The Language Of Cannibals

CHAPTER SEVEN

I regained consciousness-in what I assumed was a hospital bed-with a skull that felt like someone had tried to split it down the center with a chisel, a mouth that felt and tasted like it was filled with steel wool soaked in dirty turpentine, and the terrible fear that I'd been partially blinded. I lay in a dim pool of pale yellow light cast by a bulb set somewhere in the wall above my head. Virtually everything beyond a three-foot radius was impenetrable darkness; what I could see out of my left eye was blurred and milky, and I could see nothing at all out of my right eye. I grabbed for the blind eye. Pain shot through my head and right shoulder, but I was rewarded, if that was the proper term, with the feel of a heavy bandage covering the right side of my face. Maybe I hadn't been blinded after all. I groaned, closed my good eye against the pain. When I opened it, a blurred but instantly recognizable shape, complete with full beard and shoulder-length hair, was leaning over me.

"Why do I have the distinct feeling that I should have stuck around Saturday to listen to your bad news?" Garth said in a voice that was wry, yet heavily laden with emotion.

"A comedian is just what I need, Garth. Ha ha."

"Sorry about that. Just my way of showing how happy I am to find you alive. I passed your wreck on the way here, and it gave me a few anxious moments."

"What's the news on me? Did I lose an eye?"

Garth laid one of his large, powerful hands on my left shoulder, squeezed it very gently. "No. You're going to be all right, brother. For a time they thought you'd fractured your skull, but X rays show otherwise. Mild concussion, lots of cuts, scrapes, and bruises to keep the other bruises you had company, but you'll live. You've got a twelve-stitch gash over your right eye, but the eye itself is undamaged; they just found it easier to bandage it the way they did. You've lost a little scalp and hair on the right side of your head, but you were thinking of getting a haircut this week anyway, right?"

"There you go again with another real knee-slapper."

"How do you feel, Mongo?"

"Garth, my physical and mental states of being lend the term 'feeling like shit' new depths of meaning."

He began to gently knead my shoulder in a way that relaxed my muscles, and somehow began to ease the twin suns of white-hot pain that were blazing behind my eyes. "That was some job of flying you did in the Volkswagen, brother," he said softly, his tone soothing, almost hypnotic. "You must have sailed better than a hundred feet through the air going down that hillside; you flew right between the eaves of two houses, rolled over, and landed on top of a tree beside some guy's deck. You made him spill his drink. When the paramedics finally managed to climb the tree, they found you hanging upside down in your harness. You're a hell of an advertisement for seat belts and harnesses." He stopped the kneading, eased himself carefully down on the side of the bed. When he spoke again, all traces of warmth and humor were gone from his voice. "What the hell happened, Mongo? What's going on here?"

I worked my tongue over my gummy lips, tried to clear my throat. "Get me some water, will you?"

"Watch your eye," Garth said as he rose from the bed.

He turned on the light, came back, and poured me a glass of water from a plastic carafe on a table beside the bed. Then he sat down again, gently raised me up, and handed me the glass. As I sipped the water, he gently rubbed my back between the shoulder blades, then kneaded the back of my neck. Incredibly, my nausea and pain began to ease, and the vision in my uncovered left eye began to clear somewhat. If I was ever to bet on the healing power of the laying on of hands, it would be Garth's hands I'd bet on. They were hands that, more than a few times in the past, since his poisoning with nitrophenyldienal, had been ready to kill-never inappropriately, but often prematurely, at least in my opinion. But they were also, most definitely, a healer's hands.

"So," I said as I drained off the water and handed him back the glass, "where am I?"

"Cairn Hospital. I'm told it's a very good one."

"What time is it?"

"Three o'clock in the morning, Monday. I got home around six yesterday, found your note. When you weren't home by nine, I picked up the phone and called the police and the hospital. Bingo. That's how I found out you'd been in an accident."

"It was no accident; it was an on-purpose. Two guys ran me off the road."

Garth grunted, as if he wasn't surprised. The knotted muscles in his jaw and neck were the only sign of his anger and concern. He refilled the water glass, then pulled a chair over to the bed and sat down in it. When he spoke, his voice was low, but humming with tension. "What was the bad news you wanted to give me on Saturday, Mongo?"

"Oh, that," I said, rolling over on my side and propping myself up on a very sore elbow. "You mean the bad news you said I should take care of?"

