Below the Thunder

by Robin Duval

  The recall of it made him shudder.

  Good might – nevertheless – come out of it. Maybe, as the cinema dust settled, Agnete would find she’d discovered something… not unwelcome. And there was plenty of unfinished business. Further instructions. Further opportunities. Time to prove his mettle. The cause was not lost.

  As he was passing through the curtained door at the back of the auditorium, he noticed two stocky-looking men – certainly not students – buying tickets in the lobby. There was little enough about them to alarm him. They did not look in his direction. They were not wearing three-piece suits with unsightly pectoral bulges. But he was beginning to get into the habit now of elaborate exits. So he retreated up a corridor, pushed open a door at the end and made his way round the building to the car park at the rear, where his Chevrolet should still have been.

  It was not. He checked around in case he’d misremembered its location; but it was already obvious what he was supposed to do. One of the keys in Agnete’s envelope had a tag attached to it, and a number. The matching vehicle turned out to be a newish Ford Focus similar to his own car in Salt Lake City, parked near the exit. Sitting on the backseat was his overnight bag – which he had last seen when he’d thrown it in the boot at Medford – packed with all his clothes and belongings.

  The Ford was an automatic and needed no instruction this time in how to manage it. He drove out of the lot and dog-legged around for several blocks until he could be confident no one was following. He returned and drew up in a tree-shadowed side street where he had a view of the entrance to the cinema car park; and settled in for Agnete and further instructions.

  It was another very long wait. After an hour, during which there was no sighting either of Agnete or of the two stocky men, or indeed anyone else who might have concerned him, he fell once more to searching through the car for guidance. In the glove compartment he found a hard-cover map book of San Francisco and the towns to the south, and worked his way through that for clues. Nothing. It was so crisp and clean he wondered if it had ever been opened.

  He scoured the car. There were a few grubby signs of previous use – an unopened pack of lady wipes and some parking tickets in the driver’s door bin; and a discarded sandwich wrapper and a halfdrunk bottle of grape juice in the other. Otherwise – again – nothing.

  There was one other obvious place to check. He climbed out, looked both ways up the street for strangers, and cautiously raised the tailgate. Under a piece of carpet was the promised foldup trolley, a range of metal tools including a crowbar, a hammer and some chisels, and a pencil torch. But there was no sheet of paper, no cell phone, or scratched message, or anything else that might have helped to enlighten him.

  It seemed to him he’d stayed long enough. He drove away, past Stanford’s great green campus with its grand, impeccable lawns and avenues of palm trees, and headed south from Palo Alto until he arrived at an all-day Pancake House on the San Antonio Road. He ordered a takeaway coffee and a pie-like dessert called a ‘Dutch Baby’; and sat in the Ford Focus with his supplies.

  The only item still unscrutinised was the envelope containing the keys. He held it up to the light and squinted at it from different angles for hidden writing or a similar clue. He even sniffed it and thought he detected the fragrance of Agnete. There was nothing left to do but sit back and let his brain process everything in its own good time.

  He finished the pie and stuffed its crumpled plastic tray into the door bin. Then – as he sat and sipped his coffee – from the darkest recesses of his memory the solution began to emerge. A possible solution only, he told himself; but he knew he was right.

  He leaned across to the front passenger seat and retrieved the old discarded paper sandwich wrapper from its bin. First he held it up to the daylight, already fading with the approaching evening. He had not really expected anything; and there was nothing to be seen. He smoothed out the wrinkled paper on the cloth of the seat, silently apologising for what he was about to do. It was a game he had used to play with Marcus, taught him – as usual – by his cousin. He twisted the top off the half full grape juice bottle and poured the contents over the wrapper. The liquid was a deep, purple colour, and left a stain on the seat cover which could probably never be removed.

  A rubric slowly resolved itself, as indistinct as a wraith, but – for one moment – legible. 72 D20. Like the CD before it, the wrapper started to dissolve and disintegrate until all that was left on the ruined seat was the faint smell of grape juice and baking soda and a soggy mass of what might once have been brown paper.

  He picked up the map book and looked up page 72. Letters of the alphabet ran down the side and numbers across the top, and he followed them with his fingers until he arrived at the confluence of D and 20. There, very faint and missable unless you happened to be looking directly at it, was a tiny pencilled circle within a grid square. The page covered Professorville, a district a few blocks north-east of Stanford University.

  Bryn closed the book and gazed at the setting sun.

  ‘So we meet again, Professor Williams.’

  Of course he’d heard of the place. It had been built around the same time as Stanford and was not, as a person might reasonably imagine, a stopping point on some ride around Disneyland populated by munchkins in mortarboards. It had been created – quite literally – for the purpose proclaimed by its name.

  Was this, however, a coincidence too far? Bryn had never thought of his cousin as a particularly humorous person, but the adventure was taking on the character of an elaborate and rather extended joke. Maybe it was time to recognise a signal to a wiser man than he – not perhaps the first such signal – that the game was no longer worth the playing.

