“I told you he was.”
“Then go get him, I guess.”
When the sergeant went through the door Bonhomme was left with Barber and a guard in a special detention wing of the Sacramento jail.
“She scares you, huh?” Barber asked softly.
“Yeah. Yeah, I never felt anything like it. Nothing. It was like pure sex. I went home and my wife, she … well, she went to visit her mother after two nights with me. I was all over her. I couldn’t help myself.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“I know it doesn’t. I’m no sex maniac.”
“No, not that,” Barber said. “Everybody we interviewed about Zimmerman said that her effect was to make them love only her. No one in the Haight slept with anyone but her — if she allowed it.”
“What are you talking about?” Bonhomme was angry. “Some kinda hocus-pocus? I don’t think the woman has some kinda power. What happened to me was what you call suggestion. All this talk about sex and perverts brought on a sorta temporary anxiety, that’s all.”
“Then why’re you scared to go in there?”
“I’m not scared. I’m just waiting for Briggs to bring Clemmens.”
Miles allowed the lie to go unchallenged. He knew that the small woman had power. He felt her presence, but not like other men did. There was something obscene in his experience. He didn’t hear a silent siren’s call. The dark place in his heart responded with distaste and anger.
After a few minutes Lonnie Briggs returned with George Clemmens. Clemmens was tall and heavy, Barber once told me, with loose flesh that fit him like a suit a size or two too large. He also had big shiny eyes and nearly no chin.
“Okay, Lonnie,” Bonhomme said. “Let’s stop acting like kids and get this thing over with.”
Lonnie Briggs pulled open the door with a solemnity that made him blush. George Clemmens, who was the state prosecutor, looked from one agent to the other with an uncomprehending frown on his face.
Barber was introduced as a special consultant on the case.
“What’s wrong with you guys?” George asked. “You act like you got an armed and dangerous in there. I mean, you know this is late for me to be talking to someone we’re about to indict.”
“You trust me, George?” Bonhomme asked.
“Yeah, yeah, I guess.”
“Then hold on to your hat and don’t touch her, no matter what you do.”
Claudia was sitting on a three-legged wooden stool, her legs crossed and lips red. Her skirt was hiked up to her thigh, and she was smiling.
There was the look of hunger in her small eyes.
Miles found that his distaste had grown nearly into hatred.
“Claudia Zimmerman,” the prosecutor said.
“Claudia Heart,” she purred.
“You know you should have a lawyer present. These are serious charges you are facing.”
Bonhomme and Briggs watched the prosecutor closely.
“I don’t need a lawyer, Mr. Clemmens,” Claudia replied. “And if there are too many people in the room at the same time, I sometimes lose my concentration.”
A dog howled outside. Claudia looked up with the light of recognition in her face and smiled.
“All you have to concentrate on are the concerns at hand, Mrs. Zimmerman,” George Clemmens said. “We would like to know how you plead to the charges, if charges are brought, and it would be better if you had a lawyer on hand to do that for you.”
“I don’t plead to anyone.” The love goddess tossed her limp brown hair back out of her face.
“Has your attorney explained to you the charges?”
“What color are your eyes, Detective Bonhomme?” Claudia asked.
Later the inspector told Barber and Briggs that he was surprised not by the question but by the simple fact of how plain she was. “Just a plain-looking woman in her thirties. Not ugly exactly, but homely, unattractive, you know?”
“Answer the questions, honey,” Bonhomme said with the harshest tone he could muster. “You’re going to be indicted tomorrow for second-degree manslaughter and inciting to riot.”
His manner struck Claudia as if it were a bucket full of ice. She got up from the stool and went into her little water closet, half closing the door behind her. The men could hear the retching grunts and then the toilet flushing. A few minutes later Claudia came out of the stall pale and uncertain.
“Has she been seen by a doctor?” George Clemmens asked the agents.
Neither Briggs nor Bonhomme would answer.
“Have you seen a doctor?” the prosecutor asked Claudia.
