Strangers

by Dean Koontz

  “Some people have no consideration,” Jorja said. She saw Pepper’s eyes narrow, but before the hooker could say anything, Jorja said, “Am I to understand that Alan was pimping for you?”

  Pepper scowled. “Listen, I don’t need a pimp. Whores need pimps. I’m no whore. Whores give fifty-dollar blow-jobs, screw eight or ten johns a day for whatever they can get, spend half their lives with the clap, and wind up broke. That’s not me, sister. I’m an escort for gentlemen of means. I’m on the approved escort lists of the finest hotels, and last year I made two hundred thousand bucks. What do you think of that? I got investments. Whores don’t have investments, honey. Alan wasn’t my pimp. He was my manager. In fact, he managed a couple of my girlfriends, too. I fixed him up with them because, at first, before he started getting strange, he was the best.”

  Dazzled by the woman’s self-delusion, Jorja said, “And Alan took a managerial fee for handling your career—and theirs?”

  Her scowl fading, somewhat placated by Jorja’s willingness to use euphemisms, Pepper said, “No. That was one of the best things about our arrangement with him. He was still a blackjack dealer, see; that’s where he made his money. He had all the contacts needed to manage us, but all he wanted for his trouble was free trade. I never knew a man who needed so much pussy. He couldn’t get enough. In fact, the last couple of months, he seemed obsessed with pussy. Was he like that with you, honey?” Repulsed by this sudden intimacy, Jorja tried to stop the woman, but Pepper would not be quiet. “In fact, the last few weeks he was so horny all the time that I started to think maybe I should dump him. I mean, there was something a little crazy about it. He’d do it and do it and do it until he just couldn’t get his pecker up to do it any more, and then he’d want to watch X-rated videotapes.”

  Jorja was suddenly angry that Alan had made her executor, forcing her to witness the moral squalor in which he had passed the last year of his life. And she was angry because she would have to find a way to explain his death to Marcie, who was already treading a psychological tightrope. But she was not really angry with Pepper Carrafield; not angry but appalled, yes, because even Alan deserved a little mourning and respect from his live-in lover, more than this shark could ever give him. But there was no point in blaming the shark for being a shark.

  One of the elevators opened, disgorging uniformed policemen, morgue employees, and a gurney bearing a corpse in an opaque plastic body bag.

  Jorja and Pepper rose from the sofa.

  Even as the stretcher was being rolled out of the first elevator, the doors of the second opened, and four more cops appeared, two in uniform plus a team of plainclothes detectives. A detective came to Pepper Carrafield and asked a few final questions.

  No one asked any questions of Jorja. She stood rigid and suddenly numb, staring at the body bag that contained her ex-husband.

  They rolled the gurney across the travertine. The wheels squeaked.

  Jorja watched it moving away.

  Two cops held the lobby doors while the morgue attendants pushed the gurney outside. It moved past the lobby windows. Jorja turned to observe its progress. She still felt no grief, but she was swept by a powerful wave of melancholy, a profound sadness at what might have been.

  From the nearest of the elevators, where she was holding a door open, Pepper said, “Let’s go up to my place.”

  Outside, they closed the doors of the coroner’s van.

  In the elevator on the way up, and in a discreet whisper in the fourteenth-floor hallway, then continuing in a normal tone of voice as they entered her big living room, Pepper insisted on describing Alan’s peculiar sexual hunger. He had always had the carnal appetite of a gourmand, but apparently sex had become a sick obsession with him as his life had wound down through its last couple months.

  Jorja did not want to hear about it, but stopping the hooker seemed more difficult than simply enduring her chatter.

  In recent weeks, Alan’s days had been devoted to erotic pursuits, though it all sounded feverish and desperate rather than pleasurable. He had used sick leave and vacation time to spend long—often frantic—hours in bed with Pepper or others whose “careers” he managed, and there was no variation or perversion that he failed to explore to excess. The hooker chattered on: Alan had developed a fascination with lascivious substances, devices, appliances, and clothing—dildos, penis rings, spike-heeled shoes, vibrators, cocaine ointment, handcuffs....

