Grimes said, “Lenna never looked for you because she thought you were dead. Faroe ordered that you be killed.”
“As a baby?”
Ella asked as if this were inconceivable. Grimes knew she wouldn’t have been the first child to die for that reason; he didn’t say so. He nodded.
“Faroe believed that you had been killed. So did Lenna. It wasn’t until yesterday she found out you were still alive.”
Ella took this in and thought about it amid the roar of the propeller for a long time. Then, unconsciously, she wrapped her arms around herself.
“It was Charlie—Clarence Jefferson—who took me away, wasn’t it?”
Grimes nodded.
“Was it him that was meant to kill me?”
“Yes.”
Ella stared at the floor, hugging herself, as she put the picture together.
Then she asked, “So Jefferson never told Lenna that I was alive.”
“No, he didn’t,” replied Grimes. “I can’t tell you why. Clarence Jefferson marches to a different drum than the rest of us.”
“And the secret place where I was born, where was it?”
Grimes felt a sudden dread of telling her. She saw it in his eyes.
“I have a right to know, don’t I?” said Ella.
“You were born in what Lenna calls the Stone House.”
“Where we’re going now.”
“I figure that’s where Faroe will hold Lenna.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because Lenna turned it into a jail and kept him prisoner there for thirteen years.”
Ella searched his eyes. She seemed bewildered. Then, as if seeing something open out before her, she said, “It’s like a tiger chasing its tail, on and on until it eats itself.”
Grimes nodded. He had no right to judge any of them, and he did not.
“Can we stop it?” asked Ella.
“Faroe’s got a lot of hate inside him,” said Grimes. “It won’t be over until he’s dead. That’s down to us.”
“Won’t that make us part of the tiger too?”
“When I got into this deal I told myself I wouldn’t do anything out of hatred, that I’d only do what needed to be done.”
He looked down at the tarp -wrapped body on the floor.
“That’s the only answer I can give you.”
They sat in silence for a moment and Grimes waited for the question she hadn’t asked yet but would have to.
“My father—Wes Clay …” It was hard for her. “He’s dead, right?”
“Yes.”
“Did Clarence Jefferson kill him?”
“No.” Grimes shook his head. It wasn’t that simple, but what did it matter? “No. Faroe killed Wes Clay himself.”
Ella said, “Thank you for telling me.”
Grimes sensed that she wanted to be alone. He stood up.
“I better go talk to Oates, figure out how to get to Lenna,” said Grimes. “Will you look after Gul for me?”
Ella put her arms out to Gul and he went to her.
Grimes climbed forward into the copilot’s seat. Titus Oates sat massively at the controls, as if this was where he most liked to be.
“Did I happen to tell you, Doc, that I’m thinking of converting to Islam?”
Grimes sat down next to him. “No, I don’t think you did.”
“I’ve been studying the Koran. It’s one fuck-off heavy-duty religion, man. And, you know, you get to wear those neat hats and choose a cool name for yourself.”
“I wish you luck,” said Grimes. He tried to broach the issue at hand. “How far are we from New Orleans?”
“Twenty-five minutes.”
Grimes said, “I’m already in your debt, Titus …”
“Balls, man.”
“I’m going to ask you for something more.”
“Shoot.”
“The people who killed my father,” began Grimes. He swallowed. “They’ve got Lenna and they’re going to hurt her, badly. Ella is Lenna’s daughter.”
Titus Oates turned his hairy, beefed-up face toward him. Behind the beard his face was that of a deranged cherub. He twisted in his seat and looked back at Ella where she sat listening to them. His expression darkened.
“Mmm,” said Oates.
From the breast pocket of his jacket Oates pulled out a thick joint. He put it in his mouth, lit it with a Zippo and inhaled deeply. He held it in until his face started to turn purple, then let out his breath with a gasp.
“Christ. Alaskan hydroponic. I’d tell you guys to toke it up but I wouldn’t want to be responsible.”
Oates inhaled again and spoke without letting any of the smoke escape.
“You got any large-caliber firearms?”
“We’ve got two pistols,” said Grimes.
Oates grunted as if this was unlikely to fit the bill.
