She seemed as startled to see me as I was discomfited to see her. We stood unmoving, staring at each other, our mouths open, as if we were a couple of figures from an animated Swiss clock that had suddenly stopped with the opening of the door.
Like Henry Lolam and Paulie Sempiterno, surely Victoria thought that Noah Wolflaw’s invitation to Annamaria and me was reckless and inexplicable. While I was searching for words, I knew that she was deciding whether to cry out in alarm, because I was welcome only on the ground floor of the house.
Before she could scream, I stepped into the laundry room, smiled my dumb-as-a-spatula fry-cook smile, and raised the pillowcase sack in which I carried the towel-wrapped hacksaw. “I have some delicate laundry, and they told me to bring it down to you.”
Twenty-seven
SLENDER, FIVE FEET TWO, VICTORIA MORS WORE THE black slacks and simple white blouse that served as a uniform for her and Mrs. Tameed. Although she was probably in her late twenties, I thought of her as a girl, not a woman. She was pretty in an elfin sort of way, with large faded-denim eyes. Barrettes held her strawberry-blond hair back; but now—as every time I’d seen her—a couple of strands had escaped the clasps and curled down the sides of her face, which with her rosy cheeks gave her the look of a child fresh from a session of jump rope or hopscotch. Although her body would have suited a ballerina, she sometimes moved with a charming, coltish awkwardness. She tended to look at me sideways or else with her head lowered and from under her lashes, which seemed like girlish shyness but was more likely sour suspicion.
There in the laundry room, she stared at me directly, and her large, pale-blue eyes were open wide with solicitude, as if hovering over my head were a vampire bat of which I was unaware.
She said, “Oh, you didn’t have to bring the laundry yourself, Mr. Odd. I would have come to the guest tower for it.”
“Yes, ma’am, I know, but I hoped to save you the effort. It must be exhausting for you and Mrs. Tameed to take care of this big house. All the dusting and sweeping and polishing and the endless picking up after. Although of course I suppose there must be several other maids I haven’t met.”
“Haven’t you?” she said, by her tone and expression managing to present herself as a dim but winning girl who couldn’t quite follow conversations in which exchanges were longer than six words.
“Have you worked at Roseland for long?”
“I’m ever so glad for the job.”
“Well, who wouldn’t be?”
“We’re like a family here.”
“I feel the warmth.”
“And it’s such a lovely place.”
“It’s magical,” I agreed.
“The beautiful gardens, the wonderful old oaks.”
“I climbed one, spent an entire though very short night in it.”
She blinked. “You did what?”
“I climbed one of the wonderful old oaks. All the way to the wonderful top, where the limbs were almost too small to support me.”
Perhaps because I’d gone well past six words, she was confused. “Why would you do that?”
“Oh,” I said, “I just had to.”
“Climbing trees is dangerous.”
“Not climbing them can be just as dangerous.”
“I never do anything dangerous.”
“Some days, just getting out of bed is dangerous.”
She decided not to look directly at me anymore. Returning to the task of sorting laundry from the cart into the two washing machines, she said, “You can just leave your things, and I’ll deal with them, Mr. Odd.”
“My things?” I asked, because I can pretend to be as obtuse as anyone.
“Your delicate laundry items.”
I couldn’t yet decide whether or not I wanted her to starch the hacksaw, so I held on to the pillowcase sack and said, “Mr. Wolflaw must have very high standards. The house is immaculate.”
“It’s a beautiful house. It deserves to be perfectly kept.”
“Is Mr. Wolflaw a tyrant?”
Glancing sideways at me as she continued to feed the washing machines, Victoria seemed to be genuinely hurt on behalf of her boss. “Whyever would you think such a thing?”
“Well, people as rich as he is can sometimes be demanding.”
“He’s a wonderful employer,” she declared, with a note of disapproval aimed at me for doubting the exemplary nature of the master of Roseland. “I never want another.” With the tenderness of an infatuated schoolgirl, she added, “Never ever.”
