John Verdon - Think of a Number

“I have to pee,” said the woman in a pixilated voice, her fingertips again drifting back over her blond curls.

“It’s all right, dear,” he answered without looking at her. “Everything will be all right. Everything will be the way it always should have been.” Dermott adjusted the position of the goose slightly in his lap, refining, Gurney supposed, the aim of the revolver inside it at Nardo. “All set?”

If Nardo’s steady gaze were poison, Dermott would have been dead three times over. Instead there was only a flicker around his mouth, which might have been a smile or a twitch or a touch of excitement.

“I’ll take your silence for a yes this time. But a friendly word of warning. Any further ambiguity in your responses will result in the immediate termination of the play and your life. Do you understand me?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. The curtain rises. The play begins. The time of year is late autumn. The time of day is late evening, already dark. It’s rather bleak, some snow on the ground outside, some ice. In fact, the night is very much like tonight. It’s your day off. You’ve spent the day in a local bar, drinking all day, with your drunken friends. That’s the way you spend all your days off. You arrive home as the play begins. You stagger into your wife’s bedroom. Your face is red and angry. Your eyes are dull and stupid. You have a bottle of whiskey in your hand.” Dermott pointed to the Four Roses on the hope chest. “You can use that bottle there. Pick it up now.”

Nardo stepped forward and picked it up. Dermott nodded approvingly. “You instinctively evaluate it as a potential weapon. That’s very good, very appropriate. You have a natural sympathy with the mind-set of your character. Now, with that bottle in your hand, you stand, swaying from side to side, at the foot of your wife’s bed. You glare with a stupid rage at her and her little boy and his little stuffed goose in the bed. You bare your teeth like a stupid rabid dog.” Dermott paused and studied Nardo’s face. “Let me see you bare your teeth.”

Nardo’s lips tightened and parted. Gurney could see that there was nothing artificial about the rage in that expression.

“That’s right!” enthused Dermott. “Perfect! You have a real talent for this. Now you stand there with bloodshot eyes, with spittle on your lips, and you shout at your wife in the bed, ‘What the fuck is he doing in here?’ You point at me. My mother says, ‘Calm down, Jim, he’s been showing me and Dickie Duck his little storybook.’ You say, ‘I don’t see any fucking book.’ My mother tells you, ‘Look, it’s right there on the bedside table.’ But you have a filthy mind, and it shows in your filthy face. Your filthy thoughts are oozing like the oily sweat through your stinking skin. My mother tells you that you’re drunk and you should go to sleep in the other room. But you start taking your clothes off. I scream at you to get out. But you take off all your clothes, and you stand there naked, leering at us. You make me feel like I’m going to vomit. My mother screams at you, screams at you not to be so disgusting, to get out of the room. You say, ‘Who the fuck are you calling disgusting, you slut bitch?’ Then you smash the whiskey bottle on the footboard, and you jump up on the bed like a naked ape with the broken bottle in your hand. The nauseating stink of whiskey is all over the room. Your body stinks. You call my mother a slut. You-”

“What’s her name?” interrupted Nardo.

Dermott blinked twice. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Sure it does.”

“I said it doesn’t matter.”

“Why not?”

Dermott seemed taken aback by the question, if only a little. “It doesn’t matter what her name is because you never use her name. You call her things, ugly things, but you never use her name. You never show her any respect. Maybe it’s so long since you’ve used her name you don’t even know what it is anymore.”

“But you know her name, don’t you?”

“Of course I do. She’s my mother. Of course I know my mother’s name.”

“So what is it?”

“It doesn’t matter to you. You don’t care.”

“Still, I’d like to know what it is.”

“I don’t want her name in your filthy brain.”

“If I’m going to pretend to be her husband, I have to know her name.”

“You have to know what I want you to know.”

“I can’t do this if I don’t know who that woman is. I don’t care what you say-it makes absolutely no goddamn sense for me not to know my own wife’s name.”

It wasn’t clear to Gurney where Nardo was going with this.

Had he finally realized that he was being directed to reenact the drunken assault by Jimmy Spinks on Felicity Spinks that had occurred twenty-four years ago in this same house? Had it dawned on him that this Gregory Dermott who a year earlier had purchased this house might very well be Jimmy and Felicity’s child-the eight-year-old Spinks boy whom social services had taken into their care in the aftermath of that family disaster? Had it occurred to him that the old woman in the bed with the scar on her throat was almost certainly Felicity Spinks-reclaimed by her grown son from whatever long-term nursing facility the trauma had consigned her to?

Was Nardo hoping to change the homicidal dynamic of the little “play” in progress by revealing what it was all about? Was he trying to create a psychological distraction, in the hope of finding some way out? Or was he just fumbling around in the dark-trying to delay as long as he could, however he could, whatever Dermott had in mind?

Of course, there was another possibility. What Nardo was doing, and how Dermott was reacting to it, might not make any rational sense at all. It could be the sort of ridiculously trivial sidetrack issue over which small boys beat each other with plastic shovels in sandboxes and angry men beat each other to death in bar fights. With a sinking heart, Gurney suspected that this last guess was as good as any.

“Whether you think it makes sense is of no importance,” said Dermott, again adjusting by a quarter inch the angle of the goose, his gaze fixed on Nardo’s throat. “Nothing you think is of any importance. It’s time for you to take your clothes off.”

“First tell me her name.”

“It’s time for you to take your clothes off and smash the bottle and jump up on the bed like a naked ape. Like a stupid, drooling, hideous monster.”

“What’s her name?”

“It’s time.”

Gurney saw a slight movement in the muscle in Dermott’s forearm-meaning that his finger was tightening on the trigger.

“Just tell me her name.”

Any doubt Gurney had about what was happening was now gone. Nardo had drawn his line in the sand, and all his manhood-indeed his life-was invested in making his adversary answer his question. Dermott, likewise, was invested 100 percent in maintaining control. Gurney wondered whether Nardo had any idea how important this matter of control was to the man he was trying to face down. According to Rebecca Holdenfield-in fact, according to everyone who knew anything about serial killers-control was the goal worth any price, any risk. Absolute control-with the feeling of omniscience and omnipotence it engendered-was the ultimate euphoria. To threaten that goal head-on without a gun in your hand was suicidal.

It seemed that blindness to that fact had put Nardo once again an inch from death, and this time Gurney couldn’t save him by shouting him into submission. That tactic wouldn’t work a second time.

Murder was moving now like a racing storm cloud into Dermott’s eyes. Gurney had never felt so helpless. He couldn’t think of any way to stop that finger on the trigger.

It was then he heard the voice, clean and cool as pure silver. It was, without a doubt, Madeleine’s voice, saying something she’d said to him years ago on an occasion when he felt stymied by a seemingly hopeless case.