In Phoenix—with its impossible-to-live-in blast-furnace May weather—Ed found Tracy where she said she would be, beside the boat-rental office in Encanto Park. She seemed agitated by a compensatory bluster as she made breezy small talk and walked at an exercise clip. Her dry brown skin, slack cleavage, and sprayed coif were new, but the look on her face was a look Ed remembered—hard and immune to moral argument. Finally, they perched on a bench by the lagoon, Ed in his Vuarnets and an Arizona Diamondbacks cap, Tracy in million-dollar faded jeans.
“ ‘I Saw Search King Commit Murder,’ ” she said. “I can see that in the National Enquirer.”
Ed sighed.
“Wouldn’t that be a bummer?” said Tracy. “Especially because, when it comes to murder, there’s no statute of limitations.”
“This is disappointing,” said Ed. “You’re about the thousandth old friend who’s sent me a note, only to proceed to extortion.”
“Walter Cousins,” said Tracy. “You ran him off the road and killed him, Ed, remember?”
“No. And this is sad, Tracy. You’re really stooping.”
“I see why you’ve gotten so rich,” she answered.
“And I see extortion and deceit,” Ed replied. “This is no way to make a living, Tracy. Look, if you want to contact the National Enquirer and report to them your falsehood and fabrication, I can’t stop you from doing that, can I? But it’ll just be another rumor, that’s all. No—I’m not giving you a single dime.”
“You could also go to prison,” Tracy observed.
“Well, if I did it would be one of those very sad cases where an innocent person is victimized by a liar. But I don’t think a prosecutor is going to press charges against me based on what you fabricate.” Ed got up. “I’m really sorry I came down here,” he said. “I didn’t expect this, but I should have. Oh well, take care, Tracy. I mean that. I wish you all the best.”
He walked away at an unruffled pace while Tracy yelled, “That’s Ed King! Right there! That guy! He’s a murderer! Ed King is a murderer!” But no one in the park showed anything but perplexity in response to this manner of accusation. Which was good, because Ed’s heart was beating faster than it had since the day he’d killed Walter Cousins.
Later, on the tarmac, as Ed was strapping in, Guido asked, “Quickie in the desert?”
“Shut up, Guido.”
“Hey, you’re the man. You’re always the main man, sir.”
Ed sighed. What was wrong with this guy? For a moment he thought of firing him on the spot, but, on the other hand, Guido was time-passing entertainment. “Listen up, Guido,” he said. “We’re going to change places. I think I’ll take the wheel of my plane. I feel like flying my plane right now so I don’t have to listen to your bullshit.”
“You feel like flying,” Guido answered, getting up. “You want to be a pilot. You want to decide where we go and how we get there. Our flight destination, our flight path, our altitude. Have at it, then, sir. Go right ahead. But if you’re going to be a pilot, you need to learn the lingo. It’s ‘take the controls,’ not ‘take the wheel.’ You got that? ‘Controls.’ ”
“Roger,” said Ed, then got up and moved left. “Relax, Sternvad. Be a passenger for a while. Read a magazine or something, but shut up.”
“Roger,” said Guido. “Good one, sir. You want to learn some professional lingo? Try ‘Alpha Mike Foxtrot,’ as in ‘Adios Mother Fucker.’ Try ‘sending an admiral to sea.’ That’s taking a shit before you take off. ‘Checking for light leaks’—that’s lingo for a nap. ‘Kick the tires and light the fires’—that’s taking off without a full safety check. Here’s a good one—‘My fun meter’s pegged.’ That’s sarcasm for combat danger. Got the hang, sir? You feeling warm-fuzzy? You ready to be a real pilot?”
“Alpha Mike Foxtrot.”
“Put it in the air, then,” Guido said. “I’ll watch.”
Ed pulled over in the run-up area and, while ostensibly checking his data and instruments, silently cursed Guido Sternvad. Then he switched his radio from ground to tower, and when his turn came, teased the power levers forward, hit the throttle, surged down the runway, and got off the ground without a hitch. “You see, I’m in control,” he announced, pulling back on the yoke. “I can fly this plane as well as you can.”
“For the moment,” said Guido, and raised the landing gear. “But you think you could fly solo? You wouldn’t go Whiskey Delta in Sweat Bead Condition One if you were up here flying solo, would you? You know that one? ‘Whiskey Delta’? Weak dick, sir. Now throttle back a little, tough guy. I don’t want us joining the Martin-Baker Fan Club.”