  Jorja, already weak-kneed and dizzy since seeing the body bag, grew queasy. “Please stop. What’s the point? He’s dead, for God’s sake.”

  Pepper shrugged. “I thought you’d want to know. He threw away a lot of his money on this ... this sex binge. Since you’re the executor of the estate, I thought you’d want to know.”

  The last will and testament of Alan Arthur Rykoff, which he had left with Pepper for safekeeping, was a simple preprinted one-page form of the type obtainable at any business supply store.

  Jorja sat on a cobalt-blue Ultrasuede chair beside a lacquered black Tavola table, quickly scanning the will in the light from a high-tech, burnished-steel, cone-shaped lamp. The most surprising thing was not that Alan had named Jorja as executor, but that he had left what he owned to Marcie, whose fatherhood he had been prepared to deny.

  Pepper sat on a black lacquered chair with white upholstery, near a wall of windows. “I don’t figure it’s much of an estate. He spent money pretty freely. But there’s his car, some jewelry.”

  Jorja noticed that Alan’s will had been notarized just four days ago, and she shivered. “He must’ve been considering suicide when he had this notarized; otherwise, he wouldn’t have felt the need for it.”

  Pepper shrugged. “I guess.”

  “But didn’t you see the danger? Didn’t you see he was troubled?”

  “Like I told you, honey, he’d been weird for a couple months.”

  “Yes, but there must’ve been a noticeable change in him during the last few days, something different from that other strangeness. When he told you he’d made out a will and asked you to put it in that lockbox of yours, didn’t you wonder? Wasn’t there anything about him—his manner, his look, his state of mind—that worried you?”

  Pepper stood up impatiently. “I’m no psychologist, honey. His stuffs in the bedroom. If you want to give his clothes to Goodwill, I’ll call them. But his other stuff—jewelry, personal things—you can get them out of here right now. I’ll show you where everything is.”

  Jorja was sickened by the moral squalor into which Alan had sunk, but she also felt a measure of guilt for his death. Could she have done something to save him? By leaving his few possessions to Marcie and by naming Jorja executor of his will, he seemed to have reached out to them in his last days, and although that gesture was pathetic and inadequate, it touched Jorja. She tried to remember how he had sounded on the telephone before Christmas, when she had last spoken with him. She remembered his coldness, arrogance, and selfishness, but perhaps there had been other more subtle things that she should have heard beneath the surface cruelty and bravado: distress, confusion, loneliness, fear.

  Brooding on that, she followed Pepper toward the bedroom. She loathed this task, pawing through Alan’s things, but it had to be done.

  Halfway down a long hall, Pepper stopped at a door, pushed it inward. “Oh, shit. I can’t believe the damned cops left it like this.”

  Jorja looked in the open door before she realized that this was the bathroom in which Alan had killed himself. Blood was all over the beige tile floor. More blood was spattered over the glass door of the shower stall, sink, towels, wastecan, and toilet. The wall behind the toilet was stained with dried blood in a macabre pattern resembling a Rorschach blot, as if Alan’s psychological condition and the meaning of his death were there to be read by anyone with sufficient insight.

  “Shot himself twice,” Pepper said, supplying details Jorja did not want to hear. “First in the crotch. Is that queer or what? Then he put the gun in his mouth and pu
lled the trigger.”

  Jorja could smell the vague coppery scent of blood.

  “The damned cops should’ve cleaned up the worst of it,” Pepper said, as if she thought policemen ought to be armed not only with guns but with scrub brushes and soap. “My housekeeper doesn’t come until Monday. And she’s not going to want to deal with this disgusting mess.”

  Jorja broke the bloody bathroom’s hypnotic hold on her and stumbled blindly a few steps along the hall.

  “Hey,” Pepper Carrafield said, “you okay?”

  Jorja gagged, clenched her teeth, moved quickly along the hall, and leaned against the jamb of another doorway.

  “Hey, honey, you were still carrying a torch for him, weren’t you?”

  “No,” Jorja said softly.

