The Crooked Staircase

  She said, “Your brother’s flying in from D.C. on an FBI jet he commandeered for his work at the Department of Justice. He’ll land at Orange County airport, the private-plane terminal, at about ten-thirty tomorrow morning. One of your company’s limos will pick him up. Don’t deny it. Researching you, I hacked your company. I saw the booking for him. So what I want is…you pull your scheduled chauffeur off the job, and I’ll supply the driver.”

  He said, “No.”

  “No? You really think no is an option?”

  “Time comes, I’m gonna put a hand up your snatch and rip your guts out through it.”

  “So you skipped high-school biology, huh?”

  He sheathed his dagger eyes.

  “Anyway,” she said, “your hands are still in your pants. Find any little thing yet? Maybe if you think about punching your mother in the face, that’ll work better than Viagra.”

  He hated her too much to keep his eyes closed. The sight of her filled him with homicidal fantasies, one of his favorite forms of entertainment.

  From the breast pocket of her sport coat, Jane removed a microcassette recorder smaller than a pack of cigarettes. “Everything we said is on this.”

  “Why do I give a shit? I’m telling you, I’m wired into so much protection, the cops will shine my shoes if I ask.”

  “Maybe I know cops who don’t shine shoes. Cops or no cops, I’ll hand a copy of this to your mom, in another recorder, ready to play. She lives under her maiden name—Anabel Claridge—half the year on an estate in La Jolla, half on a waterfront estate in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. When I give it to her, I’ll suggest if she gets a gift box on Mother’s Day, she should call the bomb squad to open it.”

  Throughout their tête-à-tête, Simon’s complexion had been florid to one degree or another. Now he paled.

  “I could leave you like you are for the weekend,” Jane said, “and be in La Jolla in little more than an hour. Your mommy would be able to have a listen over and over again before you’d have a chance to explain yourself. Do you think you might get just a spanking, or do you maybe wish you had presidential-level security like the one of her four husbands who’s managed to stay alive?”

  He needed only a moment to consider the situation. “What’re you going to do to Booth?”

  “Just ask him a few questions.”

  “If you do anything to him, the biggest damn hurt you can imagine is gonna come down on you. I don’t know his world, what he does in it, and I don’t want to know. But he’s in with the biggest movers and shakers, and they look out for their own.”

  “I’m trembling.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m serious. You’re gonna be one sorry-ass bitch if you so much as muss his hair.”

  Jane got off the stool. As she explained how she expected him to assist her, she walked slowly twice around the mechanic’s sled, studying him as if he were some bizarre sea beast that she had found on the beach.

  When Jane was finished with her explanation, Simon said, “I need to piss.”

  “This theater,” she said, “is the swankiest urinal in California.”

  48

  In the garage, to the left of the workbench, stood a sixteen-foot-long bank of seven-foot-tall cabinets, a single built-in unit with four doors. Behind the first three doors were shelves stocked with parts and supplies for the repair and maintenance of Simon’s car collection. Behind the fourth, an empty space without shelves offered only a pole near the top from which coveralls and other garments might be hung, though nothing hung there now.

  Jane stepped in front of the open door adjacent to the empty unit. In her right hand she held a plastic thumb-size electronic-key blind-stamped with the word HID, the initials of the company that had provided it. She’d found the key in Simon’s desk, just where he had promised it would be. Holding it at arm’s length, she pointed it at the cornice rail of the cabinet, above the open door, and moved it left to right until a single beep signified that a code reader had approved the key. A series of concealed lock bolts clacked open, and the side walls of the cabinet whisked pneumatically out of the way, to the left, taking with them the loaded shelves, which now filled the previously empty fourth unit as if they had always been there.

  When Jane stepped into the now empty third space, her weight triggered a lock release, and the back wall of the cabinet—inch-thick steel clad in wood—whisked to the right, revealing a walk-in safe about fourteen feet from front to back and twenty feet from side to side. Overhead lights brightened automatically as she entered the vault.

