The Puppet Master

by John Dalmas

  When we'd disconnected, I keyed the office. We carry beepers, but it's company policy not to use them except for urgent messages. In our work, beeping can be a nuisance, even a danger, so we check in from time to time. Fidela told me I hadn't had any calls, and Carlos and Joe hadn't put a come-in on me. Then I went to the gym for a couple of hours. I left the Nautilus alone, worked hard on my flexibility and forms, sparred awhile, and finally beat and kicked hell out of first the heavy bag and then Big Dummy, the response mech. After that, and ten minutes in the sauna, I ate a green salad and a bowl of rice and beans, and took my coffee black. All in all, I figured, I'd almost made up for Molly Cadigan's chocolate doughnuts.

  Afterward I keyed up the public access information on Olaf Sigurdsson. He was no kid. He'd been born near Eskifjördur, Iceland, on 8 February 1928, which made him eighty-four years old. His profession was listed as psychic consultant, and there was a published biography on him by Laura Wayne Walker.

  * * *

  Tuuli and I ate supper at home that evening: broiled walleye with lemon, microwaved potatoes, barely cooked mixed veggies . . . You get the picture. I can eat all I want of stuff like that. I've discovered it's good, too, but it pains me to see Tuuli eat butter brickle ice cream for dessert while I finish off with fat-free fruit yogurt. She says she can't help it if she can eat the way she does and stay trim. She's right, and I'm glad for her, but it hurts.

  I told her I was trying for an appointment with Ole Sigurdsson, and right away she wanted to go with me. She'd never met him, and wanted to. I told her I had nothing against her meeting him, but not when I was on official business. It wouldn't be professional.

  We were about ready to have a fight over that, when the phone rang. I answered. The man on the screen was elderly, his face strong-boned and hawk like. "I'm Olaf Sigurdsson," he said. "And you're Martti Seppanen."

  "Right. With Prudential Investigations and Security. I'm not looking for your services as a psychic, Mr. Sigurdsson. Not just now. What I would like is your views on the Institute of Noetic Technology. In connection with an investigation. I'd like to talk with you; tomorrow. If possible."

  "Ja-ah?"

  It came out as a question, as if he wanted to know more about it, or what else I was interested in. I didn't intend to mention my interest in the Merlins yet. Sproule had said he was a friend of theirs. I'd bring them up when I was with him; make it seem as if my interest was incidental.

  "Yes, sir," I said. He had an eye like a hawk, and it was looking inside me, right over the phone.

  "Do you vant to know v'at I charge for consulting vith police? Or investigators like you?"

  I said yes. It wasn't as high as I thought it might be, but I'd prefer not to pay it out of my own pocket.

  "You'll have to make it this evening, though," he went on. "My vife and I are leaving town tomorrow."

  "I can be there in under an hour."

  He nodded, then looked at me silently, as if thinking. Or looking into my head. Disconcerting. "And bring your vife. Ve have heard of her."

  I glanced at Tuuli. Where she stood, she'd shown in his screen too, though out of focus. She was grinning. "Fine," I said. "We'll both be there."

  * * *

  Sigurdsson's place was modest for Bel Air, but the location was something else, on top of a ridge. Sigurdsson himself answered the door, a tall, rawboned old man who still stood straight.

  His eyes settled on Tuuli right away. Men generally find her interesting. She's small, dainty actually, but nicely shaped, with a face that's delicate and pretty. She's been described as elfin. Her hair is tan and so is her skin. All over; it's her natural color. Her eyes are green and tilted. She's Lapp on her mother's side, and Finn on her father's.

  I introduced us. Sigurdsson's eyes shifted to me while I spoke, then turned back to Tuuli. It wasn't as if he was an old lecher. It was more like a—like a personnel examination. After four or five seconds he nodded, as if he approved of her.

  "Laura vill vant to meet you both v'en ve're done vith business," he said. "She is in her office, marking up a shooting script. Yust now she's executive producer for a picture that the director is trying to run up the costs on."

