by Farris, John
"I didn't know anyone could do that."
"Lincoln Grayle for one. Also the guy from Santa Rosa, California, who bit off the monsignor's face in the papal library."
Eden looked out at the orangerie, where Charmaine patiently waited with an unopened bottle of wine cooler in her hand.
"Do you think—"
"I'm not sure yet, but it's suspicious. Also she hasn't wanted me to touch her. As if she knows I could get a reading. And there are crosscurrents of extremely bad vibes in that villa where she's staying. I felt like I was wading through a tide of stinging jellyfish. Of course vibes hang on in places like this, where there could've been a couple of hundred people in and out during the past month, very few of them perfect in their love for Jesus."
"Then we don't want her hanging around with us."
Bertie thought about it.
"I'd rather know where she is than not know where she is."
"So we'll do lunch?"
"Let's find out what we can. About Charmaine, and those vibes I mentioned."
"You're not planning to—"
"Bad vibes or not, before I clean up I'd like to do a walk-through next door. Just keep Charmaine occupied while I'm snooping. Oh, you'll need a church key for those wine bottles. There's one on the bar over there. And Eden?" Bertie waited for Eden's full attention. "On this of all days we need to keep our wits about us."
"Remember that yourself. And I'll just have a Coke."
Chapter 45
11:24 A.M.
Brunch had been served to Lincoln Grayle and Eden Waring's doppelganger on the terrace of the second of three traylike levels of the magician's mountain home, designed, apparently, by a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright and constructed of native sandstone with a plentiful use of bronze-toned glass. While Tom Sherard and Courtney Shyla watched from the high-country hide that Courtney had selected on her first foray, Gwen previously had gone inside to put on clothes. And returned of her own volition. Tom noted this with interest and apprehension. After returning she had listened, saying little or nothing, to a pitch from Lincoln Grayle that went on for nearly a quarter of an hour, Grayle pacing around the terrace while Gwen remained seated, motionless, her head bowed, hands knotted in her lap. She looked tensely servile, Tom thought, sharing with Courtney binoculars that would not reflect sunlight. They were about three hundred yards from the house, in a jumble of sheared boulders below a southwest face of the mountain, scrub spruce that clung to deep cracks between the rocks providing good cover for their surveillance.
"What do you think he wants from her?" Courtney commented when Gwen and the magician devoted themselves to their meal. Gwen ate tentatively at first, but after a few bites of beef Wellington her appetite perked up. Food seemed also to loosen her tongue. Her end of the conversation was accompanied by mostly negative gestures. Sherard was glad to see that; he had thought she might have been mesmerized by the Trickster. The only other way to account for Gwen's continued presence on the terrace would have been black light; but obviously she wasn't a prisoner of high-quantum energies. So Grayle had come up with another means of keeping Gwen close to him. And he wanted her cooperation. Leoncaro, Tom thought, might have been right when he theorized Grayle needed the dpg to retrieve the missing half of his black soul.
"Maybe I can answer that," he said to Courtney. "But first you should know that Gwen is not exactly what she appears to be."
"Here we go again," Courtney said, rolling her eyes in mock resignation.
Chapter 46
11:27 A.M.
While Bertie supposedly was dawdling in an upstairs shower, Eden toured Charmaine around the first floor of the six-thousand-square-foot villa, this one with all of the Technicolor panache of a 1940s Carmen Miranda musical. Bertie slipped over the garden wall again and reentered the villa next door, not without a heavy baggage of misgivings.
Just inside the glass doors she stood very still for half a minute, eyes closing, hands levitating from her sides, fingertips beginning to tingle. She sensed, as if her outstretched fingers were divining rods, black arts, a household of evil, murder.
Also, thankfully, a benign presence.
"I'll watch your back," the entity said in her mind. "Have a look around."
"Thanks. What am I supposed to see here?"
"You know I can't answer that."
