On, Off

by Colleen McCullough

  “Our people need more provocation,” Ali el Kadi answered; that was the name Wesley le Clerc had chosen when he espoused Islam.

  “No,” said Mohammed strongly. “Our people don’t need, the Black Brigade does. And not provocation. We need a martyr, Ali. A shining example who will bring us men in tens of thousands.” He patted Wesley/Ali on the arm. “In the meantime, go to your job, do good work there. Enroll in night school. Cultivate that infidel pig, Delmonico. And find out everything you can.”

  The Forbeses were still in Boston, would be until the roads were safer, and the Finches were snowbound. Walt Polonowski had spent the weekend in his cabin, but with a living girl, Marian. The men Danny Marciano had sent up there to investigate hadn’t announced their presence; it was no part of Carmine’s intentions to render any Hugger more miserable than he needed to be, and that meant helping Polonowski keep his secret — for the moment.

  Patrick had found nothing in the house on Dublin Road either to confirm or deny that Margaretta’s abductor was their man, though he had established that the method of choice had been ether.

  “He wears some kind of protective suit,” Patrick said to his cousin. “It’s made of a fabric that doesn’t shed any fibers, and whatever he wears on his feet have smooth soles that don’t make footprints unless he steps in mud, which he doesn’t. The suit has a close-fitting bonnet or hood that covers his hair completely, and he’s gloved. With this night abduction, obviously everything he wears is black. He may blacken his face. I’m picking that the suit is rubber and form fitting, like a diving suit.”

  “They’re clumsy to move in, Patsy.”

  “Not these days, if you can afford the best.”

  “And he can afford the best, because I think he has money.”

  Corey and Abe’s investigations in Groton had yielded nothing; New Year’s was always rackety.

  “Thanks, guys,” Carmine said to them.

  No one stated the obvious: that they would know more when Margaretta’s body turned up.

  The previous evening had seen Carmine ascend in the elevator of the Nutmeg Insurance building to its top floor, where he sought out Dr. Hideki Satsuma. Who was willing to admit him.

  “Oh, this is nice,” said Carmine, gazing around. “I tried you last night, Doctor, but you weren’t at home.”

  “No, I was up at my place on Cape Cod. The Chathams. When I heard the weather forecast, I decided to come home today.”

  So Satsuma had a place in the Chathams, did he? A three-hour drive in that maroon Ferrari. But shorter if the drive had begun in Groton.

  “Your courtyard is beautiful,” Carmine said, going over to the transparent wall to gaze through it.

  “It used to be, but there are imbalances I am trying to correct. I have not yet succeeded, Lieutenant. Perhaps it is the Hollywood cypress — not a Japanese tree. I put it there because I thought a strand of America was necessary, but perhaps I am wrong.”

  “To me, Doctor, it makes the garden — taller, twisted around itself like a double helix. Without it, there’s nothing high enough to reach the top of the walls, and nothing symmetrical.”

  “I take your point.”

  Like hell you do, thought Carmine. What does a gaijin know about gardening the universe?

  “Sir, will you give me permission to have someone look at your house on Cape Cod?”

  “No, Lieutenant Delmonico, I will not. If you so much as try, I will sue.”

  Thus had Monday ended, with nothing to show.

  At six on Tuesday evening he arrived at number 6, Ponsonby Lane, to beard the Ponsonbys in their den. The deep baying of a large dog greeted his car, and when Charles Ponsonby opened the front door he was hanging on to the collar of — his sister’s guide dog?

  “A weird breed,” he said to Ponsonby as he divested himself of layers in the weather porch.

  “Half golden labrador, half German shepherd,” said Charles, hanging up the clothing. “We call her a labrashep, and her name is Biddy. It’s okay, sweetheart, the Lieutenant is a friend.”

  The dog wasn’t so sure. It decided to allow him in, but it kept a wary eye on him.

  “We’re in the kitchen, starting to make a Beethoven dinner. Numbers three, five and seven — we always prefer his odd-numbered symphonies to his even-numbered. Come through. I hope you don’t mind if we sit in the kitchen?”

  “I’m glad to sit anywhere, Dr. Ponsonby.”

  “Call me Chuck, though for form’s sake, I’ll stick to your official title. Claire always calls me Charles.”

