The Crooked Staircase

  As his sister exited the passenger door, Sanjay looked up at the sky, wondering. If someone knew the registration number of this vehicle and therefore was able to obtain the unique signal that its locater broadcast as part of its navigation system, could that someone find them? Did the vehicle’s transponder continue to transmit even when the engine was off? Could a satellite serving their navigation system “see” them by that transmission, and could their GPS be switched on remotely to taunt them? He didn’t know the answers. But the glowing screen in the dashboard seemed to say, You can’t hide.

  He heard an engine in the distance. More than one.

  Tanuja looked at him across the hood of the SUV. “Sanjay?”

  As the engine noise grew louder, he hurried around the front of the Hyundai and grabbed his sister’s hand. “Run!”

  15

  The cool air carried on it an astringent chemical odor, and under that a fainter and less pleasant organic smell on which Jane chose not to dwell.

  The slightly tilted stainless-steel table with blood gutters had been used and methodically scrubbed clean. It stood empty now, as was the clear-plastic collection reservoir under it.

  The decedent had been transferred to a second steel slab, this one without gutters, where he lay naked under a white shroud that exposed only his neck and head, and one arm that had slipped out from under the sheet and hung off the table. The hard, pitiless light rendered every enlarged pore as a crater, every wrinkle as a crevasse, so that his pale face had the texture and contours of a track of desert tortured by heat, eroding wind, and tectonic forces. He would look much better in the morning, after the esthetician had painted a semblance of life and an illusion of sleep over his grim features.

  Attached to the foot of the table was a file holder. She found a photograph of the deceased as he had been when alive and healthy, a guide for the esthetician. His name was on the back of the photo: Kenneth Eugene Conklin.

  She returned the file to the holder and placed a call with her disposable phone.

  In a viewing room upstairs in the funeral home, the proprietor answered. “Gilberto Mendez.”

  “You once said you’d die for my husband if it came to that. No need to die, he beat you to it, but I could use a little help.”

  “My God, where are you?”

  “Keeping company with Kenneth Conklin.”

  “I don’t believe this.”

  “I’d put him on the line to vouch for me, but Ken’s in a funk.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  When Gilberto came through the door a minute later, dressed in a black suit and white shirt and black tie, he looked twenty pounds heavier than he’d been two years earlier, but still in good shape. He had a round, brown, pleasant face. His wife, Carmella, called it a gingerbread man’s face. At thirty-six, with receding hair, he’d begun to resemble the father from whom he’d inherited the business.

  Closing the door behind him, referring to Jane’s jet-black hair and dark eyes, he said, “You aren’t you at all.”

  “It’s just a wig, colored contacts, and attitude.”

  “Well, you’ve always had attitude.”

  He came to the farther side of the table, the dead man between them, and Jane said, “How’re you doing, Gilberto?”

  “Happier than I deserve to be.”

  “Makes me feel good just to hear that.”

  “We’re having our fourth baby in June.”

  “Another girl?”

  “A boy. God help him, with three older sisters.”

  “Like having three guardian angels.”

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  Jane indicated the graven face of the man on the table. “At your dad’s funeral two years ago, you said you were going to sell the business.”

  When Gilberto smiled, he looked boyish, sweet. Even then, his eyes were the saddest Jane had ever seen.

  “I joined the Marines to escape this,” Gilberto said. “But the way it turned out, this work is a calling, not just a business. My dad said what it’s about, above all else, is preserving the dignity of the dead, about not letting death rob them of it. That didn’t make sense to me then. After I’d been to war, it did.”

  With tenderness, as if he were a nurse and the decedent a sick friend, he lifted the uncovered arm onto the table and pulled the shroud over it.

  He said, “Nick never would’ve killed himself.”

  “He didn’t.”

  “So this mess you’re in, it’s because you want the truth.”

  “I’ve learned the truth about Nick. It’s way beyond that now.”

  “The things they say about you on the news—murder, selling national secrets, treason—no one who knows you would believe it.”

  “There’s not much news in the news anymore. The lies they tell don’t leave a lot of time for the facts about anything.”

  “Whose rocks did you overturn?”

  She said, “Some of them are in government, some in private industry. They play a lot of the media like so many harmonicas.”

  From the moment Gilberto had mentioned Carmella’s pregnancy, Jane had not been able to stop thinking about the wife, the three young daughters, and the boy waiting to be born.

  She said, “You’ve got so many responsibilities. I never should have come here. I better go.”

  In a quiet voice, almost a murmur, suited to conversation with grieving loved ones in the viewing rooms on the main floor, he said, “How’s your boy, how’s Travis?”

  After a silence, she said, “He’s struggling with the loss of Nick. But he’s safe, hidden away with people who care about him.”

  “It’s necessary to hide him, is it?”

  “To stop me from investigating all this, they threatened to kill him. But they’ll never get their hands on him. Never.”

  When Jane picked up her tote bag to leave, Gilberto said, “Why do you think semper fi doesn’t mean anything to me anymore?”

  “That’s not what I think, Gilberto.”

  “Always faithful means always faithful, not just when it’s convenient.”

