The Light at the End (32 page)

*

…
and she was down there, he could see her, in the center of the platform
…

“Allan! Allan!” He could hear Armond’s frantic voice, but not well. It was obscured by the sound of a moving train.

“You’re at Astor Place?”

“Yes, yes!” Armond sounded terribly agitated. “You have heard from Claire?”

“Yes, she…”

“Is she safe?”

“Yeah, but…” Allan’s face screwed up in puzzlement. “What do you mean?”

Another train, much louder, rolled by, completely drowning out Armond’s response.

…
and he was moving toward her
…

He was moving toward her. She watched him, entranced. It was like a dream.
Like a dream.
The way he moved toward her.
So slowly.
So slow that it seemed like the whole world had shifted into low gear. Like time had slammed on the brakes. And the moments were stretching.

Claire’s eyesight was not very good. She had worn corrective lenses since she was eight. Her contacts helped a lot; but she still had a problem with details in the distance. As Rudy moved toward her, he looked to her eyes like a punked-out Prince Charming.
He’s coming back for me
, a little voice in the back of her mind squealed delightedly.

Then he got a little closer, and he didn’t look quite so good.

She remembered the dead phone, still pressed numbly to her ear.

“Hello?” she said quietly into the mouthpiece. “Hello?”

“
What?
” Allan yelled over the roar of the train, and then Armond’s voice came back in.

“Rudy has escaped through the back window of the train, Allan! Danny saw him running back…”

“Toward Claire.” Allan finished the sentence. “Oh, my God…”

…
and he was getting closer
…

The bathroom door opened, and Josalyn stepped out, looking confused, “GET ON 09, QUICK!” Allan shouted at her, and she hurried over to the switchboard, grabbed the receiver up with one hand, pushed the wrong button with the other.

“…but, Vince, you don’t understand…” she heard Jerome saying.

“JESUS CHRIST…” Allan roared.

…and he was very close now, very close, so close that Claire could see with exquisite and soul-blasting clarity that Rudy was not Prince Charming any more, not even remotely, with his hair mussed up and his clothes in tatters and his sunglasses smashed so that the red of his eyes showed through, so bright that it was like looking down into two active volcanoes, two matching round portals to Hell…

…and the thing that she thought was a smile was a snarl…

…and the thing that she thought was desire was…

“Please help me,” she whimpered into the dead receiver and then let it drop from her hand. He was too close now, too close. Finally, she began to back away from him; it was a case of too little, too late.

At the last moment, Claire “De Loon” Cunningham dipped into her messenger bag and pulled out her cross with a trembling hand. She held it up before her. She prayed for it to save her.

Rudy smacked it aside, as if it were nothing.

And then he was upon her.

*

Allan and Josalyn, at their separate controls, pressed the same button at the same time and clutched the receivers to their ears.

Just in time to hear the screaming.

“Claire?” Allan said. Josalyn’s voice was frozen in her throat.

There was a clicking sound, and then the screaming came in again, wailing out and out over the tiny speakers. The phone clicked again. The scream. The click.

“Omigod,” Allan said.

Then Josalyn screamed, too.

Click. Scream. Click. Scream. Click.

And a mechanized voice came over the line, saying, “
Please deposit five cents for the next three minutes
…”

“…
or your call will be interrupted
.”

Back and forth. Back and forth.

“
Five cents, please.
”

The receiver was swinging on its cord.

“
Five cents.
”

Back and forth.

There was blood on the receiver.

“
Thank you.
”

The blood was everywhere.

Click. “
Claire? Claire?
” Tiny voices, from the other end of the line.

Claire didn’t deposit five cents.

Click.

A dial tone.

Back and forth. Back and forth.

It was now 12:32. And seven seconds.

Precisely.

