The Puppet Master

by John Dalmas

  We took Tuuli's little red Sportee, and stopped at a restaurant on Hillhurst near Sunset, called Pie Are Square. We eat there now and then. As we followed the hostess, we passed close by a table where three people sat, wearing the sky blue uniform of Gnostie staff. One of them laid his eyes on me almost as soon as we came in, and said something quietly. The other two glanced at us then. As we walked toward them, Tuuli started talking Finnish at me, telling me to talk, but to speak Finnish, not English.

  So I did, asking her what was going on. She told me she felt danger. I didn't know whether she was being psychic or if it was because the Gnosties were looking at us. We talked Finnish all the way to the corner booth we went to; she wanted the Gnosties to think we were foreigners. I sat where they couldn't see me. That was her idea too. A couple of them could see Tuuli, but she wasn't worried about that. A few minutes later, Nerisa, our usual Filipina waitress, came over and took our orders. A couple of minutes after that, Tuuli saw one of the Gnosties beckon to Nerisa and talk to her, but nothing more happened.

  When we left, two of the Gnosties were still at the table, talking over coffee. Tuuli hadn't noticed when the other one left, or if he'd just gone to the rest room. One of the two gave me a glance, but that was all, and I told myself that if there'd been any danger, it was past. We went out to her car and drove to the movie.

  15

  INDIAN'S STORY

  A couple of days later I stopped at Morey's for breakfast, and while I was eating, a guy called Indian came in. He'd taken to wearing his hair in a Mohawk, exposing the skull patches he'd had put on for electronic brain stimulation. Indian's a Loonie who works as a casual for Yitzhak's Transit, just down the street from Morey's. As a casual, some days he works and some days he doesn't. He turns up at Yitzhak's at 7:10 for muster, and if they don't have a job for him that morning, he stops in at Morey's for coffee and a glazed doughnut. He's been doing that for at least as long as Prudential's been in the new building.

  He's a big, rawboned Angeleno, not an Indian, though he claims to be a quarter Chippewa. His hair's sort of sandy brown, and his mustache is red, but if you dyed his face and hair, he might pass.

  He saw me when he came in, and when he'd gotten his coffee and doughnut, he came over. "Hey, Martti!" he said. "I ain't seen you lately! You're looking good, man! Like the spirits are bein' good to you!"

  I told him Tuuli and I had gotten out of town last weekend and it had done us both a lot of good.

  "I seen you and her a couple days ago at that pie place on Hillhurst. Me and Moonbeam were across the street in the ticket line at SF Adventures, to see Time Drifters. And I seen a little red Ford parked at the pie place, and I said to Moonbeam that it's the kind your wife drives; I wonder if they're havin' supper there? And a little later, sure enough! You came out and drove away."

  "Yeah," I told him, "we went to the WorldWide to see a movie."

  He broke his doughnut in half, dunked a piece, and took a bite. "You know what else I saw?"

  He said that quietly, looking around, which caught my interest. It was out of character for him; Indian's usually very open. "Right after I first saw your car, some New Gnu in uniform came out and stopped behind it. And wrote down your license number."

  Yitzhak's a New Gnu, a politer term for Gnostie, and most of the people who work for him are New Gnus. According to Indian, they're a good bunch to work for and with, but they don't have any tolerance at all for outsiders talking about the church, because it catches so much bad-mouth.

  "Writing down our license number?"

  "That's how it looked. He stopped behind it and it looked to me like he was writing it down in a pocket notebook or something."

  That actually gave me a cold chill. "Huh! That's weird. Why would he do that?" Because there was no way he could have known it was ours. He couldn't have seen us get out of it from where they'd been sitting. "Maybe he was getting the number of the car next to it," I suggested.

  "Might be. Couldn't be sure from where we were."

  * * *

  I spent most of the day on other things, and before lunch took time for an hour's workout. I seemed to be dead in the water on the Christman case.

  That afternoon I got a phone call from Molly Cadigan. "You alone, Sweetbuns?" she asked. I told her I was; actually Carlos was in my office at the time.

  "I had a lunch date this afternoon with a friend of mine. In the Saints' Deli. The Gnostie hangout on Winderly, across from the Campus. While I was waiting for her, I looked at the notice board." She paused for effect. "And saw your picture."

