by Dean Ing
Majid Hashemi, standing in a darkened bathroom at the end of the west wing of the sprawling house, had been watching past the crack in the door, ready to shut it. He saw two people carrying trays and collecting dinnerware: a stocky woman in starched burgundy and a heavy man all in white. The kitchen was evidently to the right somewhere. He saw a half-dozen others, including a delectable little brunette sipping from cocktail glasses in both hands, before he realized that his formal attire needed only one thing to be perfect. He took off the rented coat; stuffed the coat into the toilet tank; neatly rolled the starched sleeves of his shirt halfway to his elbows. If he could find the kitchen, and simply took a tray of food and mingled with the guests, perhaps no one would think to ask why.
Majid knelt and prayed, then took a deep breath and marched out of the bathroom, hell-bent on paradise.
Near the pool, Rogan belched, tipped up his Anchor Steam, waved it toward David Kaplan who was dancing with his wife on Wes’s seldom-used handball court. “Maybe Kaplan has some ideas,” he said.
A finger snap from the younger Schultheis. “Fishing! Wes will buy it; we’ll claim we didn’t get to go because of that laserboost failure on Delta One. Dad, how long since you helped fuel a jet?”
“Not since we fired the last Natter at Waldsee,” Wolf Schultheis replied, looking into the sky, remembering another age and another battle against time. A battle he had lost; but some battles were well-lost, and some wars were fought without bullets. A bass chuckle: “Dere will not be any strafing of our site dis time, 1 trust.”
“Don’t bet on it,” Rogan said cheerfully. “If there is, it’ll come from the guy heading for us now.”
Wes had only pointed Ellie Schultheis out to Christopher before hurrying outside in search of a man he had long intended to meet. He beamed now, approaching the trio that lounged between his diving board and his big pool filter, wondering how he had missed them at their entry. He would never have suspected that Tom Schultheis might be delaying an introduction. “Hello, all. Tom, is this the Zeppelin builder?”
Tom Schultheis made the introductions. “I am honored to meet de builder of Delta One,” said Wolf Schultheis with a straightening of the shoulders, the slightest bow of his big round head. “And now, alzo of de world’s fastest locomotive,” he added.
“You can say that again,” Rogan grinned, his gaze flickering to Tom Schultheis, who seemed to be silently counting to ten.
Wes and the old man plunged almost instantly into comparisons of dirigibles old and new, searching not for agreement but, in the manner of enthusiasts everywhere, for some point of contention to explore. Wes did not notice the fidgets of the younger Schultheis, who had harbored misgivings about tlys meeting since Alma first arranged it. As much as he wanted to hear every word, Tom Schultheis felt an increasing temptation to try censoring his father’s end of it. And that, he knew, would not only be obvious; it would also offend his father deeply.
He escaped the dilemma by excusing himself, noting that Rogan seemed to be searching for someone - probably Alma, or anybody with an extra beer. A moment later, Rogan wandered off to widen his search.
Wes blundered into the contention area with Wolf Schultheis after the old man broached the subject of Delta One’s laserboost experiment. “De only thing between Peel Transit and cheap asteroid mining,” said the German, “is bigger lasers.” “There’s a guy named Lake working up a paper on that from our flight data,” Wes said, “and more power to him, if you’ll pardon the pun. But I made a bargain with the good Lord: If He doesn’t stop me down here, I won’t poke my machines in His eye up there. ’ ’ Wes realized it sounded idiotic, and hoped the old man would take it as a joke.
But: “Avoiding de future on religious grounds, Mr. Peel?” “Transport on earth is my religion, Mr. Schultheis. I just haven’t got time to spread myself so thin.” It would sound even stupider to admit I’m stuck with a promise I made to Gram, thirty years ago. And I could eventually lose my best men if Patrick Sage is right, but got-damnitall, . . . “That doesn’t mean I’d turn down a honeymoon suite in an orbiting Hilton,” Wes went on, grinning. “I’m not against them; I just don’t build them.”
“And if you do not pioneer de inexpensive boosters, you must plan on paying for dat honeymoon in rubles, and you will not have even dat choice for many years, ’ ’ Wolf Schultheis said wryly.
