The Devil You Know

“Evening, lover,” she said. That’s her usual form of address for me, but she knows I won’t get the wrong idea; her husband, Jason, is a burly male nurse and could make a novel origami sculpture out of me in the space of about five seconds. “I thought he’d been pretty good lately.”

“He’s been fine, Carla,” I said, scribbling my name in the daybook. “Tonight I’m just visiting. He wrote me a letter.”

Her eyes widened, and interest quickened on her face. Carla is an inveterate gossip. It’s her only vice, and she regrets bitterly the failure of real-life hospitals to live up to the same standards of intrigue and promiscuity as fictional ones.

“Yeah, I saw,” she said, leaning in toward me a little. “He had a hard time with it, too. You know, the strong hand writing, the other one trying to snatch the paper away.”

I raised and lowered my eyebrows in a virtual shrug. “Asmodeus won,” I said tersely, and Carla made a sour face. Asmodeus always wins. It wasn’t even worth commenting on anymore, and I’d only said it to avoid giving any other answer to her implied question.

“I’m going to go on in,” I said. “If Dr. Webb wants to talk to me, I can stick around for a while afterward. But really this one is just private stuff.”

“You run with it, Felix,” she said, waving me on. “Paul’s got the keys.”

Paul was a lugubrious black man so tall and broad that in a 4-4-2 formation, he’d count as one of the 4s all by himself. He scarcely ever spoke, and when he did, he kept it short and to the point. When he saw me walking up the corridor toward him, he said the single word “Ditko,” and I nodded. He turned around and led the way.

There’s a left turn at the end of the main hallway with a subtle upward gradient underfoot as you pass from the converted cottages into a newer, purpose-built wing. It has a different feel to it, too—on a psychic level, I mean. Old stones put out a sort of constant, diffuse emotional field like the glow of a dead fire; newly poured concrete is blank and cold.

Which may be why I shuddered when we stopped in front of Rafi’s door.

Paul bent down to check the inspection window, made a tutting sound with his tongue against his teeth. Then he put the key in the lock and turned it. The door swung open.

I always forget in between visits how small and bare Rafi’s cell is. I suppose forgetting makes the whole thing easier to bear. The place is a cube, essentially, ten feet on a side. No furniture, because even when it’s bolted down, Rafi can rip it up and use it, and there are people still working at the Stanger now who remember the last time that happened. “If in doubt, don’t,” is their fervent creed. The walls and ceiling are bare white plaster, but out of sight underneath them, instead of plasterboard, there’s a layer of silver and steel amalgam, one part to ten. Don’t ask me how much that cost. It’s the main reason why I’m poor. On the floor, the metal isn’t even covered over. It shines dully up from between old scuff marks.

Rafi was sitting in the corner in the lotus position. His long, lank hair hung down over his face, hiding it completely. But he looked up at the sound of my footsteps, parted the foliage, and grinned out at me from under it. Someone had released one of his arms from the straitjacket and given him a deck of cards; they were spread on the floor in front of him in the pattern of a game of clock patience. Hard-edged, plastic-coated—that looked like a really bad idea in my book. I made a mental note to tell Carla to slap Webb over the back of the head for me and ask him what he thought he was doing.

“Felix!” Rafi growled in one of his more unpleasant voices—all in the back of his throat, gutturals so harsh they sounded like slowed-down shotgun blasts. “I am honored. I am so fucking privileged. Come on in, now. Come right on in. Don’t be shy.”

“He gives you any trouble,” Paul said, stolid and matter-of-fact, “you just call, all right?” He closed the door behind me, and I heard the key turn again.

Rafi was watching me in silence, expectant. I let my coat fall open and touched my fingers to the pocket where the tin whistle nestled, the top inch or so of its gleaming metal visible against the gray lining, like half-cooled cinders. He sighed when he saw it, a sigh with a jagged edge to it.

“You gonna play us a tune?” he whispered. And it was really Rafi for a moment, not Asmodeus stealing Rafi’s voice.

“It’s good to see you, Rafi,” I said. “Yeah, I’ll whistle something up for you in a minute or two. Give you some peace—or at least some headspace.”

Rafi’s face twisted abruptly—seemed to melt and re-form in an instant into a brutal sneer. “You fucking wish!” snarled the other voice.

Well, I knew this wasn’t going to be easy. It never is. With the feeling of a man about to jump up over the top of the trench and go charging across no-man’s-land, I sat down in front of him and got into a cross-legged posture that mirrored his own. I took the letter out of my coat pocket, unfolded it, and held it out for him to see.