Dante's Numbers (38 page)

S
HE WOKE BENEATH THE WRINKLED SHEETS OF an uncomfortable old double bed pushed hard against the corner of a cramped office that smelled of damp and sweat. As she tried to clear the fumes of the drug from her nose and throat, choking and nauseated, Maggie Flavier felt at her own body automatically, fingers trembling, mind reeling. She ached. She felt… strange.

Then she opened her eyes, knowing what she'd see. John Ferguson, whoever he was, sat opposite, his arms leaning easily on a chair back, watching her squirm as she tried to force herself upright on the stiff mattress. It took one look at herself to confirm what she suspected. She was now wearing the strange green dress and nothing else. He must have stripped her while she was unconscious, then put on the old silk garment.

She tried to move but something stopped her and it hurt. Rough brown rope, the kind construction people used, gripped both her wrists. He'd tied her to the iron bed-head, loose enough to let her move a little, but not much. Not enough to get off the bed entirely.

He had an expression on his face that suggested he knew the panic that was running through her head, and a part of him liked it. But there was some uncertainty there, too.

“I told you it was a nice dress.” He reached for a packet of cigarettes tucked into the sleeve of his T-shirt, took one out, the last one, lit it, scrunched up the pack, and threw it on the floor. The smoke rose into the blades of a rotating ceiling fan performing lazy turns above them.

“Who are you?” she asked. “Where the hell am I?”

“You had an engagement. Don't you remember? Booze and boyfriends getting to the old grey cells now?”

“There'll be people here soon. Just let me go now and I'll forget this ever happened.”

He closed his eyes for a moment as if he despaired of her.

“That's what I love about movie people. You're all so damned wrapped up in yourselves you never check stuff out, do you? Someone calls and says”—he put on a high-pitched girl's voice, like Shirley Temple on drugs—” ‘Miss Flavier. Oh,
Miss Flavier.
We love you so much you just
got
to come open our little noir festival in some flea-pit movie theatre you wouldn't normally'”—the real voice came
back—”‘deign
to set foot inside.' And you don't even think to check it out.”

He flicked a finger at the face of his watch.

“Why I say, I say…” She recognised the new voice. It was a cartoon character, fake Southern gentleman Foghorn Leghorn. “… I
say
, boy… festival folk don't turn up till four in the afternoon. Till then ain't nobody here but us chickens.”

He leaned forward. “I hope you enjoy my voices, Maggie. I've been working on them for a while. All my life, if I'm being candid.”

She hitched herself up on the bed, knees together beneath the sheets, taking the rope as far as it could go before the harsh hemp began to bite into her skin, and said, “Your voices are very good.”

“We have scarcely scratched the surface, dahling…” he groaned lasciviously.

She recognised this new look. It was one she'd known since she was a pretty little teenager. He was staring at her as if she were meat.

“Here's a question,” he continued. “You wake up stark naked except for that dress and you realise some guy you don't even know put it on you. At least there
is
a dress. Not like Madeleine, huh? There she was all
… bare…
in Scottie's apartment… nice apartment by the way, play your cards right and one day maybe you get to see it. Well?”

“Well what?”

“Why didn't Madeleine scream? Some complete stranger takes her home, puts her in his bed, takes her clothes off…”

She didn't rise to the bait. This flustered him.

“I mean he must have
looked
, didn't he? Maybe more than just looked. How would you know? If you were out cold like that?” A pink flush briefly stained his cheeks. “How would you know… If…if…he'd d-d-done the
real thing.
All the way. You must know, right? You'd feel something. I guess.”

She still didn't say anything.

“But what about if he just kind of…fiddled around?” He sniggered. “Got some touchy feely in there.” He shook his head, laughing out loud now. “You ever think of that? Jimmy Stewart perving all over Kim Novak while she was out like a light and him all hot fingers, runny, runny…” He was licking his hands, slobbering all over them. “…runny…runny. And she never even knows.”

He stiffened up on the chair and stopped laughing.

“Or does she?”

John Ferguson, which was, she now recalled, the real name of the character Jimmy Stewart played, leaned forward and screamed at her,
“Does she?”

“They were actors. None of it was real.”

His face, which had seemed so ordinary, wrinkled with hate and disgust.

“Now who's being naive, Miss Flavier? You of all people. Telling me a little of the story never makes its way into real life. Truly, I
am shocked.”
It was a new voice, that of a doctor or a prim schoolteacher.

Beside the bed there was some kind of storage cabinet. On it stood film cans lined up like books next to a small office desk with a phone on it, a cheap chair, and not much else. A dusty window almost opaque with cobwebs. A door opposite that led… she had no idea where. They had to be in the movie theatre. But even so, she could only picture one part of it in her head: the big white bell tower looming over Chestnut.

If she could just get to the door, fight him off long enough…

“What do you want?” she asked.

He shook his head as if that was a way of changing something, whichever character possessed him.

The voice altered again.

“You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me? You talkin' to
me?
Then who the hell else are you talking…you talking to
me?
Well, I'm the only one here. Who the fuck do you think you're talking to?”

Taxi Driver.

“I don't know who I'm talking to but I don't think it's John Ferguson,” she said quietly. “Or Travis Bickle.”

His head went from side to side in that crazy fashion again. He blubbed his fingers against his lips and made a stupid, childlike noise.

“Yeah. That's the problem.
You don't know, Maggie.
And you should. Because knowing means you get to answer the conundrum.”

“The conundrum?”

“You know.
The
conundrum.”

She stared at him, baffled. He sighed as if she were a stupid child.

“The fuck-you-kill-you conundrum,” he said, wearily.

Maggie Flavier's mind closed in on itself, refused to function.

