by Hal Ackerman
The service for Nicholette was being conducted in a small amphitheater on the level below them. The arched portal and floor of the entryway were made of marble. The walls appeared smooth until you looked more closely and saw the hundreds of little sliding vault drawers that were built in. Morty shook his head profoundly when he realized what they were. Several hundred mourners were gathered on the grassy lawn looking up at a portly, white-whiskered Reverend Parsegian. Stein recognized him from late night cable TV. His voice was raspy with the ravages of non-filter cigarettes and Aquavit. He opened a small parcel wrapped in a lovely Indian cloth.
“Death,” he intoned, “whatever we think it is, it’s bound to be something else.” He took a handful of what were presumably Nicholette’s remains and scattered the ashes to the winds. “Let her beauty fill the world,” he prayed.
“Any time you want to tell me what we’re doing,” Morty hinted.
Stein scanned the crowd below him intently. “I hope I’m wrong but I don’t think I am.”
“That clears it all up.”
Stein sensed peripheral movement along the ridgeline. Fifty yards away, the diminutive figures of two mourners who had separated from the main body were absconding in rapid lockstep. Paul Vane was wearing a dark suit and designer sunglasses. Michael Es-posito was in Hunter Thompson gonzo white.
“That’s them,” Stein whispered.
Michael was doing most of the talking. Vane listened like a child being told a harsh truth by a younger, wiser, crueler boy. Stein tried to penetrate through the pantomime. “I think they may have my daughter and my friend in their car.”
After a brief huddle below, Vane and Michael Esposito departed in opposite directions.
“You take the little one,” Stein ordered.
Morty bolted out of their little culvert in the direction of Paul Vane.
“No, the other little one,” Stein yelled, but Morty covered the ground across the open field with amazing speed and was nearly upon him.
Michael Esposito had undulated along the back side of the marble wall and was out of sight. Stein gauged where he would emerge, and lumbered down the grassy side of the hill, still favoring his injured ankle. The grade was steeper than it appeared and the grass concealed uneven contours of the hillside. He couldn’t break his hurtling momentum and had to throw himself to the ground and roll. The impact knocked the wind out of him and he felt like he had run into a stone wall. For a moment he feared he was paralyzed. He took mental inventory, discovered nothing was broken and pulled himself up by the handles of the sliding crypts.
Moments later Michael Esposito came around the wall and Stein stepped into his path.
“Hello, Michael,” Stein said.
If the little shit were frightened he didn’t show it. Stein grabbed him by the scruff of his shoulders and swore to him “If any harm comes to my daughter, I mean any harm, I will tear every inch of you apart, starting with your eyes. Where are they?”
Stein’s threat was met with a smile, a killer’s courtesy. “Lovely girl,” he said.
Morty Greene pushed a miserable Paul Vane into the picture. Vane’s eyes were red and he extended his hands to be cuffed. “I am the man you’re looking for. Michael had nothing to do with it.”
Vane’s eyes were on Michael Esposito, imploring him to look upon him with favor, which he did not.
“Are they in the car?” Stein directed the question to the one place he thought he might get a straight answer. He thought he saw a sympathetic response from Paul Vane telling him “no.”
Morty Greene’s investigation went along less subtle ground, He bent down and grabbed the elegant cuffs of Esposito’s pant legs and lifted up and inverted the man several feet off the ground. He shook loose his car keys and quite a bit of pocket change, a nail clipper and silver flask of brandy.
“Easy on the rough stuff,” Stein said. “He likes it too much.”
The electronic key set the welcoming lights flashing on Paul Vane’s Mercedes. They had parked it at the end of a row for easy egress. Stein ran to the car and threw open the doors to liberate his daughter and friend girl.
But the car was empty. He knuckled the hood of the trunk. He pressed the button enough times so it finally opened. He pulled up the platform that hid only the miniature spare tire, no prisoners
Morty was right behind him with the culprits in tow when out of the shadows of the “Walls of Eternity,” David Hart emerged.
“Oh Good Christ,” Morty gaped. “Another one.”
