The Basement Read online

  THE BASEMENT

  By Stephen Leather

  New York always brings out the serial killer in me. It’s a great city to kill in. The best. You've got something like fifteen million people living cheek by jowl, and most of them couldn't give a damn about anyone else. No one wants to get involved. No one cares. It's terrific. Walk down any street in the Big Bad Apple and the only time you'll make eye contact is if you meet a hooker on the make or a panhandler with his hand out.

  Getting a gun is easy, too, legally or otherwise. And you can carry it in a holster under your arm or strapped to the back of your trousers and without probable cause the police can't throw you up against the wall and search you, not like they can in some parts of the world. It's all thanks to the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution. It goes something like: ‘The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated.’ The only exception is if the cops have what they call ‘probable cause’, which means that they have to have a good reason. I love America. So long as I don't stick out, so long as I blend, I can walk around all day with a loaded gun down the back of my pants, assuming that I'm the sort of person who'd want to do that. Which I'm not, of course.

  And what other city in the world provides such a variety of victims? Not just the sheer number, but the types: rich, poor, famous, unknown, black, white, every shade of brown. New York has everything, a veritable buffet for the committed serial killer. The trick is not to be too greedy. I mean, if you carry on like Son of Sam and blow away teenagers or you write ‘I did it and you'll never catch me’ letters to the newspapers or the cops, then pretty soon there's going to be a task force after you with all your victims pinned up on a bulletin board and then it's just a matter of time before you're behind bars. No, the successful serial killer takes his time, chooses his victims with care, and keeps the lowest of low profiles.

  The trick is to blend, and to let the numbers take care of themselves. The numbers? Yeah, the numbers. You don't have to bury your victims or dissolve them in acid or cut them up into tiny pieces and drop them all over the city in garbage bags, there's no need. You hide them in the numbers. Fifteen million people, right? Give or take. So, ballpark figure, assume that the average lifespan is eighty years. Yeah, I know, women live longer, men die younger, but eighty is pretty much an average and like I said, we're talking ballpark figure. So, fifteen million people living an average of eighty years means that almost two hundred thousand people die each year in New York. Two hundred thousand. That's about four thousand a week. Now, that four thousand includes automobile accidents and a plethora of natural deaths, but there's also a fair sprinkling of murders and suicides. The serious serial killer takes his time, chooses his victim with care, and then does all he can to conceal his crime among the vast numbers of ordinary deaths each year. That's one of the first things you have to realise. Death is a normal part of city life. Four thousand a week. Six hundred a day. The average American doesn't like to think about that, they prefer to imagine that they're immortal and that very few people actually depart this mortal plane. But everyone dies sooner or later. Everyone. Make it look as if your victim slipped and fell in the shower or jumped from her window or decided to swallow bleach, and the chances are that you'll get away with it. Do that for the majority of your victims and then just now and again, when you really can't help yourself, you can cut one up and put it in garbage bags.

  Hey, don't get me wrong. This is all hypothetical, right. I'm not a killer, I'm a writer. I'm always looking for plots. For stories. I wouldn't really go on a killing spree. Not really.

  A city of strangers, that's New York City. And every day more pour in. One of my favourite spots is opposite Grand Central Terminal, where I can stand and watch them arrive, like ants scrambling out of an anthill, searching for food. Every one a potential victim. When I first got to the city, I used to follow a girl for fun, for the sport. I'd stand and I'd watch and then I'd pick one at random. I'd tell myself that I'd follow the tenth, or the twentieth, or the thirtieth, and then I'd count as the women went by and then I'd follow the lucky winner for as long as I could. Sometimes they'd get into a cab and that'd be the end of it, sometimes I'd lose them on the subway, but occasionally I'd follow them all the way home. God, it gave me such a feeling of power, to stand outside their home and know that they were inside. And you know something? Not one of them ever knew. Not one of them turned to look, not one picked up on me. At times I'd feel like a lion staking out a herd of zebra. Stupid, docile zebras, too dumb to know that they're in danger until the lion's claws rip out their throats and their blood flows. It's not hatred I feel. It's contempt. But hey, it's only research, right?