Bertie heard colorful, infectious music: hectic drummings, guitars, tambourines. Samba. Her hips began to move involuntarily. Gotta dance. When she opened her eyes one of the cariocas on the mural in the grand salon was moving also. Bare to below his slim brown waist, glistening with perspiration. He wore tight-fitting awning-striped bell-bottom pants and an old-fashioned straw boater. As Bertie looked at him with a twitch of a smile and the music became louder, throbbing with good feeling and diminishing some of the nastier vibrations inside the villa, the carioca doffed his boater, rolled it on its stiff brim the length of an outstretched arm, winked, and returned the hat to his head at a cocky angle. His feet were moving all the time to the frenzied beat or Brazilian conga drums.
"Do I know you?" Bertie said subvocally.
"Let us say we have a mutual acquaintance in Rome."
"Okay, let us say. What do I call you?"
"How about 'Bing'? I have always taken a shine to that name."
"Bing it is. What tripped your trigger, Bing? Do I really need to know what went down here?"
"Yes. But be cautious."
"The magician?"
"And his many surrogates. Thousands of them infest Las Vegas. This place is long overdue for a good dose of plague and fire."
"You sound like the late Pledger Lee Skeldon."
"I had the duty and pleasure of assisting him in his long career."
"So what are you doing in Vegas, Bing?"
"Unfortunately I was unable to prevent another terrible murder. The magician was a stronger presence. And I have no license to interfere in human events. Otherwise what need do souls have for human beings?"
"I thought it was the other way around."
"Of course not."
"Could you tone the music down a little, Bing? I can handle whatever is left here to deal with."
"A great deal, I'm afraid. And there's so little time. But you're a resourceful girl."
"Where do I start?"
"May I suggest the master suite? And I wouldn't leave Eden Waring alone for too long with your new friend."
"Way ahead of you there, Bing."
Chapter 47
11:38 A.M.
Gwen dabbed her lips with a linen napkin and asked one of the Hispanic girls who had waited on them at breakfast to adjust the tilt of the sunshade above her head. The other girl poured more fresh orange juice into her glass from a pitcher, looked inquiringly at Lincoln Grayle. He waved both of them away and off the terrace.
"The point is," Gwen said, "I've never time-traveled. I know how it's done, but—"
"What do you need," the magician said genially, "a time machine?" He had begun to enjoy her company, now that she was thawing out and accepting the fact that her hostility was misplaced. He really did want to help her achieve her full potential as an ex-doppelganger.
"Time is a machine."
"Oh."
"With an infinite number of entrances and exits. How complex do I let this get before I lose you completely?"
"That's enough of an explanation. My question was—"
Gwen had been staring into blue space, running her tongue thoughtfully over the edges of her front teeth, trying to ignore a relentlessly up tempo version of "Ding Dong Merrily on High" pouring out of multiple speakers on the terrace.
"What do I need? To start with, photographs of the period. Summer of 1926."
"Original photos? That would take time."
"No. I think good copies from an Internet archive might do. I'm not all that sure. But all images, even those, let's say, in a faded old Raphael tapestry from the early sixteenth century, can be used to gauge the exact position and velocity o
f the particles that resulted in the creation of the image, and once I'm logged into that flow of the machine, I know at just what point I 'get off.' It's like riding on a subway the thickness of a human hair, where all the tunnels are wormholes and I'm the only passenger."
"What if you want to travel to the future?"
"The past, obviously, is predictable; the future is not, according to chaos theory, so that's another story. But I'm not going to the future."
"Could I tag along with you? To Georgia in 1926?"
"No. Nothing personal, it's just that your string section doesn't play the same tune as my string section. Sub-atomically you'd wind up scattered in an infinity of universes, crying for your mommy."
"Like yourself, I never had a mommy. So explain to me how you'll know, out of several thousand prisoners on a hundred or more chain gangs, which one is—"
Gwen pushed her chair back, got up, and walked around the table to where Grayle sat, relaxed, smiling quizzically at her. She bent down swiftly to kiss him, one hand going to his face. Her nails raked skin and he flinched. Gwen stepped back, holding out her hand for him to inspect.
