Bonhomme must have wondered if the one-eyed ex-detective freak was living in the temporary office. But there was no suitcase in the cloak closet or bedding or even a toothbrush to prove it. That was because Miles Barber never slept. He kept his toothbrush in his pocket, stowed his suitcase in a locker at the bus station, and did his latrine with a washrag, a bar of soap, and a ceramic mug. Once a week he took his clothes to a French laundry on Spring.
Barber spent every night working on Bonhomme’s files. He typed and filed, ordered and reordered until the inspector returned. He worked because that kept him from heeding the changes happening on the inside.
Miles Barber, while he pecked and hunted, was going through a metamorphosis. On one hand, he was dying, fading out just as his best friend, Brad Sanders, had after a chest wound at Anzio. But on the other hand, there was a life growing from the inside. This new life was coming out of what he had always known as himself, but it wasn’t him — at least, it didn’t have to be. Barber feared that if he fell asleep for long, he would die and this bean sprout in his heart would take over. So he stayed awake, working, playing the radio, and denying the changes that were trying to take hold.
He went on like that, working twenty-hour days and talking to Bonhomme and Briggs now and then about the Close Congregation and their possible relationship to Fargo. Miles had almost finished with the files when he began to worry that Bonhomme had meant to keep him only till all the work was done.
But the ex-detective had a plan. There had been nothing of interest in the files he copied. He would, instead of working on his typewriter at night, break into the inspector’s active files in the back office. He’d transcribe all the information that had to do with Winch Fargo, so when he was released, he’d be able to shadow the SIB investigation until they led him to his prey.
Then one afternoon Lonnie Briggs returned from a four-day field trip.
“Hey, Patch,” Briggs said to the ex-detective secretary. It was a nickname Briggs was fond of using. It bore no enmity. “How’s the filing coming? You almost finished?”
“Not quite.”
The smile Briggs gave was wide and insincere. At least, that’s what Barber thought. He made up his mind to break into the locked files that night.
Briggs went in to confer with Bonhomme. They talked for a while and then Briggs came out.
“Come on in here a minute, will ya, Milo?”
“What for?”
“Just a couple’a things.”
Miles felt something enter his mind. It wasn’t a thought, but an overwhelming excitement that bordered on fear. He couldn’t explain then that it was a power coming over him, the ability to receive emotional and other, more obscure impressions from people around him.
“Take the hot seat,” Briggs said, indicating the chair before his boss’s desk.
As Miles lowered himself into the chair, Briggs said to Bonhomme, “He’s gonna need a hat.”
“What?” asked Miles.
“A hat,” Briggs repeated. “With a big brim too. I mean, if we’re gonna go out with these crazies in the desert, then we’re gonna have to be inconspicuous. No offense, but it would take a blind man not to notice you.”
Miles Barber laughed. The three deep single-syllable tones that burbled out of his chest were odd enough to arrest the agents’ attention.
“You okay, Barber?” Bonhomme asked. He even put down his pipe in case he needed both hands to lend assistance.
The ex-detective wanted to answer; he tried to. But first he had to figure out what that bullfrog laugh was.
“It was like looking for my long-lost father,” Miles said to me much later next to a campfire. “Instead, I found the devil. But in the back of my mind I was thinking that the devil was my old man. You see what I mean?”
I did get his meaning. That laugh was the annunciation of the new life that had been growing since Grey Redstar’s will had touched Barber’s soul. In that office he was a new man being offered the old man’s obsession. And in that moment the will of the man who should have passed on was soldered onto the detritus of Gray Man’s rage.
“I’m fine, Christian,” Barber said at last.
“You sure? You sounded a little funny.”
“Is this about Fargo?”
Bonhomme winced in a final moment of indecision, but Miles knew that it would pass. He’d soon be on the trail of the man who had killed him and then brought him back to life.