  "My picture?!"

  She held it in front of her vidcam, a printed church circular with a composite computer sketch of me. A pretty good one. "I recognized you right away," she said. I couldn't read much of it on the screen, only the heading: Security Division. FOR IN-HOUSE DISTRIBUTION ONLY. "It orders anyone who recognizes you to notify church security," she told me.

  I thought, Judas Priest! What does this mean?

  "It says In-House Distribution Only, which is ominous by itself," she went on. "If they didn't have something unpleasant in mind, they wouldn't have said that. Obviously some dimwit on church staff posted it in the Saints' anyway. So I took it down."

  Obviously she had. "Wasn't that sticking your neck out?" I asked her.

  "Sweetbuns, my neck's been out so far for so long . . . But if anyone had noticed, they'd have squawked. And I'd have jumped all over them, because the thing says In-House Only." She paused. "What'd you do to stir them up?"

  "I'm not sure," I told her. "I did get an interview with Lon Thomas. Under an assumed name. I told him I was writing a book."

  "Hah!" She barked the sound. "I'll bet he had someone research the name and found out you weren't legit! Look, Sweetbuns, take my advice. Stay well away from the Campus. Lon Thomas doesn't play with a full deck. He's smart, but he's crackers, too."

  She didn't have to convince me. When we'd disconnected, I sat back wondering if one of those might get posted in Yitzhak's. Not likely, but . . . Occasionally there was a guy or two from Yitzhak's besides Indian that ate at Morey's, and they'd recognize the picture.

  "Sweetbuns?" Carlos said. One eyebrow was cocked halfway up his forehead. He couldn't see my phone screen from where he sat.

  "It's just something she says," I told him. "She's twenty years older and twenty pounds heavier than me."

  He grinned. "If you say so. You're wondering about Yitzhak's now, right?"

  "I was, yeah."

  "Penny and I are going to put some stuff in storage," he said. "I think I'll walk down to Yitzhak's. I suppose he sells storage boxes. And while I'm there, I'll browse their notice board."

  That's Carlos for you. He didn't get to be supervisory investigator by being slow.

  After Carlos left, I recalled Indian telling about the Gnostie staff member writing down our license number. I thought I knew why. Tuuli had a Finnish-flag bumper sticker, with "Suomi" written on it. It's unlikely he knew that Suomi meant Finland, and even less likely that he recognized Finnish when he heard it. But we'd been talking a foreign language, and he could easily have recognized the sticker as a flag. Flag stickers aren't rare with a generation that's gotten interested in their ethnic roots.

  And if they'd questioned Nerisa about us, she might have said that ordinarily when we came in, we spoke English. Even Tuuli doesn't have much accent.

  All in all I didn't feel too comfortable.

  16

  WRONG TARGET

  That was on Friday. On Sunday I slept in, and Tuuli and I had breakfast together. We figured that after we'd eaten, we'd go to the L.A. Zoo. It's in Griffith Park, built against the foot of the Hollywood Hills, and if the winter rains have come through, the hills are exceptionally beautiful in spring. The zoo itself is sort of overgrown with tropical and subtropical plants, its paved paths leading around through them. Just for starters, there are albino tigers, pens with goats that children can get in with and pet, and an African bull elephant that dwarf
s the Asian elephants. He wears a huge leg chain bolted to a steel post set god knows how deep in concrete.

  Our plans got altered though. We had the TV news on for breakfast, something we seldom do. It's bad for the digestion. Maybe Tuuli's psychic power was operating subliminally. She's the one who turned it on.

  The feature story was a bombing the evening before, and the building bombed was the apartment house she used to live in. Worse, the specific apartment bombed was on the southwest corner of the second floor, the one that used to be hers. It killed an Armenian immigrant family: Barkev Boghosian, his wife Sophie, their two children, and Boghosian's mother. It also killed a person in the apartment below. A still picture showed Boghosian as a husky, thirtyish guy who worked for an import-export firm.

