Bloodstained Kings

  Faroe’s voice was flat and uninflected by emotion. This was a side effect, like the bloating of his flesh and the stiffness of his features, of the neuroleptic tranquilizers that he had been given, in enormous quantities, for over a decade. A week before Lenna’s scheduled visits, the Jessups routinely withheld the drugs and Faroe’s central nervous system was allowed to recover from the stupor in which it was generally maintained. On the morning of her visits he was strapped into the chair and given an injection of the amphetamine drug methedrine—pure speed—to boost his dulled consciousness to the frantic level of a Super Bowl quarterback about to make a big play. In that heightened and overstimulated state he would endure her presence for as long as it pleased her. When she left, Faroe would remain in the chair—alone; immobilized; chemically hypercharged so as to dwell more acutely upon his fate; and soiling himself as his bladder and bowel found necessary—until the following morning, whereupon he would be returned to a state of tranquilized oblivion and released from his strappings to stumble about his cage—a slurring, retarded zombie, more vegetable than man—for a further three weeks.

  Perhaps it was only the drugs that prevented him from going insane.

  Before he’d been involuntarily exiled to this chamber, Filmore Faroe had seen his name make the lower end of Forbes’s list of the four hundred richest men in America. Now, this was his life. Lenna Parillaud had designed and constructed it for him; and thus did she maintain it.

  She stared at him now and couldn’t think of anything to say. These meetings had changed for both of them over the years. Faroe no longer foamed and ranted and shrieked in the eye-bulging, speed-stoked frenzies of rage and despair that had characterized the beginning; and Lenna no longer shrieked and laughed back, while lifting her dress to show him her pussy and torment him with pornographic inventions. When that had paled—and it had taken a long time—she had shown him videos of herself engaged in sweating, grateful congress with Clarence Jefferson. And Faroe’s lips had bled and his nails had peeled the skin from the palms of his hands and he’d pleaded to be killed there and then, and she’d told him: Never. Never. Always it will be like this. When that too had lost its savor, Lenna had taken to reminding Faroe of how the great kingdom that he’d built and won was now hers, and of how, under her direction, it was making more money than even he ever had, and of how also, while all those activities he had loved continued and thrived in what once had been his world, he himself could only sit there in his rubber chair—at the epicenter of all he’d created—and piss in his pants while she smiled.

  Now, like two junkies who could no longer remember why they’d ever taken smack in the first place, and had long ago lost the buzz, they sat staring at each other through the bars in mute and mutual disgust.

  Finally, Faroe asked, “Have you fucked any niggers lately?”

  In his eyes she saw a glimmer of the reptilian intelligence that had once put him among the most feared corporate hitmen in the South. His pathetic attempt to initiate a dialogue was a measure of how low she had brought him, and her answer of how low she had brought herself

  “You enjoy that one, these days, don’t you, Fil?” she said. “It really turns you on.”

  The lizardy eyes blinked.

  “Harvill’s seen you, you know,” said Lenna, “trying to reach your dick to jerk yourself off after I’ve gone. If you like I could ask him to do it for you.”

  Faroe dropped his gaze to the skin of her throat and the suggestion of cleavage. The creases at the corners of his eyes deepened. His gaze lost focus and grew glassy.

  “For want of a nail the shoe was lost,” said Faroe. ”For want of a shoe the horse was lost.”

  Lenna had heard this before, as she had heard all of his limited repertoire before. According to Woodrow, Faroe, during his one night a month on speed, could sometimes be heard moaning and rocking in his straps as he bellowed the nursery rhyme from his chair, over and over again throughout the early hours. Perhaps it gave him some comfort. She let him finish.

  “For want of a horse the rider was lost. For want of a rider the battle was lost. For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.” Faroe looked back at Lenna, the glaze clearing. “And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.”

