by Wim Coleman
“And you’re recording the call, right?”
“Yes,” Clayton said.
“That’s fine,” said Ramos. “Just as long as I know.”
Clayton breathed a sigh of relief that Ramos simply didn’t hang up on him. Clayton closed his eyes. In order to make this conversation really click, it would help to visualize Ramos the way Ramos wanted to he pictured. And immediately, an image came into Clayton’s mind. It was of a criminal mastermind from some old spy movie—a figure dimly visible behind a layer of bulletproofed glass, with a Venetian blind pulled down to cover his face. A fluffy white cat sat in this mastermind’s lap, and his voice was amplified over a loudspeaker.
Yes, that’s just the way he’d like me to see him. Hell, I wouldn’t mind playing that role myself.
Clayton also knew that he now had to call Ramos by the name of Zoomer. On the telephone—in the electronic world—Mike Ramos actually became Zoomer.
“Are you still there, Detective Saunders?” Zoomer asked.
“Yes, Zoomer. I’m still here.”
“What did you want to talk to me about?”
“Just to see if you can help set me straight on some things. I’m dumb about computers. That’s probably why I don’t understand Insomnimania. The only hackers I’ve met before are Maisie and Pritchard.”
“Those guys have both been around for a long time. But they went commercial and hit it big. They aren’t hacking now.”
“Are they good?”
“Pritchard’s the only wizard. Maisie’s canny but he’s not powerful. They’re both sloppy. I was surprised that they could make a universe and actually keep it running.”
“But you’re a good hacker?”
“Yes, I am.”
“I sure need your help. Maisie and Pritchard haven’t been able to figure this thing out.”
“What are you trying to figure?”
“Who’s logging on as Auggie? His membership information is phony.”
“Just pick up Auggie’s address when he’s on. That should be simple enough.”
“We’ve done that. But the results have been … inconclusive.”
“That’s odd.”
“It is, isn’t it? How could a hacker appear to be dialing out of someone else’s telephone?”
“Ah. You’re talking about major phone phreaking there. They’re either tapping into the line directly or you’ve got a supreme phone wizard on your hands. I’m afraid it’s not my area of expertise.”
“You can’t hack telephones?”
“Not the way you’re talking about. So Auggie’s doing that now?”
“We’re having a hard time figuring out just what Auggie’s doing,” Clayton said. “Can you tell us anything at all about how Auggie appeared in the first place? How did he get started?”
There was a moment of silence. When Zoomer began talking, it was nearly in a whisper.
“Tell me, Detective Saunders, how far back can you remember?”
Clayton wrinkled his brow. “Remember what?” he replied.
“Anything. How old were you when the earliest thing you can remember took place?”
Clayton was mystified at this turn in the conversation. “How far back can you remember?” Clayton replied.
“Real far,” Zoomer said, his voice trailing away as if he was talking to himself. “I can remember a long time ago, when I was just tiny, before I could even walk. My father bought me this little brown plastic wagon with little black plastic horses and little yellow wheels. One day, I left the wagon on the heating register—the one downstairs, right above the furnace. The furnace was on, and I crawled by in time to notice that the wagon was melting. Those little bright yellow wheels were losing their shape, starting to drip slowly through the metal grate, turning into a glistening liquid. I was tickled by how it looked. I laughed. It looked like something out of my grandmother’s oven. I thought my wagon was turning into some kind of glazed, delicious candy. I crawled across the register to get it. Then I cried out with shock and pain. My hands were severely burned. 1 remember how I wept, how I cried. I suppose it was the first time I ever felt really severe pain.
“Strange, isn’t it, how we cry over pain when we’re children? Adults rarely weep from physical pain. Oh, we complain or groan or gnash our teeth or scream, but we hardly ever weep. I didn’t weep when I received the injuries that crippled me. It’s different for little children. Can you tell me why?”
“No,” Clayton said softly.
“I think children cry from grief,” Zoomer continued. “They cry from the sadness of learning that there is such a thing as pain in the world.”
The hacker let forth a sad little laugh. “Most of us forget all our crying when we grow up. But I don’t forget. I am determined to maintain my sensitivity, my humanity. I refuse to be hardened. I am determined to remember what it feels like to grieve and weep for pain and lost innocence. That incident took place on the sixteenth of February, 1966. I was one year, seven months, and three days old.”
“You remember the date?” chimed in Clayton skeptically.
“Of course I don’t remember the date,” Zoomer replied. “I looked it up. You see, I had to be taken to the emergency room at the hospital. They had records. I suffered from second degree burns. I still have the scars.”
“What’s all this got to do with Auggie?” grumbled Clayton, sounding like an impatient kid.
“Let me finish. You’ll understand. On the twenty-seventh of March, 1967, my father took me to a circus. In case you’re wondering, I got that date off an old newspaper microfilm. It was exactly one year and thirty nine days after my burning accident, and I was two years, eight months, and eight days old. I sat on my father’s lap in the front row. I had never seen a circus. At first, I loved it. I loved the sequined men and women defying natural forces with which I was still scarcely acquainted. I loved the many fine pets which were too big and fierce and noisy to take home. But I did not know what to think of the clowns. While the rest of the circus was wild and dreamlike, the clowns were so real, so ordinary—as if my aunts, uncles, and grandparents had decided to camp out in Neverland. I thought they had no business in that ring. I wanted them to go away.