  Pepper moved closer, too close, putting an unwanted consoling hand upon her shoulder. “Sure, you were. Jesus, I’m sorry.” Pepper oozed unctuous sympathy, and Jorja wondered if the woman was capable of any genuine emotion that did not have its roots in self-interest. “You said you were burnt out on him, but I should’ve seen.”

  Jorja wanted to shout: You stupid bitch, I’m not carrying a torch for him, but he was still a human being, for Christ’s sake. How can you be so callous? What’s wrong with you? Is something missing in you?

  But she only said, “I’m all right. I’m all right. Where are his things? I want to sort through them and get out of here.”

  Pepper ushered Jorja through the doorway in which she had been leaning, into a bedroom. “He had the bottom drawers of the highboy, plus the left side of the dresser, and that half of the closet. I’ll help.” She pulled out the lowest drawer of the highboy.

  For Jorja, the room suddenly was as eerie and unreal as a place in a dream. Her heart began to pound, and she moved around the bed toward the first of three things that had filled her with fear. Books. Half a dozen books were stacked on the nightstand. She had seen the word “moon” on the spines of two of them. With trembling hands, she sorted through them and found that all six dealt with the same subject.

  “Something wrong?” Pepper asked.

  Jorja moved to the dresser, on which stood a globe the size of a basketball. A cord trailed from it. She clicked a switch on the cord and found the globe was opaque with a light inside. It was not a globe of the earth but of the moon, with geological features—craters, ridges, plains—clearly named. She gave the glowing sphere a spin.

  The third thing that frightened her was a telescope on a tripod beside the dresser, in front of a window. Nothing about the instrument was different from other amateur telescopes, but to Jorja it seemed ominous, even dangerous, with dark and unknowable associations.

  “Those’re Alan’s things,” Pepper said.

  “He was interested in astronomy? Since when?”

  “For the past couple months,” Pepper said.

  The similarities between Alan’s and Marcie’s conditions troubled Jorja. Marcie’s irrational fear of doctors. Alan’s compulsive sex drive. Those were different psychological problems—obsessive fear in one case, obsessive attraction in the other—but they shared the element of obsession. Apparently, Marcie had been cured of her phobia. Alan was not as fortunate. He’d had no one to help him, and he had snapped, shooting off the genitals that had come to control him, putting a bullet in his brain. Jorja shuddered. It was too coincidental that father and daughter had been stricken by psychological problems simultaneously, but what made it more than coincidence was the other strangeness they shared: their interest in the moon. Alan had not seen Marcie in six months, and their most recent phone conversation had been in September, weeks before either had become fascinated by the moon. There had been no contact by which either could have transmitted that fascination to the other; it appeared to have sprung up spontaneously in each of them.

  Remembering Marcie’s moon-troubled sleep, Jorja said, “Do you know if he was having unusual dreams? About the moon?”

  “Yeah. How’d you figure that? He was having them, but he could never remember any details when he woke up. They started ... back in late October, I think it was. Why? What’s it matter?”

  “These dreams—were they nightmares?”

  Pepper shook her head. “Not exactly. I’d hear him talking in his sleep. Sometimes he sounded afraid, but lots of times he’d smile, too.”

  Jorja felt as if ice had formed in her marrow.

  She turned to look at the lighted globe of the moon.

  What in the hell is going on? she wondered. A shared dream? Is that possible? How? Why?

  Behind her, Pepper said, “Are you okay?”

  Something had driven Alan to suicide.

  What might happen to Marcie?

  8. Saturday, January 11

  Boston, Massachusetts.

  The memorial service for Pablo Jackson was held at eleven o’clock Saturday morning, January 11, in a nondenominational chapel on the grounds of the cemetery where he was to be buried. The coroner and police pathologists had not been finished with the body until Thursday, so five days had passed between Pablo’s murder and his funeral.

