The Decoy (16 page)

'What does Connie say?'

'Connie thinks I'm right.'

'The part demands it, huh?'

'You know I wouldn't ask unless it did.'

'I'll have to think about this.'

'Don't think too long,' he says. She hears an echo of her drama teacher.
Don't think. Act.

'All right,' she says. 'I'll do it.'

===OO=OOO=OO===

'You've asked her to do
what
?'

'To sleep with Vogler,' Frank says calmly. 'And she's fine with it. Aren't you, Claire?'

'More or less,' Claire says uncertainly. 'Though you did give me the impression that you'd already discussed it with Connie.'

'We discussed the general approach.'

'We did not!' Connie spits.

'Claire, would you, uh, give us a moment, please?'

She turns to go.

'Stay,' Connie says icily.

She stays.

'I want Claire to hear this,' Connie says. 'Let me take you back a few weeks, Frank. I undertook to gather some psychological material which would help to eliminate or implicate a suspect. Snakes and ladders, remember? You're talking about something quite different: a honey trap. And that's not only unethical, it's also highly dangerous.'

'No more dangerous than what she's already done.'

'Remember the previous girlfriend, Frank? The one who Christian played death games with? This isn't going to be some soft-focus Hollywood love scene. There's no saying what Stella's killer might do in a sexual situation.'

'Well, if he tries to kill her, we'll know he's guilty.' He glances at Claire. 'Don't worry. We'll have armed cops standing right outside. If he kicks up rough, we'll shoot him.'

'Shoot him? Dear God.' Dr Leichtman looks exasperated. 'This is insane.'

'Look, Connie. These people you study, they're not figures in some textbook. They're out there on the streets. If you want to catch them, you have to get your hands dirty.'

Claire says, 'Like blowing up a bomb.'

They both look at her. She says to Connie, 'You remember you compared them to unexploded bombs? Well, when they find a suspect package, they don't always open it up and snip the wires. Sometimes they just stick some more explosive under it and blow it up. I guess sometimes the crudest ways are the most effective.'

Connie says incredulously, 'You really don't think he did it, do you? That's why you're agreeing to this. You think he's everything he claims to be.'

Claire flushes. 'But have
you
ever thought that he might actually be innocent? Have you? What would an innocent man do, faced with someone who was demanding all this weird stuff? Wouldn't he go along with it, if he could? Wouldn't he
pretend
to be interested in all the things she's telling him she likes?'

'Why would he do that?' Dr Leichtman says.

Claire mutters, 'If… if he thought she was someone special, underneath. Someone who was really worth it. That's why he'd pretend.'

'Frank,' Connie warns.

'Yes?'

'You can't do this. This girl is getting way too involved.'

'Maybe,' Frank says wearily, 'but she's the only girl we've got.'

She walks the streets of New York for hours, not buying anything, just wandering. Frank's right: she has few inhibitions about the act itself. Years ago she learned to see her body as a thing apart, a lump of raw material, a
resource.

She thinks of actors who have gone far, far further than this, turning themselves into bloated monsters for the duration of a shooting schedule, or living in a wheelchair to play the part of a paraplegic. By comparison, what she's been asked to do is nothing very much.

If she has reservations about this next step, it isn't for her sake. It's for his. She's afraid that if she lets Christian make love to her, he'll become even more entangled in Dr Leichtman's web.

Connie's right: she's too involved, and in a way she never anticipated. Looking back, she isn't even sure when exactly it was that her allegiances became so muddled.

Yet if she pulls out now, she'll lose Christian completely, and that's something she doesn't want to do.

===OO=OOO=OO===

Mid-morning, she finds herself passing by the Drama Bookstore. She hasn't been in here for, well, only for a few weeks, but already her previous life seems to be receding into the past, as though those memories belong to a different person.

She goes in and wanders over to the scripts section. There are armchairs, and she drops into one with a sigh of relief. She's picked a copy of Albee's
The Zoo Story
from the shelves, and she's soon lost in the play, speaking the lines in her head.

