Perhaps she could phone one of the papers, perhaps someone there could tell her more about the cult. She could instruct the hotel switchboard to interrupt if anyone called her. She reached wearily for the phone.
But here were the members of the cult, trooping yet again into the courthouse, hiding their faces. If the newscaster had fresh information it was no use, since she didn't understand a word. She stared at the screen in the hope of glimpsing the faces of the cultists, and Kaspar Ganz looked straight at her.
It was only for a moment. Had the cameraman been moved on by police, or had those eyes daunted him? As they gazed out of the long sharp face, which looked dry and hard as an insect's, they seemed to swim forward out of their sockets. She could only pray that those famished eyes had never seen Angela.
At once he was gone, ousted by the newscaster. No doubt "magia negra" meant what it sounded like, but those were the only words she understood. She began changing channels, to give herself no chance to imagine what he was saying. Audiences were roaring, contestants grimaced desperately, reassuring monsters tramped about the small cage of the screen, the phone was ringing.
Her feet were tangled in the newspapers. The entire room seemed to be rustling. She kicked the papers aside and grabbed the receiver. "Will you accept the charges for a call from Janet Lieberman in San Francisco?" the switchboard operator said.
"Yes, I will." Her voice was firm, even if her legs were shaking.
Janet Lieberman was brisk almost to the point of rudeness. "Mrs. Waugh, I understand you want information about Kaspar Ganz. Why?"
"Because--was Surely it couldn't matter if she gave away ------------------------------------257
the secret so far from home. "Because I'm afraid my daughter may be involved with his people in Britain."
"I hope you're wrong." At once she was sympathetic. "What do you want to know?"
"Everything. As much as you can tell me."
"In that case, maybe I should write to you."
"No, please, I have to know now." Barbara was afraid that the reporter would cut her off briskly now that she'd undertaken to write. "I've read about Kaspar Ganz. I want to know what he influenced people to do."
"Well, he got them to swallow his whole theory--you know, that apparently unmotivated killings are committed by the killers on behalf of something else. The purpose of the killings will only be apparent when the pattern is complete. Of course in a way that's a flawless theory, since it explains away all objections before they're even raised, and I guess the people who embraced it found that reassuring. Some people need that kind of reassurance."
Barbara sensed she was reluctant to continue. "You're telling me what they believed," she made herself say, "but what did they do?"
"I imagine you've heard that they gave up their names. That was supposed to show that they were only the tools of what they were doing." She couldn't prevaricate any longer. "What they did, well, they kidnapped people and tortured them to death. They believed in reincarnation, so they could tell themselves the sufferings of their victims were insignificant, because they said you never remember what you've suffered in your other lives. Well, that's California, that kind of garbage, and Ganz used to make his followers take drugs with him, which must have warped their minds that much more. It doesn't have to mean that his people in Britain went in for everything they did."
Barbara wished she could feel reassured, but she was too aware of avoiding the question she had to ask. "I can't ------------------------------------258
understand how it took so long for them to be caught," she said.
"Well, there weren't so many kidnappings. They made their victims last a long time." She clearly regretted having said that, for she hurried on: "It looks as though some of his people deliberately gave themselves away because they were close enough to achieving their goal to have an idea what it was. Or maybe it was their people somewhere else who were close, because the arrests don't seem to have worried Ganz at all. The way I hear it, his people here would like to see the others arrested, only they're literally unable to say anything about them." After a token pause she said, "Does that cover what you wanted to know?"
"No, not quite." Barbara wished that it did. "I heard that some of his people had children. How deeply were they involved?"
There was a longer silence. "How old is your daughter?" Janet Lieberman said.
"She's just a child. They stole her."
"I assumed she was grown up." Perhaps Janet Lieberman was hesitating in order to break the news more gently, or perhaps she hoped it would give Barbara cause to hope. "The children are initiated in their thirteenth year," she said.
The hotel room grew flat as the television screen. The colors shivered, seemed on the point of leaking beyond their outlines. The floor sounded like a mass of static. "Do you need to know anything else?" Janet Lieberman said.
"No." It was less an answer than a plea. "Thank you for calling," Barbara said automatically, and replaced the receiver, only to cling to it while she tried to think what she could do.
She should never have left England. Everything was ------------------------------------259
fitting together now, yet she had already known that Angela would be initiated, if she had only realized. She had almost known it that night at the Gregorys', when Sybil had mentioned that her daughter was going through the rituals of becoming a Girl Guide. Angela must have begun calling because she was afraid of the initiation--and now, if she called her mother's flat while it was occupied, she would hear a strange man's voice. Perhaps that would scare her away for good.
Barbara was still clutching the phone when it rang. Though she felt as if it had given her an electric shock, she managed to hang on to the receiver while she saved the body of the phone from falling off the table. "Mr. Ted Crichton calling from London," the switchboard operator said.
Couldn't he wait for news of his novel? "What do you want?" she demanded as soon as they were connected. "What's wrong? Why do you keep calling me?"