  A guy in a stained brown raincoat appears at my left shoulder and in a nasal whine asks me if I've any spare change. He must be about forty years old but his face is weathered and lined like old leather and his eyes are red and watery as if he'd been crying a lot. He wipes his nose with the back of his hand and makes the snuffling sound of a pig at a trough. He asks again. I lean towards him. He smells bad, like rotting cabbage. I smile reassuringly. What I want to say is: ‘Fuck off, or I'll shoot you in the face,’ but the guy has a crazy look about him. Intellectually challenged, you might say. Or emotionally different. Whatever, showing any sort of aggression will probably lead to a shouting match and that's the last thing you need when you're trying to blend. I reach into my trouser pocket and pull out a handful bills and I peel off a dollar and give it to him.

  ‘Merry Christmas, fella,’ I say and his eyebrows shoot up. He grins at the bill and for a moment he looks as if he's going to reply but he just mutters something unintelligible and shuffles away. After half a dozen steps he looks over his shoulder and mutters something else. I look at my watch. Eleven-thirty. I've got to get to Macy's by noon because that's when she'll be there.

  Macy's is at Broadway and 34th Street so I walk at a brisk pace, my breath feathering in the crisp winter air. Winter is my favourite New York season. Everything seems cleaner, and the place doesn't smell as much. The same goes for the people. Each step closer to the store builds the anticipation in my stomach and I almost feel light-headed. I can't believe I'm actually going to see her. I'm finally going to get close enough to talk to her.

  When I reach the storefront there are posters everywhere. In the picture she's wearing a white dress that’s cut lower than it needs to be and her shoulders are bare but it's the eyes that dominate, it's the eyes that you look at. They're so brown that they’re almost black. The eyes seem to follow me as I walk, as if she’s looking right at me. She's got it, all right. Star quality. It wouldn't matter if you'd never seen one of her music videos, you'd still know it just by looking at the picture. There's an aura about her, a radiance that says ‘I'm different, I'm special, kneel before me and worship me.’ I can't believe I'm going to meet her. The anticipation forms a hard knot in my stomach.

  The store is packed. Not full, not busy, but packed, people standing shoulder to shoulder, craning their necks for a better look, for a glimpse of her. The disappointment hits me like a punch in the solar plexus. There isn't a cat in hell's chance of me getting within a hundred yards of her. She's too popular, everyone wants a piece of her, everyone wants the chance to touch the hem of the famous. Fuck them. Fuck them all.

  * * *

  They always look so weak when they're asleep. So defenceless. You could so easily kill them, slit their throats or drive the knife into their chests and twist and they'd probably never know. You wonder about that sometimes, you wonder what happens when you die in your sleep. Do you carry on dreaming, does the moment of death expand to fill the void so that the dream goes on forever, or does it just fade to black? An
d if it goes on forever, does it matter whether the dream was a pleasant one or a nightmare. Would one be heaven and the other hell?

  She shifts on the bed, her mouth opens and her tongue licks her upper lip, leaving it wet and glistening. A strand of her blonde hair falls across her left cheek and she moves her left arm to brush it away but the chain stops her, limits her movement. She groans softly in her sleep and shakes her head slowly. The hair slides across her face and she licks her lips again. The bed is big, a queen size. You wanted it big because of what you plan to do with her. You need the room.

  She tries to turn onto her side but the chains fastened around her ankles keep her on her back. They jingle as she pulls first her left and then her right leg. The chains aren't thick, they don't need to be. It doesn't take much to restrain a woman, you know that from experience. The weaker sex.