  He led us down a hall to a comfortable room like a small living room, that obviously served as his den. Against one wall, a brick stove had been built that could be used for heat in chilly weather. I'd never seen a brick stove before. It had a steel plate in the top that you could cook on, and looked as if it burned wood. There was also a table painted like a couple I'd seen in old Swede farmhouses back in Ojibwa County, with chairs to match. The couch he motioned us to was high enough and firm enough for comfortable sitting.

  "Coffee?" he asked.

  We both said yes. He put on a red-laquered percolator with something written on the side in a foreign language, Icelandic I suppose.

  "So," he said, looking me over, "v'at do you vant from me?"

  I told him I was investigating the disappearance of Ray Christman. That the Institute of Noetic Technology, or people inside it, were suspect, and I wanted to know more about it. A woman named Molly Cadigan had suggested I talk to him, had said he might be more up to date than she was. That I'd read a Times article on the institute, dated 1993, and a brief biography of Leif Haller which had information about the institute as it had been years ago. And that I'd talked with Winifred Sproule.

  "Vell," he said, "I ain't much more up to date than that. But I'd be surprised if the institute vas up to getting Christman killed. If any individual Noetie vas, it vould be Haller himself."

  "And he's dead," I said.

  "Do you know that?"

  That stopped me. "According to his biography," I answered, "he died of the Great Flu in December '99, and was buried in a mass grave near Eau Clair, Wisconsin." I looked at the circumstances that would have prevailed then. I didn't know how big Eau Claire had been, but big enough to be a well-known name throughout the region—forty or fifty thousand maybe. That mass grave would have been one of many for Eau Claire, each with maybe a hundred or even five hundred bodies. There'd have been no autopsies, no embalmings, little if anything more than an identification by whoever discovered the body or brought it in. Even my home town, Hemlock Harbor, had mass graves, and it only had some four thousand people before the Flu—twenty-eight hundred afterward. They bulldozed a trench, lined the bodies out in it, limed them heavily and covered them up.

  I changed tack. "As a psychic, does it seem to you that Haller's alive?"

  "I don't get anything vun vay or another on that."

  "Do you get anything on who's responsible for Christman's disappearance?"

  He stood silent for a minute, frowning, then grunted and shook his head. "Nothing on that either. How long has he been missing?"

  I gave him a rundown on what Armand Butzburger had told me. Meanwhile the coffeepot had been perking, and when I'd finished, Sigurdsson got up and poured three mugs. I had mine with honey and cream, the cream out of a little oak-veneer fridge built into his oak bookcase. He didn't have anything to say till he'd served all three of us.

  "So he has been missing probably since October. More than six months. Then I vould guess he is dead. But that's only a guess. And considering v'at the church is like, I vould guess that somevun or some group inside it killed him."

  "I don't suppose it would do me much good to interview Lon Thomas?"

  Again he grunted. "From v'at I've heard, he vouldn't give you an interview. And if he did, v'at makes you think he'd tell you the truth?"

  "I consider myself pretty observant about things like that. I think I'd know if he was lying."

  "Don't be too sure. I vas never in the church, but I have friends that vere, three or four of them that vere pretty high up. Thomas is sharp—maybe not intelliyent, but sharp—kvick, avare. And he came up through their PR division. The people in public relations there do lying drills till they can say anything to anyvun, straight-faced and vithout blinking."

  My first reaction was,
it sounded like a myth, the kind that can grow up about a mysterious organization or secret government agency. But even as I thought it, I realized it was possible, and might well be true of an outfit like the Gnosties. I nodded. "Who are these three or four people you mentioned? I'd like to talk with them."

  "There vas three of them. Two died in the plagues. The other vun you already talked to: Vinny Sproule."

  "Ah."

  "So," he said. His eyes, I'd thought, were gray. Now I decided they were blue. They looked into me, steady and disconcerting. "There is something else you vant from me. V'at is it?"

  "Dr. Sproule mentioned a couple named Vic and Tory Merlin."

  His gaze never changed, he didn't nod, his eyebrows didn't arch. He simply said, "O-oh?"

  I hadn't intended to say what I said next. It just sort of blopped out. "She told me that Christman's ideas came from them. That he simply adapted them for teaching and application."

