“Who are you?” he asked. “I can’t see. I’ve been blinded.”
“You’re not blind,” the stranger said, and from the tone of his voice Louis reckoned he had enjoyed scaring him. “The lights are off.”
Louis brought his hand to his face and held it an inch away from his eyes. It was true. He could see the bandages wrapped around his digits, though in the near total darkness he thought he could only count three fingers and they looked kind of shorter and stubbier than normal. He let the thought go, blaming it on the lack of visibility, and told the stranger to switch on the lights.
“They’re off for a reason,” the stranger said.
Louis heard him snigger again under his breath. His high reedy voice was really beginning to give him the creeps. It sounded like the squeak of a mouse, or even a rat; and no matter how goddamn ridiculous it sounded, the idea that he was in conversation with a rodent wouldn’t leave his head. He wanted to see who he was talking to. Had to see, for his own sanity.
“I don’t give a goddamn hoot what the reason is. I want the lights on.”
The stranger replied, “They’re off for your own protection.”
Again, Louis heard the guy (mouse?) snigger. He had heard something else too, a kind of swish, like something (a tail?) trailing across the floor. Something wasn’t right here. Something wasn’t goddamned right at all. Louis took a step back, feeling his way toward the wall. “I want the light on,” he said, taking another step back. “I want it on now!”
This time the stranger snorted in contempt. “I tell you what. Why don’t you stop giving the orders and start taking them?”
Louis took another step back. The leather layback wasn’t where it should have been. The darkness had him so disorientated he had lost all sense of where he was in relation to it. What’s more, the room seemed bigger somehow, as if the walls had stretched apart with the Super Nova explosion. Even the ceiling seemed higher. The dark space was vacuous; and if he didn’t think it impossible, he could have sworn he was in a different room from a moment ago.
It even smelled differently. The white room (if he could actually suspend disbelief for a moment and admit that he was no longer in that room), the two-way mirrored room, hadn’t really smelled of anything. It certainly hadn’t smelled of disinfectant or antiseptic floor wash, the kind of nasal-cleansing reek he expected from a hospital; and neither did this room (the dark room?). It smelled more like he remembered his grandfather’s farm, cattle and horses and pigs and poultry, before the old man was forced to sellout to the Office of Roads and Transport and watch the bulldozers level the only property he had owned to make way for a goddamn highway. That’s what this room smelled of, animals; and whether they loved it or hated it, that was the smell every kid growing up in the big smoke remembered about their trips to the countryside. The smell that lingered for days in your hair and clothes when you got back to your parents’ two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, no matter how often you rinsed your head or how hard you pressed your jeans and shirt through the wringer. The smell that made the bullies in the playground rub your face in the mud and call you “Farm Boy” or “Stinky” (Horseshit, DeVille, you stink of goddamn horseshit!), then pull your trousers down and fill it with dog turds and tell all the other kids that you crapped in your pants.
Yeah, he remembered that goddamned smell all right. He had never forgotten it; and it was with him again.
Louis backed further away. He could still hear the swish of whatever it was trailing back and forth behind the stranger. A length of rope? For what? To tie him up?
“You can stop backing away, Mr. DeVille,” the stranger said, but that was the last thing Louis was going to do. “I’m here to help.”
Two steps more, Louis backed into the wall. Though difficult to feel anything through the bandages, he ran his hand over it for a door handle or window ledge. Even still, he could tell that the wall was rough with indented shallows and knobby bumps, as if a pickaxe had gouged the entire face out of rock. That was a goddamn surprise. He thought he was on the upper level of the hospital, where most ITU departments seemed to be located. Except now it seemed he was somewhere underground, in a tunnel or something. Most probably down in the basement with the emergency generators and laundry rooms. Which explained why the room was so goddamn stifling. When had it got so goddamn hot and steamy? It was a goddamn sauna.
He kept running his bandaged hand over the rocky wall. The stranger scuffled closer. “I want my lawyer,” Louis said. He had never wished to see that Jew-boy Epstein as much as now. “I know my rights.”
The stranger sniggered, scuffling closer still. “You’ll get a lawyer in due course.” Louis figured the gap between them was no more than two or three arm-lengths now. “As for your rights,” and he paused, sniggering, “you have as much as what The Boss allows you to have.”
Louis pressed himself to the wall. He felt his body break out in sweat beneath the bandages. The stranger was now right in his face, yet he still couldn’t see him. Where was that goddamn Jew-boy when he needed him? Where was Sarah? Goddamn it, where was any of his employees? The stranger sniggered and a stench of rotting flesh wafted past his nostrils, a stench so goddamned vile it made him gag and his head start to spin.
“I’ve waited a long time for this, Mr. DeVille,” the stranger said. “Your ass is mine!”
Louis felt the stranger grab him on the shoulder and then a sudden sting in the neck. He squealed, a pathetic noise that sounded alien and far away. Worse, as if he had just been injected with some hypnotic drug, he felt his head beginning to spin. It was happening again. His knees crumpled beneath him, then his ears blocked up and he was suddenly deaf as well as blind. He could still smell, though. That god-awful reek was worse than anything. It was everywhere, totally overwhelming his senses (Horseshit, DeVille, you stink of goddamn horseshit!).
Powerless, he slid down the wall and collapsed in an unconscious heap at the feet of the stranger.
CHAPTER SIX
The Mirror of Truth
THE first thing Louis saw when his eyelids creaked open was the portrait. Similar in many ways to the portrait hanging in his office, the one he had paid a goddamn fortune for, it was roughly the same size and had the same gilded frame. Yet it wasn’t his portrait. To begin with, there was no Roman Coliseum in the background. Just a plain gray backdrop like on those days when the clouds sheeted the sky from horizon to horizon and drizzled nonstop for hours and hours and hours.
What’s more, someone with a warped sense of humor had replaced his imposing Caesar-like figure with a scrawny weasel, still wearing a toga and laurel mind you. A goddamn caricature those two-bit artists at Times Square or Liberty Island sketched for the tourists, the ones that exaggerated your worst features – bucked teeth, bulging eyes, flapping ears – and made you look like a goddamn Loony Toon cartoon. Maybe Epstein had passed the hat around the office and had it made while he was stuck in hospital. Maybe the Jew-boy thought it would cheer the boss up and help him with his rehabilitation. If that was the case, he could afford a bit of a chuckle. He wasn’t so uptight he couldn’t laugh at himself (hadn’t his VPs always called him “the old weasel” behind his back?). As long as Epstein hadn’t dipped into company funds to pay for the goddamn thing, it was all right with him.
Thinking of his subordinates caused him to remember where he was and how he had got there. Looking left and right to see if he still had company, he realized somewhat absently that he was on the leather layback again, now propped upright with something digging into his lower spine, a cylindrical-shaped lump, like a rolled newspaper or magazine. Thankfully, he was alone again,