“I know,” Sylvie answered, if not quite believing it was true. They loved her, yes, but the whole world was woeful, all the places they had been were so bereft, that no one could blame them for having to care for it equally or perhaps even more than for their own child. She should be more wise and serious and realize again the necessary scale of their devotions. How capacious their hearts truly needed to be. For only such would lead them now as it had before, as long as they were steadfast, the force of benevolence lighting the way. And wasn’t there some hope? The Harrises were injured, yes, but had walked away mostly under their own power; she and her parents were untouched; and while Benjamin was in grave danger, he must finally see now that there was no other way, he had witnessed the vile consequences and would relent, tell the officer whatever he wished to know.
The sudden report of footfalls made her mother grip Sylvie’s side with an urgent, pincering force. “Careful now,” she whispered in her ear. “Stay quiet.”
Before Sylvie could answer the officer entered. Three soldiers followed, pushing in Benjamin Li before them. He was still shackled. As far as she could tell he hadn’t been harmed further, and was even cleaned up, his swollen face swabbed clear of dried blood. She tried to catch his eye but he kept his head bowed, as though he were still deeply ashamed.
“It’s all right, Benjamin,” she cried out, not able to help herself, “we’ll be fine now!”
At that moment the officer’s lightless eyes met hers.
“Still this man refuses to answer my questions,” the officer said in the plainest, uninflected voice. “So it has led us to this.”
He spoke a few words gruffly in Japanese and there was an odd pause and then without warning one of the soldiers grabbed her mother by the hair, wrenching her up on her feet. A low, feral sound came from her father and he hurled himself at the soldier’s face with both hands. Her mother screamed, “Francis!” but it was too late; another soldier lunged at him from behind with his rifle, a dull glint of metal flashing in the lamplight. Her father groaned and fell. Sylvie scrambled to him, not sure where he was injured; then she felt a warmth emanating from his side. Her hand came away damp; he’d been stabbed just below the ribs. In the lamplight the blood stained her fingers dark, almost black. He was grimacing terribly, unable to speak, and he pulled her down to him. His face frightened her and she resisted but then she realized what he was doing, what he desperately did not want her to see.
The two soldiers were pushing her mother about, pulling off and tearing at her clothes as though they were flaying her, piece by piece, and Sylvie could hear her mother gasping, the rents of the fabric, the taunts of the soldiers.
The officer had forced up Benjamin Li’s bowed head by the chin, to make him watch.
“Don’t!” Benjamin said, his eyes closed. “Don’t do this.”
“Speak!” the officer cursed at him. “Speak now!”
But Benjamin shook his head, hoarsely crying out as though it were his own mother or sister before him. By now they had stripped Jane Binet naked. The officer repeated his demand but Benjamin wouldn’t comply, tightly shutting his eyes. He was shuddering and weeping. He had crumpled to his knees, scraping his face against the rough, splintered boards of the floor. On the officer’s command one of the soldiers dragged Benjamin to Jane as she was held down by the others and shoved him on her, making him kiss her on the mouth and the neck and the belly and down below. Then they forced them to copulate. They kicked him when he balked, but when that did no good they began kicking her instead, until he finally assented. His grunts were low and fitful; there were no longer any sounds from her. The soldiers were deriding him and laughing and when he couldn’t seem to finish the large soldier with the thick neck hurled Benjamin aside and threw himself on top of her. Benjamin ended up a few feet away, suffering a few more kicks in the groin and chest before lying in a curled heap, weakly coughing up blood. When the big soldier was done the other two began bickering for their turn but the officer silenced them with a sharp order.
It was only at that point that Sylvie was able to glance up. She herself was breathless, shaking, her own throat as if throttled by a pair of invisible hands. Her mother gathered her ruined clothes and began dressing. She did so without looking at anyone. She simply threaded her arm through the torn sleeve of her blouse and then crawled back over to Sylvie and Francis, immediately checking her husband for his wounds. He tried to embrace her but he had no strength.
She rolled her coat and gently laid it beneath his head.
