

  Traffic had still not moved. Fifteen minutes ago he had left his Wall Street office—he would have done better on foot.

  He called up to his driver then: “Can you make out the difficulty, Jordan?”

  “It’s a frozen horse up at the corner, sir—it’s causing all kinds of trouble; hard to get around.”

  Nelson sat back. He might have known. How many hours of his commuting life had he spent trapped because of frozen horses. Or simply dead ones in the warmer times. Tens of thousands of horses each year were abandoned on the streets of New York. The minute a horse snapped a leg on the unpaved avenues, their owners would desert them.

  “I do want to get home soon, Jordan.”

  “I think conditions are improving up ahead, Mr. Stewart.”

  How could they fail to improve, Stewart wondered. This was the worst of all days for travel—cold enough at night to freeze animals, but warm enough at the noon hour to allow their perfumed aromas to rise from the streets.

  In the old days, when he was rich but no one knew, he used to ride the horsecars to and from work. They were every bit as fast and much more comfortable, being on rails, than a private wheeled carriage. Nelson never minded being with dozens of other people twice each day. But when his wealth became common knowledge, he had to have a carriage—if he hadn’t had one, people would have thought his business was in trouble, so there you were.

  Uncomfortable in the extreme, he sat in his beaver hat and cashmere coat with the sable collar that his wife had insisted he buy because the Rockefellers had them.

  Ahhhhh.

  Movement.

  The carriage passed Lord & Taylor’s, passed Tiffany’s, passed the great Broadway hotels whece, at five o’clock, the handkerchief ladies would appear, dropping their kerchiefs for young bucks, arranging the financing then and there, before going around the corners to where the handkerchief ladies kept rooms.

  They never allowed such behavior where he came from; they frowned on such open tawdriness in Boston. Ahead now, he saw a heavy woman trying to race safely across the street via the hopping stones; she held her skirt with one hand^ was doing well enough until a horse reared beside her, reins tangled with the wagon alongside, and the woman lost her balance and sprawled into the muck.

  I don’t think I would much enjoy riding in a horsecar with that lady, Nelson decided. Perhaps the elevated trains everyone was arguing about were a solution. The £1 over on Ninth Avenue was already in operation, and it was filthy, and it constantly poured cinders on the citizens below—but at least you were above the problems of animal residue.

  “Look out, sir!” Hastings cried, and just in time, for Mr. Stewart was able to brace himself before the sudden halt. He peered out. A barrel had fallen from a beer wagon, had split open up ahead. Now the aroma of beer began to spread.

  W. Nelson Stewart sat in his carriage as around him were dray wagons and food carts and conveyances piled high with dry goods and horsecars and taxis and old women pushing pullcarts and old men pulling pushcarts and scavengers and hags and sledges and sleds; all the other vehicles that made up daily Broadway traffic, all of them congealing again, glued there, at least for a time.

  I will not miss this commute when I move to Boston, W. Nelson

  Stewart reminded himself. I will not miss this at all…

  Ninety minutes before she became a widow, Charlotte was in an absolutely fabulous mood—except for her husband. She lay alone on her bed, thinking about him. Ever since his return from his sudden trip to Boston, Nelson had been, well, just so terribly nice. Considerate even. He didn’t snipe at the boys and he asked after her days as if he really cared about the answer.

  Well, of course, he did love Boston. The city was more than likely responsible for the change. She herself, though she had never voiced her feelings, loathed the place. All the women so snobby, all the men so cold.

  This new figure of the past days, this nice Nelson, troubled Charlotte because, well, how could she let her mind drift toward Theo with Nelson being human?

  But her mind did drift toward Theo. The pale blue eyes, the brilliance. Fragile he was; almost that sometimes. His body so pale, his pink nipples the only color on his chest.

  Charlotte closed her eyes and moved her lips to his words:

  Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,

  And slips into the bosom of the lake:

  So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip

  Into my bosom and be lost in me.…

  Nelson had said those words were effeminate. But what did Nelson know? About business yes, everything; about money, yes, everything.

  About bodies? Charlotte let her mind drift easily toward her genius. He was lying beside her. She had undressed him. He was trembling, he wanted her so desperately. Charlotte moved toward him, undecided as to on which part of his body she should begin to feast…

  An hour before the murder, Theo could hardly have been more joyous—except for his shoes. He sat in his workroom by the children’s gymnasium, tried thinking about the poem he had half finished.

  But his eyes kept staring at his shoes.

  Not that there was anything wrong with them. Or anything unusual about them. They were the kind of shoes he had used all his life: wear alls. Where he came from in the Midwest, everybody wore wear alls. You put whichever foot you wanted into whichever shoe you wanted. Simple, efficient, no fuss over footwear.

  Theo had heard of differentiated shoes of course, but they seemed the province of the rich, just another silly way for those with to lord it over those without. Wasteful, it always seemed to him, having a shoe curved so that it would only go over your left foot, another that would only take the right. Ridiculous, really; what if you were harder on the left, say, and it wore out while the right was still in its prime… With wear alls, no problem; you just bought a new shoe when you needed one. Of course, wear alls were, in order not to be uncomfortable, enormously large; clumpy in fact.

  W, Nelson Stewart’s shoes were not
clumpy. He had his handmade, and they made his not particularly small feet seem delicate. Theo envied the stern older man that delicate look.

  But more than envy was this: Those differentiated shoes were a symbol Theo was a poet, he was a tutor, he was an educated incompetent as far as finance was concerned.

  And Charlotte was so rich. Even before Stewart, she had been brought up to all the better things, travel and new clothes and shoes that fit your feet.

  How was he to match that?

  True, Stewart was old, mid-fifties or thereabouts, but even if he dropped over and Charlotte came to him after an acceptable time, he could never receive her with that encumbrance. He was not about to go through life with the sneers of the world forever with him. “He was their tutor, didn’t you know?” “Of course he married her for her money, the question is why did she marry him?” “She’ll come to her senses, she was lonely, he was there, she’ll leave him, what woman wouldn’t leave a man who couldn’t support her?” “Leech.” “Bootlicker.” “Toady.” “Sycophant.” “Parasite.” “Minion.” “Vassal.” “Fool.”

  Theo jerked his mind away from those words, looked at his wear alls, jerked his mind away from them. He looked at the poem he was attempting. “Charlotte” was really an unfortunate name from a poetic point of view—-the accent fell on the wrong syllable, “Charlotte.” If it were the other way, “Charlotte” his road would have been ever so much straighten “Camelot” or “polyglot” or “Aldershot” or “Forget-me-not” or—

  —or “tommy rot” Theo decided, scratching out the beginning, starting over. He dipped his pen in the inkwell, closed his eyes, tried ever so hard to come up with a fresh rhyme for “Aphrodite…”

  Half an hour before it ended for him, Nelson Stewart sat alone in his bedroom, trying to get his speech straight in his mind. He looked at his watch. Two o’clock straight up. No hurry at all.