Ten minutes go by. She's been dimly aware of other shoppers around her, but it's only now, alerted by something at the edge of her vision, that she raises her eyes and sees someone she recognizes.

He's been working his way along the shelves until he's standing quite near her, so she knows she's not mistaken. A thin, weasel-like face. For a moment she wonders if he's from her acting class. No, not that. A production in England? And then it comes to her. She's looking at the child rapist she saw being hypnotized by Connie.

She studies his face, making absolutely sure. Sensing her gaze, he turns and catches her looking at him. Smiles, says, 'Hi,' and turns back to the shelves. A second later, he glances back at her book.

'Great choice,' he says conversationally. 'Man, I love that play.'

She wonders why he doesn't recognize her, too, then remembers that he never had a chance to see her. She saw him on CCTV.

'I'm sorry,' she says quickly. 'For a second I thought I'd met you before.'

'Happens all the time,' he says.

He smoothes his hair back, for all the world like someone who thinks he's getting lucky. 'People see you on TV, they think you must live next to them,' he explains.

'Right.' He must mean his trial, she thinks.

'Maybe you caught me in the Apple computers spot,' he says.

She frowns. 'You're an
actor
?'

'Sure,' he smiles.

'You weren't ever in prison?'

'Hey!' he jokes. 'My ex-wife thinks I should be, but…' The words die on his lips. He looks at her again. 'Shit!' he says urgently and begins to run.

He runs out of the store, scattering the other shoppers, and she follows him as best she can. He's darting through the traffic, running for his life. She tries to catch up, but she's not as fit as he is, and there's no way she's fast enough to reach him.

A cop. There's a cop directing traffic at the intersection. Once more she plunges into the traffic, dodges trucks and tugs at his arm. 'That man's an escaped convict,' she gasps, pointing.

'What man?' the cop says, peering.

But there's no reply.

By the time the cop's turned around she's realized her mistake and has vanished into the crowd.

'Hey!' the cop calls. 'Hey, lady!'

Shrugging, he turns back to the traffic and blasts some more Manhattan pollution through his whistle.

===OO=OOO=OO===

It takes an hour in the drama bookstore, looking through
Spotlight,
the actors' register, before she finds his face.

Eric Sullivan. Minor parts in a couple of TV movies and a few commercials. But indisputably an actor, just as he said.

===OO=OOO=OO===

She takes a cab back to the office in Queens. She still has her pass, which gets her into Reception. The corridors are deserted, as usual.

She barges into Connie's office. The psychiatrist is in conference with her secretary and half a dozen men in suits.

Claire has time to notice that the secretary seems to be addressing the meeting from beside a monitor on which a tape of Claire herself is showing, before the presentation comes to a halt.

'Claire, this is a surprise,' Dr Leichtman says coolly. She reaches across and switches off the tape.

'What happened to the convict?'

'What convict?'

Claire slams the page she's ripped from
Spotlight
onto the table. 'The one I saw in here being hypnotized. The child molester. The one you said had a long way to go before he was released. The one I just met in the drama bookstore.'

For a moment even Connie seems lost for words. She says slowly, 'Claire, you of all people should understand the importance of good theatre. We thought it best that my authority be clearly established from the start.'

'What authority?' She looks around the room. 'Who are all these people?'

The man nearest to her gets to his feet and extends his hand. 'Paul Ashton, Claire, FBI. I have overall responsibility for Operation Magnet.'

'What's Operation Magnet?'

No-one answers. She looks from face to face. 'I thought Connie was running this.'

'We felt it best to restrict the number of people who have direct access to you, Claire. Dr Leichtman was chosen to be your handler—'

'My handler?' She shakes her head. 'I'm not a
dog.'

Connie says, 'These people are my colleagues, Claire. I called this meeting because I wanted their advice. This is, by its very nature, a collaborative operation. Operational decisions are the responsibility of the New York Police Department, who are operating under — how shall I put this? — short-term local pressures, which may have influenced their judgement. We were just discussing whether we can really allow this operation to go ahead under the… changed circumstances which Frank's suggesting.'

'It isn't up to you, though, is it? It's up to me.'