  When the last eulogy was delivered, the mourners adjourned to the grave, where the casket waited. Snow had been cleared around Pablo’s plot, but the space was insufficient. Scores of people stood outside the prepared area, some in show deeper than their boots. Others remained on the sidewalks that crisscrossed the memorial park, watching from a distance. Three hundred had come to pay their last respects to the old magician. The chilly air steamed with the breath of the rich and the poor, the famous and the unknown, Boston socialites, magicians.

  Ginger Weiss and Rita Hannaby stood in the first circle around the gravesite. Since Monday, Ginger had not had much of an appetite and had gotten little sleep. She was pale, nervous, and very tired.

  Both Rita and George had argued against Ginger’s attendance at the services. They were concerned that such a wrenchingly emotional experience would trigger a fugue. But the police had encouraged her, hoping she might see Pablo’s killer at the services. In self-defense she’d hidden the truth from the cops, leading them to believe that the killer was an ordinary burglar, and sometimes burglars were driven by such sick compulsions. But she knew that he was no mere burglar and that he would not risk arrest by coming to the cemetery.

  Ginger wept during the eulogies, and by the time she walked from the chapel to the grave, her grief was a vise squeezing her heart. But she did not lose control. She was determined not to make a circus of this solemn occasion, determined to pay her respects with dignity.

  Besides, she had come with a second purpose that could not be fulfilled if she spiraled down into a fugue or suffered an emotional collapse. She was sure that Alexander Christophson—former Ambassador to Great Britain, former United States Senator, and former Director of the CIA—would be at the funeral of his old friend, and she wanted very much to speak with him. It was to Christophson, on Christmas Day, that Pablo had turned for advice about Ginger’s problems. And it was Alex Christophson who had told him about the Azrael Block. She had an important question to ask Christophson, though she dreaded the answer.

  She had seen him in the chapel, recognized him from his days in public life, when he had been on television and in newspapers. He was a striking figure, tall, thin, white-haired, unmistakable. Now, they stood on opposite sides of the grave, the draped casket between them. He had glanced at her a couple times, though without recognition.

  The minister said a brief final prayer. After a moment, some of the mourners greeted one another, formed small groups to talk. Others, including Christophson, moved away through a forest of headstones, past snow-laden pines and winter-stripped maples, toward the parking lot.

  “I’ve got to talk to that man,” Ginger told Rita. “Be right back.”

  Startled, Rita called after her, but Ginger did not pause or offer further explanation. She caught up with Christophson in the jagged shadows cast by the skeletal branches of an immense oak that was all black bar
k and crusted snow. She called his name, and he turned. He had piercing gray eyes, which widened when she told him who she was.

  “I can’t help you,” he said, and began to turn away from her.

  “Please,” she said, putting a hand on his arm. “If you blame me for what happened to Pablo—”

  “Why should you care what I think, Doctor?”

  She held fast to his arm. “Wait. Please, for God’s sake.”

  Christophson surveyed the slowly dispersing crowd in the cemetery, and Ginger knew that he was afraid the wrong people—dangerous people—might see him with her and assume he was helping her as Pablo had done. His head twitched slightly, and Ginger thought it was an indication of his nervousness, but then she realized it was the faint tremor of Parkinson’s disease. He said, “Dr. Weiss, if you’re seeking some form of absolution, then by all means let me provide it. Pablo knew the risks, and he accepted them. He was the captain of his own fate.”

  “Did he understand the risks? That’s what I’ve got to know.”

  Christophson seemed surprised. “I warned him myself.”

  “Warned him about who? About what?”

  “I don’t know who or what. But considering the enormous effort expended to tamper with your memory, you must’ve seen something of tremendous importance. I warned Pablo that whoever had brainwashed you was no amateur and that if they realized the two of you were trying to break through the Azrael Block, they might come after not just you but him as well.” Christophson’s gray eyes searched her eyes for a moment, and then he sighed. “He did tell you about his conversation with me?”

  “He told me everything—except about your warning. ” Her eyes filled with tears again. “He didn’t breathe a word of that.”

  He withdrew one elegant but palsied hand from his pocket and gripped her arm reassuringly. “Doctor, now that you’ve told me this, I can’t possibly lay any of the blame at your doorstep.”