  Unless… that is… Marcus and his people really did take it all seriously. An Alice in Wonderland world as opaque as a Guardian crossword. Secrecy, riddles and complexity. Boys’ games as a way of life. Lapel transmitters, hidden cameras, ciphers, codes and dead letter boxes. Power plays and betrayals. Where people even killed each other in novel and ingenious ways, with poisoned sushi and toxin-tipped umbrellas.

  Agnete’s world also.

  He opened the map book again. No harm in playing the game a little longer – it was not as if he had yet committed himself. It would be prudent to avoid a direct route to Professorville, and better still to keep off the main thoroughfares. A detour to the east through Mountain View should do it, past the naval air station and back west to Charleston Meadow and thence up the dormitory side streets past Rinconada Park, to the objective. No harm in trying it out…

  The approach to the block discreetly circled on the map was down streets so tightly lined with trees and high-grown hedges that the houses were only intermittently visible. The few he could see were set well back behind their defensive greenery, and built in the now-familiar white-faced, decorated Mission style. They were all huge and magnificent. Either construction costs were exceptionally low in those days or Stanford academics were exceptionally well paid.

  He had arrived at the circled spot. On one side of the street was a high wall with a double gate set into it; on the other, what looked like a private tennis club, with some courts beyond a car park. He parked the car in a space designated for the club Vice President, conveniently below an overhanging acacia bush.

  He sat at the wheel for a quarter of an hour. No other vehicle or pedestrian came down the street. In the dying evening light, the site was as dark and silent as a burial ground. He could feel himself becoming excited and apprehensive and ready for action. He climbed out of the car and collected the pencil torch from the boot.

  The wall on the other side of the unlit road ran the full length of the block. A security camera was mounted alongside the gates, pointing at the ground in front of them. He edged up on the tennis club side, keeping in the deepening shadow of the trees, and crossed and approached the camera from behind, hoping to get a glimpse of the house within. But even when he crept up to the gates, all he could see were wide lawns an
d dense, excluding shrubbery.

  Chapter 14

  There was a mail box in the wall by the gates, immediately below the camera. Not the usual open-fronted design, but a stout, black steel canister with a letter slot set into a lockable flap. A number of bricks had been removed – not a difficult task since the wall was already flaking with age – and the box had been cemented into the space created.

  He pressed back against the wall beyond the camera’s field of view, and tried to slip a hand through the slot. It was stuffed with envelopes; and he struggled to force his fingers far enough in to grasp one. The gap was too narrow and the thick gauge steel too brutally unyielding. He tried teasing an envelope out with a ballpoint pen but managed to lose the pen in the box’s maw. He found a twig by the roadside and wriggled it around. It shortly broke in two. The problem needed a little more thought.

  He edged back up the street, crossed in the darkest part, and worked around again to the car. He took out the map book and ripped off its front cover, folded the cardboard down its length and flexed it to and fro until it became two pieces. He returned with one to the mail box.

  It required time and patience but eventually he managed to force the cardboard into a shape with which he could lever up the topmost envelope inside the box. With some wriggling and shaking, it slid to the front of the open slot and into his grasp. A disappointment. In the slim beam of the torch it revealed itself merely as a circular letter from a local real-estate agent, addressed to ‘The Property Owner’.

  He tried again. This time the process took even longer. The outcome, though, was everything he could have hoped for. This second envelope was from The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and was addressed to a Mr Ricky Gaunt. Serendipity… He tore it open. Inside was a leaflet listing the events and exhibitions available to Academy Members during the forthcoming year. No further information; but that was enough.

  Bryn recognised the name. Ricky Gaunt might be well forgotten these days. There would be no tourist charabancs drifting past his celebrity residence, or fans hanging around for a brief glimpse of the one time star. Occasional bit parts in Japanese yakuza films, as an elderly Mafia don or the millionaire American father of a kidnapped heiress, were currently his main source of employment. Yet Ricky had once been the beefcake hero of a series of massively popular teenage Beach Party films – forty years ago and more.

  Bryn had even attended a season at the British Film Institute in London two years since, when half a dozen of his derided money-spinners were brought together for a celebration presided over by the great Ricky himself. Bryn had thought him remarkably well preserved, if a little expanded at the waist. A testimonial to liposuction, Botox and permatan.

  He studied the keys Agnete had given him. Attached to the car key was a smaller one, cut from hard plastic, multi-pinned as for a high security lock. It could not be for the mailbox or the gate, which was activated by a key pad set in the wall, and too well protected by Ricky Gaunt’s camera to risk attempting. The plastic key had to be for some later lock.

  He went back to the car and collected up the crowbar, the hammer and a chisel, though not – for the time being – the fold-up trolley. He felt his way along Ricky Gaunt’s nine foot high curtain wall until he found, about a hundred feet beyond the gate, a point where the mortar was at its most decayed. He threw the crowbar over and waited for its impact in the soft earth on the other side. He tossed the hammer over a little further down to avoid a clash of metal on metal. It took a few minutes’ quiet chisel work between the bricks to excavate the foot holes needed. He scrambled up with assistance from an overhanging tree branch, and dropped into the darkness beyond.

