Hmmmm.
In 1997, Life magazine placed Nikola Tesla among the one hundred most famous and world-changing people of the past thousand years.
Of course that was before reality TV, Twitter, Twaddle, and the like managed to reduce the average attention span of most of the world’s population to two minutes, wither our long-term memory to fourteen months, and convince us that the most admirable of all individuals are not the likes of George Washington, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Jonas Salk, Mother Teresa, and Nikola Tesla, but instead whatever celebrity just won Dancing with the Stars and whatever dancing cat just drew ten million hits for its YouTube video.
Tapping. Scratching. Knock-knock.
“Who’s there?” I asked softly. “Juno,” I replied in a quiet but authentic piggy voice. “Juno who?” I asked with sincere puzzlement. And I answered: “Juno how much I’d like to get in there and ham it up with you?”
I learned also that Tesla had his peculiar side. Sometime between 1899 and 1900, in his laboratory in Colorado Springs, he believed that he had received signals from another planet. Serious people examined his evidence and agreed. He once said that with the right application of an electric current, he could easily split the Earth in two. Fortunately, Tesla didn’t leave notes as to how this might be done, for otherwise those guys in the Jackass movies would already have done it.
In short, he not only could think outside the box, but he could think outside the bigger box in which the first box had come. Such a man might be able to meet the challenge of harnessing time and using it as he wished.
Before I was tempted to surf over to YouTube to look at that dancing cat, I backed out of the Internet and shut down the computer.
As the tapping and scratching came again at the shutter, I heard Chef Shilshom in the kitchen, cursing profusely, as though he thought he might be Victoria Mors. He seemed to be coming this way.
I sprang off the Jabba the Hutt office chair, snatched up the pillowcase sack, and darted through the door between the chef’s office and the walk-in pantry, which also had an entrance from the kitchen.
In the pantry, I left the door to the office a half-inch ajar and waited to see if the quiche king would appear.
The chef breached the room in great white billows, more than agitated but less than panicked, as though he had just seen Captain Ahab stumping toward him on one good leg and one of polished whalebone. He didn’t appear to be in a mood either to bake or to broil.
From a cabinet that might have contained a trove of exotic spices or his personal collection of antique egg cups, he took what appeared to be a 12-gauge semiauto combat shotgun.
Thirty-seven
A FRIGHTENED, ANGRY, FOUR-HUNDRED-POUND, ANTISOCIAL chef with a combat shotgun never leads to anything good.
I slipped away from the door between Chef Rambo’s office and the pantry. Eased through the dark. Found the other door by the thin line of light that glowed at the bottom of it. Entered the kitchen. Left the kitchen. I crept along a hallway where one door or another might suddenly be flung open by a Roselander, whereupon I’d be discovered and sternly reprimanded for not remaining behind locked doors in the guest tower—or shot.
When I reached a side hall and then a discreet service door to the main drawing room, I ducked into that vast space, which felt like a stately common room on some exceedingly formal luxury liner from a distant era, which in the movies are peopled by beautiful women in glamorous gowns and men in tuxedos and platoons of waiters in white jackets serving drinks on silver trays. Islands of Persian carpets offered several arrangements of furniture, armchairs and side chairs and sofas and chaises enough to seat a quarter of high society’s top four hundred.
The windows were shuttered. None of the Tiffany lamps glowed. Of the five chandeliers, only the one in the center of the room provided light.
Directly under that glitteration of candle-shaped lamp bulbs and pendant crystals stood a circular banquette that surrounded a twice-life-size statue of the Greek god Pan. Pan had the head and chest and arms of a man, the ears and horns and legs of a goat, and he was badly in need of a fig leaf.
The periphery of the room was curtained with shadow. The corners folded away in the dark.
My intention was to slip around the darker part of the chamber, staying well away from horny Pan, until I came to another service door, hidden in the wall paneling, catercorner from the one through which I had entered. That would take me to a short hallway that also served the library, where I hoped to climb the circular bronze stairs to the second floor.