  Her clothes look expensive. Well tailored. Designer labels, perhaps. That was one of the things that attracted you to her, the way she dressed. That and the hair. The shoulder length blonde hair that whispered that it wanted to be caressed, that it wanted to feel your fingers running through it. You sit down on the bed and reach out your hand to touch the hair. Silky. It feels soft and silky. Her skin is soft to the touch, too. Soft like a young girl's. How old is she? Twenty seven maybe. Twenty eight, tops. Certainly no older. She had two children, both girls and both with the same honey blonde hair. That was something else that had attracted her to you. The girls.

  You run your hand down her left cheek and under her chin. She mutters something in her sleep but you can't make out the words. She has a beautiful voice, a voice that is used to getting what it wants. A firm voice. Firm but soft. You heard her call the girls in while you sat in the van outside her house and waited. You got excited when you heard her voice and wondered how it would sound when she was begging and pleading.

  You look at your watch. The drug should be wearing off within a few minutes. You've used it many times so you know how effective it is. You used it on yourself once so you'd know how it felt and how even when you woke up you were too disorientated to move for ten minutes at least. You run your hand down the front of the white silk shirt she's wearing, your index finger catching on each of the hard white buttons. Her breasts move in time with her breathing and you slip your hand inside the shirt. You can feel the lace of her bra and the soft flesh it contains. You move your finger around and it finds the nipple. You feel a sudden desire to pinch the flesh, to rip out the nipple and stifle her screams with your mouth, but you fight the urge and remove your hand. Slowly. You must take things slowly.

  She's wearing a blue linen suit, a matching jacket and a skirt which stops just above the knee. She's wearing stockings or tights, you can't tell which. You know you could look, all you have to do is to push the skirt up, but you don't because you know you have all the time in the world. Besides, it's more fun to have them take off their own clothes. It would be the easiest thing in the world to strip her while she's drugged and have her wake up naked, but you know from experience that they only panic and it takes a while to calm them down. The trick is to be firm but polite and explain to them just why they have to do as they're told. They soon understand.

  You've taken her shoes off. They were black and had high stiletto heels. You like to see women in heels, they stretch the muscles in the back of their legs and it tightens their backsides and makes them sway when they walk. You took the shoes off when you chained her to the bed because the heels were sharp enough to use as weapons and there's always a danger of them lashing out until they fully understand their situation. The shoes are upstairs, along with her handbag.

  She coughs and tries to cover her mouth with the back of her right hand but the chain prevents her. Her eyelids flicker and she licks her lips again. She'll be thirsty when she wakes up. They always are. You walk over to the bathroom and fill a paper cup with cold water. There's no seat on the toilet, no mirror on the wall, no shower curtain or towel rail, nothing that can be used as a weapon. You learned that the hard way. You thought that screwing the mirror into the wall was enough but one of them smashed the glass and came at you with a jagged piece, a mirrored dagger that she slashed from side to side as blood dripped from her hand. That one had been messy and you learned your lesson. Now there's nothing sharp in the room.

  You put the paper cup on the tiled floor and sit down on the bed again. The bed has a metal frame and a brass headboard, a gentle arch with vertical brass bars. You've welded the headboard to the frame so that it can't be taken apart. Chains lead from her arms to the headboard, short enough to keep her confined to the bed, long enough to give her some movement. There are small padlocks at her wrists and ankles and similar ones fastening the chains to the bed. The chains are as shiny as surgical instruments, and like the padlocks they're brand new.

  She coughs and a dribble of saliva runs from the side of her mouth and trickles down her chin. You take a handkerchief from the back pocket of your jeans and use it to dab the frothy mess. She moves her head away and her eyelids flicker again. She'll be awake soon and your stomach goes liquid in anticipation. First you must explain the rules to her. Then you can begin to play.

  * * *

  I hate my apartment, I really do. It's more of a studio than an apartment if the truth be told, the bed is in an alcove that the landlord calls a bedroom and which I call a cupboard. The main room, okay, the only room, is five paces long and four paces wide, which means that if I keep close to the walls I can do a circuit in eighteen paces. If each pace is a metre than each circuit is eighteen metres. Simple arithmetic, any college kid could work that out. A high school graduate might have to use a calculator, but what the hell, right?