“They did not go away. Two of them were particularly stubborn and persistent. One was a white-clad gentleman with great red buttons and a silly conical cap. He gave all the orders, and most of them were stupid orders. He acted just like my father or mother. He delivered his orders to a put-upon, battered fellow with a smashed derby and patched pants and a bright red nose. This lowly dark clown bungled the white clown’s instructions every way he could.
“I tried to ignore these two humdrum characters, but they kept coming closer and closer to the audience. The dark-clad, red-nosed clown began to pad along the front row in his outsized shoes, squirting child after child with the gigantic sunflower in his lapel. When I saw that he was coming my way, I squirmed and squealed, trying to escape my father’s idiotic grasp. I knew he was going to rip me away from my father and take me God knows where. I also knew that this was my father’s whole reason for bringing me to the circus. He wanted to get rid of me—to sell me like some kind of beast or slave to that ghastly world of the clowns.
“At last the clown arrived, and I stopped squirming and squealing. I guess my father thought I’d had a change of heart, that I now supposed the clown to be some sort of friend. But I was actually frozen with fear. I couldn’t even breathe. I could see the clown very clearly now. His face was inches away from mine, and he looked entirely different than he had before. In the ring, he seemed so bright, so primary, so loud and ghastly. But up close, I could see where his white, red, and black makeup was melted and smeared by sweat, revealing awful, wrinkled flesh underneath. I could see that his painted smile actually disguised an expression of unspeakable weariness and
dread. And he smelled like death. Then came that geyser of water from his lapel, and I began to scream.
“I don’t remember what happened after that, but I’ve been told I didn’t stop screaming for hours, and that my father had to take me home. Nobody knew why. But I knew. The pain I had felt when I burned myself, the pain I thought I had left behind had pursued me, had sought me out. That pain had taken the form of the shabby and ragged clown.”
Zoomer was quiet for a moment, then concluded blandly, “So perhaps you understand now why I chose to give his shape to a cartoon killer.”
Clayton felt the shot of adrenaline in his body. “So what you’re telling me,” he said, as calmly as he could, “is that you created this clown—the most powerful character in the game. But you said that now he is not your alter.”
“That’s right,” Zoomer said.
“Of course you realize this sounds like a very naive ploy to escape becoming a murder suspect.”
“I realize that, yes. It’s unbelievable, isn’t it? Too unbelievable for me to make up. At least as unbelievable as the notion that I’m going around chopping people up. Of course, we murderers are a notoriously naive bunch.”
Clayton hesitated for a long moment. “So you don’t know who’s using Auggie now?” he asked at last. “Could you find out if you tried?”
Clayton could hear the whirring sound of the pacing wheelchair even over the telephone. Finally the young man said softly, “No.”
“But you haven’t tried to find out?”
“No.”
“Forgive me for saying so, Zoomer hut I find that a little hard to believe.”
“Why?”
“Well, by your own account, you’re a brilliant guy and one hell of a computer hacker. And here you go to all this trouble to create this terrific character who—how might you put it?—embodies all your childhood pain. But when somebody takes this character away from you, you don’t even try to take it back. You don’t even try to find out who’s responsible.”
There was a moment’s silence. Then Zoomer said in a rather distant voice, “At first, there were just small peculiarities. Times when he almost seemed to be acting independently. For a while, I did think it was a challenge from some other hacker.”
Zoomer was silent for a few moments.
“Then what happened?” Clayton asked.
“One day when I was running him through his tricks in Ernie’s Bar, he ... drew away from me. He started acting on his own, speaking in a different voice. So I left him.”
“You left him” demanded Clayton.
“Yeah, I left him.”
“Why?”
“I’d made him out of my pain, and it was his privilege to exist, to carry out my wishes. But he turned away from me. When I create something, Detective Saunders, I never stoop to trying to win its loyalty. It not my style. The clown is on his own now. I see him around from time to time.”
“You sound like a superstitious man, Zoomer,” said Clayton, echoing Ramos’s overly precise, measured delivery.
“Do I really?” asked Ramos, sounding almost pleased.
“Indeed you do. You impute human characteristics to nonhuman things. A collection of electronic commands isn’t exactly capable of betrayal. Can a man of your phenomenal intelligence not know that?”
“You miss the point, Detective Saunders,” Zoomer said, sounding pleased by Clayton’s verbal challenge. “I know it’s often considered a sign of ignorance and superstition to anthropomorphize mere things. But in an inhuman universe, it’s the only way I know of to make life palatable. Besides, I find it much more entertaining to think of him as independent than to assume someone merely rewrote his program.”
Clayton felt exhausted. He had no idea what tack to try with the hacker next. He looked at Nolan inquisitively, but his partner just shrugged.
“Zoomer, I appreciate your help,” Clayton said. “If it’s all right with you, I’d like to phone you again sometime.”
“You have the number, Sergeant,” Zoomer said, then added, with a trace of wry humor, “I’ll he here.”