  A neighbor reported having seen a man, with a package "as big as a suitcase," ringing the Boghosian's doorbell a few minutes ealier. The man had worn a brown shirt and trousers like a deliveryman's uniform. Apparently the package had held the bomb.

  It could have been a coincidence, of course, but right from the start, neither of us had any doubt that the bomb had been meant for us. For me specifically and for Tuuli by association. I put it together for her this way: The Gnostie that took her license number had then reported seeing us at Pie Are Square. Maybe he'd even been sitting in his car watching, and saw us come out and drive away. We'd been speaking a foreign language, but according to Nerisa were able to speak perfectly good English.

  Tuuli admitted that she hadn't sent her change of address to the Department of Motor Vehicles after we got married, and she hadn't had to reregister her car yet, so their records still showed the old Hollywood Boulevard address. Someone in the church either hacked or bought their way into the DMV's computer and got that address; not an easy thing to do. The guy who delivered the bomb would even have been met at the door by a burly guy with a foreign accent, though presumably that made no difference in what happened.

  Thomas would have watched this morning's news, or maybe last night's, and read the morning paper. And he'd know from the DMV records that Tuuli's car wasn't registered to any Boghosian. Besides, except for the build, Boghosian's picture didn't look like me. He'd know they'd hit the wrong target.

  When I'd run through it, we sat looking at each other over our coffee. "How'd you like to take a vacation in Arizona?" I asked her.

  "If you'll come with me."

  "Honey, I can't; I've got a case. This is the best lead I've had on it, and if I solve it, I'll have the people who want to kill me. This is real evidence, circumstantial but real, that the church is behind Christman's disappearance."

  "Let Carlos handle it."

  "Honey, Carlos is good, very good, but he's not as good as I am. The firm will rent me a room somewhere; maybe a series of rooms. You can go stay at Diacono's. I'll bet the firm will cover the cost. If they won't, we'll cover it ourselves."

  She looked thoughtful. I could almost see the wheels turning: she was thinking about studying or whatever with a guru. She'd already told me that Bhiksu was psychically very advanced, and had done some remarkable things that evening at the Merlins', after I'd fogged out and gone to sleep.

  I remembered the dream that maybe hadn't been a dream.

  She'd also told me that Mikki was a psychic whose powers had been expanded and stabilized by Tory and Vic.

  A lot of people, Tuuli said, had occasional psychic moments, probably most people. With some of them, these were explicit, but mostly they were vague, like a notion with no apparent source. With her, they were only occasional, unless she deliberately looked for one. Then she'd often get something, often sharp and clear.

  And one of the things they did at Diacono's Spirit Lodge, she said, was train people in that sort of thing—people with a talent for it. My natural tendency was to be skeptical, but if believing would get Tuuli out of L.A. for a while, great. Besides, I couldn't doubt that Vic had some sort of power, not after what he'd done for me. And apparently Tory did too.

  After a minute, Tuuli nodded. "All right. I have appointments with clients on Monday and Tuesday. Surely the people that want to kill us won't have our new address by then, will they?"

  "I've assumed they got your name and old address from DMV. And now that they know the address was wrong . . ."

  Suddenly I realized there was something I needed to do. Right away! I got up from the table and called GTE. Had them remove both of us from directory assistance—Tuuli's business listing as well as our residential listings. I used my investigator's credentials to have it done immediately. In fact I didn't disconnect till it was done. The big question was, had it been in time?

  Tuuli hated to have her listings removed, but she recognized the need. If Thomas or whoever hadn't checked yet, being unlisted would stall them for a while, maybe quite awhile, and we could get listed again when it was safe. There were phone books, of course, but most people didn't have one. If your phone wasn't computerized, you got the books free, white and yellow pages separately. Otherwise you had to order and pay for them. Presumably the church didn't have phone books, and wouldn't think to check one anyway. If someone wasn't in the electronic directory, they'd rarely be in the book either.

  Of course, if they'd already checked . . . "Hon," I told her, "I think you should leave today. Call and notify your clients that you've had an emergency of some kind."

  She frowned, considering. "This is a security building," she countered, "and Prudential has the contract. I don't like to be driven out of my home by some criminal. And I hate to lose business."

