Abel Baker Charley

by John R. Maxim

  “It sounds like the girl was right,” Harrigan whispered appreciatively. “If you can believe Sonnenberg, all this time he's just been bumbling along enjoying himself.” He motioned toward the pins on Sonnenberg's map. “Is it possible that all those people out there are sitting around waiting for a signal that Sonnenberg doesn't ever mean to give? And why, by the way, is he letting me see where they are?”

  “They're not Sonnenberg's people,” Baker answered. “The pins are in the wrong places.”

  Harrigan raised an eyebrow. “He wouldn't have gone to that trouble just to mislead anyone who saw a map they wouldn't even know about. Why wouldn't he just take the damned thing down? And what're those two pieces of crepe over Denver and Kansas City?”

  “If you want a guess”—Baker shrugged—“I'd say they're Peck's people. Sonnenberg wouldn't have much trouble finding anyone Peck hid.”

  ”I know. He wrote the book. What about the crepe?”

  Baker suspected but he did not know. For reasons he wasn't sure about, he thought of Howard Twilley. Gifted, frustrated, angry Howard Twilley, who, Baker knew, was convinced that a purpose existed behind the talent Sonnenberg had developed in him. A purpose he was eager to fulfill and a talent he was impatient to use in a way more significant than in the suppression of bar-room troublemakers. It would have been only a matter of time before Sonnenberg could no longer contain him. In a way, Baker thought, Peck might have solved a problem by becoming a nuisance when he did.

  ”I think it might be the demonstration Sonnenberg mentioned a few minutes ago. I think he means to teach Peck a lesson.”

  “How, lad?” Harrigan's brow darkened.

  “Just listen.” Baker pointed to the speaker.

  “Another question. You haven't asked about all that happened at the Carey house. Would you like to be briefed or can I assume from the swings of my mood that my brain has already been picked clean?”

  “Thank you,” Jared answered absently. “It's not necessary.”

  “Screw you, Baker.”

  “Sorry, Duncan. Inside joke. Where was I, by the way?”

  “You were escaping from a psychiatric ward,” Peck answered dryly, “committing a murder in the process.”

  Sonnenberg clucked his tongue. “Ah yes, Duncan. You have had legal training, haven't you. Someone once wrote that no poet has seen in nature the variety a lawyer sees in the truth. We were discussing, in any case, whether or not I had a master plan. The plain truth is that since I paroled myself from St. Elizabeths, one thing rather led to another. First there was a need to create a new me, and I thought I might enjoy being a doctor this time. Something bearded, perhaps, and faintly Viennese. A Viennese accent and beard are usually all that is needed to set oneself up in the field of behavioral psychology. Still drifting, however, I drifted into my local butcher shop, where I sought to purchase a rack of lamb. The butcher was Ben Meister, who, speaking of lawyers, thought he would enjoy that profession, although I can't think why. But a lifetime of carving flesh turned out to be superb elementary training. Simulated regression—you recall the technique—helped do the rest. He thought he was Louis Brandeis for the twelve months it took him to prepare for the bar examination. Benjamin is in a Melvin Belli phase at the moment.

  “Moving right along, Meister then defended a woman named Melanie Laver, who was charged with manslaughter. Unhappily, due to Meister's inexperience, to say nothing of Melanie's guilt, he failed to win an acquittal. Nice woman, though. We contrived a satisfying alternative to ten years in a Massachusetts state prison.

  Peck looked at his watch, then winked at Burleson. Sonnenberg saw it.

  “May I continue, Duncan?” he admonished. “Here's your quarry, 'fessing up to all at last, and you're being rudely inattentive.”

  “I'm terribly sorry, Marcus.” Peck affected a somber expression and sat erect in his chair. “It's just that I've sat through this scene in every grade B detective movie of the thirties and forties. The protagonist pieces together all the loose ends in a tiresome chronology and then points an accusing finger at the surprise villain. Since there are few surprises here, Marcus, I wonder if we might vault ahead. To the modern era, perhaps.”