Then there was a click, and the dial tone buzzed in the ears of both detectives.
“I’m getting too old for this,” Clayton complained, as Nolan walked toward him.
“So what did we get out of him?” Nolan asked.
“Beats me,” Clayton said. “I didn’t understand half of what that fucker was talking about.”
“You didn’t?” Nolan exclaimed. “You sure as hell acted like you understood him. So what do you figure? Is he connected with the killer?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure if he knows.”
“Well, he hasn’t been out of that wheelchair lately,” Nolan said, “because we know his disability squares with his DMV records. Still, he’s awfully smart. Do you think he’s a director of some kind of murder club—something like that?”
Clayton shook his head. “He wants too much for us to think he’s some evil genius—like that baldheaded what’s-his-name in the James Bond movies. But he ain’t quite as smart as he’d like to be. My guess is that this particular master hacker got out-hacked and that Auggie really doesn’t belong to him anymore. My guess is that we ain’t even glimpsed our bad guy yet.”
Nolan groaned. “That’s what I was afraid you’d say,” he said.
“Wish I could tell you otherwise.”
“Anyway, you handled him brilliantly,” Nolan said, sitting on the desk beside Clayton.
“You really think so?”
Nolan shook his head. “Hell, more than a few guys around this department wish they had your capacity to crawl inside people’s brains, understand what makes them tick. You’ve got a gift, man. You make me feel like a lumbering oaf a lot of the time—particularly on a bitch of a case like this.”
“This case is just following the usual pattern, buddy,” Clayton said reassuringly. “I make two or three good intuitive leaps, then you unravel the threads and follow them through the dark. It always takes your brains to bring us over the finish line.”
“I hope my brains get engaged pretty soon,” Nolan said with a sigh.
“Don’t worry. They will.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” Nolan said. “We sure make one hell of a team, don’t we?” he added warmly.
“We sure do,” Clayton said. Then he felt swept by a wave of irrational sadness.
Nolan returned Clayton’s melancholy look.
“Did I ever tell you about Syd Harper, my mentor back at the academy?” Nolan asked.
Clayton laughed. “Sure. Crazy Sid. When we first started working together, you hardly ever talked about anything else. Syd taught you this, Syd told you to do that.”
“Well, for the last few years, Syd’s been sheriff up in a little town in Oregon. It’s a real cop’s delight up there—hardly any crimes to speak of except a little vandalism or a stolen bicycle now and then. Anyway, Syd’s getting ready to retire. And he got in touch with me not long ago, suggesting I take over his job.”
Clayton felt his throat choke up slightly.
“So have you made a decision yet?” he asked.
“Not yet,” Nolan said.
Both men were quiet for a moment.
“You know, the problem’s more than what happened to Louise,” Nolan said at last. “Sometimes I feel like a goddamn dinosaur hanging around this town, particularly when the criminals start using computers. It’s like my life here has ended, something here is all over. I’m tired, Clay. Really tired. I think I could use the change.”
“Can’t say I blame you,” Clayton said.
“What about you?” Nolan asked.
Clayton fell quiet. For a moment, he didn’t know what to say.
“This town really is hell sometimes,” he said at last. “So
full of fear and bigotry and hate and all. Sometimes I can hear the hate, Nol. I can hear it even when no one’s saying anything. It doesn’t whisper, it yells at me from the streets and hallways. That’s when I just want to take Sheila and the kids and get the hell out of here.”
“It would be a poorer place if you did,” Nolan said gently.
Clayton felt a smile form slowly on his lips.
“Yeah,” he said. “I guess. But I’d miss you like hell, buddy.”
“Yeah, me, too. But remember—the whole thing’s still up in the air.”
“I know,” Clayton said. “So. What about Marianne?”
Nolan gave Clayton a surprised look.
“What about her?”
“If you go up north, will she go, too? You two are an item, right?”
“How the hell did you know that?” Nolan asked.
Clayton laughed. “Are you kidding?” he said. “That night when I called about the DNA test—when Gauld’s killer turned out to he a woman—I knew. I knew right then. I could tell by your voice.”
“You uncanny son of a bitch,” Nolan said. Then he shrugged, “I don’t know what she’d do. I haven’t talked to her about it yet.” Then he looked at his watch. “I guess I’d better get on home,” he said. “That lady’s probably waiting for me right now.”
10101
TRAVELING HORSE
Marianne pressed her face against the glass in order to see the carousel inside. Three rows of brightly painted horses stood quietly in dappled light that filtered in through small panes of glass. One spot of strong sunlight fell directly on a sweet-faced white pony that had a flowing mane and a red bridle and saddle.
“I love this building,” Marianne said, standing back and looking up at the turreted, multi-windowed building on the Santa Monica pier. “It’s like a warp in time—a 1920s space that never changed. When the carousel is running, the horses dance around to calliope music. They always look so beautiful.”
Now the sun highlighted a wooden mane waving in the air, making it seem that the horse was prancing to tunes it undoubtedly knew by heart. Another sunlit animal reared with its head stuck up in the air, mouth open as though fighting the bit. That one looks a little like Renee’s horse.