by John Farris
And a little before ten p.m. Eden Waring had arrived.
Business or pleasure?
The tapes he was watching didn’t have her walking into the theatre, standing there in that big lobby a little uncertainly, maybe, then being noticed by one of the security techies in the bunkered room with all the TV screens, who alerted Patrol or maybe Perk herself to find out what Eden wanted. Skarbeck didn’t see any of that and wasn’t particularly interested. What he wanted was to see her leaving, with or without the Magician. Or had Eden left at all before the big slide, the unexplained melting of eight huge chandeliers? Bronc Skarbeck had a mystery to solve. But he was objective, pragmatic. A man to keep his head even with the world out of warp. Eden Waring didn’t scare him. She only made him think about things he didn’t want to think about.
Harlee Nations came into Bronc’s study while he was on another phone call. Harlee wasn’t wearing the usual teenager grunge. She dressed up to be casual. Three thousand dollars’ worth of Hermès stuff; and she was barefoot. Touching. She’d had her morning swim in the lap pool, done another mile on the treadmill in the poolside gym. Unusual for a sixteen-year-old with a heaven-sent body to pay so much attention to physical conditioning. Also she watched what she ate. No fast food for Harlee and she never touched “sweetsies,” her name for candy or desserts.
She stood a few feet behind his high-backed leather swivel chair, visible to him on the blank face of one of the monitors. There were three on his boomerang-shaped desk. The two other monitors were running tapes simultaneously.
Skarbeck terminated his call and swiveled around to face her with his terse, slightly canted smile of admiration. He put the tapes on pause.
Harlee kissed the top of his head where his scalp showed in a small brown oval.
“What’s going on, Daddy?” she said in her wisp of a voice, greengage eyes catching sunlight from prisms of leaded glass in the windows.
“There was a rock slide at the theatre last night.”
“Ohh. Was anyone hurt?”
“We don’t think so. I’m looking at tapes for around midnight to see—uh, if it might have been a minor earthquake. I could go for a fresh cup of coffee.”
“Sure. Then if it’s okay I’m going to meet a couple of friends at the Grand Canal Shops. We’ll probably do lunch too.”
“Need some money?”
“Oh, I guess three hundred. I won’t splurge, Daddy.”
Bronc took out his bankroll and slipped some fifties from his money clip.
“Have a good time,” he said indulgently.
“Thanks. I’ll be right back with your coffee.”
Skarbeck took off the tapes he’d been looking at and considered those that remained in the big carton on one end of his desk. He selected one marked MENAGERIE TUNNEL/2300 HOURS, and another that afforded a 180-degree continuous pan of the lobby, 2400–0200 hours. He ran the tunnel tape first, and saw nothing of interest until shortly before midnight.
At eleven fifty-six, according to the counter in the lower left of the frame, two figures appeared. Bronc slowed the tape to normal speed. The camera angle and the low after-hours lighting in the tunnel prevented him from seeing all but the basic structure of their faces. Nonetheless, from the shape of the man, the way he walked, or prowled, that wily grace, he had to be Lincoln Grayle. The young woman keeping him company had a bottle in one hand. Too big for Pepsi. It had the canister shape of a wine bottle.
She stopped, swaying tipsily, and swigged. Grayle paused too, leaned against a tunnel wall. There was some dialogue between them. The young woman overgesturing in an impassioned but well-soused manner. Grayle patient, watchful, perhaps, with folded arms.
Then she lurched toward the Magician, bottle in the left hand and behind her hip. For a moment her face turned toward the camera, flaring into a clarity of features as if flashgunned. Skarbeck hit Pause. He studied her. Yes. He was looking at Eden Waring.
Eden put her right hand on Grayle’s opposite shoulder. Then around to the back of his neck. She tried to snuggle against him. Still talking. He appeared not to like having her on top of him but made no attempt to push her away. She put her head down against his chest and dropped her hand to his crotch, began to grope him.
