Carrion Comfort (101 page)

The sunset Monday night was obscured by clouds and Barent announced that the barometer was dropping rapidly as a storm approached from the southeast. At 10:30
P.M.
they adjourned from the dinner table, left bodyguards and aides behind, and took the teak-lined private elevator to the Game Room.

Behind locked doors, the single hanging light shone on the great green table and turned the five faces to shadowed masks. Through the long window, lightning was visible as it rippled along the horizon. Barent had ordered the compound and garden floodlights switched off so as not to compete with the storm’s splendor, and now all eyes were on the lightning in the lull before Barent said, “The starshell will be fired in thirty seconds. At its signal we will commence.”

Four of them closed their eyes, faces tense with expectation. Harod turned to watch the white flashes to the southeast show silhouettes of trees along Live Oak Lane and illuminate the interiors of the blue-black storm clouds themselves.

He had no idea what would happen when they removed the bars holding the Jew named Saul. Harod had no intention of touching the man’s mind and without a surrogate he would be out of touch with the night’s events. It suited Harod perfectly. What ever was going on, whoever was stacking the proverbial deck by bringing in the Jew, however they planned to use their advantage, it meant very little to Tony Harod. He knew that he would have nothing to do with the events of the next six hours, that this was one game he would sit out completely. Of that he was sure.

Harod never had been so wrong.

S
aul had been imprisoned in the tiny cell for more than twenty-four hours when a mechanism in the stone walls whined and the steel bars slid up. For a second he did not know what to do.

He had been strangely at ease with his imprisonment, almost content, as if forty superfluous years had slipped away, returning him to the essential moments of his life. For twenty hours he lay in the cold, stone niche and thought about life, remembering in complete detail the evening walks with Natalie near the farm at Caesarea, the sunlight on the sand and bricks and the lazy green swells from the Mediterranean. He remembered conversations and laughter, confidences and tears, and when he slept the dreams took him immediately, carrying him to other affirmations of life in the face of brutal abnegations.

Guards slipped food through the slot twice a day and Saul ate it. The low plastic trays were filled with dehydrated freeze-dried stews, meat, and noodles. Astronaut food. Saul did not wonder at the irony of the space shuttle meals in a seventeenth-century slave pen; he ate everything, drank the water, and continued with his exercises to keep his muscles from cramping, his body from growing too chilled.

His one great concern was for Natalie. Each had known for months what they would have to do and how alone they would have to be to do it, but the actual parting had held the flavor of finality. Saul thought of the sunlight on his father’s back, Josef’s arm over his father’s shoulder.

Saul lay in the darkness that smelled of four centuries of fear and he thought about courage. He thought about the Africans and American natives that had lain in these very stone cages, smelling— as he was smelling— the scent of human hopelessness, not knowing that they would prevail, their descendents demanding the light and freedom and dignity denied those who awaited death or chains there. He closed his eyes and immediately saw the cattle cars rolling into Sobibor, the emaciated bodies intertwined, cold corpses huddling for a warmth that could not be found, but even through that image of frozen flesh and accusing eyes he also saw the young Sabra of the kibbutzim going out for morning work in the orchards or arming themselves for evening perimeter patrol, their eyes stern and confident, too confident perhaps, but alive, so very alive: their very existence an answer to the questioning eyes of the cattle car corpses being pried from one another on a frost-lined siding in 1944.

Saul worried about Natalie and was afraid for himself, terribly afraid, with the testes-raising fear of blades approaching the eyes and cold steel in the mouth, but he recognized the fear and welcomed it back— knowing very well that it had never left— and let it flow through him and past him rather than over him. A thousand times he rehearsed what he wanted to do and what might stop him. He reviewed his options. He considered courses of action should Natalie keep the old woman on track precisely as planned and other actions in the more probable event that Melanie Fuller would act as unpredictably as her madness predicted. If Natalie died, he would go ahead. If nothing went as planned, he would go ahead. If there was no hope at all, he would go ahead.

Saul lay in the dark crack in cold stone and thought about life and contemplated death, his own and others’. He reviewed every possible contingency and then invented more.

And even then, when the bars slid up and out of sight and the four others stirred and slid from their recesses and walked toward the distant opening, Saul Laski, for an eternal minute, did not know what to do.

Then he slid from his own niche and stood. The stone floor was cold under his bare feet. The thing that had been Constance Sewell stared up at him through steel bars and a veil of tangled hair.

