Gurry Debritto nodded. They were good, these people, but always the little problems and changes required adjustments. Evidently the original destination had been somehow fouled and the backup couldn’t be trusted, so they were shifting to a new place. He had a hunch where. The boat was headed south along the coast to the same bay as planned, and San Francisco Bay seemed a logical place to start, particularly in light of OKIE TURF – Oakland, if his hunch was right. He turned to the keyboard and punched up the Oakland Index, then the street directory. He assumed the time and address were contained in the numbers 107772400. He studied them for a moment, deciding to start with the obvious – 2400 as the time. He tapped out 107 77 Street on keyboard and there it was: CARDINAL LIGHT IMPORTS, twenty-one-thousand-square-foot warehouse, owned by Tao-Hihe Chemical, leased to Cardinal Light Imports in January. He punched in the access code for Langley Central Records, then the security clearance sequence that was one of the perks he’d insisted upon as a condition for his services.
Not much on Harvey Moon, but enough. President of Cardinal Light Imports, a board member of Tao-Hihe Chemicals, and an elder of the Breaking Wave Temple, a Taoist church that drew their religious inspiration from Lao-Tzu and their social analysis from Karl Marx. Suspected of smuggling arms for Mao (unconfirmed) and drugs for the Danish Provos (unconfirmed; perhaps disinformation). Lives aboard yacht [Susy-Q: Cayman Reg: LV967769]. Married seven times; thirty-one children…
Debritto read on. Thirty-one fucking kids. Didn’t these people understand that they had to quit breeding like dogs?
He repunched the Oakland street directory and jotted down the map file number for Seventy-seventh Street. If they were bringing the Diamond down on Moon’s yacht, it would be sweet to take it right there on the boat. But the yacht would be risky, too hard to secure. He’d have to hire help, and he’d always worked alone in close.
When he pulled the Seventy-seventh Street aerial from the map case and located the Cardinal Light warehouse, he dropped all consideration of hitting the yacht. The warehouse was perfect. One story, open ground all around it, a large skylight on the roof. He always appreciated skylights. He liked looking down. Perhaps Mr Moon would show up in person. So far, they’d been more than accommodating. They were bringing it right to him. He was in Berkeley, right next door. He could take the Nimitz and be there in twenty minutes.
He went down to the basement and opened the weapons locker. He would have at least a day to set up the warehouse. It was just past midnight, a perfect time to go take a look. He decided he could afford the extra weight and bulk of four grenades, a drag on stealth but nice to have if even half the Moon kids showed. In a way, he wished they would.
‘Thirty-one kids,’ he muttered, slipping the.380 in his ankle holster. ‘That’s a crime against humanity. This has to stop. If the idiots keep breeding and the intelligent wisely don’t, humans will devolve back to animals. Beasts. Goddamn cunts. Let’s make a baby. If the fucking women weren’t so weak we’d have a chance.’
As soon as he had the Diamond in his control, he’d brush up on his underwater demolition techniques and go slap a mine on Mr Moon’s floating pleasure dome.
Debritto rolled up over the roof gutter and came up in a crouch. The warehouse was just like in the picture: flat tar roof, skylight, three small vent pipes. He held himself motionless for a full minute, eyes scanning the roof, listening. Staying low, he moved to the edge of the skylight. He laid out flat and listened. He could hear muffled music inside, probably a radio. He slipped the silenced.357 from its shoulder holster and inched forward.
What he saw confused him. A man’s face stared up into his. In the instant he realized the warehouse floor was covered with mirrors, the dart hit an inch below his left ear. He tried to roll and snap off a shot but instead flopped onto his back. His body went rigid, the gun slipping from his hand as the fingers stiffened and spread until they were almost bent backward. His lungs were filling with ice. Just before he lost consciousness he saw a tall figure in a black cape and black nurse’s cap step from behind the closest ventilation pipe and raise the blowgun to his lips. The back of Debritto’s right hand stung.
He heard footsteps, a rustle of cloth, a burning sensation in one of his arms. His eyes were open but he couldn’t see. His body had turned to frozen glass. He was a fly in amber, paralyzed, senseless. But he could hear, he realized, had heard footsteps and a rustle of cloth.