Skarbeck wished he knew what was being said at that moment, but probably even a lip-reader wouldn’t have been of much help to him. Lincoln Grayle with his shoulders against the wall and the Waring girl trying to get into his pants.
Then Eden appeared to collapse. The Magician’s hands were at his sides, obviously he hadn’t struck her. She was all of a sudden dead-slack against his body, like a fainting spell, and knock-kneed.
When he tried to lift her up and move her away from him, Eden recovered. Skarbeck saw, in her left hand, the wine bottle that for a time had been out of sight. She rammed the bottle butt-first into Lincoln Grayle’s face and there was a dark spume of blood as his head snapped back.
She hit him again, backhanded with the bottle, which broke jaggedly in two against a cheekbone or the top of his skull. Her quickness and the savagery of the attack amazed Skarbeck. He had to see it again. Then once more. Then the tape ran on and Grayle sprawled on the tunnel floor, hands raised weakly to protect himself, but obviously he was all but unconscious.
For a few moments Eden Waring stood over him in a lethal sort of crouch, the sawtoothed part of the wine bottle poised near his bludgeoned face. Grayle gestured weakly, unable to defend himself.
Jesus.
But she didn’t do it. Eden apparently said something final to him—as if anything remained to be said—with an angry jerk of her head. Then she backed away, turned, and walked quickly out of range of the surveillance camera, not drunk at all in Skarbeck’s estimation.
Precision and brutality. Eden Waring had set Grayle up, probably having known what she was going to do even before she arrived at the theatre. Skarbeck could admire that sort of purpose and the nerve necessary to pull it off.
He watched Lincoln Grayle, barely moving, casualty of an intimate war Bronc had been unaware of, lying on the floor of the menagerie tunnel until the tape ran out.
There was no follow-up tape of the tunnel that might have told Skarbeck how long the Magician had lain there bleeding. The security bunker wasn’t manned after eleven p.m. If one of the veterinary crew still in the menagerie had heard Grayle call for help during the few minutes from midnight to the moment the towering glass facade of the theatre had slumped down like fiery lava from the mountain, piling up on the terrace and ultimately causing its collapse, Skarbeck would have been alerted right away and Grayle would be in a hospital now with plastic surgeons considering how to rebuild that famous face, resurrect its nuances of dark romance and canny mystery.
So Linc had managed to leave the tunnel without anyone to help him and go—where?
Skarbeck started the lobby tape.
Each tier of the eight identical chandeliers, powered down to a dappled glow after-hours, had the tightly joined facets of a dowager’s diamond bracelet. They reflected light from the terrace floods through the glass of the lobby doors. Part of the terrace was visible as the camera panned. He noticed movement out there. Skarbeck paused the tape and tried to make out what was happening through the floodlight glare on the lobby doors. He recognized a security patrol cart, stationary, but because of the camera angle he would’ve needed computerized enhancement to identify who was standing beside the cart.
Even without enhancement, the figure was unmistakably female. Miss Waring again?
He fast-forwarded until the camera had returned to that area of the terrace about which he was most curious. Pause.
The same figure, and now, at the outer edge of the camera’s eye, a hint of someone else.
Exasperated by his limited apprehension, Skarbeck let the tape move on. When it panned back to that glimpse of terrace that was beginning to obsess him, he paused again.
The figure that had been standing by the golf cart wasn’t there. Something else was, m
uch larger than a human being. Dark and catlike, thrashing on the terrace floor as Skarbeck rolled the tape forward and back, again and again.
On the next pass by the camera the beast had definition and was closer to the theatre, on the move and dragging something that looked like—
Looked like, almighty Jesus, a human leg.
Skarbeck blinked and fidgeted while the camera panned away. When it returned almost dead-center on the lobby doors he saw that the thick sandwich glass had been broken out of its chrome steel frame, and the animal, bigger than any panther Bronc had seen—no, the color was throwing him off, that jet inkiness, this cat had the heavyweight body of a tiger. With a large, ugly, dog-like head. Nightmarish, even without the fifth appendage, a lissome length of woman’s leg hanging from the beast’s shaggy underbelly. Worse, leaving a swath of blood or excrement across the travertine floor while, in the floodlit exterior, Eden Waring followed with the measured steps and clasped hands of a processionist.