  “Family first,” she said. “Be faithful to your family.”

  “Nick was family. Like a brother. I wouldn’t be here today if not for him. Makes you family, too. Put down the tote. Respect me enough to tell me what you need from me. If it’s too damn crazy, if it’s jumping off a cliff, I’ll say no.”

  She did not put down the tote bag. “I was going to ask you to pose as a chauffeur and drive a car.”

  “What else?”

  “We’d be kidnapping this creep who works in the Department of Justice. My only remaining lead. He surfaced in the attack that killed the governor of Minnesota last week. I learned he’s coming here when I back-doored the computer of his brother’s limo company. He has information I’m going to have to break him to get, but I don’t need you for that. You pick him up as if you’re his assigned chauffeur, you drive him to me, you leave. That’s it—if all goes well. Which maybe it won’t.”

  He said, “I’m a good driver. Never had a ticket.”

  “Kidnapping, Gilberto. They put you away for a long time.”

  “I’ll just be driving. Playing a chauffeur—a piece of cake. Part of what I already do is be a chauffeur. I drive the hearse.”

  16

  The California live oaks didn’t grow close enough together to constitute a forest, but their crowns were of such immense diameter that across the vale and up a long slope, the figuration of their massive limbs arched over Tanuja and Sanjay like the vaulted ceiling of some elaborate nature-built cathedral in which the god Pan might come upon them, goat-legged and horned, playing his panpipes.

  But as they hurried away from Honeydale Stables, the closest thing to music was the singing of countless tree frogs that, in Tanuja’s estimation, wa
s ominous as never before. Such frogs always celebrated following a rainstorm, but they were acutely aware of intruders in their realm and fell silent during the passage of any human being. This chorus, an almost frenzied jubilation and not once interrupted, seemed to suggest that nature and her creatures knew that the Shukla twins were so soon to be dead that they were already hardly more than spirits and of no concern.

  The blessing of a writer’s imagination was also a curse.

  With only wild grass and no deep brush to hamper them, on terrain presenting no foot-twisting fissures, they were restrained from a flat-out run only by the darkness and the fear of falling off an unseen edge. They reached the top of the ridge in good time and paused and looked back to the south, high enough to see over the trees. For a long moment, gasping for breath, they stared at two sets of headlights in the distance, neither pair of beams currently on the move, both focused on what must have been the Hyundai Santa Fe Sport that they had abandoned.

  “Who are they?” she wondered.

  “Not just sheriff’s deputies. Someone bigger wants us.”

  “Bigger who? Wants us for what?”

  “Damn if I know, Tanny. But we’ve got to keep moving.”

  Together they turned from the southern vista. North-northeast, beyond another ridge, the darkness relented to an eerie light, in fact three conjoined and distorted bubbles of light—one blue, one red, one yellow. The blue like a gas flame but constant in shade and brightness. The red not reminiscent of fire, but intense and darkish and steady like the ruby color of a lit glass cup on a votive-candle rack. A canted brim of canary yellow, as if the blue and red were borne on it like the twin crowns of a tipped hat.

  For a moment, it seemed to Tanuja that she was being drawn through this extraordinary and fearsome night toward some ultimate mystery and revelation, as might be a mystified character in one of the stories in her preferred genre of magic realism. But then she realized from where the lights arose. She said, “It’s neon glow from Coogan’s Crossroads.”

  The Crossroads was a restaurant, but less a restaurant than a tavern, and less a tavern than a tradition, the iconic gathering place to which the residents of the smattering of tiny communities in the remote east-county canyons were drawn for companionship, especially on weekend nights like this.

  “Probably half a mile,” Sanjay said.

  “We can get help there.”

  “Maybe,” Sanjay said. “Maybe.”

  “There’s sure to be at least a couple people we know.”

  “We knew Lincoln Crossley—or thought we did.”

  “The whole world can’t have been corrupted, Sanjay. Come on.”

  With the threat of their pursuers no longer immediate, they descended the ridge, angling north-northeast toward the neon aurora, adopting a less reckless pace overland now that they had a place to go and the hope of help. The clouds were slowly unraveling. Through the ragged rents and thinning veils came a suggestion of moonlight. The only thing that could go wrong now—or so it seemed—was for one of them to stumble in the gloom and fall and break a leg. Sanjay held Tanuja’s left arm as together they proceeded with caution.

  17

  Maybe they kept the dead man between them because Jane still had second thoughts about involving this father of four in such a dangerous enterprise, and because Gilberto, for all his talk of semper fi and a debt owed to Nick, had doubts of his own.

  Solemn and silent on the table, the decedent was a barrier to impetuous action, a reminder that they might die in the course of a kidnapping. Jane’s love for Nick was so intense that his death had not diminished it, and though Gilberto’s gratitude and admiration were less piercing emotions, Jane’s late husband served as a touchstone by which they both could test their commitment to what was good and true in a world of darkness and lies. But a touchstone had value only if they acted with reason, from a sense of duty, rather than because sentimentality overtook them. Jane knew—perhaps, so did Gilberto—that a touch, a hug, even a handshake in the early minutes of this reunion could twist honest sentiment into sentimentalism, inciting him to make a fateful decision on the wrong grounds.

