by Trevor Hoyle
Cawdor peeked out with one eye, stomach tensed, ready to retreat should they head this way. The corridors, empty and featureless, afforded no hiding place: avoiding detection would mean running like a bat out of hell. To his relief the guards took a different direction, and he heard their footsteps fading away down the echoing corridor.
Moving with swift silent strides, he reached the sign that read PERFORMERS AND GUESTS: GOLD PERMIT ACCESS ONLY, and kept on going along the short corridor, the red carpet underfoot.
He tested the doorknob, half-expecting it to be locked, then turned it fully when he met no resistance. There was a click, and one half of the double doors opened. Cawdor stepped through, softly closed the door behind him, and turned to find himself in a carpeted corridor with subdued lighting and silver-framed prints of celebrities on the darkgreen walls. Several doors opened off it.
‘Come on, don’t be difficult, sweets. There’s nothing to fear.’
Cawdor froze at the sound of Wilde’s voice, huskily cajoling yet underlaid with chill menace. This was the third door Cawdor had tried. Now he stood listening, his ear pressed close to the edge of the door, which was open the merest crack. From inside came rapid panting breaths and a subdued whimper.
Moving swiftly and without a sound, Cawdor opened the door, entered a small hallway, passed the open door of a bathroom, and came into the main suite, where he faltered in mid-stride.
It was very odd, because for an instant he didn’t recognise either of the two figures. Not the apparition in the white robe, nor the young girl with flowers in her braided hair, her face a ghostly white mask with fogged eyes leaking huge tears.
Holding her by the arm, Messiah Wilde was half-coaxing, half-dragging Daniella towards the elevator. She looked dazed, her movements sluggish, trying to resist with what little strength remained in her watery limbs. Messiah Wilde’s arm encircled her shoulders, his mouth whispering in her ear. Cawdor fought the urge to cry out. His swift and silent appearance had gone unnoticed; for a few vital moments he had the advantage of surprise.
Messiah Wilde murmured, ‘Your mom will be so proud of you. It’s a great honour to have been chosen –’
A knotted fist struck the side of Messiah Wilde’s head with such force that he reeled over and went skidding on his back, legs in the air, and crashed into the bar, the white robe billowing around him. Crystal decanters on a silver tray toppled over and smashed, showering him in a pungent cocktail of bourbon, vodka, brandy and gin. Messiah Wilde blinked the stinging mixture from his eyes and shook his head to clear it. He reached up to grip the edge of the bar counter.
Cawdor was too preoccupied with his daughter; she was all that mattered to him.
‘Daniella! Daniella, look at me!’
But he realised that she didn’t recognise him: in her befuddled confusion she was seeing only a strange man in a peaked cap and a dark-green blouson with TRANS-STATE TRAVEL SERVICE stitched into the black epaulettes.
She backed away, hands raised defensively in front of her.
‘Daniella… Daniella!’ Cawdor stretched out his hand. ‘Don’t be afraid. Everything’s OK. He won’t hurt you, I promise. You’re safe with me now.’
Her dulled eyes searched his face as the words seeped into her brain. Very slowly and wearily her eyelids closed. Daniella opened them again until she was wide-eyed and staring. In their depths, Cawdor saw reality rekindled: he saw his daughter emerging from the nightmare.
‘Dad…?’ she mouthed faintly, astonished. ‘How did you find me? How did you… Oh, Dad!’
Daniella fell forward and collapsed into his arms.
‘How charming. Family values aren’t dead. Loving Pop to the rescue.’
Messiah Wilde was leaning his back against the bar, supported on one elbow, a litter of broken crystal at his feet. His left cheekbone was obliterated by an inflamed swelling. ‘Like the get-up, Pops.’ His hand moved stealthily across the bar counter towards the alarm button set two inches below the inner rim. ‘Let me guess, you entered a Marlon Brando lookalike contest and came third.’
‘Where’s my wife?’
‘I wouldn’t know. Not here.’ Messiah Wilde shrugged, looking around the dressing room. ‘If that isn’t stating the obvious.’
His fingers crept over the edge of the bar counter.
‘I think you do know.’