“I’m so sorry, darling,” her father said, hardly audible for how weak he was. Tears were streaming down his face. The color seemed drained from his cheeks, his lips. “Will you forgive me? Please?”
“Stay quiet now,” she said, wiping his eyes. “Don’t try to move. You’re bleeding too much.”
“I don’t care,” he said. “I only care about you and Sylvie.”
“We know that,” she said. “Just stay still.”
“I love you so much, Jane,” he said.
“We love you.”
“Please say you do,” he said. “Please.”
“I love you.”
He was going to answer but his breathing suddenly became labored, his torso heaving hard upward, once, twice, and then down. Her mother was crying. Sylvie kissed his temple and there was warmth. He was still alive. She kissed him again and it was the same. It was over now. She felt a hand on her neck, slightly rough, as if her mother had instantly, terribly aged, and for an instant she leaned her cheek into it before she horridly realized it was the hand of the young officer, his short, narrow fingers chapped and scarred.
“Get up,” he said to her.
But it was Jane Binet who rose instead, her expression strangely icy and dispassionate, only her hands leaping out in fury at his holstered revolver. For a moment she had it in her grasp before he wrested it from her, striking her in the ear with its grip. But she did not pause and came at him and he shot her twice in the chest. After she fell to the floor he shot her again. The officer pulled Sylvie from her father’s side and dragged her toward Benjamin Li. She was too frightened to resist, or even move; her mind was bounding but in place, disconnected from her limbs. Everything came to her through the small end of a spyglass. When he shoved up her skirt she heard her own meager voice, blunted as if through a cold horn, calling out for her mother, for her father, even as she knew neither would answer.
The officer was now shouting, though not at her; he had Benjamin by the throat. He was shouting thunderously at him, lividly, if almost wearily, as if he himself were finally sick of the torment.
“You are a worthless human being! Do you hear me? Less than that! Not even a rat! A piece of dung! You are nothing! You will make no difference! You will not be remembered!”
He thrust him toward Sylvie, making him eye her nakedness. “You wish to see what will happen to her now? You wish to, yes? Is that it?”
Benjamin was shaking his head, crying something over and over to himself, his eyes now tightly shut.
“Tell me who they are!”
Benjamin curled up in a ball, as though he were trying to make himself disappear.
“Ahhh!” the officer cried. He kicked him in frustration. Then he gave an order to the soldiers and two of them held Benjamin down so that he couldn’t move. The officer kneeled over him and took a straight razor from his back pocket. He unsheathed it and worked quickly. Benjamin was groaning, guffawing; then he began to scream. When the officer stepped back Benjamin’s eyes were bloodied; they looked as if they had been gouged out. But the officer roughly wiped them with his sleeve and it was clear what he had done: he had cut away only the eyelids. The eyes themselves were intact, the orbs monstrous, for being so exposed. His was a fleshy skull. They retied his hands so that they were secured behind his back.
“Watch now, you son of a bitch.”
The officer sharply gave an order and one of the soldiers stood over Sylvie and began unbuckling his belt.
It was then that Benjamin began screaming again. He was screaming bloody murder, all the names of his compatriots, screaming them in a litany, most loudly his own.
NINE
AT THE END OF HER WRITTEN STATEMENT to the local constabulary relating her dealings with Nicholas, the antiquities dealer in London added a coda to her testimony:
“Mr. De Nicole, or whoever he may turn out to be, was by every measure a charming, delightfully assured, extremely knowledgeable young man. Aside from the value of the stolen pieces, his departure will certainly prove a considerable loss to our firm.”
So, June thought, someone else was missing him, too.
That the sentiment was barely a month old was a cause for special heartache, and as June peered out the window glass from the back of the sedan Clines had rented for them, she realized that what she was feeling, despite the circumstance, was a deep flush of motherly pride.
Delightfully assured
.
