Spitting Image (13 page)

What I was more afraid of was that they’d destroy the lives of my friends. Better to give in than see any of them go to jail or lose their jobs or wind up outcast for something my enemies did with my friends’ faces on.

None of that meant I could trust them to deal honestly. Once I wasn’t useful, then what? They could kill me, but dead bodies are inconvenient. They’re hard to get rid of, they cause talk, they invite suspicion. Probably they’d just frame me and impersonate enough witnesses that I’d spend a long time in jail. A life sentence for anybody is awful, for me it would be more so. And without the ability to move on, sooner or later, somebody would start doing the math on my age and identity.

Just on principle, I tried the door. It was locked of course, but people have made worse mistakes than forgetting to lock a door, and if I hadn’t tried it, I’d never have forgiven myself. I leaned on it. Most interior doors are fairly light and flimsy, but this was a solid door, not something I was going to be able to kick down. I began to suspect that they’d used this room to hold people before. I leaned on the wall. If it was just sheetrock over studs, or lath and plaster, I could probably smash my way through that, given time. But it didn’t flex, so it was probably plywood. 

There wasn’t anything in the room except for a table, two chairs and the bucket. It was unlikely that I could break the door down with the table and fight my way out with a bucket of urine, but it would be a great story to tell later.

I decided to keep that option in reserve.

After I finished eating, the two heavies came back in, taking care to shut the door.

“Back in your seat,” said the first.

I was hoping it wouldn’t come to that. I thought about fighting, but there were two on them, and the door was locked. This didn’t seem like the right time. Every time you resist, they get a little more cautious, every time you submit, they drop their guard just a bit more.

They’d captured me in the evening, somebody was supposed to meet Sarah the next evening. While I wasn’t sure how much time had gone by, they’d fed me once, and judging by the clock of hunger and thirst, that had been adequate. If they meant to keep me healthy, they’d have to feed and water me at least once more. If they untied me again, that might be the time to go all out.

I decided this was not a good time to fight. Anything could happen in a day. Sarah should know something was wrong, she was smart enough to have contacted somebody.

I grit my teeth, let them shove me back down into the chair and tie me again. I flexed while they tightened my bonds, so that when I relaxed they’d be a bit looser, but I didn’t make a show of it. Right now, I didn’t want to give them any reason to take extra precautions.

They left me again, alone with my thoughts.

I’ve heard people say that being alone is the worst part of captivity, the worst torture a person can suffer. I tend to think they say that kind of thing because they’ve never been physically tortured.

Maybe that’s just me, but I really don’t like pain, and I’ve spent a lot of time with myself, and I’m pretty good company.

The thing that can drive you insane is worrying about things you can’t do anything about. Make a few decisions, like how you might try to escape, then stop thinking about it. Don’t worry about the world outside your cell. You may as well worry about conditions on the moon for all the effect it will have.

My hands didn’t hurt so much this time, since I’d managed to keep the bindings looser. There was still no chance I was slipping out of them, but it was nice that they weren’t cutting into me.

I tried to pass the minutes remembering the good times. Drinking with Alexandre Dumas, laughing at Mark Twain’s quick wit, just trying to keep up with Oscar Wilde.

I don’t know how long it was before the door opened again. Not very long, judging by the fact I wasn’t hungry. There was no way they could have already gone to the fake meeting with Sarah. I wondered what they planned. More questioning, maybe.

As far as I could tell, the same two men walked in. They wore unpleasant smiles. The kind of smiles people wrongly compare to wolves. Wolves don’t have evil smiles. They either smile like dogs, out of happiness, or they bare their fangs, which is just wolf for “why don’t you leave now, before you get hurt.”

No, this was the smile of a bully. Of a man who was going to do something nasty to you, who knew you couldn’t fight back and took unholy pleasure in that fact. The kind of smile that spoke of a mean, petty spirit who had learned that power corrupts and saw it not as a cautionary tale, but an added bonus. It was the smile of a torturer or a prison camp guard or a middle manager.

