Or maybe it was another veil rotting by the moment, a veil between her life as she believed it to have been and her life as it truly had been, between what she was and what she could be. The abyss on the brink of which she stood was the truth.
Her body ached from the beating she had taken at the hands of the man she had killed, and her ear felt as if it were afire. She had left the Tylenol in the car. Didn’t matter. The pain would not incapacitate her. It focused her instead, sharpened her senses.
The thick fog resisted the power of light, and the flashlight beam proved a feeble tool. The fog did not only pool and eddy and creep, but also clung to surfaces in a way not foglike. Within the general murk, thicker shrouds grew like moss on tool-storage sheds, on pallets of concrete blocks and stacked crates of cobblestones. It draped backhoes and forklifts and other equipment like sheets thrown over furniture in a house closed for the season.
She became aware of—or imagined—low swift shapes paralleling her in the cloaking mist. They were pale-gray and featureless, as low as dogs or bobcats, but they were neither of those animals, slinkier than dogs and larger than bobcats, larger also than coyotes, wolfish and elusive. She saw no eye shine, and if they were more than shadows of a threat conjured by her mind, they were as silent as spirits.
The property would feel huge in broad daylight; but at night and in this murk, it seemed to be even more immense, a county unto itself. Bibi more sensed than saw the swooping forms of completed and half-finished buildings akin to those in the scale model in the construction trailer. Twice she came upon enormous cranes balanced by massive counterweights, their girdered booms vanishing high into the mist, like fossilized upright carcasses from the Jurassic period.
She moved at a turtle’s pace, and the farther east she went toward the back of the property, the more finished the project seemed to be, as if they had begun construction there and worked westward. At times the compacted earth gave way to cobblestone paths, to plazas paved with limestone inlaid with patterns in quartzite and granite, glimpsed through the turbid shifting mist. She circled the raised base of a fountain with a currently dry pool that must have been fifty feet in diameter, from the center of which rose what might have been, had the fog relented, a school of bronze dolphins leaping together, perhaps to spout water when the pool was filled and the pumps were started.
Bibi began to feel as if she had lost her way in an amorphous maze that foiled her by continually altering the route that would allow it to be successfully navigated, but then she saw lights ahead. They were faint at first, and curious, two measured series of large spheres, the first row perhaps fifteen feet above the ground, the second row about fifteen feet above the first. As they grew slowly brighter, she suspected that they weren’t floating spheres, but were instead windows formed like portholes, each six or seven feet in diameter. Her suspicion was confirmed when she drew close enough to make out the muntins that radiated from the center of each window and held the pie-shaped panes in place.
Although she could at first perceive the structure’s shape only by inference from the size and placement of the portholes, it had the feeling of a gargantuan vessel. She approached it with a shiver of wonder, as perhaps anyone in 1912 would have, from dockside, looked up with awe at the towering Titanic. Even within a few yards of the place, when she determined that it was not a vessel but a building, she could not discern more than a fraction of its details, though she sensed that it was longer than a football field, domed like an airplane hangar, and without windows on the ground floor. Walking alongside the structure, sliding a hand over the curved wall, she decided that it was skinned in metal, and she felt large, regularly placed exterior ribs forged of steel.
By the time she reached one end of the building and found a flat wall, the wolfish stalkers, real or imagined, attended her in greater numbers, as though they had been trained especially to protect this special edifice to which Bibi now sought an entrance. They were shadows of shadows. Surely immaterial. Except, now she heard subtle panting and the tick-click of claws on paving stones. She had the pistol in hand, wet with condensed fog and perhaps with Hoffline-Vorshack’s blood, but she had little faith that it would prove effective against the shadow horde—or even against one of them.
A fuzzy reflection of the flashlight flared in a matte-finished steel door, about five feet wide and eight tall, rounded at the top and protected by an overhanging cowl, medieval in spite of the material from which it had been crafted. There was no door handle or anything like a conventional keyhole, nor a slot into which she might insert a key card. The only possible lock release was a large oval hole in the wide steel frame encircling the door.
