Thomas Harris: Black Sunday

“It’s better to let—”

“He told her that the life expectancy of a released POW is about half the average.” Lander was wearing a wide smile now.

“Surely, Captain, there must have been some other factors.”

“Oh sure, she was already getting some dick on the side, if that’s what you mean.” Lander laughed, the old spike through him, the pressure building behind his eyes. You don’t have to get them one at a time, Michael. Sit in a cell and sing and masturbate.

Lander closed his eyes so that he could not see the pulse in Pugh’s throat.

Pugh’s reflex was to laugh with Lander, to ingratiate himself. But he was offended in a Baptist sort of way by glib, cheap references to sex. He stopped the laugh in time. That action saved his life.

Pugh picked up the file again. “Did you receive counseling about it?”

Lander was easier now. “Oh, yes. A psychiatrist at St. Alban’s Naval Hospital discussed it with me. He was drinking a Yoo-Hoo.”

“If you feel the need of further counseling I can arrange it.”

Lander winked. “Look, Mr. Pugh. You’re a man of the world and so am I. These things happen. What I want to see you about is some compensation for the old flipper here.” He held up his disfigured hand.

Now Pugh was on familiar ground. He pulled Lander’s Form 214 from the file. “Since you obviously are not disabled, we’ll have to find a way, but”—he winked at Lander—“we’ll take care of you.”

It was four thirty p.m. and the evening rush had begun when Lander came out of the Veterans Administration building into the soiled Manhattan afternoon. The sweat was cold on his back as he stood on the steps and watched the garment district crowds funnel toward the Twenty-third Street subway station. He could not go in there with them and be jammed in the train.

Many of the VA personnel were taking an early slide from their jobs. A stream of them fanned the doors of the building and jostled him back against the wall. He wanted to fight. Margaret came over him in a rush, and he could smell her and feel her. Talking about it over a plywood desk. He had to think about something. The teapot whistle. Not that, for God’s sake. Now he had a cold ache in his colon and he reached for a Lomotil tablet. Too late for Lomotil. He would have to find a restroom. Quick. Now he walked back to the waiting room, the dead air like cobwebs on his face. He was pale and sweat stood out on his forehead as he entered the small restroom. The single stall was occupied and another man was waiting outside it. Lander turned and walked back through the waiting room. Spastic colon, his medical profile said. No medication prescribed. He had found Lomotil for himself.

Why didn’t I take some before?

The man with the moving eyes tracked Lander as far as he could without turning his head. The pain in Lander’s bowels was coming in waves now, making goose bumps on his arms, and he was gagging.

The fat janitor fumbled through his keys and let Lander into the employees’ washroom. Waiting outside, the janitor could not hear the unpleasant sounds. At last, Lander turned his face up to the Celotex ceiling. Retching had made his eyes water, and the tears ran down his face.

For a second he was squatting beside the path with the guards watching on the forced march to Hanoi.

It was the same, the same. The teapot whistle came.

“Cocksuckers,” Lander croaked. “Cocksuckers.” He wiped his face with his ugly hand.

Dahlia, who had had a busy day with Lander’s credit cards, was on the platform when he got off the commuter train. She saw him ease down off the step and knew he was trying not to joggle his insides.

She filled a paper cup with water from the fountain and took a small bottle from her purse. The water turned milky as she poured in the paregoric.

He did not see her until she was beside him, offering the cup.

It tasted like bitter licorice and left a faint numbness in his lips and tongue. Before they reached the car, the opium was soothing the ache and in five minutes it was gone. When they reached the house, he fell into bed and slept for three hours.

Lander woke confused and unnaturally alert. His defenses were working, and his mind recoiled from painful images with the speed of a pinball. His thoughts rolled over the safe, painted images between the buzzers and the bells. He had not blown it today, he could rest on that.

The teapot—his neck tightened. He seemed to itch somewhere between his shoulders and his cortex in a place he could not reach. His feet would not keep still.

The house was completely dark, its ghosts just beyond the firelight of his will. Then, from the bed, he saw a flickering light coming up the stairs. Dahlia was carrying a candle, her shadow huge on the wall. She wore a dark floor-length robe that covered her completely and her bare feet made no sound. Now she was standing by him, the candlelight a pinpoint in her great, dark eyes. She held out her hand.

“Come, Michael. Come with me.”

Slowly backing down the dark hall, she led him, looking into his face. Her black hair down over her shoulders. Backing, feet peeping white from under the hem. Back to what had been the playroom, empty these seven months. Now in the candlelight Lander could see that a huge bed waited at the end of the room and heavy drapes covered the walls. Incense touched his face and the small blue flame of a spirit lamp flickered on a table near the bed. It was no longer the room where Margaret had—no, no, no.

Dahlia put her candle beside the lamp and with a feather touch removed Lander’s pajama top. She undid the drawstring and knelt to slip the trousers off his feet, her hair brushing against his thigh. “You were so strong today.” She gently pressed him back upon the bed. The silk beneath him was cool and the air was a cool ache upon his genitals.

He lay watching her as she lit two tapers in holders on the walls. She passed him the slender hash pipe and stood at the foot of the bed, the candle shadows moving behind her.

Lander felt that he was falling into those bottomless eyes. He remembered as a child lying in the grass on dear summer nights, looking into heavens suddenly dimensional and deep. Looking up until there was no up and he was falling out into the stars.

Dahlia dropped her robe and stood before him.

The sight of her pierced him as it had the first time, and his breath caught in his throat. Dahlia’s breasts were large, and their curves were not the curves of a vessel but of a dome, and she had a cleavage even when they were unconfined. Her nipples darkened as they came erect. She was opulent, but not forbidden, her curves and hollows lapped by candlelight.

Lander felt a sweet shock as she turned to take the vessel of sweet oil from above the spirit lamp and the light played over her. Kneeling astride him, she rubbed the warm oil on his chest and belly, her breasts swaying slightly as she worked.

As she leaned forward, her belly rounded slightly and receded again into the dark triangle.

It grew thick and soft and springy up her belly, a black explosion radiating tufts as though it tried to climb. He felt it touch his navel and, looking down, he saw suspended in the whorls like pearls in the candelight, the first drops of her essence.

It would bathe him he knew, and be warm on his scrotum and it would taste like bananas and salt.

Dahlia took a mouthful of the warm, sweet oil and held him in it, nodding gently, deeply to the rhythm of his blood, her hair spilling warm over him.

And all the while her eyes, wide-set as a puma’s and full of the moon, never left his face.

A SOUND LIKE A SLOWroll of thunder shivered the air in the bedroom and the candle flames quivered, but Dahlia and Lander, fixed in each other, did not notice it. It was a common sound—the late jet shuttle from New York to Washington. The Boeing 727 was six thousand feet above Lakehurst and climbing.