If the sister continues to make any noise, her protests are of little volume and contained within some room farther along the hall, where what was inevitable has come to pass.
Carter Jergen rises from his chair and stands over Sanjay, gazing down at him. “It’s not as bad as you think. It won’t haunt you the rest of your life. You won’t forever be eaten by guilt. In fact, though your sister is traumatized and filled with shame now, she’ll have entirely recovered by dawn. No trauma, no shame. Once your control mechanisms self-assemble and you’ve become adjusted people, I only need to tell you and her to forget everything that occurred tonight, and all of it will be gone from memory—including me, including my partner and what he’s done. A thing that can’t be remembered…well, that’s as good as if it never happened.”
46
Cinema Parisian. The area in front of the stage and the apron of the stage itself lighted as if for live entertainment to precede the movie, the front row of seats in half light, the second row in shadow, the third in darkness draped…And at the highest point of the theater, shrouded in gloom, the lone member of the audience, Petra Quist, perhaps a candidate for redemption, perhaps beyond reclamation…
Jane placed the workshop stool beside the mechanic’s sled and sat there as Simon Yegg muttered, his facial expression morphing to reflect the rapidly changing circumstances in one of the vivid and macabre dreams that sometimes made an ordeal of chloroform sleep.
He startled awake, blinked at her towering over him, mumbled, “No,” and closed his eyes as though he could refuse this reality and receive another. He repeated this exercise—“No…no…no…hell, no”—each time becoming more aware of his hard circumstances, testing the extension cords that bound him, until he came to the realization that there was but one world for him, whereupon he said in rapid order, “This sucks. Who’re you? What’s this about? You’re the walking dead. You realize that? You’re as dead as dead gets.”
Jane said, “Given your situation, you talk some amazing trash. But I guess maybe you’ve got a good reason to pretend you’re full-on macho.”
He clearly didn’t like what she said, but he failed to comment on her implication. “You can’t scare me. I don’t scare. You got me good. That was smart the way you got me like this. Real smart. So let’s deal. You want money. Everyone wants money. So okay, I got money. Though you should live long enough to spend a dime.”
After a silence, smiling as if he amused her, Jane said, “Maybe I’m not here for money. Maybe this is about the Hamlet list.”
“The what?”
“Maybe it’s about these bastards who call themselves the Techno Arcadians, like thirteen-year-old nerd boys meeting in a clubhouse in a tree.”
“You sure you have the right address, honey? Maybe this would make sense to somebody next door, but it’s just noise to me.”
His confusion seemed genuine. His brother—Booth, big man in the Department of Justice—had been steering government business to him for years, but that didn’t mean he trusted Simon enough to involve him in the conspiracy that had killed her Nick.
She said, “Or maybe I’m here on behalf of your ex-wives.”
He didn’t need to hesitate to formulate a deceitful comeback. “They took me to the cleaners. What more could they want?”
“They took you? Not the way I hear it.”
“Everybody has her story.” He realized that in addition to the cords binding him, his hands were in his pants and cinched tight under his belt. “I got a circulation problem here. My fingers are numb.”
“Word on the street says it’s not your fingers that’s numb.”
“What does that even mean?” he dared to ask. “Are you a crackhead bitch? You freebasing cocaine or something? You’ve maybe got a psychological problem, honey. Don’t bring me that. I’m no psychiatrist. Let’s get this done, let’s talk money.”
Trammeled beyond any hope of escape, flat on his back, gazing up at her on the high stool, he had to be disoriented. On the ladder of fear, other men might have been on the step labeled DREAD or even TERROR. Simon didn’t appear to have gotten as high as MILD DISQUIET. Techniques for managing fear and subverting it into positive energy could be taught, but Simon’s attitude and responses did not suggest he’d been through such instruction. Instead, his apparent confidence was in fact unalloyed arrogance, and his fearlessness more likely had its roots in solipsism, the belief that in all of the world, he alone was truly real, the center of the universe and its only story, while other people were just furnishings, mere provisions of which he could make any use he wished. In her serial-killing and mass-murder cases with the Bureau, she had encountered more than a few sociopaths like him. Because of his delusional view of reality, there were strings she might use to manipulate him; however, it was necessary always to recognize his twisted genius and his cunning, for such a man could be dangerous no matter how thoroughly he had been tied down and immobilized.
“?‘Everybody has her story,’?” Jane quoted him. “Except your first ex, Marlo, who has no story these days because she was beaten to death in Paris.”
“I loved that girl. She was my world, she truly was. She was sweet, but she had no common sense. What the hell was my Marlo doing in a radical Muslim neighborhood, anyway? Looking for a rich sheik?”
“And Alexis has no story anymore, either. She was pushed off a cliff in Yosemite. Three hundred feet is a long way to fall knowing you’ll be dead on impact.”
“Pushed? Who ever said pushed? She and some idiot boyfriend were hiking on an insanely dangerous trail. They were casual hikers. They didn’t have the skills for it. Made me sick when I heard about it, just sick to my stomach, heartsick. I was in Hawaii at the time. Ruined Hawaii for me. Sure, our marriage didn’t work out, and that was mostly my fault. I’m not proud of sometimes thinking with my little head instead of my big one. I’m no choirboy. But I loved that girl, and it hurts me, hurts me bad, her life was cut so short.”
Jane had the urge to get off the stool and step on his throat, put all her weight into it, and hear his esophagus collapse with a satisfying crunch. Such was the response that his kind too often elicited, because his mission in life wasn’t what he thought, wasn’t to be the unconquered hero of an epic story of power and triumph; his role was to anger others and dispirit them and, if possible, foster in them a desire to descend to his level and tempt them to act with a viciousness equal to his. She did not crush his throat, but the desire to do so remained.
“I guess it also hurts you when you think what’s happened to your ex Dana, how she’s totally agoraphobic now, so afraid of the wider world that she can’t leave her house, lives such a prescribed existence, she’s more isolated than a nun in a cloistered order.”