I waited for one of them to speak. There probably wasn’t anything I could say that would make things easier, but plenty that would make things worse for me.

“I hope you have had time to consider your situation,” said the first man. Brad, I think. “We have shown you how things can be somewhat pleasant, if you co-operate, or mildly unpleasant if you do not. We are here to explain that things can be more intense in either direction.”

“You mean if I’m really good, next time you’ll get me the meal with the toy inside?”

I knew as the words left my mouth that it was a stupid act of defiance, but that’s a lesson that never really stuck, and I hated Brad’s brand of petty evil. More than real, big evil probably. At least history’s true monsters had some vision, some scope to their cruelty. Underlings like Brad were content to fawn and grovel for scraps and use their small authority to indulge their tiny power fantasies.

Putting an entire city to the sword is evil, and certainly worse in absolute terms, but at least it’s a bold sin. It’s making a point. Cromwell was certainly more evil than Brad, but he stood up and owned his evil. I’m sure Brad would claim he was just obeying orders.

Evil cries out for justice, but petty abuse of authority makes my skin crawl, and I’ve never learned to suppress my contempt for it.

Which probably explains why I’m so bad at getting promoted, or staying promoted.

At the end of the day, though, you need to live with yourself.

Brad provided a counter argument when he punched me in the nose. Not too hard, but enough to make me see stars and feel blood running.

“See?” he said. “I can make it more unpleasant. Please, feel free to see just how unpleasant we can make things.”

I bit back a witty reply. I was pretty sure I could make him hit me again, but where was the challenge in that?

“Ah. You can hold your tongue. You may be capable of learning after all.” He stepped up and pulled a bag over my head.

I felt the chair lifted and carried out. This couldn’t be good. I decided that next time the ties were off, I was definitely going to make a break for it.

We couldn’t have gone very far when we passed through a door into an echoing room. They set the chair down on what sounded like tiles.

Tiled rooms seldom meant that anything good was going to happen. Bringing a prisoner into a room where you could hose all the blood down the drain generally didn’t bode well.

“Now we are going to ask you some questions,” said a voice. “How helpful you are will determine how pleasant your stay with us will be for you.”

There were plenty of things I wanted to say, but none that would help so I kept quiet.

Suddenly, the chair lurched over backward, crashing into something that rang like a gong. I was now leaning backward as the back of the chair rested on something.

“No smart comeback? No? Well, then let us begin.”

I waited, trying to stay calm, breathe deep and slow, knowing something bad was coming. I’ve heard that the worst thing about being blindfolded was the uncertainty, but I disagreed. I was quite certain something bad was coming, but that didn’t make it any better.

“How did you know that it wasn’t your girlfriend you were with that night?”

“I thought it was strange when she didn’t want to play ‘the Panzer Commander and the French Milkmaid’—”

Somebody lifted the legs of the chair and my head went backward, plunging into a tub full of cold water. I gasped, which is a bad move under water. I felt it pouring into my airway and I panicked. I tried to cough, to bend my body and get my head out of the water, to retch and cough and expel the water and pull in air.

I’d been talking when they dunked me, so I didn’t have all that much air in my lungs and I saw red closing in on the edges of my vision and water was filling my lungs and then I was out again, spluttering and coughing and pulling wheezing breaths in.

“Now,” said a calm voice in the darkness. “We will try again. How did you know it wasn’t your girlfriend?”

“I didn’t,” I panted when I could speak. “Not then. I knew something was different.”

“Different how?”

Well, that was both pretty personal, and hard to put into words, but I really didn’t want them to hold my head under while I thought about it.

“It’s complicated–” I began and they plunged me back under. I felt the chair start to move so I held my breath this time as the icy water closed over me and the bag clung to my face. Soon the lights began to flash behind my eyes and my lungs began to burn. I figure they pulled me out a good six seconds before I went insane.

