Waldman stumbled trying to straighten up. He had been kneeling too long for his fifty-year-old frame. You knew you were getting old when you couldn't do that anymore. A young patrolman with a happy, glad-to-meet-you smile entered the basement room.
"Yeah?" said Waldman. The patrolman's face was familiar. Then he saw the badge. Of course. It must have been the model for the recruiting poster. Looked just like him, right down to that artificial friendly grin. But that couldn't be a real badge. The commercial artist hired by the police department, some radical freak, had done his defiance bit by giving the poster model a badge number no one had… "6969" which meant an obscenity.
And this patrolman, now smiling at Waldman, had that number.
"Who are you?"
"Patrolman Gilbys, sir." That flat voice. It was the voice on the tape.
"Oh, good," said Waldman pleasantly. "Good."
"I heard you were on the case."
"Oh, yeah," said Waldman. He would put the suspect at ease, then casually get him to the station house, and stick a revolver in his face. Waldman tried to remember when he had last cleaned his pistol. A year and a half ago. No matter. A police special could take all sorts of abuse.
"I was wondering what you meant by a horror scene? You were quoted as such in the newspapers. You didn't mention creativity. Did you think it was creative?"
"Sure, sure. Most creative thing I've ever seen. All the guys down at the station house thought it was a work of art. You know, we ought to go down and talk to them about it."
"I do not know if you are aware of it, but your voice is modulating unevenly. This is a sure indication of lying. Why do you lie to me, kike? I assume it is kike, unless, of course, it is kraut."
"Lie? Who's lying? It was creative."
"You will tell me the truth, of course. People talk through pain," said the phony patrolman with the glad-to-meet-you smile and the obscene badge from the recruiting poster.
Waldman stepped back, reaching for his gun, but the patrolman's hand was squeezing his eyeballs.
His hands couldn't move and in the red, blinding pain, Waldman told the patrolman the truth. It was the most uncreative horror Waldman had ever seen.
"Thank you," said the phony patrolman. "I took it right from the poster, but I did not think copying someone else's work was creative. Thank you." Then, like a drill press, he pushed his right hand through Waldman's heart until it met his left hand.
"So much for constructive criticism," the flat voice said.
CHAPTER TWO
His name was Remo and they wanted him to show his press pass. They wanted him to do this so much that Brother George stuck the barrel of a Kalishnikov automatic rifle under his right eye and Sister Alexa put a .45 caliber automatic in the small of his back, while Brother Che stood across the room aiming a Smith and Wesson revolver at his skull.
"If he steps funny, we'll blow him to hamburger," Sister Alexa had said.
No one wondered why this man who said he was a reporter failed to be surprised when the hotel room door opened. No one suspected that just not talking while waiting for him was not enough silence, that tense breathing could be heard even through a door as thick as that one in the Bay State Motor Inn, West Springfield, Mass. He seemed like such an ordinary man. Thin, just under six feet tall, with high cheekbones. Only his thick wrists might have told them something. He seemed so casual in his gray slacks and black turtleneck sweater and soft, glove-leather loafers.
"Let's see it," said Brother Che as Brother George closed the door behind him.
"I have it somewhere," said Remo reaching into his right pocket. He saw Brother George's right index finger squeeze very close on the trigger, perhaps closer to firing than Brother George knew. Sweat beaded on Brother George's forehead. His lips were chapped and dry. He drew air into his lungs with short choppy breaths that seemed to just replenish the tip of his supply of oxygen, as though he dared not risk a complete exhale.
Remo produced a plastic-covered police shield issued by the New York City Police Department.
"Where's the card from the Times? This is a police card," said Brother George.
"If he showed you a special card from the Times, you should start wondering," said Brother Che. "All New York papers use cards issued by the police."
"They're a tool of the pig police," said Brother George.
"The cards come from the police so the reporters can get past police lines at fires and things," said Brother Che. He was a scrawny man, with a bearded face that looked as though it had once been bathed in crankcase oil and would never be fully clean again.
"I don't trust no pig," said Brother George.
"Let's off him," said Sister Alexa. Remo could see her nipples harden under her light white peasant blouse. She was getting her sexual jollies from this.
He smiled at her, and her eyes lowered to her gun. Her pale, pottery-white skin flushed red in the cheeks. Her knuckles were white around the gun, as if she were afraid it would do its own bidding if not held tightly.
Brother Che got the card from Brother George.
"All right," said Brother Che. "Do you have the money?"
"I have the money if you have the goods," said Remo.
"How do we know we'll get the money if we show you what we've got?"
"You have me. You have the guns."
"I don't trust him," said Brother George.
"He's all right," said Brother Che.
"Let's off him now. Now," said Sister Alexa.
"No, no," said Brother Che, stuffing the Smith and Wesson into his beltless gray pants.
"We can get it all printed ourselves. Every bit of it the way we want," said Sister Alexa. "Let's stick it to him."
"And two hundred people who already think like us will read it," said Brother Che. "No. The Times will make it international knowledge."
"Who cares what someone in Mexico City thinks?" said Sister Alexa.
"I don't trust him," said Brother George.
"A little revolutionary discipline, please," said Brother Che. He nodded for George to stand by the door and for Alexa to go to the closed bathroom door. The curtains were drawn over the window. It was twelve stories down from the window, Remo knew. Brother Che nodded for Remo to sit at a small glass-and-chrome coffee table.
Sister Alexa brought a pale, bespectacled man out of the bathroom. She helped him lug a large black cardboard suitcase with new leather straps to the coffee table. He had the wasted look of a man whose only sunshine had come from overhead fluorescent lights.
"Have we gotten the money?" he asked, looking at Brother Che.
"We will," said Brother Che.
The pale man opened the case and clumsily put it on the floor.
"I'll explain everything," he said, taking a stack of computer printouts from the suitcase, laying out a manila envelope which proved to have news clippings, and finally a white pad with nothing on it. He clicked a green ballpoint pen into readiness.
"This is the biggest story you're ever going to get," he told Remo. "Bigger than Watergate. Bigger than any assassination. Much bigger than any CIA activity in Chile or the FBI's wiretaps. This is the biggest story happening in America today. And it's a scoop."
"He's already here to buy," said Brother Che. "Don't waste time."
"I'm a computer operator at a sanitarium on Long Island Sound in Rye, New York. It's called Folcroft. I don't know if you've ever heard of it."
Remo shrugged. The shrug was a lie.
"Do you have pictures of it?" asked Remo.
"Anyone can just walk up and take pictures. You can get pictures," said the man.
"The place is not the point," said Brother Che.
"Right, I would guess," said the man. "I don't know if you're familiar with computers or not, but you don't need all that much information to program them. Just what's necessary to the core. However, four years ago, I began to do some figuring, right?"