Come to Grief (32 page)

“Untie me,” I said with force.

No chance. He didn’t even show he’d heard.

I asked, “How did you get yourself into this mess?”

No answer.

I tried again. I said, “If I walk out of here free, I’ll forget I ever saw you.”

He turned around, but he had his back to the light and I couldn’t see his eyes clearly behind the spectacles.

“You really are in deep trouble,” I said.

“Nothing will happen.”

I wished I believed him. I said, “It must have seemed pretty harmless to you, just to use your paper to ridicule someone week after week. What did Yorkshire tell you? To save Ellis at all costs. Well, it is going to cost you.”

“You don’t understand. Ellis is blameless.”

“I understand that you’re up to your noble neck in shit.”

“I can’t do anything.” He was worried, unhappy and congenitally helpless.

“Untie me,” I said again, with urgency.

“It wouldn’t help. I couldn’t get you out.”

“Untie me,” I said. “I’ll do the rest.”

He dithered. If he had been capable of reasoned decisions he wouldn’t have let himself be used by Yorkshire, but he wasn’t the first or last rich man to stumble blindly into a quagmire. He couldn’t make up his mind to attempt saving himself by letting me free and, inevitably, the opportunity passed.

Ellis and Yorkshire came back, and neither of them would meet my eyes.

Bad sign.

Ellis, looking at his watch, said, “We wait.”

“What for?” Tilepit asked uncertainly.

Yorkshire answered, to Ellis’s irritation, “The TV people are on the point of leaving. Everyone will be gone in fifteen minutes.”

Tilepit looked at me, his anxieties showing plainly. “Let Halley go,” he begged.

Ellis said comfortingly, “Sure, in a while.”

Yorkshire smiled. His anger was preferable, on the whole.

Verney Tilepit wanted desperately to be reassured, but even he could see that if freeing me was the intention, why did we have to wait?

Ellis still held the wrench. He wouldn’t get it wrong, I thought. He wouldn’t spill my blood. I would probably not know much about it. I might not consciously learn the reciprocal answer to my self-searching question: Could he personally kill
me,
to save himself ? How deep did friendship go? Did it ever have absolute taboos? Had I already, by accusing him of evil, melted his innermost restraints? He wanted to get even. He would wound me any way he could. But
kill
. . . I didn’t know.

He walked around behind me.

Time, in a way, stood still. It was a moment in which to plead, but I couldn’t. The decision, whatever I said, would be his.

He came eventually around to my right-hand side and murmured, “Tungsten,” under his breath.

Water, I thought, I had water in my veins.

He reached down suddenly and clamped his hand around my right wrist, pulling fiercely upward.

I jerked my wrist out of his grasp and without warning he bashed the wrench across my knuckles. In the moment of utter numbness that resulted he slid the open jaws of the wrench onto my wrist and tightened the screw. Tightened it further, until the jaws grasped immovably, until they squeezed the upper and lower sides of my wrist together, compressing blood vessels, nerves and ligaments, bearing down on the bones inside.

The wrench was heavy. He balanced its handle on the arm of the chair I was sitting in and held it steady so that my wrist was up at the same level. He had two strong hands. He persevered with the screw.

I said, “Ellis,” in protest, not from anger or even fear, but in disbelief that he could do what he was doing: in a lament for the old Ellis, in a sort of passionate sorrow.

For the few seconds that he looked into my face, his expression was flooded with awareness ... and shame. Then the feelings passed, and he returned in deep concentration to an atrocious pleasure.

It was extraordinary. He seemed to go into a kind of trance, as if the office and Yorkshire and Tilepit didn’t exist, as if there were only one reality, which was the clench of forged steel jaws on a wrist and the extent to which he could intensify it.

I thought: if the wrench had been lopping shears, if its jaws had been knives instead of flat steel, the whole devastating nightmare would have come true. I shut my mind to it: made it cold. Sweated, all the same.

I thought: what I see in his face is the full-blown addiction; not the cruel satisfaction he could get from unscrewing a false hand, but the sinful fulfillment of cutting off a live hoof.

