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37

FLOOD AND I woke up together in the morning. My left hand was buried somewhere beneath her so I couldn’t see my watch, but the light outside told me it was well past sunup. Flood stirred against my shoulder, mumbled something I couldn’t understand. I bounced her gently with my shoulder until she came around. She opened her eyes and blinked at me. “You okay, Burke?”

“Yeah, and I’m ready to go to work. Let me just get cleaned up a bit, and I want to start on Goldor’s file.”

She rolled over onto her side so I could get off the mat, then lay back and closed her eyes. I watched her practice her breathing for a minute before I walked into her tiny shower. My face in the mirror startled me-it was healing but the lower jaw was all bluish-yellow-it would probably stay discolored for another few days. I used some of Flood’s mouthwash and then examined my teeth in the mirror-the stitches were holding.

When I went back inside, Flood was lying on her back, her legs in the air, toes pointed up. She was doing some kind of exercise where she split them until they were nearly parallel to the ground, then brought them together again, lowered them almost to the floor but didn’t touch it-she held them for a few seconds like that, then broke them again and started over. Her movements were so smooth they looked effortless, but they couldn’t have been. I waited until her legs were straight up again and grabbed an ankle in each hand. “You have thick ankles, Flood,” and moved my hands away from center to spread her legs again. They didn’t budge-I increased the pressure and watched the long muscles flex on the inside of her thighs. I could feel the strain in my forearms, and finally her legs started to yield. I pushed harder and suddenly her legs shot open and I fell forward right on top of her. But before I could land she whipped her legs back, doubled up her knees, and caught me on the pads of her feet. And then she tossed my entire bulk into the air like a seal playing with a ball. She caught me on the way down, giggling like a little kid. The second time I was headed down I flipped my shoulders back, landed on my feet, grabbed her ankles again and pulled her upside down and erect, facing away from me. But before I could do some giggling of my own she slammed into my ankles with the heels of her hands and I toppled over with her underneath. This time her damn laughing fit made it feel like I was lying on top of some rocky Jello. I rolled off, reached for a cigarette-she was still chuckling.

“Flood, you’re a clown, you know that?”

“What did I do?”

“Never fucking mind,” I told her, and tried to keep from laughing myself. She got up without using her hands and floated off to the shower. I got dressed, lit up another smoke, and took out the Goldor file. It was everything Pablo had promised: full name (Jonas James Goldor), date of birth (February 4, 1937, in Cape May, New Jersey), height (5’ 11”), weight (175), rap sheet (two arrests for assault, the last one in 1961, no convictions), military service (none), marital status (never married), mother’s maiden name, father’s occupation at time of Goldor’s birth (note that both parents were deceased. Too bad-I hated to have anything in common with him). A long list of corporations and partnerships in which he held an interest. Location of two known safe-deposit boxes in commercial banks. Copies of driver’s license, ownership registration certificates for four cars (a Rolls, a Porsche 928, a Land Rover, and a 500-series Benz sedan), copies of some cancelled checks written on two of his corporations, a copy of his 1979 IRS return (showing a gross income of $440,775 with a net of $228,000, all from a series of subChapter -S corporations, a pass-through tax trick so that he could be the sole stockholder and not be taxed corporately and individually). Also a floor plan of his house in Scarsdale, complete with all the switch-box locations for the electronic protection system. A note that said Goldor kept nobody but himself on the premises at night, but that he had a silent alarm setup connected directly to the local police station-and another note that said they didn’t know all the locations for the switches that would set it off. They even had a copy of a New York City carry-pistol license. Other random notes: Goldor was a health-food freak, gobbled tons of vitamins and supplements every day. Worked out regularly, had a complete gym with Nautilus equipment and a sauna in his basement. He had all his clothes custom-made, even his shoes. A gun collector, but not of modern weapons.

And that was it, except for some blue onionskin pages typed with an ancient IBM Model-B using italic type. A psychiatric profile, obviously prepared by Pablo at long distance from the subject. I scanned it once quickly, then settled down to read:

“Goldor from relatively wealthy family, sent to British boarding school from age nine to fifteen, when he returned to the States. Return probably occasioned by death of his father. Managed a variety of his father’s holdings, gradually at first, then took exclusive control just prior to death of his mother when he was about twenty. Obsession with hairlessness probably traceable to preoccupation with bodybuilding (note: body builders routinely shave all body hair so as to better display muscular development and vascularity). No validatable information concerning early development. Runs a variety of sex-oriented businesses concurrently with more legitimate enterprises. Projects image of power and dominance in business relationships.”

Then came these underlined words: “What follows is, at best, an educated guess. This represents theorization absent sufficient data and should be so weighted.” Then a lot of mumbo-jumbo about “homosexual ideation,” “situational impotence,” “unresolved Oedipal conflicts,” “sadistic obsessions which the subject believes he tightly controls,” “suspect enuresis, fire-setting, cruelty to small animals, classic triad,” “possibility of iatrogenic therapy prepuberty,” “grandiosity bordering on belief in omnipotence,” “utterly self-contained,” and “functioning psychopath.”

I was still reading when Flood came back wearing one of her robes, this time a bottle-green job with wide black piping on the sleeves. I handed her the stuff without a word and sat and smoked while she read through it. It didn’t take her long. “You know what this stuff means?” she asked.

“Yes-remember, a lot of it is just guessing.”

“I understand some of it-enuresis is bed-wetting, right? But what’s this classic-triad stuff? And what does iatrogenic mean? And-”

“Hold up a minute, Flood. The classic triad is the kid who wets the bed, sets fires, and tortures small animals, especially his own pets. If all three things are going on with the same kid the odds are in favor of him pulling a homicide or two before he grows up. And iatrogenic means a therapeutic treatment that makes a disease worse, like pouring salt on a wound. The whole thing boils down to Goldor being a confirmed degenerate, someone who can never get better no matter what you do with him-or to him.”

“Is this just words, or does it help us?”

“I don’t know. Most of the time it would mean a lot of nothing, but the people who put this together know what they’re doing.”

“They say he’s a functioning psychopath. I thought all psychos were just looney-you know, off the wall.”

“You know what a psychopath is, Flood?”

“I guess not.”

I got to my feet, walked over a few paces and turned to face her. “Imagine you got thrown into a totally dark room, okay? You can’t see a thing. What’s the first thing you do?”

She didn’t hesitate. “Reach out my hands to see where the walls are.”

I reached out my own hands. “Right, you want to find the limits of your environment. Less fancy-you want to know where you stand, what’s going on. That’s why some kids act so bad when you put them in institutions… they don’t know the limits and they don’t know how to ask, so they act up so people will step in and show them. But a psychopath, you throw him in a blacked-out room and you know what he does?”

As Flood looked up at me I wrapped my arms around my biceps like I was giving myself a hug. “A psychopath has everything he needs right inside himself. He doesn’t need an environment, doesn’t have to work with it. He doesn’t see people, he sees things. And he could move these things around or throw them out and break them the same way you might rearrange furniture.”

Flood looked at me, her face calm and composed. “A whole lot of words.”

She had me there. I got my things together, and then Flood and I got out her wok and burned up the whole Goldor file. Pablo wouldn’t want it back and I wasn’t about to be walking around with it either. We sat together and watched the flames eat Goldor’s dossier. No answers rose with the smoke.

I told Flood that I had to make some arrangements before we could go and visit Goldor, that it might be that very night, and she was to stay home and wait for my call. She nodded absently-her thoughts were somewhere else. She walked me to the door, stood on her toes to kiss me goodbye.


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