I was still about six acres away from my destination when I heard hurried footsteps on marble. Through the deep, columned archway that separated the drawing room from the better-lighted foyer, I saw Noah Wolflaw—alias Cloyce—and Paulie Sempiterno, both with shotguns, coming this way.
Allergic as I am to buckshot, I dropped to my hands and knees and hid behind a sofa.
Even as the madman and his chief lieutenant arrived in the drawing room, a door opened toward the farther end of the chamber, perhaps the one I had used. Others joined Cloyce and Sempiterno at the center of the big room, under the lit chandelier, beside the shameless Pan.
Peering warily around the end of the sofa and over a forest of furniture, I discovered that Jam Diu and Mrs. Tameed had arrived. The gardener carried a shotgun. Mrs. Tameed, almost a foot taller than Mr. Diu, wore a gun belt with a holster on each hip, and in her right hand she held one of a pair of door-buster handguns, aimed at the ceiling.
The pistol-packing Swede could have kicked a lion in the butt and made it mewl like a frightened kitten. Jam Diu looked like Buddha gone bad.
The room had excellent acoustics, and I could hear everything they said. Victoria Mors had gone missing. She wasn’t in her private rooms, and she didn’t answer when called on her Talkabout, which was evidently a walkie-talkie that they all carried to keep in touch in the immense house. They were certain she’d been in the main residence when the shutters went down.
Not in the least embarrassed to declare the obvious, Paulie Sempiterno said, “Something’s wrong.”
That something was me.
Mrs. Tameed said, “Where’s that phony [expletive deleted] little [expletive deleted] bastard?”
Again, that would be me.
“Henry called from the gatehouse earlier,” Cloyce said, “after the shutters fell here. Thomas was pounding on the door down there, trying to get in. The freaks were after him.”
“Then he’s dead,” Jam Diu said.
Mrs. Tameed said, “Probably he’s dead. But don’t underestimate the [expletive deleted], [expletive deleted], [hyphenated expletive deleted] creep.”
Considering that Mrs. Tameed was far older than she appeared, I wondered if, under another name, she had worked in the Nixon White House.
“If he was out of the house when the shutters went down,” said Jam Diu, “then he can’t have gotten in again. Let’s not waste time worrying about him. He’s just an ignorant clocker.”
Clocker. Not cocker.
“Even a clocker can catch a lucky break now and then,” Paulie Sempiterno said.
“I’m more concerned there might have been a shutter breach,” Jam Diu said.
“There’s no shutter breach,” Cloyce assured him. “Whatever has happened to her, it’s not a freak that’s gotten her.”
They agreed to search the house for Victoria Mors, working in teams of two, always staying on the same floor, starting at the top of the house.
“She’s not in my suite,” Cloyce said. “But there’s a lot of other territory to search. Every damn closet, every corner. Let’s move.”
They all left the drawing room through the columned arch and, from the foyer, took the stairs to the second floor.
I settled from my hands and knees onto my side behind the sofa, and then rolled onto my back. Spears and daggers and darts of light, cast up from the pendant crystals of the chandelier, were frozen in bright violent patterns on the center of the
plaster ceiling, but darkness bled away to the walls.
Clocker. I was a clocker because I was certain to age and die, at the mercy of the ticking clock. Being able somehow periodically to restore their youthful appearance and health, they were what Victoria had called “Outsiders, with no limits, no rules, no fears.”
They were also delusional. Reality imposes limits whether we choose to recognize them or not. These so-called Outsiders might be as bright as the prismatic reflections that the faceted crystals threw on the ceiling, but they were no less surrounded by darkness than were those spear-point patterns of light.
Perhaps these people did live without rules, at least in the sense that they acknowledged no natural law, but I had seen how fear circumscribed their lives. Victoria Mors would do nothing risky, lest she die by accident. Henry Lolam could not bear to be long outside the walls of the estate, because proximity to Tesla’s machinery and the Methuselah current was his best insurance of great longevity.