  "She is right about v'ere his ideas came from. His ideas about reality and people and how to help them. But Christman did more than adapt them. Overall he changed them. Not on purpose, I don't think. He didn't fully understand them. He changed importances, left important things out . . . Made a dog's breakfast out of them, if you vant to know. Except the easy stuff, the beginning stuff. He got that pretty good."

  "Could you tell me how to get in touch with the Merlins? Give me their phone number?"

  He pursed his lips. "Tell you v'at. I'll give them your number, and tell them v'at you're interested in. If they vant, they can get in touch vith you."

  * * *

  And that's as far as I got. Sigurdsson turned his attention to Tuuli, and they talked for a few minutes while I sat there like a lump. If he'd been forty years, or maybe even thirty years younger, I'd have been jealous. Tuuli gave him her card, and he talked about the Merlins, whom he called the most powerful psychics he knew of. Then he buzzed his wife, and she came in, a really good-looking lady in her sixties, I judged. Probably twenty years younger than her husband. She and Sigurdsson and Tuuli had a good time yakking for another half hour, but I had things on my mind, and didn't add much to the conversation.

  I needed to talk with Lon Thomas. I'd been afraid of it, afraid of him, been holding the idea down, mostly refusing to look at it, telling myself he wouldn't say anything useful. After a few minutes we got up, shook hands and left. As we drove away, Tuuli was full of the evening, full of having had a conversation with Olaf Sigurdsson! And of how friendly and charming Laura Sigurdsson had been. She was so full of it all that at first she didn't seem to notice I was only half with her. When she did notice, she laid a hand on my arm.

  "Thank you, Martti," she said softly in Finnish. "Thank you for taking me along."

  I hadn't had much choice; Sigurdsson had almost ordered it. But she wasn't expressing thanks; she was expressing affection. Love. She didn't do that a lot. Of course, lots of times I wasn't very loveable; I was inconsiderate and unreasonable, and took too much for granted. We both did, as far as that went.

  I'd turned onto Mulholland Drive by then, headed east. We came to a place—a public overlook—with a great view of the billion lights of the San Fernando Valley, and I pulled off the right of way into one of the diagonal parking slots there. Then we just sat holding hands and looking. We didn't even neck. I can't say personally what L.A. was like in the smog years. But with Arne Haugen's geogravitic power converters powering everything from cars to cities, from desalinization plants to transmountain water pipelines, L.A.'s got to be one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Especially at night, from the Santa Monica Mountains.

  We'd been there about three or four minutes when a Buick pulled up behind us, blocking us in. Both of us stiffened; I thought of the guy who'd tailed me. I had my 9mm Glock in the door pocket and my 7.65 Walther under one arm. Presumably Tuuli had the little .25-caliber Lady Colt I'd given her in her shoulder bag. There were at least four guys in the Buick. Three piled out with wrecking bars and hammers in their hands. Trashers. Two of them came to my door and one to Tuuli's, all of them grinning, probably high on something.

  My window was open—Tuuli had run hers up—and one of them stuck his face in. "Hey! You!" he said. "No fucking in the car! Unless you're gonna pass it around!"

  Now I knew which one was the ringleader. The others laughed at his wit until I pointed my Walther at him. He backed away quickly, both of them did, but not any quicker than I keyed the door open and stepped out.

  "You pull a gun on someone and you can go to jail!" He half yelled it; the other half was whine, high and nasal.

  I answered by shooting once, blowing the Buick's right front tire. Their hands were already up. Now they reached higher, stretching. "On your bellies!" I said, twitching my gun at the two in front of me. They went down as if their knees had melted, very cooperative, hands wide. Meanwhile I'd heard Tuuli's door close. I glanced back and saw the guy on her side backing away. She'd have her Lady Colt in her hand. I pointed the Walther at the guy still in the Buick, behind the steering wheel; his hands were up by his ears. I stepped to where I could see his other front tire, and shot it out. That left me with seven rounds. "Out!" I told him, and out he got.

  "You got a trashing tool in there?" I asked. He nodded. "In back?" Another nod. "Get it out! Carefully, or I'll put one of these right through your spine." He gave a little half sob, opened the back door, and brought out a short-handled sledgehammer.

