The Eye: A Novel of Suspense (8 page)

Only a matter of time. Only a matter of my choosing.

My first choice was Charles Unger. Have I explained about him? Not in enough detail, perhaps, and he is important. Because he was the first, and because it was through him that I realized my destiny and achieved my apotheosis.

The Eye had closely observed him, along with all the others in my universe. A cantankerous old man, red of nose and gray of hair, a prodigious consumer of alcohol. But it was not drink that led to his death, except indirectly; it was rudeness. For he was rude to me, and that is a form of blasphemy.

I was walking one afternoon in the midst of that which is mine, having parked my car some distance from West Ninety-eighth, as I generally do. I felt my power that day as I walked among my children, felt it surging through me like an electrical current. And Charles Unger, whom I considered to be without sin at that time, rudely shoved me aside so he could cross an intersection before the traffic light changed. A cab screamed to a stop quite near me. Furious, I protested. But Unger was drunk; he became loud and belligerent, turned and shoved me again so that I stumbled backward over the curb and almost fell. Then he walked on in mortal ignorance.

I was stunned and I did not act immediately. But I understood as I watched the lurching old man push his way through other pedestrians and cross the street that he had made a fatal mistake. In my mind he was already dead, and so he would be, and was, in actuality. He had left me no choice. As Bailey said, “He hath no power that hath not power to use.” So, in a sense,
not
acting against Charles Unger would have diminished my power.

The Eye observed him for several days after that. I would smile as I watched him idly stumble about the neighborhood. He was restless in his retirement, unsure of how to spend his time, not realizing that nearly all of it was already spent. Then one night I parked my car in the usual place, walked into my domain, and waited for Charles Unger to return from a tavern he habitually frequented in the evenings. And after first whispering to him of vengeance and of the wages of sin, I released him from this life.

On my way home last night, I understood that Unger would not be the last of the evil ones to receive swift justice by the hand of the deity. Death is the swift and deserved end for the sinner. To eliminate the wicked is to strengthen the lives of the chaste and the pure. A good god is a just god, and I was determined to be both.

It was not difficult to select the second evil one to die. Peter Cheng I had observed with various young men, some Chinese and some Caucasian; his homosexual couplings were a mockery of all that is good and clean. And then, one night before his unshaded window, the Eye observed him lewdly exhausting his passion with
two
young men in leather costumes, while an obese Chinese woman looked on, stroking herself. It was bizarre and repugnant. Could I allow Peter Cheng to remain among the living after
this?

I forgave him as I sent the bullet into his brain and freed him from his sins. I forgave Charles Unger as well; and I will forgive all the others who are to follow.

Oh, I admit again that Martin Simmons was a mistake, and yet I have decided that he, too, deserved to die. He was a fornicator, an evildoer; he brought his evil into my universe, and he paid justly with his life. I have forgiven him too.

The Eye continues to scan the windows of the buildings across the river, even as I dictate these words. Most of the windows are dark now, shades and curtains drawn; most of my children are asleep. The sinners too—some of them. The brief sleep before the final one soon to come.

Do they suspect, any of them, what is in store? Do they sense the higher purpose that is mine, or glimpse the specter of pale horse and rider? There is poetry in death, as every poet knows. Perhaps those about to die can somehow detect the meter of their own imminent demise.

Yet if they do, they ignore it. Far removed (though not so far as they choose to believe) from the primal state, they do not listen to the cells of their own bodies, the ancient silent voices hinting of eternity. They do not really know. And they will not, until the pale horse appears before them, and his name that sits on him shall be Death.

PART 2

SATURDAY

SEPTEMBER 21

9:00 A.M.

WALLY SINGER

When Marion announced that she was going to Brooklyn to spend the day with her sister, Singer barely managed to hide his elation. It surprised him. She didn’t get along with her sister; hell, she didn’t get along with anybody, the fat cow. But she was upset about the shootings, she said, and she wanted to get out of the neighborhood for the day. She couldn’t talk to him; all he cared to do was argue and pick on her. Ellen, at least, was family and would offer a sympathetic ear.