“That’s what I thought. He seems like a saint.”
She frowned. “Then why did you say ‘tyrant’?”
“Due diligence. I’m going to apply for a job.”
She met my eyes directly again, and said dismissively, “There aren’t any openings.”
“Seems like there aren’t enough security guards.”
“Two of them are on vacation.”
“Ah. Henry Lolam says he gets eight weeks off. That’s a generous vacation.”
“But there aren’t any openings.”
“Henry only took three of his eight weeks. He says the world is changing too much out there. He only feels safe here.”
“Of course he feels safe here. Who wouldn’t feel safe here?”
I suspected that the thirty-four dead women in the subcellar of the mausoleum had at some point not felt safe in Roseland; however, I didn’t bring up the subject because I didn’t want to be boorish.
If I had ever fantasized about being a CIA interrogator, I’d lost interest in the job when the law limited them to extracting information from terrorists only with the offer of candy. But I was pleased with myself for getting some interesting responses from the maid even without a Three Musketeers bar.
Now that I’d switched techniques and had begun to needle her a little, our chat might turn hostile, in which case I would have to solve the problem she presented before she could report my presence in the house to anyone.
Unfortunately, I hadn’t yet figured out how to deal with her, because I was not inclined to shoot her as a first option.
She was nearly finished sorting the laundry.
I said, “Henry Lolam told me Roseland is an unhealthy place, but I think he must have been joking, considering that he can’t bear to be away from it.”
“Henry reads too damn much poetry, he thinks too damn much, and he talks too damn much,” Victoria Mors said, sounding not at all like a schoolgirl.
“Wow,” I said, “you really are like a family.”
For just an instant, the hatred in her eyes told me that she wanted to bite off my nose and turn me over to Paulie Sempiterno so that he could put a bullet in my face.
But Victoria Mors was a quick-change artist. As I set down the pillowcase sack, she retracted her fangs, blinked the venom out of her eyes, washed the vinegar out of her voice with honey, and spoke with the quivering emotion of a winsome child defending the honor of her beloved father.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Odd.”
“De nada.”
“Please forgive me.”
“Forgiven.”
“It’s just, well, I can’t stand it when someone’s unfair to Mr. Wolflaw, because he’s really so … he’s so incredible.”
“I understand. It really steams me when people say bad things about Vladimir Putin.”
“Who?”
“Never mind.”
Victoria had finished with the laundry, so she wrung her hands as if she’d spent a lot of time recently learning dramatic skills from silent-movie melodramas.
“It’s just that poor Henry, he’s a nice man, he is rather like a brother to me, but he’s one of those people—you could give him the world, and he would be unhappy because you didn’t give him the moon, too.”
“He wishes aliens would come and make him immortal.”
“What’s wrong with him? Why can’t he be happy with everything he has?”
As if Henry exasperated me, too, I said, “Why indeed?”
r /> “Noah is a brilliant man, one of the greatest men who ever lived.”
“I thought he ran a hedge fund.”
As I finished speaking, the laundry-room door opened, and the tall, gaunt, mustachioed man in the dark suit entered the room, the one who had told me that he had seen me where I had not yet been and that he depended on me. His deep-set eyes were dark, too, and bright with fevered emotion, arguably the most intense eyes I’d ever seen, his stare so penetrating that I might not have been too surprised if it had actually boiled my brain in my skull.
He came toward me, reaching out imploringly with one bony hand. “I intended none of this.”
Instead of grasping the hand that I reflexively held out toward him, the man passed through me, as if he were a ghost. For the brief moment that we occupied the same space, an electrical current seemed to surge from the core of my body to every extremity, neither painful nor thrilling, but making me acutely aware of the neural pathways by which I felt pain and pleasure, hot and cold, smooth and rough, sound and sight and smell and taste. The routes taken by every nerve in my flesh were as clear in my mind’s eye as were the highways on any map I’d ever read. No ghost could ever have such an effect.
