The Throat (9 page)

Charlie Carpenter and Lily Sheehan had turned away from me, they
were grinding their teeth and wailing.

I sat down on a bench in the sun. I was sweating. I was not sure if
I had been going east toward Fifth Avenue, or west, deeper into the
park. I slowly inhaled and exhaled, trying to control the sudden panic.
It was just a bad one. It was just a little worse than normal. It was
nothing too serious. I grabbed one of the books I had bought and opened
it at random. It was
The Gospel
According to Thomas,
and here is what I read:

The Kingdom of Heaven
Is like a woman carrying a jug
Full of meal on a long journey.
When the handle broke,
The meal streamed out behind her, so that
She never noticed anything was wrong, until
Arriving home, she set the jug down
And found that it was empty.

I thought of my father drinking in the alley behind the St. Alwyn
Hotel. Hard Millhaven sunlight bounced and dazzled from the red bricks
and the oil-stained concrete. Drenched in dazzling light, my father
raised his pint and drank.

I stood up and found that my legs were still shaking. I sat down
again before anyone could notice. Two young women on the next bench
laughed at something, and I glanced over at them.

One of them said, "You are sworn to secrecy. Let us begin at the
beginning."

Back on Grand Street I typed my notes into the computer and printed
them out. I saw that I had mapped out the next few days' work. I
thought of going downstairs for lunch so I could show Maggie Lah those
enigmatic, barbaric verses from the gnostic gospel, but remembered it
was Friday, one of the days she worked on her philosophy M.A. at NYU. I
went into my own kitchen and opened the refrigerator. Fastened to the
door is a photograph I cut out of the New York Times the day after Ted
Bundy was executed. It shows his mother holding a telephone receiver to
her ear while she plugs her other ear with an index finger. She has
bangs and big glasses and concentration has pulled her thick eyebrows
together. The caption is
Louise
Bundy, of Tacoma, Wash., saying goodbye by telephone to her son,
Theodore Bundy, the serial killer who was executed for murder yesterday
morning in Florida.

Whenever I see this terrible photograph, I think about taking it
down. I try to remember why I cut it out in the first place. Then I
open the refrigerator door.

The telephone rang as soon as I pulled the handle, and I closed the
door and went into the loft's main room to answer it.

I said, "Hello," and the voice on the other end said the same thing
and then paused. "Am I speaking to Timothy Underhill? Timothy
Underhill, the writer?"

When I admitted to my identity, my caller said, "Well, it's been a
long time since we've met. Tim, this is John Ransom."

And then I felt an
of course
:
as if I had known he would call, that predetermined events were about
to unfold, and that I had been waiting for this for days.

"I was just thinking about you," I said, because in Central Park I
had remembered the last time I had seen him—he had been nothing like
the friendly, self-justifying captain I had met on the edge of Camp
White Star, parroting slogans about stopping communism. He had reminded
me of Scoot. Around his neck had been a necklace of dried blackened
little things I'd taken for ears before I saw that they were tongues. I
had not seen him since, but I never forgot certain things he had said
on that day.

"Well, I've been thinking about you, too," he said. Now he sounded a
long way from the man who had worn the necklace of tongues. "I've been
reading
The Divided Man."

"Thanks," I said, and wondered if that was what he was calling
about. He sounded tired and slow.

"That's not what I mean. I thought you'd like to know something.
Maybe you'll even want to come out here."

"Out where?"

"Millhaven," he said. Then he laughed, and I thought that he might
be drunk. "I guess you don't know I came back here. I'm a professor
here, at Arkham College."

That was a surprise. Arkham, a group of redbrick buildings around a
trampled little common, was a gloomy institution just west of
Millhaven's downtown. The bricks had long ago turned sooty and brown,
and the windows never looked clean. It had never been a particularly
good school, and I knew of no reason why it should have improved.

"I teach religion," he said. "We have a small department."

"It's nice to hear from you again," I said, beginning to disengage
myself from the conversation and him.

