Butcher's Moon

Forty

A murmur of voices woke Faran. He was very uncomfortable and he had a lousy cottony headache, and at first he couldn’t remember where he was or what was going on. Then he tried to shift on the bed, and realized his wrists were tied behind him, and it all came back.

Parker. The son of a bitch had kidnapped him last night, just as he was closing the club. Standing there in the street, cool and calm and taking his time, he’d tied Faran’s wrists and put some sort of bag over his head and then walked him to a car and drove him here—wherever here was.

In an apartment building, he knew that much. They had driven for a while, not long enough to be out of the city, and just before the car stopped, it had dipped down some sort of short incline. An apartment building with a basement garage. And an elevator, in which they rode up together, his head still inside the bag, silent Parker’s hand on his elbow. Then along a corridor until Parker stopped him and withdrew his hand for a few seconds. The grate of a key in a lock. He was led into the apartment, the door was closed, and the bag was taken away.

The apartment was a surprise. He’d expected a grubby room somewhere, but it wasn’t like that at all. It was a pleasant middle-class apartment, sofa and chairs and TV and lamps and tables. Green drapes covering windows in the far wall. Carpeting, with a bit of dark-stained wood flooring showing around the edges of the room.

Near the entrance door was a dining area: an oval table and four chairs, tucked into the corner. Parker sat Faran down there, produced pen and paper, and started asking questions. At first Faran wouldn’t answer, and he expected to be threatened and maybe punched around, but Parker didn’t do anything like that at all. He just took a small white box out of his pocket and put it on the table where Faran could see the severed finger lying inside it. Then he asked the questions again, and after a short hesitation Faran started answering.

The questions went on till long after sunup, till Faran was so exhausted he could barely keep his head vertical and his eyes open. But Parker kept pushing, wanting to know more, demanding details, writing it all down on sheet after sheet of paper. Doing sketches and blueprints and insisting that Faran study them, tell him where the details were wrong. What kind of window is this? How many people work in that office? What time does this place open?

Till at last it was finished. Faran fell asleep at the table while Parker read through his notes once more, to be sure there wasn’t anything else he needed to know. Then Parker had to thump him and shout at him and yank him by the hair to wake him up enough so he could stand and be marched into a bedroom and locked away in a closet. It was wide enough so he could lean his back against one side wall and stretch his feet out to the other, and that was the way he slept, until midafternoon. At any rate, he thought it was probably midafternoon, since there hadn’t been any direct sunlight on the closed drapes in the morning but there was when Parker unlocked the closet door and let him out.

Parker had obviously slept in the bed, and looked rested and hard. Faran felt cramped, stiff, and logy, and his stomach was acting up again. He couldn’t keep from breaking wind all over the place, even after Parker untied his wrists and let him use the John. For the next hour or so Faran remained untied, but the way Parker looked at him, he knew better than to try anything. The two of them had a silent meal together, made out of cans from the kitchen closet, and then Parker let him sit in the living room for an hour or so. They watched television, and it seemed to Faran that Parker didn’t care what program he watched. It was as though he wasn’t really watching television at all, but was concentrating on things inside his own head and found it restful to fill the time with the flittering shadows and piping voices from the TV set.

Then the doorbell rang, and at once Parker turned off the TV, tied Faran’s wrists again, and marched him to the bedroom. In the bedroom he pointed at Faran’s face and said, “Those teeth in the front. They caps?”

“On the top, yeah.”

Parker nodded toward the window. “If I come back in and that shade is up,” he said, “I’ll take those caps out of your head.”

Faran just nodded. He didn’t want to open his mouth to say anything.

Then Parker left him, and he sat on the bed, and gradually the light against the window shade dimmed. From time to time he heard the doorbell ring again, and after a while he could make out several male voices. He was having trouble believing it, but it had to be true: Parker was going to start a war. He was supposed to be a loner, an orphan without true connections, but he was bringing in people from somewhere, and he was honest to God going to start a war against Dutch and Calesian and Ernie Dulare. Especially Ernie Dulare, who was the most vulnerable to the kind of war Parker apparently intended to wage.

If they found out, if Ernie and Dutch and Calesian ever found out where Parker had gotten his information, Faran knew they would kill him. No question, no bullshit about this being the bloodless new order, they would flat kill him.

Unless Parker killed them first.

And after a while he was no longer entirely sure which side he wanted to root for.

Somewhere in through that space of time, his mind full of muddled thoughts, he had fallen asleep again, curled up awkwardly on the bed with his wrists tied behind him, and now he was awake once more, listening to the sound of voices in the living room, wondering what was going to happen next and what Parker would be doing with him when it was all over.