"Come on, Mongo."

"The bad news on Saturday was that I'd become convinced Michael was murdered. Today's bad news is that the KGB agent who probably murdered Michael works for Elysius Culhane. Naturally, Culhane isn't too eager for this fact to become public knowledge, and the FBI seems perfectly willing to help him cover it up. Cairn has a chickenshit police chief who doesn't seem inclined to do anything about it, and then there's the minor matter of the possible existence of a death squad in Cairn, which may be responsible for me being here."

"Whoa, Mongo. I feel I've done sufficient groveling, so stop trying to be clever and just start from the beginning."

I did, relating what I'd learned and everything that had happened from the time I arrived in Cairn on Friday afternoon to the moment on Sunday afternoon when I yanked on Beloved Too's steering wheel and went soaring off into space. Garth listened in silence, the steady, bright gleam in his limpid eyes his only display of emotion. When I finished I was exhausted, once again in pain, and with increasingly blurred vision in my good eye. Garth seemed to sense this; he leaned forward in his chair and once again began to knead the muscles in my back and neck with his powerful but incredibly gentle hands.

"Okay," Garth said softly. "First, let's try to sort out this attempt to kill you. Trex and one of his buddies ran you off the road. The problem is that nobody seems to have seen it happen."

"Who reported the accident?"

"The guy who spilled his drink when you landed in the tree next to his deck. He just saw the car come sailing out of nowhere and land on top of the tree; he didn't see what happened up on the road, and no other witnesses have come forward. Do you think the ambush was Trex's idea?"

"He sure as hell had a powerful itch to kill me."

"And he was waiting for you in ambush. He knew you'd probably be using 9W to get to the Palisades Parkway. How did he know you were in Cairn? Could he have been following you?"

I shook my head. "He couldn't have been out of the hospital himself for more than a short time before he came at me. Besides, Gregory Trex wasn't interested in following me, only killing me-and, if he'd been following me, he'd have had a lot better places to kill me than on 9W. Even if they weren't in trucks, that shithead and his friends wouldn't be good enough to tail me without my knowing it. He must have seen my car parked outside Town Hall, or seen me go in. He figured I'd be going home eventually, so he rounded up a buddy and set up the ambush."

"Maybe Culhane put Trex and his buddy on to you."

I thought about it, nodded. "Could be; it would be enough simply to drop a hint to Trex that I was in town, and Trex would take it from there. After Mosely called him, Culhane had time to call Hendricks at the FBI before he came to confront me. Maybe he also took the time to call Trex."

"There's another possibility, Mongo. There is indeed a death squad operating here, with Gregory Trex and his masked buddy being two of its members and Jay Acton controlling it."

"Acton shouldn't have a clue that I'm breathing down his neck. Supposedly he was out sailing when Mosely called Culhane."

"Mosely could have reported to Culhane on the conversation you had with him on Friday evening. If Culhane mentioned to Acton that you had questions about Burana's death, it would have put Acton on his guard."

There was something odd in Garth's tone that made me nervous. "Okay, Garth," I said, watching his face, "that's a possibility. But I really can't see a clever KGB agent having anything to do with a loose cannon like Gregory Trex. Like I said, Trex didn't need anyone to goad him into trying to kill me. The ambush may be totally unrelated to the other matters."

"I think it is related."

"What's the matter, Garth? What is it?"

"Somebody has been following you, Mongo-and I agree that it had to have been a pro, or you'd have picked up on it."

"How the hell do you know somebody's been following me? You didn't even know I was in the hospital until a few hours ago, and you didn't know what's been happening until a few minutes ago."

Garth bowed his head slightly, sighed as he ran the fingers of both hands through his long hair. "Harry Peal's dead, Mongo."

"Oh, God," I said, turning my face away and clenching my fists against the new pain that suddenly shot through my heart. "Shit. How?"

"He died in a fall off the cliff outside his home sometime Sunday afternoon."

"That was yesterday; I told you I went up to see him yesterday afternoon."

"I know. Supposedly there was a witness to his death. This witness claims there was a struggle between Peal and a very small man-'dwarf is the word he used, I'm told-and the dwarf pushed Peal off the cliff."