  There was still no sign of a house or any building. He seemed to be in an enclosed country estate, surrounded by groves of mature rhododendrons, camellias and azalea. He followed the light of his torch down a narrow winding path between the towering bushes, to a clearing. Ahead of him – at last – stood a mansion three storeys high with a single gable spanning its frontage. Beneath the gable was a covered verandah and a flight of steps – all as wide as the house. The whole edifice floated on a sea of billiard-flat lawns, gleaming in the evening moon like a silver galleon.

  He hung around amongst the rhododendrons, searching for security cameras. There were none that he could see. He worked through the bushes until he was opposite the right flank of the mansion, where the overgrowth came closest and hidden lenses might be least likely, dashed across a stretch of lawn and edged along the house until he reached the front entrance.

  The darkness under the overhanging gable was so intense that he could not make out a lock in the door until he had switched the torch back on. He tentatively inserted the plastic key; and at once it began to turn.

  And at that point he stopped. Old fears about the credibility of the enterprise began to rise again.

  The lack of security inside the perimeter wall was, to say the least, surprising. Unless he had missed something. It was unlikely that the owner could have placed all his reliance on one camera covering the gates.

  He crouched down on his haunches, watching and waiting. Silence. No dogs, no alarm bells, no arriving police car.

  What would happen when he turned the key fully and the door opened? He shone the torch through the leaded window lights. In the entrance lobby, a couple of yards away, a control panel was fixed to the wall. Its style and four digit code pad were familiar from the homes of Bryn’s wealthier Salt Lake City friends. He’d even seen them in London. He squatted down and pondered again.

  The plastic key was a chimera. There was no point in utilising it if he could not switch off the inevitable alarm. Maybe it really was time to recognise that this was an adventure fraught with too many problems, and call it a day.

  On the other hand.

  One thing he’d learned from security-conscious friends, particularly the older ones, was how dependent they were upon something memorable to put into that code pad. And the older they became, the more likely it was that those numbers – those four digits – would be the same easy-to-remember sequence. With a maximum of sixty seconds before the alarm sounded and the police were on their way, it was almost inevitable that they would fall back on the one set of numbers they could all, always, recall whatever the pressure. Security companies counselled against it, but still they put it in: the year of their birth.

  And Ricky Gaunt was no spring chicken.

  Add to that the near certainty that he – an ageing Hollywood star – would be systemically vain and self-obsessed. How likely was it that he could invent a code that was not, in some way, himself? Bryn was as sure of this as he could be. If, in the event, he was wrong and all the bells burst into evening chorus, he could still beat a retreat before the Palo Alto constabulary arrived. And register a proud defeat.

  So when exactly was little Ricky Gaunt born? What was the year of his birth?

  He, like his co-stars, was famously a teenager when the first of the Beach Films was released. He looked mature even in those days, so let’s say he was nineteen. That would make the date around 1945. In fact, now he considered it, Bryn was sure that was the year he’d seen recorded in Ricky’s own, self-generated entry on the imdb.com website. It was worth a try.

  He inserted the key again in the lock and turned it all the way. The door swung open and he hurried through to the panel. It was already counting down, but – alarmingly – from forty seconds only. He held his breath in fierce concentration and carefully put in 1… 9… 4… 5…

  The countdown continued relentlessly.

  Should he try a year later, making Ricky eighteen at the time of his first film? But what star would claim publicly to be older than he really was? He put in 1946 anyway. Still no effect. And only ten seconds left. Should he leg it down the drive or try an earlier date? He stabbed a final time at the code pad… 1… 9… but disastrously missed his aim and put in a 3 where he’d intended a 4. He wildly hit one last digit and fled.

  Bryn was already w
ell out of the door when he realised that nothing had happened. No ringing of bells. No screaming of sirens. So either the police had been silently alerted and were already on their way.

  Or.

  He crept back and looked at the face of the device. The countdown had stopped with two seconds remaining. For a moment, before it faded away, the small LCD window showed the last code tapped in: 1938.

  He closed the door and walked through to the main part of the house.

  He was in a vast sitting room, also stretching the width of the building. It was less dark than expected. With floor to ceiling windows on three sides, and heavy tapestry curtains drawn back, the full moon bathed the entire saloon in a soft, silver light. The décor reminded Bryn of the interior of the Frank Lloyd Wright houses he’d once visited near Chicago with arts and crafts detailing on the furniture and around the massive open fireplace and on the oaken stairs at either end leading to the levels above.

  But there was work to be done. He pointed the torch at the floorboards. They were great polished oak beams half a yard wide and as thick as railway sleepers. Each one ran unbrokenly the length of the room. He could not see how, short of industrial scale equipment, he could ever hope to raise a single slab. By the same token, it seemed supremely unlikely that any proud owner would have ever wanted so destructively to secrete a safe beneath one. In front of the fireplace and under the Model D Steinway at the far end of the room, a few expensive Persian rugs had been shaken out onto the boarding. So he lifted them all, just in case, to see if there might be a hidden cavity below. It was a predictably futile endeavour.