Singer told her he didn’t care what she did, and she was gone at 8:45. He waited fifteen minutes, spending the time in the bathroom trimming his sparse beard and daubing himself liberally with English Leather cologne. Then he locked the apartment, rode the elevator downstairs, and went out to the street.

There was an unmarked police car parked at the curb. He’d seen it before, so he knew it belonged to the detectives from the Twenty-fourth Precinct. He didn’t like the police much, particularly the sandy-haired cop named Oxman; Oxman’s shrewd eyes and probing questions, boring at him as if
he
were guilty of something, had left him with a bad case of nerves yesterday. Still, there was a certain comfort in knowing the law was around. Nothing else was going to happen with the police crawling all over the block.

Singer crossed the street, went up the steps of 1279, and pressed the button alongside the smudged white card that read
2-C Cindy Wilson
. It took a full minute for Cindy’s voice to say scratchily from the intercom box, “Yes, who is it?”

“It’s Wally. Buzz me in.”

“Wally! Yes, just a second …”

The lock on the entrance door made a burring sound. Singer pushed inside, climbed the stairs to the second floor. Cindy had the door open and was peering out when he came down the hall. She was wearing a dressing gown over a baby-doll nightgown; her dark hair was tousled and she looked sleepy. Singer’s eyes moved over her body as he approached. She wasn’t much to look at, really, but she had a damned good body, slender, well filled out. God, it was nice to have a slim woman after all the years with Marian.

As soon as he was inside, she shut the door and threw the dead-bolt locks. Then she turned, put her arms around him, and kissed him lingeringly. Singer let his hands slide over the silky roundness of her buttocks, cupping them, pulling her tight against him. But she wasn’t ready for fun and games yet; she broke the kiss, eased away from him. Her eyes, he saw, had purplish half-moons under them, as if she hadn’t slept much during the night.

“It’s so early,” she said. “How did you get out?”

“Marian’s gone for the day, visiting her sister in Brooklyn.”

He reached for her again, but she placed her hand against his chest. “Wait, Wally. I’m still half-asleep; I need some coffee.”

“We can have coffee later,” he said.

“No, I need some now. It won’t take a minute. I didn’t sleep very well and I’m still a little groggy.”

She started away to the kitchen. Singer curbed his impatience and followed her, watching the roll and sway of her hips, the outline of her thighs under the thin gown. He could feel heat stirring in his groin. It had been four days since he’d last been to bed with her and he was damned horny. After he’d finally got rid of the detective, Oxman, and come over to see her yesterday, she’d been too upset to do any screwing. He had tried to talk her into it without success, so he’d gone home frustrated. And picked another fight with Marian as soon as she came back, because by then he’d been in a lousy mood and fighting with her gave him a measure of release.

The kitchen was cluttered with dirty dishes, overflowing garbage bags, food remnants all over the table and the floor. The front room, with its worn furniture and piles of movie magazines, was in similar disarray. Cindy was something of a slob, but it didn’t bother Singer half as much as Marian’s tendencies in the same direction. Everything about Marian bothered him, including the fact that she was intelligent. Cindy, on the other hand, wasn’t much in the brains department, and he liked that just fine. He liked having a woman who was his intellectual inferior, a woman he could manipulate, a woman who listened to what he said and thought he was somebody important.

She put coffee water on to boil. Sitting at the table, she brushed crumbs off onto the floor and then ran spread fingers through her hair and yawned. “God,” she said, “I can’t seem to wake up.”

“Why couldn’t you sleep last night?”

“You know why. The shootings …”

“Stop worrying about that. Nothing’s going to happen to you or me.”

“But don’t they make you afraid?”

“No,” he lied. The shootings did worry him, did make him a little afraid, but he wasn’t going to tell her that. Or Marian or anybody else. The way he felt was nobody’s business but his own. “The police will find out who’s doing it. They’ll get him.”

“You really think so?”

“I really think so.”

She yawned again. “I took a cab home last night,” she said. “I can’t afford it, you know, but I just couldn’t come on the subway.”

