“What I forgot to ask you is how long I’ll need to hide from this Puck when he shows up.”
The longer he listened to the breathing, the more Fric realized that this had peculiar and disturbing qualities far different from the standard pervert-on-the-phone panting that he’d heard in movies.
“I looked up Moloch, too.”
This name seemed to excite the freak. The breathing grew rougher and more urgent.
Abruptly Fric became convinced that the heavy breather was not a man, but an animal. Like a bear, maybe, but worse than a bear. Like a bull, but nothing as ordinary as a bull.
Up the coiled cord, into the handset, into the ear piece, into Fric’s right ear, the breathing squirmed, a serpent of sound, seeking to coil inside his skull and set its fangs into his brain.
This didn’t seem at all like Mysterious Caller. He hung up.
Instantly, his line rang: Ooodelee-ooodelee-oo.
He didn’t answer it.
Ooodelee-ooodelee-oo.
Fric got up from the armchair. He walked away.
He passed quickly along aisles of bookshelves to the front of the library.
His personal call tone continued to mock him. He paused to stare at the phone in this main reading area, watching as the signal light burned bright with each ring.
Like all the members of the household and the staff who enjoyed dedicated phone lines, Fric had voice mail. If he didn’t pick up by the fifth ring, the call would be recorded for him.
Although his voice mail was currently activated, the phone had rung fourteen times, maybe more.
He circled the Christmas tree, opened one of the two tall doors, and stepped out of the library, into the hall.
At last the phone stopped taunting him.
Fric glanced to his left, then to his right. He stood alone in the hall, yet the feeling of being watched had once more settled over him.
In the library, among the hundreds of tiny white lights strung like stars across the dark boughs of the evergreen, the angels sang silently, laughed silently, silently blew heralds’ horns, glimmered, glittered, hung from their halos or harps, dangled from their pierced wings, from their hands raised in blessing, from their necks, as if they had broken all the laws of Heaven and, executed in one great throng, had been condemned forever to this hangman’s tree.
CHAPTER 34
ETHAN DRANK SCOTCH WITHOUT EFFECT FOR his metabolism seemed to have been dramatically accelerated by the experience of his own death twice in one day.
This hotel bar, with its crowd of self-polished glitterati, was a favorite of Channing Manheim’s, a haunt from the early days of his career. In ordinary circumstances, however, Ethan would have chosen a joint without this flash, and with a comforting soaked-in-beer smell.
The few other bars familiar to him were frequented by off-duty cops. The prospect of running into an old friend from the force, on this evening of all evenings, daunted him.
During just one minute of conversation with any brother in the badge, regardless of how artfully Ethan tried to wear a happy face, he’d reveal himself to be deeply troubled. Then no self-respecting cop would be able to resist working him, either subtly or obviously, for the source of his worry.
Right now he didn’t want to talk about what had happened to him. He wanted to think about it.
Well, that wasn’t entirely true. He would have preferred denial to thought. Just forget it had happened. Turn away from it. Block the memory and get drunk.
Denial wasn’t an option, however, not with the three silvery bells from the ambulance glimmering on the bar beside his glass of Scotch. He might as well try to deny the existence of Big Foot with a Sasquatch sitting on his face.
So he had no choice but to dwell on what had happened, which led him immediately into an intellectual dead end. He not only didn’t know what to think about these weird events, he also didn’t know how to think about them.
Obviously he had not been shot in the gut by Rolf Reynerd. Yet he intuitively knew the lab report would confirm that the blood under his fingernails was his own.
The experience of being run down in traffic and broken beyond repair remained so vivid, his memory of paralysis so horrifically detailed, that he could not believe he had merely imagined all of it under the influence of a drug administered without his knowledge.
Ethan asked the bartender for another round, and as the Scotch splashed over fresh ice into a clean glass, he pointed to the bells and said, “You see these?”
“I love that old song,” the bartender said.
“What song?”
“‘Silver Bells.’”
