House Haunted (31 page)

Falconi noticed a florid-faced, uniformed cop with a blond mustache and thin receding hairline standing in the doorway of his glassed-in office.

“What is it, Guinty?”

Detective Guinty stood mute.

“Well?” Falconi bellowed.

“Gary Gaimes, sir.”

“What about him?”

Guinty looked like he'd rather be anywhere else on earth. “He's gone, Lieutenant. He overpowered Martin while he was being fed. Cut him up with a sharpened spoon. Must have been working on it since his first meal—”

“
Jesus
!” Falconi roared. He stalked around his desk, pausing to glare murderously at Guinty before stomping into the hallway. He stopped, turned on his heel, and regarded Brennan. His voice came out with controlled fury.

“If I went by my gut now,” he said, “you'd be a dead man. God knows what kind of shit you filled Gaimes's brain up with. I
personally
tracked this fucker for eight weeks, losing sleep every night, spending time away from my kid, my wife, just to suck him off the streets so he wouldn't slice anybody else up because his sick little mind told him to. I'd be willing to believe just about anything about him—that his old man put his head in a vise when he was five, his mother stuck lit cigarettes on his testicles, his neighbors came over every Friday and did things to him your average S and M nut wouldn't even know about. I'd believe anything, because his mind is twisted and that's why he did the things he did. I'd be willing to listen to anything about Gary Gaimes, because I'm interested in what turned him into the sick dog he is. If we find that out, maybe we can stop somebody else from becoming a sick dog and slicing people up because they think it's the correct thing to do.” His face was scarlet with anger; he brought his index finger up to point at Brennan, then brought himself under control and lowered it. “I would love to believe you, Dr. Brennan. To know that there was some other place beyond death, that all of the pain and hate and murder, all the sick shit I see every day was just a prelude to something else, something better—well, that would almost make it all worthwhile. I would have to say it would make me happy. But I'm sorry. I have to draw the line somewhere. And believing this
creep
Gary Gaimes is girl Friday for some monster from beyond the grave is just not something I'm prepared to do.”

Brennan crushed out his cigarette and began to gather his material into his briefcase. “If you don't help me, Lieutenant,” he said, “you'll be one sorry asshole.”

Falconi raised his index finger again, thought better of it, gave Brennan a baleful stare before stomping off down the hallway, shouting, “Minkowski!”

Viktor Borodin never tired of America. What he tired of was fools. And, it seemed that in America there were so many fools. It only made his job more difficult.

Today, though, he was forced to admit,
The fool is our own.

In fact, he had rather enjoyed the report. Couched in hysterical terms, syntax that in the old days, perhaps even during Brezhnev's reign, would have stricken icy fear into the heart of any bureaucrat unlucky enough to have it land on his desk, the report was, in these new days, these days of perestroika, of glasnost, taken very seriously by Borodin. But he had also allowed himself to see the comical side of it. It was almost like French farce. Here was this third-rate Pole, sequestered in an underground detention camp near Treblinka that some idiot in Warsaw had decided to set up to study ardent Solidarity supporters, in order to come up with some way to break their spirit—and the union's—and it turns out this fellow was not the man the officials thought he was and should not have been taken to begin with! And not only that, here was this fellow, this
Polack
, after one month of nearisolation, mental torture, and physical abuse, not only escaping his detention, but murdering the camp commandant (another stupid Polack) and, not so funny, his visiting Soviet liaison. Then—and this was the most farcical of all—this crazy man takes the liaison's clothes, matches his mannerisms and voice, rides his limousine to the Krakow airport, where he boards an Aeroflot jet, flies to New York, and, rather than stopping in for a chat at the embassy in Riverdale, has the waiting limousine driver drop him at a private residence in upstate New York.

Beautiful, just beautiful. Funny as hell.

But, again, not all that funny.

Viktor could afford to laugh, and openly, because he knew that in a day or two he would have this Polish whelp by the collar, singing like a whippoorwill, stripped of his stolen clothes, and on his way to Moscow.

But there were other KGB agents who were not laughing, because the Soviet attach~ had apparently been wearing an Italian suit, something he should not have been able to afford. There were all kinds of allegations, from bribery to spying, which also gave Borodin a hearty belly laugh, because all of Liukin's men at home—and Viktor, from this distance, thought of them as his dear, dear brothers in arms who had the bad luck to deal with bad Russian plumbing, rotten Russian food, terrible Russian television, atrocious movies, despicable weather, ugly women—were shaking in their boots.

Yes, he loved America.

Except for the fools.

Viktor tapped on the glass partition; his driver slid the small window back and cocked his ear. “Drive slowly for a little while, Mikhail. This is the nicest part of the Hudson Valley in the fall.” As an afterthought, for fun, he added, “Don't you agree?” He watched as Mikhail, a proper public servant, nodded briskly to the order, but ignored, and properly so, the intimacy, the invitation to opinion. “Just drive,” Viktor said heartily, and Mikhail, nodding briskly, at once shut the opaque window and slowed the car five miles an hour.

This was a lovely part of the country. One of the pleasures Viktor had allowed himself was reading Washington Irving, the short story writer and essayist, who had described this area of New York so perfectly. Viktor doubted that, at least at certain times of the year such as high autumn and June, there was a more beautiful spot in all of the United States. He had been stationed many places before coming to New York, and he had never seen the kind of foliage he was witnessing now: long vast valleys sloping off the Taconic Parkway to the near horizon, trees in blinding reds and yellows broken only by the occasional dairy barn or silo. He considered telling Mikhail to pull into one of the turnouts they were passing at regular intervals, so that he could get out of the car and feel, away from the confines of the automobile, the true sweep of the autumn vista. But that was not something he could do in laughter, because Mikhail, who watched him as surely as Viktor watched everyone else, would be safe to report that Viktor Borodin had not only taken it upon himself to slow his car down but wasted more time away from the business of the state by actually stopping the car to enjoy a frivolous view.

