Prelude to a Scream

by Jim Nisbet

  Stanley shifted uneasily.

  “It’s not the procedure that’s complicated. It’s the Hop Toy family’s relationship to authority that’s complicated.”

  “Authority?”

  “Yeah,” said Stanley. “Authority.”

  She frowned.

  Stanley sighed loudly. “IRS? Do I have to spell it out?”

  “Oh. I get it. You mean if he suddenly comes up with too much money…”

  Stanley nodded. “Little bells go off in big computers.” He waved his hand. “But, bottom line — Hop Toy has done plenty for me as it is.”

  Iris touched his face. “Too bad we’re not married. My insurance might have covered this…”

  Stanley looked at her. “Married? I hardly know you.”

  She replied softly, “The scope of the subjunctive.”

  Stanley blinked. “Beg pardon?”

  “Condition contrary to fact.”

  “Ah…: Yes…?”

  She shook her head. “I came across a couple of lines, once, on just that subject, by Tom Raworth. He’s an English poet. Perhaps you know of him?”

  “Yeah,” Stanley sighed wearily. Was there no end to this woman’s discursiveness? “Perhaps I know of him.”

  She smiled an inward smile, and quoted the lines.

  each day

  repeated

  he lives

  for ever

  he thinks

  alone

  in the honey

  comb o

  the subjunctive

  that riffle

  of the deck

  She ruffled his hair. “That didn’t flood the noggin too badly, did it?”

  Damn, Stanley brooded. This woman’s smarter than I am.

  The metal door to the staircase opened with a crash and the light flooding out of the portal was eclipsed by the bulk of Felix, who stood aside for the much thinner frame of Fong, walking backwards to let a wire peel off a spool between his hands.

  “What’s this?” said Iris. “It looks like they’re going to blow up the building.”

  When Fong had cleared the door Felix kicked the wire into the corner of the threshold and closed the door on it.

  Fong trailed wire off the whirling spool until he’d arrived by the arm of Stanley’s wheelchair. Then he set the spool in a flower box on the windowsill and disappeared into the darkened shed. A few minutes later he reappeared with the bok choy crate that normally lived beneath the TV. He set it to the right of the door and went back inside.

  Felix Choy stood the briefcase full of tools on the pea gravel beneath the spool and geraniums, turned his back on the shed and studied the layout. After a moment he moved the wooden crate a couple of feet toward Berkeley. He stepped back for a moment, shaded his eyes toward the moon, then stepped forward and adjusted the angle of the box.

  “What’s he doing?” Iris whispered, as if Felix were on stage.

  “Shh,” said Fong, from the darkness beyond the door. “He’s aligning the table for optimum Chih energy.”

  Iris giggled.

  When Felix was ready, Fong produced a folding camp stool and stood it on the pea gravel between the bok choy crate and the window box. He placed a fresh can of cherry Coke next to the stool and went back inside the shack.

  Felix stood the pigskin bag on the crate, unzipped it, and pulled a small plastic case out of it. Even in the dark, the case looked like a computer. Not much of a computer, Iris judged, as it seemed to be about the size of a box of chocolates. On the other hand, Sean Corrigan carried a much smaller one that seemed impressively powerful. The edges of the black plastic case were sleek and rounded, and three sides of it bristled with buttons, slots and connectors. Felix set the computer on the box and pulled two more plastic boxes, two wires and a curly-cord out of the bag. Fong came back outside trailing an extension cord, and traded the female end of it to Felix for the pigskin shoulder bag, which Fong zipped closed and placed on the floor just inside the door of the shack—not without a certain tender reverence for the bag’s quality.

  Sitting down on the canvas stool, which creaked ominously beneath his weight, Felix Choy pulled the crate toward his stomach as far as it would go. The effect was similar to that of a bumblebee refueling a gnat. He picked up the computer and plugged a wire into it. Then he set the machine down to plug the other end of the wire into a transformer, and plugged the transformer into a multiple-outlet strip. This in turn he plugged into the extension cord. Then he carefully stood a portable printer on the tool valise, beside the table, and plugged its power cord into the power strip.