Joseph didn’t waste any time with common courtesy. He drove like a maniac, running red lights, cutting people off, chasing pedestrians out of the way, honking his horn and screaming like a lunatic. At one point, a bunch of kids in a Trans Am were stopped in the middle of the street, talking to friends. Joseph came up behind them and told them to get their butts out of the way. The driver slipped him the finger. Joseph slammed into the back of the Trans Am, jumped out before the kids had recovered, and ran toward the driver’s window. The driver decided that, yes, maybe he’d move after all. The Trans Am took off. Joseph got back in his van. The encounter took less than a minute.

He pulled up to the entrance of the Bleecker Street station at 12:43 on the dot.

The ambulances were already there. And the police cars. Apparently, they hadn’t wasted any time on the way over, either. He envied them their sirens, their automatic priority status. He wished he could just put out an APB of Rudy right now… on the condition that Rudy be handed over to Joseph personally.

That’s the bitch
, he mused bitterly, and left it at that.

“You know she’s dead,” Stephen moaned from the passenger seat. Tears glistened on his cheeks, strobing red from the police car lights. He spoke as if he were telling Joseph something informative.

“Yeah, and you know it
too
, doncha?” Joseph countered, cutting the engine and pocketing the keys. “You and your darling buddyboy.” Then, before he felt compelled to go on, maybe wind up punching the little twit again, he got out and walked over to the uptown entrance.

The crowd had gathered there, as usual, to soak up the bloodshed. He could see that the police were holding them back and parting them down the middle; some guys in bloodstained paramedic suits were trying to get a stretcher up the stairs. The sheet was pulled all the way up; no questions there.

Something lumpy and shapeless and extremely dead was sticking to the underside of the sheet. Joseph was grateful for having been spared the sight of it.
At least she won’t be coming back
, he noted, sourly nodding.
There’s not enough left of her
.

That was all he really needed to know; her death was a foregone conclusion. He circled slowly around the outside of the crowd, scanning the faces… no Rudy, of course… and made his way to the phone.

Danny didn’t take it well. Nobody expected him to. Nobody attempted to offer him the tiniest bit of consolation, because there was nothing to say. She was dead, and there wasn’t anything even remotely alright about it.

They had gotten out of Astor Place as quickly as possible: T.C.’s warning notwithstanding, the word had gotten out, and transit cops were starting to appear as they headed up the steps. The first thing to pass them on the street was an empty cab; they snagged it and rode it almost aimlessly all over the East Village, waiting for the sound of a beeper.

It came.

And Danny wasn’t taking it well. Armond and T.C. could do nothing but watch while he crumbled to pieces on the corner of Prince and Elizabeth, sagging against the street lamp and letting out terrible whooping sounds.

When he wheeled around suddenly, blindly, incoherently, and began to stagger off in the general direction of home, neither of them did anything to stop him. Both of them knew that there was nothing they could do for him… or he for them… until his grieving had run its course.

“Be well,” Armond whispered after him. “Take care.” T.C. nodded in silent agreement.

They would never see him again.

The time was one o’clock.

Rudy rounded the corner onto Mercer Street at 1:20, hugging the shadows. A van was pulling away from the curb. The words stenciled across the back door meant nothing to him. He had never heard of Your Kind Of Messengers, Inc.

The occupants of the van failed to notice him, too, as they rumbled away.

It had been that kind of a night.

Rudy moved quietly up Mercer Street, probing the air with tendril-like senses for any hint of movement, the glint of watchful eyes. Nobody, nothing. It both pleased and disappointed him.

If anybody sees me, I’ll have to kill them
, he knew. It was good to not have to kill anybody right now, because he was already splattered with blood, and he didn’t need to be made more conspicuous. But it was too bad, because he’d have
liked
to kill somebody right now, feel them come apart in his hands and teeth.

He paused in the middle of the block, staring across the street at the windows of Stephen’s apartment. The living room light was on. Rudy smiled, the dried blood cracking on either side of his lips. “This is it, Stephen,” he whispered to the windows.