A woman’s voice whispered in his ear, ‘Dimethyl tubocaine chloride, a neuromuscular blocking agent. To slow you down enough to listen. I suggest you listen as if your life depended on it. The second dart was a mixture of curare and datura. I gave you two injections a moment ago, both containing synergistic combinations. Belladonna. Tetraclorothane. Methyl iodide. Sodium acid sulfate. Plus a few others I’d lost the labels for. Oh, and some hallucinogens for color. I won’t bore you with the specific effects of each. You’ll know soon enough. And I can’t tell you the cumulative effects because I’ve never tried these combinations before. You’ll be the first to know. Maybe the only one who ever will. And you do deserve to know, don’t you, Mr Debritto? I think so. Information is the root of understanding, and compassion is its flower. I’m an understanding and compassionate woman, Mr Debritto. I am also a Raven, quicksilver’s daughter, the moon’s witness, a messenger between the dead and the living, and a dweller in both realms. I know you doubt my compassion as you lie here so pathetically trapped inside your senseless flesh. Doubt is a tribute to intelligence, as I’m sure you’d agree if you could. So let me prove my compassion, Mr Debritto, prove it with a promise and a gift. I promise I will call you an ambulance within twenty minutes. And the gift is a critical piece of information that could mean the difference between life and death. I’m not sure whether I’ve given you a lethal dose or not. Lucky, lucky you. Yet another adventure in self-discovery. Poor baby. Poor, poor baby.’ She paused, and though he couldn’t feel it, gently stroked his brow. When she spoke again, her voice seemed harsher and more intense: ‘He was able to steal the Diamond because he believed in the Diamond. Now we’ll find out what you believe in.’
Debritto heard the rustle of her skirt as she walked away. He tried to move his right hand to find the gun but it was impossible, his mind trapped in a block of ice. He pitted his rage at her against the terror of his own helplessness. He would not be beaten by a woman, by a weak, brainless cunt. She probably hadn’t given him a fatal dose. Too soft to make irrevocable decisions, too sentimental to exercise full power. He tried to concentrate on remembering the poisons she’d said she used. How stupid to mention them. If the paralysis faded he could tell the doctors, who’d know the antidotes. But concentration was difficult lying there paralyzed on the roof. He tried to squeeze his attention back to the poisons she’d named. He heard a female voice whispering in his ear, but it was another woman speaking. His mother’s voice told him, ‘You are evil. Corrupt with evil. Sick with evil. Mad with evil. Evil, evil, evil.’
Debritto’s rigid body barely twitched when he tried to scream. This couldn’t be his mother. He had no memory of her. She’d died when he was five months old. That’s what his father had told him. Why should he doubt his father? He’d always told him the hard truth. No, it had to be the poisons – some sort of auditory hallucination.
‘You were born evil. Full of sickness and rot. Shame of my flesh. Shame of my heart. You know my voice from the womb. You have dreamed my dreams. I gave you life. I gave you life, and you defiled it. Now I’ve come to take it back.’
Tape Transcript (partial):
Interrogation of Elwood and Emmett Tindell, brothers (ID Access LCR 86755)
File: OPERATION NEST EGG
Tonopah Emergency Field Office, Nevada
April 10, 1987
Present: Reg. Sup. Keyes; agents Stanley, Dickerson, Peebe
PEEBE: Okay fellas, I want you to tell it to Supervisor Keyes. He’s flown in after a hard day, so keep it short and to the point.
ELWOOD: We got the same d
eal still? No charges on us – nothing; half of any reward or business deals; you take brother Emmett to the hospital and get his nuts fixed up; we get us a new Camaro and two thousand bucks each? That what we talking?
EMMETT: El, you’re fucking hopeless. Don’t tell ’em shit.
ELWOOD: Don’t fret on me, Em; your big brother knows what he’s doing. We’re in the big time here. This is CIA, not your sheriffs and highway troopers. This is national law. They can deal. So, Mr Peebe, Mr Keyes, how about it?
KEYES: That sounds reasonable to me. However, since we’re overburdened with paperwork, would you take twenty thousand in cash to cover the car and the medical bills yourself? You still get half of any reward money, walk out of here clean.
ELWOOD: You got the money on you, I wouldn’t mind looking it over.
KEYES: Dickerson? Show him. You can count it later. You don’t walk till you pass the polygraph, though.
ELWOOD: The what?
KEYES: Lie detector. We pay for truth and punish bullshit.
ELWOOD: I got no problem with that. Brother Em, how about you?
EMMETT: Officers, he’s been using drugs something fierce ever since he was a baby. There’s lots of things he thinks are true that ain’t even close.