‘Well, I might,’ Messiah Wilde admitted. ‘But whether I’m going to tell you, Pops, is another kettle of fish entirely. Now, if you’d had the grace to ask politely in the first place…’
Cawdor laid his daughter down in an armchair. He picked up the silver tray from where it had rolled to and brought the rim of it down on Messiah Wilde’s reaching arm, breaking a number of the small bones in his wrist and nearly severing the main artery. Blood splashed over the white robe. Cawdor batted the silver tray into Messiah Wilde’s face as if he were swatting a fly, and there was a melodic boyyyyong followed by the dry crackling crunch of bone and gristle as his nose was squashed flat. He slid down, legs splayed among the broken crystal, a starshaped spatter of blood emanating from the red splodge in the centre of his face, his limp and ragged-edged wrist bent at an odd angle. Cawdor tossed the silver tray aside, knelt down and lifted Messiah Wilde’s head by its long black hair and wrapped his fingers round the pale throat. Specks of blood and tissue were flying from the flattened nostrils with each snorting breath. He was choking and gurgling on his own blood.
Tell me where she is,’ Cawdor said, ‘or ten seconds from now I’m going to kill you.’ He pressed his thumb against the jerking windpipe. ‘Feel that? It’s the last thing you’ll ever feel. Where is she?’
But when Cawdor shook him by the hair his eyes rolled crazily and stared emptily at the ceiling before his eyelids drooped shut. There seemed no point in strangling somebody who was semiconscious and already choking to death.
Cawdor wiped his spattered hands on Messiah Wilde’s robe. There were spots of blood all over the front of the blouson, as well as the strong whiff of spirits. He pulled his daughter to her feet, and with his help she was able to walk to the elevator. Daniella slumped groggily on the leather-bound bench seat while he closed the inner gate. He turned to the panel, and then stared in dismay – there was no button marked FIRST FLOOR or GROUND FLOOR. He traced his finger from the top floor – 29 – downward, and then from the lowest sub-basement level – marked with a T – upward. They met at a button marked p, and Cawdor pressed it, hoping to God it was the right one, and wondering what the hell P might stand for. Parking? Private?
The elevator rose rapidly and whined to a halt. He opened the gate, looped his arm round Daniella’s waist, and half-carried her into a short passageway that had a steel door at the end, reinforced with bars of solid brass. Should it lead into the reception hall, or to any other public place, he had some fast talking to do. The cap and blouson came off: they were a positive danger to him now that security was on the lookout for a bus driver. He straightened his tie and smoothed the creases in his jacket. He was presentable enough, Cawdor reckoned, and should have no problem mingling unnoticed in the crowd; that’s if there was a crowd, and the audience hadn’t boarded the buses. One more problem remained, however.
‘You OK to walk?’ He couldn’t risk carrying her: they would be spotted at once. ‘You have to walk on your own. Can you do it?’
Daniella raised her head. She looked deathly tired, dark rings under her eyes. ‘Hold my hand, Dad, and I’ll walk,’ Daniella said.
‘Sure, honey.’ Cawdor hugged his daughter. ‘The two of us are gonna walk straight out of here, not a thing to worry about.’ He held her hand, which was icy cold with shock, in his. ‘Ready? We’re on our way, Tonto.’
Daniella nodded. ‘OK, Kimo Sabe.’
She was coming back to him. Cawdor could have wept.
Instead, he opened the door.
There was nothing there. Total blackness. Were they still underground? What did ‘P’ stand for – the pit?
He went
forward, holding her hand, the other outstretched into nothingness. The air felt different – warmer, clammier. Something rattled above his head. Cawdor looked up, startled, and in that moment lightning forked through the sky in a split-second flash that imprinted everything on his eye like a photograph. They were inside a perspex tunnel. The rattling sound was the drumming of rain on the rounded plastic overhead, drowned a moment later by the rolling boom of thunder. Through the rainsmeared plastic walls he saw the darkened bulk of the glass pyramid rising behind them. They were outside. Messiah Wilde’s private elevator led to this perspex tunnel that led directly out of the building.
