Last Days (8 page)

"Is it time?" he asked. And then, seeing the drink in Kline's hand, "Are you bringing that for me?"

Kline handed him the drink, and without a word left.

"Well," said John. "What do you think? First-rate setup, no?"

"Where's Ramse?" asked Kline.

"Ramse?" said John. "I don't know," he said. "Maybe over there?"

Kline started across the hall, moving from cluster to cluster until he found Ramse speaking to a man in a chair whose legs had been cut off at the knee.

"I need to talk to you," he said.

"All right," said Ramse, excusing himself from the legless man. "What's the trouble?"

"Jesus," said Kline. "What kind of party is this?"

"It's Gous' party," said Ramse. "His three. Where's your drink? Do you need another drink?"

"What the hell does that mean?"

"Isn't it obvious?" said Ramse. He looked at Kline, eyes wide, then shook his head. "I forget you don't know us very well," he said. "It's an amputation party."

"An amputation party."

"Like a coming out," said Ramse. "Gous is giving up two fingers. He's gathered his friends around him for the occasion. He's going from a one to a three."

"Jesus," said Kline. "I have to leave."

Kline tried to make for the door but Ramse was pressing his forearm to Kline's chest. "You can't leave," hissed Ramse, "not now that you've come. It'd break Gous' heart."

"But," said Kline. "I don't believe in any of this. I can't stay here."

"It's not that you don't believe," said Ramse. "It's just that you don't have the call yet."

"No," said Kline. "It's that I don't believe."

"I don't care what you believe," said Ramse. "Just do this for Gous. He admires you. What has he ever done to you to deserve this?"

"What has he ever done to deserve losing his fingers?"

"He doesn't see it that way," said Ramse. "He's had the call. This for him is an act of faith. You don't have to believe in it, but you can still respect him."

"I have to go," said Kline, pushing against his arm.

"No," said Ramse. "Please, just for Gous. Have compassion. Please."

By the time the amputation took place, Kline had had a few drinks, had drunk enough in fact that he had trouble making his eyes focus. To see reasonably well, he had to cover one eye with his stump.

Eventually Ramse coaxed the drink out of his hand, goaded him now through the open partition and into the half-room beyond. He stood on the edge of the lit circle, swaying slightly, Ramse beside him, Ramse's forearm tucked under his arm. In the center was the doctor, his mask up now. He had stripped the cloth off the small metal cart to reveal an array of tools that seemed half to be medical instruments, half to be from the knife block of a gourmet chef.
Jesus
, Kline thought.

Gous came into the circle, smiling, while the tuxedo-dressed gentlemen clapped gently. Two gentlemen were called forward as witnesses, each of them placing a stump under one of Gous' arms. He leaned over the large table, placed his hand on it, palm up. The doctor took a hypodermic off the table and slid its needle into Kline's hand. His fingers twitched. Or rather
Gous
' fingers, Kline realized; it was not his own hand, he could not start to think of it as his own hand. The four of them--the doctor, Gous, the two witnesses--stood as if in tableau, motionless in a way that Kline found unbearable, only the doctor moving from time to time to regard his watch. At last he took a metal probe from the small metal cart and pushed at the hand.

Gous watched him, then nodded slightly. The two witnesses braced themselves behind him. The doctor switched on a cauterizer. After a moment, Kline could smell the way it oxidized the air. The doctor let his fingers run over the instruments, then took up the cauterizer with one hand. What looked like a stylized and carefully balanced cleaver was in the other. He approached the table, lined the cleaver along the line Gous had drawn on his hand, and then raised it, brought it swiftly down.

Kline saw Gous' eyelids flutter, then the rest of his body faltered and was supported and caught by the witnesses behind him. All around, the men began to clap quietly, and blood began to spurt from the wound. Kline closed his eyes, felt himself begin to lean to one side, but Ramse caught him, held him upright. He could hear the buzz of the cauterizer and a moment later began to smell burning flesh.

"Hey," whispered Ramse. "Are you all right?" All around them, men were beginning to move.

"Just a little drunk," said Kline, opening his eyes. Gous was there before him, having his hand bandaged.