Then the bedroom door opened, letting in yellow light that made him squint, and he suddenly realized that the scraping metallic noise of the key in the lock was what had brought him up from a fuzzy, shallow, unsatisfying sleep to a fuzzy, headachy, unsatisfying wakefulness. Sitting up, blinking fast, trying to accustom his eyes quickly to the light, he made out the black silhouette of somebody entering the room, and he thought, He kills me now. I’m not useful to him any more.

Then the overhead light switched on, and Parker crossed the room to lift him up with a hand clutching his upper arm, saying, “Come on, Faran. Some people for you to see.”

“What? What?”

“Walk.”

“I was asleep, I—” He cleared his throat, coughed, cleared his throat again. He was waking up now, at least a little. He put one foot in front of the other, urged on by Parker’s hand holding his arm, and walked shakily out of the bedroom and around the short hall to the living room.

The people there woke him up for good. There must have been a dozen of them, ranging in age from mid-twenties to late forties and in size from small and narrow to huge and heavily muscled, but every one of them had the same tough cold self-sufficient look as Parker. They gave him those flat emotionless stares, classifying him, deciding about him, and he stood there blinking and licking his lips, terrified beyond the call of rational argument, as frightened as a bird in a den of snakes.

And the pile of pistols on the big table by the front door didn’t help either.

Parker stayed beside him, and he had to give his order twice before Faran heard it: “Tell them your name.”

“My n— What? My name.” He hurried to obey. “Frank Faran.”

“What do you do for a living, Frank?”

The use of his first name might have been meant to reassure him, but the cold impersonality in the sound of it had just the opposite effect. Striving to be calm, trying to be capable of instant accurate response to any question that might be put him, he said, “I manage the New York Room. It’s a—it’s a local nightspot.” The word “nightspot” echoed in his ears, sounding foolish and limp, and he was horrified to feel himself blushing.

Parker had more questions. “What else do you do, Frank?”

”Well, I’ve still got— I used to be heavily in union management, I’ve still got a few posts, minor, uh—”

“Local union executive?”

“Yeah, uh— Yeah, that’s right.”

“Sweetheart unions?”

“Well, we, uh, mostly have, uh, good understandings with the employers.”

“What else are you connected with, Frank?”

Faran tried to think of anything else, but there wasn’t any more. “Nothing,” he said. “That’s all.”

“You’re not thinking, Frank.” There was a small threat shimmering in the words. The dozen men sitting on sofa and chairs, standing leaning against walls, continued to watch him. Parker said, “Who do you work for, Frank?”

“Oh, Mr. Lozini. I mean, I did, but he’s dead. So I guess now it’s, uh, Dutch Buenadella or Ernie Dulare. Or both, maybe.”

Parker pointed, and Faran saw that on the coffee table in the middle of the living room papers were spread: the blueprints and notes Parker had taken last night during the question-and-answer session. Parker said, “You told me all that, didn’t you, Frank?”

“Yes,” Faran said. “Right, yes.”

“And it’s all straight goods, isn’t it, Frank?”

Faran tried for a joke, a laugh, a bit of human contact. “I’m not going to lie,” he said.

No change in the faces in front of him, except that one of them said, “How can we be sure of him?”

“Because,” Parker said, “he knows we don’t let him go until after we’ve checked out everything he told me. And he knows that if he lied to us we’ll kill him. Don’t you, Frank?”

Faran nodded. He didn’t trust himself to speak.

There was a little silence. He looked no one directly in the eye, looked only at the spaces between them, but felt them all staring unblinking at him. Trying to decide about him. His throat ached, felt raspy, as though he’d been shouting at the top of his lungs for half an hour.

Parker said, quietly, “You want to change anything you told me, Frank?”

Faran shook his head, but at the same time he was trying to think, trying to remember everything he’d said. Could he have made any mistakes? No, it wasn’t possible. Parker had made him go over every detail again and again. “I told you the truth,” he said. “I swear I did.”

Faran turned to look at Parker, and saw Parker looking at the dozen men, waiting for them to say whether they were satisfied or not. Faran couldn’t face front again, he had to keep blinking at Parker. His left cheek, the one toward the men, prickled, felt pins and needles.

One of them said, “Okay. You made your point.”

Parker nodded. “Anybody want to ask Frank anything?”

None of them did. Faran was grateful for that, and grateful, too, when Parker said, “All right, Frank, let’s go back.”

The two of them walked back to the bedroom. Faran entered it, and Parker remained in the doorway. Faran turned around and said, “You can trust me, Parker. I won’t cause any trouble.”

“That’s right, Frank,” Parker said. He switched off the light and shut the bedroom door.