What the Night Knows

29

MACE VOLKER IS A DELIVERYMAN AND A THIEF. NOW THIRTY, he has delivered flowers for a florist since he was nineteen, and he has been stealing since he was eleven. He has never been caught nor has he even once come under suspicion, for he is blessed with a gentle and open face, a most appealing voice, and a fearless nature, all of which he uses as instruments of deception no less artfully than a concert pianist uses his supple, nimble hands.

Mace shoplifts, picks pockets, burglarizes homes. He doesn’t steal solely or even primarily for financial reasons but mainly for the thrill. Stolen cash and goods have a powerful sensual appeal and feel better to him than the silky skin of a beautiful woman. He can’t achieve climax merely by caressing stolen money, but he can become fiercely aroused by the texture of it, sometimes teasing himself for an hour or more, into a sweat of desire, merely by handling purloined twenties and hundreds. A psychiatrist might say Mace is a fetishist. He has had a few girlfriends, but only to see how much he can steal from them: money and possessions, honor and hope and self-respect. Generally he turns to prostitutes for satisfaction, and the best sex is always when he steals from them the money with which he paid for their services.

There are ten doors into Mace Volker: his sensitive and thieving fingertips.

Twice a week, he delivers flowers to the Calvino house, roses for Nicolette’s studio, and occasionally a dining-table arrangement. This fourth of October, shortly before five o’clock, he has three dozen long-stemmed yellow roses for the artist, each dozen in its own plastic sleeve. He is not taken when he rings the doorbell, but by his index finger on the button, he is known and wanted.

Walter Nash signs for the flowers. Because Walter’s arms are filled with the bundled roses and the greens that come with them, Mace assists him, upon leaving, by pulling the front door shut from outside. Taken. Mace isn’t aware that he is no longer alone, that he is now a horse with a rider that might in time dismount without ever making itself known to him—or that might choose instead to ride him to death.

Deliveries concluded, Mace returns the van to the florist’s shop where he works. Ellie Shaw, the owner, is behind the cashier’s counter, totaling out the register, and Mace hands in his clipboard manifest, with the signatures of those customers who received the flowers. Ellie is in her late thirties and quite pretty, but Mace has never really seen her as a woman because she is his boss and, therefore, he can’t use her and steal from her without serious consequences. As they talk briefly about the day, Mace imagines her naked, which he has never done before—other women, never Ellie—but to his surprise and alarm he also vividly envisions her strangled with a striped necktie, her swollen grayish tongue protruding from her mouth and her dead eyes wide in the final look of terror with which she rewarded her enthusiastic murderer. This fantasy pumps him rigid with desire.

Rattled by this vision and afraid that Ellie will notice his condition, he mentions a nonexistent engagement with a young lady and flees to his car in the employee parking lot. Behind the wheel and on the move, wondering at his savage flight of imagination, Mace stops at a traffic light where a young woman and a girl of about ten stand hand in hand, waiting to cross the intersection. With graphic detail and an intensity that rocks Mace, he suddenly sees them both naked, stepping into the street—but then bound to chairs in a rough room, raw and red and carved like scrimshaw.

So as not to alarm the horse unnecessarily, the rider reins in its tendency to envision objects of its desire in conditions of total subjugation and physical ruin. In truth, Mace Volker is shocked by his hallucinatory episodes but not entirely repelled. He is, after all, a thief who is thrilled by the act of stealing rather than by the gain received from what is stolen; and he will realize now that the ultimate act of theft is the taking of a life. This realization may have an interesting effect upon the deliveryman’s future criminal career.

Having burglarized a house during his lunch hour and having taken some good diamond jewelry that he hopes will bring him as much as twelve to fifteen thousand dollars, Mace drives now to a tavern he knows in a part of the city that was once on the skids but is being gentrified. This is the kind of neighborhood in which a white-collar bar isn’t a dive and serves as a respectable front for a fence who, paying hard cash for stolen merchandise, also finds the streets safe enough that he doesn’t need to worry about being hijacked when coming or going. The tavern has a black-granite and mahogany facade. Inside, the booths and bar stools are occupied by more upwardly mobile young couples than young loners.