Another astonishment: a thin radiance, a lance of light, beamed out from somewhere near her breastbone, and her eyes were vividly aglow in an otherwise shadowy, somber face. The upward-slanting beam of light she seemed to project connected with a chandelier above the crawling, obviously wounded beast. The chandelier erupted like a phosphorous torch, whiting out the tape until the panning camera moved on.
Another twenty seconds before the camera returned to that exact angle, where it captured an elongated, molten glop of what had been crystal chandelier engulfing the silently screaming creature on the lobby floor.
What wonders were these?
Skarbeck heard a shriek behind him. He jumped as if a knife had been thrust between his shoulder blades.
He looked around to see his delicious teen companion, Harlee Nations, lose her grip on the mug of black coffee she had brought him. Her head fell back and she crumpled bonelessly in a dead faint on the Spanish tiles of his study.
5:22 A.M.
In the ninth hour of the high-stakes Texas hold ’em game that had begun the night before in one of the plush card rooms of Bahìa, Cody Olds was reasonably sure he knew who the big winner was going to be, with $180,000 in a pot that was still building.
Four of the six players who had begun the game had quit the table: the cross-dressing heart surgeon from Dallas; the German arms dealer who looked like Beethoven; the hip-hop record producer, a sharp dresser who had a silly street name and carried a covey of adoring chocolate chippies around with him; and a sixtyish comedienne and longtime Vegas favorite who had a butch haircut, a twinkle, and a salty leer. Along with The Actor, she had kept the verbal action lively (“I named my last dog Oedipus Rex; he had a lot of mother issues”). When she left the game with a grand sigh after mucking a pretty good hand, The Actor had looked up at her with exaggerated pity and said, “Glut thy sorrow on a morning’s rose, Nadine.”
Then, as he pondered the cards on the flop, he’d said, “Nadine and I have always been on the verge of getting it on, you know. But somehow it never happened. One of those great unconsummated romances, like Hemingway and Garbo.”
“Marlene Dietrich,” Cody had murmured. “Wasn’t it?”
“You were never going to get within sniffing distance of my organ grinder ’long as I was buying the drinks,” Nadine had retorted as she was leaving the card room. She had handed out C-notes to the casino employees who had kept the game running smoothly with new decks when requested and providing liquid refreshment, a buffet, lots of bowls of ice, and hot moist towels for the players.
The Actor had kept their little break going by taking a sip of the apple juice he drank exclusively while playing poker. He had been nominated four times for Academy Awards and had won twice. He read good books and collected Impressionist paintings.
“Only those with some experience in living know how to age well,” he had said to the hip-hop artiste, who was in his young thirties, played poker recklessly and without flair, and had no idea of what The Actor was talking about.
The Actor played now with a leisure that somewhat masked his ferocious desire to destroy everyone else in the game. He was probably the best bluffer Cody had ever met. Cody was no slouch at the gull either. He had inherited a sparse and stoic expression that went back a ways on the family tree—his father’s side—to one of the original mountain men of the early 1880s. The eyes like chips of obsidian. The rest of him—his build, bold chin and cheekbones, hair as black as an Indian pony’s mane—was pure Navajo.
Two sevens and the jack of diamonds had been dealt on the flop. The Actor, who was sitting across the table from Cody, now might be holding quads: two sevens down, two on the flop. But at least trips, Cody thought.
With two jacks in the hole, Cody was already secure with a full house.
The Actor went all in: another eighty thousand. So this was going to be the ball cruncher of the all-night game. The Actor had to be smelling a possible full house in Cody’s cards. Either he had the nuts and Cody could save himself an expensive call, or The Actor was running a bluff with only three sevens. And why not? He played aggressively and bluffed with panache; he’d taken two big pots already against weaker players when they had better cards. Most actors who were any good at poker were lamentably short of easy tells, and adept at spotting phonies. Part of their professional training, Cody assumed.