“Oh, I dunno. I seem to be wavering abou. honeymoons, lately.” Wes’s smile was reflective as he swung his gimpy hip onto the edge of the pool filter housing and glanced toward the house.
Inside, Jim Christopher was plying Ellie Schultheis with food, and keeping her entertained. For someone that small, she seemed to have huge appetites for canapes, for martinis, and if her liquid gaze was to be trusted, for men. “I’d say a hot-air balloon reminds me more of a ripe pear than a condom,” he replied to her latest suggestion, hoping to steer the discussion elsewhere.
Ellie lowered her lashes demurely to her glass and sipped, wondering just how broad a hint this wide-shouldered specimen needed. She’d show the big oaf a pair of ripe pears! She inhaled, her breasts riding dangerously high in their lace chalices. She saw him looking, all right, and smiled up at him, trying to focus on his mouth. When you looked at their mouths, they got the idea in a hurry. “Caught you peeking,” she purred, very slowly, to avoid slurring. “Big tall men like you have lots of advantages.” Her big eyes challenged him to enumerate a few.
“Have a banana,” he offered helplessly, lifting a skewered slice of fruit from his plate.
As Ellie was batting her eyes and admitting she didn’t mind if she did, Majid Hashemi turned away from the congressman and the TV anchorwoman, who had taken tiny smoke-fragrant morsels of meat from the tray he held. He had tried one himself before leaving the kitchen. He heard the legislator admit that barbecued pork was among his minor vices, looked down at the loathsomely tasty meat, and swallowed hard. No matter. Even the sin of eating pork would soon be cleansed from him. Hashemi tried to smile, avoided the lurch of the science writer, and froze. From Hashemi’s angle, the tall man’s mustache was barely visible. Blond, slim-hipped, wide of shoulder, the man stood a pace away from an opened sliding door that led to the patio. Hashemi did not care in the slightest that a dozen people were in that room, nor that an obviously drunk woman looked up at the man, murmuring something intimate.
Hashemi balanced the tray in his left hand - pork was not really food - and moved his right hand down to his vest pocket as he stepped near. He was breathing quickly, lightly, and his eyes dilated as he stepped up to his quarry for this final, shattering intimacy. In a transport of joy he asked formally, “Mr. Peel?”
“No, but it’s a common mistake,” said Jim Christopher, turning, smilingly grateful for any interruption. Christopher saw a look in the little waiter’s face that was beyond earthly pleasure; saw it falter as the swarthy little fellow’s eyes swept his face. Disturbed, Christopher glanced away and, by chance, saw Wes a hundred feet away. “That’s Mr. Peel on the other side of the pool. Uh . . . why don’t we take you to him?” He grasped the little man’s right wrist, the one with fingers halfway into a vest pocket, hoping he could guide Ellie Schultheis outside in the process.
Majid Hashemi’s hand flew from his vest. No, this was not his quarry, and he had come within a finger of martyring himself to no purpose! In consternation that bordered panic, Hashemi dropped the tray and bolted through the open doorway into the night, toward the distant pool, slamming the drunken woman out of his way with his left forearm as he ran. Christopher’s plate flew into the air with a scatter of food.
Ellie Schultheis did not even bleat, caroming from the door facing to fall on her knees. Christopher snarled, ‘ ‘Clumsy idiot, what’s the . . . ?” And then, reaching for Ellie’s arms, he remembered what he had overheard between Wes, Vangie, and the Tribune man. Thugs or phonies? The shirt-sleeved little waiter seemed too insignificantly small to count, but no waiter in his right mind ever behaved that way and, if a phony,
perhaps a thug as well. And he was looking for Wes Peel.
This reflection took perhaps two precious seconds before
Christopher, in the act of raising Ellie Schultheis by her elbows, saw Masefield turn toward the commotion. “Masefield! Mayday! Nail the waiter,” he bawled.
Reese Masefield, at that moment, was nursing a scotch and water, admitting to Vangie that he felt a bit foolish about his surveillance. They stood near the well-lit table-tennis arena with Alma, watching a surprisingly even contest between Rogan and Pat Sage, and as he turned toward the shout, Masefield saw a black-vested little man dart from between guests in Wes Peel’s direction.
