They crossed the rutted and weedy football field, circled the farther stack of bleachers, turned left into an alley, and slipped away into the suburban sprawl. For the moment, they had eluded the agents of Utopia who would, without hesitation or remorse, kill them in the name of social progress.
She could think of no viable option other than the one Gilberto offered her. How strangely apt it was to find herself harried to a mortuary, to seek refuge with the dead, while in her hands she held the life of this man Hendrickson, who had ordered and/or assisted in uncounted murders.
22
Sanjay Shukla sat at his computer, in a condition he’d never known before, not merely inspired to write but impelled to write, as though he’d been bitten by some exotic mosquito that carried not any wasting disease, but instead a communicable need to create. No, not just a need. The word need implied a lack of something, a deficiency that he might or might not fill. The extreme urgency with which he was motivated to string together words into sentences allowed no choice between might or might not, but incited him to write as if his very existence depended on the quality of what he created. He was gripped not by the need to write but by the necessity, for there was no alternative to writing. He pounded the keyboard as if fever-driven, raining a tropical storm of words onto the screen, with none of his usual careful crafting.
He had awakened from a half-remembered dream seething with kaleidoscopic images of menace and horror. He had at once been obsessed with writing a story about a man who’d been obliged to protect an innocent child and failed to do so, by his failure allowing the child to perish. He had no complete story in mind. He knew only that when the child perished, so did all innocence in the world, whereupon civilization fell into a darkness that would never know a dawn.
The narrative flowed from him without a conventional structure, a stream-of-consciousness rant in the voice of the father who had failed the child. Although Sanjay strove to bring coherence to the story, the English language became a wallow of vexatious snakes that he could not wrangle into a satisfying story. Nevertheless, he wrote at a blistering pace for an hour, two hours, three, until the tips of his fingers were tender from the force with which he’d struck the keys. His neck ached, and a heaviness gathered in his chest as if his heart had swollen with retained blood.
He stopped typing and sat in bewilderment, for how long he did not know, until he smelled coffee brewing, bacon frying. The aromas stirred him as if from a dream, as if he had never fully awakened when he had gone from his bed to his office chair. He saved what he had written and got up and went into the kitchen.
At the cooktop, using tongs, Tanuja turned bacon in a frying pan. She looked at him and smiled. “Omelet in the warming drawer. I’ve made enough for two. The toast is about to pop up. Butter it, will you? Plenty of butter on mine.”
Sanjay meant to say that he was starving, but instead he said, “I’m so empty.”
If she thought his statement strange, she didn’t remark on it, but said, “We need to eat, that’s all, just eat and get on with it,” which seemed to him nearly as peculiar as the words that he had spoken.
The toast popped up.
He buttered it.
23
The mortuary cosmetician was at work in the basement. The assistant mortician and his intern had driven the decedent from the previous night’s viewing to the cemetery, where a graveside service would soon be under way. No other viewing had been scheduled until six o’clock this evening. The place was as quiet as a funeral home.
After stripping off Hendrickson’s suit coat and shoulder rig, they strapped him to a gurney on which cadavers were transported, and they wheeled him through the back entrance, into the vestibule. With Gilberto at the head of the gurney and Jane at the foot, they bumped it up the stairs to the family apartment on the top floor.
The sleek and airy modern décor was in stark contrast to the ornate moldings, heavy velvet draperies, and neo-Gothic furniture on the ground floor.
As they wheeled Hendrickson through the living room and along a hallway, Jane said, “What’s it like to live with the dead?”
“Same as it is for everyone else,” Gilberto replied. “Except we realize we live with them—all of us are the dead in waiting, but most people put it out of their mind.”
“The kids ever have nightmares?”
“Yeah, but not about the dead.”
She left him in the kitchen with Hendrickson and returned to the Suburban to get her tote, the attaché case, and the Medexpress carrier.
When she returned to the kitchen, Gilberto had adjusted the gurney, jacking up the back end, so Hendrickson remained strapped across his arms and legs, but reclining at a forty-five-degree angle rather than lying flat.
“A mortician doesn’t need this feature,” Gilberto said, “but they make gurneys mostly for the living, and this is how they come these days. Useful for you, I think.”
She checked Hendrickson’s pulse, but she didn’t at once take the red neckerchief off his face.
Gilberto made coffee, strong and black, and poured it for himself and Jane, without sugar.
Carmella had left a homemade ricotta pie to cool on a wire rack. Jane ate a large slice as a belated breakfast, while Gilberto adjourned to another room to speak with his wife by phone.
By the time Jane finished eating, Hendrickson was muttering to himself. She washed her plate and fork, put them away, refreshed her mug of coffee, and took the scarf off his face.
When he opened his pale-green eyes, he was still floating on currents of chloroform, unaware that he was strapped down, in no condition to puzzle out her identity, not even fully aware of his own. He smiled dreamily up at her as she stood beside him. In a lotus-eater voice of indolent contentment, he said, “Hey, sexy.”
“Hey,” she said.
“I got a use for that pretty mouth.”
“I bet you do, big guy.”
“Bring it on down here.”
She licked her lips suggestively.
He said, “Uncle Ira is not Uncle Ira.”
“Who is he, then?”
Hendrickson smiled patronizingly. “No, that’s not what you’re supposed to say.”
“What am I supposed to say, big guy?”
“You just say, all right.”
“All right,” she said.
“Blow me, gorgeous.”
She puckered up and blew in his face.
“Funny,” he said and laughed softly and drifted off into the shallows of unconsciousness.
Half a minute later, when he opened his eyes again, they were clearer, but he still smiled at her and recognized no danger. “I know you from somewhere.”
“Want me to refresh your memory?”
“I’m all ears.”
“You people killed my husband, threatened to rape and kill my little boy, and have been trying to kill me for months.”
Slowly his smile faded.
24