The Face

by Dean Koontz

  The day was simultaneously too real and a fantasy, the dreams of Hollywood having brightened the city in a few places, darkened it in many more, changed it in every corner, until nothing seemed as solid as it ought to be.

  They were in Ethan’s Expedition, having left Hazard’s plain-wrap department sedan at Our Lady of Angels. Since Ethan had no police authority, he couldn’t arm-twist information out of anyone, but his partner couldn’t both arm-twist and drive.

  To check out their six leads, they would enter jurisdictions other than those strictly within the authority of the LAPD. Without preparing the way through proper channels, even Hazard would not have entirely legitimate authority. They didn’t have time for protocol.

  Hazard rode shotgun, making phone calls. His voice rose from a polite and almost romantic murmur to a demanding thunder, but most often settled into an easy folksiness, while relentlessly he used his status as homicide detective to coax-pinch-push-pull-wrench cooperation from a series of higher-education bureaucrats.

  Every college and university in the greater Los Angeles area had closed for the last two or three weeks of the year. Something less than a skeleton staff remained on duty to serve those students who had not gone home for the holidays.

  At each institution that he phoned, he employed charm, appeals to good citizenship, threats, and persistence to get from one know-nothing to another, but always eventually to a know-something who could further their investigation.

  Already they had learned that the drama professor—Dr. Jonathan Spetz-Mogg—had organized both of the weekend conferences on acting for which Rolf Reynerd had written checks. They had been granted an appointment with Spetz-Mogg at his home in Westwood, to which they were en route without benefit of emergency flashers or siren.

  In the process of tracking down Dr. Gerald Fitzmartin, who had organized the three-day weekend conference on screenwriting, Hazard became so infuriated with the runaround at which all academic types excelled that he paused in the chase before frustration drove him to smash his department-issued phone to pieces against his own forehead.

  “All these university cheese-eaters hate cops.”

  “Until they need you,” Ethan said.

  “Yeah, then they love us.”

  “They never love you, but if they need you to save their ass, then they’ll tolerate you.”

  “You know that Shakespeare quote?” Hazard asked.

  “There’s more than one.”

  “About how to make the world a better place—”

  “Kill all the lawyers.”

  “Yeah, that one,” Hazard said. “Shakespeare didn’t stop to think who trains all the lawyers.”

  “University cheese-eaters.”

  “Yeah. You want to make a better world, go to the source.”

  The traffic remained relentless and tight. The Expedition kissed paint with a black Mercedes SUV, spared from a bruise to the factory finish by nothing more than the lubricating lip gloss of rain.

  With a start, Ethan thought that he saw Fric on the sidewalk, wandering alone among strangers. A closer look proved that the boy was younger than the Manheim heir, trailing behind his parents.

  This had not been the first false Fric that he had seen and reacted to since leaving the hospital. His nerves had been rubbed raw by too much weird experience.

  “What about Blonde in the Pond?” Ethan asked. “Did you get your lab report this morning?”

  “Didn’t check. If I’ve got the true goods on my city councilman, it’ll just make me squirmy, having to leave him walking around full of himself, the way he is, like he’s the Lord by election, which is even more infuriating when you think how many ballot boxes his thugs stuffed for him. I’ll call the lab tomorrow, the day after, whenever it is we settle the situation we’re in.”

  “Sorry about this,” Ethan said.

  “If you’re sorry for that nose of yours, get it fixed. Anything else you’re sorry for, you shouldn’t be.”

  “Lunch and a few mamouls didn’t pay you for this much trouble.”

  “It wasn’t you turned my world upside down. Some guy gives me a set of dream bells out of a nightmare, then disappears into a mirror, I tend to get shook up without your help.”

  Hazard reached under his jacket with both hands, tugging on his cotton sweater, and Ethan said, “You bulked up since yesterday?”

  “Yeah. Had me a breakfast of Kevlar.”

  “Never knew you to wear protection.”