  “Well.” Sonnenberg sniffed. ”I suppose we needn't catalogue all the Ben Meisters and Melanie Lavers. Or the Roger Hersheys, the Howard Twilleys, and the Luther Dowlings. That's your complete list, isn't it, Duncan? It was the cause of your smirk to Edward a moment ago. Your wink was saying, ‘Let the old fool ramble on, never dreaming that we're having these five people rounded up even as he prattles.’ Well, they're not at home, and you can't have them either.”

  Peck flushed but held himself under control. He glanced at the phone and restrained himself from rushing to it to ask whether his roundup of Sonnenberg's known subjects was as futile as Sonnenberg suggested. “Perhaps there are surprises after all, Marcus. Please continue.” He needed time to rearrange his thoughts.

  “Along any particular avenue, Duncan?”

  Duncan Peck shrugged. “I'm rather interested in the Chimera phenomenon, if you wouldn't mind.”

  “Ah yes.” Sonnenberg picked up his thread. “It's instructive, first, to understand how we got there. It was really a sort of on-the-job training. As we went through the Ben Meisters and Melanie Lavers and on to the others, every new technique, every success at radically altering a personality or developing a new talent, led to whole new areas of inquiry. In some cases, we even succeeded in tapping genetic memories. I'd been fascinated by the subject for some time. I've always suspected that an ‘idiot savant,’ for example, who can hear a Beethoven piece once and then play it faultlessly without even a lesson, is actually displaying a skill that was mastered in a prior generation by a biological antecedent. All of us, in fact, possess skills and aptitudes that were actually learned by blood forebears generations, even eons, ago and retained in the genetic blueprint of later generations. A simpler example concerns animals. What we call instinct in a dog is actually behavior that was learned for the purpose of survival by an ancestor low on the evolutionary scale. Dogs and idiot savants don't spend a great deal of time thinking about what they can and cannot do. They just go ahead and do it. I simply began helping subjects to identify those talents, to believe in them and to focus on them.

  “We were well along this road, Duncan, identifying deeply hidden knowledge and aptitudes, when we learned of experiments elsewhere that permitted a quantum leap. Several research centers, notably Cal Tech, had successfully taken memory-bearing brain tissue from one rat and injected it into the brain of another rat. The first rat, in one experiment, would be taught to run a difficult maze or learn a complicated feeding sequence, and then the tissue bearing that knowledge would be directly transfused into the skull of another rat. It worked. The difficulty, of course, was that the donor rat either died or was left impaired, so Cal Tech never got to try it on people.”

  “You, I assume, had no such reluctance, Marcus.”

  “Within certain limits, Duncan, but yes. In the past, I've restricted my experiments to terminally ill volunteers who, in return for the donation of their brain tissue within hours of their anticipated deaths, lived out their days comfortably and left handsome legacies to whomever they designated. They're all still quite alive, you know. Beyond providing nutrients to my rhododendrons out back, each is at this moment sharing productively in another human consciousness.”

  “Including Baker's, I gather.”

  “Oh goodness, no,” Sonnenberg answered quickly. It wouldn't do at all, he thought, to have Jared wondering if I'd squirted bits of someone else's neocortex into his head. He's miffed enough already. “One does not create a Chimera, Duncan, more's the pity. One must find a Chimera. As I assume you recall, I've been looking for one for almost forty years. Oh, the Chimera potential is common enough if you know what you're looking for. Much more common than multiple-personality disorders, which themselves are a dime a dozen. First, it's a matter of understanding that a distinct personality
exists within the limbic system of every human brain. Primordial man, basically. Something like old Bridey Murphy but far more elemental. The next step is to find the right subject, an individual whose primordial or reptilian personality has slipped to the surface. What remains is to discover whether this phenomenon can be isolated and controlled. There's the rub, I'm afraid. One produces some very odd results along the way and far more failures than successes.”

  “The failures, I assume, are also gracing your garden.”

  “Not at all, Duncan. The procedure involves no danger to life.” Sonnenberg reminded himself again that Baker was listening. “It's only that the subject must be stable, balanced and emotionally healthy. Lord knows what you'd find if you started digging into Edward here. Possibly nothing at all. Possibly, however, a great humanist and lover of mankind. After all, the nobler instincts you've managed to breed out of this surface creature must necessarily have found a home in some remote lobe or other. Speaking of lobes, one must also be certain, Duncan, that a chosen subject is not schizophrenic to any important degree, or all you'll end up with are creatures of your subject's emotional needs. I'm afraid I've made that mistake at least once in the past.”

