by Farris, John
"I wouldn't want to throw my chi at Grayle. I have a hunch I'd get it right back, like a live wire across my face. He'd laugh."
Eden spread her hands. "And that's where we are."
"I believe you both underestimate yourselves," Leoncaro said. "There was, I believe, an incident involving a nuclear device surrounded by a highly charged electrical field?"
Eden was surprised, again, that he knew so much about her.
"Okay, that. No idea how I managed it. I don't think I could do it again if I lived a thousand—"
"It's simply that you don't want to do these things, because they frighten you. As for your powers, Eden: they exist. Dormant most of the time, behind barriers you've erected. But both you and Bertie are, at unpredictable and highly stressed times, capable of tapping into the Dark Energy and focusing it."
"Dark Energy? What's that?"
"The Energy that expands the universe and keeps it humming. That builds galaxies, and tears them apart. A force that even Mordaunt is helpless to deal with."
Leoncaro beckoned the three of them to step around behind his desk with him. From a drawer he withdrew a small but heavy bronze casket that looked as if it might be three thousand years old. Placed it on his desk blotter and invited Eden to raise the lid.
Lying on faded velvet inside were two small chunks of a dark dense metallic substance.
"Each little piece you see here may have traveled for a billion light-years through the firmament before reaching Earth. And each retains a portion of the Dark Energy that formed it—let us say, one-millionth of the power necessary for a firefly to light up its behind."
They all smiled, even Leoncaro. Then he turned serious again.
"Nevertheless, even an infinitesimal residue of Dark Energy can be useful to you, as a means of controlled contact with the entire celestial reservoir through which these bits of metal once traveled for eons. There is one for each of you. Mount them in some manner so that you may always wear them in contact with your bodies." His green-eyed gaze was almost unnerving. "They will work for you, when you most need their help. And, Tom?"
"Yes, Sebastiano?"
"I have not forgotten about you."
Leoncaro rose from his chair and opened a nearby armoire, reached down from a shelf a long bubble-wrapped and taped package that he handed over to Sherard.
"Your lion's-head walking stick, for your continued protection. I know how responsible you feel for the lives of these young women. I couldn't ask you to go in harm's way with nothing more substantial than a side arm."
"But I thought—"
"It was decided to remove your stick from the body of the shape-shifter once a similar length of mopane wood, suitably sharpened and consecrated, was also driven through the remains. And of course those remains are now entombed in stone, never to be disturbed."
"By the way" Bertie asked, "what happened to her—husband, the one who fainted?"
"He was easily persuaded, once he recovered part of his faculties, to undertake a lifetime of prayer and silent contemplation in an old cloister that overlooks what I am told is one of the loveliest fjords in all Norway."
"What we don't understand," Sherard said, "is how Mordaunt, or Grayle, is turning out shape-shifters to do his killing for him."
"Wouldn't we all like to know?" Leoncaro said thoughtfully. He looked at Eden. "Possibly you could find out for us. Remember that there is not so much to fear while he is in human form. That is when Mordaunt is most vulnerable; when he believes he is in control of you."
The old rotary-style white telephone on the Pope's desk rang twice: a discreet reminder.
"I'm afraid that I have backlogged my appointments until well past the dinner hour." He smiled in apology. "Tomorrow's dinner, very likely."
Eden, holding the bronze casket under one arm, looked at Bertie with a fateful smile.
"Let's go to Las Vegas."
"I will be praying for you," Leoncaro said. "Go with God and in full confidence of your great strength."
Leoncaro arose from his prie-dieu in what had been, moments before, the solitude of his Spartan bedroom. Now that his prayers were done, the room began to fill up.
"Let's make it brief" he grumbled. "I still have a lot of work left today."
The Caretaker who until recently had been known as Pledger Lee Skeldon said, "What's this about 'Dark Energy,' Sebastiano?"
"I remembered the term from an article on stellar dynamics I read in Scientific American."
"And pieces of meteorite?" said the white-bearded Rebbe from Brooklyn.
"Who knows? They might well have been from the engine block of a Jeep the Germans eighty-eighted, or a tank tread. Leoncaro picked them up in a rubbled lot when he was a boy. They looked interesting, so I have kept them all of these years."