“So pitch me the bottom line,” said Oates.
“The bottom line,” said Grimes, “is that I need to know if you have an especially deep attachment to this plane of yours.”
“This is a 1967 De Havilland Beaver, man. The last of the independents.”
“I know.”
“Mmm,” said Titus Oates.
This time he sounded like Gul. He took another toke of his joint.
“Maybe you guys better tell me exactly what’s involved.”
TWENTY-NINE
THE SQUAT GRAY BOX stood brooding against a landscape of unimpaired blackness. Its walls were bare of windows or any other feature. From the glass panes set into its roof two broad shafts of blue-white light struck upward into the sky. Paradoxically, the effect of the roof lights was to heighten the sense that this was a place of mystery, where acts private, or obscene, might occur in perfect concealment.
Lenna had never seen the Stone House in darkness before; only in daylight. It was she who had built it, this place of concealment—for acts both private and obscene—and perhaps it was that thought more than any other that chilled her now.
“Here we are, Magdalena,” said Filmore Faroe, behind her. “Welcome home.”
Lenna didn’t turn. Whatever was inscribed on her face, she didn’t want Faroe to see it. She stood with her back to the chopper, and to Faroe and Herrera and his men. Lying motionless in the yard before her—his left wrist shackled to his right ankle by a length of chain—lay Clarence Jefferson. Lenna’s handcuffs had been removed. She looked down at Jefferson.
At regular intervals, beginning with his capture at the farm, Jefferson had been beaten, by the rifle butts and boots of Atwater’s thugs, into a sack of raw meat. Jefferson had borne it without a sound. Lenna could not see him breathing. As she looked at his mutilated form she no longer felt the malice—or the self-disgust—that had bound her to him for so long. She felt pity. Suddenly the blade of her pity pierced her to the hilt, and its sharpness shocked her and she gasped, and she realized that amid all the torment she had carried on the shoulders of her hate, she had felt nothing so agonizing, or so welcome, as this pain—this pity—lancing through her now. For it freed her.
Her hate was gone.
She searched inside and she couldn’t find it.
It was gone. It had slipped away without her knowing. Since giving herself up to Atwater she had been filled only with one sense, one feeling, one all-fulfilling image: Ella’s face looking into her eyes and saying “I will take it away for you. And I’ll make it mine.” That was when her chains had melted into air. Her heart was no longer of stone; it felt as fragile and open as a newborn child’s. She was able to look upon Clarence Jefferson with pity and more than that—she made herself admit it even though it shamed her—she looked on him with love, architect though he was of so much that had harmed her.
She heard Herrera say, “What do you want us to do with that one?”
Faroe replied, “Put him where his stink won’t bother anyone.”
Two of Herrera’s men stepped past her, rifles slung. Each grabbed one of Jefferson’s feet and dragge
d him away across the tarmacadamed yard toward the Jessups’ place. Faroe appeared beside her. She didn’t look at him. He held his forearm out.
“May I?” said Faroe.
Still avoiding his face, Lenna put her hand on his arm. Together they walked to the damaged steel doors of the Stone House and went inside.
As they passed among the crates and through the antechamber Lenna felt a rising thud in her chest. Inside the main chamber the fluorescent lights were white and lifeless. Beyond the wall of steel bars stood the original Stone House, the true Stone House: the wooden shack that she had transplanted so perfecdy, and so eerily, into this enclosing jail. They entered the cage. Their footsteps clacked on the tiled floor. When Lenna stopped before the age-warped doorway of the shack, she discovered, here at the last, that she was no longer afraid to walk inside.
Inside the single room of the shack no lights burned. Three steps led up from where she stood to the platform upon which the shack was lodged. At the top of the steps a door hung open from its leather hinges onto the shadows within. Lenna had not been inside the shack since the night, twenty years before, when she had dragged herself from its bloody interior and screamed herself unconscious in the rain. Only in her dreams had she dared go back inside, and then always unwillingly, and always to lose herself in a blur of horror too unbearable to remember. Faroe, in bringing her here, no doubt imagined he inflicted on her something ofthat horror; but he was wrong. Now it was just a sharecropper’s tin-roofed shack, where she would finally complete the circle around whose circumference she had toiled for so long. She wanted to go inside.