  Anyway, I'm on my one hundredth and fifteenth circuit, which means that so far this evening I've walked just over two thousand metres. I think better when I walk, and New York being New York, it's safer to walk inside than out. There isn't much furniture in the apartment. I'm not really one for furniture. There's a built-in wardrobe at the end of the bed, which is all the storage space I need. There's a chair, an overstuffed leather armchair which is sagging and which creaks whenever I drop down into it, and there's a wooden coffee table on which I put the typewriter. That's it. The entire contents of my apartment. A bed. A chair. A table. A typewriter. It's all I need. Writer's write, and you don't need a roomful of Italian designer furniture to get the words down on paper. That's what I am, a writer. I write, therefore I am.

  A typewriter? Sure. Not a laptop. Real writers don’t write on computers. A real writer needs to suffer for their art and that means pounding away on a typewriter or even writing by hand. The only reason I don’t use a pen is that it slows me down too much. And studios won’t even look at a hand-written screenplay. So I use a typewriter, an eighty-year-old Remington. Getting the ribbons is the worst part of using a typewriter. They stopped making them years ago. The typewriter will probably outlast me but without ribbons it would be useless. I was lucky, I found a little old guy in Greewich Village whose stationery store was going out of business and he had a box of ribbons tucked away in the back. It was my lucky day. Twelve dozen ribbons. Enough for a lifetime’s work.

  I don't tell people that I'm a writer, not any more. I used to, I used to tell anyone who'd listen that I was a writer and that one day I'd be rich and famous, but they'd always ask the same questions - had I been published, had I written anything they might have read. So then I'd have to explain that I write screenplays, not novels, that I prefer to work in film rather than the printed page. So then they'd ask what films I'd written and I'd start to explain how it's a tough business to break into, that it's all about contacts, about getting your work read by the right people, and then their eyes would glaze over and I could see that they thought I was full of shit. So I don't tell people that I'm a writer, in fact I don't tell them what I do. It's not their business, right?

  The pacing helps me think. It puts part of my mind on auto-pilot while the creative bit gets on and does i
ts own thing. I'm halfway through this screenplay about a waitress who falls in love with a Mafia hitman. I've done the first act, the set-up, but I'm having trouble with the second act. I can hear the voices of the characters, I can picture them, but I don't know how to take the story forward. It's not writer's block, I never get blocked, I just need a flash of inspiration, and if I walk long enough, I'll get it.

  I'm also working on a thriller called Checking Out, a sort of Die Hard in a Las Vegas casino. It's set in the biggest hotel in the world, a two thousand room medieval theme monstrosity which is preparing for its busiest night of the year - New Year's Eve. The manager receives a letter cobbled together from newspaper headlines from a killer who has struck at two other hotels on previous New Year's Eves. The killer warns that he plans to kill again, this time at the medieval hotel. The owners of the hotel aren't sure what to do - shutting down the hotel and its casino will cost them millions, and the police say that they can’t guarantee the safety of the guests.

  The hotel's head of security is not up to the job, so the management calls in an outside security force. Because it's New Years Eve, most of the city's security firms are busy - the only one they can hire is run by a group of oddball Vietnam veterans. The management has no choice but to hire them. Their mission - to identify a serial killer from among thousands of revelers. At eleven thirty, the manager of the hotel is called to the phone. It's the serial killer, telling him that there is a body in one of the suites, along with a message. The manager, and the Vets, rush to the suite where they find the body of the head of security and a stack of high explosive. There is also a message warning that there is a huge bomb hidden in the hotel which will explode at midnight unless ten million dollars from the casino is taken to the roof. There isn't time to evacuate the hotel. The money is taken to the roof, and a helicopter arrives.....can the Vets thwart the killer and save the hotel? Or are the Vets themselves behind the scam? I've only just started it but it has a good feel. The only problem is that there are too many heroes, and the studios seem to be going for single hero movies with one big name, Matt Damon or Leonardo DiCaprio. It's a problem, but not insoluble.