"I didn't draw blood or mess up your handsome profile. A little of your skin under my nails is all I need to take with me."
"How will that help you? Maybe you didn't understand. 'Smith' is not flesh of my flesh."
"I'm not hard of hearing" she said with a touch of Eden's asperity. "Remember what I said about your subatomic structure and travel to the future?"
"Yes."
"Once I locate 'Smith' the complexities are just beginning." There was perspiration on Gwen's faintly downy upper lip. "That little matter of chaos theory. The interesting thing about theoretical physics is, almost all conclusions lead to paradoxes. I guess that's why I'm a nut on the subject. Why I'm going to try to do this. When can you have those photos for me?"
Grayle tapped out a number on his wrist pager.
"Give me half an hour. One of my secretaries will deliver them to you. I need to go to the theatre; I have a show to put on. Will you be here when I get back?"
"No," Gwen said. "But I'll leave you something to remember me by. One more thing: please hang a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door to my room. If I make it back, it could be a thousand years from now, or thirty seconds ago. If a return is possible at all; I may not have a way of fine-tuning it."
"Now you tell me." There was no censure in his voice. Until a few days ago, until Eden's doppelganger came to his attention, he had thought that he was the loneliest entity in the universe.
Chapter 48
11:46 A.M.
Bertie joined Eden and Charmaine in the orangerie of the Carmen Miranda villa after her return from next door, a hasty shower, and a change of clothes: bolero jacket, black leather pants with painted peacocks on each leg, and python-skin boots; an outfit Charmaine practically swooned over. Fashions gave them all something to chat about on a level of vapidity that allowed Bertie and Eden to converse about more serious matters subvocally.
"You're still damp behind the ears. Everything okay?"
"Worse than we figured. The magician got to our friend here, however he works his spells, and the results ain't pretty."
"Evil enchantment, you mean."
"As good a description as any. Her lover was an Atlanta detective named Lewis Gruvver. I doubt if he played any poker last night. He's floating face up in a room-size aquarium beneath a glass floor in the master suite over there."
"Sleeping with the fishes?"
"Don't make me laugh in Charmaine's face. He's very dead. Shot once in the temple."
"Charmaine's not exactly grief-stricken, is she?"
"She hears a different drummer now. Eden, you have to go to Los Angeles, right away."
"I missed some of that, I think. Los Angeles? Tom told us not to get separated."
"This qualifies as an emergency, babe. Gruvver was an investigator on the Pledger Lee case. He got suspicious of Lincoln Grayle somehow, and he'd spent most of his time in Vegas documenting his suspicions. I read all of his notes. We already know what Grayle, or Mordaunt as he's famously known around the Vatican, has been trying to do: kill the world's most prominent religious leaders. Many of whom are also Caretakers in some kind of holding pattern."
"Care what?"
(To Charmaine Bertie says, "Michael Kors, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Christian La Croix—and Dior, of course—depending on the season and the occasion. I never let anyone except Wendell Wyatt touch my hair, and most of the time I ask for Merope Miglietta or Roque Velacqua to do my makeup?")
"Caretakers. We'll cover that later. Right now there's a Buddhist Patriarch from Thailand at the UCLA Medical Center, kidney cancer or something. Gruvver compiled a comprehensive list of people who were entertained by Grayle after his shows, going back more than a year. Two of the people on that list showed up at the papal audience intending to murder Leoncaro. A boy named Jimmy Nixon did Pledger Lee Skeldon, remember Jimmy's sweet face? He was also on that list of Grayle's select people. And so are three others who are currently on staff at UCLA Med. A male nurse, a physical therapist, and a resident oncologist. Gruvver concluded that the Buddhist is a likely target of Mordaunt's. Makes sense to me."
(Eden, holding back a yawn with the back of her hand, says to Charmaine, "Couture? Me? Shucks no. I'm more of a connoisseur of lowbrow.")
"What could I hope to do about it?"
"Make certain that none of those three get anywhere near the Patriarch."