She turned and looked into the eyes of Filmore Faroe.
He stood at her right elbow, and as he saw the look on her face he smiled. Probably, he thought he saw fear. But Lenna wasn’t afraid. Death she did not fear; she had wished for it too many times. Anything Faroe could do to her she could endure, now that she had that image in her mind. Ella was safe and Faroe knew nothing of her existence. And Ella knew that Lenna loved her. Nothing else mattered. Let Faroe believe what he would.
So Lenna looked at him: and felt nothing.
She saw a bloated, spindle-limbed wretch who had shaved his head to impress his mercenaries. She saw the specter of a man once fine, now grinding his teeth behind his smile, infected by the rage that would torture and enslave him forever. She saw a broken king, scrabbling amid the ruins for a worthless crown. She felt no pity for him; and certainly not the love she had never known before; but neither did she hate him anymore. She knew, now, that something in her wiser than herself had waited for this moment. That was why she’d never killed him. If she had she would never have been free. His death would have condemned her hatred to an eternal life; as Faroe would now condemn himself.
Lenna said, “What would you like to do, Fil?”
The calmness in her voice seemed to disappoint him. He held his hand out toward the shack.
“We’re going inside, Magdalena. Just you and I.”
Lenna mounted the steps. At the doorway she paused and listened. She heard rain falling on the roof. She heard her own panting cries. She felt a contraction in her belly. Then she heard sounds she’d been too afraid to remember since first she’d heard them: the first cries of a life. The cries had been exiled to a lost territorium whose ground she had not dared tread; now they returned. Along with the face of Ella the young woman—and her eyes and the touch of her hand—the remembered cries of Ella the baby would keep Lenna company throughout whatever was to come. Lenna stepped through the door into the shack.
By the light falling through the door and windows she could see that the shack was just as she remembered it. A bed covered with crumpled sheets, a dresser, a table and chairs, even, at one end, an iron stove. The bloodstains were still there too, dashed across the walls and floor, drained by age to a faded pallor, yet at the same time dark as sin. Lenna walked over and sat at the table. Faroe stepped tentatively through the door. He saw her watching him and blinked and then he sneered and walked toward her.
“Did you ever come in here, Fil?” she asked. “When you were resident?”
“I don’t remember,” said Faroe.
He sat down opposite her.
“So, are you going to keep me here forever, Fil?” she said.
“No,” said Faroe. “Only until the trial.”
“The trial?”
Faroe said, “When I’m stronger, when I’m ready to take my place again, I’m going to turn you over to the authorities. You’ll be tried by the law for all that you did to me. A woman who joined forces with a corrupt police captain to steal her husband’s fortune. I don’t think the jury will have too much difficulty reaching a verdict.”
“And the murders you’re guilty of?” said Lenna.
“You mean the nurse and the doctor? There were never any records of their existence. And Wes Clay? That sorry tap-dancing nigger? Magdalena, please.”
He smiled at the pain she must have shown him.
“No, no. I don’t think there need be any public discussion of those regrettable events. Do you?”
“I’ll take whatever I’ve got coming,” said Lenna, “but when the questions are asked I’ll tell the truth.”
“That would cause me an embarrassment I could live with but which I’d rather avoid. I believe that you would too. After all, don’t you have your daughter’s feelings to protect?”
Lenna felt her throat and face go numb.
“You might consider her safety, too,” added Faroe.
Lenna stared at him without speaking. Her mind seemed blank. All she could think was: he knows about Ella.
“You look unwell,” said Faroe.
From his pocket he took a sheet of paper. As he unfolded it, she saw what it was. Clarence Jefferson’s letter. Lenna felt nauseous. She closed her eyes. The night before. The conversation with Grimes. The blue dress. The sleeping pills. Bobby Frechette waking her. The black suit. Then Bobby dead, Faroe coming through the door. She’d left the letter in her bedroom, in the dress. There’d been too much confusion, she’d … She stopped the shrieking excuses. The letter. Jefferson hadn’t mentioned Ella’s name. She’d had to ask Grimes for Ella’s name. She was certain ofthat. She remembered. She opened her eyes. Faroe sat across the table savoring her distress.