Saul hurried to follow the others toward the doorway into darkness. Tony Harod sat in the Game Room and stared from under lowered lids at the faces of the four men awaiting the beginning of the night’s competition. Barent’s face was calm and composed, his fingers steepled beneath his lower lip, a slight smile moving the muscles at the corners of his mouth. Kepler’s head tilted back as he frowned with the effort of concentration. Jimmy Wayne Sutter sat forward, arms on the green baize of the table, sweat on his furrowed forehead and long upper lip. Willi sat back so deeply in his chair that the light touched only brow, sharp cheeks, and the blade of his nose. Still, Harod had the strong impression that Willi’s eyes were open, staring at him.

Harod himself felt panic rise in him as he realized the absurdity of his position; there was no way he could know what was going on. He did not wish to even try to touch the Jew-surrogate’s consciousness and knew that even if he did try, whoever was controlling the Jew would not allow him access. Harod scanned the faces a final time. Who could be handling two surrogates at once? Logic dictated that it had to be Willi— both motive and the extent of the old man’s ability suggested it— but then why the ruse in the garden? Harod was confused and frightened. It was little consolation at that moment that Maria Chen was waiting downstairs or that she had smuggled her gun onto the boat waiting at the island’s dock should there be need for a sudden departure.

“What the goddamn hell!” shouted Joseph Kepler. All four men had opened their eyes and were staring at Harod.

Willi leaned forward into the light, his face a reddened mask of fury.

“What are you doing, Tony?” The cold glare swept over the other men. “Or
is
it Tony? Is this the way you play your games of honor?”

“Wait! Wait!” cried Sutter, his eyes closed again. “Look. He’s running. We can . . . all of us together . . .”

Barent’s eyes had snapped open like a predator waking for the night’s stalk. “Of course,” he said softly, fingers still steepled. “Laski, the psychiatrist. I should have noticed earlier. The lack of a beard fooled me. Whoever thought of this has a very poor sense of what constitutes a prank.”

“Prank my ass,” said Kepler, his eyes tightly shut again. “Get him.” Barent shook his head. “No, gentlemen, because of the irregularities here, to night’s competition is canceled. The security forces will bring Laski in.”

“
Nein
!” snapped Willi. “He is
mine.
”

Barent was still smiling as he swiveled to face Willi. “Yes, he may well be yours. We shall see. In the meantime, I have already pressed the button that notifies Security. They monitor the opening of the game and will know whom to seek. You may aid in the capture if you wish, Herr Borden, but see to it that the psychiatrist does not die before interrogation.”

Willi made a sound amazingly like a snarl and closed his eyes. Barent turned his deadly placid gaze toward Harod.

Saul had followed the other four surrogates up the ramp and outside into a tropical night thick with humidity and the oppressive threat of a storm. No stars were visible but lightning flashes showed trees and a cleared area north of the Security Zone. He stumbled once, falling to his knees, but rising quickly and moving forward. There was a huge pentagram embla-zoned there and the other surrogates already had taken their places at the points of the star.

Saul debated making a break for it then, but two guards with M-16s and nightscopes were visible across the Security Zone each time the lightning flashed. He would wait. Saul had to take the empty circle between Jensen Luhar and a tall, thin young man with long hair. Somehow it seemed appropriate that all of them were naked. Saul was the only one of the five who was not in superb physical condition.

Jensen Luhar’s head swiveled as if it was on a turntable. “If you can hear me, my little pawn,” it said in German, “I will say goodbye. I do not kill you in anger. It will be quick.” Luhar’s head turned back to the sky, watching— as were the others— for some sort of signal. The flashes of lightning etched the black man’s powerful profile in liquid silver.

Saul pivoted, cocked his arm, and hurled the palm-size stone he had picked up when he had deliberately fallen to his knees a minute before. The rock caught Luhar just behind his left ear and the big man went down at once. Saul turned and ran. He was through the bushes and into the tropical forest before the other three surrogates had done anything but turn to watch him go. There were no shots.

His first five minutes of running were sheer, mindless flight, with pine needles and fallen palmetto fronds pricking his bare feet, branches and undergrowth raking at his ribs, and his breath rasping in his throat. Then he controlled himself to the point of pausing, crouching at the fringes of a small canebrake and listening. To his left he could hear the lap of waves and a more distant sound of powerful outboard motors. A strange rasping could have been the sound of electric bullhorns bleating across the water, but the words were indistinct.

