Ooodelee-ooodelee-oo.
Stacked floor to ceiling along one brick wall, several of the enormous barrels featured hinged bottoms that could be swung open, doorlike. Some barrels had shelves inside, on which were stored wineglasses, linen napkins, corkscrews, other items. Four contained televisions, allowing a wine connoisseur to view multiple channels simultaneously.
Ooodelee-ooodelee-oo.
Fric opened the phone keg and answered his private line in the usual Frician style, determined not to sound intimidated. “Pete’s Pest Control and School of Home Canning. We’ll rid your house of rats and teach you how to preserve them for future holiday feasts.”
“Hello, Aelfric.”
“Do you have a name yet?” Fric asked.
“Lost.”
“Is that a first name or last name?”
“Both. Are you enjoying your dinner?”
“I’m not eating dinner.”
“What did I tell you about lying, Aelfric?”
“That it won’t get me anything but misery.”
“Do you eat in the wine cellar often?”
“I’m in the attic.”
“Don’t seek misery, boy. Enough of it will find you without your help.”
“In the movie business,” Fric said, “people lie twenty-four hours a day, and all it gets them is rich.”
“Sometimes the misery follows swiftly,” Mysterious Caller assured him. “More often it takes a lifetime to arrive, and then at the end, there’s a great roaring sea of it.”
Fric was silent.
The stranger matched his silence.
At last Fric drew a deep breath and said, “I’ve got to admit, you’re a spooky son of a bitch.”
“That’s progress, Aelfric. A little truth.”
“I found a place where I can hide and never be found.”
“Do you mean the secret room behind your closet?”
Fric had never imagined that any creepy creatures lived in the hollows of his bones, but now he seemed to feel them crawling through his marrow.
Mysterious Caller said, “The place with steel walls and all the hooks in the ceiling—is that where you think you can hide?”
CHAPTER 28
WITH MURDER ON HIS MIND BUT NOT ON HIS conscience, Corky Laputa, fresh from the vault of the nameless dead, crossed the city in the night rain.
As he drove, he thought about his father, perhaps because Henry James Laputa had squandered his life as surely as the vagrants and teenage runaways bunking at the morgue had squandered theirs.
Corky’s mother, the economist, had believed in the righteousness of envy, in the power of hatred. Her life had been consumed by both, and she had worn bitterness as though it were a crown.
His father believed in the necessity of envy as a motivator. His perpetual envy led inevitably to chronic hatred whether he believed in the power of hatred or not.
Henry James Laputa had been a professor of American literature. He had also been a novelist with dreams of worthy fame.
He chose the most acclaimed writers of his time to envy. With fierce diligence, he begrudged them every good review, every word of praise, every honor and award. He seethed at news of their successes.
Thus motivated, he produced novels in a white-hot passion, works meant to make the fiction of his contemporaries appear shallow and pallid and puerile by comparison. He wanted to humble other writers, humiliate them by example, inspire in them an envy greater than any he’d directed against them, for only then could he let go of his own envy and at last enjoy his accomplishments.
He believed that one day these literati would be so jealous of him that they’d be unable to take any pleasure in their own careers. When they coveted his literary reputation with such intensity that they were avaricious for it, when they burned with shame that their greatest efforts were fading embers compared to the bonfire of his talent, then Henry Laputa would be happy, fulfilled.
Year after year, however, his novels had received only lukewarm praise, and much of this had flowed from the pens of critics who were not of the highest tier. The expected award nominations never came. The deserved honors were not conferred. His genius went unrecognized.
Indeed, he detected that many of his literary contemporaries patronized him, which led him to recognize, at long last, that they were all members of a club from which he’d been blackballed. They did recognize the superiority of his talent, but they conspired to deny him the laurels that he had earned, for they were intent on keeping the pieces of the pie that they had cut for themselves.
Pie. Henry realized that even in the literary community, the god of gods was money. Their dirty little secret. They handed awards back and forth, blathering about art, but were interested only in using these honors to pump their careers and get rich.
This insight into the conspiratorial greed of the literati was fertilizer, water, and sunshine to the garden of Henry’s hatred. The black flowers of antipathy flourished as never before.
Frustrated by their refusal to accord him the acclaim that he desired, Henry set out to earn their envy by writing a novel that would be an enormous commercial success. He believed that he knew all the tricks of plotting and the many uses of treacly sentimentality by which such hacks as Dickens manipulated the unwashed masses. He would write an irresistible tale, make millions, and let the phony literati be consumed by jealousy.
This commercial epic found a publisher but not an audience. The royalties were meager. Instead of showering him with money, the god of mammon left him standing in a manure storm, which was exactly what one major critic called his novel.
As more years passed, Henry’s hatred thickened into a malignity of pure, persistent, and singularly venomous quality. He cherished this malignity, and in time it soured and festered into rancor as virulent and implacable as pancreatic cancer.
At the age of fifty-three, while delivering a caustic speech full of fire and outrage to an indifferent crowd of academics at the Modern Language Association’s annual convention, Henry James Laputa suffered a massive heart attack. He fell instantly dead with such authority that some audience members thought he’d daringly punctuated a point with a pratfall, and they applauded briefly before realizing that here was death indeed, not shtick.