Cool fresh rain hit them, driving hard into their faces, and rain had never felt so good. They ran together, hand in hand, soaked through in less than ten yards, towards the floodlit glow of the public parking lot, visible above a row of thorn bushes and young palms being lashed by the fierce wind. They came upon a chain-link fence, no more than five feet high, and once over that were in the parking lot itself. A few buses were still loading, lined up to take the last of the passengers sheltering beneath the covered walkway.
Most of the cars had gone. The Honda Civic stood on the expanse of rain-swept asphalt. Gasping for breath, soaked to the skin, father and daughter climbed inside.
5
It had torn him apart, driving off into the night knowing that Sarah was still somewhere inside, perhaps held against her will, but the compulsion to get Daniella away from that hateful place overwhelmed all else. Maybe when she was at a safe distance, and secure (a motel?) he could get his thoughts in order and formulate some sort of plan. For now, heading towards the coast for no other reason than that was where the road went to, his mind was in a ferment of such virulent and poisonous rage that he felt almost demented.
In the grip of it, Cawdor didn’t notice for a dozen miles or so that Daniella was huddled and shivering in the seat beside him, chilled by the cold night air. He turned on the heater and held her hand for warmth and comfort. He could hardly bear to look at the primped and prettified effigy they had made of his daughter, even though the rain had washed away most of the white make-up and flattened her hair to a sodden cap, tangled strands sticking to her shoulders. A limp petal or two were all that was left of the crown of primroses.
He squeezed her hand. ‘Don’t worry about your mom, Daniella. I’ll get her out of there.’ His tone was assured, defiant, but he thought it wise not to add that he hadn’t the faintest notion how. But he would do it, by Christ he would. ‘First we’ll find you a place to stay, and then –’
‘I don’t think she’s in there.’
Now Cawdor did look at her, tearing his eyes away from the rain sweeping towards them through the headlights. ‘But weren’t you together? Both of you appeared on the show, didn’t you?’
‘No. It was just me. I haven’t seen her since …’ Daniella struggled to reconstruct the past 24 hours. ‘She was with me last night, at a party after the show. Then… I think…’
‘What?’
‘I … I’m all mixed up.’ Her face was creased with the effort of trying to make coherent sense of her befuddled memories. ‘Last night I stayed at his house, near the ocean –’
‘His house,’ Cawdor said, staring into the driving rain. He should have finished the bastard when he had the chance. ‘You stayed at Messiah Wilde’s house?’
‘Yes. I didn’t see her, but I think Mom stayed there, too. That’s right, that’s right.’ Daniella leant forward, nodding rapidly. ‘He invited us both to stay at his home; that’s right, he did. The rest is kinda hazy and… all I remember is waking up in this bedroom with a view of the ocean. And there was a servant – small, brown, Asian I think – he came in and told me to get ready. I had to leave right away.’
‘You didn’t see Sarah before you left.’
‘No.’
Cawdor wiped first one sweaty palm on the seat cover, and then the other. He said quietly, ‘Where’s the house, Daniella? You remember?’
‘It was… it was…’
Cawdor bit into his lower lip to stop himself urging her to remember, because he could tell she was already straining as hard as she knew how. He waited in an agony of imposed silence, the passage of time marked by the beating wipers.
‘It was in Palm Beach.’
‘Palm Beach,’ Cawdor repeated. There was a sign up ahead. 1-95. The coastal highway stretched the entire length of Florida’s eastern seaboard, from Miami in the south to Jacksonville in the north, and then on into Georgia. Along that route, thirty miles north of here, was Palm Beach.
It was so sudden that Cawdor couldn’t believe the evidence of his own eyes.
One minute the car was enveloped in a raincloud, the headlights feebly attempting to probe the dense murk, and quite literally one minute later the visibility had cleared so that he could see stars in a clear sky, the headlights picking out just a few damp patches on the road ahead. The edge of the storm’s footprint lay directly east to west, almost exactly midway between Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach. Unused to the bizarre, capricious nature of tropical storms, it seemed to Cawdor that the heavens must be playing tricks at his expense.