Claudia went from nausea to a bright smile in an instant.
“Of course,” she said, not to Clemmens’s question. “I’m pregnant, and all the power has gone to nourish them.”
“Excuse me?”
“Leave me,” Claudia commanded, a goddess again. “I must rest.”
“Mrs. Zimmerman —” George Clemmens said.
“Leave me.”
“Come on, George.” Bonhomme patted the lawyer on the back. He was smiling. “Let’s leave her to boil in her own soup.”
The indictment was easy to obtain. Claudia Heart refused to recognize the court or to speak to the attorney that the court appointed. She didn’t mind the jail cell or the green-and-white striped dress she was given to wear.
George Clemmens asked for an extension to prepare his case and was granted six weeks. In the meantime, Bonhomme and Briggs plotted with ex-Detective Barber to find the whereabouts of Winch Fargo.
Gerin Reed was already under arrest and being held on various charges, including the unlawful detainment of his wife. Robert Halston also awaited trial. Bonhomme had Mackie Allitar transferred from the prison infirmary, where he was dying, to a secured room in the city hospital in Sacramento.
“It was all me by then, Chance,” Miles Barber said. “That bitch had scared all of them. The men that had been her studs were dying. All of Allitar’s friends were already dead. All they had left was Allitar, Reed, Heart, and Halston. They had them together for a trial that would never be, but I knew that Gray Man would be there if Heart was. I knew it.”
He sounded like a good cop on the trail of an exceptionally hard-to-catch crook. But the sweat on his face and the glaze on his one eye told me that all he’d really felt was fear. He was compelled to hunt. Compelled by his previous life. He couldn’t help himself, and so he created a lie and a false faith. He had convinced himself that he could conquer Death — but somewhere, just below the surface, he knew that it was all a lie.
Miles Barber fooled himself that he was the puppet master, that the forces brought together were working for him. But much more than he knew was to unfold.
Nesta Vine had read an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about Claudia Zimmerman and her arrest. Even though the journalist, or her editor, played down the power that Zimmerman’s followers claimed she had, Nesta felt something from the article, from the words that were missing. She went to visit the lovelorn remnants of the commune in the Haight. The empty structure, which was once a small appliance store, was filthier than the worst crash pad or drug den. The members at first glance seemed as if they might be related. But it was the glassy eyes and emaciated bodies that made them kindred. They lived on corn bread mix and beer. Not one of them ever ventured farther than the supermarket. They didn’t bathe or groom, speak or dream. All they did was huddle together in threes and fours in the low, dark room.
“What’s wrong with you?” Nesta asked a small cluster of forlorn lovers.
“Just sad,” one of them said.
“We’ll be better soon,” another added.
One doe-eyed and acned acolyte looked up and said, “She said that we had to wait until she came back. But that means she’s comin’ back, don’t it?”
On the upper floor Nesta found three bodies that had been piled in a closet. It was the closest thing to a burial that the love cult members could muster.
&nb
sp; “They’re dead.” The woman’s voice startled Nesta.
“Who are you?” Nesta asked, addressing the darkness of the larger room.
A young woman came from the gloom. Her large eyes and slender form marked her as a member of the cult, but she seemed to have more life to her.
“I’m Trini.” The girl spoke clearly but slowly.
“What happened here?”
“Without Miss Heart they don’t wanna live,” Trini said. “She was all they wanted and now she’s gone.”
“Why didn’t the reporter write about this? Why haven’t the police come?” Nesta found her humanity pulsing in the wake of this destructive blue light.
“They been gettin’ worse. At first they was just sad, but now it got worse and they started to die.” Trini was a white girl. Nesta classified her accent as coming from Tennessee.
“Why aren’t you sad, Trini?”
“I am. Just not so sad. She balled all’a them. But she said that I was her special girl ’cause’a how it was when I was a girl back home. I crashed here with my boyfriend, Lloyd. He’s in there.” Trini looked at the six bare feet sticking out of the closet door. “But she liked me. Every morning she’d give me a French kiss and I’d follah her just like a dog. And when she left I was sad, but not like everybody else.”