  Three walls were lined with two-foot-deep shelves, and in the center of the space stood an eight-foot-square work island with a stainless-steel top. Some of the shelves were unused, but others held cardboard file boxes, guns, ammunition, cartons containing she knew not what, and the two high-end four-inch-deep titanium-alloy attaché cases stored where Simon had said they would be.

  She put the cases on the work island and opened them using the combination locks. Each contained banded ten-thousand-dollar stacks of hundred-dollar bills, each bundle vacuum-packed in waterproof plastic using a FoodSaver sealing appliance.

  In weeks past, she’d invaded a few homes of the self-described Arcadians and always found cash, on average two hundred thousand per residence. Usually there were forged passports as well, in a variety of names, and credit cards to match.

  Considering that they were people of extreme arrogance who saw themselves as the rightful makers and rulers of a brave new world in which they could murder those whom they deemed bad influences on the culture and enslave hundreds of thousands if not millions of others with nanomachine brain implants, Jane found it telling that they all took the precaution of squirreling away the cash and credentials to support a hasty exit from the country, to get them to wherever they had secreted fortunes to sustain them in the aftermath of failure. Under the egoism that armored them, beneath the layers of pride and conceit and disdain, at the center of the rotten fruit that was their hateful conviction, nestled a seed of doubt.

  Simon Yegg apparently wasn’t one of the Arcadians. He didn’t resort to noble talk about saving civilization as a justification for using people. He just ruthlessly used them. Maybe intuition warned him that the consequences of his actions required that he be prepared to flee the authorities in some crisis. Or maybe his half brother had hinted at possible ugly consequences of the work in which he was involved. For whatever reason, Simon had stashed passports and other forged ID in each attaché, and he’d set aside more get-out-of-Dodge cash than any Arcadian: $480,000, half in each titanium case.

  49

  With Sanjay Shukla strapped in it, Carter Jergen turns the dinette chair off its side and tips it up onto four feet once more. He spends the next two hours alternately using his laptop to scout possible Caribbean vacations and studying the young writer, who sits in wet-eyed silence when he isn’t weeping. The tears seem excessive, but perhaps a successful writer must be more sensitive than makes sense to a nonwriter. Growing bored with the Caribbean, Jergen opens himself to a more exotic getaway in the South Pacific and begins to investigate Tahiti.

  At last Radley Dubose returns with Tanuja. After what must have been a vigorous workout, the big man ought to appear sated, a little loose in the joints, his eyes heavy-lidded, his face softer in the afterglow of such a release. But Dubose looks as edgy as ever and remains darkly energized, still the West Virginia golem that he has always been, as if shaped from mud, invoked with life by some ill-advised ceremony, and sent forth on a mission of revenge.

  The girl seems weary but not broken. Her hair is in disarray, one sleeve ripped off her T-shirt, the collar torn along the stitch line. When leading her to a seat at the table, Dubose jerks too hard on her leash. In a furious silence, she pivots to him and strikes his massive chest with her fists, tries for his face but fails to land a blow there. He grabs her by the neck, jams her in the chair, an
d ties her leash to the stretcher bar.

  For his part, Dubose is amused by Tanuja’s rebellion. He seldom either laughs or smiles, and now his amusement is conveyed to Jergen only by raised eyebrows and a shake of the head. He leans against the counter by the sink and fishes the half-finished hand-rolled cigarette from his jacket pocket. He preps the joint and fires it and takes a deep drag, staring into space as he did before the idea of doing the girl began to be irresistible.

  Now that Tanuja is seated within the candlelight, Jergen sees that her lower lip is swollen, blood coagulated in one split corner.

  When she speaks to her brother, however, her speech is not thick from the injury. Softly and with grave tenderness, she says, “Sanjay? Chotti bhai…?”