The clean type of those words was a sudden salve to her flesh, for otherwise she could hardly keep from crying out from the frightfully sharp pains in her joints and limbs. For the moment they seemed to be far-off alarums, urgent enough and real, though happening to some other unfortunate, dying woman. This dying woman, on the other hand, this one wearing a woolen skullcap and a green silk shawl wrapped snugly about her shoulders on a warm autumn evening, was in fact enjoying the first good day of the end of her life, and not even the jarring, potholed drive up the West Side Highway could call her back to her miserable bones. For she could believe that Nicholas was basically all right; that there was nothing fundamentally wrong with him; that no matter what crimes he’d committed he was essentially a promising, capable young man; that he needed, ironically, only to come back in from the world in order to thrive.
This was the mad logic of her illness, of course, and even as she understood it to be so, she took the same comfort and refuge in her thoughts of Nicholas as with the palliatives from her doctor, these new warm blankets of her life. Something had begun to happen to her body in the last weeks, and she recalled now what her doctor had warned of a month ago when she told him she was not going to see him anymore, that she was going away. Dr. Koenig said the pain would change and evolve, grow worse, much worse, and that eventually it would overwhelm her. She liked his frankness, even before she’d quit as his patient. When Dr. Koenig first informed her of the diagnosis of the stomach tumor she’d felt that horrid bleat arise in her throat, for she could tell by the grip of his unwavering stare that there was little hope for her. He wouldn’t say that, of course, Dr. Koenig being famous for his aggressive, innovative techniques, but also for his utter refusal to relent, no matter the circumstance.
June’s case was compelling, she was told by a resident, because the tumor in her stomach had insinuated itself in a manner rarely seen. She asked how and the young doctor told her, with unintended poetry,
Like fingers in a jar
. Eventually the cancer would spread to the other organs, but during the initial examination Dr. Koenig told her they would succeed, that they would first excise certain sections and then use other experimental regimens, some brand-new, and despite what she’d first seen in his eyes she very quickly came to believe him.
“You will realize I’m very greedy about life,” he said to her, in his stripped, weary baritone. “It’s life or nothing.”
For a time June was a model patient, and though not trying to be she became perhaps his “favorite,” a special case even among his special cases, a status she sensed whenever she had to stay a few days in the hospital, by how frequently his residents dropped in on her and wished to hear of her condition and even any complaints, none of which she ever expressed. She placed herself at his disposal, completely, never declining or even hesitating when he would request that she undergo yet another uncomfortable or painful procedure or submit to a new battery of tests. They drew blood from her as if from a tap. Of course she was encouraged by his doggedness, his decision to operate even when others believed it was no use, his aggressive regimens of radiation and then his constant calibrations of medicines, until one day, during a weeklong hospital stay, by then every strand of her lustrous black hair gone and her bones droning with a pain that was insidiously alive and the veins in her arms as brittle and ruined as Roman aqueducts and the right half of her back angrily stippled with an outbreak of shingles, June at last said no to a minor request by a resident to have an umpteenth CAT scan, for which she would have to drink a foul, metallic-tasting shake. The resident, a very smooth-shaven and bespectacled Pakistani fellow, had not quite heard her, or else believed that he had heard her assent, and ordered the nurse to prepare the concoction, to which June again said no, this time louder, and the young doctor paused for a moment before leaving her room without another word. Soon Dr. Koenig appeared at the foot of her bed with his hands splayed out as if he were a wounded suitor. His eyebrows, bushy and graying, were wilted with strain. He seemed already to know what she was going to say. Still, he quietly asked her what was the matter. “Has something gone wrong?” June shook her head. “Are you terribly uncomfortable? Are you suffering? We can address this.”
“That isn’t it.”
She was in fact suffering, but as yet still only in the corporeal sense. Her mind, she felt, was still sharp, and steely. It could still see each moment from every side. “Then I don’t understand, June. Why must you do this? Why thwart our efforts? You must appreciate how far we’ve come already.”
“Of course I do. You’re magnificent. Everyone here has been magnificent.”
“Then let’s keep on!” he said. She could tell he’d registered her appreciation by his rolling over it. More than anything else, she liked Koenig for this feature of his character.