Bibi stood defeated for a moment but then remembered. From a pocket of her blazer, she withdrew the electronic key attached by a chain to the Lucite fob in which a dead wasp took wing forever.
The house in Cameo Highlands was to music what Toba Ringelbaum’s house was to books. Ganesh Patel, surf legend and audio-video god, had designed, manufactured, and sold a lot of through-house music systems; but in his own home, he had a standalone system in every room. The issues were volume, clarity, and ideal reverberation, and he was always making improvements to his equipment setups.
When Pax and Pogo stopped by to get the repaired tape recorder, the living room boomed with music Pax had never heard before. It was Hawaiian sway and steel guitar, it was rockin’ piano, it was tied together by backup harmony worthy of Motown, and the lead singer sounded like Elton John if Elton had been born in Nashville and grown up listening to Johnny Cash. But it was good. Their host turned the music down just far enough that they didn’t have to shout to hear one another.
“This little puppy,” Ganesh said, presenting the cassette recorder on the palm of his hand, “was sweet for its time. Plus it made you feel as sly and cool as a spy, how you could conceal it, a microphone that pulled from across the room. Even if you interviewed someone openly, with this puppy on the table, it felt clandestine.”
“Could we turn the music down a little more?” Pogo asked.
Ganesh smiled and shook his head. “Not really.”
He was thin and dark and intense, perhaps as intense as his paternal grandfather, who as a New Delhi street performer had tamed cobras with the usual flute, but also sometimes with just his hands, caressing them into a stupor at the risk of a lethal bite. Grandpa might or might not have been a snake charmer. He might or might not have stroked and tickled cobras into a trance with his bare hands. There were those who said that Ganesh had been born and raised in Boston, into a family that had run restaurants for three generations, and that the closest he had gotten to India was watching Bollywood musicals in his twelve-seat home theater. With his thick black hair and lean good looks and large, expressive eyes, Ganesh had all the success with women that he could handle, but he was not above tapping his cultural heritage—real and imagined—when he felt that the new beauty who attracted him would respond to an extra layer of exotic personal history. No one, not even the women, took offense at or disapproved of Ganesh’s biographical elaborations, because he was unfailingly ebullient and entertaining and likable.
“This old dude on the tape,” he said, “was he Bibi’s uncle or something?”
“Her grandfather,” Pax said. “Nancy’s dad.”
“Wow. More like Grandpa Munster than Grandpa Walton. Was he an alky or a serious mushroom-eater, or what?”
“He was a retired Marine,” Pax said. “Never met him. He died before I showed up. But Bibi loved him. The music is really loud.”
“Isn’t it great? You can’t help moving to it,” Ganesh said, jiving in place. “You didn’t say not to listen to the tape, so I listened.”
“That’s all right,” Pogo said.
“I thought if it was a little damaged, I could do a transfer and clean up the sound. But it was clear. Clear and crazy. The old dude was flyin’ on something, man, higher than Jet Blue could ever take him. He totally creeped me out. I had to put on this music t
o stop the centipedes crawling through my blood. He must’ve creeped out Bibi, too. Although it doesn’t seem to have screwed her up any. How is our radiant Kaha Huna, by the way?”
Kaha Huna was the mythological Hawaiian goddess of surfing, sand, and sun. Ganesh wasn’t being jokey or ironic when he referred to Bibi as a surfing deity.
Pax and Pogo had agreed not to broadcast Bibi’s condition in the beach community. Perhaps in acknowledgment of the dread they would not otherwise discuss, they felt superstitiously that the more surfers who knew about her brain cancer and coma, the sooner she would die.
“She’s good,” Pax said, and Pogo said, “She’s cool.”
Bobbing his head in agreement but also to the music, Ganesh said, “She’s sacy, she’s stylin’. For a while I was in love with her from a distance. Maybe I still am. But I always knew I wasn’t good enough for her. Are you good enough for her, Pax?”
“I’m gonna try to be.”
“You better be.”