I could see now why Henry fantasized about having a close encounter of the third kind, during which aliens would grant him immortality. He wanted to live forever, but without the bonds that tied him so tightly to Roseland. They were all to one degree or another prisoners of this estate, psychologically if not physically.
The longer that they lived, the longer they wanted to live. And the longer they lived, the more their world shrank. Their spectrum of experience grew narrower year by year. Their sociopathic arrogance, their sense of godlike power, and their contempt for clockers were continuously distilled into an ever more poisonous brew.
I wondered who these people were with whom Constantine Cloyce formed the deranged community of Roseland. Did all of them date back to the 1920s, were they his servants then? What had been the original names that they had outlived?
If they were all from that time, I suspected that they must be far more insane than I yet knew. The gauntlet I must run to save the boy would be bristling with more and sharper spears than the arsenal of prismatic lights on the ceiling.
Thoughts of longevity brought me inevitably to memories of Stormy Llewellyn, who had died so young. Of necessity, I had come to be at peace with my loss, to live with a certain emptiness but not with a constant anguish. Now a melancholy ache weighed me to the floor longer than I intended to lie there. It seemed to me that if Nikola Tesla could have defeated Death by inventing a fantastical machine, I should have defeated the Reaper by being smarter and quicker than I was on that desperate day in Pico Mundo when I became the eternal lover of a woman I could never again kiss in this world.
Having given the four searchers plenty of time to ascend to the second floor and to proceed away from Cloyce’s suite of rooms, I got to my feet, drew the pistol from my holster, picked up the pillowcase sack, and slipped shadowlike along the dark perimeter of the drawing room.
Some there be that shadows kiss; / Such have but a shadow’s bliss.
By those words is the prince of Arragon described in The Merchant of Venice when he fails to choose correctly and, by his wrong choice, loses all hope of wedding Portia.
My friend Ozzie Boone, writer of mysteries, used to mock me for having been an indifferent student in school and especially for knowing nothing of Shakespeare. Since leaving Pico Mundo, as time permits, I have immersed myself in the works of the Bard. Initially, I read the plays and the sonnets for the simple pleasure of seeing Ozzie’s pride in me when one day I returned to my hometown. But soon I read them to glimpse a world that was so right in Shakespeare’s time but that has gone so wrong in ours.
His words, written over four hundred years ago, often encourage me and keep my spirits high. But sometimes lines come to me that strum a darker chord, and they pierce as I would much prefer not to be pierced.
Some there be that shadows kiss; / Such have but a shadow’s bliss.
Thirty-eight
THE MASTER OF ROSELAND’S SUITE WAS OFF THE WEST wing. Had the windows not been protected by steel shutters, most rooms would have offered me a view of the land rolling down to the coast and to the sea a mile away.
Cloyce had left burning not just a lamp or two but all the lights, as though when he returned, he didn’t want to have to spend even a moment on the threshold of darkness, fumbling for a switch.
He’d once claimed not to have slept in nine years, but I was sure his assertion was a great exaggeration if not outright nonsense. The truth might be that he’d not slept well in nine years or longer, perhaps because he left the lights on all night, unable to tolerate a room that was as midnight-black as his mind.
His quarters were as sumptuously furnished as any chamber in the house. The Tiffany lamps, the antique bronzes, and the paintings were likely to bring millions.
I found nothing particularly strange until I got to a spacious chamber that I imagine he thought of as his trophy room. On the walls were the mounted heads of a lion, a tiger, a gazelle with magnificent ringed horns, and other specimens he must have shot and shipped back from Africa.
On one wall numerous framed black-and-white eight-by-ten photographs included several taken on safari. A young Constantine Cloyce, surely no older than thirty, was recognizable in spite of his hairstyle, which was of that era, and his lush mustache. He posed with various kills, holding a rifle, solemn and proud in some pictures, grinning and proud in others.
