As she turned over to find a portion of the bed that was still cool an image flashed into her head. It was gone again before she could entirely grasp it but she caught enough to wake her with a start. She saw a man-faceless, but familiar-crossing a tract of grass. At his heels, a tide of filth. It crept close behind him, in blind adoration, its waves sibilant as snakes. She didn’t have time to see what the waves contained, and perhaps that was a good thing.
She turned over a third time, and ordered herself to forget these nonsenses.
Curiously, the dogs had stopped barking.
And what, after all, was the worst he could do, what was the very worst? Whitehead had tried on this particular question so often it felt like a familiar coat. The possible physical torments were endless, of course. Sometimes, in the clammy hug of a three-A.M. sweat, he would deem himself worthy of them all-if a man could die a dozen, two dozen times-because the crimes of power he had committed were not easily paid for. The things, oh, Jesus in Heaven, the things he had done.
But then, damn it, who would not have crimes to confess, when the time came? Who would not have acted out of greed, and envy; or grappled for station, and having gained it, been absolute in authority rather than relinquish it? He couldn’t be held responsible for everything the corporation had done. If, once in a decade, a medical preparation that deformed fetuses had slipped onto the market, was he to blame because there’d been profit made? That kind of moral accounting was for the writers of revenge fiction: it didn’t belong in the real world, where most crimes went punished only with wealth and influence; where the worm seldom turned, and when it did was immediately crushed; where the best a man could hope was that having risen to his ambition’s height by wit, stealth or violence there was some smidgen of pleasure in the view. That was the real world, and the European was as familiar with its ironies as he was. Hadn’t Mamoulian shown him so much of it himself? How, in all conscience, could the European turn around and punish his student for learning his lessons too well?
I’ll probably die in a warm bed, Whitehead thought, with curtains partially drawn against a yellow spring sky, and surrounded by admirers. “There is nothing to fear,” he said aloud. The steam billowed. The tiles, laid with an obsessive’s precision, sweated with him: but coldly, where he was hot.
Nothing to fear.
36
From the door of the doghouse Mamoulian watched Breer at work. It was an efficient slaughter this time, not the trial of strength he’d had with the dog at the gate. The fat man simply opened the cages and then the throats of the dogs one by one, using his long-bladed knife. Cornered in their cells the dogs were easy prey. All they could do was turn and turn, snapping uselessly at their assassin, somehow knowing the battle was lost before it was truly entered. They dropped turds as they slumped down, slashed necks and flanks spurting, brown eyes turned up to look at Breer like painted saints. He killed the pups too; tearing them from their mother’s lap and cracking their heads open in his hand. Bella fought back with more vehemence than the other dogs, determined to inflict as much damage as she could on the killer before she too was killed. He returned the favor, mutilating her body after he’d silenced her; wounds in return for the wounds she’d given him. Once the clamor was over, and the only movement in the cages was the twitch of a leg or the splash of a bladder giving vent, Breer pronounced himself finished. They went together toward the house.
There were two more dogs here; the last of them. The Razor-Eater made short work of them both. By now he looked more like an abattoir worker than a sometime librarian. The European thanked him. It had been easier than he’d expected.
“I have business inside the house now,” he told Breer.