Corky had learned so much from his parents. He had learned that envy alone does not constitute a philosophy. He’d learned that a fun lifestyle and cheerful optimism cannot exist in the face of all-consuming, all-embracing hatred without surcease.
He’d also learned not to trust in laws, idealism, or art.
His mother had trusted in the laws of economics, in the ideals of Marxism. She ended as a bitter old woman, without hope or purpose, who seemed almost relieved when her own son had beaten her to death with a fireplace poker.
Corky’s father had believed that he could use art like a hammer to beat the world into submission. The world still turned, but Dad had gone to ashes, scattered in the sea, dispersed, as if he’d never existed.
Chaos.
Chaos was the only dependable force in the universe, and Corky served it with the confidence that it would, in turn, always serve him.
Across the glistening city, through the night and unrelenting rain, he drove to West Hollywood, where the undependable Rolf Reynerd needed to die.
Both ends of the block where Reynerd lived were closed off by police barricades. Officers in black rain slickers with fluorescent yellow stripes used chemical-light torches to redirect traffic.
In the basic colors of emergency, bright skeins of rain raveled through the pulsing ambulance beacons and knitted urgent patterns on the puddled pavement.
Corky drove past the barricade. Within two blocks, he found a parking place.
Perhaps the official bustle on Rolf Reynerd’s street had no connection with the actor, but Corky’s intuition insisted otherwise.
He wasn’t worried. Whatever mess Rolf Reynerd had gotten himself into, Corky would find a way to use the situation to further his own
agenda. Tumble and tumult were his friends, and he was confident that in the church of chaos, he was a favored child.
CHAPTER 29
FRIC FELT THAT BY SOME MAGICAL INFLUENCE of the brick floor under his feet and the brick walls around him and the low brick vaults overhead, he had been transformed into brick himself as he listened to the soft voice of this stranger.
“The secret room concealed behind your closet isn’t as secret as you think, Aelfric. You won’t be safe there when Robin Goodfellow pays a visit.”
“Who?”
“Previously I called him the Beast in Yellow. He styles himself Robin Goodfellow, but he’s darker than that. In truth, he’s Moloch, with the splintered bones of babies stuck between his teeth.”
“That’ll take some heavy-duty dental floss,” said Fric, though a tremor in his voice belied the flippancy of his words. He hurried on, hoping that Mysterious Caller had failed to detect his fear. “Robin Goodfellow, Moloch, baby bones—you aren’t making any sense.”
“You have a great library in your house, don’t you, Aelfric?”
“Yeah.”
“And you must have a good dictionary in that library.”
“We have a whole shelf of dictionaries,” said Fric, “just to prove how scholarly we are.”
“Then look it all up. Know your enemy, prepare yourself for what is coming, Aelfric.”
“Why don’t you tell me what’s coming? I mean just plain, simple, easy to understand.”
“That’s not within my power. I’m not licensed to take any direct action.”
“So you aren’t James Bond.”
“I’m authorized to work only by indirection. Encourage, inspire, terrify, cajole, advise. I influence events by every means that is sly, slippery, and seductive.”
“What’re you—an attorney or something?”
“You’re an interesting young man, Aelfric. I’ll genuinely be sorry if you’re disemboweled and nailed to the front door of Palazzo Rospo.”
Fric almost hung up.
Wrapped around the handset of the phone, his palm became greasy with perspiration.
He would not have been surprised if the man on the far end of the line had smelled this sweat and had commented on the salty scent.
Returning to the subject of a deep and special secret place, Fric mustered a steady voice. “We have a panic room in the house,” he said, referring to a hidden high-security haven armored to keep out even the most determined kidnappers or terrorists.
“Because the house is so large, you actually have two panic rooms,” Mysterious Caller said, which was true. “Both are known, and neither will keep you safe on the night.”
“And when is the night?”
Enigmatically, the man said, “It’s a fur vault, you know.”
“A what?”
“Long ago, your nice suite of rooms was occupied by the original owner’s mother.”
“How do you know which rooms are mine?”
“She had a collection of expensive fur coats. Several minks, sable, white fox, black fox, chinchilla.”
“Did you know her?”
“That steel-lined room was meant to keep the fur coats safe from burglars, moths, and rodents.”
“Have you been in our house?”
“The fur vault is a bad place to have an asthma attack—”
Stunned, Fric said, “How could you know about that?”
“—but it’ll be an even worse place to be trapped by Moloch when he comes. Time is running out, Aelfric.”
The line went dead, and Fric stood alone in the wine room, surely alone, but feeling watched.
CHAPTER 30
IF THE SKY OPENED TO DISGORGE A DELUGE OF fanged and poisonous toads, if the wind blew hard enough to flay the skin to bloody ruin and to blind the unprotected eye, even such cataclysmic weather would fail to dissuade ghouls and gossips from gathering at the scenes of spectacular accidents and shocking crimes. By comparison, a steady drizzle on a cool December night was picnic weather to this crowd that followed misery as others might follow baseball.