“I’m coming to get you now…”

He crossed the empty street, made his way quickly to the front door of the building, stepped inside. He looked at the buzzer marked PARRISH, brought his finger to the button, and stopped.
A surprise visit would be nicer, don’t you think?
he asked himself, and found that he couldn’t agree more.

By some fortuitous breach of security, the inner door of the foyer had been left unlocked. Rudy was positively beaming as he stepped through it and moved up the stairs to the second floor landing. There he paused, staring down the hall at Stephen’s door, confusion washing across his features.

There was a note on the door. He moved slowly toward it, and the words came into focus. He stopped, reading it. His smile came back, magnified a thousandfold.

The note read:

Dear Josalyn,

I had to step out for a minute. Please wait for me. I’m sorry. I’ll be back as quickly as I can.

Stephen.

BOTH of them! The thought made his heart go pitter-pat.
Together! Tonight! In living color!
He rubbed his hands together with glee, pondered the implications: no having to traipse around, tracking them down; no hiding the corpses in separate locations: no muss, no fuss, we deliver to your door, the whole thing wrapped up tight as a gnat’s ass on a silver platter.

And handed over. To him.

He tried the doorknob. It opened to his touch, as if by magic. He took a step inward, then remembered that Josalyn might already be inside. It gave him a moments cunning pause.

“YOO-HOO!” he called, a high-pitched singsong. “OH, JOS-A-LYN!”

No answer.

“ANYBODY HOME?” he tried once again, but the effort was halfhearted. He was talking to the walls. Slightly disappointed, he stepped inside and closed the door behind.

I can wait
, he thought.
I can wait all night, if I have to. It’ll be worth it.

The trap had worked perfectly.

To no avail.

While Rudy amused himself, digging through Stephen’s papers and rinsing the blood from his body and clothes, the following things were going on:

Josalyn and Jerome were exchanging troubled glances as they watched Allan slowly descend into drunkenness, while Doug tossed and turned on the couch in a shock-induced slumber;

Stephen was being led by Joseph and Tommy, very much against his will, down a workman’s staircase to the forever darkness of the underground;

Danny was wandering alone, broken and wailing, down streets without name or number, completely cut off from the others and the relentless ticking of the clock;

one Detective Brenner was contemplating the connection between three extremely dead girls, with particular attention to the strange collection of objects found amidst the ruins of the late Claire Cunningham, and the still-stranger murder suspect sought for the Sullivan Street killing;

and T.C. was listening with rapt attention to the horror stories of the old man in the cab beside him as they rolled resolutely from station to station to station…

“You have heard of Treblinka?” Armond asked. T.C. shook his head slowly. “So few seem to know about it. Such a tragedy, for so many to have suffered and died unknown. How is it that… ?” He stopped himself, made a game attempt at a smile, struggling to control his voice. “Not your fault. Not your fault,” he said. Whether he was addressing T.C. or himself was a question that not even he could answer.

“Treblinka…” T.C. gently prodded.

“…was a death camp in Poland, where the Jews of Warsaw were taken to be exterminated during the Holocaust,” Armond continued. His tone was level, almost as if he were reciting a childhood lesson from memory. “Others were taken there, too, caught up in the machineries. Others like myself, my wife, and my son. Political martyrs.”

Armond shuddered. His companion was unable to speak. In the front seat, separated from them by a sheet of transparent plastic, the cabbie drummed his fingers on the steering wheel while salsa music clattered tinnily through the dashboard speakers. It played in obscenely cheerful counterpoint as Armond resumed.

“I was there for just two months short of a year. My son celebrated his eighteenth birthday there, two weeks before he… died.” An undecipherable expression crossed his face for a moment: maybe fondness, maybe pain. T.C. wasn’t sure. “My wife died almost instantly… within an hour of our arrival. The Nazis were that efficient: several thousand per hour, eight hours a day, seven days a week.”

T.C. lit a cigarette. It was the only thing he could think of to do. His hands were shaking ever so subtly: it took three matches to do the job, with all of the windows closed.