“I thought I might find you here,” Stein said.
“You should be more careful with the women you love,” Hart advised him cooly. “That’s three of them you’ve lost.”
Vane beseeched Stein to believe him as he grasped for Michael Esposito’s hand. “I never meant for them to put them in danger.”
“Ironic, isn’t it, how things work out?” said David Hart. And Stein watched as the picture was shifted one more time by the deft hands of the 3-card Monte dealer: Michael Esposito spurned the hand of Paul Vane and stepped into the embrace of David Hart.
“Did you think I was blind to your little game?” Hart flaunted his disdain at the flabbergasted and now twice-jilted Paul Vane. “You have such compassion, Paul. You didn’t want to witness my humiliation. Compassion must be a quality that comes with age. And God knows you have oodles of that. So much age that it makes me wretch every time you touch me. Your old alligator fingers. Your old smell. And I’ve found someone who will take care of me in perpetuity.”
David Hart kissed Michael Esposito on the face and neck, never taking his eyes off Paul Vane as he did. “You thought you were leaving me?”
“Oh my,” Paul Vane breathed.
Morty pulled the smoochers apart. “That is really disgusting.”
“You don’t like to see two gay men kissing?” Esposito taunted him.
“I don’t even like to see straight men kissing.”
The picture manifested itself to Stein for the eleventh different time, but this time he knew it had come to rest. Stein realized that once again he had allowed all his conclusions to rest on the outdated karmic principle that good prevailed and that people got what they deserved. Hence his unchallenged acceptance of the notion that Paul Vane had been the one to leave David Hart. It was obvious now that the reverse had been true, that David had left him. David and Michael Esposito were the molecule; Vane was the odd man out, a stray electron spinning in lonely orbit around them.
Stein stepped into the narrow space between Hart and Esposito. “The very next thing that’s going to happen is you are telling me where my daughter is or my homophobic friend will start bashing heads.”
“Yes, that’s very butch,” said Michael, “but Let’s talk about what’s actually going to happen. Your daughter’s safety is time sensitive. So the sooner we all agree, the happier we all are.” He saw Stein’s abhorrence and reveled in it. “You think you’re smarter and morally superior to everyone. You’re a joke. You’re a minstrel show. Everything you believe about the world is over.”
Stein made himself play “Moonlight Sonata” in his mind. Fingers moving slowly up and slowly down.
David Hart got cranky. “Hello. I believe I’m here.”
Michael smiled at his new lover then at the others. “In a few moments David and I are going to depart for destinations unknown, taking with us only the ten or twelve million we’ve garnered so far from our little moonlighting venture.”
“Our little moonlight adventure,” Paul Vane amended, with just a bit of irony. “You said you were going to let him down easy and come back to me.”
At the end of every relationship, one lover is willing to take as many wrong roads as necessary to find the right way home; the other has already called off the search. Michael patted Vane’s perspiring pate. “Look at it this way, sweetie. Everybody wins. Mat-tingly gets his whole company. David gets taken care of in perpetuity. In your old age you’ve had both me and David in our glorious youth. And n
ow you get the pleasure of knowing you’ve brought the two of us together. You’re thrice blessed.”
“My daughter,” said Stein.
Esposito went on with blithe unconcern “In an hour, when David and I are safely outside the reach of extradition treaties, you will be informed where to find your ill-mannered progeny and her disagreeable nanny, or whoever that cloying woman is.”
Vane looked at Michael, still trying to salvage a way to think of him kindly. “My dear boy,” he whispered, “you have to tell him where his daughter is now. An hour will be too late.”
“I’m not dear, I’m not a boy, and I’m not yours,” said Michael.
Vane turned to Stein. “I know where she is. I can take you to her.”
“You don’t know anything,” David Hart spat. His hand flashed into his pocket and emerged with a snub-nosed .22 pistol. The report in the wide-open air sounded like a little pop. Vane clutched his chest and went down. Morty Greene engulfed Hart, took away his gun and then very nearly disarmed him in the literal sense. Michael tried to bolt, but Morty did a one-arm pushup, holding David to the ground and leg-whipping his fleeing accomplice. Small bodies lay strewn all about.