"That wasn't so bad, was it?" asked Ramse. "Gous certainly didn't think so. Not so bad, eh?"

"I don't know," Kline said. "I want to go home."

"The night's still young," said Ramse. "We're only getting started."

The rest of the night was a blur to him. At some point he lost his tuxedo jacket; at another point, he found the next day, someone had smeared a swath of blood across his forehead. At one point he could hear Ramse telling everyone not to give him another drink and then he was outside, vomiting onto the gravel, Ramse seeming to be trying at once to hold him up and to knock him over. Then they were stumbling across the gravel courtyard, Kline covering one of his eyes so he could see, and into the bar where he was drinking not whiskey but first coffee and then water. It was not exactly a bar either, but more like a club. They were sitting in armchairs, a small coffee table before them, pointed toward a stage, and Kline realized the curtain was opening.

The stage was bare at first, lit by a reddish spotlight, and then a woman came out onto it swaddled from knees to neck in boas.

"Watch this," said Ramse, his words slurring even more than usual. "She's really something."

A strip show, thought Kline. He had seen a strip show before, more than once, had seen several in fact with the man who had since come to be known as the gentleman with the cleaver, the man who was dead now. He didn't care about strip shows one way or the other. He watched the woman lose one boa after another while Ramse whistled. She would let a boa trail first and then finally let it flop all the way off and then kick it to one side of the stage. And then finally she was done, stripped naked, blurred in the red light, not particularly attractive.

He waited for the curtain to go down but the curtain did not go down. He turned to Ramse but found him still staring rapt at the girl, and so he himself turned back to her and watched as, with a flick of the wrist, she cracked off her hand.

A dim howl went up through the house and Kline heard, scattered through the chairs, a dull thumping, the sound of stumps beating against one another. She made her way toward one side of the stage, spinning slightly, and then snapped the stump of her arm against her remaining hand and Kline saw three fingers wobble loose and slough away. The crowd roared. He tried to stand up but Ramse had his hand on his shoulder and was shouting in his ear. "Just wait," Ramse shouted, "the best is yet to come!"

And then the woman sashayed across the stage and reached up with her remaining finger and thumb to tear free her ear. She spun it around a few times before tossing it out into the audience. Kline saw a group of men rise up in a dark mass trying somehow, with what hands they had left between them, to catch it. And then she turned away, turned her back to them, and when she turned back her artificial breasts had been pulled away to hang like an apron around her belly, revealing two shiny flat patches where they had been. She spread her legs and squatted and Kline imagined her legs were beginning to separate, to split up.
Jesus, God
, he thought, and tried to stand, and felt Ramse trying to hold him down, and felt the blood rush to his head. He staggered forward and into the small table, hot coffee sloshing all over his legs, and looked up to see the woman on the stage gouging her fingers beneath one side of her face, but mercifully, before she had torn it away, he had fallen and did not, despite Ramse's urging, get up again.

VI.

It was late in the afternoon before he could bring himself to get up again, his head still spinning. He went into the bathroom and drank cup after cup of water and then turned on the water, stood under the shower for a while, steam rising around him.

He got dressed and opened the door, found outside a covered plate of food and, next to it, a cassette tape. Putting the plate of food on the table, he removed the lid. Pancakes, sodden now with syrup, with eggs floating grimly to one side. There was no silverware. He ate with his fingers until he felt sick, then went to the bathroom and threw up and then came back and ate a little more, just enough to keep something in his stomach.

The tape he put into the tape recorder, turned it on.

"One: State your name and your relation to the deceased," he heard himself asking.

"Two: Where were you on the night Aline was murdered?

"Three: Do you know of anyone who might want Aline dead for any reason?

"Four: Did you see the body? If so, please describe in detail what you saw.

"Five: Are you absolutely certain Aline's death wasn't a suicide?

"Six: Did you kill Aline?"

What followed was a blank unrolling of tape, a dim static that lasted five or six minutes, and then the tape clicked loudly and a man's voice began to talk.

"Helming," the voice said. "We were . . . associates." There was a pause, the tape microphone clicked off but the tape ran on.

"I was in my room. I heard a noise and had Michael carry me out into the hall and--"

The tape fell suddenly silent, part of it erased.