I glanced very briefly at Yorkshire and Tilepit and saw their frozen, bottomless astonishment, and I realized that until that moment of revelation they hadn’t wholly believed in Ellis’s guilt.

My wrist hurt. Somewhere up my arm the ulna grumbled.

I said, “
Ellis
” sharply, to wake him up.

He got the screw to tighten another notch.

I yelled at him, “
Ellis
,” and again, “
Ellis.
”

He straightened, looking vaguely down at fifteen inches of heavy stainless steel wrench incongruously sticking out sideways from its task. He tied it to the arm of the chair with another strap from the desk and went over to the window, not speaking, but not rational, either.

I tried to dislodge myself from the wrench but my hand was too numb and the grip too tight. I found it difficult to think. My hand was pale blue and gray. Thought was a crushed wrist and an abysmal shattering fear that if the damage went on too long, it would be permanent. Hands could be lost.

Both hands ... Oh, God. Oh,
God.

“Ellis,” I said yet again, but in a lower voice this time: a plea for him to return to the old self, that was there all the time, somewhere.

I waited. Acute discomfort and the terrible anxiety continued. Ellis’s thoughts seemed far out in space. Tilepit cleared his throat in embarrassment and Yorkshire, as if in unconscious humor, crunched a pickle.

Minutes passed.

I said, “Ellis...”

I closed my eyes. Opened them again. More or less prayed.

Time and nightmare fused. One became the other. The future was a void.

Ellis left the window and crossed with bouncing steps to the chair where I sat. He looked into my face and enjoyed what he could undoubtedly see there. Then he unscrewed and untied the wrench with violent jerks and dropped the abominable ratchet from a height onto the desk.

No one said anything. Ellis seemed euphoric, high, full of good spirits, striding around the room as if unable to contain his exhilaration.

I got stabbing pins and needles in my fingers, and thanked the fates for it. My hand felt dreadful but turned slowly yellowish pink.

Thought came back from outer space and lodged again earthily in my brain.

Ellis, coming down very slightly, looked at his watch. He plucked from the desk the cosmetic glove from my false arm, came to my right side, shoved the glove inside my shirt against my chest and, with a theatrical flourish, zipped up the front of my blue tracksuit to keep his gift from falling out.

He looked at his watch again. Then he went across the room, picked up the unscrewed hand, returned to my side and slapped the dead mechanism into my living palm. There was a powerful impression all around that he was busy making sure no trace of Sid Halley remained in the room.

He went around behind me and undid the strap fastening me into the chair. Then he undid the second strap that held my upper arms against my body.

“Screw the hand back on,” he instructed.

Perhaps because they had bent from being kicked around, or perhaps because my real hand was eighty percent useless, the screw threads wouldn’t mesh smoothly, and after three half turns they stuck. The hand looked reattached, but wouldn’t work.

“Stand up,” Ellis said.

I stood, swaying, my ankles still tied together.

“You’re letting him go,” Tilepit exclaimed, with
grateful
relief.

“Of course,” Ellis said.

Yorkshire was smiling.

“Put your hands behind your back,” Ellis told me.

I did so, and he strapped my wrists tight together.

Last, he undid my ankles.

“This way.” He pulled me by the arm over to the door and through into the passage. I walked like an automaton.

Looking back, I saw Yorkshire put his hand on the telephone. Beyond him, Tilepit was happy with foolish faith.

Ellis pressed the call button for the elevator, and the door opened immediately.

“Get in,” he said.

I looked briefly at his now unsmiling face. Expressionless. That made two of us, I thought, two of us thinking the same thing and not saying it.

I stepped into the elevator and he leaned in quickly and pressed the button for the ground floor, then jumped back. The door closed between us. The elevator began its short journey down.

To tie together the wrists of a man who could unscrew one of them was an exercise in futility. All the same, the crossed threads and my fumbling fingers gave me trouble and some severe moments of panic before the hand slipped free. The elevator had already reached its destination by the time I’d shed the tying strap, leaving no chance to emerge from the opening door with everything anywhere near normal.