Stein knelt alongside Paul Vane and pushed a handkerchief against the wound to staunch the blood.
“Are you all right?”
“Just a glancing blow to the heart.”
Now the entire landscape began to vibrate. The SWAT helicopter swooped in over the top of the hill. Chief Bayliss leaped out again, trying to understand through the tableau in front of him what might have taken place. He saw Morty Greene on the ground holding Michael Esposito down with his legs and David Hart down with his arm
Vane looked up at Bayliss from Stein’s arms. “We need to get to Espé headquarters right away.”
“Who is this?” Bayliss demanded to know. “Who are all of them?” David Hart and Michael Esposito and Paul Vane all began to speak at once.
“Sir.” Morty Greene suggested politely. “Best you listen to the little bleeding one.”
NINETEEN
THE POLICE HELICOPTER whizzed east over the Palisades. The cabin was filled with noise and activity. Esposito and David Hart were handcuffed in the tail of the craft amidst Bayliss and a dozen Special Ops. Paul Vane was wedged in the jump seat between Morty Greene and the pilot. A medic had dressed his wound. It was painful but not life threatening. Stein was an empty ghost, his face pressed against the plastic bubble, looking down over the terrain. Edna Greene sat alongside him and could read his thoughts. “Your baby will be all right,” she said. “I don’t believe any of these men would hurt a child.”
Stein nodded thanks. But not because he believed her.
Paul Vane nudged the pilot’s elbow and pointed down. “There it is.” The pilot brought them down over the loading platform. The deck foreman who had taken over for Morty Greene was a muscular Italian in a formfitting undershirt with a marine buzz cut and bright corneas that made him look continually startled. Bayliss held onto the bulwarks and picked his way through the matrix of limbs and weapons, positioning himself to be closest to the exit when the bird touched down.
They alighted on the Astroturf front lawn of the executive wing. Bayliss leaped out first. The paramedic helped Paul Vane down. Aided by an adrenaline high and unmindful of his wound, Vane led the unit around to the elevated side of the building where the executive office wing fronted the warehouse silos.
“You know the layout?” Stein asked.
“I’ve been here once or twice,” he said with a tight smile.
Inside, there were five corridors leading out from the central lobby. Bayliss deployed his men in groups to cover each artery of the wing. “The rest of you wait here,” he directed.
“Like hell am I waiting here,” said Stein.
“I’m not messing around with you, Howard. Stay out of the way!”
“This might be the time to mention that my name is Harry.”
The paramedic who had taken Vane down the hall to the bathroom to re-dress his bullet wound now came running back in a state of agitation. “Somebody’s locked in the girl’s loo.”
“Angie!” Stein bolted down the wing that the medic had just come from. The sound of muffled pounding could be heard from inside.
“Angie? We’ll have you out in a second.”
He tugged on the door but it was solid and locked and he couldn’t budge it. He yelled down the hall. “Does anyone have a key?”
Morty Greene had gotten his mother comfortably seated in the ergonomic chair in the main lobby and now ran up to where Stein was tugging on the door. He extracted a skeleton key that fit into the lock.
“I’m not going to ask how you have that,” said Stein.
“I appreciate that.”
The thick double door opened and Lila sprang out, a total wreck After a moment’s relief Stein looked past her. “Where is she?”
She could barely look at Stein, so wracked with guilt was she. “They wanted to take her picture.”
“You let her go off with strangers?”
“I know where she is,” said Vane.
Stein tried to hear relief in his voice but heard only restrained dread. Paul guided them through a door that looked like it led to an emergency staircase, but instead opened into a narrow corridor. It took a surprise dogleg to the left and seemed now to be angled upward. The perspective gave no evidence of elevation, but walking was more difficult. There was another security door at the end of the corridor. Stein’s blood froze at the sound of running water. Steady. Unabated. Neutral. The way it had run that night at Nicholette’s.