"Because I know where Angela is," he said. ------------------------------------260 ------------------------------------261
261
Thirty-two
When Glasgow went by for the third time she felt she was trapped on a merry-go-round. The captain's voice announced that the runway was still not available, and nobody seemed worried except Barbara; the stewardesses patrolled imperturbably, the passengers shrugged and smiled. She was hanging thousands of feet in the air, she was crying out to be let off but nobody could hear. She managed to quell her silent cry; it wouldn't bring her destination any closer. At least she was on her way to the Glasgow house.
Glasgow had come round once more when the landscape tilted abruptly. The merry-go-round had fallen from its axis. She closed her eyes, for though the horizon was steep as a mountain now, she couldn't feel the tilt. She felt unreal, suspended in a dream by jet lag, even though it was true at last: Ted had convinced her she was going to the place where the cult was hiding. ------------------------------------262
At first she hadn't dared believe him. Suppose the cult had tricked him? Was he sure that he'd spoken to Angela? Eventually he had persuaded her that he was. Angela must have found him persuasive too, for she had told him the address.
Barbara couldn't help resenting that a little guiltily. It was hardly surprising if Angela needed a father as well, and Ted must have seemed an acceptable substitute. Could he be, in time? She mustn't dream. Angela couldn't have trusted him entirely, or he would have gone up to Glasgow at once, by himself. He had told Barbara that she would have to go with him to the house.
The airport sailed up, growing all at once. A whisper of Muzak celebrated touchdown. People stood up around her, hemming her in while they reached for their hand luggage, and she was still trapped. The plane hadn't even finished taxying. She would be lucky to leave the airport in less than an hour.
Ted had insisted that she let him know as soon as possible which flight she would take,
so that he could meet her at Glasgow. Eventually she'd managed to book herself onto a flight which reached Glasgow via London on Sunday morning. When she'd called him back at her flat it had taken him a while to answer, long enough to make her afraid that something was wrong. No, he'd said, everything was perfect. He would be waiting.
The resurrection of her luggage seemed to take forever. Her suitcases were almost the last on the belt. While she waited she couldn't help thinking of Laurence Dean. She'd had to send him a telegram to cancel their meeting. Perhaps that had killed his interest in A Torrent of Lives, perhaps now the film would never be made. Sybil had been right to sound grudging.
She thought she had nothing to declare at Customs, but the officer wasn't so sure. He was young and visibly ------------------------------------263
determined to prove himself. She opened her cases and waited while he pawed through her underwear. Red spots of embarrassment or frustration burned on his cheeks. He glared at her before he chalked the cases and let her go.
In the main hall amplified chimes rang like giant doorbells, a large clear voice announced flights. People were meeting friends from her flight, but there was no sign of Ted. Of course there wasn't, since he was expecting her to arrive at Glasgow Airport on a later flight, not here at Prestwick. She wished she had been able to reach him to let him know what she was doing.
She had begun packing as soon as she'd spoken to him, and before she had finished she'd known that she wouldn't be able to bear the delay. While she was detouring via London, what might be happening to Angela? Out of desperation rather than hope she had called the airline again, and there had been a cancellation on a direct flight to Prestwick.
And so she was on her own. By the time she'd thought of sending Ted a telegram, she had been rushing to Kennedy Airport, barely in time to catch her plane. At least she knew where she was going; she'd made him tell her the address of the Glasgow house, to convince her that he knew. She would rescue Angela by herself--she couldn't bear to wait for Ted, in case they were too late.
Outside the hall the Glasgow bus was ready to leave. Sliding doors slipped out of her way. She dumped her luggage beside the bus and rummaged in her bag as the driver waited patiently. She hadn't even found her purse when panic began to squirm in her belly. She had been so intent on planning what she would do in Glasgow that she had forgotten about money. She had almost no sterling at all.
She was clutching the handful of small change she had found, and wondering if she could ask the driver to trust ------------------------------------264
her, when she discovered another coin in the lining of her purse. She paid him and dragged her luggage on board. All the banks were shut on Sunday, but she could get money from the Barclaybank machine on Sauchiehall Street, if she had the time.
The bus sped toward Glasgow. Fields sparkled in the early morning light, long unbaked loaves of cloud piled above the hills, in the cold sky of late September. In front of Barbara a man whose neck looked composed of diced raw beef was reading a Sunday newspaper, where is granny who all the CHILDREN loved? There she was, in a photograph beneath the headline, an old lady whose white hair was interrupted by a streak of silver. The local children had adored her. She hadn't been seen for weeks. Police were concentrating their search in the Glasgow area, but Barbara had problems of her own. She closed her eyes and tried to doze; she'd had little sleep on the plane.
She woke at the Glasgow bus terminal. A few people waited among the silent buses beneath the low concrete roof. The journey had taken longer than she had expected, for it was nearly eight o'clock. Was there time for her to do whatever had to be done, or should she go to Glasgow Airport to meet Ted? She was tempted to wait until he arrived, but she mustn't lose her nerve. If she went to the house as early as this she ought to have the advantage of surprise.