  Lenna stood up. Already, she’d had enough. It was getting difficult to breathe. She asked herself, as she had many times before, why she didn’t have Faroe killed and the Stone House plowed beneath the ground. It would have been easier and safer than keeping him alive. She looked past Faroe to the ancient tin-roofed shack, poised on its platform like a surrealist installation amid the gray concrete and yellow sunlight. Her gut tightened. Somehow her instinct insisted that while Faroe was alive there still remained a lingering possibility, however remote, of some kind of completion, of resolution. What that was, she did not know and she couldn’t make any sense of it; she just knew that if she killed him, then she too would remain here in the Stone House forever. She turned away from the wooden shack, and away from Faroe without looking at him.

  “Goodbye, Fil.”

  As she walked away Faroe said, “I loved you, Magdalena. Never forget that.”

  Lenna stopped. He had played this role before, the noble penitent enduring a cruel and unjustified punishment. She despised him for it. In part she despised herself too, for the pretense of love, sustained over flesh-crawling years, that she’d used to seize his power. Yet she’d done what she had done, and without trying she suddenly recalled something Clarence Jefferson had once told her. “Consider those deeds that history writes most bold, Lenna,” he’d whispered in his honeycomb voice. “Hatred is the blackest ink. Not love.”

  Lenna looked back at Faroe over her shoulder.

  “But remember I never loved you, Fil,” she said. “That’s the difference between us: you could never fake it. I could.”

  Without waiting to see his reaction Lenna walked out through the antechamber and between the stacked crates and out into the yard. There the air felt good. She breathed deeply, a hand pressed to her chest. She dropped the hand as she heard Woodrow Jessup cough behind her.

  “You okay, Miss Par-low?”

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  “Thought I’d wait till you’d finished your bidness before giving you this. Hope that’s all right.”

  He handed her a sealed white envelope. The back was blank. On the front was handwritten Lenna. Lenna felt a convulsion through her spine. She recognized that elegant and extravagant hand.

  “Where did this come from?” she said.

  “Fella brought it this morning, a stranger.” Woodrow nodded at the letter in her hand. “I asked him, he said he didn’t know what was in there or who it was for, he just had to deliver it here by hand. Said them was his instructions. Declined to give his name or who’d sent him, then drove off. Didn’t even get out of his car, but maybe that was on account of the dogs.”

  “What did he look like?” asked Lenna.

  “Old guy, sixty maybe? Lean as a whip and all turned out in a suit and tie. I don’t think he was up from the City, though.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well he was polite, for a start-off, and I’d say smart, but not slick, you know? Straight as a string, that was my feeling. Calm, too. His eyes put me in mind of a certain kind of old-time horse trader you see back home, or maybe a lawyer. I don’t know exactly where, but he was country for sure.”

  Lenna frowned and looked again at her name on the envelope.

  “Would’ve cost us a fuss to stop him leaving, Miss Par-low. I calculated you wouldn’t want that.”

  “You did the right thing,” said Lenna. “Has anyone else been around?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Anything strange at all?”

  Woodrow shook his head. “Things as quiet as always. The dogs would’ve picked up any snoopers.”

  Lenna nodded. She raised the envelope. “You and Harvill forget this ever happened.”

  “It’s forgot.”

  “You did
well. Thank you.”

  Woodrow blushed and shuffled.

  “Anything else happens you call me right away Okay?”

  “Sure thing, Miss Par-low”

  Lenna walked over to the Mercedes and got in. She put the envelope on the seat beside her and drove away. Now that she was alone the dread that the letter provoked was so intense she was unable to think. She swung off the dirt road, fishtailed in a billow of red dust, straightened up. A mile along the blacktop she jammed on the brakes and stopped. She opened the envelope and took out a single sheet of paper. The same elegant handwriting met her eyes.

  As she read them the words seemed to bypass her consciousness and open a channel to an underground sea of emotions that she could not name and which she had thought long dead. Halfway through the letter she started sobbing. Then the paper fell from her hands. And Lenna clung to the wheel and gave herself up to the roar offerees so immense she would not have believed her body could contain them and still live. Yet if she did not believe, it was because she had known them before but had forgotten, and so she wept: as she had not wept in twenty years.