“There’re three avenues of investigation that we could follow,” Bonhomme said a little too loudly. “There’s Fargo. He’s the reason we’re on the case. There’re the guys in the prison that were torturing Fargo. And there’s this guy Halston. He was the guard on duty who disappeared at the same time. The warden, Gerin Reed, is also under investigation, but we’re not sure about his role yet.”
“Yeah,” Sergeant Briggs added. “He’s pretty hard to find too.”
“I see,” Miles said. He acted as if he were following the conversation, weighing the options. But he already knew the answers. He already knew what they were going to do.
“I’m interested in that guy Allitar,” Briggs said.
“Who’s that?” Barber asked.
“He’s one of the four guys who kept Fargo tied to a bunk in his cell. Halston had to be helping them, but Allitar was the ringleader.”
“What kind of name is Allitar?”
“It’s an alias.”
“Well, then, what’s his real name?” Barber asked the burly sergeant.
“His father’s name is Brown, a con artist. Took retirement accounts from old ladies starved for love. He went under the alias Conrad L. Allitar for fifteen years. Married under that name. Had kids under that name. Mackie’s legal name is Allitar even though it was just his father’s alias.”
“What’s his story?”
“Allitar is in on a multiple homicide committed during the robbery of a pharmacy,” Bonhomme interjected. “He claims that there was some kind of drug in Fargo’s blood. They used to bleed him for it, he says.”
“To sell it?”
“No, not if you’re to believe him. Fargo sold the drug himself, even though no one but his cellmate, Allitar, knew the source, that’s what Mackie claims. They told everybody that the Martel woman was a mule that smuggled the stuff in.” Bonhomme stopped and stared at Barber for a moment or two.
“Yeah?”
“You told us about this Martel woman independently of Mackie.”
“So what?”
“What do you think it is with this blood stuff?”
“I couldn’t say. They all talk about blue light and blood the way Christians talk about the cross and blood. I don’t know. Did you get any of this stuff that Mackie said Fargo made? Send it down to a chemist?”
A professor of mine used to tell me that a well-placed question is a scholar’s best shield. You could use a question to imply an idea that you had but could not prove. Or you might want to seem open to a line of inquiry that you had no intention of following. Miles’s question was designed to tell Bonhomme that he had no knowledge, no agenda, and a cop’s objectivity about any hocus-pocus that might be presented as fact.
“Yeah, we did,” Lonnie Briggs said when his boss went silent. “Milk and sugar, blood and baking soda. But there’s something else too. Something they can’t analyze. Maybe that’s what the broad brought in.”
“Like a culture or something?” Barber asked.
“Maybe,” Bonhomme replied. “Maybe.”
“Maybe if you let me talk to him, I could make some connection he might have with the people in Berkeley,” Miles offered. He wanted to meet the blood addict. “Or maybe one of the others that helped him bleed Fargo.”
“All dead but Mackie,” Bonhomme said. “He’s dying too. Wasting away. I don’t think you’d get much out of him. Anyway, we couldn’t get you into a penal facility. You don’t have any certification. No. We’ll let the lab worry about the blood. We want you to try and help us trace Bob Halston.
We have some information about him and a communal cult in the Haight.”
Thirteen
IN THE FARTHEST EASTERN corner of the Mojave Desert is the abandoned Jacobi gold mine. In a subterranean room off the central shaft Winch Fargo sat on a cold stone, laughing. The thrumming in his body told him that it was the right time.
“She’s comin’,” he said to himself, sniggering. “She’s almost here.”
The rocks were cold, and there was only a candle for light and warmth. But that was more than his mother gave him. When she locked him in the closet, when he was a child, there was no candle or room to walk around. There was no promise of somebody coming to love you. No promises at all.
Fargo wore only a loincloth fashioned from a big man’s T-shirt. He was skinny and his nose ran freely, but still he tittered merrily.
“She’s comin’ to get my blood, yes sir. She needs me and I need her. And it’s almost time. Yeah, yeah.”
The thick oaken door groaned as it was pulled open. Fargo leaped to his feet and lunged for the lamplight that appeared. The chain around his left ankle kept him from reaching the door.
