Holy Terror Read online

  ‘This is Sidney Randall,’ said Conor. ‘The greatest hypnotist in the history of – well, hypnotism.’

  ‘Well, it takes all sorts,’ said Sebastian. He led them through to the living room, where twenty or thirty guests were gathered, some of them men and some of them men, even though they wore short skirts and high-heeled shoes and flapping false eyelashes. Calexico was playing on the CD, far-out Tex-Mex steel guitar music with marimba and trumpets. Ric was standing in the far corner, wearing a floppy white see-through shirt, tight black pants and brown Enrol Flynn boots. He had his arm around a pale, white-haired creature with enormous brown eyes and a short white muslin dress, like a stick insect that had never seen the light of day.

  ‘Eleanor!’ crowed Ric. ‘I can’t believe it!’ He and Eleanor kissed and embraced, while the stick insect clung to its elbows and let out testy, impatient sighs and rolled its eyes up into its head.

  ‘So you’re a hypnotist?’ Sebastian asked Sidney. ‘I don’t think I ever met a hypnotist before.’

  ‘I used to be a hypnotherapist,’ Sidney told him. ‘I don’t practice any more.’

  ‘Well, that’s such a pity! I have this insatiable craving for Reece’s Pieces, but they play havoc with my figure.’

  ‘Do you live here?’

  Sebastian looked perplexed. ‘Yes. I live here, yes.’

  ‘Do you work in interior design?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is today Thursday?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is it five forty-five p.m.?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you wish to stop eating Reece’s Pieces?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If I could put you into a trance to stop you from eating Reece’s Pieces, would you want me to do it?’

  Sebastian stared at Sidney and said nothing. Sidney looked across at Conor and gave him a tired, amused smile.

  ‘This is what we call the “yes set”,’ he said. ‘Your subject has a comparatively short span of attention so he goes into a trance simply to escape the boredom of giving the same answer to the same obvious questions.’

  ‘He’s in a trance? Already? Just like that?’

  ‘I told you: it’s easy. He’s a very receptive subject and he wants something from me.’

  He turned back to Sebastian and said, ‘You hate Reece’s Pieces. Next time you eat one of them, you will feel sick to your stomach. You will awake when I count to five and you will forget everything that happened. One – two – three – four – five—’

  Sebastian looked around him and shivered. ‘Do you know something? I had the strangest feeling, like a goose just walked over my grave.’

  ‘Maybe you shouldn’t have the air conditioning so cold,’ said Conor.

  ‘You’re right. Maybe I shouldn’t. Maybe a sheen of sweat would make me look more Afro-American. What do you think?’

  The party broke up around eight. There were giggles and screams and kisses and endless goodbyes, but at last there was silence and Conor and Sidney and Eleanor were able to go to bed. Conor shared the main guest room with Sidney, and Eleanor was put up in the small, prettily wallpapered ‘writing room’ which contained an antique desk and a single bed where either Sebastian or Ric could sleep if they had a tiff.

  After she had showered, Eleanor put on a long, flowing creation in shimmering turquoise which Sebastian had lent her as a nightdress. She came to Conor’s door and knocked. ‘I just wanted to tell you that the bathroom’s free.’

  ‘Thanks, Eleanor.’

  ‘There’s something else … I wanted to say that you shouldn’t blame yourself for everything that’s happened.’

  ‘Well, that’s generous of you to say so, but if I hadn’t come to you for help—’

  Eleanor firmly shook her head. ‘You didn’t oblige us to help, Conor. In my experience there are some powerful currents running through life, and sometimes we get swept along with them, whether we want to or not.’

  Sidney was sitting on the end of the bed, incongruously dressed in a Dolce e Gabbana T-shirt and a pair of silk shorts that looked as if they had once belonged to Muhammad Ali. ‘I think you’re right, Bipsy. Whatever this current is that we’re caught up in now, it was strong enough to bring you back to me, after all these years, wasn’t it?’

  Sidney and Eleanor were looking into each other’s eyes so meltingly that Conor had to change the subject. ‘That was incredible, Sidney – the way you hypnotized those taxi drivers so that they would never remember that they picked us up.’