Cody thought he had spotted something, though, during previous sessions when The Actor was in town. He tended to be more talkative when he was running a bluff. And it was his nature to relish gutting an excellent player holding a hand that should have won the pot. Persuading Cody to fold a full house would juice him for a week. In spite of long hours at the table with only a couple of breaks, The Actor’s eyes behind lightly tinted glasses were otherworldly bright, like the mystical jewel in a toad’s forehead. Yeah, he was up to stealing another pot, Cody thought, a little dry in the mouth but otherwise nerveless. Not the impression he conveyed, however, worrying a stack of chips with his left hand. Letting the suspense build.
They looked at each other, minds locked in contemplation of their strengths and rivalry.
“You don’t talk much about yourself, Cody. I’ve noticed that.”
“Not all that much to talk about.” He had a low-pitched, square-shooter’s voice, pure western Americana as to accent, the sort of voice ad agencies employed to sell rugged pickup trucks on TV or persuade people to eat more beef.
“Not married, I presume.”
Cody considered an answer.
“The only woman I ever wanted to marry is married to my best friend.”
“Oh. That is a dilemma.”
“No, I wouldn’t say so. I just go on lovin’ them both and it’s good enough for me.”
“Men less wise than yourself would consider it a tragedy.” The Actor had another nip of apple juice, not taking his eyes from Cody’s face as he enjoyed Cody’s other, presumed dilemma: to call or not to call. “You know, it’s a toss-up whether more tragedies are born of vanity, or of love.” He paused and let a smile uncurl. “Or is love just another form of vanity?”
“Beats the hell out of me,” Cody said, wondering what movie that was from.
“Well, it’s been enjoyable, Cody. Most enjoyable. But now I believe the moment of truth is at hand.” The Actor’s smile became a little cozier as he watched Cody with crafty passionate eyes.
Cody abruptly called, then flipped over his cards.
For a moment The Actor had an expression of airy surprise, like a man taking a misstep off a blue-sky girder. He looked for salvation on Fourth and Fifth Streets, the skid row of back-broke poker players. The dealer laid down a six of spades and a king.
“Nice doin’ business with you,” Cody said.
The Actor drew a long theatrical breath. “I may be screwed, but tell me I don’t deserve it.”
“You don’t,” Cody said, casting an eye on the card-room majordomo, who came over to box up his chips. Two hundred forty thousand for a night’s recreation. He’d won bigger, a
nd he’d lost his share. “Trips usually get the job done.”
“I don’t suppose I can interest you in one more turn of the cards for, say, fifty thousand?” The Actor wheedled. “Just to give me a little taste of satisfaction after such a disappointing night?”
“Nope,” Cody said. And, unexpectedly, he winked. “I’m afraid of you gamblers.” It was the pure-luck factor involved in high-card that made him leery. For thrills he rode roller coasters.
“I do have an early call, so I should be on my way to the set. But tell me: how did you learn to size up people so well?”
“People are easy,” Cody said. “Horses, they’re hard.”
5:40 A.M.
Tom Sherard was waiting at the north end of the Lincoln Grayle Theatre’s parking lot in the light of three emergency flares, antacid-pink semaphores to the sky above, when the helicopter arrived, huge and thundering. Sherard flew helicopters himself and as this one was landing he identified it as one of Sikorsky’s S-80 superlift models. Three General Electric engines. Its hover shook him and sucked the air out of his chest. Super Stallion. They had been built for the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, but Sherard observed as the helicopter settled down a hundred feet from him that it had no military markings. The Stallion could carry a couple of pilots, a crew chief, and fifty-five troops, or a max payload close to seventy thousand pounds.
With his head down he walked through a squall of dust and fumes toward the helicopter. Ten men—he assumed they were all men—disembarked. They were anonymous, all about the same size in dark gray paramilitary or SWAT gear, but Sherard didn’t see any automatic weapons. Sidearms only, probably Tasers.