  He picked up the computer again and held it to the moonlight, peering at one edge of it. Having reappeared from the interior of the shack with another chair, Fong handed him a loose end of the telephone wire from the spool on the windowsill. This Felix plugged into the computer as well, along with a cable from the printer.

  Finally, Fong lit six sticks of green incense and stuck them into the dirt among the geraniums.

  “Flame on,” Fong said softly to himself, taking a seat where he could watch the screen over Felix’s shoulder.

  Felix fingered a lock and the whole top of the computer opened up, revealing a screen and a keyboard. He touched a switch. The machine beeped, and a little green light winked in the darkness. With miscellaneous clicks and whirs the machine spun to life. The screen lit up a bright, deep blue, casting an eerie glow over the features of Felix who, as soon as the machine had booted, began to stab at the keyboard with all ten fingers. His typing style was a graceful, assured blitz, quite unlike anything else evinced by Felix’s teenage demeanor.

  His typing style reminded Stanley of Giles MacIntosh.

  “You want to sit down?” Stanley asked Iris, taking his eyes off Felix. “This might take a while.”

  Still sitting on Stanley’s lap, Iris realized he was talking to her. “Am I too heavy?” she asked.

  “No. I was thinking of your discomfort.”

  “Oh, Stanley,” she said, and put her head on his shoulder.

  Felix took a long pull on the new cherry Coke. “Got the data?” he said to no one in particular, and made a low scooping gesture with his free hand, beside the camp stool. When his hand came up empty, an expression of unmitigated petulance darkened his beardless features. “Hey.”

  Fong dropped the front legs of the straight-back chair down to the gravel and went inside the shed. They could hear him rooting around in the shopping bags.

  Stanley plucked the folded piece of notepaper from the envelope and handed it to Felix.

  A jet liner sloped in over the city from the northeast, with a long decrescendo of turbofans. The night was so clear they could distinguish every round window on the starboard side of the aircraft, like the stops on an ocarina.

  Fong came back out of the shed to place an opened family-sized bag of potato chips next to the bok choy crate, well within reach of Felix’s questing hand.

  “There’s no paper in the printer,” said Felix, digging deep into the bag.

  “Salt plus hydrogenated palm oil equals smarter already,” muttered Fong, uncharacteristically humble.

  While Fong bent over the little printer, carefully stacking and loading ten or fifteen sheets of paper into its feeder, Felix happily filled his mouth with chips once, twice, and a third time, each mouthful sluiced by a long draft of cherry Coke. The crunching sounded like a herd of reindeer migrating across the gravel roof.

  Felix thoroughly crushed the soda can between two meaty fists. When he tossed the can over his shoulder, calling, “Recycle,” Fong caught it and replaced it with a fresh one.

  “Department of Motor Vehicles,” said Felix, eying the slip of paper as he sipped at the third cherry Coke. “We’ll start there.” He slipped a corner of the paper under an edge of the computer, where he could read it by the light of the screen, and attacked the keyboard.

  Fong leaned forward, his hands on his knees, to watch the screen over Felix’s shoulder.

  “First,�
�� Fong narrated, “a free, untraceable phone line.”

  A dial-tone hummed within the little computer, then its modem dialed a long series of digits, each proceeded by the variable-length clicks of rotary dial access.

  The clicks stopped. A telephone rang once. The line picked up. A modem from cyberia emitted a squeal and a chatter. The computer’s modem squealed back. Various messages flashed on the screen in front of Felix. Iris and Stanley watched the play of light on Felix’s face. The modems reciprocated each other with chattering trills, like mechanical birds. The devices agreed on something, data began to flow, and the modem speaker fell silent.

  “Now,” said Fong. “Accessing somebody’s account. Needing a password.”

  After a minute or two Fong let out a low whistle. “Would have took me all night, just to do that,” he said appreciatively.

  Felix let his fingers fly over the keys as he watched the screen. Stanley pulled on the wheels of his chair until he’d maneuvered himself into the doorway of the shack, Iris still in his lap, so they could see better. In Felix’s hands the computer might well have been a grand piano.

  Felix, Stanley realized uneasily, typed faster than Giles MacIntosh.