“Thanks for this,” Pax said, indicating the tape recorder in his hand. “Appreciate it.”
“De nada,” Ganesh said. “It was fun taking it apart and putting it back together. Just a knack. I can fix anything.” He tapped the recorder. “Except I couldn’t have fixed Grandpa Marine. That old dude was a serious head case.”
In the Honda once more, putting the key in the ignition but letting the engine rest, Pogo said, “Grandpa Munster?”
“That’s just Ganesh being Ganesh.”
“I don’t think so.”
“We’ll know in a minute.” Pax switched on the tape recorder.
They had a good view of the sunset from Cameo Highlands. A magical Maxfield Parrish blue for the base color of the sky. Clouds on fire, orange and scarlet, blazing from San Clemente in the south to Long Beach in the north. The sun balanced on the sea, a fat round bead of blood.
The electronic key fit the oval hole, the wasp in the Lucite glowed like a lamp filament, and the pneumatic steel door whisked open. Because the chamber beyond the threshold had a high positive pressure, a gust of sanitized air blew across Bibi and chased the fog off her shoulders and back. As she stepped inside, none of the wolfish, shadowy stalkers lunged at her, which made her wonder if their purpose was to guard this building or rather to herd her into it if she failed to enter of her own will. Behind her, the door slid shut with a whoosh.
She stood in what might have been a reception hall, one designed to intimidate or inspire awe. It was about eighty feet wide, sixty deep, forty high, illuminated by adjustable pot lights recessed in the ceiling, most of which were directed straight down. Every surface was finished in panels of white quartz, which lacked the veining of marble and therefore presented a gleaming and uniform surface with depth. The only decoration appeared in the wall opposite the door: an inlaid twenty-foot-diameter disc of some blood-red stone, perhaps carnelian, which itself was inlaid with two parallel, highly stylized lightning bolts in black granite.
Bibi recognized the lightning as being a version of the double-S logo that had appeared on the front-page of Das Schwarze Korps—The Black Guard—the official newspaper of the Schutzstaffel, Hitler’s chief instrument of terror. The colors of the Nazi flag were boldly represented in this enormous room, although reversed. Instead of red for the field, there was white; instead of a white circle, red; instead of a black swastika, the black double-S motif. Whatever use might be intended for this building, Terezin had made only a minimal effort to disguise his inspiration. Perhaps that was because, here in the tumultuous second decade of the new century, frightening numbers of people were either easy to deceive or wished ardently to submit to any belief system, no matter how delusional, that reassured them and justified their hatreds.
Bibi had fallen into a peculiar state of mind. She was afraid but not of this building or anything in it. Not of Terezin, if he were waiting for her in some other room. She was afraid of herself, of some potential in herself that she had long denied but that she might be unable to deny any longer.
She did not fear the bottled and stoppered anger that popped and spilled when she bludgeoned her former teacher with the pistol. Her rage and capacity for violent action were righteous rather than savage. Envy of others and hatred of others because of their race or creed or class were the source of the storms that sometimes destroyed entire civilizations, but they were not the source of her anger. If she raged, it was against barbarism and cruelty, against willful ignorance and arrogance, against the demonizing of one’s opposition and the brutalizing of the innocent. She could control even that potent anger born from seventeen years of repressing fundamental knowledge of herself, which had left her with the fear of some act she had committed—and might still commit—but with no knowledge of what the act had been.
Besides rage, however, there was some other potential that she possessed, forgotten but not lost. It was coming back to her. In some way, the quest that she’d been on for two days was as much a search for that repressed truth as it was for Ashley Bell.
The immense white-red-black chamber was unfurnished except for what might have been a reception desk, a great block of midnight-black granite, so high that anyone manning it during an event would have to remain standing. As this object held the greatest interest, she moved toward it. When Bibi had closed to within a few yards of the desk, Chubb Coy rose to his feet behind it. He held a Taser.