  ‘Nonsense. That was nothing but a party trick. Easier than the way you opened that wine bottle. I’ll teach you to do it yourself.’

  ‘Thanks. But what I have to do next is talk to some of the people whose safe deposit boxes have been rifled. I need to talk to their lawyers, too. I want to know exactly what I’m supposed to have said to them, and how I’ve managed to double the money they’re prepared to pay to get their property back. There’s no case that doesn’t have clues.’

  ‘So what’s your plan of action?’ asked Sidney.

  ‘Well… I know for sure that one of those stolen safe deposit boxes belonged to Davina Gambit, who used to be married to Jack Gambit, the property tycoon. I’m going to see if I can fix up a meeting with her and her lawyer.’

  ‘Don’t you think that’s kind of chancy?’ asked Eleanor. ‘They may call the police.’

  ‘I don’t think they will. This is the beauty of this particular heist. Nobody wants the cops to know what was taken … or the IRS, or US Customs, or the Justice Department. Besides, I’m going to arrange it so that we can’t be followed. I’m going to arrange it in a location where Slyman and his cronies won’t dare to whack us.’

  ‘I still don’t see exactly what you have in mind.’

  ‘Listen … I don’t think there’s any question that Davina Gambit’s lawyer will have been approached by Hypnos and Hetti offering to sell her private papers back. The Gambit divorce settlement was like the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire. The alimony payments ran into tens of millions, and Jack Gambit was really sore about it. But supposing for instance that Davina Gambit has been hiding evidence that she committed adultery, or that she shifted some of Jack Gambit’s funds out of the country without him knowing, or who knows what else? Jack Gambit’s worth so much he doesn’t know how much he’s worth, but if he finds out that somebody’s been ripping him off … well, let’s put it this way: he may be rich but he’s not forgiving. That’s how he got rich in the first place.’

  ‘So how is this going to lead us to Hypnos and Hetti?’

  ‘I don’t know. But that’s what detective work is all about. Gathering bits and pieces, putting them together. Most of the time, even your star witnesses don’t realize the value of their own evidence.’

  The phone rang. It was Lacey, calling from the payphone in back of Gristede’s market on Third Avenue. ‘Conor? Are you OK? I’m going to have to make this quick.’

  ‘Fine, I’m fine. How about you?’

  ‘I miss you so much. The place seems so empty.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I think we’re making progress. I’ve got some good people here to help me.’

  ‘All I’m going to say is – watch the news tonight. Somebody did it again.’

  ‘What?’

  At that moment, she put down the phone. She must have been worried that somebody was watching her. Conor looked at the receiver for a moment as if he expected it to speak to him, and then hung up.

  ‘That was Lacey. She says there’s something on the news.’

  The top headline of the day was that FBI agents had raided a house on East 86th Street on a tip-off that a suspected terrorist, Dennis Evelyn Branch, had been sighted in New York. Then there was the President’s ‘emphatic’ denial that he had slept with a Cuban transvestite called Jola Ramada.

  ‘At the midtown law offices of Goldman, Farbar and Scheier today, police were trying to solve the mystery of how more than a hundred confidential files have disappeared
. According to informed sources, all of these files relate to the personal lives and business dealings of some of their most eminent clients.

  ‘The files were discovered to be missing from thirty-fourth-floor offices in the GE Building shortly after noon. No intruders were seen, no force was used, and video surveillance tapes are said to show that several trusted members of Goldman, Farbar and Scheier’s staff seem to have taken the files out of the firm’s security room and handed them voluntarily to a third party. All however strongly deny that they can remember doing it.’

  A detective with a shock of white hair and a pastrami-colored face appeared on the screen. ‘So far we’re keeping a very open mind. Either we’re dealing with a conspiracy here, amongst more than a dozen previously loyal staff; or else it’s a case of mass memory loss. Either way, it’s straight out of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not.’

  Eleanor said, ‘Surely your Lieutenant Slyman is going to put two and two together after this.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Conor. ‘There’s no hard evidence that it was Hypnos and Hetti, and I think that Drew Slyman only believes what he wants to believe – and more than that, he wants to see me dead, or at the very least indicted.’

