First Interlude Gwen, Underfoot #6
Colin looked away, up the stairs, which was when Fleming made her move. She snatched a walking stick with a steel tip and
poked it at him. She missed his eye and struck his cheekbone. His head went back and she brought the tip down on his foot
with a fleshy thump. Colin screamed and fell back into Donna. The door slammed.
“I WILL call the cops, you little fucks,” she shouted from the other side. “I’m doing it now! You think I won’t?”
Colin had one hand clapped to his face while he hopped on his left foot. Donna seized his elbow to keep him from falling over.
“We should go,” Van said. “In case she really does call someone. I’m holding.”
“You’re what?” Donna cried.
He shrugged. “It’s not like I’ve got a pocket full of black tar heroin. It’s just ’shrooms. But at fifty bucks an ounce, I’m
not going to chuck ’em in the gutter.”
“I might have to hit urgent care anyway,” Colin said. “There’s a small chance she broke my foot.”
They were climbing up the stairs, but Sheldon was moving in the other direction, squeezing between them to get to that absurdly
narrow door. Colin limped. Donna and Allie helped him along.
Gwen trailed behind the others, head down, going back over what had just happened. When she answered the door, Fleming had
been wondering why a package would come from the United Kingdom, when she was headed to London herself in just a few months.
She was going abroad at almost the same time King Sorrow would be notching up his next kill. She’d be gone—and her apartment
would be empty. Gwen kept this thought to herself. She tried to think who she knew in Gogan who could get her in through the
window. It was a surprisingly fulsome list.
Sheldon stumbled to the bottom of the steps and began to beat on the door.
“Mrs. Fleming! Mrs. Fleming? You got to take ’em back. I’m asking nice! I’m asking so nice! Please? Pretty please?”
Then he began to bang his head against the door. Gwen paused to look back, anxious for him. Sheldon drew his head back and
snapped it forward, once, again. As he beat his head on the door, he began to laugh.
“Pretty please with brains on it? Pretty please with brains all over your door? Pretty please pretty please pretty please,” smashing his head into the door on each please while Fleming screamed from inside, screamed the police were coming, which was probably true.
Sheldon paused, turned his head, and grinned up the steps at Gwen. Blood drooled from a welt in the center of his forehead.
There was some blood in his teeth.
“I been trying to get some real bad ideas out of my head,” Sheldon told her. “Think if I keep beatin’ my head against this
door, I finally will?”
Arthur squeezed Gwen’s hand and drew her away, down the sidewalk, into the icy darkness. She could hear Sheldon slamming his
head against Fleming’s door and laughing, all the way to the end of the block.
13.
Llewellyn liked to suck on little pieces of ice. It numbed his sore mouth, and the cold trickle of water into his throat made
it easier to bear the fever. Gwen knew all this without being told. When he wouldn’t drink his dinner—a nutrient shake—she
spooned him ice, a few crunchy pieces at a time. Colin drank the shake instead, sipping at it now and then, while he watched
the TV at the foot of the bed, the only light in the dark. Jeremy Brett in a top hat, carrying a cane, stalked the wicked
in a sunlit London that never was. Llewellyn couldn’t see the TV anymore, but he could hear the carriage wheels clacking over
cobblestones and Brett’s clipped, precise observations. How they resembled one another, Llewellyn a decayed and wasted version
of the great detective.
“We used ice water,” he said. “In Saigon. But not on the asset. Never on the asset. It was best if they had a wife. Or children. We had designed a kind of theater in the debriefing room: a window with a red velvet curtain, tied back with a gold rope, at the back of what had been a French cabaret. Once upon a time men could pay to enter the room and view a private dance. It served much the same purpose for us, only the curtain was drawn back to reveal the asset’s wife.
Or daughter. Or son. Always naked. It was a room made for nakedness.
There was a big steel washtub filled with ice water.
One of us would plunge them in head and shoulders and hold them underwater, their hands tied behind their backs.
A man never lied after seeing his naked, screaming daughter half-drowned.
Sometimes I asked the questions and sometimes I held the fish.
Love shatters the best of us. This is the heart of my book on interrogation, which is still studied and shared among field agents to this day. ”
She offered him a spoonful of ice.
“You should rest,” she said.
“Do you know how I want to die, Colin?”
“Tell me,” Colin said, without looking from the TV.
“I want to be drowned in ice water with my hands bound behind my back, and a man forcing my head into the basin.”