“Martin-Baker Fan Club?”
“Maker of ejection seats. Martin-Baker. So don’t lose the bubble there, Top Gun.”
Absolutely no one talked to Ed like this, but somehow Guido got away with it. In fact, between Phoenix and Seattle he harangued Ed incessantly: “You think you’re a pilot? Well, chew on this, sir. You’re actually just a cog in a flying machine, hauling passengers from A to B. Did I say passengers? Passengers are pawns. Smooth flight, they snore; turbulence, they’re scared of dying. If I want to, I can sit up here playing with their heads. Snore. Fear of dying. Whatever. Up to me. Maybe I get on the intercom and hail them, just to remind them I’m actually here. Up in the cockpit behind my locked door. Sure, I sound calm, nothing’s a big deal, but remember, you’re all at my mercy!”
Ed said, “Guido, shut up for a minute. Shut up and let me fly the plane.”
“Fine,” said Guido. “But just to Seattle. Your two-bit hometown. I’ll give that to you—no harm there. There’s nothing doing between here and there anyway. Just bland weather, fair skies, flat air, Point A to Point B; so, sure, go ahead, be a pilot if you need to, but don’t try straying from the flight plan, okay? And no tricks, or I’m taking the controls.”
“Straight to Seattle,” said Ed. “Now shut up.”
Guido did shut up, but only for a minute, so as to give full attention to a new round of Name Scramble. “Hey, man,” he said. “Check this out. Check this out, sir. It’s great!” He thrust his P-Pad in front of Ed’s face, so Ed could read:
DARK WINGED
“Get it?” asked Guido. “Edward King. Dark Winged! Edward King is Dark Winged!”
Ed pushed the P-Pad out of his way. “Guido,” he said, “I’m trying to fly my plane right now, so I don’t want to hear another word from you. Not one.”
“Dark Winged!” repeated Guido. “That’s perfect!”
In Seattle, once he was cleared for approach, Ed turned off the autopilot and said, “I’ll do this stick-and-rudder, Sternvad, just to show you I can.” He got everything right, too, and could have met the runway gently, but instead landed with his nose a tad high in a showy, fighter-pilot touchdown. Sternvad yawned. “Great,” he said. “Perfect weather, no wind. You’re really a right-stuff guy, King.”
At the Pythia hangar, Ed’s chopper was waiting with its rotors turning already. Everything was as it should be—the Tracy problem solved—except that Guido wouldn’t shut up, even now that they were on the ground. Ed, before deplaning, tried for the last word: “I mean it, Sternvad. Don’t talk so much. Your babbling gets on my nerves.”
“Really,” answered Guido. “Well, let me tell you something, guy. All right, you’re the richest man in the universe, you got what people dream of, you’re a big name, the boss. But you know what? Not on my plane. On my plane, I’m in charge.”
“No,” said Ed, “this is my plane. Don’t forget that. It’s not your plane. I hired you to fly it, so shut up and fly it when I ask you to, okay? Get me from Point A to Point B.”
“Now, wait,” said Guido. “We got a rule in aviation. And that rule is, the skipper of the plane, the head pilot—me—that person has say over everything—everything! I’m the one in charge of what happens. I’m God here, okay? You’re along for the ride.”
“Bad delusions of grandeur,” said Ed. “You’re a driver, Guido. You’re a chauffeur, not God.
Think about this—did you pay for the fuel? For the maintenance? The hangar? Anything? Yes or no? Guido, you’re just a driver on call. You don’t do anything but wait for me to snap my fingers. In fact, if it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t exist.”
“It’s the other way around,” insisted Guido. “You need me. Otherwise, you’re stuck on the ground. You get what I’m saying? I’m the captain. I’m the key. I’m the linchpin. You’re just a passenger.”
Ed said, “I love you, man. Great trip. Thanks for everything. But—shut up, okay? Just shut up.”
Guido answered, “As soon as we deplane, you won’t hear a word from me.” And then Guido let the gangway down, took the stairs with rapid ease, and strode away with the proud gait of someone who’s sure he’s the hero of his own life.