  “But I blame me,” Ginger said in a voice thin with misery.

  “No. You can’t blame yourself for any of it.” Looking around again to make sure they were not under surveillance, Christophson opened the top two buttons of his overcoat, reached inside, plucked the display handkerchief from the breast pocket of his suit jacket, and gave it to Ginger. “Please stop punishing yourself. Our friend lived a full and fortunate life, Doctor. His death might’ve been violent, but it was relatively quick, which can be a blessing.”

  Drying her eyes on the swatch of pale blue silk that he had given her, Ginger said, “He was a dear man.”

  “He was,” Christophson agreed. “And I’m beginning to understand why he took the risks he did for you. He said you were a very dear woman, and I see his judgment was as accurate and reliable as usual.”

  She finished blotting her eyes. Her heart still felt pinched in a vise, but she began to believe there was a chance that guilt and grief would eventually give way to grief alone. “Thank you.” As much to herself as to him, Ginger said, “What now? Where do I go from here?”

  “I’m in no position to help you,” he said at once. “I’ve been out of the intelligence business for almost a decade, and I’ve no contacts any more. I’ve no idea who might be behind your memory block or why.”

  “I wouldn’t ask you to help me. I’m not risking any more innocent lives. I just thought you might have some idea how I can help myself.”

  “Go to the police. It’s their job to help.”

  Ginger shook her head. “No. The police are slow, too slow. Most of them are overworked, and the rest are just bureaucrats in uniforms. My problem’s too urgent to wait for them to solve it. Besides, I don’t trust them. Suddenly I don’t trust authorities of any kind. The tapes Pablo made of our sessions were gone when I took the police back to his apartment, so I didn’t mention them. I spooked. I didn’t tell the cops about my fugues or about how Pablo had been helping me. I just said we’d been friends, that I’d stopped by to have lunch and walked in on the killer. I let them think it was an ordinary burglary. Sheer paranoia. Didn’t trust them. Still don’t. So the cops are out.”

  “Then find another hypnotist to regress you—”

  “No. I’m not risking any more innocent lives,” she repeated.

  “I understand. But those are the only suggestions I have.” He shoved both hands into the deep pockets of his overcoat. “I’m sorry.”

  “No need to be,” she said.

  He started to turn away, hesitated, sighed. “Doctor, I want you to understand me. I served in the war, the big war, with some distinction. Later, I was a good ambassador. As head of the CIA and as a senator, I made many difficult decisions, some that put me in personal danger. I never backed away from risk. But I’m an old man now. Seventy-six, and I feel older. Parkinson’s. A bad heart. High blood pressure. I have a wife I love very much, and if anything happens to me, she’ll be alone. I don’t know how well she’d deal with being alone, Dr. Weiss.”

  “Please, there’s no need to justify yourself,” Ginger said. She realized how completely and quickly their roles had reversed. In the beginning, he had been the one full of reassurances and absolution; now she was returning the favor. Jacob, her father, had often said that the capacity for mercy was humankind’s greatest virtue, and that the giving and receiving of mercy formed a bond unbreakable. Ginger remembered Jacob’s words now because, in allowing Alex Christophson to allay her guilt and in trying to allay his, she felt that bond.

  Apparently, he felt it, too, for although he did not stop trying to explain himself, his explanations became more intimate and were offered now in a tone of voice that was less defensive and more conspiratorial. “Quite frankly, Doctor, my reluctance to get involved is not so much because I find life infinitely precious but because I am increasingly afraid of death.” As he spoke, he reached into an inside pocket and withdrew a notepad and pen. “In my life I’ve done some things of which I’m not proud.” Holding the pen in his palsied right hand, he began to print. “True, most of those sins were committed in the line of duty. Government and espionage are both necessary, but neither is a clean business. In those days, I didn’t believe in God or an afterlife. Now I wonder.... And wondering, I’m sometimes afraid.” He tore the top page from the pad. “Afraid of what might await me after death, you see. That’s why I want to hold on to life as long as I can, Doctor. That’s why, God help me, I’ve become a coward in my old age.”