Once through me, he kept going, fading away two steps farther into the laundry room. Although he vanished, four words rang out in his accented voice after he was gone: “Throw the master switch.”
Victoria Mors turned her head to watch the apparition vanish. Then she met my eyes.
Neither of us spoke, but she didn’t have to say anything for me to know that she had encountered the tall gaunt man before, and I didn’t have to say anything for her to realize that I knew enough about Roseland to be unfazed by this bizarre event, enough to be a mortal danger to them all.
I caught her under the chin with a right uppercut and followed with a left that nailed her above and slightly to the side of the right eye, and she dropped like a sack of laundry down a chute.
Twenty-eight
I WASN’T PROUD OF MYSELF. I WASN’T EXACTLY ASHAMED of myself, either, but I admit to being grateful that the laundry room didn’t have a mirror.
Never before had I punched a woman. Not only was she a woman, but she was also smaller than I was. Not only was she a woman and smaller than I was, but she was also pretty in a cute, elfin way, and I felt as if I’d just beaten up Tinker Bell. Yes, I know, Tink was a fairy, not an elf, but I can’t help how I felt.
I took solace in the belief that she knew the darkest secrets of Roseland and therefore must be a bad girl. She couldn’t work here and be unaware of the grim collection of dead women in the mausoleum subcellar, which was easily accessible from the basement of the main house.
Worse, she seemed to be in love with Noah Wolflaw or at least admiring of him. What kind of person, laundress or not, could have tender feelings for a torturer and murderer of women?
I opened her mouth to be sure she hadn’t severely bitten her tongue when I delivered the uppercut, but there wasn’t any blood in there. She was going to have nasty bruising and a mean headache. I felt sorry about that, although probably not as sorry as I should have been.
In one corner of the laundry room was a seamstress station. I found a pair of scissors in a drawer.
Fishing among the clothes in one of the washing machines, which as yet contained no water, I found some garments—none of them unmentionables—that I could cut and rip to use as binding material.
Working quickly, worried that she would regain consciousness and berate me in a most unpleasant fashion, I securely tied her wrists in front of her and then bound her ankles. I connected those bindings with a hobble, which would prevent her from getting to her feet.
After opening the door and scoping the hallway, I cradled the maid in my arms and hurried with her to the furnace room next door. She was slender but she weighed substantially more than Tinker Bell.
I put her down in a corner, where she could not be seen from the door because of an intervening boiler as big as a space-shuttle booster rocket. She began to mutter like a sleeper in the midst of a disturbing dream as I hurried out of the room.
Once more in the laundry, I put away the scissors. Snatched up a few lengths of cut fabric that I still needed. Threw the mutilated garments in the trash. Retrieved the pillowcase sack with hacksaw.
When I returned to Victoria Mors, she was moaning but not yet conscious. I sat her up with her back against the wall, positioning her approximately as the thirty-four women were arranged in the mausoleum subcellar, though of course she was still clothed, hadn’t been tortured, was alive, and remained an admirer of Noah Wolflaw.
Using a yellow sash from a pair of cotton slacks in the laundry, I tied a noose around her neck. I secured the free end of the sash to an inch-diameter water line that came out of the wall and ran to the boiler. The pipe was securely anchored, and jerking on it with all my strength caused little noise; no one in the hallway could have heard it. Now she wouldn’t be able to scootch along the floor and reach the door after I left.
As I knelt beside her, Victoria’s eyelids fluttered. She opened her eyes and for a moment did not seem to know me. Then she must have recognized me, because she spit in my face.
“Nice,” I said, and wiped off the spittle with a piece of a T-shirt that I had earlier scissored apart.
The act of spitting evidently caused some discomfort, because she winced and worked her jaws to assess the damage from the punch.
I said, “I’m sorry I had to hit you, ma’am.”
In spite of the pain, she spit in my face again.
After wiping off the spittle, I said, “Do you know about the dead women in the mausoleum?”