To have had the time and resources to be an adventurer at such a young age, he must have inherited the newspaper fortune that had allowed him later to launch a movie studio. If he was thirty in the photos, the safari dated to 1908, fourteen years before he began to build Roseland.
In some of the photographs, another young man appeared with him. He must have been a pal of Cloyce’s because in two photos, rifles having been set aside, they stood behind the animals they had shot, arms around each other’s shoulders. Henry Lolam looked the same then as now, though back then he must have had another name.
Farther along the wall were photographs of Roseland during its construction. In some of them, Cloyce posed with others.
I saw Nikola Tesla first. He appeared in four pictures, always wearing a business suit and tie when the others dressed casually. In two, he was such a strikingly hawkish figure with such intensity of expression that, by comparison, the people with him seemed to be no more real than those life-size photo cutouts of famous folks that you once could pose with in carnivals and boardwalk arcades. In the other two, those with him looked real enough—although Tesla seemed to be uncomfortable, as if he thought he didn’t belong with his current company.
Mrs. Tameed posed with Cloyce in one shot. She looked forty now, but appeared to be twenty-something in the photo. If there had been a greater age difference, I might not have recognized her except maybe by her height. Hair cut short, wearing a cloche hat, she was dressed in the flapper style of the period—sleeveless dress with a knee-length skirt, a V-neck bodice with cleavage revealed—that shocked the parents of that free-spirited generation.
I had difficulty imagining that Mrs. Tameed had ever been as frivolous and cheerful as she seemed to be in that picture. I would have thought that she insisted on wearing jackboots from the day she started to walk and that her greatest regret as a young woman had been her inability to grow a mustache to match Hitler’s.
She was in another photo with Cloyce. This time she and Victoria Mors flanked him, both dressed as flappers, both hanging on him. They appeared to be a tipsy and dissolute trio.
In that picture, Victoria looked as young as she did now, tender and elfin and sprightly. I wondered if she maintained herself in a more constant state of youth than did the others. And if she did so—why?
In another shot of Cloyce with four men, dating perhaps before the 1920s, I knew only two of the others. Paulie Sempiterno stood slightly to one side, somewhat but not much younger-looking than he was now, glowering at the camera as if he distrusted the photographer and the very idea of cameras. Jam Diu looked ten years older then than now. He wore white shoes, a white suit, and
a white Panama hat; and he boasted a Fu Manchu mustache that dangled two or three inches below his chin.
I had seen everyone currently of Roseland except Chef Shilshom. But if he had been of normal size in those days, I would not have recognized him.
The mounted heads of animals on two walls lent this place none of the men’s-club atmosphere that might have been intended. Instead, at least for me, each head was Death in masquerade, his skeletal face concealed behind animal masks, as in Prince Prospero’s abbey where he had partied in costume. Their presence oppressed me. I imagined that their glass eyes followed me as I toured the room.
I was eager to move on, but I wanted to investigate the contents of a highly polished mahogany cabinet with inlaid geometric patterns of ivory and ebony. Behind its doors were shelves filled with DVDs.
A man given to murder for pleasure might have a collection of films, but I doubted there would be a single Muppet movie among them. No titles were printed on the narrow spines of the cases. Expecting either pornography or tales of extreme violence, I took one from the top shelf and saw taped to the front a photograph of one of the naked women in the subcellar of the mausoleum, in the very pose in which he had arranged her in that other trophy room.
I checked a few more on the top shelf. Like the first, they bore photos of the victims in death, each labeled with a name and date. But there were a lot more DVDs here than bodies in the mausoleum.
When I examined some on the bottom shelf, I found that, like those above, they were arranged from left to right and shelved by date. The earliest was labeled 1962.
He must have filmed those early victims in 8 mm, later using a video camera. As technology advanced, he transferred his archives to videotape and later to DVD. His experience in the movie industry and his wealth gave him the knowledge and the means to upgrade the filmed record of the abominations that he committed. Somewhere in the house, he must have a well-equipped little studio where he could edit his films and transfer them to more sophisticated formats as those were invented.