فصل 65

Chapter 65

BARNEY HAD never been in the barn before. He came in a side door under the tiers of seats that surrounded an old show-ring on three sides. Empty and silent except for the muttering of the pigeons in the rafters, the show-ring still held an air of expectation. Behind the auctioneer’s stand stretched the open barn. Big double doors opened into the stable wing and the tack room.

Barney heard voices and called, “Hello.”

“In the tack room, Barney, come on in.”

Margot’s deep voice.

The tack room was a cheerful place, hung with harnesses and the graceful shapes of saddlery. Smell of leather. Warm sunlight streaming in through dusty windows just beneath the eaves raised the smell of leather and hay. An open loft along one side opened into the hayloft of the barn.

Margot was putting up the currycombs and some hackamores. Her hair was paler than the hay, her eyes as blue as the inspection stamp on meat.

“Hi,” Barney said from the door. He thought the room was a little stagy, set up for the sake of visiting children. In its height and the slant of light from the high windows it was like a church.

“Hi, Barney. Hang on and we’ll eat in about twenty minutes Judy Ingram’s voice came from the loft above.

“Barneeeeeey. Good morning. Wait till you see what we’ve got for lunch! Margot, you want to try to eat outside?”

Each Saturday it was Margot and Judy’s habit to curry the motley assortment of fat Shetlands kept for the visiting children to ride. They always brought a picnic lunch. “Let’s try on the south side of the barn, in the sun,” Margot said.

Everyone seemed a little too chirpy. A person with Barney’s hospital experience knows excessive chirpiness does not bode well for the chirpee.

The tack room was dominated by a horse’s skull, mounted a little above head height on the wall, with its bridle and blinkers on, and draped with the racing colors of the Vergers.

“That’s Fleet Shadow, won the Lodgepole Stakes in ‘52, the only winner my father ever had,” Margot said. “He was too cheap to get him stuffed.” She looked up the skull. “Bears a strong resemblance to Mason, doesn’t it?”

There was a forced-draft furnace and bellows in the corner Margot had built a small coal fire there against re chill. On the fire was a pot of something that smelled to soup.

A complete set of farrier’s tools was on a workbench.

She picked up a farrier’s hammer, this one with a short handle and a heavy head.

With her great arms and chest, Margot might have been a farrier herself, or a blacksmith with particularly pointed pectorals.

“You want to throw me the blankets?”

Judy called down.

Margot picked up a bundle of freshly washed saddle blankets and with one scooping move of her great arm, sent it arching up to the loft.

“Okay, I’m gonna wash up and get the stuff out of the jeep. We’ll eat in fifteen, okay?”

Judy said, coming down the ladder.

Barney, feeling Margot’s scrutiny, did not check out Judy’s behind. There were some bales of hay with horse blankets folded on them for seats. Margot and Barney sat.

“You missed the ponies. They’re gone to the stable in Lester,” Margot said.

“I heard the trucks this morning. How come?”

“Mason’s business.”

A little silence. They had always been easy with silence, but not this one. “Well, Barney. You get to a point where you can’t talk anymore, unless you’re going to do something. Is that where we are?”

“Like an affair or something,” Barney said. The unhappy analogy hung in the air.

“Affair,” Margot said, “I’ve got something for you a hell of a lot better than that.

You know what we’re talking about.”

“Pretty much,” Barney said.

“But if you decided you didn’t want to do something, and later it happened anyway, do you understand you could never come back on me about it?”

She tapped her palm with the farrier’s hammer, absently perhaps, watching him with her blue butcher’s eyes.

Barney had seen some countenances in his time and stayed alive by reading them. He saw she was telling the truth.

“I know that.”

“Same if we did something. I’ll be extremely generous one time, and one time only. But it would be enough. You want to know how much?”

“Margot, nothings gonna happen on my watch. Not while I’m taking his money to take care of him.”

“Why, Barney?”

Sitting on the bale, he shrugged his big shoulders. “Deal’s a deal.”

“You call that a deal? This is a deal,” Margot said. “Five million dollars, Barney.

The same five Krendler’s, supposed to get for selling out the FBI, if you want to know.”

“We’re talking about getting enough semen from Mason to get Judy pregnant.”

“We’re talking about something else too. You know if you take Mason’s jism from him and leave him alive, he’d get you, Barney. You couldn’t run far enough. You’d go to the fucking pigs.”

“I’d do what?”

“What is it, Barney, Semper Fi, like it says on your arm?”

“When I took his money I said I’d take care of him. While I work for him, I won’t do him any harm. “

“You don’t have to . do anything to him except the medical, after he’s dead. I can’t touch him there. Not one more time. You might have to help me with Cordell. “

“You kill Mason, you only get one batch,” Barney said.

“We get five cc’s, even a low-normal sperm count, put extenders in it, we could try five times with insemination, we could do it in vitro Judy’s family’s real fertile.”

“Did you think about buying Cordell?”

“No. He’d never keep the deal. His word would be crap. Sooner or later he’d come back on me. He’d have to go.”

“You’ve thought about it a lot.”

“Yes. Barney, you have to control the nurse station. There’s tape backup on the monitors, there’s a record of every second. There’s live TV, but no videotape running. We - I put my hand down inside the shell of the respirator and immobilize his chest. Monitor shows the respirator still working. By the time his heart rate and blood pressure show a change, you rush in and he’s unconscious, you can try to revive him all you want. The only thing is, you don’t happen to notice me. I just press on his chest until he’s dead. You’ve worked enough autopsies, Barney. What do they look for when they suspect smothering?”

“Hemorrhages behind the eyelids.”

“Mason doesn’t have any eyelids.”

She had read up, and she was used to buying anything, anybody.

Barney looked her in the face but he fixed the hammer in his peripheral vision as he gave his answer: “No, Margot. “

“If I had let you fuck me would you do it?”

“No.”

“If I had fucked you would you do it?”

“No.”

“If you didn’t work here, if you didn’t have any medical responsibility to him would you do it?”

“Probably not.”

“Is it ethics or chickenshit?”

“I don’t know.”

“Let’s find out. You’re fired, Barney.”

He nodded, not particularly surprised.

“And, Barney?”

She raised a finger to her lips. “Shhhh. Give me your word? Do I have to say I could kill you with that prior in California? I don’t need to say that do I?”

“You don’t have to worry,” Barney said. “I’ve got to worry. I don’t know how Mason lets people go. Maybe they just disappear.”

“You don’t have to worry either, I’ll tell Mason you’ve had hepatitis. You don’t know a lot about his business except that he’s trying to help the law - and he knows we got the prior on you, he’ll let you go.”

Barney wondered which Dr Lecter had found more interesting in therapy, Mason Verger or his sister.