Stanley Brussels, recently a carpenter from Indio, fell back as soon as he pulled the door open. He had seen Fargo’s incredible strength before. When Fargo was free to walk among the others, aboveground, he had gone insane, breaking the necks of three of Claudia’s chosen. Claudia Heart had told them that he could somehow sense the men who had most recently been her lovers, that he had to kill any man who had been with her.
“You should stay out of reach,” Stanley told Claudia.
She was standing, shivering and naked, behind her lantern-bearing acolyte.
“Don’t worry, Stan,” she said. “Hurting me is the last thing on his mind.”
Fargo giggled like an insane child.
Claudia Heart entered demurely, carrying a shallow wooden bowl in one hand and an ornamental dagger in the other. Stanley put down his kerosene lantern and pushed the heavy door shut.
“Hi, princess,” Winch said, rising to his knees.
She put down her knife and bowl. “Hello, Winch.”
“How’s the sunlight up there?”
“I could have you tied up and brought up top if you want, honey. You know it hurts me to see you down here so sick and cold.”
“No, no, don’t … don’t take me up there. I couldn’t take it, smellin’ your pussy on all them men.” Fargo stood up suddenly and violently. “Goddammit!”
Claudia rose with him, but not in fear. She drew close to his chest and stroked its long, skinny muscles.
“Shhh, baby. Don’t be like that. Come on, let’s sit. Come on. Yeah, honey. Don’t you think of anything but me right here with you.”
They both sank to their knees in an embrace.
“I want you, princess.”
“You know we’d both get sick if we did that, Winchy.”
“I don’t care. I want you. I need to have you.”
Claudia stroked his skinny, heaving chest and purred, “You will be the father of my children. You will.”
The moan that issued from Winch’s lips would have broken the hardest of hearts. But Claudia simply disengaged from the embrace and lifted her dagger.
“Put out your arm, Winch.”
“But it hurts,” he said, looking as coy as pure evil can.
“Put out your arm now.”
She etched the sixth cross on the underside of Winch’s left forearm. Then she held the bowl below the wound while he massaged out the blood.
“Six times on one side and six on the other,” Claudia chanted. “It’s our own alchemy, father. It is the blood of our children.”
When the bowl was a quarter filled, Claudia rose, saying, “It’s time,” and the door behind her groaned again.
When Winch looked up and saw that she was gone, he laughed loudly and for a long time.
While Claudia Heart and her Special Chosen had gone to the Jacobi mine, her remaining acolytes — men and women — stayed in the commune off Haight Street in San Francisco. They were waiting for Heart’s return, but she had already decided that she was never going back. Her servants had served their purpose; they had already gotten all of her that she would give.
Bonhomme, Barber, and Briggs interviewed many of the depressed followers but found no answers. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to help. They would have done anything to find their lost love. They would have turned her in to the police just to see her again.
Now Claudia lived in the former gold mine’s cafeteria with her dog, Max. Her Chosen, originally fifteen virile young men, and Bob Halston, lived in the bunkhouse.
In the cafeteria Claudia Heart cooked up the blood biscuits for her Chosen, only twelve after Winch Fargo’s slaughtering rage.
Claudia spent chaste days gauging her ovulation.
He’d come in wearing a long trench coat, taken off one of his human victims, to cover the blood. He staggered up the stairs and shoved the bloody clothes in the bottom drawer of the dresser. Then he lay back, near death from the harsh shine of Eileen Martel’s final moments.
“She was strong,” Gray Man thought. “The strongest of them all.”
Gray Man had killed all the hard ones. Now it was just the children, the strumpet, the other two women, and some things not human. One, probably a tree, a couple of hundred miles to the south, would wait for him. He’d track down the coyote and the dog last.
And then there was that other one. The one who had somehow gotten their light leaked into his veins. The one Gray Man had divined from Phyllis Yamauchi’s dying blood. The one Gray Man had hoped would give up his masters. Chance. But he was nothing, hardly worth the notice of Death; except that he had brought the girl.
