“Martha, I need you to take a look at this video. The group sent it,” said Steve Privilegiata, an early middle-aged man with close-cropped black hair and a dark tan dressed raffishly in a Lacoste jersey and khakis. That he was extremely nervous was plain. Little beads of sweat dotted his face, and especially his upper lip. He kept tapping the pad on the laptop as if it might change what he was looking at. It didn’t.
“Why are they contacting us?” asked his wife. She was clean-scrubbed, blond with highlights, dressed in slacks and a blouse, wearing jewelry a bit too conspicuously. She was at the very beginning of being upset. “That’s not right. We’re supposed to be silent partners. What if this e-mail’s a lead to track us? A way for investigators to find an in? What if we’re compromised?”
“I don’t think that’s the problem right now. It was sent through an anonymizer and encrypted, so I don’t think we need to worry.”
“So then, why are you worried?”
“I think this is something our partners want us to worry about.”
“Why can’t Finnerty or the Comptroller take care of it?”
“Because according to the e-mail, they’re no longer alive.”
“What the fuck is happening?” she asked, disturbed, genuinely agitated.
“Just watch this clip with me.”
Martha Privilegiata came up behind her seated husband and looked over his shoulder at the laptop screen. Her breathing was shallow.
“What the fuck is this?”
“Just watch. It’s crazy. It’s a taped feed from one of the playhouses. The one with the retards.”
“Why are we getting this? No one from the group is supposed to contact us about anything but Finnerty or that little Jewish creep.”
“The e-mail says they’re dead.”
“What? That just doesn’t make any sense.”
“Let me take the stream off pause here and I’ll show you something that doesn’t make any sense.”
Steve took the media player plugin off pause with sweaty fingers and his wife breathed heatedly through her nostrils as she drew her face in closer over his shoulder to watch. Off pause, a picture clearly emerged of a high-angled view of the living room rug and some of the furniture in the main room of the Spilotro house in Brockton. A skeleton of a man with sunken cheekbones, hollow eyes wearing white painter’s coveralls blemished with brilliant vermillion-saturated spots of fresh blood greeted them almost cheerily. The man was animated, swinging a machete. Lying at his feet was a bundle of gore barely distinguishable as a human being that had once been Tony Spilotro.
The little man spoke, clearly and evenly. Darker blood was visible in solid formations on the debased rug by his feet, which were sheathed in blood-soaked shoe covers for painting.
“I hope you can hear me clearly, since there really isn’t any way for me to check the mics here to establish that they’re working properly. I assume they must be, because, really, what value would your playhouse have otherwise? You should be getting all the moaning and crying and sobbing in the background, if things go right. For all you goofs, I just want you to know that if you log off and stop viewing this Hebe Group material, I won’t be able to find you. I highly recommend it. Otherwise, you’ll soon be on my list. But for you, Hebe Group employees, there really is no hope. Unless you kill me, which I have to say doesn’t turn out to be as easy as it sounds. No, not so far.”
“Anyway, you’re going to die. I’m going to find every single one of you and do exactly to you what I did to this blob of mess right here by my feet—the late Tony Spilotro.” He kicked the blob for emphasis. “I don’t know if you saw the part of the feed where I slowly turned Mr. Spilotro into this pile of bloody gelatin,” he kicked at the blob again, “but if you have, then perhaps you get the point. Not only am I going to kill you, but if time and circumstances permit, I’m going to torture you to death. You’ll beg for me to kill you and I’ll refuse. I’ll keep hurting you and hurting you until you can no longer last. Of course, I’m a realist about things. If I’m hurried or there are just too many of you to see to all at once, I’ll simply make do and kill you as quickly and painfully as I know how.” He paused, unblinking, looking straight at the cameras. “And let me promise you right now: this is a subject about which I have a lot of knowhow!”
He moved his legs up and down for a moment, as if working them to bring back their circulation after having spent too much time in a bent over position.
“I’m sure you’re thinking of coming after me. This, of course, is an impractical idea. Don’t worry about trying to find me because I’m going to find you. You’re going to see me, right up close, squeezing the light right out of your eyes until you die.” He sighed and flopped his arm with the machete down by his side. “Still, you probably want to know who I am. That’s easy enough. My name is Null. Call me Null. And if you want to try and call the police, which I think must be a funny idea even to you, I can tell you right off the bat that the punchline to that joke is that they think I’m dead. But when they find you, on the other hand, they’ll know you’re dead—that’s if they can identify the corpse once I’m done with you.”
