Carrion Comfort (98 page)

The ex-president left on Saturday after the midday luau and by seven
P.M.
the only guests left were middle-and low-level hangers on, lean and hungry Cassiuses and Iagos in sharkskin suits and Ralph Lauren denim. Harod thought it was a good time to go back to the mainland.

“The Hunt starts tomorrow,” said Sutter. “You don’t want to miss the festivities.”

“I don’t want to miss Willi’s arrival,” said Harod. “Is Barent sure that he’s still coming?”

“Before sunset,” said Sutter. “That was the final word. Joseph is being coy about his lines of communication to Mr. Borden. Perhaps too coy. I believe Brother Christian is growing annoyed.”

“That’s Kepler’s problem,” said Harod. He stepped from the dock onto the deck of the long cabin cruiser.

“Are you sure you need to pick up these extra surrogates?” asked the Reverend Sutter. “We have plenty in the common pool. All young, strong, healthy. Most came from my rehabilitation center for runaways. There are even enough women for you to choose from, Anthony.”

“I want a couple of my own,” said Harod. “I’ll be back late to night. Early morning at the latest.”

“Good,” said Sutter and there was a strange glint in his eye. “I wouldn’t want you to miss anything. This may prove to be an exceptional year.”

Harod nodded good-bye and the launch roared to life and left the harbor slowly, building to speed once beyond the breakwater. Barent’s yacht was the last large ship left except for the picket ships and departing destroyer. As always, a speedboat with armed guards approached, visually confirmed Harod’s identity, and followed them as they covered the last few hundred yards to the yacht. Maria Chen was waiting by the stern staircase, overnight bag in hand.

The night crossing to the coast was much smoother than the trip out. Harod had requested a car and a small Mercedes was waiting behind Barent’s boat house, courtesy of the Heritage West Foundation.

Harod drove, taking Highway 17 to South Newport and taking I-95 the last thirty miles into Savannah.

“Why Savannah?” asked Maria Chen. “They didn’t say. The guy on the phone just told me where to park— near a canal on the outskirts of town.”

“And you think it was the same man who kidnapped you?”

“Yeah,” said Harod. “I’m sure of it. Same accent.”

“Do you still think it’s Willi’s doing?” asked Maria Chen.

Harod drove a minute in silence. “Yeah,” he said at last, “that’s the only thing that makes sense. Barent and the others already have the means to get preconditioned people into the surrogate pool if that’s what they want. Willi needs an edge.”

“And you’re willing to go along with it? You still feel loyalty toward Willi Borden?”

“Fuck loyalty,” said Harod. “Barent sent Haines into my house . . . beating you up . . . just to pull my chain tighter. Nobody treats me that way. If this is Willi’s long shot, then what the fuck. Let him go for it.”

“Couldn’t it be dangerous?”

“The surrogates you mean?” said Harod. “I don’t see how. We’ll make sure they’re not armed and once they get on the island there’s not a chance in hell they could create a problem. Even the winner of that fucking fiveday splatter Olympics ends up six feet under mangrove roots in an old slave cemetery up the island somewhere.”

“So what is Willi trying to do?” she asked. “Beats the shit out of me,” said Harod, exiting at the I-16 interchange. “All we have to do is watch and stay alive. Which reminds me— you bring the Browning?”

Maria Chen removed the automatic from her purse and handed it to him. Driving with one hand, Harod slid the ammunition clip from the handle, checked it, and pressed it back in against his thigh. He tucked it into his waistband, pulling his loose Hawaiian shirt over it.

“I hate guns,” Maria Chen stated flatly. “I do too,” said Harod. “But there are people I hate more, and one of them’s that bastard with the ski mask and the Polack accent. If he’s the surrogate Willi’s going to send with me to the island, it’ll be everything I can do to keep from blowing his brains out before we start.”

“Willi would not be pleased,” said Maria Chen.

Harod nodded, turning off the side road that had led from the highway to an abandoned boat launch area along an overgrown section of the Savannah & Ogeechee Canal. A car was waiting, a station wagon. Harod parked sixty feet away as prearranged and blinked his headlights. A man and a woman got out of the car and walked slowly toward them.