  "There are worse things to lose. And building security isn't intended to prevent determined terrorist-type attacks. It's to prevent nuisance entry and discourage crime on the premises. Utilities people, delivery personnel, clients who come to see you—anyone who seems to have a proper reason to enter—they let in."

  I shifted my approach then, and phoned the Diaconos to ask how much they charged. Frank answered. For Tuuli, he said, they'd only charge for meals and housekeeping: fifteen dollars a day. When I objected that that seemed awfully cheap, he laughed. "We've got unoccupied rooms, and our food is nothing fancy. If it was you, we might charge twenty-five."

  While we were talking, I remembered where I'd known Diacono before. Not personally, but on television, when I'd been a kid. He'd been an all-pro NFL linebacker before I was born, and I'd seen his antidrug spots on television when I was little.

  I generally liked people who fought drugs. The guy who'd gunned down my parents had been a drug smuggler dad had caught, and who'd nursed his grudge for eighteen years in prison. As if it was dad's fault, not his. He'd only had about half a minute to enjoy it before I unloaded a charge of number four shot into his back from my twelve-gauge. It severed his spinal cord. Then I'd kicked and stomped him very thoroughly to death. Something I used to revisit in nightmares.

  I told Frank what our situation was, and that conceivably Tuuli's presence could be a risk to them. He grinned and said so was a tornado or Lucifer's Hammer, and not to worry about it.

  She talked to him then. He finally agreed to accept twenty. She also arranged to be picked up at Flagstaff on Wednesday—made the decision on her own and without discussing it with me. When she disconnected, she turned, expecting me to blow up. "I won't postpone my clients," she said. I surprised her. "Okay. I'll call Joe and tell him what's happened. I'll ask him to intensify security here for a couple of days. If we have to, you and I can pay for an extra guard or two."

  Joe agreed without hesitating. He'd add a third guard on each shift, seasoned people with superior ratings, and send out a scanner they could use to check packages. Then I called the building manager and had him take our names off the directory. I told him we'd had some harassment calls.

  We did get to the zoo that day, only later than we'd planned. By the time we got back, I'd thought of something else I needed to do. I'd called myself Martin Eberly for my appointment with Lon Thomas. Presumably he'd checked afterward, when he'd decided I might be
a threat, and concluded that the name was false, but I wouldn't take it for granted. So I checked for possible Martin or M. Eberlys, Eberleys, and Eberles listed in metropolitan L.A.-Riverside-Long Beach. There weren't any. If there had been, I'd have had the firm warn them of possible danger.

  17

  TUNNELS

  On Monday I talked with Carlos about the bombing and the encounter at Pie Are Square, and he agreed it pointed to the church. Joe called the LAPD, told them the firm might have a lead on the bomber, and asked for a contingency contract on the bombing case. A contingency contract pays nothing unless you get information that at least contributes to an indictment, but it doesn't commit you to anything, either.

  He had to give his reason for thinking there might be a connection, and put it in very general terms: The bombed apartment had until recently been occupied by the wife of one of his investigators, whose car the investigator sometimes used. Thus the bomber might well be connected with some case the investigator was working on or had worked on. It was a nice job of selected facts effectively worded. And broad enough not to sound promising, so they didn't ask for more details. Which also gave Joe the impression that the LAPD's theory was totally different.

  Still, we had a reputation, and a contingency contract would be insurance for them, so it seemed likely their Contract Office would approve Joe's request. Which would give us limited computer access to the State Data Center, via contract ID.

  Meanwhile, Joe told me to carry a gun at all times, including off the job.

  * * *

  Tuuli's Tuesday meeting ran into complications, and she had to meet with her client again on Wednesday. So she rescheduled to leave Hollywood-Burbank Airport at 4:20 Wednesday afternoon, on one of those flights that service smaller towns—in this case Victorville, Barstow, Needles, Kingman, Williams, and Flagstaff.

  She'd drive her new Haugen Arrow to Hollywood-Burbank. She hadn't felt comfortable with her Sportee since the bombing, and had found a buyer for it. I was to drive it to work that morning. The buyer, a dealer from the Lower Wilshire District, would pick it up at noon. My own car was already in the security lot, at the building. I'd drive it to the room the firm had rented for me.