She advised me to have an erotic experience with myself.
“Obviously you do know about the dead women.”
She suggested that I had fornicated with a close relative.
In this light, her faded-denim eyes appeared to be the pale blue-purple of highly poisonous belladonna flowers. They were still large and limpid, but there was no mistaking them any longer for the eyes of a shy and winsome girl.
“What is this place, what is the purpose of all the strange machinery?”
Now in a mood to dispense culinary advice, she recommended that I make a dinner of the end product of her digestive tract.
Drawing the pistol from my belt holster and pointing it at her face, I said, “Who was the man who came into the laundry room?”
Refusing to be intimidated, she continued to favor me with her belladonna stare and told me in no uncertain terms to shove the pistol up a part of my anatomy that wasn’t designed to serve as a holster.
“Don’t underestimate me,” I warned. “I’m more dangerous than I look.”
After informing me that I had a face reminiscent of a monkey’s posterior, she said, “You’ll never get out of Roseland alive.”
“Maybe none of us will.” I pressed the muzzle of the Beretta against her forehead. “I’ve killed a number of people, ma’am, and I expect I’ll have to kill some here.”
“I’m not afraid of you.”
“Maybe not,” I said, “but I’m afraid of me.”
That was too true. With the excuse that I am a defender of the innocent, I have done things that curl in my memory like worms in an infected apple. When I sleep, they squirm and wriggle forth to crawl the dreams from which I wake in a sweat.
Earlier she had told me that she never did anything dangerous, not even anything as relatively unchallenging as climbing an oak tree. As her fundamental aversion to risk returned, she closed her eyes and shuddered.
Deciding to appeal to whatever shred of decency might still hang tattered in her heart, I took the gun away from her face, and in a tone of voice marked both by distaste and by a sympathetic desire to understand, I said, “Is this some kind of cult, you’ve been caught up in it and you can’t see a way out? Is Noah Wolflaw your Jim Jones or something?”
“Cultists are deranged,” she said. “Ignorant and deranged
. Cultists? No. We’re the sanest people who ever lived.”
“Ever, huh?”
“You and your kind are the deranged ones, and you don’t even know it.”
“Enlighten me.”
Every feature of her face contorted to form a sneer of maximum power and hauteur. “You bear the whips and scorns, but we don’t and never will. You bear them, and they drive you mad.”
“Well, that clears up everything,” I said, and wondered if some voodoo priest I didn’t remember meeting had placed a curse upon me that would condemn me to a life of association with people who spoke always in riddles.
Her face grew red and dark with hatred, and the contempt in her voice was so thick that her words seemed in danger of clotting on her tongue unspoken. “Your thoughts are enslaved to a fool, but ours will never be.”
In spite of her denial, this seemed like cult talk, words passed down from the supreme leader and repeated by followers who only half understood them but resorted to them as mantras, whether they were appropriate to the moment or not.
Now that she was talking, I tried to bring her back to the issue of the dead women in the mausoleum. “You called Wolflaw one of the greatest men who ever lived. How can you follow him so submissively when he’s treated those women like dolls to be played with, broken, and discarded?”
Shared gender with the victims was not enough to squeeze a drop of pity from Victoria Mors. “They’re not women like me. They weren’t like us. They were like you. Animals, not gods. Walking shadows, poor players. Their lives signified nothing.”
The more she said, the madder she seemed, the pretense of sanity now too far behind her to be retrieved.
Yet something in her words seemed familiar to me, as if in some other place and time I had heard certain of these phrases used in a rational context, for a nobler purpose.
I felt contaminated by this Victoria, who seemed like the evil twin of the laundress, but I pressed her further. “Where did those women come from? How did Wolflaw persuade them to let him bring them here?”
She smirked like a child with a dirty secret that she relished revealing. “Noah never leaves Roseland to go farther than to town. Paulie cruises far and wide for them. Henry goes fishing, too, all over the state and into Nevada, elsewhere.”