“I have to hand it to the Captain,” said Faroe. “He is a piece of work.”
He waved the letter.
“He doesn’t mention the name of this black nigger offspring of yours, but if we made a public appeal at the trial, I’m sure she’s the sort of person who would come forward to help her mother.”
Lenna found herself overbreathing. Her body felt rigid. She forced herself to take a single deep breath. She found her voice.
“I’ll do and say anything you want,” she said.
“Of course you will.”
Faroe carefully folded the letter back into his pocket.
“You know, my memory is not quite my own at the moment,” he said. “In here I lived with fantasies and dreams. So tell me, did I ever strike you, Magdalena, that is, physically? The truth, now.”
Lenna shook her head. “No. You never did.”
“I often imagined, here in your Stone House, that it might be satisfying to do so.”
Lenna said, “Then why don’t you?”
Faroe punched her in the mouth. Her head spun but the punch was weak. She felt her lip swelling. She was stronger than him, she knew. She could probably overpower him. Could she strangle him before his bodyguards arrived? Probably not. She would have to take it. Until she knew more she would have to take it. She sat in the chair and looked at him with disgust.
“I was right,” said Faroe. “It feels good.”
The sound of feet mounting the steps came through the door. Her-rera appeared, holding a phone in his hand.
“Mr. Faroe, sir?”
Faroe turned and snapped, “What?”
Herrera raised the phone. “It’s Atwater. Some kind of trouble at the hou
se.”
“Trouble?” said Faroe.
Lenna’s nerves screamed. She tried to calm herself. It wasn’t possible that the trouble had anything to do with Ella. She was too far away. She was safe. Lenna’s only function was to keep her that way, to keep her from harm. She couldn’t let her daughter be killed again.
Herrera said. “Mr. Atwater insists he talk with you. He sounds hysterical. Or maybe drunk.”
“Deal with it,” said Faroe.
“Sir?”
Faroe stood up. “Deal with it. I want you here. Send the helicopter with some men. Do your job.”
Herrera saluted and disappeared.
Filmore Faroe turned back to Lenna.
“Stand up,” he said.
Lenna stood up.
Faroe said, “It’s strange, you know, the things one clings to, to keep oneself alive. Do you remember, Magdalena, the rhyme that kept me company during my exile? That little child’s nursery rhyme?”
Lenna saw in his watery eyes, swimming about and containing the inner core of malice and anger, the massive horror she had inflicted on him and which Faroe had endured. She did not look away from it. She had done what she had done.
Faroe said, “For want of a nail, the shoe was lost.”
Faroe punched her in the stomach and she jackknifed forward. This blow was stronger, more confident than the first. Faroe pulled her back upright. This time he whispered.
“For want of a shoe, the horse was lost.”
Faroe doubled his fist and hit her, again in the belly. Lenna fell to her knees. She heard his voice above her. This time he screamed.
“For want of a horse the rider was lost.”
THIRTY
RUFUS ATWATER was mildly drunk. He was sitting in Filmore Faroe’s study in the CEO’s chair with his feet crossed on the desk and a glass of champagne in his hand and the bottle in an ice bucket on the floor. The champagne was old and French, and for the first time in his life Atwater understood why people made such a fuss over it and paid through the nose. He took another sip. He had also learned that you drank the stuff from tall, curvy, narrow glasses, not from those wide flat-topped deals they always used in Cary Grant movies. From now on this was the way it was going to be. No more stinking junkies vomiting on his shoes and begging for the methadone program. No more rape victims changing their minds about testifying a day before trial and fucking up his case. No more listening to the D.A. chew him out. He had brought home the grand slam: Lenna Parillaud, the suitcases of political plutonium and, as a little bonus, Captain Clarence Jefferson himself. Mr. Filmore Faroe was mightily pleased. Only Dr. Grimes had escaped the net, but Faroe’s arm was long. No: Rufus Atwater’s arm was long. Now, Atwater was Faroe’s right hand. Grimes was a dead pigeon, like his psycho old man. Atwater took another slug of bubbly.