T. Boyle - Riven Rock

O‘Kane was elected, because of his reputation with women — a reputation long since obscured by Giovannella and little Guido and Edwina and the business end of the bottle, but never mind that. He went down to Spanishtown the next night — and it had changed, squeezed and reduced by the grand new buildings going up in the wake of the earthquake — and asked around a few of the joints he knew. It was all underground, speakeasies, triple knock and codeword—“Clara Bow”; “Big Bill”; “Dixieland”—but anybody who knew anybody or anything could get in and no questions asked. He found her at the third place he tried, a cramped downstairs space so full of people, noise and smoke there was no room to breathe, let alone enjoy a drink of whatever shit they were selling behind the bar. O’Kane sampled a few anyway, leaning into the bar as if it were a bed, a pillow, Giovannella with her dress up and a smile on her face, and when he turned his head, there she was.

She was sitting alone at a table in the middle of the room, people dancing and jostling all around her and nobody even giving her a second glance. She had a compressed, angry look about her, bad luck and worse news all the way round, and she was clutching a cigarette as if she were trying to strangle it. Smiling Eddie O‘Kane, pimp to the McCormicks, moved in. “Hi,” he said. “Mind if I join you?”

She glared at him.

He sat down.

“Buy you a drink?” he offered. The music was furious, clarinet, piano, drums, people doing the shimmy and the Charleston, the very table shaking with the thump and roar of it.

Her mouth softened. She’d been holding it very tightly, as if it might fall off her face and shatter if she wasn’t the carefulest girl in the world. She couldn’t have been more than twenty. “Sure,” she said, and her lips fell back in what she probably thought was a smile.

They agreed on a price — it was dicey, real dicey, because all the way up the stairs, out the door and into the big blue-black Pierce Arrow limousine she thought she was going to bed with him, Eddie O‘Kane — but when he explained the situation to her somewhere between the Salt Pond and Hot Springs Road, she began to balk, especially seeing the car and its appurtenances and Roscoe up front in his monkey cap, and he had to double the price to keep her quiet. Twelve-thirty in the morning, the night watchman, the iron gates, the house like a chunk of the night cut away with a serrated knife and blackened in India ink. Lights on upstairs, though, and Nick and Pat waiting on tenterhooks. “He won’t hurt me, will he?”

“No,” O‘Kane assured her, “no, he won’t hurt you. Besides, we’ve got him restrained.”

Her voice, so thin and frightened it sickened him and he almost backed out of the thing right there: “Restrained?”

O‘Kane didn’t know what to say. He led her up the big staircase and opened up the barred door himself, her thin cold elbow quailing under the grip of his hand, and she was trying to be brave, trying to get through with this, he could see that. “Jesus,” she whispered, turning her head to get a look at the bars as they passed through the doorway, and O’Kane held her there a minute while he turned the three separate keys in the three separate locks. And then, Nick and Pat gouging her with their eyes, she hesitated at the bedroom door and the thought of what lay behind it, the bed bolted to the floor and the barred windows and Mr. Stanley Robert McCormick, Reaper heir, lying there on his back, wrists and ankles bound up tight — double tight — to the bedposts. “You better give me the money,” she said, her eyes shrunk to pinpricks, the mouth a misshapen hole in the middle of her face. “Give it to me now.”

Nick and Pat both watched, silent presences in a darkened room, no light but what the stars gave and the moon — it was their duty, after all — but O‘Kane couldn’t do it. He should have been exhilarated, should have felt good, should have rejoiced in Mr. McCormick’s happiness, the need and thrill and privilege of every man — sex, just sex — but instead he went out onto the upper patio and hung his head over the drain in the corner and threw up everything he’d drunk that night, and the taste of it, full of bile, was bitter and lingering, a sharp unallayable sting of the lips and tongue that was like the very kiss of despair.

Kempf was perplexed. “I can’t understand it,” he said, getting up from behind his desk and pacing up and down while O‘Kane sat in a chair so comfortless and hard it might have been designed for the witness stand at the county courthouse. “We were making such progress, and now nothing: Pffft! I throw the usual bugbears up to him — his parents, his wife, the experience in Paris — and he won’t respond at all. Even free association’s a dud. I say ’boxer dog’ and he just stares at me. All he’ll say is ‘one slit, one slit,’ over and over again.” He knotted his hands behind his back, shaking his head, dapper and narrow-shouldered, with the bleeding eyes and precise hair of a screen idol. “I thought we were past all that.”

O‘Kane didn’t respond. The doctor was talking to himself, really, as he did nearly every afternoon in the wake of his session with Mr. McCormick; O’Kane was merely a sounding board. Holding himself very rigid, hardly breathing, he let his eyes crawl round the room. The decor wasn’t substantially different from that of the Hamilton and Brush eras, but for the fact that Hamilton’s neurological molds and Brush’s Hawaiian scenes were gone, replaced by a single massive reproduction of a painting that was affixed to the wall of Dr. Freud’s office in Vienna, or so Kempf claimed. “Le Leçon clinique du Dr. Charcot,” a plaque beside it read, and it showed a white-haired doctor — presumably Charcot — supporting a young hysteric by the waist while twenty bearded students looked on and her nurse stood ready to catch her should she fall. The woman was wearing a low-cut blouse that had slipped down over her shoulders, and though she was standing, she appeared to be unconscious — either that or faking it. The significance of it all escaped O‘Kane, except that the woman was a real looker and Charcot obviously had her in his power. So what was the attraction for Kempf — wish fulfillment?

“That stingaree was a damned unfortunate thing,” Kempf mused, still pacing, “rotten luck and no two ways about it. But I thought Stanley was getting over it, I really did, and now he’s blocked again, no more sensible or responsive than a stone. Something has set him off, no doubt about it — you don’t know anything that might be troubling him, do you, Eddie?”

O‘Kane, rigid, just his lips: “No, nothing at all.”

“It’s funny,” Kempf said, pausing now in front of O‘Kane’s chair. He was looking down at him, furrowing his brow, squinting those rounded eyes till they were no more than slits. “Really odd. Nothing happened last night, did it? While you were here — or after? That you might’ve gotten wind of, that is?”

“No, nothing.”

The doctor made a feint with his hand, as if he were trying to snatch something out of the air. “I just thought that Nick or Pat might‘ve—”

“No. Uh-uh. They didn’t say a word.”

“Well, something has happened. I’m sure of it. He won’t say, but I’ll get it out of him. You watch me. I just hope it won’t…”

“What?”

Kempf let out a sigh. “I just hope it won’t compromise the progress we’ve made with his wife and the others — and you know, I’ve already hired on the new nurse. Mrs. Gleason. She worked under me at Saint Elizabeth’s.”

And now O‘Kane was stammering, just like Mr. McCormick: “I don’t think — well, it’s not my place to say, but is it really advisable to bring a woman in — I mean, at this juncture? When he seems so disturbed? Over the stingaree, I mean.”