“You do know what that is, don't you?” he said.

“Tell me,” she said softly.

“Fuck you
then
kill you? Fuck you
or
kill you.” He placed a finger on his lips, hamming a pensive pose. “Kill you
then
fuck you, even?” He giggled. “Though if I'm honest, the fuck-you part is a little moot. Let's face it: whatever way things work out, that's gonna happen.”

He leaned forward, looked very sincere, and added, “I've been waiting a very long time for that, Maggie. Keeping myself… pure. While you got banged by anything that grabbed your fancy.”

There had to be a weapon somewhere. Or something she could use. A kitchen knife. A ballpoint pen. Anything she could stab him with when he came close.

“Who…” she asked, very slowly, “…are…you?”

“Like you want to know.”

“I do.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

He shrugged, got up, walked over to the little desk, rudely swept away a pile of papers from the surface, and then scrabbled around until he found what he wanted. Then he came back, sat down again, eyed her once more. Maybe not quite so hungrily. Not quite.

“My name…my
real
name,” he said quietly, “is”—the voice became liltingly Irish now—”Michael Fitzwilliam. ‘Fitz' in the Gaelic sense, meaning bastard,
sans père
for you froggies, illegitimate, mongrel, wrong side of the blanket, born out of wedlock, or even love child, if you happen to be of a humorous or gullible disposition.”

She found it hard to breathe. She was remembering something from a very long time ago.

“Sure and the name has jogged a little memory now, I'm thinking.”

It was a terrible Irish accent and meant to be.

He had something in his hand. She didn't want to see it. But there was nowhere to run, and she felt hot and tired and weak beneath the old dress that was tight in the wrong places.

Michael Fitzwilliam—Mickey, hadn't they called him that?— threw a piece of fabric on the bed and she couldn't not look at it, couldn't take her eyes away.

Notre Dame des Victoires was on Pine Street, four blocks from the Brocklebank Apartments, though that wasn't why her mother chose the school. It was the only one in the city that offered daily classes in French conversation and writing.

She stared at the school badge, faded with age, pinched between his fingers. A white fleur-de-lis inside an oval shield with a red and blue crown at the centre. She thought of the name Mickey Fitzwilliam again. Now the memory had a face attached to it, that of a sad, lonely, unexceptional child, one who bragged constantly of his famous father yet always refused to name him.

“I'm so sorry,” she whispered.

His head lolled around his shoulders, his eyes rolled in their sockets, a bad comic actor's “come again?” routine.

“Is that it? ‘I'm so
sorry.'
Me, the poor little bastard you all laughed at, teased, and fucked with. No dad. No money. Just a drunk for a mom and a…”

She could hear it before he even spoke, rattling around her head from across the years.

“… a st-st-st-st-st-stutter…”

Mickey Fitzwilliam, who so wanted to be the same as the rest of them and never could. She'd made sure of that.

“I'm sorry,” she said again.

“You will be. You've got to be.
Really
sorry, Maggie. Not acting sorry. I know the difference. I had a director for an old man, and in between times when he was pretending I didn't exist, I got to watch him and learn. Got to know how he worked. Got to learn your
tricks
over the years. Can't fool Roberto Tonti's kid now, can you? Not some two-bit actress who got where she is by handing out a quick fuck on the casting couch to any wrinkled old producer who demanded one.”

“That is not
true!”
she screamed.

He sat there, smiling, unmoved. “No. It's not true. So what
really
got you where you are, Maggie? Do you remember?”

She'd heard that question a million times, from a million different showbiz hacks.

“A little luck,” she said automatically. “A little bit of talent.”

Mickey Fitzwilliam gazed at her, then shook his head. “You've got to remember better than that, Maggie.”

He reached down beneath the foot of the bed and his hands came back up with a knife in them. The blade was long and clean and shiny.

“It's what the fuck-you-kill-you conundrum hangs on.”

I
T WAS SATURDAY MORNING, SHOPPERS' HELL. The traffic started bad and got worse. He was still ten minutes from the theatre when it finally ground to a halt. Up ahead, through the snarl of cars, he heard the wail of a siren and his heart fell. Then a couple of very shiny red fire engines battled their way into the angry mass of stalled machines blocking the breadth of Chestnut. Costa pulled the Dodge over to the side of the road and climbed out.

People were coming out of stores and offices to stand in the street to gawk. There was a cop there, in uniform, looking bored.

Costa caught his attention.

“Can you tell me what's going on?”

“Fire down at Fort Mason. Stupid contractors lousing up or something. Or maybe the insurance. That place always was bad news.”

A fire. Not an emergency call to the little theatre further down the road on Chestnut. Maybe he had still had time.

“Is the street going to be blocked for long?”

The cop grimaced. “Sadly, my psychic powers just fail me there, sir. You can't dump your vehicle like that, by the way. You'll have to wait for this train wreck to clear just like everyone else.”

He'd put on Gerald Kelly's leather shoulder holster. The black handgun sat snug against his chest. If this cop had been any good, he'd have seen it already.

“Thank you, Officer,” Costa said meekly, and went back to sit behind the wheel of the Dodge.

When the stocky blue uniform crossed the road, wending his way through the choked cars and buses, he climbed out again, looked down the street, past the idle bystanders clustered on the sidewalk. In the distance, crowds of shoppers milled on the sidewalk outside the stores, wandering into the road, darting in between stalled cars the way Romans did in the Corso on a Saturday afternoon.

He took one look at them, saw the cop was returning, looking angrily at Catherine Bianchi's abandoned Dodge, and then began to move, falling into a steady pace as he wound through the growing throng of bodies, on into the Marina.