Masefield delayed an instant too long before reacting; realized, even as he dropped his glass and reached toward his kidney, that he must not risk a shot in this throng and that such a little fellow could not be all that dangerous; and then he ran to head the little man off.
Hashemi scarcely heard the sudden buzzing commotion among the people he passed because now he recognized John Wesley Peel, and Peel had not even turned his head, and if Hashemi ran along the near side of the pool, the one man who was sprinting toward him would find a thirty-foot expanse of water in his way. Majid Hashemi, a dozen steps from paradise, began to laugh.
Masefield wondered later why he was unable to shout anything more useful than, “Wes!” The little waiter was now across the pool, streaking unimpeded along the tiles, and Masefield grabbed the metal folding chair without much hope of doing anything with it. He hurled the chair as he would hurl a discus, seeing as he lost his balance that even if it cleared the pool, its trajectory was much too low to strike the man. Masefield shouted his friend’s name again as he fell on his back.
Wes, fascinated with Wolf Schultheis’s firsthand account of a 1932 Lippisch tailless glider with canards, glanced around only when he heard his name. He saw the flicker of a folding chair as it scissored shut in midair; saw the little man racing toward him; blinked at the slashing clatter of the chair on poolside tiles, twenty feet from where he stood.
Hashemi’s footing was only adequate, but nothing human could stop him now, and he could round the edge of the pool in four more steps. He managed only one of them. The metal chair, sliding on tiles still wet from Masefield’s emergence a half hour before, skidded directly underfoot and Hashemi’s next step was onto the flat, spinning chair. He cried out, arms flailing, and kept his balance just enough to leap across the edge of the pool toward Wes Peel. Hashemi knew that he would hit the water. But his right hand was already flashing into his vest pocket.
Wes saw the little man lose his balance, saw him vault across the comer of the pool, and did not want this diminutive drunk to get him or old Wolf Schultheis soaking wet. Wes lunged forward, bearing the old man down with him onto the lawn, hoping that the pool filter would be their splash barrier.
A sound of a small body cannonballing into water, and almost simultaneously, a bucking concussion through turf. The explosion of six pounds of plastique underwater was curiously muffled, a resounding kaTHUMPaaaa that blew the filter housing from its mounts and beyond Wes’s heaving shoulders. The rounded inner wall of the pool formed a reflector even while it split into slabs, and a thousand gallons of water lofted toward the guests.
Fifty pounds or so of Majid Hashemi were mixed with the deluge, a splatter of flesh and fragments of cloth falling in a fan-shaped pattern as far as Wes’s patio. Wes rolled to his feet, helped old Wolf Schultheis up with ringing ears and a muttered apology, and turned toward his guests. A few of them, drenched and half-blinded by the underwater flash, were just beginning to realize the nature of the stringy stuff plastered on their clothes and in their food. The stuff of martyrdom and, imsh’Allah, of paradise lost.
EIGHTEEN
Because Alameda County deputies were not fools, they alerted Treasury agents in the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms division. Because Reese Masefield was no fool either, he phoned the briefest of reports into the Trib and stayed into the night, long after the other guests made their statements and fled their living nightmare past Sheriffs men and the plastic tape that now ringed the Peel acreage.
Vangie stayed as well, paying off the caterers, seeking ashtrays to empty. And, Masefield felt certain, waiting for the authorities to leave. The prowler story was now on tape, but it wasn’t the whole story. He knew one of the T-men slightly, the gaunt one who left attach^ cases full of electronic equipment to others, and made do with a video-modem memocomp that any reporter would die for. Shortly after midnight, he waited with Wes while the T-man plugged his gadget into Wes’s phone to send a set of images over the wires. While the T-man waited, Wes stared at that very special memocomp. “Whose fingerprints?” he asked.
“Don’t know yet,” sighed the T-man, lighting a Camel. “They were all over a credit card in a tux jacket somebody stuffed into your toilet tank. Frigging bathroom floor’s all wet since the float was held down,” he said, and fired blue smoke from his nostrils. “We’ll see if the credit card belongs to those arms we fished out of the soup in the bottom of your pool.”
Wes, astonished: “I didn’t realize there was that much of the guy left.”
