He returned the pistol to his shoulder holster.
He studied his hands. They were trembling.
On the back stairs once more, climbing to the fifth floor, he encountered the lingering soapy smell, the trace of aftershave. This time, he also detected another odor less clean than the first two, elusive but disturbing.
Whatever else he might be, Dunny Whistler was surely a living man, not an animated corpse. Why would one of the walking dead come home to shower, shave, and dress in clean clothes? Absurd.
In the apartment kitchen, Ethan used a DustBuster to vacuum up the fragments of picture-frame glass.
He found a spoon and an open half-gallon container of ice cream in the sink. Apparently, those who were recently resurrected enjoyed chocolate caramel swirl.
He put the ice cream in the freezer and returned the empty picture frame to the study.
In the master bedroom, he stopped short of the bathroom doorway. He had intended to check the mirror once more, to see if it was still misted and if, in the glass, anything moved that shouldn’t be there.
Actively seeking that phantom suddenly seemed to be a bad idea. Instead, he left the apartment, turning off the lights and locking the door behind him.
In the main elevator, as Ethan descended, he thought, For the same reason that the proverbial wolf put on a sheep’s skin to move undetected among the lambs.
That was why one of the walking dead would shower, shave, and put on a good suit.
As the elevator conveyed Ethan to the ground floor, he knew how Alice must have felt in free fall down the rabbit hole.
CHAPTER 16
AFTER SHUTTING DOWN THE RAILROADS, FRIC left the dirty Nazis to their evil schemes, departed the unreality of the train room for the unreality of the multimillion-dollar car collection in the garage, and ran for the stairs.
He should have taken the elevator. That cableless mechanism, which raised and lowered the cab on a powerful hydraulic ram, would be too slow, however, for his current mood.
Fric’s engine raced, raced. The telephone conversation with the weird stranger—whom he had dubbed Mysterious Caller—was high-octane fuel for a boy with a boring life, a feverish imagination, and empty hours to fill.
He didn’t climb the stairs; he assaulted them. Legs pumping, grabbing at the handrail, Fric flung himself up from the basement, conquering two, four, six, eight long flights, to the top of Palazzo Rospo, where he had rooms on the third floor.
Only Fric seemed to know the meaning of the name given to the great house by its first owner: Palazzo Rospo. Nearly everyone knew that palazzo was Italian for “palace,” but no one except perhaps a few sneeringly superior European film directors seemed to have any idea what rospo meant.
To be fair, most people who visited the estate didn’t give a rip what it was called or what its grand name actually meant. They had more important issues on their minds—such as the weekend box-office numbers, the overnight TV ratings, the latest executive shuffles at the studios and networks, who to screw in the new deal that they were putting together, how much to screw them out of, how to bedazzle them so they wouldn’t realize they were being screwed, how to find a new source for cocaine, and whether their careers might have been even bigger if they had begun having face-lifts when they were eighteen.
Among the few who had ever given a thought to the name of the estate, there were competing theories.
Some believed the house had been named after a famous Italian statesman or philosopher, or architect. The number of people in the film industry who knew anything about statesmen, philosophers, and architects was almost as small as the number who’d be able to give a lecture regarding the structure of matter on a subatomic level; consequently, this theory was easily embraced and never challenged.
Others were certain that Rospo had been either the maiden name of the original owner’s beloved mother or the name of a snow sled that he had ridden with great delight in childhood, when he had been truly happy for the last time in his life.
Still others assumed that it had been named after the original owner’s secret love, a young actress named Vera Jean Rospo.
Vera Jean Rospo had actually existed back in the 1930s, though her real name had been Hilda May Glorkal.
The producer, agent, or whoever had renamed her Rospo must have secretly despised poor Hilda. Rospo was Italian for “toad.”
Only Fric seemed to know that Palazzo Rospo was as close as you could get, in Italian, to naming a house Toad Hall.
Fric had done some research. He liked knowing things.
Evidently, the film mogul who built the estate more than sixty years ago had possessed a sense of humor and had read The Wind in the Willows. In that book, a character named Toad lived in a grand house named Toad Hall.
These days, no one in the film business read books.
In Fric’s experience, no one in the business had a sense of humor anymore, either.
He climbed the stairs so fast that he was breathing hard by the time that he reached the north hallway on the third floor. This wasn’t good. He should have stopped. He should have rested.
Instead, he hurried along the north hall to the east hall, where his private rooms were located. The antiques that he passed on the top floor were spectacular, although not of the museum quality to be found on the two lower levels.
Fric’s rooms had been refurnished a year ago. Ghost Dad’s interior designer had taken Fric shopping. To redo the furniture in these quarters, his father had provided him with a budget of thirty-five thousand dollars.
Fric had not asked for fancy new furniture. He never asked for anything—except at Christmas, when he was required to fill out the childish Dear Santa form that his father insisted be provided by Mrs. McBee. The idea of refurnishing was entirely Ghost Dad’s.
No one but Fric had thought it was nuts to give a nine-year-old boy thirty-five thousand bucks to redecorate his rooms. The designer and the salespeople acted as if this were the usual drill, that every nine-year-old had an equal amount to spend on a room makeover.