  He led Carmine through one of those genuinely 250-year-old houses that sag at the beams and have floors full of undulations and jogs, into a more modern dining room that opened into what was definitely the original kitchen. Here, the wormholes, the fading paint and the splintering wood were authentic: eat your heart out, Mrs. Eliza Smith.

  “This must have been separate from the house in the old days,” said Carmine as he shook hands with a woman in her late thirties who looked just like her brother, even to the watery eyes.

  “Sit over there, Lieutenant,” she said in a Lauren Bacall voice, waving a hand at a Windsor chair. “Yes, it was separate. Kitchens back then had to be, in case of fire. Otherwise the whole house burned down. Charles and I joined it to the house with a dining room, but oh, what a headache the building process was!”

  “Why’s that?” he asked, taking a glass of amontillado sherry from Charles.

  “The ordinances insist that we have to build in timber of the same age as the house,” Charles said, seating himself opposite Carmine. “I finally located two ancient barns in upstate New York and bought them both. Too much timber, but we’ve stored it for any future repairs. Good, hard oak.”

  Claire was standing in profile to Carmine, wielding a thin-bladed, supple knife that she was using to prepare two thick cuts of filet steak. Awestruck, Carmine watched her deft fingers get the knife under a tendon and strip it off without losing any of the meat; she performed the task better than he could have.

  “Do you like Beethoven?” she asked him.

  “Yes, very much.”

  “Then why not eat with us? There’s plenty of food, I do assure you, Lieutenant,” she said, rinsing the knife under a brass tap over a stone sink. “A cheese and spinach soufflé first, a lemon sorbet to clear the palate, then beef fillet with Bearnaise sauce, new potatoes simmered in homemade beef stock, and petits pois.”

  “Sounds delicious, but I can’t stay too long.” He sipped the sherry to find it a very good one.

  “Charles tells me another girl is missing,” she said.

  “Yes, Miss Ponsonby.”

  “Call me Claire.” She sighed, put the knife away and joined them at the table, accepting a sherry as if she could see it.

  The kitchen was much as it must always have been, save that where once the great chimney would have held the spits, hooks and bread oven of eighteenth-century cooking, it now held a massive slow combustion stove. The room was too warm for Carmine.

  “An Aga stove? I don’t know it,” he said, draining his sherry.

  “We bought it in England on our one adventure abroad years ago,” said Charles. “It has a very slow oven for all-day baking, and an oven fast enough to do justice to pastry or French bread. Lots of hot-plates. It supplies us with hot water in winter too.”

  “Oil fired?”

  “No, it’s wood fired.”

  “Isn’t that expensive? I mean, heating oil is only nine cents a gallon. Wood must cost a lot more.”

  “It would if I had to buy it, Lieutenant, but I don’t. We have twenty acres of loggable forest up beyond Sleeping Giant, the last land we own apart from these five acres. I cut what I need each spring, replant the trees I take down.”

  Jesus, here we go again! thought Carmine. How many Huggers have these secret retreats tucked away? Abe and Corey will have to go up there tomorrow and comb his twenty acres of forest — how they’ll love that with all this snow on the ground! Benjamin
Liebman the undertaker has a mortuary so clean that we’d have to catch him in the act and the Prof has a basement full of trains, but a whole goddamn forest —!

  A second glass of the Ponsonby sherry made Carmine conscious that he hadn’t eaten breakfast or lunch: time to go.

  “I hope you won’t consider my question rude, Claire, but have you always been blind?” he asked.

  “Oh, yes,” she said cheerfully. “I’m one of those incubator babies got fed pure oxygen. Blame it on ignorance.”

  His rush of pity made him look away, up to where on one wall hung a group of framed photographs, some of them old enough to be sepia daguerrotypes. A strong family resemblance ran through the faces: square adamantine features, fiercely marked brows and thick dark hair. The only different one was clearly the latest of them: an elderly woman whose face was far more reminiscent of Charles and Claire, from its wispy hair to watery pale eyes and long, lugubrious features. Their mother? If so, then they were not in the Ponsonby mold, they were in hers.

  “My mother,” Claire said with that uncanny ability to pick out what was going on in the sighted world. “Don’t let my prescience bother you, Lieutenant. To some extent, it’s legerdemain.”

