“Would you like to go to the bathroom?” Shondell said. “Just say so.”
“Yeah, we would!” Carroll said.
“Good boy. See what can happen when you’re under the right discipline?”
“What are you getting out of this, Shondell?” I said.
“Everything,” he said. “The reconstruction of the republic. A new era is beginning, and it’s based on the purity of the Nordic race.”
“There’s no such thing as a Nordic race,” I said.
I heard Shondell squat down close to me. I could feel his presence like an obscene hand hovering above an unguarded part of my body. I could see nothing through the hood. He touched my forehead with the tip of his finger. “Scared?”
“I’ll make you a promise,” I said. “If I ever get loose, I’m going to twist off your head and piss on it and flush it down a toilet.”
“Let’s see how you feel by this time tomorrow.” He got to his feet again. “I need you in here, fellows.”
I heard other men coming through the hatchway.
“Get our friends to the bathroom and make sure all their needs are met,” Shondell said.
The ligatures were taken from my ankles, and a man held me by each arm and led me to a toilet; one of them freed my wrists and let me relieve myself, the hood still on my head. “You guys know I’m a cop, right?” I said. “You know what happens when you kill a cop in Louisiana.”
“We are cops,” one of them said.
They led me back to the compartment, then took Clete and Carroll LeBlanc to the head and brought them back.
“I want to show you my collection,” Shondell said.
“Is Penelope in on this?” I said.
“How stupid can you be, Dave? Would she be with Adonis if he were not a rich and powerful man?”
“Fuck your collection,” I said.
“You’re an educated man. Profanity is the tool early man used to ward off situations he couldn’t change — in other words, a confession of inadequacy. Does it bother you that you’re such a predictable fellow?”
Chapter Thirty-seven
The hoods were removed from our heads, and we were marched down a passageway to a forecastle that had leather-padded bulkheads and blue plastic tarps spread on the deck. There were no portholes, and I had no way to get a bearing. Chains with sheep-lined leather cuffs hung from the bulkheads.
“How do you like my arrangement?” Shondell said. “Roomy, soundproof, and with an array of items that go back perhaps five hundred years.”
At the far end of the compartment were primitive machines and worktables covered with metal instruments. The machines were constructed of brass and iron and oak and heavy bolts and spikes and pulleys and cogged wheels with long wood handles attached to them.
“Anything to say, Mr. Purcel?” Shondell said.
“Eat shit,” Clete said.
“When it’s your turn, the man whose finger you shot off will be here to cheer you along,” Shondell said. “You don’t mind, do you?”
“What are you going to tell Johnny about all this?” Clete said.
“He’ll know you went away. He’s a good boy. He’ll stay that way.”
“What about Isolde?” I said.
“Believe me, these are not your concerns. In the next twenty-four hours, you’re going to be extremely preoccupied.” Shondell gazed at the machines and instruments that represented the darkness I had tried to plumb in Marcel LaForchette. How could I have mistaken the torment in poor Marcel for the disease that lived inside Mark Shondell?
“I love the names of these things,” he said. “The scold’s bridle for loquacious housewives, the choke pear for expansion of the mouth and other places, the iron maiden, the scavenger’s daughter for compressing people who need size reduction, the rack, and the thumbscrew. How about my favorite, the brazen bull? The victim is inserted inside and slowly boiled. There’re pipes inside that make his screams sound like the roaring of a bull.”
Carroll LeBlanc was crying.
“Nothing to say, Dave?” Shondell said.
“It looks like a junk pile that your average pervert would probably appreciate,” I said.
“I think you’ll change your tune.” Shondell looked at the brazen bull and grinned. “That’s a hint.”
“Here’s one thing that won’t change, Shondell,” I said. “No matter what happens to us, you’ll remain the same. You’re trash, your family is trash, and your ancestors were trash. I think God keeps a few people like you around to remind the white race we’ve got some serious problems. I heard the Shondells worked as pubic-latrine cleaners for Robespierre during the Reign of Terror. Is that true?”
Maybe it was the light or my imagination, but the creases in his face seemed to deepen, with an effect like soil erosion, the blood leaving his lips. He exuded an odor that smelled like an unchanged bandage. There were whiskers showing above his collar, the way they do when an old man cannot shave adequately.
Then he seemed to collect himself. “A young woman awaits me now,” he said. “After a nap and a shower and a fine breakfast, I’ll return, and we’ll continue our talk. General Mendoza will be accompanying me.”
“Mr. Shondell, you promised you’d get my daughter into a hospital,” Carroll said.
“Oh, yes,” Shondell said. “Thank you for reminding me. A lovely girl.”
We were taken back to the compartment where we had woken up, the ligatures on our wrists. Bell locked us in. We sat on the deck in the white bareness of the compartment, hands bound behind us, the engines humming through the bulkhead. I was reminded of the play No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre. The characters find themselves in a windowless room and discover they are not only dead but in hell.
“Hey, you guys, I know this won’t mean much, but I’m sorry I sold you out,” Carroll said.
Neither Clete nor I could bring ourselves to look at him.
“Y’all hear me?” he said.
“Yeah, we heard you,” Clete said. “That means you don’t need to say any more.”
“We saw all their faces,” Carroll said.
“Yeah,” Clete said.
“That means we got no chance, huh?” Carroll said.
“No one is putting the glide on you, LeBlanc,” Clete said. “Now shut up.”
“I don’t want to go out like this,” Carroll said. “With you guys hating me. My daughter never had a mother. I tried my best. I didn’t think all this would happen.”
“I’m going to come over there and kick the shit out of you,” Clete said.
“Listen to me, Carroll,” I said. “You owned up. You’re genuinely sorry. We accept that. Now we’re going to do everything we can to get out of here. Shondell has a weakness.”
“What?” Carroll said.
“He’s vain and afraid,” Clete said. “He knows what’s waiting for him down the track.”
“What’s waiting for him?” Carroll said.
“Probably everything he’s done to other people,” Clete said.
“Yeah?” Carroll said. “What good does that do us?”
Clete struggled to his feet. “There is no us. There is me and there is Dave. Then there is you. There is no us. Do you have that straight, you pinhead?”
It would have been funny in any other circumstances. But we were inside a nightmare, perhaps an atavistic memory of real events passed down through the eons, like dreams of falling or burning or being buried alive. We had no place to hide, no mother to wake us, no descent from the heavens by a winged spirit with a shining broadsword.