  Fong broke into a grin. Simultaneously, Felix frowned.

  “This person’s password is Poontang,” muttered Felix. “What’s that mean?”

  Iris blinked and looked at Stanley. Stanley looked at Fong.

  “Island off Borneo,” Fong said quickly. “Very obscure.”

  “Oh yeah?” Felix said. “I got a pop-up atlas in here somewhere…”

  “Skip it,” said Fong. “Sticking to the mission.”

  “Never hurts to learn,” said Felix petulantly.

  “This is an illegal phone connection,” Fong reminded him. “Not to dawdle.”

  The computer beeped. “Account accessed,” said Fong. “Calling Department of Motor Vehicles in… how about… Duluth, Minnesota?”

  Felix hunched a shoulder and typed. “Duluth… Minnesota.”

  Before long Felix was inside the California DMV’s main computer, accessing its vehicle registration files via the Minnesota Highway Patrol’s main computer, which for reasons best known to Felix Choy was acting under the impression that Felix was a patrol car making a routine check on an out-of-state vehicle while cruising the beltway engirdling Duluth. Within a few minutes he had the name, address, and serial numbers of outstanding parking tickets credited to a registered owner for the license number Stanley had taken from the BMW the night before. As Felix was about to hit the key to print this information, he sat up in his chair, nearly upsetting the table.

  “Hey. The California computer is getting excited.” He waited a minute. “Oh, wow. Way cool. The Beamer is stolen.” He dragged a fistful of potato chips out of the bag and stuffed them into his mouth, still watching the screen. “Are we surprised?” he said through the mouthful of chips.

  Fong and Iris looked at Stanley, who had told them nothing of the night before. “No,” he said. “We’re not surprised. But get the info anyway.”

  Felix hit a button. “Printing data.” The little printer below the table began to zip and snap like a tiny welder.

  “What about the van?”

  “Checking…,” said Felix. He consulted Stanley’s slip of paper and tapped in the figures.

  Stanley had never had much hope for the Beamer, but he held out some for the van. It seemed obvious that they might think it important to steal Green Eyes a different car every week. Her vehicle was the more exposed. But the van would be a much more intrinsic part of the operation, too difficult to readily replace.

  A moment passed, then two, then three. A sailboat, motoring through the still night with all sails dropped and a single light atop her mast, emerged from beneath the Bay Bridge, hard against Treasure Island, cruising silently north, unremarked by the party on the roof.

  “Got it,” said Felix. “It’s not stolen.”

  “Don’t sound so disappointed,” said Fong.

  “Hey,” said Felix, brightening.

  “What’s up?”

  “I’m not disappointed anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  Felix pressed the key to print the screen and the little printer came to life again.

  “It’s registered to a funeral home.”

  He happily filled his mouth with chips.

  Chapter Twenty

  THE COLUMBARIUM WAS IN OAKLAND—NOT FAR FROM WHERE THE grass grows greener on account of all the leaky sarcophagi.

  Bay Memorial Vista was a beautiful if blunt memento mori by moonlight. Surmounted by the perpetually lit and windowless Mormon Tabernacle, the marble garden draped over the slopes of a low pair of adjacent hills like a silk blouse over the shoulders of an immortal concubine, providing its eyeless denizens a thorough overview of the phantom trace of the Cypress Freeway, felled with a loss of 62 souls by the earthquake of ’89, and the shadowy landfill flats of West Oakland (called Ghost Town by the locals because of its murder rate). Beyond lay the velvet darkness of the Bay, the intermittent twinkles of Treasure Island and the catenary path of yellow bulbs following the Bay Bridge to San Francisco, a vista stretching fifteen miles and more. Between Ghost Town and the edge of the Bay glowed the crane derricks and slab-sided hulls of the container port. The quartzite mauves and ochres, their geometries set quivering by distance, seemed a bright, complex world built and maintained by robots, entirely enclosed within the prolate globe of a mercury lamp balanced on the palm of Oakland’s outstretched hand.