  “I’ve been thinking maybe I’ve dodged more bullets than any man has a right to. Doesn’t mean I’m not still fearless.”

  “Didn’t say you weren’t.”

  “I’m scared shitless, but I’m still fearless.”

  “That’s the right psychology.”

  “Survivor’s psychology,” Hazard said.

  “Anyway, what’s wrong with my nose?”

  “What isn’t?”

  The hard rain abruptly began to fall harder, and Ethan cranked the windshield-wiper speed to the highest setting.

  Hazard said, “Feels like the end of the world.”

  CHAPTER 61

  AFTER RECEIVING A FRANTIC TELEPHONE CALL from Captain Queeg von Hindenburg, Corky Laputa had to undertake an unexpected journey to the farther reaches of Malibu.

  The man in Malibu currently called himself Jack Trotter. Trotter owned property, carried a valid driver’s license, and paid as few taxes as possible under the name Felix Greene. Greene, alias Trotter, had once used the names Lewis Motherwell, Jason Barnes, Bobby Domino, and others.

  When Jack-Felix-Lewis-Jason-Bobby had been born forty-four years ago, his proud parents had named him Norbert James Creezel. They had no doubt loved him and, being simple Iowa farm folk, could never have imagined that Norbert would grow up to be a wigged-out piece of work like Captain Queeg von Hindenburg.

  Corky called him Captain Queeg because the guy exhibited the paranoia and megalomania to be found in the character of the same name in Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny. Von Hindenburg suited him in part because—like the German zeppelin that had taken thirty-six to their deaths in Lakehurst, New Jersey, in 1937—he was a gasbag and, if left to his own devices, he would one day crash and burn spectacularly.

  On his way to Malibu, Corky stopped at a garage that he rented in Santa Monica. This was one of forty double-stall units accessed by an alleyway in an industrial area.

  He held the lease on the garage under the name Moriarity and paid the monthly bill in cash.

  A black Land Rover occupied the first stall. Corky owned this vehicle under the name Kurtz Ivory International, a nonexistent but well-documented corporation.

  He parked the BMW beside the Land Rover, got out, put down the garage door, and switched on the lights.

  Redolent of the crisp limy scent of cold concrete, the sweet-and-sour fragrance of old motor-oil stains, and the faint but still lingering astringency of insecticide from a termite fumigation that had been conducted a month ago, this drab space was, to Corky, the essence of magic and adventure. Here, like troubled Bruce Wayne in the Batcave, Corky became a dark knight, though with an agenda that might appeal more to the Joker than to Bruce in cape and tights.

  In the war between Heaven and Earth, armies of rain marched across the corrugated-steel roof, raising such a battle roar that he could not have clearly heard himself singing if he’d chosen to break into “Shake Your Groove Thing.”

  After switching on an electric space heater, he took off his rain hat and yellow slicker. He hung them on a wall peg.

  On the left side of the garage, toward the back, four tall metal lockers were bolted to the wall. Corky opened the first of these.

  Two zippered vinyl wardrobe bags hung from a rod. On a shelf above the bags, a large Tupperware container held socks, neckties, a few items of men’s inexpensive jewelry, a wristwatch, and other personal effects of a false identity. On the floor was a selection of shoes.

  After pulling off his rain boots and a double layer of socks,
after stripping to his underwear, Corky dressed in gray cords, a black turtleneck, black socks, and black Rockports.

  The elaborate combination workbench and tool-storage cabinet at the back of the double garage featured a spacious secret drawer that Corky himself had designed. This drawer contained a selection of handguns and packets of false identification in six names.

  Over the turtleneck, he strapped on a shoulder holster. He stuffed the holster with a 9-mm Glock.

  He swapped his wallet for one that was filled with everything that he needed to hit the road as a different man: driver’s license, social-security card, a couple of credit cards in his new name, and photographs of a wife and family that were entirely invented. The wallet was even preloaded with five hundred dollars in cash.

