60
For Caradoc
Thanks to: Sarah, Julia, Emad, Kate and Anne at HarperCollins; Caradoc, Yasmin, Linda, Louise and Elinor at A.P. Watt; Charlotte, Judy and David Starling; John Saunders and the gentlemen and players of the José Raúl Capablanca Memorial Chess Society.
‘Play the opening like a book.’
Rudolf Spielmann, Austrian chess player
(1883–1942)
It’s not hard to shrink a human head.
First, you make a slit up the back. (Well, first you sever the head from the body, but I guess you figured that out already.) Then, you peel the skin and hair away from the skull. Slow and careful does it: you gotta keep it all in one piece, else you’ll spend hours tryin’ to make it right again, and even then it won’t look quite the same. And it’s not like human heads grow on trees, and you can just go out and find another one. So take your time and get it right. Sorry to sound all bossy, but it’s gotta be said.
You don’t need the skull no more, least not for this process, so do what you want with it. Chuck it away (someone else’s dumpster’s better than your own, in case the cops come knockin’), or, I don’t know, put a candle in it, save it for Hallowe’en, give it to the next guy you know playin’ Hamlet, whatever.
But you still need somethin’ to keep the head’s shape, so put a wooden ball in where the skull used to be. Sew the eyelids shut; the finer the thread the better. You need delicate fingers; think piano players rather than piano movers. Close the lips and skewer ’em with little palm pins, the kind you get on dog brushes.
Then take the head over to the stove, put it in a cookin’ pot, and simmer for a couple of hours – no more, you hear, not unless you want all the hair to fall out and the skin to end up as dry and cracked as a summer riverbed. A couple of hours, and the skin’ll look and feel like dark rubber. That’s what you’re aimin’ at. Take it out the cookpot, remove the wooden ball, flip the skin inside out and scrape out all the gunk and fat on the inside. Flip it back again and sew shut the slit you made at the back to kick this whole thing off.
You don’t need the wooden ball no more today, but of course keep it close to hand if you’re plannin’ on shrinkin’ more heads any time soon.
Now you need a heap of hot stones, to shrink the head even more and sear its inside clean. Drop the stones through the neck openin’, one at a time. Make sure you keep movin’ ’em around, else you’ll leave scorch marks. When you got too many stones in there to keep rollin’ ’em around nice and easy, take ’em all back out, one by one.
The stones all gone, tip hot sand into the head. The sand gets in the places the stones can’t reach, the little crevices of the nose and ears. Attention to detail, folks. But you ain’t finished with the stones yet, no sir. You press ’em to the outside of the face: shape and seal, shape and seal. Gotta keep those features lookin’ good. Think of it like moldin’ a clay face, like you’re Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore in Ghost. Love that movie.
Singe off any excess hair and cover the face in charcoal ash. This is supposed to let you harness the dead person’s spirit to your own ends; you don’t put on the ash, the soul’ll seep out and avenge the death. That’s what the old-timers say, at any rate. Not sure I believe ’em, but what the hell. Can’t do any harm, can it?
The head should be about the size of an orange by now. Hang it over a fire to harden properly, and you’re done. You can do what you want with it now.
Like I said, not hard. Not hard at all.
Sunday, October 31st
Foxborough, MA
There are several types of hangover. There’s Hangover Lite, a mild but insistent ache in the temples; there’s Hangover Medium, where you ride greasy swells of nausea which rear and ebb without warning; and there’s Hangover Max, when a team of roadworkers are jackhammering behind your eyes, your heart is doing a one-man Indy 500, and the thought that you might die is eclipsed only by the fear that you won’t.
And then there’s the kind of hangover Franco Patrese had at the precise moment his cellphone jolted him from sleep with a brutality that was borderline sociopathic.
But Patrese was a pro. In the time it took for the phone to ring once, neither the shock of the rude awakening nor the monumental combination of toxins gleefully racing round his body could prevent him from assembling a few salient points.
First, it was still dark outside.
Second, he was in a hotel room, which he remembered as being on the outskirts of Foxborough, Massachusetts.
Third, there was another bed in the room, and in that bed was a man named Jeff whose snoring had the rhythm and persistence of waves breaking on a shore. Jeff was one of Patrese’s college buddies. A whole bunch of them had hooked up to come see their beloved Pittsburgh Steelers play the New England Patriots in Foxborough this coming afternoon, and, as Patrese hadn’t seen much of his old friends since moving down to New Orleans, they’d decided to make a weekend of it, all boys together. For someone like Patrese, a single guy who lived in party central, this was just another weekend of good times. For those of his buddies who were married with kids, and whose usual weekends were therefore kids’ soccer practice, home-improvement jobs and putting up with the in-laws, this was pretty much their only free time all year, and by hell they’d made the most of it.
Fourth, Patrese had been first a cop and then an FBI agent for more than a decade, so he knew that no one rang that early on a Sunday morning unless there was a good reason for it. And nine times out of ten, a good reason means something bad has happened.
He answered on the second ring. ‘Patrese.’
Well, ‘Patrese’ was what he’d wanted to say. ‘Ngfrujghr’ was how it had actually come out.
‘Hello?’