  Time passed. The sounds of her grief escaped from the car and drifted away to lose themselves among the whispers of the marsh grass. After a while the car fell silent.

  When the forces had finally passed, Lenna put her hands over her face and made things dark. For a while all she knew was the wetness on her palms, the quieting shudder of her breath, the flicker of yellow shadows upon the blackness she squeezed from her eyes. More time passed, in an emptiness so crystalline, so utterly void, she would have stayed there forever if she could. Then into the void came fear, at first of nothing in particular, just fear itself. Then came something worse: hope. With the hope came the knowledge—the horror—that if she failed, then all this—all this and worse than this—awaited her again.

  Something wiser than herself shut it down, blanked it out. Her breathing steadied. She took her hands from her face and blinked. Ahead of her she saw again the April blue and the shifting yellow-brown sea divided by a black strip of pavement. She found she couldn’t remember what she’d just read; rather, she could not afford to remember. Not yet. She had to act, and to act she had to shield herself from its contents—and from the terrors of the void it might provoke—until she was ready.

  Lenna snatched up the car phone and punched the buttons. It was answered, silendy, after the first ring.

  “Bobby?” she said.

  “Tell me what’s wrong,” said Frechette.

  Frechette’s voice, at the same time mellow and alert, calmed her. She took a breath; her strength flowing back. She felt her jaws grind until her head ached. At last she had something worth going to war for. She let go of the bite.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I’m on my way back. Call Rufus Atwater. Have him run a check on a guy—a doctor—called Grimes, right now. Tell him I want to see him as soon as he’s done.”

  “I need that name again,” said Frechette.

  Lenna reached down and picked up the letter. Patches of it were wet, the ink blurred. Without rereading she scanned the paragraphs until she focused on the words she needed.

  “Grimes. Eugene Cicero Grimes.”

  “Dr. Eugene Cicero Grimes,” said Bobby Frechette. “You got it.”

  Lenna hung up. Then she folded the letter, put it in her jacket.

  She thought: She’s alive.

  She felt the crumbling edge of hope open up beneath her feet. What if it’s not true? She hauled herself back. Later. She crammed the thought down and slammed the lid. Then Lenna Parillaud gunned the Mercedes to life and headed back to Arcadia.

  TWO

  CICERO GRIMES raised his head a couple of inches from where it lay pillowed on his forearms and opened his eyes. Lethargic motes of dust drifted about his field of vision. Beyond the motes a filth-strewn terrain undulated away toward the far wall of the room, which, in its turn, was blackened by the scorch marks of fire and smoke. The sight was wretched but familiar. Grimes dropped his head back down and waited for a thought that was worthy of the mental effort required to process it. Experience suggested that he would have to wait a long time.

  He was sprawled in a loose tangle of his own limbs on the hardwood floor of his living room. The radiant heat hammering into the back of his skull told him that the sun had risen high enough to pour direcdy through the casement window facing out onto the street and that it was therefore sometime after noon. From deep inside his chest he heard a groan.

  Grimes had been more or less unconscious for about thirteen hours, and had the option been open to him he would have stayed that way for thirteen hours more. To have slept would have been better still, but sleep was a state that implied a degree of comfort, a repletion of cortical centers, of which his brain no longer seemed capable. From time to time he would surface from his third-rate oblivion with the unwelcome knowledge that he should drag himself to his feet and act like a man. Instead he would pray for the oblivion to return, and if luck was with him, he would drift back into the haze of half-remembered dreams and sweat-drenched squirmings for which he was so grateful. Now, with the sun tormenting him from the far side of an indifferent cosmos, he knew there was no point; and so he waited, with the patience of one for whom time possessed neither meaning nor value, for the arrival of the thought with which he would begin this, his day

  When the thought finally came it was not a product of his own impoverished intellect but, if he remembered correctly, of the fearless metaphysician Arthur Schopenhauer. The human personality, claimed Arthur, was not something to be glorified or exalted but, on the contrary, a gore-encrusted dungeon in which the futile horror of existence was placed on display as squalid and mindless suffering and, occasionally—in a few select specimens—as tragedy