"I don't know why anyone would [blank space] question I suppose of having insufficient faith."

"No, I didn't see the [blank] . . ."

"Yes."

"No. I--"

The tape cut abruptly off, and there was silence and then it resumed with another voice, another individual, the same enigmatic, half-erased style, nothing really stated of substance. Why were there gaps? A third voice was the same, and it was only then that Kline realized that the answers being given were vague enough that they could be read as responses to almost any questions.
On that night I was in my room. I heard a noise and went into the hall and--
could be answering his question
Where were you on the night Aline was killed?
but he could imagine other questions that might have been posed that would elicit the same response.
Where were you on the night the hallway was graffitied? Where were you on the night Marker came in drunk?
None of the three recorded voices mentioned the word "murdered" or the word "Aline" or the word "death." Or if they did it was in the portion of the tape that had been erased.

He rewound the tape and listened again, turning up the volume as high as it would go, listening to the blank spots of erased tape, hoping to hear hints of whatever had been there before the erasure. He heard nothing but a low half-muttering which, he realized, wasn't a human voice at all but the magnified sound of the tape recorder's mechanism itself. He turned off the tape and sat, thinking, wondering what to do next.

When Ramse arrived with dinner balanced on his arms in the early evening, Kline demanded to see Borchert.

"I'll put in a request," said Ramse.

"I need to see him right away," said Kline. "I need to see him now."

"Right now what you need to do is eat some supper," said Ramse. "And try to get over your hangover. You were a hell of a mess last night."

"I need to see Borchert," said Kline. "It's urgent."

"Fine," said Ramse. "Go ahead and eat. I'll walk over and see what I can do."

At the door he stopped and looked back, a look of reproach on his face. "You didn't even ask about Gous," he said.

"What about him?"

"About how he's doing."

"How is he doing?"

"Good," said Ramse. "He's doing just fine."

"Wonderful," said Kline. "Now, goddammit, go get Borchert."

Once Ramse was gone Kline uncovered the tray and ate: boiled potatoes, a thin and curling piece of grayish meat, a pile of overcooked carrots. He ate slowly, moving from potatoes to meat to carrots and back again until it was all gone, then sat playing the tape over. It seemed obvious that there was no real interest in solving the crime.
Why even bring me out at all?

When Ramse returned, he turned the tape off.

"It's all arranged," said Ramse. "Borchert will see you."

"Good," said Kline, standing up. "Let's go."

Ramse looked a little surprised. "Oh, not today, Mr. Kline," he said. "He can't do it today."

"I need to see him today."

"He can see you in three days," said Ramse. "That was the best he could do."

Kline pushed past Ramse and went out the door, out of the house. He could hear Ramse calling after him, loudly. He walked briskly across the gravel-ridden lot in front of the house, turned down the road, cut at the right moment down the path to dip down through the trees. He wondered if Ramse was following him. He broke into a jog.

He came up over the top, the tree-lined path, the house looming up, the gate before it, a guard darting out again from behind a pillar of the house, standing at the far side of the gate regarding him with one eye. He couldn't tell if it was the same guard as before.

"What is wanted?" asked the guard.

"I'm here to see Borchert," said Kline, moving forward until he was nearly touching the gate.

"Borchert isn't seeing anyone today," said the guard.

"He'll see me."

The guard swiveled his head a little, fixed his remaining eye hard on Kline. "No," he said. "He won't."

Kline reached across the top of the gate and punched him. He was prepared to feel his hand strike the guard's temple but the sensation of his stump striking it was an odd one. It ached. The guard fell to the ground without a word, and as he struggled to get up Kline clambered over the gate. He kicked him a few times until he was sure the guard had stopped moving.

By the time he was knocking on the door of the house, he could see Ramse nearing the gate. The gatekeeper was still down but on his knees now, struggling his way up. He knocked again and the inner guard cracked the door open and said "What is wanted?" and Kline, without awaiting a response, kicked the door hard so that the edge of it split open the man's forehead and he stumbled back, spattering blood. Kline struck him open-palmed on the chest, knocking him down, and rushed by, down the hall and into the stairwell.