“I’m tired of worrying about what’ll please Willi or please Barent or please fucking anybody,” Harod said through gritted teeth. He stepped out of the car and pulled the automatic loose. Maria Chen opened her overnight bag and removed the chains and padlocks. When the man and woman were twenty feet away, hands still empty, Harod leaned toward Maria Chen and grinned. “It’s time they all began worrying about how to please Tony Harod,” he said and raised the pistol, aiming it steadily and precisely at the head of the man with the short beard and long graying hair over the ears. The man stopped, stared at the muzzle of Harod’s pistol, and adjusted his glasses with his index finger.

S
aul Laski felt as if he had been through it all before.

It was after midnight when the boat bumped against the concrete dock and Tony Harod herded both Saul and Miss Sewell off. They stood on the dock, Harod no longer showing the weapon since these were two catspaws he was supposed to be controlling. Two electric golf carts glided up and Harod said to a man in a blazer and slacks, “Take these two to the surrogate pens.”

Saul and Miss Sewell sat passively in the middle seat of the cart as a man with an automatic rifle stood behind them. Saul glanced at the woman next to him; her face showed no emotion or interest. She wore no makeup, her hair was clipped back, and her inexpensive print dress hung loosely on her. As they stopped at a checkpoint on the south end of the security zone and then rolled forward through a no-man’s-land paved with crushed shells, Saul wondered what, if anything, was being relayed to Natalie via Melanie Fuller’s six-year-old familiar.

The concrete installation beyond the north fence of the security zone was awash with bright lights. Ten other surrogates had just arrived and Saul and Miss Sewell joined them in a concrete courtyard the size of a basketball court surrounded by high barbed wire fences.

There were no blue blazers and gray slacks on this side of the security zone. Men in green coveralls and black nylon baseball caps stood cradling automatic weapons. From Cohen’s notes, Saul was sure that these were members of Barent’s private security force, and from interrogating Harod two months earlier, he was equally sure that every one of them had been conditioned to some extent by their master.

A tall man with a holstered sidearm stepped forward and said, “Awright, people,
strip
!”

The dozen prisoners, mostly young men although Saul could see two women— little more than girls— near the forefront, looked at each other dully. All of them seemed drugged or in shock. Saul knew the look. He had seen it approaching the Pit at Chelmno and leaving the trains at Sobibor. He and Miss Sewell began discarding their clothing while most of the others stood where they were and did nothing.

“I said
strip
!” shouted the man with the sidearm and another guard with a rifle stepped forward and clubbed the nearest prisoner, a boy of eighteen or nineteen with thick glasses and an overbite. The boy pitched forward without a word, his face striking the concrete. Saul could clearly hear his teeth breaking. The nine other young people began taking off their clothes.

Miss Sewell finished first. Saul noticed that her body looked younger and smoother than her face except for a livid appendectomy scar.

They put the prisoners into lines without segregating men from women and marched them down a long concrete ramp into the earth. Out of the corner of his eye, Saul caught glimpses of doors leading to tiled corridors running off from this central subterranean avenue. Security men in cover-alls came to doorways to watch as the surrogates were marched by and once the two lines had to press against the walls as a convoy of four Jeeps came by, filling the tunnel with noise and carbon monoxide fumes. Saul wondered if the entire island was honeycombed with security tunnels.

They were marched into a bare, brightly lighted room where men in white coats and surgical gloves looked in mouths, anuses, and the women’s vaginas. One of the young women began sobbing until she was slapped into silence by a guard.

Saul felt strangely calm even as he wondered where these other surrogates had come from, if they had been Used yet, and how his own behavior might visibly differ from theirs. From the examination room they were led down a long, narrow hall seemingly cut from the stone of the island itself. The dripping walls were painted white and small, hemispherical niches in the rock held naked, silent forms.

As the line stopped for Miss Sewell to enter her hole in the rock, Saul realized that full-size cells were not required because no one would be kept on the island longer than a week. Then it was Saul’s turn.

The niches were staggered at different heights, tiers of crescent-shaped cracks with steel bars set in white stone, and Saul’s niche was four feet above the ground. He rolled into it. The stone was cool against his flesh, the ledge just long enough to lie full length. A gutter and foul-smelling hole carved into the rear of the shelf showed him where he would relieve himself. The bars slid hydraulically from the roof of the niche into deep holes in the shelf, with the exception of a slit that left a two-inch gap where food trays must be inserted.

Saul lay on his back and stared at the stone fifteen inches from his face. Somewhere down the corridor a man began to cry out in a ragged voice. There were footsteps and the sounds of blows on metal and flesh, and silence returned. Saul felt calm. He was committed. In a strangely intimate way, he felt closer to his family— his parents, Josef, Stefa— than he had for decades.