Lunatics.
Fric often suspected that the soft-spoken, seemingly reasonable people surrounding him were in fact all BIG-TIME CRAZY.
Every item in his remade rooms was modern, sleek, and bright.
He had nothing against the furniture and artworks of distant times. He liked all that stuff. But sixty thousand square feet of fine antiques was enough already.
In his own private space, he wanted to feel like a kid, not like an old French dwarf, which sometimes he seemed to be among all these French antiques. He wanted to believe that such a thing as the future actually existed.
An entire suite had been set aside for his use. Living room, bedroom, bathroom, walk-in closet.
Still breathing hard, Fric hurried through his living room. Breathing harder still, he crossed his bedroom to the walk-in closet.
Walk-in was a seriously inadequate description. If Fric had owned a Porsche, he could have driven into the closet.
Were he to add a Porsche to his Dear Santa list, one would most likely be parked in the driveway come Christmas morn, with a giant gift bow on the roof.
Lunatics.
Although Fric had more clothes than he needed, more than he wanted, his wardrobe required only a quarter of the closet. The rest of the space had been fitted out with shelves on which were stored collections of toy soldiers, which he cherished, boxed games to which he was indifferent—as well as videos and DVDs of every stupid boring movie for kids made in the past five years, which were sent to him free by studio executives and by others who wanted to score points with his father.
At the back of the closet, the nineteen-foot width was divided into three sections of floor-to-ceiling shelves. Reaching under the third shelf in the right-hand section, he pressed a concealed button.
The middle section proved to be a secret door that swung open on a centrally mounted pivot hinge. The shelving unit measured ten inches deep, which left a passageway of a
bout two and a half feet to either side.
Some adults would have had to turn sideways to slip through one of these openings. Fric, however, could walk straight into the secret realm beyond the closet.
Behind the shelves lay a six-by-six space and a stainless-steel door. Although not solid steel, it was four inches thick and looked formidable.
The door had been unlocked when Fric discovered it three years ago. It was unlocked now. He had never found the key.
In addition to the regular lever handle at the right side, the door featured a second handle in the center. This one turned a full 360 degrees and in fact was not a handle, but a crank, similar to those featured on casement windows throughout the house.
Flanking the crank were two curious items that appeared to be valves of some kind.
He opened the door, switched on the light, and stepped into a room measuring sixteen feet by twelve. An odd place in many ways.
A series of steel plates formed the floor. The walls and the ceiling also were covered in sheets of steel.
These plates and panels had been welded meticulously at every joint. During his study of the room, Fric had never been able to find the smallest crack or pinhole in the welds.
The door featured a rubber gasket. Now old and dried and cracked, the rubber had probably once made an airtight seal with the jamb.
Built into the inner face of the door was a fine-mesh screen behind which lay a mechanism that Fric had examined more than once with a flashlight. Through the screen, he could see fan blades, gears, dusty ball bearings, and other parts that he couldn’t name.
He suspected that the crank on the outside of the door had once turned the suction fan, drawing all the air out of the room through the valves, until something like a vacuum had been created.
He remained mystified as to the purpose of the place.
For a while, he’d thought it might have been a suffacatorium.
Suffacatorium was a word of Fric’s invention. He imagined an evil genius forcing his terrified prey into the suffacatorium at gunpoint, slamming the door, and gleefully cranking the air out of the chamber, until the victim gradually suffocated.
In fiction, villains sometimes engineered elaborate devices and schemes to kill people when a knife or gun would be much quicker and cheaper. Evil minds were apparently as complex as anthill mazes.
Or maybe some psycho killers were squeamish about blood. Maybe they enjoyed killing, but not if they were left with a mess to clean. Such murderous types might install a secret suffacatorium.
Certain elements of the room design, however, argued against this creepily appealing explanation.
For one thing, a lever handle on the inside of the door overrode the deadbolt lock operated by a key from the outside. Clearly, the intention had been to guard against anyone being trapped in the room by accident, but it also ensured that no one could be locked in here on purpose, either.
The stainless-steel hooks in the ceiling were another issue. Two rows of them extended the length of the room, each row about two feet from a wall.
Gazing up at the gleaming hooks, Fric heard himself breathing as hard now as when he’d just finished racing up eight flights of stairs. The sound of every inhalation and exhalation rushed and reverberated along the metal walls.
An itching between his shoulders spread quickly to the back of his neck. He knew what that meant.
This wasn’t merely rapid respiration, either. He’d begun to wheeze.
Suddenly his chest tightened, and he grew short of breath. The wheezing became louder on the exhale than on the inhale, leaving no doubt that he was having an asthmatic attack. He could feel his airways narrowing.
He could get air in more easily than he could get it out. But he had to expel the stale to draw in the fresh.
Hunching his shoulders, leaning forward, he used the muscles of his chest walls and of his neck to try to squeeze out his trapped breath. He didn’t succeed.
As asthma attacks went, this was a bad one.
He clutched at the medicinal inhaler clipped to his belt.