  "Whose car?" I asked.

  "My old man's."

  "Your what?!"

  "My father's."

  "He know what you use it for?"

  "He thinks I'm at Sepulveda Mall, ice skating."

  "Hon!" I said. "Cover those three!"

  "I am!"

  I had the driver get back in his Buick and drive it ahead a few meters, out of the way, then get out with his hammer and lie down by the other three. "Hon," I said, "back out and then back east down the road a hundred feet or so." I was assuming none of the punks had read my plates, and I didn't want them to. When she'd done it, I had the four of them get up, watching them closely. I decided that none had a gun actually on him, though there may have been one in their car. They were dressed in the Valley Smooth style, tights with a codpiece, and not even pocket space for a handkerchief. "Pick up your tools!" I told them.

  They did.

  "Now trash the Buick!"

  No one moved. Then I fired a round close, very close, to the head of one of them, the one nearest the car, the driver. He may have felt it zip past his ear. Whatever. He flinched and yelped. "The next one," I told him, "is right through your face."

  It was really real to him now that he could die, bleed out his life right there, right then. He stepped quickly to his father's car, smashed a front window, then stopped and looked back at me. The others were moving reluctantly. "That's a start," I told him. "Keep it up."

  Meanwhile Tuuli had come back and handed me the Glock. I stood there like John Wayne, a gun in each hand. The driver sobbed again, not weeping but in frustration, and again he swung, this time with more force, putting a large dent in the door. The others joined in, and in a moment they were all hammering away.

  That's what they were doing while we backed off to my car and got in. I presumed the shots had been heard, and three should have been enough for someone to get a directional fix on them, more or less. I accelerated hard past the trashers, wanting to get off Mulholland onto Beverly Glen Boulevard, the quickest way into the anonymity of Valley traffic.

  As we wound down the hill, I was shaking, telling myself it was all right, that no one could identify me. That they'd had it coming; that they were lucky I hadn't leg-shot them. They weren't really hard cases, but up there with the two of us alone, if we hadn't been armed, they'd hardly have settled for trashing our car.

  But I didn't really calm down all the way home.

  Our building loomed square and shadowed behind its sentinel date palms and the row of tall, vine-covered Mexican pines along the curb.
The place had never looked so good. I stopped, put my key card into the slot, and when the cover raised, keyed in my code number. Through the open window, I heard insects or tree frogs or something chirring in the darkness, and a mockingbird tried a tentative half bar. Voices murmured on balconies, and someone laughed softly. The door swung up, and I rolled down the ramp and inside. Al, the guard covering the garage that night, waved from his booth.

  I never even thought about Lon Thomas or Vic Merlin. When we got to the apartment, Tuuli and I were in one another's arms almost before the door closed.

  10

  TWO APPOINTMENTS

  The next day I slept in till after Tuuli was up. She fixed our breakfasts, then left for an appointment in Thousand Oaks. If I hadn't had the Christman case in mind when we got in the night before, I did now. And I knew what I wanted to do next. I'd pretend to be a freelance writer, and get an interview appointment with N. Lonnberg Thomas, President of the Church of the New Gnosis.

  I wasn't sure what I might accomplish, the case was still so amorphous. But church factions were suspect, and I needed to poke around and see what I could learn.

  I spent a couple of hours at Gold's, doing Choi Li Fut forms followed by a Nautilus workout, had a good lunch at Morey's, then went to my office, where I created a fictional résumé of imaginary publication credits, and printed it out. Next I tried to foresee what questions Thomas or his secretary might ask before giving me an interview, and how I'd handle them.

  Then I called the church, got a receptionist, and told her I wanted to speak with N. Lonnberg Thomas. When she asked what the call concerned, I told her my name was Martin Eberly—Eberly's my mother's maiden name—an identity I have official-looking documentation for, from driver's license to credit cards. That I was a freelance writer preparing an article on the church, and wanted an interview with Reverend Thomas at his earliest convenience. I'd gotten a lot of adverse statements about the church, I said, and felt I should hear its story from its own president. Particularly since I had an uncle in Detroit whom the church had relieved of his eczema and asthma.