  ‘Hypnotically speaking, what Hypnos and Hetti are doing is very interesting,’ Sidney remarked, in that flat, world-of-his-own voice. ‘It’s not so uncommon, either. There was a whole rash of hypnotic robberies in South-East Asia a couple of years ago. I’ve written a chapter about them in my book’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘Much the same as what’s been happening here. Same kind of hypnotic induction – distracting people – confusing them – putting them into a trance. For instance there was one case in September 1966, where two men came up to a grandmother in a bus station in Singapore. They started chatting to her, nice and relaxed. Then they showed her a piece of foil with Arabic characters on it. They placed the foil in her hand – and gently touched her hand while they did it. Then they asked her to say a prayer and to perform some special ceremony by cutting a lemon with a razor blade.

  ‘I mean, it was all nonsense, but that was the point. It was deliberately intended to confuse her. The woman says she can’t remember what happened next… but what did happen was that she took off her gold bracelet and her necklace and handed them over. The two men disappeared with her jewelry and the woman didn’t fully come out of her trance until four days later.’

  ‘Four days?’ asked Eleanor, in disbelief.

  ‘There was nobody around to snap her out of it. I know that doctors don’t believe it, but trances can continue for a week. The evidence is indisputable. There was a sixty-year-old woman from west Java who had a conversation with three men on a bus. She gave them all the jewelry she was wearing. Then she took them back to her house and gave them all the rest of her jewelry and cash. She didn’t regain consciousness for almost ninety-six hours.

  ‘Then – in 1991, in Italy – there was a gang of two men and one woman who stole over nine hundred and fifty thousand dollars. They hypnotized their victims by repeating the letter “I” to them, over and over, in a special way … the same way that I hypnotized your friend Sebastian by using a “yes set”. This gang went up and down the main street of Novara, going from store to store and hypnotizing the storekeepers into handing over all of their money. The trance was very light and it didn’t last long, no more than a couple of hours, but that was all the time they needed.

  ‘There were plenty of eyewitness descriptions of them, and it didn’t take long before the Italian police tracked them down to a hotel in Turin, and arrested them. They had Pakistani passports even though they obviously weren’t Pakistani. The police had everything they needed for a prosecution – forensic evidence, stolen goods, positive identifications. But the very next day they released all three of them. Nobody could explain why, except to say that it was some kind of “administrative error”. Nobody could remember what the error was, or who had made it. But Turin’s chief prosecutor Flavia Nasi is on record as saying that they probably hypnotized the police into letting them go.’

  Conor said, ‘Before I met Ramon Perez and Magda Slanic – and before I met you – I wouldn’t have believed it.’

  ‘Well, no. Most people don’t. They don’t want to think that somebody could take control of them, as easy as holding their hand. But heck, it’s true. You’ve seen it for yourself. And you can do it, too.’

  He paused, and then said, ‘By the way … from the descriptions issued by the Turin police, two of the members of that gang were Hypnos and Hetti. Latin-looking man, tall dark woman. The third man was a bald-headed character whose body was found two or three months later floating in the River Po.’

  ‘Sobering thought,’ said Conor. ‘Maybe we’d better sleep on it.’

  ‘I’m not sure that I can sleep,’ said Eleanor.

  Sidney said, ‘I could help you to sleep, Bipsy. No problems.’

  ‘Oh, come on, now, Sidney. I won’t have you putting me into one of your trances. I’m not in the mood.’

  ‘That’s all right. Would you prefer to sleep now or in a few minutes?’

  ‘I think I’d prefer to go to bed first.’

  ‘Would you like to sleep sitting up or lying down?’

  ‘I don’t really care, so long as I sleep.’

  ‘Do you want to go into a deep sleep or just a light sleep?’

  ‘A light sleep, Sidney. A light sleep will do.’

  ‘When you fall asleep, your hands will begin to feel as if they don’t weigh anything, as if they’re floating in the air. Which hand do you think will begin to feel light first? Or maybe they’ll both feel light at the same time?’

  ‘I really don’t know, Sidney.’

  ‘You don’t have to fall asleep as a person but you can fall asleep as a body.’

  ‘So what does that mean?’

