No Such Creature

FIVE

It started over a disagreement concerning a pack of cigarettes-a half-empty pack of Marlboro Lights-but it quickly escalated to the point where Zig was banging the guy’s head on the floor.

Being a berserker, an unknown quantity capable of exploding over the smallest of provocations, had worked well for Zig up to that point. It had worked for him in the juvenile detention facilities where he spent most of his teenage years; it had worked for him in his time at Rikers; and it had even worked reasonably well for most of his ten years (sexual assault, aggravated assault, attempted murder) at Sing Sing.

He was a decent talker, and he had sunny periods during which he was able to nurture relationships that almost approximated friendships, but always, sooner or later, he would explode and someone would end up in hospital, and it was never Zig, despite his deficiencies in height, weight and reach.

Until the cigarette thing. Unfortunately, the head he was banging on the cement floor of the TV room-a privilege he had earned during one of his sunny periods-belonged to one Teddy Kern, favourite punk of no other than Khalid Mossbacher. Khalid Mossbacher, until his incarceration for murder and conspiracy, had been a hip-hop star famous for his abs and biceps.

It was only a matter of time. The messages started arriving well before Kern was out of hospital: messages yelled down the wing after lights out, messages that arrived with Zig’s food. He even began to hear messages in the clanking of the prison’s old radiators, though he hadn’t the first clue about Morse code.

Khalid going to pop you-that was the mildest note he received. Others were more exuberant: Khalid going to dismantle you. Khalid is going to torch your ass.

He thought about faking cardiac pain. At best, that would get him into hospital for a few days. But when it was over, he would still have to return to the wing to face the righteous wrath of Khalid Mossbacher. The only way Zig was going to survive was to get transferred to another wing, and the only way you got transferred was if there was a credible risk of grievous injury or murder. His predicament certainly met that standard. But the catch was, if you snitched about your problem, the risk of getting murdered increased tenfold.

So Zig didn’t say a word to anyone. Within a week he had scored cocaine from one source, a razor blade from another. One night, when the whole prison seemed to be asleep, he made the cocaine into a paste and rubbed it into himself at the crucial points. He sat himself on the floor and, with his back to the door, tied himself to the bars. He cut off first one nipple, then the other, slipped his free arm back into his bindings, and let loose some hellish shrieking.

Worst part of it was, the cocaine paste didn’t work all that well.

Guards came running, the wing was locked down, and Zig was wheeled off to the prison hospital. In the circumstances, his claim that his life was under imminent threat was deemed credible, and he was transferred to another wing where he was not known. Max’s wing.

It was while recuperating in hospital that Zig came up with his money-making idea. He’d had lots of money-making ideas over the years, but incarceration tended to dampen entrepreneurship, and somehow they had never come to anything. The Subtractors had long been the stuff of criminal legend; Zig had been hearing about them since he was twelve. Since their victims were thieves, they could hardly report matters to the police.

You’d expect there would be lots of thieves hobbling around missing toes and fingers and what have you, but somehow, despite his long association with the profession, Zig had never run into any of these victims. And yet everyone claimed to know someone who had been kidnapped, maimed, and let go, and most criminals believed the gang existed.

Now, as Zig contemplated the missing nipples under his bandages, he began to see possibilities in the Subtractors’ business model. He knew hundreds of thieves and robbers; he even knew their MOs. All he had to do was keep up on the crime news-dead easy in this Internet age-and do a little guesswork. The rest was simple.

So, shortly after his release from Sing Sing four years previously, he had set about bringing the Subtractors into actual existence. The fear factor was definitely in his favour, and he was in an excellent position to amp it up, given his own peculiar mutilation. He told himself he had no intention of turning into a sadist. You don’t want to lose your humanity, after all. It was simply a business model. He formed a loose association of assistants to put his scheme into action, and the Subtractors myth became his biggest asset.