"Telling whoppers to innocent young things" the Buddhist nun Ling Qi chided him.
"I'm surprised at all of you," Leoncaro said. "Have none of you seen one of my favorite Disney movies? The one about the baby circus elephant with extremely large ears? So large he couldn't walk without tripping over them. That, and the laughter of the other elephants, was very hard on the youngster's confidence?'
"Dumbo the flying elephant," said the Metropolitan of the Russian Orthodox Church.
"That movie. Well, poor Dumbo was shunned and frustrated because he didn't look like the other baby elephants. But he did have this wise-guy little mouse friend—"
"I loved that part" Ling Qi confided to the group of Caretakers.
"—Mouse friend," Leoncaro continued, frowning at her, "who convinced Dumbo that as long as he had a certain 'magic feather' with him he could fly, flapping his large ears and soaring through the sky with a gaggle of reprobate crows."
"Isn't it 'gaggle of geese'?" said the prominent Islamic Imam and scholar who had just popped in.
"Don't know. Anyway, there was nothing magical about the feather, of course. Dumbo could fly perfectly well without it. The feather was just a—"
"Confidence-builder," the currently unemployed Caretaker concluded for him. "Smart, Sebastiano."
"Can't hurt. Those girls will need all the confidence they can muster." He looked hard at the Caretaker, who was loafing around now that Pledger Lee had been laid to rest. "Don't you think you ought to be on your way to Las Vegas yourself? No need to fully assimilate another persona. Just move in temporarily and as unobtrusively as possible on someone in a position to keep an eye on the situation."
"Been there," the Caretaker replied agreeably. "About to do that. I've already located just the guy. You know, it was a heck of a long time for me between visits out there. Pledger Lee was a child evangelist doing revival meetings in that shabby tent of his in those days. Brother, you don't know how hot it can get until you've done Vegas in the summertime. Hell hath no fury. Anyway, little Pledger Lee was just across the street from where Mickey Cohen was putting up the Flamingo—the Mick was Jewish, but one night he—"
"Go," Leoncaro said, in his most commanding voice.
"It's a good story, Sebastiano."
"Some other time. May we know who you've chosen to co-opt while you're out there again?"
"He's a vacationing cop from Atlanta. Small coincidence. He worked my—I mean—Pledger Lee's case. What I could tell him."
"No, you won't."
"And he has a gorgeous girlfriend."
"I'm sure that had nothing to do with your choosing him."
"Yes, it did."
Chapter 31
MOUNT CHARLESTON, NEVADA
OCTOBER 24
1:15 P.M. PDT
"How do you feel?" Lincoln Grayle said to Eden Waring's doppelganger.
"Not any better than I did last night. Like I tried taking a shortcut through a demolition derby. My bones feel soft and my joints ache. Could you please turn that horrible light off for a little while?"
"I'm afraid I can't do that. Not until we've reached a level of mutual trust that I'm hoping is not too far in the future—"
&
nbsp; "Trust?! You had me kidnapped and a man was shot, probably killed!"
He adjusted the bullet-shaped head of the slender black standing lamp that had been aimed at the middle of his bed where Gwen was sprawled, wearing a pair of the magician's pj's, her weakened body covering the gold script G on the black silk coverlet. The bed was about the size of a badminton court. Everything else in the bedroom, including the walls and the smoke-toned mirrored ceiling, was either gold or black. As was the magician himself this afternoon. He wore black loafers without socks, black jeans, a harlequin-style black-and-gold cashmere turtleneck sweater, glasses with elliptical black metal frames and gold-tinted lenses. He straddled a lacquered black Chinese Chippendale chair and smiled ruefully at her.
"I regret the violence. But I had no time to waste. If you'd returned to your homebody, then I might never have had this opportunity."
"I had you so wrong! What a bastard you are. Smuggling me aboard your plane in a theatrical trunk—I could've smothered."
"But doppelgangers, I am told by an expert, can't die: only cease to exist. Something of a paradox, but we'll pass over it for now. The trunk seemed to be the best way to get you out of Italy, with all of the added security at the airport prompted by Al Qaeda and their Italian friends."
A few tears leaked from Gwen's reddened eyes. She barely had the strength to blink. "What do you want? I'm not Eden! Why don't you just let me go!?"