The doorway opened up onto a webwork of metal catwalks encircling an observation point fifty feet above an enormous open lake, two hundred feet around. One slender metal tightrope wire crossed above the center. Anyone traversing that bridge would feel like a Flying Wallenda. The bridge was vibrating.
A steady hum and splash emanated from the depths of the pit where epic-sized mechanical arms were rotating heavy steel mixing rudders through the liquid below. Through sluices at symmetrical points on the circumference torrents of ingredients cascaded into the lake. The roiling liquid formed a layer of foamy soap scum several feet high that looked like weary cappuccino.
“Daddy.”
The sound of Angie’s voice penetrated through every other sound, as it always had, all of Stein’s life since she was born.
“There!” Lila pointed down into the lake where archipelagos of glycerin islands dotted the surface. The not very solid masses were diminishing in size, from large islands to very small ones, and then disappearing into the mixing blades. Angie was kneeling adrift on one of the tiny glycerin islands. Her legs and her arms were bound.
Vane melted into a pool of shame under Stein’s horrified look.
Stein could only choke out, “You weren’t going to tell me?”
“He promised she’d be safe.”
“Angie, I’m coming! Hold tight.” In a spastic frenzy Stein tore off his shirt and ripped at his shoes, trying to pull them off without untying them.
“Leave them on,” Vane instructed. “The glycerin-alcohol tincture is more buoyant than water. You need the ballast. You have to pull her down to the bottom. Then swim through the drainage pipes.” Stein listened carefully. “You’re going to be under for at least sixty seconds. Tell her not to take too deep a breath. You won’t be able to get down deep enough with too much air in your lungs.”
“Hurry, Daddy.”
Stein maneuvered slowly out over the thin, vibrating, wire bridge. When he was positioned nearly above Angie he closed his eyes and plunged. Feet first. Stein had never learned to dive; he had never liked water. At the moment of impact he curled his knees to his chest, gulped a breath and cannonballed through the surface of the viscous liquid.
At the bottom, the tubes, like two giant nostrils, snorted out the impurities from the pool; the ferrocycrosulphate, the flecked mica flecks of phenol2Yisobutyltryptophane. He could do this, he told
himself. He would propel himself up to the surface now.
The first twenty feet up was dessert pastry. Easy. Sweatless. He was a seahorse, bobbing to the surface. Squinting, he could see the outlines of the bottoms of solid mass. The hype about the shampoo was right in one regard, it didn’t sting his eyes. He could see translucent outlines. Then he hit the glycerin level. It was like swimming through a five hundred foot clam. He had no more breath and began to flounder. His body thrashed. His neck arched, desperately pushing his nose toward the surface. At last, with a thwop, he surfaced through the membrane into fresh air.
Soapy bubbly air filled his nostrils. He coughed and gagged and nearly puked.
“Daddy, here.”
Her little iceberg of glycerin had dissolved into a smaller islet and was drifting inexorably toward the lip of the upper level of the pool, from where it would plunge into the mixing section, where the steel blades whirred.
“I’ve got you, honey. We’re ok.”
Stein maneuvered himself to her and bit through the duct tape used to bind Angie’s arms. The shampoo made it come off a little easier. When he had pulled the tape off her hands and feet he held her face in his hands. Her eyes were wild like a deer trapped in a forest fire.
“Are we going to die?”
“Remember the time I pulled that cactus needle out of your eyelid and you had to sit perfectly still? And I told you it would hurt like hell for ten minutes and then it would be ok?”
“You pulled it and it bled and we had to go to the hospital.”
“This time it’ll be different,” he smiled.
He reached his arms out and eased her down into the lake. They held onto their dissolving life raft. “Get your clothes all heavy and goppy,” he said. “We’re going to take a deep breath and dive down to the very bottom. We’re going to see a couple of tubes and we’re going to swim right through them, until we get to the other side. We’ll have to hold our breath until we count up to sixty nice and slow in our minds and when we get there, we’ll be fine. Are you ready?”