Maybe though, this once, he thought with rising hope, in his favour. Daniella’s recollection of where Messiah Wilde’s house was located, except for the fact that it fronted the ocean, was vague: trying to find it in a raging storm would have stacked the odds against them, whereas in this suddenly calm and clear evening there was at least a sporting chance.
‘Any of this familiar to you?’ he asked her as they drove down the main thoroughfare, past the large tourist hotels with their white stucco façades. On the opposite side of the street, away from the ocean, people were sitting outside cafes and bars, enjoying the balmy breeze rustling the fronds of the tall palm trees. As he expected of Palm Beach, they were a fashionably dressed, well-heeled crowd, and the Porche 911 Turbos, Camaros and Dodge Vipers in the parking lots confirmed their wealth and status.
‘I don’t think so,’ Daniella said, staring out miserably. ‘I just remember these big houses with lawns out front, set wide apart. Some of them had high walls and gates.’
‘Does this house have walls and gates?’
Daniella bit her lip, struggling to remember. ‘It had a wall… but not very high, with bushes planted along the top. The wall was sort of dark grey and shiny and … yes, smooth. Like the rocks had been cut and polished and fitted together like a jigsaw.’
A granite wall with bushes growing on top, Cawdor thought in despair. He might spend a whole week scouring Palm Beach and never find such a place. Here were million-dollar homes on every block. And time, above all else, was the crucial factor. Messiah Wilde might have recovered by now and alerted his security people. If Sarah was being held at Wilde’s house, surely his first act would be to warn whoever was holding her there.
Cawdor knew he couldn’t waste even a few hours on a futile search.
He had to find Sarah now.
He drove slowly along a curving road that had windblown sand heaped in the gutters. To his left were four-storey condominiums with balconies and wrought-iron railings; to his right large and impressive houses whose rear aspects overlooked the beach. Although the road was well lit, the globes on their slender steel posts gave everything a bland appearance, washing out all colour. It was possible to tell if the walls surrounding some of these properties were light or dark, but not much else.
Every now and then he glanced at Daniella, desperately wishing that something might register, waiting for her to leap up and point out a landmark or a feature that had been forgotten until she set eyes on it again. He waited for it to happen, growing more anxious with each passing moment, but it didn’t.
The road reached the crest of a small rise and curved downhill, loosely following the contour of the shoreline. There it intersected with a busier, four-lane highway that Cawdor guessed was possibly US 1.
He pulled away from the STOP sign, crossed the highway, and drove int
o a Texaco station. He didn’t enter the gas lane, but parked near the window of the building where he could keep watch on the car, determined not to lose sight of his daughter for even a single second.
Inside the brightly lit store area he asked the cash clerk, a plump, grey-haired matronly woman seated behind a screen of toughened glass, if he might look at the phone book. There was a problem. The phone book was too fat to slide underneath the cash slot. Cawdor indicated the door at her side. ‘Can you pass it through?’
‘Not allowed to open it, sorry.’
‘So how do your customers get to find a number?’
The matronly woman shrugged. ‘I can see that’s not much help, but…’
‘It’s no help at all,’ Cawdor said acidly. He saw her bridle, and said, ‘Please, this is very important –’
‘I don’t make the rules. Take it up with the company.’
‘OK, yes, you’re right. Look, I’m sorry I snapped at you. I need the address of someone. This is very important to me. Will you please check it for me? Please.’
‘Least you had the decency to apologise,’ she sniffed. ‘After all, it ain’t my fault. What name?’
‘Wilde,’ Cawdor said, and spelt it so that she understood there was an ‘e’ at the end. The chances that he was in the phone book were slim to nonexistent, but Cawdor clung to the remnant of this slender hope because he was hanging on by his fingernails to nothing else.
There were nearly two full pages of Wildes, three columns per page. The woman looked up at him. ‘Do you have a first name or initial?’
Even if he was in the book, he wouldn’t be listed under the self-deluding stage name of ‘Messiah’. But he had no other name that Cawdor knew of. ‘Look under “M”.’
The woman’s blood-red fingernail traced down the column. ‘“M” for what? Looky here, you got all these –’ she angled the phone book for him to see ‘– must be thirty, forty or more.’