“So you see them?”
The bartender cocked one eyebrow. “Yeah. A set of three little bells. How many sets do you see?”
Ethan’s mouth cracked into a smile that he hoped looked less demented than it felt. “Just one. Don’t worry. I’m not going to be a danger on the highway.”
“Really? Then you’re unique.”
Yeah, Ethan thought, I’m nothing if not unique. I’ve died twice today, but I’m still able to handle my booze, and he wondered how quickly the bartender would snatch the drink from him if he spoke those words aloud.
He sipped the Scotch, seeking clarity from inebriation, since he couldn’t find any clarity in sobriety.
Ten or fifteen minutes later, still cold sober, he caught sight of Dunny Whistler in the back-bar mirror.
Ethan spun on his stool, slopping Scotch from his glass.
Threading his way among the tables, Dunny had almost reached the door. He was not a ghost: A waitress paused to let him pass.
Ethan got to his feet, remembered the bells, snatched them off the bar, and hurried toward the exit.
Some patrons were visiting from table to table, standing in the aisles. Ethan had to resist the urge to shove them aside. His “Excuse me” had such a sharp edge that people bristled, but the expression on his face at once made them choke on their unvoiced reprimands.
By the time Ethan stepped out of the bar, Dunny had vanished.
Hurrying into the adjacent lobby, Ethan saw guests standing at the registration desk, others at the concierge desk, people walking toward the elevator alcove. Dunny wasn’t among them.
To Ethan’s left, the marble-clad lobby opened to an enormous drawing room furnished with sofas and armchairs. There, guests could attend high tea every afternoon; and at this later hour, drinks were being served to those who preferred an atmosphere gentler than that in the bar.
At a glance, Dunny Whistler couldn’t be seen among the crowd in the drawing room.
Nearer, to Ethan’s right, the revolving door at the hotel’s main entrance was slowly turning to a stop, as though someone had recently gone in or out, but its quadrants were deserted now.
He pushed through the door, into the night chill under the roof of the porte-cochere.
Sheltering their charges with umbrellas, the doorman and a busy squad of parking valets escorted visitors to and from arriving and departing vehicles. Cars, SUVs, and limousines jostled for position in the crowded hotel-service lanes.
Dunny wasn’t standing with those who were waiting for their cars. Nor did he appear to be hurrying through the downpour in the company of any of the escorts.
Several Mercedes in various dark colors idled among the other vehicles, but Ethan was pretty sure none of them was Dunny’s wheels.
The ring of his cell phone might not have been audible above the chatter of the people under the porte-cochere, the car engines, and the hiss and sizzle of the drizzling night. Set for a silent signal, however, it vibrated in a jacket pocket.
Still surveying the night for Dunny, he answered the phone.
Hazard Yancy said, “I’ve got to see you right now, man, and it’s got to be somewhere the elite don’t meet.”
CHAPTER 35
DUNNY TAKES THE HOTEL ELEVATOR UP TO THE fourth floor in the company of an elderly couple. They hold hands as though they are young lovers.
; Overhearing the word “anniversary,” Dunny asks how long they have been married.
“Fifty years,” the husband says, aglow with pride that his bride has chosen to spend most of her life with him.
They are from Scranton, Pennsylvania, here in Los Angeles to celebrate their anniversary with their daughter and her family. The daughter has paid for the hotel honeymoon suite, which is, according to the wife, “so fancy we’re afraid to sit on the furniture.”
From L.A., they’ll fly to Hawaii, just the two of them, for a romantic week-long idyll in the sun.
They are unaffected, sweet, clearly in love. They have built a life of the kind that Dunny for so long disdained, even mocked.
In recent years, he’s come to want their brand of happiness more than anything else. Their devotion and commitment to each other, the family they have built, the life of mutual striving, the memories of shared challenges and hard-won triumphs: Here is what matters, in the end, not the things that he has pursued with single-minded strategy and brutal tactics. Not power, not money, not thrills, not control.
