On, Off. Colleen McCullough

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СКАЧАТЬ had reserved for their own use—no need for locks, there were no thieves here. Then they started the business of their day.

      Cecil could hear his babies calling for him; he went straight to their door and opened it, speaking to them in a tender voice.

      “Hi, guys! How ya doin’ huh? Everybody sleep well?”

      The door was still hissing shut behind Cecil when Otis saw to the least palatable job of his day, emptying the refrigerator. His wheeled plastic bin smelled clean and fresh; he put a new liner in it and pushed it over to the refrigerator door, a heavy steel one with a snap lock handle. What happened next was a blur: something streaking past him as he opened the door, screaming like a banshee.

      “Cecil, get out here!” he yelled. “Jimmy’s still alive, we gotta catch him!”

      The big monkey was in a state of gibbering frenzy, but after Cecil talked to him a little while and then held out his arms, Jimmy bolted into them, shivering, his shrieks dying to whimpers.

      “Jesus, Otis,” Cecil said, cradling the beast like a father his child, “how did Dr. Chandra miss that? The poor little guy’s been locked in the fridge all night. There there, Jimmy, there there! Daddy’s here, little man, you’re okay now!”

      Both men were shocked and Otis’s heart had a jelly roll beat to it, but no real harm was done. Dr. Chandra would be pleased as punch that Jimmy hadn’t died after all, thought Otis, returning to the refrigerator. Jimmy was worth a hundred big ones.

      Even two cleanliness fanatics like Cecil and Otis couldn’t banish the smell of death from the refrigerator, scrub it with disinfectant and deodorant though they did. The stench, not of decay but of something subtler, surrounded Otis as he flipped the light switch to reveal the chamber’s stainless steel interior. Oh, man, Jimmy had made a regular mess of it! Torn paper bags were strewn everywhere, headless rat carcasses, stiff white hair, obscenely naked tails. And, behind the dozen rat bags, a couple of much bigger bags, torn up too. Sighing, Otis went to fetch more bags from a cupboard and began to make order out of Jimmy’s chaos. The dead rats properly bagged again, he reached in to the chilly chamber and pulled the first of the two big bags forward. It had been rent from top to bottom, most of its contents on full display.

      Otis opened his mouth and screamed as shrilly as Jimmy, was still screaming when Cecil erupted out of the monkey room. Then, not seeming to notice Cecil, he turned and ran out of animal care, down the halls, into the foyer, out the entrance, legs opening and closing in a punishing run down Eleventh Street to his home on the second floor of a shabby three-family house.

      

      Celeste Green was having coffee with her nephew when Otis burst into the kitchen; they leaped to their feet, Wesley’s passionate diatribe about Whitey’s crimes forgotten. Celeste went for the smelling salts while Wesley put Otis on a chair. Back with the bottle, she pushed Wesley roughly out of her way.

      “You know your trouble, Wes? You always in the way! You didn’t get in Otis’s way all the time, he wouldn’t call you a good for nothin’ kid! Otis! Otis, honey, wake up!”

      Otis’s skin had faded from a warm deep brown to a pasty grey that didn’t improve when the ammoniac vapors were jammed under his nose, but he came around, jerked his head away.

      “What is it? What’s the matter?” Wesley was asking.

      “A piece of woman,” Otis whispered.

      “A what?” sharply from Celeste.

      “A piece of woman. In the fridge at work with the dead rats. A pussy and a belly.” He began to shake.

      Wesley asked the only question that mattered to him. “Was she a white woman or a black woman?”

      “Don’t bother him with that, Wes!” Celeste cried.

      “Not black,” Otis said, hands going to his chest. “But not white neither. Colored.” He added, slipped forward off the chair and fell to the floor.

      “Call an ambulance! Go on, Wes, call an ambulance!”

      Which came very quickly, due to two fortunate facts: one, that the Holloman Hospital was just around the corner, and the other, that business was slack this hour of morning. Still very much alive, Otis Green was put into the ambulance with his wife crouched beside him; the apartment was left to Wesley le Clerc.

      He didn’t linger there, not with news like this. Mohammed el Nesr lived at 18 Fifteenth Street, and he had to be told. A piece of woman! Not black, but not white either. Colored. That meant black to Wesley, as it did to all the members of Mohammed’s Black Brigade. Time that Whitey was called to account for two hundred years and more of oppression, of treating black people as second rate citizens, even as beasts without immortal souls.

      When he’d gotten out of prison in Louisiana he’d decided to come north to Tante Celeste in Connecticut. He yearned to make a reputation as a black man who mattered, and that was easier to do in a part of the nation less prone than Louisiana to throw blacks in jail if they looked sideways. Connecticut was where Mohammed el Nesr and his Black Brigade hung out. Mohammed was educated, had a doctorate in law—he knew his rights! But for reasons that Wesley saw every day when he looked in a mirror, Mohammed el Nesr had dismissed Wesley as worthless. A plantation black, a nobody nothing. Which hadn’t dampened Wesley’s ardor; he intended to prove himself in Holloman, Connecticut! So much so that one day Mohammed would look up to him, Wesley le Clerc, plantation black.

      Cecil Potter had soon discovered what sent Otis screeching out of animal care, but he wasn’t a panicky man. He did not touch the contents of the refrigerator. Nor did he call the cops. He picked up the phone and dialed the Prof’s extension, knowing full well that the Prof would be in his office, even at this hour. His only peace happened early in the mornings, he always said. But not, thought Cecil, this morning.

      

      “It’s a sad case,” said Lieutenant Carmine Delmonico to his uniformed colleague and nominal superior, Captain Danny Marciano. “With no other relatives we can find, the kids will have to go into the system.”

      “You’re sure he did it?”

      “Positive. The poor guy tried to make it look like some stranger busted in, but there’s his wife and her lover in the bed and her lover’s cut up some but she’s mincemeat—he did it. My bet is that he’ll confess later today voluntarily.”

      Marciano rose to his feet. “Then let’s get some breakfast.”

      His phone rang; Marciano wriggled his brows at Carmine and picked up. Within three seconds the police captain had stiffened, lost all contentment. He mouthed “Silvestri!” at Carmine and commenced a series of nods. “Sure, John. I’ll start Carmine now and get Patsy there as soon as I can.”

      “Trouble?”

      “Big trouble. Silvestri’s just had a call from the head of the Hug—Professor Robert Smith. They’ve found part of a female body in their dead animal refrigerator.”

      “Christ!”

      Sergeants Corey Marshall and Abe Goldberg were breakfasting at Malvolio’s, the diner the cops used because it was next door to headquarters in the County Services building on Cedar Street. Carmine didn’t bother walking in; he rapped his knuckles on the glass of the booth where Abe and Corey were washing СКАЧАТЬ