  Duncan Peck leaned forward in his chair, deeply fascinated, his mind searching in several directions at once while absorbing the information so freely offered by Sonnenberg. Lunatic though he may be, Peck thought, he's far from foolish. Yet he's providing information that might be useful. Why? To keep me here until his friends from the police arrive? Hardly. A show of credentials will turn them away with even less inconvenience than Edward experienced with the Greenwich police. To detain us while his own people fly to his aid and our extermination? Not his style. To play cat and mouse? Obviously. But why? And as for these discourses he's enjoying so much, they have a curious quality, some of them. Almost as if he's speaking not so much to me but to ... whom else, Ivor? You said there are no recording devices, and I think I'll take you at your word. Nor have you tried to elicit an incriminating admission from me, although you've made several such admissions yourself. For whose benefit, Ivor. Certainly not Edward's. Could Connor Harrigan be within earshot, Ivor? And Jared Baker?

  “While you're being so generously discursive, Ivor—”

  “Marcus.”

  ”—Marcus, I don't suppose you'd share with me how one goes about identifying a Jared Baker.”

  “Actually, Duncan, we're running short of time,” Sonnenberg answered. “You'll be getting a phone call in a very few minutes.”

  Peck stood up and motioned Burleson to his feet. ”A disagreeable phone call, Marcus? I trust I'm not about to learn that the President of the United States is a former mechanic who once repaired your transmission.”

  ”I try never to diminish, Duncan. Only elevate. Where are you off to, by the way?”

  “I'm afraid I must rescind my early concern for your woodwork, Marcus.”

  “Charley?”

  “peck thinks you're here, he hopes you're here, he thinks sonnenberg is talking to you and harrigan more than him.”

  Baker repeated Charley's message to Harrigan.

  “Like the man said, lad''—Harrigan pointed to the shaft above the air conditioner—“we'll know when to leave. It sounds like things are about to get nasty.”

  “Jared?” It was Sonnenberg's voice coming from the speaker.

  “Yeah?” Harrigan answered for him.

  “They can't hear this speaker, Mr. Harrigan, although they will when they reach the basement. Do two things for me, please. First, make sure you haven't fiddled with the setting of the air conditioner. In fact, turn it up to its loudest setting. Next, go at once, but wait in the covered well at the end of that shaft until it seems prudent to take your leave.”

  “One more time, Doctor.” Baker spoke to the microphone. “Where are they?”

  “To the park, Jared. And you, Mr. Harrigan. Off with you both. Truth and justice await you there.”

  “Report, Douglas.” Duncan Peck stood in the driveway, Burleson at his side, addressing his man Peterson. Michael Biaggi stood near, looking furtively into Peck's eyes for some sign of what might have been said.

  “Sonnenberg's people are all gone, sir. The five our men tried to pick up, anyway. And they're all traveling light from the look of their apartments. Most personal effects are still there. I have a two-man team covering each location for when they return.”

  Peck turned to Burleson. ”A probably useless measure, Edward, but leave them. If their homes are like this one, the remaining personal effects have been shed like the skin of a snake. A pity. I'd almost have been tempted to bargain all five for one Jared Baker.”

  “We're also having a difficult time with the direction finders, sir,” Peterson continued. “He's set up a series of signal relays somehow. We've triangulated five different locations as the signal source, and before we can check out one he switches to another. Some are very close. One's coming all the way from a boatyard down on the Sound.”

  ”A boat, you say?”

  ”I assume so, sir. I have a man checking to see if there's a berth in Sonnenberg's name.”

  “There probably is,” Peck mused. “And boats have radio equipment. Although I can't think why he'd ensconce himself in anything so minimally mobile. On the other hand, Sonnenberg is nothing if not perverse. Send a man, Douglas. Have a second man prepared to place an immediate trace on a telephone call it appears I'm to receive here. With the rest, seal off this house and let us begin pulling it apart.”