I kept my fists clenched and face turned away, fighting back tears of grief, frustration, and rage. Mosely had been dead on target when he labeled me, in so many words, a kind of pariah, but that wasn't news to me. A grand old man of folk song, conservation, and fierce real patriotism had survived more than eight decades of severe trials to body and soul; he'd survived everything but one Sunday afternoon conversation with Robert Frederickson. "Why didn't you tell me this at the beginning?" I asked in a voice that I hardly recognized as my own.

"To what purpose? I knew you didn't kill some old man. I wanted to hear what you had to say so that maybe I could get some clue as to who did kill him. My money's on your KGB plant."

"For Christ's sake, Garth, Harry Peal was Jay Acton's father."

"He'd never met the man. Harry Peal would have been just one more threat, like Burana, who had to be removed; we're talking KGB here, not the Junior Chamber of Commerce. And he figured he'd try to take you out along the way."

"That's fucking absurd," I said, turning back to face Garth. "It doesn't make any sense at all. If Acton wants me out of the way because I know he's probably KGB, why didn't he just kill me, instead of trying to frame me on some bullshit murder charge that can't hold up? Arranging for me to be charged with murder isn't going to keep me from talking."

"You have a point," Garth said evenly, staring thoughtfully at the palms of his hands. "Except that he couldn't be in two places at once. He took care of Peal himself, and he was counting on Trex and his buddy to take care of you."

"And they muffed it; I end up alive and in the hospital. So what's to be gained by this stupid murder charge? Who's this witness?"

"An anonymous phone tip."

"An anonymous phone tip?"

"What the hell; it did the job. You're currently under arrest, dear brother, on the charge of suspicion of murder. There's a guard sitting outside your door right now. He was looking real bored when I came in, so I managed to find him a newspaper."

"How did you get in here?"

"My old NYPD courtesy card and a little courtesy from a former comrade-in-arms."

"Mosely?"

"Uh-huh. That's where I got my information."

"I take it he failed to mention all the other shit that's been going down around here."

"It must have slipped his mind," Garth said absently.

"You remember Mosely from the good old days?"

Garth nodded. "Vaguely. Our paths used to occasionally cross at the station house, and I remember seeing his name on the duty list. He spent some years in safe and loft, then was transferred to full-time U.N. detail. The word on him was that he was a straight arrow-probably a lot straighter than most of the other cops in that precinct."

"Except you."

"There are a lot of honest cops, Mongo. You know that."

"And you're saying Mosely was an honest cop?"

"I never heard otherwise-and I would have."

"Well, he's a real. . he's something else now."

"But not necessarily dishonest," Garth said distantly. I suspected he was thinking about the same thing that was troubling me, namely what my enemy or enemies hoped to accomplish by maneuvering Mosely into arresting me. "He's got a political job now."

"I still don't understand this move, Garth. What's the point of trying to pin Harry Peal's murder on me, especially when the witness is nothing but an anonymous phone tip? It can't stop me from talking about the KGB officer on Elysius Culhane's staff. I've already told you, and-oh, shit." Suddenly I understood. I sat bolt upright in bed, ignoring the pain that shot through my skull and back. "It's just a holding action, Garth. Acton had counted on Trex to kill me, and Trex blew it. Now Acton needs time to figure out how to get at me. I wanted to freeze him in place by having him arrested, and that's precisely what he's done to me. I have to die, same as Michael and Harry Peal, because of what Harry told me. Now you'll be marked too."

"Why wasn't Peal killed the same time as Burana?"

"There wasn't time. Harry left for Eastern Europe within hours after he talked to Michael. The KGB didn't want Harry to die in a communist country, because it would have been an embarrassment to the Russians and their allies. Harry had just returned from that trip when I talked to him on Sunday."

Garth rose, looked over his shoulder to make sure the door was closed, then reached into his jacket pocket and took out his old Colt automatic. Garth no longer liked guns and didn't even bother practicing on a firing range. I hadn't seen the old Colt in years, and yet from the way he held the weapon as he checked the firing chamber and magazine I suspected he remained the deadly accurate shooter he had once been.

He looked up, reacted to the surprise he must have seen on my face. "I noticed your gun was missing from the safe, so I figured I'd better bring mine along. I assume you lost the Beretta?"