"No, listen. You might be interested in something that happened. I
want, I'd like to talk to you about it."

"What happened?" I asked.

"Someone attacked two people and wrote blue rose near their bodies.
The first person died, but the second one is in a coma. She's still
alive."

"Oh." I couldn't say any more. "Is that really true?"

"The second one was April," he said.

My blood stopped moving.

"My wife, April. She's still in a coma."

"My God," I said. "I'm sorry, John. What happened?"

He gave me a sketchy version of the attack on his wife. "I just
wanted to ask you a question. If you have an answer, that's great. And
if you can't answer, that's okay too."

I asked him what the question was, but I thought I already knew what
he was going to ask.

"Do you still think that detective, Damrosch, the one you called
Esterhaz in the book, killed those people?"

"No," I said—almost sighed, because I half suspected what a truthful
answer to that question would mean. "I learned some things since I
wrote that book."

"About the Blue Rose murderer?"

"You don't think it's the same person, do you?" I asked.

"Well, I do, yes." John Ransom hesitated. "After all, if Damrosch
wasn't the murderer, then nobody ever caught the guy. He just walked
away."

"This must be very hard on you."

He hesitated. "I just wanted to talk to you about it. I'm— I'm—I'm
not in great shape, I guess, but I don't want to intrude on you
anymore. You told me more than enough already. I'm not even sure what
I'm asking."

"Yes, you are," I said.

"I guess I was wondering if you might want to come out to talk about
it. I guess I was thinking I could use some help."

You are sworn to secrecy.

Let us begin at the beginning.

My second encounter with John Ransom in Vietnam took place while I
was trying to readjust myself after an odd and unsettling four-day
patrol. I did not understand what had happened—I didn't understand
something I'd seen. Actually, two inexplicable things had happened on
the last day of the patrol, and when I came across John Ransom, he
explained both of them to me.

We were camped in a stand of trees at the edge of a paddy. That day
we had lost two men so new that I had already forgotten their names.
Damp gray twilight settled around us. We couldn't smoke, and we were
not supposed to talk. A black, six-six, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound
grunt named Leonard Hamnet fingered a letter he had received months
before out of his pocket and squinted at it, trying to read it for the
thousandth time while spooning canned peaches into his mouth. By now,
the precious letter was a rag held together with tape.

At that moment someone started shooting at us, and the lieutenant
yelled,
"Shit!"
and we
dropped our food and returned fire at the
invisible people trying to kill us. When they kept shooting back, we
had to go through the paddy.

The warm water came up to our chests. At the dikes, we scrambled
over and splashed down into the muck on the other side. A boy from
Santa Cruz, California, named Thomas Blevins got a round in the back of
his neck and dropped dead into the water just short of the first dike,
and another boy, named Tyrell Budd, coughed and dropped down right
beside him. The F.O. called in an artillery strike. We leaned against
the backs of the last two dikes when the big shells came thudding in.
The ground shook and the water rippled, and the edge of the forest went
up in a series of fireballs. We could hear the monkeys screaming.

One by one we crawled over the last dike onto the solid ground on
the other side of the paddy. A little group of thatched huts was
visible through the sparse trees. Then the two things I did not
understand happened, one after the other. Someone off in the forest
fired a mortar round at us—just one. One mortar, one round. I fell down
and shoved my face in the muck, and everybody around me did the same. I
considered that this might be my last second on earth and greedily
inhaled whatever life might be left to me. I experienced that endless
moment of pure helplessness in which the soul simultaneously clings to
the body and readies itself to leave it. The shell landed on top of the
last dike and blew it to bits. Dirt, mud, and water slopped down around
us. A shell fragment whizzed overhead, sliced a hamburger-sized wad of
bark and wood from a tree, and clanged into Spanky Burrage's helmet
with a sound like a brick hitting a garbage can. The fragment fell to
the ground. A little smoke drifted up from it.

We picked ourselves up. Spanky looked dead, but he was breathing.
Leonard Hamnet picked up Spanky and slung him over his shoulder.