Null shook his head, looked around the room toward the background noises of sobbing and moaning delivered from Aldo and Seymour off-camera.
“If you didn’t see the part of the feed that precedes my little speech, don’t worry about it. I have two more to handle, just like the late Tony over there. Feel free to watch to your heart’s content.” Null went off-camera for a moment then reappeared, dragging the bloodied, bound and wounded Seymour into the frame. “Don’t worry,” said Null smoothly, as if in comfort, “this won’t take long.”
Seymour screamed, “God help me!”
Null went up, holding the machete high in both hands.
Then Null was suspended, stuck in time, the machete yet to come down.
Steve had put the recording back on pause.
Both he and his wife couldn’t move for a moment—
they were frozen stock still. Steve forced himself to get up from the computer. His wife’s eyes were welled with tears. Imperceptibly, she trembled.
“Marty, do you have the card?”
“What card?” she sniffled.
“You know the one.”
“We’re never supposed to call him. We’re never supposed to call anybody!” she wailed.
“Yeah,” Steve said, rubbing his hands. “Him. Legere. We need to call Legere.”
“But he’s street—we don’t deal with street ever!” She was shrill, panicked.
“Well, my darling, it appears we do now.”
* * *
An anonymous factory building off Cambridge Street in Allston set back from the street on a large acre of tar. Years ago, it was artists’ work-live spaces when funding existed for such things. The impoverished artists moved in and bought lofts with friendly bank loans and state and federal underwriting. When real estate prices went up just before the last financial crisis, each and every struggling, starving, grants-saturated artist, adjunct professor of this or that sold their lofts out at a profit and moved off to the distant suburbs without a peep to the press, who ignored it regardless. After several failed attempts at adaptive reuse—
including an ambitious co-op initiative to turn it into an Ivan Illich-style alternative school—developers and investors abandoned the property altogether.
Fallen into disuse and disrepair (a rat-infested homeless squat for a time), it was picked up by an investment consortium for a song.
Now, it was a hive of activity.
Activity involving children.
Most businesses were closed, or at least shuttering their doors at this time of night in Allston. In the main office on the fourth level of the building, operations manager Benedict “Ben” Servus was wide awake, monitoring ongoing business on an array of screens set up in half moon formation with a wide Ford Executive Modern Desk set in the center. The screens all showed young children of various ages in sexual positions with an array of adults. He looked at the feed on these screens as dispassionately as if they were spread-sheets of numbers.
Servus was a short, paunchy man with a full head of salt-and-pepper hair, dressed in shirt-sleeves and dress pants, no jacket or tie. He was swarthy and large-pored with drooping, dark eyes. His posture was in a perpetual bit of a slouch. He thought for a moment he detected a disturbance at the second level on one of the screens. He used his dedicated walkie talkie to contact the employee nearest the disturbance. There was no answer. He left the office and went out to the catwalk, looking out over the various house-settings that were in plain view. Nothing. It was just a blip of activity on the screen, he decided. That sometimes happens. He shouldn’t be so jumpy. His wife was right—he sorely needed to get some downtime and relax.
When he went back into his dimly lit office, he discovered a shape at his desk in the shadows. He kept his calm.
“I’m not alone in here anymore, am I?”
“Obviously,” came the dead voice from the shadows.
“What do you want? I’m in no position to give you anything. There’s nothing but petty cash on hand, and that’s not even a thousand bucks. Sorry buddy, but you’ve come to a dry place. If you want, I can put you in touch with someone who can help you.” He allowed his breathing to relax, told himself he was no longer in danger. What would be the point of his doing anything anyway? He wasn’t even sure this guy was armed.
“The guy you want to put me in touch with—his name’s Legere, right?”
“Yeah, that’s him. How’d you know?”
“Everybody wants to put me in touch with Legere. Yet he doesn’t seem to want to be very much in touch with me.”
Ben Servus tensed. His back spasmed. He came to a sudden black and disastrous realization.
“You! You’re him—you’re—the crazy fuck on that tape of the feed.”
“My reputation precedes me,” said Null drily. “By the way, you should probably avoid calling certain people crazy fucks. You never know what they’re liable to do.”
Null got up from the desk and stepped into the light shining in from the long windows facing the catwalk. The Heckler was out and ready.
