“She had a slight accent—could’ve been German,” he told Goulart—and again, alert, they exchanged glances.
A maid answered the mansion door—a pretty Spanish girl in a black maid uniform with a frilly white collar and apron. She told them she would fetch Miss Bose and left them in the foyer.
“You think her boyfriend spanks her in that uniform?” Goulart asked as he watched her go.
Zach cracked up. “Would you shut up, Broadway. God Awmighty.”
“Look at this place.”
Zach did. They’d seen a lot of fine houses these last few days, but this had to be one of the finest. No flash, just clean elegance. Persian rugs over parquet floors with walnut inlay. A straight-through view from the foyer to the tumultuous surf visible through the picture windows in the grand back room. A switchback staircase with a white balustrade and a walnut banister going up to one balcony and then another. Gold designs painted straight into the white, white walls.
It sure is purty, Zach was about to drawl aloud, but before he could get the words out, he caught a whiff of something—something dark, fulsome; offensively organic. The word blood went through his mind, and he thought of a great red, thick, rancid pool of blood, before he shook the word and the image off and told himself to stop this crazy nonsense—whereupon Angela Bose appeared from around a corner and said “Welcome, Detectives. Come this way please.”
Was this another symptom of his fever: this maddening patina of the uncanny that lay over ordinary things? Moment to moment, Zach was not sure whether Angela Bose was one of the most beautiful glamour-queens he’d ever laid eyes on, or the product of some sort of artifice—makeup or plastic surgery or something—disguising a face and figure that would otherwise have appeared withered and unpleasantly overripe. She seemed to change even as he looked at her—which could’ve been a trick of the beach-light pouring through the wall of windows in the back room, catching her at different angles as she turned gracefully from one of them to the other. Or maybe, even at twenty-seven, she had simply reached that precise second when a woman’s perfect youth trembles on the brink of ending. . . .
Or maybe he was just going loony.
Whatever it was, Zach got the idea in his head that, despite the strong and chiseled and regal features beneath her shoulder-length auburn hair, and despite the sleek figure in her white blouse and white slacks, Angela Bose was secretly a shriveled cadaver that had somehow been inflated to a semblance of vitality and loveliness as a tick is bloated with blood. He kept catching the aroma of blood in the room. And the aroma of corruption.
The maid placed a tray of coffee and china on the low table set among the cushioned wicker chairs, but Angela Bose poured for them herself. She spoke without condescension or self-consciousness, but Zach could see that her manners were elegant and ladylike as if she were, as he put it to himself, highborn.
“Could you tell us if the thieves took anything really valuable?” he asked her.
“There was a gold brooch that I was quite fond of, handed down from my great-great-grandmother,” she said. “Of tremendous sentimental value, though the insurers only assessed it at eight or nine thousand dollars. And they stole a drawing by Bosch that I do believe is worth something. I suspect they made off with that by accident, though, because they took a lot of worthless prints and watercolors besides—probably for the frames.”
“Excuse me asking, but what sort of accent is that you have, ma’am? Is that German?” Zach said. He sipped his coffee from a cup decorated with roses.
“Dutch, actually. My family has been in the Netherlands for some four hundred years. What about your accent, Agent?”
“West Texas. My grandpappy was a moonshiner and that’s all I know.”
She smiled graciously—though damned if there wasn’t something skullish and awful about it too. Or was this just more creepy stuff from his imagination?
“You ever hear of a fellow named Dominic Abend?” said Goulart, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees.
“No. No, Agent, I don’t believe so.”
Goulart unfolded the photo from his jacket pocket and showed it to her. She looked it over—and Zach could have sworn she recognized it, but at this point he didn’t trust his own instincts.
“No,” she said. “It is not a very good picture, of course. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen this man.”
Outside, on the beach through the picture window, a green wave rose against the blue sky and crashed down upon the yellow sand. The white froth of the surf seemed to be reflected by the thin white clouds above.