ELWOOD: Why are you being like this, Em? We got outer-space invaders running around and you don’t want to cash in. Your nuts still swoll and achy, that it? Getting whopped in the nuts always did get you strange. Remember when we were seven and that red-headed Simmons girl liked to kick your nuts up your throat for waving your pee-pee at her? Remember? You got real fretted and grumpy, and––
KEYES: I’m sure you both had charming childhoods, but I’m much more interested in what happened this morning on Highway Ninety-five.
ELWOOD: Well sure. Okay. Me and Emmett was driving along, heading up to Reno to see if we could get us some jobs, and––
PEEBE: [to Keyes] Car was stolen in Phoenix yesterday. We just put the make and numbers out on the us-only line, Phoenix west, but it was already on a general APB.
ELWOOD: Hard to look for work without a car.
KEYES: Forget the car. Never happened. Go on.
ELWOOD: So we’re driving along about an hour after sunup and we see this guy sitting alongside the road. Kinda got his head tucked down on his chest and his hands over his face. Looked like maybe he was feeling puny. So me and Em, we pull over, see if he’s all right. But this guy – said his name was Herman – he wasn’t even next door to right. We seen that straight off. One thing, he’s wearing fucking bowling shoes, I mean right out there in the sage-brush and all. Bowling shirt, too. Name of some construction company on the back – Rice Construction, Price, something like that. He’s packing his bowling ball with him, and he’s got this backpack and real nice briefcase, too. Weird. Like he don’t know if he’s a bowler, forest ranger, or banker. What’s weirder, he’s crying. Not ‘boo-hoo,’ you know, but his eyes are ’bout as red as granddaddy’s long johns and his cheeks are all wet and streaky. But what’s––
KEYES: What’d this guy look like? Age? Size? Eye color?
PEEBE: We got it in detail already; went out with the car description on our line. I can run it by you quick.
KEYES: Quick.
ELWOOD: Hold on, dammit. It’s just getting to the really weird––
PEEBE: [to Keyes] Mid-twenties, six feet, hundred sixty to eighty pounds, blue eyes, brown hair, scar on right temple, dressed as described.
KEYES: White man?
PEEBE: Yes sir. Sorry.
EMMETT: He’s just jerking your chain. Ain’t too many blue-eyed spades or spics I ever saw.
ELWOOD: You guys want to hear the weird part, or what?
KEYES: Okay, let’s hear it. The guy was crying …
ELWOOD: So naturally I ask him what’s wrong. And he says, ‘I think I was remembering a dream my mother had when I was in her womb.’ You got that? Guy fucking thinks he’s remembering dreams from inside his mama? Me and Emmett weren’t much for school, but you don’t need no graduation papers to see this guy is bat-shit loony, maybe run off from a nuthouse or something. His eyes looked crazy, too, kinda glassy and far away, and he generally looked all grungy. So wasted, me and Em had to help him get in the backseat.
KEYES: How much help? I mean, did he voluntarily enter your vehicle?
ELWOOD: Pretty much, yeah. We said we’d take him on to Reno, wouldn’t even make him pay for no gas. Me and Em was being nice.
PEEBE: Spare us. No charges, right? Just what happened.
ELWOOD: So we’re driving along and talking with this guy – Brother Em’s at the wheel, me riding shotgun, this Herman weirdo in the back – just getting acquainted, you know, and I ask him what he’s got in his bags and briefcase, just out of being curious. And he says real matter-of-fact, real cool, that he’s got extra clothes and shit in the little backpack, a grill in the bowling bag, and in the briefcase he’s got about twenty thousand dollars, cash money. So––
EMMETT: El, you dumb shit, he said grail. Grail, not grill.
ELWOOD: Me and Em’s been arguing over this all afternoon, but grill – like for cooking up meat – is what I heard. Struck me as kinda odd, too, that he’d be packing around some little grill in a bowling bag,’ specially since it looked like it already had a bowling ball in it. So I asked him if we could see this grill. He said seeing the grill was something you had to earn. So I said how ’bout seeing the money, and son of a bitch if he don’t say ‘Sure’ and open it right up. I took a good eyeful – never seen so much in my life – and then I looked at Em, and Em was looking at me. Me and Em been poor ever since we got orphaned off when we was pups. We––
PEEBE: Get to it, Elwood – save the shit. Your rap sheets are longer than your dicks.