Being out wasn’t all I’d hoped. Gasping for air pulled the cloth tight against my nose and mouth, and wrung water from it into my throat. I coughed and retched and felt bile come up, burning my trachea even as I struggled to get that elusive, life giving air.

I thrashed, straining against my bonds, but that just made everything worse.
Jesus H. Fucking Christ!
I thought, which is as close to praying as I’d come in a long time. In fact, I think it was Mars or Odin the last time I’d called out for divine help.

Somewhere in the back of my brain, a cold, cynical voice cut across my panic, told me to calm down, flailing was just demanding more of the precious oxygen that I didn’t have. I fought down the fear, the struggle, the wash of adrenaline that thought it was helping while making things so much worse. I turned my head to the side, blew out, and took small breaths, which helped make a little pocket between the maddening hood and my mouth, and let the water and bile and whatever other hellish stuff I’d brought up run out the corner of my mouth. Every breath was like dragging a saw across my throat, my lungs felt raw, but at least I was breathing. It was hard to breathe through the bag, but not impossible.

“How did you know it wasn’t her?”

“I knew something was wrong,” I panted, quick as I could, before he ran out of patience and dunked me again. “It felt wrong. Just not like usual. I figured she was upset at me.”

They plunged me in again.
Oh holy fuck, why?
I thought. I held my breath and my sanity with a weakening grip. This time, I kept down my panic until I thought I couldn’t, but I dug deep and found a stronger emotion than fear.

Anger.

I would survive this, because they wanted me to, and then at some point I would be free and then I would take the kind of revenge that would make Ghengis Khan blanch. I held onto the rage until I passed through it, into a calm sea of disoriented oblivion, floating above the whole tawdry scene.

I came to on the floor, still tied to the chair, but on my side, the hood removed, my cheek pressed against cold tiles. I could hear a hideous wheezing, crackling whistle. It took a moment to realize it was my own breathing.

That horrible calm voice spoke again. “That is why you suspected. I need you to tell me how you
knew.
”

I lay still and panted for a moment. How did I know? Caruthers. Was that it? Were they looking for a rat? Trying to ferret out an informer? If that was it, what did I owe him? I didn’t like the idea of throwing anybody to the wolves, but if they kept this up, I’d get to the point where I’d roll on the Virgin Mary.

“Alright,” said the voice. “We’ll try again.”

My chair was manhandled off the floor and the man who wasn’t Brad approached me with the hood. I recoiled at the thought of the cold, wet thing over my head, blocking out the light, restricting the air. I felt the horror surge up again.

“A man!” I shouted. “A man tipped me off.”

“That’s better. Who?”

My thoughts raced. I didn’t want to give anybody up, and maybe I didn’t have to. The informer could have been anyone, and he wouldn’t have given his real name.

“He said his name was Nolan,” I said. “Jim Nolan.”

It’s dangerous to lie to interrogators. They usually ask some questions they know the answer to, and some they don’t. If they catch you in a lie, they hurt you, and they don’t trust your next answer. So they hurt you even when you tell the truth, until you repeat it often enough. If you are going to lie, you need to keep it close to the truth as you can, and most important, tell a lie you can remember, because they will probably ask you again when you’re tired and scared and beaten, so don’t make up anything too complicated.

Gypo Nolan was a character in
The Informer
, an old black and white John Ford film about the Irish war of independence. It was easy to remember that, but “Gypo” was odd enough that they wouldn’t believe it, so I changed it just enough. Nolan was the informer who sold his friend out to the Black and Tans, the British Special Police, and easily as big a bunch of bastards as Brad and company. The fate of poor Nolan was what you’d expect, which was a subconscious reminder to stick to my lie. If they asked what he looked like, I’d just describe the actor, Victor McLaglen. I’d seen Caruthers change his appearance, there’s no reason he couldn’t have shown up looking like Victor McLaglen.