Saul felt his eyes closing and he forced them open, rubbed them, and set his glasses back in place. Strange they let him keep his glasses. Saul tried to remember if they had let the naked prisoners wear their glasses to the Pit at Chelmno. No. He remembered being part of a detail that shoveled hundreds of glasses, thousands of glasses, great heaps of glasses, from a room onto a crude conveyor belt where other prisoners separated the glass from the metal, the precious metals from steel. Nothing was wasted in the Reich. Only people.

He forced his eyes open, pinched his cheeks. The stone was hard, but he knew he could slide into sleep with little trouble. Slide into dreams. He had not truly slept for three weeks as each night the onset of dream state, rapid eye movement, triggered the posthypnotic suggestions which now formed his dreams. He had not needed the stimulus of the bell for eight nights now. REM alone triggered the dreams.

Were they dreams or memories? Saul no longer knew. The dream-memories had become reality. His days with Natalie, preparing, planning, and plotting were dreams. That is why he felt so calm. The dark, the cold corridor, the naked prisoners, the cell— all this was much closer to his dream-reality, the unrelenting, self-induced memories of the camps, than were the hot summer days in Charleston watching Natalie and the child Justin. Natalie and the dead thing that looked like a child . . .

Saul tried to think of Natalie. He squeezed his eyes shut tightly until they filled with tears, opened them wide, and thought of Natalie.

It was two days earlier, three now, a Thursday, when Natalie had come up with the solution. “Saul,” she cried, setting down the maps and turning toward him as they sat at the small table in the motel kitchenette, “we
don’t
have to do this alone. We
can
have somebody at the extraction while someone else watches in Charleston!” Behind her, blown-up photographs of Dolmann Island covered one wall of the kitchen in a grainy mosaic.

Saul had shaken his head, too stupid with fatigue to respond to her enthusiasm. “How? They’re all gone, Natalie. All dead. Rob, Aaron, Cohen. Meeks will be flying the plane.”

“No—someone!” she said and slapped her forehead with the heel of her hand. “All these weeks I’ve been thinking there’s
someone
— someone with a vested interest. And I can get them tomorrow. I won’t be seeing Melanie until our Saturday morning session at the park.”

She told him then, and eighteen hours later he watched as she disem-barked from the flight from Philadelphia, a black man on either side of her. Jackson looked older than he had just six months earlier, his balding head gleaming under the bright terminal lights, his face set in lines that declared a final, tacit state of neutrality with the world. The youth to Natalie’s right might have been an antimatter opposite of Jackson’s: tall, skinny, loose limbed, with a face so fluid that expressions and reactions flowed across it like light on a mercurial surface. The young man’s high, loud laughter echoed in the terminal corridor and caused heads to turn. Saul remembered that the man’s nickname was Catfish.

Later, during the drive into Charleston, Jackson said, “Laski you sure this’s Marvin we talking about?”

“It’s Marvin,” said Saul. “But he’s . . . different.”

“Voodoo Lady got him good?” asked Catfish. He was fiddling with the car radio, trying to find a good station.

“Yes,” said Saul, still not believing that he was talking to anyone besides Natalie about this. “But there may be a chance we can recover him . . . rescue him.”

“Yeah, man, we going to do that,” said Catfish. “One word to our main men and Soul Brickyard’ll be all over this cracker city like a rubber on a trick’s dick, you know?”

“No,” said Saul, “that won’t work. Natalie must have told you why.”

“She told us,” said Jackson. “But what do you say, Laski? How long do we wait?”

“Two weeks,” said Saul. “One way or the other it’ll be all over in two weeks.”

“Two weeks you got,” said Jackson. “Then we’ll do what ever we have to do to get Marvin back, whether your part is finished or not.”

“It will be finished,” said Saul. He looked at the big man sitting in the backseat. “Jackson, I don’t know whether that’s your first or last name.”

“Last,” said Jackson. “I gave up my first name when I came back from Nam. Didn’t have any use for it anymore.”

“My name ain’t really Catfish, neither, Laski,” said Catfish. “It Clarence Arthur Theodore Varsh.” He shook Saul’s proferred hand. “But, hey, man,” he said with a grin, “being ’cause you be a friend of Natalie and all, you can call me Mr. Varsh.”

