The Violet Hour (19 page)

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Authors: Richard Montanari

BOOK: The Violet Hour
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As Geoffrey scaled the steps, he knew that what he was about to do might be unnecessary – the erasure of his small but very specialized and expensive collection of digital porn – but he also knew that he couldn’t take the chance. If he were exposed, what would it do to his mother? It would
kill
Mina Coldicott, that’s what it would do. Mina Coldicott would curl up on her creaky bentwood rocker back there in Painesville, Ohio. Mina Coldicott would evaporate from shame. All eighty-one years and ninety-nine puritanical pounds of her.
Geoffrey, a bit winded now, reached his door and inserted the key in the lock. But before the first tumbler fell, a shadow darkened the wall beside him.
He spun around, more than a bit startled, and saw that it was Tom.
‘Oh. Um. Hi,’ Geoffrey managed.
‘Hello,’ Tom said softly, taking the key from Geoffrey’s hand. Tom reinserted the key and opened the door. He gestured to Geoffrey to enter the apartment. Tom wore a black wool crew neck, tan trousers, camel-hair blazer. Very smart, Geoffrey thought. Very Ralph Lauren. He seemed taller to Geoffrey than he had the day before, broader through the shoulders and chest.
Tom closed the door, turned the dead bolt. ‘Here,’ he began, reaching out, ‘let me help you with your coat.’
Geoffrey turned slowly around, unbuttoning his coat, and noticed that his pulse had begun to race. Geoffrey took a deep breath and let Tom peel the coat from his shoulders.
‘How did you know where I lived?’ Geoffrey asked, fumbling with his pack of Salems. He was blowing it. He wanted this man to stay, to leave, to get in and out of his life as soon as possible.
‘You told me last night, Geoffrey.’
‘I did?’
Tom laughed and it ran a shiver down Geoffrey’s spine. ‘Somebody was into the Pimm’s before they went to the pub, eh?’ Tom walked over to the hall closet, seeming to know where that was located, as well. He hung up the raincoat and returned to the small front room. ‘You mean you really don’t remember telling me all about yourself last night, Geoffrey?’
‘Well, I—’
‘About how you really don’t read very much anymore and how you really don’t like going to the movies as much as you used to because the films are just so silly nowadays. Don’t you remember, Geoffrey?’
Geoffrey tried to strike a calm, affable pose. He failed.
‘And how you really only care about one thing these days. Your computer.’
Geoffrey glanced at his computer, which sat in an alcove off his living room. He looked back at Tom and the dominoes began to tumble. He remembered now. The graphic of the poem, the T.S. Eliot poem he had received on his secret e-mail account and had summarily erased as so much cyber junk mail. The image now drew itself in his mind, the fluid strokes, the jet black ink.
T.S. Eliot. Julia Raines.
My God, Geoffrey thought.
All these years.
Geoffrey thought of the stack of photographs Tom had shown him. How the man fucking
knew
. He felt a black gorge rise within him.
‘We have business to do, and we have pleasure to do,’ Tom said, reaching into his coat pocket, retrieving a pair of thin rubber gloves.
Geoffrey stared at the gloves, his eyes widening. ‘We do?’
‘Oh yes,’ Tom said, his voice affecting a British accent. ‘Which do you fancy first, love?’
30
 
The Golden Gate Villas were directly across Mayfield Road from Golden Gate Shopping Center, a strip center anchored by an OfficeMax and a Friday’s.
Nicky arrived in the Heights at five-thirty, a half hour early, so he stopped at Ferrara’s Imported Foods. It was physically impossible to drive past the Italian food store without grabbing a few slices of prosciutto and a warm bread. As Louie Stella always said, if you can’t read a newspaper through it, the prosciutto’s too thick. Ferrara’s always did it right.
Nicky continued up Mayfield Road, pulled into the lot at Golden Gate, looked at his watch. Five-forty.
Okay, he said to himself, in solemn, almost liturgical tones, ten minutes, that’s it. Or ten bucks. Ten minutes or ten bucks. That was his credo, although he had never been able to uphold either of those commandments in the past.
He parked the car and stepped into Half Price Books.
31
 