Mace gets a bottle of Heineken, no glass, from the bartender, who knows him and who uses the house phone to seek permission for him to go to the back office. After receiving the bartender’s thumbs-up, Mace pushes through the swinging door into the small kitchen, which produces only sandwiches, French fries, and onion rings. A door at the farther end of the fragrant room leads to a narrow staircase with a ceiling-mounted camera at the top that covers his ascent. On the upper landing, he waits for a moment at a steel door before it opens and he is ushered inside.

This is the reception room. The office of Barry Quist, tavern owner and fence (among other things), is through an inner door. Here in the first room is a table on one edge of which sits a beefy man in shirtsleeves, his shoulder rig and pistol in plain sight. Another guy in shirtsleeves, equally solid and well-armed, has opened the door for Mace. He closes it and, though he knows Mace doesn’t carry, he pats him down for a weapon before he returns to a chair on which lies an open issue of Sports Illustrated. These two men are always with Barry Quist, but Mace has never heard their names. He thinks of them as One and Two, One being the behemoth who opened the door. They look like men who, in a fight, will not shirk from committing any cruelty and will be stopped by nothing short of a bullet in the brain. With six straight-backed chairs in two groups separated by a tall magazine rack holding a collection of glossy publications, the place resembles a dentist’s waiting lounge—if you wanted a dentist who would knock your teeth out with a hammer.

On the table lies a pistol with an extended magazine, which evidently belongs to the man currently doing business with Barry in the fence’s office. Beside the pistol lies a sound suppressor, which can be screwed onto the barrel.

In one of the straight-backed chairs sits a stunning blonde who also belongs to the man now with Barry. Two has come out from behind the table and is sitting on it so that he can chat her up. Evidently they know each other, and the guy she has come with is named Reese. Two speaks to her as if he is a concerned friend: “All I’m sayin’ is get from Reese as much as you can, as fast as you can. He wants everything he sees, and he’s always movin’ on.” The blonde says she knows her guy, she’s got him by the pecker and she knows how to make him heel like a well-trained poodle. Two shakes his head and says, “If he got all the money in the world and he laid every woman worth the time, then suddenly he’d start wantin’ little boys. He’s never gonna stop wantin’ what he doesn’t have or can’t have.”

The inner door features an electronic lock, and it buzzes a moment before Reese comes into the reception room. He is a crocodile in a five-thousand-dollar suit, his claws given a civilized shape and a coat of clear polish by a manicurist, his wide mouth designed for efficient consumption, his eyes restless with hunger. He consults his twenty-thousand-dollar wristwatch in such a way that he displays it for others to admire. But his expression sours at the sight of it, as if recently he has seen a more expensive watch and is dissatisfied with this instrument that has previously so pleased him.

Reese has many doors by which he can be entered, but the eyes are the easiest. Taken.

As flower deliveryman Mace Volker, now only himself, proceeds into Barry Quist’s sanctum sanctorum to negotiate a price for the stolen jewelry, Reese Salsetto recovers his pistol as well as the precision-machined sound suppressor, which fits in a separate sleeve of his custom shoulder holster. His rider is content for the moment to use neither spurs nor reins, and Reese is unaware that he is no longer the master of himself. To Brittany Zeller, the blonde, he says, “Let’s go, Puss.”

Crossing the kitchen and then the busy tavern, Reese is aware that every man’s attention is drawn irresistibly to Brittany. Every man covets her and envies him.

They have a seven-thirty dinner reservation at one of the city’s finest restaurants, where he is a valued customer. In the street, at his Mercedes S600, Reese tells Brittany that he wants to move the reservation to eight o’clock, so they will have time to go back to his place first. He explains that he has bought something wonderful for her birthday—three days hence—and he’s so eager to see how she likes it that he can’t wait until then to give her the gift. They’ll have a martini together at home and go from there to the restaurant.