Nesta was sure then that the woman who’d abandoned the commune was her sister in blue light. The notion disgusted her.
“Come with me, Trini.”
“Where to?”
“I’m not sure yet.”
“Okay.”
Miles Barber thought that he was pulling the strings when he was no more than a tick grasping on to a lion’s mane.
Eighteen
THE DEFICIENT BLUE, THE dog, and Death all converged on the state capitol for their own special reasons.
Gray Man bit on a bath towel in the Transient Hotel, eleven blocks from the state building where the prisoners were being held. The fires still burned in him, pained him. Redwood had transferred into his fiber all her placid memories of water and light coming together — life. This light heightened the death god’s senses and his pain. Gray Man felt two Blues, maybe three, maybe four, barely a mile away. He had come to kill them, but somehow the perception of their strong blue light brought even more pain. Life was trying to grow in him even though Horace had finally dissipated and gone.
If he closed his eyes, he could see it like a brilliant red-and-blue tumor growing inside. He conjured up an army of maggots to eat away the fibrous heart. They set at it, gnawing and squirming, but then flew outward, having become crystal-winged butterflies. Gray Man sent sharp flying blades to lacerate the flesh and sinew. But the rich blood flowed out as flowers that fell to the ground and grew.
Gray Man opened his eyes and bit his towel. He took a step toward the door but fell to the floor, moaning. Winch Fargo walked, on faltering feet, the length of the 700 block of Proctor. His body caught between the music of love and death. The closer Winch got to one, the other one seemed to wane. He’d get to the end of the block and then, feeling the fading of light at his back like the cool breeze from a dark closet, turn to follow that.
Back and forth Winch Fargo staggered, between love and death. His skin was rough and burned from the desert sun and wind. His found pants were too short, revealing thin ankles — one of which was bruised and bloody from its manacle. The overcoat he wore was too warm, with sleeves that went down well below his fingertips.
His senses were assailed by the murmurs of dreams that the people walking by had had in the past few days. Snatches of serene beaches on crisp, cold mornings, of rude rituals, and of sex — not the act of sex, but the feeling of it in their chests and arms and genitals. He eavesdropped not only on human dreams but also on the feral dreaming of cats and rats and dogs. His mind fluttered with the insanity of fleeing birds and the complex geometric flight patterns of flies. Winch Fargo’s perception surpassed animal life and went into the deep serenity of the granite beneath his feet and the confusion of bricks, seeking only dissolution.
Winch Fargo, riding the space between the delicate vibrations of blue light, for a moment in time became a conduit for the soul. The soul: what Ordé had called that energy which binds the tiniest pieces of the universe, that force which seeks to unite and dissimulate. For those few hours Winch Fargo was the black hole of all feelings, beyond life and weight and space.
All he wanted was her, his queen. But so much bombarded him that he couldn’t recognize her signal or even remember what she looked like. He was a wild animal pacing in his cage, looking for a way out and ravenous to the point of rage.
Nesta and Trini had taken a room in a boardinghouse for women. They spent their days at the state building where the state detainment facility was housed. They asked about Claudia Heart/Zimmerman but were told that information about prisoners was private and confidential.
Nesta considered applying for a job in the building; she almost did it. She needed a job while waiting for the chance to see her blue sister. This curiosity about Claudia Heart was the most powerful urge she’d ever felt.
One day she left Trini in the room and went down to the state building to fill out a job application. She was walking up the broad granite stairway when she felt something.
Max the dog ran out from behind the shadows of a stone column, snarling and wagging his tail. Everything about him sang in her mind. The wave of vibrations going through her abdomen and breasts almost made her cry out. She bent down intending to pet Max but ended up sitting on a stair. The dog crawled up, laying his belly across her lap and whimpering. Nesta cried too.