The last day before leaving had been the worst. Saul had been sure that nothing would work— the old lady would not come through with her part of the bargain or had not been capable of the conditioning she said she had been carrying out for three weeks in May as Justin and Natalie had stared across the river through binoculars. Or Cohen had been mistaken in his information— or had been correct, but the plans had been changed in the intervening months. Or Tony Harod would not respond to the phone call in early June— or would tell the others once on the island— or would not tell them, but would kill Saul and whomever Melanie Fuller sent as soon as they were out of sight of land. Or he would deliver Saul to the island and then Melanie Fuller would choose that time to turn on Natalie, slaughtering her while Saul was locked away, awaiting his own death.

Then Saturday afternoon arrived and they were driving south to Savannah, getting set in the parking area near the canal even before twilight had faded. Natalie and Jackson hid themselves in underbrush sixty yards to the north, Natalie with the rifle they had pulled from the deputy’s vehicle in California and kept separate when they packed away the M-16 and most of the C-4 explosive.

Catfish, Saul, and the thing Justin had referred to as Miss Sewell waited, the two men occasionally drinking coffee from a metal Thermos.

Once the woman’s head had swiveled like the head of a ventriloquist’s dummy, she stared straight at Saul, and said, “I don’t know you.”

Saul said nothing, staring back impassively, trying to imagine the mind behind so many years of mindless violence. Miss Sewell had closed her eyes with the mechanical abruptness of a clockwork owl. No one had spoken again until Tony Harod arrived shortly before midnight.

Saul had thought for a second that the diminutive producer was going to shoot during the long seconds he stood aiming the pistol at Saul’s face. Tendons had stood out on Harod’s throat and Saul could see the trigger finger growing white from tension. Saul had been frightened then, but it was a clean, controllable fear— nothing like the anxiety of the past week or the raging, debilitating fear of the Pit and the hopelessness of his nightly dreams. What ever happened next, Saul had
chosen
to be there.

In the end, Harod had contented himself with cursing Saul and striking him twice across the face, the second backhanded blow laying open a shallow cut on Saul’s right cheek. Saul had not spoken or resisted and Miss Sewell remained equally impassive. Natalie had orders to fire from ambush only if Harod actually shot Saul or Used another to assault him with intent to kill.

Saul and Miss Sewell were put in the backseat of the Mercedes, thin chains wrapped repeatedly around their legs and wrists. Harod’s Eurasian secretary— Saul knew from Harrington’s and Cohen’s reports that her name was Maria Chen— was efficient but careful not to shut off circulation as she pulled the chains tight and set the small locks in place. Saul looked at her quizzically, wondering what had brought her here, what motivated her. He suspected that this had always been the downfall of his people, the eternal Jewish quest for understanding, motivation, and the
reasons
for things, endless Talmudic debates over nuance even as their shallow and efficient enemies chained them securely and carried them off to the ovens; their murderers never worried about the questions of means versus ends or morality as long as the trains ran on time and the paperwork was properly done.

Saul Laski jerked awake just before his slide into the REM state triggered his dreams. He had entered a hundred of the biographies Simon Wiesenthal had provided into the catalog of hypnotically induced personas, but only a dozen kept recurring in the dreams he had conditioned himself to have. He did not dream their faces— despite his hours staring at photographs in Yad Veshem and Lohame HaGeta’ot— because he was looking through their eyes, but the landscapes of their lives, dormitories and work-houses, barbed wire and staring faces, had again become the true landscape of Saul Laski’s existence. He realized, as he lay in the stone niche under the rock of Dolmann Island, that he had never really left the landscape of the death camp. In truth, it was the only country of which he was a true citizen.

He knew then, as he teetered on the brink of sleep, whose dreams would claim him that night: Shalom Krzaczek, a man whose face and life he had memorized but which were lost to him now that the details had become induced reality, data lost in the haze of true memories. Saul had never been to the Warsaw Ghetto, but he remembered it nightly now— the line of refugees fleeing the fires through the sewers, excrement tumbling onto them as they crawled through black and narrowing pipes, one at a time, cursing and praying that no one ahead of them would die and block their way as scores of panicked men and women scraped and crawled and forced their way into the Aryan sewers, beyond the wall and the wire and lines of Panzers; Krzaczek leading his nine-year-old grandson Leon through the Aryan sewers where Aryan excrement rained down on them and floated around them as the water rose, choking them, drowning them, then light ahead, and Krzaczek was leading no one, crawling alone into the Aryan sunlight, but turning then, turning, forcing his body back into that narrow, stinking hole after fourteen days in the dark sewers. Going back to find Leon.