Second Horseman Out of Eden

The owner of the voice of sweet reason suddenly saw spots swimming in front of his eyes, the result of spiking blood pressure. Suddenly I felt as if I were burning, and then all reason was swept away as rage mixed with loathing and horror and exploded. I screamed something unintelligible and jumped on the man in the tan parka, knocking him backward onto a bed of snow-smothered pachysandra. I ripped off my gloves, but couldn't manage to get my hands around his throat because of his parka. Blind with rage, nauseous with a sick sense of something I couldn't quite identify, I rained blow after blow on his face, and didn't stop even when blood started flowing freely from his nose and mouth. I couldn't stop; while one part of my mind clearly recognized that the man I was sitting on was flesh and blood, another part of me felt as if I were punching a phantom, something unspeakably evil that had plagued the heart and soul of humankind from the time we had learned to walk upright. We had split the atom and soared in space, but all the knowledge we had gained had not been sufficient to slay this evil; the evil embodied in the man I was beating was immune to knowledge, for it spurned reason. I hated this evil and knew that it was too deeply ingrained in the man ever to be expunged. Even as my fists shredded the flesh of the man's face, I somehow felt that I was attacking superstition and stupidity, the things that had broken men's and women's bones in the Inquisition, the things that had caused the deaths of countless men, women, and children in countless wars.

I was a tad worked up.

'You shit-for-brains, rotten, fucking son-of-a-bitch!' I screamed as I grabbed the man's hair and shook his head back and forth. 'You tell me where Kenecky and the girl are, or I'll kill you! I'll kill you!'

And then Garth's powerful fingers grabbed the back of my parka, pulled me off the man even as I continued to punch and kick at the air. He lifted me up and away, then set me down on my feet-but he kept a firm grip on my coat as I again lunged for the man. The bloody mouth of the twin in tan hung open, and he seemed to be in a state of shock.

'He can't tell you anything while you're punching out his lights, Mongo,' my brother said dryly, sounding slightly bemused. 'Once you'd abandoned your perfectly rational and perfectly useless approach to these jokers, you should have let me take care of business. You just get too emotional.'

'Let me go, Garth!'

'Calm down.'

'I am calm!'

'Get calmer.'

I stopped struggling, then started with surprise when the man I had been beating on, his face smeared with blood, abruptly sat up and started to shout-at least at first I thought he was shouting, but then realized that he had gone into a kind of trance and, like Craig Valley, was 'speaking in tongues.' His eyes were wide and out of focus, his head thrown back as he howled at the sky.

Then the second twin, apparently caught up in his brother's ecstasy, started. The man in the blue parka grasped his brother's hand as he screamed, swayed, shouted, and stamped his feet. A chill that had nothing to do with the freezing cold went through me.

Then, still holding hands and screaming, moving in unison as if through some secret means of communication, the two men abruptly leaped to their feet and rushed between Garth and me.

'Hey, what the hell?!' I shouted, grabbing for the man in the tan parka as he hit me in the chest with his elbow and rushed past.

Garth lunged and grabbed for the other twin, and ended up holding an empty blue parka.

Stunned and horrified, Garth and I turned as one, cried out as the twins, still holding hands and shrieking their language which no one could understand, sprinted the short distance across the rooftop garden, jumped up on the parapet, and without hesitation hurled themselves out into the snow-swept darkness that echoed with the bells and music of Christmas Eve.

8

'You two are in a lot of trouble,' Detective Lieutenant Malachy McCloskey said as he finally-ten minutes after we had been ushered into his office-looked up from the paperwork on his desk. The man with the acne-scarred face looked as if his chronic sciatica was acting up; he sat at a twisted angle, as if favoring his left buttock. He was unshaven, and his gray hair was rumpled. He'd obviously been rousted out of bed two or three hours before, and he was still missing his bed. Two or three hours was the length of time we'd had to wait after first coming into the precinct station; it confirmed to us that McCloskey had been given the standing assignment of dealing with all things now wrought by the Fredericksons. Levers had been pushed, strings pulled, and Malachy McCloskey, better than most people, would know how easily a man could get ground up in that kind of political machinery.

If Garth felt any discomfort at now being more or less at the mercy of a man who probably hated him, he didn't show it-just as he hadn't displayed any embarrassment or discomfort as we'd sat on the wooden benches outside and he'd had to endure the furtive, curious glances of his former colleagues. Only three men on a shift of twenty-eight had come over to say hello and ask after his-our-health; it was as if they sensed, correctly, that the man with the full beard was very different from the Detective Lieutenant Garth Frederickson they had known and worked with.

'I'm sorry you had to get out of bed on Christmas Eve, McCloskey,' Garth said evenly.

McCloskey shook his head impatiently, ran his right hand over his grizzled cheeks, then scratched his head. 'Christmas Eve, my ass,' he said in his raspy voice. 'It's Christmas Day. My daughter's here from Iowa with my two granddaughters. I really would have liked to see their faces when they open their presents.'

'Maybe you can still make it,' I said brightly, flashing a broad smile.

McCloskey looked at me for a long time, and he didn't smile at all. 'I seriously doubt that, Frederickson,' he said at last.

'Come on, Lieutenant; give us a break.'

'Give you a break?'

'What do you want from us? You've got our statement-and a very long one, I might add. We're the ones who called the police, and we came over here right away.'

'Big deal. You knew you'd probably have been arrested and handcuffed if you hadn't.'

'I don't know that at all. You've read our statement; you've probably read it more than once. Garth and I haven't done anything wrong.'

McCloskey's black eyes flashed. 'Jesus Christ, man, you've-'

'We've been fully cooperative, is what we've been-which is more than I might say of the police. We've been cooling our heels here for better than three hours now.'

'You've got to be kidding me. You think you and your big brother get points for calling in and then coming over here? Considering the fact that two men were splattered all over the sidewalk in front of a certain building on Fifty- sixth Street, a building wholly owned by the famous Fredericksons, it's not too hard to figure out where they fell from, is it? You really think you have any choice but to cooperate?'

'We've explained what happened.'

'And you really expect us to believe that they jumped from your roof?'

'Yeah. We expect you to believe that.'

'Both of them?'

'You've got it. They were linked together, holding hands, when they jumped. Garth and I tried to stop them, but they were too quick for us.'

'And you claim they were happy about jumping off the top of a four-story building?'

'That's not what our statement says at all. We don't claim to be psychiatrists, but to us it appeared that they'd worked themselves into a kind of trance with glossolalia-'speaking in tongues.' They were experiencing religious ecstacy, and it led to their taking their own lives.'

'Religious ecstacy?'

'A trance, self-hypnosis, religious ecstacy-call it what you want. I told you they were speaking in tongues.'