Geoffrey sat very still, his trousers around his ankles, his penis in his right hand, but for some reason, he could not seem to achieve an erection. Perhaps, more than the debilitating fear itself, it was the humiliation of having to go through his computer files, photo by photo, with another human being in the room, looking over his shoulder. Tom, who seemed to be extremely knowledgeable about computers, had set the software to run them automatically, in succession, like a slide show at a degenerate convention.
Geoffrey stared at the screen and wondered how he ever found them so thoroughly arousing. Photographs depicting acts in which he would never dare partake. Now they were making him ill.
Another photo appeared. This one a trio of Asian girls, urinating onto a very thin, very erect black man.
‘Tell me what happened that night,’ Tom said softly. ‘Tell me in your own words.’
Geoffrey said it again. It seemed as if he’d said it a thousand times already. He was nearing his ballast of tears. ‘I swear to God I can’t remember. I can’t remember twenty minutes ago. Why won’t you believe me?’
Tom stepped around front and snapped another photograph with the digital camera.
Snick
! went the flash. ‘Tell me what happened that night. Tell me in your own words.’
‘I don’t know . . .’ Geoffrey replied wearily. ‘I don’t know . . .’
Tom stepped behind Geoffrey and stood there for a few moments, watching the slide show on the computer monitor. Geoffrey felt his presence, but he could not turn around in the chair.
The monitor now showed a blond girl in pigtails fellating a man in a sailor suit, a man with amputated legs.
Next a young white man in a penis clamp and a leather mask.
Tom had been very clear about what he intended to do with the digital photographs of the naked, masturbating Geoffrey if Geoffrey didn’t tell him what he wanted to hear. He said he was going to take the photographs and upload them onto the Internet. The Internet, where they would be available to the whole world.
It was unthinkable.
Tom snapped the shutter once again, the flash blinding Geoffrey momentarily. Five pictures now.
Tom hunkered down on one knee, just to Geoffrey’s right, and looked through the viewfinder. ‘Tell me what happened that night,’ he said. ‘Tell me in your own words.’
‘I don’t—’
Snick
.
The computer screen now showed a tangle of naked bodies on red satin sheets.
Tom stepped back, looking at the monitor once again. He leaned in front of Geoffrey, hit a few keys. Within moments they were connected to the Net.
‘Wait!’ Geoffrey shouted. ‘Okay . . . uh . . . I remember something . . .’
‘Go on.’
‘It was Halloween and we were all hanging out at Ben Crane’s apartment on Bellflower and—’
‘Wrong.’ Tom connected the digital camera to a USB port. In an instant the photographs he had taken of Geoffrey Coldicott’s twig-thin, incandescently white body were displayed on the monitor.
‘Last time,’ Tom said. ‘Tell me what happened that night.’
Geoffrey was sobbing now, his tears flowing freely. ‘Please. Why are you doing this to me?’
‘You selected yourself, Geoffrey. You and the others.’
‘But we were kids.’
‘We were
all
kids.’
‘Yes, but none of us knew how you felt about her,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Not really. We never would have, you know . . .’
‘Who was the pirate in the mask that night?’
‘Well,’ Geoffrey began, sitting a little straighter in his chair. ‘I’m not sure about that, but—’
‘And why don’t you remember?’
‘I was loaded!’ Geoffrey said. ‘I was ripped by eight o’clock that night. You remember those days. Reds for sleeping, whites for cramming, coke for parties, ’ludes for sex. And always with those stupid fucking Algonquin drinks. Come on. I was fucked up. We were
all
fucked up. Ask Sebastian, if he’s still around. You can’t hold what happened that night against us. Especially not after so many years. Julia was willing. You have to—’
The look that Geoffrey received at that moment froze the words on his tongue. He had said the wrong thing. He had gone too far.
‘And you were just starting to make sense,’ Tom said, leaning over and pressing a few keys on the computer’s keyboard. ‘And as for Dr Keller, I’ll be seeing him soon. He has a grade coming, too.’