  “I can tell she’s your mother, and that you both resemble her rather than the Ponsonby line.”

  “She was a Sunnington from Cleveland, and we do take after the Sunningtons. Mama died three years ago, a merciful release. Very severe dementia. But one cannot put a Daughter of the American Revolution in a home for senile old ladies, so I cared for her myself until the bitter end. With some excellent help from the county authorities, I add.”

  So it’s a D.A.R. household, Carmine thought. Ponsonby and his sister probably don’t vote for anyone left of Genghiz Khan.

  He got up, his head spinning slightly; the Ponsonbys served their sherry in wine glasses, not little sherry glasses. “Thanks for the hospitality, I appreciate it.” He glanced across at the dog, lying with eyes fixed on him. “So long, Biddy. Nice to meet you too.”

  “What do you think of the good Lieutenant Delmonico?” Charles Ponsonby asked his sister when he returned to the kitchen.

  “That he doesn’t miss much,” she said, folding stiff egg whites into her cheese and spinach sauce.

  “True. They’ll be tramping all over our forest tomorrow.”

  “Do you care?”

  “Not a bit,” said Charles, scraping the raw soufflé into its dish and putting it in the hot oven. “Though I do feel sorry for them. Futile searches are exasperating.”

  Chapter 16

  Thursday, January 13th, 1966

  “Carmine looks down,” Marciano whispered to Patrick.

  “He and Desdemona aren’t playing speaks.”

  Commissioner Silvestri cleared his throat. “So how many of them refused to let us look around without a search warrant?”

  “In general they’ve been pretty co-operative,” said Carmine, who did indeed look down. “I get to see anything I ask to see, though I’m careful to make sure one of them at least is with me. I didn’t ask Charles Ponsonby for permission to search his forest because I didn’t see the point. If Corey and Abe find any fresh tracks through all this snow, or evidence that fresh tracks have been covered up, then I’ll ask. My bet is that all twenty acres are pristine, so why give Chuck and Claire anguish ahead of time?”

  “You like Claire Ponsonby,” said Silvestri, stating a fact.

  “Yes, I do. An amazing woman, doesn’t harbor any grudges.” He put her out of his mind. “To answer your original question, so far I’ve had refusals from Satsuma, Chandra and Schiller, the three aliens. Satsuma shipped his private peon, Eido, up to his Cape Cod cottage about ten seconds after I left his penthouse, is my guess. Chandra is an arrogant bastard, but that’s probably understandable in a maharajah’s number one son. Even if we did manage to get a warrant, he’d complain to the Indian Embassy, and that is one very aggressively touchy nation. Schiller is a more pathetic case. I don’t suspect him of anything more unorthodox than lots of photos of naked young men on his walls, but I haven’t pushed him because of his suicide attempt. It was a serious one, not a grandstand.”

  Carmine grinned. “Speaking of photos of naked men, I found a doozy in Tamara Vilich’s chains-and-leather bedroom. None other than that ambitious neurosurgeon, Keith Kyneton, who strips better than Mr. Universe. They say these muscle-building guys do it to compensate for an undersized dick, but I can’t say that of him. He’s hung like a porn star.”

  “Well, what do you know?” asked Marciano, leaning back in his chair to avoid Silvestri’s cigar — why did it always have to be his nose it got shoved under? “Does that eliminate the Kynetons? Or Tamara Vilich?”

  “Not entirely, Danny, though they’ve never been high on my list. She paints very sick pictures and she’s a dominatrix.”

  “So Keith baby likes having the shit beaten out of him.”

  “Seems so. However, Tamara can’t mark him much or his doting wife would notice. It’s his mother I feel sorriest for.”

  “Another one you like,” said Silvestri.

  “Yeah, well, time to worry when there’s nobody I like.”

  “What do you plan now?” Marciano asked.

  “Taxing Tamara with the Kyneton business.”

  “That won’t cost you any pain. Her, you don’t like.”

  He bearded her in her office. “I found the picture of Dr. Keith Kyneton under the one of your mom,” he said bluntly, admiring her spirit; her eyes, more khaki in this light, lifted to his face fearlessly.

  “Fucking isn’t murder, Lieutenant,” she said. “It isn’t even a crime between consenting adults.”