From the outside, the Desert Moon funeral parlour looked like a drive-through bank. In fact, that wasn’t a half-bad idea, Zig thought as he went inside. You could have the coffin low in a window, loved one on display, and people could just drive by, stop for a second, and take off.

The interior offered the usual collection of hushed rooms and pastel fabrics. Melvin Togg was laid out in viewing room three. Besides Melvin himself there was only one lone occupant, a woman sitting on a long, low couch beneath a soothing abstract.

Zig went and stood over the casket, head bowed. Melvin looked peaceful, and quite a bit healthier than he had in life, the mortician’s art tastefully applied. A tiny guitar with Graceland scrolled around it was pinned to Melvin’s lapel, a rosary entwined in his fingers. The cuffs of his burial suit covered his wrists and any microscopic evidence of duct tape that might have remained, not that any would.

It hadn’t taken Melvin long to lose consciousness, but Zig had to be sure, and he and Clem had waited quite a while after the bag stopped puffing in and out before venturing over. They had untaped his wrists and ankles from the chair, putting the tape into their pockets. Then they had carried Melvin over to his bed and laid him down on it, still with the bag over his face. Zig washed his wrists with rubbing alcohol to remove any trace of the tape.

Melvin’s Elvis clock had startled them as they were leaving.

“Man, am I beat,” the King said. “It’s six o’clock.”

Zig went over to the woman. “Charlie Zigler,” he said. “Would you be Melvin’s wife?”

“No, no. Melvin wasn’t married,” the woman said. “I’m his sister. Monica Davies.”

“Very sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you.”

“Melvin was a good guy. I didn’t know him very well, but I liked him, same as most people.”

The woman smiled faintly.

“I was shocked when I heard he’d, you know …”

“Committed suicide? How would you even hear such a thing? It wasn’t in the paper.”

“No, I know. But people talk. And they’re all saying the same thing: no one saw it coming. Melvin seemed pretty chipper, pretty gung-ho, right up to the end. You know the way he was.”

The woman nodded, dipping her head once.

“I probably should have seen it, though. I’m kicking myself about that.”

It took a moment for this to register. When Ms. Davies looked up at him, it was with a frown of puzzlement. “But you said you hardly knew him.”

“I know. That’s what makes it so weird. In retrospect, I mean.”

Zig reached into his satchel and handed her a parcel loosely wrapped in brown paper. She slipped off the rubber bands and unfolded the paper, contemplating the framed rectangle in her hands.

“It’s from Elvis,” she said.

“Uh-huh. Isn’t that amazing? Melvin come over to my place one afternoon last week and give it to me. I was kinda surprised at the time, because I knew he was a real Elvis fan. And I couldn’t figure out why he wanted to give it to me.”

Monica Davies seemed frozen in that hunched-over position. Not a muscle moved. A tear detached itself from her eyelash and splashed onto the picture. She rubbed it away with a neatly painted index finger.

“Like I say,” Zig said, “Melvin hardly knew me, but he give me this thing. I was surprised, but I didn’t think too much about it until I heard the news. Then it kinda made sense. They say people give away things that are precious to them, you know. Anyway, I thought I’d come here and give it to his wife or family or whatever.”

“You’re very kind,” she said, and wept a little into a Kleenex.

“I’m just sorry I didn’t realize what it meant at the time. I coulda done something maybe.”

“How could you know?” she said softly. “What does anybody know about anybody?”

For the entire next day Max was sullen as only Max could be. Here they were strolling the brightest, gaudiest blocks in the world-neon cowboys, a Manhattan skyline, the temple of Luxor-and Max was ignoring it, muttering to himself like a gargantuan baby. Owen kept trying to interest him in the criminal history of Las Vegas, the colourful, murderous life of Bugsy Siegel, but Max would not snap out of it.

That night in his bunk, Owen could hear Max talking to himself in the Rocket’s master bedroom. He reached for a paperback in an effort to ignore him: The Magus, a novel with which he was flat-out in love. Owen was soon absorbed in the story.