On three occasions that he could remember, Fric had been so severely deprived of air that his skin had taken on a bluish tint, and he had required emergency treatment. The sight of a blue Fric had scared the piss out of everyone.
Freed from his belt, the inhaler slipped out of his fingers. It fell to the floor, clattered against the steel plates.
Wheezing, he stooped to retrieve the device, grew dizzy, dropped to his knees.
Breath had become so hard to draw that a killer might as well have had both hands around Fric’s throat, throttling him.
Anxious but not yet desperate, he crawled forward, groping for the inhaler. The device squirted between his suddenly sweaty fingers and rattled farther across the floor.
Vision swam, vision blurred, vision darkened at the edges.
No one had ever taken a photo of him in a blue phase. He’d long been curious about what he looked like when lavender, when indigo.
His airways tightened further. His wheezing grew higher pitched. He sounded as if he had swallowed a whistle that had lodged in his throat.
When he put his hand on the inhaler again, he held fast to it and rolled onto his back. No good. He couldn’t breathe at all on his back. He wasn’t in a proper position to use the inhaler, either.
Overhead: the hooks, gleaming, gleaming.
Not a good place to have a severe asthma attack. He didn’t have enough wind to cry out. No one would hear a shout, anyway. Palazzo Rospo was well built; sound didn’t travel through these walls.
Now he was desperate.
CHAPTER 17
IN A MEN’S-ROOM STALL AT THE SHOPPING MALL, Corky Laputa used a felt-tip marker to write vicious racial epithets on the walls.
He himself was not a racist. He harbored no malice toward any particular group, but regarded humanity in general with disdain. Indeed, he didn’t know anyone who entertained racist sentiments.
People existed, however, who believed that closet racists were everywhere around them. They needed to believe this in order to have purpose and meaning in their lives, and to have someone to hate.
For a significant portion of humanity, having someone to hate was as necessary as having bread, as breathing.
Some people needed to be furious about something, anything. Corky was happy to scrawl these messages that, when seen by certain restroom visitors, would fan their simmering anger and add a new measure of bile to their bitterness.
As he worked, Corky hummed along with the music on the public-address system.
Here on December 21, the Muzak play list included no Christmas tunes. Most likely, the mall management worried that “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” or even “Jingle Bell Rock” would deeply offend those shoppers who were of non-Christian faiths, as well as alienate any highly sensitized atheists with money to spend.
Currently, the system broadcast an old Pearl Jam number. This particular arrangement of the song had been performed by an orchestra with a large string section. Minus the shrieking vocal, the tune was as mind-numbing as the original, though more pleasantly so.
By the time that Corky finished composing pungent racist slurs in the stall, flushed the toilet, and washed his hands at one of the sinks, he was alone in the men’s room. Unobserved.
He prided himself on taking advantage of every opportunity to serve chaos, regardless of how minor the damage he might be able to inflict on social order.
None of the restroom sinks had stoppers. He tore handfuls of paper towels from one of the dispensers. After wetting the towels, he quickly wadded them into tightly compressed balls and crammed them into the drain holes in three of the six sinks.
These days, most public restrooms featured pushdown faucets that gushed water in timed bursts, and then shut off automatically. Here, however, the faucets were old-fashioned turnable handles.
At each of the three plugged sinks, he cranked on the water as fast as it would flow.
&n
bsp; A drain in the center of the floor could have foiled him. He moved the large waste can, half full of used paper towels, and blocked the drain with it.
He picked up his shopping bag—which contained new socks, linens, and a leather wallet purchased at a department store, as well as a fine piece of cutlery acquired at a kitchen shop catering to the crowd that tuned in regularly to the Food Network—and he watched the sinks fill rapidly with water.
Set in the wall, four inches above the floor, was a large air-intake vent. If the water rose that high, spilling into the heating system and traveling through walls, a mere mess might turn into an expensive disaster. Several businesses in the mall and the lives of their employees might be disrupted.
One, two, three, the sinks brimmed. Water cascaded to the floor.
To the music of splash and splatter—and thinly spread Pearl Jam—Corky Laputa departed the restroom, smiling.
The hall serving the men’s and women’s lavatories was deserted, so he put down the shopping bag.
From a sports-coat pocket, he withdrew a roll of electrician’s tape. He never failed to be prepared for adventure.
He used the tape to seal off the eighth-inch gap between the bottom of the door and the threshold. At the sides of the jamb, the door met the stop tightly enough to hold back the mounting water, so he didn’t need to apply additional tape.
From his wallet, he extracted a folded three-inch-by-six-inch sticker. He unfolded this item, peeled the protective paper off the adhesive back, and applied it to the door.
Red letters on a white background declared OUT OF ORDER.
The sticker would trigger suspicion in any mall security guard, but shoppers would turn away without further investigation and would seek out another lavatory.
Corky’s work here had been completed. The ultimate extent of the water damage now lay in the hands of fate.
Security cameras were banned from restrooms and from approaches to them. Thus far he’d not been captured on videotape near the crime.
The L-shaped corridor serving the restrooms led to the second-floor mall promenade, which was under constant security surveillance. Previously, Corky had scoped out the positions of the cameras that covered the approaches to the lavatory hallway.