  The packet also included a birth certificate, a passport, and a leather ID fold containing fake FBI credentials. For the task at hand, he required none of those items.

  He did, however, take with him a second slim leather fold that contained fake but convincing credentials identifying him as an operative of the National Security Agency. This was who Queeg von Hindenburg believed him to be.

  The NSA identification would reduce the average civilian to a swoon of cooperation, but wouldn’t withstand determined verification by any authority. Corky would never dare flash it at a cop.

  Because it was real, the driver’s license in this false name could endure close scrutiny by any police officer who might stop Corky. In addition, it credited him with a spotless driving record.

  Years ago, the state of California had lost control of many of its bureaucracies, including the Department of Motor Vehicles. Certain corrupted DMV employees sold tens of thousands of valid driver’s licenses every year to men like Mick Sachatone, the multimillionaire anarchist who also regularly supplied Corky with disposable cell phones in fake account names.

  Mick—and other middlemen like him—made substantial money by obtaining driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants, for convicted felons who had served their time and who earnestly hoped to begin fresh criminal lives uninhibited by their arrest records, for chaos activists like Corky, and for many others.

  Sufficiently IDed, with the Glock in a holster under his left arm, Corky shrugged into a stylish black leather coat tailored to conceal the bulge of the weapon. He tucked two spare magazines of ammunition into the coat pockets.

  He closed the locker, closed and locked the secret drawer in the workbench, and switched off the space heater.

  Behind the wheel of the Land Rover, he clicked the remote to roll up the garage door. He backed into the rain-swept alley.

  He had arrived in Santa Monica as Corky Laputa. He was leaving as Robin Goodfellow, agent of the NSA.

  After waiting to be sure that the garage door went all the way down, he pressed a second button on the remote, engaging an electric lock that doubly secured the premises.

  The CD player in the Land Rover was loaded with the symphonies and operas of Richard Wagner, which was his preferred music when he was being Robin Goodfellow.

  He fired up Götterdämmerung and set out through the storm for Malibu, to have a serious face-to-face talk with the man who this evening would get him onto the Manheim estate undetected.

  Corky loved his life.

  CHAPTER 62

  SANDWICHES,” SAID FRIC.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  After conveying the dozen quake lights to his deep and special secret place, Fric had decided to return the empty picnic hamper to the lawn-and-patio-storage room, where he had originally gotten it. He had undertaken this task for some reason that had seemed logical at the time, though he could not now recall what it had been.

  Mr. Devonshire, one of the porters—the one with the English accent, the bushy eyebrows, and the weak left eye that tended to drift toward his temple—had encountered Fric in the ground-floor west hall, at the end of which lay the lawn-and-patio-storage room. By way of friendly small talk, Mr. Devonshire had said, “What’ve you got there, Fric?”

  Sandwiches, Fric had said. Now he said again, “Sandwiches.”

  This was a stupid, stupid, stupid thing to say, let alone to repeat, because when Mr. Devonshire had first seen him, Fric had been swinging the hamper as he walked along the hall, swinging it in such a way that its light weight—and therefore its emptiness—must have been instantly apparent.

  “What kind of sandwiches?” Mr. Devonshire asked.

  “Ham,” said Fric, for this was a simple response that he could not screw up in the nine thousand ways that he could probably mangle the words peanut butter and jelly.

  “So you’re having a picnic, are you?” Mr. Devonshire asked, his left eye slowly drifting out of alignment as though he expected to be able to look behind himself while simultaneously studying Fric.

  When the porter had first come to work at Palazzo Rospo, Fric had thought that he possessed an evil eye and could cast curses with a glance. Mrs. McBee had corrected this childish misapprehension and had suggested that he do some research.

  Fric now knew that Mr. Devonshire suffered from amblyopia. This was a little-known word. Fric liked knowing things that most people didn’t.