  ‘It means you have a choice … you can fall asleep in any way you like

  ‘And

  ‘You will.’

  Eleanor was still sitting up but her eyes were closed and she was breathing deep and slow. Sidney turned to Conor and said, ‘You couldn’t carry her to bed, could you? There was a time when I could do it. But not now.’

  Conor lifted Eleanor out of the chair. She seemed to weigh almost nothing, all skin and bones, like a starved bird. But she was still beautiful, in her way, and for the first time in his life Conor realized how age never erases beauty, but simply shows us what it was made of.

  As he carried her to the door, Sidney kissed his fingertips and touched them to her forehead, and there were tears twinkling in his eyes.

  Not long after midnight, they heard Sebastian gagging and retching in the bathroom.

  ‘Oh, God,’ he was moaning. ‘Never again. Never!’

  Sidney listened for a while and then turned over in bed. ‘Reece’s Pieces,’ he said, in satisfaction. ‘I said that I could cure him.’

  Chapter 13

  On their way uptown, Sidney said to Conor, ‘I want you to try a little exercise now. When you give the taxi driver his money, stroke the inside of his wrist with your middle finger, and say, “Haven’t you taken me here before?”

  ‘Look into his eyes, but focus on a point about three feet behind him. Then say, “You must be very comfortable in this taxi. Very relaxed. You’re so comfortable you don’t care about anything. You don’t even care that I’m not going to give you a tip.”’

  ‘I’m not sure I can do that,’ said Conor.

  ‘You don’t know unless you try.’

  The taxi pulled up outside the side entrance to Temple Emanu-El, the vast Turkish-Italianate synagogue on East 65th Street. ‘This is it, gents,’ said the taxi driver, in a voice thick with phlegm. He was a squat little hunchbacked man with heavy-rimmed glasses and a prickly gray mustache. His license said his name was Chaim Reeven Weintrop. Conor reached forward and handed him a $10 bill. As he did so, he lightly touched the man’s wrist and the palm of his hand.

  ‘
Haven’t you taken me here before?’

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘I said, haven’t you taken me here before?’

  ‘Maybe I did. Who knows?’

  ‘You look very comfortable in this taxi. Very comfortable.’

  ‘Comfortable? Are you kidding me? The seat adjuster’s broke. I have to sit up straight all the time just to see over the dash. You know what a coccyx is? Yeah? Well, you wouldn’t want to trade coccyxes with me, I can tell you.’

  ‘So you’re not comfortable?’

  ‘Am I hell comfortable. I’m driving around here like a frog sitting down the bottom of a well.’

  Conor turned to Sidney for help; but all Sidney could so was smile and shake his head and say, ‘Don’t forget to tip him.’

  They climbed out of the taxi into the roasting mid-morning heat. ‘So what did I do wrong?’ asked Conor.

  ‘You lost confidence in what you were doing because he didn’t immediately give you the answers you were looking for. You let him steer the conversation whereas it should have been you who was doing the steering. You should have surprised him, distracted him. It doesn’t matter how.’

  They climbed the steps between the synagogue’s limestone pillars. ‘So what would you have done?’ asked Conor.

  ‘Well … since he wasn’t comfortable in his taxi, I would have put him in mind of someplace where he usually was comfortable. I would have said, “I bet you can’t wait to go home … I bet you have a comfortable chair at home where you can ease your back … how would you like to go home sooner and sit in that comfortable chair?”’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve got what it takes to do that kind of thing just yet.’

  ‘It takes confidence, Conor, and you’ve got plenty of that. All you have to do is keep on practicing, every opportunity you get.’

  They walked into the huge, vaulted synagogue. There was a rustling hush in here, as tourists wandered around, their sneakers squeaking on the floors, and men knelt and mumbled prayers, their heads covered with talysim. The light was dim, and diffused, with dust twinkling in the air, and the limestone walls gave the synagogue a coolness and a feeling of spiritual refreshment. Even though Conor was a Catholic he felt that God was here. Temple Emanu-El was the largest Reform Jewish place of worship in North America. Two and a half thousand people could come here to pray, although Conor and Sidney had come here looking for another kind of salvation.