“Alacrity,” Gray Man mouthed in his bed. “I’ve got a real treat for you, child.”
He lay back in Horace LaFontaine’s old room, weakened to the point of real death. Gray Man liked the feeling of being so close to expiration. He wanted to die. He was Death. He almost let the final shade come down on him. Almost let the light out of the box.
But there was the child, Alacrity. The passion he felt for her was beyond anything he’d known, beyond anything Horace LaFontaine had ever experienced. Her life beat so strongly, completely free from human frailty, and as powerful as the moment of death when the struggle is its greatest.
Gray Man wanted her.
But first he had to rest.
He closed his eyes and descended into the depths of death without dying. He sighed deeply and an instant later, when those eyes opened again, Gray Man was gone.
Horace looked around the room, feeling weaker than he could ever remember. Even when he had been dying of cancer, he could lift a finger, moan from the pain. But now all he could do was to look out and see the room he’d died in years before.
It’s like I’m a ghost, he thought. Like I ain’t even here, but I never left.
The sun went down while he lay there in darkness, remembering all the things that he’d done in his wasted life. Then he thought of all the things he hadn’t done. He’d never learned a thing on purpose, never helped a soul without helping himself. He’d never even done a single thing because it was the right thing to do. Even Death, old Gray Man, did what he thought was right. It was right, Death thought, to kill. He risked his own life to achieve his goals.
A knock came on the door.
A voice, probably the girl, Joclyn Kyle. Horace didn’t understand the words.
She must have gone, he thought, probably thinks I’m out prowling around like he does.
Horace tried to lift his arm but was still too weak. He could feel Gray Man’s presence way down in his mind. He knew how drained the devil was and hoped that Gray Man would die. Even his own death would be worth that.
Horace thought of the man he killed in prison. Prescott Jones, a Brooklyn fence. Horace’s best friend, Vinnie the Cat, had gotten the contract from his girlfriend. She told Vinnie and Vinnie told Horace that a man called Beldin S
tarr needed Prescott Jones silenced before his trial in June. Prescott was going to testify against Starr.
The deal was worth ten thousand dollars and the best lawyer in New York to get on Horace’s appeal, which was botched by the prosecutor but also ill represented by an uncaring public defender.
Horace was on the good-conduct program. He had a lot of places he could go in the prison with his mail wagon. He was in for armed robbery and assault, but he’d never got in trouble once they locked him up.
Prescott had a job in the lower kitchen. He washed the big pots and prepped vegetables and fruits, anything that needed cutting. Usually he had a partner, Willie Josephson, but Horace found out one day that Willie was sick, or pretending to be, and Prescott was alone.
The lower kitchen was a big room with a lot of waist-high counters piled with pots and bags of raw fruits and vegetables. All Horace had to do was to put his canvas cart in a broom closet, squat down in the rear corner, and wait.
Horace, lying there in the dark of his sister’s old house, remembered squatting down on that slimy wooden floor. He could almost smell the insecticide and detergent. The aluminum counters were cold against his arm and cheek. There was a round metal knife sharpener at his feet. The sharpening steel was maybe fifteen inches long and just thick enough. The perfect weapon to crack bone efficiently.
Horace’s heart fluttered when he heard the door open. He reached for his weapon and held his breath. Somewhere in the back of his mind he railed against killing this man. But it was already too late. There was only one way out of that room.
He waited a few minutes and then rose. He couldn’t see Prescott above the pots and pans, so he went down the aisle, looking. In the fourth aisle he saw the small white man. He was squatting down as Horace had done. His back was partly turned, but Horace could still see what he was up to.
Prescott was down on one knee masturbating, making little grunting sounds.
Horace knew what was going on. Prescott had a cellmate and was too shy to be heard enjoying a little jack-off. It was a pleasure to get alone and make some noise, maybe even call out the pinup’s name.
“Oh, yeah!” Prescott moaned.
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