Saul closed his eyes and tried to picture the maps and photo montage of the island, remembering the many hours in the motel kitchenette with Natalie. It was more than four miles— almost five— to the northern tip of the island. He knew that the forest he was in would soon condense to real jungle, opening slightly to saltwater marshes a mile below the northern end but closing in again to swamp and jungle before the beach could be reached. The only structures along the way would be the ruins of the slave hospital, the overgrown foundations of the Dubose Plantation near the rocky point along the eastern coast, and the tumbled headstones of the old slave cemetery.

Saul glanced at the canebrake during the white flash from the approaching storm and felt an overwhelming urge to hide in there, simply to crawl in and crouch and curl in a fetal position and become invisible. He knew that he would only die sooner if he did so. The monsters in the Manse— three of them at least— had spent years stalking each other through these few miles of jungle. Under interrogation at the safe house, Harod had told Saul about the “Easter egg hunt” on the last night when the Island Club released all of the unused surrogates— a dozen or more naked and helpless men and women— and then used their own favorite surrogates to hunt them with knives and handguns. Barent, Kepler, and Sutter would know every hiding place, and Saul could not get over the feeling that Willi could sense his whereabouts. He expected the old man’s foul touch in his mind at any moment, knowing that such a seizure at these distances would mean total failure of all of his plans, months of wasted work, a lifetime of his own dreams sacrificed for nothing.

Saul knew that his only chance was in flight to the north. He moved from the canebrake and ran as the approaching storm flashed and crashed behind him.

“There,” said Barent, pointing to the pale, naked figure stumbling past the panning range of a screen in the fifth row of monitors. “There’s no doubt it is the psychiatrist, Laski.”

Sutter sipped at a tall bourbon and crossed his legs in the cushioned comfort of one of the Monitor Room’s deep couches. “There never was any doubt,” he said. “The question is— who introduced him into the game and why?”

The other three stared at Willi, but the old man was watching a monitor in the first row where security guards were carrying away the still-unconscious form of Jensen Luhar. The three surrogates had been sent into the jungle after Laski. Willi turned toward them with a thin smile. “It would have been stupid for me to have inserted the Jew,” he said. “I do not do stupid things.”

C. Arnold Barent stepped away from the monitors and folded his arms. “Why stupid, William?”

Willi scratched at his cheek. “You all associate the Jew with me even though it was
you
, Herr Barent, who most recently conditioned him and, alone among us, have nothing to fear from him.”

Barent blinked but said nothing. “If I were to bring a— how do you say it?— a ringer into your games, why would I not have brought one unknown to you all? And one in much better physical condition?” Willi smiled and shook his head. “No, you need only to think a minute to realize how absurd it would be for me to do this. I do not do stupid things and you would be stupid to think I would.”

Barent looked at Harod. “Tony, do you still want to hold to your story of an abduction and blackmail?”

Harod slumped in the low couch and chewed on his knuckle. He had told the truth because he suspected that they were ready to turn on him and he wanted to divert their suspicions. Now they thought he was a liar and he had succeeded only in relieving some of their natural fear of Willi’s involvement. “I don’t
know
who’s fucking responsible,” snapped Harod, “but somebody here’s playing with this shit. What would I have to gain doing it?”

“What indeed?” said Barent in a conversational tone. “I think it’s a diversion of some sort,” gritted Kepler, glancing toward Willi with obvious tension.

It was the Reverend Jimmy Wayne Sutter who laughed. “A diversion from what?” he asked, chuckling. “The island is sealed from the outside world. No one is allowed on this end of the island except Brother C’s personal security force, and they are all Neutrals. I have no doubt that at the first sign of irregularity in the game, all of our aides were . . . ah . . . escorted to their rooms.”

Harod looked up in alarm, but Barent only continued smiling. Harod realized how foolish it had been of him to hope that Maria Chen might be able to help in a crisis.

“Diversion from what?” continued Sutter. “It would seem to this poor old backwoods minister to be a poor excuse for a diversion.”

“Well,
somebody’s
controlling him,” snapped Kepler. “Perhaps not,” Willi said softly.

All heads turned toward him. “My little Jew has been amazingly per sis-tent over the years,” said Willi. “Imagine my surprise when I discovered him in Charleston seven months ago.”

Barent’s smile had disappeared. “Wilhelm, you are contending that this . . . man . . . came here of his own free will?”

“
Ja.
” Willi smiled. “My pawn from the old days still follows me.” Kepler was livid. “So you admit that you’re the reason he’s here, even if he came on his own to find you.”

“Not at all,” Willi said affably. “It was your genius that had the Jew’s family killed in Virginia.”