With the years Diane became her own business, and opened secret accounts in Turks and Caicos, Singapore, and Luxembourg. They were, of course, pointless in her present incarnation as Mrs. Ed King, the Queen of Search, but because she’d been knocked down more than once in life, she still felt the need for a backup plan and a bottom-line desperation retreat. The plan she put in place called for a fake name—Eunice Halston-Smith was what she came up with, because it sounded appropriately stuffy—a false British passport, the secret accounts, and a secret residence in northwestern Tasmania, ten minutes from a regional airport. There she kept on hire a staff aware of her only as a mysterious English widow who paid extremely well via a trust officer in Sydney. She was Mrs. Halston-Smith, who liked poetry and fine art, if the evidence on her shelves and walls was any indication. Diane never visited this last-ditch hideaway, but in the pictures she’d seen it looked like Balmoral Castle, with a thousand hectares of forest and field, an ambience of baronial calm, orderly gardens, and a sea view from a precipice. If it came to it, for whatever reason, she could live out her days there with decent Pinot on hand and no need ever to lift a finger.
But right now, there was a job to do, and that was to use Pythia’s security apparatus to track down her half-brother Club. He was a longshoreman, it turned out, in Long Beach, California, and a member of Local 19. There were two drinking establishments he frequented in Norwalk—both close enough to his third-floor flat so he could shuffle back to it in half an hour—one a cocktail lounge at Studebaker and Rosecrans, and the other across the 605, near a McDonald’s, a doughnut shop, and a coin laundry, all of which were also part of Club’s life. Club didn’t do much other than work, watch television, drink, and ride a heavily lacquered Goldwing touring bike. After work, he stopped sometimes at a Wal-Mart in Long Beach. He liked Roscoe’s House of Chicken, and Hamburger Mary’s, and almost always bought gas at the same 7-Eleven. Club lived alone and had never been married. While wrestling with various greencard hassles, he’d served three years’ probation as an accomplice to grand larceny. Lately he’d been buying a lot of Hot Spot and SuperLotto Plus tickets. He was badly overweight, with an achy back and sloped shoulders. On the docks, wearing a lumbar support with crossing shoulder straps and chewing on a toothpick, he drove reach trucks and side-loaders. Impacted teeth made it hard for Club to chew. Diverticulitis, a hammer toe, and sleep apnea had all taken a toll on him. Still, he was not immune to ponying up for the occasional prostitute, and every spring he rode with other Goldwingers to Vegas. Club’s tradition in Nevada was to try a new brothel each year and to place paltry bets in a race-and-sports lounge. At home, he was religious about Friday happy-hour drinking at the Zoo Room, a Long Beach bar that served Boddingtons and aired the English Premier League on large screens.
Security had more data if Diane wanted it. She didn’t because the data presented were sufficient for the planning she was about. The first step was to locate a dominatrix in L.A. There were plenty to choose from, including many who had private studios where a client could be trampled, flogged, smothered, choked, chained, and so forth, and some who traveled with kits. Diane settled on the English Mistress, who emphasized red bottoms, and who described herself, in a return phone call to Diane, as specializing in restraint, rope bondage, medical play, and paddling. She had a dungeon but would carry equipment on hotel calls. On request, she worked with a partner.
All of that sounded good to Diane. She told the English Mistress that the prospective client, her husband, Caleb, was eager to role-play from start to finish as a burly longshoreman who meets the English Mistress in a bar and proceeds from there to her fancy hotel room. The English Mistress would play a well-to-do Londoner on holiday in California who is away from her effete and asexual spouse. It was a birthday present for Caleb, Diane explained, and the kicker was that Diane would participate. “What do you think?” she asked. “What would that cost?” Then she hung up and made a reservation under an assumed name for a Royalty Suite on the Queen Mary, now a Long Beach waterfront hotel instead of a trans-Atlantic ocean liner. The next day, Diane got installed in her kitschy California lodgings and convened a planning session with the English Mistress, who looked like Barbie at forty. Things couldn’t have been more perfect.
On the Friday in question, then, the English Mistress, costumed as a traveler out of her element while baring a little risqué cleavage, sat nervously nursing a colorful drink at one end of the Zoo Room’s bar. When Club stepped up and ordered a double scotch, neat, and a pint of Boddingtons, the English Mistress looked at him quizzically and said, “Now, that’s quite tricky. East Midlands, is it not?”