He has tried to change, but he’s gone too far along a solitary road to be able to turn back and find the companionship for which he yearns. Hannah is five years gone. Only when she had been on her deathbed had he realized that she’d been the best chance he’d ever had of finding his way from the wrong road to the right one. As a young hothead, he had rejected her counsel, had believed that power and money were more important to him than she was. The shock of her early death forced him to face the hard truth that he’d been wrong.
Only on this strange, rainy day has he come to understand that she was also his last chance.
For a man who once believed that the world was clay from which he could make what he wished, Dunny has arrived at a difficult place. He has lost all power, for nothing he does now can change his life.
Of the money he withdrew from the wall safe in his study, he still has twenty thousand dollars. He could give ten of it to this elderly couple from Scranton, tell them to stay a full month in blue Hawaii, to dine well and drink well, with his blessings.
Or he could stop the elevator and kill them.
Neither act would change his future in any meaningful way.
He bitterly envies their happiness. There would be a certain savage satisfaction in robbing them of their remaining years.
Whatever else may be wrong with him—the list of his faults and corruptions is long—he can’t kill solely out of envy. Pride alone prevents him, more than mercy.
On the fourth floor, their accommodations are at the opposite end of the hotel from his. He wishes them well and watches them walk away, hand-in-hand.
Dunny is using the presidential suite. This grand space has been booked on a twelve-month basis by Typhon, who will not be needing it for the next few days, as business will take him elsewhere.
Presidential implies an understated democratic grandeur. These large rooms are so rich and so sensual, however, that they are less suitable for a steward of democracy than for royalty or demigods.
Inlaid marble floors, Oushak rugs in tones of gold and red and apricot and indigo, bubinga paneling soaring sixteen feet to coffered ceilings…
Dunny wanders room to room, moved by humanity’s desire to make beautiful its habitat and thereby bravely to deny that the roughness of the world must be endured. Every palace and every work of art is only dust as yet unrealized, and time is the patient wind that will wither it away. Nevertheless, men and women have given great thought, effort, and care to making these rooms appealing, because they hope, against all evidence, that their lives have meaning and that in their talents lies a purpose larger than themselves.
Until two years ago, Dunny never knew this hope. Three years of anguish over her loss, ironically, made him want to believe in God.
Gradually, during the years following her funeral, an unexpected hope grew in him, desperate and fragile but enduring. Yet he remains too much the old Dunny, mired in old habits of thought and action.
Hope is a cloudy radiance. He has not learned how to distill it into something pure, clear, more powerful.
And now he never will.
In the master bedroom, he stands at a rain-washed window, gazing northwest. Beyond the storm-blurred city lights, beyond the lushly landscaped and mansioned slopes of Beverly Hills, lies Bel Air and Palazzo Rospo, that foolish yet nonetheless brave monument to hope. All who ever owned it have died—or will.
He turns from the window and stares at the bed. The maid has removed the spread, turned down the sheets, and left a tiny gold box on one of the pillows.
The box holds four bonbons. Elegantly formed and decorated, they appear to be delicious, but he doesn’t sample them.
He could call any of several beautiful women to share the bed with him. Some would expect money; others would not. Among them are women for whom sex is an act of love and grace, but also women who revel in their own debasement. The choice is his, any tenderness or any thrill that he desires.
He cannot recall the taste of the oysters or the bouquet of the Pinot Grigio. The memory has no savor, offers less stimulation to his senses than might a photograph of oysters and wine.
None of the women he could call would leave a greater impression than the food and drink that, still settling in him, seems to be a meal imagined. The silken texture of their skin, the smell of their hair would not linger with him past the moment when, in leaving, they closed the door behind them.
He is like a man living through the night before doomsday, with full knowledge that the sun will go nova in the morning, yet unable to enjoy the precious pleasures of this world because all his energy is devoted to wishing desperately that the foreseen end will not, after all, come to pass.