“Lower legs, too. Water does funny things to inhibit blast effects,” said the T-man. “I’d make a guess the suspect had the stuff taped around his middle, and that his head was still above water when that French C-4 went off; no mug shots for this guy. Gonna be a lot of jays hopping around on your lawn for stuff we don’t find.”
“Not so loud,” Wes frowned, nodding toward the next room. “The lady’s had a rough day.”
“Uh . . . sorry. ’ ’ The man favored Vangie with a thoughtful glance. “Your secretary, you said?”
“Exec assistant,” Wes corrected.
The T-man pursed his lips, let his eyebrows rise and fall. “Help like that is hard to find. You oughta remind her just how lucky everybody was, tonight. From the look of her, you’d think somebody died.”
“Somebody did,” Masefield reminded him. “Whose credit card?”
A slow smile from the T-man. “No can do, Masefield. I didn’t let any other reporters past the warning strip. You’re here because you tripped the suspect, and according to my notes, you suspected something was going down. So did the woman,” he added, nodding toward Vangie, who sat staring into space in the next room.
“So did Jim Christopher,” Wes put in, mystified.
The T-man conferred with his memocomp’s offline notes. “Yeah, he heard you two and the Broussard woman talking. Be glad he did, Mr. Peel. If all your friends didn’t have a healthy dose of paranoia, we might be collecting you and that old fella in a bag, right now.” He looked Wes up and down with a faint smile. “Hell of a note; your pool is a total loss, Mr. Peel, but the lens effect at the deep end kept you bone-dry. You, ah - you pretty good with explosives?”
“Not that good,” Wes answered, ignoring the innuendo. “The stuff was French?”
“According to our instruments and the gas traces. Not much help without taggant chips. The French will sell breeder reactors to Iraq, or plastique to the IRA.”
Masefield jerked slightly, then looked away.
A chiming tone announced that somewhere, someone was finished feeding data back to that nifty memocomp. The T-man disengaged the instrument, excused himself, and strode outside with it to confer with two waiting men, one still strolling Wes’s grounds with flashlight, throwaway gloves, and a body bag.
Masefield nudged Wes with an elbow and nodded toward Vangie. “I could drop her off on my way home, but I need to talk to you.”
“So does she. Damned if I know why. You two keeping something from me, Reese?”
A pained expression: “Get serious. I’m putting some twos together. Remember Adam Elliott? Remember Hal Kroner? I wonder if - ”
“Mr. Peel?” The T-man again, standing at the sliding door, motioned Wes outside. “Just you, please.”
Wes sighed, unfolded his arms, and saw Vangie looking his way. He gave her his best smile and
an “OK” hand sign; she gave no indication that she saw either, grayish patches of exhaustion showing below her eyes, and Wes hurried outside.
The odors on his patio were a strange assortment: the sharp tang of explosive residues, and a sweet musk like that of pork, competed with the faint scents of excrement and vomit. This was one party nobody will ever forget, he thought with resignation. To the T-man he said, “Don’t tell me you found a head for me to identify. He wasn’t part of the catering staff, I can tell you that.”
“Confirmed. The credit card was reported stolen. The prints on it match those on the suspect.”
Wes smiled faintly. “Suspect. Boy, now there’s caution for you.”
“You could use a little of it from here on out, Mr. Peel,” said the T.-man. Pause. “Ever hear the name Majid Hashemi before?”
Wes gnawed his mustache for a moment. Then, “Not that I recall. I’d hate to think he’s - was - one of my employees.” “Nope; a foreign university student back east. I can’t tell you more than that right now. Some of my guidelines get tangled when,” his glance flicked toward the house, “the press is involved. Masefield is one of the best, but my guidelines are clear.”
“What the hell are you trying to say?”
“As little as possible,” said the T-man, with a wan smile, “while asking you to accept some Treasury men for. . . well, not bodyguards, officially. It’s just temporary, in case this guy has local backups.”
Wes thought about the implications. “This Hashemi has friends?”
“He didn’t make that plastique out of match heads, Mr. Peel. We’d like to keep an eye on you while we tun some checks. Our people won’t cramp your style,” he promised.
“But they’ll follow me everywhere,” Wes replied, and got a shrug. “I have a personal life.”
“Everybody does. Actually, I didn’t have to ask you. Uncle isn’t new at this.”