Geoffrey shifted gears. ‘But you can’t upload those photographs. People can see my face. My
apartment
. People will know it’s me. It will ruin me!’
Tom squared himself in front of Geoffrey. ‘Well, then. That leads us to one overwhelming question, as Mr J. Alfred Prufrock might have put it.’
A thin ray of hope skittered across Geoffrey’s face. ‘What?’
‘What happened that night?’
‘I don’t fucking remember! I don’t fucking remember!’ Geoffrey screamed. ‘I don’t fucking remember fucking remember fucking remember fucking remember. . . .’
Tom hit the Enter key and began uploading the files, sending the photographs of Geoffrey Coldicott to more than a dozen sites worldwide. Geoffrey struggled against the rubber bungee cords that secured him to the chair, but it was fruitless. Within a minute the files were uploaded, gone. His professional life with them.
‘Now,’ Tom began, removing a hypodermic needle from his coat pocket. ‘Tell me what happened that night, Mr Geoffrey Drake Coldicott, class of 1988.’ He placed the syringe on the desk. ‘Tell me in your own words.’
It wasn’t until ten minutes later that Tom reached into his inside coat pocket and removed a pair of newspaper clippings. One spoke of the death of a Dr Benjamin Matthew Crane, forty-three, of Erie, Pennsylvania. The other, of the death of a Father John Angelino, forty-two, of Highland Heights, Ohio. He placed them in Geoffrey’s lap.
Geoffrey glanced down, his mind racing, his stomach a vile torrent of nausea. Words jumped up to meet him. Names. Names he knew. Johnny Angelino. Ben Crane.
‘Tell me if you remember this,’ Tom said.
He placed a typewritten sheet of paper in front of Geoffrey’s face. On it was a poem Geoffrey knew well, a poem by T.S. Eliot entitled ‘Whispers of Immortality.’ Just the title alone hurled Geoffrey back to those heady nights in college at CWRU: Albee plays at Eldred Theater, staying up until three and four and five in the morning, all-night Truffaut at Strosacker, breakfast at Howard Johnson’s on the Circle, arguing until dawn about Kerouac, Kafka, Kierkegaard.
‘It’s not his most famous poem, but I think it is one of his best.’
Geoffrey’s eyes began to move down the page of poetry, and the newspaper clippings on his lap began to make a clear, horrifying sense.
Webster was much possessed by death and saw the skull beneath the skin,
the poem began.
And breastless creatures under ground leaned backward with a lipless grin.
No, Geoffrey thought. This cannot be happening.
Daffodil bulbs instead of balls stared from the sockets of the eyes!
My God. No.
The couched Brazilian jaguar compels the scampering marmoset with subtle effluence of cat . . .
Geoffrey slumped in his chair, a thoroughly vanquished man, a man who could no longer fashion his features into even a veil of terror. But he could still see. Oh, yes. His eyes were a bit blurred with tears, but they still worked fine. Tom had made sure of that. Because the photograph that dropped into Geoffrey’s lap at that moment was not to be missed. Not if you were a male child who had ever suckled at his mother’s breast, not if you’d ever stood on a silky beach while the waves receded and your mother splashed water over your legs and you laughed until it felt like there was a knitting needle in your side; not if you’d ever put in hour after hour in wood shop, standing at the lathe, turning a pair of salt and pepper shakers that to this day served a function on her table. It was not one of the photos his tormentor had just taken, that was for sure, yet it took Geoffrey a moment to realize just what he was looking at, because it wasn’t that often that one got to see an eighty-one-year-old woman nude, especially if she was sprawled in a makeshift grave, her face made up like an ancient street-walker, especially if there was something wrong, terribly wrong with her fragile anatomy—
And breastless creatures under ground . . .
‘What do you think of her?’ Tom asked, both hands on Geoffrey’s shoulders now, gently massaging them. ‘Sexy? Or don’t you like older women?’

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