  He cannot look at her. He sits with his head bowed, and when she says chotti bhai, whatever that means, his weeping, which has recently been quiet, becomes a wretched sobbing.

  “Chotti bhai,” she repeats, “it’s all right.”

  “No,” Sanjay says. “Oh, God, no.”

  “Look at me. You have no blame,” she says. When he can’t bear to face her, she says what sounds like “Peri pauna.”

  This so affects Sanjay that he gasps and looks up at her and says, “Bhenji, no. I don’t deserve your respect or anyone’s.”

  “Peri pauna,” she insists.

  Curious, Jergen says, “What does that mean—peri pauna?”

  The girl turns her head to stare at him, and though she is shackled to the chair, the ferocity in her eyes and the loathing in her voice chill Jergen when she says, “Go fuck yourself, you disgusting pig.”

  This elicits a small laugh from Dubose, and though the chill lingers in Jergen’s bones, he smiles and nods and says, “Indulge yourself in a little rebellion.” He consults his wristwatch. “You don’t have much more time for it.”

  50

  Earlier, leaving Simon Yegg firmly bound at the foot of the stage, Jane had rolled Petra Quist out of the theater and into the lobby once more. Although the girl had not wet herself, she no longer professed an urgent need to pee. She hadn’t been voluble and challenging as before, but reserved, taciturn. And sober.

  Now Jane returned with a black-and-yellow four-wheeled Rimowa suitcase that she had taken the liberty of packing with a couple changes of clothes and what she thought were the essential items from Petra’s share of the master-bathroom drawers. She stood it by the candy counter. She also brought a pair of sneakers, socks, jeans, a sweater, a leather jacket, and Petra’s purse, all of which she put in the half bath adjacent to the lobby, so that the girl could dress in more practical gear for what might lie ahead.

  Jane brought as well one of the titanium attaché cases that contained $240,000. She placed it on the upholstered bench in front of the office chair to which Petra remained shackled.

  She would keep the second case. The quest for truth upon which she had embarked was also a kind of war, and wars were expensive.

  She sat on the bench beside that treasure.

  In the short and sleeveless dress, Petra still appeared to be all long legs and slender arms, but she did not, as before, evoke thoughts of fashion models and party girls. Her powerful sexuality—bestowed so generously on her by nature, which she so diligently maintained and enhanced—had for the moment ebbed. Time seemed to have carried her backward through its forward flow, washing from her all iniquitous experience and corruption, so that she had become a gangling, awkward child.

  She sat with head half-bowed, eyes open but perhaps seeing some memory of another time and place. A bluish bruise shadowed the line of her jaw on the right side of her face and half her chin, no doubt a result of the blow she’d taken from Jane’s forearm when she’d been jammed against the refrigerator in the kitchen.

  “Some people,” Jane said, “will tell you Simon is a vicious swine, a woman hater, a sleazy thief, a self-absorbed narcissist, and they’re half-right. He’s all those things, but he’s something worse.”

  Petra said nothing.

  “He’s one of those dangerous people that we call sociopaths. He fakes being human, because he lacks all the emotions you and I feel. He cares only about himself, and if he felt he could get away with it, he would commit any atrocity you can imagine, without remorse.”

  There seemed to be no anger in this girl, no bitterness arising from how dismissively Simon had spoken of her. Rather, she appeared to be shaken by the realization of how naïve she had been. Perhaps she thought it not possible to imagine a way forward. Events had unmoored her. She must feel adrift.

  “Some believe sociopaths are born that way,” Jane said, “and others believe they’re made that way by dreadful parenting. Nature or nurture. I think it’s both. Some are born that way, and some are made. In Simon’s case, I suspect he was born sociopathic, the son of a sociopathic mother—and then made worse by her. Now he knows you told me stuff about him that he didn’t want known. If I turn him loose after this thing with his brother is done, and if you’re still where he can find you, he will kill you, Petra. And he will make it a very hard death.”