I put the mechanical hand deep into my right-hand tracksuit trousers pocket. Surreal, I grimly thought. The long sleeve of brown overall covered the void where it belonged.

Ellis had given me a chance. Not much of one, probably, but at least I did have the answer to my question, which was no, he wouldn’t personally kill me. Yorkshire definitely would.

The two blue-clad bodyguards were missing from the lobby.

The telephone on the desk was ringing, but the bodyguards were outside, busily positioning a Topline Foods van. One guard was descending from the driver’s seat. The other was opening the rear doors.

A van, I understood, for abduction. For a journey to an unmarked grave. A bog job, the Irish called it. How much, I wondered, were they being paid?

Ellis’s timing had given me thirty seconds. He’d sent me down too soon. In the lobby I had no future. Out in the open air ... some.

Taking a couple of deep breaths, I shot out through the doors as fast as I could, and sprinted—and I ran not to the right, towards my own car, but veered left around the van towards the open gates.

There was a shout from one of the blue figures, a yell from the second, and I thought for a moment that I could avoid them, but to my dismay the gatekeeper himself came to unwelcome life, emerging from his kiosk and barring my exit. Big man in another blue uniform, overconfident.

I ran straight at him. He stood solidly, legs apart, his weight evenly balanced. He wasn’t prepared for or expecting my left foot to knock aside the inside of his knee or for my back to bend and curl like a cannonball into his stomach: he fell over backwards and I was on my way before he struggled to his knees. The other two, though, had gained ground.

The sort of judo Chico had taught me was in part the stylized advances and throws of a regulated sport and in part an individual style for a one-handed victim. For a start, I never wore, in my private sessions with him, the loose white judogi uniform. I never fought in bare feet but always in ordinary shoes or sneakers. The judo I’d learned was how to save my life, not how to earn a black belt.

Ordinary judo needed two hands. Myoelectric hands had a slow response time, a measurable pause between instruction and action. Chico and I had scrapped all grappling techniques for that hand and substituted clubbing; and I used all his lessons at Frodsham as if they were as familiar as walking.

We hadn’t exactly envisaged no useful hands at all, but it was amazing what one could do if one wanted to live. It was the same as it had been in races: win now, pay later.

My opponents were straight musclemen with none of the subtlety of the Japanese understanding of lift and leverage and speed. Chico could throw me every time, but Yorkshire’s watchdogs couldn’t.

The names of the movements clicked like a litany in my brain—
shintai
,
randori, tai-sabaki.
Fighting literally to live, I stretched every technique I knew and adapted others, using falling feints that involved my twice lying on the ground and sticking a foot into a belly to fly its owner over my head. It ended with one blue uniform lying dazed on his back, one complaining I’d broken his nose, and one haring off to the office building with the bad news.

I stumbled out onto the road, feeling that if I went back for my car the two men I’d left on the ground would think of getting up again and closing the gates.

In one direction lay houses, so I staggered that way. Better cover. I needed cover before anyone chased me in the Topline Foods van.

The houses, when I reached them, were too regular, the gardens too tidy and small. I chose one house with no life showing, walked unsteadily up the garden path, kept on going, found myself in the back garden with another row of houses over the back fence.

The fence was too high to jump or vault, but there was an empty crate lying there, a gift from the gods.

No one came out of any of the houses to ask me what I thought I was doing. I emerged into the next street and began to think about where I was going and what I looked like.

Brown overalls. Yorkshire would be looking for brown overalls.

I took them off and dumped them in one of the houses’ brown-looking beech hedges.

Taking off the overalls revealed the nonexistence of a left hand.

Damn it, I thought astringently. Things are never easy, so cope.

I put the pink exposed end of arm, with its bare electrical contacts, into my left-hand jacket pocket, and walked, not ran, up the street. I wanted to run, but hadn’t the strength. Weak ... Stamina a memory, a laugh.