  “I appreciate you’d do this just for me,” she said, “just for Nick. But if they discover you helped me, they won’t care that all you did was drive. They’ll take you out. You need to understand what they’ve done, what they want to do, how much they have to lose.”

  She looked at the dead man’s face, so eggshell white after his embalming, lips fixed as if they had never formed a smile, eyelids paper thin as though half worn away by all the distressing sights against which, in life, they’d been closed. Nick had been cremated. She preferred fire, too, if after her death a body could be found.

  “These bastards, this conspiracy, cabal, whatever you want to call it—they have a computer model. It identifies people likely to steer civilization in the wrong direction, people in the arts, journalism, academia, science, politics, military….”

  Gilberto frowned. “Wrong direction? How does a computer decide what’s the wrong direction for civilization?”

  “It doesn’t. They decided when they designed the damn computer model. All it does is identify targets. They say, just erase enough carefully selected people, those likely to achieve positions to influence others with wrong ideas, then over time we’ll have Utopia. But it’s not about Utopia. It’s all about power. Absolute power.”

  Gilberto had come back from war with an enduring sadness from which was born a gentleness and a desire to avoid all conflict. But anger enfolded the gentleness now, and his mouth was set tight when he said, “Just erase. Erase. Always the nice words for murder.”

  “Joseph Stalin reportedly said, ‘A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.’ You have a problem with that?”

  “They’re gonna kill a million?”

  “Eventually more. Two hundred ten thousand per generation, in the U.S. So eighty-four hundred a year.”

  “They told you this?”

  “One of them did. You’ll have to take my word for it. He’s not available to confirm it. I killed him. In self-defense.”

  Although he’d been to war, Gilberto was shaken. War half a world away was different from battles in the streets of his own country. He put his hands on the steel table and leaned into it for support.

  Jane said, “The people they kill are on something called the Hamlet list. Once they identify the targets, they go after them when they’re most vulnerable. When they’re away from home at a conference or traveling alone and can be drugged, sedated one way or another.”

  “ ‘Sedated’?”

  “They don’t want it to look like murder. They sedate them and program them to commit suicide. Nick was on their Hamlet list. He cut his throat with his Marine Corps knife, his Ka-Bar, sliced so deep that he severed a carotid artery.”

  Gilberto stared at her for a long moment, as if to determine what brand of crazy she had embraced. “Program them?”

  “Life is sci-fi these days, Gilberto. And it’s not a feel-good family movie. You know about nanotechnology?”

  “Microscopic things. Maybe machines so small they’re invisible. Something like that.”

  “In this case, constructs made from a few molecules. Hundreds of thousands—maybe millions—suspended in a serum, injected into the bloodstream. They’re brain-tropic. Once they pass through the capillary walls into brain tissue, they self-assemble into a larger network. A weblike control mechanism. Within hours, total control is effected. The subject doesn’t know anything’s happened. He seems himself. No one sees anything different about him. But days later, weeks, whenever, he gets a command to commit suicide…and obeys.”

  “If I didn’t know you,” Gilberto said, “I’d think you were a candidate for a psych ward.”

  “Sometimes lately, I’ve felt like one. Nick didn’t know what he was do
ing. Or maybe he knew and couldn’t stop himself, which makes me sick.” She closed her eyes. Took a deep breath. “Suicides of successful, happy people have soared for two years, people with no history of depression, with every reason to live. Sometimes they take other people with them.” She opened her eyes. “You must have seen the story about the woman in Minnesota, Teacher of the Year, not only killed herself but also the governor and forty-some others. I know for a fact she was controlled by these people, as Nick was.”

  “You have proof of all this?”

  “Yeah. So who do I trust with it? The FBI isn’t entirely corrupt, but some people in it are part of this conspiracy. Same with the NSA, Homeland Security. They’re salted everywhere.”

  “Go to the press?”

  “I tried. Thought I had a trustworthy journalist. He wasn’t. I have evidence, a lot of it. But if I give it to the wrong person and he destroys it, everything I’ve endured has been for nothing. And there’s even worse than the Hamlet list. Much worse. Not everyone they inject is programmed for suicide.”

  “Then what?”

  “Some people under their control seem to have free will, but they don’t. They’re used ruthlessly. As programmed assassins. Others are flat-out enslaved and used as cheap labor.”

  She hated death, the thief that had robbed her of her mother and her husband, but when she looked at the corpse between her and the mortician, the cold, wax-pale face suggested an enduring peace that might be envied by those who lived with a nanoweb woven across and through their brains.

  “I’ve seen men guarding an estate of one of the Arcadians—as they call themselves—a pack of men in slacks and sport coats, normal at first glance, but like trained dogs, living in conditions as crowded as kennels. Their personalities and memories wiped away. No internal lives. Programmed to carry guns and provide security, to track down and kill intruders. They’re like…machines of flesh.”

  If she had any doubt that he believed her, it was resolved when he made the sign of the cross.