This change of plans is the desire of Reese’s rider, but it is so subtly encouraged that Reese doesn’t detect the pressure of the bridle or feel the bit between his teeth. Already, the rider knows everything about its horse: Reese’s history, hopes, needs, desires, every secret in the nautilus turns of the popinjay thug’s twisted and corrupted heart. In all those interwound darknesses, the rider has discovered a family that will be a pleasure to reduce to bloody ruin. Its expectation had been that four or five changes of horses would be necessary before a target family would be found. But Mace Volker to Reese Salsetto is all that’s needed.

Home, to Reese, is a flashy penthouse apartment neither as large as he feels that he deserves nor on quite as high a floor as he desires. But this building is one of the finest, and in another year, he will ascend to higher and much larger quarters. The style is plush Art Deco, the furnishings of the best quality. The decor was provided by a woman whom Reese believes to be the classiest and most talented interior designer in the city largely on the basis of her British accent.

While Brittany goes directly to the corner bar in the living room to mix a pair of Grey Goose martinis, Reese proceeds to the bedroom to retrieve the diamond-and-emerald necklace that is her birthday present. He can’t resist stepping into the master bathroom for a quick look in the mirror, to assure himself that his pocket handkerchief is properly presented, his necktie precisely knotted, and his hair in place.

Because the time has come to take absolute control of the horse and to smother every expression of its will, the rider allows itself some fun. After the fop assesses his appearance with satisfaction, his reflection changes in a blink, and instead of himself, he sees Alton Turner Blackwood, whose spirit feet are in Reese Salsetto’s stirrups. Hunched back, sharp chin, brutish jawbones, half-ripe and entirely cruel mouth, black-hole eyes with enough gravity to pull whole worlds to destruction. Even Reese, a fearless sociopath, cries out in fear, but his cry is soundless, for he no longer has control of his body. He is a prisoner in his own skin, shackled by bones he once controlled, a powerless observer behind the windows of his covetous eyes.

Reese joins fetching Brittany in the living room, not with her gift in hand but with the sound suppressor fitted to the barrel of his pistol. When she turns toward him, offering a martini, he shoots her twice in the abdomen and once in the chest. The shots make a shushing sound, as if admonishing Brittany to die quietly.

Although the rider is a connoisseur of torture and relishes the humiliation and the pain of others, it wastes no time with Brittany Zeller because she is too hard for its taste, too knowing, long in the process of extinguishing her own light. Instead, the rider yearns to rend what is tender, to corrupt what is innocent, and to destroy what shines.

Leaving the dead blonde in the living room, Reese Salsetto—under the firm control of his rider—returns to the master bedroom, takes a box of ammunition from a nightstand drawer, and replenishes the extended magazine of the pistol, which when fully loaded holds sixteen rounds.

A family is living its last hours. Father, mother, son, and daughter. The mother, seen in Reese’s memory, is succulent and sure to be exciting, but the eighteen-year-old daughter is luminous and untouched, a rare flower the despoiling of which will be a fine achievement. He will kill the father, then disable the son and force him to watch the use, abuse, and ruination of the mother and the girl.

Reese says aloud, “You’ve been wanting the girl yourself, Reese, and now you’ll have her.”

He turns out the living-room lights.

The re-enactment continues, and this time everything will be done right, as it had almost been done back in the day. The promise to John Calvino will be kept. The Promise.

Reese says, “It’s warm and cozy in the skin again. Don’t you think so, Reese? Aren’t you warm and cozy, Reese?”

In the kitchen, he stands staring at a rack of knives. They will have knives at their house. He can carve the girl with their cutlery.

As he turns out the kitchen lights and retreats along the entry hall to the foyer, Reese says, “This will be such fun, Reese. Don’t you think it’ll be fun?”