“Is that how you want to die,” Colin said, “or is that your idea of foreplay?”
The old man cackled. His laughter turned to coughing, until blood flecked his lips, and then a bronchial wheeze that shook
his whole frame. Gwen put on latex gloves and dabbed him clean with a tissue. When she was done, she paused, looking at the
stained paper, thinking how fully death was concentrated in those few drops of blood.
Calm again, Llewellyn’s bony, withered hand found Gwen’s in the dark, a claw not unlike the one that had gripped her from
beneath the basement stairs.
“My blood is full of the most evil poison,” he whispered. “But you cleaned it up anyway, without a flinch. You’re a good girl,
Gwen. So brave. So easy around death. You were born for this—to show people to the last door and to hold it open for them.
I know, because I was too.”
14.
When Llewellyn was at last asleep, she opened the door into darkness and crept out along the gallery over the reception hall,
leaving him with Colin. Her eyes were still adjusting to the gloom when Arthur’s hand slipped into hers and her heart throbbed.
His other hand found the waistband of her sweatpants and tugged her toward him. In his black turtleneck and cinder-colored
jeans, it was as if the shadows had sprung to life and reached out and caught her.
They didn’t talk, and the guest room was only a few steps away. Even after, they hardly said a word.
15.
Gwen climbed in behind the wheel of the car, wondering if it would start. The night was so cold, the windshield was a blind
eye, frosted over with a thousand overlapping feathers of ice. It was less like getting into a Honda Civic, more like finding
herself in a cave of ice. The chill was thrilling, or maybe she was just highly sensitized; her body was still ringing like
a struck bell.
She bent to stick the key in the ignition, turned it over—a gentle whinny and it sprang to life—and sat up again, which was
when one claw gripped her right arm from behind. Another reached forward from the dark and took her left, pinning her to her
seat.
Gwen looked in the rearview mirror.
Nothing.
“I am hungry,” King Sorrow said. “As far as I can see, this misbegotten parcel of the American States specializes in exactly two crops:
potatoes and fatty little Underfoots. And I’m offa chips, luv, I’m watching my waistline. There’s a lot of it to watch. Thirty-eight
feet of it.”
“You didn’t eat Jayne Nighswander. She wasn’t food.”
“Not her flesh,” a cold, rasping tongue trilled at her earlobe. “I supped on her dying anguish. It saturated her blood—all
that misery, all that terror—and made it as sweet as the sweetest Riesling.
I could never resist that. Give me a taste and I have to have every drop.
I need it like Donovan needs a drink, like Allie needs pussy, like Arthur needs you.
I has cravings, I has, and you has to satisfy them.
You have Colin Wren’s list of names. Pick someone off the menu. ”
“Tell me something. Say I do pick someone for you. Do you have to persecute them? Terrify them? Tease them like you do?”
“Sweet meat must have sour sauce,” he crooned. “It’s the marinade that flavors the flesh.”
“What if I didn’t want you to torment them before you kill them?”
“What if the damned want ice water in hell?” he said and laughed.
“I’d riddle for it,” she said. “For you to extend that mercy.”
“Oh,” he said—almost sighed. “I do enjoy a good riddling contest. You’d risk a riddle with me . . . just so I don’t haunt the chosen before their sacrifice?”
“I’d want more than that. Tell me about King Herod.”
“I slew babies for Herod. As they say, young flesh and old fish are best.”
“Way I heard it, you missed the only one he wanted.”
“I got the ones I wanted, which suits me well enough. And in the end I got Herod too—he drank my tears from a golden goblet. Which was better
than he deserved.”
“It was painful?”
“Not at all. When he died he was filled with a sweet feeling of incandescence, which eased him out of this life on wings of flame. All his suffering came in the months before he drank from my cup. He had picked up a disease from a whore. His cock was black and when he pissed, he pissed blood.”
“Kind of you to give him a gentle end,” she said. “Why was that?”
“He paid me with a fine puzzle. Perhaps it pains you, to learn a wicked man chose the terms of his own ending? But it is the
finest of all riddles: Why are the best among us nailed to crosses to die while the cruel live long enough to grow bored of
their harems?”
“How does it work? The riddling contest?”
“I give you a riddle, and if you answer it, you get what’s coming to you.”
“What do you want if I can’t answer?”
“I want you to tell Arthur you do not love him and never did. You are not to sleep with him again, not ever—you are never
to care for each other that way. Fail on this point and your life is forfeit . . . and his too. Prince Charming’s kiss brought