“I have of late, and wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth …”

Max was reciting loudly enough to make sure Owen could hear.

“… forgone all custom of exercise. And indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory.”

Yeah, yeah, keep it up, Max. I know you’re upset.

Owen fitted the buds of his iPod into his ears. This little gizmo was the legacy of a raid they had pulled on a dinner party in the Hamptons a couple of years ago. It wasn’t one of the video models, but it was still a little gem. Owen dialed up a pod-cast of flutey New Age stuff, supposedly for meditation but perfect for reading. By the time he had finished the story of Conchis and the Nazis and switched out his light, all was silent in Denmark, the curtain having apparently come down on Hamlet and his depression. Owen drifted off to the whirr of the Rocket’s air conditioner and the traffic on the distant Strip.

He was awakened sometime during the night by a cry ringing in his ears-loud enough that his heart was jacked up and his eyes wide open. He lay still, hearing nothing but the rattle from the AC. Then another shout.

Max and his nightmares. A burst of incoherent cries got Owen out of bed and into his bathrobe. He opened the bedroom door.

“Max?”

Max was cowering against the head of the bed, striped pyjamas soaked in sweat, his face pressed into a pillow balanced on his knees.

“Max?”

“Wuh-hah!” He thrashed at the air with one hand, clutching the pillow with the other. A quiver shook his massive frame.

Owen went over and laid a hand on his shoulder.

Max heaved with a great intake of breath and lifted his head from the pillow. His eyes opened, glazed and bloodshot.

“The Butcher,” he said hoarsely. “The Butcher was here. Right here. In my room. In this very room.”

“The Alcatraz guy?”

“S’blood, boy. I could have reached out and touched his cleaver. Fuh! Sitting in that chair, talking to me.”

Max leaned toward his night table, straining mightily, and hoisted his water glass. An interlude of gulps and slurps.

“Blood up to his elbows. Both hands. Blood over his face. Like he’d been swimming in it. And he says to me, ‘Welcome home, Maxie. I think we’re going to get along fine.’”

“It was just a nightmare.”

“No! I tell you he was in this room. Alive as you or me.”

“Max, you had a nightmare.”

“He reeked of prison. I wouldn’t survive if I had to go back inside, boy. I frankly prefer death, d’you hear?”

“Max, take it easy. You’re not going to prison.”

“Boy, listen to me.” He clasped Owen’s hand between two hot paws. “I’ve not been the perfect father, God knows. But I’ve done my best to bring you up like my own. Asked nothing in return. Nothing big, anyway-well, nothing too big. But now I am, I do, I must. Look me in the face, boy.”

The old eyes were red and watery and full of fear.

“D’you love me, kid?”

Owen couldn’t believe his ears; he wanted to flee. “Uh, yeah, Max. Of course I do.”

“I need you to promise me something. I need you to promise me that, no matter what happens, you will never let me go back to prison.”

“Max, how can I promise that? You know the old rule: if you-”

“If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime. Not a rule I’ve ever lived by. My rule is, if you’re going to get caught, not. That’s why I’m the most conservative thief the country has ever seen. But if something should happen-God forbid-if something should go wrong and I’m facing a prison sentence again, I want you to promise to get me out of it.”

“Max, I’m not gonna machine-gun ten cops to get you out of jail.”

“I’m not talking about anyone else, I’m talking about me. Just think of it as putting the dog down.”

“Max, you always taught me to keep things non-violent. Now you expect me to shoot you?”

“All right, maybe you don’t do it yourself. You could hire someone. No one’s ever going to suspect you.”

Had it not been the middle of the night, and had Max looked even slightly less terrified and vulnerable, Owen might have put up further resistance, but as it was he found himself agreeing, regretting it even as he did so. “All right, yes. I promise. I won’t let you go to prison.”

“Swear it?”

“I swear.”

“That’s my boy. Now haste thee to thy bed.”