She had no need to cover her mouth because her lips barely moved.
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This was a skill Fletcher associated with prisons. He had never been to prison but he had seen movies. When Escobar whispered back, he raised a fat hand to cover his own mouth.
Fletcher watched them and waited, knowing that the woman was telling Escobar he was lying. Soon Heinz would have more data for his paper, Certain Preliminary Observations on the Administration and Consequences of Electrifying the Shit of Reluctant Interrogation Subjects.
Fletcher discovered that terror had created two new people inside him, at least two, sub-Fletchers with their own useless but quite powerful views on how this was going to go. One was sadly hopeful, the other just sad. The sadly hopeful one was Mr. Maybe They Will, as in maybe they really will let me go, maybe there really is a car parked on the Street Fifth of May, just around the corner, maybe they really mean to kick me out of the country, maybe I really will be landing in Miami tomorrow morning, scared but alive, with this already beginning to seem like a bad dream.
The other one, the one who was merely sad, was Mr. Even If I Do.
Fletcher might be able to surprise them by making a sudden move—
he had been beaten and they were arrogant, so yes, he might be able to surprise them.
But Ramón will shoot me even if I do.
And if he went for Ramón? Managed to get his gun? Unlikely but not impossible; the man was fat, fatter than Escobar by at least thirty pounds, and he wheezed when he breathed.
Escobar and Heinz will be all over me before I can shoot even if I do.
The woman too, maybe; she talked without moving her lips; she might know judo or karate or tae kwon do, as well. And if he shot them all and managed to escape this room?
There’ll be more guards everywhere even if I do—they’ll hear the shots and come running.
Of course rooms like this tended to be soundproofed, for obvious reasons, but even if he got up the stairs and out the door and onto the street, that was only the beginning. And Mr. Even If I Do would be running with him the whole way, for however long his run lasted.
The thing was, neither Mr. Maybe They Will or Mr. Even If I Do 129
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could help him; they were only distractions, lies his increasingly frantic mind tried to tell itself. Men like him did not talk themselves out of rooms like this. He might as well try inventing a third sub-Fletcher, Mr. Maybe I Can, and go for it. He had nothing to lose. He only had to make sure they didn’t know he knew that.
Escobar and the Bride of Frankenstein drew apart. Escobar put his cigarette back in his mouth and smiled sadly at Fletcher. “Amigo, you are lying.”
“No,” he said. “Why would I lie? Don’t you think I want to get out of here?”
“We have no idea why you would lie,” said the woman with the narrow blade of a face. “We have no idea why you would choose to aid Núñez in the first place. Some have suggested American naiveté, and I have no doubt that played its part, but that cannot be all. It doesn’t matter. I believe a demonstration is in order. Heinz?”
Smiling, Heinz turned to his machine and flicked a switch. There was a hum, the kind that comes from an old-fashioned radio when it’s warming up, and three green lights came on.
“No,” Fletcher said, trying to get to his feet, thinking that he did panic very well, and why not? He was panicked, or almost panicked.
Certainly the idea of Heinz touching him anywhere with that stainless steel dildo for pygmies was terrifying. But there was another part of him, very cold and calculating, that knew he would have to take at least one shock. He wasn’t aware of anything so coherent as a plan, but he had to take at least one shock. Mr. Maybe I Can insisted that this was so.
Escobar nodded to Ramón.
“You can’t do this, I’m an American citizen and I work for The New York Times, people know where I am.”
A heavy hand pressed down on his left shoulder, pushing him back into the chair. At the same moment, the barrel of a pistol went deep into his right ear. The pain was so sudden that bright dots appeared before Fletcher’s eyes, dancing frantically. He screamed, and the sound seemed muffled. Because one ear was plugged, of course—one ear was plugged.
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“Hold out your hand, Mr. Fletcher,” Escobar said, and he was smiling around his cigarette again.
“Right hand,” Heinz said. He held the stylus by its black rubber grip like a pencil, and his machine was humming.
Fletcher gripped the arm of the chair with his right hand. He was no longer sure if he was acting or not—the line between acting and panic was gone.
“Do it,” the woman said. Her hands were folded on the table; she leaned forward over them. There was a point of light in each of her pupils, turning her dark eyes into nailheads. “Do it or I can’t account for the consequences.”
Fletcher began to loosen his fingers on the chair arm, but before he could get the hand up, Heinz darted forward and poked the tip of the blunt stylus against the back of Fletcher’s left hand. That had probably been his target all along—certainly it was closer to where Heinz stood.
There was a snapping sound, very thin, like a twig, and Fletcher’s left hand closed into a fist so tight his nails cut into his palm. A kind of dancing sickness raced up from his wrist to his forearm to his flopping elbow and finally to his shoulder, the side of his neck, and to his gums. He could even feel the shock in his teeth on that side, or in the fillings. A grunt escaped him. He bit his tongue and shot sideways in the chair. The gun was gone from his ear and Ramón caught him. If he hadn’t, Fletcher would have fallen on the gray tile floor.
The stylus was withdrawn. Where it had touched, between the second and third knuckles of the third finger of his left hand, there was a small hot spot. It was the only real pain, although his arm still tingled and the muscles still jumped. Yet it was horrible, being shocked like that. Fletcher felt he would seriously consider shooting his own mother to avoid another touch of the little steel dildo. An atavism, Heinz had called it. Someday he hoped to write a paper.
Heinz’s face loomed down, lips pulled back and teeth revealed in an idiotic grin, eyes alight. “How do you describe it?” he cried.
“Now, while the experience is still fresh, how do you describe it?”
“Like dying,” Fletcher said in a voice that didn’t sound like his own.
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Heinz looked transported. “Yes! And you see, he has wet himself!
Not much, just a little, but yes . . . and Mr. Fletcher—”
“Stand aside,” the Bride of Frankenstein said. “Don’t be an ass.
Let us take care of our business.”
“And that was only one-quarter power, ” Heinz said in a tone of awed confidentiality, and then he stood aside and refolded his hands in front of him.
“Mr. Fletcher, you been bad,” Escobar said reproachfully. He took the stub of his cigarette from his mouth, examined it, threw it on the floor.
The cigarette, Fletcher thought. The cigarette, yes. The shock had seriously insulted his arm—the muscles were still twitching and he could see blood in his cupped palm—but it seemed to have revital-ized his brain, refreshed it. Of course that was what shock treat-ments were supposed to do.
“No . . . I want to help . . .”
But Escobar was shaking his head. “We know Núñez will come to the city. We know on the way he will take the radio station if he can
. . . and he probably can.”
“For awhile,” said the Bride of Frankenstein. “Only for awhile.”
Escobar was nodding. “Only for awhile. A matter of days, perhaps hours. Is of no concern. What matters is we give you a bit of rope, see if you make a noose . . . and you do.”
Fletcher sat up straight in the chair again. Ramón had retreated a step or two. Fletcher looked at the back of his left hand and saw a small smudge there, like the one on the side of Tomás’s dead face in the photograph. And there was Heinz who had killed Fletcher’s friend, standing beside his machine with his hands folded in front of him, smiling and perhaps thinking about the paper he would write, words and graphs and little pictures labeled Fig. 1 and Fig. 2 and, for all Fletcher knew, Fig. 994.