ELWOOD: Okay. Sure. So we pull off on a nice little turnout a ways up the road – one of them history monuments – and Em gets this Herman guy out of the car to check out the marker, take a leak. Guy takes the fucking bowling bag with him. Now the way we work it, Brother Em’s the holder and I’m the whopper. I use a sawed-off ax-handle,’ bout this long, top foot drilled out a quarter-inch wide and filled back up with lead. So I come up behind him real easy as he’s standing there beside Em. Em nods he’s ready, so I plant myself solid, and when Em grabs him around the shoulders, I swing down with the club, swing hard. And this is the truth – hook me up to the biggest lie detector you got – right in the middle of the swing, the guy fucking disappears. And Em’s standing there with his legs braced, holding nothing but air, and the club smacks him right in the nuts. I’m sorry, Em. Fuck, what can I say?
EMMETT: Nothing, you dumb shit.
ELWOOD: He’s an alien, Em. People are into aliens. We’re gonna make a ton o’ money just by warning people against him. Could get us on TV.
KEYES: Whoa, you two. Let’s get back on track. Emmett, did you see this guy disappear like your brother claims?
EMMETT: That’s what my eyes saw. The rest of me ain’t believing it.
KEYES: Okay then. He disappeared. Then what happened?
ELWOOD: Well, Emmett screamed and went down. I was trying to figure out what the hell was going on – looking around kinda wild to see where the guy mighta went to, but he was nowhere. Emmett’s sorta gurgling at my feet, so I bend down to see if I can help him, and the car starts up. Guy had snuck back to the car and was stealing it. Drove right off toward Reno, giving the horn a couple of big honks. Was another hour before your people happened by.
KEYES: I want you both to think hard: You said this guy got out of the car with the bowling bag, right? So when he disappeared, what happened to it?
EMMETT: No idea.
ELWOOD: Me either. I don’t remember seeing it on the ground by Em. Didn’t see him come back to get it. Figure it must have gone with him.
PEEBE: We searched the area. Nada.
ELWOOD: We’re dealing with some kind of outer space alien, right? Some sorta critter from the stars that can take our shape but get back invisibl
e when it wants?
KEYES: So it would seem. But whatever he is, we’ll find him.
EMMETT: Hey, officer – don’t you listen? The guy can disappear. Get it? Poof! If he can disappear, maybe he can do other things. Ask me, you’d have to be superstupid to fuck with him. Super-super.
Daniel fidgeted behind the wheel of the Tindell brothers’ turquoise- and-pink Cutlass. Their alleged Cutlass, anyway, since he’d wisely checked the registration only to find it in the name of Mrs Heidi Cohen. Daniel somehow doubted she knew Emmett and Elwood personally. He remembered Mott telling him that if you were going to drive what he called ‘blind loaners’ – vehicles that the owners didn’t know they’d lent – you should borrow a new one every twelve hours.
When he discovered the registration anomaly shortly after leaving the brothers in the dust, Daniel had decided to ditch the car. He’d pulled off on a spur road and gathered his stuff to walk away when he was taken with the notion to try vanishing with the Diamond in daylight again.
He vanished for three futile hours. He still couldn’t see the Diamond’s spiral flame in daylight, and without its axis to mark the center, he couldn’t focus. He’d tried imagining the spiral flame but this split his attention. He gave up in a fit of frustration. He needed to step back. He was acting as if there were deadlines. He could take the rest of his life to work with the Diamond.
The time pressure he felt was actually the phantom pressure of pursuit, the sense that he had to enter the Diamond before he was caught. But objectively, they couldn’t catch him or seize the Diamond as long as he could vanish and take it with him. In an oblique way, his urgency was a failure to be true to himself, a failure to trust his powers.
‘I don’t trust me. Me don’t trust I. Is this a natural neural lag in accommodating change, or do we have a serious disagreement? And if it’s a disagreement, how can it be harmoniously resolved?’
Daniel tried to think about this, more from duty than passion. One evening at Nameless Lake Wild Bill had said the trouble with self-analysis was the built-in human eagerness to accept all sorts of preposterous and absurd suppositions, not the least of which were both the possibility and desirability of knowing one’s self. Bill had likened this to using a corkscrew to pull your image from a mirror. Daniel smiled. With mock sternness he told himself, ‘You have a problem with self-image. Admit it – I admit it.’ He came to his own defense. ‘But if you can vanish, you’re supposed to have problems with self-image. You’d be insane if you didn’t.’