“You live here with your father?” said Zach.
“No. Pa-pa lives in Amsterdam. He visits me from time to time, and the house is in his name.”
“Which is?”
“His name? Herman Bose. Von Bose, actually, but he doesn’t like the aristocratic pretension. He owns a shipping company. I’m curious why you should ask.”
Zach gestured with his coffee cup. “This Dominic Abend we’re looking for is German. I’m just casting around for any possible connections.”
“Of course.” She smiled again—politely this time—and her bright blue eyes went up and down him. It was not a mere sexual appraisal, he thought. She seemed to be taking his full measure. When she was done, she inclined her chin slightly as if to say she knew him now, she knew who he really was, deep down.
“There wasn’t any kind of weapon stolen, was there?” he asked her. “A dagger. A sword. Something like that.”
Her eyes were still lingering on his face so that when she lied—and Zach felt sure she was lying, sure enough that his heart raced—he thought he could see a look of irony in them. She seemed to be sending him a message that went something like, Forgive me, but now I must lie to you, even though we both know I am lying. It is simply what must be done.
“No,” she said aloud. “There was nothing like that. I have given a full inventory of what was stolen to the local police, you know. I’m sure they would happily share it with you.”
Driving back into the city, Zach spoke only after the Crown Vic was on the expressway, only when he felt he had put some distance between the rear fender and Sea View, as if he was afraid Angela Bose would overhear him.
“You get the feeling she was lying?”
Goulart rounded on him in surprise. “No! Did you? I thought she was being totally straight with us.”
“Really?”
“Well, yeah. I mean, the whole accent and everything had me on the lookout, but there’s a lot of these European types out here. Especially recently, with all of them escaping from the apocalypse and so on.”
“I thought I saw something in her eyes when she looked at Abend’s picture. Like she recognized him.”
Goulart shrugged and shook his head: he hadn’t spotted it.
Which bothered Zach. Because Goulart was such a mind reader. And he, Zach, had thought it was so obvious. But then he’d also thought he smelled blood and corruption. He also thought he’d been attacked by malicious giant cockroaches and that he was being haunted by a German college professor. . . . So, yeah, maybe Angela Bose was lying and maybe Goulart was on the take and covering up for her, or maybe Goulart was just not at his observational best because he was distracted by his medical problems, or maybe Goulart was lying about his medical problems too. . . . Or maybe Zach was just going out of his ever-loving mind. Hard to say at this point which scenario was more likely to be true.
“Can I ask you something?” he said after another while.
Goulart grunted. “Sure.”
“Not sure how to put this exactly, but . . . all you been going through? The medical stuff and all.”
“Yeah?”
“You ever give any thought to the big picture? God and the supernatural and like that.”
“You’re not gonna preach to me, are you, Cowboy?”
“No, no, not at all, I’m just . . . curious, I guess.”
He heard Goulart take a deep breath in and out thro
ugh his nose. “Well. . . . Who the hell wouldn’t give it some thought, right? In my position. The way I see it: sure, maybe there’s a god, and maybe not. But maybe the thing is: it doesn’t make any difference. You ever think of that? I mean, maybe there’s a god and this is all just his train set or something. Maybe we’re like a TV show he watches in his spare time. Because he likes the sex scenes and the car chases. ‘Nuclear war? Yeah, that was cool. Great special effects. Wonder what else is on.’”
“Well, what about . . . ?” Zach stopped.
“What? No, go ahead. This is good. We’re sharing. It’s like we’re partners. Gives me a warm glow. Kiss me, you beautiful son of a bitch.”