She had researched Tasers for her novel. There was the thrust-and-click stun gun with no more range than the length of your arm, and there was the kind that fired two small probes trailing fifteen-foot wires. Coy was armed with the latter. He said, “Damn it all, woman, I don’t belong here.” Propelled by nitrogen gas, the wire whispered toward Bibi and the probes pierced her T-shirt. The shock mapped her peripheral nervous system and disrupted its messaging along both sensory and motor nerves. Racked by pain, without control of her limbs, she crumpled to the white-quartz floor, stuttering a curse that her tongue could not complete.
Bibi couldn’t sharply focus on Chubb Coy. She twitched in her private world of pain and motor-nerve confusion, like some broken-back beetle in denial of its fractured shell. But she realized what he must be doing, understood him well enough to know that he was coming around from behind the desk, not done with the Taser, tossing aside the used cartridge, clicking another one into place. She had known him only a short while, but she knew his capacity for malice. She knew him well. Her expectation was at once fulfilled as indigo light bloomed behind her eyes and an alien current razored along radiant neural pathways, chattering her teeth, making her hands flop like the hands of a marionette operated by a drunk puppeteer.
Coy circled as Bibi crabbed on the quartz, leaning toward her and raising his voice. “Do you understand that I don’t belong here? Do you get what I’m telling you? Are you going to stubbornly persist with this thread, the Chubb Coy thread? Is the hard way the only way you can fumble yourself to enlightenment?”
Her eyes were full of tears, squeezed out of her by pain. Before her, the white quartz shimmered as if melting, as if it might have been composed of condensed and petrified fog that was about to return to vapor. Aside from Coy’s shoes as he paced around and around her, the only dark object in view, approximately ten feet away, must be her pistol.
If she could get to the gun, she could use it. Pax had taught her how to use it. She was ready to use it now. No more hesitations. Use it not merely to intimidate. Not as a bludgeon. Pull the trigger. Empty the magazine. Kill the bastard.
“So I’m a retired police detective enjoying a second career as head of hospital security. That’s logical. Sets me up as being maybe more skilled, more dangerous than your average rent-a-cop. Not bad. Not terribly clever, but credible.”
He continued to circle her as she painstakingly dragged herself, shuddering and uncoordinated, inch by inch across a floor shimmering like a frozen sea under the pot lights. At times, the plain of quartz seemed to tilt precariously, so that she feared sliding at increasing velocity
until she pitched across some brink, into a melt-smoothed vent flume that would spin her down—she was already dizzy—down into deep and deeper ice caverns.
“From the get-go,” Coy said, “my job was to establish the air of conspiracy and paranoia that would thicken and become complicated event by event. But that’s about all I was given to do. Except, of course, to be a distraction, to pop up when perhaps your thinking leads you toward the thing you find unthinkable.”
The Sig Sauer lay inches away, frozen to the tilted ice field and thus resistant to the gravity that would have sent it spinning away from her. She reached for it with her right hand, which was coming under her control again.
Coy had clicked a third cartridge into the Taser, and he fired it into her back. The probes, which could bite through an inch of clothing, pierced her blazer and T-shirt with no difficulty, serpent fangs injecting a current similar to that of the human body. Techno mavens called it neuromuscular incapacitation, a solemn laboratory term for a total physical freak-out, the baffled brain no longer able to discern the difference between the body’s natural signals and the storm of meaningless static, but the effect was more visceral and more emotional than the dry term suggested. With each shock, Bibi was thrown into a cold rushing river of sensation at the same time that she was robbed of any ability to control her reaction to it, and she wondered if with the fourth cartridge or the fifth, she would soil her pants and have the last shreds of dignity stripped from her.
Coy kicked the pistol away from Bibi’s spasming fingers. The weapon spun beyond her blurred and salt-stung vision.
“Are you listening to me, woman?” Coy asked, booming at her as if he were a lowercase god of the elements, speaking in the language of thunder, and she were a groveling penitent. “Think about my name. Chubb is as frivolous as Bibi, don’t you think? Yeah, sure, I’m being used to distract you, but part of me, just like part of you, wants you to find the truth, to be freed by the truth.”