'We can't guarantee your safety,' the psychiatrist says gently.

'You never did.'

The woman she had known as Connie's secretary clears her throat. 'Uh, Claire, some of us take the view that this operation is becoming increasingly
random.
That proper controls are no longer in place.'

'Random?' Claire says. 'Random?' She shakes her head in disbelief. 'Christian and I aren't
data.
We're not some mould you've spawned in a test tube. These are our lives you're messing with.'

Connie says, 'This website the killer's set up. We think it's a very worrying development.'

'You don't say.'

'Listen to me, Claire. Every serial killer thinks of himself as a kind of performer, acting out a personal psychodrama. Like any performance, it's incomplete without an audience. That's why many serial killers pose their victims' bodies: they get a kick out of imagining the reaction of whoever finds them. Our killer's found a way of performing to a huge audience. It's going to be an immense thrill for him, and probably an addictive one. He's going to want to do it again.'

'All the more reason to catch him, then.'

'And all the more reason to be professional about how we do it.'

An echo in her head:
I'd committed the cardinal sin, you see. I'd been unprofessional.

'Fuck you,' she says. 'Fuck
you
.'

She slams the door on her way out. As she goes past Reception, she says to the girl behind the desk, 'Hey, honey. Who's your agent?'

'Eileen Ford,' the girl says automatically, then stops, confused.

Model, Actress, Whatever. New York is full of them.

===OO=OOO=OO===

She phones him at his apartment. When she hears the familiar soft, precise voice, she simply says, 'The answer's yes. Tonight.'

===OO=OOO=OO===

The man gets to the woman's home quite late. He's brought her flowers — lilies and tulips and great curling claws of twisted willow.

'Oh, thank you,' she says, taking them. 'They're beautiful. I'll get a vase.'

'Take off your clothes,' he says gently.

'I should get them into some water.' She starts to turn away, but he stops her with a touch.

'Take off your clothes. I want to see you naked.'

Meekly, she allows him to reach up and unthread the earrings from her ears, unfasten her necklace — Frank's necklace — and slip the first of her blouse buttons through its eyelet.

As he reaches into the small of her back for the fastening of her bra, she says self-consciously, 'They're too small.'

'They're perfect.' He cups each naked breast briefly, bending to take each nipple in turn between his teeth.

The button of her trousers cracks like a plate between his fingers. Her panties make a frail figure of eight around her ankles. She steps out of them. For a moment they tangle on her ankles, and she has to tread them off, as if she's miming walking upstairs. Then she's naked.

'So,' he says, looking at her.

'Will I do?' she jokes self-consciously.

'Don't joke,' he says. 'Don't ever joke about this.'

There's a feeling in her stomach, as though she's hurtling up a skyscraper in an elevator.

For a long moment he looks at her. Then she steps forward to unfasten his shirt. His chest is covered with sleek curls, like a bull's forehead.

When she frees his penis he gives a sigh, and for a moment she holds him softly, feeling the delicate, trembling beat of it, the blood-twitch. She's shivering, too, though whether from nerves or cold or something else entirely, she couldn't have said.

Then he starts to kiss her, gently at first, and something starts to melt inside her head, some barrier that gives way and floods her brain with pleasure. And then the melting sensation spreads from her head to the rest of her, and she gasps as he pulls her to the ground, letting him position her where he wants her, letting him seize her, letting him impale her on his cock, pulling up her knees so that he can gore her with it in sharp, savage thrusts, the way a horse's underbelly is gored by the horns of a bull. She cries out, breathless and dazed, and he pushes himself deeper inside her.

===OO=OOO=OO===

In the apartment below, Weeks rubs his hands together. 'Will you look at what she's doing now? How many copies of this you gonna make, Frank? I'll take a dozen for the boys.'

'Leave it, will you?' Frank says quietly.

'What, you don't want a souvenir?' He nudges Positano. 'I think maybe Frank wants this one all for himself. Something to while away the long nights. That right, Frank?'

Abruptly, Durban reaches forward and turns off the picture. 'I said we'd just use the mikes.'