Cindy worked as a waitress at a restaurant on Columbus Avenue near Lincoln Center, from four to eleven, five days a week. That was where Singer had first met her; he’d gone there with Marian one night for dinner, and Cindy had smiled at him in a more than impersonal way, as if she liked what she saw. He liked what he saw too, and he’d gone back a few days later, alone. She’d been impressed when he told her he was an artist; creative people fascinated her, she said. Then they’d found out they were neighbors—one of those crazy coincidences that happen sometimes in a city like New York. She’d been living across the street from him for almost a year and yet they’d never run into each other before, they’d had to meet by chance at a restaurant.

He’d asked her to go to a movie with him and she’d accepted. After that it was walks in Riverside Park, drinks in a couple of bars on Broadway. And after that, just ten days after he’d gone back to the restaurant, it was afternoons in her bed any time he could get away. Cindy was divorced and she lived alone, so there was no problem there. The only hassle was that her ex-husband was trying to convince her to let him move back in and he kept showing up unannounced. Once he’d almost caught them together. That had been a bad time for Singer; the ex-husband was a truck driver, a big bastard, and mean from what Cindy told him. Singer didn’t consider himself a coward, but neither did he go looking for trouble. He was careful now never to see Cindy on Sundays or Mondays, the two days her ex-husband was off work.

He said, “You going to take a cab home every night?”

“Until they catch that maniac, I am.”

“Do you really feel safer that way?”

“I do. Much safer, even if I can’t afford it.”

“I’d help you out if I could,” Singer lied, “but you know how things are with me.”

“Oh, I don’t want any money from you, Wally, you know that. I’d feel … well, I’d feel cheap if I took money from you.”

“One of these days my work will start to sell,” he said. “Then it’ll be different. For both of us.”

“I know it will, Wally. You’re a good artist, you really are.”

“That’s true.”

“Every time I look at the painting you gave me, I can feel your talent. I mean, I can actually
feel
it.”

Singer suppressed a wry smile. The painting he’d given her was a small still life—a bowl of fruit, no less—and one of the worst things he’d ever done. But she’d gone into raptures over it, and the screwing that day had been extra fine. Giving it to her was a smart move on his part. And Marian had never missed it; she didn’t even look at his work anymore.

The kettle on the stove began to whistle. Cindy took it off the burner, spooned instant coffee into two semi-clean cups, added the boiling water, and handed him one of the cups. Looking at her in that gown, with the tops of her breasts showing above the baby dolls, Singer could feel his hands twitch. Christ, but he wanted that body of hers. He felt like a stud when he was around her, a feeling he hadn’t had with Marian since the first year of their marriage.

Cindy wanted to talk about the cop who’d been to see her yesterday, a black cop, she said, very polite, but blacks made her nervous because she had never been able to relate to them. Her father was a bigot, she said, maybe that was why. All the time she’d been growing up, it was nigger this and nigger that. Singer didn’t want to hear about the cop; he didn’t want to talk any more about the shootings. But he let her babble on until both their cups were empty. You couldn’t push her when she was wound up like this; you had to wait until the right moment.

When she swallowed the last of her coffee he locked eyes with her across the table. Then he said, “Why don’t we go to bed now?”

“Well …” she said, and wet her lips. “You did say we have all day …”

“Yes, but I want you. You know how much I want you.”

“Oh, yes, I know.”

“How much I want to fuck you,” he said.

He heard the sharp intake of her breath. It made her hot when he used words like that; she’d told him so, more than once. All a matter of timing, he thought. He had her hooked now. She was ready.

He stood up, reached out a hand. She got up too and came to him, and he kissed her, slid his tongue into her mouth. At the same time he opened the front of her gown, eased his hands down inside the baby dolls and fondled her breasts. The touch of them, soft and firm, gave him an erection. She could feel it pressing against her, and she made a moaning sound in her throat.

“Fuck,” he said against her mouth.

“Oh, Wally …”

“Fuck. Fuck.”

“Yes!”

He pulled her into the cluttered bedroom, saying the word over and over until she tore at his clothes, until they were both naked and she was thrashing under him on the bed, frenzied, saying, “I love you, Wally, I love you, I love you …”