“Now me,” he continued. “I’m easy. No doubt crazy, I’ll give you that, but I’m far from unpredictable. With me, you always know what I’m going to do.”
“Okay, whoever you are—”
“Null. You can call me Null.”
“Okay, Mr. Null. I’m only the operations manager around here. I just keep things running smoothly and efficiently. Just tell me what you want, and I’ll do my best to help you.”
“Thanks, but I don’t really want anything.”
“You’re the one put the faces of everyone you killed up on the landing page, didn’t you? Twenty people?”
“On the nose. Good, you can count.”
“High body count.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Isn’t that enough? How many more are you going to kill? And for what? It’s not making you rich.” His voice was trembling, breathing had become shallow and forced. He thought he was playing for time. He wasn’t. Null was simply taking his time.
“I don’t do it for money, not even for morality. I do it for ethics.”
“Ethics? You think all these murders are ethical?”
“In context, yes, as a matter of fact I do.”
“What are you going to do?”
“If you saw the feed, you wouldn’t have to ask me.”
“Please don’t kill me?”
“Why not?”
“I’m a decent man, a family man—I have a wife—”
“And you have kids, no doubt. Nice, clean-scrubbed suburban kids.”
“That’s right. Two well-behaved sons, as a matter of fact.”
“No rough life for them, was there? Nothing to make it hard. No privation or abuse.”
“Not at all. Just good old American discipline.”
“I see. You don’t mind answering a question or two for me, do you?”
Servus thought it best to play for time. Security should be up there soon. He already had had the presence of mind to press the red call button on his walkie talkie that was now holstered and which he conspicuously made no move to touch.
“Of course not.”
“Put the walkie on the desk.”
“Sure thing.”
“Slowly,” intoned Null.
Servus did as he was told.
“It doesn’t matter that you pressed the call button for security. They won’t be coming.”
“Wh-why not?” asked Servus, again playing for time.
“Because they’re busy.”
“Busy doing what?”
“They’re busy being dead,” replied Null.
“Wh-what are you going to do?”
“I’ll get to that. But first, the questions I wanted to ask you.”
Servus fidgeted, shifted his weight from foot to foot. “G-go ahead.”
“Why do your children get to grow up safe and protected and the ones downstairs wind up raped, abused, tricked out and used up and—if they survive to get old enough—outright sold to rich perverts as slaves?”
Servus took a deep breath and explained, doing his best to pitch it hard like a sale. “Luck of the draw,” he said. “These children are cast-offs anyway, thrown-away items, no parents, no relatives, no prospects, foster homes couldn’t cope with them, juvenile facilities too overcrowded and down-sized to take them. They’re casualties of the modern economy—like little animals, feral wild things. We take care of them, feed them, house them, get them medical attention—”
“Treatment for venereal diseases? Herpes, hepatitis?”
“Of course. All of that.”
“So, it’s really okay that they’re anally raped and used as human sex dolls? Just the luck of the draw?”
“It’s how they sing for their supper, as the saying goes. They grow to like it, the physical affection.”
Null didn’t blink.
“You’re at ease with what you do?”
“I am. Taking the great pay, job security and medical into account, you get used to it. You can get used to anything. They’re just a commodity, like loaves of bread. Get ‘em in get ‘em out, and that’s that.”
“Bernie said the same thing, about loaves of bread.”
“Well, he’s right. The expression fits.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
Null checked his phone. “It seems we still have plenty of time. And I intend to use it.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Fair question. You have a good style. And you’re right. To me, you’re just a commodity. Get ‘em in, get ‘em out and that’s that. Excellent phrasing, by the way.”
Servus inched toward the door backward.
“Oh, and you were doing so well,” said Null.
“What are you going to do?!” Servus screamed.
“You deserve an answer,” Null replied softly. “And I’ll give you one.”
“Okay,” Servus said distractedly, eyeing the door, sweating and trembling.
“I’m going to fire two rounds from this pistol straight into your belly. Then, with the machete I have hanging from a lanyard around my neck under my coat, I’m going to chop you into pieces, see how long you last before either one kills you.”
Servus smiled and laughed in nervous relief, wiped his sweaty brow with the back of his hand. “For a moment, I thought you were serious. But you’re joking, right?”
“No, I’m really not.”
Null showed him, fired two shots into Servus’ copious gut from the Heckler, then maneuvered the machete out from under his coat.
Servus screamed for a very long time.