She left her cases in the terminal, then she hurried uphill into Glasgow, past a parking lot that resembled a squat gray helter-skelter full of darkness. She was alone in a dead city, she was surrounded by tombs for Chicago businessmen, a multitude of windows blank as ice. A neon hyphen glimmered in a fourth-floor window, as if the office were refusing to die. Everything was oppressively close to her, the clang of her heels on the anvil of the pavement, the new-penciled lines between bricks and ------------------------------------265
paving stones. Birds that sounded large as blankets flapped beneath eaves.
At the top of the hill a web of streetlamp cables had caught a bird. It fell as she reached the crossroads. It was only a gray piece of litter, paper or cloth, which fluttered clumsily downhill. Nevertheless she felt unbalanced by the blackened castle above her, the YMCA building whose top-heavy turrets looked closer to her than the lower stories. That was the architecture's fault, not hers. She turned left toward the Inner Ring Road.
She heard it as soon as she passed the Albany, a hotel whose windows resembled squares of tissue paper pasted on the chocolate walls. A stub of a street, derelict shops patched with notices, led her to the road itself.
Flaking terraces stood on its brink. Some were propped up by ground-floor shops and bars, but the upper windows looked half-blind. Beyond the unpaved far edge of the road, the highway underpass magnified the shrill roar of trucks. As she crossed the road bridge to the terraces, she felt as though a circular saw had got into her head.
She hurried past the Mitchell Library with its green stone skullcup. A stone woman sat above the entrance, waiting for the library to open. Further on, pillars held up an abandoned section of highway, both ends in the air, as if the concrete was already falling into ruin. Traffic waited at lights, engines pounding like a factory. In a factory she would have been given earmuffs.
She must be close by now to where she had to go. On the far side of the lights the pavement was broken; she could feel candy wrappers sticking to her shoes. The day was growing hotter as it crept toward nine o'clock. Cars sprayed her with dust, which seeped into her throat.
The doors of the Dreamland Cinema were nailed shut beneath graffiti; the plastic letters of its name were entangled on the marquee. The narrow pavement led past a few ------------------------------------266
discolored shops to a service station, and all at once there was a sharp lump of apprehension in her stomach. That must be the service station at West Graham Street, close to the point from which, Ted had told her, she would be able to see the house.
When she reached the service station she paced slowly past the gleaming carapaces of cars for sale, and stared across the road. Above the highway underpass, concrete pillars stepped out from behind one another as she paced. How could there be room for a house in the maze of concrete that was the edge of the highway? Ted had been tricked. She had come all this way for nothing.
The pale concrete planes dragged across one another as she paced, to the sound of the roaring of traffic--but one of them was darker than the rest, and moved less. Another pace, then she could see the sunlight on a window, blazing through the grime. She halted with only the road and the confusion of concrete separating her from the house. She'd been wrong to doubt Ted's efficiency. He had brought her where she had to go. ------------------------------------267
267
Thirty-three
As soon as she crossed to the pillars she saw that she would be in view of the house well before she reached it. Between the concrete and the front door was a patch of waste ground at least twenty yards wide. She dodged between the pillars, which concealed her from the house but not from the roar of the highway, for a closer look.
It was a nondescript house with a pair of bay windows one above the other, the kind of house that would go unnoticed in the midst of thousands of terraces. Perhaps it had once been the last house of a terrace; now it stood alone on the brink of the highway. Whatever color it had been originally, it looked like the back of a fireplace now. Above the greasy gray tiles of the roof the uneven chimney pots were splintered sticks.
Both windows were heavily curtained. No dou
bt any windows at the back were curtained too. What were the ------------------------------------268
curtains hiding? She turned uneasily, for she'd realized that the noise of the highway made her unable to hear if anyone was behind her, sneaking between the pillars. The longer she stood here, the more nervous she would grow. There was no way she could dodge unseen around the house. Giving herself no time to think, she headed straight for the front door.
A bald doll with its head and limbs twisted back-to-front stared at her with a socket and one eye. She was watching the curtains to see if they moved, but she glimpsed the garbage all around her, a driving mirror half-buried in the clay, a mosaic of broken glass, a sodden jacket or a piece of carpet, a giant blue and white chrysalis which was a shoe, a greenish length of copper pipe. Without breaking her stride she grabbed the pipe, which felt reassuringly heavy. Would she really be able to use it as a weapon, when she had never in her life encountered violence? The way she felt now, she was sure that she would.
The curtains were absolutely still. She was so intent on watching them that she had almost reached the front door before she realized it was open. Was it a trap? Cars roared by above and below her, isolating her with the house; none of the drivers could help her, she doubted that they even noticed her; if they saw her in trouble they wouldn't be able to stop. She lifted the pipe above her head and kicked the door wide open.
The interior was as soulless as the facade, but dimmer. A narrow hallway led past two open doors to a kitchen discolored with fat and rust. Grimy light hovered between browning walls above the blackened shiny carpet, the cracked footprints of dried clay. Somewhere the plumbing had burst, for water glistened like a snail's track on the left-hand wall, over the stairs. It seemed clear that nobody had lived here for months.
Ted had been wrong, after all. Angela couldn't have ------------------------------------269
trusted him entirely, this unfamiliar voice at her mother's flat. She had given him an old address, to teach him a lesson, perhaps. She was out of reach again, and the only reason Barbara restrained herself from weeping was that if she began she might never stop.
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