Viktor sighed; turning away from his view, he once again tapped on the smoked glass partition. When it opened, he said, in a curt voice, “We have wasted enough time, Mikhail. Find the house.”

Which they did, soon enough. The directions had been excellent, for once; apparently the driver who had been fooled into bringing the Pole up here was so contrite—or, more to the point, so frightened—that he had provided each detail, down to the tilted mailbox on the corner where they last turned and the description of the way the trees suddenly parted to give a view of the house, which was well off the road, before swallowing it up again.

They slowed, the way the driver had told them to; and the trees parted as if drawn back by an invisible hand (the colors were breathtaking up here, the roads dusted with first fallings that only reflected and intensified the colors in the trees), and they found the narrow drive and were soon in front of the house.

A gloomy place, Viktor thought. He allowed Mikhail to open the door of the Cadillac for him (oh, these wonderful American limousines!) and to assist his bulk out. Leaning on his cane, he looked up at the front of the place.

Gloomy, unkempt. A big Victorian that may at one time have been very beautiful. Now it looked a little like the house in
Psycho
, that wonderful film of Hitchcock's American period. High attic cupola topped by a rusted weathercock. Chipped scrollwork under the eaves. Tall stained-glass windows needing a good cleaning. There was nothing as depressing as soiled stained glass. That was one thing the Church knew.

Viktor eyed the door: large, darkly recessed under a paint-peeled porch. It looked as though it hadn't opened in a long time.

It certainly had, at least once recently, to let in a daring, infamous, desperate Polack.

Viktor stepped toward the porch.

Mikhail, standing deferentially by the car, said, “Shall I come with you, sir?”

To himself, Viktor snorted.
Not to help, but to watch me, no doubt.

“No. Stay with the car.” He smiled, grimly. “He could escape, steal the car, and get away from us—and then what?”

The
then what
, meaning,
and then what would happen to our asses?
seemed to penetrate Mikhail's tiny mind, and he nodded sharply. Already he looked diligent, watching for wild Polacks leaping from windows or charging from the shrubbery.

Shaking his head in wonder, Viktor Borodin walked to the door and knocked on it.

There was no answer. But, then, he hadn't expected one. He knocked again, shouting, “Jan Pesak! We know you're in there! Please come quietly, I'm sure we can figure something out to make us all happy!”

Meaning, of course, that Pesak, if he had any more brains than Mikhail, would be long gone, would have contacted some Western agency by now, either the State Department or the press, and, at the very least, blabbed his story if not begged asylum. Then again, he might still be here.

He is a Polack, after all.

“Jan Pesak!” Viktor shouted again. When he put his hand on the door, it opened halfway, on its own.

Standing where he was, Borodin pushed the door open the rest of the way with his cane.

A dimly lit vestibule was revealed, with no one in it. Viktor snorted, looked back at Mikhail, and stepped into the house.

Somewhere in the long distance behind him he heard the front door close. But when he turned in the sudden darkness to look at it, there was no doorway there.

There was sudden light.

He was walking on snow. He felt stone beneath; he was on a snow-covered stone walkway that widened out all around him. It was early morning. The sun was low in the east, rising filtered through gray clouds thickening overhead. They promised more snow later. Someone had his arm around him; when Viktor turned to see who it was, he was met by a bearish grin in a face that
seemed
like that of a bear, all covered with hair. The man's teeth were bad; it looked as though his gums bled. The eyes in the grinning face were as cold and flat as small black coins.

“So, comrade, it is so
good
to have you back with us.” The man hugged Viktor with his arm, using his free arm to gesture around them at what, Viktor realized with a shock, was Red Square. “Doesn't it feel wonderful to be back?”

Dazedly—and because the man was gazing at him with such purpose—Viktor nodded.

The man hugged him close again. “Good,” his huffing breath said; even in the cold, in the fresh air of morning, and at a discreet distance, Viktor could smell his bad breath.

They walked on. The Kremlin grew closer. There were guards, at rigid attention. They smacked their heels together and saluted as the man and Viktor passed. The man waved lazily at them and their saluting hands lowered to their sides.

They passed through a small courtyard, through an iron gate, into a building. Viktor, who had been to the Kremlin, didn't recognize it. Neither did he recognize the way they had come, the guard's entrance, the descending, darkly lit hall-way they now passed through.

They walked for a long time. Viktor's companion had ceased speaking, and now he took his arm away from Viktor and began to walk in a more military fashion. Stealing a look at him, Viktor saw that his right ear was partly gone; it looked as though it had been bitten off, a ragged tooth line of healed tissue ridged above the lobe.

Viktor was becoming short of breath; he desperately hoped they would reach their destination before he was beset by an emphysemic attack. His companion increased their pace, beginning to swing his arms at his side like a soldier, eyes straight ahead. Viktor did all that he could do to keep up. Suddenly he stopped, leaning on his cane, and said, “See here! You'll have to wait.”

The other ignored him, marching on ahead, and soon was lost in the dim downward slope of the hall:

After a mental count of sixty, a common technique, Viktor Borodin had regained his breath to the point where he could rise off his cane and take in his surroundings.

The initial shock of finding himself here had worn off. He was left with more a sense of wonder than anything. Had he wandered into some secret experiment? Could the Polack Pesak be something much more than he had seemed, or that he, Viktor Borodin, had been told about? Viktor reached out to touch the walls, found them solid and real. Could this be an illusion? An induced dream? Temporal travel? Sensory deprivation? Something to do with Star Wars, SDI?