"Yeah," I replied curtly. I felt very tense and anxious. Now that it had finally dawned on me why I was under arrest for the murder of Harry Peal, I hoped I wasn't too late to prevent another killing. "Listen, there has to be a pay phone around here someplace. Go find it and call Mary Tree; get the number for the Community of Conciliation from Information. Whoever's been following me must know that she and I talked, which means that her life is probably in danger; she's the one who steered me to Harry Peal in the first place. She has to be warned. Her organization has offices all over the world. She has to split, and she has to do it right now. Tell her to find some other Community residence to hole up in, preferably one that's a long ways from here. Tell her to pack her bags in a hurry, and you'll take her to the airport."

Garth grunted, clicked on the Colt's safety catch, then stepped forward and slipped the gun under the sheet, next to my thigh. "Hang on to that until I get back," he said, then turned and left the room.

I gripped the taped butt of the Colt and waited, my heart pounding. Hours had passed since Harry Peal had been killed and the attempt made on my life. Everything indicated that Jay Acton, whoever he really was, was in a hurry to clean house, to eliminate everyone he thought could connect him to his Russian mother and birthplace and membership in the KGB, which meant that Mary Tree might already be dead. I would not like that at all. It would be my fault.

Garth returned twenty minutes later. "Did you reach her?" I asked as soon as he stepped into the room and closed the door behind him.

"Yeah," Garth replied easily as he walked over to the bed, took the gun from my hand, and put it back into his jacket pocket. Then he went to the window, looked down. "No problem."

"What the hell does that mean? Does the Community have some other residence that's secure, and where she can hide?"

"I suppose so," he said in a tone of voice that I thought sounded oddly distracted under the circumstances.

"What the hell do you mean, you suppose so? Are you taking her to the airport?"

"No," he said evenly as he turned away from the window. "As a matter of fact, you and I are going to the Community residence here for an indefinite stay."

"What?"

"We both agree that your arrest is somebody's idea of a holding action, and we agree that said holding action isn't going to serve any purpose unless you're taken out before you can start talking to the media. Your police guard doesn't exactly remind me of Wyatt Earp to begin with, and when I came back from using the phone I found him down the hall trying to make time with one of the night nurses. I don't think you're safe here, brother, and I wonder how safe you'd be in police custody. If I were a KGB killer, I don't think I'd lose much sleep worrying about the prowess of the Cairn Police Department."

"I can't say I'm overjoyed with my situation, but I don't much care for the idea of putting you and Mary in the position of aiding and abetting a fugitive."

"I discussed that with Mary, and she and I agreed that the two of us have more serious things to worry about. As you pointed out, I'll be marked for death now that I've come to see you, so the three of us arc all in this together. Even if she did want to fly out of the country, there's no guarantee that the KGB wouldn't be able to trace her. But I doubt we'd even make it to the airport; by now my car has been identified, and somebody is probably keeping an eye on it. Mary says she can sneak us into that mansion and find a place for us to hide in there without anyone else knowing about it. We'll have sanctuary there and time to figure out our next moves." He paused, turned back to the window, continued, "I checked again with your night nurse, and she said you definitely don't have a fractured skull. You're under observation, and she figures you'll be released from the hospital into police custody in two or three days. I'm kind of hoping that means your head won't fall off if you're moved."

"It's all well and good for you to say things like that, since it's not your head that's likely to fall off. What's so interesting out the window?"

"Mary should be here in about ten or fifteen minutes to pick us up; she told me she could sneak out in one of the Community's cars that isn't used too much and shouldn't be recognized." He turned back to me, raised his right hand. "How many fingers?"

I squinted my unbandaged left eye in an attempt to focus on the blurred figure across the room. "Four," I said.

"Be serious."

"I am being serious. I can count four fingers when I see them."

"Two," Garth said with a sigh as he lowered his hand. "It looks like you've got a good case of double vision, but it can't be helped. You've been hurt worse. Just divide everything you see by two."

"Thanks a lot, Garth. There are times when I can't imagine what I'd do without your sage advice. What floor are we on?"

"The third."

"Great. I like all your thinking and planning up to this point except for one very minor little detail. Even assuming I can walk without a serious wobble, which I don't assume at all, how the hell do you plan to spirit me out of here without us being seen? The guard may not be Wyatt Earp, but he's obviously not blind either."

"Tsk, tsk. You've always been such a worrywart."

"Garth? What the hell are you planning to do?" Garth smiled sweetly, always a bad sign, and walked toward me. "You let me worry about spiriting you out of here, baby brother. It's as good as done."