“You see, as soon as we were unloaded from the trains… they brought us in on the trains, of course, like cattle to the slaughter… as soon as we were unloaded, the men and women were separated and herded off to different locations. There we were made to strip off our clothing, and all of our possessions were taken.

“They spent a bit of time on the men: long enough to determine who among us was strong enough to work, to survive. But they wasted no time with the women. They had no use for them. I was still being beaten and stripped and appraised when I saw the women… naked, their hair shorn and their bodies bent, the Nazis raining blows upon their backs and heads… when I saw them being driven down what they called ‘The Road to Heaven.’ I saw my wife among them. I almost didn’t recognize her. She was running. Her head was bowed. A club… one of those men, those monsters, those Nazis… a club hit her on the back of the neck, and she staggered; but she continued to run. I saw it all.”

He paused. T.C. could see the tears welling up in the old man’s eyes, the way his body jerked with emotion like an ancient marionette on an abandoned stage, left dangling by strings to be buffeted by the storm winds. T.C. wanted to say something, but there was absolutely nothing to say.

Armond continued.

“‘The Road to Heaven’ led to the gas chambers, of course. My wife ran very bravely to her death. She did not cry… she did not cry out… not even when she stumbled and almost fell. I was watching her face…”

“
My God, WHY AM I TELLING YOU THIS?
” he wailed: so suddenly, so abruptly, that the cabbie involuntarily slammed on the brakes and yelled, “Everything all right back there?”

And Armond laughed.

Like a bell. Like the purest tinkling crystal. Like a glorious cascade of rainfall from heaven, in consummate correspondence with the tears that trickled down his cheeks.

“Oh, yes!” he cried out. “All’s right! All’s right with the world!” He laughed again. “Drive on!” he encouraged the cabbie, who shook his head and stepped back down on the gas pedal. Then the old man turned to his companion and smiled, face radiant with tears and inner light.

“I don’t need to burden you with all the horrible details,” he said. “I am sorry to have said so much already. The important part of the story… the part that lives on, as part of our history… is this: Treblinka was overthrown by its own prisoners, and burned to the ground. I was there. I took part in that victory. And I survived… quite an accomplishment, I think… as less than fifty of us are still alive.”

“Jesus.”

“
Evil can be defeated
. Never doubt that for an instant: if you doubt, you will be lost. And we will lose as well.”

“I had a dream, quite recently… the night of the murder, that woman on the train, the one whose head you found… yes. That night, I had a dream. I dreamed that the monsters had come back, and I was in Treblinka again; but Treblinka had been moved to New York City, and the Nazis all wore Rudy’s face. Instead of leading us to the gas chambers, they led us to their dining rooms. One by one, we joined them.

“Just before I awoke, my wife and son appeared to me. They told me that I was to come with them. Their eyes were like coals, and they were drooling…”

The cab pulled over to the curb and idled there. “Grand Street,” the driver said wearily. His passengers jumped and stared blankly at their surroundings. “You wanted all the subway stations? This is Grand Street. You want it or not?”

“Thank you,” Armond answered finally. “I will only be a moment.” He got out and moved slowly to the subway stairs. T.C. watched him, running the images back through his mind. He knew what the moral of Armond’s story was; the old man didn’t need to say another word.

If we don’t kill Rudy, that’s all she wrote. The monsters will take over again; and everything he did… his revenge, his survival… won’t mean a thing. That’s why he won’t rest ‘til we nail that sucker: he can’t rest ‘til it’s done.

An’ I guess I can’t, either. Not knowin’ what I know.

“I don’t wanna be nosy,” the cabbie turned to him and said, “but what’s he doin’ out there, anyway?”

Savin yo’ ass
, T.C. was tempted to say, but he restrained himself.

“Don’t ask,” he suggested instead. “You’ll be glad you didn’t.”

From there, they moved on to the East Broadway station, doubled back along Canal Street to hit all sixteen of the entrances there, and gradually crisscrossed their way down to the tip of the island.

It would be three o’clock before they reached their final destination.