"I've always known that you weren't Eden, since I was allowed that glimpse of you on the street in Nairobi. I suppose you were just feeling playful that day, but I was inspired to speculate about the possibilities you presented. Doppelgangers have long been an interest of mine. Now I have one."
"I won't talk to you anymore if you're going to continue t-torturing me!"
Sunlight slanting through the solar-gain windows of Grayle's Mount Charleston hacienda made the light from the hundred-watt ultraviolet bulb in the bullet lamp all but invisible; its power to render a doppelganger nearly helpless was not diminished.
When he continued to study her intently but without speaking Gwen cried out bitterly, "Just turn the lamp off for a little while. I promise I'll—"
"Stay? But you can't make promises to me, Gwen. Can you?" Her lips clamped whitely together. "It's Eden who makes all of the decisions for her dpg," Grayle said.
"Sure. You have it all figured out. Without Eden, I'm a big nothing."
"And you hate the restrictions of your situation. You even hate your homebody, at times."
Gwen had no reply. Today she hated everybody.
"What if we can get you free of Eden, so that you can be Gwen in more than name only? That's a promise I can make."
"Like hell you can," the hard metal of her spirit beginning to show through her self-pity. It felt good. "You don't understand doppelgangers at all. Neither does your so-called expert, whoever that is."
"Someone you know well, I believe. Maybe it's time for him to come in. I have a crowded schedule this afternoon."
Lincoln Grayle activated the cell phone he wore on one wrist like a slightly oversized diver's watch. He relayed a summons, then reached out and, to Gwen's relief, turned off the ultraviolet light.
"I know the effects will continue for several minutes, so you'll be good for now. Can you sit up? Wonderful, sweetheart."
"What's going on?" Gwen said suspiciously, working at keeping her woozy head up.
Double doors to the bedroom suite were opened. Dr. Marcus Woolwine walked in. Legs as bowed and muscular as ever, sunlight forming a nimbus around his deeply tanned bald head, flaring from the surfaces of his mirrored sunglasses.
Gwen blinked a couple of times, bringing him into sharp focus.
"Oh! God!"
"Hello, Gwen. Such a great pleasure to see you again. I would like to apologize for some of the things I once said to you. A soulless facade, a fake, a nonbeing. But, after all. It wasn't easy being forced to consume humble pie—a man of my stature in the remodeling business."
Dr. Woolwine was followed into the bedroom by a Chinese male anesthesiologist wearing OR scrubs, pushing a stainless-steel cart of meds and bags of IV saline solution dangling from a short pole.
Gwen's mouth was locked open at a grisly angle as he approached her, his bullet head thrust forward with a smile prepared to be ingratiating. She watched herself withdraw, tiny and insubstantial, in the twin convex mirrors concealing Woolwine's eyes.
"From the day we both, ah, found it sensible to flee from Plenty Coups," Woolwine said, "my interest in you has grown with each passing hour. I have the good fortune now to be in the employ of a man who shares my fascination with doppelgangers." He turned to Grayle with a courteous expression, unusual for a man with an ego to match his arrogance. As Gwen remembered him. "And now we are ready for her, at your pleasure."
"What are you going to do to me?" Gwen screamed at the magician. She was still too weak from the black light to get much lung power into her scream.
He sat down on the bed and gently ran a hand over her head, stroked a cheek with his fingertips.
"You'll soon have the life you've always wanted."
Grayle said reassuringly. "Disengaged at last, freed from the tyranny of a homebody. For your freedom, all I ask in return is a favor."
"Do you a favor? I'd rather vomit in my own eyes."
"But we'll talk more about that when I see you tomorrow."
Chapter 32
3:20 P.M.
Lincoln Grayle had finished an arduous session on the parallel bars in his gym and was relaxing beneath the hands of his masseuse when Cornell Crigler was brought in to see him.
Grayle dismissed the masseuse and sat up naked on the side of the table, looking at the uneasy Cornell. "Tell me about your brother-in-law."
"Lewis is my half brother, Great One." Cornell, the childhood stutterer, needed when under duress to think about each word before he spoke. "I'm tuh-ten years older. We never really known each other all that well, although these days with E-mail it's easier keepin' in touch. I grew up in Chicago, and—"
"Let's keep to the point, Cornell. He's a detective with the Atlanta Police Department, you told Gaby. Why is he in Las Vegas asking questions about me?"