  Long ago Fric had learned to look at Mr. Devonshire’s good eye when talking to him. Right now, however, he wasn’t able to meet the porter’s good eye because he felt so guilty for lying; consequently, he found himself gazing stupidly at the amblyopic eye.

  To avoid embarrassing Mr. Devonshire and himself, he stared instead at the floor and said, “Yes, a picnic, just me, something different to do, you know, ummm, not the old routine.”

  “Where will you have your picnic?” Mr. Devonshire asked.

  “The rose garden.”

  Sounding surprised, Mr. Devonshire said, “In this rain?”

  Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  Fric had forgotten the rain. He said, “Ummm, I mean the rose room.”

  The rose room, as members of the staff continued to refer to it, was a small ground-floor reception parlor. Its windows presented a view of the former site of the rose garden.

  A few years ago, at the urging of their feng-shui consultant, the rose garden had been moved farther from the house. Where the old rose garden had been, grass grew, and from the grass soared a massive piece of contemporary sculpture that Nominal Mom had given to Ghost Dad on the ninth anniversary of their wedding, at which time they had been divorced for eight years.

  Nominal Mom described the sculpture as “futuristic organic Zen” in style. To Fric it looked like a giant heap of road apples produced by a herd of Clydesdales.

  “The rose room seems like an odd place for a picnic,” said Mr. Devonshire, no doubt thinking about the Zen turd pile beyond the windows.

  “Ummm, well, I feel close to my mom there,” Fric said, which was so lame that it was almost clever.

  Mr. Devonshire was silent for a moment, and then he said, “Are you all right, Fric?”

  “Ummm, sure, I’m swell, just a little, you know, bummed out by all the rain.”

  After another but thankfully shorter silence, the porter said, “Well, enjoy your ham sandwiches.”

  “Thank you, sir. I will. I made them myself. From scratch.” He was the world’s worst liar. “With ham.”

  Mr. Devonshire walked toward the north hall, and Fric just stood there, stupidly holding the hamper as if it were heavy.

  After the porter disappeared at the intersection of the west and north halls, Fric continued to stare after him. He was convinced that Mr. Devonshire was hiding just out of sight and that the man’s eerie left eye would turn so far to one side that it would be hanging out of his head when he peeked around the corner.

  The lawn-and-patio-storage room, to which Fric had been headed, was not set aside for the storage of lawns and patios. Rather, the cushions for the hundred or more outdoor chairs and sun lounges—and sometimes the furniture as well—were moved there in anticipation of bad weather. The big room also held lawn umbrellas, croquet sets, outdoor
games, and such associated paraphernalia as picnic hampers.

  Following his conversation with the porter, Fric could no longer simply return the hamper to the storage room. If Mr. Devonshire saw him without it anytime soon, he would be exposed as a devious liar who was actually up to some kind of no good.

  Suspicious, the staff might surreptitiously watch him, even as shorthanded as they were at the moment. Without realizing it, he might reveal his deep and special secret place to a keen observer.

  Now that he had committed himself to the picnic story, he must follow through. He would have to lug the hamper to the rose room and sit by the windows, gazing out at the rose garden that wasn’t there anymore, pretending to eat ham sandwiches that didn’t exist.

  Mysterious Caller had warned him about lying.

  If he wasn’t ready to handle nice Mr. Devonshire, Fric wondered how he could expect to deceive and hide out from Moloch.

  Finally he decided that the porter and his lazy eye were not lurking just around the corner, after all.

  Certain that he appeared too grim for a picnicker, but unable to force a smile, he carried the damn hamper all the way from the southwest corner of the house to the northeast corner, to the rose room.

  CHAPTER 63

  JACK TROTTER, KNOWN TO THE WORLD BY MANY names, known only to Corky as Queeg von Hindenburg, didn’t live in the glamorous part of Malibu. He resided far from those view hills and beaches where actors and rock stars and the fabulously wealthy founders of bankrupt dot-com companies sunned, played, and shared recipes for cannabis brownies.