When we walked into the little village in the woods on the other
side of the rice paddy, I experienced a kind of foretaste of the misery
we were to encounter later in a place called la Thuc. If I can say this
without setting off all the Gothic bells, the place seemed
intrinsically, inherently wrong—it was too quiet, too still, completely
without noise or movement. There were no chickens, dogs, or pigs; no
old women came out to look us over, no old men offered conciliatory
smiles. The huts were empty—something I had never seen before in
Vietnam, and never saw again.

Michael Poole's map said that the place was named Bong To.

Hamnet lowered Spanky into the long grass as soon as we reached the
center of the empty village. I bawled out a few words in my poor
Vietnamese.

Spanky groaned. He gently touched the sides of his helmet. "I caught
a head wound," he said.

"You wouldn't have a head at all, you was only wearing your liner,"
Hamnet said.

Spanky bit his lips and pushed the helmet up off his head. He
groaned. A finger of blood ran down beside his ear. Finally the helmet
passed over a lump the size of an apple that rose up from under his
hair. Wincing, Spanky fingered this enormous knot. "I see double," he
said. "I'll never get that helmet back on."

The medic said, "Take it easy, we'll get you out of here."

Out of
here
?" Spanky
brightened up.

"Back to Crandall," the medic said.

A nasty little wretch named Spitalny sidled up, and Spanky frowned
at him. "There ain't nobody here," Spitalny said. "What the fuck is
going on?" He took the emptiness of the village as a personal affront.

Leonard Hamnet turned his back and spat. "Spitalny, Tiano," the
lieutenant said. "Go into the paddy and get Tyrell and Blevins. Now."

Tattoo Tiano, who was due to die six and a half months later and was
Spitalny's only friend, said, "You do it this time, Lieutenant."

Hamnet turned around and began moving toward Tiano and Spitalny. He
looked as if he had grown two sizes larger, as if his hands could pick
up boulders. I had forgotten how big he was. His head was lowered, and
a rim of clear white showed above the irises. I wouldn't have been
surprised if he had blown smoke from his nostrils.

"Hey, I'm gone, I'm already there," Tiano said. He and Spitalny
began moving quickly through the sparse trees. Whoever had fired the
mortar had packed up and gone. By now it was nearly dark, and the
mosquitoes had found us.

Hamnet sat down heavily enough for me to feel the shock in my
boots.>

Poole, Hamnet, and I looked around at the village. "Maybe I better
take a look," the lieutenant said. He flicked his lighter a couple of
times and walked off toward the nearest hut. The rest of us stood
around like fools, listening to the mosquitoes and the sounds of Tiano
and Spitalny pulling the dead men up over the dikes. Every now and then
Spanky groaned and shook his head. Too much time passed.

The lieutenant came hurrying back out of the hut. "Underhill,
Poole," he said, "I want you to see this." Poole and I glanced at each
other. Poole seemed a couple of psychic inches from either taking a
poke at the lieutenant or exploding altogether. In his muddy face his
eyes were the size of hen's eggs. He was wound up like a cheap watch. I
thought that I probably looked pretty much the same. "What is it,
Lieutenant?" he asked.

The lieutenant gestured for us to follow him into the hut and went
back inside. Poole looked as if he felt like shooting the lieutenant in
the back. I felt like shooting the lieutenant in the back, I realized a
second later. I grumbled something and moved toward the hut. Poole
followed.

The lieutenant was fingering his sidearm just inside the hut. He
frowned at us to let us know we had been slow to obey him, then flicked
on his lighter.

"You tell me what it is, Poole."

He marched into the hut, holding up the lighter like a torch.

Inside, he stooped down and tugged at the edges of a wooden panel in
the floor. I caught the smell of blood. The Zippo died, and darkness
closed down on us. The lieutenant yanked the panel back on its hinges.
The smell floated up from whatever was beneath the floor. The
lieutenant flicked the Zippo, and his face jumped out of the darkness.
"Now. Tell me what this is."