  “I’m not interested in the fucking, Miss Vilich. I want to know whereabouts you meet to fuck.”

  “At my house, in my apartment.”

  “With half of the neighborhood working somewhere in the Chubb Medical School or on Science Hill? Someone who knows Kyneton or his car would be sure to spot him sooner or later. I think you have a hideaway somewhere.”

  “You’re wrong, we don’t. I’m single, I live alone, and Keith makes sure there’s no one about if he arrives before dark. Though he never does arrive before dark. That’s why I love winter.”

  “What about the faces peering behind a lace curtain? Your affair with Dr. Kyneton gives him a double connection with the Hug. Wife and mistress work there. Does his wife know?”

  “She lives in complete ignorance, but I suppose you’ll yap far and wide about Keith and me,” Tamara said sulkily.

  “I don’t yap, Miss Vilich, but I will have to talk to Keith Kyneton, make sure there isn’t a hideaway somewhere. I smell violence in your relationship, and violence usually means a safe hideaway.”

  “Where the screams can’t be heard. We never go that far, Lieutenant, it’s more a matter of playing out some scenario,” she said. “Strict teacher with naughty little boy, lady cop with her handcuffs and sandbag baton — you know.” Her face changed, she shuddered. “He’ll dump me. Oh, God, what will I do? What will I do after he dumps me?”

  Which only goes to show, thought Carmine, departing, just how wrong assumptions can be. I thought the only person she loves is herself, but she’s nuts about a turkey like Keith Kyneton, which may account for her paintings. They’re how she feels about love — how sad, to hate love! Because she knows that Keith is only there for the sex. It’s Hilda he loves — if he’s capable of love.

  Tamara caught him at the elevator.

  “If you hurry, Lieutenant, you’ll find Dr. Kyneton between operations,” she said. “Holloman Hospital, tenth floor. The best way to get there is through the tunnel.”

  It was as spooky as all tunnels; after exploring the warren of tunnels the Japs had lived in on some of the Pacific islands during the War, Carmine feared them, had had to force himself to descend into the bowels of the earth in London to walk the tunnels between tube connections. Tunnels had a growl to them, an anger transmitted from the outraged, invade
d earth. No matter how dry or brightly lit, a tunnel suggested lurking terrors. He strode the hundred yards of the Hug tunnel, took its right-hand fork and came into the hospital basement near the laundry.

  All the operating rooms were on the tenth floor, but Dr. Keith Kyneton was waiting for him at the elevator block, clad in greens, a pair of cotton masks dangling around his neck.

  “Private, I insist on keeping this private,” the neurosurgeon said in a whisper. “In here, quick!”

  “Here” was a storeroom choked with boxes of supplies, devoid of chairs or an atmosphere Carmine could use to good effect.

  “Miss Vilich told you, huh?” he asked. “I never wanted her to take that goddamn photograph!”

  “You should have torn it up.”

  “Oh, Jesus, Lieutenant, you don’t understand! She wanted it! Tamara is — is fantastic!”

  “That I can believe if you like kinky. Nurse Catheter and her enema kit. Who started it, you or her?”

  “I don’t honestly remember. We were both drunk, a hospital party Hilda couldn’t make.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Two years. Christmas of 1963.”

  “Where do you meet?”

  “At Tamara’s place. I’m very careful going in and out.”

  “Nowhere else? No little hideaway in the country?”

  “No, just at Tamara’s.”

  Suddenly Kyneton turned, put both hands on Carmine’s forearm and clung, trembling, tears coursing down his face.

  “Lieutenant! Sir! Please, I beg of you, don’t tell anyone! My partnership in New York City is almost set, but if they find out about this, I’ll lose it!” he cried.

  His mind full of Ruth and Hilda, their constant sacrifices for this big, spoiled baby, Carmine shook the grip off savagely.

  “Don’t touch me, you selfish fuck! I don’t give a shit about your precious practice in New York, but I happen to like your mother and your wife. You don’t deserve either of them! I won’t mention this to anyone, but you can’t be stupid enough to think that Miss Tamara Vilich will be so charitable, surely! You’ll dump her, no matter how fantastic the kinky sex with her is, and she’ll retaliate like any other scorned woman. By tomorrow everyone who matters to you will know. Your professor, mother, wife, and the New York bunch.”