"Usin' some of his vacation time. He was a part of the Pledger Lee Skeldon murder investigation team. Case is closed, fuh-far as Atlanta PD is concerned. But Lewis, he made a connection between that case, the death of Sai Rampa in India, and the attempt on the Dalai Lama's life. Said to me last night, 'Cornell, I'm convinced the Pope also was attacked in Rome this week, but you won't hear a word; Vatican's too good at coverin' up when it threatens the stability of the church.' Right now Lewis is attempting to contact a few people on the Pope's invite list Tuesday. So I thought you ought to know—"
Grayle shrugged. "The connection Lewis has made leads straight to me. Which does explain his interest in the Lucky Ticket list that we gave out to his lovely companion."
Cornell said, looking everywhere except at the splendid body on display a few feet from him, "I did tell Lewis right off that he shouldn't mess with important people like yourself, since he don't have a thing to go on but suspicions."
"Cop smarts. Give Lewis credit, Cornell. No need to defend yourself. It's an awkward situation for you."
"Wuh-what do you want me to do, Great One?"
"Don't be nervous. I don't see that we have a problem. Other than to somehow make up for our bad luck in Rome. And it was all planned so carefully." Cornell's brow furrowed in commiseration. "But let's think about Lewis. He's clever and tenacious. Know what I think of clever people, Cornell?" He didn't wait for Cornell to finish shaking his head. "Never can get enough of them. So I look forward to meeting Lewis. And what's-her-name."
"Charmaine."
"Where are they staying?"
"Bahla."
"On the cheap, of course. Maybe, since one or the other of them is going to do me a favor soon, they should have choicer accommodations for the remainder of their stay. Their own pool,
hot tub."
Cornell tried not to look puzzled or apprehensive. The blond masseuse had returned, wearing chrome-plated chains and manacles around her shoulders like an iron maiden's boa; forty pounds if they were an ounce, Cornell reckoned, but she didn't appear to even notice the weight. The masseuse was shapely and missed being beautiful because the iron in her Germanic soul blocked expression from her flawless face like a course of Botox.
She spent two and a half minutes locking Grayle into various contorted positions while Cornell, not yet dismissed, fretted silently, wondering if the chaining of Grayle was a prelude to some variation on kinky sex play that he might be forced to watch. Cornell was a Bad Soul, but he did have his druthers.
The magician and the masseuse, however, appeared to be all business as he supervised his heavy bondage, making suggestions as to how and where the chains could be tighter.
With the last padlock in place she helped Grayle down from the massage table. He was bent nearly double. He could move, only shuffling a few inches at a time and with great effort. The masseuse left again. Grayle made his way to the edge of a ten-foot-square pool. It looked deep.
"Do you have a watch, Cornell?"
"Yes, Great One."
"I'm going to sit on the bottom of the pool for a while, practice getting out of these chains. Let me know when eight minutes is up."
"Eight minutes? How do I do that?"
Grayle managed to look back over one shoulder, the shoulder that still contained bits of a .470 Kynoch slug and which hurt like hell. But he loved the pain. Pain was pride. Pain was money.
"Just jump in and holdup your fingers where I can see them, Cornell," the magician said as he began to concentrate, preparing his remarkable body for the ordeals ahead.
Chapter 33
6:25 P.M.
After his workout in the pool, from which he emerged thirty seconds ahead of schedule and just as Cornell was taking off his shoes, Lincoln Grayle napped, then shared a light supper with two members of his design team. They were working on an illusion that the magician called "The Gilded Cage." It also involved a perilous escape, with Grayle wrapped this time in barbed wire, adding to the degree of difficulty. He was to be dropped from the highest bridge in North America, which was in West Virginia, into a river chasm some five hundred feet below. He had conceived the Gilded Cage stunt two years ago. The design challenges were enormous. The Gilded Cage would replace the illusion for which he'd been denied access to the Colosseum in Rome. That production, now on the back burner, featured some comely female gladiators, a chariot drawn by six black horses, a pair of lions, and Grayle himself locked inside a body bag with ten pounds of raw liver.