On the front lawn of an apartment house, catercorner across the intersection from the police barricade, twenty to thirty neighborhood residents gathered to share misinformation and gory details. The majority were adults, but half a dozen energized children capered among them.
Most of these sociable vultures were outfitted in rain gear or carried umbrellas. Two bare-chested and barefoot young men, however, wore only blue jeans and appeared to be so steeped in a marinade of illegal substances that the night could not chill them, as though they were being cooked flamelessly like fish fillets in lime juice.
An air of carnival had settled upon this gathering, expectations of fireworks and freaks.
In all his glistening yellowness, Corky Laputa moved among the onlookers, like a buzzless bumblebee patiently gathering a morsel of nectar here, a morsel there. From time to time, to blend better with the swarm and to win friends, he offered a taste of ersatz honey, inventing florid details of the vicious crime that he claimed to have heard from cops manning the second barricade at the farther end of the block.
He quickly learned that Rolf Reynerd had been killed.
The gossips and the ghouls weren’t sure if the victim’s first name was Ralph or Rafe, Dolph or Randolph. Or Bob.
They were pretty sure that the luckless fellow’s last name was either Reinhardt or Kleinhard, or Reiner like the film director, or maybe Spielberg like another famous director, or Nerdoff, or possibly Nordoff.
One of the bare-chested young men insisted that everyone had confused the victim’s first name, surname, and nickname. According to this wizard of deductive reasoning, the dead man’s true identity was Ray “the Nerd” Rolf.
All agreed that the murdered man had been an actor whose career had recently rocketed toward stardom. He had just completed a film in which he played Tom Cruise’s best buddy or younger brother. Paramount or DreamWorks had hired him to costar with Reese Witherspoon. Warner Brothers offered him the title role in a new series of Batman movies, Miramax wanted him to play a transvestite sheriff in a sensitive drama about anti-gay bigotry in Texas circa 1890, and Universal hoped he would sign a ten-million-dollar deal for two films that he would also write and direct.
Evidently, in this new millennium and in the popular imagination of those who dwelt on the glamorous west side of L.A., no failure ever died young, and Death came early only to the famous, the rich, the adored. Call it the Princess Di Principle.
Whether the man who had killed Ray “the Nerd” Rolf had also been an actor on the brink of superstardom, no one knew for certain. The murderer’s name remained unknown, unmangled.
Indisputably, the killer himself had been gunned down. His body lay on the lawn in front of Rolf’s apartment house.
Two pairs of binoculars circulated among the onlookers. Corky borrowed one pair to study Rolf’s apparent executioner.
In the darkness and the rain, even with magnification, he was unable to discern any identifying details of the corpse sprawled on the grass.
Crime-scene investigators, busy with scientific instruments and cameras, crouched alongside the cadaver. In black raincoats draped like folded wings, they had the posture and the intensity of crows pecking at carrion.
In every version of the story viewed with credibility among the gossips, the killer himself had been killed by a police officer. The cop had been passing by in the street at the right moment, by sheer happenstance, or he had lived in Rolf’s building, or he’d come there to visit his girlfriend or his mother.
Whatever had occurred here this evening, Corky was reasonably confident that it would not compromise his plans or cause the police to turn a gimlet eye on him. He had kept his association with Reynerd secret from everyone he knew.
He believed that Reynerd had been likewise discreet. They had committed crimes together and had conspired to commit others. Neither of them had anything to gain—and much to lose—by revealing their relat
ionship to anyone.
Stupid in uncounted ways, Rolf had not been entirely reckless. To impress a woman or his witless friends, he might wish to reveal that he’d had his mother killed by proxy or that he was partner to a murderous conspiracy involving the biggest movie star in the world, but he would never go that far. He would just invent a colorful lie.
Although Ethan Truman, incognito, had visited earlier this very day, the possibility that Reynerd’s death was connected in any way to Charming Manheim and the six gifts in black boxes remained unlikely.
Being an apostle of anarchy, Corky understood that chaos ruled the world and that in the rough and disorderly jumble-tumble of daily events, meaningless coincidences like this frequently occurred. Such apparent synchronisms encouraged lesser men than he to see patterns, design, and meaning in life.
He had wagered his future and, in fact, his existence, on the belief that life was meaningless. He owned a lot of stock in chaos, and at this late date, he wasn’t going to second-guess his investment by selling chaos short.
Reynerd had fancied himself not only a potential movie star of historic proportions, but also something of a bad boy, and bad boys made enemies. For one thing, more in search of thrills than profits, he had dealt drugs to a refined list of entertainment-industry clients, mostly cocaine and meth and Ecstasy.
More likely than not, tougher men than pretty-boy Reynerd had decided that he was poaching in their fields. With a bullet in the head, he’d been discouraged from further competition.
Corky had needed Reynerd dead.
Chaos had obliged.
No more, no less.
Time to move on.
Time, in fact, for dinner. Aside from a candy bar in the car and a double latte at the mall, he had eaten nothing since breakfast.
On good days filled with worthwhile endeavors, his work provided nourishment enough, and he often skipped lunch. Now, after busy hours of useful enterprise, he was famished.
Nevertheless, he tarried long enough to serve chaos. The six children were a temptation that he could not resist.