“He was the first,” Nesta said about that meeting. “Like you’d been waiting on a deserted island for years, for your whole life, but you never knew it because you never knew that there was anywhere else. But then he crawled up on me and I held him. I felt his loss. He’d followed a scent there that then turned into a memory. He howled as I held him, and I held him for hours. With my eyes closed I was gone from here. I was out in space with millions just like me, singing the same song that Max did.”
“Were you still human?” I asked. “I mean, when you closed your eyes?”
“This body is like a uniform, Chance. I’m like a soldier. I’m proud of the colors and buttons, but they are only vestiges of the spirit that wears them.” Her amber eyes glowed in the cathedral we called home. I felt a strong anger because of the love she felt for a dog.
So while Miles Barber played the puppet master inside, the real story was elsewhere, in Claudia Heart’s womb and the streets of Sacramento.
Gray Man rose to his feet, shivering like a cold dog. He looked at himself in the mirror. His ungroomed hair looked wild. All the years that Horace LaFontaine had straightened it had killed most of the crinkling, but it was still coarse. When Gray Man brushed the clumps back his head resembled a dark brown porcupine whose quills were only half at rest.
He pulled on a T-shirt and a pair of jeans. He rubbed his hand against his chest, feeling for the pain of life that the redwood had cursed him with. Then he left the room.
He walked out the flophouse door and into the street. The sun grilled down on his bare head. He wore only one black-and-white tennis shoe, the other foot was bare.
“I am Death,” he chanted under his breath again and again. “I can kill. It makes me strong.” He uttered the words, only barely understanding them. This because the redwood’s life had taken root in the soil of his dead soul.
The moment Gray Man stepped out of his door, Winch Fargo was free. The emanations from the death god got clearer as he came closer to Fargo, and Winch knew that it was not his woman’s song. He walked out from the dream of everything, giving it up gladly for the mother of his grandchildren.
He stalked forward, dreaming now only of her feet where he could curl up and worship. Winch didn’t know that her music had dried up. He was following the scent and sound of the dog now. A dog who had also licked and whimpered at the feet of Heart.
/> Gray Man was walking fast. Two blocks away Winch Fargo broke into a hobbling run. They felt each other, hated each other. Gray Man despised the passion that drove Fargo, while Fargo knew that Death’s light wanted to burn his soul away.
Nineteen
NESTA FELT THEIR APPROACH and dreaded it. Max jumped from her lap and began to pace in front of her, stopping now and again to sniff and growl.
Suddenly he grew still and stared down the concrete stairs.
Gray Man was there half barefoot in a T-shirt and jeans. He was looking at Nesta with a friendly smile, the smile of a hunter at the end of a long chase.
Max scooted behind his new protector as Winch Fargo turned the corner.
In his bulky coat and short pants Fargo looked like a cartoon sorcerer, down on his luck but still with a trick up his sleeve.
Gray Man, the pain of Redwood pulsing in his temples, turned again. He regarded this new creature with confusion and disdain.
“I’m not concerned with you, half-thing. Go away and suffer what little light you have.”
“Fuck you, man,” Fargo replied. “Fuck you two times. Mess wit’ me an’ I go to war on your butt.”
Nesta wanted to run but was transfixed with the rage and pain down below her. She had never imagined that the light in her eyes could be so twisted and ugly.
“I’ll kill you with just these hands,” Gray Man said on a slender breath. Then he ran at Fargo.
“Hey, you two, stop that,” said a man selling newspapers from a wooden crate on the street.
A woman wearing white pants and a fuzzy pink sweater let out a little scream.
No one but Nesta and Max knew the threat of those skinny arms and legs.
Gray Man, sitting astride his foe’s chest, tried to get his hands around Fargo’s throat, but the ex-con held those hands away while cursing and foaming at the mouth.
As people began to gather, the men, Evil and Death, struggled against each other. They looked like street denizens, prematurely aged and demented by wine. No one moved in to stop them, more from an unwillingness to touch them than from fear of being hurt.
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