  In a small lunchroom in Greeley, Colorado, two thousand miles west, Moon Huggins looked up in distaste at the black man slowly stirring coffee at the far end of the counter. Moon knew this was one of those smart-ass niggers the second he had laid eyes on him. A three-hundred-dollar suit he probably paid for by selling his wife's black ass or peddlin' drugs to decent white folks. Even a vest, for Christ's sake. Walkin' in here and askin' for coffee and a sweet roll like he had all the right in the world, ploppin' down that briefcase on the next stool just like it was his. Ain't even drinking. Took one sip and he just sits there stirrin', happy as a hog because he got a white man waitin' on him.

  Things just ain't the same no more. At least not here in Greeley. But it ain't changed all so damned much down in Tupelo. Not that I could ever go back there, likely. Picture him walkin' into a white man's place in Tupelo with his big flat nose in the air sayin', “Good morning, my man. Coffee and a pecan roll, if you please.” Shee-it. Sumbitch probably never had a pair of shoes until some Jew commie got hold of him and filled his burr head with liquid shit. Speakin' of which...

  “Hey, Ira?”

  A heavyset man wearing laced boots and a red hunting jacket looked up from a newspaper. He was dressed too warmly, even for an early Colorado autumn. But hunting clothes told people he was a mountain man and summer clothes didn't. Ira hated summer. He didn't much like niggers either.

  ”Yo, Moon,” he answered.

  “You hear the one about the nigger who had diarrhea?”

  Ira chuckled to himself. A third white man, a salesman according to the sample case at the base of his stool, glanced sorrowfully at the black man and lowered his head.

  “Can't say I have, Moon.” He closed his newspaper and pushed it aside. “What about the nigger who had diarrhea?”

  “He thought he was meltin'.” Moon Huggins slapped a palm down on the counter and guffawed. Ira chuckled again and winked his encouragement.

  The salesman bit his lip. He reached into his pocket for a bill, which he waved toward Moon. Moon was glad to see that. If that ham and egg salesman was to leave, maybe him and Ira could have some fun with the nigger, providin' of course he wasn't smart enough to get his black ass out of here. Which it appears he ain't. Look at him. Just sittin' there with one of them superior eye smiles, too dumb to know what's in our heads to do to him if we get half an excuse. What's that he's doin'? Rubbin' up and down the sides of his cup with a handkerchief as if his damned snot rag was cleaner than my
cup.

  “Somethin’ the matter with that cup, boy?”

  “It's just fine, sir. Thank you.” The black man lifted the cup to his lips and sipped, still holding it with his handkerchief. ”I had the impression you'd rather not have me touch any of your fine china.” Next he dampened his cloth in the coffee and began buffing away smudges on the counter itself. Ira stood up from his table, his eyes shifting between Moon and the black man. Moon's good humor had faded.

  “Are you tryin' to be smart with me, boy?” He reached under his cash register and pulled out an old bung starter he kept there for troublemakers. Moon rested it on the counter a few feet from the black man.

  “Not at all, sir. In any case, I'll be leaving shortly.” The black man turned on his stool and flipped open the briefcase that had been sitting there. His politeness irritated Moon all the more.

  “Don't go settlin' in here with that.” Moon gestured toward the briefcase. “It ain't no readin' room. You want to read, you can haul ass down to Denver, where they got one of them black studies places with books all about where niggers come from and how one of them figured new ways to use peanuts. Hey, Ira. Don't that tell you somethin'? White folks can send TV cameras to outer space, but all the niggers are good for is figurin' out that if you mash down peanuts real good you got peanut butter. You ought to go look it up, nigger. You won't be so ignorant.”

  “Thank you just the same, Mr. Boley, but I've been there.”

  The color drained from Moon Huggins's face. “What was that, boy? What did you call me?”

  ”I called you Mr. Boley. You're Raymond Boley from Tupelo, Mississippi.” Howard Twilley slid a hand over the open briefcase and then returned it, no longer empty, to the edge of the counter. Moon Huggins stared down across the length of a large-caliber pistol. Fitted to its muzzle was a dull black cylinder six inches long and as wide as a half-dollar.