Pit and the Pendulum. John Gregory Betancourt

      And for my wife, Kim,

      who is responsible for

      pretty much everything else.

      PIT AND THE PENDULUM

      When the phone rang, I rolled over with a groan and reached for it. Who could possibly be calling me? I didn’t have any friends left, and all my bills were paid up, thanks to last month’s trip to Atlantic City’s casinos.

      “’Lo?” I mumbled into the receiver. My head pounded something awful.

      “Pit?” asked a man’s voice.

      I blinked. Nobody had called me that in years. “Who is this?”

      “Pit! Thank God I reached you—I need your help.”

      “Huh.” I managed to sit up in bed. The room swayed; I felt sick and dizzy. “What? Help? Who is this?”

      “God, Pit, it’s three o’clock! Aren’t you awake?”

      “What? Three o’clock?” With my free hand, I rubbed at crusty-feeling eyes. It didn’t help. I felt old and tired and all fogged up inside…thirty years old and ready to die. “Call me in the daytime!”

      The voice on the phone chuckled. It sounded forced.

      “Come on, Pit,” the man said urgently. “It’s three o’clock in the afternoon. Wake up. You’re the sharpest guy I know. I need your help!”

      Slowly I tried to think it through. Only frat brothers had ever called me Pit. Short for Pit-Bull—because I never let go. So that meant we had gone to college together, a lifetime or so ago. At most in any given year, our fraternity had thirty-two members. Times four…a lively selection of suspects.

      “Pit? You still there?”

      I frowned. A decade had deepened his voice, but it sounded familiar. Like a gear clicking into place, my brain started working and the name came to me: David Hunt. Tall, blond, and good-looking in a Calvin Klein-model sort of way, mostly skilled in partying and racket ball, but good enough academically to get his MBA without any special assistance from me. That was the only reason they let me into old Alpha Kappa, after all, to help the jocks and old-money frat boys keep up their GPAs. Sometimes I had resented it, being there to be used, but mostly I didn’t care, since the perks were great. I got into all the parties. I had my share of dates and fun and beer, and I still graduated at the top of our class. So what if I did a lot of tutoring and ghost-writing?

      David had been…fifty-third? Yes, that was right. Fifty-third in our graduating class. More than respectable for a party-boy from Alpha Kappa.

      “What is it, Davy?” I said. The haze was lifting now. “And I go by Peter these days.”

      “Peter. Right. Come see me—I need your help. I’ll make it worth your while.”

      I yawned again. “Where are you?”

      “The Mackin Chase Hotel. I’ll be in the lobby. Twenty minutes okay?”

      “Make it an hour.”

      “If I have to. But hurry.” A frantic note crept into his voice. “My future depends on it.” He hung up.

      Since he sounded desperate, I debated skipping a shower. But one look in the mirror and a sniff at my armpits changed my mind: I could live with bloodshot eyes and mussed-up hair, but popular society frowned on people who smelled like I did right now.

      Heaving my legs over the side of the bed, I found a bottle of aspirin on the night table and dry-swallowed four tablets. My right foot bumped against a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniels on the floor, and briefly I debated a wake-up shot. No, not now; I had an appointment to keep. Instead, I screwed the cap back on.

      I spent the next fifteen minutes showering, shaving, and cleaning myself up for polite society. A gulp of half-flat Pepsi and a cold slice of pizza from the refrigerator made a very late breakfast. Then I found a shirt that wasn’t too rumpled and put it on with jeans and comfortable old loafers. Finished, I grabbed a cane from the umbrella stand by the door, left my little one-bedroom Northwood apartment, and limped out to the Frankford El station.

      A train came almost immediately, luckily. It was mostly empty, so I flopped down in the corner—not the handicapped seat by the door, which I hate—and from there I proceeded to study the gum, scuff marks, and unidentifiable stains on the floor, trying not to look out the window at passing brick factories and endless lines of row-houses. Details tended to overwhelm me these days; that was partly what led to my nervous breakdown and retirement from a twenty-hours-a-day job at a Wall Street investment firm four years before. Now I kept to myself, tried not to leave my apartment when I didn’t have to, and drank to blunt the pain and keep the edge off my always-racing mind.

      Already it was starting. Everything I knew about David Chatham Hunt came bubbling up through my subconscious, whether relevant or not. The two classes we’d both taken together (Comp 104 and Introduction to Analytical Writing). His family crest, which he’d once shown me (a griffin on a shield, surrounded by Masonic-looking symbols). I could even name all seventeen girls he’d dated (and the two he’d bedded) while living at the frat house.

      What could David Hunt possibly want with me? He came from a rich old family; his life should have been golden. Mellow, easy-going, never-a-worry-in-the-world Davy Hunt’s greatest decision these days should have been which swimsuit model to date or which of his many Saabs and Porsches to drive.

      The train tracks went underground, and the car got noisy and claustrophobic and dark. A dozen people joined me in the car. Almost there, almost there. I tried not to look at anyone else. I didn’t want to figure out life stories from their clothes, tattoos, body-piercings, and jewelry.

      * * * *

      I knew the Mackin Chase Hotel quite well, of course; it’s a Philadelphia landmark, a towering glass-and-steel building near the intersection of 20th and Vine, five minutes’ walk from the train station. Elevators ran up the outside of the building, and the roof had a helicopter pad. Several times I had wondered what the view would be like from up there. Several times I’d wondered what it would be like to jump.

      I was ten minutes early for our appointment, but I strolled into the hotel lobby anyway. There, a modernistic fountain made of bent pieces of copper-colored sheet-metal splashed and burbled amidst carefully groomed ferns and bamboo. Pale yellow carp swam lazily through a series of interlocking shallow pools. Around me, orchestral music played an incongruously up-tempo version of the Beatles’ “Yesterday.” How appropriate.

      Davy Hunt, dressed all in black from his handmade Italian leather shoes to his mock turtleneck sweater and stylish leisure jacket, folded up the newspaper he’d been pretending to read and rose from a marble bench by the fountain. He forced a sickly grin as I hobbled toward him. His blond hair had grown longer and he now wore it combed to one side, trying to hide a receding hairline. When I got close, I saw the fine web of wrinkles around his eyes. But if he looked his age, I knew I must look thirty years older than mine. Huffing a bit, I leaned