  Grimes was by now far too intimate with his own bespattered cell to flatter himself with the idea that he belonged among the company of the select and tragic few. He was, he knew, merely a scumbag; clinging to the driftwood of his own self-disgust on a far-flung beach of despair. Indeed, it occurred to him—as he lay there on the floor amid a debris of half-empty pizza boxes, squashed cigarette packs, unwashed clothes and sundry other trash—that if he’d ever laid claim to the nobility of despair, he had finally lost even that delusion. The shingle upon which he now sprawled was beyond the ocean of anything so grand as despair. Today, in the aftermath of Schopenhauer’s reassuring description of the human estate, Grimes discovered that he did not even pity himself. This startled him: he was even losing his capacity for self-loathing. He was becoming a shriveled bag of basic life functions, burdened by a consciousness that knew the desire—but lacked the will—to bring itself to a dignified end.

  These reflections were sufficientiy humiliating to drag Grimes up as far as his knees. He rested his forehead on the bare planks. Then he mumbled a few words to Jesus, most of them profane, and stood up, blinking, on his hind legs.

  The sun was an evil but he could not close the window blinds against its rays. Grimes had torn them from their hangings during one of the black rages that periodically broke through his torpor to destroy whatever was closest at hand. The broken blinds were somewhere in the ankle-deep garbage that formed the shallow pit from which he had just risen. Grimes stood in the pit and wondered what to do next.

  He lived on the second floor of an old New Orleans firehouse and had called it home for eight years. In the eighties the fire department had abandoned the building for modern premises and it had stood disused until Grimes had found it and taken out a lease. The living room was large and distinguished by a tarnished brass pole that ran through a hole in the floor to the former engine room below. The engine room contained a heavy bag, which in health Grimes had pounded for thirty minutes a day, and a set of iron weights; both weights and bag were now as idle as he was. Behind the living room were two bedrooms and a bathroom. He’d decorated and furnished the place without any concern for aesthetic integration or style: he sat on the chairs; he placed thin
gs on the two scarred tables; the shelves supported books; the kitchen area was small and rarely used. Across the rear half of the room the walls and ceiling had been damaged by fire. This created an atmosphere that reminded Grimes of newsreel footage of postwar Berlin. To date he’d made no attempt to repair the damage. Grimes had known good times here and bad. He had listened to music and sipped whiskey and talked through the night with friends. He had made love here: with women he had loved, with women he had not. And he had been broken here, too, on the wheel of his own psyche.

  At this moment he regarded this place—his place—as his prison and his tomb. The door was open; he was a free man; yet he went out for no more than a few minutes a day, walking to the store to buy cigarettes and juice and a few items of fresh food that usually went bad before he got around to eating them. Then he would walk back home, climb the single flight of stairs and slam the door behind him for another twenty-fours hours or so of mindless isolation. He kept his telephone unplugged. He had no TV. He never switched on the radio. Occasionally he listened to music; but too often it reminded him of things he would rather forget.

  He had not worked in months and could not imagine doing so again; in fact it scared him that he had ever been capable of any such activity. Grimes was a doctor: originally a surgeon; latterly a psychiatrist. Somewhere in the haze of memory he knew his work to have been something infinitely valuable to him: the passion and the labor of his life. There had, it seemed, once been such things. But then was then and now was now. It was as if his hands had died on him, for it was in his hands that his passion and his labor had resided. He had betrayed that passion and that labor, before himself, even if before no one else; the details of the betrayal itself had milled and sifted into a dust of futile regrets, long since blown away across the barrens of melancholia.

  Grimes avoided alcohol and was under the influence of no drugs other than those deranged neurotransmitters generated by his own unstable brain. He could have named some of them. He could have speculated at length on the nature—biological, psychological and spiritual—of his affliction, and even prescribed sage advice on how to treat it; and from time to time what was left of his observing ego did just that. But his heart preferred not to hear. Something in his soul insisted that he endure this dark passage to its end, whatever that end might bring, and wherever that end might be.