CHAPTER 36
ETHAN AND HAZARD MET IN A CHURCH, FOR at this hour on a Monday night, the pews were empty, and no chance whatsoever existed that they would be seen here together by politicians, by members of the Officer Involved Shooting team, or by other authorities.
In the otherwise deserted nave, they sat side by side in a pew, near a side aisle where neither the overhead nor the footpath lights were aglow, veiled in shadows. The stale but pleasant spice of long-extinguished incense perfumed air as still as that in a sealed jar.
They spoke less in conspiratorial whispers than in the hushed voices of men humbled by awesome experience.
“So I told the OIS team I went to see Reynerd to ask about his friend Jerry Nemo, who happens to be a suspect in the murder of this coke peddler name of Carter Cook.”
“They believe you?” Ethan asked.
“They seem like they want to. But suppose tomorrow I get a lab report that superglues Blonde in the Pond to that city councilman I told you about.”
“That girl dumped in the sewage plant.”
“Yeah. So the bastard councilman will start looking for a way to get at me. If any guys on the OIS team can be bought or blackmailed, they’ll turn that homey hit man with the coke-spoon earring into a crippled choirboy who got shot in the back, and my mug will be on the front pages under the nine-letter headline.”
Ethan knew what the nine-letter headline would be—KILLER COP—because they had talked about the power of anti-cop prejudice over the years. When a dirty politician and the sensation-hungry press discovered a shared agenda in any case, truth was stretched tighter than the skin of any Hollywood dowager with four face-lifts, and the blindfold over Lady Justice’s eyes was ripped away and shoved into her mouth to shut her up.
Hazard hunched forward, forearms on his thighs, hands clasped almost as if in prayer, staring at the altar. “The media love this councilman. His rep is he’s a reformer, got all the right sympathies and positions on the issues. They ought to love me, too, ’cause I’m so lovable, but that crowd would rather cut off their lips than kiss a cop. If they see a chance to save him by crucifying me, every hardware store in the city will be sold out of nails.”
“I’m sorry I got you into this.”
>
“You couldn’t know some fool would whack Reynerd.” Hazard turned his gaze from the altar, and his eyes met Ethan’s as though searching for the Judas taint: “Could you?”
“Some ways this looks bad for me.”
“Some ways,” Hazard agreed. “But even you aren’t dumb enough to work for some movie-star asshole who settles business like he’s a rap-music mogul.”
“Manheim doesn’t know about Reynerd or the black boxes. And if he did know, he’d figure all Reynerd needed to improve his psychology was a little aromatherapy.”
“But there is something you’re not telling me,” Hazard pressed.
Ethan shook his head, but not in denial. “Oh, man, this has been one long day in a monkey barrel.”
“For one thing, Reynerd was sitting on his sofa between two bags of potato chips. Turns out he kept a loaded piece in each bag.”
“Yet when the shooter rang the bell, Reynerd answered the door unarmed.”
“Maybe ’cause he figured I was the true threat, and already through the door. My point is you were right about the potato chips.”
“Like I told you, a neighbor said he was paranoid, kept a pistol close to him, stashed it in odd places like that.”
“The talky neighbor—that’s bullshit,” Hazard said. “There was no talky neighbor. You knew some other way.”
They were at a crossroads of trust and suspicion. Unless Ethan spilled more than he had revealed thus far, Hazard wasn’t going to follow him one step farther. Their friendship would not be finished, but without greater disclosure, it would never be the same.
“You’re gonna think I’m mental,” Ethan said.
“Already do.”
Ethan inhaled more incense, exhaled inhibition, and told Hazard about being shot in the gut by Reynerd, opening his eyes to discover he wasn’t shot after all, and in the absence of a wound, nevertheless finding blood under his fingernails.
Throughout all this, Hazard’s eyes neither swam out of focus nor shifted toward some far point of the church, as they would have done if he’d decided that Ethan was either jiving or psychotic. Only when Ethan finished did Hazard look down at his folded hands again.