Zach gave a crooked smile, but he pushed on too. “Well, to be honest, I was thinking about the practical side of it. You think there could be . . . supernatural stuff? Here on Earth, I mean. Evil stuff. Or even supernatural good stuff. I mean, Grace, she’s always talking about miracles and God’s will and the Enemy’s schemes and all that. Angels. Demons.” He eye-checked Goulart to see if he would laugh at that, but he only gave a small snort. “I know, but she really believes in it. My mama did too. And they weren’t stupid, either of them. I mean, sure, women, you know, are crazy and all that, but they’re not always wrong about things. And Grace—well, she knows people. She understands the world, in some ways. In some ways better than I do. She gets a lot of stuff right.”
“Hey,” said Goulart in a broad-minded tone—because you never disrespected your partner’s wife, and he’d always liked Grace, all the guys did. “It’s as good a way of describing things as any. There may not really be a devil, but the world behaves exactly as if there was. So if you believe in that stuff—yeah, you’ll never go far wrong.”
Zach grunted thoughtfully in response, but in fact the answer wasn’t much help to him. Was it possible there were ghosts and magic daggers and marauding cockroaches, or not? That’s what he wanted to know.
The sun went down beyond the windshield, and the blue of the sky began to deepen. The expressway street lights came on, and so did the oncoming headlights, and so did the diamond-like gleams of house windows that were splayed to the left and right of them in the Island towns.
“The thing is,” said Goulart, “when you look into the abyss. . . . ’Cause that’s why you’re asking me this shit, right? ’Cause let’s face it, I’m looking smack dab into the abyss.”
Zach answered with a gesture so he wouldn’t have to lie—because, of course, that wasn’t why he was asking at all.
Goulart went on: “All I can tell you, pard, is that from where I’m standing? The abyss is awful abyssy. You know? Awful dark. And in all that dark, who the fuck knows? Right? Could be angels and demons playing checkers with our souls. Could be dirt and nothing all the way down.”
“What the hell is taking them so long with those tests of yours?” Zach blurted out, because he really did care about the New Yorker and wanted him to know it.
“Ah!” said Goulart and he waved the question away.
Once again Zach had to push down the thought that his partner was hiding something. Or that he knew more than he was telling. Or that the whole sickness story was a deception. Because if any of that was true—if any of his instincts and paranoid suspicions and weird feverish perceptions were accurate—then what about the rest of it? Those giant cockroaches? The executioner standing on the bridge? The corpse smoking a cigarette in his bedroom chair? And that night—in Germany—in the Black Forest. . . .
He had to be crazy, had to be. His mind had to be messed up by fever. There was no other reasonable explanation. But then how the hell was he supposed to be a cop—how the hell was he supposed to be a human being—if he could no longer trust his own observations? If he no longer knew what was real and what was madness?
It was full night when they parked in one of the angled spaces outside the one-six. Shoulder to shoulder, the two detectives walked wearily across the street and up the three concrete steps to the precinct’s front doors. Goulart pulled one of the doors open and went through first—and Zach caught the edge of the door with his hand and was about to follow when he felt someone’s eyes on him.
He paused. He turned, the door still in his hand. He saw that woman again—the woman they had spotted watching them days ago, the slender pretty girl with short black hair, wearing her belted purple sweater. She was back. Watching them again—watching Zach, anyway—from just down the sidewalk now, only a couple of dozen yards away.
She didn’t hurry off this time. She went on standing there, a little outside the glow of a street lamp. She went on staring at Zach, so that Zach realized she had meant for him to feel it, that she had been beckoning him silently.
Zach called into the building after Goulart, “I’ll catch up to you,” and let the door swing shut. He walked back down the steps and headed toward the woman.
She waited for him to reach her. She stood with her hands in her belted purple sweater-thing, her shoulders hunched, her chin tucked in. Maybe she was simply huddling against the cool of the autumn night, but Zach thought she looked nervous too. He felt a little nervous himself, come to think of it. He had that sense again—that sense he had had earlier—that he had seen this woman somewhere before, and that it mattered.
He stepped up to her and before he could say anything, she said, “It’s odd that we can do that, isn’t it? Feel someone staring at us. Scientists say it’s just a superstition but . . . I find it really quite odd.” She had a clear, bell-like voice and a distinct British accent.