  After a silence, the girl met Jane’s eyes. “Do you think it’s true what he said about Felicity and Chandra and them?”

  “Felicity and Chandra who?”

  “My crew, you know, my girlfriends. He said if I go missing, like, in a month they won’t remember my name. That’s shit for sure—don’t you think?”

  Jane considered her words carefully. “Remember your name? Of course they will. Miss the free limo, yes. And I bet you buy a lot more drinks for them than they buy for you, so they’ll miss that. But care that you’re gone? What do you think?”

  Petra broke eye contact. Glanced at the door to the theater.

  “Sweetie,” Jane said, “it’s not that you aren’t memorable. God knows, you’d be hard to forget. But tell me true…if one of them dropped out of your crew and just went away, would you care?”

  The girl opened her mouth to respond, frowned, said nothing.

  “A life of superficial pleasures can be exciting, a lot of fun, even thrilling. For a while. But if you party every day, they soon aren’t parties anymore. They’re desperation. And if all you do with your friends is party—then your friends are really strangers.”

  Petra closed her eyes and hung her head, perhaps thinking about what might have been, what had been, and to what end her twenty-six years now pointed.

  She whispered, “Where do I go from here?”

  “I don’t know. And no one can tell you where. You’ve got to find the way yourself. But this may help.”

  The sound of the latches opening on the attaché case raised Petra’s head and opened her eyes.

  “It’s nearly a quarter of a million dollars,” Jane said.

  Regarding the cash with a solemnity that defied interpretation, the girl at last said, “What if all that money…undoes me?”

  “Simon’s not going to report it stolen.”

  “No, I mean what if I take it and…slide back into all the usual shit, not with Simon but with some other guy?”

  “If you can ask that question, then you probably won’t slide.”

  “No guarantee, though.”

  “Life doesn’t come with one.” Jane closed the case.

  From her tote bag, she removed a pair of scissors. She cut the zip-tie binding the captive’s right wrist to the arm of the chair.

  “I’m not your enemy, never was. Now that you’re not drunk, I’m counting on you to remember that.” She gave the scissors to Petra. “Just the same, I’ll move back a ways while you free yourself. Use the half bath to freshen up and change clothes. I’ll wait.”

  As the girl cut the plastic strap on her left wrist and then leaned forward to feel under the chair for the ties that bound her ankles, she said, “That stuff about their mother made me half-sick, you know? I feel dirty if I was lik
e her to him. Is the brother that twisted?”

  “You don’t want to know about the brother,” Jane said.

  Getting up from the chair, putting the scissors on the bench beside the attaché case, Petra appeared unsteady, muscles cramped. “I guess I don’t want to know your name, either.”

  “You’ve got that right.”

  51

  In the church kitchen, the silence of grief and the stillness of dread, the brother’s guilt and the sister’s forgiveness no longer spoken but palpable, two of the three dwindling candles guttering in their glasses, flames twisting and leaping as if to take flight from their wicks and morph into butterflies, lambent light and rippling shadows tattooing ever-changing patterns across the faces of the twins, faces as spectral as any appearing in a séance…

  As if he is the Last Judgment embodied in a dark and fierce form, Radley Dubose comes to the table and speaks to Carter Jergen. “It might have happened by now. Let’s try the trigger and be done with them if we can.”

  Those adjusted persons injected with previous iterations of the command mechanism have been accessed and controlled by the phrase Play Manchurian with me, a reference to the famous 1959 novel by Richard Condon, a thriller about brainwashing. That was a little joke of Dr. Bertold Shenneck’s, the recently deceased genius behind this application of nanotechnology.

  Jane Hawk has learned that unlocking sentence. Therefore, all the adjusted people thus controlled are being reprogrammed as quickly as possible. For new conversions, a fresh set of triggering words is installed with the latest generation of the command mechanism.

  From across the table, Jergen regards the twins and says, “Uncle Ira is not Uncle Ira.”