Robert Knightly: The cold room

‘Suppose we find someplace else?’ Horn asked. ‘Or you just walk away right now. I mean, if you left, there’s not much we could do about it.’

Aslan and Hansen both rejected the Fed’s suggestion with simple shakes of the head. ‘Here is better deal,’ Aslan declared. ‘I will make trade. Bring to me Detective Corbin and I will give to you back your lives.’

The offer was a transparent lie, but Hansen didn’t dispute it. Instead, he stroked his knobby chin for a moment, then said, ‘I could try him on his cell phone.’

‘No, do not try. For to go on with living, you must succeed.’

‘My cell phone’s in my coat pocket. My phone book too.’

Aslan grinned. ‘I am not afraid you will pull gun on me. That would be suicide.’

Hansen made a show of thumbing through his phone book, although he had to know that he didn’t have the number of the cell phone I was using. I’d purchased minutes in bulk, instead of buying into a phone company plan, and the number wasn’t listed in any registry. But that didn’t discourage Hansen. He punched away at the number pad, raised the phone to his ear, waited a few seconds, then said, ‘Show time, Harry. Get your ass inside.’

I straightened, stepped through the door and walked up to stand between Hansen and the Fed. Horn’s jaw was bobbing helplessly, his teeth clacking together, his eyes rolling in his head. Aslan Khalid wasn’t in much better shape. His eyes were saucer-wide, his irises a pair of black dots lost in a milky sea. As I approached, he riveted those eyes to mine. Linde immediately took advantage of Aslan’s fixation, his left hand snaking up to unbutton his jacket. Now he could get to the. 357 he carried in a shoulder rig.

‘How’d ya know?’ I spoke directly to Hansen.

He rolled his eyes, his mouth curling into a little circle of distaste. ‘You left a goddamned swamp in the hallway downstairs.’

‘I was gonna clean up, only I didn’t get a chance. But what I’m asking is how you knew it was me who left the puddle?’

‘Well, I knew Aslan didn’t leave it, because we’ve been tailin’ him all afternoon.’

‘Fine,’ I insisted, ‘only that doesn’t explain how you knew it was me. Or how you knew I hadn’t come and gone.’

Hansen laughed. ‘Some things in this life you gotta take on faith, kiddo.’

Aslan rose from the chair, displaying the remote control as through it was a cannon. ‘Enough from this crap.?.?.’

‘Will you shut up,’ I said. ‘I’m speaking to my partner.’ I didn’t wait for a reply. ‘Who’d you break?’ I asked. ‘Nicolai Urnov?’

‘Yeah, Urnov. I put him in the hot seat and melted him like a stick of butter. He told me that Aslan owns a piece of a bar in Canarsie, so I gathered up Agent Horn, drove to Canarsie and there he was. It was only a matter of waiting for him to leave.’

Aslan was virtually incoherent by then, the hate in his eyes all-encompassing. I addressed Horn for the first time. ‘Take your weapon,’ I ordered, ‘and get the fuck out of here. And don’t call the cops.’

Horn looked from me to Aslan. I don’t know what message he took from Aslan’s contorted features, but he finally snatched up his gun and took off like a shot. I listened to his feet on the stairs, to the door slam behind him, then I raised my left hand to expose the AAA batteries in my palm. Aslan stared at my hand for a moment, then jabbed the ON button anyway. When nothing happened, he pressed it again, then again. Finally, his eyes darted to his left, to the DVD player still lying against the far wall.

‘Why,’ Aslan asked, his tone genuinely perplexed, ‘you have done this thing to me?’

I marveled at the question as I watched Hansen’s fingers move toward his weapon, thinking that the list of reasons, should I give them voice, would go on for hours. But the question was never meant to be answered. Instead, it was an attempt to divert our attention, and it might have been effective if Aslan hadn’t paused long enough to throw the remote in our direction before diving for the DVD player. Linde’s hand was on his. 357 even as the remote sailed over his head. He got off his third shot before Aslan took his third step.

The muzzle flashes were predictably blinding in the darkened room, inducing a series of images that persisted in my retinas -

Aslan turning, Aslan rising suddenly on his toes, Aslan halfway to the floor, eyes open, lips parted, the back of his head a spray of red particles fanning out across the room.

I dwelt on these flashes, on the entire sequence and my part in it, until my wildly expanded pupils again contracted, until the roar of Hansen’s. 357 gave way to the patter of rain on the windows. Hansen was kneeling beside Aslan. His fingers were pressed to Aslan’s throat, the gesture somehow ritualistic, as though he were blessing the body.

‘You realize,’ I said, ‘what would have happened if one of those bullets you fired off had ploughed into one of those bricks on the wall, right?’

‘What was I supposed to do, let him get to that DVD player, maybe turn it on?’

‘It wouldn’t have mattered, Hansen, because I cut the wires before you made your grand entrance.’

Linde rose to his feet and slid his revolver into the holster tucked beneath his arm. For a long moment, he regarded me with his hands on his hips. Then he grinned a grin that bore all the marks of his boyhood, towering blue skies, golden sunlight, fields of tasseled corn that ran all the way to heaven.

‘Okay,’ he said, ‘so one day Ole and his cousin, Sven, rent a boat and go fishing on Lake Chimmawabbee. They don’t have much luck at first, so they keep moving from one spot to another until finally, in the middle of the afternoon, they start catching fish. For the next half hour they’re pulling them in as fast as they can re-bait and cast off. Then they finally take a rest. “Sven,” Ole says as he lights his pipe, “we just better mark this spot so we can find it again.” After due consideration, Sven takes out a magic marker and draws a circle in the bottom of the boat. Ole stares at the circle for a moment, then shakes his head in disgust. “Ya big dummy,” he says, “how do ya know we’ll get the same boat tomorrow?”

This time, not even Hansen laughed.

There was nothing to do but wait there in the dark, wait to see if the shots were reported, if uniformed officers would come knocking. Sheets of rain continued to rattle against the windows and on the roof above our heads, rain that seemed to grow louder as time passed. In the kitchen, a wall clock in the shape of a black cat ticked away, its long tail and dark eyes twitching from side to side with every tick.

‘What next?’ Hansen finally asked. He was standing before the front windows, looking up and down the street as though expecting a SWAT team to appear at any minute.

I held him off with a raised forefinger, then took out my cell phone and punched in the number for Beekman Hospital as I walked into Aslan’s bedroom. The operator I got was as nasty as she was uncooperative, even when I identified myself as a police officer. I had to demand a supervisor before I was put through to the nursing station in Adele’s unit and found a sympathetic nurse. Adele was asleep, she told me. She was doing just fine.

‘Look, detective, I know it’s none of my business, but I want to offer my condolences. It’s a hard thing to deal with, a miscarriage, but it’s not the end of the world. There’s no reason why Mrs Bentibi can’t become pregnant again.’ I looked through the doorway, at Aslan Khalid’s shattered skull. No, no reason at all, I thought. No reason at all.

Hansen was standing over Aslan’s body when I came back into the room. ‘I didn’t have any choice under the circumstances, but Sarney’s gonna go nuts,’ he announced.