“You wanted to speak to me?” Zach said.
“You are Mr. Adams? Mr. Zach Adams?”
“Agent Adams—I am, yes,” Zach said. “And you are?”
“Forgive me—Agent, of course. My name is Imogen Storm. I’m a journalist. I work for a website called Bizarre! It’s important that I speak with you.”
“Bizarre!” Zach repeated, deadpan. He did not know whether to be amused or alarmed. “What do you want to speak with me about?”
The woman drew a deep, unsteady breath. She really was nervous. She said, “I want to speak with you about Gretchen Dankl. The werewolf.”
15
STORM WARNING
She seems to have vanished,” said Imogen Storm.
“She seems to have never existed,” said Zach.
They were sitting at a square blond-wood table in a coffee shop on a corner near the precinct. Sitting by the window with the homeward-bound pedestrians rushing past in both directions on the other side of the glass.
“Oh, she existed all right,” said Imogen. She leaned forward, the fingers of both hands wrapped around her cardboard coffee cup. “She murdered my fiancé.”
Zach raised his cup to his mouth but didn’t drink from it. He was using it to cover his expression. He didn’t want her to see his unbelief or his eagerness to believe—either of them. On the one hand, he was excited and afraid at hearing her speak the impossible thing he had barely allowed himself to think. On the other hand, two people confirming each other’s delusions were still deluded—maybe twice as deluded. He wanted to be certain she wasn’t simply as crazy as he was before he told her anything about his own experience.
“It’s true,” said Imogen, sensing his skepticism. “She tore his throat open. While in her wolf mode, of course.”
“In her wolf mode, sure,” said Zach. “What did you say the name of your website was again? Incredible?”
“Bizarre!” She took a card from her purse and pushed it toward him. She had scribbled a New York address on it. “We used to have a dead-tree edition as well, but we’ve gone fully digital now.”
“Congratulations.”
Imogen Storm heard his droll tone clearly enough, but she would not be baited. She was used to this. Skepticism. Sarcasm. Teasing. She always rebuffed it with a composed and professional air. Any sign of agitation only encouraged the hecklers.
“We cover—well, all sorts of things,” she said. “Anything, really, that smacks of
the uncanny. We follow up on reports of UFO sightings, strange creatures, hauntings, other paranormal events and so on—and we describe them to our readers in objective, unemotional prose, without sensationalism.”
“So you mean you take them seriously . . . ?”
Imogen weighed her response. “For much of our audience, our dispassionate approach gives our stories a rather cutting-edge tone of irony. Because the subjects are so outlandish, you see, the proofs generally so meager, the witnesses . . . well, they’re so eccentric that we only have to describe them accurately for them to seem a joke to many of our readers.”
“I get it.”
“But now and then, it’s different. Now and then, we hit on something—something unusual.”
“Like Gretchen Dankl.” Zach had left his cup on the table now, but he was still hiding his mouth, propping his chin on his thumb, draping his index finger across his upper lip. “You’re telling me she’s really a werewolf?”
Imogen had turned her head to look out the window. Her profile struck him as elfin, what with the boy-cut black hair and the kiss-curl sideburns and the cute turned-up nose and bright brown eyes. Elfin—and yet wistful for a girl in her twenties, or she seemed wistful at the moment as she gazed out at the rushing New York pedestrians and the yellow cabs bunched up together under the traffic light with the white beams of their headlights crisscrossing.
“It’s all so normal here,” she said. “You can’t know how odd it seems, coming from where I do.” She faced him. “You’ve heard what’s going on in my country—all over Europe?”
“What I catch on the news, yeah.”
“I wonder sometimes. I turned on the television today to see what they were saying about it, and all I could find were stories about a child trapped on a cliff face in North Dakota or somewhere.”
“We’re a big country. We’ve always got plenty to talk about right here at home.”