  The Chippendale O’Hare Columbarium, Crematorium, and Funeral Home didn’t actually border Bay Memorial Vista. It was a low, rambling building several blocks north of the cemetery, with a discreet sign that should have made it hard to find. But lofting from the far corner of the premises, its snub muzzle of painted bricks like the handle of a four-story nightstick, the smokestack gave it away.

  Number 34, Avenida Del Fumador. The numeral was etched into a brass plate screwed high up on a brick pilaster. A slight breeze occasionally lifted the shadow of an oak limb off the plaque, so it could be feebly touched by the light of a street lamp.

  Stanley slowed the truck long enough to confirm the address, then accelerated past it. At the second cross street north he made a U-turn and drove slowly back, to park just below the crown of the hill overlooking the hollow that contained No. 34, where he could comfortably study the layout.

  Aside from Chippendale O’Hare, the neighborhood seemed strictly residential, and older than those by which more recent development had encapsulated it; its cozy bungalows had been built between the Depression and the end of World War II, when the labor demands of the naval shipyards attracted many new people to Oakland and San Francisco. At the end of the war, one of these bungalows could be had for five thousand dollars; the payments on a 20-year, four-percent loan bequeathed by the G.I. Bill came to $27.84 a month. But the shipbuilding had ceased long since. The massive naval force that had steamed in and out of the Golden Gate, all through the war, now rotted in row after row of mothballed hulks in Suisun Bay. The sailors’ and welders’ families that had occupied the bungalows were all grown up and scattered.

  A disjoint abutting of slabs whose horizontals were delineated and emphasized by clerestories, Number 34 would have been very modern in 1956, an architectural innovation. Now dated by its design, a few windows cracked, some plywood paneling warped, enveloped by neglected oaks and acacias, it projected seediness. A tall pyracantha hedge paralleled the brick perimeter wall, the two entirely enclosing the compound. Behind the buildings a tall Monterey pine stood almost as high as the smokestack.

  A leaf-covered driveway swept into the entryway between two brick columns, broadened to encompass a carport and parking lot, then spilled steeply through a pair of locked gates onto the street demarcating the back side of the block.

  And it was quiet in this neighborhood.

  Dead quiet.

  The northern building seemed to be of one story. But a row
of low windows along its north side were only about a foot off the ground. Studying the structure, seeing certain vents and gratings, Stanley realized that another, subterranean level must extend all the way from the row of windows, beneath the carport, to the southern building. The complex was actually two stories, and would encompass perhaps six or seven thousand square feet.

  The three-dollar digital clock integral to the notepad stalk depending from the inside of the windshield said it was a quarter to two. How late do mortuaries stay open?

  This one looked closed. In fact, the more he studied the place, the more Stanley wondered if it did any business at all.

  The parking lot was deserted. The trees and the hedges had a shaggy look to them; certainly, much time had passed since they’d been attended to. Pine straw was drifted up in windrows along the edges of the parking lot and the roofs of the buildings. With a little rain all that detritus would cause a lot of trouble with a drainage system. Surely, bad drainage wasn’t a good idea in a building intended to display urns containing ashes of the dead?

  The upper branches of the trees suddenly filled with angular beams of light. A car topped the hill behind the truck and Stanley slouched in his seat as the cab flooded with swift shadows. The car accelerated downhill, trailing fumes and music, passed the Toyota, nominally braked for the stop sign at the corner, and with a squeal of tires was gone.

  Silence ebbed back into the sleeping neighborhood.

  After a while Stanley could hear a breeze passing through the upper branches of the lone Monterey pine. When the breeze ebbed he could detect a similar whispering, almost a mutter, from the freeway, nearly two miles away.

  At the bottom of the hill, across the intersection, a light came on in a window of a bungalow. It was a small window with a frosted, translucent pane.

  Stanley shifted his eyes above the window and its roof, to the lights twinkling south and west of the field of pale obelisks. Just as a pain asserted its identity in his lower back, a discreet cluster of lights lifted above the horizon. The lights assumed a path that took them up at an increasingly oblique angle, drawing them further away from their landlocked brethren until they passed beyond the darkened side of the hill to Stanley’s right, on route to Portland or Seattle, Vancouver or Anchorage.