"How?"
"Come on. You're Eden Waring. You're famous for your premonitions."
"Notorious."
"Even better. You had four magazine covers that week. In this country alone. Der Spiegel went nuts over you. That Germanic theme of déjà vu. So fly down to L.A., demand to see the hospital administrator, do a number, get the old boy ironclad security."
"You know what will happen. They'll throw my butt out on the street."
"The Fox Network won't throw your butt on the street."
"Oh, God. The Fox Network."
"You must do this, Eden."
(Charmaine says to Bertie, "What are designers like? I mean, other than gay?")
"Bertie, I'm not leaving you alone with this airhead werewolf."
"Yawn again, excuse yourself to take a nap, walk out the front door, get into the van, and tell the Blackwelder guys to run you over to the airport. Don't worry about me and Charmaine. We'll do lunch, have a fun afternoon, and then I'm going to seriously fuck with her mind."
(And to Charmaine Bertie says, "Designers? They're all like monks. The sort who illuminated manuscripts, obsessing by candlelight in monkish cells. In thrall to line and form. Fresh air never touched their eyeballs. Or else they're crazy as bedbugs. Sometimes both at the same time.")
Chapter 49
12:22 P.M.
One of Lincoln Grayle's hirelings delivered an envelope to Gwen on the terrace where she'd spent the past hour and a half. Photographs. She looked briefly at several of them, slipped the photos back into the envelope, and said something to Lincoln Grayle, who was talking on his cell phone. He nodded. Gwen got up with the envelope and walked into the house, having a last glance at the magician before she disappeared.
"Looks worried," Courtney Shyla commented, lowering her rubberized binoculars.
"Did you catch a glimpse of any of those photographs?" Tom Sherard asked her.
"Couldn't tell much because of the sight lines from here," she said. "They appeared to be mostly period stuff. Men wearing high collars and bowler hats like my grandfather Wallace when he was sheriff of Rio Blanco County, Colorado. Streetcars, old cars, and trucks, what looked like a line of convicts swinging pickaxes—"
"A chain gang."
"Yeah, old stuff like that." She looked at Sherard. "Mean anything to you?"
"I'm afraid so." Sherard also looked worried. "We need to get her out of there as quickly as possible."
Lincoln Grayle had finished his conversation, closed his cell phone, and
was putting it away as he rose from the table. Sunlight flashed from gold chains at his throat and on one wrist. He stretched himself, limber as a big cat; momentarily motionless and bent nearly double with his locked hands high above his shoulder blades; a tortured position maintained with ease, he seemed to look right at them.
"Did you move?" Courtney whispered to Tom.
"No." He wanted to; his bad knee was killing him.
"Okay."
They were eye to eye, faces two feet apart. Her breath had a flavor of spearmint gum. She narrowed her eyes slightly.
"What is it?"
"The sun," she said. She looked down at the walking stick in his right hand. The gold lion's head was a light from a thin shaft of sun slanting through a break in the high greenery above them. "Damn. He might have noticed that."
Sherard moved the stick slightly toward him and the lion's head lost its luminosity.
On the terrace Lincoln Grayle had turned away and was contemplating a small chest on the table.
"We're nearly three hundred yards from him," Sherard said. "His eyesight can't be that keen."
"Mine is," Courtney said a little boastfully. "On a clear mountain night I can see the two largest moons of Jupiter without a scope. Let's ease on out of here. Do we try to retrieve the subject while Grayle is still domiciled?"
"I said as quickly as possible."
"Right." Courtney started to move backward in a crouch, a hand on his sleeve. She stopped. "What is he doing now?" She steadied herself on one knee, raised her binoculars for a closer look.
Lincoln Grayle had opened the chest and was taking out several balls, each the size of a tennis ball but transparent. Plastic or glass. When he had four balls in his large hands he began to juggle them.
Courtney handed Sherard the binoculars. "He's working on hand and eye coordination. Very smooth. And it must be hard to see those balls in full daylight."