Club went for it. Aboard the Queen Mary, in a gilded hallway, the English Mistress explained herself. “I travel, you might say, equipped,” she said. “There’s no use for my tools at home, you see, so why not take them on the road?”
Club said, “I’m with you. Gagging for it.”
“Good,” said the English Mistress. “Because I’m going to take your dangly-bits, Caleb, and have a royal go at them, you know.”
In the Royalty Suite, with rope, a collar, cuffs, chains, a gag, and nautical cleats, she got Club into the butt-high posture Diane had elaborated for her. She caned him red, flogged and insulted him, and then she told Club, who looked like wild boar on a serving plate, that she had yet another surprise in the offing: a second dominatrix—was he ready for this?—who was known as the Goddess of Vengeance. Of course, Club couldn’t endorse or reject such an eminence, because he had a ball in his mouth held in place by headgear. So the English Mistress rang up the Goddess of Vengeance, who arrived at Club’s bedside wearing a mask she’d acquired earlier that day at an upscale adult store in Beverly Hills—leather, handmade, with elaborate tooling, and a row of stainless-steel spikes in its forehead. Hovering over Club, the Goddess of Vengeance clutched a ten-dollar voice synthesizer—the sort of thing meant for trick-or-treating or for disguising one’s voice in the service of prank phone calls—and displayed a plastic funnel with a ten-inch hose.
“Is he prepared?” she asked, through the synthesizer.
“Yes, Goddess,” intoned the English Mistress. “And now I bid you farewell.”
When she was gone, the Goddess advised Club, through the synthesizer, “Grit your teeth. This is really going to hurt.” Then she pulled on surgical gloves and fed the hose into him. What could he do? There was nothing he could do. He struggled, puckered, wheezed, and strained, but the Goddess of Vengeance went on feeding in the tube until the whole ten inches was snaked into Club and the funnel was pinched between his butt cheeks.
Speaking once more through the synthesizer, she said, “So how does that feel? Do you like it?”
From a drawer she took a pint can of Boddingtons, popped the top, then poured some into Club’s eyes. The rest got poured into the funnel, where it pooled and drained gradually. “Delicious,” said the Goddess, as the can slowly emptied. “I’m sure you’re enjoying this.”
She set the empty Boddingtons on the bedside table, where Club could read its label. “Irony,” she said. “Well, I better run and pee.” Then she slipped off her gloves, tossed them on his back, and left the room.
The ascendance of Pythia pro
ceeded apace—600 million raised in a just post-millennial IPO—with Ed as overlord and tyrant. He kept his finger on the company pulse and put his imprint—publicly—on each gamble and initiative. New products were unveiled at monster events, carefully crafted, zealously produced, and scheduled to crown huge hype campaigns aimed at cranking up hysteria for launch dates. Ed, as chief pitchman, was a dazzler, a shill, an icon, and a superstar genius, and so visible, available, prominent, and profiled that in the public eye, worldwide, Pythia and Ed were the same. What happened to one, happened to the other. Pythia was built around a charismatic leader whose persona demanded constant monitoring by a team of propagandists who fretted and bit their nails. All it would take was a slip, they knew—the wrong words out of Ed’s mouth, say, or a bit of unsavory personal news—to send Pythia’s stock price spiraling. Worst-case scenario was personal catastrophe—that might spell the demise of Pythia. He could go to jail, like Martha Stewart or Bernard Madoff, or go crazy, like Howard Hughes.
It didn’t help—as it might have helped—that in 2013, at the age of fifty, Ed handed over day-to-day operations to President Buddy Singh. It didn’t help because Ed didn’t leave the stage—he just stopped attending to every detail, in favor of continued media intensity, continued unilateral decision-making, and more time for neglected personal matters, foremost among them, the long deferred need to exercise. Over the years, his curved feet had caused damage to his knees, so now he had his knees replaced by the best doctor in the business; then he had laser eye surgery, which improved his vision to twenty-fifteen. All of this felt so renewing and invigorating that Ed, wanting more of it, hired a personal longevity consultant, who advised, and administered, treatments to stave off aging. Diane got on that wagon, too, and they both began taking not only human growth hormone and the steroid known as DHEA, but intravenous infusions of phosphatidylcholine isolated from egg yolks. Diane replaced estrogen, and Ed took testosterone. Diane had another face-lift; Ed had his chin tucked.